A Changing Culture

The years between 1870 and 1945 were a time of radical restructuring in America – an inchoate era marked by a complex, often painful, transformation from a Victorian world to what we have come to regard as the modern one. During this period, Americans, caught up in the thrill of progress and the rush to modernity, experienced a bewildering kaleidoscope of events and developments – the disappearance of the American frontier in the wake of a pathology of uncontrolled expansion; the rise of the New South; secularized religion; an increasingly mechanized and compartmentalized daily life; the advent of the “New Woman”; commercialized recreation; countless labor union challenges to laissez-faire capitalism; the obliteration of regional divisions and differences, first by a national railroad system and later by the automobile, movies, and radio; and the standardization of American culture by a culture industry assisted by technologies of mass communication – to cite some of the more pronounced and dramatic examples. Although this list is by no means exhaustive, it is illustrative of the scope and range of the changes and the accelerating pace of innovation confronting Americans as the nineteenth century ended and they moved into the next. To historian Alan Trachtenberg, the sum of these changes amounted to nothing less than a total cultural transformation “so swift and thorough that many Americans seemed unable to fathom the extent of the upheaval”.

Introduction

The period from the end of the Civil War to the onset of the Great Depression was the most dynamic in the history of the American stage. General economic prosperity and expanding urban populations fueled a demand for theatrical entertainment and an ever greater number of actors. Emerging young talents overlapped waning older stars. Traditional and new acting approaches and dramatic material jockeyed for audience attention and critical recognition. The acting profession, long held in disrepute, gradually attained an unprecedented level of social respectability. For the acting profession, it was a dynamic, progressive time, although not without significant organizational and artistic tensions and conflicts. Since other essays in this volume describe how organizational changes – the long run, touring combinations, managerial monopolies, and so forth – affected actors, this chapter concentrates principally on signal developments within the acting profession, on shifts in acting style, and on the leading, most celebrated actors of the era.

The Gilded Age: 1870–1915

The Profession Expands

After the Civil War, the number of actors steadily increased. The 1870 census reported two thousand actors and actresses; by 1890 this figure had grown almost fivefold. By 1912 there were more than fifteen thousand actors (see Winter, Wallet of Time, I, 28). This figure probably included only legitimate performers. If one adds professional showpeople – dancers, circus performers, and variety artists – there were possibly as many as thirty to forty thousand employed in some form of theatre or popular entertainment at the turn of the century.

Introduction: Death, Fire, and Wizards

Inside and Outside Of the Playhouse

The period of American theatrical entertainment to be surveyed here covers approximately three-quarters of a century, beginning in 1870 – though I will actually reach back to 1865 as my starting point – and ending in 1945. It is a rich, complex era of theatrical developments and transformations. During these decades American entertainment became one of the largest industries in the country, encompassing not only dramatic performances and musical theatre (from revues to opera) but also minstrelsy, vaudeville, amusement arcades and parks, circuses, and the new media of film and radio. In this chapter some of the defining traits of this broad array of entertainment will be outlined, and American theatre will be situated within the context of American cultural history (the political, economic, social, moral, and artistic aspects of the time). The events and conditions of the period serve as both a catalogue of the defining traits of American life and a measure of the theatre’s accomplishments.

Typically, when dividing history into epochs, the beginning and the end of a period are identified by means of major events, including decisive wars and the deaths of important people. In the case of American history between 1865 and 1945, the deaths of two presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, coincide with the culmination of two major wars and thus provide convenient and fitting period markers. The deaths also serve as points of transition between what has been and what will be, momentary gaps in the march of history.

Introduction

Melodrama dominated American drama in the post–Civil War period as managers sought to attract a large popular audience by offering spectacle, sensational plots, and topical subjects. Success was measured by the box office. The ability to anticipate and satisfy popular taste, then as now, was difficult and required from playwrights a keen sensitivity to changes in the social and moral order as well as skill in crafting their plots in broad strokes to hold the attention of the public. Playwrights responded to and influenced public taste, shaping the experiences of the spectator in an ongoing and interactive process.

Arthur Hobson Quinn in his history of American drama credits Augustin Daly with laying the foundations for the post–Civil War American drama in the 1860s and 1870s, but one can argue that these foundations were established in the decade before the Civil War as the public began to abandon the standard repertory of the American stock company – Shakespearean revivals, eighteenth-century English classics, and nineteenth-century pseudo-Elizabethan romantic tragedies – in favor of more contemporary dramatic fare. Several milestones appear important. The success of George L. Aiken’s dramatization of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1853 and afterward suggested to managers that a fortune was to be made from plays that dealt with contemporary events and dramatized subjects of concern to most people, especially if they included sensational scenes such as Eliza’s crossing the Ohio River on blocks of ice. Also the new sensational French drama, especially Dumas fils’s La Dame aux camélias (The Lady of the Camellias), which, as Camille, Matilda Heron popularized at Wallack’s in 1857, made old war horses such as James Sheridan Knowles’s Virginius, and Bulwer-Lytton’s The Lady of Lyons and Richelieu seem old-fashioned.

