Go-Won-Go Mohawk (1859-1924), Part 3

 

GO-WON-GO MOHAWK: SUPPLEMENTAL BIOGRAPHY
(Continued) 

[This is the conclusion of my supplemental biography of Go-won-go Mohawk, the Native American actress and playwright.  Readers who haven’t read Part 2, posted on Rick On Theater on 26 December, should go back before reading Part 3 below, as this is a continuation of my biographical sketch of Mohawk and it will be hard to follow if you start in the middle.

[The supplemental bio follows on the New York Times‘ obituary, part of the paper’s “Overlooked” series.  It’s posted as Part 1 of this series on 23 December.  Parts 2 and 3 are my attempt to fill in the missing details of the Times’ belated obit.

[Part 3 covers the later period of Mohawk’s life, including her most important performances: Wep-ton-no-mah: The Indian Mail Carrier, which she wrote for herself, and The Flaming Arrow, which playwright Lincoln J. Carter wrote for her.]

Go-won-go Mohawk wrote her first play, with contributions from her husband and manager, Charles W. Charles, soon after arriving in New York City in 1888.  This was Wep-ton-no-mah: The Indian Mail Carrier, Mohawk’s best-known work.  The Native American actress—and now dramatist—kept the play on stages around the world from 1889 to about 1910 playing the title role until she was over 50—3,000 times by her own count.

The play begins on the ranch of Colonel Stockton (played by Charles), with a gathering of his servants; his young daughter, Nellie; his cowardly, gambling-debt-ridden nephew, Captain Franklin; and Franklin’s Mexican partner-in-crime, Spanish Joe, who, along with cowboys and Indians, come to round up Stockton’s cattle.  

The cattle begin to stampede and a young Indian man, Wep-ton-no-mah (Mohawk), gallops onto the stage on horseback and rescues Nellie.  The colonel rewards him with the position of Pony Express mail carrier to the fort.  In the West, both in reality and in fictional portrayal, the Pony Express rider was a figure of stature among the settlers on the vast spaces of the frontier who relied on him for personal and commercial communication and news.  Wep-ton-no-mah would receive substantial income unavailable to other indigenous people in the 19th century.

Next, Wep-ton-no-mah prevents Spanish Joe, who’s obsessed with Nellie, from kidnapping her—a scheme tied to Franklin’s forgery to cover his gambling losses—by beating him in a fistfight.  In revenge, Spanish Joe shoots at a figure he mistakes for Wep-ton-no-mah, but who turns out to be the young Indian’s father, Chief Ga-ne-gua (frequently played by an actual Seneca chief; this character was given the Native name of Mohawk’s father [see Parts 1 and 2]).

The rest of the plot is essentially a revenge narrative, as Wep-ton-no-mah, while heroically saving the mail from attack, tracks down Spanish Joe, ultimately defeating him in what the press called “a dreadfully realistic knife fight” (“Empire Theatre,” Pittsburgh Dispatch 25 January 1910).  Along the way, stock melodrama elements—disguise, ethnic (often racist) humor, visual spectacle (including thunder, lightning, and the special “red fire” effect typical of 19th-century frontier melodrama)—are staged.

(“Red fire” refers to a pyrotechnic stage effect that creates a striking red flame, often used to simulate fire on stage in scenes with highly dramatic elements.  It’s essentially a colored flame produced by a specific chemical mixture that burns with a red glow.  Using red fire on stage, however, even if it's meant to appear as a visual effect, is considered a fire hazard.)

Although Charles is acknowledged as a co-author of The Indian Mail Carrier, the U.S. copyrights are solely in Mohawk’s name.  This was highly unusual for a woman at that time, and even more so for an indigenous woman. 

Publicity for the show also stressed that Mohawk had written the play on her own.  Charles was largely credited with the comedy in the play, which, by all accounts, was the period standard of racial (and racist) caricatures and language and slapstick gags and pratfalls.

In addition to being the playwright and lead actor in the play, Mohawk was also the costume and scenic designer—some of whose creations were quite elaborate.  Furthermore, she had a large degree of creative and managerial control over the production, another unusual achievement for an indigenous artist of that time.

Mohawk and Charles quickly started assembling a theatrical troupe under her name.  The first production of The Indian Mail Carrier was on 4-9 February 1889 at H. R. Jacob’s Lyceum Theatre in Brooklyn (according to Odell’s Annals of the New York Stage, vol. 14: 195).

As much as the summary of The Indian Mail Carrier sounds like standard late-19th-century American melodrama, there are significant differences.  First, during the round-up in the first scene, Indians are shown working alongside white cowboys. The publicity asserts that the indigenous cowhands are “played by genuine Indians”; in The Buffalo [New York] Enquirer of 18 January 1898, the producer pledges that “Miss Go-Won-Go-Mohawk claims to be the only Indian actress on the stage,” but who really knows. 

It is accepted, though, that Mohawk employed members of her immediate family and some performers from the Cattaraugus Reservation in her entertainment troupes.  The actor who played Ga-ne-gua, for instance, Wep-ton-no-mah’s father, was often identified as an Onondaga Indian (a people whose historical homeland is in and around present-day Onondaga County, New York; pronounced on-un-DAH-guh).

Of course, the main difference of The Indian Mail Carrier with the standard 19th-century melodramatic fare on American stages is Go-won-go Mohawk herself, playing the male lead.  In “From Wigwam to Stage,” Alice W. Eyre (see Part 2) described her:

Physically, Miss Mohawk is well-nigh perfect inasmuch as she meets . . . all the requirements of the high standard of physical excellence demanded by art.  She’s very tall, her carriage is graceful, and added to this is a quiet dignity of manner.

In her dissertation, Michelle S. A. McGeough pointed out some of the principal differences between Mohawk’s The Indian Mail Carrier, and the contemporaneous border plays of white dramatists. 

The five-act play is a musical drama of deception, murder, and greed of epic proportions.  In all instances, Go-won-go’s narrative offers the audience a very different view of Indigenous people in comparison to that of her contemporary playwrights.  Go-won-go revealed her motivation for writing the plot of Wep-ton-no-mah in an interview where she said that her work was the desire, “above all things to prove the native Indian is capable of the highest civilization” ([Roger A.] Hall[, Performing the American Frontier, 1870-1906 (Cambridge UP, 2001),] 159).  Although Go-won-go’s desire to use the theater to prove that the Native American was capable of the highest civilization, that same desire did not extend to other minorities.  Her depictions of Mexicans and Afro-Americans in the characters of Spanish Joe and Sam, the help, rely heavily on racialized stereotypes.  Spanish Joe is seen as the villain in both his greed and the licentious pursuit of the virginal Nellie, and he pays for his miscreant behavior with this life.  Franklin, the Colonel’s nephew, on the other hand, whose money troubles lead him to enter a criminal partnership with the villain, is forgiven for his errant ways by the end of the play (“The Indigenous Sovereign Body: Gender, Sexuality and Performance,” Ph.D dissertation, University of New Mexico, 2017, pp. 91-92; Hall is a professor of theater at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia).

The play toured the United States and Canada, and between 1892 and 1897, Mohawk toured the United Kingdom and Europe with her company, performing The Indian Mail Carrier to large and enthusiastic audiences engrossed by the myth of the American “wild west.”  She was so popular in Britain that in 1903, she returned for another tour there that stretched into 1908.

When Mohawk returned to the U.S., she continued to tour and performed to full houses all across the country.  The Baltimore Sun reported on 3 December 1889, for instance, that the show “attracted large audiences yesterday and . . . promises to fill the house all the week.”  “‘The Indian Mail Carrier’ . . .,” recounted the 13 January 1891 Philadelphia Inquirer, “opened before large audiences, who thoroughly enjoyed the excellent acting done by the star and her carefully selected company.”

Between her two tours of Great Britain and Europe, Mohawk took on her second-best-known play, The Flaming Arrow.  On 24 April 1900, the Detroit Free Press announced:

Lincoln J. Carter has signed to write a play for Go-Won-Go-Mohawk [sic].  It will be a new Indian play, which he will bring out next season with an Indian band and a herd of bronchos [sic] to give it local color (“The Stage: Hit or Miss,” p. 4).

Mohawk played the lead role in Flaming Arrow, an Indian man named White Eagle.  The play premièred in Chicago at the Criterion Theatre on 26 August 1900; it moved to New York City for an opening on 17 December 1900 at the Star Theatre, on Broadway at East 13th Street, south of Union Square, which was the city’s theater district at the time.  Mohawk toured the show around the country for three years.

The play was frequently labeled “the stirring drama of western life” and one account went on that it

relates the love of [Mary,] a daughter of a colonel [Colonel Fremont—played by Mohawk’s husband, Charlie Charles] of the United States Army, commanding a western post [Fort Reno, Oklahoma, an actual cavalry post until 1908] for a young Indian, “White Eagle” [the role played through about 1903 by Mohawk], and the machinations of two villains [a “treacherous” former army officer who’s a deserter in league with a Mexican] which furnish the motives of the action.  The villain inflames several braves to make war on the decimated forces at the fort and in the attending excitement abduct the commander’s daughter.  The daughter, after a series of hair-raising adventures, is rescued by her Indian lover and justice is dealt out to the villains in true western style.  The cast is a large one and contains the names of many prominent people.  A tribe of full-blooded Indians are also carried.  The scenery is said to be especially elaborate, many of the scenes being taken from real life (“A Story of an Army Romance: The ‘Flaming Arrow’ is an Interesting Drama,” Decatur Daily Democrat [Decatur, Indiana], 29 October 1907: 1).

