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Cheryl Black
In the early nineteenth century, America was entering the world stage as a political and economic force to be reckoned with, having doubled its size with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and amicably concluded the “second war of independence” from Great Britain in 1814. The new nation’s shifting geographic boundaries effected similar shifts and steady growth in population. In 1819, a diplomatic coup added Spanish Florida to American territory; by 1820, 23 states comprised a diverse and heterogeneous nation of nearly 10 million inhabitants, including 1.5 million enslaved individuals. Whatever it meant to be an American – and that was the question of the hour – everyone who lived within its ever‐expanding borders helped shape that identity. Part of that process of self‐definition involved gaining cultural autonomy from Europe through the creation of original, cultural products, including distinctly American dramatic traditions.
This chapter surveys roughly a century of that process of creation, as patriots, artists, and entrepreneurs attempted to express in dramatic terms their sense of self and their experience of American life. It is an undertaking that reveals a treasure trove of wonders and horrors, and a process of development simultaneously constructive and deconstructive, complex, contradictory, and compelling.
Patriots and Playwrights of the Early Republic
In 1820, there seemed little motivation to pursue playwriting as a profession. In addition to the dubious social and moral standing of those following theatrical professions in general, there was no copyright protection, and playwrights were notoriously undervalued and underpaid. Economic and social concerns were compounded by contradictory artistic demands. Although urged to wean themselves away from European models, playwrights’ efforts were usually judged by long‐established classical precepts governing the use of language, character decorum, unity, and probability.
For many early American playwrights, however, the mandate to produce a national drama on national subjects was a form of patriotism. Mordecai Noah, who became US ambassador to Tunis, proffered a model in She Would be a Soldier, or the Plains of Chippewa (1819). She Would be a Soldier celebrated a US victory over the British during the War of 1812 and featured a cross‐dressed heroine, a daring rescue by her heroic betrothed, and an early example of the “noble savage” character, a tribal chief who challenged white imperialism in standard and eloquent English.
James Nelson Barker, a War of 1812 veteran and politician, exhorted American dramatists “to keep alive the spirit of freedom” and “to unite conflicting parties in a common love of liberty and devotedness to country” (quoted in Richardson 1998: 265). Barker’s dramatic successes include Marmion (1812), which invited comparison between England’s relationship to Scotland in the sixteenth century and its current relationship to America; and his highly regarded Superstition, or The Fanatic Father (1824), which depicts the persecution of an unorthodox widow and her son by a zealous Puritan cleric in colonial New England. Employing colonial settings in American plays during the early nineteenth century may have evoked favorable comparisons between the “superstitions” of the colonial period and the more enlightened conditions of the new republic, although Barker may have evoked Puritan ideology to critique contemporary conditions, introducing a recurring trope in American drama.1 Barker’s earlier The Indian Princess, or La Belle Sauvage (1808) pioneered the musical genre of “operatic melodrama” and introduced Pocahontas as an enduring “gentle savage” type who protects and nurtures Anglo‐Americans. Approximately 50 plays with Native American themes were performed from 1825 to 1860, including four retellings of the Pocahontas myth (Quinn 1923: 275).
A generally overlooked work in this category of patriotic dramas of the early republic is Alphonso Wetmore’s The Pedlar,2 produced in St. Louis in 1821. Wetmore was a New England native, veteran of the War of 1812, and an army paymaster ordered to frontier service in the Missouri territory in 1819 (Barile 2012: 52). Written to celebrate Missouri’s statehood, the play is also an early example of the “frontier drama” genre and features a host of national characters: a Yankee peddler whose wooing and wedding of a western wildflower symbolizes the union of East and West, an enslaved girl who is disguised as her mistress to thwart a prospective suitor, the stage debut of the boasting, brawling backwoodsman (a decade before James Kirke Paulding’s Nimrod Wildfire in Lion of the West), and the first appearance on stage of American folk hero Mike Fink, the “king of the keelboaters” (Barile 2012: 49). The enslaved‐girl‐disguised‐as‐mistress comic device was repeated four years later in the extremely successful The Forest Rose, or American Farmers by Samuel Woodworth, a play that offered a celebrated version of the rural Yankee character (Jonathan Ploughboy) and was regularly revived until the Civil War. Although rarely produced, The Pedlar was published in 1821, and may have influenced the plethora of plays with frontier themes and characterizations that followed. The brawling backwoodsman held the stage for half a century, reappearing in a more heroic (less comic/eccentric) figure in the western dramas of the post‐Civil War era.
