During the first two decades of the 20th century, the public taste for secular spectacles merging text, dance, music, and theatrical artifice led to a proliferation of pageants across the United States. These community celebrations might commemorate historical events, indulge in mythology, or air social concerns. They were performed by largely amateur casts (usually numbering in the dozens, but occasionally in the thousands) in outdoor settings (often site-specific or otherwise appropriate spaces for the events depicted), which might include little theaters, the courtyards in front of public buildings, stadiums, or academic facilities. The creators, whose budgets varied considerably, were often aspiring playwrights and directors, drawing upon the Progressive era’s reformist spirit.
Pageantry came to the fore just as the earliest academic theater programs developed at Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia University, the University of North Carolina, Carnegie Institute of Technology, and the University of North Dakota. Among faculty members with an abiding interest in pageants were George Pierce Baker, Frederick H. Koch Sr., and Thomas Wood Stevens. Stevens, for example, worked closely with Kenneth Sawyer Goodman to coscript and stage several pageants in Chicago. Before moving to Carnegie Tech, Stevens also managed the Goodman Theatre and School (named for his deceased collaborator in the 1920s).
Another influence on pageants was Percy MacKaye, who lectured and wrote about pageantry as a reflection of democracy in an evolving community, seeing it as a means by which citizens expressed their concerns and celebrated their goals. His ideas on the subject were published in three books, The Playhouse and the Play (1909), The Civic Theatre (1912), and A Substitute for War (1915). MacKaye’s sister Hazel brought together the idea of pageantry and the interests of the women’s suffrage movement, as did Mary Porter Beagle who, with Jack Randall Crawford, coauthored Community Drama and Pageantry (1916), which stressed the importance of dance. In 1913, the American Pageant Association was established, and it published newsletters and served as a connecting link among those staging pageants. The association folded in 1921, after which pageants slowly disappeared from the dramatic landscape.
Eugene Walter’s astringent four-act melodrama opened on 25 February 1908 for 167 performances at the Astor Theatre. Despite some leavening farcical humor, this tale of Joseph Brooks, a self-centered and morally corrupt young man, played by Tully Marshall, was a grim portrait of selfishness. Brooks exploits Emma, his loving wife, insisting that she offer herself to the boss from whom he has embezzled funds. Too unpleasant for popular acceptance by a Broadway audience, even though the wife, finally realizing her husband’s vile nature, does leave him, Paid in Full was generally well received by critics. They especially appreciated Marshall’s performance, which he repeated in a 1914 movie version, with another screen adaptation appearing in 1919.
H. H. Frazee produced Edward Peple’s three-act farce at the Longacre Theatre, where it opened on 17 March 1914 for 207 performances. Originally titled The Party of the Second Part, Peple’s play focuses on two partners in the Eureka Digestive Pill Company who cannot get along. The main friction stems from the two men quarreling over which of them is responsible for the success of a purple pill that supports the company. To settle the problem, their lawyer suggests the men play a poker hand, with the loser required to serve as the other’s butler for a year. George Parsons and Hale Hamilton played the partners, with Maude Eburne as Coddles, the English maid. Some critics complained of a lack of subtlety, but audiences flocked to the play in its original run, in a move to the Majestic Theatre in Brooklyn and back to Manhattan’s Standard Theatre, and on tour. The play was performed in England and Australia and won further audiences in a 1918 silent movie in which Eburne repeated her Broadway role costarring with Taylor Holmes. A musical adaptation, Queen High (1926), scored a hit on Broadway, a success repeated in the movies in an early “talkie” adaptation.
Situated at 1564 Broadway near the intersection of West 47th Street, the Palace Theatre, designed by Milwaukee theater architects Kirchoff & Rose and bankrolled by producer Martin Beck, opened its doors in March 1913 and quickly became a landmark for vaudeville, despite more than 1,500 vaudeville houses in the United States during the peak of the variety stage. Playing the Palace for any act meant having achieved the pinnacle of fame. Comedian Ed Wynn headlined the first bill, but the diversity of the bill, which included everything from animal acts and acrobats to singers and great dramatic actors who performed in one-act plays, including Ethel Barrymore, proved to be the true attraction for audiences. A little of the best of everything was established in the Palace’s first year. Greats from all walks of show business appeared at the Palace, from Sarah Bernhardt to Enrico Caruso, all sharing the stage with novelty acts and entertainers of every stripe. Movie stars also made personal appearances there to promote their films. Palace headliners included Nora Bayes, Will Rogers, Lillian Russell, Bert Williams, Marie Dressler, the Marx Brothers, Fanny Brice, Trixie Friganza, Weber and Fields, Ethel Waters,* Clark and McCullough, Mae West, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Eddie Cantor, and countless others. The performing structure was what became known as the “two-a-day,” with the bill repeated twice daily.
By 1932, vaudeville virtually disappeared overnight in the wake of the Great Depression and the popularity of sound films; ironically, the theater became a cinema, remaining so until 1949. That year, the management of the Palace attempted to revive vaudeville with live acts appearing in tandem with a feature film. In 1951, Judy Garland headlined a vaudeville bill in the old two-a-day format initially scheduled for four weeks. She scored such a success that the bill continued for a record-breaking 19 weeks. She returned twice (1956, 1967), and, despite drawing sell-out audiences, a true revival two-a-day vaudeville was unsustainable. From the 1960s, the Palace became home to a long series of Broadway musicals continuing to the present. Countless film musicals set in the heyday of vaudeville depict the Palace as the ultimate goal of all entertainers.
Connecticut-born Albert Marshman Palmer studied law at New York University but chose to pursue political opportunity through a friendship with New York’s Internal Revenue collector Sheridan Shook,† who ultimately made Palmer manager of the Union Square Theatre, where he produced Rose Michel (1870) and The Two Orphans† (1874). The theater failed at presenting vaudeville, so Palmer established a repertory company to rival those of Lester Wallack and Augustin Daly. The company scored successes with several new plays, but a falling-out with Shook led Palmer to take over the Madison Square Theatre, where he built a reputation for high-quality productions of both American and European plays, the most successful of which were Anselma (1885), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1887), Partners (1888), Beau Brummell (1890), Alabama (1891), Lady Windermere’s Fan (1893), New Blood (1894), Trilby (1895), and His Absent Boy (1896). Palmer served as president of the Actors’ Fund of America from 1885 to 1897. During his years of declining health, he worked as Richard Mansfield’s manager and also managed Charles Frohman’s Herald Square Theatre.
Born in Newark, New Jersey, Franklin Pangborn began his stage career as a supernumerary in productions with Mildred Holland in 1904 and continued working with her for over a decade, appearing in a range of small and large roles with her and in vaudeville. On tour with Holland, he acted in David Harum in 1907 and appeared with her in vaudeville in 1911. Pangborn’s Broadway appearances included a run of Holland’s repertory in 1911–1912, including the plays The Triumph of an Empress, The Lily and the Prince, Camille, and The Marionettes. He also appeared in a Klaw & Erlanger revival of Ben-Hur in 1911–1912. In 1913, he acted with James O’Neill in Louis N. Parker’s Joseph and His Brethren and appeared in numerous silent movies, many for comedy director Mack Sennett. During World War I, Pangborn was seriously injured at the Battle of Argonne, and he returned to his stage career following the war. He made his final Broadway appearance with Francine Larrimore and Clifton Webb in Parasites (1924) prior to returning to films, becoming a beloved character actor, usually in effeminate roles in comedies, in a score of classic films such as My Man Godfrey (1936), Stage Door* (1937), Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938), The Bank Dick (1940), Sullivan’s Travels (1941), Now, Voyager (1942), The Palm Beach Story (1942), Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), and, later, in television as well as movies until his death, shortly after an appearance on Red Skelton’s TV show.
Although panoramas cannot be called a form of theater, they had an important impact on scene design for both the legitimate and musical stage, and they were marketed to the public, along with live theater and dime museums, under the category of amusements. After paying admission, a patron would climb a spiral staircase to a viewing platform from which one could contemplate an encircling painted vista of a city or a battlefield, with three-dimensional elements in the foreground. Panoramas were novelties in Europe around 1800 but enjoyed worldwide popularity by the 1880s. Kansas City, for example, had two panoramas in operation in 1887, each showing a Civil War battle scene. A mid-19th-century variation was the moving panorama; this involved scrolling across the stage a huge canvas depicting the changes of scenery over a vast distance. When actors or horse-drawn chariots (as in Ben-Hur) moved in the opposite direction on a treadmill in front of the unspooling canvas, the illusion of a journey was created.
This name was given to an actor or an entire act featuring stereotypical homosexual elements. Especially popular in the 1920s, “pansies” were actors specializing in playing outrageously exaggerated effeminate personas. More likely to be seen in nightclubs or vaudeville than on Broadway, such actors ultimately found their way to movies portraying “sissies,” creating a screen character type otherwise not specifically named as gay.
Produced by F. C. Whitney, this wickedly delicious little three-act “amorality play” by Zoë Akins was published in 1913, staged in Los Angeles in 1916, and professionally mounted in New York in 1919. Opening on 10 April 1919 at the Little Theatre, it ran for 12 performances. English character actor John L. Shine played the charmingly effete title character.
Philip Barry’s three-act comedy premiered at the Music Box Theatre on 27 December 1927 for 234 performances under the direction of Arthur Hopkins and with scene designs by Robert Edmond Jones. After six years of what she believes has been a model happy marriage, Mary Hutton (Madge Kennedy) learns that her husband, Jim (Donn Cook), has not always been faithful. Angry and intent on divorce, Mary recalls the advice of her father-in-law (Gilbert Emery) not to let meaningless infidelities damage their marriage as his had been. Facing the truth of her own flirtation with a young composer, which Jim has chosen to ignore, Mary heeds her father-in-law’s advice. The cast also featured Hope Williams in her Broadway debut. Praised by critics for its social commentary and wit, this early success for Barry was a prototype of his sophisticated comedy of manners style. A movie version of Paris Bound was released in 1929.
