David Belasco produced this John L. Hobble comedy, which ran for 340 performances at the Belasco Theatre beginning on 5 September 1918. Several happy bachelors resist marriage and raising children but are persuaded to adopt war orphans. The play explores their varied experiences, with particular focus on writer Robert Aubrey, who is shocked to discover that his orphan is actually vivacious 17-year-old Ruth Atkins. She convinces Aubrey to use his skills as a writer to win support for the plight of war orphans. Aubrey falls in love with Ruth and surrenders his prized bachelor status. George Abbott played one of the bachelors. Mae Marsh starred as Ruth in the 1924 movie version.
Opening on 28 September 1914 at the Gaiety, this comedy by Jean Webster, based on her own 1912 novel of that title, ran for 264 performances. Ruth Chatterton attained stardom as the orphan who knows her educational benefactor only by the long-legged shadow he cast on the wall when he arranged for her to leave the orphanage and get an education. Henry Miller produced and directed the long-popular heart-warmer.
Opening 31 August 1921 at the Plymouth Theatre, the provocative drama by Zoë Akins, produced by Arthur Hopkins, ran for 129 performances. Marjorie Rambeau played the wife who sacrifices to support her selfish husband’s career as a painter, while his behavior hints at homosexuality. A movie adaptation was released in 1925.
Born in New York and raised in Brooklyn, Peter Francis Dailey made his first stage appearance at age eight at Broadway’s Globe Theatre. He performed in Whitney’s Circus, but found his footing as a vaudevillian as part of the “American Four,” a quartet including James F. Hoey, Peter Gale, and Joe Pettingill. After the troupe broke up, Dailey performed at Boston’s Howard Athenaeum† in Evangeline, but he scored his first major success in A Straight Tip (1892), which he followed with A Country Sport and The Night Clerk, the latter with Raymond Hitchcock. He joined the Weber and Fields company and became identified with the burlesque entertainments typical of them, parodying well-known celebrities and plays. Dailey starred in Hodge, Podge and Company (1900), followed by Twirly Whirly (1902) with Lillian Russell, Champaign Charley (1902), A Little Bit of Everything (1904) with Fay Templeton, The Great Decide (1906), About Town (1906), and his final Broadway role in The Merry Widow Burlesque (1908) with May Irwin shortly before his death.
This lightly satiric three-act comedy by George Kelly opened on 25 October 1926 at the Playhouse Theatre. Cliff Mettinger, a lifelong bachelor caring for his deceased sister’s daughter, horrifies his other two sisters, both small-minded gossips, by becoming betrothed to the title character, a vulgar, good-natured spinster from the wrong side of the tracks. Despite attempts by his sisters to break up the relationship, Cliff prevails, persuading Daisy that she means more to him as a person than simply as a prospective mother for his orphaned niece. Accepting Cliff’s proposal, Daisy gets her wish to become a “lady.” Kelly’s play overcame middling reviews to achieve 112 performances and numerous amateur productions.
Born Alfred J. Cohen in Birmingham, England, the renowned drama critic came to New York in 1885 and learned all about theater while working as secretary for Leander Richardson. In 1887, he joined the Evening World as drama critic and, later, moved to the Evening Journal. From 1895 to 1915, Dale reached the height of his influence as reviewer for William Randolph Hearst’s New York American, but he left apparently because he refused to tone down his vitriolic pronouncements. After freelancing for a time, he returned to the American but wrote in a softened vein. Abel Green and Joe Laurie pronounced him “a triton among minnows.” Dale also wrote many books and one unsuccessful play.
See SMITH AND DALE.
A native of Philadelphia, Margaret Rosendale began her acting career playing supporting roles with Charles Frohman’s company in 1898. As an ingénue, she appeared with Henry Miller in The Only Way (1899), based on Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, followed by roles in a revival of Brother Officers in 1900, Mrs. Dane’s Defense (1900), and a revival of Diplomacy in 1901. These were followed with a wide range of roles, including in a revival of The Importance of Being Earnest in 1902 and The Price of Money (1906). Dale achieved major status as John Drew’s leading lady between 1902 and 1905. Later, she appeared opposite star George Arliss in the highly popular biographical drama Disraeli, which they performed between 1911 and 1917. Dale also appeared in W. Somerset Maugham’s drama Caesar’s Wife (1919), a revival of The Married Woman (1921), The Best People (1924), The Cradle Snatchers (1925), Rosalie (1928), Dinner at Eight* (1932), The Dark Tower (1933), The Old Maid* (1935), Tovarich (1936), Lady in the Dark (1941), The Late George Apley (1944), and Town House (1945). Dale appeared in only six movies, including a silent version of Disraeli (1921) with Arliss.
Peter Christopher Arnold Daly was born in Brooklyn, New York, and worked as an office boy for producer Charles Frohman before making his debut as an actor in a small role in a touring production of The Jolly Squire (1892). Daly achieved his first success as Chambers in an adaptation of Mark Twain’s† Pudd’nhead Wilson (1895), after which he gave well-received performances in Barbara Frietchie (1899), Hearts Aflame (1902), and Major André (1903). Thanks to the intercession of Irish relatives acquainted with George Bernard Shaw, Daly and his partner Winchell Smith attained rights for the American premiere of Shaw’s Candida (1903) with Daly as Marchbanks, after which he staged a 1904–1905 season of Shaw’s plays, including How She Lied to Her Husband (which Shaw wrote for Daly), You Never Can Tell, The Man of Destiny, John Bull’s Other Island, and, most notoriously, Mrs. Warren’s Profession. New York authorities found the latter so indecent that they arrested Daly and his costar, Mary Shaw, though both were ultimately acquitted. Condemnations from critics caused Daly to abandon his hope for creating a “theater of ideas” in the United States. He spent most of his remaining career acting in popular entertainments, notably as the Vagabond in George M. Cohan’s comedy-mystery The Tavern (1920). Daly also staged classical Japanese plays and William Butler Yeats’s poetic dramas.
Born John Augustin Daly, son of a sea captain, the playwright and producer began his theatrical career as a drama critic. His first play, Leah, the Forsaken, adapted from S. H. von Mosenthal’s Deborah, scored a success in 1862. Daly had an even greater triumph with his sensationally popular melodrama Under the Gaslight† (1867). He began producing plays at the Fifth Avenue Theatre† in 1869. He established an innovative repertory company, staging both contemporary and classic works (frequently adapted by Daly) and broke away from the standard lines of business, expecting his performers to play a wide range of characters.
Daly operated the Fifth Avenue Theatre successfully until the building burned in 1873, but he pressed on in other facilities until he briefly retired in 1877. Back at work in 1879, Daly established an acclaimed company at the Daly Theatre (formerly Woods’s Museum) that included the “Big Four,” as they became known: Ada Rehan, Mrs. G. H. Gilbert, James Lewis, and John Drew, with William Davidge† and Charles Fisher† in strong support. Performing every manner of play, from works by Shakespeare and Tennyson to new American plays, including works credited to Daly, as well as popular operettas and musicals, Daly’s company dominated New York theater in the last two decades of the 19th century. The troupe toured the United States and England frequently, and it had three residencies in France and one in Germany.
Daly is credited with writing as many as 100 plays, mostly adaptations of classics or European plays. It is believed that Daly’s brother Joseph, an attorney, was an uncredited coauthor on some. The most appreciated Daly plays—Frou-Frou (1870), Horizon† (1871), Divorce† (1871), and Pique† (1875)—were staples of his company’s repertory. Later Daly successes included Needles and Pins (1880), Dollars and Sense (1883), Love on Crutches (1884), and The Lottery of Love (1888). Daly’s most successful Shakespearean production, The Taming of the Shrew, performed at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1888, was billed as the first production of the play there.
Born in New York of Irish immigrant parents, Charles Patrick Daly worked various jobs while studying law prior to being admitted to the bar in 1839. As a respected jurist, he wrote prolifically on many subjects as well as serving as president of the American Geographical Society. His love of theater impelled him to offer legal aid without charge to indigent actors. In response to anti-theatrical sentiment in the 19th century, he published First Theatre in America: When Was the Drama First Introduced in America?
Opening on 11 August 1924 at the Booth Theatre, the provocative drama written by Edmund Goulding with producer and director Edgar Selwyn ran for 311 performances. Mary Young played the mature wife who responds to her husband’s infidelities and her flapper daughter’s partying by beating them at their own game. She goes out with the man who has been seeing her daughter Kittens (played by Helen Hayes) and enjoys her freedom so much that she heads off to Europe, leaving her suddenly distraught husband and daughter. It was the Doll’s House–like ending that particularly captured the fancy of audiences in 1924.
The droll comic actor Frank Daniels was capable of eliciting tears of laughter from audiences as he used his expressive eyebrows and vocal skills in a monologue or musical number. He made his professional debut in 1879 and had his first “mirth-provoking” role in New York in Charles Hoyt’s A Rag Baby (1884), which he revived to acclaim at Niblo’s Garden Theatre in 1887. Hoyt’s burlesque Little Puck (1888) gave Daniels his greatest eccentric character vehicle, and he toured the play for seven seasons. As “one of the earliest Gilbert and Sullivan comedians,” as noted in Variety on 15 January 1935, Daniels played virtually every role in H.M.S. Pinafore. Other successes included Miss Simplicity (1902), The Office Boy (1903), and The Tattooed Man (1907).
Western poet Joaquin Miller’s 1877 melodrama of Mormon revenge remained popular on the road, especially in the west, throughout the 1880s, and was particularly identified with actor McKee Rankin. Among the strong appeals of the action was a defenseless woman who disguises herself in male dress and lives in a crude mining camp in order to escape the Danites who seek to kill her.
David Belasco and John Luther Long scored a success with their collaboration on their one-act Madame Butterfly (1900), leading Belasco to suggest they work together on a full-length play with a Japanese setting. The resulting five-act tragedy, The Darling of the Gods, opened on 3 December 1902 at the Belasco Theatre for 182 performances, and the Belasco-Long collaboration continued with Adrea (1905). The Darling of the Gods, a fantastic play of enduring love across time, was considered contrived by critics, but it was popular with audiences for its exotic setting and the visual splendor and realism typical of Belasco.
