Roscoe Conkling Gaige was born in Nelson, New York, and started out as a play broker. He became a producer in partnership with Edgar Selwyn and Arch Selwyn, presenting such hits as Within the Law (1912) and Lilac Time (1917), both starring Jane Cowl. Among Gaige’s successes as an independent producer was The Butter and Egg Man (1925). He associated with Jed Harris to produce Broadway (1926) and Coquette (1927) but ultimately left the theater to devote himself to writing about food and wine.
A native of Portage, Wisconsin, playwright Zona Gale attended the University of Wisconsin, after which she made effective use of her midwestern small-town roots in a series of popular novels. Most of Gale’s attention was devoted to fiction writing, but she also adapted plays from her novels. Gale was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in drama, awarded for Miss Lulu Bett (1920), a poignant comedy/drama about a small-town spinster who reluctantly participates in a mock marriage ceremony that turns out to be genuine. At the request of University of Wisconsin professor Thomas Dickinson, Gale wrote the one-act play The Neighbors (1912) for use by Little Theater groups. After its premiere by the Washington Square Players, Gale made it available for royalty-free production by Wisconsin Players or by any group that would plant a tree for each performance. She dramatized her 1918 novel Birth as Mr. Pitt (1924); produced by Brock Pemberton, with Walter Huston in the title role, it ran for 87 performances. Her success at capturing the midwestern flavor of dialogue made her other plays popular with amateur theaters: Uncle Jimmy (1922), Evening Clothes and The Clouds (1932), and Faint Perfume (1934).
See GALLAGHER AND SHEAN.
Al Shean (1868–1949), born Abraham Elieser Adolph Schönberg, and Ed Gallagher (1873–1929), born Edward Francis Gallagher, were both solo performers in vaudeville and musical comedy when they met in the cast of The Rose Maid (1912). They teamed for two years, without much success, and broke up. In 1920, they reunited with much greater success in The Ziegfeld Follies of 1922 and 1923. In the 1922 edition of the Follies, they scored a hit with the comic song “Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Shean,” which featured many choruses of questions and answers joking about their various experiences. Offstage disagreements led to the breakup of the act in 1925, with Gallagher suffering a nervous breakdown.
The frictions between Gallagher and Shean were part of the inspiration for Neil Simon’s* 1972 play, The Sunshine Boys,* about two elderly ex-partner vaudevillians who cannot get along offstage (another team, Smith and Dale, were also inspirations of Simon’s play, though they were close friends). Following the demise of the act and Gallagher’s death in 1929, Shean developed himself as a character actor on Broadway and in movies. On stage, he acted in Betsy (1926), a 1930 revival of The Prince of Pilsen, Light Wines and Beer (1930), Music in the Air (1932), Father Malachy’s Miracle (1937), Popsy (1941), Meet a Body (1944), and Doctor Social (1948). Gallagher and Shean had filmed their famous number in a 1931 short film, and Shean alone appeared in such movies as Music in the Air (1934), San Francisco (1936), The Great Waltz (1938), and Ziegfeld Girl (1941). Shean was the brother of Minnie Schönberg Marx, the mother of the Marx Brothers.
Born most likely in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania (though other sources give New York or Bergen, New Jersey, as her birthplace), Bertha Galland formed her own stock company in 1896 in partnership with George Edgar, winning positive reviews from provincial critics for the scenes from Shakespeare and other English and American authors they performed. In 1900, Galland appeared opposite James K. Hackett in The Pride of Jennico, followed by The Love Match (1901), The Forest Lovers (1901), a tour of Sweet Kitty Bellairs, and a lengthy and highly successful tour of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. At the conclusion of that tour, Galland returned to New York, scoring notable successes in Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall (1903) and The Return of Eve (1909), after which she retired. Galland worked for the Actors’ Fund after her retirement. She was killed in a car accident in White Plains, New York.
The highest level of theater auditorium seating, usually a tier above the balcony, held the cheapest seats, sometimes called “the heavens.” In many cases, a theatergoer paid admission for unreserved seating in the gallery, and thus there could be considerable jockeying for position. William A. Brady recalled in his memoirs how as a youth he spent his evenings “scrunched up on the edge of a hard gallery bench” 50 feet above the stage. He paid the 20-cent admission when he had it; otherwise he sneaked past the gallery doorkeeper. “The gallery-patrons had a grudge against the swells down in the orchestra who’d paid as much as seventy cents to get in” and sometimes pelted them with peanuts. Long after the practice of munching peanuts during the performance had been banned, the derogatory term “peanut gallery” persisted. “The proudest moment of my early life,” Brady reminisced, “was the time I hit the bass-drum with a marble from the top gallery of Booth’s Theatre on 23rd Street during the sleep-walking scene in Macbeth.” See also GALLERY GODS.
Although the cheap admission price attracted some rowdies to the gallery seating, the majority of theatergoers who bought gallery seats were low-salaried working people who spent their discretionary income to attend the theater several times a week. Thus they developed strong opinions about performers, plays, and production values, and they did not hesitate to express their pleasure or derision. They were called “gallery gods” partly because their seats were the closest to heaven and partly because of their power to advance or destroy stage careers.
George M. Cohan wrote, produced, and starred in this four-act play, which opened at the Fulton Theatre on 26 August 1929 for 152 performances. A Broadway gambler, Al Draper (Cohan), decides to take matters into his own hands when his adopted daughter, being held in quarantine in a New York hotel, elopes but is later found murdered. Cohan appeared in a movie version (1934) of the play, which is considered lost. Reportedly, the film was so poorly done that Cohan convinced the film’s producers to destroy it, and apparently they did so, as no known print survives. Cohan’s only other sound film, The Phantom President (1932), survives.
Opening on 21 October 1911 at the Century Theatre, the opulently staged drama ran for 241 performances. Mary Anderson emerged from retirement to collaborate with Robert Hichens in dramatizing the popular novel of the same title by George Tyler; the authors were present at the sold-out premiere, which lasted four hours. Processions of camels and other scenes of Arabic culture interspersed the dialogue sequences that advanced the romantic love story culminating in Christian renunciation. Mary Mannering as Domini Enfilden and Lewis Waller as Boris Androvsky declare their love in Count Anteoni’s verdant garden. They marry and conceive a child before Domini learns her husband’s secret: Boris is a Trappist monk who has broken his vows. They bid each other a poignant farewell before the monastery gates, but the audience gets a final glimpse of the eponymous garden in an epilogue showing mother and child five years later. One of the most impressive scenes of spectacle was the night scene in the desert. Out of an azure sky with twinkling stars came a terrific sandstorm, as the New York Times reported: “At one side stands the flapping tent of the wanderers, while from all sides pour the heaps of sand forced by the gale, rolling, tumbling, sweeping along, in a seeming race with the wind-driven clouds.” See also †*RELIGIOUS DRAMA.
The playwright Eleanor Gates was born in Shakopee, Minnesota, and had two important stage successes: Poor Little Rich Girl (1913), based upon her own novel of that title, and We Are Seven (1913). She was married first to actor Richard Tully and, later, to Frederick Moore.
The Chicago-born manager, producer, and agent Frank A. P. Gazzolo started as a program boy at J. H. Haverly’s Eden Musee Theatre on Chicago’s west side. He became an advance agent for Jacob Litt, traveling in advance of an In Old Kentucky company. In partnership with George Klimt, he produced the successful melodrama The James Boys in Missouri, followed by many other melodramas sent out on the Stair and Havlin circuit. Leasing Chicago’s Imperial Theatre in 1910, Gazzolo and Klimt operated a stock company, the first of several in his career. He was also a partner in the Central States Amusement Company.
This New York–born stage and movie character actress originally named Luella Gardner Van Nort moved easily between musicals like Gay Divorce (1932) or On Your Toes (1936) and straight plays, mostly comedies, including Sabrina Fair* (1953). She debuted on Broadway in the musical Love o’ Mike (1917), and among her numerous Broadway performances, Gear appeared in The Gold Diggers (1919); Poppy (1923); Queen High (1926); The Optimists (1928); with Bert Lahr* and Ray Bolger in Life Begins at 8:40 (1934); and with Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, Bobby Clark,* and Carmen Miranda in Streets of Paris (1939). Gear acted in the movies Adam and Eve (1923), Carefree (1938), and Pffft (1954). She also appeared occasionally on television in the 1950s and 1960s.
Born Norman Melancton Geddes in Adrian, Michigan, Norman Bel Geddes studied art in Cleveland and Chicago before beginning his distinguished career in scene designing at the Los Angeles Little Theater in 1916. Profoundly influenced by European modernist designers, including Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig, Geddes abandoned the proscenium for some of his designs and brought current trends in art into his productions, as his art deco designs for musicals demonstrate. Brought to New York to design for the Metropolitan Opera under the aegis of Otto Kahn, Geddes collaborated with Max Reinhardt on The Miracle (1924), for which he converted the Century Theatre into the interior of a medieval gothic cathedral. Even more ambitious was his unrealized design for The Divine Comedy, which called for a performance area 100 feet wide and over 70 feet high.
