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A Conservative’s “Hamilton”?
Imagine this: The insular world of the Manhattan theater scene is buzzing about an exciting new play by a brilliant outsider. It’s a tour de force of Black acting and true American history, mixed with dazzling dramatic craft and lacerating humor that wins over even its ideological opponents. It’s talked about in The New York Times, touted for theater prizes, and becomes one of the hottest tickets in town. You know this story, right?
But this was all in 1997, eighteen years before “Hamilton” opened. You’ve probably never heard of the hit play I’m about to tell you about. Don’t feel bad, hardly anyone has, and of the hundreds of thousands of smart people who read and talked about it that year, scarcely anyone seems to remember it now. Strange how that happens.
It was a drizzly spring night, twenty-three years ago. I walked briskly across town to see that off-Broadway show, “Stonewall Jackson’s House” by playwright Jonathan Reynolds. It would invite confusion nowadays to just call it “Stonewall”, so for the sake of brevity, I’ll dub it SJH. It was anything but a show for SJWs. Reynolds already had a few quirky plays to his credit, like a viciously funny anti-Hollywood satire called “Geniuses”, but he hadn’t yet dominated sophisticated conversation to this magnitude.
The reviews, from respectful to laudatory, can barely convey what an audience experienced: a daring, rollicking good time in the theater, scalding nearly everyone’s prejudices and preconceptions before the evening was over. It wasn’t just conservatives who thought so. From Variety, the modestly self-styled “Bible of Show Biz”: “What follows is…a frequently hilarious debate on political correctness in the theater; racism; sexism; victimization; the welfare state; black leadership and the disintegration of the U.S., as well as the personal disintegration of one of the characters. The cast does a superb job of delivering the author’s complex arguments with clarity and conviction. Lisa Louise Langford (as LaWanda) is especially strong.”
Curtain Up, a Broadway fixture just beginning to go online in early 1997, was won over: “Everybody and everything is given a turn at the tip of Reynolds’ rapier-sharp pen. His five mouthpieces—ten, really, since this is a play within a play—give voice to so many outrageous prejudices and hypocritical do-good-isms that Reynolds’ oversized soapbox often seems in danger of collapsing. The reason it doesn’t is that it’s thoroughly amusing, original and theatrical”.
Curtain Up, in those days as gay as Broadway got (which is really saying something), continues, “The barbs at the theater community are amongst the sharpest, as when Tracy lambasts gender-blind casting with ‘nobody believes men playing women except in Las Vegas’. But everyone gets their turn to blast some group or another and expose the shakiness of their own goodwill.”
How about the august cultural gods of The New York Times? Even they were dazzled: “A rambling, funny, cranky, and highly entertaining diatribe against all the agenda-laden forces and high-minded programs (especially of the liberal stripe) that he believes have conspired to wring common sense out of American political and cultural life. Affirmative action, political correctness, nontraditional casting, the welfare state, black studies, ethnocentrism, multiculturalism: Mr. Reynolds pushes so many buttons he could have staged the play in an elevator”.
As a matter of fact, afterward the audience crowded into the freight elevator that hauled us back up to the ground level of this peculiarly-sited theater space, midtown’s American Place Theater. This play was, I felt, a sure winner, a total smash in the making. It needed help getting the attention of Hollywood people in a financial position to make a script deal with Jonathan Reynolds. Time to play John the Baptist.
I had a flight back to L.A. at two o’clock the next day; I moved it up to 9am and asked to set up appointments with a number of key big shots whose help we were going to need. At first, we were merely going to set up a staged reading. This is a long-established inside Hollywood practice, a slightly dramatized reading of the play, with actors in street clothes and a plain set, to bring the attention of the press and the film and TV industry to an interesting new idea. American Cinema Foundation had done that two years previously for Turner’s “Kissinger and Nixon”, and gotten a screen credit for it.
Very quickly, even before the first press announcements, “industry sources” found out about the project. The Olin Foundation, still a powerhouse in 1997, was willing to meet immediately about an instant proposal to sponsor the American Cinema Foundation as presenters of “Stonewall Jackson’s House” in a Los Angeles showcase, an actual, semi-Broadway-scale mounting of the play designed to spark a national debate about its issues, as well as spark a likely deal to bring it to a much wider audience than Manhattan theater could provide. A deal we wouldn’t play a financial part in, by the way; when you’re trying to be John the Baptist, not the William Morris Agency, you aren’t angling to get a cut of the action.
