LOS ANGELES – I bet not one in a thousand readers of these words has ever heard of Anne Royall (1769-1854), America’s first female journalist. I certainly hadn’t. But I rushed to the Promenade Playhouse for the first production in its new location in West L.A. to see what it was all about.
Hardly surprising that we never heard her name before—an anticlerical muckraker who at the dawn of the Andrew Jackson administration in 1829 and 1830 sounded the alarm on evangelical leaders (she calls them the “blackcoats”) declaring their intent to reshape America into a Christian nation. Hmm, now it’s beginning to sound a little familiar, and ever so timely.
Mike Teverbaugh’s The (Mostly) True Story of a Common Scold is directed by Natalia Lazarus, the founding director of the Promenade Playhouse and its Los Angeles Performing Arts Conservatory, in its world premiere production. May it go on to a glorious future!
Lazarus directs a cast of seven that features Dendrie Taylor in the lead role, and Zuri Alexander in the role of her Black servant, the freewoman Hazel, whom Anne, against the law, has taught to read, although it remans a very imperious relationship with all the authority resting in Anne. One gets the impression that Anne, like the later figure of prominent atheist activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, could be a difficult person to deal with.
The 18 male roles (by my count) are deployed amongst five actors, Tom Waters, Satiar Pourvasei, Scott Parkin, Jake O’Flaherty, and Scott Burkholder. The main role Waters plays is Nicholas Biddle, an American financier who served as the third and last president of the Second Bank of the United States. Pourvasei plays the Rev. Ezra Stiles, but it would appear that the playwright has misidentified this character. Ezra Stiles (1727-1795), a Congregationalist minister who long predated the Jackson administration, became the seventh president of Yale, where a new residential college named for him was built in the early 1960s. From the biography online, I have the impression that Mike Teverbaugh must have meant Ezra Stiles Ely (1786-1861), son of Rev. Zebulon Ely and possibly a daughter of Ezra Stiles. Ely totally fits the profile of the character portrayed in the play as an advocate for a Christian Party in his day. I have a hunch the playwright will be hearing about this from the university in New Haven.
Parkin plays a good friend of Royall’s, the courageous, but often cautious journalist Duff Green. Royall acquired a disused printing press from Green that she operated out of her Washington, D.C., kitchen with Hazel and a couple of boys from the poorhouse. O’Flaherty plays George Waterston, an old friend of Royall’s from their early days as aspiring writers, who is now the head of the Library of Congress abusing his franking privileges to send out religious tracts. Burkholder is John Eaton, a confidant of Jackson’s and later Secretary of War whose values comport closely with Royall but whose official position prevents him from being more openly supportive.
We see a number of examples of characters waffling on their principles for personal advantage, others using the mechanisms of the federal government to promote their private sectarian views, and rank prejudice against an outspoken, “unbecoming” and “nasty” woman who was eventually brought up on charges dating back to the witch-hunting ethos of the 1600s when being a “public nuisance, a common brawler and a common scold” was literally a crime (but only applicable to women). Only by virtue of a very late coming to conscience on the part of her fellow mainstream journalists did they realize that the attack on Royall could open the door to wider suppression of speech and ideas and might one day backfire on themselves. Their last-minute defense of Royall spared her a brutal punishment that likely was meant to kill her. (The Wikipedia entry on her reflects a somewhat different outcome insofar as the court itself ruled the common-law punishment obsolete and instead levied a $10 fine on her.)
It may or may not have been part of the historical record. But in the courtroom scene, the prosecuting attorney addresses her as Roy-ALL, with the stress on the last syllable, to which she objects. I couldn’t help comparing that to the purposeful mispronunciation today of Kamala Harris’ name intending to undermine her hard-won identity.
The play shuttles back and forth among several locales—the American South, Vermont, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.—though is mostly centered in the national capital. Much is compressed into a short time frame, with a host of minor characters. The director might have taken greater pains to ensure that the male actors clearly distinguished among the several—two, three, four, or five—characters they play. And if in the interest of making Anne Royall a more contemporary-sounding person the playwright has her utter a large quantity of foul vulgarities, I think this is misguided. It makes him sound like he’s pandering to his audience and more than likely misrepresents his heroine.
Still, a heroine she was, and her name deserves to be heralded in the halls of the free press. Her newspapers Paul Pry and The Huntress exposed fraud and corruption. Vigilantes harassed her day and night, turning over the stagecoach in which she traveled and maiming her, bricks were thrown through her windows, and preachers set up a prayer house right next door to torment her with hymn-singing. The U.S. mails refused to deliver her newspaper to her subscribers. She decried a nation where the ignorant are lifted up and the wise are ignored. It all sounds excruciatingly contemporary.
A unit set serves to show a number of different locales from her home to the halls of the Library of Congress, to editors’ offices to the stagecoach and a courtroom. Projections help to define other spaces as well, including the crane over the Potomac River into which Royall is originally sentenced to be dunked (and probably drowned). The men appear with some changed items of clothing to signify their different characters, but Ms. Royall appears always in the same period dress as she’s virtually always on stage. The set design and special effects are by Chris Kooreman.
The playwright beings out that Royall was not a disbeliever or atheist. To the contrary, she firmly believed in God and Jesus, and recommends that her opponents actually follow the words of Jesus. But she did not take those beliefs as a ticket to deprive other Americans of their rights. In today’s terms she’d stand with liberal people of faith who tolerate no exceptions to the sacred principle of separation of church and state. In that way she was a true patriot defending the fragile new nation from fanatical subversion.
This “mostly true” drama brings us back to the early decades of our nation in a highly delectable form—vivid characters, passions flying, a love of the secular values that informed the creation of the first republic in the modern world. Long live Anne Royall! And with thanks to the folks at the Promenade Playhouse for bringing us this informative, intriguing history.
The (Mostly) True Story of a Common Scold runs through October 27, with performances Fri. at 8 p.m., Sat. at 7 p.m., and Sun. at 2 p.m. The Promenade Playhouse is located at 10931 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles 90064. Tickets can be purchased online or by calling (310) 656-8070. The running time is 90 minutes without intermission.
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