JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE Number 1
Volume Ill Winter 1991
Co-editors Walter J. Meserve
Vera Mowry Roberts
CUNY Graduate School
Managing Editor Edwin Wilson
Assistant Editor Joel Berkowitz-
CASTA Copyright 1991
The Journal of American Drama and Theatre (ISSN 1044-937X) is published three times a year, in tlie Spring, Fall, and Winter. Subscriptions are $12.00 for each calendar year. Foreign subscriptions require an additional $6.00 for postage. Inquire of CASTA, CUNY Graduate School, 33 West 42nd Street, New York, New York 10036.
Editorial Board
Stephen Archer University of Missouri
Bruce A. McConachie College of William and Mary
Ruby Cohn University of California, Davis
Margaret Wilkerson University of California, Berkeley
Linda Jenkins
Don B. Wilmeth Brown University
From the Editors
Readers will note the somewhat eclectic character of the essays in this issue--essays by two editors of the journal, an excerpt from a 1982 CUNY PhD Program In Theatre dissertation, iheatrical biographies reprinted from a rare volume published in the mid-1850s. Although such a collection was not our original design when we started this journal, we believe that the content of this issue steadfastly promotes our previously stated aim to encourage research and to provide opportunity for that enlightened understanding to _which we all aspire. As we began to organize this winter issue of 1991 , however, necessity stimulated inventiveness. We are not receiving enough of those carefully researched and thoughtful essays that give journals the distinction that all editors desire. American drama and theatre deserves scholarly attention, and "attention must be paid." What do you have to say?
Vera Mowry Roberts
Walter J. Meserve Co-Editors
2
Table of Contents Volume Ill
Winter 1990
Bruce McConachie
Out of the Kitchen and Into the Marketplace: Normalizing Uncle Tom's Cabin For the Antebellum Stage ...................~ .. 5
Nancy Wynn
Sophie Treadwell: Author of Machinal .............................. 29
Walter J. MeserVe
The American West of the 1870s and 1880s as Viewed From the Stage .................................... 48
F.C. Wemyss, compiler
Theatrical Biographies of Eminent Actors and Authors ............... 64
Number 1
Contributors ......................................................................................... 75
3
Manuscripts should be prepared in conformity with The Chicago Manual of Style, 13th ed., and should be submitted in duplicate with an appropriately stamped, self-addressed envelope. Please allow three to four months for a response. Our distinguished Editorial Board will constitute the jury of selection. Address editorial inquiries and manuscript submissions to the Editors, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Ph.D. Program in Theatre, CUNY Graduate Center, 33 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036.
CASTA Publications are supported by generous grants from the Lucille Lortel Chair in Theatre and the Sidney E. Cohn Chair in Theatre Studies in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the City University of New York.
Beginning with this issue of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, members of the American Theatre and Drama Society receive as a privilege of membership a subscription to JADT.
4
OUT OF THE KITCHEN AND INTO THE MARKETPLACE: NORMALIZING UNCLE TOM'S CABIN FOR THE ANTEBELLUM STAGE
Bruce McConachie Theatre historians examining the two most popular antebellum stage versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin have focused on the extent to which the two adapters, George L. Aiken and Henry J. Conway, remained faithful to Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery intentions. Both dramatizations achieved immense success, playing to varied audiences in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia from late in 1852 through 1853 and sparking a notorious "theatre war" in New York City between the National Theatre, where Aiken's version ran for an astounding 325 performances, and the American Museum Theatre, where P.T. Barnum touted Conway's script as .. the only just and sensible dramatic version of Mrs. Stowe's book." The Aiken adaptation, most historians conclude, softened Stowe's objections to slavery as an institution, but retained much of her sentimental abolitionism. Piecing together the Conway version from letters, programs, and newspaper reviews, historians supposed that this adaptation sacrificed most of Stowe's strikes against slavery to pander to northern audiences nervous about the political implications of her principles. 1 Now that Conway's script has been recovered, however, it is evident that this version does not "make it quite an agreeable thing to be a slave," as a reviewer for William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator asserted. In the context of Northern debates about the South's "peculiar institution" In the earfy 1850s, both adaptations were anti-slavery, though Aiken's version was much closer to Garrisonian abolitionism than Conway's.2 Stowe's novel was much more than a tract against slavery for her antebellum readers, however. Recent scholarship on Uncle Tom's Cabin reveals that her anti-slavery beliefs are embedded in a nexus of values that challenged the secular, masculine, and capitalist society of the antebellum North. In her seminal essay on the book, cultural historian Jane Tompkins concludes that Stowe "attempted to turn the socio-political order upside down" by witnessing the day "when the meek-- which is to say women -- will inherit the earth." Elizabeth Ammons adds that Stowe's spiritual vision is best exemplified In her maternal characters, Uncle Tom included, since
5
Stowe converts "essentially repressive concepts of femininity into a positive (and activist) alternative system of values...." Gillian Brown argues that Stowe posited a matriarchal utopia in which a precapitalist domestic economy would replace the. market economy of the status quo. And Theodore Hovet comments that Uncle Tom's Cabin captured not only an extreme form of social injustice but also the fundamental conflict in modern western culture between a spiritual vision of human existence, a vision given its most powerful expression In the Christian mystical tradition, and a modern materialistic ethos, which treated the world, even human beings, only as physical entities subject to natural law.a While these and other critics and historians differ on several matters of interpretation and emphasis, they would agree that the novel envisions a society In which Christian values, maternal love, and economic cooperation might finally triumph over individualism, materialism, and exploitation. For Stowe, slavery was simply the wqrst instance of the larger system within which it was embedded -the system of market capitalism. How, then, did the Aiken and Conway adaptations of Stowe's novel position their northern audiences to respond to the realities of capitalism enveloping their lives in the 1850s? Thomas Haskell's influential essay "Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility" provides a useful and revealing way into this question. Haskell links abolitionism and similar humanitarian reforms in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to a •cognitive style" resulting from the rise of market capitalism. In brief, he argues that the experience of market relations taught capitalists to value conscience as well as calculation: several "men of principle," having profited from the promise-keeping and the future-orientation of contractual relations, were led, "by subtle Isomorphisms and homologies," to embrace a humanitarian sensibility. Hence, habits trained in the marketplace led to a style of thinking which suggested the possibility of moral progress and guided capitalist reformers in shaping their strategies. 4 Clearly, Stowe's novel owes much to the •cognitive style" of humanitarian reform, despite its attack on capitalist exploitation. Like the ideologies supporting market capitalism and female domesticity, the social orientation of the sentimental novel expressed the moral certainties of a dominant eighteenth-century middle class. s By the nineteenth century, however, Stowe and others were constructing 6
sentimental values In unconventional ways. As Isabelle White notes, Uncle Tom's Cabin uses an "individualist appeal for anti-individualist ends," and the resulting contradiction harms her politics. Charting the implications of this contradiction within the context of antebellum debates between radical feminists and conservative defenders of domesticity, Jean Fagin Yellin concludes that Stowe's book, despite its radical ideas, celebrates "ordinary women who practice not feminism and abolitionism but 'domestic feminism' and colonization." Ultimately, states Yellin, "Uncle Tom's Cabin counter(s) the practical measures urged by the black and white [feminists of her tlme] .6 Stowe's conservative methods contradicted her radical appeal to conscience--a likely key to the immense popularity of her book. Like the novel, both stage versions are complex sites of ideological conflict. Also grounded in assumptions about conscience and agency deriving from the historical dynamics of capitalism as described by Haskell, both adaptations, too, criticized several of the effects of capitalism in the antebellum United States. Whereas Stowe's book, by turning the mandates of individualistic conscience against capitalistic consequences, remains conflicted about the morality of market capitalism, Aiken's and Conway's adaptations move toward a resolution of this ambivalence. Both scripts suggest that humanitarian sensibility and modest reform can solve the problems of slavery and capitalism without altering the underlying structure of capitalistic culture and society in the 1850s. This implied resolution brought both adaptations more fully into line with the traditional "cognitive style" of humanitarian reform and with the values of the dominant antebellum culture than was Stowe's novel. At a time when both political parties accepted capitalism as the engine of progress--the Whigs touting the virtues of the "selfmade man" and the Democrats guarding the "free" market against the incursions of "aristocrats"--Stowe's insistence that women's duty to God often runs counter to man's economic self-Interest was a cultural anomaly. Similarly, Stowe's abolitionism, based on mystical notions of Christianity and motherhood rather than on a "masculine" logic of perfectionist reform, was uncharacteristic of the 1850s and of the tradition of humanitarianism? In effect, then, the stage adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin normalized Stowe's novel, smoothing away the radical challenges to the dominant culture implicit in its mystical and matrifocal values. As the stage popularity of "the world's greatest hit'' suggests, these versions of the novel were closer to the traditional morality and contemporary practice of capitalism than the original. This is not to say that all of Stowe's strikes against capitalism are excluded from the two adaptations. Both Aiken and Conway 7
condemned the calculating greed of the slave catchers and the cruelty of Legree's economic exploitation. In addition to these obvious and uncontroverslal targets, moreover, both playwrights devised new characters and dialogue that point up the immorality of more legitimate capitalistic practices in the North. Aiken probably created the character of Gumption Cute to generate comic relief from the Legree-Tom scenes set in the South by alternating them with scenes of comic confrontation involving Cute against Topsy, Miss Ophelia, and others In the North. The new character also serves the poetic justice of Aiken's plot by helping to kill Legree near the end of the play. Along the way, however, Aiken also uses Cute to censure the unfeeling calculation of the speculator. A derivative of the stage Yankee, a character typically laughed with for his cunning and Independence, Aiken's Cute Is written instead to be laughed at for his failures and to evoke disgust for his heartlessness. Out for any "speculation" that will turn a profit, Cute, soon after his initial entrance, tells Lawyer Marks about his past difficulties in making money. His latest venture, he says, was as an overseer on a plantation: "I made a pretty good thing of that, though it was dreadful trying to my feelings to flog the darkies; but I got used to it after awhile, and then I used to lather them like Jehu" (IV:1). In the end, he and Marks try to blackmail Legree out of a thousand dollars by agreeing to keep silent about his murder of St. Clare in a barroom. This stratagem falls, too. Gumption Cute, in other words, is all Inept calculation; despite his name, he lacks courage and cunning as well as moral sensibility. Aiken wants his audience to understand that speculators are allied with villains.a Conway also added a stage Yankee, Penetrate Partyside, but used him to uphold the capitalistic values of Yankee individualism. Nevertheless, Conway distinguishes between the "cute and calculatin' population" of New England (111:1) and the "English aristocracy and capitalists who are only doing in another form what the American planter does· (11:4). Drawing on dialogue from chapter 19 of Stowe's novel, Conway has his St. Clare continue: [The English laborer] is as much at the will of his employer as if he were sold to him. The Slave holder can whip his refractory slave to death; the English capitalist can starve him to death.. . . [The two systems] are In nature the same, though different In name. One set of humans are entirely appropriated to the use and Improvement of the other without any regard to their own. Raised in ignorance, living in want, and dying in wretchedness (11:4).
8
Partyslde embraces St. Clare's sentiments. Later In the play, Partyside seconds this critique of capitalism in a scene with Aunty Vermont, a character based on Stowe's Miss -Ophelia. Pouring over law books to discover a way of freeing Tom from Legree, Partyside notes a statute that masters can only manumit old slaves if they agree to provide them with food, clothing, and lodging. "Pity [the law] weren't more general," says Penetrate. "Guess it wouldn't do much harm to some of the rich folks in the North if they was obliged to provide for all those who have gotten grey and superannuated in their service" r-J:1). Despite Conway's rousing rhetoric against capitalist exploitation and Aiken's withering attack on speculators, both plays stop far short of attacking the legitimacy of American market capitalism. Cute, his failed speculations reflected in his increasingly shabby clothes, declines in respectability as the play proceeds. Further, the moral insensitivity he embodies hurts only himself; Aiken never uses Cute's comic villainy to exemplify a social system of calculation and exploitation. Conway's St. Clare and Partyside understand that treating people as property is an inherent problem in capitalism, not simply the result of individual moral failing. But aside from Penetrate's mild rebuff of northern capitalists in Act V, the play locates the problem of exploitation in England, not America. Stowe, of course, excoriated English capitalism too, but she also used the English system to generalize about conditions in America. Uke Aiken, Conway lifted entire passages of dialogue from the novel, cutting but rarely adding to the speeches Stowe wrote for her characters. Conway did add to the St. Clare speech quoted above, however. Where Stowe wrote, "The slave holder can whip his refractory slave to death; the capitalist can starve him to death," Conway modified the noun "capitalist" with the adjective "English: At a time when most Americans contrasted what they believed to be the social justice of their own national economy to the wickedness of the English factory system, Conway's addition significantly undercut Stowe's Intended attack on the systemic evils of American market capital.ism. The bland concern in both adaptations about the inhumanity of capitalism in general, however, masks a stronger link binding both melocframas to the "cognitive style" deriving from capital.istic market relations, as understood by Haskell. In particular, both plays embrace the two main "lessons· taught by the dynamics of the market and celebrate "men of principle" as the model of male behavior in a capitalist society. Haskell notes that the regimen of the market taught entrepreneurs the necessity of keeping their economic promises. Mutual promise-making and promise-keeping provided 9
the basis for contractual relations, without which trade, employment, and banking could not develop. Because fulfilling a contract presupposed some human control over nature and historical circumstances, capitalism also "expanded the range of causal perception and inspired people's confidence in their power to intervene in the course of events,• Haskell's second lesson. This magnification of a sense of personal power and responsibility led capitalists both to elaborate techniques for manipulating others for their own profit and to apply many of those same techniques to humanitarian purposes. Together, the two chief lessons of the market created the "man of principle, .. the dominant model of ethical behavior In society by the late eighteenth century. An "inner-directed" man concerned to act on principle and focused on future consequences, this historical type thrived best in the United States between the Revolution and the Civil War, when, says Haskell, "the future was at once open enough to the individual to be manipulable and yet closed enough to be foreseeable.'t9 Interpreting the texts of these two plays within the context of this cognitive style might best begin with a focus on the "man of principle" norm in both adaptations. Both stage versions of Stowe's novel contain characters who embody the attributes of this norm as well as others who legitimate it through comic or villainous contrast. In Conway's adaptation especially, the "man of principle" functions as the implicit norm against which the actions and values of the other characters are judged. Conway and Aiken can only feature men of principle in their melodramas, however, by eliminating all of Stowe's women of prlncl.. pie. Cut from both plays Is Mrs. Shelby who, in the novel, pleads with her husband not to sell Tom and Eliza's little Harry to settle their debts. Refusing to consider people as property, Mrs. Shelby understands that the system of slavery cannot be ameliorated by individual acts of morality; her critique of slavery announces Stowe's attack on all systems of exploitation that contradict the model of the Christian family. Also excised from both adaptations is Mrs. Bird, the wife of an Ohio senator, whose motherly concern for Eliza conflicts with her husband's desire to uphold the Fugitive Slave Law. As Stowe makes clear in her chapter entitled "In Which It Appears That A Senator Is But A Man, .. the morality of the heart must override the legalities of the country. Finally, Aiken and Conway cut Rachel Halliday, the Quaker mother who helps George and Eliza escape to Canada. Critic Elizabeth Ammons notes that Halliday's "beauty Issues from her perfection as a mother and from the way she uses her power In what is in practice a matriarchal {because completely home-centered) community. • 1o Without the image of Halliday's
10
kitchen on stage, the Conway and Aiken versions lack the matrifocal utopia against which Stowe measured northern and southern social relations in her novel. For the most part, Aiken and Conway turn the major female characters that remain into melodramatic stereotypes. Stowe, working within the conventions of the sentimental novel, also used stereotypes, but attuned them to her own purposes. While she initially treats Aunt Ophelia with comic affection, for instance, she wants her readers to understand that this overly efficient Yankee does learn from her mistakes; Eva's death makes her a.true mother to Topsy. In Aiken's version, Aunt Ophelia is mainly a comic old maid, laughed at throughout the play for her busybody foolishness and, in scenes invented by Aiken, for her pathetic attempts to gain a husband. Aiken's use of her for comic relief from the Legree-Tom scenes overshadows the reform of her heart and her new-found love for Topsy. Denied the opportunity to experience mother love by Conway (because, in his version, Eva does not die), Conway's Aunty Vermont is completely contained by the stereotype of the old maid. Significantly, both playwrights eventually marry off their Aunt Ophelia characters. Unlike Stowe, they can imagine no use for older women who are unattached to husbands. Stowe constructed Eliza as the mulatto version of the ideal Christian wife and mother; whatever the cost to herself and her husband, she will save her child. Stowe's Eliza, already close to the victimized female of the melodramatic stage, is pushed over the edge by Conway and Aiken. Conway reduces Eliza to a minor character, refusing to dramatize the moment of her greatest heroism, her escape over the ice. In the Aiken version, she is mostly innocent desperation, her fate depending primarily on the resourcefulness or sacrifice of men. Neither playwright shows the pacifying effect Eliza has on her husband. In general, then, Aiken and Conway either exclude Stowe's strong women or essentialize their passive or negative traits, thus countering their representation by the novelist. In partial defense of the adapters, both playwrights were necessarily drawing on production practices and theatrical conventions illsuited to realizing Stowe's matrilocal ideals in production. Strongwilled mothers rarely appeared on the antebellum stage; most stock companies would have been hard pressed to cast several such roles. Since companies generally contained two to three times as many male as female actors, Aiken and Conway knew they would have to excise several of Stowe's female characters in their adaptations. Then, too, the time constraints of conventional theatregoing mandated both extensive cutting and the flattening of several complex but minor characters. Even with both melodramas consuming 11
