Failure, Fascism, and Teachers in American Theatre: Pedagogy of the Oppressors (Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History) 3031340124, 9783031340123

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE HISTORY

Failure, Fascism, and Teachers in American Theatre Pedagogy of the Oppressors James F. Wilson

Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History Series Editors

Elizabeth Osborne Florida State University Tallahassee, FL, USA Shannon Walsh Louisiana State University Baton Rouge, LA, USA

Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History is a series devoted to the best of theatre/performance scholarship currently available, accessible and free of jargon. It strives to include a wide range of topics, from the more traditional to those performance forms that in recent years have helped broaden the understanding of what theatre as a category might include (from variety forms as diverse as the circus and burlesque to street buskers, stage magic, and musical theatre, among many others). Although historical, critical, or analytical studies are of special interest, more theoretical projects, if not the dominant thrust of a study but utilized as important underpinning or as an historiographical or analytical method of exploration, are also of interest. Textual studies of drama or other types of less traditional performance texts are also germane to the series if placed in their cultural, historical, social, or political and economic context. There is no geographical focus for this series and works of excellence of a diverse and international nature, including comparative studies, are sought.

James F. Wilson

Failure, Fascism, and Teachers in American Theatre Pedagogy of the Oppressors

James F. Wilson City University of New York New York, NY, USA

ISSN 2947-5767     ISSN 2947-5775 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History ISBN 978-3-031-34012-3    ISBN 978-3-031-34013-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34013-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration by Tug Rice This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

For the Teachers: Artists, Mentors, and Warriors

Acknowledgments

After my previous monograph was published, I found myself quoting Huck Finn: “[I]f I’d a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it and ain’t going to no more.” Time has a way of healing some traumas, though, and making this book—since, like Huck, I realize trouble extends beyond the comparatively simple act of writing— has been a richly instructive experience. Although it is impossible to acknowledge everyone here, I am grateful for the incredible support I received while tackling this project. First, I appreciate the guidance of Eileen Srebernik, my editor at Palgrave, and the anonymous readers, who offered keen critique and helpful suggestions in the later stages of my research. Talkin’ Broadway’s Howard Miller, Grace Walker from Matt Ross PR, and the fantastic staff at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts provided invaluable assistance in securing scripts and archived materials. I am particularly thankful for Jeremy Megraw’s and Andrea Felder’s help securing photos and permissions. My superb research assistant Asya Gorovits was enormously helpful compiling the bibliography and creating the list of teacher plays and musicals for the online appendix, and Chris Harder lent his keen editorial eye when I most needed it. Additionally, I benefitted from a generous PSC-CUNY grant, which afforded me time and space to work through early drafts. I am fortunate to have not just one but two separate groups of amazing institutional colleagues. My fellow travelers at LaGuardia Community College, especially Terry Cole, Carlos Hiraldo, Demetrios Kapetanakos, Karlyn Koh, Richard Lieberman, Naomi Stubbs, Ting Man Tsao, Stephen vii

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Weinstein, and the late Sandra Hanson, furnished proof that laughs and enjoyment are conducive to rigorous research and conscientious pedagogy. I continue to learn and grow as a scholar from the intellectual and artistic generosity of remarkable individuals in the Theatre and Performance program at the Graduate Center, including Marvin Carlson, Peter Eckersall, Jean Graham-Jones, Frank Hentschker, Erika Lin, David Savran, and Patricia Goodson. I am also indebted to Jill Dolan, who was my dissertation advisor, and when I graduated, she assured me that “a mentor is for life.” Nearly twenty-five years later, Jill remains a valued and magnanimous guide as well as the tough and compassionate editor in my head. My hardworking students at LaGuardia, Muhlenberg College, the Graduate Center, and notably my dissertation advisees, inspired me to be a better researcher, writer, and teacher. While working on this project, I have drawn emotional sustenance from family members and friends. Jordan Schildcrout supplied much-needed encouragement throughout, and I have benefitted tremendously from his feedback and model scholarship. Charles Kloth, Sam Leiter, Tug Rice (who designed the fabulous cover image), and Audrey Coughlin are treasured theatre companions, and many of our conversations helped plant the seeds for ideas that would eventually take root. Thanks also to Ann Miner, who knew when to ask (and when not to) in perfect Sondheimese, “How’s the book? You working on the book?” Kyrylo and Artem Skipakevych, my dear friends in Kyiv, have taught me what true bravery and resilience look like. Their humor, spectacular kindness, and irrepressible optimism are a potent form of magic, which they wield against the forces of pure evil. The Brothers Skipakevych put my own privileged life into perspective, and I look forward to celebrating the end of the war with them over borscht, varenyky, and kebabs. I cannot imagine completing, let alone surviving, the daunting writing challenges if it were not for my cherished friend and confidante, Kevin Winkler. In a nod to RuPaul, I remain in awe of Kevin’s prodigious charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent. Our periodic lunch meetings at the Red Flame Diner helped rekindle smoldering notions, and while he was subsumed in his own work, he always found time to give me razor-sharp and reassuring assessment. Finally, this book would not have been written without the support and seemingly limitless patience (and I promise not to plumb those depths any further) of my partner, Kevin Lustik. We often quote Natalia Makarova who, while accepting a Tony Award, acknowledged “my husband—who

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didn’t help much but wasn’t in the way.” On the contrary, Kevin helped in large and small ways throughout. He listened good-naturedly to half-­ baked, tangled, and longwinded arguments in-progress, and he helpfully got out of the way when I needed to be alone with my thoughts, unattainable words, and escalating rage. The guiding principle of this book is failure, which I have embraced in its myriad forms, and thanks to Kevin and all of the people acknowledged (and regrettably unacknowledged) here, I can confidently state in the words of Quentin Crisp that in the end, “failure may be my style.”

Contents

1 Introduction: “Unbecoming Teachers”  1 2 “All  the Single Ladies”: A Century of Schoolmarms, Spinsters, and Superwomen Teachers 13 3 Lesbians,  Vampires, and Vermin: The Unspeakable Dangers of Unfit Teachers, 1920s–1940s 49 4 Commies  on Campus: Radical Liberalism and Academic Freedom, 1940s–1950s 75 5 Crème  de la Crème of Fascism: Miss Jean Brodie, Miss Margarida, and Sister Mary Ignatius Explain It All for You, 1960s–1980s117 6 Failure  to Achieve: A Report Card on Male Educators in the Theatre147 7 Epilogue: “Becomes a Student”183

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Appendix: Teacher Plays and Musicals by Year187 Bibliography199 Index207

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3

Ann Miller and Mickey Rooney in Sugar Babies (1979). (Photo by Martha Swope. © The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts) Ethel Barrymore in Emlyn Williams’ The Corn is Green (1940). (Photo by VanDamm Studio. © The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts) Michelle Wilson in Dominique Morrisseau’s Confederates (2022). (Photo by Monique Carboni) Anne Revere and Katherine Emery in Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (1934). (Photo by VanDamm Studio. © The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts) Lois Wheeler and Lydia St. Clair in Dorothy and Howard Baker’s Trio (1944). (Photo by Alfred Valente. © The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts) John Ireland in Keith Winter’s The Rats of Norway (1948). (Photo by Fred Fehl. © The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts) Ruth Matteson and Elliott Nugent in The Male Animal (1940). (Photo by VanDamm Studio. © The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts) Gwen Anderson and Laurence Hugo in Decision (1944). (Photo by Fred Fehl. © The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts) Phyllis Love, Karl Malden, and Lloyd Richards in Molly Kazan’s The Egghead (1957). (Photo by Friedman-Abeles. © The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts)

22 24 38 53 61 68 80 91 107

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List of Figures

Fig. 5.1

Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3

Amy Taubin, Kathryn Baumann, Zoe Caldwell, and Joseph Maher in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1968). (Photo by Friedman-Abeles. © The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts) Estelle Parsons in the 1990 revival of Miss Margarida’s Way (1977). (Photo by Martha Swope. © The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts) Mark Stefan and Elizabeth Franz in Christopher Durang’s Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You (1979). (© The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts) Maurice Evans in Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version (1948). (Photo by Eileen Darby. Eileen Darby Images, Inc. © The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts) Remak Ramsay in Simon Gray’s Quartermaine’s Terms (1983). (Photo by Bill Carter. Hunt/Pucci Associates. © The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts) Biko Eisen-Martin and Travis Raeburn in the MCC production of Donja R. Love’s soft (2022). (Photo by Daniel J. Vasquez. Reprinted with permission of MCC)

125 134 143 160 173 179

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: “Unbecoming Teachers”

I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit. John Steinbeck, “…like captured fireflies” (1955) Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching. Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying” (1889)

Alan Bennett’s The History Boys was the most successful play of the season when it opened on Broadway in 2006. The production originated at London’s National Theatre in 2004, and it toured internationally before arriving in New York, where it won all the top theatre awards. In addition to attracting large audiences, the play stimulated conversations about the function of education, and The History Boys raised questions about pedagogy’s purpose as “a means of acquiring the right qualifications” for particular vocations, or on broadening a student’s mind, and  thereby gratifying “the love of learning itself.”1 These opposing arguments are

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 David Gritten, “The Lesson of ‘History,’” Los Angeles Times (April 9, 2006).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. F. Wilson, Failure, Fascism, and Teachers in American Theatre, Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34013-0_1

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articulated in the play by a pair of rival teachers. Irwin, who drills the boys with factual information, teaches the students to use rhetoric and logic to bend and embellish the truth. His antithesis is Hector, whose spontaneous classroom lessons intermix poetry, music, classic Hollywood film scenarios, and improvised skits applying the boys’ French skills. Analytical discussions around Bennett’s play tended to revolve around the teachers’ differing methodologies, and there was not a great deal of critical attention to the ways in which the teachers themselves were presented on stage. In different ways, Irwin and Hector are, in one boy’s words, “Reckless; impulsive; immoral.”2 First, there is young, bespectacled, and gay Irwin, who lied about his Oxford pedigree, which helped him land the History position at the boys’ school in the north of England. Recklessly, Irwin accepts an invitation to “suck off” a student, telling the student that he will change his Sunday plans because “I think I just had a better offer.”3 Even more vexatious is Hector, the inspirational and unconventional General Studies teacher. Richard Griffiths starred in the original production and received critical raves (and a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play). Bennett’s character description merely states that “Hector is a man of studied eccentricity. He wears a bowtie.”4 However, when the role became associated with Griffiths, who was a very large man, the character’s girth became a prominent attribute. Critics described him as “roly-poly English master Hector,”5 and “Hector, a rotund, engaging, extremely unorthodox professor of English literature.”6 A married man, Hector hits his students with an exercise book and sexually fondles some of them, but reviewers tended to excuse, and in some cases, extol his proclivities. Ben Brantley wrote, “This is a work in which the most likable and, by the play’s standards, most moral figure is an obese English teacher who regularly swats his students in class and fiddles (to use the euphemism of choice) with the more

 Alan Bennett, The History Boys (2004) (New York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2006), 100.  Bennett, 101. 4  Bennett, 4. 5  David Rooney, “Review: ‘The History Boys,’” Variety, April 23, 2006. 6  Michael Riedel, “Back with the Muggles: From Harry to ‘History’ for Griffiths,” New York Post, April 19, 2006. 2 3

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attractive of them after school.”7 With a new consciousness borne of the #MeToo era, this is most likely not a play that will age well. Compared with Irwin’s epistemological sophistry, Hector’s unstated philosophy seems to hue more closely to Oscar Wilde’s aestheticism. To him, high grades, certificates of achievement, and elite college offers are merely “those longed-for emblems of your conformity.”8 Instead, Hector provides intellectual, spiritual, and artistic inspiration, and in the form of Greek pederasty, he infuses his mentoring with a heaping dose of eros. The play minimizes the ick factor by placing the molestation off stage during unseen motorcycle rides and by making the boys cheerfully complicit. The original production’s cast and director addressed the issue and noted, “In the hands of a different playwright, the image of a teacher touching his students’ genitals would be sinister, if not downright disturbing, but in The History Boys it becomes a source of amusement for the boys—at least until it proves to be Hector’s undoing and the end of his teaching career.”9 Hector’s ultimate punishment is his death in a motorcycle accident, but the play concludes with students and teachers delivering gushing tributes. Irwin is harshly punished as well. He is paralyzed from the waist down in the same accident, and he is never able to take up his student’s sexual proposition. Consequently, The History Boys weaves several conflicting but familiar impressions of teachers as alternately (or simultaneously) inspirational, pedantic, manipulative, predatory, and ridiculous. Failure, Fascism, and Teachers in American Theatre: Pedagogy of the Oppressors examines both the culturally enduring and historically shifting representations of teachers in the theatre, primarily from the beginning of the twentieth century to the early decades of the twenty-first, and using an

7  Ben Brantley, “Rivals for Young Hearts and Minds in Alan Bennett’s ‘History Boys,’” New York Times, April 24, 2006. 8  Bennett, 4. 9  Quoted in Emma Thirlwell, editor, “National Theatre Education: The History Boys Workpack” (London: The Royal National Theatre Board, 2005), 10. When asked about this aspect of the character, Griffiths said: “‘If it were up to me, pedophiles would have to be made to stand in front of a blowtorch for at least two minutes and then go home,’ says Griffiths. ‘But Hector is not a pedophile. Nobody in the play is below the age of 18. And the one boy who is under 18 doesn’t go on the motorcycle because he’s too young’” (Quoted in Riedel, “Back with the Muggles”). The script does not specify each boy’s age except to state that there are “eight boys of seventeen or eighteen” (Bennett, 3).

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amalgamation of theoretical and sociological lenses, the book explores through plays and performances the public’s ongoing contradictory attitudes toward educators. In US opinion polls, for instance, teachers rank among the most respected of all professionals. Teachers generally place below nurses and medical doctors, but they score well above police officers, clergy, and bankers.10 The polls also show that Americans regard teachers “as selfless members of a helping profession” and they are accorded “very great prestige.”11 National news, however, is filled with stories about the supposed efforts of liberal teachers to indoctrinate (or more insidiously, “groom”) students with radical and dangerous conceptions about gender, sexuality, and race. In December 2021 Florida governor and presumptive Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis announced legislative efforts to ban the teaching of critical race theory in school. He claimed to be pushing back on “state-sanctioned racism,” announcing, “We won’t allow Florida tax dollars to be spent teaching kids to hate our country or to hate each other.”12 Texas governor and fellow Republican Greg Abbott has been similarly vocal about the prevalence of “obscene” texts in the schools that address LGBTQ+ lives and experiences. He threatened, “Educators who provide pornographic material will lose their educational credentials, forfeit their retirement benefits and be placed on the do-not-hire list.”13 This dichotomy—the esteem for teachers on the one hand and contempt on the other—is a recurring refrain in the historical narrative of education in the United States. Indeed, the epigraphs by Steinbeck and

10  “Honesty/Ethics in Professions,” Gallup, December 1–16, 2021, http://www.gallup. com/poll/1654/honesty-ethics-professions.aspx. Accessed June 20, 2022. See also, Gerald Grant and Christine E.  Murray, Teaching in America: The Slow Revolution (MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 213. 11  Paul E. Peterson, Michael Henderson, and Martin R. West, Teachers Versus the Public: What Americans Think About Schools and How to Fix Them (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 2014), 9. 12  “Governor DeSantis Announces Legislative Proposal to Stop W.O.K.E.  Activism and Critical Race Theory in Schools and Corporations,” Ron DeSantis, December 15, 2021, www.fl.gov. 13  Andrea Drusch and Brooke Crum, “Abbott Pitches School Vouchers, Threatens Educators Who Step Out of Line,” San Antonio Report, May 9, 2022. https://sanantonioreport.org/abbott-pitches-school-vouchers-threatens-educators-who-step-out-of-line/

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Wilde denote this vacillating reverence and denunciation of teachers. Moreover, the desire to discipline, control, and silence educators is evident in political rhetoric since at least the beginning of the twentieth century when many school districts did not allow women teachers to marry, have children, smoke, wear improper clothing, or dance. And in the 1910s, as the First World War erupted, teachers were subjected to “inquisitions” to root out those “holding views” considered “unbecoming teachers.”14 Some years later districts across the country instituted school board certification examinations, which authorized superintendents to terminate a teacher for failing to meet physical, mental, and/or moral fitness standards. In a 1935 media firestorm Miss Rose Freistater, a New York City teacher, was deemed a “handicap” at 62 pounds overweight and was denied a teaching license.15 The imposition of loyalty oaths, assaults on academic freedom, prohibitions against lesbian and gay teachers, and skirmishes around curriculum and teaching methodologies are just some of the battles waged since then. Failure, Fascism, and Teachers surveys the various ways in which theatre artists have represented teachers within and against the political contexts of US education history. Teacher characters on stage have been undeservedly neglected while teacher characters in film have received a great deal of scholarly attention. Researchers have shown, to name just a few, how films such as Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), To Sir, with Love (1962), Up the Down Staircase (1967), Stand and Deliver (1988), Dead Poets Society (1989), and Freedom Writers (2007) depict teachers as godlike in their ability to transform lives. Other films, however, offer a message that without any specialized training anyone can be a teacher as demonstrated in Kindergarten Cop (1990), School of Rock (2003), and Bad Teacher (2011).16 One may detect some overlap in film and stage delineations— and, of course, many characters have been translated from stage to screen as well as from screen to stage—but teaching in itself is a performative

14  “Asks School Board’s Aid: Resolutions Urge Curb on ‘Inquisition’ as Demoralizing to Teachers,” New York Times, January 21, 1918. 15  “Teacher Held ‘Fat’ Gets an Appeal,” New York Times, August 15, 1935. 16  For a taxonomy of film-teacher types, see Harold J. Burbach and Margo A. Figgins, “A Thematic Profile of Teachers in Film,” Teacher Education Quarterly 20, no. 2 (Spring 1993), 70.

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profession, and teacher characters are ideally suited to the theatre. Additionally, the uniqueness of drama as a genre, the relationship of the actors with the audience (who are sometimes “cast” as students in the classroom), and the modes of production make theatre a rich site for exploring the embodiment of teachers and their varying expressions of power, acquiescence, seductiveness, and ineptness. The subtitle of the book riffs on the title of Paulo Freire’s landmark Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968). Freire’s foundational work dissects the connections among society, teachers, and students. By severing the systems of “banking education” by which the student is conceived as an empty vessel into which knowledge is metaphorically poured, Freire contends students and teachers may ultimately break the stranglehold of oppressive regimes. Teacher plays expose similar relationships among students, teachers, and the larger community. In most cases (and I would argue more so than in filmic portrayals), the teacher characters are presented as oppressors, who pose a genuine or fabricated threat to the morality, physical well-being, and/or intellectual growth of their students. Threats to the young, after all, in political parlance constitute threats to the aspirations of society. Rather than damning anti-teacher plays, though, close inspection of negative depictions of teachers can be just as useful as examination of idealized teacher superheroes. The plays highlight fears, desires, and fetishistic fantasies associated with teachers, and uncover the collectively assumed power of teachers as either liberating or complicit in systems of oppression. If not quite delivering a decisive blow to teacher opponents, analysis of the plays may provide opportunities for intervention in the education wars. The story of these teachers/oppressors is very often also a story of failure. Even before George Bernard Shaw published his famous Maxims for Revolutionists, “He who can, does. He who cannot teaches,”17 educators were linked with defeat and regarded undeserving of social acceptance and economic rewards. Schoolmasters in the nineteenth century, like Ichabod Crane in Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” were considered cruel, unmanly, and at the mercy of their neighbors for free meals and handouts. Consequently, this was not a profession worthy of successful and alluring people of either gender. An epigram in the early twentieth 17  George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman. (Cambridge, MA.: The University Press, 1903); Bartleby.com, 1999. www.bartleby.com/157/.

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century posited teaching as “the refuge of unsaleable men and unmarriageable women.”18 Even today, teaching is thought to be a fallback profession among college students, and students with the highest SAT scores tend to avoid majoring in education. Building on theoretical and cultural studies projects, especially J. Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure,19 I argue failure can be instructive and politically illuminating, and teacher characters reflect this notion. The spinsters, emasculated men, and queer teacher characters that populate the theatre offer a powerful rejoinder to the heteronormative, capitalist, and white male systems of oppressions. Even in their defeat, the characters may disclose the depths of societal misogyny, hyper-masculine values, and anti-intellectualism. Coming from a line of educators—my mother taught Latin for forty-­ some years, and her mother was a music teacher, and I have taught English and theatre at the middle school, high school, and college levels—I have a special affinity for teachers. When I undertook this project, I had a sense of the prevalence of teacher characters in plays and musicals, but scouring the archives and searching databases for theatre reviews and play summaries, I found a staggering number of instances. I currently have a working list of more than 300 titles, and I have profited from the suggestions of friends and colleagues. Each play on my list includes at least one teacher character, who may be central or ancillary to the plot. I have also limited the characters to those who are identified professionally as educators and may have a scene or scenes in a classroom (such as Miss Jean Brodie in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), or characters who identify as former teachers (such as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire). I include teachers of every level, from elementary school to the college or university. The study could not possibly cover every single teacher play, so many are mentioned simply in passing, and a good deal others are listed only in the book’s appendix, which includes a selection of plays and musicals featuring teacher characters. I hope the work may serve as a platform for additional work in the area. Furthermore, this book focuses primarily on plays that have been performed in the US, and teacher representations are reflective of or filtered through the national struggles. That said, the American education system has been influenced by (and influences) international movements. Plays and 18  Willard Waller, The Sociology of Teaching (1932) (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1965), 61. 19  J. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press, 2011).

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musicals imported from other countries—and except in a few cases, such as the original Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) from Ireland and Sarafina (1988) from South Africa, most have been re-imagined by American actors, directors, and designers—can show us a great deal about how attitudes toward teachers simultaneously transcend and are delineated by national borders. And as a theatre historian, I am particularly interested in examining the plays and characters within their social, political, and pedagogical contexts, and I consider the plays as both written and performed texts. Where possible (and where useful), I evaluate the plays in performance, and I weigh the responses from critics and scholars for indications as to what these tell us about contemporary viewpoints. My close readings of the plays and characters have benefitted from the critical and theoretical tools I borrow from myriad fields and disciplines, including educational philosophy, queer theory, women’s studies, Marxism, and historicism.

Chapter Breakdown and Description Comprising five chapters, an introduction, and conclusion, Failure, Fascism, and Teachers is arranged thematically and chronologically. Chapter 2, “All the Single Ladies: A Century of School marms, Spinsters, and Superwomen Teachers” explores the persistent image of the unmarried or divorced woman teacher. Through the beginning of the twentieth century, most school districts carefully monitored the domestic and social status of their employees, and it is no accident that, as Jackie M. Blount explains, the overwhelming percentage of all US teachers in the early twentieth century were made up of “single, widowed, or divorced women.”20 Concurrently, philosophers and sexologists pointed to spinsters as mannish, sexually nonconforming, and deviant in their apparent refusal to engage in “normal” heterosexual coupling. The spinster teacher is an ambivalent figure in the popular theatre, and she is presented as an object of both fear and pity. The monstrous and sadistic schoolmarm, for example, was a familiar character in vaudeville and burlesque sketches through the 1920s. On the other hand, the spinster teacher is occasionally pitiable in her solitary professional existence and heroic in her single-­ minded devotion to her young charges as in Harry James Smith’s The Little Teacher (1918) and Emlyn Williams’ The Corn Is Green (1940). As 20  Jackie M. Blount, Fit to Teach: Same-Sex Desire, Gender, and School Work in the Twentieth Century (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005), 59.

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married women began to dominate the profession around mid-century, the spinster teacher was still a prominent personage in theatre and drama. In popular theatre the single-woman teacher is often used as a cautionary tale, suggesting that women must choose either professional success or personal fulfillment. They cannot have both. Exploring the intersections of gender, race, and class, the chapter further assesses the complex circumstances facing single women teaching in a range of institutional settings. Plays discussed include William Inge’s Picnic (1954), William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker (1959), Paul Zindel’s And  Miss Reardon Drinks a Little (1971), Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles (1988), Margaret Edson’s Wit (1998), Nilaja Sun’s No Child… (2006), Jocelyn Bioh’s School Girls; Or the African Mean Girls Play (2017), and  Dominique Morisseau’s Confederates (2022). In the interwar period, more students were going to (and staying in) school, and parents were turning over a good deal of the mentally and morally formative years of their offspring to teachers. As the Depression wore on and another world war loomed, the promise and future of the youth seemed especially important. As a result, the physical and psychological fitness of teachers as role models for their students became a source of scrutiny and panic. Chapter 3, “Lesbians, Vampires, and Vermin: The Unspeakable Dangers of Unfit Teachers, 1920s–1940s,” looks at how the concern about teachers’ suitability, which was a near national obsession, played itself out in dramas. Keith Winters’ The Rats of Norway (1933), Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (1935), Dorothy and Howard Baker’s Trio (1944), and Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), among several others, reflected anxieties about the potential moral corruption posed by lesbian, gay, and/or sexually voracious teachers. Chapter 4, “Commies on Campus: Radical Liberalism and Academic Freedom, 1940s–1950s,” mirrors a related but different anxiety about teachers and their threat to susceptible youth and national security. Schools, colleges, and universities were presumed hotbeds of communist activity, and thousands of (predominantly male) schoolteachers and professors were interrogated for their political beliefs, and most of those investigated were forced to leave the profession. Hollywood films, as has been well-documented, shied away from critiquing and speaking out against the redbaiting and blacklisting, but the mainstream theatre provided a space for addressing the issues around academic freedom, compulsory loyalty oaths, and Fifth-Amendment rights. Light comedies, such as James Thurber and Elliott Nugent’s The Male Animal (1940; revived

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1952) and Rosemary Casey’s The Velvet Glove (1949), as well as Broadway melodramas, including Edward Chodorov’s Decision (1944), Herman Wouk’s The Traitor (1949), and Molly Kazan’s The Egghead (1957), showed the complicated interweaving of pedagogy, radical politics, and cultural notions of manhood. Three strong, seductive, and dangerous women are the central focus of Chap. 5, “Crème de la Crème of Fascism: Miss Jean Brodie, Miss Margarida, and Sister Mary Ignatius Explain It All for You, 1960s–1980s.” The teacher-centered classrooms rendered in these plays may be read allegorically as dictator-controlled societies, but I also maintain the works by Jay Presson Allen, Roberto Athayde, and Christopher Durang reflect some of the pitched educational battles at the time. Progressive education was under attack by the 1960s, and conservative reactionaries demanded a traditional, back-to-basics approach to teaching. In their own way The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1966), Miss Margarida’s Way (1977), and Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You (1979) test and thwart the educational philosophies of practitioners, such as John Dewey, A.S.  Neill, and Paulo Freire. The penultimate chapter is an exploration of men teachers in drama and theatre. In 1932 sociologist Willard Waller wrote, “It has been said that no woman and no negro is ever fully admitted to the white man’s world. Possibly we should add men teachers to the list of the excluded.”21 Chapter 6, “Failure to Achieve: A Report Card on Male Educators in the Theatre,” probes the ingrained idea that men who teach are failed men. As members of a woman-dominated profession, recipients of comparatively modest salaries, and intellectuals in an anti-intellectual, hyper-masculinized society, they putatively forfeit their claims to manhood. Many of the men teachers, then, are portrayed as unhappy, dissolute, and very often drunk in dramas of the twentieth and twenty-first century. After examining the emergence of key motifs in pre-modern plays by Aristophanes and Shakespeare, this chapter shows how plays, including Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version (1948), Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), Robert Marasco’s Child’s Play (1970), Simon Gray’s Butley (1971) and Quartermaine’s Terms (1982), David Mamet’s Oleanna (1992), and Donja Love’s soft (2022) demonstrate the transgressive failure, emasculation, and fatuousness of the male teacher.

 Waller, 50.

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Theatre and performance, like gifted teachers, have the power to reveal to us who we are, what we value, and how we fit in the world. My hope is that the chapters taken together will provide deeper insights into fraught educational, political, and social histories to help us better understand the current culture wars. Representation matters. Perhaps deconstructing well-worn tropes will encourage educators, artists, and scholars to forge new ones. These are the lessons and legacies we can impart to generations of future teachers. In the words of Hector from The History Boys: Pass the parcel. That’s sometimes all you can do. Take it, feel it and pass it on. Not for me, not for you, but for someone, somewhere, one day. Pass it on, boys. That’s the game I wanted you to learn. Pass it on.22

 Bennett, 109.

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CHAPTER 2

“All the Single Ladies”: A Century of Schoolmarms, Spinsters, and Superwomen Teachers

“A Social Nemesis” Historically, the spinster schoolteacher is a profoundly ambivalent figure. On the one hand, she represents the beneficent surrogate mother, a woman who devoted her life to caring for, instructing, and serving as a role model for other women’s children. And as Jackie M. Blount explains, in the nineteenth century, “the public regarded kindly single women teachers as high-minded, upstanding pillars of the community.”1 On the other hand, as an unmarried, childless, and financially self-supporting woman, the spinster teacher transgressed expected gender roles. She was not quite a woman, certainly not a man, but something in between. This presumably deviant in-betweenness and her close proximity to children and adolescents made her a potentially corrupting influence. She was, as one British writer described her in the early twentieth century, “a social nemesis” due to “her power and dominion.” Writing under the pseudonym “One” in The Freewoman, a feminist publication from 1911, the author begins the screed: “I write of the High Priestess of Society. Not of  Jackie M.  Blount, “Spinsters, Bachelors, and Other Gender Transgressors in School Employment, 1850–1990,” Review of Educational Research 70.1 (Spring 2000): 83–101. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. F. Wilson, Failure, Fascism, and Teachers in American Theatre, Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34013-0_2

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the mother of sons, but of her barren sister, the withered tree, the acidulous vestal under whose pale shadow we chill and whiten, of the Spinster I write.”2 With marriage bars enforced in most of the United States during the first decades of the twentieth century, single women teachers over twenty-­ five years old were considered failed women because of their inability to attract a husband or in their perceived lack of desire for men. In an article for the New York Times in 1939, Benjamin Fine riffed on George Bernard Shaw’s axiom about teachers, writing, “Those who can, marry; those who cannot, continue to teach.”3 Indeed, in the interwar years, independent women and supposedly sexually deviant teachers posed an existential threat to public morality and to society itself. Social and cultural historian Alison Oram concludes, “Hostility towards spinster teachers in the inter-­ war period focused on their failure to marry and produce children, on their unhealthy influence as celibates or lesbians in the schools, on their earning power and on their feminist politics.”4 By the 1950s perspectives shifted, and married teachers had become preferable to the educated, single women who had dominated the profession since the 1850s. And at the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, there has been much stronger legal protection for teachers whose personal lives transgress community standards, such as those rooted in religious or moral objections to divorce, pregnancies of unwed women, and openly identifying LGBTQ educators. Yet stigmas associated with single women remain as evidenced by a recent study that revealed participants held more favorable attitudes toward divorced women than toward their never-been married counterparts.5 Even as the rate of single women continues to rise, there appears to be a deeply engrained marital bias. Plays presented in the United States since the early 1900s reflect both  the stubbornly instilled and ambivalent attitudes toward single 2  One, “The Spinster,” The Freewoman: A Weekly Humanist Review, vol. 1 (November 23, 1911): 10. 3   Benjamin Fine, “Married Teacher Issue Up Again,” New York Times, September 24, 1939. 4  Alison Oram, “‘Embittered, Sexless, or Homosexual’: Attacks on Spinster Teachers 1918–39. Current Issues in Women’s History, edited by Arina Angerman, et  al. (London: Taylor and Francis Group, 2012), 199. 5  Christin L. Munsch and Shardé M. Davis, “Marital Status, Gender, and Race in the U.S.: Perceptions of Middle-Aged Men and Women,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 52.4 (2021): 596–622.

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women teachers. From the self-sacrificing one-room-school-house schoolmarm to the authoritarian spinster teacher to the unmarried superwoman college professor, the theatre has accommodated and perpetuated familiar cultural perceptions of women teachers. Applying Sheila L.  Cavanagh’s useful taxonomy drawn from medical and psychoanalytical literature of the early twentieth century, I consider the characters according to four principles of personality as they relate to single women teachers. These personalities are imbued with Freudian concepts and beliefs of turn-of-the-twentieth-century sexologists and include: “the masculinity complex,” or the embodiment of socially accepted male traits and behaviors over female; “moral masochism,” which refers to a spinster teacher’s complete and ascetic acceptance of the constricting rules linked with virtuous, feminine conduct; “altruistic surrender,” or the transfer of a teacher’s own motherly aspirations and professional ambitions to the children in her charge; and “the tyrannical disciplinarian,” referring to a teacher who wields her punitive power with sadistic pleasure.6 Analyzing these plays and women characters in their cultural and sociological contexts establish the performativity of the archetype as well as the complex interplay among gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality, and age. These provide a useful lens for examining the construction of a recognizable and persistent dramaturgical trope, and in the process—to evoke Simone de Beauvoir— demonstrate that one is not born a spinster teacher, but rather becomes a spinster teacher.

The Little Teacher: A Kind, Gentle, and Pistol-Packin’ Schoolmarm Miss Emily West, the titular character of Harry James Smith’s The Little Teacher (1918) is an anomaly among spinster teacher characters: She is conventionally feminine, and therefore, marriageable. A Broadway hit in 1918, Smith’s play presents a nostalgic view of a spirited and loving schoolmarm assigned to a one-room schoolhouse in Goshen Hollow, Vermont. Produced by George M.  Cohan and Jed Harris, The Little Teacher was a hit on Broadway, running 128 performances. The comedy, as it was publicized, begins in April 1917 as the United States is entering 6  Sheila L. Cavanagh, “Spinsters, Schoolmarms, and Queers: Female Teacher Gender and Sexuality in Medicine, Psychoanalytic Theory and History,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 27.4 (December 2006): 421–440.

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World War I and ends in the summer of 1917 with the young heroine leaving for Europe to assist in the war effort. Offering a heaping portion of feel-good Americana for a war-weary nation, the play patriotically trumpets American virtues, such as the sanctity of motherhood, moral justice, and chivalrous masculinity. Emily West is a recent transplant from New York City, but she has roots in Goshen Hollow. Unlike the stereotypically stern and unsmiling schoolmarm, Emily is adored by the children in the school. This is evident in the opening of the play as several children have confessed to being “bad” so they can spend more time with her. In fact, her maternal affections are so strong, she personally escorts a child with a bloody nose to his home and puts him to bed. She confides to Mrs. Caldwell and Miss Meech, the snooty women of the Ladies’ Parish Circle, “Oh, I just love putting little boys to bed; getting them into their nighties. Don’t you?”7 Later, when Emily discovers that two of the children are regularly beaten by their drunken father and cruel mother, waving a pistol she pulls from her purse, she abducts the children and takes them to the boarding house where she lives. The children are delighted and relieved with their kind and affectionate protector, and Emily is thrilled to experience the joys of motherhood. As she declares to the mistress of the boarding house, children are “the most beautiful things any of us women have in our lives.”8 Fortunately, to keep the children’s drunk father at bay, Emily is safeguarded by Pug Dermott, a lumberman who is smitten with the little teacher. Whereas Emily is lovely and well-mannered, Pug is described as “an illiterate, profane, low-lived roustabout,” but he is a staunch defender of the young woman and children.9 Legally, Emily has no claim as a parent or guardian, but when the children’s supposed mother states that she would rather the children were raised in the local orphanage than stay with their teacher, Emily intuits that this woman could not possibly be their real mother. Surely, such an attitude goes against the laws of nature. As it turns out, Emily is correct: As infants, the children had been kidnapped while playing in Central Park by the nefarious Sicilian woman and her loutish husband. Foregoing attempts at ransom, the couple had escaped to Vermont because New York 7  Harry James Smith, The Little Teacher: A Comedy in Four Acts. Copyright 1918. (Digitized script in Library of Congress), 15. 8  H. J. Smith, 57. 9  H. J. Smith, 79.

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City detectives were onto them. As the play ends, the children are reunited with their birth mother, and Emily and Pug are off to the south of France to manage a home for abandoned children. The curtain comes down as Pug’s fellow lumberman (originally played by movie gangster Edward G. Robinson) sings George M. Cohan’s war anthem, “Over There.”10 In many ways, Emily West manifests the image of the spinster teacher, but in her affirmation of heterosexual desire and veneration of motherhood, she upholds gender expectations of the era. As a paradigmatic spinster teacher, Emily’s altruistic surrender, to employ Cavanagh’s terminology, reflects one of the worrying elements of the archetype: She exhibits an arguably unhealthy student/teacher relationship. Education sociologist Frances Donovan warned, “The rapport between teachers and pupils, however, must be kept well balanced or it may become a little dangerous. If it is continued over a long period of time, also, it may lead to a slavish adoration that is unwholesome for both teacher and pupil.”11 Surely, most school administrators would frown on Emily’s relationship with her students. For instance, in addition to the joy she receives “getting little boys into their nighties” and tucking them under the covers, Emily bathes and puts “the two adorable babies” (aged six and eight) whom she has essentially kidnapped into her own bed.12 One area in which Emily dramatically diverges from the stereotypical female teacher is in her delicate appearance and inability to effectively discipline. In 1931 the Journal of Educational Sociology published the results of a study on the physical appearance of “The School-Teacher Stereotype.” The upshot, the report concludes, “is not a pleasing picture. It is a harsh, painful, and forbidding one.”13 As suggested by the survey, schoolteachers wore their frown lines, tight lips, and narrowed eyes like battle scars. Additionally, they were thought to have a yearning for control and domination. Reasoning why single women remained schoolmarms, one writer hypothesized that “it may be noted that the authority they exercise and their habits of doing all the talking and much of the thinking for their pupils tend to make them autocratic, uncomplaisant, indocile and often  H. J. Smith, 101.  Frances R.  Donovan, The Schoolma’am (New York: Frederick A.  Stokes Company, 1938), 137. 12  H. J. Smith, 43. 13  Kenneth H. McGill, “The School Teacher Stereotype,” Journal of Educational Sociology 4.10 (June 1931), 650. 10 11

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somewhat intractable, unamenable and austere.”14 Emily, on the contrary, professes, “I don’t know anything about anything,” and she admits she is not a disciplinarian. When she asks Mrs. Caldwell, a former teacher, how one acquires the skills, she is told: “Either it’s in you, or it isn’t in you— and that ends it.”15 In support of the school-teacher stereotype, it also should be pointed out that Emily presumes (correctly) that the autocratic and intractable Mrs. Caldwell is a former teacher. “How could you tell I’d taught school?,” inquires Mrs. Caldwell. Emily responds innocently: “Just to look at you.”16 Like other so-called marriageable women of the era, Emily successfully escapes the teaching-trap to enter wedlock. In the final moments of the play, she concedes to Pug that since the children have “found their real mother. I’m free.”17 With the bonds of teaching lifted, Emily can be a wife, a real mother, and with Pug by her side, will aid the allies in Europe. As the curtain falls and the strains of Cohan’s patriotic tune fill the stage, nothing could seem more American.

Autumn Crocus: Fanny Gray, or “The Little Brown Lady” While Emily West is freed from her role as “make-believe mother,”18 Fanny Gray, the protagonist in Dodie Smith’s Autumn Crocus (1932), seems destined for a life confined to teacher spinsterhood. Smith’s play (which she presented under the pseudonym C.  L. Anthony) focuses on Fanny, a British schoolmarm, who is on holiday with her colleague and fellow spinster teacher, Edith, in the Tyrolean Alps near Innsbruck. Fanny falls in love with the charming innkeeper, Herr Steiner, and she decides to stay in Austria. When she finds out Steiner is married, she resolves to remain anyway but changes her mind when Edith warns her of the scandal that will surely follow. First produced in London in 1931, Autumn Crocus opened on Broadway the following year and starred Patricia Collinge (who was a Broadway fixture and is best known for her role as Birdie in Lillian  “Not Given to Marrying,” New York Times (July 21, 1918), 42.  H. J. Smith, 16. 16  H. J. Smith, 16. 17  H. J. Smith, 98. 18  H. J. Smith, 95. 14 15

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Hellman’s The Little Foxes [1939], for which she received an Oscar nomination for the 1941 film version). The play was very successful, and Dorothy Gish replaced Collinge during the run. Basil Dean, who staged the play in London and New York, directed the 1934 film version with Ivor Novello, Fay Compton, and Muriel Aked. The play makes it abundantly clear that Edith and Fanny are archetypal spinster teachers. When Edith first appears, the stage directions state, she “is about forty, heavily built and with a plain but rather pleasant face. She is wearing tweeds which fit fairly well but are not at all smart… A shrewd observer would say ‘school mistress on a holiday’ without a moment’s hesitation.”19 Fanny is similarly dressed, and because of her drab, unstylish facade, Steiner’s first impression of her is as “the little brown lady.”20 The stage directions indicate, “It would be quite impossible to make a guess at her age. Her face is shadowed by a very unbecoming felt hat, and she wears pince-nez. She also is in tweeds, but she does not so much wear them as is she enveloped by them. They are of a nondescript brown and a size too large. It is unlikely, however, that anyone would notice this. If they notice [her] at all, it would be as someone quiet, dowdy and unobtrusive.”21 Later, Fanny removes her tweeds, lets her hair down, wears a mauve dressing-gown, and noticed she is. She has been completely transformed into a lovely young woman (but still of indeterminant age). “One is astonished,” the description accentuates, “that she looks very pretty. She also looks very young—yet—one is not quite sure.”22 Steiner is gobsmacked, and the flirtation between the innkeeper and schoolmarm commences. We learn later, however, that Fanny is 35, and Steiner is most likely (according to Fanny) her last chance for romantic love. Notably, the play displays the spinster schoolteacher figure as defined by not just her gender, but her social class as well. While many teachers came from the lower classes, by the early twentieth century most educated

19  Dodie Smith, Autumn Crocus (New York: Samuel French, 1933), 9. Dodie Smith’s other plays produced on Broadway, include Call it a Day (1936), Dear Octopus (1939), and Lovers and Friends (1943). She is better known as a novelist, particularly for The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956). 20  D. Smith, 16. 21  D. Smith, 9. 22  D. Smith, 16.

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young women teachers emerged from the upper-middle classes.23 Once they were in the profession, they were lumped in the lower-middle class. Edith rebukes Fanny’s desire to stay with Steiner as a violation of middle-­ class morality and class aspirations: Edith:

[…] Oh, I can’t think of it—a girl of your type and a man of his!—Oh, I know he’s unusual—charming even—but you’re not the same class— Fanny: What is my class?—The daughter of a poor clergyman! […] Edith: It doesn’t make any difference—he’s a peasant. (Brokenly.) Fanny, hasn’t our friendship meant anything to you? I’m fonder of you than anyone in the world, and if this happens I shall never be able to look at you again. It isn’t that I’m narrow-minded, but it’s—just unthinkable for you. Heaven knows if it were a happy marriage I’d be glad for you, but this—24 Marriage, it was presumed, offered upward mobility for women teachers, and in exchange for independence, they would receive social respectability and financial reassurance. Donovan writes, “When the schoolma’am does contemplate marriage she seeks a husband who is an economic success, not only because this success will provide security for her and her children, but also because she wants to be proud of her mate. She prefers to marry a professional man but she would accept a successful business man provided he has the intelligence, cultivation, and understanding heart that will make possible a happy union.”25 Donovan posits that it was rare for a woman teacher to leave the profession for a husband who was beneath her economic station. At the end of the play, Fanny metamorphoses back into the “little brown lady.” She is no longer a bewitching and bold young woman but once again an unalluring and inconspicuous schoolmarm, a role that she 23  Donovan writes, “Around the turn of the century the attitude of the women who went into teaching, however, underwent a decided change. Although there were still a considerable number of poor girls who entered the profession, impelled by the old missionary spirit, the twentieth century brought in many recruits from upper-middle-class homes. Girls who were not obliged to teach for a living and who had little, if any, missionary zeal, ‘new women’ who rode bicycles and wore short skirts, wanted jobs that would give them independence and a chance to see the world” (8). 24  D. Smith, 66. 25  Donovan, 37

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feels no choice but to adopt. Wearing her spectacles, oversized brown tweed traveling clothes, and her hair tightly pulled back, she sublimates her sexual desires and performatively appropriates the image of the old-­ maid teacher. The actions reflect those of—to deploy one of Cavanagh’s descriptors of the personality types aligned with spinster teacher—a moral masochist. Building on Giles Deleuze, Cavanagh elucidates, “The masochist becomes highly moral through the renunciation of instinct and experiences the absence of instinctual gratification as pleasure.”26 The decision to leave Steiner emboldens Fanny to face a loveless but fulfilled future. As she is leaving, she beseeches, “I want you to remember me as I am now, not—not grown old.” When he protests, she responds, “It’s all right—I shan’t mind—now.”27 The play ends, and she and Edith are on their way to Venice to spend time with another teacher, Miss Travers, the elderly and insufferable geography teacher. A spinster’s holiday, indeed. Autumn Crocus invokes references to the spinster schoolteacher as a moral masochist, but it also conjures allusions to the sadistic disciplinarian. Steiner imagines Edith teaching mathematics to older students. He ventures, “I can just see her: ‘What is twice two? You do not know?’ Bang! (He hits the table with a fork.)”28 The denotation would have been instantly recognizable to theatregoers of the 1930s. In fact, the student-whacking teacher was a familiar trope in vaudeville and burlesque sketches of the early twentieth century. School acts, as they were called, included a teacher, often male with a thick European accent, in a classroom of dense immigrant children. The Marx Brothers, for instance, spotlighting Groucho as German-dialect spouting Herr Teacher, had their first successful act with Fun In Hi Skule (1910), and the brothers would develop other school acts throughout their career. Rick DesRochers writes, “The focus of the act was the frustration of the teacher with the stereotypical ignorance of the students. The institution of school was represented by a teacher who demanded that the students correctly answer his relentless and arbitrary questions.”29 In burlesque sketches, the teacher was often an uptight schoolmarm, who hit the students with a rolled-up newspaper or an umbrella every time they got an  Cavanagh, 431.  D. Smith, 74. 28  D. Smith, 26. 29  Rick DesRochers, The New Humor in the Progressive Era: Americanization and the Vaudeville Comedian (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 85. 26 27

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Fig. 2.1  Ann Miller and Mickey Rooney in Sugar Babies (1979). (Photo by Martha Swope. © The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts)

answer wrong and/or replied (as they often did) through sexual innuendo. Ann Corrio, who toured This Was Burlesque (1962) for over thirty years, featured a schoolroom act called “School Daze,” and Ralph Allen, who adapted classic burlesque bits for Sugar Babies (1979), devised “Bored of Education” for Ann Miller as the clueless and abusive schoolmarm, with Mickey Rooney playing the bratty child with a filthy mouth (Fig. 2.1). An example of the humor comes across in “A Classy Place,” one of Allen’s sketches. As part of an English lesson, the Teacher quizzes a student to “use the words ‘honor’ and ‘offer’ in a sentence.” The student

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responds: “That’s easy. She offered her honor. He honored her offer. And all night long, it was on her and off her. (TEACHER hits him again.)”30 In the sketches, the student (played by one of the burlesque show’s clowns), gets the final word, the punchline of the skit. The scenes indulge childhood fantasies in which the tyrannical teacher is made ridiculous by the anarchical behavior of the recalcitrant students. The apotheosis of this trope may be seen in Miss Trunchbull, the ruthless hammer-throwing Olympian and child-tossing headmistress in Matilda (2010), the musical based on Roald Dahl’s novel. Miss Trunchbull, played originally by Bertie Carvel in drag, is a decidedly queer, abominable, and hilarious character, who is ultimately defeated by the “revolting Children.”31 Incorporating another spinster figure, the story concludes with Matilda’s adoption by the sweet and motherly Miss Honey, who previously had been victimized by the evil Miss Trunchbull.

The Corn Is Green: Meet Miss Moffat, “An Educated Woman” In 1923, British philosopher Anthony Ludovici wrote that the spinster “is an abnormal being—just as the celibate priest is abnormal, and just as the non-reproductive adult animal is abnormal—and therefore that her impulses must inevitably find their adaptation in an abnormal manner.”32 Building on this conception of the spinster’s abnormality, Cavanagh affirms that historically, “spinsters were read in ways that we now call queer or gender variant” because “they were represented in ways that upset regulatory norms governing femininity, [and] they opted out of heterosexuality (by choice or by necessity).”33 As stage depictions of spinster teachers go, surely the apotheosis is Miss Moffat in Emlyn Williams’ The Corn Is Green (1940). Miss Moffat is the embodiment of a queer spinster: A fascinating, formidable, and, most certainly, abnormal being.

30  Ralph Allen, The Best Burlesque Sketches as Adapted for Sugar Babies and Other Entertainments (New York: Applause Books, 1995), 77. 31  Dennis Kelly and Tim Minchin, “Revolting Children,” Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical (New York: Music Theatre International, 2010), 84–7. The musical premiered in Stratfordon-Avon in 2010, transferred to the West End in 2011, and opened on Broadway in 2013. 32  Qtd. in Julie V.  Gottlieb, Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain’s Fascist Movement, 1923–45 (London: I.B. Tauris & Co., Ltd. 2000), 16–17. 33  Cavanagh, 438.

