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83
Figure 2: Cover of 1930 program. Courtesy of Willa Saunders Jones
Papers/Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and
Literature, Chicago Public Library.
efforts of composers and performers who wedded sacred lyrics with a
blues sound and nourished by the tremendous influx of poor Southern
migrants who gravitated to less formal church practices, gospel music
flourished in Chicago's black churches during the Great Depression and
quickly fanned out to other urban centers across the country. Many
church members and clergy criticized and resisted gospel music, in part
because it introduced demonstrative expressive practices into services. It
not only involved bodily movement on the part of the performer, such
as hand clapping, walking, and "shouting" (i.e., holy dancing), but also
elicited vocal and physical responses from the congregation.JS
Jones apparently did not include gospel compositions in her play
in 1930, but she appreciated gospel music and over time included well-
known gospel singers in her production. In fact, her work as a soloist and
member of a women's chorus brought her in immediate contact with
IS For an excellent study on the development of gospel music in Chicago, see
Michael Harris, The Rise of Gospel Blues: Thomas Andrew Dorsry and the Music of the Urban
Church (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
84
HAll.sTOOS
some of the individuals most responsible for the rise of black gospel
music, in particular Magnolia Lewis (Butts) and Thomas A. Dorsey.
During the same time that Lewis conducted the flrst chorus to feature
Dorsey's gospel compositions, she also sang with Jones as part of the
Treble Clef Glee Club (both groups originated from the Metropolitan
Community Baptist church) (Figure 3).16 As a member of the Gospel
Choral Union, Jones sang the spiritual "City Called Heaven" at the first
annual session of the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and
Choruses, founded by Lewis, Theodore Frye, and Dorsey, who proceed-
ed to serve as president of the organization for decades.17 Over the years,
Jones included gospel performers such as Dinah Washington (who went
on to jazz music stardom), Mahalia Jackson Oanes's close friend and per-
haps the most famous gospel singer of all-time), Sheila, Jeanette, and
Wanda Hutchinson (sisters who later formed the pop group The
Emotions), and the Barrett Sisters (major figures in Chicago's gospel
scene).18 Steeped in both traditional and the most contemporary music
performed in the black church, Jones offered a compendium of black
sacred music styles in her play, echoing a similar diversity in the music
programs of many large African American churches in Chicago that
catered to the various musical tastes of their congregants.
16 Maude Roberts George, "News of the Music World," Chicago Defender, 4
February 1933, 15. A few years earlier, both Jones and Lewis sang solos at a concert in
Chicago's Orchestra Hall before a predominantly white audience. Henry Willingham,
"George Garner Pleases Chicago Audience," Chicago Defender, 13 December 1930, 3.
1
7 "Gospel Singers Close National Meeting," Chicago Defender, 9 September
1933,15.
18 Many articles refer to the participation of Dinah Washington and Mahalia
Jackson in the play, although none of them indicate exactly when they participated.
Washington probably sang in the play as a child or teenager prior to becoming an inter-
national pop star. She attended St. Luke's, where she learned to sing gospel and play piano
under the tutelage of her mother Alice Williams, an accomplished choir director, and may
have seen the play during the 1930s. While one of Mahalia Jackson's biographies mentions
Jones multiple times and also refers to her play, it does not indicate when she participat-
ed. Both Jones's grandson, Rogers Jones, and her daughter-in-law, Ruth Jones, remember
Jackson performing in the play, but could not pinpoint this event to a specific time.
Rogers Jones recalls that Jackson made cameo appearances to help her friend attract audi-
ences. For participating in the play as angels in 1966, the Hutchinson sisters received
attention in the pages of the Chicago Defender. The newspaper also highlighted the appear-
ance of the Barrett Sisters (Delois Barrett Campbell, Billie Green Bey, and Rodessa
Porter) in the 1970s. See Nadine Cohodas, Queen: The Ufe and Music of Dinah Washington
(New York: Pantheon Books, 2004); Laurraine Goreau, Just Mahalia, Balry (Waco, TX:
Word Books, 1975), and Mary Kay Baum, "Novice Players Find Opportunity in Passion
Play Kept Alive by Vow," Chicago Defender, 27 March 1966, X1.
PAGEANT AND PASSION
85
SANG AT DEFENDER MUSICALE SUNDAY
Figure 3: Jones (far right) and Magnolia Lewis-Butts (not pictured) sang with
this choir under the direction of]. Wesley Jones (center) in April 1935.
Courtesy of Chicago Defender.
If Jones embraced the sound of gospel, she nevertheless
eschewed the aggressive physicality generally associated with the per-
formance of this music. This meant that she discouraged vocalists from
wedding the energy and expression in their voices to the movement of
their bodies, preferring instead that they perform relatively still. As
Jones's grandson Rogers Jones explained, she was a "cultured person,"
which precluded her from including the emotional exuberance of gospel
music for her "refined" production.19 The terms "cultured" and
"refined" indicated a particular social attitude associated with linked
notions of class-consciousness and religious decorum. Although Jones
rose from humble origins in the South, she lived in relative comfort in
Chicago, wearing fashionable clothes, attending fashionable social events,
and eventually owning homes in middle-class black neighborhoods. The
music that she listened to and performed, however, had no less impor-
tance as a marker of her identity than any other sign of Christian middle-
class respectability. What Jones viewed as excessive physical display may
have registered as the unrefined exuberance of working class culture,
which shared more with the expressive practices of blatantly secular
music, in particular jazz and blues, than she cared to condone. Her musi-
cal training and affiliation with pioneers of gospel music prepared her to
accept the sound of gospel as a noble vehicle for the glorification of her
God, but she could not view the demonstrative aspect of the music as
anything but socially regressive, if not sacrilegious, in the context of her
19 Rogers Jones explained that he added emotionally and physically exuberant
gospel music after he took over as director of the play at the end of the 1970s. He made
these changes in order to attract younger and broader audiences, and he claims that it
worked. Rogers Jones, telephone interview by author, 8 December 2004.
86 HALLSTOOS
play.
Jones's music background, which she discussed in a 1956 pro-
gram, indicates how central music was to her conception of the play.2o As
a girl, her parents could not afford piano lessons or a piano, so she taught
herself to play by practicing on a picture of the piano keys drawn with
charcoal on a piece of cardboard. Her only instruction came from a girl
who lived next door and took lessons. In adulthood, Jones studied with
several prominent vocal instructors, and Dr. Charles Carleton of
Columbia University, New York, taught her piano and organ.2
1
She per-
formed as soloist at several churches, sang in many large-scale church-
sponsored events, and served as pianist, organist, and choir director for
eight different churches (including eighteen years as director and organ-
ist at St. Luke's Baptist Church) .22 Perhaps the most impressive testimo-
ny to her exceptional musicianship and the rare esteem with which
church officials held her musical abilities was her experience as the direc-
tor of mass choirs. According to her account, she served as choral direc-
tor of thousand-voice choruses for the National Baptist Convention in
Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, New York, California, and Arkansas.23 From
20 Program dated 1 April 1956, Willa S. Jones Papers, Box 1.
2! The vocal teachers included Dr. A. ]. Offord, Prof. J. Wesley Jones, Dr.
George Garner, and Prof. William Myricks. Church choir director J. Wesley Jones led the
annual Bud Billiken Easter Music Festival to which the Chicago Defender dedicated ample
attention. For one of many examples, see "Billiken Easter Music Festivals Thrill 20,000,"
Chicago Defender, 15 April1950, 19.
22 Jones served as soloist, organist, pianist, and/ or choir director for St. John
Baptist Church, Metropolitan Community Center, St. Luke Baptist Church, Bethel Baptist
Church choir, Tabernacle Baptist Church, Ebenezer Baptist Church choir, Shiloh Baptist
Church, and Mt. Sinai Baptist Church (all in and around Chicago), and Holy Trinity
Baptist Church (Brooklyn, NY).
23 She also served as Assistant Director of a 5,000 voice chorus for the Baptist
World's Alliance in Cleveland, Ohio (1956 Program). Dr. J. Robert Bradley, former direc-
tor of music for the National Baptist Convention (NBC) and internationally celebrated
singer, remembered Jones fondly, but had no recollection of her directing mass choirs. He
claimed that prior to his tenure as music director, his predecessor, Lucie Campbell, direct-
ed all NBC mass choirs for several decades and suggested instead that Jones may have
directed a choir at a pre-convention event. J. Robert Bradley, telephone conversation with
author, 2 August 2006. According to newspaper accounts, Jones co-directed a 1,500 voice
chorus at the forty-first session of the National Sunday School and Baptist Training
Union Congress in 1946, along with Prof. George Guillat and another gospel music lumi-
nary, Prof. Theodore Frye. Albert G. Barnett, "Expect 15,000 Baptists For Chicago
Conclave," Chicago Defender, 22 June 1946, 1, 3. In 1958, she served as the central director
of a 1,500 voice chorus for a pre-convention event at the Chicago Coliseum for which
she received ample attention in the newspaper. In one of these articles, she was quoted
PAGEANT AND PASSION 87
humble origins, her talent developed into a major musical force that even
the organizers of the most significant gathering of the largest African
American denomination in the country recognized and utilized.
These credentials attest to her formidable music talent, but they
do not indicate what type of training she had as a dramatist. This same
program makes no mention of her theatre experiences, other than to list
five other plays she wrote and produced, and offers no indication from
where she received creative inspiration for her drama, other than from
the Bible.24 What possessed Jones to write a play when her background
appeared so slanted toward music? It may be that she simply took greater
pains to document her musical than theatrical accomplishments.zs Rogers
Jones claims that his grandmother studied theatre at Columbia University
as saying "'I have had the privilege of directing convention choruses all over the country
for many years."' "Chicago Is Ready For Baptist Meet," Chicago Defender, 30 August 1958,
3. Her statement does not clarify whether or not her experiences as director of NBC cho-
ruses occurred before or during the official annual meeting, although the distinction may
be a bit superfluous. These pre-convention events appeared to be on a par with the music
during the convention in terms of prestige and cultural significance. One reason Bradley,
who met Jones through their mutual friend Mahalia Jackson, may not remember more
about her involvement with NBC choruses is that during the late 1940s until the mid-
1950s (the most likely period during which Jones would have directed NBC choruses
other than the ones discussed above) he was primarily in New York City and London,
England. He apparently had a lengthy hiatus from the annual convention until being
appointed Director of Music Promotion for the Sunday School Publishing Board in 1955.