an entire evening's entertainment (a playwriting gamble in itself), the playing time for both scripts could only last about one tenth as long as it might take an average reader to get through the novel. In this regard, Stowe's conservative feminism helped to insure that many of her women would not make it onto the stage. Her domestic ideology gave men the right to act in the world and relegated women to the sidelines as keepers of conscience. Thus on a plot level -- necessarily the main focus for any nineteenth-century adapter of a long novel -- Shelby, George Harris, St. Clare, and Legree are absolutely essential to the development of the story; Mrs. Shelby, Mrs. Bird, and several other women are not. Nonetheless, Aiken and Conway could have Included several of Stowe's strong matriarchs and could have refrained from stereotyping the major female characters that remained. That they chose not to do so, however, may be less an indictment of them than of the practices, conventions, and expectations of the culture within which they worked. Lacking strong women of principle, both adaptations feature several men of principle whose will and foresight animate the plots of both plays. In the Conway version, the character who embodies most of the attributes of this historical type is George Shelby. After learning in the first act that his father has sold Tom to Haley, little George makes this pledge: I am only a boy, but listen to me and remember: if I live to be a man you shall be free. See Uncle Tom, I have bored a hole through this dollar and I now put it around your neck. Kneel, Uncle Tom and listen to the promise of a boy who will redeem it if he lives to be a man (1:3). Sure enough, George grows up to be a man of principle and keeps his promise. And the token of his pledge, in proper melodramatic fashion, figures significantly in the action, one time saving Tom from Legree's wrath. Conway used a minor event from the novel, George Shelby's promise and gift to Uncle Tom, to frame his entire adaptation: The promise occurs at the climax of an early scene and Its redemption at the conclusion of the play. Other men of principle dot the action of Conway's melodrama. The playwright has Drover John plan the escape of George and Eliza from the slavecatchers and then defend them when they are cornered; he eliminates all the other Quakers, however. George Harris, the white half of his mulatto nature emphasized on stage, uses his freedom to plan the rescue of Eliza from Legree. (In Conway's version, Eliza Is lured from Canada and taken to Legree's
12
plantation; in effect, she's a substitute for Stowe's Emmeline.) Conway's Yankee character, Penetrate Partyside, described as a •down easter collecting materials for a book on human nature generally and other materials on his own particularly• (list of characters), acts on humanitarian principles throughout. Taking his first notes on slavery, Penetrate comments, •Niggers chained like dogs ginerally because they are going to be sold according to law particularly. Querel Who deserves to be chained most, the niggers to be sold or the owners who sell them?• (11:2). Partyside befriends St. Clare, marries Aunty Vermont, tries to rescue Tom at the slave auction, and searches for a legal way to free Tom from Legree. These minor heroes of Conway's melodrama are not scrupulous and respectable capitalists, but they all embody •the defining characteristic of the man of principle, • according to Haskell: "his willingness to act on principle no matter how inconvenient it might be. •11 More closely allied to the storyline and themes of Stowe's novel, Aiken's adaptation features fewer men of principle and relies on them less frequently to move his plot. As in the book, a grown-up George Shelby follows Tom to Legree's plantation, but his earlier promise to rescue the slave is cut. Phineas Fletcher, a Drover John character with much of the same altruistic good humor, actually has more humanitarian work to do In the Aiken version than In Conway's to save George and Eliza. And George Harris, when free, acts selflessly to save his wife and child as he does in the Conway adaptation. But Aiken neither frames his plot around the promise of a man of principle nor Introduces a Penetrate Partyside figure whose disinterestedness allows him to moralize freely and perform good deeds when necessary. This is because the moral center of Aiken's play, even more so than in Stowe's novel, is the death and apotheosis of Uttle Eva. In contrast, at the end of Conway's melodrama Eva is as alive as Uncle Tom. Consequently, the standard of the man of principle is less important in centering Aiken's version than Conway's. In both adaptations, however, this norm helps to clarify audience response to Augustine St. Clare. As Amy Schranger Lang concludes, Stowe had difficulties with this character: Augustine St. Clare is the only character in the novel in whom masculine and feminine attributes are equally mixed; because of this, he endangers the novel. Combining virtue and power as he does, he could presumably translate private feeling into public action. He could, that is, both feel and compete. But to send St. Clare out into the world as •actor and regenerator" would be to rewrite the book. 13
This is so, states Lang, because gender is the determining category in the novel; disrupt what Stowe takes to be the fundamental differences between men and women by a character who combines both attributes and "the Mrs. Birds and the Mrs. Shelbys lose their special capacity for right feeling, the state of the kitchen no longer symbolizes the moral worth of the family it feeds, and domesticity becomes indistinguishable from competition.• 12 Consequently, as soon as St. Clare is ready to act on the basis of Eva's Injunction to free his slaves and preach abolitionism, Stowe must kill him off. And, says Lang, she does it unconvincingly, awkwardly deploying the conventions of sentimental fiction in St. Clare's death scene. Conway and Aiken rely on the norm of the man of principle to contain if not resolve the problem of St. Clare's ideologically troubling androgyny. As Conway characterizes him, St. Clare is too "feminine· for his own "masculine• good: His feelings get the better of him and drive him to drink. The Boston Museum "programme of scenery and incidents" for Act Ill, scene 7 of Conway's adaptation charts the downward path of this failed man of principle: "Saloon In St. aare's house. Grief and desolation. Agony of the wife and child. DEATH OF ST. CLARE. Apotheosis of his mother! Tableau."13 Aiken's St. Clare, close to Stowe's in balancing "feminine· feeling and "masculine· will, promises Tom he will give up drinking, pledges to Eva that he will free his slaves, and is about to sign Tom's freedom papers when Legree kills him. Through the salvific agency of Tom and Eva, Aiken's St. Clare becomes a man of principle. The adapter even evokes sympathy for St. Clare by having him apologize to Tom --"I have forgotten to sign your freedom papers" (IV:5) --before he dies. Consequently, St. Clare can appear in heaven for Aiken's final tableau. In both adaptations, the man of principle is the implicit standard by which Stowe's St. Clare is transformed and against which his actions are judged. Arguably, both playwrights control this character and his fate better than Stowe herself, since St. aare does not threaten the moral calculus of their plays. Many of Aiken's and Conway's comic characters are constructed to contrast to the heroic men of principle at or near the center of both dramatizations. This is especially true of Conway's black buffoons, whose characterizations are taken directly from the stereotypes of the minstrel show. Conway depicts Sam on the Shelby farm as a ragged but pretentious bumpkin. He and Chloe dance a minuet "with the greatest extravagance and politeness· while the other slaves form •a half circle" to watch them (1:1 ). St. Clare's Adolph is a minstrel dandy; he speaks "foppishly, • owns a "half pair of specs," and is •an scented over too, • notes a surprised Partyside
14
(111:1 ). Topsy, when free, delivers a stump speech promising to join "a benevolence s'ciety" in the North to ·1ucidate to dat s'ciety de necessity ob doin' somethin' for dere coloured brethren in bondage• (IV:1). All of these minstrel characterizations effect their comedy by the implicit contrast between the respectable white man of principle and the unrespectable black fool attempting to •ape• his betters. 14 Aiken, on the other hand, follows what George Fredrickson terms the "romantic racialist• attitude of Stowe in constructing Topsy, his single comic black character.15 As in the novel, Topsy is childish and trusting, full of mischief and eager to learn Christian morality. Topsy, both before and occasionally after her reformation, delights in lying, stealing, and fighting--attributes .that keep her unrespectable even after she becomes a Christian. In line with Aiken's overall intentions, Topsy contrasts primarily with Eva. Uke Conway's minstrel stereotypes, she is also a counter to Aiken's men of principle. This historical type of capitalist is also the absent •other" both melodramatists use to define their villains. While Stowe characterizes Haley, Marks, Loker, and the other slave catchers as businessmen and therefore evil, Aiken and Conway tend to separate their villainy from their means of making a living. Aiken's Lawyer Marks, for instance, is tight-lipped and greedy, as willing to make a dollar from selling information to George Shelby or blackmailing Legree as from catching slaves. Ukewise, the Simon Legree of both adapters is the opposite of the man of principle. To the extent that the antitheses of the feminine ideal and of the man of principle share certain characteristics, Stowe's and the playwrights' arch villains are the same. All three Legrees have rejected the love of their mother (Conway's Legree even killed her), treat women and slaves as disposable property, and live by force and cunning. Unlike Stowe's character, though, the Legre~ of Aiken and Conway is not the embodiment of a social institution that systematically exploits other people. In the novel, Legree's degradation of Tom and the other slaves is rooted In rational economic motives. As Theodore Hovet comments, "[Stowe's] Legree has recognized the full industrial potential of slave labor.... His slaves are no more than interchangeable parts in a complex machine of cotton production. . . . [Legree himself] is not unlike the steam-powered machines which drive New England mills."16 In both plays, on the other hand, Legree's evil is reduced to his personality. An anti-man-of-principle, Legree acts primarily out of cruelty and revenge, not to make a profit. In Conway's auction scene, for instance, Legree tells Tom, •1 will buy you and the dearer you cost me, the dearer I'll make you pay for it• (IV:3). Stowe's Legree is alive at the end of the novel, a reminder that the systemic inhumanity of slavery continues. Both playwrights,
15
however, follow melodramatic convention In killing off the villain: Aiken has Marks shoot him when Legree turns on Marks and Cute for attempting to blackmail him and Conway concocts a gothic death scene where Legree, terrified by the ghost of his murdered mother, "dies struggling" with unseen demons (V:3). In both adaptations, Legree dies for his personal sins, not for his role In perpetuating a system that exploits and degrades others. Uncle Tom cannot represent a man of .principle In either the novel or its stage versions because, regardless of his morality, the character lacks the freedom to effect his will. Elizabeth Ammons persuasively argues that Tom is best understood as the "suffering heroine" of Stowe's book; he embodies the womanly traits of intuitive emotionalism, Christian meekness, and familial loyalty conventionally reserved for virtuous female characters in sentimental novels. Ammons points out that "feminizing• Uncle Tom served Stowe's basic argument "that home and mother must not figure as sanctuaries from the world but as imperative models for its reconstitution."17 Thus, Tom's martyrdom marks the final commitment that many of Stowe's strong females stand ready to make to realize their domestic Ideals. In line with her conservative notion of reform, Tom's Christian sacrifice was also meant to provide a model for Stowe's women readers. It is difficult to understand how Stowe's intentions for Tom might have been realized on stage. Any image of the character, necessarily embodied in the nineteenth-century theatre by a male actor, could not have been as "feminine" for its audience as Stowe wished for her readers to imagine. Aiken and Conway exacerbate this fundamental difficulty by radically decontextualizing Tom's womanly suffering and call to conscience. Audiences watching their plays would not see Tom's actions as the most radical step possible for American women because both adapters cut or reshaped all of Stowe's strong mothers. Aiken at least dramatized the parallels between Tom's death and Eva's, but without the Mrs. Shelbys of Stowe's novel, Tom's passion remains only slimly connected to Stowe's conservative agenda for social reform. Conway's Uncle Tom, saved from martyrdom, floats free altogether. Given the gendered basis of Stowe's religious and social values--her assumption that a "feminine" moral sensibility is always superior to a "masculine" one--the isolation of Tom from other strong women characters radically undercuts her critique of patriarchal capitalism. All that remains in both scripts is a character whose 'womanly.. traits, though still preferable to the aggressive masculinity of Legree and the slave catchers, make him child-like, spiritual, and loyal. Stowe's novel also aligns degree of blackness with •femi16
ninity"; fully African male slaves such as Andy on the Shelby plantation and Tom are depleted as Inherently more "feminine" than mulattos like George Harris. But without strong white women in both plays, this alignment falls apart. Since no white adult Is as spiritual and as vulnerable as Uncle Tom, race tends to replace gender as the distinguishing basis of moral sensibility In both adaptations; on the whole, however, no single touchstone of morality remains. In such circumstances, better to be a white man of principle and control your own future, these melodramas implicitly suggest, than a black slave. As a result, Conway's and Aiken's treatment of Tom decouple Stowe's antislavery sentiments from her gender-based excoriation of market capitalism. The legitimation of contractual relations in both adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin also undercuts Stowe's critique of capitalism in antebellum America. As Haskell notes, contract-making was the logical extension of promise-keeping among businessmen, a legal method of binding strangers to ties of mutual trust and responsibility. Contracts fostered the rapid expansion of market relations in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by allowing people "who shared no tie of blood, faith, or community" to do business together.18 Because contracts were fundamental to the expansion of capitalism, businessmen and those influenced by bourgeois culture began to believe that other areas of social life might also be ordered along contractual lines. In politics, for instance, many of the advocates of a national government understood the Constitution as a contract among the people which established and legitimized the power of the state. And by the mid-nineteenth century, temperance leaders typically viewed The Pledge as a contract between man and society. Two traditions, Calvinism and sentimentalism. taught Harriet Beecher Stowe to value the relations of God to man and of loving parents to obedient children over the contractual relations of the marketplace and Its perceived homologies. To be sure, Calvinism, with its emphasis on a covenant binding the Chosen to God, contained a significant germ of contractual thinking. But contractual thinking assumes that both parties are free to enter into or to refuse agreement. Consequently, the power of the Almighty and the sinfulness of man in Calvinism insured that their religious covenant would never be mistaken for a secular contract. Stowe rejected the side of Calvinism that preached the inevitability of sin to embrace a Christocentric faith centering on man's ability, through the grace of Christ, to attain salvation. But Stowe retained a strong belief in God's omnipotence, both for salvation and damnation. 19 The salvific power of the Deity insures Tom's "victory" over Legree and the concluding sentence of Uncle Tom's Cabin warns ominously that "injustice and
17
cruelty shall bring on nations the wrath of Almighty God· {Chap. 45). Secondly, the sentimental tradition relied on an image of the loving family, specifically the relation of parent to child, as the model for extending compassion to the unfortunate. Centered on biological ties, parental authority, and mutual affection, the relations of the sentimental family could have little in common with contractual relations among strangers. Stowe makes her preference forcibly known in the chapter featuring the escaping Eliza and Senator and Mrs. Bird, a forthright attack on the Fugitive Slave Law. All of the Senator's arguments about the legitimacy of the law, based on a contractual understanding of state power, are swept away by Eliza's daughter-like plight and the motherly compassion of Mrs. Bird. 20 Stowe's novel takes no stand on contractual relations per se; there are even some minor instances in which contracts between businessmen and workers are treated as ethically neutral. But to the extent that contracts threaten the moral mandates of God or the ideal of the sentimental family they must be set aside. Realizing Christian motherhood has prior authority over fulfilling secular contracts. Some of the business contracts mentioned in Stowe's book are essentially unaltered In both adaptations. Aiken and Conway depict the slavecat~hers' agreement among themselves about dividing the profits for catching Eliza, George, and little Harry much as Stowe had drawn it, for example. Conway borrows Stowe's description of the Implicit contract binding Drover John to his Kentucky slaves directly from the novel. Says John, I've got a gang of boys and I just tells 'em run now, cut, dig, just when you wants to. I shall never come to look arter you. That's they way I keeps mine. Let 'em know they're free to run anytime and it just breaks up their wantin' to. . .. And I tell you, stranger, no man in our parts gets more out of his niggers than I do (1:5). Aiken uses this speech of Stowe's for his Phineas Fletcher, but changes the verbs to past tense because Fletcher is no longer a slave holder. In the same scene, Aiken borrows from Stowe Mr. Wilson's description of the business relation he had with George Harris and his master: •[George] worked for me some half dozen years In my bagging factory, and he was my best hand, sir. He is an ingenious fellow, too; he invented a machine for the cleaning of hemp.... His master holds the patent of it• (11:3). Although Stowe's lightly ironic tone and the context of both incidents make it clear to the reader that she does not wholly approve of the business relations between Drover John and his slaves and Mr. 18
Wilson and his "hands," Stowe does not condemn these contractual relations outright. Indeed, she suggests that the primary injustice with regard to George and his invented machine is that he cannot profit from the fruits of his labor. In this instance, Stowe implicitly endorses the legitimacy of factory relations and patent laws, and the social morality of protecting private property which lies behind both. Perhaps because Stowe assumes that these relations between white employers and black workers involve only men and not women, she is not overty troubled by the possibilities for exploitation within them. Conway and Aiken erase Stowe's irony and ignore her contradictory thinking regarding contracts. Neither the context nor the tone of these scenes In their adaptations imply that there could be anything immoral about contracts enabling farmers to pay black field hands solely for their food, clothing, and housing or capitalists to hire gifted black artisans for their factories. Finding little opposition in Stowe to disparities of power based on race and class, Aiken and Conway implicitly endorse contractual relations which elevate white male paternalists over black workers. Undertying all contracts is the assumption that human volition can shape much of the future. For the most part, both adaptations, like Stowe's novel, assume that God will not directly intervene In human affairs, although human acts may occasionally embody His authority. The saintly death of Eva, for example, has Christocentric repercussions In both the novel and Aiken's stage version, but the Deity has not caused these consequences. To the extent that spectators and readers believe the Almighty to be controlling the action of the play or the novel, however, they will understand that the power of human characters to affect the course of events, through contracts or other means, has been diminished. The Lord's most active intervention in the human affairs of the ·novel occurs when Stowe's God haunts Legree, leading him to change his behavior toward Tom and incapacitating the villain from stopping the escape of Cassy and Emmeline. Karen Halttunen, drawing on Joel Porte's Insight that the effectiveness of gothic fiction drew on "the dark rites of sin, guilt, and damnation" in Calvinism, ties Stowe's attraction to gothic themes, especially her interest in the "tormented condition" of Legree's divided soul, to the Calvinist heritage of the Beechers. 2 1 Both adapters follow Stowe in using gothic conventions to dramatize God's power to counter ttie evil intentions of Simon Legree. Aiken demonstrates Legree's guilt by having a long curt of Eva's hair, reminiscent to the villain of his m·o ther's golden locks, twine around his finger. As in the novel, Legree screams, "Damnation," and writhes "as if the hair burned him" (VI:3). Conway contrives a similar effect with hair that Legree supposes actually came from his 19
