THE JOURNAL OF

AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 17, Number 3 Fall2005

Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve

Editor: D avid Savran

Managing Editor: Ken Nielsen Editorial Assistant: Peter Zazzali

Circulation Manager: Louise McKay Circulation Assistant: Kim Sandberg

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center

Professor Daniel Gerould, Executive Director Professor Edwin Wilson, Chairman, Advisory Board

Jan Stenzel, Director of Administration Frank Hentschker, Director of Program

THE GRADUATE SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY CENTER OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF N EW YORK

EDITORIAL BOARD

Philip Auslander Una Chaudhuri William Demastes Harry Elam Jorge Huerta

Stacy Wolf

Shannon Jackson Jonathan Kalb Jill Lane Thomas Postlewait Robert Vorlicky

The Journal of American Drama and Theatre welcomes submissions. Our aim is to promote research on theatre of the Americas and to encourage historical and theoretical approaches to plays, playwrights, performances, and popular theatre traditions. Manuscripts should be prepared in conformity with The Chicago Manual of Style, using footnotes (rather than endnotes). We request that articles be submitted as e-mail attachments, using Microsoft Word format. Please note that all correspondence will be conducted by e-mail. And please allow three to four months for a decision. Our distinguished Editorial Board will constitute the jury of selection. Our e-mail address is jadt@gc.cuny.edu. You may also address editorial inquiries to the Editors, JADT /Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10016-4309.Piease visit our web site at web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc.

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center publications are support-ed by generous grants from the Lucille Lortel Chair in Theatre, the Sidney E. Cohn Chair in Theatre Studies, and the Vera Mowry Roberts Chair in American Theatre in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the City University of New York.

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Copyright 2005

The Journal of American Drama and Theatre (ISSN 1044-937X) is a member of CELJ and is published three times a year, in the Winter, Spring, and Fall. Subscriptions are $12.00 for each calendar year. Foreign subscriptions require an additional $6.00 for postage. Inquire of Circulation Manager/Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10016-4309.

All journals are available from ProQuest Information and Learning as abstracts online via ProQuest information service and the International Index to the Performing Arts. All journals are indexed in the MLA International Bibliography and are members of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

THE JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 17, Number 3

J ENNIFER SCHLUETER Staging Versailles:

CONTENTS

Charles Mee and the Re-Presentation of History

VERNA FOSTER Suzan-Lori Parks's Staging of the Lincoln Myth in The America Plqy and Topdog/Underdog

RENA FRADEN A Mid-Life Critical Crisis: Chiastic Criticism and Encounters with the Theatical Work of Suzan-Lori Parks

GLENDA GILL Sean Combs's 2004 Broadway Portrayal of Walter Lee Younger

Fall2005

5

24

36

57

in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun: a H istorical Assessment

CONTRJBUTORS 77

J OURNAL OF AMERICAN D RAMA AND THEATRE 17, NO. 3 (FAIL 2005)

STAGING VERSAilLES: CHARLES MEE AND THE RE-PRESENTATION OF HISTORY

}EN ScHLUETER

History and drama have been uneasy bedfellows at least since Aristotle sought to distinguish between the two in his Poetics: "the histo-rian speaks of what has happened, the poet of the kind of thing that can happen. Hence also poetry is a more philosophical and serious business than history; for poetry speaks more of universals, history of particu-lars."1 Aristotle's distinction is provocative-and also eminently dis-putable. His desire to carve off one form from the other betrays an underlying truth: the line between fiction and nonfiction is complicated by the written techniques they share.

From Aeschylus to Michael Frayn, playwrights have troubled Aristotle's taxonomy by creating what Herbert Lindenberger has termed "historical drama."2 Some of these works, such as Shakespeare's Henry V or King]ohn, are fictions that make use of the well-known names of his-torical personages. Others, such as Emily Mann's Execution of Justice or Robin Soans's Talking to Terrorists, offer works full of factual (if selective) information in the mode of "docudrama" or "verbatim" theatre. And there are all manner of works that draw from history at the points along the continuum between the two poles.

But of course historical writing draws upon many of the rhetor-ical and narrative techniques of fictional writing. During the past half-century, historians, philosophers, and literary theorists have focused con-siderable attention on the inevitable use of fictional and dramatic tech-niques in the crafting of narratives from historical evidence. Peter Burke, Georg Iggers, Natalie Zemon Davis, R.G. Collingwood, Paul Ricoeur, Michel de Ccrteau, and Hayden White, as well as a host of historiogra-phers in allied fields like art history or theatre history, have been thrash-ing out the similarities and differences between historical and fictional

I Aristotle, Poetics translation by Gerald F Else (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), 32-33.

2 Herbert Lindenberger, Historical Drama: The Relation of Literature and &aliry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).

6 SCHLUETER

wntlng. White, for example, in The Content of the Form (1987), draws rhetorical analogies between theatrical performance and narrative con-struction, writing, "The production of meaning ... can be regarded as a performance, because any given set of real events can be emplotted in a number of ways, can bear the weight of being told as any number of dif-ferent kinds of stories."3

This uneasy coexistence between drama and history is evident in the ways that writers in both narrative forms emplot major historical events, especially those of battles, crimes, and conspiracies. Because such events are often touchstones for national conflicts, ethical debates, con-tending agendas, and opposing identities, they are often controversial; the explanations of the causes, actions, and effects are usually complex. Historians and dramatists are drawn to these events precisely because they offer the challenging opportunities and difficulties of adequate and convincing representation.

The events of World War I and its troubled peace settlement have proven especially magnetic for historians and dramatists. Dramatic works on WWI, both theatrical and cinematic, run the temperamental gamut from harshly critical to jingoistically supportive of the war. A quick sampling of plays and fllms on the topic underscores this variety: Maxwell Anderson's What Price Glory (1924), R.C. Sheriff's Journry~ End (1929), Nathaniel West's and Joseph Schrank's Good Hunting (1938), Joan Littlewood's and Charles Chilton's Oh! What a uve!J War (1964), King Vidor's Big Parade (1925), Howard Hughes's Hell~ Angels (1930), Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957), as well as the first Academy Award winner for best picrure, Wings (1927), starring Clara Bow and Gary Cooper, and the John Ford version of What Price Glory (1952), starring James Cagney.

Theatre and fllm producers have repeatedly mined WWI; so too have historians. If anything, historians have been even more prolific, writing nearly one thousand books 1914 and 2005 that address them-selves to the topic. From Theodore Roosevelt's America and the World War (1919) and Winston Churchill's The World Crisis (1923), through John Dos Passes's Mr. Wilson~ War (1962) and Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August (1964), to Hew Strachan's The First World War (2003) and David Stevenson's Catac!Jsm: The First World War as Political Tragetjy (2004), these

3 Hayden White, Tbe Content of tbe Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987), 44.

STAGING V ERSAilLES 7

books have come at the war with a variety of beliefs about why it hap-pened, what it meant, how it might have been averted, or who could be blamed for its outcomes. Each historian marshaled his or her evidence; each came to slightly different conclusions.4

But only one author has addressed the war as both a historian and a dramatist. On this subject, Charles L. Mee Jr. wrote a narrative his-tory (The End of Order: Versailles 1919, published 1980), an essay (in his ?/crying God: Seven Fateful Moments When Great Men M et to Change the World, published 1993), and a play (The War to End War, produced 1993, pub-lished 1994) which was then adapted by Nathan Birnbaum into an opera (same title) that premiered in April 2004 at the University of California-Irvine.

Mee is now best-known as the author of several successful plays that surfaced in the late 1990s and early 2000s, including Big Love, bobrauschenbergamerica, and Wintertime. When he graduated from Harvard in 1960, Mee had every intention of building a career in the theatre. But life intervened, as life does. Following a short stint at TDR (then the Tulane Drama Review) under Richard Schechner, Mee in 1971 became edi-tor-in-chief at Horizon, American Heritage's hardcover magazine devoted to art, history, and archaeology. Between 1965 and 1993, while Mee was still working on and off as an editor, he wrote sixteen books of popular history. Among these are Meeting at Potsdam (1975), on the resolution to WWII, and The Genius of the People (1987), on the Constitutional Convention. The former was adapted into a TV movie by D avid Susskind in 1976; the latter won him a nomination for the National Book Critics Circle best literary work of 1987.5

Mee is frank about the reasons he turned from playwriting to the writing of history. Pragmatically, he had a family to support. Off Off Broadway, where his work was produced in the 1960s, simply did not pro-vide sufficient income and pressed a career change upon him. But Mee also had a desire to, as he put it, "talk politics with my fellow citizens" in

4 For a contemporary summary of the literature on WWI, and one which rais-es salient historiographical issues and examines why the war might still matter to us today, see Adam Gopnik, "The Big One," The New Yorker (23 August 2004): 78-85.

5 For a fuller study of Mee's career rrajectory, from his early years writing plays for Off Off Broadway through his history writing days to his return to playwriting, see Jennifer Schlueter, "Patronage and Playwriting: Richard B. and Jeanne D onovan Fisher's Support of Charles Mee," Angels in American Theatre, in ed. Robert Schanke (Carbondale: SIU Press, forthcoming) .

