by Mark Jordan
t one point
toward the end of the musical 1776, currently playing at Theatre
Memphis through this Sunday, Benjamin Franklin tries to mollify an enraged
John Adams who, in order to see through the passage of the Declaration of
Independence, which he has so passionately championed, must now acquiesce
to the South's demand for removal of a section in the document condemning
the practice of slavery.
"What will posterity think we are -- demigods?" Franklin asks Adams. "We're men -- no more, no less -- trying to to get a nation started against greater odds than a more generous God would allow."
The controversial passage is struck out and, though the issue of the South's "peculiar institution" will continue to haunt it for the first 200 years of its life, a new nation is born.
The genius of Peter Stone and Sherman Edwards' Tony Award-winning musical is in the deft, entertaining way the writers convey that the founding fathers of this country were just men, with problems and failings like anyone else.
The setting is Philadelphia in the summer of 1776, and the second Continental Congress is convened but unable to accomplish much, hampered by husbands who miss their wives, drunken delegates, petty disputes, and the insufferable Philadelphia summer heat. As the play opens, John Adams, the "obnoxious and disliked" delegate from Massachusetts, has been noisily agitating the Congress for a whole year to make official the rebellion sparked a year earlier at Lexington and Concord.
Though the play makes much of the democratic process involved in the nation's split with England, it is quite clear that Adams is the hero of the story; it is Adams who in many ways embodies the spirit of the revolution. Unfortunately, Stu Kaplan is simply too young for the role of the hardened Adams. With his characterization, Adams' myopic passion comes across as mere youthful arrogance.
Adams is seen by his fellow congressmen as something of a zealot on the subject of independence, and because of this Adams is unable to even get the matter debated in Congress. To the rescue comes Adams' truest ally, the venerated old Benjamin Franklin. It's easy to see why Samuel Benjamin Lancaster has won such acclaim for his various re-creations around the country of "the father of the stove and other inventions"; it is more an alter-ego than a role for him. But it may be one of the few faults of Stone's book that Franklin's dialogue often comes off as mere sound bites selected from this eloquent man's body of work.
In one of the most amusing scenes, capped by the hilarious "The Lees of Old Virginia," Franklin convinces Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee to ride home and get the permission from his state legislature to introduce a resolution on independence in Congress.
Once the resolution is made, Adams is dismayed when it is decided that any vote on independence must be unanimous. As the issue seems headed for a ruinous vote that same day, Adams must stall the vote -- a stall that becomes the impetus for the Declaration of Independence.
In telling the story of the political haggling and compromises that went into the colonies' severing their ties to England, a lesser dramatist than Stone may have felt compelled to turn the opponents of the Declaration into stereotypical bad guys. But in Stone's treatment of the subject, all the delegates are sympathetically portrayed as honorable men who merely have different, perhaps less noble, agendas than the separatists.
Opposing Adams from the northern colonies is John Dickinson, a Pennsylvania delegate who values the protection of the English crown. From the South, Adams must appease Edward Rutledge, a South Carolina delegate who doesn't want to be ruled by a distant crown but doesn't particularly want to be governed by his fellow colonies, either. As played by Ernie Scarborough and Charles K. Hodges, respectively, these performances are the outstanding ones in addition to Lancaster's Franklin, and result in two of the finest numbers in the play: Hodges' "Molasses to Rum," which points out the North's culpability in the ongoing slave trade, and Scarborough's "Cool, Cool, Considerate Men," which astute observers will notice is a song that was cut from the 1972 film.
Though, for whatever reason, the actors don't use the performance space to its fullest potential, staying annoyingly still during some numbers, scenic designer Corey Shelsta has, nevertheless, constructed a wonderful set dominated by a recreation of Freedom Hall, built with a diminishing perspective. This design scheme, besides the practical intent of bringing important background action to the forefront, has the added effect of accentuating the reality of the characters and situations, showing the audience that these men and women, whom they previously may have seen merely as names on the flat page of a history book, are now realized, complex players in a rich, multi-dimensional world.