An Experiment in Modern Vaudeville: Archiving the Wretched Refuse in John Howard Lawson’s Processional

Abstract

John Howard Lawson’s Processional: A Jazz Symphony of American Life (1925) was an experiment in putting mass cultural forms to leftist avant-garde uses. But as the play negotiates the conflict between two basic principles for organizing mass culture’s stock materials – between vaudeville and the symphony – it stages a basic tension between an item-level approach to collecting “acts” and a collection-level imposition of structure on atomized parts. Lawson’s play staggers between an impulse to present a found poem of American popular, national, and industrial culture, warts and all, and an impulse to submit that culture to the kind of focused critique that could extricate the play from the vaudeville logic of the commodity fetish. This unstable but productive archival détente would give way in Processional ’s afterlife, when its vaudeville excesses, particularly its representation of stereotyped ethnic difference within the national collection, proved subject to a history of reappraisal and de-accessioning.