Staging Choices Undermine The Copper Children's Potential
Photos by Jenny Graham
The Copper Children was commissioned as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) “American Revolutions” play cycle, which was launched in 2008 with the goal of developing and staging 37 new plays about moments of change in American history. According to OSF’s website, the goal of this play cycle is to generate new work that establishes “a shared understanding of our nation’s past while illuminating the best paths for our nation’s future,” and, we assume, every grant proposal they’ve ever applied for to fund this program. Playwrights are offered creative control over the “content, form, and style” of their work, and the only parameter is that what they write has to be anchored in a pivotal moment in US history.
As of 2019, 11 plays have gone through the full development process and premiered on OSF stages. Many of these plays focus on underrepresented stories in American history, such as 2018’s The Way the Mountain Moved, which used the backdrop of the expansion of the transcontinental railroad through the Utah territory to show how technology changed the way Indigenous populations, Black Mormons, vaqueros, and white settlers related to each other, or 2019’s Between Two Knees, generated by the 1491s and New Native Theatre, which used a combination of stand-up and sketch comedy as a framework to confront the legacy of violence against Indigenous populations, from the massacre at Wounded Knee to its reoccupation by Indigenous people in 1973. Others focus on artistic controversies, as in Paula Vogel’s Indecent, which addresses the suppression of Jewish theatre artists in the 1920s, or document the changing landscape of American politics under specific administration, as the duet of The Great Society and All the Way do for Lyndon Baynes Johnson, which was commissioned by Seattle Rep before heading to Broadway.
The American Revolutions program was instituted under OSF’s previous artistic director, Bill Rausch, building on his predecessor Libby Appel’s commitment to producing new work. It continues under the festival’s new artistic director, Nataki Garrett (whose first season of leadership has been thrown the unfortunate challenge of running an arts organization during a global pandemic). There is great value in the works produced under the American Revolutions program, both artistically and socially. The existence of these plays, often written by playwrights with more diverse backgrounds than the festival’s namesake, opens up a wider window into who gets represented in the theatre. OSF’s acting company is incredibly diverse, employing not only actors of color, but also trans and nonbinary actors. To be an actor is to be asked to make your identity flexible, to subsume your body to the body of the character you are playing. OSF’s Shakespeare productions, alongside its other more “classic” productions, adhere to color-conscious casting: any actor can play any role, regardless of the color of their skin unless race is specified in the script. The festival sometimes deliberately chooses to regender characters, as in its 2018 reimagining of Oklahoma! as a queer text by making its lead romances both queer. (Ado Annie became Ado Andy.) But many plays in the American Revolutions commissions strive for greater representation beyond futzing with the canon; these plays strive to tell stories from perspectives that have been less-than-canonized, highlighting the diverse bodies of the actors who get to tell them.
Zacarías’s The Copper Children is an uneven contribution to the American Revolutions program. Seattle theatre goers who saw Zacarias’ play Native Gardens in 2019 at the Seattle Rep may be surprised that the plays share the same author. Native Gardens is a clever, playful, and at times laugh-out-loud comedy that explores contemporary American Latinx/Anglo cultural tensions, cross-ethnic gender politics, marital conflict, and the contradictions of white liberal environmentalism by way of a property boundary dispute between two affluent households who happen to be neighbors. The play’s choice to make the Latinx couple upper-middle class professional couple—a relatively under-represented class in mainstream US theatre—is an interesting contribution in itself to diversification.
Aside from the strong emphasis on ensemble work and the plot device of babies, the plays have little in common. Inventive and witty dialogue, rich use of metaphor, and an aesthetic that aims to unsettle its audience enough to trigger critical reflection on race, class, gender, and environment, give way to a blunt, didactic dramaturgy. Focussing on the transmission of information rather than imaginative stimulation, the script does not imaginatively capitalize on its raw material. This is a lost opportunity given that the material is important and fascinating: It concerns the 1904 transportation from New York of Irish Catholic-born babies for adoption by working-class, politically-mobilised Mexican families, also Catholic, and residents of a copper mining town in Arizona. Pollution from the mine creates an equal opportunity infertility problem, such that the middle- and upper-class Anglo, Protestant wives of company officers also want babies, and feel entitled to take the newly-arrived ones away from their designated families. They do just that. Their racist and classist reasoning is that the local Mexican families are too poor (an unacknowledged consequence of their lousy employment conditions), and/or morally depraved (allegedly sex workers and alcohol abusers) to parent children. That the infants are ethnic Irish and intended for Catholic upbringing becomes immaterial to the baby thieves; the Irish nuns involved in transporting the children share their anti-Mexican prejudice and support the re-location. The resulting lawsuit decides in favour of the baby-thieves, and we witness an expanding hegemonic whiteness at work, absorbing Irish Catholicism to coalesce against Latinx communities.
As this might indicate, the subject matter resonates with contemporary issues and conflicts shaping the United States and beyond: the environmental and social damage of mineral extraction; the exploitation of immigrant labour; class and race bias in adoption policies and the judiciary; the politics of whiteness; and the limitations of white women’s social conditioning are among them. The play’s direction gestures towards the contemporary and global connections to be made, when its Mexican workers perform what South Africans may recognize as a ‘gumboot’ dance, that originated among black South African miners. But these gestures appear arbitrary and imposed rather than systematic and integral to the production itself. This brief use of physical theatre in the gumboot dance is a directorial decision that is more distracting than aesthetically satisfying: the use of a large, bald, faceless puppet for the red-haired baby Katie is another. For the most part, the staging and set design seem lost opportunities not only to explore the episode’s contemporary connections, but also to situate the script in evocative and diverse material settings (copper mines; the company store; the differently classed domestic residences of Mexicans and Anglos). Despite the play’s title, copper as a colour and a mineral hardly features on stage.
The script owes a large debt to Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle in dramatizing the conflict between two women, of different classes, claiming parental rights to the same child. Other Brechtian techniques may be spotted here, including the alienation effect. But in its use of tableaux, interspersed by announcements of historical information, and without giving the audience an empathetic character to connect to, the play avoids the emotional complexity and depth of such a heart-wrenching part of American history. This distancing does not do justice to the subject matter, which would have been better served by the more conventional approach of taking the audience on a character’s emotional journey, for example, if the story were given a perspective—perhaps from the point of view of Katie’s initial Mexican mother or from the dual perspectives of her Mexican mother and her ultimate Anglo mother.
By treating the troubling subject matter of The Copper Children as a list of facts, the play begs the question of what the director, and the playwright, had in mind regarding impact on the audience, or if they had the audience in mind at all. A Brechtian approach certainly has its place in American theater; musicals like Hamilton have judiciously used social gest and have broken the fourth wall when actors directly address the audience. At such times, the audience finds itself both entertained and surprised; even if they are not lost in the narrative, the audience remains emotionally engaged. The Brechtian techniques employed in The Copper Children are neither entertaining nor surprising, and they do not foster the critical reflection and social-political mobilization that Brecht aimed for. In the end, the audience is left in the passive consumer position—merely holding a bag of facts that is no more exciting than a Wikipedia article.
The Copper Children
Written by: Karen Zacarías
Directed by: Shariffa Ali
Produced by: Oregon Shakespeare Festival
July 2 - 22, 2020
Review Team: Laura Chrisman, Stevi Costa, Kate Forster
