DATE: Sunday, October 5, 1997               TAG: 9709250518

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J3   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN

                                            LENGTH:   73 lines

EARLY DRAMA IS PART OF RICH LITERARY HISTORY

The trouble seems to have started pretty close by, at a tavern in Pungoteague on the Eastern Shore, where, in 1665, ``Ye Bare and Ye Cubb'' became the first play performed in English-speaking America.

We've been going to shows ever since, in ragtag frontier playhouses, ice-palace movie theaters and, since instant-access radio and TV, our own intimate front-row living rooms.

And what have we been rapt witness to, down through the years?

The ritual reenactment of the American Dream.

Clint Eastwood cleans up the town; Roseanne sets matters straight; Neil Simon (or Edward Albee or Tennessee Williams or David Mamet) potshots pretense but provides a loophole of hope.

Today we sit spellbound before special-effects conflict and cliffhanger soap opera, clay-pigeon comedy and distorted, sensational ``docudrama.''

So what's new? wonders Jeffrey H. Richards, a scholar of this country's historic stagecraft.

``In a world swirling with contentious political rhetoric, financial panics, and controversies of all kinds,'' he has written of pre-Civil War showmanship, ``the mainstream stage saw its bread buttered in appealing to the subpolitical, `universal,' desire among theater patrons to laugh or cry - to be entertained.''

Richards, 48, chair of the English department at Old Dominion University, collects and comments on plays from our antebellum past in Early American Drama (Penguin Books, 512 pp., $13.95), an interesting, eye-opening anthology.

Long regarded by conventional critics as subliterate because of their unabashed melodramatic manner, these plays in fact reveal enduring approaches to subject, form and theme that mirror the present moment.

Take ``The Indian Princess'' (1808) by James Nelson Barker, who, among other things, had been mayor of Philadelphia. In defiance of the facts, Barker created a paragon Pocahontas who renounced ``savagery'' with the same unaccountable romantic readiness of the politically correct Disney version almost two centuries later. And Barker's treatment, like Disney's, was fantastically musical.

``But the common use of music in ordinary plays, especially after 1800,'' notes Richards, ``was to heighten mood, introduce character, or otherwise add to the sensual effects of the production.''

Name a modern motion picture that doesn't routinely employ sound in precisely the same ways - or a conventional western that doesn't distort the character of the Native American to support the notion of Manifest Destiny.

Then there's James Montgomery Bird's ``The Gladiator'' (1831), which, like the Kirk Douglas spectacle of 1960, presents the rebel slave Sparticus as a species of American democrat but submerges an inevitably racial application.

Judging from this anthology, American drama tends to confront issues after the social revolution is over.

``The plays,'' reports Richards from his Chesapeake home in Western Branch, ``were deliberately meant to embrace as much of the culture as possible.''

We still don't want to offend anybody; show business has been, and remains, big business.

``The risks that people thought they were taking don't look as great to us now,'' says Richards.

We think of William Henry Smith's ``The Drunkard'' (1844), which came down strongly against alcoholism - as if anyone even then would argue persuasively in favor of it; but the only temporarily down-the-tubes protagonist was saved by the love of a good woman, just like Ray Milland in ``The Lost Weekend'' (1945).

As Americans, we tend to be against sin.

In the abstract.

Richards is married to Stephanie Sugioka, who has master's degrees in Chinese literature and creative writing; they have a son, Aaron, 15, and a daughter, Sarah, 10, who are engaged readers like their parents.

Early American Drama is a fascinating text that makes the obscure accessible and recovers an important link in our literary history. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia

Wesleyan College.

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