• U.S.

Spectacles: Ten-Gallon Straw Hat

4 minute read
TIME

In an outdoor amphitheater at Williamsburg, Va., Thomas Jefferson writes the Declaration of Independence downstage left. In Boone, N.C., Daniel Boone stalks around a stage slightly larger than an elbow of the great Catawba River. And with annual punctuality and a sound like muslin ripping, gunshots in New Mexico signal The Last Escape of Billy the Kid. Mixing fact, fiction, sentiment and gunpowder, the U.S.’s grandiose, often grandiloquent summer pageant plays provide a basic drive-in course in history for more than 5,000,000 people a year, some of whom are surprised to learn that the first De Soto did not reach the Great Smokies on six cylinders.

Collectively a sort of ten-gallon straw hat, the huge productions use as many as three separate stages, demand actors by the horde. Some are professionals, but most are local amateurs and college students whose unpredictability can add suspense to the re-creation of the past. At one amphitheater, the general manager once discovered minutes before curtain time that a corps of miffed undergraduates, dressed in red coats and demoralized by nightly defeat, were planning to win the Battle of Yorktown. Only a threat that they would not be paid persuaded them to take the usual dive.

Among the more notable pageant plays:

∙ THE LOST COLONY (Manteo, N.C.) set the standard for open-air pageantry in 1937, and is still running. Playwright Paul Green retells the story of the small group of settlers on Roanoke Island who dis appeared from history in 1587. The play delivers the infant Virginia Dare, also delivers some tentative speculation on what happened to the settlers: forced to choose between surrender to a Spanish warship and taking their chances elsewhere in the unknown country, they elect the footpath in the wilderness that will lead to freedom, or death.

∙ UNTO THESE HILLS (Cherokee, N.C.), by Kermit Hunter, has been seen by more than 1,500,000 people in twelve seasons and is the biggest money grosser on the pageant circuit. Dealing with the misfortunes of the Cherokees, it has a 50% Cherokee cast, goes vigorously for the scalp of Andrew Jackson. Early in the play, a Cherokee chieftain heroically saves General Jackson’s life at the battle of Horseshoe Bend, but before long, in a scene set in the White House, President Jackson defeathers his old allies, insists on deporting them to Oklahoma despite the eloquent pleas of Daniel Webster and Sam Houston.

∙ THE SONG OF HIAWATHA (Pipestone, Minn.), an even more expansive redskin opera, has a stage more than a quarter of a mile wide with lighting that can pinpoint one face in the darkness or illuminate an acre of land. The hybrid Longfellow narrative comes out of loudspeakers while the actors pantomime, but even without dialogue, the leading role is so strenuous that fresh Hiawathas are sent in like substitute halfbacks to spell the panting starter. Their hero slays the “wary roebuck,” sears the wild West Wind, hunts down “monsters and magicians,” wendigoes and kenabeeks. Skillfully J-stroking his canoe back and forth across the great sea water of an old stone quarry, he shoots mighty arrows at serpents made from inner tubes (every time he hits one, it has to be vulcanized), woos and wins fair Minnehaha.

∙ OLD FOUR EYES (Medora, N. Dak.) moves closer to the 20th century, has a guitar-plunking balladeer who helps chronicle Theodore Roosevelt’s four years in the badlands, showing his metamorphosis from dude to rough rider, his encounters with horse thieves, cattle rustlers, and a French nobleman who tried to set up a meat-packing empire long before Swift took on Armour. Following T.R.’s memoirs about the period, the pageant’s Dakota cowboys take one look at his glasses and begin calling him “Four Eyes.” T.R. bats all of them and sternly vows reform when he witnesses the lynching of a horse thief.

∙ WILLIAM TELL (New Glaurus, Wis.), an import from Europe, is a lavish adaptation of Schiller’s play particularly popular with Wisconsin’s Swiss-Americans. At the climax, the Swiss hero draws his bow with fervor, shoots the apple from his son’s head (the boy nods on cue, the apple falls, he leans over and picks up another one hidden in the grass with a shill arrow in it). In the audience, half the town roars with pride—the other half is in the play.

Never more popular than they are now, the pageant plays may nonetheless have hit some sort of peak in a single line in a production staged three years ago at Lake City, Colo. A long dead, excessively rocky mountaineer named Albert Packer was revived each night and retried for murder and cannibalism; with injudicious partiality, the judge glared vengefully at him and said: “There was seven Democrats in Hinsdale County, and you et five of them.”

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