Geddes demonstrated originality and versatility in his designs for such 1920s Broadway productions as a 1920 revival of Erminie, The Truth about Blyades (1922), The Rivals (1922), The School for Scandal (1923), Lady, Be Good! (1924), Jeanne d’Arc (1925), Ziegfeld Follies (1925), Julius Caesar (1927), The Five O’Clock Girl (1927), The Patriot (1928), and Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929). His later notable productions include Hamlet (1931), Dead End* (1935), The Eternal Road (1937), and Seven Lively Arts (1944). He was also an industrial designer, designed a few theaters, pioneered the use of lenses in lighting instruments, and was the father of actress Barbara Bel Geddes.* See also †SCENERY.
Harrison Rhodes and Thomas A. Wise collaborated on this comedy, which opened in a William A. Brady and Joseph R. Grismer production on 29 September 1908. It ran for 407 performances at the Bijou Theatre with Wise in the leading role, along with future movie star Douglas Fairbanks. Set in Washington, D.C., political and family machinations surround the arrival of a new senator, William H. Langdon (Wise), who manages to avoid a scandal involving his grown children, including his daughter Hope, with the assistance of a reporter, Budd Haines (Fairbanks). Haines is rewarded for his efforts with the love of Hope. President Theodore Roosevelt attended a performance of the play and was heard to call it “bully.” Wise reprised his role in a 1914 silent film version. According to the New York Times review, “The audience laughed until its sides ached, and then it laughed some more.” Wise also appeared in a 1914 movie adaptation of the play.
The second play by Harriet Ford, based on Stanley Weyman’s romance, opened on 30 December 1901 at Wallack’s Theatre in a Liebler & Co. production and ran for 120 performances. The casting of Kyrle Bellew and Eleanor Robson as the romantic interest enhanced the appeal of this seven-scene historical drama set in Renaissance France. The swordplay and other physical activity brought shrieks, cheers, and whistles of delight from the gallery. Ford herself later referred to it as “the slaughter of eighteen” and “the last of the swashbucklers.” A movie version was released in 1921.
A three-act comedy by Anita Loos and John Emerson adapted from Loos’s novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, opened on 28 September 1926 for 199 performances. Lorelei Lee (played by June Walker), a flapper from Little Rock, Arkansas, travels to Europe with her friend Dorothy—thanks to the largesse of Lorelei’s “sugar daddy,” button-manufacturer Gus Eisman. The gold-digging Lorelei cuts a swath through England where she charms a knight into giving her a diamond tiara and becomes enamored of Henry Spofford (played by Frank Morgan). When she learns that Spofford and Dorothy are an item, she returns to Eisman. A movie version was released in 1928. In 1949, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes became a hit musical by Jule Styne, Leo Robin, Joseph Fields, and Loos, making a star of Carol Channing* as Lorelei. The musical was filmed in 1953, starring Marilyn Monroe as Lorelei, and in 1974 Channing again played the role in an adaptation called Lorelei.
Born Grace Doughtery in New York, Grace George spent much of her childhood in a convent school. She then attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and made her New York debut playing a schoolgirl in The New Boy (1894). George’s first significant role, in The Turtle (1898), capitalized on her beauty, vivacity, and the sharp intelligence that led to stardom in such plays as Pretty Peggy (1903), The Two Orphans† (revived 1904), The Marriage of William Ashe (1905), and a major success as Cyprienne in a revival of Victorien Sardou’s Divorçons (1907). This was followed by further successes in A Woman’s Way (1909) and The School for Scandal (1909).
George’s husband, producer William A. Brady, built the Playhouse for her in 1911, and she established a repertory company there in 1915, presenting and starring in the first American production of George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara (1915), as well as Shaw’s Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (1916). During the 1920s, George appeared in The Merry Wives of Gotham (1924), She Had to Know (1925), and The First Mrs. Fraser (1929), which she also directed to long-running success. George also appeared successfully in Kind Lady (1935), The Velvet Glove (1949), and opposite Katharine Cornell in a revival of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Constant Wife in 1951, after which she retired. George appeared in two movies, Tainted Money (1915) and Johnny Come Lately (1943), costarring with James Cagney in the latter. Her career encompassed over 50 productions in which she figured as actor, director, manager, or translator.
A group of civic-minded citizens, led by lawyer and banker Elbridge T. Gerry, established the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in 1875. The society’s intention of preventing abuses by producers and exploitive parents was largely covered by child labor laws passed during the same era, but the society focused much attention on the stage and was often criticized for overzealousness. Eddie Foy and his children, “the seven little Foys,” famously ran afoul of the Gerry Society. Well into the 20th century, producers were compelled to seek the society’s approval before employing child performers on the legitimate stage and in vaudeville. The society continues its functions today.
Born in Krakow, Bertha Gerstein (also spelled Gersten) immigrated to the United States at an early age and began her stage career in vaudeville before a transition to dramatic acting, often as a member of the Yiddish Art Theatre company and as costar of Jacob Ben-Ami.
The widely produced one-act Overtones (1915) was written by Alice Gerstenberg, who was born in Chicago and attended Bryn Mawr College. She began writing novels in 1908 but turned to playwriting when her first full-length play, Alice in Wonderland (1915), was produced at New York’s Booth Theatre. That same year, the Washington Square Players produced her Overtones, which tapped into the craze for Freudian psychology by showing the subconscious alter egos of the two female characters. Returning to Chicago, Gerstenberg was a charter member of the Chicago Little Theater and continued writing one-acts that experimented with dramatic form.
Born in Vilna, Russia, Morris Gest immigrated to Boston as a child. He began his theatrical career producing plays there in 1903. By 1905, he had formed a successful New York production partnership with F. Ray Comstock. Spectacles like The Story of the Rosary (1914) and The Wanderer (1917) characterized their years at the Manhattan Opera House (1914–1920) and the Century Theatre (1917–1919). They presented Jerome Kern’s musical Leave It to Jane (1917) at the Century. However, their crowning efforts were foreign attractions, including the long-running British musical Chu Chin Chow (1917), Nikita Balieff’s Chauve Souris revue (1922), an acclaimed New York season of the Moscow Art Theatre (1923), legendary Italian actress Eleonora Duse’s triumphant 1923–1924 tour (which ended abruptly when she died suddenly in Pittsburgh), and Max Reinhardt’s spectacular production of The Miracle (1924). The Gest-Comstock partnership ended in 1928, but Gest continued producing until his death, including American tours by Reinhardt’s leading actor, Aleksandër Moissi, and the Freiburg Passion Play, as well as the Al Jolson musical The Wonder Bar (1931). See also †FOREIGN PLAYS ADAPTED TO THE AMERICAN STAGE.
This phrase was coined at Miner’s Bowery Theatre in the late 19th century to urge the use of an actual large hook used to pull weak performers offstage when they failed to please the raucous audiences in attendance at Miner’s. The phrase fell into common parlance, though an actual hook was rarely used.
The first of song-and-dance man George M. Cohan’s successful nonmusical works, Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford is based on George Randolph Chester’s Saturday Evening Post short stories. This lighthearted comedy ran for 424 performances at the Gaiety Theatre in a Cohan and Sam H. Harris production beginning 19 September 1910. Cohan directed but did not appear in this amusing glimpse of all-American confidence man J. Rufus Wallingford, who moves from one town to the next, setting up fake businesses to bilk the local “rube” populace. In Battleburg, however, he falls for Fanny Jasper, a local girl whose belief in him propels Wallingford to succeed with a company that makes carpet tacks to match any carpet. As the curtain falls, to his great surprise, Wallingford becomes an accidental millionaire, legitimate, and engaged to Fanny. Critics approved of the typically American character types and values, finding the show colorful and fast paced in the Cohan tradition. The play was revived on Broadway in 1917 and spawned three movie versions (1916, 1921, 1931).
A. H. Woods produced Wilson Collison and Avery Hopwood’s three-act sex farce directed by Bertram Harrison, which opened on 1 August 1921 at the Theatre Republic for 120 performances. Its modest run on Broadway was only the tip of the iceberg for a play that, perhaps inexplicably, had an enduring life on tour, in movies, and in amateur, academic, stock, and dinner theaters. On Broadway, Hazel Dawn played Gertie Darling, a young wife, whose husband, Teddy, as a stage-door Johnny, has formerly given a bejeweled garter to a chorus girl. In order to recoup the garter (and the money he spent for it), the young man goes through a series of plots and catastrophes until the final curtain. Life magazine’s critic was approving, though warned that audiences could be “a little disappointed in that it is not quite so naughty as it sounds,” but George Jean Nathan, writing in The Smart Set, reported that despite his study of French boulevard comedies, “in none of them have I ever encountered dirtier lines than those in the American ‘Getting Gertie’s Garter.’” Film versions appeared in 1927, 1933, and 1945.