In another comparison with the prevailing content and presentation of border melodramas in this era in the United States, a Norfolk, Virginia, reviewer of The Flaming Arrow asserted:

A decided novelty in the way of melodrama will be the offering of the Academy tomorrow night, when Lincoln J. Carter will present “The Flaming Arrow.”  The name of the play is significant of blood and thunder in a superlative degree, and the fact that it is produced by a company composed largely of real live Indians naturally strengthens the impression.  But by the time the curtain descends on the last act the audience begins to realize that there isn’t much in a name after all, and that Indians under certain circumstances can present another phase of character other than that usually depicted in a dime novel.  The show is clean and wholesome, well staged and has some of the best scenic effects Mr. Carter has as yet turned out (“About Plays and Players: ‘Flaming Arrow’ Tomorrow,” Norfolk Dispatch [Norfolk, Virginia] 28 December 1904: 3).

(Readers will note that this notice was of a later performance of the play, after Mohawk was no longer leading the cast.  I contend, nevertheless, that as Flaming Arrow was composed for and at the behest of the Native American actress, and the reviewer’s remarks are about the script and not the performances, it’s still a valid comment on Mohawk’s intentions for the play’s content.)

The Flaming Arrow toured widely (with and without Mohawk) for 11 seasons from the fall of 1900 to the fall of 1911.  The play should not be confused with the 1913 film of the same title (but with a significantly different plot), also written and directed by Carter (1865-1926), a director, designer, writer, and lyricist, who, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, authored scores of popular melodramas.  A master of the genre, Carter used many novel visual effects to add realism to the situations in his plays.  His realistic staging of such dramatic events as train- and shipwrecks were only surpassed by the advent of motion pictures.

But Mohawk’s time with melodrama was coming to an end.  She took The Indian Mail Carrier to Britain again in 1903 and when she returned to the U.S. in 1908, she was almost 50, a little old to be playing the young hero.  Furthermore, the growing popularity of movies in the middle of the decade was beginning to outdraw stage melodrama, which couldn’t compete with its technological thrills and magical film spectacle.

It was also easier to perform in a movie than to put up with the hard life of a stage actor, especially at the lower end of the accommodation and workspace—not to mention the often two-a-day performances and the traveling from small town to far-flung city every few days for months at a time and even years.  And that’s not even considering the remuneration for a movie versus a play.

It was also less likely for a movie cast and crew to be stranded in some remote place after the production company goes broke or sneaks out of town in the dead of night, a circumstance, as we saw the Michael Strogoff company suffer in 1889 (see Part 2), and which happened not infrequently.  (It was one of the principal motivations for the formation of Actors’ Equity Association in 1913; see “Actors’ Equity at 100: Part One,” 19 June 2013.)

So, Mohawk shifted to vaudeville and then film, although vaudeville was on a downward track as well.  Movies were taking a bite out of variety, too, as many of the stars shifted over to film: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, W. C. Fields, The Marx Brothers, Mae West. 

(When talkies came along in 1926, that really sounded vaudeville’s death knell (pun semi-intended).  Ironically in a way, television sort of resuscitated it with the advent of the sitcom and, most of all, the variety show.  Many of the big stars of TV shows in the early days of the 1950s and ’60s—George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jack Benny, Sid Caesar, Kate Smith, Milton Berle, Rose Marie, The Three Stooges—were all alumni of vaudeville.)

Little is known of the film version of Wep-Ton-No-Mah, the Indian Mail Carrier except that it was released in 1909 by the Carson Film Company as a silent, black-and-white one-reeler.  (That would only have been about 15 minutes of film.  I don’t even know if a print of it is still extant.  Apparently, what is known comes from contemporary cinema magazines such as Moving Picture World, and theatrical trade newspapers like the New York Dramatic Mirror.) 

I mentioned above in passing that The Flaming Arrow was also produced as a two-reel movie (around 24 minutes long at most) in 1913, and Go-won-go Mohawk was featured.

Mohawk went on writing plays after returning from England.  In 1909, she copyrighted An Indian Romance: A Forest Tragedy, a one-act drama.  There’s no evidence that it was ever staged, but Christine Bold posits, “By length, economy of setting, compression of plot, deployment of conventional tropes, and stagecraft (working the curtain to allow another act to set up in the space behind) it clearly is a vaudeville playlet or afterpiece” (Christine Bold, “Vaudeville Indians” on Global Circuits, 1880s-1930s [Yale University Press, 2022], 103).  She describes the play:

An Indian Romance is a fascinating work that converts the concentrated tempo of vaudeville specialties, in which Mohawk was already adept, into narrative form.  Mohawk compacts spectacular action and formulaic plotlines familiar from dime novels, including the ones in which her namesake featured, into one “thickly wooded lot” between a wigwam, a hut, and a tree stump.  Trick riding (one rider on two horses and two riders on one horse), two murders, and a climactic knife fight punctuate the strands of English aristocratic romance, Prussian-sounding skullduggery, and revelation and restitution of the Englishman’s inheritance by letter.  Like the script of Wep-Ton-No-Mah, this playlet interweaves comic blackface dialogue and stage Injun speech, again moving in and out of both in ways that remind the reader that these are prerequisite conventions of the period.  Among the sensations, caricatures, and sentimentality, the playlet makes two statements that would be far from conventional on the vaudeville stage—especially from the pen, mouth, and bodily presence of an Indigenous actor.   One concerned the perceived value of an Indigenous woman’s life, the other enacted a direct riposte to the dime-novel industry’s appropriation and containment of Go-won-go.

At the center of An Indian Romance are two love stories that double the sentimentality and cross Indigenous-settler lines in two directions.  The romance concerns a white brother and sister, Anthony and Lena, unjustly exiled from their English home, and an Indigenous brother and sister native to these woods—the two pairs constituting two heterosexual, cross-race couples.  For the Indigenous brother and sister, Mohawk reprised her role as Wep-ton-no-mah, for whom she created a female twin, Mi-ra-no-mah, and played both parts herself.  Never seen on stage at the same time, the twins ride on and off on Mohawk’s trained ponies, demonstrating equestrian skills while advancing the plot.  Mi-ra-no-mah ends up carrying the letters that prove her English lover’s innocence and restore his inheritance; when she refuses to surrender them to the villainous Karl Kovoloff, who initiated and stands to profit from the lie, he kills her off stage.  At that point, Wep-ton-no-mah gallops on stage in a panic, searching for Mi-ra-no-mah, and confronts Anthony, her white lover, about his missing sister . . . .

The play ends with Mi-ra-no-mah’s coffin centered on the stage, the white heroine reaching out her arms to her Indian lover.  As with the ending of Wep-Ton-No-Mah and The Flaming Arrow, the Indian hero leaves that romance unresolved—indeed, almost beside the point.  Wep-ton-no-mah leads his horse off into the sunset, the male character and his creator reunited bodily, the Indian princess deployed by the dime novel to straighten out Go-won-go killed off.  The centuries-old trope of the sacrificial Indian maiden, when read within Go-won-go Mohawk’s performance history, is here used against itself, Mohawk once more clearing and riding into vaudeville space as her own kind of Indian (103-05).

Not much is recorded of Go-won-go Mohawk’s last years.  Performance reports peter out around 1910 or so, soon after she returned to the U.S. from England in 1908; she’s reported to have become retired by 1917 (“Indian Chief Makes Patriotic Address,” Evening Record and Bergen County Herald [Hackensack, NJ] 6 June 1917: 1).  Seven years later, we know her health had deteriorated, but whether that had started as early as the second decade of the 20th century is uncertain.

Other reports indicate that Go-Won-Go continued to tour and perform until her health failed in 1924.  She owned a large home in the Borough of Edgewater, New Jersey, at the foot of the Palisades in Bergen County, across the Hudson River 14 miles north of New York City.  She kept her two white stallions at the Mohawk Wigwam, as Mohawk and Charles had named their house.  They had lived there for over 27 years when she died in her home, following a series of “strokes of apoplexy,” on 7 February 2024 at the age of 64. 

Mohawk was laid to rest on 10 February in “a solemn and beautiful” ceremony, described by Wilhelm Benignus in the Altoona [Pennsylvania] Tribune of 20 March 1924 (“‘Go-Won-Go Mohawk,’ American-Indian Princess,” pp. 6, 11), at Edgewater Cemetery, where the remains of heroes from the Revolutionary War (1775-83) through the Spanish-American War (1898) from the local area are also buried.

Fifteen years later, Mohawk, “the last Indian in Edgewater,” was remembered as

a familiar sight along River Road where she was wont to ride a strapping gracefully proportioned white horse.  She is often recalled by old residents of the Borough who relate that she was a woman of striking personality and philanthropic character (“Water Supply Paces County Growth: Our River Front Grew As Indians Boosted Trade,” Bergen Evening Record [Hackensack, NJ] 29 Sept. 1939: 33).

Go-won-go Mohawk was one of the first Indian actresses on Broadway—possibly the first—though not in one of her own plays.  It wouldn’t be until 2023 that the first woman Native writer would have a play on Broadway: Larissa FastHorse (Sicangu Lakota Nation) with The Thanksgiving Play.  It's mentioned in “‘Superheroes on Native Land,' Part I,” 21 January 2024.

