October
17 ,
2003
A
Historian in the Theatre:
A Conversation with Daniel Czitrom
| 
Daniel
Czitrom at the eleventh-century ruins of the historic
abbey in Dunfermline, Scotland |
Among
the offerings at the 2003 Edinburgh Fringe Festival--the largest
arts festival in the world--was Red Bessie, a play cowritten
by history professor Daniel Czitrom and Sarasota-based playwright
Jack Gilhooley.
The play, a historical drama with original and period songs,
follows the lives of two American Communists between
the radical idealism of
the 1930s and the anti-Communist repression of the 1950s. Red
Bessie ran for 25 performances in August, receiving glowing reviews
from critics and an enthusiastic response from audiences. In
the September 5 issue of the Times Literary Supplement, critic
Keith Miller described Red Bessie as "clearheaded and humane,
not unaware of the hurt that political idealism can cause, and
more fun than might be expected of such a high-minded project." Writing
in the London magazine Three Weeks, Ron Nissin called it "a
brilliantly illuminating, frequently hilarious political
show." The CSJ recently spoke to Czitrom about the play and how a historian
finds his way into theatre.
Is Red Bessie your
first play?
It’s my second, and both have been collaborations with
Jack Gilhooley, an alum of the New Dramatists in New York and
a widely produced playwright. In 1992, the MHC theatre department
produced our first play, Big Tim and Fanny, here at the Rooke
Theatre. That play grew out of work I had published on "Big
Tim" Sullivan, a larger-than-life Tammany Hall politician
who was very influential in turn-of-the-century New York City.
As a historian, one is bound by certain rules of evidence, but
of course there are often large gaps in the historical record.
That was the case with Sullivan—there are not a lot of
written sources about him. Writing the article, I kept thinking, "There
are a lot more here but I can’t do it as straight history." So,
I put an ad in the Village Voice that literally read, "Historian
Seeks Playwright." I received several responses and found
that Jack was the collaborator I had been searching for. Big
Tim and Fanny explores the political relationship between Sullivan
and Mount Holyoke’s own Frances ("Fanny") Perkins.
Perkins, at that time, was a young reformer who made common cause
with Big Tim in the wake of the disastrous 1911 Triangle Fire.
|
Lauren
Wood and John Barron, who performed Red Bessie at the
2003 Edinburgh Fringe Festival |
What inspired the creation
of Red Bessie?
I have deep family connections to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,
the roughly 3,000 American men and women who traveled illegally
to Spain in the late 1930s to fight fascism and defend the Spanish
Republic. My mother’s brother was killed there, and my
father had two cousins as well, one of whom also died there.
Some years ago my father’s sister gave me a bunch of letters
that their cousins, Joe and Leo Gordon, had written her from
Spain. I eventually published these, with an introduction, in
the Massachusetts Review. My goal was to explore their motives
for going to Spain, to humanize these very dedicated, idealistic,
and ultimately doomed radicals. I found that their experiences
in their neighborhood, their family, their union organizing,
and other political activism before they went to Spain were far
more crucial for understanding them than anything else. I was
also struck by the dramatic potential of their story. Jack Gilhooley
had the original idea of using the letters and their story as
a starting point for a play.
|
Red
Bessie handbill |
What is the play about?
There are two characters and two acts. Act I is set in 1938 at
an event that is both a fundraiser for the Abraham Lincoln
Brigade and a memorial for Leo Gordon, who has died in Spain.
We created the character of Bessie Markowitz, a radical folksinger
and Leo’s cousin. At the memorial, Bessie reads letters
from Leo, the actual ones he wrote to my aunt. So we make use
of historical materials—events, letters, and songs. The
other character is Martin Franklin, Bessie’s brand-new
guitarist, who is very different from her. Martin is a Yale
grad, soft-spoken, and a pacifist, in stark contrast to Bessie,
a brash, confident, dedicated Communist. The first act brings
Bessie and Martin together for the first time. The key dramatic
subtext of the first act, which is also based on fact, is that
Leo has left his pregnant wife to go to Spain.
The play is not a romantic celebration of 1930s radicalism—and I think
reviewers and audiences picked up on this. There’s a lot of questioning.
For example, what does it mean when you put political idealism before your
family? The second act takes place in 1953, on the eve of the execution of
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of conspiracy to give atomic
secrets to the Soviet Union. Martin and Bessie are now married and have kids.
They’re still folksingers who have been fighting the good fight and rallying
the troops for years. Of course, now anticommunism is the dominant theme in
American politics. And here’s this couple who, 15 years ago, were so
much more optimistic and felt like they had a place in American political life.
The second act is about what happens to political idealism, as the two struggle
both with blacklisting and the revelations of atrocities in the Soviet Union
under Stalin. Communists all over the world began questioning their loyalty
to the party that had shaped their lives. So the second act is more wistful,
more elegiac. But the humor and singing are there as well.
How do you translate what you do as a scholar to creating public
entertainment?
History is an act of imagination. You’ve got to try to
re-create an event, a milieu, or a person’s life or whatever
you are working on, using whatever sources you can find. But
I think the best historical writing goes beyond that to interpreting
and ascribing meaning to events, and to bringing people alive,
so that the reader can understand the choices people faced at
a particular time. There is a creative aspect to history, especially
when the gaps in the sources require greater speculation. And
since historians are bound by rules of evidence, I find that
historical drama offers an alternate way to represent the past
and to try to find historical truths.
What was it like staging Red Bessie at the Fringe?
Firstly, I want to thank the College and the faculty grants committee,
which helped us enormously by putting up some money that we
needed for registration and publicity at the Fringe. We are
very grateful to them. As for the Fringe, we were really unprepared
for the enormity of it all—the opening-day parade along
Edinburgh’s Royal Mile attracted about 150,000 people.
There were hundreds of productions going on, about 80 percent
of which were comedies. The best way I can describe the Fringe
scene is to liken it to a Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland movie
on acid—thousands of young people all giving out flyers
to each other for their shows. Everybody’s in show business.
A lot of productions had Web sites touting their shows, and
many of the UK people were over there promoting in advance.
We, on the other hand, arrived with our two actors, Lauren
Wood and John Barron, our stage manager, Naomi Miller, and
our minimal set. The biggest problem we had, the biggest
problem everyone had at the Fringe, was attracting audiences
because there were so many shows. That made the positive
critical response even more heartening.
Do you have future plans
for the play?
We would love to have a production in the States and we are pursuing
several possibilities—but developing new work in the American
theatre is extremely difficult. There are fewer and fewer venues,
fewer producers willing to take chances, fewer regional theatres
willing to do something new instead of yet another Neil Simon
play. And let’s face it, the whole nonprofit world is struggling
right now. We’re committed to trying to get another production,
but it may take a while. We’ve really been encouraged by
the reviews—not just the critics, but also the audience
reviews. The Fringe has a Web site where audience members can
post their own reviews. And that’s great, because a lot
of times a critic will write a review and ignore the audience
response.
What is it like to see your work come to life on the stage?
The most creative aspect is the work of moving from the page
to the stage. That process by which actors and directors interpret
what the words mean and try to connect emotions and physical
presence to what’s been written, that’s where the
art is. The flip side is that after you see your play performed
25 times, all the weaknesses, all the jokes that fall flat,
all the things that aren’t quite working become glaring.
That’s painful, but it’s also part of the creative
process. So we’ll be doing some revising. One of the
lessons I’ve learned is how much serendipity is involved
in theatre—in casting your performers, in who comes to
see your play, in who reviews it. I find the collaborative
work of theatre to be a refreshing alternative to the more
solitary work of scholarship, and it involves very different
rewards and challenges.
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