Late 19th Century Theatre: Realism and Naturalism II: America and England

Realism and Naturalism in America

Writer/performer/manager Dion Boucicault (1822-1890) wrote increasingly realistic melodramas, including The Poor of New York, an outright steal of The Poor of Paris, but set firmly in America, 

framed by the financial panics of 1837 and 1857. The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana is about a woman white enough to “pass” but who is discovered to be black and suffers the consequences.  Boucicault was so popular a writer that he could and did demand royalties, which have become a playwright’s bread and butter (well, before they could sell the movie rights!).  Before Boucicault’s lobbying for royalties and living wages for writers, a very popular nautical melodrama, Jerrold’s Black-Eyed Susan, earned its author a paltry 70 pounds.  Boucicault earned over 500,000 pounds on the royalties for only one of his plays.  Rigorous international copyright laws did not go into effect until just after the turn of the 20th century, but Boucicault really paved the way in securing rights and money for writers. Boucicault is also usually credited with responsibility for the long run as the usual way to do theatre in the States.  Because his plays were SO popular, they no longer had to be run in rotating rep with other plays.  His plays could run on their own for weeks, months, years. Uncle Tom’s Cabin predates Boucicault’s plays in this, but it was the exception, not the rule. 

After the Civil War in America, then, more and more often single plays began to be run in New York City, the center of theatrical activity, and then tour the country, not via troupes of traveling players who would incorporate it into their rotating rep, but lock stock and barrel, in what was known as a combination company – one that takes everything needed (actors, sets and costumes, technicians) to do a single play.  The rapidly constructed new railroads which began to criss-cross the US in the 1860s and 70s allowed for this new way of doing theatre: run a play in NYC as long as financially feasible, then send it out on national tours.  So this collusion of very successful single plays (it’s much easier and cheaper to tour a single play rather than a repertoire of plays) and the extraordinary transportation revolution created by the proliferation of railroads was a major factor in changing the way theatre was delivered. To give you some sense of the scope of this, by the theatrical season of 1876-77 there were nearly 100 touring companies on the (rail)road. By 1886-87 the number of touring companies in the US had nearly tripled, to 282!

   

One of the earliest of these “long run” plays was the Hamlet of Edwin Booth (1833-1893), which ran for 100 nights. Although his 

brother John Wilkes nearly killed his brother’s career the night he assassinated Lincoln, Edwin went into seclusion but re-emerged in less than a year and rapidly became the greatest actor-manager in American theatre in the latter half of the 19th century. The 100-Nights Hamlet really launched Booth’s career. As an actor Booth believed that the theatre artists should perform only the finest drama, and that it was the actor’s job to bring out the beauty and wisdom in the play.  In Edwin Booth, then, we see one of the first (and nearly ONLY) argument for an “art” theatre in America.

      

Booth also ventured into new experiments with stage architecture.  In his own theatre, called Booth’s and opened in 1869, Booth got

rid of the raked stage and introduced “free plantation” style sets.  These consisted of large set pieces and flats not dependent on painted side wings, but “planted” in different parts of the stage.   These set pieces could be flown from above or raised from below on the elevators he installed.  The free plantation system created a more realistic look on stage, and Booth often used box sets in his plays for still greater scenic realism.

      

Edwin Booth was certainly the most important American actor-manager at this time, but another is worth mentioning, because in 

what was almost exclusively a man’s domain, Laura Keene (1820-1893) was, obviously, a woman!  Keene battled from the 1850s to the 1870s, to secure her own theatre in competition with several males, most of whom wanted to destroy her merely because she was a woman. She became tremendously popular in spite of all sorts of hardships.  Keene used to be known only as the star of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre the night Lincoln was shot, but more recently, Keene has become a landmark example of American women actor managers -- she was hardly the only one, and not the first, but one of the most important.

