In 2019, situated in the historical and environmental milieu of the Berkshires, Matthew Cumbie, then an artist and educator at Johns Hopkins’ Peabody Conservatory, met his friend and fellow dancer, Tom Truss. The setting for such a meeting was remarkably important. Almost two centuries ago, against the same backdrop of the Berkshire Mountains, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne first met. Now regarded as two of the most acclaimed American novelists, these companions cultivated a collection of texts, which are eternalized in our literary canon while simultaneously fostering one of the most speculated, obscure, and alluring friendships of contemporary culture and written history.
“The exact nature of [this] relationship has been the subject of a lot of speculation by scholars,” said Katherine Stubbs, the Lee Family Associate Professor of Literature at Colby College, who draws attention to a series of ten letters written by Melville and directed toward Hawthorne. According to Stubbs, these correspondences are imbued with “fairly over-the-top erotically charged language.”
Despite evidence of a brief and intense correspondence beginning in 1850 between the two writers, each of the letters Hawthorne penned to Melville was lost or destroyed — with the exception of one, a rather uninteresting read. Just a year later, in 1851, Hawthorne abruptly left the Berkshires with his wife and children. This mysterious liaison fueled a literary fascination with the pair, who have enthralled a variety of readers and intellectuals, including Cumbie and Truss, who, after their meeting in the Berkshires, embarked on creating their project, ReWritten.
ReWritten responds to archival gaps in queer literature through the lens of Hawthorne and Melville’s potential romantic affair; through critical fabulation, Cumbie and Truss make a self-conscious effort to reframe our natural interpretations and imagine a might-have-been. Though the two had no exact blueprint for ReWritten, or even an initial concept, Cumbie said yes without knowing what they would make or how.
After “[discovering] a great deal of overlap in terms of our artistic history and interests, [Tom] pitched the idea of working together,” Cumbie explains. “I’m deeply interested in queer histories, and in exploring how artmaking can be a catalyst for new kinds of knowledge and practice,” he continues. And so, ReWritten began.
Then, in January of 2020, Cumbie came to Colby as a visiting instructor to teach a JanPlan for the Department of Performance, Theater, and Dance. The class intersected with the Colby Museum, which, at the time, opened an exhibit about Alex Katz’s drawings of Moby Dick. There, Cumbie met Stubbs, who — in connection with the show — was giving a talk about her personal research on Hawthorne and Melville. As Stubbs guided Cumbie through readings of these queer texts, the two became fast friends, and Stubbs now serves as the dramaturg for ReWritten.
Shortly after, the pandemic hit. Cumbie, Stubbs, Truss, and a variety of other production workers began meeting over Zoom. Despite their physical distance — their forced stagnation — Matthew and Tom taught the team about movement. Truss and Cumbie employed the parameters outlined by choreographer Rudolf Laban, an Austro-Hungarian theorist who described dance by three chief pillars: body, effort, and space.
“There was a moment when we were over Zoom and [Tom and Matthew] said to me: how would you describe Melville’s movement vocabulary?” Stubbs said. Stubbs sourced passages from literary texts, guiding Truss and Cumbie through the works and homosexual romantic entanglements insinuated in the texts of both Hawthorne and Melville. Then, Truss and Cumbie translated these words into dance.
“Dance,” as Cumbie explains, “brings attention to multiple aspects of one’s experience simultaneously — sensorial, imaginative, physical, spatial, temporal — and then asks that person to actively make choices on what to do and how to do it.”
Dance promotes a kind of attentiveness that enables us to understand unfamiliar and differing perspectives; it is an instrument through which we apply our whole selves to our learning by means of one of the most personal and fragile ways.
ReWritten completed a weekend of performances at Colby, beginning Friday, September 18th, and terminating Sunday, September 20th. The show’s analysis of Hawthorne and Melville blends both Cumbie and Truss as inhabitants and depictors of these authors while concurrently presenting scenes where Cumbie and Truss play their own, real selves. ReWritten is an ode to the queer archive, to that which history failed to show, and to creating art that is a more accurate portrayal of all of us, in each of our forms, our sexualities, and our identities.
~ Maya Corrie `29
Review
The premise of ReWritten sounds like a bad fanfic written by an English major. But in practice, while ReWritten might still be a kind of fanfic, it’s actually very good.
Tom Truss (sometimes Nathaniel Hawthorne) and Matthew Cumbie (sometimes Herman Melville) have undeniable chemistry, and they each have a deep empathy for their characters that surfaces in their acting. Truss fully embodies the older, more staid Hawthorne, and his audiobook-narrator voice is the perfect medium for the writer’s words; Cumbie captures a Melville who is younger, a little reckless, a little desperate, suffering from self-doubt and a chronic inability to profit off his stories. They’re the only two actors on stage, but they carry the audience’s attention like they’re an ensemble cast.
The performance is made more technically impressive by the way in which both actors weave in and out of character, diegesis, and time. The show opens with a humorous rendering of Truss and Cumbie meeting on a dating app. So while the two actors fade into their characters, enacting a centuries-old romance that may or may not have been, there’s another layer unfolding at the same time. Namely, for the duration of the show, the audience is wondering: Are Tom Truss and Matthew Cumbie also…?
It’s fun stuff. Which is not the adjective you’d expect to apply to the show about the guys who wrote The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick.
Cumbie and Truss make much of this fact. They’ve got an acute literary sensibility, but they’re also tuned into the cheekiness of their premise. As a result, they strike a deft balance between gravity and levity, between scholarship and daydreaming, between Serious Literature and Heated Rivalry. The result is a complex, multi-layered piece of theater art whose beauty, earnestness, and execution are all phenomenal.
~ Elias Kemp `27
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