Reviewed by:

• 1776
• Jennifer A. Low

A row of shoes on the lip of an empty stage was all there was for spectators to look at while waiting for Roundabout Theatre’s production of 1776 to begin. Then about twenty women came onto the stage, dressed in ordinary street attire. As the spectators watched, they began dressing up, putting on knee-breeches, white stockings, and the long coats that gentlemen wore in the late eighteenth century, many with frogging and gold braid. Last of all, the women stepped into their shoes.

With that act, the women became living props, standing in for almost monumental historical figures as actors do at “living history” sites. The figures they portrayed included well-known men like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Hancock, and Benjamin Franklin, as well as lesser-known figures like Robert Livingston, Stephen Hopkins, Samuel Chase and Josiah Bartlett. Directed by Jeffrey L. Page and Diane Paulus, this much-heralded revival of a musical in which almost all the roles are male featured a cast with no men at all. Instead, the ensemble consisted of non-binary people and women, some of them trans. Is 1776 worth staging in this way, or was it, as detractors have said, simply a gimmicky “woke” version? I found the effort decidedly worthwhile.

The actors in the production played the role, not the gender of the character, and, while they played male roles as men, made no attempt to efface their own gender. Nonetheless, for much of the time, the illusion held, and spectators forgot the actors were playing across gender. Periodically, however, as in all theatre, that illusion was broken—and, in this case, to good effect. The characters of 1776 are more than men and more than historical figures—they’re representatives of thirteen colonies. It’s true that every member of the 1776 Continental Congress was male, but the same was not true of the people they represented. In separating male interests from male bodies, this production drew attention to the usual conflation of the two.

The company of Roundabout Theatre Company’s 1776.

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The dramatic action of 1776 grows out of the conflicting interests of the colonies whose representatives are present onstage; at the time, these interests were gendered male—property, business, economics, and freedom of speech. Though John Adams extols independence throughout the musical, almost all the other characters speak more about these other issues, which provides the lens through which they examine the possible benefits of independence. Given that the characters are, among other things, walking property interests, it seems only reasonable to make that point clearer. Rather than having the actors appear to be men, the casting decisions ensured that the actors’ bodies represented the other members of the thirteen colonies: the female and non-white figures who made up so much of the population of the land. As Crystal Lucas-Perry, who played John Adams for the first half of the run, observed, “Our contribution to the history of the production is our bodies, our physical selves.” In bringing these actors’ bodies into the spotlight, this production reminded watchers of the many Americans from that era who never wore the dress of propertied men and who stood in the shadows as the Continental Congress made decisions that affected everyone in the region, whether they were English, Spanish, French, or Indigenous, female or male.

The changes to the show were approved by the creators’ estates, and indeed, the impressions conveyed by the presence of these actors are already implied in some of the dialogue and songs. When Charles Thomson, Secretary to the Continental Congress, reads a dispatch from General Washington, the letter describes the typical Continental soldier as “ignorant of hygiene, destructive, disorderly, and totally disrespectful of rank,” and complains of the enlisted men’s “drunkenness, desertion. . . and an epidemic of the French disease.” By contrast, Representative John Dickinson’s song describes his allies as “cool, cool...

审阅者：

• 第1776章
• 詹妮弗·A·洛

在等待环岛剧院1776 年演出开始时，观众只能看到空荡荡的舞台边缘的一排鞋子。然后大约二十名穿着普通街头服装的女性走上舞台。在观众们的注视下，他们开始盛装打扮，穿上及膝马裤、白色长袜，以及十八世纪末绅士们所穿的长外套，其中很多都带有青蛙纹和金色辫子。最后，女人们站了起来。

通过这一表演，这些女性成为了活生生的道具，就像演员在“活生生的历史”遗址中所做的那样，代表着几乎不朽的历史人物。他们描绘的人物包括约翰·亚当斯、托马斯·杰斐逊、约翰·汉考克和本杰明·富兰克林等知名人士，以及罗伯特·利文斯顿、斯蒂芬·霍普金斯、塞缪尔·蔡斯和乔赛亚·巴特利特等不太知名的人物。这部广受好评的音乐剧由杰弗里·L·佩奇和黛安·保卢斯执导，几乎所有角色都是男性，演员阵容中根本没有男性。相反，这个团体由非二元性别的人和女性组成，其中一些是跨性别者。《1776》是否值得以这种方式上演，还是像批评者所说的那样，只是一个噱头十足的“觉醒”版本？我发现这种努力绝对是值得的。

作品中的演员扮演的是角色，而不是角色的性别，虽然他们扮演男性角色，但并没有试图抹去自己的性别。尽管如此，在大部分时间里，这种幻觉依然存在，观众忘记了演员们是在跨性别表演。然而，就像在所有戏剧中一样，这种幻想会定期被打破——在这种情况下，效果很好。《1776》中的人物不仅仅是人类，也不仅仅是历史人物——他们是十三个殖民地的代表。确实，1776 年大陆会议的每位成员都是男性，但他们所代表的人民却并非如此。通过将男性利益与男性身体分开，这部作品引起了人们对两者通常合并的关注。

1776年是Roundabout Theatre Company的公司。

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1776 年的戏剧性事件源于殖民地代表的利益冲突。当时，这些兴趣都是男性的——财产、商业、经济和言论自由。尽管约翰·亚当斯在整部音乐剧中都颂扬独立，但几乎所有其他角色都更多地谈论这些其他问题，这为他们提供了审视独立可能带来的好处的镜头。考虑到这些角色除其他外，都是行走的财产利益，似乎只有更清楚地阐明这一点才是合理的。选角决定并没有让演员看起来是男性，而是确保演员的身体代表了十三个殖民地的其他成员：占这片土地人口大部分的女性和非白人人物。正如在上半场扮演约翰·亚当斯的克里斯托·卢卡斯-佩里所观察到的那样，“我们对这部作品历史的贡献是我们的身体，我们的身体自我。” 通过将这些演员的身体置于聚光灯下，这部作品让观众想起了那个时代的许多美国人，他们从未穿过有产阶级的衣服，当大陆会议做出影响该地区每个人的决定时，他们站在阴影中，无论他们是是英国人、西班牙人、法国人或土著人，女性或男性。

节目的改动得到了主创们的批准，事实上，这些演员的出现所传达的印象已经暗示在一些对话和歌曲中。当大陆会议秘书查尔斯·汤姆森宣读华盛顿将军的一封电报时，信中将典型的大陆士兵描述为“不讲卫生、具有破坏性、无秩序、完全不尊重军衔”，并抱怨士兵们“酗酒、遗弃。。。以及法国疾病的流行。” 相比之下，众议员约翰·迪金森的歌曲将他的盟友描述为“酷，酷......