250 Years of Theater
Revue: Bunker Hill brought to Life, Brecht, and the theater of American 'rebellion'
June 21, 2025. Stage Fort Park, Gloucester, Massachusetts.
The sounds, fife and drums, booming cannon fire, parade through the trees with trailing smoke and lines of red-coated men, appearing from beneath the berm. A crowd of onlookers parts. The familiar face of the park is shifted around, masked by a little historical theater. People throng along the ways in long lines and little familial clusters. The mood is something of a cross between a summer blues-music festival and a gathering of the Sons of the Revolution. The sun is hot and bright, the sky clear. A Union Jack waves from above the trees and British ships are firing artillery from off of Half Moon beach (the ships are in fact American, familiar to Cape Ann residents: the Ardelle, the Adventure, the Lannon, the Story). At tables around the grounds people are showing wares and vittles of 1775, dressed the part. Women bound about in petticoats, bonnets and straw hats.
Stage Fort Park has seen its share of actual historical landings, such as members of the Dorchester Company in 1623 giving the city its title as “America’s Oldest Seaport”; as well, its share of reenactments, such as the tercentenary pageant of that first contact with European fishermen. The stage of Stage Fort refers to fish-racks, for drying salted Cod, that those men erected here. The fort also saw historical opportunity, dissuading British penetration in 1812, and event likewise reenacted.
America has a ceaseless desire to reach out and touch its own history. And with some make believe, it seems possible. The reenactment here in Gloucester is patriotically meddled epic theater. The crowds dig the drama, cheering and booing, while they examine the proceedings like a historical document, a living diorama, interrogating actors or posing with them.
I wander through a dioramic encampment, starch white tents pitched along the rocks of Cressy’s beach. Players go to-and-fro, a blended coterie of Brits, Rebels, ‘women-folk’ and young boys in various costume. I see infantrymen trading packets of black powder charge. Others stand together, silently looking out to sea, as if waiting, stoic before the battle. A large sergeant puffs on a stogie. Spectators lounge in the creases of the park, fraternizing with the men and women of both sides. Soldiers pick apple skins from between their teeth. My contemporaries carry corn dogs with them from food trucks across the street, but the reenactors are eating fresh baked bread lathered in pig grease, keeping up the illusion.
There is something especially pleasing about incongruity, seeing eras collide. Young British soldiers lean against a fence, checking their phones. Infantrymen march along the road, passing Subarus, Toyotas. Young boys in Celtics T-shirts run around wearing tri-corner hats and wielding toy muskets, doing Fortnite dances.
Up at the rebel redoubt, a series of hand-dug earthworks situated atop a ridge along the third base side of the ball field, the action continues. These fortifications in foul territory represent the primary redoubt of William Prescott’s men, on Breed’s Hill—though we call the battle, and the reenactment, by its neighbor, Bunker’s Hill. The British cannonade has been targeting the works for several hours, despite the geographic anomaly of them facing the wrong way. The third base line faces Cressy’s beach, rather than Half Moon, where the ships are preparing to land. This strange, perhaps unavoidable inaccuracy only proves to strengthen the theater, the make believe. It becomes easy to feel like a kid in a sandbox, following the movements of an imaginary army. Regardless, the battle is underway, and our attentions are being constantly refocused.
Through it all a disembodied voice, spreading across the park via loudspeakers, like play-by-play at a football game, directs our attention toward places of strategic interest. At one point this voice announces that a young man on the American barricade has had his head blown clean off by a twenty-pound cannon ball. The actors gather round, praying over their comrade. They bury him in the earthworks. Colonels can be heard attempting to raise their men’s spirits in the face of death. Meanwhile, we stand around, in American flag T-shirts, floppy hats, arms spread thick with sunscreen. We are milling back and forth, hearing the naval barrage and trying to follow the action.
A man stood behind us, dressed in regal blue and capped by a white wig, is speaking to a small group about Joseph Warren, famed Colonial surgeon, statesman, freemason, and general in the Continental Army—quietly famous for having ordered Paul Revere’s “midnight ride.” Warren volunteered as a private, to serve amongst the redoubt on Breed’s Hill, and was killed during the battle. The man behind us is speaking about Warren’s chances of becoming president, had he survived. He is telling us about the lineage of Massachusetts doctors descended from Warren, including those who first used anesthesia on patients in the commonwealth. Joseph Warren’s body was recovered later, from the battle field, and identified thanks to an artificial tooth he had himself installed. It is perhaps the first instance of dental forensics in American history. As it turns out, the man regaling the shaded crowd with Joseph Warren’s saga, is the man himself, Joseph Warren. We laugh, and thank him. Though the wide-angle view of this event is overwhelming and occasionally confusing, and resembles a moving tableaux covering in broad strokes the textbook description of history, serious, contemplative moments of learning have been made available, to those who might listen.