J. Robert Bradley, I Have Always Been In the Handr of God: An Autobiograpf!J of the Lje of Dr.
]. Robert Bradlq (Nashville, TN: Townsend Press, 1993), 83-150. See also "Baptists Prepare
Huge Convention Chorus," Chicago Defender, 10 May 1958, 12; "Baptist Women Give
Preview of Gala NBC Activities at Elaborate Banquet," Chicago Defender, 16 August 16,
1958, 15; "Church Choirs Give Program Tuesday Night," Chicago Dai!J Tribune, 5
September 1958, A4; Ted Ston, "Heard and Seen," Chicago Defender, 8 September 1958, 17;
"Expect 9,000 Persons At Baptist Convention Fete," Chicago Defender, 9 September 1958,
1; "Baptists Applaud Mass Pre-Convention Musical," Chicago Deftnder, 11 September 1958,
5; Ted Ston, "Heard and Seen," Chicago Deftnder, 17 September 1958, 17.
24 Jones titled her other plays The Lft Boat, Just One Hour to Live for the Dope
Addict, The Call to Arms, Up From Slavery, and The Birth of Christ.
25 I n contrast to Jones, her husband, George W Jones, had a one-page feature
in this same program that focused on his theatrical experience. The program notes that
George Jones's "ancestors for generations were Biblical dramatists . . .. Since childhood, he
has been trained and prepared in every detail to enact the leading role of the Passion. For
it was at his mother's knee he received his 'first' training. Both his mother and father are
devout Christians. In the past 22 years he has interpreted the part of the Christus before
more than six thousand audiences." While this fmal claim seems implausible, the descrip-
tion suggests that he did not separate his theatrical training from the religious training he
received his entire life.
88
HALLSTOOS
in New York and had a particular fondness for drama.26 She also may
have studied drama and participated in sacred plays at Arkansas Baptist
College, where she graduated in 1920 at the age of sixteen.2
7
Churches provided another venue in which Jones may have
observed sacred drama and learned to create her own work. By the early
twentieth century, at least some congregations staged productions, and
many more showed passion play films.2s Judging by the fact that newspa-
pers failed to mention Jones's play until after more than a decade of
annual productions, the vast majority of plays mounted by churches
received no media attention.29 About the time that the Chicago Defender
and the Chicago Tribune started to run stories on Jones's established and
mammoth production, the Chicago Bee reported on comparatively small
productions from the city's black churches. For instance, a pageant enti-
ded The Cross featured a cast of one hundred and showed in an auditori-
um under the auspices of the Bethel A.M.E. Church, and the All Nations
Pentecostal Church staged Echoes of the Cross, thus indicating that the
Baptists were not the only ones interested in sacred drama.30 While these
26 Jones, interview, 8 December 2004.
27 The college's curriculum apparently did not include the study of drama, but
Jones may have participated in extracurricular theatre activities at the school. Vertie L.
Carter, Arkansas Baptist College: A Historical Perspective 1884-1982 (Houston, TX: D.
Armstrong Co., Inc., 1981), 46-48, 108.
28 For example, the Mt. Olive Church in Joliet, Illinois staged a "well attended
and very interesting" passion play. Myrtle L. Clark, "Prairie State Events," Chicago Defender,
16 October 1915, 2. Some of the more popular passion play films traveled to numerous
black churches during the Easter season. A film touted as "The new and revised Passion
Play of the Life of Christ" showed in at least five Baptist and Methodist churches, includ-
ing the one in which Jones first staged her play, St. John Baptist, and may have shown in
many more judging by the fact that advertisements for it ran into August. See Chicago
Defender, 5 May 1918, 12; 11 May 1918, 6;25 May 1918, 6; 8June 1918, 10; 15June 1918,
2,10; 22 June 1918, 6; 29 June 1918, 12; 6 July 1918, 12; 13 July 1918, 13; 27 July 1918, 3;
3 August 1918, 14.
29 The Chicago Defender made the first explicit reference to Jones's play in late
1944, although an earlier mention in a South Side community paper in April1941 may have
been referring to the play. The announcement said, "Hear about the development of reli-
gious drama and attend a presentation of the Passion Play by Negro actors. Meet at 3 p.m.,
4920 Parkway." "'Birth of Christ' Produced in East," Chicago Defender, 30 December 1944,
14; "Tours Dealing With Religion Set by WPA," Southt01vn Economist, 2 April 1941, 5.
30 Chicago Bee, 6 April1947, 18; Chicago Bee, 7 April1946, 2. For additional adver-
tisements and articles on church plays, see Chicago Bee, 4 April 1943, 12; Chicago Bee, 18
April 1943, 9; Chicago Bee, 25 April 1943, 12; Chicago Bee, 25 March 1945, 18; Chicago Bee,
14 April 1946, 8, 11; Chicago Bee, 6 April 194 7, 14; Chicago Bee, 13 April 1947, 18.
PAGEANT AND PASSION 89
and other productions may have developed in response to Jones's play,
they also may serve to suggest the under-examined cultural traclition that
informed the inception of The Resurrection two decades earlier.31 In spite
of their relative obscurity, the presence of these homegrown dramas by
the 1940s belies the recent claim that no African American passion plays
existed prior to Langston Hughes's The Gospel Glory: From the Manger to the
Mountain (Gospel Glow) of 1962.32
By writing her own passion play, Jones joined a dramatic tradi-
tion that originated over one thousand years earlier in European medieval
churches. In spite of some general similarities with these liturgical dra-
mas, Jones's play seemed more akin to the outdoor vernacular religious
plays performed during the .Middle Ages, which featured a broad array of
realistic special effects. They also involved lay people, representing all
ranks and professions. Jones drew upon clergy and laity, young and old,
rich and poor in her production.33 Another basic similarity to these early
productions was that music served a central role.34 It is not clear that
Jones ever witnessed the famous Oberammergau passion play, let alone
found inspiration from it, although the play came to the U.S. in 1923 and
was well known in Chicago's African American community.35 At the very
least, the popularity of this play and another passion play from Freiburg,
3l Rogers Jones claimed that many churches initiated their own passion plays in
response to the success of his grandmother's play. Rogers Jones, interview by author,
Chicago, 23 November 2004. Choral director Dr. Robert E. Wooten supported this
assessment when he suggested that some audience members of Jones's play "would go
back and try to duplicate that type of performance at their church ... on a smaller scale."
Dr. Robert E. Wooten, interview by author, Chicago, 12 August 2006.
3
2
Joseph McLaren, "From Protest to Soul Fest: Langston Hughes' Gospel
Plays," The Langston Hughes Review 15 (Spring 1997): 52.
33 According to one account, "There are more than a dozen ministers in the
group, church workers from nearly all of Chicago's churches, a policeman, several attor-
neys and school teachers, and even a few young toughs off the street who begged to be
included in the cast." "Passion Play," 26.
34 For more on vernacular religious plays, see Oscar Brockett and Franklin
Hildy, History of the Theatre, 9th ed. (New York: Allyn and Bacon, 2003), 82-95.
35 Many wealthy black Chicagoans made the trip overseas to see the
Oberammergau play, which was performed for several months every ten years. Others vis-
ited churches, community centers, and auditoriums around the city to see films and hear
travel lectures, often supplemented with slides and ft.lms, on the play. During their visit to
the U.S., the man who played Christ, Anton Lang, and other members of the
Oberammergau cast were feted by members of the black elite at a home on the South Side.
90 HAll.sTOOS
Germany which showed in the Civic Opera House in 1930, gave Jones's
efforts cultural legitimacy and demonstrated that the ancient biblical story
could be presented in a format for popular consumption.
In addition to the links between Jones's passion play and its
European predecessors, another dramatic form-the pageant-exhibited
equal, if not greater influence on the conception and development of her
production. In fact, rather than referring to The Resurrection as a play, the
1930 program announced that the production was "AN EASTER
PAGEANT" on its cover.36 Similar to passion plays, pageants had
medieval origins and, having been transplanted to America, were being
updated to serve the cultural needs of new audiences. In the late nine-
teenth century, African Americans began using pageants to celebrate
black history, combat derogatory racial representation, and instill racial
pride.37 During World War I, women mounted more pageants than men,
in part because "pageantry, unlike the theatre, was accepted as a proper
endeavor for respectable middle- and upper-class women."38 Impressing
through sheer size, pageants included orators, musicians, and other pre-
dominantly amateur performers, sometimes numbering over one thou-
sand participants, and were seen by even larger audiences, which often
filled stadiums or other mammoth outdoor venues. Organizers placed a
premium on visual spectacle (costumes, staging, choreography), high-
Mrs. Yerby, the host of the event, returned the favor of a few years earlier when she had
stayed at the home of Lang and his family while visiting Oberammergau. "Chicagoans
Meet Passion Players at Yerby Home," Chicago Defender, 1 March 1924, 8. Perhaps the most
engaging and informative account of African American experiences with the
Oberammergau play during the first half of the twentieth century comes from Annabel
Casey Prescott and her attorney husband Patrick Prescott, who visited Oberammergau in
1934. See Patrick Prescott, "Prescotts Compare Fatherland with Romantic France,"
Chicago Defender, 8 December 1934, 5; Patrick Prescott, "Tourists Continue Trip Through
Old Country," Chicago Defender, 22 December 1934, 5; Annabel Casey Prescott,
Travelers Tell of Trip ro Europe," Chicago Defender, 15 December 1934, 5. Annabel
Prescott's article reYeals that lectures, movies, and musicales (music festivals) on the pas-
sion story were commonplace in Chicago's churches.
36 The program also refers to The Resurrection as "A Sacred Pageant" and simply
as "this Pageant."
37 For an overview of pageants in African American culture, see Christine R.
Gray, Introduction, Plays and Pageants from the Life of the Negro, ed. Willis Richardson
Oackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993 [1930)) and DaYid Krasner, A Beautiful
Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910-1927
(New York: Palgrave, 2004), 85, 93-94.
38 Frances Diodato Bzowski, "'Torchbearers of the East': Women, Pageantry,
and World War I," Journal of American Drama and Theatre 7, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 88.
PAGE.\NT AND PASSION 91
quality music, and historical veracity. According to the eminent African
American intellectual WE.B. Du Bois, pageants were "a great historical
folk festival ... with the added touch of reality given by numbers, space
and fidelity to historical truth."39 The fact that he wrote his own pageant,
entitled The Star of Ethiopia (1913), attested to his belief that the form
could promote social progress.
