Reason 5 for Seeing volume of smoke: Rescuing History
volume of smoke takes as its subject the Great Richmond Theater Fire of 1811. The event was a catalyst for broad social change in the 19th century. It helped fuel the Second Great Awakening, a several-decades-long period of religious revival that changed American politics. All public performance was banned in Richmond for eight years. The fire codes that resulted from the fire are still on the books in Richmond, VA today.
Clay is from Richmond, and he hadn't heard of the theatre fire until he was looking for subject matter to fulfill a commission. My parents are from Richmond and weren't familiar with it. Anne is from Richmond and hadn't really heard of it. When we did the show in Richmond, many people didn't know about it.
This is probably because tales of calamities in Richmond are fairly frequent. The entire city did burn to the ground after all just a few decades afterwards. And who wants to pay attention to a brief moment of Richmond noteriety when they have the whoel Capital of the Confederacy thing to fall back on?
But this was an important time in American history, and an important, almost forgotten event. We rescue this time and that event nightly in the play, and it is part of what is so moving about participating in the play.
It is even more moving when one realizes what Clay has done-- taken this historical event and returned it to the people. It would've been easy to write a play about the Governor of Virginia who died in the fire, or the Senator from Kentucky. What Clay did instead was write a play about the every day people who get swept up in the tides of history, religion, politics, art and tragedy. It's a people's history of the moment, taken from interviews with real survivors in a book that was never published, but is instead available in fragments on the internet.
Who decides what is history? Who decides what stories get remembered and what don't? Who, ultimately, will speak for us? Remember us?
We know that history isn't just about Great Men Doing Great Things. We know that there are social conditions that shape our times, forces at work. History is its own force, like gravity. And yet we create it and exist within it at the same time. volume of smoke serves as a reminder that history is also what happens to the slave who rescues people in the fire, the actress who loses her daughter to the inferno, the stagehand backstage wondering if it's all his fault, the reverend who capitalizes on the disaster. This play rescues an almost-lost moment in our history and returns it to the people it happened to. The dead call across two hundred years to the living, and they have something they want to tell us...
To hear what they have to say, though, you'll have to buy a ticket!
Mr. Butler,
I am only a recent reader of your blog, but I am extremely excited to read about your show. I am currently staging my directing thesis at Wesleyan University, a play based on the Hartford Circus Fire of 1944, a similarly buried national catastrophe. Good luck with your forgotten fire, I hope I can see the production when mine is over.
Posted by: Jess | March 22, 2007 at 10:04 PM