Twenty-three years ago, a pie-eyed academician’s wife plowed through her front door, surveyed her castle, and brayed, “What a dump!” As we, too, surveyed what seemed in fact to be a comfortable New England living room in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, we might have concluded that her undiplomatic critique was simply a reflection of the messy state of the union between herself and her husband. We might have, that is, if we had ignored a not-so-incidental touch: the couple in question happened to be named George and Martha. This was the sly wink of an American playwright with dirt in his eye. When Albee nudged us with reminders of that first First Family, the domestic crisis on stage transmogrified from the disgusted personal declarative to the paranoid national interrogative: What a dump! Look what we’ve come home to! George and Martha. Look what We’ve come to! What have We come to?
The death of George and Martha’s non-existent child in Virginia Woolf pronounced the last word—or the last rites, as it were—on the death (or phoniness) of the American Dream. Since then, the death has been done to death; it seemed for some years as if playwrights everywhere were staging walpurgisnachts in front of their wallpaper. Beyond the forest of George and Martha’s living room lay a vast graveyard of American living rooms where everyone dumped his disillusionment. In the case of Sam Shepard, the mess spilled out into the kitchen.
In the last few years, a few intrepid playwrights have been grappling with their lingering agoraphobia (a fear as much rooted in the economics of theatre as in a failure of imagination), busting out of their personal histories into the open spaces of the national history. Panoramic plays like Peter Parnell’s Romance Language, Thomas Babe’s Planet Fires, Michael Weller’s The Ballad of Soapy Smith and John Guare’s Lydie Breeze cycle have forsaken the intimate parlor games of the contemporary den in favor of the big stakes of our country’s frontier. This disparate crew has founded the New American Epic.
These writers’ latest works, admittedly, form a melting pot of wildly varying styles and intentions—but for all of them, size, narrative and language are the common denominators of exploration in a new dramatic territory. In the historical canvases of these New American Epics, playwrights are brushing with the kind of grand strokes that would do honor to David Belasco: casts are big, language is heightened, and the characters are the larger-than-life figures that constitute our American iconography. Here, one is more likely to discover George Washington than George the history professor, and the latter’s toy gun with the flag that says “bang” has been replaced by real guns. There are a lot of guns now, and they all, inevitably, go off. The living room as battlefield has given way to the battlefield as battlefield. Audiences are holding their ears a lot.
One advantage of the historical mode, as these playwrights are rapturously discovering, is that leading audiences into an alien, antique world can serve to release them from the expectations they cart into the theatre. The pay-off for the playwrights is a “carte blanche” dramatic license to experiment with language, to populate their stages densely for the sheer potential of action and spectacle, and to explode and mix genres with a devil-may-care sense of freedom. Viewed with 1980s eye for the inter-relatonships of past and present, and the complexities of our American past (in direct protest against the whitewashed textbook history of grammar school days), playwrights can dissect an epoch of their choice either for its own pure historical fascination, or to give us a distanced perspective on our urgent, contemporary issues.
The exponents of the New American Epic are reversing the question from “What have We come to?” to “What have We come from?” Neither the question nor the allegorical historical mode are without precedent in 20th-century American drama. O’Neill got an Oresteia out of his system, along with some Freudian faddishness, through the Civil War context of Mourning Becomes Electra. The witch hunts of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible provided a safe historical distance from which to observe the savagery of McCarthyism at a time when the average American was trying to discern whether the real threat was tinted red or red-white-and-blue.
What has been left behind in these new historical plays is the lugubrious and portentous weight of occasion that Miller and O’Neill heaped upon their historical works. The new American Homers have matters of consequence on their minds, but they will be quick to let you know that the bottom line is not the issue but the exhilaration of the ride. All of them want to tell a story; none of them wants to tell you what to think. Thus, in their plays, those oft-maligned theatrical cousins, melodrama and farce, are not only not dirty words, they are infinitely desirable. If anything, they provide a free-wheeling dramatic springboard which allows the playwrights to jump beyond those genre borders and experiment with new forms.
