#i knew this story before i started my lincoln deep dive this year

[fictionadventurer]

@story-courty I can corroborate! Edwin Booth, elder brother of John Wilkes and the man considered possibly the greatest actor of the nineteenth century, saved Robert Todd Lincoln from falling from a train platform in Jersey City, New Jersey. We don't know the exact date of the incident, but it most likely occurred sometime in 1863 or 1864, when Robert was returning to Washington from Harvard, and Booth was going to Richmond with John T. Ford, owner of (believe it or not) Ford's Theater.

The Library of Congress website provides a link to the April 26, 1865 edition of the Cleveland Morning Leader that tells the story like this.

Not a month since, Mr. Edwin Booth was proceeding to Washington. At Trenton, there was a general scramble to reach the cars, which had started, leaving many behind in the refreshment saloon. Mr. Edwin Booth was preceded by a gentleman whose foot slipped as he was stepping upon the platform, and who would have fallen at once beneath the wheels had not Mr. Edwin Booth's arm sustained him. The gentleman remarked that he had had a narrow escape of his life, and was thankful to his preserver. It was Robert Lincoln, the son that that great, good man who now lies dead before our blistered eyes, and whose name we cannot mention without choking. In some way the incident came to the knowledge of Lieutenant General Grant, who at once wrote a civil letter to Mr. Edwin Booth, and said that if he could serve him at any time he would be glad to do so. Mr. Booth replied, playfully, that when he (Grant) was in Richmond, he would like to play for him there.

Robert Lincoln confirmed the story for the Century Magazine in 1909. (Possibly as part of nationwide centennial celebrations of Abraham Lincoln's birth).

The incident occurred while a group of passengers were late at night purchasing their sleeping car places from the conductor who stood on the station platform at the entrance of the car. The platform was about the height of the car floor, and there was of course a narrow space between the platform and the car body. There was some crowding, and I happened to be pressed by it against the car body while waiting my turn. In this situation the train began to move, and by the motion I was twisted off my feet, and had dropped somewhat, with feet downward, into the open space, and was personally helpless, when my coat collar was vigorously seized and I was quickly pulled up and out to a secure footing on the platform. Upon turning to thank my rescuer I saw it was Edwin Booth, whose face was of course well known to me, and I expressed my gratitude to him, and in doing so, called him by name.

Edwin Booth didn't know the name of the man he'd saved until 1865, when Adam Badeau, another officer on Grant's staff who Lincoln had told the story to, wrote him a letter about it. Booth was a staunch Unionist and admirer of Abraham Lincoln, and he'd been feuding with his younger brother for years because of his Confederate sympathies. The news of the assassination devastated him, and he later told a friend that one of the only things that got him through those dark months afterward was the knowledge that he'd saved Robert's life. People initially thought that the Booth name was too blackened for Edwin to continue his career in acting, but he made a triumphant return to the stage in 1866 for a performance of Hamlet that got rave reviews, and eventually opened his own theater and went on a worldwide tour.

I can't fail to mention that this is only one of the coincidences regarding presidential assassinations in Robert Todd Lincoln's life, because he is the only man to have been present at events surrounding three of the four assassinations of American presidents. He was present at his father's deathbed after the assassination (though he wasn't at the theater and always regretted it, because he would have been sitting at the back of the box between Booth and his father). In 1881, he served as Secretary of War under President James Garfield, and was with him at the train station when he was shot by a crazed office-seeker. Robert secured the services of the doctor who had cared for Abraham Lincoln--though, unfortunately, this doctor's overzealous methods, insistence on his own theories, and refusal to follow antiseptic practices caused the infection that actually killed Garfield more than two months later. In 1901, Robert Lincoln was working as president of the Pullman Palace Car Company when President William McKinley invited him to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York where McKinley was making an appearance. At the same time Lincoln's train pulled in to the station, McKinley was shot by an assassin who'd joined the receiving line to meet him. Lincoln immediately went to the hospital to visit the injured McKinley, who died six days later.

Robert Lincoln was a major figure in the Republican Party whose name was often mentioned as a presidential candidate, but Robert never pursued the office, for what should be obvious reasons.

This blog from the U.S. National Archives sums up the situation well.

When Theodore Roosevelt assumed the Presidency, Lincoln wrote him. “I do not congratulate you for I have seen too much of the seamy side of the Presidential Robe to think of it as a desirable garment.” Later, he was invited to the White House as a figurehead of the Republican Party. He declined and swore he would never step foot in the White House again. “I am not going and they’d better not invite me,” he said, “because there is a certain fatality about presidential functions when I am present.”