This term refers to a freestanding pole with a single illuminated bulb placed on stage as a safety precaution when the theater is otherwise dark. “Ghost light” comes from the days of gas-lit theaters and refers to the dim lighting maintained to relieve pressure on gas valves, along with the myth that a light in a theater kept ghosts away. The ghost light is sometimes called the “Equity Light” or “Equity Lamp” in reference to an Actors’ Equity Association regulation that resulted from—according to theatrical legend—a lawsuit lodged against a Broadway theater by a burglar who successfully broke into the theater but fell in the dark and injured his leg, then sued the owner.
Born Anne Hartley in London, England, the character actress began as a dancer in the corps de ballet at Her Majesty’s and Drury Lane Theatres. In 1846, she married dancer George Henry Gilbert, and three years later, they left for the United States. By 1851, they were performing with a Chicago company. In 1861, Gilbert played Lady Macbeth opposite Edwin Booth during his brief engagement in Louisville. After her New York debut in 1864, Mrs. Gilbert’s career as a performer of eccentric woman roles became well established, marred only by the death of her husband in 1867. From 1869 until her death, with only a three-year hiatus (1877–1880), she acted in Augustin Daly’s company in New York, becoming familiarly known (and beloved) as “Grandma Gilbert.” She appeared on Broadway in The Rose of Castile (1864), Play (1869), Caste (1869), Surf (1870), King Richard II (1875), Pique† (1875), Miss Hobbs (1899), A Royal Family (1900), and the appropriately named Granny (1904), a play by Clyde Fitch and produced by Charles Frohman as her last appearance. Her memoir, The Stage Reminiscences of Mrs. Gilbert, was published in 1901.
The unprecedented popularity of the team’s British light operas on the American stage forced reconsideration of international copyright provisions in 1891, which in turn impacted the legitimate stage. The London playwright W. S. Gilbert (1837–1911) and composer Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900) were brought together and represented by Richard D’Oyly Carte. The wildfire success of their H.M.S. Pinafore in 1879 led to countless pirated American productions using the word “Pinafore” in the title while borrowing and adapting characters and songs without crediting the creators. D’Oyly Carte then strategized the premiere of The Pirates of Penzance to open in New York in advance of the London premiere and thus establish copyright in the United States; it opened at the Fifth Avenue Theatre† on 31 December 1879. In 1885, The Mikado generated an American fad for Japanese-style objects and manners. In an article in the Baltimore Evening Sun on 29 November 1910, H. L. Mencken claimed that there were 117 Mikado companies on the road.
One of the major stage stars of the late 19th century, William Gillette, a native of Hartford, Connecticut, was the son of a U.S. senator and received his education at Yale University, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Fine Arts Institute before making his stage debut in Faint Heart Ne’er Won Fair Lady in 1875. He played secondary roles in several productions at the Boston Museum.† He made his New York debut in George Densmore’s The Gilded Age (1877). While Gillette toured in Bronson Howard’s Young Mrs. Winthrop, he began to write plays as vehicles for himself, notably The Professor (1881) and Digby’s Secretary (1884). His other early plays include Esmeralda (1881), which he adapted with Frances Hodgson Burnett, the melodrama Held by the Enemy (1886), She (1887), All the Comforts of Home (1890), Mr. Wilkinson’s Widows (1891), and Settled Out of Court (1892).
Gillette’s dual careers peaked with Too Much Johnson (1894), Secret Service (1896), and his major triumph in Sherlock Holmes (1899), a mystery-melodrama adapted from Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories of the fictional Victorian detective. Gillette was admired as a more natural actor than many of his contemporaries, and in 1913 he published his lecture “The Illusion of the First Time in Acting.” Gillette’s later plays, including Clarice (1905) and Electricity (1910), were mildly successful, but after 1900 he was preferred in plays by others, including J. M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton (1903) and Dear Brutus (1918). The exception was Sherlock Holmes, a character Gillette frequently performed on stage and in movies (1916), reviving the play in New York for the last time in 1931 at the age of 76. Gillette is believed to have given over 1,300 performances in the part. Like many of his star contemporaries, Gillette was both blessed and cursed by finding that one iconic role. See also DORO, MARIE (1882–1956).
Born in New York to British parents, Frank Gillmore was taken to England for his education. He returned to the United States to act and played leading man to Henrietta Crosman, Mary Mannering, Alla Nazimova, and other stars. He is most remembered for his presidency of Actors’ Equity from 1929 to 1937. As one of its founders and most active leaders, he held the number one Equity membership card.
The daughter of Frank Gillmore, Margalo Gillmore studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and made her debut in 1917 in The Scrap of Paper. She played the title character’s daughter in The Famous Mrs. Fair (1919). In 1922, she acted in the Theatre Guild’s He Who Gets Slapped and continued as a Guild actress for many years in such pre-1930 productions as The Straw (1921), Alias Jimmy Valentine (1921), Outward Bound (1924), Ned McCobb’s Daughter (1926), The Silver Cord (1926), The Second Man (1927), Marco Millions (1928), and a number of classics. Although stardom eluded her, Gillmore enjoyed a long solid career as “a regular on Broadway for 45 years,” as her obituary in Variety on 9 July 1986 noted.
San Francisco–born actress Mabelle L. Gilman was educated at Mills College Almeida and made her mark mostly in musical comedy and operetta, beginning with her debut in London in The Countess Gucki (1896). Her Broadway debut, that same year, in The Geisha, was followed by success in A Runaway Girl (1898), and she branched out with roles in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing and The Merchant of Venice, followed by The Rounders (1899), The Casino Girl (1900), and The Hall of Fame (1902) with Marie Dressler. These and other performances established Gilman as one of the standout musical performers on Broadway. In 1907, she married United States Steel president William Ellis Corey, causing scandal since he had to divorce his first wife, which led to an acrimonious front-page battle. Gilman divorced Corey in 1923 and took up permanent residence in France where, in 1940, she was arrested and interred at a Vittel prison camp by occupying Nazi troops, though her release was secured in 1942.
Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Paul Howard Gilmore’s parents pushed him toward a career in the law, but he began acting in amateur shows at the Milwaukee Grand Opera House. When producer Jacob Litt saw Gilmore perform, he hired him for a tour of The Ensign in 1891. Only intending to work for Litt briefly, he stayed on and appeared in productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin† and In Old Kentucky on tour. Gilmore’s good looks led to leading man roles, and his career prospered when he left Litt in 1896 to work for Charles Frohman in such popular plays as The Wife, Americans Abroad, and Sweet Lavender. Gilmore rose to Broadway stardom in Myron Leffingwell’s melodrama, The Dawn of Freedom (1898).
In 1897, Gilmore married Regina Cooper, daughter of a millionaire wagon manufacturer, and she gave birth to twins in 1899, but she died two days later. To continue his career on tour, Gilmore turned over custody of the children to his father-in-law. Not long after his wife’s death, in 1899, Gilmore himself was nearly killed when live rounds were accidentally loaded into a prop gun during a performance of The Musketeers in Phoenix, Arizona. Gilmore recovered and continued to tour and returned to Broadway in Mistress Nell (1901) as a replacement for Aubrey Boucicault. He toured constantly as a matinee idol but began increasingly to turn his attention to movies. Gilmore acted in at least 10 films beginning in 1897 and appeared in his last in 1920, after which he operated New York’s Cherry Lane Theatre with his daughter, Virginia Cooper Gilmore (1899–1981), where he gave early opportunities to many actors, including Robert Walker, Jennifer Jones, and Carl Reiner. In 1948, Gilmore established the Gilmore Summer Stock Theatre in Duluth, Minnesota, again working closely with his daughter.
African American actor Charles Sidney Gilpin was born in Richmond, Virginia. He worked for a time in a printing firm before joining a black stock company in 1903. At times, Gilpin also worked as a train porter, a barber, and an elevator operator. He toured with numerous troupes, including the all-black Pekin Stock Company in Chicago; then, in 1916, he became a director of Harlem’s Lafayette Players, the first black stock company in New York in a century. Appearing on Broadway as William Custis, a minister, in John Drinkwater’s Abraham Lincoln (1919) led to his getting cast in the title role of Eugene O’Neill’s expressionist drama The Emperor Jones (1920). Race prejudice and his sudden fame led Gilpin to overindulge in alcohol. After he was passed over in favor of Paul Robeson for the Broadway and London productions of The Emperor Jones, he appeared in a short-lived revival of the play but rarely worked again.
