Zitkála-Šá

 

[On 21 July 2026, I posted “250 Years of Theater History,” which was an article from the Theatre Communications Group’s quarterly magazine American Theatre entitled “We the (Theatre) People” by Charlotte M. Canning.  Late in the semiquincentennial survey, Canning introduces Zitkála-Šá, a Native American theater artist and activist.  Canning’s mention is brief, but I found her biography fascinating and compelling, so I first added a rather long note about her and now, I’m going to write up what I can find on her life and work. 

[I’ve published several posts on Native American theater, including two series, “Staging Our Native Nation” (six parts with eight articles: 24, 27, and 30 March, and 2, 5, and 8 April 2018) and “Superheroes on Native Land” (three parts and two supplements: 21, 24, 27, and 30 January, and 2 February 2024). There are more, if you search the archive.

[One of particular note relative to this entry is “Go-Won-Go Mohawk (1859-1924)” (23, 26. and 30 December 2024), a post similar to “Zitkála-Šá” in that it’s also about the life and work of a little-known American Indian theater artist—an actress and playwright in this case.]

Zitkála-Šá (pron.: zit-KAH-lah-shah; 1876-1938), a Yankton Dakota Sioux whose name in Lakota means ‘Red Bird,’ was born on the Yankton Indian Reservation in the Dakota Territory in what’s now Charles Mix County in southeast South Dakota.  She was also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, a name she was given at the White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute, a Quaker missionary boarding school in Wabash, Indiana. 

Gertrude Simmons Bonnin was her married name; her husband, Raymond Talephause Bonnin, was also a Yankton Sioux.  We’ll see that she condemned the cultural erasure she suffered at the hands of the missionaries and teachers at the school and rejected her English name.  So I’ll call her by her Yankton name, Zitkála-Šá, as she did herself.

Though she suffered anti-Indian prejudice, discrimination, and attempts to erase her native culture, Zitkála-Šá became a musician, music teacher, composer, writer, librettist, editor, translator, and educator.  She was also a lobbyist for indigenous peoples’ right to United States citizenship and other civil rights, and one of this country’s most influential political activists for Native Americans.

Zitkála-Šá was born on 22 February 1876, ironically, George Washington’s birthday and a federal holiday from 1879 until 1970, and the year (on 25-26 June) that the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho nations defeated the U.S. Army under the command of Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer (1839-76; brevetted brigadier and major general [1963-66] during the American Civil War [1861-65]) at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Her mother, Thaté Iyóhiwiŋ (tha-TAY ee-YOH-hee-wing; 1828-1914), ‘Reaches for the Wind’ (aka: Ellen Simmons), was of Dakota Sioux heritage and her father, William Felker (1830-?), was a transient white trader of European (likely German) descent.  Felker, who wasn’t legally married to Zitkála-Šá’s mother—they had what was characterized as a common-law marriage—abandoned the family when his daughter was very young, and she was raised by her Dakota mother and aunts on the reservation in her native language.

Because Zitkála-Šá’s father left, Thaté Iyóhiwiŋ did not use the surname Felker for her daughter when she was growing up.  Her mother later took the surname of her previous husband, a man named John Haysting Simmons (d. 1874).  

When Zitkála-Šá was taken to a Quaker missionary boarding school at age eight, the administrators forced her to register under her anglicized name Gertrude Simmons. Later in life, she cast off this identity and named herself Zitkála-Šá.

(Just for the record, Thaté Iyóhiwiŋ was first married to François St. Pierre [dates unknown]. He was a French-Canadian or Métis [member of a Canadian mixed-heritage ethnic group] fur trader.  Zitkála-Šá had three older half-brothers: Henry St. Pierre [1848-1925], Peter St. Pierre [1851-1930], and David S. Simmons [1866-1946]. 

(That last is “Dawee,” whom Zitkála-Šá writes about fondly in her memoirs, American Indian Stories [Hayworth Publishing House (Washington, D.C.), 1921]; also in “Impressions of an Indian Childhood” [Atlantic Monthly, Volume 85 (February 1900)].  Dawee, ten years Zitkála-Šá’s senior, was at White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute with his sister.)

[nb: The layers of Zitkála-Šá’s family history feature conflicting documentation, in particular the marriages and relationships of Thaté Iyóhiwiŋ, including the correct names, marital status, life dates, and ultimate fates of the fathers of her children.  I have tried to keep to academic consensus and genealogical studies to follow the correct lines and omit errors and perpetuated misreadings.]

In 1884, when Zitkála-Šá was 8-years-old, Quaker missionaries came to the reservation to recruit children for their boarding school, the White’s Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Indiana (775 miles east of the reservation), established in 1861 through the bequest of Josiah White (1781-1850; Pennsylvania industrialist and philanthropist).  The “recruitment” was a Mephistophelean bargain hidden behind a snake-oil sales pitch. 

The Quaker “recruiters” articulated a highly targeted, deceptive, and manipulative sales pitch that promised children like Zitkála-Šá western knowledge, wonder, the thrilling prospect of riding on the “iron horse” (the train), “all the red apples she could eat,” and a glamorous life.

Just as in Damn Yankees, Applegate was selling Joe Hardy a life as “Shoeless Joe,” baseball star—with the devil lurking in the background ready to take his soul—Zitkála-Šá willingly, even eagerly, signed the contract, despite her mother’s disapproval, blinded by the immediate, glittering prize of a free education. 

Just as Joe Hardy didn’t initially grasp the horror of losing his soul to become a baseball star, 8-year-old Zitkála-Šá didn’t understand that the “land of red apples” was actually an engine of institutional erasure designed to “kill the Indian, save the (wo)man.”

[“Kill the Indian, save the man” was the motto of Richard Henry Pratt (1840-1924; U.S. Army officer: 1861-1903), founder (1879) and superintendent (1879-1904) of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania where Zitkála-Šá later taught.  The school closed in 1918.]

Zitkála-Šá begged her mother to let her go, and her mother, aware of the advantages that an education offered, reluctantly agreed.  The missionary school, however, wasn’t the adventure that the recruiters had seemed to promise.

At White’s Institute, she was registered under the missionary name Gertrude Simmons.  There she was forced to speak English, wear only Western dress, adopt the customs of her Quaker teachers, and to pray as a Quaker. 

At the school, the practice of indigenous cultural and religious traditions was banned.  While the missionary school taught her English literacy, Zitkála-Šá was beaten and punished for speaking her tribal language or practicing her Sioux culture.

Perhaps the most humiliating and traumatic indignity was the cutting, or “shingling,” of her hair.  In most Native American cultures, long hair is deeply sacred, serving as a physical extension of the soul, representing cultural identity and a connection to the Creator and ancestors. 

Shingling meant cutting the hair into a severely short, severely cropped “bob,” the result of which was the elimination of traditional signifiers like long braids, intricate parts, or tribal hair ornaments.  Indian children were instantly stripped of their unique tribal appearance. 

While shingling became a popular fashion trend for Western women in the 1920s, because the school staff or older students performed these haircuts rapidly and en masse, the results were often jagged, uneven, and unattractive, adding to the humiliation.

In “The School Days of an Indian Girl: The Cutting of My Long Hair” (Atlantic Monthly, Volume 85 [February 1900]; republished in American Indian Stories), Zitkála-Šá recounted:

I remember being dragged out, though I resisted by kicking and scratching wildly.  In spite of myself, I was carried downstairs and tied fast in a chair.  I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick braids.  Then I lost my spirit.

She added: “Our mothers had taught us that only unskilled warriors who were captured had their hair shingled by the enemy.”

Studious and talented, Zitkála-Šá excelled at her studies, winning prizes for essay-writing and oration.  Zitkála-Šá slowly adapted to her new environment, but the price of success was estrangement from her cultural roots. 

The off-reservation boarding schools like White’s Institute deliberately made it difficult and expensive for students to return to their homes for holidays and family visits or for parents to make the journey to the school to see their children.  The great distance between Wabash and the Yankton Reservation, as well as the cost of the train trip, meant that Zitkála-Šá was pretty much isolated from her mother and aunts, not to mention her tribe.