[wen-kexing-apologist]

Thoughts on Comfortable Queer Rep

So I've been on a bit of a queer media kick recently, and by that I mean that in the past month I have listened to The Bright Sessions, Greenhouse, The Infinite Noise, and Look Up and I have watched The Owl House and Young Royals and there has been something embedded in these stories that has been really jarring to me personally, but in a really good way. And it's literally just that in each of these stories there is at least one character that is just able to openly, genuinely, and simply state (or express) their sexuality.

I think of this in The Bright Sessions with Caleb being like "I don't care that he's a boy", with Adam and his "depressed gay kid" comment to his mother in The Infinite Noise, with Lincoln's Dad just being happy for him and with Emmet's aunt asking him if he was gay in Look Up. And the same thing for the shows I've been watching too, in Young Royals, Simon looks at his father and says "I'm gay, Papa" and it's not even a coming out, it's just a reminder, and his father just...apologizes for getting it wrong and corrects the language. It's no big deal, Simon is comfortable, Simon knows who he is, and there is no hesitation and no tentativeness behind his statement. In The Owl House Luz shows her bisexuality from the start, she isn't embarrassed that she has a crush on Amity, she's only nervous to ask her out because she thinks Amity might be too cool for the theatrics. And it's just...

Every time I hear a character be completely open about their sexuality with their family, it soothes something that I didn't realize I was carrying. It marks me as strange, that they can simply say it. It makes my heart twinge, and it makes me happy for a literal fictional character, that they are able to just...know who they are and not be worried about what their family will think. In The Bright Sessions, in The Magnus Archives, in The Owl House there hasn't been a coming out, and until this month I never realized how much I needed to see that.

When I came out, I started as many do, with my closest friends, people I knew I could trust, people who I knew would celebrate it. And then, when I found a label I liked, that I felt suited me, I made a post on social media...and I never talked about it again. From time to time I mention to my mother that I have a meeting for LGBTQ+ students, or that I went to a gay bar. But we have never sat down and talked about it. My mother has had exactly one discussion in any level of detail about sexuality and what different labels in the LGBTQ+ community means, and that was before I came out. When she saw my post she literally left a comment "glad I figured out how to check social media or I would have missed the fun!" and then we literally never talked about it again. She never asks questions and honestly that's fine, but there is some twisted and warped part of me that believes that she isn't fully comfortable with the idea of me being gay. And I know she loves me, and that that love is unconditional and I am extremely lucky for that. That said, I don't necessarily feel ashamed of being LGBTQ+ when I'm with her

But with my father that is a whole 'nother story. I never came out to him, I'm not sure if he saw the posts I made when I did come out and we barely talk as it is. But while he has definitely gotten better over the years with his homophobia, I can't say that growing up in his household I ever got the impression that he was comfortable with gay people. If there was ever a queer character in any show we were watching, his reaction to their love, was less than ideal, and while I didn't realize my own sexuality until I was years and years outside his house, I think knowing him and know the company he kept, that it delayed any desire to do a deep dive into my own identities. Even now, as I am questioning my gender identity, the distain he has for my "boyish" haircut really proves to me that he is not someone that I could ever come out to about maybe not being cis.

But, that's all besides the point. The point is, I am coming to terms with whatever internalized homophobia I have been carrying that makes it hard for me to even verbalize my sexuality or gender identity to the people around me. Most of my coming out has been through screens, through social media, or private messages, because I'm too much of a fucking coward to say it to people who aren't already a part of the community. Because there are people in my family, cousins, uncles, etc. that hate people like me, that are disgusted by people like me, that don't know about me and don't know the harm they are causing.

I have no disillusions about their impressions of me, I know most people in my life were not surprised when I came out to them. I think most people knew before I did that I was queer. But still, it took me listening to this newer wave of media, where gay characters are allowed to be comfortable, where their crises are not knowing if their crush likes them back, where their conflicts or emotional turmoil is because they are an avatar for an ancient evil, and not because they were outed to a homophobic relative. (and yes, that part doesn't really apply to Young Royals for Wilhelm, but Simon's openness about his sexuality to his family is a gift imo) Its late, and I'm tired, and I don't really know exactly what I'm saying here, but the point is that every time I see a character that is open, out, and confident in their sexuality, and can just easier than breathing say they are gay, or that they have a crush on someone of the same gender, or just state that they are in a queer relationship, I keep getting stuck on this feeling that that isn't supposed to happen. That the other shoe has to drop. And there is a part of me that is surprised that they say these things with conviction, and that there is no hesitation in saying the words. It just makes me happy and I'm so so glad that so many queer people have these characters now. That they can see a different generation of storytelling that allows queer people to exist, to be open, to not be ashamed, to not have to face homophobia. I wish I had had more examples of that growing up.