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Williams’ play revolves around a teacher who establishes a small school in a Welsh mining town at the end of the nineteenth century, and with determination and drive that would give Henry Higgins pause, Miss Moffat helps transform a young miner from guttersnipe into a budding Oxford scholar. The play opened in London on the cusp of World War II, and when it finally had its New  York premiere two years later, it was a gigantic critical and financial hit. Brooks Atkinson proclaimed, The Corn Is Green “is as close to being a masterpiece as a journeyman theatregoer can reasonably expect.”34 The show ran an impressive 477 performances. While Bette Davis, who played the role in the 1945 film version, and Katharine Hepburn, who appeared in the 1979 television adaptation, are most associated with Miss Moffat, Sybil Thorndike originated the part to great acclaim in London, and Ethel Barrymore played it on Broadway to universal accolades.35 (Cicely Tyson did not fare as well in the ill-conceived 1983 Broadway revival, but Nicola Walker reinvigorated the character in London’s 2022 National Theatre production.) Williams based the play on his own experiences, and Sarah Grace Cooke, a social-worker-turned-­ teacher, was the model for Miss Moffat. Miss Cooke was, like the character she inspired, a force of nature, and she was still teaching at the time The Corn Is Green premiered in London. In 1941, Williams described a letter he received from her when Great Britain was at war with Germany. She wrote that she would “give anything to be a rear-gunner.” “I could see her, too,” Williams opined, “her gray hair back in the wind, taking pot-­ shots at a lot of fanatical young barbarians whom (in a saner world) she might be busy turning into good citizens.”36 Just as Miss Cooke defied expectations of femininity by desiring to be a bomber plane machine-gun operator, Miss Moffat confounds conventional assumptions about womanhood in the play. In the parlance of early-twentieth-century psychoanalysts, she gives the impression of suffering from an acute masculinity

 Brook Atkinson, “Portrait of Miss Moffatt,” New York Times (December 1, 1940), X1.  Atkinson wrote about her performance: “Miss Barrymore owns any stage on which she treads through knowledge of how to use it. Whether she owns Miss Moffatt or Miss Moffat owns her is much harder to say. For she has surrendered the brilliant actress to the school teacher who, in turn, has lost herself in good works. Out of Mr. Williams’s play and Miss Barrymore’s acting Miss Moffatt emerges as one of the great people of our day.” 36  Emlyn Williams, “The Corn Was Green in England,” New York Times (February 16, 1941), X1. 34 35

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complex.37 Less than one hundred years later, in her assault on gender norms and heterosexuality, she would be considered undeniably queer. As the curtain rises, the town squire and property overseers are preparing for the arrival of the new owner of the Welsh country home. When Miss Moffat enters, wheeling a bicycle and wearing a straw hat, collar and tie, and “a dark unexaggerated suit,”38 they are incredulous that the proprietor is a woman. After all, the letters she had mailed were “unscented,” written in “such a bold hand,” and admirably meticulous in their legal details about the lease, so it seems impossible to them they were not composed by a man. Besides, her signature and post-nominal title were surely those of a military officer. Miss Moffat responds, “My initials, L. C. Moffat? You see, I never felt that Lily Christabel really suited me.” The M.A. afterward, she informs them, refers to Master of Arts. The condescending squire scoffs, “A female M.A.? And how long’s that going to last?” To which Miss Moffat counters, “Quite a long time, I hope, considering we’ve been waiting for it for two thousand years.”39 As the Squire immediately learns, this Lily Christabel is no shrinking violet (Fig. 2.2). Miss Moffat also makes it clear that she has opted out of heterosexuality by both necessity and choice. In an exchange with Miss Ronberry, whom she appoints as one of the school assistants, Miss Moffat explains that physically, temperamentally, and intellectually she was never disposed toward marriage and instead focused on her personal aspirations. “I’m afraid,” she admits, “I’m what is known as an educated woman.”40 Miss Ronberry, however, urgently yearns to be a wife, but Miss Moffat gives her

37  In her influential essay “The Flight from Womanhood: The Masculinity-Complex in Women, as Viewed by Men and Women” (1926), psychoanalyst Karen Horney writes, “Owing to the hitherto purely masculine character of our civilization it has been much harder for women to achieve any sublimation which should really satisfy their nature, for all the ordinary professions have been filled by men. This again must have exercised an influence upon women’s feelings of inferiority, for naturally they could not accomplish the same as men in these masculine professions and so it appeared that there was a basis in fact for their inferiority.” (Reprinted in Female Sexuality: The Early Psychoanalytic Controversies, edited by Russell Grigg, Dominique Hecq, and Craig Smith. [London and New  York: Routledge, 2015], 119–20.) 38  Emlyn Williams, The Corn Is Green (1938) (New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1972), 15. 39  Williams, 17. 40  Williams, 20.

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Fig. 2.2  Ethel Barrymore in Emlyn Williams’ The Corn is Green (1940). (Photo by VanDamm Studio. © The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts)

a dose of reality about the “right gentleman” she expects to miraculously appear: Miss Moffat:

If you’re a spinster well on in her thirties, he’s lost his way and isn’t coming. Why don’t you face the fact and enjoy yourself, the same as I do? Miss Ronberry: But when did you give up hope—oh, what a horrid expression— Miss Moffat: I can’t recall ever having any hope. Visitors used to take a look at my figure and say: “She’s going to be the clever one.” Miss Ronberry: But a woman’s only future is to marry and—and fulfill the duties of—

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Miss Moffat: Miss Ronberry: Miss Moffat: Miss Ronberry: Miss Moffat:

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Skittles! I’d have made a shocking wife, anyway. But haven’t you ever—been in love? No. How very odd. I’ve never talked to a man for more than five minutes without wanting to box his ears.41

Later, Miss Moffatt flirtatiously seduces the squire to use his influence to help attain a scholarship for Morgan Evans, her young protégé. For Miss Moffat, sexuality, like education, is a transactional tool of power and social change. When the squire leaves, she mockingly states, “That man is so stupid it sits on him like a halo.”42 She then triumphantly and teasingly announces to Miss Ronberry, “[Y]ou’d better watch out, I may beat you to the altar yet—.”43 To her, heterosexual coupling is simply a game to be played by frivolous people. Whereas other schoolmarms are represented as maternal and nurturing, Miss Moffat’s relationship with Morgan, whom she calls by his surname (Evans), is paternal and undemonstrative. She refers to him as her “little pit-pony”44 and considers him less as a surrogate son—his own parents both dead—than a financial and temporal investment. When he confronts her, claiming she has no interest in him except as “the schoolmistress’s little dog,” she responds: I never meant you to know this. I have spent money on you—I don’t mind that, […] money ought to be spent. But time is different. Your life has not yet begun, mine is half over. And when you’re a spinster, some folk say it’s pretty near finished. Two years is valuable currency. I have spent two years on you. […] Ever since that first day, the mainspring of this school has been your career. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, when I have been desperately tired, I have lain awake, making plans. Large and small. Sensible and silly. Plans for you. And you tell me I have no interest in you.45

In an atypical moment of softness, she chides Morgan, “If I say any more I shall start to cry; and I haven’t cried since I was younger than you are,

 Williams, 19.  Williams, 52. 43  Williams, 53. 44  Williams, 53. 45  Williams, 55–6. 41 42

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and I’ll never forgive you for that.”46 Aside from a few moments in which she gives in to sentimentality, Miss Moffat is strictly business. Rather than hugs and warm words of encouragement, she expresses her devotion through relentless grammar corrections, practice syntax drills, and a simplified Greek alphabet table. Soon after the confrontation, Morgan gets a young woman pregnant, and when fatherhood threatens to prevent him from pursuing the scholarship, Miss Moffat agrees to adopt the baby. At first, she considers it impossible, asseverating, “But…but what would I do with a baby? I—I don’t even know what they look like!”47 Then, she sees that adopting the child is the only way for the dream she has thrust on Morgan to come true for him—and her. In comparison, her magnanimous gesture does not echo the Little Teacher’s notion of children as the “most beautiful things” in women’s lives; she regards the adoption as an altruistic surrender, a necessary means for achieving her own personal reward. She confides to Morgan, “Every morning regularly, […] I found myself thinking of you working for this scholarship, and winning it. And I experienced something which must after all be comparatively rare: A feeling… of complete happiness. I shall experience it again. No, Morgan Evans, you have no duty to me. Your only duty is to the world.”48 Morgan leaves for Oxford, and the teacher and student agree they will not see each other again. True to form, though, Miss Moffat immediately forgets about the baby. When she is handed her son’s birth certificate, she is confused at first, and then comments, “I had forgotten—all about that.”49 Clearly, the unconventional teacher will be an unconventional mother.

The Durable Trope The spinster schoolteacher was an enduring figure on the stage through much of the twentieth century, and as this section substantiates, she continues to materialize in plays and musicals of the twenty-first. One of the most memorable is Rosemary Sydney, the morally vacillating schoolteacher in William Inge’s Pulitzer-Prize winning Picnic (1953). Rosemary is a self-­ identified “old maid school teacher,” and she seems to revel in her  Williams, 56.  Williams, 77. 48  Williams, 82. 49  Williams, 84. 46 47

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autonomy. “Shoot! I lived this long without a man,” she insists, “I don’t see what’s to keep me from getting on without one.”50 Publicly, she is prudish and righteous, scorning books like Carson McCullers’ “filthy” The Ballad of the Sad Café, which, she notes, was justifiably removed from the library because “everyone in it is some sort of degenerate.”51 University student Alan reports that the book is on college reading lists, and she scoffs, “Well, those college professors don’t have any morals.”52 Rosemary’s exaggerated priggishness is a source of humor and derision for the students in her school. Madge, the play’s sexually awakening heroine, tells the hyper-masculine Hal: Women like Miss Sydney make me disgusted with the whole female sex. […] Last year she and some of the other teachers made such a fuss about a statue in the library. It was a gladiator and all he had on was a shield on his arm. Those teachers kept hollering about that statue, they said it was an insult to them every time they walked into the library. Finally, they made the principal—I don’t know how to say it, but one of the janitors got busy with a chisel and they weren’t insulted any more. The next day there was a sign hanging on the statue—“Miss Sydney was here.”53

It turns out, though, Rosemary’s high-mindedness is a pretense, a masochistic guise to conceal her own sexual desire. She drops the façade as she seizes onto her last chance to scrap the old-­ maid act and marry the equally hypocritical businessman, Howard Bevans. After spending a romantic evening together, she urges him to take her back to his place for the night. He is concerned, however, about the gossip that might follow, and she counters, “What’d people say if I walked down the street and showed ’em my pink panties? What do I care what people say?”54 When Howard remarks such behavior is unlike her, she proclaims, “I’m more like myself than I ever was.”55 Inge scholar Jeff Johnson explains, “The truth is, of course, that she is not a self-actualized spinster ‘proud of her independence’ but a desperate woman frantic about losing the one thing she still has going for her: sex, and the ebbing but not quite finished passion to  William Inge, Picnic (1953) (New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1983), 16.  Inge, 19. 52  Inge, 20. 53  Inge, 54. 54  Inge, 58. 55  Inge, 58. 50 51

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provoke a leeching sap like Howard to provide her a veneer of respectability.”56 At the end of the play, both Rosemary and Howard get what they desire. She will be a wife, and he will have greater social and economic capital, claiming that “folks’d rather do business with a married man.”57 Whatever its strengths as a play (and the strengths are considerable), Picnic reinforces the perception of teaching as a fallback position for unmarried women. For instance, Rosemary describes a spinster teacher’s life as “livin’… in rented rooms, meetin’ a bunch of old maids for supper every night, then comin’ back home.”58 The successful teacher, according to this logic, is the one who can shed the constraining cloaks of rigid morality and abandon the trumpeted independence to marry out of the profession. Tapping into familiar stereotypes, the play presents spinster teachers as ridiculous, sanctimonious, and pathetic. A stage teacher who definitely is not ridiculous, sanctimonious, nor pathetic is Annie Sullivan, Helen Keller’s instructor, from William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker (1959).59 Annie bears the hallmarks of the (queer) spinster teacher’s countenance, and like Miss Moffat, she overturns gender conceptions in appearance and deportment. She is described as having “a face which in repose is grave and rather obstinate, and when active is impudent, combative,…and handsome.”60 Although she promises that when she gets to the Kellers’ house, she will “be so ladylike they won’t notice [she’s] come,”61 almost instantly Annie’s intractability, forthrightness, and most unladylike roughness cause tension with Captain Keller, the family patriarch. Furthermore, her relationship with Helen is intensely physical, and some of the scenes do not so much resemble one-on-one tutoring but pro-wrestling matches. Annie’s unrelenting demand for obedience and discipline of Helen is also a rebuke to the family that ceded all household control to the disabled child. Captain Keller admonishes her that as a teacher, Annie should have more “pity.” Annie reproaches him 56  Jeff Johnson, William Inge and the Subversion of Gender: Rewriting Stereotypes in the Plays, Novels, and Screenplays (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2005), 60. 57  Inge, 68. 58  Inge, 59. 59  Annie Sullivan is also a character in Gibson’s sequel Monday After the Miracle (1982). The original production of The Miracle Worker ran a noteworthy 719 performances on Broadway, but the follow-up barely eked out seven. 60  William Gibson, The Miracle Worker (1956) (New York: Scribner, 2008), 12. 61  Gibson, 14.

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(while she has a kicking and squirming Helen pinned to the ground): “Pity? For this tyrant? The whole house turns on her whims, is there anything she wants she doesn’t get?”62 Later, Captain Keller forcefully reminds Annie of her position in the house and that she is an employee of the family. He reiterates, “Miss Sullivan, you are here only as a paid teacher. Nothing more, and not to lecture—.”63 As the battle lines with Helen are sharpened, she reiterates the statement, professing, “I didn’t come here for love. I came for money.”64 Yet, by the end of the play she has earned Helen’s love, and she returns it in kind. She becomes a maternal presence in the child’s life. As Mary M. Dalton writes about the film version’s ending, “The connection between Helen and her mother no longer has the primacy it once did; and, the connection between Helen and Annie has been made and secured, establishing teacher as maternal but not mother.”65 In diametric opposition to Rosemary Sydney, who prides herself on being able to afford fine clothes (“And don’t have to ask anybody when we wanta get ’em, either”66), Annie is single-minded in her focus on Helen’s education and life-changing effects it can have. Contrary to earlier protestations, for Annie, as Dalton illustrates, “[T]eaching is much more than paid employment.”67 She cites Kathleen Casey’s narrative analyses of “women teachers working in real classrooms,” who are similarly single-­ minded. Casey concludes, “Many women define being a teacher as a fundamental existential identity.… These women work for children, not for those who pay their wages.”68 It is no wonder, then, that Annie does not give Captain Keller the chance to terminate her employment. The protagonist in William McCleery’s Good Morning, Miss Dove (1963), adapted from Frances G. Patton’s novel, is feared by students and parents alike but beloved by the community for her constancy, steadfastness, and sage advice. In a description that could apply to nearly any stock spinster teacher, the stage directions delineate Miss Dove:

 Gibson, 49.  Gibson, 50. 64  Gibson, 71. 65  Mary M. Dalton, The Hollywood Curriculum: Teachers in the Movies, 3rd Edition (New York: Peter Lang, 2017), 93. 66  Inge, 26. 67  Dalton, 90. 68  Quoted in Dalton, 90. 62 63

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She is about fifty, her figure spare, her hair twisted into an old-maid’s-knot. Her unpainted mouth seems to bear no sign of the uncertainty that marks most mouths in the course of time. She has the look of a queen about her; but a hard-working, no-nonsense kind of queen. Her dress is conservative and is a close cousin of the one in which she made her pedagogical debut thirty years ago. She wears round-toed black shoes with low, rubber-tapped heels. All in all, MISS DOVE suggests the classic portrait of the eternal teacher that American small fry, generation after generation, have drawn upon fences and sidewalks.69

In the play (which diverges from the film version’s more maternal character), Miss Dove appears before the school board and a psychiatrist due to her excessive classroom punishments. She is accused of being “mentally and emotionally disturbed.”70 She comes to realize, however, that her forceful regimentation is misplaced revenge on a lover who had jilted her decades before, and she vows that henceforth she will be more moderate. If Miss Dove offers a familiar but affectionate portrayal of the tyrannical spinster schoolteacher, Paul Zindel’s And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little (1971) paints a darkly comic picture of unredeemable and grotesque women teachers. Miss Reardon centers around three sisters, all of whom are in education. The youngest sister, Anna, is a high-school chemistry teacher, who has had an emotional breakdown and possibly assaulted one of her male students. The middle sister, Catherine, the tippling title character, is an assistant school principal, and she has to play defense for her sister, who is tormented and ridiculed by the students. As Catherine grills her neighbor, “Do you have any idea how embarrassing it can be to be the assistant principal of a high school and have your own sister arrive at the faculty conferences wearing a One of my tits is rubber sign on her back?”71 The oldest sister, Ceil, is the school superintendent. She is the only married woman of the sisters, having stolen Catherine’s boyfriend some years before. The play has some fabulously bitchy scenes and the Broadway premiere boasted some terrific performances (by Julie Harris, Estelle Parsons, and Nancy Marchand as the three sisters; and Rae Allen as a chatty guidance counselor), but its targets remain elusive. As Walter Kerr succinctly articulated, “The play seems content to say that people are peculiar, if not unfathomable. To peculiar, we 69  William McCleery, Good Morning, Miss Dove (1963) (New York: Samuel French, 1991), 9. 70  McCleery, 54. 71  Paul Zindel, And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little (1971) (New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1999), 12.

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agree. But some degree of fathoming is surely the first business of a playwright.”72 In Zindel’s sardonic and unflattering view of the educational system, schools are  repositories  for  sexually repressed, slightly deranged, and shamelessly unscrupulous teachers and administrators. Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) and Hazel Ellis’ Women Without Men (1938; first produced in the U.S. in 2016) depict spinster schoolteachers in Ireland of the 1930s and appear to be very much like their counterpoints across the Atlantic. Fussy and priggish schoolteacher Kate Mundy is the oldest of five unmarried sisters in Friel’s play, and she is the financial and moral backbone of the household. She is a staunch Catholic and opposed to the pagan rituals that have begun to infiltrate the house, but she is not immune to the Irish music and dancing that brightens her rather dreary life. Women Without Men is set in an all-girls Irish boarding school and renders the quiet, and not-so-quiet desperation of women whose chances of marriage are slipping away or have evaporated. As one of the character defeatedly admits about their plight, “When a man gets a bit of money he can always get married no matter how old he is, but we poor devils have to wait to be asked.”73 The women are sadistic and cruel with one another, and as José Lanters suggests, there is a rippling of queerness in the play.74 When a new teacher presses why the women act the way they do, one of them replies, “What else would you expect? A small group of women all cooped up together with no release from each other save in the privacy of our bedrooms. Women brought together not by choice, not by liking, but by the necessity of earning our living.”75 Misery is seldom as entertaining as it is in Women Without Men. This section concludes with two examples of unmarried women educators confronted with the oppressions of teaching at the intersection of gender, race, and class. The threatening cloud of failure looms large above them, and the plays demonstrate the demoralization caused by the profession. First, thirty-something-year-old Ms. Sun is a teaching artist assigned to Malcolm X High School in the Bronx in Nilaja Sun’s No Child…(2006). She has developed a six-week workshop with a class of students, and the 72  Walter Kerr, “Peculiar People, All Right, But What About Them?,” New York Times (March 7, 1971), D29. 73  Quoted in José Lanters, “Women and Marriage: Hazel Ellis’ Gate Theatre Plays of the 1930s in Context,” Review of Irish Studies in Europe 5.2 (2022), 15. 74  Lanters, 14. 75  Quoted in Alexis Soloski’s “‘Women Without Men,’ A Learning Experience of Sorts,” New York Times (March 26, 2016), C5.

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program will culminate in a production of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good (1988).76 After enduring several weeks of the students’ excessive absence, lateness, offensive name-calling, and disruptive behavior, Ms. Sun admits that she has failed and notifies the principal that she quits. She rails against a system that is completely broken and one that sets up the students, the teachers, and the schools for failure. The play takes its title from the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which as shown here, seems to have been established to assure that every child in a disadvantaged school is left behind. Ms. Sun argues that rather than readying the students for professional careers, inner-city schools with their emphasis on punishment and security surveillance are preparing the students for prison. She rages: I’m tired, and I’m not even considered a “real” teacher. I don’t know how I would survive as a real teacher. But they do…on what, God knows. And the worst thing, the worst thing is that all those kids in there are me. Brown skin, brown eyes, stuck. I can’t even help my own people. Really revolutionary, huh? […] We’re totally abandoning these kids and we have been for thirty years and then we get annoyed when they’re running around in the subway calling themselves bitches and niggas, we get annoyed when their math scores don’t pair up to a five-year-old’s in China, we get annoyed when they don’t graduate in time. It’s because we abandoned them. And, I’m no different, I’m abandoning them too.77

Nevertheless, the students convince Ms. Sun to return, and the play ends with a miracle that would make Annie Sullivan envious: The show does go on, and it is a triumph. When the curtain comes down, the students are confident and determined to dream their way out of their current circumstances. At least for the time being. Headmistress Francis in Jocelyn Bioh’s School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play (2017) is a throwback to the schoolmarm image examined earlier in the chapter. She has devoted her life to the Aburi Girls’ boarding school in Central Ghana, where the play is set. The year is 1986. The school is struggling financially, and Schoolmistress Francis, a graduate of Aburi, frequently uses her own money to pay for supplies and to assist the girls, many of whom come from poor families. Aburi is thrown into 76  Our Country’s Good follows a group of convicts in eighteenth-century Australia and who are mounting a production of George Farqhhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706). Therefore, No Child…can be described as a play-within-a-play, within-a-play, within-a-play, within-a-play. 77  Nilaja Sun, No Child…(New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 2008), 21–2.

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turmoil with the arrival of the light-skinned and wealthy new student Ericka, who has come from the United States, and the simultaneous visit by Eloise Amponsah, the recruiter for the Miss Global Universe pageant. Eloise, as she frequently points out, is Miss Ghana 1966, and she hopes to find the next Miss Ghana among the girls at Aburi. Eloise also is the headmistress’ former classmate, and she was presumably a mean girl in school who has turned into a mean woman in adulthood. She condescendingly suggests that Headmistress Francis, who remains at Aburi and is pumping private funds into a declining enterprise, is a professional and social failure. Eloise boasts, “I’m Miss Ghana 1966. And here you are, still trying to keep up with the popular girls.”78 Like many schoolmarm characters before her, though, the headmistress does not regard her life as a failure. The school is proudly the crux of her existence, and through self-sacrifice, she is a surrogate mother to the students. When, Paulina, the deeply insecure queen bee of the popular girls, uses toxic skin-lightening cream because she despises her appearance, Headmistress Francis scolds her in a manner that echoes Miss Moffat’s chastising Morgan Evans. She says, “Paulina—I have looked after you like you are my own child. Took care of you and paid for things your mother couldn’t afford. And let’s not talk about the countless hospital bills I incurred only for you to turn around and start using this mess again?”79 Headmistress Francis, like Miss Moffat and Annie Sullivan, is a maternal persona who sublimates or, in Miss Moffat’s case, renounces heterosexuality. The characters limn teaching less as professional choice but as a religious calling.

“Women, Where Are We Going?” In January 2014, Barack Obama was on the road touting his plans to bolster job-training programs and manufacturing positions when he took aim at supposedly impractical college-level liberal-education pursuits. He told the crowd, “I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.”80 He later apologized publicly as well as in a personal 78  Jocelyn Bioh, School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play (New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 2008), 26. 79  Bioh, 43. 80  Quoted in Scott Jaschick, “Obama vs. Art History,” Inside Higher Education, January 31, 2014, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/01/31/obama-becomes-latestpolitician-criticize-liberal-arts-discipline.

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handwritten note to art historian Ann C. Johns, the Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Professor and senior lecturer at the University of Texas, Austin.81 Regrettably, Obama’s swipe was at the expense of a field dominated by women,82 who already face considerable obstacles in higher education. Obama’s slight could very well have been directed at Heidi Holland, the fictional professor and art historian at the center of Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles (1989). Heidi and other women professor characters exemplify the many obstacles that university and college women faculty regularly encounter. Although women outnumber men in nursing programs and some of the so-called soft college majors, like art history, anthropology, and gender studies, they are in the minority of fulltime faculty across the campuses. Historically, this has always been the case. In 1920, 26% of all college faculty were women (compared with 86% women teachers in primary and secondary education); in 2020, 43% of full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty were women (with 76% women teachers in primary and secondary education).83 The numbers are even more discouraging in terms of promotion and salary. Citing a 2020 report from the American Association of University Professors, Karen L. Newman writes: “Among people working toward tenure, women account for 50 percent of assistant professors and 45 percent of associate professors, but only 33 percent of full professors. According to that study, women faculty only earn 82 percent of what their male counterparts do.”84 Not only are women under represented and paid less than their male counterparts, they are expected to shoulder more of 81  Scott Jaschick, “Apology from Obama,” Inside Higher Education, February 14, 2014, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/02/19/professor-ar t-histor yreceives-handwritten-apology-president-obama. 82  According to a 2019 statistic, 61% of art history professors are women, and 39% are men. “Art History Professor Demographics and Statistics in the US,” Zippia: The Career Expert, Accessed January 15, 2023, https://www.zippia.com/art-history-professor-jobs/ demographics/ 83  Karen L.  Newman, “Women in Academia: Have We Really Come a Long Way?,” Fulcrum Leveraging Our Differences (March 16, 2022), https://thefulcrum.us/big-picture/Leveraging-big-ideas/women-professors. A report on primary and secondary teachers notes, “Women make up 76% of all teachers at public and private schools and an even larger share at the elementary school level. Women comprise 89% of teachers in public elementary schools, 72% of teachers in public middle schools, and 60% of teachers in public high schools” (“Who Are the Nation’s 4 Million Teachers?,” USA Facts [December 4, 2020], https:// usafacts.org/articles/who-are-the-nations-4m-teachers/). 84  Newman.

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the academic and institutional labor. As Jill Dolan emphasizes, “women, lesbians, and people of color are often tokenized on committees,” and typically they are unrewarded and unacknowledged by the college or university for their work.85 Women marginalized by other social identities, such as those associated with race, class, sexual orientation, and age, undergo even greater challenges. Studies examining African American women faculty in predominantly white institutions reveal the challenges associated with their race and gender. They are accorded less prestige, respect, and backing from administrators and colleagues, who assume they were hired due to tokenism or affirmative action charges. Consequentially, they need to work harder to earn promotion and are placed under more careful observation than their non-person-of-color peers. And as Sherrée Wilson argues, referencing bell hooks, white students consider an African American woman instructor as a “mammy,” looking down upon her as a servant or caretaker. Wilson asserts, “Those students may resent an African American woman who has power over them and is in a position of authority; the result may be lower-­ than-­average student evaluations and an increased number of complaints regarding assignments and overall teaching competence.”86 Doubly marginalized by their race and gender, African American women faculty often find themselves working in an unsupportive and often hostile work environment. The final section of this chapter examines four plays, Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles, Margaret Edson’s Wit (1998), Julia Cho’s Office Hour (2017), and Dominique Morisseau’s Confederates (2022). Each features women college faculty members as the main characters, and all of the protagonists are single. Two have never married, and two are divorced or divorcing. This aligns with the majority of plays constructed around women in higher education as if to suggest that highly accomplished and professional women cannot have it all—partner, family, and career. (Wasserstein’s Third [2005] is a rare exception, but the woman professor’s husband in that script is an unseen character.) The four plays offer a

85  Jill Dolan, Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 129. 86  Sherée Wilson, “They Forgot Mammy Had a Brain” in Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia, edited by Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, et al. (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2012), 66.

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snapshot of the daunting adversity and quotidian battles women professors and college instructors face on campuses across the United States. Heidi’s “Women, Where are We Going?” monologue is arguably the most memorable scene in The Heidi Chronicles and certainly the most polarizing. In the play Heidi, now an esteemed art historian and Columbia professor, has been invited to speak at a luncheon hosted by her high school alma mater. Heidi describes in her speech an incident in her university’s gym locker room that involved several women talking about the latest fashions, gym accessories, trendy foods, and illustrious offspring. She confesses having nothing in common with these wealthy matrons and style-obsessed young women and that the years fighting for social and political justice have come to naught. She feels isolated and defeated, concluding the speech: I don’t blame the ladies in the locker room for how I feel. I don’t blame any of us. We’re all concerned, intelligent, good women. [Pause.] It’s just that I feel stranded. And I thought the whole point was that we wouldn’t feel stranded. I thought the point was we were all in this together.87

Heidi rectifies her feelings of solitariness by first deciding to move to the Midwest (but she doesn’t, so she can be with her gay friend) and by adopting a baby girl. The curtain falls with Heidi settling into a rocker and singing “You Send Me” to the infant cradled in her arms. On the one hand, the play captures the difficult lives of women academics in the 1980s. This was a period in which feminist academics were slowly breaking through academe’s glass ceiling and were landing positions in the rarified and male-gendered Ivy-League. The skirmishes were hard-fought after decades of exclusion and subservience. Joan C. Chrisler expostulates, “In the early 1970s, academia was a male bastion. Men led the professional associations, planned the curriculum, wrote the textbooks, edited the journals, devised the theories, conducted research of interest to themselves (usually about other men’s work or with data provided by other men), and trained the professoriate of the future.”88 Although there was considerable progress by the mid-1980s, women were still fighting for crumbs and forced to make concessions in their private 87  Wendy Wasserstein, The Heid Chronicles (New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1990), 71. 88  Joan C. Chrisler, “In Honor of Sex Roles: Reflections on the History and Development of the Journal,” Sex Roles 63 (2010), 299.

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lives (such as pregnancy and autonomy) that their male counterparts did not. It is unsurprising that a distinguished scholar like Dr. Heidi Holland would feel embittered and burnt out. On the other hand, the play suggests that no matter how successful and publicly admired a woman is, she is not complete unless she is a mother. The final image of Heidi apparently content and serene with her child projects this cultural attitude. The Heidi Chronicles also intimates that second-­wave feminism had exhausted itself out, and Wasserstein treated women’s protests and consciousness-raising groups, for example, with mockery and scornfulness. Feminists in the late 1980s when the play first appeared were justifiably annoyed. Dolan writes, “Wasserstein’s play was derided as liberal sour grapes, in which a woman playwright used the popular Broadway forum to gesture to a history she intimated was finished and a politic she suggested was spent. Many feminists saw The Heidi Chronicles as a sellout, a sop to dominant culture just when the social movement needed a powerful public champion.”89 Still, even with its flaws, the play reflects the demands placed on women academics and the extraordinary pressures they encounter trying to navigate their professional and personal lives. Gina Gionfriddo’s Rapture, Blister, Burn (2013), which centers around an unmarried media studies professor, takes up some of the same questions about the feasibility of women having it all. In 2013, Heidi’s daughter, by then  most likely a college graduate and embarking on her own career path, would probably be wondering the same thing. If Heidi’s adopted daughter summons comparisons to Miss Moffat’s adopted son, Vivian Bearing in Wit even more potently manifests qualities of an archetypal spinster schoolteacher. She is fifty, never-been-married, and she is a no-nonsense pedagogue. When we meet her, Vivian is in her final hours as she succumbs to ovarian cancer. She addresses the audience directly, and she is wry, supremely vulnerable, and eminently honest as she reflects on her life as an academic and recounts the pain and indignities associated with her illness. This dying lecturer persona is in marked contrast with the impression we have of her as a classroom instructor. Clinical fellow Dr. Jason Posner, a former student, reports that her seventeenth-­ century poetry course “felt more like boot camp than English class.”90 Vivian maintains as much, admitting, “And I know for a fact that I am  Jill Dolan, Wendy Wasserstein (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 59.  Margaret Edson, Wit (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 75.

89 90

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tough. A demanding professor. Uncompromising. Never one to turn from a challenge.”91 We get a glimpse of this inflexibility in an exchange with a student in a classroom flashback: Student 1: Professor Bearing? Can I talk to you for a minute? Vivian: You may. Student 1: I need to ask for an extension on my paper. I’m really sorry, and I know your policy, but see— Vivian: Don’t tell me. Your grandmother died. Student 1: You knew. Vivian: It was a guess. Student 1: I have to go home. Vivian: Do what you will, but the paper is due when it is due.92 In her sarcasm and unbending adherence to the class policies, she comes across as callous and insensitive. Her illness has provided an opportunity to understand what it feels like to be on the other side of the desk. She does not appeal directly to the audience for penitence, but in the confessional approach, she seeks redemption. Notably, Wit has been used as a teaching tool in medical ethics programs for the ways in which it dramatizes doctor-patient interactions.93 In the play, many of the medics treat Vivian as a case, an experiment, and a diseased body to be scrutinized rather than as a human being desiring compassion. Susie Monahan, Vivian’s nurse, is warm and empathetic. Yet, Wit shows that academics can be just as obdurate and uncharitable toward their students, and the turning point occurs as Vivian realizes this. She divulges, “So. The young doctor, like the senior scholar, in her pathetic state as a simpering victim, wishes the young doctor would take more interest in personal contact.”94 Arguably, Vivian’s notoriety as a John Donne scholar is a result of her perceived ruthlessness and obstinacy. Like her mentor and role model, Professor E.M.  Ashford (but who is more maternal in her prompting the young Vivian to go out and socialize more),  Edson, 12.  Edson, 63. 93  See, for instance, Ann Henley, “Images of Healing and Learning: The Patient as Text: Literary Scholarship and Medical Practice in Margaret Edson’s Wit,” American Medical Association Journal of Ethics 17.9 (September 2015): 858–64. 94  Edson, 58. 91 92

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Vivian is unsentimental and pertinacious. She is, in short, more like a male academic. Research shows that women professors are less likely to achieve the same level of success as their male peers because they take on more responsibilities within departments. They are also perceived as nurturing and regarded severely if they are not. More so than male instructors, women are implored to grant special favors to students and be more pliant with class policies (such as meeting paper submission deadlines). Sociology professor Joya Misra contends that the issue stems from the fact that women are considered “helpers” and men “doers.” This, she claims, “has a tremendously negative effect on the careers of academic women, who either engage in helping behaviors—and spend less time on more valued work— or do not, and are viewed as selfish or not team players, even when their men colleagues are similarly less likely to engage in helping behavior but face no consequences.”95 Vivian, it is clear, refused to be constrained by gender assumptions and could forthrightly pronounce that as a scholar, “After twenty years, I can say with confidence, no one is quite as good as I.”96 Of course, in the end, it doesn’t matter. She surmises that her epitaph would simply read: “Published and perished.”97 On the opposite side of the academic-teaching spectrum is Gina, the university writing instructor racked with the possibility that one of her students may or may not be a school shooter in Julia Cho’s Office Hour (2017). Dennis, the troubled student, has taken several writing courses within the unnamed university’s English department, and previous instructors David and Genevieve indicate that he was always a sullen, threatening presence in class. Moreover, his poetry, screenplays, and responses concentrated on topics like rape, pedophilia, and torture. He is registered in Gina’s class, and since the administration will not do anything to help, he’s her problem now. Cho has said that she wrote the play as a reaction to the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007. In an interview with Diep Tran, she specified, “I read some books about Virginia Tech, and there’s so much in what I was reading about how much [shooter] Seung-Hui Cho frightened his teachers, how clear it was to the people around him that there was 95  Quoted in Colleen Flaherty, “Dancing Backwards in High Heels,” Inside Higher Education (January 10, 2018), https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/01/10/ study-finds-female-professors-experience-more-work-demands-and-special-favor 96  Edson, 20. 97  Edson, 33.

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something very wrong with him.”98 Office Hour shows the precariousness of teaching in the twenty-first century, and in addition to gun violence, it tackles issues of racism (specifically, anti-Asian attitudes), bullying, and mental illness. Structurally, the play reflects the characters’ psychological and emotional instability. Set during Gina’s office hour, the scenes include shifting variations indicating how the scenarios might play out. (For comparison, the conceit is similar to Caryl Churchill’s Heart’s Desire [1997], David Ives’ Sure Thing [1988], and Nick Payne’s Constellations [2012].) For instance, in one sequence of events Dennis reaches into his backpack, pulls out a gun, and shoots Gina. After a quick blackout, the events are replayed with Dennis reaching into his backpack, pulling out a nail clipper, and trimming his nails. Dennis discloses that he has been bullied, mocked, and degraded, and these have made him feel “dead for years.”99 Ultimately, the play is not very convincing. It is hard to fathom that a writing instructor, who suspects a student as potentially posing harm to himself and others, would sequester herself in an office with him even if the door is slightly ajar. Furthermore, within minutes, she shares with the student information about her marriage—she’s getting a divorce—and her relationship with her immigrant father. Finally, it doesn’t seem logical that an issue that has caused such an outcry from faculty and students (who are dropping classes in which they are enrolled with the student) would go completely unacknowledged by the administration. It seems to be an invitation for a lawsuit. Still, Office Hour highlights real and plausible concerns in the tenuous lives of contingent faculty. Job insecurity, low salaries, and lack of professional autonomy are just some of the worries that bedevil college adjuncts. Gina articulates the issues when she tells Dennis: Now I’m just an adjunct. I don’t even have an office. (Gesturing around.) This, I share with three other adjuncts, all of us teaching writing classes, with no hope of tenure, barely getting by. But what else can we do? We’re writers. We have no skills.

98  Quoted in Diep Tran, “Julia Cho Returns to Playwriting with ‘Aubergine’ and ‘Office Hour,’” American Theatre, February 17, 2016, https://www.americantheatre. org/2016/02/17/julia-cho-returns-to-playwriting-with-two-new-plays/. 99  Julia Cho, Office Hour (New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 2018), 26.

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So I need this class to go well. If enrollment dips below fifteen—for whatever reason—that’s pretty much a guarantee I’m not coming back.100

The stress of the job has affected Gina’s health, most especially in triggering her acute insomnia. The play also hints at the responsibilities of a faculty member to be teacher, mentor, and therapist all at once. Cho, who had been a college teaching assistant, ascertains that the necessity of being a counselor to students is “a scary place to be, because you have so much responsibility, but you have zero training in any of that.”101 Gina’s plight reflects the position that many women teachers face. Scholarship and disciplinary knowledge are secondary to their presumed ability to be sympathetic, available, and nurturing. After all, their lives may depend upon it. Women faculty members as nurturers is powerfully and painfully literalized in Morisseau’s Confederates. The play begins with the projected image of a Black slave woman with a white baby suckling on her breast. Sandra, an African American woman professor of political science, introduces the photo as a hostile smear against her. Someone had photoshopped the picture, putting Sandra’s face on the slave woman, and taped the poster to Sandra’s office door. While attempting to ferret out the responsible party or parties, Sandra, who is a respected scholar and public pundit, realizes that her race and gender make her a threat to nearly all of the college constituents. Malik, who is one of her students and is Black, believes that a low grade on an essay exposes Sandra’s favoring Black women students  over Black men. Additionally,  Sandra’s white student assistant, Candice, suggests that based on Sandra’s decision to wear a Black Lives Matter T-shirt to class, white students think the professor gives preferential treatment to Black students. And Jade, the only other Black department faculty member and who is up for tenure, alleges that Sandra is obstructing her promotion to safeguard the constricted prestige and resources afforded women of color (Fig. 2.3). The play shifts between scenes set at the university and those occurring on a southern plantation amidst the Civil War. The plantation scenes focus on Sara, a slave woman, who supports and assists her brother Abner, a runaway slave and Union soldier. Other characters include Missy Sue, the slave owner’s daughter, who involves Sara in a conspiracy to intercept  Cho, 16.  Quoted in Tran.

100 101

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Fig. 2.3  Michelle Wilson in Dominique Morisseau’s Confederates (2022). (Photo by Monique Carboni)

messages from the Confederate army, and the devious house slave, LuAnn, who blackmails Sara into helping her escape slavery. In juxtaposing the two narratives, Confederates shows the parallels between academic institutions and slave-plantation hierarchies. Sandra and Sara, separated by centuries, are transgenerational confederates. Morisseau’s characters convey the cumulative effects of what William A. Smith describes as “racial battle fatigue,” which is “a response to the distressing mental/emotional conditions that result from facing racism daily (e.g., racial slights, recurrent indignities and irritations, unfair treatments, including contentious classrooms, and potential threats under tough to violent and even life-threatening conditions).”102 In Sandra’s circumstances, the university administrators turn a blind eye to the everyday perceptible and imperceptible acts of prejudice, and expect professors of color, as Jade utters to Sandra, “to be these ‘tolerant negroes.’”103 In the

 Quoted in Wilson, 70.  Dominique Morisseau, Confederates (Press Script, Signature Theatre, 2022), 53

102 103

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end, though, both Sandra and Sara defiantly stand up to and against the racist institutional structures. Sandra acknowledges that there will not be any disciplinary action against the perpetrators, and we learn that the nursing Black woman is a photo of Sara’s mother. As unapologetically recalcitrant Black women, they withstand the institutional injustices, and the play concludes with the two women facing down their oppressors. Appearing before the image of the Black woman and white baby, the women avow: Sandra: […] This is what it means to be at this institution. To know deep in your core that there will never be justice for you here. Sara: This is what it means to be in a peculiar institution. Under its boot, everybody yo’ enemy. Even ones say they your friends. ‘Long as there’s a plantation, ain’t none of us free. Sandra: This image was used to humiliate me. But I stand before you to say that I’m not ashamed. Sara: I stand here before you to tell you that I am no more chattel and bond. I’m barren, but all woman, whole and full body. [Sara bares her breast to the audience.] Not to be nursin’ your chir’ren or layin’ in your bed. Not to be suckled from or auctioned off. Only to be governed by my own damn self. Sandra: I am no more your tolerant negro. Sara: I am no more your slave nigger.104 And then, invoking Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I Woman?” speech and foreclosing any possibility for counterargument, they state simultaneously, “And that’s all I have to say today. Thank you for your/yo’ time.”105 In the final moment, Black histories, feminisms, and resistance coalesce in a beautifully orchestrated mic drop. The four plays discussed in this section spotlight the astounding institutional pressures  and nearly insurmountable professional  stakes that women in higher education face.  Alluding to another feminist motif, Confederates floats the superwoman signifier as a reference to women  Morisseau, 89.  Morisseau, 89. In the transcript of Truth’s speech, she concludes: “Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain’t got nothing more to say.” (“Speech Entitled ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ by Sojourner Truth Delivered at the 1851 Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio,” https://thehermitage.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Sojourner-Truth_ Aint-I-a-Woman_1851.pdf.) 104 105

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academics. Arguably, this notion of the superwoman academic can apply in different ways to Heidi, Vivian, and Gina as well, and they all demonstrate the enormous personal sacrifice that comes with the moniker. In The Heidi Chronicles, a talk-show host asks Heidi, who, in her mid-thirties, has published a book, teaches at Columbia, and organizes a collective of women’s artists, if she’s a “superwoman.” Heidi laughs off the allusion, blurting, “Oh, gosh, no. You have to keep too many lists to be a superwoman.”106 In Wit, Vivian is a formidable scholar and an intimidating sovereign presence on campus, but she leads a rather solitary existence. Gina from Office Hour is a fearless teacher and counselor, who thrives on limited financial resources and minimal family support. In Confederates, Candice, the white student in Confederates, refers to Sandra as “inhuman” and a “superwoman” because she comes across as “strong and resilient.”107 Sandra disavows the comparison, admitting, “It is very very hard to be a woman in academia. A black woman even harder. I have to temper myself with my colleagues. With my students. I feel that I owe something to myself, to women, to… the future, even, to make sure that I am not disposable here. And that means carrying myself with a demeanor that doesn’t allow for much crack in the foundation.”108 Being a perceived superwoman carries enormous professional and psychological burdens. In her foundational feminist text Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, Michele Wallace characterizes the Black superwoman as an individual “of inordinate strength, with an ability for tolerating an unusual amount of misery and heavy, distasteful work.”109 The deeply embedded contrivance presumes that Black women do not feel pain in the ways that other people do, are capable of negotiating a range of work and personal responsibilities concomitantly, and will not complain about adverse conditions. The myth, therefore, makes it socially acceptable for Black women to continue to be overworked and underpaid. Adjacently, being placed on a pedestal does not acknowledge the anguish and subjugation Black superwomen actually endure. And finally, the myth causes Black women to censure themselves when they are unable to live up to the unreasonable demands placed on the Black superwoman. They are expected to have it  Wasserstein, 59.  Morisseau, 35. 108  Morisseau, 36. 109  Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1978) (New York: Verso, 1999), 107. 106 107

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all—personally, professionally, sexually—and are criticized if they are unable to attain perfection or keep their emotions in check. Sandra reveals the ways in she concealed the feelings of failure in her personal life with a durable, impenetrable shield forged from her professional success. Jade chastises Sandra for not being more open and for not being a “sister,” “who would look after her own.” Sandra, concedes that she was suppressing roiling inner turmoil over the breakup with her husband, their inability to conceive, and his lack of support for her work. She rails, “If I unraveled to you and ripped out what was barely left of my dignity would that have made you feel more connected to me? God forbid we both be Black and I don’t unravel in front of you. Because maybe, just maybe, I wouldn’t be able to thread myself back together again. And while you’re feeling good about us both having some sense of kinship, what the hell am I supposed to do with scattered fucking threads of myself???”110 In declaring in front of the institution’s administration that she is no longer “your tolerant negro,” Sandra once and for all rejects the Black superwoman designation. Representations of women teachers on stage reveal complex, shifting, and often contradictory societal attitudes. The images bring to the fore the obstacles facing real-life teachers, who are expected to be both irreproachably divine and cheerfully servile. The academic superwoman is as much a cultural construction as the spinster schoolteacher is, and both creations are infused with the specter of failure. In stage representation, the characters are deemed incomplete or failed women. The schoolmarm, old-maid spinster, and Black superwoman reside in a space outside of conventional gender roles and expectations. They have been depicted as motherly, but not real mothers; psychologically imbalanced and abnormal sexual beings; masculine, ambitious, and tyrannical; and as ethereal, altruistic, and saintly. These alternately nonhuman and inhuman characteristics also make educators  suspect  in their  proximity to children, adolescents, and young adults, making them potentially dangerous. In fact, US history includes many instances of teacher panics, or  widespread societal  fears about the moral and physical perils they pose to students. The next chapter examines one of these eras, the interwar years, in which the underlying anxieties about unfit teachers were dramatically, salaciously, and thrillingly presented on stage.

 Morisseau, 62.

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CHAPTER 3

Lesbians, Vampires, and Vermin: The Unspeakable Dangers of Unfit Teachers, 1920s–1940s

Fat, Insane, and Unfit to Teach In August 1929, New York’s Board of Education pronounced that a public-­school teacher had “an obligation to look after his [sic] own health, not only to increase his efficiency, but to set an example of an ‘ideal of healthy adulthood.’”1 In the interwar years, the physical and mental health of the city’s teachers were under watchful scrutiny as community leaders attempted to weed out so-called unfit teachers, who might jeopardize the exalted, wholesome future of America’s youth or might be a burden to taxpayers. In 1935, for instance, the New York Times followed the proceedings against Miss Rose Freistater, who was barred from teaching because the Board of Examiners “decreed that she would not receive a license because she was too fat.”2 At five feet, two inches, Miss Freistater’s ideal teaching weight, according to the board, was 120 pounds, but they would allow her an extra 30 pounds. Unfortunately, she weighed in at 182 pounds, and the board denied her appeal, claiming that she “would be unable to stand the strain of stair climbing and other physical trials of her duties and would be a bad risk for the pension fund.”3 The Board of  “Health of Teachers,” New York Times, August 31, 1929.  “Teacher Held ‘Fat’ Gets an Appeal,” New York Times, August 15, 1935. 3  “Teacher Held ‘Fat.’” 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. F. Wilson, Failure, Fascism, and Teachers in American Theatre, Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34013-0_3

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Education leveled an even harsher judgment at Mrs. Marguerite S. Cunningham, a New York City fifth-grade teacher, who was deemed a “fire hazard” because of her size. Mrs. Cunningham was fifty-one, weighed 275 pounds, and according to the board president, “the teacher walked with a cane, could not flex her right wrist, and in other respects did not belong in active service.”4 As evidence that Mrs. Cunningham might be an “obstacle” and “would endanger the lives of her pupils,” the board staged an impromptu school fire drill, calculatedly placing observers in the hallway. The final report concurred that Mrs. Cunningham was a “definite and dangerous ‘fire hazard.’” The board representative wrote that “the teacher was not able to take part in the fire drill,” concluding, “Before Mrs. Cunningham had limped down the stairs the children in her class were a block away from her.”5 Overweight and physically disabled teachers were not the only targets for termination during this period. A plague of psychologically maladjusted, emotionally unstable, and intellectually incompetent teachers, it seems, needed to be identified and rooted out of the system. In 1934, Dr. Emil Altman, the chief medical examiner for New  York City’s public schools, estimated that of the 36,000 teachers, 1,500 were “either emotionally unstable or insane.” He described an incident, for example, in which an elementary school teacher was convinced that “the children of her class were staring at her.” As a means “to distract attention from [herself],” she “continually held the leg of a chair near a boy’s eye and twisted it, without actually touching the eye.”6 The teacher was subsequently relieved of her duties. Several years later, Altman took aim at the intellectually inept among the ranks. In one situation, a thirty-year veteran teacher spent more than an hour trying to solve the following assigned math problem: “If three apples cost 5 cents, how much would fifteen cost?” Dr. Altman reported: “[The teacher] observed that the problem was too difficult to solve in her head, but thought she could do it on paper. After covering both sides of two clean sheets of composition paper, she confessed that she was stumped.”7 In spite of her limitations with basic arithmetic, the teacher remained in the city’s school system.

 “Special Fire Drill Held for Teacher,” New York Times, April 3, 1940.  “Special Fire Drill.” 6  “1500 City Teachers Held Unbalanced,” New York Times, March 27, 1934. 7  “Drive is Continued on Unfit Teachers,” New York Times, February 16, 1940. 4 5

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As the above cases show, effective pedagogy often had little to do with teachers’ grasp of their discipline or their talent in helping students master the material. Physical and psychological fitness were generally considered the essential qualification, particularly as schools became more and more important within their communities. In the early twentieth century the number of students attending and remaining in school skyrocketed as a result of Progressive education reform. Education historian Diane Ravitch documents that approximately 10% of all teenagers were enrolled in high school in 1900. By 1940 about 70% were registered.8 This expanded democratization of education coincided with an obsession on physical health and mental stability that reflected an emerging nationalist American dominance. Teachers—most of whom were women—were becoming increasingly more professionalized and unionized, and they endured intense surveillance as they represented the presumed principal role models for the country’s youth. Societal ills, including juvenile delinquency, were the result of, according to psychologists and medical examiners, unfit teachers. Addressing the American Psychiatric Association, Dr. Sara Geiger said schools were especially vulnerable to lazy and dissolute workers because the profession enticed them with the benefits of “short hours and long vacations, or a desire to dominate, which has never been gratified.”9 She also claimed administrators did not effectively weed out the large number who were morally and mentally unfit for working with youth. Concurrently, there was a move to include fingerprinting in the application process as precaution for hiring known sex offenders.10 A teacher’s body, professional conduct, and extracurricular interests, therefore, were monitored assiduously.11 In the interwar years, psychologically maladjusted and physically impaired teachers were not simply a community problem, they ostensibly posed possible imperilment to the well-being of the nation. The fixation with unfit teachers was not just evident in cruel and humiliating newspaper stories, but it became a familiar topic of mainstream plays 8  “American Traditions of Education” in A Primer on America’s Schools, edited by Terry M. Moe (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2001), 13. 9  Quoted in “Child Delinquency Linked to Schools,” New York Times, June 7, 1938. 10  “Will Fingerprint WPA Men Workers,” New York Times, December 4, 1938; “Lack of Funds Prevent Teacher Fingerprinting,” New York Times, December 15, 1939. 11  For a detailed study of teachers in the post-Reform era, see Jonna Perrillo, “Beyond ‘Progressive’ Reform: Bodies, Discipline, and the Construction of the Professional Teacher in Interwar America,” History of Education Quarterly 44.3 (Autumn 2004), 337–363.

