Behind the Bay Window: Gerald Parker’s the Eagle and the Lion

• Published in: Canadian review of American studies 1987-12, Vol.18 (4), p.495-497
• Main Author: Woodman, Ross G
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0007-7720; 1710-114X
• DOI: 10.3138/CRAS-018-04-03

The Eagle and the Lion, a new play performed during the last week of January, 1988, in the Drama Workshop at the University of Western Ontario under the direction of its author, Professor Gerald Parker of the Department of English, begins impressively. Edwin Forrest, the nineteenth-century American actor, is performing in a separately-framed playing area the role of the Indian Chief, Metamora. It is the final scene. Surrounded by off-stage white soldiers, his wife, Nahmeokee, hands him his dead child wrapt in a white shawl as if in swaddling bands. Knowing himself defeated, Metamora stabs his wife, assuring her she will join in death her murdered father. "She felt no white man's bondage," he orates in that nineteenth-century melodramatic manner that will be with us for the rest of the evening. "She was free as the air in which she lived . . . pure she was . . . pure as the snow . . . and yet. . . and yet. . . ." The lighting now slowly shifts from red to blue. Forrest takes off his Indian head-dress and puts on Othello's robe. "Yet I'll not shed her blood," he continues with no shift of rhythm or intonation. When at last he smothers Desdemona, it is with the swaddling band encasing the dead child of Nahmeokee.