James A. Herne’s last play, a four-act comedy, opened on 24 October 1899 at Boston’s Park Theatre for 107 performances, after which it played for 76 performances at New York’s Republic Theatre beginning on 27 September 1900. Critics noted similarities between this play and Herne’s earlier Hearts of Oak (1880) and were mixed on its merits, but Herne’s performance as Captain Dan Marble was applauded and the influence of producer David Belasco was acknowledged in the realism of the visual aspects. Brothers Ben and Frank Turner vie for the affections of Martha Reese. She is in love with Frank but marries Ben out of a sense of duty. Frank leaves but returns two years later and persuades Martha to run away with him. Before they do, wise old Captain Marble tells them of the tragic consequences of a similar situation, persuading them to accept their circumstances. Sag Harbor provided Lionel Barrymore with one of his earliest roles as Frank, and Herne’s daughter, Chrystal Herne, was also in the cast.
Born Orange Salisbury Cash in Angola, New York, Monroe Salisbury became an actor and appeared in New York and on tour with such prominent actors as Richard Mansfield, Eleonora Duse, John Drew, Nance O’Neil, and others. Salisbury had his first Broadway role in Marta of the Lowlands (1903). He appeared with Mrs. Fiske in a 1904 revival of Becky Sharp and in Leah Kleschna (1904), acted with George Arliss in Mrs. Fiske’s own play The Eyes of the Heart (1905), and acted in The Prince of India (1906). Salisbury made his first screen appearance in The Squaw Man (1914) and subsequently acted in over 40 movies, including his greatest hit, Ramona (1916), as well as Brewster’s Millions (1914), The Rose of the Rancho (1914), and The Eyes of the World (1917).
Paul Armstrong’s four-act drama, sometimes known as Salomy Jane’s Kiss and based on a Bret Harte story, opened on 19 January 1907 at the Liberty Theatre for 122 performances and was produced by Theodore A. Liebler. Critics appreciated Eleanor Robson as a young woman molested by a would-be lover and H. B. Warner as a mysterious stranger who murders the molester. Salomy Jane helps the stranger escape lynch mob justice even though she knows he had his own reasons for killing her attacker. The cast also included Holbrook Blinn. The play had a brief return engagement beginning on 2 September 1907, and movie versions were released in 1914 and 1923.
Born Nathan Salsbury in Illinois, he became an actor, playwright, and manager after service in the United States Army during the Civil War. Following the war, he acted with stock companies before finding success in 1875 when he established Salsbury’s Troubadors, a five-man comedy troupe, for whom he wrote farces, including The Brook (1875). He gained fame in 1883 as general manager of William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West Show, a position he retained for the rest of his life. Salsbury was instrumental in adding sharpshooter Annie Oakley and Chief Sitting Bull to the company and planning international tours. One digression from the Wild West Show was Black America (1895), a mammoth production in which 300 black performers appeared in scenes depicting African American life, but despite Salsbury’s producing skills it was a short-lived failure. Salsbury is immortalized in the character of Charlie Davenport in the 1946 Irving Berlin musical Annie Get Your Gun, and he was the father of artist Rebecca Salsbury James. See also FRONTIER DRAMA.
Arthur Hopkins produced and directed this three-act play by Sidney Howard and Charles MacArthur at the Empire Theatre, where it opened on 31 January 1928 for 31 performances. The failed play, with a cast including Pauline Lord, Osgood Perkins, Marjorie Main, and Helen Ware, was an exposé of a female evangelist, a thinly veiled portrait of Aimee Semple McPherson, but despite the failure the collaboration of Howard and MacArthur helped launch MacArthur’s career, which, that same year, led to his long partnership with Ben Hecht and their hit play, The Front Page (1928).
This three-act melodrama by Edward Sheldon opened at the Hackett Theatre on 17 November 1908 for 71 performances starring Minnie Maddern Fiske. Sheldon’s first important play was directed by Harrison Grey Fiske with an eye for richly realistic details emphasizing the lives of New York’s immigrant underclass. Nell Saunders (Fiske), a cleaning woman at a 10th Avenue saloon, becomes pregnant by street tough Jim Platt (Holbrook Blinn). Jim is imprisoned for killing a man attempting to seduce Nell, and she loses her job. Major Williams (David Glassford) of the Salvation Army recruits her, saving her from falling into prostitution. Eight years elapse, and Nell has become a leading force with the Salvation Army. Jim, newly released from prison, is at first put off by Nell’s attempts to reform him. When she threatens to turn him in to the police when he plans a robbery, Jim beats her before running away in fear of returning to prison. Williams expresses his love for Nell, but she and her child await Jim’s return. Hearing her address a congregation, Jim is deeply moved and asks her to help him change. Critics applauded the play’s realism and its emphasis on exposing the squalid conditions of turn-of-the-century New York City slums. The cast also included Merle Maddern. Movie versions of Salvation Nell were released in 1915, 1921, and 1931.
The great Italian tragedian Tommaso Salvini, born in Milan, was a star long before his first of five American tours, in 1873–1874, when he performed with Edwin Booth in a polyglot production. On that and subsequent tours (1880–1881, 1882–1883, 1885–1886, 1889–1890), Salvini performed in Italian. He never learned much English, though he came to love America. Best known for the unbridled passion of his Othello, Salvini proved daunting to actresses playing Desdemona’s death scene opposite him. Salvini’s son, Alexander (1860–1896) and his English-born wife, Maud Dixon, toured extensively with a repertoire of romantic dramas during the 1890s.
Theatrical legend suggests that actor Maurice B. Curtis (1851–1921?) commissioned George H. Jessop to write a play in which the central character is a heroic Jew. Jessop’s four-act play, with Curtis playing the title character, opened on 16 May 1881 for 96 performances at Haverly’s Theatre. Jewish salesman Samuel Plastrick hopes to marry Rebecca, whose family he knew in the old world. Rebecca and Samuel work at a jewelry store owned by Jack Cheviot’s uncle, Winslow. Jack, who also works in the store, is framed by Frank Kilday for a crime he did not commit. Winslow fires Jack, as well as Rebecca and Samuel, forcing Samuel to discover that Frank is the real criminal. Curtis played Samuel for many years and took credit for an adaptation of the melodrama, cowritten with Edward Marble, which first appeared in 1891 demonstrating a less abrasive image for Plastrick. Sam’l of Posen is believed to be the first American play to feature a heroic salesman character. Curtis acted in a short movie version of the play in 1910.
Samuel French, a publisher of inexpensive editions of literary works, also published plays via his French’s American Drama series. From this he raised enough capital to buy out his major competitor, William Taylor and Company, in 1854. The company bearing French’s name provided all manner of theatrical services from its beginnings, but by the end of the 19th century it ultimately settled on publication of acting editions of plays and licensing stage works for performance. Along with Dramatists Play Service Inc., it is the most significant company serving this purpose.
Clyde Fitch’s adaptation of Alphonse Daudet’s 1884 novel (which had been dramatized by A. Belot and Daudet’s widow) opened on 5 February 1900 at Wallack’s Theatre. The play focuses on a poverty-stricken French girl, Fanny Legrand, who becomes a wealthy, notorious courtesan. She becomes the mistress of an artist who sculpts her in the guise of Sapho, the Greek poet, and this sensual work becomes the talk of Paris, enhancing Fanny’s fame. Referred to as Sapho, she is a much-sought-after model by other artists and has other affairs, but eventually she falls in love with a poor art student, Jean Gaussin, with whom she lives quietly in the country. Their rustic idyll is interrupted by Fanny’s city friends, causing Jean to leave. He is so miserable without her that he returns despite the realization that he will never be at peace about her past.
Sapho closed abruptly on 5 March 1900 after 29 performances by order of the police, acting on complaints from Anthony Comstock’s New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Producer and star Olga Nethersole was arrested for what was described as her attempt to “corrupt public morals,” and Nethersole’s manager, along with the manager of Wallack’s Theatre and leading man Hamilton Revelle, were called before a magistrate’s hearing. The large cast also included John Glendinning and Taylor Holmes. Nethersole, however, insisted on a trial, and anticensorship forces, led by several prominent writers, protested her arrest. After a sensational three-day trial, Nethersole was acquitted after the jury deliberated for less than 15 minutes. Sapho reopened for an additional 55 performances and played several return engagements between 1900 and 1908 as part of Nethersole’s repertory. Sarah Bernhardt appeared in a 1910 Broadway performance on one of her frequent tours of the United States, and Nethersole was seen in a 1900 movie of a scene from the play. There were several other screen adaptations of Daudet’s novel, but none made use of Fitch’s play. See also *SEXUALITY ON THE AMERICAN STAGE.
Opening on 26 January 1927 at the Booth Theatre, Maxwell Anderson’s three-act comedy ran for 326 performances. Guthrie McClintic* directed Ruth Gordon* and Roger Pryor as the young married couple trying to live on $40 a week because the man insists that his bride quit her job as a stenographer and let him support her. The situation occurs in a number of plays of the decade, including The First Year by Frank Craven, Tarnish by Gilbert Emery, and Two Girls Wanted by Gladys Unger. Anderson’s treatment of the subject brings the couple to divorce, so that they can then live as individuals and recapture the romance of their relationship. The cast also included Humphrey Bogart, Frederick Perry, and Beulah Bondi. Movie versions of Saturday’s Children were released in 1929, 1933, and 1940, the latter starring John Garfield* and Anne Shirley.
A beloved Yiddish theater comedian, Ludwig Satz debuted in 1918 and was greatly admired for his skill creating diverse characters through mastery of makeup and improvisation. S. M. Melamed described him as the greatest Jewish comedian of his time in a 1925 New York Times article, but he made occasional departures from comedy, as in The Messiah Is Coming (1937). Satz appeared on Broadway in Potash and Perlmutter, Detectives (1926), and Money Mad (1937), as well as a few movies, including The Lunatic (1927), What a Mother-in-Law! (1934), and His Wife’s Lovers (1931), billed as “the first Jewish musical comedy talking picture.”
Geraldine Bonner and Hutcheson Boyd’s 1909 play opened on 15 April 1911 for two performances produced by William A. Brady at the Playhouse Theatre. A wife, Kitty, played by Grace George, feels ignored by her husband. Their interests are not complementary, and his attention strays to another woman. Kitty decides to show her interest in another man, which, finally, has the desired effect of awakening her husband to his neglect. Despite a witty script, the play failed on Broadway, though George and much of the original cast toured successfully with the play. A movie version was released in 1918.
Producer Henry Wilson Savage was born in New Durham, New Hampshire. He moved from real estate into theater and maintained offices in Boston and New York. As manager of Boston’s Castle Square Opera House, he ran a successful stock company. Savage’s Broadway productions included The College Widow (1904), The Girl of the Golden West (1905), and Madame X (1909). He was also distinguished as the first to present grand opera in English.
Born in Boston, Everett McKenzie began as a child performer there, winning approval doing “hootchie-kootchie” dances, and he performed under the name “Maude” in the Bowery. His early experiences included touring as a chorus boy, and he prospected for gold in the Yukon prior to joining the Russell Brothers female impersonation act. He found success cross-dressing in vaudeville and on Broadway, often sharing the stage with Jay Brennan (1883–1961), his straight man. Savoy and Brennan worked with Irving Berlin teaching U.S. soldiers how to perform in drag for Berlin’s World War I musical Yip Yip Yaphank. On Broadway, Savoy, a rival of drag star Julian Eltinge, appeared in The Passing Show (1915), Hitchy Koo (1917), Miss 1917 (1917), Ziegfeld Follies of 1918, and The Greenwich Village Follies of 1920 and 1922. Mae West purportedly modeled her hip-swinging walk by observing Savoy. His career was cut short when he was struck by lightning and killed on a beach on Long Island.
Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, William J. Scanlan became the leading Irish actor and singer of his day. In 1935, critic Austin Latchaw remembered him as a performer with “real charm, with romantic fervor, and a beautiful voice to express it.” He made his New York debut in The White Slave (1882). In 1885, he produced Shane-Na-Lawn, which he wrote as a vehicle for himself. Scanlan’s greatest hit, Myles Aroon (1888), remained in his repertoire until 1891 when Scanlan became seriously ill while performing in Mavourneen (1891), for which he wrote music and lyrics. Scanlan’s retirement opened the way for Chauncey Olcott.
Born George Moore Scarborough in Mount Carmel, Texas, he studied law at Baylor University and the University of Texas. He worked as a journalist and Secret Service agent prior to finding success writing modestly successful melodramas, including The Lure (1913), At Bay (1913), The Last Resort (1914), What Is Love? (1914), The Heart of Wetona (1916), Moonlight and Honeysuckle (1919), The Son-Daughter (1919, coauthored by David Belasco), Blue Bonnet (1920), The Mad Dog (1921), and The Heaven Tappers (1927).
Percy MacKaye’s four-act drama (labeled a “tragedy of the ludicrous”) opened on 17 January 1911 at the Garrick Theatre in a Henry B. Harris production for 23 performances, having been performed at the Harvard University Dramatic Club in 1909. Despite its brief run, the play, based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Feathertop,” became a staple of little theaters and academic drama groups and was revived off-Broadway* in 1953. Set in 17th-century Massachusetts, The Scarecrow focuses on an ostracized witch seeking revenge. She transforms a scarecrow into a man she calls Lord Ravensbane and sends him to the house of Merton, the man who many years before had betrayed her love. Ravensbane courts Merton’s niece, Rachel, who is loved by Richard Talbot. Talbot exposes Ravensbane, who has developed a compassionate heart. To undo the witch’s plans, Ravensbane destroys a brimstone-burning pipe that ends her spell and dies as a result of performing this selfless act. A 1972 public television version of The Scarecrow starred Gene Wilder and Blythe Danner.*
Scene design did not truly emerge as a distinct artistic contribution to theater production until late in the 19th century, a development accelerated by the New Stagecraft in the 1910s. Robert Edmond Jones was exemplary in his ability to design lighting and costumes, as well as settings, for all manner of plays, contemporary (Eugene O’Neill) and classic (Shakespeare). Before Jones and others of his generation, stage scenery had evolved from flat, painted literalism to an extreme three-dimensional realism exemplified by David Belasco’s productions. Jones’s impressionistic approach, inspired by European designers and evolving technologies, prepared the way for the next generation of designers: Lee Simonson, Jo Mielziner, Donald Oenslager, Mordecai Gorelick,* Boris Aronson,* and others.
The earliest American publication on scene painting, according to Warren C. Lounsbury, was A Practical Guide to Scene Painting and Painting in Distemper (1883) by F. Lloyds, who described techniques, equipment, and scene design elements. Most paint colors had to be purchased as lumps to be crushed or else ground down with a palette knife in water. Some form of glue or “size” had to be mixed with the water as a binder.
A good summary of the art of the scene painter appears in Claude Bragdon’s More Lives Than One: “First, the linen- or canvas-covered flats are arranged vertically on the paint-frame, a gigantic easel, sliding up and down through a slit running the entire length of the floor. The design is then drawn in charcoal, enlarged from the scenic designer’s sketch. The paint (opaque water-color with an admixture of liquid glue) is laid on rapidly with broad, flat brushes. To give tone, texture, ‘life,’ the painted surfaces are either spattered with a brush, stippled with a sponge, or rolled with a tightly twisted damp cloth. Sometimes the flats are laid out horizontally, free of the floor, and drenched with dashed-on pails of water, or paint of a different colour, causing the pigments to mingle and deposit themselves in delightful, sometimes unpremeditated ways. Silver or bronze powder, sparingly sprinkled on the still wet canvas, relieves the deadness of dark hues. For curtains and cycloramas dye is used instead of paint, which would stiffen the canvas and flake off. Effects of extraordinary richness are obtained by the use of so-called broken colour, where the mixing takes place in the eye of the beholder, instead of on the surface seen.” See also BERGMAN’S STUDIO; †SCENERY.
At the beginning of the modernist era, wing-and-drop settings, or profile scenery, were still common, as was the use of stock scenery. The rise of the combination system meant that many companies traveled with their own scenery specific to the show, usually realistic box sets with practical elements. For transport by railroad, scenic units had to fit through the door of a boxcar, and all professionals knew that five-foot-nine-inch measurement. Claude Bragdon, art director (scene and costume design) for Walter Hampden during the 1920s, observed in his 1938 memoir More Lives Than One that even an elaborate production would have no more than six weeks from conception to opening, and that the schedule was relentless: “The scenery must go direct from the builder to the scene-painter, and from him to the theater. It must neither lag nor hasten at any point in the journey, on account of lack of storage space.” Major developments in scenery occurred with the rise of the New Stagecraft in the 1910s, as more impressionistic European designs pioneered by Robert Edmond Jones, Lee Simonson, Jo Mielziner, Donald Oenslager, and others dominated the era between the two world wars. See also †LIGHTING.
Born in Vienna as the son of German actor Rudolph Schildkraut, Joseph Schildkraut came to New York with his father, and Rudolph became a celebrated Yiddish theater actor. Joseph Schildkraut had studied with Max Reinhardt in Germany and made his earliest appearances performing in Yiddish. His first major roles were for the Theatre Guild, including the amoral carnival barker in Ferenc Molnár’s Liliom (1921) and as Benvenuto Cellini in The Firebrand (1924). He joined Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre and appeared in movies beginning in the silent era. Schildkraut returned to Broadway periodically, most notably in Clash by Night (1941), Uncle Harry* (1942), revivals of The Cherry Orchard in 1944 and The Green Bay Tree in 1951, and The Diary of Anne Frank* (1955) as Otto Frank, a role he repeated in the 1959 screen version.
