The son of producer Alfred E. Aarons, Alexander A. Aarons, born in Philadelphia, was an early enthusiast for George Gershwin and also developed musicals for Fred and Adele Astaire. He brought them all together with Ira Gershwin for Lady, Be Good! in 1924. In partnership with the business-savvy Vinton Freedley, the artistically astute Aarons continued presenting the Astaires until 1927 and the Gershwins until 1930. In 1927, Funny Face inaugurated the Alvin (combining Al for Alexander and vin for Vinton) Theatre on 52nd Street. They also produced Oh, Kay! (1926), which introduced Gertrude Lawrence* to the American stage. Other Aarons musical productions include Tip-Toes (1925), Hold Everything (1928), Treasure Girl (1928), and Girl Crazy (1930). Aarons also presented straight plays, including The Hole in the Wall (1920), The New Poor (1924), and Adam Had Two Sons (1932).
Born in Philadelphia, the agent-producer-manager-songwriter Alfred E. Aarons began as a call-boy for Fox Varieties in Philadelphia and worked his way up to treasurer. He managed a succession of theaters in New York, including Hammerstein’s Roof Garden. From 1893 to 1895, he scouted talent in Europe for Hammerstein’s Victoria Theatre. He wrote songs for interpolation into the musicals he produced. His other endeavors included running a booking office for one-night stands, serving as trustee for the Actors Fund of America, general management for Klaw & Erlanger, and managing various New York theaters, including the New Amsterdam.
Drawn to the theater even as an employee of his father’s jewelry shop in his native Akron, Ohio, Henry Abbey rose to become one of the most respected impresarios in America. He managed theaters, attaining the Park Theatre† in New York in 1876, followed by Booth’s, Wallack’s, and the Metropolitan Opera House. Above all, his reputation shone by the magnitude of the stars he managed, including such international luminaries as Sarah Bernhardt, Hortense Rhéa, and Adelina Patti. William H. Crane’s memoir Footprints and Echoes recounts how Abbey could be credited with bringing him and Stuart Robson together for their revered 12-year partnership in comedy. Abbey’s partnership with John B. Schoeffel and Maurice Grau expanded his sphere of influence. In 1893, he built Abbey’s Theatre at 38th and Broadway and brought Sir Henry Irving from England to inaugurate it.
After studying under George Pierce Baker at Harvard University, seeing one of his short plays produced there, and winning a prize for the best one-act comedy at the Bijou in Boston, George Francis Abbott considered himself ready to conquer Broadway as a playwright. However, the tall, attractive young man first earned success as an actor, making his Broadway debut in 1913 in The Misleading Lady and notably playing a leading role in the Pulitzer Prize–winning play Hell-Bent fer Heaven (1924). He worked with John Golden and David Belasco, then moved into directing. Among the seven plays Abbott directed in 1926 and 1927, four were coauthored by him, including Broadway (which he directed again on Broadway for his 100th birthday) and Coquette, which took Helen Hayes to stardom.
While Abbott is best remembered for his remarkable record of directing 113 Broadway productions, he also gained respect as a play doctor and, from the mid-1930s, as a producer. His crisp, snappy directorial style became known as “the Abbott touch,” and fellow artists always addressed him as “Mister Abbott,” the epithet that served as the title for his 1963 autobiography. There are many classic musicals among Abbott’s credits, including Jumbo (1935), On Your Toes (1936), The Boys from Syracuse (1938), Too Many Girls (1939), Pal Joey (1940), On the Town (1944), High Button Shoes (1947), Where’s Charley? (1948), Call Me Madam (1950), Wonderful Town (1953), The Pajama Game (1954), Damn Yankees (1955), Fiorello! (1959), and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), and in many cases, he produced and/or contributed the libretto. His work directing nonmusicals includes Chicago (1926), Spread Eagle (1927), Twentieth Century* (1932), Three Men on a Horse* (1935), Boy Meets Girl* (1935), Room Service* (1937), and a 1955 revival of The Skin of Our Teeth.* Remarkably, Abbott was still directing at age 100, and he lived to 107.
Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, Walter Abel spent his long career mostly in character roles in theater, movies, and television. His first Broadway part, in Dorothy Donnelly’s Forbidden (1919), was followed by a small role in the first American production of George Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah (1922). Abel performed supporting roles in As You Like It (1923) and August Strindberg’s The Spook Sonata (1923) and the role of the sheriff in Eugene O’Neill’s Desire under the Elms (1924). As his roles grew in size, Abel won praise as Olson in O’Neill’s S.S. Glencairn (1929) and as Orin Mannon in a short-lived 1932 revival of O’Neill’s tragic trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra.
Born in St. Louis, Edward Abeles went into law and journalism before making his 1891 debut in Alabama. Known professionally for his charming personality, he played many comic roles on Broadway but was best known for the title role in the long-running hit Brewster’s Millions (1906). At the time of his death, he was in the musical Oh, Lady, Lady (1918). Abeles also appeared on Broadway in Under Two Flags (1901), a brief 1902 revival of The Lady of Lyons with Kyrle Bellew, and in the American premiere of George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman (1905).
Anne Nichols’s innocuous comedy of a romance between a Jewish boy and an Irish girl improbably became the longest-running Broadway play of the 1920s, chalking up 2,327 consecutive performances beginning on 23 May 1922 at the Fulton Theatre. Originally titled Marriage in Triplicate, the play spawned modestly successful revivals in 1937 and 1954, movie versions in 1928 and 1946, a 1940s radio series, and innumerable imitators of its lighthearted dramatization of an ethnic culture clash between the traditional fathers of a Jewish son, Abie Levy (played by David Herblin), and an Irish-Catholic daughter, Rose Mary Murphy (played by Anne Bronaugh). Abie and Rosie secretly marry, but Abie’s strict father, Solomon, believing Rosie to be a Jew (“Rose Murpheski”), arranges for a rabbi to marry the couple. Rosie similarly deceives her father, and he arranges for a priest to perform a marriage ceremony. Rife with ethnic stereotypes and broad comedy, this sentimental play received devastatingly negative reviews but found a vast audience through its message of reconciliation thanks to Nichols’s investment of her own resources to keep it running. When her funds diminished, she found a backer in Jewish mobster Arnold Rothstein, who bankrolled the production until word of mouth made it a hit. Additional cast members were Bernard Gorcey, Andrew Mack, and Mathilde Cotrelly.
John Drinkwater’s drama in six scenes inspired by key moments in Abraham Lincoln’s adult life, from being elected president of the United States to his assassination, opened on 15 December 1919 at the Cort Theatre for 193 performances. Lester Lonergan directed, with scene and costume designs by Livingston Platt in a William Harris Jr. production. Frank McGlynn, who bore a remarkable resemblance to the 16th president, played Lincoln, with a large supporting cast including Winifred Hanley as Mary Lincoln and African American actor Charles Gilpin as William Custis.
Abraham Lincoln is somewhat unique in its focus on an iconic American character in a work by an English playwright. Drinkwater focuses on the historical events in Lincoln’s life, indulging in some fictionalizing and paying comparatively little attention to Lincoln’s personal relationships (Drinkwater also wrote historical dramas on Robert E. Lee and Mary Stuart). Abraham Lincoln was well received in its time but ultimately superseded by other works, particularly Robert E. Sherwood’s Pulitzer Prize–winning drama, Abe Lincoln in Illinois* (1938). D. W. Griffith’s 1930 movie of the same name had no connection with the Drinkwater play. In 1929, McGlynn appeared in a brief revival of the play at the Forrest Theatre and had previously appeared in a rare 1924 sound film version (Phonofilm), which was filmed by sound pioneer Lee De Forest. Orson Welles* also presented a radio version of the play in 1938 on his Mercury Theatre of the Air program.
Study of dramatic literature at colleges and universities in the United States dates to well before the American Revolution.† Before the middle of the 19th century, however, there is little evidence to suggest that plays were frequently performed on campuses or that the techniques of staging them were studied. Harvard University’s Hasty Pudding Club began producing plays in 1844 with Lemuel Hayward’s burlesque of a burlesque, Bombastes Furioso. Twentieth-century students who participated include Robert E. Sherwood and Alan Jay Lerner.
Other literary societies that sprang up at colleges after the Civil War sometimes mounted theatrical productions as extracurricular activities. Among these were Princeton University’s Dramatic Association (1888), which ultimately became the Triangle Club, and the Mask and Wig Club at the University of Pennsylvania (1889). In 1881, Harvard students spent six months rehearsing Oedipus Rex in Greek for a performance considered to be the first of its kind in the United States.
William O. Partridge, a Columbia University professor, called for the creation of drama classes and departments of theater as early as 1886. Brander Matthews became the first professor of dramatic literature at Columbia University in 1902. The first formalized instruction in theatrical techniques appears to have been George Pierce Baker’s English 47 course at Harvard, first offered in 1905. In 1912, Baker added the 47 Workshop for aspiring playwrights, and the result was a generation of important writers, including Eugene O’Neill (who participated in the 47 Workshop in 1914–1915), Philip Barry, Sidney Howard, and others.
Baker’s course soon inspired other faculty at various institutions to offer theater courses. Baylor, the University of North Dakota, DePauw, Swarthmore, the University of Iowa, Cornell, Columbia, Princeton, Smith, and others added theater to the curriculum and as a regular feature of extracurricular activities. Carnegie Institute of Technology claims the first department of dramatic arts, established in 1914 under the guidance of Thomas Wood Stevens and Ben Iden Payne. In 1925, Baker, who had moved to Yale, set up a department of drama there. By the end of the 1920s, many colleges and universities had established academic departments (or at least regularly offered courses) in theater. See also †AMATEUR THEATER.
Accidents causing serious injury were all too common on the modernist stage before the era of union regulations. Scenery and lighting equipment sometimes fell onto performers, trap doors malfunctioned, prop pistols misfired, electric lights on costumes could short-circuit, hems of dresses might swish over the footlights and ignite, and so on. A few news reports will show that the stage could be a dangerous place. In New York, on 10 September 1883, during a rehearsal of Othello at Colville’s Fourteenth Street Theatre, a bridge gave way, causing Friedrich Price and six supernumeraries to drop 13 feet; the injuries ranged from fractured ribs to a broken foot. In Louisville, on 20 October 1877, the leading actress in Spalding’s Dramatic Company production of Dion Boucicault’s The Shaughraun† was wounded by the paper wad and powder from a pistol shot. A solo dancer in the opera Faust in Kansas City on 16 April 1911 was injured in rehearsal when she leaped and landed on a part of the stage floor that had been cut into for electrical connections; a long splinter pierced her cloth dancing pump and incapacitated her for two days. The popular equestrian actress Leo Hudson† died in St. Louis on 4 June 1873, about three weeks after a performance of Mazeppa† in which her horse Black Bess lost its footing during the dramatic ascent up a zigzag runway; she and the horse fell about 14 feet. The Sacramento Bee reported in December 1885 that the operator of the thunder effects in Rip Van Winkle stood on a small platform in the theater’s loft and became so engrossed in his work that he stepped off the platform and one leg went through the ceiling, causing a rain of plaster on the orchestra. The audience started to panic, but when they looked up and saw the limb with a foot that was “not of Cinderella like proportions,” the terror turned to uproarious laughter.
Of course, there were also “happy accidents” like those recounted in Claude Bragdon’s memoir, More Lives than One. For example, an audience member appreciated the “marvelous illusion of a twinkling star in the sky,” which turned out to have been created by the shiny head of a safety pin used to repair a tear in the sky cloth. When Provincetown Players’ scene designer Cleon Throckmorton was complimented on a fleecy white cloud in his blue sky, he found that someone had accidentally punched a hole through one of the blue gelatins on a lamp aimed at the cyclorama, and the resulting patch of white light resembled a cloud. See also IROQUOIS THEATRE.