8 SCHLUETER

a way that the writing of popular history seemed to make possible.6 For example, Mee's first book, Dear Prince: The Unexpurgated Counsels of N. Machiavelli to Richard Milhous Nixon (1969), which he coauthored with Edward C. Greenfield, flagged his growing discontent with the Nixon presidency that would coalesce in the following years into agitation for impeachment.7 And he wrote The Ohio Gang: The World of Warren G. Harding (1981) because, for him, Harding's tainted presidency resonated with, and provided Mee a way to talk about, then-president Ronald Reagan's.s

By the early 1980s, Mee was midway into a comfortable history-writing career. However, he had grown increasingly dissatisfied with his work. Somewhere along the line, his ability (or desire) to "talk politics" through the writing of history began to wear thin. He tried to write a novel. He got deeply into debt. Increasingly disillusioned with his work, Mee began to question the veracity of historical writing in general, declar-ing that "a passionate life of writing history books ... finally seemed pointless in the pretense that it is possible to speak dispassionately about what life is and how it unfolds."9

And so Mee moved away from his history books and towards the opposite pole in Aristotle's binary: theatre. To date, Mee has written thir-ty plays that are (1) based on historical events (e.g. The Constitutional Convention: A Sequel and The Investigation of the Murder in El Salvador), (2) adapted from historical texts or other plays (e.g. Orestes, from Euripides's Orestes or Time to Burn, from Gorki's The Lower Depths), or (3) derived from

6 Robert Dahlin, "Charles L. Mee, Jr.," Publishers Week!J (26 June 1981), 12.

7 In 1973, Mee founded and chaired the National Committee on the Presidency (NCOP) in response to the Watergate break-in. It was, he called it, a "nationwide, grass-roots, citizens' organization of some thousands of good middle-of-the-road, respectable, decent people ... who desired and lobbied tirelessly for the constitutional removal of the President." See Mee's first memoir, A Visit to Haldeman and Other States of Mind (New York: M. Evans, 1977), 23.

8 Dahlin, 12. Mee went on to say, "we might look at Harding, a man who wished to be good, but not sufficiently so to overcome the weaknesses and a certain lack of ethical rigor in his character."

9 Charles Mee, A Near!J Normal Ufe: A Memoir (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1999), 213.

STAGING VERSAILLES 9

historical material (all of his plays are collaged texts). Of his working technique, Mee suggested "I look at this material [for his plays] as a his-torian does, that is, as evidence of the world we live in."IO

Mee's disciplinary shifts present theatre historians with a tanta-lizing opportunity to analyze the ways in which one writer has both nar-rated and performed one historical event. Yet the reasons Mee offers up for undertaking the shift from history to theatre are both provocative and reductive. Mee's sense that his writing of history books was suffused with a "pretense that it is possible to speak dispassionately about what life is and how it unfolds" which his playwriting averts is, on the one hand, per-ceptive. On the other hand, Mee seems to be setting up and buying into a familiar and dangerous binary: history is dispassionate or objective, while theatre is passionate or subjective. Yet Mee at one point conceived of his own historical writing as an (assuredly passionate) opportunity to "talk politics with [his) fellow citizens." We must be wary, then, of appre-hending Mee's disciplinary migration either as a postmodern turn to sub-jectivity or as an example of that old antagonism, scholar versus artist. In his incisive essay ''Writing History Today," Thomas Postlewait rhetorical-ly asks of historians struggling with the tensions between evidence and speculation, "Has disenchantment ordained disengagement?"ll Mee might be disenchanted with the writing of history; he remains, however, far from disengaged from the issues it raises.

Mee's historiographic and dramaturgical concerns are succinctly illustrated in the ways he has represented the resolution of World War I. Taken together, his three works on Versailles-his book, The End of Order:Versailles 1919, his essay in Playing God Seven Fatifu/ Moments When Great Men Met to Change the World, and his play, The War to End War-pro-vide a template for tracing the distillation of one writer's argumentative focus, as Mee moves from book to stage. Selection is a process that every historian enacts as a narrative is constructed; however, under the height-ened constraints of dramatic realization, the choice-making process becomes more prominent. Moreover, these works crystallize Mee's strug-gle with what he calls "cause and effect" historical narrative as he exper-iments with alternative methods of recapitulating knowledge of events with the express purpose of generating dialogue and debate. The ques-

10 Scott T. Cummings, "Love Among the Ruins," American Theatre 17 (December 2000): 20.

II Thomas Postlewait, "Writing History Today," TheatreS urvry 41.2 (November 2000): 87.

10 SCHLUETER

cion at hand, then, is not how correctly (or innovatively) Mee interprets Versailles; it is how (and why) he successively reinterprets--or re-presents it-from book to essay to play.

In the preface to his book The End Of Order: Versailles 1919, Mee sets the stage by telling readers that this was a time of disintegration. The conference saw:

a collapse of many of the traditional ideals and usages that had underlain the political order of the nineteenth century. But the war had discredited much of the rheto-ric of national pride, honor, and sacrifice, as well as faith in the notions of reason, progress, humanism. Nor did the notions of God, representational art, or Newtonian physics appear to be in such good repair.12

Both the title of Mee's book and the preface to it underscore his narra-tive stance on the peacemaking process following World War I. A broad conception of radical disintegration and change grounds Mee's central thesis and his perspective on the evidence he selects.

Disintegration (and the fragmentation that results from it) is a trope inherent in all of Mee's works. Following a childhood bout with polio, Mee was left partially paralyzed and today walks with the assistance of a crutch and a cane. The experience, as his memoir A Nearfy Normal Life (1999) details, permanently and radically altered his world view. And that alteration defined his narrative style.

XVlll.

I find, when I write, that I really don't want to write well-made sentences and paragraphs, narratives that flow, structures that have a sense of wholeness and balance, books that feel intact. Intact people should write intact books with sound narratives built of sound paragraphs that unfold with a sense of wholeness and balance, books that feel intact. That is not my experience of the world. I like a book that feels like a crystal goblet that has been thrown to the floor and shattered, so that its pieces, when they are picked up and arranged on a table, still describe a whole glass, but the glass itself lies in shards .... If a writer's writings constitute a "body of

12 Charles Mee, The End of Order: Versailles, 1919, (New York: Dutton, 1980),

STAGING VERSAilLES

work," then my body of work, to feel true to me, must feel fragmented. And then, too, if you find it hard to walk down the sidewalk, you like, in the freedom of your mind, to make a sentence that leaps and dances now and then before it comes to a sudden stop.u

11

In his playwriting, Mee purposefully and consciously fragments his nar-ratives, filling them with unpredictable, illogical veerings. But the same ill-ter of fragmentation was operating in Mee's history writing as far back as The End rf Order. It was, in fact, the core of his argumentation in that book.I4

Moreover, Mee's disintegration thesis informs more than just the content of The End rf Order. It also shapes its form. The text of the book is arranged in a series of sections (Arrivals," "The American Offensive," "Entr'acte," "The French Offensive," "Loose Ends," "The German Counteroffensive," and "Epilogue") that are further divided into discrete sketches. Although loosely arranged by chronology, the vignettes remain disconnected and disjointed, producing implicit, not explicit, meaning. So, in the ''American Offensive" section, which attempts to detail Wilson's strivings (and those of his entourage) towards the League of Nations, a three-page sketch on Colonel House and his troubled rela-tionship with Wilson is followed by a half-page recounting of Clemenceau's analysis of ancient Greek literature and his friend's collec-tion of skulls. The connection between the two vignettes lies in Mee's perception o f barbarism only thinly veiled by the decorum of the diplo-mats. Yet this connection is never overtly stated within the narration of the events; it is, in fact, never narrated at all. Mee's thesis is implicit: the

13 Mee, Nearfy Normal, 40-41. It is not only Mee's sentences that "leap and dance." His plays are violently, vibrantly physical works, from Big Love with its requisite crash-mat-padded performance space to bobrauschenbergamerica with its human-sized mar-tini mixed by bathing-suited actors atop a giant piece of plastic sheeting. Sec Jennifer Schlueter, " 'This is what it is to be human': The Drama and History of Charles L. Mee," thesis, The Ohio State University (2003), 24-36.

14 However, critics including jonathan Mandell have seemed to ignore this part of Mee's writing. In an interview with Mee, Mandell said, ''None of [your] books, nor your memoir, take the sudden jagged turns of your plays." in "Falling In, Falling Out: Love's Cycle of Rebirth," The New York Times, September 2, 2001. On the contrary, Mce's books-especially The End if Order, but also Mee's first memoir, A Visit to Haldeman and Other States if Mind (1977)-are filled with such turns.

12 SCHLUETER

material is not laid out in a cause-and-effect manner. Even as he tries to write a narrative history, Mee strains against its expectations and frag-ments his storytelling.

Mee pauses mid-book for a section entitled "Entr'acte," which begins with a recounting of Clemenceau's near-assassination and moves into a description of the "smart set" that formed the social background to the political exchanges. Mee then describes some of the literary and artistic movements that were active in France at the same time as the peace process was unfolding. The focus is undoubtedly on Dada and Surrealism, with the works of Andre Breton, Tristan Tzara, and Robert Desnos forming a series of extended quotations. Mee concludes this sec-tion with a sketch of the March 1919 Cabaret Voltaire evening entitled Nair Cacadou, as well as with a description of the collage work of Kurt Schwitters and Max Ernst (whom Mee has called, elsewhere, his "dra-maturg").