The play focuses on the machinations of war minister Zakkuri to kill Prince Kara, a renegade outlaw who has gained the favor of Prince Saigon of Tosan for saving his daughter from death. Kara and Saigon’s daughter, Princess Yo-San, fall in love, but when Zakkuri attempts to have Kara assassinated, Yo-San hides him for 40 days. This liaison is idyllic, but Kara is obliged to return to his band of outlaws. He is captured, and when Yo-San goes to Zakkuri to plead for his life, Zakkuri attempts to make her his mistress. Yo-San rejects him, and Kara is killed after pledging to meet her in a thousand years in the First White Heaven. Yo-San commits suicide, and after a thousand years pass, they meet in the other world. The cast included George Arliss as Zakkuri and Blanche Bates as the tragic Yo-San.
Born in New York, Davenport was an actor from his youth when he understudied Augustin Daly and later performed with Richard Mansfield, Eleonora Duse, Sarah Bernhardt, and John Drew. He then turned to playwriting and achieved one notable success, Keeping Up Appearances, which was produced by the Shuberts in 1910. From 1923 until his death, Butler Davenport devoted himself to running an admission-free theater, which he sustained by passing the hat at each performance. He lived at the theater, 27th Street and Lexington Avenue, where he presented the classics, occasionally interspersed by his own plays. His idea was to give New Yorkers free theater to parallel the city’s many free music and art events.
Born in London, Fanny Lily Gipsy Davenport was the first child of American actor E. L. Davenport† (who had come to London as Anna Cora Mowatt’s† leading man) and English actress Fanny Vining. The Davenports moved to the United States in 1854 and settled in Boston, where Miss Fanny was educated. She soon began playing child roles at the Howard Athenaeum,† which her father managed from 1859. Her early adult line of business was soubrette roles in a stock company in Louisville, Kentucky, and then at Philadelphia’s Arch Street Theatre.† On 29 September 1869, she made her very successful debut with Augustin Daly’s company at his Fifth Avenue Theatre† in New York. She remained with Daly until 1877, triumphing notably as Mabel Renfrew in Pique,† which Daly wrote for her and which achieved a run of 238 performances. She then toured as a star with a repertory of Shakespeare, melodramas, and English comedies. In 1883, she began acquiring the American rights to the French actress Sarah Bernhardt’s vehicles (Fedora, La Tosca, Cleopatra, and Gismonda), all of which she performed with considerable success. In 1889, she married her second husband, matinee idol Melbourne MacDowell.
Born Harold George Bryant Davenport in Canton, Pennsylvania, to a distinguished American theatrical family, Harry Davenport began his own career as an actor at age five in Damon and Pythias with the guidance of his father, E. L. Davenport,† and his mother, Fanny Vining. His siblings all took to the stage, most notably his elder sister, Fanny Davenport, who became a major star of 19th-century theater. On Broadway, Davenport’s early career was devoted most often to musicals, including The Belle of New York (1897), In Gay Paree (1899), The Rounders (1899), It Happened in Nordland (1904), and The Dancing Duchess (1914), but he found his niche as a versatile character actor in a range of comedies and dramas beginning with a stage adaptation of Mark Twain’s† novel Pudd’nhead Wilson (1895), A Country Mouse (1902), Yvette (1904), On the Eve (1909), The Next of Kin (1909), Children of Destiny (1910), The Inner Man (1917), Lightnin’ (1918), Three Wise Fools (1918), the American premiere of Noël Coward’s* Hay Fever (1925), a revival of Julius Caesar in 1927, Topaze (1930), Happy Landing (1932), Re-Echo (1934), and Battleship Gertie (1935).
In 1913, along with comedian Eddie Foy, Davenport founded the White Rats, an organization of Broadway performers lobbying for better treatment from the reigning producers of the day: the Shuberts, David Belasco, and others. The group evolved into the Actors’ Equity Association, which, in 1919, spearheaded a strike against producers that ultimately led to improved conditions for actors. Though he appeared in silent movies as early as 1914 in Too Many Husbands, Davenport became one of Hollywood’s most admired character actors in over 160 films. Drawing on the versatility he had developed in his long stage career, Davenport appeared in The Life of Emile Zola (1937), You Can’t Take It with You* (1938), Gone with the Wind (1939), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Foreign Correspondent (1940), King’s Row (1942), The Ox-Bow Incident (1942), Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), and Little Women (1949). Davenport’s second wife, Phyllis Rankin, was the daughter of stage actors McKee Rankin and Kitty Blanchard.† Screen star Bette Davis,* who worked with Davenport in three films, recalled that “[t]he beauty of Harry Davenport as a human being and as an actor will never be forgotten by any of us who worked with him. . . . Without doubt, Mr. Davenport was one of the truly great supporting players of all time. Any of us were lucky when he was cast in one of our films.”
Opening on 1 October 1900 at the Garrick Theatre, the comedy by R. and M. W. Hitchcock, based upon a bestselling book by David Westcott, was directed by Edward E. Rose and produced by Charles Frohman. It ran for 148 performances. The title character is a shrewd, horse-trading, homespun philosopher, a New England small-town banker who manipulates the plot. It was perfect for the popular comedian William H. Crane, who won unprecedented accolades for his portrayal, and yet the play proved popular on the road in other hands as well. “I never enjoyed playing any part so much,” Crane reminisced in his memoir Footprints and Echoes.
Born in St. John’s, Quebec, Canada, the preeminent drama critic of the 1890s Acton Davies came to New York in 1887, joined the staff of the New York Evening Sun in 1890, and moved into drama criticism there in 1893. Abel Green and Joe Laurie called him “the master of the verbal stiletto.” With a change in management at the Sun, Davies left reviewing and became a press agent for the Shuberts.
The actor known as Charles “Jumbo” Davis was born in Baltimore, Maryland. Alvin Joslyn (1882), the vehicle he wrote for himself, about a rube in the big city, became a popular piece in middle America and made Davis a fortune, which he used to build the Alvin Theatre in Pittsburgh.
Born in Baltimore, the African American actress Henrietta Vinton Davis was educated in Washington, D.C., where she began her career as an elocutionist. Touring widely with a program of speeches by Shakespeare’s heroines, she held her mostly white audiences spellbound with her recitations. Racial segregation precluded the blossoming of her remarkable talent as an actress, for she performed in only four legitimate dramas: Damon and Pythias (1884), Dessalines (1893), Our Old Kentucky Home (1898), and Henri Christophe (1912). After 1912, she channeled her energies into political activism.
Born in Portland, Maine, Owen Davis attended Harvard University, and after exhausting his youthful desire to be a writer of blank-verse tragedy, he became one of the most successful writers of melodrama and comedy during the first three decades of the 20th century. He may have written as many as 200 plays for stock and touring companies, the best of which was Through the Breakers (1899). Davis’s first Broadway contribution, The Battle of Port Arthur (1908), was a musical spectacle produced at the Hippodrome. Though Making Good (1912), his first straight play produced in New York, failed, he had better luck with his 1913 play, The Family Cupboard, and subsequent works, including Sinners (1915), Forever After (1918), and Opportunity (1920).
When Davis switched to serious drama with The Detour (1921), he found critical approval as well. Icebound, a drama of an avaricious family disinherited by its matriarch, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. Most of Davis’s subsequent plays were comedies or in the melodramatic style of his early work. Among these, The Nervous Wreck (1923) and Mr. and Mrs. North (1941) were popular successes, but the style was considered outmoded by 1930. In 1936, Davis collaborated with his son, Donald, on an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome.*
Born in Philadelphia, the exuberant journalist and playwright Richard Harding Davis earned the epithet “Beau Brummell of the Press.” Renowned particularly as a war correspondent, he translated his experiences into short stories, which he then dramatized. Among his 20 or more plays to reach the stage were Soldiers of Fortune (1902), The Dictator (1904), and The Blackmailer (1912).
The “grand old man of Chicago’s show world,” as Variety described him on 23 May 1919, Will J. Davis was a widely respected gentleman manager. He came to Chicago after the Civil War and worked in railroad and finance offices before turning to theatrical management in the 1870s, beginning in the box office of the Adelphi Theatre. He managed tours for Lester Wallack’s company and the Chicago Choir’s H.M.S. Pinafore. He discovered talents like opera singers Mary Garden and Jessie Bartlett; he married the latter in 1880. Davis managed several Chicago theaters, including the Illinois Theatre from its opening in 1900. He and Al Hayman were part owners of that theater and of the Iroquois Theatre, which opened in 1903. Brought to trial in 1905 for manslaughter over the deaths in the Iroquois fire, Davis was acquitted. Having voluntarily assumed responsibility for investigation of the fire, according to his Variety obituary, “he came out of it with clean hands.” In 1914, he retired to his Indiana farm.
Opening on 25 January 1909 at the Lyceum, this three-act drama by Frances Hodgson Burnett ran for 152 performances. Eleanor Robson played the poor but optimistic Glad, who shows how good deeds can brighten one’s outlook even in dreary London. Movie adaptations of The Dawn of Tomorrow were released 1915 and 1924.
New York–born Edmund Day began his theatrical career as an actor but turned to playwriting. His farce The Head-Waiters (1902) found an audience, but Day had his greatest success with the melodrama The Round Up (1907), produced on Broadway by Klaw & Erlanger. Day’s other plays, including The Cardinal’s Edict (1905) and Behind the Mask (1906), achieved only short runs, but he fared better when he wrote two star vehicles. For prizefighter James J. “Gentleman Jim” Corbett, Day crafted Pals (1905), and for Lillian Russell, he provided The Widow’s Might (1909).