Although penned by theater professionals rather than avocational patriots, two other works merit attention within this category of early, patriotic drama: William Alexander Brown’s King Shotaway and William Dunlap’s A Trip to Niagara. Brown’s King Shotaway, though lost, deserves recognition as the first known drama by an African American and as one that writes African diasporic and Indigenous American experience into the national narrative both as anti‐colonial heroism and slave rebellion. According to contemporary accounts, King Shotaway, produced in 1821 and revived in 1823 at Brown’s African and American Theater in New York City, was written “from experience” by Brown and depicted events from the anti‐colonial insurrection on the island of St. Vincent in 1795. “Shotaway” is Brown’s rendering of “Chatoyer,” the Carib leader (Hill and Hatch 2003: 34–35). That its creation and run occurred during the 1822 slave uprising in South Carolina, led by Caribbean‐born Denmark Vesey, seems notable. Toward the end of his illustrious career as theater producer, playwright, performer, and historian, William Dunlap, the “father of American drama,” produced one of his most innovative works, A Trip to Niagara, or Travellers in America, which ran for nearly a year (1828–1829) and was revived twice in 1830. The play’s national characters include James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking, Irish immigrants, and a free black waiter who declares “I am my own master” and belongs to a theatrical troupe, a possible reference to Brown’s company, founded in 1821 (Shanks 2015). A satire with a nod to farce and Romantic pathos, the play celebrates American cultural values and its natural splendors, vibrantly delivered via the latest in American technical ingenuity – the moving panorama, 25 000 feet of painted canvas depicting colorful scenes of a boat trip up the Hudson River. This proto‐cinematic spectacle prefigured an American predilection for visual dramaturgy, perhaps a harbinger of American dominance of the global film industry in times to come.
History and Romance in the Jacksonian Era
The preoccupations of Romanticism – nostalgia for the past, glorification of nature, valorization of individual heroism, and a tendency to value emotion and instinct over reason – resonated with American audiences in the Jacksonian era (c. 1828–1840s). Nostalgia for the past made American history a popular subject, as well as historical works from other locales that seemed relevant to American conditions. A focus on the individual and fondness for heightened emotional displays brought actors into the spotlight. Star actors dominated theatrical production, and playwrights were commissioned to tailor vehicles to their demands.
America’s leading actor Edwin Forrest, noted for his muscular, athletic masculinity, commissioned works featuring heroic freedom fighters, beginning in 1829 with John Augustus Stone’s Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags. Metamora, which became one of the most popular plays of the era and remained in Forrest’s repertory for 40 years, was loosely based on a colonial‐era war between English settlers and the Wampanoag tribe. Metamora possesses the manly virtues of courage, loyalty, and love of family, and his desire for revenge against the English seems justified. Contemporary critics and audiences were divided in their opinion of whether the play was supportive or critical of Jackson’s Indian Removal Policy, and scholars remain divided regarding Stone’s or Forrest’s motives, although Eric Lott’s theories of blackface (in this case, redface) performance as “love” and “theft” (1993) is enlightening. Three other Forrest vehicles featured similarly heroic freedom‐fighters confronting impossible odds: Robert Montgomery Bird’s Oraloosa (1832), which depicted an Incan hero at the time of the Spanish conquest of Peru; Robert Conrad’s Jack Cade (1841), a dramatization of the popular uprising against Henry VI in the fifteenth century; and Bird’s The Gladiator (1831), a portrayal of the slave rebellion led by Thracian gladiator Spartacus against Rome in the first century BCE. The Gladiator also remained in Forrest’s repertory throughout his career. Although Spartacus is a slave who urges his fellow slaves to “arise” and “kill” their oppressors, Tice Miller (2007) has concluded that most white American audiences and critics identified with the rebelling slaves rather than their oppressors (71). It is possible, however, that opponents of the Indian Removal Act (including members of Congress and the Cherokee Nation) and members of the American Anti‐Slavery Society (numbering 250 000 in 1840) saw these works as subversive, and found in them some hope for freedom from oppression close to home.
Two works by women playwrights offered variations on Native American and frontier types. Louisa Medina’s melodrama Nick of the Woods (1838), adapted from a novel by Robert M. Bird, features a bloodthirsty backwoodsman seeking vengeance against vicious and inarticulate Native Americans. Whether audiences responded favorably to the play’s racist characterizations, its violence, or its spectacular effects (including a flaming canoe hurtling down a waterfall), Nick of the Woods was one of the most popular plays of its time, holding the stage for half a century. Charlotte Barnes’s The Forest Princess (1848), borrowing liberally from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, transforms Pocahontas into a proto‐feminist Pocahontas/Miranda (also performed by Barnes), a “consolidated American identity” and goodwill ambassador who negotiates peace between the Native Americans and British (Loeffelholz 1990: 58).
Several verse dramas in this era, all set in the past and all with more or less domestic themes, have earned sustained recognition for artistic achievement but also address contemporary concerns of paternal authority and class and gender relations. Bird’s The Broker of Bogota (1834), generally considered his masterpiece, is a tragedy of filial disobedience. Nathaniel Parker Willis’s Tortesa the Usurer (1839), which Edgar Allan Poe pronounced “by far the best play from the pen of an American author” (quoted in Miller 2007: 81), is a romantic quadrangle happily resolved when Tortesa gives up his claim to wed a noblewoman whose father is his debtor, in order to wed (befittingly) a woman of his own class. George Henry Boker’s Francesca da Rimini (1853), considered one of the finest American plays of the era, was the first English dramatization of the tragic love story immortalized by Dante. Although all the characterizations are complex, Boker’s most original creation is the embittered servant Pepe. Despite the fact that Pepe’s vengeful actions cause the deaths of all three main characters, he utters anti‐aristocracy rhetoric that might garner sympathy from an American audience, calling for “a simple commonwealth” in which “aspiring merit takes the lead, and birth goes begging” (Moody 1966: 450). More popular with critics than audiences in its first run, Francesca was successfully revived in 1882 and again in 1901.