*  *  *  *

One further comment—of an entirely personal and irrelevant nature: In his opening remarks to a post concerning his family history, my friend Kirk Woodward wrote:

It’s hard for us . . . to realize how recently life in the United States was vastly more primitive and basic. . . .  Two generations between ourselves and the War Between the States – and one more long lifetime would reach all the way back to the Revolutionary War!  And both those events seem buried in the mists of history (“A Lawyer and a Life,” 11 November 2010).

I thought about that statement when I noticed the relation of Go-won-go Mohawk’s death to the birth dates of my parents.  When she died on 7 February 2024, my mother was 10 months old already and Dad was 5-years-and-3-months old.  Not old enough to have seen her on stage, but still, in their lifetimes.  We’re not talking about my grandparents or great-grandparents—this is just one generation back from me.  It doesn’t mean a thing, really, but it astounded me when I noticed that Mohawk lived into the lifetimes of both my parents.

[This project kept expanding because, as I read more about Mohawk, especially about her work, I came upon elements that aren’t well known today, or, in some cases, not known at all—especially outside the theater world.  The piece became partly a disquisition on the theater of the late 19th century (melodrama, vaudeville) and, even more so, on the Native American adaptation of American performance tropes (“vaudeville Indians,” Indian bands).

[Another aspect of the post that took extra time was the details of Mohawk’s non-theater life.  The salient aspects of her life—marriages, homes, schooling—were covered at least as to the bare facts, but other specifics were either unrecorded—but I still searched until I was sure the record didn’t exist—or were buried in sites/articles/reports that weren't readily accessible.

[All this was further complicated by the fact, as I mention in the post, that Mohawk's native first name is written several different ways, which significantly affects computer searches, especially in newspaper databases.  

[Even after posting, I continued to do some searching for missing or "fudged" information along the way.  Mostly life dates (i.e., James Rider, Mohawk’s first husband; Lydia Hale Mohawk Killey, Mohawk’s mother) and other bio bits from that period, which are hard or impossible to find or confirm.

[Among the details I still haven’t located are two plays in which Mohawk appeared that I couldn't identify fully.  One is Michael Strogoff; the other’s called The Outcast.  It starred Louise Pomeroy, Mohawk’s sister-in-law, and was Mohawk’s first theater job.  It was based on a French novel by Edmond About, and I even found some newspaper announcements and reviews that confirmed the title and a New York theater where it played.  But I have not found the novel from which it was adapted.

[Nowhere is the French title of The Outcast noted, either as the play or a translation of the novel.  Oddly, About wrote a novel called L'Infâme, which means 'the infamous [one],' a likely title to be translated as The Outcast—except that the synopsis of the novel's plot is not the same as the plot of the play!  The characters’ names are also completely different, too.  (The novel is translated, but uses the French title for the English version.  Go know!)

[One of the “fudged” details has to do with East Lynne, a popular melodrama to which Mohawk refers in a quotation (see Part 2).  The actress used the play as an example, and I searched to see if there’s any record of her having done that show.  There wasn’t, so I surmised that she’d simply seen it, because it was such a popular property.

[I subsequently found that East Lynne was frequently playing at a theater in the same town where Mohawk was doing either The Indian Mail Carrier or The Flaming Arrow, and at the same time.  I decided that may be why she used it as a talking point: not only had she probably seen it, but it seemed often to be on stage somewhere near her.

[But then, when I was using a search of Pomeroy to see if I could find more details about The Outcast—Part 2 was already posted—I came upon two seemingly irrelevant pieces of information about Pomeroy’s career.  Until, that is, I considered them from a different perspective.

[First, Pomeroy did East Lynne, probably more than once.  I don't know when—whether it was while Mohawk was associated with her, for instance—or in what part.  (She was usually a lead actress, so she probably played Isabel Vane.)  So, it's possible that Mohawk not only saw East Lynne, but saw it with her sister-in-law in the production, giving her an even stronger reason to cite it as an example.

[I also found that Pomeroy was well known for having (creditably) played Hamlet, one of few women to have done so.  (Sarah Bernhardt [1844-1923] was famously among them, in 1899.)  I wondered if that could have given Mohawk the idea to play men's parts in her own plays, or convinced her that it was a viable idea?  She just took it to another level than Pomeroy. 

[I decided to insert those two little factoids, and my speculations, into Part 2, even though it’s already published.]

Go-Won-Go Mohawk (1859-1924), Part 2

[Go-won-go Mohawk’s life and career were so interesting that I couldn’t even sketch them in in a single post.  I’ve therefore split my attempt to fill in some of the gaps in the New York Times obituary that constitutes Part 1 of this short series (posted on 23 December) into two installments.

[“Go-Won-Go Mohawk (1859-1924), Part 2” takes readers up to the composition of her first play, Wep-ton-no-mah: The Indian Mail Carrier.  Part 3 picks up at that point and brings ROTters to Mohawk’s retirement and death.  As Michelle S. A. McGeough, professor of art history, observes, after Mohawk’s death, she “faded from the public’s memory and consequently very little has been written about her”—until quite recently.  (McGeough’s dissertation was submitted in 2017 and Christine Bold’s “Vaudeville Indians” was issued in 2022.)]

GO-WON-GO MOHAWK: SUPPLEMENTAL BIOGRAPHY

The New York Times and I have already explained (see Part 1) that Go-won-go Mohawk went by different names at different times and under different circumstances, depending as well on the publication in which her name appeared.  The Times explained about the three variations of her English name: Carolina, Carrie, and Carolina (or Caroline) A.  I added that along with Go-won-go, her native name was often also written as Go-Won-Go and Gowongo.  I have also found documents in which the name was spelled Go-wan-go (with an a in the middle). 

It’s not even certain under which name Mohawk was born—though most accounts say that she didn’t use her indigenous name, which she said means “I fear no one” in the Seneca language, until later in her life when she began writing and performing her own plays in the 1880s.  Several sources indicate that Mohawk was called Carolina while she lived in Greene, New York (1860/61-1870/71).

The obituary in Part 1 gives the date of Mohawk’s birth as 11 August 1859, but numerous other sources, including the Library of Congress, give the year as 1860.  (Oddly, her gravestone is inscribed with the date of her death, but not her date of birth.)  The problem with this, aside from merely the accuracy of her date of birth and her age at the time of any given event, is that all dating information that follows from that is ambiguous. 

One case in point relates to the historical marker that designates the house in Greene, New York, as a former residence of the Mohawk family.  I found two sources that recorded that the Mohawk family moved there when Go-won-go was one year old.  It goes on to say that she left with her mother after her father’s sudden death at 46 in 1869, adding that Go-won-go Mohawk lived in Greene for eight years.

But that would only be so if she was born in 1860 and had moved to Greene in 1861.  If she was born in 1859 and moved in 1860, she’d have lived in Greene for nine years.  (The date of Allen Mohawk’s death is not in dispute.  Furthermore, almost all sources say that Lydia Mohawk left Greene with Go-won-go a year after her husband died, making it 1870, 10 or 11 years after the family moved to Greene.)

(I’ll be going by the date the Times uses; another source I found that uses 1859 as her birth year is Wikipedia—but that’s hardly conclusive since it gives the Times obit as the source of this datum.  Wikipedia does note that “Records vary on exact birthdate.”)

The place of birth for Mohawk is also unclear, but the consequences are much less pervasive.  As the obituary makes clear, some sources say she was born in the small town of Gowanda, New York, while others say she was born on the Cattaraugus Reservation. 

This is only a small issue, depending on how much store one puts on whether Mohawk was born in an American town or in an indigenous community within the Seneca Nation.  The fact is that the reservation is mostly rural and Gowanda is a town practically on its southeastern border. 

In any case, as I’ve noted, the Mohawks moved to Greene, 330 miles east of Gowanda, by the time Go-won-go was one year old.  Go-won-go Mohawk’s father, Allen (or Alan) Mohawk—also known as Ga-ne-gua (“Brave Man” in Seneca)—was an herb doctor and a well-regarded member of the community. 

(The marker in front of the Mohawks’ South Chenango Street house refers to Go-won-go as an “Indian princess,” an appellation she often used in publicity for her performances and appearances.  It was common at the time to use the title “princess” for female Indian performers, although Native Americans had no such concept.  Presumably, this comes from her father’s status as a chief of the Seneca Nation.)

A year after Allen Mohawk died, Lydia Hale Mohawk moved with her 11-year-old daughter to Painesville, Ohio, where she was from, and where she had family.  She married widowed blacksmith Robert Killey (1826-90), a non-Indian, in 1873, and gave birth to a son, William (“Will”) Henry Killey, the next year.  Sadly, Go-won-go’s mother, too, died in 1875, when Mohawk was about 15.

At her mother’s death, Mohawk was named the sole heir of Lydia Killey’s estate; her mother left nothing to Will or her husband.  The inheritance may have allowed Mohawk to enroll in Lake Erie Female Seminary in Painesville (which became Lake Erie College in 1908), a religious boarding school which she didn’t like.

In Greene, Mohawk had felt like an outsider at her school, presumably a regular public school where she was likely the only Indian student.  She dressed Indian style, she said, wearing moccasins and clad in a blanket.  At recess, she recounted, she stood alone while the other children played.  They sometimes asked her about her Indian life—based on the stories and myths about indigenous Americans told in newspapers and dime novels, and displayed in the popular wild west shows.

