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“I'll Show You the Bowery from Chatham Square to the Cooper Institute”: The Entertainment and Ethics of Slumming in the Theatre
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 May 2015
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In 1894, Robert Neilson Stephens's play On the Bowery debuted at Haverly's Fourteenth Street Theatre in New York City, with Steve Brodie, who had won fame for purportedly jumping from the Brooklyn Bridge years earlier, playing himself. Although Brodie's entrance is delayed until the second act, he rather quickly commandeers the plot and leads the rest of the characters through the Bowery and across the Brooklyn Bridge (where he reenacts his jump to enthusiastic audiences) to an East River pier, where he leaps into a burning building to rescue one of those perpetually distressed damsels from the 1890s. Naturally, mainstream newspapers were rather critical of On the Bowery’s literary merits. The New York Herald claimed that the play made “no dramatic pretensions,” and the Philadelphia Inquirer emphasized that it left the critic not “overly impressed with the play as a play.” The New York Times took an especially harsh line. Lamenting the play's “threadbare plot” and “no originality,” and overreliance on Brodie's celebrity, its critic used the production as an opportunity to advance rigid delineations of highbrow and lowbrow, upper class and lower class, and literature and leisure. For what this reviewer described as the “Brodie audience,” the working-class spectators who crowded the gallery and boisterously cheered Brodie's every feat, On the Bowery gratified a yearning for escapism and entertainment. On the Bowery was not, according to the Times, geared to what the reviewer described as the “Booth audience,” the middle- and upper-class spectators who normally prized Edwin Booth's Shakespearean performances: “even the management does not take [Brodie] seriously.” If box office success is any measure, however, many from both the Booth and Brodie audiences did take On the Bowery seriously. Productions of the play toured for nearly three years, and a number of plays emulated On the Bowery during the next five years. If Bruce McConachie is right that what is relevant is not “whether . . . melodramas were any good” but what audiences were watching and what meanings they were constructing from these plays, then theatre history should take On the Bowery seriously too.
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References
Endnotes
1. Brodie's alleged leap took place in 1886 and was something of a sensation in newspapers and local lore. For details, see Sante, Luc, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991)Google Scholar.
2. “Theatrical Folk Arrive,” New York Herald, 12 August 1894; “At the Theatres,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 9 September 1894.
3. “‘On the Bowery,’ a Sensational Play, with Scenes in New-York,” New York Times, 11 September 1894.
4. McConachie, Bruce, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, x.
5. Gandal, Keith, The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 8Google Scholar.
6. “Slumming in This Town: A Fashionable London Mania Reaches New-York,” New York Times, 14 September 1884.
7. Heap, Chad, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 110CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8. See Heap; Gandal; and Giamo, Benedict, On the Bowery: Confronting Homelessness in American Society (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989)Google Scholar for discussions of this leisure economy.
9. Robert Neilson Stephens, On the Bowery (1895), typescript, 2.1.5, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center, New York (hereafter Billy Rose Collection, NYPL). Because the typescript restarts pagination with each new act, references to the script will be in the following format: act, scene (when necessary), and page. Subsequent citations will appear parenthetically in the text.
10. See “Tomorrow Night,” The State, 26 August 1897; “Theatrical,” Fort Worth Morning Register, 5 September 1897.
11. Heap, 148.
12. There are many examples of how theatregoing and slumming became conflated during the Progressive Era. In 1898, John Corbin published “How the Other Half Laughs” in Harper's New Monthly Magazine (98: 30–48), an article that described the amusements of the Lower East Side; for details, see Haenni, Sabine, The Immigrant Scene: Ethnic Amusements in New York, 1880–1920 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 1–6Google Scholar. In 1905, Franklin Fyles published “Theatrical Gossip” in the Daily Express, which described the tours of slummers who visited theatres in Chinatown. In 1913, Charles Darnton emphasized the ways that mainstream theatre had come to function as slumming when he complained that “going to the theatres these nights is like going slumming”; see Johnson, Katie N., Sisters in Sin: Brothel Drama in America, 1900–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 127Google Scholar.
13. Gandal, 5–6.
14. Ingersoll makes it clear that the purpose of taking a “ramble” in the slums was for the wealthy to contrast themselves with what they found there. See Ingersoll, Ernest, A Week in New York: Rand McNally & Co.’s Illustrated Guide to the American Metropolis (New York & Chicago: Rand McNally & Co., 1891)Google Scholar. Bunner's description of slumming is more complicated, since he demonstrates remarkable enthusiasm for the immigrants who could be seen on the Bowery, from their clothing to their sweets, all of which he invites his readers to consume, figuratively and sometimes literally. However, Bunner's enthusiasm for taking part in immigrant life corresponds with what he sees as the exoticism of the immigrant, whom he continually describes as strange, curious, and foreign.
15. For an excellent overview of these reformers/campaigns, see Lubove, Roy, The Progressives and the Slums: Tenement House Reform in New York City 1890–1917 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962)Google Scholar.