murdered mother. Then, topping Stowe's psychological gothicism, Conway depicts Legree's ghoulish death by •unseen hands": an Illuminated window in Legree's haunted plantation house shows Eliza dressed like his murdered mother -with a long white dress, bosom bloody, and a long white veil. [She] points to Legree with her left hand and to heaven with her right hand. • Legree, beset by "demons• because of his guilt, dies in agony (V:3). Although Cassy and Eliza stage the masquerade, a theatre audience, knowing that the monster killed his mother and prompted by Eliza's gesture heavenward, would surely understand that an Angry God effected Legree's death. By putting the Lord on stage and giving Him more secular power than even Stowe allowed, Conway modified the authority of human relations, including contracts, to shape the course of events. Aiken, again following the novelist more closely, dramatized less efficacious direct intervention. Unlike the novel, however, Aiken's adaptation suggests that contractual relations are as beneficent as God's authority in delivering social justice. In the slave auction when Legree buys Tom and Emmeline, Aiken chalks up the evil outcome of the scene to the evil character of the white men involved, not to the system of marketing slaves by contract. In contrast to Stowe's abrupt, dispassionate treatment of the auction as business as usual, Aiken expands the scene by elaborating the villainy of one of the buyers, the auctioneer, and Legree himself. The scene's ending--"Music. Legree stands over (Tom and Emmeline] exulting• (V:1)-focuses attention away from the general, everyday fact of such injustice and toward the pathos of these particular victims. The scenes involving Gumption Cute and his "speculations• offer positive examples of market forces weeding out the inept and immoral. All of Cute's attempts to cut deals--with Topsy, Aunt Ophelia, and Lawyer Marks--fail, primarily because no one trusts him enough to make a contract with him. Aiken assumes here that market relations are self-regulating and ought to be, so that knaves like Gumption Cute will get their just reward. Contractual relations originating in the marketplace are not to blame for any evil and may lead to some good in Aiken's adaptation. Most of Conway's stage version endorses contractualism wholeheartedly, contradicting the implicit power its gothic ending gives to a Calvinist God to alter such human arrangements. Not only is Conway's auction scene conducted by villains, It is also Illegal. "We are prepared to prove that [Tom] was sold unlawfully,• states George Harris (V:1), returning to the South from Canada to free Eliza as well as Tom. Indeed, this assertion follows a scene in which Penetrate and Aunty Vermont had outbid Legree to buy Tom at the auc-
20
tlon, but were foiled by an Illegal prior agreement between Legree and the auctioneer. George Harris knows that Eliza was kidnapped, and he discovers that Cassy Is also being held In bondage against the law. ·Legree owns by a false bill of sale my wife's mother: he states fY: 1). All of the slaves that the audience has any reason to care about, In other words, Legree holds illegally. This plot convenience, of course, allows Conway to oppose slavery for three of its victims, but to uphold the legal structure of slavery, Including the Fugitive Slave Law. In the process, Conway embraces the contractual basis of state power and legitimizes its laws. In the end, Conway does not even oppose laws that define slaves as property, so Important a basis of Stowe's objection to the Institution that she initially subtitled her novel, -rhe Man Who Was A Thing. • In the last line of the melodrama, Penetrate Partyside says: You're free twice over. Your wife Chloe has sent money enough to buy you and Duck [i.e., Aunty Vermont] and I have as much more ready which shall buy, not your wife and children because your young master here has freed them already, but a lot of good land down East; there ain't a spot of land there that wouldn't be honored by having erected on it Uncle Tom's Cabin fY:3). For Conway, buying slaves is essentially the same as buying land. The contractual relations undergirding market capitalism and the laws of the state are not part of the problem of slavery, according to Conway; they are the keys to its solution, or at least its amelioration. Let rich people buy the freedom of worthy slaves, Conway seems to suggest, and we can forget about the rest. In this regard, Conway's adaptation turns Stowe's novel on its head. Stowe envisioned a very different future. As several of her critics have noted, she used the Quaker settlement In Uncle Tom's Cabin to posit a matriarchal domestic utopia which she believed could replace the patriarchal expansionist capitalism of the United States. Tompkins asserts that •the true goal of Stowe's radical undertaking Is nothing less than the institution of the kingdom of heaven on earth.· In the Quaker settlement, a vision •ooth utopian and Arcadian, • motherhood fulfills the mandate of Christian love: The form that Stowe's utopian society takes bears no resemblance to the current social order. Man-made institutions-- the church, the courts of law, the legislatures, the economic system -- are nowhere in sight. The home is the center of all meaningful activity; 21
women perform the most important tasks; work is carried on in a spirit of mutual cooperation and the whole is guided by a Christian woman who, through the influence of her "loving words, • •gentle moralities,· and II motherly loving kindness, • rules the world from her rocking chair. 22 Stowe offered the Quaker settlement as an Ideal model, but suggested no political strategies for realizing its attainment. In her Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin {1853), she spoke of the love of Christ as the only effective way to oppose the ambition "to be above others In power, rank, and station.•23 A preacher's daughter, Stowe saw her role as depicting the final goal and left the job of charting the path to others. Implied In her picture of a matriarchal utopia, however, was her belief that the "mothers of America, • working in their families and together cooperatively, could shape a radically different future than the one emerging out of the dynamics of market capitalism. Aiken shifted Stowe's utopia from this world to the next. Following melodramatic convention, the adapter painted his picture of the ideal future in the final tableau: Gorgeous clouds, tinted with sunlight. Eva, robed in white, is discovered on the back of a milk-white dove, with expanded wings, as if just soaring upward. Her hands are extended in benediction over St. Clare and Uncle Tom, who are kneeling and gazing up to her. Impressive music. Slow curtain (VI :6). By ending his play with Eva welcoming Tom and St. Clare into heaven, Aiken drew attention away from the possibility of social change on earth and focused it on the promise of life after death. As Philip Fisher notes, "To use death as the central Image for suffering Is to strengthen the passivity within sentimentality. . . . Slavery can be abolished but, of course, not by a child like Uttle Eva.•24 Centering his drama on Eva's death and apotheosis, Aiken Induced more tears than outrage. Nor does Aiken envision fundamental social changes to improve the lives of the characters who remain alive; perhaps more worthy slaves will attain their freedom, but men of principle and contractual relations offer no impediment to this pious hope. Conway foresees only business as usual. One contemporary reviewer of the production of Conway's adaptation at Barnum's Museum noted without elaboration that his version completely destroyed "the point and moral of the story of Uncle Tom. •25 Though probably not commenting on Stowe's critique of antebellum capi-
22
tal ism, this reviewer might very well have been. No utopian altenlative or even heavenly reward is necessary for his characters to live happily ever after because market relations and the legal protection of private property already insure a bright future, especially for the men of principle who populate his melodramatic world. Although mildly anti-slavery, Conway's dramatization primarily induced smug satisfaction with the status quo. Why does such a gulf separate the social values endorsed by the novel and Its versions on stage? Certainly Stowe had different ideas in mind than Aiken and Conway. The main reason for this wide disparity, however, lies not in authorial intention but in the differences between the social formations within which both artisti'c practices were produced and received. By the 1850s, women writers and readers dominated the literary market for sentimental fiction. Working within this formation, Stowe wrote alone and at home, knowing that her readership would consist primarily of the "mothers of America .. whom she addressed directly in her final chapter. Stowe could also anticipate that most of her readers would be middle-class females living in or near small or medium-sized towns, not in big cities. Before beginning Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe considered publishing it in the National Era, an abolitionist journal of small circulation; indeed, the novel was first serialized in that newspaper. Consequently, Stowe also wrote for readers she knew to be generally sympathetic to abolitionism, however much they might disagree among themselves about specific abolitionist factions and strategies. 26 Aiken and Conway, on the other hand, produced their adaptations to meet the needs of specific theatrical companies. Significantly, neither playwright initiated the job on his own. A member of the acting troupe at the Troy Museum, Aiken was asked by his cousin, George C. Howard, the head of the company, to work up Stowe's novel as a vehicle for Howard's daughter, Cordelia. Conway got Involved when Moses Kimball, owner of the Boston Museum, hired him to put together a script that mingled "the grave and gay" elements of Stowe's book and featured his star performer, William Warren. 27 . Both playwrights also understood that the managers for whom they were working would make changes in their scripts and would retain ultimate control of their plays . George C. Howard, for instance, mindful of his daughter's recent success as Little Dick in Oliver Twist, insisted that Aiken inject some lines of dialogue from the Dickens' novel. And when Aiken's initial four-act version of the novel (which ended in Little Eva's death) proved popular, Howard commissioned his cousin to write a sequel and then to conflate both scripts
23
into a six-act play. Kimball's stage manager, William S. Smith, who had already gained fame as a play carpenter for the museum's longrunning hit The Drunkard, worked with Conway to suit his adaptation to the acting company and audience of the Boston Museum. Smith's hand is most apparent in the Conway script in those scenes when St. Clare becomes a dipsomaniac. On 15 November 1852, Conway's version opened at the Boston Museum, the same date as the Initial performance of Aiken's six-act combination in Troy. Unlike the conditions of Stowe's writing practice, the means of script production for the theatre mandated that Aiken and Conway collaborate with and sell their scripts to the managers who hired them. Copyright laws did not protect plays In the early 1850s.28 Aiken and Conway also anticipated audiences that were more male, more urban, more working -class, and less persuaded by abolitionism than Stowe's readers. Although museum entrepreneurs had attracted respectable women to their theatres by producing moral plays as family entertainment, the percentage of museum theatregoers who were women remained far less than the percentage of women readers of sentimental fiction. Unlike most theatre managers, operators of museum theatres in the early 1850s looked to all classes for their spectators, specializing only in so far as they catered to Protestant rather than Catholic audiences.29 Aiken and Conway could anticipate that some of these Protestant, mostly middle-Income spectators would be favorably inclined to anti-slavery views, if not to outright abolitionism, but they and the managers for whom they worked had little experience on which to judge the probable success of an anti-slavery play. Despite the enormous success of the novel by the fall of 1852, an earlier stage adaptation produced at a working-class playhouse In New York had achieved only a modest run. Besides, the great success of minstrel troupes with these same audiences must have suggested to these museum playwrights and managers the inherent difficulty of induci~ white spectators to take seriously the plight of black characters. Little wonder, then, that Aiken's and Conway's versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin erase many of the anomalies of Stowe's radical critique and legitimate the underpinnings of antebellum market capitalism. Endnotes 1Theatre historians writing on stage versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin include: Harry Birdoff, The World's Greatest Hit: Uncle Tom's Cabin (New York: S.F. Vanni), 1947; David Grimstad, "Uncle Tom from Page to Stage: Limitations of Nineteenth-Century Drama,• 24
Quarterly Journal of Speech 56 (October 1970): 235-44; Barnard Hewitt, ·uncle Tom and Uncle Sam: New Ught from an Old Play,• Quarterly Journal of Speech 37 (February 1951): 63-70; Richard Moody, ·Introduction to Uncle Tom's Cabin,• Dramas from the American Theatre, 1762-1909 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1966), 34959; Frank Rahill, The World of Melodrama (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1967); Laurence Senelick, The Age and Stage of George L. Fox, 1825-1877 (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1988); Robert H. Shipp, ·uncle Tom's Cabin and the Ethos of Melodrama,• (Ph.D. Diss., Columbia University, 1986); and Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). Short Introductory essays by theatre historians Glenn Loney, Daniel Gerould, Errol Hill, and Vera Jijl are also available In Showcasing American Drama: George L. Aiken, Uncle Tom's Cabin; A Handbook of Source Materials, ed. Vera Jiji (Program for Culture at Play; Multimedia Studies In American Drama: Humanities Institute, Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, 1983). Also, I have written on Conway's version of the novel: ·H.J. Conway's Dramatization of Uncle Tom's Cabin: A Previously Unpublished Letter,• Theatre Journal 34 (May 1982), 149-54. Barnum quoted by Birdoff, p. 88. 2 1rely throughout this essay on the Aiken version as published in Moody's anthology, cited above, pp. 360-96, and on the promptbook copy of Conway's adaptation, General Theatre Collection, Hoblitzelle Library, University of Texas at Austin. The promptbook, used In a Boston Museum production in 1876 gueststarring Mrs. George C. Howard as Topsy, Is Incomplete. Missing are nearly all of scenes three through seven of Conway's Act Ill. In place of these five short scenes, I rely on a Boston Museum program for Uncle Tom's Cabin dated 7 December 1852 (Boston Museum Collection, Boston Public Library). It is clear from the detailed description of scenes In this program that the 1876 promptscript was not substantially altered, except for those five scenes. Indeed, with that exception, the 1876 script may have been exactly the same play as was performed in Boston in the ear1y 1850s. Liberator, quoted In Birdoff, 114. 3See Tompkins, ·sentimental Power: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Politics of Literary History,• in Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 139; Ammons •Heroines in Uncle Tom's Cabin,• in Critical Essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe, ed. Elizabeth Ammons (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980), 153; Brown, •Getting in the Kitchen with 25
Dinah: Domestic Politics in Uncle Tom's Cabin," American Quarterly 36 (1984): 503-23; Hovet, "Modernization and the American Fall Into Slavery in Uncle Tom's Cabin,• New England Quarterly 54 (December 1981): 500. 4American Historical Review 90 (April and June 1985): 339-61, 547-66. son the sentimental novel, see Herbert R. Brown, The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789-1860 (1940; rpt., New York: Pageant, 1959); Gregg Camfield, •The Moral Aesthetics of Sentimentality: A Missing Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin,• NineteenthCentury Literature 43 (December 1988), 319-45; and Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). On sentimentalism, domesticity, and capitalism, see Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: •woman's Sphere• in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); and Barbara Welter, Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976). 6Jsabelle White, •The Uses of Death in Uncle Tom's Cabin,· American Studies 26 (Spring 1985), 13; and Jean Fagin Yellin, •Doing It Herself: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Woman's Role in the Slavery Crisis,· in New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 101-2. 7 See Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984) and Thomas F. Gossett, Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture (Dallas, Texas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985) for contemporary reactions to Uncle Tom's Cabin. Also useful Is Mary P. Ryan, The Empire of the Mother: American Writing About Domesticity (New York: Haworth Press, 1982). Regarding antebellum politics and abolitionism, see Herbert Aptheker, Abolitionism: A Revolutionary Movement (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1989); Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Lawrence J. Freidman, Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 18301870 (Cambridge: ~mbridge University Press, 1982); and Blanche G. Hersh, The Slavery of Sex: Feminist Abolitionists in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978). 8Shipp, disagreeing with Grimstad (1970), makes a good case for this interpretation of Gumption Cute, 103-114. 9Haskell, 556, 561. 10Ammons, 155.
26
11 Haskell, 560. 12Lang, 47, 47-48. 13Boston Museum program for 7 December 1852 In the Boston Public Library. 14Richard Yarbrough, •strategies of Black Characterization in Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Early Afro-American Novel: in New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin, 45-84, points out, however, that Stowe aslo stereotyped several of her black characters. Sam and Andy on the Shelby farm, for instance, are already close to minstrel blacks. 15See George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 18171914 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971), 103. 16Hovet, 513, 514. 17Ammons, 160. 18Haskell, 556. 19Qn Stowe and Calvinism, see Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977); Chartes H. Foster, The Rungless Ladder: Harriet Beecher Stowe and New England Puritanism (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1954); and Karen Halttunen, •Gothic Imagination and Social Reform: The Haunted Houses of Lyman Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher, and Harriet Beecher Stowe," in New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin, 107-34. 20Qn Stowe and the sentimental tradition, see Camfield and Fisher. 21 See Karen Halttunen, •Gothic Imagination and Social Reform,• and Porte, "In the Hands of an Angry God: Religious Terror in Gothic Fiction,· In The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark · Romanticism (Pullman, Washington: Washington State University Press, 1974), 45. 22Tompkins, 141-42. Ammons (1980), and her later essay, •stowe's Dream of the Mother Savior: Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Woman Writers Before the 1920s,• in New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin, 155-95, and Brown also comment extensively on Stowe's Quaker utopia. 23Quoted In Ammons (1986), 169. 24Philip Fisher, •partings and Ruins: Radical Sentimentality in Uncle Tom's Cabin,• Amerikastudien 28 (1983): 289. 25Anonymous reviewer quoted in Gossett, 275. 26Qn Stowe's methods and readership see Baym and also E. Bruce Kirkham, The Building of Uncle Tom's Cabin (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977). 271n his letter to Kimball, Conway outlined his plan for adapting the novel to the stage and noted, •By all you will be ·able to judge 27
how far I have complied with your desire of blending the grave and gay" (1 June 1852, Kimball correspondence, Boston Athenaeum Libraryl. 2son the conventions of playwright-manager relations in the antebellum theatre, see David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture, 1800-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). On Aiken's collaboration with the Howard troupe, see Birdoff, Senelick, and Shipp. For the origin of Conway's script in the context of the Boston Museum, see McConachie; and Claire McGIInchee, The First Decade of the Boston Museum (Boston: Bruce Humphries, 1940). 29'fhere Is no general study on the audiences for antebellum museum theatre. Nonetheless, low ticket prices (twenty-five cents for adults, twelve-and-a-half cents for children), seating arrangements (orchestra-balcony seating replaced box-pit-and-gallery), the exclusion of prostitutes and alcohol from the theatres, and the predominance of Protestant-oriented moral drama in their repertories suggests that these theatres catered predominantly to middleincome Protestant families, women and children included. This conclusion accords with critic William W. Clapp's statement about the Boston Museum Theatre in 1853: "[Kimball's] museum attracted all classes, and it was the resort not only of the middling and lower classes, but of the more wealthy residents, for the pieces were well put upon the stage and the actors above mediocrity. The museum . . . is now patronized by a large class who do not frequent theatres" [A Record of the Boston Stage (Boston: James Munroe, 1853), 471 ). 30'fhe Charles W. Taylor version of Uncle Tom's Cabin had a two-week run beginning August 23 at Purdy's National Theatre in New York, and enjoyed occasional revivals thereafter. On minstrel audiences, see Toil.
