Mainstream theatre in the United States has undergone a number of transformations in the past decade. Not the least is the acceptance of woman to the playwriting elite. Plays by Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, Tina Howe, and Wendy Wasserstein have all had successful Broadway runs, and Henley, Norman, and Wasserstein have been honored with Pulitzer Prizes. These successes suggest the opening of the “establishment” to new and diverse voices. While some feminist critics view this “opening up” as a co-optation,¹ it may indicate a shift in mainstream cultural attitudes. Whether or not such a shift has actually occurred is debatable; nevertheless, these new woman playwrights touch on themes close to the hearts of traditionalists. For instance, in The Holdup (1980-3), Marsha Norman confronts the frontier West—long the focus of a male-centered mythology. While admitting that this play was not a typical “Norman play,” that it has more fantasy than substance, and that it was not intended “to substantiate Western mythology” (all facts that might explain why some critics responded negatively to it), Norman also claimed that in The Holdup “there are serious things to be said about stories and how they operate on our minds.”² Indeed, the structure of this play's “story” suggests a transformation of the frontier myth.

Certainly, Marsha Norman is not the first American playwright to question the traditional frontier myth. This myth, which attained its purest form at the end of the nineteenth century, has been challenged and revised by twentieth-century American male playwrights. To fully appreciate the change in approach that Norman's play represents, it will be useful to recall the way the frontier myth appeared in turn-of-the-century American drama and how it has recently been reformulated by an iconoclastic male playwright like Sam Shepard. Given this context, it will not only be possible to isolate the changes in the myth made by Marsha Norman in The Holdup but to evaluate the extent to which these changes suggest a new feminist perspective on the frontier experience.

The nineteenth-century version of the frontier myth was perhaps best expressed by Frederick Jackson Turner in essays like “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893). Central to Turner's thesis is the belief that “the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.”³ This “area of free land” offered discontented Easterners a “gate of escape to the free conditions of the frontier.”⁴ “In a word,” Turner wrote, “free lands meant free opportunities.”⁵ Luring Easterners or immigrants west, this frontier was the anvil on which the American democratic character received its distinctive form. More specifically, Turner described this frontier as “the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization. … The line of most rapid and effective Americanization.”⁶ Viewing “Americanization” as an interaction of Eastern pioneer and Western locale, he wrote: “… at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails.”⁷ Having adapted to the frontier, the pioneer soon begins to tame it. Gradually he “transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe. … The fact is, that here is a new product that is American.”⁸ In short, Turner viewed this distinctly American product in traditional Romantic terms whereby a decadent civilization is purified through contact with uncorrupted nature. In Turner's thinking, this process takes on the form of a synthesis or marriage of Eastern civilization and Western savagery.

A Turner-like perception of the interaction of East and West appears in the drama even before Turner began disseminating his famous thesis. Bartley Campbell's popular melodrama My Partner (1879) concludes with a marriage of Eastern heroine and Western frontier hero that bodes well for the play's fictitious community and, by suggestion, for the nation at large. In turn-of-the-century American plays like David Belasco's The Girl of the Golden West (1905) and William Vaughn Moody's The Great Divide (1906), a similar theme is developed. In Moody's play, for instance, the New Englander, Ruth, moves to Arizona where she confronts an untamed environment personified by the Westerner, Stephen Ghent. Ghent forcefully abducts Ruth in Act I but is eventually transformed by his love for her, and at the play's end he wins her love. Ruth embraces Ghent and the freedom of the West.⁹ In tracing the interaction of the “civilized” Ruth and the “savage” Stephen, Moody like Campbell employs traditional—if now out-dated—gender types¹⁰ to celebrate the “marriage” of Eastern “civilization” and Western “savagery.”

