Audience Guide

by Kim Stinson

Our 70th Season

This Audience Guide was made possible through a Projects Pool Grant from the United Arts Councilof Catawba County with funding from the North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the Department

of Natural and Cultural Resources, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, and a host of other characters—famous and not—rings so true that it can only be a

Doctorow must have spent at the library looking through newspaper clippings, hunting historical books in the card

catalog, and delving into encyclopedias given that the internet was not at his disposal at the time of writing the novel. When writing my play, Sprung from Red Clay: Stories of Catawba County Women, I spent many hours at both Patrick Beaver Memorial Library and the main branch of

the Catawba County Library in Newton, in addition to scouring for

details that I could glean about the women of our county, gives me a great appreciation of Doctorow’s novel and the amount of work he surely spent on the historical details. After attending Hickory Community Theatre’s heartfelt performance of Ragtime, consider reading the novel. Although,

it to those in your life under eighteen. In addition to more depth of detail about the characters that grace the stage in the story’s musical version, there is a nod to our own city when Hickory is mentioned in Chapter 28, “The harness was a special snap-on variety developed for

believability to his novel. Whether or not you decide to spend more time with this touching story by reading the novel, sit back and enjoy the poignant and engaging musical as capably presented by Hickory Community Theatre’s artistic director, Pamela Livingstone.

An Audience Guide to Ragtimeby Kim Stinson

Many writers who set out to create the next “Great American Novel” rarely get enough words on the page, much less complete the work, or write a story worthy of critical acclaim. E.L. Doctorow accomplished all these tasks when he wrote Ragtime which was published in 1974. The novel garnered awards including the National Book Critics Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. The book was also a nominee for the Nebula Award for Best Novel. Many newspaper critics at the time gave it rave reviews. In a book review for the Chicago Tribune, John Brooks writes, “It is a fable that serves as an excuse for a great deal of social observation, and for the introduction of numerous real historical people, each of whom Doctorow (best known previously for "The Book of Daniel") freely and happily gives his own utterly unhistorical twists.” The novel and the stage musical both interweave the lives of characters who hail from all walks of life. Represented on the page—and the stage—are the poor, the rich, the famous, the infamous, and the ordinary. Gender, race, and class politics of the early twentieth century—which also resonated in the 1970’s and still do so today—are the source material for the dramatic storylines of Ragtime and Ragtime, the Musical. The musical, based on the novel, opened on Broadway on January 18, 1998, at the Ford Center for the Performing Arts. The story of a musical (all the parts except the songs) is called a “libretto” or a “book.” The book for Ragtime, the Musical, was written by Terrence McNally. Music was written by Stephen Flaherty while the lyrics were written by Lynn Aherns. McNally is also known for having written the book for Kiss of the Spiderwoman, as well as, several plays of controversy with LGBT themes. Aherns and Flaherty still work together today writing music and lyrics for musicals, including Anastasia, which is currently running on Broadway. Ragtime, The Musical was nominated for thirteen Tony Awards, of which it won four, including Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical given to Audra McDonald for her portrayal of Sarah. As is the nature of changing mediums, writing for the stage requires playwrights to take the most intense and heartfelt moments from novels to distill the stories to their core conflicts. The audience

today, as we witness police disproportionately shooting African American men during investigations, the ramifications of centuries of the oppression of people of color is still intertwined in our lives. The character of Coalhouse Walker, Jr. and his militant response to injustice juxtaposed with Booker T. Washington brings forth a comparison between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. This 1960’s comparison would likely have been on Doctorow’s mind as he developed the character of Coalhouse. Malcolm X and Coalhouse have similar approaches to dealing with the white people who serve injustice while Booker T. Washington and King share similarities in their more peaceful philosophies. All the threads of the novel—race relations, gender politics, and immigration—become even more intertwined in the plot of the musical and have a common touchstone in one character. The center of Doctorow’s story, around whom all the storylines pivot, is the character of Mother. It is her Younger Brother who becomes involved with Evelyn Nesbit and, then, joins Coalhouse in his revolutionary acts. It is Mother’s son who becomes friends with Tateh’s daughter, which leads to the families becoming intertwined. Mother is the one who rescues Sarah and Coalhouse’s child and helps them to the point

of causing strife in her own marriage. She is the character who undergoes the most change and, in the end, has the most depth—despite her lack of a specific name. Mother’s journey from being completely dependent upon Father’s guidance to finding her inner strength and independence is the spine of this dramatic tale. This leads the reader to wonder if the character is a tribute to one or more of the women who graced the author’s life? Doctorow has woven a tale of historical fiction of the utmost believability. His bringing together Houdini, Evelyn Nesbit,

the bottom of social hierarchy of the time. A widower, Tateh travels with his young daughter to America with the hopes of creating a better life. Once here, he finds the harsh realities of poverty to be overwhelming. He does persevere and is able to remake himself. He becomes the example of what can happen with tenacity and a good

deal of luck. While Tateh is a Jewish immigrant and the bigotry of the early twentieth century against his race is illustrated quite thoroughly in the novel, his struggles to make a better life for his daughter resonate with those affected by the current

