Street Show Sheds Light on American History
The Philadelphia Inquirer, Arts and Entertainment, Sunday May 28, 2000

Sober Independence Square and the surrounding historic district are up in lights these days, courtesy of "Lights of Liberty." Every Thursday, Friday and Saturday after dusk, hundreds of people in groups of 20 and 30 don computerized headsets and wend their way across the mall and down market Street, stopping first amid an incendiary mob outside Ben Franklin's house. Dodging clopping horses and clots of citizens belly-aching about King George, these nightly patrols next head to Carpenters Hall, where they watch and eavesdrop on an angry Continental Congress taking boycott. Then they move on to Independence Hall- ducking Red Coats bullets on the way- for an anxious reading of the brand-spanking-new Declaration of Independence. As "God Bless America"- rendered by a mighty chorus and members of the Philadelphia Orchestra- reverberates within 30 MP3-muffed headsets- a massive six-story-high image of Jefferson's handwritten declaration scrolls up Independence Hall from base to steeple to, and a twirling 13-star-spangled flag rotates across the brick surface like a great roulette wheel.

Quite a walk: 13 years of revolutionary doings compressed into an hour, all narrated by a free black man (played by Ossie Davis) and a featuring a gun-toting Debbie Franklin (Claire Bloom). This is not the document-under-glass history of the American Revolution.

But it's the city's history. "Lights of Liberty", the new sound and light show, is now in it's first full season of technological wizardry. The brainchild of former mayor Ed Rendell and former city planning czar Edmond Bacon, "Lights of Liberty" has been five years and $12-million in the making, and after receiving the blessing of the National Park Service, it represents one of the boldest and most significant efforts yet to exploit the city's cultural and historical resources and push Philadelphia into the center of the nation's tourist consciousness.

It also represents a radical change in the way some of the nation's most storied symbols are conceived and presented. No longer is Independence hall a simple shrine, a solid icon of nationhood. At least in part, it had become a set peopled by ghostly figures, a cinematic prop for a culture of audiences in a restless search for entertainment.

Being authentic and important are not nearly good enough when the tourist dollar is on the line. "When you come to visit monuments of American History, the point used to be sacralize the space," said Neal Gabler, author of Life: The Move. " People could stand there and feel the sacredness of the space". That's almost passe. Who wants to experience a space? You have to experience an experience within the space." As the "Lights of Liberty" tour guide says: "Grab your headsets we're joining a revolution!"

A sound-and-light extravaganza in the mist of Independence National Historical Park is one more example of the "absolute need to convert everything into entertainment," Gabler said. "You could have refurbished Independence Hall and done what Williamsburg did," he said. " But that's not enough anymore. People crave a narrative. How do you make a space a story?

Ellis Island did just that. Easily the biggest historical refurbishing in years, the $161-million dollar makeover of the Ellis Island immigration station in new York harbor offers no creative narrative or reenactments. Visitors are greeted, almost literally, by a wall of beaten up old bags and trunks, no names attached, no historical celebrities- just simple reminders of the poor and foreign origins of the millions of people who passed through Ellis Island. The great Registry Room on the second floor of the station, where immigrants waited anxiously for medical and document inspections, is completely empty. Small examination rooms off this main hall feature low-key exhibits, and overt narrative intrudes only the extent that visitors of the station can listen to recorded reminiscences, personal experiences of immigrants.

What sets Ellis part, at least from a much older stand icons such as Independence Hall, is that many visitors to the site arrive with their own personal history connected to it; they reenact their own dramas, their own memories. They even arrive by boat- the Ellis Island ferry- recapitulating the experience of those who came to Ellis Island "for real".

Independence hall and surroundings are of a different order entirely. Most visitors may "know" about the American Revolution, but they have no personal involvement in it. Independence hall is an abstract experience. It depends on ideas and books, not family memory. Independence hall is history; Ellis Island is experience. "The people who felt this visceral connection with [Independence Hall] are now gone," said Roy Rosenzweig, professor of history at George Mason University. "So it may be that's why it is less sacred for people today. And that may be why this entertainment version works better."

It is perhaps also significant that Independence Hall has gone through many permutations and transformations over time. For most of the 18th and 19th centuries, it was a working office building, housing federal, state and municipal governments. During the early decades of the 19th century, the second floor was home to stuffed birds, bones, portraits and other artifacts belonging to Charles Willson Peale's museum of curiosities- Independence Hall's first foray into the world of public entertainment and education.

