Theatre in the Combat Zone: The Military Theatricals at Philadelphia, 1778

Abstract

This paper will consider the connections between different types of theatre and theatricality under conditions of war in Philadelphia in 1778 during the British occupation. The ethical cleansing of the title refers to the Mischianza, the giant medieval tournament and naval regatta on the Delaware organized by the British on the eve of their departure in May 1778. Staged theatre, improvised by the personnel of both sides with army and navy soldiers performing texts from the regular British 18th-century dramatic repertoire, was also a feature common both to the winter encampment in Valley Forge and to the British in their conventional theatre in Philadelphia. The Mischianza was an extension of these types of theatricals. What I will be arguing is that a study of the connections between theatre, performance and theatricality allows us to model the disparate forces at work in a society experiencing the irreversible social and political changes of war. The kinds of theatrical modelling I am suggesting will attempt to describe a distributed, dialogic, set of performance inscriptions out of which Philadelphia emerged as an urban space in the post-colonial phase. In short, both the theatricals on both sides, the Mischianza included, were attempts at territorializing space, inscribing ownership, allegiance and cultural value through the repetition of performance. The most promising theoretical model for analyzing these complex cultural interactions arises from the synthesizing the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Manuel DeLanda in A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity.