Drama: Regarding Broadway

DRAMA: REGARDING BROADWAY

"The Great White Way."

By 1900 most of the signs on Broadway had gone electric, and New York City's famous theater district soon became known as "The Great White Way." By 1900 it was the mecca of the American theatrical world: the rest of the country was referred to by people in show business as "the Road." Technically, the New York City theater was as brilliant as its new marquees; artistically, it had not emerged from the nineteenth century's genteel shadow.

Do Not Disturb

Sentimental melodrama passed for legitimate theater. Although they were lavishly produced for maximum appeal, Broadway dramas tended to be thin on plot, weak on character, and heavy on manipulated emotion. The New York City audience in the 1900s was middle class and conservative. Theatergoers who could afford the everescalating ticket prices were stubbornly averse to "artiness" and insisted that their expectations regarding decorum be met. They wanted to be driven to tears by the plight of a damsel in distress; they did not wish to be disturbed by plots based on real-world problems. They counted on the presence of a bona fide Broadway star in every production as well as the absence of vulgar language or risqué situations. A play could never cause offense to genteel sensibilities nor suggest that crime paid in any way. It is no wonder that musicals and melodramas were the prime boxoffice draws of the decade. An occasional London import, such as a Bernard Shaw satire or a J. M. Barrie fantasy, played to appreciative crowds, and a talented group of actors from the Irish National Theatre company was well received on its U.S. tour of 1908, but most popular Broadway drama ran to historical costume pieces, action-adventure Westerns, religious plays, and conventional love stories.

The Syndicate

Commercial theatrical producers were all too happy to accommodate audience demand for spectacle over substance. For them "show business" was no different from any other business. By 1900 Broadway financial backing was almost entirely centralized in a business trust known as the Theatrical Syndicate, headed by entrepreneur Charles Frohman and his fellow theater owners Marc Klaw and Abraham Erlanger. The syndicate would control American theater for the next decade and a half until internal disagreements over money, questionable legal practices, and business rivalry by the Shubert brothers and others weakened its power.

Monopoly

Frohman and his business partners had taken virtual control of Broadway as well as "the road" by offering surefire boxoffice attractions to theater owners and managers, who in return pledged to book plays and hire artists exclusively through syndicate contracts. Owners who rejected syndicate advances were left to book second- and third-rate shows; managers who failed to sign exclusively with Frohman and his associates were unable to use syndicate-controlled theaters; actors who rebelled were blacklisted. The syndicate also promoted the star system, which inhibited the development of accomplished drama. Playwrights were commissioned to write vehicles that showcased a certain star's particular abilities, and in doing so subjugated their own talents to the pressure of boxoffice success. The syndicate was at the height of its power from 1900 to 1909; during the decade it collected 5 to 10 percent of each member theater's gross income and dictated terms to ten thousand members of the theatrical profession. Syndicate-owned plays enjoyed long runs and lucrative road tours, and the syndicate made many actors and playwrights wealthy. Many more were callously exploited by the system and felt a justified resentment toward the monopoly imposed on their art.

Opposition

The syndicate had its enemies, and among them were some of America's best actors and actresses. Minnie Maddern Fiske, a leading lady of the stage and an advocate of realism in acting and playwriting, became an independent producer. She and her husband, Harrison Grey Fiske, brought Henrik Ibsen's modern dramas to the Broadway stage. Arnold Daly (1875-1927) helped establish Bernard Shaw's reputation in the United States by mounting repertory productions of Shaw's work between 1903 and 1905. The talented James O'Neill, father of dramatist Eugene O'Neill, also opposed the monopoly. Relegated to minor theaters, James O'Neill supported his family and made a lifelong career by playing the lead in The Count of Monte Cristo. The most effective single response to Frohman and his business partners came from David Belasco (1853-1931), who became the most popular producer-playwright in America during the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1902 Belasco acquired his own theater; he refused to sign with the syndicate, offering high-quality playbills and star players without syndicate backing. The legal battles that ensued resulted in syndicate acceptance of Belasco's terms and signaled the first weakening of the syndicate's grip on show business.

The Shuberts

When the syndicate refused to book Sam and Lee Shubert's productions in 1905 as a punishment for noncompliance with its terms, the brothers decided to branch out on their own. The two men were already successful theatrical producers: since coming to New York City from the "minor leagues" of show business in 1900, they had acquired several theaters and backed many boxoffice successes despite syndicate control. Now the Shuberts began to mount a massive challenge to Frohman and his associates. They formed an alliance with Belasco, purchased theaters in Philadelphia, and established a New York City-Pittsburgh circuit for their attractions. They gave small theater owners more playbill choices, offered theater managers better terms, and courted the goodwill of other producers. The rivalry was welcomed by those who were feeling the syndicate's artistic and financial muscle, and many producers broke away from the syndicate to shake hands over Shubert contracts instead. In 1905 after Sam Shubert's death in a train wreck while en route to acquire theater property in Pittsburgh, Jacob Shubert joined Lee in the show-business enterprise. Although in later years the Shubert system became nearly as dictatorial as the syndicate, in the early 1900s the brothers' encroachment on syndicate territory was seen as a positive victory for the theatrical profession against a business conglomerate.