TL;DR: It still surprises me when queer characters are allowed to be secure in their sexuality and I didn't realize how much I needed that kind of representation in my life until now.

[jjarcc]

Brokeback Mountain and Brandon Teena

i think for me, growing up where i grew up was both good and bad. i spent a large portion of my childhood lonely, i felt isolated from other people no matter if they where adults or children. where i live its what i’ll call “the most souther” part of the midwest, we have the poverty and ideology of small-town southern america even deep into the city, and so i often find myself relating more to LGBT characters from movies set in the south rather than the cities in the north/east.

for me, Brokeback mouton really spoke to my heart. the large about of terror both men had for loving each other, the way the wives reacted when they realized their husbands where in love with one another, the movie in its whole.

the movie goes deeper than two repressed gay men having a beer and fuck once a year, the movies dives deeper into showing us the fear these men had. jacks pain and longing to be with ennis, while ennis was so scared of the idea of loving him openly that his emotions where completely shut off and absent throughout their relationship.

when ennis was young, his father had showed him some horrible shit- a gay man from their town bloody, mutilated and dead. jack never knew of this, but i believe that was the root of Dennis’s fear. he didn’t want that to be jack; or himself.

he had probably known, and likely his father too, and thats why they decided to add that into the movie. that particular scene was one of the most striking and powerful for me.

jacks family, however emotionless they where, where not like ennis’s. however, he had a lot of internalized turmoil. the turmoil turning to great frustration as time went on.

over the 20 years in their relationship, there was a lot of lying, tension, and even agony. all because of what? their fear of judgement? or, their fear of the worst; death.

when jack was found dead and ennis found out, i felt my heart stop. i felt that pain in that moment, that crushing pain that ennis felt. all his fears had come true. in a frantic frenzy to find out what happened, he called his lovers widow, and she then (as i assume) knew why her husband was always so joyful to go on those fishing trips.

the whole movie is powerful- and painful. it shows our terror to be ourselves, and shows how we often are treated.

another movie that i find myself relating to the most would be Boys Don’t cry, which is a film about Brandon Teena, a trans man who was murdered based on his identity.

(TW for some of what i talk about coming after this, there will be specific TW for when violence is mentioned)

brandon teena was born in lincoln Nebraska, which i don’t live 3 hours away from, so this one scared my pants off.

he had had quite a troubled childhood; his father died 8 months before he was born, and he spent the first few years of his childhood living with his grandmother, then eventually his mother. (TW) when he was young, he was sexually abused by his uncle, and eventually sought counseling for this.

in 1993, after some legal trouble, he moved to falls city nebraska where he first started identifying as a man openly, and then met Lana Tisdel, and some convicts by the names of John Lotter and Marvin Nissen.

in late december 1993 brandon was arrested for forging checks, and Lana ended up paying his bail. he was thrown into a woman jail, and his girlfriend of course questioned him on it, to which he said he was a Hermaphrodite working towards a sex change, and they continued dating.

Brandon’s arrest was put in the papers, and so he was outted. now, heres the fucked up part; his murder.

now, i couldn’t make myself watch this far into the actual movie, so I’m going off of a wikipedia article now, but i know it was bad. so TW for this part.

this is copied from wikipedia but ill edit it some:

During a Christmas Eve party, Nissen and Lotter grabbed Teena and forced him to remove his pants, proving to Tisdel that Teena was anatomically female. Tisdel said nothing and looked only when they forced her. Lotter and Nissen later assaulted Teena, and forced him into a car. They drove to an area by a meat-packing plant in Richardson County, where they assaulted and gang raped him. They then returned to Nissen's home where Teena was ordered to take a shower. Teena escaped from Nissen's bathroom by climbing out the window, and went to Tisdel's house. He was convinced by Tisdel to file a police report, though Nissen and Lotter had warned Teena not to tell the police about the gang rape or they would "silence him permanently". Teena also went to the emergency room where a standard rape kit was assembled, but later lost. Sheriff Charles B. Laux questioned Teena about the rape; reportedly, he seemed especially interested in Teena's transsexuality, to the point that Teena found his questions rude and unnecessary, and refused to answer. Nissen and Lotter learned of the report, and they began to search for Teena. They did not find him, and three days later, the police questioned them. The sheriff declined to have them arrested due to lack of evidence.