Born in Lima, Ohio, Dazey earned his lasting renown as the author of In Old Kentucky (1893), a melodrama with local color that broke national records by its continuing popularity on the road and in stock. Dazey attended the College of the Arts in Lexington, Kentucky, and Harvard University. When his first play, Rusticana, was produced at college, it led to its professional staging, followed by many more plays on Broadway, including Elsa (1882), For a Brother’s Life (1885), The Rival Candidates (1894), The War of Wealth (1895), In Mexico—1848 (1896), The Tarrytown Widow (1898), The Suburban (1903), The American Lord (1906), The Three Lights (1911), and The Stranger (1911). Others were produced on the road. W. H. Thompson made a specialty of performing Dazey’s vaudeville sketch The Old Flute Player. Dazey married Lucy Harding, and they had one son, Frank Dazey, a Hollywood screenwriter. Dazey was a member of the Lambs Club in New York, but he made his home in Quincy, Illinois, where he died on 9 February 1938.
Born in New York, Pedro de Cordoba enjoyed a stage career before settling in Hollywood to work in movies. He made his stage debut with E. H. Sothern’s company in 1902 and continued to perform with Sothern until 1907. After a tour in support of John Griffith’s Shakespearean repertory, de Cordoba worked steadily in New York in a variety of roles, playing opposite Margaret Anglin in 1914 and in Minnie Maddern Fiske’s company in 1928.
Born in Adrian, Michigan, Louis Vincent De Foe began his career in journalism with the Chicago Tribune. In 1899, he became drama critic for the New York Morning World and held that position until his death. According to Abel Green and Joe Laurie, he was unmitigatedly honest in his regular reviews, but then he would mollify the advertising department by reflecting back on the preceding week and offering more generous assessments in his Sunday column.
Born in New York City, Elsie de Wolfe gave her first performance in the Amateur Comedy Club in A Cup of Tea in 1886, followed by a move into the theatrical profession appearing in Victorien Sardou’s Thermidor in 1891. In 1894, de Wolfe joined Charles Frohman’s Empire Theatre stock company. She appeared on Broadway in a range of plays, including Christopher, Jr. (1895), Marriage (1896), Never Again (1897), One Summer’s Day (1898), Catherine (1898), The Surprises of Love (1900), The Lash of a Whip/The Shades of Night (1901), The Way of the World (1901), Cynthia (1903), The Other Girl (1903), and A Wife without a Smile (1904). As early as 1897, de Wolfe had designed and executed costumes for A Marriage of Convenience, in which she also acted, but she turned away from acting toward design after 1904 (though she appeared in three movies between 1915 and 1920). Her costumes were seen in The Prima Donna (1908), The Fair Co-Ed (1909), The Candy Shop (1909), Miss Princess (1912), The American Maid (1913), Nobody Home (1915), Very Good Eddie (1915), Go to It (1916), and Ode to Liberty (1934).
De Wolfe and her longtime partner Elisabeth Marbury bought the Villa Trianon near Paris, where they entertained lavishly. The House in Good Taste, de Wolfe’s 1913 book, established her as a prominent interior designer (a profession, some claimed, that she invented) in the social world of New York, England, and France. During World War I, de Wolfe volunteered among the wounded in France as well as raised funds in the United States to purchase ambulances for the Ambrine Mission near Paris; after the war, the French government recognized her with the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor. She married Sir Charles Mendl in 1926, becoming known as Lady Mendl, which only improved her “brand” as an interior decorator for the rich and famous for the rest of her career.
Not to be confused with the more famous actress named Julia Dean† (1830–1868) in the previous generation, this Julia Dean was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. She began acting with a stock company in Salt Lake City, later toured with Joseph Jefferson and James O’Neill, and made her New York debut in 1902 with Nat C. Goodwin. She married Orme Caldara. In the mid-1930s, 10 years after retiring from stage acting, she became a movie actress.
Known throughout the theatrical profession as Billy Dean, William J. Dean served as David Belasco’s general director and right-hand man for many seasons. Dean was a member of both the Lambs and the Players.
According to William A. Brady, Kansas “was known throughout the theatrical world as ‘the death circuit.’” Barnstorming troupes that ventured into Kansas were particularly prone to “unpaid salaries, starvation rations, absconding managers, sheriffs’ attachments on scenery.”
Alberto Casella’s haunting novel was adapted to the stage by Walter Ferris as a three-act dramatic fantasy. In a Lee Shubert production, Death Takes a Holiday opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on 26 December 1929 for 180 performances under the direction of Lawrence Marston. As the title suggests, Death, in human form, takes a vacation from the demands of his unique job, falling in love in the process. From the object of his love, Death comes to an understanding of why humans fear his arrival. Philip Merivale and Rose Hobart led the cast, but Hobart was replaced by Helen Vinson for a second run at the Ambassador Theatre beginning on 16 February 1931 for 32 performances. Fredric March* won kudos in a 1934 movie version, with numerous subsequent film, television, and even musical adaptations following, including the 1998 film Meet Joe Black starring Anthony Hopkins and Brad Pitt.
The high society drama by Zoë Akins opened on 6 October 1919 at the Empire Theatre, was produced by Charles Frohman, and ran for 257 performances. Ethel Barrymore played the graceful heroine, Helen, who maintains her poise after she is divorced and loses her social position. Though some snub her, she snubs no one, and even charmingly takes tea with some comic bohemian acrobats, but in a cruel twist of fate, Helen lies dying (hit by an automobile) just when the long-lost love of her life returns with money to propose marriage. Movie adaptations appeared in 1925 and 1929, the latter renamed Her Private Life.
Born in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, Jasper Deeter was inspired to pursue a theatrical career when he saw actor James O’Neill in The Count of Monte Cristo.† In 1919, Deeter acted with the Provincetown Players, appearing in plays by O’Neill’s son, Eugene O’Neill, including Exorcism (1920) and The Emperor Jones (1920). He also acted on Broadway in William A. Brady’s production of Josef and Karel Čapek’s The World We Live In (1922), adapted by Owen Davis, and in Leo Bulgakov’s production of Carlo Gozzi’s Princess Turandot (1926). As a director, Deeter staged the Pulitzer Prize–winning Paul Green tragedy In Abraham’s Bosom (1926) and the flop One for All (1927). In 1923, Deeter founded the Hedgerow Repertory Theatre* in Moylan, Pennsylvania, which he led for 30 years and where he produced a range of classic and contemporary works. The Hedgerow produced actors who found significant success on stage, in movies, and television, including Richard Basehart, Ann Harding, Everett Sloane, and Henry Jones, but, for Deeter, the play was the thing; despite turbulent finances, the company had a long run and rivaled the most noted off-Broadway* theaters.
Born in Barry, Illinois, Floyd James Dell moved from the laboring class when he discovered his interest in writing, which he put to the service of his socialist beliefs. Dell wrote poetry, literary criticism, and novels, as well as plays, as a major force in the “Chicago Renaissance” of the pre–World War I decade. Dell moved to New York’s Greenwich Village in 1913 and served as managing editor of the Masses, a politically radical magazine. He helped found the Provincetown Players, which produced his one-act play King Arthur’s Socks (1916). Dell’s other plays include Human Nature (1913), Chaste Adventures of Joseph (1914), Ibsen Revisited: A Piece of Foolishness (1914), Enigma (1915), Rim of the World (1915), Legend (1915), Long Time Ago (1917), Angels Intrude (1917), Sweet-and-Twenty (1918), and Poor Harold (1920). Dell’s only Broadway endeavors, in partnership with actor Thomas Mitchell, were the hit Little Accident (1928) and the flop Cloudy with Showers (1931).
North Carolina native Henry Churchill DeMille, who had originally intended a career in the ministry, took a position as a play reader for the Madison Square Theatre in 1882, the year before his first play, John Delmer’s Daughter (1883), flopped. Collaborating with Charles Barnard, DeMille scored his first success with the melodramatic The Main Line (1886), a play so popular that he revised it, retitled The Danger Signal in 1891, in collaboration with Rosabel Morrison to ensure its continued popularity. DeMille’s greatest triumphs—The Wife (1887), Lord Chumley (1888), The Charity Ball (1889), and Men and Women (1890)—were all written with producer David Belasco. After his partnership with Belasco ended, DeMille adapted The Lost Paradise (1891) from Ludwig Fulda’s Das verlorene Paradies. With his wife, Beatrice Samuel, a successful agent, DeMille fathered playwright William C. deMille (who altered the family name) and legendary movie director Cecil B. DeMille.
Born in Washington, North Carolina, William Churchill deMille (who altered the family name from DeMille) attended Columbia University and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Along with his brother, Cecil B. DeMille, deMille embarked on a career as a playwright, following the lead of their father, Henry Churchill DeMille. Their collaborations, including the comedy The Genius (1906), failed, so Cecil focused exclusively on movie directing while William wrote several successful plays, the first of which, Strongheart (1905), offered a rare exploration of interracial love between a white girl and a Native American man. In collaboration with Margaret Turnbull, deMille scored a success with a West Point comedy, Classmates (1907), before an even greater hit with his solo work, The Warrens of Virginia (1907), a romantic Civil War melodrama. Two more failures in collaboration with his brother, The Royal Mounted (1908) and After Five (1913), sent him to Hollywood despite a final theatrical triumph with The Woman (1911), an indictment of political corruption. Subsequent plays—A Tragedy of the Future (1913), Food (1913), After Five (1913), Poor Old Jim (1929), and Hallowe’en (1936)—were all short-lived. With his first wife, Anna George, deMille fathered choreographer Agnes de Mille (who again altered the family name).
Born in London, Clarence Derwent had been acting in England for 13 years before making his New York debut in 1915 opposite Grace George in Major Barbara. He enjoyed a long distinguished career in both countries, playing as many as 500 roles. Having performed in all but three of Shakespeare’s plays, he could claim as his favorite role Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, and he appeared in a range of classics, from Greek tragedy to Restoration comedy of manners. Derwent’s Broadway credits include The Letter of the Law (1920), Serena Blandish (1929), Topaze (1930), The Late Christopher Bean (1932), Kind Lady (1940), The Pirate (1942), and The Madwoman of Chaillot (1948). He served two terms as president of the Actors’ Equity Association and was president of the American National Theater and Academy* from 1952 until his death.
