Theatrical Spectatorship in the United States and Soviet Union, 1921-1936: A Cognitive Approach to Comedy, Identity, and Nation

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Pamela Decker, MA

Graduate Program in Theatre

The Ohio State University

2013

Dissertation Committee:

Lesley Ferris, Advisor

Jennifer Schlueter

Frederick Luis Aldama

Copyright by

Pamela Decker

2013

Abstract

Comedy is uniquely suited to reveal a specific culture’s values and identities; we understand who we are by what and whom we laugh at. This dissertation explores how comic spectatorship reflects modern national identity in four theatre productions from the twentieth century’s two rising superpowers: from the Soviet Union, Evgeny

Vakhtangov’s production of Princess Turandot (1922) and Vsevolod Meyerhold’s production of The Bedbug (1929); from the United States, Eubie Blake and Noble

Sissle’s Broadway production of Shuffle Along (1921) and Orson Welles’ Federal Theatre

Project production of Horse Eats Hat (1936). I undertake a historical and cognitive analysis of each production, revealing that spectatorship plays a participatory role in the creation of live theatre, which in turn illuminates moments of emergent national identities. By investigating these productions for their impact on spectatorship rather than the literary merit of the dramatic text, I examine what the spectator’s role in theatre can reveal about the construction of national identity, and what cognitive studies can tell us about the spectator’s participation in live theatre performance.

Theatre scholarship often marginalizes the contribution of the spectator; this dissertation privileges the body as the first filter of meaning and offers new insights into how spectators contribute and shape live theatre, as opposed to being passive observers of an

ii already-completed production. Taking account of historical circumstances, I apply theories of empathy, social affect, and group identification to each production, questioning how spectators helped create and gave meaning to these shows, along with the attitudes and identities that might have arisen from them. In my analysis, I expect to uncover moments in each nation’s history where comic spectatorship reveals an emergent national identity—either collectively uniting in a moment of cultural or political promise, or splintering under social and economic distress. Furthermore, an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of theatre production—one grounded in cognitive science, culture, and politics—provides a new perspective on the study of spectatorship in theatre history.

iii Acknowledgments

I would like to thank a number of people, who, without their assistance, advice, and support, this dissertation would not have been possible. First, I am tremendously grateful to Lesley Ferris for being a wonderful advisor and advocate. Thank you to

Frederick Aldama, for his kind support and expertise on cognitive studies. I cannot thank

Jen Schlueter enough for her guidance, helpful criticism, and sense of humor. I would also like to thank the OSU Department of Theatre for its generosity in travel assistance for conference participation and archival research. Furthermore, I am also grateful to

Amy Cook, Bruce McConachie, and the participants of the ASTR Cognitive Studies working group. Their advice, guidance, and interest in my project have been invaluable.

I must also express my appreciation to Matt Yde not only for his friendship, but for showing me just how one goes about writing a dissertation. Thank you to Francesca, for being a wonderful friend and roommate. And also, I must thank my friends from the first year of my Master’s degree at Wisconsin—Bethany, Erin, Annie, Lindsay, Liz, and

Laura—I could not have asked for a more amazing group of women with which to start my graduate journey. Thank you to Manon van de Water for all her assistance and guidance along the way. Finally, I would never have been able to accomplish this without the help of my parents; their assistance, support, and love have made all the difference in

iv the world. And, of course, a special thanks to Kaya, who has certainly made the whole journey just a little easier.

v Vita

May 2002…………………………………B.A. Theatre and English, Hanover College

May 2008…………………………………M.A. Theatre, University of Wisconsin- Madison

2008 to present……………………………Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of Theatre, The Ohio State University

Publications

“Review of Russian Culture and Theatrical Performance in America, 1891-1933.” Theatre Journal (March 2013).

“Review of Hot Off the Presses: The Curtiss Show Print Collection.” Broadside: Newsletter of the Theatre Library Association 38.1. (Fall 2010).

“Review of Nature Theatre of Oklahoma’s Romeo and Juliet.” Theatre Journal 62.4 (Dec. 2010).

Fields of Study

Major Field: Theatre

vi Table of Contents

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………....ii

Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………..iv

Vita………………………………………………………………………………………..vi

Chapter 1: Introduction…………………………………………………….…...…………1

Chapter 2: Princess Turandot and Early Soviet Identity……………….………………..29

Chapter 3: Split Empathy in Soviet Spectatorship of The Bedbug………………...…….72

Chapter 4: Shuffle Along and 1920s Spectatorship…………………………………..…114

Chapter 5: The Divided Spectatorship of Horse Eats Hat…………………………..….162

Chapter 6: Conclusion…………………………………………………………………..203

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………214

vii

Chapter 1

Introduction: Comic Spectatorship and Cultural Identity

Comedy is uniquely suited to reveal a specific culture’s values and identities; we understand who we are by whom we laugh at. This dissertation explores emergent cultural and national identities through the comic spectatorship of four theatre productions from the Soviet Union and United States. From the Soviet Union, I examine

Evgeny Vakhtangov’s production of Princess Turandot (1922) and Vsevolod

Meyerhold’s production of The Bedbug (1929); from the United States, Eubie Blake and

Noble Sissle’s Broadway production of Shuffle Along (1921) and Orson Welles’ Federal

Theatre Project production of Horse Eats Hat (1936). In my analysis, I investigate moments in each nation’s history where comic spectatorship reveals an emergent national identity—either collectively uniting in a moment of cultural or political promise, or splintering under social and economic distress. Identifying these respective moments of unified and fractured cultural identity reveals an era in each nation's modern development when its cultural promise was at its brightest. In turn, these eras are looked back to as cultural markers to define national identity through a narrative of origin. Taking account of historical circumstances, I apply theories of empathy, social affect, and group identification to each production, questioning how spectators helped create and gave meaning to these shows, along with the attitudes and identities that might have arisen from them. This dissertation privileges the body as the first filter of meaning and offers

1 new insights into how spectators contribute and shape live theatre, as opposed to being passive observers of an already-completed production.

Early in the twentieth century, the United States and Russia were positioned to become two of the most influential and powerful nations in the world. As their promise materialized after World War I, perhaps more so for the United States economically, but also for Soviet Russia as a cultural and political power, each nation exerted their identity, ideologies, and influence on the rest of the world throughout the twentieth century.

While often appearing diametrically opposed to one another in culture, politics, and economics, their paths to modern nationhood followed a remarkably similar trajectory.

The moments in each nation’s cultural development that I examine in this dissertation, during the years 1921-1936, reveal a critical time of modern nation-building for both the

US and USSR, and illuminate the identities we have come to understand as “American,” or as “Russian,” or “Soviet.” How cultural identity was shaped and reflected during this time for both nations also foreshadows the paths that each nation was to take throughout the twentieth century. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the United States’ current decline in global status, it is worthwhile to look back to the moments where each nation's cultural promise was at its strongest, in order to explore the identities that have continued to shape and inform each nation's narrative, purpose, and direction.

Spectatorship can illuminate cultural and national identity, and has up to this point been relatively unexamined in theatre scholarship. Theatre history has tended to marginalize the contribution and response of the spectator, relying instead on close readings of dramatic texts to explore their respective societies. Through a historical investigation and cognitive analysis of each production, I argue that spectatorship plays a 2 participatory and enduring role in the creation of live theatre, which in turn provides an understanding of how emerging national identities are revealed. By examining productions for their impact on spectatorship rather than the literary merit of the dramatic texts, what can the spectator’s role in the theatrical event reveal about the cultural identities of these two nations? What can cognitive studies tell us about the role of the spectator in the creation and understanding of live theatre?

Furthermore, in order to investigate national and cultural identities, I chose to examine the spectatorship of only comic theatre productions. Comedy must reflect social values and identities, and needs the spectator’s participation to be truly successful and relevant. Its dramatic structure invites the complicity of the spectator and requires a shared responsibility with the characters in the play. Guiding my analysis of comic spectatorship in all four productions were scholars such as Northrop Frye, Patrick Colm

Hogan, and Geoff King. Their arguments and observations on comic performance, plots, and spectatorship strongly influenced the direction that my analysis took. Specifically, I use Frye’s 1957 essay “The Mythos of Spring: Comedy,” along with his 1965 book A

Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance. His analysis on conventional comic structure, plots, and characters were of great help with my investigation of the four twentieth-century productions. Patrick Colm Hogan’s arguments in his 2009 book Understanding Nationalism: On Narrative, Cognitive

Science, and Identity connect nationalism and how its subsequent identities are plotted through narrative prototypes; it informed my own analysis of how comic spectatorship can reveal emergent social and cultural identities. In King’s 2002 book, Film Comedy, he asserts that “Who we laugh at, and why, has implications in terms of both how we see 3 others and how we define ourselves,” which influenced how I approached the reception to these productions in terms of social identity.1

Comedy often culminates in the reintegration and rebirth of a community, but usually at the expense of a specific character’s humiliation and social rejection.

Therefore, its actions and imagery reflect social integration and division at the same time.

This emphasis on social rehabilitation is thought to have its roots in Golden Age Greek comedy. However, the structure and devices of traditional comedy, as it has existed for over two thousand years, did not originate in the earliest forms of Greek comedy, such as the political satire of Aristophanes, but rather from what is called the New Comedy, credited to Menander (c. 342-291 BC) and later to the Roman playwright Plautus (c. 254-

184 BC).2 This development was marked in content; the plays of old comedy took place in the public sphere, and dealt with public issues—Lysistrata, The Clouds, and The Birds are all examples of Aristophanes’ satirical works that commented on public figures.

However, as Athens’s political climate changed by 404 BC, the content and structure of comedy had changed.i The new comedies contained formulaic plots about fictionalized characters that took place out of the public eye. Whereas the plots and characters in Old

Comedy typically refer to real people or events that had actually occurred, New Comedy dealt in universal character types, within an anonymous domestic setting.

While the social aspect of New Comedy shifted from the public to the private realm, its need for sociability nonetheless remained a vital component to its function.

Northrop Frye describes comedy as an inclusive genre, to both the characters in the play

i For a more detailed analysis of Old and New Greek Comedy, and the transition between the two, see William E. Gruber’s Comic Theaters: Studies in Performance and Audience Response, pp.9-42. 4 and the spectators who watch the dramatic event; he notes that older examples of comedy often conclude with an explicit invitation to festivities after the action of the play has ended. Because this invitation extends to the audience, Frye maintains that it is only with the audience’s compliance that the full resolution of comedy can occur: “As the final society reached by comedy is the one that the audience has recognized all along to be the proper and desirable state of affairs, an act of communion with the audience is in order.”3

Thus, as a requirement within the genre, all involved with the production contribute to the dramatic event—playwright, performers, and spectators—all assist in the creation of a comedy.

The invitation to the feast extends to all; however, in Frye’s description, there is at least one character that, for at least part of the play, is ridiculed and expelled from the social order. Often referred to as a blocking character, it serves an important function to the plot and the themes in dramatic comedy. As part of the plot, the blocking character’s attempts to prevent the romantic union of the young lovers provide the main conflict.

Thematically, the victory over the blocking characters and the union of the lovers, according to Frye, represents the birth of a new society: “At the end of the play the device in the plot that brings the hero and heroine together causes a new society to crystallize around the hero.”4 By the end of the play the young heroes find a way to overcome the obstacles in their way, the blocking characters are outwitted and denounced, and a new, freer society emerges from the old, repressive one. The young lovers’ marriage (or, as is often the case in traditional comedy, multiple marriages of young lovers), provides the context for the celebration of the new society’s emergence.

5 Ritualistically, this process could be traced to the tradition of scapegoating.

Detailed in James Frazer’s widely influential study The Golden Bough, scapegoat rituals have been used in multiple cultures and societies to cast out perceived evils or demons that plague a community. The scapegoat is a physical embodiment of the society’s ills, cast out beyond a community’s borders or simply killed. In addition to cleansing an ailing community of devils or sickness, a scapegoat ritual often marked the beginning of a new year, with the time immediately following given over to festivities.5 This ritual, of course, mirrors the action of most traditional comedies. However, the potential for a scapegoat’s re-admittance into a community does exist in the comic form. Once the blocking character (or scapegoat) has been summarily humiliated and cast out of the existing social order, the young lovers united and society set on a new course, this character is forgiven and let back into the community. Since this character has been properly rehabilitated and has accepted the ways of the new social order (in theory at least), it is the implicit understanding that he or she will not behave the same way as in the past.

Frye maintains that it is the tendency of comedy to forgive and accept those who have prevented the emergence of a new society, yet we observe that this does not need to happen in a successful comedy. Using Shakespeare as an example, many of his comedies do not feature the blocking characters completely rehabilitated and harmoniously reintegrated into the new society. In fact, some are purposefully excluded. At the end of

Much Ado about Nothing, Don John is captured and brought back to Messina, only to be tortured for his mischief. In Twelfth Night, once Malvolio is released from his prison and reunited with the other characters he promptly vows revenge upon them and departs in a 6 rage. Only the potential for harmonious reconciliation exists as a new and better society emerges at the end of the play, not a guarantee of it. The joyful new world can emerge and move forward without everyone from the previous society forgiven, or even included.

It is worth pointing out that in traditional comedy, the action ends in the renewal of a society, but the overall structure and rules of that society stay much the same.

Laughter often serves as a tool of social conformity and points to what many have perceived as comedy’s conservatism. Traditional comedy, while often upending societal norms throughout the course of a play, actually reinforces traditional social roles by its conclusion. The most obvious example is the marriage festival that marks the conclusion of most comedies. Another is the scapegoating of characters that possess or represent undesirable physical or social qualities. Stott suggests that “Instances of comedy that openly deride ethnic, gender, or physical attributes are acts of aggression that indicate a fear of difference and a desire to present oneself as more roundly human than those in the target group.”6 Maintaining patriarchal roles and the dominance of specific social groups through laughter certainly contributes to the isolation and dehumanization of another group, but it is also through this very tactic that dominant groups come to strengthen their own sense of identity and social cohesion. King asserts that “Laughter at others is one way social groups define themselves, a process consisting to a large extent of distinctions between self and other. It is common from one culture to find the norms of another to be

‘foolish’ or ‘unclean’ in one way or another.”7

The spectators are complicit in this action; in order for the play to truly be considered “comedic,” they must agree with the characters that this blocking agent is 7 rightly defeated and isolated from the world of the play. As the contemporary complexities of a play like The Merchant of Venice demonstrate, who we decide to cast out and for what reasons change with time. Spectators are the ones who allow for the resolution of comedy, as Frye maintains, and must judge if a comedic production is accurate in its choice of scapegoats and who is invited to the final celebration. Eric Weitz observes that “If there is a yearning to validate our experiences of life with others, it may account for some part of the spark of recognition which attends the response to a successful joke…Our senses of life and humor are individually constructed, but jokes would never succeed if they didn’t also attest to shared experience of the world.”8

Theatrical Spectatorship and the Cognitive Turn

It is this “shared experience of the world” provided through comedy and theatre spectatorship on which cognitive studies can offer new insights. For example, it is generally understood that watching a humorous movie or television show is a funnier experience when viewed with other people than by oneself; joy, along with all other emotional states, can be infectious among groups of people. Cognitive studies can help us understand how these emotional states can be contagious, and its greater relevance among local communities and larger societies. In his book Laughter, Robert Provine scientifically explores the ubiquitous yet elusive phenomenon of emotional contagion— how it seems to work, and why. Regarding infectious emotion during a comic performance, Provine asserts that a successful production is dependent upon audience and performers working together. He writes, “Theatrical performance, especially comedy, involves a collaboration between actors and audience…Successful comedy cannot be done in a vacuum—many actors have commented on how difficult it is to do comedy in a 8 half-empty or indifferent house.”9 Emotional collaboration seems to be a key component to an effective comic performance; the process begun by performers ends in a circle of festive reciprocation with spectators, which strengthens the social bonds between those who watch and perform in the production. In addition to Provine's investigation of the human experience of laughter and comedy, other research in cognitive studies provides valuable insights on the interplay between performers and spectators, different groups of spectators, and spectators and their larger culture.

When considering the role of spectatorship in these productions, social and historical contexts are not adequate for a full understanding of spectators’ participation in a performance. Because of what recent developments in cognitive studies have revealed about how emotions “catch” amongst groups of people, whom we empathize with and why, and how people identify with specific groups, we can more thoroughly investigate how spectators contribute to the creation of theatre productions and make meaning of them. Ultimately, this dissertation involves an intersection of theatre, politics, culture, and research in the cognitive sciences. The fulcrum of all four areas is the body, which makes an analysis based in cognitive science necessary for this work. While the cognitive sciences are often identified with research on the brain and neuroscience, the field covers a wide range of human function and structure, including the origin of emotions and feelings, bodily and sensory perception, and how structures within the body influence social communication.

For the last two decades, interest in the field of cognitive studies has grown remarkably, with scientists publishing works that have begun to be utilized not only by those working in the sciences and psychology, but by scholars in the humanities as well. 9 Theatre scholars such as Bruce McConachie, Rhonda Blair, and Jill Stevenson, among others, have incorporated research on cognition and neuroscience in their theoretical, practical, and historiographical work. In his 2008 book Engaging Audiences: A

Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre, Bruce McConachie explains why cognitive studies is a fruitful approach to theatre scholarship. He writes that “Cognitive studies, as opposed to semiotics, is better equipped to help us understand the phenomena of live theatre…there are fundamental differences between readers making sense of signs on a printed page and the mostly nonsymbolic activity of spectator cognition.”10

This new approach to theatre studies has many benefits. It provides an alternative to theoretical discourses based in semiotics and deconstruction, and encourages analyses that acknowledge and appreciate the materiality of theatre performance. Theatre can be interpreted as signs to be decoded, but it is also living bodies, in the form of actors, performing for other living bodies, spectators. These spectators in turn take those performances with them when they leave the theatre, both in their mind and body, which lingers with them as they interact within their respective communities.

The most relevant theories and research that assist my analyses involve empathy and group identification, but having a brief description on the recent discoveries of the

Mirror Neuron System (MNS) is beneficial, as most scientists and psychologists believe that the MNS is foundational in how empathy, emotional contagion, and other cognitive processes work. After a Mirror Neuron System was discovered in monkeys nearly twenty years ago, many neuroscientists concluded that a similar neural network also exists in humans. The general consensus is that similar to the Macaque monkey, where MN activity was first discovered, there are neurons in the human brain that activate for both 10 an observed action and the same performed action. Validated by both fMRIii and clinical studies of patients with damage to parts of the brain where MNs are thought to function, the implication of this discovery is that there is a system of neurons in the brain that simulates observed actions; by simply watching an action being performed our neurons simulate the same action within our brains. We are literally embodying what we watch, on a neuronal level. The implications of this kind of inter-neural communication are potentially profound for understanding human behavior and thought. Some neuroscientists, such as V.S. Ramachandran, believe that the human MNS is likely to be responsible for many of the functions and behaviors that make human beings “human.”

Ramachandran and Lindsay M. Oberman state that “the discovery of neurons in the premotor cortex that respond to both observed and executed actions similarly provided the mechanism that may underlie a host of seemingly unrelated cognitive and social abilities including imitation, theory of mind, empathy, and language.”11 However, despite reservations among neuroscientists about whether a unified mirror neuron system exists, or if there are individual neurons that function only as mirror neurons, it is generally agreed upon that there are simulating neurons playing a prominent role in embodiment, empathy, and understanding the actions and goals of others.

While understanding the function of neurons and other brain-related processes may seem peripheral to the event of watching live theatre, research from the cognitive sciences holds much promise for the study of arts and humanities overall. For example,

John Cacioppo and Gun R. Semin advocate that instead of thinking about social cognition

ii Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. An fMRI measures blood flow in the brain and spinal cord that corresponds with neuronal activity. 11 in terms of “receivers” and “senders,” we consider a model that relies on a more engaged interaction between two or more agents. They write, “the current emphasis on a passive observer paradigm is…about an individual rather than a dyad, triad, or group. The co- regulation of individuals is about jointly recruited processes and the resulting emergent cognition and behavior.”12 While Cacioppo and Semin are not specifically discussing an aesthetic event, their research (along with others) in cognitive studies has opened new avenues of inquiry in the investigation of spectator/performer dynamic, and suggests broader implications for the study of performance, literature, and aesthetics. Using cognitive studies to explore literature and the aesthetic experience in Conversations on

Cognitive Cultural Studies: Literature, Language, and Aesthetics, Frederick Aldama states that “the aesthetic is essentially a relation—a relation between an object and a subject or of a subject to an object. Beauty is not contained in the object itself. It is not contained in the subject (human) itself. Beauty is contained only and exclusively in the relationship between object and the subject.”13 Utilizing research from cognitive scientists like Cacioppo and Semin, and following the lead from scholars like

McConachie, Blair, Stevenson, and Aldama, this dissertation examines the spectator/performer dynamic of live theatre from the perspective that it is an active relation—one with shifting and emerging exchanges of emotions, expressions, and ideas.

There is no stasis or isolated moments between one another in a theatrical event. Indeed, these experiences are shared ones.

Among specific cognitive research used in this dissertation, I foreground my investigation of spectator response in Evan Thompson’s analysis of empathy as outlined in his 2007 book Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of the Mind. 12 Empathy can be a somewhat loaded and indistinct term, so it is important to establish how I define empathy throughout this dissertation, and how it distinguishes itself from other experiences such as sympathy or compassion. Thompson defines empathy as

“experience[ing] another human being directly as a person—that is, as an intentional being whose bodily gestures and actions are expressive of his or her experiences or states of mind.”14 For Thompson, this is definitely not the same thing as sympathy, which he defines as developing feelings of pity or sorrow for another's distress.15 As I will explain throughout this dissertation, simply feeling the same distress or understanding that another person is going through discomfort does not automatically mean that one will take pity or wish to ease the suffering. There are instances in which people fully understand that another is suffering, and choose to do nothing to alleviate it, or even take pleasure in it (this is often referred to as schadenfreude). Empathy, then, according to

Thompson, is emotionally feeling the same way as another, or consciously knowing what another person is feeling whether one experiences the accompanying emotion or not.

Empathy is a unique experience unto itself; it serves as a “gateway” to developing feelings of pity or schadenfreude in the case of another's suffering, or of joy in the case of another's good fortune, but it is a separate experience from those feelings.

Thompson, a philosopher of mind, incorporates research from cognitive science with phenomenology to explore cognitive processes such as empathy, consciousness, and emotion. In Mind in Life, Thompson defines empathy and classifies it into four different levels of experience: “(1) The passive or involuntary coupling or pairing of my living body with your living body in perception and action; (2) The imaginary movement or transposition of myself into your place; (3) The understanding of you as an other to me, 13 and of me as an other to you; (4) The moral perception of you as a person.”16 These four levels have proven vital in my analysis of theatre spectatorship, as the different experiences of empathy have given valuable insights to the reception of the productions, the circumstances in which these productions took place, as well as how the spectatorship of these productions reflected moments of cultural unity or discord. As I will be referring to these levels multiple times throughout my dissertation, the following paragraphs detail how each level functions and has informed the analyses of the four theatre productions' spectatorship.

Thompson’s first level of empathy, what he refers to as passive or involuntary coupling, involves comprehending another’s emotions, gestures, and movements. At its most basic, this kind of empathy simply allows us to experience another person as just that—a living bodied subject capable of expression, thought, and agency.17 Citing research on the mirror neuron system as evidence that supports this foundational level of empathy, Thompson describes this kind of empathy as something that everyone engages in. No matter how a spectator feels about a performance, if he or she can perceive and understand what is happening, then they are experiencing this level of empathy. As this is a kind of “universal” form of empathy, this experience is taken into account for all of the productions that I examine.

The second level of empathy, described as “the imaginary transposition of oneself to the other’s place,” is a far more conscious process than bodily coupling and a basic comprehension of actions.18 It involves a willingness and ability to imagine oneself in another’s place. This ability is also referred to as Theory-of-Mind (ToM), which people are thought to have when they consciously speculate about the mental states of 14 others.19 It is important to point out that ToM does not have to be an accurate estimation of what another is thinking, but only necessary that one is intentionally trying to guess what another is feeling. This level of empathy is also applied to all of the productions' spectatorship, as it helps to reveal what possible social and group identifications existed in spectators, and what kinds of emotional and mental states were being projected onto the productions by spectators. The third level of empathy, which is more complex than the first two, offers new ways to understand the spectator/performer dynamic, and how spectators might actively contribute to a live theatrical event. The third kind of empathy, according to Thompson, involves “the possibility of seeing myself from your perspective, that is, as you empathetically perceive me. Empathy thus becomes reiterated, so that I empathetically imagine your empathetic experience of me and you empathetically experience my empathetic experience of you.”20 Far more involved than simply comprehending the actions of another, or imposing your idea of what another might be thinking or feeling, this kind of empathy requires a reciprocity of experience—a feedback loop, if you will, of shared emotion and perspective. Thompson describes a state of shared experience that breaks down any barriers between a subject and an other, until both are able to empathize with each other to the point that they are able to experience the situation from the other’s perspective, at which point the other would effectively cease to be “other.” Also, those who are caught in this reciprocity of experience are better able to step outside their immediate perspectives and see themselves as part of a larger dynamic social body of which they are participating agents. In all four of the productions that I examine, this level of empathy led to new interpretations of how spectators contributed to the live performances, and made meaning of them. 15 Finally, the fourth level of empathy as defined by Thompson factors less in my analyses of Princess Turandot and Horse Eats Hat, but is important in the chapters on

The Bedbug and Shuffle Along. Thompson describes this experience as “the perception of the other as a being who deserves concern and respect. This type of empathy is not the same as any particular feeling of concern for another, such as sympathy, love, or compassion. Rather, it is the underlying capacity to have such other-directed and other- regarding feelings of concern.”21 Especially in regards to how spectators can potentially view scapegoats or heroes who are from a different social, political, or racial group, applying this level of empathy to the spectator's experience can reveal how opinions and identification can evolve about others after having seen a comic performance.

Additionally, theories of social identification inform my analyses of the four productions' spectatorship. I use theories of in-group and out-group identification to examine how spectators might have identified with theatre productions, and how these identifications contributed to larger cultural identities. In his 2008 book Human: The

Science of What Makes Us Unique, Michael Gazzaniga points out that “Social psychologists have shown that group loyalty and hostility emerge with predictable ease.

The process begins with groups’ categorizing into Us and Them. It is called in-group— out-group bias and is universal and ineradicable [Gazzaniga's italics].”22 Applying this concept of in-groups and out-groups helps to examine not only how previous group identifications of spectators determined response to the productions, but also how the experience of seeing the productions contributed to creating new in-group and out-group identifications.

16 Forging Modern Identities: Spectatorship in the Soviet Union and United

States

I intend to use this research and analysis of spectatorship to investigate the emergent modern identities of the United States and Soviet Russia. I have found the modern trajectories of both nations to be compellingly similar and deserving of analysis.

Each nation emerged as an international power immediately after WWI, and began to display a perceived exceptionalism and sense of global destiny. In Terrible Honesty:

Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, an extensive historical analysis of 1920s Manhattan,

Ann Douglas identifies this historical moment in the United States as having a profound impact on its cultural identity. She writes that “America’s greatest takeoff occurred in the late 1910s and 1920s. All historical circumstances in the 1918-28 decade…seemed effortlessly to conspire to assure the country’s global preeminence.”23 As the United

States experienced a growing sense of cultural and economic dominance throughout the world, Russia was following a similar path of modernization at the beginning of the twentieth century. Nicholas Rzhevsky describes this sense of cultural purpose, albeit with a tone of regret, when he writes:

The prophecies…that Russia had a unique universal mission to contribute to

humanity turned out to be true in the twentieth century. However, except the

contributions they imagined were replaced by a cautionary tale of the central

principles played out in historical communism—the diminution of human beings

to social and economic categories implemented by force—and by the tragic

earthly resolution of the perennial hopes of complete freedom, complete human

mastery of the world, complete equality and moral being.24 17 At the beginning of the 1920s, those in command of Soviet Russia’s cultural and political destiny saw nothing less than a world revolution, modeled in the style of the 1917

Revolution, sweeping the globe and creating a new global society in the image of Soviet

Russia. The global aspirations of the United States, while perhaps not as totalizing or monolithic, still nonetheless desired to dominate much of the world in profits if not in politics.

Furthermore, theatre performance, both in the United States and Soviet Russia during the 1920s, was particularly reflective of the evolving sense of modern destiny in both nations, and achieved a cultural pre-eminence throughout the world. The avant- garde productions of Soviet Russia were equated with artistic quality, a modern sensibility, and high cultural status throughout Europe and the United States. Never had the world seen such an explosion of bold and experimental theatre productions in such a short span of time. Directors such as Vsevolod Meyerhold, Evgeny Vakhtangov, and

Alexander Tairov produced both contemporary and classical plays with daring concepts, presentational acting styles, and modern set designs. Also, while not all of the great

Soviet directors produced overtly political work, most of the dominant theatre practitioners heavily infused their work with a strong political and cultural sensibility, and many of the most famous Soviet productions served as direct political commentary or

Bolshevik propaganda. This cultural flourishing during Revolutionary Russia— theatrical, artistic, and literary—became a point of national reference and identification throughout the existence of the Soviet Union and contemporary Russian society.

Rzhevsky describes this time as a “specific historical period of unusual brilliance and creative vitality: the end of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. 18 This was the central moment of modern Russian culture, its historical crux, and…a primary point of orientation and hope after the collapse of the Soviet Union.’25

During this time in the United States, performance was not as conceptually advanced as in the Soviet Union, but the theatrical entertainments, particularly the ones coming out of Harlem and Manhattan, were gaining world-wide acclaim for their own merits. As the Harlem Renaissance spread through Manhattan and its night clubs, attended by wealthy white patrons, performances by African American entertainers became not only a cultural commodity, but a cultural export as well. Douglas elaborates:

Jazz, like the dances it spawned, like its predecessor ragtime and its companion

the blues, was the creation of America’s Negro population, and white urban

Americans wanted to go straight to the source to get more of it. By the mid-1920s,

Harlem was being advertised as the “Nightclub Capital of the World.” About 125

nightclubs, led by the Cotton Club and Connie’s Inn, served up African-American

music and dancing to white patrons eager to enjoy a little regression back to

jungle life and to participate, if only as voyeurs, in what was palpably the most

exciting entertainment scene America had ever boasted.26

Rooted in African American music as well as American vaudeville and blackface minstrelsy, these entertainments began to influence New York theatre performance from

Broadway revues to night-club routines. Within the decade, jazz music and these minstrelsy-inspired entertainments became attractions for foreign tourists as well as exports to Europe, demonstrating both the United States' cultural allure and rise in global status.

19 The United States and Soviet Russia experienced a peak of cultural innovation during the 1920s, and while the artistic output was markedly different from each other's, the modern theatrical cultures of both nations can be traced back to specific moments in the nineteenth century. For Russians, it was the eradication of serfdom in 1861; in the

United States it was the emancipation of African American slaves in 1863. These moments, taking place within years of one another, marked not only the beginning of a

“modern” identity for both nations, but also set the nations on cultural paths that would determine the kinds of theatrical performances that I examine in this dissertation.

Rzhevsky explains the relevance of these historical moments on the developing identities of each nation:

Serfdom, which ended in 1861 one year before Lincoln’s proclamation freeing

Afro-Americans, was as long-lasting in cultural repercussions and social

retributions as American slavery. A crucial factor, reminiscent of American

liberal angst in the 1960s, was the upper classes’ feeling of guilt. It impelled the

1870s “going to the people,” a specific historical event, but also a description of

fundamental directions in Russian social and political agendas in the modern

period.27

A cultural repercussion of what Rzhevsky describes as “going to the people” was many writers, artists, and cultural critics in Russia appropriating folk culture in order to connect or align themselves with “the people.” In his book Inventing Popular Culture, John

Storey asserts that those who considered themselves “experts” on folk culture used this tactic to engineer a modern national identity: “the folk allowed middle-class intellectuals to imagine a lost national and natural identity and to dream of the possibility of a new 20 ‘authentic’ national unity of a people bound together once again by the organic “ties of land and language.”28 How this idealized vision of folk culture manifested itself in many of the Soviet theatre productions from the 1920s was through the use of popular entertainments, such as circus and cabaret performance, but also through clowning and

Commedia dell’arte. In the case of the productions of Princess Turandot and The

Bedbug, Vakhtangov and Meyerhold drew from Italian street performance in order to establish the production's “folk” sensibility, and to distinguish it from more “bourgeois” styles of theatre.

For the United States, the most popular theatrical entertainments would be inspired and derived from African American entertainments that originated in the nineteenth century. Even before the emancipation proclamation, blackface minstrelsy dominated live entertainments from the 1840s onward. Blackface minstrelsy was an entertainment first developed by white male performers, but towards the end of the nineteenth century it had become adopted and modified by African American performers.

And, while having lost its popular appeal by the beginning of the twentieth century, it nonetheless determined the kinds of theatre that flourished on New York City stages during the height of the Harlem Renaissance and Negro Vogue of the 1920s. The complexities and social issues regarding African American and white relations were reflected through such theatrical entertainments as the Broadway musicals of the 1890s, and the various live and filmed entertainments of the early twentieth century.

Regarding the individual productions and the historical circumstances surrounding them, there were numerous authors, scholars, and other resources that were instrumental in my research. For my research into early Soviet Russia and the 21 productions of Princess Turandot and The Bedbug, Konstantin Rudnitsky’s extensive survey of early-to-mid twentieth-century theatre, Russian and Soviet Theatre: Tradition and the Avant Garde (2000), proved invaluable to this project. Nicholas Rzhevsky’s two books, The Modern Russian Theater: A Literary and Cultural History (2009) and the

1998 edition of The Cambridge Companion to Modern Russian Culture also informed the theatrical productions as well as the cultural and historical conditions of the time period.

For specific research on Meyerhold and Vakhtangov, Edward Braun's 1969 Meyerhold on Theatre and Andrei Malaev-Babel's 2011 The Vakhtangov Sourcebook provided insights from the directors into the process and circumstances surrounding each production. Finally, Vladmir Brovkin's 1994 Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War:

Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918-1922 and his 1998 Russia After

Lenin: Politics, Culture and Society 1921-1929, guided my analysis and understanding of the political and social backdrop of early Soviet Russia.

My investigation of the United States’ productions were supported largely by a few key texts as well as various archives at the New York Public Library. Already cited in this introduction and invaluable to my research on 1920s New York was Ann

Douglas’s 1995 book Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. Also instrumental for my research on Shuffle Along and the cultural circumstances surrounding the production was David Krasner’s 2002 A Beautiful Pageant: African-American

Theatre, Drama and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910-1927; without

Douglas’s or Krasner’s scholarship on these topics, this project would have proven extremely daunting. For my research on Horse Eats Hat and the Federal Theatre Project,

Simon Callow’s 1995 biography of Orson Welles, Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu 22 was exhaustive in its research of this lesser-known production. Mark Fearnow’s 1997 analysis of Horse Eats Hat in 1930s America, The American Stage and the Great

Depression: A Cultural History of the Grotesque offered important perspectives into the spectator response of the production. Finally, the archived collections that I was able to research at the Schomburg and Performing Arts branches of the New York Public Library proved vital to this project. From the Schomburg Center, the Helen Armstead-Johnson and Florence Mills Collections aided my research of Shuffle Along; from the Performing

Arts Library, The Billy Rose Collection and Hallie Flanagan Papers informed my research of Horse Eats Hat.

The first chapter of my analysis focuses on the spectatorship of the Soviet production of Princess Turandot. In the 1922 production of Carlo Gozzi’s 1762 version of Princess Turandot, director Evgeny Vakhtangov created a joyful, life-affirming piece of theatre during the final days of the Russian Civil War. The production was an exuberant success, drawing a spectatorship from a variety of backgrounds in Soviet

Russia, and ran for over 1,000 performances. Robert Leach describes its effect on national identity as “implicitly an evocation of what post-revolutionary Russia might become.”29 I argue that Princess Turandot represented a collectively hopeful view towards the newly-established state, and that the spectator response to the show revealed a moment of unified cultural and social promise in the Soviet Union. By investigating the spectatorship of Princess Turandot through the lens of the civil war and the imminent reconstruction of the Soviet Union, I argue that spectators, by empathizing with the multi-layered circumstances of the production, could embody identities and attitudes that were unimaginable in earlier political spectacles. While not as overtly political a 23 production as most of its contemporaries, Turandot was nevertheless able to unite spectators in a moment of cultural and social purpose.

The second chapter examines Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1929 play The Bedbug, directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold. The production used its comedic form to ridicule and ostracize those aligned with the bourgeois values associated with the New Economic

Policy. Spectators, by empathizing with either the futuristic social order, or with the lead character—the grotesque social climber Prisypkin—helped shape the relevance of this production in the context of the political developments during the late 1920s. I argue that if Turandot revealed a triumphant moment of newfound social purpose, the Bedbug reflected an increasingly fractured and cynical Soviet identity. Due to the rampant abuses and corruption from the growing communist bureaucracy, combined with increasingly difficult conditions for workers and considerably less expressive freedom for artists, many Russians felt a growing discontent with the once bright future promised by the

Bolshevik elite. As a result, any cohesive Soviet identity that was established and accepted in the early 1920s had begun to splinter the end of the decade.

The third chapter turns to the theatre productions of the United States, where I examine the 1921 Broadway musical Shuffle Along. Shuffle Along was one of the first

African-American Broadway musical comedies successful with both white and black audiences. It is considered by many to have initiated the African American artistic and cultural flourishing in the 1920s known as the Harlem Renaissance. Concerning this cultural moment in modern American identity, Ann Douglas calls the 1920s the “most revealing moment, the decade after the Great War (as this generation called World War

I), when America seized the economic and cultural leadership of the West.”30 The 24 spectatorship of Shuffle Along reflected this moment of economic and cultural revelation within the United States.