Born in Constantinople, Rudolph Schildkraut acted for Max Reinhardt in Germany and Austria, scoring a notable success as King Lear and appearing in German movies. He arrived in New York to become a leading man with the German-language Irving Place Theatre in 1910, after which he acted frequently in Yiddish theater, most notably as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. Schildkraut had his greatest success in Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance (1924), which he first played in Yiddish but later performed in English for a Provincetown Players production on Broadway. Schildkraut also appeared in Reinhardt’s New York production of The Miracle (1924) and in Hermann Bahr’s The Mongrel (1924). Schildkraut was the father of actor Joseph Schildkraut.
Born in Sedikor, Russia, Maurice Schwartz came to the United States in 1901 to act in Yiddish theater in Baltimore. He had considerable touring experience before joining David Kessler’s German-language company in 1912. At the outbreak of World War I, such theaters became unpopular, leading Schwartz to take over management of the Irving Place Theatre, rechristened the Yiddish Art Theatre (YAT), a company he ran until 1950. Schwartz’s flamboyant acting style, coupled with a resonant voice and fierce intellectualism, won him the label of the “John Barrymore of Yiddish theater.” The Yiddish Art Theatre’s productions included Schwartz’s adaptations of I. B. Singer’s The Brothers Ashkenazi and Yoshe Kalb, and Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman, a particular triumph for Schwartz who also played the role in a movie. Several YAT productions transferred to Broadway, including If I Were You (1931), Bloody Laughter (1931), Wolves (1932), Yoshe Kalb (1933), The Water Carrier (1936), Borderline (1937), and Conscience (1952).
Born in Banbridge, County Down, Ireland, the actor made his stage debut in Paterson, New Jersey, in The Girl I Love in 1883. He toured with Minnie Maddern’s company (before she became Mrs. Fiske), performed a season with Richard Mansfield in 1886, supported Lotta Crabtree in The Little Detective and Pawn Ticket 210 in 1887, and acted with E. H. Sothern in Lord Chumley at the Lyceum in 1888. His list of Broadway credits includes Shenandoah (1890), The Lost Paradise (1891), The Girl I Left behind Me (1892), Dr. Syntax (1895) with DeWolf Hopper, The Heart of Maryland (1895), The Circus Girl (1897), and The Lottery Man (1909). His memberships included the Lambs Club, the Players, and the Actors’ Fund of America.
Born Zelda Paldi in Brockway, Michigan, she went on the stage as Zelda Sears in 1896 in comedy roles in several Clyde Fitch plays, including Lovers’ Lane (1901), The Truth (1907), and The Blue Mouse (1908), as well as James Forbes’s The Show Shop (1914). Sears moved from acting to playwriting in the 1920s, finding success writing books and lyrics for musicals, including Lady Billy (1920), The Clinging Vine (1922), The Magic Ring (1923), Lollipop (1924), and A Lucky Break (1925) before turning to movie writing and making a half dozen screen appearances.
As in a duel, the second could step in to cover for the leading man but, otherwise, played a strong supporting role. In every line of business for which two or more actors were employed, the second deferred to the principal. A stock company might include a second heavy, a second low comedian, a second old man, and (perhaps doubling as a low comedienne) a second old woman. According to Gladys Hurlbut in Next Week—East Lynne!, “the thing to look for when you hired second people was a slight case of menace. If a man suggested betrayal more than rescue, he was a second man type, and if a girl was too tall for soubrettes and you could picture her as a correspondent, then she was a second woman. . . . Second people were often very good actors and popular too. . . . The second woman got some fat parts but not too many. She played the rough comedy leads, like the Florence Moore farces that were too naughty for the little leading lady, and I had to fight to get Craig’s Wife away from the second woman because the management thought it would hurt my popularity to be so mean all week.”
S. N. Behrman’s first Broadway play, a three-act comedy produced by the Theatre Guild and starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, The Second Man opened on 11 April 1927 at the Guild Theatre for 178 performances. Critics carped about its slim plot, but most reviewers were dazzled by Behrman’s wit and language, enhanced by the skillful performances of the Lunts. Pleasure-seeking writer Clark Story (Lunt) is set to marry wealthy Mrs. Kendall Frayne (Fontanne), but he learns that Monica (Margalo Gillmore), a young woman with whom he has had a previous relationship, is pregnant. Clark initially accepts the necessity of marrying Monica, despite the fact that she is engaged to another man, Alistin Lowe (Earle Larimore), but both eventually realize they are not right for each other. Monica goes back to her intended, and Clark merrily returns to Mrs. Frayne, who accepts his free-and-easy ways.
This four-act romantic melodrama, which opened on 5 October 1896 at the Garrick Theatre, was produced by Charles Frohman. It is set during the last days of the American Civil War. It ran for 176 performances and proved to be the only vehicle written by and starring William Gillette that rivaled the enduring popularity of his Sherlock Holmes (1899). Northern agent Dumont is operating in disguise as Captain Thorne (Gillette), a Confederate officer. His spying in Richmond is hampered by his growing affection for Edith Varney (Amy Busby), a young Southern woman who obtains for him a commission as major in the Confederate army. Arrelsford (Campbell Gollan), an officer from the War Office (and rival for Edith’s affections), suspects Thorne and obstructs his spying, but when Edith learns Thorne’s true identity, she attempts to aid his escape despite conflicted loyalties. Thorne refuses her assistance in a highly charged telegraph office scene in which Thorne and Edith find their loyalties tested. He withdraws information he was sending to the North that would lead to a devastating attack on the city, and, chastened by Edith’s love, Thorne allows himself to be arrested. She promises to await his release at the inevitable conclusion of the war. Secret Service is rarely revived (Gillette revived the play twice, in 1910 and 1915), but a 1976 Phoenix Theatre* production starring John Lithgow* and Meryl Streep* was adapted for public television.
Elmer Rice’s three-act farcical comedy opened on 24 September 1929 for 62 performances at the Vanderbilt Theatre in a production directed by Rice and designed by Robert Edmond Jones. The cast included Claudette Colbert playing American heiress Nanette Dodge. Nanette marries a Russian prince to prevent his blackmail of her sister. To get away from him, she flees to Sorrento, followed by the man she loves, Charles. He does not believe Nanette’s story, but when they subsequently learn that the prince has been murdered by victims of his blackmailing schemes, Charles is fully convinced. He and Nanette are reunited. The cast included Pedro de Cordoba, Roger Pryor, and Lucille Sears. Rice generated considerable humor from the encounter of typically American characters with a continental European sensibility.
Born Archibald Selwyn in Canada, he followed his brother, Edgar Selwyn, to New York. Edgar, an actor, secured Selwyn a position working in the Herald Square Theatre box office. The brothers branched out in the ticket brokerage business and eventually partnered with Elisabeth Marbury and John Ramsay to create the American Play Company. The brothers also set up as producers, building three theaters (Apollo, Selwyn, and Times Square), and Selwyn and Company staged many popular plays and musicals between 1912 and 1924, including Within the Law (1912); Under Cover (1914); Fair and Warmer (1915); the first Pulitzer Prize–winning play, Jesse Lynch Williams’s Why Marry? (1917); Smilin’ Through (1919); The Circle (1923); and Jane Cowl’s Romeo and Juliet (1923). Selwyn and his brother went their separate ways after 1924, but he continued to produce on his own, including Noël Coward’s* Easy Virtue (1925) and This Year of Grace (1928), and, in partnership with Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., he produced Coward’s operetta Bitter Sweet (1929). Most of his later productions were failures, with the exception of Revenge with Music (1934).
Born in Cincinnati, actor, producer, and playwright Edgar Selwyn debuted as an actor in William Gillette’s Secret Service (1896) before writing the melodrama Pierre of the Plains (1908) and The Arab (1911) and before establishing Selwyn and Company with his younger brother, Arch Selwyn, in 1912. They produced popular plays and musicals, including the first Pulitzer Prize–winning play, Jesse Lynch Williams’s Why Marry? (1917), but the brothers dissolved their partnership in 1924, after which Selwyn continued producing, including Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1926), The Barker (1927), and the George and Ira Gershwin musical Strike Up the Band (1930). His final production was The Wookey (1941), after which Selwyn retired.
Sydney Rosenfeld was prevailed upon to finish this four-act comedy when author David D. Lloyd died before completing it. Starring W. H. Crane and Georgiana Drew Barrymore, The Senator opened on 13 January 1890 at the Star Theatre, where it ran for 119 performances and spawned a 1915 silent movie version. Crane played Senator Hannibal Rivers, who wins the affections of a young woman betrothed to a philandering Austrian count through the efforts of a flirtatious widow, played by Barrymore, and a government claim dating to the War of 1812.
A play designed to arouse strong sensations in the spectator—either by suspense and surprising twists of plot or by amazing scenic effects—could be touted for its “sensations.” Most of these plays were melodramas, but not all melodramas were sensational. Prominent among the sensational melodramas still widely produced at the end of the 19th century were H. M. Milner’s Mazeppa† (1831), in which an apparently naked youth is tied to the back of a wild horse that gallops through a craggy landscape; Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon† (1859), in which the heroine is put on the slave auction block, and in which a steamboat explodes; and Augustin Daly’s Under the Gaslight† (1867), in which a man tied to railroad tracks is rescued by a woman just in time before the locomotive roars onto the stage.
Jed Harris produced S. N. Behrman’s two-act comedy adapted from Enid Bagnold’s novel at the Morosco Theatre, where it opened on 23 January 1929 for 93 performances. Ruth Gordon* starred as the title character, a woman resistant to the idea of marriage even as she expectantly awaits a husband. Serena turns to Countess Flor di Folio (Constance Collier), who trains her in the ways of winning a wealthy and important husband. Courted by a likely prospect, Serena ultimately resists her newfound training as a seductress to be true to her own nature and elopes with the young man she truly loves. The play’s supporting cast included Henry Daniell, Clarence Derwent, and A. E. Matthews.
New York–born Vincent Serrano was the son of a Colombian dentist and an Irish mother. He attended New York College, graduating in 1887, and aimed for a business career, but he was drawn to acting and debuted in Arthur Wing Pinero’s Cabinet Minister (1890) at Daly’s Theatre. As a matinee idol, Serrano’s most noted stage role was Lieutenant Denton in the hit Augustus Thomas play Arizona (1900), a part he played more than 1,000 times on Broadway and on tour. He was a member of Richard Mansfield’s company, and he played Gratiano to Nat C. Goodwin’s Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, revived on Broadway in 1901. Serrano’s other Broadway credits included Pretty Peggy (1903), Mrs. Leffingwell’s Boots (1905), On Parole (1907), As a Man Thinks (1911), The Lure (1913), The Lie (1914), The Revolt (1915), Fools Errant (1922), The Werewolf (1924), and the hit Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.–produced musical Rio Rita (1927). Serrano acted in a handful of films, including A Modern Monte Cristo (1917), Eyes of Youth (1919), The Deep Purple (1920), and The Branded Woman (1920).
Charles Rann Kennedy’s five-act morality play won approval from critics when it opened on 23 March 1908 at the Savoy Theatre in a Henry Miller production for 80 performances. It returned to the Savoy for an additional month of performances in October 1908. Manson, played by Walter Hampden, is a mysterious servant dressed in Eastern garb working for Reverend Smythe, whose snobbish, judgmental family is struggling to rebuild their crumbling church and dealing with the demands of several individuals requiring their assistance. The clergyman’s family is brought together through the quiet wisdom and compassion exuded by Manson, the embodiment of applied religious ethics. Kennedy employed the novel device of continuous action despite a five-act structure. The Servant in the House was revived four times (1918, 1921, 1925, and 1926) with Hampden returning to the role at his own theater in the last of these. Jean Hersholt played Manson in a 1921 movie version.
Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood collaborated on this three-act farce, a major hit when it opened on 10 November 1909 at the Astor Theatre for 397 performances. Seven Days was adapted into the 1919 musical Tumble In, and movie versions were released in 1914 and 1925. When James Wilson attempts to hide his divorce from a visiting aunt, he persuades a woman friend to pretend to be his wife, setting up innumerable farcical situations. Florence Reed appeared as a fortune-teller who believes that a burglar is loose in Wilson’s house.
George M. Cohan adapted this two-act comedy in a prologue and an epilogue from a novel by Earl Derr Biggers, which was produced by Cohan and Sam H. Harris at the Astor Theatre, where it opened on 22 September 1913 for 320 performances. A writer, William Halliwell Magee (Wallace Eddinger), bets a friend that he can write a 10,000-word novel in a mere 24 hours. The friend supplies Magee with the keys to a closed resort, the Baldpate Inn, so he can write without fear of interruption. Despite the planned seclusion, Magee encounters a parade of individuals possessing keys turning up during a long night. Cohan appeared in a revival of Seven Keys to Baldpate at the National Theatre, where it opened on 27 May 1935 for eight performances as a benefit for the Players. A starry cast in support included Ernest Glendinning, Walter Hampden, Josephine Hull, and Zita Johann. Seven Keys to Baldpate has had a prolific life in movies, with versions in 1916, 1917 (Cohan starred in this version), 1925, 1929, 1935, and 1947, with television adaptations in 1947, 1952, and 1962. This enduringly popular play had a long life in amateur and academic theaters.
Stanislaus Stange and Stannard Mears based their four-act comedy on Booth Tarkington’s popular novel of the same name. Produced by Stuart Walker, Seventeen opened on 22 January 1918 for 225 performances. Capturing small-town Indiana life, the simple plot focuses on the machinations of teenager Willie Baxter (Gregory Kelly), who is in love with Lola Pratt (Ruth Gordon*), a baby-talking local girl. Willie runs into trouble when he steals his father’s tuxedo to impress Lola. A movie adaptation of Tarkington’s novel was released in 1916, prior to this stage adaptation, and a subsequent 1940 film featured Jackie Cooper. A musical adaptation appeared on Broadway in 1951.
Produced by John Golden at the Booth Theatre, this three-act Austin Strong drama was a major hit despite complaints regarding its sentimentality. Opening on 30 October 1922, Seventh Heaven ran for a phenomenal 704 performances. Helen Menken, whose touching performance was admired by critics, played Diane, a street urchin saved from prostitution by Chico (George Gaul), a street sweeper. He falls in love with Diane and takes her to his seventh-floor garret that becomes their “seventh heaven.” Deeply in love, Diane and Chico are parted when he is sent to war. When Diane learns that Chico has been killed, she despondently falls into the arms of another man, Brissac (Frank Morgan). However, a blinded Chico returns and cannot see Brissac, so he and Diane are reunited. The play was as successful on tour as on Broadway, and Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell starred in a hugely popular 1927 movie version, remade in 1937 with Simone Simon and James Stewart. A 1955 Broadway musical adaptation failed.
Augustin Daly’s acting troupe, John Drew, James Lewis, Ada Rehan, and Mrs. G. H. Gilbert, won favor in his four-act comedy based on F. von Schoethan’s Die Schwabenstreich, which is credited with saving Daly’s company from bankruptcy. It opened on 24 February 1883 for 49 performances but was revived often and toured successfully. The title refers to a number on a painting, “Portrait of a Lady,” that captivates two men, Courtney Corliss and Lord Lawntennis. The image’s real name is Flos Bargiss, and the men track her to her father’s house where they vie for her affections while Flos’s mother, Mrs. Bargiss, publishes love poems her husband sent her, not realizing they are Shakespeare. Bargiss is forced to buy up all of the published copies while Flos decides in favor of Corliss before it is realized that Lawntennis only wants to purchase the dog sitting beside Flos in the painting.
One of the most scandalous stage works to reach Broadway in the 1920s, Sex was a vehicle Mae West wrote for herself under the pseudonym Jane Mast. Its initial production on 26 April 1926 at Daly’s Theatre resulted in an impressive 375-performance run, due in large part to publicity surrounding West’s arrest for indecency and a citywide poster campaign exploiting the play’s title after newspapers refused to run advertisements. Headlines blared: “Is the Stage Jazzing Down to Hell? At Last! The Facts Handled without Gloves!” the New York Evening Graphic claimed. West played Margie La Mont, whose crooked boyfriend drugs a rich woman who accuses Margie of robbing her, despite Margie’s attempt to prevent the theft. Angered, and resenting the inherent snobbery of this upper-class woman, street-smart Margie seduces the woman’s son for revenge. Critics unanimously condemned the play, but audiences flocked to see it.
Although American theater was prone to romanticized plays prior to 1930, frank discussion or exploitation of sexuality was taboo except in musical comedies, where scantily clad chorus girls were an accepted fixture. West set out to break long-held taboos through humorous and melodramatic depictions of sexuality, always with herself as the central temptress who is usually good-hearted despite an unconventional lifestyle and questionable moral choices. For a 1929 tour, West’s advertisements made things clear: “WARNING! If you cannot stand excitement—see your doctor before visiting Mae West in ‘Sex.’”
West’s 1927 play, The Drag, may have been the first American play to depict homosexuals and transvestites in its drag ball scene, but that play failed to open in New York, in part due to the ensuing scandal, as well as that which Sex had created the previous year. Despite the failure of The Drag, West continued to please audiences with subsequent plays, particularly Diamond Lil (1928), and in a series of popular movies in the 1930s. See also †*CENSORSHIP.
The depiction of sexuality on the American stage has always been fraught with controversy, challenging playwrights, actors, producers, and censors, not to mention audiences. By the middle of the 19th century, attention was focused on the revelation of the female form as most vividly exemplified by Adah Isaacs Menken’s† illusion of nudity in Mazeppa† (1861), which simultaneously scandalized and titillated audiences. From 1880 to 1930, the focus shifted from nudity (it was generally not permitted, although musicals and burlesque featured scantily clad chorus girls throughout this period) to frank discussions of life’s realities, including sexuality, in the plays of Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, and a few of their contemporaries. The earliest productions of these plays in American theaters inspired considerable controversy, mostly over depictions of marital infidelity, unwed mothers, social disease, prostitution, and such. American dramatists were slow to step into such areas except in the most sentimentalizing and moralizing ways. James A. Herne’s Margaret Fleming (1890), which dealt with a faithless husband forced to bring his out-of-wedlock child to his wife’s care, appeared in this period, although it was not widely seen. The plays of Ibsen and Shaw raised outcries, with producer Arnold Daly and actress Mary Shaw arrested for producing Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession in 1905, a play equating prostitution and marriage.