Around 1:00 a.m. on December 31, 1993, Nissen and Lotter drove to Lambert's house and broke in. They found Lambert in bed and demanded to know where Teena was. Lambert refused to tell them. Nissen searched and found Teena under the bed. The men asked Lambert if there was anyone else in the house, and she replied that Phillip DeVine, who at the time was dating Tisdel's sister, was staying with her. They then shot and killed DeVine, Lambert and Teena in front of Lambert's toddler. Nissen later testified in court that he noticed that Teena was twitching, and asked Lotter for a knife, with which Nissen stabbed Teena in the chest, to ensure that he was dead. Nissen and Lotter then left, later being arrested and charged with murder.

one of the real kickers for me, is that brandon’s grave is written as “Daughter, Sister, And friend”.

Because Teena had neither commenced hormone replacement therapy nor had sex reassignment surgery, he has sometimes been identified as a lesbian by media reporters. However, some reported that Teena had stated that he planned to have sex reassignment surgery.

JoAnn Brandon sued Richardson County and Sheriff Laux for failing to prevent Brandon's death, as well as being an indirect cause. She won the case, which was heard in September 1999 in Falls City, and was awarded $80,000. District court judge Orville Coady reduced the amount by 85 percent based on the responsibility of Nissen and Lotter, and by one percent for Brandon's alleged contributory negligence. This led to a remaining judgment of responsibility against Richardson County and Laux of $17,360.97. In 2001, the Nebraska Supreme Court reversed the reductions of the earlier award reinstating the full $80,000 award for "mental suffering", plus $6,223.20 for funeral costs. In October 2001, the same judge awarded the plaintiff an additional $12,000: $5,000 for wrongful death, and $7,000 for the intentional infliction of emotional distress. Laux was also criticized after the murder for his attitude toward Teena – at one point, Laux referred to Brandon as "it". After the case was over, Laux served as commissioner of Richardson County and later as part of his community's council before retiring as a school bus driver. He has refused to this day to speak about his actions in the case and swore at one reporter who contacted him for a story on the murder's twentieth anniversary.

In 1999, Brandon became the subject of a biographical film entitled Boys Don't Cry, directed by Kimberly Peirce and starring Hilary Swank as Teena and Chloë Sevigny as Tisdel. For their performances, Swank won and Sevigny was nominated for an Academy Award. Tisdel sued the producers of the film for unauthorized use of her name and likeness before the film's release. She claimed the film depicted her as "lazy, white trash, and a skanky snake". Tisdel also claimed that the film falsely portrayed that she continued the relationship with Teena after she discovered that Teena was transgender. She eventually settled her lawsuit against the movie's distributor for an undisclosed sum.[14][15]

JoAnn Brandon publicly objected to the media referring to her child as "he" and "Brandon". Following Hilary Swank's Oscar acceptance speech, JoAnn Brandon took offence at Swank for thanking "Brandon Teena" and for referring to him as a man. "That set me off", said JoAnn Brandon. "She should not stand up there and thank my child. I get tired of people taking credit for what they don't know. However, in 2013, JoAnn told a reporter that she accepted Teena being referred to as transgender in the media. Although she was unhappy with the way Boys Don't Cry portrayed the situation, she said about the film, "It gave them [gay and transgender advocates] a platform to voice their opinions, and I'm glad of that. There were a lot of people who didn't understand what it was she (Teena) was going through. We've come a long way". When asked to how the murder affects her life today, JoAnn replied, "I wonder about how my life would be different if she was still here with me. She would be such a joy to have around. She was always such a happy kid. I imagine her being a happy adult. And if being happy meant Teena living as a man, I would be fine with that."

Brandon, an interactive web artwork created in 1998 by Shu Lea Cheang, was named for Brandon Teena. The artwork was commissioned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Much of the site's content relates to Brandon's story.[36]

The British duo Pet Shop Boys released a song called "Girls Don't Cry" (a bonus track on U.K. issue of I'm with Stupid) about Teena in 2006. Vancouver-based pop-punk band JPNSGRLS released the song "Brandon", off their debut 2014 album Circulation, in memory of Brandon Teena.

boys dont cry was very hard for me to watch because i felt a sense of attachment to brandon, both in personality and feeling. i felt like i really understood, and it scared me.

both brockback mountain and Boys Dont Cry are amazing movies, if you can, check them out. they deserve all the appreciation they can get. 

[laceycutler]

Tom & Laura

I am one who appreciates deep feelings and often finds myself down the rabbit hole of universal questions and deep thoughts, feeling more than I should.  I don’t connect easily to many people, but when I do its that kind of deep connection with those who you’re not afraid to dive into the messes of life with.  