She later learned that the government paid the schools a bounty for every child successfully removed from reservations.  Zitkála-Šá realized that the schools were operated for cultural erasure.

Alongside the racism and ridicule she encountered, Zitkála-Šá felt a deep conflict between her native identity and the dominant white culture, the sorrow of being separated from her mother, and her joy in learning to read, write, and play the violin.  She later wrote that she quickly came to regret her decision to come to White’s Institute.

In 1887, she returned to the reservation.  She found that after her three years at the Institute, she no longer fit in her native home.  The forced assimilation was taking its toll.

So, after three years at home, Zitkála-Šá decided she wanted to continue her education and at age 15, returned to Wabash.  For the rest of her life, Zitkála-Šá lived in two worlds.

She studied piano and violin, and taught music from 1891 to 1895 when the Institute’s music teacher resigned.  She earned her first diploma and made a speech at graduation that advocated for women’s equality.  It was praised in local newspapers.  She had a gift for public speaking and music, and it was recognized.

Instead of returning home after graduation as her mother wished, Zitkála-Šá accepted a scholarship at Earlham College—a Quaker school like White’s Institute—in Richmond, Indiana, where she was one of the few indigenous students, and enrolled in a teacher-training program.  At Earlham, she began to collect stories of Native American tribes, which she translated into Latin and English.

In 1897, six weeks before she was to graduate, Zitkála-Šá had to leave Earlham for financial and health reasons.  Again, she chose not to return to the reservation but moved to Boston, where she enrolled at the New England Conservatory of Music to study and play violin. 

In 1899, she took a job as music teacher at Richard Pratt’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School.  She also hosted debates there on the issue of Native American treatment and assimilation, a fundamental principle of Pratt’s and his school’s that caused her great grief and pain from the loss of her heritage.  

Ironically, the school used Zitkála-Šá to impress the world and recruit students, and in 1900, it sent her back to the Yankton Reservation.  She was distressed to find her family home poverty-stricken and some of its land occupied by white settlers.  

Zitkála-Šá returned to Carlisle and began writing about Native American life in publications like Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Monthly.  In 1901, she wrote a piece for Harper’s, “Soft-Hearted Sioux” (Volume 102 [March 1901]), that described the profound loss of identity felt by a student at the Carlisle Indian School.  Pratt called it “trash,” and she was fired from Carlisle that year.

Zitkála-Šá wrote pieces that portrayed Lakota people as generous and loving, actively fighting stereotypes in the mainstream that were used in arguments supporting assimilation.  She went back to the reservation to look after her mother, who was in failing health, and continued to collect Sioux stories.

In 1901, she published Old Indian Legends (Ginn and Company [Boston]), a collection of 14 Sioux tales, some she learned as a child and others she gathered from different tribes.  It was directed principally at children in an attempt to preserve Native American traditions and stories, and to gain respect for Native cultures from Euro-Americans. 

At this time, Zitkála-Šá also took a job as a clerk in the Bureau of Indian Affairs office at Standing Rock Indian Reservation, inhabited by Sioux peoples approximately 320 miles northwest of the Yankton Reservation.

Working at Standing Rock, she met Captain Raymond Bonnin (1880-1942), a mixed-race Yankton Dakota and former U.S. Army officer (1914-20) who followed Yankton culture; they married in 1902.  For the next 14 years (1902-1916), they were assigned to the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, the homeland of the Ute Indian Tribe in Vernal, Utah, where Bonnin served as the BIA school superintendent.

In 1910, while she was living and teaching on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, Zitkála-Šá attended a local Ute performance of the Ute Sun Dance ritual.  There, she met William F. Hanson (1887-1969; composer and music teacher), later a professor of music at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, who specialized in Native American music.

[Hanson was in Vernal, near which he was born and raised, after completing a two-year program in music at BYU and his two-year stint as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.  He was teaching at the Uintah Academy, a private LDS-operated school in Vernal, at the time that Zitkála-Šá taught music at the federal Uintah Boarding School located in Whiterocks, on the reservation.]

Hanson and Zitkála-Šá began discussing the cultural significance of the ceremony, which led the Native American musician to propose they co-write an opera to preserve the music and rituals.  Over the next three years, they collaborate on The Sun Dance Opera, the first opera co-written by a Native American.  She wrote the libretto and the songs, while Hanson wrote the score.  

Zitkála-Šá played melodies on the violin and flute, and Hanson wrote them out and orchestrated them to use as the basis of his composition.  The songs were based on the sacred ritual of the Sioux Sun Dance to explore Ute and Yankton Dakota cultures.  The Sun Dance was federally outlawed from 1904 to 1978, so by folding the sacred ritual into a Western operatic structure, the librettist legally bypassed federal restrictions and preserved her culture.

[There were several Sun Dance rituals, including a Ute ceremony and a Sioux ceremony.  The Ute dance is derived from the Plains version, brought home by a Shoshone visitor, who passed it on to the Utes.  While there are distinct Sioux and Ute variations of the ritual, they share the same Great Plains root.

[In the Sioux tradition, on which the opera is based. the Sun Dance is the most sacred spiritual ceremony practiced among the Plains Indian nations.  It’s held during the summer solstice and serves to renew the community’s connection with the Earth, the spirit world, and the Creator. 

[Tribe members unite for prayer, healing, and cultural renewal.  A specially chosen cottonwood tree is erected at the center of a circular dance lodge to represent the connection between earth and sky.  Participants fast from food and water for several days while dancing continuously. 

[To demonstrate ultimate devotion, male dancers often endure flesh piercings on their chests or backs. They are attached to the sacred pole by leather thongs, dancing until the skin tears away as an offering for the well-being of the tribe.  (The Utes don’t practice this ritual.)  Dancers look directly at the sun to absorb its spiritual power, offering their personal sacrifice so that the earth, the buffalo, and the tribe will be spiritually renewed for the coming year.]

The storyline of The Sun Dance Opera takes place in the Pipestone Quarry near Yankton, South Dakota, in some unspecified, pre-colonial time.  The plot centers on the pursuit of Winona, a chief’s daughter, by two suitors: Ohiya and Sweet Singer.  (nb: Zitkála-Šá and Raymond Bonnin’s son was named Raymond Ohiya Bonnin [1903-39].)  The climax features the Sun Dance ritual.

In the prologue, Sweet Singer, a Shoshone man, violates his nation’s religious rules and travels to the land of the Sioux.  Sweet Singer is set up as the piece’s villain.  He commits blasphemy by stealing and misusing sacred medicine.  He steals “sacred love-leaves” belonging to a holy Medicine Man and uses them selfishly and “lightly.”  

By doing so, he unwittingly forces a Shoshone maiden to fall deeply in love with him.  This spiritual transgression brands him an immoral outcast, forcing him to flee his homeland and travel into Sioux territory, where he sets the main plot in motion by pursuing Winona.

The narrative proper starts off with the Sioux protagonist, Ohiya, pledging to win Winona’s affections.  To win her hand, Ohiya must prove his endurance and bravery in the grueling Sun Dance.  The opera culminates in this intense physical and spiritual ritual (the singers and actors feigned the body piercing), and the chief sanctions the union of Ohiya and Winona, as Ohiya has fulfilled his Sun Dance vow.

The Sun Dance Opera premiered for three nights in February 1913 at Orpheus Hall on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, performed by members of the Ute Nation who lived on the reservation.  The performance received immense regional praise and community pride locally. 

The enthusiastic reviews, however, often carried a highly patronizing tone typical of the assimilation era.  The Vernal Express reviewer wrote very positively about the artistic spectacle but viewed the ritual through a lens of exoticism.  

The writer said that the indigenous performers “danced and forgot the present while they dreamed of battles, a trail of blood and a pile of scalps,” mirroring the government rhetoric that stereotyped Native traditions as inherently violent.

The LDS-owned Deseret News of Salt Lake City, the major state paper, framed the première as an “event of more than passing importance to the people of Utah.”  The review-writer focused heavily on the deep emotional impression the opera left on the audience and praised the “sympathy with which the native peoples are represented.”

