Theatre Journal

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.

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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...