Not even twelve months ago we moved to Lincoln.  I was super excited, but quickly found myself with anxiety, something I had not experienced before.  One day while in the throws of this A-word beast, while sitting on my front porch, I spot a little lady, adorned in an oversized Husker sweater and grey sweatpants.  She had her super long blonde hair up in a pony tail with cigarette in hand.  She immediately spotted me too and started talking to me from her yard.  Of course, I couldn’t hear a word she said but she soon came right over to chat.  Not long after that chat ended, she was over with brand new toys she had originally had for her grandkids, but gave them to our 2 year old.  

She was selfless from the first day I met her.  Shortly after our first encounter she was over almost every day, telling me her life stories.  Let me tell you, she had not had an easy 49 years on earth, but definitly a full life.  Laura described to me the situations she had landed in, rough, rough, rough.  Despite her past, she had found love and happiness with her new husband, Tom.  

Everytime Laura talks about Tom, she has this smile that I can only describe as her Tom smile.  Literally almost ear to ear, and her eyes light up just as wide as her smile.  

After her tales of life and love, she tells us she has cancer and its bad.  This is not her first walk with cancer, in fact, If i remember right, she’s had cancer at least three times, but don’t quote me on that.  She was battling cancer in her spine and it was about to start spreading further.  Daily trips to the hospital for nightmare shots, meds, and chemo.  

I think it really hit me when she wanted me to shave her head.  Thats when I knew we had reached a level of friendship that I had never reached with anybody before.  Although I didn’t end up needing to do it (she did it herself), it was something that I think defined my level of importance in her life and her importance in mine.  It was months of pain and suffering for her, losing her hair, battling the never ending shakes and sickness, and the many nights I would spend with her just listening to her losing hope and crying because she was so sick of the pain.  

Just like how we met, one day I was sitting on my front porch enjoying the weather when Laura pulled up with her husband.  She gets out of the car with a smile almost as big as her Tom smile.  “I’M IN REMISSION”  

I don’t think I have EVER been as happy for someone as I was in that moment.  

Life was suppose to be good again, but isn’t that always the furthest from the truth. 

Fast forward to two weeks ago, I get a call from Laura.  “Tom has cancer, everywhere.”  

WHAT? 

Here we are again, but this time its worse, this time the doctor’s have given a time limit to his pain.  This time there is an end, but its not the end anybody wants.  Remission is not in his future, in fact, he may not even see another one of his beloved Husker games again.  

Life has not been kind to the blue house on Butler.  Life has thrown more curveballs than I think any one person would be able to handle, but she’s handling it.  She’s taking charge.  

Becaue of the time limit, I used the only outlet I know how to help her in this time, and for the time after.  To help her hold on to the faces of love and joy in both of their faces when they are together.  

God brought me to Butler for a reason, and I’m almost entirely sure she was that reason.  

Pray for this family, to whatever God you believe. Pray long, pray hard,  Whatever you do, just pray.  

[newyorktheater]

The actual Charles Gilpin in Eugene O’Neill’s “Emperor Jones”

Shaun Parkes as Charles Gilpin playing Brutus Jones in “The Black Emperor of Broadway”

In 1920, Eugene O’Neill turned a Black actor into a star by casting him as the lead in his play “The Emperor Jones” — and then fired him for having changed the script during performances to avoid repeating the racial slur that the playwright favored.

The actor, Charles Gilpin, is the subject of “The Black Emperor of Broadway,” a new movie that launches online today, and will be released as a DVD on October 6.

“The story about the battle over the N word is true,” says theater artist Adrienne Pender. “Charles must have said it during rehearsals, but early during the run, as he got confident, he stopped saying it.” Things heated up when Gilpin went on tour.  “Reports came back to O’Neill from some crew members that Charles wasn’t just changing that one word, he was changing other sections as well…He felt he knew what Brutus Jones would or would not say. O’Neill put his foot down.”

The much younger Paul Robeson took over the role in the Broadway revival and then starred in the 1933 movie adaptation.  Robeson remains famous. Gilpin died in 1930, buried in an unmarked grave, and has been largely forgotten. But Gilpin is the actor who originated the role of Brutus Jones, the Pullman porter who becomes the dictator of a tropical island, and Gilpin was initially showered with attention for his performance — invited to the White House, honored by the Drama League, although they did not invite him to the dinner in his honor at first because of his race, until O’Neill and others protested.