A female perspective is a feature of two of the era’s notable blank verse dramas. Charlotte Barnes’s Octavia Bragaldi, or The Confession (1837) transplanted a contemporary, American “honor killing” to the Italian Renaissance. With Barnes in the title role, the play enjoyed successful runs in America and England and was popular until midcentury. Suffragist/abolitionist Julia Ward Howe’s Leonora, or The World’s Own (1856) depicts the seduction, abandonment, and suicide of its protagonist and was rebuked by critics for its frank treatment of female sexuality.
Melodrama and Minstrelsy
Melodrama and its countless subgenres (gothic, domestic, heroic, spectacle, moral reform, to name a few) dominated American theater in the nineteenth century. Although not questioning the “aesthetically poor quality” of the plays, David Grimsted’s Melodrama Unveiled (1968) nevertheless firmly established the subject as an “unusually sensitive barometer” of the attitudes and concerns of the era (xv, xvi). A later generation of scholars – notably Bruce McConachie (1992) and Jeffrey D. Mason (1993) – delved more deeply into how these works constructed American identity and hegemony. As the century progressed, melodramas increasingly addressed serious, contemporary concerns: poverty, political and business corruption, alcohol and drug abuse, slavery, and prostitution. What weakened their effectiveness as instruments for social change, however, included the lack of morally complex characterizations, the valorization of authority and order, and the improbability of events, especially contrived, happy endings. As many scholars have argued, melodrama was an inherently conservative form that naturalized patriarchal and white authority.
Developing in its wake, however, was a satirical and irreverent tradition that undermined the conservative messages and overwrought sentimentality of melodrama. The foremost purveyor of this subversive tradition was Irish‐American actor/playwright John Brougham, the “American Aristophanes.” The degree to which Brougham parodied not only individual works, but also prevailing systems of thought, is suggested by his titles and subtitles: Po‐co‐hon‐tas, or The Gentle Savage (1855), an “original aboriginal erratic operatic semi‐civilized and demi‐savage extravaganza”; Columbus, El Filibustero! (1858), a “historico‐plagiaristic, ante‐national, pre‐patriotic, and omni‐local confusion of circumstances, running through two acts and four centuries”; and Me‐ta‐mo‐ra, or The Last of the Pollywogs: A Burlesque in Two Acts (1859). Marc Robinson has suggested that Brougham’s closest descendant in the American theater may be Charles Ludlam, who, like Brougham, “mastered an array of performance and literary customs so that he would be bound by none” (2009, 11). The performance group Split Britches, and playwrights George C. Wolfe and Suzan‐Lori Parks, are also inheritors of this parodic and subversive tradition.
Eleanor Traylor has argued persuasively that the roots of minstrelsy – that is, the authentic, African American source materials later appropriated and distorted by white performers – constitute the only indigenous American dramatic form (1980, 45–52), an argument supported by Richard Moody’s inclusion of a minstrel show text in his 1966 anthology of American drama. Minstrelsy rivaled melodrama as the premier public entertainment from the mid‐nineteenth into the early twentieth century. Minstrelsy and melodrama cross‐pollinated, as melodrama borrowed musical and dance numbers, characterizations, and modes of humor from minstrelsy, and minstrelsy, in turn, incorporated (and burlesqued) dialogue, characterizations, and plots from melodrama. Primarily evoking a (literally) fantastic version of African American experience as imagined by white performers in blackface only to be eventually reimagined by black performers in blackface, minstrelsy is an unparalleled example of a representation of a “reality” that never existed. Radically departing from classic or well‐made play structures, minstrelsy developed a unique and generally consistent form: a First Part devoted to songs and comic exchanges between the Interlocutor and Endmen, ending with a chorale number; a Second Part (Olio) consisting of specialty routines demonstrating comic, musical, or other special skills; a Third Part usually burlesquing a serious drama (from “Hamlet the Dainty” to “Uncle Dad’s Cabin”). Typical character types, both racialized, classed, and gendered constructions, included the Mammy (or “Auntie”), the Old Uncle, the “yaller” wench, the “happy darky” (Jim Crow), the Dandy (Zip Coon), and the pickaninny. Although black character types dominated, other types included hard‐drinking, hot‐headed Irish and beer‐bellied German immigrants, and pigtail‐wearing, pidgin‐English‐speaking Chinese characters.
Despite its popularity among black and white, primarily working‐class audiences, many decried minstrelsy as vicious and degrading, a view still widely held. There are others, however (notably Eric Lott and W.T. Lhamon, Jr., 1998) who perceive subversive messages in these performances that simultaneously construct and transgress racial boundaries. Minstrelsy’s legacy has been detected in American musical theater and dance, the “chitlun circuit,” stand‐up comedy, hip‐hop, film, and television.
Social Satire
Anna Cora Mowatt’s enormously successful Fashion (1845) was a singular event in the development of domestic, social satire. Fashion ridiculed the superficial, material, and European‐inspired “fashions” in contrast to American values of honesty, frugality, and the relegation of wives, daughters, and servants to the paternal control of plain‐speaking, cane‐wielding patriarchs. Continuing the tradition of social satire, particularly skewering superficial social aspirations and obsession with material acquisitions (and owing much to Mrs. Mowatt), were Sidney Frances Bateman’s Self (1856), Charles Mathews’s False Pretences (1856), and Olive Logan Sykes’s Surf (1870) and Newport (1879).