The play-by-play narration has done something to correct our attentions in general and to bring into the fray of military reenactment something dialectical, oppositional, and educational. Bertolt Brecht, in defining and advocating what he called “Epic” theater, wanted to implement a revolutionary type of theater that could develop active intervention in societal processes. Brecht’s Epic theater did away with traditional linear structure, making the action discontinuous, segmented, interrupted. It was also fun, and often took place in venues that served beer and attracted working class crowds. At the same time, Epic theater was meant to make the viewer present and active; to do away with the “intoxication” and emotional attachment that familiar dramatic narratives often produce. Listening to the same old stories and myths does indeed have this effect on us, and we forget to question what we are hearing.1
Witnessing history is crucial, but so is realizing that we are living and enacting it, and are not observers only. The essential issue with theater, that Brecht had tried to correct, is that it subdues, opiates, rather than spurs. Even when confronted with a ‘living’ history it requires an actively critical, creative mind to interpret historical implications. However much theater we might do, we remain subjects of our own age. There is an inevitable ‘historical parallax’ that distorts our image of either the past, or the present. Perhaps we see historical events as having more bearing on our material lives than they should, or else we mistakenly assume ours is an entirely unique historical phenomenon. Neither is true. But through some correction of our vision we might see the past for what it really is—a long gone present. History should not be seen as a grand sweeping narrative that moves us to emotion but rather as an interchange of momentary ideas and materials. History is Epic as in Brecht, rather than epic as in Titanic or Gone With the Wind.
Even more challenging is the necessary step of contrasting and collating the historical event with the historical moment, our moment (actual living history). It might seem easy to spurt relevant quotations, things that link our times to those of 1775, but remember that the American Revolution only liberated some people from some taxation and oppression. The working person was soon very much in the same situation as before and the “Founding Fathers” were not benevolently interested in the restructuring of class or even democratic systems. As James Madison puts it, in his tracts within The Federalist Papers (written alongside Alexander Hamilton and John Jay), the new government would need to “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” The majority being those un-landed workers who built and continue to build the infrastructure of the country, people of color, displaced indigenous people, women; these people were not even a part of the soon-to-be government. If you did not own land you had no political power. Those with most incentive to do away with injustice in labor laws, major debts, and broad income inequality, would have no direct course of action to do so. The government was positioned to secure the assets of landlords, factory owners, those who stood to profit upon the labor of others, and slave owners (James Madison among them).2
Still, it remains that an enlightenment-tinged independent spirit, an outrage toward monarchical repression, pushed those players to make significant contributions toward modern liberal society. Their positions on free speech, religion, arbitrary imprisonment and due process, are some of the very basic things that an equitable society should be able to provide. The American Revolution was intellectually and ideologically an impetus for the French Revolution, and slantwise, for Marx. Change is always somewhere on the horizon, even if we cannot yet recognize its form.
It is necessary to go beyond quotation. Thomas Jefferson’s invective of “the blood of patriots and tyrants” is twisted every which way, without much investigation. Jefferson is in part responding to European claims of anarchy in America, launched after Shay’s Rebellion, an armed uprising in Western Massachusetts led by Daniel Shay, a veteran of Breed’s Hill. Jefferson is writing in support of resistance, in defense of Americans, but not in support of Shay. “Let them take arms,” he says, “the remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them.” Though Daniel Shay was pardoned several of his collaborators were hanged, the rebellion vilified. For American government, after the first, has not been especially kind to rebellion. What are other battles waged on American soil? Perhaps we could reenact those. Wounded Knee? The Seminole Wars? Countless labor struggles put down by military force? The Ludlow Massacre? Haymarket? We can’t imagine transforming these into living history, but maybe we should.
It is a perhaps peculiarly American cultural phenomenon that the mythos of our government’s formation has become central to our proposed identity, so much so that deviation is seen as tyrannical, rather than patriotic. The Black Panther Party. Kent State. Columbia University encampments. Los Angeles. It seems odd, to one side, that those in power adopt Jefferson’s words while attempting to destroy those very resistors. Yet Jefferson’s words don’t disagree with power. He advocates for occasional ‘reminders,’ not overthrow. A few lives lost on either side, to him, are inconsequential as long as course is recorrected.
A distinctly American brand of performative rebellion is here present. ‘Don’t Tread on Me,’ alongside Canadian and Ukrainian flags (even British flags, a sure enough joke by this time), and 45-47 caps. There is surely some historical parallax happening here, and not enough people wondering if the Founding Fathers would even understand them, or allow them to vote. A present day national guardsman in fatigues walks about as a spectator, incongruous against a 250 year passage. It is troubling, in some way, that this long, strange history of American military ventures is viewed as homogenous, striving toward a singular end, rather than as discrete historical persuasions dialectically interrelated. When historical parallax is only cheerful, celebratory, it loses most of its usefulness.
Upon leaving the park, musket fire in our ears, hundreds of star-spangled flags wave along Stacy’s Boulevard, reminding us who ultimately wins the war. We keep reminding ourselves, daily, monthly, yearly. America’s problem isn’t that we can’t reach out and touch our past, but that we do it in the wrong ways. History shouldn’t be venerated, but studied. Historical figures shouldn’t become iconography, and war shouldn’t become a sporting event.
Photographs by Jefferson Everest Crawford
Brecht on Theater
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
good thoughts you