Before World War I, a few dramatists, including Edward Sheldon, touched on sexuality. After the war, sexual themes were often present, if only vaguely, in depictions of out-of-wedlock pregnancies, faithless spouses, and a somewhat more open awareness of sexuality. Interracial sexuality was occasionally depicted, although not without controversy, as in the case of Edwin Milton Royle’s The Squaw Man (1905), featuring a marriage between a white man and a Native American woman, but more significantly in Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1924), which explored a relationship between an African American man and a white woman. O’Neill received death threats, and a significant censorship battle ensued. Mae West scandalized Broadway with her play Sex (1926), in which she assaulted the hypocrisies of contemporary sexual mores, and her next play, The Drag (1927), delved into the realm of homosexuals and transvestites. It so outraged the populace that it never opened in New York despite West’s box office clout. Explorations of heterosexuality were more frequently seen, but homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgender issues would not find dramatic voice until after the 1960s.
Born in New Orleans, William Seymour began a successful career as an actor, director, and stage manager as a child actor. In 1869, he became a call-boy at Booth’s Theatre and acted with Edwin Booth, Joseph Jefferson, Charlotte Cushman,† and Edwin Forrest,† after which he managed several theaters, including the Union Square Theatre, the Madison Square Theatre, the Metropolitan Opera House, and the Empire Theatre. His directorial credits include Clyde Fitch’s Barbara Frietchie (1899) and an all-star revival of Trelawny of the “Wells” in 1925. Seymour also managed the Boston Museum† from 1879 to 1888 and was married to E. L. Davenport’s† daughter, May.
The plays of William Shakespeare (1564–1616) were frequently produced in North America from the earliest settlements by Europeans. Before American independence and well into the 19th century, English troupes, or British-trained actors, included Shakespeare’s plays centrally in their repertories. The first performance of Shakespeare in New York is believed to have been Richard III, staged in 1750 by Thomas Kean, but he used Colley Cibber’s bowdlerization of Shakespeare for his text. Resistance to English players in America came to a violent head in the Astor Place riot† in 1849, pitting supporters of rivals William Charles Macready,† an English actor, and Edwin Forrest,† America’s greatest tragedian to date, against each other. African Americans made their first theatrical inroads when the African Grove Theatre† launched careers for black Shakespeareans James Hewlett† and Ira Aldridge.† By the mid-19th century, Edwin Booth emerged as the premier American Shakespearean, scoring a major triumph with his Hamlet, which ran for 100 consecutive performances in 1865. Shakespeare was central to the repertoires of Booth and other touring stars: Thomas W. Keene, Lawrence Barrett, Frederick Warde, Louis James, Marie Wainwright, E. L. Davenport,† Emma Waller,† John McCullough, and Helena Modjeska. As European immigrants poured into New York beginning in the 1890s, foreign-language productions of Shakespeare were frequently seen, including notable Yiddish theater performances by Jacob Adler in The Merchant of Venice and King Lear.
In the first decade of the 20th century, E. H. Sothern and Julia Marlowe revived interest in Shakespeare on the road with their elaborately staged productions, from their 1904 triumph in Romeo and Juliet until the 1920s. Charles Coburn and his wife Ivah Wills performed virtually the entire Shakespearean canon on tour with their company. Modern European staging techniques began to have an impact on Shakespearean production in the United States with English director Harley Granville-Barker’s innovative A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1916 and others, but the New Stagecraft triumphed in the Arthur Hopkins–Robert Edmond Jones collaborations on Richard III (1920) and Hamlet (1922), starring John Barrymore, whom many critics considered to be the greatest Hamlet since Booth.
Lula Vollmer’s nine-scene drama opened on 16 October 1923 for 278 performances at the Greenwich Village Theatre. Vollmer, a North Carolina native, specialized in folk dramas of backwoods life. In The Shame Woman, she focuses on Lize Burns (Florence Gerald), a woman chastised by her neighbors because she had been violated by the boastful Craig Anson (Edward Pawley) 20 years before. Known as the “shame woman,” Lize lives in her isolated cabin with only an adopted daughter, Lily (Thelma Paige). When Lize learns that Lily has been meeting a man, she feels compelled to reveal her own past as a warning. Lily runs away and kills herself, a fact Lize sadly accepts until she learns that Anson was Lily’s seducer. She kills him with a potato knife to prevent his bragging of his conquest of Lily. Minnie Dupree was also in the cast. Critics praised the raw power of the play, as they had done with Vollmer’s earlier play Sun-Up (1923) and its rich depiction of a rarely dramatized world.
A four-act melodrama by John Colton produced by A. H. Woods and directed by Guthrie McClintic,* The Shanghai Gesture opened on 1 February 1926 for 331 performances at the Martin Beck Theatre. Mother Goddam, played by Florence Reed, runs a Shanghai brothel and avenges herself on Sir Guy Charteris (McKay Morris), her former lover who sold her into prostitution. With Charteris looking on, Mother Goddam sells a young woman to some junkmen, after which she reveals that the girl is her daughter by Charteris. When the girl later appears as a drug-addicted prostitute, Mother Goddam strangles her. Colton wrote Mother Goddam for Minnie Maddern Fiske, but she left the production during its rehearsals and Reed stepped in. Critics found the play lurid, but Reed’s acclaimed performance helped it to a long run in New York and on tour. Josef von Sternberg directed a 1941 movie adaptation, and Bette Davis* played Mother Goddam in a 1970s television film.
Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the actress Effie Shannon enjoyed a 70-year career that began with her billing as “La Petite Shannon” when she played Little Eva in a Boston production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin† at age seven. In 1889, she became a member of David Belasco’s company and married leading man Herbert Kelcey, with whom she appeared in Clyde Fitch’s The Moth and the Flame (1891). Among her many credits are roles in Tangled Lives (1886), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1888), Shenandoah (1889), Her Lord and Master (1902), Widowers’ Houses (1907), Years of Discretion (1912), Pollyanna (1917), Under Orders (1918), Heartbreak House (1920), The Youngest (1924), She Stoops to Conquer (1924), Trelawny of the “Wells” (1927), The Admirable Crichton (1931), Morning’s at Seven* (1939), Juno and the Paycock (1940), and her last appearance in a three-year stint replacing Jean Adair* as Aunt Martha in Arsenic and Old Lace* in 1942.
This three-act comedy, written by actor James Gleason and produced by Crosby Gaige and Earle Boothe, opened on 26 September 1927 for 288 performances at the Martin Beck Theatre. Gleason played Mickey Shannon opposite his real-life spouse, Lucille Webster, in a lighthearted story of a vaudeville team who take over management of a hotel, Swanzey’s House, when stage bookings dry up. Complications over a mortgage and a proposed airport that might improve the hotel’s sagging fortunes drive the simple but pleasing action. The Gleasons starred in a 1929 movie version.
This slang term for an actress who revealed the contours of her body by cross-dressing to play male roles was mildly pejorative in that it implied a reliance on flaunting one’s physical attributes as opposed to genuine artistry. In her book Performing Mazeppa, Renée M. Sentilles discusses the mid-19th-century phenomenon of women in breeches roles as a social phenomenon related to the Civil War and as one of many appeals to novelty-seekers. However, it is important to note that Shakespearean heroines like Rosalind and Viola, disguised during their plays as themselves as boys, were handled with considerable modesty by serious actresses like Helena Modjeska and Julia Marlowe. Indeed, Modjeska announced in 1893 (when she was 53) that she was dropping Rosalind from her repertoire “because she cannot consent any more to wear the costume.”
Born in Boston, Mary Shaw debuted with the Boston Museum† stock company in 1878. As a firebrand feminist, Shaw became a proponent of the plays of modernist dramatists Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw. After appearing on Broadway in David Belasco’s production of Ben-Hur (1899), Shaw’s early stage experiences were in support of several actresses who shared her feminist views or interest in Ibsen, including Helena Modjeska, Minnie Maddern Fiske, and Julia Marlowe, and she toured the United States in Ibsen’s controversial Ghosts in 1903. Shaw appeared in Hedda Gabler in Chicago in 1904 before starring in the first American production of George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession in New York in 1905, a production that landed her and producer Arnold Daly in jail for indecency. Undaunted, Shaw later appeared in 1918 and 1922 revivals of the play and usually acted in works focused on women’s rights and other controversial social issues, including Votes for Women (1909), Divorce† (1909), Polygamy (1914), and The Dickey Bird (1915). Shaw founded the Gamut Club, was a charter member of the Professional Women’s League, represented the United States at the International Congress of Women in London in 1899, and was a much-sought-after lecturer.
The slow, steady acceptance of the plays of George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) on the American stage began in the mid-1890s with his least controversial works: Arms and the Man, produced at the Herald Square Theatre in 1894, and The Devil’s Disciple, staged at the Fifth Avenue Theatre† in 1897. Richard Mansfield was the driving force behind these early Shaw productions in the United States, but in the last days of the 19th century, actor-manager Arnold Daly offered a series of Shaw’s plays beginning with Candida, which he first presented in Chicago in 1899 (the play had been seen in two amateur productions prior to this one) and, later, in Philadelphia in 1903, followed by a New York run later that year. Daly also produced other Shavian works, including The Man of Destiny (1904), You Never Can Tell (1905), and John Bull’s Other Island (1905). Mainstream audiences were clearly attracted to the vaguely scandalous reputation of Shaw, a socialist and women’s rights advocate inspired by the plays of Henrik Ibsen, but when Daly presented Shaw’s controversial Mrs. Warren’s Profession at the Garrick Theatre in October 1905, he and Mary Shaw, the play’s star, were arrested for indecency through the efforts of Anthony Comstock’s New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and a flurry of editorials in newspapers. Despite Comstock’s efforts, the play was performed and drew substantial audiences.
Shaw’s plays were not always appreciated in England, as was the case with his Androcles and the Lion, which was hissed at during its London premiere, but American audiences were receptive when Harley Granville-Barker staged it in New York in 1915. Grace George produced and starred in the American premiere of Major Barbara that same year, and it became one of the most frequently revived Shaw plays in the United States. Other productions of Shaw’s works followed, as well as Oscar Strauss’s operetta based on Arms and the Man, a popular success called The Chocolate Soldier (1921). Most of Shaw’s plays premiered in England with U.S. productions following, but a few of his works had their initial performances in New York through the auspices of the Theatre Guild, including Heartbreak House at the Garrick Theatre in 1920 and Saint Joan, also at the Garrick, in 1923. All told, the Theatre Guild produced American premieres of seven Shavian works, also including Back to Methuselah (1922) and The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1935). By 1930, Shaw’s plays were produced frequently on Broadway and, later, became staples of repertory theaters emerging after 1960 across the nation. Shaw’s influence on American drama can be seen to a greater or lesser degree in the works of a range of playwrights, including Clyde Fitch, Langdon Mitchell, Edward Sheldon, Eugene O’Neill, Rachel Crothers, Robert E. Sherwood, Philip Barry, and S. N. Behrman, and many American actors made their reputations appearing in Shaw’s works.
See GALLAGHER AND SHEAN.
Edward Brewster Sheldon was born in Chicago to a wealthy family. He studied with George Pierce Baker at Harvard University and, with Baker’s guidance, presented his first Broadway offering, the popular Salvation Nell, in 1908. Prior to the emergence of Eugene O’Neill, Sheldon was one of a few American playwrights demonstrating promise at merging modernist philosophy with contemporary popular drama. Salvation Nell was followed by the controversial, race-centered The Nigger (1909), after which The Boss (1911), The High Road (1912), and Romance (1913) seemed, in part, to fulfill his promise. However, other works, including Princess Zim-Zim (1911), Egypt (1912), and Sheldon’s adaptations of Song of Songs (1914), The Garden of Paradise (1914), The Jest (1919), and The Czarina (1922), leaned more toward the expectations of the commercial stage. Struck with illness that rendered him progressively blind and paralyzed, Sheldon thereafter worked with collaborators, including Sidney Howard on Bewitched (1924), Charles MacArthur* on the controversial Lulu Belle (1926), and Margaret Ayer Barnes on the comedy Jenny (1929) and the thriller Dishonored Lady (1930). Even as he lay immobilized in his apartment, theater artists like Agnes de Mille would seek his unfailingly generous counsel on their works in progress.
Charles Frohman’s first successful New York production was Bronson Howard’s rousing four-act drama set during the American Civil War, but it was first produced in a poorly received version in Boston in November 1888. Howard’s revisions and a stronger New York production led to its triumph when it opened at the Star Theatre on 9 September 1889 for 250 performances. A sweeping melodramatic romanticism blended with social significance and touches of realism combined to make it one of the most popular plays of its day, although critics carped about the complexity of its plot involving two West Point classmates who become officers in the opposing armies at the outbreak of the Civil War.
Southerner Robert Ellingham (Lucius Henderson) is taken prisoner, and his sister, Gertrude (Viola Allen), is arrested as a spy and brought to Kerchival West (Henry Miller), who protects her because he is in love with her. Confederate prisoner Thornton (John E. Kellerd) stabs West but, to save himself, attempts to frame him by claiming that West has been the lover of the wife of his superior, General Haverhill (Wilton Lackaye). Thornton believes he has prevailed when it is discovered that West has a locket containing a portrait of Mrs. Haverhill, but West says he took the locket from a young soldier, Lieutenant Bedloe (G. W. Bailey), who turns out to be the Haverhills’ son fighting under an assumed name. Taken prisoner, Bedloe is exchanged for Robert, and the two old friends continue to serve their respective armies until the war ends and they can be reunited with their lovers. Effie Shannon was also a cast member.
The 1913 movie of the same name was adapted from the Howard play, but a 1965 film, and the 1975 Broadway musical based on it, although similarly set in the Civil War, otherwise bear little resemblance to Howard’s play.
Born in Painesville, Ohio, Emma Viola Sheridan was the daughter of Brigadier General George Sheridan and wife of Alfred Brooks Fry of the New York Naval Militia. She trained as an actress with the Lyceum stock theater and its affiliate American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She performed with Richard Mansfield in Prince Karl (1886), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1887), A Parisian Romance (1888), and others. Retiring from the stage, she wrote a “Wednesday Afternoon” column of theater reviewing and dramatic commentary for the Boston Commonwealth. In the 1930s, she lectured at Columbia University and was director of the Educational Dramatic League.
Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories of the Victorian detective are among the most durable sources for dramatic and movie adaptation. Few treatments have attained the success of William Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes, produced by Charles Frohman on 6 November 1899 at the Garrick Theatre for 256 performances with Gillette himself as leading man. The subtitle, “Being a hitherto unpublished episode in the career of the great detective and showing his connection with the Strange Case of Miss Faulkner” indicated that Holmes’s friend, Dr. Watson (played by Bruce McRae), was recounting the story of the play. Ernest Gros designed the evocative setting.
The adaptation conformed to the melodramatic techniques of 19th-century theater as it focused on Holmes’s attempt to aid Alice Faulkner (Katherine Florence), a young woman in possession of the letters of her late sister, who died brokenhearted as a result of being jilted by a member of the royal family. Bent on avenging her sister, Alice is caught between attempts by the royals to save face and the unscrupulous Jim and Madge Larrabee (Ralph Delmore and Judith Berolde), con artists who hope to secure the letters to demand a huge ransom from the royal family. Behind the Larrabee plot is the evil genius of crime, Professor Moriarty (George Wessells), who is determined to outsmart Holmes. The resilient Holmes not only defeats the criminals but restores the letters to Alice, with whom he has fallen in love.
Sherlock Holmes won huge and enduring audiences in its original production, and Gillette spent much of his career playing the role in various tours and in New York revivals in 1902, 1905, 1910, 1915, and 1929, as well as a radio performance in 1930. Other actors have essayed Gillette’s role, including Robert Warwick in a 1928 Broadway revival, John Wood in a Royal Shakespeare Company production in 1974, and Frank Langella* in a Williamstown Theatre Festival* production filmed for television in 1981. Despite the fact that numerous other stage and screen versions of the Holmes tales have been popular, the troubled, erudite Holmes is forever associated with Gillette.
Robert Emmet Sherwood was born in New Rochelle, New York, and graduated from Harvard University, where he wrote and worked on theatricals for the Harvard Lampoon and studied with George Pierce Baker. Sherwood’s service with the Canadian Black Watch during World War I led to his pacifist stance and mistrust of government. After various writing assignments with Vanity Fair, Life, and Scribner’s, Sherwood’s first important play, The Road to Rome (1927), was an antiwar comedy set in ancient times starring Jane Cowl, but it was followed by more overtly commercial offerings, including The Love Nest (1927), The Queen’s Husband (1928), and This Is New York (1930). The tragic wartime romance of Sherwood’s Waterloo Bridge* (1930) was not well received, but it proved enduringly popular in two movie versions in 1931 and 1940.
Sherwood’s post-1930 plays were his most important, including Reunion in Vienna* (1931), The Petrified Forest* (1935), and three Pulitzer Prize winners, Idiot’s Delight* (1936), Abe Lincoln in Illinois* (1938), and There Shall Be No Night* (1940). During World War II, Sherwood was a speechwriter for President Franklin D. Roosevelt and was appointed director of the Overseas Branch of the Office of War Information, but his postwar plays were less appreciated than his prewar works.