Wilson Collison’s short-lived three-act steamy romance set in the Sahara Desert opened at the Princess Theatre on 13 February 1922 for 16 performances under Harry Andrews’s direction. Set during a single night at an isolated desert encampment, an escaped prisoner, Berndon (Norman Trevor), who had been jailed for a murder he did not commit, arrives seeking the woman he loves, the wife (Virginia Hammond) of the man he has been accused of killing. Followed by the true killer (Edmund Lowe) who is, himself, killed by an Arab girl (Anzonetta Lloyd, Collison’s wife) for sexually assaulting her, Berndon is thus exonerated and returns to England with the widow of the murdered man. Though the play won some positive notices, Collison, the author of numerous popular farcical comedies, was believed by critics to have failed to make the transition to drama.
Eugene O’Neill’s three-part drama opened on 11 November 1924 at the Greenwich Village Theatre. In it, O’Neill revisited themes from his Pulitzer Prize–winning play Beyond the Horizon. Commercial success (208 performances) resulted from the authorities’ attempt to close it after moral crusaders objected to its steamy subject matter. The play is set on a rocky New England farm, a stark environment powerfully evoked in the scene design by Robert Edmond Jones.
The elderly, morally rigid Ephraim Cabot weds a much younger widow, Abbie Putnam. Ephraim’s oppressive manner drives Abbie toward his grown son Eben. When she becomes pregnant by Eben, Ephraim believes the child to be his own. Eben learns that Abbie wanted the child so that she could inherit the farm, which had belonged to his mother, and so Eben rejects Abbie. She then kills the baby in a misguided attempt to demonstrate her love for Eben. Only then does Eben realize his love for Abbie, and he insists on sharing responsibility for the child’s murder. Walter Huston scored a personal success playing Ephraim. This unsparing study of family strife, greed, and untamed sexuality is now regarded as one of O’Neill’s finest early plays. Karl Malden appeared in a 1952 Broadway revival. Anthony Perkins,* Sophia Loren, and Burl Ives starred in a 1958 movie version. See also †*CENSORSHIP.
Born Mary Veronica Callahan to Irish immigrant parents in Philadelphia, the actress-manager grew up reciting for family and church members and attending performances of the local stock company. She joined the Chestnut Street Theatre’s† stock company and took Mae Desmond as her stage name. She married actor Frank Fielder in 1908. She held leading lady positions in various theaters and cities but, in 1917, formed her own company, the Mae Desmond Players, in Schenectady, New York. Two seasons later, she established a foothold in her native Philadelphia. The Desmond Players gained a loyal following for their moral tone and family-friendly productions over a period of 50 years. Desmond and her husband lived into their 90s, becoming icons of Philadelphia theater.
Established by Mae Desmond and her husband, Frank Fielder, this stock company offered “popular-priced” tickets to patrons in Schenectady, New York, beginning in 1917. The Players moved for a time to Elmira, New York, and then to Scranton, Pennsylvania, before settling in Philadelphia, where they operated successfully until 1929. In the Kensington neighborhood, the Players presented a repertory aimed at German and Irish audiences in the vicinity.
Opening 23 August 1921 at the Astor Theatre, this poignant rural drama by Owen Davis ran only 48 performances. Effie Shannon played the farm wife who resents the years of drudgery and channels her frustration into secretly squirreling away money to send her daughter to New York City to be an artist. Her dream is dashed when her daughter realizes that she has no artistic talent and prefers to marry the local boy, while her husband uses the money she saved to buy more land.
This 1886 play by Elizabeth Avery Meriwether (1824–1917) angles the typical temperance melodrama from the viewpoint of the wife of a drunkard. It depicts a wife taking control of her husband’s weakness for alcohol. When he is delivered back to their home in an unconscious state following a stag party, she responds by using home remedies to address what she later pretends, with the help of a sympathetic doctor, was a fainting spell. The husband, unable to confess his weakness, goes along with the ruse, and her intervention leads him to signing a pledge of sobriety. The final scenes of the play are set 10 years after the first, in which the husband is seen as a successful and sober man with a happy home, while the others who overindulged at the stag party have fallen into various individual tragedies. Other works by Meriwether include The Master of the Red Leaf (1873), The Ku Klux Klan; or, The Carpet-Bagger of New Orleans (1877), Black and White: A Novel (1881), and The Sowing of Swords; or, The Soul of the Sixties (1910).
Ethnic and national dialects were a popular source of comedy not only on the variety stage but also in legitimate plays from the 1890s to the 1930s, when immigrants were coming to the United States in record numbers. Before the racial integration of the American stage in the 1920s, African American characters were portrayed by white actors in blackface using linguistic clichés. Similarly, the stage Irishman or Irish cook and the stage Jew were portrayed largely through exaggerated speech patterns and vocabularies. Dialect comedians were consistently popular in musical and vaudeville entertainment into the 1930s. See also ETHNICITY IN AMERICAN DRAMA.
By the time Mae West wrote and starred in this bawdy comedy-drama, she was a major box office draw as a result of Sex (1926), which garnered the attention of audiences, critics, and the police. Similarly, her follow-up play, The Drag (1927), which featured homosexual characters, met with so much controversy that it closed out of town. In Diamond Lil, which opened on 9 April 1928 at the Royale Theatre for 176 performances, West effectively balanced the play’s risqué elements with humor and melodrama, a formula that served her well in a string of 1930s movies she scripted and starred in beginning in 1932.
Lil is the prototype of West’s screen persona, a sexually liberated, good-hearted 1890s adventuress from the “wrong” side of town who lives by her own code in a man’s world. Despite her involvement with the unfaithful, two-fisted Gus Jordan, owner of a Bowery saloon and a white slave trafficker, Lil develops relationships with other men. Among them is Captain Cummings, a policeman in disguise as a Salvation Army preacher, who ends Jordan’s white slave trade while protecting Lil from involvement. Drawn to Cummings, Lil contemplates “reforming.” West toured with the play and revived it in London in 1947 for a year-long run that inspired her to bring it back to Broadway in three limited engagements between 1949 and 1951. Film fans will recognize the plot as that used in one of West’s biggest hits, She Done Him Wrong (1933), in which Lil was called Lady Lou. See also †*CENSORSHIP; *SEXUALITY ON THE AMERICAN STAGE.
Born in Philadelphia, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson began as a platform lecturer, then intertwined careers as an actress and playwright. In 1876, she played Anne Boleyn in her own play A Crown of Thorns; or, Anne Boleyn in Boston. The savage reviews of both her acting and her writing did not deter her from reviving it in New York a year later and again in 1882. The New York Times reviewer of Dickinson’s performance as Hamlet at the Fifth Avenue Theatre† in 1882 acknowledged that she was “an intelligent and a gifted woman in her manner,” yet she made “a conspicuous example of pretentious and presumptuous incompetence.” She was fortunate enough to get Fanny Davenport to play the title role in her play An American Girl (1880) at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, and still it was found dull.
Born Charles Doblin, Charles Dickson began barnstorming at age 17. After a supporting engagement with William H. Crane and Stuart Robson, he acted with William Gillette in Held by the Enemy. In 1887, Dickson joined Daniel Frohman’s stock company at the Lyceum as a light comedian. Later he toured as a star with his own company. He won such favor with an old farce, Incog., that he adapted the book for a musical, The Three Twins (1908). Its success led him to abandon acting and focus on playwriting. In 1926, he returned to the stage to play the gambler Meyer Wolfshiem in The Great Gatsby.
This 1904 farce by Richard Harding Davis, produced by Charles Frohman, opened on 4 April and ran for 64 performances at the Criterion Theatre. William Collier played an American playboy caught in a mistaken identity quandary in a revolution-prone Latin country. John Barrymore’s performance as a cocktail-swilling telegraph operator won special notice. Barrymore re-created his role in a 1915 movie version, and a remake was released in 1922.
Eugene O’Neill’s early full-length drama of romance stunted by puritanical attitudes was produced by the Provincetown Players on 27 December 1920, achieving an initial 74-performance run. In 1921, the play transferred to Broadway. Thirty years pass between the two acts, during which period the ingénue (played by Mary Blair) evolves into a foolish spinster who seems to adumbrate the grotesque virgins of Tennessee Williams.*
Born in Dublin, Dudley Digges worked with the Irish National Theatre as a young man, but his long career in a wide range of drama found its fullest expression in America. He came to the United States in 1904, and within a few years, he was playing opposite Minnie Maddern Fiske in The Rising of the Moon (1908) and George Arliss in Disraeli (1911). He worked for several seasons as stage manager for Arliss before returning to acting when he joined the Theatre Guild in 1919 for a role in their first production, The Bonds of Interest. During 11 years with the Theatre Guild, Digges played every manner of character with distinction and was often associated with important new dramas, including the original productions of The Adding Machine (1923), Outward Bound (1924), Marco Millions (1928), and Dynamo (1929), as well as a range of American productions of European works including Heartbreak House (1920), Liliom (1921), The Brothers Karamazov (1928), and Major Barbara (1928).
Also a respected director, Digges staged several Guild productions, including three George Bernard Shaw plays: Candida (1925), Pygmalion (1927), and The Doctor’s Dilemma (1927). After leaving the Theatre Guild in 1930, Digges found success in On Borrowed Time* (1938), George Washington Slept Here* (1942), and a revival of Candida (1942). He served as vice president of the Actors’ Equity Association and appeared in nearly 50 movies, including Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1933). Given his association with several O’Neill plays, it was fitting that Digges’s final Broadway role, that of Harry Hope in O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh* (1946), won him critical plaudits.
Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Charles Bancroft Dillingham moved from journalism to theater management to producing. He enjoyed associations with Charles Frohman, Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., and Abraham Erlanger in addition to his own Dillingham Theatre Corporation. In 35 years, he produced over 200 plays in New York, with a predilection for clean, classy musicals and operettas like those of Victor Herbert. Among the stars he managed were Margaret Anglin, Kyrle Bellew, Elsie Janis, Julia Marlowe, and Fritzi Scheff. In 1910, he built the Globe Theatre, which he managed while also running the Hippodrome from 1910 to 1923. So beloved was the dapper bon vivant known as “Good Time Charlie” that friends contributed to maintain his trademark wardrobe after his 1933 bankruptcy.
The actor, playwright, stage and movie director Alan Dinehart was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. After participating in academic theatricals, Dinehart joined a touring company. He acted in stock and on Broadway, interspersed with stints in vaudeville, including a 1915 Palace Theatre engagement in his sketch The Meanest Man in the World, later made into a full-length play by George M. Cohan. In the 1920s, he both directed and acted in light comedy, including plays like Applesauce (1925) and Treat ’Em Rough (1926). In 1934, he acted and directed his own play Alley Cat.
The rise of the director began in the last decades of the 19th century as modernism took hold in Europe and America. The actor-manager of the 18th century and first three-quarters of the 19th century slowly evolved into a dominant interpretive force who claimed artistic responsibility for every facet of production. As pioneered by Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meningen, in the 1870s in Germany, the modern director guided actors, scene designers, and technicians to achieve an aesthetically unified production. At the dawn of the 20th century, American theater practitioners had largely embraced this model, although program credit for directing did not become standard until after World War I. The prior control of actor-managers, particularly those who were star actors, continued into the 20th century as the star often remained the strongest presence in a commercial theater production, while artistically inclined producers such as George M. Cohan (who often directed, while also producing, acting, and writing) or Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. (strictly a producer) employed directors as little more than glorified stage managers while they continued to control all aspects of production. Indeed, in England, the practice of directing continued to be ascribed to a “producer” for several decades after the term director became current in American theater.
The rise of realism in American drama, first evident in James A. Herne’s social problem play Margaret Fleming (1890) and in the painstakingly detailed stage productions of David Belasco, along with significant advances in theatrical technology, increased the need for a strong director to guide actors through the intricacies of challenging plays and to supervise complex technical productions. By the 1910s, with the emergence of the Little Theater Movement and, after World War I, the formation of ambitious producing organizations (the Provincetown Players, the Theatre Guild, etc.), directing required a fervent artistic vision coupled with sensitive interpretive skills. The Russian-born theater artist Theodore Kommissarzhevsky worked in the United States from 1934 and was instrumental in demonstrating directorial artistry as distinct from producing or management. See also AMES, WINTHROP (1870–1937).
British playwright Louis N. Parker wrote this play on a commission from actor George Arliss in London in 1910, with aid from Arliss when he struggled with writer’s block. Arliss had perhaps his most memorable role in Disraeli, which opened at Wallack’s Theatre on 18 September 1911 for 280 performances. Though not an American play, Disraeli was a significant hit in the United States. Set in 1875, British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, a Jew, faces prejudice while contending with an effort to gain control of the Suez Canal for England; at the same time, he battles political challenges in the House of Commons from an aspirant for his job, William Gladstone. Disraeli also uncovers the plottings of a cabal of Russian spies and wins the support of Meyers, a financier who is also a Jew. Arliss also appeared in a 1917 revival and toured in the play. There have been three movie versions of the play. The first, made in England, starred Dennis Eadie, but Arliss acted in a 1921 version and, with the introduction of sound films, in 1929, winning an Academy Award for Best Actor.
The eminent drama critic Edward Augustus Dithmar was born in New York City and became a reporter for the New York Evening Post at 17. From 1877, he worked at the New York Times, where he served as critic from 1884 to 1901.
Ultimately a naturalized American citizen, Leo Ditrichstein was born in Temesvár, Austria-Hungary, and educated in Vienna. In the United States, he became an actor in Die Ehre (1890), followed by Trilby (1895), At the White Horse Inn (1899), Twelve Months Later (1900), There’s Many a Slip (1902), At the Telephone (1902), a revival of His Excellency the Governor in 1902, The Phantom Rival (1914), The King (1917), The Marquis de Priola (1919), The Purple Mask (1920), Toto (1921), Face Value (1921), The Egotist (1922), The Business Widow (1923), and some works he scripted. Ditrichstein moved away from acting toward playwriting, finding success most frequently in comic and farcical genres. One of his major hits, the three-act comedy Is Matrimony a Failure? (1909), based on a German play, was directed by David Belasco and starred Jane Cowl, with a cast including W. J. Ferguson and Blanche Yurka. Ditrichstein’s other plays include Gossip (1895) coauthored with Clyde Fitch, A Southern Romance (1897), A Superfluous Husband (1897), The Head of the Family (1898), Are You a Mason? (1901), The Last Appeal (1902), Vivian’s Papas (1903), What’s the Matter with Susan? (1903), Harriet’s Honeymoon (1904), Tit for Tat (1904), Before and After (1905), The Ambitious Mrs. Alcott (1907), The Lily (1909), The Million (1911) adapted from a French play, The Concert (1911), High Jinks (1913), When Claudia Smiles (1914), and The Great Lover (1915), coauthored with Fanny and Frederic Hatton. Some of Ditrichstein’s plays were adapted as silent movies.
The prolific author of plays, novels, and movie screenplays was born in Kingston, Massachusetts. She graduated summa cum laude from Radcliffe in 1893 and began writing plays and historical novels during the 1890s. Among those produced in New York were A Rose o’ Plymouth Town (1902), Boy O’Carroll (1906), The Road to Yesterday (1907), and The Lilac Room (1907), all in collaboration with Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland. Among her solo pieces were the antiwar plays Across the Border (1915, one-act) and Moloch (1916). She was married to George H. Flebbe. Around 1916, Cecil B. DeMille brought her to Hollywood, where Dix scripted several Sherlock Holmes films as well as others for stars like Norma Shearer.
Despite being largely associated with musicals, Henry E. Dixey (born Henry E. Dixon in Boston) also starred in a number of legitimate plays. He made his debut in Under the Gaslight† in Boston when he was nine. For his adult debut in 1874, he played eight roles (including half of a dancing cow) in the burlesque Evangeline. He was long associated with the title role in Adonis (1884), as he cut such a handsome figure in the form-revealing costume. His major roles on the legitimate stage included David Garrick in Oliver Goldsmith (1900), Marquis of Steyne in Becky Sharp and Peter Swallow in Mrs. Bumpstead-Leigh (both 1911, with Minnie Maddern Fiske), Malvolio in Twelfth Night (1914), Long John Silver in Treasure Island (1916), and Sir Benjamin Backbite in The School for Scandal (1923). In 1909, Dixey married Marie Nordstrom, with whom he starred in Mary Jane’s Pa (1908).
Born George Alfred Clapp in Hartford, Connecticut, Lew Dockstader became an adept comedian and singer who ultimately found prominence in minstrel shows and vaudeville. He gained his first foothold on the stage in the Earl, Emmett and Wilde Minstrels and in 1874 joined Whitman and Clark Minstrels prior to forming a partnership with Charles Dockstader, whose surname he took for his own. By the mid-1890s, he was a solo act in vaudeville and appeared on the first bill at Proctor’s Pleasure Palace. In 1898, Dockstader teamed with George Primrose to create Primrose and Dockstader’s Minstrel Men, a troupe that gained prominence and, for a time, gave some new life to the fading form of blackface minstrelsy. However, Dockstader used blackface only as a traditional stage mask; he did not attempt any sort of African American imitation.
Dockstader ran his own show after 1904, and his troupe produced some performers who succeeded in his show and on their own, including Cornelius J. O’Brien, Eddie Leonard, Neil O’Brien, Will Oakland, and, most notably, Al Jolson. Dockstader’s Minstrels, with 40 performers, had successful runs on Broadway in 1904 and 1906, and he appeared in the short-lived musical revue† Some Party (1922). Along with his stage work, Dockstader appeared in two silent movies, Minstrel Mishaps; or, Late for Rehearsal (1908) and Dan (1914). He also recorded for Columbia Records in the early days of commercial recording. In the hit film biography The Jolson Story (1946), actor John Alexander played Dockstader in scenes depicting Jolson’s rise to show business prominence. Scholars often see Dockstader’s death as marking the end of the minstrel tradition.
Born in Franklin, Pennsylvania, Lee Wilson Dodd graduated from Yale University and New York Law School. He gave up legal practice after five years in order to write novels and plays. He was best known for his Pulitzer Prize–nominated play The Changelings (1923). Shortly before his death, he was appointed to succeed George Pierce Baker as head of the Yale Drama School.
Born in Buffalo, New York, to a wealthy family as Mabel Ganson, the writer and arts philanthropist Mabel Dodge participated in the artistic ferment of Greenwich Village and Provincetown in the 1910s and ultimately had a nationally syndicated newspaper column for William Randolph Hearst’s syndicate in which she reported on the arts. In 1932, she married her fourth husband, Antonio Luhan.
Born Anna Laura Fish in Greenwich, New York, she was an aspiring writer who wrote short stories for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated. She was also a successful painter. She married a photographer, George S. Fox, and worked with him until her desire to work in theater ended their union. In 1875, Don debuted with a touring company in Brooklyn, New York, after which she worked with John Ellsler’s company in Cleveland. That same year, Don played Ophelia to E. L. Davenport’s† Hamlet, and before the year was out, she appeared in The Pioneer Patriot; or, The Dawn of Liberty. In 1876, Don acted in Two Men of Sandy Bar and, in 1878, in Our American Cousin† and Dr. Clyde.
In 1880, Don toured to England with Frank Mayo’s† troupe and, by the end of that year, acted in Two Nights in Rome at the Union Square Theatre back in New York. The next year, Don appeared in Fresh, the American and My Mother-in-Law. Don’s promise as a playwright was evident in her first and only play, A Daughter of the Nile, in which she played the lead character, Egypt, in its first production at the Standard Theatre. Following its New York run, Don took the play on the road. In 1884, Don began rehearsals to play Cleopatra at the Baldwin Theatre in San Francisco, but she became seriously ill during rehearsals. Spending a year in France in hopes of recovering, Don ultimately returned to the United States, where she died. Following Don’s death, Elsie Ellsler found success with Don’s A Daughter of the Nile, which was retitled Egypt; or, A Daughter of the Nile.