The Florida-born scene designer studied in Paris and Germany. His New York career spanned four decades, beginning with the settings for Paris by Night (1904) until his retirement in 1938. Among his many shows were Rachel Crothers’s first produced play, The Three of Us (1906), as well as The Bohemian Girl (1911), The Firefly (1912), Dancing Around (1914), Robinson Crusoe, Jr. (1916), Sinbad (1918), Sitting Pretty (1924), No, No, Nanette (1925), The Girl Friend (1926), Five Star Final* (1930), Sailor, Beware!* (1933), Richard of Bordeaux (1934), Philip Merivale’s Othello and Macbeth in 1935, and Abide with Me (1935). His studio was located at 140 West 38th Street in New York City.
Born into a milieu of wealth and privilege in New York, the youngest of her parents’ eight children had ready access to theater, even spending a great deal of time in childhood with producer Augustin Daly and his leading lady Ada Rehan. As Robert A. Schanke shows in “That Furious Lesbian”: The Story of Mercedes de Acosta, she enjoyed a close friendship with Eva Le Gallienne from 1920, and this inspired her first venture into playwriting. Le Gallienne played the title role in Acosta’s Jehanne d’Arc (1922) in Paris. Subsequent plays were Jacob Slovak (1923), The Mother of Christ (1924), World without End (1925), The Dark Light (1926), and Illusion (1928). While Acosta’s flamboyant life may have been her most remarkable achievement, the plays offer heartfelt portraits of women wrestling with spiritual and sensual impulses. Her fashionable sister, Rita de Acosta Lydig (1875–1929), rallied New York society’s support for the Vieux Colombier’s 1917–1918 Broadway season.
Before the long-running play became economically feasible in the 1890s, the fundamental qualification for a career on the stage was the ability to memorize a lot of lines on short notice, for only a star knew the luxury of the limited repertory. Stock company actors were cast according to lines of business, but might be called upon to play a different role every night for months on end. Marie Dressler recalled her days in a traveling stock company: “Often a bill was changed on an hour’s notice or less. Every member of the cast had to be a quick study. I have gone on in a part which I had only read over hastily while dressing, more intensive study being pursued while I waited in the wings for my cue.”
Vocal projection skills were essential, including the ability to adapt to a variety of acoustic environments. Periodic unemployment was to be expected. Even actors who enjoyed long association with a single company based in a large city found themselves obliged to travel. Acting style remained under the influence of melodrama during much of the modernist period: making points in vocal interpretation, using grand gestures, and striking attractive poses both in individual physicalization of the text and in tableaux by the ensemble. This romantic school of acting, with the climactic unleashing of a storm of passion, was the foundation for the careers of many tragedians who performed the Shakespearean repertoire, for example, Fanny Janauschek, Thomas W. Keene, Robert Mantell, and John McCullough.
At the same time, however, other actors gradually introduced greater realism into their performances. As early as the 1850s, Edwin Booth was turning from his father’s romantic style, adopting an economy of gesture, while eschewing points. His conversational manner of delivery and immersion in his character proved influential on such actors as Lawrence Barrett, Mary Anderson, and Otis Skinner. Minnie Maddern Fiske was especially noted for the apparent naturalness with which she assumed her characterizations, and she was fortunate in finding roles that allowed her use of subtle effects. The gradual acceptance of psychological realism in acting was certainly reinforced with the advent of plays by Henrik Ibsen and James A. Herne.
The handsome actor-playwright William Gillette has been signaled as another leader in the move away from elocutionary artifice of line interpretation; his biographer Doris E. Cook described him as “one of the first American actors to speak rather than declaim his roles.” She quotes his recollection of his early days of acting in the earlier style: “I began very humbly indeed, in stock, and if I had tried to be natural, I’d have lost my position. My business then was to learn the tricks of the stage. We had our tragic walk, our proper comedy face, our correct and dreadful laugh, our carefully learned gestures, our shrieks and outcries and our stilted voices. We were to hope for success in so far as we mastered these rules and tricks and put force and personal ‘vigor’ into our execution of them.” In 1936, several critics analyzed Gillette’s contribution to the art and mentioned his detailed handling of properties, his “under-acting,” and “the illusively effective naturalness of his acting.”
Comic acting was largely realistic while allowing for exaggerations to heighten character or get the laugh. Rural or ethnic stereotypes appeared frequently in legitimate drama as well as on the variety stage. William H. Crane and Stuart Robson figured prominently among character actors specializing in comedy. For polished light romantic comedy, John Drew reigned supreme.
By the 1920s, the range of styles had expanded to include celebrity acting by those who stamped their roles with their own personalities rather than immersing themselves in the characters. A few examples are Tallulah Bankhead, Billie Burke, DeWolf Hopper, Olga Nethersole, and Mae West. However, Hopper reminisced in his 1927 autobiography Once a Clown, Always a Clown that versatile actors were better than “the products of to-day’s specialization.” For example, Blanche Bates learned early in her career that “an actress should be able to play Topsy or Lady Macbeth equally well. It is not how she looks, but what she makes the audience think and feel.” Other exceptionally talented and compelling actors of the modernist period include Ethel Barrymore, John Barrymore, Julia Marlowe, and Otis Skinner. See also ECCENTRIC BUSINESS; LEADING MAN, LEADING WOMAN/LADY; UTILITY; VILLAIN; WALKING GENTLEMAN, WALKING LADY.
The tradition of the leading actor who ran his own touring company was a long-standing one in England but less prevalent in the United States, although star actors certainly preferred to keep control over casting, rehearsal discipline, bookings, and salaries rather than leaving those decisions entirely to agents and company managers. When Edwin Booth and Lawrence Barrett toured together as costars in 1887–1889, Barrett took on the management function in addition to playing opposite Booth. Early women actor/managers included Laura Keene† and Minnie Maddern Fiske, among others.
In no other period of American theater history has the stage boasted so many outstanding performers with so wide a following. Avid theatergoers collected cartes de visite (like trading cards, each with a photograph of an actor or actress) and postcard portraits. Mass circulation magazines and newspapers were full of interviews and human interest essays about actors along with line drawings early in the modernist era and, later, photographs. There was also a huge market for books about major actors and actresses, including those by Amy Leslie, Lewis C. Strang, Wingate and McKay, Margaret, and many others (see bibliography). Memoirs of stage careers were best sellers, as were biographies of actors and actresses.
Polish-born Helena Modjeska, for example, wrote her autobiography and was the subject of two biographies during her lifetime (as well as three later biographies). Like Modjeska, a number of foreign-born actors spent the greater part of their careers on the American stage. These include the Italian-born Tommaso Salvini and his son Alexander Salvini, the French actress Hortense Rhéa, Russian actress Alla Nazimova, and Czech actress Fanny Janauschek. Other European stars made a number of American tours: nine by Sarah Bernhardt, four by Eleonora Duse, eight by Henry Irving, and several by Ellen Terry. Quite a few performers born in Britain enjoyed dual careers on both the British and American stages; Dion Boucicault, Charles Coghlan, Rose Coghlan, Leslie Howard, Robert Loraine, Robert Mantell, Fanny Davenport, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Agnes Robertson, and Lydia Thompson are a few examples of these.
So many remarkable talents emerged to meet the demands of the entertainment-hungry American road that it is difficult to signal a few of them as “the best.” For sheer brilliance of artistry in legitimate theater, the greatest names of the modernist era would certainly include Edwin Booth, Joseph Jefferson III, Helena Modjeska, Mary Anderson, Julia Marlowe, E. H. Sothern, Minnie Maddern Fiske, Otis Skinner, Maude Adams, and Pauline Lord. Among the leading lights who combined acting and musical talents, one must mention Lotta Crabtree, DeWolf Hopper, Eddie Foy, George M. Cohan, Elsie Janis, and Chauncey Olcott.
Because women usually guided the choice of plays to see, many actors rose to stardom at least partly on the basis of their physical attraction, beginning with Henry Dixey in Adonis in 1884. Other particularly handsome actors included John Barrymore, Kyrle Bellew, William Gillette, Herbert Kelcey, and Henry Miller. William S. Hart was a wooden actor, but he had a strong masculine presence that suited stars like Julia Arthur, Helena Modjeska, and Hortense Rhéa, who hired him as their leading man. Actors who neither cut a fine figure nor boasted appealing vocal quality had to demonstrate exceptional ability to interpret lines and project characterizations, as did Lawrence Barrett,† a cold fish with a whiny voice who nevertheless achieved stardom on sheer intelligence and technique. Other major serious actors include George Arliss, Richard Bennett, Richard Mansfield, John McCullough, Thomas W. Keene, James O’Neill, and Frederick Warde; for most of these, Shakespeare’s plays were at the core of their repertoires.
Actresses particularly noted for their beauty or charismatic bearing on stage include Mary Anderson, Viola Allen, Maxine Elliott, Marie Doro, Grace George, Virginia Harned, Mary Mannering, and Ada Rehan. Vitality and sweetness were also prized in actresses like Blanche Bates, Lillian Gish, Maggie Mitchell, and Laurette Taylor. The leading emotional actress was Clara Morris. Among those evincing more subtlety in their psychological acting were Margaret Anglin, Katharine Corcoran Herne, and Ethel Barrymore. Prominent among those who projected sexuality were Olga Nethersole, Mrs. Leslie Carter, and Mae West.
Among the legions of character actors, those who rose to particular prominence and affection with audiences include William H. Crane, Mr. and Mrs. W. J. Florence, Mrs. G. H. Gilbert, Edward Harrigan, John T. Raymond, Sol Smith Russell, and Denman Thompson. See also †CHILD PERFORMERS.
This theatrical union was founded in 1913 by a group of 122 actors, led by Francis Wilson, in response to poor conditions and unethical practices by producers. A prior organization, the Actors’ Society of America, formed in 1895, advocated for a minimum wage and other issues, but it disbanded in 1912. AEA, filling the void, negotiated unsuccessfully with producers for a standard contract until 1919, when tensions reached a peak. The AEA called a strike, supported by the Associated Actors and Artistes of America, an organization chartered by the American Federation of Labor. The month-long strike beginning in August 1919 closed theaters in eight cities, forced the closing or prevented openings of numerous productions, and finally brought an agreement with the Producing Managers’ Association for a five-year contract. Additional agreements set up a union shop in 1924, established guidelines for actor-agent dealings in 1929, guaranteed a minimum wage for actors in 1933, and a minimum rehearsal pay in 1935. AEA remains the dominant union for professional stage actors.
George M. Cohan led fellow producers, all members of the Producing Managers’ Association, to form this organization as a countermove to the establishment of Actors’ Equity Association (AEA) in 1919. The goal was to mitigate what the producers saw as Equity’s overly stringent demands for improved salaries and working conditions. Cohan and the other producers persuaded some older, established members of the acting profession to join AFL, but AEA’s membership, which derisively referred to the AFL as “Fido,” far outstripped the AFL’s; with the Actors’ Equity strike of 1919, the AFL became meaningless.
In 1882, producer Harrison Grey Fiske lobbied through the New York Dramatic Mirror to establish a charitable organization to support the needs of elderly, infirm, or indigent actors. Major players and producers of the day, including Edwin Booth, Joseph Jefferson III, Lawrence Barrett, A. M. Palmer, P. T. Barnum,† and Edward Harrigan, were among its founders, with a $500 contribution from Booth. Lester Wallack was the AFA’s first president, and producer Daniel Frohman later held the office. In 1902, a retirement home was established on Staten Island, but it was eventually moved to Englewood, New Jersey.
