“American Homespun Fascists”: Seán O’Casey and the Returning Veteran at the American Negro Theatre

Abstract

This article explores four works produced by the American Negro Theatre (ANT) for stage and radio between September 1945 and July 1946 – Arthur Laurents’s The Face (1945), Samuel J. Kootz’s Home Is the Hunter (1945–46), Erik Barnouw’s The Story They’ll Never Print (1946), and Seán O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1946) – arguing that they collectively constitute a coherent, if uneven, set of responses to what ANT co-founder and director Abram Hill had called in September 1945 “one of the most pressing questions facing the world today: What is the reaction of the returning Negro GI to his land of democracy?” This essay identifies the interrelatedness of these four works and draws on archival sources to pay close attention to the production of Juno (which has never previously been discussed at length or in connection with the ANT’s other returning veteran dramas). Analysing the ANT’s Juno as an oblique “returning Negro soldier drama” that critically retools what Judith Smith terms “trading places” stories of the immediate post-war years, this essay further contends that the company trod a fine line between an explicit and an implicit critique of the United States, protesting against “American homespun fascists” and asserting the ordinariness of African American soldiers. While this strategy sometimes risked opacity, it invited astute audiences to make connections that were inferred rather than asserted and thus circumvented accusations of anti-Americanism.