28
SOPHIE TREADWELL: AUTHOR OF MACHINAL
Nancy Wynn Sophie Treadwell wrote thirty original full-length plays for the stage (excluding revisions), in a variety of forms, modes, and styles: comedy, domestic tragedy, history, biography, melodrama, expressionism. She wrote nothing in verse and did not consider herself a poet or writer of poetic dialogue. She favored the form of what she called the well-made play, which was actually her version of melodrama. In the melodrama of the time of Treadwell's youth, emotions and language were sentimental, Incidents were sensationalized, morality was simple and obvious, villainy and virtue were exaggerated. While never completely adhering to these characteristics, Treadwell's plays tended to utilize these elements but in subtle ways.
*
*
*
*
In April and May, 1927, Treadwell sat in on the murder trial of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, although she was not officially covering the trial as a news assignment. Because Treadwell was a newspaper woman, she was curious about the events in the trial of two lovers who murdered the woman's husband, a story that consumed hundreds of columns of newsprint. Briefly, Ruth Snyder, after attempting unsuccessfully to murder her husband on seven prior occasions, persuaded her lover, Judd Gray, to be her accomplice In the eighth attempt. In March, 1927, they bludgeoned the sleeping Albert Snyder, an art editor for a boating magazine, with a window sashweight. It was not a cleverly planned murder, and they were put on trial by mid-April. Both were convicted May 9, and they were executed by electrocution in January, 1928. This act of murder was to have been "a step toward the larger freedom, a fuller enjoyment of life. •1 The paradox of the brutal act juxtaposed with the rationale that this was a step toward freedom piqued Treadwell's curiosity: What crushing set of circumstances could compel the woman to murder her husband to attain freedom? After the Gray-Snyder trial, Treadwell was Involved with the out-of-town tryouts for Wild Honey. She probably worked with the concept and outline for Machinal in the summer of 1927, and com29
menced dictating the dialogue after the unsuccessful tryout of Wild Honey in October. 2 She finished the bulk of the play after the GraySnyder executions in January, 1928. Machinal was copyrighted 21 April1928. Evidently, Treadwell was able to interest director-producer Arthur Hopkins almost immediately in her play. They worked on it together in the summer of 1928, and, after one month's rehearsal, Machinal premiered at the Plymouth Theatre on 7 September 1928, to critical acclaim. Treadwell had evidenced hints in the past of her ability to give unconventional dramatic treatment to a play. Her one-acts, Eye of the Beholder and To Him Who Waits, were departures from the wellmade play structure and realistic dialogue she usually adopted in her writing. But it is in Machinal that Treadwell Is finally able to blend her concerns for women's rights and socio-economic inequities; her journalistic knowledge of an interesting, topical story well told; and her artistic experience in combining the right dramatic style with those elements of theme and plot. The right dramatic style was expressionism, a mode which flourished in Germany in 191 0-20 and was introduced in America by the Theatre Guild's 1922 production of Georg Kaiser's From Morn To Midnight (1916), Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape (1922) and The Great God Brown (1926), Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine (1923), and John Howard Lawson's Processional (1925), among others. Treadwell's use of this presentational style not only is the perfect choice for her story of murder and adultery, but it transforms those tabloid cliches into sensational drama which suggests a universality of concerns. •Machinal combines cogency and palpability of theme with sympathetic insight into the mainsprings of the woman's motives.•3 In his introduction to the published version of Machinal, John Gassner summed up what many of the critics thought of the play and placed it in historical perspective: One of the most unusual plays of the twenties, Machinal, appeared on the stage in the very last year of that decade [Machinal was produced in 1928]. almost as if it had been deliberately produced to sum up trends in the theatre of that period. In Machinal were to be found formal experimentalism, recognition of the machine age and concern with individual struggles viewed against a general background of modern life in America, and a vague protest against the blight of materialism. Formally, it belonged to the main theatrical adventure of the twenties, the telegraphic imaginative 30
style ... known as expressionism . ... Sophie Treadwell's use of this subjective style of distortion and depersonalization was, however, quite unique. In her play, expressionism, although applied to a sensational murder, was subdued and was given a muted musical function, being used as a sort of obligato to the heroine's failure. Her first numb state of mind, her awakening to love, her desperation, and her defeat found a theatrical translation in the automatic movement, sound, and speech of the play.... In this play, Miss Treadwell was able to convey a rare compassion for her character as an individual and yet make her story representative of many lives; and this in spite of the unusual murder of the climax. In the process, besides, Machinal managed to project the mechanical essence of a world in which private frustrations and heartbreaks can seem only half real in spite of their acuteness. If the author had poured the same story into the mold of an ordinary three-act realistic play, it would have been quite unremarkable... .4 Something Treadwell saw in Ruth Snyder's sordid act of violence and her subsequent trial transcended the act itself and triggered her deep sympathy for the position of women in the world. Once again it aroused her resentment of what she perceived to be woman's essential helplessness in the power structure of society. Submission is the key to Helen Jones's agony in Machinal. She has been forced to submit to her mother, to society's expectation that she must marry, to her husband's ardor, to the birth of an unwanted child, to society's condemnation for having taken a lover, and, finally, to the prison barber who shaves the crown of her head before she Is electrocuted. 5 YOUNG WOMAN No! No! Don't touch mel I will not be submitted--this Indignity! No! I will not be submitted!--Leave me alone! Always to have to submit--to submit! No more--not now--l'm going to die--1 won't submit! Not now! BARBER (Finishing cutting a patch from her hair) You'll submit my lady. Right to the end. You'll submit! There, and a · neat job too.
31
JAILER Very neat. MATRON Very neat. YOUNG WOMAN (Her calm shattered) Father, Father! Why was I born? PRIEST I came forth from the Father and have come into the world--1 leave the world and go into the Father. YOUNG WOMAN (Weeping) Submit! Submit! Is nothing mine? The hair on my head! The very hair on my head . ... Am I never to be let alone! Never to have peace! When I'm dead, won't I have peace?6 Once again, one of Treadwell's women finds that she needs something more than the world is prepared to grant her; she yearns to find herself freedom/joy /peace, but is thwarted in her search by a society which expects passivity, sweet compliance, submission. In his column, "Offstage and On,· New York Herald Tribune, 20 September 1928, critic Arthur Ruhl acknowledged Treadwell's attempt to make a special plea, not for murderesses, but for all women: There is a curious quality in Sophie Treadwell's fine play "Machinal, • a kind of desperate intensity at once wistful, defiant, and fiercely in earnest--which, for want of a better word, we might call "feminine•.... There is no doubt of her blazing sympathy and indignation. The whole thing tingles and vibrates like a fine wine, plucked as it nears the breaking point. And there is something more than sympathy and indignation for the Individual victim, something of a broader revolt against the Inescapable facts of what is still largely a man's world. There are bits, here and there, which it seemed to us only a woman could have written; lines which have an uncanny touch of feminine authenticity. . ..
32
In three pages of notes explaining the original version of Machinal (before Hopkins), Treadwell mentions her fascination with the effects of radio, and its implications for the vast American audience. She was acutely aware of this first electronic mass medium, and she felt her Machinal audience would have been "trained to radio, and so accustomed to the drama of the lovely unaided voice." Consequently, she wanted snatches of music, perhaps In Imitation of the sound of a radio dial being spun In search of a station. She felt that the monologues, •a11 the voice of the woman coming from out a dark stage" (a disembodied voice as out of a radio), should be "connecting channels of action." She speculated on whether or not these monologues might not approach closer to "the scattered ness, unexpectedness of the relaxed meditating mind," than the usual "demand that the thought move through them in an approximately straight line" (as in realistic drama). In these notes outlining her intentions, Treadwell never mentions the genre of expressionism as a starting point, although she uses the word •expressionism" once. Obviously, she had a sense of the elements which make up the expressionistic genre; but it seems that she was approaching what she called the style of Machinal through a sort of inductive process: combining a set of particulars (radio cacophony, repetition, city sounds, stream of consciousness, the concept of a spiritual journey, explosion of emotion), and arriving at a dramatic style of production. For the characters of the play (other than the Young Woman), she directed that they are to be played as "personifications" of what they represent (genuinely, type actors giving type performances). Their make-up (dress and facial) should be in the "expression" of the kind of people they represent, and once found should remain fixed (so as to become clear and established in the imagination of the audience). Gestures should not be quite automatic but simple and repetitious (as the make-up--constantly declarative of what the characters are).7 There has been some speculation concerning just how much of the final production of Machinal was Treadwell's idea and how much was provided by Arthur Hopkins and Robert Edmond Jones. These notes make clear that her style of writing and original intention not only dictated the scheme for Hopkins' production but the set design and striking lighting effects as well. She wanted a unit set with suggestions of a door and windows and only essential pieces of furniture and props--things "full of character." The revolutionary
33
departure in setting and lighting attributed to Robert Edmond Jones was actually Treadwell's original intention, although he Is to be credited for his artistic Interpretation and final execution of those technical elements. Because of the unity created by her single artistic vision, she was more responsible for the total masterpiece of Machinal than most playwrights are in other commercial productions. Her experience in all the .component elements of theatre served her well in the creation of Machinal. Certainly the contribution of both Hopkins and Jones was considerable. Of all the directors and designers with whom she worked, Treadwell preferred these two and developed life-long close friendships with them. In an article, "The Hopkins Manner, • Treadwell indicated his style as a director and alluded to the way In which he helped her as a playwright: . . . He chooses a play that he himself wants; and having chosen it, he enters Into it, explores it, questions it, looks at it, listens to it. If it is not the way he thinks it should be, he tells the playwright so--and waits until It is. ... In other words, Mr. Hopkins does not put a script into rehearsal until he himself knows this script and feels it is right ... He does not expect values that are not there to suddenly appear. He knows that production is no alchemy, that it cannot turn palpable weakness Into strength, or make real dullness glitter.. . . He . uses his knowledge ... when it will do the most good-on the written script before it is put into rehearsal.... The ancient battle of conflicting forces In the theatre--the battle as to who is pre-eminent, actor, playwright, scene designer, or director, is here settled without even a contest. And the answer is •the d irector. • The answer is "Arthur Hopkins.•a Certainly Hopkins helped Treadwell tighten and focus the monologues of the Young Woman. A comparison of portions of these speeches, before and after Hopkins, probably shows his influence. In the original version (Episode 1): . .. Now I'm going to marry Mr. J. He's asked me so I suppose I am. I wish he hadn't--then I wouldn't have to. Now I suppose I'll have tcr-l'd be crazy if I didn't. He says he wants to--so--but I don't want to. Why does he want me, I wonder, when I don't want him? He says it's 34
my hands. He says he loves my hands. He says he loves my hands--1 don't like his. Mine are tapering. His are fat. They're awful fat. I don't like them to touch me. He likes to touch me--that's love--he loves me.... In the published version (Episode One): Marry me--wants to marry me--George H. Jones-George H. Jones and Company--Mrs. George H. Jones. Mrs. George H. Jones. Dear Madame--marry--do you take this man to be your wedded husband--1 do--to love honor and to love--kisses--no--1 can't--George H. Jones--How would you like to marry me--What do you say-why Mr. Jones 1--let me look at your little hands--let me hold your pretty little hands--George H. Jones--Fat hands--flabby hands--don't touch me--please--fat hands are never weary--. . . As expressed in her notes accompanying the first typescript version, it was Treadwell's goal somehow to combine uncompromised dramatic artistry with commercial viability and perhaps touch women especially by this play: The hope Is (by accentuation, by distortion, etc.), to create a stage production that will have 'style', and at the same time, by the story's own Innate drama, by the tremendous interest and curiosity already aroused in It by the actual and similar story of Ruth Snyder, by the directness of its telling, by the variety and qulckchanglngness of its scenes, and the excitement of Its sounds--(and perhaps by the quickening of still secret places In the consclousnesses of the audience, especially of women)--to create a genuine box office attraction.
Machinal assaults the senses of the audience with an array of stimuli. The play is inextricably interwoven with music and sound. After the advent of sound in films Treadwell would refer to these sounds and the music accompanying her later play, For Saxophone, as soundtracks. In Episode One of the published version of Machinal, Treadwell specifies that before the curtain rises, the audience hears the sounds of office machines going, and they accompany the Young Woman's thoughts after the scene is blacked out. The pace of this scene is rapid, whipped along by the clacking 35
of typewriter keys and the chanting of telegraphic dialogue. The speed suggests the pace of modern life. ADDING CLERK (In the monotonous voice of his monotonous thoughts; at his adding machine) 2490, 28, 76, 123, 36842, 1 1/4, 37, 804, 23 1/2, 982 FILING CLERK (In the same way--at his filing desk) Accounts - A. Bonds - B. Contracts - C. Data- D. Earnings -E. STENOGRAPHER (In the same way) Dear Sir--in re--your letter--recent date--will stateTELEPHONE GIRL Hello--Hello--George H. Jones Company good morning--hello--hello-George H. Jones Company good morning--hello. FILING CLERK Market - M. Notes - N. Output - 0. Profits -
P.... The boss, George H. Jones, has offered marriage to the Young Woman, and she ends the scene with a monologue in which the audience hears her concerns: Should she marry Mr. Jones, even though his touch repulses her; the fear of losing her job and being unable to pay the bills; the crush of the subways and the pace of life-both of which are too much for her. Machine sounds segue Into radio sounds, and the Young Woman is seen eating dinner with her mother with whom she has no more connection than she has with the office characters. They are obsessed with work routine, her mother with food and its dregs-garbage: YOUNG WOMAN Ma--l want to talk to you. MOTHER Aren't you eating a potato?
36
YOUNG WOMAN No. MOTHER Why not? YOUNG WOMAN I don't want one. MOTHER That's no reason. Here! Take one. YOUNG WOMAN I don't want it. MOTHER Potatoes go with stew--here! YOUNG WOMAN Ma, I don't want it! MOTHER Want it! Take it! YOUNG WOMAN But 1--oh, all right. (Takes it--then) Ma, I want to ask you something. MOTHER Eat your potato. YOUNG WOMAN Ma, there's something I want to ask you--something · important. MOTHER Is it mealy? YOUNG WOMAN S'all right. Ma--tell me. MOTHER Three pounds for a quarter.