The size of the cast of and venue for The Resurrection paled in
comparison to the pageants Du Bois created and championed, but the
program suggests that Jones borrowed from the pageant format
nonetheless. For instance, in the opening prologue she included the alle-
gorical figures Father Time, Truth, and Mystery, who exclaim "the true
mysteries that have happened since the beginning of time," thereby con-
textualizing the moral lessons to be learned from the sacred story that
follows. Like its much larger outdoor counterparts, therefore, Jones's play
sought to edifY audiences. In September 1930, only a few months after
Jones's production of The Resurrection, musical educator Manet Harrison-
Fowler produced a massive pageant, entitled The Voice. Held at the
Chicago Coliseum, it documented the history of black Baptists. In a pub-
lication from the event, Harrison-Fowler ended her foreword with the
hope that her pageant would inspire "all who may chance to see it to 'Do
Good."'
4
0 This impulse to lead observers to virtuous behavior may be a
characteristic unique to sacred pageants in contrast to the more common
secular African American pageants, which focused more on feeling good
about oneself in a racist world pitted against this possibility. Du Bois's
The Star of Ethiopia, for example, attempted to foster racial pride rather
than prescribed action. Given its significance in African American culture
at the time, the pageant provided both Harrison-Fowler and Jones with
an effective format for inspiring their audiences to "Do Good."
Perhaps nothing linked Jones's production more ambiguously
between the traditions of pageants and passion plays than how she
employed music. From one perspective, the differences between the two
traditions blurred, emphasizing the centrality of music in both. Analyzing
the function of music in a passion play in Bloomington, Illinois, which
developed in relative proximity to Jones's production in both space and
time, theatre historian Lawrence Tucker offered an apt description for
either dramatic form. He wrote that music was used "to enhance the
39 W E. B. Du Bois, "A Pageant," Crisis 21 (1915): 230, quoted by Gray, in
Richardson, Plays and Pageants From the Lfe of the Negro, xxvii.
40 Manet Harrison-Fowler, The Voice: A Pageant of the Origin, Growth and
Accomplishments of the Negro Baptists of America (Chicago: National Baptist Convention,
1930), 2.
92 HAILSTOOS
emotional effects, to provide background for dialogue, to bridge the story
from one scene to another and to permit time for scene changes."41 Like
Harrison-Fowler's The Voice and the passion play in Bloomington, The
Resurrection probably had an uninterrupted string of music that shifted
between background and a more prominent position in relation to the
drama.42 All three works ended with rousing choruses. According to the
description of the final act, The Resurrection concluded when the "multi-
tude bursts forth in the mammoth chorus 'Zion Awake from their
Sadness."'
4
3 In spite of these similarities, pageants tended to foreground
music to a greater degree than passion plays, using it to serve more explic-
itly as the expressive focal point. When central characters from Jones's
play sang solos (such as the apostle Simon Peter, who bid Mary to "Weep
no more") and together in smaU groups, they relied more heavily on the
power of music to convey dramatic content that in conventional passion
plays depended more upon the spoken word and visual effects. Whether
viewed as a pageant-like passion play or a play-like pageant, the point is
that Jones's production represented a hybrid of the two dramatic forms.45
The Chicago Defender featured an advertisement for the opening
of the "PASSION PLAY" at the Civic Opera House in 1946, which
marked a permanent transition to labeling the production a play rather
than a pageant. This new designation only mildly evoked the substantial
change that had occurred in the production since its inception. For
instance, the play increased from four acts to ten episodes, which
increased the number of biblical events that the play covered and the
41 Lawrence Elza Tucker, The Passion P!qy in Bloomington, Illinois (Ph.D.
Dissertation, State University of Iowa, 1951), 353.
42 For instance, "Note Music should be played throughout, always softly, when
parts are spoken" (Harrison-Fowler, The Voice, 11). Various informants have claimed that
the music continued uninterupted in Jones's play, although none of these people wit-
nessed productions from the early years. The 1930 program lists an organist, who prob-
ably provided background music in the absence of singing.
43 The Voice concluded with the "Hallelujah" chorus from Beethoven's oratorio
The Mount of Olives and the Bloomington passion play ended with the "Hallelujah Chorus"
from Handel's oratorio Messiah, a work that Jones also included in productions of her play.
44 See Dorothy Chansky, "North American Passion Plays: 'The Greatest Story
Ever Told' in the New Millennium," TDR 50 (Winter 2006): 120-45.
4
5 When questioned about why Jones did not refer to her production as a musi-
cal, Earl Calloway differentiated between musicals and pageants by highlighting the
humor and entertainment value of the former and gravity and religious significance of
the latter. Calloway, interview, August 2006.
PAGEANT AND P ASSION
93
depth in which it explored them. Whereas the earlier production began
with the priests and scribes plotting the death of Jesus, the later version
dramatized a series of the miracles that Jesus performed earlier in his life,
including the calming of the sea and the healing of Lazarus. The increase
in scenes also increased the number of roles and lengthened the produc-
tion to nearly three hours. While the 1930 production had a cast of
around forty, including the choir members and musicians, by the end of
the 1940s it had swelled to around three hundred members.46
Moving into the Civic Opera House in downtown Chicago also
opened up a new realm of creative possibilities unavailable in the Du
Sable High School auditorium, let alone in local churches. The elegant
venue allowed for an impressive array of technical and stylistic innova-
tions to the play. For instance, the large orchestra pit in front of the stage
established an ideal space for a mass choir of seventy-five to eighty voic-
es, who provided the music for most of the production. The elevated
proscenium and sophisticated rigging behind the stage allowed for Jesus'
dramatic ascent into the heavens via a pulley system. Moving into this
venue also led to more extravagant costumes than before, which the cast
borrowed from the Civic Opera Company (Figure 4). "One of the great-
est things that ever happened in having the play at the Civic Opera House
was the fact that we were able to borrow and use the costumes and
scenery from the Lyric Opera [Company]," recalled Rogers Jones, who
felt these additions brought a high level of historical veracity to the pro-
duction. 47 A descriptive booklet, probably published in the 1930s, offers
an illuminating look at the beauty and grandeur, as well as lists the ameni-
ties of the large theatre. According to this source, the theatre boasted
3,517 seats on the main floor, in two balconies, and in thirty-one boxes.
It included separate elevators for the cast and crew, a special microphone
system for the stage manager, hydraulic bridges to change the topography
of the stage, hydraulic machines to quickly move curtains, and an elabo-
rate array of lights that could be operated by remote control.
The costumes, staging, lighting, and other mechanical sophisti-
cation of the Opera House offered concrete expression to the consider-
able social prestige that performing in this venue conferred on Jones.
Signaling her cultural ascent, Chicago newspapers began to announce the
production regularly during the Easter season. Gospel singer and choral
director Ella Jackson, who worked for Jones during the mid-1960s in
preparing for the play, remembered that she "loved the Opera House."48
46 "Passion Play," 25.
47 Jones, interview, August 2004.
94
HAU.STOOS
g,
J; -.
~ ..
t.
;.'\'
' .1:, _ .. '
. r.: , ,
~ ~ I
,'!'"'
The Kiss of Death
Jl.ldo. Borgains for 30 Pieees of Silv.,.
Before Pilate
Figure 4: Page from 19 56 program. Courtesy of Willa Saunders] ones
Papers/Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and
Literature, Chicago Public Library.
Some of this affection may be attributed to the connection Jones made
between this venue and her increasing cultural capital within the black
church (which may have contributed to her selection as one of the three
esteemed directors who led a mass choir a couple months later at the
annual session of the National Sunday School and Baptist Training
Union Congress).49 Judging by people's memories of her, Jones gravitat-
ed to people, places, and events associated with high social status.
Jackson, who remembered her as "a pleasure to work with," also charac-
terized her as "very highbrow" and used to "the finer things in life."
50
While committed to spreading the good news of Jesus Christ to every-
one and a friend to people from all stations in life, Jones was susceptible
48 Jackson, interview, December 2006.
49 Barnett, "Expect," 1, 3.
50 Jackson, interview, December 2006.
PAGEANT AND PASSION 95
to elitism.
Her attraction to the social prestige attendant with the Civic
Opera House, however, represented something more significant than this
insight into her personality. It represented black achievement in theatre,
offering tangible proof that African Americans could produce serious
and noble drama at a time when popular culture presented the opposite
perspective. In a highly visible way, her play refuted the pervasive and
degrading stereotypes of African Americans in radio, film, and print
media. In a 1950 feature on Jones and her play in Ebony magazine, Jones
explained why she had rejected offers to sell her play: "I just wouldn't
want to see it re-written and jazzed up as another 'heavenly fish fry' for
Negroes like Green Pastures."St Written by Marc Connelly after a book by
Roark Bradford (both white men), The Green Pastures was an extremely
popular play during the 1930s and featured an all-black cast portraying
scenes from the Old Testament. After a long and successful run on
Broadway, it toured around the country for several years before returning
to New York. Hollywood made a highly acclaimed movie of the play in
1936, which spread and prolonged its popularity. While featuring a black
man as God, a move that could have been perceived as radical and poten-
tially subversive at the time, The Green Pastures drew upon offensive
stereotypes of blacks and the dialogue reflected a white man's conde-
scending interpretation of Southern black dialect. In mentioning this play
as an example of what she consciously wished to avoid replicating, Jones
implied that her own work embodied an ideology of racial uplift that
served to redress the hurt and degradations inflicted on African
Americans by a racist society.sz
Any umbrage she may have taken to plays and ftlms like The
Green Pastures, however, spoke as much to her Christian piety as it did to
her racial politics, indicating a point at which the boundaries between race
and religion blurred. If we may label Jones as a "race woman," the femi-
nine form of a term used in the first half of the twentieth century for an
African American leader who embodied success and the hope of black
social progress, it is because her religious faith impelled her to "Do
Good" and use her considerable gifts to lead people to the word and way
51 "Passion Play," 26.
52 Ironically, Jones served as the soloist during the funeral of the man most cel-
ebrated for his role in The Green Pastures, Dr. Richard B. Harrison, who played "De Lawd."
During the ceremony, one eulogist claimed that Harrison "converted an otherwise ridicu-
lous play into a masterful interpretation of dignity and beauty," illustrating that others
shared Jones's view of the play, yet also felt that the play's limitations could be transcend-
ed. "Pay Tribute to 'De Lawd' at Memorial Services," Chicago Defender, 8 June 1935, 3.
96 HAllsTOOS
of a just and all-powerful God. As many have attested, her deep faith or,
as one of her friends and supporters put it, her "profound spirituality,"
was the secret to her inextinguishable energy and unwavering commit-
ment to perpetually mounting her play.s3 To this end, her success proved
that she took her initial covenant with God regarding the passion play
most seriously. Several years after rising as a major cultural figure, she
described her "most thrilling moment" as the day she "accepted Christ."
