Immigrant Dramatists

Today there were protests all across the United States in support of immigrants, so I wanted to blog about some of the great American dramatists who were immigrants:

Dion Boucicault - Born in Ireland, Dion Boucicault moved to England where he rose to fame with his play London Assurance, which Madame Vestris produced at Covent Garden. After a string of hits in London, he moved to New York, where he conquered Broadway with his melodrama The Poor of New York. The play was actual adapted from a French work, but Boucicault went on to write the quintessentially American play The Octoroon, which Branden Jacobs-Jenkins recently adapted for the 21st century. Boucicault is perhaps the first truly great American playwright. (Though you could argue for the French-born Anna Cora Mowatt.) And, of course, he was an immigrant.

Kurt Weill - Don't you love "Mack the Knife," "September Song," and "The Saga of Jenny"? All of those hit Broadway songs were written by the German immigrant Kurt Weill. "Mack the Knife" of course came from The Threepenny Opera, which Weill originally wrote in Berlin with Bertolt Brecht and Elizabeth Hauptmann. Being as he was a gay Jewish leftist, Weill had to flee Hitler's Germany, first to Paris, then London, and eventually New York. That's where he collaborated with Maxwell Anderson on Knickerbocker Holiday, which gave us the jazz standard "September Song." "The Saga of Jenny" comes from Lady in the Dark, and featured lyrics by the all-American Ira Gershwin, who was--incidentally--the son of immigrants.

Maria Irene Fornes - Born in Cuba, Maria Irene Fornes moved to New York in the 1950s. Her play Fefu and Her Friends has become a modern classic. I've always been a fan of her brutal one-act play The Conduct of Life, and spoke about it when she received the 2015 Edwin Booth Award. Recently, the Signature Theatre produced her short play Drowning, which reimagined a story by Anton Chekhov, but was told from the point of view of aliens from outer space. Fornes wasn't from outer space, but she was once an alien to this country, before become one of America's great playwrights of the 20th century.

Nilo Cruz - Speaking of Cuban-American playwrights, Nilo Cruz, who won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for his drama Anna in the Tropics, was born in Matanzas in Cuba, but immigrated to Miami as a child when his parents fled communism. Cruz's play Sotto Voce tells the story of a woman mourning the failure of both Cuba and the United States to take in Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. As a former refugee himself, Cruz certainly knows the importance of showing compassion to those who arrive on your borders.

Martyna Majok - And who won the most recent Pulitzer Prize for drama? That would be Polish-born playwright Martyna Majok. I haven't seen The Cost of Living, which garnered her the award, but her play Ironbound is wonderful, and deals quite poignantly with coming of age in urban America.

So thank you, immigrants. You make America great!

Back From the Shaw

I'm back now from the Shaw Festival and the conference being held in Niagara-on-the-Lake by the International Shaw Society.

In addition to seeing some great plays by Bernard Shaw (Androcles and the Lion and Saint Joan),  I caught a preview of the festival's production of Dracula. At first, I didn't particularly care for the stage adaptation by Liz Lochhead, which was originally done at the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh in 1985. However, as the play went on, it grew on me, and I ended up liking it.

Lochhead combines characters, switches quickly back and forth between different parts of the book, and makes some plot changes I wouldn't have made as an adapter, but if you think of the production as its own work, rather than simply an imitation of Bram Stoker's novel, it's actually quite enjoyable. Lochhead is more interested in 1980s feminism than the 1890s paranoia that drove Stoker, but the play's steamy updating of the story's finale was brilliant.

I was at the Festival to deliver a paper at the ISS conference, and I greatly enjoyed some of the presentations given by other conference attendees. Peter Gahan gave a talk called "Bernard Shaw's Religion of Equality" in which he talked about Shaw's activities with the socialist Fabian Society. Beatrice and Sidney Webb, who co-founded the London School of Economics, stressed state ownership of the means of production, while Shaw emphasized redistribution of wealth. For Shaw, the ultimate test of equality was inter-marriageability. Classism would only be dead when an individual from one economic group could marry a member of any other group without raising eyebrows.