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of the time as well. Fictional stage teachers mirrored cultural anxiousness about the moral, psychological, and corporeal power real-life educators have over their young charges. Rather than representing incubators of democratic idealism, the schools and colleges in which many of the plays are set, depict sanctuaries for pernicious, sadistic, and sexually uncontrolled individuals. On one hand, the dramas replicate the panics initiated by supposedly amoral predators and serve as cautionary tales about the hazards of unfit teachers, but on the other, they incorporate the melodramatic convention in which villainy and immorality are punished or destroyed. While this chapter examines plays from the 1920s to 1940s that offer vilifying views of teachers, there are, it should be stated, some from the period that offer loving or favorable depictions. For instance, the teacher characters of Philo Higley and Philip Dunning’s Remember the Day (1935) and John Boruff’s Bright Boy (1944) are kind and compassionate. The faculty and administrators in Floyd Dell and Thomas Mitchell’s Cloudy with Showers (1931), Clifford Goldsmith’s What a Life (1938), and Joseph A. Fields and Jerome Chodorov’s Schoolhouse on the Lot (1938) are generally harmless and a little silly. There are also plays that render teachers spectacularly magnanimous even if moderately tyrannical, including, as analyzed in the previous chapter, Miss Moffatt of Emlyn Williams’ The Corn is Green (1940). But these benevolent characters are far outnumbered by the lesbian, degenerate, and monstrous teachers that appeared in homegrown American dramas or in Broadway productions of plays that originated in Europe. I focus here on works that feature teacher characters as oppressors, or those who threaten the precarious moral, physical, and/ or intellectual welfare of their students. After all, in the national imaginary, the hopes of society reside in the healthy bodies and minds of the country’s youth.

“Just as Unnatural as It Could Be” Lillian Hellman’s hugely successful The Children’s Hour is arguably one of the most notable teacher plays in the American theatre. The show opened in November 1934 and closed after 691 performances, making it Broadway’s ninth longest running show at the time. Critics hailed it as a “venomously tragic play” and “a splendid piece of dramaturgy with the

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Fig. 3.1  Anne Revere and Katherine Emery in Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (1934). (Photo by VanDamm Studio. © The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts)

added distinction of being good theatre.”12 In its portrayal of the hysteria induced by the charge that lesbians are at the helm of a girls’ boarding school, the play also reflects the fears that unfit teachers can irreparably harm morally vulnerable students. Yet, as is customary of plays of the era (and later eras as well), The Children’s Hour ends with the destruction of the supposedly sexually depraved character (Fig. 3.1).13 12  Brooks Atkinson, “Children’s Hour, Being a Tragedy of Life in a Girls’ Boarding House,” New York Times, November 21, 1934; Wolfe Kaufman, “Plays on Broadway: The Children’s Hour,” Variety, November 27, 1934. 13  Several studies examine the treatment of LGBT characters, showing how historically and dramaturgically they are presented as murderers, tragic victims, and objects of ridicule. See, for example, John M. Clum, Still Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000); Jordan Schildcrout, Murder Most Queer: The Homicidal Homosexual in the American Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014); Alan Sinfeld, Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century (New Have, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).

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Karen Wright and Martha Dobie are the central characters, and they supervise and teach at a New England girls’ school. Both women are in their late twenties and are unmarried. Karen is engaged to a young doctor, Joe Cardin, and Martha, who is insecure and edgy, worries that the imminent marriage will lead to the end of the business partnership and friendship. The fate of the school and the teachers themselves face dire straits when Mary Tilford, one of the students, overhears Lily Mortar, Martha’s meddling aunt, chastise her niece for her intense jealousy. Lily tells Martha that her fondness for Karen is “unnatural. Just as natural as it can be.”14 Mary’s whispered accusation of the unmentionable and unnamed relationship between Karen and Martha to her grandmother provokes a legal firestorm and mass exodus from the school. In the play’s climax, Martha shoots herself after declaring she is the “God-damned sick and dirty” thing the spiteful child, identified her as. The Wright-Dobie school is fictional, but the play is based on events that occurred in 1810 at a Scottish boarding school. In her version of the incident, Hellman offers a recognizable vision of an American girls’ school in the early twentieth century. Sarah A.  Dyne reminds us, “Boarding schools are unique spaces and pedagogical systems that function within modernist literature to reinforce hierarchical and heteronormative ideals and expectations in order to produce nationalized, gendered, and racialized citizens through the use of discipline.”15 When the drama begins, several students are sewing, another is trimming her classmate’s hair, and another is reading from a book aloud. Mrs. Mortar is upset with a girl who is using the time to study for an exam when she should be practicing becoming a lady. The central lesson Mrs. Mortar intends to impart is “courtesy is breeding and breeding is most to be desired in a woman. It’s what every man wants in woman.”16 The lesson is not unusual for its time since emphasis on ladylike conduct was a central part of the curriculum in the interwar years. Jackie M.  Blount explains that schools and colleges often required students to take hygiene classes, which “reinforced traditional gender behaviors and sexual practices.” These courses were linked with the eugenics movement (at its height in the pre-War 1930s), and 14  Lillian Hellman, The Children’s Hour (1934, revised 1952) (New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1981), 21. 15  Sarah A. Dyne, “It’s so queer—in the next room”: Docile/Deviant Bodies and Spatiality in Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour,” Miranda [Online] 15 (2017). URL: http:// journals.openedition.org/miranda/10519. 16  Hellman, 11.

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lessons “also provided advice on how youth eventually might find healthy spouses with whom they could produce physically fit children for the ‘betterment of the race.’”17 As boarding schools tried to mold the girls into virtuous (heterosexual) women, these institutions were considered dubious sites in which same-sex crushes and desires might kindle and burn. Girls were considered markedly susceptible to homosexuality, which, as sociologist Willard Waller argued in 1932, emerged from the conviction that female genitalia are “less complex” than males’ and, therefore, less specific in their “sexual aims.”18 American physicians held similar convictions, and building on the work of noted turn-of-the-century British sexologist Havelock Ellis, they asserted, “Female boarding schools and colleges are the great breeding grounds of artificial [acquired] homosexuality.”19 This connection between environment and mutable sexuality reflects what Benjamin Kahan describes as “a homosexuality not of persons, but of place.”20 The rumored lesbianism at a girls’ boarding school in The Children’s Hour prompted critics to make comparisons to a play from two years earlier that deals with similar issues: Christa Winsloe’s Girls in Uniform (1932), which was adapted from the German play Gersten Und Heute (and upon which the film Mädchen in Uniform [1931] is based). While not actually focusing on an unfit teacher but centering on a student who announces her love for a woman teacher, the play demonstrates the prevailing notion of girls’ boarding schools as a seedbed in which

17  Jackie M. Blount, Fit to Teach: Same-Sex Desire, Gender, and School Work in the Twentieth Century (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005), 72. 18  Willard Waller, The Sociology of Teaching (1932). (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1965), 140. Psychologist Winifred Richmond argued homosexuality was more prevalent in girls than boys, and she said it was on the rise in Western countries because of the economic need for women to work, “which delays marriage and makes it imperative that women become wage earners, thus bringing out their masculine characteristics” (The Adolescent Girl: A Book for Parents and Teachers [New York: Macmillan, 1925], 68). 19  Quoted in Blount, 34. George E. Gardner argued the limited interactions among college students of the opposite sex could induce homosexual relationships. In “Causes of Mental Ill Health Among College Students,” he explained, “Homosexuality is often a direct result of such limited contacts, a tendency which, according to [Smiley] Blanton, is more prevalent in women’s colleges than in those for men only” (Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 149 [May 1930], 104. 20  Benjamin Kahan, “The Walk-In Closet: Situational Homosexuality and Homosexual Panic in Hellman’s The Children’s Hour,” Criticism 55.2 (Spring 2013), 189.

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homosexuality might take root.21 The student in Winsloe’s play is Manuela, a motherless adolescent, who is sent to an all-girls boarding school. The school is run by Fräulein von Nordeck, the callous and unsympathetic headmistress, and most of the other women teachers are heartless and stern with the children. Fräulein von Bernburg, a young motherly teacher, however, is kind, and Manuela falls in love with her. Fräulein von Bernburg kisses each girl good night, and Manuela’s passions are ignited when her teacher kisses her on the lips. When the coldhearted headmistress confronts the young teacher, Fräulein von Bernburg condemns Fräulein von Nordeck for cultivating a cruel and barbaric environment. She exclaims, “You kill the soul, the spirit! This galvanized suppression is spiritual death. Only women can do such terrible things to women!”22 In another scene, Fräulein von Bernburg discovers as she gingerly runs her fingers over Manuela’s underwear that her petticoat is replete with holes. She offers the girl one of her own chemises, which empowers Manuela, imbuing her with greater confidence. Later, after giving a splendid performance as Don Carlos in Friedrich Schiller’s play, Manuela accidentally gets drunk on spiked punch, and to the shock of the headmistress and her classmates, she loudly proclaims her love for Fräulein von Bernburg. The head mistress pronounces the admission as “Revolting! A scandal! A scandal!,” and she orders Manuela to permanent isolation.23 Sobbing, Manuela says goodbye to Fräulein von Bernburg, and soon after kills herself by jumping out of a window. The plots of both The Children’s Hour and Girls in Uniform revolve around, to draw on Kahan’s analysis of Children’s Hour, homosexual panics.24 In Hellman’s play, the accusation whispered in Mrs. Tilford’s ear (and it is so ghastly, it must not be uttered aloud), prompts the grandmother to immediately notify the parents and guardians of the school’s students. Justifying the clearance at Wright-Dobie, Mrs. Tilford unrepentantly replies, “I have done what I had to do. What [Karen and Martha] 21  The Five Lesbian Brothers satirize (among other things) the association of girls’ boarding schools with lesbianism in Brave Smiles…Another Lesbian Tragedy (1992). 22  Christa Winsloe, Girls in Uniform. English adaptation by Barbara Burnham. (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1936), 129. 23  Winsloe, 93. 24  Kahan, 188. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick unpacks the term as a dubious legal defense to justify homophobic attempts, but considering the trauma inflicted upon Martha and Manuela, the usage does not at all seem a stretch here. (Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet. [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990], 19–21.)

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are may possibly be their own business. It becomes a great deal more than that when children are concerned in it.”25 Likewise, Manuela must be quarantined from her peers to prevent the spread of the transmittable pathosis for as Fräulein von Nordeck orders, “The other children must run no further risk of contamination.”26 Circumstances in actual boarding schools would have received comparable counteractions. According to most experts of the time, pathological homosexuality was both a congenital disorder and a social disease. As Waller wrote in The Sociology of Teaching, “[N]othing seems more certain than that homosexuality is contagious.”27 Vigorous safeguards needed to be put in place to protect children, who had not yet reached moral and sexual maturity. It bears noting that the students in the case on which Hellman based her play were also summarily evacuated. Furthermore, as Kahan points out, “the pupils at the real-life Scottish model for the Wright-Dobie school (with the exception of one) were unable to find places at other schools for fear that the knowledge of lesbianism that they had gained, if not the contagion itself, could cause an outbreak at another school.”28 Even schoolgirl crushes, which is insinuated in Girls in Uniform, could lead to disastrous results. School psychologist Bess E. Johnson cautioned, “If the older woman is herself of the homosexual type and encourages and reciprocates the girl’s affection great harm may be done the girl by causing her to select one of her own sex as the object of her love.”29 Great care must be taken, according to Johnson, to make sure that same-sex attraction does not extend beyond childhood. “If homosexual interest continues

 Hellman, 47.  Winsloe, 105. 27  Waller, 147–148. In the same study Waller describes the methods by which administrators may detect an “individual with a marked homosexual component in his personality.” He writes: “One man with an experimental turn of mind evolved what he thought to be a satisfactory formula for men teachers. ‘Do you like boys?’ he would ask. Often the answer betrayed the applicant. An over-enthusiastic answer was taken as probably betraying a homosexual, latent or active, while an under-enthusiastic answer bespoke a turn of mind that could not bear association with children cheerfully.…A more sophisticated technique would probably depend somewhat more upon such personality traits as carriage, mannerisms, voice, speech, etc.” (148). 28  Kahan, 189. 29  Bess E. Johnson, “Adolescent Crushes and the Teacher’s Responsibility,” The Clearing House 13.9 (May 1939), 533. 25 26

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beyond the later adolescent period,” she forewarns, “it is less likely that it will ever be discontinued.”30 In a case of art imitating life, plays with lesbian and gay characters were deemed dangerously immoral and contaminating. Case in point, The Children’s Hour was banned in London and Boston. In addition, responding to the notable 1952 revival (which was slightly revised to metaphorically link the circumstances with McCarthy’s whispering campaigns), the Cook County American Legion’s anti-subversive committee urged a boycott, calling it “salacious and indecent.” Recalling the argument about the susceptibility of children to homosexuality, the chairman of the committee’s chief reason was, “It shouldn’t be seen by our youth.”31 Presumably, the risk of contracting homosexuality in a theatre is as great as it is in a classroom. 

No Lesbians Here Ten years after The Children’s Hour first premiered, another teacher panic play involving a lesbian  riled New  York’s theatre community.  Not since Edouard Bourdet’s The Captive aroused the ire of New York’s chief magistrate in 1926 had a play dealing with lesbianism caused so much conflict on the New York stage. Since Hellman’s play was a huge hit, it seemed that by the 1940s lesbian teachers were immune to New York’s censor. So, the announcement of Dorothy and Howard Baker’s Trio (based on Dorothy Baker’s novel of the same name), a play with a lesbian college professor, caused little fanfare. The play’s titular threesome comprises Pauline Maury, a professor of French literature; Janet Logan, her protégé and minion who lives with her; and Ray Mackenzie, a student who falls in love with Janet. The plot is rather simple. While working at a cocktail party in Pauline’s apartment, Ray meets Janet, and the two become romantically involved. In the second act he is repulsed to discover Janet lives under Pauline’s emotional and intellectual domination. In the third act Ray barges into Pauline and Janet’s apartment and successfully woos Janet away from Pauline. Alone and now exposed as having plagiarized her celebrated book on French Symbolists, Pauline is about to commit suicide as the curtain descends. Trio’s production history is nearly as dramatic as the play and triggered a clash of homophobic responses and artistic freedom petitions. The out-­ of-­town tryout premiered October 25, 1944 in Philadelphia. Trio was to  Johnson, 531.  “Hellman Play Boycotted,” New York Times, November 20, 1953.

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open on Broadway a few weeks later, but Lee Shubert, whose family owned the Cort Theatre, where Trio was heading, suddenly reversed his support because New  York’s License Commissioner, Paul Moss, threatened to revoke the theatre’s license. Lee Sabinson, the show’s producer, struck back in a media campaign, arguing that Moss’ threat and Shubert’s acquiescence were a throwback to Broadway censorship of the 1920s. Actors Equity Association, among other organizations, submitted formal appeals. Written by Will Geer and John McGovern, the Equity petition argued, “[T]he denial of a theatre to ‘Trio’ constitutes a trial without jury and in effect pre-censorship, thus establishing a precedent dangerous to the freedom of expression of ideas in the theatre.”32 The Bakers offered their own statement, denying controversial material and stating that the play is not specifically about homosexuality (in a justification similar to Hellman’s claim that The Children’s Hour “is not really about lesbianism, but about a lie”33). They explained: The booking troubles that ‘Trio’ has run into have started the misleading and damaging rumor that ‘Trio’ is a drama about Lesbianism. This report falls far short of the truth. We, the authors, would have had no interest in dramatizing anything so special, so chaotic, or so finally uninteresting as Lesbianism, and the attachment between the two women in our play is a very small part of a much larger pattern of psychological domination.34

Pauline is despicable not for her sexual desire but for her drive for power, and, they argued, the teacher character has an important allegorical function. They described Pauline as “an intelligent and soulless egocentric,” “a pitiable old woman who symbolizes all the false glamour, unhealthy pretensions and specious complexities of the modern sophisticated world.”35 Shubert, however, stood resolute. Sabinson secured the Belasco Theatre, an independently owned Broadway house, and Trio debuted in New York on December 29, 1944. Most of the critics saw nothing all that shocking about the play, and one critic said if he did not know better, he would have considered the 32  Untitled clipping dated November 11, 1944. Source not indicated. Trio Clippings File, Library of the Performing Arts, Billy Rose Theatre Collection. 33  Quoted in Harry Gilroy, “The Bigger the Lie,” New York Times, December 14, 1952. 34  Undated clipping. Source not indicated. Trio Clippings File, Library of the Performing Arts, Billy Rose Theatre Collection. 35  Trio Clippings File.

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pre-­Broadway brouhaha a publicity stunt.36 John Chapman’s chief complaint concerned the verboseness, writing, “It is so talky that last night I wanted several times to get out in the air, or maybe talk back to whoever was gabbing on the stage.”37 Trio closed after just 67 performances when Paul Moss threatened to revoke the Belasco’s license, which was in the process of being transferred to a new owner. Moss was pilloried in the theatre community for acting as a one-person censor, but there were intimations Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia was calling the shots and forcing the closure. Apparently, LaGuardia had been besieged with letters from religious leaders throughout the city, protesting the assault on public morality.38 Actors Equity, American Civil Liberties Union, among others, filed protests and adopted resolutions of censure against Moss and the Mayor’s office. As war in Europe and Asia raged, many in the labor and arts communities regarded it their nationalist duty to defend Trio and the perceived attack on American ideals even as the play presented a view of American higher education as corrupt and destructive. On first glance, the Bakers’ Trio does not seem particularly salacious. The script does not mention “lesbian” or “lesbianism,” nor does it suggest an erotic relationship between Pauline and Janet. The unpublished script specifically notes, “No tenderness between the two women, either normal or otherwise, is indicated in this play.”39 However, the depiction of a lesbian teacher is unmistakable even if the Bakers claim otherwise, and Pauline embodies the qualities of the stereotypically evil lesbian. In The Culture of Queers Richard Dyer traces the correlation of vampirism and homosexuality, showing how vampires, circulating among the living, conceal the secret of their identity, and in a sexual parallel they act on the uncontrollability of their desires.40 Similarly, Lillian Faderman shows the lesbian vampire as a common trope in twentieth-century novels. Faderman explains, “It is not the victim’s blood that the villain lives on but her youth and energy, which the modern vampire requires to transfuse her aging, hideous, malcontented 36  Burton Rascoe, “‘Trio’ is Good but Fails Buildup as Sensation,” New York WorldTelegram, December 30, 1944. 37  John Chapman, “Trio Finally Arrives and Proves Talky But Strangely Fascinating,” New York Daily News, December 30, 1944. 38  “‘Trio’ to Close Tonight,” New York Times, February 24, 1945. 39  Unpublished and corrected manuscript of Trio by Dorothy and Howard Baker (1944), n.p. Box 7, the papers of Dorothy and Howard Baker, M0903, Dept. of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, CA. 40  Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 70–89.

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Fig. 3.2  Lois Wheeler and Lydia St. Clair in Dorothy and Howard Baker’s Trio (1944). (Photo by Alfred Valente. © The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts)

self.”41 There is a strong case for Pauline as a metaphorical lesbian vampire. Her life force comes from Janet, and so it is no surprise her protégé is perpetually weak, tired, and teetering on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Escape from the eternal power of the lesbian vampire’s clutches is impossible for Janet, who proclaims, “I’ve prayed for her to die. Because I haven’t the nerve to kill her.…But she won’t die. She’ll live to be a thousand, and probably I will too. She and I, forever.”42 As the nubile prey, Janet is incapable of escaping the clutches of her oppressor. Ray, the anti-intellectual, heterosexual male, holds the stake that can destroy the lesbian vampire and rescue the powerless victim (Fig. 3.2). 41  Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Quill and William Morrow & Co., 1981), 343. 42  Bakers, 2–33. (Pages in the manuscript are indicated by Act-page number or Act-scenepage number if the act has more than one scene.)

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Pauline and Janet’s vampire-like relationship is established almost immediately. The curtain rises on Janet, who is grading a set of Pauline’s student papers, and Pauline enters, a hungover queen-of-the-night, recovering from a party the night before. (Pauline’s nocturnal vitality is alluded to several times.) Secretiveness is insinuated as Pauline scolds Janet for leaving the blinds open, allowing the neighbors to gawk at them through the windows. Pauline’s parasitic reliance on her students’ lifeblood is also revealed. Pauline makes a short speech for the assembled guests at her cocktail party, proclaiming: I am to dedicate my life to the young, and there is no experience and no privilege I value so much as to teach them.…They’re all so alive, they care so much about everything, they’re so wonderfully foolish, and so imperishably right and sensible. All my life I know they’ll teach me, and I shall learn from teaching them.43

As a teacher, Pauline retains her own youth by absorbing (or in vampire style, sucking) the youth from others. Indeed, her actual age is something of a mystery. At one point she tells Ray and Janet, “I’ve never made a secret of the fact that I am…well, I am thirty-three years old, and all that that implies.”44 The character description, however, suggests any implications are purely conjectural. Pauline “says she’s thirty-three,” the notes inform, but “[s]he’s older than that: no statement of hers is to be taken at its face-value.”45 The characterization further highlights the danger of the unchecked stereotypical lesbian. Pauline is celebrated for her scholarship on French symbolist poets, and she lords this over her male colleague, who has recently become a father and seems incapable of completing his own book. As a star academic, Pauline’s stature is already suspect because of her gender, and she rails against the male-dominated university systems. She tells the dean that students are the unfortunate receptacles for male-generated knowledge through the centuries. She sneers, “The lectures of the learned men turn out to be repetitions, almost invariable, of the misinformation of the ages. All the ancient mistakes are ponderously given forth to be memorized and handed down again.”46 Her research also flies in the face of  Bakers, 1–1–26.  Bakers, 2–24. 45  Bakers, n.p. 46  Bakers, 3–11. 43 44

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conventional respectability, and the topic of her book mirrors the supposed degeneracy of her personal life. Commenting on Pauline’s work, her male rival tells her, “Your poets were all depraved in their various unhappy ways…they were alcoholics, they were addicted to drugs, they had sadistic and homosexual and murderous tendencies.”47 Professionally and personally, Pauline epitomizes moral depravity. Pauline’s domination over Janet, her alcoholism, and her sadism,48 are all parts of an immoral whole, but the clincher is a charge of plagiarism (from the work of her dead, lesbian lover/mentor), the equivalent of first-degree murder in academia. In the end Pauline is alone, revealed as an unsuitable teacher, a failed (heterosexual) woman, and a fraudulent scholar. Earlier, the audience learns that she is not even an American citizen—she is French. The final stage directions state that “her strength and fury are gone,” and she walks toward the bedroom with a tablecloth in her hands, twisting it into a rope with which to hang herself.49 The vampire killer in this play is Ray MacKenzie, an on-again, off-again college student, who rejects the elitism a college education affects. He particularly disdains teachers, who in his opinion wear the cover of respectability but are failed achievers. When Janet tells him Pauline is helping her become a teacher, Ray warns against such a career move. Rehearsing the familiar those-who-can’t maxim, he says that teachers are teachers “because they couldn’t be something else. They want to be actors, so they give emotional lectures. They wanted to have a lot of children, so instead they teach kindergarten. They wanted to be newspapermen, so they teach journalism. It’s always an approximation or a compromise. You don’t want to be like that.”50 He despises immoral people of all kinds, and he is unambiguously opposed to literature and the arts because “poetry and music and pictures attract degenerates.”51 When Janet reveals her concealed  Bakers, 1–2–28.  The novel alludes more overtly to Pauline’s sadism. In one of the first images of the book, a Filipino housekeeper (and whom Ray calls a “fairy”) is cleaning Pauline’s apartment, and the narrator explains: “Then he put the shoes in the closet, picked up a braided-leather riding crop from the floor and stuck it behind the gold-framed picture of a ballet girl stooping to fix her slipper, and made the bed” (Dorothy Baker, Trio [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Co., 1943], 6). 49  Bakers, 3–25. The ending differs from the novel. In the novel Janet tells Ray she is going to stay with Pauline. As Ray is getting ready to leave, a shot is fired from the bedroom. Janet concedes control to Ray, who is going to make the call to the police. 50  Bakers, 2–7. 51  Bakers, 2–38. 47 48

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identity as Pauline’s kept woman, Ray is disgusted, saying Janet is “not even a woman.”52 In the third act he heroically bursts into Pauline’s apartment to free Janet and vanquish her captor. True to form, the lesbian character is destroyed, and Janet can break free because Ray’s love has given her the strength. Trio concludes as expected of a 1940s melodramatic morality tale. The intellectually and professional overachieving (evil) woman and lesbian is annihilated, and the virtuous young woman, who is anemic and depleted by forced intellectualism, is emancipated from both academia and lesbian captivity by a salt-­ of-­the-earth man. As with many plays presented on Broadway in this era Trio also shows schools and universities as havens for morally deficient teachers. Therefore, characters like Janet are fortunate to be saved from the stultification of educational institutions.

“What Sort of a Fag Do You Call Yourself?” Perhaps because homosexuality within all boys’ schools and colleges was thought to be rarer compared with girls’ educational environments, there were only a few plays that touched on the subject in this period. Male homosexuality also had a tougher time getting past the censor as evident by Mae West’s The Drag (1927), which never made it to Broadway. There were, however, a few European imports to take up the subject of homosexuality and boys’ schools, and these tapped into American anxieties. Frank Wedekind’s Spring’s Awakening (translated from the German, Frühlings Erwachen [1906]), which includes homosexuality, rape, abortion, teen suicide, and featuring a host of cruel and sadistic teachers, had a single performance in 1917 (under the title The Awakening of Spring). New  York’s Supreme Court barred further production stating the play “had no proper place on the stage of a public theatre,” and said it would do “infinitely more harm than good.”53 Two later British imports, John Van Druten’s Young Woodley, a play banned in London but a big Broadway hit in 1925–1926, and Keith Winter’s The Rats of Norway, a big London hit in 1933 and a big flop on Broadway when it finally opened in 1948, showed the complicated sexual tension among students, teachers, and administrators’ wives.

 Bakers, 2–39.  “Court Bars Sex Play,” New York Times, May 3, 1917.

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Van Druten’s Young Woodley opened in November 1925 amid news that London’s Lord Chamberlain barred the play on the West End.54 The New York critics’ reaction amounted to a collective shrug. The play, which on the surface seems innocuous, focuses on a sixth-form student, Roger Woodley, who is motherless and romantically naïve. Out of mutual loneliness, Woodley and the headmaster’s wife, Laura Simmons, fall in love. The two are caught in an embrace by her overbearing husband, who is a bully with his students. As a result of Laura’s threats of scandal and abandonment, Simmons does not force Woodley’s expulsion, but when the young man pulls a knife on his classmates for taunting him about the affair, the school administrators force Woodley’s withdrawal. The play ends as the young man leaves the campus to join his father’s business. The circumstances have brought together Woodley and his father with whom he had a strained relationship, and there is a happy ending of sorts. The Lord Chamberlain reacted to the critique of early twentieth-­ century British schools, which in their sexual repressiveness contributed to a number of sexual scandals.55 The first scenes in particular ripple with sexual tension and an undercurrent of homosexuality. The curtain rises on a young boy in the prefect’s room, and he is identified as Cope, “a small fag of about 14.” The system of younger students (“fags”) catering to the older, mentoring students (“prefects”) is immediately established along with the sadistic and homoerotic relationship. Vining, a prefect, cuffs, kicks, and mocks Cope for not working up to his standards. In the opening scene Vining demands, “Well, Cope, not done yet? What sort of fag do you call yourself?”56 Van Druten, who was gay, calls attention to the arrangement, which as many historians argue provided the derogatory term for a gay man. As Vern and Bonnie Bullough document, Thomas Arnold in the nineteenth century created the prefect system, which consisted of older boys providing moral guidance for younger ones. “Fagging” was a part of this system, and younger boys served the older boys by doing “mundane tasks such as cleaning boots and running errands to more unexpected tasks which seem to have included sexual services.” The Bulloughs state, “The implication in these practices is obvious because it  The ban was subsequently lifted, and the play opened on the West End in February 1928.  The Variety review states, “The author seemingly has an axe to grind, so sharpens the weapon upon the routine of British school life which, because of its restrictions, enhances the mysteries of sex” (Skig, “Young Woodley,” November 25, 1925). 56  John Van Druten, Young Woodley (1925) (New York: Samuel French, 1930), 5. 54 55

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is from the English public school term ‘fagging’ which originally meant doing something which causes weariness that we derive one of the slang terms for homosexual.”57 The sexual tension between Vining and Cope is accentuated when the younger boy asks for clarification on what the headmaster meant by advising the boys to keep themselves “pure in thought, word, and deed.” Vining wields his power over the young fag. “And perhaps if you are a good boy I’ll tell you some day.”58 A few beats later when pressed further, he says, “Another day, Cope. You come to me and I’ll tell you.”59 The play also highlights Woodley’s sexual ambiguity. Before his first entrance, the boys debate whether Woodley’s sexual reserve is a result of innocence, reticence, or if he’s actually pretending to be shy since his poetry betrays a deep knowledge of women’s sensuousness. (Vining responds to the last theory, “Oh, that doesn’t mean anything. He was probably thinking of an athletic aunt on the tennis courts.”60) Later Woodley expresses confusion around his sexual feelings and admits, “I suppose I am different from other fellows.”61 Woodley’s ambiguous sexuality, though, is rescued by the housemaster’s wife. Woodley’s academic prospects are ruined (as his father tells him, “I’m afraid Cambridge is out of the question”62), but he has gotten a better education: He has learned how to be a man by Laura Simmons. Laura has given Woodley the ability to fall deeply in love with a woman, and the memory of their brief affair will give him the strength to love another. In a tearful goodbye, she says, “We shan’t meet again…ever, I expect. But I want you to remember…gladly, if you can.”63 The plot recalls Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy (1953), a play in which a sensitive youth’s sexuality (albeit more obviously homosexual) is also rescued by a housemaster’s wife, and the later play also concludes with the older woman telling the young lover to treasure their experience: “Years from now, when you talk about this—and you will—be kind.”64 In both plays, students with questionable 57  “Homosexuality in Nineteenth Century English Public School,” International Review of Modern Sociology 9.2 (July-December 1979), 262–3. 58  Van Druten, 6. 59  Van Druten, 7. 60  Van Druten, 8. 61  Van Druten, 14. 62  Van Druten, 58. 63  Van Druten, 60. 64  Robert Anderson, Tea and Sympathy (1953) (New York: Samuel French, 1983), 88.

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heterosexual desires are steered in the culturally correct direction by a woman whose own sexual life has veered off course through her marriage to a cold and uncaring man: A teacher. Laura’s own sexual dissatisfaction and emotional distress are a result of her husband’s “domineering, selfconscious attitude of the pedagogue that hangs around [him] like a halo,”65 and this mindset permeates the educational environment, and Woodley’s withdrawal seems fortuitous. Whereas Young Woodley concentrates primarily on the lives of students, Winter’s The Rats of Norway examines the British prep school experience by way of the faculty members, and the only indication of student presence is an occasional off-stage voice. Judging by Winter’s depiction of boys’ prep school life, faculty members are as consumed by sex, in its myriad forms, as students are. Based on Winter’s 1932 novel of the same name, the play had been a hit in London, where it opened in 1933. The cast of that production boasted some of England’s finest actors, including Laurence Olivier, Raymond Massey (who also directed), and Gladys Cooper. There had been periodic announcements that Rats would get a New York production, but it was not until after the War in 1948 when James S.  Elliott produced and directed it at the Booth Theatre, and New Yorkers had the chance to see what the fuss had been about.66 The Rats of Norway opened and closed within two days of its Broadway debut in April 1948 (Fig. 3.3). Set in Fallgates, an all-boys school in Northumberland, Rats concerns the sexual affairs among the faculty, particularly two pairs of lovers. The first pair includes the headmaster’s wife, Jane Claydon, middle-aged and sexually repressed, and one of the teachers, Hugh Sebastian, a World War I veteran and committed drunk. The second pair involves the passionate and naïve piano teacher, Tilly Shane, and the new young male faculty member, Stevan Beringer, who aspires to be a headmaster. A major complication is the fact the men are more attracted to each other than they are to the women. Sebastian tells Beringer, “I couldn’t live without Jane, and yet as far as contentment goes I’m far happier with you.”67 They have put their hopes for personal fulfillment in the wrong objects of desire, and the title references this. A program note describes the allusion to a Norwegian  Van Druten, 29.  Vernon Rice, “‘The Rats of Norway’ Finally Being Produced,” New York Post. Undated clipping in Rats of Norway Clippings File, Library of the Performing Arts, Billy Rose Theatre Collection. 67  Keith Winter, The Rats of Norway (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1933), 80. 65 66

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Fig. 3.3  John Ireland in Keith Winter’s The Rats of Norway (1948). (Photo by Fred Fehl. © The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts)

legend in which thousands of rats swim out to an island long since submerged, and as none has ever made it back to warn other rats of the situation, thousands follow to their own predestined misfortune. The four lovers embark on a similar doomed expedition in attempting to attain passionate and perfect love, and as the playwright explains, “like ‘The Rats of Norway,’ they finally drown their spiritual selves in their quest for the impossible.”68 The play ends as Sebastian’s dead body has been discovered in the headmaster’s wife’s bed, and scandal and ruination upon the school are imminent. Just before the curtain comes down, Jane and Beringer, alone with Sebastian’s corpse, confront the impossibility for personal satisfaction: 68  Rats of Norway Playbill, 23. Rats of Norway Clippings File, Library of the Performing Arts, Billy Rose Theatre Collection.

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Jane: You loved him too, didn’t you? Stevan: Yes. Jane: More than Tilly? Stevan: Yes. Jane: It’s a pity we couldn’t be happy. Curtain.69

Jane, who planned to divorce her husband and escape with Sebastian, and Beringer, who had dreamed of being headmaster at a prestigious school, seem destined to continue to live (and teach) within the life-­depleting walls of Fallgates. The play was generally reviled across the board. Ward Morehouse called it “dreadful stuff,” singling out “one of the most frightful performances a cast of professional grownups has given in my time”; and the Daily News’ headline proclaimed, “‘The Rats of Norway’ Incredibly Staged and Quite Awful Besides.”70 Rats lost some of its shock value in the intervening years and would clearly have benefitted from the acting talents of the West End originals. Still, there was some pungency in its carnal treatment of the unhappy foursome, and a few of the critics found it distasteful particularly because of the prep school setting. Wolcott Gibbs described the production as “a vulgar and tiresome essay on alcoholism, homosexuality, and adultery, made feebly just a little more offensive by the fact that the background was a boys’ school.”71 The homosexual attraction between Sebastian and Beringer is made somewhat more palatable since they are both adults, and in context, the characters are romantically linked with women. The play hints, however, at inappropriate relations between faculty and students. Rats includes a minor character, Chetwood, a stereotypical sissy who provides comic relief. The characters tease him for having traces of powder on his face (which he claims is soap), and mockingly say he would prefer to play the part of Guinevere in the school play over the boy who was cast.72 He is  Winter, 104.  Ward Morehouse, “Quick! Some Rat Poison!,” The Sun, April 16, 1948; John Chapman, “‘The Rats of Norway’ Incredibly Staged and Quite Awful Besides,” Daily News, April 16, 1948. Rats of Norway Clippings File, Library of the Performing Arts, Billy Rose Theatre Collection. 71  Wolcott Gibbs, “Passion in Dotheboys Hall,” The New  Yorker, n.d., 50  in Rats of Norway Clippings File, Library of the Performing Arts, Billy Rose Theatre Collection. 72  Winter, 43, 72. 69 70

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rendered slightly pernicious, though, because in his rejection by the other teachers, he finds solace with a student. The Broadway program describes Chetwood as “an effeminate young teacher whose mannerisms make him the butt of jokes and ridicule by his fellow colleagues at the school. As the term progresses, he becomes more girlish in his behavior and he turns to a student for companionship in his loneliness.”73 In a theatrical rarity, Chetwood is not destroyed for his sexual and gender nonconformity. He seems destined to continue to live in the soul-squashing world of the prep school, which may be punishment enough. Just as other plays highlight the enervating effects of educational institutions, Fallgates represents a spiritual wasteland for the faculty members. The faculty mark time by weeks and terms, wearily trudging through each new school year. When asked why he became a teacher, Sebastian says, “Because after the war I didn’t want to think any more, so schoolmastering seemed the obvious thing. Here, for example, you could be as dead as dead and yet lead a very active life.”74 The vermin-like characters in The Rats of Norway personify the notion that school faculties are populated with perverts, drunks, and as members of the living dead, veritable vampires.

“Panic, Just Panic, that Drove Me from One to Another” Immoral teachers were familiar characters in plays through the 1940s. Homosexuality was not the only vice represented, however, and there were many cases of heterosexual teachers who preyed on their students. They wielded their power and domination to physically bully, morally corrupt, and sexually abuse the young and vulnerable, and manifested the cultural suspicions associated with educational institutions. Some of the plays include: Frederick L. Day’s Makers of Light (1922), which presents the scandalous and tragic affair of a twenty-nine-year-old unmarried teacher, “whose stamina has been broken by the weight of her life,”75 and a lonely seventeen-year-old male high school student. Paul Osborne’s Hotbed (1928), which is about a college professor, who is, Brooks Atkinson describes, “tripping down the primrose path with a young lady of tender 73  Rats of Norway Playbill, 30. Rats of Norway Program File, Library of the Performing Arts, Billy Rose Theatre Collection. 74  Winter, 52. 75  “‘Makers of Life’ Vigorous,” New York Times, May 24, 1922.

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years.” The play presents the college faculty as concerned only for the scandal it might bring to the college. The professors are represented, according to Atkinson, as “spineless, ingrown, jealous and selfish stuffed shirts.”76 Irving Stone’s Truly Valiant (1936) concerns a college economics teacher, who impregnates a young student boarder, but when his profligacy is revealed, his worry is that his publisher, Macmillan’s, will cancel his book deal. The play closed after a single performance, which Atkinson called “badly acted,” and the performers “were all sufficiently punished…by an unruly audience.”77 John Van Druten’s The Druid Circle (1947) fared much better among the critics and Broadway audiences. The drama focuses on a “sour and arid” English college professor, who cruelly humiliates a pair of romantic co-eds. Atkinson said about Van Druten, who also wrote Young Woodley, “He has written cleverer plays but none better than The Druid Circle.”78 This chapter concludes with an examination of Tennessee Williams’ masterpiece, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). While Streetcar is not by any means a play about teaching, it showcases one of the most infamous teacher characters in American drama. I argue here that Blanche DuBois, whom Anne Fleche describes as “the aristocratic Southern Poe-esque moth-like neuraesthenic female,”79 embodies the era’s cultural and sociological dogma about the dangers of a morally unfit schoolteacher. She also exemplifies what community sentinels warned against regarding the noxious effects from exposure to homosexuality and justifies their worst fears triggered by gay panics. As Streetcar begins, Blanche arrives at Stella and Stanley’s New Orleans apartment having left her position as a high school English teacher. She insists that she needed time off because of the stress of losing the family’s home, Belle Reve, and she tells her sister, “I was so exhausted by all I’d gone through—my nerves broke.” She adds, “So Mr. Graves—Mr. Graves is the high school superintendent—he suggested I take a leave of

76  Brooks Atkinson, “The Play: Hypocrisy on the Loose,” New York Times, November 10, 1928. 77  Brooks Atkinson, “The Play: Home Life of a Professor,” New York Times, January 10, 1936. 78  Brooks Atkinson, “At the Theatre: ‘The Druid Circle,’” New York Times, October 23, 1947. 79  Anne Fleche, “The Space of Madness and Desire: Tennessee Williams and Streetcar,” Modern Drama 38.4 (Winter 1995), 497.

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absence.”80 As Stanley discovers through gossiping work contacts, “She didn’t resign temporarily from the high school because of her nerves! No, siree, Bob! She didn’t. They kicked her out of that high school before the spring term ended.” Blanche, Stanley discovers, was fired from her job for having a dalliance with a seventeen-year-old male student. The young man’s father informed the superintendent, and the school board terminated her immediately. Stanley gloats, “They told her she better move on to some fresh territory. Yep, it was practickly a town ordinance passed against her.”81 She has come to New Orleans to have a fresh start. Like Martha in The Children’s Hour, Blanche is a victim of gossip, and like Pauline in Trio, she is a vampiric victimizer. In her courtship with Mitch, one of Stanley’s poker buddies, she conceals the visible signs of her debauched past under subdued lighting from paper lanterns and beneath the veneer of professional and personal refinement. She spouts poetry, converses in cultivated southern English, and describes herself as an “old maid school teacher.”82 In return for sagacity and poesy Blanche desires from Mitch emotional security and recuperated innocence. And like the youth-sucking lesbian Pauline Maury of Trio, Blanche had been dependent on the vitality of young people to maintain her own maidenhood. She tells Mitch that when she lost her job, “My youth was suddenly gone up the water-spout.”83 Teenagers and strangers offer provisional sustenance for her, but like Pauline, Blanche pays a high price for gratifying her desires. She betrays herself with the need for straight liquor to settle her nerves, but her hopes for respectability are dashed when her Laurel past catches up to her in New Orleans through whispers and gossip. Stanley needles her with insinuation: “Well, this somebody named Shaw is under the impression he met you in Laurel, but I figure he must have got you mixed up with some other party because this other party is someone he met at a hotel called the Flamingo.”84 When Mitch verifies Stanley’s second-­hand gossip through two other men, Blanche’s misrepresentations and libertinisms are exposed in the uncompromising light of the torn paper lanterns.

 Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) (New York: Signet, 1972), 21.  Williams, 101. 82  Williams, 55. 83  Williams, 55. 84  Williams, 77. 80 81

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Many scholars and critics have read Blanche’s downfall and ultimate destruction as a consequence of her sexual insatiability and uncontrolled sexual desire. She is, according to Nina Liebman, a victim of her own sexuality, and she is “punished with insanity for expressing [her] desire.”85 Yet, Blanche could also, using the contemporaneous logic behind homosexual panics, be viewed as a casualty of the exposure to the conventionally unmentionable infection of homosexuality. She says of her young husband Allan, “There was something different about the boy, a nervousness, a softness and tenderness which wasn’t like a man’s, although he wasn’t the least bit effeminate looking—still—that thing was there…”86 She adds, “[A]ll I knew was I’d failed him in some mysterious way and wasn’t able to give the help he needed but couldn’t speak of!”87 Allan is described only in flashback, and his presence is evoked through phantom music and, reminiscent of Martha in Children’s Hour, by the frightful sound of a gunshot signifying his death by suicide. His specter, however, looms over the play. As Francisco Costa writes, “Although the homosexual character does not appear in the play, he exerts a tremendous influence on its development as well as on various levels of its interpretation.”88 Allan is in many ways a stereotypically queer character, and his gay relationship reflects the standard rendering of a young person preyed upon by an older roué. Nevertheless, the revelation of her young husband’s unspeakable vice has a profound effect on Blanche’s psyche. She explains: “Then I found out. In the worst of all possible ways. By coming suddenly into a room that I thought was empty—which wasn’t empty, but had two people in it.…the boy I had married and an older man who had been his friend for years….”89 Blanche’s fate affirms contemporary education sociologists’ assertions about the contagion and collateral damage caused by contact with known homosexuals. The effects of Allan’s communicable sexual perversion cause in Blanche her own panicked response and subsequent moral ruination. Even more crucially, as theorists warned about the nature of sexual perversion (and a reason why some boarding schools had 85  Nina C. Leibman, “Sexual Misdemeanor/Psychoanalytic Felony,” Cinema Journal 26.2 (Winter 1987), 27. 86  Williams, 95. 87  Williams, 95. 88  Francisco Costa, “‘There was something different about the boy’: Queer Subversion in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire,” Interactions: Ege Journal of British and American Studies, 23.1–2 (2014): 81. 89  Williams, 95.

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to be emptied), Blanche,  tainted with the toxins  through  association, poses a risk of causing irreparable harm to others, particularly innocent youth. She confides in Mitch: Yes, I had many intimacies with strangers. After the death of Allan—intimacies with strangers was all I seemed able to fill my empty heart with.…I think it was panic, just panic, that drove me from one to another, hunting for some protection—here and there, in the most—unlikely places—even, at last, in a seventeen-year-old boy.…”90

As is also evident by the seduction of the young newspaper boy—telling him, “Come here. I want to kiss you, just once, softly and sweetly on your mouth!”91—Blanche is a threat to childhood, adolescent purity, and the ideal of healthy adulthood. This threat is articulated by the superintendent, who removed her from the classroom, declaring, “[T]his woman is morally unfit for her position.”92 In 1914, British sociologist Gustav Spiller wrote: “The school, in a word, should and must co-operate with other agencies in raising the general standard of home morals. The welfare of the individual, the family, and the country demands it.”93 Tremendous responsibility is placed on teachers to serve as professional and personal exemplars of physical, psychological, and ethical virtuousness. The degrading portraits of putatively unsuitable teachers and the profusion of plays demonstrate the obsessions with and apprehensions about the presumed power educators have over the youth of the nation. On stage, teacher characters embody both the collective fantasies and underlying fears when individuals are most vulnerable and dependent on others for knowledge, guidance, and moral direction. In the first half of the twentieth century, as the country’s future seemed more and more uncertain, the nation’s youth was of supreme importance, and plays of the era illustrated the near obsession with teacher fitness. Hence, the theatre offered a cathartic space to root out, discipline, and punish unfit teachers.

 Williams, 118.  Williams, 84 92  Williams, 118. 93  Gustav Spiller, The Meaning of Marriage: A Manual for Parents, Teachers, Young People (Over 18), and Husbands and Wives; Also for Spinsters and Bachelors, Widows and Widowers (London: Watts and Co., 1914), 30. 90 91

CHAPTER 4

Commies on Campus: Radical Liberalism and Academic Freedom, 1940s–1950s

“Dress Rehearsal for McCarthyism” Two high profile cases involving academic freedom in US universities bookended the 1940s. The first centered on British scholar Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), who was appointed to a 16-month term as professor of philosophy at City College in New York City on February 26, 1940. Just after the formal announcement, Bishop William T.  Manning of New York’s Protestant Episcopal Diocese accused Russell of being “a recognized propagandist against both religion and morality, and who specifically defends adultery.”1 Although Russell was slated to teach classes in mathematics and logic and not religion and ethics, the New  York State senate officially opposed the appointment. In the media campaign that followed, Russell received endorsements from renowned scholars and intellectuals across the country, including John Dewey, Albert Einstein, Arthur M.  Schlesinger, and nearly 300 faculty and administrative staff members from City College, who spoke out for the cause of academic freedom. Students at City College held rallies championing Russell, and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) drafted a revised Statement of Principles governing academic freedom and tenure.  “Bishop Manning Makes Protest Against Russell’s Appointment,” New York Times, March 1, 1940. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. F. Wilson, Failure, Fascism, and Teachers in American Theatre, Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34013-0_4

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They were no match, though, for a Brooklyn homemaker, Mrs. Jean Kay, a dentist’s wife and mother of two, who filed a taxpayers’ suit in New York’s Supreme Court ordering the Board of Higher Education to revoke Russell’s appointment. Kay said she did not want her son nor daughter to be subjected to immoral teachings should either go to City College after high school. (The fact that in 1940, City College admitted only men to the undergraduate programs was apparently irrelevant.) Kay’s case hinged on Russell’s non-US citizenship, which legally barred him from working as a New York City civil service employee, and her petition forcefully addressed his supposed encouragement of pre-marital sex and “companionate marriages.”2 After months of legal back-and-forth and mudslinging, which, among other charges, alleged Russell was a Communist, pro-homosexual, a teacher of “barnyard philosophy,” and a nudist,3 Mayor LaGuardia retracted the City’s $8800 budgeted allotment for Russell’s lectureship.4 The Russell uproar was almost immediately followed in 1940–1941 of investigations of suspected Communists at City College, leading to the job loss of more than fifty faculty and staff members. Carol Smith refers to this political purge, the most extensive at a single college, as “the dress rehearsal for McCarthyism.”5 In January 1949, nine years after the Bertrand Russell flare-up and almost exactly a year before Joseph McCarthy’s famous Wheeling, West Virginia speech in which he claimed to be in possession of a list with the names of 205 known  communist State Department employees, the University of Washington in Seattle became ground zero for the academic redbaiting that would grip public universities and schools for much of the 1950s. The “precedent-shattering” event, as described by one of the board members involved with the investigation and firing of three faculty, was formally announced on January 23, 1949.6 Joseph Butterworth,  “Charges are Filed in Fight on Russell,” New York Times, March 20, 1940.  See, “Council Demands Russell Rejection,” New York Times, March 16, 1940; “Nudist Charges Denied by Russell,” New York Times, March 29, 1940. 4  “Russell Case Dropped: Board of Higher Education Votes 15 to 2 to End Fight,” October 22, 1940. 5  Carol Smith, “The Dress Rehearsal for McCarthyism,” Academe 97, no. 4 (July-August 2011), 48–51. 6  “University of Washington Oust 3 Professors After Red Inquiry,” New York Herald Tribune, January 23, 1949. 2 3

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associate professor of English (19 years at the University of Washington); Ralph Gundlach, associate professor of psychology (22 years); and Herbert J.  Phillips, assistant professor of philosophy (29 years), were accused of “asserted present or former Communist party membership” and were summarily dismissed from the university faculty.7 Three others, Harold L. Eby, professor of English; Garland Ethel, assistant professor of English; and Melville Jacobs, associate professor of anthropology, were also charged as admitted past members of the party but were placed on probation pending their willingness to sign affidavits declaring they were no longer members. The three men signed, and Eby and Ethel publicly stated, they “were gratified by the decision.”8 The stage was set for similar university investigations, hearings, and faculty purges across the country as the era of the “orgy of investigation,” to use Howard K. Beale’s term from a different era, reached its apotheosis in the period of McCarthyism.9 The Bertrand Russell and University of Washington faculty cases highlight the vulnerability of university professors in the 1940s and 1950s and point to the precariousness of academic freedom as a basis for legal defense. How did the Ivory Tower, a symbol of intellectual elitism and home to practically impractical sages, come to be considered a site of subversiveness and a fortress of evil masterminds? In part, the shift has to do with attitudes toward national security in the years immediately before and after World War II. Political rhetoric was focused on holding off external threats through policies of isolationism and containment, leading to increased paranoia about subversive and clandestine internal threats to the American way of life. College professors and high school teachers, with their generally outspoken liberal leanings and access to the young, seemed especially dangerous. They posed an affront to traditionally held values, such as the sanctity of family, delineated gender and racial roles, and reverence for capitalism. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, real-life teachers and professors often played central roles in the political spectacles of congressional and legislative hearings and trials, which provided spellbinding national  “Three Professors Dismissed as Reds,” New York Times, January 23, 1949.  Quoted in “Educators Resent Dismissal as Reds,” Los Angeles Times, January 24, 1949. 9  Howard K.  Beale, Are American Teachers Free?: An Analysis of Restraints Upon the Freedom of Teaching in American Schools (New York: Scribner’s, 1936), 61. 7 8

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drama.10 On the New York stages several productions also presented the collision of politics and pedagogy, and the plays grappled with the limitations of academic freedom, the ambiguous relationship between masculinity and intellectualism, and the clash of radical political ideologies and state repression. This chapter looks at several Broadway plays, spanning the years from 1940 to 1957. This period in commercial theatre has often been criticized for not fully taking on pressing social issues of the day, such as blacklists, political purges, and pressures to name names. With the demise of the Federal Theatre Project (1935–1939) and the Group Theatre (1931–1941), and with playwrights like Clifford Odets, Elmer Rice, and Robert E. Sherwood spending much of their creative energy in Hollywood, leftist political theatre was relatively rare on Broadway. Indeed, Arthur Miller famously referred to the time as an “era of gauze” for the seeming unwillingness to present truthful and unfiltered social and political realities on stage. Placing most of the blame for this trend on Tennessee Williams, Miller claims the plays of the period rejected social issues to explore personal and psychological conflicts. He calls this drama “a cruel, romantic neuroticism, a translation of current life into the war within the self. All conflict tends to be transformed into sexual conflict…. It is a theatre with the blues.”11 There are, however, a fair number of plays that metaphorically allude to communist witch hunts, political informers, and ideological subjugation, most notably Miller’s The Crucible (1953), Lillian Hellman’s revived and slightly revised The Children’s Hour (1953), Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy (1953), and Jerome Lawrence and Robert E.  Lee’s

10  As education historian Dana Goldstein shows, university professors were not the only educators subsumed within the Red trials. Public school teachers were also pursued, and state and federal laws enabled these pursuits. Goldstein writes: “In 1949 the New York State legislature passed the Feinberg Law, which allowed school districts to dismiss teachers who belonged to any ‘subversive organization,’ including the Communist Party. Even the far-left wing of the labor movement rushed to distance itself from the red menace. In March 1950 the CIO expelled the Teachers Union and eleven other communist-sympathetic unions. What followed was a decade of anticommunist purges that ended the careers of 378 New York City public school teachers, most of them tenured and extraordinarily professionally distinguished. (An additional 1,000 teachers were investigated but were allowed to continue working)” (The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession. New York: Doubleday, 2014), 104–105. 11  Quoted in Henry Brandon, “The State of the Theatre, a Conversation with Arthur Miller,” Harper’s 221 (November 1960), 68.