In the "Entr'acte," Mee draws special attention to Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), a wide-ranging and fragmentary work that, according to Mee, asserted, "most of what is truly important cannot be encompassed in logic: ethics, values, idea of beauty, justice, religion, and morality- all these are in a realm beyond models, and philosophers ought to keep their hands off such things, cease to believe that such mat-ters could be reduced to logic- leave them to poetry, satire, irony, music."15

Why does Mee include this digression into art and philosophy in a book ostensibly on the Versailles treaty? Mee frankly admits that Wittgenstein had nothing to say about the diplomacy of Versailles, yet argues that applying Wittgenstein's methods of analysis to the peace con-ference coalesces a disturbing picture. "The diplomats," he writes, "dealt in a world of wishes, not of what was but of what they wished would be."16 Mee goes on, however, to construct his own "world of wishes," in which he imagines how Wittgenstein would have critiqued Versailles:

Wittgenstein might have said that no language could have been drafted to correspond rigorously to the facts. "The world," his first sentence of the Tractatus states, "is everything that is the case." But Wilson spoke as though the League of Nations was the case; and Clemence au as

15 Mee, Near(y Normal, 132.

16 Ibid., 133.

STAGING VERSAILLES

though French hegemony was the case, and lloyd George as though the survival of the empire was the case. Strictly speaking, the models of the Dadaists and the Surrealists were more firmly grounded in the real world than the formulations of the diplomats. Wittgenstein would have known at once that the diplo-matic formulations were hopelessly meaningless.!?

13

In this book of ostensible history, Mee asks the unaffiliated character of Wittgenstein to pass judgment on the events that transpired at Versailles. Essentially, this Wittgenstein becomes a mouthpiece for the author; or, better, this Wittgenstein is played by Charles Mee. What we can see in the End rf Order as a whole is a historian straining to make a logical narrative out of events that he perceives to have been enacted illogically. Mee holds up the Dadaists and Surrealists as having seen and reported the chaos of Versailles clearly, even as he himself attempts to address the events in the form of a cause-and-effect narrative structure. But Mee cannot do it. The book is, ultimately, little more than a series of vignettes. It is more the dramaturg's casebook for the play Mee had not yet written.

Mee admitted, "I didn't get it right in the book," and tried again to deal with Versailles in his 1993 extended essay on the nature of power entitled Plqying God: Seven Fateful Moments When Great Men M et to Change the World. 18 In this book, Mee examined the decision-making processes at seven selected "summit" meetings throughout history, including, among others, Pope Leo the Great's meeting with Attila the Hun and Henry VIII's with Francis I. In each chapter, Mee focuses on the specific prob-lems that the participants in his chosen summits experienced and exem-plified. In his prologue Mee writes, "The sources of the big, repeated mistakes in history are the conceptual pitfalls that undo the best made plans of the most able practitioners. There are many such pitfalls, large and small. This book deals with seven of the most common and upset-ting."19 The categories Mee elucidates include "the difficulty of knowing

17 Ibid., 133.

18 Charles Mee, 'The Theatre of History," Interview conducted by Alisa Solomon in 1988, in Conversations on Art and Peiformance, eds. Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 185.

19 Charles Mee, Plqying God Seven Fateful Moments When Great Men Met to Change the World, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 14.

14 SCHLUETER

the facts," "the illusion of power," "the inevitability of surprise," "con-tingency," "the false lessons of history," "the rule of unintended conse-quences," and "the fantasy of realism."2D

The chapter on "the false lessons of history" deals specifically with Versailles. Its central thesis is precisely Mee's Wittgenstein-filtered reading of the event in The End of Order. Mee leads into his analysis of the actions of Wilson, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George with this state-ment:

Even if everyone might agree on what lesson a given historical event teaches, there are probably no true les-sons of history, if what is meant by that is a mine of specific lessons to be applied to specific events. Because all historical moments are unique, because history does not repeat itself, the wisdom of history is an elusive quality21

As Mee tells it, the major players at Versailles were all working from a false conception of the applicability of their past experiences to the incomparable moment of making the peace. Clemenceau had powerful memories of seeing the Germans take Paris in the Franco-Prussian War and believed wholeheartedly that the only way to protect France from any such future action was to decimate Germany. Wilson possessed stubborn faith in the democratic ethos of the United States, which led him to believe that the principles outlined in his Fourteen Points would indeed make the world a better place. Lloyd George had a habit of compromise born of his lifetime of work in the British Parliament, which led him to approach the peace process as a game of manipulation. Mee suggests that each man's bedrock beliefs quite literally set the stage for a failed confer-ence: "the remembered past contained the wrong lessons, or at least the wrong combination of lessons. In Paris, in 1919, the memories of the past helped to create the nightmare of the future."22

zo Ibid., 15-18.

21 Ibid., 138-9.

22 Ibid., 139.

STAGING VERSAILLES 15

In Plqying God, Mee's distrust of historical narrative clearly became more acute. He moved farther away from attempting to re-pres-ent "facts" and into writing through a more personal struggle with past events. The bibliography to Plqying God makes this shift clear. In it Mee writes, "I have tried to mention my principal sources as they have come up in the text of each chapter- in part to remind myself and the reader that no material of history comes without a provenance, and also-because this is an extended essay and not a work of research-to avoid footnotes."23 Conversely, The End of Order concludes with over twenty pages of endnotes, an annotated bibliography, and a record of his archival research.

Mee's struggle with the contained and logical form of the his-torical study in his End of Order led him to construct his meditative essays on the broader themes of power brokering in Plqying God. Yet the burden of historical proof and objectivity was incumbent upon both works. Striving for more direct engagement with the material of history, Mee was still dissatisfied with the result of his work. His dissatisfaction became creative when, a year after publishing Plqying God, he published a play on the Versailles events, entitled The War to End War.24

The research Mee undertook for The End of Order grounds The War to End War. In fact, the portions of the play that deal with Versailles are wholly created out of passages from his book. Mee samples from his own prose as well as from the quoted material he selected from the jour-nals, diaries, letters, memoirs, and creative works of his cast of characters. Yet Mee's distancing from the project of writing history is made clear

23 Ibid., 243.

24 The War to End War is organized in three basic movements. The first two focus on Versailles and Dada. The last is an imagined game of poker at Los Alamos on the night before Trinity played by]. Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Enrico Fermi (all instrumental in creating the atomic bomb), and John von Neumann (creator of game theory, which heavily influenced mid-twentieth century economics and provided statisti-cal/probability frameworks that the atomic bomb scientists utilized). The final thesis of the play is that, in the words of von Neumann, "One can play or not play, but the game goes on in any case, with new players replacing the old; and it has its own logic on which the players are carried along with ever-increasing stakes. There are no exact parallels since the play is ever-intensifying. The players cannot affect the game, although the game can affect the players" (44) . Mee's implicit critique is that the decisions of a few, powerful men-at Versailles or in a laboratory--change the lives of the rest of us, without our per-mission or our participation. In any case, for the sake of focus, this essay will deal only with the first two movements of The War to End War, which relate directly to Mee's work in his The End of Order.

16 SCHLUETER

with the introductory note to the play: while End of Order had an anno-tated bibliography and endnotes and Plqying God had merely a bibliogra-phy with no sourcing, the play has only the statement, "The War to End War incorporates texts from Harold Nicolson's memoirs as well as texts written by Tristan Tzara, Hans Richter, Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, the letters of]. Robert Oppenheimer, and others."2S No titles, no quotation marks, no footnotes are offered. There is only a broad sense of from where the material was drawn.

Unlike his book, or even his essay, Mee's play does not attempt to retell the Versailles events; rather, it aims to encapsulate the conflict-ing forces at play and the resultant destruction left by these forces. The play is first and foremost guided by Mee's disintegration thesis as first articulated in The End of Order. He creates his play out of his books, tak-ing with him his argumentative focus.

Thus, the physical embodiment and enactment of Mee's inter-pretation of Versailles becomes the crucible of his historiographic con-cerns. Mee set his play in front of an enormous shattered mirror held in several elaborate gilt frames, "a mosaic of broken shards of glass."26 In this setting, Mee flags his sense of the fragmentary nature of the story he is about to tell as well as his discomfiture with his own historian's attempt to encapsulate such destruction in pretty gilt frames of narrative. The frames might be intricately wrought but the fragments of the past they surround cannot be remade whole. These frames, like the framing narra-tives for which they are a metaphor, are beautiful falsehoods, replete with unattainable wishes for complexity and completion.

The characters in the War to End War enact Mee's critique of the major players at Versailles. For example, Wilson and Clemenceau appear in the play, but Lloyd George is nowhere to be found; rather, his aide, copious note-taker Harold Nicolson, stands in for the British perspective. Lloyd George, widely regarded as a womanizer and somewhat less than effectual at the conference, functions as an invisible figurehead . In mak-ing this dramatic choice, Mee directs his audience's attention (and, poten-

25 Charles Mee, The War to End War, in History Plays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998), 12. All citations are from this version. However, the play was previously pub-lished in TheatreForum 5 (1994): 47-58, with accompanying commentary by Marthew Wilder and cast/ crew information on the first production. The play can also be obtained for free on Mee's website (http:/ /www.charlesmee.org). The three published versions of the play are substantially the same, with only minor typographical shifts distinguishing them.

