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U.S.A.
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by Paul Shyre and John Dos Passos
Directed by Scott Alan Evans
May 5, 11 & 12, 2003
Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th Street
NYC
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| SYNOPSIS |
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Stirring, impassioned, troubling, inspiring: America at the dawn of the last century comes to vivid life in this striking panorama of theatrical invention. Opened Off-Broadway October 28, 1959 |
| CAST/CREW |
Colin McGrath
Guitar/ Banjo/ Harmonica
Michal Beit-Halachmi
Clarinet
Dawn Dunlop
Production Stage Manager
David Toser
Costume Consultant & Designer
Mary Louise Geiger Lighting Designer |
| PRESS |
NY Theatre Review
In a time when too much of what's produced in the theatre is a revival of a show either too familiar... [ read more]
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| DRAMATURGY |
?Where do I belong? To whom do I owe allegiance? What is my country?
Where is my home?? These fundamental questions are basic questions of identity which emerge among people when society undergoes rapid, fundamental change. The questions are social as well as personal, for they raise concerns about the nature of society, its hopes and its reality. Such questions appeared at the beginning of this century in America. They continue to resonate even today in these times of rapid and startling change.
Such questions were essential to the twentieth century personal and political odyssey of American novelist John Dos Passos. At one point called the greatest writer of his time, Dos Passos deserves our attention for his artistic achievements. But perhaps more important for us today are his efforts to answer the nearly universal questions which erupted anew in this ?American Century.?
The first four decades of this century witnessed an enormous upheaval in social, economic and political events. In 1896, when Dos Passos was born in Chicago, America was still largely rural and just beginning to experience the first shock waves of a vast, industrial transformation. Challenged with an economic depression and the proclaimed ?closing of the frontier,? Americans faced the new century with great anxiety over domestic issues. Three wars, the suppression of the Philippine rebellion, and a series of invasions of Central American nations also forced Americans to reconsider themselves. Were they, as they had believed, the peace-loving patriots who sought to extend democracy to other nations by their own example? Or were they instead a raw, powerful nation who obeyed no law but themselves? Who, after all, were these Americans? What place under the sun did they deserve? As a tidal wave of new immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe arrived in America, spilling over into their cities and altering their society and its politics, the questions took on an almost frenetic urgency. Who are we?
For John Dos Passos, America?s national quest merged with his personal odyssey. For him the question of identity held an intense personal meaning. John was an illegitimate child whose parents were already married to others. For the first sixteen years of his life John was not allowed to claim his father?s surname. Fear of a social scandal for his father, a highly successful corporate lawyer, or his mother, member of an aristocratic Virginia family, meant that for much of his early life John and his mother traveled outside the United States, often in Europe, joined at times by his father. His mother Lucy, born in Virginia before the Civil War, almost forty-two years old when she gave birth to John, served as his closest friend and companion. He was, in his own words, a ?hotel child.?
Dos Passos had to beg his parents to allow him to attend preparatory school in America. But America too regarded him as an outsider, a raw immigrant of sorts. At the Choate School, in Wallingford, Connecticut, he was socially very uncomfortable. His glasses, slight build, and speech patterns from which tumbled both English and French accents tempted his classmates to tease him. There and later at Harvard, Dos Passos felt keenly the divisions which set him apart from the sons of the New England aristocracy.
While John was a student at Choate, his mother and John?s father were finally able to marry and John eagerly adopted not only his father?s last name but a nickname as well, becoming ?Dos? to his friends. Still the deepest ties of social identity for John came from his mother, and they were cut when she died while John was a student at Harvard.
As a college student Dos Passos told others he intended to become an architect. But before he graduated from Harvard he joined the editorial staff of the Harvard Monthly, wrote numerous articles and reviews, and began a novel. Graduating in 1916, Dos Passos set off for Europe, first studying in Spain, but soon becoming an ambulance driver and seeing the war first hand. In his journals he recorded his shocked perceptions and gathered the material which he would use in his first two published novels, One Man?s Initiation (1920) and Three Soldiers (1921). The war struck him as the final act of a civilization gone brutally mad, the product of monopoly capitalism sacrificing the bodies of young men for the sake of an imagined market advantage. Surely, he felt, people would see for themselves the corruption all around them and cry out ?enough!? However, Americans turned their back on reforms and instead embraced in the 1920?s a decade of somnolence, too entranced with the material gains of new consumer products, most notably Henry Ford?s popular Model T, to even recognize the failure of politics, of ideals, of the nation?s democratic heritage. Dos Passos turned his pen and his body to social activism. He publishing two critiques of the war, followed by a realistic attack upon urban life in Manhattan Transfer (1925).