She wrote, "I never shall forget Thursday night, more than thirty years
ago, in the little Mt. Ollie Baptist Church, at Little Rock, Ark., when the
minister extended the invitation and I accepted Christ as my personal
Savior."
54
It is easy to understand the transition of Jones's passion play
from the church to prominent commercial venues as an inevitable devel-
opment in a cultural form fueled by faith and geared toward proselytiz-
ing. This development, however, depended upon Jones's mastery of the
expressive conventions that resonated with the Christian audience who
made her passion play-cum-pageant possible. I n particular, Jones knew
what music audiences wanted to hear and how they wanted it performed.
Her choices mirrored and helped to shape the expectations of mainline
black churchgoers in Chicago, who viewed sacred music as an important
index of class and respectability, as well as an agent of great emotional
power and beauty. Had Jones only included black gospel songs in her pro-
duction or encouraged a demonstrative delivery of the music, she would
have lost a large portion of the audience she intended to reach. As a
result, her play probably would have remained in the church and left no
trace other than in the memories of the few who witnessed it each year.
Jones's words and actions indicated that this would have been an unfor-
tunate fate for a cultural production to which she devoted her creative
energies for life.
On the other hand, she also indicated that devotion to a higher
power trumped such worldly concerns. In her favorite hymn "I'm a Child
of the King," the final stanza suggested that human edifices, presumably
including opera houses, were meaningless in light of heavenly promise:
A tent or a cottage, why should I care?
They're building a palace for me over there;
Though exiled from home, yet still may I sing:
All glory to God, I'm a child of the K.ing.ss
53 Calloway, interview, August 2006.
54 Program, 1956.
PAGEANT AND PASSION 97
Her expressions of pious humility convinced many people that Willa
Saunders Jones, a southern migrant from humble origins, truly was "a
child of the King." Ultimately, her reputation as a woman of deep faith
underwrote her status as an authority of sacred music and the success of
her drama on the story of Christ.
55 For lyrics and music to the song "I'm a Child of the King," see www .. cyber
hymnal.org/htm/ c/h/ childkin.htm.
JOURNAL OF AJI.IEIUCAN DRAJVlA AND T HEATRE 19, NO.2 (SPIUNG 2007)
DISLOCATIONS OF TIME AND SPACE ON THE EARLY TWENTIETH-
CENTURY BROADWAY STAGE
LEIGH KENNICOTT
The regular theatre ... will, of course, always exist, but not, I
think, as now. The [moving] pictures will utterly eliminate
from the regular theatre all the spectacular features of pro-
duction .... Pictures have replaced all that.
- D. W Griffith
1
For a ftlm. theory class at the University of Colorado, I conduct-
ed an experiment entided "Mediatized/UnMediatized" about the recep-
tion of cinematic versus theatrical images. Although there is some contro-
versy about these terms, I use them to connote the commonly held des-
ignations for ftlm (mediated) and theatre (unmediated).Z
I performed a monologue twice in the same room, under the
same conditions, first using my live performance, then presenting the
same monologue on video. I supposed the students would feel closer and
more connected to the live performer. To my surprise, however, they felt
just the opposite. They reported feeling direcdy addressed in the per-
formance directed to the camera, whereas, in the live presentation, they
were watching a "performance" not directed to any one individually. In
conducting the experiment, I had tapped into the adjustment in percep-
tion that, after more than one hundred years of cinematic influence,
engendered a greater feeling of intimacy between the spectator and the
mediated, unanchored image, than the "flesh and blood" rendition of the
same thing.
The author thanks Dorothy Chansl;y for her editorial assistance with this essay.
1
David Wark Griffith, "Some Prophesies: Film and Theatre, Screenwriting,
Education" in Theatre and Film, ed. Robert Knopf (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2005), 99.
2
Susan Sontag writes, "Theatre has been described as a mediated art, presum-
ably because it usually consists of a pre-existent play mediated by a particular perform-
ance which offers one of many interpretations of the play. Film, in contrast, is regarded
as unmediated- because of its larger-than-life scale and more unrefusable impact on the
eye .... But there is an equally valid sense which shows movies to be the mediated art and
theatre the unmediated one." "Film and Theatre," in Film Theory and Criticism, 4th ed., eds.
Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leon Braudy (New York: Oxford University Press,
1992), 368.
100
K.ENNICOTI
In Liveness, Philip Auslander asserts that "live performance
inevitably yields a sense of the failure to achieve community between the
audience and the performer"
3
-he argues that live performance necessi-
tates distance between audience and spectator, whereas a mediatized
image beckons each member of the audience into the spectacle and suc-
cessfully registers as a group experience.
4
Auslander's conclusion con-
firms that, rather than experiencing the recorded image at a remove, as
earlier observers have maintained is the case, spectators consider it to be
transparent, even penetrating. What, then, accounts for cinema's capacity
for uncritical absorption while theatre seems to remain a discrete, sepa-
rating medium? Further, how does the variation in reception between the
two media identify differences in their construction? Answering these
questions became the project of this paper.
To trace the concomitant paths of film and theatre in the early
years of the twentieth century I take the view that, as a cinematic ration-
alization of vision began to take hold, audiences desired in plays the same
visual grammar they were learning from movies. In addition to
Auslander, I call upon the pioneering work of Hugo Munsterberg,
Marshall McLuhan, and more recendy, art historian Jonathan Crary, to
help me investigate the origins of the relationship between mediatized
and unmediatized images, a relationship that seems to build upon the
dialectic of presence and absence, attention and distraction. These theo-
rists' perspectives help illuminate a period at the turn of the twentieth
century that became the turning point in a struggle for influence between
two media-at the time, one long established, the other a new, young
upstart.
In the plays of Roi Cooper Megrue, a litde-known playwright
who produced some of the earliest responses to the cinematic shift in
perception, I uncovered the beginnings of a temporal and spatial eman-
cipation on the Broadway stage taking place early in the twentieth centu-
ry. Megrue was one of a small cadre of playwrights who, influenced by
both demand for novelty and a newly naturalized way of seeing, began in
1914 writing plays that integrated cinematic techniques with those of the
well-made play.
5
That year, Megrue, a man rooted not in theatrical tradi-
3
Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (New York:
Routledge, 1999), 57.
4
The word "mediatized" comes from Jean Baudrillard in ''Aesthetic Illusion
and Virtual Reality," in Reading Images, ed. Julia Thomas (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 179.
5
For this reason, 1914 marked a turning point in public recognition of cinemat-
ic influence, placing Roi Cooper Megrue at the head of a long, diverse, and accumulating
number of dramatic experiments deemed "cinematic." After 1914, a rising tide of plays
identified as cinematic inhabited Broadway stages. The effects ranged from enframing sto-
ries (the plays of Edward Knoblock, George Broadhurst) to adding ftlm clips, thus creating
DISLOCATIONS OF TIME AND SPACE 101
tion but in the world of commerce, brought two plays, Under Cover and It
Pqys to Advertise (with Walter Hackett) to Broadway within weeks of one
another. Both exhibited the dramaturgical characteristics immediately
defined as "cinematic." It can be argued that Megrue's works recognized
and responded to what Jonathan Crary describes as the "sweeping reor-
ganization of visual/ auditory culture."
6
Instead of flowing strictly into
the future in the traditional cause-effect construction, however, Megrue's
plotting unfolds sideways, through overlapping scenes in Under Cover, and
in quick cuts in his It Pqys to Advertise. Such scrutiny sets the stage for dis-
covering how cinematic ways of seeing penetrated human consciousness
and paved the way for innovations in theatrical structure that did not truly
reach fruition until Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams brought their
innovations to Broadway.
7
Cinema and Theatre: Same Space, Different Time Duration
Dr. Hugo Munsterberg (1863-1917) stands as one of the flrst
important observers of cinema who considered the dichotomies in
time/ space perception between fllm and theatre. A psychologist who had
trained with Sigmund Freud, Munsterberg wrote a groundbreaking trea-
tise, The Photoplqy, a Prychologica! Stucfy (1916).
8
Applying psycho-physio-
logical theory to the screen, Munsterberg elaborated how with cinema,
the spectator ceased to be merely the recipient of vision but became a
participant in the creation of it. He combined physical psychology with
dream analysis, building on Freudian concepts to identify crucial percep-
tual differences between theatre and fllm.
9
film/ theatre hybrids (such as The Battle Cry (1914] and The Alien [1915]).
6
Jonathan Crary, Suspensions o/ Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture
(Cambridge, MA: An October Book, The l\1IT Press, 1999), 2.
7
Yet, when Tennessee Williams wrote his first play, Not About Nightingales
(1936), it was deemed so cinematic that, at the time, it was not producible. Clearly his new
"way of seeing" had overstepped the contemporary stage- or, in Strindberg's words, he
"tri[ed] to put new wine in old bottles" ("Preface to Miss Julie," August Strindberg: Selected
Plqys, trans. Evert Sprinchorn [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press], 204).
8
Hugo Munsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Stu<!J (New York: D.
Appleton and Company, 1916).
9
Freud established his career as a respected neurologist who followed the work
of physiologist and physicist Hermann von Helmholz. His school of thought held that
organisms could be explained exclusively in term of physical and chemical forces.
Munsterberg was among those who came from this background before following Dr.
Freud's psychoanalytic theories (see the introduction by Ritchie Robertson in Sigmund
Freud, The Interpretation o/ Dreams [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999]).
102
KENNICOTI
Paradoxically, Munsterberg was an advocate of the well-made
play who had clearly defined, culturally charged attitudes about the the-
atre. He asserted, "the consciousness of unreality, which the theatre has
forced on us, [determines] the condition for our dramatic interest."
10
In
contrast, "in every respect the film play is further away from the physical
reality than the drama and in every respect this greater distance from the
physical world brings it nearer to the mental world."
11
Further,
Munsterberg stated, "it is interesting to watch how playwrights nowadays
try to steal the thunder of the photoplay and experiment with time rever-
sals on the legitimate stage."
12
He gave as examples three productions
that opened in the fall of 1914; among them was Megrue's Under Cover.
The other two plays cited by Munsterberg are On Trial by Elmer
Reizenstein (later Rice), and Between the Lines by Charlotte ChorpenningY
It is intriguing that three plays exhibiting cinematic qualities appeared one
after another during the same season. Their presence seemed to herald
the rippling influence of cinema to the stage.
This influence-or new way of seeing-may not have been as
easy for Megrue's contemporaries to recognize as it is in retrospect.
