Reckoning With Ramona: White Supremacy, Indigenous Resilience, and Community Fellowship in the US's Oldest Outdoor Drama

Adron Farris writes that outdoor drama must be "dramatic, theatrical, and spectacular," and with horseback riding, forbidden love, song and dance, murder, and stunning vistas, Ramona does not disappoint.2 The highlight is an arresting and disquieting tableau of fellowship between a group o...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Theatre annual 2020-01, Vol.73, p.1-92
Main Author: Hatton, Oona
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aesthetics
Children
Citizen participation
Novels
Pageants
Popularity
Prose
Scripts
Theater
Tourism
White supremacy
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Summary:Adron Farris writes that outdoor drama must be "dramatic, theatrical, and spectacular," and with horseback riding, forbidden love, song and dance, murder, and stunning vistas, Ramona does not disappoint.2 The highlight is an arresting and disquieting tableau of fellowship between a group of Indigenous musicians, singers, a nd dancers, a nd scores of loincloth-clad, painted children performing as "Rock Indians. "6 Hemet's production was part of a vast "Ramonaland" network that included the fictional sites of Ramona's birth and marriage, as well as two estates alleged to be models for Rancho Moreno.7 Motivated by profit anda national craze for historical pageantry, the Chambers of Commerce of Hemet and neighboring Sanjacinto hired pageant master Garnet Holme to dramatize Jackson's novel.8 Excepting a few reordered scenes and the deletion of some heated religious refer- enees, locals performed Holme's script for eight decades. 2015 marked a new chapter in Ramonas history when producers commissioned a new adaptation from filmmaker Stephen Savage. In its early years, Ramona exemplified what sociologist Chris Rojek calls a literary landscape-a strategically constructed environment based on a popular novel or author's oeuvre.9 Like other regional entrepreneurs, the play's producers capitalized on the natural landscape, using it to create a mimetically successful mise en scène that affirmed the production's legitimacy by tying it to the book's vividly descriptive prose. "10 As decades passed and the book's popularity waned (along with the novelty of auto-tourism), the amphitheatre, known as the Ramona Bowl, became less a destination for literary groupies and instead a site of education and commemoration of local history.
ISSN:0082-3821