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Inherit the Wind (1955).12 I am interested here in the straightforward treatment of political radicalism and anti-communism, specifically as they pertain to educators. Although not widely discussed, there were, in fact, several light comedies, melodramas, and realistic social dramas, which explicitly dealt with radical liberalism and communism (often conjoined terms in the 1940s and 1950s). As products of their historical moment, these plays reflect the cultural anxieties toward Communists on campus in addition to academic freedom as a legal principle and American value. Finally, I argue the teacher characters and their dramatic circumstances reveal the conflation of cultural tensions associated with Cold War politics and show the unease in which issues around gender, sexuality, and race were negotiated in the 1940s and 1950s.  Sadly, many of  the lessons and concerns imparted in these plays are as relevant now as they were then.

Football Heroes, Unconfused Liberals, and Blatherskites James Thurber and Elliott Nugent’s The Male Animal (1940) opened almost two months before the Bertrand Russell story broke, but the similarities between the silly, flight-of-fancy, Broadway comedy and the somber, all-too-real, legal drama did not go unnoticed in the press. The Male Animal concerns a young, bookish English professor, Tommy Turner (played originally by the comedy’s co-writer, Nugent); his beautiful wife, Ellen; and former football hero and Ellen’s college sweetheart, Joe Ferguson. Joe has returned to the Midwestern university (and generically named in the play, “Midwestern University”), where Tommy now teaches, for the season’s big football game, and as old flames are rekindled, the strength of Ellen and Tommy’s marriage is tested. The pedantic Tommy appears to be the inevitable loser beside the virile, and recently separated, Joe, but in standing up for his own principles and making a case for American values, he wins the love of his wife (Fig. 4.1). Amidst the farcical proceedings, a political football is also tossed: The university has recently been racked with scandal as three accused professors were dismissed for having communist affiliations. In response to the 12  Albert Wertheim provides a good analysis of these plays within their political context in “The McCarthy Era and the American Theatre,” Theatre Journal 34, no. 2 (May 1982), 211–222.

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Fig. 4.1  Ruth Matteson and Elliott Nugent in The Male Animal (1940). (Photo by VanDamm Studio. © The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts)

purge, Michael Barnes, a young, radical student, has written an editorial in the college newspaper, chastising the administration for caving into the intimidation of the trustees. He caps his piece by praising the true academic courage of Professor Tommy Turner, who, unbowed, is going to read a letter by Bartolomeo Vanzetti—of the contentious Sacco and Vanzetti pair—to his composition class. As a result, Tommy’s job is threatened, and academic freedom is debated. In the end, the students rally around Tommy, and his job along with his marriage are saved. Comparing The Male Animal with the Russell case, one editorialist said the similarities were “purely coincidental” as the writers “could not have foreseen the turn of event on the campus of the College of the City of

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New  York when they wrote the collegiate comedy now at the Cort Theatre.”13 The writer goes on to say, however: And yet the swift march of events that overtakes Professor Turner in “The Male Animal” is not unlike the fate that has befallen Russell. Both have been attacked for their beliefs not directly germane to the subject at hand. And both events precipitated a completely unanticipated demonstration of the student body.14

In many ways the play proved to be prescient, and even though the conclusions of the real-life legal case and boulevard comedy are markedly different, they reflect the entanglement of sex, politics, and academic freedom in the 1940s and 1950s. At its core, and as evidenced by the title, The Male Animal is a domestic comedy about the battle of the sexes. Before the end of the play in which the matrimonial bond between Tommy and Ellen, a childless couple, is re-established, the triangular relationship involving the three main characters calls to mind Russell’s views on companionate marriages. In such a union, legal documents and proceedings would not be an obstruction for dissolving a marriage contract of a couple without children. “So long as the marriage remains childless,” Russell explains, “divorce by mutual consent is to be permitted.… But as soon as there are children, the marriage is to become, ipso facto, an ordinary marriage.”15 Tommy embraces this forward-thinking, pre-no-contest-divorce attitude when he sees Joe and Ellen dance together and then kiss. He is convinced that his wife would be happier with her former beau. He encourages Joe and Ellen to go off together to the Pittsburgh suburbs, where Joe lives. Joe is confused by Tommy’s nonchalance in giving over his wife to him, and Tommy responds, “I’m being broadminded. I’m taking things in my stride. It’s the modern way of doing things.”16 Somewhat later, Ellen attempts to show that she is similarly broadminded. Albeit, while spurring Tommy on to fight to save their marriage, she announces she is no longer Tommy’s wife and is going to move in with Joe. Just as Russell’s own views were 13  “Academic Freedom: ‘The Male Animal’ and Bertrand Russell,” New York Post, April 13, 1940. 14  “Academic Freedom.” 15  Bertrand Russell, “The Ostrich Code of Morals,” Forum, July 1, 1928, 7. 16  James Thurber and Elliott Nugent, The Male Animal (New York: Random House, 1940), 108.

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considered too scandalous for City College, the perceived sexual immorality nearly causes a firestorm in the play. Not surprisingly for a comedy of the 1940s, the uber-masculine, All-American (and politically conservative) football hero Joe forsakes the arrangement, exclaiming, “I come from a long line of married people!,”17 and the curtain falls as Tommy and Ellen, “kissing each other very, very hard,” settle into what Russell would call an “ordinary marriage.” In the end, The Male Animal affirms notions of traditional marriage, but its treatment of maleness is somewhat more unconventional. In fact, one critic hailed the play for overturning the expectations of a typical college-­set comedy: “At the Cort Theater, for the first time in the history of American drama, the football hero does not win the girl at the final curtain.”18 In this play, the record is broken twice. Ellen chooses Tommy over Joe, and Patricia, Ellen’s younger sister (and originally played by Gene Tierney before being whisked off to Hollywood), chooses Michael, the radical writer, over Wally Myers, the high scorer of the big football game. It would seem from the comedy’s set-up that the glasses-wearing, unkempt English professor and the radical student would not stand a chance in out-manning the former and future All-American football heroes. Who is and who is not masculine is the central question of the comedy, and the characters’ political leanings complicate the matter. The attention to the football heroes, from both men and women characters, reflects an idealized masculinity associated with aggressiveness and bravado. This notion is addressed directly in the second act in which Tommy explains to Michael the importance of virility and physical assertiveness to be both attractive to women and able to keep them as wives and girlfriends. Real men, he suggests, do not verbally hypothesize and scrutinize; they physically attack. This is, he explains, the essential characteristic of “the male animal.” Tommy: Let us say that the tiger wakes up one morning and finds that the wolf has come down on the fold. What does he—? Before I tell you what he does, I will tell you what he does not do… He does not expose everyone to a humiliating intellectual analysis. He comes out of his corner like this—

 Thurber and Nugent, 170.  “Death of a Drama Tradition—Football Hero Loses the Girl,” source unidentified and undated clipping in The Male Animal clippings file, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library. 17 18

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(Rises, assuming an awkward fighting pose, fists up, then sits quickly again.) The bull elephant in him is aroused.19

The extended scene between Tommy and Michael is the comedic centerpiece, and it reflects several of the male-bonding and homosocial elements Robert Vorlicky introduces in his analysis of male-cast plays in twentieth-­ century American drama. First, alcohol is key to the self-revelations. As the two men become increasingly drunk, Tommy’s cerebral façade gives way to primal instincts. After a bottle or two of Scotch, Tommy has “found [him]self,” and he intends to be a new man. Alcohol, Vorlicky explains, allows men in plays to talk without inhibition and “self-disclosingly.”20 Additionally, in his inebriation, Tommy’s previously exhibited liberal attitudes (for 1940) toward gender equality—in which a woman has a say in her own happiness and can choose a man for herself—evaporate as he realizes that a woman is something to fight over to prove his own value as a man. The scene was considered the show’s highpoint. Brooks Atkinson wrote, “There has seldom been a funnier drunk scene than the one in which Professor Turner tries to reason himself into primitive action against a man three times his size.”21 Richard Watts, Jr. had a similar response: “All of the second act is prodigiously funny, but it is when the shy teacher and the radical student get together over their whisky bottle and discuss animals and sex that you really have something wonderful.”22 The laughs derive from the silliness of watching two men—who represent the epitome of failed masculinity—attempt to successfully transform (or at least postulate on transforming) into the quintessence of manliness. The emphasis on male animals, sex, booze, and men three times their size is simultaneously homoerotic (which is underscored by the two critics) and re-inscribes the heteronormative dictum of men as active subjects and women as passive objects. The conversations “illuminate,” to cite Vorlicky, “patriarchal positions.”23 A man’s worth in this social structure is based on his domination over others, and the objectified woman is defined by her relationship with a man.  Thurber and Nugent, 129.  Robert Vorlicky, Act Like a Man: Challenging Masculinities in American Drama (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1995), 7. 21  Brooks Atkinson, “James Thurber and Elliott Nugent’s ‘The Male Animal’ Begins a New Theatre Year,” New York Times, January 10, 1940. 22  Richard Watt’s Jr., “Season’s Return,” New York Herald Tribune, January 10, 1940. 23  Vorlicky, 56. 19 20

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The sexism in the exchange between Tommy and Michael is undercut, though, by the ironic presentation of machismo. For all his swagger about brutish behavior and brawn over brains, Tommy, even while intoxicated in this world of beasts and All Americans, can never be a real man: He is a professor. Despite his initial resistance to unmanly “humiliating intellectual analysis,” and his desire to, well, “arouse the bull elephant,” he scrutinizes his hypothesis of the male animal through several variations to its discursive conclusion. He can deliver a lecture but not an uppercut. As Tommy ends his treatise with a final argument about winning a woman’s devotion, he resorts to what he does best and what defines him as a man: He teaches. Michael is his class of one. Tommy:

All the male animals fight for the female, from the land crab to the bird of paradise. They don’t just sit and talk. They act. (He removes his glasses and blinks owlishly around.) I hope I have made all this clear to you. Are there any questions? Michael: No, sir.24 The impromptu lesson reveals that if Joe Ferguson, the symbol of masculinity in the play, is a wolf, Tommy Turner, no matter how hard he tries to anthropomorphize himself into a tiger, will presumably always be a wise, unthreatening owl. By the play’s conclusion, intellect trumps brute force, and both Michael’s and Tommy’s manhoods are redeemed as they each vanquish their male rivals. In the process, Michael comes out of the political closet and reveals he isn’t Red (or even Pink). In a moment of revelation that teases with innuendo and links communism with sexual confusion, Tommy asks Michael uncomfortably, “Michael, tell me…are you really a communist?” Michael responds, “Me? No. I only know one guy who is. I’m— well, I guess I’m an unconfused liberal.”25 With the support of the student body, Tommy makes an impassioned case for academic freedom. Unlike his previous exchanges, the argument is concise and unambiguous. His ardent delivery differs from his previous esoteric lectures, and he stands in stark contrast to the retreating faculty member. In fact, early in the play Keller said that faculty could not be trusted to “decide what’s fit to teach”

 Thurber and Nugent, 131.  Thurber and Nugent, 158.

24 25

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because they “are too wishy-washy.”26 Tommy shows that he is anything but wishy-washy as he confronts Dean Damon and promises to read the letter: No, it’s a dangerous thing to keep down. I’m fighting for a teacher’s rights, but if you want to make it political, all right! You can’t suppress ideas because you don’t like them—not in this country—not yet. This is a university! (To Damon) It’s our business to bring what light we can into this muddled world—to try to follow truth!… Don’t you see: this isn’t about Vanzetti; this is about us! If I can’t read this letter today, tomorrow none of us will be able to teach anything except what Mr. Keller here and the legislature permit us to teach. Can’t you see what that leads to—what it has led to in other places? We’re holding the last fortress of free thought, and if we surrender to prejudice and dictation, we’re cowards!

In a telling rhetorical move, Tommy’s speech is among the few moments in the play in which his lines are punctuated with exclamation points. The other characters shout and exclaim throughout, but up to that scene Tommy’s dialogue is declarative and sophistic. Physically, Tommy may still be unthreatening, but in his outburst, his language is muscular, forceful, and defiant. In defending a so-called American value of academic freedom, he uses images of a nation under attack and military defense. Football seems trifling in comparison, and Tommy is hailed as the true hero of the university. As typical of a romantic comedy, Tommy has proven his manhood and wins the love (and subservient deference) of his woman. This was certainly a familiar narrative by 1940. For instance, a popular advertisement of the 1930s depicted a scrawny kid getting sand kicked in his face by the beach bully. The kid goes home, purchases Charles Atlas’ Dynamic Tension system, and goes back to the beach to punch the bully in the face, receiving the adoration of his girlfriend and the other sun-bathing women (“Oh, Mac! You ARE a real man after all!”).27 In The Male Animal Tommy is the 97-pound weakling, and in standing up to the capitalist bullies, he becomes a real man. The effect on the women characters is akin to Mac’s retaliatory punch. Ellen confides to Joe that her attitude toward Tommy has changed.  Thurber and Nugent, 56.  The advertisement was reprinted in comic books and popular magazines with slight variations for several decades beginning in the early 1930s. See for instance, Popular Science Monthly (July 1934), 104. 26 27

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“I’m kind of scared of him,” she says. “He used to be just–nice, but now he’s wonderful!”28 For academics, Tommy’s stand against tyranny and curricular oppression would be a sweet and vicarious victory. Of course, in 1940, Bertrand Russell and many other academics would not enjoy a similar happy ending. The Male Animal proved to be a big hit for Thurber and Nugent. The original production ran an impressive 243 performances, and the movie rights were sold shortly after the play opened on Broadway. The successful film version, released in April 1942 by Warner Bros., starred Henry Fonda (Tommy), Olivia De Havilland (Ellen), Jack Carson (Joe), and Joan Leslie (Patricia). Elliott Nugent directed the film, and the New York Times called it an “exceptional screen adaptation of the play.”29 The play remained a staple of community and college theatres throughout the 1940s, and it was (very) loosely adapted in 1952 as a Warner Bros. movie musical She’s Working Her Way through College with Ronald Reagan and Virginia Mayo. In the musical version the politics have been scrubbed, but the domestic triangle remains. Mayo plays a former burlesque dancer, and the motivating academic crisis revolves around her rights as an ex-stripper to be a college student (Reagan’s Tommy Turner-based character defends these). Richard L.  Coe of the Washington Post found the film “depressing” because it had obviously removed the political bite to keep the McCarthyites at bay: This spineless, tepid rewrite of the amusing and fundamental freedom of speech motif of the play is a morbid reflection on Hollywood producers’ reaction to accusations of communism on the screen.30

At the time of the film’s release in the summer of 1952, a Broadway revival of The Male Animal opened. While the musical remake eschewed the politics of the original play, they were front and center in the stage revival, and the response highlighted the differences between Broadway’s and Hollywood’s approaches to Cold War tactics. In the twelve years between the original production of The Male Animal and its revival, the academic and artistic landscape had become more  Thurber and Nugent, 198.  Bosley Crowther, “‘The Male Animal,’ With Henry Fonda, Olivia De Havilland, at Strand,” New York Times, March 28, 1942. 30  Richard L. Coe, “How to Waste a Fine Comedy,” Washington Post, July 12, 1952. 28 29

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treacherous as accusations, firings, and blacklisting wreaked havoc on thousands of careers and lives. In the same decade as the Bertrand Russell and City College purge, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) became increasingly more powerful, first under the leadership of Martin Dies, Jr. (D-TX) and Samuel Dickstein (D-NY); and then Edward J. Hart (D-NJ), the first chair of the HUAC standing committee; and later J. Parnell Thomas (R-NJ), who presided over the Hollywood Ten hearings and the blacklisting of prominent screenwriters and film directors. The 1949 University of Washington investigations of communist affiliations among faculty brought on by members of the board typified the model of McCarthy’s approach to redbaiting and assumed guilt when under the cover of Fifth Amendment rights. Under McCarthy’s leadership of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) beginning in 1953, communist probes would reach their apotheosis. As film historians have shown, Hollywood studios bowed under the pressure of anti-communism measures, including blacklisting. When it was pretty clear in the spring of 1947 HUAC would conduct an intense investigation (and in which the ten individuals labeled “unfriendly witnesses” were subsequently fired and blacklisted), Eric Johnston, the president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), spoke out against the Red Scare. In private, however, he urged the studio executives and the media labor unions (such as the Screen Actors Guild) to cooperate with the investigations and not oppose the blacklist. This was, Johnston believed, the most effective way of containing the damage to the industry. The Committee also imposed pressure on spreading  the anti-communist message. At the hearings, Richard Nixon (R-CA) and Karl Mundt (R-SD) pressed Johnston to make anti-­communist movies. The studios complied, and between 1948 and 1952, the major studios, such as Twentieth-Century Fox, RKO, and MGM, released over twenty anti-communist films.31 Some of these include, for instance, Behind the Iron Curtain (1948), Conspirator (1949), I Married a Communist (1949), The Red Menace (1949), I Was a Communist for the FBI (1950), and Atomic City (1952). Just as university administrators acquiesced to slander, gossip, and personal attacks on faculty and staff members affecting 31  See for example, “The Red-Scare: A Filmography,” compiled by Glenda Pearson for the All Powers Project, University of Washington Libraries (March 5, 1998). Accessed June 23, 2015. https://www.lib.washington.edu/exhibits/AllPowers/film.html

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academic and curricular decisions, motion picture industry executives sacrificed their own artists and laborers and allowed outside pressure to dictate the terms of production. Consequently, as Larry Ceplair writes, “Hundreds of ‘subversive’ workers were deprived of their jobs in an important media industry which, with a few exceptions, was sanitized of political content for over a decade.”32 Opening in the tense political climate, the buoyant revival of The Male Animal was welcomed with open arms. The production, directed by Michael Gordon and starring Elliott Nugent (once again as Tommy Turner), Robert Preston (Joe Ferguson), and Martha Scott (Ellen Turner), opened at the New  York City Center on April 30, 1952. The play was slated for a limited, two-week run, but the reviews were uniformly ecstatic, and the show moved to Broadway’s Music Box Theatre.33 This production was more successful than the original, running 317 performances. Critics hailed the comedy as better than they remembered it twelve years earlier, and most of them agreed it was more relevant in 1952 than 1940. If the movie industry and some universities appeared to bend over backwards to risk offending or arousing the ire of anti-American investigation committees, New York’s theatre community, as reflected by responses to The Male Animal revival, were not intimidated. In 1940 the drunk scene and the professor’s exposition of anthropomorphic maleness received the greatest attention, but the responses to the revival tended to focus on the attacks on American freedoms. “A curious thing has happened since ‘The Male Animal’ first kicked-off early in January 1940,” Whitney Bolton wrote. “At that time its basic theme that a professor needs to tread lightly when pursuing a liberal cause in his classroom had not the pertinence and sharpness it has today, when so many professors have lost their jobs because of liberal thinking. It is rare that any play of modern times survives the wearing effects of 12 years. It is even rarer that a modern play gains points after 12 years.”34 Brooks Atkinson also referenced recent attacks on academic freedom in the country’s colleges and universities. Citing an  Larry Ceplair, “The Film Industry’s Battle against Left-Wing Influences, from the Russian Revolution to the Blacklist,” Film History: An International Journal 20, no. 4 (2008), 408. 33  Bert McCord, “News of the Theater: ‘Male Animal’ Moving,” New York Herald Tribune, May 9, 1952. 34  Whitney Bolton, “‘The Male Animal’ Provides Full, Rich Evening of Complete Fun,” Morning Telegraph, May 1, 1952. 32

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incident in which Ohio State University established a gag-rule for individuals whose views might not coincide with the administrations, Atkinson described the case of Cecil Hinshaw, a Quaker and a pacifist, who advocated tax resistance (when funds are used to finance wars) and advised individuals to refuse to be drafted. Hinshaw’s invitation to address the students was publicly revoked. Atkinson said the play unfortunately was even more topical as Congress had made “depriving people of their livelihood for holding or investigating unpopular ideas” part of its main mission. He concluded his review, “In 1940 Mr. Thurber and Mr. Nugent did not know how prophetic they were being. Could they be that light-hearted today about the academic freedom part of their theme?”35 Nugent coyly avoided addressing the potential subversiveness of the play, but James Thurber pulled no political punches. In an interview with columnist Earl Wilson, he vehemently opposed communism, but he was appalled by “all the guys who seek refuge in refusing to answer questions,” but he said the Congressional investigators, a group of “blatherskites,” were taking away writers’ ability to write. “The truth is, everybody’s scared to death of these blatherskites. Who can write where everybody’s scared? The end of American comedy is in sight, and the theater’s gone to hell, and you can thank a bunch of guys in Congress.”36 In the same interview he claimed to be on the same list of subversives as Paul Robeson, HUAC’s public enemy number one, but he said if he were called to testify, he would not be browbeaten by a congressional committee, which had become a censoring machine. He maintained the permeating sense of fear was reflected in the audience reception to The Male Animal: But the investigations are serious. We have a line in our play about nobody telling an American what he can read—“not yet.” It used to get great cheers. Today it gets dead silence.37

Under the censorious tone established by Washington, Thurber feared the American theatre would only continue its slow demise. In an essay in the New York Times, Thurber reaffirmed this stance. Writing from the set of The Male Animal, Thurber compared what it was 35  Brooks Atkinson, “‘The Male Animal’: Still Funny After Twelve Unfunny Years,” New York Times, May 18, 1952. 36  Quoted in Earl Wilson, “It Happened Last Night,” Newsday, June 19, 1952. 37  Wilson.

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like to be in Tommy Turner’s living room in 1940 and 1952. While the scenery and props had changed very little from the Cort to the Music Box theatres, the mood in the on-stage parlor had changed considerably in twelve years. The atmosphere had become anxious and unhappy, and Thurber said that as he was sitting on Tommy’s sofa, he began railing at the toll the political culture had taken on the American theatre. Still proclaiming his non-communist leanings, Thurber defended writers who may have dabbled in communism  because, he argues, humans are by nature curious. Congress, he stresses, has overstepped in the extreme in suspecting these authors represent any kind of threat: Nobody has yet turned up sound evidence that any writer has seriously tried to overthrow the Government. I do not consider Whittaker Chambers [one-time Soviet spy and Alger Hiss congressional informer] a writer, any more than I consider Robert Stripling (former chief investigator for the House Committee on Un-American Activities) a writer, although he calls himself one in Who’s Who. Or Richard Nixon, who reports in the same volume that he is the author of “Changing Rules of Liability in Automobile Accident Litigation” (1936).38

As a humorist, Thurber saw not much that was humorous in the nonsensical times. He predicted Broadway would not survive the kinds of intense investigations as those visited upon Hollywood, and he thought the only way to defeat the McCarthys and the Striplings and the Nixons was to make them laughable and drain them of their potency. Only then would Broadway be saved: “Playwrights may come out of hiding and start working happily again if they hear the old reassuring sound of America laughing; but if the subpoenas for Hellman and Odets are the beginning of an endless probe of Broadway, then the American theatre cannot be saved and will die.”39 The Male Animal may have lacked the dramatic power and lasting legacy of a play like Miller’s The Crucible, which opened just one week before the revival of Thurber and Nugent’s play closed, but its political sting and capacity to provoke protest was no less effective.

38  James Thurber, “Dark Suspicions: Contemporary Writers are Handicapped By Current Atmosphere of Distrust,” New York Times, July 27, 1952. 39  Thurber.

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“Let’s Go!” Thurber’s jeremiad aside, his play co-written with Nugent, is essentially utopic. In a single weekend, a nebbish teacher becomes a man, a college community unites against the capitalist forces of oppression, and academic freedom reigns. Not bad for a middlebrow comedy. Two melodramas of the 1940s, Edward Chodorov’s Decision (1944) and Herman Wouk’s The Traitor (1949), also employ academic characters to address the political anxieties. Unlike The Male Animal, these two plays present a dystopic view in which totalitarianism and threats of nuclear apocalypse are brought state-side. Both plays tap into the disquieting attitude that the possibility of destruction from outside the US is not as concerning as the assailants concealed within. In these plays, schools and universities  are havens for wickedness and are vulnerable to homegrown totalitarianism and Russian-­ style duplicity and efforts toward world domination (Fig. 4.2).

Fig. 4.2  Gwen Anderson and Laurence Hugo in Decision (1944). (Photo by Fred Fehl. © The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts)

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The setting of Decision is a principal’s home on the school grounds near an unnamed “American city.” As the play begins, Principal Riggs has been heading a community committee, which is investigating a race riot that occurred at the local war factory. Riggs has uncovered evidence proving the corrupt state Senator Dufresne with aid from the town’s chief newspaper editor, Ed Masters, provoked the riot to break up the union and to perpetuate racial discrimination at the plant. At the same time the principal’s son Tommy has returned from the War, where he was injured in military combat in Italy, and he and the school’s math teacher, Harriet “Harrie” Howard, are resuming their pre-War romance. Harriet and Principal Riggs deliberately try to conceal the information surrounding the riot, but Tommy eventually learns the truth as pressure on his father to back down intensifies. Attempting to squelch the committee’s report, Masters and the anti-communist machine accuse Riggs of raping a female student, and he is taken to jail. The following morning, news arrives that Riggs has hanged himself with his suspenders in his cell, but evidence emerges Dufresne’s men murdered him. Appalled with his country whose fascist factions are beginning to resemble the ones very much in the countries he was fighting, Tommy initially vows to leave the small town and never to return. Galvanized by his fiancée’s and neighbors’ cajoling, his father’s fighting spirit, and his attachment to his hometown, Tommy determines to take on the enemies of freedom. Just before the play ends, Tommy defiantly says: Okay, Harrie—you’re right! This is my home, and no Masters or Dufresne or anyone else is going to run me out of it! I’ll see them in hell first! Do you hear that? Okay, Mister! You all think my Pop was a terrific guy? You think he died for something? Well, let’s find out! Let’s go!40

While The Male Animal ends in a sustained kiss, Decision ends ambiguously with a sob. Tommy’s final words are “Let’s go!”, but as the curtain falls, he is holding his father’s pipe and the stage directions indicate he “sinks into [a] chair, sobbing.”41 In the play’s final image the would-be

40  Edward Chodorov, Decision: A Melodrama in Three Acts (New York: Samuel French, 1943), 83. 41  Chodorov. One may note the similarity of the ending to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1954). Estragon’s final words in that play are also, “Let’s Go!,” and are followed by the stage direction, “They do not move.” (New York: Grove Press, 1954).

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national hero and upholder of American values is stymied by sorrow. The call for political action concludes with inaction. Decision ran 160 performances and was a Broadway hit of the 1943–1944 season, and the reviews were generally favorable. Lewis Nichols of the New York Times wrote, “Edward Chodorov has written a sincere study of the fight against fascism in this country, and his players act it to the hilt. Between them they take it out of the category of pamphlet and make of it a real evening in the theatre.”42 Several reviewers commended Chodorov’s fearlessness in tackling such a sensitive subject, especially as the nation was at war and when patriotic fervor was at its height. Louis Kronenberger described Decision as “an immensely timely play and a very telling one,” and Robert Garland began his review: “In ‘Decision,’ which had them up on their feet and cheering as I left the Belasco, no one can say that Edward Chodorov hasn’t made a sincere and valiant effort to expose the deep and dangerous machinations of such Fascist-minded home-fronters as threaten to destroy our forthcoming victory. Even before that victory has been won.”43 Tackling such topics as labor unions, racial inequality, and political corruption, the play was a throwback to the drama of the 1930s and the works presented by the Group Theatre and the Federal Theatre Project. Nevertheless, Decision had its detractors, and even its most ardent champions faulted the structural elements. That is, as a melodrama (and the published script affirms in its subtitle, “A Melodrama in Three Acts”), Decision does not always behave like one. In a typical melodrama, good prevails over evil, and justice is served. As Burton Rascoe wrote about Chodorov’s play, “there ought to be another act,” because “you cannot have a good man evilly put upon without making his persecutors pay for their crimes.”44 Principal Riggs is a virtuous, faultless hero, but he is killed before the third act. Tommy, a war hero and defender of his father’s legacy, promises to take on the evildoers, but the villains do not appear in the third act (and the most vicious scoundrel, the one calling the shots, Senator Dufresne, never appears at all). The dramatic pleasure associated  Lewis Nichols, “The Play,” New York Times, February 3, 1944.  Louis Kronenberger, “A Keen Jab at Native Fascism,” New York Newspaper PM, February 3, 1944; Robert Garland, “Small-Town War Story Deals with Fascism on the Home Front,” New York American-Journal, February 3, 1944. 44  Burton Rascoe, “Decision is Drama of Corrupt Politics,” New York World-Telegram, February 3, 1944. 42 43

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with watching the melodramatic hero take on and defeat the villain does not occur. Arguably, the play’s dramaturgical ambivalence is its most interesting (and disturbing) quality, and the unresolved and unpunished assault on the academic institution and its principal educes a sense of powerlessness when confronted with homegrown fascism. The setting of the play is peopled with academics, war veterans, union leaders, African Americans, and business leaders: It is a democratic fiefdom. In addition, the school campus is the town’s center of egalitarianism, and the teachers and principal are the arbiters of fairness and compassion. Riggs, for example, had been summoned to quell the race riot because of his reputation in impartially dealing with Black and white students alike. Furthermore, the false rape accusation stems from Harriet’s empathy for a “very sick” student, whom she had discovered was having sex with young men in the principal’s conference room, but the teacher did not report her for fear of ruining the girl’s future.45 The school faculty and staff are esteemed and regarded as fair-minded citizens and staunch members of the community. Even the hardboiled union leader must admit: “Shows you. I always looked down my nose at schoolteachers. Thought they lived in an—ivory tower—is that what you call it?”46 The teachers are puny, nevertheless, compared with the massive political corruption that brings the school to its knees. The larger community surrounding the school is rife with racism, union tension, and anti-Roosevelt attitudes. These toxins gradually pervade the Riggses’ home and office. At the end of the first act, newspaper editor Masters challenges Riggs’ commitment to education and his efforts to extend democracy to all of the country’s citizens. In perhaps the most dramatic scene, the two men square off, representing the view of a presumably politically influenced press versus a politically progressive educational system. Masters tells Riggs he will do everything in his power to prevent the town from being racially equal and becoming a site of union labor at the plant owned by Mr. Anderson. The conversation establishes the principal as the voice of liberalism and American values, and the newspaper editor as the voice of bigotry and corruption: Masters: Now look, Riggs—on the level—who do you think you are? Abe Lincoln? Going to free the nigger all over again? Well, he’s  Chodorov, 48.  Chodorov, 14.

45 46

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not going to be free—not to stand up and work as an equal with the decent white man—and certainly not to draw the same pay—not permanently—not around here—not while I’m around! I don’t want you to make any mistake about my personal opinion. Riggs: I realize, Mr. Masters, that I have made no mistake. Masters: Anderson never would permit a black face in his plant, but a few government contracts changed his mind. Now he’s got ‘em pouring in from all over—and a contract with the unions to boot—something no man ever thought possible here. Riggs: Would you have Mr. Anderson refuse to obey the decisions of his government in time of war—? Masters: Yes! When they’re decisions made by a bunch of communistic New Dealers and labor racketeers! Kowtowing to Washington bureaucrats doesn’t spell patriotism to me!47 The exchange highlights the (fraught) interconnections of race, labor, and capitalism. Masters articulates a familiar refrain in the early 1940s to repeal New Deal initiatives, such as those attempting to abolish discrimination in defense industries and government offices. Depending on one’s point of view at the time, the race riots in various US cities in the 1940s were either a symptom or a cause of this clash of forces. Race riots, like the one precipitating the events in the play, were surely on the minds of many audience members, and the argument between Masters and Riggs evokes the political rhetoric of those events. The summer before Decision premiered the nation was reeling with the news of racial violence in such places as Detroit and Harlem. The three-day Detroit riots in June 1943 resulted in 34 killed, 600 injured, and 1,900 arrested. Of the killed, injured, and arrested, more than three quarters were African American. A fist fight between two men, one Black and the other white, sparked the riot and emanated from a rumor of the death of a Black woman and her child at the hands of the police. The underlying strains were more accurately related to the economic disparities and prejudice. House Representative John E. Rankin (D-MS) blamed this on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attempts to curb racial discrimination in the workplace. “Detroit,” Rankin told the House, “has suffered one of the most disastrous race riots in history. This trouble has been hastened by the crazy  Chodorov, 35–36.

47

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policies of the so-called fair employment practices committee in attempting to mix the races in all kinds of employment.”48 In July 1943 Vice President Henry Wallace visited Detroit, and in a speech to the city he affirmed the importance of racial equality, education opportunities for “all people,” and maintaining a strong labor movement. He cited the so-called “American Fascists” and “midget Hitlers,” who had tried to roll back New Deal policies, attack labor unions, and undermine the work of the Fair Employment Practices Committee, which was established in 1941. Chodorov’s message regarding the emergence of an American fascism comes through in a crucial point in Wallace’s speech: “We cannot fight to crush Nazi brutality abroad and condone race riots at home. Those who fan the fires of racial classes for the purpose of making political capital here at home are taking the first step toward nazism.”49 The fictional Senator Dufresne emerges from such warnings. Decision first appeared in the 1944, but the play offers a foresightedly frightening and cynical view of anti-Communist investigations as well as the utter defenselessness no doubt felt by countless educators, race activists, and laborers in Cold War America. Schools and universities were ground zero for the real-life melodrama of the hunt for Cold War Communists.

Thorium Plates, Loyalty Oaths, and Communists in the Guise of Educators Wouk’s The Traitor, a more conventional—in terms of structure and characterization—melodrama opened March 31, 1949, and despite some strong reviews, the play ran only 67 performances. Brooks Atkinson wrote a damning review, calling the play “hokum melodrama” and a “second-­ rate melodrama about a first-rate subject,”50 but other critics found it a captivating thriller. Robert Coleman of the Daily Mirror wrote, “With ‘The Traitor,’ Herman Wouk proves that melodrama can be both exciting and intelligent. The town’s newest thriller arrived at the 48th Street Theatre last evening under the [producer and director] Jed Harris banner, and

 Quoted in “Kelly Acts to Ease Detroit Riot Curb,” New York Times, June 24, 1943.  Quoted in “Text of the Vice President’s Speech at Detroit,” New York Times, July 26, 1943. 50  Brooks Atkinson, “At the Theatre: ‘The Traitor,’” New York Times, April 1, 1949. 48 49

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held a first-night audience spellbound.”51 The play is essentially a cops-­ and-­robbers/Soviet-spy play, but it also deals with the ethics of academic loyalty oaths, traitorous faculty, and Cold War espionage. Above all, The Traitor supports the viewpoint that colleges and universities are especially susceptible to communist infiltration. The Traitor takes place in the Manhattan apartment of Dr. Tobias Emanuel, professor of philosophy, near a university (though unnamed, it is most likely Columbia). When the play begins, Emanuel is in a quandary as he has been asked to sign a loyalty oath, and while he regards the request as un-American, he feels the pressure of the university trustees, who warn him that his retirement and pension hang in the balance. Simultaneously, and unbeknownst to Emanuel, his co-faculty member and friend, Professor Allen Carr, a young, atomic scientist, has been making deals with Soviet agents over radioactive thorium plates. Carr, the titular traitor, justifies his actions by reasoning that if Russia also has the atomic bomb, there would be a level playing field, and the two countries might be more open to peace talks and diplomacy. Emanuel discovers Carr’s involvement and helps him see the error of his ways. In the end, Emanuel signs the loyalty oath, Carr cooperates with Naval Intelligence, and while assisting in the entrapment of the spies, Carr is killed by a Soviet agent. Unlike Decision, there is no ambivalence in the final message: The bad guys are apprehended, and justice is served. The Traitor also affirms the need for loyalty oaths and presents a university system in which lurking Communists collude and scheme. The first few scenes, however, seem to be quite radical, offering an anti-propagandistic and (for 1949) subversive attitude toward communist beliefs. When the university trustee Fislinger, who is spearheading the loyalty oaths, asks about Emanuel’s attitudes toward communism, the businessman receives a lecture comparing communism  to a religion making it worthy of tolerance. Communists, Emmanuel argues, are like a religious minority and deserve protection: Fislinger:

Religious minority? These people have no religion. They’re political traitors. Emanuel: Have you ever faced the possibility that the Communists may be right? Fislinger: [Impatient] About what? 51  Robert Coleman, “‘The Traitor’ Is Exciting, Intelligent Drama,” Daily Mirror, April 1, 1949.

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Emanuel: [Smiling serene] About the class struggle? About economic determinism? About the theory of surplus value? Fislinger: No! It’s always sounded like foreign gibberish to me. Emanuel: The Gospels must have sounded like foreign gibberish in ancient Rome. Fislinger: Well—I didn’t come here expecting to be sold Communism. Emanuel: I haven’t got it to sell. I know its Scriptures, but I’m not a believer.52 After comparing the canonized texts of Marxism, the “major and minor prophets,” and a “supreme hierarchy with a supreme head on earth” with “crusading religion,” Emanuel intensifies his argument and expresses a strong anti-capitalist position. Communists, he says, “regard our government as a fake show of freedom, behind which capitalists like yourself rob the workers.”53 Such a leftist argument might force a real-life professor to appear before a committee, but Emanuel effectively defends communist principles while avowing he is not one. In short, he makes a very convincing argument for Marxism, but he disassociates himself from its adherents. It is important to remember that the play opened just over a year before Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested for passing atomic bomb information to the Soviet Union, so the defense of communism and the portrayal of a sympathetic traitor would not be as provocative if the play had opened in 1951. Audiences expecting the play to strike a blow against anti-communist campaigns and HUAC-style totalitarianism, however, would be disappointed in Wouk’s denouement. Disheartened by the revelation of Carr’s clandestine dealings and with proof that covert Communists are among the university faculty, Emanuel eventually decides to sign the loyalty oath. Although the document goes against Emanuel’s inherent sense of academic freedom, he believes it a necessary precaution. He explains: I hardly imagined the events of an evening could change me. I’m not happy about it. These questionnaires at best are like fever therapy—infecting ourselves with one illness to cure another. But it now seems a serious public danger to me to allow Communists in the guise of educators to recruit

 Herman Wouk, The Traitor (New York: Samuel French, 1949), 27–28.  Wouk, 28.

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among the immature for their secret work. I hope that with vigilance the remedy may not prove a worse danger.54

Emanuel’s reluctant acquiescence reflects the gravity of the issue, which was among the most controversial of the Cold War era. Loyalty oaths were not new to educational institutions in the late 1940s. As Marjorie Heins explains, loyalty oaths are as foundational to America as Plymouth Rock: They came to this country with the Puritans. School teachers in Revolutionary-era Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania were required to sign their allegiance to the colonies’ adherence to virtue, liberty, and patriotism. While the original framers of the Constitution banned them, loyalty oaths often emerged during times of war and civil unrest.55 Notably, right after World War I, the US saw its first Red Scare, and the Lusk Committee (spearheaded by New  York State senator Clayton Lusk) created several repressive laws designed to prevent the infiltration of communism and the planned overthrow of the government by the Russians. One of the laws, which was first vetoed by Governor Al Smith, but then signed when Governor Nathan Miller came into office, was a “teachers’ loyalty bill.” All public-school teachers had to swear their support for the laws and constitutions of New York State and the nation.56 In the 1930s as international tensions flared, there was a flurry of new teacher oaths. In 1935 alone seven states passed legislation requiring teachers’ oaths. Seven others defeated such measures, and the governors of two other states vetoed similar bills.57 By 1949, as Ellen Schrecker explains, “loyalty oaths were ubiquitous,” and “almost every state required them in one form or another.” For instance, New  York State’s controversial Feinberg Law, introduced in March 1949, included a loyalty test to bar teachers with intentions to overthrow the government. For the most part, the oaths were met with very little resistance, and as Schrecker states, “They had the great advantage of allowing their sponsors to boast that they had eliminated the

 Wouk, 92.  See Marjorie Heins, “‘A Pall of Orthodoxy’: The Painful Persistence of Loyalty Oaths,” Dissent 56, no. 3 (Summer 2009), 63–72. 56  Marjorie Heins, Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge (New York: NYU Press, 2013), 28–30. 57  Catherine MacKenzie, “Teacher’s Oath Debated,” New York Times, December 8, 1935. 54 55

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subversive threat from the nation’s classrooms—without costing a penny.”58 Coincidentally, The Traitor opened just six days after the eruption of one of the most high-profile instances of faculty resistance to a loyalty oath. On March 25, 1949, Robert Gordon Sproul, the president of the University of California, proposed to the Board of Regents a loyalty oath for all faculty. The measure was surely intended to head off the kind of outside investigations that had plagued the University of Washington, and faculty were asked to swear to the following statement: “I do not believe in and am not a member of, nor do I support any party or organization that believes in, advocates or teaches the overthrow of the Government of the United States by force or by any illegal unconstitutional methods.”59 The contents were revealed to the faculty in June 1949, and within days the university’s faculty senate resoundingly rejected the oath, citing assaults on academic freedom, its unconstitutionality, and questions about its effect on faculty tenure. Several months of impasse and legal battles ensued, and two years after the oath was first proposed, the terminated faculty non-signers were victorious when they took their case to the California Third District of Appeal.60 As Heins points out, the victory “became moot” when California introduced the Levering Oath, “an anti-subversive oath for all employees, not just academic.”61 It remained on California’s books until 1967. As a historical document, Wouk’s The Traitor effectively captures the national attitude in the late 1940s and early 1950s about threats of communist teachers to national security as well as in their access to students. In reality, there never was much of a threat. College president after college president proclaimed that there was little indication of communist activity on their campuses.62 Additionally, nearly all the faculty who had been 58  Ellen Schrecker, “Subversives, Squeaky Wheels, and ‘Special Obligations’: Threats to Academic Freedom, 1890–1960,” Social Research 76 (Summer 2009), 536. 59  “Faculty Anti-Red Oaths Set at University of California,” New York Times, June 13, 1949. The oath was revised a few weeks later to specify instead, “that I am not a member of the Communist party or under any oath or a party to any agreement or under any commitment that is in conflict with my obligation under this oath” (“California Revises Its ‘Loyalty Oath,’” New York Times, June 25, 1949). 60  For details about the case and its ramifications, see Nancy K. Innis, “Lessons from the Controversy over the Loyalty Oath at the University of California,” Minerva 30 (Autumn 1992), 337–365. 61  Heins, Priests of Our Democracy, 74. 62  See Phillip M. Smith, “Teacher Loyalty and Academic Freedom,” Journal of Educational Sociology 23, no. 5 (January 1950), 251–257.

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fired, untenured, or non-reappointed were results of uncooperativeness with investigation committees and not for advocating governmental takeovers. Nevertheless, the play capitalized on Cold War hysteria and showed the fallibility of ideological liberalism when pitted against “a cynical, unscrupulous and destructive ideology.”63 This destructiveness is personified in the play by the Soviet agent Baker (and performed by John Wengraf to excellent notices), who is described as “pleasant” and “not [a] typical spy,”64 and his ordinariness is what makes him particularly nefarious. The proximity of subversive teachers to their vulnerable charges was the primary basis for the laws that followed. As a professor of education at Eastern Washington College stated, “To protect our government and our way of life, the federal government and many states individually have enacted laws designed to rid the country and the schools of the influences of those who, as agents of a foreign power, would use their positions and the schools as a means of infiltration and the teaching of communism and other doctrines inimical to society.”65 Loyalty oaths, many people believed, offered a way, in the words of the fictional Professor Emanuel, “to force the Communists out of their faculty posts.”66 The efficacy of Emanuel’s action is not quite clear, and his philosophical logic is at best fallacious: Traces of radioactive plutonium reveal Carr’s guilt, not a signed document. Such fallacies surrounded the topic, though, and if many people acknowledged the significance of a formal and ceremonial promise of non-­ subversiveness, there were just as many who saw the futility of the act. For instance, in an ambivalent editorial concerning the University of California brouhaha, the New York Times on one hand claims to not understand, even in “the noonday madness,” the “great hardship for the faculty members and administrative officers” to make the pledge. On the other hand, the editorial says, “It seems fairly certain that nobody willing to overthrow the Government by force, which means a little murder if necessary, would stop at the lesser crime of lying.”67 Emanuel’s concern about the collateral damage of loyalty oaths were realized on real-life campuses across the country. As Harold Taylor, the president of Sarah Lawrence College, said at the time, “Symptoms of extreme anxiety have broken out in many  Coleman, “‘The Traitor’ Is Exciting, Intelligent Drama.”  Wouk, 3 65  N. William Newsom, “Teacher Loyalty Oaths and Related Issues,” Peabody Journal of Education 32, no. 3 (November 1954), 175. 66  Wouk, 73. 67  “Loyalty Oaths,” New York Times, June 14, 1949. 63 64

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places and everyone seems jumpy, nervous and distrustful.”68 College campuses, which were generally thought to be communities unto themselves, had become tainted by suspicion and surveillance. Perhaps a reason The Traitor did not have a longer run could be that real-life had become more tense than a cloak-and-dagger Broadway melodrama.

“A Trifle Marxian” At the end of 1949, Broadway welcomed another play about a professor accused of being a communist, The Velvet Glove by Rosemary Casey. As the title indicates, The Velvet Glove is not a hard-hitting, gripping melodrama like Decision and The Traitor, and nor is it a raucous comedy in the vein of The Male Animal. Casey’s benign comedy about life in a convent and college arrived on Broadway after winning a Christopher Award, a prize which came with $5000. The Christophers, a Catholic organization established in 1949 by Father James Keller, honored Mother Hildebrand (the play’s original title) as a work “most likely to promote Christian ideals in American living.”69 The judges that year included Katharine Cornell and Oscar Hammerstein II.70 The play was a modest hit at the Booth Theatre, where it ran for 152 performances, and if it lacks the theatrical fireworks of the other plays examined in this chapter, The Velvet Glove raises pertinent questions about the relationship between  communism and Catholicism and the role of education in society. When it opened, no one claimed The Velvet Glove to be a radical play (and as far as I know, nor has anyone since). The responses were generally mixed, and the critics who liked it applied reserved descriptors such as “amiable but mild,” “nice and pleasant,” and “lovely.”71 Those who didn’t, used non-vitriolic appraisals, such as “very slight and very light,”

 “2 Educators Score Oaths of Loyalty,” New York Times, June 16, 1949.  Robert Garland, “A Pleasant Comedy, One of the Best in ’49,” New York JournalAmerican, December 27, 1949. 70  Robert Coleman, “‘Velvet Glove’ at Booth Is Amusing, Rewarding,” Daily Mirror, December 27, 1949. 71  Richard Watts, Jr., “A Quiet Comedy of Convent Life,” New York Post, December 27, 1949; John Chapman, “Grace George Returns, Lovelier Than Ever, in ‘The Velvet Glove,’” New York Daily News, December 27, 1949; and William Hawkins, “Miss George Is Charming In New Play,” New York World Telegram, December 27, 1949. 68 69

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“arch, sporadically amusing,” and a “gentle bore.”72 The strongest notices were reserved for Grace George, a beloved Broadway performer, who had returned to the stage after a seven-year hiatus, and who had appeared in over 40 plays since her New York debut in 1898. George played Mother Hildebrand, the fiercely protective mother superior, who defends the young history professor from charges of communist affiliations, and who skillfully prevents the bishop from firing the young man. By all accounts, George was radiant in the performance directed by Guthrie McClintic. Ward Morehouse of The Sun wrote: This distinguished actress of the American drama for half a century brings her lovely voice, her vast technical skill, her exactness of timing and her mastery of the art of acting to her playing as the mother superior, a witty and all-wise woman who keeps the young professor in his job and prevents the good bishop from making an error in judgment. Miss George’s performance is one of dignity, humor and poise.73

She was in good company, which included John Williams as the Bishop, and her co-star, Walter Hampden, who had starred in The Traitor earlier the same year. Hampden, as most reviewers asserted, did not have enough stage time as Monsignor Burke, the physically feeble and intellectually astute, old priest brought in to provide a voice of reason. In his few scenes, reviewers agreed, he was dazzlingly paired with George. The play’s potentially incendiary mix of education, politics, and religion were handled with such professionalism and (velvet) kid gloves, it did not seem to occur to audiences and critics they should be shocked. By 1949 the Church was officially at war with communism. Pope Pius XII decreed in July of that year all Catholics who continue to “knowingly and of their free will” associate with the Communist Party will face excommunication. The Holy Office issued the mandate, according to a New York Times report, “to mobilize all Catholics throughout the world against what the Vatican considers the arch foe of the Church.”74 The Velvet Glove 72  Ward Morehouse, “Miss George Brilliant in Frail Comedy,” The Sun, December 27, 1949; Otis L.  Guernsey, Jr., New York Herald Tribune, December 27, 1949; and “Miss George, Master White, and Dr. Goldsmith,” New Yorker (January 7, 1950), 44. Review in The Velvet Glove clippings file, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library. 73  Morehouse, “Miss George Brilliant in Frail Comedy.” 74  Camille M.  Clanfarra, “Church-Communist War Enters Crucial Phase,” New York Times, July 17, 1949.

