THEATER

THEATER in America started as ritual performance by Native Americans and then, upon the arrival of the first white, Spanish settlers, became another sort of ritual, based on medieval European Christian morality plays. For many years, theater was outlawed in Colonial America, although the proscription hardly called a halt to performances. As everywhere, theater ranged between high and low: early "high" theater attempted to duplicate what was going on in Europe and included rewritten ("improved") Shakespeare and other, mostly British dramas, including School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. "Low" theater included riverboat shows, VAUDEVILLE, minstrel shows, and Wild West shows. It was not until the late eighteenth century that an authentic "American" voice began to emerge in the theater. This voice continued to develop throughout the nineteenth century and found itself being embraced on the world stage during the twentieth century.

Early American Theater

While there are no records of the earliest Native American performances, Indian rituals were noted by the early white settlers. Native Americans performed most of their theatrical pieces in honor of various gods or to celebrate changes in seasons, harvests, hunts, battles, and so on. Among the many performances were the summer and winter rituals of the Pueblo Indians. Pueblo dramas included the Deer Dance, Buffalo Dance, Corn Dance, Raingod Dance, and the Eagle Dance. Variations on Native American performance were later played out many times with white settlers in rituals and ceremonies focused around treaties and other meetings. These dramas included gift giving, dances, and speeches. Later, Indians—and cowboys—became stock characters in performances ranging from melodramas to vaudeville. In "Wild West" shows of the nineteenth century, Indian rituals were recreated for white audiences in the eastern United States and in Europe.

The first recorded white colonial performances were morality plays performed by missionaries for Spanish soldiers in Florida in 1567. These plays were intended to show the supremacy of the Spaniards' religion and its ultimate triumph in the New World. Although no record of the actual play exists, it can be assumed that it took the stylized and ritualistic form of medieval drama.

In Colonial days, theater was looked down upon by many of the Puritanical white settlers, so it was not until 1665 that the first play performed in English was recorded. Ye Bare and Ye Cub was performed by three men in Accomack County, Virginia. Apparently someone was offended by the offering, or simply by the idea of theater, because the players were sued. After the play was performed in court, the performers were found "not guilty of fault." Quakers were especially opposed to theatrical performances and had laws passed against them in most of the colonies, beginning with William Penn's in Pennsylvania. Proscriptions against theater were not passed in Virginia, and that is likely why it became the home of the first professional American theater, the Company of Comedians, led by entrepreneur Lewis Hallam.

Hallam's troupe of provincial players arrived from England in 1752. Like most of the companies to follow, the Company of Comedians was run by an actor/manager. After performing Shakespeare in Williamsburg, Virginia, Hallam built the first theater in New York City in 1753 and in Charleston in 1754. Hallam's fare also included such English staples as Restoration drama, farce, and operetta. His company played Philadelphia and toured the South and eventually moved to Jamaica, where Hallam died. While in Jamaica, Hallam's wife married another theater producer, David Douglass, who had founded theaters in Philadelphia and New York. Under Douglass, the company moved back to the States, calling itself the American Company. Hallam's son, Lewis Hallam the Younger, often performed opposite his mother and proved to be a talented comic. In 1767, Hallam played the lead in the first professional American drama, Thomas Godfrey's Prince of Parthia.

In 1775, theater was again banned, this time by the Continental Congress. While the ban was routinely ignored, it did put off professional theater producers—including David Douglass, who moved back to Jamaica—and fostered more amateur performances, especially those featuring patriotic themes.

Theater in the Early United States

After the Revolutionary War (1775–1783), the American Company returned to New York City and when David Douglass died, Hallam took over and produced what is widely believed to be the first important American play, one written by a Harvard-educated lawyer and army officer, Royall Tyler. Tyler's play, The Contrast, debuted in New York in March 1787. The characters in The Contrast include a Revolutionary War veteran and a man deemed a natural nobleman. The leading character, Jonathan, was the first in a long line of "Yankees" to grace the American stage. Tyler made comparisons between American and British attitudes that favored the American. In addition to its themes of patriotism and the belief that love conquers all, Tyler's play is filled with references to the fashions and topics of the time. The Contrast was an instant hit that was also performed in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston and has seen revivals up to the twenty-first century.