“When I think of those American children, the English ideas of Indians don’t seem so funny after all,” she said bitterly.  When she got to Paineville, she rejected institutional discipline and resisted enforced assimilation, wore her hair over her eyes, and eschewed hats.  The interviewer who elicited these recollections remarked that “she must have been anything but an elegant member of a young ladies’ seminary” (Christine Bold, “Vaudeville Indians” on Global Circuits, 1880s-1930s [Yale University Press, 2022], 80).

(According to Wikipedia, citing two 19th-century newspaper articles, Mohawk later attended university.  That’s the only source I saw that stated she went to “the University of Ohio,” but no such school exists, and I couldn’t find any reference to a school in the 19th century that used that name. 

(There’s no telling how far off the references are, but there are only two similarly named universities in Ohio: Ohio State University, founded in 1870 in Columbus, the state capital, and Ohio University, chartered in 1787 in Athens.  I couldn’t establish any connection between Mohawk and either school.  Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, the other large state school in Ohio, while it opened in 1824, was closed between 1873 and 1885, covering the period when Go-won-go Mohawk would most likely have been a college student.

(I can only surmise, but it’s possible that the reference to Mohawk’s having gone to college might be a reference to Lake Erie Seminary, which “offered an advanced curriculum that was more extensive than high school,” according to Michelle S.A. McGeough.  Her 2017 University of New Mexico PhD dissertation, “The Indigenous Sovereign Body: Gender, Sexuality and Performance” quotes a description of the seminary’s curriculum [p. 80] and describes other aspects of the school’s program.)

In 1879, when she was 19, Mohawk married Civil War Veteran James E. Rider (or Ryder) who was in his early 30’s.  She married under the name of Carrie A. Mohawk.  The marriage didn’t last long as her husband was abusive and Mohawk left him.  Rider, however, was the brother of well-known actress Louise Pomeroy (née Ryder; c. 1853-93).

Mohawk began her acting career in 1883, when her sister-in-law was the first person to cast her in a small role in a play.  (The play was reported as The Outcast, an adaptation from a French novel by Edmond About [1825-85].  It played at New York’s Fourteenth Street Theatre—on West 14th Street, west of 6th Avenue—in December 1884, but I wasn’t able to identify it any further since neither the novel nor the stage adaptation seems to be listed anywhere.)  Mohawk also worked at the Windsor Theatre at 43 Bowery in New York on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, but I couldn’t discover what play(s) she did there, or when.

Over the next six years, Mohawk played various female roles in many European and American melodramas and comedies in cities such as New York and Philadelphia.  She was displeased with the parts in which she was cast, observing dismissively, “Indian parts?  No, indeed: roles of great ladies and suffering heroines, such as Isabel in ‘East Lynne’ and adventuresses in melodrama—adventuresses must be dark, you know” (Bold, p. 81).

(Melodrama is a form of drama that emphasizes emotion and heightens plot or action, stressing romantic sentiment and agonizing situations at the expense of characterization.  Its plots don’t follow the principle of cause and effect.  The characters are flat archetypes, usually of exaggerated disposition: evil villain, innocent victim, stalwart hero/savior; there are no such figures as antiheroes or conflicted bad guys.  Suggestive musical accompaniment often underscores scenes which are especially thrilling or pathetic.  It was arguably the most popular type of play in the Victorian era.)

(East Lynne, in Mohawk’s reference, is one of the many—at least nine—stage adaptations of the 1861 “sensation” novel by Ellen Wood [English; 1814-87], under the pen name Mrs. Henry Wood.  “Isabel” is the central character of the story, Isabel Vane, who’s beleaguered by many misfortunes and tragedies. 

(Considered the archetype of the Victorian melodrama, the most successful version was Clifton W. Tayleur’s [American actor and dramatist; 1831-91] adaptation of 1862; another popular version was the 1866 dramatization of John Oxenford [English; 1812-77].

(It was a much-disparaged—for its elaborate and implausible plot—but immensely popular melodrama of which one theater manager who produced it many times quipped: “No other play in its time has ever been more maligned, more burlesqued, more ridiculed, or consistently made more money” [Denis Meikle, Mr Murder: The Life and Times of Tod Slaughter (Hemlock Books, 2019)].  

(I found no information that Mohawk ever played in East Lynne, but it was often playing at another theater in towns where she was performing The Indian Mail Carrier or The Flaming Arrow.  Furthermore, I did find that Louise Pomeroy, who’d cast Mohawk in her first stage role around 1884, played Lady Isabel Vane/Madame Vine many times from 1879 on all around the U.S., including New York City, as well as abroad in Australia, New Zealand, and India.

(Pomeroy gave several performances of compilations of scenes from her many productions.  They always included Lady Isabel/Mme. Vine.  I posit that Mohawk might well have seen Pomeroy in that role, leading her to cite East Lynne as an example of the kind of characters leading actresses were asked to play on Victorian stages.)

During a production of Michael Strogoff, another adaptation from a novel, this one by Jules Verne (French; 1828-1925), in Philadelphia, she met her second husband, Charles W. Charles (1834-1926), who was also in the play.  (Charles was, like Rider, a former army officer.  He was a captain who had served with General George Armstrong Custer [1839-76].)  

The company presenting the production in which Mohawk and Charles performed—as “Sangarra, a gipsy [sic] woman,” and “Landlord of the Post Relay,” respectively (Daily Mail [Toronto, Ontario, Canada] 23 August 1887, as cited in McGeough, p. 82)—was Charles L. Andrews’s Minuet Carnival Company.

(Michael Strogoff is a stage adaptation of an 1876 novel, Michael Strogoff: The Courier of the Czar [French: Michel Strogoff, initially entitled Le Courrier du Tsar].  I couldn’t definitively identify the version used in the 1889 Philadelphia production referenced above, but Verne staged his own adaptation, entitled in English Michael Strogoff: A Play in Five Acts and Sixteen Scenes, with playwright and novelist Adolphe d’Ennery [1811-99] in 1880.)

The Minuet Carnival Company went broke in Rochester, New York, as reported in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle of 24 February 1889, leaving the company members without jobs or funds (“Stranded Actors: The Michael Strogoff Company Disbanded with the Salaries not Paid,” p. 6). 

Mohawk and Charles were married in May of 1889—and this time, Mohawk signed the documents as Go-won-go Mohawk, proclaiming her indigenous status and her Seneca heritage.  (Despite her own accounts, the actress was often erroneously identified in the press as a member of the Mohawk people because of her name.)

According to several reports, when Mohawk and Charles married, neither of them was divorced from previous spouses. This caused a stir in 1892, as reported in the Paterson [New Jersey]  Evening News of 25 January, when Mohawk’s first husband, James Rider, confronted the couple in Newark, New Jersey, where they were scheduled to perform at the Grand Opera House.  Mohawk was arrested but discharged.

(Some biographical sketches of Mohawk state that she had been married to an “Indian-fighter.”  I haven’t been able to determine to whom that refers.  Brigadier and major general were brevet, or temporary, ranks Custer held only during the war [March 1865-July 1866].  As commander of the 7th Cavalry Regiment in the West [July 1866-June 1876], during the post-Civil War Indian Wars, he was a lieutenant colonel.)

Back in Greene when she was growing up, Mohawk kept close ties with the Seneca community until she was 10, when her father, who had grown up on the reservation, died.  Then her mother, who was only part Indian, moved away, 140 miles southwest of the Cattaraugus Reservation.  Her new stepfather wasn’t an Indian, and the girls’ seminary was an alienating environment for Mohawk.

Her father, an excellent rider himself, taught Mohawk to ride and fish.  She had enjoyed riding horses, running, hunting, fishing, and rowing, none of which were really the activities cultivated by genteel young Victorian ladies.  In an 1898 issue of Metropolitan Magazine, a monthly periodical published in New York City, Alice W. Eyre further described Mohawk as: “a clever shot, an able fencer, an excellent archer, and very skilful [sic] with the lariat” (“From Wigwam to Stage,” Metropolitan Magazine 7.1 [January 1898], 101-2).

Now fully adopting Go-won-go as her identity on and off stage, Mohawk was also obscuring her gender identity.  Her native name was gender-inclusive—perhaps in today’s terms, non-binary is more accurate—and at least one source notes that Mohawk shifted pronouns in her copyright documents (Bold, p. 300 [notes to pages 79-82]: note 17).  At the time of her marriage, as she took the name by which she’d be known for the rest of her life, she declared to the 31 March 1910 Des Moines Register and Leader (Bold, p. 300 [notes to pages 79-82]: note 15):

I grew tired of being cast in uncongenial roles.  I said to myself that I must have something free and wild that would fit with my own nature.  I wanted to ride and wrestle, and I thought, “Well, I can’t do that as a woman, I must act a man, or better, a boy.

(I can’t prove it, but I wonder if Mohawk’s notion of playing a male character in order to portray strong and heroic Native Americans on American stages might have come in part from seeing her initial mentor, Louise Pomeroy, play Hamlet with some success in the 1880s.  Mohawk’s sister-in-law performed the play several times, but her “doleful Dane” was also always part of her compilation presentations of scenes from her various productions.)

Once Mohawk was in charge of her own stage career—husband Charles W. Charles was her manager—she was frequently billed in programs, posters, newspaper display ads, and announcements of coming attractions as “The Only Indian Actress” or “The First Indian Actress,” though modern-day authorities assert that this was more marketing hype than historical accuracy.