This optimistic interpretation of the frontier experience so characteristic of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century has been questioned in the mid and late twentieth century. The closing of the frontier took on especially ominous dimensions during the Depression of the thirties. General socio-economic hardship, “Dust Bowl” conditions on the Great Plains, and labor tensions in the Far West undermined the belief in the West as “a gate of escape.”¹¹ Depression era doubts concerning the validity of the frontier myth appear in plays like Robert Sherwood's The Petrified Forest (1934), John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (1937), and William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life (1939).¹² Challenging the frontier myth has continued to be a theme in post-Depression era plays as diverse as Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949), Arthur Kopit's Indians (1968), and Mark Medoff's When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder? (1974). The questions posed in these plays have been fully developed by Sam Shepard in a number of his plays, most especially True West (1980).¹³

In Shepard's play the harmonious marriage of Eastern civilization and Western savagery has gone awry. Revolving around the interaction of the two brothers, Austin and Lee, the play is set in their mother's southern California, suburban house, which—with its various modern accoutrements and abundance of house plants—testifies to the successful taming of the Western frontier. Indeed, Mom's horror of the Alaskan wilderness, which she has just visited, and her apparent devotion to traditional values make her a perfect representative of modern civilization. Even as her family collapses around her, she clings to the vestiges or, perhaps more accurately, the clichés of family order; she futilely insists: “Don't shout in the house” (p. 73); “You boys shouldn't fight in the house. Go outside and fight” (p. 74); and “He won't kill you. He's your brother” (p. 75). Despite such efforts, the coherence of this nuclear family has long since been lost. The boys' father long ago fled this tame environment and now lives freely, if primitively, in the desert. The fact that he never appears in this play suggests that the “savage” frontiersman has been banished from mainstream, social life. The boys' mother and father may be contemporary versions of Moody's Ruth/civilization and Stephen/savagery, but here the hope of youthful marriage has become the cynicism of separation and divorce.

While neither son embodies the civilization or savagery principle as absolutely as Mom and the Old Man, each son is closely associated with one of the parents. Austin, an Ivy League educated writer living a settled family life in the Bay area, takes after the mother, and Lee, a reclusive, antisocial desert dweller, takes after the Old Man. During the course of the play, these two brothers, associated with very different value systems, explore each other's life style. Lee tries writing, and Austin tries to prove his frontier prowess by burglarizing his mother's neighborhood. Neither masters the other's way of life. Finally, they attempt to collaborate on a filmscript before going together into the desert. This plan also fails. The play climaxes with a violent wrestling match between Austin and Lee, and the play ends with the two brothers facing each other in a stand-off. Here, there is no possible resolution of the tension between savagery and civilization. Unlike Moody, who structured The Great Divide around the marriage of male savagery and female civilization, Shepard structures his play around an unbridgeable opposition of savagery and civilization. In so doing, he avoids the reassuring closure that Moody's play borrowed from the moralistic, melodramatic tradition. A joyful marriage of male and female intimating an optimistic American future gives way to an irreconcilable polarity of males suggesting the contradictory American present. Indeed, Austin and Lee, the off-spring of a “marriage” of civilization and savagery, represent a composite portrait of the late twentieth-century American character, torn apart by opposing impulses.

While Shepard's play implies that the American frontier experience may have been a curse and not a blessing, Marsha Norman's frontier play, The Holdup, which “officially premiered”¹⁴ three years after Shepard's True West, seems to represent an attempt to go beyond this kind of despair and cynicism. Ironically, Norman's play is structured around a group of characters that closely parallel the character types in Shepard's play. Set “in northern New Mexico” (p. 107) in 1914, The Holdup—like True West—includes characters from two generations. As in Shepard's play, the younger generation is represented by two brothers. Norman's pair of brothers work on a wheat-threshing crew and are presently camped in a cookshack “miles from nowhere” (p. 107). They are surprised when—in the middle of the night—two older people, Lily and the Outlaw, arrive separately to rendezvous in this isolated spot. While the two generations are not actually related by blood, Lily and the Outlaw function in Norman's play as Mom and the absent Old Man do in Shepard's play: they provide a context for the interaction of the two brothers. Moreover, Lily and the Outlaw embody values roughly similar to their counterparts. Lily, like Mom in Shepard's play, personifies “civilization,” and the Outlaw, like the Old Man, incarnates “savagery.”

Norman describes Lily as “a frontier beauty, a little past her prime” who “has graciously accepted the wisdom and perspective that have replaced her once startling appearance” (p. 107). A one-time “dance-hall favorite,” Lily now owns “the finest hotel east of Albuquerque” (p. 107). While not the stereotypical frontier woman as civilizing “schoolmarm,” she is linked to the tradition that produced that type. After all, Lily is associated with the education of the West: when her rich rancher husband died leaving her with a fortune, she built a school and named it for the deceased. Cutting herself off from her questionable past, she is now an upstanding member of her town—providing shelter for “fancy eastern folks” (p. 120) and representing the civilized domesticity that the Outlaw has always rejected.

