In February 1988, the Ukiah Players, a five-member theatrical troupe, will begin a tour of twenty-two rural towns in central and northern California. At each site, audiences will gather at a local community college theater to see the Ukiah Players’ production of A More Perfect Union, a forty-five minute original drama that provides a compact but engaging introduction to the history of the writing of the Constitution. After each performance, a historian from the host community will invite the audience to join the cast in discussing the issues the play raises. Each playgoer will also receive a playbill replete with a chronology of events leading to the Constitution, a short bibliography, and brief essays by historians, jurists, and political theorists.
Funding for this program has come from the California Council for the Humanities (CCH) and a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Two years ago, the CCH provided initial funding of $11,900 to the Mendocino County Office of Education for the development of the play. The county (pop. 73,000) is located three hours north of San Francisco and is nearly twice the size of Delaware. It encompasses an area of great natural beauty, but has few cultural institutions and only a single two-year community college.
The CCH grant enabled the Ukiah Players to develop a script and to present it to school age and adult audiences in Mendocino County in 1986. Although unemployment ranges as high as 20 percent at Ukiah, the county seat, the thirty performances of the play attracted audiences of more than 2,200 children and adults—3 percent of the county’s population.
In this effort, the Players had the assistance of Professor Daniel Markwyn, a historian at Sonoma State University. While A More Perfect Union was still in rehearsal, Professor Markwyn met with social studies teachers from the county’s middle and secondary schools. They helped him to formulate issues and questions for classroom use and also joined in a teacher training conference just prior to the scheduled performances in the schools. Evening presentations were, of course, provided for adult audiences.
The Ukiah Players have already performed A More Perfect Union in a daunting array of settings: high school gymnasia cafeterias, and auditoriums; before rural audiences sitting on raised bleachers above bare basketball floors; or in their own theater in Ukiah before the county bar association. In informal settings, a folding backdrop and bunting on the floor outline the performance area. Within this minimalist approach, the five players show remarkable versatility. For example, to indicate the move from Shays’ Rebellion to the Federal Convention, they simply change their waistcoats from burlap to velvet. Brief passages of song and dance, accompanied by a handful of musical instruments, smooth the historical transitions.
On the basis of its success in Mendocino County, the California Council applied to the NEH for a grant that would enable the Ukiah Players to bring their performances to adult audiences at twenty-two community college campuses in the northern and central rural areas of the state. NEH Chairman Lynne Cheney personally announced the grant award in Sacramento on May 29, a few days after the Ukiah Players had given a “command performance” before an increasingly attentive audience of state legislators in the Assembly chambers at the capitol.
I had seen the play two weeks earlier when, along with Professor Robert Post (UC Berkeley law school) and Henry Mayer (an unaffiliated historian who resides in Berkeley), I was invited by the CCH to observe a performance of A More Perfect Union at Sacramento City College. The California Council’s executive director, Jim Quay, had asked the three of us to serve as academic advisors to the project—to comment on the substance of the play, write short essays for the playbill, and conduct a day-long seminar with the players and the post-performance discussion leaders. My interest in this endeavor had been whetted by a stint (now concluded) with the California Bicentennial Commission, where I had reviewed a number of uninspired ideas for bicentennial celebrations. In A More Perfect Union, I at last encountered a creative project that promised something of substance and which—based on an early review done for the CCH by Professor Joseph Illick of San Francisco State University—seemed well designed to present the 1787 Convention in a way that would engage the attention of some of the toughest audiences.
Bob Post, Henry Mayer, and I all returned from Sacramento well pleased with the performance. In just less than fifty minutes, and with a verve and pacing that never flag, the Ukiah players do, in fact, succeed in covering far more Convention-related issues than a skeptical academic might imagine could possibly be done. Moving quickly from one point to the next, the Players raise enough serious issues for the audience to question and discuss once the play itself ends. Obviously, they cannot provide a detailed statement of (for example) James Madison’s theory of the extended republic, and the three of us felt that some emphases were misplaced. But within the imposing restraints of time and the settings under which they perform, the Ukiah Players reveal both ingenuity and intelligence.
In discussing the play with the cast afterward, we were also struck by how engaged the five Ukiah Players have become with the material they are presenting. And this in turn suggested why the California Council for the Humanities felt so strongly about securing funding that would enable A More Perfect Union to be made available to a wider audience. The play’s initial reception in Mendocino County indicated that it was both lively enough to be entertaining and informative enough to stimulate discussion, especially since its pacing and economy leave the audience with ample time and energy for serious conversation about events and issues related to the making of the Constitution.
This project is a good example of an opportunity for the general public to learn about, reflect on, and discuss historical text. In an entertaining but informative way, A More Perfect Union integrates scholarly research into an accessible public forum with out compromising standards of accuracy. It also provides a welcome invitation to Constitutional scholars and historians to participate in a public humanities activity.
Jack Rakove is Professor of History at Stanford University.