16. Dawley, Alan, Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 43Google Scholar, Dawley's italics.
17. Howells, William Dean, Impressions and Experiences ([1896]; New York: Harper & Brothers Press, 1909)Google Scholar. Howells's book is part memoir, part mediation with regard to slumming. He recounts some of his experiences walking through the slums of New York in ways that highlight the ethical dilemma that the competing discourses of poverty and philanthropy posed for the emergent middle class during the Progressive Era. See his chapters “Tribulations of a Cheerful Giver” and “New York Streets” for details of these dilemmas.
18. Knowles, Ric, Reading the Material Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 10Google Scholar. Although Knowles's book addresses performance studies and reception theory, the interpretive framework he develops with regard to materialist semiotics makes an excellent tool for theatre history.
19. Ibid.
20. The critic emphasized the way the Brodie audience was “leaning over [the gallery] rail in the attitude of Raphael's cherubs, but with the ‘mugs,’ in the Bowery parlance, of those whose surroundings are popularly supposed to be clouds more sulphurous . . . than those which support the little winged children.” See “‘On the Bowery,’ a Sensational Play. . . .”
21. Both Chad Heap and Timothy J. Gilfoyle have described the practice of treating, which was part of a much more complex taxonomy of prostitution than what was understood during the Victorian Era. See Heap; and Gilfoyle, Timothy J., City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992)Google Scholar.
22. This theatrical representation of the sporting man became common in the following decade. The figure appeared in plays as different as Charles A. Taylor's From Rags to Riches, Frances Hodges Burnett's The Dawn of a To-morrow, and Clyde Fitch's The Straight Road. See both Heap and Gilfoyle for discussions of the sporting culture of men.
23. “Theatrical Folk Arrive.”
24. Sunday News Tribune, 25 November 1894, Theater Clippings File: On the Bowery, Billy Rose Collection, NYPL.
25. “The National's Opening,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 5 August 1894.
26. “‘On the Bowery’: Steve Brodie the Bridge-Jumper, in the Role of Actor,” New York Sun, 26 February 1895.
27. “By an Ex-Editor: The Veteran Catches Gleams of the New Civilization of New York,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 23 February 1895.
28. Hoyt, Charles H., A Trip to Chinatown, in Five Plays by Charles H. Hoyt, ed. Hunt, Douglas L. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), 137Google Scholar.
29. Sante, 63–5.
30. Howells, 186–7; Hoyt, 137.
31. “‘On the Bowery’: Steve Brodie the Bridge-Jumper. . . .”
32. For background on Bush, see “Frank Bush: Jewish Headliner,” Virtual Vaudeville, http://vvaudeville.drama.uga.edu/hypermedianotes/frankbush_JewishHeadlinerF.html, accessed 11 October 2013; and Fields, Armond, Tony Pastor: Father of Vaudeville (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007)Google Scholar.
33. Zangwill's play debuted in New York City. When Zangwill arrived from London as part of the run-up to the opening, he described Children of the Ghetto in the following terms: “As a matter of fact, the Hebrew character has never been faithfully portrayed on the stage, and in my play many of the characters ar[e] Jewish. Heretofore the Jew has been caricatured. My aim is to give a true picture of the Hebrew as he is, both as regards characteristics and religion”; “Zangwill in Gay Humor,” New York Times, 6 August 1899. Zangwill never mentions On the Bowery, but Stephens's play was clearly guilty of perpetuating the caricatures he described.
34. For a history of Bloom's performance of “The Tramp,” see DePastino, Todd, Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Slide, Anthony, The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville ([1994]; Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012)Google Scholar.
35. Riis wrote, “Thrift is the watchword of Jewtown, as of its people the world over. It is at once its strength and its fatal weakness, its cardinal virtue and its foul disgrace. Become an over-mastering passion with these people who come here in droves from Eastern Europe to escape persecution, from which freedom could be bought only with gold, it has enslaved them in bondage worse than that from which they fled. Money is their God”; Riis, Jacob, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York [1890], intro. Leviatin, David (Boston and New York: Bedford of St. Martin's Press, 1996), 130Google Scholar. Ingersoll wrote, “The Russian, the Pole, the Bohemian, is lost at once in the American; but the Jew remains a Jew”; Week in New York, 213.
36. Heap, 113.
37. Gandal, 5–6.
38. In the theatrical poster which features this incident (see figure 2), Gibbs's line is changed to “Naw! Go chase yourself!”
39. Sunday News Tribune, 25 November 1894, Theatre Clippings File: On the Bowery, Billy Rose Collection, NYPL.
40. Stephens quoted in Octavus Cohen, “Drama for the Masses,” Idaho Statesman, 5 June 1895.
41. Charles Darnton, quoted in Johnson, 127.
42. This last category included Bayard Veiller's The Fight and George Scarborough's The Lure, both of which were temporarily closed in 1913 for violating obscenity laws. For details, see Johnson; and Houchin, John H., Censorship of the American Theatre in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.
43. In 2009, Theresa Saxon, guest editor for the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, lamented the continued problem of the abridgment in US theatre history that understands this history as beginning with O'Neill and the Provincetown Players. See “Multiple Stages: Expanding American Theatre History,” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 15.1 (2009): 7–10Google Scholar.