Jonathan Crary explains that reorganization in the observer had to occur
before technological advances could be purposefully utilized. He writes,
"the break with classical models of vision in the early nineteenth centu-
ry was far more than simply a shift in the appearance of images and art
works, or in systems of representational conventions."
14
Just as photog-
raphy predicted movies, he posits, the invention of a new observer pred-
icated differences in reception that made movies possible.
15
But it was
Marshall McLuhan, at mid-century, who remarked, "it was only in the
nineteenth century that artists, painters, and poets began to notice that it
was the environmental form itself, as human!J constituted that really provid-
10
Munsterberg, The Photoplay, 163.
11
Ibid., 175.
12
Ibid., 181.
13
Chorpenning set her play within a frame taking place in the present, while
each act depicted the past to dramatize the contents of three letters. This device was
becoming a staple of D. W Griffith's film technique through 1912 and beyond.
14
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the
Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 3.
15
For example, Paul Levinson repeats the story of Lumiere's The Train Enters
the Station, the movie that is said to have caused "people in the audience [to] duck and
scream as if the train were charging right at them." He explains that people had to learn
how to accept the images on the screen in Digital McLuhan (New York: Routledge, 1999),
143-44.
DISLOCATIONS OF TIME AND SPACE
103
ed people with the models of perception that governed their thoughts"
(emphasis mine).
16
The premise that changes in mechanization create
changes in the environment in which people live, perceive and react, pro-
vided the fulcrum for McLuhan's media theories. ~ n y understanding of
social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way
media work as environments," he explained in The Medium is the Massage.
17
The year 1914 seems to mark the deflning moment in an unspo-
ken film/theatre popularity contest, as cinema ceased to emulate theatri-
cal form, coming into its own through the experimentation of D.W
Griffith and others like him. In turn, some new playwrights like Roi
Cooper Megrue, searching for an antidote to cinematic influence, began
to experiment with traditional dramatic structure in admittedly cinematic
ways.
Roi Cooper Megrue, the "Broadway Trickster"
The author of Under Cover, one of the plays cited by Hugo
Munsterberg, was somewhat of a dandy. He attended Trinity School and
Columbia University, domiciled at the Ansonia Hotel in Manhattan, and
made numerous crossings to Europe with his mother, socialite Stella
Cooper Megrue.
18
Rather than studying to become a playwright with
George Pierce Baker at Harvard, where he might have encountered icon-
oclasts like Eugene O'Neill, Robert Edmond Jones, Kenneth Macgowan,
and other "new dramatists" who were about to appear on the Broadway
stage, he apprenticed instead with the prominent literary agent Elizabeth
Marbury, reading "4,000 scripts" in his eleven-year tenure.
19
When he
joined the venerable Players Club, he made important Broadway connec-
tions and became a confldant of many producers and managers, particu-
larly the Shuberts, who just happened to have bought many adapted plays
from Marbury's concern.
But everybody, including Megrue, was going to the movies.Z
0
16
Marshall McLuhan, "Hot and Cool Interview" (with Gerald Emmanuel
Stern), in Media &search: Technology, Att, Communication, ed. Michael A. Moos (Amsterdam:
Overseas Publishers Association, 1997), 67.
17
McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), 26.
18
Montrose J. Moses, ed., Representative American Plqys (Boston: Little, Brown,
and Company 1929), 676.
19
Megrue seemed to inflate this number as he gained success. He cited only
2,000 scripts in "Roi Cooper Megrue- The Boy with Two Plays on Broadway," Theatre
20, no. 165 (December 1914): 276.
20
Publisher Harrison Grey Fiske editorialized, "There have been various esti-
mates as to the number of persons that weekly witness moving picture shows in Greater
104 KENNICOTT
The proliferation of nickelodeons represented a social phenomenon that
developed a new, diverse audience only recently cultivated by vaudeville.
Nickelodeons continued the vaudeville format-some even going to the
lengths of re-integrating live entertainment-and provided the site for a
transition toward the greater "narrativization" of cinema. Combining
more complex plotting with progressively more sophisticated cinematic
techniques insured that a distinct way of seeing became widely estab-
lished. The new audience relied for meaning upon a system of under-
standings based upon visual signals rather than on spoken words, thus
reinforcing an imagistic language that rested "on a spatial freedom
unavailable in the theater."
21
In such an atmosphere the structural exper-
iments of playwrights unleashed new sorts of cinematic gimmicks on
Broadway.
2
Watchful critics colluded in this process, proclaiming each new
approach to be the "New Drama" they were longing for.
23
While Sheldon
Cheney lobbied for "the art piece," Clayton Hamilton offered prescrip-
tions for greater success and found delight when playwrights took him up
on his suggestions. Hamilton is notable because he encouraged innova-
tion in theatre from the point of view of the cinema. He addressed his
remarks to the reformers of the day in an effort to gain acceptance for
cinematic techniques and change movies' disreputable reputation. In The
Bookman, one of the period's widely read intellectual magazines, the influ-
ential Hamilton often ruminated in print about the contrasts in media. He
considered the motion picture play "a more serviceable medium for story
telling that the spoken drama. The author is granted an immeasurably
greater freedom in handling the categories of place and time."
24
Hamilton's ideas fit well into the reformers' project of bending movies
toward morally uplifting material. His project in equating the cinema with
the legitimate theatre was meant to elevate films to acceptable status in
Nev: York, and it has been said the number will reach half a million. The patronage of
the fifty odd theatres devoted to regular or standard amusements in this city sinks in com-
parison to an insignificant number." "Moving Pictures," New York Dramatic Mirror, 30
January 1909,2.
21
Tom Gunning, D. W Griffith and the Origim of American Narrative Film
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 35.
22 See note 5.
23
For instance, on the opening of Elmer Rice's On Trial, Wendell Philips
Dodge wrote, "The real novelty in 'On Trial' as a play-is its 'movie' aspect. This is a new
dramaturgy, and one that bids fair to revolutionize playwriting and play production." "The
New Plays," Theatre 20, no. 164 (October 1914): 198.
24
Clayton Hamilton, "The Decorative Drama," Bookman 35 (1912): 166.
DISLOCATIONS OF TiME AND SPACE
105
order to attract a "better" class of audience.l" In becoming an advocate
for fllm, he helped to popularize trends in cinema such as relaxing the
strictures of time and space in the well-made play formula.
Hamilton's articles not only critiqued, they suggested and
cajoled. In "Building a Play Backwards," he proposed, "[T]here are cer-
tain other stories which can be understood most truly only if we follow
them backward from effects to causes. As a matter of experiment, it
would be extremely interesting if some playwright should soon set before
us a story of this type in the perspective of reversed time."
26
Furthering
his "experimental" critique, he reflected in The Bookman,
American drama at the present time seems to be hover-
ing in a state of transition between that initial period
during which it was made up of mere theatrical machin-
ery and discussed no topics of serious importance to
the public, and that still future period during which it
will ascend to the revelation of permanent realities of
life.
27
Hamilton was not the only one who believed that the commercial theatre
was straying farther and farther from serious drama in an attempt to
retain its mass audience. The drumbeat had grown louder in the previous
decade as worried commentators signaled legitimate theatre's imminent
demise. Dorothy Chansky samples some fifteen articles published
between 1890 and 1923, concerned with the issue.
28
Such notable critics
as Montrose J. Moses ("The Disintegration of the Theatre") and Walter
Pritchard Eaton ("The Menace of the Movies") joined with t he more
prescriptive voices of men like Hiram Kelly Moderwell, Thomas
Dickinson, and Sheldon Cheney, all searching for the same strategy for
the salvation of an institution that they saw was in need of resuscita-
tion.29 Mark Hodin suggests that the major reorganization of theatre
called for during those early days was necessary to arrive at its uniquely
American voice. He remarks,
25
Ibid., 167.
26
Clayton Hamilton, "Building a Play Backwards," Bookman 38 (1913): 608.
27
Clayton Hamilton, Problems of the PlayJVright (New York: Henry Holt and
Company, 1917), 323.
28
Dorothy Chansky, Composing Ourselves: The little Theatre Movement and the
American Audience (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), 36.
29
Ibid., 72, 73, 75.
106 KENNICOTf
If one response to an increasingly unstable and multiple
turn-of-the-century cultural landscape was to cordon
off the territory of "high culture," as Lawrence Levine
and others have argued, then another, related Bourgeois
project involved appropriating working-class cultural
practices as forms of therapeutic revitalization.
30
As if in reaction to the call, Roi Cooper Megrue obligingly stepped into
the limelight.
Under Cover
Megrue's Under Cover opened the season on 26 August 1914.
Crook plays such as this one were then a popular dramatic genre. With
this play, one of Munsterberg's observations about the difference
between theatre and cinematic time sequence came to the fore.
Munsterberg had compared cinema's ability to rove backward and for-
ward in time to involuntary reveries and temporalities of the mind. In a
like manner, Megrue's play began the fourth (and final) act five minutes
before the events of the third act ended. In act 3 all the action is located
in the room of the main character, Steven Denby, up to his returning to
it, and all the scenes held downstairs continue, out of time sequence, in
act 4. The unifying feature was a clock striking three a.m. in both acts,
further emphasizing a dramaturgical fracturing of time. Since the over-
lapping action in both places was shown consecutively, the audience was
asked to negotiate in its own mind the juxtaposition of the appropriate
occurrences at the appropriate moments. Megrue manipulated time, pro-
longing his climax, essentially repeating it with different characters; jux-
taposing "there and then" in one act with "here and now" in another, and
managing to make them both resonate as "now."
Critics assessed Megrue's strengths as well-defined characters
and clever dialogue, but his plotting was critiqued as "lacking in ingenious
touches and highly illogical."
31
"The First Nighter" seemed unimpressed
that Megrue had grafted a complex time sequence onto an otherwise tra-
ditional "crook" play. Although "The First Nighter," recognized
Megrue's "cinematic" stage technique, the reviewer labeled it as a typical
cliff-hanger:
To what expedients the author is compelled to resort
appears from the fact that the last act is retroactive ...
30
Mark Hodin, "Legitimate Theater and the Making of Modern Drama"
(Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1995), 63-64.
31
"The First Nighter," Ne11' York Dramatic Mirror, 2 September 1914, 8.
DISLOCATIONS 01' nME AND SPACE 107
just as in a novel when the author says, "We will now
return to our hero, whom, the kind reader will remem-
ber, we left hanging from the end of a broken bough by
the seat of his trousers."
32
The New York Times took a cynical view: "these adventures in dramatic
construction threaten soon to become so much the order of the day that
a performance like Mr. Megrue's will hardly deserve to be described in
terms of temerity."
