Historical Dictionary of American Theater: Modernism (Historical Dictionaries of Literature and the Arts)

HISTORICAL DICTIONARY OF

AMERICAN THEATER MODERNISM

JAMES FISHER and FELICIA HARDISON LONDRÉ

HISTORICAL DICTIONARIES OF LITERATURE AND THE ARTS Jon Woronoff, Series Editor 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

Science Fiction Literature, by Brian Stableford, 2004. Hong Kong Cinema, by Lisa Odham Stokes, 2007. American Radio Soap Operas, by Jim Cox, 2005. Japanese Traditional Theatre, by Samuel L. Leiter, 2006. Fantasy Literature, by Brian Stableford, 2005. Australian and New Zealand Cinema, by Albert Moran and Errol Vieth, 2006. African-American Television, by Kathleen Fearn-Banks, 2006. Lesbian Literature, by Meredith Miller, 2006. Scandinavian Literature and Theater, by Jan Sjåvik, 2006. British Radio, by Seán Street, 2006. German Theater, by William Grange, 2006. African American Cinema, by S. Torriano Berry and Venise Berry, 2006. Sacred Music, by Joseph P. Swain, 2006. Russian Theater, by Laurence Senelick, 2007. French Cinema, by Dayna Oscherwitz and MaryEllen Higgins, 2007. Postmodernist Literature and Theater, by Fran Mason, 2007. Irish Cinema, by Roderick Flynn and Pat Brereton, 2007. Australian Radio and Television, by Albert Moran and Chris Keating, 2007. Polish Cinema, by Marek Haltof, 2007. Old Time Radio, by Robert C. Reinehr and Jon D. Swartz, 2008. Renaissance Art, by Lilian H. Zirpolo, 2008. Broadway Musical, by William A. Everett and Paul R. Laird, 2008. American Theater: Modernism, by James Fisher and Felicia Hardison Londré, 2008.

(ISTORICAL$ICTIONARYOF !MERICAN4HEATER Modernism

James Fisher Felicia Hardison Londré

Historical Dictionaries of Literature and the Arts, No. 23

The Scarecrow Press, Inc. Lanham, Maryland • Toronto • Plymouth, UK 2008

SCARECROW PRESS, INC. Published in the United States of America by Scarecrow Press, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.scarecrowpress.com Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2008 by James Fisher and Felicia Hardison Londré All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fisher, James, 1950– Historical dictionary of American theater : modernism / James Fisher, Felicia Hardison Londré. p. cm. — (Historical dictionaries of literature and the arts ; no. 23) “1880 to 1930”—Introd. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-13: 978-0-8108-5533-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8108-5533-X (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Theater—United States—History—20th century—Dictionaries. 2. Theater— United States—History—19th century—Dictionaries. 3. American drama—20th century—Dictionaries. 4. American drama—19th century—Dictionaries. I. Londré, Felicia Hardison, 1941– II. Title. PN2266.3.F57 2008 792’.097303—dc22

2007025843

∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America.

#ONTENTS

Editor’s Foreword

Jon Woronoff

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Reader’s Note

xi

List of Acronyms and Abbreviations

xiii

Chronology

xv

Introduction

xxxi

THE DICTIONARY

1

Bibliography

535

About the Authors

569

v

%DITORS&OREWORD

The age of modernism in American theatre, running from roughly 1880 to 1930, was a transitional period, or more concretely, a period of maturation in every sense. There were more and more theatres, not only in major cities, but also lesser ones, and even small towns had a location for such activities. There were still visiting companies from Europe, and European actors appealed to the public, but there were more and more American companies and actors, and this meant not only major ones but touring companies on the road and, increasingly, amateur groups. There were theatrical clubs and drama schools, and the public was kept informed by more and better critics. All that was lacking were American plays and playwrights, but even that gap was gradually filled. However, maturation does not necessarily mean maturity, the range of topics dealt with was limited, and some topics were off-limits such that they were blocked by informal or official censorship. The portrayal of minorities and women was more negative or condescending than not, and political or social commentary was usually meek if at all present. Yet, no matter how you look at it, this was a very exciting period in theatrical terms, and a lot happened. So much, indeed, that even this substantial volume cannot include everything, although it does offer an exceptionally broad and deep coverage. The chronology already indicates what was going on, and when, so that this process of maturation can be traced over the years. Next, it is put into context in a more analytical introduction. Then the dictionary section, with an amazing 1,400 entries, takes a closer look at the actors, producers and directors, playwrights, critics, and others who contributed to the maturation process. Other entries describe some of the major theatres or deal with aspects of production and scenography, emerging trends, and themes. This is rounded off with commentaries on the more memorable plays. Big as it is, this book can only go so far and it therefore concludes with a bibliography that can take interested readers even further. vii

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EDITOR’S FOREWORD

This Historical Dictionary of American Theater: Modernism was written by two academics with a keen interest in the period and an accumulated knowledge without which it could hardly have been written: James Fisher and Felicia Hardison Londré. James Fisher is head and professor of theatre at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, following nearly three decades at Wabash College, nearly half of this as department chair. During this time, he has authored several books on American theatre and is busily working on the historical dictionary that will deal with the contemporary period. On top of all this, he has written two plays of his own. Dr. Londré is also a professor of theatre, teaching theatre history at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, for three decades, at present focusing mainly on turn-of-the-century American theatre. Alongside her teaching, and among many other things, she served as dramaturg for Missouri Repertory Theatre and is presently dramaturge for the Nebraska Shakespeare Festival. She, too, has written several books on American and world theatre. This volume draws on their impressive experience and provides interested readers with a solid and often entertaining guide to a crucial period in American theatre. Jon Woronoff Series Editor

!CKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors are grateful to the staff of The Scarecrow Press for their patience and support, with particular thanks to our editor, Jon Woronoff, for his impressive grasp of the big picture as well as his remarkable memory for details. His promptness in responding to our many queries as well as his insightful suggestions on other matters helped us enormously. Felicia Hardison Londré is deeply grateful to her amazingly resourceful and industrious collaborator, Jim Fisher, with whom it has been a joy to work. Indeed, the inception of the project owes much to the friendship that began with our mutual love for the immortal voice of Al Jolson, whose career peaked during the modernist era. Felicia extends her appreciation also to all the valiant artists of the American theatre, past and present, including her colleagues in UMKC Theatre at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She thanks Daniel J. Watermeier for his suggestions on various points. She especially thanks her wonderful, supportive family: Venne-Richard Londré, Tristan and Tilda Londré (and their children Tristan Graham, Henry, Eleanore, Gilbert, and Adeline), and Georgianna Londré and Martin Buchanan. James Fisher would like to express his gratitude to his collaborator, Felicia Hardison Londré, for the privilege of learning from her vast store of knowledge of American theatre history and especially for her warm, generous friendship and encouragement. He would also like to acknowledge the support of his former colleagues in the Wabash College Theatre Department and his new coworkers at UNCG, his 2005 summer research intern, Braden Pemberton, and, above all, his wife, Dana, and their children, Daniel and Anna, for their continual love and support.

ix

2EADERS.OTE

The plan of this volume follows the format established for Scarecrow’s series of Historical Dictionaries of Literature and the Arts. Although we cover only five decades (1880–1930) and focus narrowly on legitimate theatre while leaving aside musical and variety entertainment forms (except as they directly impact the legitimate theatre), the amazing richness of the modernist era necessitated somewhat selective coverage. To list every performer, manager, designer, or critic who made a mark on the theatre during that half century, or every play that ran more than 200 performances on Broadway, might have doubled the length of this volume. The difficult choices between inclusion and exclusion were made with the probable needs of the reader or researcher in mind. We weighed relative influences and resorted informally to a quasi-Googlelike system of giving extra value to names and terms boasting the greatest number of cross-references. Yet we are mindful also that much of the value of a work of this nature lies in the rescue of reputations and concepts that were common currency in their day but are in danger of being lost to posterity. The vastness of our subject may be seen in the length of our bibliography, which is divided into subcategories. Other approaches to the material are offered in the chronology, in the introduction, and in overview entries on some broad topics like actors and actresses, playwrights, comedy, musical theatre, African American theatre, Shakespearean influence, and so on. Those overview entries contain the most important names in that category, and those names are boldfaced to indicate crossreferencing to individual entries. Individual entries cover the noteworthy dramatists, actors, directors, designers, and critics, as well as individual plays, terminology, theatrical publications, companies, producing organizations, unions, technical developments, genres, and other features. Some of the plays merit plot summary in their individual entries. Other plays are notable more for xi

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READER’S NOTE

the artists involved or for the unusual nature of the material or the audience response. In any case, rather than adhere to a rigid formula, we have endeavored to offer what is likely to be most useful in understanding the importance of the work within the context of theatre history and of the era. In many cases, the influence or accomplishment of an individual extends beyond 1930, the year we see as a useful demarcation between modernist and contemporary theatre. Such entries in this volume stress an entrant’s activity before 1930 but also include a brief summation of the direction of later work. Those entrants will also be found in The Historical Dictionary of the American Theater: Contemporary, 1930 to the Present, where the emphasis will be on their work since 1930. Names, titles, terms, and so on, included in the contemporary volume will be noted with an asterisk (e.g., Katharine Cornell*), while cross-references of names, titles, terms, and so on within this volume will be indicated by bold type. Those cross-references that will be in both volumes will appear in small caps (e.g., +ATHARINE #ORNELL  Individual entries that will appear in both volumes will be represented by a dagger (e.g., CORNELL, KATHARINE. †).

