THE JOURNAL OF

AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 23, Number 2 Spring2011
Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve
Co-Editors: David Savran and James F. Wilson
Guest Editor: Mark Cosdon
with the ATDS Publications Committee:
Dorothy Chansky, Harley Erdman, Anne Fletcher, Michelle
Granshaw, Kim Marra, Peter Reed, Ilka Saal, Sarah Stevenson,
Bob Vorlicky, and Barry Witham
Managing Editor: Naomi Stubbs
Editorial Assistant: Andrew Kircher
Circulation Manager: Barrie Gelles
Circulation Assistant: Ana Martinez
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Professor Daniel Gerould, Director of Publications
Jan Stenzel, Director of Administration
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY C ENTER
OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY oF NEw YoRK
EDITORIAL BOARD
Philip Auslander
Una Chaudhuri
William Demastes
HarryElam
Jorge Huerta
Stacy Wolf
Shannon Jackson
Jonathan Kalb
Jill Lane
Thomas Posdewait
Robert Vorlicky
The Journal of American Drama and Theatre welcomes submissions. Our aim is to
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THE JouRNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE
Volume 23, Number 2 Spring 2011
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 5
AMANDA WRIGLEY AND ROBERT DAVIS 7
Greek Immigrants Playing Ancient Greeks at Chicago's Hull-House:
Whose Antiquity?
J OCELYN L. B ucKNER
Diggin' the Material: Ideological State Apparatuses, "Capitalizm,"
and Identity in Suzan-Lori Parks's Red Letter Plays
GAD GUTERMAN
"The, Uh, Immigration Situation": Living Out and the Legal/Illegal
Divide
VICTOR HOLTCAMP
Working on the Line: Industrial Capitalism in A Chorus Line
CHRYSTYNA M. D AIL
Radical Economics for the "Ordinary American": Arthur Miller's
That They Mqy Win
CONTRIBUTORS
31
51
75
91
109
Introduction
In 2012, the American Theatre and Drama Society will celebrate its twenty-
fifth anniversary. With approximately 200 members in the United States and
around the globe, ATDS is a truly international organization dedicated to
the study of United States theatre and drama, its varied histories, traditions,
literatures, and performances within its cultural contexts. One of ATDS's
most important and visible endeavors is our annual partnership with the
Journal of American Drama and Theatre) published by the Graduate Center
at the City University of New York. Co-editors David Savran and James
F. Wilson edit one of the finest journals in the profession, continuing
the work of JADTs founding editors Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter
Meserve. In particular, I've been honored to work with David these past
two years and am grateful for his continuing counsel, enthusiasm, and
dedication. As JADTs guest editor in 2010 and 2011, I've worked quite
closely with the Journals Naomi Stubbs. I sincerely appreciate Naomi's
patience, helpful comments, and generosity. In the coming years, I look
forward to working with Naomi on future projects.
For the spring 2011 issue, ATDS's Publications Committee received
an especially large number of submissions. Each article was carefully
vetted and commented upon by the members of AIDS's Publications
Committee, for which I am particularly thankful. This year, I was assisted by
Dorothy Chansky (Texas Tech University), Harley Erdman (University of
Massachusetts), Anne Fletcher (Southern Illinois University Carbondale),
Michelle Granshaw (University of Washington), Kim Marra (University of
Iowa), Peter Reed (University of Mississippi), Ilka Saal (Ghent University),
Sarah Stevenson (College of Mount Saint Vincent), Bob Vorlicky (New
York University), and Barry Witham (University of Washington) . It's been
such a pleasure to work with this incredibly smart, gracious, and hard-
working committee. My Allegheny research assistant Courtney Rice has
always been helpful and resourceful.
Building on a suggestion by Ilka Saal, ATDS's Publications
Committee invited submissions on the theme of Capitalism and Identity.
Recognizing that the American theatre is particularly exposed to changing
economic, political, and social environments, we wondered how does
American drama stage the economic and cultural forces of capitalism?
How does capitalism impact individual lives? How have plays and
performances changed prevalent perceptions? How do playwrights stage
capital? The Publications Committee requested essays addressing these
subjects from contemporary as well as historical perspectives. Our six
selected authors, Amanda Wrigley and Robert Davis, Jocelyn L. Buckner,
6
Gad Guterman, Victor Holtcamp, and Chrystyna Dail, imaginatively
approached the selected theme from a truly diverse array of theoretical and
historic perspectives. Yet, each author's work underscores the inescapable
ties between our art form and Capitalism and Identity.
In their essay "Greek Immigrants Playing Ancient Greeks at
Chicago's Hull-House: Whose Antiquity?" authors Amanda Wrigley
and Robert Davis interrogate Chicago's Hull House and the production
of ancient Greek drama, uncovering the uneasy relationship between
socio-economic tensions and cultural heritage. Jocelyn L. Buckner
examines the treatment of class in "Diggin' the Material: Ideological State
Apparatuses, 'Capitalizm,' and Identity in Suzan-Lori Parks's Red Letter
Plays." Employing Louis Althusser's concepts of social and economic
forces, Buckner demonstrates the agents of capitalist enterprise at work
in Parks's In the Blood and Fucking A. Particularly topical and timely, Gad
Guterman invites us to see the troubling connections between unfair labor
practices, employer/ employee relationships, and identity formation in his
contribution "'The, Uh, Immigration Situation': Living Out and the Legal/
Illegal Divide." A Chorus Line has been the subject of a great deal of
recent scholarship. Yet, in his article "Working On the Line: Industrial
Capitalism in A Chorus Line," Victor Holtcamp brings a fresh theoretical
perspective, arguing that rehearsal and production techniques both require
and negate individuality. Finally, in her essay "Radical Economics for the
'Ordinary American': Arthur Miller's That Thry Mqy Win," Chrystyna Dail
finds many eerily contemporary issues of social relevance, including equal
compensation, accessible and affordable childcare, and the hardships of
having a partner deployed for many months, in Miller's under-known
work from the 1940s.
I've immensely enjoyed working with each of these authors and
have learned much from them.
Mark Cosdon
Guest Editor
Allegheny College
JOURNAL OF AMERICAN D RAMA AND T HEATRE 23, NO.2 (SPRING 2011)
GREEK IMMIGRANTS PLAYING ANciENT GREEKS AT CHICAGo's
HULL-HOUSE: WHOSE ANTIQUITY?
Amanda Wrigley and Robert Davis
In the late nineteenth century, the economy of the United States developed
a ravenous appetite for unskilled labor. The country outpaced its European
rivals in the speed of its industrialization: at the conclusion of the Civil
War more than half of American workers labored on farms, but by the
second decade of the twentieth century over two-thirds were located in
factories.
1
Between 1881 and 1910, more than seventeen million immigrants
arrived in America.
2
Willing to take low pay for jobs in conditions that
we would today find barbaric, workers from Southern and Eastern
Europe, "new immigrants" in contemporary parlance, excited major
controversy throughout the United States. To varying extents immigrants
were welcomed, feared, and attacked-welcomed by industrialists for
providing the cheap labor necessary for a rapidly expanding economy,
feared by unionists for stealing American jobs, and attacked by nativists
and restrictionists for crowding the cities and polluting the pure American
"blood"-but they were also, on the whole, set apart from mainstream
cultural and social identities.
In What Social Classes Owe Each Other (1893) Yale sociologist
William Graham Sumner expressed typical laissez-faire attitudes to
immigrants: "one man, in a free state, cannot claim help from, and cannot
be charged to give help to, another."
3
The social settlement movement,
The authors are grateful to the anonymous readers of this article for their per-
ceptive suggestions for improvement and the staff of the University of Illinois at Chicago
for their help with the Hull-House Collection. Warm thanks are offered to Margaret Mal-
amud, Rob Ketterer, Diana Ng, Patrice Rankine, and others who offered interesting and
encouraging responses to earlier versions of this paper given (by Amanda Wrigley) at the
"Classicizing Chicago" conference at Northwestern University, and to the Greater Chicago
Chapter of the Victorian Society in America. Conversations with Judith P. Hallett have also
been instructive.
1
Matthew Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples
at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 65.
2
Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History qf Immigration and Ethniciry in Ameri-
can Life (New York: Harper Collins, 1990), 124.
3
William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe Each Other (New York: Harp-
er and Brothers, 1893), 27. Sumner believed that individuals are not only obligated to help,
but that doing so would cause social degeneration.
8 WRIGLEY AND DAVIS
however, offered a new mode of thinking. The movement began in
London in the 1880s in response to the problems of urban poverty caused
by industrial capitalism. It involved university men living in poor London
neighborhoods so that they could study the problems of industrial society
first-hand and work to improve the situation. Education was central to the
movement, together with the promotion of a cultural life shared between
classes. Education and culture were envisaged as the enabler of fuller
citizenship.
Toynbee Hall, one of London's first such settlements, was in
1888- three years after its foundation-visited by two well-educated and
socially conscious American women, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr.
In 1889 they founded Hull-House, one of the first settlements of its kind
in the United States, in a mixed immigrant neighbourhood on Chicago's
West Side which, according to Stuart Hecht, "reflected the worst of late
19th century urban conditions."
4
Rather than treat them as a problem to
be solved, Addams considered immigrants to be "Americans in process"
capable of making immediate contributions to society.
5
In Chicago, the
working poor were mostly immigrants and the children of immigrants,
and while those who ran Hull-House and its activities were educated and
privileged women and men. Addams and Starr sought a new relationship
with ethnic and working-class communities founded more on principles
of dialogue than paternalistic charity work. Addams believed that "the
sharing of the life of the poor is essential to the understanding and
bettering of that life."
6
As in London, residents therefore lived among-
and studied-immigrant communities, offering educational, recreational,
and cultural activities as part of their mission.
Addams sought a way of fostering immigrant identities that would
also heal the social rifts caused by industrial capitalism, an approach which
was in sharp contrast to early twentieth-century theories of immigrant
assimilation, such as that of the sociologist Robert E. Park whose "race
4
Stuart ]. Hecht, "Sodal and Artistic Integration: The Emergence of Hull-
House Theatre," Theatre ]ourna/34, no. 2 (May 1982): 172.
5
Jane Addams, "Immigration, A Field Neglected by the Scholar," Commons 10,
no. 1 Oanuary 1905): 14. The publication was a copy of a convocation address delivered at
the University of Chicago.
6
Jane Addams, "The Settlement as a Factor in the Labor Movement," in Hull-
House Maps and Papers, a Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested Distnd of Chicago,
by Residents of Hull-House (New York: Thomas Y Crowell and Company, 1895), 183.
Addams remained at Hull-House until her death in 1935; she not only worked locally for
the good of the settlement but also nationally for the settlement movement, women's
rights, organizations such as the National Child Labor Committee, and international peace
efforts (in 1931, she was the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize).
GREEK I MMIGRANTS Pr \YJNG ANCIENT GREEKS 9
relations cycle" involved competition, conflict, and accommodation before
the stage of assimilation was reached. In her writing, she looked forward
to a future based on "a larger solidarity which includes labor and capital"
that might encourage a "communion of universal fellowship" which
was built by peaceful development rather than class struggle.
7
Addams,
who was a pacifist, considered that workers needed to focus on "higher
motives," such as the enrichment of their cultural and educational lives,
rather than engaging in class war. To achieve social integration peacefully,
she considered, workers needed to come together in their communities
and work together in their leisure time "to carry out the higher aims of
living."
8
Hull-House therefore promoted a range of cultural activities,
including theatre, which provided a space for groups on the margins of a
society ravaged by industrial capitalism to re-establish and develop their
cultural identities as an important part of the process of assimilation. At
the turn of the century, when (not incidentally) the elite were gripped by
the fashion for philhellenism, the revival of ideas about Greek heritage
formed a particularly potent form of cultural capital for the Greek
immigrant community.
9
In the 1890s, Chicago's West side was in a period of transition:
established local communities of Germans, Irish, and native-born
Americans were moving out and being replaced by new immigrant
communities of Greeks, Italians, and Russian-Jews. During Hull-
House's first decade it was overwhelmingly the older immigrants who
had moved out of the neighbourhood who took advantage of the
settlement's rich range of educational and cultural programmes.
10
Lissak
notes that although a considerable portion of Hull House's immediate
neighbourhood population in the 1890s was comprised of new immigrant
groups, including the Greek community, it took ten to fifteen years before
these were reflected in Hull-House membership. For example, Greeks
7
Addams, "Settlement as a Factor," 200.
8
Ibid., 203.
9
Although antiquity was a common subject in popular culture, it was often used
to sacrilize high art. For example, American Renaissance sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens
was celebrated with a performance of The Masque of Ours, a Greek-themed piece which in-
cluded the entire Boston Symphony Orchestra and a cast of two hundred. See David Bje-
lajac, American Art: A Cultural History (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2004), 279.
10
Rivka Lissak, "Myth and Reality: The Pattern of Relationship Between the
Hull-House Circle and the 'New Immigrants' on Chicago's West Side, 1890-1919," in jour-
nal of American Ethnic History 2, no. 2 (Spring 1983), 23. These included an art studio,
lectures, a library, and numerous social clubs; see Andrew E. Barnicle, "The Origins of
Theatre at Hull-House" (MA Thesis, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1978), iv.
10 WRIGLEY AND DAVIS
started arriving in Chicago in significant numbers in the last quarter of
the nineteenth century, but it was not until 1899 that a link between Hull-
House and the neighbouring Greek community was established.
11
The catalyst for this relationship was a performance in ancient
Greek of The Return of Ocfysseus. Indeed, Stuart Hecht notes in his
dissertation on Hull-House that the choice of this play was intended to
encourage local Greeks to get involved in the settlement:
Addams had other reasons for wanting the Greek drama
performed at Hull-House. The Greek community
was not participating in settlement programs, and
Addams sought a means of getting them involved. She
recognized the interest a play based on Homer would
create among the Greeks, and this led to her inviting
Barrows (the producer] to Chicago. Addams had again
turned to dramatics in order to realize the settlement's
social objectives.
12
The relationship between Hull-House and local Greeks was strengthened
with a second production in ancient Greek, Sophocles's Ajax in 1903.
The two productions are notable for the fact that performances drawing
on the surviving texts of ancient Greece had only hitherto been seen in
America on the academic stage.
13
Furthermore, although they may be a
mere footnote in the long and varied history of dramatic performance
at the settlement,
14
their wider significance lies in the fact that they were
11
Andrew T. Kopan, "Greek Survival in Chicago," in Ethnic Chicago: A Multicul-
tural Portrait, edited by Melvin G. Holli and Peter d'A. Jones, 4th edition (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 1995), 261 ff. Kopan outlines the relationship between the Greek community
and Hull-House (283-86). See also George A. Kourvetaris, First and Second Generation Greeks
in Chicago: An Inquiry into Their Stratification and Mobility Patterns (Athens, Greece: National
Center of Social Research, 1971).
12
Stuart Joel Hecht, "Hull-House Theatre: an Analytical and Evaluative His-
tory" (Ph.D. Thesis, Northwestern University, 1983), 33.
13
One notable exception is the week-long run of 1882 Oedipus Tyrannus at
Booth's Theatre, New York, a commercial revival of the 1881 Harvard Oedipus (mentioned
below). See Doris Alexander, "Oedipus in Victorian New York," American Quarter!J 12, no.
3 (Autumn 1960): 417-21.
14
See Hecht, "Hull-House Theatre" and Barnicle, "The Origins of Theatre at
Hull-House" (1978). A related point of interest is the extent to which the study of ancient
Greece and Rome featured in Hull-House's curriculum. There were, for example, lectures
on "Greece" and "The Rise of Hellenism" and recitations of Greek plays by University
of Chicago professors. Professor Judith P Hallett, University of Maryland, is investigating
this topic.
GREEK IMMIGRANTS PLAYlNG ANCIENT G REEKS 11
successful in fulfilling two of Addams's desires: first, the forging of a
bond with the local Greek community and, second, the introduction of
a more serious form of drama onto the Hull-House stage to displace the
melodrama, farce, and light comedy which were very popular in the local
community.
This essay considers the various claims on Greek antiquity made
by the forces involved in the productions of The Return of Ocjyssetts and
Ajax, exploring how individuals and communities contributed to and
engaged with these stagings of antiquity, and why. An examination of
the critical, popular, and intellectual receptions of these productions
demonstrates that tensions in the perceived cultural value of the
performance of ancient Greek texts are closely related to socio-economic
situations and assumptions of cultural heritage. The essay argues that for
Hull-House workers and producer Mabel Hay Barrows these productions
were an attempt to connect the Hull-House stage and its social work with
the prestigious school and university tradition of staging Greek drama in
the original language. For the Greek community, the productions were a
site of struggle between their social identity and their relationship with
the American economy. They engaged with their ties (real or imagined) to
a rich classical past and elements of American philhellenism to generate
cultural capital which enabled them to achieve unprecedented access to
Hull-House resources.
The Return of Odysseus (1899) and Sophocles's Ajax (1903)
At the close of the nineteenth century, Chicago's Greek community,
numbered at a couple of thousand (although estimates vary), was mostly
composed of men aged between twenty and forty years old who were
either single or married with families in Greece.
15
Economic reasons had
driven these men to find a better living on American shores: in response
to a survey, 83/o of first generation Greeks gave economic factors as the
reason for their emigration.
16
Early twentieth-century books on Greek
communities in America tend to describe early Greek immigrants in rather
dismissive terms as being "of a rather ignorant peasant class" and "poorly
15
Kopan, "Greek Survival in Chicago," 262 and 265. See also Grace Abbott,
''A Study of the Greeks in Chicago," The American Journal if Sociology 15, no. 3 (November
1909): 384. Only from 1904 did wives and children start arriving in appreciable numbers,
see Andrew T. Kopan, "Greeks" in Encyclopedia if Chicago, http: / /www.encyclopedia.chica-
gohistory.org/pages/548.html (accessed 1 January 2011).
16
Nine percent gave the reason as being related to military matters; 8% had
other reasons, see Kourvetaris, First and Second Generation Greeks, 47.
12
WRIGLEY AND DAVIS
educated farmers and shepherds" from rural and mountainous villages
of the Peloponnese, mostly around Sparta and Tripoli.
17
More recent
scholars, such as Andrew Kopan, emphasize the "desperate poverty"
of late nineteenth-century Greek villages, especially in the Peloponnese
which had been suffering from the drastic drop in the price of currants,
the main export.
18
Debates over the social good of immigration at large have
extended to commentary on the desirability of specific ethnic groups. An
influential study by the sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross depicts Greeks
as primarily concerned with earning money, with a particular inclination
to exploit other Greeks in conditions reminiscent of slavery.
19
He praises
their industry but raises the alarm that "if the immigration from Bellas
keeps up, in twenty years the Greeks will own the candy trade of the
country, the soda fountains and perhaps the fruit business."
20
Scholars
have noted that popular lines of work for Chicagoan Greeks included
selling fruit, confectionery, and flowers: successful merchants would
graduate from carrying a tray around their shoulders, to a cart, a stall on
the sidewalk, and then a shop; other work was found as labourers or in
restaurants, coffeehouses, and shoe-shine parlours.
21
By the turn of the century the largest settlement of Greeks in
Chicago was in the 19th Ward, north and west of Hull-House. In 1909
a survey of this community by Grace Abbott, a social worker resident
at Hull-House, found "the colony as a whole ... still ignorant of our
language."
22
The men were said to live in poor conditions, often several to
a room in low-rise tenement blocks. Observe the mildly alarmist report in
a 1902 newspaper article entitled "Races Shift Like Sand" which reports
17
Abbott, ''A Study of the Greeks," 380 and 385; Thomas Burgess, Greeks in
America: An Account if Their Coming
1
Progress) Customs
1
Living
1
and Aspirations, with an His-
torical Introduction and the Stories if Some Famous American-Greeks (Boston: Sherman, French,
and Company, 1913), 25. See also Kourvetaris, First and Second Generation Greeks, 43 f See
below for the educational experience of immigrant Greeks.
18
Kopan, "Greek Survival in Chicago," 261 See also Alice Scourby, The Greek
Americans (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984), 26. The map at Kourvetaris First and Second
Generation Greeks, 46 shows the Peloponnese as the origin of most first generation Greeks
in Chicago.
19
Edward Alsworth Ross, The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and
Present Immigration to the American People (New York: The Century Company, 1914), 182-90.
20
Ibid., 187.
21
Kopan "Greek Survival in Chicago," 277 -80; Burgess, "Greeks in America,"
25-26; Abbott, ''A Study of the Greeks," 386.
22
Abbott, ''A Study of the Greeks," 383.
G REEK IMMIGRANTS P LAYING ANCIENT GREEKS
A GREEK PLA )l
l I l f l t'l ll H I I H ' \ JI
'tl" tl}t41\" ....
I H ll RH1 URJ'I. OF OUY 'SE ,
\HI I Ill< Gl\'1 I'N l lll\tf l l. ,
A1 I Ii ,
Hull Hou c Auditorium
By OJf GREl-.CE
Ln.'JNl> t,.: l HI ' A(. ()
THURSDAY, DEC.
F'RlDA Y. DEC. EIGHTH
\T E. GHT I' W
13
Figure 1. Flyer for The Return of Odysseus, 1899. Hull House Collection, box
36a, folder 356. Special Collections, University of Illinois at Chicago Library.
that Greeks in Chicago live "in extremely congested quarters, sleeping
in sheds or barns or wherever they can find shelter."
23
It was from this
community of "natives of Greece living in Chicago" that around twenty-
five men were drawn for the 1899 production of The &turn of Ocfysseus in
ancient Greek (see figure 1). In a review, Bazaar reinforces typical
stereotypes when it refers to the men's "mouth-filling native names . . .
which they have long since laid aside, with other foreign impedimenta
to a business career in the United States" (see Figure 2).
24
As to whether
"the poorly educated farmers and shepherds" noted above, had studied
ancient Greek texts at school, there is no firm evidence but it looks
extremely unlikely. Kopan, an educational historian with a specialism in
the Chicagoan Greek community, states that at the turn of the century
these Greek immigrants had either "no schooling, or at best a minimal
amount" and that around a quarter of the Greek community could not
read or write (modern) Greek.
25
What is, however, clear is that they were
23
"Races Shift Like Sand," an unattributed 1902 newspaper article clipping, Box
53, Hull-House Collection, University of Illinois at Chicago.
24
"A Play Acted by Modern Greeks," Harper's Bazaar, 30 December 1899, 1126.
25
Kopan, "Greek Survival in Chicago," 286. Abbott provides precise figures
from her 1909 survey (''A Study of the Greeks," 387). Scourby concurs that the community
14
Dramads l'et<onac
n. l'l.tlf ..r
..... , }
UAlt .... ,
J
.e..on .... )
.... --.Will$ ..
......... J
' *"'--... I"' .....

............ ! ....
(AW,
........ ... .
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11,...,..h , .. ,..


j t hll' .... f'Ra
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WRIGLEY AND DAVIS
Figure 2. Cast list from the programme for 1he Return of Odysseus, 1899.
Hull House Collection, box 36a, folder 356, Special Collections, University of
Illinois at Chicago Library.
certainly already familiar with the mythological narrative of Odysseus
through oral traditions.
26
Ellen Gates Starr had expressed a perhaps typical opinion when
wondering whether it was "at all worth the cost to perpetuate art under
conditions so hopeless" as in urban Chicago but she concluded that
art could be "be restored as a living source" in workers' lives through
involvement with Hull-House.
27
In Lines of Activity, Shannon Jackson
outlines a genealogy of theatre and associated practices at Hull-House,
including dance, gymnastics, readings, and recitals, thus demonstrating
that performative practice was part of the Hull-House program from its
generally had "little education" (Greek Americans, 27). It was in the 1900s that university
graduates from Greece arrived to begin their professional careers in America; they had
great difficulty in doing so, instead finding work in hotels, factories and newspaper offices.
See]. P. Xenides, The Greeks in America (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1922), 85.
26
Jane Addams, "Our Foreign Population," Fn'ends Intelligencer, 4 July 1903, 430.
See also Kopan: "Greek immigrants were knowledgeable about their illustrious past and
the achievements of their people, possibly because of a long oral tradition in Greece"
("Greek Survival in Chicago," 286).
27
Ellen Gates Starr, "Art and Labor," in Hull-House Maps and Papers, 165.
GREEK IMMIGRANTS PLAYING ANCIENT GREEKS 15
earliest days.
28
Hull-House had the first settlement theatre in the United
States. Drama had been actively pursued in the 1890s as an important
component of its social and artistic goals.
29
In 1897 a drama group was
established and in December 1899 a new theatre building was inaugurated
with The Return if Ocjysseus. The play is a dramatization of Homer's
Ocjyssry, an ancient Greek epic poem. In six acts it tells of some of the
hero's adventures on his long way home following the Trojan War and
his homecoming (which was, perhaps, a poignant scene for these recently
arrived Greeks most of whom, it is documented, fully intended to return
home but two-thirds of whom would not).
30
The play was delivered by the
Greek actors in ancient Greek.
31
An article publicizing the production in the Hull-House Bulletin,
probably written by Addams, notes that "our colleges occasionally give
Greek plays, but American students have been the actors. It is a unique
experiment to have genuine Greeks portray Homer."
32
It was not only to
be unusual and beautiful, she continued, but also "educational, as great
pains have been taken to make all the details strictly correct from an
archxological point of view."
33
Addams's statement that it is a "unique"
and "unusual experiment" suggests the sheer novelty (at least on American
soil) of having "genuine Greeks" play ancient characters; this indeed was
something which caught the eye of the nation, as evidenced by advance
notices in newspapers from Los Angeles to Omaha to Boston.
34
It also
appeared in reviews: Harpers Bazaar, for example, considers that "a Greek
28
Shannon Jackson, Lines if Activity: Performance, Historiograpf?y, Hull-House Domes-
tici!J (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 213-216.
29
Hecht, "Social and Artistic Integration," 17 4. Additionally, Jackson notes that
"theatrical performance intersected and overlapped with [Hull House's} sociological proj-
ect" (208).
30
Abbott, ''A Study of the Greeks," 380. It was prefaced by a rendition ~ the
3rd century BC "Hymn to Apollo," recently discovered in Delphi.
31
"Greeks to Enact Homer: Will Present the Story of Odysseus at Hull House,"
Chicago Daify Tribune, 3 December 1899, 8.
32
0ur emphasis. Jane Addams, "Greek Play," Hull-House Bulletin 3, no. 12 (No-
vember-December 1899): 2. The phrase "genuine Greeks" is also used in "Greek Play at
Hull House," Chicago Daify Tribune, 11 December 1899, 6.
33
Addams, "Greek Play."
34
Delia T. Davis, "Her Greek and Latin Plays: Miss Barrows Producing The
Return if Ot{ysseuswith Greeks and Italians," Los Angeles Times, 3 December 1899, 23; "Miss
Barrows' Greek and Latin Plays," Omaha Illustrated Bee, 3 December 1899, 3; "Boston Girl's
Classic Triumph," Boston Daify Globe, 3 December 1899, 29.
16 WRIGLEY AND DAVIS
play performed with the utmost enthusiasm by young candy merchants,
fruit-peddlers, and the like, is a novelty."
35
By association with their
"genuine" ancient past, modern Greeks seemed to earn some distinction
from other immigrant groups.
In Addams's statement there is also the suggestion that-in
addition to the desire to establish serious drama in the programme-
the modest Hull-House stage sought to place itself within the American
tradition (which had flourished since the landmark production of
Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannus at Harvard in 1881) of serious and scholarly
productions of Greek drama in the original language and with (what was
at least popularly considered to be) archaeological accuracy. The 1881
Oedipus had caught the European wave of enthusiasm for textually and
archaeologically correct academic productions of Greek drama which
seemed to strive to bring the idea of ancient Greece and indeed ancient
Greeks alive for the late nineteenth-century imagination. This fashion to
embody antiquity and ancient dramatic characters on stage had a lot to
do with the display of archaeological discoveries in the ancient lands of
the Mediterranean both in museums and in pictorial reproduction in the
international press.
36
This fashion had been taken up vigorously across
the world and especially in university cities, with performance of the plays
in ancient Greek gradually coming to share the stage with performance
in translation. Chicago was no exception: in 1895, for example, Beloit
College of Wisconsin brought their English-language production of
Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannus to the Central Music Hall of Chicago, the
music for which "was arranged or composed ... with reference to Prof.
Paine's music for the Harvard CEdipus in 1881."
37
In 1899, The Return of Ocfysseus was clearly intended to engage
with this tradition, and many reviews in 1903 placed the Hull-House Ajax
firmly within the string of educational institutions "reviving" Greek drama:
"Now one must live very remote from college centers not to have such a
chance [of seeing a Greek play] now and then . .. . Harvard, Vassar, Beloit,
the Universities of Toronto, Pennsylvania, California, Leland Stanford
and others have given Greek plays," writes one reviewer, before going on
35
"A Play Acted by Modern Greeks" (1899). Also, "Greek Play for Vassar Aid:
Hull House Production to be Repeated for Benefit of the Chicago Society's Fund," Chicago
Daify Tribune, 13 May 1900, 3.
36
See Amanda Wrigley, Performing Greek Drama in Oxford and on Tour with the Ballt'ol
Players (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2011), 52.
37
Lucy Monroe, "Chicago Letter," The Critic: A Weekfy Review of Literature and the
Arts, 30 March 1895, 249.
GREEK IMMIGRANTS PLAYING ANCIENT GREEKS 17
to mention The Return of Ocfysseus and now Ajax at Hull-House.
38
Indeed,
the Hull-House Ajax is specifically feted as the first English-language
production of the play; actually, it was not the first, but this claim enabled
reviewers to link the production in the American reader's mind with what
was probably the first modern production of the play in ancient Greek
which was performed at the University of Cambridge in 1882.