In her PhD dissertation, Michelle S. A. McGeough, assistant professor of art history at Concordia University (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), wrote that “Go-won-go, by all accounts, had a larger than life persona(s) that seemed to defy labels of any kind” (“The Indigenous Sovereign Body: Gender, Sexuality and Performance,” Ph.D dissertation, University of New Mexico, 2017, p. 68).

I find it noteworthy that Mohawk so stalwartly fought against the racial and ethnic stereotyping with which she’d been burdened in her nascent stage career—not to mention her daily life—but she apparently bought into, however begrudgingly, the gender typecasting to the extent that she had to cross-dress to accomplish a degree of self-determination—to play a strong and heroic character.  Perhaps she saw that fighting that stereotyping was just a losing battle, and she took the one victory she saw she could win.

Nonetheless, Mohawk’s construction of Native Americans, particularly Native American men, contradicted the common stereotypes.  In that Metropolitan Magazine of 1898 I quoted earlier, author Eyre reported that Mohawk’s “acting [of male characters] is so realistic that it is often hard to believe that she is a woman.”

Eyre, however, also declared: “She has overcome the thousand-and-one barriers which strew the pathways of any woman who starts out to fight her own battles . . . .”  The writer added, “Miss Mohawk is not lacking in purely feminine accomplishments.”

As I noted within the Times obituary, most of the plays in which Go-won-go Mohawk acted in her later career were border or frontier dramas.  (Frontier plays that featured horses, as did Mohawk’s—she was an accomplished horsewoman and trick rider—were called “equestrian dramas.”)  The genre of the frontier drama was the precursor of western movies—which were sometimes referred to as “horse operas.”)

The portrait of the frontier of these plays, as in other forms of literature, was not necessarily accurate or even realistic, despite being promoted as “based on real events.”  Not only was the setting a mythical place and time, but it was a vehicle for making socio-political statements.  The opposition of savagery and civilization, for example, functioned significantly as a way of distinguishing characters and motivating the plot in border plays.

Another norm was a hardworking, rough-hewn hero paired with a morally upright, and educated heroine.  The homespun hero (that would have been Mohawk’s part) was romantically linked to the refined heroine, and together they were pitted against morally bankrupt villains, who endangered the girl but were thwarted by the hero (who sometimes died in the effort).

While as a genre, border plays may be set anywhere where there was once a frontier, usually in Mohawk’s day, the plays were set in the West and almost always featured Native Americans.  In Mohawk’s scripts, however, Indians were portrayed in contradiction to their usual depiction.  

The violence and savagery in Mohawk’s plays, in contrast to, say, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West extravaganzas—contrary to the popular misconception, the word ‘Show’ was not a part of the title—wasn’t always the province of the Indians; often the savages were white men. 

“Did your father ever kill any one [sic]?” Mohawk’s schoolmates back in Greene had asked her, prompted by the images of Indian life in the stories and sensationalist wild west pageants.  “Well, did your mother ever kill any one?”  She answered no, but they’d just move away (Bold, p, 80).

Mohawk arrived in New York City in 1888, where she appeared on the vaudeville stages.  From the early 1880s until the early 1930s, vaudeville was the most popular theatrical form in the United States.  A form of variety entertainment, close kin to music hall in Victorian Britain and variété on the Continent, a typical vaudeville show was a series of unrelated comic, musical, and acrobatic “turns” or “numbers” selected to appeal to a mass audience of mostly middle- and working-class people.

Almost immediately, indigenous performers—or faux-indigenous poseurs—became a staple of vaudeville.  Almost all were used to reflect the stereotypes of popular lore and, like other ethnic groups or communities (blacks, Jews, immigrants, country folk), made figures of fun and ridicule.  A few were presented to perform acts considered Indian expertise, such as throwing tomahawks or knives, ritual dancing, trick horseback riding (Mohawk’s forte), rope tricks (the specialty of Will Rogers—of Cherokee descent; 1879-1935), drumming, juggling, and so on.

The Native American performers were dubbed “Vaudeville Indians,” and Christine Bold, a research fellow at the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, has published “Vaudeville Indians” to cover this phenomenon.  The book has a chapter on Go-won-go Mohawk and there’s an online version interested readers may access.

Indeed, Bold states in her introduction of Mohawk in her book: “Go-won-go Mohawk (1859-1924) can equally be celebrated as, in several senses, the mother of all vaudeville Indians” (p. 78).

Specialty acts, as the vaudeville turns were called in drama circles, that could be easily dropped into any plot drove play production.  In fact, as Bold reports:

“It was standard for stage melodrama to intersperse ‘specialty acts’ into its plotline. . . .  Precisely because the vaudeville acts changed, the script does not specify them, but it is clear from reviews that Mohawk did horse-riding tricks, whip routines, and fancy lariat work years before Will Rogers won fame doing the same; she also sang.  Her turns came among established vaudeville specialties: sand-dancing and minstrelsy by blackface Sam, sentimental singing by Nellie, piping and comic jigs by the Irishman, and “a roaring burlesque of the familiar serio-comic young woman of the vaudevilles” included (p. 88).

The humor of the vaudeville comic turns was low, based on racial and ethnic stereotypes that would be anathema today.  Though Mohawk turned the Indian characterizations on their heads, using the format of the vaudeville comedy to contradict its habitual message, she played into the portrayals of other ethnic Americans. 

Here’s a bit of a review of a 1902 performance of The Flaming Arrow, Mohawk’s later play (1900), written for her by Lincoln J. Carter (1865-1926), at the Camden Theater in Camden, New Jersey.  Note that the “specialties” to which the anonymous reviewer refers are the variety or vaudeville numbers commonly inserted into melodramas:

The specialties introduced in the third act were good and dovetailed naturally with the thread of the plot.  The Indian band won applause as did also Snow Ball’s coon song and dance, Jerry’s cornet solo and Sergeant True’s really clever work on the bugle (Camden Daily Courier, 4 March 1902: 8).

In case readers haven’t twigged to it, Snow Ball is an African American character, labeled earlier in the review as “a colored gent,” and Jerry is “one of the fighting Irish.”  They were stock farcical characters in the melodrama, along with several others—including Native American characters in the hands of white dramatists writing frontier melodramas. 

Sergeant True, who was in charge of the Indian band, was listed as being played by W. H. Killey, noted in one announcement of the play as “the world’s champion bugler” (“Two Big Productions,” Camden Daily Courier 26 November 1900: 8).  In case readers don’t recognize the initials, that’s William Henry Killey, Mohawk’s half-brother, her mother’s son born in the year before her death in 1875.  After his father’s death in 1890, Mohawk took him in as part of her household and company; he made bugling his specialty and appeared in both The Indian Mail Carrier and The Flaming Arrow.

A “coon song” was a type of musical number, adopted from minstrelsy, that made racist fun of a black character.  Snow Ball and characters like him were usually played by white actors in blackface.  (Indian characters in other frontier plays would be played by actors in red-face makeup.  There were professional non-indigenous performers who regularly performed as Indians on American popular stages; in a review of “Vaudeville Indians,” Benjamin R. Kracht dubbed them “‘pretendians’ and red-face poseurs” [American Indian Culture and Research Journal 47.2 (2024): 177; https://escholarship.org/content/qt2rk0k2kf/qt2rk0k2kf.pdf?t=shl6wv].  In Mohawk’s productions, Indian characters were ostensibly all played by indigenous actors.)

The mention of the “Indian band” in the Daily Courrier review needs a little explanation as well.  In the 19th and 20th centuries, there were scores of Indian bands in the U.S.  A band composed of and led by Native American musicians, sometimes playing music that incorporates elements of their traditional tribal sounds, stories, and instruments, they were a byproduct of the Indian boarding schools of the era, though many tribes organized marching bands that toured both at home and abroad. 

Though the bands were meant as a way to support assimilation of the Indians into mainstream American culture (“Kill the Indian, Save the Man”), the Indians were able subtly to subvert this plan under the radar of the dominant society.  Indians succeeded in nativizing and Indianizing the bands so that they became part of their indigenous culture.

The music Indian bands played was mostly American and European, though occasional indigenous music and even pieces by Indian composers, was included in the program.  I have no evidence for this supposition, but I posit that Mohawk’s performances were accompanied by bands playing more Indian music than was standard in the 1890s and 1900s—because that would match her intentions for the plays in the first place.

In addition, most Indian bands wore uniforms that were modeled on American military garb, but some wore native clothing.  Given Mohawk’s intentions for the theater she produced—remembering the level of control she maintained—I suspect, though again, I can’t prove it, that the bands she had for support in her productions wore Indian dress.

[This is a good place to break my report of the life and work on Go-won-go Mohawk, Native American actor and playwright.  I will post Part 3, which starts with Mohawk’s creation of her first original play, on Sunday, 29 December.  I hope readers will come back to Rick On Theater then to read the conclusion of this series.]

Go-Won-Go Mohawk (1859-1924), Part 1

[When I read the long-delayed obituary of Go-won-go Mohawk in the New York Times last month, I was immediately interested.  I thought I’d never heard of her, an indigenous actress who became a sensation on America’s stages at the turn of the 20th century, and I wanted to know more.  

[(As it turned out, I had run across the name Go-won-go Mohawk.  She got a passing mention in “Superheroes on Native Land: Supplement – History of Native American Theater,” posted on Rick On Theater on 2 February 2024.  “Superheroes on Native Land” is a series of five posts on Native American theater, published between 21 January and 2 February 2024.)