Indeed, despite the ugliness of the split between playwright and performer, Pender recalls a remark O’Neill made near the end of his life: “Of all the actors who ever played in my plays, only one ever fully realized a part as I heard it in my head, as I wrote it and imagined it from the beginning – that was Charles Gilpin.’”

Pender has a special connection with Gilpin.  She’s related.  Her cousin Jackie is Gilpin’s granddaughter. “The family story was just that we had an actor in the family who made a name for himself in a play by O’Neill, and that was literally the extent of what I heard.” It was only when she turned from acting to playwriting that his life story really registered with her…vividly. One night six years ago, “I had a dream about Charles, just telling me, ‘it’s time.’ And I woke up and said, okay, I get it.” She started researching and writing a play, which she entitled “N,”  and which has been produced by theaters in Raleigh and Detroit. Screenwriter Ian Bowater and director Arthur Egeli  have adapted “N” into the film “The Black Emperor of Broadway.”

When Pender started on her journey to discover her little-known relative, “I wondered why I’d never heard about him before, and what a huge gap in my education that was. I talked to some Black actors I knew, and only a very few of them had heard about Charles.” There is little written about him — only a chapter here or there, such as a chapter in a book called “A Beautiful Pageant; African American Theater and Drama and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910-1927,” and Moss Hart’s account in his memoir “Act One” about making his Broadway debut as a performer in “The Emperor Jones” at the age of 22 opposite Gilpin, who was by then was lost in an alcoholic fog.  (Chuck Cooper portrayed Gilpin in the recent dramatization of Act One at Lincoln Center.) “There is no official, serious biography on Charles,” Pender says, “but there should be.”

That there is so little information available about Gilpin “gave me some freedom to write him as I wanted to, I wasn’t tied to too much history.”

Much of what Pender did discover about Gilpin was found through her research on O’Neill, especially on an Artist in Residence fellowship at Tao House,  the National Historic Site where O’Neill live when he wrote his great later plays like The Iceman Cometh, Moon for the Misbegotten, and Long Day’s Journey. ( She had written to the Eugene O’Neill Foundation for permission to use scenes from “The Emperor Jones” in the play. “They wrote back immediately, and said that I didn’t need permission (public domain), and oh, by the way, we have literally just now finished creating an Artist in Residence fellowship.”) “I used the residency time to comb the files for tidbits on Charles. I found letters from Gene about Charles;  I found blurbs about Charles in Gene’s working diary.”

Much of the movie, as the play, focuses on the relationship between Gilpin and O’Neill. Pender was originally in fact going to create a two-character play. “But I realized there are things that Charles as a Negro in 1920 would not or could not say to a White man. There needed to be another Negro character, so I decided to make that character Charles’ wife, Florence.”  (In the movie, John Hensley plays O’Neill and Nija Okoro plays Florence, but there are a dozen other characters, including O’Neill’s colleagues at the Provincetown Players, as well s Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois.)

I have always felt ambivalent about “The Emperor Jones,” a bit baffled by the continuing accolades. I wondered after her deep dive into the playwright and the play what her view of it is.

“I’ve always thought it was racist,” she replies. “But I also thought that it was just one of those pieces of art that had to be viewed in the context of the time it was written. I’m not a believer that we should completely toss ‘Gone With the Wind;’ there just needs to be discussion about the context of the novel AND of the time of the movie.

“But now I think some works just can’t be redeemed, even with context. Removing the ‘N’ word as Charles did, doesn’t make The Emperor Jones any less problematic, or any less racist. I don’t think it could be performed today, even as a period piece.”

(There actually have been a couple of recent productions of The Emperor Jones in New York, one as late as 2017, another that I saw in 2009 starring the great John Douglas Thompson.)

So why was it (is it) so admired?

“It was admired in its time for a few reasons; there really was a difference in American theater before O’Neill, and theater after him, and most of his early works were experimental paradigm shifts from what came before them. He’d won his second Pulitzer Prize while The Emperor Jones was on Broadway.”  (The first two of the four he won were for “Beyond the Horizon” and “Anna Christie”) “So on one hand, The Emperor Jones was the latest play by O’Neill to push some boundaries. BUT — it became a hit because of Charles. The Emperor Jones made a lot of money for O’Neill and for the Provincetown Players. Charles’s performance was considered epic, revelatory, and he was hailed immediately as the greatest actor of the generation. Reviews of the play from 1920 and 1921 call out the problems with the play itself even back then — but everyone agreed that the reason to see the play was Charles.”

  ohn Hensley as Eugene O’Neill

confrontation between O’Neill and Gilpin

Confrontation between O’Neill and Gilpin in The Black Emperor of Broadway

Charles Sidney Gilpin

The Black Emperor of Broadway. Charles Gilpin, Eugene O’Neill’s Great Forgotten Actor In 1920, Eugene O’Neill turned a Black actor into a star by casting him as the lead in his play “The Emperor Jones” -- and then fired him for having changed the script during performances to avoid repeating the racial slur that the playwright favored.