The opera was performed several times at BYU, including twice in 1914 and once in 1935.  Then, on 27 April 1938 (three months after the librettist’s death), the opera débuted at the Broadway Theatre, where it was put on by the New York City Light Opera.  Reviews were universally bad and a planned second performance was cancelled.

At the New York production, the critical elite universally dismissed the work, entirely failing to understand its cultural or political significance.  New York papers expected the rigid, grand operatic structures of Europe.  Confronted with a hybrid of Western operetta melodramas and traditional Native melodies, critics panned it as a failure of authenticity on both sides.

They viewed the music as primitive or mismatched, failing to see the opera as a deliberate act of indigenous self-determination and political resistance.  Rather than viewing it as a historic piece of art, they treated it as an unpolished, outdated regional novelty.

In the New York Times, Howard Taubman (1907-96), a prominent music critic and reporter for the paper at the time (he eventually became the Times’ chief music reviewer [1955-60] and later its chief theater reviewer [1960-66] when Brooks Atkinson [1894-1984] retired), wrote:

The performance did not persuade a listener that Mr. Hanson had succeeded in welding his material and his knowledge into a cohesive work for the stage.  In transforming his studies into an opera, Mr. Hanson produced, although he evidently did not intend it, a score that is reminiscent of the European operettas of the nineteenth century and at times of a hokum treatment of the Indian.  The music is light and tuneful, but it could be applied with equal success to a story about Graustark [i.e., a highly implausible and melodramatic piece of writing].

Hanson received all public credit for the opera, with no mention of Zitkála-Šá, which was also true in 1935 at BYU.  She wasn’t involved in the production, nor in the revisions made to her libretto and Hanson’s composition which doubled the show’s length. He added a number of songs and rewrote those remaining from the original text.

After 1916, when she and her husband left the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, Zitkála-Šá never returned to public music-making.

While on the reservation, Zitkála-Šá continued to write articles about her life and native legends for English readers. In addition to Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Monthly, her essays also appeared in American Indian Magazine (published by the Society of American Indians, Washington, D.C., 1910-19), which she edited from 1918 to 1919.  

[The SAI American Indian Magazine should not be confused with the current American Indian, the quarterly magazine published since 2000 by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.]

She joined the Society of American Indians, a group founded in 1911 with the purpose of preserving traditional Native American culture while also lobbying for full American citizenship.  She became increasingly vocal in her criticism of the Bureau’s assimilationist policies and practice, reporting abuse of children when they, for example, refused to pray as Christians.  

[Prior to 1924, American Indians could only obtain citizenship through specific treaties, military service, or complex naturalization processes.  While the 14th Amendment to the Constitution (1868), which addresses citizenship rights and equal protection under the law, excluded indigenous people, Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 to grant full citizenship to all Native Americans born in the U.S.

[Despite gaining U.S. citizenship, some states actively barred American Indians from voting for decades, a disenfranchisement that wasn't fully resolved until the 1960s.  New Mexico was the last state officially to grant Native Americans the right to vote in 1962. 

[(Full access to the ballot box was not guaranteed, however.  Many states continued to use indirect suppression tactics similar to Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise indigenous communities as they did for other minorities.  These pervasive barriers prompted Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which provided federal oversight and outlawed discriminatory voting mechanisms nationwide.)]

While Zitkála-Šá’s pieces were often autobiographical, they were still political and social commentary that showed her increased frustration with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which fired the couple in 1916.

In 1916, the couple moved to Washington D.C., where Zitkála-Šá served as the secretary of the Society of the American Indian.  In 1926, she founded the National Council of American Indians, an organization that worked to improve the treatment and lives of Native Americans.  

At the same time, Zitkála-Šá also worked with white suffrage groups and was active in the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) beginning in 1921.  She created the Indian Welfare Committee of GFWC in 1924.

That year, when the Indian Citizenship Act passed Congress, she ran a voter registration drive among Native Americans, encouraging those who could to engage in the democratic process and support legislation that would be good for Native Americans.

In 1923, Zitkála-Šá published a report entitled “Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes – Legalized Robbery” (Indian Rights Association).  This article was instrumental in getting the government to investigate the exploitation and defrauding of Native Americans by outsiders for access to oil-rich lands.

By 1928, she was an advisor to the Meriam Commission, which would lead to several improvements in how the Federal Government treated native peoples.

[The Meriam Commission, led by technical director Lewis Meriam (1883-1972), was a team of researchers who published a landmark 1928 report titled “The Problem of Indian Administration.”  Commissioned by the Institute for Government Research (later the Brookings Institution) and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, it investigated the devastating social and economic conditions of Native Americans.

[The Meriam Report documented widespread, extreme poverty, highlighting how assimilation policies stripped Native Americans of millions of acres of land.  Federal boarding schools were heavily criticized for providing substandard vocational training, severe overcrowding, malnourishment, and actively destroying indigenous cultures.

[The report identified dismal healthcare, resulting in high rates of infant mortality, tuberculosis, and trachoma.  The commission recommended moving away from harsh, forced assimilation, improving education, granting Native Americans more autonomy, and enhancing the protection of their property rights.

[The report caused a national outcry, ultimately laying the legislative groundwork for the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which promoted tribal sovereignty and self-governance.]

Zitkála-Šá lectured across the country, promoting the preservation of Native American cultural and tribal identities while continuing to write.  Her books and essays became more political in such works as American Indian Stories (1921) and “Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians,” published in 1923 by the Indian Rights Association. 

American Indian Stories was a mix of tales and legends, non-fiction essays about her culture, and other indigenous peoples’ customs and beliefs, but it also included several autobiographical articles and so, serves as her memoir.

Zitkála-Šá continued to work for improvements in education, health care, and legal recognition of Native Americans as well as the preservation of Native American culture.  She died at 61 on 26 January 1938.  She’s buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Viginia, with her husband, who died on 24 September 1942 at 62.

[Zitkála-Šá had only a brief encounter with theater.  Among her other talents—and she had many, as we’ve seen—she was a consummate professional musician on both the violin and piano.  She had a special gift for composition, and she was a devoted music conservationist.  But she had other drives in her life.  Marisa Mathias of the National Women’s History Museum characterized her thus:

Zitkála-Šá was one of the most important reformers of the 20th century.  She helped empower Indigenous people by writing about their culture, history, personal experience, and concerns.  Her writings forced the audience to face the complexities and beauty of Indigenous culture and the tragedy of the Native experience in America.  And her activism influenced change that advocated for citizenship rights, better educational opportunities, improved health care and cultural recognition and preservation for Native Americans.

[Many of Zitkála-Šá’s works are accessible online.  Here are a few links: Old Indian Legends (Standard Ebooks), Old Indian Legends (Project Gutenberg), Old Indian Legends (Electronic Text Center), American Indian Stories (University of Wisconsin – Madison), American Indian Stories (Standard Ebooks).]

Ado Annie Is In My House!

 

For years, I’ve been struggling to remember some details of an occasion that took place when I was a teenager and my parents were living in Germany where my father was a Foreign Service Officer serving at the U.S. embassy in Bonn, the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany at the time.  It was pretty significant in my life—you’ll see why shortly—and I recall much of it, but one particular detail has evaporated from my memory.

Here’s what I could remember, some of which I recounted in my article about the 1957 broadcast of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella (“Cinderella: Impossible Things Are Happening (CBS-TV, 31 March 1957)” [25 April 2013]):

Actress Celeste Holm (1917-2012), a favorite actress of mine because of, among other roles, Ado Annie in the original Broadway production of Oklahoma! (1943), a performance I only knew from my dad’s cast album, and the Fairy Godmother in the 1965 remake of the R&H Cinderella, and her then-new husband (1966-96 [his death]), Wesley Addy (1913-96), had completed a State Department goodwill tour of the Middle East.  

On their way back to the States, they stopped in Germany, and did a special show of their performance for an invited audience of the embassy.  As I was home from college in the States—I pegged the period of the performance as the summer of 1966 or ’67, when I’d have been 19 or 20—I attended with my parents.  

