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.