  

Two men deserve attention at this time because they ran theatres, directed actors, and wrote plays but did NOT star in them.  In breaking from the actor/manager tradition, Augustin Daly and David Belasco became two of the earliest professional directors in American (or any other) theatre.  Augustin Daly (1836-1899) 

was quite a hustler. He wrote drama criticism under assumed names for 5 different newspapers in NYC.  While it was not unusual to write under a nom de plume, it was unusual to write for so many papers, and to critique plays while producing your own plays. A Daly play opens, and 5 papers automatically love it!  This interesting take on self promotion didn’t last for long, and much more importantly, Daly was a major contributor to stage realism, 

not in his stories, which were totally melodramatic. It was Daly’s idea, for example, to tie a person to a railroad track to gain suspense in a play called Under the Gaslight. But he was realistic in his staging techniques.  In his production of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, for example, Daly’s scene painters reproduced precise renderings of famous sites in the title 

Hisstorical accuracy at the expense of the play?

city. In his Midsummer Night’s Dream, fifth century BC Athens was re-created as closely as possible on the stage.  Daly was also crucial in the development of the professional director in that he insisted upon absolute control over all elements of production.  He wooed the best actors in America to his company, including Clara Morris, 

who, because she was so fine at pathetic suffering, was known as the “queen of spasms” and John Drew II, a fine leading man, and one of the earliest of the line which became the Barrymore family. Drew played leading roles opposite Ada Rehan, as Petruchio to her Kate for example.  Rehan became Daly’s favorite -- in fact she became his mistress! And while Daly otherwise insisted on the importance of ensemble playing, he made Ada Rehan a star.

      

If Daly was known for realistic staging, David Belasco (1854-1931) became famous for stage naturalism. At the same time that 

Andre Antoine was directing naturalist drama on stage in Paris, Belasco was doing it in New York.  Belasco wrote many of the plays he produced, including Heart of Maryland (1895) in which a daughter saves her father from execution by hanging on the clapper of the bell that is to ring in the hour of his death. You've heard of "cliff-hangers..Maryland is the first (and I hope only) bell-hanger! Two other of his plays, Madame Butterfly (1900) and Girl of the Golden West 

(1905), were operatized by Puccini and are much better known as operas – melodramatic? Nooooo!  But Belasco is best remembered for his staging.  When he directed Eugene Walters’ grittily naturalistic The Easiest Way (1909), Belasco, he needed a cheap boardinghouse room for his main character (a prostitute who could have broken away from her awful existence by marrying a reporter who loved her, but who instead took the “easiest way” and remained in her trade), so he merely bought an entire boardinghouse in the infamous “tenderloin” district of Manhattan and put what he needed of it on the stage.  In the Governor’s Lady there was a scene set in a restaurant.  Belasco bought one of the Child’s chain of restaurants and simply placed it on the stage!  Belasco was also a flamboyant producer and star-maker, one of the great early American directors.

      

Another early director was Steele MacKaye (1842-1894), also an actor, playwright, & inventor.  MacKaye brought Delsarte’s system 

of performance training to America and started one of the earliest acting schools in the U.S., which would later become the American Academy of Dramatic Art. He wrote very realistic melodramas, including Marriage (1869) and Hazel Kirke (1878).  The realism in these plays was more in the staging than in the story.  MacKaye was an idealist, and started several theatres.  Along with Booth, MacKaye was one of the few who advocated for art in the nineteenth century American theatre, where the dollar was almighty.  Unfortunately, MacKaye’s idealism lost him lots of money, but this did not stop him from experimenting and inventing.  

He came up with an early form of air conditioning a theatre auditorium (huge blocks of ice placed just out of sight, blown by large fans to cool a theatre on a hot summer’s night). He used huge elevators for quicker set changes.  It was usual at the time to listen to music during set changes, with hammers banging in the background, for 5-10 minutes between scenes.  MacKaye’s elevator system cut the time it took to change even complicated scenes to 40 seconds.  MacKaye was also one of the first directors to see the potential of and to use electric light in the theatre.

      

It is at this time that America’s unique gift to world theatre, the musical, was born.  In 1866 a melodrama was in its final stages of rehearsal, but James Niblo, manager of Niblo’s Garden’s Theatre, saw that it was in major trouble. It was missing...something!  

Meanwhile, nearby in Manhattan, another theatre has burned down, leaving a troupe of French female dancers nowhere to play.  The answer?  Niblo decided to combine forces with the dance troupe, and accidentally created what is usually called the first American musical, The Black Crook.  Granted, most melodramas made use of music, but this was something else, and the formula Niblo stumbled on out of necessity created a sensation. Niblo had great settings (the play was a fantasy, in which a magician is constantly transforming things, making use of lots of sets and set changes) and a pretty crummy story.  But when the dancing girls arrived, he realized he didn’t really NEED a story. He 

had a chorus line of lovely legs!  This combination of spectacle and cheesecake proved a huge success. The Black Crook was a hit! The next year another foreign troupe, Lydia Bailey and her British Blondes, took New York by storm in a similar manner. After these two experiments, in 1874 Evangeline hit the stage. Based VERY loosely upon a Longfellow poem, this 

Evangeline?

show featured scantily clad dancers, a whale and a dancing heifer (two men in a cow-costume), along with songs such as “In Love with the Man in the Moon.” Despite the critics, one of whom wrote of it: “Several scenes are so stupid, that it is difficult to contemplate them without going to sleep,” Evangeline became hugely popular and others like it began to be written. Audiences began to get a steady stream of these new musical entertainments, and little changed in the format of the American musical until December 1927...but more of that later!