My dad was the Cultural Affairs Officer at the time, which made him the ostensive official host, so after the performance, my parents held a reception for the little troupe in our apartment in the embassy residence compound in the Plittersdorf section of Bad Godesberg, then a Bonn suburb—now a borough of the larger city—where most of the embassies were located.  

So, Celeste Holm was a guest in my parents’ apartment in Germany years after the first Cinderella in 1957 (which is the topic of the linked post above), and shortly after the remake (which aired on 25 February the year before the embassy performance).  As Cultural Affairs Officer at the embassy, my dad was her troupe's official host in Bonn—but all I knew was Ado Annie is in my house!  

(If you read “A Broadway Baby” [22 September 2010], you’ll understand why I was so thrilled about this happening.  I was still in high school in Geneva when Cinderella débuted in February ’65, but I saw it in a rebroadcast when I was back in the U.S.)

The Holm-Addy show was a collection of scenes from plays and prose literature that showed love, romance, and relationship between a boy or man (Addy) and a girl or woman (Holm) through different ages, from teens to seniors. 

One I remembered, but couldn't identify now, was from a story.  The couple were college students and the boy was constantly instructing the girl on her decision-making because, he insisted, she was using her emotions to reach her conclusions, not logic. (The undertone was that this was the difference between men’s thinking—superior—and women’s—inferior.) 

Finally, the girl tired of this and broke up with the boy and informed him she was going out with another boy at the school.  The now-dumped boyfriend argued that she couldn't choose this guy over him, and she countered each of his points with logic, just as he’d been instructing her.  He quickly descended into pure emotional appeals, and she pointed this out and turned on her heels, leaving him standing alone on stage, completely defeated.

My main problem is that I've never been able to identify the story.  I thought it was a Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) piece, but since that could have been wrong, I was flying blind.  (Less important was putting a date, or at least a year on the Bonn performance, and maybe the title of the show itself, if it had one.

There was a program, possibly just a mimeographed sheet, because I remember that Holm announced that it was her custom to “sell” her autograph for cash that would be going to UNICEF, and I got her to sign my program.  This has stuck in my mind, first, because I thought it was sweet, and, second, because she charged 25¢—but she accepted quarters or any (close) equivalent in other currency, such as West German marks (a mark at that time was worth exactly 25¢), French francs (20¢), or Swiss francs (23¢).  Unfortunately, I no longer have the program.

Finally, in the past couple of weeks, I was able to dig out more of the pertinent facts.  

First, I went to Google AI.  (I had tried plain Google years ago, before there was Google AI, and came up with nothing because I couldn’t devise useful search words.  I’d had the same problem with another search, the one that was about what turned out to be “Ragamuffin Day” [26 November 2016], but then I stumbled on the main clue by chance.)

With AI, I could ask questions and keep narrowing down the answers until I had something concrete.  Then I found a New York Times report on the Holm-and-Addy tour that filled in more information.  Here’s what I ended up with:

First, AI narrowed down the source material for the scene as a classic short story called “Love Is a Fallacy” by Max Shulman (1919-88), a humorist best known for his short story and television character Dobie Gillis.  (The story was written in the mid-to-late 1940s and was first published in the June 1951 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine.)

(It wasn’t Parker, obviously, but another scene I remembered from the performance—about a newly married couple on a train to their honeymoon—was from one of her stories [“Here We Are” (Cosmopolitan, 31 March 1931)].  

(In this story, a young bride and groom, married for exactly “two hours and twenty-six minutes,” are on a train bound for their honeymoon.  Overwhelmed by nervousness about the looming consummation of their marriage, about which they never speak, the couple acts out their anxieties by picking petty, passive-aggressive fights.  The newly-weds seem to have come to an unspoken consensus by the end, but Parker implies that this is only the first of many failures to communicate.

(I knew Parker was somewhere on the program!  But that also explained one reason that I could never identify the story I was looking for: I was searching works by the wrong author!)

I was already pretty sure the Shulman was the right piece because in logic, a “fallacy” is an argument, or apparent argument, which professes to be decisive of the matter at issue, while in reality it isn’t.  That’s exactly what the boy in the scene accuses the girl of doing, and what she later forces him into doing himself in the end.

AI also gave me a link to an online copy of the story so I could read it without having to get to a library and search through short-story anthologies to find a print copy.

Google AI also summarized “Love Is a Fallacy” so I could see that it fit the description of what I was looking for based on what I could remember (which I had fed into the AI):

The unnamed narrator, a “freshman in law school,” is an insufferably arrogant, self-proclaimed genius college student.  He views his roommate, Petey Bellows, as “dumb as an ox,” and sets his sights on Petey’s beautiful girlfriend, Polly Espy.  Deciding that Polly has everything he needs in a wife except a brain, he cuts a deal to trade Petey a coveted raccoon coat, which he wants more than anything, in exchange for the chance to court Polly.

In his endeavor “to get her mind up to the standard I required” as a suitable wife, the narrator takes Polly out on a series of “educational” dates where he condescendingly teaches her the fundamentals of logic, using all the academic Latin names for the devices of argument and the logical fallacies, explicitly to correct her “emotional” female thinking. (This is where the scene in the performance started.)

He explains, for example, that Dicto Simpliciter means an argument based on an unqualified generalization and that Hasty Generalization is generalizing from inadequate evidence.  The narrator then gives Polly an example of Post hoc [ergo propter hoc] (“after this[, therefore because of this”]), a fallacy which presumes an event causes a closely succeeding one merely on the grounds that it followed so soon afterwards.  The law student, who, “It happened . . . was taking a course in logic,” proceeds to teach Polly five more logical fallacies.

After the first session, the narrator is discouraged because Polly only agrees with everything he tells her without seeming to understand it.  He keeps trying, and begins to see some signs “that Polly was not altogether a cretin.”  He admits that he even loves her, comparing himself to Pygmalion and Polly to Galatea.

After days of lessons, the narrator decides Polly is finally “enlightened” and confesses his love.  When Polly rejects him to stay with Petey, the incipient lawyer is furious and argues that she’s making an illogical choice.  Every time he screams an argument at her, Polly perfectly identifies the logical fallacy he’s committing, throwing his own lessons back in his face.  

The would-be attorney entirely abandons his “superior logic,” descending into desperate, emotional pleading.  Polly calls out his final fallacy and walks away, choosing Petey simply because Petey owns a raccoon coat.  

Now, the Holm-Addy tour.  Google AI informed me that it went out in the spring of 1966, so I was basically right about that.  It didn’t just cover the Middle East, however, but also parts of Europe.  The performance was entitled With Love and Laughter or Invitation to Love, apparently depending on where it was being presented.

The New York Times article—“Tour Abroad Set By Celeste Holm” by Louis Calta, 26 March 1966—contradicted Google AI on the last detail, reporting that the show was called Interplay – An Evening of Theater in Concert.  Since I have no recollection on this point, I can’t resolve this conflict.  The paper said that it would “primarily . . . be performed before university students studying English,” though, of course, that didn’t apply to the special performance at the Bonn embassy.  

I’m not positive, but I think the show was presented not at the embassy itself, but at the Embassy Club, a community center located in the Plittersdorf residence compound. The audience was made up of invitees of the ambassador (and my dad’s ultimate boss) George C. McGhee (1912-2005; U.S. Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany: 1963-68), but the club, which was tax-exempt and duty-free, was generally open only to employees of the American embassy and foreign diplomatic personnel so as not to complete with local German businesses and commercial establishments.

(If he wasn’t out of town at the time, the Deputy Chief of Mission, the second-in-command at the embassy and my father’s immediate superior, Martin J. Hillenbrand [1915-2005; DCM in Bonn: 1963-67], would also have been at the performance.  In June 1972, about a year after I arrived in Berlin as a Military Intelligence officer, Hillenbrand took up his post as the new ambassador to the FRG; on 7 July, he made his first visit to Berlin, where the ambassador maintained an office in the Headquarters Compound, where my unit was also located.)