During the early nineteenth century, touring groups continued to play a large role in American theater, and English actors were often imported to headline local productions. Among the more popular players were Edmund Kean and Junius Brutus Booth (father of actor Edwin Booth and actor/Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth). At this time, actors often specialized in one or two roles that they were known for.

The American-born actor credited with innovating a truly American style of acting was Edwin Forrest. After playing second leads to Edmund Kean, Forrest eventually became a leading man and played throughout the East, South, and Midwest. Forrest was an athletic actor who was a natural for heroic and rebellious roles. He found his greatest fame as star of Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags (1829), a play that he found by sponsoring a contest for a tragedy, "of which the hero … shall be an aboriginal of this country." Forrest played the Indian Metamora throughout his career, and the success of the play caused many other dramas featuring the noble savage to be entered into the American repertory.

For the most part, when Black Americans were portrayed, it was not as noble persons but as buffoons. The 1840s saw the rise of minstrelsy, in which mostly white, but also black, performers sang and danced while made up in blackface, achieved by smearing coal on the face. Minstrel shows remained popular until the early twentieth century. Also wildly popular in mid-century were "Tom Shows," melodramatic productions based on Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Other forms of diversion included vaudeville, which boasted such performers as Eddie Foy, W. C. Fields, and Sophie Tucker. P. T. Barnum sponsored singing tours by the "Swedish Nightingale," Jenny Lind, and opened the American Museum (1842) in New York City where he exhibited such freakish attractions as "Tom Thumb" and the Siamese twins Chang and Eng. Barnum, along with James A. Bailey, founded the Barnum and Bailey Circus in 1881.

Wild West shows were in vogue, especially Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, organized by former Pony Express rider William Frederick Cody in 1883. Cody's Cowboy and Indian show toured throughout the United States and Europe. Showboats were also a popular venue for all manner of entertainment from vaudeville to Shakespeare.

Theater of the Gilded Age

The last thirty years of the 1800s, often referred to as the "Gilded Age," were dominated by melodrama. Many Civil War plays were produced; they often focused on romances between Northern and Southern lovers but skirted the political issues of the war. Nonetheless, American theater was edging ever closer to the realistic style of performance that would come to dominate it in the twentieth century.

A trend in late-nineteenth-century drama, attributed largely to California-born manager/playwright/producer David Belasco, was to greatly enhance the production values of a play. Belasco built enormous and spectacular three-dimensional sets that he deemed naturalistic. Belasco was among the forerunners of a small group of producers who were breaking away from the romantic style of acting that marked the nineteenth century as well. These producer/directors encouraged actors to perform in a naturalistic style that suited the actors' own personalities.

By 1888, it was estimated that there were more than 2,400 professional actors in the United States. A few earned as much as $100,000 a year—a tremendous amount at the time. Among the highly paid actors were many who came from theatrical families, including descendents of the Booths, the Davenports, the Jeffersons, and the Drew-Barrymores (Lionel, Ethel, and John Barrymore all worked on the New York stage in the early twentieth century). Lesser-known performers were often badly treated; sometimes no pay was given for weeks or even months of rehearsal. Thus, in 1894, the Actors' Society of America, later Actors' Equity, was formed to negotiate standard contracts for actors. Even before this, other stage employees organized unions.

The number of actors grew to around 15,000 at the turn of the twentieth century. Along with the increase in actors came an increase in acting schools. Among the first was the Lyceum Theatre School, founded in New York City in 1884 and renamed the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1892. The American Academy of Dramatic Arts remains perhaps the most prestigious acting school in the country.

In the mid-nineteenth century, stock companies rose in number and often traveled. The opening of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869 meant that productions could travel to the West Coast. Soon companies stopped developing a large number of new plays and instead produced long runs of a single, popular play that they often took on tour. By the early 1870s, there were about 50 resident stock companies in the country. In 1886, a group of booking agents and managers formed a partnership known as the Theatrical Trust (or Syndicate). For approximately thirty years, the Syndicate controlled virtually all bookings at professional theaters. Over 1,700 theaters were available to touring productions in 1905, according to Julius Cahn's Official Theatrical Guide, making the Syndicate's sphere of influence very great indeed. By the turn of the twentieth century, resident stock companies were nearly nonexistent.