37
YOUNG WOMAN Ma--tell me-- (Buzzer) MOTHER (Her dull voice brightening) There's the garbage. JANITOR'S VOICE (Offstage) Garbage. MOTHER (Pleased--busy) All right. (Gets garbage can--puts it out. Young woman walks up and down.) What's the matter now? YOUNG WOMAN Nothing. MOTHER That jumping up from the table every night the garbage is collected! You act like you're crazy. YOUNG WOMAN Ma, do all women-MOTHER I suppose you think you're too nice for anything so common! Well, let me tell you, my lady, that it's a very important part of life. YOUNG WOMAN I know, but if you--Ma-MOTHER If it weren't for garbage cans, where would we be? The sounds of the radio playing a sentimental song about mother fade into a jazz orchestra which plays behind Episode Three-Honeymoon. Appalled by the thought of consummating the marriage she didn't want, the Young Woman cries for her mother, and then, .. Somebody, somebody--. • The jazz band segues into the sound of steel riveting, a striking choice for the sound to accompany the hospital scene--Episode Four. She now has a child she didn't want, but no one explained to her how not to have one. She thinks aloud again in a speech In which -.he single emotional word [or short
38
phrase] replaces the involved conceptual sentence"9 and in which punctuation--the dash--is one of the crucial tools of visualization. The words and dashes together indicate the use of the pause as a means of expression and their combination "form a kind of linguistic chiaroscuro." 10 This significant means of expression shows the kinship between expressionist dialogue and music, which can create a theatre of multiple emotional levels inaccessible to conceptual speech. (Episode Four): Let me alone--let me alone--let me alone--l've submitted enough . . .--tired--too tired--dead--no matter--nothing matters--dead--stairs--long stairs--all dead going up-going up to be in heaven--golden stairs--all children coming down--coming down to be born--dead going up--children coming down--going up--coming down-going up--coming down--stop ... Her final lines In this scene, "I'll not submit any more--1'11 not submit--" are the last words heard before riveting slowly fades to electric piano. In Episode Five she meets a Man In a speakeasy. He Is a romantic figure of freedom, one who has won his own life by killing Mexican bandits with a pebble-filled bottle: "Ain't a bad weapon--first you got a sledge hammer--then you got a knife." (Episode Five): YOUNG WOMAN Why did you? 1st MAN What? YOUNG WOMAN Kill'em. 1st MAN To get free. YOUNG WOMAN Oh. In Episode Six, the Young Woman is Intimate with the man and experiences emotion, from which she has been alienated, for the first time. She has made a connection--she is saved: "I never knew anything like this way! I never knew that I could feel like this! So--so purified! . .. Purified." 11 As a result of her purification, she is "born
39
again" and cannot return to the old ways. In Episode Seven--Domestic, she contemplates suicide or escape as possible ways out: (Seated at opposite ends of the divan. They are both reading papers--to themselves.) HUSBAND Record production. YOUNG WOMAN Girl turns on gas. HUSBAND Sale hits a million. YOUNG WOMAN Woman leaves all for love-HUSBAND Market trend steady-YOUNG WOMAN Young wife disappears-The Young Woman is reminded of her lover toward the end of the scene. The words "stones--small stones--precious stones-millstones" echo in the darkness, and she kills her husband, the violence unseen by the audience as In a Greek tragedy. In Episode Eight the automatic actions and relentless routine of society return. She is in the hands of the law. The ritual of the trial is accentuated by sequential repetition and telegraphic exchanges, accompanied by the clicking of telegraphic instruments: LAWYER FOR DEFENSE I object! I object to the introduction of this evidence at this time as irrelevant, immaterial, Illegal, biased, prejudicial, and-JUDGE Objection overruled. LAWYER FOR DEFENSE Exception.
40
JUDGE Exception noted. Proceed. LAWYER FOR PROSECUTION I wish to read the evidence to the jury at this time. JUDGE Proceed. LAWYER FOR DEFENSE I object. JUDGE Objection overruled. LAWYER FOR DEFENSE Exception. JUDGE Noted. "The words and movements of these people except the Young Woman are routine--mechanical--each is going through the ... motions of his own game." {Episode Eight) Treadwell even satirizes the press and makes the reporters part of the clacking machine slowly drawing in the Young Woman: 1st REPORTER {Writing) Under the heavy artillery fire of the State's attorney's brilliant cross-questioning, the accused woman's defense was badly riddled. Pale and trembling she-2nd REPORTER {Writing) Undaunted by the Prosecutions's machine-gun attack, the defendant was able to maintain her position of innocence In the face of rapid-fire questioning that threatened, but never seriously menaced her defense. Flushed but calm she-When an affidavit from her lover is read testifying that they had "intimate relations," the Young Woman confesses three times: "I did it! I did it! I did it!" Three reporters end the ritual of the trial with a trio of lines: "Murderess confesses. Paramour brings confession. I 41
did it! Woman cries." 12 The stage directions specify that '1here is a great burst of speed from the telegraphic instruments. They keep up a constant accompaniment to the Woman's moans."13 In Episode Nine the final elements in the aural accompaniment supply irony as they play out the tragedy: a priest chanting prayers, a Negro singing spirituals, the whir of an airplane flying, keys rattling. The Young Woman calls for answers, seeks comfort; and the priest impersonally intones selections from his prayerbook: YOUNG WOMAN Father, Father! Why was I born? PRIEST I came forth from the Father and have come into the wor1d--l leave the wor1d and go into the Father. YOUNG WOMAN ... Is nothing mine? ... The very hair on my head-PRIEST Praise God. YOUNG WOMAN ... When I'm dead, won't I have peace? PRIEST Ye shall indeed drink of my cup. YOUNG WOMAN Won't I have peace tomorrow? PRIEST I shall raise him up at the last day. YOUNG WOMAN Tomorrow! Father! Where shall I be tomorrow? PRIEST Behold the hour cometh. Yea, it is now come. Ye shall be scattered every man to his own. On the now-black stage, the voices of the reporters come out of the darkness with the question and answer that encompass the theme of the play (Episode Nine):
42
1st REPORTER Suppose the machine shouldn't work! 2nd REPORTER It'll work! --It always works. The machine, the routine, the society--the process: It always works. With her final cry, "Somebody,• the cry which has been her motif of yearning throughout the play, the Young Woman's voice is cut off and the priest's voice drones on in the darkness. Not indicated in this published version is the description of Episode Ten--In The Dark--found in the acting version of Machinal at the Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center in New York City. Lines are spoken in darkness until a light comes at the end. The acting version specifies: "Overhead lights come up on cyclorama first faint blue--then red--then pink--then amber--they are thrown up full-pause--then curtain." The critics' attempts to describe this clear contribution of Robert Edmond Jones indicate that its effectiveness was unquestionable. "The morbid, drooping climax is heightened by a complicated curtain of colored lights supposed to represent ... the migration of a woman's soul ...... 14 "At the end of the play, just after a terrifying moment of complete darkness--the electrocution is heard, not seen--the frame [of the stage] has been taken away, the rose lights on the burlap [sic] cyclorama remain for a long minute and the curtain quickly falls." 15 '"Somebody, somebody!' she screams at the end. Only a pulsating flood of terrifying crimson light, like a still flame, makes reply."16 Joseph Wood Krutch praised "the gradual emergence of a blood red glow out of the darkness In which the play ends ..." as "one of the most unobtrusively effective bits of stage techniques seen here in a long time." 17 Percy Hutchinson interpreted it as •an empty stage with the light of morning creeping up on the hanging...."18 Stark Young was profoundly affected by Jones's .. genius of light" which left "only the vacant stage, no object, no people, no events, only the light growing brighter, flame colors at the bottom rising into blue, the moment of death for the tormented being in the electric chair.•19 Treadwell finally had achieved a commercial and critical success. Although Machinal ran for only ninety-one performances on Broadway, it was subsequently performed all over the world bringing its author substantial royalties. The initial critical notices were full of acclaim and secured her reputation as a master craftswoman of drama. Percy Hammond acknowledged the successful departure from conventional drama:
43
Unlike most efforts to liberate the stage from its old-fashioned harness, "Machinar cuts the straps with considerable facility and releases an Interesting study and well-told tale.... The speech of the play is simple utterance of human beings; the action is directed by Mr. Hopkins with a canny view to illusion, and the lights and settings . . . are just bizarre enough to further the purposes of one of the best of the unusual dramas.20 Brooks Atkinson called Machinal "the tragedy of one who lacks strength": From the sordid mess of a brutal murder the author, actors and producer . . . have with great .skill managed to retrieve a frail and sombre beauty of character.... But Sophie Treadwell has in no sense capitalized on a sensational murder trial in her strangely-moving, shadowy drama. Rather she has written a tragedy of submission; she has held an individual character against the hard surface of a mechanical age.. .. Subdued, monotonous, episodic, occasionally eccentric in style, 'Machinal' is fraught with a beauty unfamiliar to the stage.21 In his review cited above, Pierre de Rohan felt that Treadwell had achieved at least a critical success: Sophie Treadwell has done for the theater what Theodore Dreiser did for literature. She has created a complete picture of life's bitterness and essential meanness, painted with the small, oft-repeated strokes of the realist, yet achieving in perspective the sweep and swing of expressionism. In short, she has written, in "Machinal," a great play, but {or perhaps therefore) one which is not likely to find a large audience. Gilbert Gabriel praised Treadwell's mastery of genre and evoked the name of Eugene O'Neill: You forget to be annoyed by the allegorical naming of the characters as Mr. A. and Miss Q., a Husband, a Man, Richard Roe. The breath of a warm, plain, pitifully real existence gradually fills these types and 44
travesties, and, once filled, they remain buoyant and unpuncturable and alive. That, I think, is Miss Treadwell's finest feat. Few have achieved it with this by now benighted form of playmaking. . . . She has written it with an extreme simplicity which generates a power all its own. The episode in the lover's room is told as tenderly as really. It has needed something more than common craftsmanship to turn a Graphic titbit [sic] into an O'Neill splendor.22 John Anderson called the play •a magnificent tragedy- and was obviously deeply affected by it: Here are superlatives for the superlative--a tragedy of sullen splendor.... It is superb and unbearable and harrowing in a way that leaves you bereft of any Immediate comparison, and leaves you, too, for that matter, a limp and tear-stained, wreck. There is a fine fluency in the writing of the scenes. Miss Treadwell has stripped them down to bare bones of drama, and flung them across the play in a swift stacatto [sic] movement which gives it huge power and terrific momentum. ...23 Every artist involved in the production received praise from the critics: Arthur Hopkins; Robert Edmond Jones; Frank Harling, who composed the Incidental music; Zita Johann, the Young Woman; George Stillwell, the Husband; and Clark Gable, the Man--her lover, in his first major stage role prior to Hollywood stardom. In the final analysis, Treadwell wrote a timely, exciting play which satisfied the critics, the audience, and herself. To satisfy herself, she wrote an experimental, unusual and powerful drama which documented how the world treated a woman who sought the same kind of freedom of choice accorded men, a woman unable to adapt to that sexist world. She dramatized a social problem happening to an individual, but she was able to make that individual represent a larger group. She blended her own style of didacticism with the emotional punch of melodrama so that the audience experienced thrills, tears, and horror: a catharsis. Machinal made Treadwell's reputation as an important American playwright, and provided income the rest of her life, in spite of the fact that it closed on Broadway after ninety-one performances.
*
*
*
*
Sophie Treadwell had a long and enormously productive
45
career. She was an ambitious, versatile high-achiever: a college graduate (a non-traditional achievement for women of her time), an editor of the college humor magazine, teacher in a country school, actress, investigative reporter, correspondent, noted journalist, playwright, producer, director, novelist. The distinctive quality of those impressive achievements is that she worked in a time when it was more difficult for a female to be accepted as a serious career woman, a time in which it was assumed-expected--that males were ·serious career men. Work was the most important element In Treadwell's life. To say that she was goal-driven or compulsive may be overstating her concern, but certainly her work took precedence over her personal life. There are numerous references to the importance of work in her diaries throughout her life. Even the last entry written the night she suffered the stroke said, ". . . To bed early after supper. . . . Feel hopeful that I can finally get to my work now.•24
Copyright 1990 Estate of Nancy Wynn
Endnotes 1Edmund Wilson, "Judd Gray and Mrs. Snyder,• The American Earthquake: A Documentary of the Twenties and Thirties (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1958), 163~ 2Probably as a result of her newspaper experience, Treadwell developed the habit of dictating the dialogue of her plays from a detailed outline of incidents. Characteristically, she would spend several weeks perfecting the outline of a play before she began dictating dialo.g ue to a stenographer. 3Cfipping, Treadwell Scrapbook 10, Nancy Wynn Archive (in Aurora, New York; hereinafter referred to as NWA), Kelcey Allen, "Zita Johann Gets Ovation in Machinal," Women's Wear Daily, 10 September 1928. 4Sophie Treadwell, "Machinal," Twenty-Five Best Plays of the Modern Theatre; Early Series, ed. John Gassner (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1949), 494. svvonne B. Shafer, "The Uberated Woman in American Plays of the Past," Players, Vol. 49, no. 3-4 (Spring 1974), 97. 6Treadwell, Machinal, 527. The dialogue of Machinal used in this study is. from the published version In the Gassner collection cited above. In this version Treadwell reinstated sections of dialogue which had been cut from the acting version.
46
7Sophie Treadwell, Machinal (Introduction to First Version), TS, University of Arizona (hereinafter referred to as UALSC), Box 10, n.p. 8Ciipping, Treadwell Scrapbook 10, NWA. Sophie Treadwell, ''The Hopkins Manner," The Stage World, 25 November 1928. 9Walter H. Sobel, ed., An Anthology of German Expressionist Drama (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1963), xviii. 101bid•,XIX. . 11Treadwell, Machinal, Episode Six, 516. 121bid., 526. 131bid., 526. 14Ciipping, Treadwell Scrapbook 1o, NWA, Pierre de Rohan, "'Machinal' Ugly But Great Play; New York American, 8 September 1928. 15Ciipping, Treadwell Scrapbook 10, NWA, S. Jay Kaufman, "Hopkins Does 'Machinal' Magnificently," New York Telegraph, 8 September 1a28. . 16Ciipping, Treadwell Scrapbook 10, NWA, J. Brooks Atkinson, "Against the City Clatter," The New York Times, 16 September 1928. 17Ciipping, Treadwell Scrapbook 10, NWA, Joseph Wood Krutch, "Behaviorism and Drama, .. The Nation, 26 September 1928. 18Ciipping, Treadwell Scrapbook 10, NWA, Percy Hutchinson, "As the Theatre Practices the Art of Homicides," The New York Times, n.d. 19Ciipping, Treadwell Scrapbook 10, NWA, Stark Young, •Joy on the Mountains," New Republic 31 October 1928,299. 20CJipping·, Treadwell Scrapbook 10, NWA, Percy Hammond, ''The Theaters," New York Herald Tribune, 8 September 1928. 21 Clipping, Treadwell Scrapbook 1o, NWA, J. Brooks Atkinson, "The Play," The New York Times, 8 September 1928. 22Ciipping, Treadwell Scrapbook 1o, NWA, Gilbert W. Gabriel, "Last Night's First Night," The New York Sun, 8 September 1928. 2~Ciipping, Treadwell Scrapbook 10, NWA, John Anderson, "Snyder Case Suggested In a Magnificent Tragedy," New York Evening Journal, 8 September 1928. 24Sophie Treadwell, 1970 Diary, February 11, NWA.
