1776

Last night, as I was coming home from seeing the Broadway production of 1776 by Roundabout Theatre Company, I found out that Charles Fuller, author of the brilliant A Soldier's Play, had died.

Roundabout's revival of A Soldier's Play, which I saw at the beginning of 2020 before a certain virus shut down the world, was staged in the American Airlines Theatre, the same theatre where the current revival of 1776 is now playing.

A Soldier's Play is probably the best thing I've ever seen Roundabout do, so it's not much of a criticism to say that the company's current production doesn't live up to it. Nevertheless, it's interesting how different these two historically set revivals were.

Both productions were very much about the present, about now, rather than events that happened decades or even centuries in the past. The production of A Soldier's Play didn't try to run away from the past, though, presenting it with more-or-less historical accuracy, and trusting the audience to make their own connections to America in the 21st century.

The current revival of 1776, however, is in danger of breaking its arm due to the strength with which it is patting itself on the back. As the show's co-directer Diane Paulus notes in the program, the cast provides "multiple representations of race, gender, and ethnicity." This is true, but hardly revolutionary. Yes, this production of a famously male-heavy show has no cis-gender men on stage, but that's hardly a first for 1776.

I remember visiting Nittany Theatre at the Barn out in the middle of Pennsylvania back in 2017, and the cast was reminiscing about years gone by when they had done an all-female version of 1776. Rather than boasting about it, though, they admitted, "Actually, a lot of smaller companies around the country do the play that way. It's kind of become commonplace." The current revival also gets milage out of casting people of color as enslavers, but this is hardly new, either. (Hamilton anybody?)

Hamilton famously dresses its characters in period clothing from the neck down, while heads are left wig-free with hats and hair styles that are modern. The result is a balance that allows the audience to dig into history while ghosting (as Marvin Carlson would put it) contemporary America on top of the centuries-old characters. Costume designer Emilio Sosa instead leans into the contemporary for 1776, providing knee breeches, shoes, and coats that evoke the 18th century, but making sure everything underneath those fancy coats drag us back to the present.

There's a similarly heavy-handed flight from the source material in the stylistic renderings of Sherman Edwards's 1969 score. The music leans into its own corniness at times, but the performers often seem embarrassed by the notes they're singing. Their anything-but-the-melody approach to the music was probably meant to be refreshing, but it sometimes reminded me of the Forbidden Broadway lampoon of Donna Murphy "Whistling a Sondheim Tune" in a revival of The King and I.

The play's core trio of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson is ably played by Crystal Lucas-Perry, Patrena Murray, and Elizabeth A. Davis. However, my favorite musical numbers were those sung by minor characters. As Martha Jefferson, Eryn LeCroy makes the typically weak number "He Plays the Violin" actually work. I've never been a fan of "Momma, Look Sharp" either, but Salome B. Smith nails it as the Courier. "Molasses to Rum" is always a chilling showstopper, but Sara Porkalob knocks it out of the park singing the song as Edward Rutledge.

Both Paulus and her co-director Jeffrey L. Page (who also choreographed the show) have done audiences a favor in bringing this classic musical back to the stage. For all their efforts to make the play relevant to a modern audience, though, the most powerful moments in the piece come from the lines written by book writer Peter Stone, many of them cribbed from the letters of the Founding Fathers themselves.

Sometimes you don't need to beat the audience over the head with an idea, but can just allow great material to speak for itself. That's what Roundabout did with their production of Fuller's A Soldier's Play, and I hope we can see more revivals like that one in the future.

The Father

Currently, August Strindberg's play The Father is running in rep with Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House at Theatre for a New Audience. This is an excellent opportunity to see two companion plays (both directed by Arin Arbus) back to back with an amazing cast.

Strindberg wrote The Father in 1887, eight years after A Doll's House (or A Doll House if you prefer that translation of the title). In part, it was a reaction to a number of Ibsen's plays, including Rosmersholm, which had come out the previous year. Being that the play concerns marriage, though, parallels with A Doll's House are most apparent.

TFANA's productions play up those parallels. John Douglas Thompson, who plays Thorwald in A Doll's House, is the title character in The Father, and Maggie Lacey, a superb Nora in Ibsen's drama, plays his wife Laura in The Father. Both plays feature physicians, and Nigel Gore admirably portrays both doctors. Similarly, Laurie Kennedy appears as a nanny in the two plays.