This exciting effort would turn out to be disappointing, for logical but frustrating reasons. On Broadway, the writer is king. In Hollywood, the director is. Reynolds’ Broadway rights included cast approval, which proved to be the biggest of a number of obstacles to bringing this topical, fissionable drama and satire to Los Angeles. He wouldn’t budge, which was his right. He was loyal to the Black actresses in New York who’d bravely taken the stage—dominated it, really—and wanted to see the lead role go to Lisa Louise Langford or her successor in the part, Starla Benford. He didn’t want a bunch of west coast types interfering with his creation.
Jonathan Reynolds was reasonable. The frustrating thing was, we were reasonable too. Our guys—basically, the ACF board—were stubbornly unwilling to budge on their rights either, not if we were putting up $200,000 to provide a no strings attached showcase of his stuff, largely in an attempt to drive up his profile and his ultimate sales price. No pressure; but ACF’s board included Oscar nominee Lionel Chetwynd; Back to the Future creator Bob Gale; Matthew Duda, executive VP of Showtime; a top broadcast TV showrunner, Rob Long; and the former head of Columbia Pictures and of Universal Pictures, Frank Price. We were not, in short, just a couple of well-meaning conservatives working out of a church basement. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) Reynolds was understandably a little cautious.
Willette Klausner with TV show creator David E. Kelley (L.A. Law, Ally McBeal, Boston Public) at an ACF event in 1997
ACF founding board member Willette Klausner, the first Black woman to reach a AQtop executive level at Universal, had plenty of useful relationships on Broadway and in Hollywood. We wanted Jonathan to at least look at tape we had of an impressive actress who’d just turned thirty a few months ago, Stacey Dash. What if we could make “Stonewall Jackson’s House” a live TV theater event on Fox with Keenan Ivory Wayans as co-producer? What would the critics have said then? We could have set a high mark for scorching, honest, and risky television satire that might have ignited a longer trend.
But the honest fact is, even with the best of intentions, we didn’t get it done. No knight in shining armor stepped in with a few million bucks to videotape the stage performance and resolve this little dispute. In retrospect, there may have been a lack of realization, on all sides, of what a rare window of cultural opportunity had opened for us, and how quickly it would close.
Academia, which forms the voice of history, and therefore of much of our collective memory, has studiously forgotten the 1997-99 debates over Reynolds’ play. If there’s ever a truly honest collection of the too-few brave and original dramas about serious national issues of the past couple of decades, ”Stonewall Jackson’s House” belongs in that collection, no matter what you think of the author’s politics.
Years after the Berlin wall came down, an old ACF quote of ours was at the entrance to Kino Arsenal, the film center in the former East Berlin. “Movies Have a Memory”, it said. Of course, on one level the statement is defiantly illogical, but former citizens of the German Democratic Republic knew what we were talking about. The stage, the movie screen, and television are mute objects that don’t really have a memory unless each of us chooses to give it one. Sometimes it’s up to us to step up and be the “living history books”, Ray Bradbury-style, when the so-called real books won’t include the whole truth.
Back to the original subject. Culturally, this play was one of the richest collisions of American history, race, honesty and wit I can remember in any media—film, theater, TV, you name it. It deserved to be on your Fourth of July selections list for Disney Plus every bit as much as “Hamilton”, which even most conservatives concede to be a fascinating theatrical experiment in re-imagining American history. So was “Stonewall Jackson’s House”. As The New York Times said about it on February 19, 1997, “Maybe a little more unvarnished spleen-venting is just what the theater needs”.
Read it if you can. You’ll get why I mourn the fact that its wider American impact could have been, and should have been, so much more. Even reading it shortchanges what it’s intended to be—an electrifying challenge, as close to live theater as television could have made it.
Published in General
Wow. I never even heard of it.
Was that our Rob Long?
It sure was. That’s how I met him.
I get the feeling that these days, whatever the content, whatever its brilliance, just the name would make it DOA.
What a fascinating chapter (however abbreviated) in theatre history. So well told. (Please come out with a book; I will be first in line to buy it.)
Second. This was fascinating, thanks.
“Hamilton” was reimagined U.S. history, which can be fun. However, it was a “musical” with ersatz music.
But that’s just me.
We couldn’t help but be better off if more people would bypass the songs and read the actual The Farmer Refuted.
I’m not sure why you think actual Hamilton isn’t “a conservative’s ‘Hamilton'”.
A great story, but sad. Perhaps it has a chance now?
I think it was while reading Ron Chernow’s biography that I decided Alexander Hamilton was our Founding Fascist.
I have always thought this portion of my bookshelf provided proper perspective:
I meant, why does Gary think that conservatives wouldn’t/don’t like Hamilton (the Broadway show).
Clickable.