39
Addams was clearly concerned to draw on one of the most
important values perceived to be inherent in productions in ancient Greek
on American (and indeed international) academic stages of the previous
eighteen years- that is, archaeological fidelity to ancient Greece. To this
end, she called in the expertise of one Mabel Hay Barrows (1873-1931), a
college graduate who had made quite a career as a professional trainer and
coach of classical play performance at schools and universities. Indeed,
to be precise, in the 1890s Barrows had been less interested in producing
works by the Greek and Roman playwrights than her own dramatic
adaptations of Greek and Latin epic poetry. Her adaptations from Homer
and Vergil, The Return of Ocfysseus, The Feast of Dido, and The Flight of
Aeneas, were extremely popular across the country.
40
The Boston Dai!J Globe
reports that her aim was "to resurrect Homer and Virgil from their text
book graves and make them live again."
41
After hearing from a mutual
acquaintance that Addams wished to stage Barrows's plays at Hull-House,
Barrows wrote to Addams pointing out that these plays were in ancient
Greek and Latin, not in English, and also suggesting that her "pantomime
of Greek life which can be acted by those who have no knowledge of
Greek or Latin" might be appropriate. Barrows continues: "I have always
had such an intense interest in settlement life . . . that I should count it a
privilege."
42
After school and before college, Barrows had taken a course in
archaeology and Greek art at Leipzig and she is said to have observed
"old Greek customs, games, and dances" when in Greece with her father
38
Elizabeth C. Barrows, "The Greek Play at Hull-House," Commons 9 Ganuary
1904): 6. See also "Modern Revivals of Old Greek Plays," The Chautauquan 43 (1906):
151-57.
39
E. C. Barrows, "The Greek Play," 7.
40
"Boston Girl's Classic Triumph."
41
Ibid. This phrase appears in several newspapers across the country, suggesting
that it may have originated in a press release by Barrows.
42
Letter from Mabel Hay Barrows to Jane Addams, 22 November 1898, The
Jane Addams Papers, edited by Mary Lynn McCree Bryan and Peter Clark (Ann Arbor, MI:
University Microfilms International, 1985), Reel 3.
18 WRIGLEY AND DAVIS
who was, not incidentally, collecting material for his popular book The
Isles and Shrines of Greece.
43
Her educational and cultural experiences found
their way into her Homeric productions. The Return of Ocfysseus duly
included ancient Greek games, a boxing match, and dances. Her version
of archaeological correctness, then, took inspiration both from the material
remains of ancient Greece (being depictions of these activities in vase-
paintings and sculpture) and a kind of incorporated "cultural tourism" of
modern Greece (deriving from personal observation of modern Greek
life and customs). In fact, so valuable a commodity was "Greekness," as
perceived by Barrows, that when acting the female roles in the Hull-House
production of The Return of Ocfysseus she elected to do so under the Greek
pseudonym Mavilla Mparos (see Figure 2).
Following the success of The Return of Ocfysseusin 1899, Barrows was
invited back to Hull-House in 1903 to stage the Greek tragedy Sophocles's
Ajax, again with local Greek men, two of whom had performed in The
Return (see Figure 3): "with their help candidates were brought in, scores
of them, [a] multitude of workingmen, clerks, bookkeepers, fruiterers,
flower sellers (not a college graduate among them) ... none of the twenty-
five in the cast had command of English."
44
The following year, 1904,
Barrows took Ajax to New York, where it was also performed by men
from the local Greek community. It is beyond the scope of this paper to
discuss this in detail, but the context and the reception of that production
were very different. Suffice it to say that the organizing committee was
large and prestigious (including John LaFarge, one of the first artists to
be admitted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1904),
and ninety per cent of the New York audience were, we learn, from "high
latitudes" rather than the local Greek community.
45
Later in 1904 Barrows
staged the same play with university students in the Greek Theatre at the
University of California, which brings us back, full circle, to Barrows's
enduring connection with elite academic stages.
In an interview, Barrows claimed that she did not " take a prominent
part in the performance myself" but goes on to relate how she is "always
on the stage, leading dance or chorus, or directing some part of the play
43
"Boston Girl's Classic Triumph." Samuel June Barrows, The Isles and Shrines
of Greece (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1898). Barrows pere (1845-1909) was a
Unitarian minister, congressman (1897 -1899) and prison reformer.
44
E. C. Barrows, "Greek Play," 8-9.
45
"Sophocles in Clinton St.," The Sun, 27 March 1904. For an illustrated review
see "Ajax by American Greeks: An Interesting Interpretation of Sophocles, Translated
into Modern Language and Performed on New York's East Side," Public Opinion, 7 April
1904.
GREEK I MMIGRANTS PLAYING ANCIENT GREEKS

THE A JA.X OP
SOPHOCLES
Wit.&. - IIIA01"a Q 1/i."r
RULI ... HOU8B
. ., .... -...........
caoaaTQaaaaC"noa-
c. a A1' .... aow
raa na or
DEC.BHBER
7, 9 -'liD 11
.,. .... - na
.a.rra .. UCHI
BATURD.AY.I)IICK.B&ll a

_.,.., ........
__..., ,_ . L:..a..!J. - ,
19
Figure 3. Flyer for Ajax, 1904. Hull House Collection, box 36a, folder 356.
Special Collections, University of Illinois at Chicago Library.
[for] it gives the men more confidence."
46
As noted above, she played the
roles of Penelope and Arete under a Greek pseudonym, she designed
and made almost all of the costumes, and as choreographer and director
she led a punishing rehearsal schedule from 8am until midnight. "The
cruder your man," she considered, in a paternalistic attitude typical of
powerful commercial producers, "the more you want to work to see what
can be brought out of him."
47
The production team for the Hull-House
productions of The Return of Ocfysseus and fljax were educated, middle-
class women inspired by the successes of Harvard and other prestigious
educational institutions in staging Greek drama au nature/ and wanting, at
least in part, to use a Greek play as a vehicle for educational purposes and
the establishment of serious theatre at the settlement.
48
46
"Boston Girl's Classic Triumph."
47
Ibid. For an in-depth discussion about relationships between male producers
and female stars, see Kim Marra, Strange Duets: Impresarios and Actresses in the Ameni:an The-
atre, 1865-1914 (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2006).
48
For an account of the history of Greek plays on American academic stages in
this period see Domis Edward Plugge, History o/ Greek Plqy Production in American Colleges
and Universities from 1881 to 19 36 (New York: Columbia University Bureau of Publications,
1938). Plugge's findings are listed in the database of the Archive of Performances of
Greek and Roman Drama: search www.apgrd.ox.ac.uk/database for American produc-
tions in the date range 1881 to 1936.
20 WRIGLEY AND DAVIS
We must not overlook the overwhelming tension in these two
productions which sought to graft on to the local community of displaced
and economically deprived modern Greeks a rather elite vision of ancient
Greece which derived in large part from privileged academic stages. In
this regard it is astonishing to note that the Hull-House production of
The Return of Odysseus was revived in 1900 with largely the same cast in
Chicago's Studebaker Theater, but this time the local Greeks were not
performing largely for their compatriots but rather ironically in benefit
performances for Vassar College Students' Aid Society. "When Greek
plays Greek ... next week," the Tribune states, "the Vassar Students' Aid
Society of Chicago hopes to profit."
49
(One hopes, but rather doubts, that
the men were paid something for their efforts.)
Present in a number of reviews of the Hull-House performances
of The Return of Odysseus and Ajax are comments which highlight the
differences between these settlement productions and the now long
and widespread tradition of staging ancient Greek plays on academic
stages. In the press, there was much discussion of the modern Greek
pronunciation of the ancient Greek texts and other ways in which these
spirited productions differed from rather serious academic presentations.
For example,
The Greeks refused to use the scholastic pronunciation
of Erasmus and insisted upon reading the Homeric verse
without metrical inflection, with the pronunciation of
modern Greek. There was no attempt at retaining Greek
ideas of dramatic unity and little at giving a Greek play.
What was presented was a series of brilliantly colored
Homeric pictures, pantomime of dignity, and dialogue
of force and dramatic strength . . .. The Greeks displayed
just the amount of composure to give dignity to the
statuesque mural effects.
50
Reviews tend to note a divide in the composition of the audience:
first, "large numbers of the Greek colony" and, secondly, "instructors
49
"Greek Play for Vassar Aid," and "Chicago Greeks Give a Greek Play," Chicago
Daify Tribune, 17 May 1900,2.
50
"Realism at Hull House: Audience Yells at Sham Knock-Out in Homeric
Play," Chicago Daify Tn.bune, 7 December 1899, 5. See also "Hull House and Sophocles:
What a Chicago Social Settlement has Achieved," Atlanta Constitution, 13 March 1904, C8.
Erasmus (1466-1536) wrote on the authentic pronunciation of Greek, based on writings
by ancient grammarians; Greeks tend to pronounce ancient texts using contemporary pro-
nunciation which emphasizes the similarities between ancient and modern words.
GREEK IMMIGRANTS PLAYING ANCIENT GREEKS 21
from the University of Chicago, Lake Forest, and Northwestern and some
ministers and other professional men."
51
Reviews make much mention of
the perceived feeling of national pride on the part of the Greek community.
A reviewer of The Return of Ocfysseus in the Tribune considered that "after
watching the action on the stage and the action in the audience the feeling
grew upon one at least that the play had touched the patriotic chord in the
local Grecian hart [sic], and touched it forcefully."
52
"If the players enjoyed
themselves," the Tribune continued, "their fellow-countrymen beyond the
footlights were no less delighted. Every picture was applauded, every
speech and evolution cheered."
53
The scholars, too, found something
powerful in these productions, an energy perhaps perceived to be lacking
in academic productions. For example, a reviewer of The Return of Ocfysseus
claims that "the scholars who saw the play said it had a value which the
more technically correct representations of Greek plays given by college
students have lacked. It was the modern Greek idea of what ancient Greek
was."
54
Another commentator considered that the Greeks "interpreted, as
no group of college boys can hope to interpret, the spirit of these tales."
55
Addams reports that "the professors ... were astonished to know that
the modern Greeks were able to give such a charming interpretation of
Sophocles. [fhey] felt that perhaps the traditions had not been so wholly
broken in the case of Greece as they had been led to believe."
56
Romanticising and Patronizing the Greek
Let us return to what Addams describes as the "novelty" of having
"genuine Greeks" staging ancient texts in America, and what seems to
be a subsequent romanticising of the figure of the Greek immigrant.
Grace Abbott noted in her 1909 survey of Chicagoan Greeks that "with
the glory of ancient Greece and Byron's romantic championship of the
modern Greek in mind, one is shocked when he meets for the first time a
representative of that people in the .. . keeper of a fruit-stand or 'shoe-
51
"Realism at Hull House."
52
"News of Theaters: Return of Ocfysseus," Chicago Daify Tribune, 9 December
1899, 5.
53
Ibid.
54
"Realism at Hull House."
55
Lorado Taft, "Odysseus in Chicago," Chicago Record, 13 December 1899.
56
Jane Addams, "Women's Conscience and Social Amelioration," in The Social
A pplication of Religion. The Merrick Lectures for 190 7-8, by Charles Stelzle, et al. (Cincinnati:
Jennings and Graham, 1908), 56.
22 WRIGLEY AND D AVIS
shine parlour."'
57
She continues: "the average American expecting every
Greek to have the beauty of an Apollo and the ability of a Pericles, and
reading only sensational newspaper accounts of some crime he may or
may not have committed, concludes that the race has degenerated and
constitutes a most undesirable addition to our population."
58
A cruder
version of this line of thought appears in Edward Steiner's On the Trail
of the Immigrant (1906): in comparison with the mythological figures of
Greek antiquity, the modern Greek immigrant appears (at least to him)
"undersized ... round-headed, looking into the world out of small, black,
piercing eyes, their complexion sallow and their hair straight and black."
59
The Greek immigrant was not, however, experienced thus in
performance. In fact, the muscular physiques of the Hull-House casts
garnered attention in reviews. These men, it should be remembered, are
likely to have been farmers back in Greece, and were currently employed
in work involving much physical labour.
6
Figure 4 shows a boxing or
fighting scene from a Hull-House Greek play, possibly from act 5 of The
Return of Ocfysseus in which Phaeacian noblemen engage in games such as
"running, boxing, discus throwing, and wrestling."
61
Indeed, Greeks are
known to have held wrestling matches at Hull-House and "many began to
engage in amateur wrestling and won national and regional titles for Hull
House"; perhaps it is not impossible that the same men who were engaged
in competitive performances of manly strength and display also performed
in what would in the event be perceived as a rather patriotic theatrical
event of some note within the community.
62
In reviews of The Return of
Ocfysseus, Greek physiques were admired and idealized. A writer in the
Tribune considered that "the splendid physiques of these descendants of a
57
During the Greek War of Independence (1821-28) a wave of philhellenism
swept the United States: see Kopan (1995), 261, and Stephen A. Larrabee, He/las Observed:
The American Experience of Greece, 1775-1865 (New York: New York University Press, 1957),
for Byron's involvement.
58
Abbott, ''A Study of the Greeks," 381, 382.
59
Alfred Stener, On the Trail of the Immigrant (New York: Fleming H. Revell Com-
pany, 1906), 283. It should be noted that, shortly afterwards in 1911, the Dictionary of Races
or Peoples published for the Immigration Commission in Washington offered a more re-
demptive picture, marshalling linguistic, physiognomic, and geographical evidence to claim
that modern Greeks are of the same racial stock as their ancient forbearers who had "laid
the foundations of modern civilization" (69).
60
Addams, "Our Foreign Population," 430: "fruit-peddlers" were laborers in
the summertime.
61
"Chicago Greeks."
62
Kopan, "Greek Survival in Chicago," 283.
GREEK I MMIGRANTS PLAY1NG ANCIENT GREEKS 23
Figure 4. Scene from a Hull-House play, possibly 1he Return of Odysseus,
1899. Jane Addams Hull-House Photographic Collection,JAMC_0000_0363_
4288, University of Illinois at Chicago Library, CARLI Digital Collections.
race which cultivated physical beauty awakened an apprehensive query as
to whether an equally tall, lithe, and muscular cast could be got together for
an American amateur effort from the daily American associates of these
men in the city."
63
The physicality of the Greeks seemed at least in part
to contribute to the perceived vital energy and presence of these amateur
actors especially in relation to the youthful college boys in productions of
Greek plays on academic stages.
64
Not only in the physical dimension was the Greek immigrant's
stature enhanced to an ideal derived from antiquity. One reviewer
romantically declared that "the blood of their ancestors beat in their
hearts";
65
another that they "had forgotten the passage of nearly 3,000
years";
66
and yet another that male dancers were "as graceful as their
63
"Greek Play at Hull House."
64
It was common at the time for male bodybuilders to pose as classical statues.
Most famously, Eugene Sandow, who won acclaim on the Midway of the 1893 Chicago
World's Columbian Exposition under the wing of promoter Florenz Ziegfeld, often posed
as ancient statues such as the Dying Gaul. Sandow, who came from Prussia and whose real
name was Friedrich Wilhelm Muller, soon became a symbol of the ideal male body. For a
discussion of the role of classical bodies in the visual culture of the period, see Bryan E.
Burns, "Classicizing Bodies in the Male Photographic Tradition," in A Companion to Classi-
cal Receptions, edited by Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray, Blackwell Companions to
the Ancient World (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 440-51.
65
E. C. Barrows, "Greek Play," 9.
66
Chicago Dai!J Tribune, 7 December 1899, 5.
24 WRJGLEY AND DAVIS
ancestors."
67
The sculptor Lorado Taft (who had worked on some of the
sculpture for the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition six years earlier)
wrote: "The thought which came over and over again into every mind was:
these are real sons of Bellas chanting the songs of their ancestors, enacting
the life of thousands of years ago. There is a background for you! How
noble it made these fruit merchants .. . . What distinction it gave them!"
68
The
Greek immigrant male was, I would argue, for some audience members
at least, transported into a vision of heroes of time past, temporarily
removed from being amongst the lowest classes of time present-without
a decent level of education, unable to speak the language of the land in
which he lived, working punishingly long days, and sharing with many
others his cramped living quarters.
A romanticising of the Greek also seems to be present, to a
degree, in both Mabel Hay Barrows's and Jane Addams's thought. By
1898, in response to requests for a version of The Return of 0 4Jtsseuswhich
could be performed by those who did not know ancient Greek, Barrows
had written Hellenion[?], a "pantomime of Greek life" which involved
the performers in silent portrayal of pastoral scenes involving nymphs
and "saucy fauns" as well as the acts of spinning, playing knucklebones,
dining, dancing and wrestling.
69
In Linn's biography, Addams is recorded
as saying that "the Greek peddling bananas at the corner once wakened
every morning in sight of the Acropolis";
70
Addams herself notes that
after a meeting of Americans and Greeks at Hull-House in 1904 "one
felt a curious sense of the possibility of transplanting to new and crude
Chicago some of the traditions of Athens itself," almost as if they are
commodities.
71
Both statements seem to fly in the face of the fact that
most of the local Greek community had lived in mountainous villages
67
"News of Theaters."
68
Our emphasis. Taft, "Odysseus in Chicago." See also "Hull-House Retro-
spect," Hull-House Bulletin 1, 1900. The contrast between real-life Greek immigrants at the
turn of the century and idealized ancient Greeks was always good for comment by native
American observers: "We never picture the heroes of Greek epics, undersized, like these
moderns; round-headed, looking into the world out of small, black, piercing eyes, their
complexion sallow and their hair straight and black" (Steiner, On the Trail of the Immigrant,
283).
69
Mabel Hay Barrows, ''A New Pantomime Play" [unpaginated]: she explains
that English would have "mar(red] the Greek atmosphere."
70
James Weber Linn, Jane Addams: A Biograpf(y (New York: Appleton-Century
Company, 1935), 236.
71
Jane Addams, Twenry Years at u i i H o u s ~ with Autobiographical Notes (New York:
Macmillan Company, 1911), 256.
GREEK IMMIGRANTS PLAYING ANCIENT GREEKS 25
in the Peloponnese rather than in Athens. As Grace Abbott stated in her
1909 survey: "all of them talk of 'the Athens' as though it had been their
home, but although it belongs to them in a very intimate sort of way, very
few of them have ever seen it."
72
From this we might conclude that both
for Addams- who had long admired and valued classical antiquity and
learning-and for the Greek immigrant, Athens stood as a potent symbol
for the ancient glories of Greece.
For most writers in the press, the humble immigrant was
(through these productions) elevated into a position of cultural and social
importance in an unproblematic way. He brought alive to his compatriots
the stories of Homer and therefore engendered a patriotic sense of
honour and pride. He opened the eyes of scholars who are reported to
have been brought new insight into the texts they knew from the page. He
gave rise to Chicagoans's new admiration for the Greek community and "a
truer knowledge of the intelligence and ability of the large Greek colony
surging about the doors of Hull House."
73
Such statements, when read
against reports of the usual attitude of established Americans to Greek
(and other "new") immigrants do, however, serve to underline the social
tensions that existed between the older and newer communities.
Only occasionally did contemporary commentators seem to be
alert to the disjunction between the stage and reality. In response to a
performance of Ajax, one reviewer-noting that "few things would
ordinarily be less associated in the public mind than a social settlement
and Sophocles"-went on to say that the man playing the great king
Agamemnon "next morning undoubtedly laid down his chieftainship to
'sella de ripe banan."'
74
Despite Hull-House's claims to equality, a rather patronizing thread
noted in reviews is that these productions served to present Chicagoan
Greeks with their own ancient cultural heritage. The Tribune, for example, '
declared that the lasting value of this production would be "to present
Uocal Greeks] with their true historic background, to demonstrate their
right to its inheritance, and to accredit them not only among those who
cherish Greek history but in their surroundings generally."
75
The same
newspaper on another day rather condescendingly considered that the
production may have been "undertaken in the hope that it would turn the
attention of the Greeks to the knowledge of the wealth of literature which
72
Abbott, ''A Study of the Greeks," 380.
73
E. C. Barrows, "Greek Play," 6.
74
"Hull House and Sophocles."
75
"Greek Play at Hull House."
26 WRIGLEY AND D AVIS
is theirs by racial heritage [that he may learn] through realistic pictures that
his ancestors fought and wrestled ... even as he does at the end of this
nineteenth century."
76
The implication here is surely that the modern Greek
may begin to fully appreciate his cultural heritage only when it is mediated
through the performance tradition of elite educational institutions where
ancient plays had been staged for the past two decades. Others, it should
be noted, took the opposite stance, including the sculptor Lorado Taft
who, writing in the Chicago Record, declares that the Greeks "were set right
at last in our eyes. The sons of princes, they had known their heritage all
the time; it was our ignorance which had belittled them."
77
Indeed, before a joint meeting of women's clubs in Boston, and
indeed elsewhere, Addams said that the Greeks were "delighted to play
before the Americans, that they might illustrate and emphasize the fact
that they were not barbarians. One man always prayed before rehearsing
his part, and I asked him the reason for his prayer. He told me that he
prayed for power to properly present the honor and glory of ancient
Greece to the ignorant people of America."
78
A positive reading of this
attitude is that the Greeks may have perceived that their status in the
wider community was raised via the recognition of their cultural heritage.
Indeed, one non-Gr eek contemporary endorsed the view of Hull-House
theatre as an instrument of social change in a review of Ajax: "the poor
and the illiterate are gaining self-respect, not through charity, but by being
convinced that they themselves are worth something."
79
The perceived legacy or heritage of ancient Greece was also,
problematically, used to make claims for the Greek immigrant community
over other new immigrant communities in Chicago: it is reported in
several places that Greeks wanted to prove themselves somehow better
than other Mediterranean immigrants in the city. Addams herself wrote of
how she believed that the Greeks felt they were "easily confused with the
more ignorant immigrants from other parts of south-eastern Europe."
80
Conclusion
These observations hint at the complicated social and cultural capital
that the Hull-House productions of Barrows's The Return of Ocfysseus and
76
Our emphasis. "News of Theaters."
77
Our emphasis. Taft, " Odysseus in Chicago."
78
Addams, "Our Foreign Population."
79
"Hull House and Sophocles."
80
Addams, Twenty-Years at Hull-House, 388.
GREEK IMMIGRANTS P LAYING ANCIENT GREEKS 27
Sophocles's Ajax generated for those who invested in them, and how this
value was intimately bound up with socio-educational circumstance and
perceptions of cultural heritage, as observed in the tensions within the
archival and documentary record. We have two essentially very different
communities working together on the realization of theatre productions,
with each group having different cultural claims and aspirations, in
addition to being from very different socio-economic demographics. The
evidence for these moments of engagements with Greek antiquity are
richly illustrative of attempts at understanding, and misunderstandings
and prejudice, and therefore informative of socio-cultural life in Chicago
at the time.
At Hull-House, the Greeks were not engaging in their own
performative interpretations of the Ocfyssry and Ajax so much as
participating in the American academic tradition of staging ancient Greeks,
complete as it was in these cases with Barrows's amateur archaeology
and casual observations of modern Greek life from her travels. Yet, it is
also manifestly clear from the press reports of the enthusiastic reception
of these plays by the local Greeks in the audience that the productions
inspired in them a strong sense of honor and pride and strengthened
their sense of national (Greek) identity.
81
The ways in which the Greeks
may be considered to have contributed something of their own to these
productions is in their performances of Barrows's choreography of th.e
dances and wrestling matches, and in their insistence-much criticized
in the press-on delivering the ancient Greek text in modern Greek
pronunciation.
One anecdote which nicely illustrates this disjunction between the
imagined reconstruction of ancient practice and the real, lived customs of
a community concerns a Thanksgiving reception held to honour Barrows
in 1903, to which the cast of Ajax and their friends were invited. At this
party, we are told, "the men gave some of their national dances and sang
a number of folksongs [whilst] Miss Barrows in classic costume danced two
historical dances, one of joy and one of tragedy."
82
Yet, this reception also
reveals a moment of (perhaps disparate) unity, when Harriet A. Boyd (a
lecturer in Greek archaeology, epigraphy, and modern Greek at Smith
College, Massachusetts) gave an illustrated lecture of Greek sites. It roused
much applause, "[appealing] strongly," we are told, "to the memory and
81
For one description of the reactions of Greek audiences, see "A Play Acted
by Modern Greeks" (1899).
82
"The Greek Party," Hull-House Bulletin 7.1 (Mid-Winter 1903-04), 17-18. Kour-
vetaris, First and Second Generation Greeks, 88 notes the popularity of folk music amongst
first generation Greeks.
28 WRIGLEY AND D AVIS
patriotism of her audience."
83
A glowing review by Elizabeth Barrows-who may well have been
a relative of the producer Mabel and therefore not a neutral observer-
declared that The Return of Ocfysseuswas "extremely popular, especially with
those who were born under the fair skies of Greece and who love the
atmosphere of that charmed land."
84
In other words, she seems to say, the
play serves to unite modern Greeks in America who feel strongly about
their heritage and modern non-Greek Americans who feel strongly about
their global cultural heritage. If such unity between these different socio-
economic classes dzd occur in this production, it did not, we would argue,
come about unproblematically. And yet, although the local Greek men on
the one hand and the well-educated Barrows and women of Hull-House
on the other collaborated in this venture with probably very different
ideals and aspiration, some kind of connection does seem to have been
established.
As indicated above, Addams's intention to use ancient Greece
as a vehicle to get the local Greek community more involved in Hull-
House was to an extent successful. Gradually, in the first decade of the
twentieth century an increasing number of social and political meetings
were held in the premises and a number of modern Greek plays were
staged. The political meetings discussed matters such as Greek-Turkish
relations which it is said often included "a recital of the glories of ancient
Greece."
85
In 1906, for example, a committee of well-educated Greeks
arranged a meeting with Addams in which:
Americans should speak in English of the glorious
history of Greece, and the Greek speakers should tell
their countrymen in their native tongue some of the
duties and requirements of their adopted country. .
. . The hall was elaborately decorated with Greek and
American flags, pictures of classic buildings of Greece,
and banners from the various Greek societies. . . . The
address given by Professor Paul Shorey [classical scholar
at the University of Chicago] contained many quotations
from ancient and modern Greek authors which were
most enthusiastically applauded by his Greek auditors.
86
83
"The Greek Party."
84
Barrows, "Greek Play," 6.
85
" Greek Lectures," Hull-House Year Book, 1906-07.
86
''American-Greek Meeting at Hull-House," Hull-House Bulletin 7, no. 1 (1905-
GREEK I MMIGRANTS PLAYING A NCIENT GREEKS 29
Lissak notes that this relationship "was achieved by her giving up any effort
to interfere in, or influence Greek activities at Hull House;" indeed the
Greek activities were led not by Hull-House volunteers (as was customary),
but by Greeks themselves.
87
Addams even shut her pacifist eyes to the
Greek military training which took place in the Hull-House gymnasium.
88
Having come to accept modern Greek life and culture unconditionally in
this way meant that amongst the Greeks she came to be praised as "a
patroness of Hellenic arts and ideals."
89
06), 23.
87
Lissak, "Myth and Reality," 39.
88
Kopan, Greek Survival in Chicago," 283-84.
89
Ibid., 283. In 1907, Addams was described by the Greek newspaper The Star
as "one of the best friends of Greek people of Chicago" (quoted in Lissak, "Myth and
Reality," 39).
JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 23, NO.2 (SPRING 2011)
DIGGIN' THE MATERIAL: IDEOLOGICAL STATE APPARATUSES,
"CAPITALIZM," AND IDENTI1Y IN SUZAN- LORI PARKS'S RED
LETTER PLAYS
Jocelyn L. Buckner
In a class society the relations of production are relations of
exploitation) and therifore relations between antagonistic classes.
1
Thry don't call it Capitalizm for nothing.
2
Suzan-Loti Parks's Red Letter Plays In the Blood and Fucking A
unapologetically depict seedy societies and depressed economies
where two heroines, both named Hester, are each caught in a web of
intersectional oppression, abuse, and exploitation due to their race, gender,
sexuality, and class.
3
When analyzing these "sister plays,"
4
most scholars
acknowledge the two Hesters' economic lack and how the characters
surrounding them embody social forces that ultimately contribute to their
continued marginalization. For example, Jon Dietrick explains that In the
Bloods Hester La Negrita "interacts with various characters representing
institutional forces of American society that, while ostensibly meant to help
her, instead collude in her exploitation."
5
Likewise, Christine Woodworth
notes in her examination of the children in the Red Letter Plays that "both
plays ... illustrate the ways in which institutional oppressions impact the
1
Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards
an Investigation)" in Lenin and Philosopf?y and Other Essqys (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1971), 183.
2
Suzan-Lori Parks, In the Blood in The Red Letter Plqys (New York: Theatre Com-
munications Group, 2001), 72.
3
I would like to thank JADT guest editor Mark Cosdon, editorial mentor Bob
Vorlicky, and the entire ATDS editorial board for their guidance and support during the
publication process. Special thanks also to Heidi Temple, Sara Warner, and Aimee Zyg-
monski for providing critical feedback during the development of this article.
4
Rena Fraden, "Suzan-Loti Parks' Hester Plays: In the Blood and Fucking A," The
Massachusetts Review 48, no 3 (Fall2007): 439.
5
Jon Dietrick, "'A Full Refund Aint Enough': Money in Suzan-Lori Parks's Red
Letter Plays" in Suzan-Lon Parks: Essqys on the Plqys and Other Works, edited by Philip C.
Kolin Oefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 88.
32 BUCKNER
lives of children and subsequently haunt their adulthoods."