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draws a battle line between Catholics and Communists, but the ingenuity of this little play is in the way in which it manipulates and obscures that line. In actuality, the lay history professor Pearson, who is untenured, would have been easily terminated. Pearson denies the accusation against him, but the case seems unassailable. First, the charges were brought to the bishop by a wealthy trustee, whose daughter is one of Pearson’s students. In the utopian dramatic world, however, hearsay and whisper campaigns are vigorously countered. Sister Monica, the college dean and chemistry teacher, for instance, points to the groundlessness of relying on student allegations, stating: “It is a proof that students are incredibly stupid! And that is a proposition which needs no proof, as you would know if you had taught Chemistry for fifteen years!”75 The argument with the bishop moves in a provocative direction when Mother Hildebrand articulates an essential element of education and draws a comparison between Catholic teaching and Marxist philosophy: Bishop Gregory: He’s agitated them mentally, Mother! Mother Hildebrand: Isn’t that the object of a teacher, Bishop? To stir up his students’ minds? Bishop Gregory: Not as he’s done it! He has them worrying about private property, and wealth, and their duty in a society in which there is economic inequality. Mother Hildebrand: Then he has them worrying about questions which have absorbed Christians for two thousand years! That, I take it, ought to be the function of a professor in a Catholic college. Bishop Gregory: But by his emphasis, he is troubling his students’ consciences,—making them uncomfortable! Mother Hildebrand: Moral awakenings are always uncomfortable, but they frequently give us saints!76 Later in the play, the bishop reads an excerpt from a speech delivered by Pearson, and he denounces it as “rabble-rousing” and the work of Communists. Pearson coyly reveals the passage to have been quoted from “Rerum Novarum” (1891), the Encyclical on Capital and Labor, by Pope Leo XIII, through which he further shows the overlaps of Marxism and  Rosemary Casey, The Velvet Glove (New York: Samuel French, 1950), 42.  Casey, 43.

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Catholicism. But the final victory for Pearson (and Mother Hildebrand who engineered it) is the one-upmanship of the wealthy trustee. The college alumnae foundation will revoke their considerable financial support (and bring scandal upon the diocese) if Pearson is indeed fired. The bishop gives into the pressure, and order has been restored to the convent and college. In an ironic reversal, therefore, the class-conscious, anti-­aristocratic teacher is saved not by papal doctrine and morally awakened students but by a few of the college’s very influential and very wealthy patrons. Richard Watts, Jr. of the New York Post expressed some discomfort with the play’s treatment of economics and religion, stating the play “seemed perhaps a trifle Marxian.”77 In general, though, the consensus suggests the interweaving of the philosophical, political, and pedagogical is softened by the gentleness and respectfulness with which Mother Hildebrand deals with her religious superior (hence, the title). Additionally, the triumph of competitive capitalism undercuts the play’s subversive impact. Still, The Velvet Glove gets in a few slaps at the redbaiters invading college campuses at the end of the 1940s and takes a stand for academic freedom. The message was not completely missed by theatregoers. One critic wrote, “Miss Casey presents an issue which is important to all of us: freedom of opinion challenged by reactionary forces.” In reference to the accused communist leanings of the professor, the same critic asked, “Doesn’t that have a familiar sound? And it could happen here, there or anywhere.”78 The fact such a dire warning could be prompted by a lightweight Broadway comedy, sanctioned by the Catholic Church, and opening in the “noonday madness” of anti-communism investigations is a small miracle.

Soft-Boiled Liberals and Hard-Boiled Eggheads By 1957 the Red Scare that had gripped the nation for over a decade had pretty much run its destructive course in academia, the entertainment industry, and public sphere. The popular theatre of the 1940s and 1950s may have taken some jabs at McCarthyism and anti-communist investigations, but it was the upstart television medium that delivered the

 Watts, “A Quiet Comedy of Convent Life.”  Undated, undocumented clipping in The Velvet Glove clippings file, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library. 77 78

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knockout, one-two punch.79 First, in March 1954 Edward R.  Murrow broadcast a stinging See It Now documentary indictment, which was followed by McCarthy’s rebuttal and concluded with an episode featuring a further drubbing by Murrow. And in June the nationally broadcast Army-­ McCarthy hearings provided a sound-bite clincher when Joseph Nye Welch uttered his famous, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” The Senate formally censured the Junior Senator from Wisconsin in December 1954. McCarthy continued to serve in the Senate for two and a half years until his death at age 48 in May 1957. A few months after McCarthy’s demise Molly Thacher Kazan’s The Egghead opened at New York’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre on October 9, 1957. The play focuses on a self-proclaimed liberal economics professor, played by Karl Malden, who publicly and vehemently supports a former student, an African American labor activist, played by Lloyd Richards, who is accused of being a Communist. Opening on a Red-weary Broadway and after the fall of Joseph McCarthy, The Egghead conveyed a whiff of old news and lasted only 21 performances. It lost its entire $96,000 capitalization.80 As a piece of dramatic literature, the play is not particularly notable, but written by the wife of Elia Kazan, who is remembered as much by his contributions to theatre and film as he is by his appearance as a friendly witness to HUAC, it is significant in theatre history as an artistic response to the hearings. As a cultural and historical artifact, The Egghead reveals the lingering effects of Cold War anti-intellectualism and attitudes toward academic liberalism (Fig. 4.3). On April 11, 1952, Elia Kazan appeared for a second time (the first was in January of the same year) in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee after deciding that he would, upon careful consideration, provide the names of fellow associates in his two-years, “active service” in the Communist Party. Saying it was his “duty as a citizen” to tell the committee everything he knew, Kazan admitted he “did wrong to withhold these names before, because secrecy serves the Communists and is exactly what 79  See, for example, Thomas Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). Doherty counters the usual arguments of television as a mechanism for promoting traditionally conservative values by arguing the medium in many ways promoted tolerance and social progressiveness. 80  “‘Egghead,’ ‘Heart’ Folds Lose 400G,” Undated, unattributed clipping in The Egghead clippings file, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library. $96,000 in 1957 is roughly equivalent to just over $800,000 in 2015.

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Fig. 4.3  Phyllis Love, Karl Malden, and Lloyd Richards in Molly Kazan’s The Egghead (1957). (Photo by Friedman-Abeles. © The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts)

they want. The American people need the facts, and all facts, about all aspects of communism in order to deal with it wisely and effectively.”81 Kazan’s experiences with the Party stemmed from his days with the Group Theatre when he worked as a stage manager and bit player from 1934 to 1936, and he claimed the encounter gave him “a taste of police state living,” and he “did not like it.”82 As a “friendly witness,” he offered the names of eight individuals, also connected with the Group Theatre, including Clifford Odets, who had, according to Kazan, left the Party around the same time. Kazan reasoned it was important for political 81  C.  P. Trussell, “Elia Kazan Admits He Was Red in ‘30’s,” New York Times, April 12, 1952. 82  Trussell.

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liberals to testify because their own careers were in jeopardy. They were presumed guilty by association, and fifth-amendment witnesses, according to Kazan, abet the communist cause. He said, “The employment of a lot of good liberals is threatened because they have allowed themselves to become associated with or silenced by Communists.”83 Kazan’s actions were condemned by many of his friends and industry colleagues, including Arthur Miller, and though his film and theatre work continue to be lauded, Kazan remains a controversial figure. As The Egghead readied for Broadway, the production was shadowed by the playwright’s famous husband. The publicity was careful to note that Mrs. Kazan had considerable theatre experience of her own, and she was not a celebrity dilettante capitalizing on her famous surname to get a play to Broadway. She was a graduate of Vassar College and spent two years as a playwriting student at Yale Drama School, where she met Elia. After they were married in 1932, she served as a script reader for the Group Theatre and later the Theatre Guild. While her husband was building a career as a director, she raised their family, and by the mid-1950s and with the four children (aged 9–21 years) all in school, she had time to return to writing. She spent three years writing The Egghead, stating that she did not receive dramaturgical or political advice from her husband. Elia, she told the press, offered only “husbandly, constructive comments” and was “merely an interested bystander.”84 Molly Kazan may not have sought her husband’s opinion of the play, but decades later in his autobiography, he admitted he was unimpressed with the final product. Elia suggests the project was a means of bringing order to the societal confusion and presumably to the turmoil in their lives. Order and truth, he says, can be disastrous in the theatre: There was no moment in that evening’s entertainment when it appeared that both sides might be right; only Molly, the author, was right. In the theatre, order, clarity, and goodness are not enough; to be correct is not a sufficient virtue. An audience wants to be shaken and for a time kept in doubt. That’s the fun of it. Molly, being absolute in her opinions, had no inner conflicts herself; she could therefore create conflicts only within a perimeter she’d set. The audience felt that she knew the solution to everything happening on stage and that she’d uncover these solutions when she  Trussell.  “Project,” undated, unattributed clipping in The Egghead clippings file, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library. 83 84

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chose to. This produced the one unforgivable dramatic fault: The conclusion was predictable.85

He goes on to intimate the play had a deleterious effect on their marriage (and he began an extramarital affair about this time), even though he was sorry for the play’s lack of success. The Egghead, in his view, demonstrated a rigidity and simplicity in thought, which he despised. In many ways Elia Kazan is correct about The Egghead, but his attitudes might also be informed by the fact the play does not place liberals (among which Elia counted himself) in a particularly favorable light. From the beginning Hank Parson, the play’s “egghead,” is inflexible and aggressively leftist when confronted by the FBI G-men. He rails against the academic “idiots,” the “country club boys,” and the “conformists.” Perry Hall, the African American young man the FBI is investigating, is attacked because of his skin color according to Hank. The more evidence stacks up against Hall, the more intransigent Hank becomes. Hank is dangerous not for outright treasonous acts, but for his doctrinaire willfulness that amounts to political ignorance. Hank is incapable of seeing the errors in his own judgment and nearly allows the Communist to go free. Structurally, the play calls to mind Molière’s Tartuffe (1664). In that comedy, Orgon, the father of the household, is duped into supporting the hypocritical, lying Tartuffe against the repeated warnings of his family. Orgon and his family are nearly brought to ruin, but through a turn of events engineered by the king, Tartuffe is arrested, and Orgon is saved. In The Egghead, Professor Hank Parson is similarly single-minded. In his stubborn devotion to Perry, he enables the young man’s duplicity. Hank announces, for instance, the FBI’s investigation at a cocktail party, and thus receives warning of the investigation. Later, Hank willingly hands over letters to Perry that might prove incriminating, and he invites Perry to give a lecture at the college where he can espouse his ideas. Unlike Orgon, who is repentant and gratified by the resolution and the royal intervention, Hank only momentarily shows remorse and then relief. The curtain comes down as his wife and son are lovingly exasperated with him because he vows to be even more liberal and more “eggheaded,” shouting: The only thing that was wrong with me was that I wasn’t liberal enough! I didn’t use my eyes and ears. I didn’t use my God damned head! There’s  Elia Kazan, A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1988), 570–571.

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nothing wrong with having brains! I didn’t use them. I didn’t stick to my own principles. I acted out of prejudice. Why, I was insufficiently eggheaded!… That’s the point I’ll make to my class.86

The character as drawn by Kazan is buffoonish in his zealousness, and wearisome in his unwaveringness. He claims to be the voice of intellect, and characters describe his scholarly success, but in his inability to recognize the Communist right under his nose, he comes across as posturing, ignorant, and unbelievable. Interestingly, the most complex and fully drawn character is the villain, Perry Hall. Perry, as noted by several critics, is both culprit and victim, and Richards (who two years later would be the first Black director of a play on Broadway with A Raisin in the Sun [1959]) imbued the character with depth and nuance. Walter Kerr wrote, “The story of this particular man is whipped out in all its particulars. Both the portrait and its performance are strikingly, even shockingly, complete.”87 Brooks Atkinson had similar praise, especially for Richards, stating that his performance drew applause when he exited the stage. “Mr. Richards,” Atkinson said, “plays the villain with enough skill, intelligence and bravado to win the admiration of the audience at the end.”88 William F.  McDermott reviewed the play in Cleveland and noted the novelty and progressiveness of Kazan’s presentation of the Black character. He explained, “Superficially, the Negro is the villain of the piece and this is the first time in the modern theater, so far as I can remember, that a member of his race has been so presented, but he is not fundamentally a villain in the old-fashioned sense.”89 Perry, as he is developed in the play, is a Communist because racist America made him so. As a college-educated, African American man, he believes he does not have a chance in a white-dominated society that has no regard for Black lives. Conversely, the Communist Party offered a vision of social and political change. In the climactic exchange, Perry details his reasons for staying in the Party:

 Molly Kazan, The Egghead (New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1958), 78.  Walter Kerr, “Theater: ‘The Egghead,’” New York Herald Tribune, October 10, 1957. 88  Brooks Atkinson, “Theatre: ‘The Egghead,’” New York Times, October 10, 1957. 89  William F. McDermott, “McDermott on ‘Egghead,’” Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 15, 1957. Clipping in The Egghead clippings file, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library. 86 87

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Perry:

Hank, all I’m doing, I’m fighting for what any decent person wants—peace in the world—security—and freedom—an equal chance. Hank: You think you’d find those things behind the Iron Curtain? Perry: (He comes to him.) I’m talking America. I’m talking the [Emmett] Till case. A fourteen-year-old boy murdered in cold blood because he whistled at a white woman. Hank: (Guilty.) I know. Perry: I’m talking the case of Willie McGee. Hank: I know. Perry: Harry Moore, killed by a bomb in Florida. And Mrs. [Rosa Lee] Ingraham [sic], in jail for life for—nothing. And four Negroes shot down in Monroe, Georgia. Nobody even arrested.90 He admits he hates the “stupid meetings” and “the stupid directives that you know are wrong and you still have to follow,” but these are part of the price, he believes, he must pay to change the current racist system.91 Whereas Hank’s actions seem calculated to keep the plot’s machinery chugging along until the resolution, Perry’s motivations are much more plausible and dramatically compelling. What Hank and Perry have in common are their impressive intellects. Perry is said to be “one of the most brilliant students” the college ever had; Hank is a notable economist and wrote a celebrated book. Paradoxically, they seem to have more brains than sense. Perry is unable to see he is being exploited by the Party and his freedom is every bit as curtailed by “the stupid directives” enforced by the leaders. Similarly, Hank is constrained by his unquestioning liberalism, and he is blinded by a form of reverse prejudice. In Hank’s closed-mindedness Perry’s race is proof of his innocence, and the obdurate professor is incapable of getting beyond skin color to see the man, who is guilty. In both cases, over-thought and intellectualized racism informs their injudicious actions. Intelligence, the play implies, can be more dangerous than ignorance. Kazan’s play, therefore, taps into and reflects an anti-intellectual strain of the 1950s. In his book, Inventing the Egghead: The Battle over Brainpower in American Culture, Aaron Lecklider complicates the widely-held notion of  Kazan, Egghead, 68.  Kazan, Egghead, 71.

90 91

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anti-intellectualism in the 1950s. Lecklider argues the Cold War era “was not only anti-intellectual but also anti-collectivist, anti-elitist, and anti-­ communist.”92 The figure of the egghead, characterized as white, intellectual, and “queerly feminine,” contained the critical antitheses of all these mindsets in one persona, and posed a threat to the overwhelming populist and conservative values of the period. As the term entered political discourse, social critic Louis Bromfield offered a definition of the egghead, which seems to fit Hank to a tee in Kazan’s play. Writing for The Freeman, he extrapolated: Egghead: A person of spurious intellectual pretensions, often a professor or the protégé of a professor. Fundamentally superficial. Over-emotional and feminine in reactions to any problem… A doctrinaire supporter of Middle-­ European socialism as opposed to Greco-French-American ideas of democracy and liberalism. A self-conscious prig, so given to examining all sides of a question that he becomes thoroughly addled while remaining always in the same spot. An anemic bleeding heart.93

Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic Presidential nominee in 1952, is regarded as the archetypal egghead. In fact, Molly Kazan said that when people heard the title of her play, some reflexively thought she had written a play about the presidential election. When the play was in rehearsal, she said, “Somebody asked (again!) is the play about Adlai Stevenson. No, it’s not about Adlai Stevenson.”94 With his protruding and egg-like smooth forehead, Stevenson’s large cranium seemed to house a larger than normal brain, and he did not convey traditional masculinity in appearance or manner. In addition, J.  Edgar Hoover planted rumors (which stuck) that Stevenson had had homosexual affairs.95 Stevenson, though, reveled in his eggheadedness and poked fun at the ascribed subversiveness of the identity. 92  Aaron Lecklider, Inventing the Egghead: The Battle over Brainpower in American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 197. 93  Quoted in James Penner, Pinks, Pansies, and Punks: The Rhetoric of Masculinity in American Literary Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 95. 94  Quoted in Harlowe R. Hoyt, “Molly Kazan Squirms as ‘Egghead’ Is Born,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 15, 1957. 95  See, for example, David K. Jonhson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Aaron Lecklider writes that Walter Winchell, among others, referenced the queerness rumors. “A vote for Adlai Stevenson,” Winchell announced, “is a vote for Christine Jorgensen” (Inventing the Egghead, 203).

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Playing on Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ clincher from The Communist Manifesto, he would proclaim during his campaign: “[E]ggheads of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your yolks!”96 The joke was surely not funny for those who perceived the egghead as a threat to national security. McCarthy, for example, railed against “eggheads” and “deluded liberals,” who were supposedly enabling Communists by “demanding curbs on his authority as a Communist investigator.”97 In 1953 when McCarthy proposed boycotting allied countries who would trade with Communist China, he publicly predicted a backlash from his sworn enemies, “the appeasers and the eggheads.”98 College professors were especially despised by anti-Communists because as a group, they tended to be on the Left politically. They stood for most of the things the hard Right were against, including labor unions, academic freedom, and civil rights. Seymour Martin Lipset, a sociology professor, wrote a self-­flagellating piece in the New York Times in 1957 called “The Egghead Looks At Himself” in which he concludes most of the problems of perception stem from the intelligentsia themselves, but he does point to evidence that “the better educated individuals are[,] the more they favor all forms of ‘non-economic liberalism,’ such as civil liberties for unpopular political minorities, equal rights for Negroes and other ethnic minorities, foreign aid and internationalism, the end of national immigration quotas.”99 The cultural anxieties associated with these stances were effectively assigned to the marginalized image of the egghead, who is contradictorily brainy and muddled; aggressive and unmanly; racially privileged and anti-racist; and conspicuous and subversive. He was, in short, a caricature of liberalism run amok. Karl Malden, who played the title role in Kazan’s play, was cast perfectly to type. He was 45 at the time, and with his oval head, receding hairline, impressive forehead, bulbous nose, and thin lips, Malden was not standard Broadway leading man material. The critics agreed this was the perfect match of performer and role. Atkinson, for example, praised the “homeliness and sincerity” the actor brought to the part, and Kerr said Malden “plays [Hank] beautifully—for every degree of pompousness, of fatuousness, of closed-minded righteousness that is in him.… This is the liberal as  Quoted in Lecklider, Inventing the Egghead, 207.  W.H. Lawrence, “McCarthy Defends His Methods and Defies Critics ‘High’ or ‘Low,’” New York Times, March 18, 1954. 98  “McCarthy Demand Boycott By Allies,” New York Times, September 24, 1953. 99  Seymour Martin Lipset, “The Egghead Looks At Himself,” New York Times, November 17, 1957. 96 97

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fossil, cuttingly written, juicily played.”100 The show’s advertisement and poster design highlighted the pompousness and fatuousness of the central character and gestured toward some of the main themes and plot elements. The egghead, as pictured and dramatically represented, is supremely arrogant and potentially dangerous. The poster image, designed by Robert Galster, includes a line-drawing of Malden in profile, emphasizing the egg-shaped head of the character. The face dominates the frame, as if it were a propagandistic wall mural with glowering Big Brother-like glare. The figure’s left eye is looking down and to the left; accentuated by a furrowed eyebrow and a small slash of a mouth, the egghead is sneering sinisterly. In the lower left corner, an innocent young woman with a hair-bow, long pony-tale, and undefined facial features peers imploringly upward as if to the heavens. Her hands are behind her, seemingly restrained as if making herself vulnerable to the bodiless head towering above her. The woman character in the design is Sally Parson, who Variety describes as “the child-wife whose alertness uncovers the protege’s secret and who finally revolts against her husband’s patronizing blindness and forces him to see the truth.”101 Phyllis Love played the part to excellent notices. Sally’s victory in exposing Perry’s treachery underscores an attitude toward superficial and jumbled academic intelligence versus practical and uncluttered natural learning. Hank is dogmatic and blustering, and he is prone to “absent mindedness.” Sally, on the other hand, is the professor’s infantilized wife, who is described by the college president as his “favorite girl.” He is particularly impressed that as Hank’s wife she has been able to hold onto her “intellectual innocence.”102 Sally eschews formal education, and her primary concerns are making sure the cocktail party proceeds smoothly, and the children are content. There are matters, she explains, she does not want to know about. “I let [Hank] do the deep thinking and politics,” she tells her college-aged stepson. “I do the personal things.”103 As the events around Perry’s accusation unfold, she becomes inquisitive and sensitive to issues of right and wrong. She weighs the various pieces of information she assembles from her library research along with conversations with people who know Perry, and she comes to a decision about Perry that is clear and correct. True intelligence, the play seems to suggest,  Atkinson, “The Egghead”; Kerr, “The Egghead.”  Hobe Morrison, “Shows on Broadway: ‘The Egghead,’” Variety, October 16, 1957, 83. 102  Kazan, Egghead, 27. 103  Kazan, Egghead, 19. 100 101

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does not belong to those who wield it like a weapon, but can be found among everyday people who possess common sense and deft observation. Lecklider sums up the play’s message, writing, “Though Kazan allowed eggheads some space within American political life, her characters ultimately suggested that intellect was the province of misguided radicals and was destructive to the project of American liberalism.”104 It should be pointed out, though, the play cannot be dismissed as purely anti-academic. The Egghead includes an anthropology professor, a Germanborn, Nazi-oppression survivor, Gottfried Roth. Roth is a well-­ liked teacher, and his elective is the most popular course. Unlike Hank, who has become stale in his teaching by telling “the same jokes”105 to his classes, Roth engages the students by assigning them to do active field work on campus. In sum, he is a college professor, but he is not a stereotypical egghead as devised by the rightwing politicians of the 1950s. Roth, however, is a former Communist, and he knows the deadly threat they pose. In the third act Sally asks Roth’s advice about what to do with the knowledge she has uncovered about Perry. “I told you. You have to expose him,” he tells her.106 Roth is, just as Elia Kazan saw himself to be when appearing before HUAC, the voice of truth, speaking out against those who are naïve and blind to their danger. The Egghead intimates that college campuses may be hotbeds of secretive Communists and those who would enable them, but there is hope for national security when there are reasonable and outspoken people to risk their careers and personal comforts. The Egghead, along with the other plays discussed in this chapter, may not warrant revival or continued stage life: They may be too dramaturgically and culturally out-of-sync with current tastes and social references. These works deserve acknowledgment, nevertheless, for putting the clash of academic liberalism and authoritarian overreach on stage. The collision simultaneously reveals the strains that resulted from the interconnected issues of masculinity, race, and brainpower that the orgy of investigations unleashed. The playwrights also show the at-times outlandish, at-times catastrophic, at-times inspiring, and at-times edge-of-one’s-seat effects of educators under ideological siege. The lesson all these plays emphasize is that in undermining democracy in education, it can—and did—happen here.

 Lecklider, Inventing the Egghead, 219.  Kazan, Egghead, 19. 106  Kazan, Egghead, 60. 104 105

CHAPTER 5

Crème de la Crème of Fascism: Miss Jean Brodie, Miss Margarida, and Sister Mary Ignatius Explain It All for You, 1960s–1980s

“Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.”1

Thus, Miss Jean Brodie welcomes her young students at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh, Scotland, of the early 1930s. Miss Brodie, as the audience is continually reminded, is (at nearly 40) in her “prime,” and she vows to dedicate her best years to her charges, “the crème de la crème.” She is an energetic and engaging teacher, and she regales her students with stories of summer trips to Italy, takes them to the opera, and tells her class in heartbreaking detail about her tragic romance during World War I.  Miss Brodie is also dangerously manipulative, prompting one girl to run away (and to her death) to fight in Franco’s army and another into the bed of the school’s married art teacher. Additionally, she has a penchant for fascism—Mussolini is her political hero—and she regards Hitler as a “prophet-like figure.”2 Jean Brodie in Jay Presson Allen’s 1966 play adaptation (and which served as the basis for her 1969 screenplay) of Muriel Spark’s 1961 novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, is as compelling and seductive as she is disturbing. Miss Brodie demonstrates the power charismatic school  Jay Presson Allen, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1966) (New York: Samuel French, 1969), 7. 2  Allen, 67. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. F. Wilson, Failure, Fascism, and Teachers in American Theatre, Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34013-0_5

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teachers have in molding young minds and the potential for abusing that power. Writing about the novel, Jo Keroes contends, “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie haunts our imaginations precisely because it’s about seduction and betrayal and as such reminds us that teaching itself can be about these things as well.”3 And as a stereotypical spinster teacher in her prime, the character embodies both sexual desire and destructive magnetism. Using methods of an autocrat, such as selecting members for an elite group, rewarding the most trustworthy girls, and disclosing the threats of those who are not part of the inner circle, Miss Brodie exhibits the intense influence educators have when students are at their most vulnerable and by extension the willing trust individuals place in a captivating leader. This chapter examines Miss Jean Brodie, alongside her theatrical cousins, Miss Margarida of Roberto Athayde’s Miss Margarida’s Way (1977) and Sister Mary Ignatius of Christopher Durang’s Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You (1979). In all instances, the teachers are domineering, enigmatic, and morally and/or physically dangerous. Sex, power, and hardline dogma infuse their pedagogy, and analyzed in the tandem, the characters reify cultural fears about the traumatic, and sometimes debilitating, impact teachers can have on their students. The plays premiered in an era in which progressive education was under political attack, and these works dramatize the incendiary disputes about proposed educational reform in the 1960s and 1970s. At a time in which teachers, schools, and educational curricula were subjects of political debates and were blamed for a host of international crises and declining social standards, Miss Brodie, Miss Margarida, and Sister Mary Ignatius reflected widespread anxieties about teachers as potential purveyors of despotism, repression, and moral corruption.

Progressive Attitudes and Mental Pablum The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie takes place in the 1930s and is based on Spark’s schoolgirl memories and her experiences with a particular teacher, but the argument of progressive versus traditional education was a large part of the national discourse in the 1960s when the novel, play, and film version all originally appeared. When the school’s headmistress, Mrs. Mackay, reminds Miss Brodie that Marcia Blaine is not “a progressive

3  Jo Keroes, “The Crime of Miss Jean Brodie,” Tales Out of School: Gender, Longing, and the Teacher in Fiction and Film (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 33.

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school” and does not “encourage the—uh—progressive attitudes,”4 the allusion would resonate on both sides of the Atlantic. In the 1960s the United States and the United Kingdom regarded education as an essential stronghold for retaining world standing amidst social and political upheaval. Progressive education, associated with John Dewey (1859–1952) in the United States and Alexander Sutherland Neill (1883–1973) in the United Kingdom, was, depending on where one stood on the traditionalist/progressivist divide, the root of national decline or the route to a better future. Central to the debate was the notion of freedom, specifically regarding individual liberties, curricular choice, and temporal and spatial restraints. In the play version of Miss Jean Brodie, Miss Brodie says she has been encouraged to take a job in a “crank school,”5 and the reference is most likely meant to suggest a progressive institution like Summerhill School. In 1960, A.S. Neill’s Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing was published in the United States and became an immediate bestseller. Across the country schools modeled on Summerhill emerged, and they were supported by the Summerhill Society based in New York City.6 Born and raised in Scotland, Neill taught in a number of schools before briefly pursuing journalism, and he returned to teaching in Dresden (where Summerhill originated). Neill founded Summerhill School in 1921, and the institution moved a few times before establishing a permanent home ninety miles northeast of London in Leiston, Suffolk. The guiding philosophy behind the school was and is “Freedom, not License,” whereby students are free to make their own decisions and do as they wish (providing they do not cause harm to others). The children and grown-ups have equal say in the running of the school, and students may choose to attend or not attend the lessons offered by the teachers. Having taught in traditional schools, Neill believed the restraints of sitting at desks, constrained by timed lessons and pursuing “mostly useless subjects” appealed to “those uncreative citizens who want docile, uncreative children who will fit into a civilization whose standard of success is money.”7 He stressed that  children would reach their full intellectual, creative, and vocational  Allen, 30.  Allen, 42. 6  Joan Cook, “New School Will Adapt Concepts of Summerhill,” New York Times, April 7, 1964. 7  A. S. Neill, “Summerhill School,” in Summerhill and A. S. Neill, edited by Mark Vaughan (New York: Open University Press and McGraw-Hill Education, 2006), 6. 4 5

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potential if they developed on their own without authoritarianism and without fear of adults. As a result, conventional philosophies and methodologies had no place in Summerhill. He wrote: Well, we set out to make a school in which we should allow children to be themselves. In order to do this, we had to renounce all discipline, all direction, all suggestion, all moral training, all religious instruction. We have been called brave, but it did not require courage. All it required was what we had—a complete belief in the child as a good, not an evil, being.8

Unsurprisingly, not everyone was a convert to Neill’s approach to education and the rise in progressive schooling and educational permissiveness. A superintendent visiting a Summerhill-like school, for instance, scoffed at the lack of order and rigor he noted among the teachers and pupils. In a report to the State Education Department, Henry G.  Paul stated he observed “children wandering around the place,” and he noticed in one room, “The teacher was sitting with her feet against the stove, reading from a book. The children were chewing bubble gum.”9 In the US of the early 1960s, the war over progressive education became national news with the election of the Los Angeles Schools superintendent. As many contemporary journalists and education advocates pointed out, the election of a superintendent, even in a large urban area, was rarely newsworthy and usually amounted to nothing more than a single name on the slate. In 1962 that all changed. The competing candidates were Max Rafferty, a right-wing proponent of an educational “return to fundamentals,” and Ralph Richardson, a liberal who endorsed team teaching, reduced class size, and increased technology as a pedagogical tool. At stake in the election was progressive versus traditional education. An article in the New York Times pointed out, “Although his name will not be on the November ballot, John Dewey has been projected prominently into the hottest school election battle in California history.”10 The battle had been brewing for some time, and many politicians and social commentators blamed the legacy of Dewey, Herbert Spencer, and Jean Piaget, the most famous names aligned with progressive education at the turn of  Neill, 6.  “School Where Pupils are on Own Is Ordered Shut Down by State,” New York Times, June 27, 1965. 10  Bill Becker, “2 Educators Face Coast Vote Fight: Rivals for School Chief Clash Over Progressive Theory,” New York Times, June 17, 1962. 8 9

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the twentieth century, for a decline in US education. Critics and nationalists went so far as to attribute the defeat in the space race with Russia and the launch of Sputnik to the schools, teachers, and administrators that adopted progressive methodologies.11 Congress responded to the Sputnik launch by passing the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), which intended to strengthen the teaching of science, math, and foreign languages.12 Rafferty’s campaign depicted teachers and their unions as national enemies, saying they “had absorbed Dewey’s theory ‘as though it were mother’s milk.’” Teachers were, in Rafferty’s view, playing a “game of blindman’s bluff with children’s lives” and destroying the fabric of the nation and creating a population of imbeciles.13 “By gravy,” he said, “it’s time to stop spoon-feeding our kids mental pablum.… It has gotten so bad that if you ask a boy about Charlemagne, he replies, ‘What channel is he on?’”14 Rafferty vowed to radically revise the K-12 curriculum, placing an emphasis on US history and instilling patriotism. Richardson, his opponent, became the symbol of the status quo (even though Richardson also said that major educational reform was necessary), but he got in a few digs of his own, describing Rafferty as “the finest mind of the twelfth century.”15 It did not matter. Rafferty won the election soundly and held two terms as superintendent before overreaching his political aspirations and losing to Alan Cranston for a position in the US Senate. John Dewey, who had died more than a decade before this battle over progressivism, was depicted as the culprit in the state of education affairs, and anti-progressivists charged him and his philosophies with the downfall of intelligence and patriotism. Deweyism by the 1960s was correlated with excessive freedom, lack of intellectual discipline, and curricula devoid of content. To be fair, Dewey championed the notions of democracy, experience, and teaching the “whole child,” but he also stressed the importance 11  See for instance, Norman Dale Norris, The Promise and Failure of Progressive Education (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Education, 2004), 50. 12  Diane Ravitch provides a comprehensive discussion of the effects the Sputnik launch had on educational reform in Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001). 13  Max Rafferty, “Suffer, Little Children,” The Phi Delta Kappan 38, no. 3 (December 1956), 92. 14  Quoted in Becker, “2 Educators.” 15  Quoted in Lawrence E.  Davis, “Californian Proposes to End ‘Dewey Philosophy’ in Schools,” New York Times, January 9, 1963.

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of intellectual rigor and students’ mastery of subject matter. Exercises in rote memory or the delivery of knowledge without context are not effective, Dewey stressed, compared with purposeful activities that engage the learner to connect the information to her or his experiences. As these theories of education dispersed from his experimental school in Chicago, they were diluted and transformed. Dewey himself was distressed by the ways in which progressive, “child-­ centered” approaches and democratic classrooms had been pushed to the extreme. Dewey did not mention Summerhill School by name (and Neill claimed to not have been influenced by Dewey’s extensive writing), but he was opposed to its underlying philosophy on principle. In Experience and Education, Dewey says, “Yet I am sure that you will appreciate what is meant when I say that many of the newer schools tend to make little or nothing of organized subject-matter of study; to proceed as if any form of direction and guidance by adults were an invasion of individual freedom, and as if the idea that education should be concerned with the present and past has little or no role to play in education.”16 The “freedom” Dewey imagined for the students is based on order and careful planning by the teacher to ensure each student’s capability to pursue learning and experiential education. Absolute freedom could be as harmful as authoritarian, teacher-centered approaches. “It is not too much to say,” Dewey contends, “that an educational philosophy which professes to be based on the idea of freedom may become as dogmatic as ever was the traditional education which is reacted against.”17 In the midst of the attacks on Dewey’s legacy and his acolytes, enter downstage far-right Miss Jean Brodie, who personifies progressive education critics’ dire warnings. As an ultimately politically, morally, and intellectually injurious teacher, Miss Brodie reflects the abuses (and misuses) of progressive education (as well as the worst traits of traditional education). Although the play is set in the 1930s, the issues are very much also of the 1960s. The London production of Jay Presson Allen’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, directed by Peter Wood and starring Vanessa Redgrave, opened in May 1966. The play was significantly rewritten before opening in January 1968 on Broadway, where it was directed by Michael Langham and starred Zoe Caldwell. Both the West End and Broadway productions 16  John Dewey, Experience and Education (1938) (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 22. 17  Dewey, 22.

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were hits (in London more so), and both received mixed reviews, though Redgrave and Caldwell received generally high praise across the board. There has not been a great deal written about the character in the original London and Broadway productions, but a fair amount has been written about the character in the film and novel, particularly in scholarly articles and chapters on topics such as Spark’s confounding omniscient narrative voice, the character’s dalliance with fascism, and Miss Brodie as a desiring/desired figure.18 As a proclaimed teacher, “first, last, always,” Miss Brodie thrives on being the center of attention, and so, on stage and in front of a live audience is her ideal place.

Leading out and Feeding in Redgrave and Caldwell made Miss Brodie spellbinding and seductive in different ways. Redgrave’s performance, for instance, was characterized by flightiness and eccentricity, and several critics described her “well-­ observed” mannerisms and comic awkwardness.19 Ronald Bryden of The Observer said she demonstrated herself to be the artistic progeny of famed nineteenth-century actress Ellen Terry by making the smallest moments transcendent: “She makes something ludicrously lovely of cracking a hard-­ boiled egg on the handle of a picnic basket.”20 Claudia Cassidy also praised the “chameleonic” physicality of Redgrave’s performance, describing a scene in the play in which she mentions taking the girls to see La Traviata. “Her jaw jutted a fraction and there was Joan Sutherland,” Cassidy wrote.21 Some of the critics indicated that these enchanting qualities in Redgrave’s performance made the second-act revelations of her dangerousness even more surprising and pitiful. This notion is conveyed by the 18   See, for example, Keroes, Tales Out of School; Mary M.  Dalton, The Hollywood Curriculum: Teachers in the Movies, Second Revised Edition (New York: Peter Lang, 2010); Judy Suh, “The Familiar Attractions of Fascism in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” Journal of Modern Literature 30, no. 2 (Winter 2007), 86–102; Patricia Duncker, “The Suggestive Spectacle: Queer Passions in Bronte’s Villette and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” Theorizing Muriel Spark: Gender, Race, Deconstruction, ed. Martin McQuillan (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 67–77; and Ann Ashworth, “The Betrayal of the Mentor in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 16, no. 1–2 (March 1995), 37–46. 19  Philip Hope-Wallace, “‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie at Wyndham’s,” The Guardian, May 6, 1966. 20  Ronald Bryden, “Winsomeness Triumphant,” The Observer, May 8, 1966. 21  Claudia Cassidy, “Zoe Caldwell’s Potent Miss Brodie in New York’s Broader than the Redgrave in London Style,” Chicago Tribune, March 25, 1968.

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Variety critic’s summing up of her performances as: “Miss Redgrave, wearing a severe wig and drab clothes, and using a Scot accent, turns herself into a gawky, frustrated, ridiculous and yet pathetic eccentric.”22 Redgrave stayed with the production for about six months before going to Hollywood to film Camelot with Richard Harris and Franco Nero.23 Anna Massey replaced her, and Elizabeth Sellars closed the play in late 1967. Whereas Redgrave’s Brodie was tall (about six feet), gangly, and with an ethereal quality, Caldwell’s was small (just over five feet), imperious, and a force of nature. Clive Barnes described Caldwell as a “braw, splendid lass,” and Richard P. Cooke said, “She so dominates the stage that it may almost be said there isn’t too much room for the play.”24 Several critics mentioned the simmering sexuality Caldwell exuded, including Richard L. Coe, who wrote, “She has found a parched, breathless voice which suggests sexual repressions. Her shoes seem to have grown out of her feet, pointed but sensible. Her walk is a sort of controlled lope.”25 Urjo Kareda described the near rapturous response Caldwell received in an era in which standing ovations were not de rigueur: “The audience was hypnotized; Miss Caldwell stopped the show on several occasions, drew applause on virtually every exit, and, at the end (surprising at any time on Bro[a]dway, and amazing for a preview audience), she received a wild, cheering ovation.”26 Caldwell stayed with the show for its nearly year-long run (379 performances) on Broadway. A little over two months after the Broadway production closed, the film version with Maggie Smith in an Oscar-­ winning performance was released in the United Kingdom and then the United States (Fig. 5.1). Despite the bravura performances in London and New York, most of the critics were of divided sentiments regarding the play. Some faulted the framing device in which Sandy, Miss Brodie’s star-pupil turned “assassin,” and now a Catholic nun, is interviewed by a journalist. Others found the episodic structure diffuse and thought the playwright did not sufficiently  Rich., “Shows Abroad: ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,’” Variety, May 18, 1966.  David M. Culhane, “Fleet Street Window: Vanessa Redgrave Is Primed for Stardom,” The Sun, June 12, 1966. 24  Clive Barnes, “Teacher’s Tale: Miss Jean Brodie at the Helen Hayes,” New York Times, January 17, 1968; Richard P. Cooke, “The Theater: An Apple for the Teacher,” Wall Street Journal, January 18, 1968. 25  Richard L.  Coe, “Zoe Caldwell in her Prime: What an Actress and What a Part!,” Washington Post, March 3, 1968. 26  Urjo Kareda, “Zoe Caldwell is Superb,” Globe and Mail, January 15, 1968. 22 23

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Fig. 5.1  Amy Taubin, Kathryn Baumann, Zoe Caldwell, and Joseph Maher in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1968). (Photo by Friedman-Abeles. © The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts)

prepare the audience for the scenes depicting  sexual manipulation and the championing of fascism in the second act. The play did, however, provoke responses in terms of the cult of the teacher motif, or the influence charismatic teachers have on their students. In his New York Times review, Clive Barnes identified the “two themes” of the play as “the folly of the romantic imagination and the imprint made upon a child’s character by an inspired teacher.”27 As an essential element of the cult of the teacher, the teacher’s personality, compelling energy, and emotional stimulation are memorialized and psychically inscribed. Writing about Miss Brodie of Spark’s novel, Keroes reasons the character “appeals to a popular belief 27  Clive Barnes, “Teacher’s Tale: Miss Jean Brodie at the Helen Hayes,” New York Times, January 17, 1968.

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that the truly memorable teacher is the one who cultivates our individuality and helps us to discover our truest, best, and most original selves, especially as she explicitly sets herself in opposition to the notion of the teacher as one who merely imparts information.”28 Miss Brodie, both as a character and as embodied by Redgrave and Caldwell, epitomizes the cult of the teacher motif. She also reflects the tension between progressive education’s philosophy of individualized and experiential learning and traditional education’s focus on the transmission of facts, skills, and socially accepted morals. The pull of progressive versus traditional education is best exemplified in the conversations between Miss Brodie and Headmistress Mackay and present a cautionary tale of the effects of progressive education gone awry. This argument is clearly illustrated near the end of the first act when Miss Mackay has summoned Miss Brodie to her office. The headmistress is distressed over the following observations: one of the students sobbed over a history lesson (in which the class was actually being regaled with the story of Miss Brodie’s fallen lover on Flanders’ Field); the students’ reenactment of the tubercular death scene from La Traviata (instead of “breathing deeply” out on the hockey field); and students have been observed counting on their fingers when doing multiplication problems. Miss Brodie has also made regular excursions with the girls to Cramond, where the music teacher Mr. Lowther has a home, for the sole purpose (she tells Miss Mackay) of providing opportunities for experiential learning. When Miss Mackay insinuates that visits to Mr. Lowther’s home are unseemly, Miss Brodie responds with a very Dewey-like justification: Miss Mackay, I use Cramond. As I use anything tha[t] can possibly be of benefit to my girls. I use the woods of Cramond for lessons in botany…the rocks of the shore to investigate the mysteries of geology… It should be patently clear to the Board of Governors that my expeditions there are expeditions for enrichment—enrichment both for my girls and for Marcia Blaine.29

Miss Mackay is not impressed with such methods, and she advocates more conventional approaches such as stressing “hard knowledge” and deemphasizing “culture,” including art, music, and literature. These

 Keroes, “Crime of Miss Jean Brodie,” 36.  Allen, 32.

28 29

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opposing philosophies are specifically articulated by both women as they reference conflicting etymologies of the word “education.” Brodie:

To me education is a leading out. The word education comes from the root “ex” meaning “out” and “duco,” “I lead.” To me, education is simply a leading out of what is already there. Mackay: (Dryly.) I had hoped there might also be a certain amount of putting in. Brodie: (Bravely, foolishly, plunging on.) That would not be education but intrusion. From the root prefix “in” and the stem “trudo,” “I thrust.” Ergo to thrust a lot of information into a pupil’s head.30 When Miss Brodie leaves the room, feeling as if she has trumped the headmistress, Miss Mackay opens her own dictionary. Mackay: “Educere, to lead. Educari, to feed.” Ergo, Miss Brodie, to educate does not mean to lead out—it means to feed—to feed in. (Snaps book shut.) It would seem that your Latin is as “progressive” as your mathematics. Now just what is your subject, Miss Brodie?31

Of course, the audience already knows the answer to Miss Mackay’s rhetorical question: Miss Brodie’s subject is Miss Brodie. Deriding expressions of conformity, such as “team spirit” and “corps de ballet,” Miss Brodie emboldens her girls to embrace notions of romantic individualism and defy the “status quo.”32 Yet, contrary to the philosophy of education she expounds for Miss Mackay, and regardless of her counsel to pursue individualism, she “thrusts a great deal of information” into her students’ minds and strives to mold them into versions of herself. This is evident in her initial introduction to her students: Brodie:

 Allen, 30.  Allen, 32. 32  Allen, 10. 30 31

Little girls. I am in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders, and all my pupils are the crème de la crème. Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life. You girls are my vocation. If I were to receive a proposal

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of marriage tomorrow from the Lord Lyon King-of-Arms, I would decline it. I am dedicated to you in my prime. And my summer in Italy has convinced me that I am truly in my prime. Prop up your books in case of intruders…if there are intruders, we are doing our history. But we will not do our history, rather I want to tell you of my summer and the man I met in the Borghese gardens and of the paintings I saw. Can anyone tell me who is the greatest Italian painter? Little Girl: Leonardo da Vinci, Miss Brodie. Brodie: That is incorrect. The answer is Giotto; he is my favorite.33 The play also ends with Miss Brodie’s “mine-for-life” credo. During the final fade-out, the specter of Miss Brodie (a disembodied voice) repeats the first three sentences as if to reenforce her domination over Sister Helena/ Sandy, Miss Brodie’s trusted informant. The final words of the play, “Mine for life,” on first hearing may be taken as an exciting opportunity for the young charges, but at the end they are portentous and prophetic. Miss Brodie’s approach is the antithesis of progressive education in her didacticism and dogmatism; hers is the quintessence of teacher-centered pedagogy in which her own opinion is presented as factual information. Adversely, her methods cannot be classified by traditional education principles as she eschews the standard curriculum, and she rejects conventional textbooks. Relying on her own personal appeal, she is purely method and charisma without an underlying (coherent) teaching philosophy. She represents the cult of the teacher without educational training; she is an endearing and egotistical autocrat with a muddled political message. The play suggests that Miss Brodie’s real danger stems not from her political beliefs but her sexual power, and this is why she must be destroyed. Citing Jane Gallop, who has written extensively about teaching as a form of pederasty in which the teacher phallically inserts knowledge into the student, Keroes explains Miss Brodie exposes the uncomfortable connections between erotics and teaching. In sharing her own romantic adventures, she demonstrates mastery of her own desires. In bestowing the gift of her “prime” to her selected set and swearing absolute devotion to the girls, she masters their desires and can manipulate them at will. Indeed, Miss Brodie is both sexual object and messianic prophet. Miss  Allen, 7–8.

33

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Brodie’s subversiveness evolves from her resistance to accusations about her sexual power. She is, however, ultimately defeated not for her sexual manipulations but for her “side interest” in politics and for being “a born Fascist.”34 Sex and power are often aligned, however, and theatre critic Emily Genauer suggests that Miss Brodie’s obsession with control stems from her own failures as a woman. She pondered, “Did [Miss Brodie’s malevolence] grow out of a spinster’s sexual frustration? But Miss Brodie is in the midst of an affair with the school’s music teacher desperately eager to marry her. Has she been poisoned by her hopeless earlier love for the school’s married art teacher? But they’ve had a brief affair, too.”35 In the end Miss Brodie is essentially unknowable, but as Keroes says, her disgrace is inevitable. She must be “brought down”; Keroes maintains, “Miss Brodie represents the danger of an autocratic, beguiling female figure assuming a certain kind of authority over her pupils. She entices for precisely the same reason she unnerves: because she is dangerous, a woman who takes advantage of and constantly threatens to make overt the erotic nature of the teacher-pupil encounter.”36 The play concludes with her dismissal amidst the backdrop of news that Mr. Lowther has been rescued from Miss Brodie’s grip: he is engaged to the chemistry teacher, Miss Lockhart. As some of the critics indicated, the script produced in London was significantly revised for the New  York opening. The biggest difference between the two is the play’s ending. In the London version Sister Helena (née Sandy) tells the journalist that upon her dismissal Miss Brodie committed suicide by riding her bicycle into a pond. In the New York production her fate upon dismissal is not explained. (In the novel, Miss Brodie dies a few years after her forced retirement, never quite certain of the student who had betrayed her.) Critics who had seen (or were aware of both versions of the play) were taken aback by the rewrite, claiming that by minimizing Miss Brodie’s infatuation with Mussolini and eliminating the suicide reference, the script had been watered down for New  York audiences. Clive Barnes described the change in the ending as an act of “cowardice.” Director Michael Langham publicly defended the changes and renounced Barnes’s allegation. In a letter to the Times he stated the  Allen, 79.  Emily Genauer, “‘Jean Brodie’: Spinster with an Iron Spine,” Los Angeles Times, February 11, 1968. 36  Keroes, “Tales Out of School,” 37–38. 34 35

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revision was intended to make the play more successfully capture the novel’s essence. The rewrite was not made, he protested, in a cynical effort to make the play more commercially successful. Langham wrote, “After seeing the production in London, it was the opinion of the playwright that this incident (which does not occur in Muriel Spark’s novel) was not only tasteless but out of key with the style of the work. The producer and I fully agreed with this. Indeed our intention with the Broadway production has been to capture rather more of the spirit and style of Spark than was evident in the London version. Whether we have succeeded is for the Spark aficionados to decide.”37 Langham’s justification aside, the uproar over the ending raises interesting questions. Why would critics find it preferable for Miss Brodie to commit suicide? Does the death of Miss Brodie seem a more fitting punishment than a merely disgraced teacher? She has, after all, championed fascism and induced one student’s death. Or is it that suicide is the more merciful outcome for Miss Brodie, who is a spinster and now past her prime? Her chance at domestic happiness seems to evaporate when Lowther is engaged with the chemistry teacher. Perhaps her suicide is the fittingly ultimate act of a classically tragic and romantic heroine as Miss Brodie fashions herself to be? One of Miss Brodie’s favorite poems is Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott.” The ballad ends with the Lady of Shalott, “who hath no loyal knight,”38 willfully confronting the curse that has made her eternally lonely and which leads to her death. The literary parallel seems appropriate for a teacher who believes “the real foundation is the Humanities” and strives to “train [the girls] for heroic action.”39 Or is it possible that as a single woman in her prime and an unambiguous sexual subject and object, Miss Brodie has committed the vilest educational taboo? For all of these reasons, it would seem to contemporary critics, death is the most appropriate and most satisfying dramaturgical conclusion for such a character.

37  Michael Langham, “Drama Mailbag: Miss Brodie’s Prime,” New York Times, February 18, 1968. 38  Lord Alfred Tennyson, “The Lady of Shallot,” line 62. Poem reprinted in QuillerCouch, Arthur Thomas, Sir. The Oxford Book of English Verse. Oxford: Clarendon, 1919, (c1901); Bartleby.com, 1999. www.bartleby.com/101/. Accessed August 22, 2015. 39  Allen, 27.