The heifer dance from Evangeline

Quick sidebar: for a great description of Evangeline have a look at this website from the New York Public Library: http://www.nypl.org/blog/2012/11/30/musical-month-evangeline

Burlesque star Eva Tanguay

If you move towards scantily clad women and away from a well-plotted play, you get burlesque American style -- a collection of variety acts and musical numbers in which women “take off”, not in the sense of mocking other forms, but in the sense of their clothes!  Tony Pastor cleaned up the burlesque around the turn of the century, made it suitable for the entire family, usually, and called it vaudeville, which was a hugely successful form until the talking pictures began stealing its audiences away.

   

There were many famous actors working in the U.S. at this time, 

and several of them I’ve already mentioned.  Let’s look quickly at three more: William Gillette was a major star in the 1890s, and wrote plays as vehicles for himself, including Secret Service (1892) and Sherlock Holmes (1895). He was a highly realistic actor.  It was Gillette who first said that every night an actor plays, s/he should attempt to present “the illusion of the first time.”

      

James O’Neill was an actor who had played Othello to Edwin Booth’s Iago, but then got sucked into a play version of The Count of Monte Cristo, which he toured everywhere, which he made tons of money from, and which nearly destroyed his family...read his son’ Eugene’s play on the subject, Long Day’s Journey into Night.

      

Finally, Richard Mansfield, star of melodrama (Beau Brummel), 

dabbler in Shakespearean roles (Richard III probably best among them), introducer of Shaw to America (Arms and the Man, Devil’s Disciple) -- he toured England and flopped there, but was probably the most popular actor in America in the 1890s.  The man he tried to emulate was the most famous actor in England at the time -- Henry Irving.  And this brings us briefly to England. 

Quick Look at Late Nineteenth Century British Theatre

      

Henry Irving was the undisputed star of the London stage at the end of the century.  In fact British theatre at the end of the century

has been referred to as the age of Irving – this means that not only was he the greatest actor of his age, but also that he typifies the period.  Irving began his career in 1871 as a player of leading roles at the Lyceum, a theatre he remained associated with all his life.  In 1878, Irving took over management of the Lyceum, where he strove for pictorial realism.  As Booth had done in America, 

Irving ripped out the wings and grooves on the stage, replaced the raked floor with a flat floor -- the stage was equipped with flies that sent scenery in from above and elevators that lifted it from below, all in the service of free plantation of the scenery.  Irving’s repertoire featured a traditional mix of Shakespeare and melodrama, but he used modern staging methods to produce the plays.  Irving was knighted in 1895, the first actor in England to be knighted, and as important as it was for Irving, it also marked a new respect for at least some actors in England.

   

Irving’s leading lady, and surely the most popular actress in London during the late 19th century, was Ellen Terry.   She came from a 

theatrical family; her sister Kate, for example, also had a fine career, her son was Gordon Craig, about whom we’ll speak next week, and her grandson was John Gielgud!  Terry excelled at Shakespearean comedy, particularly in the roles of Beatrice, Viola, and Portia; but she was also quite fine in serious roles, such as Lady Macbeth. She was made the first Dame (which is somewhat equivalent to knighthood for women), shortly after Irving was knighted.

A rather unique contribution to musical theatre was created in late 

nineteenth century London by William Gilbert (1836-1911) and Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900), who wrote a series of satirical comic operettas for the Savoy Theatre between the mid-1870s and the mid-1890s.  The operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, which include HMS Pinafore (1878), The Pirates of Penzance (1879), and The Mikado (1885), remain staples of that genre today and are still frequently performed.