[newyorktheater]

Playwright David Adjmi’s delightful new book Lot Six: A Memoir (Harper Collins, 388 pages) is the most entertaining theater memoir I’ve read since  Act One, the gold standard of theatrical memoirs, which the celebrated playwright and director Moss Hart wrote in 1959 (two years before his death) about his stage-struck, impoverished childhood in the Bronx, his theatrical apprenticeship and his first of many Broadway triumphs. If there are some similarities in the stories – and the wit – of the two Jewish New York theater artists born into challenging circumstances seven decades apart, their differences reflect the many ways the theater has changed. Hart was forced to drop out of school as a teenager, had his first play produced at 18, and was writing Broadway hits starting in his twenties. The Brooklyn-born Adjmi matriculated at several prestigious universities and graduate programs, and has won major prizes and fellowships — in the acknowledgements page, he thanks nine different writers residencies where he wrote much of the memoir – yet at the age of 47, he has not yet had a play on Broadway. (His new play “Stereophonic,” was aiming for a Broadway run in 2021, but like everything else, is currently in limbo.) He is probably best known for his play “3C,” an Off-Broadway parody of “Three’s Company,” and then largely because he won a lawsuit against the copyright holders of the TV sitcom. If “Act One” capped an illustrious career, “Lot Six” promises a higher profile for a writer who deserves it. Adjmi wins me over in his very first story, about seeing “Sweeney Todd” when he was eight years old. His mother had been taking him from their insulated Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn to Broadway shows since the age of five, determined “to bring me up as cultured – even if she didn’t know what culture was, exactly.” But this musical shocked him from the first earsplitting shriek of a factory whistle and the terrifying first song. “Was this the right show? Where was the pie lady from the commercial?” What follows is the funniest yet clearest and most spot-on description of “Sweeney Todd” that I’ve ever read – all the more priceless because it includes his reaction to it, which was passionate enough to ignite not just an identification with the wronged Sweeney but a life-long devotion to the theater. “Sweeney Todd made me physically sick, but somehow the ugliness in it was exquisite….I wanted that beauty in my life.” After the first scene, however, there is little mention of theater for a very long stretch, as the author takes us through the next decade or so of his lonely, circumscribed life — his quirky, dysfunctional family, parochial community, and oppressively rule-dominated yeshiva, where he most definitely did not belong: “I found God very off-putting. He was a bully who inflicted psychological torture on people . And the Bible wasn’t spiritually edifying. It didn’t fill me with emotion, it didn’t make me want to bolt up and start singing or dancing or sobbing the way I did watching The Wiz and 42nd Street.” The anecdotes from his childhood can be horrid: Sent to school hungry, because his neglectful parents couldn’t even get it together to feed him, he once asked a group of girls whether they could share their snacks with him. One of them threw a fistful of potato sticks on the dirty floor, and giggled. David scooped them up and ate them. “Soon my classmates were all standing in a semicircle, throwing food at me – dried fruit and potato sticks and Twizzlers, and I ate whatever they threw. It didn’t feel like a compromise or humiliation, it didn’t feel like anything…” His own family made him feel alienated because of their ridicule of what they called Lot Six, which is a dismissive epithet used by the Syrian Jewish community for queer people. Adjmi knew he was attracted to men from an early age, but never said it aloud until 14, when his therapist (to whom he was sent because of bad grades) encouraged him to do so using a hand puppet. The overall impression of Adjmi’s unhappy childhood is far from grim, because of the many moments of rebellion and relief – the tales of mischief with his one friend, Howie, for example – and also thanks to the author’s sharp, often comic rendering of unforgettable characters and vivid moments. Adjmi is mercilessly precise in his description of physical appearances. A long paragraph skewers a vengeful teacher by detailing her features, including “fingernails..so long and glossy they seemed part machine. Each element felt so blown out and artificial that when one put them all together it was like a surrealist painting…” It’s not surprising that, as he tells us in an Author’s Note, all the names in his memoir have been changed, even those of his family. But if such a visual portrait might feel like revenge, he applies the same unrelenting eye to characters he likes. “…his fingers were long and thin like insect antennae…” “She was from Los Angeles but seemed like a New Yorker. She wore a lot of black and looked like she’d be good at hailing cabs….” “He was doe-eyed and chinless, unrugged and soft-voiced. On cold days, his nose appeared