Intellectual Improv

It's a little sad that it has come to this: respected scholars stooping to dress themselves in 19th century garb, solely to trick us into partaking in an educational moment.

Think of it as the professor's Halloween Ball: a small core of academics nationwide, including University of Nevada, Reno, English professor Anne Bail Howard, donning the look, mannerisms and personalities of historical figures, hoping to capture the imagination of a literature-illiterate MTV nation.

They call it Chautauqua. Chata - wha? Yes, Chautauqua, pronounced Sha-ta-kwa. Named after the upstate New York lake where it originated, a Chautauqua is a history lesson come to life -- an educational road show in which scholars reincarnate long-dead intellectuals to better capture an audience's attention.

Unfortunately, straightforward lectures on Stephen Crane and Mark Twain aren't exactly turning them out in droves.

"Some academics don't quite like this -- that people have to do it this way," Doug Mishler, program coordinator of the Nevada Humanities Committee's new office in Southern Nevada, admits. The committee has brought the first Chautauqua to Las Vegas this week at the Rainbow Library Amphitheater.

"I have a Ph.D. and taught history for five years, but I don't have a problem with it," Mishler continues. "If you can reach a much wider audience and make it more palatable to them and they start thinking and buy the books, does it really matter in any significant way how you've reached them?"

Chautauqua hearkens back to an earlier time of pre-digital entertainment popularized in the 1870s through the mid-1920s, when whole communities would eagerly await the arrival of the traveling troupe for its dramatic and musical performances, and stimulation of public discourse.

Revived in 1976 by the North Dakota Humanities Council to showcase its programs, these intellectual vaudevilles have now become popular -- if you use the term loosely -- in about 33 states, including Nevada.

Reno hosted its first Chautauqua eight years ago, while Boulder City has held one for the past five years. Following on Las Vegas' heels, Pahrump plans to have its first in December.

But Chautauquas are still most favorably received in the heartland, in states such as North Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma, where there's not much by way of competing entertainment.

There, locals often prepare as enthusiastically for the Chautauqua as if the Wells Fargo wagon were a comin', boning up on the characters' written material to better challenge the performers.

Selling the past

Howard, a seven-year veteran of the National Chautauqua Tour, which often performs in towns with a populace no larger than 100, is curious to see how it will be received in Las Vegas.

"Las Vegas is the biggest city we've ever done it in," she says. "It'll be quite intriguing to see what happens here."

The closest one in a city of this size, held recently in San Bernadino, Calif., tanked.

"We're not foolish," Mishler, whose modest goal is to attract a crowd of 500 for this first year, concedes. "We know it's going to be a difficult task in Las Vegas to build an audience. But instead of trying to out-glitz Siegfried & Roy, we thought, 'why don't we come up with something that is lacking here?' "

The Las Vegas stop will feature American "Writers of the Gilded Age," the period between the Civil War and World War I, and will include Kate Chopin ("The Awakening"), Mark Twain ("The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"), Stephen Crane ("The Red Badge of Courage"), Zitkala-Sa ("American Indian Stories"), W.E.B. Du Bois ("The Souls of Black Folks") and Jack London ("The Call of the Wild").

In future years, the committee hopes to hire area performers and localize the characters to those with a Las Vegas connection.

The one hitch? They have to be "pretty long-term dead," Mishler says. "We even talked about Bugsy Siegel, but some people are upset about that idea. You have to be careful if you start treading on a family member's name."

One way to skirt the issue is to find historical personas whose themes parallel real-life figures of today.

"You can't do Steve Wynn," Mishler explains, "but the theme -- build a bigger casino and people will come -- well, that's P.T. Barnum."

And the prevalent issues of the end of the 19th century -- racial injustice, women's place in society, disparity of wealth -- have hardly been resolved at the end of the 20th.

"What people find out is when they get to ask questions of a character, they have questions about how what he said affects the issues of today," he says. "So, if it's Jack London talking about how man and the environment have to get along, that's very pertinent to our lives today."

Getting "in character"

However, don't bother asking the Chautauqua players what they think about Yucca Mountain.

When they are "in character," most refuse to take questions that demand a modern perspective until the end, when they revert to themselves and answer questions from a posthumous perspective.

"I like to stay in the past," Mishler, who has portrayed Barnum, Andrew Carnegie and, most recently, Henry Ford, says. "If they want to ask me about Bill Clinton, I'll say, 'No, my president, to my dismay, is Roosevelt.' "

And when an audience member once asked Howard about an unpublished work of Louisa May Alcott's, true to character, she responded indignantly, "Why, you must have been going through my personal papers!"

"What's fun," Mishler adds, "is when they get mad at you. I've had women who got mad at P.T. Barnum because he didn't want women to vote. I try to explain why it's consistent that he'd be against it, and that for his day, he was actually very liberated."

But the more heated the discussion, the more successful the Chautauqua.

"The symphony leaves you entertained, but after a Chautauqua, you go away thinking about what you've seen and heard and talked about that night," Mishler says. "I think that's the real benefit of this form. People do want to learn things. They are looking for substance and this is a way to get substance in a very entertaining format."

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