The Reviews of 'Dreams of Violets'

 

When I posted “Dreams of Violets: AI Movie Première” on Sunday, 7 June 2026, I promised to return and add a survey of the film’s reviews published after the opening at the Tribeca Film Festival on the 10th.  I got distracted, but now I've typed up the review round-up.  It came out longer than I anticipated, so I decided to post it as a separate piece.

[I strongly suggest, however, that readers who haven’t seen the first report on the film go back and read it before trying to make sense of the reviews.  I explained and defined a lot in the original post that I haven’t duplicated below.]

The Tech

In his review of Dreams of Violets in Variety (“‘Dreams of Violets’ Review: What Does a Film Made Entirely with AI Look Like? AshKoosha’s Iranian Protest Drama Is Dramatically Numbing, but It’s Still aStartling Portent of the Future”), Owen Gleiberman stated:

[T]hose of us at the premiere were really watching—and evaluating—two films at once.  The first is a drama, set in Tehran . . . .  But the other movie, which is far more interesting and significant, is the one that demonstrates, simply by virtue of its existence, what some of the possibilities might be for the use of AI within the world of feature filmmaking.

I also see the criticism of Dreams of Violets as the evaluation of two aspects of the film: the AI technology in all its implications, including its ethical considerations, and the cinematic or artistic assessment—how good a movie it is, irrespective of how it was made.

I think I covered the ethical debate over AI filmmaking in the original post, and I don’t think seeing the movie has changed people’s minds about where they stand in that debate.  So, let’s see what reviewers said about the effectiveness or lack thereof of the technology.

In “Iran’s Political Violence In A.I.-Generated Film” (online: “The Violence in Iran Was Real. The Film Showing It Was A.I.”), Malia Mendez and Matt Stevens reported in the New York Times that among viewers, “Some felt it was evident that the footage had been generated by A.I. and not filmed, while others said they were shocked by how real the people looked.”

“Andres Ramirez, a filmmaker [Mexican; b. 1996; independent filmmaker],” from whom they quoted, “was critical, calling some scenes ‘cartoonish’ and akin to ‘early PlayStation 2 graphics.’  The characters’ emotional reactions, he added, did not always look genuine.”

The filmmaker added “that atrocities depicted by A.I. just do not have the same impact as ‘the real thing,’ and continued, ‘I think I will always wonder what the documentary of this film would look like.’”

In the Financial Times (“AI-generated film about Iran protests turns tragedy into slop”), Nicolas Rapold expressed the opinion that “the movie . . . arrives with the growing pains of AI evident in every aspect—less proof of concept than cautionary tale.”

Observes Rapold, “technically [the movie is] a mess.  The AI-generated humans have vacant eyes, the usual bland burnish and push-button emotional expressions.  They move through scenes and shots that are clunkily edited.  In an astonishing unforced error, their dialogue sounds muddy, even garbled . . . .”  He adds, “AI’s tendency to homogenise [sic] reality keeps undermining any attempts to make the portrayal of resistance feel grounded.”

In conclusion, Rapold asserts, “Dreams of Violets is better described as a vibe—a prolonged evocation of concussed trauma—rather than a fully realised [sic] movie.  AI cinema still awaits its Lumière brothers.”

[The most significant accomplishment of the Lumière brothers (Auguste (1862-1954) and Louis Lumière (1864-1948), French manufacturers of photography equipment, was the invention of the Cinématographe (1895), an all-in-one device capable of capturing, printing, and projecting motion pictures.  This breakthrough paved the way for the birth of cinema as a mass medium and entertainment industry.]

Gleiberman, in his Variety notice, first asks “an aesthetic question: Is ‘Dreams of Violets’ a weirdly distant and unsatisfying movie because it was made with AI?  The strange answer to that is yes, but not really.”  (I’ll get to his “aesthetic” answer in a bit.)