26 Ibid., 13.

STAGING VERSAILLES 17

tially, blame) towards Wilson and Clemenceau, whom he envisions as the two opposing forces, unable to compromise, that dragged the conference down.

Mee builds much commentary into the first appearance of both Clemenceau and Wilson. According to the stage directions, "Clemenceau enters, helped in by an African in a burnoose and an Asian in a chef's hat.27 Clemenceau wears grey gloves, holds one hand to his heart, where he has been shot, and is bleeding . . . and coughs, his lungs filled with blood."28 Visually, Mee condenses his interpretation of Clemenceau's character into a few key images. Clemenceau was known for wearing gray gloves, indoors and out, and was called "the grey tiger," caricatured with his ubiquitous gloves covering his claws. In addition, an attempted assas-sination during the peace process left a bullet lodged in his chest that caused him periodically to cough violently. Surviving this attempt on his life and continuing his work for France, Clemenceau strengthened his diplomatic position following the vote for Wilson's Fourteen Points. According to Mee in The End rif Order, "Having shot Clemenceau, the assassin had wounded Wilson."29 Accordingly, in The War to End War, bleeding Clemenceau dominates Wilson.

27 The African and rhe Asian (also called "rhe Oriental") who accompany Clemenceau are flexible metaphors wirh multiple purposes wirhin rhe text. First, while France, Britain, and the United Stares dominated the conference at Versailles, most other counuies in the world had a presence at the conference or sent delegates periodically to lobby for their interests. So, Mee is hoping to remind us of the (generally silenced) needs of non-major powers. At the same time, Britain was not the only country with colonies about the globe-Algeria was a French colony and France maintained a presence in Morocco. The colonial powers, seeing it as their province to guide rhe development of non-Western countries, tended to ueat these countries patronizingly. Thus, China's Shantung province (held by rhe Germans but taken by the Japanese during the war) was promised to Japan in a joint agreement berween Britain, France, and Italy, without China's permission. The figures of the Asian and the African, then, serve both to remind the audience of the silenced voices in the traditional narrative of World War I and to reflect widespread fairh in colonial power. The Asian might also represent Ho Chi Minh, who was in Paris during the war and worked as a pasuy chef under Escoffier and as a design-er of Asian Antiquities. According to Mee in The End of Order, he uied to get the big three to end colonial exploitation of Vietnam but failed to get their full attention.

28 Mee, The War to End War, 16.

29 Mee, The End of Order, 101.

18 SCHLUETER

Wilson's embodied presence in The War to End War is also com-mentary. When Wilson enters, the stage directions suggest, "He wears pince-nez, high starched collar, is sick and weak, has difficulty breathing, is helped in by a dead soldier."3 The glasses and the collar are quintes-sentially Wilsonian: he was seen as stiff and proper by most of his con-temporaries. His progressively debilitating series of strokes are indicated by his weak look and the dead soldier who serves as his familiar through-out the play is a reminder of Wilson's personal feelings of guilt over entering the war in order to make the peace. More telling, perhaps, is Wilson's first (and only) monologue in .the play:

I am the sort of person, I must admit, who likes the same sweater, for instance, the same automobile ride, the same woman. In fact, nothing pleases me more than taking an automobile ride along a familiar route wearing the sweater I wore in my Princeton days. Think of it. You know. Poetry. The same passages from the same books. Old college songs. The good things, the simple pleasures I suppose. We might all agree. Nothing extrav-agant. When I take a vacation I go to the same place every time, the lake country in England, and ride my bicycle over the hills. I'm fond of England, Europe gen-erally. Exceptions here and there, of course, who would-n't have? But on the whole, you know. And even so, one must admit, sometimes. Of the possibility of the new)!

Mee, as author of this history, chooses to depict a Wilson who is staid, reticent, and stubbornly reliant on the past for solace. The perspective is the same one Mee laid out in the introductory pages of The End of Order.

The president . . . looked, and dressed, like a Presbyterian minister, with a three-piece suit, firmly but-toned, silver-rimmed pince-nez . ... He loved all things

30 Mee, The War to End War, 16.

3! Ibid., 17. Mee is fascinated with Wilson's "type." In Mee's The Trqjan Women a Love Story, Talthybius speaks a similar monologue, built out of the exact same informa-tion as Wilson's in The War to End War. In fact, Mee has a multitude of favorite passages which he reuses throughout his plays.

STAGING VERSAIU.F.S

familiar-old southern songs, the Princeton song, such hymns as "The Son of God Goes Forth to War" and "How Firm a Foundation"; he liked to read the same books over and over, to take the same automobile rides repeatedly, to revisit the same vacation spots in the English Lake Country, to wear the same old cape and, quite particularly, an old gray sweater that he had bought on a bicycle trip through Scotland some years before ... Once he got hold of something that he liked and that was comfortable, he hated to let go.32

19

Clearly, Mee has an agenda for Wilson, who is, to him, intractable. However, there is a crucial distinction between Mee's treatment of Wilson in his book and in his play. In the book, the voice of the author criticizes a described Wilson. In the play, and damningly, Wilson describes himse!fthe way Mee, as the author of this history, sees him. Wilson's voice in the play is not taken from his own words, but rather from an author's interpretive narrative. The interpretation is, surely, built on evidence, but its subjectivity is central to the presentation of Wilson on the stage.

Such subjectivity extends to Mee's dramatic usage of quoted material, which is unpredictable and tied more to thematic concerns than historical fact. For example, in the book The End of Order, Mee quotes Nicholson's diaries as noting that Paderewski's wife "looked like hell in orchids."33 In the play The War to End War, it is Clemenceau's African familiar who asks of no one in particular, "Doesn't his wife look like hell in orchids?"34 And then there is Wittgenstein, who appears as a character in the play, serving as Brockdorff-Rantzau's familiar. When dealing with Versailles as a historian, Mee wrote that, though Wittgenstein had noth-ing to do with Versailles, his world view was such that he "would have known at once that the diplomatic formulations were hopelessly mean-ingless." As a playwright, Mee embodies his perspective on the war by placing Wittgenstein onstage and by placing words from his own Tractatus but also from the works of D adaist Tristan Tzara and Andre Breton, into

32 Mee, The End of Order, 4.

33 Ibid., 107.

34 Mee, The War to End War, 25.

20 SCHLUETER

his mouth. Together with Brockdorff-Rantzau, who speaks an anachro-nistic (since it was not written until 1932) section of H ans Arp's Notes from a Dada Diary, Mee's Wittgenstein speaks nonsense. While Clemenceau and Wilson spout diplomatic nonsense, well-reasoned, Wittgenstein stands by while Brockdorff-Rantzau refuses the entire proj-ect:

People have not yet succeeded in unveiling the world through reason! A great deal in the new doctrine does not fit together like a meander in patent leather shoes who goes walking on the arm of a somnambulist box of sardines through the sooty hortus deliciarum, if you see what I mean. Einstein does not want to cover up the asphodel meadows. Einstein's poems have nothing to do with modern alarm clocks. Before them reason takes its tail between its legs and goes philandering somewhere else.35

Mee collapses Wittgenstein into Dada as he envisions both critiquing Versailles through an embrace of irrationality.

It makes sense, then, that the second movement to The War to End War is entitled "Dada."36 In a stage direction to the section, Mee writes "the play begins here."37 In this cryptic remark, Mee suggests that the first third of his play, built on (though freely interpretive of) histori-cal personages involved in the treaty at Versailles, is of less importance to the work-a Dada provocation. The purposeful irrationality of European Dada becomes, paradoxically, the place to look for meaning or understanding in a world where the superficially logical gerrymanderings

35 Ibid., 24. See also Hans Arp's "Notes from a Dada Diary," in Robert Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets (Cambridge, .MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard Universiry, 1979), 223-224. The Einstein to whom Arp refers is not Albert, but Carl, who edited a Dada publication, according to Motherwell (145). The confusion is, perhaps, intentional on Mee's parr, since Albert Einstein figures in the third movement of The War to End War, where the atomic bomb is discussed.

36 I t is this portion of the play that was musicalized in 2004 by Nathan Birnbaum at the Universiry of California-I rvine, directed by Annie Loui.

37 Mee, The War to End War, 30.

STAGING VERSAILLES 21

of diplomats devolve. The End of Order seems to pause or digress mid-book for Mee's Dadaist "Entr'acte." Mee takes that Entr'acte and makes it the center of The War to End War. Here it is not the intermission but the performance.

