The American Season

I've been looking forward to July 2026: it marks the end of the 25-26 theatrical season, and this year, it means that we're finally through the marathon of American™ Theater. You know, the 1776 s. The What The Constitution Means To Me s. Every theater came out with their season of American™ Theater- lineups that all made a lot of sense and were great for a semiquincentennial-minded crowd. Nothing really surprised me, and a lot of it was good theater, but there was one theater company here in Philly who I thought really nailed the brief: Philadelphia Artists Collective, with their productions of Inheritors by Susan Glaspell and The Contrast by Royall Tyler.

Inheritors I saw in January at the Community College of Philadelphia's theater, an apt venue given what I was about to see. Morton Sr. founds Morton College based on a deep sense of idealism and stewardship of the land, decades later his granddaughter, Madeline, sees his ideals put to the test (and failed) by the adults around her. Considered one of America's first historical dramas, it's the kind of play that if written today, I might criticize as too on the nose, but given that it was written 105 years ago, I really can't levy that against Glaspell, can I? 

The show touches on a lot of issues I would have considered contemporary: freedom of speech on college campuses, the expulsion of foreign students bringing the legal threat of deportation, indegenous rights, and the inhumane treatment of people in prisons. It's not necessarily seamless, the show was written in 1921, but that's where PAC and director Abby Weissman made some really smart choices. The sound design was sparse but achingly effective, the use of an imagined jail cell drawn on the floor in chalk that trapped multiple characters; I especially appreciated how the casting tackled the racial aspects of the piece: Poles and Swedes are not considered non-white in the ways they were in the early 1900s. All of those characters were portrayed by actors (a great Justin Jaine and Zachary Valdez) a modern audience would read as racialized.

It was an excellent production my partner and I talked about for weeks after seeing it, and somehow, it was made even better after I saw The Contrast.

The Contrast was a hit in it's time and is still a solid comedy in this one. The first appearance of the Stage Yankee stock character in American theater, the play takes the classic form of the European Comedy of Manners and frames it in a newly-American point of view. It was a play that made me realize: I had never seen an American play from 1787! I didn't know what American theater was about in the decades after the revolution, let alone what they were joking about. Unsurprisingly, they were making fun of Europeans, but my favorite part was seeing how they made fun of the Americans- passionate, spirited, perhaps a little dumb, obscenely forward-thinking, and always going on about the "spirit of the ideals of this fair nation" or what have you. (Shoutout, again, to Zachary Valdez, and to an incredible clown Kevin McCann.)

With these jokes about American idealism so firmly on display, I found myself thinking about Morton from Inheritors once again. What once seemed like an overly-flowery, blindingly optimistic man who fought through the War of Independence and was The Founding Pioneer of his town suddenly felt like a character grounded in realism, the man behind the joke of what was being satirized in The Contrast. Madeline's insistence on being faithful to her grandfather's ideals as an act of patriotism in the face of a free-speech crackdown was supported by historical precedence, a tradition she could see clearer than I could and wanted to carry on.

As someone who is cynical about American patriotism in general (can you tell?), it was eye-opening to see how these ideas evolved and held strong for people who believed in "radical" things like education access for all, prison abolition, and land back principles. These two plays were filling a blindspot I didn't even know I had, and it recontextualizes the American theater that I am familiar with, all of which was written after these two plays. Well done, Philadelphia Artists Collective! You made me think kindly about America, something I didn't think was going to happen this theatrical year.