33
Fashionable Vogue dismissed it as, "good of its kind,
and the kind may be defined, in the familiar phrase, as 'what the public
wants."'
34
drama:
But in his review of Under Cover, Clayton Hamilton defended the
There are two points in Under Cover which call for seri-
ous consideration from students of the technique of the
drama . ... After we have been shown what happened in
one room of a house during a certain period of five
minutes, we are shown what was happening in another
room of the house during the same period.
35
As to "locations to give the impression of simultaneity" in Megrue's con-
struction, Hamilton noted charitably, "there is no reason whatsoever why
the dramatist should not be permitted to turn back the clock whenever,
by so doing, he can heighten the dramatic interest of his story."
36
Film historian Tom Gunning posits a theory of cinematic dis-
course that not only serves to describe the evolution of narrative in cin-
ema but illuminates developments such as Megrue's on Broadway. The
theory has three parts: the pro-filmic, the enframed image, and the
process of editing. These three are necessary components of f.tlm lan-
32
Ibid.
33
"Smart Melodrama Splendidly Acted," New York Times, 27 August 1914, 11.
34
"Under Cover By Roi Cooper Megrue, Cort Theatre, New York," Vogue
(October 1914), Roi Cooper Megrue file, New York Public Library of the Performing
Arts, New York, New York.
35
For the second point, Hamilton groused that Megrue had "deliberately cho-
sen to violate the traditional maxim that a dramatist must never deceive his audience."
Megrue's central conceit, he noted, lay in Stephen Denby's identity as a jewel smuggler
when in reality (as we discover), he is part of the secret service. For Hamilton, the sec-
ond point was much more important. See "Chronological Sequence in the Drama,"
Bookman 40 (1914): 184.
36
Ibid.
108 KENNICOTJ
guage and together constitute what Gunning calls "narrative integration."
His categories are recognizable components of theatrical experience as
well: pro-fllmic elements include objects to be viewed, such as actors,
sets, lighting and props. The "enframed image," described as "an image,
filmed from a particular point of view, framed within the camera aperture
that geometrically defines the borders of the image,"
37
can be equated
with the proscenium arch with its elements of framing, perspective, and
distance. Finally, Gunning defines the process of editing that developed
between 1904 and 1913 as "the differences that can arise between the
temporality of events as presented in narrative discourse and their time
relations within the story being told."
38
In his construction, Megrue's sequencing is reminiscent of the
methods of ftlm director D. W Griffith, whose trademark became the
suspenseful use of parallel editing-achieving exactly the same result that
Megrue was trying for in his play. In 1914, as Under Cover came to
Broadway, the popularity of Griffith's "one-reelers" had reached a high
point. The technique had progressed in sophistication and complexity in
Griffith's hands, until, by 1913, "he developed a rudimentary rhythm in
his suspense sequences with shorter and shorter shots and cuts not only
from action to action- from the pursued to the pursuer to the rescuer-
but also from medium shots to long panorama shots to close-ups."
39
The
pioneering director's use of parallel editing served yet another purpose
related to Megrue: Griffith's technique functioned melodramatically to
extend and enhance suspense in two simultaneous locations.
An avid movie-goer and script-reader, Megrue could envision an
alternative that might not have occurred to someone less steeped in the
manners of the boulevard. Hampered by the inexorability of time and
space/ cause and effect that Munsterberg maintained was the raison d'etre
of all drama, Megrue solved his problem the only way he knew how: by
overlapping time to demonstrate crucial developments in plot. Megrue's
structuring places all the action in Denby's room up to his returning to it,
in act 3; then all the scenes taking place simultaneously are held down-
stairs in act 4. The unifying feature of the clock striking three a.m. in both
acts further emphasizes the fracturing of time. Since the action in both
places is shown, the audience mentally rearranged the appropriate occur-
rences into chronological order.
A synopsis of the final moments of act 3 and the first of act 4
follows: amateur sleuth Ethel enters Denby's room to search it and he
catches her in the act. Denby tosses the contested necklace out the win-
37
Gunning, D. W. Griffith, 19.
38
Ibid., 21 .
39
Robert Sklar, Movie Made America (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 54.
DISLOCATIONS 01' 1iME AND SPACE
109
Figure 1: (L toR) William Courtney, Lily Cahill, and De Witt C. Jennings in a
scene from Roy Cooper Megrue's play, "Under Cover," at the Cort Theatre.
From The Theatre Magai}ne, October 1914.
dow, setting off the burglar alarm. In the commotion, Denby accidental-
ly makes the pre-arranged signal that Ethel has the necklace. One of the
partygoers enters Denby's room and accuses him of stealing the necklace
as the others follow into the room. Denby convinces them that he is not
the crook, but abruptly runs out. End of act 3. Downstairs (act 4), the
houseguests are playing bridge when the necklace drops in front of the
window. They hear the burglar alarm. The guests head up to Denby's
room to see what the ruckus is all about, leaving Nora and Monty down-
stairs. In a short scene, the two declare their love and Monty proposes as
two inspectors pass by on their way upstairs. In a moment, everyone
reassembles downstairs talking excitedly about what they have just wit-
nessed. Denby, who had returned to his room after they left, comes down
accompanied by the two policemen.
As a representative of the new observer, Megrue wrote a play
that was emblematic of a new phase of theatrical innovation, when artists
began fitting cinema-like fragments into more conventional dramatic
construction. Under Cover ran for 349 performances before taking to the
road, where the second company traveled for a number of years to great
acclaim.
40
110 K.ENNJCOTI
Another Op'ning, Another Show
The young playwright did not have time to contemplate the con-
sequences of his innovations in Under Cover before the first play he ever
wrote opened on September 8, 1914. As a result of his connections at the
Marbury Agency, Megrue had entered into a fortunate collaboration with
the knowledgeable veteran Walter Hackett. The result, It Pegs to Advertise,
proved to be an extraordinarily popular farce about a young man who
turns his fortunes around through the power of advertising. Because
George M. Cohan produced the play as part of a package, Clayton
Hamilton labeled this joint enterprise as a product of "the Cohan for-
mula." Hamilton ticked off the formula's characteristics: it must treat of
success; feature "a hopeless failure" as the hero (but one who needs to
display the potential for success); and the hero must demonstrate his
cleverness through "some preposterously imaginative scheme," ultimate-
ly winning the girl and the keys to whatever fortune has been in dispute
all along.
The currency of Advertise stemmed in part from actual advertis-
ing statistics and recognizable sloganeering of real products: their subti-
tle for the comedy was ''A Farcical Fact in Three Acts." In his 1929 vol-
ume, Representative American Dramas, Montrose ]. Moses acknowledged
grudgingly: "there are many who have taken such a dramaturgic [farcical]
knack for what it is worth, and acknowledged its cleverness, its amusing
quality."
41
He considered it, at best, "avowedly a play constructed on the
model of its period," quoting at length from Walter Lippman:
The authors were not writing a play, but a panegyric
backed by all the faith of Broadway .... It pursues one
step further the magazine policy of surrounding reading
matter with publicity, and if the logic of the situation is
developed we shall have Bibles with the magazine adver-
tisements, sermons in which mention can be purchased
and schoolbooks garnished with Campbell's Soup.
42
An example from the play illustrates his accusation. In act 1 Peale tells a
doubting Rodney:
PEALE: If I say His Master's Voice, you know that
advertises a phonograph. You're on to what soap "It
40
Burns Mantle and Garrison P. Sherwood, eds., The Best Plqys of 1909-1919
(New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1943), 529.
41
Moses, American Plqys, 330.
42
Ibid.
DISLOCATIONS OF TIME AND SPACE
floats" refers to. There's a Reason-Uneeda-Quaker
Oats- Phoebe Show-Children Cry for It . . . The
Watch that Made the Dollar Famous. I suppose you
don't know what any of them mean?
RODNEY: (amused) I know what they all mean.
43
111
Indeed, It PC!Js to Advertise was stylistically formulaic in the Cohan
tradition, but that did not prevent the New York Dramatic Mirror from
gushing that it was "[o]ne of the cleverest farces of years."
44
Here is the
plot in outline: Martin, a prosperous soap manufacturer, has an idler for
a son. Hoping to jog him into usefulness, the magnate makes a pact with
Mary Grayson, his stenographer, with whom his son, Rodney, is in love.
On a pretext, Martin says, he will throw Rodney out. Only when Rodney
has proven himself worthy will his father condone a wedding between
the two lovers. Rodney seeks the advice of his friend Ambrose Peale, a
theatrical press agent. The friends plan to go head to head with the old
man by introducing a new line of soap. They pour all their money
(anonymously supplied by Rodney's father) into beautiful offices and an
extensive ad campaign, leaving them with no capital to fund soap manu-
facture. When the orders roll in, they are forced to buy their product
from Rodney's father before managing to sell it at a higher price.
45
One quality setting the "farcical fact" play apart from other
comedies of 1914 was its clever use of curtain calls.
46
Advertise boasted a
series of act-ending scene-lets, at once reminiscent of the old staged
tableaus in melodramas, of vaudeville and also, the screen. Gerald
Bordman writes, "In some plays, these curtain calls were simply the usual
bows, but other plays, and It Pqys to Advertzse was one, employed them for
mini-scenes."
47
The influence of cinema can be felt in the execution of
these rapid "scene-lets," a series of fast curtains serving as cinematic
"quick cuts," suggesting Megrue's appropriation of the newest in cine-
matic techniques. Unlike other uses of its kind on the stage, these scenes
43
Roi Cooper Megrue and Walter Hackert, It Pqys to Advertise (New York: Samuel
French, 1917), 28-29. Nowadays we may be hard pressed to remember these slogans, although
they remained current through the mid-twentieth century.
44
"It Pays to Advertise," New York Dramatic Mirror, 10 September 1914.
45
Adapted from my own synopsis in "Playing With Time: Cinematic Influences On
Broadway Plays 1900-1918" (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado, 2002), 202.
46
In the opening weeks of the 1914-15 season alone, in addition to Advertise, the
comedies Apartment 12-K, The Third Parry, Twin Beds, and The High Cost of l...tJving rolled out
in rapid succession ("Rise of the Curtain," Theatre 20, no. 163 (September 1914): 98-99.
47
Gerald Bordman, Amencan Theatre: A Chronicle of Comet[y and Drama, 1914-
1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 8.
112 l<ENNJCOTI
were meant to be experienced as
Gunning relates that, at the same time Megrue was writing, over-
lapping cuts and analytical editing (exclusive of chase scenes or parallel
constructions) began to be used in feature films. Significantly, in the years
1912-1913 Griffith began to "break a single space into separate shots."