47
THE AMERICAN WEST OF THE 1870s AND 1880s AS VIEWED FROM THE STAGE
Walter J. Meserve Spectacles have always fascinated mankind. Whether they were Dionysian celebrations in ancient Greece, the Hundred Entertainments of T'ang Dynasty China, church pageants in medieval Europe or public hangings in Elizabethan England, spectacles have provoked and focussed public attention. Theatre managers in midnineteenth century America understood this fact very well and acted accordingly. In a country still trying to determine its national character and to explore its geographical and ideological boundaries there were spectacles to be found in all directions--among the diverse people, on the land they inhabited, and in the events they created. Much of this mass of spectacle appeared upon the stages of American theatres--exploited by character actors in such roles as Jonathan, Paddy, Mose, or John Schmidt; presented through the scenic designer's art in historic battles on land and sea, burning boats and buildings, and reproductions of New York architecture; and dramatized in such diverse and appealing forms as prancing horses and scantily clad young ladies. These were the prevailing theatrical spectacles reflecting the developing nation, of which the West--that land beyond the Mississippi River, reaching the Pacific Ocean and now appearing in stories, paintings, and legends as well as historical documents--was Itself a spectacle of Immeasurable dimensions. · As the American people emerged from the most strenuous of all political upheavals, a civil war, the challenge of developing the West and viewing its spectacles was as urgent to some as dealing with the problems of reconstruction or the growth of industry, and in many ways it was more attractive. There were the heroes of legend and history--Kit Carson and Buffalo Bill--and a Wild West which lent itself easily to the demands of melodrama. It was the task of theatre managers to be aware of the mood and idiosyncrasies of the American public and the fad or fancy currently popular with audiences. In contrast to the tameness of an effete East (deplored and ridiculed by critics with more vigorous imagination than searching intellect) the vital wildness of the West provided an abundance of physical adventure involving '\tarmint redskinsN and the vagaries of an untamed nature. Considering the character of the American
48
stage, there was no better place to bring this vitality to the attention of an American public that might be presumed to thrive upon it. Yet the stage of this period was not glutted with plays depicting the movement westward nor of the public Involved, notwithstanding the variety of spectacles presented by actors, scenic designers, and theatre managers. This is, perhaps, surprising until one understands the place and the nature of mid and late nineteenth century theatre in America. The Mormon Trek, the Gold Rush, the Homestead Act, the completion of the transcontinental railroad--all encouraged movement toward that land Horace Greeley urged American youth to seek. At this point in history, however, the American theatre was concerned with its own survival. For the generation of theatre-goers after the Civil War it was an actor's theatre In America which, like England, could boast no dramatist of Inspiring stature. The popular and financially sustaining theatrical entertainments of these years were spectacles such as Uncle Tom's Cabin or the Black Crook or one-character plays in which actors such as Frank Mayo (Davy Crockett), Frank Chanfrau (Kit Carson), Joseph Jefferson (Rip Van Winkle), John T. Raymond (Col. Sellers), or Denman Thompson (Uncle Josh Whitcomb) built substantial careers. In spite of vigorous activity in a number of towns and cities across the country, the theatre remained largely an eastern establishment where managers and playwrights understood their obligation to entertain eastern audiences. The literary center of the United States at this time was Boston, while New York claimed a superior position in the theatre world. As these two hubs of intellect and Imagination began to merge toward the end of the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the flames of literary and artistic nationalism leaped higher, critics begged more Insistently for the American play, but playwrights, by and large, did not look westward In thought or plot. Records clearly establish that after mid-century more and more dramatists tried to depict American city life and American society where it might be recognized, in such areas as traditional Philadelphia, Back Bay Boston, Knickerbocker New York, and Tidewater Virginia. It was this social comedy approach to theatrical entertainment that critics enjoyed, as one reviewer for The Critic of 21 October 1882 explained: For months we have been crying on the housetops. "Give us a good American play. Let us get rid of the masterworks of Mr. Bartley Campbell and Mr. Fred Maeder. Let us get rid of Mr. Wallack's stupid English 49
comedies with their ever1asting 'haw, haw.' Let us get rid of Mr. Palmer's artificial French drama, mauled and mangled in the adaptations. Give us a well-written native play, presenting scenes which appeal to everybody. Let the same skill which Frenchmen apply to French life and Englishmen to English life be applied by Americans to American life." Mr. Bronson Howard has answered this appeal. (2:287) The play the reviewer praised was Young Mrs. Winthrop by an author whose interest in and knowledge of geographical America was limited to land east of the Appalachian Chain. Among those playwrights mentioned, Wallack and Palmer were theatre managers, interested by necessity in box office returns. The work of Campbell and Maeder, however, though clear1y lacking in some of Howard's dramatic skills and clear1y outside the interest of the reviewer for The Critic, is vital to a discussion of plays dealing with Western America. Eastern America acquired much of its education about the West from the stories of Bret Harte and the numerous Dime Novels that Erastus Beadle began to publish in the ear1y 1860s. From habits formed before mid-century many American playwrights took their inspiration from stories published in newspapers and weekly magazines, and their adaptation from page to stage was a recognized art form for which permission was rarely sought. In this manner the far West was brought into the theatres--by known and unknown theatre hacks as well as by the established playwrights of the day. During the 1870s the major American dramatists included Augustin Daly, J.J. McCloskey, Bartley Campbell, Steele Mackaye, Clay Green, Fred Maeder, Bronson Howard, Edward Harrigan, and B. E. Woolf. Of these, the first six wrote plays about the West or featuring some aspect of the West. Add to their number during the 1880s Edgar Fawcett, A.A. Cazauran, A.C. Gunter, David Belasco, and James A. Herne, none of whom during this decade depicted Western America in their plays. Several lesser playwrights, of course, contributed melodramas about the West, including such literary giants as Joaquin Miller, Bret Harte and, in particular, Mark Twain, whose fascination with the theatre and covetous interest in the big money it sometimes provided induced him to try to write the popular one-character plays. Among others who wrote Western melodramas for popular consumption were William Bausman, William H. Young, Ned Buntline, John Wallace Crawford, Joseph Clifton, Char1es Foster, and Howard Hill. But Western melodramas were not the only route through which the West came into the theatre. There were also numerous vehicle plays made popular by James Wallack,
50
Frank Chanfrau, Frank Fayne, and Clara Butler, as well as the several plays dramatizing the exploits of Buffalo Bill. Once called ,he greatest of our American dramatists, • Bartley Theodore Campbell (1843-1888) started writing plays in 1871 after working as a reporter, a magazine editor, a dramatic critic, a poet, and a novelist. From 1879 to 1885 he was not only the most popular American dramatist but was considered by some critics as the best. 1879, the year My Partner (one of Campbell's most popular successes) opened, also marks the beginning of a mental breakdown that eventually caused Campbell's death. It was a period of tremendous pressure as well as tremendous success as Campbell sometimes sent out from his New York office as many as six theatre companies, each touring with one of his plays. His evident selfsatisfaction is revealed in the large diamond collar button he wore and a letterhead emblazoned with two busts--one of Shakespeare and one of Campbell. By early 1886, however, the man whom "Nym Crinkle" (drama critic Andrew C. Wheeler) later described as "killed by his own sensibilities" drew public attention to his violent behavior, was legally charged as irresponsible, and was eventually committed to the State Hospital for the Insane in Middletown, New York, where, declared incurable, he died on 30 July 1888. Wheeler's final comment in the New York Dramatic Mirror, 4 August 1888, noted the great power in Campbell's plays, undisciplined though it was, and his "emotional nature, so unbalanced.• He was reminded, he wrote, of a "literary Abe Lincoln. He has the same rusticity and homeliness of method all in a smaller way. "1 Of some thirty-four plays written by Campbell, several revised and produced under different titles, at least four depict Western scenes and characters, and at the time of his breakdown he was working on a play set in Denver, Colorado, during its boom days and to be called Romance of the Rockies. The Vigilantes; or, The Heart of the Sierras, 1878, was adapted from an earlier play entitled How Women Love; or, The Heart of the Sierras with a debt he acknowledged to Bret Harte's Outcasts of Poker Flat. From its opening to closing scenes in the Sierras, It is a story of love and adventure, rejection and seduction, a good woman and a dissipated man, all of which is given a Western flavor with the introduction of an old miner named Joe Comstock and scenes in the mountains and in San Francisco. Through Fire, 1871, a "sensation play" produced In 1873 as Watch and Wait; or, Through Fire, Is a melodrama combining passionate love and irresponsible thievery. Act Ill opens on the Western plains where the hero, a wagoner, induces the heroine to sleep in her wagon rather than in the ranch house which is set on fire by Indians during the night. Part of Act IV takes place in a rich Californian's
51
home, part in a mountainous area. The first and last acts are set in New York. Campbell's fascination with the broad scope of the American scene actually began with his first play, a Historical Allegory of America, 1871, composed of three parts--The Past, 1860 and 1971. Concentrating upon the issues of the CivU War, Campbell allows all of the States to present their points of view. Finally, Progress speaks In 1971: America has progressed at wondrous speed. We've railroads to Alaska's frozen vales, And railroad tunnels do away with sails. (Part Ill, I) With the exception of two plays, however, Campbell's attention to the American West remains generally superficial. Neither characters nor actions realistically represent any particular region. In My Partner, 1879, which many consider his masterpiece, Campbell managed to create a definite Western tone with the obvious help of Bret Harte's tales and the stories and plays of Joaquin Miller. The plot is simple and sentimental: two men, partners In a gold mine claim but not of equal moral fortitude, love the same woman. With predictable recognitions, confrontations, and sacrifices, Campbell mixes a little humor and some satiric comments on politics and religion before contriving a happy ending. Local color in scene, speech, and manner obviously helped the play to succeed, but critics were also impressed with the realistic qualities of incidents and character, none of which appeared extravagant. Wing Lee, a Chinaman, and Major Britt, a heavy drinking long-winded legislator, are not only Western personalities appropriate to Siskiyou County, California, but are vital to the plotting of the play. For contemporary American audiences sentiment held a high priority, and loyalty was next to godliness. "My partner," says Joe, the hero, is •better than a brother; for brothers they quarrel sometimes, but Ned and I have worked together on the same pan, slept under the same blanket" (l,i). As the play ends and the villain is punished, Joe, played by Louis Aldrich, who was billed as "the leading exponent of the strong, virile American character upon the stage• (New York Telegram, 17 September 1879), explains to Mary: "Yes, dear! The night has been long and dark. But on the height of happiness, where we are standing now, our love will illuminate our lives forever- (IV). A well-paced melodrama, with humor, moral standards, local color, excellent suspense, and good use of music and calcium fire, My Partner combined Western America and the American dream. A Brave Man, 1882, a five-act melodrama set at a Western
52
ranch, exists only in a prompt-book manuscript and may never have been acted. Its plot imitates popular scenes from various plays, and the interaction between the characters is confusing. The West, however, is everywhere evident--in the scenery, the characters, and the action. The major conflict lies between the villain Ranforth and Douglass Macair, a straight and honest hero and a brave man who confronts the villain at the climax of Act I. With his many friends and their pistols, however, Macalr is able to rescue Flip, the abused daughter of Ranforth: ,he gal goes with met• One interesting revelation concerning the social mores of the West appears in a humorous exchange between Sambo and Aanagan, who taunts the black man: "Nigger, nigger, never die--black face and Chinese eye" (1). But when Sambo removes his coat, to reveal two big pistols at his belt, the Irishman is property Intimidated. The character of Flip, an Intriguing, adolescent tom-boy, is the best part of the play, which ends with the villain dead and Douglass, reunited with his wife, providing a good home for Flip. Exciting melodrama was Campbell's forte, and when he chose the West as his setting, he melded those Western peculiarities of scene and people, then popular with journalists and story-tellers, with the most admired qualities of the American character to create sentimental and sensational spectacles of tremendous effect. Like Campbell, James J. McCloskey (1825-1913) tried to bring to the theatre the great popularity of Western story-tellers. George C. D. Odell, reporting in the Annals of the New York Stage, IX, on a production of McCloskey's Schneider; or Dot House von de Rhine at the Olympic Theatre on 17 July 1871, commented that "McCloskey wrote plays as easily as Young America eats or dances." Unfortunately, except for a temperance play called The Fatal Plan and Across the Continent, the scripts of McCloskey's plays have been lost, but many of his accomplishments were recorded. As a young man, McCloskey went to California in the rush for gold and started a career as an actor and theatre manager, later capitalizing on his experience in his plays. In addition to his most lasting success, Across the Continent; or, Scenes from New York Life and the Pacific Railroad, he wrote other plays about the West--The Far West; or, The Bounding Fawn, 1870; Poverty Flat; or, California in '49, 1873, Over the Plains, 1874--although the number and quality can never be determined. Across the Continent maintained Its appeal for audiences throughout the nineteenth century despite a hodge-podge of structure that is frustrating to describe. Essentially the play first surfaced in the 1860s as an unsuccessful production entitled New York in 1837; or, the Overland Route. It was so unsuccessful, In fact, that
53
McCloskey sold the play outright to another actor, Oliver Doud Byron (1843-1920), who tinkered so well with his purchase that a version he performed in the fall of 1870 somehow caught the public fancy and supported him remarkably well for the next thirty seasons. Simply stated, the play Byron performed had something for everyone-minstrel show humor, farce, local color from New York, Western scenes, Indian raids, melodramatic rescues, and numerous stage characters identified by dialects and personal idiosyncracies (New Yorker, Irish, Italian, Dutch, Negro, Chinese, Indian). The first act dramatized the currently popular temperance theme, ending with a pledge--and a thrilling fire on stage. Acts II and Ill are structured around the popular gambler-victim thesis, but the betrayed and the deceived, controlled by their own weaknesses and an unscrupulous villain, are saved just in time by the hero, Joe the Ferret. The West is depicted in Act IV at a station house on the Union Pacific Railroad where Joe is the stationmaster of the 47th U.P. Railway station. In this act, with a Chinese and a Negro for farcical humor and an Indian chief and his band helping the villain intimidate the hero, McCioskeyByron took advantage of the completion of the U.P. in 1869 and the still mysterious telegraph placed in the hands of Joe, who taps out a message to station #46: ·Get help and send back the train at lightning speed. I am surrounded by Indians. • Joe also has two helpless females to protect, but the message goes through, the train arrives in time, loaded with soldiers who kill the Indians and the villain as "Louise rushes into Joe's arms, forming the picture as down comes The Curtain. • This was the West as many Americans Imagined and understood it--spectacular, thrilling, ana entertaining. Augustin Daly (1838-1899), a major theatre manager and playwright of the last half of the nineteenth century, was scarcely known, except on rare occasions, for having an interest in American dramatists or the American scene. With an eye to profit he encouraged the dramatic efforts of such literary giants as W.O. Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James, but he might have chosen better candidates for the kind of theatre he supported. A few of his plays touched on eastern American society, and his interest in adapting popular works to the theatre led him to write Horizon, 1871, a frontier play in five acts and seven tableaux. The story starts with the arrival of Captain Van Dorp at Fort Jackson on the western plains, •pretty well out towards the Horizon.• Van Dorp's major task is to protect the Congressional land grant of Sundown Rouse, a man of considerable influence in Washington, but the play quickly evolves Into a love story remarkably similar to Bret Harte's "The Outcasts of Poker Flat.• Calling it •a play of contemporaneous events on the border of civilization," Daly enlisted the aid of a sentimental gambler, a con54
firmed drunkard, a Vigilante Committee, numerous Indians, and the U.S. Army to create a spectacular melodrama about the real and imaginary American West. Indian warfare was rampant during the years following the Civil War, and Daly's portrayal of Wannemucka suggests some of the conventional attitudes Americans held toward the Indians as well as the basically poetic Indian legend and lore which were in key with the moral and romantic atmosphere of the play. Steele Mackaye (1842-1894) held that spark of genius which has garnered him some fleeting fame In several aspects of theatre development during the late nineteenth century. His play Hazel Kirke, 1880, had phenomenal success among American audiences. His inventions helped change American theatre, and his designs for the Spectatorium for the Chicago Exposition of 1893 vividly represent an American theatre dream. As an actor, theatre manager, Inventor, teacher, and playwright, Mackaye made his mark in theatre history and at the same time gained a reputation as one who was generally outwitted in financial transactions. Among the thirty plays he wrote from 1872 through 1894, Won at Last, 1877, Hazel Kirke, and Paul Kanver (Anarchy), 1887, were the most popular products of his artistry. Although his work is Infrequently associated with the American West, his notebooks and memorabilia at the Dartmouth College Library clearly indicate that the West was on his mind a great deal, a fact revealed in his numerous unpublished playscripts. One of these plays, Colorado Joe, "An American Comedy in 4 Acts," opens in Colorado in 1876, has some action in New York In 1883 and concludes back in Colorado in 1884. The plot follows the sometimes confusing and frequently thwarted pursuit of the heroine by Joe Dean, a fur trapper whose noble character bears the scars of his struggle before the play reaches its happy ending. Another Western play by Mackaye, Grizzly Jack, dramatizes the emotional problems of Kate, the daughter of an old miner, loved by Panther Jack but married to Arthur whose previous marriage is revealed by the forsaken wife who charges bigamy. Although the westerner, Jack, had previously stepped aside for Arthur, he soon asserts his noble feelings and wins the girl in the final act as Arthur goes to prison. Reckless is another Mackaye play of love, violence, and sacrifice in the West, part of the action taking place on top of the shafting of the Good Hope Mine in a canyon of Colorado. Sometime during the 1880s Mackaye also outlined a Buffalo Bill play which he called The Wild West and planned to produce in Madison Square Garden. True to his belief that nature was the basis of all art and his tendency to think on a very large scale, his play suggested historical scope and theatrical innovations--Savage life,
55
Pioneer life, Settler life, and Frontier life. His sketch indicates a gigantic production comparable to the Buffalo Bill Wild West Shows that were becoming popular toward the end of the decade through the entrepreneurship of Nate Salisbury. There were to be pony races, shooting competitions, Indian dances and Indian raids, an enactment of Custer's massacre, and the scene on the plains where Buffalo Bill killed Yellow Hand. Mackaye's personal contact with Salisbury reveals the seriousness of his plans, but these, along with his other western plays, were all to remain unfinished scripts by one of the great imaginative artists of the nineteenth century. If Mackaye had concentrated his efforts to reveal the West to the American people, the public might have been better served on the subject. As it was, his plays suggest an interest in the Western spectacle and a popular subject but no evidence of the detailed knowledge that would have made such plays a cantribution to Western theatre or literature. By the early 1890s Buffalo Bill and the Wild West Show with Col. William F. Cody as president and Salisbury as vice-president and manager had achieved European acclamation for spectacular performances in England, Scotland, France, Spain, Italy, and Germany. The beginning of this phenomenon, however, one that helped introduce the American West to the American people as well as the Western wor1d, occurred in the ear1y 1870s. Fred G. Maeder (1840-1891), son of the actress Clara Fisher Maeder, started the fad which immediately sent the Bowery Boys into a frenzy with Buffalo Bill, King of the Bordermen, 1872, a dramatization of Ned Buntline's story (ms in Harvard Theatre Collection). It was, to say the least, a broad and frequently absurd melodrama, opening at Buffalo Bill's cabin in Kansas and emphasizing the murder of his father by Col. Jake McKandless before the eyes of his adoring family. Pursuit of the villainous Jake motivates Buffalo Bill, his friend Bill Hickok, and much of the action of the play, but there are also sentimental scenes in the Cody household mixed with scenes of love and mischief involving Kitty Muldoon, Snakeroot Sam, Fire-Water Tom, and Major Williams, the "old Vet." J.B. Studley played Buffalo Bill with all the fervor of Western melodrama at its most colorful. At the climax of Act I Bill wounds Jake who in Act II steals Lettie, Bill's feisty sister. Scene 3 of this act was particularly popular as Bill, to get some sleep safe from Indians, chooses a hollow log to crawl into, only to find his hideout the scene of an Indian powwow and his log part of the campfire. With gunpowder and some cautious wriggling, Buffalo Bill escapes and enjoys the explosion that scatters the Indians. The act concludes with a knife fight between the villain and hero and the rescue of Lettie. Con-