The actress-playwright Dorothy Donnelly was born into a theatrical family in New York City. She acted in her brother’s Murray Hill stock company for three years, followed by 20 years of good roles in New York, including the title role in Madame X (1909). However, she soon devoted herself more to writing librettos and song lyrics. She worked with Sigmund Romberg on the adaptations and lyrics for the operettas Blossom Time (1921) and The Student Prince (1924). During World War I, she worked with Rachel Crothers to organize and run the Stage Women’s War Relief.
The Baltimore-born playwright Henry Grattan Donnelly gained early experience in journalism and acting. He was a reporter for the Omaha Bee and dramatic editor of the Philadelphia Press. Donnelly’s Broadway plays include The Millionaire (1890), Her Ladyship (1892), Darkest Russia (1894), Hamlet II (1895), The Woman in Black (1896), and Carolina (1906).
Born in Philadelphia, Leo Donnelly rose from vaudeville to legitimate theater and did his most acclaimed acting in Potash and Perlmutter (1913). Donnelly also appeared on Broadway in its follow-up, Abe and Mawruss (1915), as well as Object—Matrimony (1916), The Meanest Man in the World (1920), the Al Jolson musical Big Boy (1925), Pagan Lady (1930), and The Milky Way (1934), among others. In movies beginning with the screen version of Potash and Perlmutter (1923), he played mostly small parts in short subjects and occasional features, including Roadhouse Nights (1930).
Née Marie Stuart, the pretty actress with delicate features was born in Pennsylvania but grew up in Kansas City. She performed in local amateur productions as a child and was often engaged by professional touring companies as an extra; thus she played Little Eva with a visiting Uncle Tom’s Cabin† company. She began her adult career in stock in St. Paul, then toured in musical chorus parts. In 1903, she reached New York, playing opposite Jerome Sykes in the comic opera The Billionaire. As a protégée of producer Charles Frohman, Doro enjoyed a succession of major roles and a London engagement. She was William Gillette’s leading lady in three plays, including a tour. Doro gave up singing for straight comedy, finding her greatest success in The Morals of Marcus in 1907 in New York and on a long national tour. In the 1910s, Doro turned to movie acting. Kansas City drama critic Austin Latchaw remembered that “Miss Doro had pretty little tricks.” To show petulance, for example, “she had a way of screwing up her face as if to sneeze.”
It was common practice for utility and even supporting actors to play two or more roles in the same play, especially in touring companies. Stars occasionally doubled roles as a tour de force, as when Mary Anderson became the first actress ever to play both Hermione and Perdita in The Winter’s Tale.
Because barnstormers toured so economically, each trouper had to fulfill functions beyond playing several roles on stage. Ability to “double in brass” was an asset for an actor seeking employment in a barnstorming troupe, since standard practice before the first performance in a new town was to attract attention with a noisy parade along the main street. Whatever combination of wind and percussive instruments the players could muster would continue their racket in front of the theater until almost curtain time when they would retreat to take up the acting side of their job.
Born in Richmond, Virginia, Catherine Calhoun Doucet became a school teacher but gave it up to pursue an acting career, making her debut on Broadway in 1905 in Brown of Harvard opposite Laura Hope Crews. She emerged on stage and in films as a character actress, where she often played strong-minded matrons and society women. Doucet’s most notable Broadway credits include the first play to win a Pulitzer Prize for a woman playwright, Zona Gale’s Miss Lulu Bett (1920), George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s The Royal Family (1927), Eugene O’Neill’s drama Dynamo (1929), and Rachel Crothers’s comedy As Husbands Go* (1931). She also appeared in Modern Marriage (1911), a 1912 revival of Monsieur Beaucaire, The Model (1912), What It Means to a Woman (1914), The Potters (1923), Louie the 14th (1925), Devil in the Cheese (1926), The Perfect Alibi (1928), The Camel through the Needle’s Eye (1929), Topaze (1930), among others. On screen, Doucet acted in over 30 movies, including As Husbands Go (1934), Accent on Youth* (1935), These Three (1936), Poppy (1936), Detective Story* (1951), and she made a few television appearances.
Born Frank Harrison Dowd in Madison, Connecticut, he was a poet, pianist, and actor. In 1918, he made his Broadway debut in Chu Chin Chow. For the Provincetown Players, he played Pierrot in Aria da Capo (1919). He contributed poems to the New Yorker while continuing his acting career in the 1920s. Dowd’s Broadway roles include A Trip to Scarborough (1929), The Dragon (1929), Nights of Love (1941), Harriet (1943), a 1944 revival of Little Women, The Assassin (1945), A Temporary Island (1948), Dinosaur Wharf (1951), See the Jaguar (1952), The Visit (1958), Caligula (1960), and Night Life (1962). In 1950, Dowd wrote a potboiler novel about homosexuality called The Night Air. From 1951 to shortly before his death, Dowd appeared in television dramas, most notably playing Jimmy Tomorrow in a 1960 TV adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh.*
Born in Washington, D.C., Robert Lindley Downing spent the early part of his life as an actor, beginning as a utility man in the company of John T. Ford.† Austin Brereton writes that the burly Downing applied himself to learning all aspects of the acting trade, after which he toured for four years (1880–1884) with Mary Anderson and two years (1884–1886) with Joseph Jefferson. By the end of his time with Jefferson, Downing had attained stardom and performed an array of Shakespearean roles, from Marc Antony to King Lear. He retired from acting in 1908 to become an evangelist.
Despite being of English origin, the vampire thriller by John Balderston and Hamilton Dean, based on the Bram Stoker novel, would haunt the American stage for many years following its original Broadway debut, opening 5 October 1927 at the Fulton Theatre for 261 performances, with Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi scoring a personal hit in the title role. A Transylvanian vampire posing as one Count Dracula preys on women for the infusions of blood he requires and meets his match in Dr. Van Helsing, who intends to stop him. Ira Hards directed, Joseph A. Physioc designed scenery, and Horace Liveright produced. Lugosi appeared in a 1931 movie version that won critical acclaim and commercial success, and he occasionally toured in the play. A 1931 Broadway revival featuring Courtney White flopped, but Frank Langella* scored a major success in a lavish 1977 revival with memorable scene designs by illustrator Edward Gorey (Langella also appeared in a 1979 film version).
Mae West’s 1927 three-act drama, written under her pseudonym Jane Mast, was performed in New Jersey and Connecticut prior to an intended Broadway opening. Her first work following her highly controversial 1926 play, Sex, led censorious forces to assume, rightly, that West intended to continue to breech the boundaries of accepted norms regarding sexuality. In fact, The Drag crossed into uncharted territory in its depiction of homosexuality and female impersonation. The play includes discussion of conversion therapy, cross-dressing, and a depiction of the frustrations of a young wife whose husband, Rolly, is a closeted homosexual murdered following a drag ball by an ex-lover. To avoid scandal, the murder is declared a suicide. During its pre-Broadway performances, The Drag attracted large audiences but virulently negative reviews. West closed the production, revising the play as The Pleasure Man (1928) by remaking the gay character as a heterosexual. However, critics still resisted the overt sexual content and the play itself, which opened on 1 October 1928 and closed the next day.
While the mass audience for theater was being diverted to vaudeville and movies, the Drama League was formed with a goal of educating audiences by fostering good plays and legitimate theater, whether amateur or professional. Founded in 1910 by a women’s literary circle in Evanston, Illinois, the organization grew to more than 100 local centers in little over a decade. According to Karen J. Blair in The Torchbearers, membership peaked in 1915 at 100,000. Part of the movement’s success lay in their ability to draw professional men to participate in the cultural work of forming public taste. In The Twentieth Century Theatre (1918), William Lyons Phelps wrote that “both manager and dramatists are glad to have the League’s endorsement; it means increased business. The League flourishes in every part of America.” Although a center was not founded in Kansas City until 1927, it hosted in 1928 the Nineteenth Annual Convention of the Drama League of America. The national organization disbanded in 1931, but some centers continued their activities, notably the New York Drama League.
The professional organization of American playwrights grew out of earlier clubs that had been formed to protect dramatists. The American Dramatic Authors’ Society (1878) was succeeded by a similar organization, the American Dramatists Club (1891). Because the latter did not admit women, Martha Morton organized a Society of Dramatic Authors (1907) with a charter membership of 30 women. The two groups soon consolidated as the Society of American Dramatists and Composers (SADC), with Bronson Howard as president and Morton as vice president. The Dramatists Guild (DG), which supplanted it, was founded in 1920.
This short-lived producing organization was founded in 1923 by a small group of playwrights that included Owen Davis, Edward Childs Carpenter, James Forbes, Cosmo Hamilton, and Arthur Richman. Several plays were presented, including The Goose Hangs High (1924) by Lewis Beach (who was not one of the founding group), Cock o’ the Roost (1924), Young Blood (1925), and Scotch Mist (1926), none particularly successful, and the company dissolved in 1926.
A term referring to the transporting of goods over a short distance, drayage was a valuable service in the days of touring shows. The transportation of scenery, properties, and theatrical trunks between the depot and the theater could amount to a considerable, but inevitable, expense.
In the 1890s, when theater began to sound almost as respectable as opera house, and when fixed seating replaced chairs on the auditorium floor, the term dress circle began to supplant parquette to designate the section on the main floor behind the orchestra seats.