Dorothy Rothschild was born in West End, New Jersey, and, as Dorothy Parker, became a celebrated writer. As a critic, Parker wrote during the 1910s for Vogue and Vanity Fair before joining the staff of the New Yorker as book reviewer “Constant Reader” and, later, as drama critic. Parker’s sarcastic, witty condemnations of plays and actors are legendary, as when she described The House Beautiful (1931) as “the play lousy,” or when she wrote that Katharine Hepburn,* starring in The Lake (1934), ran the gamut of emotions “from A to B.” Parker wrote sketches for the musical revue† The 49ers (1922), contributed the lyrics for No, Sirree! (1922) and Shoot the Works (1931), and collaborated on two successful plays, Close Harmony; or, The Lady Next Door (1924, with Elmer Rice) and Ladies of the Corridor* (1953, with Arnaud D’Usseau). With D’Usseau, she also wrote the unproduced play The Ice Age (1955). She collaborated with Ross Evans on The Coast of Illyria (1949). One of Parker’s books, After Such Pleasures, was adapted to the stage by Edward F. Gardner in 1934. With her second husband, writer Alan Campbell, Parker wrote movie scripts (including A Star Is Born [1937]) and the play The Happiest Man (1939), which was never produced. Parker also contributed lyrics to the musical Candide (1956), wrote 20 screenplays and several collections of poetry, and is also remembered as founder and resident “wit” of the famed Algonquin Hotel Round Table, along with George S. Kaufman, Robert Benchley, Harold Ross, and James Thurber.*
Henry Taylor Parker was in Boston and dropped out of Harvard University because it then lacked courses in dramatic literature, instead working as a journalist. He became New York correspondent for the Boston Transcript from 1892 to 1898, and again from 1901 to 1903. Parker reviewed drama for the New York Commercial Advertiser (1898–1900) and the New York Globe (1903–1905). In 1905, Parker began a long tenure as resident drama critic for the Boston Transcript, signing his reviews H. T. P. Widely considered a perceptive and fair-minded critic, Parker gained a reputation as one of the most distinguished critics of his era.
A native of Oswego, New York, Lottie Blair Parker began her career acting opposite John McCullough, Mary Anderson, and Dion Boucicault before becoming a playwright of a dozen popular potboilers. Her plays include White Roses (1892), Under Southern Skies (1901), Lights of Home (1903), and The Redemption of David Corson (1906). Parker’s greatest success, Way Down East (1898), was a Broadway and touring hit revised by Joseph R. Grismer and produced by William A. Brady and Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. This popular melodrama was a major silent movie triumph directed by D. W. Griffith and starring Lillian Gish in 1920.
Born Louis Napoleon Parker in Calvados, France, he lived in England (and became a citizen there in 1914) following education at Freiburg and at the Royal Academy of Music. Influenced by Richard Wagner, he composed music, but diminished hearing led to a transition to writing and staging pageants. Ultimately, he began writing plays and adapting and translating works by others. Among his first important plays, Parker dramatized Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield and adapted Hermann Sudermann’s Magda as a vehicle for Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Parker’s Disraeli (1911), which starred George Arliss on Broadway and in movies (Arliss won an Academy Award for his performance), had the longest life on stages and won critical approval. Parker adapted and translated French and German plays, most notably Edmond Rostand’s L’aiglon (1900) and Chantecler (1911), both of which found appreciative audiences starring Maude Adams (he also translated Rostand’s The Lady of Dreams in 1912). One of Parker’s most enduring works is the one-act ghost play, The Monkey’s Paw (1907), long a favorite of amateur theaters.
Other Parker plays, original and translated, provided vehicles for Ethel Barrymore, James O’Neill, Helena Modjeska, Richard Mansfield, William Faversham, Henry Miller, James K. Hackett, E. H. Sothern, Olga Nethersole, Rose Eytinge, Margaret Anglin, Nat C. Goodwin, Otis Skinner, Arnold Daly, Margaret Wycherly, Jacob Ben-Ami, and others. These plays included The King of Peru (1895), Gudgeons (1895), Rosemary (1896, a collaboration with Murray Carson), The Mayflower (1897), Change Alley (1897), The Termagant (1899, with Carson), The Bugle Call (1900), The Cardinal (1902), The House of Burnside (1904), Love in Idleness (1905), Beauty and the Barge (1905), Pomander Walk (1910), The Lady of Coventry (1911), The Paper Chase (1912), Joseph and His Brethren (1913), and The Highway of Life (1914). Parker’s fluency in several languages provided him with ample opportunities translating and adapting European works. These translations include Ludwig Fulda’s The Twin Sister (1902), Victorien Sardou’s The Sorceress (1904), Alfred Capus’s The Brighter Side (1905), Henri Lavedan’s The Duel (1906), Lavedan’s Sire (1911), and Meinhard and Rudolph Bernauer’s Johannes Kreisler (1922). In the early days of movies, a number of Parker’s plays were effectively adapted to the screen.
Born in New York and very likely raised in New Jersey, George A. Parkhurst trained for the stage under the guidance of Edwin Forrest.† For a time, he worked as a postman but ultimately returned to theater. He had a significant brush with history on 14 April 1865 when he was a member of Laura Keene’s† company performing Our American Cousin† at Ford’s Theatre† for President Abraham Lincoln.† Parkhurst was acquainted with John Wilkes Booth,† who, during the performance, assassinated Lincoln. During the 1880s, Parkhurst toured with Maggie Mitchell’s company, acting with her in Fanchon, the Cricket,† The Quick or the Dead, and most notably in the role of Hobbs in Little Lord Fauntleroy.
C. W. Bell and Mark Swan’s risqué three-act farce opened at the Republic Theatre on 24 December 1917 for 232 performances and was produced by A. H. Woods. Angelica Irving is titillated to think that her mild-mannered husband, Reggie, has been a ladies’ man prior to their marriage. Reggie, fearing she will be disappointed, writes love letters to himself from fictional “other women.” Chaos ensues, and Angelica is satisfied that her image of Reggie is what she hoped. Francine Larrimore and Sydney Shields were among the cast. A silent movie version appeared in 1920, and it was remade in 1931 as a “talkie” starring Buster Keaton.
Charles H. Hoyt’s three-act farce, which opened on 22 September 1884 for 16 performances at Tony Pastor’s Theatre, was little more than an excuse for interpolated songs and dances within the lighthearted plot of two small-time hustlers who convince Captain William Kidd that he is a medium. Working with Kidd’s daughter, ironically named Innocent, they hold séances while searching Kidd’s house for items to steal. In the play’s most memorable scene, one of the thieves is forced to hide in a drawer. The play became a popular touring attraction, and actor William F. Hoey interpolated the music hall song “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo”; Jennie Yeamans was also in the cast. A Parlor Match was revived in 1896 as a vehicle for Anna Held’s American stage debut, with Hoey also in the cast.
The parquette section of seating on the main floor of the opera house was behind the orchestra chairs. With the balcony over them and standing room behind them, these seats were often slightly less expensive than the orchestra and yet they were prized for the prestige of their proximity to the best seats.
Augustin Daly’s five-act comedy with music, adapted from the German comedy Krieg im Frieden, opened at his theater on 10 November 1881 for 103 performances. This genial, innocuous play depicts the Excelsior Regiment of the National Guard stationed at New York’s Narragansett Pier where romantic entanglements ensue, including between characters acted by John Drew and Ada Rehan.
Antonio Pastor was born in New York and began performing as a child on the temperance circuit and as a child prodigy at P. T. Barnum’s† Museum in 1846. He also worked in minstrel shows and as a circus entertainer. Pastor opened his first theater in New York in 1865 with the goal of making the vaudeville stage family friendly. In 1881, Pastor built a large theater on Fourteenth Street as a home to what he billed as vaudeville, a field in which he became known as a premier producer. Pastor served as a participating master of ceremonies and was a significant force in nurturing performers, including George M. Cohan, Emma Carus, Maggie Cline, Nat C. Goodwin, Lillian Russell, and Weber and Fields.
Opening on 23 December 1925 at the Booth Theatre, the three-act domestic comedy by Barry Conners ran for 245 performances and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. The title refers to the henpecked husband whose wife and elder daughter make his life miserable. They are also cruel to the Cinderella-like younger daughter, Patricia, but she remains generous and decent, ultimately to win from her sister the man she truly loves. Her father finally learns to stand up to his wife, after which he comes into a happy-ending bundle of money. Marion Davies and Marie Dressler appeared in a 1928 movie adaptation.
The journalist and critic Ada Patterson flourished in the 1900s and 1910s, first as a reporter often assigned to cover murder trials. As one of the four women assigned to Harry K. Thaw’s trial, she earned a place as one of the original so-called sob sisters. During the 1910s, she turned increasingly to writing on theater for the Green Book, Green Book Album, and the Theatre. With Robert Edeson she wrote a play, Love’s Lightning (1918). She was drama critic for the New York American for 10 years before her retirement in 1924. See also THEATRE MAGAZINE.
This familiar character actress of movies and television was born in Savannah, Tennessee, daughter of a Confederate soldier. While in college in Tennessee, Patterson acted in plays. To discourage her involvement with theater, Patterson’s parents sent her to Europe, but upon her return, she went to work with repertory companies in Chicago and elsewhere. Called “Patty” by her peers, she debuted on Broadway beginning with a revival of the 15th-century morality play Everyman in 1913. Patterson’s most notable roles came in the first productions of Eugene O’Neill’s In the Zone (1917) and Rope (1928), as well as The Intimate Strangers (1921), Magnolia (1923), Lazybones (1924), The Marriage Bed (1929), Solid South (1930), Her Master’s Voice* (1933), and others. In films from 1926, Patterson played a range of sweet old ladies and spinster aunts in So Big! (1932), Love Me Tonight (1932), A Bill of Divorcement (1932), Dinner at Eight* (1933), Tobacco Road* (1941), Lady on a Train (1945), Little Women (1949), and on numerous television shows, including as a regular playing Mrs. Trumbull on the I Love Lucy series, working into her mid-80s.
Steele MacKaye’s five-act melodrama of the French Revolution opened on 24 December 1887 at the Standard Theatre for approximately 100 performances. Paul Kauvar behaved heroically during the French Revolution but, by 1794, is horrified by the rampant violence and intrigue under Robespierre. Paul helps the Duc de Beaumont and his daughter Diane to hide from the terror, but he is recaptured and nobly takes the guise of a royalist general in order to save him. Before Paul can be executed, he is reunited with Diane and learns that Robespierre is dead and that the Reign of Terror has ended.
