Revolutionary City (review)

Colonial Williamsburg opened its 2006 season in late March with Revolutionary City. The performance, running in two-day cycles throughout the summer, stages scenes set in and around Williamsburg from between May 1774 and September 1781. The scenes combine documented events of the American Revolution (Governor Dunmore's dissolving of Virginia's House of Burgesses in May 1774, Benedict Arnold's seizing of the city in April 1781) and conjectural exchanges (an out-of-work carpenter argues with his wife about whether he should enlist in the Continental Army, a group of slaves discusses Dunmore's offer of emancipation in return for joining the British forces against the rebelling colonists). Spring 2006 press releases announced that this year's storyline would more fully immerse the living history museum's visitors in the pivotal events of the Revolution than ever before.

Revolutionary City's promise of more interactive visitor participation functions as part of an effort to combat declining attendance. Living history museums nationwide, in fact, are seeking higher-energy programs in response to the growing competition for tourists' leisure time and rising gas prices. Williamsburg has marshaled several strategies, including podcasts for visitors' portable MP3 players and pirate-related programs to coincide with the recent much-hyped release of Disney's Pirates of the Caribbeansequel. By far, though, the largest portion of summer visitors will witness the museum's recent labors through the first-person characters they will encounter in Revolutionary City.

Revolutionary City's performances are situated in and around significant landmarks of eighteenth-century Williamsburg such as the Capitol, Raleigh Tavern, and the Courthouse. Large scenes are staged in stations, their start times specified on a handbill. In between, characters draw groups of visitors into conversations about what they have just seen, or continue the drama in smaller vignettes in the streets. In one conversation, John Randolph wonders aloud whether patriots can condone acts of protest like the Boston Tea Party if they involve such irresponsible destruction of property. In another, a character outlines the finer points of humor theory and climate to explain why Virginians are much more temperate than their New England compatriots.

Despite Williamsburg's intentions ,I found the audience interaction in Revolutionary Cityas superficial as in past seasons. With few exceptions beyond responding to yes-or-no questions—or the several times actors coached the audience to cheer three "huzzahs"—we actually participated little in the action. Perhaps we were overwhelmed. Unlike past seasons at Colonial Williamsburg, where each day of the week has corresponded to a particular date leading up the Revolution, the audience careened through seven years of history in a total of five hours; at such a frantic pace, spectators found it difficult to piece together more complex narratives. Even with this obstacle, however, the performances did succeed in driving home historical particulars as well as drawing some pointed connections between the past and present.

The performance concluded, for instance, with a hat-tipping to our current war. Upon news of the French Navy's defeat of the British fleet at Yorktown in September of 1781, George Washington addressed us outside the Courthouse: "We are liberators," the General explained. "And the force used to liberate is always superior" to that used to conquer and oppress. The rhetoric appears sharply familiar to what we have heard these past few years regarding Iraq and Afghanistan. Surprisingly, though, for this historically conservative institution, these winks toward the present proved more often cautionary than blindly patriotic. In a reenacted trial earlier in the day, a young woman complained that the Committee of Public Safety had intercepted and read her personal correspondence—a nod to the Bush administration's wiretapping scandal last spring. And when Williamsburg citizen Archibald Cary erects a "liberty pole" hung with a barrel of tar and a bag of feathers to discourage colonists from breaking the embargo on British imports, John Randolph objects. Tar is heated to near boiling before being smeared on the offender's skin, he points out. Is using the threat of torture...