!CRONYMSAND!BBREVIATIONS

AAAA AADA AEA AFA AFL ALA ALT ART ASA ASSP CRT DG FTP IATSE IWW K&E MAT NAACP NATSE NTC PMA RADA SADC SRO TOBA USAA

Associated Actors and Artistes of America American Academy of Dramatic Arts Actors’ Equity Association Actors’ Fund of America Actors’ Fidelity League Authors’ League of America American Laboratory Theatre American Repertory Theatre Actors’ Society of America American Society of Scenic Painters Civic Repertory Theatre The Dramatists Guild Federal Theatre Project International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees International Workers of the World Klaw & Erlanger Moscow Art Theatre National Association for the Advancement of Colored People National Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees National Theatre Conference Producing Managers’ Association Royal Academy of Dramatic Art Society of American Dramatists and Composers Standing Room Only Theatre Owners Booking Association (a.k.a. Tough On Black Actors) United Scenic Artists of America

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#HRONOLOGY

1860–1880 During this period, theatrical activity spreads across the United States and territories, while New York City maintains its wellestablished dominance as the center of the American entertainment industry. The Civil War puts a damper on much activity, and yet theatre continues to be available in cities like St. Louis, where the colorful manager Benedict De Bar soldiers on for the arts. Rivers are the main highways into the interior of America until the 1870s. That decade marks the transition from trouping by horse-drawn wagon and riverboat to train travel. With the rapid expansion of railroads in the 1880s, touring companies come into their glory days, quickly replacing the old resident stock companies. 1861 6 June: Adah Isaacs Menken plays the title role, a male character, in an old melodrama, Mazeppa, for the first time in Albany, New York. In the famous climactic scene, wearing flesh-colored tights, she creates the illusion of nudity, while strapped to the back of a horse sent galloping up a ramp decked in canvas painted to represent a mountain. Menken tours the show for five years and inspires other equestrian actresses to take the role. 1864 26 November: Edwin Booth opens his record 100-performance run in the title role of Hamlet at the Winter Garden in New York. 1865 14 April: Actor John Wilkes Booth assassinates President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., during a performance of the comedy Our American Cousin by Laura Keene’s company. His brother Edwin Booth leaves the stage for one year. Tony Pastor opens his Opera House, where he initiates the trend toward making variety entertainment clean enough for women. Joseph Jefferson III first performs the title role in Dion Boucicault’s adaptation of Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle in London. xv

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1866 The Thalian Dramatic Association, one of the first academic theatre groups, is established at Brown University. 3 September: Joseph Jefferson first performs the role of Rip Van Winkle in the United States at New York’s Olympic Theatre; it will remain a staple of his long career. 12 September: The Black Crook, a fantasy-melodrama with spectacular effects and ballet sequences, opens to acclaim at Niblo’s Garden, and is later signaled as a milestone in the development of American musical theatre. 1869 Augustin Daly opens his Fifth Avenue Theatre, home to his excellent ensemble in polished productions for a decade. 1872 12 December: Edwin Forrest, the leading American romantic actor, dies in Philadelphia. 1875 14 December: Augustin Daly’s popular drama Pique opens with Fanny Davenport as Mabel Renfrew surrounded by a strong cast featuring John Drew, John Brougham, James Lewis, and Maurice Barrymore. 1877 McKee Rankin begins touring Joaquin Miller’s The Danites. 22 December: Polish actress Helena Modjeska makes her Englishspeaking debut at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in Eugène Scribe’s Adrienne Lecouvreur. 1879 Steele MacKaye opens his state-of-the-art Madison Square Theatre, with an elevator stage, on West 24th Street. David Belasco collaborates with James A. Herne to write Hearts of Oak, a popular success. Harrison Grey Fiske founds the New York Dramatic Mirror, an important trade newspaper. Augustin Daly opens Daly’s Theatre at 1221 Broadway. August–December: The Mulligan Guards’ Chowder by Edward Harrigan opens in August at the Theatre Comique, followed in December by The Mulligan Guards’ Christmas, launching the popular Mulligan Guard series of plays with music and ethnic characters, set in New York’s Lower East Side, an American alternative to Gilbert and Sullivan and other European operettas. 1880 Uncle Tom’s Cabin is performed with an integrated cast for the first time at the Gaiety Theatre (Boston). George H. Jessop’s Sam’l of Posen; or, The Commercial Drummer begins its long life as a stock and touring vehicle. Steele MacKaye presents his own play, Hazel Kirke, starring Effie Ellsler, at Madison Square Theatre. November 8: Sarah

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Bernhardt makes her American debut at Booth’s Theatre on the first of her nine American tours. Tony Pastor introduces Lillian Russell as a star attraction. 1881 October: Tony Pastor opens his new Fourteenth Street Theatre to present family-oriented variety (already beginning to be called vaudeville). P. T. Barnum merges his circus with that of James A. Bailey to create “The Greatest Show on Earth.” William Gillette stars in his own slight comedy The Professor, an auspicious beginning to his career as a prominent actor and dramatist. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex rehearses for six months and is performed in Greek at Harvard University. 1882 Boris Thomashefsky persuades a Lower East Side saloon owner to underwrite a Yiddish Theatre production of Avrom Goldfaden’s Koldunye. The Actors’ Fund of America is founded as a charitable organization to aid ill and indigent actors. 1883 12 February: James O’Neill acts the role of Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte Cristo for the first time at Booth’s Theatre in New York; he plays the role more than 4,000 times (6,000 in some sources) during four decades. 6 August: The most popular of Harrigan and Hart’s Mulligan Guard plays, The Mulligan Guard’s Ball, opens. William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West Show, managed by Nate Salsbury, is established and operates successfully until 1902, touring the United States and Europe. October: British actor Henry Irving begins the first of his six American tours; Ellen Terry makes her American debut as a member of his company. 1884 The Lyceum Theatre School of Acting (later better known as the American Academy of Dramatic Arts), the first conservatory of actor training in the United States, is founded by Franklin Haven Sargent in New York City. 1885 27 April: Charles H. Hoyt’s farce with music, A Parlor Match, opens at New York’s Grand Opera House, with attention going not to the author but to the comedy team of Evans and Hoey. Sharpshooter Annie Oakley and her husband, Frank Butler, join William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West Show. 1886 The Theatre, a publication of stage news, makes its first appearance. 16 August: William Gillette stars in the opening of his own Civil War melodrama, Held by the Enemy, at Madison Square Theatre.

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1887 Edwin Booth and Lawrence Barrett begin their first season of “joint star” tours, with a repertoire of Shakespearean plays. Denman Thompson first performs Josh Whitcomb in the full-length version of his play (coauthored with George W. Ryer) The Old Homestead, a rural comedy that remains the staple of his career until 1910. David Belasco collaborates with Henry C. DeMille on The Wife, the first of several successful plays they write together. 26 September: Bronson Howard’s inside look at Wall Street speculation, The Henrietta, opens at the Union Square Theatre. 20 October: Julia Marlowe makes her New York debut as Parthenia in Ingomar in a matinee performance at the Bijou. 1888 The Players club in New York’s Gramercy Park, underwritten by Edwin Booth, is incorporated. Augustin Daly’s company tours Shakespeare plays to England. 16 October: Eugene O’Neill, son of actor James O’Neill and future playwright, is born in a hotel on what is now Times Square. 3 December: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy opens at the Broadway Theatre. 1889 David Belasco and Henry C. DeMille continue their successful coauthorship with The Charity Ball. 6 March: Charles H. Hoyt’s rural farce A Midnight Bell opens at the Bijou and tours for several seasons. 9 September: Bronson Howard’s Shenandoah, produced by Charles Frohman, opens at the Star Theatre. 21 October: Having triumphed in London as Richard III, Richard Mansfield opens Shakespeare’s Richard III at Palmer’s Theatre, initiating a new phase in his career. 1890 James A. Herne’s Margaret Fleming, the first American play patterned on the realistic social problem dramas of Henrik Ibsen, is completed, but its shocking subject matter prevents public performances. January: Richard Mansfield presents Beatrice Cameron in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in New York; the production elicits a mixed critical response: an anti-Ibsen movement led by critic William Winter versus enthusiasts for the new realism. November: Charles H. Hoyt’s comedy A Texas Steer debuts. Clyde Fitch begins his prolific 20-year playwriting career with Beau Brummel, a vehicle for Richard Mansfield. Joseph Jefferson III publishes his autobiography, a chronicle of his long career and of the 19th-century American stage. 1891 A young George M. Cohan plays the title role in the farce Peck’s Bad Boy as part of The Four Cohans (with his parents and sister). The first international copyrights convention is held, establishing some

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protections for dramatists. The male-only American Dramatists Club is founded. 1 April: Augustus Thomas’s Alabama opens at Madison Square Theatre. 4 April: Edwin Booth performs Hamlet at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and announces his retirement from the stage; it is his final performance before his death in 1893. 9 November: Charles Hoyt’s A Trip to Chinatown opens at Madison Square Theatre. 9 December: James A. Herne’s Margaret Fleming opens at Palmer’s. Thomas A. Edison patents the kinetoscope, a cinematic peep show that paves the way to motion pictures. 1892 James A. Herne’s Shore Acres premieres in Chicago. 17 February: Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler opens at the Amberg Theatre in New York. 10 November: With the opening of Mavourneen, Chauncey Olcott establishes himself as the leading Irish tenor–comedian in show business. 1893 The Orpheum circuit is founded in San Francisco by Morris Meyerfield and Gustav Walter, and will control vaudeville west of the Mississippi for many years. Thomas A. Edison’s Black Maria motion picture studio is constructed for the manufacture of films for public consumption. African American writer-activist Henrietta Vinton Davis stages William Edgar Easton’s Dessalines in Chicago. 23 January: Eleonora Duse makes her American debut in The Lady of the Camelias at the Fifth Avenue Theatre; it is the first of her four American tours. 25 January: Charles Frohman opens his Empire Theatre at 40th and Broadway with The Girl I Left Behind Me by Franklin Fyles and David Belasco. 25 March: Martha Morton’s Brother John opens, starring William H. Crane. 7 June: Edwin Booth dies. 4 September: Nat C. Goodwin stars in Augustus Thomas’s In Mizzoura, which opens at the Fifth Avenue Theatre. 23 October: Charles T. Dazey’s In Old Kentucky opens at New York’s Academy of Music and will long remain popular on the road. 1894 Frederick F. Proctor, “dean of vaudeville,” establishes Proctor’s Pleasure Palace in New York City, and a circuit of 25 vaudeville theatres nationally. Oscar Hammerstein (I) opens his Victoria Theatre, which offers legitimate theatre until 1904, when he switches to vaudeville attractions. 15 February: Minnie Maddern Fiske plays Nora in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House as a matinee benefit performance for a hospital maternity department; its success prompts her return to professional acting and the beginning of general acceptance of Ibsen’s realism.

