Racing toward History: Utopia and Progress in John Guare’s A Free Man of Color JOANNA MANSBRIDGE ABSTRACT: This article examines the way John Guare’s A Free Man of Color (2010) mobilizes a metatheatrical aesthetic to question the meth- ods we use to organize our understandings of the past and formulate our projections of the future. Looking specifically at George C. Wolfe’s production at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre and drawing on the work of Reinhart Koselleck and Ernst Bloch, the article shows how Guare’s densely textured epic stages a metatheatrical duel between two competing forces of history: one grounded in Enlightenment notions of progress (rational, linear, forward movement), the other in utopia (an imagined future always on the horizon). As progress and utopia jos- tle for the authority to define the history – and so also the future – that the play re-enacts, it becomes clear to the audience that what is at stake, in our present, is the meanings and practices of citizenship, race, sexual- ity, and class that history defines. KEYWORDS: John Guare, utopia, progress, affect, George C. Wolfe, meta- theatre A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias. – Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism A Free Man of Color, John Guare’s first new play in eight years, premiered at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater in November 2010, with a cast of twenty-one playing forty characters. As scripted by Guare and directed by George C. Wolfe, the play is a densely textured and visually stunning epic set mainly in New Orleans at the dawn of the nineteenth century. The script cap- tures the affective energy and frenetic pace of the play’s precise historical moment: 1801–1806, just before and after the Louisiana Purchase, when New Orleans was passed among Spain, France, and finally, the United States, and © University of Toronto doi: 10.3138/md.0729