American Theatre to the Civil War Part 1

The earliest records of theatrical activity in the “new world” were found in Native American rituals, but it was the transplanted European tradition of theatre that flourished in the Americas.  In 1538 dramatic activity began in Spanish settlements, in 1606 the first theatricals were recorded in French-speaking Canada, but English language drama got off to a slow start. The first colonists along the east coast of the future U.S. were explorers, convicts, and radically religious souls – NOT your average theatre crowd! Even if audiences had been friendly to theatre, there just wasn’t enough time for it.  Benjamin Franklin wrote:  “After the first cares for necessities of life are over, we shall come to think of the embellishments.”

      

The first record of English-language theatrical performance in the colonies (a play called “Ye Bare and Ye Cubbe”) was not a playbill or a review. It was a court decision in Williamsburg VA, 1665. Three Virginians decided to put on a play. As their reward, they were put on trial!  The good news is that they were freed, but incidents like this one gave even the most intrepid performers pause.

It was safer to put on theatre in universities, where it was thought of as educational.  A student at Harvard College wrote the first play by an American in 1690, and the play, called Gustavus Vasa, was produced there.  There is also some evidence of theatrical activity at William and Mary College as early as 1702.

      

The first theatre in what would become the United States opened in Williamsburg, VA in 1716.  Theatres began to be built in New York City, where a warehouse was turned into a theatre on Pearl Street in 1735, but the first center of theatrical activity in the colonies was Philadelphia.  As early as 1749 the first company of actors in America, the Murray-Kean Company, performed at Plumstead’s Warehouse in Philly.  They also played in New York City at Nassau Street as well as in Williamsburg, and in Maryland – but we know little else about them.

      

We DO know that this group made efforts to establish a circuit, in which a company played one town for as long as profits held, then moved on to another, then another.  The idea was to play a circuit of 3 to 5 towns, then begin another circuit of the same towns, and so on, after which the company might move farther on and create a new circuit.

The Hallam Troupe was the first company to tour regularly along America’s east coast.  Unlike the Murray-Kean company, which survived only briefly, the Hallams dominated theatrical activity in 

the colonies for nearly 50 years. How did they start? William Hallam sent his brother Lewis, Lewis’s wife and son, and a few others to America from London in 1752.  This company of 12 adults and 3 children opened in Williamsburg VA on 16 September 1752 with a production of The Merchant of Venice.  They established a circuit that included New York, Philadelphia, Annapolis and Charleston, but that stayed away from puritanical New England at first. They worked in these cities until late 1754, then spent three years in Jamaica, another British colony, which was more amenable to theatre than those on the mainland.

During the time in Jamaica, Lewis Sr. died and his widow married David Douglass, an actor who took control of the troupe and 

brought it back to America in 1758. Once back, the company continued to tour up and down the Eastern Seaboard, became rather successful, and in 1763 changed its name from “The London Company of Comedians” to the “American” Company. The new name had a ring to it, but the change was also politically motivated, as the colonies were becoming increasingly anti-British. Lewis Jr. played leads opposite his mother, and Douglass built new theatres from scratch (we call them “purpose-built” or revamped old buildings to make theatres. The first of these was the 

Southwark Playhouse in Philadelphia in 1766. The first professionally produced play by an American took place at he Southwark:  The Prince of Parthia. This dreadful piece by Thomas Godfrey, an awful mish-mash of thievings from Shakespeare, had only one performance, on 24 April 1767. Douglass next built the John Street Theatre in New York City,

 which opened in December 1767.  The John Street remained NYC’s major theatre for 30 years. The Hallam company introduced new British plays to the American colonies and established more theatres, but in Providence RI they were drummed out of town, even after the company advertised its plays in that city (and others, see below) not as theatrical fare but as “moral lectures!”

      

Then in 1775 the Continental Congress ordered a halt to theatrical and other “frivolous activity,” but immediately after the Revolution professional theatre in America began to flourish. The American Company returned to the new United States in 1784, led by Lewis Hallam, Jr.  In 1794 another 

group of actors opened a theatre in Philadelphia called the Chestnut Street Theatre; soon after Boston’s Federal Street Theatre opened its doors; and in New York City the Park 
Theatre became the finest theatre in the

country in 1798. The first American-written comedy to be professionally produced in the U.S. was The Contrast, by a lawyer named Royall Tyler. In this comedy of manners, Tyler “contrasted” American ways (bold, heroic) with British ways (effete, foppish) and introduced a character called the Yankee, a very popular type in nineteenth century American theatre.

      

Most of the actors and nearly all the plays at the turn of the nineteenth century were British, but Americans too engaged in writing for the theatre. One of the most important was 

William Dunlap, a Jack-of-all-trades. He adapted many of German melodramatist Kotzebue’s plays and wrote several of his own, the best being Andre (1798), about the British spy and General George Washington’s decision to execute him. In addition to his writing, Dunlap also managed theatres, among them the Park Theatre (unsuccessfully) in New York. Dunlap also wrote the first history of American theatre and the first history of American art.  A painter as well as a man of the theatre, Dunlap’s huge canvases toured the country, often with a spieler who “narrated” the paintings to audiences.