Despite the French name, Etienne Girardot was born in London and worked as an actor there before scoring a major Broadway success as Lord Fancourt Babberley in the 1893 American debut of Brandon Thomas’s enduring English farce Charley’s Aunt. Girardot appeared opposite Minnie Maddern Fiske in Leah Kleschna (1904) and in other roles, including in Caliban of the Yellow Sands (1916) and The Bonds of Interest (1929). He was in constant demand for revivals of Charley’s Aunt and became so associated with that role that it proved difficult for him to find others. His final stage appearance, as the deranged religious zealot in Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s* Twentieth Century* (1932), won plaudits. Girardot appeared occasionally in silent movies as well as in small roles in sound films, including The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) and The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939).
Clyde Fitch’s four-act drama opened on 4 December 1901 at the Lyceum Theatre for 125 performances, produced by Charles Frohman. Based on an actual incident Fitch heard from an Ohio judge, the play follows Winifred Stanton, who stays with her kleptomaniac mother when her parents separate. Winifred becomes engaged to Chartris, a young judge. After Winifred’s mother swipes jewelry from her fiancé’s mother, Winifred compels her mother to confess. The erring mother is taken to a sanitarium, leaving Chartris and Winifred free to marry. Annie Russell won positive reviews as Winifred. The cast also included Mrs. McKee Rankin and Mrs. G. H. Gilbert as the two mothers. A movie version appeared in 1918.
A. H. Woods produced this Paul M. Potter adaptation of French playwright Pierre Véber’s sex farce Loute, which opened at Weber’s Music Hall on 1 February 1909 for 184 performances. Van Rensselaer Wheeler played Richard O’Shaughnessy, a decadent young man having an affair with a woman named Loute Sedaine, played by Violet Dale. When Richard meets Marcia Singleton (played by Nena Blake), a classy young woman from Battle Creek, Michigan, he decides that she would be a perfect mate and breaks off his relationship with Loute and with his mentor and financial supporter whom he knows only as Colonel Tandy. Once in Michigan with Marcia, Richard learns that Tandy is in fact her father and Loute is also from Battle Creek, the wife of a judge. Complications arise with considerable comings and goings in bedrooms in a roadhouse, with the main characters and others caught up in revelations of various romantic affairs. Things eventually work out with Loute reconciling with her husband and Richard and Marcia marrying. Despite the production’s healthy run, critics and others found the play indecent from its preview performances in Trenton, New Jersey, where a group of clergymen complained to police, who shut down the production. The New York run met with similar controversy and outcries, including from journalist Samuel Hopkins Adams who described the play’s final act as “the grossest bit of action that I have ever seen on the English-speaking stage.” A movie adaptation was released in 1917.
David Belasco and Franklin Fyles collaborated on this melodrama, which opened at the Empire Theatre on 25 January 1893 for 208 performances. A London production opened at the same time. Set in a remote United States Army post in Montana Indian country, the play deals with power battles between whites and Native Americans.
The plot of The Girl I Left behind Me centered on the Indian chief Scar-Brow, educated by whites, adopted, and now called by a white name, John Ledru. He has become embittered against whites and rejoins his Blackfleet tribe. General Kennion, commander of the garrison, senses a coming disaster, even as a romantic triangle involving his daughter Kate takes center stage. An Indian attack occurs and subsides, and, as the play draws to its climax, a young Indian woman, Scar-Brow’s daughter Fawn-Afraid, is wounded. Sympathetic to the whites, and also Scar-Brow’s daughter, she had brought water to help the besieged garrison. Kennion informs Scar-Brow that he will hand her over if the siege ends. However, before agreement is reached, Fawn-Afraid dies. Scar-Brow vows final revenge and, assuming all is lost, Kennion reluctantly agrees to Kate’s request that he shoot her in the event of a breach of the garrison. As he prepares to comply, the distant sound of the U.S. Cavalry arriving to reinforce the garrison is heard.
The play was popular throughout the 1890s, and two months into its Broadway run, producer Charles Frohman moved the original company to Chicago’s Columbian Exposition for a run there and it toured successfully. Movie versions appeared in 1908 and 1915, the latter starring Robert Edeson. The Girl I Left behind Me is dubiously famous for the line, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” spoken by Major Burleigh, who becomes an Indian hater when his wife deserts him for an Indian. Critics at the time called the play “the most novel and original conception of American army life ever presented to the public.”
David Belasco’s three-act melodrama, which opened on 14 November 1905 at the Belasco Theatre for 224 performances, became the first American play to be converted into a grand opera when Giacomo Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West opened at the Metropolitan Opera House on 10 December 1910. The enduring popularity of the opera ultimately submerged the source play, but not before Belasco exploited it through his characteristic use of visual realism in scenes depicting sunsets, snowstorms, and an impressive opening sequence in which a panorama moves vertically to take the audience from the heroine’s cabin in the mountains down to the entrance of the saloon in town. Blanche Bates starred as the Girl (whose name turns out to be Minnie) and played return engagements of the play in 1907 and 1908.
The Girl of the Golden West is set in a California mining camp. The Girl falls in love with Dick Johnson, who turns out to be Ramirez, a bandit hunted by Sheriff Jack Rance. She hides the wounded Dick in her loft, but his blood drips through a crack in the ceiling while Rance is there. Rance wants the Girl for himself (although he has a wife elsewhere). He agrees to play a hand of poker with the Girl to decide the presumptive outlaw’s fate. The Girl wins by cheating. Back at the saloon, the locals still want to hang Dick, but he and the Girl get away and together face the eastern sunrise. Several movie versions were released (1915, 1923, 1930), as well as a version combining Belasco’s play with music from Puccini’s opera in 1938. See also FRONTIER DRAMA.
Opening on Christmas Day 1902 for 108 performances at the Savoy Theatre in a Charles Frohman production, this four-act Clyde Fitch drama was directed by its author. Clara Bloodgood starred as the jealous Jinny, who learns that her brother Geoffrey has committed bigamy, marrying Ruth Chester despite his previous drunken union with a maid. Geoffrey confides his dark secret to Jinny’s husband John Austin, the maid’s brother, who refuses to divulge the information, despite Jinny’s machinations, including a suicide attempt. John saves her, but critics complained that the happy ending marred the play’s inherent tragedy. A movie version was made in 1916.
The beloved sister of Lillian Gish was born in Massillion, Ohio, and first performed on stage at age four as Little Willie in East Lynne.† She played child roles on the road and in New York until 1912. That year, she and her sister joined D. W. Griffith’s movie company, for which Dorothy made 61 films before obtaining her first star contract in 1915. Her performance as the Little Disturber in Hearts of the World (1918) endeared her to the public. She returned to legitimate theater in 1928 to perform in Young Love on Broadway, followed by a London engagement, and was among several actresses who played Mother in Life with Father* (1939) during its long run. Most of the remainder of her career was on stage, with only occasional films, most notably on Broadway in Morning’s at Seven* (1939) and The Magnificent Yankee (1946).
Born in Springfield, Ohio, the actress Lillian Gish was always protective of her younger sister Dorothy Gish. As “Baby Lillian,” she made her stage debut in a touring melodrama in 1902. Occasionally during her childhood she toured apart from her mother and sister. After being hired by D. W. Griffith in 1912, Gish devoted most of her acting career to movies, though she appeared with Mary Pickford on Broadway in A Good Little Devil (1913). Her work on the legitimate stage included Uncle Vanya (1930); Camille (1932); Nine Pine Street (1933); The Joyous Season (1934); Within the Gates (1934); Hamlet (1936), costarring with John Gielgud; The Star-Wagon (1937); Dear Octopus (1939); Mr. Sycamore (1942); Crime and Punishment (1947); The Curious Savage (1950); The Trip to Bountiful (1953); The Family Reunion (1958); All the Way Home* (1960); a 1963 revival of Too True to Be Good; Anya (1965); I Never Sang for My Father* (1968); a 1973 revival of Uncle Vanya, and A Musical Jubilee (1975). Her autobiography, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, was published in 1973, and she lived long enough to be the last major silent star still working into the 1990s.
The charming and athletic actress/singer Lulu Glaser was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, and she debuted on Broadway in 1891 in The Lion Tamer. In 1899, she acted in a revival of the operetta Erminie, followed by a short-lived musical version of Cyrano de Bergerac (1899) playing Roxanne. Glaser acted in both musicals and comedies, including Sweet Anne Page (1900), The Prima Donna (1901), The Merry Widow Burlesque (1908), Mlle. Mischief (1908), and The Girl and the Kaiser (1910), after which she made numerous appearances in vaudeville and made two silent movies, How Molly Made Good (1915) and Love’s Pilgrimage to America (1916). Glaser was married for a time to DeWolf Hopper, and she retired in 1918.
A native of Davenport, Iowa, Susan Glaspell was educated at Drake University and the University of Chicago. She worked as a journalist before embarking on a career writing novels and plays. She was one of the founders of the Provincetown Players along with her husband, George Cram Cook, with whom she wrote one-act plays that were performed in its little wharfside theater on Cape Cod. Glaspell’s Suppressed Desires (1914, coauthored by Cook), Trifles (1916), Close the Book (1917), A Woman’s Honor (1918), and Tickless Time (1918, coauthored by Cook), are diverse in topic and style, ranging from comedy to drama.