Local Heroes
In the 1820s, W.T. Moncrieff’s Tom and Jerry, or Life in London launched a vogue for American versions of “local color” dramas. The most successful among them was Benjamin Baker’s A Glance at New York (1848), which introduced Mose the “Bowery B’hoy,” an Irish‐American, working‐class, urban hero. The play’s episodic structure captured the excitement, the (diffused) danger, and swift pace of urban American life, introducing new slang phrases like “on the lam” and “cheese it,” and interpolating popular songs (from minstrelsy) and dance. In direct contradiction to previously touted values, country life was disparaged, and the urban, working classes held center stage. Bowery audiences cheered this representation of themselves; according to C.D. Odell, A Glance was “one of the greatest successes ever known in the history of the New York stage” (quoted in Miller 2007: 98). It spawned a series of plays featuring Mose in various locations, and may be seen as a link in the development of American musical comedy.
In 1857, Irish‐American actor/playwright Dion Boucicault offered a grimmer look at urban experience. Depicting the financial panics of 1837 and 1857, The Poor of New York sensationalized the financial fall and resurrection of a banking family, staging a tenement fire onstage. It was very popular, playing around the world for years under changing titles to match the production location. Boucicault’s skillful adaptation of Rip Van Winkle (1865) effected an unusual integration of local color, moral reform melodrama, and fantasy for actor Joseph Jefferson, who toured the play for 40 years. Boucicault, who was known as both the “Master of Melodrama” and “Apostle of Realism,” had a major impact on the development of American drama. Author/adaptor of over a hundred works, he also contributed 13 essays on dramaturgy to the North American Review and was a master at integrating the roles of actor and playwright.
Augustin Daly’s Under the Gaslight (1867), one of the most successful melodramas of all time, continues the realistic creation of locale and more natural dialogue, yet retains melodramatic characterizations (hero, heroine, villain), events (babies swapped at birth, damsel in distress, daring rescue, and happy ending), and conventions like soliloquies, asides, musical interludes, and tableaux. Its sensational events include the burning of a Hudson River steamboat, and most memorably, a thrilling rescue of a man tied to railroad tracks in the face of an oncoming train. Notably, the heroine is the rescuer, and Daly sends an early pro‐suffrage message as the rescued Civil War veteran exclaims, “And these are the women who ain’t to have a vote!” (Gerould 1983: 177) Gaslight drew huge audiences in the United States and England, running for 20 years. Daly, author/adaptor of over 90 plays, was one of the earliest and most notable of the theater entrepreneur/playwrights.
Edward Harrigan’s Mulligan Guard series (nine plays, 1878–1884) were famed for authentic representations of heterogeneous and intercultural life in lower Manhattan, featuring Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, and African American characters in comically contentious coexistence (with Harrigan’s partner Tony Hart performing in blackface and drag as washerwoman Rebecca Allup). The plays also included exegetic musical numbers, contributing to the development of the American musical.
Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconciliation
Slavery was the most divisive issue of the nineteenth century and the subject of the era’s most popular melodrama, George Aiken’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or Life Among the Lowly (1852), adapted from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best‐selling novel.3 Its sensational scenes included Eliza’s famous crossing of the icy Ohio River with her baby, bloodhounds in pursuit, and Little Eva’s ascension into heaven. Its characterizations included racial types that would become iconic: the tragic mulatto, subject to white sexual desire; Uncle Tom, signifying acquiescence to white authority; and Topsy, the impish pickaninny. Multiple versions of the story were dramatized, frequently incorporating such features as Jubilee singers, brass bands, panoramas, and pyrotechnic displays. At one time, five versions of the play were performing simultaneously in New York and London (the play was eventually staged throughout western Europe). By 1854, Tom tours were ubiquitous in America; at the turn of the century, 500 companies were performing it. It spawned sequels, parodies, and burlesques, and multiple film versions were made, dating from 1903 to 1987. Its influence can hardly be overestimated.
In the 1850s William Wells Brown, who had escaped from slavery in 1834, wrote two antislavery plays that subverted previously published white works. In response to Reverend Nehemiah Adams’s A South‐Side View of Slavery (1854), which portrayed slavery as morally and spiritually beneficial, Brown wrote “Experience, or How to Give a Northern Man a Backbone,” a satirical depiction of a northern proslavery minister who is mistakenly sold into slavery. Although never published, Brown performed the play on the antislavery lecture circuit. Brown also performed his The Escape; or A Leap for Freedom, which challenged existing melodramatic and minstrel tropes. Portraying the successful escape to Canada of three enslaved characters, The Escape includes the usual episodic structure, sensational events, and several musical numbers. What distinguishes the play is its satirical tone, Brown’s proto‐absurdist caricatures of the white slave owners, and the utter lack of sentimentality – no angelic little white girls, no “kindly” slave owners, and no “loyal” servants. As Harry Elam has observed, Brown’s Cato “subverts the comic house slave stereotype” revealing his prior “happy darky” performance as performance (Elam and Krasner 2001: 294). Cato appropriates the tune of a popular minstrel number (Dandy Jim) in combination with original lyrics that confront American hypocrisy:
My old massa tells me, Oh
This is a land of freedom, Oh
Let’s look about and see if it’s so
(Meserve and Meserve 2000: 173)
The subversive potential of Brown’s plays was enhanced by the fact that his solo performances, embodying characters of diverse ethnicities, ages, and genders, destabilized essentialist notions of identity. The Escape was published in 1858, increasing the influence Brown may have had on the development of a satirical and subversive tradition in American drama.