Perhaps the most irreverent example is Peter Parhell’s comedy Romance Language, first produced this past winter at Playwrights Horizons in New York. It is a bawdy, picaresque cartoon, in which Parnell calculatedly uncages elementary school assumptions about our literary lions. In a sexually footloose odyssey, Huckleberry Finn steps off the 19th-century American Heritage bookshelf to see whom he’s been keeping company with, only to find Emily Dickinson playing Juliet to actress Charlotte Cushman’s Romeo (both on and off stage), Louisa May Alcott in a rough-and-tumble tryst with General George Armstrong Custer, Ralph Waldo Emerson longing for the ghost of Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman bedding down with a veteran from Lincoln’s 27th regiment. “The world sure has been turnin’ into an awful strange place,” Huck confides to buddy Tom Sawyer, after a drag queen saloon entertainer named Madame Nash blows his own head off in a fit of unrequited love.
The libidinous co-minglings of Parnell’s anything-goes imagination are filtered through Whitman, whose dreams and poetry provide a frame for the play’s breakneck comings-and-goings, and a rationale for the sensibility of sexual freedom. Parnell explains, “Whitman links democracy and sex—he says the country as a democratic poem should also be a sexual poem, where one is allowed to be creative sexually. It’s a dangerous area. For Whitman, sex is an area where there is equality. Whatever power is going on in the bedroom is presumably an agreed-upon power, whether it is a man and a woman, a man and a man, a woman and a woman—or a congressman and a hustler. People’s sexual dealings with one another are somehow equated, on a grand level, with the search for equality in the nation. Whitman tried to make that link, and so did I in the play.”
If the philosophical impetus for Romance Language was Whitmanesque, the ribald and goofy enactments of that philosophy are definitely observed from the playwright’s self-consciously modern perch. Louisa May Alcott (a.k.a. Miss Apricot, in Parnell’s fruitbowl), disgusted by her prunish Little Women reputation, yearns for the lurid passions revealed in her lesser-known, pseudonymed works like Pauline’s Passion and Punishment. Suffocated by the inhibitions imposed by her era and public face, Alcott goes underground, emerging as the spicy, sultry Minnie Montez (a cheap-joke hybrid cloned from the actress Lola Montes).
Parnell’s feverish ricochet of fleshly and ghostly encounters climaxes in Heaven, where his wanderers have landed after either being slaughtered in a shoot-em-up Little Big Horn sequence (Louisa May stumbles through the Gates with an arrow in her back) or committing suicide (Madame Nash flounces in with his shot-off head nestled in his arm). It is in Heaven that Parnell crystallizes his link between his character’s carnal quests and the more transcendent search for Utopia—a futile search because Identity and Utopia are one and the same, and remain unrealized in life. The notion of Utopia unrealized permeates the New American Epics. In Romance Language, Thoreau still wanders in search of his Walden Pond, Emily is still stalking America, and Huck Finn, who may know something that the rest don’t, is looking for Tahiti.
Huck’s ponderings provide the most eloquent articulation of the play’s main theme:
When I think about being free, it makes me think of not knowin’ anyone I once knew. Not Aunt Polly or Judge Thatcher or the Widow Douglas or my dead Pap—an’ of just bein’ my own person with no past to worry me. But maybe havin’ a past don’t matter much. I mean, we all got pasts, and most of us got more ghosts than we know what to do with. But that don’t mean they got to bog us down. Not if life’s got all kinds of possibilities, as Walt likes to say. So maybe we can have a past and still be free.
The Parnell/Whitman utopian quest fails in part because the antebellum universe has not yet invented a language to define the characters’ clouded sense of identity, in part because they are prisoners of their own history. “It’s all about being able to invent oneself,” concludes Parnell, in the best post-Freudian manner.
The constant collision of lyrical interludes with throwaway literary send-ups gives the play’s detractors fuel to claim superficiality and pretentiousness. But the play’s brassy appeal (like that of Guare’s plays) lies both in the playwright’s identification with his literary progenitors and his impish travesties of them. “There’s a tremendous exhilaration in aligning oneself with these figures,” Parnell confirms, “to come out not just in terms of one’s sexuality, as Whitman did with Leaves of Grass, but to come out by declaring oneself part of a tradition. At the same time, I thought, let’s have some fun with this.”
