Looking Back to Look Forward, Part Two: Revolutions

This article is Part Two in a series. Check out Part One here.

Amidst our recent heatwave, Dr. Heather Nathans, chair of the department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at Tufts University, a theatre professor, practitioner, and writer raised by two historians, felt a particular physical connection to the stuffiness eighteenth century Bostonians would have undoubtedly experienced in theatres during the summer and during the summer of 1776, specifically. The original spark which fueled her desire to write two books on Boston's theatre history was a query against the widespread belief that the puritanical politics of Boston meant that there was no history of theatre here. This misconception has affected the idea of Boston theatre with longstanding consequences. A Nora Long, who has also conducted extensive research into Boston's theatre history, rolls her eyes at critic Elliot Norton's famous belief that Boston has served most significantly in theatre history as a "try-out town" for shows to later shine on the Great White Way. "You wouldn't tell a Red Sox fan that the pinnacle of Red Sox history was playing at Yankee Stadium," she quips.

Right now, Nathans is interested in Boston theatre's lackluster attention to gender, ethnicity, and racial inclusivity dating back to the developments immediately following the Revolutionary War. "There was a real power struggle in Boston," she begins. "There was this rising generation of white, moneyed individuals who decided a new nation needs to have a new theatre. Their immediate thought followed that 'if we build it, art will come'." So this group of men established a "temple of art", as she describes it. The Federal Street Theatre, in what is now Boston's Financial District, drew from European architectural styles and encouraged an outcropping of buildings meant to resemble Bath in England all around it. "They published a poem encouraging anyone to attend the theatre and inviting the general public to forget their rabid political alliances and join in a 'democracy of glee', but the structuring of the building- with divisions by class and race- militated against those purported ideals." She observes how a theatre lit by candles in a standard style first established in the Jacobean era would keep an audience in full lighting, able to see each other (and be seen by each other) as crowds were encouraged to take breaks in tea rooms, card rooms, and even open ballrooms during an evening's entertainment. This constant awareness of societal division in full light kept anyone from experiencing a 'democracy of glee'. "Those rich men in power struggled to create a sense of unity without disrupting the systems which facilitated inequitable relationships." Immediately, one can draw parallels to Boston theatre's more recent obsessions with updated facilities, expensive redesigns of lobby spaces, and aiding in our city's rapid gentrification. "This model of theatre aspires to democracy, and certainly can put the entire scope of democracy on view, but the power structures of the outside world are still at play."

Additionally, she continues, there was a combative mentality against the Federal Street Theatre amongst Bostonians in the eighteenth century. "Meanwhile, disenfranchised men from Boston's working class developed a rival theatre company. The Haymarket Theatre was built in order to provide access for working class white people." Even before the Federal Street Theatre burned down, the competing theatres struggled to attract audiences whose ticket sales could keep them open. Although depleted audience interest can cause strife for any theatre, Boston quickly established itself as a city with two theatres, each capable of seating roughly 2,000 people, but a total population ranging from only 15,000 to 17,000. This over-saturation of performances caused a bitter rivalry between two organizations to implode upon itself. "That was the problem -- there weren't 4000 theatre-goers per night in Boston to fill both houses."

Well into the nineteenth century, an over-ambitious hubris continued to drive Boston's wealthy population. Long notes, "the nineteenth century saw the establishment of some of the most classically beautiful sights in Boston, and affluent people are largely responsible for them. The Museum of Fine Arts, Symphony Hall, the Copley Square Boston Public Library, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the public gardens." (Of note, Boston boasts the first public botanical garden in America and the public library is still the third largest in the country after the Library of Congress and New York Public Library, which is technically publicly as well as privately-endowed.) "There was a drive for Boston to claim the identity as the 'Athens of America'." However, as demonstrated in the struggles to operate two theatres concurrently earlier in the city's history, there is sometimes a disjointedness between the image of Boston desired by the wealthy elite and the reality of the city's general population.

Early in the nineteenth century, even before the official beginning of the Civil War, another important chapter of Boston's theatre history was being written. William Cooper Nell, a writer, publisher, and abolitionist as well as the first ever African American civil servant thanks to his work at the post office, could arguably have started Boston's Black theatre movement. "He founded the Histrionic Club," Nathans adds to his many accolades, "which, after the first professional Black theatre was founded in New York, became the country's first amateur Black theatre company."

She explains how the Histrionic Club was founded. "Cooper Nell noticed that, even if Black people were allowed into theatrical spaces, they were not always welcomed."

He had bought tickets to a program at the Howard Atheneum and was violently removed, along with his guests, because of the color of his skin. One of his companions won a legal suit against that theatre company, but Nell noted that the Atheneum may have only been more upfront about their racism than other theatres in the city. "He believed Black audiences should see themselves on stage. (The Histrionic Club) wrote original works and performed popular plays that the white theatres were doing. They welcomed painters, dressmakers, and the inner artistic circle of Black Bostonians to work alongside formerly enslaved people. After the Civil War Nell start(ed) a fund to initiate legal suits against places like theatres that he anticipate(d) would try to deny access to Black audience members."

In an attempt to convince Boston to declare Crispus Attucks the first casualty of the Revolutionary War, Cooper Nell organized an all-Black reenactment of the Boston massacre tableaux based on Paul Revere's famous engraving. "Nell reimagine(d) the American Revolution as a Black Revolution. This was a man who would fight to be present in white spaces," Nathans eulogizes. "He fought legally, morally, through performance-issues that we still see being fought in American theatre today. The Histrionic Club fought on many fronts, but above all, they thought of the future."

