The first home I remember was a caravan behind a pub in the woods around Brookmans Park in Hertfordshire. I had spent the first nine months of my life in an incubator with whooping cough and the doctors had suggested that getting out of the city into the fresh air might help my recovery. We moved first to Clacton, to be by the sea, and then to that caravan.
My memories are golden and sunshiny, of bright open spaces, hazy summer days, an outdoor life picking flowers and berries: a childhood lived, it seemed, skipping around in meadows. History, like memory, is fluid. I remember fragments: exploring woodland paths, learning how to whistle through grass, playing in a glade filled with bluebells.
On a rainy Wednesday night, 31st March 1943, Oklahoma! raised the curtain at the St. James Theatre, Broadway. Betty Garde, as Aunt Eller, sat alone on stage churning butter and from the wings came the rich baritone of Alfred Drake singing, ‘There’s a bright, golden haze on the meadow.’ That night has come to occupy a revered position in musical theatre historiography: the night the modern musical was born.
Oklahoma! is a convenient origin point, not because it can truly be said to be the first of its kind, but because mythology demands a moment of genesis. The genesis we choose is always, to an extent, the one we need in order to understand what came after.
I was a pale, delicate child. My hair, rose-gold in hue, hung around my face in long gossamer ringlets. I was a willow-the-wisp, a fey, fairy, sylvan creature skipping from place to place. I was never anchored, my place was on the wind. I felt, have always felt, that I belonged somewhere else. My brother and sister, ruddy, dark-haired, earthbound children were often tasked with looking after me. How do you hold someone who doesn’t want to be held? I was happiest alone, crawling through a bush, seeking fairies in the undergrowth.
Curly McLain in Oklahoma! has been theorised as an American Adam, a symbolic figure of birth or rebirth. Within this pastoral mythology he is not merely a romantic lead but the physical embodiment of the harmony sought by both Oklahoma in its pre-state territory days and by the America of 1943 emerging from Depression and war. He is hope. He is moral, decent, socially acceptable: an archetype who announces his arrival in song. He represents what America hopes to become: a poet-hero who can be both vulnerable and emotionally articulate without sacrificing his masculinity.
Understanding the mythos of the American cowboy is critical to reading Oklahoma!. The cowboy has long functioned as a folkloric figure within American culture. Myths are the tools we use to define a culture. Oklahoma! is set before Oklahoma achieved statehood and became part of the Union, and it was first performed at the moment when America sought to redefine itself on the world stage. At its heart Oklahoma! is about how a community is created, and its dramatic tension lies in how that community responds to those who threaten it.
Any reading of early frontier/cowboy literature cannot ignore the intimate relationships between men that are, at the very least, homosocial and, at best, queer-coded. The cowboy is, by nature, an outsider, which perhaps explains his importance in the queer community. His is a paradoxical position, he enforces normative masculinity while also acknowledging that that same masculinity is a costume, a stylised rendition. Curly McLain is a queerly legible figure because he presents masculinity as performance, his authority coming, not from brute force or dominance but from his ability to unite the community in song.
Curly is of the outdoors: he is free to sing wherever he chooses, to praise nature’s beauty. His voice, a lyrical baritenor sits in harmony with everyone, his songs root him in the community but also, as the highest male vocal line, position him as leader. Despite being the outsider he is clearly socially integrated.
At the opposite end of the scale is Jud Fry. His timbre is darker, rooted. His bass voice, always enclosed in space, caged, never free, bears a more troubling fecundity, one that the pastoral world cannot accommodate. The threat to the community comes not from Curly, the outsider, but from within, from the smokehouse. Where Curly’s masculinity is socially acceptable, Jud’s is threatening.
The gender mores and sexual politics of Oklahoma! initially seem questionable - grab her and kiss her, you can have the girl for fifty dollars - but a different reading might suggest a community actively negotiating the conditions under which desire and sexuality are expressed. The courtship of Curly and Laurey is public, structured. Sexuality is socially moderated.
In these early book musicals, the secondary couple, Ado Annie & Will Parker in this instance, often serve as narrative counterpoint to the principal. Where Laurey and Curly must, by necessity, serve a romantic ideal, Ado & Will are allowed to be messier, to acknowledge the genuine complexity of romantic relationships. Ado Annie’s song, I Cain’t Say No, while often played solely as comic relief, nevertheless allows her to express sexual desire without shame or judgement, a startlingly subversive idea for 1943. All Er Nuthin’ allows Ado and Will to negotiate, within the moral framework of their community, the terms of their relationship with a candour that feels surprisingly modern. Will’s understanding of masculinity is not only a version that he must learn, it is one that he is taught - by a woman, no less.