For Parnell, the appeal of the New Epic goes far beyond the attractions of history revisited. “In all of them, there’s a sense of the fabulous—of dreams and myth and fantasy,” he emphasizes. “When Caryl Churchill puts all of those women in a restaurant at the beginning of her play Top Girls, it’s not just that she’s using history; it’s an imaginative leap that you would make if you were reading Italo Calvino or Jorge Luis Borges. Literature and music and art are far ahead of theatre in this way.”
Parnell would be the first to concede that the ability to write in the vernacular and size of the fabulous cannot exist without a theatre to support its extravagances. As Parnell laments, “If you have a big play, and it’s not a ‘Broadway’ play, where do you go? Gosh, you can’t go around writing 20-character plays, because people can’t put them on. I feel that if Romance Language were smaller, it would still be running.”
Michael Weller concurs. He was provided with a commission springboard for The Ballad of Soapy Smith from the Seattle Repertory Theatre, where the play premiered in 1983, opening SRT’s new Bagley Wright Theatre. “It’s a matter of a lot of work, and you know it’s not going to make any money because it’s too big a play. The thing that allowed me to write Soapy Smith was basically that an opportunity was provided to see it done. And that’s what I wanted. That’s all you ever really want as a playwright.”
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For all of their expansiveness, one is able to isolate in all of the New American Epics a character who seems to embody the playwright’s experience of America. Within Parnell’s stage population of 22, it is Huck Finn’s naive responses that ultimately mirror his own. In the playwright’s words, “To be an American is to believe in a place of infinite possibilities and infinite compassion for everyone. That America really doesn’t exist. One wants to believe it does, but what is so galling is that the politicians constantly want to insist that it does. I won’t even listen to the State of the Union address.”
Had Parnell listened to this year’s address, he may have squirmed at President Reagan’s vainglorious alliance with our nation’s visionaries: “America is stronger because of the values that we hold dear. We honor the giants of our history not by going back, but forward to the dreams their vision foresaw.” By shutting out those sentiments, Parnell was unwittingly echoing his own hero, that giant-of-history Whitman, who rejected the posings of political rhetoric in 1870 by lamenting, “Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believ’d in, nor is humanity itself believ’d in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask?” The penetrating journey through Parnell’s work, and the body of the New American Epics, is the passage from naive, sometimes desperate, belief in “the values that we hold dear,” to a dismayed discovery of “the hollowness at heart.”
Both Babe in Planet Fires and Weller in Soapy Smith similarly employ the device of a naive American Virgil who is led through a series of rude awakenings about his country. The device serves as a sieve for the playwrights’ conflicting views of America at the same time as it announces the play’s connections to an Epic narrative legacy that precedes Dante. In Weller’s opus, Paul, a young bartender with poetic aspirations, serves as the hired chronicler of an Alaskan gold Rush con artist Jeff “Soapy” Smith. Soapy, modeled from a real-life turn-of-the-century figure who fleeced pioneer towns around the land, is in the great tradition of American opportunists like Willie Stark and Charles Foster Kane, who climbed over the masses on a ladder of charm and populist/Christian homilies and were finally defeated by the tangle of their sophisticated deceptions.
Weller (who once told a reporter during his Moonchildren/Loose Ends years that “I write about people that I come into contact with”) moved into a new phase with Soapy Smith. “At the end of his life, Soapy wanted people to believe that he was good man,” Weller says of his hero. “So much of American history is involved with very poor people or even criminals coming over to make their way, trying to eradicate the past, get rich quick, buy a new identity. There is a spiritual vacuum in America, because the idea of a very gradual progression through life, a slow but steady accumulation of achievements, makes people nervous and impatient.
“We have this dream that we can go to a shrink and come out changed, or go to EST and come out changed. Nixon comes back into the public eye after crawling away with his tail between his legs, calls himself the New Nixon and somehow wants us to believe it. It seemed to me that either he was joking with us or he was insane.”
Similarly, Weller’s Soapy is so demonically slippery that one never knows when, if ever, sincerity has soiled his methodically corrupt agenda. “There is a great naïveté in America about politicians, and it expresses itself either in a dewy-eyed belief in their integrity or an utter cynicism about their motives,” Weller reasons. “And neither is true. I wanted a naif in the middle of the play (Paul) who believed utterly in this great thing and found himself telling more and more lies. Paul reflects the way people become enamored of a great and glittering figure, and because of their admiration for that figure they overlook little faults, and excuse more monstrous things, until finally something overdrives.”