New Orleans–born actress Sydney Shields, daughter of an attorney and an actress/press agent who had performed with Mrs. Fiske, went on stage in childhood, playing roles like Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin† and Little Lord Fauntleroy. When she reached her teen years, Shields quit the stage to write for a newspaper but returned to acting via vaudeville around 1910. On Broadway, Shields debuted in What Money Can’t Buy (1915) and also acted in The Fear Market (1916), If (1917), Parlor, Bedroom and Bath (1917), The Hindu (1922), New York Exchange (1926), Such Is Life (1927), Red Dust (1928), White Flame (1929), and Spring Freshet (1934). Shields also toured for seven years as Walker Whiteside’s leading lady. During World War I, Shields joined the Over There Theatre League and was part of the first company of American actors to tour Europe in the postwar era. She was married to actor/director Edward H. Robins.
An actor not up to the standard of the rest of the company might be disparagingly termed “a shine.”
Born in New York as Samuel Shiffman, he began a playwriting career translating Jacob Gordin’s The Kreutzer Sonata (1904). Most of his plays were collaborations, including The Spell (1907, a rare solo effort), Elevating a Husband (1912, with Clara Lipman), Friendly Enemies (1918, with Aaron Hoffman), East Is West (1918, with John B. Hymer), The Woman in Room 13 (1919, with Max Marcin), First Is Last (1919, with Percival Wilde), Crooked Gamblers (1920, with Wilde), Lawful Larceny (1922), Crime (1927, with Hymer), Scarlet Pages (1929, with Hymer), A Lady Detained (1935, with Hymer), and Behind Red Lights (1937, with Beth Brown).
Brooklyn-born Ann Shoemaker, daughter of a U.S. Navy man, attended the Hickman Dramatic School in Washington, D.C., and made her professional debut in the Keith Stock Company in Philadelphia prior to her Broadway debut in Nobody’s Widow (1910). Shoemaker’s most auspicious appearance came playing Cybel in Eugene O’Neill’s The Great God Brown (1926). Her subsequent credits display a wide range of genres, including The Noose (1926), We All Do (1927), Speak Easy (1927), To-Night at 12 (1928), Button, Button (1929), The Novice and the Duke (1929), The Silent Witness (1931), Black Sheep (1932), and a 1941 revival of O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!* costarring Harry Carey (she also appeared in a Hollywood production of the play with Will Rogers). Subsequent roles included a 1951 revival of Elmer Rice’s Dream Girl,* she replaced Anne Seymour as Sara Delano Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello* in 1959, and the musical Half a Sixpence (1965). Shoemaker was married to Henry Stephenson, and they both appeared regularly in movies as character actors with the arrival of sound. She repeated the role of Sara Delano Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello (1960) but appeared in a wide range of films including Alice Adams (1935), Stella Dallas (1937), Babes in Arms (1939), My Favorite Wife (1940), and Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (1944); she also acted in numerous television shows until shortly before her death.
James A. Herne’s four-act comedy, written in collaboration with his wife Katharine Corcoran Herne, opened at Chicago’s McVicker’s Theatre on 17 May 1892, after which it settled in at New York’s Fifth Avenue Theatre† for 244 performances. Herne labored on the play in several versions titled The Hawthornes, Shore Acres Subdivision, and Uncle Nat. Particular praise was directed at Herne’s performance as avuncular Uncle Nat and the local color of its coastal Maine setting. A long New York run and five years on tour made a fortune for Herne, restoring a vast sum he had expended attempting to produce Margaret Fleming (1890), his controversial drama inspired by Henrik Ibsen’s realistic social problem plays.
Shore Acres, a domestic comedy, deals with Nathan’l Berry, “Uncle Nat,” a genial old man who has been ill used by his brother, Martin, who married a woman Nat loved. Martin, keeper of the Berry Lighthouse, attempts to sell off family property, including a farm his mother is buried on, and stands in the way of his daughter, Helen, who is in love with a young doctor, Sam Warren. When Nat helps the lovers elope, they are caught at sea in a storm, and Martin refuses to turn on the light to save them. Nat, rushing to the rescue, prevails in a fight with Martin and turns on the light, saving the lovers. Nat puts up his pension to save the family property, a selfless act that finally shames Martin into admitting his foolishness. Everyone goes to bed, and in one of the play’s most memorable scenes, Nat silently goes about the business of closing down the house for the night. Movie versions of Shore Acres appeared in 1914 and 1920.
Contrary to some histories of the musical theater stage, the original production of Show Boat, which opened on 27 December 1927 at the Ziegfeld Theatre, was neither a critical nor a commercial disappointment. Produced by Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., with music by Jerome Kern and lyrics and libretto by Oscar Hammerstein II, adapted from Edna Ferber’s novel, the two-act Show Boat ran for an impressive 572 performances. This extraordinary, epic musical featured scene designs by Joseph Urban, costumes by John Harkrider, and choreography by Sammy Lee. Kern’s music, merging operetta and the sounds of American popular music, inspired by African American rhythms, and Hammerstein’s adaptation of Ferber’s novel emphasizing the cycles of life across a 40-year period from the 1880s to the 1920s, provided a model for a revolution in musical theater. Hammerstein’s libretto featured a depth of character and seriousness of theme, and the integration of song and story depicted life on a Mississippi River show boat operated by Captain Andy Hawks. Issues of race, miscegenation, and life’s joys and tragedies were set against the currents of the river, as memorably captured in the show’s leitmotif, “Ol’ Man River.”
A pair of star-crossed lovers, river gambler Gaylord Ravenal and Captain Andy’s daughter, Magnolia, fall in love and live high on the proceeds of Ravenal’s gambling luck until his luck runs out. He disappears, leaving Magnolia to turn to the stage to survive, which she does with skill, thanks to the behind-the-scenes help of her old friend, the tragic Julie, a mulatto passing for white who had formed a close friendship with Magnolia during her time as star of the show boat. The daughter of Magnolia and Ravenal grows to adulthood and success as a Broadway headliner, as Ravenal returns and he and Magnolia are ruefully reunited. Hammerstein also directed, and his staging featured such innovations as eliminating the curtain call, which puzzled audiences and frightened Ziegfeld when the curtain fell on opening night and the audience did not applaud. After a few moments passed, the audience cheered a show that provided the start of a period of growth and evolution for the musical stage. Hammerstein’s innovations would appear again in his collaborations with Richard Rodgers on Oklahoma! (1943), Carousel (1945), and the Pulitzer Prize–winning South Pacific (1949).
To date, Show Boat has had six Broadway revivals, including a 1932 run including members of the 1927 cast, most notably Helen Morgan, and featuring Paul Robeson as Joe, a role forever after associated with him, though he did not originate it. Other revivals occurred in 1946, 1948, 1954, 1983, and 1994, with three movie adaptations in 1928, 1936, and 1951.
James Forbes’s farcical satire in four acts opened on 31 December 1914 at the Hudson Theatre for 156 performances produced by Selwyn & Co. Forbes’s play lampoons the backstage machinations of theater folk as they prepare a new play, The Wallop, a “turkey” that its producer, Max Rosenbaum, must make palatable to his audience while keeping the shenanigans of his cast and immediate circle of friends from scuttling his hopes. Forbes claimed that the impetus for the play was the desire to create a “stage mother” character, and he was lucky in the casting of comedienne Zelda Sears in that role. Critics applauded the cast of this popular work, which included, besides Sears, Patricia Collinge, Ned A. Sparks, and a young Douglas Fairbanks. One noted that “it is the rich humor, the abounding sympathy, the pleasant satire and the perfect idiom of The Show Shop that make it so agreeable to hear and see.”
Floating theaters were operating downriver on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers before the Civil War, but the heyday of showboating came after mid-century as steam power allowed them to operate both up- and downriver. Steamboats pulled separate boats fitted out as theaters. Eventually, some, including circus boats, became quite elaborate. From the end of the Civil War to 1930, as many as 75 showboats operated on American rivers. One of the leading showboat owners, Augustus Byron French, managed five showboats (advertising some as “floating palaces”) between 1878 and 1901, pioneering the use of marching bands put ashore to attract the local community to the theater. Another important manager in this period, E. A. Price, developed publicity devices, including calliopes and billboards, to call attention to the arrival of his theaters.
The showboats featured all manner of amusements, from minstrels and variety acts to dramatic works, including the perennial melodrama Uncle Tom’s Cabin.† Some operators produced Shakespeare and other prestigious dramas, while others focused on “moral amusements” including lectures. E. E. Eisenbarth’s Temple of Amusement was renamed the Cotton Blossom, and under Ralph Emerson’s management it presented Broadway hits and popular melodramas until 1931. Showboats inspired Edna Ferber’s novel Show Boat (1926) and the subsequent Broadway musical Show Boat (1927), which was adapted from it, and both presented an epic story set on a Mississippi River showboat from the 1880s to the 1920s. The Great Depression and the arrival of sound movies significantly undermined the survival of the showboat phenomenon, although some operated as late as the 1940s.
George Kelly’s three-act comedy opened at the Playhouse Theatre on 5 February 1924 for a remarkable 571 performances, followed by numerous tours and revivals, making it one of the most popular plays of its era. The Pulitzer Prize committee selected it for the award, but Columbia University officials overturned the choice, selecting Hatcher Hughes’s Hell-Bent fer Heaven instead. Set in the lower middle-class Philadelphia home of the Fishers, news that their daughter Amy (Regina Wallace) is in love with ostentatious braggart Aubrey Piper (Louis John Bartels) sets off an uproar. Amy and Aubrey are married despite parental protests and the warning of Amy’s sister, Clara (Juliette Crosby), that Aubrey will end up living in their house. Aubrey proves generally unsuccessful in his endeavors, a fact sarcastically remarked upon by his dour mother-in-law, Ma Fisher (Helen Lowell). When Aubrey borrows a car and crashes into a trolley, it is left to Clara’s husband, Frank (Guy D’Ennery), to bail him out. Pa Fisher (C. W. Goodrich) dies and the family’s financial stability is in doubt, but Amy’s brother Joe (Lee Tracy) is given $100,000 for an invention. When it is revealed that Aubrey provided the necessary connections and muscled the backers into doubling Joe’s cut, Aubrey genially announces that “a little bluff goes a long way sometimes.” All are impressed except a skeptical Ma Fisher, who remains unconvinced of Aubrey’s worth. An impressive six Broadway revivals (1932, 1937, 1950, 1967, 1968, and 1992), as well as stock productions, abounded after the play’s first appearance. Among the revivals, a 1950 staging advertised as the first “arena”* production in New York and a 1967 revival starring Helen Hayes as Ma Fisher were well received, as were movie versions in 1926, 1934 (with Spencer Tracy as Aubrey), and 1946.
A scene, song, or actor is said to stop the show when the audience is so impressed that its applause momentarily prevents the performance from continuing. The term is most frequently applied to musicals when a star and a great song inspire an overwhelming response.
This was a slang term for a sensational drama or melodrama. Brady lists several standard shreikers of “the period of gas-light and blood and thunder”: Sweeney Todd, the Maniac Barber, Nick of the Woods, Jack Sheppard, and The Seven Charmed Bullets, among others.
Levi, Samuel, and Jacob Szemanski were all born in Shervient, Lithuania, and all immigrated to the United States in 1882 when their family settled in Syracuse, New York. Americanizing their names to Lee, Sam S., and J. J. Shubert, they created a theatrical empire that bears their names over 120 years after they bought the area touring rights to Charles Hoyt’s A Texas Steer (1894). Leading the way, Sam and Lee rented the Herald Square Theatre (and, later, the Casino) and made a truce with A. L. Erlanger of the Theatrical Syndicate, allowing them to present Augustus Thomas’s Arizona (1900). Among the stars of Shubert productions in their early years were Richard Mansfield, Sarah Bernhardt, and Lillian Russell. Within only a few years, the Shuberts managed to break the syndicate’s monopoly, amassing a theatrical chain larger than any other. In 1905, Sam, the dominant partner, died in a train wreck, after which Lee took over management of their mutual interests. J. J., who was more interested in staging productions, particularly operettas and musical comedies, left managerial tasks to Lee.
Among the Shubert stars between 1910 and 1930, Al Jolson (1885–1950) was their greatest discovery. He starred in a long series of musicals at their Winter Garden Theatre beginning in 1911, among them La Belle Paree (1911), Vera Violetta (1911), The Honeymoon Express (1913), Dancing Around (1914), Robinson Crusoe, Jr. (1916), Sinbad (1918), Bombo (1921), and Big Boy (1925). Between their failed production of The Brixton Burglary (1901) and 1954, the Shuberts produced a remarkable 250 Broadway productions, including Heidelberg (1902), Widowers’ Houses (1907), The City (1909), The Passing Show (1912), Ruggles of Red Gap (1915), Maytime (1917), He and She (1920), Blossom Time (1921), Artists and Models (first edition in 1923), The Student Prince (1924), and Countess Maritza (1926). Their principal New York theaters, the Winter Garden and the Princess, were seldom dark. The Shuberts were criticized for ruthless business practices, but they were also known to offer reduced rents to worthy productions or troupes struggling to make a go of it.
Since Lower East Side audiences for the Yiddish theater craved sentimental appeals and thrilling sensations, theater managers tended to pander to them with shund, a broad concept that might best be defined as the opposite of highbrow. The word translates literally as “trash.”
Bartley Campbell’s six-act melodrama divided critics when it opened on 26 February 1883 for 40 performances at Haverly’s Fourteenth Street Theatre. Georgia Cayvan played one of two daughters of a Christian mother and Jewish father forced to flee oppression in the aftermath of the assassination of Czar Alexander II as political activists and Jews were persecuted. Despite its short run, the play remained popular in revivals and on tour until well into the 20th century. A 1905 revival ran for a month, and a 1926 movie version starred Alma Rubens and Edmund Lowe.
During the modernist era, actors rarely saw the complete script of a new play they were to perform. Instead, each actor got the sides for his or her character: that character’s lines plus the three or four cue words preceding each line. Even after affordable Samuel French Inc. editions of plays became available for all, some old actors would retype their parts in the form of sides, because they felt that learning the role that way made them more alert on stage.
Scott Marble’s comedy/melodrama was produced at Haverly’s Fourteenth Street Theatre, where it opened on 2 December 1895. Set in the prosperous home of a retired New York stock broker, John Pemberton, the play shifts from there to the city’s slums, where Pemberton’s son, Roy, has kidnapped a young woman, and efforts are made to rescue her. At the climax, the hero, Kearny P. Speedy, dives from a tower into the East River to save the woman as the villain attempts to drown her. Critics applauded the play’s reality in its depiction of Herald Square and New York’s Tenderloin section but also offered a range of racial and ethnic stereotypes, as well as a typical Bowery B’hoy and his “goil.” The play was revived in New York in 1902.
Son of a blacksmith and born in Homer, New York, Arthur C. Sidman worked at several jobs, including as a reporter for his hometown newspaper before moving to the neighboring town to continue his journalistic pursuits. There, Sidman found his way into amateur theater, an experience that fueled his desire to pursue a professional stage career. He made his debut in vaudeville portraying a stereotypical Yankee† farmer in a sketch he authored, A Bit of True Life. Sidman’s popularity grew, and he wrote plays, including Summer Showers (1895) and York State Folks (1900), the latter having an enduring stage life. It was performed on Broadway in 1905.
Bronx, New York–born Sophia Kosow was adopted by her stepfather, Sigmund Sidney, following her parents’ divorce during her childhood. She studied at the Theatre Guild’s School for Acting with the goal of overcoming shyness, but her abilities won her roles on Broadway and in Hollywood. Sidney’s Broadway appearances included Crime (1927), Gods of the Lightning (1928), Nice Women (1929), Bad Girl (1930), To Quito and Back (1937), and The Gentle People* (1939). Until 1952, she devoted herself to movies, returning to Broadway to replace Jessica Tandy* in The Fourposter.* She also appeared in Enter Laughing (1963) and replaced Mildred Natwick* in Barefoot in the Park* in 1967.
Sidney’s final Broadway appearance was in 1977 as Mrs. Wire in Tennessee Williams’s* Vieux Carré; the play failed, but Sidney won positive reviews. On screen, Sidney became a major star in the early sound era. She received an Academy Award nomination for Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (1973) and a Golden Globe Award for An Early Frost (1985). Her other major films included An American Tragedy (1931), Street Scene (1931), Madame Butterfly (1932), Accent on Youth* (1935), Fury (1936), Dead End* (1937), One Third of a Nation* (1939), and The Searching Wind (1946). Late in her life, Sidney won new audiences as Juno in Beetlejuice (1988) and Grandma in Mars Attacks! (1996), both directed by Tim Burton. Sidney married three times: publisher Bennett Cerf, actor Luther Adler, and radio producer Carlton Alsop.
Born in London, Caroline F. Siedle (or Siedel) came to the United States with her husband Edward Siedel and made a career in costume design. Despite frequent misspelling of her name as “Seidel,” and despite reviewers’ habitual neglect of mentioning design credits in an era when not all costumes were designed specifically for a show, Siedle was recognized in her day. Surviving renderings for Broadway and Metropolitan Opera productions show a strong sense of line and color. She created costumes for a total of 58 productions, mostly musicals and operettas, including El capitan (1896), The Belle of New York (1897), The Fortune Teller (1898), Sally in Our Alley (1902), Babes in Toyland (1903), The Wizard of Oz (1903), The Earl and the Girl (1905), and The Red Mill (1906); she collaborated on 13 shows with director Julian Mitchell.
English-born, of German descent, Edward Siedle made his career in the United States from 1878. As property master, and later technical director, at the Metropolitan Opera House for 34 years, he prepared over 50 productions, including the Met’s first world premiere, La fanciulla del west (1910). He also freelanced his expertise and achieved renown rare for a technician when he built a life-size elephant for a DeWolf Hopper number in Wang (1891). He also owned his own properties warehouse, Siedle Studios, in New York. His New York Times obituary on 31 March 1925 calls him “the invisible autocrat of the opera.” He was married to costume designer Caroline F. Siedle.