At the turn of the century, actor/manager Herbert Beerbohm-Tree (1853-1917) was one of the most important performers and also 

one the last of the great actor/managers.   Beerbohm-Tree offered audiences Shakespeare the old fashioned way, and played many of the Bard’s great comic as well as serious roles.  His production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream featured live rabbits in a super-realistic forest.  The star’s greatest success came in 1916 when he offered a London public in dire need of escape from the ugly fact of the First World War a musical extravaganza called Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, which ran for 2,000 performances, the longest running show to that date in London. Beerbohm-Tree also originated the role of Henry Higgins for George Bernard Shaw in Pygmalion.  This places him at a strategic moment while extravaganzas were popular, but while other new theatrical styles were ushering in the modern era.

In terms of theatre spaces in Europe, England and the U.S., towards the end of the century as realism became more and more THE trend, theatres in England became more and more complicated backstage and became somewhat more intimate.  Mainstream theatres built at the end of the 19th century began to abandon the pit, box, and gallery system for the orchestra (or stalls, or parterre) and balcony system we’re used to today on Broadway. In fact the first theatres built around 42nd Street in NYC were built at the turn of the century.  The usual seating capacity went down from 2,000-3,000 seats to 1000-1500 seats. For example, the New Amsterdam, built in the early years of the 20th century, seats a bit over 1700.

In recent lectures I’ve simplified a highly complex time period.  Mainstream theatre featured realistic dramas, but various anti-realistic theatrical movements were growing as well.  It gets more complicated as we move forward, but in order to do that will now move back a bit in time, to writers, directors, designers, who began to experiment with  form that we have labeled the “modern.”

Late 19th Century Theatre: Realism and Naturalism I: France and Italy

French Romanticism, born suddenly in 1830 by riots at Hugo’s Hernani, died rather quickly, largely because of conditions in over-crowded cities, working conditions under greedy bosses, people oppressed by old fashioned, autocratic governments, not only in France but throughout Europe.  Revolutions for democratic rights were fought in many European cities in 1848; all were put down by the old order, whose leaders became even more despotic afterwards.

      

Plays began to reflect these less than romantic conditions, and the first important plays in this new mode were written by the French.  The writer who signaled the shift out of Romantic and into realistic

 drama was Eugène Scribe, who began in his plays to examine situations in a detailed, realistic manner.  One of his dramas is titled A Glass of Water.  Scribe wrote formulaic plays in a manner guaranteed to please an audience -- the pièce bien faite or the well-made play.  His formula included careful exposition, cause and effect incidents, building each scene to a strong climax, and the use of withheld information, sudden reversals, and lots of suspense.  The well-made play was strong on 
plot, usually at the expense of character.  But it was tremendously 

popular, and before he died Scribe scribbled out over 300 plays, which were the rage of Paris during the 1840s.  Scribe’s artistic heir was Victorien Sardou, who wrote many plays in the same style, including the realistically titled A Scrap of Paper and Tosca for Sarah Bernhardt.  Tosca is now more famous in Puccini’s opera version, but it was a very popular piece, as were other of Sardou’s plays, which George Bernard Shaw wittily damned as “Sardoodledom!”

      

Other French writers used Scribe’s well-made play formula to voice their concerns about society, and their work, dubbed pièce à these or the thesis play, was the first to combine realistic subject matter 

with strong social commentary.  Alexandre Dumas-fils (1824-1895) wrote about society’s injustice in La Dame aux Camélias, about a woman with a past, in this case a “whore with a heart of gold” as many such characters would be called, Marguerite Gautier.  In the play, the courtesan Marguerite, touched for the first time by true love – for young Armande Duval -- gives 

French film version of Dumas-fils's play

up the debauched, profligate life she led in Paris, but Armande’s father skillfully pressures Marguerite, convincing her that if she really loves his respectable son, she must give him up.  She makes the great sacrifice and does so, but Armande follows her to Paris, and insults her at a party. She collapses, falls into a consumptive decline, and just as Armande, having 

A huge hit for Garbo, Camille was a U.S. film version

learned the truth from his father, bursts into her sickroom and holds her in his arms, she dies. Paris went wild, and the play was made into one of Verdi’s finest operas, La Traviata.  Dumas-fils used Scribe’s formula in crafting his plots, and he very carefully and precisely set up the milieu in Paris in which Marguerite and her kind thrived, known as the demi-monde, so it was very realistic in this sense, and of course to use a prostitute as the sympathetic leading lady in a play just wasn’t done!  But although Dumas used a prostitute relatively realistically and though his play was filled with realistic touches, the main thrust was still romantic, even melodramatic. 