Like Shepard's Old Man, the Outlaw represents a savagery that is no longer socially acceptable, but unlike the Old Man, the Outlaw does appear in this play. “A worn, grizzled desperado, now approaching fifty. … a wily survivor of the Hole-in-the-Wall era” (p. 107), the Outlaw claims to be Tom McCarty, who supposedly “taught Butch Cassidy to rob banks” and was “the best horse-handler in the business” (p. 126). Since a failed bank robbery in Delta, Colorado, twenty years earlier, the Outlaw has been on the run, hiding from the law and gunning down whoever challenges him. Now tired of running, he has returned for Lily, his sweetheart of twenty years before.

The contrast of civilization and savagery embodied by the older generation is repeated in the younger generation; however, removed from the original frontier, the brothers in Norman's play—like those in Shepard's play—represent a somewhat diluted version of this contrast. The younger brother, Archie, like Shepard's Austin, is closely associated with civilized ideals, but here those ideals have a more traditional caste than they did in Austin's case. Archie is devoted to mother, church, and education. Although he works as a wheat thresher, Norman describes him as one who “doesn't belong here. He's eager to find a way out but is held back by his mother and his age and his fear” (p. 107). It is Archie who is most shocked by the Outlaw who arrives suddenly out of the night, gun raised and threatening. Archie protests: “… we get a night off and you come up and shoot us. It's not fair. It's not civilized. We're a state now. It's 1914” (p. 112).

On the other hand, Archie's brother Henry feels liberated by the possibility of violence. Indeed, Archie is referring to Henry when he laments that a man is “supposed to use his brain, not his gun” (p. 114). In fact, Henry has been forced to stay at the cookshack while the rest of the wheat-threshing crew has gone to town because he drew his gun during a card game. Like Shepard's Lee, Henry is “mean and tough,” “foul-mouthed,” and “heavy-drinking” (p. 107). A bitter man, he resents his brother whom he holds responsible for his own failures. Henry complains:

My whole life I spent so you could go to school, so you could dream about airplanes, so you could go to church. I'm out there feedin' half-starved cattle and raisin' scrub crops, still workin' for Dad when I oughta be long gone all because you can't do nuthin' and never could. The most help you can ever be is just get out of my way, Archie. …

(p. 123)

While disdainfully referring to Archie as “somebody's aunt,” Henry looks forward to the day when he will be able to prove himself the heir to the frontier tradition.

Henry believes his chance has come when he finds out who the Outlaw really is. To prove his mettle to this idol from the past, he is willing to sacrifice his brother; however, as he roughly ties Archie up, the amazed Outlaw can only respond: “nobody I know ever tied up his brother” (p. 126). On the one hand, Henry is crueller than the Outlaw, but, on the other, Henry's claim to the savage way of life is a deceit. What he knows about old-time outlaw gangs, he knows from books not from experience. Ironically, the products of civilization, the various outlaw books that he has carried from home, only help to fuel Henry's “savage” impulses.

Although Norman's characters seem to mirror Shepard's, this play does not result in the same kind of “stand off” that concluded True West. Shepard may have turned the Romantic frontier myth presented in a play like The Great Divide upside down, but the resolution of True West is still dependent on the traditional Romantic categories: a feminine Eastern civilization and a masculine Western savagery. While Shepard's play presents the failure to reconcile these disparate elements as the source of a deep-rooted tension in the American character, Norman attempts to resolve that tension by eliminating one side of the equation. Rather than maintain a precarious balance between civilization and savagery, between Archie and Henry, Norman's focus gradually turns toward Archie alone. In this regard, Norman presents Western savage violence as a self-destructive delusion that can and must be transcended. While True West ends with the two brothers frozen in a stalemate, the first of two acts of The Holdup ends with Henry being killed by the Outlaw. Hoping for a moment of glory and despite the fact that—as Archie claims—he is an inept gunman, Henry challenges the Outlaw. Henry's worship of violence results in his death.

In the same vein, the “savage” Outlaw's commitment to violence has led him to a dead end. He has lived an unproductive life—especially when compared to Lily. All that he has to show for twenty years of running from the law is a satchel full of “old wanted pictures, newspaper articles, books about his friends, books with his name in them” (p. 127). Interestingly, these souvenirs suggest that the Outlaw is forced to depend on the artifacts of a recently arrived “civilization” to remind himself of the “savage” frontier West that is passing away. The futility of his situation is apparent from the start of the play when he is forced to shoot his horse, the foundation on which the old-time Westerner built his life.

