Title: Re-staging Roy: Citizen Cohn and the Search for Xanadu
Abstract: Re-staging Roy: Citizen Cohn and the Search for Xanadu Stephen J. Bottoms (bio) Roy Marcus Cohn (1926–1986) was a prodigiously talented but notoriously unscrupulous lawyer, who played a significant role in several of the most dramatic episodes of post-World War II American history. In the early 1950s, as a young Assistant U.S. Attorney, he first came to public attention as prosecuting counsel in the trial of the alleged spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and succeeded in sending them both to the electric chair via illegal, private harrassment of the trial judge. He then became chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, the upper chamber’s closest equivalent to the notorious House Committee on Un-American Activities. Though his star faded with that of McCarthy himself after 1954, he returned to the public stage in the 1970s and 1980s, as a rehabilitated celebrity of the New Right, and a major campaigner in the cause of counteracting the influence of 1960s “permissiveness.” Despite his high profile, though, Cohn’s name—unlike those of so many of the people with whom he fraternized (Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, Ronald Reagan, and Rupert Murdoch, to name but a few) or with whom he crossed swords (most notably Robert Kennedy)—never really acquired currency as a “household word.” It might therefore seem surprising that, since his death from an AIDS-related illness in 1986, he has become a figure repeatedly represented in a diverse range of new dramas and theatre pieces. Yet as someone whose life appears to have been a catalogue of glaring contradictions, he has been posthumously seized on as epitomizing—and so perhaps illuminating—certain of the contradictions in America’s current political and cultural climate. This is especially true of the three theatre pieces that I want to explore in this paper: playwright Tony Kushner’s mammoth, Pulitzer-Prize-winning meditation on the state of the nation since AIDS, Angels in America (1991–92); We Got A Date (1989), a performance devised by the Chicago-based physical theatre group, Goat Island; and Roy Cohn/Jack Smith (1992), a pair of complementary monologues devised by Ron Vawter of the Wooster Group and performed by him on [End Page 157] numerous occasions up to the time of his own death from AIDS in April 1994. 1 These pieces are very different in style and tone, but each uses its representation of “Roy” to raise important questions about the condition of America’s multicultural, heterogeneous society, and particularly about the perpetuation—through self-reproducing performativity on the part of both the powerful and the powerless—of certain dominant, narrowly homogenized views of social and sexual “normality.” 2 Before setting out this argument in more detail, I want briefly to sketch out the elements of Cohn’s life story that have prompted such interest since his death. Put simply, Cohn was a man who actively persecuted those very sections of society with whom he might be expected to sympathize most. Firstly, coming from a Jewish family, Cohn was conspicuous in his hostility towards other Jews: an alarming proportion of the alleged ex-Communists whom he subsequently dragged before the McCarthy committee were (like the Rosenbergs) Jewish, and he was notorious for off-handedly voicing anti-semitic sentiments. Secondly, he was virulent in his condemnation of homosexuality, and in the 1970s and 1980s actively campaigned against the gay rights movement; this despite the fact that his own promiscuous homosexuality was an open secret. To the day of his death, Cohn insisted that he was suffering from liver cancer, not AIDS, and threatened to sue anyone who disputed this. Clearly then, Cohn was a figure of enormous contradictions. To date, however, attempts to examine his life biographically have succeeded only in raising still more questions. The Autobiography of Roy Cohn, published posthumously in 1988, is, as one might expect, a tissue of self-justifying rhetoric, more interesting for what it leaves out (any mention of a personal life, for example), than for the succession of anecdotes around which it is built. Interestingly, Cohn’s ghost-writer, Sidney Zion, is a journalist in the traditional liberal mold, but he is...
Publication Year: 1996
Publication Date: 1996-05-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 6
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