By Ingrid Schnader
The original script for “1776: The Musical,” which was written in 1969, calls for a cast of two women and 24 men.
But when Samford University theater director Chelsea Nicholson got hold of the script, she decided to take a different artistic direction.
“Look at Congress today,” she said. “It’s 80% men, 20% women in 2019. And that’s only after that huge election last year where there was an influx of women in Congress. It was still only 20%. So, our cast was the flip of that – 80% women, 20% men.”
Samford’s production of 1776, which ran Nov. 21-24 at the Harrison Theatre, cast four men and 22 women.
“It’s set in the 18th century, when women didn’t have a voice outside of their households,” Nicholson said. “So, to get to hear them speak those words, when they weren’t given a voice at the time, was really important to me and something I was really interested in looking at.”
It’s all about representation, Nicholson said. For thousands of years in theater history, even going back to ancient Greece, women didn’t have any representation on stage; men played all of the roles.
“I’m kind of at a point in my career, both as an actor and a director, where I’m really interested in seeing how wide we can open up casting and getting people who wouldn’t normally get a chance to share their voice in certain stories on stage,” she said.
She asked the cast members to play the characters in an honest, human way. She didn’t want it to be a joke; she wanted them to treat it like any other part.
“Even (in) one of the very first rehearsals, I said, ‘I’m not looking for you to be more like a man. If I wanted these characters to be more manly, I would have cast 24 men and two women, as it’s called for,’” she said. “I wasn’t interested in that. I was interested in the human qualities of these historical figures who are dried up, dead and only living on textbook pages.”
For Kentucky native Anna Medley, this was a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” She’s a theater major in her junior year at Samford, and she played Benjamin Franklin in the production.
“I have on my resume Benjamin Franklin, 1776,” she said. “And you would never think that I could do that. It’s such a cool opportunity to say I got to step into this historical figure’s shoes as a person and not as a man.”
Medley found out that she got the part in May. Then later that summer, she had the opportunity to visit the founding father’s hometown and museum in Pennsylvania. She spent her visit learning more about her character’s life.
“I found out that he’s just so optimistic,” she said. “He’s striving to want to learn everything, but he’s also very respectful in other people’s opinions. He doesn’t think his opinion is the ‘right’ one; he’s open to everything. He just wants to learn and grow.”
She discovered that Franklin loved to read. He only had two years of formal schooling, but he constantly read books, stayed curious and kept an open mind. Despite being a woman born almost three centuries after Franklin, Medley saw a little bit of herself in his character.
“I’m a history nerd,” she said. “I love learning new things, and taking new opportunities, and taking classes I probably wouldn’t take in the real world and delving into everything I can.”
Overcoming Obstacles
Even though the original 1776 script was written only five decades ago, it contains some off-color and lewd remarks that would be taboo in a modern script.
Women are always the butt of the jokes in the production, Nicholson said. She considered cutting out some of those lines.
“These are just so offensive,” she said. “They make me uncomfortable as a woman, as a director.
“But then I was like, no. I think if we’re twisting this show and putting women into these shoes, then it’s going to actually pump those statements up to the point that we’re all like, ‘Whoa, why did men talk like this? Why do they still talk like this sometimes?’”
Medley said she tried not to take those lines too seriously; otherwise, she would have been uncomfortable reading them. It helped her to remember that she is a woman talking to another woman.
“For me, saying those things, it brought to light how women were treated back then,” she said. “But they’re there, and that’s history, and we have to bring light to that.”
Finally, after spending three hours on stage trying to decide whether America should declare independence, the delegates come to a compromise and sign the Declaration of Independence at the end of the show.
Nicholson said she hopes the audience walked away from 1776 with a sense of compromise.
“That we were able to reach across the aisle and hold hands with people we didn’t agree with in 1776 – we need to do the same thing today,” she said. “Hopefully, the show sparked conversations amongst friends and families, like ‘What can I do in my own circle, in my own community?’”