The distinguished theater manager and director B. Iden Payne emigrated from England to the United States in 1913 to manage little theaters in Philadelphia and Chicago, with occasional Broadway productions, including the first stagings of Langdon Mitchell’s Major Pendennis and John Galsworthy’s Justice, starring John Barrymore, both in 1916. His final ventures, Embezzled Heaven (1944)—a rare failure for Ethel Barrymore—and The Winter’s Tale (1946), were not well received, but Payne spent most of his career (1919–1934) as professor of drama at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, followed by other academic jobs.
Despite his semi-serious billing as “The World’s Best Bad Actor,” Centreville, Iowa, native Corse Payton managed his own successful theater in Brooklyn, New York, for two decades after long stints touring the western half of the United States with his family. The secret to his success was a stock company of bright young talents, including Fay Bainter, Richard Bennett, Dorothy Gish and Lillian Gish, and Ernest Truex, and keeping ticket prices between a dime and 30 cents.
Born in New York, the lifelong poet Josephine Preston Peabody attended Radcliffe and, after studying with William Vaughn Moody, turned to playwriting. Her major success, The Piper (1911), was, like all of her dramatic works, written in blank verse with romantic settings. Other Peabody plays, often produced by little theaters, include The Wayfarers (1898), Marlowe (1901), The Wolf of Gubbio (1913), and Portrait of Mrs. W. (1922).
This derogatory reference to the cheapest seats at the highest level of the theater continued in use long after the practice of munching peanuts during the performance had been banned. See also GALLERY.
Based on George Peck’s “Bad Boy” sketches, first published in the Milwaukee Sun and later collected and published as Peck’s Bad Boy and His Pa (1883), Charles Pidgin’s stage adaptation opened on 10 March 1884 at Haverly’s New York Comedy Theatre for 40 performances, although it became a durable touring vehicle that later launched George M. Cohan (in an 1891 production with the Four Cohans, his parents and sister), among others, to stardom. Peck’s Bad Boy lacks a distinct plot but focuses on Henry Peck, a boldly mischievous Milwaukee youngster who, along with his cohort Jimmy, wreaks community havoc. Never repentant when caught, the character of the “bad boy” became a prototype for similar figures on stage, in movies (first in a 1921 silent version with Jackie Coogan), and television, including his logical descendant, “Dennis the Menace.”
J. Hartley Manners, author of this sentimental, charming comedy, created a perennial vehicle for his wife, Laurette Taylor, who became one of the most beloved stage stars of the time in the title role. The bankrupt Chichesters are offered a financial reprieve if they will look after their orphaned cousin, teenager Peg, who arrives at the Chichester estate in time to catch her cousin Ethel in a secret tryst with Brant, a scheming philanderer. The snobby Chichesters look down on waiflike Peg, whose unfashionable clothes and beloved mutt appall them. Peg befriends a neighbor, Jerry, and manages to rescue Ethel from eloping with the nefarious Brant. When Jerry reveals himself as Peg’s wealthy guardian, she wins approval from the Chichesters, her own riches, and Jerry’s heart. Opening at the Cort Theatre on 20 December 1912, Manners’s play and Taylor’s touching performance won acclaim from critics and audiences, leading to an impressive 603 performances. Multiple tours, frequently with Taylor in the lead, popularized the play, and a 1921 revival, starring Taylor, was as successful as the original production. Movie versions appeared in 1919, 1922 (starring Taylor), and 1933. Tin Pan Alley songwriters Alfred Bryan and Fred Fisher wrote a song using the play’s title (and emblazoning a photo of Taylor in costume on the cover), and it became an enduring hit song. Manners wrote the book for a failed 1924 musical version titled Peg o’ My Dreams, but its quick demise did nothing to undermine the enduring popularity of Peg o’ My Heart.
Chicago’s Pekin Theatre was the first in that city, and among the first in the United States, to feature African American actors. The theater stood at 27th and State Streets and was often referred to as the Temple of Music. The space opened in June 1905 through the efforts of a professional gambler, Robert T. Motts, who converted his hotel and barroom into the theater. In operating the company, those working in management met with hostility and skepticism about the ability of blacks to do anything other than minstrel shows. A fire early on led Motts to renovate, and the theater size grew from 400 to 1,200 seats. Within short order, the Pekin had its own stock company to produce everything from vaudeville to musical comedy, and among the most celebrated black artists worked there. The musical The Man from ’Bam in 1906 drew significant attention to the company and as it found its footing, the company’s all-black staff grew and was advertised as “the only theatre in America playing colored artists exclusively.” Some actors, including Charles Gilpin, gained experience at the Pekin. An attempt by Motts to diversify by operating another theater space led to financial difficulties that closed the Pekin in 1911, unfortunately at a high point when an estimated 53 theaters owned and operated by African Americans were operating in the United States.
Born in Leavenworth, Kansas, Brock Pemberton attended the University of Kansas, after which he pursued a journalistic career, serving as drama editor for the New York Mail and the New York World. In 1917, he took a position as assistant to producer Arthur Hopkins before branching out on his own to produce Enter Madame and The Tavern, both in 1920. He continued producing a diverse array of American and European plays with considerable success until shortly before his death, including Miss Lulu Bett (1920), Six Characters in Search of an Author (1922 and 1924), The Mask and the Face (1924), Mr. Pitt (1924), Loose Ankles (1926), The Ladder (1926), Strictly Dishonorable (1929), Personal Appearance* (1934), Ceiling Zero (1935), Kiss the Boys Good-bye* (1938), Lady in Waiting (1940), Janie* (1942), and Harvey* (1944). He mentored Antoinette Perry and helped launch her directing career. Pemberton makes a brief appearance as himself in the movie Stage Door Canteen.
Born Edward Henry Peple in Richmond, Virginia, he was a railroad man before becoming a playwright. He scored major hits with two plays, The Prince Chap (1905) and A Pair of Sixes (1914), both of which had Broadway runs and further success on tour. Peple’s The Littlest Rebel (1911) was later adapted into the popular 1935 Shirley Temple movie of the same name. His libretto and lyrics for the 1912 musical The Charity Girl caused a scandal when it was closed by New York police because of objectionable lyrics in the song “I’d Rather Be a Chippie than a Charity Bum.” His other plays include The Love Route (1906), The Silver Girl (1907), The Call of the Cricket (1910), The Spitfire (1910), and Friend Martha (1917).
This optical illusion used plate glass and mirrors to create the visual effect of figures magically floating. According to William A. Brady in his memoir Showman, “the actors, down in a pit beneath the stage, had to go through their gestures lying on their sides against a surface slanted at an angle of forty-five degrees.” The audience would see the reflected image as an apparition on the stage.
A native of West Newton, Massachusetts, Osgood Perkins graduated from Harvard University in 1914, where he studied with George Pierce Baker. He served in World War I and acted in silent movies, forming the Film Guild. Perkins made his Broadway debut in a supporting role in George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly’s Beggar on Horseback (1924), followed by Lynn Starling’s Weak Sister (1925). His greatest stage success came as the cynical newspaper editor Walter Burns in The Front Page (1928), which amply demonstrated Perkins’s versatility in moving easily from comedy to drama. He subsequently appeared in a variety of innocuous plays, including The Masque of Venice (1926), Pomeroy’s Past (1926), Loose Ankles (1926), Say It with Flowers (1926), Spread Eagle (1927), Women Go on Forever (1927), and Salvation (1928). After 1930, Perkins was well received as Astrov in a revival of Uncle Vanya (1930); he also acted in Point Valaine (1935), Ceiling Zero (1935), and End of Summer* (1936), among others. Perkins also acted in several films, including Scarface (1931), and was the father of actor Anthony Perkins.*
Born in Denver, Colorado, Antoinette Perry made her acting debut at age 17 in 1905, appearing in Lady Jim (1906) and A Grand Army Man (1907) before marrying wealthy businessman Frank Freauff in 1909. She retired until his death in 1924, after which she returned to the stage under producer Brock Pemberton’s guidance, acting in Mr. Pitt (1924), Minick (1924), The Ladder (1926), and Electra (1927). She became Pemberton’s assistant and directed plays under his aegis, including Strictly Dishonorable (1929), Personal Appearance* (1934), and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Harvey* in 1944. Beginning in the 1930s, Perry actively involved herself in theatrical service organizations. In collaboration with Jane Cowl and Rachel Crothers, Perry established the American Theatre Wing* and the Stage Door Canteen* during World War II. Her service work led to the annual Antoinette Perry Awards, nicknamed the “Tony Awards,”* which were named for her in 1947, the year after her death.
His first Broadway appearance came when he stepped in as a replacement in Ben-Hur (1899), playing Arrius. He also played the Prince of Arragon in The Merchant of Venice starring Nat C. Goodwin in 1901. Perry’s other credits included Du Barry (1901), a 1904 revival of The Two Orphans,† Monna Vanna (1905), The Man of the Hour (1906), Mother (1910), The High Road (1912), On Trial (1914), The Song and Dance Man (1923), Stronger Than Love (1925), The Half-Caste (1926), Saturday’s Children (1927), Midnight (1930), and Her Master’s Voice* (1933). He also directed The Mills of the Gods (1907) and appeared with Laurette Taylor in scenes from Shakespeare in 1918. Perry acted in six movies between 1915 and 1918, including a film version of Jim the Penman (1915).
British playwright J. M. Barrie’s fantasy about a boy who refuses to grow up has endured as one of the most beloved stage works on the American stage, revived, adapted, and an inspiration to new works borrowing its characters. Having premiered in London in January 1905, it opened in New York on 6 November 1905 starring Maude Adams, for whom Barrie had written the play. It ran for 223 performances, and Adams scored a major triumph in the breeches role of Peter, returning to New York in revivals in 1906, 1912, and 1915, and playing it on tour. Numerous revivals, tours, and musical and movie adaptations proliferated through the 20th century starring diverse Peters, including Marilyn Miller, Eva Le Gallienne, Jean Arthur, Mary Martin,* Sandy Duncan, and Cathy Rigby.
Charles Rollo Peters III was born in Paris but spent his early life in California as the son of painter Charles Rollo Peters. His theatrical career offered a rare combination—actor and scene designer—with successes in each area. Peters acted and designed for the Washington Square Players and provided settings for Minnie Maddern Fiske’s production of Madame Sand (1917) before becoming a founding member of the Theatre Guild, acting in and designing their first production, Jacinto Benavente’s The Bonds of Interest (1919). He also acted in the Theatre Guild’s production of St. John Ervine’s John Ferguson (1919) and played Romeo opposite Jane Cowl in a production of Romeo and Juliet he designed in 1923; he partnered with Cowl again in Antony and Cleopatra (1924). Peters also played significant roles in Trelawny of the “Wells” (1928), Diplomacy (1928), The Age of Innocence (1928), and The Rivals (1930); he also acted in and designed revivals of The Streets of New York† (1931) and The Pillars of Society (1931).