If you see a soldier killing a civilian in a documentary, it’s horrifying, but the effect is 100 times less powerful in a film that simply looks like a documentary, since we know, in our gut, that we’re not watching reality.  That’s why the quality that draws us into a movie, even if it is a documentary, is the connection we feel to the people we’re watching.  But Ash Koosha hasn’t scripted “Dreams of Violets” that way.  He has made a movie with an uncanny-valley problem, an “existential” drama that’s all “authentic” but abstract moments: the vérité political-war-movie equivalent of calendar art.  It’s like synthetic prize-winning photojournalism that moves.

[I was unfamiliar with the expression “uncanny valley” (or “uncanny valley effect”) so, for others in the same boat, according to Wiktionary, it means:

Digital or ambiguous physical spaces that create a sense of unease or eeriness due to deviations from familiar patterns that challenge perception and categorization, leading to discomfort. (e.g., liminal spaces, haunted houses, the Backrooms, etc.).

[The phrase is a literal translation of a Japanese expression first used in 1970 by roboticist Masahiro Mori (1927-2025) from his essay entitled “Bukimi No Tani” (“The Uncanny Valley”).  The terms both come up often in reviews of Dreams of Violets.]

“But if ‘Dreams of Violets,’ as a movie, is mostly a bust,” concludes Gleibman, “as an AI showreel it’s something more.”  He elucidates:

[W]hat I saw in “Dreams of Violence” looked plenty textured and realistic.  Does this mean that AI can “make a movie”?  No.  But it does mean that AI can give you scenes of roiling tumultuous Civil War set in the hurly-burly of Tehran at sunset, with soldiers roaming the streets and forcing citizens into vans as others scurry out of the way, and it can make you believe your eyes.  

Then, his clincher:

And here’s the buried lead: The film’s entire budget was $2,000. . . .  [T]he most powerful message to emerge from “Dreams of Violets” isn’t that the Iranian regime is a ruthless pack of totalitarian oppressors.  It’s that $2,000 can now buy a hell of a lot of motion picture.

In “‘Dreams of Violets’ Review: An AI-Generated Movie Is Worrisome for All the Right Reasons” on The Wrap, Matthew Creith observes, “Memories blur together, and faces appear and quickly vanish like vignettes without a motive.  Whether intentional or not, the dreamlike nature of AI-generated moving imagery often mirrors emotional reality rather than depicting actual emotions through acting or historical reenactments.” 

The Wrap reviewer continues:

The limitations of current technology are impossible to ignore on the artificial intelligence front.  Characters frequently move with an unnatural stiffness while [Ash] Koosha lingers on close-ups of eyelashes and tears to signify the detail that AI is supposed to be good at creating.  Facial expressions often feel generic rather than lived-in, and frequent quick cuts are distracting at best.  The dialogue, much of it generated from Koosha’s own vocal performances and modified through common AI tools, can sound muddy and disconnected from the images on screen.

When a film like this, despite its short runtime, is asking viewers to engage with real human suffering, that emotional disconnect can be difficult to overcome.

Describing what I understand as the “uncanny valley effect,” Creith reports:

The faces in “Dreams of Violets” often feel ghostly, almost suspended between existence and disappearance.  The streets of Tehran seem simultaneously real and imagined, sort of like Spike Jonze’s [b. 1969] “Her” [Warner Bros., 2013] without the authenticity of its central characters.  Rather than recreating reality with documentary precision, the film exists in a liminal space between memory and testimony.

In The Indypendent [sic] (“The Tribeca Film Festival AI Movie Is Not Just Bad, It’s Cynical”), a progressive newspaper based in Brooklyn, New York, that covers local, national and international news; food; cinema; and culture, John Teufel complained that

at no point does the film allow you to forget that it was made with AI—which makes sense, as we will see (cash-grab!).  Everything is exaggerated past reality in an attempt to show off how “good” the AI is, but it overshoots, and becomes hyperreal, in the Baudrillardian sense.   When a character has wrinkles, they have the most wrinkles.  More wrinkles than any man you’ve ever seen.  When a woman looks concerned, she looks comically concerned, because someone typed MAKE HER LOOK VERY CONCERNED as the prompt.

[Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was a French sociologist and philosopher with an interest in cultural studies.  He’s best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication.  His concept of hyperreality is complex and hard to explain in a few words, so I suggest readers who want to unpack this comment look it up for themselves and try to sort it out.  The simple definition is that Baudrillardian hyperreality is a condition in which what is real and what is fiction blend together so seamlessly that we can no longer tell the difference.  In this state, simulations, images, and media models replace the original reality, becoming “more real than real.”

[As for “cash-grab,” Teufel reports later in his column, “[Ash] Koosha has a long history of trying to make money from AI, which undercuts any claims that the tech was forced on him to represent the horrors inflicted on his people.”  He lists some of Koosha’s tech holdings to suggest that the film’s creator is promoting his commercial enterprises to sell his services.]

The AI also chooses the same type of shots, again and again . . . .  Most scenes, particularly ones with a lot of people on screen at once, have a weird blur effect around the edges, so the viewer can’t make out details.  Nothing about the film feels like deliberate artistic choices—all of it feels like “what could the computer do.”

The Indypendent review-writer notes that the movie “is filled with glitches and what we would call “bugs” if it was a video game.  A man has nothing on his face, wipes it off his face, and has nothing on his hand.  A man is pushed against a wall face-first and suddenly turns face-out.  Someone is shot—there is no bullet wound.”  And so on. 

The Art

The Times didn’t have much to say about the movie as a movie, but filmmaker Ramirez, while offering the opinion that “‘Dreams of Violets’ would be the most-talked-about movie of the festival,” mused, “‘I think I will always wonder what the documentary of this film would look like.’”

FT’s Rapold found “The film’s very loose train of events returns to a few largely perfunctory characters—a doctor, a young pianist, a boy in a wheelchair watching from a window—while cycling through street scenes of security forces attacking protesters.”  He added that the characters “move through scenes and shots that are clunkily edited.

“There’s also no substitute for good writing,” he admonished: “the wheelchair-bound boy and his caretaker brother are cornily sketched out, as is the pianist who declares: ‘I don’t have anything but music.’”

“Koosha . . . appears to weave in actual audio recorded by protesters,” reports Rapold, which a “more documentary-oriented version of the movie might have emphasised [sic] . . ., so it’s maddening to hear sometimes barely audible snippets playing in the background of scenes.” 

Rapold observed that “scenes are shoddily realized [sic]: a tone-deaf replay of the wheelchair-bound child’s parents dying in a car that flies off a cliff; a street scene involving a falling loaf of bread that wobbles in slow-motion.”

In his assessment of Dreams of Violets in Variety, Gleiberman said of the “first” movie, the “drama set in Tehran,” “I didn’t find that movie to be particularly effective.  In fact, after a while I thought it was stultifying.”

I gave the Variety reviewer’s technical response to his “aesthetic question above, but here’s the artistic response:

It’s actually the form of the movie that’s odd and off-putting: a barely scripted series of anecdotes, or mere moments, with little in the way of dramatic development. . . .  But though the characters in “Dreams of Violets” look and talk like real people, and the rubble-strewn urban streets look and feel like real rubble-strewn urban streets, we’re barely given a context for what we’re seeing . . . .

“Koosha doesn’t create fully realized scenes,” writes Gleibman.

“Dreams of Violets” is not a days-of-rage tale of inspiration.  It’s set after the protests have already been contained (the country’s police are doing a clean-up operation), and what it offers, mostly, is raw snapshots of state-sanctioned murder and political oppression.  Yes, we “get to know” half a dozen characters—a boy in a wheelchair, his physician older brother, a reminiscing old woman, a music student, and several others.

The justification Koosha gives for making Dreams of Violets with AI is that it couldn’t have been made any other way.  Says Gleibman:

[B]ut effective art needs no justification.  If you wanted to be cynical about it, you could say that Ash Koosha is exploiting the tragedy of his homeland to have the best possible excuse to craft an AI showreel.

This is Gleibman’s version of the “cash-grab” scenario, and makes the same point that The Indypendent’s Teufel made about Koosha’s AI businesses.