In "Dada," Mee combines parts of Robert D esnos's 1919 poem "The Voice of Robert Desnos" with pieces of "Noir Cacadaou" to cre-ate a counterpoint to the rationalizations of the diplomats in the previ-ous movement. Wittgenstein reappears as do the dead soldier, the African, and Brockdorff-Rantzau. They are joined by Kurt Schwitters and Duchamp's mustachioed Mona Lisa. As the movement progresses, Wittgenstein strips naked and moons the audience.38 I t climaxes with the arrival of a machine even less rational than the previous events:

A Rube Goldberg contraption of enormous complexity and stupidity slowly descends, deus ex machina fashion, from above. . . .The actors stand amazed. . . . Wittgenstein steps up to it, takes out a cigar. The con-traption whirls, cranks, flails, rocks, and finally produces a light for Wittgenstein's cigar . . . the contraption explodes ... and ascends into the flies. The music ends with clanking, echoing, banging against steel walls, hoarse crying out and wailing in the night.J9

The futility of the "solution" offered to the disorder on the stage lies in the impotence of the machine. For all its magnitude and complexity, it is only capable of lighting a cigar-and it can't even do that adequately. The machine is similar in many respects to Mee's interpretation of the treaty ultimately signed in Versailles: gigantic, long-awaited, and ultimately use-less. What the Versailles treaty did successfully establish, Mee argues, was to rancor Germany sufficiently to pave the way for Hitler to rise to power. More important, it made what he sees as the nihilistic gamble of nuclear warfare possible. In such a mad world, why not? This perspective grounds the third movement of his play, in which von Neumann, Teller, Fermi, and Oppenheimer play a game of cards as they discuss the bomb that they are creating.

38 Compounding the complexity of Wittgenstein's place in Mee's narrative is the fact that the role was played, in the 1993 original production, by a woman, who hap-pened to be Mee's then-partner Laurie Williams. See Charles Mee, "The War to End War," TheatreForum 5 (1994): 47.

39 Mee, The War to End War, 37.

22 SCHLUETER

In his book Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre, Freddie Rokem grapples with the ways in which the theatre has addressed itself to historical events that are of such mag-nitude as to defy easy encapsulation within two hours' time (like the Shoah) and were conceived theatrically to begin with (like the French Revolution). Of this balancing act, Rokem writes:

The historical realities do not have a beginning, a mid-dle, and an end; therefore, the notion of performing his-tory inevitably confronts the tensions between such nar-rative principles of selection, on the one hand, and the seemingly chaotic and sometimes unimaginable dimen-sions of these historical events and their catastrophic characteristics, on the other.40

The theatre of war, and the theatricality of the peacemaking conference that succeeds it, is in many ways the best example of the kind of chaot-ic and catastrophic event Rokem elucidates. Its enormity defies the his-torian's need to select and to shape some kind of normalizing explana-tion. It defies understanding as, at the same time, it must be understood.

In writing about Versailles, Charles Mee struggled with this pre-cise dilemma. Far from being great, The Great War saw millions of young men die along the western front for control of a few miles of devastat-ed real estate. This war did not, as its famous moniker declared, "end war." As Mee sees it, the only thing WWI did end was order; as the title to his narrative history flags. For him, classifying and capturing its events into an objectively ordered narrative seemed less and less possible. And less and less desirable.

like the Dadaists and Surrealists whom Mee praises as "more firmly grounded in the real world" than the diplomats at Versailles, Charles Mee resists order.41 This resistance, which has its roots in his experience with polio, plays out in Mee's affinity for the fragmented. It also grounds his repulsion from the unified and the tidy, which feel, to

40 Freddie Rokem, Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000), 10.

41 Mee, The End of Order, 133.

STAGING VERSAILLES 23

him, not only false but downright "hostile" to his experience of the world.42 So Mee rejects what he calls history'srational statements when he writes: "The form of history, I thought, required rational, dispassionate statements about the world that were meant to contain the truth, but they were statements about a world that made you want to weep and shriek and cry out."43 Yet he equally rejects a theatre based in psychological real-ism because it is "reductionist" and "eliminates history, eliminates poli-tics."44 Mee's quarrel is really neither with history nor with theatre; instead, i t is with what he sees as impenetrably ordered versions of each that deflect the inexplicable, unpredictable elements of human experi-ence. And so Mee's plays are purposefully "broken, jagged, filled with sharp edges, filled with things that take sudden turns, careen into each other, smash up, veer off in sickening turns."45 His characters are not unified, psychological wholes; they are unpredictable, mercurial mixes of philosophy and pop culture. His plays are not the neat product of one mind; they are collages of text and plot from many sources. Aptly, Mee says, Dadaist and Surrealist artist Max Ernst serves as his "dramaturg" along the way.46

Mee wrote The End if Order in 1980. He returned to playwriting in 1986 when Vienna: Lusthaus won him an Obie Award. However, it was not until 1993 that Playing God, his last book of history, was published. In that same year, The War to End War was performed at the Sledgehammer Theatre in San Diego. The play marked the culmination of his movement from book to theatre, from historian to playwright. But Mee's gravitation to the fragmented- his overarching concern, his defining taste-remained constant in the transformation.

42 Erin Mee, "Shattered and Fucked Up and Full of Wreckage: The Words and Works of Charles L. Mee," The Drama Review 46.3 (2002): 97.

43 Mandell, "Falling In, Falling Out: Love's Cycle of Rebirth."

44 Erin Mee, "Shattered and Fucked Up," 100.

45 Charles Mee, History Plays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998), i.

46 Celia Wren, "Combines in Red," American Theatre (September 2001): 58. Mee has also named Robert Rauschenberg as one of his formal inspirations. Mee is fond of both artists because of their use of collage. Rauschenberg, though, is especially dear to Mee because he made art "by picking up stuff off the street, broken stuff, rejected stuff-junk-and putting it into paintings and sculptures, saying: 'This, too, belongs in a muse-um; this, too, is worthy of attention and respect'" (Nearly Normal, 190). The linkages between Ernst and Rauschenberg, Dada and Pop Art, can help illuminate Mee's work. See Schlueter, '"This is what it is,"' 14-26.

jOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 17, NO.3 (FALL 2005)

S UZAN-LORI P ARKS'S STAGIN G OF THE LINCOLN MYTH IN 1HB AMERICA PlAY AND T OPDOG/UNDBRDOG

V ERNA F o sTER

A few years ago Suzan-Lori Parks was asked whether, as a Black woman, she felt excluded from the American mythology centered on Abraham Lincoln. Parks replied, "No. I've gotten two plays out of it."1 The plays are, of course, The America Plt!J (1994) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Topdog/Underdog (2001) .2 The America Plcry is an exceptionally inventive-difficult but metaphorically direct-rendering of the prob-lematic place of the Lincoln myth in African American history and cul-ture. Parks's preoccupation with Lincoln's assassination and her emphasis on the need to dig (literally in this play) in order to recover African American history from the "Great Hole of History" are repeated more obliguely in Topdog/ Underdog, which focuses on the conflict between two brothers named Lincoln and Booth. Both plays are about inheritance, the uncertainty of documentation, and knowing the difference between the "real thing" and the "echo" in The America Plqy (175) or between "what is" and "what aint" in Topdog/Underdog (73).3

At first glance the later play seems to beat a dramaturgical retreat from the experimental mode of The America Plqy to the more conven-tional dramatic realism of family drama. Some critics, Robert Brustein, for example, expressed disappointment with the new development in Parks's work.4 Others were better pleased. Reviewing the play for the New York Times, Ben Brantley commended Parks for writing a play accessible

1 Joshua Wolf Shenk, "Beyond a Black-and-White Lincoln," New York Times, April 7, 2002.

2 The America Play was produced at the Yale Repertory Theatre and the New York Public Theater in 1994; Topdog/ Underdog opened at the New York Public Theater in 2001 and transferred to the Ambassador Theater on Broadway in 2002.

3 Quotations from The America Play are taken from Suzan-Lori Parks, The America Plqy and Other Works (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995). Quotations from Topdog/ Underdog are taken from Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog/ Underdog (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2002). Further quotations from the text will be parenthetical.

4 Robert Brustein, "A Homeboy Godot," New Republic, May 13, 2002.

THE LINCOLN MYTH 25

enough to be produced on Broadway and attributed her success to her ability to construct "a captivating narrative without sacrificing her high thematic ambitions."s If Brantley offers a commercial defence of Parks's dramaturgy in Topdog/ Underdog, Una Chaudhuri in her review for Theatre Journal offers a convincing aesthetic defence of the play's experimental use of realism. Chaudhuri argues that in Topdog/ Underdog Parks "rein-vents" the dramatic mode of "psychological realism": the set is at once a literal and an "archetypal" room; the play possesses abundant "metaphor-ic potentiality, both poetic and political"; and in the "extraordinarily inventive performance styles" developed by director George C. Wolfe and actors Jeffrey Wright (Line) and Don Cheadle (Booth), the play "ful-filled and far exceeded the terms of psychological realism" to which it ostensibly adheres.6

Whatever position one adopts on the vexed question of Topdog/ Underdogs dramaturgy, the fact that Parks revisited the chief con-cerns of The America Plf!j and in such a different form in Topdog/ Underdog calls for some critical attention to the nature of her revisions. In particu-lar, the historical themes of the later play can best be understood in light of their more explicit articulation in the earlier one. In this essay, I pro-pose to show how The America Plf!J and Topdog/Underdog illuminate one another and, more specifically, to argue that the realism (even naturalism) of the later play is an important move forward in Parks's continuing experimentation with the relationship between content and form.

Topdog/Underdog is a version of both a realistic and a naturalistic play. I define "naturalism" as the most photographic and literal form of realism in its depiction of action, characters, dialogue, and place; it is also historically (since Zola) a deterministic mode: characters' behavior is to a large extent determined by their heredity and environment.7 Parks utilizes these characteristics of naturalism but also, as Chaudhuri notes, goes well beyond them. Specifically, Topdog/ Underdog incorporates several kinds of theatricality of its own. The play within its naturalistic terms is as metatheatrical as its more overtly experimental predecessor.