A native of Spring Garden, Wisconsin, Jennie Van Norman gave musical recitals when she was young, attended Northwestern University, and married a doctor. In 1900, Otis Skinner convinced her to pursue a career in theater. She gave her first performance in a small part in Skinner’s melodrama Prince Otto (1900). Her other Broadway appearances included Tom Moore (1901), The Ninety and Nine (1902), Personal (1903), The Earl of Pawtucket (1904), The Heir to Hoorah (1905), The Three of Us (1906), and The Great John Ganton (1909) starring Laurette Taylor. Peyton’s two final Broadway performances were in David Belasco’s hit production of William C. deMille’s The Woman (1912) and a flop with Eleanor Gates’s We Are Seven (1913).
Born in New London, Connecticut, Mary Philips was educated at St. Mary’s Academy in New Haven prior to beginning a theatrical career as a chorus girl in 1920, moving to ingénue roles. On Broadway, Philips acted in diverse genres, from musicals to serious drama, including most notably in The Wisdom Tooth (1926), a 1930 revival of George M. Cohan’s The Tavern, Maxwell Anderson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Both Your Houses* (1933), George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s* Merrily We Roll Along* (1934), and James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1936). For a time, Philips had an association with Cohan, also appearing in his Gambling (1929) and a 1930 revival of The Song and Dance Man. Her other Broadway credits include The Old Soak (1922), The House Beautiful (1931), and Chicken Every Sunday (1944). In musicals, Philips appeared in Poor Little Ritz Girl (1921), Big Boy (1925) starring Al Jolson, Anything Goes (1934), and The Show Is On (1936). She made 20 movies, including A Farewell to Arms (1932), Lady in the Dark (1944), Kiss and Tell* (1945), Leave Her to Heaven (1945), and Dear Ruth* (1947), as well as a few television appearances. Philips was married to Humphrey Bogart from 1928 to 1938, and she encouraged the young actor to take his career more seriously.
Born in Maysville, Kentucky, Montgomery Phister studied at Yale and became a newspaper critic almost exclusively for the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune. Phister’s reviews were widely admired, and although he had offers to move to New York newspapers, he chose to remain in Cincinnati.
Joseph Allen Physioc was born in Richmond, Virginia, but spent much of his youth in Columbia, South Carolina, before working as a scene designer in Alabama. On the scene painting staff of the Metropolitan Opera for a time (after a brief stint as an actor), Physioc collaborated with Henry E. Hoyt on designs for Raymond De Koven’s operetta Rob Roy. From the mid-1890s, he designed scenery for a series of important American plays including Richard Mansfield’s production of Richard III (1896), Beau Brummell (1900), The Climbers (1901), Resurrection (1903), Strongheart (1905), The Lion and the Mouse (1905), The Traveling Salesman (1908), Within the Law (1912), Peg o’ My Heart (1912), Lightnin’ (1918), Seventh Heaven (1922), and Dracula (1927). His work as a disciple of the painted realism of the late 19th century seemed old-fashioned by the 1920s when the New Stagecraft came to the fore.
Born in New York, Molly Picon grew up in Philadelphia where she and her mother sewed costumes for Yiddish theater actors. She made her debut in an English-language vaudeville act in 1904, although she spent much of her career on the Yiddish stage. Admired in the stock role of Schmendrick, Picon also demonstrated versatility in old and new Yiddish plays and musicals during her long career. She became one of the most beloved stars on Second Avenue, mixing an infectious gamin charm with a tomboyish feistiness. Often working with her husband, Jacob Kalich, Picon wrote and produced many of her vehicles; made occasional appearances on Broadway, in vaudeville (playing the fabled Palace Theatre in the 1920s), movies, radio, and television; and won rave reviews in the Jerry Herman Broadway musical Milk and Honey (1961).
Opening 1 September 1924 at the Little Theatre, this three-act comedy by Anne Morrison and Patterson McNutt ran an astonishing 347 performances. It found a continuing life with amateur groups, presumably on the basis of its midwestern setting and easy-to-cast roles for six men and four women. Junior’s (Wallace Ford) scheme to buy 250 sick pigs, cure them, and sell them at a profit leads to silly family complications before the plan succeeds. The cast also included Nydia Westman and Maude Granger.
Born in Poland, David Pinski began his playwriting life in Warsaw before immigrating to the United States in 1899, where he wrote most of his 38 plays for Yiddish theater companies. He demonstrated impressive versatility in style for works including the realistic tragedy Isaac Sheftl (1896) and two symbolic treatments of Jewish history, The Tsvi Family (1904) and The Eternal Jew (1906). His Yankl the Smith (1906), a drama about love and jealousy, was made into a 1938 movie, The Singing Blacksmith. Pinski’s greatest success, The Treasure (1910), was first directed by Max Reinhardt in German, then in Yiddish, after which it was produced in English in 1920 by the Theatre Guild with a cast including Celia Adler, Dudley Digges, and Henry Travers. A comedy about the role poverty plays in human greed, The Treasure is Pinski’s most enduring work. The Provincetown Players staged Pinski’s The Final Balance in 1928 at their New York theater, but it ran for only 28 performances.
Josephine Preston Peabody’s verse dramatization of the tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin opened at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, on 26 July 1910, having won the Stratford prize for the best play (among 315 submissions) with action set before 1800. Peabody, wife of an English-born Harvard University professor, had taken up the subject at the suggestion of actor Otis Skinner, who sought a legitimate play on the subject even as DeWolf Hopper was touring in the musical Pied Piper. Skinner was unavailable when she completed it, so she submitted The Piper to the English competition. The New York premiere, on 30 January 1911 at the New Theatre, was produced by Winthrop Ames with Edith Wynne Matthison. It was quickly published and widely translated, although the large number of children in the cast, including five child speaking roles, precluded frequent productions.
As long as copyright protection remained haphazard or loosely enforced, unscrupulous entrepreneurs helped themselves to creative work without crediting the original artist. This might involve borrowing a plot of a popular play and slightly altering the title to pass it off on provincial audiences as if it were the original Broadway show. Pirating might even extend to a performer stealing another actor’s routine or a technician’s copying a melodramatic sensation.
Born in New York, Augustus Pitou began his acting career in a small role in Edwin Booth’s Hamlet in 1867 and continued in Booth’s company for a few seasons. He was a member of the inaugural company at Kansas City’s Coates Opera House during the 1870–1871 season. Then he settled in New York to manage, at various times, Booth’s Theatre, the Fifth Avenue Theatre,† the Fourteenth Street Theatre, and the Grand Opera House. He also managed several stars, including Robert B. Mantell, Rose Coghlan, William J. Scanlan, and Chauncey Olcott, and he served as Olcott’s agent as well as producing and writing librettos for romantic musical dramas for the Irish tenor, including Sweet Inniscarra (1897), A Romance of Athlone (1899), Garrett O’Magh (1901), Old Limerick Town (1902), Terence (1904), Edmund Burke (1905), Eileen Asthore (1906), O’Neill of Derry (1907), Ragged Robin (1910), Barry of Ballymore (1911), and Macushla (1912). His 1914 memoir is titled Masters of the Show.
Brooklyn-born Annie Shea spent her youth in San Francisco in supporting roles to touring stars Joseph Jefferson in Rip Van Winkle and McKee Rankin in The Danites in the 1870s, taking her stepfather’s surname as her stage name. Pixley made her Eastern debut in Philadelphia in H.M.S. Pinafore, but she gained fame (and favorable comparisons with Lotta Crabtree) as an Irish soubrette in operettas and light comedies (with musical sequences) such as M’liss, the Child of Sorrow (1878), Zara (1873), Eily (1885), The Deacon’s Daughter (1887), and Kate (1890).
A native of Plattsburg, New York, Livingston Platt was a force in the triumph of European-inspired New Stagecraft through his work at Boston’s Toy Theatre following a period of art studies in Europe. For Margaret Anglin, Platt created scene designs and costumes for The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, and As You Like It, all in 1914. In these and most of his subsequent productions (for which he usually designed lighting as well), Platt created stylized settings resisting the realism typical prior to World War I. He demonstrated versatility in a wide range of plays, including East Is West (1918), Shakuntala (1919), Rain (1922), Daisy Mayme (1926), The Racket (1927), Behold the Bridegroom (1927), The First Mrs. Fraser (1929), Grand Hotel* (1930), Dinner at Eight* (1933), and The Pursuit of Happiness* (1933), after which an arrest on a morals charge ended his career.
The term refers to an individual (usually a playwright) who works over another writer’s script to make it viable for production or who steps in to observe rehearsals of another writer’s play to offer criticisms, usually at the behest of the producer or director. Seldom does the play doctor claim public credit for the changes, though they were often remunerated. Many established playwrights served at times as play doctors, including George M. Cohan, George Abbott, Harriet Ford, and Channing Pollock. It is widely believed that Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse* significantly rewrote Joseph Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace* (1941), transforming a mystery play into a long-running hit farce. Neil Simon,* one of the most successful comic writers of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, was nicknamed “Doc” Simon by friends and coworkers for his skills as a play doctor. See also HOPWOOD, AVERY (1884–1928).
Printer Frank Vance Strauss established a company to produce programs for New York theatrical productions in 1884. These programs were of the four-page variety typical of the period, but in 1911 Strauss created a longer format filled with articles and advertising, varying only in a unique cover for each play and the pertinent production information and credits. First called the Strauss Magazine Theatre Program, the name was simplified to Playbill in 1934 and the number of pages grew, mixing advertisements and short articles on various theater-related topics. With modest changes, this format continues to be employed by Broadway and off-Broadway* theaters, and it serves as a model for many regional repertory theaters and amateur and academic groups.
The prestigious club for theater people elected to membership has been headquartered since 1888 in a remodeled mansion at 16 Gramercy Park in New York City, which was also Edwin Booth’s last home. Incorporated earlier that year by Booth and 15 other stage professionals, the Players was intended to provide its members with a venue for civilized discourse while demonstrating to the world the refined qualities of actors and other artists. Booth and Lawrence Barrett contributed their personal libraries to form the collection housed there, augmented by a wealth of theatrical portraits and memorabilia. Booth’s third-floor bed–sitting room remains as it was the night he died there, with his slippers beside the bed.