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Everyone Wants to Be Miss Margarida As far as fascist teachers are concerned, Miss Jean Brodie is a pussycat compared with Miss Margarida, the volatile, bullying, and sex-taunting eighth-grade teacher of Roberto Athayde’s Miss Margarida’s Way. While Miss Brodie’s credo is “Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life,” Miss Margarida promises (and demands) similar control of her students and their learning. As she tells her class, “What would be the good of Miss Margarida’s authority over you if she couldn’t modify your minds? Miss Margarida molds you. When Miss Margarida says you must do something it means that you just have to do it. You must obey willy-­ nilly. Whether you like it or not.”40 Whereas Miss Brodie is genteel and elevates her students, referring to them as the crème de la crème, Miss Margarida is crass and denigrates her pupils. In a moment (and there are many) of rage, she hurls invective at the class for presumably having “bad thoughts” about her and not having the courage to share these to her face: A bunch of cowards, that’s what you are! Go ahead, say it right to my face! You are all full of shit! Who’s gonna be first to step forward and say something? You faggots! You morons! I’ll kick your stinking balls in! Who’s gonna come up here? You’re gonna say Miss Margarida is a ballbuster, aren’t you? (Quite beside herself, screaming.) I am a fucking ballbuster! And you are all pederasts and bums! You want to say Miss Margarida is a crazy cunt, I know it! Then, fuck you! (Running hysterically about the stage.) I’m a desperate cunt! I’m gonna castrate all of you. I’ll cut off your balls and throw them in the river! What do you take me for? A good-for-nothing? A fuckedup whore? A shit-head that everyone pushes around? (Crying.) You’re ­ gonna treat me very well! You’re gonna respect me as I respect you!41

As with Miss Brodie, assassination seems to be the only recourse in removing Miss Margarida from her position of power. In fact, Miss Margarida’s Way has been described as a political allegory about totalitarianism, but the play, like Miss Jean Brodie, also highlights the connections among pedagogy, power, and sexual domination. Athayde’s play interrogates these junctures, urging the audience to consider the means in which systems of

40  Roberto Athayde, Miss Margarida’s Way: Tragicomic Monologue for an Impetuous Woman. (New York: Samuel French, 1977), 41. 41  Athayde, 26.

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political and pedagogical oppression are sanctioned, perpetuated, and maintained. Brazilian playwright Athayde was only 21 when he wrote Apareceu a Margarida, which received its first production in Rio de Janeiro in September 1973. Opening during the period of dictatorship under Brazil’s military government, the play starred the country’s best-known actress Marília Pêra and was directed by Aderbal Freire-Filho. After just a few performances the play was banned by the authorities, who had apparently received complaints from several generals’ wives about the thinly veiled references to life under the dictatorship. There were some vociferous public protests, and performances resumed a week later with a cleaned-up version of the play. Ariel Dorfman states, “Many of the obscenities had been excised along with an unmistakable reference by the crazed schoolteacher to the fact that the students she had sent to the Principal’s office ‘never came back’—in other words, were tortured and executed.”42 Athayde put the offensive material back in and slightly reshaped the monologue (with its new title Miss Margarida’s Way) for its US debut in March 1977 at San Francisco’s ACT theatre. This production starred Michael Learned, who as Olivia Walton was a beloved television mom on The Waltons and surprised some with her performance “in which she bared her legs and cursed a lot.”43 As the play readied for its New  York opening, Athayde worked closely with American actress Estelle Parsons, who had previously won an Oscar for her performance in Bonnie and Clyde (1967). In a production directed by Athayde, Miss Margarida’s Way opened Off Broadway at the Public Theater in July 1977 and quickly moved to Broadway’s Ambassador Theatre in September of the same year. The play ran 98 performances, and Parsons received a Tony nomination for her performance. Parsons has become closely associated with the part of Miss Margarida having toured extensively throughout the United States and in London. In 1990, she revived the play on Broadway, where it ran a disappointing three weeks. The play has also had a robust life on stage with productions in more than 30 countries across the globe. For instance,

42  Ariel Dorfman, “Can a Dictator Tell Us Something About Ourselves?,” New York Times, February 25, 1990. 43  Nancy Faber, “What Would Mama Walton Say? Michael Loves a Taxi-driving Man, Will Parker,” People, July 11, 1977, 81.

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Edwin Wilson mentions a European production in which “Miss Margarida was dressed to resemble a Nazi storm trooper.”44 The central conceit of the play is that the audience performs Miss Margarida’s class of eighth graders, so she interacts with the spectators directly. There is, however, one plant, an actor who assumes the role of a student and who goes onstage (i.e., the front of the classroom) several times to receive her verbal abuse, for example, and to perform CPR when she collapses near the end of the play. As many accounts indicate, audience members have often taken their roles very seriously by shouting back, throwing paper airplanes, and being generally unruly. New York Times reporter Grace Lichtenstein recounted, “One night, all the erasers and chalk disappeared from the blackboard during the break. Later, a conservative couple came up to Miss Parsons and confessed they were the ones who had hidden them. Then they confessed that in real life, they were teachers.”45 Dan Sullivan described a performance in which three young women, “snapping their gum,” went onstage to confront Miss Margarida. After some moments of uncomfortable silence, Miss Margarida told the girls to write their names on the blackboard, and as they did, she shouted, “I said write not print!” Sullivan said the girls were not prepared for the response, and further, “They didn’t expect her to push the gum in once she snatched it out.” Miss Margarida sent the humiliated girls back to their seats, scoffing, “What are you? Transfer students from New Jersey?”46 Parsons later admitted that sometimes individuals got carried away and interfered with her ability to get through the text (Fig.  5.2). In those cases, she escorted the “bad pupils” to the “principal’s office.” In reality she led the miscreants to the house manager, “who may or may not refund their money”47 Parsons received nearly across-the-board favorable reviews wherever she performed the play. “Tour de force,” “extraordinary,” and “a triumph of concentration” were some of the ways in which critics praised her

44  Edwin Wilson, “Of Art, Politics and Eighth-Graders,” Wall Street Journal, September 30, 1977. 45  Grace Lichtenstein, “How to Act When It’s the Audience That Does the Ad-Libbing,” New York Times, September 11, 1977. 46  Dan Sullivan, “‘Margarida’: Class Clown,” Los Angeles Times, November 16, 1977. 47  Phyllis Funke, “Teaching—And Learning—From ‘Margarida’s Way,’” Los Angeles Times, October 28, 1979.

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Fig. 5.2  Estelle Parsons in the 1990 revival of Miss Margarida’s Way (1977). (Photo by Martha Swope. © The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts)

performance.48 The play itself, on the other hand, has not received as much acclaim. Many critics have found the play repetitive through its recycling of Miss Margarida’s tirades and aborted lessons, including biology, history, and math, and they bemoan the lack of character development. The play also has been criticized for using the hoary interactive device, which by the mid-1970s had been worked to the point of near cliché. Looking at the play alongside participatory theatre so prevalent in the 1960s with, to name some of the pioneers, Judith Malina and Julian Beck’s Living Theater, Richard Schechner’s Performance Group, and Allan Kaprow’s Happenings, Allan Wallach said the form had worn out its welcome by 1977 and did not help in illuminating Athayde’s themes. He wrote, “Audience participation too often means audience antics. ‘Miss Margarida’s Way’ draws a spurious excitement from the device, but it’s 48  Walter Kerr, “An Audience of Pupils Learns Some Ugly Lessons,” The Sun, August 7, 1977; Richard Eder, “‘Margarida’ Explores Power,” New York Times, September 28, 1977; John Beaufort, “A Classroom the PTA Never Dreamed Of,” Christian Science Monitor, August 8, 1977.

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essentially a slight play that doesn’t succeed as allegory. I can’t think of any play utilizing such participation that stands firmly on its own merits. And I can’t think of any play of real merit that needed the active help of the audience.”49 The play is, for the purposes of this chapter, especially notable in the ways in which it dramatically manifests ideas about education and social change. If Dewey is considered the prophet of education philosophy of the first half of the twentieth century, Paulo Freire (1921–1997) assumed the mantel in the second half.50 Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) remains one of the most significant books on education, and his theories and methodologies have been adapted by both educational practitioners and theatre activists. Most distinctly, Augusto Boal (1931–2009), who was a fellow Brazilian and friend of Freire, built on the ideas of social revolution and political transformation through critical engagement and reflection. Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (1973) is as significant to acting programs and applied drama workshops as Freire’s work is to critical pedagogy. Although Athayde has not publicly stated (as far as I know) the influence his national compatriots have had on his work, Miss Margarida’s Way incorporates, embodies, and parodies many of Freire’s and Boal’s ideas around systems of oppression and the possibilities for liberation as a result of communication, consciousness-raising, and role-playing. Central to Freire’s critique of education is his discussion of the banking concept as an essential element of institutionalized oppression. Under this system, students are treated as empty “receptacles,” and the teacher fills them with information and viewpoints. Therefore, students are passive learners, and their ideas of the world are shaped and molded by the knowledge the teacher makes them “receive, memorize, and repeat.”51 In other words, students are discouraged from (and even disciplined for) thinking on their own, and within this system, there are no opportunities for inquiry, reflection, and independent learning. Freire enumerates the essential characteristics of the teacher/student relationship in, what he calls, “banking education”:  Allan Wallach, “Getting Too Involved in Theater,” Newsday, October 23, 1977.  For a comparison of Dewey and Freire, see Joseph Betz, “John Dewey and Paulo Freire,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 28, no. 1 (Winter 1992), 107–126. Freire was familiar with Dewey’s educational philosophies having studied them as a graduate student in education and during his time in the United States. 51  Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) (New York: Continuum, 2000), 72. 49 50

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(a) the teacher teaches and the students are taught; (b) the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing; (c) the teacher thinks and the students are thought about; (d) the teacher talks and the students listen—meekly; (e) the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined; (f) the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply; (g) the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher; (h) the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it; (i) the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students; (j) the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects.52 The result of banking education is a society of dehumanized people, whose individuality is stifled and their social consciousness repressed. Miss Margarida pushes each one of these dictates to the extreme, many in exaggeratedly comic ways. At one point she upturns student-centered learning theories by describing a method (called, in German gibberish, “Hamburger-Sudamerikanisches Dampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft”) she has created, which is based on a philosophy whereby, “one should learn for the sake of teaching and teach for the sake of learning.”53 Her pupils are “good-for-nothings,” and when she asks if anyone knows what a “microbe” is, she immediately answers her own question, “Of course you wouldn’t.”54 She also makes it clear nearly from the start that the students/audience members have no agency in their educational development and knowledge acquisition. When the class turns to biology, Miss Margarida reminds them/us that not only does she control what is learned, she also controls the class’s erotic desires. At the mention of the lesson’s shift to biology, for example, Miss Margarida presumes her students are only interested in learning about anatomy and sexuality. She says such things are not part of the eighth-­grade curriculum and are not taught until the twelfth grade. Of course, as the purveyor and subject itself (to riff on Freire) of the lesson  Freire, 73.  Athayde, 31. 54  Athayde, 19. 52 53

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material, Miss Margarida sadistically taunts the class with sexual possibilities and then forestalls such prospects. She says, “If you think Miss Margarida is about to teach you how to fornicate, you are totally mistaken. Nothing of the sort!”55 Much later, Miss Margarida suggests that if the class works hard, she might offer a lesson in sex education after all. She teases, “Miss Margarida could perhaps open up her blouse just a little bit and show her tits to you. Just think about that! Miss Margarida could pull her skirt up just a tiny bit for you.”56 The principal has expressly forbidden her from bearing her breasts to the eighth graders, but this does not seem to matter. Miss Margarida uses sexual manipulation as a tool for complete control, and in her world everyone desires and “wants to be Miss Margarida.”57 As with other spinster stage teachers, Miss Margarida is especially dangerous because she represents a supposedly abnormal sexual being. As a deviant figure—one who does not conform to cultural gender and sexual roles—she poses a threat to hetero-masculine order. She revels in her sexual supremacy, and this “fact” becomes a lesson to be learned. For instance, she says that as a bunch of “queers,” the eighth-graders (with girls students made invisible)/spectators are powerless: “You are a bunch of fairies! This classroom is filled up with queers! Help, queers all over the place! The whole world’s full of queers! (Pause; didactic.) There are only two kinds of men: the homosexuals and the faggots. I’m going to write it on the greenboard so that you memorize it.”58 Powerlessness is a central lesson, and in Miss Margarida’s world, fascism and sexual domination are intertwined. Revolution without manhood seems all but impossible, and the act of writing the failure of male heterosexuality on the board is a form of castration through pedagogy. As Freire explains, the system of oppression in which Miss Margarida reigns is cyclical, and he would surely argue that Miss Margarida is also a victim of this oppression. She herself was taught by a Miss Margarida (quite literally), her “alter ego,” who provided a model for imparting information, conducting a class, and occasionally inflicting violence on students (e.g., Miss Margarida’s Miss Margarida hit a student “in the

 Athayde, 15.  Athayde, 44. 57  Athayde, 18. 58  Athayde, 24. 55 56

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wrong place,” and he became sterile59). Freire says that through “cooperation,” “action,” and “dialogue” (three methods, which are, to Miss Margarida, not nearly as important as “theory,” which she imposes on her students to maintain the status quo60), the cycle can be broken and revolution can be waged. Revolution and liberation can only be achieved, according to Freire, if the oppressed see the vulnerabilities of their oppressors and recognize them as pervious to defeat. Additionally, the oppressor “must ‘die,’ in order to be reborn through and with the oppressed.”61 The play hints at the possibility of liberation, but in the end it is foiled. In a fit of rage Miss Margarida has a stroke, and she collapses. The student plant goes onstage and “feeling sorry” for his teacher, he erotically and lovingly massages her chest to resuscitate her. Miss Margarida revives, but she is transformed, appearing “pathetic” and “sincere.” She reassures the class/ audience not to worry because “Miss Margarida is not going to die. Miss Margarida will always be with you. Miss Margarida will never stop teaching you. Today it’s you. Tomorrow it will be your children. And afterward the children of your children. Miss Margarida always will be here.”62 Miss Margarida exits, and the final stage directions63 state that after a pause the student plant goes to her desk and rummages through her purse. He pulls out pieces of candy, then a gun, which he lays on the desktop, and eats some of the candy. He goes back to his desk, and the class concludes with the assumption that Miss Margarida will be back to teach another lesson, another day, and another group of students. The explicit references to Freire are clear in Athayde’s text, and it is tempting to also consider the play’s dramaturgical conceit through the work of Boal. Exiled to Argentina for five years during the period of the Brazilian military dictatorship, Boal is known for his prolific work on interactive theatre practices, and some critics were quick to find parallels to his work in assigning the audience the roles of the eighth-grade students. As Los Angeles Times writer Felicia Funke explained, “This particular type of audience involvement is similar to theatre designed for Latin-American  Athayde, 30.  Athayde, 28. 61  Freire, 133. 62  Athayde, 58. 63  In “Language an Power in Miss Margarida’s Way and The Lesson” (Latin American Literary Review 14, no. 27 [1986]), Vicky Unruh says the performances directed by Athayde in the United States ended at Miss Margarida’s exit and did not include the final bit with the student plant. The summarized stage directions appear in Miss Margarida’s Way, 58–59. 59 60

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peasants as outlined in Augusto Boal’s book ‘Theater of the Oppressed.’ Boal espouses the stage as a laboratory wherein a proletarian audience can practice and experience hostile and/or aggressive acts.”64 In many ways Funke’s analogy is correct. As the butts of Miss Margarida’s verbal abuse, the audience members, albeit in the safety of a theatre and with the knowledge they are part of a performance, may get a visceral sense of the system of oppression imposed by tyrannical teachers and dictatorial leaders. Nevertheless, the play, as written and as staged by Athayde, does not have all that much in common with Boal’s emphasis on activist theatre. Indeed, Boal’s range of theatre exercises were intended to foster awareness of the systems of oppression Freire enumerates, but they were also devised as tools for disrupting the cycle. In fact, just as Pedagogy of the Oppressed provides guidelines for achieving freedom through dialogic education, Theatre of the Oppressed may be viewed as a treatise and practical sourcebook on the ways in which theatre might become a rehearsal for revolution, and interactive performance techniques enable individuals to enact liberation. As a result, eliminating the distinctions between spectator and actor—creating a spectactor in Boalian terms—an audience member is both the subject and the creator of the drama. As Boal explains, this theatre experiences “focuses on the action itself: the spectator delegates no power to the character (or actor) either to act or to think in his place; on the contrary, he himself assumes the protagonic role, changes the dramatic action, tries out solutions, discusses plans for change—in short, trains himself for real action.”65 Miss Margarida’s Way prompts limited audience participation, but audience members are not spectactors to the extent the script and ending may be altered. Even the appearance of the gun with no Miss Margarida to use it on in the final moments may indicate powerlessness in the ongoing struggle for autonomy. Of course, one needs to remember the play was originally produced in a political environment in which it was potentially dangerous to provoke an audience to think about the possibility of liberation, let alone act on the opportunity. The Brazilian military dictatorship would surely have demanded more than censorship of language and metaphorical allusions to secret corporal discipline if such a public performance were offered. The exigency of social and political transformation occurs at the reflective  Funke, “Teaching—And Learning—From ‘Margarida’s Way.’”  Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed (1974), translated by Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985), 122. 64 65

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level, and action may follow. In fact, Estelle Parsons suggests the play works more effectively as a political statement if audience participation is kept to a minimum. She said, “The fact is that the text functions best when no one takes part. It’s more chilling when the audience is passive, when you don’t know what it’s planning. In the face of this bottled-up hostility, it is clear to see that the leader is destroying herself, that at the core of totalitarianism lie the seeds of destruction for the leader.”66 The outcome, therefore, may be closer to Bertolt Brecht than Boal. The audience members/eighth graders, bereft of teacher and sitting in the shared light of the auditorium/classroom, are left to consider the possibilities of an altered world. The play ends with questions and conceivably should rouse critical introspection about what it means to live and learn under Miss Margarida’s control. Should they use the gun? Should they eat the candy? Or should they sit and wait for further instruction in Miss Margarida’s way?

Roman Catholic Fascism Miss Margarida may be a pistol-packing schoolmarm, but in her two-hour class (including a short “recess”) she does not in fact turn her gun on the students. Sister Mary Ignatius, the Catholic elementary school nun of Christopher Durang’s Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, on the other hand, conceals a pistol in her habit and employs it twice to fatal effect: first, in self-defense when an embittered former student pulls a gun on her and then for soul-defense when she intends to assure a gay former student a place in heaven. Make no mistake, this sister has no mercy when it comes to sin and sloppy catechism. Just as Miss Brodie and Miss Margarida use their educational position to shape and forge the morality and viewpoints of subsequent generations through the knowledge and ideas they deposit into their students’ heads, Sister Mary Ignatius is similarly single-minded. Connecting the characters from Durang’s and Presson Allen’s plays, Kevin Kelly writes, Sister Mary Ignatius is “an obsessed and dangerous fanatic, Miss Jean Brodie prattling Roman Catholic Fascism, and meaning every blast-blest word. She’s dangerous because she’s a teacher, an educator, a molder of the young whom she holds in a tight and sweaty grasp. The grasp—clutching hidden cookies—opens now and then to reward a pupil when he parses the proper catechetical responses to her

 Funke, “Teaching—And Learning—From ‘Margarida’s Way.’”

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questions.”67 One could say the pedagogical approach at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow, where Sister Mary Ignatius teaches, is the exact inverse of A.S.  Neill’s at Summerhill. Discipline, direction, moral training, and especially religious instruction are the guiding and supreme tenets in her parochial education. When Sister Mary Ignatius opened as part of a one-act play series in December 1979 and then in a program showcasing two one-acts (the other being The Actor’s Nightmare) by Durang in October 1981 (first in a limited run produced by Playwrights Horizons and then in an open run at the Westside Arts Theatre), the critics were in general very amused by this no-holds-barred comedy. Frank Rich said it was Durang’s “most consistently clever and deeply felt work” to date, stating the play “has the sting of revenge drama, even as it rides the wave of demonic laughter.”68 The play ran for more than two years Off Broadway, was produced in over 100 regional and community theatres across the country, and Showtime made a film of it, titled Sister Mary Explains It All, in 2001. Its incredible success notwithstanding, the play proved to be a flashpoint in many communities as some people considered it an all-out attack on Catholicism. Early in its initial run, several chapters of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights vociferously opposed the production, objecting to the fact that the play’s producer, Playwrights Horizons, was a recipient of (minimal) public funds. The president of the Long Island chapter argued, “There’s a peculiar double standard that is applied to matters Catholic. There is no question about whether a musical comedy about the Holocaust or the Ku Klux Klan would receive government funding…. The public funding of this vile, anti-Catholic play is an affront to the Catholic community in New  York State and the Legislature should act now to prevent it from happening again.”69 The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith (ADL) voiced its support for the Catholic League’s renunciation of the play, stating, “The ADL finds the play offensive, demeaning and misrepresentative of the Catholic faith and of those who believe and practice it.”70 The play was met with protests when it opened in Detroit, Chicago, and Boston. In a city known for its large Catholic population,  Kevin Kelly, “Fine Satire—but Poor Melodrama,” Boston Globe, November 14, 1981.  Frank Rich, “One-Acters by Durang,” New York Times, October 22, 1981. 69  William F.  Lindner, “Letters: No Tax Money for Bigotry,” Newsday, September 11, 1983. 70  “Play Mocking Catholicism is Condemned by ADL,” Jewish Advocate, September 13, 1984. 67 68

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the Boston mayor described the play as a “cruel and bigoted stereotype” and one that “ridicules Catholic beliefs, practices and institutions.”71 The play created a state-wide firestorm when it was produced in St. Louis. The Theater Project Company of St. Louis had announced their intent to do the play in late 1982, and the local archdiocese and the Catholic League publicly objected to its production, which was partially funded by the government-sponsored National Endowment for the Arts and the State’s Missouri Arts Council. The company’s theatre host, the Gateway Hotel, cancelled Sister Mary Ignatius as well as the rest of the season when confronted with the hullabaloo. Protests raged on both sides of the issue (spurred on, no doubt, by Phil Donahue’s dedication of a one-­ hour segment about the debate on his daily afternoon talk show), and Washington University in St. Louis stepped up to offer the production a space and the resources to perform the play as planned. The entire 15-­performance run was completely sold out.72 Subsequently, the funding issue was resolved in Missouri’s State Senate, which had originally cut all funds to the Missouri Arts Council in retaliation. In June the Senate recanted and voted to restore $60,000 to the Council (but ensuring the Theater Project would receive none), and Council’s board received a legislative “letter of warning,” which was intended “to caution against giving any public money in the future to groups that discriminate against religious denominations.”73 First and foremost, Sister Mary Ignatius is an over-the-top comedy, a “savage cartoon,” as Mel Gussow described it,74 and it may seem an unlikely candidate for such an equally over-the-top uproar (Fig. 5.3). After all, a good deal of the humor comes from the play’s absurdity and the interactive context. Sister directly addresses the audience members, who are attending a lecture that can best be described as a primer on Catholicism. Unlike the conceit of Miss Margarida’s Way, the spectators are not students of the nun (though there are former students among them). She acknowledges the religious diversity of the audience and clarifies concepts

 “‘Sister Mary Ignatius’ Draws Boston Pickets,” New York Times, September 19, 1984.  Lee Grant, “In the Wake of ‘Sister Mary,’” Los Angeles Times, February 20, 1983. 73  Herbert Mitgang, “Dispute on Durang Play Is Eased in Missouri,” New York Times, June 9, 1983. 74  Mel Gussow, “Four from Ensemble,” New York Times, December 21, 1979. 71 72

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Fig. 5.3  Mark Stefan and Elizabeth Franz in Christopher Durang’s Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You (1979). (© The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts)

“for those non-Catholics present,”75 but Sister’s pedagogical approach, exemplifying Freire’s notion of banking education, also reflects her attitude toward educated Catholics, who are clearly deficient in their catechism. For instance, after explaining the “Immaculate Conception” is not to be confused with the “Virgin Birth,” she says, “Everyone makes this error, it makes me lose my patience.”76 The tone careens from silliness to 75  Christopher Durang, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You (1979). Christopher During Explains It All for You: Six Plays by Christopher Durang. (New York: Grove Press, 1983), 170. 76  Durang, 171.

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mordant humor. One moment, Sister is cheerfully singing to her model seven-year-old student and helper, Thomas, and the next, she is asking the audience to consider their puny suffering compared to Christ’s experience on the cross, which she ghoulishly (and a tad excitedly) recounts in grisly detail. And upon triumphantly shooting her former student, she does not even halt the lecture but uses it as a teachable moment: “Ta-da! For those non-Catholics present, murder is allowable in self-defense, one doesn’t even have to tell it in confession.”77 In the end, Sister needs a nap and turns the lecture over to Thomas, who dutifully recites his catechism while pointing the gun at Aloysius, the remaining returning student (“and if he moves,” Sister instructs, “shoot him”) and who desperately needs to use the bathroom.78 When the lights have dimmed to black, the play is fully enveloped in absurdism. Exaggerated and darkly comic as she is, Sister Mary Ignatius epitomizes the primary characteristics of a hazardous schoolteacher on stage: she is fascistic, narcissistic, emotionally unstable, and morally unfit. Her classroom is strictly teacher centered, and her students’ learning is dictated by what she (in the language of Headmistress Mackay and Miss Brodie) feeds in and leads out through memorized facts and parroted expressions. In Freire terms, the lessons Sister imparts are nearly as much about Catholicism as they are about herself, and she revels in sharing her own experiences as one of 26 children (15 of whom pursued religious vocations and the rest were institutionalized) and living with a drunk father who tormented her mother by bringing home “drunken bums off the street.”79 For opponents of the play, Sister is especially dangerous because her sadism and sexual control are wrapped up in and defined by her religious views. And unlike most other immoral spinster teachers, Sister is not destroyed, ruined, or even weakened. In this regard, the ire aroused by defenders of religious liberty is not surprising. Father John L.  May, the St. Louis Archbishop, stated emphatically, “This character is a monster. She’s either insane or diabolical, an insidious perverter of people’s minds and someone like that deserves to be attacked.… But in this case, she perverts them through the teachings of the Catholic Church, so here the Catholic

 Durang, 204.  Durang, 207. 79  Durang, 173. 77 78

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Church is the enemy, perverting one generation, then another.”80 The play opened more than a decade before the pedophile priest accusations of the 1990s when the Church became synonymous with sexual scandal, but the Archbishop and other opponents of Durang’s play vociferously objected to the conflation of nuns in particular and Catholicism in general with perversion. Sexual control and family life education (as the sexual education curriculum is often euphemistically titled in Catholic and public schools alike) are indeed an integral part of Sister’s lecture. In addition to her near obsession with the Virgin Mary’s moral and sexual purity, she is nostalgic for the control over boys’ bodies the Church once had, saying about her seven-year-old helper: Thomas has a lovely soprano voice which the Church used to preserve by creating castrati. Thomas unfortunately will lose his soprano voice in a few years and will receive facial hair and psychological difficulties in its place. To me, it is not a worthwhile exchange.81

A little later in a moment of tenderness with Thomas, she asks: Sister: Thomas: Sister:

Would you like to keep your pretty soprano voice forever? Yes, Sister. We’ll see what we can do about it.82

In addition, instilling family values and perpetuating Catholicism through heterosexual marriage and raising several (Catholic) children are key to Sister’s pedagogy. When the four former students all show up, she greets them, “It’s so nice to see you all again. You must all be married by now, I imagine. I hope you have large families like we encouraged.”83 As the first student admits to having had two abortions, the next being an unwed mother with a daughter, and the third living in a gay relationship, Sister is disgusted. Only Aloysius is married, but he admits to being alcoholic, suicidal, and has lately “started to hit [his] wife.” Sister responds approvingly, “At least one of my students turned out well. Of course, I don’t know how 80  Quoted in Lee Grant, “Satire of Catholic Education Arouses Passions in St. Louis,” January 9, 1983. 81  Durang, 172. 82  Durang, 177. 83  Durang, 199.

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hard you’re hitting your wife; but with prayer and God’s grace….”84 The students also divulge that as children they were bullied, beaten, and humiliated by Sister (and to which she says they deserved everything they received). Their adult lives have been permanently affected by the treatment they received under Sister Mary Ignatius. Durang’s play is a satire, and as such it provokes reflection and numerous questions about fascistic Catholic teachings (which is, one may argue, why the Church has gone to such extremes to suppress productions). Audiences are left pondering such sacred cows as: Why must people turn over control of their bodies, through rules about diet (e.g., no meat on certain Fridays), physical relief (e.g., the permission to use the toilet), and abortions? Why must believers who have sex with others out of wedlock or with members of their own gender endure humiliation or threats of eternal damnation? How can a religion, which has as its basis commandments to honor and love others, encourage judgmental denunciations, promote corporeal discipline, and fetishize—through the crucifixion—cruelty toward fellow human beings? The success of the play lies in Sister’s hilarious, ridiculous, and ultimately futile attempts to explain it all for us. Miss Jean Brodie, Miss Margarida’s Way, and Sister Mary Ignatius reveal societal anxieties about the potentially treacherous influence teachers have over students. As such, the plays can be read as either allegory for teachers as despots, or as allegory for despots as teachers. Miss Brodie, Miss Margarida, and Sister Mary Ignatius are products of the heated rhetoric  around contemporary  education battles, and they  show the ways in which teachers and leaders may seduce their subjects through manipulation, coercion, and disciplinary force. Confrontation, assassination (literal or figurative), and capitulation are possibilities for dealing with fascist teacher characters. In real life, silencing instructors, restricting course material, and targeting tenure are the methods justified not just for the select few, but, in some cases, across the board. Rather than assassination and vilification,  strengthening the discourse among teachers, students, parents, and community leaders is surely a much more effective strategy for altering and overhauling the pedagogy of the oppressed.

 Durang, 195.

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CHAPTER 6

Failure to Achieve: A Report Card on Male Educators in the Theatre

The Occupation of Second Choosers In his foundational study The Sociology of Teaching (1932), Willard Waller writes, “It has been said that no woman and no [N]egro is ever fully admitted to the white man’s world. Possibly we should add men teachers to the list of the excluded.”1 By the early twentieth century, as teaching in the primary and secondary grades had become overwhelmingly dominated by women, men schoolteachers were collectively regarded as professional losers and unmanly men. Waller claims teaching was antithetical to the presumed aspirations of white American males, who were expected to be leaders among men, self-reliant, and fervently in pursuit of capitalist ventures. Primary and secondary education as an occupation, therefore, was deemed a “failure belt” and, according to popular belief, “the refuge of unsaleable men [i.e., those unsuccessful in sales positions] and unmarriageable women.” Waller qualifies the epigram as gross exaggeration, but claims “it mirrors a general belief.” He explains, “Certainly for many teachers it is a failure belt, for they think of teaching as an unpleasant or boring occupation from which they are unable to extricate themselves. For them, it is the occupation of second choosers.”2 1  Willard Waller, The Sociology of Teaching (1932) (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1965), 50. 2  Waller, 61.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. F. Wilson, Failure, Fascism, and Teachers in American Theatre, Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34013-0_6

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While faculty in US elementary, middle, and high schools were and are predominantly women, colleges and universities were and are dominated by men. Nevertheless, as Richard Hofstadter shows in his Pulitzer Prize-­ winning Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), the academic scholar was considered just as unmanly as his schoolteacher counterpart. At least two centuries prior to the attacks on leftist and supposed-­ communist male professors and eggheads, the intellectual was considered “either an outsider, a servant, or a scapegoat.”3 By the beginning of the twentieth century, the assaults on the intelligentsia had become part of the political rhetoric, and academics, particularly those in the humanities, represented a despised cultural elite. “Invoking a well-established preconception of the American male,” Hofstadter contends, politicians and statesmen “argued that culture is impractical and men of culture are ineffectual, that culture is feminine and cultivated men tend to be effeminate.”4 Many plays of the twentieth century reflect this widespread attitude toward male schoolteachers and postsecondary school academics. Across a range of dramatic genres, including comedies, English drawing-room plays, psychological dramas, and melodramas, the cumulative effect reveals a shared viewpoint of male teachers and professors as failed men. This chapter examines the trope first in Aristophanes and Shakespeare and then in more contemporary examples, including Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version (1948), Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), Robert Marasco’s Child’s Play (1970), Simon Gray’s Butley (1971) and Quartermaine’s Terms (1981), David Mamet’s Oleanna (1992), and Donja R. Love’s soft (2022). The main characters from these plays by and large are drained of their virility, disillusioned with life, degraded either by their wives or the educational system (and sometimes both), and frequently intoxicated. They are often victims of their demasculinizing circumstances and perpetuators of the demasculinized institution in which they work. Correspondingly, these plays reflect academic settings as sanctums for unmanly men and toxic environments created to sap men of their manhood.

3  Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 146. 4  Waller, 186.

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The Right Kind of Men A short chronicle of men in the teaching profession helps illustrate how cultural perceptions reflected on stage were forged. By 1900, teaching had become, for all intents and purposes, a woman’s job. In 1905 The Journal of Education reported that of the 449,287 public schoolteachers in the United States, 332,252 (almost 75%) were women. In fact, the ratio of women to men had nearly doubled in the preceding 50 years.5 A similar trend is evident in England during the same period. In 1870, roughly one half of the British teachers were men, and by 1900, more than two thirds of the teaching work force was made up of women.6 The gender shift can be explained by a number of similar factors in the two countries. First, teaching was one of the few careers available to women, who were graduating in large numbers from female seminaries and academies (such as the Emma Willard’s school in Troy, New  York, and Frances Buss’s North London Collegiate School for Ladies in England) and colleges (such as Wesleyan and Vassar in the United States and Bedford and Queen’s College in the United Kingdom). Salaries for teaching were also quite low, and as more and more towns and cities built schools, and as the costs of educating more and more children climbed, women were less expensive to hire than men. The schools generally could afford to employ a male principal or headmaster, and as Jackie M. Blount enumerates, this personnel structure was quite satisfactory since it “pleased those who believed that schools needed the gender-regulating presence of men—and that women needed to be supervised by them.”7 The superseding of women teachers over men in the first decades of the twentieth century introduced a host of anxieties and culminated in an economic battle of the sexes. At this time not only were the number of men going into teaching steadily decreasing, but the quality of male teachers entering the profession, school principals attested, was also noticeably declining. In 1911, the New York Times reported that low salaries were 5  J.M. Greenwood, “The Professional Culture of Teachers After They Have Been Regularly Employed in School Work,” The Journal of Education 62, no. 5 (July 20, 1905), 132. 6  Michael Apple, “Teaching and ‘Women’s Work’: A Comparative and Historical Analysis” (1985), reprinted in The Structure of Schooling: Readings in the Sociology of Education, edited by Richard Arum, Irenee R.  Beattie, and Karly Ford (Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, 2014), 471. 7  Jackie M. Blount, Fit to Teach: Same-Sex Desire, Gender, and School Work in the Twentieth Century (Albany, New York: State University Press, 2005), 24.

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attracting “undesirable men,” according to school administrators across New York City’s boroughs. “Two-thirds of the Principals who supervise men teachers in their schools,” the article states, “are of the opinion that the right kind of men are not now attracted to teaching in the elementary schools. About 12 per cent. of the Principals believe that the present salaries attract good men, the same percentage are doubtful, and the remainder are united in decrying the kind of men that are now applying for license to teach.”8 The article does not clarify the deficiencies of the men teachers although the problems are insinuated to be less in the individuals’ methodologies and knowledge than in their ability to serve as ruggedly masculine role models. In a formal statement, the principals emphasize the necessity of strong male exemplars for children (particularly boys) because men teachers, “the experts declare, are needed because boys naturally follow a man in preference to a woman, and because boys need the influence of those who can best understand them, because they were boys themselves.”9 Other “experts” in the early twentieth century concurred that subjecting students to only women teachers could have deleterious effects. Dr. Fletcher B. Dresslar of the United States Bureau of Education unambiguously claimed, “There is no doubt that it is unwise to intrust so important a matter as the teaching of boys and girls so largely to women; but the facts are known and have been for many years, and yet the hoped-­ for change does not come.”10 Whereas most of the reasons given for encouraging more male teachers were couched in innuendo, George W. Ehler, the Athletic Director of the Cleveland Public Schools, pulled no punches when he affirmed: “women effeminize the boys.”11 While the paucity and supposed inadequacy of men teachers in the system signified both an educational liability and a social crisis in the early 1900s, men teachers, as depicted in the media, were faced with an additional assault, this one by women teachers, a coalition of whom were demanding equal pay. In 1906, women teachers in New  York City’s schools were hired at $600 a year (roughly equivalent to $20,000  in 2023), and after 11 years of service and scheduled certification examinations, their salaries would peak at $1440 a year (about $47,500 in 2023). A woman teacher could earn an additional $60 per year by teaching an all  “Men Teachers Alarmed,” The New York Times, March 24, 1911.  “Men Teachers Alarmed.” 10  “Fewer Men Teachers,” The New York Times, January 7, 1912. 11  “Men Teachers in the Schools,” The New York Times, September 13, 1908. 8 9

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boys’ class. Men teachers, on the other hand, were hired at $900 a year (about $30,000 in 2023) and after 11 years of service and periodic certification examinations, would make a maximum of $2400 ($79,000  in 2023).12 Denouncing the disparity, women teachers organized around the issue, and school administrators refused to yield. In the spring of 1906, “Equal pay for equal work” became a rallying cry as women teachers promised to take the case to the Board of Education, the Legislature, and the New York State Supreme Court if necessary. It was necessary, and ruling in the case entitled Golding versus the Board of Education, Supreme Court Justice Benedict decreed that men teachers hired after January 1, 1912, would make the same yearly salary as women, $720 (roughly $22,000 in 2023). Those hired before that date would remain in the former salary schedule.13 The arguments for maintaining inequitable salaries reflected prevailing arguments of the era. Notably, many believed men teachers make better role models for children (especially those past the primary grades); men are more deserving of higher salaries because they have families to feed; and women are only temporarily in the profession until they enter a more permanent vocation in matrimony. A 1907 letter to the editor in the New York Times captured this attitude, stating “the fact” that teaching for men is a livelihood, “while often excellent women teachers are frankly teaching until they get married or till parents or relatives leave them a competence.” And delineating between a man who teaches to support his family and aged parents, the writer paints a hypothetical portrait of the “bright and ambitious” young woman schoolteacher, who “is teaching because she likes nice clothes and independence and something to do until she gets married,” at which time, “she will gayly turn her back upon the classroom forever.”14 Other arguments posited that men deserve higher salaries because they exhibit stronger intellects and bring to their positions more extensive educational preparation, and this made them better suited to teaching in the nation’s high schools. “There is still a difference in scholarship,” C.W. Bardeen claimed in 1912. “The woman’s ideal is not as high 12  Figures presented in “Women Teachers Want Equal Pay with Men,” The New  York Times, September 30, 1906. Conversion data obtained from “US Inflation Calculator,” https://www.in2013dollars.com/. Accessed January 22, 2023. 13  “Men Teachers Lose,” The New York Times, September 22, 1912. 14  “Teachers—Men and Women: A Correspondent Cites a Few Cases and Draws a Moral,” The New York Times, December 23, 1907.

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as the man’s.”15 The research, however, did not support any such conclusions. In a 1909 report for the United States Bureau of Education, Edward L. Thorndike showed that men teachers in secondary public schools had received less educational preparation than their women counterparts, and both groups left teaching at approximately the same rate and after the same number of years.16 Wayne John Martino explains that even as school administrations were able to attract women who were willing to work for teachers’ relatively small salaries, principals and superintendents actively sought to recruit male teachers. Compounding the shortage of male teachers were the two world wars, which depleted a large number of men working in the schools. Consequently, there were even greater efforts to stem the “increasing panic and concern being expressed as women’s presence in schools continued to grow into the 20th century.”17 Quoting Geraldine J.  Clifford, Martino writes that during the Depression and World War II there were concerted endeavors to entice men “in part to protect or restore the patriarchal position of men in the American family” as solid male role models were supposedly essential in the moral development of adolescent boys.18 By the end of the twentieth century, this presumed lack of such male role models led to what Kim du Toit evocatively describes as the “pussification of the Western male.”19 Similar trends in the feminization of teaching are evident in many Western countries as Martino shows. Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom, for instance, have similar patterns of women entering the profession in the latter half of the nineteenth century and increasingly outnumbering men teachers, most especially in the primary grades. By 2011 male primary school teachers in England had become all but an endangered species. The Daily Mail, a British publication, reported

15  C. W. Bardeen, “The Monopolizing Woman Teacher—(I.),” The Journal of Education 75 (May 9, 1912), 514. 16  “Men Teachers Not Stable,” The New York Times, June 7, 1909. 17  Wayne John Martino, “Male Teachers as Role Models: Addressing Issues of Masculinity, Pedagogy ad the Re-Masculinization of Schooling,” Curriculum Inquiry 38(2008), 197. 18  Martino. 19  Kim du Toit, “The Pussification of the Western Male” (2003), reprinted on Chiefs Planet blog. Accessed December 22, 2022. http://www.chiefsplanet.com/BB/showthread. php?t=74328

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that 25% of all primary schools had no registered male teachers among the faculty.20 Historically, mainstream theatre has perpetuated the message that men should enter teaching at their own risk. In the plays examined in this chapter, the men educator figures are scorned, ridiculed, and debased. In most cases, they are miserable. With apologies to Mart Crowley’s classic line from The Boys in the Band (1968), “Show me a happy male teacher character, and I’ll show you an academic corpse.”

Birth of the Sophist and Pedant Derision directed at male teachers arguably goes as far back as there have been teachers and almost certainly as long as there have been plays. Before examining the conceptions of male teachers in the wake of the progressive education movement, it is useful to compare perceptions in the premodern era theatre. A particularly notable example is the character of Socrates in Aristophanes’ The Clouds (423 BCE), which competed in the Great Dionysia festival in Athens. To the chagrin of the playwright, the comedy came in third place, and he revised it eight or nine years later. As historians have noted, the Socrates that appears in The Clouds bears little resemblance to the actual philosopher, but the treatment of the character reflects a general distrust and unease toward educators. Kate Brassel explains that unlike Aristophanes’ creation, the philosopher did not oversee a school nor did he accept money for his mentoring. The character, however, is a stand-in for the fifth-century BCE Athenian sophists or paid itinerant (i.e., non-Athenians) teachers who were responsible for educating young men and nobility harboring political ambitions. “Enriched by tuition fees, sophists were often portrayed as having a certain mercenary slickness and suspected of teaching manipulative tricks rather than the pursuit of truth or the Good Life.”21 Practiced rhetoric and clever logic were tools of power and exploitation, and the sophists, many believed, trafficked in this new form of education in Athens. 20  Kate Loveys, “No Sir: A Quarter of Primary Schools Do Not Have a Single Male Teacher,” Daily Mail, July 8, 2011, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2012707/Aquarter-primary-schools-male-teachers.html#ixzz3v5SWQTYW. Accessed January 17, 2023. 21  Kate Brassel, “Historical Context of Aristophanes’ Clouds,” in “The Core Curriculum,” Columbia College website, https://www.college.columbia.edu/core/content/historicalcontext-aristophanes-clouds-0. Accessed January 24, 2023.

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J.  Peter Euben distinguishes the old education from the new in the manner in which young men acquired knowledge. “In the late fifth century B.C.,” Euben writes, “education as a ‘natural’ process in which older male relatives initiated young men into the rituals and practices of public life was being challenged by professional teachers who claimed superiority in imparting skills that would lead to political success.”22 In this new system, intelligence and virtue were not simply passed down by elites but could be learned by young men with the means to pay for their education. As most were noncitizens of Athens and, therefore, outsiders, the sophists were especially dubious. Truth, beauty, and democratic ideals seemed to be secondary to profit, and the use of rhetoric and persuasion was a means to power and wealth. As a result, the sophists were believed to be corrupting influences on young men. Aristophanes taps into this cynicism in The Clouds. The play centers around Strepsiades, who is buried in debt because his ne’er-do-well son Pheidippides has lost exorbitant amounts on chariot races and lives a reckless life, which is encouraged by his mother and Strepsiades’ foolish wife. The harried father has a plan to extricate himself from his troubles by enrolling his son in the Thinkery, the school next door. There, he will learn the art of speech and debate, and he will be able to talk his way out of what the family owes rather than have to pay it back. He tells Pheidippides: That’s the Thinkery, where the professors live. They’re so clever, they can show you the sky And convince you it’s really a chimney All around you and you’re lumps of coal inside. Pay them enough, and they’ll teach you ways To win any case in court, guilty or innocent.23

Pheidippides has no interest in becoming educated, so even though learning should be reserved for the young, Strepsiades enrolls instead. Inside the Thinkery, Strepsiades encounters students standing erect, staring intensely at the ground and another group bent in half with their butts pointing upward. A student guide says matter-of-factly that they are 22  J. Peter Euben, Corrupting Youth: Political Education, Democratic Culture, and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 34. 23  Aristophanes, The Clouds, trans. Kenneth McLeish, Aristophanes, Plays: Two (London: Methuen Drama, 1993), 75.

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contemplating the Underworld. Eventually, Socrates enters floating aloft so as to “ponder on the sun.”24 The learned philosopher quickly tells the new student that Zeus and the gods do not exist. At the Thinkery, the patron goddesses are the Clouds. “You have to give up the other gods,” Socrates orders, “and believe/ In ours: Chaos and Clouds and Argument.”25 Using analogies of flatulence and calling on the Clouds for assistance, Socrates attempts to educate the vapid bumpkin, but it proves to be an impossible task. Strepsiades returns home and convinces his son to pursue the course of study. Pheidippides is much more successful in acquiring the skills to reason his way out of the debts using his newly acquired Wrong Arguments as opposed to the Right ones. Pheidippides announces: The great thing about being educated is, you know What everything’s about. You’ve got arguments, Clever arguments; you can turn things upside-down. In the old days, when I knew nothing else But horses, I couldn’t harness three words together Without going off course. But the Prof soon stopped that. I’m master of thoughts and tricks and arguments.26

When Pheidippides applies his new skills in circuitous logic to explain why the son may beat both his father and mother, Strepsiades is beside himself. He regrets letting Socrates persuade him to disavow the gods, and the play ends as he burns down the Thinkery, shouting, “I’ll teach you to laugh at the gods,/ And look at the Moon when she’s gone to bed!/ Bang! Wallop! Smash! Pay them back/ For everything…but especially for mocking the gods.”27 The new education, The Clouds suggests, is dangerous in its abnegation of traditional beliefs. Socrates, as he is presented here, is a charlatan and a pretentious intellectual. Rather than weighty subjects associated with democracy, he obsesses on such ludicrous quandaries as whether a gnat’s buzz comes from its mouth or from the sound of air passing through the insect’s body and out its anus. He is preposterous, but he is also dangerous. Socrates provides students with the skills, according to Euben, for “making the worse argument the better by engaging in logical shenanigans that trick  Aristophanes, 82.  Aristophanes, 92. 26  Aristophanes, 139. 27  Aristophanes, 145. 24 25

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the youth into transgressing proper boundaries and repudiating normal ways and rightful hierarchies as they are defined by those with political and cultural power, such as the politicians and poets.”28 In a nod to the power of theatre (particularly of theatre in the fifth century BCE), Plato hypothesized that the unfavorable representation of Socrates, whose method of leading students to find truth was in contrast to the sophists’ empty vessel approach, diminished the esteem for the philosopher. The real Socrates was accused of the same crimes as the character in The Clouds, and he was executed for them.29 As far as I know, Shakespeare’s characterizations never led to the execution of a teacher, but several of his plays offer a rather unflattering portrait of educators. As specified by Patricia Winson, in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, there are four schoolmaster characters. These include the mystical Doctor Pinch in A Comedy of Errors (1592–1594), the ostentatious Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594–1595), the  well-meaning but ineffectual Sir Hugh Evans from The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597), and the pompous Gerrold in The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613). Winson also identifies the cameo appearance of Artemidorus of Cnidos, a teacher of rhetoric, in Julius Caesar (1599), and Prospero, who refers to himself as “schoolmaster” to Miranda and Caliban, in The Tempest (1610–1611).30 More so than the others, Holofernes embodies the stereotypically effete, arrogant, and tyrannical pedagogue. Holofernes is a close cousin to the Il Dottore stock figure in commedia dell’arte. He is loquacious, and he tries to impress with long sentences, sesquipedalian flourishes, and liberally tossed-out Latin (which is almost always full of error). Similar to Aristophanes’ professors, Holofernes masters the effects of language without using it to plumb and transmit truth. His parlance is, to quote from another Shakespeare play, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Additionally, he uses jargon and heightened diction as a show of supposed superiority. When he is introduced, for example, he launches into a critique of the Spanish braggart Don Armado and focuses solely on his adversary’s syntax and pronunciation. He rants:  Euben, 33.  See, for instance, Andrew D.  Irvine, Socrates on Trial: A Play Based on Aristophanes” Clouds and Plato’s Apology, Crito, and Phaedo Adapted for Modern Performance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). 30  Patricia Winson, “‘A Double Spirit of Teaching’: What Shakespeare’s Teachers Teach Us,” Early Modern Literary Studies Special Issue 1 (1997): 8.1–31, https://extra.shu.ac.uk/ emls/si-01/si-01winson.html#. Accessed January 23, 2023. 28 29

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[Armado] draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument. I abhor such fanatical phantasimes, such insociable and point-­ devise companions, such rackers of orthography, as to speak “dout,” fine, when he should say “doubt”; “det” when he should pronounce “debt”—d, e, b, t, not d, e, t. He clepeth a calf “cauf,” half “hauf,” neighbor vocatur “nebor”; neigh abbreviated ne. This is abhominable—which he would call “abominable.” It insinuateth me of insanie. Ne intelligis, domine? To make frantic, lunatic.31

His only responsibility in the plot is to help organize the “Nine Worthies” pageant, but he dominates the performance by assuming three of the roles. His overwrought wit is no match for the young students of philosophy, though, and he leaves the pageant in disgrace. Humiliated, he utters: “This is not generous, not gentle, not humble.”32 Notably, the stage directions identify Holofernes as “the Pedant, or schoolmaster.” The term “pedant” borrowed from either Middle French or Italian has been ascribed to Shakespeare, but the OED cites uses of the word that predate Love’s Labour’s Lost. In any case, the OED’s definition applies to Holofernes: “A person who excessively reveres or parades academic learning or technical knowledge, often without discrimination or practical judgment. Hence also: one who is excessively concerned with accuracy over trifling details of knowledge, or who insists on strict adherence to formal rules or literal meaning.”33 Drawing on elements of the sophist, the pedant, in Shakespeare’s rendering, is pure academic artifice without substance or poetry. As Shakespeare scholars have shown, Holofernes has a great deal in common with his namesake, the sycophantic, tyrannical general who succumbs to the charms of pious Judith and is subsequently beheaded in the apocryphal Book of Judith. Ursula Ann Potter argues that the identity of Holofernes would have been instantly recognizable to Elizabethan audience members, and they would have linked the villainous Assyrian general with Shakespeare’s supercilious pedant. She argues, “Connections between schoolmasters and a biblical tyrant can be traced to a social context in 31  William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. Barbara A.  Mowat and Paul Werstine, Folger Shakespeare Library (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), V.i.17–27. All quotations come from this edition. 32  Shakespeare, V.ii.700. 33  “pedant, n. and adj.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2022, www.oed. com/view/Entry/139539. Accessed 25 January 2023.