This fraternal order began in 1849 with a Philadelphia chapter known as the Shakespeare Lodge and later added the Edwin Forrest† Lodge in New York. Both branches sponsored dinners and lectures for members and worked for the uplift of the acting profession with a particular focus on charitable works. By 1910 the AOF owned a clubhouse at 139 West 47th Street, which it shared with the Green-Room Club in an effort to facilitate friendships between actors and managers. See also †CLUBS; THEATRICAL CLUBS.
Formed in 1895 by Louis Aldrich, the Actors’ Society of America (ASA) endeavored to standardize contracts between actors and producers. Due to the virtual monopoly of the Theatrical Syndicate, little progress was made. When Aldrich died in 1901, the ASA’s membership declined. The organization finally disbanded in 1912 to be replaced by the Actors’ Equity Association.
The 1919 comedy by Guy Bolton and George Middleton opened on 13 September 1919 and ran for 312 performances at New York’s Longacre Theatre. A wealthy businessman employs manager Adam Smith to ride herd on his spendthrift family while he is away for three months. Adam concocts a ruse to force the family to try working for a living. Like the rest of the family, Eva develops character through work and finally realizes her feelings for Adam.
Annie Adams was born to a leading Mormon family, in a log hut with buffalo-hide doors. She made her acting debut in 1865 in The People’s Lawyer at Salt Lake Theatre and remained as leading woman with that company until 1874. In 1869, she married James H. Kiskadden and acted as Mrs. Kiskadden until his death when she resumed her maiden name. Subsequently she performed with John Piper’s Company in Virginia City, Nevada, and Tom Maguire’s stock company in San Francisco. The Kiskaddens’ daughter Maude Adams performed with her mother at Maguire’s, and in 1890 both joined the Charles Frohman Stock Company at New York’s Empire Theatre. Annie Adams retired and returned to Salt Lake City in 1908.
Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, Maude Kiskadden was the daughter of James Kiskadden and Annie Adams, a popular actress on Salt Lake City stages. Maude made her first stage appearance as an infant carried on stage by her mother. Her first speaking part, at age five, as a little boy in Fritz, Our Cousin German† was prophetic in that her greatest role would be as a boy who refused to grow up. She followed her mother into the profession, taking Adams as her stage name. As an adult, she first appeared in stock in California before making her Broadway debut in The Paymaster (1888). Following that, she acted with E. H. Sothern in Lord Chumley and Charles H. Hoyt in A Midnight Bell.
With her appearance in Men and Women (1890), Adams began a long association with producer Charles Frohman, who cast her opposite John Drew in The Masked Ball (1892). She acted with her mother in The Butterflies (1894) and The Imprudent Young Couple (1895), and once again worked with Drew in Christopher, Jr. (1895).
Adams followed these roles with Rosemary (1896), a play that encouraged J. M. Barrie to adapt his novel, The Little Minister, into dramatic form for her in 1897. As Barrie’s Lady Babbie, Adams scored a great success and was starred for the first time, after which she won praise as Juliet to William Faversham’s Romeo in 1899. She had, however, become Barrie’s American muse and starred in a series of his plays, including Quality Street (1901), What Every Woman Knows (1908), The Legend of Leonora (1914), A Kiss for Cinderella (1916), and the play that placed her among the theatrical immortals, Peter Pan (1905). In this role, Adams’s soulful sweetness, humor, and intellect were showcased. Peter Pan occupied her for a few years, after which she had a brief run as Viola in Twelfth Night (1908). She also gave admired performances in Edmond Rostand’s L’aiglon (1900) and Chantecler (1911).
After Frohman’s sudden death on the torpedoed Lusitania in 1915, Adams slowly lost interest in her career. In 1918, she announced her retirement. She worked as a lighting consultant for General Electric in the 1920s, then returned to the stage to tour with Otis Skinner in The Merchant of Venice during the 1931–1932 season and to play Maria in Twelfth Night in a stock production, after which she retired definitively. From 1937 to 1950, Adams taught drama at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri.
Elmer Rice’s seven-scene expressionist drama, originally billed as a tragedy, centers upon Mr. Zero, a bookkeeper in a heartless modern corporation. Zero escapes the drudgery of his job and the nagging of his harridan wife through a rich imaginary world depicted in striking surreal images. When Zero is rendered superfluous by a new mechanical wonder—the adding machine—and is fired from his drone-like job toting up figures in a ledger, he murders his boss. His comparatively harmless fantasies devolve into bizarre, violent nightmares. A petty nonentity, Zero is not the most engaging or sympathetic hero, but Rice focuses on the potentially dehumanizing aspects of technology and the corporate world, as well as on the bourgeois pieties and bigotries of lower-middle-class American life.
Produced by the Theatre Guild, The Adding Machine premiered at New York’s Garrick Theatre on 19 March 1923 under the direction of Philip Moeller. It met with generally positive response for the playwright, cast (Dudley Digges and Helen Westley as Mr. and Mrs. Zero, with Edward G. Robinson and Margaret Wycherly in smaller roles), and the scene designer, Lee Simonson, who took inspiration from German expressionist theater and movies.
A popular author of light dramatic satires as well as nondramatic writing in various genres, George Ade grew up on a farm near Kentland, Indiana, where he was born. He graduated from Purdue University in 1887 and joined the staff of the Chicago News-Record in 1890 (until 1900), then traveled abroad on royalties from his books. His 20 or so plays (some lost), all written during the 1900s, included one-act comedies, musicals like The Sultan of Sulu (1902) and The Sho-Gun (1904), and college plays like The College Widow (1904) with its lampoon of Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana.
Daughter of legendary Yiddish theater actor Jacob Adler, and his wife, actress Dina Stettin, Celia Adler was praised for her sensitive, intellectual acting. Raised by her stepfather, Sigmund Feinman, an actor who encouraged her theatrical interests, Adler debuted as a child performer, and her entire career was devoted to acting in Yiddish theater plays in New York, particularly for the Yiddish Art Theatre and on tour. Her few Broadway appearances included short-lived productions of David Pinski’s The Treasure (1920) and A Flag Is Born (1946).
Born in Clinton, Iowa, Felix Adler became one of the most famous white-faced clowns in America for the Ringling Circus. His grotesque white makeup, exaggerated costumes (often in drag) with a tiny hat, giant shoes, and overly padded derriere, delighted audiences during the first half of the 20th century. Often compared with the legendary Dan Rice, Adler borrowed Rice’s trademark gimmick of bringing a piglet into the ring with him and feeding it from a baby bottle. Adler was also a producer and created routines for many of the clowns in the Ringling organization.
The dominant actor of the New York–based Yiddish theater during its heyday, Jacob Adler endeavored to elevate the quality of acting and the dramatic literature performed by Yiddish-speaking companies. As a young man, Russian-born Adler joined a small theatrical troupe in Riga, Latvia. During the pogroms, Adler left for London, where he lived for a time in the mid-1880s before moving to the United States. He first attempted to establish a Yiddish company in Chicago, but it failed. After a frustrating two years in New York City, Adler returned to London and was well received, but he remained there for only two years before returning to New York billed as “Greater Than Salvini.”
Adler’s first American appearances, in The Beggar of Odessa and Under the Protection of Sir Moses Montefiore, flopped, but The Russian Soldier, followed by La Juive, firmly established his popularity. Adler toured with Boris Thomashefsky for a time, but personal matters and divergent tastes ended the partnership. Adler particularly rejected the operettas and other lighthearted fare that Thomashefsky typically presented as part of his repertory, instead setting about to raise tastes and audience expectations.
Adler commissioned playwright Jacob Gordin to write The Yiddish King Lear (1892), a free adaptation of Shakespeare, and it was a major success frequently revived by Adler. Gordin also wrote The Wild Man, another triumph. Adler’s production of a Yiddish translation of The Merchant of Venice in 1901 was the pinnacle of his achievement as an actor. It was staged on Broadway (in 1903 and 1905) with the convention that all of the actors spoke English except Adler, who spoke Yiddish in the role of Shylock. In 1909, Gordin wrote Elisha ben Avuya for Adler, and although it failed in its initial production, it ultimately evolved into another Adler staple, as did Leo Tolstoy’s The Living Corpse.
Following Adler’s marriage to Dina Stettin (mother of their daughter Celia Adler), he indulged in several scandalous love affairs before marrying Sara Levitzka, mother of his other seven children, including actors Luther Adler, Julia Adler, and Stella Adler. Worshipped by Jewish audiences, Adler suffered a stroke in 1920 that ended his acting career, bringing an irreparable loss to the Yiddish stage.
The Philadelphia-born daughter of legendary Yiddish theater actor Jacob Adler, Julia Adler began acting as a child performer with her father in Yiddish roles. Less known than her siblings, her Broadway appearances included The Faithful (1919); as Jessica opposite David Warfield in a revival of The Merchant of Venice in 1922; Rosa Machree (1922); as Bessie Berger in a 1939 revival of Awake and Sing!,* taking on the role originated by her sister Stella Adler and winning kudos; and Tovarich (1952). She was the last surviving child of Jacob Adler.
Polish-born actor Julius Adler emigrated to the United States with his mother at age six following his father’s death. No relation to the famous Yiddish theater Adler family, he found work in New York’s Yiddish theater community, acting with luminaries like Boris Thomashevsky. In 1938, he married actress Henrietta Jacobson, whom he had met in 1935 and partnered with on stage in plays and in Yiddish vaudeville. Among his many stage roles, Adler appeared in the first New York production of the Yiddish theater classic The Dybbuk in 1921 and appeared in several movies, including Tevya (1939), the source for the musical Fiddler on the Roof. Bruce Adler, son of Adler and Jacobson, became an actor and worked with his parents and on Broadway, garnering two Tony Award* nominations.
Born in New York as Lutha Adler, son of the great Yiddish theater actor Jacob Adler and Sarah Levitzka, Luther Adler was destined for the stage, where he succeeded as both an actor and a director. He began as a child performer in Yiddish theater but later joined the Provincetown Players. In 1923, Adler made his Broadway debut in Humoresque, followed by substantial parts in a series of moderately successful plays including The Monkey Talks (1925), Money Business (1926), We Americans (1926), a revival of The Music Master (1927), John (1927), Red Dust (1929), and Elmer Rice’s Pulitzer Prize drama Street Scene (1929), in which he played the pivotal role of the idealistic Jewish law student, Sam Kaplan. Adler joined the Group Theatre* in 1935. Following its demise in 1940, Adler never regained his momentum as an actor. His final stage appearance, replacing Zero Mostel* as Tevye in the musical Fiddler on the Roof (1964), brought Adler back to his Yiddish theater roots.
Born in Odessa, Yiddish theater actress Sara Levitska saw her career eclipsed by that of her much-admired husband, Yiddish theater legend Jacob Adler, and the later reputations of their children, most notably Stella Adler, one of the 20th-century American theater’s most esteemed acting teachers. Educated in Russian schools, she debuted professionally at the age of eight in a production of Friedrich Schiller’s The Robbers. Adler studied voice at the Odessa Conservatory and performed as a singer between acts of plays before marrying actor Maurice Heine.
When Yiddish theater was banned in Russia, Heine’s troupe moved to London and then, in 1884, to the United States. She subsequently divorced Heine and married Adler. He became leader of a serious brand of Yiddish theater in the United States from the 1890s, and the couple won over enthusiastic audiences and they became the center of a group of turn-of-the-century artists and intellectuals. The Adler marriage was a turbulent one due to his infidelities, but despite this, and the birth of five children, all of whom also turned to the stage, Sara Adler had numerous Yiddish theater successes, including leading roles in some 300 plays, most memorably in Mina, Emese Kraft, The Homeless, The Stranger, Elisha ber Anya, The Worthless, Broken Hearts, A Mother’s Tears, The Kreutzer Sonata, Resurrection, and as Nora Helmer in A Doll’s House. Following Jacob Adler’s incapacitating stroke in 1920, Sara Adler rarely appeared on stage.