The final chapter of my analysis examines Orson Welles and John Houseman’s

1936 Federal Theatre Project’s spectatorship of Horse Eats Hat, which I argue reflected a fractured national identity during the Great Depression. The farcical, absurdist production was not a critical or commercial success, yet it managed to create a cult-like following among select theatre-goers. Its split spectatorship implies that those who did embrace the show forged a separate community of self-identified spectators, effectively othering themselves in relation to the larger public. The fact that this absurdist farce was funded by the Works Progress Administration further contributed to its political polarization. Overall, it revealed a moment in modern United States history when the public identity split into social and political associations that have endured up to present day. In this chapter I argue that the divided spectatorship of Horse Eats Hat’s reveals a cultural divide among audience members in this moment of history, and a disillusionment with the cultural excesses of the United States during the 1920s.

Finally, it is important to state that this dissertation is not using science to arrive at an objective analysis of spectatorship. For my purposes, cognitive studies serves as a lens from which to analyze the spectatorship of these productions within their historical contexts. My intention is to use research that opens new avenues of inquiry in theatre history, not to limit them. Ultimately, I will demonstrate that the spectatorship of these four productions reflected specific moments in the modernity of each nation when a common social identity or purpose first crystallized in the minds of spectators, and when that unified identity began to fracture and dissolve. To arrive at these conclusions, this 25 dissertation requires an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of the theatre productions—one grounded in cognitive studies, culture, and politics—and supports a new methodology with which to study spectatorship in theatre history.

26

Endnotes

1 Geoff King. Film Comedy. London, New York: Wallflower Press, 2002: 129.

2 Andrew Stott. Comedy. New York: Routledge, 2005: 21.

3 Northrop Frye. “Mythos of Comedy,” Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957: 142.

4 Ibid. 141-142.

5 James Frazer. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922: 575.

6 Stott, 147.

7 King, 144.

8 Eric Weitz. The Cambridge Introduction to Comedy. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge UP, 2009: 68.

9 Robert Provine. Laughter: A Scientific Investigation. New York: Viking, 2000: 138-39.

10 Bruce McConachie. Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008: 3.

11 Lindsay M. Oberman and V.S. Ramachandran. “Reflections on the Mirror Neuron System: Their Evolutionary Functions Beyond Motor Representation,” Mirror Neuron Systems: The Role of Mirroring Processes in Social Cognition. Ed. Jaime Pineda. New York: Springer, 2009: 40.

12 Gun R. Semin and John T. Cacioppo. “From Embodied Representation to Co- regulation,” Mirror Neuron Systems: The Role of Mirroring Processes in Social Cognition. Ed. Jaime Pineda. New York: Springer, 2009: 111.

13 Frederick Aldama. Conversations on Cognitive Cultural Studies: Literature, Language, and Aesthetics. Co-authored with Patrick Colm Hogan. Ohio State University Press, 2014. 27

14 Evan Thompson. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007: 386.

15 Ibid: 386.

16 Ibid: 393.

17 Ibid: 393.

18 Ibid: 395.

19 Ibid: 396.

20 Ibid: 398.

21 Ibid: 401.

22 Michael Gazzaniga. Human: The Science of What Makes Us Unique. New York: Harper Collins, 2008: 74.

23 Ann Douglas. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: 1995: 4.

24 Nicholas Rzhevsky The Cambridge Companion to Modern Russian Culture. Ed. Nicholas Rzhevsky. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998: 6.

25 Ibid: 8-9.

26 Douglas: 74.

27 Rzhevsky: 7.

28 John Storey. Inventing Popular Culture: From Folklore to Globalization. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003:14.

29 Robert Leach. Revolutionary Theatre, 1917-1930. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999: 309.

30 Douglas: 3.

28

Chapter 2

Princess Turandot and Early Soviet Identity

Turandot had a triumphant success all through the Soviet Union and also abroad—Berlin, Stockholm, Paris, and many other cities. The play carried in itself, let us say, one- millionth part of the faith in a bright and happy future which permeated the conscience of the Soviet people.

- Ruben Simonov, Stanislavsky’s Protégé: Eugene Vakhtangov. p. 198

The 1922 production of Princess Turandot is widely considered one of the most significant productions of early Soviet theatre. Its legend has been forever associated with that of its director, Evgeny Vakhtangov, who died of cancer at age thirty-nine shortly after the play opened. Andrei Malaev-Babel writes that “Turandot is considered

Vakhtangov’s testament. It survived over 1,000 performances in its original staging, and enjoyed two consecutive revivals.”1 Its exuberant reception by the Moscow theatre community on the night of its dress rehearsal only solidified its narrative as a great achievement in theatre history. In addition, the staging methods and acting approach that

Vakhtangov developed with his actors, known as fantastic realism, foreshadowed major theatrical innovations later in the twentieth century such as Bertolt Brecht’s Epic Theatre and Jerzy Grotowski's Poor Theatre. As his final production, it serves as a haunting indication of what the great director was capable of achieving, as well as the productions that were never to be. Without any obvious political overtones, the show reflected the brutality and hardships endured during the civil war with a sense of optimism. The light, 28 joyous comedy of Turandot became a metaphor for hope and festivity during a cold, dark, and uncertain time for the new Soviet state.

However, the production reveals more than Vakhtangov’s great talent cut tragically short or a celebratory contrast to harsh conditions during the civil war. The mass appeal of this production indicates that Princess Turandot reflected a moment in the social history of the Soviet Union, one that more politically-themed theatre productions from the era were unable to achieve. Konstantin Rudnitsky describes how the production was able to reflect the age without being overt: “Vakhtangov refused to ‘reflect his times’ literally. The pulse of contemporary times, however, did beat in Princess Turandot. It reflected the essence of the period; the festive, forward-looking, and hopeful spirit of the time.”2 The spectator response and participation in the show revealed a moment of unified cultural and social promise in the Soviet Union, a moment that was necessary to move the war-weary population forward from a bleak survivalist mentality into a more prosperous and stable identification. The suffering experienced during civil war and the subsequent War Communism gave way to a sense of joy and collective celebration in the world of Turandot; the triumph of life in the face of death and a desire to connect audiences and performers through an act of collaborative theatre all made this production a moment of realized potential for the Soviet Union in the minds of its spectators.

This chapter investigates the spectatorship of Princess Turandot through the lens of the civil war and the imminent reconstruction of the Soviet Union. This production could not have reflected this moment of cultural promise without the exuberant response and participation from its spectators. I explore how the production managed to achieve such mass appeal among its spectators at the specific time it did, and what this reveals of 29 an emergent Soviet identity. Specifically, I connect the spectator’s experience to what

Andrei Malaev-Babel describes as “the three layers of the character structure…present in every aspect of Vakhtangov’s Turandot.” By Vakhtangov’s setting aside the conventions of Stanislavsky’s psychological realism and having the actors play three different given circumstances—the world of Carlo Gozzi’s Princess Turandot (fairy-tale China), an imagined Renaissance Italy (as commedia players enacting the Gozzi text), and present day Moscow (the actors were also intentionally playing themselves playing the characters)--I argue that the spectators were also able to identify with these three separate circumstances. These circumstances, in turn, resonated with the emerging cultural and social identity of the Soviet Union. Also, I investigate how spectators contributed to the creation and perception of this show and shaped its dominant narrative in theatre history.

How might have Turandot united spectators through comic performance, and contributed to a common in-group identity during a time of social, political, and economic turbulence?

Theories of empathy and social identification guide my investigation of how spectators would first have emotionally identified with the characters in the production through the stylized and multi-layered performances. Because of “the three layers of character structure” that Malaev-Babel describes, spectators were able to empathize with the performers in multiple ways that acknowledged not only the circumstances of the play itself, but also the circumstances of present-day Soviet Union, as well as the hopeful circumstances of a festive, bright, idealized world—an imagined space where a common social identity can be projected onto their current lives. Spectators, by socially identifying with the “given circumstances” of the production (Vakhtangov’s concept of the 30 production included the spectators’ presence in the given circumstances of the play), could embody identities and attitudes that were unimaginable in earlier political spectacles.i Without obvious social messages, Turandot was able to achieve what the more decidedly Bolshevik spectacles could not—uniting spectator and performer in a moment of hopeful cultural and social purpose.

Identity, Spectacle, and Spectatorship: The Storming of the Winter Palace,

Mystery-Bouffe, and Princess Turandot as Soviet Comedies

One of the greatest challenges facing the Bolsheviks throughout the civil war of

1917-1922 was establishing a common narrative of national identity and social purpose in the fledgling Soviet state. In order to convince the population of its common identity, state-appointed cultural guardians promoted art, literature, and theatre that captured the loyalties of the people through its ideological content. Theatre proved to be one of the most attractive methods to sway the population towards the Bolshevik cause; not only did theatre combine numerous art forms such as visual design, music, and literature, but it was particularly effective at reaching a nation where nearly eighty percent of its population was illiterate. Laurence Senelick describes how the Bolsheviks quickly invested in theatre in order to establish cultural identity:

No sooner had the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917 than they turned

their attention to the theatre. As early as 9 November 1917, a decree of the Soviet

of People's Commissars placed the theaters under the authority of the arts section

of the newly formed State Commission (later Commissariat) for Education. A

i Given circumstances is a termed developed by Constantin Stanislavsky to describe the conditions in which a character exists in the world of a play. Time, place, social and economic circumstances are all examples of given circumstances. 31 theatre section (TEO: Teatralny Otdel) was organized to consolidate and operate

the theatres. At first, the TEO was run by experienced people who had a real

interest in the theatre's welfare: Meyerhold directed it from August 1920, and its

repertoire section was under the control of poet Aleksandr Blok, while Evgeny

Vakhtangov, Stanislavsky's favorite pupil, ran the directing section.3

From the outset of the Revolution, many influential theatre artists were quick to align themselves with the Bolsheviks. Leading the charge was Vsevolod Meyerhold, but others would follow in creating politically-themed work that glorified the Soviet Union after the 1917 October Revolution. Vakhtangov, as will be explained later, was also enthusiastic towards the outcome of the Revolution, but his productions featured suggestive and fantastical content over more direct propaganda.

From a narrative perspective, theatre performance proved to be an ideal medium for conveying new Soviet values as well. James von Geldern explains that “Public celebrations become particularly meaningful during times of revolutionary change, when societies not only must project themselves into the future but must grapple with the legacy of their past.”4 To promote a promising future, the Bolsheviks needed to establish what it currently meant to be Soviet, which meant creating a story of origin that distinguished this new identity from previous ones. The Bolsheviks and their adherents believed that through theatre spectatorship could a single national identity be best realized and communicated to the nearly 185 million people from over 100 different ethnicities. In addition to the theatre clubs associated with the government-run

32 Proletkult,ii theatre as a whole proliferated throughout the Soviet Union during this time in the forms of touring groups, local workers’ theatres, and even amateur groups within the ranks of the Red Army and Navy.iii The overall intention of the newly-formed theatre groups was, in Robert Leach’s words, “a genuinely democratic re-examination of every aspect of social and moral life.”5 In particular, the mass spectacles, specifically with the aim of promoting Bolshevik sympathy among spectators, drew the interest of the more progressive theatre artists. These spectacles attempted to define national identity through spectator participation. Nicholas Rzhevsky explains how a particular narrative of history could be communicated and imposed through such performances. “Massive representations of historical events—at first particularly of the Russian revolution…turned spectators into performers and became finely scripted tools of legitimization for the new political authorities.”6

Before I consider Princess Turandot in detail, I wish to examine two notable propagandistic productions, Nikolai Evreinov’s 1920 mass spectacle The Storming of the

Winter Palace, and Vsevolod Meyerhold's 1918 and 1921 productions of Vladimir

Mayakovsky's Mystery-Bouffe. While all three reflect events and cultural identities of the early Soviet Union, the spectatorship of Winter Palace and Mystery-Bouffe was ultimately unable to reflect a potential social and cultural identity. Analyzing the comedic

ii The Proletkult (short for Proletarian Culture) was a loose federation of pro-Soviet theatre companies, artists, and other cultural societies funded by the People's Commissariat for Education of Soviet Russia. It was founded, organized, and led by Anatoly Lunacharsky, the People's Commissar of Education in Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1929. iii “By 1920 approximately 2000 amateur theatres, clubs and studios were in operation in the Red Army's divisions, brigades, and regiments as well as in the Navy. They gave their performances in the immediate vicinity of the front line, in the most readily available premises—in stations, schools, colleges and barns, often holed by shells, under kerosene lighting, sometimes even by candlelight or in the open air by the light of campfires.” (Rudnitsky, 46) 33 plot structures can illuminate why Turandot was more successful at capturing an emergent Soviet identity than the more propagandistic theatre productions.

The most famous Soviet mass spectacle, Nikolai Evreinov’s 1920 The Storming of the Winter Palace, was extravagant in both its scale and execution. The production took place in St. Petersburg's Palace Square, recreating the November 7, 1917 Bolsheviks’ assault on Kerensky’s Provisional Government. While in reality the overrunning of the

Winter Palace was largely unopposed, with minimal fighting, the 1920 theatrical recreation suggested otherwise. The production included “About 10,000 soldiers and sailors…which re-fought the struggle between the ‘Reds’ and the ‘Whites’ over the

Winter Palace, while approximately 100,000 townspeople followed their 'performance.’”7

With silhouettes of people locked in combat in the lit windows of the palace, combined with continuous gunfire, rockets, and a chorus of 40,000 singing the “International” at the finale, Evreinov's spectacle did much to alter the perception of the historical event. It also established a narrative for Bolshevik identity; by placing the October Revolution’s origin in a stunning and hard-fought victory, instead of a relatively easy takeover due to luck and good timing, the Bolsheviks could identify themselves with military might, the support of the people, and superior strategy.

Meyerhold and Mayakovsky's Mystery-Bouffe, performed in 1918 and again in

1921, was in many ways the original Soviet propaganda play. In comparison to The

Storming of the Winter Palace, Mystery-Bouffe did not incorporate spectator participation, but promoted the values and narrative of the Bolshevik Revolution perhaps more directly than any other Soviet theatre production. In fact, Rudnitsky credits

Mayakovsky’s dramatic parable as highly influential to many directors who would go on 34 to create the militant mass spectacles over the next three to five years. The plot is a parody of the biblical Flood and Ark story, and the characters are divided into two groups—the “clean” and “unclean”—representing the bourgeois class of owners and the proletariat, respectively. The play consists of five acts, with each act representing a different stage on the Ark’s journey, finally arriving in a mechanized, electrified

“Promised Land” where all class struggle has ended, and the proletariat victorious.8 The set pieces were basic representations of the Ark story: a half of a globe emerging from the stage indicated the global sweep of revolution, a prow of a ship extending towards the audience represented the ark, a red cave symbolized hell, and pink clouds represented heaven.9 While the production was influential in its content and themes, it ultimately failed to win over critics or spectators; the 1918 production played for only three scheduled performances. Despite both Meyerhold and Mayakovsky’s enthusiastic support for the new government, the harsh incompatibility between their artistic visions and those of the Bolshevik authorities would be a running theme throughout the 1920s, as the next chapter will demonstrate. Nikolai Pesochinsky elaborates, “Meyerhold’s productions were abstract and emotional depictions of the ethos of building a new world, and yet they could not serve as illustrations of specific Bolshevik campaigns.”10

However, in 1921, confident from the success of his 1920 political spectacle The

Dawn, Meyerhold decided to restage Mystery Bouffe, with Mayakovsky rewriting large sections of it to respond to events that had occurred since 1918. The set had also changed somewhat; the globe returned but the ship was replaced by a series of staircases and platforms that could represent different locations in the action of the play.11 The critics and cultural authorities were no more impressed than two years before, but this 35 time it enjoyed more success with spectators.iv While the revival of Mystery-Bouffe gained popularity, Rzhevsky asserts that the new version of Mystery-Bouffe nevertheless failed to galvanize audiences with the Revolutionary fervor of three years ago. Blaming the content and style of production for failing to connect with the masses, Rzhevsky writes:

Society and the proletarian millions…did not respond with any great enthusiasm.

No matter how much the poet and the director tried to put their language in the

service of the growing propaganda industry, they could not lower their sights to

levels acceptable to nearly illiterate workers or their Bolshevik leaders.12

Mystery-Bouffe revolutionized the Soviet theatre and invigorated new directors with its bold futuristic approach, yet it was unable to resonate with the larger theatre going population, which by that time had grown to include workers, soldiers, and peasants, in addition to the Bolshevik elite. Senelick writes:

To promote popular education, free tickets were distributed to Party cadets,

military units, factory workers, and other proletarian groups. Overnight, the

Russian audience changed. Instead of well-read, highly educated spectators,

actors were confronted with soldiers fresh from the front, illiterate mechanics, and

old market-women. Unaccustomed to the etiquette and conventions of the theatre,

these untutored playgoers ate, drank, responded vociferously, often to the shock

of such as Stanislavsky. Amid the cold, privation, and uncertainties of the Civil

War, theatre, dozens of them brand new, played to full houses.13

iv Braun states that “Mystery-Bouffe…was performed daily until the close of the season on 7 July. In the five months up to the end of May 1921, 154 performances of the two plays were watched roughly by 120,000 spectators” (166). 36 I focus on these two productions to strike a contrast with the seemingly apolitical content of Princess Turandot. While both The Storming of Winter Palace and Mystery-

Bouffe were successful as innovative, brilliantly-orchestrated theatrical spectacles, they did not achieve lasting popularity in the way Turandot did, nor did those productions capture the cultural and social moment with spectators as succinctly. Mystery-Bouffe,

Winter Palace, and other shows like these were reactionary productions, memorializing the Revolution, and more concerned with establishing an origin narrative and dictating an emotional and social identification to the audience, instead of reflecting the current sentiments and experiences of spectators. They were more emotionally imposing than emotionally participatory, even if the spectators could physically join in the action, as in the case of Winter Palace. These emotional disconnects can be understood, in part, by the kind of comic plots and devices of each production.

All three productions can be considered comedies: a comedy can be, at its most basic, a narrative or plot, as Hogan asserts, “in which the hero achieves his goal at the end.”14 It is important to remember that a play does not have to be funny or laughable in order to qualify as comedy. A comic play, in the classical sense, can be identified as such through its plot and conclusion: one in which the hero achieves his or her goal and a new society emerges from the previous one. The plots and conclusions of Princess Turandot,

Mystery-Bouffe, and The Storming of the Winter Palace all match these criteria. In the case of Mystery-Bouffe, it could potentially fit within what Northop Frye describes as the fifth comic plot, “the drama of the green world,” where “it is possible for a comedy to present its action on two social planes, of which one is preferred and consequently in some measure idealized,” and “its plot being assimilated to the ritual theme of the 37 triumph of life and love over the waste land.”15 However, this classical plot description is not quite a perfect fit for Mayakovsky's parable, as “the triumph of life and love,” proves to be a curious one in this play. The final act of Mystery-Bouffe does reveal “The

Promised Land,” yet this world is, in Rudnitsky’s words, “a realm of mechanization, a vision of a bright future, a mechanized world gleaming with the coldness of iron and steel,” instead of the continuation of a previous society where youth triumphs over age, and fertility over status—hardly the “drama of the green world” that Frye describes.16 Of course, one can assume that Mayakovsky intentionally turned the conventional expectation of a green, fertile ending of the play into something that would reflect his idea of a modernized happy ending—which is also probably why the culturally traditional

Bolsheviks leaders disliked the play.

The plot of Winter Palace could be what Hogan describes as heroic, or sacrificial.17 However, instead of reaffirming social hierarchy, the plot serves to install a new, rightful leadership and social order. What is most significant about the comic structure of Winter Palace (and Mystery-Bouffe as well) is that there is less emphasis on a joyous and hopeful resolution to the social conflict, and more on the struggle between the bourgeois class and proletariat. This places more importance on scapegoating, and leaves little room for development past the expulsion of the class enemies. The desire for their subsequent removal from the new society is made paramount—there is no hint of forgiveness, let alone a re-admittance into the new social order. This of course upsets the traditional view of comedy, as Frye explains:

The tendency of comedy is to include as many people as possible in its final

society: the blocking characters are more often reconciled or converted than 38 simply repudiated. Comedy often includes a scapegoat ritual of expulsion which

gets rid of some irreconcilable character, but exposure and disgrace make for

pathos, or even tragedy [. . .] The tendency of the comic society to include rather

than exclude is the reason for the traditional importance of the parasite, who has

no business to be at the final festival but is nevertheless there.18

There is no place in the idealized Soviet society for parasites (which will be explored in detail with The Bedbug), and certainly there can be no forgiveness. But this de-emphasis on the inclusion within the new society does dampen the comic aspect of both Winter

Palace and Mystery-Bouffe, and can in part explain why these productions ultimately could not appeal to mass audiences in the ways that Turandot did.

Because the plots are less inclusive and more condemnatory towards its blocking agents, Winter Palace and Mystery-Bouffe have a much different emotional tone than

Turandot, and encourages spectators to react less with joy and optimism, and with more hostility and contempt. Rudnitsky describes the tone of the larger spectacles such as

Winter Palace as “militant”:

By the most direct means they responded to the hatred for the enemies of

revolution characteristic of the entire situation of civil war. Rage directed against

the former masters of this world, the wealthy, the factory owners, the landowners,

the merchant, against the White Guard and interventionists, boiled within them

and poured out in crude placard forms.19

Mystery-Bouffe encouraged a similar emotional response not so much through spectacle and militancy, but by how the characters were represented. In Mystery-Bouffe, the proletariat was portrayed as a collective, and the bourgeois more as individuals. 39 Rudnitsky describes how Meyerhold and Mayakovsky achieved this effect. “Within the group of ‘the unclean,’ similarity was more important than difference. The whole group is a collective hero [. . .] Mayakovsky portrayed ‘the clean’ in placard-style satire by means of vicious theatrical caricature.”20 However, while this might lead to spectators having more empathy for the more individualized “clean” characters, this does not mean that the audience will like them more, or have sympathy for their circumstances. In fact, by making characters that we do not like easier to empathize with, there is more potential for the spectators to experience schadenfreude towards them. Also, by making these characters comic scapegoats, through “vicious theatrical caricature,” Mayakovsky further distinguishes for whom the audience is to feel hostility and superiority towards.

Remembering that Geoff King states that “Laughter at others is one way social groups define themselves…It is common for one culture to find the norms of another to be foolish or ‘unclean’ in one way or another, a potential source of comedy that helps to mark the bounds of the former.”21 This is an interesting twist, as Mayakovsky named the characters that he wanted spectators to sympathize with most as “unclean,” while naming the class enemies “clean,” which no doubt was also an intentional choice of the playwright, to further upend conventional expectations of drama. It was in this way that

Mayakovsky and Meyerhold influenced the spectators’ negative response towards the bourgeois characters; by individualizing the blocking agents, the audience creates a strong empathetic experience with them, even if that empathy leads to schadenfreude rather than sympathy and moral concern. In both Winter Palace and Mystery-Bouffe, comic structures and other devices, such as characterization, were not used to unite spectators in a common identity so much as they were to separate audiences by fostering 40 a sense of militancy against all that opposed the Bolshevik Revolution, and by unrepentantly scapegoating those who were not directly aligned with the proletariat.

Identifying through Empathy: Princess Turandot and Post-Civil War Soviet Union

Compared to directors such as Meyerhold and Evreinov, Vakhtangov could be described as supportive of revolution, yet his body of work was not obviously reflective of it. It was the styles of performance and staging where the director was truly revolutionary, instead of the content of the plays. In the early 1910s, Evgeny

Vakhtangov began studying acting and directing under Stanislavsky, eventually going on to direct major productions for the First MAT Studio, one of the four experimental studios of the Moscow Art Theatre. As one of Stanislavsky’s favorite and most talented students, Vakhtangov developed a directing style in his earlier productions that, while rooted in the psychological realism of the MAT, nevertheless took shape in expressionistic and grotesque forms. By the end of his life, this signature performance style of Vakhtangov’s came to be known as “Fantastic Realism.” Oscar Brockett describes how fantastic realism took form through Vakhtangov’s direction:

It most resembled expressionism, for in it external appearance and behavior were

exaggerated, distorted, and reshaped to reflect inner realities (the mask behind the

face, the psychological, social, or moral truth behind surface appearance.) But if

like Meyerhold or Tairov, he distorted reality, like Stanislavsky, Vakhtangov

believed that the director is bound by the playwright’s text…Vakhtangov

emphasized the director’s need for creative actors…in his actors he sought

partners who could fill form with content and find the necessary justification for

41 conduct on the stage even though this justification had to be found not in the

psychological but in the theatrical plan of the spectacle [my italics].22

As much as Vakhtangov’s work ventured into the presentational and abstract, it was always grounded by the circumstances of the production text. What made his productions stand out from Stanislavsky’s, however, was that those circumstances were not usually bound in an everyday, psychological truth; the “truth” of theatricality often took precedent over any naturalistic circumstances.

While Vakhtangov was honing his directing style for several years leading up to

1917, the social upheavals experienced during the Revolution and the civil war served to further shape his methods. Rebecca Gauss states “following the 1917 Revolution,

Vakhtangov felt the theatre needed ‘large, clear, graphic, but above all, theatrical motion’ in response to the monumental nature of the time. His work moved steadily toward the grotesque and theatrical.”23 He created performances that celebrated theatricality as a means to connect to his audiences to the present moment in the most vibrant and life- affirming ways possible. Increasingly, and especially after the Revolution, his goal became to seek a creative communion not only with performers, but also “the people,” the spectators. In 1919, Vakhtangov wrote that “If the artist wants to create the ‘new,’ to create after the Revolution arrives, he must create ‘together’ with the People. Not for them, not for the sake of them, not outside of them, but together with them.”24 This sentiment was certainly not isolated to Vakhtangov, as the concept of "going among the people” originated in the 1870s, shortly after serfdom was abolished. However, in the years preceding and immediately after the Revolution had occurred, the concept of “the people,” and more specifically, an interest in folk culture, had grown among artists, 42 writers, and those concerned with establishing a Soviet culture in the aftermath of the

Revolution. No doubt influenced by these movements, Vakhtangov worked on his own personal theatrical styles inspired by certain concepts of folk performance, while also grounded in Stanislavskian realism and avant-garde experimentalism. Specifically, combined with the grotesque and expressionistic styles that he developed in productions such as Erik XIV and The Dybbuk, the conditions of Princess Turandot would most fully realize Vakhtangov’s aspirations as a revolutionary director, and create the ideal circumstances for the kind of creative communion that he sought between performers and spectators.

Vakhtangov’s 1921 production of August Strindberg’s Erik XIV at the First

Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre, as well as his 1922 production of An-sky's The

Dybbuk with the Habima Theatre both marked an important transition in the director’s career, who, up to that point in time, had been acting and directing under the tutelage of

Stanislavsky. As far as his personal mentor was concerned, Vakhtangov began to feel that a strict interpretation of Stanislavsky’s system was becoming inadequate for the kind of theatre that he wanted to create. Vakhtangov was interested in creating theatre that could draw parallels to the current circumstances of the day and comment on the existing class struggles in Soviet Russia. However, he was never willing to completely reject all of the foundations he learned from Stanislavsky, and, over time, Vakhtangov’s solution for discarding obsolete styles while keeping the integrity of the dramatic text was a use of heightened contrasts between expressionism and naturalism to reflect thematic differences between social classes.

43 After the success of Erik XIV and The Dybbuk, Vakhtangov turned his attention to the Carlo Gozzi version of Princess Turandot. Gozzi's commedia play was also adapted in 1801 by Friederich Schiller (Giocomo Puccini would also write an opera with the same title based upon the Gozzi text in 1924). His decision to stage the 1762 Italian comedy was more incidental than deliberate. Frustrated by a lack of repertoire plays, he got the idea to stage the play from watching a studio scene that one of his students had performed from the Schiller text. He was directing The Dybbuk at the time, and had low expectations for the Schiller production. However, having returned to the Third MAT

Studio from an imposed stay at a sanitorium (by this time his physical condition had deteriorated to such a point to require medical treatment, although Vakhtangov was not yet aware that he had cancer) he switched from the Schiller version of the play to Gozzi's text, took another look at the previously uninspiring production concept and found something new. Nick Worrall describes Vakhtangov’s reaction to the Gozzi version:

[It] seemed to [Vakhtangov] to correspond to an audience’s dream of the future—

something which answered to the optimistic love of life which Russians shared

with the Italians but that which was not reflected in the Russian climate. The idea

became one of acting a contemporary attitude towards the fable of the cruel

Princess Turandot.25

The plot of the Gozzi play revolves around the character of Calaf, a displaced prince searching for fortune in the capital city of ancient China. At the beginning of the play, he recounts how he and his parents were conquered by barbarians and forced into poverty and exile. Calaf soon learns that many princes have traveled to the capital city, seeking to marry the vicious Princess Turandot, who refuses to accept any man unless 44 they answer her three riddles. If they fail to answer her riddles correctly (which no one has done yet) they are decapitated. Upon hearing of Turandot’s furor towards potential suitors, and also after seeing a portrait of her, Calaf decides that he should take it upon himself to answer the riddle challenge and win Turandot’s hand in marriage. Early on in the play, Calaf is in fact able to answer Turandot's riddles correctly, sending the princess into a rage, threatening to kill herself if she is forced to marry. Calaf, desiring to actually have Turandot fall in love with him, tells her that she may yet have a chance to escape marriage if she is able to discover his true name and the name of his father, which Calaf has kept secret up to this point. Furthermore, if she is able to correctly discover Calaf’s real identity, she may have him executed. By the end of the play, Turandot is able to discover Calaf’s and his father's name, but at the last minute falls in love with the prince just as he attempts to kill himself from grief. Traditional commedia characters, such as

Pantalone, Tartaglia, Brighella, and Truffaldino, are inserted into the play to thicken the otherwise light plot with drawn-out scenes of physical comedy or witty banter.

Turandot functions as classical comedy, although it also contains some darker elements. Frye would classify the comic plot as one “in which a senex iratus or other humor gives way to a young man’s desires.”26 In Turandot, however, it is not the angry father or older competitor who is blocking the young man’s desires; the “other humor,” in this case, would be the murderous pride of the woman Calaf desires, Princess Turandot herself. Fulfilling the requirements of New Comedy, Turandot focuses on sexual desire, the restoration of proper social roles (Calaf restored to his princely status), and the imposition of patriarchal order (Turandot finally submitting to overtures of marriage).

Other dark aspects are scattered throughout the play. Calaf’s backstory involves much 45 suffering, as both he and his elderly parents are forced into poverty and exile. Calaf’s mother dies during the course of the play, which is related to the audience through

Calaf’s father, who appears halfway through the play. Turandot is ruthless throughout, killing many young men both before and in the earlier parts of the play, torturing those who she believes know the identity of Calaf, and is especially driven in her pursuit of discovering Calaf’s true identity so she may kill him and save her pride. While Turandot is the blocking character, there is a minor subplot where Adelma, a former princess- turned-slave, falls in love with Calaf and wants him for her own. She attempts to thwart

Turandot’s plans to kill Calaf, but Adelma cannot truly be considered a blocking agent in the play. However, it is she who is effectively cast out of the new society by the end of the play, when the emperor gives her freedom and she leaves heartbroken, after Turandot submits to love and marriage with Calaf. Comedy usually culminates in the reintegration and rebirth of a community, and often at the expense of a specific character’s humiliation and social rejection. From the described suffering of Calaf and his parents, to the offstage executions of young princes, to Adelma’s rejection and expulsion from society,

Princess Turandot has a measure of pathos to accompany the traditional comic plot.

The Gozzi version of the fairy tale, in the hands of Vakhtangov, would make for a lighter, more ironic treatment of what could be more tragic material. In a departure from the dark, ominous, and twisted atmospheres that he created in previous productions such as Erik XIV and The Dybbuk, Vakhtangov turned to commedia dell’arte as an inspiration of festivity, celebration, and creativity. A concept that relied too heavily on the grotesque, as Vakhtangov did with Erik XIV and even The Dybbuk, could potentially have given the Gozzi play a darker tone than what Vakhtangov wished, as the more tragic 46 and violent elements might dominate the audience's imagination. The emphasis on

Italian street performance achieved a number of things. First, it created an atmosphere of celebration and joy for both the performers and spectators. Second, it encouraged the actors to work spontaneously and to improvise, bringing vitality to their performances.

Of course, Vakhtangov was not the first experimental director to turn to commedia dell'arte for inspiration; the Italian improvisational performance was a popular conceptual choice for many avant-garde directors throughout Europe from 1890s through the early decades of the twentieth century. Earlier in the twentieth century, productions directed by Meyerhold such as The Puppet Show (1906) and Columbine’s Scarf (1910) used commedia for both symbolic and darkly ironic purposes; during the years of Soviet

Revolution, however, commedia would be used to express a newfound joy and hope.

Vakhtangov also used the theatrical form to communicate the sentiment of the times.

Laurence Senelick states that Turandot “was the culmination of all those fin de siècle experiments in commedia dell’arte. High-spirited, improvisational, and playful, yet sophisticated in its sources of fantasy, it brought a ray of sunshine into the lives of playgoers inured to hunger, darkness, cold, and imminent danger.”27

Using commedia as an excuse to “play” within the production, this concept took on multiple dimensions in Turandot. From the general festive atmosphere of the production, to the various given circumstances that the actors were required to skip to and from, to the whimsical staging and properties, the show would communicate a decidedly light tone from its very beginning. This is another way in which Vakhtangov’s production stood out from the earlier spectacle-driven theatre that marked the first three years of the Bolshevik rule; the condemnatory Mystery-Bouffe and the stunning, yet 47 imposing, nationalism of spectacles like Storming of the Winter Palace did not allow for playful or imagined possibilities. Turandot, in contrast, gave both actors and spectators a certain freedom of interpretation through the act of play; while Vakhtangov and his actors made clear the three layers of characterization, which “layer” spectators would have identified more with, and how far their imagination would take them in the fantasy was ultimately up to them. James von Geldern explains how this element of play was lacking in many Revolutionary productions, to the detriment of the Bolshevik cause:

Of greater import was a quality that had been neglected…make-believe. Although

the materialist Bolsheviks, who were often guilty of excess sobriety, left no room

for play in their cultural theories, there was a role for it in evolving socialist

culture. Make-believe asks participants to imagine themselves in new

surroundings and to create behavior appropriate to that environment [. . .] It does

not obligate its participants and makes no claim to permanence.28

Not only was Princess Turandot successful because it used the element of play to help spectators imagine a new social identity through the production, but also because it incorporated multiple levels of play and imagined spaces. The ways that I explore the

“playful” nature of Turandot will be in its inclusion of the audience within the world of the play, the three layers of characterization or given circumstances, and the highly theatrical techniques used in staging and properties. Furthermore, an analysis based in cognitive research of these three playful aspects of the production can offer insights into how spectators might have experienced these theatrical innovations, and how the success of the production could have contributed to an emergent Soviet identity.

48 The first choice Vakhtangov made in order to create an atmosphere where both performer and spectator could collaborate together was by explicitly including the spectator into the world of the play. He was able to achieve this by utilizing the

Stanislavskian technique called the “circle of attention,” but not in the way that

Stanislavsky would have traditionally intended. The circle of attention refers to the immediate circumference of space that an actor allows him or herself to be aware of while portraying a character. In psychological realism, the actor’s circle of attention can include his or her immediate surroundings (the world of the play as specified by the set), as well as the other actors on stage, who are also embodying characters as realistically as possible. Rarely does the circle of attention extend past the end of the traditional playing space, or the “fourth wall” of the production; Stanislavsky believed that by keeping an actor's awareness limited to only the circumstances onstage could the actor perform most truthfully within the world of the play, and thus portray the actions and emotions as authentically as possible.

Wanting to keep the idea of living “truthfully” within the circumstances of the play, but not interested in making the world of Princess Turandot effectively closed off to the audience, Vakhtangov decided to expand the circle of attention to include the spectators’ space. Not only did this choice give the actors the freedom to interact with and include the audience in their performance, but Vakhtangov made sure that the audience was also aware of their intended inclusion and participation. Ruben Simonov, who played Truffaldino in the original production, describes how the production incorporated the audience into the performers' circle of attention:

49 Striving to achieve fuller participation for the audience (which is important in a

performance based primarily on improvisation), Vakhtangov intentionally

widened the actor’s “center of attention” during the rehearsals of Turandot. He

moved the fourth wall over the footlights to the last row of the orchestra and

gallery. When, according to the content of the play, the action was spread into the

auditorium, the auditorium was lit. This was a sign for the audience that moment

had arrived when a most important communication between it and the actors

would take place.29

This way, the actors were still creating complex characters that were responding to all the circumstances of the production, instead of limiting themselves to only the scripted interactions between characters within the confines of the stage. However, by not completely rejecting the Stanislavskian techniques of character development, their performances had a depth and commitment to them that a more improvisational approach might have lacked.

Another successful production choice was the “demystified,” or presentational style of performance. In order to demonstrate to the audience the theatrical “truth” of the production (and also to include them in the theatre-making process), the cast was consistently showing how the world of the play was made, starting from the moment they entered the auditorium. Before the performance started, the cast entered dressed in formal attire—the men wearing tailcoats and the women evening dresses. This choice did not make the actors blend in with the spectators, for at this point, five years into the

Revolution, audience members would not be wearing such clothing to the theatre. It was not a controversial choice for the actors, however, as Malaev-Babel explains that the 50 choice of “tailcoats for men and evening gowns for women—the kind of attire [was] historically used by actors for their recitals. After the revolution, tailcoats gradually disappeared from common use and, therefore, became an exclusive attribute of an actor.”30 Presenting the actors as themselves, first and foremost, would help the audience understand the multiple layers of characterization that Vakhtangov had intended.