On The Wrap, Creith observes, “Rather than following a traditional narrative, the film drifts between interconnected stories . . . .” 

The result often feels less like a conventional feature and more like fragments of memory stitched together.  Scenes emerge and fade as characters cross paths, without necessarily creating a clear narrative throughline.  At times, the experience is meant to feel like watching a documentary, though it evokes emotions akin to flipping through a collection of postcards from a traumatic moment in history.

. . . .

The strongest moments arrive when Koosha focuses less on spectacle and more on human experience, though these are few and far between and obviously not actually human.

The Wrap review-writer concludes:

As an experimental and timely film, “Dreams of Violets” is uneven, frequently frustrating, and undeniably flawed.  As a snapshot of where both filmmaking and AI technology currently stand, it may ultimately prove more significant than the movie itself.  What cannot be denied is that it leaves an impression, whether good or bad, and the movie deserves the conversation that will undoubtedly surround it.

At the very least, “Dreams of Violets” remains one of the most unusual and thought-provoking films playing at Tribeca this year.

At the start of his review, The Indypendent’s Teufel gives his mindset away: “Before I attended the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of Dreams of Violets . . . I had one serious fear: what if it was good?”  His fears don’t materialize: “As it turns out, Dreams of Violets is awful, and if this is the best AI can do, then it is possible it will never be able to replicate even passable visual art.”

“I am just here to inform you this is, possibly, the worst film of all time,” he confirms.  (Do you suppose it’s relevant that Teufel is German for ‘devil’?  Naah!)

The reviewer expands a little on his pronouncements:

If you are going to see Dreams of Violets—which you should not—I urge you to read up on these events [the January 2026 protests in Tehran] before you watch, because nothing is explained, including the demonstrators’ motivations, which adds to the film’s torture-porn vibes.  Essentially, you are going to watch a bunch of strangers get killed, with some brief, emotionally manipulative backstories for some of those strangers.  There is even a sad handicapped child sadly wheeling his way through scenes (although, weirdly, his legs appear to work fine at one point).  If this was well-made, it may have been upsetting.  As it stands, it is mostly just eyeroll-inducing.

“The film entirely lacks narrative logic,” complains Teufel, “making it impossible to follow, much less become engaged by.  After just the first few scenes it becomes little more than a series of images.”  Adds the reviewer, “And the images themselves are astoundingly ugly, far worse than even uncanny valley-fests like The Polar Express [Warner Bros. Pictures, 2004].”

[Some critics panned The Polar Express’s character animation for dipping into the uncanny valley, because it seemed to falter in mimicking realistic facial expressions and emotions.]

“It is typical at film festival screenings for movies to get applause,” Teufel concluded. “When the lights came up on Dreams of Violets, nobody clapped.  The vibe was funereal.”

[It seems to me, from reading these and other reviews, that the artistic weaknesses in Dreams of Violets are the fault of the fact that Ash Koosha isn’t either a screenwriter or a filmmaker.  He’s essentially an amateur and he worked alone, without even an editor to advise him. 

[So, when it came to making choices about how to frame a scene or write a piece of dialogue, he had nowhere to go except his untrained eye and ear.  No wonder he made bad choices.

[On the other plane, however, where his expertise lay, he had to contend with the inherent weaknesses of the medium.  But that’s just temporary.  Variety points out that

the baby is going to grow up.  And what will it look like when it does?  “Dreams of Violets” offers indications of at least a few of the places that AI, as its symbiosis with the industry grows and gathers force (which it surely will), might go.

[Some day, and probably soon, given the speed at which time passes in the cyber world, AI will be able to compensate for all the problems the reviewers above all spotlighted.  That may or may not be a goof thing for the industry, but it’s gonna happen sure as God made little green apples.

[In the hands of an actual filmmaker with a real screenplay, Dreams of Violets will become just a far-off—in computer terms—memory, like black-and-white TV or color TV with the colors that bled.]

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 [1 Dec. 1900]), 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.