[I also wondered if there’s enough of her story on record to make a post for Rick On Theater, since a Native American actress from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th would be a perfect subject for my theater blog.  So, I did a quick survey of the Internet to see what’s online—and I was happy to see that there are dozens of sites with at least a bit of information.

[I even did a quick scan of one of the newspaper databases on the New York Public Library site to see what old newspapers might yield, and I was delighted to find a number of reviews of some of Mohawk’s performances.  (As students of the history of theater in the United States will know, plays toured all over the country in those years, so even small-town papers as well as regional dailies covered the shows that were the popular entertainment in the decades before movies and television—even if a popular figure like Go-won-go Mohawk weren’t a draw.)

[So, I set out to see what I could learn about this phenomenon.  I’m going to start out with a repost of the Times piece, and then expand on that with what I’ve uncovered in my own research.  I found the story of Go-won-go Mohawk fascinating.  I’m sure you will, too.]

OVERLOOKED NO MORE: GO-WON-GO MOHAWK,

TRAILBLAZING INDIGENOUS ACTRESS

by Elyssa Goodman

[Elyssa Goodman’s belated obituary of Native American actress Go-Won-Go Mohawk ran in the New York Times of 12 November 2024 in section B (“Business”/”Sports”); updated online, 13 November 2024.  It’s part of “Overlooked,” a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in the Times.

 [Readers should note that Mohawk’s first name is spelled in English at least three different ways in various publications.  The New York Times obituary below (and other Times articles) used “Go-won-go,” capitalizing only the first letter.  Other publications use “Go-Won-Go” or, as in Wikipedia, “Gowongo” (without hyphens). 

[There doesn’t seem to be any rationale for the variations, so I will select one arbitrarily.  Except in quotations from published material, within which I must conform to the original usage, I will use “Go-won-go.”]

In the 1880s, the only roles for Indigenous performers were laden with negative stereotypes. So Mohawk decided to write her own narratives.

For a long time, theatrical roles for Indigenous characters were laden with stereotypes: the savage, the tragic martyr, the helpless drunk. And it was rare in stories of any kind, on the page or on the stage, for an Indigenous character to have a starring role.

By the late 1880s, the actress Go-won-go Mohawk had had enough. “I grew tired of being cast in uncongenial roles,” like meek princesses or submissive women who were restrained in corsets, she told The Des Moines Register and Leader in 1910. So she decided to write her own roles, ultimately carving out a groundbreaking career in which she told stories onstage about Indigenous people as the heroes of their own lives. And she did it while performing as a man.

Mohawk’s primary work was “Wep-ton-no-mah, the Indian Mail Carrier” (1892), which follows the title character, a young Indigenous man, as he saves a young white woman from a stampede, winning her heart and earning the respect of her family.

The woman’s father, a colonel, offers Wep-ton-no-mah a position as a mail carrier, which he initially turns down. “I could not start being under the control of anyone but the great Manitou,” Wep-ton-no-mah says, referring to the spiritual power of the Algonquians. “I want to be free–free–free like the birds, the eagles and deers — owning no master but one.”

Another man, Spanish Joe, plots to kidnap the woman, but when Wep-ton-no-mah thwarts his plan, Joe vows to kill him. Joe, however, accidentally kills Wep-ton-no-mah’s father, Ga-ne-gua, instead. Wep-ton-no-mah then takes the mail carrier position and later kills Spanish Joe in a knife fight.

The play presented themes of interracial coupling and Indigenous power and autonomy that were rare at the time.

[The five-act play, Wep-ton-no-mah: The Indian Mail Carrier, was first performed in Liverpool, England, in April 1893, and became incredibly popular.  An 1892 copy of the script is held by the Library of Congress and has been digitized.

[All the later plays of Mohawk (after she started creating her own male characters), including those she didn’t herself write (see The Flaming Arrow, below), were labeled “border dramas.” These were plays focused exclusively on the performance and commercialization of an image of the “frontier”—wherever that was located at the time each play was set. Indeed, “border play” and “frontier play” were terms commonly used synonymously.]

Mohawk herself played Wep-ton-no-mah, riding horses, fighting and performing stage combat with knives. She was the powerful Indigenous woman in the role of the powerful man, the hero and not the villain or the victim.

“I said to myself that I must have something free and wild that would fit with my own nature,” she said in 1910. “I wanted to ride and wrestle, and I thought, ‘Well, I can’t do that as a woman, I must act a man, or better, a boy.’” 

Mohawk started touring the show in 1889, in vaudeville shows across the United States and Canada and in England. The accolades rolled in. “She acts with intelligence and has the repose of an expert,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote that year of her performance, although the reviewer found the play ordinary and questioned whether she was actually Indigenous.

“Miss Mohawk is a clever actress,” The New Haven Morning Journal and Courier in Connecticut wrote a few weeks later. “She came entirely unheralded, and has already proven that she possesses unusual dramatic talent.”

Records vary, but Mohawk is believed to have been born on Aug. 11, 1859. She was known by the English names Carolina, Carrie and Carolina [or Caroline] A. at various times in her youth; she later permanently adopted her Indigenous name, Go-won-go, to remain connected to her heritage.

She was born in upstate New York, either in the village of Gowanda or on the Cattaraugus Reservation of the Seneca Nation, according to the scholar Christine Bold’s 2022 book, “‘Vaudeville Indians’ on Global Circuits, 1880s-1930s” [Yale University Press, 2022]. There is also a historical marker on a former residence of hers in Greene, N.Y., that was placed in 1935.

[Gowanda (guh-WAN-duh) is a village in western New York. It lies partly in Erie County and partly in Cattaraugus (cat-uh-RAWG-us) County. Its population in 1870, the earliest figure I could find, was 994. (By my approximation, there could have been as few as 728 people in Gowanda in 1860, the year after Mohawk was born.)

[The Cattaraugus Reservation is in the same area of New York State, covering today about 34.4 square miles in parts of Erie, Chautauqua (cha-TAW-kwa), and Cattaraugus Counties. Gowanda lies just south of the reservation's southeast corner. As of 1850, Cattaraugus Reservation had a population of 871; I estimate that its population might have been about 997 in 1860.

[At the age of one, Mohawk moved with her family to Greene, New York, a town of 3,809 in 1860, in Chenango County in the south-central section of the state, part of the Southern Tier region, just above the border with Pennsylvania. Her father, Dr. Allen (or Alan) Mohawk, a chief and medicine man of the Seneca Nation, set up practice and she lived there for about nine years until the death of her father.  The historical marker is alongside the road in front of the house on South Chenango Street where Mohawk lived in Greene.]

Carolina’s father, Allen Mohawk (b. 1823), who was known as Ga-ne-gua, practiced herbal medicine. He died in 1869. (The character in “The Indian Mail Carrier” was named after him.) Her mother, Lydia Hale Mohawk, remarried, and Carolina entered a religious boarding school.

Her mother died when she was about 15, and a few years later she married James Rider [1846-?], a Civil War veteran 13 years her senior. Marrying a white man enabled her to change her status in the eyes of the law from a ward of the state into someone who would be able to navigate the complex American political landscape more independently, said Christiana Molldrem Harkulich, a professor of theater, film and gender studies at Eastern Illinois University. Mohawk began looking into a career in acting. (Her husband was abusive, and she soon left him.)

The roles available to Indigenous people were limited, and the few that were available often depicted them in a negative light. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West traveling shows [1883-1913; William Frederick Cody (1846-1917)], for instance, showed Indigenous people attacking white settlers and exoticized their culture for entertainment purposes.

Mohawk wrote “Indian Mail Carrier” with her second husband, Charles W. Charles [1948?-1926], a former Army captain turned actor, whom she married in 1888. The play’s copyright belongs entirely to her, which was exceedingly unusual for a woman at the time, let alone an Indigenous woman (her husband’s contributions were relatively minimal).

“It is natural for me to write,” she told The Liverpool Weekly Courier in 1893 while on tour in England, “and besides that, I never had a part in a play which seemed suitable to me, and therefore I made one for myself.”

Mohawk was often billed as the “only living Indian actress,” or the first. But that was most likely a marketing tactic, said Bethany Hughes, of Oklahoma’s Choctaw Nation, an assistant professor of Native American studies at the University of Michigan.

Still, Mohawk was probably one of the first. “There’s going to be very few self-identified Native female actresses or actors in the time period that are understood as legitimate theatrical performers,” Hughes said in an interview.

Mohawk made her Broadway debut in 1900 as the lead in “The Flaming Arrow,” a five-act melodrama written by Lincoln J. Carter [1865-1926], playing a male Indigenous character named White Eagle who falls in love with a white woman.

[The Flaming Arrow opened at the Star Theatre on 17 December 1900. The closing date is unknown but the next show booked at the theater opened on 14 January 1901. (Short runs were the norm at the time and all the shows at the Star with both opening and closing dates recorded ran for five or six days, so Flaming Arrow probably closed on 22 or 23 December.) The Star, which was demolished in 1901, was at 844 Broadway at East 13th Street, south of Union Square.]

Mohawk copyrighted another work, a melodrama chronicling the push and pull of Indigenous heroism and interracial love called “An Indian Romance: A Forest Tragedy.” But it was never published, and there is no record of it ever having gone into production.

Mohawk became so popular in England that she toured the country for almost a decade, first from 1893 to 1897 and then from 1903 to 1908. On returning to the U.S., she and her husband settled in Edgewater, N.J.