Established in 1913 by actress Mary Shaw as a theatrical women’s organization with the main goal of promoting woman suffrage, the league membership included several stars, among them Margaret Anglin, Billie Burke, and Jane Cowl. Lotta Crabtree was vice president. Members gave curtain speeches in favor of a woman’s right to vote and dispensed literature and organized consciousness-raising activities. The league continued until women were enfranchised.
One of the standard clichés of American theater history is that no significant playwrights emerged prior to World War I, and that the appearance of Eugene O’Neill and his generation transformed Broadway drama after 1920 from a marketplace of frivolous entertainments to a center for drama of serious purpose. Though it may well be true that few dramatists of lasting international significance appeared in the 19th century, several generations of diverse and challenging playwrights filled American stages with intriguing dramas and comedies from the end of the American Revolution† to World War I, when O’Neill and his contemporaries established themselves.
In the first half of the 19th century, the outstanding literary figures of the age—Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson—generally avoided playwriting (though some tried their hand at it) perhaps because theater was considered an inferior form in intellectual circles. The problem was compounded by the fact that much serious drama was imported from Europe or, more significantly, was adapted from other sources by lesser writers or actor-managers. At mid-19th century, little had changed, although a few dramatists, particularly Dion Boucicault, demonstrated facility in a range of genres. The most celebrated play of the era, Uncle Tom’s Cabin,† was adapted from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel by George L. Aiken,† a little-known actor-manager. Aiken’s hack job aimed at exploiting the novel’s huge popularity. Many dramatists adapted popular fiction or were compelled to custom-tailor vehicles to showcase actors. Few could make a comfortable living as a playwright, which may account for the fact that many dramatists of the era also worked as actors or managers.
As the first tremors of modernism were felt in the 1870s, American dramatists tentatively broke away from the grip of melodrama to explore new European trends in drama, particularly the much-vaunted realism and, in general, the greater seriousness of purpose inherent in it. Bronson Howard, for example, scored a major success with The Henrietta (1887), an assault on corrupt Wall Street speculation, while other writers looked to the tragedies of the Civil War and its aftermath for subject matter. The emergence of the “new woman” brought realistic social problem plays by Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw to American stages, often inspiring considerable controversy. Actor-playwright James A. Herne modeled his 1890 drama Margaret Fleming on works along those lines by Ibsen. Controversy kept Herne’s play from public stages, but European developments would continue to inspire playwrights like William Vaughan Moody, Clyde Fitch, Edward Sheldon, and others in form and content after 1900.
The early deaths of Moody and Fitch may well have slowed the emergence of a more serious American drama, but by the 1910s, a new generation of dramatists appeared, many profoundly influenced by what became known as the New Stagecraft, which flourished alongside the Little Theater Movement. Typically, little theaters, which proliferated in most major American cities between 1910 and the mid-1920s, allowed playwrights, actors, directors, and scene designers to experiment in style and techniques, as well as to explore previously taboo subjects, often in one-act form and all without major commercial constraints. Many of the finest U.S. dramatists of the post–World War I era found their first opportunities through little theaters, with O’Neill the most exalted example.
After World War I, Broadway audiences and critics began to reject melodramatic and sentimental plays, instead lionizing the “serious” dramatist as exemplified by O’Neill, Elmer Rice, Maxwell Anderson, Robert E. Sherwood, and others, all of whom had their first important Broadway successes in the 1920s. These writers, and others following in their wake, experimented not only with the realistic form and socially conscious themes but also explored expressionism, symbolism, and other innovations emerging on European stages. Women playwrights asserted themselves in this era, with Susan Glaspell, Zoë Akins, and Sophie Treadwell leading the way. African American playwrights found some space in all-black little theaters like the Lafayette Players and made inroads into the mainstream, with the work of writers Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston establishing a beachhead.
While serious dramatists like O’Neill dominated the attention of critics, a generation of sophisticated comic dramatists also appeared, led by George S. Kaufman, S. N. Behrman, and others. Playwriting steadily evolved into a respected profession and even moderately successful dramatists could expect to make a living through Broadway productions, publication of their plays, and touring, stock, and amateur royalties. Many specialized in particular genres, while others demonstrated versatility writing dramas, comedies, and musicals. Some turned to directing and producing as well. In the 1920s, playwrights created organizations like the Dramatists Guild to protect their interests. These writers created a golden age of American drama on Broadway that stretched to the early 1960s.
After a brief run at the Bronx Opera House (17–22 September) and a week (commencing 24 September) at the Boulevard Theatre in Queens, Mae West’s provocative comedy-drama opened at the Biltmore Theatre on Broadway on 1 October 1928 and ran only two performances despite a heavy advance sale. Each performance was raided by police who took the cast to the police station; bail was provided for over 50 people in each instance. The play was deemed indecent and immoral because of its emphasis on sexuality with some homosexual implications. The action is set among vaudeville performers playing a midwestern engagement. The title character, a sexual predator, incurs the wrath of two men, whose wife and sister have been compromised by him, and he dies after being mutilated by one of them. The 14-day trial began on 13 March 1930 and resulted in the dismissal of all indictments. Although West reportedly lost $60,000, she deemed it good value in publicity. See also †*CENSORSHIP.
Among the most frequently anthologized African American one-act plays of the 1910s and 1920s, Plumes was written by Georgia Douglas Johnson and won first prize in the 1927 playwriting contest sponsored by the magazine Opportunity, which published it that year. Produced the following season by Harlem Experimental Theatre, the play focuses on a laundress whose 14-year-old daughter lies ill in the next room. The doctor says that an operation might save her, but the woman hesitates because if her daughter dies after she pays for the operation, there would be no money left for a proper funeral with plumes on the horses. While she ponders what to do, the daughter dies.
Born in Boston, Eben Plympton worked as a bookkeeper before migrating to California. He began acting in Stockton, California, in 1871, after which his robust masculinity and confidence won him a place in Lester Wallack’s company. A few years’ apprenticeship led to leading roles in Rose Michel (1875) and Our Boarding House (1878), and he won plaudits as Romeo in 1877. Plympton scored triumphs in Hazel Kirke (1880) and Esmeralda (1881), after which he starred opposite Mary Anderson and played Laertes to Edwin Booth’s Hamlet. Between 1894 and 1914, he appeared in a diverse range of plays, including Cotton King (1894), Gossip (1895), In the Palace of the King (1901), The Hunchback† (1902), Romeo and Juliet (1903), The Man from Blankley’s (1903), London Assurance (1905), The Duel (1906), Divorce† (1909), The Garden of Allah (1911), and Twelfth Night (1914).
When melodrama ruled the stage, “points” were the actor’s stock in trade. Playing for points was a way of underscoring certain lines, poses, or dramatic moments to get a reaction from the audience. Actors who knew how to perform that kind of flourish still trod the boards in the modernist era, but critic John Mason Brown noted that “‘points’ are more or less looked down on by the moderns.”
Born in Washington, Channing Pollock became drama critic for the Washington Post in 1898. Later he was press agent for William A. Brady (1900–1904) and for the Shuberts (1904–1906). During his long stint as drama critic for the Green Book (1905–1919), Pollock began writing plays. He was best known for his high-minded dramas of the 1920s: The Fool (1924), The Enemy (1925), and the expressionist drama Mr. Moneypenny (1928). Pollock’s other plays produced on Broadway include The Pit (1904), The Little Gray Lady (1906), Clothes (1906), In the Bishop’s Carriage (1907), The Secret Orchard (1907), Such a Little Queen (1909), The Red Widow (1911), My Best Girl (1912), Her Little Highness (1913), The Beauty Shop (1914), A Perfect Lady (1914), The Grass Widow (1917), The Crowded Hour (1918), Roads of Destiny (1918), The Sign on the Door (1919), and The House Beautiful (1931), of which critic Dorothy Parker wrote, “The House Beautiful is the play lousy.” He also contributed to the Ziegfeld Follies of 1911, 1915, and 1921. Pollock’s memoir Harvest of My Years (1943) conveys his readiness to speak out for a cause and captures his colorful career and many theatrical associations.
A three-act romance by Margaret Mayo (with unbilled collaboration from Winchell Smith), Polly of the Circus opened on 23 December 1907 at the Liberty Theatre for 160 performances. When circus entertainer Polly, played by Mabel Taliaferro, is injured in a fall during a small-town appearance, she is taken to recover in the home of the local minister, John Douglass (Malcolm Williams). They grow close, but Polly is conscious of her low status as a circus performer and leaves. John follows and convinces her to marry him. The circus scenes were impressive, and the romantic plot left its audience satisfied. The play was made into a movie twice, in 1917 with Mae Marsh, and in 1932 starring Marion Davies and Clark Gable.
George Middleton and Guy Bolton’s three-act comedy opened on Broadway on 6 September 1917 at Belasco Theatre for 315 performances, produced by David Belasco. Ina Claire played Polly, a minister’s daughter from Ohio, who is studying for a singing career in New York. To meet expenses, Polly works as a maid for friends of Rex Van Zile, who is trying to break off with a girlfriend. Polly is persuaded to pretend to be a French temptress on the prowl for Rex, who, by curtain fall, is in love with Polly. Claire repeated her role in a 1920 movie version.
Based on Eleanor H. Porter’s 1913 novel, this play by Catherine Chisholm Cushing, produced by George C. Tyler and Klaw & Erlanger, opened at the Hudson Theatre on 18 September 1916 for 112 performances. The cast included Jessie Busley, Patricia Collinge, Maude Granger, Herbert Kelcey, Philip Merivale, and Effie Shannon in the tale of the orphaned title character sent to live with her spinster aunt Polly, a prominent resident of a grim Vermont town. Despite her unhappy circumstances, Pollyanna lives by a philosophy of “gladness,” a personal game in which she attempts to find something to be happy about in any situation. Her sunny personality ultimately warms up her aunt and the little town that has become her home. Several movie and television adaptations of this perennial story appeared over the subsequent 100 years, including a 1920 silent film version starring Mary Pickford in her most characteristic role, and a 1960 Walt Disney–produced version featuring English actress Hayley Mills.
