Staging Poetic Justice: Public Spectacle of Private Grief in the Musical Parade

Abstract

This paper makes inquiries into the 1998 musical Parade by playwright Alfred Uhry and composer Jason Robert Brown, based on the historic case of Leo Frank, a Jewish industrialist from New York running a pencil factory in Atlanta and accused of murdering the 13-year-old girl Mary Phagan in 1913. How can the thorny case be represented with any fidelity on stage when all the facts have not come to light? What can a theatre researcher contribute to or comment on a controversial production of a reproduction of a historical incident that has never ceased to produce great furors over the past 90 years? In the absence of irrefutable legal evidence that could close the case and in the face of contending camps that claim justice on each side, the author will stay above the litigation fray and distance himself from any attempt to pass judgment on the innocence or guilt of people involved in the historic case. Rather, the paper first probes the context surrounding the case, including war, class, race, and to a lesser extent, sexuality by examining it from the perspective of historical legacy, such as the post-bellum South reeling from the repercussions of the Civil War defeat, the regional animosity between the highly industrialized North and New Industrial South, the class antagonism of management and labor in the pencil factory, the ethnic strife between blacks, whites, and Jews, and the conventional bias against the perceived sexual perversion of Jews and blacks.Secondly, the paper discusses the embedded theatricality of both the national institution of trial by jury and the regional institution of lynching in the US. Then, it considers the staging of Frank's trial, conviction, death penalty, commuted sentence and final lynching, each phase of the case presented as public spectacle. Musicals have been conventionally considered a genre that thrives on light-hearted sentimentality and fantasy, but its recourse to spectacle and appeal to emotion paradoxically lends itself to the heightened emotion of the conflicted victims in private as well as the specular nature of the trial and lynching in public, giving utterance to both the public outrage and private trauma.The paper concludes that since vigilante justice takes over and continues the vicious cycle of vengeance where legal justice fails, poetic justice in the form of theatrical representation, albeit not without its problematics, should be rightfully taken into account as a viable means of redressing public wrong and representing private grief.