By then, audiences had become fascinated with the degree of fame she had achieved. She had previously been serialized as a character in [Beadle & Adams] dime novels; the character was reinvigorated, and a song, “Go-Wan-Go Mohawk: Intermezzo in Two-Step,” was released as sheet music by Dewitt Bell of the Bell Music Company in 1910.

[Erastus Beadle (1821-94) started his pulp fiction publishing company with his brothers in 1850. In 1856, Robert Adams (1837-67) and his brothers joined the Beadle brothers’ company. Beadle & Adams became the foremost publisher—and pretty much the inventor—of the dime novel.]

She died of a stroke at her home on Feb. 7, 1924. She [was] around 64.

[Elyssa Goodman is a New York-based writer and photographer specializing in nonfiction writing and documentary photography about arts and culture.  Her work has appeared in the New York Times, VICE, Billboard, Vogue, Vanity Fair, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, ELLE, and the online LGBTQ magazine them, among others.  Her first book, Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City, was published in 2023 by Hanover Square Press and named a 2024 Stonewall Honor Book.]

*  *  *  *

[Now, I’m going to try to expand on Goodman’s obituary profile of Go-won-go Mohawk.  The details of Mohawk’s life and career are not well documented, considering both the era in which she lived and, on top of that, the fact that she was a Native American woman.  I probably can’t clear up any conflicts or gaps in the record, but I can point them out.

[In addition, the New York Times focused mostly on Mohawk’s theatrical career to the detriment of other details, and I can try to fill that in a bit.  Finally, there’s the fact that she went by four names, three English first names and an Indigenous name that was spelled at least four ways that I found, so there are information sources under most of them.

[I’ll be posting Parts 2 and 3 on Thursday and Monday, 26 and 29 December.  Please come back and see what I found out about Go-won-go Mohawk, the Native American actress and playwright of the turn of the last century.]

Performance Diary: 'Follies,' Part 2

by Kirk Woodward

[In his account of the work on the Gas Lamp Players’ production of Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman’s Follies, Kirk picks up where he left off in Part 1 of his “Performance Diary”: in the middle of the rehearsal period.  Kirk will take us through the final dress rehearsal to opening night and the short performance run.

[If you haven’t read Part 1, posted on 15 December, I suggest readers go back and pick that up before reading Part 2, below.  Kirk has been presenting a day-by-day chronicle of the progress of the show and without his commentary from the beginning, you will have missed the build-up.]

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 11 – There are some rehearsals you just have to have, whether you want to or not. What I am going to write here should not be taken in the slightest as a criticism of the creative team of our Follies production. I think they’re splendid and doing a fine job. But a production has to work with what it has – including its schedule.

Tonight was a “stumble-through” of Act 1, which is basically a series of vignettes at a party, meaning that its focus frequently changes, while movements occur around the main events that seem to be random (they are not). It was the first time we’d tried to play the act from beginning to end.

The central story, about four characters, is played by eight actors, and that fact in itself demonstrates the complexities of the script (the additional four actors are younger versions of the “present day” characters). 

I have written before in this blog about my conviction that any part of the rehearsal process should have a single focus [see, for example, “Performance Diary, Part 2,” 28 August 2024: “I still feel that a director should define for the cast a single, definite purpose for each rehearsal, or for each run through . . . .”] – in particular, when something new like, say, stage lighting is introduced at a particular rehearsal, that should be the focus, and the actors should be told to concentrate on that and not worry much about acting (which nevertheless will happen, usually effectively, because the pressure is off).

[In “A Directing Experience, Part 1” (13 October 2023), in which Kirk explains this principle as applied by the director he was assisting: “One important directing technique, which I have come to strongly endorse, is that he tried to give goals for each rehearsal. This communication practice frees actors to concentrate on a few specific things, and in the process, everything else is likely to improve as well.”  ~Rick]

Tonight, though, was full of new items, and the result was predictable. Among tonight’s major “firsts” were:

We had a pianist for the first time – previously we had been moving and singing to recordings of previous productions. As far as I could tell, the pianist, who I have the impression will eventually be quite good, was unfamiliar with the score, which, being a Sondheim score, has plenty of complexities. He made his way through the score, but often what he played was unrecognizable.

We also had a musical director present for the first time, but since none of us had worked with him before, he had no idea of what the actors might want in the way of accompaniment, and he spent most of his time either indicating a tempo that might or might not work with the song, or turning pages.

We were in a new space – the cafeteria of the high school. The stage was marked out by tape on the floor, so we could tell how small the playing area is, but being in a big room gave the feeling of spaciousness. Next week the small size of the performance space will be a shock, even if intellectually we know the dimensions of the set.

The act was being put together for the second time, so many were unsure of their cues for entrances and exits (including me). Not everyone was completely “off book” with their lines entirely memorized (I was, but I have very few lines), and, again, the singers in particular were suddenly singing against musical backgrounds that were entirely new to them.

So we worked our way through the act, and it was necessary and useful to see how all the separately rehearsed pieces fit together, but there was a lot of confusion and little sense of performance – how could there be? As an example, Janet Aldrich, a powerhouse singer, made a huge impression singing “I’m Still Here,” but she had to call for lyrics twice and was being coached on movement while she sang, a reflection of how muddled things were.

At this point it doesn’t seem to me that the central story of the musical is clearly told – not that the authors have helped much with that problem. A friend told me that she had talked to a film director recently who said, “I tell the actors, you can do this or you can do that, but you have to do this, because if you don’t, the story doesn’t get across.”

That, it seems to me, is the crux of the matter – a director is always trying to answer the question, “How can the story best be told?” I don’t doubt that Kristy and Susan are aware of this.

And it’s foolish to judge a production based on rehearsals. We have almost two weeks until opening, nine full rehearsals, and as my friend also pointed out, we don’t have any of the “wizardry” in place yet – lights, amplification, orchestra, costumes, and so on.

At this point there’s also no coherent sense of style about the production, but the same point applies – there’s a long way to go, and we have good people in charge of the process. So, onward! Act II tomorrow night!

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 12 – Act II is less complicated than Act I as far as staging goes. Basically, after a brief argument among the leading couples, a kind of “Follies” called “Loveland” begins, and a series of brilliant songs takes ironic looks at the couples’ troubles.

I wrote last night about difficulties in telling the story of the show, but tonight the principals seemed to have that under control, so that’s good. We worked our way through the act; two of the male principals, for various reasons, are still using their scripts, but I doubt that anyone is worried about either of them. The teen company of dancers and actors is terrific, and so were several of the numbers tonight.

We eight men did our dance to baffled applause. Deshja Driggs, an extraordinarily talented performer who sings the lead in the song, eyed the solid floor of the cafeteria warily as she considered how safe our lifting her into the air could possibly be (I’m not one of the lifters, thank heaven), but her life was spared, at least for tonight.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 13 – I arrived a little early (always a good idea – maybe even an imperative) while some scene work was going on, and Susan, the director, came over and told me that her husband, who has been playing the second male lead, has got a role in another major show.

He’ll be “swing,” a form of understudy, for a production that starts rehearsals next Tuesday. Obviously he can’t be in our show, and Susan and Kristy were interviewing a replacement when I arrived. Susan asked me not to tell anyone else, and I said, “Tell them what?”

I was complimented twice tonight on my opening speech. Of course that was before rehearsal; I hope they feel the same about it now.

When our rehearsal began, Kristy fine-tuned parts of the opening scene, and it’s now clearer and more fun. She really is a very good director. Then the cast separated for detailed work on three smaller scenes, and finally we eight male “dancers” worked out the glitches in our number until I thought my feet would fall off, especially my right one.

A note to directors: actors are not pleased if a director, having looked elsewhere, tells them that they ought to do something they just did. Much better to ask “Did you . . ." or “Were you able to . . .? I couldn’t see.”

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 15 – In our performance space (the Glen Ridge, NJ Women’s Club) for the first time as a cast. It’s a lovely auditorium; the stage is definitely smaller than one would imagine (I think that was true for all of us), and tonight’s rehearsal was basically dedicated to adjusting our movements to the new conditions.

The set is basically in place. There are three stage curtains at the back of the stage (“upstage”), each gathered together in the middle so the back of the wall – a theater wall, appropriate for the show! – is visible. There’s a three-level staircase, not walled in but “skeletal,” a smaller platform on the other side of the stage, and that’s it. Properly lit (we had a few stage lights already), it’s lovely.

We needed to make many adjustments to the staging in the new space, there were basically four people making the changes (two directors, the choreographer, and the musical director), and both time and patience ran short as the evening went on. (Talent is important, but patience is one of the greatest theatrical virtues.)

Our dance comes toward the end of the show, and therefore of the rehearsal as well. There were questions about its ending, lots of conversation, no decision yet . . . .

That’s when I left, because my right foot, never sturdy because of two falls on ice over the years, pretty much gave way when I twice stepped clumsily on stairs. I was limping, it’s really sore, and I need to do my best to get it in shape for the rehearsal tomorrow night.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 15 – Although I hadn’t broadcast my hurt foot, I hadn’t kept it a secret either, and when I arrived early for rehearsal tonight Susan was solicitous, asking if I wanted to stay in the number (I did) or if I’d rather get out (I wouldn’t), although she said it would be a loss because I’m so adorable in the dance, which I’m afraid means . . . well, you can figure it out.