In the era of international touring stars, audiences wanted to see celebrity performers like Sarah Bernhardt despite their inability to perform in English. This posed little problem since audiences knew their Shakespeare and other works of the standard repertory. If the star did not travel with a company performing in the same language, American actors might be hired to support the star. Thus the lines would be given and cues picked up in two different languages, or sometimes even three. For example, the Polish-born actor Bogomil Dawison (1818–1872) performed in German opposite Edwin Booth in 1866. Booth also played Iago to the Italian-speaking Othello of Tommaso Salvini in 1886. See also †FOREIGN STARS AND COMPANIES ON THE AMERICAN STAGE.
Charles Pope was born in Germany, not far from Weimar, but was brought to the United States before his first birthday. From his youth, he was attracted to the stage and found employment as an actor with various theaters in New York City. From 1854, he played leading roles with Benedict De Bar’s† company in New Orleans and St. Louis. He managed the inaugural season of Kansas City’s first opera house (1870–1871), then toured for a time as a leading man. His career peaked at his own theater, Pope’s Theatre, in St. Louis.
George M. Cohan’s three-act comedy opened on 1 October 1906 at Wallack’s Theatre for 24 performances in a Cohan and Harris production. Thomas W. Ross played Robert Rand, a popular actor, who ultimately wins the hand of a millionaire’s daughter. Cohan composed a ragtime song, “Popularity,” included as incidental music in the play, but the tune had a longer life with audiences than the show. Staging innovations employed such as using the theater’s actual backstage for the second half of the play and invitations for the audience to participate in the action on stage by applauding at key points received the most appreciative comments from critics. Cohan later reworked elements of Popularity into the musical The Man Who Owns Broadway, which was a hit.
This term refers to low-priced productions aimed at theatergoers unable to pay top prices at theaters in major cities. Underpricing the competition allowed smaller theaters to draw audiences. This term was later adopted by the Federal Theatre Project* for one of its wings, the Popular Price Theatre, which offered cheap tickets for plays by new playwrights.
Opening on 10 October 1927 at the Theatre Guild, this folk drama of African American life by Dubose and Dorothy Heyward, based upon Dubose Heyward’s 1925 novel Porgy, ran for 367 performances. Frank Wilson played the crippled Porgy, who goes about on a wagon pulled by a goat. Porgy loves the wayward Bess and wins her from Crown, but she is in thrall to the “happy dust” purveyed by Sporting Life. Cleon Throckmorton’s settings evoked the Charleston, South Carolina, slum known as Catfish Row. Rouben Mamoulian directed, and Rose McClendon played Serena. It was made into the 1935 opera Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin.
Conceived by Stuart Walker in 1914 as a means of fulfilling his desire to write, act, and produce plays as well as to provide opportunities for beginning actors, the company was created in 1915. Inspired by his childhood toy theater, Walker created a portable stage that could quickly be set up in any room 25 feet wide and over 16 feet high. It carried its own lighting system and gridiron for hanging scenery. Walker’s mantra was “imagination instead of information.” An outdoor Christmas pantomime in Madison Square for an audience of 5,000 brought recognition that made extensive touring possible in 1916. It also had New York runs, at the Thirty-Ninth Street Theater in 1916 and at the Princess Theatre in 1917. Three volumes of Portmanteau plays were published, including Walker’s most popular piece, Six Who Pass While the Lentils Boil.
Born in Seattle, Washington, Guy Bates Post made his stage debut in 1894 in Charlotte Corday in Chicago. Within a few years, he joined Otis Skinner’s company and, in 1897, married actress Sarah Truax, Skinner’s leading lady (they divorced a decade later). In 1900, Post toured in Israel Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto. Within a short time, he was on Broadway in My Lady Dainty (1901), Manon Lescaut (1901), The Rose o’ Plymouth-Town (1902), a revival in 1903 of Hamlet, Major Andre (1903), The Virginian (1904), Love’s Pilgrimage (1904), The Heir to the Hoorah (1905), and The Bridge (1909). In 1909, Post played a leading role in Edward Sheldon’s controversial race-themed drama, The Nigger (1909), after which he acted opposite Laurette Taylor in Richard Walton Tully’s The Bird of Paradise (1912); he had his greatest personal success in the title role of Tully’s Omar the Tentmaker (1914). Post’s other Broadway appearances included The Witch (1912), The Masquerader (1917), The Wrecker (1928), The Climax (1933), and The Shatter’d Lamp (1934). Post also appeared in 25 movies beginning in 1922, though the roles decreased in size over time. He repeated his starring stage role in Omar the Tentmaker in a 1922 movie. His other screen appearances included Maytime (1937), Of Human Hearts (1938), Marie Antoinette (1938), The Mad Empress (1939), and A Double Life (1947). Following his marriage to Truax, Post was married to Jane Peyton, Adele Ritchie, and Lillian Kemble-Cooper, the latter union lasting over 30 years until his death.
Montague Glass, with assistance from an uncredited Charles Klein, based this three-act comedy, produced by A. H. Woods, on a series of short stories he wrote for the Saturday Evening Post. The play opened on 15 August 1913 for a whopping 441 performances. Mawruss Perlmutter and Abe Potash, two garment merchants, played in the original production by Alexander Carr and Barney Bernard, are the comedy’s central focus. Rife with Jewish stereotypes, the play’s simple plot involves two bickering partners having to put aside petty differences to save their business from an embezzling employee. Overcoming all obstacles, Perlmutter also finds a bride in their new designer, Ruth Snyder (Louise Dresser). The phenomenal success of Potash and Perlmutter inspired a long series of popular sequels including Abe and Mawruss (1914), Business before Pleasure (1917), His Honor Abe Potash (1919), Partners Again (1922), and Potash and Perlmutter, Detectives (1926). Potash and Perlmutter became a movie in 1923 with Carr and Bernard reprising their roles. With George Sidney taking over for Bernard, Carr appeared in two films, In Hollywood with Potash and Perlmutter (1924) and Partners Again (1926).
Born in New Orleans, Mary Cora Urquhart married James Brown Potter, a financier, in 1877. She became a notable society woman via her husband’s wealth and position, and, on a trip to England in 1886, she met the Prince of Wales. A year later, Potter made her stage debut in Brighton in Civil War. In partnership with Kyrle Bellew, she made her first New York appearance in the same play. She toured with Bellew for a decade. On tour, Potter acted in Charlotte Corday and The Queen’s Necklace, both in 1895. She divorced Brown Potter in 1900, but continued to use his name as her stage name. Potter made her last appearance in 1912 in London.
Born Walter McEwen (or McLean) in Brighton, England, Paul M. Potter changed his name and left his homeland for the United States after a journalistic scandal forced his departure. He worked as a newspaperman in Chicago before turning to playwriting. Potter achieved modest success with The City Director and The Ugly Duckling (coauthored by A. D. Gordon), both in 1890. His first major hit was an adaptation of George du Maurier’s Trilby (1895). Then came The Conquerors (1898), Under Two Flags (1901), The Honor of the Family (1908), The Girl from Rector’s (1909), and the books and/or lyrics for several musicals.
J. P. McEvoy’s three-act comedy, produced by Richard Herndon, opened on 8 December 1923 at the Plymouth Theatre for 245 performances. Feisty Ma Potter nags her nebbish husband, Pa, about his meager paycheck. Pushed to action, Pa invests in an oil speculation. To complicate matters, their daughter Mamie elopes, but a surprise gusher in Pa’s oil field stifles Ma’s complaints. Critics found that the innocuous plot was bolstered by McEvoy’s charmingly believable depiction of the title family, a quality carried over to a 1927 silent movie version starring W. C. Fields.
A native of Detroit, Michigan, Phyllis Povah aimed for an acting career after studying at the University of Michigan from 1914 to 1916. Her first professional job was stepping in as a replacement in a Baltimore performance of Seeing Things in 1920. This led Povah to an opportunity in Henry Miller’s company in Stepping Stones in Washington, D.C. Over time, she emerged as a skilled character actress able to play characters considerably older than her actual age. Povah’s Broadway credits included her debut in A. A. Milne’s Mr. Pim Passes By (1921), as well as several notable plays, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Owen Davis drama Icebound (1923), George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s Minick (1924), Philip Barry’s Hotel Universe* (1930), Norman Krasna’s* mega-hit comedy Dear Ruth* (1944), Moss Hart’s* backstage comedy Light Up the Sky* (1948), and the Moss Hart–directed Jerome Chodorov* and Joseph Fields comedy Anniversary Waltz* (1954). Povah also appeared on Broadway in Windows (1923), Paolo and Francesca (1924), The Virgin (1926), Marriage on Approval (1928), Re-Echo (1934), Dear Octopus (1939), The Land Is Bright (1942), Broken Journey (1942), The Naked Genius (1943), and Gently Does It (1953). Povah acted in both the Broadway (1936) and movie (1939) versions of the long-running hit Clare Boothe Luce* comedy/drama The Women.* On screen, Povah only made a few film and television appearances. Other than The Women, which was her first film, Povah acted on the big screen in Let’s Face It (1943), The Marrying Kind (1952), Pat and Mike (1952), and Happy Anniversary (1959)—the latter a screen adaptation of Anniversary Waltz—and a few television roles.
Grandson of playwright and actor Tyrone Power,† Frederick Tyrone Edmond Power was the son of Harold Power. Born in London, Power arrived in the United States in 1886 and made his stage debut in St. Augustine, Florida, before joining Augustin Daly’s company. Acting under the shortened name Tyrone Power, he was well received in Minnie Maddern Fiske’s productions of Becky Sharp (1899) and Mary of Magdala (1902), after which he appeared in numerous plays, including Ulysses (1903), a 1904 revival of When Knighthood Was in Flower, Adrea (1905), The Redskin (1906), and The Servant in the House (1908). Power also appeared in the long-running musical Chu Chin Chow (1917) and in secondary roles in Shakespearean plays, including playing Claudius to John Barrymore’s Hamlet in 1922. He was the father of movie star Tyrone Power.*
Born James McGovern in New York, he began his theatrical work in circus and vaudeville before rising to prominence in the operetta Evangeline (1882) and a series of farcical comedies, including Dreams (1882), A Bunch of Keys (1883), and A Tin Soldier (1886). A founding member of the Casino Theatre company, Powers moved into Augustin Daly’s celebrated company in 1893 to replace James Lewis. He acted in various plays and musicals, including The New Boy (1894), San Toy (1900), The Messenger Boy (1901), The Jewel of Asia (1903), A Princess of Kensington (1903), The Medal and the Maid (1904), The Blue Moon (1906), Havana (1909), Two Little Brides (1912), The Geisha (1913), and Somebody’s Luggage (1916). Much of his later career was spent in European musicals on Broadway and on tour, but he also appeared in a string of all-star revivals, including Out There (1918), The Rivals (1922, 1923, 1930), Henry IV, Part I (1926), Julius Caesar (1927), The Beaux’ Stratagem (1928), Becky Sharp (1929), and Seven Keys to Baldpate (1935).