The six-week tour began in Cairo, Egypt, on 29 May 1966 and then traveled on to Syria, Lebanon, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland.  Six weeks from 29 May would be 10 July; that’s when the troupe should have finished up their tour.

From what I’ve learned, the troupe finished in Reykjavik, Iceland, and flew to Germany the next day.  They were apparently in Bonn for the following three days, departing for the States on the 15th.  Making allowances for a rest day after six weeks and 6,565 miles of traveling and performing, and time to pack and handle the departure logistics for the final flight home, it seems the performance on 12 July was most likely, leaving the 13th for PR, press, and courtesy calls. 

I would have easily been home from college in Virginia after my freshman year.  That makes perfect timing for what I remember.  I was 19 on my previous birthday, December 1965.

(As it happens, I had to stay in Washington for a week or so after the end of classes and exams that summer, but school was finished by early June, so there’s little doubt that I would have been back in Germany by mid-July.)

The show ran two hours, according to the Times.  It was divided into two parts, “Before Marriage” and “After Marriage.”  Calta (1913-90), a theater reporter and reviewer for the paper for 49 years at his retirement in 1977, noted that the texts were drawn from the work of 22 writers.  (Holm told Calta that she “was reluctant to give details about the program’s format because of the possibility of imitators.”)

The article mentioned both Holm’s work on Oklahoma! and her practice of charging 25¢ for her autograph.

As a result of this inquiry—which, by the way, was no longer of practical use, so it was now only a matter of scratching a really annoying itch that I’d had for something like 15 years—I learned a few surprising things about the story.  First, it’s a Dobie Gillis story.  Yep, the “unnamed narrator” is Dobie!  

After the first publication in Cosmopolitan, “Love Is a Fallacy” was compiled with Shulman’s other Dobie Gillis stories in the book The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis: Eleven Campus Stories (Garden City Books, 1951).  That’s what revealed that Dobie was the narrator, since his name is never used in the story.

When the stories were turned into a weekly TV series (after the film adaptation of the anthology, The Affairs of Dobie Gillis [MGM, 1953]), The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, which ran on CBS from 1959 to 1963, a first-season episode was based on (and entitled) “Love Is a Fallacy” (episode 22, 1 March 1960).

I had watched the first two seasons of Dobie Gillis (then I went away to boarding school, where I didn’t watch TV much, and then I went to live in Germany, where, as you might imagine, there wasn’t any American television).  But I’d never read the stories—I didn’t know there were stories!—so I didn’t know that the Dobie Gillis of the TV show (played by Dwayne Hickman [1934-2022]) was very different from the character in Shulman’s stories (even though the author was creator, writer, and executive producer of the show.

The reason that I first started to look for the information on what turned out to be “Love Is a Fallacy” is that I was working on a post for Rick On Theater for which I wanted the name of the piece.  The post was “The Relation of Theater to Other Disciplines” (21 July 2011).  

It was a question my boss handed me when I was teaching middle school theater at a private school in Brooklyn back in 1977.  As I recall, it was prep for answering the question, voiced apparently by some parents, why their child should take a theater class at all.  (The school mandated that middle schoolers take a class in theater, dance, and visual arts each for one-third of each year.)

When I started ROT, I thought blogging on that question—“How does theater compare to other academic disciplines?” with regard to educational value—would be worthwhile.  One point I was making in my post was that there are plays that can be used as models of logic, and the scene I remembered from the Holm-Addy performance leapt immediately to mind as a great example.

But, aside from not being able to identify the source of the scene, I came to realize that it was almost certainly not from a play at all.  That made the search moot, and I used other scripts to exemplify that point.  But the failed search stuck in my head (and my craw), and I wanted to find the source of that scene that had made such an impression on me, even though the need for the information no longer existed.  

And, so, here we are.  Mission accomplished at long last.  I won.  Even if there’s no prize, I still won.

250 Years of Theater History

 

[On 16 July 2026, I posted “250 Years of Dressing for the American Dream” by Vanessa Friedman (under the headline “Dressing for the American Dream”).  That was about fashion, with an unstated theater connection to costume.  Now I’m posting another semiquincentennial article, this one with an unquestionable theater connection—it’s about theater history!

[Maybe five pages—that’s how long the article was in print—isn’t anywhere near sufficient space to cover a quarter of a millennium of theater in America, but there was enough coverage to introduce to me some pretty interesting things I didn’t know or hadn’t considered.  See if you agree.] 

“WE THE (THEATRE) PEOPLE”
by Charlotte M. Canning 

[This article was published in American Theatre 42.4 (Summer 2026 – “Theatre History”) on 30 June 2026. Under the same headline, it’s posted on the website of the Theatre Communications Group at AMERICAN THEATRE | We the (Theatre) People.]

The history of live performance on this continent has been about art, commerce, innovation, stereotyping, and the breaking of stereotypes—i.e., messy democracy in action.

John Adams [1735-1826; a Founding Father of the Unites State and the second President of the United States: 1797-1801] once predicted [in a letter to his wife on 3 July 1776] that July 4, the date of the vote ratifying the Declaration of Independence, would be “celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary festival . . . with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires, and Illuminations from one End of this continent to the other.”

[In the quotation above, Adams was, however, referring to 2 July, the day the Continental Congress actually officially voted to sever ties with Great Britain, making the colonies independent states—rather than 4 July, when Congress formally adopted the wording of the Declaration of Independence, drafted to explain their decision to the world. Adams believed, erroneously, as it turned out, that 3 July would forever be marked as America's true birthday.]

Adams had little interest in theatre at the time, but he understood that live performance [i.e., “Shews”] is bound to democracy as a civic space of convening, public discourse, and collective engagement. Just over 50 years later, a visiting Frenchman would affirm Adams’s sense that democracy and theatre are bound up with one another. “When a revolution that has changed the social and political state of an aristocratic people begins to affect literature, it generally manifests itself first in the drama and remains conspicuous there,” politician and historian Alexis de Tocqueville [1805-59; French diplomat, political philosopher, and historian] argued in Democracy in America [De la démocratie en Amérique; two volumes: Librairie de Charles Gosselin, 1835 and 1840]. The book is still read today for its prescient insights into and understanding of the United States, and its passing observations on U.S. theatre offer a tidy summary of why and how it persists in the 21st century.

[The two volumes of de Tocqueville’s study were first published in English by London’s Saunders and Otley (translated by English political writer and jurist Henry Reeve [1813-95]) in 1835 and 1840, later the same years as the original editions. The first U.S. editions, the Reeve translations with an original preface especially for American readers, were released in 1838 and 1840. They were published by Adlard & Saunders, a newly established U.S. branch of the British publishers, in partnership with George Dearborn & Co. of New York City. There are, of course, many more recent republications, both in French and English.]

In de Tocqueville’s nine months of travel around the nation in the company of magistrate Gustave de Beaumont [1802-1866; French magistrate and prison reformer]—an itinerary which spanned Boston, upstate New York, Quebec, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Memphis, among other places—it is certain that the two men attended the theatre in Philadelphia, New York City, and New Orleans, though there may have been other visits that they did not document. What would de Tocqueville and de Beaumont have seen on American stages in the early 19th century? In Mobile, Alabama, and New Orleans, they would have seen theatre produced by managers Noah Ludlow [1795-1886; actor and manager of a theater company touring Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi] and Sol Smith [1801-69; actor and theater manager in St. Louis], whose partnership exemplified one way theatre operated up through the mid-19th century. From the 1830s through the ’50s, Smith and Ludlow commanded the theatre scene in the South and Midwest. They not only controlled acting companies and repertoire; they also built, ran, and owned influential theatres, most significantly the St. Louis Theatre [1837-51; first theater in St. Louis; first real theater west of the Mississippi] and the St. Charles Theatre in New Orleans [1835-1967; first English theater in New Orleans]. Their acting companies were itinerant, stopping in smaller towns to perform while traveling to and from Smith and Ludlow’s larger theatres.