Born in New York, the daughter of Yiddish theater legend Jacob Adler and Sara Levitzka, Stella Adler made her stage debut as a child performer, acting with her father. Passionately interested in acting, she studied with Richard Boleslavsky at the American Laboratory Theatre (ALT) and appeared in its productions of The Straw Hat (1926) and Big Lake (1927). Adler joined the Group Theatre* in 1931 at the behest of Harold Clurman,* whom she married (and later divorced). Adler’s tall, formidable presence and powerful personality may have limited her as an actress, but she appeared with distinction in several of the Group Theatre’s productions. She made her lasting contribution to the theater with the founding of a school for acting, the Stella Adler Conservatory, in 1949.
David Belasco and John Luther Long’s five-act drama opened on 11 January 1905 at Belasco Theatre for 123 performances, followed by a brief return engagement the following September. It marked the end of Belasco’s association with Long, which had begun with their collaboration on Madame Butterfly (1900), and with Mrs. Leslie Carter, who in Adrea played a blind princess on an Adriatic island in the fifth century. Critics and audiences enjoyed the play’s dark fairy tale qualities, enhanced by Belasco’s lavish production, and many regarded it as Mrs. Carter’s finest performance. The cast also included Tyrone Power.
Charles M. Babcock, a medical doctor, wrote this three-act drama in 1880 as part of the long tradition of 19th-century temperance plays meant as a deterrent to alcohol abuse. Filled with melodramatic flourishes, this comparatively short play ended with its leading character, merchant George Renshaw, exclaiming that “intemperance will never again set my dear ones adrift.”
Traveling ahead of a touring company, the advance agent or “working agent,” later called press agent, would oversee any special arrangements contracted with the theater manager, consult with the local bill-posting business on the design of posters and on getting them posted in advantageous locations, and schmooze the local newsmen to get favorable coverage. In the 1870s, before the rise of booking agencies, the advance man functioned as a booking agent, arranging dates, negotiating contracts, and tending to the advertising, often even posting the bills himself. Although legendarily underpaid, advance agents had to be gregarious personalities with long memories, for it might be a year between visits to a given city. The week before the Maurice Grau French Opera company opened at Kansas City’s leading opera house, for example, advance agent Charles Conelli “proceeded to entertain quite a little party which had collected in the JOURNAL editorial rooms” with his debunking of the Italian stereotype. The two-column story in the Kansas City Journal of 18 December 1883 concludes, “after discussing the comparative merits of operas, the modern Roman bowed himself out while the little party dispersed, all determined to hear Aimee and the charming Fouquet.”
In his 1912 book, M. B. Leavitt listed the names of 180 advance agents whose skills had convinced him that having the right man ahead of an organization would “materially add to its receipts.” By the turn of the century, however, centralized booking of combinations out of New York City was already contributing to the decline of the advance agent, while the later term “press agent” referred to more circumscribed public relations responsibilities. By 1905, the profession often lamented the passing of the colorful advance agent of yore, although Goodson claims that it was the advance man’s reputation for deceptive claims that helped propel audiences from the legitimate theater to the movies.
Theatrical advertising during the modernist period consisted largely of newspaper notices and large bills posted on walls of downtown buildings. Ads in the 1870s tended to be simple notices of the title of the work and the time and place of performance. The 1880s and 1890s brought more text, often describing the scenic thrills, emphasis on the stars, a schedule of performances of the plays in repertory, and occasionally some artwork. The name of the playwright virtually never appeared. Newspapers were also full of paid puffs, little snippets of promotional material disguised as reporting. Electricity led to lighted marquees on theaters in the 1900s. Although radio became widespread in the 1920s, it was not readily used as a medium for advertising theater. See also ADVANCE AGENT OR ADVANCE MAN; BILL-POSTING.
Black playwrights and managers were precious few in the United States before 1880, despite the brief triumph of the African Grove Theater† in New York in 1821, at which everything from Shakespeare’s plays to new works by black writers provided African American actors with opportunities when there were no roles available in white theaters (and when demeaning depictions of black characters were habitually performed by white actors in blackface† even in such classics as Fashion†). Serious actors like Ira Aldridge,† Morgan Smith, and Paul Molyneaux crossed the Atlantic to make their careers abroad. The first decades after the Civil War brought opportunities for professional black performers primarily in minstrel shows. Only gradually did African American performers move into legitimate theater, the way paved by hundreds of amateur groups associated with schools and churches, and by solo platform readers like Emma Hatcher and Henrietta Vinton Davis, both in the 1880s.
The modernist era gave rise to many big-name African American musical and variety performers beyond the scope of this book, including the Hyers sisters, Sam Lucas,† Sissieretta Jones, Ernest Hogan, Bert Williams, George Walker, Aida Overton Walker, Bob Cole, Billy Johnson, and Abbie Mitchell. However, those musical performers stimulated African American writers to create new material like Out of Bondage (1876) by Joseph Bradford for the Hyers sisters, Peculiar Sam; or, The Underground Railroad (1880) by Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, and Clorindy; or, The Origin of the Cakewalk (1897) by Will Marion Cook and Paul Laurence Dunbar, as well as the musicals of Cole and Johnson and of Williams and Walker.
With the founding of the Astor Place Company of Colored Tragedians in 1884 by actor J. A. Arneaux, the slow process of black actors finding legitimate dramatic challenges truly began. Black playwright William Edgar Easton won attention with two plays about the Haitian slave revolution, Desalines (1893) and Christophe (1911), both of which were produced by Henrietta Vinton Davis. Bob Cole organized an all-black stock company and school in New York at Worth’s Museum. Some critics encouraged African Americans to establish resident companies as venues for new plays, and thus, in 1906, the Pekin Stock Company was established in Chicago (with later troupes formed in Cincinnati and Savannah) by Robert Motts. In 1912, New York’s Negro Players started. Anita Bush headed the influential Lafayette Players from 1915.
The earliest appearances of blacks in serious drama on Broadway came through the work of white playwrights, first in Ridgely Torrence’s Three Plays for a Negro Theatre (1917), followed by Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920), produced by the Provincetown Players and starring Charles Gilpin, who was later replaced in the role by Paul Robeson. Robeson also appeared in O’Neill’s controversial miscegenation play, All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1924). Other white writers of black drama include Paul Green, whose In Abraham’s Bosom (1926) won the Pulitzer Prize and provided an outstanding role for Rose McClendon. Dubose and Dorothy Heyward’s Porgy (1927) and Marc Connelly’s The Green Pastures* (1930) similarly featured African American subject matter and mostly black casts. Appearances (1925) by Garland Anderson marked the first Broadway production of a legitimate drama by an African American writer. Black poets and novelists, including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright,* led the way for black playwrights in the 1920s and 1930s. See also HARLEM RENAISSANCE.
An agent was one who represented the business interests of another party, whether individual actors or a producer or a touring company on the road. Agents might specialize in areas like drawing up contracts, handling theater and railroad bookings, or generating publicity. See also ADVANCE AGENT OR ADVANCE MAN; BOOKING AGENT, BOOKING OFFICE, BOOKINGS.
Born in Humansville, Missouri, Zoë Akins was drawn to theater from childhood, especially after her family moved to St. Louis in 1897. She tried acting and playwriting but found herself better able to earn a living by magazine writing. She continued this pattern after moving to New York in 1909. Her first professional production came in 1916 when the Washington Square Players staged her one-act tragedy The Magical City. The success of the tragedy led to productions of her earlier Papa (1913), a sly and witty “amorality play.” Of the many plays she wrote from the 1910s to the 1940s, the best known are three written in quick succession and featuring complex leading women: Déclassé (1919), Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting (1921), and A Texas Nightingale (1922, alternately titled Greatness).
Other Akins plays included Footloose (1920), The Varying Shore (1921), and A Royal Fandango (1923), as well as a series of adaptations of European plays, though these rarely won favor. In 1930, however, Akins scored a major popular success with The Greeks Had a Word for It, a risqué comedy about chorus girls. Her greatest critical acclaim—and a Pulitzer Prize—resulted from her adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Old Maid* in 1935, which was successfully adapted to the movies, starring Bette Davis* in 1939. Akins wrote screenplays, including for her theatrical works, but her subsequent plays, including O Evening Star (1936) and Mrs. January and Mr. X (1944), were not well received. Despite melodramatic situations in many of her plays, the wit of Akins’s dialogue is trenchant.
The four-act drama by Augustus Thomas premiered at Madison Square Theatre on 1 April 1891 in an A. M. Palmer production. Set in the postbellum South, the action insinuates Northern railroad builders onto the decaying property of the remnants of a plantation family. The atmosphere reeks of Southern clichés and culminates in an affair of honor avoided at the last moment; the reunion of long-lost father, son, and daughter; and the newfound happiness of two couples. Maurice Barrymore played Captain Davenport, the son who fought for the Union but now returns to the fold.
Born in Machias, Maine, son of a shipwright whose family dated back to the founding of the Massachusetts Bay colony, Edward Franklin Albee grew up in Boston. He attended public schools until he was 12 years old, then worked odd jobs, and at 19 joined P. T. Barnum’s† Circus. Albee learned all aspects of the entertainment trade in seven seasons with the circus before he met B. F. Keith in 1885. Albee and Keith produced Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado in Boston with modestly priced tickets. The success of that venture allowed them to expand bargain-priced theater productions to several cities, creating a circuit of theaters that reached New York by 1893.
Albee remained associated with Keith for nearly 30 years, while the Keith-Albee Circuit maintained its dominance over the top revenue-generating industry in American entertainment: vaudeville. When Keith died in 1914, Albee inherited half of his late partner’s interests. When Keith’s son, who had acquired the other half, died four years later, Albee was able to assume complete control of their enterprises. He subsequently merged his interests with the Pacific coast Orpheum circuit in 1927, merging again with the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) a year later. Albee’s legacy is mixed, for he was certainly ruthless in his dealings with rival managers and with performers who challenged him. On the positive side, in addition to philanthropy, he instituted efficient booking practices and improved some working conditions for performers.
In the 1880s, the Brooklyn-born scene designer worked as art and scenic director for Pope’s Theatre in St. Louis and formed an important partnership—Noxon, Albert, and Toomey—that created scenic elements for theaters all over the Midwest. Ernest Albert moved to Chicago to participate in planning the layout for the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Then he went on to design scenery in New York, including The Pacific Mail and Gismonda in 1894; A Round of Pleasure and A Ward of France in 1897; Ben-Hur in 1899; Broadway Tokio, Sapho, The Casino Girl, and Monte Cristo in 1900; Twelfth Night and A China Doll in 1904; and many spectacular musicals. Albert was also regarded as a major landscape artist and, in 1919, was elected the first president of Allied Artists of America.
As a child actor in his native Ohio, Louis Lyons (or Lyon) performed under various names, including Master Moses and Master McCarthy. He toured with the Marsh Troupe† of juvenile performers for five years. At the peak of his career, he was leading man at Philadelphia’s Arch Street Theatre† under Mrs. John Drew and then, in 1879, began starring in his great vehicle as Joe Saunders in My Partner† by Bartley Campbell. See also ACTORS’ SOCIETY OF AMERICA (ASA).
Growing up in Boston, Mildred Aldrich got a solid education and was also an avid matinee girl. After her father’s death, she became her family’s source of support and went into journalism. By the late 1880s, she was a prolific theater critic. Around the turn of the century, she moved to France, befriended Gertrude Stein, and bought a country house overlooking the Marne. There she witnessed both fighting and soldier theatricals in the Great War, all of which she wrote about in a series of slender volumes published in the 1910s.