Glaspell’s full-length plays, including The Inheritors (1921), The Verge (1921), and Alison’s House* (1930), a fictionalization of Emily Dickinson’s life, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, were well received. Like Eugene O’Neill, another dramatist whose career was forged by the Provincetown Players, Glaspell merged contemporary themes with dramatic techniques influenced by modernist European playwrights. Expressionist and symbolist elements are found in Glaspell’s plays, which often depict the “new woman” as a central character. With her second husband, Norman Matson, Glaspell wrote The Comic Artist, a play that met with success in Europe but failed in its 1933 New York production. During the Great Depression, Glaspell headed the Midwest bureau of the Federal Theatre Project.*
Montague Marsden Glass was born in Manchester, England, and was brought to the United States as a child. He published humorous magazine stories about New York City’s garment district, and these became the basis for plays he wrote in collaboration with other dramatists: Potash and Perlmutter (1913) with Charles Klein, which inspired a series of comedies involving those title characters, including Abe and Mawruss (1915), Object—Matrimony (1916), Business before Pleasure (1917), His Honor: Abe Potash (1920), Partners Again (1922), Potash and Perlmutter: Detectives (1926), and several others with Jules Eckert Goodman. They also wrote a musical, Why Worry? (1918), featuring Joe Smith, Charlie Dale, and their costars in the Avon Comedy Four. See also ETHNICITY IN AMERICAN DRAMA.
Born in a showbiz boardinghouse in New York City, James Gleason grew up performing in his parents’ stock company, with his first significant role coming when he was five. After years of touring, Gleason served in the United States Army. He made his New York debut as a blackface waiter in Pretty Mrs. Smith (1912). With the success of his play Is Zat So? (1925), in which he wrote the role of boxing manager Hap Hurley for himself, Gleason initiated a long succession of tough fight-manager characters first on stage and then in movies. Other plays by Gleason include The Fall Guy (1924), The Shannons of Broadway (1927, with his wife, Lucille Webster), Rain or Shine (1928), and Puffy (1928). In movies, Gleason became a prolific character actor from 1922, nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), and in a slew of classic films including Meet John Doe (1941), A Guy Named Joe (1943), Arsenic and Old Lace* (1944), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), and his final appearance in The Last Hurrah (1958).
A native of Ulverston, England, the son of actors John Glendinning and Jessie Millward, Ernest Glendinning studied at Margate College and spent most of his career in the United States, sometimes opposite actress Marguerite Clark, including in Harley Granville-Barker’s Prunella (1913). Glendinning made his debut in Mice and Men (1903), which starred Annie Russell. His numerous Broadway roles included Just a Wife (1910), The Honeymoon Express (1913) starring Al Jolson, a 1914 revival of A Scrap of Paper, The Song of Songs (1914), A Modern Eve (1915), Caesar’s Wife (1919), Little Old New York (1920), Moonlight (1924), and The Greeks Had a Word for It (1930). Glendinning acted in three movies, including When Knighthood Was in Flower (1922). He made his final Broadway appearance in George M. Cohan’s Seven Keys to Baldpate (1935).
A well-known British actor, John Glendinning was the son of a minister and found his way into theater in amateur shows in his youth. He spent some years working in American theater, brought to the United States by Madge Kendal. On Broadway, Glendinning first performed in Trilby (1895). His second appearance was in Clyde Fitch’s scandalous Sapho (1900), which led to the arrest of leading lady and producer Olga Nethersole for immorality. Sapho was closed for a time and replaced by a revival of The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. Glendinning was clearly drawn to “cutting-edge” works, as in the case of a double bill of The Greatest Thing in the World and The Moment of Death (1900), the latter by Israel Zangwill, a radical Jewish playwright.
Glendinning also performed in the premiere American cast of William Butler Yeats’s The Land of Heart’s Desire on a double bill with Robert Browning’s In a Balcony (1900). Glendinning’s subsequent Broadway credits included Mistress Nell (1900), The Girl and the Judge (1901), Mice and Men (1903), The Younger Mrs. Parling (1904), Joseph Entangled (1904), The Hypocrites (1906), Irene Wycherley (1908), Divorce† (1909), The Girl in the Taxi (1910), and a revival of Rosedale in 1913. He authored the unsuccessful play The Hand of Time (1898). Glendinning married Jessie Millward, afterward billed on stage as Mrs. John Glendinning; she had been a member of Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre Company. Their son, actor Ernest Glendinning, had a successful career on stage and movies.
This extraordinary three-act play by Sholem Asch from the Eastern European Yiddish theater aroused considerable controversy when it reached the American stage. In a large town in Poland, Yankl Tshaptshovitsh, known as “Uncle,” lives in a flat above the brothel he operates. Residing with him is his wife, Sarah, a former prostitute, and their teenage daughter, Rivkele, whom Yankl intends to keep away from the illicit activities a floor below. Yankl hopes to arrange a marriage for the girl to a Talmudic scholar in his desire to achieve respectability despite his chosen profession. Even Yankl cannot imagine the temptation that draws Rivkele to one of the prostitutes, Manke, the most desired woman in his brothel. Rivkele enters into a lesbian relationship with Manke, and this threatens Yankl’s plans for improved social status.
Asch wrote this unsettling drama in 1907 in Yiddish, with a New York production starring David Kessler the following year. It is believed to be the first play staged in the United States
to depict a lesbian relationship. Kessler and the cast performed in Yiddish, so the
play received comparatively little attention outside the Jewish community. However,
Jewish leaders expressed concerns over a possible backlash of anti-Semitic violence
should knowledge of the play’s content reach the English-speaking audience. The second
New York production opened on 20 December 1922 at the Provincetown Playhouse and moved on 2 February 1923 to the Greenwich Village Theatre, then almost immediately
moved to the Apollo Theatre on 19 February 1923; all told, it played a total of 133
performances. Rudolph Schild-
kraut, who had appeared in the first production of the play directed by Max Reinhardt in Berlin, played Yanke in a cast also including young actors Morris Carnovsky* and Sam Jaffe. Produced by Harry Weinberger, the production ran afoul of authorities during its
run at the Apollo.
On 6 March 1923, following the second act when Rivkele runs away with Manke, a detective arrived to announce that a grand jury had indicted the entire cast earlier that day. Weinberger served as defense attorney for the company and himself. When a guilty verdict was handed down on 23 May 1923, Weinberger appealed to the theatrical community for support against obscenity charges, even publishing a pamphlet asking if the play was either immoral or a great drama. Asch defended the play in a letter included in the pamphlet criticizing both the American audience for its inability to appreciate the subject and the Jewish community for their fears of anti-Semitism. “Jews,” he wrote, “do not need to clear themselves before anyone. They are as good and as bad as any race. I see no need why a Jewish writer should not bring out the bad or good traits.” The presiding judge stepped away from the lesbian issue, condemning instead what he considered “desecration of the sacred scrolls of the Torah,” but it was hard to mistake the response of critics, who were clearly disturbed by the lesbian element. Following the Broadway run, which ended before the indictment, the play had moved to the Prospect Theatre in the Bronx.
Translated into no less than nine languages, God of Vengeance has taken its place among pioneering LGBT dramatic works, from an early authorized English translation by Isaac Goldberg in 1918 to Donald Margulies’s adaptation of Asch’s play (updated and re-set on New York’s Lower East Side) that was not well received in its premiere at the Williamstown Theatre Festival* in 2002. More recently, God of Vengeance has inspired Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Paula Vogel* to write Indecent, a play with music, focused on the controversy surrounding the play’s 1922–1923 New York production. Directed by Rebecca Taichman (who was billed as a cocreator with Vogel), Indecent premiered in late 2015 to critical praise in a joint production of the Yale Repertory Theatre* and the La Jolla Playhouse* before moving to a Broadway run in 2017.
Opening on 24 October 1929 at the Little Theatre, this powerful drama by Maxwell Anderson and Harold Hickerson ran only 29 performances. Inspired by the injustice of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, the play centers upon one Irish and one Italian labor organizer framed for the murder of a paymaster. A corrupt court system allows tainted evidence and coached witnesses. The execution of the two innocent men is confirmed in the last scene. The cast included Sylvia Sidney, Charles Bickford, and Barton MacLane.
Eugene O’Neill’s tragic four-act play opened on 1 June 1921 at the Frazee Theatre for a mere 13 performances in a John D. Williams production. O’Neill had completed writing the play in 1920, following production by the Provincetown Players of an earlier one-act version of a “ghost play” titled Where the Cross Is Made, which he then crafted into a full-length work using the same characters, setting, plot, and other elements. In the first act, set in the Malay archipelago in 1900, aging Captain Bartlett (played by Willard Mack), is in pursuit of buried gold his father had presumably buried there. He finds a cheap brass, bejeweled (with glass) bracelet he believes has brought him, finally, to the lost treasure. The remaining acts are set in California, where Bartlett’s obsession with the false gold leads to tragedy. When the play opened, Variety’s critic seemed to capture the general response, finding the play “talky, balky, tiresome and impossible.” O’Neill believed the play was harmed by the overblown performance of Mack as Bartlett, but Gold remains one of O’Neill’s least revived works.
