Behind the Bay Window: Gerald Parker’s the Eagle and the Lion

BEHIND THE BAY WINDOW: GERALD PARKER'S THE EAGLE AND THE LION Ross G. Woodman The Eagle and the Lion, a new play performed during the last week of January, 1988, in the Drama Workshop at the University of Western Ontario under the direction of its author, Professor Gerald Parker of the Department of English, begins impressively. Edwin Forrest, the nineteenth-century American actor, is performing in a separately-framed playing area the role of the Indian Chief, Metamora. It is the final scene. Surrounded by off-stage white soldiers, his wife, Nahmeokee, hands him his dead child wrapt in a white shawl as if in swaddling bands. Knowing himself defeated, Metamora stabs his wife, assuring her she will join in death her murdered father. "She felt no white man's bondage," he orates in that nineteenth-century melodramatic manner that will be with us for the rest of the evening. "She was free as the air in which she lived ... pure she was ... pure as the snow ... and yet ... and yet. ... '' The lighting now slowly shifts from red to blue. Forrest takes off his Indian head-dress and puts on Othello's robe. "Yet I'll not shed her blood," he continues with no shift of rhythm or intonation. When at last he smothers Desdemona, it is with the swaddling band encasing the dead child of Nahmeokee. The swift transition from Metamora to Othello works primarily because the Canadian actress playing the American actress Charlotte Cushman, playing Nahmeokee, has sufficient dignity and presence to absorb both Nahmeokee and Desdemona into a single identity that obscures the obvious differences between them. For the substantial moment of her monumental presence an obscure 496 Ross Woodman American melodrama appears to hold its own with Shakespeare's tragedy. Weas audience are almost persuaded that a coarse American culture, which will grow coarser as the evening wears on (as perhaps only through a Canadian' s eyes it can), is the equal of British culture at its best. Or perhaps we are seeing in the adroit juxtaposition of melodrama and tragedy Othello as Elizabethans in the Globe pit might have seen it. Shakespeare's London may indeed not have been that different from the New York of the mid-nineteenth century. Performances of Shakespeare seen from the pit may have been rather like an American circusor vaudeville act (Forrest began his career as a circus performer). Or, again, English Canadians, caught between an obsolete vision of a gentle England as its mother country and an excessively vulgar neighbor, may in a rather uniquely silly way still be struggling to balance that ill-founded inheritance against the overwhelming presence of an American culture they pretend, in the name of the mother, to despise. If this is a play that is inadvertently about the Canadian psyche by virtue of its Canadian authorship and its Canadian audience, one can only conclude that the message is '' a plague o' both your houses'' when, alas, both houses are all there is. The riddle of this play, I suggest, is not its lively-enough subject, but the void at its centre, a void that has always been perplexing to the English, to the Americans, and to ourselves. We sit there helpless and homeless, catching glimpses of ourselves in a cracked mirror whose silvered backing has partially worn away, leaving a blurred surface. We sit there being ourselves, hoping to come into focus. What follows the performance of Othello is a eulogy of Edwin Forrest and a plea from Forrest himself, still locked in his Metamora role (despite the fact that he has just played Othello), to uphold' 'the sacred leg?CYof freedom from British rule.'' Upholding that legacy means denouncing the American tours of Charles Dickens and the English actor, William Macready, whose presences have desecrated American soil with their aristocratically darkened hearts, their declining abilities, and greed. The first scene ends promisingly with Forrest as Metamora putting his Indian headdress back on and striking a heroic pose. There are offstage cheers from the pit, with the actual, off-centre Canadian audience quietly joining in. Gerald Parker is obviously indebted to Pirandello, though perhaps in ways that are more uneasily felt...