In Philadelphia these days there are two kinds of theater experiences. There’s the Walnut Street Theater with its mostly mainstream fare like 1776 – The Musical, and Sherlock Holmes: The Great Detective, and then there’s the theater of ideas and politics where the entertainment factor is of a different sort.
The shift from “best selling” theater hits to plays that challenge the mind has been building in the city for a long time. Much of it began with the founding of the Wilma Theater (whose honest motto is “Art has no answers at all”) in 1973.
These progressive theater trends were welcoming at first. It was refreshing to see a black woman play a white male Hamlet, or an androgynous actress play a page boy, or see love stories with interracial and same sex couples. It was fun to see rigid orthodoxies falling by the wayside. But over time a fresh new breeze can easily morph into a strong wind that disrupts and distorts.
This pretty much describes what has happened to the city’s theater community. The delightful avant garde innovations of old have now become the status quo.
Does every Hamlet or traditionally white Shakespearean character have to be black in order to prove a point about racism? Does every heterosexual couple presented on stage have to be interracial, even when it seems to work against the soul of a play? Does every single young boy in an Elizabethan play have to be played by a girl, as if to “instruct” the public on gender issues. Are real boy actors really so rare?
Enter the new play, “The Spirit of ’76,” by Miriam Colvin and Jackson Pavlik, staged at Carpenters Hall from April 10th to the 13th. The location of Carpenters Hall is significant, since this is near where the Founding Fathers struggled together to write the Declaration of Independence. The premise of the play is the coming together of the cast and production crew to formulate an agreeable script for a fictional July 4, 2026, performance in which the governor will be present. The play is a raw look into the world of gritty rehearsal debates where disagreements abound, where egos are hurt and where sometimes disgruntled actors storm out of the production, vowing never to return.
“The Spirit of ’76,” is also a reflection of what went on in Independence Hall before the signing of the Declaration of Independence on August 2, 1776. Certainly, the Founding Fathers disagreed; the debates there probably reached a fever pitch. Likewise, we see the cast and production crew of the 2026 play as two factions at war with one another: one side wants history told as it happened, while the other side wishes to reformat that history as a virtue signaling lecture, a condemnation or critique of that history.
The play opens during one rehearsal where disagreements quickly emerge. Should Thomas Jefferson be played by a black female? The woke faction is fine with that, but soon after the character Hannah (played by Shantel Hill) gets the Jefferson role, there’s an uprising among the cast. Jefferson was a man and he was white, not a black female, and it’s the 4th of July when audiences don’t want a far-fetched Howard Zinn-style history lesson. Hannah’s closest actor friend, Reg (played by GJ Terry), who consoles her through a panic attack in the first act, will later try and convince Hannah that, for the sake of the play and common sense, she needs to forfeit the role of Jefferson because, no matter how you stretch it, it’s just not believable.
Hannah feels betrayed, believing that friends must affirm friends even when it comes to personal delusions.
The long and rambling first act doesn’t really set the stage for what follows: an intensely interesting and electrifying second act. Here’s where the real story begins. The huge cast — thirteen actors — might be a challenge for any production crew, but by the second act we finally have a sense of who everybody is.
The cast is knee-deep in various culture war issues common in today’s polarized society. In deciding how to best present the play for the governor, one cast member delivers a scathing criticism of land acknowledgment announcements at the beginning of the play. This should be canned because the concept of stolen land is false; Native American tribes stole whatever land they owned from other Native American tribes in an endless cycle of theft and retrieval.
And then we have the character Brent (played by P J Witowski) condemning the use of printed pronouns under each actor’s name in the Playbill program as absurd and over the top. He promises to scratch out all the pronouns with a sharpie when they are printed. (In an ironic twist, next to actor Witowski’s name in the real program what do we find: pronouns!)
The cast’s lefty faction is best represented by Ophelia (played by Nia K. Amate) who wants Jefferson to be played by Hannah and who wants slavery to be the main focus of the play. In her view, you can empower the future if you write about historical events as you wish they had been played out in reality. The exasperated director, Angela (played by Jo Dunphy), wants to please both sides. She believes the play is dead when the cast threatens to walk out if Hannah insists on playing Jefferson.
This impasse is reflective of the deathly partisan divide in America, with both sides refusing to compromise. A deal is struck when Reg proposes a solution: Hannah can play Jefferson if all the slavery references are removed from the play. Ophelia balks at this but then relents as the cast realizes it’s this or nothing. They all sign a written contract to not go back on their word. Hannah refuses until the end when she reluctantly signs the contract in a huff, realizing it is the only way to move forward, just as many of the Founding Fathers must have felt in their sweaty struggle of give-and-take before signing the Declaration of Independence.
The play also invites audience members to participate in the cycle of “political” compromise when Caleb (played by Jerrick Medrano), who impersonates a Carpenters Hall park ranger, invites the audience to stand for both the Pledge of Allegiance and the National Anthem.
Only one person in the audience remained seated for this.