     

John Howard Payne began his career as a child star, later 

moved from America to England, & became a playwright. His most famous play, Brutus (1818), was written as a star vehicle for Edmund Kean and was very popular in Kean’s repertoire. In another play, Clari, he wrote the lyrics for long-enduring song, “Home Sweet Home.”

      

One of the most popular women on the American stage was Anne Brunton Merry, who excelled at tragic roles.  Born in 

Britain, Anne married a Mr. Merry, who was also active in theatre, and she worked at Covent Garden. Merry died, and Anne came to America to join the company at the Chestnut Street Theatre. She married actor/manager Thomas Wignell. When Wignell died she married a third time to yet another American actor. She continued to perform until she died in childbirth, at age 39.

   

Thomas Abthorpe Cooper was, at the turn of the century, 

America’s reigning star.  In 1808 he took over management of the Park Theatre and turned it into America’s foremost playhouse.  Cooper wisely partnered with Stephen Price, who ran the business end of the enterprise shrewdly.  Cooper excelled in tragic roles and appeared across the country in star tours throughout the 20s and 30s.

Design in the American theatre usually consisted of simple roll drops, even at the most important playhouses, until the 18-teens. As companies often had to rely on circuits early settings were kept simple and easily mobile.

     

After the War of 1812 Americans began to move off the Eastern Seaboard and started to go west. Shortly after pioneers had settled an area, itinerant entertainers followed, at first solos and duos that would perform magic tricks, shadow puppet plays and comic improvisations. Small troupes of professional players, usually family based, followed, braving the roads, putting up in the only hotel in a village, and playing in a hall there, at times the courtroom on the second floor of the local courthouse, at others the assembly hall of the 2-storey school house. 

      

One of the first of these theatrical pioneers was Samuel Drake. He, his family & a few others, struck out from a theatre in Albany, NY in 1815, headed for Kentucky. Drake had made a deal with a Kentuckian that he would bring theatre to a circuit of cities in that new state, Frankfort, Louisville, and Lexington, a city known at that time as “the Athens of the West.” On their way to Kentucky the actors played towns along the way, bringing some of the first theatre to villages in central and western New York. Their route was one of the few early ways west, The Cherry Valley Turnpike. In the 1820s this area became the route of the Erie Canal, and in the 1840s & 50s, the route of the New York Central Railroad. 

      

Drake’s company was highly portable. He carried 6 roll drops that could be set up on a platform in any large room. He altered plays so that his ten actors could perform them. Some of these plays were barely recognizable after his alterations, but when he arrived in Kentucky, his circuit was a success. Drake’s sons and daughters became known throughout the country as these tours multiplied. Thus intrepid theatrical types such as Drake and others used circuits to expand into the west.

      

Two men connected with Drake’s company did much to expand the American theatre. Noah Ludlow and Sol Smith 

became partners after splitting from the Drake troupe. In the 1830s and 40s they established theatres in Nashville, New Orleans, and in 1835 the westernmost point in Anglo-America, St. Louis.  Others followed their example and by the 1840s and 50s there were several slow-moving “national tours” through the country.  Chicago saw its first permanent theatre in 1847.  At the same time, the Gold Rush brought performers FAR west by boat; it was too dangerous to try to cross the wild west by wagon. San Francisco became a thriving theatrical center by 1850.

      

The Chapman family floated boats -- showboats -- down rivers, mainly the Mississippi, at this time. The Chapmans 

created circuits of their own, offering entertainments to the towns that sprang up along the river. The early boats were simple affairs that used the current of the river to carry them down it. Then at journey’s end with no way to get back up the river the boats were torn up and sold for their wood, the players headed north by land, built another and back down the river they went. After the Civil War, showboats grew large & lavish, ran under their own power, and remained in use into the early 20th century.

      

In the 1840s and 1850s the creation and expansion of railroads unleashed a transportation revolution.  The Drakes had played villages on their way to Kentucky because they could only manage 15-25 miles a day on roads called turnpikes that turned into mudpikes after it rained. This slow and miserable way of moving was replaced by the railroad and by the early 1850s you could get from Albany to Buffalo on an express train in less than 12 hours, which meant that it was no longer necessary to play Canandaigua or other small villages on the way.  This transportation revolution created a touring hierarchy -- bigger stars played bigger towns (with bigger spaces, larger audiences and increased profit). Smaller companies began to fill the needs of the smaller, out of the way places like “centrally isolated” Ithaca, NY, a town Dr Jack knows all too well.

      

New York City became the major population center, in 1820 doubling Philadelphia’s population of 60,000. By mid-century, New York’s population was close to a half-million!  

More people created a need for more entertainment and increasingly larger theatres were built in Manhattan. After the Park Theatre burned in 1820, a new Park was built, with a seating capacity of 2500, doubling that of the old building. Larger competitors followed, including the Lafayette Theatre (1826), which was equipped for both hippo- and aqua-dramatic activities; and the Bowery, which seated 3600 

(double the size of the largest Broadway theatres today). The Bowery was nicknamed “The Slaughterhouse” because it produced “blood-red” melodrama. The Bowery was notorious for burning down and third playhouse on the site (1845) seated 4000! The Astor Place Opera House opened its doors in 1847; the Lyceum in 1850.  These and other theatres made NYC the theatrical center of the U.S.