In Planet Fires, which was commissioned by Rochester’s GeVa Theatre, and was scheduled to open the company’s new theatre March 24, Babe’s babe-in-the-woods is a freed black slave named Will. Like the protagonist of the Parnell and Weller plays, Wilis is trying to shake the bondase of the past and, as Parnell says, “invent himself.” As Will relinquishes his chains, he is held morally captive by people with strong and adversary opinions about the hierarchy of freedom. They include Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas, a white prostitute, a Confederate deserter and a fast-talking circus proprietor named Van Amburgh whose Collosal Circus and Hippodrome provides the fantastical setting for the melodrama of Will’s liberation.
Van Amburgh’s Circus is at once a metaphor for the technological carnival that is to consume Americans in the coming century, and a playful comment on the dialectical three-ring circus into which Will finds himself tossed. If Babe’s debaters were relegated to rings, the first would spotlight Susan Anthony and the prostitute (the relative power of women), the second would feature Frederick Douglass and the runaway soldier (the bogus power of the freed black man in relation to a white outlaw), and the third would contain Lincoln and Douglas (the power of the polity, i.e. free white men). As Will presses on, the rings of debate cross over and mesh into the concentric blur that characterizes the same power struggles in 1985.
Like Weller in Soapy Smith, Babe refuses to concede or simplify a point of view, because the multilayered nature of historical events makes a godlike position untenable. “There’s a genuine dilemma involved in our historical perception of ourselves as citizens, as a nation, as a republic,” Babe believes. “It remains unresolved and tragic that a whole portion of our population (blacks) was never assimilated, and that that portion of the population has been the fount of so many hopes and so much hatred at the same time. It’s like a living contrast, a living commentary to all we claim we believe in in this civilization. I can’t resolve it here and never intended to. What I wanted to do was depict it and make us care about one man.”
Before Planet Fires, Babe explored the American past in a Civil War drama (Rebel Women) and a Wild Bill Hickock saga (Fathers and Sons), but he is quick to point out the contrast in his approach to history from work to work. “Fathers and Sons was about Wild Bill on one level, but it was really about what happened at Kent State. The generations were at war, and the play that I wrote was to get at the spirit of the moment.”
As for Rebel Women, “it’s the way Ibsen would have done the Civil War in the South, because it’s in real time, the language is heightened and people don’t mind expressing their emotions at the drop of a hat. In many ways Ibsen is a playwright of the Reagan years, because all his concerns are those of the bourgeoisie. He made bourgeois tragedies, and some of them seem strange to us, like sexual liberation as a form of downfall. But Ibsen’s [dramaturgy] doesn’t seem to me to be the way to deal with history anymore. When you look back on history, it doesn’t occur as a neat line, or a naturalistic drama. It occurs as a series of flashes that you can hold together under the umbrella of your prejudices.”
Like Weller and Parnell, Babe finds a sense of liberation in considering contemporary matters beneath a large, historical backdrop. “We live at a time when people have relationships rather than falling in love, or have misunderstandings rather than feeling hate. The whole vocabulary has shrunk, and thus the possibilities have shrunk. If you move into a time in our history where we expect people to have slightly inflated ideas of themselves, then that’s a great liberation.
“Because I’m not responsible to the American Historical Association, I don’t have to footnote what I am doing. I have an incredible license to see historical figures exactly as I’d love to see them if I met them, and have them encountering things I imagine they encountered.”
When reminded of the responsibility-to-fact debate that followed such “factionalized” works as Doctorow’s Ragtime and Stoppard’s Travesties, Babe holds firm. “Those are two classic cases where the facts of history are not as important as the conceit of the author. My approach is more cumbersome and less witty than the Doctorow/Stoppard approach—but it’s not just name-dropping. It’s a way to create wonderful characters who come to you with biographies of their own, biographies that you can enliven.”
As the New American Epic writers scout the biographies that matter to them, it is striking to note that all of them have zeroed in on a 25-year period surrounding the Civil War. Weller would contend that it was the subject, and not the era, that was the magnet for him. He will also remind you of his yet unproduced 150-character play about the John Kennedy assassination, as well as his interest in moving into the period of the American Revolution for an upcoming play.
