If you’d met me when I was 8, you’d likely have found me wearing a tricorner hat. My role model that year was Johnny Tremain, the kid hero of a Disney film about the American Revolution. The occasion was, of course, the nation’s bicentennial, a celebration with its own official logo (a curvy, five-pointed tricolor star—very 1970s) and, as far as I was concerned, an unofficial dress code, to which I adhered with the imaginative rigor of the best cosplay.
A lot has changed since 1976, both in the nation and in my own sense of it. The mood around the nation’s 250th birthday is, from where I sit, far more equivocal and ambivalent than it looked through my child’s eyes. For one, I have since learned the full scope of the American history I took for granted, and been schooled on its lacunae: that women couldn’t vote until my grandmothers’ lifetime, that African Americans were first enslaved, then disenfranchised until roughly my own birth year, that Native Americans have been summarily slaughtered and dispossessed. I have also witnessed in my own children’s lifetime a fresh resurgence of white supremacist, blood-and-soil politics, shorn even of an ideological fig leaf. Given that grim history and troubling present, is it still possible to celebrate the intertwined counter-traditions of protest and reparation that have fitfully brought our nation closer to realizing its founding ideals?
Two examples from the performing arts may be illustrative. In her one-woman show The Peculiar Patriot, which she toured around prisons and theatres (including Baltimore Center Stage) for nearly 25 years before retiring the piece in a National Black Theatre staging at New York Theatre Workshop in June, Liza Jessie Peterson pledged her allegiance to the Black and brown populations of America’s overcrowded, plantation-like prisons, offering to this colony-in-a-nation the healing vision of Betsy LaQuanda Ross, who sews not a flag but a commemorative quilt. A patriot, by Peterson’s definition, is someone who fights for their people.
But who are “our people,” broadly defined? Can we even talk about a common American experience or identity, to which we can all attach a full-throated patriotism? We might look to the example of New York City’s Lincoln Center, the lofty culture palace erected in the 1960s atop the debris of a razed neighborhood, San Juan Hill, a formerly vibrant Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood. It would be all too easy to shrug off this act of colonization and erasure. But in May, to its credit, Lincoln Center broke ground on a newly expanded and accessible Damrosch Park, on the campus’s southwestern end, to include green space and a new outdoor theatre. The project, undertaken intentionally as an act of redress and repair, with the input of affected community members, made me think of the unique ways that culture workers and institutions are positioned to lead. As T.S. Monk, the son of jazz giant Thelonius Monk, who lived and played in San Juan Hill, put it in remarks at the groundbreaking event: “I feel great pride here today, but also pain in what was displaced. Both can be true. What matters now is what we choose to build here for the future.”
Might this be our model as we tentatively, advisedly mark America’s semiquincentennial? This Summer issue includes an anthology of work by Native American playwrights, whose claim to the continent long precedes that national anniversary; feature articles on the history of performance in the U.S. and on the precarious state of federal arts funding; an account of a production about HMong immigrant life on the frontlines of this year’s ICE/CBP occupation of the Twin Cities; and a play, Talene Monahon’s Meet the Cartozians, that interrogates the conflation of whiteness and citizenship.
Langston Hughes put it best in the poem “Let America Be America Again”:
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!
Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is editor-in-chief of American Theatre.
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