When costumes are nearly ready, the director and costume designer will view the actors in their costumes on stage under stage lighting in order to consider the effect of the color and intensity of the lighting. In his memoir More Lives Than One, the 1920s costumer Claude Bragdon recalled that “the dress parade was my most harrowing ordeal, for then each member of the cast appears in costume, to be passed upon as to its suitability, becomingness, style, fit, workmanship, down to the last shoestring, for all of which I was officially responsible.” The dress parade is often in tandem with the dress rehearsal, which occurs just before the official opening of the play when all elements are in place and the actors are fully dressed in costumes, wigs, and makeup. The dress rehearsal comes at the point when all of the technical elements are completed and allows the director and scene designer to perfect details and solve problems.
An individual or individuals assisting actors in applying makeup, wigs, and costumes for a performance was a dresser. Most stars employed personal dressers.
Born in Evansville, Indiana, as Louise Josephine Kerlin, Dresser took her stage name from a family friend, songwriter Paul Dresser, brother of novelist Theodore Dreiser. In vaudeville from her teens, she married singer and songwriter Jack Norworth in 1899, but they divorced in 1907. On Broadway, Dresser appeared in musicals such as About Town (1906), The Girl behind the Counter (1907), The Girls of Gottenberg (1908), The Candy Shop (1909), A Matinee Idol (1910), (From) Broadway to Paris (1912), Hello, Broadway! (1914), Have a Heart (1917), and Rock-a-Bye Baby (1918); she also appeared in straight plays, including the long-running hit Potash and Perlmutter (1913) and one of its sequels, Abe and Mawruss (1915), as well as the flop Cordelia Blossom (1914). As she moved to nonmusical entertainments, Dresser graduated into character roles, often playing mothers. Dresser appeared in silent movies beginning in 1922, garnering an Oscar nomination as Best Actress in the first Academy Awards in 1929. Her other notable films were Salomy Jane (1923), Ruggles of Red Gap (1923), Mammy (1930), Lightnin’ (1930), State Fair (1933), The Scarlet Empress (1934), and Maid of Salem (1937).
The portly songwriter Paul Dresser was born Johann Paul Dreiser Jr. in Terre Haute, Indiana, and was sent to a seminary by his devout father to study for the priesthood. Dresser had other ideas, and after studying music, he began working as an organist and singer with a traveling minstrel troupe, the Lemon Brothers. From the late 1870s, Dresser appeared with other minstrel shows, medicine shows, and small-time vaudeville. A taste for alcohol and brothels led to Dresser’s first hit song, “My Gal Sal,” believed to have been suggested by his acquaintance with one or another Evansville, Indiana, prostitute; it also inspired his song “The Curse,” referring to a case of syphilis he contracted in the mid-1880s. In that period, he developed a vaudeville show with James Goodwin, John Leach, and Emma Lamouse that found popularity in Chicago and elsewhere, before Dresser took aim at a more national audience. As an exemplar of Tin Pan Alley in New York, he wrote many songs for plays such as Charles H. Hoyt’s A Tin Soldier. The popularity of “My Gal Sal” and Dresser’s other more than 150 songs was surpassed by his greatest hit, “On the Banks of the Wabash,” recalling the Indiana river prominent in his early life. He became involved in song publishing, but by 1905, his health had deteriorated and he died shortly thereafter. Dresser was the older brother of the novelist Theodore Dreiser.
Space was designated backstage where actors could prepare for performances. By 1880, such spaces in newly constructed theaters were individual rooms for the leading players and larger common rooms for the supporting cast and chorus. Typically, the star dressing room was elaborately appointed. Most dressing rooms featured a dressing table, a mirror surrounded by lights to aid the actor in applying makeup, and a rack for costumes. A major innovation of the 1890s was fixed washstands in theatrical dressing rooms.
To dress the house is to create the illusion of a large audience by sprinkling a smaller audience throughout the auditorium, leaving occasional seats vacant and using as many rows of seats as possible. Theater managements also “papered the house” by giving away complimentary tickets to create the impression of a larger audience when ticket sales were weak.
Decorating the stage setting usually involved filling a box set with furnishings, wall hangings, and other items in order to create the illusion of a genuine room. However, the term is freely applied to stage decoration and also refers to arranging actors on the stage decoratively to fill out the acting area.
Born Lelia Maria Koerber in Cobourg, Canada, the daughter of a hot-tempered Prussian cavalry officer and a long-suffering musician began performing in amateur theatricals as a child and soon realized her ability to make audiences laugh. At 14, she left home and changed her name to make her professional debut with a cheap traveling stock company in the dramatic role of Cigarette in Under Two Flags. After three years with the Nevada Stock Company, she toured briefly in the Robert Grau Opera Company chorus, then held chorus parts with Frank Deshon’s Starr Opera Company and then George A. Baker’s Bennett and Moulton Opera Company, followed by a Chicago engagement with Eddie Foy in Little Robinson Crusoe.
After her 1892 New York debut in a musical play, Dressler faced the fact that she was destined not to be a diva but a comedy performer. Despite her full-figured 200 pounds, she had stamina and athletic grace. She often bicycled with Lillian Russell and relished the epithet “Beauty and the Beastie” describing them. Dressler’s ability to improvise comic business and to captivate audiences with her double takes and other facial expressions blossomed in the role of Flo Honeydew in The Lady Slavey (1896), which ran two years in New York and then toured, taking her to stardom. In the musical comedy and burlesque realms, Dressler’s corpulence and broad comic style were best showcased. These entertainments included The Man in the Moon (1899), Miss Prinnt (1900), The King’s Carnival (1901), The Hall of Fame (1902), King Highball (1902), Higgledy-Piggledy (1904), The College Widower (1905), Twiddle-Twaddle (1906), The Boy and the Girl (1909), Tillie’s Nightmare (1910), Roly Poly/Without the Law (1912), Marie Dressler’s “All Star Gambol” (1913), The Century Girl (1916), The Passing Show of 1921 (1920), and The Dancing Girl (1923).
Dressler’s support of a strike of chorus girls in 1917 and the Actors’ Equity Association strike of 1919 cost her support from producers, but her popularity with audiences was never in question, especially with her transition to movie acting in Tillie’s Punctured Nightmare (1914). Despite her burgeoning weight and having passed her 60th birthday, Dressler’s greatest successes in movies came with the dawn of sound when she was improbably voted the most popular actress for three years running by movie exhibitors. Dressler received a Best Actress Academy Award for Min and Bill (1930) and was nominated again for Emma (1932). Her comic skills were put to good use in Chasing Rainbows (1930) and Tugboat Annie (1933), but she also scored in the film version of Eugene O’Neill’s play, Anna Christie (1931), appearing opposite Greta Garbo, and, in one of her last roles, as aging femme fatale Carlotta Vance in the screen version of George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s play Dinner at Eight* (1933). Late in life, Dressler commented on her enduring popularity, noting, “By the time we hit fifty, we have learned our hardest lessons. We have found out that only a few things are really important. We have learned to take life seriously, but never ourselves.” She wrote two memoirs, The Life Story of an Ugly Duckling (1924) and My Own Story (1934).
Named for his father, the manager of Niblo’s Garden,† John Drew shied away from a life in the theater, working for a time as a clock salesman in Philadelphia. Returning to the family profession, Drew made his 1873 stage debut at Philadelphia’s Arch Street Theatre† with his mother, Mrs. John Drew (Louisa Lane). After two seasons in her company, Drew made his New York debut in The Big Bonanza† (1875) for producer Augustin Daly, who guided Drew’s career for many years. As one of the Daly stars, including Ada Rehan, James Lewis, and Mrs. G. H. Gilbert, Drew won critical approval as Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew and other Shakespearean and Restoration comedies. Drew’s good looks secured his position as a popular box office attraction. When he switched allegiance to producer Charles Frohman, Drew won approval in The Masked Ball (1892), W. Somerset Maugham’s Jack Straw (1908) and The Circle (1921), and revivals of The School for Scandal (1923) and Trelawny of the “Wells” (1925 and 1927). Through his sister, Georgiana Drew Barrymore, he was the uncle of Lionel Barrymore, Ethel Barrymore, and John Barrymore.
Daughter of actors Thomas Frederick and Eliza Trenter Lane, Louisa Lane took to the provincial stage as a child performer following her father’s death, making her debut in The Spoiled Child (1828) and impressing audiences by playing five characters in Twelve Precisely. She acted opposite Junius Brutus Booth† in Richard III and Edwin Forrest† in William Tell and Macbeth. She married for the third time to John Drew† (1827–1862), a Shakespearean actor, in 1850. He managed the Arch Street Theatre† in Philadelphia, and, following his death, Lane, billed as Mrs. John Drew, managed the theater for 30 years and continued to act into the 1890s, most notably in Shakespearean roles and Restoration comedies, scoring a particular success as Mrs. Malaprop in The Rivals. See also *BARRYMORE, ETHEL (1879–1959); BARRYMORE, GEORGIANA DREW (1856–1893); BARRYMORE, JOHN (1882–1942); BARRYMORE, LIONEL (1878–1954); †WOMEN IN THE PROFESSION.
One of James A. Herne’s earliest plays, and one of his first to exhibit his interest in European realism in the Henrik Ibsen mode, Drifting Apart, which was originally named Mary, the Fisherman’s Child, was first produced at Boston’s Park Theatre† on 11 June 1888. Though the drama’s depiction of heredity and environment on an alcoholic sailor failed to find favor with audiences, Herne’s achievement was recognized by several important critics, including Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells, whose praise encouraged him to continue in the realistic social problem drama style that would reap his finest play, Margaret Fleming.
This word has several theatrical meanings—to drop lines, to drop the voice, to drop in a flown scenic unit—but it usually serves as shorthand for the drop curtain, a painted canvas lowered from the flies as a scenic background or as masking.