At one point, Strindberg's father asks, "Do you know Ibsen's Ghosts?" The audience, predictably, roars with laughter. I found myself ghosting that play while watching The Father. Strindberg's pastor (played by Jesse J. Perez) reminded me of Pastor Manders in Ghosts, and the title character's hovering between life and death at the end of the play is eerily similar to Oswald at the end of Ghosts.

While A Doll's House is performed with an intermission, TFANA is presenting all three acts of The Father straight through, with only a short pause as the stage is reset between acts. Also, this adaptation by David Greig takes some liberties, including making the final moment between Laura and her daughter more ambiguous than it is in the original text.

Though I preferred A Doll's House (which, honestly, is just a better play), both pieces are worth seeing, and they benefit from viewing them back to back. If you're interested in tickets, go to:

Theatre for a New Audience

The Haunted Stage

I've been reading Marvin Carlson's book The Haunted Stage. His central thesis is that while all literary texts bring up recollections of works from the past, performance is inherently even more about memory, since every element of a performance brings up recollections of past performances.

A play like Hamlet relies on the fact that audiences have seen other plays before and are familiar with the basic concept of a revenge tragedy, and probably with the story of Hamlet as well. The actor who is playing Hamlet has played other roles before this one, and audiences have likely seen, or at least heard about, other actors playing Hamlet. The costumes, scenery, lighting design, even the blocking probably resemble elements from other plays. Finally, the physical theatre where the play is performed likely conjures up memories of other performances. Even if an audience member has never been in that particular theatre before, he or she probably has seen other theatres to compare with it.

Carlson is aware of how all texts are "haunted" by the past, but he notes that the theatre is a special place due to its physicality. There is a phenomenological element to performance that necessarily complicates and enriches it to a level far beyond that of a simple text. He calls this "ghosting" and describes it this way:

Unlike the reception operations of genre (also, of course, of major importance in theatre), in which audience members encounter a new but distinctly different example of a type of artistic product they have encountered before, ghosting presents the identical thing they have encountered before, although now in a somewhat different context. Thus, a recognition not of similarity, as in genre, but of identity becomes a part of the reception process, with results that can complicate this process considerably.

The key point here is that it is "the identical thing" itself that is recycled, whether it be the script, the actors, the sets and costumes, or the theatre building. Of course, today we frequently expect sets and costumes to be used for one production and then only brought out for a new play if they have been considerably modified. Carlson points out that this is not always the case in non-Western theatre, and it did not used to be the case in the West, either.

He cites the Romantic era as the locus of this shift in the West. Specifically, he mentions Victor Hugo's preface to his play Cromwell, in which the French author rails against the neoclassical tradition of setting every play in the same neutral antechamber. For Hugo, the historical spot where an incident occurred was important, and the passionate feelings of Romantic artists, Hugo included, led to a demand that each new production make efforts to be historically and geographically accurate.

While we no longer expect every production of Julius Caesar to be set in ancient Rome or each new production of Macbeth to be costumed like medieval Scotland, we do expect new set and costume designs for a new production. Still, they will likely remind us of other designs we have seen in the past, and we cannot help but compare them to the elements used in these past productions.

Going back to the Greeks, playwrights have been concerned not simply with telling stories, but with retelling them. Here again, Romanticism changes things, placing a new emphasis on "innovation, individuality, and uniqueness," as Carlson puts it.

But what is the great Romantic text if not Goethe's Faust? And was not Faust inspired in part by the puppet plays that were performed throughout Germany in Goethe's day? And were not these plays in turn inspired by earlier plays, including perhaps productions of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus that likely toured Germany during the 16th and 17th centuries? Carlson points out that Paul Valery wrote a version of the story titled My Faust, though in a way each new telling is an author's own version of a common tale, My Oedipus, My Hamlet.

In the third chapter, Carlson remarks on an audience's ability to see not just an actor on stage, but the ghosts of all of the previous roles inhabited by that performer. He also notes the rather obvious fact that writers "ghost" actors into the texts that they write:

Goethe and Schiller conceived their productions with the specialties of Weimar actors in mind, Voltaire for the actors of the Comedie Francaise, Moliere for the company in which he was the leading player. Even a playwright like Ibsen, with very tenuous ties to his major producing organization, is revealed through his letters to be quite concerned with the specific actors that would perform his roles and with what associations and physical and emotional characteristics they would bring to the roles, certainly predictable concerns in any dramatist who writes with an eye toward stage realization.

This of course leads to the idea of the "vehicle play," which Carlson defines as a work constructed precisely to feature the already familiar aspects of a particular actor's performance." As examples, he cites Sardou's plays for Sarah Bernhardt and Rostand's plays for Benoit-Constant Coquein.