Furthermore, the demystifying elements, combined with the joyful spirit of commedia dell'arte performance, had a particularly energizing effect on the audience. Robert Leach describes the full entrance of the performers:

At the start of the play, Tartaglia, Truffaldino, Pantalone, and Brighella

introduced themselves to the audience, then two of the comedians parted the

curtains and the rest of the troupe came through. The bare stage was covered with

apparently random strips of bright cloth. Suddenly, to fast, exhilarating music,

the actors spread across the stage, picked up the pieces of ribbon and playfully

added them to their costumes. They finished dressing at the same time, came to

the front to sing a chorus number, and disappeared. The comedians were left

clowning…The overt theatricality added both resonance and joy to the audience’s

response. 31

Asides from the “random strips of bright cloth” described by Leach, the playing space for the actors also consisted of a raked stage with a few angular walls to suggest a public square or street. Banners in large geometric shapes hung from above, giving the set an overall busy and playful look, described by Rudnitsky as “a laconic sketch for a hastily delineated space intended for performance and ready for any transformation.”32

51 The sheer pleasure and joy that the set and performers were able to communicate to the audience was by all accounts infectious. In addition to the contagious pleasure at watching the actors transform into characters, how the stage properties were used was also a source of the spectators’ joy. Already mentioned were the inventive use of everyday objects transformed into exotic-looking costumes: Hats and crowns were made out of lampshades and baskets, old man beards were made out of frayed towels, squares of cloth were royal robes, and strips of paper became knives, all transformed in front of the eyes of the audience.33 Being able to watch how commonplace objects were transformed into more fantastical items would certainly have given pleasure to the spectators, but the liveliness and skill with which the actors transformed the objects should also be considered. The pleasure of seeing how things are constructed, be they machines, stories, or theatre, can be particularly strong, especially among an audience seeing something demystify itself in real time. However, perhaps the word “demystify,” while accurate, is not fully adequate to describe the collective wonder at seeing an everyday object take on a new life. McConachie reminds us that “the instant ‘life’ that human intentionality gives to the object and the shift in vision it produces often create a wonder and joy akin to infant happiness.”34 In Turandot, Vakhtangov intentionally wanted the props to create a sense of liveliness and joy for both the performer and spectator. Malaev-Babel writes how the director created this effect:

Vakhtangov himself possessed an exceptional skill in this area. Anyone who saw

a ‘dead’ piece of fabric come to life in his sinewy hands—deft, soft, and agile

hands—could not look at this spectacle without amazement and delight…Thus

Vakhtangov developed in his students theatrical dexterity, precision, and 52 economy of movement, a faultless eye, and the feeling of the object. Vakhtangov

strove to achieve the kind of performance where no ‘dead’ objects would be

present onstage at the moment of acting. Living souls, and lively existence,

should be present everywhere onstage; anything dead should come to life at the

first theatrical touch—any fabric can be turned into a theatrical costume, and any

object can be transformed into a stage property.35

The joy of seeing a previously “dead” object come to life, or an object that one identifies as serving a specific purpose re-imagined to serve another just as deftly, clearly created a sense of pleasure and heightened emotional response in the spectators.

In addition to the handling of the costumes and properties, the acting style of the production engaged the spectator's emotions. The performance style of Turandot was not realistic, but it did not necessarily mean that the actors were not grounded in a particular set of given circumstances. Vakhtangov determined the given circumstances of his actors to be themselves, playing members of an Italian commedia troupe who were performing

Gozzi's play at the Third Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre. Under those conditions,

Vakhtangov then asked his actors to employ Stanislavsky’s “magic if” technique. The magic if is a technique where the actor asks him or herself “what would I do if I were living under the same given circumstances as my character?”36 It was in this way that

Vakhtangov honored many of Stanislavsky’s methods and approaches in his work, and still was able to create a highly presentational production that transcended psychological realism. The use of the magic if was applied to the three different circumstances, or

“layers of characterization,” by the actors of the Third Studio: How would I behave if I were playing myself playing an imagined commedia dell’arte performer from 53 Renaissance Italy playing a role in Carlo Gozzi’s Princess Turandot for a Soviet Russian audience in January 1922. Malaev-Babel describes the production circumstances in greater detail:

The artistic reality of the production consisted of the elements that belonged to

three completely different realities. (All three of these harmoniously merged in

Turandot.) The first reality was one of 1922 Moscow and the Vakhtangov Studio

at Arbat Street. The second was in Italy in the times of commedia dell’arte. The

third reality was of fairy-tale China, the setting of Princess Turandot. Elements

of all three realities were present in the set, costumes, music, audience

experience…What made Vakhtangov’s Turandot a revolutionary production

signifying a new method in theatre was that the actors’ method of creative

existence onstage actually included all three of these layers: Moscow, Italy, and

China.37[Malaev-Babel’s italics]

Spectators could have empathized with each layer of characterization that the actors were playing, further multiplying the dimensions in which spectator and performer alike were experiencing the emotions and actions of one another. Applying Thompson’s four levels of empathy, there are potentially various ways for spectators to empathetically connect with the performers in Princess Turandot. Although there can be many combinations of how empathy could arise in spectators of this production, my analysis will focus on the second and third levels of empathy that Thompson describes—“The imaginary movement or transposition of myself into your place,” and “The understanding of you as an other to me, and of me as an other to you.”38 I argue that because of these

54 two levels of empathy were spectators of Princess Turandot able to respond and participate in the show in such a way that helped reflect a moment of national identity.

Being involved in the given circumstances of the play, as well as being enclosed in the fourth wall, would have given the spectators a sense of belonging in the production, and a greater emotional stake with the performers. However, being able to empathize with three different characterizations would have lent a depth to the experience of and participation in the production and would have affected how spectators identified with its circumstances. For example, by being able “to imagine or mentally transpose oneself into the place of the other,” spectators could imagine what it would be like for the young actors of the MAT Third Studio performing the roles of the production as they entered in traditional evening dress: How might it feel to wear such elegant clothing during War Communism? What is it like to joyfully and energetically perform these actions in a time of hunger, cold, and uncertainty? What kind of mental and emotional preparation did the actors go through to perform the play in this particular style? By consciously imagining what it might be like to be the actors at that moment, the spectators can instantly empathize at this level, and vicariously experience what they believe the actors are experiencing.

Additionally, once the actors begin to characterize not just themselves, but also the imaginary commedia troupe in Italy, the spectators have the opportunity to conceptualize what it would be like to be Italian performers, joyously enacting a comedic play in a warm, festive climate. This might have been an unexpected thing to conceptualize, but it is likely that many in the audience would have taken pleasure in an escape from the circumstances of the Russian winter during wartime. Finally, when the 55 actors add the third and last layer of characterization, the circumstances of Princess

Turandot, the audience can imagine not only the traditional ending of social order being restored to a satisfactory conclusion, they can also imagine the trials of suffering and misfortune that Calaf must endure before he wins Turandot’s heart and puts an end to her merciless executions. This aspect of the performance might not be so difficult for spectators to imagine; later in the chapter I will discuss the immediate circumstances occurring in the Soviet Union towards the end of the civil war and beginning of the New

Economic Policy. The acknowledgement of pain and hardship, combined with the celebratory, hopeful return to order no doubt resonated with spectators when empathizing with the actors/characters of the production.

Because these three levels had the potential to speak to different circumstances and aspirations of Soviet spectators at this specific time, Thompson’s third level of empathy, “The understanding of you as an other to me, and of me as an other to you,” would have been the emotional glue that connected the spectators with the performers.

Not only would the spectators have been able to imagine how the actors/characters would have felt or experienced the circumstances of winter in the Soviet Union in 1922, sunny

Renaissance Italy, or the turbulent world of Princess Turandot, but by experiencing this third kind of empathy they would have felt a reciprocation of feeling from the actors as well, bonding them in the experience and creating a social identification through the production that could reflect a larger sense of unity during this moment in the Soviet

Union. The reciprocation of feeling and reiterated empathy between actor and spectator was what Vakhatngov had intended; all of the techniques he employed, along with expanding the circumstances of the production to the audience space was done to foster 56 the creative communion he sought between artists and “the people.” This would have led to a feeling of solidarity and of being part of an in-group. Of course, other theatre, especially the political spectacle examined earlier in the chapter, would also have contributed to creating an in-group, but the in-group created by Turandot was through reciprocated experiences, rather than singling out a group of outsiders to feel contempt for. Indeed, the individual accounts of spectator reaction and the production’s overall success can attest to this accomplishment.

Princess Turandot’s Impact and Legacy on Soviet Identity

The first spectator reaction to the production was nothing short of legendary.

However, it is important to note that the audience that attended on the night of the final dress rehearsal was largely made up of the Moscow professional theatre community. Not only were the directors and lead acting company from the Moscow Art Theatre in attendance, along with the other MAT studios, but so were other prominent figures such as Meyerhold and Mayakovsky—many of the greatest Russian theatre artists from the era were a part of that initial audience. While it might seem counterproductive to divide the spectator response between theatre artists and other spectators, it is important to specify the different responses if only to draw a comparison between non-theatrical spectators

(many of which were proletariat who had rarely, if ever, saw theatre before the

Revolution) and seasoned theatre goers who might have known the performers and MAT productions with more intimacy. Of the night of the final dress, Malaev-Babel writes:

The first act alone brought the kind of success no one at the Studio could have

anticipated. During the first intermission, Stanislavsky appeased Vakhtangov via

telephone, informing him of the audience’s impression of the first act. Finding the 57 telephone conversation insufficient, Stanislavsky decided to go to Vakhtangov

and share his impression in person. The audience in the house, and actors onstage

and backstage, waited for Stanislavsky’s return. The success grew throughout the

rest of the performance. Every moment of the production, every witty situation

and word, found live response in this exclusive audience—an audience imposing

heavy responsibility on every performer. ‘Bravo, Vakhtangov,’ proclaimed

Michael Chekhov; by doing so he created a storm in the audience.39

However, as celebratory as the audience of the first dress rehearsal was, enduring success for the production was not determined until a few performances later, after which it became evident that Turandot was popular not only within the community of theatre artists, but also among non-professional theatre goers, who by this time had expanded to include the proletariat, soldiers, and peasants.40

The initial run of the production would run for over one thousand performances, with numerous revivals over the decade. The production's success was dependent upon many factors: Vakhtangov's methods of fantastic realism provided the audience with an escape from what seemed to many the dated styles of the Moscow Art Theatre and a playful, festive alternative to the imposing spectacles of Meyerhold and other more politically-driven directors. The production clearly spoke to a specific moment in time for its audiences, with its themes and styles of performances resonating with spectators on multiple levels. Spectators could have empathized with the various characterizations: understanding the actors of the Third MAT Studio as putting on a festive and joyful production in the midst of sacrifice and struggle; imagining themselves as Renaissance players or audience members in the festive world of make-believe Italy; and as characters 58 averting disaster and welcoming a comically restored world in Princess Turandot’s fairy- tale China. The circumstances of the production, determined by Vakhtangov, not only created an ideal atmosphere for emotional contagion but also one for the kind of empathy that allows for both spectator and performer to reciprocally feed off each other’s emotions, effectively creating the performance together. This spectator/performer interaction potentially come to define the narrative of Princess Turandot in theatre history, one in which Robert Leach describes as “a cascade of brilliant colors, characters ripe with joie de vivre, and a hallucinatory, distorted setting, transported the spectator to some imagined world of revelry, light, and laughter, implicitly an evocation of what post- revolutionary Russia might become.”41 Of course the empathetic reaction between the actors and spectators certainly helped to shape this narrative, but the immediate circumstances of the Soviet Union leading up to this moment must be understood to fully examine how this production could reflect the emerging cultural and social identity of the

Soviet Union at that time.

By the time Princess Turandot premiered, the Revolution was technically into its fifth year. The resultant civil war that erupted shortly after the Bolsheviks had shut down the all-party Congress in November of 1917 was still in effect, although most of the heavy fighting had ceased by 1920. The White army was all but defeated, but the civil war was a larger, more complex event than simply the Bolshevik Red Army against the

Royalist White forces. Rex Wade describes the conflict typically known as the Russian

Civil War as “a complex, multiphased event, with overlapping military, economic, national, international, and other conflicts.”42 Aside from the main conflict with the

White armies, there were several smaller factions (mainly small rural militias) that kept 59 revolting against Bolshevik rule, an international blockade, and even a short-term invasion from Poland that the Bolsheviks forces were able to repel relatively quickly. To secure enough resources for the military effort, as well as to maintain political power, the policies associated with “War Communism” were established by 1918. One of the most contentious policies of War Communism was the requisitioning of grain and manpower, primarily from the rural population. While the strategy did manage over the long term to preserve the Bolsheviks' power and keep most of the Soviet Union together, War

Communism was also responsible for placing extreme hardships on peasants, which led to further resistance against the Bolsheviks.

In addition to stirring resentment among the Russian peasantry, grain requisitions had other unforeseen and devastating effects on society. Brovkin summarizes how the cycle of economic destruction and subsequent food shortages evolved during the civil war years. He writes that “the Bolsheviks needed grain to provide subsidies to the army and cities, but they could not get it because the peasants were not willing to sell. And they were not willing to sell because the ruble was losing value with every passing day, partly, one might add, due to the Bolsheviks’ attack on capitalism and the market economy as such.”43 Mainly because of the requisitions, and as the Red Army took more and more of the food supply as the civil war continued, armed militias began to resist the subsequent taking of grain. The difficulty in procuring grain led to reduced rations for workers in the cities, resulting in strikes and low rates of industrial production.

By 1921 the policies that had been keeping the Bolshevik government afloat could no longer hold. A number of things had occurred, and by early 1921, Lenin and his inner circle were forced to make drastic changes. Numerous peasant revolts occurred 60 because of grain requisitioning, overall industrial output fell dramatically, and workers went on various strikes, met by violent resistance from the government. Again Brovkin summarizes:

The economy virtually came to a halt in February 1921. Nothing worked.

Railroads barely functioned. Food supplies were running out. For the lack of raw

material most factories had to be shut down. The population was abandoning the

cities. The Bolshevik leaders were very well informed about the political

attitudes of workers and sailors.44

The final straw was the Kronstadt rebellion in March of 1921, when the sailors and soldiers at the Kronstadt naval fortress revolted against the Bolsheviks in cohort with

Petrograd workers. The rebellion was crushed, but Lenin could no longer keep the population under control with the previous policies. In March of 1921, Lenin effectively ended the policies of War Communism and initiated the New Economic Policy, or NEP.

Under the NEP, limited private enterprise and small-scale production would be allowed, while the government still controlled heavy industry, transportation, and major finance.

Furthermore, the NEP put an end to grain requisitioning, and gave peasant farmers greater freedom in managing their land. The Bolsheviks’ iron fist had eased a bit, seeking some compromise with the peasants and disgruntled workers, and found ways to stimulate an otherwise devastated economy.

Lenin’s abrupt shift in policy marked not only an end to the civil war, but the beginning of social and economic reconstruction. Overall, the years of civil war and War

Communism were marked by violence, disease, and famine, which threatened to tear the already precarious social fabric of the Soviet Union apart. I quote an especially long 61 passage from Wade, but it succinctly captures the chaos and suffering endured during the time period:

Precise figures for the losses of life during the terrible years from 1914 to 1923 do

not exist. Overall population loss, however (not counting those who broke away

with the newly independent Polish, Finnish, and Baltic states) was perhaps as high

as 25-30 million. This includes about 10 million during the civil war, mostly from

disease rather than direct fighting…About 5 million died in the great famine of

1921-23, which adversely affected another 35 million people. Millions more died

from other war-related causes…The social dislocations were terrible as well.

There were perhaps as many as 7 million homeless children roaming the cities

and countryside at the end of the civil war. Untold millions of women were

widowed or abandoned, and most of them consequently further impoverished

(along with their children). All major cities lost more than a quarter of their

populations, and Petrograd more than half. Two to three million, mostly from the

best-educated sectors of society, had fled abroad, permanently as it turned out.

Large portions of the remained middle and upper classes lost their jobs, homes

and status (large numbers of women from those classes were forced to resort to

prostitution).45

In the face of such harrowing figures, it must be questioned how such a lighthearted piece of theatre could possibly speak to the various hardships endured by so much of the population. It might also be asked how a production such as Princess

Turandot could even be as popular as it was during that time. It goes without saying that not every Russian’s experience of the civil war was equal. Life in the major cities, for 62 example, was not as dire as life in rural areas. As an actor in Turandot, Simonov describes the time as “several years of devastation and hunger…The streets of Moscow were plunged into darkness. The roads were covered by snowdrifts. Cabmen cleared a passage for the sleighs on tramrails. The trams were not functioning, and Moscovites performed their daily duties mostly on foot.”46 Simonov describes a difficult experience, to be sure, but one that cannot compare to certain starvation, imprisonment, or violent retaliation from soldiers. Many also had different views of the Bolsheviks in power; some fled the while others experienced the brunt of famine, disease, and oppression due to the government’s poor planning and vindictive policies. Still others wholeheartedly joined in the march towards Socialism and were well rewarded for it. And, despite the death and destruction at the hands of the Bolsheviks and other forces entangled in the civil war, the time was also brimming with an enormous hope. Wade reminds us of “the optimistic and reform features of the early Bolshevik regime, how so many believed that they were ushering in a new and better era in human history…Many Bolsheviks—and others—saw the revolution as the beginning of a great cultural transformation, indeed as the road to utopia.” 47 It was those that looked upon the future with a sense of hope and promise— regardless of their level of hardship and suffering—that Turandot spoke to the most.

With Princess Turandot, Vakhtangov firmly established himself as one of the great directors of his era. However, the cruel irony was that Vakhtangov would never see his finished production, as he left the theatre shortly after the final dress rehearsal, never to return. Dying of stomach cancer and in constant pain during Turandot rehearsals,

Vakhtangov took to bed and never left his home until the day of his death, May 29, 1922, at age thirty-nine. Of course, the irony is double here; Vakhtangov, always dealing in 63 contrasts, balanced the joy and celebration of Princess Turandot with the pain and mortality that he was personally experiencing. Rudnitsky writes, “The concept of ‘festive theatricality’ is indissolubly linked with Princess Turandot…It was as if the festive beauty of the merry spectacle refuted the everyday reality of Moscow life in the early

1920s, still cold, dark, and half-starved.”48 Knowing that Turandot would be his last production, his final message to the world was a one of creativity, celebration, and joyful communion between performer and spectator. Vakhtangov was a director who seemed most comfortable working amid contrasts: the contrast between the harsh living conditions of early 1920s Russia and the glorious future promised by the Revolution; the contrast between the materialistic and power-hungry upper classes and the idealized proletariat; the contrast between Stanislavsky’s realism and Meyerhold’s formalism; finally, the contrast between life-affirming, celebratory theatrical work and his own disease and impending death.

The content of Princess Turandot can even be considered to hold such contrasts.

As described earlier in this chapter, the Gozzi version of the play, while definitely a traditional comedy, contained enough tragic elements in the backstory and plot to cast more than a shadow of suffering on the play and any potential production. And while

Vakhtangov took a decidedly light tone with what could be otherwise dangerous and depressing events, all of his productions were infused with strong contrasts: highly theatrical styles grounded in psychologically realistic circumstances; lighthearted comic plots played on abstract, angular sets; acting that veered into the grotesque while emotionally beckoning the spectators to join in on the performance. The element of suffering, uncertainty, and of death never quite left the playing space where Vakhtangov 64 intended spectator and performer to collaborate together, no matter how festive and celebratory the tone became. Perhaps such an attention to the extremes of life and death were unavoidable in such times, with the Soviet economy shattered and famine ravaging much of the population at this point, and of course, Vakhtangov’s own approaching death

(by the time of Turandot’s final rehearsals, he knew that he was dying and that this production would be his last). These contrasts, developed in productions such as Erik

XIV and The Dybbuk, have come to be associated with the style of Fantastic Realism, using bold, expressionistic acting styles anchored in Stanislavskian technique. As the devastating effects of the civil war and Vakhtangov’s cancer continued, the performance style that Vakhtangov spent years developing before and during the Revolution would never have so much resonance with both the performers and spectators as in Turandot.

The use of such contrasts in Princess Turandot, in a play that swings between such tonal contrasts itself, speaks to a time burdened by pain and hardship, yet also in some ways wildly hopeful for the future. Perhaps this production was so successful with such a broad range of the Soviet theatre-going population because it could speak to such extremes. Perhaps only a dying man, caught between the pain of his disease and the ecstasy of artistic creation, could communicate such a vision during such a time.

Vakhtangov provided the vision and created the circumstances, but it was the spectators together with the performers who made Princess Turandot a reflection of the emerging idea of the Soviet Union—its greatest hopes for prosperity and joy amidst terrible hardships. It seems that with Turandot Vakhtangov was able to realize his dream of creating art with “the people,” as it was a production that captured the harsh contrasts of

Soviet life with the aspirations of peace, joy, and prosperity to come. For these reasons 65 could the 1922 production of Princess Turandot capture and reflect a newfound identity of the Soviet population in ways that the incendiary productions of Evreinov, Meyerhold, and Mayakovsky could not. Nick Worrall elaborates:

The production was a celebration of the creative, improvisatory art of the actor, a

manifestation of tremendous optimism in a revolutionary world where starvation,

hunger, cold, and the threat of war were the norm. It answered the need for a

feeling of social uplift and corresponded to the imaginative perspectives of a land

on the brink of something exciting, new and, at the same time, uncertain and

mysterious. It was the kind of production which had even someone like Vladimir

Mayakovsky applauding wildly.49

Conclusion

The End of an Era: Soviet Hopes Reflected in Princess Turandot

If Princess Turandot had been produced much sooner than the moment that it was, it most likely would have had none of the impact that it had. It would have been no more than an ill-timed trifle; perhaps well-executed under the direction of Vakhtangov but insensitive to the moment. However, its opening in January of 1922 came after the worst of the social upheavals associated with the civil war and its destructive policies, and after Lenin's step to initiate the NEP. A resolution (of sorts) had been found between the rebellious peasants, weary soldiers, and Bolshevik government. The population could look forward to a higher degree of prosperity and stability. However, just because

Turandot came not a moment too soon does not mean that it could have opened much later than it did with the same effect; especially after Lenin’s death in 1924, great changes, social and economic, would soon sweep the Soviet Union as Stalin established 66 his command. Not only in its content, but in its style did the production capture a single moment in Soviet culture and history. Laurence Senelick writes:

The sum product was an exuberant, physical, caricatural theatre, exuding joie de

vivre and an almost adolescent impetuosity. It is no accident that it was

concurrent with the New Economic Policy (1921-28), propounded by Lenin as a

short-term solution to Russia's ruined infrastructure; limited capitalism allowed a

certain scope for individual initiative and private concerns. The abuses of NEP

provoked a host of broad comedies, and even a space to play them in, the Theatre

of Satire. But with Lenin's death, the accession of Stalin, and the cancellation of

NEP, satire became a dangerous commodity.50

As the next chapter illustrates, Meyerhold and Mayakovsky’s 1929 satire of the

NEP, The Bedbug, was not accepted by all with the exuberance of Princess Turandot.

The unified, hopeful moment of Soviet identity had long passed by then; the relief and optimism, defined by the catastrophe of the civil war, had faded into a more cynical, if prosperous tone by the end of the 1920s. The artistic flourishing of the Revolutionary years and early 1920s had slowly, but intentionally, began to dwindle under state coercion. As Lenin’s corpse was embalmed and put on display in the Kremlin following his death in 1924, so, in a sense, did much of Soviet identity and culture, which since that moment had often looked back to the brilliance of the Revolutionary era, but dared not reinvigorate the artistic flame that once burned so brightly.

The timing of Princess Turandot was such that it was able to capture a final moment of the most unbridled artistic flourishing in Soviet theatre, as the culture was

67 preparing to change radically, or in some cases, stagnate into mediocrity. J. Douglas

Clayton writes of the production's significance:

It was a moment of balance representing a turning-point in the history of the

theatre, aware from the experiments of the past. It could hardly be repeated, not

only because Vakhtangov died shortly after opening, but more importantly

because the centre of gravity in Soviet culture was shifting irrevocably. Far from

announcing a new age in Soviet theatre, Turandot marked the end of one. 51

The choice of the play, along with Vakhtangov’s choices in performance and staging, made this production resonate fully with its spectators. Spectators contributed to the play not only through Vakhtangov’s innovative techniques of extending the fourth wall, having the actors play multiple characterizations, and demystifying elements, but combined through their ability to empathize and identify with the action of the play. This was a production that needed full participation from both spectator and performer to be successful. As a result, Princess Turandot was able to reflect the emergent identity of much of the Soviet population, from the theatre artists in the audience who joyously attended the final dress rehearsal to the workers, soldiers, and peasants who had never gone to the theatre before this production. The hope and celebration that was realized in the space of Princess Turandot, both the physical space and imagined space, could not live long past the mid-1920s, but it reflected a moment where the Soviet Union was imagining its full social and cultural promise as a newly-established nation.

68

Endnotes

1 The Vakhtangov Sourcebook. Ed. Andrei Malaev-Babel. New York: Routledge, 2011: 53.

2 Konstantin Rudnitsky. Russian and Soviet Theatre: Tradition and the Avant-Garde. Trans. Roxane Permar. Ed. Lesley Milne. London: Thames and Hudson, 2000: 74.

3 Laurence Senelick. “Theatre.” The Cambridge Companion to Modern Russian Culture. Ed. Nicholas Rzhevsky. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998: 274.

4 James von Geldern. Bolshevik Festivals: 1917-1920. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993: 5-6.

5 Robert Leach. “Revolutionary Theatre, 1917-1930.” A History of Russian Theatre. Eds Robert Leach and Victor Borovsky. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999: 302.

6 Nicholas Rzhevsky. The Modern Russian Theater: A Literary and Cultural History. London: M.E. Sharpe, 2009: 53-54.

7 Rudnitsky: 44.

8 Ibid: 43.

9 Rudnitsky: 43.

10 Nikolai Pesochinsky. “Meyerhold and the Marxist Critique.” Theater 28.2: 40.

11 Rudnitsky: 62.

12 Rzhevsky, Nicholas. The Modern Russian Theater: A Literary and Cultural History. London: M.E. Sharpe, 2009: 55.

13 Senelick: 275.

14 Frederick Aldama and Patrick Colm Hogan. Conversations on Cognitive Cultural Studies: Literature, Language, and Aesthetics. Ohio State University Press, 2014.

69

15 Northop Frye. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. New York: Atheneum, 1957:158- 159.

16 Rudnitsky: 43.

17 Patrick Colm Hogan. Understanding Nationalism: On Narrative, Cognitive Science, and Identity. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2009: 12-13.

18 Frye: 143-44.

19 Rudnitsky, 44.

20 Ibid 43.

21 Geoff King. Film Comedy. London, New York: Wallflower Press, 2002: 144.

22 Oscar Brockett and Robert Findlay. Century of Innovation: A History of European and American Theatre and Drama since the Late Nineteenth Century. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1991: 333.

23 Rebecca Gauss. Lear’s Daughters: Studios of the Moscow Art Theatre 1905-1927. New York: P. Lang, 1999: 93.

24 The Vakhtangov Sourcebook. Ed. Andrei Malaev-Babel. New York: Routledge, 2011:166.

25 Nick Worrall. Modernism to Realism on the Soviet Stage: Tairov-Vakhtangov- Okhlopkov. Cambridge; NewYork: Cambridge UP, 1989: 128.

26 Frye: 157.

27 Laurence Senelick. “Theatre.” The Cambridge Companion to Modern Russian Culture. Ed. Nicholas Rzhevsky. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998: 278.

28 James von Geldern. Bolshevik Festivals: 1917-1920. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993:148, 151.

29 Ruben Simonov. Stanislavsky’s Protégé: Eugene Vakhtangov. Trans. Miriam Goldina. New York: DBS Publications, 1969: 163.

30 Malaev-Babel: 294.

31 Robert Leach. “Revolutionary Theatre, 1917-1930.” A History of Russian Theatre. Eds Robert Leach and Victor Borovsky. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999: 309.

32 Rudnitsky: 54. 70

33 Worrall: 131, Gauss, 102.

34 Bruce McConachie. Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008: 84.

35 Malaev-Babel: 299-300.

36 Rebecca Gauss. Lear’s Daughters: Studios of the Moscow Art Theatre 1905-1927. New York: P. Lang, 1999: 101.

37 Malaev-Babel: 79-80.

38 Evan Thompson. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenoloy, and the Sciences of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007: 393.

39 Malaev-Babel: 306.

40 Ibid: 307.

41 Leach: 309.

42 Rex A. Wade. The Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War. London: Greenwood Press, 2001: 63.

43 Vladimir N. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918-1922. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1994: 15.

44 Ibid: 390.

45 Wade: 23-24.

46 Simonov: 141.

47 Wade: 78.

48 Rudnitsky: 55.

49 Worrall: 127-28.

50 Senelick: 284.

51 Douglas J. Clayton. Pierrot in Petrograd: The Commedia dell’Arte/Balagan in Twentieth-Century Russian Theatre and Drama. London: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1993: 122.

71

Chapter 3

Split Empathy in Soviet Spectatorship of The Bedbug

It is, indeed, the figure of the clown in various manifestations, the hapless little man, the pathetic, yet comic victim of circumstances beyond his control that was the most central image of the theatre of the 1920s in Russia.

-J. Douglas Clayton, Pierrot in Petrograd: The Commedia dell’Arte/Balagan in Twentieth-Century Russian Theatre and Drama. p. 184.

In the spring of 1928, director Vsevolod Meyerhold was getting desperate.

Despite the outpouring of avant-garde theatre in Soviet Russia over the last decade, there was currently a lack of new plays. The early Soviet theatre was remarkable for its thrilling, modern production concepts, designs, and performances, but it was never as famous for its dramatic texts. By the late 1920s, however, the situation had become especially dire. Edward Braun writes that “such was the repertoire crisis at the Meyerhold

Theatre in the late twenties that Meyerhold himself staged no new work to mark the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution.”1 In May of 1928 Meyerhold took action and contacted his past collaborator, Vladimir Mayakovsky, requesting a new comedy. After years of diminished repertoires and dwindling audiences, Meyerhold would open the

1929 season of his theater with a new play by Mayakovsky, a futuristic comic fantasy titled The Bedbug. While Braun writes that “In terms of theatrical innovation, The Bed

Bug was one of Meyerhold’s least significant productions,” the show was remarkable enough for its congregation of young talent. In addition to Mayakovsky as the

72 playwright, the Constructivist painter Alexander Rodchenko designed the futuristic set, and a twenty-three year old Dmitri Shostakovich wrote the musical score. Also, one of the most popular and celebrated comic actors of Soviet Russia, Igor Illinsky, played the lead role of Prisypkin.

Mayakovsky wrote The Bedbug as a satire against the greed and predatory excesses of those who benefitted from the New Economic Policy. Describing the play as a “fairy-tale comedy,” Mayakovsky sets the action in present-day Soviet Russia, on the eve of Prisypkin’s marriage into a wealthy family of merchants. After a freak house fire kills the entire wedding party except for the groom, and firefighters hose water on the smoking wreckage in sub-zero temperatures, Prisypkin and a little bedbug manage to survive embedded in a block of ice for fifty years. Re-animated by scientists in 1979, after the entire world has evolved into a perfect socialist utopia, Prisypkin and the little insect are regarded as strange, foreign relics. By the end of the play the two parasites are put on display in a zoo to educate citizens of the barbarism and vulgarity of a past age.

The final image of the play is of Prisypkin, not understanding why he has been put on display, crying out to the people and asking them to join him in the cage.

The Bedbug opened on February 13, 1929 and was very successful with audiences, but universally disliked by the press.2 From Shostakovich’s score to

Rodchenko’s designs, professional critics found fault with nearly everything in the production, including Mayakovsky’s script and Meyerhold’s direction. While the reviews were aligned in disapproval, their reasoning was rather varied: Some took issue with the buffoonish portrayal of the ex-Party member Prisypkin; others were offended that the futuristic Communist society seemed a joke; still others were upset that the play 73 was satirical at all, feeling that Soviet society was beyond such mockery. While the comic scapegoat was meant to be the character Prisypkin, there were many who thought the real joke was on the party and its policies. Jestrovic observes that “Critics were confused, suspecting that the communist utopia represented on Meyerhold's stage was in the first place a parody of socialism's achievements.”3 By 1929, there was a noticeably decreasing tolerance for criticism of the Communist party and its policies, in artistic expression and just about everywhere else. Particularly in the realm of comedy and satire, fewer and fewer subjects were acceptable targets of laughter. This narrowing of expression indicated nothing less than a totalizing cultural shift.

If the spectatorship of Princess Turandot represented a moment of crystallized identity in early Soviet Russia, then the reception of The Bedbug reflected a moment of a fracturing, contentious identity being fought out between Party elites, Soviet artists, and the theatre-going public. The idea of a unified Soviet identity, accepted and promoted by the government, artists, and spectators alike, had begun to crack and fade by the end of the 1920s, if not in the eyes of the party, then in the eyes of those who enjoyed the production. As one of the last avant-garde productions at the end of the vibrant era of theatre in Soviet Russia, The Bedbug is noteworthy not only for its showcasing of the age's most brilliant artists, but also for its ability to capture and reflect a growing pessimism with the direction that Soviet culture was taking. The fact that critics could not agree upon the overall message and tone of The Bedbug demonstrates that the production spoke to audiences in multiple ways. Different empathies arose from watching the production, which reflected shifts in cultural tastes and identifications.

74 This chapter explores the varied reactions to The Bedbug, and considers how its reception reflected an increasing turbulence in Soviet cultural identity. Exploring these reactions through empathy and group identification offers insights on how one of the greatest comedies of Soviet Russia could so vehemently divide the identity of the party from the identity of everyday spectators. Many in the communist elite felt that the jokes were directed at them, and many spectators were unsure which scenario was supposed to be the more satirical—the vulgar and self-absorbed present day, or the glittering, yet sterile, socialist future. Ultimately, the confusion and contention over who the proper scapegoat was supposed to be, and what exactly was being satirized, indicates that a common in-group identity amongst the population had lost its former cohesion.

“Ostrovsky” and the NEP: Communist Control and Bourgeois Values

Two major social changes had occurred in Soviet Russia since the days immediately following the civil war. Economically, at Stalin’s command, the NEP was ended, and the first five-year economic plan was implemented.i Culturally, Anatoly

Lunacharsky, the Commissar of Enlightenment, had declared an official end to the rampant experimentation in the theatre, urging writers, directors, and designers to go

“Back to Ostrovsky!”, meaning a return to more realistic forms of art and literature.ii

These two developments may seem unrelated to one another, but they reflect the

Communist Party’s growing boldness in micro-managing both the economy and culture.

The NEP, which had actually been a very successful economic policy that was abruptly

i The first of the Five Year Plans, spanning from 1928-1932, was focused primarily on the collectivization of agriculture. While industrial output grew during this time, the overall disruption resulted in famine and social breakdown in rural areas. ii Alexander Ostrovsky (1823-1886), is considered to be Russia’s greatest playwright from the nineteenth century. He wrote realistic plays about Russian society, particularly the rising merchant class. 75 abandoned in favor of the unwieldy five-year plans, was a move on Stalin’s part to reduce the power of those who had most benefitted from the economy of the NEP and put control back into the hands of the central party planners. Lunacharsky’s pseudo-mandate

(which not all artists would follow until Socialist Realism became the official style of art and literature in the early 1930s) was a subtle method of removing influence from the avant-garde artists who dominated the culture in the early-to-mid 1920s, and promoting art that the party elites felt comfortable with and understood. In both cases we see a move from the party to take hold of the major engines of Soviet life and identity, and direct them as they saw fit.

While the NEP might not seem directly important to the development of The

Bedbug, having a brief trajectory of the policy helps to explain the social themes of the play, and how the general cultural climate had been shaped by the economic plan.

Overall, the NEP’s effect on the economy was overwhelmingly positive. Gregory explains:

According to Soviet statistics, the highest level of NEP is usually dated to 1926,

when prewar production levels were generally surpassed. The absolute growth of

the nonagricultural private sector stopped in 1926. At that time, all seemed to be

going well; yet two years later, NEP was abandoned in favor of the radically

different system of central planning by the state, collectivization of agriculture,

and nationalization of industry and trade.4

From 1921 to 1926, Soviet Russia was able to rebound from the near-total devastation of its economy from the Revolution and civil war; this makes the sudden shift to a centrally- planned economy puzzling. However, if we look at the reasons why the NEP was 76 established in the first place, and the long-term goals of the Communist Party, this decision makes more sense.

The NEP, as described in the previous chapter, was designed as a “retreat” from the growing pressures of soldier, worker, and peasant discontent at the end of the civil war. After the Kronstadt Rebellion, it became obvious to Lenin that the Bolshevik policies of centrally-planned War Communism would cost them control of the country.

Furthermore, the Bolsheviks’ ultimate goal of the Revolution was to achieve state- controlled socialism, and allowing for private enterprise, no matter how limited, was not part of that vision. Brovkin asserts that “NEP was never conceived of as a path to socialism, but as a detour, as a temporary obstacle to overcome. The Bolshevik Party desperately needed a role to play; it needed a reaffirmation that it was leading Russia and not simply waiting for the condition to arise when the socialist offensive could resume.”5

The NEP was never meant to be more than a stop-gap, a means of letting the economy recover to a point of quelling the people's discontent, after which the broader goals of the

Bolsheviks could be pursued again.