Indeed, theatre in the U.S. has always been about travel and movement. Large companies known for their impressive quality and stars with name recognition were no less itinerant than small groups who hustled from small town to small town trying to make a living. With itinerancy, though, came suspicion. In Mark Twain’s famous novel, Huckleberry Finn encounters two fraudsters [the Duke and the King in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Chatto & Windus [U.K.], 1884; Charles L. Webster And Company [U.S.], 1885)] on the Mississippi who offer a “Shaksperean [sic] Revival ! ! ! Wonderful Attraction!” with the “world-renowned tragedians, David Garrick the Younger [1716-79] of Drury Lane Theatre London, and Edmund Kean [1787-1833] the elder, of the Royal Haymarket Theatre.” These may have been fictionalized parodies, but their struggle and desperation would have been instantly recognizable to any 19th-century jobbing actor. Harry Watkins [1825-94; actor, diarist, playwright, and theater manager], whose career spanned the 1840s to the late ’80s, never impersonated a fake British star (he did claim to perform “in imitation of the celebrated Lucius Junius Brutus Booth”), though he knew his Shakespeare well. But his plight was often no better than Huck Finn’s companions. Of an 1845 stint in Galveston, Watkins rejoiced that one show had done well enough that he could afford both shoes and food. “I had nothing on my feet before, and now I have a good pair of boots, and enough money left to buy something to eat with and that is a good deal in Texas,” he wrote in his diary.

[Lucius Junius Brutus Booth, better known as Junius Brutus Booth (1796-1852), was an English-born American theatrical tragedian, one of the most prominent actors of the 19th-century American stage. He was the father of 12 children, including Edwin Booth (1833-93), widely regarded as one of the greatest American tragic actors of the 19th century and the first American-born actor to achieve an international reputation; Junius Brutus Booth, Jr. (1821-83), an actor and theater manager; and John Wilkes Booth (1838-65), the actor who infamously assassinated President Abraham Lincoln (b. 1809; 16th President of the United States: 1861-65) at Washington, D.C.’s Ford’s Theatre on 14 April 1865.

[Curious fact: Gail Merrifield Papp (b. ca. 1935), widow (and partner) of New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater founder Joseph Papp (1921-91), whom she married in 1976, is the great-great-granddaughter of John Wilkes Booth. Though Booth never married, he had a secret, long-term, out-of-wedlock affair that in 1859 produced a daughter, Gail Papp’s great-grandmother.  The Booth family never acknowledged the relationship, but private family records and contemporaneous letters confirm it.  (The descent passed through the female line, so the surname changed with each generation until Gail Papp’s grandmother, Booth’s granddaughter, married a man named Merrifield in 1899.)]

Though the two Frenchmen were unimpressed with the quality of what they saw (“The theatres are bad,” de Beaumont bluntly observed), the important thing to note is the connection de Tocqueville posited between democracy and theatre. “Most of those who frequent the amusements of the stage do not go there to seek the pleasures of the mind, but the keen emotions of the heart,” de Tocqueville argued. Audiences in democracies like to see onstage “that medley of conditions, of feelings, and of opinions, which occurs before their eyes. Theatre becomes more striking, more vulgar, and more true.”

If de Tocqueville and de Beaumont were looking for the most meaningful theatre on the continent, they may have been looking in the wrong place, and with the wrong measuring tools. Theatre in the U.S. was not a proper literary endeavor until well into the 20th century. Instead, theatre as it emerged in what became the United States, and was practiced up through the end of the 19th century, was not about inventing a new literary canon but about innovation in performance itself. As theatre historian Constance Rourke [1885-1941; author and educator; known for shaping the fields of American studies, American literature, and American folklore] has argued, Americans “emerged as the theatrical race,” defining “theatrical” in opposition to “the dramatic” and characterizing it as “full of experiment . . . closely interwoven with the American character and the American experience” [American Humor: A Study of the National Character (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931)]. Rourke went on to argue that some of the earliest performance innovations in North America happened during encounters between Europeans and Indigenous Americans. She found evidence for the claim in treaties as early as 1677.

“These treaties were essentially plays,” Rourke wrote, “recording what was said in the parleys, including bits of action, the exchanges of gift, of wampum, the smoking of pipes, the many ceremonial dances, cries, and choral songs. Even the printed form of the treaties was dramatic: The participants were listed like a cast of characters, and precise notations were made as to ceremonial action” [The Roots of American Culture (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1942)].

Rourke and subsequent theatre historians also recognized the primary, and problematic, invention that North American theatre contributed to global entertainment: blackface minstrelsy. The practice emerged in the early 1830s as a white performance form presented as a representation of Black life. Comic actor Thomas Dartmouth Rice [1808-60; performer and playwright] claimed to be mimicking a Black man he had seen in the street when he performed “Jump Jim Crow” [song and dance from 1828 that Rice performed in blackface all over the U.S.] but his appropriation, distortion, and exploitation owed far less to accurate research than to the white racist imaginary. The first minstrel shows featured white performers in blackface (often burnt cork; eventually makeup companies offered specialized products), though by the mid- to late 19th century Black performers found that their access to professional performance often depended on their willingness to “black up” for minstrel shows.

[Minstrelsy (or minstrel shows) was a 19th-century American theatrical entertainment where white performers wore blackface makeup to act out demeaning, racist caricatures of African Americans, establishing harmful stereotypes of Black people as lazy, dimwitted, and buffoonish.

[Originating in the 1830s in New York, minstrelsy became the most popular form of public entertainment in the country by 1848. Minstrel shows emerged as brief burlesques and comic entr’actes in the early 1830s in the Northeastern states. They were developed into full-fledged art form in the next decade.

[Shows typically featured a mix of comedy skits, musical numbers (such as early ragtime), and variety acts. It laid the foundation for vaudeville (early 1870s-early 1930s) and modern American musical theater. Its legacy of stereotypes heavily influenced early 20th-century radio, television, and film.]

While de Tocqueville and de Beaumont did not comment on minstrelsy, they did notice that racism was no less part of the theatre than the nation at large. As de Beaumont later reflected, “The first time I attended a theatre in the United States, I was surprised by the care with which white spectators were distinguished from Black audiences.” He used this practice in his 1835 novel Marie, or Slavery in the United States [Stanford University Press, 1958 (first English edition); Marie; ou, L'esclavage aux États-Unis (Libraire de Charles Gosselin, 1835)] to illustrate the ferocious violence Black people experienced under white supremacy.

Across the 19th century, theatre was where American national identity was rehearsed and produced, often self-consciously: In 1828, actor Edwin Forrest [1806-72; American Shakespearean actor] offered a prize for a new play in which “the hero shall be an aboriginal of this country.” While Forrest was primarily looking for a starring vehicle for himself, he also earnestly wanted to develop U.S. dramatic literature. Metamora, or the Last of the Wampanoag [debuted, 1829 in New York City], by John Augustus Stone [1801-34; American actor, dramatist, and playwright] became a staple in Forrest’s repertoire, and inspired a character that resonates to the current day, that of the “vanishing Indian.” Theatre historian Bethany Hughes [Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma; DOB unknown] has noted that so-called “Indian plays” like Metamora typically depict “noble savages dying to make way for virile young Americans” [Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity (NYU Press, 2024)]. Like minstrelsy’s racist depiction of Black people, these Native American stereotypes have persisted into the 21st century.

Plays by Shakespeare [1564-1616]—whom Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82; essayist, lecturer, philosopher, minister, abolitionist, and poet] described as “the father of the man in America,” despite his being English—were also a staple of the emerging American identity. De Tocqueville remarked “there is hardly a pioneer’s hut in which the odd volume of Shakespeare cannot be found.” Audiences were even willing to resort to violence to assert American ownership of the Shakespearean tradition. Forrest, for one, had a long-established rivalry with British actor William Charles Macready [1793-1873], which came to a head in 1849, when Macready dared perform Macbeth the same night as Forrest and only a few blocks away in New York. A fierce riot broke out, leaving dozens dead and more than 120 injured. The Astor Place Riot, named for the theatre where Macready was performing, was fueled more by class identity and anti-British hatred than fandom per se. Nevertheless, the riot demonstrates how integral theatre was to life in the U.S.

