ABSTRACT
At the end of the second act of Ned Harrigan’s The Mulligan Guard Ball, the Irish Mulligan Guard and the African-American Skidmore Guard, always at odds, hold their fancy balls in the same venue on the same evening. Dan Mulligan, the leader of the Mulligans, calls out for the musicians to play “The Virginia Reel” to celebrate his son’s marriage, and the music and dancing begin. Upstairs, there is also much dancing at the Skidmore ball-the dancers are so exuberant that the ceiling begins to shake. As the dancing heats up upstairs and down, the ceiling gives way: “A crash. Chandelier falls on Dan. Negro dummies, wenches, and soldiers fall through ceiling. Simpson, Puter, and four negroes enter at back. A Melee and Curtain” (101-102). Similar “melees” occur in all the Mulligan Guard plays, raucous pileups of actors, dummies, animals, furniture, and clothing that bring the events of the play to a hilarious dramatic climax. These uproarious melees convey the double meanings of the word-a battle at close quarters, intended to keep groups apart, and a medley or mixture that confuses distinctions between them-exemplifi es the battles between Irish Americans and African Americans in the works I discuss in this chapter. IrishAmericans use melees, like the draft riots, to draw clear borders between the two groups. But melees are jumbled medleys, often revealing as much about what participants share than differences between them. This tension between the desire for clear boundaries and the confusing, messy melees that threaten to blur them frames this chapter.