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1895 May Irwin, formerly a vaudevillian, wins stardom in The Widow Jones shortly before she appears in a motion picture short, The Kiss, which shocks audiences with the first “close-up” shot of a kiss: Irwin kissing John C. Rice. May: The Actors’ Society of America is founded to protect those in the acting profession. 22 October: Mrs. Leslie Carter, a socialite famous for a scandalous divorce trial, stars for David Belasco in The Heart of Maryland, opening at Herald Square Theatre. 1896 Producers Marc Klaw, Abraham Erlanger, Al Hayman, Fred “Sam” Nirdlinger, J. Fred Zimmerman, and Charles Frohman establish The Theatrical Syndicate (a.k.a. The Theatrical Trust) with the goal of dominating theatre management in the United States. Koster & Bial’s Music Hall, the most prestigious vaudeville house of the day, is the first to show a motion picture on its bill. European sensation Anna Held is brought to New York by Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. and performs in a revival of Charles H. Hoyt’s A Parlor Match. Julius Cahn’s Official Theatrical Guide, an invaluable source for stage professionals, begins publication. 5 October: William Gillette stars in his own Civil War melodrama, Secret Service, opening at the Garrick Theatre. 1897 2 March: Minnie Maddern Fiske plays the title role in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, at the Fifth Avenue Theatre. 27 September: Maude Adams attains stardom as Lady Babbie in J. M. Barrie’s The Little Minister, produced by Charles Frohman. 1898 7 February: Lottie Blair Parker’s rural melodrama Way Down East opens at the Manhattan Theatre and will find a long life on tour and in motion picture adaptations. 1899 The Hebrew Actors Union is formed. Henrietta Vinton Davis stages The Negro, a pageant on African American life, and it tours the country. 12 September: Langdon Mitchell’s adaptation of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, titled Becky Sharp, opens at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, with Minnie Maddern Fiske in the title role. 24 October: James A. Herne acts in the opening of Sag Harbor, the last play from his pen. 6 November: William Gillette plays the title role in the opening of Sherlock Holmes at the Garrick Theatre, his own adaptation from Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, and will play the role frequently into the 1930s. 29 November: Ben Teal directs William Young’s stage adaptation of General Lew Wallace’s novel Ben-Hur, a production featuring consider-

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able visual spectacle (including an onstage chariot race), opening at the Broadway Theatre. 1900 Vaudeville artists unionize under the name White Rats. Managers counter with their own organizations: Association of Vaudeville Managers, which soon becomes the Vaudeville Managers Protective Association. The Shubert brothers, Lee, Samuel, and J. J., lease and refurbish the Herald Square Theatre, initiating their 15-year process of breaking the managerial dominance of the Theatrical Syndicate. 5 February: Olga Nethersole stars in Clyde Fitch’s Sapho, opening at Wallack’s Theatre; on 23 February, she and several others are arrested for indecency. 5 March: David Belasco’s Madame Butterfly, coauthored with John Luther Long, opens, produced by Belasco and starring Blanche Bates. 12 November: The musical Florodora, with the famous Florodora sextette’s number “Tell Me, Pretty Maiden,” opens at the Casino. 1901 Forty-one legitimate theatre houses are operating in New York City, as well as seven vaudeville and six burlesque theatres. Theatre Magazine is founded. Minnie Maddern Fiske and her husband, Harrison Grey Fiske, take over management of the Manhattan Theatre in defiance of the Theatrical Syndicate. Jane Addams and Laura Dainty Pelham establish the Hull-House Players at Addams’s settlement house in Chicago. 4 February: Clyde Fitch’s comedy Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines opens with Ethel Barrymore in her acclaimed debut performance. 25 February: George M. Cohan makes his Broadway debut in his own play The Governor’s Son. 20 May: The Shuberts open their Herald Square Theatre with Brixton Burglary. 23 September: David Warfield plays the title role in the opening of David Belasco’s and Charles Klein’s The Auctioneer. 1902 Brander Matthews is appointed Professor of Dramatic Literature at Columbia University, the first such position in American colleges. 3 December: David Belasco and John Luther Long present an Asianthemed mythical drama The Darling of the Gods, starring Blanche Bates and George Arliss. 25 December: Clyde Fitch’s drama The Girl with Green Eyes opens starring Clara Bloodgood. 1903 Edwin S. Porter’s motion picture The Great Train Robbery shows the possibilities of the storytelling motion picture. 25 May: Jacob Adler plays Shylock in Yiddish with English-speaking supporting actors in

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the opening of The Merchant of Venice on Broadway. 12 October: The New Amsterdam Theatre opens on 42nd Street. 13 October: Victor Herbert’s operetta Babes in Toyland opens. 30 December: During a sold-out matinee performance of Mr. Bluebeard, starring Eddie Foy, a fire breaks out in Chicago’s Iroquois Theatre and 602 people are killed. The tragedy prompts renewed attention to safety standards in theatres everywhere, as well as ill will toward the Theatrical Syndicate. 1904 5 January: Owen Wister’s The Virginian, adapted to the stage by Kyle Bellew, opens. April: Longacre Square is renamed Times Square. 3 September: Anne Crawford Flexner’s Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch opens. 6 September: David Warfield opens in the longpopular tearjerker The Music Master by David Belasco and Charles Klein. 7 November: George M. Cohan writes, directs, and stars in the opening of his musical, Little Johnny Jones, featuring the songs “The Yankee Doodle Boy” and “Give My Regards to Broadway.” 1905 Producer Sam Shubert is killed in a train accident. 12 April: The mighty Hippodrome opens at 43rd Street and Sixth Avenue. 31 October: At the behest of Anthony Comstock, secretary for the Society for the Suppression of Vice, police close Arnold Daly’s production of George Bernard Shaw’s controversial drama, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, starring Mary Shaw. 6 November: Maude Adams plays the title role in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. 14 November: Blanche Bates finds her greatest role as the title character in David Belasco’s The Girl of the Golden West, opening at the Belasco Theatre. December: Variety, a publication aimed at theatrical professionals, is founded by Sime Silverman and begins publication. 1906 George Pierce Baker establishes his English 47 course at Harvard University, emphasizing techniques of playwriting. French actress Sarah Bernhardt tours the United States for the seventh time. George M. Cohan has two hits in the same season: George Washington, Jr., starring Cohan, and Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway, starring Fay Templeton and Victor Moore. Rida Johnson Young finds success with Brown of Harvard and will go on to write 26 plays, musicals, and operettas. David Pinski’s Yiddish theatre play, The Eternal Jew, is produced. 4 October: Opening of William Vaughn Moody’s The Great Divide, featuring Margaret Anglin and Henry Miller. 17 October: Playwright Rachel Crothers’s The Three of Us opens at the Madison Square Theatre.

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13 November: Alla Nazimova opens in Hedda Gabler, supported by Henry Miller. 19 November: Langdon Mitchell’s The New York Idea opens. 27 November: David Belasco’s Rose of the Rancho, coauthored by Richard Walton Tully, opens with Frances Starr in the title role. 1907 The Society of Dramatic Authors is founded as an advocacy group for women playwrights by Martha Morton. Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. produces the first edition of his celebrated Follies, a lavish musical revue, with annual editions until 1925. 7 January: Clyde Fitch’s drama The Truth opens for a short run at the Criterion, followed by a tour during which its star, Clara Bloodgood, commits suicide in December. 16 October: A Grand Army Man, starring David Warfield, opens David Belasco’s new theatre at 111 West 44th Street. 21 October: Franz Lehar’s Viennese operetta The Merry Widow opens at the New Amsterdam Theatre. 18 November: The Witching Hour by Augustus Thomas opens. 3 December: William C. deMille’s The Warrens of Virginia opens. 1908 20 April: George M. Cohan stars in the opening of his own The Yankee Prince. 17 November: Edward Sheldon’s Salvation Nell, starring Minnie Maddern Fiske, opens and causes a sensation for its frank subject matter. 29 December: Marion Fairfax’s comedy, The Chaperone, starring Maxine Elliott, inaugurates Maxine Elliott’s Theatre. 1909 Percy MacKaye publishes The Playhouse and the Play, the first of several important discussions of the little theatre movement and a plea for subsidized community theatre in the United States. 19 January: William Vaughn Moody’s last play The Faith Healer opens. 8 April: Helena Modjeska dies. 4 September: Clyde Fitch dies in France; his last play, The City, opens on 21 December. 1910 8 February: A Man’s World by Rachel Crothers opens. 5 May: Marie Dressler keeps her audience laughing all evening at the opening of Tillie’s Nightmare at the Herald Square Theatre. 7 November: Victor Herbert’s operetta Naughty Marietta opens. 15 November: Avery Hopwood’s comedy Nobody’s Widow, produced by David Belasco for his star, Blanche Bates, opens. 1911 The Authors’ League of America is founded with Bronson Howard as president and Martha Morton as vice president, superseding the previous playwrights’ organizations that were segregated by gender.