On the eve of the Civil War, Dion Boucicault wedded sensation, spectacle, sentiment, and urgent social issues of slavery and miscegenation with The Octoroon, or Life in Louisiana (1859). The play, which portrays a doomed romance between a white man and the enslaved Octoroon Zoe, features sensational events (a murder, a slave auction, a burning ship, Zoe’s suicide) and the employment of high technology (photography) to solve a crime. The Octoroon ran for years and was the second most popular of the antebellum melodramas.
During the Civil War years, there was little new development of genre, form, or characterization, although the war itself provided abundant material in terms of content, with dramatizations of conflicts appearing, as jokingly reported, while troops were still fleeing the battlefield. The postwar era, however, inspired a subgenre Walter Meserve has dubbed the “romantic reconciliation melodrama,” in which a romantic union between former enemies symbolizes the re‐union of the nation (Meserve and Meserve 2000: xiv). In these pairings, typically the North is represented as masculine, the South as feminine. Each side is presented with equal sympathy, and the causes of the war are rarely mentioned. These plays represent gradual steps toward greater realism and introduce a new female type – the southern belle who is as spirited, proud, and courageous as she is beautiful, and whose loyalty to the southern cause in opposition to the man she loves is the sharpest point of conflict in the play. This character debuts in Dion Boucicault’s Belle Lamar (1874) as the estranged wife of a Union officer and a Confederate spy. Though initially ready to die for the Confederacy, Belle eventually comes to realize that “a woman’s country is her husband’s home; her cause, his happiness” (Meserve and Meserve 2000: 326). Bronson Howard’s Shenandoah (1888) ran for 15 years, becoming a classic of the American stage. Epic in scope (the play spans the entire war, from Ft. Sumter to Lee’s surrender), Shenandoah includes a spectacular scene of a military retreat and depicts two pairs of star‐crossed lovers – two former classmates on opposing sides in love with the other’s sister. It is the Union man/southern woman pair at center stage, however, especially the sensuous southern belle who attempts a spy mission. Both women eventually succumb to love, and the Union officer delivers the homily that “every woman’s heart, the world over, belongs not to any country or any flag, but to her husband – and her lover” (Meserve and Meserve 2000: 388). David Belasco’s The Heart of Maryland (1895) featured a daringly spectacular scene in which the Rebel heroine clings to a swinging clock tower bell to prevent its warning the sentries that her Union lover has escaped. Maryland enjoyed a long initial run and toured for years; three silent film versions were made, in 1915, 1921, and 1927.
The last and best of the reconciliation romances was William Gillette’s Secret Service (1896). By this time the transition from melodrama to the more realistic, well‐made play was fairly well established. The play proceeds in real time – act 1 begins at 8 p.m., act 2 at 9 p.m., act 3 at 10 p.m., and act 4 at 11. In addition to a steady build toward the climax, Gillette provides complex characterizations, natural dialogue, an intricate yet probable plot, the use of modern technology (pivotal scenes occur in the telegraph office), and extensive stage directions that script visual as well as verbal action. Modernist literary maven Gertrude Stein has described Secret Service’s dramaturgy as proto‐cinematic: “Gillette had conceived a new technique of silence stillness and quick movement […] what the cinema later repeated by mixing up the short story and the stage” (1985: 116–117). Gillette, who also directed and performed the leading role of a Federal Secret Service agent posing as a Confederate officer, included two southern belles, one the love interest who discovers the hero’s secret, and the other a headstrong 16‐year‐old whose closest descendant is Scarlett O’Hara. Gillette challenged character conventions by having an enslaved man come up with an ingenious strategy to save the Union agent’s life when he is condemned to be shot as a spy, and by having the Union hero, rather than the Rebel heroine, sacrifice duty for love.
Staging the West
The Homestead Act of 1862 opened the West to settlement, and western melodrama (distinct from the earlier, rambunctious frontier farces) increased in popularity. Daly’s Horizon (1871) was a pioneering work in this genre, moving further toward realism in its natural dialogue, emotional restraint, and individualized characterizations, and also contributing to a notion of the West as both a land of unparalleled opportunity and a breeding ground for bigotry, greed, violence, and lawlessness. Mark Twain and Bret Harte’s mining camp drama, Ah Sin (1877), popularized the “heathen Chinee” stereotype, and Henry Grimm’s The Chinese Must Go (1879) specifically called for the exclusion of Chinese immigrants (a wish fulfilled with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882). Joaquin Miller’s The Danites in the Sierras (1878), one of the most popular of the western dramas, reinforced common prejudices against Mormons as sinister, cultural others.
Bartley Campbell’s My Partner (1879), a bromance between two miners who are in love with the same woman, veers from convention in two ways: it allows a Chinese character to provide testimony that saves the hero wrongfully accused of his partner’s death, and allows a “fallen” woman (she has succumbed to the partner who is killed) to live and presumably enjoy a happy future with the other. My Partner was praised for its authenticity, enjoyed long runs in America and abroad, and was translated into German.