Wow, Gary! A great story. I’d sure like to see it produced today.
(sigh) just (sigh)
Downloadable PDF and soft cover also for sale here.
I think most conservatives do like seeing Hamilton, Charlotte, and I think I even said that in one of the final paragraphs. Hamilton, like the film Saving Private Ryan, are both works of art that liberals can be proud of creating and anyone can appreciate. Both are big hits that started a national conversation about its subject. All I’m saying is, why didn’t we get there with our own surprise hit?
In some ways, of course, today’s cultural atmosphere would be much more hostile to Stonewall Jackson’s House than it was a generation ago. There were no Twitter mobs in 1997. But that’s also an opportunity, an extremely risky one for anyone who produced or acted in SJH today. There’s no recent work that’s more on-the-nose about cancel culture. Putting on SJH now would be a daring claim that the PC lockdown is over, and America can start to enjoy a phased re-opening of the American mind.
Hamilton maneuvered into being the whiskey rebellion and its savage quashing didn’t he?
This goes double for Jonathan Reynold’s next play Girls in Trouble. It’s rather, shall we say ‘dubious,’ about abortion. Need I say more?
Does it help somewhat to understand that the same year you tried to get Stonewall Jackson’s House on the silver screen, Married…With Children was (very abruptly) cancelled three months after the Broadway debut of the play? Could it have been that you, along with the rest of Hollywood (regardless of political belief), were at the very beginning stages of a cultural shift in entertainment?
I had lunch with Reynolds at Delmonico’s, a seafood place near Fox, ABC, HBO. A crowded place full of industry people, and to a some degree Reynolds, a great conversationalist, played to the “audience”. One thing we talked about was what subjects made Hollywood conservatives different, which ones made us similar to the rest of the country. One blunt difference is ethnicity and religion; in literal numbers, the American Cinema Foundation was probably one of the least Christian of conservative organizations. (We never claimed to represent the interests of every conservative in Hollywood, but I believe we were an accurate large sample.) This didn’t affect our strong views about national identity, American and world history, or a general support of customs and traditions. It did mean that other than a handful of people like Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton, there wasn’t all that much support for positions important to fundamentalist Christians. Reynolds glanced around the half-eavesdroppers surrounding the table and raised his articulate voice slightly.
“You refer, of course, to America’s continuing slaughter of the unborn”. He smiled, delighted with the aghast silence of our neighbors.
Conservatives passing through Century City — whether “pro-life” or “pro-choice” — could always do with a refresher summary of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.
Thank you for this. I have ordered the play, and hope to find the time to read it.
If the playwright is still alive, why not pitch the idea to a conservative or daring film company today? Even if you think that a hard sell, it couldn’t hurt to put a bug in the ear of your old ACF allies.
These days (if not then), a few million for a quality recording and editing of a stage play seems unnecessary. Cameras, editors, and expertise are much more accessible today.
If nothing else, pitch the idea to a high school or college — a B-team stage production — and ask some aspiring young film makers to record it for YouTube. That would at least better preserve the play and give a chance to rekindled popularity.
Or not. Thanks for the history.
Just some added perspective for all you people who are past the age of rapid, and immediate changes and have been for a while.
1997, the oldest cohort of the Millenials was just entering high school.
Today, we are now eligible to run for President.
Good suggestions. Each one has a different obstacle course attached to it. Fact is, conservatives don’t risk money in a cause like this; they’d rather sit on their fannies and whine about how powerless they are. That’s not bitterness talking, just experience.
To make Stonewall Jackson’s House, you need a Black actress who is not just talented, but utterly fearless. That’s one thing we liked about Stacey Dash; she really didn’t give a damn what the NAACP Image Awards thought of her. There are always a handful of heroes out there, but you gotta find ’em.
Good for you, iWe. I think you’re going to like it.
I remember Stacey Dash from Clueless and maybe a couple other films. Her career did not really take off, but I’m glad to see she is still able to find work.
I also purchased a copy, scheduled to arrive next week.
Reynolds should be around 77 now. Perhaps he’s mellowed, and more willing to yield on casting issues. Age makes us look at things differently. At 55, a crowd of protesters outside a small theater is a publicity windfall. At 77, it could be life threatening. Of course, so are heavy French sauces, a far more imminent danger for a playwright whose day job is Times food writer.
For a mere $2.99 on Kindle (don’t accidentally click on the $930.35 hardcover!) I downloaded Reynolds’ autobiography Wrestling with Gravy: A Life with Food. Seems entertaining so far. It’s a sort of foodie musical: somewhere in every chapter the narrative pauses and the author bursts into recipe.