After Gahan's talk, Tony Stafford spoke about animal imagery in Saint Joan. Though he said he originally got involved in the topic due to the bird imagery in the play, I was most struck by the way he pointed out how important horses are in the piece, with Joan being glad at the end that her horse has not been forgotten. Charles Del Dotto spoke about the sublime in the late plays of Shaw, citing (among other things) A.C. Bradley's adage about waste being a defining element of tragedy. Anton Jesensek rounded out that session by speaking about the reception of Saint Joan in Italy, which had been performed initially in both French and Italian translations.

That night I saw 1837: The Farmer's Revolt. Rick Salutin wrote the play together with Theatre Passe Muraille in 1973 to tell the story of an ill-fated uprising in what is today Ontario against the corrupt colonial government. Had the farmers been better organized, they might have succeeded in establishing a Republic of Canada. Unfortunately for them, their rebellion was brutally put down, and the play ends with a harrowing image of some of the surviving farmers being hanged. It wasn't until 1867 that the various colonies the British still held in North America were brought together as the Canadian Confederation.

The following day, Fintan O'Toole gave a talk on what he called the 10 rules of Shavian theatre. These included forgetting cause and effect, accepting that motivations don't matter, having drama shape character rather than the other way around, remembering that anti-climax is a good thing, accepting that form is a trap, discovering morals rather than vindicating them, realizing that acting is not truth, accepting that the sounds you make are not who you are, banishing shame and suicide, and embracing the fact that nothing can be undone.

Michael O'Hara, president of ISS, gave a great talk on the history of Androcles and the Lion, which Shaw wrote in 1912, getting mixed reviews in London, but then taking the United States by storm. There was a 1915 production in New York, and a revival 10 years later featured Edward G. Robinson as Caesar. A 1935 all-black production played in various city parks in Chicago, and in 1937 the Negro Company did the show in Seattle. Perhaps the most famous production was the 1938 staging by the Negro Theatre Project in New York, but a production the following year in Atlanta was notable for its use of jazz. Marc Blitzstein composed incidental music for a production of the play in 1946, and Richard Rogers later musicalized it for television in 1967.

There were plenty of other fine presentations, but I'll mention just one more. Jen Buckley gave a paper called "Melodrama of Ideas" about Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's An Octoroon. She argued that melodrama can indeed be a genre that works intellectually as well as emotionally. My last night in Niagara-on-the-Lake, I got to see Jacobs-Jenkins's play, and I have to say I agree. An Octoroon was hands-down the best thing I saw at the Shaw Festival. I was familiar with the original (The Octoroon) by Dion Boucicault, and in addition to commenting on the play, Jacobs-Jenkins fixes many of its problems.

I'm not sure when I'll get up to the Shaw Festival again, but I certainly enjoyed my visit!

Everybody

Last night, I saw Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' new play Everybody at the Signature Theatre Company. Though at first I wasn't sure how I was going to feel about the piece, it won me over by the end.

Everybody is based on the medieval morality play Everyman, though Jacobs-Jenkins updates the piece and gives it a contemporary feel. As one character reminds us at the beginning, our English play Everyman is itself likely an adaptation of the Dutch play Elckerlijc, so further adaptation seems fair game.

The fact is, Death comes for Everybody, and in this production Death is the adorable Marylouise Burke, who also played the title character in last years' Imagining the Imaginary Invalid. The sweet older woman isn't taking anything from anybody, or Everybody, since Everybody is the main character in this play. (Get it?)

And who plays Everybody? Well, that depends on which night you go. Five actors of various ages, genders, and ethnicities form the core of the company, and one of them is chosen by lot to be Everybody. The rest play allegorical figures such as Friendship, Beauty, Stuff, and Kinship. There are a couple of other surprises, too, so don't count on getting your program until after the play is over. They want to keep some of the secrets.

Lila Neugebauer competently directs this production, and I was particularly taken by the simple but effective set, designed by Laura Jellinek. Just when you think you know where the play is going, along comes a new twist, keeping the audience on its toes.

If you want to see the play, it's running until March 12th. You can find more information at:

Signature Theatre Company