Avery Hopwood’s three-act comedy of backstage life, produced by David Belasco, opened on 30 September 1919 for 720 performances at the Lyceum Theatre. A template for numerous similar comedies and a string of popular 1930s musical movies beginning with Gold Diggers of 1933 (which borrowed many elements of this play’s plot), The Gold Diggers depicted the machinations of a staid rich man, Stephen Lee, who attempts to stop his nephew from marrying a chorus girl. Lee turns to a chorus girl he has known, Jerry Lamar (played by Ina Claire*), to break up the engagement. Jerry attempts to convince Lee that all chorus girls are not seeking rich husbands, but several of her friends, played by Jobyna Howland, Lilyan Tashman, Luella Gear, and Gladys Feldman, seem to refute her argument. Offended by Lee’s pompous assertion that he could never be tricked into marrying a chorus girl, Jerry gets him drunk, and, under the influence, he proposes to her. When he sobers up, she confesses her trickery because she truly loves Lee, who feels the same way and forgives her ruse. A television adaptation as late as 1952 testified to the story’s durability.
The legendary showman who acted, wrote songs, and produced more than 100 plays was born in New York City. In his youth, he worked as a bricklayer on the Garrick Theatre and as a supernumerary at Niblo’s Garden.† After a stint as actor-manager with a touring company, Golden wrote songs for such Broadway musicals as Chin-Chin (1914) and The Big Show (1916), the royalties of which financed his first venture into producing. Turn to the Right! (1916), produced with Winchell Smith, began their successful partnership. Golden had an unerring sense of what the public wanted. His long-running hits included the record-setting Lightnin’ (1918) and The First Year (1920). Other Golden productions on Broadway include Three Wise Fools (1918), A Serpent’s Tooth (1922), Seventh Heaven (1922), The Wisdom Tooth (1926), Four Walls (1927), Let Us Be Gay (1929), London Calling (1930), As Husbands Go (1931), When Ladies Meet* (1932), The Bishop Misbehaves (1935), Susan and God* (1937), Skylark (1939), Theatre (1941), revival of Counsellor-at-Law* in 1942, They Knew What They Wanted in 1949, and The Male Animal* in 1952. Later Golden became involved in philanthropy, creating funds to assist needy theater artists.
An actor whose career emphasized “Down East” characters from his birthplace, Bangor, Maine, and its environs, Richard Golden was the son of Irish immigrants. He began performing in a Mexican circus in his early teens but achieved success when he married Dora Wiley and toured as a member of the Dora Wiley Opera Company. The couple endured a roller coaster of success and failure, but things improved considerably with the success of Golden’s comedy Old Jed Prouty, which he wrote in collaboration with William Gill and which is set in a small Maine town not far from Golden’s hometown of Bangor. The play was a popular success in New York and went on tour, winning Golden significant popularity. However, the marriage with Wiley ended and Golden fell on hard times, declaring himself broke and suffering from alcoholism in 1895. Within a relatively short time, he pulled himself together and toured again with Old Jed Prouty. Though he continued to play the role, Golden achieved renewed popularity in comic opera and comedies, appearing in The Fortune Teller (1898), In Paradise (1899), The Princess Chic (1900), Common Sense Bracket (1904), The Bad Samaritan (1905), The Tourists (1906), and The Other House (1907). When he died suddenly in 1909, Golden was among the most beloved stage comedians of his era.
Born Avraham Goldenfudim in Russia, Avrom Goldfadn spent most of his working life there as the “Father of Yiddish theater.” He first visited New York in 1887 to establish an American Yiddish theater in a similar style. Many of his plays became major successes, including Koldunye; or, The Witch (1877), The Fanatic; or, The Two Kuni Lemls (c. 1880), Bar-Kokhba; or, The Last Days of Jersusalem (1883), and Schulamis; or, The Daughter of Jerusalem (c. 1883). His final play, Ben-Ami; or, Son of My People (1908), was produced in New York shortly before Goldfadn’s death. Though his work was by then considered passé, over 30,000 people were reported to have participated in his funeral procession in Brooklyn. Goldfadn’s dramas were recognized as Yiddish theater classics to be frequently revived. Comic characters like Shmendrik and songs like the lullaby “Raisins and Almonds,” composed for Schulamis, won enduring fame.
This sparkling comedy by Clare Kummer opened on 31 October 1915 at the Republic Theatre and ran for 111 performances. Kummer had originally hoped to have her script made into a musical, but Arthur Hopkins chose to produce and direct it as a play. Lola Fisher played the title role, a perky girl who rediscovers her long-lost and now wealthy husband, played by Walter Hampden. May Vokes excelled as a comic kitchen wench. Sets and costumes were by Robert Edmond Jones.
This drama critic for the New York Press also wrote plays, translated plays, and directed. He joined the Washington Square Players in 1915 and founded the Stagers in 1925.
Born in Gervais, Oregon, Jules Eckert Goodman attended Harvard University, graduating in 1899, and completed a master’s degree from Columbia University in 1901. He served as editor or writer for various publications prior to turning his attentions to playwriting. Goodman’s first Broadway plays, The Man Who Stood Still (1908) and Mother (1910), based on his own novel, led to over 20 subsequent works, some of which were adapted as movies. The most noted of these was The Silent Voice (1914), which starred Otis Skinner and was a modest Broadway success, subsequently adapted to the screen four times between 1915 and 1955, the most notable of which was The Man Who Played God (1932) starring George Arliss and Bette Davis,* in what was her breakthrough role. Emily Stevens appeared in Goodman’s The Point of View (1912), which was a flop, as were The Trap (1915) and Just Outside the Door (1915).
Goodman had a success with his adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1915); two more flops, The Man Who Came Back and Object—Matrimony, both in 1916; and a big hit, in collaboration with Montague Glass, with Business before Pleasure (1917). With Glass, he also provided a libretto for the Fanny Brice musical Why Worry? (1918), and the two writers partnered for three Potash and Perlmutter plays, His Honor: Abe Potash (1919), Partners Again (1922), and Potash and Perlmutter: Detectives (1926), follow-ups to Glass’s 1913 hit ethnic comedy, Potash and Perlmutter. With Maud Skinner, Goodman collaborated on a comedy, Pietro (1920), which failed, and he found only modest successes with melodramas The Law Breaker (1922) and Chains (1923). Another short run accompanied his collaboration with Edward Knoblock on Simon Called Peter (1924), but his final play, Many Mansions, coauthored with his son, Eckert Goodman (1909–1964), and directed by Lee Strasberg,* ran a season. Along with The Silent Voice, a few other Goodman plays were adapted as movies.
The privileged son of a Chicago lumber millionaire, Kenneth Sawyer Goodman was drawn away from his family business toward the arts. After working as a volunteer with the Art Institute of Chicago, Goodman crafted nearly 50 one-act plays, masques, and pageants at the height of the Chicago arts and literary renaissance in the decade prior to World War I. Goodman collaborated with both Ben Hecht and Thomas Wood Stevens, but he also wrote many plays on his own, including The Game of Chess (1912) and Back of the Yards (1913). With Hecht, Goodman collaborated on The Wonder Hat (1914) and The Hero of Santa Maria (1915); the latter was produced by the Washington Square Players in 1917. His collaborations with Stevens were mostly masques and pageants. Poised to write a full-length play and working on a plan for a repertory theater and drama school, Goodman died suddenly during the 1918 influenza epidemic while serving in the United States Navy. His untimely death may have cost the American theater a significant playwright, but his passing led his grieving parents to establish Chicago’s Goodman Theatre and school, a posthumous realization of their son’s dream.
The producer Philip Goodman, born in Philadelphia, made money in business, which he used to present such popular shows as The Old Soak (1922), Poppy (1923), Dear Sir (1924), The Ramblers (1926), The Wild Man of Borneo (1927), The Five O’Clock Girl (1927), Rainbow (1928), Among the Married (1929), and Washington Heights (1931). His daughter, Ruth Goetz, was a playwright who, among her works, adapted Henry James’s Washington Square as the hit play The Heiress* (1947).
Founded in 1925 as a memorial to Kenneth Sawyer Goodman, a promising playwright of Chicago’s art and literary renaissance of the 1910s, the theater was built on Lake Shore Drive behind Chicago’s Art Institute. The design, by Howard Van Doren Shaw, was hampered by a city ordinance limiting the height of downtown buildings. Thus, much of the theater, which also housed a drama school, was constructed underground. Its resident company thrived in repertory productions of original plays and classics. The Great Depression forced the termination of the company in 1930. The Goodman remained a drama school until the resident company was reestablished in 1969.