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Thomas H. Dickinson establishes the Wisconsin Dramatic Society. 17 January: Percy MacKaye’s The Scarecrow, based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Feathertop, opens for a short run. 20 March and 20 November: Al Jolson begins a long reign as leading Broadway musical star with two Shubert-produced shows, La Belle Paree, inaugurating the Shubert’s lavish new Winter Garden Theatre on 20 March, and Vera Violetta, opening 20 November. 20 December: Kismet opens, starring Otis Skinner. 1912 George Pierce Baker adds the 47 Workshop to his English 47 course at Harvard University. Maurice Browne establishes the Chicago Little Theatre, an early exemplar of the little theatre movement. Producer Winthrop Ames opens the Little Theatre on West 44th Street, with a goal of producing experimental new works there. The Lafayette Theatre opens on Seventh Avenue in Harlem as a venue for new plays and musicals by African American writers. 8 January and 20 December: After years of acting in provincial tours, Laurette Taylor scores two New York successes this year: in The Bird of Paradise, opening on 8 January, and as the title character in the sentimental comedy Peg O’My Heart, written by her husband, J. Hartley Manners, opening on 20 December. 22 July: The opening of the Shubert-produced first edition of The Passing Show, a semiannual musical revue meant to rival the Ziegfeld Follies. 22 December: Actors’ Equity Association is founded. 1913 W. E. B. DuBois stages his pageant The Star of Ethiopia at New York’s 12th Regiment Armory. 24 March: The Palace Theatre opens at Times Square in New York and becomes the mecca of vaudeville, operating successfully until 1932. October: B. F. Keith’s United Booking Office wrests control of the Palace from producer Martin Beck, who built it. 22 September: George M. Cohan opens his nonmusical mystery Seven Keys to Baldpate. 1914 Eugene O’Neill publishes Thirst and four other one-act plays, initiating his career as America’s leading dramatist. Thomas Wood Stevens creates a drama program at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. February: Lawrence Langer, among others, establishes the Washington Square Players, a noncommercial theatre for new and foreign plays. 19 August: Elmer Rice’s first play, On Trial, featuring innovative flashback sequences, opens.

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1915 A group of artists summering in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod stage some of their own one-act plays in a fish shack on a wharf and attract small audiences; this venture marks the larval phase of what will become Provincetown Players. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) establishes a drama committee. D. W. Griffith’s motion picture of the Civil War, The Birth of a Nation, opens. 12 February: Alice and Irene Lewisohn found the Neighborhood Playhouse, presenting Jephthah’s Daughter. 19 February: Washington Square Players open their first full season. 7 May: When the Lusitania is torpedoed by German gunboats, the theatre people killed include producer Charles Frohman and playwright Charles Klein. 9 December: Grace George stars in the first New York production of George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara. 30 December: Anita Bush’s all-black stock company takes the name Lafayette Players and opens Across the Footlights at Harlem’s Lafayette Theatre. 1916 Eugene O’Neill joins the group in Provincetown, where his Bound East for Cardiff and Susan Glaspell’s Trifles are presented in the Wharf Theatre; upon returning to Greenwich Village in the fall, the ensemble adopts the name Provincetown Players. The National Vaudeville Artists Union is established and supersedes the White Rats. Angelina Weld Grimké’s African American drama, Rachel, is produced in Washington, D.C., for two performances. Sam Hume founds the Detroit Arts and Crafts Theatre, and Frederick McConnell establishes the Cleveland Playhouse, both part of the independent or little theatre movement. Theatre Arts Monthly begins publication. 31 October: Clare Kummer’s Good Gracious, Annabelle opens. 1917 J. Hartley Manners’s Out There is performed on tour by an all-star cast in support of the war effort. Mae Desmond establishes the Desmond Players, a little theatre, in Philadelphia. April: Theatre artists become involved in the patriotic cause when the United States enters the Great War in April. 5 April: Black actors perform three plays by Ridgely Torrence on a bill that opens at the Garden Theatre. 18 April: John and Lionel Barrymore perform together in the opening of Peter Ibbetson. 1918 Smaller circuses merge to form Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, managed by Ringling North. Maurice Schwartz establishes the Yiddish Art Theatre, which operates until 1950. The Carolina

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Playmakers, an important regional group, is founded by Frederick Koch. 18 February: Augustus Thomas’s The Copperhead opens, with Lionel Barrymore in the leading role. May: Washington Square Players disband, having lost some of its company to military service. 16 August: Maytime, Sigmund Romberg’s operetta with a book by Rida Johnson Young opens. 1919 The Theatre Guild is founded by Lawrence Langner, Teresa Helburn, Helen Westley, Philip Moeller, Lee Simonson, and Maurice Wertheim and presents its first production, Jacinto Benavente’s The Bonds of Interest, opening on 14 April at the Garrick Theatre, followed by a major success with the 12 May opening of St. John Ervine’s John Ferguson. Edna St. Vincent Millay’s one-act play, Aria da Capo, is staged by the Provincetown Players. May: The Producing Managers’ Association, headed by producer Sam H. Harris, is established in May. 26 May: George Gershwin writes songs for the musical La! La! Lucille, opening on 26 May. June: The Pulitzer Prize for Drama is awarded for the first time. The first winner is Jesse Lynch Williams for his 1918 comedy, Why Marry? 7 August: Actors’ Equity begins a strike to win better wages and working conditions from producers; stagehands and musicians join the strike on 5 September. The strike is settled the following day with concessions from the Producing Managers’ Association. 30 September: Avery Hopwood scores a hit with his farce The Gold Diggers. 6 October: Zöe Akins’s drama Déclassée opens, starring Ethel Barrymore. 30 December: Jane Cowl plays the leading role in her own sentimental comedy, Smilin’ Through. Jacob Ben-Ami founds the Jewish Art Theatre. 1920 The Dramatists Guild is formed. 2 February: Eugene O’Neill’s first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, opens and goes on to win the second Pulitzer Prize for Drama. 7 March: John Barrymore stars in Shakespeare’s Richard III, directed and produced by Arthur Hopkins and designed by Robert Edmond Jones. 23 August: Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood’s The Bat opens and becomes a stock and touring perennial. 27 September: George M. Cohan’s comedymystery The Tavern opens. 1 November: O’Neill’s expressionist drama The Emperor Jones opens with African American actor Charles Gilpin in the title role. 21 December: Jerome Kern’s Sally, starring Marilyn Miller, opens, produced by Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. and introducing Kern’s song “Look for the Silver Lining.” 26 December: Zona Gale’s Miss

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Lulu Bett, adapted from her own novel, opens at Sing Sing Prison and on 27 December continues at the Belmont Theatre on Broadway; this play will make her, in 1921, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. 1921 2 March: Nice People, Rachel Crothers’s drama of contemporary mores, opens for a long run, introducing Katharine Cornell and Tallulah Bankhead in their first important roles. 26 March and 14 November: Susan Glaspell’s Inheritors (opening 26 March) and The Verge (opening 14 November) are produced by the Provincetown Players. 20 April: Ferenc Molnár’s Liliom opens, featuring Eva Le Gallienne and Joseph Schildkraut. 23 May: The all-black musical Shuffle Along by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle opens and during its long run advances the practice of racially integrated seating in all parts of the auditorium. 14 August: George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly’s satiric comedy Dulcy opens and makes a star of Lynn Fontanne. 22 September: Irving Berlin opens his Music Box Revue, the first of four annual editions. 2 November: Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie opens and wins him a second Pulitzer Prize. 1922 The Ethiopian Art Theatre is founded in Chicago by Raymond O’Neil. 9 March: Eugene O’Neill’s expressionist drama The Hairy Ape opens with Louis Wolheim in the title role. 23 May: Anne Nichols’s innocuous comedy of an interethnic romance, Abie’s Irish Rose, begins its record-breaking 2,327-performance run. 29 August: George Kelly’s hit The Torch-Bearers opens and satirizes amateur theatre and, ironically, will be frequently produced by amateur theatres. 9 October: The Theatre Guild opens Czech dramatist Karel Capek’s “robot” play, R.U.R. 7 November: Jeanne Eagels scores a personal success playing prostitute Sadie Thompson in John Colton and Clemence Randolph’s adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s Rain. 16 November: Hamlet opens, directed by Arthur Hopkins and designed by Robert Edmond Jones, with John Barrymore in the title role, which he plays for 101 performances (to surpass Edwin Booth’s 100-performance record). 1923 5 February: Rachel Crothers’s Mary the Third opens. 10 February: Owen Davis’s drama, Icebound, opens and wins the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. 19 February: Philip Barry’s first successful comedy, You and I, opens. 19 March: The Theatre Guild opens Elmer Rice’s expressionist play, The Adding Machine, with Dudley Digges as the

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leading character, Mr. Zero. 9 July: Earl Carroll produces the first of nine annual editions of his Vanities. 1924 12 February: George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly’s comedy with an expressionist sequence, Beggar on Horseback, opens. 16 April: Rachel Crothers’s Expressing Willie opens. 21 April: Legendary Italian actress Eleonora Duse dies in Pittsburgh during her fourth American tour. May: A scandal erupts when George Kelly’s comedy The Show-Off loses the Pulitzer Prize to Hatcher Hughes’s Hell-Bent fer Heaven and questions are raised about the Pulitzer selection process. 15 May: Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings, featuring African American actor Paul Robeson, opens and incites outrage over its depiction of an interracial relationship. 11 August: Dancing Mothers opens, starring Helen Hayes. 5 September: What Price Glory, coauthored by Maxwell Anderson and World War I veteran Laurence Stallings, opens and shocks audiences with the realistic dialogue of soldiers in war. 11 November: Eugene O’Neill’s tragedy Desire Under the Elms opens starring Walter Huston, with designs by Robert Edmond Jones. 24 November: Pauline Lord and Richard Bennett score personal successes in leading roles in the opening of Sidney Howard’s Pulitzer Prize–winning They Knew What They Wanted, produced by the Theatre Guild, and Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne commence their long stage partnership with the hit comedy The Guardsman. 12 December: Katharine Cornell is well-received in a revival of the opening of George Bernard Shaw’s Candida. 1925 Crisis and Opportunity magazines, both African American publications, establish playwriting contests to encourage black dramatists. Howard University professor Alain Locke publishes The New Negro. George Pierce Baker organizes the Yale University Drama Department, and Thomas Wood Stevens directs the newly opened Goodman Memorial Theatre at the Art Institute of Chicago. John Howard Lawson’s leftist expressionist drama, Processional, is produced. 10 September: Paul Robeson plays the title role in a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones. 3 October: George Kelly’s Craig’s Wife opens and wins the Pulitzer Prize. 14 October: Garland Anderson’s Appearances, the first full-length drama by an African American author to appear on Broadway (with a racially mixed cast) opens. 8 December: The hit Marx Brothers musical The Cocoanuts, by George S. Kaufman with songs by Irving Berlin, opens.