5 Ben Brantley, "Not to Worry, Mr. Lincoln, It's Just A Con Game," New York Times, April 8, 2002.

6 Una Chaudhuri, Review of Topdog/Underdog at the Public Theater, Theatre journal 54 (2002): 289-90. On Broadway Booth was played by rapper Mos Def.

7 See Emile Zola, "Naturalism on the Stage" (1881) from Le Roman experimen-tal (Paris: E. Fasqueile, 1902), ttans. Samuel Draper, in Plqywrights on PLay1vriting, ed. Toby Cole (New York: Hiil and Wang, 1961), 5-14.

26 FOSTER

The more conventional form of Topdog/Underdog is not entirely unprecedented in Parks's work. In the Blood (1999) combines a linear nar-rative and realistic central character, dialogue, and contemporary setting with Brechtian scene titles, episodic structure, and presentational acting, especially in the "confessions" with which each character addresses the audience. Fucking A (2000), too, has a central tragic protagonist, acting within an Aristotelian plot, no less, but the setting is a kind of nightmar-ish alternate universe that parallels and exaggerates the worst elements of both Antebellum and contemporary America. If In the Blood focuses on the social causes of Hester, La Negrita's plight that might be corrected by our political intervention , Fucking A offers something more like the con-ventional catharsis of pity and fear, and the play's hopelessness is offset only by the courage of its Medea-like tragic protagonist, Hester Smith herself.

Like In the Blood and Fucking A, which both draw on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, The America Plqy and Topdog/Underdog are companion pieces that use different dramatic forms to address similar historical issues; they, too, inevitably, come to very different conclusions. I use the word "inevitably" because, as Parks herself insists, in her essay "from Elements of Style," form and content determine one another: form is "an integral part of the story."s

Early in her career Parks was not interested in naturalism as a form. She seems to have understood naturalistic drama as Zola did, though she valued it very differently. In his essay "Naturalism on the Stage," Zola calls for new plays in which "environment" will "determine the characters" and the characters will "act according to the logic of facts combined with logic of their own disposition" (6). Parks commented in 1990, "If you stick to that kind of writing [naturalistic drama], then all you can write is plays about black men being killed by policemen, as if to indict society, you need a Big Event."9 In "from Elements of Style" (1994), however, Parks defends realism or naturalism (as used by Lorraine Hansberry, for example) as "a specific response to a certain historical cli-mate" (8), that is, as one form among many that a dramatist might use depending on his or her needs and purposes. At this time Gust after she had written The America Plqy) Parks still did not envision using the form

8 "from Elements of Style," in The America Play and Other Works, 7.

9 Quoted in Alisa Solomon, "Signifying on the Signifyin': The Plays of Suzan-Lori Parks," Theater, 21:3 (Summer/Fall1990): 79.

THE LINCOLN MYTH 27

in her own plays. However, Parks's obvious interest in how form or dra-maturgical technique operates in creating meaning and her changing view of realism/ naturalism explain her later turn, in In the Blood and Fucking A as well as in Topdog/ Underdog, towards some of the elements and modes of realism (linear plot, psychologically believable characters, recognizable contemporary setting, and, in Topdog/Underdog, determinism) . Parks has always enjoyed, and her work benefits from, her constant experimenta-tion with dramatic form.

Realism is not a given; it is a form to be experimented with like any other. The pairings of In the Blood with Fucking A and The America Plqy with Topdog/ Underdog accord with Parks's favored mode of constructing a play, "repetition and revision," at the level of the whole play.1o Topdog/ Underdog repeats and revises from a contemporary and pessimistic (and thus naturalistic) perspective-or, equally, from a naturalistic (and thus contemporary and pessimistic) perspective-The America Plqy 's recre-ation of African American history through its staging of the Lincoln myth. Just as Parks says, form and content determine one another.

In her 1994 essay "Possession," Parks asserts that a play is a way of "creating and rewriting history." She continues: "Since history is a recorded or remembered event, theatre, for me, is the perfect place to 'make' history- that is, because so much of African-American history has been unrecorded, dismembered, washed out, one of my tasks as play-wright is to - through literature and the special strange relationship between theatre and real life -- locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, hear the bones sing, write it down."11 These words imply that Parks sees herself as doing the work of an historian by discovering and recording past events, specifically actions performed by African Americans, but also, as she goes on to say, creating 'new' historical events" that are as valid as those already recorded and thus are "ripe for inclusion in the canon of history"(4-5). This ambiguity in the task Parks sets herself is inherent in the meaning of the word "history" itself. "History" can mean either "the past considered as a whole," as The New O:xford American Dictionary puts it, or historiography, that is, written histo-ry, the "history'' found in secondary sources attempting (through analy-sis of primary materials) to reconstruct and explain "history" in the sense

10 "from Elements of Style," 8-10.

11 "Possession," The America Pltry and Other Works, 4.

28 FOSTER

of the past. The America Play and Topdog/Underdog, I contend, put these two meanings of "history'' into dialogue with one another, as Parks both corrects common historical and cultural assumptions and (re)makes African American history within American traditions.12

The America Play takes place in a hole in "the middle of nowhere" that is "an exact replica of the Great Hole of History." The "Great Hole of History'' is at once the whole of history, the absence from that whole of African American history, an historical theme park in the Eastern United States, the replica of that theme park dug in the West by the Foundling Father, the wound in Lincoln's head, and a vagina. The hole is also the stage. From this fecund hole Parks (re)produces and reconstructs history.13 In the first act the Foundling Father, also called the Lesser Known, a Black man who is said to resemble Abraham Lincoln, the "Great Man," recounts how he gave up his profession of gravedigging to become a Lincoln impersonator. In his replica of the "Great Hole of History" customers pay a penny to play the role of John Wilkes Booth and "shoot Lincoln" as he sits in Ford's Theatre laughing at the comedy Our American Cousin. In the second act, the Foundling Father's widow, Lucy, a "Confidence" who hears and keeps the secrets of the dying, and his son, Brazil, a professional mourner, have come out West to look for him. Urged on by Lucy, Brazil digs for his heritage in the replica of the "Great Hole of History." But "History" remains elusive, always at sever-al removes from its representation. Lucy and Brazil hear only echoes, and Brazil finds, not the father he is seeking, but historical artifacts, repro-

l2 Kurt Bullock and WB. Worthen suggest similar dualities in Parks's handling of history. Bullock comments, "Parks walks a fine line in The America Plqy, disrupting his-tory-as-we-know-it without problematizing hisrory-as-it-may-be-reYealed." Kurt Bullock, "Famous/Last Words: The Disruptive Rhetoric of Historico-Narrative Finality in Suzan-Lori Parks's The America Ploy," American Drama 10 (Summer 2001): 82. Worthen argues that "Parks's plays interrogate not only history but how we have access to it, engage it, understand it" and "stage the recovery and interpretation of the past- Rep and Rev- at the reciprocal interface between writing and performance." WB. Worthen, "Citing History: Texruality and Performativity in the Plays of Suzan-Lori Parks," Essqys in Tbeatre/Eh1des Theatroln 18 (Nov. 1999): 4-5.

13 See Harry E lam and Alice Rayner, "Echoes from the Black (W)hole: An Examination of The America Pia; by Suzan-Lori Parks," Performing America: C111111ral Nationalism in An1erica11 Theater, Jeffrey .Mason and J. Ellen Gainor, Eds. (Ann Arbor: Univ. of :Michigan Press, 1999), 180; Katy Ryan, "'No Less H uman': Making HistOry in Suzan-Lori Parks's The An1erica Ploy," jo11rnal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 13 (Spring 1999): 83, 86-88; S.E. Wilmer, "Restaging rhe Nation: The Work of Suzan-Lori Parks," Modern Drama 43 (Fall 2000): 443.

THE LINCOLN MYrH 29

ductions and symbols, such as Lincoln's bust, a glass trading bead, docu-ments, and medals, and a television set, on which Lucy and Brazil watch the Foundling Father's performance of Lincoln from the first act. When the Foundling Father himself is finally discovered, he emerges from the "Great Hole" to take his place as another artifact in the "Hall of Wonders," the museum of which Brazil, who likes to "dust and polish" (185), has become the curator.

Topdog/ Underdog takes its inspiration from The America Play and thus is in itself an "echo," a revised repetition, of the earlier work. In 1999 Parks decided she wanted to write about another Black Lincoln impersonator and this time "focus on his home life" (preface); also she thought it would be "funny" if she named her new character Lincoln and his brother Booth. 14 The domestic focus explains Parks's choice of con-temporary realism as the mode for her new play, but at the same time the grotesque humor of the brothers' names implies right from the start that the play's ostensible realism of characterization, dialogue, and setting will be somehow twisted.

Line and Booth, brothers who love one another but cannot stop being rivals for affection, money, and status, share Booth's run-down room, for which Line's job pays the rent. Line's job as a Lincoln imper-sonator in an amusement arcade resonates with Parks's earlier wonder-fully audacious, thrilling, and funny construction of the Foundling Father as Abraham Lincoln but has to be rendered acceptable in the realistic terms set by the later play. Thus Line and Booth only talk, in a matter-of-fact way, about Line's experiences and customers at the arcade, and we do not actually see anyone "shoot Lincoln"- at least not until the contem-porary Booth shoots Line at the end. Booth has no occupation, though he is a talented shoplifter. His ambition is to marry his girlfriend, Grace, and to run a 3-Card Monte game to rival the legendary one Line ran years earlier. When Grace abandons him and Line beats him at the game, Booth snaps and kills his brother, as both dramatic (specifically natura-listic) and historical necessity, suggest that he must.

