Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

One of the things that theater is supposed to do is to give us a way to tell ourselves stories about ourselves. A bunch of us gather together in a public place with some other people who get up in front of us and show us behavior that, with luck, may help us understand better what’s going on in our community. Certainly the Greeks knew this. Seeing Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis wasn’t intended to be merely a diverting way to spend a couple of hours, it was supposed to stimulate thought on the relationship between the individual and the state, and what authority could ask of us in the name of what it deemed to be the larger good. It was still pretty strong stuff when I saw it in a production at the Circle in the Square in 1968. The Vietnam War was eating up the lives of thousands of young Americans in a lousy cause, and seeing a play in which young Greeks were about to be shipped to Troy to die in the service of a king who was pissed that his wife ran off with someone else … Well, the parallels were obvious and potent.

By happenstance, lately I’ve seen a number of works dealing with different aspects of American history. The tones and intentions could hardly be more diverse, from the earnest and sober to the exuberantly filthy.

Empire, a musical with book, music and lyrics by Caroline Sherman and Robert Hull, doesn’t seem to know what tale it wants to tell. It starts as a story within a story, with a woman in the 1970s thinking about her parents’ involvement in the construction of the Empire State Building. It also introduces us to a cartoony if sympathetic version of Al Smith, brought in by the developers as the figurehead for the raising of the building in the wake of his disastrous run for the presidency. There is also some acknowledgment of the mix of ethnicities who risked (and sometimes lost) their lives working without sufficient safety precautions in the clouds. It’s an ambitious project featuring a Broadway-sized cast with a substantial band, but ultimately I couldn’t figure out whether I was supposed to celebrate the building (well, it’s a traditional musical, so I guess it’s meant to be a celebration) or to muse on the cost to working people of projects rooted in the hubris of the rich. As it happens, I recently finished Donald M. Miller’s terrific book, Supreme City: How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America, and much of it concerns itself with the Empire State, the Chrysler and other architectural accomplishments in the Twenties, as well as the coming of radio, the gangsters involved in flouting Prohibition, the rise of café society and other aspects of that frenetic decade. There are plenty of stories waiting to be told in theatrical terms from those years. I went into Empire hoping that it would succeed in telling one of them. Much of the music is appealing and the band is great fun to listen to, but the words aren’t up to the subject. A missed opportunity.

Sam Collier’s A Hundred Circling Camps, directed by Rebecca Wear for the Dogteam Theatre Project, mostly focused on a handful of members of the so-called Bonus Army of 1932 and how, during the Depression, they set up a tent city in Washington DC in the hopes Congress would pass legislation giving veterans of WWI a promised bonus earlier than scheduled. Collier indulged in some intriguing juxtapositions by introducing attempts by protestors from later eras using similar methods to bring public attention to various progressive causes – poverty, environmental issues, racial issues, the Occupy movement. If the play was a little short on drama, I found it stimulating to be reminded of the parallels between the tactics of social activists of different generations. Collier’s work is new to me, but I look forward to following it in the future.

Research I’m doing for a possible book project led me to watch a TV play by Irve Tunick called The Trial of John Peter Zenger, produced for Westinghouse Studio One. Zenger, a printer in colonial New York, angered the royal governor in 1734 when he published some unflattering things about him. The governor had Zenger thrown into prison. (While Zenger was in jail, his wife Anna kept the press going.) Zenger eventually was tried for libel. He was acquitted when Philadelphia lawyer Andrew Hamilton (no relationship to Alexander) argued that nobody should be punished for printing unpleasant things about the powerful and politically connected if they happen to be, well, true. (And what Zenger published about the governor was indeed true.) The trial is commonly cited as one of the key events in the fight for freedom of the press.

I’m not going to make a claim that Trial is an under-appreciated gem of American drama. The exposition is mostly clunky and the characters frequently speak as if they know they will be quoted. Still, the piece builds up a head of steam, especially when Frederick Worlock as Hamilton delivers a ringing speech about the necessity of an honest and uncensored press in a free society. (I’m going to guess that some of the most stirring lines are ones Tunick found in the record.) It’s also of interest in that it features a very young Marian Seldes as the heroic Anna.

What particularly struck me was that the play was broadcast in 1953, when the McCarthy era was in full force. I can’t think it’s an accident that Tunick depicts Zenger refusing to tell the authorities who his associates are at the same time when people were refusing to name names to the likes of Joseph McCarthy, Roy Cohn and Martin Dies.

I am always intrigued by when historical plays are premiered and how going to the past, and how that past is treated, reflects the times in which they were written. It is common knowledge that Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible as a way of addressing HUAC, in front of which he had been an uncooperative witness. Sidney Kingsley’s play about Jefferson and Hamilton, The Patriots, premiered in 1943, in the middle of WWII; it was intended as a reminder of the founding principles of the country we were defending. Jefferson is the hero of Kingsley’s play. He is also one of the heroes of the Peter Stone-Sherman Edwards musical, 1776. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s take on Jefferson in Hamilton is considerably different.

And now we have Oh, Mary!, written by and starring Cole Escola and supposedly about Mary Todd Lincoln. It is a history play that gleefully traduces the history it references. From various plays, TV shows and movies, we have a view of Mrs. Lincoln as a difficult, unhappy person who had a troubled marriage with Abe and a troubled widowhood during which she battled her pain-in-the-ass son, Robert. (Robert’s father championed the rights of the common people; Robert became a staunch member of the corporate class.) Oh, Mary! doesn’t bother to include Robert. It doesn’t bother to include much real history either. There’s some mention of the Civil War, a character named John Wilkes Booth shows up, Abraham Lincoln is depicted as tortured by being in the closet, and a visit to the theater ends with death. But none of this corresponds much to “official” history. It is an index of how liberated the show is from the facts and conventional taste that Lincoln’s death is one of the biggest laughs in the show.

As I was laughing (and I laughed a lot), I couldn’t help but think that Lenny Bruce was arrested, tried and convicted for using language deemed to be obscene by many in 1964. The language Escola uses in Oh, Mary! today is rougher than what got Bruce arrested for sixty years ago. Bruce was harassed to death and Escola has a smash hit. That says something about the drift of history.