In the Spring of 2024, my colleagues with the Global Works theater company asked me to write a show to be presented as part of our second annual “Festival of Theater“ at 12 th Avenue Arts. The idea was to present “something” focusing on American history, on Inauguration Day, 2025.
“An American Pageant: A Decalogue on the Divided Soul of the United States of America” is the result. A “pageant” is an old form of theater, traditionally employed to present an “instructive commentary” on a period of history in the life of a political community, performed on a traditional date of celebration by that community. I did not know that I would end up writing a pageant, but that is what happened.
“American Pageant”
focuses what it calls the division between “the light” and “the dark” in American history. The light originates with the Declaration of Independence, and its embrace of equality of rights for all as the founding “truth” of the American Revolution. The dark originates further back, and is found in the American Colonists’ embrace of the enslavement of black Africans, and the doctrine of White Supremacy constructed to justify that enslavement. Using an historical panorama stretching from 1619 to the present, “American Pageant” explores the struggle between the ideals of the Declaration, which are the foundation of American Democracy, and its authoritarian nemesis White Supremacy (which over time has grown to encompass complementary systems of suppression based on patriarchy and heteronormativity, all repeatedly justified as somehow mandated by the teachings of Christianity, and buttressed by a systematic falsification of American history).
Using dramatic scenes involving historical and imagined figures, frequently supplemented with song, “American Pageant” follows this struggle through a panorama that begins with the establishment of American slavery beginning in the 1600s and its unfolding into the 1700s. We see the American Revolution of 1776, and the conflict between the lofty ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the tyrannical fact of the slave systems still found in every one of the 13 Colonies following their achievement of independence from England.
We see the subsequent waxing of Slaver power based on the spread of the “white gold” cotton to the Mississippi and beyond (thanks to the native American mechanical genius of Eli Whitney and his cotton “gin”), the growing resistance to that power, and its eventual overthrow in a bloody civil war that we name the “War of the Slaver Rebellion.” We see the ensuing attempt to establish a multi-racial democracy through the program known as “Reconstruction” and its overthrow by a resurgent White Supremacism, with the ensuing establishment of an American system of white-privileging apartheid (with “Jim Crow” in the former Confederate States, and “Sundownism” and other forms of oppression everywhere else), which reached its awful fullness by the 1930s—a period historians have subsequently so aptly christened “the Nadir.”
We then see how the most terrible war in human history paradoxically opened the door to a systematic challenge to that apartheid, unleashing democratic forces that would lead to the launching of a “Second Reconstruction” in the 1960s—an effort at liberation that soon extended beyond matters of race and color to encompass liberation for those oppressed based on their gender or sexual orientation. Finally, we see the backlash against that liberation, and the resurgence of an American authoritarianism bent on taking us back into the dark tunnels of tyranny, and this time keeping us there for good.
“American Pageant” is, ultimately, a call to resist that resurgence: to defend social as well as political democracy in the hopes that all Americans will eventually live together as one people under the bright sunshine of freedom. I hope that message resonates with everyone who sees this show.
Michael King
Author of An American Pageant