Ending the NEP was also a method of reducing the power of those who had most benefitted from it: namely private merchants and farmers. The peasant farmers, whose constant revolts and disobediences during the civil war were a large factor in the establishment of the NEP, had become quite prosperous during most of the 1920s, and had gained significant social and economic status. The Communist party had begun to dread the influence that these successful farmers had gained during the decade, and, fearing confrontations similar to those during the civil war, sought to reclaim authority in the countryside. However, the biggest social scapegoats of the NEP were the private 77 entrepreneurs (known pejoratively as “Nepmen”) who were known to inflate prices beyond the state-mandated ceilings and thus made large profits by overcharging their customers. The Nepman’s petty abuses in profiteering created a very negative cultural view of those who thrived in the free market environment. The Bolsheviks, not yet having a solid grip on the nation's economy or the people’s support, began to devise subtle and not-so-subtle ways of undermining the Nepmen. Gregory describes:

The Nepman soon came to be regarded as an enemy of the state. Beginning in

late 1923, policies were adopted to systematically drive out the Nepman and

widen the state's control over trade. This objective was pursued through the

control of industrial raw materials and goods produced by state industry,

surcharges on the rail transport of private good, and taxes on profits of Nepmen.

In 1926 making “evil-intentioned” increases in prices through speculation became

a crime punishable by imprisonment and confiscation of property. Finally, in

1930 private trade was declared a crime of speculation.6

By the mid-1920s anti-Nepmen sentiments began to be reflected in theatre, literature, and popular culture. Peter Yershov explains that “the NEP proved to be fertile ground for the growth of a Soviet comedy of manners.”7 In the following passage he elaborates how comic forms were used to attack the Nepmen and their values:

By the mid-1920s comedies deriding the obyvateli and the Nepmen began to

appear in volume. The term obyvateli, meaning smug and inert people whose lives

are circumscribed by their own petty interest, now carried added opprobrium,

used as it was to stigmatize “undesirables” from the Soviet point of view as

“bourgeois” misfits and hangers-on, relics of the past, too sluggish or too intent 78 upon their own comforts to devote themselves to the furtherance of the new

order.8

Part of the reason that the Nepmen made such good comic targets was that the population could easily identify and demonize the worst excesses in post-civil war society, but another reason is that writers, performers, and other artists were strongly discouraged from mocking much else. It is hard to tell if the bulk of these comedies that made fun of the decadent Nepmen were directly inspired by party rhetoric, but throughout the 1920s the line between political platform and artistic expression would only become more blurred. By 1923, the party was beginning to strongly suggest the kinds of literature and theatre that were most appropriate to produce, and the mutual benefits that artists and the

Bolsheviks enjoyed in the early days of Revolution were definitely starting to shift in favor of the government.

Lunacharsky's 1923 declaration of “Back to Ostrovsky!” was certainly part of this deliberate tilt towards art as public policy. While there was never a lack of artists during the 1920s who were eager to promote socialism through their work, the party increasingly took issue with the style of art produced, as well as its content. Curtis writes that “As early as 1920 Lunacharsky was beginning to point out that he had observed workers getting bored at ‘revolutionary’ plays, and that he had even read a petition from workers and sailors asking for them to be stopped and for Gogol and Ostrovsky to be put on instead.”9 As the previous chapter describes, the most avant-garde revolutionary theatre, especially that produced by Meyerhold and Mayakovsky, was at times enthusiastically received by the public, but only tepidly by the Bolsheviks. At best, the progressive theatre artists enjoyed moderate successes with a theatre-going public made up of 79 everyone from cultured elites to soldiers to the general proletariat; at worst, their productions fell flat with audiences, and were harshly criticized by the ruling class.

Brovkin paints an even starker portrait of the indifference faced by the Revolutionary artists, and their eventual appropriation by the Communist party. He writes:

Throughout the first half of the 1920s the party remained in the background,

preoccupied with its own internal strife and search for its own identity and course

of action. The revolutionary masses did not comprehend avant-garde art, and its

appeal remained limited to a small and dwindling circle of the intelligentsia. By

the end of the 1920s, the opposite relationship was in place: the party asserted its

determination to guide the artist in the artistic construction of the new society.10

Rarely could bold talents like Meyerhold, Mayakovsky, and others find acceptance beyond their circle of fellow theatre artists and the ever-weakening intelligentsia. And, by 1923 Lunacharsky began the calculated push back to the classical dramatic material and aesthetic styles resembling the psychological realism that Stanislavsky and the

Moscow Art Theatre had developed over twenty years earlier.

The Bedbug and Spectator Empathy: Satire in the Age of Stalin

It was in this considerably less tolerant, less experimental atmosphere that

Mayakovsky and Meyerhold would co-produce The Bedbug. Since their last collaboration together on the 1922 revival of Mystery-Bouffe, nearly seven years earlier, both artists had steadily grown disillusioned with the state of Soviet Russia, and had recently taken long trips abroad—Meyerhold to France, Mayakovsky to the United States and Europe. While their work was still innovative and successful, with Meyerhold staging his famous productions of Ostrovsky’s The Forest (1924) and Gogol’s The 80 Government Inspector (1926), and Mayakovsky continuing to publish poems and literary periodicals, their work was beginning to display a creeping cynicism and defiance, much to the chagrin of party officials. For example, while Meyerhold’s productions of

Ostrovsky and Gogol would, at least on paper, seem to follow Lunacharsky’s declaration of “Back to Ostrovsky!” the productions were nothing at all like the psychological realism the Bolshevik elites desired to see. The Forest was heavily inspired by commedia and cabaret performance, and The Government Inspector was a brilliant, yet abstracted production of Gogol’s great satire of Russian political life—it has been described as an “apocalyptic phantasmagoria…similar in style to the paintings of Picasso and Dali.”11 This was not what Lunacharsky had in mind.

In the fall of 1928, Meyerhold was still in France, further delaying his return to the Meyerhold Theater in Moscow. Despite the fact that the cultural authorities in Russia had twice demanded he return and begin rehearsing his new season, Meyerhold was stalling, preferring to wait for the comedy he requested of Mayakovsky earlier in May.

By the very end of the year, on December 28, 1928, Mayakovsky himself returned from abroad, fulfilled Meyerhold’s request and held a staged reading of The Bedbug for the theatre company. After slightly more than a month’s rehearsal, the play opened on

February 13, 1929.12

The play begins in a bustling market scene in the Russian city of Tambov, where men and women are obnoxiously selling their wares on the street. Dolls, buttons, whetstones, bras, and balloons, among other trifles, are aggressively marketed to the audience and the characters. In the middle of this commercial circus Prisypkin enters with his future parents-in law, Rosalie and Oleg, shopping for the wedding feast and 81 purchasing everything in sight. Mistaking a fur-lined bra for a baby’s bonnet, Prisypkin demands that his future parents-in-law buy it, explaining that “his house must be a horn of plenty.”13 As the scene continues, Prisypkin charges ahead on his shopping spree, demanding everything that is advertised. Rosalie voices her reservations about satisfying

Prisypkin's every whim, but Oleg reminds her “don't provoke him until you get that union card. He is the victorious class and he sweeps away everything in his path, like lava.” The only reason that Oleg and Rosalie tolerate Prisypkin’s behavior (and his marriage to their daughter) is that he claims to be a member of the working class, complete with union card and party membership (this claim will later turn out to be exaggerated). Both of the parents are Nepmen, former bourgeoisie-turned-entrepreneurs in the post civil war years, and own a successful beauty parlor. Here Prisypkin represents the parasitic and hypocritical party member, living off the material comforts of those he is supposedly

“victorious” over.14

The first scene of the play was to be seen as an attack on rampant consumerism in present-day Soviet Russia. Meyerhold hired the satirical cartoon/illustrators group

Kukryniksy to design the first half of the production (Rodchenko would design the futuristic second half).iii Braun writes that “the young ‘Kukrinkiksy’ cartoon group was invited to design the settings, costumes, and make-up. Nearly all the costumes and properties were bought over the counter in Moscow shops in order to demonstrate the pretentious ugliness of current fashions and the all too discomfiting topicality of the iii Kukryniksy consisted of Mikhail Kupriyanov, Porfiry Krylov, and Nikolai Sokolov, who began working together under the collective name in 1924. They were famous illustrators and cartoonists, and their work appeared in Soviet publications such as Pravda and Krokodil. Their career spanned over fifty years, and were famous especially for attacking fascism and supporting Soviet policies during the 1930s and 40s. They were five-time recipients of the Stalin award. (http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/exhibitions/TASS/Kukryniksy) 82 satire.”15 The repellent behavior of both those purchasing and selling the ridiculous items was intended to remind the audience of what was currently happening on the street. As the first half of the play continues in the greedy, grotesque world of 1929 Russia, the audience learns that Prisypkin is a loafer and a slob, having just quit his job (thus relinquishing his union and party card) to live off the NEP-generated wealth of his wife and in-laws. While denouncing Prisypkin's new lifestyle, a young mechanic that he used to room with defiantly states “You think I like wearing these lousy rags? Like hell I do!

There are lots of us, you know, and there just aren't enough Nepmen's daughters to go around.”16

Mayakovsky veers the plot into total absurdism for the wedding scene, which concludes the first half of the play. Taking place in the large, tacky beauty parlor that

Prisypkin's new family owns, the bizarre wedding reception quickly breaks down into a brawl, with the “classy” guests instigating petty arguments with one another. The scene culminates with the bride being pushed onto a stove, at which point her dress catches fire and the entire room goes up in flames. The entire wedding scene was portrayed as excessive farce; it succeeded at taking the audience further out of reality but more firmly planted in vicious satire. Braun describes this scene as “as caricature of petit-bourgeois manner in the style of vaudeville grotesque.’17 This is not the only time the word

“caricature” will be used to describe the characters and imagery of this production. For example, Gorchakov states that “To depict the Soviet reality of what was then the present, [Meyerhold] heaped piles on the stage…The masks were evil caricatures that seemed to have come from a nightmare.”18 This is reminiscent of how the “clean” bourgeois characters from Mystery-Bouffe were portrayed. Once again, Meyerhold and 83 Mayakovsky choose to present those aligned with capitalistic enterprise as comically grotesque and physically repellent. In the case of both productions of Mystery-Bouffe, however, the comic scapegoats existed more as fantastic exaggerations than of potential spectators; in Bedbug the chance that some in the audience might actually identify with the crass wedding party was significantly larger. Meyerhold and Mayakovsky were definitely taking a gamble with whom they were choosing to mock.

After the catastrophic fire of the wedding scene, there is a brief transition scene between the world of 1929 and the futuristic society of 1979. In this scene firemen sift through the smoking wreckage that they just hosed down. Unaware that their water cannons had perfectly froze Prisypkin and his bedbug within the ruins of the beauty parlor, they report finding no survivors. The end of this scene begins the transition from present to future, at which time the Kukryniksy design is replaced by Rodchenko's, and

Shostakovich's turbulent musical score plays over the transition, portraying the shift in time as well as the inevitable march towards a socialist utopia. The next scene presents the future: replacing the overstuffed, insipid, but lively world of 1929 Russia,

Rodchenko's cold and efficient set looked like another planet. Gorchakov describes that

“To depict the Federation of the future, he used metal and sparkling glass. The rooms were as white as the operating-rooms in a hospital. It was a sterilized future.”19 Indeed, in addition to satirizing a world that felt a little too close to many of the spectators,

Meyerhold and Mayakovsky took another risk when they envisioned a lifeless and mechanized socialist utopia, retaining basically nothing of previous human culture.

The first scene in the future takes place in rooms with blinking electrical lights, loudspeakers that stand in for human voices, and mechanized control panels. The 84 world’s soviets (representing such places as Rome, Chicago, Shanghai, and Kabul) electronically convene to vote on whether to “resurrect” the recently-excavated human being found in a chunk of ice. Arguments made in favor of resurrection are “the life of every worker must be utilized until the very last second," and "after the wars that swept over the world, after the civil wars that led to the creation of our World Federation, human life was declared inviolable by the decree of November 7th, 1965.”20 One of the arguments made against thawing out Prisypkin is that “In view of the danger of the spread of the bacteria of arrogance and sycophancy, which were epidemic in 1929, we demand that the exhibit remain in its refrigerated state.”21 Despite the fear of contamination, the soviets vote overwhelmingly to unfreeze the man in the name of scientific and social research.

It is in the last sequence of scenes where the play shows just how wide the gulf stretches between the world of present-day Soviet Russia and the “perfect” socialism of

1979. While Prisypkin is thawed out in the laboratory, a professor brushes up on obsolete words and concepts in a dictionary; “business,” “bureaucracy,” “sentiment,”

“guitars,” and “handshakes” are strange and unknown concepts to the people of the future. After Prisypkin wakes, the hesitations earlier voiced about unfreezing him prove true: He manages to “infect” a large section of the population with sycophancy, drunkenness, love, and dancing. In a scene where a news reporter and other citizens gather around artificial trees (the trees are centrally-controlled to sprout plates of tangerines and apples), the reporter states that the toxic substance formerly known as

“beer” (concocted in a lab to help Prisypkin transition to a normal state) has been accidentally ingested by some of the researchers, who are now singing and staggering 85 through the streets. The music that Prisypkin plays on his guitar was overheard by a young woman and now she faintly dances about and sighs to herself; the reporter explains

“The professors say it's an acute attack of an ancient disease they called ‘love.’” Still others begin to foxtrot and chorus-kick through the city. The reporter's scene does not really move the action forward in any significant way, but it does serve to create an emotional distance for the audience, not only making the future seem strange and difficult to identify with, but also making the culture and customs of 1929 take on a different perspective.

By the end of the play, Prisypkin is thoroughly disgusted with this perfect future.

Going through alcohol withdrawal, he complains about having only small servings of beer to drink and not having reading material that “plucks at my heartstrings” (all the books that the lab assistant could find were autobiographies of Herbert Hoover and

Benito Mussolini). The only art that they can offer the ailing Prisypkin is a proletariat dance performance: “a gay rehearsal of a new work-system on the farms.” When

Prisypkin demands access to the things he enjoys the most, the professor maintains that

“Society hope to raise you up to a human level,” and “Our lives belong to the collective,” although it is unclear in the world of 1979 what a “human level” actually entails— everything that a spectator of 1929 would find potentially humanizing has been discarded as barbaric and antiquated.

Finally, concerned over future “infections” of citizens and Prisypkin’s inability to be properly humanized for their society, the scientists decide to simply put the parasitic loafer and the little bedbug in a zoo, and make them both a cautionary tale of the horrors that the proletariat had to overcome in reaching their present-day utopia. As the cage is 86 unveiled to both the onstage crowd (those at the zoo) and the audience in the actual theatre, we see Prisypkin smoking a cigarette and strumming his guitar on a bed, with empty bottles strewn about him. The zoo crowd, fascinated and repelled by such a display, recoils and begs the director not to torment the poor animal, but the director instead puts on gloves, pulls out a revolver for safety, and coaxes Prisypkin out of his cage and onto a platform. He comes out obediently, but just as he appears to begin speaking on cue he explodes in an emotional frenzy and cries out to the people gawking at him: “Citizens! Brothers! My own people! Darlings! How did you get here? So many of you! When were you unfrozen! Why am I alone in the cage? Darlings, friends, come and join me! Why am I suffering? Citizens!”22 The play closes with Prisypkin being dragged away by assistants, and the zoo director ordering marching music to be played.

The ending of the 1929 production of The Bedbug reveals a level of complexity and ambivalence towards its comic targets that seems out of character for both

Mayakovsky and Meyerhold. It is clear from the text and production choices that the culture of NEP Russia is being relentlessly mocked, but once the play arrives in the distant future, the real object of satire becomes harder to determine. The play is using a kind of alienation effect (similar to what Brecht would develop with his Epic Theatre in the 1930s) to make the spectators see their present-day economic and social culture from a perspective of “strangeness.” The plot device of placing the action in the future, so that the characters can regard the present day as foreign and inhumane, can in turn help spectators do the same. In her book Theatre of Estrangement, Silvija Jestrovic describes the alienation effect that occurs in The Bedbug as “perspectival estrangement”:

87 the present is described from the vantage point of the future [. . .] The future

world, actually situated in 1979, has been cleansed of all backward inclinations.

Mayakovsky uses his unethical and self-indulged central character as a symbol of

the contradictions and problems of Soviet social reality. The inhabitants of the

future describe the Moscow citizen from 1929 as if seeing such a creature for the

first time. Thus, the first narrative commentary introduces a perspective, but does

not create the effect of distancing, while the second is an example of perspectival

estrangement.23

However, there is another side to this estrangement. In addition to experiencing a future society that criticizes an audience’s present-day ills, the device is equally effective in critiquing the socialist utopia of 1979. Because the future is nothing like the current- day world of the spectators, there is instantly an alienation effect happening; what is fascinating about this particular alienation effect is that it scrutinizes the collective identity towards which Soviet Russia is striving. The perspectival estrangement that

Jestrovic describes makes the past seem quaint and dysfunctional, but the future does not seem much better. Mayakovsky and Meyerhold both deeply believed in the mission of the Bolsheviks, but it is nearly impossible for one to read the play, consider the production choices, and not wonder how much the production was informed by a weary cynicism of the current state of Soviet Russia, and the path it was taking. Slonim remarks that “[Prisypkin's] last words are rather ambiguous; he recognizes his brothers in the crowd in front of his cage and shouts at the: ‘Citizen brothers, where do you come from, how many are you, have they thawed all of you?’ In Meyerhold's production Prisypkin addressed this speech to the house, facing the spectators.”24 Such a choice not only 88 establishes Prisypkin as a character that recognizes and identifies with the spectators, but one that simultaneously places the spectators within the sterile future of 1979. The audience is forced to empathize and identify with both realities: the present day of 1929, and the oddly inhuman utopia of 1979.

There is another device that Mayakovsky uses to help the audience empathize and identify with both the future and present-day societies. The minor character of Zoya

Beryozkina appears in both the world of 1929 Soviet Russia and in the future of 1979.

Appearing only briefly in the first half of the play, she runs into Prisypkin and his future in-laws during their shopping spree on the street. From a short conversation it is revealed that Zoya and Prisypkin had been romantically involved, and that this is the first time she is made aware of his engagement and impending marriage to a Nepman’s daughter.

Demonstrating her allegiance to the proletariat, Zoya exclaims “We were going to live and work together…so it's all over,” to which Prisypkin blithely replies “Our love is liquidated. I'll call the militia if you interfere with my freedom of love as a citizen.”25

This is the last we see of Zoya in 1929; in the next scene we hear that she has shot herself in the chest, presumably killing herself, out of grief of losing Prisypkin.

Zoya’s suicide attempt, it turns out, was not successful, and the character also appears in the socialist future. Now an elderly woman, she works as an assistant in the very laboratory that is unfreezing Prisypkin. Mayakovsky clearly presents her as a character (in fact, the only character) in the play with which the spectator can easily sympathize and identify. However, just because Zoya exists in both 1929 and 1979 does it mean that she fits well within either world. Her brief appearance in the commercialized free-for-all of 1929 serves as more of a contrast with Prisypkin and his new family: She is 89 an idealistic representation of Soviet citizenship compared to the predatory Nepmen, but necessarily not a realistic one. In the gleaming glass-and-metal world of 1979 she is not a strong presence; she is complicit in trying to adjust Prisypkin to the new society but she does not express any particular zeal for the new world. It is important to note that she does know who he is; however, it is unclear if Prisypkin fully realizes who Zoya is, or if he even cares (he does at one point ask her if she is the mother of Zoya Beryozkina, but his curiosity develops no further). In the future she is a pale shadow of the spirited young woman we briefly meet in the first scene; over the course of the second half of the play the audience realizes that any passion she might have once had has long left her.

Initially, she does beg the professor not to unfreeze Prisypkin, fearful that her unrequited love will flare up again to torment her. However, once Prisypkin is unfrozen and he and

Zoya interact, she seems ambivalent and even irritated towards him. The last line of

Zoya’s is right after Prisypkin leaves to be put on display at the zoo when she announces

“And to think that fifty years ago I might have died on account of this skunk.”26

Taken together, the elements of the play and production choices do not lead to any singular or obvious targets of identification and satire, with the exception of Zoya as a sympathetic character. But Zoya takes on a neutral, even insignificant role as the action in the future progresses. The critics' responses, in spite of the production's documented success with the general spectatorship, reflect an insecure and fractured identity at this time in Soviet history, particularly among the cultural and political elite. Truly, critics were in line with their universal dislike of the show, but there seemed to be no one reason uniting them in disapproval. One issue many took with the production was the design; while I found no sources that mentioned a direct criticism of the Kukryniksy designs that 90 dominated the first half of the production, Rodchenko's futuristic utopia was heavily criticized. Braun writes that “[Rodchenko's] vision of a disciplined, scientific

Communist future was so lifeless and hygienic that the spectator was hard put to decide where the parody really stopped.”27 In fact, the depiction of the communist future, in both the play and the production, had so irked the cultural elites that Gorchakov states

“The Soviet critics, considering the 'sterilized future' to be almost a caricature of

Communism, rebuked both Meyerhold and Mayakovsky because of it a few times.

Mayakovsky even had to take an official oath that he had not been depicting socialist society.”28 Finally, the very fact that the play was a satire and took aim at any aspect of

Soviet society—whether in the present day or the future—was intolerable to cultural critics. Rudnitsky writes that “Many critics thought that in The Bedbug Mayakovsky and

Meyerhold were mistakenly ‘inflating’ the danger of the petit-bourgeoisie. Especially hostile to the play's satire were the activists of the Russian Association of Proletarian

Writers (RAPP). RAPP stood against satire in principle.”29

Popular Success and Critical Failure: Identification with the Soviet Anti-Hero

Those in a position of cultural or political authority hated the production, but it was documented as a great success with general audiences.30 One production choice that certainly appealed to the wider spectatorship was the casting of Prisypkin with the massively popular comic actor Igor Illinsky. Illinsky had starred in many popular Soviet films and melodramatic serials from the 1920s, most of which were modeled after

American entertainments; his celebrity no doubt contributed to the large spectator turnout. Braun writes that “Despite widespread criticism…The Bed Bug was a huge popular success due largely to the inspired portrayal of Prisypkin by Igor Illinsky.”31 91 Illinsky and Meyerhold had collaborated before on theatre productions, and would continue to work together in the coming years, but there is an irony that the popular success of the production depended upon Illinsky’s previous work in more commercialized, “Western” entertainments. It only further proved that everyday Soviet audiences preferred conventional and popular entertainments to the politically-themed avant-garde theatre.

Probably as much for Illinsky's portrayal of the loutish lead character as anything else, general audiences enjoyed and identified with the action of The Bedbug. Cultural elites and the press, meanwhile, soured over what they perceived as its uncomfortably close satire of Communist policy and values. The wider spectatorship, however, did not seem to interpret the production in the same way, or, if it did, empathized and identified with characters in a very different way from the party elites. Just who and what were the real targets of satire in The Bedbug? With whom were the spectators supposed to identify? Exploring the production through Thompson’s four levels of empathy can illuminate how and why the spectators' potentially empathized with Prisypkin. As the first level of empathy would have been experienced by everyone in the audience, regardless of social or political identification, this level would not offer much insight.

The second level, transposing oneself to the person being watched, would also have occurred in all of the spectators, but depending on how spectators would have already felt about the commercial culture of the NEP or the idea of a socialist utopia, would create different responses in spectators. For example, spectators who detested the excesses of the NEP might have felt contempt for Prisypkin as he strolls through the market in the first scene, imagining his thoughts to be full of pettiness and greed. For those who might 92 not believe that anything is particularly wrong with the bustling markets made possible by the NEP, seeing the production satirize it might have made some feel uncomfortable or resentful. Additionally, watching Prisypkin callously break Zoya’s heart would further project a Theory of Mind of selfishness and coldness towards others.

Basically, it would be very difficult for any audience member to project a positive Theory of Mind for the petulant Prisypkin at this moment. What an audience member from Soviet Russia in the late 1920s could not deny, no matter their emotional reaction to it, was the accuracy of the opening scene. Mayakovsky’s stage directions for the beginning of the play describe “Display windows full of goods. People entering empty-handed and coming out with bundles. Private peddlers walking through the aisles.”32 Compared to the hardships and shortages experienced the years of War

Communism, much of the 1920s was a booming economic period, with city centers full of markets and goods. However, just because commerce and standards of living had improved for much of the population, it did not mean that all of the population was thriving after the civil war. Vladimir Brovkin describes the many contradictions in Soviet life during this time:

A stroll through the streets of Russian cities in the 1920s revealed to many foreign

observers the diversity, even incompatibility, of Soviet society's many elements.

Hundreds of petty traders with their little stalls, peasant markets with babushkas

selling potatoes, private shops selling fake French perfume and other items of

luxury, while at the same time Communist functionaries, leather-jacketed Cheka

93 agents,iv and businessmen enjoyed luxurious meals in restaurants to the

accompaniment of jazz. In contrast, hundreds of homeless children, orphaned

during the civil war, swarmed on to the streets, or lived in abandoned housing.33

It was this incompatibility that Mayakovsky and Meyerhold, with the help of Kukryniksy, re-created in the first scene of The Bedbug. They mercilessly attack it for its selfishness and hypocrisy—that not only Nepmen are profiting off the backs of struggling workers and peasants, but that union workers and party members—represented by Prisypkin—are also joining in the capitalistic orgy. Many in the audience, therefore, would have projected a Theory of Mind that would have viewed Prisypkin with at least a measure of contempt or of discomfort for recognizing their own participation in a culture that is being so thoroughly criticized on stage.

However, Thompson’s second, third, and fourth levels of empathy begin to factor more as Prisypkin unfreezes in the world of 1979. Here he is imprisoned, quarantined, and re-programmed to function in a socialist paradise. Oddly enough, due to the lifeless and antiseptic environment of the future, the qualities that make him rather contemptible in the first half of the play seem almost endearing and sympathetic now. Now the audience is able to see both the future and the present from a perspective of alienation. It is at this point where the spectator might change his or her mind about how they feel towards Prisypkin. If they were to employ the second level of empathy, which is imagining themselves in the same situation as the character, they might feel that despite

Prisypkin’s many shortcomings, he does not deserve the treatment he is enduring. Of ivThe Cheka, roughly translated as “Emergency Commission,” was the first Soviet state security force, created by Lenin in 1917 and led by Felix Dzerzhinsky. The Cheka was responsible for running labor camps, the gulag system, requisitioning grain during War Communism, and quelling worker and peasant revolts. 94 course, this shift in empathy is an intentional choice in both Mayakovsky’s writing and

Meyerhold’s production choices, especially as Prisypkin turns out to the audience in the last moments of the play, begging his brothers and comrades to join him in his cage.

Here is a moment, written into the play and blocked into the production, of what

Thompson describes as the third level of empathy. A moment of reiterated empathy

(where “I empathetically imagine your experience of me and you empathetically experience my empathetic experience of you”34) could exist between Prisypkin and the spectators. Here Prisypkin physically and emotionally acknowledges the theatre audience’s presence, and expresses concern for them as other human beings—he is imagining himself in their position as they are currently regarding him.

This is perhaps the first time in the play where Prisypkin displays any kind of empathetic interest or concern for anyone other than himself. Prisypkin never really redeems himself—he is always the same loafer and parasite from the first scene of the play—but the production does allow the audience to change how it feels towards him.

Through imagining themselves in his position and experiencing reiterated empathy for him, spectators could even come to experience what Thompson considers the fourth and final level of empathy: “the perception of the other as a being who deserves concern and respect…the underlying capacity to have such other-directed and other-regarding feelings of concern.”35 It is true that Prisypkin does not redeem himself, but his redemption can occur through the spectator's full empathetic experience of him. Through a full empathetic experience, not only can spectators understand Prisypkin’s experience in the grotesque and materialistic present day of 1929 Russia, but as a potential victim of a sterilized utopia. Thompson's second, third, and fourth levels of empathy allow this 95 recognition, redemption, and transformation to occur. Yes, Prisypkin is a skunk, but he may very well be a pitiable skunk, and one worthy of our concern.

This full spectrum of empathy could have and almost certainly occurred for spectators of The Bedbug, but clearly those who took issue with the production, such as the party-appointed cultural critics, did not allow themselves to have this emotional identification with the play or, if they did have it, would not admit to it. What can override a potential empathetic response is a strong group identification. However, this is not a group identification that was forged as a result of having watched the show, but one of pre-determined group identities. Specifically, whether a spectator was a member of the Communist party, or strongly identified with the ideology of the Communist party, was the best determining factor for liking or disliking the production. By 1929, there is already a clear divide between the Communist ruling class and most of the population.

By the time that The Bedbug opened, in fact, Brovkin asserts that the relationship between the proletariat and the Bolsheviks had deteriorated so much that “From 1925 onward, workers' discontent increased, reaching its peak in 1928-9. There were no class- conscious proletarians following the party. There was instead anti-Bolshevik radicalization against lower wages and higher production rates.”36 It might be surprising that workers were beginning to organize against the party, particularly since the economy had recovered so completely by the mid-1920s, but as the NEP was phased out, and the first five-year plan started, the policies towards workers had become more and more stringent, giving workers few options against these changes. Brovkin continues:

Bolshevik policy towards workers is a matter of factual record, not perceptions. It

stressed making workers work harder for less pay by scaling down wages and 96 benefits while raising production targets—all in the name of constructing

socialism. The study of workers’ culture, popular attitudes, and lifestyles shows a

particular psychological tension caused by the gap between official

representations and the miserable realities.37

Considering the rising inequality for workers in the late 1920s, there can be at least two strong group identifications especially relevant to the spectatorship of The

Bedbug. One would be those who identified with and were heavily invested in the

Communist Party; these people would have supported all economic policies past and current (both NEP and the Five-Year Plan), as well as the idea of working towards a perfect future socialism. The other group would have been those disillusioned with the

Bolshevik's promise of socialism in the face of higher production targets and lower wages, along with the increasing intolerance for any dissent or deviation from official

Soviet policies. The Bedbug satirizes both the excesses of the NEP and the idea of a conformist socialist utopia; the everyday proletariat, perhaps embodied by the character of Zoya, however, is not a target of mockery. Spectators who would then feel the most threatened by the production would most likely have been the group that identified itself with the ideology and policies of the party. For the sake of clarity, I will refer to this group identification as the ‘party group,” and the disillusioned group as the “proletariat group” (although a spectator would not necessarily have to have been a member of either to identify with these). According to the Intergroup Emotions Theory, the production of

The Bedbug would have threatened the “party group” the most, as it would have challenged the hierarchy and status of the group, and perhaps united those in the

“proletariat group” against what was quickly becoming its adversary: the Communist 97 party elite. Mackie, Silver, and Smith state that because of intergroup emotions, there is a strong desire amongst a group to unite in a cause, break other rival groups apart, or challenge the status and validity of rival groups.38

While the “party group” would have seen their social status questioned and challenged by the spectatorship of the production, the “proletariat group” would have been able to feel a kind of social superiority, and even experience schadenfreude towards those whom the production were satirizing. In the case of in-groups versus out-groups, experiencing schadenfreude is more complex than just a fleeting moment of pleasure at another’s misfortune; it reveals an existing or intensifying rivalry between two groups.

Describing how schadenfreude can work between in-groups and out-groups, Spears and

Leach explain:

The state of rivalry implies that the outgroup has suffered a misfortune in a

domain that is valued by the ingroup. Obviously, if the domain of the outgroup’s

misfortune is not important to the ingroup, the misfortune of the outgroup is

unlikely to have psychological impact [. . .] Intergroup schadenfreude can perhaps

prefigure as well as reflect the conditions that lead to more active forms of

persecution, along with their emotional correlates, such as gloating. Such social

changes may reflect deeper changes to the social hierarchy, and thus undermine

the very status differentials that can constrain schadenfreude in a more material

sense. Intergroup schadenfreude may therefore not just implicate emotional

opportunism, but also the social opportunism relating to social and historical

conjectures.39

98 It would have been this “social opportunism,” ignited by productions such as The

Bedbug, or by other ways of mocking party policies or voicing resentment among the population, that the party elites were unwilling to tolerate. The spectatorship of The

Bedbug reflects a divided people— ruling elites seeking to further consolidate their control of virtually every aspect of life in Soviet Union, and the wider population that was beginning to feel constriction in what was once a relatively more open society that promised a just and equitable future.

In addition to theories of group identification, analyzing the production through theories of comedy can further illuminate spectator response to The Bedbug. As comedy is specific to its culture and society, understanding how comic characters have often functioned in Russian literature and performances offers a helpful perspective. It is true that by making Prisypkin a scapegoat and comic target, audiences are invited to feel superior to him and define who they are by what he is (or isn’t). For example, spectators who would have identified with the “proletariat group” would have been able to differentiate themselves from Prisypkin because they would not have directly benefitted from the policies of the NEP, nor did they use influence of the Communist party to achieve their own ends. However, Prisypkin also functions in a more complex manner than simply as a grotesque parasite soon to be expelled from the shining new society.

There are two specific kinds of comic characters from Russian literature that no doubt were influential to Mayakovsky when he was writing The Bedbug: The middle-class lout and the holy fool. These comic characters appear throughout Russian literature, and complicate how Soviet audiences would have perceived and possibly felt about

Prisypkin. 99 The character of “the middle-class lout” would seem a good fit for Mayakovsky's attack on the materialism of 1920s Soviet Russia. However, this particular character and how it has traditionally been used to criticize bourgeois society had existed well before the 1917 Revolution. Grounded in the nineteenth-century Golden Age of Russian literature, Rzhevsky states that “Attacks on louts in their middle-class prototypes…were already familiar to Russian intellectual history in the works of Herzen, Dostoevsky, and

Konstantin Leontiev…In theatre, of course, Alexander Ostrovsky had created an immense body of dramatic texts evoking the 'kingdom of darkness' and the grotesque mediocrity of the developing middle class.”40 Such characters can also been seen in the plays of Anton Chekhov; Natasha from Three Sisters and Lopakhin from The Cherry

Orchard embody the material-minded and often vulgar rising middle class. Seen from this perspective, many spectators would have recognized Prisypkin as a variation of this

“grotesque mediocrity,” and felt the appropriate disdain not only for the character itself, but also what it represented in current-day society. What makes the use of the lout interesting in this case is that Mayakovsky is using this older convention to mock a society that is supposedly free of a greedy and vulgar middle class; by creating a play set in the world of present-day Soviet Union, and placing Prisypkin as an acceptable, functioning character in the midst of it not only re-orients the spectators to the indulgences and excess of pre-Revolutionary society, but makes a connection between that world and the current one.

Creating Prisypkin in the mold of the middle-class lout would help the audience identify what kind of values that the character is associated with, and invite spectators to project a certain Theory of Mind towards him, as well as suggest how much to empathize 100 with him. However, the other character type that Mayakovsky draws from, “the holy fool,” might invite a different kind of understanding and emotional response from the audience. Of course, the Bolsheviks and those who supported the ideals of the revolution would not openly advocate anything “holy,” but how this character has traditionally functioned in classic literature is the important element here; this kind of character would serve as an uncensored jester, and force the audience to decide if the character is worthy of only laughter and derision, or if he is providing a deeper lesson. David M. Bethea describes the history and importance of this character:

The reason the iurodivyi (holy fool, fool-in-Christ) is such a potent figure in

Russian literature, from Aleksandr Pushkin's character who says to the tsar what

no one else dares (Boris Godunov) to Yury Olesha's Ivan Babichev who tells

campy versions of Gospel parables to the drunks and outcasts of Soviet society, is

because he captures in one person, with great economy and expressive force, this

principle of iconic liminality. He voluntarily humiliates himself, thus re-traversing

Christ’s path, in order, as it were, to rub society's nose in its own pride and

exclusionary logic…the reader must make a choice: is this simply a fool whose

antics reveal the workings of divine wisdom? Do I judge and join the ranks of

the modern Pharisees or do I imitate Christ and celebrate the carnival logic or

role-reversal, laughter, and folly?41

This Christianized analysis would definitely not have appealed to either

Mayakovsky or Meyerhold, but how the audience could come to view Prisypkin is remarkably similar to Bethea’s description. Prisypkin’s antics and eventual humiliation do reveal Communist society’s flaws, his admission of selfishness and playing the system 101 for his own gain is a reflection of many in 1929 Soviet Russia, and he even achieves a kind of pathos at the end, when he pleads with the audience to join him in his cage.

Finally, at the end of the play the spectator is forced to choose how they feel about

Prisypkin and his situation: Is he nothing more than a selfish fool who deserves his imprisonment in the future, or should the audience “join” him in the cage by identifying with him and forgiving his faults? Mayakovsky or Meyerhold does not make it easy for the audience to choose one or the other; as written before, Prisypkin cannot be redeemed without a level of participation from the audience, and he never truly stops being a lout or fool. Also, the levels of empathy experienced for Prisypkin would have certainly varied from spectator to spectator, with of course each person's group identifications factoring in. However, the fact that the playwright and director place the main character in situations similar to comic characters that can be identified from classical Russian literature, gives the spectators subtle clues about how this character functions in the play, and what it is revealing about current-day society.