Emile Augier also wrote thesis plays, and also used the well-made play formula to build his plots.  Augier’s first important play was Olympia’s Marriage, written in 1855 as a response to La Dame aux 

Camélias.  Augier accepted the concept of a reformed prostitute, but what, he argued in this play, could happen if a prostitute only pretended to reform? In this play, Olympia is a woman who, after living a life of sin, makes her former life go away by moving and assuming a new name, another “woman with a past.” In her new identity, Olympia marries a naive young Marquis, Henri.  His father welcomes her into their aristocratic circle.  Her nature, however, is evil; she yearns for the excitements of her early life, and in her boredom Olympia creates a scandal, ruining nearly every character in the play.  At the end the old Marquis, Henri’s father, shoots her to protect the honor of his family, and is shown re-loading the pistol to kill himself, as the curtain falls. As a playwright, Augier was more versatile than Dumas, but this didn’t stop La Dame aux Camélias from being much more popular than Olympia’s Marriage.

Realism in France was dethroned by a darker version of its own self: naturalism.  Darwin’s revolutionary Origin of Species was published in 1859.  This shocking study defined evolution, “the survival of the fittest,” and argued that an individual’s traits are determined by heredity and environment.  Naturalist writers rallied round Darwin’s theory and characters in this form of literature were reduced to the status of natural objects to be scientifically examined. The stage proved a fine operating room for this examination.  Plays in the style of une tranche de vie -- a slice of life -- began to be presented.

      

Emile Zola (1840-1902) was the leading literary figure of naturalism.  He argued that the stilted neoclassical rules had merely

 been replaced by equally artificial formulas, the contrived romantic melodrama and then well-made and thesis plays.  Zola called for no rules, no thesis, but life itself on the stage.  To demonstrate his theory he wrote a theatrical version of his own naturalistic novel, Thérèse Raquin. Both novel and play shocked and angered Parisians:

French film version of the play

Thérèse is unhappily married; she and her husband live in close quarters with his mother.  Thérèse takes a lover and the two decide to break free by murdering her husband.  They 

British film version w/Brian Cox

do, and it seems they may get away with it, because the only one who witnessed it, the mother, was so shocked and terrified by the murder that she suffered a stroke and could no longer speak.  But the guilt of the lovers gets the best of them, they are trapped in the same cramped space that she’d lived in with her husband, and his mother, sitting in a rocking chair, is a silent reminder of their deed. By the end of the play, as the mother begins to recover from the stroke and threatens to tell all, they are driven to a double suicide.

 

Awful musical version of Thérèse Raquin

Plays such as Thérèse Raquin were not written for the Comédie Française.  A new kind of theatre was required to stage naturalist plays -- the Théâtre Libre (Free Theatre).  Andre Antoine, a 

former worker with the Paris gas company, founded this theatre to produce the new drama.  In order to escape censorship, Antoine organized it as a sort of private club.  Antoine’s theatre was much smaller than the large houses where stars played melodramas to thousands; Antoine’s intimate audiences peered into settings as close to literal reality as possible.  In a play called The Butchers, for example, real sides of beef were hung on the stage.  In the play Old Heidelburg, Antoine simply bought the interior of a student’s room and transferred it piece by 

piece onto the stage.  Antoine’s naturalistic stagings were perhaps more important and revolutionary than the daring plays that he produced.  And as so often happens, when a radical experiment has proved successful, mainstream theatre copies it.  This was the case with the conservative Comédie Française, where for example in the play My Friend Fritz real water flowed on the stage, and real food and drinks were served.  

The new trends in theatres throughout Europe at the end of the 19^th century took two directions: towards the small, intimate stages that began to imitate the Théâtre Libre, or towards more comfort and splendor in mainstream theatres. The quintessential example of the latter was the new Paris Opéra (now the Opéra Garnier).  Designed by Charles Garnier, it was begun in 1862 and not completed till 1874. It consisted of a huge auditorium (seating 2100), a large stage (the proscenium opening was 55 feet, the stage

was 175 feet wide by 85 feet deep), and scenery was changed by flying set pieces in from above and raising them from below stage.  In this opulent building more lobby space was made available for gathering, communing, drinking before the show and during intermissions, increasing the role of the theatre as social gathering place, as well as a space in which to watch plays.