debate over those in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. We tend to romanticize the past and forget that immigration has always been a tough issue in this country. Each time a new wave of immigrants enters the country from a war-torn or impoverished part of the world, there is strife between that group and those who are already here. This is true today, was true when Doctorow wrote his novel in the 1970’s, and was the case in the early 1900’s when the story takes place. How can we navigate the current national debate about immigration in a way that humanizes immigrants? Is there inspiration for us in Doctorow’s novel or McNally’s script? While strife has been caused by those choosing to move to our country, there has been even more conflict around the forced immigration of slaves to this land. We still feel the ramifications of slavery, the Civil War, and Jim Crow laws. Racial relations between African Americans and Caucasians are at the crux of this story and greatly affect the characters of Coalhouse and Sarah, two African American characters. America’s being fraught with racial tensions provides an innate source of conflict from which writers can draw. The early twentieth century, at the time of this story, was still feeling the aftermath of The Civil War with institutionalized bigotry across the entire country. As Doctorow was writing the novel in the early 1970’s, the country was emerging from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's and still feeling those tensions. Even

has not the leisure time to sit through a performance that would be as long as reading a book at one’s own pace. Novels can grace us with minute details—microcosms of time and place—which are difficult to create on the stage and tend to stall the plot. Leaving the audience to ponder these depths of thought while watching a play would be deadly to the pace and entertainment value. It becomes the playwright’s job to write a story that can be entertaining while still making clear the intentions of the original author’s voice from the novel. McNally accomplished a compelling version of Doctorow’s story whose beginning was sparked by a micro-moment in the author’s own life. Doctorow’s inspiration for writing the book was revealed in an interview with Lisa W. Foderaro of the New York Times in 1999 where she writes that, “Mr. Doctorow recalled that in the early 1970’s he was struggling with such severe writer’s block that he started to write about the walls in his third-floor home office . . . . That led to musings about what his house, on Broadview Avenue (in New Rochelle, NY), and the surrounding neighborhood looked like at the turn of the century and, ultimately, to his portrait of a nation transformed by immigration and racial strife.” At the time of the interview, Doctorow and his wife were selling that same home as they were empty-nesters looking to downsize. Doctorow told Foderaro, “I was imagining what things were like in that time, with awnings on the windows and the trolley cars going down the hill to the Sound and people in straw boaters and women with parasols . . . . One image led to another, and I was off the wall and into the book.” Readers of the novel, and theatre goers seeing the musical, are left to wonder why Doctorow chose to give names to the characters except for the middle-class, Caucasian family who are referred to as “Father,” “Mother,” “Mother’s Younger Brother,” and so forth. The immigrants, the people of color, and the historical figures

mostly have specific names. Giving characters names helps to personify them and make them more relatable. Doctorow may have been sending a subtle message to those he presumed would be the majority of his readers—the Caucasian middle-class: you are the majority and society’s view of normalcy while everyone around you deserves as much recognition as you. This leaves the characters of “Mother,” “Father,” and the rest of the nameless ones to represent the mainstream people across our nation. Thus, Doctorow makes it the reader’s responsibility to identify her or himself in the characters, as well as, to determine if their perspectives are skewed by their own culture. McNally, then, faced the decisions all playwrights who adapt works of fiction for the stage must face: Which of these characters, with or without names, earns time in front of an audience? Which of Doctorow’s fictionalized versions of the famous receive lines and which are cut from the story? Which of all the characters from the novel are integral to the telling of the story for it to be essentially the same story? McNally’s choices are deft; however, they do leave out some of the truly controversial aspects of gender relations and focus more on the racial tensions of the time. There is still much to be learned about gender politics in the stage version of the story through the relationships between Mother and Father, as well as, between Coalhouse and Sarah. The story that creates the most fodder for discussion around gender politics in the novel, though, is largely left out of the musical. Evelyn Nesbit is much more layered and interesting in the novel, while in the stage play, is portrayed almost solely as a floosy. The relationship between Evelyn and Mother’s Younger Brother is distilled down to a few lines in a musical number while their story in the novel takes quite a bit of ink space. Even the amount of time and devotion Evelyn gives to Tateh and his daughter is left out of the stage play. In the book, Evelyn becomes quite obsessed with helping Tateh and his daughter which serves as an escape from

from her abusive marriage. The one-layered and myopic view of Evelyn in the musical does a disservice to her characterization by Doctorow in the novel, which more thoroughly explores her victimization by the men in her life, and even by the character of Emma Goldman. Goldman uses Evelyn to advance her own political goals—and, even in an unexpected scene, to advance her own pleasure. While Emma’s goals for social justice for the common working person are noble, her use of Evelyn to further those goals, without Evelyn’s consent, is still exploitation. This relationship between Evelyn and Emma is not seen in the stage play, nor is Evelyn’s more detailed history with her lover, Stanford White, and her husband, Harry K. Thaw. Looking at Evelyn’s victimization at the hands of these three characters—husband, lover, and dysfunctional mentor—is particularly poignant in consideration of the current day’s “#metoo” movement. Evelyn is sexually victimized without rescue at every turn, beginning at the age of fifteen. This experience resonates with the many women who are stepping forward today to pull these abusive activities out of secrecy in an attempt to change our culture. Similarly seen, at the time of the writing of the novel in the early 1970’s, was the Women’s Movement which included the publication of Our Bodies Ourselves that explored a woman’s right to control her own body. This feminist movement of the 1970’s had to have an impact on Doctorow, whether or not he was aware of it, as he wrote the novel. At the time of McNally’s adapting the novel for the stage in the 1990’s, gender politics were still under debate and discussion; however, it was not as hot a topic as it was in the 1970’s and as it is today. A continuous thread in both the novel and the musical is the issue

of immigration. The character of Tateh is the embodiment of the immigrant experience. Through his character, the reader of the novel and the theatre-goer see the hope of a better life that is thwarted by the realities of starting at