As a pioneering woman costume and scene designer, Elizabeth Alexander used Mrs. John W. Alexander as her professional name. She designed the sets for His Bridal Night (1916) at the Republic Theatre.
Born in Fort Smith, Arkansas, Katherine Alexander was part Cherokee Indian. The actress made a number of Hollywood movies beginning in two Vitaphone short subjects in 1930 opposite Spencer Tracy. In subsequent films, she acted important roles with Greta Garbo, Bette Davis,* Cary Grant, and John Barrymore, among others. On Broadway from 1917, she appeared in Clare Kummer’s A Successful Calamity opposite William Gillette. Alexander appeared in a number of successes, flops, and revivals on Broadway between 1917 and one of her more notable hits, Robert E. Sherwood’s The Queen’s Husband, in 1928. Later that same year, she had another hit in Floyd Dell and Thomas Mitchell’s Little Accident, which starred Mitchell. She also scored in Philip Barry’s Hotel Universe* (1930) and Elmer Rice’s The Left Bank (1931) before turning to films. Her later Broadway appearances were in short-lived productions, including Letters to Lucerne (1941), Little Brown Jug (1946), and Time for Elizabeth (1948). To great acclaim, she played Linda Loman opposite Paul Muni in the London debut of Arthur Miller’s* Death of a Salesman* in 1949, after which she retired. Between 1926 and 1935, she was married to producer William A. Brady Jr.
The term refers to a group of witty writers, critics, actors, and other New York celebrities who met regularly for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel between 1919 and 1929. Established by a few members in June 1919 upon their return from World War I (some having worked on the army newspaper Stars and Stripes), the Round Table had no formal membership procedures, so the regulars, both men and women, changed from time to time. Among those names most associated with the Round Table were several playwrights, including George S. Kaufman, Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber, Marc Connelly, Robert E. Sherwood, and Donald Ogden Stewart, as well as critics (Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley), actors (Harpo Marx), composers (Deems Taylor), journalists, and sundry others in the literary and artistic world of the 1920s. Numerous books about the Round Table and its regulars have chronicled the witty repartee that made it a legendary center of the artistic intelligentsia of the era.
Paul Armstrong’s four-act melodrama based on O. Henry’s story “A Retrieved Reformation” opened on 21 January 1910 at Wallack’s Theatre for 155 performances. Legend has it that Armstrong wrote the play at the behest of producer Theodore A. Liebler, completing the script in a single weekend. The fast-paced play was aided by the performances of rising stars Laurette Taylor and H. B. Warner. Three movie versions (1915, 1920, and 1928) were made of Armstrong’s play, and it was a perennial on tour and in stock.
Eugene O’Neill’s two-act drama exploring miscegenation caused a major furor when it opened at the Provincetown Playhouse under James Light’s direction on 15 May 1924 for 43 performances. O’Neill received death threats from the Ku Klux Klan and others, leading the New York City license commissioner to consider closing the production on reports that white actress Mary Blair, in the role of Ella Downey, would kiss the hand of African American actor Paul Robeson. The Gerry Society also raised concerns over the employment of child actors.
The true source of the central controversy over the play stemmed from the depiction of a lifelong relationship between Jim and Ella. They love each other, but Ella is aware that prevailing racial attitudes preclude a marital relationship. Ella becomes involved with a white man and has a child by him. When she is deserted and the child dies, the defeated Ella turns back to Jim. They marry, but she is so haunted by their racial difference that her precarious grip on sanity slips away. Reduced to a childlike state, Ella is cared for by the loving Jim. This sadly bitter play on the human toll of prejudice was revived for a short run in 1975 at the Circle in the Square Theatre* under George C. Scott’s* direction.
Born Eugene Kuttner, he aspired to work in theater and found his route through newspaper copy rooms. By age 18, he was on the staff of the New York Clipper. From 1915, he was drama critic for Women’s Wear Daily. He also worked as a Broadway press agent and sought out acquaintance with performers; indeed, it was during a chat with stars Herbert Kelcey and Viola Allen in 1910 that he chose what he considered a more glamorous name for himself. As a reviewer, he tended to be generous (with some scathing wit). It was estimated that he attended more than 6,500 opening nights.
Named for William Shakespeare’s Viola in Twelfth Night, Viola Allen was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. C. Leslie Allen, both stock company actors in the south. She was born in Huntsville, Alabama, and grew up performing with her parents from childhood. Much of her schooling was in Boston while they enjoyed long employment with the Boston Theatre Company. At 13, she made her New York debut as a replacement for Annie Russell in Esmeralda at Madison Square Theatre on 4 July 1882. John McCullough subsequently cast her as his daughter in Virginius, and she played the climax with stunning poignancy; the great tragedian then made the young actress his leading lady. She later played opposite Alexander Salvini, Lawrence Barrett,† and Joseph Jefferson. From 1893 to 1898, Allen was the leading lady in Charles Frohman’s Empire Theatre stock company, which toured annually.
Allen formed her own company in 1898 in order to present The Christian by Hall Caine, followed by many more of the melodramas that dominated her repertoire. In the 1900s, she turned to a largely Shakespearean repertoire, adding Juliet, Portia, Imogen, and both Hermione and Perdita in The Winter’s Tale to her important roles. In 1907, her company toured The School for Scandal along with the Shakespeare plays; her father played Sir Peter Teazle in that company. In 1906, Allen secretly married Kentucky horseman Peter Duryea; the wedding is sometimes erroneously reported as having occurred in 1918, the year she retired from the stage to live in Kentucky. During her 35-year stage career, she had played over 80 roles. According to Kansas City critic Austin Latchaw, Viola Allen’s attributes included her personal beauty, well-modulated voice, and sincerity of characterization.
The entire modernist period witnessed ardent theatromania, so that regular theatergoing was supplemented by parlor theatricals, as depicted in fiction by Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and others. In towns where long dark periods interspersed appearances by professional players on tour, the locals would form amateur dramatic societies and rehearse a play one or two nights a week for a few months, then perform it at the opera house for a paying audience. Any profit after expenses had been paid would often go to charity. By the 1920s, vast numbers of elocution teachers advertised to teach amateurs the fundamentals of expression. The widespread enjoyment of amateur theatricals underlay the Little Theater Movement of the 1910s, which in turn became the foundation for a vast network of community theaters in the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, some amateur theaters evolved into professional theaters, like the Cleveland Play House. See also *ACADEMIC THEATER; THE TORCH-BEARERS.
Born in Elmira, New York, Mabel Amber made her 1889 acting debut in Augustin Daly’s stock company. As Robert Mantell’s leading lady in Monbars, she showed “personal charm and latent force,” according to the Chicago Tribune (16 October 1886). Other stars whom she supported include Louis James, Nat C. Goodwin, and James K. Hackett. She also won acclaim in the title role of Trilby on tour under William C. Brady’s management. Among her Broadway credits were The Gay Mr. Lightfoot (1896), New York (1897), At Piney Ridge (1897), and a revival of Uncle Tom’s Cabin† (1901). Her last New York production was Just Out of College (1905). She lived her final 12 years at the Actors’ Fund Home in Englewood, New Jersey.
Arthur Richman’s three-act drama, produced by the Theatre Guild, opened 10 October 1921, ran for 98 performances at the Garrick Theatre, and was made into the 1931 movie The Reckless Hour. Walter is a 45-year-old clerk who lives frugally and decently, but he worries that his 19-year-old daughter is compromising her reputation when she accepts gifts from the men she sees. His wife, daughter, and upwardly mobile friends all weave a tangled web of deceit around him. Ultimately, Walter has no choice but to compromise his principles.
Born in Columbus, Ohio, Karle Otto Amend got his first theater job at Schell Scenic Studios there. A scene designer on Broadway from the late 1920s until his death, Amend was associated with the New Stagecraft movement. The plays designed by Amend include numerous musicals such as Liza (1922), Earl Carroll’s Vanities (1925), and Bye, Bye, Bonnie (1927), and nonmusicals including Crucible (1933), Under Glass (1933), The Locked Room (1933), One More Honeymoon (1934), Broadway Interlude (1934), a 1935 revival of Potash and Perlmutter, and When We Are Married (1939). From the 1920s to the 1940s, Amend operated his scenic studio in New Jersey.
Established in 1884 as the Lyceum Theatre School of Acting by Franklin Haven Sargeant, this first professional actor-training conservatory remains in operation. A not-for-profit educational institution, AADA has provided a broadly practical education in acting to its students. The AADA’s impressive alumni of stage and movie actors and directors include Spencer Tracy, Edward G. Robinson, Walter Abel, Margaret Anglin, Margalo Gillmore, Chester Erskine, Pat O’Brien, William Powell, Joseph Schildkraut, Jane Cowl, Cecil B. DeMille, Guthrie McClintic,* Howard Lindsay, Allen Jenkins, Claire Trevor, and Helen Westley.
George M. Cohan starred in his own three-act play, which opened at the Hudson Theatre on 5 October 1925 for 88 performances. According to critics, the play succeeded only thanks to Cohan’s presence on stage as Joe Gibson, an American-born son of an English-born mother rejected by her snobbish family for marrying an American gardener. Borrowing plot elements from J. Hartley Manners’s Peg o’ My Heart, Gibson inherits Malbridge Hall, the estate of his English family, causing some consternation when he arrives to take his place there. Disliking English life and his unwelcoming family, Gibson secures the survival of the family-owned factories in order to support the workers before walking away from his heritage to return to the United States to wed the girl he loves.
Established in 1923 in response to the excitement generated by that year’s Broadway season of Constantin Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre (MAT), the ALT, originally named the Theatre Arts Institute, aimed to train American actors in the ensemble techniques so effectively demonstrated by the MAT. Set up by wealthy American art patrons as a three-year professional school, the ALT featured courses in acting, mime, ballet, fencing, voice and diction, and gymnastics. MAT actors Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya remained in New York when the MAT returned to Russia, and their classes became the center of the ALT’s training program.
Between 1925 and 1930, Boleslavsky set up an American version of the MAT model called “The Lab,” with the goal of producing new American plays, although most of its productions were European plays. New works by Thornton Wilder,* Clemence Dane, and Lynn Riggs, among others, were produced, as well as a 1927 staging of Much Ado about Nothing. The Lab was short-lived (it disbanded at the height of the Great Depression in 1933), yet it played an important role in spreading the influence of Stanislavski’s principles, and it set the stage for the Group Theatre* and others to carry that work forward in the 1930s. Boleslavsky and Ouspenskaya continued to teach, and she became a popular character actress in movies.
Patrick Kearney’s three-act play, adapted from the novel by Theodore Dreiser and produced by Horace Liveright, opened on 11 October 1926 for 216 performances under the direction of Edward T. Goodman at the Longacre Theatre. A callow young man, Clyde Griffiths, works in his wealthy uncle’s factory, becoming involved with a coworker, whom he impregnates as he simultaneously is attracted to a beautiful heiress, and this leads to catastrophe. Miriam Hopkins won acclaim as Sondra Finchley, the tragic coworker, with Morgan Farley as Griffiths and Martha Lee Manners as the heiress. On 20 February 1931, the play was revived at the Waldorf Theatre for 137 performances, but Dreiser’s novel had its most successful adaptation in 1951 as a multi-Academy-Award-winning movie directed by George Stevens retitled A Place in the Sun, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, and Shelley Winters* (an earlier screen adaptation, under the novel’s original title, in 1931 featured Phillips Holmes, Sylvia Sidney, and Frances Dee, directed by Josef von Sternberg).
