Trylon & Perisphere
A stage play about the long shadow of the 1930s
Can we teach an old dogma new tricks?
Trylon & Perisphere interrogates America’s naïveté and the assault on our democracy through the lens of two Austrian immigrants, a Puerto Rican activist, and a young boy during the period leading up to the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair.
Trylon & Perisphere tackles themes we wrestle with today: is our democracy resilient enough to pass every test? Why is America perennially torn between a sick longing for its deeply racist past and an impossible utopian future? Is it because the present is too much to bear? What do we hold sacred in the face of adversity? How might we maintain hope and faith when the world feels so uncertain and ominous?
Read the introduction (below). If interested in reading the entire play, please contact me.
Introduction
The Rose McClendon Players, a well-known Harlem-based theatre group, asked my father to play the part of President Theodore Roosevelt in their production of “The Life of Booker T. Washington” during “Negro Week” at the close of the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair. They needed a president. They assumed he had to be white. My father lived in the area, was a volunteer set designer, and a bit of a ham. He fit the bill.
I have a photograph of him in a white suit, cigar in hand, rehearsing with the legendary Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Rose McClendon. Every day, he said, they arranged chairs in a circle to talk about the day’s news: the grit and grind of the Great Depression, fascism spreading through Europe, and the dilemma of Booker T. Washington himself. Some supported Washington’s economic self-reliance; others thought him too accommodating of segregation and disenfranchisement. But they all agreed: tensions like these were the stuff of art—because art raises questions. My father left each rehearsal feeling welcomed, inspired, and at peace with himself and his new friends.
Outside the rehearsal hall, Americans were desperate. Families splintered by foreclosure. Children rummaging for food. The Dust Bowl stripping the land.
As fascism surged abroad—it crept closer to home. The “America First” campaign, first coined by Woodrow Wilson to promote neutrality in foreign conflicts, was quickly adopted by far-right nativists, the KKK, and figures like Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford to demonize immigrants and reassert white supremacy. Nazi summer camps spread coast to coast.
In February 1939, 20,000 Americans packed Madison Square Garden for the German Bund’s “Pro-American Rally.” A 30-foot portrait of George Washington loomed above American flags and swastikas. After the Pledge of Allegiance and stiff-armed salutes, speeches praised anti-miscegenation laws, Jewish immigration quotas, and Jim Crow policies.
All along, World’s Fair planners had been finessing their way through three thorny challenges: (1) public suspicion that corporate greed helped trigger the Depression, (2 ) ambivalence about U.S. involvement in “Europe’s” wars. and (3) the rise of fascism at home.
Two-and-a-half months after the Nazi rally—and 150 years to the day George Washington was inaugurated in New York as America’s first president—the New York World’s Fair opened in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, atop a 1,200-acre swampland of putrid urban waste and industrial ash. The Corona Dump or Mount Corona, as it was commonly known, had served as inspiration for the “Valley of Ashes” depicted in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 masterpiece, The Great Gatsby.
The Fair’s theme, “The World of Tomorrow,” checked every box. The capitalist system was cast as triumphant. Jingles and slogans preached harmony. Europe’s troubles were trivialized or dismissed entirely. Visitors were invited to enter a giddy, utopian snow globe of corporate ingenuity they could touch and feel. You could see yourself on television. Watch a cow get milked by machine. Ride a parachute drop. Witness a robot that could smoke and answer questions. Buy a dishwasher on the installment plan. The Fair was less a typical reverential homage to science and industrial genius and more a cavalcade of products. Companies far outnumbered countries. A giant cash register tracked daily attendance. This was a World’s Fair wrapped in an American flag with a bow on top: “The World of Tomorrow,” promoters promised, will arrive by 1960.
Its centerpiece was the Trylon and Perisphere. The Trylon, a 610-foot spire, rose phoenix-like—and phallic—from those ashes in Queens to evoke a sense of limitless possibility. The Perisphere, a moon-like orb 180 feet wide, housed “Democracity,” a scaled model of a perfect, planned metropolis. As one Gotham Center historian put it: “There was no crime in the city of tomorrow, no slums, and no poverty. Progress was presented as inevitable and uniform.”
The 1939 New York World’s Fair first took hold of me when my father told me that my great uncle, Tobias Miller, a design engineer, not only had a patent for the folding chair (true), but also conceived of the design for the Trylon and Perisphere (possibly). Over time, I have come to believe that The World’s Fair encapsulates much of America’s confounding identity. It hid much and revealed more. It was hollow and sinister, yet hopeful and invigorating. Irresponsible and deceitful, yet irrepressibly entertaining. A crass manipulation of America’s fragile psyche, yet seductive in its muscular, art-deco grandeur and unapologetic optimism.
We live in the long shadow of the 1930s. The stage may have shifted somewhat, but the script feels eerily similar, including the vicious demagoguery and race hatred on display in 2024 at Trump’s own Madison Square Garden rally. In the 30s, the radio was the chief propaganda platform. Today, the hands that hoard the world’s wealth now own the megaphones of malice.
I thought of my father and his circle of thespians rehearsing their play. I imagined the questions they would discuss. What do we hold sacred in the face of adversity? Why is America perennially torn between a sick longing for its deeply racist past and an impossible utopian future? Is it because the present is too much to bear? How might we maintain hope and faith when the world feels so uncertain and ominous? How much of our identity is bound up in what we sell to ourselves and others? Is our democracy strong enough to pass every test? Is it true that, as Dorothy Parker once wrote, “You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks?” How I wish I could have pulled up a chair to listen to them.
Born during WWI, my father lived long enough to see a Black president in the White House—and, alas, half of Donald Trump’s first term. He had witnessed plenty in his 103 years.
The day after Trump’s 2017 inauguration, we watched the Women’s March together. He was almost blind then, nose inches from the screen. Suddenly, I saw his elbows stiffen. Somehow, through the blur and blotches that must have looked like seaweed and darting schools of fish, he understood what was happening. He stood up. I bolted up to spot him, but he waved me off and began to march in place. Angry, but beaming—a part of something.
He once told me: “Freddy, keep up the courage of your convictions but also admit your contradictions. Be curious and ask difficult questions. And oh, before I forget, exercise every day with two Campbell’s Soup cans.”
This play is dedicated to him.
