Fiorello! by Jerome Weidman, George Abbott, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick (1960)

Summary:  The play follows the life and career of a New York City lawyer-turned-politician named Fiorello La Guardia over the course of ten years (beginning just before World War I).  The first scenes of the play depict Fiorello as a young mayor and savior to the common man, specifically immigrants and women who are striking at a dress factory for living wages.  Building on this popular appeal, Fiorello decides to run for United States Senate...and wins!  After signing a controversial draft bill, he enlists to fight in the first World War and eventually returns home with a war record and a large ego.

After returning home, he runs for mayor in 1929 and loses, largely due to his ego and refusal to listen to his advisers.  Shortly after hearing that he has lost this election and corrupt backers of his opponent were attempting to kill him, he receives word that his wife has died.  Relatively undaunted, Fiorello decides to marry his longtime secretary and begins campaigning for the next mayoral election immediately.  In 1933, he becomes the mayor of New York City once again.

Thoughts:  My New York City history perhaps isn't what it should be, because I had no idea that Fiorello La Guardia was an actual person who served three terms as mayor of New York City.  The name of the airport makes much more sense now.  Though the musical apparently takes some liberties with the details of his personal life, it is a somewhat exciting tribute to a very important person to the people of New York in the 20s and 30s.

Fiorello La Guardia.  Photo from Wikicommons.

There are few songs from this musical that are easily recognizable, though "Politics and Poker" and "Little Tin Box" are occasionally still played on Sirius XM Radio, especially because of the recent death of composer Jerry Bock. 

The lyrics assigned to women in the musical are a bit cringe-worthy, specifically Marie's "The Very Next Man" at the end of Act 2.  Desperate to be married, Marie sings, "No more daydreams for me/Find the finest of bridal suites/Chill the champagne and warm up the sheets/I'm gonna marry the very next man/And if he likes me/Who cares how frequently he strikes me/I'll fetch his slippers with my arm in a sling/Just for the privilege of wearing his ring" (134).  Marie's wishes come true a few pages later when Fiorello decides he will need a wife during the next campaign and states, "I think you can learn to love me" (146).

The Kentucky Cycle by Robert Schenkkan (1992)

Summary:  Nine short plays are set on the same acreage in Kentucky, spanning from 1775-1975.  The plays chronicle the lives of three families, which are intertwined through rivalry, slavery and marriage.