This Theatre Guild production opened on 20 December 1926 at the John Golden Theatre and ran for 130 performances. Sidney Howard’s gripping portrait of a possessive, domineering mother (Laura Hope Crews) owed much to Freudian psychology. When her two adult sons (Elliot Cabot and Earle Larimore) bring home a wife and a fiancée (Margalo Gillmore and Elisabeth Risdon) to meet her, she begins maneuvering to drive the women away and keep her sons under her wing. But the wife proves a worthy opponent and manages to keep the elder son as her husband, while the younger son caves in to life with Mother. Movie versions were released in 1933, in which Crews repeated her role opposite Irene Dunne and Joel McCrea, and 1949.
Born in Cortland, New York, he founded Variety in 1905 in association with Al Greason and Epes Winthrop and ran it until his death.
Born in Grodno in Polish Lithuania to an Orthodox Jewish family, Mae Simon was educated
and from early youth attended Yiddish theater performances, imitating the leading actresses after each show. Around 1900, Simon and her family moved to the United States, where
at age 15 she participated in a dramatic club leading to her entrance into professional theater, first in vaudeville and later in legitimate plays, acting with such Yiddish theater stars as Jacob Silbert, Rudolph Schild-
kraut, and David Kessler. She directed the 110th Street Theatre, renamed the Mae Simon Theatre, and appeared
in a few movies, including My Jewish Mother (1930).
Born in New York, Lee Simonson, along with Robert Edmond Jones, Norman Bel Geddes, and Jo Mielziner, became one of the leading Broadway scene designers of the years between the two world wars. Simonson attended Harvard University, where he studied with George Pierce Baker, and his first designs were done for the Washington Square Players. Following military service in World War I, Simonson returned to become a founding member of the Theatre Guild, designing settings for Jane Clegg (1920), Liliom (1921), He Who Gets Slapped (1922), R.U.R. (1922), From Morn to Midnight (1922), Peer Gynt (1923), The Adding Machine (1923), Man and the Masses (1924), The Road to Rome (1927), Faust (1928), Marco Millions (1928), and Dynamo (1929). After 1930, Simonson continued to design but at a slower pace. In this period, he designed Elizabeth the Queen* (1930) and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Idiot’s Delight* (1936). Simonson’s design style owes much to the European modernist innovations known in America as the New Stagecraft, and he wrote two important books on his design ideas, The Stage Is Set (1932) and The Art of Scenic Design (1950), as well as an autobiography, Part of a Lifetime (1943).
William A. Brady produced this four-act Owen Davis play at the Playhouse Theatre, where it opened on 7 January 1915 for 220 performances. Critics carped that the play was no better than the quickie melodramas Davis had written for producer A. H. Woods, but Davis himself considered it one of his finest works. The production was aided by Alice Brady’s performance as Mary Horton, a New Hampshire girl who leaves her mother for a try at New York. Her innocence is no defense for bad influences she encounters, and Mary indulges in behavior she must hide from her pious mother. When her mother becomes seriously ill, Mary returns to New Hampshire and endeavors to keep her moral lapses from her mother, despite the arrival of several of her New York friends. The cast also included John Cromwell and Robert Edeson.
A native of Charleston, South Carolina, Susan Beverly Sitgreaves was the daughter of a Confederate soldier. She became an actress, debuting in New York opposite Richard Mansfield in Beau Brummell (1890). Sitgreaves also performed regularly in France, where she acted with Sarah Bernhardt, and in England, where she appeared in A Broken Halo (1900). On Broadway, Sitgreaves acted in Resurrection (1903), a 1904 revival of Camille titled Zira (1905), Arsene Lupin (1909), revivals of Everyman in 1913 and A Celebrated Case† in 1915, The Great Lover (1915), a 1923 revival of The Devil’s Disciple, A Royal Fandango (1923), A Weak Woman (1926), Two Girls Wanted (1926), and The Laughing Woman (1936).
William Anthony McGuire’s hit three-act comedy, which opened on 25 August 1921 at the Sam H. Harris Theatre, ran for 430 performances and became a touring and stock staple. Richard and Geraldine Burton (Donald Meek and Eleanor Gordon) are about to be evicted as the result of living beyond their income. To help with moving costs, they decide to sell their new car. The new bride living next door, Marilyn Sterling (June Walker), sets about convincing her husband, Gilbert (Ernest Truex), that they should buy the Burtons’ car. However, this expenditure sets them on the same course that cost the Burtons their comforts. Matters are made worse when Gilbert’s boss, Mr. Stapleton (Berton Churchill), turns up unexpectedly and is so shocked by the Sterlings’ elaborate lifestyle that he fires Gilbert. After considerable effort, Gilbert manages to sell the car and convinces Stapleton to give him back his position. At this point, Marilyn indicates that a new vehicle will be required after all: a baby carriage. Hedda Hopper, soon to become a Hollywood gossip columnist, has a supporting role in the play. Movie versions of Six-Cylinder Love appeared in 1923 and 1931.
Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Joseph Harold Skelley developed his comedy skills in the circus before making his legitimate theater debut in Chicago in the musical The Time, the Place and the Girl (1908), after which he joined Lew Dockstader’s minstrels. Although most of his Broadway appearances were in musicals, he scored a major success in the George Maker Watters and Arthur Hopkins play Burlesque (1927) in the role of Skid, a dissolute comedian redeemed by a loving chorus girl, played by Barbara Stanwyck. Skelly appeared in 10 early sound movies, including an adaptation of Burlesque retitled The Dance of Life (1929). His post-Burlesque stage appearances, Melody (1933), The Ghost Writer (1933), Queer People (1934), and Come What May (1934), were all failures. He was killed in Connecticut in a car accident.
Aurania Rouverol’s mild three-act comedy opened on 21 May 1928 at the Bijou Theatre for 448 performances, capturing family life in its depiction of the relationship between a father, Judge Hardy (Carleton Macy), and his daughter, Marion (Marguerite Churchill), who breaks with her fiancé (Walter Abel) to aid her father’s reelection bid. In 1937, a movie version titled A Family Affair, starring Lionel Barrymore, inspired a series of popular Hardy family films with Lewis Stone replacing Barrymore, and the focus shifted to Mickey Rooney as the incorrigible teenage son, Andy Hardy.
Born in Chicago, the daughter of actor Otis Skinner, Cornelia Otis Skinner was educated at Bryn Mawr before joining her father in his production of Blood and Sand (1921). She appeared in many plays, including Will Shakespeare (1923), Tweedles (1923), In His Arms (1924), White Collars (1925), Candida (1939), Theatre (1941), The Searching Wind* (1944), Lady Windermere’s Fan (1946), Major Barbara (1956), and The Pleasure of His Company* (1958), which she coauthored with Samuel Taylor.* Skinner gained enduring success with a long series of monodramas, including The Wives of Henry VIII (1931), The Empress Eugenie (1932), The Loves of Charles II (1933), and Paris ’90 (1952).
Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his father was a local minister, Otis Skinner began his long career at the Philadelphia Museum in 1877, followed by two seasons at the Walnut Street Theatre† and small roles in productions starring Edwin Booth, Lawrence Barrett, and Joseph Jefferson. He joined Augustin Daly’s company for four years, after which he appeared with Booth and Helena Modjeska in a series of Shakespearean productions. In 1894, he achieved solo star status in His Grace de Grammont, followed by notable—and many critics felt flamboyant—performances in a 1901 revival of Francesca da Rimini, The Taming of the Shrew (1904), The Duel (1906), The Honor of the Family (1908), Kismet (1911), The Silent Voice (1915), Mister Antonio (1916), Pietro (1920), Blood and Sand (1921), A Hundred Years Old (1929), and his final New York performance in the title role of a 1933 revival of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.† With his wife, Maud, he authored several books, and Skinner was the father of actress-playwright Cornelia Otis Skinner.
London-born Alison Mary Elliott Margaret Groom married Frank Markham Skipworth in 1882, took his surname, and went on the stage in A Gaiety Girl in 1894 at London’s Daly’s Theatre prior to moving to the United States to sing in An Artist’s Model (1895), serving as understudy for Marie Tempest. In New York, “Skippy,” as she was nicknamed, joined Daniel Frohman’s Lyceum Theatre company prior to touring with Viola Allen in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Cymbeline, and Twelfth Night, and she acted with James K. Hackett and John Drew. On Broadway, Skipworth acted most notably in The Manoeuvres of Jane (1899), Clyde Fitch’s The Way of the World (1901), Major Pendennis (1916), Rachel Crothers’s 39 East (1919), Lilies of the Field (1921), George Kelly’s The Torch Bearers (1922), The Swan (1923) starring Eva Le Gallienne, and When We Are Married (1939), among others. Beginning in 1912, Skipworth acted in numerous movies, often playing royalty, wealthy grande dames, or formidable mothers, including in her original stage role in 39 East (1920), Outward Bound (1930), Raffles (1930), Tillie and Gus (1933), Alice in Wonderland (1933), Becky Sharp (1935), and, most memorably, as the nemesis of W. C. Fields in three films, including If I Had a Million (1932).
In the era when stars toured with their companies by railroad, they were often booked into a series of one-night stands. This meant racing to pack up immediately after the final curtain to catch the night train to the next town, thus sleeping on trains and doing without the comfort and expense of hotels. For example, Otis Skinner wrote, in an unpublished 20 January 1928 letter mailed from Lincoln, Nebraska, to Kansas City Star critic E. B. Garnett: “Dear Ruby: I’ve waited until I’ve learned my railroad movements before replying to your cordial invitation. I’m just in from a night trip and find that we travel most all day on Sunday. This has been an intensive week of the lesser towns and last night was the fourth sleeper jump since Sunday. Tomorrow we give two performances at Omaha. By the time I reach Kansas City on Sunday evening I shall not be fit company for man or beast.”
Born Wendell Phillips Smalley in Brooklyn, New York, he began a career as an actor in vaudeville but worked his way toward legitimate theater. He acted on Broadway in Miranda of the Balcony (1901), The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch (1901), Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1902), Captain Molly (1902), and The Yankee Tourist (1907). In 1904, Smalley married actress/movie director Lois Weber, and four years later, the couple began to work with the Gaumont Film Company. Smalley acted in or directed more than 200 films, the large majority of which were short subjects. Many of these involved Weber, and historians labor to assess the significance of Smalley’s involvement in her writing and directing—and vice versa.
Born in England as Charles Aubrey Smith, he had a long acting career on stage and in movies in the persona of a British gentleman. On stage, he appeared in The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith (1895), The Light That Failed (1903), The Runaway (1911), The Constant Wife (1926), The Bachelor Father (1928), and Spring Again (1941); he also had a small role in Johnston Forbes-Robertson’s 1904 Hamlet. Smith became a respected character actor in films beginning in 1915, including Love Me Tonight (1932), The Monkey’s Paw (1933), Morning Glory (1933), Cleopatra (1934), Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936), Romeo and Juliet (1936), Rebecca (1940), Waterloo Bridge* (1940), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), An Ideal Husband (1947), and Little Women (1949).
Connecticut-born Harry James Smith attended Williams College and Harvard before embarking on a teaching career at Oberlin College. In 1906, he left his academic post for an editing job at Atlantic Monthly to pay the rent while he wrote plays. He scored a success with his first produced play, Mrs. Bumpstead-Leigh (1911), but his second, Blackbirds (1913), flopped. Smith had a major hit with the comedy A Tailor-Made Man (1917), followed by The Little Teacher (1918), but his career ended abruptly when he was killed in an accident serving with the Canadian Red Cross during World War I.
See SMITH AND DALE.
Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Winchell Smith inauspiciously commenced his theatrical career as an usher at the Herald Square Theatre where Richard Mansfield encouraged him to try acting. He debuted in a secondary role in William Gillette’s Secret Service (1896) and acted for several years in such plays as The New Clown (1902), The Two Schools (1902), The Girl from Kay’s (1903), The Man of Destiny (1905), and John Bull’s Other Island (1905), but within a decade, he became a highly successful playwright and director. He won popularity with the farce Brewster’s Millions (1906), followed by Polly of the Circus (1907, coauthored by Margaret Mayo), Via Wireless (1908), The Fortune Hunter (1909), Love among the Lions (1910), Bobby Burnit (1910), The Only Son (1911), The Boomerang (1915, with Victor Mapes), Turn to the Right! (1916, with John E. Hazzard), and the highly successful Lightnin’ (1918, with Frank Bacon). He directed productions of his own plays, and works by others, including The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (1925), The Wisdom Tooth (1926), and The Vinegar Tree (1930).
Two vaudevillians, Joseph “Joe” Smith (1884–1981), born Joseph Sulzer, and Charles “Charlie” Dale (1882–1971), born Charles Marks, became legendary show business icons, rising out of the Eastern European ghetto of New York City to win success in vaudeville, movies, radio, and television as a result of their long partnership. Legend has it that the duo met as teenagers in 1898, formed an act, and struggled to find work as a comedy team. In 1902, they partnered with two other singing comics, Irving Kaufman and Harry Godwin, to create the Avon Comedy Four. The quartet remained together for over 15 years, becoming one of the most acclaimed acts of the era. When the act broke up in 1919, Smith and Dale stayed together and developed their Yiddish-flavored dialect sketch, “Doctor Kronkheit and His Only Living Patient,” which kept them at the forefront of vaudeville and carried the team into other mediums as the decades rolled by. The memorably wacky humor included such lines as the following: Smith: “Are you a doctor?” Dale: “I’m a doctor.” Smith: “I’m dubious.” Dale: “I’m glad to know you, Mr. Dubious.”
In 1929, Smith and Dale scored a Broadway success in David Freedman’s play Mendel, Inc., in which they played two broadly conceived characters, Shtrudel (Dale) and Shnaps (Smith), that were merely extensions of their Doctor Kronkheit personas. Their other Broadway appearances included The Passing Show of 1919, Earl Carroll’s Vanities (1926), and The Sky’s the Limit. Smith and Dale were devoted friends, and in old age, both lived at Lillian Booth’s Actors Home in Englewood, New Jersey, and were buried together. Neil Simon’s* 1972 play The Sunshine Boys* is believed to have been inspired by Smith and Dale (and includes Simon’s own variation on the Doctor Kronkheit sketch), but the offstage bickering of Simon’s characters was instead based on a similar comedy team, Gallagher and Shean.
According to Thoda Cocroft in her book Great Names, this was the practice of posting bills on “fences, barns, buildings, back alleys, and all locations that were not owned by the outdoor advertising companies.” Sniping often involved compensating the owners of those surfaces with passes to the performance. See also BILL-POSTING; THREE-SHEET.
The deadheads in a theater audience were “snow.”
A playwright and later drama critic and theater historian, Bernard Sobel was born in Attica, Indiana, and worked as a publicist for Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., Charles Dillingham, A. L. Erlanger, and the Shubert brothers. He authored three plays, Jennie Knows, Mrs. Bompton’s Dinner Party, and There’s Always a Reason, all in 1913; acted in one, Killers (1928); and was drama critic for the New York Mirror. Beginning in 1931 with his book Burleycue; An Underground History of Burlesque Days, Sobel chronicled the history of popular entertainment in New York in such books as The Theatre Handbook and Digest of Plays (1940), Broadway Heartbeat: Memoirs of a Press Agent (1953), A Pictorial History of Burlesque (1956), and A Pictorial History of Vaudeville (1961).
“The great sensational temperance drama,” as labeled when it first published in 1887, was written by T. Trask Woodward. In five acts, the play had its first production at the Masonic Hall in Louisville, Kentucky, with Woodward himself playing the character of Bob Brittle, a good soul who saves a friend, Charles, and his family from the results of actions taken while Charles was intoxicated. At the final curtain, Brittle offers a brief epilogue inviting the audience to “join our cause.” One Louisville critic noted of the first production that it “is well above the average of modern drama.”
The sophisticated comedies of Philip Barry in the 1920s and 1930s best exemplify society drama, which focused on the values and fashions of the upper classes. Such plays might be highly charged dramas exploring class divisions or high comedies on social mores that showcased the latest styles in dress and home decor. Playwrights as diverse as Clyde Fitch, S. N. Behrman, Rachel Crothers, George S. Kaufman, and Zoë Akins explored this terrain in their plays, as did European dramatists as varied as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and Nöel Coward.* See also †COMEDY; †FOREIGN PLAYS ADAPTED TO THE AMERICAN STAGE.
Harry G. Sommers’s career in theatrical management began in Chicago where he was chief usher and assistant treasurer at Hooley’s Theatre from 1887. Over the next decade, he held various positions at the Columbia Theatre, McVicker’s Theatre, and the Illinois Theatre. In 1901, he moved to New York where he was business manager of the Knickerbocker Theatre for nearly 30 years. He added managerial connections to the Avon, New Amsterdam, Selwyn, Vanderbilt, National, Lyric, and Hudson Theatres in New York; he also operated a chain of 15 theaters throughout the Midwest. He served as vice president of the Actors’ Fund of America and belonged to all three major theatrical clubs.
George M. Cohan wrote, produced, and starred in this four-scene comedy/drama at the Hudson Theatre, where it opened on 31 December 1923 for 96 performances. In this tribute to vaudeville and to Cohan’s late father, Jerry Cohan, the titular head of his family’s vaudeville act, the Four Cohans, Cohan played John “Hap” Farrell, a happy-go-lucky dancer with a penchant for drink and gambling. “Hap” loves Julia, his stage partner, who tries to keep him sober. The cast also included Louis Calhern and Mayo Methot. Cohan returned to the role for a brief revival, which opened on 16 June 1930 at the Fulton Theatre for 16 performances. Movie versions of The Song and Dance Man starred Tom Moore and Bessie Love in 1926 and Paul Kelly and Claire Trevor in 1936. That same year, Cohan reprised his role in a 60-minute Lux Radio Theatre radio broadcast of The Song and Dance Man. Throughout his life, the multitalented Cohan consistently referred to himself as “just a song and dance man.”