6
Despite these observations of economic conditions, there remains
a lacuna in the critical assessment of class in these plays. While there has
been much intersectional analysis of the characters' race and gender and
how these factors contribute to and complicate their sexual identities,
significantly less work has been devoted to analyzing the intersection of
class with the other material circumstances of the characters' lives. Rena
Fraden points out that "both Hesters inhabit a dwindled-down history,
not of founding nations and civil wars between nations or brothers, as
is the case in Parks' two 'Lincoln' plays-the America Play and Topdog/
Underdog--but of welfare states, tiny post-colonial colonies, and petty and
brutal and trapped people."
7
It is these "welfare states," and "petty and
brutal and trapped people" that I wish to explicate.
Louis Althusser's essay "Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses" is useful for examining the embodied social forces in In
the Blood and deconstructing the more allegorical characterizations in
Fucking A. I use Althusser's theory to conduct the kind of deep "diggin'"
that Parks favors in order to come to a more nuanced understanding of
each Hester's character, her world, and the material social and economic
conditions that drive each to her own tragic ending. Identifying Ideological
State Apparatuses (ISAs) in these plays makes evident their societal roles
and their influence on shaping the life of each Hester and her respective
children. Using the understanding of identity development inherent in
Althusser's work to read these plays helps reveal, as Jennifer B. Gray states,
that the individual "is the site of the intersection of material, cultural,
and social influences. The individual is formed collectively ... as cultural
institutions and ideology work together to constitute the individual. The
individual is couched in history, between oppositions of class, race, and
the like."
8
In other words, the material conditions in which we live-
particularly our given economic circumstances-dictate to a large extent
our subjectivity and our existence within the ideological systems of our
society. Suzan-Lori Parks explores the ideological and systemic model by
characterizing and personifying the system, referred to as "capitializm" by
Hester La N egrita's friend and sometime business associate Amiga Gringa
6
Christine Woodworth, ''Parks and the Traumas of Childhood" in Suzan-Lori
Parks: Essqys on the Plqys and Other Works, 146.
7
Fraden, "Suzan-Lori Parks' Hester Plays," 436.
8
Jennifer B. Gray, Ideology, and the Theoretical Foundations: Theory
and Communication," NMEDIAC Journal qf New Media and Culture 3, no 1 (Winter 2005)
http: / / www.ibiblio.org/ nmediac/ winter2004/gray.html (accessed 7 December 2010).
DIGGIN' THE :MATERIAL 33
and sung about by Hester Smith and her friend Canary Mary in ''Working
Woman's Song":
Its not that we love
What we do
But we do it
We look at the day
We just gotta get through it.
We dig our ditch with no complaining
Work in hot sun, or even when its raining
And when the long day finally comes to an end
We'll say:
"Here is a woman
Who does all she can."
9
By presenting characters' relationships to the system and labor in multiple
ways, Parks creates opportunities for the audience to recognize how
these forces contribute to the Resters' identities within society, our own
position and collusion within the system, and the ways we are all shaped
by the forces surrounding us.
Hester La Negrita and Hester Smith dwell in welfare states
populated by people who represent social institutions. But more
specifically, I argue that these characters are the dramatic embodiment
of the social and economic forces that Louis Althusser terms Ideological
State Apparatuses. His theory of these social institutions expands
Marx's theory of the public State Apparatus (SA) which contains "the
Government, the Administration, the Army, the Police, the Courts, the
Prisons, etc ... the State Apparatus in question 'functions by violence'-
at least ultimately."
10
ISAs, on the other hand, are private institutions
which "function massively and predominantly l?J ideology, but they also
function secondarily by repression, even if ultimately, but only ultimately,
this is very attenuated and concealed, even symbolic."
11
Such institutions
include religion, educational systems, family, law, the political system,
trade-unions, media, and culture. According to Althusser, these entities
are united by their universal commitment to operating under a shared
ideology "insofar as the ideology by which they function is always in
fact unified, despite its diversity and its contradictions, beneath the ruling
9
Parks, Fucking A in The Red Letter Plqys, 122-3.
10
Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," 142-3.
11
Ibid., 145.
34
BucKNER
ideology, which is the ideology of 'the ruling class."'
12
SAs and ISAs are
similar in their collective support of a ruling or governing ideology that
creates structure and hierarchy in society. They differ in that SAs operate
under a threat of imminent violence which serves to maintain order and
compliance with the social structure they enforce, while ISAs enforce
ideology through a subliminal and often imperceptible repression of
subversive social elements and individuals, and only ultimately resort to
violence to maintain social hierarchies. While their primary tactics may
differ, as Althusser notes,
this determination of the double "functioning"
(predominantly, secondarily) by repression and by
ideology, according to whether it is a matter of the
(Repressive) State Apparatus or the Ideological State
Apparatuses, makes it clear that very subtle explicit or
tacit combinations may be woven from the interplay
of the (Repressive) State Apparatus and the Ideological
State Apparatuses.
13
These public and private Apparatuses collude to suppress cultural outliers
and reinforce normative operations, views, and behavior, which ultimately
contribute to obedient citizens and workers, more efficient workflow, and
maximum productivity and profits.
In the Blood
Oh, I coulda been the Queen if Sheba, it just werent in the cards.
14
As the main character of In the Blood, Hester La N egrita is a victim of
fraudulent and morally corrupt ISAs. They exploit and marginalize her
even further instead of helping her, providing her with education, hope,
and employment so that she can participate in society. Lisa M. Anderson
notes that "Parks is not afraid to engage with the 'negative' images of
black women, and in doing so, she works at making visible the ways in
which all of society-black and white-is implicated in the existence
of women like Hester."
15
In In the Blood, Parks constructs a postmodern
12
Ibid., 146.
13
Ibid., 145-6.
14
Parks, In the Blood, 41.
15
Lisa M. Anderson, Black Feminism in Contemporary Drama (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2008), 120.
DIGGIN' THE MATERIAL 35
version of Nathaniel Hawthorne's nineteenth-century Hester Pryne, a
social outcast attempting to support herself through piecemeal sewing
jobs and the occasional charity of social figures. Yet the dramatic intensity
of Parks's character is heightened to include a complex figure consistently
marginalized through poverty, race, sexual exploitation, several children
born out-of-wedlock, and illiteracy. Hester La Negrita is an iconic Welfare
Queen, an oxymoronic travesty of contemporary society and a painfully
human reminder of how ISAs from government to religious institutions
systematically fail to assist individuals in gaining access to opportunities
for long-term economic stability and self-sufficiency. Anderson observes
"the life of a woman on welfare is completely removed from the life of a
queen, an individual with social and economic power."
16
Hester La Negrita
struggles to maintain a shred of human decency and decorum despite her
circumstances. She rules her brood of hungry youngsters at the margins of
the community, lives under a bridge, wields a stolen bully club instead of
a scepter, and dreams of basic economic necessities rather than privileged
birthrights. Hester embodies the slippery slope between subsisting, living
on government aid, and scratching out a life below the poverty line.
Althusser argues that "the Ideological State Apparatuses may be
not only the stake, but also the site of class struggle, and often of bitter
forms of class struggle."
17
It is these very institutions that create social
conflict between classes while at the same time maintaining the economic
hierarchy of a capitalist society. Althusser theorizes that
ideology "acts" or "functions" in such a way that it
"recruits" subjects among the individuals (it recruits
them all) or "transforms" the individuals into subjects (it
transforms them all) by that very precise operation which
I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be
imagined along the lines of the most commonplace
everyday police (or other) hailing: "Hey, you there!"
18
The following analysis examines Hester La Negrita's struggles with the
ISAs religion, healthcare, and welfare, and how each deploys ideology in
the act of interpellation, thus "hailing Hester" and defining her as a subject
16
Ibid., 70.
17
Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," 147.
18
Ibid., 174.
36 B UCKNER
captive in indigent misery.
19
Hester is not at odds with her environment,
represented by the ideological social forces she encounters in her constant
effort to "get a leg up" on her situation and improve her family's (her own
little ISA) condition.
20
The ISA Religion is embodied by the character Reverend D, who
is also the father of Baby, Hester's fifth and youngest child. He sermonizes
about personal responsibility, individualism, and self-reliance, "telling you
how to pick yourself up ... you can pull yrself up" (46). Reverend D
shares with the audience that his own background is one of delinquency,
"when I was low, many years ago, with a bottle in my hand and the cold
hard unforgiving pavement for my dwelling place" (46). Ironically, when
Hester approaches Reverend D asking for help for herself and their child,
his sermons of self-reliance let society collectively and him personally
off the hook for any real responsibility to the poor or Hester specifically.
Reverend D reinscribes Hester's subsistent position rather than helping
her elevate herself.
Reverend D confesses in a soliloquy that Hester means nothing
to him, admitting that "suffering is an enormous turn-on," and "add
insult to injury was what I was thinking" when he slept with her (78). He
acknowledges that he knew about the resulting pregnancy, saying "when
she told me of her predicament I gave her enough money to take care of it"
(79).
21
ReverendD realizes his actions and their illegitimate child that Hester
chose to keep rather than abort may threaten his own precarious success.
Yet instead of assuming his portion of responsibility for his behavior
and his bloodline, he blames Hester, complaining "now God, through
her, wants to drag me down and sit me at the table at the head of the
table of her fatherless house" (79). The financially defunct and seemingly
dysfunctional familial ISA threatens Reverend D's (religion's) productivity
and economic standing. He maintains the ideology of the ruling class and
its edict of social responsibility through sermons, preaching from the
cornerstone of his soon-to-be-built church that "for most of us, God is
the IRS ... The wages of sin, they lead to death, so you say, let me give
to the poor. But not any poor, just those respectable charities. I want my
poor looking good ... Gimmie foreign poor . . . Poverty exotica. Gimmie
brown and yellow skins against a non-Western landscape" (73).
Parks uses soliloquies such as this one as confessional moments
.
19
Thanks to Joe Roach for this alliterative turn of phrase.
20
See, for example, Parks, In the Blood, 23, 28, 58. Subsequent references to this
text will be made parenthetically.
21
Emphasis in original.
DIGGIN' THE MATERIAL 37
between ISA characters and the audience. In these moments characters
reveal their private ideological misgivings about Hester and the audience is
invited, as listener, to judge, forgive, or identify with the speakers' view of
Hester. Harvey Young explains that these "confessions cast the theatrical
spectators not only as confessors, who are capable of absolving his sins,
but also as a jury, who as his peers are capable of understanding and,
perhaps, identifying with his actions."
22
Thus there is collusion on the part
of the listener cast as jury-another ISA-with the speaker, if for no
other reason than watching and hearing the ways these ISAs disenfranchise
some while protecting and promoting others, thereby creating winners and
losers within the capitalist system. In these moments the art on the stage
reflects life on the street. Audience members (who as theatergoers are able
to afford the cost of the ticket to a production and thus are not Hester's
peers by virtue of their economic solvency) experience-and participate
in- the dramatic enactment of the systemic enforcement of economic
exploitation and disenfranchisement against Hester.
Reverend D pinpoints society's desire to overlook the poverty
in our own midst in favor of turning attention and assistance to an
alien Other, a distanced and anonymous mass of humanity that, while
pitiable, does not feel like a drain on our immediate cultural and economic
system. Thus when the "local poor," i.e. Hester, comes to him directly
for assistance for his own bloodline, he threatens her. "Don't ever come
back here again! Ever! Yll never get nothing from me! Common Slut.
Tell on me! Go on! Tell the world! I'll crush you underfoot" (1 03). In this
moment, Reverend D defines Hester's subjectivity through the religious
ideology that he represents. Reverend D hails Hester, defining her as
both subject and subjected, as possessing identity and being subject to
the hierarchical ideologies he maintains. This exchange reflects Althusser's
analysis of religious ideology's "interpellation of individuals as subject
[which] presupposes the 'existence' of a Unique and central Other
Subject, in whose Name the religious ideology interpellates all individuals
as subjects." Reverend D and Hester are "the Subject's interlocutors-
interpellates: his mirrors, his reflections . .. even in the terrible inversion of
his image in them (when the subjects wallow in debauchery, i.e. sin)."
23
Reverend D manipulates his position of power within the religious system
22
Harvey Young, "Choral Compassion: In the Blood and Venus," in Suzan-Lori
Parks: A Casebook, edited by Kevin]. Wetmore, Jr. and Alycia Smith-Howard (New York:
Routledge, 2007), 34-35.
23
Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," 178-9, emphasis in
original.
38
BucKNER
of interpellation, negating Hester's ability to hail his own corruption, thus
preserving the ideological system and his own privilege within it. Such
hailing of Hester occurs throughout the play until Hester breaks under
the pressure of the system, murdering her son Jabber when he mimics the
system by hailing his own mother as a "Slut."
The healthcare system embodied by the character Doctor is
perhaps the most dehumanizing of all the ISAs. Doctor runs a sidewalk
health clinic and his bedside manner leaves much to be desired. Though
he too has slept with Hester he shirks responsibility for the act, saying
"What could I do? I couldn't help it" (45). He inspects Hester on the
street, commanding her to "gimme the Spread & Squat right quick" so he
can "have a look under the hood" and then proceeds to "slide between
her legs on a dolly and look up into her privates with a flashlight."
24
Parks
often omits stage directions, preferring to include action in the dialogue.
~ c t i o n goes in the line of dialogue instead of always in a pissy set of
parentheses. How the line should be delivered is contained in the line
itself."
25
The characters' embodiment is inherent in their dialogue on
the page in addition to their physical performance of the words and
interactions onstage. Yet here Parks makes explicit the dehumanizing
and humiliating treatment experienced by the indigent at the hands of an
overburdened healthcare system unable to fully assist uninsured citizens
living on the margins of society.
While Hester attempts to tell Doctor that her abdomen is causing
her acute pain, most likely from a lack of food, Doctor largely ignores her,
admonishing her for her poor health and its consequences for his own
livelihood and medical practice (the system he is charged with maintaining
as part of the network of ISAs) . Doctor breaks the news that omnipotent,
unseen "Highers Up" believe the best thing for Hester is a hysterectomy,
which he informs her of while conducting a vision test requiring her to
read the word SPAY Hester, being illiterate, is only able to manage the
letter A. Doctor shirks responsibility for the involuntary sterilization,
lecturing Hester to remember "You have 5 healthy children, itll be for the
best, considering ... Ive forwarded my recommendation to yr caseworker.
Its out of my hands. Im sorry" (43). Later Hester's caseworker, Welfare,
bounces responsibility for the decision back to Doctor, telling Hester "Y r
doctor recommends that you get a hysterectomy. Take out your woman
parts. A spay ... I hope things wont come to that. I will do what I can.
24
Ibid., 39.
25
Suzan-Lori Parks, "From Elements of Style" in The America Plqy and Other
Works (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 15-16.
DIGGIN' THE MATERIAL 39
You have to help me, Hester" (56). Neither ISA is willing to assume
responsibility for Hester's well-being. Ultimately Welfare assigns all
responsibility for Hester's given circumstances to Hester herself.
Doctor and Welfare collude to deny Hester her reproductive rights
and part of what defines her biological sex and status as an autonomous
adult. She is given no choice in the matter; it is simply announced during
her visit to the walk-in clinic. Such treatment echoes the kind of systematic
and prejudiced eugenics practices conducted for the better part of the
twentieth century against the country's indigent, women perceived to
be promiscuous, the psychologically and cognitively impaired, and racial
minority groups. These procedures were used to strengthen the gene pool
by stemming the transference of supposedly undesirable characteristics
to offspring, characteristics which were thought to be transferred "in the
blood." Intersectional identities compound the impact of these practices
since many individuals subjected to sterilization procedures possess
more than one of the identity traits listed above. During the decades
that involuntary sterilization was widespread, the New York Academy
of Medicine predicts "more than 60,000 men, women and children were
sterilized without their consent: more women than men and twice as
many black women as white." Historian Paul Lombardo describes such
practices as an example of "the way we institutionalize bigotry."
26
These
statistics make evident the scope of this inhumane practice; Parks makes
the problem and the victim a human one.
While the threat of sterilization smacks of racial and sexual
prejudice, it also reflects capitalism's insistence on reproduction within the
confines of economically sustainable family units, wherein the product of
sex and labor-children-can be effectively nourished, maintained, and
prepared for eventual entry into the marketplace as productive citizens and
laborers. But Hester La N egrita lives outside the capitalist system which
asks "How is the reproduction of labour power ensured? It is ensured by
giving labour power the material means with which to reproduce itself: by
wages ... indispensibles for raising and educating the children in whom the
proletariat reproduces [her] self ... as labour power."
27
Hester's household
does not fit the appropriate labor and familial ISA model, and therefore is
threatened with dismemberment.
Hester and her reproductive practices reflect US capitalism's his-
26
New York Academy of Medicine, "Involuntary Sterilization the Focus of
Academy's Lilianna Sauter Lecture," https:/ /www.nyam.org/news/1141.html (accessed
20 July 2009).
27
Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," 130-1.
40 B UCKNER
toric and ongoing views of black women. Within the American slavery
system, black women were considered valuable if they were consistently
reproducing offspring, the most important commodity or labor a black
woman could produce. However in contemporary culture an African
American mother and poorly educated children are viewed as a drain on a
system that is now unable to fully exploit their labor potential. As a result
the system marginalizes Hester and women like her, maintaining their sub-
sistence with underemployment and minimal institutional support. While
Hester is not technically enslaved, the system still "owns" her children in
the sense that they are supported by it. One tactical error by Hester, and
her "treasures" could be taken from her. Welfare's warnings that she will
remove Hester's children from the household, "I'll have you locked up.
We'll take yr kids away and yll never see them again" (59), echo threats by
slave masters to sell children "down the river" as punishment for their or
their mother's perceived misbehavior. Likewise, Hester's body represents
the health care system's historic and ongoing exploitation of young women
on welfare as guinea pigs for reproductive technologies and birth control
that are new to the market.
28
In these ways, as Lisa M. Anderson notes,
Parks's play uses history "as a way of revealing the ways in which things
have not changed,"
29
and delineates the connection between historical op-
pression and ongoing economic abuse of the indigent and black women.
Welfare reveals that she too has sexually exploited Hester, luring
her into a threesome with her and her husband.
30
She also tricks Hester
into working for less than minimum wage as a seamstress, further so-
lidifying Hester's position outside the realm of economic self-sufficiency.
Lauren Berlant observes that since Hester Prynne "is a seamstress in the
collectivity, in her work she reweaves and reinforces the world as it already
is, even as she is isolated from it and judged by it."
31
Deborah Geis notes
that Hester La Negrita, like Hawthorne's Hester Prynne, is completely
28
See, for example, Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage
Books, 1983); Jennifer Nelson, Women if Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement (New
York: New York University Press, 2003); and Jael Silliman, Marlene Gerber Fried, Loretta
Ross, and Elena R. Gutierrez, eds., Undivided Rights- Women if Color Organize for Reproductive
Justice (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2004).
29
Anderson, Black Feminism in Contemporary Drama, 118.
30
Anderson observes that "as many times as Hester is used sexually by the
people who are supposed to help her, one wonders if she would not be better off selling
herself rather than giving herself away for almost nothing," Black Feminism in Contemporary
Drama, 64.
31
Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy if National Fanta.ry: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everydqy
Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 71.
DIGGIN' THE MATERIAL 41
entwined in the system.
32
But in contrast to Prynne, La Negrita fails at
sewing (she is unable to thread a needle), thereby reinforcing the broken
nature of the system and her inability to work her way out of it. Welfare
and Amiga Gringa hail Hester as a failure for even attempting the sew-
ing project. Welfare prefaces the job offer by explaining that "It doesn't
pay well ... Hard honest work. Unless yr afraid of hard honest work ..
. Here's the fabric. Make sure you don't get it dirty" (59). Later, Amiga
Gringa reinforces the fact that Hester is enslaved in the system, assessing
this latest piecemeal job as exploitation. "Hester, I would want to be paid
a living wage. You have agreed to work for less than a living wage. May
as well be a slave. Or an animal . . . if you do well shes gonna let you be
her slave for life" (66).
33
Because Hester is uneducated, she may not fully
recognize the extent to which Welfare undermines her. Because Hester is
unskilled, she is unable to fully commit to and complete the job offered to
her. Her circumstances leave her with little alternative but to take jobs like
the sewing project, which enable her to work from home and care for her
children, since she cannot afford the child care which would allow her to
pursue employment outside the home.
Welfare resists acknowledging the ways she has failed Hester
and maintains the capitalist system by performing what Althusser
describes as "an apparatus of class struggle ensuring class oppression and
guaranteeing the conditions of exploitation and its reproduction."
34
When
Hester observes "I dont think the world likes women much," Welfare
admonishes "Don't be silly . . . Im a woman too! And a black woman
just like you," implying that anyone can be a success, or that success is
ultimately up to an individual's determination, rather than also contingent
upon a number of factors, both private and public (59-60). While the ISA
characters may share race or gender with Hester, Welfare underscores that
material circumstances are the determining factor in Hester's life. As such,
the primary divide between Hester and the other characters is class. In her
soliloquy Welfare underscores "I should emphasize that she is a low-class
person. What I mean by that is that we have absolutely nothing in common.
As her caseworker I realize that maintenance of the system depends on a
well-drawn boundary line and all parties respecting that boundary" (62).
While she previously emphasized her similarity to Hester by pointing out
their shared gender and racial background, here Welfare distances herself
32
Deborah R. Geis, Suzan-Lori Parks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2008), 129.
33
Emphasis in original.
34
Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," 184.
42 BucKNER
from her client, solely on the basis of class. She reinforces the class divide
by soliciting sympathy and understanding for herself from the audience
who, based on class status, is more likely to identify with Welfare than
Hester.
Welfare also echoes the ideology of self reliance from Reverend
D's sermon. At one point, Hester confesses to Welfare, "My life's my own
fault. I know that. But the world dont help, Maam." Welfare retorts, "The
world is not here to help us, Hester. The world is simply here. We must help
ourselves" (59). Welfare, Doctor, and Reverend D all refuse to recognize
Hester's reality as problematic, instead blaming the victim for her situation.
By denying Hester's condition, these embodied ISAs reflect Althusser's
argument that "what is represented in ideology is therefore not the system
of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the
imaginary relation of the existence of those individuals to the real relations
in which they live."
35
These ISAs bolster one another by ignoring Hester's
grim reality, hailing her as a social pariah, a "Common Slut." Through their
collective ideology, "the system of the ideas and representations which
dominate the mind of a [wo]man or a social group,"
36
they break Hester
down until she retaliates against the system and destroys her own family.
Hester's five "joys" and the hopeless strain of her circumstances
ultimately lead her to snap, lashing out at and killing her oldest and favorite
child, Jabber. Regretfully, Hester mourns, "Never shoulda had him. Never
shoulda had none of em," then quickly reverses her position, wishing she
had created her own apparatus, a military of children. She imagines, "I
shoulda had a hundred-thousand, A hundred-thousand a whole army full
I shouldal" to protect her from and overtake capitalism and society (1 06-
7) . In the final moment of the play, Hester is judged by a chorus, a jury
of her "peers," and the ISAs discuss her successful "spay." Hester has
failed to contribute to the system, so instead of profiting from her labor,
the ISAs supporting the capitalist system convict her, turning her over
to the penal system, a branch of the repressive State Apparatus. Hester's
incarceration will enable the prison industrial complex to profit from
tending to her continued subsistence as a ward of the state. In response to
her fate, Hester repeats "Big hand coming down on me. Big hand coming
down on me. Big hand coming down on me" (110). Jon Dietrick reads
the hand as "[Adam] Smith's 'Invisible Hand,' that force born of self-
35
Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," 164, emphasis mine.
36
Ibid., 158.
DrGGIN' THE MATERIAL 43
interest, competition, and supply and demand."
37
The hand of the market
represents the forces of both Repressive and Ideological State Apparatuses
that ultimately align and relegate Hester to life within another apparatus:
in prison, behind bars.
Fucking A
Freedom Aint Freel
38
While In the Blood takes place in an uncomfortably realistic setting, Fucking
A is an "otherworldly tale" dealing with extremely real problems (113).
The main character Hester Smith bears a wound: a stinking, weeping A
branded into her flesh and exposed for all to see above her left breast.
Hester's crime: being the poor single mother of a hungry son named Boy
who stole a bit of meat from the rich family she worked for, only to be
ratted out by the employer's daughter. Boy was sentenced to a three year
prison term that extended to thirty years due to poor behavior. Hester's
punishment: go to prison herself, or be branded with an A and become
the town's abortion provider, giving her the possibility of buying her son's
freedom. As Hester explains to her friend and sometime love interest
Butcher, "Go to prison or take this job. That was my choice. Choose A or
choose B. I chose .N' (165).
As in In the Blood, the invocation of slavery and entrapment in
the system also permeates Fucking A. It overshadows Hester Smith's life
and dictates her employment options. Hester Smith's physical brand links
her forever to the system that oppresses her. The allegorical A on her
chest-"so fresh like they just branded me yesterday"-symbolizes her
profession and weeps when a client is corning (1 25). It is a source of
much public scorn, but Hester is unable to hide her wound, because doing
so is "against the law" (146). Deborah Geis notes that "in Fucking A, the
branding image invokes slavery (as well as Nazism), and it allows Parks
to create a disturbing sense of what it means for the black female body
to be controlled and manipulated."
39
Marking Hester's body, like a slave
or livestock, both punishes Hester and dehumanizes her. The profession
accompanying the wound further disenfranchises Hester within the
community and economic system because she is conducting what many
37
Dietrick, '"A Full Refund Aint Enough,"' 96.
38
Suzan-Lori Parks, Fucking A, 131. Subsequent references to this text will be
made parenthetically.
39
Geis, Suzan-Lori Parks, 140.
44 BucKNER
see as an inhumane procedure.
In the Blood is punctuated by soliloquies in which the ISA
characters reveal their disdain for and reliance upon Hester La Negrita as
both a weak link and part of the proletariat base supporting the capitalist
system. By contrast, in Fucking A Parks uses Brechtian style songs to help
define and comment upon social and economic dynamics. The songs,
disconnected from yet related to the dramatic action surrounding them,
throw into high relief the characters' positions within the economy and
society, their relationships to one another, and to their work. Through
these songs Parks creates an allegorical, critical aesthetic through which
she critiques the capitalist system, foregrounding Hester's struggles within
the proletariat and against the bourgeoisie and the State. The songs
contrast in heightened dramatic fashion the given circumstances of the
lower classes, embodied by Hester Smith and Canary Mary, and the ruling
class, embodied by Mayor and First Lady, and supported by Apparatuses
embodied by the Hunters and Freedom Fund. They enable the audience
to achieve a critical distance from the characters and in doing so view
them as representative of the system and its problems. They also build
tension between the social hierarchies of power, thereby reinforcing the
dramatic action and heightening the conflict between the inhabitants of
this society.
The songs exemplify aspects of the State and its ISAs that dictate
the parameters of Hester Smith's world. In "Working Woman's Song"
quoted at the beginning of this article, Hester and her friend, prostitute
and fellow social outlier, Canary Mary, sing about their position as laborers.
They are defined by their labor, yet disenfranchised from it. Hester, as
Canary Mary observes, "perform[s] one of those disrespectable but
most necessary services" (121). It is a service that acts as what Althusser
describes as part of "the infrastructure, or economic base" that upholds the
"superstructure, which itself contains two 'levels' or 'instances': the politico-
legal (law and the State) and ideology (the different ideologies, religious,
ethical, legal, political, etc.)."
40
Like Hester La Negrita, Hester Smith is
held beneath the system by its ideology, yet her work serves to maintain
the smooth operation and resulting profitability of the social system and
capitalism itself.
Hester's position is further interpellated by state ideology. The
character named Freedom Fund (who runs the prison) hails Hester as
an obedient and productive citizen for maintaining her abortion services
while simultaneously withholding Hester's incarcerated son from her, thus
guaranteeing Hester's continued labor within the system. ''A mother cant
40
Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," 134.
DIGGIN' THE MATERIAL 45
buy her sons freedom in prison. You chose employment, Mrs. Smith.
Youve got initiative. Thats good" (132). Hester has scrimped and saved her
meager wages for three decades to purchase the privilege of an afternoon
picnic with her son. But Freedom Fund informs her that "Freedom Aint
Free" and that her son's picnic price has doubled due to bad behavior.
Such a blow is devastating to a woman who has little choice but to abort
others' babies (another example of ridding society of unwanted babies
and unwanted bloodlines and thus reinforcing the position of the ruling
class) as a means by which to gain access to her own child, torn from her
arms because of an act of hunger.
In the song "My Little Army," Mayor, who embodies "the State
which is the state of the ruling class,"
41
fantasizes about his virility (which
we learn is questionable due to his wife's inability to conceive a child with
him) and the power he imagines it represents. He sings about producing
an army of children. Unlike the unborn army of children that Hester La
N egrita mourns for at the end of In the Blood, an army that would have
enacted what Althusser envisions as the "destruction of the State (the end
of State power, the end of every State apparatus),"
42
Mayor dreams of
expanding the repressive arm of the State in order to protect his political
and economic power as head of the State and his household. His army,
willing to "lay down their lives so our state will survive" (129), would
become yet another arm of "the State apparatus, which defines the State
as a force of repressive execution and intervention 'in the interests of the
ruling classes' in the class struggle conducted by the bourgeoisie and its
allies against the proletariat."
43
Canary Mary interpellates and is also interpellated by the system
in her social position as Mayor's mistress. She begs Mayor to leave his wife
and marry her, arguing, ''You are the Mayor they are the people. You are
the shepherd they are the sheep. You set the clock you style the fashion you
define the taste" (152). During a Spell,
44
Canary Mary and the Mayor come
to an understanding that he is unwilling to leave his wealthy wife for her.