Finally, Mayakovsky complicates the conventional comedy in a way that replaces the traditional romantic subplot with the culmination of a perfect socialist utopia. In contrast to most conventional comedies, the wedding in The Bedbug occurs in the first half of the play, instead of the ending, and literally goes up in flames, killing everyone except Prisypkin. This is of course a rather sick inversion of the traditional comedy, but the audience would have probably not be too bothered; the marriage between Prisypkin and his fiancée is a predatory one, with the groom interested in the family's wealth and the family interested in his party membership. An important question to ask is if the play can even be considered a “conventional” comedy at this point. In a sense, it could, if one 102 chooses to reinterpret what the “romantic” union is at the resolution of the play. Seen from this perspective, Clayton explains how the plot of The Bedbug could still fit within the traditional parameters of commedia/comedy.

If the satirized character…were commedia masks transcoded into characters from

the situation of Soviet Russia during the NEP, the serious and aseptic plot with

communist heroics represents Mayakovsky’s transformation of the commedia

tradition, one that corresponds to Meyerhold’s similar post-1917 restructuring of

the tradition in certain productions. In this transformation the “happy end” of the

commedia love-plot was replaced by the fusion of actors and audience in the

white heat of communist endeavor.42

If an entire society working together towards a socialist utopia can replace the traditional concept of a fruitful marriage, then this can be an acceptable understanding of The

Bedbug as a Soviet-Socialist comedy. However, the sterile future nevertheless has a strange, off-putting feel to it.

Additionally, there are other comic conventions used that complicate the spectator's perception of the play. As in traditional comedy, the spectator is still invited to the “feast” at the play's resolution, but it is rather unclear where this celebration is occurring: is it the gathering at the zoo to observe Prisypkin, or is the real celebration within his cage, where the spectators are explicitly invited at the very end? Furthermore, what would have spectators made of a play where it is the scapegoat who is inviting them to the celebration—Prisypkin’s cage, after all, is the only place in the future that has cigarettes, alcohol, and music (it is also the only place where he feels protected from the harsh environment of the future). This inverts the typical resolution of New Comedy 103 where the scapegoat is often forgiven and invited to rejoin society and attend the feast at the end. If the only real feast is inside Prisypkin’s cage, and he invites the spectators to join him then who is forgiving whom, and where exactly is the renewed society?

Mayakovsky understood the conventions of comedy well enough to invert them, time and time again. As with the parasitic bourgeois characters in Mystery-Bouffe, there is no forgiveness for Prisypkin in the new society of 1979, and no room for him in the promised land of Socialist Utopia. The many inversions of the traditional comic plot in this play do little to clarify whom the spectator is supposed to identify with, and how one should feel about Prisypkin’s fate. If spectators saw this play as Clayton describes, a socialist comedy where the true union is the whole of the proletariat building a more perfect future, then Prisypkin is a traditional scapegoat, cast out of society and offered no forgiveness or second chances. However, if audiences were to see the socialist future as too austere and sterile for any human society to flourish, then perhaps the only hope for a

“renewed” society was inside the zoo cage, thus making Prisypkin a kind of redeemed comic hero.

Fractured Identities and Ideologies in The Bedbug

Interpretations of The Bedbug’s ending continue to differ. Gorchakov interprets

Prisypkin as an outcast deserving of his imprisonment when he asserts that “The suggestion to pity all those in the Soviet audience who would be in the animal cage of future Communism ended the comedy…The theme of The Bug was that the Revolution had grown narrow-minded, and the new Party functionaries had grown fat.” 43

Meanwhile, Jestrovic sees the utopia of 1979 as the satire's real target when she writes

“The future does not come across as a prolonged and improved present life, but as a 104 graveyard, a mausoleum, a dictionary, or a zoo where what survived the fire Mayakovsky set to the characters in the first half of the play is displayed as an alien and atavistic relic.”44 These conclusions are of course not the only ones that can be made about the play and the 1929 production. However, the ambiguity over what is The Bedbug’s real object of derision and whom the spectator should empathize with demonstrates that the response and contribution of the spectators in a specific historical moment are vital in creating meaning in the production.

The fact that The Bedbug’s spectatorship generated different identifications and empathies reflects not just the play’s ambiguity, but also that a unified cultural and social identity amongst those who saw the production was effectively out of reach. Whatever cultural unity had been achieved shortly after the Revolution and civil war had been lost throughout the excesses of the 1920s. The NEP was overall successful in salvaging the devastated Soviet economy, but its rampant abuses made those who profited from the economic policy, often referred to as “Nepmen,” much like the bourgeois class enemies that Mayakovsky railed against in Mystery-Bouffe. Furthermore, the growing disparity between the reality of workers’ lives and the small circle of communist elites also contributed to the splintering sense of cultural purpose. The Bedbug, regardless of whom

Meyerhold or Mayakovsky intended this production for the most, was experienced and interpreted in different ways by its spectatorship, and clearly revealed a moment of cultural and social fracturing within the Soviet Union.

The production also revealed a large amount of disillusionment with promises made by the Bolsheviks during and shortly after the civil war. Of course, many of those promises and concessions (such as the establishment of the NEP) were never intended to 105 last for long, as they were seen as obstacles in the way of creating a perfect socialist society. However, the realities of many of these centrally-planned policies were far different from the utopia that the Bolsheviks envisioned. Brovkin writes that “Most outcomes of Bolshevik social policies and cultural campaigns in the 1920s had practical results which differed from the original plans. The Communist Party was supposed to become a proletarianized vanguard building socialism. Instead it was a conglomeration of bureaucrats—many of them corrupt, some barely literate—pursuing their own private agendas.”45 It is this corrupt, selfish reality that Mayakovsky and Meyerhold portrayed in the first half of The Bedbug, challenging those with political power to confront the unsavory results of their policies and personal ambitions. However, the biggest cautionary tale of the play may not be the grotesque present, but the prospect of a future where the ruling elites can actually make their dreams of a communist society come true.

The Bedbug revealed cracks in the concept of a unified cultural identity by its spectator response; party elites saw themselves and their policies as the objects of satire, and those sympathetic to the issues of the proletariat delighted in a sense of social and moral superiority. Furthermore, by empathizing with the character of Prisypkin on multiple levels described by Thompson, spectators could vicariously experience the kinds of dangers that lurked in the extreme swings of party policy: the commercial frenzy of

NEP, or the unforgiving future utopia. In 1929, this would be one of the last instances in

Soviet Russia where theatre as social satire (at least satire towards party policy) would be tolerated, even if to be universally condemned by cultural elites. By 1932, such questions of identification and social rifts would no longer be portrayed in literature, theatre, and other art forms. It was not because these issues did not exist anymore in Soviet society, 106 or that the identity crisis that its people were experiencing would be resolved, but rather because such art and cultural dialogue would be effectively banned. There would be no more genuine public debates to reveal any splintering or fracturing of social identities. In just a short amount of time, Socialist Realism—the genre of “conflictless drama,” and the

“struggle between the good and the better”—would be the only acceptable cultural identification for the Soviet population. However, this would not be an identity co- created in moments of spectatorship and participation, but rather imposed upon spectators, dictating whom they were to empathize and identity with. Mayakovsky and

Meyerhold, perhaps clearly seeing what was coming for their generation of experimental artists, decided to make a bold commentary on the state of their Revolutionary society while they still could. Unlike the clear-cut depictions in Mystery-Bouffe, however, The

Bedbug contains a character that is torn between worlds, imperfect but not inhuman, and is perhaps a little too easy to empathize with, much to the discomfort of many in the audience. Clayton observes that “Prisypkin is a typical example of this hero in the way the author both satirizes and yet identifies with him, an ambivalence that marks the period when Russian intellectuals were becoming aware of their growing irrelevance and the fact that their days were numbered.”46

Conclusion

A Reflection of its Time: Cultural Ambiguity and Fractured Identity in

The Bedbug’s Spectatorship

By 1929, the bright promise that many in Soviet Russia felt after the Revolution and civil war had dulled into cynicism and cultural mediocrity. The party would push one identity, yet popular spectatorship often chose another through their response to 107 theatrical performances, revealing cultural and social rifts. In what was perhaps the final window of opportunity to truly criticize the cultural values and social vision of the

Communist party, Mayakovsky and Meyerhold rejuvenated their theatre and their art with The Bedbug. The success of the show demonstrated that the biting satire of the NEP and a potential socialist future were enjoyed and accepted by the theatre-going public.

The bitter criticism doled out from the party and cultural elites demonstrated that they felt their vision of Soviet identity had been mocked and challenged, and in a sense rejected by the increasingly discontented workers.

The main character of Prisypkin, a character firmly rooted in the post- revolutionary moment, but nevertheless inspired by the ‘holy fool” and “middle-class lout” of golden age literature, was a character with which Russians could both mock and identify. This dual identity was part of The Bedbug’s appeal; audiences could either identify with Prisypkin or revile him, but it was very likely that spectators would feel both for the ambiguous character. Split empathy was literally written into the script.

Perhaps this double identification was a reflection both of Meyerhold and Mayakovsky at the time, having given more than a decade to the ideals of the revolution and Bolshevik policies, only to find that the communist elite never really supported their visions and was fast clamping down on the creative flourishing that helped solidify the Bolsheviks’ power.

Meyerhold and Mayakovsky would collaborate on one more production, The

Bathhouse, in 1930. As another satirical futuristic fantasy criticizing the bureaucracy and shifting values of the Communist party, the production was far less successful with audiences, and critics hated it just as much as The Bedbug. Mayakovsky, worn down by 108 cultural intolerance, his own growing irrelevance in the Soviet literary world, and failed relationships, shot himself in April of 1930. As for Meyerhold, he did not go on to direct any other productions as memorable or influential as his masterpieces of the early to mid

1920s, yet he continued to produce theatre on his own terms, defiantly ignoring the growing chorus of Socialist Realism and its adherents. Meyerhold’s influence and good standing would only decline throughout the thirties, and, as Socialist Realism took hold, his list of enemies grew. The great director would die, in 1939, as a victim of a firing squad in a Siberian gulag. Meyerhold had long irritated Stalin with his rejection of

Socialist Realism and loud protestations in the theatre world, but exactly why he was arrested, tortured, and killed at a prison camp is still unclear.

In Mystery-Bouffe, Meyerhold and Mayakovsky attempted to capture the spirit of their age through a comedy that at once promoted the values of the Soviet Union and condemned the enemies of socialism. Seven years later, they took aim at those who were exploiting communism for personal gain in The Bedbug. The Bedbug was more successful at reflecting the social and cultural identities of Soviet Russia because the play and production were more ambiguous than in Mystery-Bouffe. Mystery was crystal clear in showing the audience which characters were heroes and which were scapegoats; the production imposed an identification upon the spectatorship, instead of reflecting it. In contrast, The Bedbug’s ambiguity and allowance for split empathies invited spectators to co-create the ultimate meaning of the 1929 production, thus revealing a cultural and social moment in Soviet history. The Bedbug would be one of the last comedies able to capture and reflect the ambiguity and conflicting identities of this time. Soon after, cultural authorities would only allow for emotionally prescriptive theatre, much like what 109 Meyerhold and Mayakovsky produced with Mystery-Bouffe, but of course looking nothing like the avant-garde theatre of the Revolutionary age. Socialist realism would be the only viable means of cultural expression, whether it accurately reflected its spectatorship or not.

110

Endnotes

1 Edward Braun, Meyerhold on Theatre. New York: Hill and Wang, 1969: 233.

2 Ibid: 236.

3 Silvija Jestrovic, Theatre of Estrangement: Theatre, Practice, Ideology. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006: 81.

4 Paul R. Gregory, Before Command: An Economic History of Russia from Emancipation to the First Five-Year Plan. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994: 92.

5 Vladimir Brovkin, Russia After Lenin: Politics, Culture and Society 1921-1929. London: Routledge, 1998: 14.

6 Gregory: 98.

7 Peter Yershov, Comedy in the Soviet Theater. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1956: 59.

8 Yershov: 60.

9 J.A.E. Curtis, “Down with the Foxtrot! Concepts of Satire in the Soviet Theatre of the 1920s.” Russian Theatre in the Age of Modernism. Eds Robert Russell and Andrew Barratt. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990: 225.

10 Brovkin: 15-16.

11 Meyerhold Theatre Centre. Vsevolod Meyerhold. 2013. Web. 8 Dec 2012. http://www.meyerhold.ru/en/biography/

12 Braun: 235-236.

13 Vladimir Mayakovsky, The Bedbug and Selected Poetry. Translated by Max Hayward and George Reavey; Edited by Patricia Blake. New York: Meridian Books,1960: 245.

14 Mayakovsky: 249.

111

15 Braun: 237.

16 Mayakovsky: 256.

17 Braun: 236.

18 Nikolai Gorchakov, The Theatre in Soviet Russia. Columbia UP, 1957: 218.

19 Ibid: 218.

20 Mayakovsky: 273.

21 Ibid: 274.

22 Ibid: 302.

23 Jestrovic: 76-77.

24 Marc Slonim, Russian Theater: From the Empire to the Soviets. Cleveland; New York: World Publishing Company, 1961: 254.

25 Mayakovsky: 251.

26 Ibid: 293.

27 Braun: 236.

28 Gorchakov: 218.

29 Konstantin Rudnitsky, Russian and Soviet Theatre: Tradition and the Avant Garde. London: Thames and Hudson, 2000: 207.

30 Slonim: 254; Braun: 237.

31 Braun: 237.

32 Mayakovsky: 243

33 Brovkin: 16.

34 Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007: 398

35 Ibid: 401

112

36 Brovkin: 217.

37 Ibid: 217.

38 Diane M. Mackie, Lisa A. Silver, and Eliot R. Smith, “Intergroup Emotions,” The Social Life of Emotions. Eds. Larissa Z. Tiedens and Colin Wayne Leach. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004: 228.

39 Russell Spears and Colin Wayne Leach, “Intergroup Schadenfreude,” The Social Life of Emotions. Eds. Larissa Z. Tiedens and Colin Wayne Leach. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004: 341, 352.

40 Nicholas Rzhevsky. The Cambridge Companion to Modern Russian Culture. Ed. Nicholas Rzhevsky. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998: 10.

41 David M. Bethea, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Russian Culture. Ed. Nicholas Rzhevsky. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998: 165.

42 J. Douglas Clayton, Pierrot in Petrograd: The Commedia dell’Arte/Balagan in Twentieth-Century Russian Theatre and Drama. London: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1993: 185.

43 Gorchakov: 218.

44 Jestrovic: 81

45 Brovkin: 219 . 46 Clayton: 185.

113

Chapter 4

Forging Modern Identity in the United States: Shuffle Along and 1920s Spectatorship

Raunchy, delicate, romantic, syncopated, [Shuffle Along] is all of these things in part. It is a series of fragments, bits, individual varied moments, each valid, brief, and pointed. But the unity is something like the unity in plurality of America itself—held together by its very disparateness and many-faceted character, in a way that any hierarchical order would violate. In short, there is no reason at all that it should have worked—and that is evidently just why it did.

- Robert Kimball, Reminiscing with Sissle and Blake, p. 101

Shuffle Along was one of the most successful and influential Broadway musicals of the 1920s. Opening on May 23, 1921, the show ran for 504 performances and grossed over three million dollars.1 Furthermore, the show’s tremendous success initiated the careers of several young African American performers in the cast, such as Paul Robeson,

Florence Mills, and Josephine Baker, and inspired numerous black musicals throughout the decade, including Runnin’ Wild (1923), Dixie to Broadway (1924), Chocolate

Dandies (1924), and Blackbirds of 1928.2 A true collaborative effort, Shuffle Along was written by Aubrey Lyles and Flournoy Miller, who both also played the comic leads. Its lyrics and music were by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake; Sissle also acted in the production and Blake played the piano in the orchestra. For all its popularity, however, the show’s significance reaches beyond its massive profits and star-making performances. As the first black musical to appear on Broadway since 1913, the show

114 was extremely popular with both black and white spectators—to such a degree that many returned again and again to watch the musical comedy complete with light-skinned chorus girls, catchy songs, a serious romantic subplot between two African American characters (a first for theatre audiences, both white and black), and the ridiculous comic antics by vaudevillian performers Lyles and Miller. Because of its wildly enthusiastic reception, Shuffle Along is considered to have initiated the African American artistic and cultural flourishing in the 1920s known as the Harlem Renaissance, along with the

“Negro Vogue” among wealthy New York whites.

Shuffle Along brought fame, influence, and cultural status to its black theatre artists and performers, but its success was mixed with troubling consequences. While the show was the first of its kind to feature what David Krasner calls “progressively-minded musical characters with integrity and capable of romance,” much of the humor and appeal of the production depended upon blackface minstrelsy and racial stereotypes.3 Lyles and

Miller, as the comic leads, performed their characters in full blackface. Some black intellectuals denounced aspects of the production as regressive and demeaning, but, despite murmurings of disapproval, African American audiences went to see it in droves.

White audiences, meanwhile, accepted the love story while laughing at the blackface humor; they also appreciated the musical numbers involving the light-skinned female chorus dancers. Sissle, Blake, Lyles, and Miller relied on racial stereotypes to appeal to both black and white audiences while simultaneously challenging expectations of African

American performance. In doing so, Shuffle Along attempted to maintain a precarious balance between racial ridicule and progressive humanization. Susan Gubar states that

“To adopt minstrelsy is to collude in one’s own fetishization; but to relinquish efforts to 115 adapt it is to lose completely a cultural past appropriated by whites.”4 By choosing to adopt minstrel forms, Shuffle Along’s popularity ushered in a decade’s worth of black musical comedies, supplied careers for black artists and entertainers, and helped to spark a vibrant Harlem nightclub scene in which wealthy white patrons paid to see entertainments by African American performers. Yet the cost of such heightened status and cultural influence also led to the kind of that fetishization that Gubar refers to; throughout the 1920s most black performers still had to adhere to the comic mask of minstrelsy, or of exoticized performance in order to find success with both black and white spectators.

While it would be an exaggeration to state that Shuffle Along’s spectatorship is the sole reason that Harlem night life flourished and white audiences demanded more entertainment from African American performers, its impact on the emerging cultural and social identity of the United Stated in the 1920s cannot be denied. In this chapter I explore how the production managed to achieve such mass appeal among black and white spectators, and what this success reveals of an emergent American identity during this historical moment. Furthermore, I investigate how spectators contributed to the creation and perception of this show, which in turn shaped its dominant narrative of igniting much of the Harlem Renaissance and “Negro Vogue” of the 1920s. Finally, I examine how the comic elements in the production, particularly the ones that relied on racist stereotypes grounded in the tradition of minstrelsy, reinforced (or possibly re-imagined) existing social tensions between black and white audiences. Did the comedy in Shuffle Along further divide spectators through scapegoating and out-grouping, or did it unite seemingly

116 different social and racial groups through a common in-group identity? Could it have done both?

To aid this investigation I consider theories of empathy and intergroup emotion along with historical and critical analyses of the production. Theories of empathy can explain how mixed audiences might have emotionally identified in a positive way with certain African American characters, while having feelings of schadenfreude towards others. Social identification also plays an important role in how spectators responded to the production; Shuffle Along had a mass appeal to both black and white audiences, but for different social and cultural reasons. Examining how intergroup identification might have contributed to these spectator affiliations, combined with the social circumstances surrounding New York and the United States in the early 1920s, will offer insights into the spectator response and participation in this production.

Ultimately, I argue that the spectatorship of Shuffle Along reflected a social and cultural moment in New York and the United States, revealing an emergent common identity. Ann Douglas considers the 1920s to be the “most revealing moment, the decade after the Great War (as this generation called World War I), when America seized the economic and cultural leadership of the West.”5 Building on Douglas’ argument, I believe that the response to Shuffle Along helped to reflect this “most revealing moment,” a crystallization of social and cultural purpose that represented a moment of power, potential, and purpose in the American narrative, one that only a brief moment of unified white and black spectatorship could create.

117 “In Need of a Hypodermic”: Producing Shuffle Along in Post-World War I United States

Shuffle Along became an extraordinary success for all involved with the production, but up until its opening on Broadway, few would have predicted that the show would have survived at all. In the first place, not since the heyday of Bert Williams and George Walker’s musicals from the 1890s and 1900s had there been a successful

African American show on Broadway. Krasner writes that “Despite an abundance of talent in the show, Shuffle Along appeared doomed from the outset…Moreover, no

African American musical, with the brief exception of Darktown Follies in 1913, had appeared on Broadway since 1910.”6 Furthermore, although it was a risky time for an

African American musical, the economy made it a particularly bad time for any

Broadway production. While the post-World War I years, all the way up to the crash of

1929, are typically considered a time of explosive economic growth, the year 1921 proved an exception to the decade. Krasner adds that “the slumping economy of 1921, which was classified as a depression, gave little encouragement to take risks…during

1921, wartime profits were swallowed up, unemployment increased from 1,305,000 in

1920 to 4, 225, 000, and retail purchasing power dropped by a whopping 7.6 billion dollars.”7 In spite of their being nearly destitute, according to Robert Kimball, the production team was able to secure a lunch date with the Cort family of theatre owners:

“Everyone was broke just then, including Mayer [one of the show’s producers] himself;

Miller, Lyles, Sissle, and Blake chipped in $1.25 each so that Al could take Harry Cort to lunch and discuss the new project.”8

118 In spite of the slumping economy and the unlikely timing for an African

American musical, Lyles, Miller, Sissle, and Blake believed that Shuffle Along had an audience for it. In an unpublished essay, Noble Sissle explained why he and his co- producers felt that the time was ripe for a show like Shuffle Along:

We were convinced America was ready for an all Negro show [. . .] Strange to

say, very few people of the Broadway theatrical managerial staffs believed us and

there were few among our own group who felt we had a chance, but we felt we

had a message—we felt that the gloom and depression of the aftermath of the war

had left the country hungry for laughter and the spirit of our country that was so

expressed in our music and rhythm was in need of a hypodermic.9

By relying on the “spirit of our country that was so expressed in our music and rhythm,”

Sissle himself reinforces stereotypes about African American performance, yet the creators of Shuffle Along fully understood that these commonly-held beliefs were not essential qualities. Later in this chapter, I explain how Sissle and Blake made use of these stereotypes to the production's advantage (such as having the orchestra memorize the score and play without sheet music, to demonstrate to audiences how “naturally talented” they were), while at the same time challenging other stereotypes.

Regarding “the gloom and depression in the aftermath of the war,’ Sissle could not have been referring only to the depressed economy. In addition to the economic slowdown of 1921, the years following World War I exploded with race riots across the

United States, climaxing in 1919. In the summer of that year, referred to as the “Red

Summer of 1919,” riots in twenty-two cities broke out. Racial violence in American

119 cities was certainly not a new phenomenon by the early twentieth century, but, according to Herbert Shapiro, this outbreak was exceptional:

1919 represented something new in American history; within a span of weeks

racial violence spread from one city to another, and every city feared its turn was

next…As Americans learned the news of racial outbreaks in such diverse cities as

Omaha, Washington, Knoxville, and Chicago, it was apparent that these

explosions expressed tensions afflicting the national society.10

Both Krasner and Douglas declare white anxiety combined with black disillusionment after World War I to be the main catalyst for the 1919 riots. Krasner describes the anger and disillusionment of black soldiers, who, upon returning home from serving their country in wartime, found no racial progress, reconciliation, or even appreciation for their efforts.11 Douglas, in the passage below, details the treatment of black soldiers during and after World War I:

The Great War had been a catalyst for the black renaissance of the 1920s as for

the white, but black hopes had been betrayed in the war more severely than white

expectations. Several hundred thousand Negro Americans fought, many of them

with undeniable courage, in Europe, and proportionately more black soldiers than

white lost their lives; 14.4 percent of the enlisted blacks, compared to 6.3 percent

of the whites…But at the war’s conclusion, the American government refused to

let its Negro soldiers participate in the victory parade down the Champs-Elysees

in Paris, though blacks in European ranks marched with their white peers; black

American soldiers were not included in the frieze depicting the Great War’s

troops on France’s Pantheon de la Guerre. It was time, much of white America 120 clearly believed, to put blacks back in their place. As soon as the troops came

home, a brutal spate of Ku Klux Klan lynchings, race riots, and deportations

began.12

While white America’s dismissive and violent response to the sacrifices of

African American soldiers was certainly a large reason for the outbreak of riots towards the end of the 1910s, Shapiro looks at the broader scope of racial violence over the first decades of the twentieth century, and suggests that there were other reasons as well for the increased violence. He cites the black migration from the south to northern industrial cities as a major catalyst, which created white resentment towards African Americans seeking employment and a larger concentration of black populations of cities. Also intensifying racial tensions was the stationing of black soldiers in racist communities, where abuse and humiliation of the soldiers often led to confrontations.13 Finally, perhaps the most important aspect to consider is the increased level of resistance with which the black community met the violent attacks against them. Shapiro states that “In the years before the end of World War I white aggression characteristically was met defensively by blacks, with blacks in the downtown areas seeking to escape from racist mobs and families in the black community protecting themselves as best they could.”14

Instances of mob violence being met with armed resistance from African Americans were common across the United States during the late 1910s and early 1920s, which in turn only intensified anxieties.

During the early decades of the twentieth century, a growing sense of African

American solidarity also contributed to the resistance against white mob violence.

Shapiro recognizes that civil rights activists, both white and black, and an independent 121 black press gave African Americans an outlet from which to voice their discontent. He also describes that one of the most important developments during this time was the establishment of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He writes, “The NAACP rose from the joining together of the black militancy expressed in the Niagara movement with the new currents of racial equalitarianism found among liberal and radical whites…From the beginning of its history the NAACP spoke out forcefully against racist violence, especially concentrating its attention upon the issue of lynching.”15

Looking at the timing of Shuffle Along through this perspective, there was indeed a certain ripeness of the cultural moment. Although socially and economically it seemed an extremely precarious time for the production, the fact that black response to white provocation was becoming increasingly bold and defensive would reinforce the boldness of mounting a production that portrays blacks not just as minstrel clowns, but also as mature adults capable of romantic love. But whether the bold timing of Shuffle Along would work in its favor, rather than against it, is what the production team did not yet know.

It was, coincidentally, an event of the NAACP that brought Blake, Sissle, Lyles, and Miller together in the first place. Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle had met in 1915, and upon their return from serving in WWI, had been touring together as “The Dixie Duo.”

According to Kimball, they were “one of the first Negro acts to play without burnt cork.”

They had established themselves as an elegant performance act, wearing tuxedoes and often playing in the homes of wealthy white elites.16 Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, on the other hand, had been performing together on the vaudeville circuits since 1909. 122 Their act was more traditional, performing comic routines in full blackface. The two duos met for the first time in 1920 at a NAACP benefit in Philadelphia. All four felt that one of Lyles and Miller’s comic sketches, The Mayor of Dixie, had strong potential to be developed into a full-length musical.17 A year later, they had convinced white producer and theatre owner Henry Cort to lease them the Sixty-Third Street Theater and back the production, which was now called Shuffle Along.

An Unlikely Success in the Likeliest of Places: Manhattan Celebrates Shuffle Along

The show’s pre-Broadway tour (which was common practice for productions then) was fraught with financial hardship and uneven success. Kimball writes that “The

Shuffle Along itinerary traced a helter-skelter course, jumping and doubling back over town, hamlet, theatre, auditorium, barn, and movie house throughout New Jersey and

Pennsylvania,”18 with, adds Krasner, “prospects for success dimming by the hour.” The show did well at African American theatres, but sales were not strong enough elsewhere to cover the production costs. As a result, “Scenery was stripped to the bare minimum and performers were often unpaid.” Worries began to mount: would the show attract enough white spectators in New York, which would be necessary for any kind of profit, regardless of whether black audiences would attend or not?19 Kimball describes a particularly disheartening experience of Eubie Blake’s immediately prior to the show’s

Broadway opening:

Riding into town with an $18,000 deficit, Shuffle Along began preparations for its

New York opening. The show was tight and ready, but there were worries [. . .]

One day Eubie ran into Jessie Shipp, a writer for the old Williams and Walker

shows, and told him he and Sissle had written a song called “Love Will Find a 123 Way.” “You’re crazy,” Shipp told him, and walked off, shaking his head. For

honest, unburlesqued romantic love interest in a black show was dangerous

ground: white audiences might be expected to boo the show off the stage.20

Shuffle Along premiered on May 23, 1921, at the Sixty-third Street Theater on

Broadway. Within a week of its opening, those who doubted the appeal of the production to white audiences were proven wrong; it was an overwhelming success. In his biography of Eubie Blake, Al Rose describes how the excitement surrounding Shuffle

Along spread among audiences:

It took several performances before most of the reviews came out, since the show

opened without either advance advertising or publicity, but the excitement of the

crowds was so intense that during the week the critics began to show up. By the

end of the week the Sixty-Third Street Theater was mobbed, and traffic became so

thick that they city had to make Sixty-Third Street one way.21

Shuffle Along made such an impact on the New York theatre scene that popular references to the production began to appear in other shows. Ann Douglas describes how the Ziegfeld Follies of 1922 made commentary on the “darkening” of Broadway that

Shuffle Along initiated a year before:

Gilda Grey, a white shimmy dancer and singer, introduced a number titled “It’s

Getting Dark on Old Broadway” that fully, if uneasily, acknowledged the black

competition:

We used to brag about the Broadway white lights, The very serious dazzling White-Way night lights, They used to glare and glimmer, But they are growing dimmer… It’s getting very dark on Old Broadway, 124 You see the change in ev’ry cabaret; Just like an eclipse on the moon Ev’ry café now has the dancing coon… Real dark-town entertainers hold the stage, You must black up to be the latest rage. [Douglas’s Italics]22

It is hard to tell just by Douglas’s passage alone how the Ziegfeld Follies actually felt about the African American musical’s phenomenal success; is the reference supposed to be derogatory, praising, or trying to grab some of Shuffle Along’s spotlight by simply mentioning it? Whatever the sentiment behind the song, it is clear that not only did the production become a sensation among audiences, it also established itself as a popular culture reference that would instantly associate those who understood it with having seen the show itself.

While some of Shuffle Along’s characterizations were considered innovative at the time, the plot was firmly rooted in the traditional style of New Comedy. The action centers on a mayoral race in fictional Jimtown, USA, which is, according Krasner, "a mythic African American city in the South."23 Two of the three candidates in the race are the co-owners of the local grocery store, Steve Jenkins (Flournoy Miller) and Sam Peck

(Aubrey Lyles), both scheming and corrupt. The third candidate is Harry Walton (Roger

Matthews), an upstanding young man. Both Jenkins and Peck make dubious promises to the denizens of Jimtown: if they vote for them, they will repeal prohibition, offer money for votes, and promise special favors to those who help them win the election. Walton's platform, on the other hand, simply consists of ideals such as "honor" and "justice," guaranteeing no preferential treatment to anyone who helps him win. Of course, there is also a more immediate reason why Walton wants to be elected Jimtown's mayor: he is in love with Jessie Williams (Lottie Gee), and, unless he wins the race, her father Jim (Paul 125 Ford) will not permit them to marry. Shuffle Along utilizes the typical plot device of the older, irrational, or corrupt forces in the world of the play (Peck and Jenkins, Jim

Williams), thwarting the progression of society through its young characters (Jessie

Williams and Walton). Krasner describes how the character of Walton provides a foil to the clownish, more corrupt characters running against him:

From the outset his potential father-in-law, Jim Williams, describes Walton as a

man of “honesty, integrity, and efficiency.” He is, therefore, “the right man for the

job” of mayor. Walton’s citizenship and decency supply little humor. His

purpose is to represent the moral nexus: the decent man amidst corruption.

Walton, juxtaposed against clownish characters, represents a side of African

American life that had rarely been seen in mainstream theatres up to this point.24

Once the circumstances of the plot are established, the comic action begins to play out between Peck and Jenkins. Each character suspects the other of stealing from the grocery, and Peck's wife ends up hiring a detective to investigate Jenkins. This plot development leads into the longest scene of the play, which occurs at the end of Act One, in the grocery store. This scene relies on the racial humor and minstrel stereotypes: a lazy African American employee (whose name is “Onions”) tries to get out of doing any work, and the dishonest store owners, Peck and Jenkins, continually pick money from the cash register behind each other's back. Towards the end of the scene, the hired detective,

Keeneye, appears in the guise of a clothing merchant. Both Peck and Jenkins pay

Keeneye out of the till without the other's knowledge—an action that will later lead to both characters’ downfalls. By the very end of the scene, however, a crowd enters the store and announces that Jenkins won the election. Jim Williams reluctantly informs 126 Harry Walton that he cannot marry Jessie, which transitions into their duet and Act One finale “Love Will Find a Way.”

At the resolution of the play, a reform movement supporting Harry Walton helps him to be elected mayor after the corruption and incompetence of Jenkins and Peck (who was appointed chief of police per an agreement between the two before the election) has been revealed. Once he is mayor of Jimtown, Harry has permission from Jessie's father to marry. However, before the final rewards and punishments are doled out to the characters, there is an extended comic fight scene between Peck and Jenkins, based upon

Lyles and Miller’s vaudeville “prizefight” routine, complete with comic ad libs and slapstick choreography.25

What made Shuffle Along such a standout for audiences certainly had to do more with the performative aspects of the production than the plot. The energy and excitement of the performances were often noted throughout the reviews of the production, with the word “infectious” appearing multiple times. Alan Dale’s May 25, 1921 review for The

American nearly gushes about the emotional contagion of the production:

Act, and the audience acts with you. This seemed to be the motto of the “troupe”

at the Sixty-third. How they enjoyed themselves; How they jigged and pranced

and cavorted, and wriggled, and laughed. It was an infection of amusement. It

was impossible to resist a jollity that the company itself appeared to experience

down to the very marrow. Talk of your pep!26

Also referring to this joyous contagion, Helen Armstead-Johnson writes “The infectious entertainment quality in Shuffle Along led audiences to demand more of it, as reflected in

127 the 'darkening' of Broadway, the spread of nightclubs and increased employment opportunities.”27

There is description of a participatory element to the show as well, which no doubt also contributed to the production’s overall “infectiousness.” In his 1979 biography of Eubie Blake, Al Rose describes the final sequence of Shuffle Along, and how the audience would typically respond:

Now just before the last number and the finale Eubie [Blake] relinquishes the

baton, hops up on the stage, and, together with Sissle, goes through the Dixie Duo

vaudeville act, already familiar but cherished by most of the audience. It never

failed to bring the house down [. . .] Eubie then gets back into the orchestra pit

and conducts the big number, “Baltimore Buzz,” in which some of the show’s

catchy melodies are heard. There follows a brief interlude, “African Dip,” a

comedy bit with Miller and Lyles. And then the finale—filled with excitement,

flag waving, reprises, sing-alongs, and audience participation. The crowd is

delighted and exhausted.28

Some reviews begrudgingly offered praise with a large measure of racist condescension.

Yet, even the more middling reviews could not deny that the production was lively, compelling, and emotionally contagious to spectators. In the May 23, 1921 review of

Shuffle Along, a critic for The Globe writes:

Of course the critical eye is not brought to bear upon performances of this nature.

It is told to slumber so that the more primitive aesthetic senses, which cake

walkers and singers of plantation melodies are supposed to arouse, may have

sway [. . .] Casting the critical eye aside, what we like about “Shuffle Along” is 128 the very joyousness of presentation…Here was variety and energy with a

vengeance.29

It seems that after much “casting the critical eye aside,” this reviewer understood that the show’s impact on the audience was worthy of recommendation. What Shuffle Along had going most for it was its sheer joy and contagious mood, communicated through the comic bits and musical numbers.

The lively, infectious mood of the production, the comedy rooted in vaudeville and minstrelsy, and the upbeat songs all certainly contributed to Shuffle Along’s success.

These elements clearly had a broad appeal, as all accounts support that African American audiences enjoyed the show as much as whites. Never described as solely a show for black audiences or one exclusively for whites, spectatorship was almost always referred to as a singular, universal entity. In Black Manhattan, James Weldon Johnson describes the reception of Shuffle Along: “all New York flocked to the Sixty-Third Street Theater to hear the most joyous singing and see the most exhilarating dancing to be found on any stage in the city. Shuffle Along was a record-breaking, epoch-making musical comedy.”30

In his autobiography, The Big Sea, Langston Hughes describes the show’s popularity:

“Shuffle Along was a honey of a show. Swift, bright, funny, rollicking, and gay, with a dozen danceable, singable tunes [. . .] Everybody was in the audience—including me.

People came back to see it innumerable times. It was always packed.”31 An immediate consequence of the show's success was that the audience space in the Sixty-Third Street

Theater became more integrated than any other Broadway theatre had before. Variety had reported that on the opening night of Shuffle Along black audience members were sitting as far forward as the fifth row from the stage, and throughout the run the box 129 office was willing to sell tickets to blacks in the rear one-third of the orchestra. This was a time when virtually no theatre supporting white patronage would allow African

Americans to sit on the orchestra level; they would only be permitted to sit in the balcony.32

One In-Group, Different Identifications: Shuffle Along’s Spectatorship among

Black and White Audiences

The racial tensions of the late 1910s and early 1920s suggest a growing boldness in the African American community, a willingness to assert themselves as fully-realized citizens deserving of all the respect and humanity enjoyed by white Americans; but what did the enthusiastic white spectatorship of Shuffle Along reveal? Furthermore, how did black and white spectatorship, taken together, reflect shifting identities and values in

1920s America? There are several historical factors that influenced the production’s spectatorship, but it is also at this point where research in cognitive fields of study such as intergroup emotions, empathetic response, and social identifications can illuminate several aspects of Shuffle Along’s response among black and white spectators.

Furthermore, it can also help us understand how a unified response, resulting in a common in-group identification, arose from the success of the show.