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Elizabethan England where schoolmasters were traditionally depicted as tyrants, a tradition that has been attributed to the inherent conflict between a schoolmaster’s sovereign authority within his school and his low status outside it.”34 Potter goes on to show that  in addition to his autocratic nature and ungentlemanly social standing, Holofernes exhibits other aspects of the stereotypical schoolmaster, specifically, “the vices of lust, drunkenness and abuse of the incident.”35 She examines the passage in which the curate Nathaniel describes Holofernes as a “good member [read: penis] of the common wealth” for the pedant’s willingness to educate the sons and daughters of the parish, and Holofernes replies with fairly clear sexual allusion, “[I]f their daughters be capable, I will put it to them.”36 Later, Holofernes makes reference to “piercing a hogshead,”37 which is slang for “getting drunk.” Nonetheless, the pedant may be morally and ethically unsuitable to teach the young, so he is presented as a comical character. Synthesizing the shyster, circumlocutional, corruptive qualities of the sophist, and the prolix, sadistic, reprobate attributes of the pedant, the male schoolteacher and schoolmaster was a familiar persona in farces, burlesque sketches, and vaudeville acts through the early twentieth century. As discussed in Chap. 2, school acts were standard fare in mainstream variety theatre, and they were often seen in the musical revues on Broadway in the 1920s and 1930s. The acclaimed revue, George White’s Scandals of 1936, for instance, featured “The French Lesson,” a comedy skit featuring exaggeratedly stooped-shoulder, Jewish funnyman Willie Howard. (He and his brother Eugene, who also headlined the Scandals, often performed together.) The New York Times review declared Howard’s performance as “a furiously bewigged teacher of French with a strong Yiddish accent.”38 By mid-century, coinciding with changing perspectives of traditional masculinity, the male educator in theatre was less frequently a subject to be laughed at but was often a character to be pitied, disdained, or destroyed.

34  Ursula Ann Potter, “The Naming of Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost,” English Language Notes 38 (December 2000), 12. 35  Potter, 14. 36  Shakespeare, IV.ii.93–97. 37  Shakespeare, IV.ii.105. 38  Brooks Atkinson, “George White Presents the Twelfth Edition of His Musical Revue,” New York Times (December 26, 1935), 20.

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“Himmler of the Lower Fifth” In his review of Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version, Brooks Atkinson summarizes the play as “the portrait of an English schoolmaster who began his career eighteen years ago after a brilliant university record and is now concluding it as a meek, ailing, unloved failure.”39 The long one-act (originally paired with Rattigan’s Harlquinade [1948]) was a huge success in London, but when it opened in New York the following year, it was, like the schoolmaster, an unloved failure, and it closed after just 69 performances. The Browning Version has, however, stood the test of time. There have been two film versions, a handful of television adaptations, and several West End revivals. In 2012, David Hare’s commissioned companion play, South Downs, a response to Rattigan and focusing on an alienated student in an Anglo-Catholic boarding school in 1962, appeared on a West End double bill with The Browning Version (Fig. 6.1).40 There may have been a public outcry for more male teachers throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, but The Browning Version presents a devastating evocation of the emasculating effects schools and teaching can have on one’s manhood. The central character is Andrew Crocker-Harris, whom his fifth-form (equivalent to 11th grade in the United States) students not so affectionately call “The Crock.” Andrew was once a lauded classics scholar, but now he is a strict grammarian and hardline adherent to academic policies and conventions. On the unnamed British public school campus, he is dubbed “the Himmler of the lower fifth,”41 and he is, in short, Holofernes without the comic bombast. Peter Wolfe effectively adjudges Andrew “a dry, inflexible, and, some would say, bloodless pedant unafraid to inflict his fussiness on others.”42 Andrew’s personal life is as equally unpleasant. His wife Millie is cold and distant with him, and she is having an affair with Frank Hunter, the charismatic science teacher.  Atkinson, “Browning Version,” New York Times (December 26, 1935), 20.  In its Chichester premiere, Michael Billington called South Downs “a beautifully melancholic study of the self-dislike many of us experience in our teens: the belief that confidence, charm and grace are qualities that others miraculously possess but that have somehow passed us by” (“South Downs/ The Browning Version—Review,” The Guardian [September 14, 2011]. Accessed January 28, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/sep/15/ south-downs-browning-version-review 41  Terence Rattigan, The Browning Version and Harliquinade (1948) (London: Nick Hern Books, 1994), 28. 42  Peter Wolfe, Terence Rattigan: The Playwright as Battlefield (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2019), 68. 39 40

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Fig. 6.1  Maurice Evans in Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version (1948). (Photo by Eileen Darby. Eileen Darby Images, Inc. © The New  York Public Library for the Performing Arts)

Teaching has taken its toll on Andrew both intellectually and physically. He suffers from heart problems, and at age 40, he is being forced into early retirement, too soon to be able to collect a pension. Furthermore, the Headmaster Frobisher apprises Andrew that he will not be the final speaker at the end-of-term ceremony the next day. That honor will go to the school’s cricket coach, Fletcher, who is significantly younger and far less experienced than Andrew. Achievement in sports, unsurprisingly, is much more valued than the efforts of a diligent classics instructor. According to Frobisher, the coach “has done great things for our

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cricket—positive wonders, when you remember what doldrums we were in before he came.”43 Rattigan presents the British public school system as an enervating institution that drains intellectual young men of their passion and masculine vitality. Hunter, who is greener than Andrew and remains quite virile, implies that teaching is beginning to take its toll on him as well. He admits he’s not interested in science or “Not at least in the science I have to teach.”44 The play also introduces Peter Gilbert, who is—like Andrew was—a “very brilliant young man,” who had similarly “won exceptionally high honors at Oxford.”45 Peter and his new wife will take over the home occupied by Andrew and Millie, and the sniping young couple appear to be the prototype of the loveless, older couple they are replacing. Millie alludes to this when she sardonically says, “I don’t think it’s much of a career, though—a schoolmaster—for a likely young chap like that.”46 Teaching, Millie insinuates, is a vocation for unmanly men like Andrew, who, she remarks, “is not a man at all.”47 He is physically, sexually, and morally deficient, and he is an inadequate provider. Millie, whose father provides her with money, needles, “What do they expect you to do? Live on my money, I suppose.”48 As Michael Kimmel chronicles, conceptions of manhood evolved over the twentieth century. After World War II, the middle class expanded exponentially, and traditional roles, including a breadwinning husband and child-rearing wife, became a Western idealized version of the family. At a time when Cold War threats loomed large, families in the United Kingdom and United States safeguarded themselves with images of the perfectly ordered and paradigmatic nuclear family. Indeed, society was changing, and embracing conservative values represented the best way to resist the infiltration of juvenile delinquents, homosexuals, and Communists. “The trappings of gender failure were all around us,” Kimmel writes, and postwar men were expected to be leaders, billpayers, and estimable fathers.49 Television propagated these viewpoints, and in both Britain and the United States, “[T]here was a more intensified  Rattigan, 23.  Rattigan, 5. 45  Rattigan, 20. 46  Rattigan, 31. 47  Rattigan, 37. 48  Rattigan, 25. 49  Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History. Third edition. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 171. 43 44

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interest in fatherhood, particularly amongst the media, and a ‘family-oriented’ masculinity emerged.”50 By this measure, Andrew Crocker-Harris is an unabashed failure. He is also, by his own admittance, a failure as a teacher. He advises Peter: For two or three years I tried very hard to communicate with the boys some of my own joy in the great literature of the past. Of course, I failed, as you will fail, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of one thousand. But a single success can atone and more than atone for all the failures in the world.51

He recognizes he is an “utter failure” as well as a laughingstock to the boys, but he is shocked to learn that as the putative Himmler of the lower fifth, he is also “feared.”52 Yet, the play shows the possibility of masculine and pedagogical redemption. John Taplow, a student making up for a missed class with Andrew, it turns out, is the one in one thousand. After a tutorial centered on translating Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, Taplow gives Andrew a used copy of a version by Robert Browning. Taplow has inscribed (in Greek) a passage drawn from the play: “God from afar looks graciously upon a gentle master.”53 Andrew is deeply moved by the gesture. He is overcome with emotion and newfound pride until Millie (Clytemnestra-like) cynically tells him that the student’s gift was merely a form of “appeasement.” Earlier, she had caught him imitating and mocking Andrew.54 Millie’s snide accusation forcibly puts an end to her affair with Frank, who is appalled by her cruelty, and the incident becomes an impetus for Andrew to finally take a stand. Norman Mailer famously wrote, “Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain.… And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.”55 The play concludes with Andrew’s small victories. Foremost, he indicates that he is going to leave Millie, and then he informs Frobisher that as “is [his] privilege,” he will “speak after, instead of before, Fletcher.”56 The 50  Angela Davis and Laura King, “Gendered Perspectives on Men’s Changing Familial Roles in Postwar England, c. 1950–1990,” Gender & History 30 (2018), 71. 51  Rattigan, 28. 52  Rattigan, 29. 53  Rattigan, 34. 54  Rattigan, 35. 55  Quoted in Anthony Synnott, Re-Thinking Men: Heroes, Villains and Victims (London: Routledge, 2016), 24. 56  Rattigan, 45.

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curtain falls with an image of the wife serving her husband, and the final tableau suggests that Andrew has gained, in cultural conceptualization, the merits of manhood.

“An Old Bog in the History Department” A similar dynamic between an emasculated husband and emasculating wife plays out between George and Martha in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. As Martha reminds George, “I’m loud, and I’m vulgar, and I wear the pants in this house because somebody’s got to.”57 While the proverbial trousers battle rages between the married couple, another skirmish, also pitched around manhood, takes center stage. This one involves a pair of dueling academics. In one corner is George, the 46-year-­ old, history professor, and in the other is Nick, the 30-year-old, biology professor. Alcohol-fueled verbal sparring during a long night of psychological warfare will reveal the undisputed big man on campus once and for all. At the height of the “Get-the-Guests” game in the play’s second act, George levels with Nick: “[Y]ou represent a direct and pertinent threat to my lifehood, and I want to get the goods on you.”58 As the college’s new golden boy, Nick could gain the prestige that has eluded George. After all, George, as Martha is quick to point out, is a professional failure. He is the son-in-law of the college president, who had high hopes for the promising young academic. Unfortunately, George did not turn out to be the leader among men Martha and her father expected him to be, and he has not ascended the ranks at New Carthage, the fictional New England college where he teaches. George mentions to Nick: “Martha tells me often, that I am in the History Department…as opposed to being the History Department…in the sense of running the History Department. I do not run the History Department.”59 As a tenured associate professor, George seems destined to dwell in professional purgatory between assistant and full professor. Humiliating him in front of the guests, Martha jabs (and jabs and jabs): “George is bogged down in the History Department. He’s an old bog in the History Department, that’s what George is. A bog.… A 57  Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) (New York: Athenium, 1970), 157. 58  Albee, 111. 59  Albee, 38. (Emphasis in original.)

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fen.…A.G.D. swamp. Ha, ha, ha, HA! A SWAMP! Hey, swamp! Hey SWAMPY!”60 Conversely, Nick, who has just joined the faculty, seems to have brighter prospects and could surpass George in academic esteem and further denigrate his rival’s manhood. In this environment, managerial acumen is privileged over intellectual prowess and teaching effectiveness. Clare Virginia Eby argues that the play premiered at a time when “American masculinity was heading into one of its recurrent crises of definition.”61 Summarizing the evolving attitudes toward “the male ideal,” Eby writes: “[D]uring the nineteenth century, from conquering space (the frontier) to conquering one another (by competing successfully in the marketplace), the twentieth century generated a new set of challenges for heterosexual men, which intensified after World War II.”62 As a result, there was a need for greater competition to prove one’s manhood by demonstrating unassailable authority. Academic accomplishments, gender theorists and sociologists maintain, were and are not signifiers of the ideal male since they are not associated with action. As Joe L. Dubbert emphasizes in A Man’s Place: Masculinity in Transition, “Since manliness was the province of the action-oriented individual, it followed that intellectual or aesthetic pursuits were not part of being manly.”63 If a man is going to be in academia, therefore, he would not receive full validation except in an administrative position. As shown in Chap. 4, eggheads are not the paragon of masculinity. Martha applies this hypothesis in her line of attack, calling George “A great…big…fat…FLOP!”64 because he is “just some nobody, some bookworm, somebody who’s so damn…contemplative, he can’t make anything out of himself, somebody without the guts to make anybody proud of him.”65 Nick draws a similar line of attack, confronting George: “It’s you sneaky types worry me the most, you know. You ineffectual sons of bitches…you’re the worst.”66 Nick preens and boasts, claiming that he will gradually take control of the college and do so by sleeping with influential faculty wives, including George’s.

 Albee, 50.  Clare Virginia Eby, “Fun and Games with George and Nick: Competitive Masculinity” in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” Modern Drama 50 (Winter 2007), 601. 62  Eby, 601–2. 63  Quoted in Eby, 608. 64  Albee, 84. 65  Albee, 85. 66  Albee, 111. 60 61

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Nick possesses another badge of comparative manhood: In attitudes toward masculinity, biology trumps history. Albee scholars have long examined the opposing positions of science versus history, establishing what has been referred to as the “two cultures argument.”67 Science is, after all, associated with looking forward and innovation, and history is concerned with looking back and outdatedness. Nick is a man of the future, and George is a relic of the past. Eby argues that beyond disciplinary generalizations, the matter is entangled with notions of manhood and asserts that “the masculinity of a humanist will likely seem yet more dubious than that of a scientist.”68 Martha corroborates this view, proclaiming biology is “right at the meat of things.”69 Taunting George, she says to Nick, “Hell, you can take over the History Department just as easy from [the Biology Department] as anywhere else. God knows, somebody’s going to take over the History Department, some day, and it ain’t going to be Georgie-boy, there…that’s for sure. Are ya, swampy…are ya, Hunh?”70 There are still some flickers of masculinity within George, though. As Jack Halberstam affirms, “failure presents an opportunity rather than a dead end.”71 By the end of the play, George is in control and is wearing the pants. Nick ultimately does not “hump the hostess,” and he is reduced to the role of  a “houseboy”72 and a fetching puppy.73 Furthermore, when Martha pleads for the evening’s games to end, George shouts, “I’M RUNNING THIS SHOW!”74 George is the unrivaled victor. Similar to The Browning Version, which also includes a triangular relationship with a scientist, a humanist, and the humanist’s wife, Virginia Woolf? upholds traditional gender roles with modest but morally significant triumphs of masculinity.

67  See, for instance, Matthew C.  Roudané, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Necessary Fictions, Terrifying Realities (Boston: Twayne, 1990); and C.W.E. Bigsby, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee. Vol. 2 of A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 68  Eby, 608. 69  Albee, 63. 70  Albee, 64. 71  Judith [Jack] Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 96. 72  Albee, 204. 73  Albee, 206. 74  Albbe, 229.

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“What Malice Can There Be in a Child?” If you crossed The Browning Version with Lord of the Flies, you would end up with something resembling Child’s Play, Robert Marasco’s hit Broadway thriller that opened in 1970. The play takes place in St. Charles’ Catholic Boarding School for Boys, and there is something seriously awry with the students. They have become exceedingly unruly and violent, surpassing the typical “jumpy” post-midterm behavior.75 First, a group of boys stands threateningly at the bottom of a school staircase refusing to let Father Penny, the biology teacher, pass. Later, during a game of dodge ball in gym class, the gang encircles a student, punching, clawing, and finally gouging out one of his eyes. Then, in a coup de grace, the boys beat up a classmate and hang him half-naked on a cross in the chapel. Playwright Marasco, a former teacher, presents a cross section of teacher types, including the kindly, well-liked Father Dobbs, whom the students refer to as “Mr. Chips.” Lay-teacher Jerome Malley, dubbed “Slash,” is a scowling pedant figure, who lives with his sickly mother. The young gym teacher, Paul Reese, is a graduate of the school and has difficulty reckoning with the fact that he is no longer a student but a colleague to the teachers. There is also the nervous biology teacher, who gives a test each time the students get out of hand (which is every day); a detention supervisor, who is overwhelmed with the number of miscreants assigned to him; and the headmaster, who is at a loss to control the evil that has infiltrated the school. Child’s Play opened to excellent reviews and won a handful of Tony Awards. In his New York Times review, Clive Barnes gushed, “Never for a moment does Mr. Marasco lose his grip on the attention, and as the mystery is chillingly unraveled, he produces one stroke after another of genuine Grand Guignol horror. This is one of the most satisfyingly scary shows in years.”76 Donald J. Mayerson raved, “Stunningly written, ‘Child’s Play’ makes a smooth and logical transition from the supernatural to the psychological. The cause of the unexplained violence? Go see it and find out, but don’t go alone. You’ll need someone to grab hold of. Not only is the play a smashing piece of theatre, but some day it is going to make one

 Robert Marasco, Child’s Play (New York: Samuel French, 1970), 15.  Clive Barnes, “Theater: Robert Marasco’s ‘Child’s Play Opens,” New York Times (February 18, 1970), 39. 75 76

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helluva hair-raising film.”77 The play is rarely revived, and its large cast (15), elaborate stage effects, and intricate design (Jo Mielziner’s original gothic set and dramatic lighting were production highlights) make it cost prohibitive. Still, Child’s Play offers some juicy roles for the main actors, allowing opportunities to indulge violent fantasies students have about teachers. (In the tradition of stage thrillers, I am obligated to point out that spoilers follow.) Reese, the gym teacher, is a conventionally lunkheaded jock. He wears sweats and a whistle around his neck, and he leaves his class under the supervision of a senior while he gets cans of Coke in the faculty lounge. He also challenges the other teachers and priests to handball games, and among the faculty, who are described as “dried-up celibates…clacking their beads and their teeth,”78 he is the only one to talk about dating girls. Reese is the manifestation of Woody Allen’s riff on Shaw: “Those who can’t do, teach, and those who can’t teach, teach gym.”79 He also articulates the established perception that teaching is a profession in which one does not need skills nor specialized knowledge to excel. He admits to the kindly Father Dobbs, whom he still calls Mr. Chips, “You’re what made me become a teacher. I figured…nice, cushy job; don’t have to know much. In fact, don’t really have to know anything.”80 The boys do sic their psychological and physical abuse on him, forcing him to gash his hand with a piece of glass. Tellingly, though, the heterosexualized, manliest teacher is the one who is unafraid to confront the boys at the end, and of the three central teacher characters, he is the only one to survive. He is also reconsidering teaching as a career because “it doesn’t seem very important right now.”81 As the seemingly kindhearted English instructor, Father Dobbs appears to be the epitome of altruistic teachers. Teaching is his life’s calling, and he characterizes himself as “the grand old man of the faculty, beloved of all

77  Donald J. Mayerson, “Theatre: Child’s Play,” The Villager (February 26, 1970), 9. The film version was released in 1972, and it was directed by Sidney Lumet and starred James Mason, Robert Preston, and Beau Bridges. Most critics did not consider it either a “helluva” or “hair-raising” film, and it was not a box office success. 78  Marasco, 45. 79  Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman, screenplay of Annie Hall (1977), https://assets. scriptslug.com/live/pdf/scripts/annie-hall-1977.pdf. 80  Marasco, 18. 81  Marasco, 58.

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the boys.”82 The boys confide in him, and he intercedes on their behalf when they are  faced with Malley’s stringent discipline. At one point, Dobbs implores him, “Your command of Greek and Latin may be awesome, Jerome, but you have no knowledge of boys. Look, all I’m asking is that you ease up on McArdle. Forget methods, forget personalities. For God’s sake, what malice can there be in a child?”83 Nevertheless, Dobbs is not what he seems. In fact, he is the opposite of what he seems. He needs the absolute devotion of all of the boys, and he must crush those who threaten to undermine him. The boys turn on their demonic possessor after he causes Malley’s suicide, and the curtain falls as they ominously close in on the helpless priest. The most interesting character is Malley, who is fastidious, fearsome, and sadistic: in short, he’s a classic classics teacher. He is an amalgamation of Holofernes, Andrew Crocker-Harris, and a gender-flipped stereotypical old-maid schoolteacher. Malley claims to be strict and demanding for the benefit of his students’ learning, but he reveals that his cruelty stems from both condescension of the students, whom he thinks are foolish and feebleminded, and disappointment in himself. He despises Dobbs, whom he believes coddles the students as a way of making up for his own failures. He professes to the priest: “Oh, God…the hate—the hate between us…How terrible, isn’t it…that the two of us should find ourselves together here…two such second-rate human beings…two such empty lives…shackled together here…”84 Malley is also coded as gay, which makes him even more reviled. Dobbs uses this to professionally and personally obliterate his rival. He sends pornographic pictures to Malley’s home, and this information leaks to the headmaster. Additionally, there have been mysterious phone calls late at night, and these hastened the death of Malley’s mother. Before throwing himself out a window, Malley crumbles: “[T]here was no need…no reason to torment her like that…an old woman who was dying…my mother. He was sending those pictures to my home. He was phoning her, telling her lies about me, destroying her with those terrible lies…All of it deliberate.”85 As with a lineage of queer teachers before him, Malley meets with inevitable annihilation. Recalling the anarchic-students

 Marasco, 18.  Marasco, 21. 84  Marasco, 32. 85  Marasco, 55. 82 83

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motif, Child’s Play presents a macabre world in which teachers are not only at the mercy of their students, but they are also their prey.

“Not What I Mean at All” Like Marasco, British playwright Simon Gray did not just write about teachers, he was one in real life. Gray was a lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London, from 1965 to 1985, and when asked why he did not leave his comparatively low-paying teaching job once he had become a moneymaking playwright, he responded: “Teaching is my bloody life.… I went to university when I was 17—and I never left.”86 He taught English literature (and Charles Dickens was his specialty), and in his plays, novels, and published diaries, he was often critical of educators. He said that one of the reasons he held onto his lecture line was to prevent an unsuitable person to fill it. “There are a lot of dead minds in education,” he said. “I’m blocking a position.”87 This critical view infuses his plays, and Gray adds to the roster of failed male teacher characters. In plays such as Butley, Otherwise Engaged (1975), Dog Days (1976), Quartermaine’s Terms, and The Common Pursuit (1984), Gray featured college professors, a British publisher, English teachers and language instructors, and a group of Cambridge graduates. Very often, the male teacher characters in his plays are self-destructive, out of touch, and alienated. Two of the most notable are the titular Ben Butley and St. John Quartermaine, who are also, if not manifestations of dead minds in education, indisputably ineffectual teachers. Butley takes place in a College of a London University faculty office. (Gray stated that the original scenic design by Eileen Diss was a meticulous recreation of his office at Queen Mary.88) Over the course of a single work day, Ben Butley’s life is completely turned upside down. First, his marriage officially dissolves as his wife announces her engagement to their old friend Tom, who, as Butley describes, is “the most boring man in London.”89 Then, Butley’s protégé Joey, with whom he is having an affair, announces that he is moving out of their flat to live with his new lover 86  Quoted in Mel Gussow, “Teaching is My Bloody Life,” New York Times (February 9, 1977), 43. 87  Quoted in Gussow, 43. 88  Anne Nothof, “The Pictures of Simon Gray: Dramatizing Degeration,” Modern Drama 43 (2000), 58. 89  Simon Gray, Butley (New York: Samuel French, 1971), 39.

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Reg. In the meantime, students interrupt Butley’s agita to attend their assigned tutorial sessions, and a pedantic colleague stops in to share news of her academic publication. Rather than eliciting pity, though, Butley’s acerbic wit and cruelty have an opposite effect. He is off-putting but also undeniably funny. His dark humor makes him irresistible. As many critics and scholars have argued, Ben Butley fits distinctly within the Oscar Wilde tradition. For one, the character delights in the absurd, and he gleefully skewers pretentiousness and academic jargon. When asked if he had forgotten to return an American student’s thesis titled “Henry James and the Crucified Consciousness,” Butley replies, “Not yet. So far I’ve forgotten to read it. Forgetting to give it back will come later. Failing Americans is a slow and intricate ritual and that’s what they come here for—the ritual—.”90 And referring to a literature syllabus he designed, Butley quips, “I wouldn’t be caught dead reading those books. And you know how it exhausts me to teach books I haven’t read.”91 His caustic, Wildean aphorisms highlight the hypocritical pretenses and morality of those who enter his sphere, yet Butley’s acumen and witty barbarisms do not give him the gratification of intellectual superiority. They only serve to further alienate himself. As Anne Nothof explains, Butley “exploits his friends, his colleagues, and his wife for his own amusement, but this amusement is ultimately more destructive of self than of others.”92 At the end of the play, he turns away a student he had purloined from another teacher. Riffing on T.S. Eliot, he declares, “You’re not what I mean at all, not what I mean at all.”93 Like Eliot’s Alfred J. Prufrock, Butley is disillusioned, broken, and alone as the curtain falls. Further aligning the play to Wilde is Butley’s ambiguous sexuality. He is a father (although he can’t remember his daughter’s name), and at the end of the first act he appears to be genuinely conflicted about divorcing his wife. On the other hand, he seems to have deep feelings for Joey and confides that he missed him when Joey and Reg were away for the weekend. While one might be tempted to define him as bisexual or queer,

 Gray, Butley, 12–13.  Gray, Butley, 16. 92  Nothof, 39. 93  Gray, Butley, 77. 90 91

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Butley refers to himself as “heterosexual.”94 Late in the second act, Butley baits Reg about the use of the word “queers,” which he equates with “fairies.” Butley, declaims: Of course they’ve almost vanished anyway, the old-style queens and queers, the poofs, the fairies. The very words seem to conjure up a magical world of naughty thrills, forbidden fruits—sorry—you know, I always used to enjoy them enjoying themselves. Their varied performances contributed to my life’s varieties. But now the law, in making them safe, has made them drab. Just like the heterosexual rest of us. Poor sods.95

Indeed, Butley embodies the trickster figure in his mockery of bourgeois attitudes about sexuality. In pointing out the performativity of sexual orientation, the character anticipates early twenty-first-century conceptions of homonormativity.96 As a trickster, Butley revels in sowing the seeds of discord, and like the Shakespearean fool archetype, he often teases with childlike rhymes and singsong patter. His go-to source is Beatrix Potter nursery rhymes, which he uses to deride the elitist academic argot. Katherine H. Burkman argues that Butley “is part clown, part social critic, and part scapegoat,” and “as an outsider he hovers and frolics on the boundaries between chaos and order.”97 This is particularly evident in his unwillingness to teach—he falsely claims tutorials across campus are cancelled that day—and his viewpoints on education. One student, Miss Heasman, corners Butley into meeting with her, and she shares an excruciating scrutiny of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Afterward, she divulges her aspiration to be a teacher of sixth-form students. He retorts, “Isn’t it more exhilarating to get them earlier? Sixth-form teachers are something like firemen called in to quench 94  Alan Bates, who originated the role in London and New York, said in an interview that when he asked Gray about Butley’s “homosexual relationship,” Gray responded, “Who said he’s a homosexual?” Bates conjectured, “Butley needed someone around, but his cruel gamesmanship was a disguise for his inability to give anything to anyone. It may be that, for all the other reasons that are possible, Joey leaves precisely because Butley won’t give him anything physical either.” (Quoted in Lawrence Christon, “Alan Bates as ‘Butley’— Intellectual Etched in Acid,” Los Angeles Times (March 18, 1973), O30. 95  Gray, Butley, 64. 96  See, for instance, Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003). 97  Katherine H.  Burkman, “The Fool as Hero: Simon Gray’s Butley and Otherwise Engaged,” Theatre Journal 33 (May 1981), 164.

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flames that are already out.”98 Like sexual identity, in contemporary society, education and learning have been drained of their distinctiveness and passion. Butley’s tragedy is his recognition that he is surrounded by boring, uninteresting, and uninterested people. He lives and works in a world that epitomizes and proudly proclaims its failure of imagination. While Butley draws comparisons to Wilde, Gray’s Quartermaine’s Terms has much in common with the work of Anton Chekhov. Set in the faculty room of an English language school in Cambridge, the play revolves around a group of faculty members, many of whom bear the Chekhovian qualities of disillusionment, discontentedness, and debilitating loneliness. These include a spinster, who lives at home with her unappreciative and cruel mother and who pines for another teacher; an unsuccessful novelist; a gullible wife saddled with a cheating husband; and a part-time, hapless teacher with a cloud of bad luck following him wherever he goes. “And, as in Chekhov,” Michael Billington writes, “these characters are all revealed to be implacable egotists.” He adds, “The big difference is that Chekhov’s characters have an unsatisfied rage for life whereas Gray’s suffer a little too passively.”99 In the center of this constellation of damaged souls is St. John Quartermaine (Fig. 6.2). Quartermaine is, by all accounts, an ineffective teacher, that is, when he bothers to show up for class at all. He often forgets to attend, and when he does, he often dismisses the class early because he “ran out of steam.”100 Loomis, the coprincipal, describes one occasion in which an irate cluster of students appeared before Loomis’s partner and his coprincipal: “[St. John’s] students waited doggedly through the whole hour for him to turn up, and then went to the office and berated poor Thomas—they were mostly Germans, and you know what they’re like if they think they’re not getting their month’s worth of syllabus.” He then ruefully adds, “Though I doubt whether they’d get more sensible English from St. John present than from St. John absent.”101 Nonetheless, Quartermaine is an entrenched fixture around the office, and the other faculty take advantage of his lack of a social life should they need a last-minute babysitter or a dinner-party  Gray, Butley, 45.  Michael Billington, “Quartermaine’s Terms—Review,” The Guardian (January 29, 2013). https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2013/jan/30/quartermaines-terms-wyndhams-london-review. Accessed February 12, 2023. 100  Simon Gray, Quartermaine’s Terms (New York: Samuel French, 1981), 34. 101  Gray, Quartermaine’s, 95. 98 99

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Fig. 6.2  Remak Ramsay in Simon Gray’s Quartermaine’s Terms (1983). (Photo by Bill Carter. Hunt/Pucci Associates. © The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts)

seat filler. More important, he is, as Loomis stresses, part of the school family, and “one does look after one’s own.”102 Gray slyly connects his characters with Chekhov directly. At one point, Quartermaine has an extra ticket to The Cherry Orchard, which is playing at the Cambridge Arts Theatre. He yearns to find a companion to go with him, but all of the other faculty members have other plans or no interest. Melanie, the spinster teacher, remarks that she despises Chekhov: “All that Russian gloom and doom and people shooting themselves from loneliness and depression and that sort of thing. But then Mother says I don’t understand comedy. I expect she’s right.”103 Similar to The Cherry Orchard, Gray’s comic drama ends with a sense of doom and an existential cry.  Gray, Quartermaine’s, 96.  Gray, Quartermaine’s, 47.

102 103

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Firs, the old manservant, in Chekhov’s play is a relic of the past, an irrelevant link to the glory days of the estate. The family keeps him on out of familial devotion, but when they are forced to move, they completely forget him. The play’s final, heartbreaking image consists of Firs alone in the front hall, locked in the deserted house, and all of the carriages and people gone. Left presumably to die, Firs recognizes his fate with an agonized, “You’ve got no strength, you’ve got nothing left, nothing…Eh, you…blunderhead!…(Lies still).”104 Quartermaine is similarly redundant, and he is an antiquated vestige from another time. For example, when he is required to give a lecture on British life and institutions using the new slide projector, the presentation goes horribly awry. The machine, he alleges, had “all those extra bits to master—anyway, one of the colleges went in upside down and wouldn’t come out so I had to—to abandon technology and do it all off my own bat—you know, reminiscences of my time at Oxford and—and anecdotes—and—you know—that sort of thing. The personal touch.”105 He has, in essence, outlived his usefulness as a teacher. Gray’s ending reverberates with Chekhov. When coprincipal Thomas dies, Loomis passes the school on to Windscape, for whom Quartermaine regularly babysat. The new principal’s first order of business in making the school more up-to-date is to fire the inept teacher because there is no “room for [him] any more.”106 The play ends with Quartermaine faced not with entrapment, since he would surely relish the chance to spend his final days in the school’s staff room. Instead, he faces a more terrifying doom: obliteration by expulsion. The curtain falls as Quartermaine repeats his favorite phrase in utter horror and paralysis: “Oh Lord! Well—I say (crosses R. to his chair as if to sit—can’t—turns front for:)—Oh Lord!”107 St. John Quartermaine is one of the few stage teachers that doesn’t invoke varying degrees of contempt, inspiration, or indifference. He will break your heart.

104  Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard, A Comedy in Four Acts, translated from the Russian by Richard Nelson, Richard Pevear, and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: TCG, 2015), 157. 105  Gray, Quartermaine’s, 33–4. 106  Gray, Quartermaine’s, 103. 107  Gray, Quartermaine’s, 104.

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“Term of Art” A good deal has been written about David Mamet’s Oleanna and its fraught depictions of sexual harassment, teacher-student power dynamics, and the presumed crisis in higher education.108 When the play opened in fall 1992, the country was still reeling from the Anita Hill hearings, and even in the pre-#MeToo movement, people were inundated with references to sexual violence and political correctness. Oleanna exploited the tense cultural politics of the time and needled the audience with its portrayal of an office hour encounter that goes terribly wrong. Critic Elaine Showalter reported that New York audience members regularly shouted misogynist remarks at the stage as Carol, the woman college student, turned the tables on John, her male professor. The consensus was that the writing and directing (also by Mamet) favored John. Showalter documents, for example, that the man sitting beside her muttered, “I nearly climbed up on the stage to kick the shit out of the little bitch myself.”109 The affective responses are particularly intriguing as they suggest that in the end, many in the audience actively rooted for an arrogant, sophistic, and self-described pedantic professor. In interviews, Mamet has described the play as written in the style of an Aristotelian tragedy.110 He summed up its thrust in a 2021 London Times essay:

108  See, for instance, Christine MacLeod, “The Politics of Gender, Language, and Hierarchy in Mamet’s Oleanna,” Journal of American Studies 29 (1995), 199–213; Richard Badenhausen, “The Modern Academy Raging in the Dark: Misreading Mamet’s Political Incorrectness in Oleanna,” College Literature 25 (Fall 1998), 1–19; Naomi Morgenstern, “The University in Crisis: Teaching, Tenure, and Transference in David Mamet’s Oleanna,” Cultural Critique 82 (Fall 2012), 1–33; Monica Prendergast, “Teaching as a Moral Act: Reflections on Five Plays Featuring Teachers and Students (Shaw’s Pygmalion, Kanin’s Born Yesterday, Riml’s RAGE, Mamet’s Oleanna, and Russell’s Educating Rita) ” in Teachers and Teaching on Stage and Screen: Dramatic Depictions, edited by Diane Conrad and Monica Prendergast (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2019), 160–9. 109  Elaine Showalter, “Acts of Violence: David Mamet and the Language of Men,” TLS (November 6, 1992), 17. I hasten to add that I saw the show at the Orpheum Theatre in New York City on December 5, 1992, little over a month after the play opened, and I did not encounter unruliness among my fellow audience members. 110  See Leo Adam Biga, “David Mamet and the ‘Stupid F***ing Words,’” American Theatre (May 24, 2022), https://www.americantheatre.org/2022/05/24/david-mametand-the-stupid-fing-words/. Accessed February 14, 2023.

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Oleanna, a play I wrote nearly years ago, is a classical tragedy. It has two antagonists, it takes place in one spot, over 48 hours, and each actor has a single goal (with thanks to Aristotle). The young student received a bad grade and pleads with her instructor for help. He decides to help her by taking her behind the curtain. Education, he teaches, is mainly nonsense, elaborating simple common sense and study into the hawking of preferment. He wants to help his student, she wants to learn and they end up destroying each other.111

Oleanna may endure scrutiny as a Greek tragedy, but in the context of this chapter, the play resonates with Greek comedy. The academia of Mamet’s creation resonates with Aristophanes’ Thinkery of The Clouds, and John has many characteristics of the satirized sophists. In addition to the “bad grade” she has received, Carol goes to John’s office because she is frustrated and feels at sea in the material and among her classmates. They seem to be speaking a foreign language, and she doesn’t “understand what anything means.” She walks around “[f]rom morning ’til night,” she confesses, “with this one thought in my head. I’m stupid.”112 When John tries to assuage her by assuring her that she is not stupid but more likely angry, she rails: Nobody tells me anything. And I sit there…in the corner. In the back. And everybody’s talking about “this” all the time. And “concepts,” and “precepts” and, and, and, and, and, WHAT IN THE WORLD ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? And I read your book. And they said, “Fine, go in that class.” Because you talked about responsibility to the young. I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT MEANS AND I’M FAILING….”113

John’s response to Carol is circuitously illogical and unenlightening. In one moment, he denigrates higher education as a form of “hazing” and “grilling” in which students are asked to uselessly parrot back what they have read or been instructed. In the next, he interrogates her, asking her to recite an example he offered in class: “Can you repeat it to me? (She looks down at her notebook.) Without your notes? I ask you as a favor to me, 111  David Mamet, “David Mamet: ‘We Baby Boomers Inherited a Circus of License and Waste,’” London Times (June 19, 2021), https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/davidmamet-we-baby-boomers-inherited-a-circus-of-licence-and-waste-fbm8989f5. Accessed February 14, 2023. 112  David Mamet, Oleanna (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 12. 113  Mamet, Oleanna, 14.

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so that I can see if my idea was interesting.”114 Additionally, he argues that higher education has become exclusionary, establishing hardened barriers between obedient students and authoritative teachers: “I came late to teaching. And I found it Artificial. The notion of ‘I know and you do not’; and I saw an exploitation in the education process.”115 Then, he uses jargon and heightened language, such as “paradigm” and “obeisance” that solidifies his intellectual power over the student. Much of it is pure pompousness. In the play’s opening, Carol questions John’s use of the expression, “term of art.” When he stumbles over a tortured definition, she replies: “You don’t know what it means…?” He concedes, “I’m not sure that I know what it means.”116 As in The Clouds, by the end of Oleanna, the student has acquired the tools of the sophist and cleverly uses rhetoric as a means to power. Carol uses the knowledge she has gained (presumably within 48 hours) to strip the professor of his erudite veneer, reducing him to physical and verbal violence. He denounces her accusation of attempted rape and physically assaults her: “I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole. You little cunt….”117 Richard Badenbausen reasons, “Carol does become quite a good student who learns her lessons well by the play’s end, for she has come to master many of her teacher’s own tricks, including a penchant for intellectual bullying; an ability to use language ambiguously so as to get her way; and an outlook on the world informed by a deep-seated cynicism about human relations.”118 Her academic ruthlessness effectively makes audiences sympathetic toward the double-talking professor. The Clouds concludes with Strepsiades burning down the Thinkery, and Mamet’s play essays a similar symbolic blow to academia. Notably, the title of the play comes from a folk song, in which a Norwegian singer longs to be in Oleanna, a utopian community in Western Pennsylvania. The idyllic vision flopped, and disappointment followed. Mamet stated that “Oleanna is a play about failed Utopia, in this case the failed Utopia of Academia.”119 The destruction of the university, Mamet posits, will not happen from outside sources but from the implosion caused by teachers and students like John and Carol.  Mamet, Oleanna, 29.  Mamet, Oleanna, 22. 116  Mamet, Oleanna, 3. 117  Mamet, Oleanna, 79. 118  Badenhausen, 13. 119  Quoted in Badenhausen, 15. 114 115

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“To Become Soft Again” In the words of Leo Tolstoy, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” A similar formula may apply to the trope of failed men teachers in the theatre. As evidenced by the cohort analyzed in this chapter, every failed male teacher is a failure in his own way. For instance, a teacher may be derisibly pedantic and a laughingstock to his students; he may be ineffectual in the classroom and emasculated in his home; he may pose a real or imagined threat to students or other teachers; or he may exhibit a combination of these failures, leading to his personal humiliation, professional termination, or mortal destruction. This chapter concludes with an examination of a different kind of failed male teacher than those previously scrutinized. In Donja R. Love’s soft, Isaiah Corbin is an English teacher in a young men’s correctional center. Isaiah recognizes that the educational system in which he works is designed for teachers and students to fail, and rather than face a future in which he is a hardened, disillusioned, and a physically beaten-up or burnt-out teacher, he quits. Mr. Isaiah, as the students refer to him, is not a failed teacher but an imminently failed teacher (Fig. 6.3). In the archive of teacher plays, soft is a rarity in that it focuses on a Black male teacher. (In real life, Black male teachers are equally rare. African American men make up just 2% of the total number of public teachers in the United States.120) Isaiah, who has had run-ins with the law, is in his twenties, married, and has a son on the way. The six students, who make up Isaiah’s writing class, are all in their late teens and individually identified as Black, Afro-Latino, and Dominican. The young men have been assigned to the “juvenile boarding school” instead of serving a jail sentence. As Mr. Cartwright, the hardened school director, explains, “It was either prison or here. Monday through Friday, we not only give them a place to learn comfortably, we also give them a home—even on the weekends. They should consider themselves blessed because they are a hairline away from the system making them forgotten.”121 Isaiah leads them through discussions of Othello and assigns them to write sonnets and do a

120  Sundjata Seku, “Why We Need More Black Men in the Classroom,” neaToday (March 17, 2021), https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/why-we-needmore-black-men-classroom. Accessed February 16, 2023. 121  Donja R. Love, soft (MCC Press Script, 2022), 18.

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Fig. 6.3  Biko Eisen-Martin and Travis Raeburn in the MCC production of Donja R. Love’s soft (2022). (Photo by Daniel J. Vasquez. Reprinted with permission of MCC)

freewrite in the form of a haiku, cinquain, “or something that will stretch [them]” about the first time they “heard the word ‘nigger.’”122 Isaiah is profoundly idealistic and truly believes that introducing students to literary analysis, composition skills, and poetry will save them from a life in prison. Mr. Cartwright warns him that every teacher begins with similar aspirations, but their naivete is soon dashed. “Hope,” the director cautions, “can be a very dangerous thing,” adding, “It can blind

 Love, 52.

122

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J. F. WILSON

you from reality. You can get lost in hope.”123 When Kevin, the brightest student in the class, commits suicide, Isaiah is racked with guilt. Kevin had talked with his teacher before hanging himself, but when Isaiah broached the subject with Mr. Cartwright, his concerns were dismissed because the director was eager to get home to his wife. Isaiah is unable to sleep, and the suicide has impacted his relationship with the other students. The class has become unruly (or unrulier than before), and Mr. Cartwright chastises him: “You’re getting soft, Isaiah. You’re letting those boys make you weak.”124 soft offers as much a rumination on masculinity as it does on teaching. Times critic Juan A. Ramírez wrote that in the play, “Black manhood is envisioned as a delicate garden full of blossoms and wilts.”125 In fact, the play’s title toys with an allusion to softness as both presumed ineffective teaching skills and unmanliness, and then it flips the script. Whereas Mr. Cartwright regards softness as a negative quality, for Love, it is a transcendent attribute of Black manhood and pedagogy. One of the students, Antoine, finally acknowledges his personal fears and admits his love for Kevin, breaking down in Isaiah’s arms. The stage directions indicate: “Mr. Isaiah holds Antoine in all his softness and tries to put him back together as he wilts in his arms. These two Black men just stand there holding each other.”126 Social circumstances and the educational systems condition the men to be hard, and in the process, it drains them of their humanity. Antoine suggests this in his final haiku: “What makes life so hard/ is most times you struggle to/ become soft again.”127 In the end, Antoine is not able to reconcile his desire for softness in a world that demands hardness of Black men. He commits suicide. As the play ends, Isaiah defiantly renounces a system that demands hardness of its male constituents and that gradually depletes the ideals and crushes the souls of well-meaning teachers. He sees his own future in the  Love, 17.  Love, 37. 125  “‘Soft’ Review: Young Black Men, Gently Pointed Toward Liberation,” New York Times (June 10, 2022), https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/10/theater/soft-reviewdonja-love.html. Accessed February 14, 2023. The description also references the original productions scenic design, which included a cold and institutional classroom and administrative office surrounded by the audience on three sides. A border between the audience and playing area was strewn with brightly colored flowers and petals. 126  Love, 79. 127  Love, 80. 123 124

6  FAILURE TO ACHIEVE: A REPORT CARD ON MALE EDUCATORS… 

181

scarred face of Mr. Cartwright, who earlier told him that one day he would be unable to extricate himself from a job he needs to leave to protect himself. Mr. Cartwright advises: And that exact moment you do give up, a student will come along and remind you that these are just kids. And the same kid that sparked that dying hope inside of you will get into a fight one day. As you break it up, he’ll pull out a knife and, in a dazed fury, slit you across the face. All the while, while this is going down, you’ll pick up a terrible smoking habit, that gets your wife sick. So, you can’t quit anymore. You have to stay here for the insurance as you climb the administrator ladder and wait to retire so you can get your pension. So you can really take care of who matters to you. So you can really save a life.128

Isiah’s existential triumph is his refusal to submit to a life of failure. Before he can  become an Andrew Crocker-Harris, George, Jerome “Slash” Malley, Ben Butley, St. John Quartermaine, John, or a  Mr. Cartwright, Isaiah walks away. Dramatically, Isaiah’s decision to leave the profession is an act of self-­ preservation, and it allows him to retain his Black male softness. Nevertheless, the play perpetuates the impression that nearly 100 years after Waller’s sociological study, teaching is still a failure belt for men teachers. Little has changed in the intervening decades. As the gender and racial divide among educators continues to grow, and as the “best and the brightest” eschew teaching as a career,129 education scholars and  Love, 39.  Richard M.  Ingersoll, et  al., “Seven Trends: The Transformation of the Teaching Force—Updated October 2018” (CPRE Research Reports, 2018), https://repository. upenn.edu/cpre_researchreports/108. Accessed February 16, 2023. 128 129

182 

J. F. WILSON

teaching-outreach administrators would do well to consider the deeply entrenched attitudes toward male teachers as depicted in mainstream theatre. Unpacking, deconstructing, and critically evaluating these plays may provide a means for imagining and actualizing successful male teachers in real-life classrooms. This may, just maybe, produce alternative male teaching role models. In an ideal world, students would interact daily with brilliant, inspiring educators of all genders, including male-identified teachers, who  are intellectually astute, pedagogically engaging, and confident in their masculinity no matter how much cultural pushback they receive. Admittedly, such a reversal would make for boring theatre, but it would be awesome for the kids.

CHAPTER 7

Epilogue: “Becomes a Student”

Teachers and professors fascinate because while we may remember our favorites and our least favorites, the kind ones, the strict ones, the lazy and slightly lunatic, in general, we don’t get to know them beyond the school walls and outside the parameters of academic lessons. In theatre and performance, though, audiences often have a privileged view of teachers in the classroom, in the faculty lounge, during office hours, or at home. In addition, on-stage teacher characters indulge our repressed crushes, lingering terrors, and revenge fantasies. Intuitive playwrights can tap into underlying cultural attitudes toward educators as well as the pedagogical challenges instructors face every day. Close analysis of the rich archive of successful, unsuccessful, frequently revived, and mercifully forgotten plays and musicals that spotlight teacher characters can provide important lessons about our contradictory feelings and perhaps clues to why education remains one of the most embattled professions. Failure, Fascism, and Teachers in American Theatre: Pedagogy of the Oppressors examines resilient and enduring tropes associated with women and men teachers as well as moments of social and political panics in which educators were singled out for the possible moral or physical harm they might inflict on their young charges. As I write this, we seem to be in the midst of yet another panic. The media air waves are filled with threats of job termination for educators who teach students about race and racism,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. F. Wilson, Failure, Fascism, and Teachers in American Theatre, Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34013-0_7

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and for so-called groomers, should they so much as mention sexuality and LGBTQ+ lives and experiences in the classroom. Even playwright David Mamet went on the attack, stating that a staggering number of teachers are “sexual predators.” Speaking to a Fox News host, Mamet stated, “This has always been the problem with education, is that teachers are inclined, particularly men because men are predators, to pedophilia.”1 American Federation of Teachers president, Randi Weingarten, promptly rebuked Mamet for his “repulsive demonization of the very people who have been the lifeline to our kids.”2 Repellant and unfounded accusations have no place in public discourse. Save it for the stage. The vilification of teachers by a vocal and powerful right-wing contingent evokes the anti-teacher sentiments of the mid-twentieth century, and education activists need to be proactive in flipping the script before it is too late—if it’s not already. Through most of the 1940s and 1950s, American education was in crisis. The limits of academic freedom, usefulness of loyalty oaths, and threats of covert subversives on school campuses were hotly debated topics in mainstream media and among educators. The repressive measures cost countless schoolteachers and college faculty members their jobs, and an atmosphere of anxiety, distrust, and intellectual suppression pervaded most educational settings. Additionally, students across the country were denied opportunities to hear from some of the most brilliant thinkers, such as Bertrand Russell and others, who were considered inflammatory and supposedly espoused dangerous moral and political views. In a cruel twist of irony, as the United States was celebrating its victory over fascism as well as the curtailment of personal freedoms globally, federal and state legislatures were enacting laws that inhibited free speech and conducting investigations based on insubstantial evidence. Public schools and universities, once considered citadels of liberalism, were regarded as seedbeds of radicalism and communist double-dealing. Hollywood of the Cold War era has often come under fire for not taking a stronger stand against the anti-communist investigations and the blacklists. The New York theatre, on the other hand, is generally considered a 1  Quoted in Greg Evans, “‘American Buffalo’ Playwright Tells Fox News That Teachers ‘Are Inclined’ to Pedophilia, Deadline (April 11, 2022), https://deadline.com/2022/04/ david-mamet-fox-news-teachers-pedophilia-1234999992/. Accessed February 19, 2023. 2  Quoted in Trudy Ring, “Playwright David Mamet Roasted for Accusing Teachers of Pedophilia,” Advocate (April 11, 2022), https://www.advocate.com/news/2022/4/12/ playwright-david-mamet-roasted-accusing-teachers-pedophilia. Accessed February 19, 2023.

7  EPILOGUE: “BECOMES A STUDENT” 

185

bastion of free speech where outspoken writers and actors could continue to work with greater impunity. That said, histories of US theatre tend to focus on canonical protest plays, which metaphorically allude to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)  and McCarthy hearings. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, for instance, is often included in school curriculum for the very purpose of “teaching” McCarthyism. However, references to witch hunts, job terminations, and First Amendment assaults did not exist only in the subtext of a handful of dramas and comedies. Plays such as The Male Animal, The Velvet Glove, and Decision, all hits in their time, are not currently revived, but they represent the efforts of politically conscious playwrights to take on issues facing educators directly. Perhaps a new generation of theatre artists might run a similar gauntlet. In the form of a coda, I would like to introduce one final teacher play, Sarah Ruhl’s Letters from Max, a ritual (2023). The epistolary drama focuses on the relationship between two characters, who are based on actual people, Ruhl and former college student and poet, Max Ritvo. Max was a participant in Ruhl’s playwriting workshop at Yale, and they developed a robust friendship outside of the classroom. Max was battling cancer when they first worked together, and he died at age 26  in 2016. Through his terminal illness, they shared poems, plays in-progress, and meditations about death, life, and the writing process. Unlike most of the teacher characters analyzed in this book, Sarah in Letters from Max offers a snapshot of the antithesis of a failed teacher. On one hand, she is an astute instructor and provides meaningful feedback on his work. For instance, she responds to his draft of a script with notes such as, “Put that speech in iambic pentameter,” and “[C]ut that monologue down by 25%.”3 And on the other, she is open to the fullness of Max’s acute knowledge, artistry, and sagacity. At one point, Sarah performs a typically un-­ teacherly act by making herself vulnerable and entrusting her student with writing that is not fully formulated. He replies with admirably teacherly generosity and intellectual approbation. Consequently, Ruhl, the playwright, describes Sarah, the character, as “a teacher who becomes a student.”4 Instructors, teachers, and professors might aspire to similar pursuits of grace and become students. Only then might true liberation from the pedagogy of the oppressors be achieved.