Dramatists. Mass appeal was the mode of the day, but a few American dramatists, whether they worked with commercial producers or not, managed to further the art of drama while they pleased the public. Although these men and women are not remembered as great writers, they were creative and skillful practitioners. Many addressed contemporary issues and treated characters and plots realistically; others brought about a revival of interest in poetic drama with their literate verse plays. Rachel Crothers (1878-1958), whose long career was just beginning in the early 1900s, took a feminist point of view in The Three of Us (1906) and A Man's World ' (1909). Clyde Fitch (1865-1909) was a prolific writer whose finest plays presented realistic human problems through concise characterizations and intense dramatic situations. The Climbers (1901), The Girl With Green Eyes (1902), and The City (1909) are among Fitch's best. William Vaughn Moody (1869-1910), a poet and university professor, wrote poetic dramas with religious themes but is remembered primarily for two prose plays, The Great Divide (1906), often called the first modern American drama, and The Faith Healer (1909). Moody's student, Josephine Preston Peabody Marks (1874-1922) was another significant poet-dramatist, as was Percy MacKaye (1875-1956). Edward Sheldon (1886-1946) and Eugene Walter (1874-1941) wrote moving character studies; Sheldon's Salvation Nell (1908) and Walter's The Easiest Way (1909) are both about women who struggle to extract themselves from poverty and abuse. Charles Klein (1867-1915) was an immensely popular playwright whose 1905 hit, The Lion and the Mouse, ran for an unprecedented two years on Broadway. Klein's portrayal of monopolistic money interests was inspired by journalist Ida M. Tarbell's exposé of the Standard Oil trust, and the play's main character closely resembled oil baron John D. Rockefeller. The prevailing tendency toward melodrama kept these writers from exploring fully the possibilities of character development and motivation-based action, but through their efforts a tentative modernity, at least, had reached the American stage.

CLYDE FITCH: MILLIONAIRE
PLAYWRIGHT

In 190 2 Billboard, the theatrical trades paper, published the following on Clyde Fitch, America's premier playwright:

RESUME

Of the Career of Clyde Fitch, the Playwright

Clyde Fitch, the noted playwright, who has hurried to Berne, Switzerland, for treatment by a noted specialist on appendicitis, in hopes of avoiding an operation, has already accomplished the work of a lifetime, though he has not yet reached the turning post in years. Mr. Fitch's career has been a strenuous one, his rapidity as a playwright having elicited much comment.… His literary ability was in no way hereditary, his father having been an army officer who was greatly prejudiced against his son's ambition.… Finally, he brought about a compromise between himself and his father, in which it was agreed that if after three years he was not supporting himself with the pen, he should then put aside his ambition and become an architect. The end of the third year approached, and the proceeds from his literary work had failed to materialize. About this time it chanced that he met a friend, who incidentally mentioned that Richard Mansfield was in need of a play.… Fitch immediately called upon the actor, and "Beau Brumme" was the result of the conference. Its immediate success assured the sale of future plays, which have been dashed off at the average of two a year ever since.

Clyde Fitch was America's first millionaire playwright, but the judgment of critics is that he bartered his talent to the Syndicate, which employed him; he was, nevertheless, a skillful practitioner with an ear for realistic dialogue and an eye for detailed stage effects. Fitch died in 1909 of the appendicitis he hoped to avoid.

Source:

Joseph Csida and June Bundy Csida, American Entertainment: A Unique History of Show Business (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1978), p. 123.

Social Comedy and Farce

Comedy, more often than not, comments on society's faults and foibles. The comedie playwrights of the 1900s were showered with excellent material. William Clyde Fitch earned an international reputation with his comedies of manners and his farces, many of which satirized the American art of social climbing. Plays such as Langdon Mitchell's The New York Idea (1907) took aim at marriage and divorce. The erst-while hero of Winchell Smith and Byron Ongley's Brewsters Millions (1906) must spend a million dollars in order to inherit millions more; The Fortune Hunter (1909) by Smith and Ongley concerns marrying for money. Inherited wealth created the pivotal situations in Augustus Thomas's farcical On the Quiet (1901), which was based on the true story of a young man who secretly married against his family's wishes. Master farceur George Ade spoofed American imperialism in The Sultan of Sulu (1902), small-town politics in The County Chairman (1903), the importance of college football in The College Widow (1904), the value of a college education itself in Just Out of College (1905), and the value of success in Artie (1907). The satirists of the decade were popular because their plays were genial and amusing; they avoided sharp-edged social commentary, and their good-natured jibes at society brought them success at the box office.