An issue concerning the spectatorship, especially white spectatorship, is how

Shuffle Along succeeded as well as it did, especially when so many in show business

(such as the writer from the old Williams and Walker shows), assumed it would fail. The fact that white spectators welcomed Shuffle Along with enthusiasm, instead of rejecting it out of racial anxiety or apathy, reveals that the enjoyment of the production well- outweighed any racial tensions that might have been lurking during the post-World War I 130 years. Interestingly, while Shuffle Along found success at African American theatres during its pre-Broadway tour, profits at white theatres were low to middling. After its box office triumph on Broadway, however, the national tour of Shuffle Along performed successfully across the Eastern United States for three years. There were two separate touring companies, a Southern company and Northern company that “played every legit house from St. Louis to Atlantic City.”33 If the production had not gotten the reception it did in New York, it would be doubtful that it would have had any life beyond a short

Broadway run. One reason for this was very likely the fact that the show opened in New

York City, at the Sixty-Third Street Theatre, next door to Harlem. Racial tensions being what they were in most U.S. cities at the time, New York was in a unique position to bypass most of the simmering violence that most of America had experienced less than two years before, in 1919. Douglas explains:

New York was one of the few big cities in the nation that did not experience mass

convulsions of racial violence between 1916 and 1930; the segregation that a

separate black community emblematized and enforced was probably the only

safeguard against white violence that Negroes could find, and Harlem was the

only such fully developed, large-scale community in the United States.34

Of course, there were numerous black communities in cities across the United States, many of which were subject to mob violence during the early decades of the twentieth century. What did set Harlem apart, as Douglas describes, was the level of development and sheer size of the neighborhood, creating an island not only of African American solidarity, but also of socio-economic mobility and affluence. James Weldon Johnson

131 compares the circumstances of Harlem to other African American neighborhoods when he writes:

In nearly every city in the country the Negro section is a nest or several nests

situated somewhere on the borders; it is a section one must “go out to.” In New

York it is entirely different. Negro Harlem is situated in the heart of Manhattan

and covers one of the most beautiful and healthful sites in the whole city. It is not

a fringe, it is not a slum, nor is it a “quarter’ consisting of dilapidated tenements.

It is a section of new-law apartment houses and handsome dwellings, with streets

as well paved, as well lighted, and as well kept as in any other part of the city.35

Harlem's social and strategic advantages to the African American community were the result of fortunate circumstances, economic gambles, and shrewd calculations.

Originally an affluent white neighborhood, Harlem began a racial transformation in the first decade of the twentieth century. An anticipated real estate boom was to accompany the building of the 1904 Lenox Avenue subway line; however, when the projected housing demand did not occur, many new and modernized apartment buildings sat vacant. Several African American speculators and investors saw an opportunity to seize high quality housing for the black community. Philip Payton Jr., the founder of the Afro-

American Realty Company, paved the way for black landlords and realtors to buy up the surplus housing that failed to attract white tenants. At the same time, white renters who had been living in Harlem began to move out as a flood of African Americans moved into the vacant housing.36 Due to the turns of fortune in real estate speculation, the first waves of the Great Migration settled in Harlem, and were able to establish a flourishing, stable, and influential black neighborhood in the middle of New York City. Because of 132 Harlem’s stability and location, the kind of racial violence and subsequent tensions were less prominent than in other cities, and therefore created a social buffer zone where the kind of anxieties could be played out and explored in shows like Shuffle Along. The presence and rise of Harlem created an in-group among African Americans, one that whites began to recognize and eventually desire to be a part of, or at least spectators to. I will discuss the effects of white spectatorship in Harlem in greater detail later in this chapter.

The production’s timing and location worked to its advantage. As far as the content of the production was concerned, the traditional comic love story set against the emotionally infectious backdrop of jazz, ragtime, and vaudeville-inspired comedy evoked a positive empathetic response for the characters of the young lovers. Aspects of the production associated with the characters of Harry and Jessie, including their Act One finale, “Love Will Find a Way,” for example, were extremely well-received. Using

Thompson’s explanation of empathy, it appears that spectators, black and white, empathized and identified with Harry and Jessie at all four levels: passive/involuntary, transposing oneself into another’s place, reiterated empathy, and the moral perception of another worthy of concern and respect. Audiences not only consciously understood what the characters were going through, and saw themselves through the characters’ perspectives, but also cared about them as potential human beings deserving of respect and concern. In other words, the spectators’ empathetic experience of Harry and Jessie could allow them to sympathize with the characters.

However, because audience members might have come to fully sympathize with

Harry and Jessie, viewing them as characters worthy of concern, this would not guarantee 133 a total empathizing and identification with all of the characters in the show. In fact, experiencing a full range of empathy for the young lovers often creates a strong potential for “dark empathy” towards the characters standing in their way. One consequence that might have potentially occurred would be that blocking characters, usually portrayed as grotesque and stereotyped African Americans, would have reinforced negative beliefs towards the established out-group—in this case, the African American community. As

Krasner previously stated, Harry and Jessie are set up as foils to the corrupt characters, played in blackface. An important function of traditional comedy is to elicit sympathy for the younger characters facing obstacles set in place by the older, irrational characters.

How dark empathy could arise for the blocking characters has much to do with competition—in the case of Shuffle Along, the competition that Harry is facing is from

Peck and Jenkins in the mayoral race. It is this competition, which could result in Harry and Jessie being kept apart, that evokes a particular kind of empathetic response towards

Peck and Jenkins. In Jean Decety and Claus Lamm’s article “Empathy Versus Personal

Distress: Recent Evidence from Social Neuroscience,” they state that “in a competitive relationship, observation of the other’s joy results in distress, whereas pain in the competitor leads to positive emotions. These findings reflect an important and often ignored aspect of empathy, namely that the ability can also be used in a malevolent way, as when knowledge about the emotional or cognitive state of the competitor is used to harm them.”37 This is what is meant by “dark empathy”—the ability to use an empathetic experience of another to feel pleasure when the other suffers pain or to inflict pain directly, with the specific knowledge of how certain experiences can make the other feel.

134 It has been established that if spectators were able to view Harry and Jessie as others worthy of respect and concern, then they had experienced all four of Thompson’s levels of empathy. Because of Lyles and Miller’s overly exaggerated performances of

Peck and Jenkins, it might seem impossible that audiences were able to reach the same kind of empathetic response towards them. However, while the extreme characterizations and blackface makeup would prevent audiences from fully empathizing with them at Thompson’s fourth level—perceiving them as others worthy of genuine concern, it would have been completely possible for audiences to experience the first three levels of empathetic experience. Thompson’s first level, the involuntary pairing of two living bodies, would only need a basic comprehension of emotional experiences, and most of this would occur at a pre-conscious level before a spectator would be aware of acknowledging the emotional states of the characters. Even if a performance is especially grotesque or abstract, humans are still remarkably good at assigning emotional and cognitive states to any subjects that appear alive and can function in a way that our mirroring system understands—one of the functions of the mirror neuron system is to try to make sense of another’s behavior, and predict what the future actions of that other will be.

The second level of empathy, described by Thompson, is the imaginary transposition of oneself into another’s place. At this level it could be difficult for spectators who already have negative stereotypes of African Americans to have their beliefs challenged because of the performance; since the second level of empathy is projecting one’s frame of mind onto another’s, most likely the thoughts projected onto blackface characters such as Peck and Jenkins would reflect the previously-held beliefs of 135 the spectators. In fact, having an audience empathize at this level is where minstrelsy’s more racist intentions function best—by reflecting and reinforcing previously held stereotypes of minorities. This level might appeal most to those who watch blackface minstrelsy desiring to see (and on a certain level, embody) a specific idea of what it means to be African American, and, by extension, what it means to be white. As for the performers, they understood perfectly well that they were not portraying a “truthful” or

“essential” depiction of African Americans; they were very consciously playing to many spectators' expectations, desires, and anxieties. Blackface minstrelsy is, in Eric Lott’s words, “precisely performative, a cultural invention, not some precious essence installed in black bodies; and for better or worse it was often a product of self-commodification, a way of getting along in a constricted world.”38 In addition to the blackface performances, another example of such self-commodification in Shuffle Along was when the black musicians in the orchestra played without sheet music. Douglas describes how “The musicians in Shuffle Along orchestra all read music easily and well, yet they memorized the score and played it without sheet music as if they were improvising on the spot.”39

Therefore, it is at this level of empathy where the spectator’s projected state of mind is necessary for blackface minstrelsy’s mainstream success, when it thrives best without obvious subversion or complication, and could easily accommodate a measure of empathy for characters like Peck and Jenkins, and the “naturally gifted” musicians in the orchestra.

Although blackface minstrelsy had long functioned as a vehicle for comical dehumanization of African Americans, especially in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, it is important to remember its original forms did not exist solely to ridicule African 136 Americans (although the earliest minstrel performances did include exaggeration and caricature of African Americans). Instead, the beginnings of minstrelsy relied far more on the ridicule of social elites and to vent working-class frustrations through comedy rather than denigrating African Americans. LeRoy Ashby writes that “The blackface acts of the 1830s helped express a developing working-class consciousness and often contained messages of contempt for privileged groups. It was not by accident that minstrel shows found exuberant audiences in places such as the Bowery section of lower

Manhattan.”40 It was not until the 1840s and 50s did minstrelsy shed its biting class commentary and begin to appeal to more middle-class sensibilities. As the class- consciousness faded away, the routines became far more reliant on the overtly racist and crude caricatures that came to define blackface minstrelsy by the end of the nineteenth century.41

Many critics of blackface minstrelsy condemn it for its grotesque depictions of

African Americans (and rightly so), but, keeping minstrelsy's class-conscious origins in mind, the dynamic that can exist between performers and spectators of this performance style was often complex and multi-faceted. Eric Lott's analysis of early minstrel performance considers the spectatorship of minstrelsy from this perspective. He argues that the appeal of blackface for many spectators stemmed from a desire to watch and in many ways, identify with the characters being portrayed. Lott writes that “It was cross- racial desire that coupled a nearly insupportable fascination and a self-protective derision with respect to black people and their cultural practices, and that made blackface minstrelsy less a sign of absolute white power and control than of panic, anxiety, terror, and pleasure.”42 From this perspective, it is valuable to consider how spectators can 137 empathize with such performances, and how these empathies might lead to new social identifications and in-groups. Shuffle Along’s use of blackface performance styles and the reception of it no doubt could be interpreted as regressive and demeaning, but there were also many ways in which the production, with the help of its spectatorship, would be able to subvert the performance into something empowering and inclusive.

Thompson’s third level, reiterated empathy, would be a more difficult kind of empathy to achieve with Shuffle Along’s blackface characters, but, especially taking

Lott's analysis into account, one that would not be impossible to attain. This is when a spectator imagines him or herself from the perspective of the performer/character on stage, coming full circle in empathetic experience. If spectators were experiencing this kind of empathy for Lyles/Peck and Miller/Jenkins, it would have complicated their experience of the production considerably. Being able to imagine how an African

American actor in full blackface, portraying a buffoonish characterization of an African

American would feel in front of a laughing, appreciative audience is certainly fraught with many complexities. It is at this point of empathy where minstrel performance can subvert itself and take on multiple meanings. It could be possible for spectators and performers who understood that a racialized performance of African Americans, usually a derogatory one, is not truly reflective of blacks to still take pleasure in Shuffle Along’s more dubious portrayals of black characters, and perhaps could develop a kind of empathy towards one another. Douglas offers an explanation for how this kind of self- conscious recognition of blackface’s artifice could emerge between spectator and performer. “This double mimicry, whites playing blacks and blacks playing whites- playing blacks, was also art, and an especially American kind of art. Black minstrels not 138 only imitated whites-playing-blacks but burlesqued them; minstrelsy involved stereotype upon stereotype, opponents as look-alikes, mocking and criticizing each other.”43

Douglas’s observations regarding the self-acknowledgement of black minstrel performers speaks to the reiterated empathy where audiences and performers are able, if even uneasily, to acknowledge on some level the conscious exchange of racial performance and expectations. There is no doubt that many spectators, black and white, were able to achieve this kind of self-conscious distance and develop a level of empathy at which they were able to regard each other in such a way.

However, many critics of blackface minstrelsy were unable to participate in and enjoy this kind of self-conscious recognition—the minstrel forms were simply too regressive and offensive. For them, the kind of reiterated empathy where the blackface performer and spectator are able to experience one another's feelings could never go beyond the mask of distortion. Vocal critics of minstrelsy-based entertainments like

Shuffle Along were the African American intellectuals closely associated with the New

Negro movement, such as Alain Locke, W.E.B. DuBois, and James Weldon Johnson. It was DuBois and these critics, according to Douglas, who “spearheaded the New Negro's attempt to find and evaluate his African roots, to understand his own cultural origins and identity. If self-examination was an ideal in the 1920s, no group of artists and thinkers pursued it more self-consciously and extensively than the leading citizens of black

Manhattan.”44 It was not that these intellectuals did not understand that such empathies could exist between black performers and white spectators, but rather they believed that the conditions and terms of the performance itself were too detrimental to lead to a constructive understanding between races. This was especially true for Du Bois, who 139 described such veiled performances as “this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that look on in amused contempt and pity.”45 It was more important for these critics to uncover and discard the masks rather than to empathize with a production that in many ways reinforced previously-held beliefs of African Americans.

Despite pointed criticisms of the production, many African American spectators attended and enjoyed the show alongside white audiences. And spectators, for a number of reasons, would have been able to experience empathy for all of the characters in the production—even the stereotypical characters. However, in the case of the characters portrayed in blackface, this empathy could easily have been channeled in a negative direction where spectators would have felt pleasure in seeing these characters suffer punishments or humiliations at the end of the play. The positive empathy, or an experience that can lead to sympathy and respect, would most likely have been reserved for characters such as Harry and Jessie.

The fact that Harry and Jessie are also African American, yet exist outside traditional expectations of racialized performance certainly complicates how spectators, particularly white spectators, would have empathized more fully with them. In terms of in-grouping and out-grouping, they could not have fit in with the same social classification as Peck and Jenkins. Typically it is difficult for spectators to empathize with all of the characters to the same point of concern and sympathy; Harry and Jessie would have been reassigned to a different group identification than the other characters, especially the “minstrelized” ones. As a result, the re-assigning of members of a traditional out-group does not necessarily mean that the opinion towards the out-group 140 has changed overall. Research on intergroup empathy and prejudice supports this position. In their article “Intergroup Contact and the Central Role of Affect in Intergroup

Prejudice,” Linda Tropp and Thomas Pettigrew assert that while empathizing with individual out-group members (such as characters of the young lovers—Harry Walton and Jessie Williams) to the point of sympathy or concern does lead to some improved attitudes towards a stigmatized out-group, their research offers a disappointing caveat.

Tropp and Pettigrew explain that “As we receive individuating information that disconfirms the group stereotype, we may become more likely to see out-group members in a more positive light, but we may also become less likely to see them as good representatives of the group."46 This means that while audience members might have accepted and felt sympathy for certain characters in Shuffle Along, spectator response to out-group members as a whole might not change significantly. While white spectators might have come to view Harry and Jessie positively, empathizing with them as fully humanized others, they would not decide that all of the characters defied previous expectations. Indeed, Krasner states that many reviews of Shuffle Along reinforced previously-held stereotypes concerning African Americans. He writes that “the white press capitalized on the musical's stereotypes, emphasizing that African Americans themselves offered images of inferiority and laziness. These ‘images’ verified the stereotypes. It was assumed that the clichés were only slight exaggerations intended for comedic purposes.”47

Another consequence of Shuffle Along’s mass spectatorship was the emergence of an in-group whose main identification was valuing a certain kind of African American identity and behavior. The consequent Negro Vogue that swept white New York 141 following the success of Shuffle Along reveals an in-group identification that focused on an interest and admiration for black performing arts, but on limited terms. African

American shows and performers achieved fame and wealth during the 1920s, but more often if they adhered to exoticized performance or entertainments rooted in minstrel traditions. For African American spectators, the success of Shuffle Along reinforced an in-group identification for light-skinned blacks, which either mocked or scapegoated the out-group of darker-skinned blacks. These emergent in-groups achieved a number of functions: For whites, it managed to legitimatize a genuine, if narrowly-conceived, interest in African American art, performance, and culture. For certain in-groups of blacks, it offered a comic distance from the “dark-skinned” stereotype that they felt did not apply to them, which in turn would elevate their own cultural status within the larger social identification of “African American,” and among the even more encompassing national identity of “American.”

The tension between African Americans regarding skin color, of course, existed long before Shuffle Along opened, but the production reflected a growing fascination among black and white moderns regarding the light-skinned African American, particularly the light-skinned African-American female. A big selling point of Shuffle

Along was the chorus itself, which consisted of all light-skinned, young African-

American women, including a sixteen-year-old Josephine Baker. A number of critics found it noteworthy that the chorus was attractive and light-skinned; in his May 25 1921 review, Dale describes Shuffle Along as “a darky show that has lost most of its darkiness.”48 The Sun's review from May 23, 1921 remarks that “This company of singers and dancers has the best colored talent: that includes a pretty creole chorus. Some 142 girls are half white and some of them look about 99 percent white.”49 Apparently critics felt that the gradations of the chorus's skin color were worth mentioning to potential audience members. They were not wrong in assuming that spectators, black and white, would care about how light or dark a performer looked; even within the play itself positive references are made about “brown skins,” or light-skinned African American women. In Act Two, after Steve Jenkins is elected mayor, Jim Williams complains of the wasteful spending on the beautiful, but incompetent, stenographers now populating the mayor's office. The secretarial beauties were played by the women in the chorus. One of the featured songs in the musical is “If You’ve Never Been Vamped by a Brown Skin,

You've Never Been Vamped at All.” According to Krasner, the concept of “brown skin” was a selling point for Shuffle Along. He writes that “The ‘brown woman’ symbolized the atavistic concept of promiscuity mixed with ‘civilizing’ whiteness. Danger supposedly lurked in the black woman. The ‘brown’ represented cannibalistic, voodoo Africa…The brown skin was white enough to obviate racial taboos, but dark enough to attract potential white audiences seeking exoticism.”50

If brown-skin meant a softened, more “civilized” exoticism for white audiences, the allure of brown-skin for African American audiences was based in its connection to

“modernized” sophistication. By rationalizing that they did not live in the circumstances of what Krasner calls “the poor old southern darky,” African Americans who had left the south and acquired a level of material wealth might have viewed Shuffle Along as “a mere representation of what was no longer a reality. People would take pleasure in comedies that represented circumstances they had escaped.” Another way to justify the enjoyment of a show that mocked one's identity is to create an new identity, or in-group, that is 143 slightly different from the one being ridiculed. Consequently, for black audiences who felt that they could be perceived as financially elevated, light-skinned, or both, Shuffle

Along reflected an in-group where being light skinned could be associated with a higher level of social mobility. The fact that the most ridiculous characters were in blackface, and the young, lovely chorus was light only reinforced this division. Krasner explains that “the light-skinned audiences attending the shows enjoyed blackface actors and their foolishness without the threat of self-malignment. If lighter skin meant refinement, darker skin meant barbarism, something to be ridiculed. African Americans accepting this view could participate in Shuffle Along’s ‘fun’ without the risk of close association.”51

This can be considered another variation of how schadenfreude can exist in the spectatorship of perceived out-groups by a self-identified in-group. Russell Spears and

Colin Leach explain that “schadenfruede is specific to particular intergroup relations, being directed towards outgroups who have suffered a setback. The state of rivalry implies that the outgroup has suffered a misfortune in a domain that is valued by the ingroup,” and “that outgroups who are seen as rivals or who are otherwise the targets of malice may invite the worst schadenfreude in response to their misfortunes.”52 In the case of Shuffle Along's black spectatorship, contrasting the “rivals” of the production— characters such as Peck and Jenkins, in full blackface—with the lighter-skinned, more emotionally-sophisticated “heroes” could have led to feelings of schadenfreude for the minstrel characters that many African Americans might have felt did not apply to them.

If one believed that he or she was lighter-skinned, the spectator might have fully

144 empathized with characters such as Harry and Jessie, or identified with the socially desirable chorus women.

These social identifications, born out of a full empathetic response to the lighter- skinned, more emotionally sophisticated characters and a negative empathy towards the darker, more grotesque characters would have had repercussions beyond the time and place of the performance. Leach and Spears elaborate:

Intergroup schadenfreude can perhaps prefigure as well as reflect the conditions

that lead to more active forms of persecution, along with their emotional

correlates, such as gloating. Such social changes may reflect deeper changers to

the social hierarchy, and thus undermine the very status differentials that can

constrain schadenfreude in a more material sense. Intergroup schadenfreude may

therefore not just implicate emotional opportunism, but also the social

opportunism relating to social and historical conjectures.53

It would be unclear if Shuffle Along's spectatorship led to an active persecution of darker- skinned blacks by lighter-skinned ones, but a social preference for lighter-skinned blacks by both whites and African Americans did intensify as a result of the show. Krasner states that “Light-skinned chorus dancers became the staple of African American musicals, with Shuffle Along essentially beginning the trend.”54

Shuffle Along and the Negro Vogue: The Benefits, Barriers, and Limitations

for Black Artists

Of course, Krasner's explanation of why certain African Americans enjoyed

Shuffle Along cannot be assumed as the only reason why black audiences would have found an in-group identity in its spectatorship. Another potential reason for the creation 145 of an in-group identification among African American spectators (and this can be extended to white spectators as well) is that they could find a different source of humor from the production, one that more “mainstream” spectators might miss. While referring to minstrel shows of the 1800s, Ashby makes the relevant point that ‘black audiences could laugh uproariously at the shows themselves, albeit for different reasons than white patrons did. Whereas most whites were inclined to take the caricatures of blacks at face value, blacks recognized that the humor rested on exaggeration and the trickster's legendary guile.”55 Applying Ashby's argument to Shuffle Along’s spectatorship, this would be another way to subvert the minstrel-inspired performances and for spectators

(both white and black) to create multiple meanings together as an in-group.

By identifying with certain characters, experiencing negative empathy against others, and creating subversive meanings out of blackface performance, blacks and whites found a common in-group identity regarding Shuffle Along, if for different reasons. This resulting ingroup was defined by having seen the show, and by adopting certain cultural preferences and attitudes as a result. Mackie, Silver, and Smith state that

“intergroup emotions involve the impulse, desire, or tendency to take action aimed at bringing groups closer together, moving them further apart, changing or justifying a status hierarchy, eliminating a competitor, or nurturing an ally—all in the service of maintaining an ingroup.”56 To maintain the in-group that Shuffle Along's spectatorship ignited, both blacks and whites nurtured each other's mutually beneficial social identifications. Whites began to patronize black nightclubs and hire black entertainers, so that they could be a part of the “darkening” of Broadway (and much else of Manhattan) that was so desirable at the time. By adhering to white expectations of cultural 146 performance, a handful of African Americans could enjoy a cultural status and financial advantage never experienced before in American mainstream culture.

The mixed-race seating, made possible by the show’s success (and location of the theater) further contributed to the establishment of a common ingroup based upon having seen the production in this particular space, and experiencing a participatory show among black and white spectators. The idea of the theatre as a middle ground for black and white spectators remained prominent throughout the 1920s; Douglas comments on how the theatre became a place where both whites and blacks found a kind of refuge from the pervasive racial tensions sweeping the nation. She writes, “For both black Manhattan moderns and the white, theater was the only means of turning danger into profit and art; drama allows its participants to find whatever meaning, whatever measure of safety, that danger allows.”57 I would argue here that “participants” can mean both performer and spectator in this situation. Certainly the danger and anxiety associated with Shuffle Along was shared among black performer and black spectator as much as between black performer and white spectator: for black audiences, whether to laugh at the blackface comedy or be angered by it would certainly be a contentious decision; for whites, whether to accept the love story within the show, and the choice to associate themselves with an in-group identity that involved African American performers and spectators.

These collective participations and agreements between spectator and performer were most certainly born out of the “danger” that Douglas describes, where actor and audience alike were seeking a common refuge from a shifting and volatile social climate.

Of course, one cannot make the assertion that because there might have been a common desire between blacks and whites to find refuge from the danger of racial 147 anxieties in the theatre, that the level of danger was in any way equal for blacks and whites—far from it. Douglas also goes on to explain that “For the New Negro, however, danger was constant, omnivorous, fluid, and unstable; it necessitated the use of that plurality of masks that Africa had donated and minstrelsy had elaborated and

Americanized.”58 Indeed, in the case of Shuffle Along, white spectators had very little to lose, even if they did gain cultural status from associating themselves with the in-group of Shuffle Along spectators. For African Americans, however, not having the show become a success would not only have meant devastated finances and finished careers for many of the investors and performers, but the added risk of social ridicule and further dehumanization for both black performers and spectators for participating in a show that featured negative stereotypes of African Americans. Also, the danger of white-on-black violence, although lessened in post-Harlem New York, was always a very real, palpable threat. Therefore, the “common refuge” that both African American and white spectators sought was one born out of vastly different stakes.

For whites, identifying with the in-group established by Shuffle Along’s spectatorship meant regularly traveling to Harlem and participating in performances of romanticized or exoticized African Americans. Ann Douglas describes 1920s Harlem as

“the ‘Nightclub Capital of the World,’” which “served up African-American music and dancing to white patrons eager to enjoy a little regression back to jungle life and participate, if only as voyeurs, in what was palpably the most exciting entertainment scene America had ever boasted.”59 The Harlem/Negro vogue became so popular with stylish, affluent whites that, over time, making it up to Harlem was not even necessary to participate in this popular identification. A Vogue article from May of 1922 describes 148 how the “exotic influences” recently unleashed upon New York created an in-crowd of

Shuffle Along enthusiasts, along with similarly-themed nightclubs and entertainments available for New York high society. The passage is long, but its descriptions are especially revealing of the values established by this spectatorship:

During the past season, New York has been subjected, artistically at any rate, to

two exotic influences. The one is African, the other Russian, and both are

extraordinarily interesting. For we see the Negro, who is a social pariah, and the

Russian, who is a political outcast, capturing, apparently without effort, the

imagination of the American theatrical public.

For example, “Shuffle Along,” the Negro revue which has just entered upon the

second year of its success, has excited tremendous admiration. Foreign visitors

become almost incoherent in their enthusiasm; indeed, it is their unqualified

praise that has definitely convinced us of the excellence of what the Negroes have

done. Strauss and Mengelberg, one is told, feel that this music of barbaric quality

is the authentic expression of the American spirit, while the artists of Russian

“Chauve-Souris” have unequivocally declared for “Shuffle Along” as the best

dramatic entertainment that New York offers at the moment.i

There is no doubt that the most interesting audience in New York is sure to be

found on Wednesday nights at the eleven-thirty performance of “Shuffle Along.”

There one is sure to see most of the journalists, actors, and managers, not to

mention the more adventurous members of the beau monde.60

i Chauve-Souris (French for “The Bat”) was a Russian performance group that toured to the United States throughout the 1920s. The troupe was known for its cabaret-style and comedic performances. 149 The Vogue article clearly is connecting an in-crowd with attending Shuffle Along, particularly the “eleven-thirty performance,” but perhaps what is more telling is how the article goes on to describe not the spectators of Shuffle Along necessarily, but the subsequent kinds of performance and nightclub entertainments that those who were wishing to be associated with the production:

Society is more likely to be found, however, at the “Plantation,” a new restaurant-

cabaret which was the scene recently of a very successful dance given for charity

under the expert auspices of Mrs. Edward Roscoe Matthews.

Plantation offers its patrons the talent of the “Shuffle Along” company, and, in

particular, the singing and dancing of Miss Florence Mills, the dusky premiere,

who sings there even on Wednesdays, when she is whisked back and forth in a

frenzied taxicab from theatre to restaurant in order to perform in both places at

once. And, for refreshment, there are, in addition to the regular cabaret supper

dishes, delicious waffles, baked most temptingly before one’s very nose, by a real,

picturesque, old-fashioned Negro mammy, who prepares them at a stove in a half-

open “nigger shanty” at the end of the room.61

Establishing that the employee who cooked the waffles in the “nigger shanty” was

“a real, picturesque, old-fashioned Negro mammy” was an extremely important detail to include in this article; Krasner describes an ever-growing “Dixie Nostalgia,” also established in the plot of Shuffle Along that signified in-crowd tastes and preferences during the early 1920s. Krasner writes, “By the 1910s and 1920s…Pragmatism would replace sentimentalism, materialism would supersede spiritualism, and realism would trump idealism…What was lacking, and what Shuffle Along supplied, was ‘nostalgia’[. . 150 .] The ‘Mammy’ provided a counterpoint to modern life’s overindulgences…she was seen as a panacea for an overwrought and anxiety-ridden world.”62 Of course, this kind of nostalgia would appeal primarily to those who were wealthy, socially mobile, and modernized—those who actually had the means to enjoy “modern life’s overindulgences,” and experience its subsequent anxieties—who could appreciate and believe in the idea of romanticized southern life. This nostalgia could appeal to both black and white spectators, since many African American spectators would have achieved enough distance from the poor, rural lifestyle that many were escaping at this time. As Krasner had established, a rising middle class of African Americans may have had enough distance from the south to not only accept the performances of “Dixieland” as a nostalgic by-gone era, but to perhaps also take pleasure in the fantasy of it.

However, the idyllic performances of southern plantation life were predominantly enjoyed by urban whites, who associated the rural African American identity with a simpler, more carefree time.

Once Shuffle Along began to shape a highly desirable in-group identity, African

Americans who wished to be associated with this identification either capitalized on a growing white interest in Harlem and black entertainers, or transplanted themselves to

Harlem as quickly as possible. Langston Hughes confesses in his autobiography The Big

Sea that it was Shuffle Along that got him to Harlem in the first place. Hughes writes that

“To see Shuffle Along was the main reason I wanted to go to Columbia. When I saw it, I was thrilled and delighted. From then on I was in the gallery of the Cort Theatre every time I got a chance.”63 However, the gleam of the Harlem Renaissance for many blacks would soon wear off when they realized just how narrowly one had to fit white 151 expectations to be allowed to participate. Hughes recalls how “White people came to

Harlem in droves…they packed the expensive Cotton Club on Lenox Avenue. But I was never there, because the Cotton Club was a Jim Crow club for gangsters and monied whites. They were not cordial to Negro patronage, unless you were a celebrity like

Bojangles.”64

Nevertheless, many Manhattan blacks (Hughes of course included) were able to benefit from the Negro vogue that Shuffle Along's spectatorship initiated. And it was not only the artists, “the talented tenth,” that were able to reap its rewards. Helen Armstead-

Johnson writes that “Employment opportunities not only increased for performers but for non-performers such as wardrobe mistresses, costumers, choreographers, set designers, and stage hands—even the waiters in nightclubs were peripheral beneficiaries of Shuffle

Along.”65 It was a decidedly mixed blessing for black Manhattan; for the first time in mainstream American culture was the African American able to truly contribute to an emerging cultural and national identity in a way that whites acknowledged and wished to be associated with, but it could only first occur by adopting and adapting the conventions of minstrelsy. Harlem was able to boast the most exciting entertainment scene in the

United States, if not the world, but the fun was primarily reserved for white audiences and foreign visitors.

“The Most Revealing Moment”: Shuffle Along beyond the 1920s

After its 504 performances on Broadway, Shuffle Along toured the United States with three different companies.66 Playing to packed houses across the Eastern United

States (both North and South), Shuffle Along was able to reinforce an identity that was not limited to New York audiences. The fact that the production had already established 152 itself as culturally relevant and desirable would of course impact its success while on tour, and this emerging identity proved to be extremely attractive for audiences beyond

Manhattan and Harlem. The broad spectatorship points to a national moment, a desired common identity that was rooted in African American music and entertainment, as well as specific expectations of what that kind of entertainment involved and looked like, and a desire to be a part of it as spectators.

Shuffle Along maintained such a strong cultural influence that Sissle, Blake,

Miller and Lyles decided to mount a revival in 1932. However, the production fared poorly; the cultural promise of the 1920s had been swept away with the stock market crash and the Great Depression. Regarding the 1932 revival, Al Rose writes that “It was clearly no time to try a musical show. People were psychologically down, but they weren't looking for escape, they were looking for answers. Even the dynamic gaiety of

Sissle and Blake…couldn't lure a depressed and disheartened public back to

Broadway.”67 It is interesting that Rose defends the 1932 revival by insinuating that it was mainly the effects of the Great Depression that kept audiences away from a show like Shuffle Along, especially since the show first thrived during an economic slump; perhaps the production team thought that Shuffle Along could again be the “hypodermic” that Noble Sissle once believed the show to be. Whatever reasons why the producers felt the show could succeed again, what had changed by this time was not necessarily the economic crash (although it certainly played a significant role in the show’s poor performance) but that spectators no longer responded to the kinds of performance that had made the first run of Shuffle Along so exciting. Many black entertainers had completely lost their fortunes (and connections) after the Crash, and those who were still 153 prominent felt alienated and disillusioned with the excesses of the 1920s, along with many whites.

Shuffle Along would be revived once more before slipping into theatre history.

The inexplicably-timed 1952 revival was even more disastrous than the previous revival; it closed after only four performances.ii The 1921 production of Shuffle Along was a product of its time, for its time, and by using older forms of entertainment fused with modern sensibilities, reflected a new identity among black and white Americans. It was an identity, before the catastrophic crashes, both financially and culturally, that spoke to the nation's first promise of power and influence in the twentieth century.

Conclusion: At the Top of the Hill

The 1920s were the years of Manhattan's black Renaissance. It began with Shuffle Along, Running Wild, and the Charleston…certainly it was the musical revue, Shuffle Along, that gave a scintillating send-off to that Negro vogue in Manhattan, which reached its peak just before the crash of 1929, the crash that sent Negroes, white folks and all rolling down the hill towards the Works Progress Administration.

—Langston Hughes, The Big Sea, 223.

If there was any spectator of Shuffle Along who understood its influence on

American identity, Langston Hughes could qualify as well as anyone. He knew Shuffle

Along very well; he had attended multiple performances of the show that he claimed first brought him to New York and Harlem, and he also witnessed first-hand the explosion of

Harlem nightlife and black performance resulting from the Shuffle Along's spectatorship.

He saw New York whites eager to participate in and pay generously for the exotic, ii In Al Rose’s biography of Eubie Blake, he explains that the 1952 revival failed because “drastic, last minute changes destroyed the original concept. The producer, Irving Gaumont, had asked Flournoy Miller to modernize the script, to bring it up to date [. . .] Gaumont, in a state of panic, accepted and produced an entirely new book, a story that had nothing to do with “Shuffle Along” except for a few of the original songs” (124-25). 154 nostalgic performances of African Americans, and he was also present for the subsequent alienation suffered by Harlem blacks who were denied a place in the nightclubs as spectators, but were allowed to participate if they played to the exotic or romanticized expectations of white audiences. For African Americans in the 1920s, their identities were defined by masks—the mask of brown-skinned exotica and the comic mask of minstrelsy. The emergent white identity was intimately tied to that of the African

American; it was one that was eager to watch, and in many ways, embody through spectating, the black identity that their own preferences, fantasies, and anxieties had helped to shape. While many African Americans were resentful of the narrowly- conceived identity to which they had to adhere, black audiences nevertheless joined in the spectatorship that encouraged these social identifications by teasing them with social mobility, fame, and financial rewards.

This chapter considered the nearly inexplicable, but perhaps inevitable, success of

Shuffle Along with black and white spectators during the 1920s. The production, seemingly against all odds, became a runaway hit with its jazz and ragtime-inspired music, lively comedy and dance routines, and a traditional comic love story that featured the first African American romantic leads. The show opened doors for African American entertainers and artists, began the white fascination with the Negro in the 1920s, and led to the cultural flourishing known as the Harlem Renaissance. However, while audiences potentially empathized with the romantic leads to the point of sympathy, concern, and respect for them as mature human beings, the minstrel-inspired comedy reinforced previously-held beliefs regarding African Americans, and led white audiences to clamor

155 for the kind of exoticized, minstrelized, and brown-skinned performances that Shuffle

Along delivered.

For a brief span of time, beginning in 1921 and lasting throughout much of the decade, these black and white identities mixed together to reflect a common cultural in- group—one that acknowledged and relied upon the artistic and cultural contributions of

African Americans, and also acknowledged that only a combined spectatorship—a problematic and conflicting one, to be sure—of black and white audiences could create.

This identity, while never fully realized again in American theatrical culture, nevertheless continues to influence and haunt the American identity today. America's promise was never brighter than in the 1920s. Later in the twentieth century, the nation would achieve greater influence, power, and wealth, but it was at this time when that cultural identity and destiny first crystallized in the minds of its citizens. In the early 1920s, the potential of a common purpose and identity was being realized within spectators as they were playing out their identities in the nightclubs and theatres, both onstage and in the audience. Douglas writes:

The situation was thus one of complex and double empowerment; at the moment

that America-at-large was separating itself culturally from England and Europe,

black America, in an inevitable corollary movement, was recovering its own

heritage from the dominant white culture [. . .] White consciousness of the

Negro’s rights and gifts (however severe the limitations of that consciousness)

and black confidence that Negroes could use white models and channels of power

to achieve their own ends (however mistaken time would prove that confidence to

156 be) reached a peak of intensity in the 1920s never seen in American history before

or since. This black and white collaborative energy crested in New York.68

Shuffle Along was the spark that set this energy in motion. It was the first theatrical production that drew the unified spectatorship necessary to make such an identity palpable in the minds of Americans. The production reflected a common, unified, modern identity; one fraught with limited expectations of African American potential, but one that both blacks and whites participated in to create the first truly American identity independent of European influences and traditions. This identity, first realized in the spectatorship of Shuffle Along, would continue to guide and influence American cultural identity all the way through the twentieth century, and into our present day.