Topdog/Underdog offers its audience a rich and realistic psycho-logical study of the relationship between two brothers that resonates with all of the other great fraternal conflicts in history and literature. D espite its realism, however, Topdog/ Underdog is just as metatheatrical as The America Plqy: Line, at Booth's suggestion, rehearses the death of Lincoln, the brothers dress up and strut in fancy stolen clothes, their practice ses-

14 Don Shewey, "This Time the Shock Is Her Turn Toward Naturalism," New York Times, July 22, 2001.

30 FOSTER

sions for 3-Card Monte (performed clumsily by Booth and expertly by Line) punctuate the play. The game of "what is" and "what aint" is played more-or-less continuously by Line against Booth and no less by Parks with the audience.

In both The America Pltry and Topdog/ Underdog it is important for both the characters and the audience to distinguish between "what is" and "what aint," between what is real and what only appears to be the case, between history as it happened, even though it cannot be com-pletely recovered, and history as it has been recorded and received, which can be rewritten - rewritten in the sense of corrected through the use of new information or rewritten in the sense of imaginatively recreated. The America Plcry and Topdog/ Underdog problematize recorded or received versions of history but do not in the end deny the existence of history in the sense of that which actually happened in the past. It is "the history of History" -or the ways in which history has been told-that is "in question," as Parks comments in her essay "Possession" (4). Recorded history itself, imperfect to begin with, is often further diluted and dis-torted through its popular reception, as academic historians have long complained.

The Ameni:a Play in particular through its dramaturgy articulates how popular history derives from repetition and "hearsay" (1 7 5) and consists of what people want to believe. The play's numerous question-able representations of Lincoln's person and his death subordinate his-toricity to historical image, while Parks's parodic footnotes make fun of academic historical documentation. Lincoln is represented variously by a pasteboard cutout and a bust, at which the Foundling Father winks and nods during his monologue in act one, by several beards, one of them blond, and by his stovepipe hat, as well as by the Foundling Father's impersonation. As an event Lincoln's death (already literally theatrical in its origin and mythological in its reception) disappears in the Foundling Father's repeated performances of it. The customers who reenact the murder usually shout either, "Thus to the tyrants!" or "The South is avenged!", which are merely Booth's "purported" or "alleged" last words (165). At a yet further remove from the murder of Lincoln as history or even as legend, Parks invents and footnotes other possible last words (for example, Mary Todd Lincoln might have said, "Emergenry oh, Emergenry, please put the Great Man in the ground" [160]), and in act two the Foundling Father's representation of Lincoln's death is itself mechanical-ly reproduced on television.Is

IS On Parks's subversive use of endnotes and " last words" see Bullock, "Famous/Last Words."

THE LINCOLN MYfH 31

The final arbiter of "the history of History," The America Plqy (and also, as we shall see, Topdog/ Underdoi) suggests, is what its consumers want to see and believe and focus on. Major historical events and minor details are jumbled together in the popular imagination and actions that can be visually represented take precedence over intellectual or econom-ic developments or other large-scale movements that can be less easily or less entertainingly recounted. The Foundling Father had to give up pre-senting Lincoln's speeches because there was no money in it; people would pay only to reenact Lincoln's death, not to listen to his ideas. 16 Even in the selective version of history that the Foundling Father is allowed to offer, however, some semblance of historical accuracy is nec-essary for the public to pay up. He explains that "if you deviate too much they [consumers] won't get their pleasure" but also that "Some inconsis-tencies are perpetuatable because theyre good for business" (163). Thus he uses the yellow beard sparingly but always wears the stovepipe hat, though this article of clothing was not worn indoors in the 1860s because "people don't like their Lincoln hatless" (168).

So how else do people like or not like their Lincoln? The histor-ical reception of Abraham Lincoln among African Americans has long been problematic. He has been both revered as the Great Emancipator and in the last half century or so criticized as a white supremacistP Parks herself has said that she was not particularly interested in the issue and thinks he can be seen as both. IS Certainly, the controversy over Lincoln's legacy for African Americans resonates in both The America Plqy and Topdog/Underdog. The Foundling Father identifies with Lincoln. But Line asserts his own separate and equally significant identity: "Fake beard. Top hat. Dont make me into no Lincoln. I was Lincoln on my own before any of that" (30). Booth is even more dismissive, referring to Lincoln as "some crackerass white man" (22). Parks, however, is less interested in judging Lincoln in her plays than in "the way he shows up in the lives of her characters"l9

16 See also Haike Frank, "The Instability of Meaning in Suzan-Lori Parks's The America Play," American Drama 11 (Summer 2002): 12, 14.

17 For a brief discussion of Lincoln's reputation among African Americans, see Shenk, "Beyond a Black-and-White Lincoln."

18 Ibid., 6.

19 Ibid.

32 FoSTER

Parks's depiction of a Black Lincoln impersonator in both The America Plcry and Topdog/ Underdog ostends in particular the absence of African Americans from their own history and the need for recupera-tion.zo In the popular historical imagination the Emancipation of the Slaves is ascribed to Abraham Lincoln and mixed up with the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln's death. Thus in describing his presentation of "The Death of Lincoln," the Foundling Father squeezes "the freeing of the slaves" in between "the slipping of Booth into the presidential box unseen" and "the pulling of the trigger" (188).21 Fascination with the "Great Man" comes at the expense of all of the ordinary people, the less-er knowns, of history, especially African Americans, who are deprived of a place in their own story.22 The Foundling Father, whose name suggests that he has been abandoned and thus deprived of a heritage of which he is also the originator, attempts to create or repossess his place in history by impersonating Abraham Lincoln. He says that he wanted people to "think of him and remove their hats and touch their hearts and look up into the heavens and say something about the freeing of the slaves. That is, he wanted to make a great impresssion as he understood Mr. Lincoln to have made" (166). But like most of his customers, the consumers of history, the Foundling Father conflates history and his own representa-tion of it. As Lucy says to Brazil, "Your Fathuh became confused" (175).

Lucy, however, is not confused. She asserts, "Now me I need tuh know thuh real thing from thuh echo. Thuh truth from the hearsay" (175).23 Lucy believes it is possible to know what is "real" because her work as a "Confidence" depends on her ability to distinguish between the

20 Writing on The America Play, Elam and Rayner comment, "As a black actor appropriates and performs the figure of Lincoln, he both displaces the connection of black liberation to benevolent whiteness and centers the African American in his own per-formance" ("Echoes from the Black (W)hole," 182).

21 Frank, "The Instability of Meaning in Suzan-Loci Parks's The America Plqy," 14-15.

22 See E lam and Rayner, "Echoes from the Black (\l'')hole," 183.

23 Steven Drukman asserts that Lucy is Parks's "mouthpiece" in " Review of The America Play," Wo!llen and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 7 (1994): 191. Lucr's clarity of perception is foreshadowed in act one by the woman who disrupts the Foundling Father's enactment of "The Death of Lincoln" by shouting, "Lies!" and "Liars!" (167) when she "shoots Lincoln." Repeating her charge from downstage, the woman challenges the audience to question everything they have learned about Lincoln.

THE LrNCOLN MYTH 33

"truth" told to her by those who are dying and the "hearsay" believed by others. Her assertion that she needs to know the "real thing" contradicts the conflation of history and its representations enacted by the Foundling Father, whose stance, shared by many academic critics, seems to be that there is no such thing as history outside its representations. But Lucy knows better. If one representation is as good, or bad, as another, then there is no point in digging for the "truth." Lucy's insistence on the "real thing" causes her to urge Brazil to dig in the "Great Hole," which Brazil declares to be his "inheritance" from his father (185), for the authentic heritage of their family. In the end it is not the Foundling Father's acceptance and perpetuation of received history that gives him his own desired place in that history. He repossesses his rightful place as "One of thuh greats Hisself" (199) only when Brazil, at Lucy's insistence, digs up his father, displays him in the "Hall of Wonders," and tells his story.24 The America Plqy works metaphorically and metatheatrically not only to question history as representation but also to stage African American history in-the-making.

Though wildly exuberant and innovative in form, content, and language, The America Plqy is, in fact, the more direct of Suzan-Lori Parks's two plays that work off the Lincoln myth. In the more conven-tional and audience-friendly Tupdog/Underdog the family history of Line and Booth obliquely evokes the history of the nation. Parks echoes some of the themes of the earlier play, but what is metaphorical in The America Plqy has to be made literal in the realistic context of Topdog/ Underdog and then, if we like, we can read the literal symbolically. Line and Booth talk about the past, but, like the Foundling Father, they have been abandoned by it. They too are "foundlings" in that they were abandoned by their par-ents as children. Thus what is metaphorical Joycean wordplay in The America Plqy is literal and depressing reality in Topdog/ Underdog. Similarly, just as Brazil asserts that the "Great Hole" is his "inheritance" from his father, so Line and Booth have both received a literal "inheritance" from their parents. Before she abandoned them, their mother gave Booth $500 wrapped in a stocking; Line received a similar amount from his father. Line has spent his inheritance without thinking much about it, but Booth has held on to his and refuses to spend it on anything. In fact, Booth has never even looked at his inheritance, so we are not sure if there is any-thing in the stocking or not.

