Portrait of a traitor

by Hedy Weiss, Theater Critic

August 25, 2006

It seems only fitting that American playwright Richard Nelson wrote "The General from America" -- his portrait of Benedict Arnold, one of the more notorious turncoats in this country's relatively short history -- on a commission from Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company.

In fact, you might even imagine titters of retroactive glee coming from the British audience that attended the play's 1996 RSC debut. After all, here is the story of a wealthy colonist from Connecticut who started out as a Revolutionary War hero but eventually shifted sides and nearly sold his comrade-in-arms, George Washington, right down the river.

Yet Nelson was more than a little surprised when he first began talking about Arnold to his English friends.

"No one had ever heard of him," said the writer, who was born in Chicago, raised in the suburbs of Gary and now lives in New York's historic Hudson Valley.

Of course, most Americans probably know little more about Arnold than the sentence or two devoted to him in their grade school history textbooks. In a nutshell: After securing crucial victories for the Americans at the battles of Fort Ticonderoga and Saratoga, Arnold came close to undermining the entire revolutionary effort with his act of treachery.

As it happens, Nelson -- whose play will receive its Chicago premiere Saturday night at TimeLine Theatre -- didn't know much about the man either until he began doing research for his play.

"The research led me to his grave, which is in London, on the south Thames," recalled Nelson, who has spent a good deal of time in England over the years, and whose plays often have attracted more attention there than at home. "And when I went to the church nearby, I noticed an amusing thing -- that it had a stained glass window with the American and British flags crossed in solidarity. I also went to Arnold's London house and found a plaque that read: 'Here lived Benedict Arnold, American patriot.'"

Several hefty biographies of Arnold gave Nelson the real content for his play. And as with many stories of disillusionment and political shape-shifting, this one turned out to be far more complex than at first glance.

"The American Revolution began in the northeast colonies, and at the start was primarily an economic revolt," Nelson explained. "But then, as the idea moved to some of the mid-Atlantic states and the South, the whole thing began to acquire a spirit of religious fervor, and this really pulled the country apart, much like today. It also alienated Arnold. I found it very interesting, for example, that when the Americans got to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, one of the first things they did was to ban the production of plays. Arnold was a merchant, a businessman. He wanted economic independence from Britain, but he was skeptical of the rest. In fact, when he got to West Point he actually produced a play -- an ancient Roman drama by Cato about political defiance."

There were many personal considerations involved in Arnold's treachery, too, including the presence of a young second wife who was a British Loyalist. Add to this financial problems (he had apparently advanced the money for all the blankets for all his soldiers and was not reimbursed) and subsequent charges of malfeasance that left Arnold bitter over what he believed was undue appreciation for his military service and for the crippling leg injuries he had suffered in battle, and you have a fuller sense of his motivation.

Arnold's act of treachery came in the form of a deal with the British by which he would essentially have ceded them the crucial fort at West Point and enabled them to capture Washington.

"The plan was uncovered, but Arnold managed to escape down the Hudson River to New York City and then to the south," said Nelson. "When the war was over, he escaped to England, sought money from the crown, moved to the Caribbean and Nova Scotia, and lived to quite an old age."

One of the most thrilling moments in Nelson's research came when he visited New York's Pierpont Morgan Library and was permitted to handle two letters penned by Arnold.

"He wrote one of them in the wake of his capturing of Fort Ticonderoga, when he requested a cannon, and it was sloppy and full of crossed out words and splatters. The other, written just after he was appointed to West Point and had already established some secret ties with the British, was a very careful and formal letter to a friend. Holding both those letters was an amazing feeling."

As for what was most surprising to Nelson as he wrote "The General from America," it was "learning just what a great state of flux this country was in until the colonies adopted the Constitution."

One final note: This will be quite a busy Chicago season for Nelson, who, in recent years, became best known as the librettist for the musical "James Joyce's 'The Dead.'" The world premiere of "Frank's House," his play about architect Frank Lloyd Wright, is set to debut in a Robert Falls production at the Goodman Theatre in November, with Peter Weller and Harris Yulin leading the cast.