Rag Dolly

A point is often made, even by the actors themselves, that one of the driving nails in this show's coffin was the scale of the venues not matching the intimate staging the playwright had intended. As stages and audiences got bigger, the characters movements became more over-the-top and circus-like. To make that point, here is the size and seating for every theater venue that Rag Dolly played in in the 80's:

• The Egg - December 1984/5
  • Venue Name:
  • Stage Width: 39 feet
  • Seats: 982 (they actually just let you look at all the rental info including scale drawings on their website and I think that's pretty rad.)
• Moscow - January 1986
  • Venue Name: Natalia Sats Children's Theater (I'm assuming main stage)
  • Stage Width: Unavaliable
  • Seats: 1,100
• Kennedy Center - August/September 1986
  • Venue Name: Opera House
  • Stage Width: 100 feet
  • Seats: 2,347
• Broadway - October 1986
  • Venue Name: Nederlander Theatre
  • Stage Width: 86 feet
  • Seats: 1,235

Why, pardon me, the actual hell, would you do a show like this in a 2K seat theater. This show about how even the humblest beginnings can inspire hope and joy. About childlike imagination and whimsy. With a script that can be very introspective and often dry in its humor. Why. Dear Gods Why.

While working on the script, William Gibson wrote that he set Rag Dolly 50 years in the past. Which, in 1984, was 1934. Despite the playbill vaguely placing the setting as "Sometime Earlier This Century".

(At least the setting is not inacurate, we'll get to that)

But I believe that the show was very purposefuly set in 1984, the middle of the US's Great Depression (what I suspect will someday be called the "first one").

William Gibson was 20 in 1934. He graduated High School and was in an out of college during the Great Depression. He was politically active, joined Socialist and Communist youth groups, wrote extensively in his autobiography A Mass for the Dead about how political unrest alienated him from his comfortably conservative parents. "There was not a year thereafter in which I did not feel endangered by my country, I lived within its mouth like Jonah". The 1930's were not picked at random.

Nor was the date picked for accuracy. Marcella Gruelle, whom the main story is based on, died in 1915. Raggedy Ann was patented earlier the same year, and the first book published in 1918. By the 1930's the Raggedy Ann franchise was in full swing and already had at least 16 books and even more stories published as newspaper serials. To those unfamiliar with the history (unthinkable) the idea of "Sometime Earlier This Century" seems accurate enough, but there's more dramaturgy to investigate here.

The playbill and script agree that the show takes place in New York, by the river. Specificaly the Hudson, with lines like "backwards night, moon's coming up over the Hudson" and an old staging note that The Palisades should be visible in the backdrop. However, Gibson also wrote in stage directions that Marcella and her father live in a "tipsy shack".

If this was in a more rural setting, a "tipsy shack" could be charming, romantic. But anyone who lives in a big city knows that you see plenty of "tipsy shacks" and people usually don't have kind words for them or the people who depend on them for survivial. I fully believe that Marcella and her father were intended live in a homeless community, called "Shanty Towns" or "Hoovervilles" in the time period. They were very common in large cities like New York (as today) and Central Park contained several.

Ok why does this matter? Is it weird to insist a character was written to be homeless?

Class struggle is a very constant theme in the script itself. Poppa is down to his "last nickel" and Mommy leaves them for a rich man with a nice car. General D. the opportunistic army recruiter offers a meaning for your death where your life has none. But Marcella faces more than immidiate struggle, she faces complete hopelessness. Poppa is unlikley to find work ever, he spends half his money on insufficient healthcare and the other half on booze, the biggest war in history is still in the public conciousness and rising facism creates whispers of another one, stop me when it sounds too famililar.

Gibson was aware of all of this right at the time when he was a politicaly active youth. He set his show in this time, he added these specific nods to shanty towns and the poverty the characters live in. And yet the 1984-6 productions paid little to no attention to it. The set is no "tipsy shack" it takes up the entire width of the stage and on Broadway was a full box-set with walls and shelves and furniture. An entire context was removed. And I'm sad about it, because I think that's exactly what makes it so relevant today. Marcella isn't just dealing with the short-term personal grief of her pets dying and her mother leaving long ago, she is already carrying the weight of this communal grief she has been born into, grief the people around her deem as too mature for her to understand. But she reads headlines, she hears adults talk, listens to the radio, she, like kids today, is not ignorant. Even if she doesn't fully understand, it is enough to sink her into a long depression.

We're never just dealing with one thing. I think that's why the show has come back now rather than any other time, the young people are more than aware of the hurt in the world and feel their grief is not taken seriously. Things are as bad or possibly worse now in the US than in the 1930's, understanding the context in which Rag Dolly was placed is the key to empathizing with the story and allowing the depth of the nuance to flourish.

Anytime you’re adapting a piece of existing media you have two options, tell a story in that world or tell a story about that word. Bare is has a hundred stories inside the world of Barbie, but there is only one Barbie movie. A movie about what it means to be Barbie, what it means to be a toy or a woman or a toy shaped like a woman. The Lego movie does less fourth wall breaking but it was never about what the animated characters are experiencing, it’s about a kid wanting to be creative and his dad who just wants to glue everything down. It’s what Boop wanted to be before vastly misjudging what people like about Betty Boop or the cartoons in the first place.

The Raggedy Ann musical isn’t a story in Raggedy Ann’s world, it’s about what Raggedy Ann’s world is for. About escapism and hope and how powerful it can be, but how specific and personal it is. About what it means to be created to bring joy and then thrust into a situation beyond your reach.

Who is Barbie if she isn’t a bimbo or a feminist icon? What are legos if you aren’t being creative with them? Who is Raggedy Ann if she isn’t smiling? Does joy and hope and laughter really have the power to cure everything? Rag Dolly says "no, but care and love and understanding do". Cheeriness vs compassion. Telling vs listening. This is what made me fall in love with this musical. I love media where the message is to encourage people, especially kids, to understand how to ask for what they need emotionally, especially when it's less about cheering up and more about listening. Marcella is going through a hell of a time, but she can't stand anyone to tells her she just needs to smile. She needs someone to hold her hand and give her just enough hope to face her demons (and her mother) herself.