The first time I remember being warned that a theatrical production would have disturbing sequences, particularly involving “cannon and musket fire” was preceding the play Tecumseh!, a play written by Allan W. Eckert exploring the life of the titular chieftain. It was also the first time I remember being disappointed at such a warning, though I can’t remember for certain whether this was because I didn’t think the cannons were that loud or because I didn’t think the warning warned enough. But the play was decent enough for my eleven-ish-year-old tastes and afterwards my grandmother bought me The Frontiersmen: A Narrative, a book by the same author concerning many of the same events.
The Frontiersmen isn’t primarily about Tecumseh, though. Instead it focuses more on the life of Simon Kenton, and the trials of his life as he drifts between America’s then-westernmost towns and the wilderness beyond. With both of these works, it’s very apparent that when you focus directly on one single person in history, their life becomes very interesting just by the nature of being around events enshrined in history.
The (maybe apocryphal) story behind the writing of Tecumseh! is that Allan Eckert refused to watch any other productions or read any scripts until he had finished writing his own. He “didn’t want certain tropes or gimmicks to pollute his writing process” or something to that effect. And I’m not sure if I believe that, or if it is true, the roughness Eckert was going for has been sanded down over the years. A lot of effort is put into a flair for the dramatic -- stage lights cut from one side of the stage to the other on a dime to represent two sides of a conflict, the aforementioned musket fire is almost rhythmic in its cue. To be fair, the production I saw had been around for forty-five years, and Eckert has been dead for almost ten of them, so changes are bound to happen (hey, I wrote a blog post on that!), but it does mean that “miracle play” narrative falls a little flat.
Recommending The Frontiersmen is difficult, and not only because it’s physically heavy enough to kill someone if it fell on their head. Eckert pulls no punches describing scenes of violent gore, from scalping to the ritual gauntlet to things with intestines that I’m not even going to attempt to describe. You have to be really interested in American history, have a strong stomach, and the willingness to sit through what some might consider a lot of fluff to get to the really interesting moments.
Recommending Tecumseh!, on the other hand, well, you still have to deal with a prop scalp and some musket-fire, but the “sanded-down roughness” I mentioned is only for the better, I think. Things just click together, author license means that historical events still make a tight enough script (from what I remember, at least), and the things that weren’t that good will probably have been improved upon in the years since I’ve seen it.
I had this all in my head while laying out the theme of these three Raindrops and Roses posts, but then I got to thinking about that disconnect. More specifically, how can I recommend only one of these two media written by the same person about many of the same events? And that got me thinking more about adaptation and the differences in form between media. “Pondering adaptation and America” was the teaser last time, and I’m not really sure I have more than comparing these pieces of media. The nature of adaptation seems like a theme all on its own, so that’s what we’ll be taking a look at next time.
-F
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