Misrecognition and Antimodernism in the Grove Plays of the Bohemian Club

Misrecognition and Antimodernism in the Grove Plays of the Bohemian Club! MARTIN HARRI ES It is che single modern instarlce 0/the communal idea in relation to the theatre; the recrudescence ofthe spiriT of the essentially ritualistic Greek drama; the most nearly complete realization ofthe dream offree art. Porter Garnett, The Green Knight ix Almost every summer since t902, at great expense of time, labor, and money, the Bohemian Club has produced a play in its redwood grove north ofSan Francisco . Members of the Club give a single perfomnance of these so-called Grove plays - complete with new text and music composed for the occasion, full orchestral accompaniment, and elaborate costumes and sets - before an exclusive audience of other members and their guests.2 The Grove plays feature themes ranging the historical, prehistorical, natural- historical. and counterhistorical gamut, from the story of Robin Hood to tales ofcavemen to a story of spiders to the defeat of Mammon by Bohemia.' In these plays and other annual theatrical rituals, the men of the Bohemian Club industriously misrecognize themselves and the sources of their own power. In the Grove plays, indeed, one can see an awkward embodiment of the production of the aesthetic as a response to the open secret that capital has reduced almost everything to the universal equivalent. Precisely those who benefit from that historical development require the sequestered groye of the aesthetic as an imagined refuge from capital's power. But the oddity of the club does not lie in this familiar creation of an aesthetic zone putatively separate from the market as a response to the exigencies of that market. What is striking is the lack of delegation; the activity of art-making is not given over exclusively to others,to artists, to those San Francisco Gilded Age "bohemians" who founded the club only to give way quickly to those who could pay the club's bills. In the Bohemian Grove, even if for only a short time, the marketeers themselves become aesthetes. Modern Drama, 47'3 (Fall 2004) 367 MARTIN HARRIES First, a brief sketch: The Bohemian Club is of some sociological interest and has convinced observers that the U.S. has an identifiable and cohesive ruling class (Domhoff, Wehr).4 The Bohemian Club admits only men and, although the Club does not make membership lists public, it is clear that a large majority of these men are white, to the right, and wealthy. Every Republican president from Herben Hoover to George W. Bush has been a member of the club; Hoover's so-called lakeside talks - disquisitions on subjects of national interest delivered ar:ound noon - were for many years a regular fixture of the club's summer encampments in the Bohemian Grove. An array of figures in the military- industrial complex has belonged to the Bohemian Club or has attended its encampments: Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld, to name only a few more recent lakeside lecturers, may stand in for a list of names it would be impossible to enumerate here.s Such a roster of the club's members would read like a social register in which a person may appear so long as that person is a man, rich, and not unwilling to vote Republican or possesses some theatrical or musical talent and is not unwilling to hobnob with that other, dominant group6 The Bohemian Club and its confluence of power, influence, and testosterone quite naturally inspire conspiratorial fantasies that range from plausible tales of insider deals to preposterous accounts of necrophilia and human sacrifice . These conspiratorial stories are not my topic. Like that of the conspiracy theorists, however, my focus here falls on the Bohemian Club's annual twoweek "encampment"- a hybrid of sodden reunion, networking extravaganza, ans-and-crafts festival; and think tank - in the club's Bohemian Grove, a plot of 2,700 acres of redwood forest along the Russian River in Sonoma County, California. The conspiracy theorists are not without material: powerful men have made agreements of some consequence under the ancient trees of the Grove. Here, in 1967, Ronald Reagan agreed not to run against Nixon, unless Nixon's campaign were to flag (van der Zee '35...