56
frontations between Whites and Indians accompanied by a lot of music and a minimal plot encumber the last act until Buffalo Bill provides the final rescue amid •cheers• and •red fire•--distinctive yet all very typical of numerous Buffalo Bill plays. Maeder's play was produced in February, 1872, at the Bowery Theatre where Edward Z.C. Judson, alias Ned Buntline, took Col. Cody to see the show. That summer Buntline conceived the idea of putting Cody on the stage. At first Cody refused, but Buntline was persistent. When he met Cody and his friend, Texas Jack Omohundro, In Chicago the following December, he put together in about four hours a piece called The Scouts of the Plains (essentially what he could remember of Maeder's play plus a role for himself) which was produced at Nixon's Amphitheatre with Cody and Texas Jack as actors. Although it consisted of little more than a lot of shooting, mainly at Indians, and a rambling conversation between Buntline and the two scouts, a new kind of spectacle had been created. Plays featuring Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill Hickok, and Texas Jack soon caught the public fancy, and Indians added to the excitement. Maeder's The Scalpers; or, Life on the Plain, 1874, for example, had ten Comanche Indians In the cast. Buntline's The Scouts of the Prairie, 1873, featured Cody, as Buffalo Bill, and twenty Indian warriors. The Prairie Waif, 1880, Included a band of Cheyenne Indians. Charles Foster's Twenty Days; or, Buffalo Bill's Pledge, 1883, was another popular vehicle, and Wild Bill; or Life on the Border, 1875, made a hero of Wild Bill Hickok by advertising his combat scene with a wild bear. Texas Jack starred in an 1877 version of Scouts of the Plains and, with his wife, a dancer named Madam Morlacchi, was featured in Texas Jack; or, Life in the Black Hills, 1877. Ned Buntline's story and his subsequent Idea to put the real hero on stage stimulated production of two types of popular entertainment: the one-character vehicle and the extravagant spectacle. Both had existed before this date, of course, but the West added a particular flavor. Cody the actor eventually found more satisfaction and money with the spectacular exhibition of his Wild West Show, but the •sco~ play his life illustrated became generally associated with the heroic activities on the western frontier. Because shooting was a major attraction, experts with firearms, such as Frank Fayne and Clara Butler, developed their careers in plays like The Scouts of Oregon and The Scouts of Sierra Nevada, 1874, and Orolosa; or, Dead Shot of the Sierra Nevadas, 1873, In which they shot apples off each other's heads. N.S. Wood, more actor than expert rifleman, starred in The Boy Scouts of the Sierras, 1880, and James Wallack was popular in the leading role of William H. Young's southwestern melodrama of The Cattle King, 1887. Kit the Arkansas 57
Traveller by J.B. De Walden and Edward Spencer gave Frank Chanfrau an excellent vehicle as Kit Redding, a fast man with a pistol or Bowie knife. About this time, too, Frank Mayo was enjoying his popularity as Davy Crockett, but the scene In Tennessee was too far east to be considered real frontier drama. Although the chief spectacle and attraction of these dramas was the actor, the Western scene was also of major importance to Americans intrigued by the romance and adventure they saw as keys to the western reaches of their country. Among the best-known story-tellers of the West, Joaquin Miller, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain also tried to recreate the West In American theatres. Miller, the Poet of the Sierras, had greater success than the others, particularly with The Danites in the Sierras, 1877. Concerned with Mormon vengeance, this melodrama was a popular vehicle for McKee Rankin for several years. Forty-nine, 1881, provided another fine role for Rankin, who played a sentimental miner whose noble sacrifice makes possible a happy ending. Although Miller had considerable knowledge of the West, he incorporated not only his own work into The Danites but also characters from Bret Harte's stories; yet, he was not capable of creating an actable drama, and T.A. Fitzgerald was paid to make The Danites stageworthy. Bret Harte's stories Inspired a number of plays. J.H. Warwich dramatized one in California; or, The Heathen Chinee, 1878; Clay Green adapted M'/iss, 1878; Bartley Campbell adapted two stories to the stage. Harte also tried his hand in The Two Men of Sandy Bar, which failed in the theatre. Obviously trying to incorporate into his play too many of his favorite characters, Harte developed some interesting scenes and vivid acting roles, but his play is at best a confusing and involved work that bewildered audiences. One character, however, Hop Sing, played by C.T. Parsloe, inspired Harte and Mark Twain to write Ah Sin, 1876. Critics found this play both laughable and lively, and audiences watched it for some five weeks, entertained more by its absurdities than by any true picture of the American West. With the exception of Sue, which he wrote with T. Edgar Pemberton In 1896, Bret Harte was never able to adapt his own stories successfully to the theatre. Equally eager to write for the stage and gifted with a sense of the theatrical as well as a knowledge of the West, Mark Twain had even less success as a playwright. Fascinated by the theatre and closely associated with it during intervals of his life, Mark Twain clearly lacked an ability to structure and sustain a full-length play. Nor did he really understand the demands of the theatre; yet, the way his Imagination worked and the potential for making money that came with a successful play frequently caused him to think of his
58
work in dramatic form. In 1870, for example, he began to consider Roughing It as a Western play; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Prince and the Pauper were both begun as plays. One of his most sustained dramatic efforts was Colonel Sellers as a Scientist, written with William Dean Howells, a failure in which the two friends clearly demonstrated their inability to collaborate on a play. If Bret Harte was stagestruck, as Mark Twain contended, so was Mark Twain. Unfortunately, neither of these writers, whose work helped illuminate the West for contemporary American audiences, was capable of creating for the contemporary stage. Of the scattered plays set In the West that have been preserved, for one reason or another, for modern readers, few were produced in New York theatres. Most are moderately to poorty conceived melodramas, written for regional theatres and produced infrequently. Their Importance lies mainly in the modest suggestion that they represent honest and typical efforts, perhaps indicative of more abundant playwriting. John Wallace Crawford (1842-1917) fits the pattern first cut by Maeder, Buntline, and Cody. Identifying himself as "the poet scout,· Crawford worked as a scout in the Black Hills, acted with Cody "on the road" in Life on the Border, 1876, and in 1877 shot himself in the leg while acting the role of Yellow Hand in Cody's play of The Right Red Hand. That same year he wrote Fonda; or, The Trapper's Dream, 1877, with the help of Sam Smith, another minor playwright. Something like Life on the Border and strongly anti-Mormon, Fonda follows the handsome scout through a series of adventures ending with his rescue of the heroine from--a bad marriage. Crawford liked to contrast his work with Cody's Buffalo Bill plays, declaring that his were ''the best, cleanest and most truthful plays of Frontier American life and history that have ever been written" and that Cody's were "gross exaggerations and untruthful fictions of frontier life and characters. •2 In 1879 Crawford copyrighted his play as California Through Death Valley. The Mighty Truth; or, In Clouds of Sunshine, copyrighted in 1889 as Tat; or, Edna, the Veteran's Daughter, is a play about women and what they should do, Indian women as well as white women, and is liberally sprinkled with Crawford's naive poetry and embellished by his own self-conscious and autobiographical prose. It is true that Crawford wanted to present the West as he saw it, but he was also a reformer, and his idealism must be noted by any reader. Across America during the 1870s and 1880s the West held a certain fascination for the theatre public. Except for a few plays performed by well-known actors, however, Western or frontier drama never developed a popularity comparable to plays on the temperance issue, for example, or plays about New York City. It
59
was, rather, a scene and a theme or a quality of character that interested some playwrights and entertained audiences on either coast and In between where theatres existed. The number of these Western plays, however, may never be known, and their quality was certainly not distinctive. Early California, 1872, for example, was the first play of William Bausman, a native of San Francisco where the play had a good run at the Metropolitan Theatre before touring In other California cities. Although the style of the play suggests literary pretensions, it Is poorly structured around a murder and a revenge theme. The murdered man's daughter stimulates much of the action until the hero's false arrest creates a crisis and the guilty villain Is arraigned. Lacking any distinction as melodrama, the play makes the most of California local color and dialect. On the east coast George Jessop and J.B. Polk wrote a comedy entitled A Gentleman from Nevada, 1880, with such characters as English Jack, •a tough snoozer but lightning at keards, • and Egerton, the •jawmaster general of the Sierras. • Placing an Englishman in Nevada and having him cope with the natives and win was a novel twist, but the scenes involving mining in California and gambling in Nevada, the Irish in California and the Chinese in Nevada, provided minimal insight into frontier life. The setting for Howard Hill's The Angel of the Trail, 1884(?), is the mission of the Silver Chimes near Needle Mountain, San Bernardino, California. The plot evolves from the efforts of Gerald, a U.S. Secret Service man, to capture Don Michael, an evil man who plans to steal the chimes. Perdita, the angel and a crack shot with a pistol, loves Gerald and eventually helps him capture his man but not before disguises, fights, a humorous sub-plot, and good suspense show this melodrama to be better than average as entertainment. Joseph Clifton is credited with writing The Ranch King, 1886, and Chick, 1889. Although J.J. McCloskey printed a romantic comedy with the title of The Ranch King in 1886, the quality of writing In this play--barely literate in the manuscript copy deposited in the George Poultney Collection of the Gleeson Library of the University of San Francisco--seems inferior to his other work. Set somewhere in Texas. the play pits a villain named Mannering against Donald McDonald, the ranch king. For some unrevealed reason Mannering swears to ruin McDonald, but his plots fail. Also, his attempt to seduce the daughter of another man is thwarted by McDonald through a game of cards, and his robbery scheme falls through. Confused and poorly constructed, this play reveals very little about Texas. Except for the heroine, Chick, a mountain waif, Clifton's later play, Chick, might have taken place in any rural area. A murder has been committed and the wrong man placed in jail only to be rescued 60
by Chick who covers the jailer with her pistol: "lay a finger on him and I'll blow your brains out.. (IV). At the end right triumphs; liquor and greed are condemned; three sets of lovers are united; and the most western reference is the name of the wrongly accused man's fiancee--Mabel West. The Cattle King, 1887, may have been written by William H. Young, but a Marie Townsend Allen also copyrighted a play by that title in 1885. (Plays at that time could be copyrighted by an author who supplied only the title.) The scene is a ranch in the territory of New Mexico, and the play contrasts an American cattle king, Bob Taylor, alias Dare Devil Dick, a champion poker player, with Don Pedro Jose Mexia, a Mexican cattle king. The well-paced action which involves shootings, a big card game, and a lot of drinking also features the usual melodramatic love problems and a spectacular fifth act rescue. The Western woman is pictured as a strong and determined heroine In one instance and by Molly, a frontier woman who wears a broad leather belt with two large sized Colts and a Bowie knife at her back. More than most melodramas, this play comments on the relations between America and New Mexico. After a long speech against Mexico, Bob (as Dare Devil Dick) condemns the practice he sees around him: "You seize this poor man's cattle and that squatter's land.. (IV,ii). At the climax of the play Don Pedro is assured of punishment under a warrant for his arrest signed by the governor of the New Mexico Territory. Clay Greene was a minor dramatist of some reputation in New York at the end of the century. In The Golden Giant Mine, 1887, he attempted to take advantage of the Western atmosphere in Golden Run, Idaho, in the ear1y 1880s. There is mystery from the beginning, but it is not a Western mystery. Two partners in a mining venture argue: one stays with the mine; the other, a villain, leaves, but his wife comes to Golden Run to find a new life, which she eventually does with the other partner. When the villainous partner reappears, to claim the wealth of the mine, the dramatist saves the happiness of all by producing a twin brother. A rather traditional and complex melodrama, The Golden Giant Mine has little, unfortunately, to identify it with Idaho. The American stage has frequently been stricken with popular fads and fancies, and one might expect that the opening of the American West with its Indian wars, the struggles of frontier life, the dreams of great wealth, and a panorama of romantic adventures would have stimulated a long and spectacular movement In American theatre. With some notable exceptions such popularity did not take place. Although most of the major playwrights of the period did write about the West in a play or two, there was not a con61
centrated effort to bring the West to the center of American theatre activity in the East where the major theatre managers such as Wallack and Palmer eschewed American plays and Daly was extremely selective. Audiences appeared to enjoy foreign plays, spectacles, one-character plays performed by favorite actors, and melodramas or farces concerned with distant lands or American city and social life. Not even Mark Twain and Bret Harte could finagle success In the theatre with the same stories that brought them popularity in print. Bartley Campbell and J.J. McCloskey gained some success portrayIng the West in their plays, but they were not eventually persuaded that the material would bear either much repetition or investigation. The great success of Buffalo Bill was the creation of the Wild West Show which appealed to the American's love of spectacle and moved on the momentum created by the circus, the showboat, and the minstrel show. Meanwhile, the Western play and the Westerner generally faded into the American local color drama to be captured occasionally by Augustus Thomas in Arizona and Colorado and finally determined by William Vaughan Moody in The Great Divide as a basis for distinction--although this is a broad oversimplification for the course of Western frontier drama. Those plays written during the 1870s and 1880s that did emphasize the West can be described in certain discrete ways. The West was largely masculine, and the plays emphasize male activities of gambling, drinking, and card playing along with rough living and fighting. Violence was popular--against Indians, against uncouth villains, against nature. If women were present, they were either strong, rowdy, and independent or helpless and weak and, therefore, eastern in temperament. There was generally shooting; people in the West were pictured as living by their guns. language, also, was rough and ungrammatical, and the houses were primitive. In such ways playwrights attempted to intensify the atmosphere of the West, contrasting the rugged and distinctive scenery of mountains with the coastal regions. It was a very physical life that playwrights described, and melodrama was the appropriate genre for their expression--large scenes, unshaded characters, violent actions. Dramatists made very few comments on society in the West or on social custom. Local color was sometimes represented in scenery, language, and general activities but seldom in what might be termed manners. For most of the playwrights the West was an exceedingly broad expanse of land reaching form Missouri to California, Texas to Idaho, but there was little in most of their works to tell where in that huge area the setting of any play actually occurred. In the 1870s and 1880s a sketchy outline of the West was being created for American theatre audiences--and not on a very
62
broad scale at that, nor a very popular one. The refinement of that outline has been long in the making--by Lynn Riggs, by William Saroyan, by William lnge, by Preston Jones.
Endnotes 1See also Wayne H. Claeren, Bartley Campbell: Playwright of
the Gilded Age, Unpublished diss. University of Pittsburgh, 1975; Napier Witt, ed. The White Slave & Other Plays, America's Lost Plays, XIX. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1965. 2 Paul T. Nolan, John Wallace Crawford (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981 ), 60.
63
From
Theatrical Biographies d Eminent ActOlS and AUthors compiled by F. C. Wemysa New York: Estate of Wm. Taylor, n.d.
[185?)
Memoir of Mr. F. S. Chanfrau Mr. Francis S. Chanfrau, the subject of this memoir, is another instance that talent and genius are not heredity, and that the road to distinction is but too often attained after many discouragements, hardships, and even defeats. Mr. C was born in New York on the 22d of February, 1824, his parents' domicile being a wooden tenement, well known as the "Old Tree House," at the corner of the Bowery and Pell Street. After receiving a respectable English education, his propensities led our hero to the west, the El Dorado of so many youthful dreamers, where he attained considerable expertness as a ship carpenter and joiner; but he was soon glad to return to his native city, under the most discouraging circumstances, with more experience in his head, but not even a copper in his pocket. His wandering spirit having been satisfied, young C turned diligently to his trade, and it is not a little remarkable that he aided to adjust the first timber of the High Bridge on the Croton Acqueduct. Up to this period the sock and buskin had never seemed to have troubled our hero, either in his sleeping or his waking dreams; but on the occasion of seeing Mr. Forrest act at the Bowery, the latent flame was kindled. He joined an amateur association, which finally organized itself under the name of the "Forrest Dramatic Association," in which he played quite subordinate parts, his mechanical ingenuity being much more available than his dramatic abilities. Subsequently this association united itself with the "Dramatic Institute," and together they hired the Franklin Theatre, where they murdered
64
Shakespeare to poor houses, and not without the perpetration of many ludicrous mistakes. On one occasion Chanfrau attempted MacBeth. The carpenters had not been paid, and refused to hoist the curtain on the second act until their claims had been tangibly acknowledged. Every penny in the box office was taken to satisfy these claims, and the curtain rose to both an empty house and treasury. Another act went off tolerably well, when lo! a second difficulty presented itself. Lady MacBeth demanded her salary! •No money, no acting,• was her motto, and as there was not a shilling to be had, she actually left the theatre. MacDuff refused to play without her, and doffing the plaid also disappeared. Nothing disheartened, Chanfrau finished the tragedy without the aid of the principal characters, and ended the fifth act by speaking to MacDuff off the stage, counterfeiting the confusion of a combat and rushing on, already wounded, to die. The audience gave three cheers and vanished, better pleased probably to have that denoument than none at all. Soon after this, Mr. C engaged himself as supernumerary and property-assistant at the Bowery; and here it was that his peculiar talent began to develop itself. His excellent private imitations of Mr. Forrest attracted the attention of Mrs. Shaw and others; and on the occasion of the ·eat Masque· being represented, wherein each character was at liberty to recite any speech which he might select, Mr. C mixed with the mothley [sic] group as MacBeth, and gave one of the soliloquies In imitation of Mr. Forrest, which was recognized, and received with the most vociferous applause. From this time he gradually rose in the profession, and soon accepted an engagement of Mr. John Rice, of the Buffalo and Detroit theatres; after which engagement, he went to the American Theatre at New Orleans. Mr. C subsequently played at Boston and at the Bowery and the Park in New York, with much success, gradually becoming a leading and attractive actor. But it was at Mitchell's Olympic Theatre that Mr. C suddenly woke up one evening and found himself famous. His Yankee in the Chinese Junk, King Almode in the burlesque on the Astor Place Opera, Jeremiah Clip (with Imitations of every actor of note) in the Widow's Victim, and a Frenchman in A Model of a Wife were all pieces of acting which attracted the delighted auditors. But his Mose in A Glance at New York was his great triumph. It at once stamped him as possessing an Intuitive perception, which neither his mere imitations nor previous performances had led his audiences to suspect. He at once became the dramatic •non• of the town; his likeness pervaded every window, and his sayings were uttered by every urchin in the city, as well as by a very great portion of the older part of the male community.