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1926 Eva Le Gallienne establishes the Civic Repertory Theatre with the goal of offering classic and new plays at low prices; the theatre is run exclusively by women and continues until 1933. The all-black Krigwa Players is established. 23 January: Eugene O’Neill’s experimental drama using masks, The Great God Brown, opens. 9 February: Lulu Belle, a lurid drama by Edward Sheldon and Charles MacArthur, opens with star Lenore Ulric controversially appearing in blackface. 26 April: Sex opens but the Society for the Suppression of Vice objects to it and actressplaywright Mae West is arrested; the publicity resulting from her brief prison sentence is invaluable. 16 September: Actor-director-playwright George Abbott coauthors and stages Broadway. 29 November and 20 December: Sidney Howard has two plays produced this year: Ned McCobb’s Daughter (29 November) and The Silver Cord (20 December). 30 December: Paul Green’s Pulitzer Prize–winning drama about black Southerners, In Abraham’s Bosom, opens at the Provincetown Theatre for a long run. Also opening is Chicago by Maurine Dallas Watkins. 1927 The Keith-Albee-Orpheum vaudeville circuit is created by a merger of the largest eastern and western circuits; it controls 700 theatres nationwide. Mae West’s The Drag, depicting homosexual characters, closes on the road. Shubert musical star Al Jolson appears in the first feature-length sound motion picture, The Jazz Singer, firmly establishing the “talkies.” 31 January: Robert E. Sherwood’s first important play, the antiwar comedy The Road to Rome, opens. 2 February: The lavish Ziegfeld Theatre, designed by architect Thomas Lamb and scenic artist Joseph Urban, opens with Rio Rita. 11 April: S. N. Behrman’s comedy, The Second Man, opens starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. 16 August: Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. produces the first edition of his Follies in two years; it is the first Follies to star a single entertainer, Eddie Cantor. 1 September: George Maker Watters and Arthur Hopkins’s backstage comedy-drama Burlesque opens. 10 September: The Theatre Guild opens Dubose and Dorothy Heyward’s Porgy. 8 November: George Abbott coauthors (with Ann Preston Bridges) and directs Coquette starring Helen Hayes. 26 December: A Broadway record is set when 11 shows open on one night. 27 December: Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. produces the landmark dramatic musical Show Boat, opening on 27 December, with music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. 28 December: The Royal Family, a comedy by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber lampooning the Barrymore family, opens.

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1928 30 January: Eugene O’Neill’s drama Strange Interlude opens and wins a third Pulitzer Prize. Also produced this year are his Marco Millions (9 January) and Lazarus Laughed (9 April). 9 April and 1 October: Mae West performs in her own plays, Diamond Lil (9 April) and The Pleasure Man (1 October). 14 August: The Front Page, a comedy-melodrama by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur opens. September: Jessie Bonstelle founds the Detroit Civic Theatre. 7 September: Sophie Treadwell’s expressionist drama Machinal opens. 23 October: The Marx Brothers open in George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind’s comedy Animal Crackers. 26 November: Holiday, Philip Barry’s high comedy, opens. 1929 10 January: Elmer Rice’s tenement drama Street Scene opens and wins the Pulitzer Prize. 11 February: Eugene O’Neill’s Dynamo opens and fails to elicit critical approval. 21 February: Rachel Crothers’s comedy Let Us Be Gay opens. 3 October: Jeanne Eagels dies at age 36. 9 October: George S. Kaufman and Ring Lardner’s comedy June Moon, satirizing Tin Pan Alley, opens. 29 October: The stock market crash begins the Great Depression, which will have a significant impact on theatre. 1930 The Keith-Albee-Orpheum Circuit merges with Radio Corporation of America to establish Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO). The League of New York Theatres & Producers is founded. Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston collaborate on the drama Mule Bone, but it is not produced. 26 February: Marc Connelly’s all-black The Green Pastures, based on biblical stories, opens and wins the Pulitzer Prize. 24 September: Once in a Lifetime opens; it is the first of eight comedies that George S. Kaufman will write in collaboration with Moss Hart. 3 November: Maxwell Anderson’s verse drama Elizabeth the Queen opens. 1 December: Susan Glaspell’s Alison’s House opens, produced by Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre, and wins a Pulitzer Prize in 1931. 1930s As the Great Depression deepens, sound motion pictures draw audiences away from live theatre. Road tours of Broadway hits had already begun their decline during World War I, but now even vaudeville loses ground to movies and radio.

)NTRODUCTION

The period from 1880 to 1930, which can best be described as “modernism,” was an extraordinary era during which the evolution of theatrical activity directly reflected America’s renewed and ever-increasing optimism following the cataclysm of the Civil War. The New York stage —“Broadway”—is often described as the center of American theatre from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, but as this volume demonstrates, American theatre was a truly national phenomenon. During the 1880s and 1890s, the “road”—a network of theatres served by railway transportation and visited by stars and journeyman actors—brought performances of every kind to cities, towns, and even rural communities across the country. The hurly-burly activity included not only plays ranging from Shakespeare and other classics to melodramas with cheap appeals, but also operettas, minstrel shows, dime museums, Wild West shows, vaudeville, burlesque, Chautauqua, and other popular entertainments. There was something for every American social and economic level. Ethnic stereotypes abounded in legitimate comedy as well as on variety stages, while those who laughed at the immigrant “other” might themselves be fairly fresh off the boat and not yet entirely assimilated into the melting pot. Audiences in the early 20th century continued to enjoy ethnic or dialect comedy and cliché-ridden sentimental boy-gets-girl plays, and yet there was a gradual progression toward greater sophistication. By the time of World War I, European influences on drama and stagecraft were merging with the new American playwriting that the little theatre movement encouraged. The 1920s brought both high spirits and cynicism, silly situation comedies and the new realism of plays about war and divorce, experimentation with new forms and the Harlem Renaissance. That decade also confirmed that the United States had found its Great American Playwright, an artist whose coming had been anxiously anticipated ever since 1820, when the Scottish clergyman Sydney Smith xxxi

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posed his famous question: “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue?” The remark galvanized Americans to find and promote artists who could gain international recognition. Certainly American actors like Charlotte Cushman, Edwin Booth, and many others included in this dictionary won over English audiences when they dared to play Shakespeare in London. But the American playwright who could win a nod from abroad proved more elusive. The one who finally did it, of course, was Eugene O’Neill, who began his upward trajectory in 1915, and who won three of his four Pulitzer Prizes during the 1920s. Out of this crucible that we call modernism, the Golden Age of American drama of the first half of the 20th century was born.

-/$%2.)3Defining modernism—and those dramatists and artists identified as modernists—is no simple task, for its seeds may be found as early as the Enlightenment and, despite the emergence of new trends labeled postmodernism in the late 20th century, modernist principles continue to influence theatrical endeavor and to coexist with what has risen in its wake. Modernism denotes an attitude that welcomes the creation of new forms, and these forms reflect a consciousness quite different from the aesthetics of the romantic and realistic writers who dominated literature and drama during the first three-quarters of the 19th century. Modernism in the theatre derives most directly from the “social problem” plays of the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen. Although his plays, from A Doll’s House (1879) to Hedda Gabler (1890), retain traditional dramatic narrative structures, their content raises serious questions about the existing order of things, and thus they must be factored into the changing of general attitudes that characterizes social evolution. Those decades brought the added influence of naturalism, manifested in the theories of Emile Zola and stage innovations of André Antoine in Paris, followed by the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg’s excursions into aberrant psychology, which segued into the work of German expressionists in the 1910s. The concurrent embrace of abstraction in the graphic arts and sculpture opened the way for departures from familiar ways of presenting reality on stage. The watershed

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moment may have occurred on 10 December 1896, when the Irish poet William Butler Yeats attended the first performance of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre in Paris. In his autobiography, Yeats recalled the apprehension he had then felt for the future of art: “After us the Savage God.”1 The term “modernism” expanded to encompass a range of antirealistic developments, including symbolism, futurism, Dada, surrealism, and expressionism, as well as the scenic innovations of Adolph Appia, Edward Gordon Craig, and Joseph Urban. All sought to reject old forms and what Craig called a slavish dependence on “photographic realism” in theatrical production. During the 1910s and 1920s, the plays of Italian dramatist Luigi Pirandello used metatheatrical devices so that his theatre commented upon itself as theatre, exposing established conventions for reexamination. American playwrights in turn experimented with a variety of approaches ranging from conventional realism to various avant-gardes. There were, for example, poetic dramas by Josephine Preston Peabody and Edna St. Vincent Millay, folk dramas by Paul Green, politically driven dramas by John Howard Lawson, dream sequences, flashbacks, allegories, masks, and more. Elmer Rice’s plays encompassed the comedy-mystery-thriller Cock Robin, the symphonic naturalism of Street Scene, and the expressionism of The Adding Machine and The Subway. Eugene O’Neill, Channing Pollock, Sophie Treadwell, and others dabbled in expressionism as well as other nonrealistic forms. It is tricky to situate modernism in relation to realism in the theatre, for realism is a relative term. That is, what passes on stage for absolute fidelity to observable reality in one era might be seen by the next generation as laughably overblown gestures in an actor’s performance and artificial-looking, flat painted cut-out pieces in a scenic environment. Moreover, to mainstream audiences during much of this era, “realism” suggested something morally compromised or antithetical to the very idea of art as a celebration of the beautiful. Critic Austin Latchaw echoed the sentiments of many when he wrote, “Yet the theater always has been and still should be the land of make-believe. . . . If we insist that the theater shall be real life always, real life no matter how ugly, we have, I believe, lost something very precious, something that could and should make real life, ugly though at times it may be, more enjoyable or more endurable, according to the circumstances.”2 Nevertheless, we can discern a broad pattern during the modernist era: while acting

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moved away from making “points” toward greater psychological realism, production values moved away from pictorial literalism toward stylization and theatricality.