157

Endnotes

1 David Krasner. A Beautiful Pageant: African-American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910-1927. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002: 239.

2 Susan Gubar. Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture. New York: Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997: 114.

3 Krasner, 240.

4 Gubar, 96.

5 Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: 1995, 3.

6 Krasner, 241.

7 Ibid, 242.

8 Robert Kimball. Reminiscing with Sissle and Blake. New York: Viking Press, 1973: 88.

9 Noble Sissle. “Account of the Process of Shuffle Along.” Unpublished. No Date. Flournoy Miller Papers, Helen Armstead Johnson Miscellaneous Theatre Collection, Schomburg Center, New York Public Library, New York, NY.

10 Herbert Shapiro.White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery. Amherst: U of Mass. P, 1988: 150.

11 Krasner: 242.

12 Douglas, 87.

13 Shapiro: 96, 107, 115.

14 Ibid, 96.

15 Ibid: 142. 158

16 Kimball: 80.

17 Ibid: 86.

18 Ibid: 89.

19 Krasner: 244.

20 Kimball: 93.

21 Al Rose. Eubie Blake. New York: Schirmer Books, 1979: 79.

22 Douglas: 354.

23 Krasner: 249.

24 Ibid: 250.

25 Ibid: 257.

26 Alan Dale. “Shuffle Along Full of Pep and Real Melody.” The American. 25 May 1921. Flournoy Miller Papers, Helen Armstead Johnson Miscellaneous Theatre Collection, Schomburg Center, New York Public Library, New York, NY.

27 Helen Armstead-Johnson. “Route’s Roots.” Undated. Flournoy Miller Papers, Helen Armstead Johnson Miscellaneous Theatre Collection, Schomburg Center, New York Public Library, New York, NY.

28 Rose: 78-79.

29 “Review of Shuffle Along.” Globe. 23 May 1921. Flournoy Miller Papers, Helen Armstead Johnson Miscellaneous Theatre Collection, Schomburg Center, New York Public Library, New York, NY.

30 James Weldon Johnson. Black Manhattan. New York: Arno Press, 1968: 186.

31 Langston Hughes. The Big Sea. New York: Hill and Wang, 1963. 223-24.

32 Brian D. Valencia. “Musical of the Month: Shuffle Along.” Musical of the Month Blog. New York Public Library. 10 Feb 2012. Web. 5 Mar 2012. http://www.nypl.org/blog/2012/02/10/musical-month-shuffle-along

159

33 “Fact Booklet for Original Production of Shuffle Along.” 1952. Flournoy Miller Papers, Helen Armstead Johnson Miscellaneous Theatre Collection, Schomburg Center, New York Public Library, New York, NY.

34 Douglas: 315.

35 Johnson: 146

36 Douglas: 310.

37 Jean Decety and Claus Lamm. “Empathy versus Personal Distress: Recent Evidence from Social Neuroscience.” The Social Neuroscience of Empathy. Eds Jean Decety and Williams Ickes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009: 208.

38 Eric Lott. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford UP, 1993: 39.

39 Douglas: 431.

40 LeRoy Ashby. With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture since 1830. Lexington, KY: UP of Kentucky, 2006: 16.

41 Ibid: 53.

42 Lott: 6.

43 Douglas: 76.

44 Ibid: 93.

45 Du Bois, WEB. “Double Consciousness and the Veil,” Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings. Ed. Charles Lemert. Boulder; San Francisco; Oxford: Westview Press, 1993: 179.

46 Linda R. Tropp and Thomas F. Pettigrew. “Intergroup Contact and the Central Role of Affect in Intergroup Prejudice.” The Social Life of Emotions. Eds. Larissa Z. Tiedens and Colin Wayne Leach. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004: 249.

47 Krasner: 248.

48 Alan Dale.

49 "Review of Shuffle Along." Sun. 23 May 1921. Flournoy Miller Papers, Helen Armstead Johnson Miscellaneous Theatre Collection, Schomburg Center, New York Public Library, New York, NY.

50 Krasner: 262. 160

51 Ibid: 266.

52 Russell Spears and Colin Wayne Leach. “Intergroup Schadenfreude.” The Social Life of Emotions. Eds Larissa Z. Tiedens and Colin Wayne Leach. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004: 339, 341.

53 Spears and Leach: 352.

54 Krasner: 261.

55 Ashby: 89-90.

56 Diane M. Mackie, Lisa A. Silver, and Eliot R. Smith. “Intergroup Emotions.” The Social Life of Emotions. Eds Larissa Z. Tiedens and Colin Wayne Leach. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004: 228.

57 Douglas: 105.

58 Ibid: 105.

59 Ibid: 74.

60 “The New York Season Speeds Gaily to a Close.” Vogue. 1 May 1922: 35. Florence Mills Collection. Schomburg Center. New York Public Library, New York, NY.

61 Ibid: 35.

62 Krasner: 259.

63 Hughes: 224.

64 Ibid: 225.

65 Helen Armstead-Johnson. “Route’s Roots.” Routes. No Date. Helen Armstead Johnson Miscellaneous Theatre Collection, Schomburg Center, New York Public Library, New York, NY.

66 Rose, 82.

67 Ibid: 109.

68 Douglas: 5.

161

Chapter 5

The Federal Theatre Project and United States Identity: The Divided Spectatorship of Horse Eats Hat

I feel sorry for people who did not see Horse Eats Hat and even sorrier for those who didn’t like it. Art or no art, it was a unique event, one which could happen only with Mars in the ascendant against a field of red, white, and blue. To quote again from my favorite review of this opus, “It is the only one there is of it.”

-Hallie Flanagan, Arena: The History of the Federal Theatre, p. 78.

In the summer of 1936, John Houseman and Orson Welles approached Hallie

Flanagan, the director of the Federal Theatre Project, to propose a “Classical Theatre” series within the larger program. After gaining Flanagan’s support, the Classical Theatre series (under the ambiguous title “Project 891”) chose its first production. It would be

Horse Eats Hat, an adaptation of Henri Labiche’s 1851 French farce, Un chapeau de paille d’Italie (An Italian Straw Hat), co-written by Welles and Edwin Denby, the poet and dance critic. This was not the first time that a version of Labiche’s play had been produced in New York; an English translation first premiered in 1880 and was revived several times afterwards under titles such as The Wedding March (1904) and The Straw

Hat (1926).1 In their adaptation, Welles and Denby shortened the original plot and added numerous comic bits in the style of American vaudeville. Shifting further away from the original French farce, Welles’s production included grotesque designs, highly physical acting, and broad slapstick comedy. It also blurred the lines between performer and

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audience by incorporating meta-theatrical moments written into the text. Such staging choices included scenery falling during key moments of the production, performers entering into the auditorium space, and actors tumbling from balconies.

Horse Eats Hat opened at the Maxine Elliott Theatre in New York on September

26, 1936, and ran through December of the same year. It seemed that the changes to the script were not well received, at least at first. Critics’ reviews of the opening night were overwhelmingly negative, and the awkwardly silent houses that followed indicated that initially, most spectators did not appreciate the show either. According to Orson Welles, the show always played to packed houses, even though it was not well-reviewed or accepted by mainstream audiences, many of whom received it with puzzlement or outright hostility.2 In spite of this, Horse Eats Hat did manage to create an exceptional following of devoted fans. Mark Fearnow states that “on the evening of its closing, only people who had seen the production at least twice were allowed to enter, and the audience was said to include a number of people who had seen the production as many as twenty times.” 3 Fans loved Horse Eats Hat so much, in fact, that at the closing performance a newspaper article reported people picketing in front of the theatre with signs that read

“HORSE EATS HAT MUST NOT CLOSE; PROJECT 891 IS UNFAIR TO THE NEW

YORK PUBLIC.” 4 While effectively alienating a large portion of spectators, there was nevertheless something extremely pleasurable about this frantic and irreverent production to a select group of theatergoers.

This chapter explores how Horse Eats Hat’s spectators helped to shape the course of this production and its narrative in theatre history—a mainstream and critical misfire that still managed to be wildly popular with a select group of audience members. 163

Furthermore, it also seeks to answer how this play might have created the polarized response that it did—with some spectators enjoying the show immensely, while leaving others cold and apathetic. An investigation of the response to this comic production can reveal social tensions and emergent identities of its spectatorship. I assert that the emotional split of Horse Eats Hat’s spectatorship reveals a social rift among audience members in this cultural moment of United States history, and a disillusionment with the direction in which the nation was going. Through an analysis of group identification resulting from having seen the production, we can discover moments of cultural and social tension reflected in its spectatorship. By framing audience response within different aspects of empathy, I examine how different spectators could have found this production to be either engaging or alienating.

Outside theories related to empathy, I look at theories of intergroup emotions, which include how social identity is constructed and how existing cultural expectations influence group identification, to also inform the analysis of this production. For example, did those who disliked the show feel this way because they did not approve of the Federal Theatre Project or, by extension, the Works Progress Administration and the politics of the New Deal in general? Or conversely, were spectators who desired a more socially relevant production from the Federal Theatre Project, which was known for its politically charged plays, disappointed when they watched a politically-content free, absurdist farce? Perhaps there were some who felt the show was too assaultive on the spectator’s space, or the humor too absurd for their comfort.

Finally, theories of comedy can illuminate the production’s mixed reception.

Analyses of the comic grotesque, in particular, offer insight into the inversion of social 164

groups that the spectator response to this production seemed to initiate, and how these perceptions went on to shape further attitudes towards the show. Horse Eats Hat is an exceptional production to analyze through the both the lens of both cognitive studies and comic theory because it managed to simultaneously define and isolate the other within its spectatorship. Those who loved the production “got” the joke, or at least experienced the kind of pleasure that the theatre artists who created the production wanted them to experience. Many of those who disliked the show felt as though a joke had been played on them, making them feel like the ridiculed out-group of the comedy. How such an inverted social identity emerged throughout the run of this production is a complicated issue. An exploration of cognitive science, comedy, and the historical circumstances of this production offers clues as to why people reacted to this show the way that they did, and what it reveals about social and cultural identity at this particular moment in U.S. history.

Seeking an Ideal Audience: Orson Welles and John Houseman Challenge

Expectations for Horse Eats Hat

Having recently directed the Federal Theatre Project’s Negro Unit production of

Macbeth, the twenty-year old Orson Welles firmly established himself as a rising star in the New York theatre scene. Often referred to as Voodoo Macbeth for Welles’s decision to set the Scottish tragedy in nineteenth-century Haiti with an all-black cast, the production was both a critical and popular success, and no doubt gave Welles and John

Houseman (who was at that time the director of the Negro Theatre Project) the leverage they needed to launch the Classical Theatre Series from within the Federal Theatre

Project. However, it was clear from the early stages of Horse Eats Hat’s adaptation and 165

rehearsal process that Welles and Houseman’s intention was to defy both popular and elitist expectations of what qualified as classical theatre. John Houseman recalls how the very idea of having to produce shows under the label of “classical” (despite it being part of their own pitch to Flanagan) made both him and Welles cringe. So premiering the series with the Labiche adaptation, especially after the acclaim of a well-known play like

Macbeth, was perhaps a choice rooted in a spirit of defiance and nonconformity.

Houseman writes “To justify our first choice we explained that nineteenth-century situation farce (le vaudeville) was a classical theatrical form ‘taught in schools’ and that

Labiche was its recognized master. Having made our point, we changed the name to

Horse Eats Hat [sic] and began to plan its production.”5 In a World Telegram interview from August 28, 1936, Welles, with characteristic bravado, explains the decision:

No sooner would you open a Classical Theater…than what public you might have

would be sure that they were going to have a feast of Ibsen and Shakespeare. That

would provide you with a self-conscious theater full of self-conscious actors,

impressed with revering the immortal bard. Damn—he’s immortal only as long as

people want to see him. That’s why we call it ‘891 Presents’ and are opening the

season with a farce. The adaptation of ‘Horse Eats Hat?’ [sic] transfers the setting

to this country and the year to 1908. If anyone likes it it will be because it turns

out to be a good show. And not because school teachers have referred to it, and

with hushed awe, as a classic.6

By opening the classical series with an “anti-classic,” Welles managed to muddy both critics' and spectator's expectations for the production. In addition, the press notices revealed an uncertainty as to what the show might be: Was it an unrealized classical gem, 166

polished by Welles and Denby for present day audiences? Was it an ideological attack on the reverence given to the classical dramatic canon? Or, was it merely an excuse to produce a scandalous farce under the protection of the Federal Theatre Project? In any case, Welles’s interview and the press notices leading up to the opening did little to give theatre goers any clear idea of what to expect. Of course, part of the ambiguity could be attributed to the typically eclectic offerings of Federal Theatre Project itself. In his biography of Orson Welles, Simon Callow refers specifically to The New York Times’s notice of the show, noting that it was “indicative of a certain confusion as to what to expect from this latest manifestation of the already bewilderingly diverse Federal Theatre

Project; the first night was a leap in the dark for all concerned, actors and audience alike.”7

The events leading up to that first night, by all accounts, were exuberant and festive, with an overall tone of celebration spilling over into the adaptation and rehearsal process. In his book The Theatre of Orson Welles, Richard France describes the kind of environment that Welles sought for Horse Eats Hat: “Its final evolution was to be very much along the lines of a Marx Brothers movie, with wild and improbable acrobatics, with the set and properties becoming all but animate in the confusion.”8 When co- adapting the script, Welles and Denby kept the basic plot of the Labiche play intact: the young hero attempts to replace a married woman’s straw hat that his cart horse has eaten.

The incident sparks more than minor embarrassment, since the woman loses the hat while she is having a tryst in the bushes with a soldier. In order to salvage her reputation, the hero frantically searches the town for an identical replacement. The complication is that it is the hero’s wedding day; his bride, father-in-law, and wedding party chase the 167

frazzled groom across town while he is in his pursuit of the hat. To further complicate matters, the hatless woman’s husband is also chasing the hero. The frantic confusions are finally resolved when a gift from a member of the wedding party is a hat that matches the woman’s horse-eaten hat perfectly, which she promptly gets her hands on before the jealous husband finds out. 9 While the bare spine of the play stayed much the same,

Welles and Denby managed to strip everything else away in order to, as Callow describes, “(seize) on its almost surreal progression from incident to incident to create something that owed a great deal to American Vaudeville…It became in their hands all form and no content: a delirious string of gags bearing only the most tenuous relationship to the basic situation.”10

If Denby and Welles pared down the action of the dramatic text until it remained a barely-recognizable shell of Labiche’s farce, then Welles as director managed to fill it back up with physical gags, comic stunts, and meta-theatrical choreography that made it nearly unrecognizable from the original play’s action. Among the physical stunts and metatheatrics that Welles employed were orchestrating characters to behave in an absurdly mechanized manner, with their actions and dialogue being intentionally incongruous or just plain inexplicable. Also written into the script was a prompter emerging onstage at various points in the show to tell the leading actor (Joseph Cotten) where to go and what to say, thus creating a play-within-a play—“the same theatrical device that Thornton Wilder was to fully develop in Our Town three years later,” according to Richard France. Break apart furniture, break away sets, a fully functioning water fountain that sprays the actors, and, finally, an actor choreographed to fall from an

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upper box seat onto a mattress laid out for him at the bottom of the orchestra pit were also incorporated into the production. 11

Despite the dangerous choreography and manic stage business (or perhaps because of it), spirits were high and an overall festive mood existed during the rehearsal process. In his memoirs, Houseman recalls feeling envious of the “gleeful, frenetic tempo of the proceedings on stage” while he had to attend to business matters in his basement-level office.12 Callow attributes the leadership of Welles himself to the exuberant rehearsal period:

Welles was at his most jovially demonic in rehearsal, possessed by a spirit of

almost unstoppable invention, regardless of life or limb. As well as the ex-

vaudevillians and broken-down tragedians, he had surrounded himself with

friends and contemporaries…and with them any trace of inhibition he may once

have had disappeared. Like a huge child, he romped gloriously through

rehearsals, cheered on by the company…any of his collaborators or friends,

before listing the torrents of rage or the storms of inspiration, will first cite

laughter as the predominant memory of time spent with him—laughter which was

often quite silly, and which could leave him (and you) helpless, with tears

streaming down your faces.13

While Houseman described the mood of the rehearsal process as “gleeful,” Callow goes on to interpret this as an ominous sign: “It may have been that worst of all possible things, a comedy in which the company shrieked with laughter during rehearsals.

Laughter is a very serious business, a science. The important thing is to give the audience pleasure, not have pleasure yourself.” 14 Of course, this is written in hindsight, with the 169

knowledge that critics would go on to shred the production. However, despite Callow’s suspicion that the comically infectious environment might have been Horse Eats Hat’s critical undoing, it most certainly had an influence on the eventual cult following that occurred later in the run; it appears to have been a matter of attracting a like-minded audience that desired and appreciated the kind of surrealistic antics that Welles’s company endlessly provided. Furthermore, once the show found its ideal audience, the production began to evolve into a more participatory experience.

From “Acute Caterwauls” to “Volcanic Islets of Mirth”: Spectators’ Response to

Horse Eats Hat

One way to examine this difference between spectators' experiences of the production is through empathetic response. Remember that Thompson’s first level of empathy, passive or involuntary coupling, involves comprehending another’s emotions, gestures, and movements. At its most basic, this kind of empathy simply allows us to experience another person as just that—a living bodied subject capable of expression, thought, and agency. 15 Thompson maintains that this kind of empathy is something that everyone engages in. It is certainly something that everyone who saw Horse Eats Hat would have engaged in; according to this theory, everyone with a optimally-functioning mirror neuron system, who came back after intermission, and was awake during the show, would have been able to at least passively experience the performers as bodily subjects performing a set of actions and displaying emotions. However, just because the audience would have been able to comprehend these actions in their proper context, doesn’t mean that each one would have necessarily enjoyed what they were watching, felt

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the same way as the performers, understood their feelings, or even sympathized with them.

Indeed, the hostile reviews from the opening night of Horse Eats Hat testify to this. The New York Times’s review from September 28, 1936 remarked about the wildly absurd nature of both the adaptation and staging:

It was as though Gertrude Stein had dreamed a dream after a late night eating

pickles and ice cream, the ensuing revelations being crisply acted by giants and

midgets, caricatures, lunatics and a prop nag. Probably it is bad, certainly it is not

good in the usually accepted sense of the theatre. 16

Citing concern for those who had to be in the production, the September 28, 1936 review from The New York American had this to say:

Dozens of young men and women are compelled by stress of circumstances to

participate in this offensive play that represents a new low in the tide of drama.

An outmoded farce has been garnered with sewage in an apparent attempt to

appeal to devotees of filthy drama sufficiently to overcome the stupidity of plot

and ineptness of production. 17

However, Richard Watts of The Herald Tribune (also from Sept. 28) was able to top The

New York American’s vitriol, describing his reaction to the production as “that dismal embarrassment which comes to one when actors are indulging in a grim determination to be high spirited and there is nothing to be spirited about…I found it of surpassing interest that one of the adapters plays the rear section of the play’s highly engaging horse.” 18

(Edwin Denby operated the hindquarters of the large puppet horse.)

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Clearly, nothing like sympathy is occurring here, but the disgust that many critics hurled towards the production was hardly universal. In fact, many spectators found the show extremely pleasurable. Pulitzer-prize winning dramatist Marc Connelly and novelist

John Dos Passos attended on opening night and loved the show. Connelly recalls “the odd circumstance surrounding the performance”:

I had gone to see it alone. From the moment the curtain rose I found it hilarious.

So did someone else seated some distance from me whom I couldn’t see. We

were volcanic islets of mirth in a sea of silence. Hearing another man laughing as

much as I was kept me from being intimidated by the general apathy [. . .] As the

audience and I moved into the lobby [for intermission], I spotted a man wiping

tears of pleasure from his eyes. It was my friend John Dos Passos. For our own

security—in case the second act proved as funny as the first—we sat in adjacent

vacant seats we found in a rear row. For the rest of the evening we screamed with

laughter together.19

However, the number of spectators who enjoyed the show as much as Connelly and Dos

Passos grew during the run of the production. And while a steady cult following of

Horse Eats Hat did emerge, houses were consistently mixed, either feeling alienated and agitated from the production, or reveling in the bizarre action.

If all who saw the show were empathizing at least on a neural level, Thompson’s second type of empathy can begin to describe how this split in audience response potentially occurred, and how their feelings towards the show were rationalized.

Described as “the imaginary transposition of oneself to the other’s place,” this kind of empathy is a far more conscious process than bodily coupling and a basic comprehension 172

of actions.20 It involves a willingness and ability to imagine oneself in another’s place.

This ability is also referred to as Theory-of-Mind (ToM), which people are thought to have when they consciously speculate about the mental states of others. 21 It is important to point out that ToM does not have to be an accurate estimation of what another is thinking, it is only necessary that one is intentionally trying to guess what another is feeling. As with Thompson’s first type of empathy, this kind of empathy can also exist for those who either loved or hated show, but, depending on how they felt about it, spectators would have experienced it in different ways. For instance, Connelly, a playwright and theatre director himself, clearly enjoyed the show; he might have empathized with the performers because he would understand the amount of work that went into making the production more than other audience members: the exquisitely- timed comic scenes, the exactness of the falling scenery, the challenges of directing an adapted script, etc. However, it would be dangerous to assume that the only reason

Connelly would have liked the show is because he could appreciate the amount of work that went into it—it is no secret that the harshest critics of a production are often other theatre practitioners. Furthermore, one does not need an in-depth knowledge of how theatre works to enjoy a theatre production. Other audience members who liked the production, but had no prior theatre experience might have developed a ToM with the situations that the characters enacted on stage. The point I make here is that because

Connelly liked the show, he might have employed a favorable ToM that could have included a prior knowledge of how much time and effort goes into the making of a theatre production.

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Inversely, those who disliked the production would have projected a ToM that reinforced how they felt about the show. If spectators found the production embarrassing or awkward to watch, their ToM towards the performers would have imagined them as feeling awkward or unhappy to be in the show. Spectators would then assume that the actors were embarrassed or uncomfortable to be up there, just as the New York American critic had done. Furthermore, the several critics that did not find the production funny or entertaining could have projected a ToM that the performers also found the material unfunny themselves, and were forcing themselves to be jolly onstage. Watts of The

Herald Tribune made such a projection when he described the show as such:

It looked as though somebody from Montclair High School had just been to a

performance of the Swedish Ballet, just read a manifesto by Meyerhold on the

idiocy of all idioms of the stage—and had also just had a sore case of the colic,

with acute caterwauls and all the other sounds of physical distress duly and direly

indicated. 22

Watts apparently hated the show so much that whatever was happening on the stage felt like “acute caterwauls and all the other sounds of physical distress”; the show was literally causing him personal discomfort. However, Connelly’s account of the production goes to show that one spectator’s “acute caterwaul” is another’s “volcanic islet of mirth.” Clearly spectators had strong empathetic reactions to this production, but many of them were quite different from one another’s. And, up to this point, the levels of empathy that I ascribe to Horse Eats Hat’s spectators d not necessarily change or affect their feelings and towards the performance. It simply reinforced what they already felt and led to no deeper connection between the performer and spectator. However, 174

Thompson’s third type of empathy differs from the previous two and allows for a deeper investigation into the nature of spectator engagement with live performance.

According to Thompson, this third kind involves “the possibility of seeing myself from your perspective, that is, as you empathetically perceive me. Empathy thus becomes reiterated, so that I empathetically imagine your empathetic experience of me and you empathetically experience my empathetic experience of you.”23 Also referred to as reiterated empathy, it requires a reciprocity of experience—a feedback loop of shared emotion and perspective. Those who are caught in this reciprocity of experience are better able to step outside their immediate perspectives and see themselves as part of a larger dynamic social body of which they are participating agents. Reiterated empathy could explain why some spectators enjoyed this production enough to see it twenty times, while others took pity on the performers or bolted at intermission. Richard France cites

Connelly’s experience of the production when he writes “When asked why so few others responded [to Horse Eats Hat] as he had, Connelly surmised, ‘They were watching it, rather than sharing in it. They reminded me of what the Greeks called agelasts, non- laughers. It’s possible, of course, they just weren’t attuned to the play.’”24 Being able to

“share” (as Connelly described it) in a production, rather than simply “watch” demands the kind of empathy that Thompson describes, and determines whether spectators can truly engage with and participate as co-creators of a production, at least in the case of this particular one.

Apart from Connelly’s recollection of the show, other accounts point to Horse

Eats Hat’s devoted following of spectators, especially in the weeks following the

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opening, and the initial critical attack. In an article from November, 1936, New Theatre magazine challenges critics’ expectations and earlier interpretations of the production:

Critics seeking subterranean meanings rationalize Horse Eats Hat into work of

surrealism and experiment. In reality it is an old story of marital entanglement

which serves as a pretext for farcical treatment [. . .] After the climax of the third

act when the stage at the Maxine Elliot resounds with the crash of falling scenery

it is difficult to imagine how the emotional pitch could be heightened further. But

the excitement is carried on without effort to a riotous last act which makes the

audience respond with a huge belly laugh.25

In response to an October 1936 New York American (a Hearst-owned publication) article titled “Does the U.S. Sanction Vulgar Play?” in which the article answered in the affirmative, Wilson Whitman wrote this defense in Stage Magazine: “this reporter discovered that the score of young men and women (it’s nearer four score, but never mind the statistics) were having a perfectly swell time. So was the audience [. . .] And, thanks no doubt to Mr. Hearst’s publicity, the house was comfortably crowded.”26 It is important to point out that these articles were written in November of 1936, nearly six weeks after the opening weekend, when the majority of the negative reviews came out.

Clearly, something in the production and spectator response had changed during this time; there was more positive response from spectators, and the production appeared to be more pleasurable to the critics who attended later in the run. Live theatrical performance is simply that—live—many factors can contribute to subtle or not-so-subtle shifts in the pacing, tone, and individual performances that make up the production throughout its run. I assert that the spectators’ contribution to this production was one of 176

the major factors that led to this critical shift in perception. Horse Eats Hat found its ideal audience, an audience that understood and appreciated the kind of humor and theatrical performance that the company was striving for, and an audience who was able and more than willing to share in the emotional experience of the production. These spectators were able to reciprocate back to the performers the experience that the performers were communicating to them, which in turn inspired the performers to acknowledge the presence and active involvement of the spectators—the theatrical equivalent of Thompson’s third kind of empathy.

Before, the spectators who were neurally mirroring the actions of the performers or extending a Theory of Mind to them were still perceiving them as an other. These processes allow for an understanding of what they are physically doing, and to project a state of mind on the performers, but beyond that, there is no true understanding of what they are really feeling. They never cease to be “other,” and their perspectives remain separate. In this situation, the spectator can only project a feeling that either reflects or reinforces what he or she is feeling. In the case of those who did not like the production, it appeared that only anger, pity, or awkwardness could be projected towards the performers. Never at any point could those spectators truly feel that the performers might have actually been enjoying the experience, finding humor and pleasure in doing it, and, furthermore, sharing that experience with spectators who were likewise enjoying the experience themselves.

Looking at the production through Thompson’s levels of empathy, it seems that those who were able to share the experience of the production with the performers and participate in the reciprocal exchange of feelings were able to strongly experience the 177

third type of empathy, while those who did not enjoy it seemed unable or unwilling to connect to the production in this way. This, however, does not mean that because some spectators did not like the show they were not capable of this kind of empathy; they just did not experience it for this production. The use of empathetic response, particularly

Thompson’s third type, serves to illuminate an audience’s pleasurable or alienating experience of live theatre, and speaks to a shared experience between performer and spectator that is vital to how a theatrical event is perceived, shaped, and understood.

If Thompson’s theory of empathy can illuminate how spectators were able to participate and influence a live theatrical performance, Daniel Batson’s analysis of empathy can offer perspective on how spectators could have felt alienated and distressed by the production. In a method similar to Thompson’s he lists up to eight uses for the term empathy. Briefly, they are: (1) Knowing Another Person’s Internal State, Including

His or Her thoughts and Feelings; (2) Adopting the Posture or Matching the Neural

Responses of an Observed Other; (3) Coming to Feel as Another Person Feels; (4)

Intuiting or Projecting Oneself into Another’s Situation; (5) Imagining How Another is

Thinking and Feeling; (6) Imagining How One Would Think and Feel in the Other’s

Place; (7) Feeling Distress at Witnessing Another Person’s Suffering; (8) Feeling for

Another Person Who is Suffering.27 Because some of these uses for empathy overlap with Thompson’s four descriptions, and also because some do not have a direct bearing on understanding spectator’s distress or empathic blocking, I will discuss only number seven (feeling distress at witnessing another person’s suffering) in relation to the negative spectator response of Horse Eats Hat.

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As mentioned before, there were critics and spectators alike who disliked the production, but for different reasons. Some found the material unfunny, or embarrassing to watch. Additionally, there were others who had difficulty enjoying themselves because of the extreme on-stage stunts. For example, the dangerous staging, such as watching an actor fall from a balcony onto a mattress in the orchestra pit, another flown up to the rafters at a key moment of the show, or still others having to artfully dodge falling scenery, might have agitated some spectators. In a passage from John

Houseman’s biography where he describes the spectator response during the previews, he recalls the kind of discomfort that kept many audience members from enjoying the show.

As madness followed madness through two crowded acts—with actors by the

score hurtling across the stage in endless, circular pursuit, in carriages and cars,

cycles, tricycles and roller skates, walking, trotting and galloping, leaving ruin in

their wake, scattering the rubber plants in Myrtle Mugglethorpe’s suburban home,

dispersing the gorgeous, squealing models in Tillie’s modish millinery

establishment, terrorizing the Countess’s elegant guests as they turkey-trotted to

the strains of a red-coated gypsy ensemble—our left-wing audience laughed but it

was not altogether at ease. Its uneasiness grew as the wildest scene of the evening

got under way. This had for its finale one of the most extravagant accumulations

of farcical horror ever assembled behind the proscenium arch of a respectable

American theater. I can still see Joe Cotten, wearing his bright yellow leather

gloves, with the coveted straw hat grasped firmly between his teeth, caught

between the Countess’s indignant guests and the vengeful pursuit of the wedding

party, leaping from sofa to table to piano top to chandelier which, at that instant, 179

started to rise like a great golden bird, carrying him upward in a wild, 40-foot

flight till he vanished in the fly loft, while a three-tiered fountain flung a giant jet

upward at the seat of his pants and Cotten himself, clinging to the rising

chandelier with one hand and grasping a siphon in the other, squirted streams of

soda water over the madly whirling crowd below.28

In his analysis of the split audience response in Horse Eats Hat, Fearnow summarizes why many spectators felt so distressed by the dangerous staging. He writes,

“The production showed an undeniable extravagance in threatening the audience, first by pulling down the conventions of performance at will (the falling scenery, the fake miscues) and then by placing actors in physical peril.”29 Watching the spectacle, there were undoubtedly audience members who might have literally felt too “threatened” by the possibility of witnessing harm come to the actors involved in the show. Batson explains that this feeling, born out of concern, can also be considered a form of empathy, which he describes as “feeling distress at witnessing another person’s suffering.”

However, although this experience qualifies as a form of empathy, its effects are limited to only the spectator and their own feelings. It is a form of empathy because they are applying a ToM to the performers—fear of the dangerous staging and falling scenery— and might also have been experiencing a strong mirroring reaction to the performers.

Often if one watches a scary event like a large object falling close to someone else, or watching another person fall, one will jump or jolt in response to watching it, even if the observer is not in the line of danger—this is our mirror neuron system at work. However, the reach of the empathetic experience ends there, because the spectator would be too focused on his or her own feelings of agitation that they cannot consider the other in any 180

greater depth. Regarding situations where we experience distress for another, Batson writes, “feeling as the other feels may actually inhibit other-oriented feelings if it leads us to become focused on our emotional states.”30 In other words, the spectators might be empathizing on basic levels with the performers, but their concern for physical safety is actually preventing them for reaching any deeper experience of empathy with them. The falling scenery might have just fallen a little too close to the performers, the pratfalls looked just a little too real, and the actor who fell from a balcony into the orchestra pit before intermission may just have caused too much discomfort for anyone who feared for the safety on those onstage. In some cases, the audience’s apprehension proved justified; the actor who did the balcony fall every night, Bil Baird, fell incorrectly one night during the run and ended up breaking his leg in several places.31

I have been discussing how certain kinds of empathic experience can be responsible for a full spectator/performer dynamic in live theatre performance, but it is important to point out that I am not stating because this production’s ideal audience appeared to have achieved this kind of empathic reciprocity with the performers, that all live theatre productions should do so. In fact, some productions go to great lengths to sever any empathic ties between the actors and audience, trying their best to alienate them and stunt emotional concern or connection. Certainly, many scholars and theatre artists would say that this is the intent of Brechtian theatre, so that spectators can better concentrate on social or ethical issues presented in the performance. While it does appear evident that at least on basic levels, some experience of empathy is occurring when we watch live theatre, even if it is only the first kind that Thompson describes, we should

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remember that this is not something that all successful theatre productions will necessarily share, or that all ideal audiences need to experience.

The (A)Politics of Horse Eats Hat: Social Identifications during the New Deal

Horse Eats Hat is remarkable because it simultaneously managed to achieve both a sense and empathetic response for its overall audience. Alienation and empathy were occurring at the same time, if for different individual spectators. However, so far the analysis has focused on how alienation and empathetic response might have been occurred within Horse Eats Hat’s spectatorship; why individual spectators might have felt the way they did has yet to be explored. Any study of empathy and cognitive processes would not be complete without a least a consideration of the social and historical circumstances surrounding the spectatorship of the production. Thompson argues that in order to properly understand empathy:

We need to take account of culture, history, and the life-world. We need to look

not only at formal structures of empathetic experience and their embodied

development, but also at the cultural and historical becoming of human

experience within and across generations…One of the most important reasons that

human mentality cannot be reduced simply to what goes on inside the brain of an

individual is that human mental activity is fundamentally social and cultural.32

I argue that when assessing theatrical spectatorship, the body is the first filter of meaning, but it must also be remembered that the body is constantly being shaped by social, historical, and material circumstances that affect how one will interpret, participate in, and feel about a theatrical event.

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Some of the most obvious social circumstances surrounding and shaping Horse

Eats Hat were economic. As part of Roosevelt’s New Deal to combat the unemployment and suffering caused by The Great Depression, The Federal Theatre Project was created to be an economic relief and recovery program, formed in the summer of 1935 under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration. One of several programs devoted to offering relief to American artists, (there was also the Federal Music Project, Art Project, and Writers Project) the Federal Theatre Project in some ways remedied a dual crisis to unemployed theatre artists: displacement by both the Depression and by the growing radio and motion picture industries. 33 Houseman recalls that many of the seventy-plus cast members of Horse Eats Hat were older vaudeville performers who, due to economic and cultural circumstances, were experiencing limited job opportunities. “Hundreds came to be interviewed, most of them rejects or fugitives from older and lesser WPA projects—vaudeville and circus, tent shows and units in dissolution. It was a bizarre collection of aging character actors, comics and eccentrics that delighted Orson’s heart.”34 In one way or another, the shadow of The Great Depression and the government relief programs created to combat it permeated both the performers and spectators’ experience of the production.

In his analysis of Horse Eats Hat, Fearnow directly ties the instability and suffering of The Great Depression to the pleasure that spectators found in watching the production, a pleasure that apparently transcended the “typical” experience of watching comedy or farce. He writes that the production “exceeded the traditional boundaries of farce by raising the level of danger in the performance to new heights and by extending the disorder of the narrative into the audience’s half of the theatre space…The levels of 183

frenzy and release in these performances corresponded to the high level of cultural tension in the 1930s.”35 Fearnow connects the positive response of selected spectators to the dire social circumstances in which the production was made, arguing that those who enjoyed watching the dangerous antics onstage had found a way to release the accumulated tensions of the 1930s. He goes on to conclude that the community of spectators who attended Horse Eats Hat repeatedly were psychologically bolstered from the experience, and emotionally stronger as a result: “Audiences who emerged from the theatre having laughed for three hours at Horse Eats Hat [sic]…would have felt terrific, possessors of a new sense of freedom and even confidence in the face of tremendous social doubt.”36 While I agree that anyone who felt they belonged to this select group of spectators would have felt a sense of belonging, pleasure, and emotional connection from watching it, and that no doubt some spectators enjoyed the production because it offered a delirious escape from everyday concerns, these are not the only reasons why Horse

Eats Hat gained the kind of following that it did. In addition to the social circumstances in which the production occurred, an understanding of how an empathetic connection to the production was forged is necessary to examine the spectators’ contribution to this production. Previous identifications with social groups and political affiliations would have certainly influenced spectators’ emotional responses to Horse Eats Hat.

Those affiliated with conservative political beliefs often criticized the Federal

Theatre Project’s government-funded financial costs, their predominantly left-wing political content, and what they saw as dubious moral quality of the productions themselves. Harrison Grey Fiske’s Saturday Evening Post article from August first,

1936, titled “The Federal Theater Doom-Boggle,” is an almost perfect summation of the 184

right’s complaints with the WPA and, by extension, the politics of Roosevelt’s New

Deal.i For reasons economic, artistic, and political, Fiske rips apart the Federal Theatre

Project, along with many of its productions. He begins his onslaught by questioning

Hallie Flanagan’s ability and appropriateness to run the project, due a supposed lack of previous experience in managing a project of this scale as well as her documented admiration for Soviet Theatre. He then goes on to criticize the project for employing more amateurs than professional actors and theatre technicians: “scores of impostors made the pay roll. These included amateurs, office workers, ‘singing waiters’ from

Village joints, miscellaneous Harlem Negroes, idle welfare workers and plumbers. An especially hospitable welcome was extended to Communists and those of radical leanings, both white and black.”37 Officially, the standard for employment in the Federal

Theatre Project was that a person must, at one point in time, have been professionally employed as a theatre artist or technician, and be talented or skilled enough to work in the theatre outside of the FTP. This restriction did cause trouble for Flanagan throughout the

Project’s existence, as what constituted a previous professional engagement, or possessing enough ability to work in professional theatre was often left to interpretation.