The actor replacing Tony in the role of Buddy was working with Kristy, Susan, and the pianist when I arrived. He looks and sounds great but doesn’t read music, so I know what he’ll be doing this weekend, or at least I expect so – listening to performances of the show over and over.

We eight male “dancers” got together to find that Emily didn’t plan to work with us, which caused some grumbling, since the very end of the routine hadn’t been staged. However, we did get her for about 20 minutes; she didn’t have anything planned but by the time she went in to work with the new Buddy there was an ending in place.

I made it clear at the start of our work that my foot was in bad shape, but I was able to do the whole rehearsal, although I didn’t push it. Our next rehearsal will be Monday night in the performance space; it’ll be a technical rehearsal, settling light cues, microphones and sound cues, costumes, and so on, and considering the size and shape of the show it’s likely to be a long and grueling evening. We shall see.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 16 – Not a rehearsal, but a performance of the musical “Singin’ in the Rain Jr.” by Gas Lamp’s junior high school cast. (The original movie was released in 1952, the adaptation for the stage first opened in London in 1983.) It was quite impressive – close to 90 children, every one aware of what they had to do, and several exceptional voices. A good omen, I hope!

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 18 – All right, class, write one hundred times, “I will not judge the show by a rehearsal.” Tonight was a technical rehearsal and those can be expected to be rough. Lights, sound, a full set, costumes . . . all new. I had managed to pull together a full tuxedo, which I’ll wear through the whole show.

The night was extremely ragged, and when we had to stop at 10 PM we weren’t quite finished with the first act. That in itself isn’t a problem; the second act, which we’ll tackle in the same way tomorrow night, is shorter and less fragmented.

My foot behaved itself, and Susan told me I was “a breath of fresh air” because “you’re so confident.” She may say the same thing to everyone for all I know, but many if not all actors thrive on praise. The music is still under-rehearsed, with some not at all helpful tempos. There was no way to evaluate the acting, which has little chance in a technical rehearsal.

There was a nice feeling of camaraderie among the cast, I thought. People seem to be having fun for the most part. “It’s such a big show,” Susan said tonight.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 19 – I told you they were smart! We left rehearsal last night planning for a 6:30 arrival time tonight for rehearsal. Today we got an email giving specific times for groups of people between 6:30 and 7:30, with the rest of the cast arriving at 7:30.

Deduction: as I wrote yesterday, the music still needs to be settled down, and the orchestra (14 altogether!) will be there tonight, so the first rehearsal hour will be spent getting the singing and the accompaniment together. Once again, the creative team is looking at what’s most important to accomplish, and putting that first. Good for them!

I was wrong, or at least I think I was. When I arrived there were a few musicians tootling (actually only half the orchestra, the students; the rest arrive tomorrow night), actors hanging around, not much sign that anything important was happening.

Eventually we got started, picking up where we left off last night. Basically the two nights went the same: with numerous stops to set or fix things, a few actors holding scripts (including our Buddy, who of course is new) or unsure of lines . . . I kept thinking of the theatrical proverb “No matter how long you rehearse, you always need two more weeks.”

In particular I’m not sure about the musical part of the show. Some of the tempos strike me as off, usually too slow; there are clunker notes, and for several songs in this particular show, the orchestra needs to accompany the singer as they sing, not lead them – no matter how difficult this may be. It can be done, but so far, in our production, it only happens sporadically.

I added to the fun by stepping badly again in the same spot I did the other night, a setback to my ability to move. Susan was solicitous, had me put my foot up, gave me some Advil, and I was able to dance in our number, probably making no more than five major mistakes.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 20 – The first of two full run-throughs in costume, with orchestra (complete and playing together for the first time), lights, sound, and no stops – except during “Who’s That Woman,” the most complex number in the show, where the orchestra lost track of the sudden tempo shifts.

I thought the evening as a whole did what it needed to do. Tomorrow night the transitions between scenes should be tighter, Buddy should be more secure on his song lyrics, and the cast’s main focus should be able to be on the show rather than on the technical elements.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 21 – Final dress rehearsal, better than yesterday, the orchestra much improved. The run through wasn’t perfect, but the glitches were either song lyrics or the occasional transition. I also understand that ticket sales are good so far. I wasn’t good, particularly in the dance, but it wasn’t entirely my fault, I beefed to Emily about the spacing at the start of our number, and she said she’ll work with the dance tomorrow at 7.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22, OPENING NIGHT! – I was irritated about how I was handling the short scenes where I have lines. My daughter Heather said something I agree with: she said that a monolog is easier to handle on stage than a short scene with only a line or two in it, because a monolog has a context, while a short scene can seem to pop up out of nowhere, and in Follies that’s the way they seem to me.

So I rewrote my cheat sheet of cues and lines to clarify the sequences, and spent time reviewing it, and that helped. On to the opening performance! The house was full, maybe a hundred or so people. The orchestra regressed a bit from last night, I thought; I suppose musicians get nervous like anyone else.

The audience was enthusiastic and the show can be declared a success. The people I know who saw it felt that the story was clear, and they were impressed with various things including the general talent level, the scale of the production, and of course the score of the show.

Several people I know felt that the book of the musical was problematic. I agree – it’s really an avant-garde musical masquerading as a typical Broadway show, and it seems determined to make the audience’s experience a difficult one.

My choreographer friend Colleen liked the choreography; the general feeling seems to be that the problems with the production were largely technical (some sound glitches) and orchestral.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23 – A two show day, one at 2 PM and one at 8 PM. Feeling that my scenes were finally under control, I spent time on two parts of the dance number that I never seemed to get right, and ended up fairly confident about them.

The afternoon show, the matinee, was splendid, with the orchestra far more together again and the performances filled with an energy that had not been there before.

Our dance, I am happy to report, was quite good, and I basically did well. A friend said to me last night, “You don’t have to worry about how the men look anyway; Deshja is so good that no one’s paying any attention to you anyway.” She really is wonderful in her role; all the principal actors are excellent, and the singing is on a high level throughout the show.

There was one incident in our dance number: one of the dancers dropped his cane, stooped to retrieve it, and missed the second “lift” of the number, when Deshja is carried from the front to the rear of the stage. However, another member of the group, seeing the problem, immediately stepped in and helped carry her, so the number proceeded safely.

The evening show wasn’t as good, for two reasons that I can identify: everyone was tired (two big shows in a day is a lot), and we probably tried to repeat the good points of the afternoon show. Trying to recreate what happened last time almost never works. The audience was pleasant but not boisterous. However, I think they still got a good show.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24 – Another big crowd for our final performance of Follies, a performance that may not have matched the spirit of yesterday’s matinee but was nevertheless fine, and our dance number finally worked the way we wanted it to.

I was so tired that I actually felt myself momentarily fall asleep at one moment in the first act while I was sitting backstage. As a result I didn’t go to the cast party that followed a brief “strike” where everything was put away; wherever I tried to help, someone beat me to it, so I finally just went home.

A few observations:

This diary illustrates something that beginning directors need to know: directing a play is not the same activity as directing a musical. A play is an artistic activity of which you are the leader. A musical is less like a play than a military operation, with intensive strategic planning, a staff, orders, placement of troops, discipline, and so on. Musicals take extensive planning. Someone must do it.

In this case the creative staff (I’m told they called themselves the “Dream Team,” and they’ve worked together on several shows) simply are first rate. They seemed to work together seamlessly, they at least visibly stay calm, and they know their stuff.

The football coach Lou Holtz (b. 1937) used to tell his teams to expect at least three times in a season when things would look bad for them. They shouldn’t be alarmed, he said; these things happen.

This production of Follies was a succession of difficulties and successes. This, it seems to me, is true of theater in general, and in life too, I suppose. Patience, as I said above, is an important theatrical virtue.

Theater has the advantage of aiming for a specific goal: the production will open on this date, regardless of how rehearsals are going. If the date has to be changed, it’s still a date, and if the production has to fold without opening, well, at least it was aiming for a date until it didn’t have one.

So in theater, which is more important, what the show is like when it opens, or how it gets to that point? There are arguments for both “process” and “product,” and they don’t necessarily conflict with each other.

Old-timers – I mean through around the nineteenth century – might have firmly said, “Theater is about what the audience gets, and that’s that.” On the other hand, many directors today, including me, would say that the nature of the rehearsal process is crucial to the success of a play. (A few directors don’t even aim to present their productions, only to work on the material. To each their own, but I don’t feel that way.)

An example of process: as I reported, as far as I know we plunged right into staging numbers at the beginning of rehearsals. Looking back, I think it would have been valuable to have had a sit-down readthrough of the show, maybe just talking through the songs, so the director could frame how the story was to be told, suggest some atmosphere, talk about the theme of the show and how it would affect the staging, and so on.

Like any work of art, a production of a musical is really a projection of the imagination, and early group work would help to have the cast sensing and feeling the same things.

On the other hand, most of my evaluations of how things were going turned out to be wrong, so maybe the lesson is that people in a show are poor judges of how things are going – or at least that I am.

The creative team demonstrated that they could be trusted. I will miss being around that skilled, stimulating group of people. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if I weren’t the only person to be inspired by their highly professional work ethic to do a little better myself next time I’m working on a show. I hope so.

[Just a reminder for readers who are just finding Rick On Theater and have enjoyed Kirk’s account if his work in this production: Kirk has written two previous pieces based on his journal entries about working in theater, “Performance Diary, Part 1” (25 August 2024) and “Performance Diary, Part 2” (28 August 2024).  I recommend giving them a read.]