The Folk Hero in Modern American Drama

THE FOLK HERO IN MODERN AMERICAN DRAMA WHEN JONATHAN WALKED OUT ON THE STAGE of New York's Park Theatre in 1787, he began a procession of folk characters that has never ceased to pass before the footlights of the American stage in astonishing variety and number. This first stage Yankee became the progenitor of a multitude of rustics, backwoodsmen, minstrels. cowboys, and bandits with whom generations of audiences have identified themselves delightedly and volubly. From Jonathan and Solon Shingle to Joe Hill and Jesse James is a long road, a road which one is tempted to say leads from fantasy to realism and back again to fantasy. Not all the folk creations of the American mind have been successfully transplanted to the stage. Major Jack Downing and Hosea Biglow and Sut Lovingood never became the protagonists of plays which enjoyed long runs and appealed to a variety of audiences. But after Royall Tyler gave birth to Jonathan, and Joseph Jefferson animated Rip Van Winkle for almost half a century, modern dramatists seized on John Henry and Paul Bunyan, on Roy Bean and Johnny Appleseed, expropriated them from the popular imagination, and made them into interesting stage figures. The folk hero, naive but shrewd, earthy or whimsical, sometimes voluble and sometimes aphoristic, has become one of the few American contributions to the world's dramatic gallery and in so doing has remained as autochthonous as he is a personality . Many historians have traced the evolution of the stage Yankee, the rude country bumpkin whose name might be Jedediah Homebred or Deuteronomy Dutiful, who wore the roughest of clothes, spoke in the most nasal of dialects, and turned out to be the most amazing paragon of honesty, morality, and patriotism.1 By his lack of pretense and his gift of wit he captured audiences, and many of his qualities lingered in the folk hero long after his rustic origins had disappeared. The Yankee was usually in conflict with authority and polite society; he was the proletarian spokesman against patrician arrogance and superiority. As Constance Rourke maintained, he 1 see for example Lawrence Hutton, Curiosities of the American Stage (New York, 1891), Constance Rourke, American HUmor (New York, 1951), and especially Richard Moody, America Takes the Stage (Bloomington, 1955), pp. 110-15°. 402 1964 FOLK HERO IN MODERN AMERICAN DRAMA 403 eventually merged in part with the backwoodsman, changing his location and to some degree his background, but not his role; and in Mark Twain's first published sketch it is the Yankee-back.woodsmansquatter who tricks the dandy from the East, just as·it is the rough Westerner, Simon Wheeler, who mocks the original narrator of the jumping frog story. In the twentieth century the Yankee has generally lost his regional label, but the folk hero in various stages of atavism preserves many of the traits which first made Jonathan memorable. Even during the years when actors like George H. Hill and Dan Marble delighted theatergoers with their impersonations of Yankee figures, the folk hero was already changing. Colonel Nimrod Wildfire, the blustering protagonist of James Kirke Paulding's long-lost play, The Lion of the West, brought to the American stage in the 1830'S the image of the backwoodsman, coarse, self-important, and above all boastful.· "Why, madam," Colonel Wildfire could say to Mrs. Wollope , "of all the fellows either side of the Allegheny hills, I myself can jump higher-squat lower-dive deeper-stay longer under and come out drier." Like Mike Fink, Davy Crockett, and other worthies of the hinterland, these gamecocks of the wilderness and yellow flowers of the forest could excel everyone else, whether their rivalry involved drinking, shooting, or fighting. Crockett himself became the central figure in a popular play by Frank Murdoch (with Frank Mayo impersonating the backwoodsman and fixing the role), one· result of which was that Crockett's maxim, "Be sure you're right, then go ahead," became a kind of national slogan. By this time the folk hero had shed the quietness and occasional reticence of the Yankee; even his profession has virtually disappeared, since the inconspicuous drover or peddler was now metamorphosed into a keelboatman, trapper , or hunter.s...