Misrecognition and Antimodernism in the Grove Plays of the Bohemian Club

Abstract

Almost every summer since 1902, at great expense of time, labor, and money, the Bohemian Club has produced a play in its redwood grove north of San Francisco. Members of the Club give a single performance of these so-called Grove plays — complete with new text and music composed for the occasion, full orchestral accompaniment, and elaborate costumes and sets — before an exclusive audience of other members and their guests.2 The Grove plays feature themes ranging the historical, prehistorical, natural- historical, and counterhistorical gamut, from the story of Robin Hood to tales of cavemen to a story of spiders to the defeat of Mammon by Bohemia. In these plays and other annual theatrical rituals, the men of the Bohemian Club industriously misrecognize themselves and the sources of their own power. In the Grove plays, indeed, one can see an awkward embodiment of the production of the aesthetic as a response to the open secret that capital has reduced almost everything to the universal equivalent.