The economic nature of these relationships is underscored when Mayor
ends the conversation with "'Wife,' 'Mistress,' what does it matter? Take
the gold. Buy something nice" (153). Canary Mary acquiesces, but sings
41
Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," 144.
42
Ibid., 141.
43
Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," 137.
44
One of Parks's "unconventional theatrical elements" defined as "an elongated
and heightened (Rest) ... denoted by repetition of figures' names with no dialogue . . .
where the figures experience their pure true simple state." Parks, Red Letter Plqys, ix.
46
BucKNER
about her conflicted predicament in "Gilded Cage," echoing Freedom
Fund's mantra. '"Freedom,' she said,-ain't free at all. It's price: a heavy
wage. And when you find how much your freedom costs, you just may
give it up for a gorgeous gilded cage" (153).
Parks further dramatizes the rift between classes by critiquing
society's tendency to incarcerate individuals for petty crimes against
capitalism and profit margins that are motivated by poverty, instead of
addressing the systemic and social issues related to poverty directly. Rather
than acknowledging the fundamental problem, society responds to its
effects, removing offenders from the community rather than providing
them opportunities for economic advancement, education, and the
maintenance of their basic human needs, what Althusser describes as "the
material means with which to reproduce."
45
As a result, poverty and illegal,
ineffective coping skills are maintained and resurrected when prisoners
reenter society, posing an even greater threat to community safety and
capitalism's profitability. Hester's son escapes from prison, breaking and
entering his own initially unrecognized mother's house, stealing meat, and
ordering her to give him all her money-money she has been saving to
purchase his freedom. Like his mother, he is dehumanized. He is hunted
like an animal and called Monster, a reference to the horrific acts he has
allegedly committed while incarcerated.
The Hunters (law enforcement) search for Monster, vying for
body parts (testicles, fingers, feet, hands) they can brandish as souvenirs
of a successful hunt.
46
Here the more dogmatic ISA and the more violent
SA merge, as the Hunters support the State Apparatus through the use
of force while singing about their restraint and moral ideology in "The
Hunters Creed":
We hunt
But we do
Not
Eat what we catch.
That'd be a little much
Dontcha think? (143-7)
Their violence includes a "run through," which they gleefully describe as
"the best thing to do to a convict when you catch him. It gets the loudest
screams. You get a hot iron rod and run it up his bottom and out his
45
Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," 130.
46
See Harvey Young, "The Black Body as Souvenir in American Lynching,"
Theatre journal 57, no. 4 (December 2005): 639-57.
D IGGIN' THE MATERIAL 47
throat. Then you stick the rod in the ground and let him wiggle on the
stick" (173). These acts of dismemberment not only echo the "sport"
with which white mobs regularly hunted and lynched African Americans
through the middle of the twentieth century, but also serve to "abort"
convicts permanently from the society they are attempting to reenter. The
Hunters are the repressive means which, as Althusser explains, "enables
the ruling classes . . . to ensure their domination over the working class,
thus enabling the former to subject the latter to the process of surplus-
value extortion (i.e. to capitalist exploitation)."
47
This systemic violence
reinforces the power, perceived value, and permanence of the ruling class.
It allows for the exploitation of workers and the annihilation of members
of the lower class who are viewed as disposable and inconsequential,
thereby limiting corruption within the system from perceived threats
while simultaneously preventing the reproduction of unsavory individuals.
Monster manages to evade the Hunters long enough to enter
into a sexual liaison with the Mayor's wife, First Lady, the rich girl
whose accusations originally landed him in prison. Their union results
in a pregnancy. This conception is a valuable acquisition for First Lady,
whose personal and economic stability has been threatened by years of
unsuccessful attempts to produce an heir and thereby secure her legitimacy
as First Lady. In contrast to her husband's daydreams of reproducing
military might, in the song "My Little Enemy," First Lady sings about
bearing a child that will be her "salvation. Who knows he may grow up to
rule the nation. And my husband, blind with happiness, will never guess,
the enemy in his army" (191). Recognizing that "class struggle concerns
State power,"
48
she revels in the possibility of strengthening her own
position within the bourgeoisie via an insidious proletariat infiltration.
Hester, believing her son has died in prison, learns of First Lady's
pregnancy and decides to abort the child in revenge, unaware that it is her
grandchild. In her grief and anger, she vows to "rip her child from her like
she ripped mine from me," but ultimately eliminates her own bloodline,
a precious link to her lost son (205). Jon Dietrick notes that "Hester's
revenge demonstrates her conditioning by the money economy."
49
Entrapment within the capitalist system reinforced by ISAs determined to
keep her in a subservient position leads Hester to "set in motion a radical
process, that of the destruction of the State (the end of State power, the
47
Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," 137.
48
Ibid., 141.
49
Dietrick, " 'A Full Refund Aint Enough,"' 100.
48 BucKNER
end of every State apparatus) ."
50
Her decision is foreshadowed in "My
Revenge" when she sings
The low on the ladder
The barrels rock bottom
Will reach up and strangle
The Rich then God rot them.
She'll mourn the day
She crushed us underfoot.
Her Rich Girl wealth
Will not stop me from put-
ting my mark on her
And it will equal what we've paid.
My vengeance will show her
How a true mother is made (184).
Althusser explains that "the proletariat must seize State power in order
to destroy the existing bourgeois State apparatus."
51
By terminating First
Lady's pregnancy Hester exacts personal and proletariat revenge on the
system that first destroyed her family.
Monster eventually returns to Hester's house and reveals his
identity to his mother. He begs her to kill him rather than allow him to
be captured, tortured, and killed by the Hunters on his trail. In an act
reminiscent of historical and literary murderous mothers such as Medea,
Sethe in Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Cora in Langston Hughes's Mulatto,
Hester acquiesces and Monster is sacrificed to avoid further victimization
by society. Yet this "mercy killing" is in vain, since Monster's body maintains
worth as a commodity in the capitalist system. The Hunters discover the
body and proclaim "Plenty of fun still to be had, though! ... Hes ours by
rights gal, give him up. If you think yll get any of the reward money you
got another thing coming" (220). Tragically, Hester's attempt to resist the
ideology of the system only leads her to commit two senseless murders.
"Hester declares that she is 'not a mother' if she forgoes vengeance on
the First Lady. In the end, she is no longer a mother as a result of her
insistence on settling the score, on paying back the First Lady in kind."
52
These songs provide an extended allegorical framework in which
characters reveal their positions within the capitalist system. The songs
50
Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," 141.
51
Ibid.
52
Dietrick, "'A Full Refund Aint Enough,"' 100.
DIGGIN' THE 49
heighten the symbolic representation of the characters. They become
what Althusser describes as "'individuals' who live in ideology, i.e. in a
determinate ... representation of the world whose imaginary distortion
depends on their imaginary relation to their conditions of existence ...
to the relations of production and to class relations."
53
The songs enable
characters to articulate their imagined relation to their material existence,
to communicate ideological constructs defining their society, and to
comment on them critically through the heightened theatricality of song.
While Ideological State Apparatuses infiltrate every part of
Hester La Negrita and Hester Smith's lives, there is one ISA that these
women have little to no contact with: the educational system. Geis argues
that "Parks is interested in the historical sense in which women have been
kept in their place by being denied the right to literacy; the image has
further resonance if we consider that African American slaves were also
denied access to forms of education that could lead to their rebellion."
54
A lack of education disenfranchises both Hesters as well as their children,
who benefit neither from a proper education nor indoctrination into "the
'rules' of good behavior."
55
Althusser argues that "the ideological State
apparatus which has been installed in the dominant position in mature
capitalist social formations as a result of a violent political and ideological
class struggle . . . is the educational ideological apparatus."
56
Education is
the means by which the state and capitalism ensures
a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the
established order, i.e. a reproduction of submission to
the ruling ideology for the workers, and a reproduction
of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly
for the agents of exploitation and repression, so they,
too, will provide for the domination of the ruling class
"in words."
57
Or, "in other words, the school .. . teaches 'know-how,' but in forms which
ensure subjection to the ruling ideology or the mastery of its 'practice."'
58
53
Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," 166-167.
54
Geis, Suzan-Lori Parks, 135.
55
Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," 132.
56
Ibid., 152.
57
Ibid., 132-3.
58
Ibid., 133.
so BucKNER
Despite their lack of education, Hester La Negrita and Hester Smith are
still subject to the forces of the state and "capitalizm," reinforced by all of
the ISAs with which they have contact. But they also lack basic intellectual
and professional knowledge that would enable them to improve their class
position within the system. Capitalism's systemic forces interpellate, or
hail, the Hesters' identities, determining each character's economic status
and level of success (or lack thereof).
While education is not the equivalent of class status, economic
advancement is largely dependent on knowledge and training that enables
individuals to pursue professional opportunities. Althusser argues that
education "drums into [children], whether it uses new or old methods,
a certain amount of 'know-how' wrapped in the ruling ideology ... or
simply the ruling ideology in its pure state" until a citizenry is "ejected
. . . practically provided with the ideology which suit the role it has to
fulfil in class society: the role of the exploited .. . the role of the agent
of exploitation . .. of the agent of repression ... or of the professional
ideologist."
59
Prematurely removed as they are from the educational
system, Hester La Negrita and Smith remain at the bottom of capitalism's
food chain and in "the role of the exploited."
This analysis explores in detail the multiple and complicated ways
that class issues and material circumstances intersect with other identity
constructs such as race and gender to dominate the lives of Hester La N e-
grita and Hester Smith in Suzan-Lori Parks's Red Letter Plays. By creating
characters modeled after Ideological State Apparatuses, Suzan-Lori Parks
underscores the difficulty that individuals experience when struggling
with intersectional oppression due to race, sex, gender-and especially
class-while trying to "get a leg up" in the capitalist system designed to
keep them down. Harvey Young notes that "what Parks succeeds in do-
ing is showcasing the vocal marginalization of the disempowered within
her play[ s]. In so doing, she gives their silence a presence and a voice."
60
But, she also gives voice and makes visible the ideological and hegemonic
forces that are part of capitalist societies and that enable ISAs to exist.
By developing figures that are the embodiment of these ISAs, and a the-
atrical, allegorical, and critical aesthetic in which to analyze them, Parks
demonstrates not only the specific kinds of oppression that individuals
like Hester La Negrita and Hester Smith face, but also the systemic forces
in place that allow for their ongoing oppression and its acceptance in the
service of capitalism.
59
Ibid., 155-6.
60
Young, "Choral Compassion: In the Blood and Venus," 39.
J OURNAL OF A MERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 23, NO.2 (SPRING 2 0 11)
"THE, UH, IMMIGRATION SITUATION": LIVING Our AND THE
LEGAL/ILLEGAL DIVIDE
Gad Guterman
Zilah Mendoza and Kathryn Meisle shared the final bow in the 2003 Second
Stage Theatre production of Living Out.
1
There is nothing remarkable
about such a curtain call. The two actors shared most of the stage time,
and the characters they portrayed were undoubtedly the protagonists in
the play about a nanny and her employer. Director Jo Bonney's choice
not only recognized the two performers' collaborative and comparable
labor in bringing Lisa Loomer's script to life-the two bodies bowing
simultaneously also emphasized Living Out's parallel structure and this
particular production's interest in parallel staging. The bow, like the two-
hour play before it, encouraged the audience to consider the partnerships
that domestic workers and their employers forge. The production explored
the complications and injustices of a relationship based on skewed power
dynamics and simultaneously stressed the intricate connections and
intimacies existing between a predominantly white, upper-middle class in
the United States and an immigrant workforce.
With Mendoza and Meisle's joint bow in mind, I explore in this
essay issues of identity formation in a political economy that categorically
divides people on the basis of immigration status. I question how a
professional theatrical performance can illuminate these issues but also
participate in the maintenance of problematic hierarchies. In proposing the
dyad of undocumented domestic worker and employer as an inseparable
unit-the identity and consciousness of one is tied to the other- I hope
to spotlight a segment of the US workforce in dire need of recognition.
Domestic labor offers a site in which undocumented immigrant workers
are disproportionately represented and especially marginalized. Moreover,
The author thanks Ilka Saal for her comments on this essay. He also extends his
gratitude to his dissertation committee: Jean Graham-Jones, Judith Milhous, David Savran,
and Sally Engle Merry.
1
The Second Stage Theatre production followed the play's 2003 premiere at the
Mark Taper Forum, which commissioned the work. Other US professional productions
include those at Seattle Repertory Theatre (2004), Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis
(2004), TheatreWorks in the Silicon Valley (2004), Round House Theatre in Washington,
DC (2004), the Lyric Stage Company of Boston (2005), and American Theater Company
in Chicago (2009). Living Out has also been widely performed in community and school
theatres.
52 G UTERMAN
because the work done by domestics occurs in homes, blurring some of
the distinctions between public and private spaces, it offers a particularly
fraught setting in which undocumented workers and their employers
must interact. Loomer explains that "in this relationship between a nanny
and the family, there [is] everything ... every dynamic of race, class, and
especially of power, but within the most personal, human family story."
2
In this case, the story centers on the relationship between Ana
Hernandez, an undocumented Salvadoran immigrant, and Nancy Robin,
an Anglo lawyer in need of a nanny for her newborn. Their arrangement
seems at first to meet their needs. Nancy is able to return to work and
leave her baby in the hands of an able and trustworthy caregiver. Working
for a fair and friendly employer, Ana begins to earn money she needs
to resolve what Nancy refers to apprehensively as "the, uh, immigration
situation."
3
With papers, Ana will be able to bring her older son, left
behind in El Salvador, to the United States. Yet, the partnership suffers
from complications prompted by Ana's immigration status. Convinced by
previous interviews that no employer will hire a nanny with a child, Ana
chooses not to let Nancy know that her younger son, Santiago, resides
in Los Angeles. Nancy decides it is best to keep Ana's illegality a secret,
even from her husband.
4
By play's end, when Santiago dies of an asthma
attack while Ana is caring for Nancy's baby, we come to see that a vast
rift remains between the two women, despite their seemingly growing
friendship and affection for one another.
In what follows, I shall examine how Living Out advocates for
undocumented immigrants by making visible and commenting on realities
of working without papers. Loomer based the play on her extensive
interviews with domestic workers, including her own employee. Living
Out indeed showcases what researchers confirm about domestic work
and about the changing nature of undocumented immigrant labor, which
is increasingly female.
5
The titular phrase refers to the arrangement that
2
Karen Grigsby Bates, "Lisa Loomer's New Play," NPR Morning Edition, 27
February 2003, transcript available through lexisnexis.com (accessed 8 July 2010).
3
Lisa Loomer, Living Out (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2005), 36. All
further references to the play will be noted parenthetically. Unless otherwise noted, italics
and ellipses are found in the original.
4
"Illegal" and "illegality'' are charged and contentious terms in a discussion of
immigrant workers. I retain their usage here precisely to call attention to the ways in which
immigration law contributes to the building of id.
5
Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, introduction to Global Wom-
an: Nannies, Matds, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York: Metropolitan Books,
2002), 2. To narrow the scope of the essay, I do not delve deeply into questions of gender.
"THE, UH, l MLVrrGRATION SITUATION" 53
Ana makes with Nancy: the play offers a view into a domestic worker's
experience in her boss's residence as well as in her own home, to which
she returns every night. Through Ana, Nancy, their husbands, and two
additional employer-nanny dyads, the play explores, among other things,
the phenomenon of having to trust someone else to care for one's own
child, and the difficult bond that individuals in such a contract must forge.
It invites us to consider how we use each other to form our sense of self.
The play serves well to reflect on the possibility that, in Linda Bosniak's
words, "first-world women's citizenship comes at the expense of the
citizenship of their household workers."
6
I pursue such possibility in the
essay's first section.
I then move to complicate the play's advocacy by considering
a broader context of theatre production and consumption. Given
that hiring practices and access to performances limit the possibilities
for undocumented immigrants to partake in professional theatre in
the United States, the play's efforts to raise the visibility of workers
without papers is inevitably problematized. I propose that we approach
professional productions of Uving Out as instances of what I will call
"undocumented-face." Evoking practices like blackface or yellowface, I
choose the admittedly charged term to approach a phenomenon in which
members of a dominant social group perform as marginalized Others. In
this case, the dividing line has less to do with race or ethnicity but involves,
above all, legal categorization. I am certain that prominent, professional
productions of the play-which offers smart, well developed Latina/ o
characters-would have come under fire had they not cast Latina/ o actors.
But what are the repercussions of representing undocumented characters,
however positive the portrayals, if undocumented immigrants themselves
are precluded from participating directly in processes of theatre-making
and theatre-going? Given Living Oufs admirable insight into life and
work without papers, its having to exist in a production system that shuts
out unauthorized immigrants offers a particularly intriguing case study
with which to consider the legal/illegal divide so prominent in the US
socweconomy.
I am more interested here in analyzing questions of immigration status.
6
Linda Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas if Contemporary Membership
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 116. To be sure, Bosniak believes this idea is
too simplistic: "Citizenship is not a single currency that is transferred from some women
to others in zero-sum fashion" (1 02) .
54 GUTERMAN
Making Invisible Women Visible
The transnational journeys of the immigrant workers depicted in Living
Out begin with a simple, crucial fact. With her husband and younger
son already in Los Angeles, Ana works to bring her other son from war-
ravaged El Salvador. The other two nannies we meet in Loomer's play,
Zoila and Sandra, also work to provide for families that live elsewhere
or to attempt reunification in the United States. Quite simply, people will
cross the border to work. Jobs in the United States offer the possibility of
better prospects for their families, prospects that conditions at home make
impossible and that immigration restrictions cannot easily deter. David
Bacon stresses that immigrant workers must be understood, above all,
as decision-makers compelled by socioeconomic and political conditions
at home and in the United States.
7
The pressure to migrate is double-
sided, as Grace Chang explains, with a "calculated pull" by First World
countries coupled with a "desperate 'push' or expulsion of people" by
sending countries. Such a dynamic reflects the international economic and
military interventions of First World interests.
8
Although immigrant women experience the possibility of a
better livelihood by coming to the United States, the costs are enormous.
Loomer carefully underscores that the work of undocumented immigrants
generally enables only someone else's American Dream. Paraphrasing
Charles Isherwood's review of the Second Stage production, we could say
that the undocumented tend to miss out on the lives they seek, regardless
of their hard work, because they are only accessories to the success of
others.
9
The play thus actively counters stereotypes of undocumented
immigrants, particularly female ones, as free riders. Chang explains that
rhetorical attacks on female immigrants commonly, and increasingly, posit
them as "idle, welfare-dependent mothers and inordinate breeders of
dependents."
10
"[Undocumented immigrants can] go out there like rats
and multiply," opined a Tennessee state representative recently.
11
Living
7
David Bacon, Illegal People: H01v Globaliifition Creates Migration and Criminalizes
Immigrants (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008), 23.
8
Grace Chang, Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy
(Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000), 3. On the push and pull experienced by immi-
grant women, see also Ehrenreich and Hochschild, introduction to Global Woman, 1-14.
9
Charles Isherwood, review of Living Out, Variery, 5 October 2003, www.variety.
com/review/VE1117922070.html?categoryid=31&cs=1&p=O (accessed 10 July 2010) .
1
Chang, Disposable Domestics, 4.
11
Lucas L. Johnson II, "State Rep. Curry Todd Likens Illegal Immigrant Births
"THE, UH, I MMIGRATION SITUATION" 55
Out not only offers portraits that stress the role of female immigrants as
laborers, as producers, but also posits employers as the real opportunists.
By emphasizing that it is employers who gain most from the work of
undocumented workers, Loomer boldly positions herself in a debate
over the costs and benefits of undocumented immigration that remains
intensely contested. The playwright suggests that, adapting Bosniak's
language, the economic well-being of the US citizens onstage does come,
or can come, at the expense of their household workers' well-being.
Tellingly, at the end of the day and at the end of the play, Ana pays a much
higher price for her actions than does Nancy. In fact, as Nancy's husband
candidly explains, the arrangement with Ana has meant the Robins have
"made a profit" (62). Nancy and Richard are financially better off with
Ana in their employ.
Because it demands relatively unstructured duties from workers
functioning in isolation, domestic work proves to be particularly prone
to engendering exploitative conditions and to attracting undocumented
immigrants, even under the best of intentions from employers. To
begin with, the work of nannies, housecleaners, and home-care workers
often fails to be recognized as legitimate employment. It is subsequently
undervalued, underprotected, and underpaid.
12
Loomer well captures this
phenomenon in a revealing moment: Believing she is being supportive,
Nancy tries to encourage Ana by saying, ''You should go to school and get
a real job!" (54). With her arm around the nanny, as indicated by the stage
directions, Nancy essentially reduces the very real work that Ana has been
doing to nothing in this remark.
The novelty of the nation's first-ever bill to afford domestic
workers basic labor rights alerts us to the general reluctance of both state
and federal authorities to legitimize and protect domestic employment.
On 31 August 2010, after six years of debating legislation, New York
State finally signed into law a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, requiring
employers to provide paid holidays, vacation, sick leave, and overtime pay
to Multiplying Rats," Commercia/Appeal (Memphis), 11 November 2010, www.commercial-
appeal.com/ news/201 0/ nov /11 / lawmaker-makes-rat-comparison/ (accessed 17 Decem-
ber 2010).
12
The gender implications here are crucial. Mary Romero explains that house-
work has "become fused with the roles of mother and wife." As such, it is often " disquali-
fied as 'real' work," viewed instead as a "labor of love" (Mary Romero, Maid in the US A.,
10'hanniversary ed. [New York: Routledge, 2002], 51). Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo similar-
ly reminds us that " [p]arents hire nanny/housekeepers to do work involving intimate care,
yet may fundamentally resist the idea that these services require monetary compensation."
Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Domestica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadozvs
of Affluence (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 120.
56 G UTERMAN
to all full-time domestic employees, dues guaranteed to workers in other
industries since the 1930s.
13
Of course, such a law will protect only those
employed full-time within New York State, leaving hundreds of thousands
of others without the same basic rights. More problematically, as one of
the law's co-sponsors underscores, the bill will not meaningfully impact
the position of undocumented immigrants.
14
Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo
concludes that domestics working without papers confront a long list of
burdens, with the risk of deportation effectively disciplining them into
compliance.
15
Throughout Living Out, Nancy hardly surfaces as an exploitative
employee. She pays Ana according to their mutual agreement. She
conscientiously compensates Ana's overtime. She blasts the "criminal
justice system" for "taking advantage of immigrants," when she learns
that Ana's husband is being denied residency status (38). Yet, it is crucial
to understand, as Shannon Gleeson explains, that "illegal status shapes
the voice, purpose, and future that undocumented workers may believe
they have a right to, irrespective of the extent of the rights offered to
them."
16
In other words, Ana's lack of papers might more fundamentally
influence her experience as an employee than her employer's express
commitment to protect her. However genuine Nancy's concern for Ana
may be, the nanny must operate in a comparatively unprotected field, her
vulnerability exacerbated by the one right she most definitely lacks-the
right to be in the United States. Gleeson's summary fittingly applies to
Ana's position: "immigration status is an 'unspoken' reality that always
hovers, never really needing to be directly articulated."
17
Nancy can feel
she is personally combating an exploitative system, but she nevertheless
gains from employing someone who is structurally vulnerable.
By making the hiring of known undocumented workers illegal,
the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) sought to shift
13
Associated Press, "Gov. Paterson Signs Domestic Workers Rights Bill into
Law," New York Post, 31 August 2010, nypost.com/p/news/local/gov_paterson_expect-
ed_law_sign_domestic_mWjRWTNCbUx:MZ:tv1YFZDwHgN (accessed 3 September
2010).
14
Kevin Parker, "The 'True' Nanny Experience," introduction to The True Nan'!)l
Diaries by Nandi (Brooklyn: Bread for Brick, 2009), unnumbered page.
15
Hondagneu-Sotelo, Domestica, 13.
16
Shannon Gleeson, "Labor Rights for All? The Role of Undocumented Im-
migrant Status for Worker Claims Making," Law & Social Inquiry 35, no. 3 (Summer 201 0):
563.
17
Ibid., 585.
"THE, UH, IMMIGRATION SITUATION" 57
some responsibility to employers for increasing levels of unauthorized
immigration. But the proliferation of undocumented labor after the
passage of the legislation attests to IRCA's failures. The US economy is
simply addicted to the cheap labor that unauthorized immigration affords.
As Bacon suggests, "there Us] no way to punish the employers without
punishing the workers first."
18
Workers, not employers, continue to pay the
highest price if they are caught working without papers.
The experience of Victor and Lillian Cordero might well attest to
this fact. Central figures in the 1993 "nannygate" that derailed Zoe Baird's
appointment as the first female US Attorney General, the Corderos
arguably suffered more drastic consequences than their notorious
employer. Ultimately forced to withdraw her name from consideration
for the post, Baird lost a prestigious appointment when the immigration
status of her nanny and chauffer were discovered. On top of $8,000 paid
in back Social Security taxes, Baird's violation of IRCA provisions resulted
in a $2,900 fine, about as high as IRCA allowed.
19
Given that Baird earned
over half a million dollars per year at the time, neither amount likely made
a dent in the attorney's lifestyle. While I have no way of gauging the full
costs to Baird for being caught hiring undocumented workers-she and
her husband did remain in temporary seclusion during the "exhausting
ordeal''
20
-Baird seemed to recover. She returned to work and, a few
months later, achieved a different position in the Clinton White House
as part of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. The Corderos were
ignored, even disregarded, by the media but not by immigration authorities.
Fearing a full investigation, they quietly opted for so-called voluntary
deportation after years of living and working in the United States.
21
Like Baird and her own husband, Nancy and Richard are practicing
lawyers, well aware of the consequences of hiring an undocumented
worker in post-IRCA, post-nannygate era. But her desire to provide good,
affordable care for her baby and to balance her professional work with
18
Bacon, Illegal People, 150.
19
Clifford Krauss, "Nominee Pays Fine for Hiring of Illegal Aliens," New York
Times, 17 January 1993, www.nytimes.com/ 1993/01/ 17/us/new-presidency-justice-de-
partment-nominee-pays-fine-for-hiring-illegal-aliens.html (accessed 19 June 201 0).
20
Jill Smolowe, Margaret Carlson, Julie Johnson, and Elaine Shannon, "The Zoe
Baird Debacle: How It Happened," Time, 1 February 1993, www.time.com/time/maga-
zine/article/ 0,9171,977610-6,00.html (accessed 21 June 2010).
21
Romero stresses that, throughout Baird's and subsequent "nannygates," public
debates and media coverage generally fail to include "the interests of nannies and domes-
tics" (Romero, Maid in the USA., 12); Paul Leavitt, "Ex-Baird Worker Feels 'Like a Hunted
Animal," USA Today, 26 January 1993, 3A.
58 GuTERMAN
homemaking drive Nancy to hire Ana. Since she does not want to abuse
Ana in any predetermined or even conscious way, Nancy offers what she
believes is a reasonable wage, a salary with which Ana is seemingly pleased.
After interviewing with Wallace and Linda, the other two employers
Loomer depicts, Ana feels fortunate to have gotten a position with the
seemingly saner, more understanding Nancy. As the play progresses,
however, we begin to understand that this ostensibly productive match
cannot sustain itself-it depends on too many lies and a disproportionate
balance of power. Both women share a need for having someone else
look after their children, both struggle to balance a job outside the home
and a married life, and both find support and guidance in each other. Still,
as Richard confesses, he and Nancy "have options" (62); Ana does not.
The parallel structure that Loomer constructs crumbles in the concluding
moments, attesting to her interest in depicting how "the privileges Nancy
enjoys as a white professional and citizen leave the women in separate
political, and, therefore, emotional, spheres."
22
While both women sit on
the same stage bed during their final interchange, their journeys to this
point have taken disproportionately different tolls. Nancy loses a trusted
nanny and reevaluates her needs as mother with a career; Ana loses a
maj or source of income, the hope of legalization and family reunification,
and a son.
Importantly, Living Out highlights that the dynamics of
exploitation prevalent in domestic employment exceed a strictly economic
imbalance.
23
First, Loomer's work allows us to examine what Judith Rollins
defines as "maternalism." According to Rollins, employers of domestic
workers-overwhelmingly female in the United States--can tend to treat
their employees-also overwhelmingly female-in a protective, nurturing
manner. However, such treatment equally manages to insult and degrade.
Along with Nancy's legal advice, salary advances, and small gifts also
come subtly disparaging remarks and actions. Giving becomes a form of
possession, and generosity a mask for control?
4
Despite the fact that she
trusts Ana with a baby, Nancy can also approach the nanny as if she herself
were infant-like. At one point, Nancy openly questions Ana's ability to
read (19). Back in her own house, Ana tries to illustrate for her husband
22
Alisa Solomon, "Candid Nanny Camera," Village Voice, 7 October 2003, www.
villagevoice.com/ 2003-10-07/ theater/ candid-nanny-camera/ (accessed 18 April 201 0) .
23
Judith Rollins, Between Women: Domestics and Their Emplqyers (Philadelphia: Tem-
ple University Press, 1985), 155-56.
24
1 paraphrase John Thompson's "Editor's Introduction" to a n g t ~ a g e & Symbolic
P01ver by Pierre Bourdieu, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1991), 24.
"THE, UH, lMJv!IGRATION SITUATION" 59
the condescension she must endure. She imitates Nancy, demonstrating
how the name ''Ana" begins to connote a certain fragility for the lawyer:
"'This is the soap, Ana' - 'Was it bad in your village, Ana?' 'Here, let me
give you a litde money, Ana, for a nice pair of ugly pants-'" (27). Nancy's
appreciation for Ana's labor does not translate into respect.