Curly’s masculinity, by contrast, is aspirational and innate. His courtship of Laurey is mythic: their union, between farmer and cowman, carries a nation’s hopes and dreams. It is an idyll and our belief in their happiness must carry the force of destiny. Ado & Will allow for realism, their appetites expressed through comedy and exaggeration. We root for them but don’t, perhaps, hold out too much hope for them.
Between aspiration and realism, there is no place for Jud Fry. His sexual appetite cannot be contained within the social framework of the community, he is an outsider who cannot be included, the threat that must be neutralised. At the heart of Oklahoma!, Jud is the darkness on the edge.
There are many theories relating to how a child recognises and demonstrates gender roles. On the Bem Sex Role Inventory my profile score is Androgynous and I rank more highly on Femininity than Masculinity. According to Sandra Bem’s Gender Schema Theory, individuals who identify strongly with their gender process information through the lens of that gender. Androgynous individuals exhibit both masculine and feminine thinking and process information through both lenses. Masculinity has always felt presentational to me, an exhausting performance that I have never understood nor been able to navigate. For some, masculinity is more innate and less performative. It appears effortless. For others it must be consciously constructed.
The world depicted by the pastoral myth also appears effortless but harmony is most visible when it is threatened. The pastoral invites us to believe in innocence, even as it requires the careful containment of whatever might violate it. In Oklahoma! it is Jud Fry. In my own pastoral idyll it was a strange man in a bluebell glade.
History, like memory, is fluid. I remember fragments: a heavy overcoat, the sound of my screams, being carried quickly away from the bluebells, blood. No more than snapshots. For decades the man in a heavy overcoat in a bluebell glade haunted my nightmares.
Perhaps Laurey’s dream ballet at the end of Act One is better understood as a nightmare. It is a psychosexual realisation of her fears, of the darkness at the edge of her world that haunts her. Her subconscious recognises the instability of the pastoral promise, her fear of male dominance. The choreography is a dramaturgical language that explores sexual danger, externalises erotic desire and exposes the truth that the pastoral myth is a maintained illusion. Having broken the world apart, albeit in a dream, Act 2 must rebuild it.
How do you put the world back together after it has been torn apart?
As, perhaps, a resolution to the crisis exposed in the dream ballet, Act 2 opens with the Farmer & the Cowman, suggesting cohesion is still possible, competing masculinities may be integrated and harmony can be restored. The dance comes close to failure as competition arises with each side attempting to dominate. It falls to Aunt Eller to restore order. The idyll holds, but it must be enforced.
In musical theatre a threat to the community must be neutralised in one of two ways. It can be absorbed into the community. This requires transformative change, giving up the old life and old ways and accepting the new. Or, it must be expelled from the community with no chance of redemption and no way back.
It is particularly important in Oklahoma! that the community triumphs. It is a creation myth: in Curly we have our Adam, in Laurey our Eve. We have, in Aunt Eller, a kind of benevolent deity. We must cast out the serpent.
Curly sells his saddle, his horse and his gun. He sacrifices everything that identifies him as a cowboy, all that marks him as an outsider. He models masculinity as sacrifice, not domination. All that remains is to expel Jud and to ensure he can never return.
And yet…
I cannot end here. To imply that Curly and Jud are opposite, that one version is better than the other, that masculinity is either this or that is reductive. Curly is no more essentially good than Jud is essentially evil. The poet-hero who has a beautiful feeling that everything’s going his way is also cruel and manipulative, while the poet-anti-hero, confined in his cage, dreams of long wavy hair that falls like rain in a storm. They are less than opposites, they are variations.
Masculinity is a contradiction. Oklahoma! does not resolve that. I saw handsome cowboys dancing and heard their song and I recognised myself in that. I saw femininity and power and recognised that. I saw brutality and dominance and violence and aggression and I recognised that too.
But I did not put it all together at the time. Not until many years had passed, and not without help. And then, I saw variations. Finding yourself in the variation and not in the definition is a homecoming. I saw that I could choose.
History, like memory, is fluid. I remember fragments: the golden haze as the sun rises, the feeling of grass tickling my bare legs, the sight of a glade filled with bluebells.
And that is all.