Robert Ames began his acting career with the Hunter-Bradford stock company in Hartford, Connecticut, where he was born. He toured in The Great Divide, then joined a stock company in Massachusetts. In 1916, he earned recognition playing opposite Ruth Chatterton in Come out of the Kitchen. Several other good roles followed, including the sympathetic lead in Nice People (1921), the unsympathetic lead in The Hero (1921), and the errant son in Icebound (1923).
Born into a wealthy family in North Easton, Massachusetts, Winthrop Ames was educated at Harvard University for a career in art and architecture. Among the first producers to bring European modernist theatrical concepts to the United States, Ames produced and directed at Boston’s Castle Square Theatre from 1904 to 1907, where his stock company changed the bill on a weekly basis, presenting the typical theatrical fare of the day. However, after a long European trip during which he was introduced to new performance concepts often described as the New Stagecraft, Ames presented a series of classical productions at New York’s New Theatre from 1909 to 1911. This attempt was unsuccessful in part because the theater was too far off the main stem, so Ames built the Little Theatre in 1912 and the Booth Theatre in 1913 with the aim of continuing productions in the new style. To inspire interest, Ames offered a prize for the best new American drama. Alice Brown’s Children of Earth won the competition from nearly 2,000 entries, but Ames’s production failed to find public favor. Undaunted, he produced Max Reinhardt’s Sumurun and employed Norman Bel Geddes to develop innovative lighting techniques for use in his theaters.
Regarded as one of the outstanding directors of the era, Ames produced and/or directed a series of important European and American plays reflecting the heightened seriousness and experimentation of the New Stagecraft movement, including The Affairs of Anatol (1912), The Pigeon (1912), Prunella (1913), A Pair of Silk Stockings (1914), Pierrot the Prodigal (1916), The Green Goddess (1921), Will Shakespeare (1923), Beggar on Horseback (1924), Minick (1924), Old English (1924), White Wings (1926), and Escape (1927). He also presented revivals of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, including Iolanthe (1926), The Mikado (1927), and The Pirates of Penzance (1927). At his retirement in 1932, Ames had expended most of his fortune in support of theatrical experimentation.
In the 1870s and 1880s, the word entertainment conveyed a sense of wasteful self-indulgence. The term recreation, while respectable, encompassed activities far beyond the scope of legitimate theater. Thus, the word amusements often served both as the header for the theater column in newspapers and as the category under which opera houses were listed in city directories. Meanwhile, theater managers took up the term attractions. Amusements were regarded as wholesome distractions from the cares of everyday life.
Born in Los Angeles, Glenn Anders studied at Columbia University in New York and made his debut in Los Angeles in 1910. He worked with various stock companies, toured with Julia Marlowe, and began getting important roles in New York in 1919. Notably, Anders played Joe in They Knew What They Wanted (1924) and Edmund Darrell in Strange Interlude (1928). Anders also appeared in Hell- Bent fer Heaven (1924), The Constant Nymph (1926), Dynamo (1929), Hotel Universe* (1930), A Farewell to Arms (1930), Another Language (1932), The Masque of Kings (1936), Skylark (1939), Light Up the Sky* (1948), The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker (1953), and Time Remembered (1957), among many others. Besides matinee idol good looks, he demonstrated considerable range in his characterizations.
An African American born in Wichita, Kansas, Garland Anderson spent part of his youth in Sacramento, California. He left home at age 11 after his mother died. He was working as a hotel bellboy in San Francisco when he saw a play and decided to write one himself. With the financial aid of Al Jolson, Anderson got a reading of Appearances in New York. Its production in October 1925 made Garland Anderson the first African American to have a full-length legitimate drama produced on Broadway, where it was revived in 1929.
The Pensacola, Florida–born drama critic John Hargis Anderson wrote for the New York Evening Post from 1918 and taught at New York University. In 1928, he became drama critic at the New York Journal. He also wrote plays adapted from European originals, including The Inspector General (1930), The Fatal Alibi (1932), and Collision (1932).
The Canadian-born writer, director, and producer John Murray Anderson was educated abroad. In 1919, he began his theater career in New York with The Greenwich Village Follies, which he continued to write and produce annually. He staged many musicals and revues,† most notably Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s Jumbo at the Hippodrome in 1935, and he wrote for the Ziegfeld Follies of 1934, 1936, and 1943.
Despite the brevity of her acting career, Mary Anderson was long vividly remembered and loved for the fresh beauty of her face and stature as well as the charm of her portrayals. “Our Mary” was born in Sacramento, California, and educated at a convent school in Louisville, Kentucky, the city where she made her professional debut as Juliet at Macauley’s Theatre in 1875. She toured in the standard repertory of romantic melodramas: The Lady of Lyons, Ingomar, and others, reaching New York’s Fifth Avenue Theatre† in 1877. She honed her vocal skills for a rich, pleasing delivery. Her plasticity of form made her especially good as Galatea in Pygmalion and Galatea, beginning in 1881. Her 1883 London debut was followed by several other engagements in England. There she was the first actress to double Hermione and Perdita in The Winter’s Tale in 1887. The physical strain of her 1889 American tour led her to announce her retirement. In 1890, she married Antonio Fernando de Navarro, settled in England, and they raised their two children. Despite calls for her return to the stage, Anderson performed only for charity functions after her marriage. However, she worked with Robert S. Hichens to dramatize his novel The Garden of Allah (1911).
Playwright Maxwell Anderson is considered to be a product of North Dakota, although he was born in Atlantic City, Pennsylvania. He taught school and had a substantial career as a journalist before making a relatively late debut as a dramatist with the quickly forgotten White Desert (1923). His fellow journalist at the New York World, Laurence Stallings, had fought in World War I and worked with Anderson to turn those experiences into a gritty realistic drama in which the characters talked the way men in war actually talk. The strong language in What Price Glory shocked theatergoers, but the play ranked as runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 1925.
Anderson’s social conscience is evident in many of his subsequent works. Outside Looking In (1925) follows a group of hobos, some of whom seek the chance to make a better life against the odds. Gods of the Lightning (1928, with Harold Hickerson) sprang from his anger over the apparent miscarriage of justice that led to the Sacco-Vanzetti executions the year before. The play shows striking workers framed by corrupt police. Saturday’s Children (1927) is a comedy but deals with the real-world difficulties of low-income marriage. His other plays of the 1920s include First Flight (1925), The Buccaneer (1925), and Gypsy (1929). In the 1930s, Anderson turned to writing historical dramas in verse and espousing the cause of poetry on the stage, while critics elevated him to the top rank of American dramatists. His standout post-1930 plays include Elizabeth the Queen* (1930), his Pulitzer Prize–winning Both Your Houses* (1933), Mary of Scotland* (1933), Valley Forge* (1934), Winterset* (1935), High Tor* (1937), Key Largo* (1939), Joan of Lorraine (1946), Anne of the Thousand Days (1948), and The Bad Seed (1954), and he contributed the librettos for the musicals Knickerbocker Holiday (1938) and Lost in the Stars (1949).
The Canadian-born actress and manager Margaret Anglin attended convent schools in Toronto and Montreal, then went to New York to train at the Empire Dramatic School associated with Charles Frohman’s theater. In a school production, she attracted Frohman’s attention, and he hired her to play Madeleine West in a revival of Shenandoah in 1894. She toured with that company and, in subsequent seasons, with the companies of James O’Neill and E. H. Sothern. She attained stardom as Roxane in Cyrano de Bergerac opposite Richard Mansfield at New York’s Garden Theatre in 1898. Numerous fine roles followed, but none as important as that of Ruth Jordan opposite Henry Miller in The Great Divide (1906), for which she had bought the rights when the play was still titled The Sabine Woman. The New York Sun review by critic John Corbin noted her ability to display “opposing impulses blindly yet potently struggling within her for mastery” in a performance of “depth and subtlety.” In 1910, Anglin formed her own company and included a Greek classic in her repertoire each season thereafter until 1928. She continued performing and touring until 1943. Her five-decade career encompassed over 80 roles.
George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind’s absurdly silly farcical play, with songs by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, and starring the Marx Brothers, opened on 23 October 1928 for 191 performances. Animal Crackers marked the last Broadway appearance of the Marxes, Groucho (1890–1977), Harpo (1888–1964), Chico (1886–1961), and Zeppo (1901–1979), before they departed for Hollywood fame. Their second movie was a screen version of Animal Crackers in 1930. As they had done in The Cocoanuts (1925), their previous collaboration with Kaufman, and to the author’s chagrin, the Marxes improvised. The slight plot of Animal Crackers, in which Groucho, as African explorer Captain Spalding, arrives for a Long Island house party, provided ample opportunity for improvisation and insertion of songs. The zany Spalding, with his secretary (Zeppo), encounters high society denizens as well as two wacky musicians (Harpo and Chico). A highlight was Groucho’s parody of the famous “internal monologues” spoken out loud that had been introduced earlier that year by Eugene O’Neill in his Pulitzer Prize–winning drama Strange Interlude (1928).
The use of performing animals was a staple of late 19th-century melodrama. For example, dogs are integral to the action in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,† which held the stage for more than a half century. Companies that carried their own scenery also had dogs trained to chase Eliza as she crossed the river on ice floes, but small troupes of Tommers, most of whom appeared in blackface makeup, would borrow a local dog in each town and lure it after Eliza by the scent of meat hidden in the blanket she carried. Victorien Sardou’s Theodora called for a lion in a cage; Sarah Bernhardt traveled with a real lion, but rising stars like Lillian Olcott made do with a papier-mâché beast. Horses added to the thrill of plays like Mazeppa† or Ben-Hur, and to the atmospheric spectacle of plantation melodramas. See also EQUESTRIAN DRAMA.
Eugene O’Neill won a second Pulitzer Prize in 1922 (following his first in 1920 for Beyond the Horizon) for this moody, character-driven drama, a revision of his earlier play Chris Christopherson, which had failed in its tryout despite Lynn Fontanne in the role of Anna. Directed by Arthur Hopkins with scene designs by Robert Edmond Jones and Pauline Lord and George Marion leading the cast, Anna Christie opened on 2 November 1921 at the Vanderbilt Theatre for a 177-performance run. A movie version in 1930 was famously advertised as Greta Garbo’s first “talkie” (Garbo also played the role in a simultaneously filmed German-language version with a different supporting cast), and the play inspired a 1957 musical adaptation, New Girl in Town, with a libretto by George Abbott.
At Johnny-the-Priest’s barroom on the New York wharfside, Scandinavian seaman Chris Christopherson awaits his daughter, Anna, whom he has not seen since she was a child. Believing that Anna would be better off living on a farm in Minnesota, Chris sent her there but does not know she suffered sexual abuse at the hands of a cousin during her adolescence and that to support herself she works as a prostitute on the streets of St. Paul. Anna arrives, exhausted, despairing, and alcoholic, but is rejuvenated by her proximity to the sea, describing it as something lost that she had been longing to find again. Anna manages to keep her profession a secret for a time, but when her father’s shipmate, Mat Burke, falls in love with her and proposes marriage, Anna, feeling that she is not good enough, confesses her sordid past. This revelation impels both Mat and Chris to get drunk and sign up for long hitches at sea. However, both reconcile with Anna before departing, and she promises to await their eventual return. Anna Christie has been revived on Broadway in 1952 (with Celeste Holm*), 1977 (with Liv Ullmann*), and 1993 (with Natasha Richardson and Liam Neeson).
The term Annie Oakley was slang for complimentary (free) tickets (indicated by holes punched in the ticket), taken from the famous Wild West sharpshooter’s skill at shooting holes in playing cards and coins. A similar term, a Deadwood, refers to a ticket purchased by a barroom patron for a drink. The ticket was handed to the bartender, and if he was in a friendly frame of mind, he would supply the drink and hand the ticket back to the patron to use again.