[The Astor Place Riot, which left between 22 and 31 rioters dead, and more than 120 people injured, broke out on 10 May 1849. It wasn’t named for “the theatre where Macready was performing,” the Astor Place Opera House (often commonly referred to as the Astor Opera House), I maintain, but the area around the theater that was known by New Yorkers simply as Astor Place. (The theater in which Forrest was playing, the Broadway Theatre, was about a mile further downtown in the area now known as TriBeCa.  Neither theater building exists today.)

[The violent clash between the fans of rival actors began at the Astor Place Opera House, the actual riot—which involved a crowd of over 10,000 people, brick-throwing, and the calling in of the state militia—predominantly played out across the entire multi-block neighborhood pocket. The riot was named for the location where the event occurred, a section of the East Village bounded by East 4th Street on the south, Broadway on the west, East 8th Street on the north, and Third Avenue on the east.]

In the post-Civil War years, American theatre also grew into a big business, and no business was bigger than vaudeville. From the 1880s to the 1930s, vaudeville circuits criss-crossed the nation. No matter `available. Vaudeville, a descendant of variety theatre, concert saloons, minstrelsy, burlesque, circuses, and medicine shows, among other popular forms, in turn shows its influence on entertainment today, from standup comedy to late-night TV to musical theatre.

[Vaudeville (early 1870s-early 1930s) was a variety entertainment consisting of short acts such as acrobatic turns, song-and-dance routines, animal acts, and so on, popular especially in the early 20th century. American vaudeville was essentially a parallel version of British music hall; though they arose independently, they shared the same core format. Furthermore, turn-of-the-20th-century vaudeville served as the direct structural and stylistic model for early television variety shows. Early TV stars like Milton Berle (1908-2002), Bob Hope (1903-2003), and Jack Benny (1894-1974) got their professional start directly on vaudeville circuits.]

Crucially, vaudeville distinguished itself from some of its disreputable predecessors thanks to the influential impresario Tony Pastor [1837-1908; impresario, variety performer, and theater owner; sometimes referred to as the “Dean of Vaudeville”], who prohibited the sale of alcohol and proscribed risqué or salacious content. This allowed him to offer “family-friendly” fare and to expand audiences to include middle-class spectators, especially women, who had shunned or been excluded from earlier diversions. At its peak vaudeville encompassed everyone from ill-paid small-time hacks in slapdash shows to big-time operators with national names performing the highest-quality work in state-of-the-art theatres.

The capital of the big-time circuit was unquestionably New York’s Palace Theater [sic], built in 1913 by manager-producer Martin Beck [1868-1940] of the Orpheum Circuit, which was operated by producer-manager B. F. Keith [1846-1914]. Keith founded the United Booking Office of America. That eventually merged with Beck’s company, further consolidating their power. This merger was typical of this period, following the recurring trend toward monopolies, and not only in vaudeville. One of the earliest and most successful of such empires was the Theatrical Syndicate, run primarily by Charles Frohman [1856-1915], Abraham Lincoln Erlanger [1859-1930], and Marcus Alonzo Klaw [1858-1936] from 1888 to 1919. This triumvirate controlled booking in most theatres, as well as the careers of many actors. Their domination was eventually successfully challenged by the Shubert brothers [Lee Shubert (1871-1953), Sam S. Shubert (1878-1905); Jacob J. Shubert (1879-1963)], and the Syndicate’s influence waned after 1910. As the Shuberts’ actions demonstrated, no control is so absolute that it cannot be challenged (today the Shubert Organization [incorporated, 1904] owns nearly half of Broadway theatres [as of 2024, 17 Broadway theaters]).

De Tocqueville once wrote that “the pit has often imposed its law on the boxes”—i.e., in the popular arts, ordinary people will not be dictated to by the elite if elite taste contradicts their needs and desires. This popular pushback might show up not only in theatre’s content but also in its practices, including racial segregation. In the 1920s, Sherman H. Dudley [1872-1940] founded the Theatre Owners Booking Association (TOBA), which established a circuit to provide Black performers with long-term contracts. Dudley also bought or leased theatres in the South and Midwest to ensure greater access for Black entertainers.

By far the most important issue being wrestled with on U.S. stages was the question of who belongs here and why. For their part, Indigenous people used theatre in multiple ways to provide their answer, and to resist their erasure from the national narrative. Activist and artist Zitkála-Šá [1876-1938; writer, editor, translator, musician, educator, and political activist] (Yankton Dakota Sioux, also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin) wrote the libretto for The Sun Dance (1913) in collaboration with composer William F. Hanson [1887-1969; composer and music teacher; specialized in Native American music]. Her goal was to merge Ute stories and experiences with Western art to create serious work from the Indigenous perspective; the opera debuted in Utah that year and was performed on Broadway in 1938.

[Zitkála-Šá (Red Bird) was born on the Yankton Indian Reservation in Dakota Territory (now South Dakota). At 8-years-old, Quaker missionaries recruited her for the White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute, a boarding school in Wabash, Indiana (775 miles east of the reservation). There she was given the missionary name Gertrude Simmons.

[Though she found great joy in learning to read, write, and play the piano and violin, she experienced great grief and pain in losing her heritage by the forced assimilation and the cutting of her hair. After returning to the Yankton Reservation in 1887 over a school break, she felt that she no longer belonged there after her time at the institute, so she returned to the institute to further her education. She later learned that the government paid the schools for every child successfully removed from reservations, realizing that the schools were created for cultural erasure.

[Zitkála-Šá began writing and producing works that portrayed Lakota people as generous and loving, actively fighting stereotypes in the mainstream that were used in arguments supporting assimilation. Working on the Yankton Reservation with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, she met Captain Raymond Bonnin (1880-1942), a Yankton Dakota; they married in 1902. For the next fourteen years (1902-1916), they were assigned to the Uintah-Ouray Reservation in Vernal, Utah.

[From 1897 to 1898, Zitkala-Ša studied and played the violin at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. In 1910, she met Hanson, a professor of music at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Hanson and Zitkála-Šá worked on the Sun Dance Opera for the next three years. She wrote the libretto and the songs for the story, while Hanson wrote the score. The songs were based on the sacred ritual that was federally outlawed from 1904 to 1978. By folding the sacred ritual into a Western operatic structure, the librettist legally bypassed federal restrictions and preserved her culture.

[Zitkála-Šá died on 26 January 1938. She is buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Viginia, with her husband, who died on 24 September 1942.

[The Sun Dance Opera premiered for three nights in February 1913 at Orpheus Hall on the Uintah-Ouray Reservation. It was performed by members of the Ute Nation who lived on the reservation. The opera was performed several more times at BYU, including twice in 1914 and once in 1935. The Broadway début was on 27 April 1938 (three months after the librettist’s death) at the Broadway Theatre, where it was put on by the New York City Light Opera. Reviews were universally bad and a planned second performance was cancelled.

[Hanson received all public credit for the opera, with no mention of Zitkála-Šá, which he’d also done in 1935 at BYU. She wasn’t involved in the production, nor in the revisions made to her libretto and Hanson’s composition which doubled the show’s length. He added a number of songs and rewrote those remaining from the original text.]

Other notable Native artists of this period include popular vaudevillians Mary Nelson Archambaud (Penobscot), a.k.a., Molly Spotted Elk [1903-77; Native American dancer, actress, and writer], and Princess White Elk (Yurok, born Bertha Thompson [1886-c. 1924; performer, model, and activist]). Writer-performer Will Rogers [1879-1935; vaudeville performer, actor, and humorous social commentator] and playwright Lynn Riggs [1899-1954; author, poet, playwright and screenwriter; his 1931 play Green Grow the Lilacs adapted into the 1943 musical Oklahoma!] were Cherokee Oklahomans with influence in multiple entertainment venues, including vaudeville, Little Theatre (a sort of precursor to regional theatre as we know it), Broadway, and Hollywood.

