American Theatre to the Civil War Part 2

As theatre in the United States grew, it attracted touring stars, primarily from Britain. George Frederick Cooke was not actually attracted to the U.S., but instead was got drunk 

by William Dunlap and others and spirited out of England on a ship to America. He awoke finding himself halfway across the Atlantic Ocean and had no choice but to perform his last intoxicated and erratic performances across the pond. Edmund Kean’s first tour in 1820 was hugely profitable in New York, although he managed to alienate audiences in Boston by making a curtain speech to the effect that he was not able to understand why all his shows were not sold out there, as they had been in New York. Even with this unfortunate remark, after Kean’s visit an army of touring stars invaded the U.S. with varying degrees of success. 

      

One of the most interesting of the touring stars was Junius Brutus Booth, who was driven out of London by Edmund Kean. Kean saw talent in the younger actor and pretended to encourage him by offering to let Booth play roles opposite him on stage. Instead, Kean "mopped up the stage" with Booth and made him a laughingstock. With little choice but to head to the new world, Booth managed a decent career in theatrical centers as well as on tours that took him as far as gold-rush California, where

Booth was the first major star to play San Francisco. Like Kean and Cooke, Booth was also big drinker, and subject to fits of madness as well, often on stage!  One of the many stories of about the unreliable actor concerns his performances of Richard III, who of course must die in battle so that the play can come to a close. Booth was at times known to go more than a wee bit crazy during the fight with 

Richmond and battled the unsuspecting other actor right off the stage into the wings, sometimes out into the street, before company members stopped him and reminded him that he must allow himself to be vanquished by Richmond. He would then say something like “Right you are!” And the fight would head back to the stage where he 

would finally meet his end. JB Booth was more famous for his sons. Edwin, who often traveled with his father and whose increasingly difficult job it was to keep his father under control, became the greatest American actor after the Civil War. Broadway’s Booth theatre is named for him. And Edwin’s brother John Wilkes, also an actor, is of course infamously known as the assassin of Abraham Lincoln.

      

Along with British touring stars, homegrown talent began to assert itself. The most famous American actor before the Civil

 War was Edwin Forrest, also called “The American Tragedian.” His style was physical, athletic, and uninhibited (some called it bombastic), and American audiences loved him. Forrest travelled the entire country, playing all the major Shakespearean roles: Othello, Lear, Macbeth, etc. 

He also sponsored contests for new American plays. The first winner was John Augustus Stone, who wrote the “American Indian” tragedy, Metamora; another important winner was Robert Montgomery Bird, who wrote The Gladiator. These plays were mainstays of the star’s repertoire, making Forrest oodles of money, earning the writers only the small contest prize. 

      

The low point in Forrest’s career and a low point in American theatre history was The Astor Place Riots. If British actors could succeed in America, he reasoned, why could not Forrest succeed in England? He was one of the first American stars to try his luck on the British stage but he was compared unfavorably to W.C. Macready, British actor/manager.  Forrest convinced himself that the British actor had hissed him at a performance (not true); so Forrest attended a performance of Macready’s and hissed him!

      

Animosity between the two actors quickly increased. In 1849 Macready went on tour in the U.S. He played New York City’s Astor Place Opera House when Forrest was playing another theatre in the city. Forrest heard that Macready was playing Macbeth. Seeing an opportunity to one-up his enemy Forrest announced that he would act the same play on the same night at his theatre. The private feud was exploited publicly by anti-British politicians who urged real “Amurricans” to go to Astor Place and hiss Macready off the stage.  On the first night of Macready’s performance, the actor was hooted off the stage by pro-Forrest and anti-British factions. He was frightened, furious and desired to leave the U.S. immediately. But friends of Macready urged him that if he performed again they would insure a good audience and his safety. 

     

The militia was called in. At Macready’s second performance the scene inside the Astor Place Opera House was peaceful.  

Outside the theatre, however, fans of Forrest along with anti-British political agitators gathered in great numbers and rioted.  The militia panicked & fired on the crowd. After the smoke cleared 22 people lay dead, with another 150 wounded.  Macready had to be smuggled out of the city for his safety after this worst and most bloody riot in theatre history. 

   

Forrest’s female counterpart was Charlotte Cushman.  She appeared somewhat masculine, with a tall, strong body, and 

she overwhelmed audiences, sometimes her male co-stars as well, particularly when she played Lady Macbeth.  She performed Romeo to her sister Susan’s Juliet; Queen Katherine in Henry VIII; and in the popular melodrama Guy Mannering she was sensational as the old crone Meg Merrilies. Cushman’s tour to England was much more successful than Forrest’s and while there she partnered with Macready in Macbeth.  By1849 she known as the finest English-speaking actress on either side of the Atlantic. 