It follows that employers can elevate their sense of worth at the
expense of employees, who are forced to inhabit a position ~ e f i n e in
negative terms. Ana's so-called illegality serves as a bolster for Nancy's
identity as a legal and natural member of society. Rollins suggests that
"any identification the employer has with the domestic is a negative
identification. The menial, unintelligent, physically strong, irresponsible,
weak-charactered servant provides a convenient contrast figure upon
whom might be projected those aspects of herself most despised and
feared."
25
This type of Bourdieuvian symbolic violence operates to some
degree because employers and employees belong to different ethnic
groups. Indeed, patterns of employment in the United States today follow
centuries of worldwide traditions of placing members of a different
ethnic background in domestic posts.
26
Statistics well serve to support the fact that most employers of
domestic workers are white and a vast majority of these employees are
not.
27
However, reducing the phenomenon of domestic workers in US
households to questions of race and ethnicity alone proves problematic.
Living Out deliberately endeavors to fine-tune such an approach. When
Ana first meets Zoila and Sandra, the latter two educate the newly hired
nanny on the particularities of various employers. Ana quickly learns that
"los Hindus pay the worst," the Chinese "never talk to you," and Latinos
treat you like a slave (23). The generalizations with which Zoila and Sandra
educate Ana alert us to the fact that an increasing number of employers
of domestic workers are not white. It is important to stress how, to
borrow Hondagneu-Sotelo's words, "the status of [domestic workers] as
immigrants today serves to legitimize their social, economic, and political
subordination and their disproportionate concentration in paid domestic
work," and, more specifically, how "immigration status has clearly become
an important axis of inequality, one interwoven with relations of race,
class, and gender" to facilitate exploitation. It is because employers and
employees often occupy different legal statuses, because domestics appear
"foreign and unassimilable," and because "they are 'illegal' and do not merit
25
Rollins, Betwem Women, 185.
26
Ibid., 7-8.
27
Romero, Maid in the USA., 101-2.
60 GUTERMAN
equal opportunities with US-born American citizens" that exploitation is
excused and even naturalized.
28
Moreover, although Loomer juxtaposes three white mothers
against three Latina nannies, she also carefully contrasts Ana's downfall
against Sandra's victories. In this way, Living Out urges us to see beyond
ethnic categorization and consider more thoroughly the power of
immigration law to shape identity and experience. Sandra gets to celebrate
her "happy citizenship" onstage, donuts and all (50). Triumphantly, Sandra
narrates that, citizenship in hand, she has traveled to Texas, confronted
her son's absent father, and in essence reached a breakthrough: "He
thought I come for the child support, but I say-'I'm not after you! I
have a happy life and I feel so proud of myself 'cause I got my citizenship
now and I sent for our son!"' (52). Without glorifying the power of legal
status (Sandra is a domestic worker just like Ana), Loomer's inclusion of
Sandra's celebration is noteworthy. The boost in self-esteem that Sandra
experiences because of her new citizenship cannot be overlooked. With
papers, employees can more confidently address unfair labor practices.
With papers, employees can more realistically quit and look for another
position. With papers, one's work is not criminalized. As long as a job is
tied to immigration concerns, the possibility for exploitation looms.
The lack of papers, then, more than ethnic categorization,
becomes a critical marker for identity construction. (I should note here
that Nancy's supervisor in the law firm, whom we hear about when
Nancy calls the office, is named Diane Machado. Although we never
see Diane, her ostensibly Latina/ o surname further complicates a neat
division along ethnic lines in the world of Living Out.) It is undocumented
domestic workers, in particular, who offer employers a readily accessible
and specific hue with which to paint the backside of their mirrors. In
their own homes, employers can turn their undocumented nannies into
objects that, beyond caring and cleaning, confer and validate status and
self-worth. "Class is a slippery concept in the United States," Hondagneu-
Sotelo tells us, "where nearly everybody, from warehouse loaders to
millionaire entrepreneurs, is likely to identify as middle class."
29
With less
strictly defined class markers, the employment of a domestic worker, and
especially her ostensible illegality, can confirm or even bolster one's own
place on an otherwise ambiguous social ladder. We might tweak Bosniak's
tentative proposition by suggesting that first-world women's sense of class
belonging comes at the expense of their household workers' seemingly
28
Hondagneu-Sotelo, Domestica, 18, 13. Emphasis mine.
29
Hondagneu-Sotelo, Domestica, 188.
"THE, UH, !MMJGRATION SITUATION" 61
lower status, a status often confirmed not by ethnic categorization alone,
but by immigration classification as well. Thus, although Ana escaped El
Salvador a professional dental student, Nancy imagines her as the illiterate
and unfortunate lower-class member against which she can pit her own
upper-middle-class position. Indeed, most undocumented immigrants in
the United States do not stem from the poorest sectors of their home
countries or from the poorest countries in the world for that matter; there
are considerable costs associated with migrating.
30
Once in the United States,
however, their lack of papers becomes a marker of class, transforming the
undocumented into a viable rung on which others can step to concretize
an elusive middle-class status. Loomer shrewdly constructs the Robins as
anxious arrivals to a new neighborhood. Worried about their mortgage
and future pre-school tuition (14), Nancy and Richard need, or want, to
resolve some of the recently experienced ambiguity, and Ana provides
them with a possibility to discern their new position.
The utility of a domestic worker as a status symbol prompts her
dehumanization, her conversion into an object seen only at surface level.
Like the right diaper bag, the right Mommy and Me class (both prevalent
in the conversations of Nancy and her peers), or the right baby name (''All
the boys around here is name Jackson," Zoila tells Ana [23]), the so-called
right domestic lets others know how well you do. Appearance becomes an
essential element for successful job performance, as important as and at
times even more so than good cleaning or care-giving. Hondagneu-Sotelo
notes that employment agencies "literally groom" domestic workers by
advising them how to dress and how to comport themselves physically.
Employers tend to prefer "Latina employees who are young, physically
attractive, and relatively light-skinned- more mestiza than indigenous."
Strikingly, employers seem most satisfied with domestic workers who
appear "humble."
31
Living Out tellingly stages a physical transformation,
with Ana donning ostensibly more demure clothes at Nancy's insinuations
(21). Ironically, the very illegality that makes the workers useful contrasts
for their employers can diminish their value as status symbols. Thus,
Nancy, Wallace, and Linda adamantly assert each of their nanny's legal
status, just as they affirm the generous "top dollar" that they pay (33).
But such falsehoods are only a means to project an image for their peers'
benefit and, with regards to wages at least, perhaps a means to convince
themselves that they are fair, reasonable employers.
The undocumented domestic workers can also serve their
30
Rhacel Salazar-Parreiias, The Force of Domesticity: Filipina Migrants and Globaliza-
tion (New York: New York University, 2008), 1.
31
Hondagneu-Sotelo, Domistica, 109.
62 G uTERMAN
employers to manufacture a benevolent sense of self. Precisely because
undocumented immigrant workers so desperately need income, employers
can begin to feel that the work they offer- regardless of salary, regardless
of duties-is not only appropriate but also charitable. As the supporter
of a poor, troubled, victimized maid, the employer can begin to construct
an altruistic sense of self, as Hondagneu-Sotelo reports. Much like an
audience member watching a liberally minded play, a point to which I
will return below, the employer, without leaving the safety of her home,
"may get satisfaction from her intimate view of the private tribulations
of a woman whose life is so unlike anything she knows that it might
seem to have come from a novel-a woman who is poor, who lives in a
crime-ridden neighborhood, who is raising children without the financial
support of a husband, who is Latina and perhaps lacks US citizenship or
legal papers."
32
Nancy's exoticizing assumptions about "people in [Ana's]
country" (31) propel her to offer plenty of unsolicited guidance. When
it comes to Ana, a "but" inevitably follows Nancy's "I don't want to
interfere" (38); she views Ana as someone who requires enlightenment.
The domestic's immigrant status can even serve employers as a
weapon with which to demean the employees and, in turn, rationalize their
hiring to tackle undesirable tasks. Romero reports that many employers
not only hire someone else to perform housework (clean the floor) but
also demand that it be done in particular ways, ways which such employers
would not undertake themselves (scrub rather than mop). This practice
requires the construction of distance between employer and employee.
33
Loomer suggests this process predominantly through the character
of Wallace, who easily demonstrates one such distancing technique. In
conversation with her peers, Wallace ostensibly rebukes immigrant women
for leaving their own children behind in other countries- "! mean, could
you do that?" Although Nancy advises Wallace to "take into consideration
the political and economic situation" of their "caregivers" (33), Wallace's
attitude confirms in her mind that her domestic worker, Zoila, is somehow
less of a woman than she is. With distance between them, Wallace can
charge Zoila, who does not have a driver's license, to maneuver the
children under her care through Los Angeles without access to a car
(29). "Que horror," sighs Ana when she learns about Zoila's plight (30) .
Wallace can similarly use Ana's immigration status to justify her apparently
unacceptable decisions. "She was illegal after all," rationalizes Wallace after
learning that Ana lied about having a son in the United States and that
32
Ibid. , 186.
33
Romero, Maid in the US A ., 130.
"THE, UH, IMMIGRATION SITUATION" 63
she took Nancy's baby without notice to see the boy in the hospital (60).
Instead of seeing a panicked mother whose son has had a life-threatening
asthma attack, Wallace sees in Ana a "rather mysterious person" (60). For
Wallace, "illegal" becomes an adjective with which to describe Ana, with
which to mark difference and conceal commonality.
The dynamics at hand change an employer, regardless of her
intentions. Just one day after having Ana in her home, Nancy is a different
person. "Taping unsuspecting immigrants!? Who are you!?" presses her
husband upon discovering that Nancy has left Ana under the gaze of a
Nanny Cam hidden in a teddy bear. ''Aren't you a member of the ACLU?"
he asks in shock (28). Nancy's political inclinations, her concern for the
global socioeconomic realities that might force someone like Ana to leave
her children in another country, fall by the wayside when it comes to
ensuring her baby's safety. Although she feels tremendous guilt, Nancy
nonetheless approaches Ana as the uneducated, untrustworthy, alien
immigrant that Wallace expects. In the play's climax, when Nancy arrives
to an empty home and a note reading "Emergency. Gone to Hospital.
Okay," the mother's worst fears return her to a deep mistrust of Ana's
foreignness and illegality (58). Earlier in the play, Ana had suggested giving
the baby some hot tea to soothe a developing cold. At first surprised by
the idea, Nancy, who has employed Ana for months now, assures the
nanny that she fully trusts her (53). But upon finding the note, Nancy's
first thought is "Oh God, maybe the tea!" (59). By amplifying the threat of
tea, Nancy betrays her misgivings about Ana's supposedly backwards ways
and ostensibly problematic decision-making. Even when the truth about
Ana's having a son in Los Angeles surfaces, Nancy finds it difficult to let
go of her distrust or to hire Ana back: "I mean, can you ever really know
someone-who's so-different from you?" (63).
Ana, like the majority of domestics, must often tolerate such
treatment. She must constantly perform a role for her employer, a part
premised on the belief that employers prefer "subservient behavior and
[do] not like a domestic's being too educated or intelligent, too materially
well off, or too attractive," as Rollins explains.
34
Although Nancy seemingly
convinces Ana to drop the formal "Mrs. Robin" (36), Ana's use of
"Nancy" becomes only an illusive marker of a budding friendship. In fact,
we might read it precisely as a way in which Ana simply does what Nancy
asks. After all, Ana continues to refer to "Mrs. Robin" or to "la senora"
34
Rollins, Between Women, 147. Through the performances that Zoila undertakes
during phone conversations with her boss, retaining a deferential and agreeable tone but
simultaneously lying and avoiding commands, Loomer demonstrates some of the ways in
which employees can retain some control (29, 50).
64 G UTERMAN
when speaking about Nancy to others (36, 43).
35
Even at the end, when
Ana has lost a son and a job, she chooses the deferential formal address
when Nancy telephones her in order to mark the distance between them
(65). Nancy, by contrast, never hails Ana as "Mrs. Hernandez."
Most jobs, I dare say, require some sort of acting. But when
undocumented workers are placed in private homes, the solo performances
that are needed can prove extreme. The secrecy and pretense that working
without papers requires is compounded with the stress of being asked to
be nonpresent. Admittedly, a domestic worker like Ana can render her
employer invisible. One of the baby's first words, is ambiguously
both "Mama" and (43). In an employer's ostensible absence
from a home, a domestic worker can find a valuable sense of worth. As
Hondagneu-Sotelo describes, domestics might be fully aware of the stigma
associated with their work, but they do find satisfaction and reward not
only in earning needed income but also in successfully caring for children
and homes.
36
But a common push into invisibility counteracts such
validation. A domestic worker is often asked not to be seen working.
37
Nancy and her husband argue about Ana, blind to the fact that she is
in the room ( 48) . The domestic's invisibility becomes dehumanizing. She
becomes another appliance. "There's no one home," answered a live-in
maid when I telephoned a household not long ago. I thanked her and
hung up, saddened by her self-erasure, her failure to acknowledge her own
existence in the house.
Invisible Women Rising
If undocumented domestic workers suffer from invisibility, what kinds of
remedies does performance offer to counteract such a condition? What
is gained when, borrowing again from Isherwood's review, "sensitive
attention" is given to "a sector of the American workforce that is rarely
35
Romero posits the general tendency between domestic workers and employers
to use uneven terms of address as part of several practices through which status is reaf-
firmed daily (Romero, Maid in the USA., 145).
36
Hondagneu-Sotelo, Domestica, 12. Of note, the domestic workers' sense of
fulfillment can perpetuate constructions of gender in the United States. The work of car-
ing for homes and children remains predominantly in the hands of women. At the same
time, because they are breadwinners working outside both their own homes and their own
countries, domestic workers can also challenge cultural stereotypes.
37
Romero, Maid in the US A., 148; Rollins, Between Women, 209.
"THE, UH, IMMIGRATION SITUATION" 65
examined in cultural contexts"?
38
Loomer approaches undocumented
laborers compellingly and sympathetically, making visible both their plight
and their integrity. In this sense, Living Out counteracts prevalent portrayals
of domestic workers in the media as "throwaway characters without any
dignity."
39
And kinder, more considerate portrayals of undocumented
workers can effect change. As legal and sociocultural anthropologist
Susan Bibler Coutin concludes, more positive images of unauthorized
immigrants enable those without papers to claim legal rights.
40
When she addressed the assembly in June 2010, New York State
Senator Diane Savino passionately offered the view that the proposed
domestic workers bill was morally imperative legislation as it would
"finally [allow] the invisible women to rise." Her phrase paid homage to a
performance she had witnessed just a couple of weeks beforehand: Invisible
Women-Rise, the centerpiece of a meeting of the Domestic Workers United
(DWU).
41
Invisible Women-Rise served to inspire and raise the consciousness
of members and friends of the advocacy group. Domestic workers were
not only the proud protagonists of the piece but also the co-creators
and performers, providing the many audience members who were also
domestics with a bold, satisfying mirror image. Presented at an event
that brought together a specific audience, such a performance celebrated
the domestics' labor, combated their invisibility head-on, and energized
workers and advocates to unite and fight.
Living Out similarly maintains a commitment to make visible
invisible undocumented workers but catered initially to less explicitly
unified and generally more affluent audiences. The play, which premiered
at the Mark Taper Forum and subsequently at Second Stage Theatre,
did not aim to reach audiences composed predominantly of domestic
workers. Loomer was able to extend an invitation to one of the Mark
Taper performances to nearly thirty nannies who otherwise might not
38
Isherwood, Variery.
39
Josefina Lopez, quoted in Yvonne Villarreal, "Ode to the Women Who Give
So Much," Los Angeles Times, 26 May 2010, D10.
40
Susan Bibler Coutin, Nations of Emigrants: Shifting Boundanes of Citizenship in El
Salvador and the United States (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 16.
41
Savino was one of several featured speakers at the 22 April 2010 event. Play-
wright Lisa Ramirez conceived and directed Invisible Women-Rise in collaboration with mem-
bers of the DWU as part of the Foundry Theatre's This Is My City /Esta Es Mi Ciudad
series. Foundry Theatre website, thefoundrytheatre.org/html/ forums.html (accessed 15
April 2010). For Savino's address to the assembly, see "Senator Savino on the Domestic
Workers Bill of Rights," video clip, YouTube, 1 June 2010, youtube.com/watch?v=r4mkn
I04aeg&feature=player_embedded (accessed 10 July 2010).
66
GUTERMAN
have been able to afford the ticket-a telling reminder that Living Out
was accessible predominantly to individuals like Nancy and not like Ana.
42
Of these special guests' experience, Loomer explains that "it is a very
exciting thing to see something so close to your life up on a stage. It
means your life is important. It means that people will 'see' you."
43
When
the Los Angeles Times invited a small group of nannies and mothers to
the performance and to a subsequent discussion, one of the domestic
employees delightedly observed, "That's me on the stage .... That's my
life."
44
Such recognition can prove meaningful, especially for those who
feel unnoticed. Yet, there are dangers involved in this process, particularly
when the very figures being made visible are not prevalent in the audience,
or in the broader theatremaking process for that matter.
Plays about Latina domestic workers-played by Latina actors-
can perpetuate rather than problematize stereotypes. Of an earlier play
about domestic workers, playwright Milcha Sanchez-Scott worried that her
work required actors to take on the very roles they are "always play[ing]
on television, in the movies."
45
Indeed, many of the actors who have
played Living Outs nannies have found themselves playing a token maid
or nanny elsewhere.
46
Furthermore, casting practices, much W{e domestic
work itself, seem to prefer more conventionally beautiful, relatively lighter-
42
Alys Marshall and Shalini Dote, "Theater Crowd Fetes 'Living' Stage Birth,"
Dai!J Varie!)', 5 February 2003, 11. Of the Mark Taper audience, Jorge Huerta noted, "a
majority of the ' usual suspects,' seated around me: Anglo, middle-aged, affluent." Huerta,
"A Comic and Sensitive Look at Undocumented Nannies: living Out by Lisa Loomer,"
Gestos 36 (November 2003): 185.
43
Lisa Loomer, interviewed by Carlo Botero, "Telling the Stories," Revolution-
ary Worker no. 1227, 1 February 2004, revcom.us/a/1227 / lisainterview.htm (accessed 21
February 2011).
44
Michael Quintanilla, "Domestic Drama," Los Angeles Times, 1 March 2003,
articles.latimes.com/ 2003/ mar/ 01 /entertainment/ et-quintanilla1 (accessed 15 May 201 0).
45
Jorge Huerta, introduction to Latina by Milcha Sanchez-Scott, in Necessary
Theater: Six Plays About the Chicano Experience, ed. Huerta (Houston: Arte Publico Press,
1989), 77.
46
Zilah Mendoza (Ana in Taper's and Second Stage's living Oul), who voiced the
maid Julia in Culture Clash's Bordertown, followed her performance in Living Out by playing
a Portuguese housekeeper in Sarah Ruhl's The Clean House (Yale Rep, 2004); she has also
played "Housekeeper" on television (Curb Your Enthusiasm). Maricela Ochoa (Sandra in
Taper's Living Oul) played "Domestic Worker" on the TV show Joan of Arcadia; and Maria
Elena Ramirez (Sandra in Second Stage's Living Ott!) played housekeeper Gilda Cera in an
episode of Law & Order. I relied on the Internet Movie Database for these credits, irndb.
com (accessed 8 July 2010). This is but a sampling of the stereotypical roles the actors and
their colleagues have played on the stage and on the screen.
"THE, UH, I MMIGRATION SITUATION" 67
skinned Latina actors in the major role of Ana, vis-a-vis the other two
nannies. Thus, while the play itself endeavors to paint complex figures, its
professional productions participate in a broader system of stereotyping
that reinforce broadly held ideas about who takes or should take domestic
work. Much like hiring practices in the domestic field reproduce "a culture
that systematically devalues older and overweight women" (and we could
add "darker" to the description following Hondagneu-Sotelo's own
explanation of employer preferences), the casting choices onstage help to
maintain hierarchies of taste that naturalize power structures and social
positions.
47
Repeated images of a nonthreatening, compassionate serving
class dedicated to caring for white Americans also risk perpetuating other
deep-rooted notions. In her study of representations of "caregivers of
color," Sau-ling Wong convincingly argues that "by conceding a certain
amount of spiritual or even physical dependence on people of color ...
without ceding actual structural privilege, the care-receiver preserves the
illusion of equality and reciprocity with the caregiver."
48
By portraying
domestic workers capable of helping and healing their less caring
employers, the play thus plays into rather than disturbs certain conventions.
Loomer urges her actors to focus on "good intentions as opposed
to caricature," explaining that "every character in this play cares about
children and is doing the best they can ... in their own way" (3). She
admits that she wants Living Out to inspire "Los Americanos" to "think of
the people they employ as people rather than conveniences" and to assure
domestic workers who may be in the audience that "their voices are being
heard."
49
To this end, the playwright insists that "the Anglo couple" and
the "Latino couple" live in the same stage space; the audience must see
"overlapping and parallel worlds" (3). By using fluid transitions between
one scene and the next, the same stage furniture to indicate both Nancy's
and Ana's homes, and simultaneous scenes in one same space, Living Out
discourages identifications based on "us" and "them." The play spurs
thinking about the extent to which undocumented labor, especially Latina
labor, is embroiled in the life of Los Angelinos and Americans more
generally. Nancy reminds herself often, and the audience in turn, that Ana's
47
Hondagneu-Sotelo, Domestica, 110. My thinking about taste here follows Pierre
Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 66.
48
Sau-ling C. Wong, "Diverted Mothering: Representations of Caregivers of
Color in the Age of 'Multiculturalism,"' in Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agenry, ed.
Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey (New York: Routledge,
1994), 69.
49
Bates, "Lisa Loomer's New Play."
68 GUTERMAN
immigration status is the result of global socioeconomic inequities and of
US international policies more specifically (62). Never does Nancy-or
Loomer for that matter-approach Ana's decision to reside in the United
States without authorization as a personal choice.
However, as foils for Nancy, the characters of Wallace and Linda
can come across as one-note caricatures of self-involved and insensitive
gringas. As such, they become easy targets for audience members to
judge.
50
The exploitation of immigrant labor can thus seem the fault of
some Americanos, offering an easy escape for audience members who might
fail to recognize themselves onstage. We might expect that those watching
Living Out will, or at least can, congratulate themselves for attending a
socially responsible event and for possessing attitudes unlike those of
Wallace and Linda. The performance can thus encourage a different kind
of us/ them divide that will nonetheless stunt thinking about how we all
participate in an economy that exploits the undocumented.
Through its multiple productions, Living Out has generated
meaningful dialogue. Producers of the play have often provided study
guides and hosted supplementary conversations and panels. While at
the Taper and during most subsequent professional productions, Living
Out has led to discussions about immigration in the local media. For
Loomer, in fact, the "most gratifying" aspect of the play is "that people
talk about it on the way home."
51
Thus, not only does the play raise the
visibility of undocumented workers but its productions can also galvanize
communities to reflect on issues of domestic labor. Loomer notes that
audience members tell her the play prompted them to reconsider how
they compensate their nannies; in some cases Living Out has led to
salary increases.
52
We find here, then, concrete evidence for the type of
"immediate effects" that Baz Kershaw terms "performance efficacy,"
50
A review of the original Los Angeles production described the employers
depicted in Living Out as "two caricatures and one character'' (Steven Leigh Morris, "Fa-
miliarity and Contempt," LA Weekly, 20 February 2003, www.laweekly.com/2003-02-20/
stage/ familiarity-and-contempt [accessed 18 July 201 0]). Of Wallace and Linda in the New
England premiere production, reviewer Carolyn Clay writes that they are "more-vacuous
rich bitches . . . spoiled, underemployed, and gossipy" (Carolyn Clay, "Nanny Diaries,"
Providence Phoenix, 1-7 April 2005, www.providencephoenix.com/ theater/ tripping/ docu-
ments/04570802.asp [accessed 18 July 2010]).
51
Loomer, interviewed by Scott French, "Us and Them: A Conversation with
Lisa Loomer," Theatre Works' study guide, worksheet 4. See also Warren Etheredge's in-
terview with Loomer, "Living Out - Screenwriter, Lisa Loomer," The Warren Report, 18
January 2003, thewarrenreport.com/2003/01/18/living-out-screeenwriter-lisa-loomer/
(accessed 21 February 2011).
52
French, "Us and Them."
"THE, UH, lMMIGR:\TION SITUATION" 69
through which a theatre production can, "however minutely," influence
"the general historical evolution of wider social and political realities."
53
Of course, a handful of raises and dialogue will not be enough to
shake the structure of an economy that relies heavily on undocumented
labor. Nearly a year after holding national attention, the Baird scandal and
the subsequent front-page and prime-time dialogue about immigrant labor
did little to alter employers' behavior.
54
Theatre can perhaps engender
more meaningful conversations and even change individual practices,
as evidenced by the feedback Loomer has received. But such results are
necessarily limited given theatre's quantitative reach. All of the audience
members who have seen professional and amateur productions of Living
Out cannot possibly match the numbers of people Loomer reaches with a
single airing of a television script. For example, nearly nine million viewers
saw the premiere showing of "Beef," a 2010 episode of Law & Order:
Special Victims Unit penned by Loomer that focuses on exploitative and
unsanitary practices at a meat-packing plant.
55
Millions more will see it
when the show re-airs in syndication. Loomer is optimistic about writing
for television, which like theatre allows her to explore issues that are
important to her, to delve into what "pisses [her] off." Yet, the demands
of the much more commercialized medium limit the extent to which
certain issues can be explored, and Loomer acknowledges that television
requires more careful attention to meeting the demands of what she calls
a "broader" audience.
56
As a stage piece, a play like Living Out "enable[s] audiences to
consider hard truths within their comfort zone," suggests NPR's Karen
Bates.
57
Herein might lie another challenge to its efficacy. Like the
employers Rollins studies, audience members, from the comfort and
safety of their (expensive) theatre seats, might feel "satisfaction" from
53
Baz Kershaw, The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention
(London: Routledge, 1992), 1.
54
Lena Williams, "Relatively Few Taxpayers Are Jolted by the Nanny Scandal,"
N ew York Times, 4 November 1993, C8.
55
TV by the Numbers website, 22 April 2010 posting, tvbythenumbers. za-
p2i t.com/ 201 0/ 04/ 22/ wednesday-broadcast- finals-idol-1-acciden tally-on -purpose-
down/ 49489 (accessed 22 February 2011).
56
Etheredge, "Living Out-Screenwriter, Lisa Loomer." Showtime Networks
has yet to develop a pilot based on Living Out, despite initial interest in the idea (see Su-
zanne Bixby, "Living Out," Talkin' Broadway Regional Theatre News & Reviews, 29 March
2005, www.talkinbroadway.com/regional/boston/boston100.html [accessed 21 February
2011]).
57
Bates, "Lisa Loomer's New Play."
70 G UTERMAN
their "intimate" look into the "tribulations" of a character who ultimately
proves to be so unlike them. Ana's lack of papers can serve as a reminder
of their own legal status, their own legitimized belonging. For as the stage
picture demands parallel action and simultaneous use of space, access to
the theatre creates a much different picture. On the one hand, ticket prices
and marketing campaigns serve to homogenize the audience, especially in
terms of income levels. On the other, labor practices in the professional
theatre forbid the employment of ostensibly undocumented workers. So,
everywhere but onstage, the undocumented remain invisible, if present
at all. For the actor playing Ana, undocumentedness becomes a kind of
mask, a defining character trait to be studied and portrayed. We could
say that by impeding the undocumented from attending the event, from
consuming the cultural product, and from producing or appearing in
the play, the performance and the performers operate through a type
of "undocumentedface." In other words, a certain ventriloquism is in
operation, wherein the undocumented are representable and represented
but not present in the theatre.
58
I certainly do not wish to imply here that
only undocumented actors can play undocumented characters. Nor do I
aim to disparage plays and productions that I believe serve an important
role in engaging audiences in necessary debates and promoting immigrant
rights. Rather, I question the effects of combating the invisibility of
undocumented workers without an explicit, concerted effort to engage
them beyond the worlds created onstage.
Post-IRCA, the professional theatre, which must abide by labor
and immigration laws, has become even less inviting for undocumented
workers. This does not mean undocumented workers do not participate in
theatremaking processes.
59
But for professional endeavors (an important
distinction, as it is the professional theatre that might warrant the most
visibility and that tends to generate the types of products that continue to
58
I am indebted to Sean Metzger's work on yellowface here. Of course, Living
Out does not aim to animate stereotypes, as do the performances of "Chinamen" that
Metzger analyzes (Sean Metzger, "Charles Parsloe's Chinese Fetish: An Example of Yel-
lowface Performance in Nineteenth-Century American Melodrama," Theatre Journal 56, no.
4 [December 2004]: 627-51).
59
Not all theatre production is professional. The immigration status of amateur,
student, and community theatremakers is irrelevant, as they are not officially employed.
Once legalized, some artists, like Josefina Lopez and Carlo Alban, have taken to the profes-
sional stage to share their experiences. Armed with papers, they no longer fear the visibility
that theatre affords. Of wanting to tell the story of his family's move from Ecuador and life
without papers in the United States, Alban notes that "for a lot of time I couldn't because
we were illegal and those things are not told" (Interviewed by Rebecca Fuentes, Palabras
Acentuadas home page, 22 May 2009, palabrasacentuadas.wordpress.com/ 2009/ 05/23/
entrevista-con-carlo-alban-interview-with-carlo-alban/ [accessed 1 July 201 0]).