Introduction

Secular theatricals of various kinds became established in America about a century after the arrival of European colonists on the Atlantic coast and the Gulf of Mexico. Many, if not most, theatre pieces presented from the 1700s and early 1800s included music in some form, although the absence of a generous system of patronage prevented the wholesale importation of the materials required to mount major European works for the stage. Spanish informants described the playing of religious theatricals with music for Native Americans in Mexico in the middle of the sixteenth century. The presence of dances that originated in the New World were already being discussed in Spain in the 1590s. Because drama continued to flourish in the seventeenth century, during the golden age of Spanish culture, the plays of Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderon de la Barca were probably performed with their incidental music in the Spanish colonies during the 1600s and 1700s, although surviving musical evidence is sparser than one might hope. A play, entitled El Rodrigo, set to music by Mexican Manuel de Zumaya (c. 1678-1750), was probably mounted in 1708, and La partenope, a three-act opera also by Zumaya (based on Stampiglia’s libretto, later used by Handel) greatly pleased the vice-regal authorities in Mexico City in 1711, well before any English and other continental works – ballad operas, Italian operas translated into English, English plays with spoken dialogue and songs, French melodramas (plays that used music to accompany action) – had been successfully transplanted.

The Heian period opened in 794 with the building of a new capital, Heian-kyō, later known as Kyoto. The grand plan of the new city, on a larger scale than earlier capitals, expressed the ambitious vision of Emperor Kammu. No other Japanese emperor had ever taken into his own hands so decisively the absolute powers of the emperor as conceived in Chinese theory. He and some of his immediate successors not only asserted the authority of the throne; they took positive measures designed to improve the effectiveness of the central government in administering the country. Theirs was a dedicated attempt to revitalize the system of administration modeled on the governmental machinery of T'ang China and operate it effectively. Throughout the four centuries of the Heian era the imperial court continued as the only political center, but the effectiveness of its administration declined gradually. The title of emperor continued in the imperial line without dynastic change, as it does to this day, but many of the reigning emperors were reduced to figureheads, manipulated by noble families at court, notably the Fujiwara, and later by senior retired emperors. The Heian period closed in 1185 when the struggle for hegemony among the warrior families resulted in the victory of Minamoto no Yoritomo and most political initiatives devolved into his hands at his headquarters at Kamakura. The imperial court continued at Kyoto, playing a largely ceremonial and legitimizing role, while political power was exercised by military overlords until the Meiji Restoration of 1868.

During Heian times, however, there was no challenge to the central position of the imperial court; rather, there was a gradual decline in its ability to derive adequate income from the provinces to sustain itself in the style it had designed.

For theatre historian Arthur Hornblow, writing in 1919, American drama had virtually ceased to exist by 1870. In its place, he insisted, had come foreign imports, a characteristic lament of American critics from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. Nor, according to Henry James, did the theatre have a direct and organic relationship to American society in the way that, for example, the novel did. It was the source of distraction, entertainment, and amusement but not of a cogent engagement with the values and experiences of a nation in other respects so concerned with its own exceptionalism. Writing in 1875, he remarked that:

Foundation

If the nineteenth century was a century of star actors, then much of the twentieth century has been a century of groups. The lead in artistic innovation was taken over by a new communitarianism in theatrical organization that featured, at its center, a circle of collaborators who shared a vision of theatre and of society. Often at the center of the circle was a playwright or a nucleus of several playwrights, who generated, like the proton in the atom, the energy that drove the organization. Many factors fed this group movement in theatre, but most prominent were the influences of Marxist social philosophy, with its emphasis on egalitarianism and social identity (as opposed to hierarchical structures and personalism), and an older tradition of social cooperation, from which Marx borrowed, that is best observed in monastic and other Utopian societies dating into the ancient past at least as far as the Essenes of ancient Israel and that could be observed in nineteenth-century America in such places as Oneida, New York; New Harmony, Indiana; and Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The twentieth-century theatre groups that contributed so mightily to theatrical and dramatic innovation tended to combine, usually unconsciously, the Marxist and monastic-utopian visions of communitarian creativity. This vision is problematic in American culture, conflicting with American ideals of individualism, competition, and personal accomplishment. Part of the story of the group experience in twentieth-century American theatre is the inevitable tension between group identity and the drives toward personal fame and fortune.