The three committee plays suggest how drama captures the ambiguities of the Revolution and the uncertainties of Anglo-American identity in the wake of separation from Britain. All three plays lack a demonstrable on-stage hero, and while Harry Camden presents himself as an admirable patriot, the only personage with sufficient stature to fill the hero's role, Washington, never appears in Traveller Returned except as a spoken object of admiration. Of course, earlier closet plays had attempted to generate American heroes as warriors for liberty: Joseph Warren in Burk's Bunker-Hill, for instance, or Richard Montgomery in Brackenridge's The Death of Montgomery. In Mercy Warren's The Group, Liberty herself seems to stand out from among the ill-intentioned mandamus council members as an emblem of purpose. After the war, however, once the immediate need for patriotic propaganda had been removed, playwrights were faced with difficult choices in terms of how precisely to honor the Revolution without simply betraying political positions on post-war allegiance with France or Britain. Among early republican dramatic attempts to portray American history on stage without reference to the committees, William Dunlap's André (1798) displays some of the problems of identification in recalling a war whose stings had not entirely been forgotten. Dunlap's tragedy stands out for its problematic portrayals of Major John André, the British spy offered up as the titular hero, and George Washington, the unnamed “General” whose decision to execute André nearly remakes the patriotic icon into a vulnerable and fallible cruel father.