Owensboro, Kentucky–born Thomas McCreery Powers attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, after which he appeared in a Pennsylvania production of In Mizzoura (1911). He gained notice in two New York productions, Mr. Lazarus and Mile-a-Minute Kendall, both in 1916; he then made an auspicious debut in musicals, introducing Jerome Kern’s “Till the Clouds Roll By” in Oh, Boy! (1917). Most of his subsequent work was in nonmusicals, with notable performances in Why Not? (1922) and in Theatre Guild productions of Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck (1925) and three George Bernard Shaw plays: Androcles and the Lion (1925), The Man of Destiny (1926), and Arms and the Man (1926). Powers scored later successes in Philip Barry’s comedy White Wings (1926) and in Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize–winning drama Strange Interlude (1928). He replaced Orson Welles* in the Mercury Theatre* production of Julius Caesar (1938). He also had a lengthy movie career, appearing most memorably as the victim in Double Indemnity (1944).
Born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, the African American actress Evelyn Preer grew up in Chicago and discovered theater in high school. She joined Raymond O’Neil’s Ethiopian Art Players and traveled with the integrated cast to Washington and New York, where she reached Broadway in May 1923 in the title roles of Salomé and The Chip Woman’s Fortune, performed in repertory with The Comedy of Errors. She joined the Lafayette Players under Anita Bush in Harlem and acted under David Belasco’s direction in Lulu Belle. She continued to play leading roles in New York but relocated to Los Angeles with the Lafayette Players, where she won acclaim as Miss Sadie Thompson in Rain in 1928. She also made jazz recordings and starred in movies produced by black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux between 1918 and 1941.
Born Eugene Wiley Presbrey in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, he started on Boston stages in 1874 before becoming a director under the auspices of producer A. M. Palmer. In the mid-1890s, he began writing romantic comedies and dramas, directing their initial productions. These included The Courtship of Miles Standish (1895), A Ward of France (1897), A Virginia Courtship (1898), Worth a Million (1898), Marcella (1900), New England Folks (1901), and his greatest success, Raffles (1903), written with E. W. Hornung, based on Hornung’s stories. He turned to movie writing around World War I, mostly drawing material from his plays.
With the gradual decline of the advance agent early in the 20th century, producers and even individual stars hired press agents to keep the name of the show or the performer before the public. Thoda Cocroft, who worked alternately as press agent, advance agent, and publicist, wrote in Great Names that the essence of the press agent’s job was informational: “He keeps dramatic editors and critics advised of his star’s activities, and advertising departments supplied with advertisements of his star’s play. His success depends upon his accuracy and not on cooked-up stunts.” She added that “the press agent, like the actor, almost seasonally must find a new job.”
Abby Sage Richardson and Grace Livingston Furniss collaborated on this four-act play, based on a novel by Agnes and Egerton Castle. Produced by Charles Frohman and directed by Edward E. Rose at the Criterion Theatre, it opened on 6 March 1900 for 111 performances. James K. Hackett played Basil Jennico, a nobleman living in Bohemia, whose intended, Princess Marie, switches places with her maid to see if Basil will love her as a commoner. The romantic machinations, which include a royal plotter and a gypsy, end with Basil and Princess Marie betrothed. The Pride of Jennico played a return engagement the following fall, for an additional 32 performances, and it was made into a movie in 1914.
Produced at the Madison Square Theatre, Edward Peple’s first play, a three-act drama, opened on 4 September 1905 for 106 performances, followed by a lengthy tour and a return engagement in New York in 1907. Sculptor William Payton is given the young child of a deceased model to support. Alice, Payton’s fiancée, believing the child, Claudia, to be Payton’s, breaks their engagement and marries another man. When Claudia grows to maturity (different actresses played the successively older Claudia in each act), Alice, now a widow, learns that Payton told her the truth, and she hopes to rekindle their relationship. Payton, however, has fallen in love with the adult Claudia. The cast included Cecil B. DeMille, although he did not direct either of the two movie versions in 1916 and 1920; the 1920 version was directed by his brother, William C. deMille. The Prince Chap had a short-lived revival in 1907.
Richard Mansfield played the title character in this four-act A. C. Gunter comedy at the Madison Square Theatre when it opened on 3 May 1896 for 122 performances, following a run at the Boston Museum.† Thinking he will gain wealth by courting beautiful widow Florence Lowell, Prince Karl breaks his engagement with a rich old woman by faking suicide in order to pose as his own brother. Florence is on to his trickery but falls in love with him despite it, informing him that her fortune came from Karl’s deceased uncle so, in a sense, it belongs to him. Prince Karl was revived successfully on 20 November 1899 at the Garden Theatre.
Small by Broadway standards, this theater at 104 West 39th Street opened in 1913, intended by its builder F. Ray Comstock to serve as a venue for experimental one-act plays modeled on the success of the Grand Guignol in Paris. Holbrook Blinn directed the Princess Players there for three disappointing seasons. The theater’s apogee came with the famous series of low-cost “Princess musicals” created by Jerome Kern, Guy Bolton, and later, P. G. Wodehouse: Nobody Home (1915), Very Good, Eddie (1915), Oh, Boy! (1917), and Oh, Lady, Lady! (1918). Among straight plays produced there were Hobson’s Choice (1915), Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1921) and Diff’rent (1921), the first American production of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1922), and a 1928 revival of Lula Vollmer’s Sun-Up. Years of ups (Pins and Needles, 1937) and downs (cinema) followed until the building was razed in 1955.
Born Cora Della Van Winkle in Trenton, Missouri, Della Pringle began her stage career in childhood with the Chicago Comedy Company. When she married Johnny Pringle in 1891, she took his surname as her stage name and was billed as Jolly Della Pringle. Pringle spent the majority of her career touring, typically in comedies, often traveling by rail in splendor in a private car. Her clothes were usually the height of Paris fashion, and women followed her lead in style (she often designed and sewed her own costumes). Pringle directed and produced her tours and was a highly successful businesswoman in various ventures. In 1916–1917, she acted in seven short movies, including as part of Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops. During the 1930s, Pringle worked as a drama teacher, and the fortune she had amassed over the years was lost during the Great Depression; ultimately, due to poor health and age, she died in poverty.
In the glory days of the railroad touring companies, peaking in the 1880s and 1890s, some stars could afford to travel in private cars attached to regularly scheduled trains and then sidetracked during the star’s engagement in a city. Among those were Sarah Bernhardt, Edwin Booth, Fanny Janauschek, and Richard Mansfield. On Bernhardt’s first American tour (1880–1881), she traveled in the “City of Worcester,” a coach equipped for dining and sleeping as well as with a parlor. On her 1887 tour, she used the same car in which Adelina Patti had traveled, a Pullman upholstered in shades of olive, with large mirrors. For her 1906 tour, Pullman built a brand-new car (two bedrooms, salon, dining room, and kitchen) and named it the “Sarah Bernhardt.” Stars often invited the press to interview them in their cars. On every one of his Kansas City engagements, Mansfield would invite critic Austin Latchaw to dine with him in his car.
Opening at the Garrick Theatre on 12 January 1925 for 90 performances and produced by the Theatre Guild, John Howard Lawson’s “jazz symphony of American life” reflected the author’s leftist politics in its vaudeville-style depiction of events surrounding a West Virginia coal miners’ strike. Lawson assailed racial prejudice (including the Ku Klux Klan), corporate and governmental indifference to economic conditions, and the inherent corruption of small-town politics. Its remarkable cast included George Abbott, Philip Loeb, Sanford Meisner,* Lee Strasberg,* and June Walker. Revised for a production by the Federal Theatre Project,* it opened at Maxine Elliott’s Theatre on 13 October 1937 for 81 performances. Lawson’s play was a rare foray into nonrealistic and overtly political drama on Broadway.
This term typically refers to an individual or an organization providing financial and organizational support for a play. Between 1880 and 1930, producers were often theater owners and many were creative forces, as well as savvy businesspeople. Prior to the 20th century, plays were often produced by star actors who were also managers of repertory companies and, in many cases, they owned and operated their own theaters. In the late 19th century, to consolidate power, several prominent producers established the Theatrical Syndicate, in all but name a monopoly with the goal of dominating ownership and operation policies. Other producers and stars battled the syndicate, especially Minnie Maddern Fiske and her producer husband, Harrison Grey Fiske, but its dominance was ultimately destroyed by another powerful producing organization, the Shuberts.
Producers often sprang from the ranks of theater workers; some were box office or publicity managers while others, increasingly, were actors and playwrights. To protect their interests, playwrights created producing organizations. Other high-minded production organizations sprang from the Little Theater Movement (Provincetown Players) and those writers, scene designers, directors, and actors striving to elevate the quality of the American stage (Theatre Guild). George M. Cohan, a leading actor, playwright, and composer, entered into a nearly 20-year partnership with Sam H. Harris to produce not only his own plays and musicals but many by others under the banner of Cohan and Harris Productions. Other individual producers, like Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., had less discernible specific talents but provided artistic vision and marketing acumen. See also *ACTORS’ EQUITY ASSOCIATION (AEA); †BELASCO, DAVID (1853–1931); BRADY, WILLIAM A. (1863–1950); DALY, AUGUSTIN (1838–1899); ERLANGER, A. L. (1860–1930); FROHMAN, CHARLES (1860–1915); FROHMAN, DANIEL (1851–1940); *GOLDEN, JOHN (1874–1955); HAMMERSTEIN, OSCAR I (1847–1919); HARRIS, WILLIAM, SR. (1844–1916); KLAW, MARC (1858–1936); *MACGOWAN, KENNETH (1888–1963); NIXON-NIRDLINGER, SAMUEL F. (1848–1918); PASTOR, TONY (1835–1908); ZIMMERMAN, J. FRED (1841?–1925).