"THE, UH, IMMIGRATION SITUATION" 71
have a trajectory of performance in amateur and school settings), it does
mean that the undocumented might only be able to participate indirectly
or under a falsified identity.
Living Out has urged its creative teams and audiences to explore ideas
about immigrant labor. What about its producing theatres? The question
especially interests me because, as an employee of an Off-Broadway not-
for-profit theatre myself, I now notice an absence in my institution's staff
list that I must confess I had not pondered before. Neither our website nor
our programs name our immigrant housecleaner, who comes in daily to
ensure our small venue remain a livable space. I conducted some quick and
unscientific research, the sample being the dozens and dozens of playbills
collecting dust under my bed. It strikes me that the rosters I find share
the common absence on the page or two dedicated to listing the many
people whose work is indirectly but significantly reflected on the stage.
Often invisible to the audience members who care to read the listings
are the names of the individuals who clean the theatres.
60
The current
Second Stage Theatre's website offers a list of "special services" under
its staff page: among them, advertising and marketing representatives,
legal counsel, accountant, insurer, and technical support team. Either
no one cleans the space or such effort is not deemed special enough to
warrant mention. But someone vacuums, wipes, and scrubs.
61
Perhaps, as
Hondagneu-Sotelo observes, we have become accustomed to noticing or
acknowledging cleaning efforts only when they are poorly accomplished.
62
60
The collection of programs I studied reflects the bias of my theatergoing in
the last several months, and the vast majority of playbills are from professional, New York
City productions. With a handful of exceptions, I found no mention of housekeeping
or the like in the myriad lists, which did detail each usher, refreshments vendor, and, in
some cases, security staff members associated with the production and theatre in ques-
tion. There may be viable explanations for such omissions. Some theatres may not have
the names of the individual workers who clean because the labor has been contracted out
to a company. However, professional cleaning services are regularly absent from many of
the rosters even though other contracted companies are expressly named. Cleaning duties
may also fall on staff members whose official tides may disguise such tasks. A "building
manager" may well be cleaning and/ or administering an unnamed janitorial team. I was
nonetheless struck by how challenging it is to match individual names to cleaning duties.
61
Second Stage Theatre website, www.2st.com/about_2st/staff (accessed 25
February 2011). I would like to think that the one and only staff member listed as "building
staff" is not alone responsible for the herculean task of cleaning all seventeen thousand
square feet of Second Stage's space, a four-level building that includes "a 296-seat theatre
with lobby on the second floor; dressing rooms, green room, and rehearsal and production
spaces on the third floor; theatrical office space in the penthouse; and entrance foyer and
box office at street level" (www.2st.com/ about_2st/ theatre).
62
Hondagneu-Sotelo, Domistica, 10.
72 G UTERMAN
Such labor, I believe, must be taken into account, especially vis-
a-vis plays focused on questions of work. As does domestic housework,
the commercial cleaning industry employs a disproportionate number
of undocumented workers relative to the entire US civilian workforce.
Likewise, under current conditions, food manufacturing and services,
farming, construction, textiles, and, increasingly, service and hospitality in
the US all depend on cheap undocumented labor.
63
Thus, when costume
designers buy clothing at K-mart, when casts order meals from Burger
I<.ing, when a new performance space is built or an old one renovated,
when a theatre outsources its cleaning needs to local companies, when a
touring company spends a night in a hotel, or when a performer relies on
a nanny to look after her child, the ties between cultural production and
undocumented labor become difficult, if not impossible, to untangle. (Both
Loomer and Living Out's director at the Taper, Bill Rauch, acknowledge
that the nannies they hire allow them to work.)
64
I am prompted to ask:
how does US theatrical production bear the imprints of undocumented
labor?
Particular theatres, companies, and unions may take steps to
verify that they are solely employing documented workers and may choose
not to fundraise directly from businesses that ostensibly do otherwise.
Yet, the realities of theatremaking in the United States today inscribe
cultural producers in a system of corporate and charitable sponsorship
that benefits from the depressed wages and unfair practices that those
without papers must face. A surge of undocumented workers since the
mid-1980s has allowed employers and consumers in turn, to reap large
profits, profits that in many cases sustain both individual artists and
performance art organizations that must sell tickets and/ or seek donations
to produce work. We need but follow the money to realize the intricate
and often contradictory links that such a system engenders. In many cases,
producers of performances seeking to combat stereotypes and raise the
visibility of undocumented workers depend or have depended on financial
support from businesses that require the very invisible and oppressive
"illegal" labor the performances protest. Certainly, these connections do
not necessarily suggest hypocrisy or moral shortcomings-in fact, an
argument could be made that the performances channel tainted capital
into more socially responsible and productive activities-but they do call
63
JeffreyS. Passel and D'Vera Cohn, "A Portrait of Unauthorized Immigrants in
the United States," Pew Hispanic Center Research Report, 14 April2009, 14-16, pewhis-
panic.org/files/reports/107.pdf (accessed 30 December 2010).
64
Huerta, "A Comic and Sensitive Look at Undocumented Nannies," 186; Bates,
"Lisa Loomer's New Play."
"THE, UH, IMMIGRATION SITUATION" 73
attention to the difficulty in separating today's cultural production from
other sectors of the US economy and, thus, from undocumented labor.
Living Out was commissioned and produced at the Mark Taper
Forum, part of Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles. One of this
organization's major donors is Target Stores.
65
Target benefits, or has
benefitted, from employing undocumented labor.
66
Thus, the underpaid
work of night janitors giving Target stores their taken-for-granted sheen,
in part, however small, makes possible the staging of a play like Living
Out. Such links need not be direct or involve huge amounts of money,
but there is no escaping the reality that theatre funding and theatre artists'
careers in the United States depend on profits, corporate and individual,
that exist because of cheap, exploitable workers.
Living Out seeks to personalize the struggles of undocumented
domestic workers, to "look at a political issue on a very intimate level."
67
It tugs at heartstrings and offer much-needed, specific human faces to the
statistics with which the immigration debate is often waged. Yet, precisely
because pity is evoked, it is perhaps difficult to notice how performances
of the play also contribute to the maintenance and reproduction of
exploitative practices. The very issues the play tries to make visible are
often ignored in the broader context of theatremaking. The situations
onstage, isolated from the labor and financial realities in which their
production occur, can appear personal rather than systemic.
Audiences are encouraged to see onstage what is invisible. The
domestic workers in the play indeed rise to compelling visibility. But if the
theatres' and audiences' complicity in maintaining and benefiting from an
economy that relies on undocumented labor remains somehow invisible,
what have we really seen? If the undocumented are not actually present in
the theatre, the legal/ illegal divide has remained solidly in place.
65
Center Theatre Group website, Corporate Circle Membership Listing, www.
centertheatregroup.org/ giving/ corporate/ membership.aspx (accessed 23 December
2010).
66
Jerry de Jaager, "Workplace Justice, Global Workers, Practical Lawyering: The
Transnational Worker Rights Clinic, University of Texas at Austin website, www.utexas.
edu/ law / academics/ clinics/ transnational/ feature_2008_transnational_clinic.php (ac-
cessed 1 July 2010).
67
Bates, "Lisa Loomer's New Play."
J ouRNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 23, NO.2 (SPRING 2011)
WORKING ON THE LINE:
INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM IN A CHORUS LINE
Victor Holtcamp
In 1927 German theoretician Siegfried Kracauer wrote "The Mass
Ornament," an investigation into the socio-political implications of
spectacle entertainments in Weimar Germany. He paid special attention to
an English chorus line act called the Tiller Girls. Similar to the chorus lines
of the Rockettes today, a Tiller Girls show offered lines of women in tight
formation kicking and dancing in unison. The Tiller Girls themselves-
despite their British origins-seemed to Kracauer an expression of
American industry. He described the Tiller Girls as coming straight from
"American distraction factories" and he saw in them a representation of
the cultural forces of capitalism. The individual was subsumed into the
mass, and the product had no meaning save for being consumed:
A system which is indifferent to variations of form leads
necessarily to the obliteration of national characteristics
and to the fabrication of masses of workers who can be
employed and used uniformly throughout the world. Like
the mass ornament, the capitalist production process is
an end in itself.
1
Kracauer's essay is largely focused on the societal implications of such
spectacles. But if these relatively anonymous chorus lines could provide
such a window into capitalism, what insights might be gleaned from A
Chorus Line, the ultimate show about dancers on the line? What are the
ways this wildly popular musical invokes, fights against, and embodies
the ethos and valuations of US capitalist production and consumption in
the late twentieth century? My purpose here is to excavate a few salient
examples from the script, read them in light of K.racauer's observations,
and illustrate via theatrical precedent the industrial-capitalist lineage
of certain elements of the play and its production history. To provide
greater context for the industrial antecedents for A Chorus Line, I will also
press into service Fredrick Winslow Taylor's monograph, The Principles of
Scientific Management, and illustrate how Taylor's exhortations for efficiency
and "science" can similarly be found in the musical.
1
Siegfried Kracauer, "The Mass Ornament," trans. Barbara Correll and Jack
Zipes, New German Critique 5 (Spring 1975): 69.
76 H o LTCAMP
The values of capitalism in the US are largely similar to the
values of modern industry, as mass production was seen throughout
much of the twentieth century as the cornerstone of prosperity and
success. These privileged valuations include a love of interchangeability,
repeatability, efficiency, rationality, and centralized controU Despite being
overtly opposed and even despised at times, this constellation of values
became a naturalized element of the dominant cultural paradigm that
theatre couldn't help but reflect. Both in content and in the mechanics of
production, A Chorus Line serves as a mirror in which to see competing
agendas: the embrace of industrial methodologies and a fight against the
homogenizing tendencies that I<:.racauer rightly pointed to half a century
before the play opened. Similarly, the actions inside the story and with
the production itself fall into a longer lineage of capitalist incursions into
the arts in the U.S., dating back to the post-WWI triumph of American
industry and the concomitant embrace of industrialization across society.
3
A Chorus Line, briefly summarized, takes place at an audition
for an unknown new musical. After making the penultimate cut, the 17
dancers who remain continue their audition for Zach, the director, largely
by talking (and singing) about their lives as dancers, their history in the
theatre, and their dreams for the future. The show grew out of a series
of interviews and workshops conducted by Michael Bennett with real
Broadway performers, and "everything in the show is either adapted from
or based on the details of someone's life story."
4
Each character, although
often a composite, was drawn from very specific stories related by the
original workshop participants. For performers who were accustomed to
a system that treated them largely as replaceable components, and which
cared little for their actual lives or experiences, such storytelling was
revelatory and offered the sharpest repudiation to the ongoing push to
regard performers-particularly chorus line dancers-as interchangeable
2
See Neil Postman, Technopofy: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York:
Vintage, 1993) for an insightful analysis of the embrace of industrial values in the US.
3
"America of the late 1920s and early 1930s was pervaded by an ethos of mass
production." David Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932: The
Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1985), 305.
4
Robert Viagas, Thommie Walsh, and Baayork Lee, On the Line: The Creation of
a Chorus Line (New York: Morrow, 1990), 24. There are a few exceptions to this, as Neil
Simon was brought in to punch up a few sections of dialogue. "Neil's lines were mos tly
in Shelia's monologue, like 'Sometimes I'm aggressive' .... Neil punched up the comedy.
He contributed to Bobby's monologue .... Neil wrote the dialogue into 'Tits and Ass."'
Ken Mandelbaum, A Chorus Line and the Musicals of Michael Bennett, 1st ed. (New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1989), 147.
WORKING ON THE LINE 77
laborers.
Despite this direct connection to the creators of the material,
however, all of the original performers could-critically for the long-
running success of the show-be replaced. A poster created some
years into A Chorus Line's record breaking run highlights this fact. It is
a long vertical banner divided into rows. Each row contains a picture of
a different cast in the totemic pose "on the line." By running your eye
down the columns of actors on the poster you can see a sampling of the
performers who have played each part, each in roughly the same pose,
looking roughly the same, right down to height and weight. Despite the
specificity of the show's content every actor could be, and eventually was,
supplanted by another similar looking actor, a fact this poster celebrates.
No character's immediacy and intimacy were directly connected to any
individual performer, as this would have been a tremendous liability for a
production aspiring to a long run.
This interchangeability is one area of overlap with industrial
modernism, and in this, A Chorus Line is not so different from any other
long-running play on Broadway. Yet the structure of this particular musical
offers a deeper, and more troubled, embodiment of the industrial love
of interchangeability. Because we see each individual going through the
audition process, and then see him or her at the end in the final number,
we witness each actor's reduction from specific character to anonymous
chorus dancer. Further, each character is a type: an abstraction and
condensation of the original dancers. Such abstraction, Kracauer argues,
is highly valued under capitalism. "Capitalist thinking can be identified by
its abstractness. Through its prevalence today, an intellectual framework
has been established which encompasses all expressions."
5
Originating in
industry, the privileging of condensation and abstraction quickly spread
from assembly lines to society at large, creating a culture reflective of
these particular capitalist valuations. Kracauer is particularly interested
in the ramifications on the capitalist project of an over-reliance of
abstract thought over actual experience. As regards A Chorus Line, the
wider implications of a habit of abstraction are less important than the
internalization of abstraction within the play itself. Despite its origins in
the concrete, lived experience of the dancers in the early workshops, A
Chorus Line ends up embodying this most capitalistic and industrial set
of values and activities. In order to make the show a viable commercial
enterprise each part needed to be abstracted away from the specific
individual who inspired it, lest it be considered unplayable by anyone
else. Further, the condensation of multiple stories into single characters
5
K.racauer, "The Mass Ornament," 72.
78 H oLTCAMP
likewise contributed to this push for abstraction, as character "types" were
distilled from the collection of recordings and discussions. Constructing
the play as a showcase for these specific dancers would have been at odds
with the capitalist industrial/ economic matrix in which the production
needed to exist. While perhaps not insurmountable, that level of initial
connection with the originators of the material would be a liability to the
long-term prospects for performance.
It is perhaps unsurprising that the casting for "type" indicated in
the history of A Chorus Line had its roots far earlier in the century. For
example, in the 1930s, Edith]. R. I saacs-one of the original publishers
of Stanislavsky's work in the US-told a story about a director defining
"good directing" for her. The director had a hit show on Broadway and
so he naturally wanted to take the show on the road. Called to his office,
Isaacs entered to find the director intently staring at two pictures. One was
of the original cast in New York, the other photo was the newly assembled
cast ready to hit Chicago:
Height for height, color for color, pound for pound, this
director had doubled these actors. Casting offices had
scoured the town to make this perfect match. Each one
of those actors had, moreover, the producer assured me,
watched his original over and over again in performance
until he had copied squarely every gesture, every bit of
business, every facial expression. ~ n d that," said the
dear man, "I call good directing. They say we don't give
Chicago as good as we got. There isn't one of them can
tell the difference."
6
Isaacs' story is revealing because it demonstrates the increasing importance
being placed on theatre being repeatable as it struggled to remain a viable
entertainment form in the industrial United States. This was an attempt
to go beyond simple consistency and achieve a homogenization from cast
to cast and venue to venue. Like the Tiller Girls, all theatre began to trend
towards an abstracted and repeatable event, with increasing value placed
on the ability to deliver interchangeable performances. The two pictures
could just as well be two rows on the long A Chorus Line poster mentioned
above, as each cast matches the next height for height, color for color,
pound for pound.
The example of "good directing" and the industrial motivations
6
Edith]. R. Isaacs, "Type Casting: The Eighth Deadly Sin," The Drama 17 (Feb-
ruary 1933): 133.
WORKING ON THE L INE 79
behind the valuing of such interchangeability reverberate through the
history of A Chorus Line. As A Chorus Line in New York continued
to perform, new actors were needed to fill the specific shoes of their
predecessors, while the touring productions desperately worked to
convince their audiences that they were seeing "as good as they got"
in New York. As the run continued, the New York production needed
continually to convince its patrons that there was some aura left in the
mechanistic repetition and clearly interchangeable casts singing "One"
night after night after night after night. In a sense this problem was
faced even before opening, as many members of the workshops were
put in the position of having their stories told on stage by actors other
than themselves. Thus, the interpretation of their own experiences was
purposely seen from the first as interchangeable, divorcing the appeal of
the show from the original performers.
The tensions between the truly auratic, singular sensation, and a
comfortingly similar, repeatable performance are interrogated by Philip
Auslander in his book Liveness. Auslander argues that live theatre has arrived
at a place where it must paradoxically give the impression of uniqueness
while at the same time delivering a performance experience which is
routinized because of the aesthetic expectations of the audience. "The
ubiquity of reproductions of performances of all kinds in our culture has
led to the depreciation of live presence, which can only be compensated
for by making the perceptual experience of the live as much as possible
like that of the mediatized, even in cases where the live event provides
its own brand of proximity."
7
The expectation of repeatability influences
forms that had come to be seen as predicated upon irreproducibility, e.g.
live theatre. It is easy, perhaps, to imagine an alternate A Chorus Line that
placed a high value on the specificity not only of the characters but also
of the performers. Such a production might be locally successful, but
could never be widely disseminated in the fashion of the real A Chorus
Line-and Auslander would further argue that it would be out of step
with a theatrical aesthetic which increasingly prizes the reproducibility
of experience regardless of the medium. Hence, the originating actors
needed to be divorced from the performance if the show was to succeed.
Industrial capitalism was not simply displayed in the mechanics
of producing A Chorus Line for a long run. Within the story itself
A Chorus Line captures the naturalization of the industrial standard.
Take the juxtaposition of these three quotes from Zach, the director/
choreographer:
7
Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd ed. (New
York: Routledge, 2008), 36.
80
Zach: There are some small parts that have to be played
by the dancers I hire. Now, I have your pictures and
resumes ... but that's not gonna help me. And I don't
want to give you just a few lines to read. I think it would
be better if I knew something about you-about your
personalities .. .. Treat it like an interview.
Zach: Now-this is important! I want to see Unison
Dancing. Every head, arm, body angle, exactfy the same . ...
I don't want anybody to pull my eye.
Zach: (Shouting): You're distorting the combination,
Cassie. Pull in. Cool it. Dance like everybody else.
8
HOLTCAMP
It is hard not to be struck by the incongruity of the elements in the
audition. The goal is to get to know the dancers-learn about their
personal lives, fears, histories, etc.-so that Zach can find the four "boys"
and four "girls" who will be able to dance exactly alike. While ostensibly,
Zach's prying into the personal lives of the auditioners will allow him to
assess who will best be able to play the small roles required of chorus
members, it is difficult to imagine what feats of emotional acting might
be required for a musical with an un-ironic top hat and tails production
number in the 1930's style. Even Zach speaks disparagingly of it in his
final showdown with Cassie, and laments that he hasn't been able to leave
the world of "making up dance steps" and direct a straight play (119).
Whatever the imagined content of the show the dancers are auditioning
for, it seems clear that it doesn't meet Zach's idea of a serious drama. The
inevitable conclusion to be drawn from this striking dichotomy between
the substance of the audition and the show being cast is that Zach is not
particularly interested in the emotional capacities of the dancers; Zach is
actually after control and uniformity. The stories are a means of assessing
how well they will take to being manipulated into the final, unchangeable
product.
Shelia, for example, who consistently challenges Zach's repeated
characterization of the dancers as "boys and girls," is noticeably not asked
to join the cast. As the interviews get underway, one of the dancers-
Diana-hesitates to talk, prompting Zach to ask, ''You want this job, don't
you?" The stage directions specify that this be said "With an edge" (30).
Multiple times Zach tells the dancers to "not perform" when they talk as he
8
Marvin Hamlisch, A Chorus Line (New York: Applause, 1995); 30, 105, 115.
Subsequent references to this text will be made parenthetically.
WORKING ON THE LINE 81
isn't interested in seeing their performance skills, although again, everything
that can be inferred about the eventual musical being cast suggests it is
nothing but oversized performance. In the final audition sequence Zach
explicitly chastises Cassie for dancing in an individual manner and Cassie
is allowed to make the cut only by pledging that she doesn't want to be
anything special, just another dancer on the line. Zach isn't making up this
playbook from scratch. The seeking of individuality in order to achieve
greater conformity is deeply rooted in industrial capitalism and can be
traced back to Fredrick Winslow Taylor, the grandfather of modern
industrialism, and his crystallization of the burgeoning mass production
movement: The Princzpies of Scientific Management. By looking at some of the
assumptions and pronouncements in this incredibly influential text, the
industrial/ capitalist influences within A Chorus Line will be more clearly
illuminated, as Taylor's exhortations and beliefs are repeated, with minor
variations, over sixty years later.
More than a simple guide to labor management, Taylor's book
is, in essence, a catechism of industrial capitalism. Originally published
in 1911, Taylor argued that everything (or at least everything of value)
could be understood rationally and scientifically. Inefficiency was the
most insidious and widespread of villains, but it could be combated by
the discovery of scientific laws and their proper application to human
endeavors. The bedrock of Scientific Management is the belief that there
is a "science" which can be discovered for a'!Y activity. For Taylor, "science"
equals rules, procedures, and systems of economy that are as natural as
the law of gravitation and the orbit of the earth around the sun. Critically
it does not take a singular genius to constantly intervene to keep the
system running. Rather, he splits the world into the men who can discover
the science behind activities and establish the optimum procedures for
accomplishment, the managers who can oversee the implementation of
this science, and the laborers who need understand nothing about what
they are doing, and need only follow the orders of those who are above
them. Crucially, Taylor believed that his approach should not be confined
to the factory floor, and instead should guide thinking regarding all aspects
of public and private life.
To illustrate these principles in action, Taylor includes a case study
on moving pig iron. Whereas tradition said that a laborer could move
roughly twelve and a half tons a day, Taylor's investigations seemed to
prove that a "first-class laborer" could move nearly four times as much.
The next step was to design a system in which the human laborers could
be made to carry the additional tonnage over the course of a shift. What
follows captures the strict division of labor and management which Taylor
expected as a matter of course, the faith that a complex science underlay
82
HoLTCAMP
even the most seemingly simple tasks, and the championing of the
accoutrements of engineering to determine all things of worth, resulting
in a more predictable and profitable outcome.
9
To begin, a suitable workman needed to be found through a
method that can be seen as similar to Zach's audition process in A Chorus
Line. "Our first step was the scientific selection of the workman. In
dealing with workmen under this type of management, it is an inflexible
rule to talk to and deal with only one man at a time, since each workman
has his own special abilities and limitations." (faylor tends to use the first
person plural in his descriptions, emphasizing his assertion that scientific
management is highly collaborative.) Just because a man could carry the
extra weight wasn't enough to select him for this system, nor would it give
Taylor the knowledge needed to treat each man as an individual, just as a
dance audition cannot give Zach the information he needs. So Taylor and
his crew "looked up their history as far back as practicable and thorough
inquiries were made as to the character, habits, and the ambition of each
of them." For the first intervention they selected "a little Pennsylvania
Dutchman who had been observed to trot back home for a mile or so after
work in the evening about as fresh as he was when he came trotting down
to work in the morning." Taylor also discovered that he had managed to
buy a plot of land and was busily erecting a stone wall before coming to
work and again at night. The implication, though never overtly stated,
was that his physical labor on his own abode was a waste of energy that
could be more usefully applied for the good of the company. Finally, the
workman was known to be quite "'close', that is, of placing a very high
value on a dollar."
10
With all of this information at their disposal, they
were ready to manipulate the man into working four times as hard for an
additional seventy cents.
Taylor explains that if Schmidt is a high-priced man, he will
want to earn $1.85 per day, rather than the $1.15 that the other laborers
are earning. Schmidt is ready to sign up, but Taylor now explains the
management portion of his system. In exchange for being a high-priced
man, Schmidt cannot control his own work, but must follow the orders of
another:
9
It should be noted that much of the example that Taylor illustrates is likely
fictionalized-itself an abstraction and condensation of an actual process or processes
that factories had gone through. Certainly the clarity with which the example plays out
leads one to believe that this is not documentary proof, but rather an idealized example of
the system in action.
1
Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York:
Dover Publications, 1997), 19-20.
WORKING ON THE L INE
If you are a high-priced man, you will do exactly as this
man tells you to-morrow, from morning till night. When
he tells you to pick up a pig and walk, you pick it up and
you walk, and when he tells you to sit down and rest,
you sit down. You do that right straight through the day.
And what's more, no back talk. Now a high-priced man
does just what he's told to do, and no back talk. Do you
understand that?
11
83
Schmidt must submit to the taskmaster (in the strictest sense of the word)
because the taskmaster is the one who can apply the laws derived from the
science of loading pig iron. Schmidt is not expected to understand wf?y he is
working the way that he is, and he is certainly not expected to question it.
His role in this system is to follow directions as given to him by the people
above him. Schmidt, in essence, is every dancer in A Chorus Line who
needs the job and is willing to do whatever they are told in order to get it.
In fact, if Fredrick Winslow Taylor were to write a musical it just
might be A Chorus Line, though he might have named it An Assembfy Line.
In content it has everything that he could hope for: a precise standard by
which to judge the potential dancers combined with an investigation into
their personal lives to see how best to motivate them to work all together
as one complete unit. The final product can be transported anywhere
and the parts themselves made into efficient "types" rather than specific
people. Instead of "Schmidt", Taylor might cite Cassie as "known to be
quite 'desperate', that is, of having failed at moving up the ladder from
the chorus." As Taylor pointed out, it was only when you (an imagined
manager) could relate to each person individually that you could most
effectively make them do exactly what you wanted, be that moving four
times as much pig-iron or dancing like everybody else. Kracauer highlights
this use and subsequent sublimation of individuality for the purposes
of control as one of the hallmarks of mass spectacle in general and of
Taylorism in particular: "[Spectacle] is conceived according to rational
principles which the Taylor system only takes to its final conclusion. The
hands in the factory correspond to the legs of the Tiller Girls. Psycho-
technical aptitude tests seek to compute emotional dispositions above and
beyond manual abilities. The mass ornament is the aesthetic reflex of the
rationality aspired to by the prevailing economic system."
12
In other words,
11
Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 21.
12
Kracauer, "The Mass Ornament," 70. The emphasis on testing can be found
in the work of Johnson O'Connor, who pioneered aptitude testing in hiring and employ-
84
HOLTCAMP
the existence of a largely anonymous chorus line is nearly demanded by
the capitalist system as a reflection in art of the daily, lived experience of
the audience.
Given the content of A Chorus Line, it is inevitable that these
tensions should be brought into sharp relief. The one thing that the
entire cast has in common is their love of, and talent for, dance. Unlike
twentieth-century conceptions of acting as the individual interpretation
of a role, ballet, jazz, and tap all contain a rigorous set of outside criteria
for success or failure. Either you can do the combination reliably every
time or you can't. Outside of improvisational forms, dance presupposes a
structure into which any trained dancer should be able to step in, learn the
routine, and perform. Such anonymity is foregrounded in A Chorus Line,
as it is clear that all the parts are, after all, in the chorus, and the desire to
give a name and a story to those who would normally labor in the shadow
of "the star" is part of what motivated the entire Chorus Line project in the
first place. When Zach calls Cassie ''special" and argues that she should
aspire to be more than a dancer on the line she responds: "No, we're all
special. He's special-she's special. And Shelia-and Richie, and Connie.
They're all special. I'd be happy to be dancing in that line. Yes, I would"
(122)Y Cassie is highlighting the "real" people behind the interchangeable
parts, even while expressing a desire to be subsumed by the very system A
Chorus Line works to expose.
In the final production number, "One," the dancers are intended
to back up the star, hence Zach's command not to "draw my eye" (105).
The dancers appear in costume for this number, all gold and sparkles, and
dance in unison across the stage. Bennett saw in this a tremendous sorrow.
"That finale is so sad [ . . . ] The craft is wonderful, but you ask, did they go
through all that just to be anonymous?"
14
Reportedly, Bennett's original
conception for the finale was even more damning:
You're going to get to know all these dancers as
individuals and care about each one. Then, at the very
end of the play, they're all going to come out in tuxedos
ment. "In view of the fact that individuals vary radically, one from another, and that these
differentials cannot be seen, it becomes of the greatest importance to measure accurately
the abilities of every child .... Human nature must be weighed and assayed with even
greater care than that used in handling gold at the mint." Johnson O'Connor, Born That
Wqy (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1928), 36.
13
Perhaps coincidentally, two out of the three people Cassie mentions explicitly
by name, Shelia and Connie, don't make the final cut.
14
Samuel G. Freedman, preface to Hamlisch, A Chorus Line, vii.
WORKING ON THE LINE
and top hats, and you're not going to be able to tell one
from another ... . It's going to be the most horrifying
moment you will ever experience in a theatre. I have a
vision of them forming a V and marching with frozen
smiles, like in Metropolis. If I do this right, you will never
see another chorus line in a theatre.
15
85
Needless to say, the final number turned out quite differently than
originally conceived, though the juxtaposition of the individuals we have
come to know and their suddenly uniform appearance in the final number
is quite striking. Some of this impulse was certainly realized during the
confrontation between Cassie and Zach. While they argue, the rest of
the cast performs the central combination from "One", bearing down on
them in a seemingly unstoppable line, and alternating between full voice
and whispers. The chorus is shown as frightening and monolithic, but that
fear is immediately undercut by Cassie's affirmation of the joy of the work
and her desire to be on the line. As for the finale, it is difficult to imagine
how any audience could perceive the sadness that Bennett saw unless they
were primed to look for it. The script calls for the all the original seventeen
dancers-plus Zach and Larry-to be costumed, as if they all got parts
(the extras-often understudies for the principals-who are cut early in
the show aren't in this number). They proceed across the stage, all singing,
all dancing, all smiling, all doing what they would "do for love" anyway.