&2/-0!'%4/34!'% When theatre scholars look to the past, the play text serves as primary source material even as it remains a literary genre subject to critical reinterpretation. Playwrights and plays are very much at the heart of this historical dictionary. Directly or indirectly, much of the best dramatic writing of the modernist era was stimulated by George Pierce Baker’s 47 Workshop at Harvard University. While plays of substance transmit ideas that were in the air, even the shallow situation comedies convey a notion of what tickled our ancestors’ funny bones. The racial injustices that prompted Marita Bonner to write her expressionist The Purple Flower simmer through the piece’s mystery and power. Philip Barry’s plays humorously and poignantly expose the foibles of the long-ago rich and famous. Plays like Merton of the Movies, The Butter and Egg Man, June Moon, and The Royal Family by George S. Kaufman and various collaborators afford us glimpses of aspects of show business that exist no longer. The astonishing variety of plays in the modernist era seems beyond recapitulation, but at least the plays are still available to us as printed texts. The more ephemeral components of theatre can be understood only through secondary sources. This is especially the case with actors and actresses. The evolution away from lines of business (leading man, leading woman, heavy or villain, juvenile, eccentric, walking, utility, etc.) to casting for characterization opened the art of acting to individual qualities that often translated into star power. But star quality is ineffable. As Eleonora Duse often noted, the art of the actress is “writ on water.” The hypnotic effect of Edwin Booth’s liquid vowels and his piercingly expressive dark eyes that elicited both a melting sensation and a shivery thrill in the matinee girl is beyond our power to feel. All of the critical encomia for Pauline Lord as Amy in They Knew What They Wanted cannot completely transport us into the experience of watching her turn that vulgar waitress into a warmly vulnerable and sympathetic woman who made a mistake that could dash her dreams. The names that once held so much evocative power—Lotta Crabtree, Minnie Maddern

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Fiske, Joseph Jefferson III, Otis Skinner, and so many more—must now be tied to photographs, critical reviews, and memoirs. During the modernist era, directing came into its own as a distinct artistic contribution apart from the duties of the company manager. The evolution of the directorial function might be traced back to David Garrick in 18th-century England, followed by George II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, who was sometimes signaled as the “father of modern directing,” in mid- to late-19th-century Europe. From the 1890s to the 1920s, André Antoine, Aurélien Lugné-Poë, Firmin Gémier, and Jacques Copeau brought the creative contribution of the director to bear in French theatre. In London, the first to establish himself as a director not tied to the tradition of the actor-manager was Fyodor (or Theodore) Fyodorovich Komissarzhevsky in 1919.3 Most importantly, beginning in 1900 in Berlin, Max Reinhardt demonstrated the power of a single creative mind to conceive and orchestrate all aspects of production. Americans who traveled to work with Reinhardt in Europe and brought back his influence included designer Robert Edmond Jones and manager Winthrop Ames. In 1907, Ames made a tour of European art theatres, keeping a meticulous record of his observations and drawing upon them in the productions he staged in New York in the 1910s. A. M. Palmer has been credited as the one who, as early as the 1870s in New York, separated artistic direction from the business management side of theatre.4 At the turn of the century, Ben Teal may have been the first American to be listed in the playbill as director rather than producer or manager. Other early directors in New York besides Ames and Teal were William Seymour, R. H. Burnside, and Eugene Presbrey. The era brought a number of stellar directors, including David Belasco, George Abbott, Jed Harris, Arthur Hopkins, Brock Pemberton, Antoinette Perry, and Eva Le Gallienne. Stage design also made important strides during the modernist era. During the decades following the Civil War, traveling companies still relied on basic stock settings to cover all scenic needs: a street with houses or shops, a forest, a grand interior, a humble interior, and a prison. If a company did not carry its own roll drops for those five scenes, most opera houses could provide wings and backdrops for that range of locales, if not more. With increasing ease of rail transportation in the 1880s, the best touring ensembles tended increasingly to travel with their own more specialized settings created for specific plays in the repertoire. Still, most first-class theatres employed a scenic artist who

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could paint a backdrop as needed when the occasion arose. The ten, twent,’ thirt’ melodramas required very specific scenic effects for their cheap thrills, and they would carry their own mechanical devices that could be adapted to the trap and fly systems of various sizes of theatres on the road. Whereas the touring repertory companies of the 1880s carried scenery for as many as four or five plays, the combinations went out from New York in the 1890s and after each formed a single-play package that was much easier to tour. With the gradual acceptance of psychological realism in the drama, box sets became standard settings with real doors, furniture, and props. Ironically, it was not long after the meticulously realistic box set replaced painted canvas wings and drops on the American stage that the Viennese designer Joseph Urban joined the Boston Opera Company in 1912 and inspired the return to painted scenery that was known in the United States as the New Stagecraft. The New Stagecraft’s stylized treatment of line and color was easily adapted to the limited production resources of the small, non-commercial or “little” theatres that proliferated after 1915.

4(%,)44,%4(%!42%-/6%-%.4 What Americans called the little theatre movement was somewhat similar to Europe’s independent theatre movement, which encompassed André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre (1887) in Paris, Otto Brahm’s Freie Buehne (1889) in Berlin, J. T. Grein’s Independent Theatre Society (1892) in London, William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory’s Irish Literary Theatre (1897; later the Abbey Theatre) in Dublin, and Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko’s Moscow Art Theatre (1898). The basic premise was to provide a venue for worthwhile plays that would not be likely to get produced commercially. Other goals included experimentation with innovative production techniques, developing a subscription audience, and maintaining an artistic ensemble. These factors applied also in the United States, with the added important motive of developing new American playwrights and plays. One-act plays worked particularly well for these amateur theatre groups. American little theatres also shared many interests with college theatres, and there was some crossover, as in the case of Thomas H. Dickinson, who moved from teaching English at the University of Wisconsin to founding the Wisconsin Dramatic Society in 1909.

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It is usual to date the little theatre movement from 1915, because that was the year in which three trailblazing theatre groups got their start: Washington Square Players, Provincetown Players, and the Neighborhood Playhouse. However, there were antecedents, such as the amateur dramatics at Jane Addams’s Chicago settlement house, performing under the name Hull-House Players from 1897. Maurice Browne’s Chicago Little Theatre was regarded as an important pioneering effort, begun in 1912, the same year as Jessie Bonstelle’s Northampton Municipal Theatre and the Little Country Theatre in Fargo, North Dakota. Indeed, Lawrence Langner, founder of the Washington Square Players and later the Theatre Guild, wrote in his autobiography that Maurice Browne and his wife Ellen van Volkenburg were “the progenitors of the entire ‘Little Theatre’ movement in America, a movement which has since become a very important part of the fabric of American cultural life.”5 Influenced by Browne’s presentation of plays by Shaw, Strindberg, and Schnitzler, Langner led Washington Square Players and the Theatre Guild to produce a selection of contemporary foreign plays alongside the new American writing. Provincetown Players launched the careers of Eugene O’Neill and several women playwrights, including Susan Glaspell, Mabel Dodge, Louise Bryant, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Neith Boyce. With its 1920 production of O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, Provincetown Players set an important precedent in integrated casting, as African American actor Charles Gilpin played the leading role, supported by a white cast. The movement grew rapidly after 1915, with more than 50 theatres established by 1917.6 Among them were Cleveland Playhouse (1916), Detroit Arts and Crafts Theatre (1916), Pasadena Playhouse (1918), and Dallas Little Theatre (1920). Over the decades the vast network of American community theatres created a solid foundation for the rise of professional regional resident theatres in the 1960s.

4(%"53).%33/&4(%!42% During much of this period, theatre was big business, rivaling railroads, steel, textiles, and others in terms of numbers of people employed in the profession and in its impact on the American economy at large. Beyond New York and other East Coast metropolises, every American city had

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its opera houses, and every town of any size had its second-story hall that served as a theatre. The opera house managers worked not only with performers and box office staff, but employed local printers, bill posters, firemen, carpenters, and musicians. Theatre managers were public personalities in their own cities and often involved themselves in charitable causes. Toward the end of the summer, managers from all across America would flock to New York City to book attractions for the coming season. From the late 1870s to the 1890s, managers of 5,000 or so theatres would annually visit the booking agencies clustered around Union Square with the goal of getting the best shows they could afford, to cover every week of the theatre season, leaving no dark nights. One can imagine how difficult it was for the agencies to juggle the booking of their attractions into theatres with the best reputations for drawing good houses and scheduling them with relatively short railroad jumps between theatres. From the agencies’ point of view (and certainly for the performers), full or half-week engagements were much preferable to a series of one-night stands. But many theatres in smaller towns could not support a company for more than one performance, even when the company was headed by a star like Edwin Booth or Sarah Bernhardt. Some chaos was inevitable, even without the doubledealing that also occurred. For example, a manager might return home happy with his contracted bookings, while the New York agency might succumb to the better terms and more convenient scheduling offered by a subsequent visiting manager. If the first manager were left without a show for even one night, the financial loss could be severe. Managers fought back by double booking some dates, but this had the result of leaving some companies stranded on the road with no means of returning to New York. The situation changed drastically, beginning in 1896. In that year, six businessmen got together and organized the American road. The partnership called the Theatrical Syndicate, or Theatrical Trust, was formed by Marc Klaw, Abraham Erlanger, Samuel Nixon, J. Fred Zimmerman, Al Hayman, and Charles Frohman. Given the preexisting regional circuits they had been operating, these men now controlled the first-class theatres in key cities across the country, and they quickly added more to bring a total of approximately 5,000 theatres in 1900. They did indeed bring order out of chaos, for they even employed hundreds of their own railway agents to schedule attractions on the road. Certainly, the theatre

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managers welcomed the guaranteed 30 weeks of attractions that would mean no more unexpected dark nights. The Syndicate’s business tactics all too soon proved ruthless. As early as 1901, Norman Hapgood’s book The Stage in America, 1897– 1900 exposed the damage being done to the theatre as an art. Those actors who had the standing and the courage to maintain their independence—notably Minnie Maddern Fiske, Francis Wilson, and David Warfield—found the complications debilitating. Mrs. Fiske’s husband, Harrison Grey Fiske, publisher of the New York Dramatic Mirror, faced his own difficulties when the Syndicate decreed that any performer or theatre company advertising in the Mirror would not be allowed to advertise in other newspapers; the other newspapers were over a barrel to comply, because they depended upon theatrical advertising for operating revenue. What finally broke the power of the Syndicate was another organization that began acquiring second-class theatres in upstate New York. The Shubert brothers—Lee, Sam, and J. J., from Syracuse, New York—opened their first New York City theatre in 1900, when they acquired the run-down Herald Square Theatre, refurbished it, and offered top-quality attractions for competitive prices. By 1905, when Sam Shubert was killed in a train accident, the Shubert Organization controlled 13 theatres and had adopted the ruthless business practices of their rivals. In many cities, they would build their own first-class theatre to draw business away from the one controlled by the Syndicate. The power struggled peaked between 1909 and 1913, but the real damage was inflicted on the theatre itself as a component of American life. Since there were not enough top-quality attractions for all the first-class theatres, many inferior companies were sent out on the road. Audiences, already lured by other entertainment options, including vaudeville and silent motion pictures, turned away from the theatre. The Syndicate was broken in 1916, but so was the American theatergoing habit outside of New York.