Producer Sam H. Harris led this producers’ organization established in 1918 at the behest of John Golden in the face of mounting tensions between the Actors’ Equity Association and the United Managers’ Protective Association. The PMA resisted negotiations with Equity, leading to the actors’ strike of 1919. Compelled by Equity’s resolve, the PMA signed the first American labor-management contract. In 1924, several producers broke with PMA to establish the Managers’ Protective Association, which evolved into the League of New York Theatres and Producers in 1930.
This theatrical subscription group set up briefly in the 1920s to develop audiences and raise production quality in the major tryout cities was undermined by the Great Depression and the emergence of similar programs established by the Theatre Guild and the Federal Theatre Project.*
William Gillette’s four-act comedy opened on 1 June 1881 at the Madison Square Theatre for 151 performances. Gillette referred to The Professor as a character study, with himself in the central role of Hopkins, a bookish young Yale professor pursued by many young women, to the dismay of the Yale students who are pursuing the girls themselves. Hopkins is also distracted from his studies by a kidnapper and the young woman victim, as well as the sudden arrival of a brother and sister he has not seen in many years. One of Gillette’s slightest works as a dramatist, it provided a popular vehicle in the early years of his acting career.
Flat, painted cut-out scenic elements such as trees or tops of buildings were often attached to flats to create the effect of three-dimensionality.
This New York–based workers’ theater group styled on similar socialist theater troupes in Berlin and Moscow was established in 1925 by immigrant German activists. Employing agit-prop techniques under the leadership of John E. Bonn, their productions inspired the Workers’ Laboratory Theatre and the creation of the Living Newspaper* techniques of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP).* The Prolet-Buehne ceased functioning in 1934, and Bonn became director of the German wing of the FTP.
An individual whose task it was to “feed” (read) lines to actors when they “dried” (forgot their lines) was often stationed in the wings in the old days of rotating repertory, when actors had to perform new plays on short notice with little or no rehearsal. Ideally, the prompter knew the production’s rhythms and the methods of the actors.
This term describes stage objects (furnishings, decorations, and personal props) used in the presentation of a play. Except for scenery and costumes, the word properties would describe virtually any other object on the stage.
Lotta Crabtree and Sol Smith Russell were protean comics—that is, they could switch rapidly among very different characterizations. The term protean came to mean generally versatile, but because of the theatricality of the technique, most opportunities for protean display occurred in comedy.
Located on the harbor side of the far end of Cape Cod, Provincetown marks the spot where the Mayflower Pilgrims first made landfall before putting in at Plymouth Rock. Before the 20th century, Provincetown was primarily a fishing port, sending out fleets of whalers and other commercial fishing vessels. Numerous wooden wharves were built to support those industries, and it was on one of those wharves that American modernist theater can be said to have begun. Mary Heaton Vorse was a well-educated woman who spent summers in Provincetown from 1906. Little by little she attracted other creative people from Greenwich Village. By the summer of 1915, a group of writers that included Neith Boyce and her husband Hutchins Hapgood and George Cram Cook and his wife Susan Glaspell were reading and performing their own plays on the Hapgoods’ veranda overlooking the harbor. Needing more space, they moved the productions to a fish house at the end of Lewis Wharf, which Vorse owned.
The following summer marked the turning point, for a young writer named Eugene O’Neill joined the group and his one-act play Bound East for Cardiff was chosen for production on the wharf. A week before its opening, a fire destroyed one of the three buildings on the wharf, but the fish house survived. On 18 July 1916, with fog rolling in and water lapping beneath the floor, the playwriting talent that would galvanize the American stage made its debut. The excitement of that work impelled the group to organize themselves as the Provincetown Players in order to continue producing new plays in Greenwich Village in New York City in the fall. O’Neill spent nine summers in Provincetown and wrote many of his early plays there. Lewis Wharf collapsed in 1922, but other venues in Provincetown attracted successive theater groups. Among them were Provincetown Theatre on Whalers’ Wharf (from 1919), the Barnstormers (intermittently after 1922), the Wharf Theater (1923–1940), and Provincetown Playhouse on the Wharf (1941–1977). Tennessee Williams* began summering in Provincetown in 1940. The Provincetown Theatre, a new theater, opened in 2003 to serve as home for both the Provincetown Theatre Company and the Provincetown Repertory Theatre. Leona Rust Egan has chronicled much of the history of theater in Provincetown in various publications.
George Cram “Jig” Cook was the visionary leader who rallied the playwrights and scene designers of the new plays presented on the wharf in Provincetown in summer 1916 to continue the venture that fall in Greenwich Village in New York City. Besides Cook and his wife Susan Glaspell, these trailblazers of American modernist theater included Neith Boyce, Louise Bryant, Michael Gold, Robert Edmond Jones, Mabel Dodge Luhan, John Reed, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eugene O’Neill, Cleon Throckmorton, and William and Marguerite Zorach. Otto Kahn was an important patron. After two seasons in a space at 139 Macdougal Street, the company made its permanent home in a former stable at 133 Macdougal Street. According to Robert K. Sarlos in Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players, they produced 97 plays by 47 American authors in eight seasons. Various theories have been advanced for the group’s demise in 1922 at the peak of its success, when O’Neill’s expressionist play The Hairy Ape was transferred to a theater uptown. Some have signaled this move as evidence that commercial success was diverting the players from their mission to nurture new plays. Others have conjectured that Cook’s departure for Greece left them rudderless. In any case, the Provincetown Players must be credited with launching the career of O’Neill as well as of numerous others. The Women of Provincetown by Cheryl Black records the contributions of women directors, scene designers, actors, and managers, in addition to the more frequently lauded dramatists.
This term, which dates back to the 17th century, refers to excessive hype in advertisements, publicity, and reviews of a theatrical production. Richard Brinsley Sheridan immortalized the word when he used it as the name of his flamboyant Mr. Puff in The Critic (1779), but in the United States, puff became prevalent as theater managers sought any means to win the battle for audience attention.
Established according to provisions in the will of newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer (1847–1911) in 1917, this honor is bestowed annually on a new American play performed in New York deemed to have “best represented the educational value and power of the stage in raising the standards of good morals and good manners.” Over the years, many of the choices made met with disagreement, encouraging critics to set up the New York Drama Critics Circle.* Jesse Lynch Williams’s Why Marry? was the first play awarded in 1918, with no winner named in 1919. During the 1920s, the award went three times to Eugene O’Neill for Beyond the Horizon (1920), Anna Christie (1922), and Strange Interlude (1928). In 1921, Zona Gale was the first woman to receive the award for the dramatization of her novel Miss Lulu Bett. The most controversial award of the period occurred when rumors circulated that George Kelly’s The Show-Off was likely to win, but behind-the-scenes manipulations led to the announcement of Hatcher Hughes’s Hell-Bent fer Heaven as the winner for 1924. Kelly subsequently won in 1926 for Craig’s Wife (1926). The remaining winners prior to 1930 were Owen Davis’s Icebound in 1923, Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted in 1925, Paul Green’s In Abraham’s Bosom in 1927, and Elmer Rice’s Street Scene in 1929.
Puppets, inanimate figures manipulated by a puppeteer, have been seen by audiences since the beginning of American theater. Whether hand puppets or marionettes (puppets manipulated by strings), these iconic human symbols date to the beginning of theatrical history. Spanish puppeteers first performed in North America as early as the 16th century, and Native Americans were known to use puppets in ritual performances. English puppet shows were frequently seen during the 18th century, with the earliest documented performance in Barbados in 1708. Chinese shadow puppets were seen in the United States in this era, as were puppet performances from Central and South America, France, Italy, and elsewhere. Puppets were popular with American children from the early 18th century, and many shops sold puppet stages and puppets to youngsters. Tony Sarg (1880–1942) was perhaps the first important modern puppeteer, beginning with performances in his studio in 1915. He toured and performed The Rose and the Ring, Don Quixote, and Rip Van Winkle with frequency.
Prior to 1930, other major American puppeteers included Helen Haiman Joseph, Edith Flack Ackley, Remo Bufano, Marjorie Batchelder, and especially Paul McPharlin (1903–1948), whose seminal book, The Puppet Theatre in America: A History (1949), provides a detailed record of the often overlooked history of the puppet and its manipulators in the United States. After World War II, with the proliferation of children’s theater companies, puppetry has become much more widespread and puppets have been employed to recount fairy tales, classical plays and mythology, contemporary stories, and for political purposes, as with groups like the Bread and Puppet Theatre.*
Opening 27 January 1926 at the 48th Street Theatre, the farcical comedy in three acts by Adelaide Matthews and Martha Stanley ran for 111 performances. Matthews and Stanley were a prolific playwriting team whose work included comedies of innuendo like Nightie Night (1919) and mystery comedies like The Wasp’s Nest (1927). Puppy Love incorporates topical references to bootlegging, women’s clubs, motorcars, and flappers. The cast included Spring Byington and Maude Eburne working under the direction of Clifford Brooke.
A native of Wadsworth, Ohio, Alban Walter Purcell lied about his age to join the 13th New York Volunteer Infantry at the start of the Civil War and fought in the battle of Bull Run. In 1863, he made his first stage appearance at the Academy of Music in Cleveland, Ohio, under the management of John A. Ellsler. In 1868, Purcell worked with John C. Meyers’s company at the Rochester Opera House and married Meyers’s daughter and the company’s leading lady, Flora. Along with Meyers, Purcell spent the next several years managing tours for Edwin Forrest,† Edwin Adams, and Charles Barron, after which he and his wife became members of Laura Keene’s† company. Purcell authored several plays, including Manassas, a Civil War Drama, The Millerties, and Bailey Neck, but continued to act until the end of his career, before which he was a member of the Castle Square Theatre, where he won approval in The Ensign during the 1890s.
This one-act expressionist drama is one of three plays written by Marita Bonner, an African American teacher and writer. The play was first published in Crisis magazine in 1928 following a first-prize win in the magazine’s literary awards. The angelic-looking White Devils occupy the sides of the hill and dance on the Thin-Skin-of-Civilization to prevent the darker-skinned Us from reaching the top where the purple Flower-of-Life-at-Its-Fullest grows. Neither talk nor work nor studies nor prayer enables Us to make headway. The music of Us is appropriated. Ultimately, one of Us named Finest Blood goes forth with the understanding that blood must be shed.