Even Paul, torn cartilage and all, is back, right in line, dancing with the
rest. The audience claps, the orchestra plays, and the cast dances and sings.
The stage directions in the published script call for this to be the only
curtain call, so that the audience is left with the vision of "a kick line
that goes on forever" (145). Paradoxically, appearing in the anonymous
line was a celebration of their individuality; a statement of faith that the
blood, sweat, and tears were not in vain. They are dancers, and dance
eternally. The sadness comes when one considers their impersonal,
replaceable position in that line, and that the emotionally flaying audition
process they went through is primarily useful so that Zach can know the
best way to manipulate them to conform to an exact, external standard.
Taylor- the proponent of the singular, ultimate method for anything-
would likely have loved "One" with its established hierarchy, unitary focus,
and dogmatically correct way of dancing. Even as the play criticizes the
structure it reinforces the assumptions, hence the internal confusion about
what is being celebrated in A Chorus Line. Is it the power of the individual,
or the power of the industry to hide that individuality?
15
Mandelbaum, A Chorus Line, 171.
86
H OLTCAMP
A few years ago a friend of mine was cast in a regional production
of A Chorus line, and in talking with her I learned a bit about how A
Chorus Line is constructed today. Most interestingly for my purposes here,
she told me that every semi-professional or professional production of A
Chorus Line receives the "Bible" (her term). This tome is a record of the
entire show: the placement of every actor at every moment, the "business"
for individual characters, as well as the costume, set, and lighting design.
As a result, each production of A Chorus Line is functionally the same.
16
Every cast, regardless of their connection to the original production, can
execute the same stage picture moment to moment, the same blocking,
and the same method of delivery faithfully. This, like the necessities of
casting and recasting the long-run and touring show, has a precedent from
early in the century, when the capitalist/industrial aesthetic valuations were
spreading from factories to daily life. Repetition and repeatability are core
values in this matrix, established by Taylor and his ilk as the cornerstones
of rational industrial production, and these values find expression in the
"Longmans script service."
Longmans was actually "Longmans, Green, and Company," a
publishing house in New York that printed plays suitable for amateur,
educational, and semi-professional theatre groups around the country.
But Longmans also offered a "unique service" which they advertised to
theatres large and small:
Each play is published in two forms-the Players'
Prompt Book, and the Director's Manuscript. The Book,
containing no stage directions, is intended only for reading
preliminary to production and for the convenience of
the players in memorizing their lines. In the Director's
Manuscript is given, besides the full text of the play, all
the information necessary to the production. Diagrams
of stage settings, pictures of the characters, lighting
and property plots, make-up directions and general
instructions are all included in addition to the complete
16
By happenstance, a touring production of A Chorus Line played in town while
I was finishing this essay, and I was able to compare my memory of the past production
with this one. To my eyes, it was clear that "the Bible" had been used. My suspicions were
further confirmed when I perused the program and discovered that Baayork Lee was given
credit for "restaging" the direction and choreography. NETworks Productions, Program,
A Chorus Line, 26 February 2011, Koger Center for the Performing Arts, Columbia, SC.
(Baayork Lee, incidentally, was one of the original members of A Chorus Line, performing
the role of Connie "The Peanut on Pointe" Wong, and is also one of the authors of On
The Line.)
WoRKING ON THE LrNE
stage business and lines of each part. The directions are
explicit and clear, so that even the inexperienced director
may not be handicapped in producing these playsY
87
Following a Longmans' Director's Manuscript insured that nothing was
left to chance. From pictures of the characters to guides to make-up and
costumes, the Longmans script covered it all. Producing a professional-
quality play was nothing more than getting the right raw materials and
shaping them according to the established plan, like manufacturing a
Model T Ford.
This system inevitably hearkens back to Taylor and Scientific
Management. The division between knowledge about how a task is to be
done and the suitability for doing that task is at the heart of Taylorism.
Taylor, although he does not describe the specific methods for moving
pig iron, believes that "the reader will be thoroughly convinced that there
is a science of handling pig iron, and further that this science amounts to
so much that the man who is suited to handle pig iron cannot possibly
understand it, nor even work in accordance with the laws of this science,
without the help of those who are over him."
18
In other words, if you are
suited to do a task, you are likely not suited to understanding wf!y you are
doing the task in a certain way. Your supervisor has gleaned enough of the
"science" to implement the system arrived at through the work of those
at the top of the pyramid. This same structure is echoed by Longmans.
The local director, after receiving a Longmans' script, becomes Taylor's
foreman and the actors Taylor's Schmidt. The director might not be a
Taylor himself; that level of understanding of the science of the theatre
is left to the professionals who compiled the Director's Manuscript. But
the local director is able to grasp enough of the system in order to tell the
other members of the cast how to follow the path already laid down.
This impulse is carried forward into the modern history of A
Chorus Line. In sanctioned Chorus Lines there is no deviation from the plan
laid out in the "Bible": no substantive input is solicited from the specific
actors called in to play the roles and no creative freedom is allowed with
the design. Even the option to change the year does not exist. For Cassie,
Val, Bebe, and the rest it will be 1975 in perpetuity. The "local" actors and
production teams connected to touring shows are so many interchangeable
parts, assembled to produce a preordained design. In accordance with
Taylor's Scientific Management the experiments were done in the first
17
Harold Lee Andrews, Acting and P lqy Production: A Manual for Classes, Dramatic
Clubs, and Little Theatres (New York: Longmans, Green and Co, 1928), 147-8.
18
Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 22.
88 HOLTCAMP
rehearsals, the innovations investigated and assessed, the results tabulated
and recorded, and the final product established. For example, the script
used for previews allowed for some discretion as to who made the final
cut. "To keep his dancers on edge, Bennett had continued the practice of
announcing a different list of eight audition 'winners' each night." But
after a week of performances, the dancers who "made it" were set in
stone, just like the rest of the play. One particular motivation for this
was the palpably negative audience response when Cassie wasn't cast. "It
might be more truthful" Marsha Mason reportedly said, "but you can't just
kill off people's hope."
19
After that, Cassie and the rest who made the cut
were always the same, just like the rest of the show. The optimum science
of A Chorus Line was established, hence there was no need to deviate from
the one true path to industrial success.
An irony of this is, of course, that the show began as such a
celebration of individuality, growing out of the conversations and
improvisations of the original dancers who met and worked with Bennett
in the real 197 4. And further, that the show was developed through
workshops sponsored by Joseph Papp's non-profit Shakespeare Festival.
A full discussion of the tortured economic path that the play itself trod
in moving from incubation to singular sensation is necessarily outside of
the bounds of this essay, but it is worth noting that despite its origins
in an apparent repudiation of the dominant economic paradigm in
production, the play was forced, if it was to survive, to integrate itself
into the economic system it was critiquing. To give just one somewhat
notorious example, the stories of the dancers- the raw materials for the
show itself-were bought from each person for the sum of one dollar,
with no guarantees made about eventual casting in the finished product.
As one of the original participants later said, "People are living in houses
in the Hamptons because of A Chorus Line. None of us are."
20
Taken individually, the elements of A Chorus Line that I have
identified here are not necessarily specific to modern capitalism.
The sublimation of individuality is certainly a hallmark of life under
communist and fascist regimes, and the spectacular entertainments that
Kracauer identified as being linked to capitalism are have proven to be
equally (if not more) popular under totalitarian dictatorships. But I use A
Chorus Line here to illustrate the particular combination of capitalist values
that emerged in the twentieth century as a result of modern industrial
19
Viagas, On the Line, 239. Reportedly, part of the original impulse to not cast
Cassie came from parallels between Bennett and Donna McKechnie's off-stage relation-
ship during development of A Chorus Line-see Mandelbaum, A Chorus Line, 146.
20
Viagas, On the Line, 138.
WORKING ON THE LINE 89
practice. The emphasis on consistency, repeatability, interchangeability-
and the means by which these are obtained-all have precedent early in
the century, as the methodologies and priorities of American industry
began to be adopted in the culture at large. Kracauer's cogent analysis of
spectacle entertainments and the chorus lines of the Tiller Girls predict
some of the ways in which A Chorus Line illustrates the valuations of
modern capitalism, and echoes of Taylor's Scientific Management can be
found throughout the play and its production history. A Chorus Line, in
both form and content, offers a rich collection of examples of how the
values of industrial capitalism were naturalized and reflected in theatrical
expression. Like any of the interchangeable products of American assembly
lines, the dancers in A Chorus Line begin as disparate raw materials. Each
is assessed and assayed, cajoled and manipulated, until they can be shaped
into the indistinguishable chorus at the back of the mystery musical.
More than other Broadway musicals, which share similar concerns about
interchangeability and repeatability, A Chorus Line illustrates these tenets
more directly because it is a glimpse into the construction of a show, even
as it is also a final product in and of itself. Perhaps one of the keys to the
play's longevity and success is that while it is ostensibly about dancers, the
experience of being merely interchangeable components in a larger system
that was largely opaque didn't seem so alien to audiences at all, as it was
a familiar pattern played out by industrial capitalism across occupations.
Bennett's original dedication was to "anyone who has danced in a line, or
marched in step . .. anywhere."
21
Everyone, dancer and audience, factory
worker and theatre performer, works in the chorus. Everyone works-or
wants to work-for Zach, and can see themselves working on the line.
21
NETworks Productions, Program, A Chorus Line, 26 February 2011.
jOURNAL OF AMER1CAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 23, NO. 2 (SPRJNG 2011)
RADicAL EcoNOMICS FOR THE "ORDINARY AMERICAN": ARTHUR
MILLER'S THAT THEY JJ1Ay W7N
Chrystyna M. Dail
In the summer of 1948, the Chicago Arts Committee for Wallace engaged
the social activist performance group Stage For Action (SFA) to perform a
series of short plays educating audiences about current events relevant to
the upcoming presidential election. The Committee was supporting Henry
Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate. One of the plays performed by
SFA had been in their repertoire since conception, Arthur Miller's That
They Mqy Win, a one-act engaging the theories of Marxist economist
and Wallace policy author Paul M. Sweezy. This article traces the various
iterations of That They Mqy Win from 1943 to 1948 illustrating its focus on
radical anti-capitalist economic policies of the period and its culmination
as election propaganda for the presidential campaign of Henry A. Wallace.
Comprised of a group of radio, stage, and literary personnel at
various points in their careers, SFA officially organized in 1943 to support
war causes and "bring to public attention the menace of native fascism."
1
SFA involved some of the leading literary and artistic minds of the day
on its Executive Board; including Howard Fast, Elizabeth Hawes, Paul
Robeson, Norman Corwin, Abram Hill, and Dorothy Parker. The group
was racially integrated, and was at times during its existence sponsored by
the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). SPA's mission was
transforming the shape of United States theatre, and more importantly,
the shape of US social activism. As a review of the group in the e o p l e ~
Voice touted, SFA was "determined that they should apply their art and
devote themselves to the cause of a better America."
2
By the time the Wallace campaign was in full swing, SFA had
been operating for five years and was arguably the leading social activist
performance group in the nation. Most of SPA's performances were
free to the public, focused on a specific issue generated from a recent
news event, and encouraged audience participation in order to inspire
personal responsibility. From their original theme in 1943 of supporting
the war effort to tackling post-war issues of housing and food shortages,
1
Burton Lindheim, ''A Stage For Action: From the Bronx to Canarsie With the
Players of Topical Problems," New York Times, 14 May 1944, Xl.
2
Stage For Action, Informational Pamphlet, The J. B. Matthews Papers, Rare
Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.
92 DAIL
unemployment, atomic warfare, racism, anti-Semitism, and the witch-
hunts of the HUAC, SFA operated as one of the "opposing currents of
dynamic progress and static conservatism .. . with its militant program
. . . takUng] the theatre to the people when the people can't come to
the theatre."
3
By 1948 SFA operated in at least nine major metropolitan
areas, initiated a training school in New York City, and was funded by or
had direct connection to the Jewish People's Fraternal Order, the CIO
Teachers' Union, the United Electrical Workers, the Furriers Union,
Transport Union, National Maritime Union, and Department Store
Workers' Union.
4
SFA was organizationally and politically involved with Henry
Wallace's presidential campaign. The Chicago unit of SFA was run for a
time by Paul Robeson, who was no stranger to Henry Wallace, as he was
a major advocate of the Vice President turned Secretary of Commerce,
accompanying him on many of his campaign tours and performing at pro-
Wallace rallies. Robeson and Wallace were brethren in the fight to end Jim
Crow laws in the United States. As political journalist Jim Sleeper writes,
"Many of Wallace's positions were ahead of their time. He was a stout foe
of racism and sexism when most Americans still sentimentalized them.
He risked his life to address integrated audiences in [Strom] Thurmond's
South during the campaign. . . . But these positions dovetailed or got
hopelessly entangled with darker Communist goals."
5
Ties to the CPUSA
would be the undoing of both Wallace and SFA, however prior to their
downfall these two were connected not only through their beliefs about
racial equality; but also on ideas about economics and the possible pitfalls
facing a post-war capitalist society.
Although each of the pieces SFA performed during their alliance
with the Chicago Arts Committee for Wallace highlight problems with
the United States post-war economy, Arthur 1-filler's That They Mqy Win
devotes a significant portion of stage time elucidating both the issues as
well as potential fixes for the economic complexities facing the nation in
1948. Accepting the Progressive Party's Nomination for President on 24
3
Arnaud D'usseau and James Gow, "Another Definition for 'Commercialism,"' New
York Times, 22 September 1946, Xl.
4
Walter S. Steele, at the time of his testimony before the HUAC, was chair man
of the national security committee of the American Coalition of Patriotic, Civic, and Fra-
ternal Societies as well as managing editor of National Republic. Congress, Senate, Commit-
tee on Un-American Activities, Testimof!)l of WalterS. Steele Regarding Communist Activities in
the United States, 80'h Cong., 1st sess., 21 July 1947,113- 7.
5
Jim Sleeper, "The Real Third-Party Candidate in 1948," George Mason Universiry's
History News Net1vork, http:/ /hnn.us/articles/1173.html (accessed 16 December 2010).
RADICAL EcoNoMics FOR THE "ORDINARY AMERICAN"
July 1948, Wallace stated:
I am committed to the policy of placing human rights
above property rights. I am committed to using the
power of our democracy to control rigorously and,
wherever necessary, to remove from private to public
hands, the power of huge corporate monopolies and
international big business. . . I am committed to a
program of progressive capitalism-a program which
will protect from the tentacles of monopolists the
initiative and creative and productive powers of truly
independent enterprise. I am committed to fighting,
with everything I have, the ugly practice of stifling with
Taft-Hartley injunctions and the power of Government
the free trade union organizations of our workers. . . . I
am pledged to licking inflation by stopping the cold war,
the ruthless profiteering of monopolies, and the waste
of resources which could give us an abundance of the
goods of peace.
6
93
Interrogating economic policies of the Progressive Party platform as well
as ideas put forth in Miller's short play, they both clearly engage theories
initially developed by renowned Marxist economist and co-founder of the
Monthfy Review, Paul M. Sweezy.
7
Paul Sweezy is best known for his theory of monopoly capitalism,
or stagnation theory, which he began developing in the early 1940s. He co-
published a full length work on monopoly capitalism with Paul Baran in
1966. The thesis of Monopofy Capitalism is as follows:
Marx's fundamental "law of the tendency of the rate
of profit to fall," associated with accumulation in
the era of free competition, had been replaced, in the
more restrictive competitive environment of monopoly
capitalism (in which a handful of giant firms tended to
6
Henry A. Wallace, "Progressive Party Candidate for President of the United
States Acceptance Speech, Philadelphia, 24 July 1948," Vital Speeches of the Dqy 14, no. 20
(1 August 1948): 620.
7
I am in no way suggesting a direct connection between members of SFA and
Paul Sweezy, although it is clear that many members as well as Sweezy supported the same
Leftist causes during and long after World War II. For example both Sweezy and Arthur
Miller were involved with the Scientific and Cultural Congress for World Peace during the
1940s and the Free Mila Aguilar campaign during the 1980s.
94
control key industries and the economy as a whole), by
a law of the tendency of the surplus to rise. The nature
of the price mechanism under monopoly capitalism (an
argument that went back to Sweezy's earlier theory of
the kinked demand curve) meant that capital tended not
to adjust to shortfalls in final demand by lowering prices,
but generated instead chronic excess capacity, as plants
were idled to protect profit margins.
8
DAIL
Simply stated, when surplus capital cannot be consumed by the everyday
wage earner, the overwhelming result in a capitalistic economy will be
stagnation because the monopolies won't stop producing nor lower prices,
therefore the monopoly capital based economy becomes dependent on
economic waste.
But where and how do a radical economic work of the 1960s and
a social activist play of the 1940s overlap? Much of Sweezy and Baran's
work confronts the economic climate of the post-WWII and Cold War
period. However, Sweezy's economic theories were already well established
and respected by the time Arthur Miller wrote the first version of That
They Mqy Win and certainly by the time Henry Wallace ran for president.
Paul Sweezy was educated at Harvard and began teaching courses in the
economics of socialism at his alma mater in 1938. The lectures developed
during these years resulted in the publication of The Theory of Capitalist
Development: Principles of Marxian Political Economy in 1942. There has yet
to be a treatise published that offers such an in-depth analysis of Marxist
economics. The conclusion of this work not only underscores the vast
majority of Sweezy's future research but also correlates directly to the
economic ideas put forth by That They Mqy Win and Henry Wallace's
presidential campaign platform, namely, "stagnation of production, in
the sense of less-than-capacity utilization of productive resources is to
be regarded as the normal state of affairs under capitalist conditions."
9
Productive resources, according to Sweezy, include both the consumables
being produced and the people doing the production.
Of course That They Mqy Win and Henry Wallace did not use terms
such as stagnation and monopoly capitalism to explain the current and
possible future economic situation of the United States. SFA's audience
8
John Bellamy Foster, "Memorial Service for Paul Marlar Sweezy (1910-2004),"
Month!J R e v i e ~ http:/ /www.monthlyreview.org/paulsweezy.htm (accessed 10 December
2010).
9
Ibid. Paul Sweezy eventually co-founded and co-edited the Month!J Review,
which is most well-known for its socialist critique of capitalism and imperialism.
RADICAL ECONOMICS FOR THE "ORDINARY AMERICAN" 95
members were neither economists nor Sweezy's intended secondary
audience, radical intelligentsia of the Left (although many of the writers
involved with SFA were included in this latter group). Instead, SFA
performed for people Sweezy referred to as "the wage earners" or what
many Leftist politicians and writers of the period (including Wallace) called
"the common man." Their audiences consisted of labor union members,
women's groups, religious clubs, and communist front organizations.
Therefore SFA writers took the Marxist economic theories developed by
Sweezy and translated them into everyday language recapitulating what
Sweezy himself understood as the original intentions of Karl Marx:
uncovering the "true interrelation between the economic and non-
economic factors in the totality of social existence."
10
Sweezy did much the
same kind of translation when co-authoring Wallace's campaign policies
in 1948. Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman composed one of the two
preambles to Wallace's platform speech for the Philadelphia Progressive
Party convention. Their preamble, called the Chicago draft (versus the
New York preamble by Scott Buchanan), was primarily concerned with
the country's "growing concentration of economic power."
11
Sweezy
and Huberman's preamble was ultimately favored for its "moderate and
scholarly tone," although Wallace's entire platform was edited by his
advisory committee in order to speak to the "ordinary American."
12
That They May Win is also aimed at the so-called "ordinary
American." Miller makes it clear in his autobiography that during the early
1940s, while his political positions were formulating, his convictions on
playwrighting "deepened the presumption that should [he] ever win an
audience it would have to be made up of all the people, not merely the
educated or sophisticated, since it was this mass that contained the oceanic
power to smash everything .. . or to create much good."
13
Epitomizing
Miller's notions that capitalism and imperialist greed were at the heart of
both World Wars, That They May Win is a drama commenting on most of
the economic issues facing American families including unemployment,
food shortages, housing, and child care.
14
The play was both the first and
one of the final performances in SPA's repertory, proving to be one of
10
Paul M. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1942), 15.
11
Karl M. Schmidt, Henry A. Wallace: Quixotic Crusade 1948 (Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press, 1960), 191.
12
Ibid., 190-1.
13
Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (New York: Penguin Books, 199 5), 82.
14
Ibid., 81.
96
DAIL
the most popular as well. According to Margaret Mayorga, the play was
"originally produced for the Victory Committee of Welfare Center 67 at
Albemarle Road, Brooklyn, New York, on December 21, 1943."
15
In a
letter to SFA Committee members in early December 1943 Perry Miller,
the founder of SFA states, that "our first script on the need for child care
centers for the children of working mothers, written by Arthur Miller, is
being directed by Sam Wanamaker, and has been cast in triplicate with
prominent actors of radio and stage."
16
The following month, January 1944, Arthur Miller's novel Situation
Norma/was published just as he was becoming more heavily involved with
SFA. The Man Who Had All the Luck would come and go on Broadway
in four performances in late November 1944_17 In his Trinity if Passion,
Alan Wald calls the years 1945-1946 ''Arthur Miller's Missing Chapter."
18
Miller disappeared from Broadway between The Man Who Had All the
Luck and All My Sons and poured himself into revolutionary work and
Leftist theatrical criticism with the New Masses. Yet Miller's plays were
not absent from the stage during this period. Between 1943 and 1948,
he established himself as the first and longest-lasting playwright of Stage
For Action.
19
But Miller did more than write for SFA. After All My Sons
opened on Broadway and Miller catapulted into the national spotlight,
he called "a meeting of writers, playwrights, composers and lyricists ... in
15
Margaret Mayorga, ed., The Best One-Act Plqys rf 1944 (New York: Dodd, Mead
& Company, 1945), 46.
16
Perry Miller, "Stage Door to Action Letter: December 1943," Peggy Clark
Collection, Performing Arts Reading Room, Music Division, Library of Congress.
17
The Man Who Had All the Luck, which critics labeled confusing because of its
"somewhat jumbled philosophies," ultimately asks whether wealth stems from hard work
or good fortune. In his New York Times review Lewis Nichols compared Miller and Saroyan
(arguing Saroyan was the better playwright). The Man Who Had All the Luck offers a Marxist
critique on capitalism, as critics at the time noted, the work lacks any real depth of political
positioning (which separates it sharply from the other writing produced by Miller during
this same period). See: Lewis Nichols, "The Play: The Philosophy of Work Against Chance
Makes Up 'The Man Who Had All the Luck,"' Neu; York Times, 24 November 1944, 18.
18
Alan M. Wald, Trinity rf Passion: The Literary Left and the A nti-Fascist Crusade
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 210-35.
19
Arthur Miller wrote at least three plays for Stage For Action: That Thry Mqy
Win, Youre Next, and the largely unknown Hiccupping Mr. Higgins. This last play may have
ended up on the American Federation of Labor four-part radio series titled Story from the
Stars for which Miller was one of the writers. His contribution was an eight-minute sketch
titled The Hiccups rf A!fred Higgins in which the protagonist begs the audience for support
in fighting the Taft-Hartley bill. See: Sam Chase, "Story From the Stars," Billboard Magazine
17May1947, 11 and 18.
RADICAL EcoNoMics FOR THE "ORDINARY AMERICAN" 97
connection with the National Council of American Soviet Friendship's
membership drive" at Zero Mastel's home "to discuss a projected series
of performances which Stage For Action will produce for the National
Council . . . special material, such as plays, sketches and songs, will be
written on American-Soviet friendship."
20
Some of the attendees included
"Irving Wexler, George Scudder, Leslie Stevens, Paul Kent, Lou Kleinman,
Joe Dation, Paul Sekon, Dave Schreiber and George I<.Jeinsinger," many
of whom already had prolific Broadway and Hollywood writing careers.
21
The fact that Miller was in charge of a meeting of such stature and that
his invitation aroused the interest of such prominent members of the
entertainment writing community illustrates that by 1947 Miller was a
leader in SFA and comfortably situated in Leftist culture as well as on
Broadway.
The three available versions of Miller's That h ~ Mqy Win point to
his influence on and lasting commitment to SFA. The play was published
in The Best One-Act Plqys of 1944, but two other versions exist. The second
version of the script is undated although it was definitely written while the
war was still going on, probably in 1944, and a revised third version of
the play is dated June 1948.
22
The three scripts utilize the same characters,
most of the same dialogue, and ultimately share the same goals of rousing
the audience to demand change from their local and national politicians.
The first two versions are more focused on lowering prices for everyday
goods and obtaining suitable childcare so that both parents can work, while
the third piece-revised specifically for the Chicago Arts Committee for
Wallace-suggests that voting the Progressive Party into the White House
will fix the lack of jobs as well as sky-high rent and food costs.
That h ~ Mqy Win centers on a married couple, Delia and Danny,
who have a small child and live in tenement housing. The third main
character in the play is their best friend Ina who is unmarried and the only
person in the piece with a stable job. The 1943 and 1944 versions of the
script begin a week after Danny has returned home from combat, a hero
but with a serious war wound. While he was overseas (Italy in the 1943
script, Africa in the 1944 version, and Germany in the 1948 version) Delia
lied to him in her letters about how she and the baby were surviving on
20
[Stage For Action], "Press Release, 18 February 1947," The J. B. Matthews
Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.
21
Ibid.
22
Arthur Miller, That They May Win in The Best One-Act Plays of 1944, ed. May-
orga; Arthur Miller, That Thry May Win (1944?) and That Thry May Win (1948), Charles
Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Library, Se-
ries XCIX, folder 7.
98 D AIL
his military allotment. In truth, she had to move to the slums because she
could not afford rent and food with the high inflation during the war years.
At one point in the play she admits to Danny,
I didn't move to this place temporarily, like I told you. I
moved here because I can't pay a decent rent and eat right,
too. Danny, you got no idea what it is to buy anything
today. They cut your throat for a bunch of carrots. I go
out and I spend five dollars and I come back with a bag
full of nothing. I walked a mile and a half last week to
save twenty cents on vegetables. I'm dealing in nickels
and dimes and pennies. We can't live on that money.
23
This speech is replicated in all three versions of That They May Win and each
version of the script includes two figures planted in the audience Oabeled
"Distressed Man" and "Man Who Knows") who yell at the characters
onstage, at each other, and the other audience members about solutions to
the current economic problems. In the 1943 version of the script the two
men recommend pushing for government-funded child care centers and
that the women in the audience get training through and volunteer with
the Office of the Price Administration (OPA), which was established in
1941 to regulate domestic prices. By the 1948 version of the script, where
Danny is first seen not recovering from a battle wound but washing and
drying dishes at the kitchen sink while wearing his wife's apron, the call
for child care centers and working with the Labor Unions and OPA have
given way to a call to vote the Progressive Party ticket. Part of the shift in
rhetoric was due to President Truman's allowing the price-control laws to
expire in June 1946 despite protests by many leading economists on the
Right and the Left (including Sweezy).
24
The possibility of massive post-war unemployment was of great
concern to many economists; however employment during the war was
also a social issue. That They May i n ~ initial focus on women working
outside the home and childcare offers intriguing insights into how SFA
situated their work in the larger economic, political, and social debates
raging in 1940s' United States. In his 1944 work The First Round: The Story
of the CIO Political Action Committee) Joseph Gaer wrote the "War Manpower
Commission has listed 370 community problems affecting the utilization
23
Miller, That They Mqy Win in The Best One-Act Plqys of 1944, 53-4.
24
Lowell Eugene Gallaway and Richard K. Vedder, Out of Work: Unemployment
and Government in Twentieth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 1997),
154.
RADICAL EcoNOMICS FOR THE "ORDINARY A.t\ffiRICAN" 99
of manpower-most of them affecting womanpower more. The most
prominent of all these vexing problems is Child Care."
25
By July 1944 one-
third of the civilian workforce was women, which means that between
July 1937 and July 1944, seven and a half million women entered the
workforce. This brought the total to 17.7 million with an estimated 33%
of these women being mothers of children under the age of 16.
26
Demand
for improved child care for mothers working in war time industries did not
become a national issue until late January 1942 when the Department of
Labor issued emergency dispensations for longer work hours by women.
All over the nation, the need for child care rose "many hundred percent
with the war program's gain in momentum."
27
The government responded
by issuing the Lanham Act, which provided "about 2,500 nursery schools
and child-care centers" and approximately twenty million dollars in
funding "for the fiscal year July 1944, to July 1945, for child care."
28
The
planning needed to design and implement the day cares, including finding
appropriate locations for child care and then staffing the nurseries and day
cares, many of which needed to be in operation seven days a week, was
not given proper time due to the immediate and ever-increasing workforce
demands on women during the war. Additionally, the Lanham Act only
provided funding in areas delegated "centers of wartime industry," so
cities such as New York, with a great demand for child care did not receive
government support because they were not considered part of the war
machine.
29
The first two versions of That They May Win explore in part
the problems of those families not covered by this act-particularly those
families in which the wives of soldiers entered the work force due to their
husbands' absence, high living costs, and inadequate military wages.
In the 1943 and 1944 versions of That They May Win, Delia suggests
that Danny stay home with his daughter while he is recovering from his
war wounds. But Danny, who has secretly already secured a part-time job,
offers an alternative that he has read about both in the English soldier
papers and at home. The following exchange between Delia and Danny
illustrates the dire situation working mothers faced:
25
Joseph Gaer, The First Round: The Story of the CIO Political Action Committee
(New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1944), 414.
26
Ibid., 411, 415.
27
"War Work 'Orphan' to Get Day Care," New York Times, 27 January 1942, 18.
28
Gaer, The First Round, 416.
29
"War Work 'Orphan' to Get Day Care."