Musicals and Operettas

By far the most popular type of Broadway entertainment from 1900 to 1909 was the musical. Although the form did not reach its artistic zenith until the 1940s, musicals, despite their slim plots, often featured lively and engaging tunes, spectacular scenery, pretty girls, and popular comedians. George M. Cohan, Florenz Ziegfeld, Gus and Max Rogers (billed as "The Rogers Brothers"), and the comedy team of Joe Weber and Lew Fields were among those who wrote, produced, and acted in musical shows. Some musicals were based on well-known stories or popular novels: Chris and the Wonderful Lamp (1900) and The Tattooed Man (1907) were Arabian Nights tales retold; The Sleeping Beauty and the Beast (1901) was a hybrid fairy tale from London reworked for the American stage; and The Wizard of Oz (1903) was the first of several musical adaptations of L. Frank Baum's best-selling novel of 1900. Victor Herbert's operettas are still remembered and performed: Babes in Toyland (1903), Mlle. Modiste (1905), and The Red Mill (1906) were some of his most prominent stage successes. Gustav Luder was another leading composer of operettas; with Henry Savage and Frank Pixley he wrote The Prince of Pilsen (1902), known for the rousing "Heidelberg Stein Song." Most Broadway musicals of the decade, however, were uninspired revues, no-table only for their stars—Anna Held, Trixie Friganza, Marie Dressier, Lillian Russell, and Eva Tanguay all became celebrities in the early 1900s—or for the songs they made famous. "Shine On Harvest Moon" and "In the Good Old Summertime," both introduced in musicals of the decade, are still American favorites.

DRAMA IN THE UNIVERSITIES

Universities and colleges were slow to recognize the teaching of dramatic literature and playwriting as fields of study, but in 1904 Professor George Pierce Baker (1866-1935) began a playwriting class at Radcliffe College. The next year it was offered at Harvard (all-female Radcliffe's brother-school) as "English 47: The Forms of the Drama." Baker's class attracted Eugene O'Neill and Edward Sheldon, among others, before Baker, unable to convince Harvard of the viability of a drama program, moved to New Haven and helped establish the Yale School of Drama. One of Baker's students, Frederick Koch, moved to the University of North Dakota in 1905 to teach theater, and the next year an acting course was taught at the University of Wisconsin. Baylor University in Texas had a technical production course as early as 1901; in fact, the "little theater" movement was to a large degree sponsored by America's colleges and universities; higher education provided virtually the only subsidized theater in the nation—meaning that college and university playhouses were among the few theaters not dependent on boxoffice receipts for success and could thus provide testing grounds for experimental practices.

African Americans on the Stage

It is not surprising that The Great White Way was "white" in more ways than one in the early 1900s. Although white actors frequently put on blackface to play comedic parts, African American performers were not often seen. One musical, The Southerners (1904), caused great audience consternation when a black chorus was featured with a white cast. Yet some black actors were able to break through Broadway's wall of prejudice and become headliners. Among them were Bert Williams and his partner George Walker. In Dahomey (1903) was the first full-length Broadway musical written and performed by African Americans; Williams and Walker starred as two swindlers who stir up trouble in the African colony of Dahomey (now Benin). The pair took their modest Broadway hit to London, where it enjoyed a seven-month run, and they returned to Broadway with Abyssinia (1906) and Bandanaland (1908), a solid triumph with a show-stopping cakewalk number. Composer Will Marion Cook and poet Paul Laurence Dunbar collaborated with Williams and Walker. Walker's wife, Ada Overton Walker, not only choreographed and acted, but when her husband became ill, she dressed as his character and took his place on the stage. Other African Americans who achieved Broadway success included songwriter-performers Bob Cole and the sibling team of J. Rosamond and James Weldon Johnson. Their first musical was The ShooFly Regiment (1907), a critically acclaimed depiction of bravery during the Spanish-American War. The next year the trio presented Red Moon, which concerned the betrothal of a beautiful maiden (Abbie Mitchell) of mixed Indian and African parentage. White playwright Edward Sheldon shocked audiences in 1909 with The Nigger, a melodrama about a bigoted southern governor who discovers an African American ancestor.

Other Minorities

Asians and Hispanics were virtually nonexistent on the Broadway stage early in the century, although Native Americans were sometimes depicted sympathetically. Edwin Milton Royle's Squaw Man (1905) portrayed a doomed romance between an Indian woman and an English soldier. Also in 1905 William C. DeMille treated the same theme in Strong Heart, and in 1906 William A. Brady's The Redskin featured ten Sioux actors. The plots of David Belasco's drama The Auctioneer (1901) and the musical Sally in Our Alley (1902), among others, involved Jewish characters. Best remembered for the phrase it introduced into American speech is Englishman Israel Zangwill's comedy-drama of Jewish life, The Melting Pot (1909). But in the first decade of the twentieth century, when ethnic and racial stereotyping was common, most minority groups were depicted on-stage with something less than dignity. What was worse, genuine artistic talent often went to waste because of exclusionary hiring practices, despite inroads to equality made by courageous actors, musicians, and writers.