After the Civil War, the hall was recognized as a national symbol- nothing else seemed neutral enough to unite the riven halves of the country. That's when the ideas for providing a suitable "setting" for independence hall began to surface, cumulating half a century ago, when the immediate neighborhood was destroyed to create the park and Independence Mall.

Now the park service has embarked on another remaking of the area. A new visitor center, a Constitution center, and a new Liberty Bell pavilion and exhibition space are under construction, or will be in the near future. Buildings and activities will return to the mall, providing an echo or simulation of past bustle- in much the same way that the sound and light show provides a simulation of past stories.

"It's one of those funny paradoxes," said Michael Zuckerman, professor of history at University of Pennsylvania. "The obsession with entertainment and amusement- you could argue that we turn away from reality. But the amusement and entertainment here is really more gritty then what has been there….As the new mall develops, the sense of the sacred will recede.

"Lights of Liberty", however is not a colonial That's Entertainment! with Martha and George soft-shoeing their way from Betsy Ross' place to Valley Forge. It contains real scholarship and unusual historical perspective, thanks largely to the script, which bares the stamp of Philadelphia-born historian Gary B. Nash, director of the National Center for history in the schools at UCLA, and who's known for his multicultural perspective on early American events.

"We though that the sound and light show, if correctly done, could be educational and entertaining, and because it's an after dark production, it would force people to spend the night in Philadelphia," said the ever pragmatic former mayor Rendell recently. "That was the goal, and the production succeeds successfully. Not a word spoken in the show that does not have an historical basis." For Penn's Zuckerman, the show and it's historical content combine in a particularly satisfying fashion.

"Everyone knows the history of the American Revolution is about whites," Zuckerman said. "And who is your narrator here? A black guy. Then you walk down Franklin court, and you don't know where you are. For the average citizen, Franklin is a good guy, but as the show begins, [during the 1765 Stamp Act crisis], Franklin is a bad guy, [seemingly a supporter of the Stamp Act tax] and there is a mob about to tear him apart.

"Franklin is one of our heroes and suddenly our whole sense of him is fractured. And who is defending his house? It's Deborah Franklin, and she's defending it not with wiles or demurely, but with guns. Everything is overturned. And you seemed to be surrounded by the mob, and you pick up the anger and you pick up the passion. You know this could explode. People are angry. There is politics here. This is an emergency of popular democracy."

Standing in Franklin court- with it's ghostly Robert Venturly-designed steel outline of Franklin's house- tour audiences are presented with phantasmal images of Deborah Franklin projected against a back wall. Images of angry and disgruntled citizens are cast here and there on other walls; their voices and shouts jostle and jar one another as the echo from digital earphones. There is a flickering, incendiary light all around.

Questions abound: Where is Franklin? How could he support an onerous tax? Will Deborah fire that musket she holds? Who are the citizens? What is going on here? "The rendering of popular politics has never been done as well," Zuckerman continued. " You are not being told about popular politics; you are experiencing popular politics. Again and again they precipitate you into these difficult situations, so you are constantly on the move, and you can never be sure which side you would be on." Technology is a big part of this layering. As audiences walk along, they over hear snatches of conversation. When British soldiers fire their guns, audiences hear bullets smack past them, ricocheting off brick. Because of the sophisticated sound, it is possible for the "Lights of Liberty" to suggest the stew of argument and opinion that categorized city life as rebellion loomed.

Nash also came along with the idea of using James Forten, a free black man living in Philadelphia at the time of the revolution as the narrator for "Lights of Liberty". (Forten is portrayed by Ozzie Davis; other celebrities include Walter Conkite, Charlton Heston, Frank Langela, Clair Bloom and Woopie Goldberg.) Forten was imprisoned at one point by British, escaped and returned to the city. More than 10 percent of the population of revolutionary Philadelphia was black, many of them were slaves. Forten was very much the exception.

"It was supposed to jar people." Nash said, alluding to the use of Forten. "At the very least people will come away from the experience saying 'Oh, there were blacks in Philadelphia at that time.'" But if the blacks fighting for the colonies, there were just as many- if not more- fighting for King George, enticed into British ranks by promises of freedom. Nash acknowledges this, and points out that many Virginians, for instance, took up arms because they feared Britain would indeed free American slaves. For Virginia planters, the American Revolution was a war defending the institution of slavery. "The revolution is the largest slave rebellion in our history because of the thousands of blacks who flee to the British," Nash said. "What where they after? Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."