• Masters of the Trade-1775-Michael Rowen, a former indentured servant from Ireland, makes deals with the Cherokee exchanging ammunition (the Cherokee have recently acquired firearms, but no ammunition) for pelts and land.  This land is the setting for all nine plays in the Cycle.
• The Courtship of Morning Star-1776-Rowen has captured a Cherokee girl named Morning Star to be his wife.  He cuts her Achilles tendon so that she can never run away.  She has a baby, Michael is pleased to have a son. 
• The Homecoming-1792-Michael Rowen returns from a trip to the city with a slave named Sallie, who he plans to breed (with himself).  Enraged at the idea that he might also have a second family in the city, his son Patrick Rowen (16) shoots and kills him.  Hearing the gunshot, neighbor Joe Talbert comes over, reveals that he has been having an affair with Star (Patrick's mother).  Patrick kills him, sends his mother away and states his plans to marry Joe's daughter. 
• Ties That Bind-1819-A judge comes to Patrick's land and informs him that he is deeply indebted to a man named Patrick, who now owns his bank loans.  As they attempt to reconcile this debt, Patrick ends up selling everything that he has ever owned--including slave Sally and her son Jessie (who is actually Patrick's brother).  In the final moments of the play, it is revealed that Jeremiah is Jeremiah Talbert-son of murdered Joe and brother of Rebecca, Patrick's wife.  As part of the deal, Patrick's sons are "employed" to work for Talbert...a vengeful man who is actually their uncle. 
• God's Great Supper-1861-Richard Talbert (39), son of Jeremiah visits the rundown Rowen house and informs Jed Rowen (28) that they will be riding into Bowling Green the next day to join the Confederate Army.  Jed is needed because he knows the land better than anyone.  Jed wisely makes a deal with Jeremiah that his family's land will be taken care of while he is away (by slaves) and he will be paid for his time and allowed to work off some of his family's debt.  Richard agrees.  Jed has actually agreed to go on this trip because he has planned to kill Richard (and his entire family supports this idea).  After Richard is dead, they will only have to kill the remaining women and children of the Talbert house and then they will have their land back and no debts.  Lots of killing happens.
• Tall Tales-1885-Jed Rowen, now 52, is visited by a "storyteller" who eventually asks him if he'd be willing to sell the mineral rights to his land for $1 an acre.  After being told that someone will remove the rocks from his soil, Jed enthusiastically agrees.  His daughter (Mary Anne) narrates the story as old and young versions of herself and eventually talks about the destruction caused when the coal companies came in. 
• Fire in the Hole-1920-Mary Anne now has a ten year old son (Joshua Rowen) who is sick, probably with typhoid fever.  They have lost their house and are now living in the awful conditions of a coal camp.  A boarder named Abe (a secret union organizer) comes to stay at their home; gradually telling her about unions and Mother Jones.  Abe eventually persuades Mary Anne and her husband Tommy to start a coal union.  Abe and Tommy are eventually killed (for being an organizer and a snitch, respectively) but Mary Anne has started the first coal union. 
• Which Side Are You On-1954-Things are not good for the Union.  Joshua (44) is now the president of United Mine Workers District 16 and has been skirting safety regulations for months.  His son is recently back from Korea and takes a job as a "yes man" to his father.  As Joshua struggles with the idea of telling the Union members that there will be more cutbacks, there is an accident in the mine (because he has been ignoring safety issues to save some money).  His son Scotty and 12 others are killed because of his negligence.
• The War on Poverty-1975-Three sixty-five year old men (a Rowen, a Talbert and a Biggs--descendant of slave Sally) are walking around the land, attempting to figure out how much it is now worth.  "Mountaintop Removal Mining" has come into existence and the three men speak about it in tones mixed with awe and fear.  In casual conversation, a reference is made to grave-robbing that is now apparently popular in the mountains of Kentucky, involving the search for Native American artifacts.  As the men amble around the land, they see a partially exhumed grave and lift a buckskin pouch out of it--a pouch that contains the well-preserved remains of a baby.  This is actually the second child of Morning Star.  When Michael Rowen saw that this child was not a boy, he took it out into the woods and buried it alive. 

Thoughts:  I checked this book out of the library during the first two weeks of the project and have complained about reading it since.  9 plays?!  332 pages?!  I saved it for a long plane ride and then for the day after Thanksgiving and when both of those days came and went without me opening the cover, I knew I needed to commit to reading it in one sitting...which is what I did between the hours of 11 PM and 4 AM this morning.

To my surprise, reading this play was not difficult.  Because there are nine short plays, a sustained attention span is not necessary.  Though the same characters appear in multiple plays, Schenkkan's character description page preceding each play specifically states how old these characters are in the play to follow.  Schenkkan's decision to bind the plays chronologically is also very helpful.  Though names repeat (a number of the boys are named after their fathers/ancestors), this was never confusing for me because Schenkkan is brief and direct about who these people are.

The Cycle is obviously very broad, and certain plays are more enjoyable to read than others--perhaps because some of the main characters are quite one-dimensional and therefore are easy to categorize as "good guys" and "bad guys."  Schenkkan's portrayal of the women in these plays is very interesting.  Though they are never the main characters of his stories, they are almost unequivocally good people--trying to make the right choices even when their husbands are doing evil things based on greed.

Importantly, in the first play, when Michael asks the Cherokee for land, the Cherokee attempts to dissuade him from taking land on the mountain.  He repeatedly issues warnings to the effect of, "You will find this a dark and bloody land" and "you live here, it is not the Cherokee you need fear" (23).  Though he explains that the land is cursed (and the manifestations of this curse are seen in the eight plays that follow), the curse is never mentioned again.

In Abraham's Bosom by Paul Green (1927)

Summary:  In 1885, twenty years after the legal end of slavery in the United States, Abraham McCranie has stayed near the place where his family members were once owned in North Carolina.  Two references are made alluding to the fact that he is the mulatto son of Colonel McClain (who once owned slaves) and a now deceased former slave.  Therefore, Colonel McCranie feels some sort of responsibility to Abraham.  He ensures that Abraham has a place to live and later, a job teaching in a schoolhouse.  This does not, however, prevent McCranie from savagely beating his secret son when Abraham threatens to kill his other (non-secret) son Lonnie.  The seven scenes of the play follow Abraham's life from 1885-1906...an existence of considerable tumult and struggle. 