A challenge to the Syndicate's authority came from independent producer David Belasco, who wanted to stage a play set in Japan at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis and was blocked by the syndicate. Belasco booked a theater anyway and, typically, the Syndicate mounted a rival play on the same topic as Belasco's. Even an antitrust suit, filed after the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 became law, failed to loosen the Syndicate's grip. What did finally stop the Syndicate was another group of theatrical monopolists, the New York–based Shubert brothers—Lee, Sam S., and Jacob J. The Shuberts, who initially worked with the Syndicate, eventually joined forces with David Belasco, actress Minnie Maddern Fiske, and others to overturn it.

The nineteenth century did see some accomplished American playwrights, including Edward Harrigan, William Dean Howells, and Steele MacKaye. However, the time and country that produced such memorable writers in other genres as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Henry David Thoreau failed to nurture a truly great playwright until the twentieth century.

Theatre in the Early Twentieth Century

The early twentieth century mostly saw a continuation of commercialization and lack of originality in the theater. Melodrama, with subjects ranging from historical to romantic to Western to mystery, remained the form most often performed. Touring ceased to be the main way in which plays were presented and stock companies again formed. The continuing prosperity of America was reflected in the theater, and by 1912 there were some 8,000 theaters in America. By then, activities were focused in New York, especially off Times Square. Many of the theaters built during the boom of the 1920s were still used in 2002.

With the exception of some suffragist actresses, there were very few performers involved in political causes. However, in the Chicago slums, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr recognized the possibilities of theater as a force for social good and opened Hull House in 1889 as an alternative entertainment for impoverished youth. Similar theaters followed, including the Henry Street Settlement in New York.

As more and more of the theatergoing public became exposed to the work of such groundbreaking European playwrights as Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, and George Bernard Shaw, a small but active theater intelligentsia was formed that looked for more sophisticated plays. In the teens, "Little Theaters" began to open around the country. Some of these were formed for the purpose of offering standard commercial fare at cut rates, but many were formed with a higher purpose in mind—to produce serious, realist drama. These little theaters, including Chicago's Little Theatre, New York's Neighborhood Playhouse and Washington Square Players, and the Cleveland Playhouse featured work by both contemporary European and American playwrights and were modeled after European art theaters such as the Moscow Art Theatre and Dublin's Abbey Theatre. American performances by these two theater companies and others greatly influenced the style of acting in America further toward naturalism.

In Massachusetts, the PROVINCETOWN PLAYERS were developing the early short sea plays (set on the sea) of the only American playwright ever to win a Nobel Prize (1936), Eugene O'Neill. O'Neill was the son of James O'Neill, a famous actor who felt he had squandered his talent playing mostly one role, in The Count of Monte Cristo, throughout his career. The plays were taken to New York and the Provincetown Players began a tradition of developing plays out of town before a New York opening. O'Neill was the first of many great American playwrights to work in the twentieth century. He is credited with first perfecting the realist voice of the American stage.

During the 1930s, the Great Depression brought a far greater interest in political theater. Such groups as the INTERNATIONAL LADIES GARMENT WORKERS UNION put on plays, and even the government got into the act through the federally sponsored and ill-fated Federal Theatre Project, which attempted to put 13,000 theater people on the government payroll. Meanwhile, the unions were represented by playwright Clifford Odets in his Waiting for Lefty on the legitimate stage. Lillian Hellman and Thornton Wilder were among the other prominent playwrights of the time.

The postwar 1940s were also a fascinating time for theater. It was then that the heartbreaking dramas of Mississippi playwright Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie (1945) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), were staged. Marlon Brando, who studied the Stanislavski System of acting originated at the Moscow Art Theatre and taught at The Actors Studio (opened 1947), became an overnight sensation after starring in A Streetcar Named Desire. His intimate performance not only led to a long film career but also had a great influence on the way American actors performed.