7/-%. Perhaps in no previous historical era did women so rapidly and fully entrench themselves in all aspects of theatre production. Theatre management by women was certainly not new, for star performers often

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INTRODUCTION

functioned as their own company managers, as did Laura Keene, Susan Denin, Mrs. D. P. Bowers, Kate Claxton, Rosina Vokes, and others. The era also brought designers like Aline Bernstein, lyricists like Rida Johnson Young and Anne Caldwell, and critics like Amy Leslie and Ada Patterson. Most remarkable of all, however, was the flourishing of women playwrights. For many women, playwriting was a way to earn money without sacrificing domesticity, as writing could be done at home, while others could handle the messy work of getting the plays staged. Others, like Martha Morton and Harriet Ford, found it necessary to invade male strongholds to promote and protect their work. Writers with a flair for comedy included Anne Caldwell, Catherine Chisholm Cushing, Fanny Hatton, Zona Gale, Zelda Sears, Clare Kummer, Edith Ellis, Rida Johnson Young, Marion Fairfax, Margaret Mayo, Gladys Unger, Adelaide Matthews, and Zöe Akins. There was also poetic drama by Josephine Preston Peabody, sensational melodrama by Lillian Mortimer and sentimental melodrama by Lottie Blair Parker, anthropological drama by Mary Hunter Austin, dramatizations of literary works by Anne Crawford Flexner and Eleanor Gates, antiwar drama by Marion Craig Wentworth and Beulah Marie Dix, one-act psychological forays by Alice Gerstenberg, and mystery thrillers by Mary Roberts Rinehart. Those whose plays continue to be found stageworthy today are Rachel Crothers, Susan Glaspell, and Sophie Treadwell. To all of those names we must add the many African American women who wrote plays as a way of making their voices heard on the pages of Crisis magazine if not from the stage. As wives and mothers, they had something to say about their own lives as well as the need to protest the lynchings that were occurring during the Jim Crow era. These women include Angelina Weld Grimké, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Mary P. Burrill, Zora Neal Hurston, Eulalie Spence, May Miller, Marita Bonner, and Myrtle Smith Livingston.

#/.#,53)/. From the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era to World War I to the Roaring Twenties, the modernist era encompassed tremendous vitality and variety in all aspects of theatre. Our focus on the spoken drama for the legitimate stage is only one small portion of the entertainment options

INTRODUCTION

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available, which included notably minstrelsy, burlesque, vaudeville, musical theatre, Wild West shows, dime museum exhibitions, silent motion pictures, and the beginnings of radio. It would require another volume as long as this one to cover the popular entertainments that coexisted with theatre. From 1930 to the present is another rich period for the theatre, and that will be the subject of the forthcoming Historical Dictionary of American Theatre: Contemporary, written by James Fisher.

./4%3 1. Quoted in Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 209. 2. Quoted in Felicia Hardison Londré, The Enchanted Years of the Stage: Kansas City at the Crossroads of American Theater, 1870–1930 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007), 88. 3. Victor Borovsky, A Triptych from the Russian Theatre: The Komissarzhevskys (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001), 317. 4. Warren Kliewer, “Directors and Direction,” in Cambridge History of American Theatre, Volume II: 1870–1945, ed. Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 520. 5. Lawrence Langner, The Magic Curtain (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1951), 82. 6. Susan Harris Smith, American Drama: The Bastard Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 85.

4HE$ICTIONARY

n!n ABBEY, HENRY (1846–1896). Drawn to the theatre even as an employee of his father’s jewelry shop in his native Akron, Ohio, Abbey rose to become one of the most respected impresarios in America. He MANAGED theatres, 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 "ROADWAY, and brought Sir Henry Irving from England to inaugurate it. ABBOTT, GEORGE (1887–1995).† 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 Abbott considered himself ready to conquer "ROADWAY 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 0ULITZER0RIZE–winning play Hell-Bent fer Heaven (1924). He worked with *OHN 'OLDEN 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 (ELEN (AYES to STARDOM. While Abbott is 1

2 •

ABEL, WALTER

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,” while fellow artists always addressed him as “Mister Abbott,” the epithet that served as the title for his 1963 autobiography. ABEL, WALTER (1898–1987).† Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, Walter Abel spent his long career mostly in character roles in theatre, MO TIONPICTURES, and television.* His first "ROADWAY role, in Dorothy Donnelly’s Forbidden (1919), was followed by a small part in the first American production of 'EORGE"ERNARD3HAW’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 %UGENE/.EILL’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.* ABIE’S IRISH ROSE. Anne Nichols’s innocuous COMEDY of the romance between a Jewish boy and an Irish girl improbably became the longest-running "ROADWAY 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, MOTION PICTURE versions in 1928 and 1946, a 1940s radio series, and innumerable imitators of its lighthearted dramatization of an ETHNIC culture clash caused by the traditional fathers of a Jewish son, Abie Levy, and an Irish-Catholic daughter, Rose Mary Murphy. 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.

ACADEMIC THEATRE

• 3

ACADEMIC THEATRE.† 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. Among those who participated during their student days were 2OBERT % 3HERWOOD and Alan Jay Lerner. Other literary societies that sprang up at colleges after the Civil 7AR 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 theatre 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 %UGENE /.EILL (who participated in the 47 Workshop in 1914–1915), 0HILIP"ARRY, 3IDNEY(OWARD, and others. Baker’s course soon inspired other faculty at various institutions to offer theatre courses. Baylor, the University of North Dakota, DePauw, Swarthmore, the University of Iowa, Cornell, Columbia, Princeton, Smith, and others added theatre 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 theatre. See also AMATEURTHEATRE.

4 •

ACCIDENTS

ACCIDENTS. Accidents causing serious injury were all too common on the modernist stage before the era of union regulations. 3CENERY 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 Theater, 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 zig-zag 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 theatre’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 (190–92). 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 SCENEDESIGNER 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; THEATRE FIRES.

ACTING

• 5

ACKERMAN, P. DODD (1876–1963). 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 2ACHEL #ROTHERS’s first produced play, The Three of Us (1906), various 3HUBERT MUSICALS of the 1910s and 1920s like Robinson Crusoe, Jr. (1916), and others. His studio was located at 140 West 38th Street in New York City. See also 3CENE$ESIGN. ACOSTA, MERCEDES DE (1893–1968). Born into a milieu of wealth and privilege in New York, the youngest of her parents’ eight children had ready access to theatre, 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 %VA,E'ALLIENNE 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. ACTING.† 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. 3TOCK 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” (quoted in Lee 1997, 15–16). 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.

6 •

ACTING

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 terms of 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” (1970, 8). 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” (12). In 1936, several critics analyzed Gillette’s contribution to the art and mentioned his detailed handling of properties, his “underacting,” and “the illusively effective naturalness of his acting” (88). 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

ACTORS AND ACTRESSES

• 7

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 4ALLULAH "ANKHEAD, Billie Burke, De Wolf 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” (14). 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” (14). Other exceptionally talented and compelling actors of the modernist period include %THEL "ARRYMORE, John Barrymore, Julia Marlowe, and Otis Skinner. See also ECCENTRIC BUSINESS; LEADING MAN, LEADING WOMAN/LADY; SECOND; UTILITY; VILLAIN; WALKING GENTLEMAN, WALKING LADY. ACTORS AND ACTRESSES.† In no other period of American theatre 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, like 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. The 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 !LLA.AZIMOVA, and Czech actress Fanny Janauschek. Other European STARS made a number

8 •

ACTORS AND ACTRESSES

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, ,ESLIE(OWARD, 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 theatre, 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 0AULINE ,ORD. Among the leading lights who combined acting and musical talents, one must mention Lotta Crabtree, De Wolf Hopper, Eddie Foy, 'EORGE- #OHAN, 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 attractions, beginning with Henry Dixey in Adonis in 1884. Other particularly handsome actors included *OHN"ARRYMORE, 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, 3HAKESPEARE’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 ,AURETTE 4AYLOR. The leading emotional actress was Clara Morris. Among

ACTORS FIDELITY LEAGUE

• 9

those evincing more subtlety in their psychological acting were Margaret Anglin, Katharine Corcoran Herne, and %THEL"ARRYMORE. 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 CHILDPERFORMERS. ACTOR-MANAGER. 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. !#4/23 %15)49 !33/#)!4)/. !%! .† 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 disbanded in 1912. AEA, filling the void, negotiated unsuccessfully with producers for a standard contract until 1919, when tensions reached a peak. 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 theatres 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. ACTORS’ FIDELITY LEAGUE (AFL). 'EORGE - #OHAN led fellow PRODUCERS, all members of the Producing Managers’