Furthermore, the Project often had difficulty securing enough professional-quality workers for many productions, which led to the exception of having up to ten percent of the workers not be on relief (this quota was eventually raised to twenty-five percent by

1936).38

i Harrison Grey Fiske (1861-1942) was a playwright, Broadway producer, and journalist. He was most notable for helping to establish the Actor's Fund of America, supporting legislation that secured copyright laws for playwrights, and weakening the Theatrical Syndicate's control of nation-wide theatre bookings. He was also, however, against the unionization of the actors' profession.

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Fiske does not stop with the alleged mismanagement of federal funds and over- employment of inexperienced workers. Although the entire operation had not even been functioning for a year, he goes on criticize the quality of the productions. In a list of productions from February 3 through May 15, 1936, Fiske summarizes each production he had seen, along with a brief review of its quality. The range of praise he gives shows goes from “this production approached the professional standard” (highest) to “beneath the standard of the sophomore class of any second-rank high school” (lowest). He was especially vicious towards Welles’s and Houseman’s Macbeth, calling it “a shameless degradation of the cosmic tragedy...converted into a frenzied voodoo jamboree.”39

Finally, citing a complaint of the Theatre Veterans’ League that had alleged the FTP was disseminating Communist propaganda, Fiske claims that “The Federal Theater’s hair is full of Communists. They crawled into it as other had crept into larger WPA projects.

Besides the monthly wage, it afforded a welcome opportunity to bite the hand that fed them.”40 I discuss Fiske’s article in detail to illustrate the political opposition faced by the

Federal Theatre Project, and, by extension, the Works Progress Administration during this time. Social and fiscal conservatives regarded the Works Progress Administration, and the politics of the New Deal in general, as a creeping socialism that would destroy the free market and consume tax payers’ money. Because of these objections, many would denounce anything connected to these government projects as such.

Many of the critics’ negative remarks surrounding Horse Eats Hat seemed to reflect this conservative opposition. Several reviews referred to the tax dollars apparently wasted on the production. John Chapman of the Daily News criticizes both the bizarre action and the extravagant expense when he describes the show: 186

a continual state of explosive disintegration—a sort of stylized lunacy in which

the effort not to make sense is too often a strain upon players and audience [. . .]

Actors burst in and out by platoons, props collapse, scenery falls and the broader

and hammier the comedy, the better. It is a government-subsidized release of all

of Mr. Welles’s inhibitions.41

The New York Post’s Wilella Waldorf complains about “the customary opulence of a

WPA project,” and goes on to summarize that the “idiotic embellishments are just as dull as the farce itself after half an hour has passed.”42 Others yet attacked the WPA-funded show under the pretext of its salacious humor. Houseman recalls how the Hearst-owned press criticized the moral quality of Horse Eats Hat in order to attack the politics of the

New Deal.43 The article that he specifically refers to, from the October sixth edition of

The New York American, says this:

Broadway playgoers are wondering whether the Federal authorities are aware of

the character and content of the play sponsored by the Works Progress

Administration, with national money, under the title Horse Eats Hat [sic] at

Maxine Elliott’s Theatre [. . .] The most striking phase of the production is that

virtually all the malodorous lines and situations are dragged into the farce without

justification or even excuse. They add nothing to the plot…Indecent innuendo

runs through the lines and even the lack of sanitary accessories is stressed. Uncle

Sam’s production represents a new low in the tide of drama.44

Still there were others who did not like Horse Eats Hat precisely because it was a

Federal Theatre project production that was not overtly political. Fiske’s accusation that

“The Federal Theater’s hair is full of Communists” was certainly shrill alarmism, but it 187

would not be inaccurate to say that many involved with the project were decidedly progressive. O’Connor and Brown offer this explanation regarding the political ideology of many Federal Theatre Project productions, and theatre in general during the 1930s:

One has to recognize that the apparent failure of capitalism engendered a radical

examination of American beliefs and institutions in a significant number of plays.

These plays and the various groups and collectives that performed them,

attempted to show how capitalism tolerated or encouraged racism, war, poverty,

and other social ills. They attracted new working-class audiences to the theatre,

where they could see powerful commentaries on their society. The bewildered

middle class were also in search of insight into their lives and culture, which

drama could provide [. . .] It is within this theatrical tradition that the FTP

inevitably, but deliberately, placed itself. 45

Undoubtedly there were audiences who appreciated and came to expect socially and politically transformative theatre from the Federal Theatre Project. Many who supported the mission and politics of the Federal Theatre Project might have been expecting something with progressive theatrical approaches, such as Welles and Houseman’s innovative Macbeth, or a show with progressive and timely messages, like the censored production of Cradle Will Rock in 1936, which consequently led to Welles and

Houseman’s dismissal from the Federal Theatre Project.46 Needless to say, many spectators felt that Horse Eats Hat did not provide this. Recalling Houseman’s account of bewildered and uncomfortable “left-wing” audiences during the preview performances, it seems that Horse Eats Hat was unable satisfy audience members who desired political content that engaged them with current-day issues. 188

When it came to those strongly associated with either progressive or conservative affiliations, Horse Eats Hat could have easily alienated both groups. Research that examines intergroup emotion offers insights as to why spectators who were closely affiliated with a political belief system would have empathized with the production in the ways that they did. Mackie, Silver and Smith state that

The experience of intergroup emotion is predicated on social identification.

When social identification occurs, appraisals are intergroup-related rather than

personally concerned. When appraisals occur on a group basis, intergroup

emotions are experienced: Emotions are experienced on behalf of the ingroup, and

the ingroup and outgroup become the targets of emotion. Specific intergroup

emotions lead to differentiated intergroup action tendencies and behavior. 47

This can help us to understand why some spectators were turned off by the production, and why their level of empathy either remained at the most basic or barely existed at all.

Those who had strong social or political identifications that the Federal Theatre Project either challenged or supported might have gone into the production with a set of preconceived biases. Mackie et al. state that if the group identification is strong enough, individuals tend to feel emotions that reflect the values of the group. In the case of Horse

Eats Hat, those with conservative or anti-New Deal identifications might have felt disappointment on behalf of their social affiliations; likewise, those who had strong identifications with progressive causes would have felt let down by the production’s decidedly apolitical tone.

It is certain that Horse Eats Hat had nearly everything going against it to appeal to pre-established social groups: It turned off progressives, it turned off conservatives, it 189

turned off mainstream theatre goers. Undoubtedly there were those who loved the production and still might have had a social identification with a political group, but either their love of the show effectively overrode any conflicts of emotional interest, or their political affiliations were not terribly strong to begin with. According to Fearnow, there appeared to be only one established social group that generally liked the show. He states that the production “seems to have been especially attractive to artists and intellectuals. In addition to the story of Conelly [sic] and Dos Passos laughing ‘like hyenas’ in the midst of a stone-faced audience…the fine arts world—the opera buffs and curators—many of them adored it.”48 We should not assume, however, that because many in the fine arts community loved the show that everyone involved in the arts loved it; for example, Harrison Grey Fiske reportedly “sat rigid with horror making notes in a little book” during the production.49

What research on intergroup emotion can also inform us of is how a new ingroup of spectators formed—spectators who loved the show and attended the production on a frequent basis. As far as the people who loved and shared in the production, and helped to shape the ultimate meaning of this theatrical event, many of them were from the community of New York artists and intellectuals. And although many members of this ingroup did consist of people from the arts world, it is important to state that a new social group emerged, independent of the broader circles of New York intellectuals and artists, who specifically identified with this production. In order to forge social identity, there needs to be an event or events where individuals are able to place and perceive themselves as part of a larger social body. Mackie, Silver, and Smith observe that “the nature of the experience of intergroup emotion is predicated on social identification. It is 190

only when we see ourselves as interchangeable members of a group, rather than unique individuals, that the world can be appraised in terms of group rather than individual outcomes and emotions can be experienced on behalf of fellow group members.”50 For those who participated in the reciprocity of experience—reiterated empathy—they were able to socially identify with the production and with others who felt the same way. They were able to create an ingroup whose locus of identification was Horse Eats Hat. This social identification brought together an ideal audience and was likely the result of the kind of empathetic experience that Thompson describes. By experiencing the production as a self-identified in-group, spectators further solidified their identification with each other, perhaps experienced an even stronger reciprocal empathy, and formed appraisals and reactions that supported the values of the in-group, such as the picketers who protested the closing night of the show.

Who is the Joke On? Divided Spectatorship and the Comic Grotesque

Finally, once spectators were able to either socially identify with or against this production, how might the comedic nature of the production have influenced or reinforced the spectators’ contribution to the show? Fearnow draws upon Bakhtin to describe spectators’ response to Horse Eats Hat, stating that “The grotesque inevitably comes into play when artists engage in the oxymoronic feat of giving ‘form’ to

‘anarchy.’”51 Here, the grotesque is interpreted as an equalizing force; through

“degrading” action and imagery, spectators are given a glimpse of a world where social status, private space and personal ego are smashed, and all who participate are melded into a larger social body. Those audience members expecting a more “traditional” farce that privileges the fourth wall and respects the spectator space, and does not threaten 191

them with potential bodily harm or danger might have felt “degraded” by having watched the production. They were no longer passive spectators, but complicit in the manic proceedings, perhaps against their will. Those who enjoyed it might have reveled in the upturned order and general disarray. They might have loved the feeling of merging egos and perspectives—once again an effect of a heightened empathetic response.

From a Bakhtinian perspective, the grotesque can equalize and invert social hierarchies. However, it can also serve to alter the spectator's perception of an object.

Many of those who enjoyed Horse Eats Hat and found a social identification in its spectatorship could have liked the production simply because it shattered the expectations of what quality theatre was supposed to be. In other words, by not living up to the standards or expectations of most theatergoers, a selected group of spectators could find cohesion by finding the production pleasurable nonetheless. This is another way that grotesque can function in art and performance: Aldama asserts that “The grotesque allows for the breach of all kinds of social rules and norms and values…within an aesthetic relation in which beauty is found in the transgression of norms and in the rehabituation of our perception of the object.”52 The fact that Welles and Houseman desired to defy expectations of a “classical” plays by producing their interpretation of

Labiche's farce indicates that they were seeking an audience that could appreciate the aesthetics of an intentionally bizarre production. The source of pleasure for many of the devoted spectators would have been the perceived “ugliness” of the show; being able to find “beauty’ in it would have further contributed to the in-group identification of those who saw Horse Eats Hat multiple times throughout its relatively short run.

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Fearnow also compares the antics of Horse Eats Hat to the Bergsonian mechanics of comedy, asserting that “the new version displayed Welles’s attraction to a literal enactment of a Bergsonian sense of humor. Welles consistently constructed scenes in which characters behave in the manner of mechanical toys, their energies wound up and then released.” 53 Bergson believed that the essence of comedy is the social correction of mechanical or absent-minded behavior through laughter, and Fearnow places the objects of social correction exclusively on the stage. However, considering that many in the audience found these absurdly mechanical actions unfunny, this analysis might better explain how some spectators were made to feel by the production. Perhaps those who were expecting their idea of a traditional farce (a well-oiled machine in itself) were confused by the strange and unexpected behavior on stage? They would have been unable to react to it in the intended manner—by laughing. Those who did laugh and greatly enjoyed the show were experiencing the intended effect of watching the farce—to find humor in it. In other words, they got the joke, and there is always a tension between groups who get a joke and those who do not. Perhaps, then, it would be those unresponsive audience members who were guilty of functioning in the mechanical sense, and thus became the butt of the joke.

If those who did not laugh at Horse Eats Hat became potential targets of the humor enjoyed by individual spectators, the implications of this also informs the emergent social identities forged through spectatorship of this production. Comedy typically needs an out-group (scapegoat) to be successful; it helps audiences to define their own identities by identifying the ones to be excluded. Initially, those who enjoyed the show were perceived as outsiders, without a cohesive social identification. They 193

were the odd spectators who actually seemed to enjoy the proceedings (think Connelly and Dos Passos howling with laughter in an otherwise silent audience). Over the course of the production, however, because the spectators who more fully empathized with the show became a self-identified in-group, the group that celebrated the world of the play and understood it, those who did not get it eventually became the out-group in the world of the production, the scapegoat to be excluded from the community. This, argues Geoff

King, is one way that group identity can be forged through comic spectatorship:

“Comedy is one of the forms through which membership of a particular group identity can be reinforced: the fact that one ‘gets’ exclusive jokes is a signifier of group belonging and distinction from those to whom comedy is inaccessible.”54

Spectators who loved Horse Eats Hat simultaneously positioned themselves as both an in-group and an out-group; they were an in-group in the world of the production—the ideal audience that understood, empathized, and shared in the experience of show with those onstage, while outside the Maxine Elliott Theatre, they were the strange minority of spectators who actually liked the show. Oftentimes, such a distinction only serves to strengthen such self-identified out-groups, especially ones that are based on cultural tastes. In the name of theatrical entertainment, they were willing to

“other” themselves in order to forge a group identified with enjoyment of the production.

Forging such a group would only heighten the empathetic experience and overall pleasure form interacting with the production.

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Conclusion

Reiterated Empathy and United States Identities Revealed through Spectatorship

This chapter has examined a strongly divided spectator response of an absurd and strange production that, in spite of its critical reception, found its ideal audience. Those who loved it were able to share in the enjoyment of the production, experiencing what

Thompson calls reiterated empathy. Those who were unable to reach that level of empathetic involvement were only able to empathize through the most basic modes of perception, or could only project a theory of mind that reinforced how they already felt about the production—usually pity or awkwardness. Some were unable to connect to the performers onstage because they were too preoccupied by their own discomfort from watching the dangerous stunts. There were a number of potential reasons why these spectators achieved varying levels of empathetic involvement. Some reasons might have to do with a sense of social identification. Audience members who were turned off by the sexual innuendoes and absurd staging would have felt alienated. Social conservatives perhaps would have been offended by what they saw as an extravagant cost for a nonsensical production. Others yet would have been disappointed by the lack of progressive political content. However, clearly there were spectators who were ready for and perhaps even desiring the grotesquely absurd antics on stage—in Fearnow’s estimation, who embraced the irrational and grotesque world onstage and identified with a general spirit of anarchy. Fearnow connects the cult-like following to an identification and release of the anarchic tensions that existed in the world outside, and Callow offers a similar reason why the production might have appealed to certain spectators when he summarizes the show as: 195

an entirely radical project, a dada deconstruction, a demonstration of the absurdity

of bourgeois plays—of the notion of theatre itself. Jarry meets Labiche. In that

case, laughter would hardly be the object of the exercise, simply exhilaration at

watching the whole edifice of expectation blown up before one’s very eyes. 55

In both Fearnow and Callow’s conclusions, what drew certain spectators to the production were the irrational and anarchic elements of the show, an attack on theatrical convention as well as the deteriorating state of the world. These arguments have much validity to them; especially considering that many who enjoyed the show were reportedly from the arts community, perhaps these spectators were ready for and welcoming of a production that shattered traditional expectations of comedic theatre. However, I argue that identification with the production does not end there. Once these spectators were able to identify themselves among a sea of apathetic and bewildered theatergoers, a sense of community began to build among them, culminating in a group of spectators who saw the show multiple times, and created a carnival-like atmosphere within the audience’s space during productions, further heightening the interplay between performer and spectator. As a result of this growing participation, the production itself began to evolve and change throughout its run, becoming something more celebratory and interactive than the “Marx Brothers movie” that Orson Welles originally envisioned.

Horse Eats Hat serves as an example of how live theatre is shaped, perceived and even co-created by the spectator’s involvement. The production also serves to reflect social and political divisions in United States at this time. As a product of the Federal

Theatre Project, the production was already under intense scrutiny from social and fiscal conservatives who opposed the economic policies of Roosevelt’s New Deal. 196

Furthermore, the production lived up to The Federal Theatre Project's promise of being a free, adult and uncensored theatre by incorporating suggestive jokes, manic stage action, and theatrical experimentation.56 This would go on to alienate spectators who desired a conventional spectator experience, unthreatening staging, and inoffensive dialogue.

Paradoxically, the production was able to highlight the political rifts of the nation by refusing to be political—everyone with strong political affiliations projected their expectations onto the production, only to be disappointed. Only those who did not have a politically-oriented group identification, or were able to set such an identification aside, were able to fully empathize and share in the production.

Furthermore, the reaction to Horse Eats Hat illuminates what theatre spectators desired and expected during this time of social and economic upheaval. Some wanted a conventional and unchallenging experience that allowed them to laugh at a socially acceptable out-group, which would further solidify and reinforce their social identities and orientation in the world. Others found great pleasure in inverting these supposedly fixed identities by finding humor not only in the carnivalesque action, but also in those spectators who did not join in on the joke. Ultimately, these differences reflect cultural and social tastes of the time. While it is important to remember that this spectatorship was limited to the New York theatergoers who attended the production, the sharp division of the audience indicates deeper and wider rifts in American culture, rifts that would continue to expand as the twentieth century continued.

Due to the shifting economic and social circumstances during the 1930s in the

United States, seeds of long-lasting political and social division were being tended, divisions that last up to this day. The spectatorship of Horse Eats Hat reflected and 197

reinforced these divisions. As evidenced by the critics’ changed perception of the show during the run, the spectatorship not only reflected and helped to forge emerging social identities, but offers a strong example of how spectators shape the perception of a theatrical event, give it meaning, and even contribute to the evolution of the production itself.

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Endnotes

1 Samuel J. Leiter. Encyclopedia of the New York Stage: 1930-1940. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989: 339.

2 Peter Bogdanovich. This is Orson Welles. New York: Harper Collins, 1992. The specific quote that Welles gives Bogdanovich is “Horse Eats Hat was the best of the Mercury shows—and, though successful, it divided the town. The press was mixed, yet it was always packed, and had an enormous following. Some people went to see it every week as long as it ran” (334).

3 Mark Fearnow. The American Stage and the Great Depression: A Cultural History of the Grotesque. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1997: 131.

4 Unknown Writer. Unknown Publication. Unknown Date. Billy Rose Theatre Collection. Performing Arts Library, New York Public Library, New York, NY.

5 John Houseman. Unfinished Business: Memoirs 1902-1988. New York: Applause Theatre Books, 1989: 109.

6 Robert Garland. “Horse Eats Hat?” WPA Project Farce. World Telegram. 28 Aug 1936. Hallie Flanagan Papers. Performing Arts Library, New York Public Library, New York, NY.

7 Simon Callow. Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu. New York: Penguin, 1995: 256.

8 Richard France. The Theatre of Orson Welles. Cranbury, NJ: Associated UP, 1977: 78.

9 Edwin Denby, Orson Welles. Complete Working Script for Horse Eats Hat. New York: Federal Theatre Project, 1936.

10 Callow: 251.

11 Fearnow: 132; France: 82; Callow: 253; Leiter: 339.

12 Houseman: 113-14. 199

13 Callow: 253.

14 Ibid: 259.

15 Ibid: 393.

16 L.N. “Review of Horse Eats Hat.” New York Times. 28 Sept 1936. Billy Rose Collection. Performing Arts Library, New York Public Library, New York, NY.

17 Callow: 258.

18 Richard Watts. “WPA Whimsy.” Herald Tribune. 28 Sept 1936. Billy Rose Collection. Performing Arts Library, New York Public Library, New York, NY.

19 John O’Connor and Lorraine Brown. Free, Adult, and Uncensored: The Living History of the Federal Theatre Project. London: Eyre Methuen, 1980: 43.

20 Thompson: 395.

21 Ibid: 396.

22 Watts.

23 Thompson: 398.

24 France: 88.

25 S.F. “Horse Eats Hat.” New Theatre. Nov 1936. Hallie Flanagan Papers. Performing Arts Library, New York Public Library, New York, NY.

26 Wilson Whitman. “Horse Eats Hat and Other Federal Theatre Plays.” Stage. Nov. 1936. Hallie Flanagan Papers. Performing Arts Library, New York Public Library, New York, NY.

27 C. Daniel Batson. “These Things Called Empathy: Eight Related by Distinct Phenomena.” Social Neuroscience of Empathy. Eds Jean Decety and William Ickes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009: 4-8.

28 Houseman: 114.

29 Fearnow: 136.

30 Batson: 10.

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31 Fearnow: 134. Bil Baird built the titular puppet horse, which was large enough for two people to operate (as mentioned before, adapter Edwin Denby operated its hindquarters). In Free, Adult, and Uncensored: The Federal Theatre Project Baird describes how he came to be the unpaid balcony-falling actor before intermission: Orson was trying to get Hiram Sherman to fall into the orchestra pit. Hiram said he wouldn’t do it…So I went, “Whoop!” like that, and did a flop and landed on my back in the orchestra pit. Everybody applauded and Orson said, “Mr. Baird, you’re hired.” I wasn’t on the Project, I didn’t get paid. I was a stagestruck kid” (46).

32 Thompson: 403.

33 O’Connor and Brown: 1-2.

34 Houseman: 108.

35 Fearnow: 130.

36 Ibid: 153.

37 Harrison Grey Fiske. “The Federal Theater Doom-Boggle.” Saturday Evening Post. 1 Aug 1936: 69.

38 The Federal Theatre Project: ‘Free, Adult, Uncensored.’ Eds. John O’Connor and Lorraine Brown. London: Eyre Methuen, 1980: 3.

39 Fiske: 70-71.

40 Ibid: 71.

41 John Chapman. ‘Horse Eats Hat’ is Mad but Not Mad Enough. Daily News. 28 Sept 1936. Billy Rose Collection. Performing Arts Library, New York Public Library, New York, NY.

42 Wilella Waldorf. “Horse Eats Hat” Revealed at Maxine Elliott Theatre. New York Post. 28 Sept 1936. Hallie Flanagan Papers. Performing Arts Library, New York Public Library, New York, NY.

43 Houseman: 114.

44 Unknown Author. “WPA Play Assailed as Vulgar.” New York American. 6 Oct 1936. Hallie Flanagan Papers. Performing Arts Library, New York Public Library, New York, NY.

45 O’Connor and Brown: 26.

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46 John Houseman. “The Good Old Days.” American Theatre. Nov 1986.

47 Diane M. Mackie, Lisa A. Silver, and Eliot R. Smith. “Intergroup Emotions.” The Social Life of Emotions. Eds Larissa Z. Tiedens and Colin Wayne Leach. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004: 229.

48 Feanow: 138.

49 Hallie Flanagan. Arena: The History of the Federal Theatre. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1965: 78. The account is from Hallie Flanagan’s experience watching Horse Eats Hat. Referring to the critical attacks made on the production, she writes, “My pleasure in the whole affair, somewhat dampened by the occasional too physiological moments, was restored by the fact that Mr. Harrison Grey Fiske, who had recently whacked us in the Saturday Evening Post, sat rigid with horror making notes in a little book. I feel sorry for people who did not see Horse Eats Hat and even sorrier for those who didn’t like it. Art or no art, it was a unique event, one which could happen only with Mars in the ascendant against a field red, white, and blue. To quote again from my favorite review of this opus, “It is the only one there is of it.”

50 Tiedens and Leach: 230.

51 Fearnow: 128.

52 Frederick Aldama and Patrick Colm Hogan, Conversations on Cognitive Cultural Studies: Literature, Language, and Aesthetics. Ohio State University Press, 2014.

53 Fearnow: 132.

54 Geoff King. Film Comedy. London, New York: Wallflower Press, 2002: 155.

55 Callow: 259.

56 O’Connor and Brown: 2.

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Chapter 6

Conclusion

Tracing Spectatorship: How Cognitive Studies Can Guide Historical Inquiry

Performances certainly leave traces in our minds, but, more remarkably, they embed themselves inside our bodies in such a way that we carry them with us, not only to every future theatrical event, but also to our other encounters and experiences in the world.

-Jill Stevenson, Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture: Sensual Piety in Late Medieval York, p. 2.

As Stevenson explains, watching a performance creates lasting effects on spectators long after the show has ended, and goes far beyond the space of the performance. Cognitive studies supports this assertion and also establishes that we, as spectators, can impact and change the performance as it happens, and create new meanings of it. Theatrical performance is affected by spectators identifying within a specific culture. In turn, spectators can influence the direction a culture takes from having participated in a theatrical performance. Spectatorship is a way to reveal and shape cultural identity.

This dissertation has examined spectatorship and its impact on national and cultural identities within the Soviet Union and United States in the early decades of the twentieth century. I have argued that the four comic productions I analyzed reveal emergent modern identities through its spectatorship. The earlier productions in each nation—Princess Turandot for the Soviet Union, and Shuffle Along for the United

203 States—reveal a moment of unified cultural identity. The later productions—The Bedbug in the Soviet Union and Horse Eats Hat for the United States—reveal a lost promise and fracturing social identity. These moments of realized and lost cultural identities, respectively, are important to recognize and investigate as they offer insights into each nation's cultural narrative and modern history. Furthermore, I would not have been able to examine the productions in the ways that I have or reach the conclusions I did without the aid of research in the field of cognitive studies. In particular, Evan Thompson’s analysis of empathy was central to my methodology, and with a thorough examination of empathy was I able to analyze each production and develop new interpretations of these events.

In my analysis, the most illuminating aspect of Thompson's four levels of empathy was what he categorized as the third level of empathy, or “reiterated empathy.”

In the chapter on Princess Turandot, the reiterated empathy that spectators would have felt for the performers in the production reflected their own hope and optimism at the end the civil war. In this way, the spectators and performers were able to co-create a meaning that was rooted in the collective desire for a return to social order, an end to bloodshed, and a celebration of new life ahead, expressed through the comedy of the performance.

Because of the reciprocal empathy that this production was able to achieve, Princess

Turandot reflected an emergent identity of Soviet Russia; the production appealed to artists and the intelligentsia, along with workers, soldiers, and peasants who were new to the theatre. The sense of hope and celebration that was imagined through the spectatorship of Princess Turandot was short-lived, but it came at a moment when the

204 promise of a strong, prosperous, and unified Soviet Russia was first able to be realized by its citizens.

Reiterated empathy in the The Bedbug was not only experienced by the spectatorship of the 1929 production, it was written into the script by Vladimir

Mayakovsky and staged into the production by Vsevolod Meyerhold. These choices invited spectators to view the oafish, yet pitiable, character of Prisypkin from a position of reciprocal understanding. At the end of the play, when Prisypkin is imprisoned at the zoo and calls out to his “comrades” in the audience, a shared moment between spectator and performer is created where both can regard each other from a position of mutual empathy. If this moment was able to occur for spectators of The Bedbug, they might have been able to see past Prisypkin’s many flaws and recognize the deteriorating state of the Soviet Union and its dehumanizing policies. The fact that Meyerhold cast the beloved comic actor Igor Illinsky in the role only heightened the potential that spectators would be able to experience the third level of empathy during this production.

In Shuffle Along, Thompson’s concept of reciprocal empathy was especially helpful in unpacking the complex ways in which white and African American spectators could empathize with the characters of the massively popular 1921 Broadway production.

The production helped to forge a modern cultural identity by relying on older forms such as American vaudeville, blackface minstrelsy, and romantic comedy while combining current musical styles such as ragtime and jazz. The result was a show that both African

American and white audiences clamored to see, igniting the Harlem Renaissance and

New York nightclub culture of the 1920s. Spectators would be able to fully empathize with the leading romantic characters, potentially creating positive views towards African 205 Americans as a separate out-group. This level of empathy would also have made it possible for spectators to view the cruder characterizations of African Americans through a kind of self-conscious, but mutual regard with the performers. No doubt this mutual regard would have been fraught with many complex emotions and reactions; certainly there were African American and white spectators feeling anxiety, tension, and guilt for enjoying the performance. However, these emotions combined with Thompson’s concept of reiterated empathy could still allow performers and spectators to share in what the critics described as the “infectious” pleasure of the show. For those spectators who could see past the masks of blackface comedy and “brown-skinned” exotica, a cautious pleasure and (pleasurable?) anxiety could be shared between spectator and performer.

Finally, Thompson’s analysis of reciprocal empathy was instrumental to the chapter on Horse Eats Hat. I argued that because of reiterated empathy a self-identified group of spectators was able to enjoy the production so much that a cult-like following emerged. This approach to the spectatorship of the production offers a different perspective than previous analyses, supporting the argument that the empathy experienced between the performers and the in-group of fervent Horse Eats Hat fans was responsible for a critical shift of the production weeks after its opening. By that time, a steady base of fans had emerged, and critics' opinions regarding the once-universally panned production began to change. Reciprocal empathy between the performers and spectators affected the performance itself, and consequently altered perceptions of the show’s meaning and success during its run.

Spectators needed to have a strong empathetic experience during these productions in order for them to reveal emergent or splintering group identifications. The 206 earlier productions for each nation, Princess Turandot and Shuffle Along, reflected an emergent identity. However, for the Soviet Union, this moment of unified cultural purpose came at a point that has been considered the tail-end of the most vibrant period of experimentation and expression, while for the United States it came at the beginning of its era of cultural innovation. Princess Turandot drew from trends and movements that originated in the fin de siècle European theatrical experiments, and was a product of the fervor and optimism experienced during the Revolutionary years. In comparison, Shuffle

Along provoked a literary, theatrical, and nightclub culture in New York never seen before or matched since. This culture and identification was spread throughout the

Eastern United States by the touring production, and set the cultural and social tone for the rest of the 1920s.

While the earlier identities for the Soviet Union and United States emerged in somewhat different circumstances, both nations are similar in how fractured identity was reflected in the spectatorship of the two later productions. For both productions, critical response was vastly negative, yet general spectatorship was positive, or, in the case of

Horse Eats Hat, an extremely enthusiastic in-group identified with the production despite the show’s mainstream failure. Also, in the case of the later shows, there was a section of the spectatorship who felt that the joke of the production was on them, placing further stress on a unified cultural identity. Additionally, an already-existing national identity played an important role in how spectators would potentially empathize with the production. Political and cultural affiliations that had been established influenced how spectators would interpret and contribute to the production. In The Bedbug, a once- unifying national and cultural identity was splintering under the stress of the decade; 207 Soviet cultural and political authorities were tightening their grip not only on artistic expression but on workers and society in general. The discontent between party officials and much of the rest of the population was growing, reflected in the spectatorship of The

Bedbug. In the United States, a devastated economy and much-changed social landscape created rifts in the modern identity forged during in the 1920s. Reflected in the spectatorship of Horse Eats Hat, most spectators rejected the bizarre, almost surreal production. Only a small, self-identified group of spectators could set aside political or social identifications and find pleasure in the show.

Throughout the twentieth century, the United States and the Soviet Union have presented themselves as vastly different nations from one another. Differences in political, cultural, and social values certainly do exist, and the resultant tensions impact the relationship between the United States and Russia to this day. However, the two nations are not so different in their struggle to create and maintain a modern national identity. Each nation rose to prominence after World War I, experiencing a burst of cultural and economic dominance during the 1920s. Within ten to fifteen years, however, this once-bright promise experienced by each nation had begun to dim—for the United

States, its economy was shattered by the 1929 Crash and Great Depression, for the Soviet

Union, Stalinism wreaked havoc on the economy and social fabric of the nation. While both nations would rebound from the depths of the 1930s and establish themselves as global superpowers for the second half of the century, the brightest moment of cultural and national identity for both was rooted in the early years of the 1920s, when the idea of a modern “America” or “Soviet Union” first crystallized in the minds of its citizens and

208 around the world. This perceived identity would go on to establish an origin story that served to remind each nation what its modern destiny and potential was to be realized.

Insights into emergent and fracturing cultural identity could not have been made without cognitive research on in-grouping and out-grouping. In all four productions, I was able to arrive at new conclusions into how spectatorship can co-create theatrical events and mirror cultural identity. In my analysis of Princess Turandot, research on how in-groups are formed through theatrical spectatorship supported my argument that

Vakhtangov’s fairy-tale production of the Carlo Gozzi comedy was more successful at reflecting a unified identity than more overtly “Soviet” spectacles and theatre productions. Understanding how social identities were divided among spectatorship of

The Bedbug was vital to explore why the production was received in the way it was, and how it was able to reflect social divisions in Soviet Russia. Shuffle Along was a production that created its own in-group: those who had seen the show and identified with having seen it, along with certain aspects of the show—manufactured southern nostalgia, catchy song and dance numbers, and the popularity of the light-skinned female chorus dancers. This in-group would strongly influence the kind of theatrical entertainments that became popular throughout the 1920s. Finally, research into how in- groups can form, especially through shared comic laughter, was helpful in my investigation of Horse Eats Hat. In the case of this production, the self-identified group of spectators actually made themselves an in-group by sharing in a joke that the majority of audience members did not enjoy or understand. In this way, a small but tight-knit in- group was able to create an out-group of mainstream theatre goers who did not appreciate the humor of Welles's and Houseman's production. 209 This was one of the first studies that directly analyzed spectatorship of historical theatre productions. Relying on original documents or secondary sources that described spectator reaction, I applied my methodology to the historical accounts of each production. Ultimately, this project was grounded in historiography and cognitive studies, and was most successful when I had access to a full range of not only secondary sources, but original documents and archival materials. For this reason, I felt that the chapters analyzing the United States productions were able to go into a greater depth of cognitive analysis; availability of source documents and information on audience reactions simply provided more opportunity for investigation, and inspired a deeper critical analysis. While I had fewer resources for my analysis of the Soviet productions, I felt this approach was still very successful for the chapter on The Bedbug, as the text of the play revealed split empathies within it along with historical accounts of the spectators’ response. I believe that using cognitive studies as a critical method to examine historical events is successful and necessary for providing new perspectives in theatre scholarship, but I also assert that it is vital that this methodology is applied in concert with rigorous historiographical work.

It is my intention that this project lays the groundwork for more in-depth investigations of spectatorship in theatre history. Cognitive studies is an appropriate and useful methodology because it offers a way to challenge and re-examine historical views and narratives of historical events. For example, Princess Turandot deserves more attention as a production that shaped and revealed Soviet identities. The production is often viewed as Vakhtangov’s last triumph, with the giants of Soviet theatre applauding madly at the final dress rehearsal. This is an accurate description, but the comic fantasy 210 has far more significance among the broader population and cultural identity of the

Soviet Union and contemporary Russia. The fact that the show (as of the year 2000) was still running demonstrates that Russians look back to that moment in history as one of cultural origin and promise.1 Applying theories of empathy and group identification illuminates the intersections of history, politics, and theatre; in this way can we examine how Princess Turandot might have had a greater impact upon Soviet culture and identity than what theatre historians have previously assumed.

By exploring split empathy in The Bedbug, I am able to challenge the dominant narrative of this production’s history, which is described as a literary triumph of the early

Soviet era but an otherwise lackluster theatre production. I argue that through the imperfect yet very human character of Prisypkin, spectators could either identify with the

Soviet anti-hero, or revile him as a greedy parasite who played the socialist system to his own advantage. No matter how spectators chose to interpret Meyerhold and

Mayakovsky’s intentionally bold choices, critics and officials with high status in the communist party condemned the production, yet it still became an extremely popular show with the rest of the theatre going public. The split response between critics and spectators indicate a moment of public contention over Soviet policy and cultural identity; it would be one of the last of such moments, as Socialist Realism would dominate artistic discourse within a few years of The Bedbug’s production. For these reasons does the production deserve a closer investigation guided by theories of empathy and group identification.

1 On page fifty-five of Russian and Soviet Theatre: Tradition and the Avant Garde, Rudnitsky writes that “It clocked up more than one thousand performances then in 1971 was revived and to this day is preserved in the theatre’s repertoire.” 211 Regarding the productions from the United States, this methodology has offered insights on both Shuffle Along and Horse Eats Hat that merit a re-examination of the impact of each production. Shuffle Along, in particular, deserves an extensive analysis that this project has only begun to undertake. The success of this production not only was responsible for the direction that theatrical entertainments were to take throughout the 1920s, but introduced a modern cultural sensibility in the United States through its spectatorship. Furthermore, its impact on modern racial perceptions has been neglected;

Shuffle Along should receive the same attention that other productions, such as Showboat, have received. Concerning Horse Eats Hat, while not as influential a production as

Shuffle Along, it still has much to reveal from an analysis rooted in cognitive studies. The sharply divided spectatorship of the 1936 production was especially appropriate for research in empathy and group identification. By using this methodology, I was able to explore a fractured cultural identity through the spectatorship of this production in a way that theatre historians had not yet considered.

All four of these productions—Princess Turandot, The Bedbug, Shuffle Along, and Horse Eats Hat—have been thoroughly studied by scholars, historians, and practitioners. All four productions have historical narratives attached to them, and have been assigned a particular significance in theatre history. The goal of this project was not to revisit scholarly arguments of these productions and support old conclusions with a new methodology, but rather to re-examine these events from an entirely different perspective and arrive at new conclusions. This dissertation has offered a new methodology from which to approach the spectatorship of these productions, and has provided new insights and perspectives regarding its significance not only in theatre 212 history, but in the cultural narratives of the nations in which these took place. The spectatorship of these productions is remarkable for its reflection of cultural moments of emergent modern identity for the Soviet Union and the United States, and are worthy of further critical analysis. The approach taken in this dissertation, grounded in cognitive studies, has the potential to change how we view spectatorship, cultural identity, and the theatrical event.

213

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