Lily, on the other hand, has contributed to the socio-economic development of the West. Ten years after the Outlaw disappeared from her life, she took the rich rancher as a husband. After his death—killed by the Outlaw who returned just long enough to shoot him—Lily sold the ranch and opened the successful hotel that she still owns. In fact, Lily's success epitomizes a “civilization” that is somewhat different from the one embodied either by Ruth in Moody's play or Mom in Shepard's play. More than embodying passive attributes of “civilization,” she embodies the active process of civilization. In this regard, Lily manifests an initiative, a toughness, generally associated in frontier plays only with the “savage” male figure. Beginning as a dance-hall favorite, incarnating some of the baser—or, perhaps, “savage”—aspects of civilization,¹⁵ she has developed into a successful business woman and a community leader by means of a strength and a sense of responsibility that were hers from the start.

Lily's independence and the Outlaw's helplessness are demonstrated throughout the play—especially as Lily, with Archie's help, saves the Outlaw's life after he takes an overdose of morphine as a self-inflicted punishment for shooting Henry. Lily and Archie spend a good portion of Act II “walking” him back to life, but after physically saving him, they metaphorically murder his savage outlaw identity. Archie picks up the Outlaw's satchel, empties “… the newspaper articles, wanted posters and other bits of evidence of the Outlaw's exploits” (p. 154) that make up its content into the campfire, and speaks a final eulogy: “All the outlaws are dead” (p. 154). As the play ends the Outlaw is thus freed of his past. Now choosing to be called “Doc,” he will return to civilization under Lily's protective eye.

More significant to the play's structure than the resolution of Lily and the Outlaw's relationship is Archie's growth as a person. It is Archie who undergoes the most extreme transformation—evolving from a “mama's boy” to a self-sufficient human being. Indeed, the play's structure is less a reflection of the interaction of civilization and savagery than of Archie's coming of age. After having helped save the Outlaw's life, Archie is ecstatic: “I feel great! I never saved anybody's life before. The way I feel, I could thresh this whole field myself before they get back. … We did it! We saved his life!” (p. 148). Archie is proud of having been able to act positively during a moment of crisis. This celebratory mood climaxes with Archie and Lily's making love—a union or “marriage” unlike the kind of union or “marriage” of civilization and savagery presented in Moody's The Great Divide. This union—a celebration of Archie's newly born ability to take responsibility for his own life—epitomizes his willingness to embrace the realistic but civilized responsibilities embodied by Lily.¹⁶ Lily functions here less as Archie's lover than as his teacher—thus further emphasizing her connection to the tradition of the frontier woman as civilizing “schoolmarm.”

Moreover, in The Holdup, unlike Moody's play, the celebratory “marriage” does not provide the kind of closure or resolution offered by melodrama. Archie and Lily's relationship is temporary: at the play's end, Lily goes off with the Outlaw, and Archie goes off to an uncertain future. His fate is ambiguous. Archie has grown up and is now ready to take on the real responsibilities imposed by history. Heading eastward, he will join the army and fight in World War I—and yet he has no romantic illusions about this war. The old frontier myth which revolves around a climactic “marriage” of male/West/savagery with female/East/civilization gives way to a more realistic vision of the frontier experience as a growth-process pointing toward some nebulous future climax or resolution.

As a mode of structuring the frontier myth, the marriage rite is thus replaced by the puberty or initiation rite¹⁷—that is, in The Holdup, the frontier experience has become a rite of initiation during which the adolescent protagonist, perhaps representing an “adolescent” United States, learns to embrace an ambiguous historical destiny. Indeed, Joseph Campbell's discussion of “the traditional idea of initiation” seems relevant in this context:

The traditional idea of initiation combines an introduction of the candidate into the techniques, duties, and prerogatives of his vocation with a radical readjustment of his emotional relationship to the parental images. The mystagogue (father or father-substitute) is to entrust the symbols of office only to a son who has been effectually purged of all inappropriate infantile cathexes—for whom the just, impersonal exercise of the powers will not be rendered impossible by unconscious (or perhaps even conscious and rationalized) motives of self-aggrandizement, personal preference, or resentment. Ideally the invested one … is competent … now to enact himself the role of the initiator, the guide, the sun door, through whom one may pass from the infantile illusions of “good” and “evil” to an experience of the majesty of cosmic law, purged of hope and fear, and at peace in the understanding of the revelation of being.¹⁸