Immigrants also employed theatre to claim space in their new country. On the vaudeville stage, actors Joe Weber [1867-1942] and Lew Fields [1867-1941], both children of Jewish Eastern European immigrants, formed a double act [Weber and Fields; first stage appearance: 1876; formed vaudeville company: 1885; Broadway debut: 1893; partnership dissolved: 1904] as two bumbling German immigrants trying to make it big in the U.S. Immigrants from one part of the world performing as those from another was a popular approach: Chinese American Lee Tung Foo [1875-1966] performed in multiple languages, sang popular and classical songs, and caricatured recent immigrants, including the Irish, Scottish, and Chinese. Diverse playwrights, including María Ruiz de Burton [1832-95; first female Mexican-American writer published in English], Israel Zangwill [British; 1864-1926], Li Ling-Ai (Gladys Li) [1908-2003], [1906-63], and Eugene O’Neill [1888-1953] all wrote movingly about their immigrant and first-generation experiences.

[The immigrant on the list is:

•   Ruiz de Burton, who was born in Baja California in 1832, before the Mexican-American War. After the war, but before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), Ruiz de Burton moved to Monterey in Alta California, which would become U.S. territory pursuant to the treaty. (Part of it would become the State of California in 1850.) Unlike the stereotypical immigrant, Ruiz de Burton became a U.S. citizen automatically by virtue of her residency in a territory acquired by the United States.  

[The first-gen writers are:

•   Zangwill was the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe—but immigrants to Britain. He wrote about that experience in works such as the novel Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People (William Heinemann (London); Jewish Publication Society of America (Philadelphia), 1892; dramatized for Broadway in 1899 and filmed in 1915), but in 1908, he wrote The Melting Pot that was a hit in Broadway (6 September 1909-1 January 1910; Comedy Theatre). The play gave us the very phrase that defines the American immigrant experience.

•   Li, a writer, dancer, playwright, and film producer, was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. Both her parents were Chinese immigrants. Before the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), Li returned to China to study Chinese music and directing theater productions at the Beijing Institute of Fine Arts. Because of the war. She returned to Honolulu ib 1937, where she conceived the project that would become Kukan (1941), a harrowing documentary exposing the atrocities of the Second Sino-Japanese War. It became the first feature-length documentary to win an Academy Award. In 1972, she published Life is for a Long Time: A Chinese Hawaiian Memoir, which detailed her parents’ medical careers and first-generation life in Hawaii. While a student at the University of Hawaii in the 1920s, she studied playwriting, and in 1924, she composed The Submission of Rose Moy (produced 1928), her most famous work was the very first play written and published by an Asian American woman. The play’s a melodrama detailing intergenerational conflict, assimilation, and the clash between Western freedom and traditional Chinese immigrant customs.

•   Odets became the Group Theatre’s signature playwright with the debuts of Waiting for Lefty (1935) and Awake and Sing! (written, 1933; produced, 1935) and his reputation is inextricably connected with the Group. Odets was the son of Russian- and Romanian-Jewish immigrants, and the characters in Awake and Sing! are a working-class immigrant Jewish family living in a crowded Bronx apartment during the Great Depression. The narrative centers on the struggle between the older generation’s traditional dreams and the younger, American-born generation’s search for identity, dignity, and economic stability (see “Awake and Sing!, et al.” [3 April 2017]).

•   O’Neill is the sole American who’s a Nobel laureate playwright and the only playwright to win four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. He was the son of Irish immigrant actor James O'Neill (1847-1920) and Mary Ellen Quinlan O’Neill (1857-1922), who was also of Irish descent. He became involved with the Provincetown Players in mid-1916 and the Players performed many of his early works in their theaters both in Massachusetts and in Greenwich Village, New York City. Long Day’s Journey into Night is widely regarded as his magnum opus and one of the great American plays of the 20th century. It was written in 1939-41 and first published posthumously in 1956. The play portrays a family, the members of which are the semi-autobiographical representations of O'Neill, his older brother, and their parents, struggling to grapple with the realities and consequences of each member's failings. (A Moon for the Misbegotten, written in 1943 and premiered on Broadway in 1957, is a sequel to Long Day’s Journey.)]

Much American theatre bloomed well outside the mainstream of national life. Indeed, for centuries theatrical works in what would become the U.S. were performed in Spanish, as theatre was first used to colonize and convert Indigenous people to Christianity as early as 1568. In the 18th century, Spanish settlers wrote plays and performed them in Alta California and Louisiana, well before the first purpose-built theatre was built by the British in their North American colonies in 1716, and before even the arrival in 1752 of Lewis Hallam’s [British; ca. 1714-56] English theatre company.

Well into the 19th century and the 20th, theatre in languages other than English dominated the stage. German-language theatre could be found in the Midwest and West, especially Wisconsin and Texas; Chinese theatre was a staple of entertainment in San Francisco and across the U.S. from the 1850s on. Yiddish theatre would be ubiquitous in New York—from 1890 to 1940 there were 200 Yiddish theatres in the U.S., most in New York City [see “National Yiddish Theatre – Folksbiene” (23 August and 26 August 2012]—and would go on to birth a generation of artists, including Stella [1901-92; actor and acting teacher] and Luther Adler [1903-84; actor], Harold Clurman [1901-80; director], and Lee Strasberg [1901-82; director and acting teacher], who would revolutionize theatre practices in the U.S.

Up through the mid-20th century, the most robust theatre circuits with the largest audiences were Spanish-language ones. They ranged from small family companies like the Compañía Hernández Villalongín, which performed on either side of the U.S.-Mexican border, to large-scale commercial businesses, with San Antonio and Los Angeles as major hubs. In the 1920s, Los Angeles easily supported over 20 theatres that changed their bills daily. Circuses and tent shows blanketed the Southwest, especially after the 1910s, when the violence of the Mexican Revolution [1910-20] drove many artists to settle more permanently in the U.S. Up through the 1940s, artists from Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico would frequently rent and fill Broadway houses.

In the early 20th century, a division began to emerge between theatre as a crowd-pleasing business and as a challenging art form. Broadway was not yet the nexus of commercial theatre that it would become after World War II, but it did reflect the emphasis on profit and popular appeal that was becoming increasingly distasteful to theatre artists who saw themselves as serious art makers.

Meanwhile, theatre was being taken up as a legitimate academic subject, with universities as diverse as Brown, Yale, Case Western Reserve, and Howard establishing theatre departments. The Little Theatre Movement encouraged the proliferation of theatre outside of commercial structures, with director Helen Spaulding declaring Chicago’s Skyloft Players in 1942 a “theatre OF the people FOR the people BY the people.” Alexis de Tocqueville would certainly have approved.

The American theatre as we know it today, though it contains traces of and owes large debts to all this history, was largely built since the 1950s and ’60s, fueled by the nonprofit funding model, the Ford Foundation, and the early support of the National Endowment for the Arts. All those pillars are in question today. Indeed, now is a perilous moment to be arguing for a telling of history that encompasses our nation’s extraordinary diversity. Not long after being inaugurated for this second term, President Trump [b. 1946; 45th President of the United States: 2017-21; 47th President: 2025-2029] issued the executive order [#14253, 27 March 2025] “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which sought to prohibit any telling of the national story that seeks to “undermine remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.”

If it is true, as de Tocqueville put it in 1835, that “no part of literature is more closely or more abundantly linked to the present state of society than the theatre,” then we should be able to look to our nation’s stages, as we always have, for signs of where our country has been—and where it is going.

[Charlotte M. Canning is the Frank C. Erwin, Jr. Centennial Professor in Drama at the University of Texas at Austin and a recipient of the University of Texas Systems Board of Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award.  She’s also director of UT-Austin’s Oscar G. Brockett Center for Theatre History and Criticism and has served as president of the American Society for Theatre Research.

[Canning has won the 2016 Joe A. Callaway Prize for Best Book on Drama or Theater for On the Performance Front: US Theatre and Internationalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and the 2006 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History for The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance (University of Iowa Press, 2005).  She’s also the co-editor, with Tom Postlewait, of Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography (University of Iowa Press, 2010). 

[Besides AT, her writing has been seen in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and Truthout, and her op-eds have appeared in Time, the Houston Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Washington Post, The Conversation, and other publications.]