Frederick Douglass, Radical Pragmatist

A thunderous new musical, American Prophet, whose script adapts Frederick Douglass’s extraordinary writing and oratory, ended its run at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., last weekend. Despair not: Assuming that demand for the subgenre birthed by Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton remains healthy, you’ll probably be able to catch the show on Broadway very soon. But expect any characteristic complexities and imperfections to be eclipsed by the halo the director casts around Douglass, the result being more hagiography than biography.

Still, Charles Randolph-Wright (who has previously directed Motown: The Musical) proves that the Revolutionary or Civil War–Era musical is to be urgently welcomed. One reason for this is that, perhaps because of her young age, America since the Founding has been a nation obsessed with writing and documentation: There’s plenty of historical material, and some of it is exceptionally good. Marcus Hummon (a familiar face on Nashville’s Broadway), who wrote the music and lyrics for American Prophet, clearly understands this. In fact, having made the sensible decision not to paraphrase or reimagine Douglass (a compulsive autobiographer), his latter task became chiefly one of compiling and editing and filling in — rather than writing — the protagonist’s parts. (Cornelius Smith Jr. delivers these capably, though it’s his co-star Kristolyn Lloyd, in the role of Anna Murray Douglass, whose vocal talent stands out.)

Of course, this work, as any exercise in retrospection, carries a risk that it doesn’t even attempt to mitigate: the temptation to idolize one’s subject. Admittedly, the title is deliberate. Douglass’s character is prophetic if slightly preachy; but, then again, the man was prescient in such things as his arguments for women’s suffrage, and his moral internationalism in the 1860s is what the New Left of the 1960s should have aspired to. The show’s sermonic set heightens this mood: Conductor Joseph Joubert and his synthesizer face the amphitheatric stage, as if leading a liturgy, which includes several gospel-inspired pieces, at least one church scene, and a spirited peroration — Douglass instructs the audience, “This is where you’re supposed to say Amen!” As with other prophets, religion is meant to follow the man rather than the other way around.

To nobody’s surprise, the creed the chosen one has been destined to deliver happens to coincide with the popular moral sensibilities of today. It would have been a great omission had the performance not included the portentous “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” speech, which in its evocation of “the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake” presaged the Civil War. (These lines form the chorus of the main number.) But it is a great omission that the performance does not include the parts of that same speech in which Douglass expresses his reverence for the Constitution and for the Declaration of Independence. It is stirring to hear Douglass say, as he did in 1847, that he has no country and no love for America. This is rightly part of Randolph-Wright’s and Hummon’s script. But equally important sentiments are forgotten, such as that America’s mission is to become the most “perfect national illustration of the unity and dignity of the human family that the world has ever seen,” which Douglass wrote in 1869. Though abolitionist luminary William Lloyd Garrison probably did harbor a petty rivalry towards his protégé — which offers some humorous reprieve in the musical — there was also an ideological break between the two. Garrison considered the Constitution irredeemable and retained his radicalism (with a penchant for theatrics — he publicly burned a copy of the Constitution on July 4, 1854) as Douglass, who rejected disunion and saw salvation in the American political establishment, outgrew his. “I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong” is a fine expression of good statesmanship.

The demi-deification of Frederick Douglass does more than flatten the arc of his intellectual life, which the musical claims to trace. Insofar as prophets are conduits of the divine, they must be not only consistent and faultless but elevated, detached from the temporal and the earthly. Put otherwise, they must be unlike men. In this production, Douglass’s estrangement from Anna Murray is diluted in scenes of an occasionally long-distance relationship, mutually endured. (Murray, by the few historical accounts that mention her, was somewhat saintly, and she helped Douglass escape to freedom in an event that the musical beautifully enacts.) While Julia Griffiths — the British abolitionist who helped with the editing and publication of Douglass’s North Star newspaper and other works, and with whom Douglass was rumored to have had an affair — does appear in the production, Ottilie Assing, the German feminist with whom Douglass probably did have an affair (biographer David Blight concludes), does not. Douglass’s second wife, Helen Pitts, with whom he spent the last decade of his life, is also absent.

Edmund Burke warns against infusing art with pedagogy, or adulterating it with the grubby business of social criticism. American history is full of episodes grand and awe-inspiring enough to elicit the sort of terror that Burke thinks is requisite for one to experience the sublime. American Prophet achieves this by virtue of its subject alone. We — and our art — would be better off if we recognized that the just and the beautiful and the good can be embodied in mere men. We have no need for their canonization.