A. H. Woods produced Edward Sheldon’s five-act adaptation of Hermann Sudermann’s 1908 novel at Eltinge’s 42nd Street Theatre, where it opened on 22 December 1914 for 191 performances. Sheldon “Americanized” Sudermann’s story of Lily, a virtuous and beautiful young woman persuaded to pose in the nude by a sculptor. They fall in love, but he fears the impact of marriage on his work and neglects her to the point that she marries a wealthy man she does not love, leading to nearly tragic circumstances and scandal. The cast included Irene Fenwick, Ernest Glendinning, Thomas A. Wise, and Dorothy Donnelly. Time magazine’s critic echoed the general sentiment that the play’s “sole object seems to be to pique depraved curiosity and please those who take their enjoyment with their tongues hanging out.” Movie versions of The Song of Songs appeared in 1918 and 1933, the latter starring Marlene Dietrich.
Born Edward Hugh Sothern in New Orleans, the son of actor E. A. Sothern, he was educated in England with hopes of becoming a painter. He chose acting instead and debuted in his father’s 1879 production, Brother Sam. After touring with John McCullough, Sothern joined Daniel Frohman’s Lyceum Theatre company for 10 years, scoring successes in The Highest Bidder (1887), Lord Chumley (1888), The Dancing Girl (1891), A Way to Win a Woman (1894), and The Prisoner of Zenda (1895). Following marriage to Virginia Harned, Sothern left Frohman in 1898 and starred for many years in Shakespearean productions, beginning with a 1900 staging of Hamlet. He began costarring with Julia Marlowe in 1904 in Romeo and Juliet, followed by innumerable Shakespeare productions and tours as “Sothern and Marlowe,” playing both comedies and tragedies: Much Ado about Nothing (1904), The Merchant of Venice (1905), Twelfth Night (1905), The Taming of the Shrew (1905), Antony and Cleopatra (1909), As You Like It (1910), Macbeth (1910), and Cymbeline (1923). They married in 1911. His non-Shakespearean productions after 1900 included If I Were King (1901), John the Baptist (1907), Don Quixote (1908), and revivals of several 19th-century plays. When Marlowe retired in 1924, Sothern acted for a few more years before retiring in 1927. Critics remarked on his comparatively natural acting, but Sothern’s romanticized style had fallen out of favor by the time he retired.
The French term refers to an actress playing a saucy or coquettish character (often a maidservant) in neoclassical comedy or opera, but the term has been freely used to describe secondary comic female characters in melodramas, comedies, musicals, and operettas.
Born in Russia, Sergei Soudeikine studied art in Moscow and became a scene designer, designing productions for Vsevolod Meyerhold and Alexander Tairov before immigrating to Paris. He came to the United States as designer of Nikita Balieff’s Chauve-Souris revue.† For many years, Soudeikine designed for the Metropolitan Opera, Radio City Music Hall, and Broadway productions of New Faces of 1934, The Chinese Nightingale (1934), and Porgy and Bess (1935).
This was a gentleman’s evening dress suit.
English feminist writer Katherine Githa Sowerby wrote several plays, one of which, Rutherford & Son (1912), scored a hit in London and on Broadway. Born in Gateshead, England, to a family of glass makers, Sowerby struggled for recognition as a writer, and Rutherford & Son was produced under the name K. G. Sowerby, only revealing after the fact that the author was a woman. Rutherford & Son ran for 133 performances in London and was translated in several languages and produced in numerous countries, including the United States, where it ran on Broadway for 63 performances following its opening on 24 December 1912 at the Little Theatre in a Winthrop Ames production. The play was revived on Broadway in 1927. Sowerby, whose writing was favorably compared to Henrik Ibsen’s, also wrote children’s books. Her other plays included Before Breakfast (1912), Jinny (1914), A Man and Some Women (1914), Sheila (1917), The Stepmother (1924), and Direction Action (1937).
The practice presently known as “scalping” was earlier called “speculation.” In towns and cities where a star was booked for a limited engagement of only a few performances, tickets could sell out quickly, and the demand for tickets meant that they could be resold at inflated prices. Even more perniciously, bogus tickets might be sold on the street. The cost of bringing in a star of the magnitude of Edwin Booth for his April 1887 first appearance in Kansas City, for example, led Coates Opera House to increase its normal price of $1.50 for a reserved seat to $2.50, but then speculators were able to get as much as $35 for the $2.50 ticket. The theater’s advertisement stated that “the management reserves the right to refuse the sale of seats to speculators,” and yet there was a frenzy of ticket speculation on that occasion. According to an 1887 report in the Kansas City Evening Star, “License Inspector Caleb Huestis said: ‘Every one of these Booth ticket speculators should be arrested, but unfortunately there is no ordinance to prohibit speculating and dealing in theatrical tickets.’ One of the luckiest of the speculators was L. A. Jenkins, who runs the cigar stand in the Coates house. He secured forty-eight tickets and disposed of them at a sufficient advance to enable him to buy a good lot in Kenwood addition.” The problem was endemic, for the Kansas City Star reported in 1900 that Atlanta had actually enforced its law against theater ticket speculators; the Atlanta man—who had four men wait in line to buy the limit of 10 tickets each for Richard Mansfield’s engagement—had to pay a $100 fine (although the mayor remitted the 30-day jail sentence).
This name is believed to have first appeared in the cast list of Charles A. Gardner’s Karl the Peddler (1886), but it owes its long life to Winchell Smith. In the 1907 production of Smith and Byron Ongley’s Brewster’s Millions, this false name is given to a mysterious character, and Smith used the name in several subsequent plays to keep the identity of similar characters a secret from the audience. The “George Spelvin” pseudonym is often employed in theatrical programs by male actors playing more than one role or who, for whatever reason, wish to be anonymous. Actresses have used the name “Georgia” or “Georgina” Spelvin for similar purposes. A director wishing to disguise his identity typically adopts the pseudonym Alan Smithee.
Born in the British West Indies, the African American writer and teacher Eulalie Spence came with her parents to Brooklyn as a child, focused on her studies; she earned an M.A. at Columbia University in 1939. She was an inspiring high school teacher in Brooklyn while becoming actively involved in theater as an actress, director, and playwright. Several of her plays were published, including Foreign Mail and The Starter (both in 1927) and Undertow (1929). The KRIGWA Players produced Spence’s Her! and Fool’s Errand, both in 1927.
This three-act comedy by Frank Craven opened on 25 September 1922 and ran 121 performances. Madge Kennedy and Jason Robards played the small-town star-crossed lovers. The leading lady owns and skillfully runs her own business in the village, but she becomes spiteful because she believes the leading man has jilted her because locals believe she makes “hussy clothes” and is “brazen—calls herself Madame Florence and not a sign of a wedding ring.” All ends happily after a fire burns down her shop.
For touring troupes of both legitimate plays and vaudeville, a split week meant spending part of it performing in one town and the rest of the week in another.
A Brooklyn, New York, resident who established a stock company at the Park Theatre there in 1901, Mary Gibbs Spooner went into theater to support her children. The Spooner Stock Company established the practice of charging low ticket prices and presenting plays popular with women. Spooner successfully moved the company to the Fifth Avenue Theatre† in 1907, and in partnership with playwright Charles E. Blaney, she established Spooner Stock Companies in numerous American cities.
Opening on 4 April 1927 at the Martin Beck Theatre, the politically charged three-act drama by George S. Brooks and Walter B. Lister was directed by George Abbott, produced by Jed Harris, and ran for 80 performances. In this era, several plays were inspired by political frictions with Mexico a decade earlier, but the action of this one is complicated by capitalist corruption. A fictional American war on Mexico is waged to protect the interests of a mineral magnate. The cast included Aline MacMahon, Donald Meek, and Osgood Perkins.
Directed by Lionel Atwill, Jean Bart’s three-act drama opened on 11 November 1926 for 444 performances at the 48th Street Theatre. Nubi (Suzanne Caubet), a gypsy girl, is taken in by the Mendez family, but she disrupts the household by her flirtations with its male members. The play’s long run is explained, in part, by the strenuous efforts of Leblang’s Ticket Office to promote ticket sales for this lurid show. Romney Brent, Henry O’Neill, Dorothy Stickney,* and Blanche Yurka were among the cast. Myrna Loy played Nubi in a 1929 movie version.
Edwin Milton Royle’s four-act play opened on 23 October 1905 at Wallack’s Theatre for 222 performances; it was produced by Theodore A. Liebler. One of the most successful plays of its time through tours that continued into the 1920s, The Squaw Man featured the comparative rarity of a central Native American character. Noble James Wynngate agrees to leave England in order to protect his cousin, a feckless young man who has stolen money. Wynngate has another motive, for he is in love with Lady Diana, his cousin’s wife. Using the name James Carston while in the American west, Wynngate is out of the reach of the authorities (who believe he is the thief) and away from Diana. He falls in love with an Indian girl, Nat-u-ritch, who has saved his life. They have a son, but Diana arrives to report that Wynngate’s innocence has been revealed and that he is now Earl of Kerhill. With a mind toward freeing her husband and the betterment of her child’s life, Nat-u-ritch takes her own. George Fawcett, William S. Hart, Theodore Roberts, and Mitchell Lewis were among the cast. Frequently revived (1907, 1908, 1911, and 1921), Cecil B. DeMille directed The Squaw Man as the first feature-length silent movie adapted from a stage source. It was a great success, but DeMille directed a 1931 sound version that failed, as did The White Eagle, a 1927 musical based on it.
During the mid- to late 1910s, Eugene O’Neill wrote a series of one-act plays prior to his first full-length drama, Beyond the Horizon. Four of these realistic one-acts, often referred to as O’Neill’s “plays of the sea,” were ultimately grouped under the title S.S. Glencairn, the name of the ship on which the four dramas—The Moon of the Caribbees (1918), Bound East for Cardiff (1916), The Long Voyage Home (1917), and In the Zone (1917)—are set. The Provincetown Players first staged the plays individually or on bills with works by other playwrights, but the bill called S.S. Glencairn premiered on 3 November 1925 at the Provincetown Playhouse for 105 performances. The bill was revived for 90 additional performances on 9 January 1929, and movie director John Ford adapted the plays to the screen as The Long Voyage Home (1940).
St. Louis, Missouri–based theater, known to residents as “The Muny,” was established in 1919 in Forest Park to present an annual summer season of plays and musicals, frequently with stars acting with a local company.
The realistic handling of properties on stage—dusting, tidying things, opening letters, hiding a key, and so on—is called stage business.
The various accoutrements of theatrical presentation, including all manner of rigging, lighting, and sound-making devices (wind machines, thunder sheets, etc.) were standard components of the well-equipped theater.
This term refers to the distance to be traveled between one-night stands on a tour. It may also refer to the time lapse when an actor forgets his lines.
“They embrace” in the stage directions of a play script before the turn of the century was seldom realized in production as a kiss on the lips. Only with the more relaxed interactions between unmarried men and women after World War I did the stage kiss become a basic technique to be mastered as part of the craft of acting. That the stage kiss had not yet become a universally practiced bit of stage business (as opposed to a real kiss) is evident in “Kissing on the Stage,” an 1883 piece published in the Kansas City Evening Star: “‘Nobody on the stage,’ said an old actress who used to be a reigning star many years ago, to a New York Journal reporter, ‘neither man nor woman, kisses from choice. At least I have never known it to be so. It is not a pleasant operation, no matter how much the people might like one another. They are both covered with paint, grease and powder, and often with perspiration, for kissing is the usual wind up to an exciting and passionate scene, and the contact of the two faces, or even the lips, is usually unpleasant. Any sort of an actor or an actress, if they know anything of their art, can simulate kissing quite as effectively as if the kiss was real. No matter how much one is excited by the scene, a kiss invariably spoils the glamour of the actress. It dispels the illusion, and brings one back to earth. On that ground I always objected to being kissed on the stage, even beyond the paint and grease idea. Actresses who consent to being kissed on the stage must want to be kissed very badly—that’s my experience.’”
This organization of theatrical women was founded by Rachel Crothers, Dorothy Donnelly, Louise Closser Hale, and other Broadway stars during World War I to provide assistance in the war effort. Theater women in New York, as well as in SWWR branches in other cities, knitted and collected clothes for French children, assembled medical supplies for shipment to Allies in war zones, sold Liberty Bonds, gave benefit performances, and arranged free theater tickets and transportation for military personnel, among other contributions.
See JOHNNY.
Born in Montreal, Canada, Rose Stahl was the daughter of a drama and music critic and grew up in Chicago. She made her acting debut in Philadelphia in 1887, toured with Daniel E. Bandmann in 1888, and made her New York debut in 1897. On Broadway, Stahl acted in A Soldier of the Empire (1899), The Chorus Lady (1908), Maggie Pepper (1911), A Perfect Lady (1914), and Moonlight Mary (1916). In 1902–1903, she toured in the E. E. Rose and Paul Leicester Ford play Janice Meredith, which had starred Mary Mannering in its original 1900 Broadway production. Stahl became closely associated with the role. Stahl was married twice, both times to actors, E. P. Sullivan and William Bonelli.
Edward Douglas Stair began working as a printer in his hometown of Morenci, Michigan. He moved into editing and publishing newspapers and always maintained involvement in journalism—including ownership of the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit Journal—even as he achieved success in theater management at Detroit’s Whitney Theatre beginning in 1892. His partnership with John H. Havlin, known as Stair and Havlin, built a circuit of melodrama theaters that expanded to become the United States Amusement Company, which encompassed theaters they built in Canada. Stair devoted some of his wealth to building an auditorium in Morenci.
According to Robert Grau, writing in 1910, the firm of Stair and Havlin, which booked melodramas on its circuit of up to 168 theaters, was “one of the largest and most successful in the world.” John H. Havlin and E. D. Stair formed their association in the 1890s and expanded rapidly by focusing on popular-priced melodramas, which retained their popularity on the road into the early 1900s.
Born in Macon, Georgia, Laurence Tucker Stallings was educated at Wake Forest University and Georgetown University before joining the United States Marines at the outbreak of World War I. He lost a leg in combat and later wrote of his experiences in an autobiographical novel, Plume (1924), which was adapted by movie director King Vidor into the classic film The Big Parade (1925). Stallings made his mark in theater collaborating with Maxwell Anderson on What Price Glory (1924), a play considered the first serious treatment of war in modern American drama, as well as a potent demonstration of the deepening seriousness of the Broadway stage. Stallings collaborated with Anderson again on two unsuccessful plays, First Flight (1925) and The Buccaneer (1925), but he ultimately turned to journalism and screenwriting, working on over 30 films.
When all seats for a performance were sold out, cheaper tickets might be sold to allow theatergoers to stand at the back of the house. Thus a notice of “S.R.O.” outside a theater meant that the show was doing excellent business. Performers boasting of success might say, according to Judge Horton, “we stood ’em up.”
Born Hugh Stanislaus Stange in Liverpool, Lancashire, England, the actor, elocutionist, playwright, and librettist was in the United States by the late 1880s when he was directing amateur productions in Kansas City. He then toured as a leading man with George C. Miln, followed by two seasons with Stuart Robson and William H. Crane. He settled in New York, where his one-act sketch Yesterday (1893) and, as the New York Times described it, his “ill-written, offensive, unimaginative piece” Mrs. Dascot (1894) appeared briefly. Stange became best known for his dramatization of Quo Vadis (1900) and his libretto for The Chocolate Soldier (1915).
Born Ruby Catherine Stevens in Brooklyn, New York, she endured the loss of her mother at age four, followed by her father’s desertion of Stanwyck and her siblings. After unhappy stints in various foster homes, she followed her sister Mildred into work as a chorus girl, ultimately landing in the chorus of the Ziegfeld Follies of 1922 and 1923 and dancing in Texas Guinan’s nightclubs. On Broadway, Stanwyck appeared in Keep Kool (1924), as a “Keep Kool Kutie,” The Noose (1926), and Tattle Tales (1933), but she had a major critical and commercial success as Bonny in Arthur Hopkins’s production of his own play, coauthored with George Manker Watters, Burlesque (1927), a three-act comedy of a chorus girl in love with a dissolute burlesque clown.
In his memoirs, Hopkins called Barbara Stanwyck “the greatest natural actress of our time.” In movies from 1927, Stanwyck won recognition as one of the finest and most versatile of screen stars of the first decades of the sound era. She was nominated for four Best Actress Academy Awards, for Stella Dallas (1937), Ball of Fire (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), and Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), and she was ultimately awarded a Life Achievement Oscar in 1982. Her other most notable films included Baby Face (1933), Annie Oakley (1935), Golden Boy* (1939), The Lady Eve (1941), and Meet John Doe (1941). Stanwyck also conquered television, winning three Emmy Awards and two Golden Globes, as well as the 1987 American Film Institute Life Achievement Award. She was married to actors Frank Fay and Robert Taylor, but both marriages ended in divorce.
Not every leading player in a Broadway production or stock company is a genuine star. A star is typically a “name” actor whose appearance guarantees an audience. From the early 19th century, a star system was in place with name actors like Edwin Forrest,† Junius Brutus Booth,† and others dominating a company of actors. The plays performed were often vehicles for the star, while the remainder of the company labored in supporting and utility roles. In the glory days of the road, a moderately successful actor might declare himself a star and form a company, as William S. Hart did for a season, but this was financially risky. Occasionally, a star is born as an actor bursts into recognition through a worthy role exploiting the actor’s gifts.
