What’s surprising about the fight over Christopher Columbus is not that this year’s official White House proclamation about Columbus Day crudely attacks “left-wing arsonists” for trying to “destroy his name and dishonor his memory,” but that theater has been dishonoring him for ages, satirically or savagely depicting the Italian explorer on stage since long before “woke.” Eugene O’Neill wrote a scorching portrait of Columbus more than a decade before 1937, the year when Columbus Day became an annual federal holiday, now celebrated on the second Monday of October (i.e. today.)  And the only American playwright to win the Nobel Prize in Literature was far from the first dramatist to be less than reverent towards the current president’s “original American hero.”

If the first plays about Columbus were straightforward – Felix Lope de Vega’s “El Nuevo de Mundo” in the 1500s, and the first to be staged in America itself,  Thomas Morton’s “Columbus, or The Discovery of America. A Historical Play” in 1794 —  John Brougham toured America in 1858 with a show whose satirical intent is evident in its lengthy title: “Columbus el Filibustero!! A New and Audaciously Original Historica-Plagiaristic, Ante-National, Pre-Patriotic, and Omni-Local Confusion of Circumstances, Running Through Two Acts and Four Centuries”

In 1893, timed to the anniversary of Columbus’s expedition to the New World, a Broadway musical that ran for 400 performances entitled “1492 Up to Date or Very Near It” had him cavorting with  chorus girls in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, while back in Spain, the royal family that paid his way has gone broke, because King Ferdinand has gone out for too many nights on the town.  As if to give the queen equal time,  the 1927 Broadway play by Lawton Campbell entitled “Immoral Isabella?” depicts an oversexed Queen Isabella taking the younger adventurer as her lover, and when her husband won’t sponsor his trip to the New World, she pawns her royal jewels to finance the trip. Another satire, “Christopher Comes Across” by Hawthorne Hurst, ran on Broadway in 1932. 

Eugene O’Neill was a pioneer in looking at Columbus in a harsh light. In his play “The Fountain,”  which opened in 1925, he is depicted as arrogant and greedy (“I need the power that wealth can give. I need it for God’s glory…”), as he leads a second voyage to the New World that brings disaster to the native population.

That’s largely been the take over the past century, at least for works staged somewhere other than elementary schools.  The 500th anniversary of the expeditions in 1992 was a banner year for such works, including “The Voyage,” an opera with music by Philip Glass and text by David Henry Hwang, at Metropolitan Opera; “Terra Incognita,” by Maria Irene Fornes, at INTAR Hispanic Arts Center; and “Christopher Columbus: The New World Order,” by Peter Schumann, the head of Bread and Puppet Theater, which one reviewer described as “a brutal tale of conquest, destruction and oppression.”

Recently, Larissa FastHorse restored a largely satirical take on Christopher Columbus and Columbus Day, in “The Thanksgiving Play,” which ran on Broadway in 2023, although one that draws blood.

Jaxton, the woke high school drama teacher, attacks his Italian-American colleague Caden, for being   “one of Christopher Columbus’ bros.”
“I’m not related to Columbus.”
“But you have the awareness that your people started the slavery and genocide of millions.”
“That’s not all Columbus did.”
“We uplift the celebration of Native American Heritage Month, and Columbus Day inches a little closer to oblivion.”
“Well, Columbus Day is actually a celebration of the contributions of Italians to….”
“Then why not Mussolini Day?”

I think it important to respond to this glib dialogue with some history, which in 2025 happens to be ironic. According to Britannica, “the direct impetus for declaring the anniversary of Columbus’s arrival a national holiday was the mass lynching of 11 Italian Americans in New Orleans in 1891. One of the largest lynchings in U.S. history, it occurred during a time of widespread anti-immigrant and anti-Italian sentiment in the country…The event threatened diplomatic relations between Italy and the United States, and, to appease the Italian government, U.S. Pres. Benjamin Harrison proclaimed the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival a national holiday in 1892, intending it to be a one-time celebration.”