65
During this successful career at the Olympic, several of his friends, unsolicited, bought the lease of the Chatham Theatre, and placed it in Mr. C's possession. It redounds much to Mr. C's reputation as a man of honor (and of which this is not the only instance we know) that notwithstanding the accession of business on his hands, he faithfully fulfilled his engagement with Mr. Mitchell, untU the close of the Olympic, playing for several weeks at both theatres on the same evening. We conclude this brief sketch with the following remarks by T. W. M. from the New York Sunday Mercury: To say that Mr. Chanfrau's Mose Is acted so well that it seems to be reality, is but to say the truth, while to imagine that it partakes, in the remotest manner, of the characteristics of the man, is to labor under a vast mistake. In private life Mr. Chanfrau is kind, affable, and gentlemanly. Although the writer of this has known him intimately from boyhood, he can point to no one bad quality belonging to him. As an actor we have shown that he Is without his equal for versatility and the faculty for Imitation; as a man we known him to be all that can be desired in a good citizen. His generosity and worth are freely acknowledged by all who have the pleasure of his acquaintance. He is entirely free from the vices which so frequently ensnare the successful young actor, and bids fair to become not only rich in the esteem of his fellow creatures generally, but In the more sordid and mercenary acceptations of the term.
Memoir of Thomas S. Hamblin The late Thomas S. Hamblin, for twenty-five years manager of the Bowery Theatre, was born at Tentonville, Islington, near London, on the 14th of May, 1800. He made his first appearance upon any public stage at Sadlers' Wells, reciting Rolla's Address to the Peruvians, between the pieces, and although perfectly satisfied with himself upon that occasion, as he often related to the writer, yet it appears the Manager had formed a very low estimate of the abilities of the new aspirant for histrionic honor, refusing to employ him about the theatre at all, even In the most humble situation, and without remuneration, for the proffered service; but Hamblin's mind was cast in the right mould; once determined to accomplish an object he per-
66
severed, in the face of every difficulty, until he generally obtained it, and having made up that mind, that he would be an actor, he was not to be daunted by this most unpromising beginning; he sought and obtained an interview with Scott, then Manager of the Sans Pare! (now the Adelphi) Theatre, in the Strand, London, who prided himself at all times on having in his theatre the best-looking men, and the handsomest women, the London Stage could supply. Pleased with the appearance of young Hamblin, to whom his only objection was his height, he offered him ten shillings per week, to dance in the Ballet, go on in all groups, and render himself generally useful. Hard work, the reader will say for twenty-two cents per day--aye, and night too, for 12 o'clock, P.M., frequently found him still on duty; but he had placed his foot firmly on the first round of the ladder he was determined to ascend, and the sequel of his history will prove, he never receded until he attained the proud position of a leading actor, then became a star, and finally an active and enterprising manager. How long Mr. Hamblin remained in this subordinate situation we have no positive means of ascertaining, but that he must have made good use of this time, and learned rapidly the first lessons of his art, we have the best proof in the fact, that on the twenty-sixth of December, 1819, he made his first appearance with success on the boards of Drury-Lane Theatre, as Trueman in George Barnwell. Here he remained for two or three seasons, until on one occasion Mr. Rae having to perform Hamlet, was suddenly taken ill in the theatre; as luck would have it (and every actor's fate was decided by luck, either for good or bad) all the principal actors who could have supplied his place, were at the instant nowhere to be found. Hamblin having been a student from the commencement of his career, had committed to memory the words of Hamlet, without an idea at that period of its proving of any further use than keeping "his study" in good training, by reading his favorite Shakespeare, he stepped forward and modestly proffered his services. The manager hesitated, but it was now past the hour for the curtain to rise, the audience were becoming clamorous, and the only alternative between the Horatio of the play-bill--for Hamlet--was a change of the play. It was decided that Hamblin should act the part. With every nerve strained for the effort, with a determined will to succeed, a thrill passed through him as he listened to the apology, and the coldness with which it was received caused a feeling of fear, of stage fright, to take possession of him, which had near1y proved fatal to his hopes: but as the prompter's whistle sounded for the change of scene his self-possession returned. He so surprised the audience, that at the end of the play he was called before the curtain, an honor of rare occurence, at that time to receive the plaudits of the
67
audience, bowed his thanks and retired, his reputation firmly fiXed as one of the most promising young actors on the London stage. The next morning he entered the theatre an altered man-he had acted Hamlet, under most trying circumstances, successfully at Drury-Lane Theatre; he well knew, that the engagements of the theatre would preclude the possibility of (even if the management had the Inclination) placing him before the audience, In the position he coveted, and the increase of salary--the reward of his last night's exertion--could not reconcile him to the idea of taking one backward step; he preferred playing the leading characters in Birmingham, Bath and Dublin, to any subordinate situation in a London theatre, and at the end of the season retired from Drury-Lane, until the day should arrive when he might return as one of the leading Tragedians of the day. No provincial actor ever enjoyed a greater share of public approbation than Thomas S. Hamblin. In 1825 he was married at St. George's Chapel, Hanover Square, to Miss Elizabeth Blanchard, one of the daughters of Mr. W. Blanchard of Covent Garden Theatre, and the event, which he then looked upon as the happiest of his life, proved the bane of his future existence. For a time the young couple (the young lady was an actress of acknowledged talent) were received with enthusiasm wherever their names were announced. Wealth, fame, and happiness, at this period, attended all their movements. Hamblin having heard that rapid fortunes were accumulated in the United States, entered into an engagement for himself and his young wife to visit the New World, under the auspices of Price and Simpson; and early in the fall of 1825 he made his appearance at the Park Theatre, New York, in his favorite, Hamlet. Mrs. Hamblin acted on the following evening Letitia Hardy in The Belle's Stratagem; they both succeeded to their heart's content and visited as "Stars" all the leading theatres of the United States. From this time Hamblin's name and history belong exclusively to the American Stage. In 1830 or 1831, Mr. Hamblin became joint lessee of the Bowery Theatre with James H. Hackett. This was the year when theatricals were at the lowest ebb; the attempt therefore to resuscitate the legitimate drama, notwithstanding the powerful array of talent announced nightly in the play-bills, was a failure. Hackett retired, leaving the whole management in the hands of his late partner--who then turned his attention to the production of MeloDramatic Spectacles. Mazeppa was produced, and its success raised the Bowery Theatre to its present high standard, and by a judicious course of management. not forsaking Tragedy or Comedy, but making these peculiar dramas, Mazeppa, The Water Witch, Last Days of Pompeii, LaFitte, Norman Leslie, Putnam, &c., the principal feature 68
he realized in an Incredible short space of time a handsome fortune. While thus prosperous, the theatre was consumed by fire in 1836, and in one night, the labor of years was wrested from his hands. He now leased the ground to Mr. Wm. Dinneford, by whom the theatre was re-built in 1837 and again destroyed by fire In 1838. Within Indomitable Industry and perseverance he contrived to erect it once more by issuing proposals for a loan, to be refunded in tickets of admission, and such was the popularity of his name at this time that the whole amount required was subscribed, and the theatre reopened to the public early in 1839. Now it was that calumny was busy with his name, and stories of the most Improbable character were circulated. The New York Herald was particularly severe in its strictures, so much so as to goad Mr. Hamblin beyond the bounds of prudence, which led him to commit an assault upon the proprietor, for which he had to pay very severely. Now It was, when all abandoned him, that James Wallack, Sen., as Wellborn says in the play of A New Way to Pay Old Debts, took him by the hand and set him upright. He gave him a complimental benefit, at the old National in Leonard Street, the proceeds of which enabled him to carry out his own views. He crossed the Atlantic and made his appearance at Covent Garden Theatre as Hamlet, but not with the success he hoped or anticipated. His old enemy, the Asthma, attacked him at the very moment he most wanted the aid of his voice, and although it could not be called a failure, it was not a performance of that nature to induce the managers to offer engagements, and he returned to the United States. While his own theatre was being rebuilt, he resuscitated the fortune of the Park Theatre for a short period by producing those dramas which had made his own fortune, but should never have been tolerated on the boards of the Old Park; that Simpson made money by the operation is true, but he furnished to his opponent at the same time the sinews of war--money. In 1839 the Bowery was again opened, and after various vicissitudes was once more a prey to the devouring elements in 1845. Mr. A. W. Jackson rebuilt it during the same year--made a handsome independence and retired, selling out to Mr. Hamblin In 1848, since which time to the hour of his death it continued in his possession. In 1848 Mr. Hamblin also obtained a lease on the old Park Theatre, which had been the object of his ambition for many years. He laid out a large sum of money to adorn and decorate it, but it proved from the commencement a losing concern, and although by its destruction by fire, he lost seventeen thousand dollars, yet the loss was a gain; another illustration of luck in the life of actors and managers. It is true it made Burton's fortune, but it saved 69
his own, for the continued drain upon the treasury of the Bowery Theatre to support the Park must, if continued, have crushed both. As an actor Mr. Hamblin belonged to the Kemble School, now fast passing from the world . Those who remember Cooper, Kemble, Hodginson, Hallam, Duff, and Henry, must hold up their hands in wonder when they compare the present generation of actors to those of former years--the mechanism of the Stage has Improved, but mind and genius have been sadly on the wane; the art of acting in tragedy has given place to sound and fury, signifying nothing, while Comedy, perhaps, was never better represented than it is at present. As a man, in all his business dealings, he was scrupulously just, scorning to take advantage of the Bankrupt or Insolvent laws to free himself from one cent of honestly incurred debt. At the very moment he had it in his power, to pay all his creditors, he was suddenly called to his last account. The last time he acted was MacBeth in his own theatre, for the benefit of the American Dramatic Fund Association, Dec. 15, 1852. He died, January 8, 1853, and was buried in Greenwood Cemetery on Tuesday January 11, 1853. To no one more than to Thomas S. Hamblin was the American Stage indebted for fostering native talent. There is scarcely a name from E. Forrest down, who has not been indebted to him for affording them an opportunity to display their ability under the most favorable circumstances. The Stage will mourn his loss--they could well have missed a better man.
Memoir of James H. Hackett James Henry Hackett was born at 72 William Street, in the city of New York, March 15th, 1800. His father, Thomas G. Hackett, though born in Holland, resided for several years in New York, and was a lineal descendant of one of the old Feudal Barons of Ireland who constituted the original Irish Peerage, most of which has become extinct; but according to a pedigree of the "Hackett FamilY issued from the Herald Office of Ireland in 1834, and attested by the Marquis Wellesley, then Lord Lieutentant and Governor General of Ireland, the original founder was that "Haket• who came over to England from Normandy with William the Conqueror, and whose name, as one of his victorious generals, is recorded and is legible to this day upon the pillar of "Battle Abbey,• near Hastings. (According to the original orthography of the name, which Is "Haquet," it is evi70
dently derived from that of a fish peculiar to the coast of Normandy-the Haque: which fish appears on the shield among the other Heraldic and amorial bearings of the Hackett family.) One of the lineage of this ..Haket" accompanied Strongbow to Ireland, and it was from this branch that the father of the subject of this memoir was derived. His mother was a daughter of the Rev. Abraham Keteltas of Jamaica, Long Island. This gentleman was the son of a Mr. Abraham Keteltas who came to America from Holland about the year 1720. He is represented to have possessed unusual talents, which were improved by profound erudition. It is worthy of notice that, after settling at Jamaica on Long Island, he frequently officiated in three different languages, having preached in the Dutch and French languages in his native city of New York. He was also, In 1777, chosen a member of the convention to frame the constitution of his native state. "Union HaW Academy, at Jamaica, Long Island, was the institution to which the subject of this memoir was indebted for his early education. He here displayed that voracious, imitative turn of mind, which subsequently qualified his so admirably for the stage; and his histrionic talents were originally exerted in hitting off the peculiarities of his tutors, which he did in a manner to call forth the unqualified delight and approbation of his schoolfellows. In the autumn of 1815, he was admitted a student of Columbia College; but a severe fit of illness interrupted his classical pursuits, and, on his recovery, he betook himself to the study of the law. Coke and Blackstone were found to be uncongenial companions, however, for one so possessed with the spirit of Momus. In 1817, he entered the counting-room of a relative, with the view of becoming a merchant. In 1819, Mr. Hackett married and took from the stage Miss Lee Sugg, of the Park Theatre, who was at that time a distinguished favorite with the public, and removed to Utica. He subsequently became extensively engaged in trade, until, ambitious of extending his sphere of enterprise, he returned to the city of New York, and became a merchant, in Front Street. Here he unfortunately became innoculated with the mania for speculation, which prevailed so universally In 1825, and, in common with vast numbers of his commercial brethren, was involved in heavy losses, by the violent fluctuations in the markets and the failures, which daily took place. It was now, that he looked to the stage for the means of extricating himself from his embarrassments, and procuring the facilities for effecting an honorable adjustment of his affairs. His first appearance on the boards of any theatre was at the Park Theatre, March, 1826, as Justice Woodcock, in Love in a Village; but his success did not equal his own expectations or those of 71
his friends. He seems to have been abandoned by his accustomed humor and self-possession. He resolved, however, on making a second attempt; and appeared in an entertainment, in which he gave imitations of popular actors, and stories illustrative of American characteristics. In this experiment he was entirely successful, and for a series of nights drew large audiences. His second great hit, was In personating one of the two Dromios in The Comedy of Errors, in which he presented a capital imitation of Barnes, who then performed the twin brother. The applause which had been bestowed on his desultory imitations of Yankee peculiarities, now Induced Mr. Hackett to try the experiment of introducing a live Yankee Into some established play, where the necessary alterations could be made, without an undue violation of the probabilities of the plot. He selected the younger Colman's comedy of Who Wants a Guinea? the title of which he changed to that of Jonathan in England, and substituted the character of Solomon Swap to that of Solomon Gundy. The success of the experiment is well known. Solomon Swap contributed much towards helping Mr. Hackett on the high road to fame and fortune; and it is still one of his most laughable characters. When he proposed playing It in England, Colman grumbled somewhat, and made rather an obvious pun upon the name of his American emendator; but if those may laugh who win, the representative of Solomon Swap had no cause to be lachrymose on the occasion. Mr. Hackett has made several visits to England, and his professional success there has, of late years, been of the most flattering description. In April, 1828, he tried his Yankee stories at Covent Garden; but they were found •undramatic, ill-arranged, too local, and too lengthy.• Some imitations of Kean and Macready, however, with which he garnished his entertainment, turned the tide in his favor, and drew down the most hearty applause. He re-appeared upon the london boards, after a lapse of years, and succeeded greatly, not in his Yankee parts, but in Falstaff and Sir Pertinax McSycophant. His Monsieur Morbleau, Nimrod Wildfire, and Rip Van Winkle, were admitted to be performances full of original vigor, talent, and humor. In Lear, he also made a highly favorable impression. During his last visit to England, he received a royal intimation, that it would be agreeable to the Queen to witness his performances, and he accordingly appeared at the Haymarket Theatre, the 26th of May, 1845, her Majesty and Prince Albert being present. We believe, Mr. Hackett is the first American performer, towards whom the same attention has been extended. From Mr. Hackett's range of parts, it will be seen that he possessed remarkable versatility of talent. He played O'Catlaghan in the
72
farce of His Last Legs, before a Dublin audience, with complete success, notwithstanding they had the recollection of Power and other Irishmen in the character fresh in their minds. Mr. Hackett has recently connected himself In the capacity of manager, with the theatre known as the ·Howard Athenaeum, • in Boston, a beautiful and commodious house; and if the experiment of which he has the direction, should not prove successful, It will be from no lack of experience, ability, and enterprise on his part.
73
A PUBLICATION OF INTEREST TO JADT READERS: Rodopi (Amsterdam and Atlanta) has just published, as its DQR Studies In Literature 7, a paperback volume called Theatre West: Images and Impact, edited by Dunbar H. Ogden with Douglas McCermott and Robert K. Sarl6s. With a foreword by William Everson, it presents nineteen essays, divided into four sections. All the material derives from frontier and/or the western United States, offering a diversity of materials on theatre and entertainment. The volume is dedicated to Alois M. Nagler, founding member and first president of the American Society for Theatre Research, at whose annual meeting in San Francisco in 1978 the idea for the volume was born.
74
CONTRIBUTORS BRUCE McCONACHIE teaches courses in theatre and American Studies at the College of William and Mary. Currently a visiting professor at Northwestern University, Professor McConachie emphasizes the approach of the historiographer In his searching analysis of American drama and theatre. NANCY WYNN (1935·1986) headed the theatre program at Wells College, Aurora, New York, and chaired the Theatre Department at Sweetbriar College, Sweetbriar, Virginia, from 1984-1986. The essay published here Is taken from her unpublished dissertation (CUNY Graduate School, PhD Program in Theatre, 1982) on Sophie Tread· well. WALTER J. MESERVE teaches courses in American drama and theatre at the CUNY Graduate School PhD Program in Theatre. The present essay was written for a collection of essays on the American West to be edited by Professor Kristen Douglas, University of New Mexico, and titled The Splintered Image. FRANCIS C. WEMYSS was an active theatre manager during the second quarter of the 19th century in America. He also acted, wrote plays, and added to American theatre history with A Chronology of the American Stage, 1852 and Twenty Six Years of the Life of an Actor and Manager, 1847.
75
For your subscription to JADT (three issues), please complete the form below and mail it, along with your payment of $12.00, to: Journal of American Drama and Theatre CASTA CUNY Graduate Center 33 W. 42nd Street New York, NY 10036 Name:
----------------------------------------Address: ---------------------------------------Phone:
----------------------------------------Affiliation: ---------------------------------------
76