24 Elam and Rayner, "Echoes from rhe Black (W)hole," 190.

34 FoSTER

Line's wasting of his patriarchal inheritance and Booth's obses-sive husbanding of his matriarchal inheritance (supposing it exists) sug-gest interesting, if fairly obvious, interpretative possibilities. The more intellectual, sober, rational Line inherits his money from his father, whom he connects in his mind with Abraham Lincoln. Talking about his Lincoln costume leads him to remember the clothes his father left hang-ing in the closet when he left home; instead of wearing his father's clothes, Line burnt them and subsequently wore a fake version of Abraham Lincoln's clothes instead (29) . In symbolic terms, he has aban-doned and wasted his African heritage and become complicit in the Anglo-American version of history personified by Lincoln. When he loses his job, he is displaced from this tradition too. The more emotion-al, creative, imaginative Booth inherits his money from his mother. The idea of the mother, even more strongly than the father, evokes Booth's African heritage, especially if we remember that in The America Plcry, while the Foundling Father identified with Lincoln, Lucy, the mother, a practi-tioner of the "Confidence" (which I take to signify a folk art handed down by her African ancestors25), passed on to her son her belief that the "truth" of the family heritage could be found. Booth's inheritance might have saved him if he had used it. Twice it is noted that he could have spent his inheritance on his girlfriend, Grace (11, 63), whom the broth-ers refer to repeatedly as "Amazing Grace"-Booth's saving grace, as she might have been-but he chose not to. Instead he kills Grace and then Line. The stocking remains unopened, its contents unknown.

The uncertainty of Booth's inheritance points to the same prob-lem of documentation, of distinguishing the "truth" of history from the "hearsay," that pertains in The America Plcry. The objects that document the brothers' past in Topdog/ Underdog-the stocking and a "raggedy fami!J photo album" (13)-remain problematic. No one knows if there is any-thing in the stocking and we do not see any photos. The one photo that is taken during the play is fake: Booth photographs Line in his Lincoln costume with two smears of white paint on his face. The image Booth captures is neither Line nor Lincoln. It is a confused representation of a representation.

25 Such as the practices associated with death described by Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chuapeake & Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1998), 640-44.

THE LINCOLN MYTH 35

In running his 3-Card Monte game, Line understands the impor-tance of knowing the difference between "what aint" and "what is." But he does not apply this understanding to history. Like the Foundling Father, Line accepts that historical representation is based on what his customers want. He will not make Lincoln's "death" at the arcade too realistic because, he says, "People are funny about they Lincoln shit. Its historical. People like they historical shit in a certain way. They like it to unfold the way they folded it up. Neatly like a book. Not raggedy and bloody and screaming" (52) . The difference between this representation of history and the event that occurs at the end of the play-"raggedy and bloody and screaming"-when Booth shoots Lincoln, as he always must, underscores the need to replace "what aint" with "what is." Line and Booth, cut off from their past (their parents), attempt to remember their history, sometimes making it up (as in Line's cliched reference to selling lemonade "on thuh corner" [85]), sometimes relying on the uncertain documentation represented by the "inheritance" in the stocking or the photo album. But even though they are cut adrift from their own histo-ry, they cannot get away from the tradition of American history in which their own is imbricated. Booth must always kill Lincoln. It seems that this is their true inheritance. Where Brazil succeeds in recreating an African American history out of the "Great [W]Hole of History," Line and Booth are condemned to relive a representation of history they do not know how to remake.

Suzan-Lori Parks herself did not necessarily become more pes-simistic in the seven years between The America Play and Topdog/ Underdog. As she explains in commenting on the inseparability of form and content in her plays, "the container dictates what sort of substance will fill it and, at the same time, the substance is dictating the size and shape of the con-tainer."26 The two plays have a common theme: the exclusion of African Americans from American history. The joyously innovative dramaturgy of The America Play at once enables and performs Parks's revision and recreation of this history, while the naturalism and the metatheatricality of Topdog/ Underdog determine and enact the later play's ali too predictable repetition of the received history.

26 "from Elements of Style," 7-8.

JOURNAL OF AMERICA.'\! DRAMA AND THEATRE 17, NO.3 (FALL 2005)

A MID-LIFE CRITICAL CRISIS: CHIASTIC CRITICISM AND ENCOUNTERS WITH THE

THEATRICAL WoRK OF SUZAN-LORI PARKS

RENAFRADEN

Possession: 1. the action or fact of possessing, or the condition of being possessed. 2. the holding or having of something as one's own, or being inhabited and con-trolled by demon or spirit .... The definition of pos-session cancels itself out. The relationship between pos-sessor and possessed is, like ownership is, multidirec-tional.

Suzan-Lori Parks

It is a familiar state: to study a subject so deeply, or think so long and hard about a character or person that you feel that strange transfor-mation take place you can't have helped and may not even have been aware having happened until you look up and realize- that you have lost your self. You thought you were applying yourself, uncovering, revealing, coming to know it or him or her so thoroughly you felt it could be said you owned the subject. It was yours. He or she belonged to you. Except, you find, no ... you have yourself been caught, held in thrall by them. What you have studied to possess possesses you. Perhaps it becomes a more familiar state in mid-life, when you can see patterns forming, because you've studied more than one subject or when you've found yourself possessed more than once by someone. You find you've been swept away, bowled over, unsettled; you see things their way, at least for a while, sometimes even in spite of some better, cautionary sense. You think to yourself, objectively speaking, where do you stand? As a serious critic, a lover, an owner?

Although trained as a literary critic, I swerved to become a cul-tural one, not wanting to or feeling able to think much about the ways in which language does or does not mean. Instead I focused on how people working within cultural institutions used those institutions and were used by them. But now I find myself mid-career taken by a subject that is, in certain ways, a familiar one for me-it is still about the theatre, and in the United States-but it is also unfamiliar to me, because the subject is not

CHIASTIC CRITICISM 37

a project but a person, the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. Parks is princi-pally a playwright, though she's written the screenplay for Spike Lee's Girl 6 and is adapting Toni Morrison's novel Paradise for Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Films, writing a musical about basketball for Disney, and her first novel, Getting Mother~ Bot!J, has just been published. She won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001 and the Pulitzer Prize for Topdog/Underdog, a play first produced at the Public Theater in July 2001 and later opening on Broadway in 2002, directed both times by George C. Wolfe. What I find myself most curious about and attracted to and want to understand more deeply, is how she uses language. This is a new subject for me and as I think about why I'm interested in language rather than culture, a person rather than a project, I can't help but think about the grounds upon which I stand, the means by which I'll interpret, how I'm going to possess and be possessed by the words.

In the new preface for his collection of essays entitled, Must We Mean What Lf7"e Sqy, Stanley Cavell writes of his attachment to Wittgenstein, that "an object of interpretation has become a means of interpretation, and the one because of the other ... and it seems to me true in varying degrees of every writer (of what person or object not?) that I have ever taken with seriousness."! For Cavell, as a critic (and philosopher), unabashedly identifies himself with his subject though it is hard to pin down exactly where the serious "I" merges with the object. Indeed, the deep structure of that sentence seems able to be mapped in different ways, just as the act of criticism can be described variously. One way of reading the sentence is as an expression of a deeply familiar crit-ical wish: DO (direct object) V (verb) [Interprets]DO (direct object); the direct object once studied by a subject now studies itself by means of itsel Subjectivity gone, the author disappeared, characters are left stand-ing on stage with truth utterly revealed, no interference of I with them. The critic is displaced altogether except as a conduit, a perfect translator. But sometimes the immersion of reader with subject makes us have that common experience when we see the world differently because of what we've read, when all dreams become wishes or our moral genealogical certainties are turned upside down. S (subject) V (verb) DO (direct object): D O (direct object) V (verb) S (subject), the direct object is inter-preting our world for us; it is interpreting us.

1 Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Sqy? (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), xxiii.

38 FRADEN

Here, something closer to a complete reversal occurs; rather than effacement, what takes place is a neat X, the Greek letter chz; from which the term "chiastic" comes from, the inversion of parallel phrases or a criss cross. For me, what I call chiastic criticism is the deep penetration we experience when we study a writer, a person, an object, that which makes us feel lost in the grips of that other thing. And sometimes that is a consummation devoutly to be wished. We feel ourselves transformed; the world seems newly clothed. If I had to declare my own critical stance, I would say I like to think that something like SVDO:DOVS happens to me, something of the chiastic sort, that whether I study a cultural insti-tution or a literary text, the rules of that engagement become my own principles of criticism. But I am also keenly aware that no matter how nakedly confessional, no matter how ordinary, the experience of using language always has the capacity to elude full disclosure and full under-standing, a complete consummation, or merging of minds. Tha~ obvi-ously, is so familiar an experience that it doesn't seem all that important even to note. Misunderstandings can be vexing and the consequences can range from annoying to dire but as a category it is usually not surprising that they occur. Enigmas, however, are something else, puzzles that can-not be cleared up or made to fit together. We may be drawn to literature because we hope it