49
The resulting scenes, providing a larger cache of information with which
to read the action, promoted a new sense of participation in spectators.
But such cutting techniques accomplished another, unintended function.
Time slowed and splintered, as the necessary components of the scene
were shown one after another, in the space intended to be read as a con-
tinuous action.
A series of cuts that Griffith employed in his Biograph featurette
The Girl and Her Trust (1912) demonstrates this point. To depict the com-
plex action needed to stave off an assault on the heroine's locked door,
Griffith broke down the scene into a sequence that juxtaposed close-ups
against medium and long shots: Grace, the heroine (played by Dorothy
Bernard), has only a pair of scissors and a bullet but not a gun to defend
herself. In a close-up, she inserts a bullet into the keyhole where two ban-
dits are banging at the door. At the top of the sequence, a long shot
shows her backing away from the door in fear or indecision. Then she
finds a hammer, and with hammer and scissors, in close-up, she hits the
scissors against the bullet inserted into the keyhole with the hammer.
Reaction shot: nothing happens. From the rear, she raises the hammer,
and, in a cut to a side-angle medium close-up, she tries again. This time
she succeeds. A cut away to the startled bandits (and a puff of smoke)
reverts to the same medium close-up of the heroine inside, registering
relief.
Gunning names this series of shots "an analytical sequence"
combining "direct assault" (the close-up) with "linear narrative" (the rest
of the story), to accomplish an explanatory function separate from its
exposition.
50
Invoking Sergei Eisenstein's theory of montage, he desig-
nates the entire sequence as the "cinema of attractions" that describes "a
unique event, whether fictional or documentary, that is of interest in
itself."
51
Eisenstein had originally coined the term "Montage of
Attractions" to explicate a concept the revolutionary filmmaker
absorbed, in turn, from his mentor, Vsevolod Meyerhold. The great
Russian defmed an attraction, as "an independent and primary element in
the construction of a performance-a molecular (that is component)
48
''A series of cuts that CUT and/or DISSOLVE into one another to tell a
story within the story, or denote the passage of time, often without DIALOGUE." Ralph
Singleton, Film Dictionary (Beverly Hills, CA: Lone Eagle Press, 1986), 106.
49
Gunning, D. W. Griffith, 264.
50
Ibid., 265.
DTSLOCA110NS OF TiME AND SPACE 113
.-... .._ .. , --............ -..
1- 1': J IT f'.\ 1'" "' o\lniu;., <- J.()Yll HJV nr r_,n.l AI t$1 ('t'""' fti i Anr
Figure 2: (L to R) Grant Mitchell as Rodney Martin, Ruth Shepley as Mary Grayson in a
scene from "It Pays to Advertise" Now Being Presented at the Cohan Theatre.
From The Theatre Magazine, October 1914.
unit of effectiveness in theatre and of theatre in general."' Megrue and
Hackett's curtain calls functioned similarly to extend the time and the
world of the play: simultaneously to tell a joke and create a bridge of
anticipation toward the next act, all in the space of a minute. In like fash-
ion, Megrue and Hackett picked up a cinematic style of action offering
"quick takes" to enliven their play and make it, as Megrue insisted, "out
of what is going on around you."
53
51
Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its Spectator, and
the Avant-garde," in Earfy Cinema: Space Frame Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser with Adam
Barker (London: BFI Publishing, 1990), 60.
52
Sergei Eisenstein, "Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today," in Film Form
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1949), 943.
53
Megrue, "Boy with Two Plays," 276.
114
KENNI COTI
To illustrate, the first act of It Pqys to Advertise ends with fast sec-
ond and third curtains. The two scenes depict Peale and Rodney making
a start-up deal based on their advertising. The act ends first with Rodney
extolling the benefits of advertising to his father:
RODNEY: ... Think what advertising means: the
power of suggestion-the psychology of print. Why, 97
percent of the public believe what they're told, and what
they're told is what the other chaps have been told, and
the fellow who told him read it somewhere . . . .
54
As the curtain begins to fall, he finishes his diatribe. Then quickly, the
second curtain opens.
(The second curtain-PEALE and RODNEY on either side
of MARTIN, are talking advertising, while MARY has her
fingers in her ears);
followed by a third curtain,
(MARTIN is protesting angri!J to MARY, while RODNEY
and PEALE are talking gleiful!J to each other and shaking
hands).
55
In the second act, the final moments portray the three simultaneously
phoning soap manufacturers on three phones situated in three separate
spaces, as a series of curtains fall. In between, the three have the follow-
ing mini-scene together, before returning to their simultaneous phone
calls.
RODNEY (Holding wire): It'll have to be Old Rose.
PEALE: Castile is the cheapest.
MARY: Order small cakes.
RODNEY: Hello, this is Martin Soap Company-we
want to get some soap-pink castile- small cakes--40
or 50,000 ....
56
From these cinematic articulations I have come to think of the
fragments, shards, and time shifts found in Roi Cooper Megrue's early
54
Megrue and Hackett, It Ptrys to Advertise, 48.
55
Ibid., 49.
56
Ibid., 87.
DISLOCATIONS OF TIME AND SPACE 115
plays as models of a "dramaturgy of attractions"-examples of a sort of
grandstanding effect existing within the text, not just the performance.
Unlike a theatre auteur such as Meyerhold fashioning his attraction out of
the components of stagecraft, the playwright deploying a dramaturgy of
attractions finds his power in the crafting of the script. When an attrac-
tion becomes identified as cinematic, it sheds its performative aspect in
favor of the dialectic of disparate elements, as Gunning points out. The
renderings of attractions (in Under Cover, a displacement of time; in It Pegs
to Advertise, a displacement of space) follow Gunning's theories, to which
I would add the observation that the innovations of both plays emanate
from the fabric of the work rather than having been super-imposed upon
the material.
Megrue went on to complete fourteen plays, most of which had
decent runs on Broadway. However, he never repeated his early experi-
ments in time and space, whether at the end of acts, as in It Pqys to
Advertise, or within the structure of the play, as with Under Cover. His
experiments signaled only the beginning for a succession of cinematic
hybrids having varied life-spans on Broadway stages.
The pressures on dramatic formation had begun with photo-
graphic imagery, normalizing desire in audiences with less linear and
more emotive structures. Throughout the 'teens, Broadway was home to
an asynchronous progression interweaving threads of popular culture
with the well-made play in ever more extraordinary combinations.
57
Suffice it to say, Broadway realized only isolated attractions that accented
unique elements over integrated plotting. These relics reveal a progressive
release from the strictures of the well-made formula that helped pave the
way for American expressionism.
Since communication between Germany, in particular, and the
United States came to a stand-still in the lead-up to World-War I, it is
notable that the experiments in form that I have described managed to
progress without outside interference.
58
Julia Walker also takes up ques-
tions of fragmented dramaturgy and argues for a home-grown form of
expressionism based on the theories of expressive culture figure, S.S.
Curry. Using this lens, she, too, concludes that American expressionism
found its voice quite separately from its European counterpart. Walker
explains that, in order to reach "authentic self-expression," Curry formu-
57
Besides the aforementioned The Alien and Battle Cry that were film hybrids
(see note 5), plays endeavoring to depict the past and present simultaneously began to
appear with greater frequency. They include: The Bi.g Idea (1914), Yes and No (1917), Forever
After; and The Unkno11111 Purple (both 1918).
58
Mardi Valgamae records that, although the first German Expressionist play
may be dated from 1908, few examples of the genre were produced in America before
the 1920s (Accelerated Grimace: Expressionism in the A merican Drama of the 1920s [Carbondale:
Southern Illinois Universiry Press, 1972], 3).
116 I<ENNICOTI
lated the concept "three languages" of the body, described as "verbal (the
conventionalized symbols of language), vocal (e.g., tone-color, rhythm,
and inflection, which register emotion), and pantomimic (gesture and
bodily comportment)."
59
Curry's aim was to achieve a unification within
the individual through these modes of expression. However, Walker
writes, "What the so-called expressionists did was effect an ingenious
solution to this dilemma by borrowing Curry's three languages but coun-
terpointing rather than coordinating them to express the spiritual dishar-
mony of their artist-figure alter-egos."
60
Rather than coming exclusively
from European and expressionist influences, as has been commonly
understood, then, I have suggested, and Walker in a separate way has
borne out, that structures much closer to home helped influence
America's emerging narrative techniques.
One Hundred Years Later ...
The advent of new perceptions and responses from theatre
practitioners coalesced in Broadway's 1914-15 season in the work of a lit-
tle-known playwright, Roi Cooper Megrue, who served as the bellwether
for isolated cinematically-influenced experiments continuing sporadically
on Broadway until the twenties. That some of these were singular
achievements does not negate their increasing frequency and impact.
Walker contends, "cultures also develop out of a dialectic engagement
with failed ideas-those ideas that are disproved, disparaged, and dis-
missed from the dominant culture but whose negation gives shape to
subsequent patterns of thought."
61
Most of the "gimmicks" during the
early decades were dead ends that nonetheless gathered momentum,
merging, exploding, and reorganizing ultimately yielding the cinematic
immersion in theatrical form we see today. Reactions from the new audi-
ence were instrumental in this phase of theatrical innovation, when
artists began fitting 11m-like fragments into integrative drama to initiate
the "dramaturgy of attractions." Cinematic features grew ever more
embedded in traditional structures, until, finally, the American expres-
sionism took dramaturgy another step by institutionalizing the interplay
between past, present and future within structures that centered less on
plot and more with the human struggle against an increasingly imper-
sonal world.
62
In the intervening hundred years, the pervasiveness of mass
media has grown to monolithic proportions and we see that D.W
59
Julia Walker, Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), 68-69. Her expressionist playwrights include Elmer
Rice, Eugene O'Neill, John Howard Lawson, and Sophie TreadweU.
60
Ibid., 120.
61
Ibid., 3.
DISLOCATIONS OF TlME AND SPACE 117
Griffith, whose search for a new visual vocabulary made such an impact,
was wrong in his assessment of theatre in the future. Blau, Crary, and
Auslander have each traced threads in the evolution of physical, mental
and psychological shifts in perception over time. Crary writes, "As numer-
ous critics have suggested, film became a validation for the authenticity
of the perceptual disorientations that increasingly constituted social and
selective experience."
63
Blau focuses upon the divide between observer
and stage. His theory points to an attentive self. ''As for the question of
meaning in the theater," Blau writes, "it resides ... in the field of percep-
tion between the thing seen or being-seen and the articulation or abrasion
of perception by the observer of the scene."