     

Given the new realistic writing, actors began to insert realistic touches into their performances. It was perhaps the first era in which props were used to increase the realistic feeling of a piece -- 

men smoked on stage, women knitted.   And while they might seem silly today, very serious attempts at realistic actor training occurred in this period.  The science of acting was addressed by François Delsarte in France.  Delsarte charted how each different body part should be placed to convey particular emotions, attitudes, or ideas.  One of Delsarte’s charts displayed the 9 positions of the eyebrow!       

     

While new trends began to influence and change some acting styles, traditional methods remained strong.  Star actors often 

defied any new rules, still wearing a costume out of tune with the rest of the production, acting in the older, more declamatory style.  The most famous male star of this era combined a relatively old fashioned approach with many of the new touches.  Perhaps that was one reason he was so popular with all sorts of audiences.  His name was Constant-Benoit Coquelin (1841-1909).  He played at the Comédie Française for 26 years, then toured throughout the world.  His most famous role was Cyrano de Bergerac.

      

The most famous French star was a woman -- and what a woman! 

Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) made her reputation at the Comédie Française, then after her controversial departure from that theatre she made several tours of the world.  Some of her greatest roles included Marguerite in La Dame aux Camelias, and the title characters in Tosca and Phèdre, but she took on all sorts of challenges.  She played Hamlet with great success.  She was old school and eccentric, but apparently possessed a mighty talent.

A Brief Glimpse at Italian Theatre in the Late Nineteenth Century

Several Italian actors gained international reputations at the end of the nineteenth century, and all but one worked in the older style.  

Three, sometimes known as the Italian Shakespeareans, are interesting because although they played standard Italian roles as well, they invested much of their time in plays of the Bard of Avon.  Adelaide Ristori was probably the greatest Italian actress in the late nineteenth century, and toured extensively, most notably as Lady Macbeth, which role she learned in English as well as Italian.  In fact she performed the famous 

sleepwalking scene in several European languages, depending on which country she visited.  Ernesto Rossi toured Shakespearean and other roles through Europe and the US but has the rather dubious distinction of playing all five acts of King Lear in Italian while the rest of the company spoke English, in both New York and London. Both attempts were poorly received.  Rossi’s other prominent Shakespearean roles

included Hamlet and Othello.  In the latter role, Rossi was eclipsed by Tommaso Salvini, one of the greatest international stars towards the end of the nineteenth century.  In his Othello, Salvini’s descent from intellectual coolness into savage rage was regarded as definitive in its time. 

      

The most important of the Italians was Eleonora Duse (1859-1924), another internationally famous actress. She began her career from the time she was four years old, and performed until she died while on tour in the United States, in Pittsburgh to be exact.  She was born in northeastern Italy, in Asolo.  She first played Marguerite Gauthier in La Dame aux Camélias in St Petersburg, she played in Boito’s translation of Antony and Cleopatra (Boito 

also wrote the libretto for Verdi’s great operatic version of Otello), she championed the work of Ibsen, including A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler, but was also at home in many of Sardou’s plays.  Her love affair with poet and playwright Gabriele D’Annunzio was tempestuous and he rather cruelly gave the lead role in his play La Citta Morta to Duse’s great rival, Sarah Bernhardt, though Duse subsequently played it to great acclaim.  While conservative critics (including her older rival, Ristori) criticized the subtlety of Duse’s playing, discerning critics like GBS had nothing but praise for it.  If Bernhardt was the last of the old style stars, Duse was the first of the new, for though she didn’t completely abandon the old method, she invested it with a simple, quiet, internalized manner that heralded a more realistic and modern style. 

While we have been discussing new movements, one thing didn't change, at least
in some theatres - spectacle!

France definitely led the way in Realism and naturalism during the second half of the nineteenth century, but realistic writing and staging occurred in countries throughout Europe, as well as in England and America at this time.  One of the more interesting theatrical genealogies is this one: John Oxenford wrote the short farce, A Day Well Spent in 1835. Viennese writer Johann Nestroy’s Out for a Lark, made use of the Oxenford’s plot to create a play about two shop assistants who pretend to be their boss. As such it is the inspiration for a host of plays, including the early American Musical A Trip to Chinatown (1890) and Thornton Wilder’s The Merchant of Yonkers, which was refined into The Matchmaker and musicalized as Hello Dolly.  This play, written at the time Scribe was crafting well-made plays in Paris, is one of the early plays outside France to feature realistic characters.

The "spectaculist" approach to theatre