Like Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dos Passos became known as a savage critic of an American culture reeking of vulgar consumerism and social indifference. His writing burned with both anger and anguish at the tyranny of the captains of industry. It exploded over the trial and execution of two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, charged with murder in a robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts. By the following year Dos Passos was rallying fellow writers with the cry that ?we must have writing so fiery and accurate that it will sear through the pall of numb imbecility that we are again swaddled in.? And with that charge he began collecting the material which would become three novels, The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money. In 1938 they would be published together in a monumental and highly-acclaimed trilogy, U.S.A.
In the brilliantly-crafted and powerful U.S.A. one can see Dos Passos? vision and his talent at their finest level of creation. At first glance the trilogy appears to be a series of fragmented sections. There are four elements which intertwine: the narratives of twelve fictional characters, brief biographical sketches of contemporary Americans, ?newsreel? headlines, and the ?camera?s eye? autobiography. In this last element, Dos Passos renders his own coming of age in America as he struggles to comprehend a nation which seems so at odds with the vision of its founders. Soon the reader realizes that these four disparate elements are united by the author?s central vision of a society in decline, with little prospect for its rescue. Yet there remains a sense of outrage, of betrayal, which suggests the author?s own hope that a concerned citizenry, through some collective action, might yet find a way to redeem the country.
By the early 1940?s Dos Passos enjoyed wide acclaim, yet his own decline as a writer, both in talents and influence, had already begun. Without directly repudiating his earlier work, Dos Passos moved philosophically and intellectually far from it. In a shift that baffled many of his friends, the writer who had previously supported revolutionary acts now switched to reactionary views. Dos Passos moved during the late 1940?s to embrace the political right wing, particularly its libertarian element.
How then should we sum up John Dos Passos and his contributions to American life? Literary artists of the twentieth century owe him a great debt for his vivid craftsmanship of the novel. Political activists of both the left and right should honor him for putting into enduring words monuments to their perspectives. For the man himself there remains both admiration and a sense of tragedy. He will always be remembered for U.S.A. and its powerfully deep, searing indictment of industrial society. Through his eyes we see the emerging power of the capitalist state. With him we are driven to question its justness for all, and forced to ask about such things as the relationship between war and profit-making. With him we experience disillusionment and the failed hopes of post-war intellectuals while morality seems on the decline and urban Americans blindly pursue material goods. In each setting we ask the questions so important to the humanities and to our society. How can we maintain a place for enduring moral values? What must this society do to sustain honesty and justice? In all our struggles and changes, is there yet a way for us to care deeply and sincerely about each other?
Excerpted from ?Beginning the ?American Century??
by Richard Johnson, Written for the New Hampshire Humanities Council 1998 Chautauqua Program
Richard Johnson is a Chautauqua Scholar, Dos Passos Interpreter, and a Professor of American History, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, CA
DOS PASSOS TIMELINE
1896 Born Janaury 14 to John Randolph Dos Passos and Lucy Addison Sprigg Madison.
1907 Enters Choate School, Wallingford, Conn.
1912-16 Studies at Harvard.
1917-18 Ambulance service units in France and Italy.
1918 Enlists in the U.S. Army Medical Corps.
1920 Publishes One Man's Initiation -- 1917.
1921 Publishes Three Soldiers, the novel meets wide acclaim.
1922 Publishes A Pushcart at the Curb , and Rosinante to the Road Again.
1923 Publishes Streets of Night.
1925 Publishes Manhattan Transfer.
1926-29 Directs New Playwrights' Theatre, NYC.
1927 Publishes Facing the Chair, defending immigrants Sacco & Vanzetti, and Orient Express.
1928 Spends months in Russia studying the socialist view.
1929 Marries Katharine Smith.
1934 Signs "Open Letter to the Communist Party," criticizing its stifling of dissent.
1938 Publishes USA's three volumes as a set.
1939 Draws attacks from former radical allies for Adventures of a Young Man.
1949 Publishes The Ground We Stand On.
1942-45 Observes theatres of WWII, begins serving as a reporter.
1947 Loses sight in one eye in an auto accident; his wife is killed. Is elected to American Academy of Arts and Letters.
1949 Marries Elizabeth Holdridge.
1950 Lucy Hamlin Dos Passos is born.
1954 Publishes Jefferson biography.
1957 Receives Gold Medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Publishes The Men Who Made the Nation.
1959 Publishes Prospects of a Golden Age.
1961 Midcentury, a new novel, is published to good critical notices.
1966 Publishes The Shackles of Power , also The Best Times, an informal memoir.
1967 Receives Feltrinelli Prize for Fiction.
1970 Dies of heart failure in Baltimore on September 28.
1974 Two works are published posthumously, Easter Island, and Cetury's Ebb.
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