64
As a result of audience self-
awareness, he notes, efforts to overcome the formal divide between audi-
ence and performer instead "opens up a new disjuncture ... that neces-
sitates a new spectatorial negotiation"
65
Auslander expands on Blau's
conception: "the experience of theatre (of live performance generally, I
would say) provokes our desire for community but cannot satisfy that
desire because performance is founded on difference, on separation and
fragmentation, not unity."
66
All three are responding to the perceptual cri-
sis caused by the dislocation of time and space precipitated by human
relationships with fleeting images. Their unique perspectives converge to
verify the shift made so clear in the "Mediatized/UnMediatized" experi-
ment that I performed.
Now that this clear demarcation in modes of seeing between
film (and now the "three screens"-computers, i-pods and television)
and theatre has been identified, we have reached a new crossroads.
Examining the entertainment that appealed to public perceptions in
1914, therefore, is instructive in understanding our contemporary, inter-
active spectators with their emphasis on the manipulation of images as
well as outcomes. How will the theatre ultimately respond to streaming
video, pod-casting, internet file sharing and My Space? Marshall
McLuhan's explanations of the influence of media defy time, moving
backward into the nineteenth century and forward to our own period.
McLuhan, himself, put it succinctly: ''A new medium is never an addition
to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to
62
See Walker's four characteristics of American expressionism (Ibid., 120).
63
Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 345.
64
Herbert Blau, The Audience (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1990), 26.
65
Ibid., 18.
66
Auslander, Liveness, 57.
118 I<ENNICOTI
oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for
them."
67
Following his idea, Auslander finds,
[M]y view of cultural economy holds that at any given
historical moment, there are dominant forms that enjoy
much greater cultural presence, prestige and power than
other forms. Nondominant forms will tend to become
more like the dominant ones but not the other way
around.
68
He goes on to warn that the generational issues surrounding "the rela-
tionship between the live and the mediatized is a volatile question subject
to change over time."
69
This conclusion seems to draw on McLuhan's
assertion that "media, by altering the environment, evoke in us their
unique ratios of sensed perceptions. The extension of any one sense
alters the way we think and act-the way we perceive the world."
70
The theatrical events of 1914 reassure that our present efforts to
negotiate between screen and-to use Auslander's term-"Liveness,"
will eventually lead us to recognize new forms and modes of seeing. How
to bridge the divide between mediatized and unmediatized remains
beyond our grasp as yet. But our awareness of the technical dominance
of electronic media, our attention to an even newer category of specta-
tor, and an understanding of shifts in perception between media will
ensure there is a vibrant, new era for the art of theatre that has survived
for the past three thousand years, despite the death knell by critics since
the advent of fJ.l.m. Paul Levinson observes, "[E)very medium is like a
Chinese box or a nesting doll-a medium within a medium, going back
to thought itself-and when we experience any given medium, we hear
the voices, see the faces, feel the breath, of all the media that have come
before."
71
Grassroots efforts to create a new theatrical landscape (on i-
pods, in animation and within programs like Real uje) currently abound
with youthful energy as a new generation experiments in the shifting per-
ceptual landscape. When the dust settles, we may well find that, rather
than leading away, dislocations of time and space will return us to the
heart of it all-our own human condition.
67
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York:
New American Library, 1966), 62.
68 Auslander, Liveness, 162.
69 Ibid.
70 McLuhan, Medium, 41.
71 Levinson, Digital Mcuhan, 109.
CONTRIBUTORS
RoBIN BERNSTEIN is an Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and
Sexuality and of History and Literature at Harvard University. The edi-
tor of Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater (University of Michigan Press,
2006), she has published articles on Lorraine Hansberry and Anna
Deavere Smith in Modern Drama and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and
Criticism, respectively. She is currently writing a book that uses perform-
ance theory to argue that cultural constructions of childhood played a
key role in U.S. racial formation from the mid-nineteenth through the
early twentieth century.
GARRETT EISLER is a Ph.D. candidate in Theatre at the Graduate Center
of the City University of New York. He holds an M.A. in English from
New York University, an M.F.A. in Directing from Boston University, and
has served as a professional literary manager in regional theatre. He has
published in Studies in Musical Theatre and is editing a forthcoming volume
of the Dictionary of Literary Biograpf?y on Twentieth-Century American
dramatists. His theatre and book reviews have appeared in Theatre Journal
and Theatre Survey, as well as The Village Voice and Time Out New York. He
also writes on contemporary theatre for his blog The Plt!jgoer (http:/ I play-
goerblogspot.com).
BRIAN HALLSTOOS is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at the
University of Iowa. His dissertation focuses on a passion play by Willa
Saunders Jones- what it reveals about gender and racial politics in early
twentieth-century Chicago and the links between black sacred music and
drama. He has four biographical entries (including one on Jones) slated
for publication in the forthcoming African American National Biograpf!J
(Oxford University Press). He has an M.A. in Art History from Rutgers
University.
LEIGH KENNICOTT presently teaches at California State University,
Northridge and the College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, California.
She received her Ph.D. in Theatre from the University of Colorado in
2002. Before returning to the university, she worked in fllm and televi-
sion for many years, notably in Current Television at ABC and for Miller-
Boyett Productions at Warner Brothers. She has written, directed, and
produced two films: the short Rubber Gloves and the documentary
Streakin'.
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
THE HEIRS OF
MOLIERE
FOUR FRENCH COMEDIES 01' THE
17tH AND 18TH CENTURIES
@ Rega<ud: TheAhoent-.Mlncled Lover
@ Deotouchec: TheCc..ceited Count
@ I.... O...uoOe: Thel'o.oh1oaa!Xe Prejudice
@ r....'I'L The l'r!ead oi the r.... ...
TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY
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This volume contains four
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In addition to their humor, these comedies provide fascinating social documents that
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USA $20.00 plus shipping $3.00 USA, $6.00 International
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Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
Mail checks or money orders to:
Circulation Manager
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
The CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 100164309
Visit our web-site at: web.gc.cuny.edu/mestd
Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Witkiewicz: Seven Plays
Translated and Edited
by Daniel Gerould
This volume contains 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 masterpeices of the dramatists of the
absurd- Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Arrabal- of the late nineteen forties and the
nineteen fifties . It is high time that this major playwright should become better
known in the English-speaking world.
Martin Esslin
USA $20.00 PLUS SHIPPING $3.00 USA, $6.00 International
Please make payments in U.S. Dollars payable to:
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
Mail checks or money orders to:
Circulation Manager
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
The CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016-4309
Visit our web-site at: web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/
Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
The Arab Oedipus:
Four Plays
Editor
Marvin Carlson
Translators
Marvin Carlson
Dalia Basiouny
William Maynard Hutchins
Pierre Cachia
Desmond O'Grady
Admer Gouryh
With Introductions By:
Marvin Carlson, Tawfiq Al-Hakim,
& Dalia Basiouny
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
Ahmad Bakathir's The Tragedy of Oedipus, Ali
Salim's The Comedy of Oedipus, and Walid
L - - - - - - - - - - - ~ ~ ~ ~ _ . Ikblasi's Oedipus.
The volume also includes Al-Hakim's preface to bis Oedipus, on the subject of Arabic tragedy, a
preface on translating Bakathir by Dalia Basiouny, and a general introduction by Marvin Carlson.
An awareness of the rich tradition of modem Arabic theatre has only recently begun to be felt by the
Western theatre community, and we hope that this collection will contribute to that awareness.
USA $20.00 plus shipping $3.00 USA, $6.00 International
Please make payments in U.S. Dollars payable to:
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Mail checks or money orders to:
Circulation Manager
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
The CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016-4309
Visit our web-site at: web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/
Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
A utr.-. 1' l.-.. 1 ,,.., t' rot l: .-.:.-.
" I),._,, 11. t lf LI!Wflh Ua\M\. llh ." 1r:
Comedy:
A Bibliography
Editor
Meghan Duffy
Senior Editor
Daniel Gerould
Initiated by
Stuart Baker, Michael Early,
& David Nicolson
This bibliography is intended for scholars,
teachers, students, artists, and general
readers interested in the theory and
practice of comedy. It is a concise
bibliography, focusing exclusively on
drama, theatre, and performance, and
includes only published works written
in English or appearing in English
translation.
Comedy is designed to supplement older, existing bibliographies by including new areas
of research in the theory and practice of comedy and by listing the large number of new
studies that have appeared in the past quarter of a century.
USA $10.00 plus shipping $3.00 USA, $6.00 International
Please make payments in U.S. Dollars payable to:
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Mail checks or money orders to:
Circulation Manager
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
The CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016-4309
Visit our web-site at: web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/
Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Contemporary Theatre in Egypt contains the proceedings of a Symposium on
this subject held at the CUNY Graduate Center in February of 1999 along with
the first English translations of three short plays by leading Egyptian play-
wrights who spoke at the Symposium, Alfred Farag, Garnal Maqsoud, and
Lenin El-Ramley. It concludes with a bibliography of English translations and
secondary articles on the theatre in Egypt since 1955.
(USA $15.00 plus $3.00 shipping. Foreign $12.00 plus $6.00 shipping)
Zeami and the No Theatre in the World, edited by Benito Ortolani and Samuel
Leiter, contains the proceedings of the "Zeami and the No Theatre in the World
Symposium" held in New York City in October 1997 in conjunction with the
"Japanese Theatre in the World" exhibit at the Japan Society. The book contains
an introduction and fifteen essays, organized into sections on "Zeami 's Theories
and Aesthetics," "Zeami and Drama," "Zearni and Acting," and "Zearni and the
World."
(USA $15.00 plus $3.00 shipping. Foreign $15.00 plus $6.00 shipping)
Four Works for the Theatre by Hugo Claus contains translations of four plays
by 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. The plays collected here with an intro-
duction by David Willinger include The Temptation, Friday, Serenade, and The
Hair of the Dog.
(USA $15.00 plus $3.00 shipping. Foreign $15.00 plus $6.00 shipping)
Theatre Research Resources in New York City is the most comprehensive cata-
logue of New York City research facilities available to theatre scholars, including
public and private li braries, museums, historical societies, university and college
collections, ethnic and language associations, theatre companies, acting schools,
and film archives. Each entry features an outli ne of the faci li ty's holdings as well
as contact information, hours, services, and access procedures.
(USA $10.00 plus $3.00 shipping. Foreign $ 10.00 plus $6.00 shipping)
Please make payments in U.S. Dollars payable to: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Mail checks or money orders to:
Circulation Manager
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
The CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016-4309
Visit our web-site at: web.gc.cuny.cdu/ mcstc/
Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868