100
Danny: Ain't there some nursery or something? I was
reading about in London how they got nurseries .... The
kids get the best of everything. And come to think of it,
didn't I read that our government was granting money
for these things?
Delia: It's in the newspapers, darling. They're not here,
though. And the ones that are, are either too full or they
cost too much.
Danny: Well, what are all the women in the factories
doing with their kids, throwing them in the sewer?
Delia: They put a key around the kid's neck and let him
run loose, or they got relatives or something .... I don't
know. I looked all over; there's no place to leave her. So
if you'd stay home ...
DAIL
The exchange leads to the climax of the play when Danny yells at Delia:
Danny: What's the matter with you? They knock you
down; they walk all over you; you get up, brush yourself
off and say it's workin' out great. What do you pay taxes
for; what do you vote for?
30
In his tirade and through the denouement of the short piece, Danny
suggests changes for women that seem progressive for the period, namely:
Women should have the right to work if they want to and should have
access to adequate child care; women should educate themselves on their
legal rights; and, women can prove a powerful lobbying group if they
work together for change.
The 1943 version ends with a speech by the Man Who Knows
defending the intellect and power of women against Distressed Man,
stating:
[Women] aren't dumb, my friend; look what they learned
to do in this war. They learned how to weld, how to run
a drill press, how to build a P-47, how to hold a home
together while their husbands are away fighting to win
the war, how to vote. And they're learning that women
30
Miller in The Best One-Act Plays of 1944, 55-6.
RADICAL E coNOMICS FOR THE "ORDINARY A MERICAN"
can fight in this war too, right here on the home front.
Their army is the Consumers' Council and their machine
guns are market baskets, and some day, when Johnny
comes marching home, they'll be able to say to him,
"Okay, soldier, I was a soldier, too!"
31
101
The rhetoric is filled with empowering justification for women engaging in
politics during the war, suggesting the women's first military front should
be an economic one. The text reads as a Marxist critique of US society.
Intriguingly, the message changes substantively in the 1944 version when
the Man Who Knows is transformed into a woman, who ends the short
play stating:
It's up to women like us who are the wives of our fighting
soldiers, the mothers of their children, to get together
to fight conditions like that. They're holding the prices
down in Canada and England because the people there
won't stand for them going up. Even in China they've
got nurseries; they've got no shoes but they've made a
place for their children. What can we do about it here?
Why aren't the unions, the housewives, the church clubs
all working together more closely? Why aren't all the
groups who want the same things getting together about
it? The President can't do it alone. He needs your help.
Let our congressmen know that we're dead serious about
keeping our people on the home front happy and well.
Organizations are like microphones. Turn on the juice
and speak up, and when our boys come home you'll be
able to face them and say, "I also fought. Yes, and I also
won."
32
By changing the protesting audience member from a man to a woman,
Miller suggests that women have the right to take political action to rectify
injustices in American society. He also offers interesting parallels between
union labor, "housewife" labor, and grass roots community organizations,
suggesting that each can mobilize to affect change.
During WWII, women were responsible for most aspects pertaining
to fiscal responsibility, not only purchasing food and sundries but also
31
Ibid. , 58-9.
32
Miller, That They Mqy Win (1944?), 9.
102 D AIL
paying rent or mortgages, making home and automobile repairs, and
deciding how much to spend or save each month. Women's rising fiscal
responsibility directly affected government policies. New York State
named thirteen women as OPA rationing board advisors in May 1944.
This change in OPA policy occurred one month after a benefit event for
SFA included a performance of That Thry Mqy Win. In attendance at the
benefit were Eleanor Roosevelt and other future OPA advisors.
33
Two of
the thirteen women named to the OPA Advisory Committee were SFA
supporters either through sponsorship or board membership. Mildred
Gutwillig, was president of the New York City Consumer Council, and
Mrs. Arthur Mayer was OPA representative of the Women's City Club
War Committee. The following year, in January 1945, Mrs. Arthur Mayer
was elected vice-chairman of the Board of SFA. Although Mayer only
remained in this administrative position for a few months, both she and
Gutwillig remained sponsors of SFA throughout its existence. That Thry
May Win1 message that women should involve themselves with the OPA
and the Consumers' Council in order to combat political oppression was
an important strategy for promoting war time political and economic
change.
Although it would be easy to read the 1948 script as patriarchal, Miller
is not necessarily emasculating Danny by placing him in an apron. By 1946
many of the war-time advances for women including equal pay, maternity
leave, and the entire contents of the Lanham Act had been terminated.
34
For SFA audiences, Miller illustrates the hurdles facing American families
and challenges Progressive males to engage in domestic responsibilities. A
perfect example of the shift in post-war domestic structure occurs in the
following exchange at the beginning of the 1948 version of the play:
Ina: What's wrong?
Danny: No more than usual. Kid didn't sleep all night's
all. He don't sleep, we don't sleep--who sleeps? They're
taking a nap now. (Kicks a chair toward Ina) Relax a minute.
She'll be up soon. (A little guiltijy) Helping with the dishes.
(Indicates apron, laughs a little)
Ina: On you it's got class. If more men put on more
33
Stage For Action, Benefit Program, Peggy Clark Collection, Performing Arts
Reading Room, Music Division, Library of Congress.
34
Almanac of Policy Issues, "Child Care," http: / /www.policyalmanac.org/ so-
cial_ welfare/ archive/ child_care.shtml (accessed 5 August 2009).
RADICAL EcoNOMICS FOR THE "ORDINARY AMERICAN" 103
aprons more times, things might be a little better.
35
Ina, who I extrapolate as a stereotypical Rosie the Riveter in the
1944 version of the play, takes an even more significant role in the final
revision of That They May Win.
36
She has a job and can earn money to buy
food (specifically meat). More importantly, she is the seer, the one who
"knows history" and takes Danny to task for not trying to find a job and
for not paying attention to what is happening to his family and society
around them. The message of the 1948 version of the script is not that
Danny is "less of a man" for helping with domestic responsibilities or
that Delia is wrong for wanting to work outside the home, but rather that
they are both failing as productive members of society for not trying to
change any of the social problems that placed them in their economic
predicament. An additional message of the piece is found in the strength
of the two leading female characters, Ina and Delia. As an advocate of
women's rights, Wallace included policies on the importance of women
in the workforce in his platform. Ina and Delia provided the archetypal
images of the "ideal" Progressive working woman and housewife as
delineated by the Wallace campaign.
Several new issues arise in the 1948 production of That They May Win
including the lack of available jobs for the working class, the suggestion
that another war is on the horizon (and indeed it was), dwindling support
of the unions, and the idea that it is a unified people (both men and
women) who will produce change in the country. Whereas in the 1943
and 1944 versions of That They May Win the Man (Woman) Who Knows
calls on women to make economic and therefore political changes in the
United States, in the 1948 version this character asks:
Where are the people? . . . To be people, you gotta
start acting like people. You gotta be people. This is a
government of the people, by the people, and for the
people. Get the dame [Ina] who knows history ... she'll tell
you. The government is you, and you gotta do something
about it. We, the people, gotta go into politics. And don't
get me wrong. Politics isn't something way off in the
clouds. Politics is just another way of saying how much
bread and chopped meat and milk your dollar's going to
35
Miller, That They Mqy Win (1948), 1.
36
Miller, That They Mqy Win (1944?), 1; In the 1944 version of That They Mqy
Win, Ina is described as "a young woman, now working in a factory. She is dressed in her
ordinary go-to-work clothes."
104
buy, and what you'll have to pay for Junior's new shoes.
You have to go to those Senators and Congressmen you
elected ... and that President you got in on a default ..
. and you gotta say to them: "Listen here for a minute,
mister. We're your boss, and you have to work for us. You
get right in there and give us a little price control, a little
housing, a little efficiency, or by God, you're on your way
out!"
37
D AJL
This speech by the Man Who Knows, which is made in response to the
Distressed Man calling him outright "a Henry Wallace," emphasizes two
significant points: economic problems are political problems (and vice
versa) and citizens ultimately change economic issues and society by
voting.
38
In his final speech of the 1948 version of the script, the Man
Who Knows states:
Vote 'em in, vote 'em out. They gotta bring prices down,
these Republicans and Democrats. They gotta feed the
people and clothe the people and give the people a place
to work and a place to live. They gotta do this, these
Republicans and Democrats ... or else they just gotta
stand aside and let somebody else have a try at it. If the
first two teams can't carry the ball, ... then by God, let's
put in a third team!
39
Since That Thry Mqy Win was sponsored by the Chicago Arts Committee
for Wallace, voting for the "third team" meant voting for Henry Wallace
in the 1948 Presidential election to produce social change.
One additional element that all three versions of That Thry Mqy Win
share is the adherence to the twelve propositions set forth by the Political
Action Committee (PAC). SFA had a strong connection to the CIO-PAC
and Wallace was at one time referred to as the PAC's "darling."
40
Several
of the PAC's leaders were sponsors or on the Board of SFA, and SFA
members taught living newspaper and other theatrical techniques to PAC
37
Arthur Miller, That They May Win (1948), 8. The "President you got in on a
default" jab references Vice President Harry S. Truman's rise to President on 12 April 1945
following the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
38
Ibid., 7.
39
Ibid., 8.
40
Lzje, 30 September 1946, 42.
RADICAL EcoNowcs FOR THE "ORDINARY AMERICAN" 105
members. The PAC was formed out of a delegation of CIO (Congress
of Industrial Organization) members on 7 July 1943 in order to educate
labor union members and provide "effective labor action on the political
front."
41
In 1944, SFA was so interconnected with the CIO (and the PAC)
that Presidents and Secretaries of local CIO and AFL unions, William
P. Feinberg, John T. McManus, and Saul Mills spoke at the initial April
benefit event for the group in between performances written by Bob
Russell, Ben Hecht, as well as and speeches by theatrical luminaries
John Gassner and Nor man Corwin.
Miller's That They Mqy Win espouses sentiments strengthening
the relationship between the CIO-PAC and SFA. Miller's play adheres to
the "One Dozen Simple Propositions" of the PAC, especially numbers
1, 6, 7, 8, and 12 stating respectively: belongs to Americans,
Earning and spending are political matters, The government should serve
the people, All the people should elect their governments, and Education
for Political Action requires organization."
42
These simple propositions
are drawn distinctly from Marxist economic theory. At the core of Marxist
theory (furthered in Paul Sweezy's work) are ideas about class conflict,
commodity and the division of labor, and human fetishism of "articles of
utility"-or more so, our obsession with things and how it reifies social
relations. Certainly Miller is playing with all of these ideas in Death of a
Salesman, but the ideas were already present in That They Mqy Win. The
major difference being while Willy Loman's fetish for a variety of articles
of utility lead to his demise, That They Mqy characters are clearly
blaming the government for blocking their access to basic needs such as
food, housing, and jobs. Drama critic Henry Popkin describes the muted
political slant in Death of a Salesman as quietly embracing "the muscular,
proletarian life . .. as a healthy alternative to commercialism."
43
Popkin
suggests the anti-capitalist rhetoric in Death of A Salesman is tame due to
the political climate while That They Mqy Win
1
and most SFA plays, swell
with overtly proletarian ideas.
By 1948, with the final version of That They Mqy Win being
performed in support of Henry Wallace's presidential bid, SFA and the
CIO were on icy terms due to the Communist and non-Communist
factions within the CIO in complete disagreement over the Marshall
41
Gaer, The First Round, 60.
42
For the complete list of the Simple Propositions set forth by the PAC and
their full explanations see Gaer pages 57-60.
43
Henry Popkin, ''Arthur ..Miller: The Strange Encounter," The Sewanee Review 68,
no. 1 (Winter 1960): 57.
106 DAIL
Plan.
44
Tensions also arose between Communist and Non-Communist
union members over election support of Henry Wallace. Despite the
CIO backing Wallace for re-election to Vice President in 1944, the CIO-
PAC had never supported a three-party system. Additionally Wallace's
friendly relationship with the Communist Party, particularly in the anti-
Communist political climate and during a time of heightened labor unrest,
forced the CIO to adopt a staunchly anti-Communist and anti-Wallace
stance. SFA members took sides with the Communist Party in backing
Wallace, therefore losing most of their labor support. In a large display
ad sponsored by the National Council of Arts, Sciences and Professionals
in the New York Times on 20 October 1948, Arthur Miller's name is listed
(along with many other SFA members) as being "for Wallace." The
Council's ad corroborates all of the issues deliberated in the 1948 version
of That Thry Mqy Win:
"We believe with Henry Wallace that the major parties
and their candidates-Thomas E. Dewey and Harry
S. Truman-in bi-partisan alliance have brought us
to the brink of war and fascism; that they represent in
their policies the interests of the few at the expense
of the many; that to a Democratic administration and
a Republican Congress must be attributed inflation
(Truman killed price control and the Republicans buried
it); fear and intimidation (Truman's Loyalty Order and
the Republicans' Thomas Committee); repression of
labor (Truman charted the course for the Taft-Hartley
law when he broke the railroad strike in 1946).
45
An organized grass-roots campaign and the support of many on
the Left notwithstanding, in the 1948 election Wallace won only 2.4% of
the popular vote and none of the Electoral College votes. SF A's support of
the 1948 Henry Wallace presidential campaign tightened the government's
noose around the group's neck. Ironically, many members of SFA as well
as Paul Sweezy felt that Wallace had not been progressive enough in his
campaign. Sweezy, for example, wanted Wallace to maintain a more open
rhetoric on the Soviet Union and focus on a pro-socialist agenda. Sweezy
viewed Wallace's decisions "to maintain the intellectual and political milieu
that had characterized the period of the popular front and the Second
44
Martin Halpern, UAW Politics in the Cold War Era (New York: State University
of New York Press, 1988), 242.
45
"We Are For Wallace," New York Times, 20 October 1948, 32.
RADICAL EcoNOMI Cs FOR THE "ORDINARY AMERICAN" 107
World War- Rooseveltian style reforms at home, combined with a
pro-Soviet orientation internationally" as inherently flawed and in stark
contrast to the economic and political changes necessary in the country.
46
Despite Wallace's less than radical agenda, Paul M. Sweezy, Arthur 1filler,
and many other supporters of Henry Wallace's presidential bid were called
before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The third version
of That Thry Mqy Win, performed in June 1948, was not only Arthur Miller's
final collaboration with the group, the production ushered in the end of
both the New York City and Chicago branches of Stage For Action.
46
Nick Beams, "Marxism and the Political Economy of Paul Sweezy," http: //
www.wsws.org/articles/2004/apr2004/ps1-a06.shtml (accessed 21 January 2011) .
109
CoNTRIBUTORS
Jocelyn L. Buckner is an Arts and Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow in
the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Pittsburgh where
she is developing a book manuscript which foregrounds the sister act
phenomenon in US popular entertainment at the turn of the last century
as a representative touchstone of American society's increasing acceptance
of female subjectivity in public, political, and artistic spheres. She also
studies the intersections of identity politics, especially race, gender, and
economics, in contemporary dramatic literature, theatrical production,
and audience reception. Her work and reviews have been published in
Theatre History Studies, Theatre Journal, andAmencan Studies Journal. She holds
a PhD in Theatre Studies from the University of Kansas and an MFA in
Theatre Pedagogy from Virginia Commonwealth University.
Chrystyna Dail will join the Department of Theatre Arts at Ithaca
College as Assistant Professor of Theatre History in fall2011. Her research
interests include US social activist performance, women in US theatre, and
twentieth-century Ukrainian theatre. She is currently developing a book-
length cultural history of Stage For Action.
Robert Davis is a doctoral candidate in Theatre at the Graduate
Center, City University of New York. His dissertation "Performance
and Spectatorship in United States World's Fairs, 1876-1893" examines
fairgoer behavior at late nineteenth-century international exhibitions in
Philadelphia, New Orleans, and Chicago. His article "The Riddle of the
Oedipus: Practising Reception and the Antebellum American Theatre"
appeared in New Voices in Classical Reception Studies (2008) . A piece on the
Federal Theatre Project's Trf!ian Incident, "Is Mr. Euripides a Communist?"
is forthcoming in Translation} Peiformance and Reception of Greek Drama
1
1900-1960: International Dialogues, a special issue of Comparative Drama.
Gad Guterman earned his PhD in Theatre from the Graduate Center,
City University of New York. His dissertation, "Without Papers: Legal
Identity, Legal Consciousness, and Performance," explores portrayals of
undocumented immigration in contemporary US theatre and questions
how law participates in processes of identity construction. He teaches at
Wagner College and serves as the Education Director for the Vineyard
Theatre. His essays have appeared in Theatre Journal and Theatre Survey.
Victor Holtcamp is Assistant Professor at the University of South
Carolina, Columbia. His major areas of study include the intersections of
culture and theatre, Shakespeare, acting pedagogy, and modern US theatre
history. He has presented papers at a variety of national and international
theatre conferences, and published on the apocryphal Shakespearean play
Mucedorus. He is currendy working on a book project examining industrial
influences on acting technique.
Amanda Wrigley is Associate Lecturer for the Open University, UK.
In 2009-10, she was Postdoctoral Fellow in Classics at Northwestern
University, and from 2001 to 2009, Researcher at the Archive of
Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, University of Oxford. Her
publications include Performing Greek Drama in Oxford and on Tour with the
Ba!liol Plqyers (2011); Translation) Performance and Reception of Greek Drama)
1900-1960: International Dialogues, a special issue of Comparative Drama
(guest editor, 2011); and Dionysus since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the
Third Millennium (co-editor, 2004). She is currendy writing Greece on Air:
Engagements with Ancient Greek Literature) History and Thought on BBC Radio)
19 20s-1960s, and co-editing Louis MacNeice: The Classical Radio Plqys (2012).
Recent essays include ''A Wartime Radio Odyssry: Edward Sackville-West
and Benjamin Britten's The Rescue (1943)," The Radio ]ourna/8.2 (2010). For
a full research profile see http:// amandawrigley.wordpress.com.
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Quick Change: Theatre Essays and Translations
Written and translated by Daniel Gerould
Quick Change is full of surprises. It is a
nicely seasoned tossed-salad of a book
concocted by an ironic cookmeister with
a sometimes wild imagination. And how
many quick changes has he wrought in
this book of 28 pieces. The writings range
from translations of letters and plays to
short commentaries to fully-developed
essays. The topics bounce from Maya-
kovsky to Shakespeare, Kantor to Lu-
nacharsky, Herodotus to Gerould's own
play, Candaules, Commissioner, Gorky to
Grotowski, Shaw to Mrozek, Briusov to Wit-
kacy. From ancient Greeks to Renaissance
and Enlightenment Europe, from pre-revo-
lutionary Russia to the Soviet Union, from
France and England to Poland. From an
arcane discussion of medicine in theatre a
"libertine" puppet play from 19th century
France.
Richard Schechner
Quick Change: Theatre Essays and Translations, a volume of previously uncollected
writings by Daniel Gerould from Comparative Literature, Modern Drama, PAJ, TDR,
SEEP, yale/theater and other journals. It includes essays about Polish, Russian and
French theatre, theories of melodrama and comedy, historical and medical simula-
tions, Symbolist drama, erotic puppet theatre, comedie rosse at the Grand Guignol,
Witkacy's Doubles, Villiers de L'lsle Adam, Mrozek, Battleship Potemkin, and other
topics. Translations include Andrzej Bursa's CountCagliostro'sAnimals, Henry Mon-
nier's The Student and the Tart, and Oscar Metenier's Little Bugger and Meat-Ticket.
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MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Playwrights Before the Fall:
Eastern European Drama in Times of Revolution
Edited by Daniel Gerould.
Playwrights Before the Fall: Eastern European Drama
in Times of Revolution contains translations of Portrait
by Slawomir Mrozek (PL); Military Secret by Dusan
Jovanovic (51); Chicken Head by Gyorgy Spiro (HU);
Sorrow, Sorrow, Fear, the Pit and the Rope by Karel
Steigerwald (CZ); and Horses at the Window by Matei
i ~ n i e c (RO) .
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Claudio Tolcachir's Timbre 4
Translated and with an introduction by Jean Graham-Jones
Claudio Tolcachir's Timbre 4 is one of the most ex-
citing companies to emerge from Buenos Aires's
vibrant contemporary theatre scene. The Coleman
Family's Omission and Third Wing, the two plays that
put Timbre 4 on the international map, are translated
by jean Graham-jones and Elisa Legon.
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Please make payments in US dollars payable to: The Graduate Center Foundat ion, Inc.
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MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Barcelona Plays: A Collection of New Works by
Catalan Playwrights
Translated and edited by Marion Peter Holt and Sharon G. Feldman
The new plays in this collection represent outstanding
playwrights of three generations. Benet i Jornet won
his first drama award in 1963, when was only twenty-
three years old, and in recent decades he has become
Catalonia's leading exponent of thematically chal-
lenging and structurally inventive theatre. His plays
have been performed internationally and translated
into fourteen languages, including Korean and Arabic.
Sergi Belbel and Llu'isa Cunille arrived on the scene
in the late 198os and early 1990s, with distinctive and
provocative dramatic voices. The actor-director-play-
wright Pau Mir6 is a member of yet another generation
that is now attracting favorable critical attention.
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}osep M. Benet i }ornet: Two Plays
Translated by Marion Peter Holt
Josep M. Benet i Jornet, born in Barcelona, is the
author of more than forty works for the stage and has
been a leading contributor to the striking revitalization
of Catalan theatre in the post-Franco era. Fleeting, a
compelling "tragedy-within-a-play," and Stages,
with its monological recall of a dead and unseen
protagonist, rank among his most important plays.
They provide an introduction to a playwright whose
inventive experiments in dramatic form and treatment
of provocative themes have made him a major figure in
contemporary European theatre.
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MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Czech Plays: Seven New Works
Edited by Marcy Arlin, Gwynn MacDonald, and Daniel Gerould
Czech Plays: Seven New Works is the first English-
language anthology of Czech plays written after
the 1989 "Velvet Revolution." These seven works
explore sex and gender identity, ethnicity and
violence, political corruption, and religious taboos.
Using innovative forms and diverse styles, they
tackle the new realities of Czech society brought on
by democracy and globalization with characteristic
humor and intelligence.
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jan Fabre: Servant of Beauty
and I AM A MISTAKE - 7 Works for the Theatre
jan Fabre Books:
I AM A MISTAKE -7 Works {or the Theatre
THE SERVANT OF BEAUTY- 7 Monologues
Edited and foreword by Frank Hentschker.
Flemish-Dutch theatre artist Jan Fabre has pro-
duced works as a performance artist, theatre
maker, choreographer, opera maker, playwright,
and visual artist. Our two Fabre books include:
I am a Mistake (2007), Etant Donnes (2ooo),
Little Body on the Wall (1996), }e suis sang (2001),
Angel of Death (2003) and others.
Price US Sts.oo each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Pl ease make payments in US dollars payable to: The Graduate Center Foundation, Inc.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulati on Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center,
The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016-4309
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MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
roMANIA After 2000
Edited by Saviana Stanescu and Daniel Gerould
Translation editors: Saviana Stanescu and Ruth Margraff
This volume represents the first anthology of new
Romanian Drama published in the United States
and introduces American readers to compelli ng
1{1111111 playwrights and plays that address resonant issues
of a post-totalitarian society on its way toward
democracy and a new European identity. includes
the plays: Stop The Tempo by Gianina Carbunariu,
Romania. Kiss Me! by Bogdan Georgescu, Vitamins by
Vera lon, Romania 21 by ~ t e f n Peca, and Waxing West
by Saviana Stanescu.
This publication produced in collaboration with the
Romanian Cultural Institute in New York and Bucharest.
Buenos Aires in Translation
Translated and Edited by Jean Graham-Jones
BAiT epitomizes true international theatrical
collaboration, bringing together four of the most
important contemporary playwrights from Buenos
Aires and pairing them with four cutting-edge US-based
directors and their ensembles. Throughout a period of
one year, playwrights, translator, directors, and actors
worked together to deliver four English-language world
premieres at Performance Space 122 in the fall of 2006.
Plays include: Women Dreamt Horses by Daniel
Veronese; A Kingdom, A Country or a Wasteland, In the
Snow by Lola Arias; Ex-Antwone by Federico Leon; Panic
by Rafael Spregelburd. BAiT is a Performance Space
122 Production, an initiative of Salon Volcan, with
the support of lnstituto Cervantes and the Consulate
General of Argentina in New York.
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MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Witkiewicz: Seven Plays
Translated and Edited by Daniel Gerould
SEVEN PLAYS
This volume contai ns seven of Witkiewicz's most
important plays: The Pragmatists, Tumor Brainiowicz,
Gyubal Wahazar, The Anonymous Work, The Cuttlefish,
Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes, and The Beelzebub
Sonata, as well as two of his theoretical essays,
"Theoretical Introduction" and "A Few Words About
the Role of the Actor in the Theatre of Pure Form."
Witkiewicz ... takes up and continues the vein of dream
and grotesque fantasy exemplified by the late
Strindberg or by Wedekind; his ideas are closely
paralleled by those of the surrealists and Antonin
Artaud which culminated in the masterpieces of the
dramatists of the Absurd . ... It is high time that this
major playwright should become better known in the
English-speaking world. Martin Esslin
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Four Works for the Theatre by Hugo Claus
Translated and Edited by David Willinger
Hugo Claus is the foremost contemporary writer of
Dutch language theatre, poetry, and prose. Flemish
by birth and upbringing, Claus is the author of some
ninety plays, novels, and collections of poetry. He is
renowned as an enfant terrible of the arts throughout
Europe. From the time he was affiliated with the
international art group, COBRA, to his liaison with
pornographic film star Silvia Kristel, to the celebration
of his novel, The Sorrow of Belgium, Claus has
careened through a career that is both scandal-ridden
and formidable. Claus takes on all the taboos of his
times.
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MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Theatre Research Resources in New York City
Sixth Edition, 2007
Editor: Jessica Brater, Senior Editor: Marvin Carlson
~
~
Theatre Research Resources in New York City is the
most comprehensive catalogue of New York City
research facilities available to theatre scholars. Within
the indexed volume, each facility is briefly described
including an outline of its holdings and practical
matters such as hours of operation. Most entries
include electronic contact information and web
sites. The listings are grouped as follows: Libraries,
Museums, and Historical Societies; University and
College Libraries; Ethnic and Language Associations;
Theatre Companies and Acting Schools; and Film and
Other.
,.,,
Comedy: A Bibliography
Editor: Meghan Duffy, Senior Editor: Daniel Gerould
This bibliography is intended for scholars, teachers,
students, artists, and general readers interested in
the theory and practice of comedy. The keenest minds
have been drawn to the debate about the nature of
comedy and attracted to speculation about its theory
and practice. For all lovers of comedy Comedy: A
Bibliography is an essential guide and resource,
providing authors, titles, and publication data for over
a thousand books and articles devoted to this most
elusive of genres.
... ~ .. . .._. ..
......... ~
~ t .__, __ c---. , _....__ ... \._
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MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Four Plays From North Africa
Translated and edited by Marvin Carlson
The Arab Oedipus
Edited by Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four modern plays from the
Maghreb: Abdelkader Alloula's The Veil and Fatima
Gallaire's House of Wives, both Algerian, Jalila Baccar's
Araberlin from Tunisia, and Tayeb Saddiki ' s The Folies
Berbers from Morocco.
As the rich tradition of modern Arabic theatre has
recently begun to be recognized by the Western theatre
community, an important area within that tradition is
still under-represented in existing anthologies and
scholarship. That is the drama from the Northwest of
Africa, the region known in Arabic as the Maghreb.
This volume contains four plays based on the Oedipus
legend by four leading dramatists of the Arab world.
Tawfiq Al-Hakim's King Oedipus, Ali Ahmed Bakathir's
The Tragedy of Oedipus, Ali Salim's The Comedy
of Oedipus, and Walid lkhlasi's Oedipus as well as
Al-Hakim's preface to his Oedipus on the subject of
Arabic tragedy, a preface on translating Bakathir by
Dalia Basiouny, and a general introduction by the
editor.
An awareness of the rich tradition of modern Arabic
theatre has only recently begun to be felt by the
Western theatre community, and we hope that this
collection will contribute to that growing awareness.
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MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
The Heirs of Moliere
Translated and Edited by Marvin Carlson
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This volume contains four representative French
comedies of the period from the death of Moliere to
the French Revolution: The Absent-Minded Lover
by Regnard, The Conceited Count by
Philippe Nericault Destouches, The Fashionable
Prejudice by Pierre Nivelle de Ia Chaussee, and The
Friend of the Laws by Jean-Louis Laya. Translated in
a poetic form that seeks to capture the wit and spirit
of the originals, these four plays suggest something
of the range of the Moliere inheritance, from comedy
of character through the highly popular sentimental
comedy of the mid-eighteenth century, to comedy that
employs the Moliere tradition for more contemporary
political ends.
Pixerecourt: Four Melodramas
Translated and Edited by Daniel Gerould & Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four of Pixerecourt's most
important melodramas: The Ruins of Babylon or ]afar
and Zaida, The Dog of Montargis or The Forest of
Bondy, Christopher Columbus or The Discovery of the
New World, and Alice or The Scottish Gravediggers,
as well as Charles Nodier's "Introduction" to the 1843
Collected Edition of Pixerecourt's plays and the two
theoretical essays by the playwright, "Melodrama,"
and "Final Reflections on Melodrama."
Pixerecourt furnished the Theatre of Marvels with
its most stunning effects, and brought the classic
situations of fairground comedy up-to-date. He
determined the structure of a popular theatre which
was to last through the 19th century.
Hannah Winter, The Theatre of Marvels
Price US $2o.oo each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to: The Graduate Center Foundation, Inc.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center,
The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016-4309
Visit our website at: www.segalcenter.org Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817 1868