From the beginning of the play, Abraham attempts to educate himself and is often teased for spending all of his time with books.  Near the end of the play, he gives a speech about building a new school and is harassed by some white men.  Enraged, he proceeds to kill Lonnie (his half-brother) and knows that this will be his end.  Moments later, a mob of white men arrive at his cabin to kill him in front of his wife, son and mother-in-law. 

Thoughts:  Many of the plays I have encountered in this project have raised troubling questions in relation to performance today, often because of specific treatments of race and gender.  As I have probably mentioned before, adding the tag "n-word" to the blog was an unwelcome surprise of the project.  However, many of those plays (All the Way Home, The Green Pastures) have highly redeemable characteristics; either because of the strength of their story or, in the case of The Green Pastures, the fact that the production employed large casts of black actors and was the first all-black cast on Broadway (and even God was portrayed as a black man). 

This play, on the other hand, contains multiple usages of the n-word, a savage whipping and two brutal murders.  The troubling take-away message seemed to be that, no matter how hard the white man tries to help the black man by providing opportunities for him, the black man is trouble....even savage.  While outwardly racist statements come from the white characters in the play, they are perhaps more disturbingly uttered by the black characters themselves.  Abraham's mother-in-law says to him, "Time you's learning day white is white and black is black, and Gohd made de white to always be bedder'n de black.  It was so intended from the beginning" (Coe 416).  On the third page of the play, three characters have an equally troubling exchange about Abe's mulatto heritage:

Lije:  Abe is bad mixed up all down inside.

Bud:  White and black make bad mixtry.

Lije:  Do dat.  (Thumping on his chest)  Nigger down heah.  (Thumping his head)  White mens up heah.  Heart say do one thing, head say 'nudder.  Bad, bad.

Puny:  De white blood in him coming up to the top.  Dat make him want-a climb up and be sump'n.  Nigger gwine hol' him down dough.  Part of him take adder de Colonel, part adder his muh, 'vision and misery inside  (Coe 387).

The Great White Hope by Howard Sackler (1969)

Summary:  Sackler’s dramatization of the life of boxer Jack Johnson (named Jack Jefferson in this play).   After winning the World Heavyweight Championship in the first few pages of the play, Jack spends the rest of his life dealing with fallout surrounding this event.  The central dramatic conflict of the play is the search for a “great white hope”—a white boxer who will fight Jack and win.  After he gets into some trouble with the law (for having sex with his white girlfriend), Jack flees the country and is repeatedly approached with offers trading his inevitable jail time in exchange for throwing a fight (losing on purpose).

Thoughts:  The play is a powerful statement about race in America, race in sports, race in families and race in sexual relationships.  Interestingly, the photo on the front of the play and the text on the back of it led me to believe that this would be a play about Jack’s rise to glory—when it is actually just the opposite.  Jack is triumphant in the first few pages of the play, but the bulk of the play’s 239 pages depict his descent into depression and desperation.  A particular low-point in Jack's departure from the glory days depicts him and his girlfriend Ellie in a performance reminiscent of a minstrel show. 

Additionally, the blurbs on the back of this play made me think about the tendency toward hyperbole when writing about culturally and literarily significant works. While I did enjoy this play and certainly do think it is important, I wonder if readers today would still draw comparisons between it and Long Day’s Journey Into Night. 

Both bad pictures courtesy of my phone and UNM's 95 cent Bantam edition of the play, April 1969.

Talley's Folly by Lanford Wilson (1980)

Summary:  The play opens with Matt directly addressing the audience, making comments about the romantic set and telling the audience that the play will be over in ninety-seven minutes.  He also states that he is going to need all the help he can get in the conversation that follows.  When Sally enters, it becomes clear that they had a hot, sexy affair the previous summer and he is back to profess his love and claim her as his wife.  Throughout the conversation, Sally resists, saying that they don't really know anything about each other and are probably too old to be getting married anyway (the play is set in 1944 and Matt is in his 40s). 

 

In response, a very guarded Matt reveals details about his past--involving a Lithuanian childhood and detainment by French and German officials in the early 1900s (this segment of the play is very important...and also very confusing).  Ultimately, Sally agrees to leave her family in Mississippi and marry Jewish Matt--a decision that will certainly not please her family.