Arthur Miller debuted works that deal with government corruption (All My Sons, 1947), the alienation of modern man (Death of a Salesman, 1949), and manipulation of public opinion through the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings of the early 1950s (The Crucible, 1953). In 1947, Julian Beck and Judith Malina formed the Living Theatre, an experimental theater devoted to producing avant-garde plays that promoted the ideals of pacifism and anarchy.

The 1940s also saw the development of the American musical, starting with Oklahoma (1943), written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein and choreographed by Agnes DeMille. Other musicals included Brigadoon (1947) and My Fair Lady (1956), by the team of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, and West Side Story (1957) by Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurents, and later, Sweeney Todd (1979), by Stephen Sondheim. The musical was to become the most American of theatrical genres; immense productions began to dominate the large theaters in New York by the 1950s and continue to do so.

Theatre in the Late Twentieth Century

The Civil Rights Movement, the war in Vietnam, and the other upheavals of the 1960s provided a rich time for theater. Playwrights including Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) championed the Black Arts Movement with such in-your-face plays as Dutchman (1964), in which a white woman stabs a black man on a subway. David Rabe wrote about Vietnam in Stick and Bones (1971). The 1960s also saw the first of many plays dealing openly with homosexuality. The Boys in the Band premiered in 1968. Later plays to deal with the subject included Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart (1985) and Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize–winning two-part epic, Angels in America (1991,1993). The 1960s also ushered in the work of Neil Simon, probably the most popular writer of comedies in the late twentieth century.

Among other important playwrights of the last part of the century, California born and raised Sam Shepard writes plays about those who, like himself, rejected the mores of polite society; Christopher Durang lampoons the Catholic church that he was raised in; and Marsha Norman writes of a woman so disconnected she is planning suicide ('night Mother, 1982). Performance artists such as Karen Findley, whose work dealt with her own sexuality, Anna Deavere Smith, who explores social issues such as Black-Jewish relationships, and performer/musician Laurie Anderson rose to prominence in the 1980s.

Many of these performances were produced Off Broadway, including the New York Shakespeare Festival, founded in 1954 by Joseph Papp for the purpose of mounting Shakespeare productions in Central Park that were free and open to the public each summer. When Papp died in 1991, the innovative African American director George C. Wolfe became director of the festival. Papp also produced the surprise hit hippie musical of 1967, Hair, at his not-for-profit Public Theater. Hair was then moved to Broadway and the profits used for other, less commercial productions.

BROADWAY is still dominated by musicals and revivals of musicals, and it has seen a tremendous decline since the 1980s, largely because of escalating costs in mounting a production. In the 1950s, a grand musical such as My Fair Lady might have cost half a million dollars to produce, and tickets were less than ten dollars each. By the end of the twentieth century, costs soared so that a musical such as The Lion King (1997) could cost $15 million to produce and a ticket could cost up to $100.

Broadway budgets and ticket prices have long provided much of the momentum for Off Broadway and later for even smaller—less than 100-seat—houses called Off Off Broadway. Greenwich Village's Caffe Cino, founded in 1958 by Joe Cino, is generally thought to be the birthplace of Off Off Broadway, but Off Off Broadway's most enduring and important producer is Ellen Stewart of Café La Mama, which was founded in 1962, and renamed the La Mama Experimental Theater Club. Stewart is known for giving fresh voices a place in her theater, not because she likes the script—she often does not read them in advance—but rather because she has a good feeling about the person bringing an idea for a production to her. Off and Off Off Broadway venues, in addition to many regional theaters including Steppenwolf in Chicago, Magic Theater in San Francisco, and repertory companies including Yale Repertory Theater, American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, Missouri Repertory Theater, and Chicago's Goodman Theater, are thought by many to be the most exciting places to view theater in the twenty-first century.

THEATER

Early American Theater

Theater in the Early United States

Theater of the Gilded Age

Theatre in the Early Twentieth Century

Theatre in the Late Twentieth Century

BIBLIOGRAPHY