Born in Cincinnati, Louis Kaufman Anspacher was raised in New York and studied law and philosophy at Columbia University before becoming a successful writer in multiple forms, from poetry to playwriting and screenwriting (solely adapting his plays to the movies). He also worked as an actor for a time. Among Anspacher’s produced plays are The Embarrassment of Riches (1906), A Woman of Impulse (1909), Our Children (1915), The Unchastened Woman (1915), That Day (1922), Dagmar (1923), and The Rhapsody (1930). Anspacher married the actress Kathryn Kidder, a choice that inspired his proper father to publicly oppose the marriage, though the union endured until her death. As he once wrote, “Marriage is that relation between man and woman in which the independence is equal, the dependence mutual, and the obligation reciprocal.”
Garland Anderson’s play about an African American hotel bellhop wrongfully accused of raping a white woman opened on 13 October 1925 and ran for 23 performances at the Frolic Theatre, toured for two years, and was revived in New York in 1929. Somewhat heavy-handed in its insistence that by hard work and honest living “any man can do what he desires to do, can become anything he desires to be,” the action culminates in a trial scene. When the bellhop Carl is vindicated, he dismisses all the characters as figments of his dream. Appearances was the first full-length play by an African American produced on Broadway; entertainer Al Jolson provided some financial support to help Anderson get the play staged.
This “Comedy of American Life in Three Acts” by Barry Conners opened at the Ambassador Theatre on 28 September 1925 and ran for 90 performances.
The ingénue Hazel has two beaux: the conventional, hardworking Rollo and the happy-go-lucky Bill,
whom her father describes as full of applesauce. In 1920s slang, the term applesauce meant double-
speak, hyperbole, flattery. Ultimately, Hazel finds a precarious happiness with Bill.
Stage and movie actor Macklyn Arbuckle was born in San Antonio, Texas, and studied for a law career. He practiced law for a little more than a year before appearing in his first Broadway play, Why Smith Left Home, in 1899. He first won notice in Under Two Flags in 1901 and had a notable stage success in his biggest hit, The County Chairman, in 1903, reprising his performance in a silent screen version. Such rural roles in comedies proved to be his strength; he scored hits in Skipper and Co.; Wall Street (1903); The Round Up (1907), costarring Julia Dean; The Circus Man (1909); and The New Henrietta (1915). Arbuckle also acted in revivals of such classics as The Merchant of Venice, The Rivals, and She Stoops to Conquer. Arbuckle appeared in a number of silent films between 1914 and 1926, but he returned to the stage to head a national tour of The Better ’Ole in 1919. Arbuckle was the cousin of silent movie star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle.
Around 1900, the arc light or carbon arc began to replace the limelight, largely because the arc light was more economical. An extremely bright, even harsh white light was created by an electric spark that jumped between two carbon electrodes. This technology came into use for special effects (bright sun, lightning, etc.) in the 1880s. The later addition of a parabolic reflector behind the rods allowed the light to be concentrated, and the carbon arcs could then be used as follow spots. See also †LIGHTING.
The decades after the Civil War saw the rise of the opera house as a venue to attract more fashionable people than those who would attend the traditional theater. While a theater could be anything from a barn to a third-floor hall above commercial space, the opera house was purpose built for respectable entertainments. The seating for up to 2,000 people in different sections at various price scales created a kind of social segregation. Often there was a separate box office and side entrance for the cheap gallery seats above the more fashionable balconies. Early opera houses had flat auditorium floors (so that the facility could also be rented for balls) and raked stages. By 1900, most opera houses were built with raked auditorium floors (allowing some visibility above the large hats worn by women) and flat-floor stages.
The opera houses built in towns across the nation tended to devote more space to amenities for the audience—lobbies, refreshment rooms, ladies’ parlors, smoking rooms—than did those in New York where square footage was more costly. Each decade brought refinements in ventilation, lighting, fire-prevention devices (sprinklers or “inundators,” asbestos curtain, additional exits), actors’ dressing rooms (eventually with fixed washstands), and scenery and equipment. Few theaters, either in New York or elsewhere, contained their own scene shops; exceptions were Booth’s Theatre (1869–1883) and Daniel Frohman’s Lyceum Theatre.
A number of innovations may be credited to Steele MacKaye at his Madison Square Theatre, which he remodeled in 1879. Leading theater architects and firms during the modernist period included John Eberson, Thomas Lamb, J. B. McElfatrick and Sons, Herbert J. Krapp, and Henry B. Herts. Opera houses continued to be built outside New York until the 1890s but then yielded place to somewhat more intimate theaters in the 1900s and 1910s. New York saw many new theaters constructed throughout the 1920s. See also PARQUETTE; THEATER FIRES.
A native of St. Louis, Missouri, Edwin Hunter Pendleton Smith moved west in his teens and labored at a range of jobs “by turns cowboy, clerk, politician, newspaper reporter, and theater manager” as reported by Variety in 1918, ultimately becoming “one of the most capable leading men on the American stage.” In 1882, he began an acting career in the company of Thomas Keene performing in Shakespeare’s plays. That same year, he appeared successfully at the Madison Square Theatre in Young Mrs. Winthrop. In this same period, Arden wrote several potboiler melodramas including The Eagle’s Nest, Raglan’s Way, Barred Out, and Zorah, the latter produced on Broadway in 1905. Arden also appeared in Edmond Rostand’s L’aiglon (1900) with Maude Adams and a revival of Victorien Sardou’s Fédora in 1905, as well as in an all-star production of Romeo and Juliet in 1903 with Kyrle Bellew and Eleanor Robson. Arden’s many New York appearances include roles in Martha Morton’s A Fool of Fortune (1896), opposite Julia Arthur in A Lady of Quality (1897), William Gillette’s Because She Loved Him So (1899), playing with Junius Brutus Booth† and Annie Yeamans in Clyde Fitch’s The Marriage Game (1901), The Ninety and Nine (1902), Israel Zangwill’s Merely Mary Ann (1903), Via Wireless (1908), Fitch’s The Happy Marriage (1909), a revival of T. W. Robertson’s Caste costarring with Marie Tempest in 1910, The Truth Wagon (1912), the long-running George Broadhurst and Abraham S. Schomer drama Today (1913) with Emily Stevens, and a revival of George Bernard Shaw’s You Never Can Tell in 1915 starring Arnold Daly. In his own play Zorah (1905) at Proctor’s Fifth Avenue Theatre,† Arden played a young rabbi who outwits the Russian oppressors.
He also performed in vaudeville and operated a stock company in Washington, D.C. In the silent movie era, Arden appeared in movies including The Beloved Vagabond (1915) and Virtuous Wives (1918), and directed and acted in the screen version of his play The Eagle’s Nest in 1915.
Employing traditional characters and images of harlequinade, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay crafted a classic one-act play and one of her most enduring literary achievements. Constructed as a song in three parts, as its title suggests, Aria da Capo is a theatrically stylized antiwar fantasy combined with a lyric drama of two conflicting shepherds engaged in a territorial struggle. Despite the simple populism of commedia dell’arte’s stock characters, Aria da Capo emerges as an eloquent statement on the human penchant for conflict. The Provincetown Players produced it under Millay’s direction (she acted in it as well) on 5 December 1919. It later opened in New York on 4 May 1925 for a single performance produced by the Manhattan Little Theatre Club at Wallack’s Theatre. Aria da Capo remains a staple among American one-act plays, a favorite of Little Theater, amateur, and academic theater troupes. Aria da Capo is among the most produced one-act plays of its era, when many dramatists wrote on occasion in the form, experimenting in little theaters and providing material for those professional and amateur theaters eager to produce plays on a smaller scale than the full-length, large-cast, and scenically demanding plays staged on Broadway.
A melodrama in four acts by Augustus Thomas, Arizona opened on 10 September 1900 at the Herald Square Theatre under the management of Kirke La Shelle and Fred R. Hamlin for 140 performances. Lieutenant Denton, serving with the 11th Cavalry in Arizona, must contend with the amoral Captain Hodgman, who has fathered an illegitimate child by one woman while attempting to seduce the colonel’s wife, Estrella. Denton’s quiet good deeds to save the situation are turned against him, and he resigns his commission. When Hodgman leads a band of renegade Indians to attack his fiancée’s ranch, Denton inspires his former troops to join him in fighting off the attack. Arizona, which became a stage staple before World War I, was revived in 1913 by William A. Brady, made into three movies (1913, 1918, 1931), and adapted into a Broadway operetta by Sigmund Romberg, titled The Love Call (1927).
Born in London as Augustus George Arliss-Andrews, he spent most of his career on Broadway stages as well as in movies. Arliss debuted in 1901, costarring with Mrs. Patrick Campbell in The Second Mrs. Tangueray, after which he was hired by David Belasco to play the villain in The Darling of the Gods (1902). This was followed by a stint as leading man for Minnie Maddern Fiske, appearing opposite her in Becky Sharp (1904), Leah Kleschna (1904), Hedda Gabler (1904), The Rose (1905), The Eyes of the Heart (1905), The New York Idea (1906), and Rosmersholm (1907). Under Harrison Grey Fiske’s management, Arliss scored a long-running success in Ferenc Molnár’s The Devil (1908), followed by Septimus (1909). His acclaimed performance in Louis N. Parker’s Disraeli (1911) kept him playing the role in New York and on tour for four years. Disraeli provided Arliss with ample opportunity to demonstrate his gift for bringing to life a vivid character from history through his angular physical presence and carefully detailed intellectual approach. Arliss’s long, dour face and aquiline nose may have “typed” him as those historical figures he resembled or in villainous roles, but his highly technical approach to acting was widely applauded both on stage and screen.
Following Disraeli, Arliss returned to Broadway to play another historical character in Paganini (1916), followed by a revival of J. M. Barrie’s The Professor’s Love Story (1917) and Hamilton (1918). For the American Red Cross during World War I, Arliss appeared in J. Hartley Manners’s Out There, costarring with George M. Cohan, James K. Hackett, Chauncey Olcott, Laurette Taylor, and other leading lights of the American stage. Arliss acted in Poldekin (1920) before assaying another of his most admired roles as the villainous Rajah in The Green Goddess (1921), after which he acted in John Galsworthy’s Old English (1924) and in 1928 as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice for producer Winthrop Ames on Broadway and on tour.
The high-energy playwright Paul Armstrong, born in Kidder, Missouri, was a Chicago sportswriter before getting his first Broadway production, The Superstition of Sue, in 1904. His 25 or so “virile dramas” include The Heir to the Hoorah (1905), Salomy Jane (1907), Via Wireless (1908), Going Some (1909), Alias Jimmy Valentine (1911), The Romance of Underworld (1911), and The Heart of a Thief (1914).
The son of a white Frenchman and a black woman, J. A. Arneaux was educated in America and Paris, where he worked for a time as a newspaperman. While employed as a singer and dancer for Tony Pastor, Arneaux established the Astor Place Company of Colored Tragedians in 1884, an all–African American company devoted to productions of classics, particularly Shakespeare. Although established in New York, Arneaux’s troupe toured to Philadelphia and Providence, Rhode Island. As an actor, Arneaux was the logical successor of Ira Aldridge† and was praised as Macbeth, Iago, and particularly in his favorite role, Richard III, in which he was favorably compared to major actors of both races.