Actors and Actresses

Going to the theater in the early 1900s was a major social event that required formal attire, and the thrill of partaking in the life of the theater, even as a spectator, was enhanced by the promise of seeing a renowned performer in a starring role. The company of leading actresses and actors was sought by socialites; the public clamored to see their favorites in choice parts; and theatrical celebrities could count on loyal audiences late into their careers. Some new stars of the decade came from theatrical royalty: twenty-year-old Ethel Barrymore shot to stardom in 1901 with Fitch's light comedy Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines. But Barrymore's father, Maurice, and her mother, Georgianna Drew, were noted thespians of the previous generation; her brother Lionel had distinguished himself in the 1890s; and John, her younger sibling, would make his stage debut in 1903. Maude Adams boosted her celebrity when she played Peter Pan in 1905; the diminutive actress charmed audiences but lived a quiet personal life. Other well-known actors and actresses in a decade of notable talent were Jacob P. Adler, who played a Yiddish-speaking Shylock in The Merchant of Venice in 1903; Blanche Bates and Amelia Bingham, who starred in some of the most extravagantly produced plays of the decade; Shakespearean performers Mrs. Leslie Carter, Ada Rehan, and Otis Skinner; and Joseph Jefferson, whose legendary career playing the title character in Rip Van Winkle was marked by his naturalistic characterization.

Stage Realism

Acting had not achieved the realism that is now standard on stage and screen, and a presentday theatergoer would be amused by the grandiose gestures, unnatural enunciation, and unabashed exploitation of the actor's "moment" or "point"—a line, phrase, or movement performed specifically to garner thunderous applause—a method employed by many Broadway stars. But realistic set design, for which Belasco in particular was famous, was the phenomenon of the era. The previous century's reliance on painted backdrops gave way to attempts at truth to life. Onstage waterfalls, actual table settings and menu items from a famous Manhattan restaurant, the wallpaper and furnishings from a run-down Bowery boardinghouse, effectively accurate special effects of blizzards and tornadoes, and fourteen-minute sunset-to-sunrise sequences were all among the marvels of the decade's realistic staging.

Premodern

As with so many other businesses in the flush times of the early 1900s, show business was booming. The syndicate, which in every way resembled a trust and whose economic malpractices were evident, was making money like the well-oiled machine it was. Plays were popular entertainment, and American drama was both sumptuous and surprising. Broadway hits enjoyed long runs and lucrative road tours. But the commercial motive on which American theater was being run meant providing popular entertainment rather than relevant theater and sacrificing dramatic experimentation to boxoffice profit. American drama was still premodern in the first decade of the century and would not be recognized as a significant artistic force until 1915, when the Provincetown Players and others would inspire the movement away from Broadway and toward the "little" theaters where the art of American drama would experience its first real unfolding.

Dramatic Criticism

A spirit of reform was affecting the country at large in the first years of the 1900s, and American theater was in many ways reforming itself. Realistic drama, naturalistic acting techniques, and advances in scene design and theater architecture were taking hold, while independent producers, as well as ethnic and university theaters, were beginning to contribute to the genesis of modern drama. The "new" discipline of dramatic criticism also did much to stimulate thinking on the state of drama as literature. Although the first publications devoted solely to the theater had appeared in the 1870s, the debut of Theatre Magazine in 1900 marked a significant maturation of the genre. Critics such as William Dean Howells, Brander Matthews, Walter Pritchard Eaton, and James Gibbons Huneker were some of the first to set high standards for contemporary American drama in their essays and retrospectives. Press reviewers, among them William Winter and John Corbin, were making serious observations about quality, and the practice of "puffing" (praising) certain plays for pay declined. As criticism grew in stature and authority, American theater began to come of age as an expression of America's cultural vitality.

Sources:

Alfred L. Bernheim and Sarah Harding. The Business of the Theatre: An Economic History of the American Theatre, 1750-1932. (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1932);

Oscar G. Brockett and Robert R. Findlay, Century of Innovation: A History of European and American Theatre and Drama since 1870 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1984);

Joseph Csida and June Bundy Csida, American Entertainment: A Unique History of Show Business (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1978);

Paul Kuritz, The Making of Theatre History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1988);

Glenn Loney, 20th Century Theatre, volume 1 (New York: Facts On File, 1983);

Walter Meserve, An Outline History of American Drama (New York: Feedback Theatre Books & Prospero Press, 1994).