Among the greatest stars working in American theaters between 1880–1930 were European greats, including Sarah Bernhardt, Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, and Eleonora Duse, while American stars of particular note included Edwin Booth, Joseph Jefferson, E. H. Sothern, Julia Marlowe, and Minnie Maddern Fiske, to name just a few. Many stars were also managers and producers, such as Grace George, and others gained as much fame as playwrights, including William Gillette, James A. Herne, George M. Cohan, and others. Various burlesque, musical, and vaudeville stages also spawned several generations of stars. See also †FOREIGN STARS AND COMPANIES ON THE AMERICAN STAGE.
Born in Oneonta, New York, as Frances Grant, she debuted in the Albany stock company in 1901. Her big break came when producer David Belasco hired Starr to replace Minnie Dupree in The Music Master (1904) before starring her as Juanita in The Rose of the Rancho (1906). Starr won her greatest acclaim playing a kept woman in Eugene Walter’s The Easiest Way (1909), and her long career continued into the 1950s, with roles in The Case of Becky (1911), Marie-Odile (1915), Little Lady in Blue (1916), Tiger! Tiger! (1918), Shore Leave (1922), Immoral Isabella? (1927), The Lake (1933), Claudia* (1942), and her final Broadway appearance in The Ladies of the Corridor* (1953).
Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, the writer Gertrude Stein studied at Harvard University and, in 1904, moved to Paris with her brother, Leo. Although Paris remained her place of residence, she was an American who wrote about America. Notable among her many plays are What Happened, a Play (1913), Ladies Voices (1922), Four Saints in Three Acts (1927), and The Mother of Us All (1946).
Born in Granada, British West Indies, Henry Stephenson Garraway turned to acting in his youth, moving steadily from leading man roles to enduring success as a character actor. A patrician but benevolent air of dignity marked his performances. He often played Englishmen of either royal or military rank. As he aged, Stephenson played warm, fatherly (and, finally, grandfatherly) parts. He first acted on Broadway in the hit drama A Message from Mars (1901), followed by numerous credits including The Man from Blankley’s (1903), Mr. Hopkinson (1906), a 1910 revival of Pillars of Society starring Minnie Maddern Fiske, Becky Sharp (1912) again with Mrs. Fiske, Kitty Mackay (1914), Under Fire (1915), Justice (1916), Lilac Time (1917), The Fool (1922), Cynara (1931), and That Lady (1949). Stephenson made his first movie appearance in 1917, ultimately becoming a noted character actor with roles in Men and Women (1925), A Bill of Divorcement (1932), The Animal Kingdom* (1932), repeating his stage role in Cynara (1932), Little Women (1933), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Captain Blood (1935), The Young in Heart (1938), Little Old New York (1940), Oliver Twist (1948), and many others. Stephenson was married to actress Ann Shoemaker.
San Francisco–born drama critic Ashton Stevens began his writing career in his hometown for the News-Letter, and other local publications, in 1894. After three years as critic for the New York Evening Journal, Stevens moved to Chicago where he became a fixture, first on the Herald and Examiner (1910–1932) and then the Herald-American (1932–1951). Known as an exacting critic, Stevens was as critical of audiences and his fellow critics as he was of the qualities of Chicago theater productions and touring shows.
New York–born Emily Stevens was the niece of Minnie Maddern Fiske and debuted in a bit role in her aunt’s production of Becky Sharp (1900). With Mrs. Fiske’s guidance, Stevens spent 10 years honing her craft, moving up to major roles in Leah Kleschna (1904) and The New York Idea (1906). She played an important part in Edward Sheldon’s The Boss (1911), and followed it with Today (1913) and her biggest success, as the unrepentant wife in Louis K. Anspacher’s The Unchastened Woman (1915). Following a few roles in movies, Stevens returned to Broadway in The Madonna of the Future (1918), The Gentile Wife (1918), Sophie (1920), Footloose (1920), The Sporting Thing to Do (1923), A Lesson in Love (1923), Fata Morgana (1924), and Hedda Gabler (1926); she replaced Lynn Fontanne in The Second Man (1927), but she died of a drug overdose at the peak of her career.
Born in Baltimore, John A. Stevens became an actor in 1865 in Norfolk, Virginia, and later managed a theater there. He managed the Memphis Opera House and Kansas City’s (Missouri) Coates Opera House in the 1870s, as well as establishing the “Great Western Star Circuit” in the American west. Stevens wrote plays to supply himself with suitable roles, including Passion’s Slave, Wife for Wife, Daniel Boone, and The Unknown: A River Mystery, the last, written in 1878, becoming his most noted vehicle. At the request of William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, Stevens wrote a suitable melodramatic vehicle, The Prairie Waif (1880). He was married twice, both times to actresses. The first, Lottie Church, appeared in many of Stevens’s productions, and his second wife, Emily Lytton, was considerably younger than her husband.
Born in Daysville, Illinois, Thomas Wood Stevens was an energetic participant in the burgeoning Little Theater Movement in Chicago in the 1910s, where he collaborated on masques and pageants with Kenneth Sawyer Goodman. In 1913, Stevens set up the Carnegie Institute of Technology’s drama program, the first degree-granting school of theater arts. Following Goodman’s untimely death in 1918, Stevens headed the Goodman Theatre and School established by Goodman’s wealthy parents in 1925. Stevens continued in this position until 1930 when he returned to Carnegie, spending most of his remaining career there. Stevens’s only Broadway work, as director of James Bridie’s The Anatomist (1932), failed.
Born in Columbus, Ohio, this actor, humorist, and playwright was educated at Exeter and Yale University. As a writer for Vanity Fair, he developed his gift for parody. He made his New York stage debut in 1928 in Philip Barry’s Holiday. In 1930, he acted in his own Pulitzer Prize–nominated play Rebound. He was one of the wits who frequented the Algonquin Round Table. Stewart won an Academy Award for his screenplay of the movie version of Barry’s The Philadelphia Story* (1940) and was nominated for an Oscar for Laughter (1930). His also wrote or contributed to the writing of the films Another Language (1933), Dinner at Eight* (1933), Holiday (1938), The Women* (1939), Without Love* (1945), and others.
A daughter of a country doctor and born in Dickinson, North Dakota, Dorothy Stickney attended acting school in Minneapolis before touring with stock companies prior to her Broadway debut in 1926 in The Squall. Later that year, Stickney acted in a small role in the hit Chicago (1926) and a couple of failures before her first notable success as compassionate prostitute Molly Malone in Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s* The Front Page (1928). She also had successes in Another Language (1932), On Borrowed Time* (1938), and, most important, as Vinnie in Howard Lindsay* and Russel Crouse’s* long-running hit, Life with Father* (1939), and its less successful sequel, Life with Mother (1948). Stickney, who was married to Lindsay, also appeared in movies and made her last Broadway appearance in the musical Pippin (1973).
This ultimately popular four-act Joseph Arthur melodrama managed only 16 performances and dismissive reviews during its initial run, opening 30 August 1887 at the Fourteenth Street Theatre. However, it returned in March 1888 for a successful 104-performance run and was a touring, stock, and amateur staple. The simple plot, in which jealous John Bird attempts to incinerate two lovers, Jack Manley and Elinore Fordham, was enhanced by spectacular stage effects, the most famous of which included fire engines racing from a firehouse and a burning building. Movie versions of The Still Alarm appeared in 1918 and 1926.
By the late 19th century, many cities and towns across the United States had stock theaters. Most involved the employment of a stock company of actors, occasionally importing major stars to play dominant roles. More often, the company employed permanent leading actors and actresses, with supporting players of various kinds. These theaters typically presented a season of plays, although some offered a repertory-style schedule. Many actors who would ultimately gain prominence started in stock theaters, while actors who had once been prominent ended their careers in stock. See also *SUMMER STOCK.
An ensemble of actors, led by a manager or director and performing a season of plays in sequence during a residence at a theater or in a town, a stock company was an important form of theater management during much of the modernist period, despite economic vicissitudes. The essence of it was that the same actors, employed according to lines of business, worked together for a season or an extended period. During the 1870s, before the rise of the road, a city’s resident stock company would have to perform a different play almost every night, and thus, the early stock companies performed what amounted to rotating repertory. During the heyday of touring companies presenting several plays in repertory in the 1880s, stock companies disappeared except in the biggest population centers like New York, Boston, and San Francisco. With the rise of the combination system in the 1890s, stock companies once again found audiences that relished the old familiar warhorses of dramatic literature. Typically, the leading player dominated (and often managed) the company, but in some cases—as with Augustin Daly’s company—the ensemble as a whole was more important than any single player.
Veteran actor Frank C. Bangs recalled his experiences with stock companies from the 1850s through the 1870s in a 29 September 1902 issue of the New York Times: “We changed the bill every week, and I have frequently gone home after the performance not knowing a single line of the play which we were to produce the following night. I was expected to be at the theatre on the following morning at 10 o’clock, letter perfect in my part. I would study throughout the night until daybreak, then have breakfast and study until 10 o’clock, and after a couple of hours sleep in the afternoon go on the stage and play the part. Throughout those two years every one of the stock actors in that theatre averaged from 800 to 1,000 lines memorizing daily. And the experience at that theatre was but the experience of all stock actors.”
According to Gladys Hurlbut in Next Week—East Lynne!, stock companies were “the best chance that actors had of learning their business,” but the system was wiped out by silent movies and then the “talkies.” As late as the 1910s and 1920s, there were “over a hundred stock companies east of the Mississippi.” She recalled that “they lived in a town for a season of twenty to a hundred weeks and they put on a different play each week. They dished up last year’s hits in five rehearsals and in between they revived the old thrillers that still did business, East Lynne† and Uncle Tom’s Cabin,† The [Old] Homestead and Trilby.” Hurlbut provides a vivid glimpse into the world of the stock actor in the late modernist period: “Stock acting was the most sweatshop kind of work I ever heard of, and the most exhausting for the brain and the body. Fifteen hours a day in the theater, many towns played daily matinees and the Middle West played seven days a week, two of the old on Saturday, two of the new on Sunday. At night the actors studied, an act a day until they knew their parts. They furnished their own wardrobes and the women sewed and pressed and trimmed and washed—always with their crumpled, frayed, typewritten parts for next week propped up before them. At night they kept them under their pillows, firmly believing they soaked in that way.”
The term stock also is used to refer to scenery. In a pinch, a few basic settings could serve the needs of most plays on the road prior to and during the early modernist period: the street scene, the forest, the garden, the humble interior, and the fancy interior. Opera houses kept wings, borders, and drops for each of those scenes in stock at the theater. Thus, the “stock sets” (as well as costumes and props from previous productions) could be pressed into service as an economy or whenever a troupe’s own stock was damaged or delayed on the road.
Born in Yorkshire, son of an actor with the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, James H. Stoddart appeared on stage at age six, joined an Aberdeen stock company at 17, acted five years with the Liverpool Theatre Company, and in 1854 joined Wallack’s Theatre, where he played stock for several seasons. Stoddart had one tour as a star in 1873 but otherwise remained a stock company actor. Other engagements were with Laura Keene,† Dion Boucicault, a season with Edwin Booth, and many years in A. M. Palmer’s Union Square company. Under Palmer’s management, Stoddart recalled, he visited California 12 times. He played Colonel Preston in the original production of Alabama (1891). Charles Frohman commissioned The Bonnie Brier Bush (1901) from a Scottish story to give Stoddart a Scottish character role. As Lachlan Campbell, he realized that “during my long career I had wept over a rather lengthy list of wayward daughters.” His 1902 memoir Recollections of a Player reveals a kindly spirited gentleman who worked appreciatively with all the great actors of the day.
When a troupe could not earn enough to pay its railroad fare to the next engagement, it risked being disbanded with the actors left to their own devices. In a strange town on the road with no source of income, they were truly stranded.
New York–born actor Robert Strange found his way to Broadway, where his credits included two plays by Eugene O’Neill, In the Zone (1917) and The Straw (1921), as well as Children of Today (1913), The Antick (1915), The Age of Reason (1915), The Seagull (1916), The Scrap of Paper (1917), a 1918 revival of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Nothing but Lies (1918), The Famous Mrs. Fair (1919), In Love with Love (1923), A Most Immoral Lady (1928), Midnight (1930), and Both Your Houses* (1933). Between 1931 and his death, Strange acted in movies, moving from leading roles to bit parts, including Marked Woman (1937), They Made Me a Criminal (1939), The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939), High Sierra (1941), and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945).
Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize–winning drama opened on 30 January 1928 at the John Golden Theatre for a run of 426 performances. Produced by the Theatre Guild, it was directed by Philip Moeller with scene designs by Jo Mielziner. Among its innovations were the characters’ private thoughts spoken aloud for the audience to hear, a daring focus on sexual psychology as a motivating factor, an abortion, and the extraordinary length of the nine-act play with action spread across 25 years, 1919–1944, in the lives of the characters. Starting at 5:15 p.m., the performance included a dinner break, which proved to be a boon to nearby restaurants.
Nina Leeds, played by Lynn Fontanne, is resentful of her father’s having prevented her marriage to her fiancé Gordon, a pilot, before the war. With Gordon dead, she will devote herself to nursing soldiers. A year later, Nina’s father has died, she has become openly promiscuous, and the three men in her life are concerned. They are the avuncular Charles Marsden (Tom Powers), the willowy Sam Evans (Earle Larimore), and the rational-minded Edmund Darrell (Glenn Anders). All three are drawn to Nina even though they sense the presence of Gordon’s ghost in her life. Nina marries Sam Evans, but before she tells him of his impending fatherhood, Sam’s mother informs Nina that Sam carries a hereditary insanity, convinces Nina to get an abortion, and even suggests that Nina give Sam a child by another man. Eventually, Nina propositions Darrell, and he agrees. By the time she is with child by Darrell, Nina has transferred her ardor to Darrell, though she carries on the charade with her husband, Sam, and Darrell escapes to Europe.
Part 2 begins with conflicted emotions and culminates in a tableau scene: Nina dominates the men whom she sees as father-substitute or confessor (Marsden), husband (Sam), and lover (Darrell); her infant son Gordon is a fourth. The action jumps to Gordon’s 11th birthday, and it is clear that the boy has a visceral dislike for Darrell. Alone together, Nina and Darrell discuss the possibility that Gordon intuits their continuing relationship and is jealous of Darrell for taking his mother’s attention. They agree that Darrell will go away for two years. They kiss farewell, not realizing that young Gordon has returned and sees them. Gordon decides that he will grow up to emulate his namesake, the pilot, and thus win his mother’s love.
On a yacht 10 years later, Nina has her three men around her, but she is jealous of her son’s fiancée Madeline. Nina is tempted to reveal Gordon’s paternity to her husband, but Sam Evans collapses with a stroke and she vows to protect him. In the final scene several months later, Evans has died. Darrell and Nina get Gordon’s blessing to marry, but neither now wishes it. Gordon flies off with Madeline. Nina will marry faithful old Marsden, and her life has come full circle.
The originality of Strange Interlude made it the subject of numerous articles in the popular and scholarly press as well as spawning many parodies: The Strange Inner Feud in The Grand Street Follies of 1928, a skit in George White’s Scandals, a sequence in the Marx Brothers musical (on stage and in movies) Animal Crackers, James Thurber’s* “Cross-country Gamut” in the New Yorker on 11 February 1928, a parody poem in the Bookman in August 1928, and a satire in the Garrick Gaities of 1930. See also *SEXUALITY ON THE AMERICAN STAGE.
Eugene O’Neill’s four-act drama, written during the winter of 1918–1919, opened on 10 November 1921 for 20 performances at the Greenwich Village Theatre in a George C. Tyler production. This autobiographical work, inspired by O’Neill’s bout of tuberculosis a decade earlier, is set in a sanatorium where a cynical aspiring writer, Stephen Murray (Otto Kruger), meets Eileen Carmody (Margalo Gillmore), who encourages him to take his work seriously. As his health improves and his work burgeons, Eileen’s health declines. A nurse aware of Eileen’s feelings for Stephen encourages him to pretend he loves the dying girl, and when he does, he realizes his feelings for her are genuine. The play had a rare revival in 2012 at New York’s Theatre at St. Clement’s. Some scholars have seen The Straw as something of a sequel to O’Neill’s masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey into Night,* particularly regarding the relation of the characters of Stephen Murray and Edmund Tyrone, both clearly intended as thinly disguised portraits of O’Neill.
Although Elmer Rice experimented with many techniques emerging from the European modernist theater, particularly expressionism (as in his 1923 drama The Adding Machine), he turned to naturalism with Street Scene (originally titled Landscape with Figures), a drama of the American melting pot set in a New York City tenement. Emphasizing the impact of poverty and the ethnic and religious tensions in 1920s urban life, this multicharacter work featured strains of humor, melodrama, and tragedy. It is set on a single day on which Sam Kaplan (Horace Braham), a young Jewish intellectual, and Rose Maurrant (Erin O’Brien-Moore), a working-class Irish girl, become soul mates. Their budding understanding is torn apart when Rose’s father, Frank (Robert Kelly), murders her mother, Anna (Mary Servoss), and her mother’s lover. Rose declines an offer to become a businessman’s mistress as well as Sam’s offer of marriage, deciding to rely on herself. After an emotional farewell with her father, Rose takes her young brother away to live in the suburbs where she will work to care for them.