Babe, on the other hand, sees a method to the Civil War mania. “Revolutionary figures are just so distant from us, and so different. It would be like an American writing a play about the British aristocracy, which is what our founding fathers were, from our point of view. The Civil War focuses so poignantly on almost everything that matters in our history. It focuses on competition among various ways of making money, on the enormous moral issue of our responsibility to other people. It’s the first great instance of suffering on our soil. It’s the first thing ever recorded with photographs so graphic that it might have happened yesterday. Because Matthew Brady was there, it was our first ‘television war,’ in a sense. Those are not just good pictures, they are dramatic pictures.”
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The most ambitious stage picture to emerge from the Epic trend—a fusion of Civil War history, the search for an American Utopia, and the fabulous—is John Guare’s “Lydie Breeze” tetralogy. The first two plays of the cycle, Lydie Breeze and Gardenia, opened in quick succession in 1982 at New York’s American Place Theatre and Manhattan Theatre Club. The third play, Women and Water, will receive a revised production at the Goodman Theatre this July after a premiere production at Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre and a February reading at Washington’s Arena Stage. The fourth, Bullfinch’s Mythology, is still in its formative stages. Collectively, they trace the genesis and fall of a utopian community in what Guare has referred to as his “Oberammergau—or maybe my version of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha Country.”
To see the cycle in the order in which the plays were written (with the exception of Bullfinch’s Mythology) is to experience the history of Lydie Breeze’s Aipotu (Utopia spelled backwards) in reverse chronology. A summary of Lydie Breeze reveals the Byzantine, beyond-the-limits genre of melodrama toward which Guare is pushing. Set in 1895 Nantucket, the play presents us with the diseased and degenerative aftermath of Aipotu’s founders: a Civil War nurse, Lydie Breeze; her husband Joshua; and his veteran chums, Dan and Amos. By the opening of the play, Lydie Breeze has already committed suicide by hanging herself, Joshua has murdered Dan in a petty quarrel and Amos has become a muck-a-muck politician.
Lydie leaves behind her a 15-year-old daughter (also named Lydie), who is partially blind from a firecracker accident (and who may or may not be Dan’s daughter as well), and a 22-year-old daughter Gussie, who has aggressively renounced her parents’ vision of “a paradise of the mind.” Dan leaves behind a spiritually tortured son, an actor named Jeremiah who roams England playing Frankenstein on stage and a quasi-Jack the Ripper off-stage, and who returns to Nantucket to avenge his father’s death. Weaving its way in and around the family tree is an insidious trail of syphilis, which eventually precipitates a double suicide in the sea.
If Lydie Breeze suggests the endless generational cycle that suffers from a poisoned dream (for “syphilis” read “diseased Utopia”), Gardenia, by contrast, locates that poison in a decidedly more introspective form. The latter play finds Joshua, after toiling seven years in the writing of a utopian tome about the wonders of the universe, noisily rejected by editor William Dean Howells. Joshua follows up the rejected submission with a journal about the rise and fall of Aipotu that knocks Howells’ socks off. The journal is the quintessential subjective historical document, a 19th-century Truman Capote tell-all which exposes to posterity the truth about American dreams. Rather than publish it at Howells’ request, Joshua burns it as a concession to the politician Amos, who will grease some palms to spring Joshua from prison in order to protect his own political future.
Each of Lydie’s Aipotun brethren has committed an act of compromise or veiled criminality which metaphorically presages the capitalist American rationale as we perceive it today. In the end, none of them proves to be up to the demands of their Utopia, the victims of the same human frailty that defeated Weller’s and Parnell’s dreamers. As Joshua finally admits, “In all our dreaming we never allowed for the squalid petty furies. We mistook the size of the ocean, the size of the sky, for the size of our souls.” Women and Water goes back to the phoenix-like birth of Aipotu from the ashes of the Civil War; with the War as its actual jumping off point, it should provide an even more turbulent succession of destructions and rebirths than those that bloodied the first two plays.