For Campbell such an initiation signifies the point when “the child outgrows the popular idyl of the mother breast and turns to face the world of specialized adult action” passing “into the sphere of the father—who becomes, for his son, the sign of the future task, and for his daughter, of the future husband.”¹⁹ In The Holdup, Archie is, of course, the novice and his initiator, the “father-substitute,” is—ironically—the mother figure, Lily. Like the spiritual guide described by Campbell, Lily leads Archie to a full understanding of adulthood. At the risk of suggesting incestual relations, it is important to recall that Lily even initiates him into the mysteries of sexual love. Ostensibly, Archie turns from his natural “mother's breast” to enter “the world of specialized adult action”—in this case, embodied by the new mother figure, Lily. At the play's end, it is, in fact, Lily who promises to sever Archie's tie to his natural mother:

ARCHIE:
… Do me a favor.
LILY:
I owe you one.
ARCHIE:
Write to my mother. It's Olivia Tucker, Clovis. Tell her to take care of herself. Tell her—
LILY:
—you did what you could. You'll write when you can.
ARCHIE:
Yeah. Thanks.

(p. 155)

Paralleling the passage from the natural mother's sphere to that of the “world mother” is another perhaps more significant progression. Archie turns not only from his natural mother's breast but also from the “inappropriate infantile cathexes” or delusions that are embodied by the Outlaw and that obsess Henry. Indeed, the context of an initiation rite provides a means of assimilating the play's darkest moment, Henry's death, into the overall action of the play. As Mircea Eliade has written, initiation rites “precisely because they bring about the neophyte's introduction into the realm of the sacred, imply death to the profane condition, that is, death to childhood.”²⁰ Focusing on the role of “death” in initiation ceremonies, Eliade claims that “it is only in initiation that death is given a positive value.”²¹ If the two brothers in this play, like the two brothers in True West, represent two facets of a composite American character, then Henry's death becomes a necessary prelude to Archie's assumption of adult status and is therefore “positive.” Archie rises above infantile savage/male fantasies to assume a responsible role in the larger world. Norman thus reinterprets the traditional initiation rite. She reverses and redefines the categories delimiting the progression of the novice. Here, initiation is the gateway not from the mother's sphere to the father's, but from the father's sphere (the Outlaw) to the Mother's (Lily). Norman “feminizes” the traditional initiation rite and, consequently, escapes the danger of restructuring the male-centered frontier myth into a new male-centered initiation rite.

Inverting the traditional initiation rite, Norman presents a feminist version of the frontier myth that has general significance. Here, the frontier experience is the source of neither American uniqueness nor present day contradictions in American cultural life, but functions as a paradigm of a kind of maturation which was and remains relevant to American development. Other American women playwrights of the 1980s have written frontier plays taking a similar approach. In plays, like Going to See the Elephant (1982), created by Karen Hensel, Patti Johns, Elana Kent, Sylvia Meredith, Elizabeth Lloyd Shaw, and Laura Toffenetti,²² and Abundance (1989), by Beth Henley, the categories of civilization and savagery, as they appear in the traditional frontier myth, are shown to be too simplistic to provide insight into the frontier experience. In these plays as well as in a musical like Quilters (1984), by Molly Newman and Barbara Damashek, the frontier experience is viewed less as an end in itself than as a gateway to “an experience of the majesty of cosmic law.” Marsha Norman may or may not have paved the way for these other frontier plays, but she took steps toward reformulating the frontier myth, and her work along with that of these other playwrights may help to change the way in which the frontier Western past is viewed and (ab)used in the future.

Notes

1. In this regard, see Jill Dolan's discussion of Marsha Norman's 'night, Mother in the chapter “Feminism and the Canon: The Question of Universality” in The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor, 1988), pp. 19-40.

2. Norman quoted in “In the Wake of Norman's Pulitzer,” Los Angeles Times, 22 April 1983, Calendar: p. 16.

3. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” in The Frontier in American History (Tucson, 1986), p. 1.

4. Frederick Jackson Turner, “Contributions of the West to American Democracy” in The Frontier in American History, p. 259.

5. Ibid., pp. 259-60.

6. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” pp. 3-4.