The relatively greater freedom accorded women in the West is depicted in David Belasco’s The Girl of The Golden West (1905) and Rachel Crothers’s The Three of Us (1906). Belasco’s central figure runs a saloon, falls in love with an outlaw, and challenges the sheriff to a game of poker in which she stakes her virtue against her lover’s life. The play continues the move toward greater realism, excepting its improbably happy ending (the outlaw/hero doomed to hang is pardoned). After a long Broadway run and several years of touring, The Girl of the Golden West was adapted as an opera by Giacomo Puccini in 1910 and was filmed at least four times between 1915 and 1938. Rachel Crothers’s plucky heroine is raising her two brothers and holding on to a mining claim. Crothers’s favorite theme of sexual double standards is manifest in her heroine’s refusal to marry a man she does not love despite being caught with him in a compromising situation. Crothers does, however, provide a more acceptable love interest by the play’s conclusion. The Three of Us enjoyed long Broadway and London runs and was filmed in 1914.
William Vaughan Moody’s phenomenally successful The Great Divide (1906), is another form of geographic, romantic reconciliation drama, this time between the East (symbolized and feminized by the heroine raised in the genteel traditions of the East) and the West (symbolized by a virile outlaw/hero). A few critics objected to the play’s morality (the relationship’s violent beginnings), but most hailed it as a landmark in American drama, “modern” in both form and content. After record‐breaking runs in New York and London, it toured from 1910 to 1920.
Quest for Realism
Although few American dramatists at the turn of the century were aesthetic purists (melodramatic tendencies died hard), realistic leanings could be discerned in the detailed recreation of specific locales, psychologically complex characterizations, more natural prose dialogue, franker confrontation with serious social problems, and the gradual elimination of overtly theatrical conventions such as asides, soliloquies, and tableaux.
Although better known as a novelist and editor, William Dean Howells’s influence as a playwright and advocate for realistic dramaturgy is considerable. For Howells, realism fundamentally required greater fidelity to actual experience, as opposed to romanticism/melodrama’s idealized or artificially constructed rendering. During the 1880s and 1890s, Howells published a number of one‐act plays, portraying ordinary events in the lives of middle‐class Americans, frequently comic in tone and praised for natural and economic dialogue. Although Howells’s plays did not enjoy commercial success they undoubtedly provided models for others; according to Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edward Harrigan, James Herne, Clyde Fitch, and Augustus Thomas acknowledged Howells’s influence (1927: 66).
American interest in the Far East accelerated following the acquisition of the Philippines after the Spanish–American war (1898) and America’s “Open Door” policy opening trade with China (1899). David Belasco exploited this contemporary interest in his romantic tragedy Madame Butterfly (1900), based on a short story by John Luther Long and produced with Belasco’s trademark attention to realistic recreation of specific locations. Belasco’s dramatization of the seduction and abandonment of a young Japanese woman by an American Navy lieutenant was a triumph. “Butterfly” (she commits suicide in Belasco’s adaptation) became a cultural and gender archetype, and her influence increased exponentially when Giacomo Puccini adapted the play to create one of the world’s most frequently performed operas. The Butterfly myth was notably reincarnated in the Schönberg/Boublil mega‐musical Miss Saigon (1989; Broadway run, 1991–2001). Playwright David Henry Hwang deconstructed the archetype and the orientalist ideology supporting it in his M. Butterfly (1993).
The rise of the newly rich captains of industry during the Gilded Age (c. 1870–1900) made business a popular theme for the new generation of playwrights devoted to the realistic treatment of serious, contemporary issues. In Bronson Howard’s The Banker’s Daughter (1878) the title character, although in love with another, agrees to wed a wealthy, older man who can save her father from bankruptcy and disgrace. In Edward Sheldon’s The Boss (1911) society ingénue Emily Griswold sacrifices herself to the man who is causing her father’s ruin – the slum‐raised son of Irish immigrants. Although Sheldon’s play is much more realistic in its frank and natural dialogue, its attention to the working classes, and the moral complexity of its protagonist, both plays affirm William Dean Howells’s oft‐quoted declaration that what the American public wants is a tragedy with a happy ending; both self‐sacrificing women eventually come to love their husbands, and the marriages begun in coercion conclude in happiness. Howard’s The Henrietta (1887) was a satirical exposé of Wall Street finances, complete with an unscrupulously self‐made millionaire and on‐stage ticker tape. The Henrietta ran for years and grossed half a million dollars, perhaps because Howard provides the requisite happy ending engineered by the “good son.” All three plays were filmed (1914–1920).
James A. Herne’s Margaret Fleming (1890) has long been heralded a milestone for its frank treatment of domestic crisis among America’s privileged class, with reference to risky business ventures, marital infidelity, unwanted pregnancy, abortion, suicide, and breastfeeding. Herne’s conservative morality, however, upholds nineteenth‐century gender and class standards: the “fallen” woman, a German immigrant who worked in the factory Philip Fleming owns, dies; Margaret is a paragon of true womanly virtue who brings the motherless infant home to be raised with her own child; and the play ends with “serene joy illuminat[ing] Margaret’s face” as Philip steps “buoyantly” into the garden to join both children (Quinn 1953: 544).