Born Nathaniel Carl Goodwin in Boston, he attended school at the Little Blue Academy in Farmington, Maine, where he acted in school dramatics. This led to an acting career, beginning with the role of a shoeshine boy in manager John B. Stetson’s production of Law in New York (1874) at Boston’s Howard Athenaeum.† Goodwin worked in vaudeville for Tony Pastor in 1875 and starred in E. E. Rice’s musicals for a few seasons before setting up his own comedy troupe, the Froliques, where he was applauded for his imitations of famous actors and for his eccentric comedic style. Goodwin was successful in a series of light comedies, including The Skating Rink (1885), Little Jack Sheppard (1886), Turned Up (1886), and Lend Me Five Shillings (1887), but he had his greatest hit in A Gilded Fool (1892). He gradually added dramatic roles to his repertoire, including the role of Sheriff Jim Radburn in Augustus Thomas’s In Mizzoura (1893). He failed in several attempts at Shakespeare, including Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (1901) and Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1903), but he found great successes opposite his wife, actress Maxine Elliott, in Nathan Hale (1899) and When We Were Twenty-One (1900). He continued to act until shortly before his death, scoring one final hit as Uncle Everett in Jesse Lynch Williams’s Pulitzer Prize–winning comedy, Why Marry? (1917).
Russian-born character actor Bernard Gorcey married in 1914 and immigrated to the United States to work in vaudeville. On Broadway, his most notable role was as the Jewish father Isaac Cohen in Anne Nichols’s runaway hit comedy Abie’s Irish Rose (1922), a part he repeated in a short-lived 1937 revival. He also acted in Tom Jones (1907), What Ails You? (1912), Somebody’s Sweetheart (1918), Always You (1920), Wildflower (1923), Song of the Flame (1925), Cherry Blossoms (1927), Presenting Business (1930), Joy of Living (1931), Wonder Boy (1931), Keeping Expenses Down (1932), Creeping Fire (1935), and Satellite (1935). Gorcey made his first movie appearance reprising his Broadway role in Abie’s Irish Rose in 1928; he played small supporting roles in a large number of films, including Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) and a long series of “Dead End” (or Bowery Boys) comedies as Louie Dumbrowsky, playing opposite his son, Leo Gorcey (1917–1969), until shortly before his death in an auto accident.
The Yiddish theater playwright—author of between 35 and 60 plays—was born in Mivgorod, Ukraine, and arrived in New York’s Lower East Side in 1891. Like other Russian-Jewish intellectuals, he scorned the vulgar lower-class Yiddish theater called shund. His first play, Siberia (1891), began the transformation of Yiddish theater into something more serious, leading to a Golden Age. Championed by Jacob Adler, Gordin went on to write The Pogrom in Russia, Sappho, Mirele Ephros, and God, Man, and Devil. In 1897, Gordin cofounded the Freie Yidische Folksbiene, and he later published Yiddish theatrical newspapers. Gordin’s dramatization of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata (1902) was revived in English on Broadway in 1906, starring Bertha Kalish.
Born in Russia, Mordecai Gorelik came to the United States in his youth to study at the Pratt Institute and under several scene designers, notably Robert Edmond Jones, Norman Bel Geddes, and Serge Soudeikine. His first designs were on a modest scale for the Provincetown Players beginning in 1920, but he developed into one of Broadway’s most important scenic artists, creating designs for John Howard Lawson’s Processional (1925), Sidney Kingsley’s* Pulitzer Prize–winning Men in White* (1933), three Clifford Odets* plays—Golden Boy* (1937), Rocket to the Moon* (1938), and Night Music (1940)—and, after World War II, Arthur Miller’s* All My Sons* (1947) and Michael Gazzo’s A Hatful of Rain* (1957), among many others, as well as contributing set designs to productions of the Neighborhood Playhouse and for the Group Theatre.* Inspired by Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig, as well as Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater, Gorelik also taught design and wrote several books on theatrical art, including New Theatres for Old (1940). See also †SCENERY.
London-born character actor Ferdinand Gottschalk spent much of his career in the United States following his start in 1887 in Toronto, Canada. Gottschalk’s over 50 Broadway appearances included roles in classics (including Shakespeare), comedy, dramas, and revivals, including The Climbers (1901), A Modern Magdalen (1902), Widower’s Houses (1907), My Wife (1907), Strife (1909), Vanity Fair (1911), The Truth (1914), You and I (1923), and In a Garden (1925). He also directed the Broadway productions The Primrose Path (1907) and Such Is Life (1916), wrote plays, and acted in over 75 movies, including Zaza (1923), Grand Hotel* (1932), The Sign of the Cross (1932), Berkeley Square (1933), and Les Misérables (1935).
David Belasco collaborated with Pauline Phelps and Marion Short on this four-act vehicle for David Warfield. A Grand Army Man opened on 16 October 1907 for 149 performances at the Stuyvesant Theatre, with Warfield as Bigelow, a veteran of the Civil War, raising Robert, son of a fallen fellow soldier. Robert falls under the influence of some nefarious friends and is jailed for unwisely giving to one of them the money entrusted to him. With Bigelow’s support, Robert is cleared and marries Hallie (played by Antoinette Perry), daughter of the judge who passed sentence on Robert. Jane Cowl was featured in a small role in the production.
William Vaughn Moody’s three-act drama opened at the Princess Theatre on 3 October 1906 for 238 performances, winning acclaim as one of the greatest plays of its time, due in part to its uncommon realism and the complexity of its human drama, as well as its more sensational aspects. Ruth Jordan, who has moved to Arizona to escape the stifling conventions of her New England hometown and to assist in one of her brother’s business ventures, is not afraid when left alone at the cabin one night, for she is attuned to the “sublime abstraction” of the American west. Three men come to rape her, but she appeals to one of them, Stephen Ghent, to buy off his compatriots, and in return, she will marry him. Ghent is successful in business and treats her well, but Ruth cannot forgive his original intentions, and earning enough money on her own, she returns to her puritanical New England family. Ghent secretly follows her. Ruth learns that he has saved her brother’s business. She defies her upbringing to return with Ghent across the great divide of the United States and their vast cultural differences. Moody claimed that the play was based on a true incident.
Originally titled The Sabine Woman, the play premiered in Chicago, starring Margaret Anglin. Moody revised it for the New York production, also starring Anglin with Henry Miller. Scene design was by Homer Emens and Edward G. Unitt. The original production toured the United States and Europe with its stars, generating considerable publicity. Hailed as the greatest American play to date for its depiction of the division between shifting urban civilization and the wild, untamed passions of the West, The Great Divide was revived on Broadway in 1907 and 1917 and made into three movies (1915, 1925, 1929). Comedian Lew Fields produced a burlesque parody called The Great Decide, which played for 56 performances in 1906. See also FRONTIER DRAMA.
Eugene O’Neill’s expressionist play, which opened at the Greenwich Village Theatre on 23 January 1926, ran for 271 performances despite the bafflement of some critics and audiences over O’Neill’s use of masks, which were employed to display the dual natures of his characters. Two young men, William A. Brown (played by William Harrigan) and Dion Anthony (played by Robert Keith), are the sons of business partners and wear masks that display appealing personas. A young woman, Margaret (played by Leona Hogarth), attracts the attention of both men, but she is drawn to Dion’s gentle, sensitive mask. He has rejected business to become an artist, but when they find themselves in a moment of passion, Dion removes his mask, revealing darker passions underneath. Margaret is appalled, and Dion dies in grief. She marries Brown after he takes up Dion’s sensitive mask, but he too dies as a result of denying his true persona, finding his only comfort with Cybel (played by Ann Shoemaker), a prostitute. Years after the deaths of both men, Margaret remains true to Dion’s idealistic mask. At the time, O’Neill considered The Great God Brown his finest work, but it had few revivals. Its first revival on Broadway was an unsuccessful 1959 production featuring Fritz Weaver.* A 1972 Phoenix Repertory* production, featuring John McMartin and John Glover, won approval from critics.
Fanny and Frederic Hatton wrote this comedy with Leo Ditrichstein as a vehicle for him. It opened on 10 November 1915 at the Longacre and ran for 245 performances. George M. Cohan and Sam H. Harris produced the play, which was directed by Sam Forrest. Ditrichstein played a philandering baritone. Part of the appeal of the play was the sense that it offered a glimpse behind the scenes of a great opera house. Movie versions appeared in 1920 and 1931.
See WORLD WAR I IN DRAMA.
As the clusters of New York theaters moved northward from Fourteenth Street in the 1880s, they reached Times Square in the mid-1890s just when the new electric street lighting began to be supplemented by electric signs. The Astor Hotel at 41st Street claimed to be the world’s “most electrified hotel.” Illuminated theater marquees added to the nighttime illumination that around 1900 gave Broadway between 37th and 42nd Streets the epithet “Great White Way” or “the Rialto.”