Born Gunther Edward Arnold Schneider on New York’s Lower East Side, son of German immigrant parents, he became an actor in his youth on both the stage and in films. Of heavy build and with a sonorous voice, Arnold was cast in a wide range of roles, often as villains or corrupt businessmen, but able to shift to comic characters and even, at times, inspirational figures. On Broadway, Arnold acted in the hit melodrama The Storm (1919), the popular comedy The Nervous Wreck (1923), a revival of The Jazz Singer in 1927, and the musical revue† The Third Little Show (1931). His other stage credits included She Would and She Did (1919), The Mad Honeymoon (1923), Her Way Out (1924), Easy Come, Easy Go (1925), Julie (1927), The Grey Fox (1928), Conflict (1929), Miracle at Verdun (1931), and Whistling in the Dark (1932). Like many of his peers, Arnold found work in the movies beginning in 1916 in silent films, including as an extra in He Who Gets Slapped (1924), but his varied successes as a character actor came in the sound era. He appeared in such classic films as I’m No Angel (1933), Roman Scandals (1933), You Can’t Take It with You* (1938), Idiot’s Delight* (1939), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Lillian Russell (1940), Meet John Doe (1941), The Devil and Daniel Webster* (1941), and in some television dramas.
A theater manager and a composer, Rudolph Aronson was born in New York and built his career there, managing musical theater performers. He built the Casino Theatre at 39th and Broadway as a home for operettas; it opened in 1882 with The Queen’s Lace Handkerchief. The roof garden he added in 1890 was the first in America. Aronson composed over 150 songs and orchestrated several comic operas.
Mary Austin’s folk drama with feminist undertones opened 27 February 1911 and had an eight-performance run at the New Theatre in New York. The title character is Simwa, who becomes chief of a Paiute tribe with the help of the Chisera, a medicine woman who loves him and whom he betrays. The white actors were coached to learn Native American chants and dances, while costumes and objects from the Museum of Natural History were copied in the scene design elements. See also ETHNICITY IN AMERICAN DRAMA; †WOMEN IN THE PROFESSION.
Indiana-born newspaperman-turned-playwright Joseph Arthur was the author of some of the period’s most frequently performed melodramas: The Still Alarm (1887), Blue Jeans (1890), The Cherry Pickers (1896), The Salt of the Earth (1898), On the Wabash (1899), and Lost River (1900).
The lovely actress with luminous dark eyes and black hair was born Ida Lewis in Hamilton, Ontario. She acted with amateur groups, then joined Daniel E. Bandmann’s Repertoire Company, touring the western United States for four years. She made her New York debut in The Black Masque in 1891. In 1893, she played the title role in the first American production of Lady Windermere’s Fan. Then she acted with Sir Henry Irving’s company in London and on an American tour.
In 1897, Julia Arthur rose to stardom in A Lady of Quality and married railroad financier Benjamin Pierce Cheney. She then formed her own repertory company to tour Shakespeare and historical melodramas like Ingomar. As a last-minute replacement for her leading man, William S. Hart enjoyed an engagement for which he did not have to furnish his own costume wardrobe. Hart wrote charmingly in his memoir My Life East and West about playing opposite her: “Julia Arthur! A glorious actress, and a glorious woman!” Julia Arthur retired from the stage in 1899 but returned in 1914. She performed an estimated 200 leading roles, including Sister Mary (1894); More Than a Queen (1899); The Eternal Magdalene (1915); Seremonda (1917), which she also wrote; the all-star 1918 revival of Out There; and as Lady Macbeth opposite Lionel Barrymore in Arthur Hopkins’s production of Macbeth with scene designs by Robert Edmond Jones.
This five-act temperance melodrama written in 1891 by J. W. Todd questioned some of the political tactics employed by anti-drink forces, especially the Anti-Saloon League, but settled for a melodramatic depiction of the redemption of a drinker by his mother’s support. A businessman, Robert Eustace, intends to sell a piece of property for the construction of a barroom but runs afoul of his wife, who is an active member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. He rejects the temperance philosophy but, ultimately, condemns the “monster within us that some men call ‘habit.’”
Opening on 13 March 1911 at the 39th Street Theatre, the Shubert-produced play, written and directed by Augustus Thomas, ran for 128 performances. Taking up issues that had been explored in the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg’s The Father (1887, produced in New York in 1912) and in Rachel Crothers’s A Man’s World (1910), Thomas explored the double standard and the torment of a husband who begins to doubt whether he is the biological father of his child. Chrystal Herne played the wife who has already forgiven her husband’s extramarital escapades, yet he sends her out of her home for an innocent impropriety. As the wife’s friend observes: “And that woman dramatist with her play was right. It is ‘a man’s world.’” Religious considerations are intertwined with the main action, in that several of the characters are Jewish, notably the good doctor, played by John Mason, who is instrumental in saving the marriage of his Christian friends, while the wife’s father is outspokenly anti-Semitic. See also ETHNICITY IN AMERICAN DRAMA; †WOMEN IN THE PROFESSION.
In the 1890s, stages began to be equipped with drop curtains that had asbestos fibers woven into them and could be lowered as a fire barrier between the stage area and the auditorium. Unfortunately, most backstage fires could not be so easily contained. In Chicago’s Iroquois Theatre fire of 1903, for example, the asbestos curtain snagged on some rigging and could not be lowered completely. See also THEATER FIRES.
The Yiddish theater playwright Solomon Asch was born in Poland and came to New York in 1914. Among his 20 or so plays, all on Jewish themes, God of Vengeance (1907) remains his best known. See also ETHNICITY IN AMERICAN DRAMA.
While Chinese and Japanese stock characters appeared in plays of the period alongside other ethnic stereotypes, there was little that could be called Asian American legitimate drama. Amateur groups sprang up in Asian communities, but only in cities like New York and San Francisco were there professional troupes performing traditional music-based theater. In most plays of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Asian characters were often played by white actors in “yellowface” makeup and featuring stereotypical images of Asians that, for a long while, prevailed in popular culture.
Lines spoken by one character in the presence of another character or characters who are not supposed to hear what is said constitute “an aside.” Printed stage directions sometimes indicate “aside to the audience.” The device goes back to classical Greek and Roman theater, but by around 1900, it was generally regarded as a creaky artifice reminiscent of old-fashioned melodrama. Eugene O’Neill’s 1928 play Strange Interlude used a variation of the aside with the actors speaking their thoughts alongside their actual dialogue, revealing an inner monologue.
The 4A’s, as the Associated Actors and Artistes of America became known, was chartered by the American Federation of Labor in 1919 to resolve counterproductive conflicts between two existing organizations, the White Rats Actors Union of America, founded in 1909 to serve variety performers, and Actors’ Equity Association, founded in 1913, to represent actors on the legitimate stage. The merger of the two organizations within Actors’ Equity (terminating the White Rats) led the 4A’s to focus on the mutual interests of all performance-related organizations in negotiations with management and supported Actors’ Equity in its strike in 1919.
Beginning with a production of William Shakespeare’s Othello, organized by J. A. Arneaux and Benjamin Ford in 1884, the relatively short-lived Astor Place Company of Colored Tragedians aimed to provide African American audiences with first-rate theater in Manhattan. Performed at Thompson’s Eighth Street Theatre on 30 June of that year, the production featured Ford as Othello, Arneaux as Iago (his talents were compared favorably to Edwin Booth), and a cast including Alice Brooks, Marie Lavere, B. C. Devereaux, and R. R. Cranvell. Subsequent productions included a November 1884 performance of Damon and Pythias and an April 1885 production of Richard III; they performed scenes from these plays whenever opportunities permitted.
Born in Melrose, Massachusetts, the son of a journalist, Justin Brooks Atkinson was educated at Harvard University, then worked as a reporter for the Springfield Daily News and taught English at Dartmouth College. Atkinson served in the U.S. Army during World War I, after which he became a reporter and assistant to the drama critic of the Boston Evening Transcript. Atkinson was associate editor of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin (1920–1922) before becoming a book review editor for the New York Times in 1922. He was Broadway drama critic at the Times from 1925 to 1942, served as a news correspondent in China and Russia during World War II, and resumed his post as Times drama critic from 1946 to 1960, when he became critic-at-large (a post he held until 1965). Atkinson authored more than a dozen books and, besides numerous awards for his drama criticism, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1947 for his writings on the Soviet Union. In 1960, New York’s old Mansfield Theatre was renamed the Brooks Atkinson Theatre.
Because of the great variety of entertainments on the road from the 1870s to the 1910s, theater managers used the umbrella term attractions to cover all kinds of bookings: legitimate plays, operas, musical revues† and burlesques, lectures, and minstrel shows. See also AMUSEMENTS; ENTERTAINMENT.
Born in Croyden, England, Lionel Atwill gained significant acting experience in provincial theaters before touring the United States in the company of Lillie Langtry. He debuted on Broadway, directing himself in The Lodger (1917), which was well received. His next few endeavors failed until he appeared opposite Alla Nazimova in a series of Henrik Ibsen plays produced by Arthur Hopkins, including The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler, and A Doll’s House, all in 1918. Atwill had a long run and tour in Tiger! Tiger! (1918), followed by another hit in Sacha Guitry’s Deburau (1920), playing early 18th-century French pantomimist Jean-Gaspard Deburau. In the early 1920s, Atwill found success in two more Guitry plays, The Grand Duke (1921) and The Comedian (1923), and in The Outsider (1924). He played opposite Helen Hayes in George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra (1925). Later, he went to Hollywood and became a venerable character actor in over 75 movies.
David Belasco, Charles Klein, and Lee Arthur collaborated on this three-act comedy that opened at the Bijou Theatre on 23 September 1901 for 105 performances starring David Warfield, Belasco’s most durable star. Surprised by a sudden inheritance, poor Hester Street auctioneer Simon Levi finds that with his unexpected wealth his wife and adopted daughter want to enjoy life’s finer things. Levi allows his prospective son-in-law to invest the inheritance in stocks, but their value declines and his fortunes are once again reduced. Warfield, who had been known mostly as a dialect comedian prior to this production, moved audiences with his first act curtain speech in which he bids farewell to his Lower East Side home and neighbors. Credited with elevating this slight play, Warfield appeared in three revivals (1903, 1913, 1918), and the role of Simon Levi became permanently associated with Warfield, although George Sidney effectively played the part in a 1927 movie version.
“The greatest room for music and opera in the world—bar none” was Frank Lloyd Wright’s assessment of Chicago’s 4,200-seat theater. Designed by Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler in 1886, the Auditorium remains one of the most acoustically perfect theaters of the era. Civic pride motivated its planning and construction, led by Ferdinand W. Peck and other wealthy citizens who formed the Chicago Auditorium Association. President Grover Cleveland laid the theater’s cornerstone in October 1887, and it was dedicated on 9 December 1889 by President Benjamin Harrison. Over 5,000 people heard Adelina Patti’s inaugural performance, for which some boxes were sold at $2,100.
Located inside a much larger building with a hotel and restaurant (among the first of such size to be electrically lighted and air conditioned), the Auditorium Theatre survived the decades partly because it would have been too expensive to demolish. A move to raze it was thwarted in 1923, but another setback came in 1929 when the Chicago Opera Company found a newer home. The theater closed in 1941, then reopened as a recreation center for servicemen during World War II, with a bowling alley installed on the stage. Roosevelt College (later Roosevelt University) acquired the building in 1946 and used the hotel floors for classes and offices while the theater stood empty. In the 1960s, Beatrice T. Spachner spearheaded a drive to restore the Auditorium Theatre. It reopened in 1967, yet restoration work continued for two decades.
Mary Hunter was born in Carlinville, Illinois, and moved with her family to California in 1888. She had begun writing and teaching before she married Stafford Wallace Austin in 1890. Apart from The Arrow Maker (1911) and Merry Christmas, Daddy! (1916), Austin wrote novels and nonfiction books on the environment.