In the late 1960s my husband Courtney and I made a mistake we’ve regretted ever since. We were living in Branford, Connecticut, a suburb of New Haven, Connecticut. New Haven is the city where producers try out their plays before they take them to Broadway, kind of the equivalent of revising a first draft. New verses are added to and/or removed from songs, dialogue is honed, and sometimes the entire second act is taken out, shaken thoroughly, and put back in.
Because the play’s a work in progress and because the audience has no idea whether it will actually make it to Broadway, let alone be any good, tickets are readily available and really cheap, and it’s possible to walk in off the street and see a performance.
We were walking past a theater in downtown New Haven when we saw that they were currently in tryouts for the musical, 1776. “A musical about the Declaration of Independence?” I remember saying, to my everlasting shame. “How can they make a play out of that? What a ridiculous idea!”
In our defense, this was a time when they were doing musicals about New York’s mayor and Zorba the Greek, but still, the long and short of it is we passed up a chance to see the original cast–Howard de Silva, William Daniels, Ken Howard, Blythe Danner–in one of the best musicals of all time, and we’ve regretted it ever since.
We’ve tried to atone by watching the movie every year on the Fourth of July, and this year was no exception. It was amazing, though, just how relevant it was this year! It’s ALWAYS relevant, with its dawdling Congress that sits there and twiddles its thumbs instead of acting and its members who only care for “the profitable pound,” but this year I was shocked by how much its issues were OUR issues.
Not only is America in dire straits–“I do believe you’ve laid a curse on North America,” John Adams says, “a second flood, a simple famine, plagues of locusts everywhere,”–they’re dealing with many of the same problems we are right now.
They’re plagued with diseases (“The children all have dysentery, and little Tom keeps turning blue,” Abigail says. “Little Abbey has the measles, and I’m coming down with flu…they say we may get smallpox”) and shortages (sewing pins and saltpeter instead of toilet paper and PPE.)
There are lines that could have been spoken today, like Benjamin Franklin’s saying, “Never has a nation been more recklessly mismanaged,” and there are parallels in the people. We have Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose health we’re praying for, and they had Caesar Rodney, a Congressman from Delaware who was dragged back to Congress from his deathbed to provide a deciding vote.
In 1776, they’re also dealing with critical issues of what they want their country to be and issues of racial justice that are threatening to tear the country apart and may even stop America from being born: “Now you’re calling our black slaves Americans?” the delegate from North Carolina asks John Adams, and Adams replies, “They’re people and they’re here. If there’s any other requirement, I never heard it.”
“They are not people,” North Carolina says. “They are property.”
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“No, sir,” Jefferson says, “they are people who are being treated as property.”
And here we are, 244 years later, having that same conversation. On the Fourth two people painted over a “Black Lives Matter” sign on a street, proclaiming, “The narrative of police brutality, the narrative of oppression, the narrative of racism, it’s a lie,” and two days ago when Joe Biden said in his Fourth of July message that all people are created equal, the spokesman for the Republican Party accused him of trying to destroy the Declaration of Independence. “It says ‘All MEN are created equal,’” she said huffily.
We’re in troubled times, just like they were, struggling to deal with life-and-death problems in circumstances “a more generous God would not have allowed,” as Franklin said. And yet, just as in 1776, there’s hope.
On the Fourth, my daughter Cordelia posted a message on Facebook in which she quoted both 1776 and an actual letter written by our second president. She wrote, “Happy Independence Day 2020. The Declaration of Independence indicated that we have the rights to ’Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.’ 244 years later and we’re still struggling to deliver on this promise to many of our citizens. But as John Adams said, ‘Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of Ravishing Light and Glory.’ We as a country are getting better, and we just need to keep striving.”
“I hear the bells ringing out,” John Adams sings, a paraphrase of that same letter. “I hear the cannons roar. I see Americans–all Americans–free forevermore.”
1776 still speaks to us after over 50 years. Plus, it’s a wonderful musical, funny and suspenseful and heartbreaking. If you’ve never seen it–or were stupid enough to say, “A musical about the Declaration of Independence! How ridiculous!” like we were–please watch it. You won’t be sorry.
Happy Fourth of July!
Connie Willis