Born in Clinton, Iowa, Robert Drouet joined a touring theatrical company in his teens, and in short order, he was a theater manager and actor in several of William Shakespeare’s plays. He played leads opposite Robert Downing for two years, after which he appeared as General Delarouche in Paul Kauvar opposite Joseph Haworth and Effie Ellsler. He acted with Clara Bloodgood in Clyde Fitch’s The Girl with the Green Eyes (1902), followed by Fitch’s The Woman in the Case (1905). Drouet also appeared in We’Uns of Tennessee (1899), Citizen Pierre (1899), Janice Meredith (1900), The Measure of a Man (1906), Genesee of the Hills (1907), The Mills of the Gods (1907), The Stronger Sex (1908), Conflict (1909), and Madame X (1910), the latter a major hit. Following this success, Drouet never appeared in a hit again, and his last appearance on Broadway was in Marie Dressler’s “All Star Gambol” (1913). As a playwright, Drouet’s works include Doris, a Bit of Acting, The White Czar, Montana, Tomorrow, An Idyll of Virginia, Fra Diano, and Captain Bob.
Effie Woodward Merriman’s 1898 one-act temperance melodrama took up the position of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in condemning the use of alcohol but was aimed at a children’s audience. Intended for home and school performances, the play is intended as a warning and adopts a moralizing tone.
David Belasco’s five-act historical extravaganza opened on 25 December 1901 at the Criterion Theatre for 165 performances. Staged with considerable historical detail in the visual elements, the sensationalized Du Barry involves French milliner Jeanette Vaubernier, who is loved by soldier Cosse-Brissac. When she is attracted to a gambling house by Comte Du Barry, she becomes a scandalous adornment to French society. She is married to Du Barry’s brother to create some semblance of respectability but has lingering feelings for Cosse-Brissac. As the French Revolution begins, Jeanette goes to the guillotine with many other members of her social set. Following the play’s opening, a lawsuit caused headlines with the news that Belasco had plagiarized French writer Jean Richepin’s La Du Barry. The notoriety, as well as a fine central performance by Mrs. Leslie Carter, Belasco’s typical visual realism, and a cast of 200, helped the play to a healthy run and a 1915 movie version.
After a couple of decades as an actor, Mount Vernon, Indiana–born Henry A. Du Souchet shot to sudden renown as a playwright with two farcical comedies in quick succession: My Friend from India (1896), which was often revived, and The Man from Mexico (1897). Among his other successes were The Swell Miss Fitzwell (1897) and Who Goes There? (1905). He wrote the book for a musical extravaganza, Over the River (1912), starring Eddie Foy. His Betsy Ross: A Romance of the Flag (1917) starred Alice Brady.
William Edward Burghardt DuBois, born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, is best known as an African American activist and cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909. However, he was drawn to the theater and encouraged African American playwrights in the pages of his journal Crisis, which held contests to support black dramatists, and on the stage of the KRIGWA Players. DuBois also wrote Star of Ethiopia (1913), a pageant of African American history that was produced in several cities in the 1910s and 1920s.
See LUCILE (1862–1935).
George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly collaborated on this hit comedy based on a character created by humorist Franklin P. Adams. Dulcy, the first of their eight collaborations, opened on 13 August 1921; the play was produced by George C. Tyler and H. H. Frazee and ran for 246 performances at Frazee’s Theatre, making a Broadway star of Lynn Fontanne in the title role. Dulcy Smith is a scatterbrained busybody who causes problems for her husband, Gordon, when she plans a weekend gathering to help him in his business. Meddling in various relationships, Dulcy’s interference nearly causes disaster, but through a series of revelations all works out well in the end and Dulcy halfheartedly promises Gordon she will never interfere in his affairs again. Movie versions appeared in 1923 (Constance Talmadge played the title role) and 1940 (Ann Sothern was Dulcy).
The 1914 comedy-melodrama by Harriet Ford and detective Harvey O’Higgins opened 13 April 1914 at the Hudson Theatre and ran for 200 performances. Barney Cook, a Bowery youth, is persuaded to pose as deaf and mute to allow himself to be kidnapped by a gang that is holding a daughter of a wealthy estranged couple. Eventually, Barney is successful in helping the daughter escape and reunite with her worried parents. A 1929 movie version starred Ruth Chatterton and Fredric March.*
Though born in Brooklyn, New York, as Daisy Juliette Baker, Margaret Dumont came to represent high society matrons both on Broadway and in movies. Raised in the South, her upbringing was mostly in the care of her godfather, writer Joel Chandler Harris. Dumont trained for opera but turned to nonmusical theater to play soubrette roles for a time. On Broadway, Dumont appeared in The Fan (1921), Go Easy, Mabel (1922), The Rise of Rosie O’Reilly (1923), The Fourflusher (1925), and Tell Her the Truth (1932), but her fortunes were assured with the Marx Brothers (Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo) in two hit musicals, The Cocoanuts (1925) and Animal Crackers (1928). The regal dowager Dumont presented a perfect target for the anarchic mayhem of the Marxes.
When the Marxes took the two hit shows to Hollywood at the dawn of sound films, Dumont went with them and became as essential to the Marx formula as the four brothers, especially opposite Groucho, who typically wooed her for her money, simultaneously complimenting and insulting her. Her movies with the Marxes, including The Cocoanuts (1929) and Animal Crackers (1930), filmed almost exactly as they appeared on the Broadway stage, as did Duck Soup (1933), A Night at the Opera (1936), A Day at the Races (1937), At the Circus (1939), and The Big Store (1941). Her skills as a straight woman were appreciated by other comic actors, including W. C. Fields, Jack Benny, Abbott and Costello, and Danny Kaye, with whom she appeared on screen, but she was at her best opposite Groucho Marx. Her final appearance, on the television variety show The Hollywood Palace, re-creating a scene from Animal Crackers with Marx, came only days before her death.
The actor, director, and producer (brother of the dancer Isadora Duncan) Augustin Duncan began his career in San Francisco, where he was born and made his debut in 1893 at Stockman’s Theatre. After years on the road, he made his New York debut in Richard Mansfield’s Henry V company in 1900. He continued performing even after he lost his eyesight in the 1920s. He produced about 40 plays and directed such landmark productions as Kempy (1922), The Detour (1921), Eugene O’Neill’s The First Man (1922), and Hell-Bent fer Heaven (1924).
Born in La Crosse, Wisconsin, Minnie Dupree began acting in 1887 and continued until her death six decades later. Early in her career, she played opposite Richard Mansfield, excelling in popular melodramas at the turn of the century. On Broadway, she acted in The Cowboy and the Lady (1899), The Climbers (1901), Life (1902), Heidelberg (1902), and The Music Master (1904) opposite David Warfield. Steadily, Dupree moved from ingénue roles to character roles, with a range of Broadway credits including The Road to Yesterday (1906), The Real Thing (1911), Everyday (1921), The Old Soak (1922), The Shame Woman (1923), and a revival of Uncle Tom’s Cabin† (1933). She stepped into the role of Martha Brewster during the long run of Arsenic and Old Lace* in 1942 and made her final stage appearance only months before her death in the flop Land’s End (1946). Dupree served as a Red Cross nurse during World War I and appeared in two movies, most notably The Young in Heart (1938).
Italy’s dominant actress of the generation following Adelaide Ristori, Eleonora Duse made four American tours (1893, 1896, 1902, 1923–1924) with mixed success. She was noteworthy for her expressive hands and for her ability to portray various ages without the aid of makeup, which she never used. Along with a repertory of Italian plays, Duse was also a major disciple of the realistic dramas of Henrik Ibsen. She died in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 21 April 1924, during her final tour of the United States. See also †FOREIGN STARS AND COMPANIES ON THE AMERICAN STAGE.
This Yiddish theater classic, written between 1913 and 1916 by S. Ansky (Shloyme Zanvi Rappoport), was, in fact, written in Russian and translated into Yiddish, receiving its first production by the Vilna Troupe in Warsaw, Poland, in 1920. Drawing on Jewish folklore, The Dybbuk; or, Between Two Worlds centers on the possession of Leah, a young bride, by a malevolent spirit—a dybbuk—the soul of her once intended husband, Chonen, a poor Yeshiva student who has died of love for her when her father, Sender, breaks an arrangement he had made with Chonen’s long-dead father that their two children should marry. Sender instead finds her a new fiancé, a young man from a wealthy family, to increase his wealth and prestige. Leah, possessed by the dybbuk, is on the brink of death, so Rabbi Azriel, an exorcist, is called in to save her. Azriel succeeds in liberating her from the dybbuk, but she dies and, as the play ends, Leah and Chonen are reunited in another world.
The play had its American premiere in Yiddish on 2 September 1921 at New York’s Yiddish Art Theatre with a cast including Celia Adler, Julius Adler, and Maurice Schwartz. The first English-language production of the play, in a translation by Henry G. Alsberg, opened at the Neighborhood Playhouse on 15 December 1925 for 120 performances featuring Mary Ellis as Leah. The Dybbuk was filmed in 1937 in Poland, a remarkable record of the play and its cast, many of whom perished during the Holocaust. Operas, ballets, and stage adaptations of The Dybbuk have abounded, as well as Broadway revivals in 1926 (two separate productions), 1948, and 1964. In 1997, Tony Kushner* adapted the play as A Dybbuk; or, Between Two Worlds, to critical acclaim when it was performed at New York’s Public Theatre.*
Eugene O’Neill planned Dynamo as the first part of a trilogy of plays about the ways in which science and modern technology were emerging as a new American religion, while continuing his experimentation with expressionism. The trilogy was abandoned, however, for the play failed to impress critics and audiences at its opening on 11 February 1929 at the Martin Beck Theatre, and it attained a mere 50 performances.
Ada Fife, an atheist’s daughter, falls in love with Reuben Light, a minister’s son. Reverend Light disapproves of Reuben’s relationship with Ada, the daughter of his enemy. Angrily, Reuben denounces the faith of his family and leaves home. Attracted to the technological wonders of the day, Reuben makes science his only faith. When Ada seduces him in a hydroelectric plant, he kills her and then ecstatically allows himself to be electrocuted by the dynamo. In her first important role, Claudette Colbert played Ada opposite Glenn Anders. Despite Philip Moeller’s direction and Lee Simonson’s impressive set designs for the hydroelectric plant, the significance of the play’s subject was obscured for many critics by its grim plot.