If Margaret Fleming’s awakening to the realities of the natures of men and marriage owes something to the realism of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, Herne’s Shore Acres (1892) anticipates the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov’s affective unfolding of ordinary lives at the end of an era. In Herne’s rendering of country life in Maine, conflicts are generational (a young doctor’s modern views of science and religion put him at odds with his sweetheart’s father) and financial (the family nearly lose the farm in a risky “land boom” deal). There are no villains, and the central character of the play, Uncle Nat, is a fully human and kind‐hearted realization of the Yankee character, who not only facilitates familial reconciliations but also saves the farm with a suddenly bestowed Civil War pension (one of the play’s few melodramatic devices). Herne’s most original innovation occurs in the play’s final 10 minutes, which transpire in total silence. Herne’s detailed visual dramaturgy scripts not only Nat’s physical actions but also an internal monologue that the actor must convey to the audience through physical action, as Uncle Nat, alone on stage, closes up the house before finally ascending the stairs in slowly fading light. The effect on audiences was profoundly moving, and occurred, as Gary Richardson has noted, 12 years before Chekhov provided a “similar riveting ending” to The Cherry Orchard (1993: 202).
Early twentieth‐century playwrights Clyde Fitch and Langdon Mitchell portrayed the urban, privileged classes whose primary preoccupations were material (the vicissitudes of laissez‐faire capitalism) and domestic (the anxiety surrounding changing sexual and gender standards). Mitchell’s witty, well‐crafted The New York Idea (1906) contrasts Victorian traditions with more modern attitudes toward marriage and divorce, featuring two distinct versions of New Womanhood, a vampish divorcée who marries up into English gentry, and the racehorse‐loving Cynthia Karslake who is happily reconciled at play’s end with the spouse from whom, it turns out, she was never actually divorced. Hardly a serious critique of gender norms (and with no hint of class or ethnic conflict), the play, though successful, was criticized in its day for its cavalier treatment of divorce. It was most recently revived (2011) in an adapted version by Pulitzer Prize‐winning playwright David Auburn. Clyde Fitch was one of the most prolific and successful playwrights of his era. Although he wrote in a range of styles, he is best known for his well‐made social “dramedies.” His The City (1909) treats financial, domestic, and political life in small town and urban social milieus. After the death of a village banker, his family, ambitious for greater social, financial, and political opportunities, moves to the city. Scandal (involving drugs, incest, and murder) threatens the political ambitions of the central character, who ultimately takes the moral high road by refusing to cover up the scandal. In depicting the ability to sustain small town values in the city, the play allays modern anxiety regarding the moral degeneration of urban life.
More realistic treatments of working‐class life appeared in Bartley Campbell’s The Lower Million (1878), which dramatized a millworkers’ strike, and the German‐American socialist workers’ Die Nihilisten (The Nihilists) in 1882.4 Meanwhile, Edward Sheldon continued to exhibit a Progressive‐era interest in America’s lower classes; his Salvation Nell (1908) brought melodramatic sentiment (a “fallen woman” redeemed by love and religion) into its naturalistic revelation of poverty, crime, and abuse among New York’s tenement dwellers. Salvation Nell was a triumphant success, and was filmed in 1915, 1921, and 1931.
Rachel Crothers continued to master and advance the well‐made, realistic play structure, writing frankly about women’s experience in modern society, and offering an explicitly feminist critique of prevailing gender roles and sexual double standards in plays like A Man’s World (1910), He and She (1911), and Ourselves (1913).
Approaching Modernism
As his peers were striving to present ordinary experience in an increasingly realistic manner, Percy Mackaye, son of playwright and theater impresario Steele Mackaye, took American drama in different directions. His whimsical parable The Scarecrow (1911), loosely based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Feathertop,” evokes the colonial era with a distinctly modern mode of expression. In it a spurned witch conspires with a disarming devil to revenge herself on her betrayer (now a judge) by creating and breathing life into a scarecrow whose mission is to seduce the judge’s daughter. The scarecrow, however, proves capable of genuine and selfless love; he sacrifices his life rather than fulfill his mission of vengeance, and dies, a human. The Scarecrow was produced in England and in Germany by Max Reinhardt.
Mackaye also worked tirelessly for the advancement of a non‐commercial, civic theater, particularly in the form of spectacular pageants that dramatized myth, history, or social reform initiatives. Pageants written by MacKaye included The Saint Gaudens Masque (1905), The Masque of Labor (1911), and The Masque of St. Louis (1914). Although patriotic pageantry had begun as early as centennial celebrations in 1876, pageants as artistic expressions of Progressive‐era reforms proliferated during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Towns across America dramatized local histories or contemporary social issues including labor, woman’s suffrage, immigrant experience, and race relations. One of the most notable was a recreation of a workers’ strike, The Paterson Strike Pageant, staged at Madison Square Garden in 1913. Mackaye’s sister Hazel Mackaye created four pageants advocating woman’s rights, including the Susan B. Anthony Pageant of 1915. Diasporic African American experience was commemorated in works like Mrs. Cora Pope’s The Great Cuba Pageant of 1898, which portrayed the revolution of Afro‐Cubans against Spain; and W.E.B. Du Bois’s Star of Ethiopia (1913), which dramatized in six episodes the history of the African people, from prehistory to the present. It was seen by more than 14 000 people in its initial three‐day run, was revived in 1915, 1916, and 1925, and inspired the creation of many similar pageants honoring African and African American contributions to culture and society.
Modernism as manifested in experimental dramaturgy and a concern with “authority” may be discerned in Mary Austin’s ethnographic depictions of “AmerIndian” life and folklore in The Land of Little Rain (1903), The Arrow Maker (1911), and Fire (1914, performed as an outdoor pageant in 1921).