Paul Eliot Green was born in Lillinton, North Carolina, and wrote many one-act plays beginning during his schooling at the University of North Carolina, where he studied with Frederick H. Koch, and at Cornell University. His one-act The No ’Count Boy (1925) exemplifies the many folk dramas he wrote. In 1926, Green’s drama of racial conflict in the South, In Abraham’s Bosom, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, although it had already closed. Green’s leftist politics, often evident in his plays, frequently focused on racial inequities. From the mid-1920s to World War II, he wrote several critically applauded works, including The Field God (1927), The House of Connelly* (1931), Roll, Sweet Chariot (1934), Hymn to the Rising Sun (1936), the libretto and lyrics for the antiwar musical Johnny Johnson (1936, with music by Kurt Weill), and a collaboration with Richard Wright* on a stage adaptation of Wright’s Native Son* (1941). In 1937, Green wrote the first outdoor drama* (or symphonic drama), The Lost Colony, set on Roanoke Island, North Carolina. Green also taught drama at the University of North Carolina.
Clay Meredith Green was, according to his Variety obituary, the first American born in San Francisco. He presided as Shepherd of the Lambs Club for 12 years before returning to San Francisco, where he was the oldest member of the Bohemian Club. Among his 80 or so plays and musical librettos were such successes as M’liss† (1878, based upon a Bret Harte story), Forgiven (1886), Bluebeard, Jr. (1889), Under the Polar Star (1896), A Man from the West (1900), and The Silver Slipper (1902).
Born in Dixfield, Maine, as Mace Eustace Greenleaf, this actor established his career in stock during the 1890s, appearing in The Prisoner of Zenda and Rupert of Hentzau. On Broadway, he acted in two hits, Trelawny of the “Wells” (1898) and The Pride of Jennico (1900), and played the Prince of Wales in the unsuccessful play Edmund Burke (1905). Greenleaf began working in movies in 1911 and made 18 shorts before his early death from pneumonia the following year.
Born in Sandwich, England, as Sidney Hughes Greenstreet, he worked in Ceylon as a tea planter and, later, in a brewery before taking acting lessons. He appeared with Ben Greet’s Shakespeare company and made his Broadway debut in 1905. This rotund character actor did not appear in his first movie role until 1941 at the age of 62 in the film noir classic The Maltese Falcon, garnering a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nomination and becoming one of the most memorable screen icons of the 1940s, but he had a long stage career prior to his screen achievement. On Broadway, Greenstreet acted in all manner of plays, from classics including Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in 1907, As You Like It in 1914 with Margaret Anglin, The Merry Wives of Windsor in 1916, and The Taming of the Shrew in 1935; Ben Jonson’s Volpone in 1930; Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan in 1914; and Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull in 1938. Greenstreet’s other two dozen film roles include his memorable turn as Ferrari in Casablanca (1942), Between Two Worlds (1944), Passage to Marseilles (1944), The Hucksters (1947), and Flamingo Road (1949). Greenstreet worked on radio, playing detective Nero Wolfe, but illness forced him to retire in 1949.
A native of San Francisco, born Katherine Best, she began her career with Augustin Daly’s company and made her first New York appearance in The Golden Widow. Grey scored a great success in 1893 in James A. Herne’s Shore Acres, leading to touring with Richard Mansfield in Arms and the Man and A Parisian Romance in 1901; she also worked for Charles Frohman. She had a long career on Broadway, including in such plays as The Great Diamond Robbery (1895), A Southern Romance (1897), The Royal Box (1898), The Last Appeal (1902), The Ninety and Nine (1902), The Reckoning (1907), and The Rule of Three (1914). In 1921, Grey appeared in two of Eugene O’Neill’s plays, Gold and The Straw, but both were failures. Grey later appeared in The Goose Hangs High (1924), Stronger Than Love (1925), A Hundred Years Old (1929) with Otis Skinner, Behind Red Lights (1937), and her last role, Delicate Story (1940). Grey also toured Australia for two years for producer J. E. Williamson.
Born in Seven Oaks, England, Harry Wagstaff Gribble attended Cambridge University. His interest in theater met with discouragement from his family, but he left Cambridge to join a Liverpool theater company, after which he toured Africa before moving to New York in 1914. In America, Gribble toured with Mrs. Patrick Campbell in productions of Pygmalion and The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. When the United States entered World War I, Gribble joined the U.S. Army, for whom he directed a soldier show, You Know Me All (1918), which brought in $50,000 in just four weeks of performances. As both director and writer, Gribble demonstrated diversity. On Broadway, he directed Artists and Models (1923, 1924, 1925), Cynara (1931), No More Ladies (1934), a 1935 revival of The Taming of the Shrew starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Johnny Belinda (1940), and the groundbreaking all-black Anna Lucasta* (1944), as well as its 1947 revival. Gribble’s playwriting work included The Outrageous Mrs. Palmer (1920), March Hares (1921), Topics of 1923 (1923), Oh Mama (1925), Mister Romeo (1927), Revolt (1928), The Royal Virgin (1930), Meet My Sister (1930), Old Man Murphy (1931), and The Perfumed Lady (1934). Gribble also wrote screenplays for a few movies, including A Bill of Divorcement (1932), Our Betters (1933), Nana (1934), and Stella Dallas (1937).
Not to be confused with her great-aunt Angelina Grimké Weld (1805–1879) after whom she was named, the playwright was born in Boston to legally married interracial parents. Like her abolitionist namesake, Grimké used her literary talent to call attention to injustices suffered by African Americans. Her play Rachel was staged by the Nathaniel Guy Players at Myrtill Miner Normal School in Washington, D.C., in 1916; at New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse in 1917; and by numerous amateur groups after its publication in 1920. In response to lynchings of black males, the tragic heroine Rachel, who loves children and has longed for motherhood, sends away the man she loves after she solemnly vows never to bring a black child into this world.
The actor, manager, producer, and playwright Joseph Rhode Grismer was born in Albany, New York. He was a leading man at the Grand Opera House and the Baldwin Stock Company. On Broadway, he produced such notable plays as Siberia (1905), The Man of the Hour (1906), and A Gentleman from Mississippi (1908). His plays were collaborations that involved “doctoring” the author’s script, notably Way Down East (1898) by Lottie Blair Parker. He was a two-term Shepherd of the Lambs Club. He died as a result of a streetcar accident.
Born in Paris, France, Ernest M. Gros had come to New York by the 1890s. He flourished during the 1890s through the 1920s and designed scenery for nearly 200 productions, including many for David Belasco. His work exemplified Belasco’s exacting standards of realism, as in The Music Master (1904), The Governor’s Lady (1908), and The Easiest Way (1909).
Born Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan in Waco, Texas, the vivacious red-haired “Tex” was a celebrity personality who had performed in vaudeville, as a chorus girl, and as a silent movie cowgirl before finding her calling in the 1920s as a New York speakeasy hostess. She knew everyone in show business from Al Jolson to Thornton Wilder* and famously greeted everyone “Hello, sucker!” Her fame was such that Guinan appeared as herself in two Broadway musical revues†—Gay Paree (1925) and Padlocks of 1927—as well as in a character based on her in the 1933 film Broadway Thru a Keyhole.
The Texas-born “cowboy composer” David Guion interspersed his serious career in music with stints in New York theater. As star of Prairie Echoes (1930) at the Roxy Theatre, he popularized his arrangement of “Home on the Range,” making it the well-known folk song it is today.
Born in Liverpool, England, and educated in California, Archibald Clavering Gunter discovered a facility for writing plays and novels. His first New York production, Two Nights in Rome (1880), had a complicated plot interspersed with exciting incidents. Noteworthy among his dozen or so produced plays were Fresh, the American (1881), which starred John T. Raymond, and Prince Karl (1886), a popular success for Richard Mansfield.
Maxwell Anderson wrote this three-act drama in 1927, which opened at the Klaw Theatre on 14 January 1929 for 64 performances under the direction of George Cukor. An attractive young wife, Ellen (played by Claiborne Foster), is seemingly a perfect spouse with an adoring though innocuous husband. Her office job helps pay housekeeping costs, and she is a skilled homemaker. Ellen, however, seems unable to resist cheating on her husband, possibly an inherited trait from her mother, who is depicted as unrepentant in her voracious sexual activity. Ellen has an abortion from fear that her child, if female, would also take numerous lovers. Ellen feels there is “no way out except dying,” and, alone, she sets the scene for her suicide by turning on the gas. However, before she loses consciousness, she opens the window in order to answer a phone call from a lover. Critics made comparisons with Zona Gale’s Miss Lulu Bett and Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal, but felt Anderson had failed to make a good idea effective. After Broadway, the play moved to the Flatbush Theatre in Brooklyn, New York.