The large cast of Street Scene also included Beulah Bondi and Leo Bulgakov. Rice stresses the socioeconomic plight of the various ethnic minorities depicted and the collisions resulting from their differences and deprivations. Despite a Pulitzer Prize and an impressive 601 performances in its original Broadway run, which opened on 10 January 1929 at the Playhouse Theatre, Street Scene is rarely revived in part because of its large cast and technical requirements. Jo Mielziner’s scene design impressed critics with its ultrarealism in depicting the exterior of the tenement building and the surrounding neighborhood. A movie version of Street Scene appeared in 1930, but it has had a more enduring life in a nearly operatic musical adaptation of the same name by Kurt Weill, with lyrics by Langston Hughes, first produced in 1947.
Much of Preston Sturges’s reputation is based on his movie directing and screenplays, but he also wrote several plays. Strictly Dishonorable was his only success, a three-act comedy produced by Brock Pemberton on 18 September 1929 for 557 performances at the Avon Theatre. A young Southern woman, Isabelle Parry, is abandoned at a New York speakeasy by her date, Henry Greene. She meets two men, opera star Count Di Ruvo and Judge Dempsey, who resides in a nearby apartment. Isabelle spends the evening with the count, known as Gus, even though he confesses that his intentions are “strictly dishonorable.” Despite this, by the end of the evening she and Gus are in love, and when Henry returns for her, the judge informs him that he is too late. Movie versions of Strictly Dishonorable appeared in 1931 and 1951.
San Francisco–born Austin Strong spent most of his childhood in Samoa, where he lived with his stepfather, Robert Louis Stevenson. As a playwright and lyricist, his works include The Little Father of the Wilderness (1906), The Toymaker of Nuremberg (1907), The Pied Piper (1908), A Good Little Devil (1913), The Dragon’s Claw (1914), Bunny (1916), Three Wise Fools (1918), and his greatest success, Seventh Heaven (1922), which had a long run and was adapted into one of the most popular movies of the late 1920s. Strong’s subsequent works, including Drums of Oude (1928) and A Play without a Name (1928), were commercial failures.
The 1905 play by William C. deMille, opening on 30 January 1905 at New York’s Hudson Theatre, became a popular favorite with audiences, was revived in August 1905, and toured to London in 1907. Robert Edeson played Soangataha (Strongheart), a chief’s son who excels at football at Columbia University. But after the flag-waving fun and the student slang of act 1, according to the New York Times reviewer, “it turns into a play with a social problem involving the love of a white woman and an Indian . . . a phase of the sometimes rather tiresome ‘race problem.’” Although the girl accepts him over her brother’s objections, Soangataha finally answers the summons to tribal leadership, along with the stricture that “you no bring the white woman.” The London Times review expressed English bemusement: “The accent of the players is not our accent, their football is not our football, their racial difficulty is not our racial difficulty, the undergraduates are not our undergraduates, the crudity of the play is not the crudity of our plays, and so one spends a pleasant evening amid strange, if rather noisy, surroundings.”
Little is known about Everett Stewart’s early life except the legend that he was “discovered” in 1887 working as a postal clerk in a Wichita, Kansas, post office by minstrel man Tom Heath, who came to inquire about his mail. Hired by Heath and ultimately billed as “Stuart,” he began his stage career in Springfield, Missouri, as part of McIntyre and Heath’s Minstrels, singing and performing in blackface. Stuart had an operatic voice and was billed as “The Male Patti” for his imitations of diva Adelina Patti. He began performing in drag wearing elaborate gowns and performed in vaudeville and music halls in the United States and Europe in the first decade of the 20th century. On Broadway, he starred in the musical The New 1492 (1898), playing Queen Isabella. Ironically, given his start, his most popular hit song was “The Letter That Never Came.”
In the theatrical publicity business, a stunt was a contrived event intended to attract newspaper reporters and photographers that would result in free “news” coverage. Thoda Cocroft’s Great Names describes several of the stunts she arranged, some of which misfired.
Edmund Preston Biden was born in Chicago, where his extraordinary childhood included assisting his mother’s friend, Isadora Duncan, with her stage productions. He served in World War I and worked as an inventor before turning to the theater. Sturges’s only great success as a playwright was Strictly Dishonorable (1929), a sweet-natured romantic comedy set in a speakeasy. It ran for 557 performances, but he never had another hit, although his 1932 play, Child of Manhattan, ran for a few months. Other Sturges plays include The Guinea Pig (1929), Recapture (1930), and The Well of Romance (1930), and he acted in Hotbed (1928). In the early 1930s, Sturges became a leading movie director and screenwriter, making a series of classics, but late in his career, he returned to Broadway as librettist of two unsuccessful musicals, Make a Wish (1951) and Carnival in Flanders (1953).
Elmer Rice wrote this expressionistic play in nine scenes produced by the Lenox Hill Players at the Cherry Lane Theatre, where it opened on 25 January 1929 for 35 performances. Adele Gutman Nathan directed Jane Hamilton, who played Sophie Smith, the play’s feminist heroine who reflects a general disenchantment with capitalism in the midst of the 1920s boom. Scholar Cynthia McCown favorably compared the play with Rice’s masterwork, The Adding Machine, referring to Sophie as “Ms. Zero” and comparing The Subway favorably with Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal, depicting as it does a young female facing “modern industrialized society” and refusing to “continue an existence bound over to white-collar slavery and male domination.” A naive 18-year-old filing clerk named Sophie (perhaps in homage to Sophie Treadwell, whose earlier play Machinal bears some similarities) yearns for beauty while her daily grind involves insensitive parents and the hysteria-inducing daily subway ride. She succumbs to a young man who is inspired to write an apocalyptic piece called “The Subway.” Guilt ridden over her possible pregnancy, she throws herself in front of an oncoming subway train.
This term appears in a New York Times review on 16 April 1918, referring to “outlying theaters” as opposed to those on Broadway.
Clare Kummer’s two-act comedy produced by Arthur Hopkins opened at the Booth Theatre on 5 February 1917 for 144 performances with a cast including William Gillette, Katherine Alexander, Estelle Winwood, and Roland Young. Returning from a year away from his much younger wife, Emmy (Winwood) and his grown children, Henry Wilton (Gillette) is increasingly distressed to find that a hectic social life and poor decision making has had a negative impact on them all. When betrayed by a business associate, Henry is financially ruined leading, finally, to Emmy regretting her extravagances. Henry ultimately turns the tables on his former associate and regains his wealth. Mistakenly assuming that Emmy has left him, Henry despairs, but she returns to report that she has sold her jewelry to help him and that she was happiest in their marriage when they were poor. Following a summer hiatus, the production returned on 10 October 1917 for additional performances, and the play was revived on 12 February 1934 with a cast including Paul Gilmore and Virginia Gilmore at the Cherry Lane Theatre. A 1932 movie version starred George Arliss, Mary Astor, and Evalyn Knapp.
Separating suffragette plays from those identified as women’s or feminist plays is difficult in American theater. A generation of suffragette playwrights, including Elizabeth Robins, Cicely Hamilton, and Elizabeth Baker, pressed their cause on London stages between 1905 and 1920, spurred by modernist plays by Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, and others. Robins’s Votes for Women! (1907), perhaps the most emblematic suffrage play, made its first appearance in New York in March 1909. In America, actress-managers including Minnie Maddern Fiske and Mary Shaw produced works by Ibsen and Shaw with an eye toward inspiring women writers and directors, as well as encouraging young actresses to take up the cause of suffrage and other issues of importance to women. American productions of the plays of the British suffragettes appeared more frequently in little theaters after 1910 than in major commercial venues, but by World War I, women playwrights like Rachel Crothers, Susan Glaspell, and Alice Gerstenberg demonstrated that women’s issues, including suffrage, could be examined more fully if the writers were women.
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Daniel Sullivan became a circus performer before turning to theater, where he specialized in comedy both as a playwright and actor. He gained lasting fame in his own 1884 play, The Corner Grocer, which had been inspired by an earlier play, Edwin Waugh’s The Chimney Corner. Sully had another hit with Daniel J. Hart’s The Parish Priest (1900) in the title role of an Irish cleric. He became associated with Fitzgerald Murphy, whose plays, especially The Irish Statesman and the Old Mill Stream (1902), supplied him with more success. Sully also appeared often in vaudeville. He was married to actress Louisa Arzuna Dulany.
From the early 19th century, country playhouses and outdoor gardens featured plays and other entertainments during the summer months when indoor theatergoing was curtailed by the heat. The golden age of summer stock may have begun with the opening of Elitch’s Gardens Theatre in Denver, Colorado, in 1890. Other such summer theaters sprang up around the country, particularly in the east, offering a season of plays, most often comedies and musicals. In the years prior to World War I, the Provincetown Players on Cape Cod merged the penchant for summer entertainment with the New Stagecraft and provided opportunities for cutting-edge dramatists (including Eugene O’Neill and Susan Glaspell) and emerging directors and actors. Summer playhouses like the Hedgerow Theatre* (Moylan, Pennsylvania) or the Williamstown Theatre Festival* (Massachusetts) were similarly ambitious, but most summer stock theaters were less inclined toward experimentation, preferring instead to present recent Broadway successes or pre-Broadway tryouts. Some theaters packaged stars in familiar vehicles or new works in hopes of an eventual Broadway production, while other summer stock companies were made up of young actors and technicians gaining practical experience. Many summer stock theaters were established by 1930 and continued operation until well into the 1960s. Relatively few survived significant changes in audience tastes and economic realities post-1960.
Sunday performances had a checkered history during the modernist era. Blue laws in rural areas often prohibited Sunday performances, while urban theater managers fought hard to gain or retain that major source of revenue. Sunday was often chosen for benefit performances. By the early 20th century, Sunday performances happened with greater frequency, most famously when Al Jolson gave Sunday night solo concerts at the Winter Garden while also appearing during the week in a Shubert-produced musical show.
Born Ninetta Sunderland, she began her career on Broadway in the flop East Street (1924), followed by roles in The Fourflusher (1925), Owen Davis’s Easy Come, Easy Go (1925), and George M. Cohan’s hit farce Baby Cyclone (1927), playing opposite Spencer Tracy. She appeared in The Lady Lies (1928), after which she acted with actor Walter Huston in Elmer the Great (1928); they were married in 1931. She subsequently acted with him in two other Broadway plays, Dodsworth* (1934) and Othello (in which she played Desdemona) in 1937. Her final Broadway role was in Robin Landing (1937). Sunderland acted in only three movies, The Carnival Man (1929), Sweepings (1933), and Unconquered (1947). She was the stepmother of Academy Award–winning director John Huston.
Opening 24 May 1923 at the Provincetown Playhouse, the North Carolina folk drama by Lula Vollmer ran for 361 performances and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. All three acts are set in the remote mountain cabin of the corncob pipe–smoking Widow Cagle, played to critical approval by Lucille La Verne. It is 1917, and her son Rufe goes off to war in France, leaving his bride with his mother. The women learn of Rufe’s death, and they shelter a deserter. When Widow Cagle learns that the deserter is the son of the man who shot her husband, she prepares to shoot him. Suddenly she hears Rufe’s voice telling her to end the hatred. She helps the stranger escape, as the room is flooded with morning sunlight. New York’s Metropolitan Playhouse mounted a rare revival in 2003.
During the last quarter of the 19th century, when touring companies presented Shakespeare or other historical dramas, they regularly engaged local amateurs as supernumeraries, often called supes, supers, or extras, to fill in the crowd scenes. Because they often swelled the ranks of an army for battle scenes, supers were sometimes pejoratively referred to as “spear-carriers.” Locally hired extras were also known as “jobbers.” Sometimes the gallery gods would call out “Supe! Supe!” when they recognized the awkwardness of the amateur amid professional actors. In professional eyes, according to the Kansas City Journal in 1927, supers were “lanky-limbed, raw-boned men with ill-fitting tights and no make-up.” They were the ones who looked nervous in a calm scene and perfectly unconcerned during a battle, or who shouted “Aye, Aye!” several seconds after the regular actors had given the cry. In those days before stage unions, the supers were sometimes ordered to carry furniture on or off stage or perform other menial tasks, all for the lowly fee of 25 cents per performance, except for the first performance, when the money went “through an unwritten law backstage,” to the property man. As many as 200 supers might be hired for a spectacle like Richard Mansfield’s production of Henry V, but 15 usually sufficed for melodramas of the period.
Actors playing secondary roles were said to support the leading players. Many actors made careers in supporting roles, never rising, whether by type, choice, or ability, to starring roles.
Susan Glaspell collaborated with her husband George Cram Cook on this one-act satire of psychoanalysis, in which Henrietta Brewster fancies herself a student of the Freudian school of psychology. When Henrietta discovers that her husband and sister seem to have suppressed desires for each other, she abandons her fashionable interest in Freud. With Glaspell and Cook acting the roles, the play was staged by the Provincetown Players in 1915, following an initial rejection by the Washington Square Players, who subsequently staged it in 1917. Suppressed Desires, and other works by Glaspell, along with one-act plays by Eugene O’Neill in the mid-1910s, are among the finest works that helped define the Little Theater Movement.
Born Evelyn Greenstreet Baker in Boston, she married John Preston Sutherland, a doctor, in 1879 and wrote a medical advice column under the pseudonym Dorothy Lundt. Soon she was writing theater columns and reviews for Boston newspapers. These were often unsigned, but Alma J. Bennett has traced their authorship. From 1892 she wrote plays under her own name. Her most successful works were typically collaborations, including several with Emma V. Sheridan and others with Beulah Marie Dix, notably The Road to Yesterday (1906). With Booth Tarkington, she wrote Beaucaire (1901, from his novel). Her collection of nine short plays, Po’ White Trash and Other One-Act Dramas (1900), includes two written with Emma V. Sheridan and one with Percy Wallace MacKaye.
This character is a hypnotic manipulator of the singer Trilby depicted in the play Trilby (1895). Dramatized by Paul Potter from George du Maurier’s novel, Svengali was most memorably portrayed on the American stage by Wilton Lackaye.
A native of Rockport, Indiana, Mark E. Swan proved to be a prolific writer of stage plays, musical librettos, and screenplays. In collaboration with C. W. Bell, Swan had his biggest hit with the farce Parlor, Bedroom and Bath (1917), which made it to the movies in 1920 and 1931, the latter version starring Buster Keaton. Most of Swan’s Broadway plays had relatively short runs, including Princess of Patches (1898), Brown’s in Town (1899), The Great Jewel Mystery (1905), Just Like John (1912), The Gentleman from Number 19 (1913), Her Own Money (1913), The Third Party (1914), Somebody’s Luggage (1916), If (1917), She Walked in Her Sleep (1918), Keep It to Yourself (1918), A Regular Feller (1919), Judy Drops In (1924), and Howdy, King (1926). Swan’s books and/or lyrics for musicals included The Press Agent (1905), The Top o’ th’ World (1907), He Came from Milwaukee (1910), Miss Jack (1911), The Blushing Bride (1922), Lady Butterfly (1923), and Judy (1927). From 1911 to 1931, Swan wrote many screenplays for Thomas A. Edison, mostly short subjects but also a few full-length films; some were based on his plays.
Augustus Pitou crafted this four-act romantic drama with music for Chauncey Olcott and produced it at the Fourteenth Street Theatre, where it opened on 24 January 1897 for 104 performances. Irishman Gerald O’Carroll, raised in England, returns home to the small town of Inniscarra and falls in love with a local girl. Her father objects and hires some toughs to kidnap Gerald, but he escapes and arrives back in Inniscarra in time to save his sweetheart from a forced marriage.
David Belasco’s four-act play, which opened on 9 December 1903 for 206 performances at Belasco Theatre, was adapted from Agnes and Edgerton Castle’s The Bath Comedy. The simple romantic plot centers on the efforts of an Irish girl, Kitty Bellairs, originally played by Henrietta Crosman, to find social acceptance in 18th-century Bath. Kitty’s motives never become fully clear, but when she and her archrival are forced to hide behind the bed curtains in the rooms of her sweetheart, a young soldier, Kitty takes responsibility, thus sparing her rival a social disgrace. The result is that Kitty wins her soldier and the social position she craves. Sweet Kitty Bellairs was adapted into a failed Rudolf Friml operetta, titled Kitty Darlin’ (1917).
This English-born actor Basil Sydney debuted in London in Edward Sheldon’s Romance in 1915, playing a dual role opposite the play’s New York star, Doris Keane. They married in 1918 and appeared together in the 1920 movie version of the play. Sydney made his Broadway debut with Keane in a 1921 revival of Romance. He worked on the American stage for about 10 years, acting in several notable plays, including Karel Čapek’s expressionist drama R.U.R. (1922); revivals of Romeo and Juliet in 1922, The Devil’s Disciple in 1923, She Stoops to Conquer in 1924, Hamlet (playing the title role) in 1925, and The Jest in 1926; a revival of The Taming of the Shrew in 1927; 12,000 (1928); Meet the Prince (1929); a revival of Becky Sharp in 1929; Children of Darkness (1930); Jewel Robbery (1932); and The Dark Tower (1933); the latter was a collaboration by George S. Kaufman and Alexander Woollcott, the noted drama critic. Sydney and Keane divorced in 1925. In 1929, he married American actress Mary Ellis and moved back to England with her. Later, Sydney married another actress, Joyce Howard. From 1920 to 1961, Sydney appeared in mostly English films, including Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) and Laurence Olivier’s* Hamlet (1948), in which he played Claudius.
Symbolism had a fleeting vogue among aesthetes in European art theaters of the 1890s and is best represented in the work of poet-playwright Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949). Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) was halfheartedly attracted to the quasi-mystical simplification of means, yet he mocked it through Treplev’s playlet in act 1 of The Seagull. In the United States, symbolism as an artistic movement had little impact other than in plays like Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Aria da Capo. However, the use of symbolist elements in plays was significant and can be seen in expressionist works by Eugene O’Neill, Elmer Rice, and George S. Kaufman after World War I, and in plays by Tennessee Williams,* Thornton Wilder,* and others after 1930.