It was not too far in the future that another pioneer would pick up the torch. In 1890, just 16 years after Cooper Nell's death, the Black Boston arts scene would again be changed forever when 16 year old Maud Cuney Hare, the daughter of two mixed-race parents, arrived to study piano and theory at New England Conservatory. As a performer, musicologist, teacher, and administrator, she elevated Black Boston artists to acclaim and founded the Allied Arts Players, Boston's first semi-professional Black theatre. "She's the only reason why anyone would look to Boston- a mostly white community at the time-for a Negro Theatre." Lisa Simmons, who runs the Roxbury International Film Festival, the largest film festival in New England celebrating filmmakers of color from around the world, has a special connection with Boston's Negro Federal Theatre, which operated under the Federal Theatre Project from 1935-1939. (Cuney Hare died in 1936, but Simmons believes her gender more prominently than her poor health or age precluded her from appointment to the head of the Negro Federal Theatre.)

First lady Eleanor Roosevelt advocated for specific allotments for workers in the creative sector in the face of the Great Depression, an era which seemed to foretell of the terrors of an unregulated free market. A Nora Long explains, "the federal government intervened as part of the New Deal when they didn't want to see violinists paving roads. At this point, Boston was considered a tough town for theatre, but the Federal Theatre Project saw success in promoting theatres who spoke uniquely to populations less likely to see themselves represented on stage." Long draws contemporary connections to the Front Porch Arts Collective, Arlekin Players, Apollinaire Theatre's bilingual works, and the Puppet Showplace Theatre as comparable to the successes of Boston's Negro, Yiddish, Italian, puppetry, and Children's theatre troupes. Some of these examples "perform for people in their own languages or make efforts to be more affordable and are therefore more accessible than other institutions of comparable renown."

Simmons' family was largely involved with Boston's Negro Theatre, so she stumbled upon this local history completely unintentionally. Under the direction of Ralf Coleman, who was the only Black man appointed to run a federally-funded theatre, Simmons' grandfather, Lorenzo Quarles, worked as a stage manager, and many of her aunts and uncles were involved in productions too. "When I started asking questions about this troupe, my grandfather just said, 'We were just doing plays and having fun.' You never really think you're in the middle of a movement when it's happening. But they loved what they were doing! And in this field, that love for the work drives a lot of us.

"All of the troupes worked separately and were paid separately. But all of them rehearsed in the same spaces and pulled from each others' troupes as needed. This project fed a lot of people. They performed at the Huntington Theatre sometimes. A lot of Black actors don't realize it, but I tell them; 'When we stand in the Huntington, we are on hallowed ground. In this space, Black actors told their own stories. Black actors did Shakespeare. They did everything.'"

Further reflecting on this idea of unknown spaces in Boston serving as 'hallowed ground', Simmons traces the driving force behind Black theatre from the end of the nineteenth century to 2020. "Even if the younger generation doesn't know the former generation, the same thing that pushed Maud Cuney Hare is pushing the next generation. It pushed Ralf Coleman up through the 1960s, the Black art movement of the 1970s, Jacqui Parker in the 1980s, and today, Summer Williams, Dawn Simmons, Company One Theatre, and the Front Porch Arts Collective."

In 1939, when funding including that of the Federal Theatre Project was scrapped for fear the programs were a front for communist conspiracies, Simmons says that many of these newly-christened theatre artists "returned to work at the post office or as waiters, but they were living high off the hog during the Depression." Ralf Coleman, however, along with a few others continued performing. Some Boston locals had traveled with Coleman from the Broadway production of Roll Sweet Chariot: A Symphonic Play of the Negro People in Four Scenes by Paul Green. Among those actors was Simmons' uncle, Frank Silvera, who appeared again on Broadway in A Hatful of Rain, in movies including The Greatest Story Ever Told and Flowers in the Attic, and on television with appearances including The Twilight Zone and a recurring role on High Chaparral.

"I don't think a similar program in response to COVID-19 is so far-fetched," Simmons poses. "I don't see anything similar aside from the National Endowment for the Arts, which is limited. But I could imagine a federal program funding theatre, or writing, or photography. The difference is we need a new Eleanor Roosevelt- someone to advocate for the arts and our culture as necessary, not just nice to have."

As the future of the theatre industry waivers, it can be reassuring that major historic shifts have been survived by our art form before. "History, however, is far from being repeated, despite many continuities with the past. Our predicament, in the global age of frantic individualism, is unique and deeper, its dangers more diffuse and less predictable." Pankaj Mishra's 2016 book, Age of Anger: A History of the Present warns of the failings of prescribing historically-successful diagnoses to current affairs. Our search for comfort and stability can lead us through a cautious buffet of the past without relying on any prior system as entirely sound, considering those systems all failed enough to land us in the uncertain positions in which we now find ourselves. It can also lead us through a survey of how deeply rooted our current inequities can be.

Saturday, in part three, we'll weigh the pros and cons of federally-funded art work with Dr. Heather Nathans, discuss financial alternatives to federal-funding with A Nora Long, and hear from Donatella Galella, author of America in the Round: Capital, Race, and Nation at Washington, DC's Arena Stage on what it means for a regional theatre to program with its constituents in mind.

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