The American Musical
Although diegetic musical numbers had become common in melodramas of the nineteenth century, the immediate post‐Civil War era witnessed significant steps toward a distinctive new genre. The Black Crook, An Original Magical and Spectacular Drama (1866), with book by Charles M. Barras, may be considered a prototype of the integrated “book musical.” Its gothic plot includes a lustful count who imprisons his intended victim’s fiancé, and a sorcerer, the “Black Crook,” who comes to the rescue. The Black Crook earned a fortune and spawned many operettic imitations. Harrigan’s Mulligan Guard series integrated story, character, and music even more plausibly, and black artists made significant advances in the development of the American musical, beginning with Pauline Hopkins’s Peculiar Sam; or, The Underground Railroad (1879).
Will Marion Cook and Paul Laurence Dunbar began a groundswell in black musicals, debuting with Clorindy, the Origin of the Cakewalk, in 1898. Their Jes Lak White Fo’ks (1899) lampooned the Progressive‐era practice of marrying American heiresses to European aristocracy. Their protagonist, a wealthy black man, attempts to wed his Vassar‐educated daughter to an African prince. For the next decade or so, black musicals, which drew heavily from minstrel traditions and were primarily satirical in tone, proliferated, touring nationally. Titles suggest experience that is specifically African and American, including A Lucky Coon (1899), Sons of Ham (1900), In Dahomey (1902), Abyssinia (1906), and Bandanna Land (1907). Bob Cole and Rosamond and James Weldon Johnson’s The Red Moon (1908) is noteworthy not only for its artistic achievement in music and choreography, but also for its portrayal of middle‐class black characters, atypical Native American characters performed by black actors, and interracial romance between African Americans and Native Americans. Minnehaha, the daughter of an African American mother and Native American father and graduate of an intercultural educational institution (modeled on the Hampton Institute in Virginia), is kidnapped by her father and taken west to a reservation from which she is “rescued” by her African American boyfriend (a lawyer) who also helps bring about a reconciliation between Minnehaha’s parents.
At about the same time, the Irish‐American playwright/performer George M. Cohan’s contributions to the development of American musical comedy were earning him the titles “the man who owned Broadway” and the “father of the American musical comedy.” Cohan’s 50‐plus dramatic works include Little Johnny Jones (1904) and George Washington, Jr. (1906), featuring numbers that have become patriotic anthems: “Yankee Doodle Boy,” “Grand Old Flag,” and “Over There.” His life and career provided the inspiration for the 1942 biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy and the 1968 musical George M! The American musical won full recognition as a dramatic genre in 1932, when George and Ira Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama.
Staging a Transnational and Intercultural America
As the turn of the century approached, increasingly diverse American immigrant communities created dramas in their native languages, pioneering a transnational and intercultural tradition in American drama. Examples include the early twentieth‐century Mexican‐American plays in the American Southwest that dramatized biblical (Las Pastorelas), or historical (Los heroes de Tacubaya) events. Bernardino Ciambelli’s I Misteri di Mulberry (1893) depicts Italian‐American experience in lower Manhattan. Although he wrote in English, Japanese‐German‐American playwright Sadakichi Hartmann wed symbolism and interculturalism with his poetic Christ (1893), Buddha (1897), and Mohammed (1899). Yiddish drama thrived in New York’s lower east side, with works that introduced new artistic traditions and dramatized their community’s progress toward “Americanization.” Notable plays include Avram Goldfaden’s Kishefmacher (The Witch), the first Yiddish play performed in America (1887), and Jacob Gordin’s Siberia (1891) and The Pogrom (1892), which introduced Russian naturalism to America. Gordin’s The Kreutzer Sonata was adapted by Langdon Mitchell and produced on Broadway in 1906. Leon Kobrin advanced Russian naturalism in plays like East Side Ghetto (1899). David Pinski’s The Treasure (1910) was produced in Berlin by Max Reinhardt and his A Dollar (1913) was later produced by the Provincetown Players. Sholem Asch’s brothel drama Got fun Nekomeh (1907) was translated into eight languages. As The God of Vengeance it shocked Broadway audiences in 1923 with its frank treatment of lesbian sexuality (the entire cast was arrested). S. Anksy’s Der Dybbuk (1914) and Sholom Aleichem’s The Big Lottery (1916) are still revived, and the book for the musical Fiddler on the Roof was adapted from Aleichem’s short stories featuring Tevye the Milkman. The influence of Yiddish dramas may be seen in the workers’ theaters of the 1930s and the works of American Jewish playwrights, from Clifford Odets to Neil Simon to Tony Kushner (who adapted S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk in 1997).
By 1914, American drama had attained dominance at home (finally supplanting plays by foreign authors) and eminence abroad. The foundations had been laid that would continue to advance American dramatic forms to global preeminence and would continue to exert a powerful influence on national and cultural life throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty‐first century. As scholars are increasingly discovering, the dramatic archives of this era are fertile repositories of historical and cultural evidence for how America has imagined itself. Recent scholarship has done much, and future scholarship should continue to uncover the complexity, diversity, and aesthetic and political implications of those imaginings.
References
Further Reading
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 12 (THE LITERATURE OF ANTEBELLUM REFORM); CHAPTER 14 (PROSLAVERY AND ANTISLAVERY LITERATURE); CHAPTER 17 (LITERATURE AND THE CIVIL WAR); CHAPTER 27 (THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE).
Notes