 

Thoughts:  The first four pages of this story have a very charming, very Our Town-like appeal.  Matt seems likable, and is highly concerned with winning the emotional support and favor of the audience.  However, once Sally shows up, the charm evaporates.  The two spend the first half of the play bickering.  When Matt is finally forced to reveal something about his personal background, his narrative is purposely stilted by how he chooses to tell the story (in vague fairytale tones).  Though this play attempts to make statements about religious persecution and family pressure in relationships, I never felt myself pulling for Sally and Matt.

 

After Sally appears, a rigid fourth wall is erected and is only broken by the last line of the play:  "And so, all's well that ends... (Takes out his watch, shows time to Sally, then to audience)...right on the button.  Good night.  (They embrace)."

 

I Am My Own Wife by Doug Wright (2004)

Summary:  Doug Wright's Introduction explains that the play is "a one-woman show, performed by a man" (xix).  Charlotte von Mahlsdorf is an East Berlin transvestite who has managed to survive both the Nazis and the Communists and lives to tell about it as she guides audiences through her home--which is a sort of collector's museum.  One actor plays thirty-six characters (including the playwright) in a style reminiscent of the ethnographic performances of Anna Deavere-Smith.

Thoughts:  This play is unlike anything else on the list of plays that have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize.  Currently, it is the only one-person show on the list and it is one of the only plays that is decidedly not about American Life (which the guidelines suggest/mandate).  The other plays that I have encountered thus far that are not about "American Life" are Ruined and The Diary of Anne Frank.  An argument could be made that all three of these plays deal with issues/people that America should have cared about, but instead turned a blind eye to (genocide in the Congo, Holocaust, Communist persecution). 

One of the most compelling parts of Wright's text is the Introduction where he details the practical and emotional experience of writing this play.  He collected hundreds of hours of interviews and then was at a loss about how to put them all together.  Eventually, his colleague Robert Blacker suggested, "Whatever you do, don't write a play about history.  Write a play about your love affair with Charlotte von Mahlsdorf.  If you're lucky, the requisite history will take care of itself."   Wright replies, "It was the most liberating gift a fellow artist could give; permission to write my own story.  For the first time, the play's structure dawned on me.  It wouldn't be a straight-forward biographical drama; it would chart my own relationship with my heroine" (xv).

Wright does an excellent job of showcasing Charlotte while using the other characters to propel the narrative; but, at times, it seems that the other characters are present for the sole purpose of providing dramatic structure.  This play is moving and important, but much of it's critical acclaim should be credited to Jefferson Mays--the actor who won a Tony Award for bringing Wright's complicated text (and the complicated character of Charlotte) to life onstage.

Inscribed copy of I Am My Own Wife.  Gift from Jessica Watkins (who worked with Doug Wright at the La Jolla Playhouse, 2009). 

The Diary of Anne Frank by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett (1956)

Summary:  Thirteen year-old Anne and her family are hiding in an attic to escape discovery and capture by the Nazis.  They are joined in their confined space by the Van Daan family and a dentist named Dr. Dussel.  Eight people and a cat attempt to survive on stolen food rations while sticking to a strict nocturnal schedule to avoid capture.  Eventually, as it begins to look like the war is ending and they will be liberated, they are all captured and sent to separate concentration camps.

Thoughts:  I wasn't looking forward to reading this play, perhaps because I knew the ending, perhaps because I remember not reading the book when it was assigned circa eighth grade.  Yesterday, I complained about the lack of action in my recent reads and was certain that this play would be the same.  Instead, though the play is confined to an extremely tight area, it is largely dependent on action rather than narrative or relationships between characters.  Each time there is a knock at the door, both the characters and the audience wonder what surprises Miep has in store...or if the families in hiding have finally met their end.  Because we know how the play will end, the repeated visits from Miep create narrative tension that closely mirrors the emotional tension that each additional month in the attic causes.

While the play is obviously called The Diary of Anne Frank, the adaptation from Frank's text tells the story of the time spent in the attic--not always from her perspective.  All of the characters are well-developed and are each given the opportunity to show their multi-faceted personalities--which inevitably change under the stress of circumstance.  Though Anne becomes more important as the play progresses, this play is not full of huge monologues or chunks from the diary as I imagined that it would be.

Additionally, I think that using this play as part of a unit would be extremely beneficial for teachers required to teach Anne Frank's actual diary.  The Goodrich/Hackett adaptation piques interest in individual characters and made me wonder about what else Anne has to say about them in a diary that spans more than two years.