bright red” The second year acting students at Juilliard “had the unnatural ablated openness of people in cults – their skin seemed ripped off and all the raw nerves exposed.” About that “ablated.” It means tissue surgically removed. “Lot Six” contains the sort of profuse use of abstruse vocabulary most common in poets and autodidacts – cathecting, pelagic, proleptic – sometimes paired with a low-rent word for what I assumed was intended as comic effect — dyadic closeness, cynosural cuddling. Given this display of erudition, I was surprised at his occasional lapses in grammar and his profligate use of “disinterest” to mean lack of interest rather than impartiality. It comes as something of a revelation about halfway through the book, when he tells us (amid much discussion of Nietzsche and literature) that as a sophomore transfer student at Sarah Lawrence he purchased “Barron’s Vocabulary Builder and a pack of index cards….” – and shot the words he learned “like lead balls from a cannon.” There are other unusual choices in “Lot Six.” It includes footnotes, which often tell stories that he could have included in the body of his book, including, weirdly, the story of his coming out to his family. Given the title of the book, there is relatively little about his gay life – little more than a few paragraphs on his first awkward sexual encounter, and a few pages about his first boyfriend. It isn’t until about two-thirds of the way through “Lot Six” that the author – and his character – dive deep into the theater. Feeling at a low point in his life, he takes a train into the city from college and buys a ticket to see “Six Degrees of Separation” – which he describes with the same clarity and passion as “Sweeney Todd,” struck by how much playwright John Guare, “whom I had never met…knew me.”– then walks through Times Square. “I stood for a moment in the jangle of voices and noise, and I felt a sense of enormous calm wash over me. It was where I belonged.” He experiences a similar epiphany again walking in Manhattan a few years later, this time in Chelsea, on Thanksgiving break from his graduate studies at the Iowa Writers Workshop (having decided senior year to become a playwright.) He began hearing dialogue for a play in his head. “It was uncanny….the sort of thing that was supposed to happen to writers all the time” – but had never happened to him. Theater people in the know will probably be talking most about the chapters of “Lot Six” that focus on his year in the playwriting program of the Juilliard School, and his tense relationship with the co-head of the program, whom he calls Gloria (but whose real identity is easy to uncover.) He graphically depicts her brutal treatment – how she looks at her cell phone, rummages through her handbag, and sometimes simply leaves the classroom, whenever he reads new pages: “Her overlong fingernails plucked the surface of the table with an aggressive clack. ‘Well,’ she trilled, ‘do you actually need comments on this, or can we just move on?’ Weeks later: “’Are you trying to write cardboard characters,’ she said, ‘or are you trying to write people?’ “The way she said the word ‘people’ made it sound like I wasn’t really a person, how would I even remotely know the workings of the species.” “’People,’ I replied with a slight aphasia…..” There is a measure of satisfaction from the fact that, although Gloria so upset Adjmi that for a long time he had trouble writing, she also (inadvertently) helped contribute to his first theatrical triumph – a convoluted tale that’s funny and touching, and involves a gazelle; that’s all I’ll say. “Lot Six,” like “Act One,” more or less ends with the story of the playwright’s first big success, a play called “Stunning” that was produced at Lincoln Center in 2009 and extended several times. But unlike the story of the Broadway hit that concludes Hart’s memoir, “Stunning” didn’t make David Adjmi rich, and it didn’t make him famous; it made him infamous, at least among the Syrian Jewish community of Brooklyn. They were the subject of “Stunning,” a bleak play that places some largely unappealing characters into a plot he tells us was loosely based on “A Streetcar Named Desire.” It was a play he wrote when he had given up on playwriting, never expecting that “Stunning” would be produced, viewing it in fact as unproduceable. “It was a suicide note — my one last missive to humanity before hurtling myself like Anna Karenina onto the train tracks at McDonald Avenue.” So it makes sense that “Lot Six” ends not in a celebratory theater party for his play, but in a quiet dinner out with his mother and sister, at which his sister recounts an ugly family funeral that Adjmi did not attend. The reaction to the play, and the discoveries he made as a result – “I’d summoned the very past I’d wanted to annihilate” – are among what feel like the new lessons in “Lot Six” about the theater of today. And they are stunning.

Book Review: Lot Six: A Memoir Of Gay, Yeshiva-Tortured Syrian Jewish Playwright David Adjmi Playwright David Adjmi’s delightful new book Lot Six: A Memoir (Harper Collins, 388 pages) is the most entertaining theater memoir I’ve read since