For Columbus Day: Christopher Columbus on Stage, from Lope de Vega to Eugene O’Neill to David Henry Hwang

Statue of Christopher Columbus in Houston earlier this year, after vandals threw paint on it.

Christopher Columbus atop Columbus Circle

“Christopher Columbus Learns The Truth About Columbus Day” by Stephen Meek, for Studio C, 2015

The program for “Christopher Comes Across,” a satire by Hawthorne Hurst that ran on Broadway for seven performances in 1932

A production of “Christopher Columbus” at Towson University, Maryland, in 1969

The Voyage, by Philip Glass and David Henry Hwang, at the Metropolitan Opera in 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s New World expedition.

“Christopher Columbus: The New World Order,” by Peter Schumann, the head of Bread and Puppet Theater

There are statues of Christopher Columbus in Columbus Circle — although city officials have hinted they want to get rid of it — and Columbus, Ohio and Columbus, Georgia and Columbus, Wisconsin, and in many cities not named Columbus. But Christopher Columbus seems to have virtually disappeared from the American stage.

That’s not the way it always was. The first play about Columbus goes back to the 1500’s: “El Nuevo de Mundo” by Felix Lope de Vega. The first to be staged in America itself was in 1794: “Columbus, or The Discovery of America. A Historical Play” by Thomas Morton. Yet even as far back as 1858, the theatrical treatment was far less than worshipful of the Italian explorer of the New World.

That’s the year that John Brougham is said to have toured a show (starting at the Boston Theatre) 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”

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