Audiences and critics at Guare’s Lydie Breeze plays don’t know whether they are getting Aeschylus. Ibsen or Dynasty, and with the exception of Jack Kroll and an articulate vindication by Lloyd Rose in Atlantic Monthly, the first half of Guare’s tetralogy has been attacked—in the vitriolic language that betrays befuddlement—as “pretentious idiocy, vacuous claptrap, pastiche and travesty of the collected works of Ibsen.” The fact remains that, of the New American Epics considered here (with the possible exceptions of the breezily accessible Romance Language and Planet Fires, for which the critical verdict is not yet in), none has been roundly embraced. In trying to blaze new dramatic territory, the Epic playwrights are encountering a dearth of pioneer spirit.
Whether it was intentional or not, Guare created through the offstage character of William Dean Howells and his appraisals of Joshua’s first opus (“Your prose is heavy with the dust of European libraries. Put it to your nose and begin sneezing”) a satiric archetype of the demon theatre cognescenti, who measure work against the mark of drama that has preceded it. Michael Weller, who was after an Elizabethan model in Soapy Smith but was likened instead to Brecht, complains, “People try and find the examples on which you modeled your work and how yours falls short of them, as opposed to understanding that your intention was to do something quite different. Of course your assimilation of all the other work will seep through the cracks in your writing.”
If Weller is haunted by the spectre of Brecht, then Guare is dogged by the ghost of Ibsen. While Indeed one can hear in Lydie Breeze glaring echoes of Ghosts (Joshua to Jeremiah: “You wouldn’t have known your father would hold his cigarette that way. Exhale that way”) and the legacy of maimed offspring hearkens back to the repeated symbolic devices of other Ibsen works, Lydie Breeze and Gardenia push the Ibsen conventions over the edge into another realm of lunacy that is quintessentially Guare. For all the ambiance of churning melodramatic events, many of the major events in Gardenia and Lydie Breeze happen offstage and are described in vigorous, lyrical language that embodies both their enormity and their eccentricity.
The irony of the dilemma faced by all of the New Epic playwrights is that they are dragged down by the same tension between the past and the present that plagues their characters. When Lydie Breeze asks “How do we unchain ourselves from history without losing any of the value of the past?”, it is the same question that Huck broaches when he speculates that “maybe we can have a past and still be free.”
In acknowledging a debt to the past, Guare admits to having jumped off from Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea in the initial stages of his tetralogy, but he would also have to acknowledge Poe, Shakespeare (particularly The Tempest), the Bible, Mary Shelley, Emerson, the Greek tragedians and, perhaps most crucially, Greek mythology. Lydie Breeze and her utopian associates pay constant, self-conscious homage to the gods of Greek mythology, but the playwright is not adorning a flat-out melodrama with grander pretensions. By mythologizing Lydie Breeze (a nurse, or healer, who leaves death and disease in her wake), Guare creates an archetype for the folly of inflating “the values we hold dear” into a utopia for everyone.
It’s a “heavy” message, both in the tonnage sense and the ’60s sense, but Guare (and Weller, Parnell and Babe) will be damned if they are going to be momentous about any of it. As Babe insists, “I always think there is a way to make the serious things as flamboyant as the funny things and make the matter. I also think everybody’s bored with seeing themselves as they are now. I’m just guessing, but I think we are about to see some good plays set in the future, not fantasies but genuine dramas that push people from our time into what seems increasingly to be a no-man’s-land, where people will be stripped to the essence. But it will be another way [like historical plays] to get us out of the moment.”
Whether tomorrow’s theatre explores the future or re-explores the past, there appears to be, perhaps more than ever before, a growing awareness of our presence in history, a new sense of our emerging from, and commenting on, a longer line. A graffiti artist, passing a billboard poster in the Times Square subway station which exhorted commuters to buy U.S. Savings Bonds, could not resist the temptation to scrawl in a cartoon balloon next to Benjamin Franklin’s paternal smile, “Goetz was wrong.” At the risk of giving the author of this terse monologue too much credit, he had written the beginning of a play. He had made a connection. And maybe some progeny of the New American Epic will someday bring together Benjamin Franklin, Bernhard Goetz, Luke Skywalker, Isaac Asimov, Geraldine Ferraro, John DeLorean, General Westmoreland and Edward Albee, and have them convene in a tribunal to reassess the state of the union, There is a play in there, somewhere.