3 4

 Sarah Ruhl, Letters from Max, a ritual (Press Script, February 20, 2023), 10.  Ruhl, 2.



Appendix: Teacher Plays and Musicals by Year

Title

Author(s)

Year

Genre (play/musical)

The Clouds A Comedy of Errors Love’s Labour’s Lost The Merry Wives of Windsor Two Noble Kinsmen The Imaginary Invalid Rosmersholm Uncle Vanya Sherlock Holmes

Aristophanes William Shakespeare William Shakespeare William Shakespeare

423 BCE 1592–1594 1594–1595 1597

P P P P

William Shakespeare Molière Henrik Ibsen Anton Chekhov William Gillette and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Anton Chekhov George Bernard Shaw Frank Wedekind George Bernard Shaw Harry James Smith Susan Glaspell Frederic Lansing Day John Van Druten Jane Thornton Music and lyrics by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, book by Guy Bolton, Kalmar, and Ruby

1613 1673 1887 1899 1899

P P P P P

1901 1905 1906 1913 1918 1921 1922 1925 1926 1926

P P P P P P P P P M

Three Sisters Major Barbara Spring’s Awakening Pygmalion The Little Teacher Inheritors Makers of Light Young Woodley Say It with Flowers The Ramblers

(continued)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. F. Wilson, Failure, Fascism, and Teachers in American Theatre, Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34013-0

187

188 

Appendix: Teacher Plays and Musicals by Year

(continued) Title

Author(s)

Year

Genre (play/musical)

The Chief Thing

Nikolai Evreinov (translated by Leo Randole and Herman Bernstein) Jules Romains Music by Ray Henderson, lyrics by B.G. DeSylva and Lew Brown, book by Laurence Schwab and DeSylva Dorothy Manley and Donald Duff Marcel Pagnol Eugene O’Neill Paul Osborn Barry Conners Harry Wagstaff Gribble Katharine Clugston Patrick Hamilton S. N. Behrman Elmer Rice Adapted by John Anderson Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman Floyd Dell and Thomas Mitchell William L. Laurence Alfred Savoir Christa Winsloe

1926

P

1926 1927

P M

1927

P

1928 1928 1928 1928 1928 1928 1929 1929 1929 1930 1930

P P P P P P P P P P P

1931

P

1931 1931 1932

P P P

Dodie Smith Harrison Zeiberg Aurania Rouverol George Sklar and Albert Maltz Oskar Rempel Jean Giraudoux Lillian Hellman Leslie Reade James Warwick Music by Sigmund Romberg, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, book by Frank Mandel Dorothy Bennett and Irving White

1932 1933 1933 1933 1933 1933 1934 1934 1935 1935

P P P P P P P P P M

1935

P

Knock Good News

Stigma Topaze Strange Interlude Hotbed Girl Trouble March Hares These Days Rope Meteor Street Scene Inspector General Once in a Lifetime Cloudy with Showers Devil in the Mind He Girls in Uniform (Maedchen in Uniform) Autumn Crocus We, the People Growing Pains Peace on Earth The Curtain Rises Intermezzo The Children’s Hour The Shatter’d Lamp Blind Alley May Wine

Fly Away Home

(continued)

  Appendix: Teacher Plays and Musicals by Year 

189

(continued) Title

Author(s)

Year

Genre (play/musical)

Remember the Day Truly Valiant

Philip Dunning and Philo Higley Holworthy Hall and Robert Middlemass Samuel John Park Oscar Saul and Lou Lantz Music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart, book by George Abbott, Rodgers, Hart John Monks, Jr. and Fred F. Finklehoffe Emlyn Williams Joseph A. Fields and Jerome Chodorov Music, lyrics, book by Marc Blitzstein Norman MacOwan J. B. Priestley Thornton Wilder Martin Berkeley Clifford Goldsmith Hazel Ellis Elmer Rice James Thurber and Elliott Nugent Arthur Wilmurt Frederick Herendeen Marc Connelly

1935 1936

P P

1936 1936 1936

P P M

1936

P

1938 1938

P P

1938

M

1938 1938 1938 1938 1938 1938 1940 1940

P P P P P P P P

1940 1941 1941

P P P

Fritz Rotter and Allen Vincent Songs by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, book by John Cecil Holm Gladys Hurlbut Alexander Afinogenov, Adapted by Peggy Phillips James Gow and Arnaud D’Usseau Jack Kirkland Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein Fredrick Stephani and Murray Burnett

1941 1941

P M

1942 1943

P P

1943

P

1944 1944

P P

1944

P

Black Widow The Revolt of the Beavers On Your Toes

Brother Rat The Corn Is Green Schoolhouse on the Lot The Cradle Will Rock Glorious Morning I Have Been Here Before Our Town Roosty What a Life Women Without Men Flight to the West The Male Animal Young Couple Wanted Popsy The Mole on Lincoln’s Cheek [Radio Play] Letters to Lucerne Best Foot Forward

Yankee Point Listen, Professor! Tomorrow the World Suds in Your Eye Chicken Every Sunday Hickory Stick

(continued)

190 

Appendix: Teacher Plays and Musicals by Year

(continued) Title

Author(s)

Year

Genre (play/musical)

Trio

Dorothy Baker and Howard Baker John Boruff Edward Chodorov Marian De Forest Music by Leonard Bernstein, book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green Les White, Bud Pearson Curt Goetz and Dorian Otvos Cyrus Wood Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht A. B. Shiffrin Tennessee Williams

1944

P

1944 1944 1944 1944

P P P M

1945 1945 1945 1946

P P P P

1946 1947

P P

John Van Druten Frank Gould Donald Ogden Stewart Music by Sidney Lippman, lyrics by Sylvia Dee, book by Max Shulman Konstantine Simonov Terence Rattigan Keith Winter Music by George Lessner, book and lyrics by Russell Maloney, Miriam Battista N. Richard Nash J. B. Priestley Fay Kanin Gertrude Berg Michael Yates Crowley

1947 1947 1947 1947

P P P M

1947 1948 1948 1948

P P P M

1948 1948 1948 1948 1949

P P P P P

Herman Wouk Rosemary Casey Bertolt Brecht (adaptation of Lenz) Louis Verneuil Samson Raphaelson Elmer Rice

1949 1949 1950

P P P

1950 1950 1951

P P P

Bright Boy Decision Little Women On the Town

Too Hot for Maneuvers It’s a Gift Good Night Ladies Swan Song I Like It Here A Streetcar Named Desire The Druid Circle Tenting Tonight How I Wonder Barefoot Boy with Cheek

The Whole World Over The Browning Version The Rats of Norway Sleepy Hollow

The Young and Fair The Linden Tree Goodbye, My Fancy Me and Molly The Rape of the Sabine Women The Traitor The Velvet Glove The Tutor Affairs of State Hilda Crane Not for Children

(continued)

  Appendix: Teacher Plays and Musicals by Year 

191

(continued) Title

Author(s)

Year

Genre (play/musical)

The King and I

Music by Richard Rodgers, book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II Lesley Storm Music and lyrics by Kay Swift, text by Cornelia Otis Skinner Robert Anderson Vina Delmar Arnold Perl

1951

M

1952 1952

P M

1953 1953 1953

P P P

Sharon A. Cole Graham Greene William Inge Robert Ardrey Paul Vincent Carroll

1953 1953 1953 1954 1954

P P P P P

Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Enid Bagnold Harold Levitt William Inge Eugène Ionesco Music by Leonard Bernstein, libretto by Lillian Hellman Music by Frederick Loewe, book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner Molly Kazan Aldous Huxley and Betty Wendel Leslie Stevens

1955

P

1955 1955 1955 1956 1956

P P P P M

1956

M

1957 1957

P P

1958

P

Norman Krasna

1958

P

Howard Teichmann James Forsyth Music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse William Gibson

1958 1958 1959

P P M

1959

P

1959

P

A Day’s Mischief Paris ’90 Tea and Sympathy Mid-Summer The World of Sholom Aleichem The Emperor’s Clothes The Living Room Picnic Sing Me No Lullaby The Wise Have Not Spoken Inherit the Wind The Chalk Garden The Passion of Gross Bus Stop The Lesson Candide My Fair Lady The Egghead The Genius and the Goddess The Marriage-Go-Round Who Was That Lady I Saw You With? The Girls in 509 Heloise The Sound of Music

Tall Story The Miracle Worker

(continued)

192 

Appendix: Teacher Plays and Musicals by Year

(continued) Title

Author(s)

Year

Genre (play/musical)

Five Finger Exercise Jolly’s Progress A Desert Incident Moonbirds Come Share My House Bye, Bye, Birdie

Peter Shaffer Lonnie Coleman Pearl S. Buck Marcel Aymé Theodore Apstein Music by Charles Strouse, lyrics by Lee Adams, book by Michael Stewart Hugh Wheeler James Goldman and William Goldman Phoebe Ephron and Henry Ephron Tennessee Williams Edward Albee

1959 1959 1959 1959 1960 1961

P P P P P M

1961 1961

P P

1961

P

1961 1962

P P

Music by Charles Strouse, lyrics by Lee Adams, book by Mel Brooks Henry Denker Ronald Millar Max Frisch Irving Cooper

1962

M

1962 1962 1962 1963

P P P P

Alan Paton, Krishna Shah Robert Fisher and Arthur Marx Music by Duke Ellington, lyrics by Marshall Barer, book by Jerome Weidman Norman Krasna Music by Manos Hadjidakis, lyrics by Joe Darion, book by Jules Dassin, Peter Nichols

1964 1965 1966

P P M

1967 1967

P M

1968

P

Jay Presson Allen

1968

P

Mart Crowley Music and lyrics by Oscar Brand and Paul Nassau, book by Benjamin Bernard Zavin

1968 1968

P M

Big Fish, Little Fish Blood, Sweat, and Stanley Poole Take Her, She’s Mine The Night of the Iguana Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? All American

Venus at Large The Affair Andorra Have I Got a Girl For You Sponono The Impossible Years Pousse-Café

Love in E-Flat Illya Darling

A Day in the Death of Joe Egg The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie The Boys in the Band The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N

(continued)

  Appendix: Teacher Plays and Musicals by Year 

193

(continued) Title

Author(s)

Year

Genre (play/musical)

Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? Up the Down Staircase Child’s Play Borstal Boy The Philanthropist And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little Butley Grease

Don Petersen

1969

P

Tad Mosel Robert Marasco Frank McMahon Christopher Hampton Paul Zindel

1969 1970 1970 1970 1971

P P P P P

Simon Gray Music, lyrics, and book by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey Tom Stoppard Jean Kerr Donald Driver Peter Nichols Music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, book by Kenny Solms and Gail Parent Izzy Salant Simon Gray Trevor Griffiths Roberto Athayde Lanford Wilson Music and lyrics by Jerry Herman, book by Michael Stewart and Mark Bramble Mary O’Malley Mark Medoff Daniel Keyes Christopher Durang

1972 1972

P M

1972 1973 1973 1973 1974

P P P P M

1975 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979

P P P P P M

1979 1980 1980 1981

P P P P

Edward Albee Martin Sherman Neil Simon Casey Kurtti Percy Granger Music and lyrics by James Quinn and Alaric Jans, book by John R. Powers Cecil Philip Taylor

1981 1981 1981 1982 1982 1982

P P P P P M

1982

P

Jumpers Finishing Touches Status Quo Vadis Forget-Me-Not Lane Lorelei

Rites of Passage Otherwise Engaged Comedians Miss Margarida’s Way Fifth of July The Grand Tour

Once a Catholic Children of a Lesser God Charlie and Algernon Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You Lolita Rose Fools Catholic School Girls Eminent Domain Do Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? Good

(continued)

194 

Appendix: Teacher Plays and Musicals by Year

(continued) Title

Author(s)

Year

Genre (play/musical)

Monday After the Miracle Quartermaine’s Terms Angels Fall Open Admissions The Golden Age Dancing in the End Zone Wild Honey Educating Rita Stepping Out Sarafina!

William Gibson

1982

P

Simon Gray Lanford Wilson Shirley Lauro Louis Nowra Bill C. Davis

1983 1983 1984 1984 1985

P P P P P

Michael Frayn Willy Russell Richard Harris Music and lyrics by Mbongeni Ngema and Hugh Masekela, book by Ngema Book by Lawrence D. Cohen, lyrics by Dean Pitchford, music by Michael Gore Wendy Wasserstein Athol Fugard Athol Fugard

1986 1987 1987 1988

P P P M

1988

M

1988 1988 1989

P P P

Brian Friel Richard Nelson Israel Horovitz

1990 1990 1991

P P P

David Mamet Frank McGuinness

1992 1992

P P

Adrienne Kennedy Vicki Quade and Maripat Donovan Tom Stoppard Emily Mann Terrence McNally David Hare Paula Vogel Donald Margulies Wendy Wasserstein Margaret Edson Rebecca Gilman David Auburn

1992 1993

P P

1995 1995 1995 1996 1997 1997 1997 1998 2000 2000

P P P P P P P P P P

Carrie

The Heidi Chronicles The Road to Mecca My Children! My Africa! Dancing at Lughnasa Some Americans Abroad Park Your Car in Harvard Yard Oleanna Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me Ohio State Murders Late Night Catechism Arcadia Having Our Say Master Class Skylight How I Learned to Drive Collected Stories An American Daughter Wit Spinning into Butter Proof

(continued)

  Appendix: Teacher Plays and Musicals by Year 

195

(continued) Title

Author(s)

Year

Genre (play/musical)

A Lesson Before Dying The Invention of Love The Retreat from Moscow Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks Avenue Q

Romulus Linney Tom Stoppard William Nicholson

2000 2001 2003

P P P

Richard Alfieri

2003

P

Music and lyrics by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, book by Jeff Whitty Alan Bennett John Patrick Shanley Stephen Belber Mark Medoff Warren Leight

2003

M

2004 2004 2004 2004 2005

P P P P P

Dan O’Brien Wendy Wasserstein Nilaja Sun David Hare Matthew Burnett Stephen Karam and PJ Paparelli Wallace Shawn Music by Duncan Sheik, book and lyrics by Steven Sater Music and lyrics by Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin, book by Heather Hach Tom Stoppard Stephen Karam Music by Elton John, book and lyrics by Lee Hall Ian Rowlands Annie Baker Moisés Kaufman Melissa James Gibson Christina Anderson Annie Baker

2005 2005 2006 2006 2006 2006 2006 2006

P P P P P P P M

2007

M

2007 2007 2008

P P M

2008 2008 2009 2009 2009 2009

P P P P P P

Norm Foster Jonathan Tolins Kim Rosenstock

2010 2010 2010

P P P

The History Boys Doubt Match Prymate No Foreigners Beyond This Point The Dear Boy Third No Child… The Vertical Hour Theophilus North Columbinus The Music Teacher Spring Awakening Legally Blonde

Rock ’n’ Roll Speech and Debate Billy Elliot Blink Body Awareness 33 Variations This Inked Baby Circle Mirror Transformation Office Hours Secrets of the Trade Tigers Be Still

(continued)

196 

Appendix: Teacher Plays and Musicals by Year

(continued) Title

Author(s)

Year

Genre (play/musical)

Abraham Lincoln’s Big Gay Dance Party Prophecy The Metal Children After the Revolution The Language Archive The Apple Family Plays Seminar Unnatural Acts The Dream of the Burning Boy Asuncion A Christmas Story, A Musical

Karen Malp

2010

P

Karen Malpede Adam Rapp Amy Herzog Julia Cho Richard Nelson Theresa Rebeck Tony Speciale, et al. David West Read

2010 2010 2010 2010 2010–2020 2011 2011 2011

P P P P P P P P

Jesse Eisenberg Music and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, book by Joseph Robinette Tarell Alvin McCraney Music and lyrics by Tim Minchin, book by Dennis Kelly Music by Jeanine Tesori, book and lyrics by Lisa Kron Gina Gionfriddo Katori Hall Scott Z. Burns Ed Falco Robert Askins Athol Fugard

2011 2012

P M

2012 2013

P M

2013

M

2013 2014 2014 2015 2015 2015

P P P P P P

Karen Sklaire Dick Scanlan and Sherie Rene Scott Anna Ziegler David Lindsay-Abaire Topher Payne Kevin Armento

2015 2015

P P

2015 2015 2015 2015

P P P P

Naomi Wallace Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics by Glenn Slater, book by Julian Fellowes John Patrick Shanley

2015 2015

P M

2016

P

Choir Boy Matilda Fun Home Rapture, Blister, Burn Our Lady of Kibeho The Library Possum Dreams Permission The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek A Ripple of Hope Whorl Inside a Loop A Delicate Ship Ripcord Perfect Arrangement Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally Night Is a Room School of Rock

Prodigal Son

(continued)

  Appendix: Teacher Plays and Musicals by Year 

197

(continued) Title

Author(s)

Year

Genre (play/musical)

Underground Railroad Game Miles for Mary Dead Poets Society The Wolves Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Pipeline School Girls; Or the African Mean Girls Play Office Hour The Prom

Jennifer Kidwell and Scott Sheppard The Mad Ones Tom Schulman Sarah DeLappe J. K. Rowling, Jack Thorne, John Tiffany Dominique Morisseau Jocelyn Bioh

2016

P

2016 2016 2016 2016

P P P P

2017 2017

P P

Julia Cho Music by Matthew Sklar, lyrics by Chad Beguelin, and book by Bob Martin and Beguelin Mike Lew Joshua Harmon Larissa FastHorse Bruce Norris Adam Rapp Madhuri Shekar Music by Julianne Wick Davis, lyrics by Collins, book by Dan Collins Music and lyrics by Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey and book by Yorkey and Kwame Kwei-Armah Dominique Morisseau Donja R. Love Sanaz Toossi Rebecca Gilman Sarah Ruhl

2017 2018

P M

2018 2018 2018 2018 2019 2019 2021

P P P P P P M

2021

M

2022 2022 2022 2022 2023

P P P P P

Teenage Dick Admissions The Thanksgiving Play Downstate The Sound Inside Queen Trevor

The Visitor

Confederates Soft English Swing State Letters from Max, a Ritual

Bibliography

Archival Collections Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library, New York City Museum of the City of New York, New York City

Newspapers and Periodicals Advocate Boston Globe Chicago Tribune Christian Science Monitor Cleveland Plain Dealer Daily Mirror Daily News Deadline Education Week Gallup Globe and Mail Guardian Harper’s Magazine Jewish Advocate Inside Higher Education London Times Los Angeles Times © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. F. Wilson, Failure, Fascism, and Teachers in American Theatre, Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34013-0

199

200 

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Articles, Books, and Book Chapters Albee, Edward. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). New York: Athenium, 1970. Allen, Jay Presson. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1966). New  York: Samuel French, 1969. Allen, Ralph. The Best Burlesque Sketches as Adapted for Sugar Babies and Other Entertainments. New York: Applause Books, 1995. Allen, Woody, and Brickman, Marshall. Screenplay of Annie Hall (1977). https:// assets.scriptslug.com/live/pdf/scripts/annie-­hall-­1977.pdf. Anderson, Robert. Tea and Sympathy (1953). New York: Samuel French, 1983. Apple, Michael. “Teaching and ‘Women’s Work’: A Comparative and Historical Analysis,” Teachers College Record, 86 (1985): 455–473. Aristophanes, The Clouds, trans. Kenneth McLeish, Aristophanes, Plays: Two. London: Methuen Drama, 1993. Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove Press, 1954. Bennett, Alan. The History Boys. New York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2006. Beale, Howard K. Are American Teachers Free?: An Analysis of Restraints Upon the Freedom of Teaching in American Schools. New York: Scribner’s, 1936. Biga, Leo Adam. “David Mamet and the ‘Stupid F***ing Words,’” American Theatre (May 24, 2022), https://www.americantheatre.org/2022/05/24/ david-­mamet-­and-­the-­stupid-­fing-­words/.

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Bigsby, C.W.E. Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee. Vol. 2 of A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Bioh, Jocelyn. School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play. New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 2008. Blount, Jackie M. Fit to Teach: Same-Sex Desire, Gender, and School Work in the Twentieth Century. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005. Blount, Jackie M. “Spinsters, Bachelors, and Other Gender Transgressors in School Employment, 1850–1990,” Review of Educational Research 70.1 (Spring 2000): 83–101. Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed (1974). Translated by Charles A. & Maria-­ Odilia Leal McBride. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985. Burbach, Harold J., and Margo A.  Figgins, “A Thematic Profile of Teachers in Film,” Teacher Education Quarterly 20, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 65–75. Burkman, Katherine H. “The Fool as Hero: Simon Gray’s Butley and Otherwise Engaged,” Theatre Journal 33 (May 1981): 163–72. Casey, Rosemary. The Velvet Glove. New York: Samuel French, 1950. Cavanagh, Sheila L. “Spinsters, Schoolmarms, and Queers: Female Teacher Gender and Sexuality in Medicine, Psychoanalytic Theory and History,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 27.4 (December 2006): 421–440. Ceplair, Larry. “The Film Industry’s Battle against Left-Wing Influences, from the Russian Revolution to the Blacklist,” Film History: An International Journal 20, no. 4 (2008): 399–411. Chekhov, Anton. The Cherry Orchard, A Comedy in Four Acts, trans. Richard Nelson, Richard Pevear, and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: TCG, 2015. Chodorov, Edward. Decision: A Melodrama in Three Acts. New  York: Samuel French, 1943. Cho, Julia. Office Hour. New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 2018. Chrisler, Joan C. “In Honor of Sex Roles: Reflections on the History and Development of the Journal,” Sex Roles 63 (2010): 299–310. Costa, Francisco. “‘There was something different about the boy’: Queer Subversion in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire,” Interactions: Ege Journal of British and American Studies, 23.1–2 (2014): 81. Dalton, Mary M. The Hollywood Curriculum: Teachers in the Movies, 3rd Edition. New York: Peter Lang, 2017. Davis, Angela, and Laura King. “Gendered Perspectives on Men’s Changing Familial Roles in Postwar England, c. 1950–1990,” Gender & History 30 (2018): 70–92. DesRochers, Rick. The New Humor in the Progressive Era: Americanization and the Vaudeville Comedian. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Dewey, John. Experience and Education (1938). New  York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.

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Doherty, Thomas. Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Dolan, Jill. Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001. Dolan, Jill. Wendy Wasserstein. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017. Donovan, Frances R. The Schoolma’am. New  York: Frederick A.  Stokes Company, 1938. Duggan, Lisa. The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. Durang, Christopher. Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You (1979). Christopher During Explains It All for You: Six Plays by Christopher Durang. New York: Grove Press, 1983. Dyer, Richard. The Culture of Queers. New York: Routledge, 2002. Dyne, Sarah A. “It’s so queer—in the next room”: Docile/Deviant Bodies and Spatiality in Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour,” Miranda 15 (2017), http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/10519. Eby, Clare Virginia. “Fun and Games with George and Nick: Competitive Masculinity” in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” Modern Drama 50 (Winter 2007): 601–19. Edson, Margaret. Wit. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. Euben, J. Peter. Corrupting Youth: Political Education, Democratic Culture, and Political Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. New  York: Quill and William Morrow & Co., 1981. Flaherty, Colleen. “Dancing Backwards in High Heels,” Inside Higher Ed, January 10, 2018, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/01/10/study­finds-­female-­professors-­experience-­more-­work-­demands-­and-­special-­favor Fleche, Anne. “The Space of Madness and Desire: Tennessee Williams and Streetcar,” Modern Drama 38.4 (Winter 1995), 496–509. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). New York: Continuum, 2000. Gibson, William. The Miracle Worker (1956). New York: Scribner, 2008. Goldstein, Dana. The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession. New York: Doubleday, 2014. Gottlieb, Julie V. Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain’s Fascist Movement, 1923–45. London: I.B. Tauris & Co., Ltd., 2000. Grant, Gerald and Christine E. Murray. Teaching in America: The Slow Revolution. MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Gray, Simon. Butley. New York: Samuel French, 1971. Gray, Simon. Quartermaine’s Terms. New York: Samuel French, 1981. Halberstam, Judith [Jack]. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

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Heins, Marjorie. “‘A Pall of Orthodoxy’: The Painful Persistence of Loyalty Oaths,” Dissent 56, no. 3 (Summer 2009): 63–72. Heins, Marjorie. Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge. New York: NYU Press, 2013. Hellman, Lillian. The Children’s Hour (1934, revised 1952). New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1981. Henley, Ann. “Images of Healing and Learning: The Patient as Text: Literary Scholarship and Medical Practice in Margaret Edson’s Wit,” American Medical Association Journal of Ethics 17.9 (September 2015): 858–64. Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. New  York: Vintage Books, 1963. “Homosexuality in Nineteenth Century English Public School,” International Review of Modern Sociology 9.2 (July-December 1979): 262–3. Inge, William. Picnic (1953). New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1983. Innis, Nancy K. “Lessons from the Controversy over the Loyalty Oath at the University of California,” Minerva 30, no.3 (Autumn 1992): 337–65. Irvine, Andrew D. Socrates on Trial: A Play Based on Aristophanes’ Clouds and Plato’s Apology, Crito, and Phaedo Adapted for Modern Performance. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Johnson, Bess E. “Adolescent Crushes and the Teacher’s Responsibility,” The Clearing House 13.9 (May 1939), 531–4. Jonhson, David K. The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Johnson, Jeff. William Inge and the Subversion of Gender: Rewriting Stereotypes in the Plays, Novels, and Screenplays. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2005. Kahan, Benjamin. “The Walk-In Closet: Situational Homosexuality and Homosexual Panic in Hellman’s The Children’s Hour,” Criticism 55.2 (Spring 2013): 177–201. Kazan, Elia. A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1988. Kazan, Molly. The Egghead. New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1958. Kelly, Dennis, and Minchin, Tim. “Revolting Children,” in Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical. New York: Music Theatre International, 2010: 84–7. Keroes, Jo. “The Crime of Miss Jean Brodie,” Tales Out of School: Gender, Longing, and the Teacher in Fiction and Film. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. Third edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Lanters, José. “Women and Marriage: Hazel Ellis’ Gate Theatre Plays of the 1930s in Context,” Review of Irish Studies in Europe 5.2 (2022): 2–18, Lecklider, Aaron. Inventing the Egghead: The Battle over Brainpower in American Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.

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Leibman, Nina C. “Sexual Misdemeanor/Psychoanalytic Felony,” Cinema Journal 26.2 (Winter 1987): 27–38. Love, Donja R. soft. MCC Press Script, 2022. Mamet, David. Oleanna. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Marasco, Robert. Child’s Play. New York: Samuel French, 1970. Martino, Wayne John. “Male Teachers as Role Models: Addressing Issues of Masculinity, Pedagogy ad the Re-Masculinization of Schooling,” Curriculum Inquiry vol. 38, no. 2 (2008): 189–223. McCleery, William. Good Morning, Miss Dove (1963). New  York: Samuel French, 1991. Morisseau, Dominique. Confederates. Press Script, Signature Theatre, 2022. Munsch, Christin L. and Davis. Shardé M., “Marital Status, Gender, and Race in the U.S.: Perceptions of Middle-Aged Men and Women,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 52.4 (2021): 596–622. Neill, A. S. “Summerhill School,” in Summerhill and A. S. Neill, edited by Mark Vaughan. New York: Open University Press and McGraw-Hill Education, 2006. Newman, Karen L. “Women in Academia: Have We Really Come a Long Way?,” Fulcrum Leveraging Our Differences, March 16, 2022, https://thefulcrum. us/big-­picture/Leveraging-­big-­ideas/women-­professors. Newsom, N.  William. “Teacher Loyalty Oaths and Related Issues,” Peabody Journal of Education 32, no. 3 (November 1954): 174–79. Norris, Norman Dale. The Promise and Failure of Progressive Education. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Education, 2004. Nothof, Anne. “The Pictures of Simon Gray: Dramatizing Degeneration,” Modern Drama 43 (2000): 56–65. One. “The Spinster,” The Freewoman: A Weekly Humanist Review, vol. 1 (November 23, 1911): 10. Oram, Alison. “‘Embittered, Sexless, or Homosexual’: Attacks on Spinster Teachers 1918–39. Current Issues in Women’s History, edited by Arina Angerman, et al. (London: Taylor and Francis Group, 2012): 183–202. Penner, James. Pinks, Pansies, and Punks: The Rhetoric of Masculinity in American Literary Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Perrillo, Jonna. “Beyond ‘Progressive’ Reform: Bodies, Discipline, and the Construction of the Professional Teacher in Interwar America.” History of Education Quarterly 44.3 (Autumn 2004): 337–363. Peterson, Paul E., Michael Henderson, and Martin R.  West, Teachers Versus the Public: What Americans Think About Schools and How to Fix Them. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 2014. Potter, Ursula Ann. “The Naming of Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost,” English Language Notes 38 (December 2000): 11–22. Rafferty, Max. “Suffer, Little Children,” The Phi Delta Kappan 38, no. 3 (December 1956): 92.

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Index

A Abbott, Greg, 4 Academic freedom, 79 Actors Equity, 60 Actors Equity Association, 59 The Actor’s Nightmare (Durang), 141 ACT theatre, 132 Aeschylus, 162 Agamemnon (Aeschylus), 162 “Ain’t I Woman?” (Truth), 45 Aked, Muriel, 19 Albee, Edward, 10, 148, 163 Allen, Jay Presson, 10, 117, 122, 140 Allen, Ralph, 22 Allen, Woody, 167 Altman, Emil, 50 American Association of University Professors (AAUP), 75 American Civil Liberties Union, 60 American Fascists, 96 American Federation of Teachers, 184 American Psychiatric Association, 51 Anderson, Robert, 66, 78

And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little (Zindel), 9, 32 Anti-Catholic, 141 Anti-Communist, 96, 184 Anti-communist investigations, 105 Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith, 141 Anti-intellectual, 61 Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, 148 Apareceu a Margarida, 132 Aristophanes, 10, 148, 153, 154, 156, 176 Aristotelian tragedy, 175 Aristotle, 176 Army-McCarthy hearings, 106 Athayde, Roberto, 10, 118, 131, 132, 134, 135, 138 Atkinson, Brooks, 24, 70, 71, 83, 88, 96, 110, 113, 159 Atomic City, 87 Autumn Crocus (Smith), 18, 21 The Awakening of Spring, 64

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. F. Wilson, Failure, Fascism, and Teachers in American Theatre, Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34013-0

207

208 

INDEX

B Badenbausen, Richard, 177 Bad Teacher, 5 Baker, Dorothy, 9, 58 Baker, Howard, 9, 58 Bakers, 59, 60 The Ballad of the Sad Café (McCullers), 29 Banking education, 135, 136 Barnes, Clive, 124, 125, 129, 166 Barrymore, Ethel, 24 Beale, Howard K., 77 Bearing, Vivian, 39 Beck, Julian, 134 Behind the Iron Curtain, 87 Bennett, Alan, 1, 2 Billington, Michael, 172 Bioh, Jocelyn, 9, 34 Blacklists, 87, 184 Black Lives Matter, 43 Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, 46 Blount, Jackie M., 8, 13, 54, 149 Boal, Augusto, 135, 138–140 Board of Education, 151 Bolton, Whitney, 88 Bonnie and Clyde, 132 Boruff, John, 52 Bourdet, Edouard, 58 Brantley, Ben, 2 Brassel, Kate, 153 Brecht, Bertolt, 140 Bright Boy (Boruff), 52 Bromfield, Louis, 112 Browning, Robert, 162 The Browning Version (Rattigan), 10, 148, 159, 165, 166 Bryden, Ronald, 123 Bullough, Bonnie, 65 Bullough, Vern, 65 Burkman, Katherine H., 171

Burlesque, 8, 21 Butley (Gray), 10, 148, 169–172 Butterworth, Joseph, 76 C Caldwell, Zoe, 122–124, 126 Camelot, 124 The Captive (Bourdet), 58 Carson, Jack, 86 Carvel, Bertie, 23 Casey, Kathleen, 31 Casey, Rosemary, 10, 102 Cassidy, Claudia, 123 Catholic Church, 105, 144 Catholic Fascism, 140 Catholicism, 102, 105, 141, 142, 144, 145 Catholic League, 141 Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, 141 Catholics, 33, 104, 124 Cavanagh, Sheila L., 15, 21, 23 Ceplair, Larry, 88 Chambers, Whittaker, 90 Chapman, John, 60 Chekhov, Anton, 172–174 The Cherry Orchard (Gray), 173 The Children’s Hour (Hellman), 9, 52, 56, 58, 59, 72, 73, 78 Child’s Play (Marasco), 10, 148, 166, 168 Cho, Julia, 37, 41 Chodorov, Edward, 10, 91, 93 Chodorov, Jerome, 52 Chrisler, Joan C., 38 Christopher Award, 102 Churchill, Caryl, 42 City College, 75, 76, 82, 87 Clifford, Geraldine J., 152 The Clouds (Aristophanes), 153–156, 176, 177

 INDEX 

Cloudy with Showers (Dell and Mitchell), 52 Coe, Richard L., 86, 124 Cohan, George M., 15, 17, 18 Cold War, 79, 86, 101, 161, 184 Cold War America, 96 Coleman, Robert, 96 College of the City of New York, 80–81 Collinge, Patricia, 18 A Comedy of Errors, 156 Commedia dell’arte, 156 The Common Pursuit, 169 Communism, 84, 102, 107 Communist, 79, 87, 95–98, 100, 101, 104–106, 108, 110, 113, 115, 184 The Communist Manifesto, 113 Communist Party, 106, 110 Communist party membership, 77 Communist witch hunts, 78 Compton, Fay, 19 Confederates (Morrisseau), 9, 37, 43–46 Conspirator, 87 Constellations (Payne), 42 Cooke, Richard P., 124 Cooke, Sarah Grace, 24 Cooper, Gladys, 67 The Corn is Green (Williams), 8, 23, 24, 52 Corrio, Ann, 22 Costa, Francisco, 73 Cranston, Alan, 121 The Crucible (Miller), 78, 90, 185 The Culture of Queers (Dyer), 60 Cunningham, Marguerite S., 50 D Dahl, Roald, 23 Dalton, Mary M., 31

209

Dancing at Lughnasa (Friel), 8, 33 Davis, Bette, 24 Day, Frederick L., 70 Dead Poets Society, 5 Dean, Basil, 19 Decision (Chodorov), 10, 91–93, 95–97, 102, 185 De Beauvoir, Simone, 15 De Havilland, Olivia, 86 Deleuze, Giles, 21 Dell, Floyd, 52 DeSantis, Ron, 4 DesRochers, Rick, 21 Detroit riots, 95 Dewey, John, 10, 75, 119–122, 135 Deweyism, 121 Dickens, Charles, 169 Dickstein, Samuel, 87 Dies, Martin Jr., 87 Diss, Eileen, 169 Dog Days, 169 Dolan, Jill, 37, 39 Donahue, Phil, 142 Donne, John, 40 Donovan, Frances, 17 Dorfman, Ariel, 132 The Drag (West), 64 Dresslar, Fletcher B., 150 The Druid Circle (Druten), 71 Dubbert, Joe L., 164 Dunning, Philip, 52 Durang, Christopher, 10, 118, 140, 141, 145, 146 Dyne, Sarah A., 54 E Eby, Clare Virginia, 164, 165 Eby, fHarold L., 77 Edson, Margaret, 9, 37 The Egghead (Kazan), 10, 106, 108, 109, 115

210 

INDEX

Eggheads, 112, 113, 164 Ehler, George W., 150 Einstein, Albert, 75 Eliot, T.S., 170 Elliott, James S., 67 Ellis, Havelock, 55 Ellis, Hazel, 33 Engels, Friedrich, 113 Ethel, Garland, 77 Euben, J. Peter, 154, 155 Experience and Education, 122 F Faderman, Lillian, 60 Failed, 63 Failed male teacher, 178 Failed men teachers, 178 Failed teacher, 178, 185 Failing, 170 Failure belt, 147, 181 Failures, 6, 7, 14, 33–35, 47, 73, 83, 129, 137, 159, 161–163, 165, 168, 169, 172, 176–178, 181 Fair Employment Practices Committee, 96 Fascism, 130, 137, 184 Fascist, 129, 131, 146 Fascistic, 144, 146 Federal Theatre Project, 78, 93 Feinberg Law, 99 Fields, Joseph A., 52 Fine, Benjamin, 14 Fleche, Anne, 71 Fonda, Henry, 86 Frances Buss’s North London Collegiate School for Ladies, 149 Freedom Writers, 5 The Freewoman, 13 Freire-Filho, Aderbal, 132 Freire, Paulo, 6, 10, 135, 137, 138 Freistater, Rose, 5, 49

Freudian, 15 Friel, Brian, 33 Frühlings Erwachen, 64 Fun In Hi Skule, 21 G Gallop, Jane, 128 Galster, Robert, 114 Garland, Robert, 93 Gay panics, 71, 73 Geer, Will, 59 Geiger, Sara, 51 Genauer, Emily, 129 George, Grace, 103 George White’s Scandals of 1936, 158 Gersten Und Heute, 55 Gibbs, Wolcott, 69 Gibson, William, 9, 30 Gionfriddo, Gina, 39 Girls in Uniform (Winsloe), 55–57 Gish, Dorothy, 19 Golding versus the Board of Education, 151 Goldsmith, Clifford, 52 Goodbye, Mr. Chips, 5 Good Morning, Miss Dove (McCleery), 31 Gordon, Michael, 88 Gray, Simon, 10, 148, 169, 172–174 Griffiths, Richard, 2 Group Theatre, 78, 93, 107 Gundlach, Ralph, 77 Gussow, Mel, 142 H Halberstam, J. Jack, 7 Hampden, Walter, 103 Happenings (Allan), 134 Hare, David, 159 Harlquinade, 159

 INDEX 

Harris, Jed, 15, 96 Harris, Julie, 32 Harris, Richard, 124 Hart, Edward J., 87 Heart’s Desire (Churchill), 42 The Heidi Chronicles (Wasserstein), 9, 36–39, 46 Heins, Marjorie, 99, 100 Hellman, Lillian, 9, 18–19, 52, 54, 56, 58, 59, 78, 90 Hepburn, Katharine, 24 Higley, Philo, 52 Hill, Anita, 175 Hinshaw, Cecil, 89 The History Boys (Bennett), 1, 3, 11 Hofstadter, Richard, 148 Hollywood Ten, 87 Homonormativity, 171 Homosexuality, 60, 64, 71 Homosexual panics, 56 Homosexuals, 63, 161 Hoover, J. Edgar, 112 Hotbed (Osborne), 70 House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), 87, 89, 90, 98, 115 House Un-American Activities Committee, 106 HUAC, see House Committee on Un-American Activities I Ignatius, Sister Mary, 144 I Married a Communist, 87 Incompetent teachers, 50 Inge, William, 9, 28, 29 Ingraham, Rosa Lee, 111 Inherit the Wind (Lawrence and Lee), 79 Inventing the Egghead: The Battle over Brainpower in American Culture, 111

211

Irving, Washington, 6 Ives, David, 42 I Was a Communist for the FBI, 87 J Jacobs, Melville, 77 Johns, Ann C., 36 Johnson, Bess E., 57 Johnson, Jeff, 29 Johnston, Eric, 87 Julius Caesar, 156 K Kahan, Benjamin, 55, 57 Kaprow, Allan, 134 Kareda, Urjo, 124 Katharine Cornell, 102 Kay, Jean, 76 Kazan, Elia, 106, 109, 115 Kazan, Molly Thacher, 10, 106, 108, 110–113, 115 Keller, Helen, 30 Keller, James, 102 Kelly, Kevin, 140 Keroes, Jo, 118, 125, 128, 129 Kerr, Walter, 32, 110, 113 Kimmel, Michael, 161 Kindergarten Cop, 5 Kronenberger, Louis, 93 Ku Klux Klan, 141 L “The Lady of Shalott,” 130 LaGuardia, Mayor Fiorello, 60, 76 Langham, Michael, 122, 129 Lanters, José, 33 La Traviata, 123, 126 Lawrence, Jerome, 78 Learned, Michael, 132 Lecklider, Aaron, 111, 115

212 

INDEX

Lee, Robert E., 78 The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Irving), 6 Lesbian, 63, 64 teachers, 58 vampire, 61 Lesbianism, 59, 60 Leslie, Joan, 86 Letters from Max, a ritual (Ruhl), 185 Levering Oath, 100 LGBTQ educators, 14 LGBTQ+, 184 Lichtenstein, Grace, 133 Liebman, Nina, 73 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 113 The Little Foxes (Hellman), 19 Little Teacher, 28 The Little Teacher (Smith), 8, 15 Living Theater (Beck), 134 Lord Chamberlain, 65 Lord of the Flies, 166 Love, Donja R., 10, 148, 178 Love, Phyllis, 114 Love’s Labour’s Lost, 156, 157 Loyalty oaths, 99, 101 Ludovici, Anthony, 23 Lusk, Clayton, 99 Lusk Committee, 99 M Macmillan, 71 Mädchen in Uniform, 55 Makers of Light (Day), 70 Malden, Karl, 106, 113 The Male Animal (Thurber and Nugent), 9, 79–82, 85, 86, 88–92, 102, 185 Male teachers, 148 Malina, Judith, 134 Mamet, D., 10, 148, 175–177, 184 Manhood, 10, 84, 85, 137, 148, 159, 161, 163–165, 180

Manning, William T., 75 A Man’s Place: Masculinity in Transition, 164 Marasco, Robert, 10, 148, 166, 169 Marchand, Nancy, 32 Martino, Wayne John, 152 Marx, Karl, 113 The Marx Brothers, 21 Marxism, 98, 104 Marxist, 104 Masculine, 82 Masculinity, 82, 115 Massey, Anna, 124 Massey, Raymond, 67 Matilda, 23 May, Father John L., 144 Mayerson, Donald J., 166 Mayo, Virginia, 86 McCarthy, Joseph, 58, 76, 87, 106, 113, 185 McCarthyism, 76, 77, 105, 185 McCleery, William, 31 McClintic, Guthrie, 103 McCullers, Carson, 29 McGee, Willie, 111 McGovern, John, 59 The Merry Wives of Windsor, 156 #MeToo era, 3 #MeToo movement, 175 Mielziner, Jo, 167 Miller, Ann, 22 Miller, Arthur, 78, 90, 108, 185 Miller, Nathan, 99 The Miracle Worker (Gibson), 9, 30 Misra, Joya, 41 Miss Brodie, 124–128, 130, 131, 140 Miss Brody, 123 language, 144 Miss Jean Brodie, 131, 140, 146 Miss Margarida, 133, 134, 136–138, 140

 INDEX 

Miss Margarida’s Way (Athayde), 10, 118, 131, 132, 134, 135, 139, 142, 146 Mitchell, Thomas, 52 Molière, 109 Moore, Harry, 111 Morehouse, Ward, 69, 103 Morisseau, Dominique, 9, 37, 43 Moss, Paul, 59, 60 Mother Hildebrand, 102 Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), 87 Mundt, Karl, 87 Murrow, Edward R., 106 N National Endowment for the Arts, 142 National Theatre, 1 production, 24 Neill, A. S., 10, 119, 120, 122, 141 Nero, Franco, 124 New Deal policies, 96 Newman, Karen L., 36 New York’s Board of Education, 49 Nichols, Lewis, 93 Nixon, Richard, 87, 90 No Child Left Behind Act, 34 No Child… (Sun), 9, 33 Nothof, Anne, 170 Novello, Ivor, 19 Nugent, Elliott, 9, 79, 86, 88–91 O Obama, Barack, 35 Odets, Clifford, 78, 90, 107 Office Hour (Cho), 37, 41, 42, 46 Old-maid schoolteacher, 168 Oleanna (Mamet), 10, 148, 175–177 Olivier, Laurence, 67

213

Oram, Alison, 14 Or the African Mean Girls Play (Bioh), 9 Osborne, Paul, 70 Othello, 178 Otherwise Engaged, 169 Our Country’s Good (Wertenbaker), 34 P Parsons, Estelle, 32, 132, 133, 140 Paul, Henry G., 120 Payne, Nick, 42 Pedagogy of the oppressed, 146 Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire), 6, 135, 139 Pedant, 157, 158 Pedantic, 175, 178 Pêra, Marília, 132 Performance Group (Schechner), 134 Phillips, Herbert J., 77 Physical and mental health, 49 Physical and psychological fitness, 51 Piaget, Jean, 120 Picnic (Inge), 9, 28, 30 Plato, 156 Political radicalism, 79 Pope Leo XIII, 104 Potter, Beatrix, 171 Potter, Ursula Ann, 157, 158 Preston, Robert, 88 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Allen), 7, 10, 122 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Spark), 117, 118 Professors as failed men, 148 Progressive education, 119, 126, 128 movement, 153 reform, 51 Progressive vs. traditional education, 118 Progressivism, 121

214 

INDEX

Q Quartermaine, 172, 174 Quartermaine’s Terms (Gray), 10, 148, 169, 172 Queer, 170 The Queer Art of Failure (Halberstam), 7 Queer teachers, 168 R Race, 115 Racism, 94, 111 Racist, 110 Rafferty, Max, 120, 121 A Raisin in the Sun, 110 Ramírez, Juan A., 180 Rankin, John E., 95 Rapture, Blister, Burn (Gionfriddo), 39 Rats, 67, 69 The Rats of Norway (Winter), 9, 64, 67–70 Rattigan, Terence, 10, 148, 159, 161 Ravitch, Diane, 51 Reagan, Ronald, 86 Redgrave, Vanessa, 122–124, 126 The Red Menace, 87 Red Scare, 87, 99, 105 “Rerum Novarum,” 104 Rice, Elmer, 78 Rich, Frank, 141 Richards, Lloyd, 106, 110 Richardson, Ralph, 120, 121 Ritvo, Max, 185 Robeson, Paul, 89 Robinson, Edward G., 17 Rooney, Mickey, 22 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 95 Rosenberg, Ethel, 98 Rosenberg, Julius, 98 Ruhl, Sarah, 185 Russell, Bertrand, 75–77, 79–82, 86, 87, 184

S Sabinson, Lee, 59 Sacco, Nicola, 80 Sarafina, 8 Schechner, Richard, 134 Schiller, Friedrich, 56 Schlesinger, Arthur M., 75 School acts, 21, 158 School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play (Bioh), 9, 34 Schoolhouse on the Lot (Fields and Chodorov), 52 Schoolmarms, 8, 18, 27, 47 School of Rock, 5 Schrecker, Ellen, 99 Scott, Martha, 88 Screen Actors Guild, 87 Sellars, Elizabeth, 124 Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, 87 Shakespeare, William, 10, 148, 156, 157, 171 Shaw, George Bernard, 6, 14, 167 Sherwood, Robert E., 78 She’s Working Her Way through College, 86 Showalter, Elaine, 175 Shubert, Lee, 59 Sister, 145 Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You (Durang), 10, 118, 140–142, 146 Smith, Al, 99 Smith, Carol, 76 Smith, Dodie, 18 Smith, Harry James, 8, 15 Smith, Maggie, 124 Smith, William A., 44 The Sociology of Teaching, 147 Socrates, 153, 156 Soft (Love), 10, 148, 178, 180 Sophistic, 175 Sophists, 153, 154, 157, 158, 176

 INDEX 

South Downs, 159 Spark, Muriel, 117, 118, 123, 125 Spectactor, 139 Spencer, Herbert, 120 Spiller, Gustav, 74 Spinster, 23, 29, 129 schoolteacher, 13, 28, 39, 47 stage teachers, 137 teacher, 15, 18, 118, 173 Spring’s Awakening (Wedekind), 64 Sproul, Robert Gordon, 100 Sputnik, 121 Stand and Deliver, 5 Steinbeck, John, 4 Stevenson, Adlai, 112 Stone, Irving, 71 A Streetcar Named Desire (William), 7, 9, 71 Stripling, Robert, 90 Sugar Babies, 22 Sullivan, Annie, 30, 35 Sullivan, Dan, 133 Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing (Neill), 119 Summerhill/Summerhill School, 120, 122, 141 Sun, Nilaja, 9, 33 Superwoman, 15, 45–47 Sure Thing (Ives), 42 Sutherland, Joan, 123 T Tartuffe, 109 Tartuffe (Molière), 109 Taylor, Harold, 101 Tea and Sympathy (Anderson), 66, 78 Teacher-centered pedagogy, 128 The Tempest, 156 Terry, Ellen, 123

215

Theatre of the Oppressed (Boal), 135, 139 Third (Wasserstein), 37 This Was Burlesque (Corrio), 22 Thomas, J. Parnell, 87 Thorndike, Edward L., 152 Thorndike, Sybil, 24 Thurber, James, 9, 79, 89–91 Till, Emmett, 111 Toit, Kim du, 152 Tolstoy, Leo, 178 To Sir, with Love, 5 The Traitor (Wouk), 10, 91, 96, 97, 100, 102 Tran, Diep, 41 Trio (Baker), 9, 58–60, 64, 72 Truly Valiant (Stone), 71 Truth, Sojourner, 45 The Two Noble Kinsmen, 156 Tyson, Cicely, 24 U Unfit teachers, 49, 51 United States Bureau of Education, 150, 152 University of Washington, 76, 77, 87, 100 Unmarried women educators, 33 Up the Down Staircase, 5 V Vampire, 62, 63 Vampirism, 60 Van Druten, John, 64, 65, 71 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 80 Vaudeville, 8, 21 The Velvet Glove (Casey), 10, 102, 103, 105, 185 Virginia Tech massacre, 41 Vorlicky, Robert, 83

216 

INDEX

W Walker, Nicola, 24 Wallace, Henry, 96 Wallace, Michele, 46 Wallach, Allan, 134 Waller, Willard, 10, 55, 57, 147 The Waltons, 132 Wasserstein, Wendy, 9, 36, 37, 39 Watts, Richard Jr., 83, 105 Wedekind, Frank, 64 Weingarten, Randi, 184 Welch, Joseph Nye, 106 Wertenbaker, Timberlake, 34 West, Mae, 64 What a Life (Goldsmith), 52 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Albee), 10, 148, 163, 165 Wilde, Oscar, 3, 5, 170, 172 Willard, Emma, 149 Williams, Emlyn, 8, 23, 24, 52 Williams, John, 103 Williams, Tennessee, 9, 71, 78

Wilson, Earl, 89 Wilson, Edwin, 133 Wilson, Sherrée, 37 Winsloe, Christa, 55, 56 Winson, Patricia, 156 Winter, Keith, 9, 64, 67 The Winter’s Tale, 171 Wit (Edson), 9, 37, 39, 40, 46 Wolfe, Peter, 159 Women Without Men (Ellis), 33 Wood, Peter, 122 World War I, 16 Wouk, Herman, 10, 91, 96, 98, 100 Y Young Woodley (Druten), 64, 65, 67, 71 Z Zindel, Paul, 9, 32, 33