7. Ibid., p. 4.

8. Idem.

9. In this regard, see Jerry Pickering, “William Vaughn Moody: The Dramatist as Social Philosopher,” Modern Drama, 14 (1971), 93-103. Pickering discusses The Great Divide in terms of the early twentieth-century context defined by the writings of William James and Turner.

10. In viewing the hero as the exponent of “savagery” and the heroine as the exponent of “civilization,” Moody adopts an out-dated traditional approach to gender distinctions. Such an approach is not unusual in nineteenth-century, frontier plays. In her dissertation, “Rhetorical, Dramatic, Theatrical and Social Contexts of Selected American Frontier Plays, 1871-1906” (University of Iowa, 1972), Rosemarie Bank refers to the fact that women in nineteenth-century frontier plays frequently function as “teachers of morality, basic education, and culture.” Interestingly, she writes that this role is “regarded as not only vital to the members of a given family but vital to society as well. Thus, possible dissatisfactions with the restrictive domestic pursuits of women is avoided by giving ‘women's work’ a serious, or seemingly serious, and even elevated position within the social hierarchy as a whole” (Bank, p. 191). Regarding the place of women in the frontier myth as “schoolmarms” and symbols of civilization, also see John Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique (Bowling Green, Ohio, 1984), pp. 75-6.

11. In this regard, see Robert G. Athearn, “‘The Dreaming is Finished’” in The Mythic West in Twentieth-Century America (Lawrence, Kansas, 1986), pp. 78-104.

12. For a lengthy discussion of the way in which The Petrified Forest and The Time of Your Life treat the frontier myth, please see my essay “‘Old West’/New ‘West’: The New Frontier in Sherwood's The Petrified Forest (1934) and Saroyan's The Time of Your Life (1939),” The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, 1,2 (1989), 17-33. The discussion of the development of the frontier myth in nineteenth-century drama presented here parallels a similar discussion in that paper.

13. Several critics writing about Sam Shepard and True West have noted a connection between Shepard's work and Turner's theories. For instance, see Ron Mottram, Inner Landscapes: The Theatre of Sam Shepard (Columbia, Missouri, 1984), pp. 136-37, 147, and Lynda Hart, Sam Shepard's Metaphorical Stages (New York, 1987), pp. 97-99. Also see my essay “‘The Frontier Myth’ on Stage: From the Nineteenth Century to Sam Shepard's True West,” Western American Literature, 24, 3 (1989), 225-41. All further references to True West (New York, 1981) will be cited in the text.

14. Marsha Norman, The Holdup in Four Plays (New York, 1988), p. 107. All further references to this play will be cited in the text.

15. Regarding this darker side of the frontier woman stereotype, see Cawelti, pp. 75-6.

16. In this regard, it is worth noting that Rudolf Erben views Archie's coming of age as another manifestation of a general movement in this play: “… everybody comes of age just like the American West” [“The Western Holdup Play: the Pilgrimage Continues,” in Western American Literature, 23, 4 (1989), 319]. Erben is interested in this play not as a statement on the frontier western myth but as a statement on the socio-political development of the West.

17. In referring to “myths” and “rites” in this discussion, I am assuming that the long-lasting debate over which came first is as irrelevant as Clyde Kluckhohn claimed when he wrote: “To a considerable degree, the whole question of the primacy of ceremonial or mythology is as meaningless as all questions of ‘the hen or the egg’ form. What is really important … is the intricate interdependence of myth (which is one form of ideology) with ritual and many other forms of behavior” [“Myths and Rituals: A General Theory,” reprinted in Myth and Literature: Contemporary Theory and Practice, ed. John B. Vickery (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1966), p. 37].

18. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Bollingen Series 17 (Princeton, 1972), pp. 136-37.

19. Ibid., p. 136.

20. Mircea Eliade, Birth and Rebirth: The Religious Meanings of Initiation in Human Culture, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, 1958), p. 18.

21. Ibid., p. 136.

22. Going to See the Elephant is perhaps not as well known as the other plays mentioned here; however, it was very well-received in Los Angeles when it opened at Los Angeles Repertory Theatre in 1982, and it was listed as one of the “Other Outstanding New Plays Cited By American Theatre Critics Association Members” in The Best Plays of 1982-83, ed. Otis L. Guernsey Jr. (New York, 1983), pp. 62-3.