The Promise of Democracy: Imagining National Community in Paul Green's The Lost Colony

The Promise of Democracy Imagining National Community in Paul Green’s The Lost Colony Angela Sweigart-Gallagher Outdoor performances were a hallmark of the Federal Theatre Project’s attempt to build a “people’s theatre” that would bring its disparate American audiences together in order to imagine a national community and to create a regionally dispersed, regionally relevant national theatre. Performances in public parks, amphitheatres, and on portable stages brought drama out of traditional theatre buildings and took it directly to the public. Although a variety of different plays and entertainments were produced for outdoor spaces, patriotic pageants and historical plays made up a significant portion of the Federal Theatre’s outdoor offerings. These plays exemplify the Federal Theatre’s impulse to use source material from U.S. history, promote American ideals, and call for a return to the promise of America’s founding in order to construct a national theatre that would forge an “American” national identity. Paul Green’s outdoor historical drama The Lost Colony, which was performed in an outdoor amphitheatre on Roanoke Island near the location of the historical “lost colony,” offers one example of Federal Theatre playwrights’ attempts to use local history as source material and focus in on the lives of average Americans. S. E. Wilmer contends that the plays and performances by nineteenthand twentieth-century European national theatres were “important sites for expressing new approaches to national identity.” Wilmer observes that in the work of many of these theatres “one can see the attempt to ‘awaken the nation’ to what is professed to be its natural sense of nationhood and to develop a notion of national character.”1 Like the national theatres in Wilmer’s study, the Federal Theatre also attempted to “awaken” its audience(s) to a national identity or character. Green, like many playwrights, directors, and Federal Theatre administrators, 98 A N G E L A S W E I G A R T - G A L L A G H E R sought to reinforce democracy as a fundamental characteristic of the American national community by revisiting and tweaking a familiar theatrical form—the pageant. Although the large-scale historical pageants promoted by pageantmasters William Chauncy Langdon, Percy MacKaye, and Thomas Wood Stevens had fallen out of favor and were often lampooned by the 1920s, Green drew on many of the techniques of historical pageants from the Progressive Era. In particular, Green seems to have integrated the way in which pageant-masters often used local history as a means to create a sense of national identity and merged sacred and patriotic imagery, while the Federal Theatre’s producers followed the pageant model by exhibiting artifacts and recreating important historical sites and integrating members of the local community into the production. By comparison to events such as Langdon’s The Pageant of Indiana (1916) and MacKay’s The Pageant and Masque of Saint Louis (1914), the Federal Theatre’s production of The Lost Colony seems small, and Green presents a much narrower and focused time line than the long series of episodes from a community’s founding to its present typical of the Progressive Era pageants. However, what Green, the Federal Theatre administrators, and the Roanoke Island Historical Association seem to have shared with Langdon, his fellow pageant-masters, and Progressive Era promoters of pageants such as the American Pageant Association is the sense that local historical pageants could be used for civic education, as an “instrument of community self-discovery” and a means to “root the spirit of unanimity around a unique local identity.”2 Like the pageant-masters before them, production organizers on The Lost Colony hoped that the presentation of Green’s fictional account of historical events in the outdoor amphitheatre near the physical location of those events manifested a real and perceived connection to U.S. history and the nation’s founding principles. The Lost Colony illustrates one way in which the Federal Theatre’s historical and patriotic dramas imagined the nation through the staging of American history, mythology, and ideals, and attempted to establish democracy as a fundamental characteristic of American national identity. Green wrote the play specifically for the Roanoke Island Historical Association in conjunction...