      

Anna Cora Mowatt started her career as a child actor, and later in life was well known for her public readings of plays, 

but is BEST known for writing the play Fashion (1845), the finest American comedy of manners of its era.  It’s a satire not dissimilar to Tyler’s much earlier play The Contrast, mocking American nouveau-riches who make fools of themselves by aping foreign (this time French, not British) manners. In an era of theatre during which almost no American play was written that is still of any interest except historically, Fashion remains to an extent in fashion, receiving occasional productions in college and regional theatre stages.

      

As in England, and Europe, melodrama was THE form of drama in the early 19th century. Mazeppa; or, The Wild

 Horse of Tartary was a Bristish hippodrama. The title character is a young man who at one point of the action is stripped naked and tied to a horse. But the horse (the hero of
the play) manages to
make its way to friendly territory and

Mazeppa is saved. In a rather unusual and more than a little exploitative twist, in the U.S. the role was played by a woman. Ada Isaacs Menken who created a sensation when she was stripped naked even though naked meant that she was stripped down to a nude-colored body suit. Some of us were easily shocked back then; some of us are easily shocked today. Thus saith Dr Jack, and what is this if not history according to…Dr Jack!

   

Another form highly popular in American theatre was temperance drama. In this melodramatic form, the hero is ruined by evil alcohol, usually administered by a very bad guy

 who’s after the hero’s wife, or home, or both! These dramas proliferated after 1830, when a huge temperance movement swept the country. Often the evening’s entertainment ended with the audience signing temperance pledges. If you read the plays today you might well wonder at the power they had, but once upon a time America was a country of big drinkers. Those times, fortunately, have passed (writes Dr Jack as he reaches for a vodka). One of the most famous dramas was The Drunkard, another Ten Nights in a Barroom.

      

New American stock character types began to be written. One was the stage “Indian,” in the early nineteenth century much 

not terribly convincing, right?

like Rousseau’s “noble savage.” A good example is Metamora in which the title character, a noble Indian chief, is betrayed both by conniving whites and treacherous members of his tribe. Rather than surrender, he and his wife stand tall as they are murdered in a hail of bullets. After the Civil War, when Native Americans were perceived as keeping us from out “manifest destiny (spare me!) the stereotype shifted from noble savage to “thievin’, connivin’ Injun.”

The first stage Yankee stole the show in The Contrast.  After that, many Yankee plays were written. The Yankee character began as the American common man, naive and a bit simple-minded, but always ready to uphold democratic principles.  

By the 1830s and 40s the Yankee was no longer a well-intentioned nitwit, instead morphing into a clever trickster who acted naive and foolish in order to outwit customers and close the deal. Two of the most famous delineators of this style were James Henry Hackett and George Handel Hill, aka “Yankee” Hill (so closely was he associated with his creation). As the characters became slyer, their names began to be more complicated and meaningful: Solomon Swap; Hiram Dodge, and so on.

      

In the 1840s the City B’hoy became another popular type.  

Usually a fireman, a good-natured roughneck like Mose the Bowery B’hoy was featured in A Glance at New York – he explains the city to the audience, but as he does so he is often interrupted by calls to save damsels in distress or kittens. A series of Mose plays followed, usually starring Frank Chanfrau, who excelled in the role.

      

These “types” often degenerated into caricature, and comedy in early nineteenth century American theatre can at times seem highly offensive as we view it through twenty-first century glasses. The stage Irishman and the stage German were merciless caricatures as these groups immigrated in great numbers to the U.S. 

The worst mimicry was reserved for forced immigrants: Black slaves. In 1828, Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a white performer, “blacked up” and did a grotesquely caricatured song and 

dance based very loosely on the dances of plantation slaves. His character was Jim Crow.  This act created a sensation, it was copied, and by the 1840s, groups of whites, often Irishmen, Campbells and Christies, for example, “blacked up” using burnt cork and performed in minstrel shows. Whom do you pick on when you are at the bottom of the “picking” order? You find someone lower still than you, sad to say. Minstrelsy became one of the most popular forms of entertainment in both the northern and southern states of the union. 

      

The American theatre was not friendly to African American performers in the nineteenth century. In 1821 the first Black 

theatre group, The African Company, played a repertoire of Shakespeare and melodrama in New York City at the African Grove Theatre. Their leader, William Henry Brown, wrote King Shotaway (1823), about a slave insurrection – the first recorded play by an African American. Brown’s star actor was James Hewlett, who played, among 

other important roles, Richard III. The African Company was forced to close after only a few years, hissed and shouted down by whites at every performance.  One member of the African Company, Ira Aldridge, set sail for England to pursue a career not available to him in America. He played both comedy and tragedy successfully in England and on tours of the European continent.  Known as the “African Roscius,” he was decorated by several European heads of state. Unable to pursue his chosen profession in the U.S. he died while on tour in Europe.

      

While African American theatre foundered and sank, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the most popular play (there were several versions) in America after 1852 and through to the end of the century, whites only were cast to “black up” and play the central characters such as Tom and Topsy.  And on that disturbing note, we’ll head out of American theatre and back to Europe, where a new kind of drama emerged.