10 •

ACTORS’ FUND OF AMERICA

Association, to form this organization as a countermove to the establishment of !CTORS %QUITY!SSOCIATION 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 AFL as “Fido,” far outstripped AFL’s and with the Actors’ Equity strike of 1919, the AFL became meaningless. ACTORS’ FUND OF AMERICA (AFA).† 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 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. ACTORS’ SOCIETY OF AMERICA (ASA). Formed in 1895 by Louis Aldrich, the Actors’ Society of America 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 !CTORS %QUITY!SSOCIATION. ADAM AND EVA. 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. ADAMS, MAUDE (1872–1953). Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, Maude Kiskadden was the daughter of James Kiskadden and Annie Adams,

ADDING MACHINE, THE

• 11

a popular ACTRESS on Salt Lake City stages. She made her first stage appearance as an infant carried onstage 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 "ROADWAY 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 this 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 many 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. After working as a LIGHTING consultant for General Electric in the 1920s, Adams 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, she taught drama at Missouri’s Stephens College. ADDING MACHINE, THE. %LMER 2ICE’s seven-scene expressionist drama, originally billed as a tragedy, centers upon Mr. Zero, a

12 •

ADE, GEORGE

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 totaling 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 lowermiddle-class American life. 0RODUCED by the 4HEATRE'UILD, The Adding Machine premiered at New York’s Garrick Theatre on 19 March 1923 under the DIRECTION of 0HILIP -OELLER. It met with generally positive response for the PLAYWRIGHT, cast ($UDLEY $IGGES and (ELEN7ESTLEY as Mr. and Mrs. Zero, with %DWARD '2OBINSON and -ARGARET7YCHERLY in smaller roles), and the SCENEDESIGNER ,EE3IMONSON, who took inspiration from German expressionist theatre and MOTIONPICTURES. ADE, GEORGE (1866–1944). The popular author of light dramatic satires as well as non-dramatic writing in various genres 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 twenty 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. ADLER, CELIA (1890–1979). Daughter of legendary Yiddish theatre 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 and her entire career was devoted to acting in Yiddish theatre plays in New York, particularly for the Yiddish Art Theatre and on TOUR. Her few "ROADWAY appearances included short-lived productions of David Pinski’s The Treasure (1920) and A Flag Is Born (1946).

ADLER, JACOB

• 13

ADLER, FELIX (1895–1960). Born in Clinton, Iowa, Felix Adler became one of the most famous white-faced clowns in America for the Ringling #IRCUS. 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. ADLER, JACOB (1855–1926). The dominant ACTOR of the New York– based Yiddish theatre 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, the 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 PLAY WRIGHT Jacob Gordin to write The Yiddish King Lear (1892), a free adaptation of 3HAKESPEARE, 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 "ROADWAY (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.

14 •

ADLER, LUTHER

Following Adler’s marriage to Dina Stettin (mother of their daughter Celia Adler), he indulged in several scandalous love affairs before marrying Sara Levitzka (1860–1953), mother of his other seven children, including actors ,UTHER!DLER and 3TELLA !DLER. Worshipped by Jewish audiences, Adler suffered a stroke in 1920 that ended his acting career, bringing an irreparable loss to the Yiddish stage. ADLER, LUTHER (1903–1984).† Born in New York as Lutha Adler, son of the great Yiddish theatre 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 in Yiddish theatre, but later joined the Provincetown Players. In 1923, Adler made his "ROADWAY 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 %LMER 2ICE’s 0ULITZER0RIZE 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 theatre roots. ADLER, STELLA (1901–1992).† Born in New York, the daughter of Yiddish theatre legend Jacob Adler and Sara Levitzka, Stella Adler made her stage debut as a child 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’s productions. She made her lasting contribution to the theatre with the founding of a school for acting, Stella Adler Conservatory,* in 1949. ADREA. David Belasco and John Luther Long’s five-act drama opened on 11 January 1905 at Belasco Theatre for 123 perfor-

ADVANCE AGENT OR ADVANCE MAN

• 15

mances, 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. #RITICS 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. ADVANCE AGENT or ADVANCE MAN. Traveling ahead of a TOUR ING company, the advance agent or “working agent,” later called press agent, would oversee any special arrangements contracted with the theatre 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 (Kansas City Journal, 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 theatre to the MOTIONPICTURE (2002, 22).

16 •

ADVERTISING

ADVERTISING.† 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 PLAY WRIGHT virtually never appeared. Newspapers were also full of paid puffs, little snippets of promotional material disguised as reporting. Electricity led to lighted marquees on theatres in the 1900s. Although radio became widespread in the 1920s, it was not readily used as a medium for advertising theatre. See also ADVANCE AGENT; BILL. AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE.† Black PLAYWRIGHTS and MAN AGERS were precious few in the United States before 1880, despite the brief triumph of the African Grove Theatre in New York in 1821, at which everything from 3HAKESPEARE’s plays to new works by black writers provided African American ACTORS with opportunities when there were no roles available in white theatres (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 7AR brought opportunities for professional black performers primarily in minstrel shows. Only gradually did African American performers move into legitimate theatre, 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, Abbie Mitchell, and many more. 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

AGENT

• 17

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 "ROAD WAY came through the work of white playwrights, first in Ridgely Torrence’s Three Plays for a Negro Theatre (1917), followed by %UGENE /.EILL’s The Emperor Jones (1920), PRODUCED by the Provincetown Players and starring Charles Gilpin, who was later replaced in the role by 0AUL 2OBESON. Robeson also appeared in O’Neill’s controversial miscegenation play, All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1924). Other white writers of black drama include 0AUL 'REEN, whose In Abraham’s Bosom (1926) won the 0ULITZER 0RIZE and provided an outstanding role for Rose McClendon. Dubose and Dorothy Heyward’s Porgy (1927) and -ARC#ONNELLY’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. AGENT. 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 theatre and railroad bookings,

18 •

AKINS, ZÖE

or generating publicity. See also ADVANCE AGENT; BOOKING AGENT. AKINS, ZÖE (1886–1958).† Born in Humansville, Missouri, Akins loved theatre 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. That success 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: Déclassée (1919), Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting (1921), and A Texas Nightingale (1922, alternately titled Greatness). Despite melodramatic situations, the wit of Akins’s dialogue is trenchant. ALABAMA. The four-act drama by Augustus Thomas premiered at Madison Square Theatre on 1 April 1890. 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. ALBEE, E. F. (1857–1930). 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 theatre productions to several cities, creating a circuit of theatres that reached New York by 1893.

ALGONQUIN ROUND TABLE

• 19

Albee remained associated with Keith for nearly 30 years, while Keith-Albee maintained their dominance over the top revenuegenerating 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. ALBERT, ERNEST (1857–1946). In the 1880s, the Brooklyn-born SCENEDESIGNER 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 theatres 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 in1899; 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 leading landscape artist and in 1919 was elected the first president of Allied Artists of America. ALDRICH, LOUIS (1843–1901). 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 Juvenile troupe 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. ALGONQUIN ROUND TABLE. The term refers to a group of witty writers, CRITICS, ACTORS, and other New York celebrities who

20 •

ALIAS JIMMY VALENTINE

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 7AR 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 'EORGE3+AUFMAN, $OROTHY 0ARKER, %DNA &ERBER, -ARC #ONNELLY, 2OBERT % 3HERWOOD, and $ONALD /GDEN 3TEWART, as well as CRITICS (!LEXANDER 7OOLLCOTT, 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. ALIAS JIMMY VALENTINE. 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 fastpaced play was aided by the performances of rising STARS ,AURETTE 4AYLOR and H. B. Warner. Three MOTIONPICTURE versions (1915, 1920, and 1928) were made of Armstrong’s play. ALLEN, VIOLA (1869–1948). Named for 3HAKESPEARE’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. 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 (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 III. From 1893 to 1898, Allen was the leading lady in Charles Frohman’s Empire Theater stock company, which TOURED annually.

AMATEUR THEATRE

• 21

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 3HAKESPEAREAN repertoire, adding Juliet, Portia, Imogene, 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, Viola 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. ALL GOD’S CHILLUN GOT WINGS. %UGENE /.EILL’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 !FRICAN !MERICAN actor 0AUL 2OBESON. The Gerry Society also raised concerns over the employment of CHILD actors, but it is clear that the central controversy 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, but 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. AMATEUR THEATRE.† 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

22 •

AMBUSH

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 theatre movement of the 1910s, which in turn became the foundation for a vast network of community theatres in the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, some amateur theatres evolved into professional theatres, like the Cleveland Play House. See also ACADEMICTHEATRE; THE TORCH-BEARERS. AMBUSH. Arthur Richman’s three-act drama, PRODUCED by the 4HEATRE'UILD, opened 10 October 1921, ran for 98 performances at the Garrick Theatre, and was made into the 1931 MOTIONPICTURE The Reckless Hour. Walter is a 45-year-old clerk who lives frugally and decently, but 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. AMEND, KARLE OTTO (1889–1944). Born in Columbus, Ohio, he got his first theatre job at Schell Scenic Studios there. Designing SCENERY on "ROADWAY from the late 1920s until his death, Amend was associated with the New Stagecraft movement. From the 1920s to the 1940s, he operated his scenic studio in New Jersey. AMERICAN ACADEMY OF DRAMATIC ARTS (AADA).† 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 MOTION PICTURE actors and DIRECTORS include 3PENCER4RACY, %DWARD'2OBINSON, 7ALTER!BEL, Margaret Anglin, Margalo Gilmore,* Chester Erskine,* Pat O’Brien, William Powell, *OSEPH 3CHILDKRAUT, *ANE

AMES, WINTHROP

• 23

#OWL, Cecil B. DeMille, Guthrie McClintic, (OWARD ,INDSAY, Allen Jenkins, Claire Trevor, and (ELEN 7ESTLEY, among many others. AMERICAN LABORATORY THEATRE (ALT). Established in 1923 in response to the excitement generated by that year’s "ROAD WAY season of Konstantin 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 ,YNN 2IGGS, 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 MOTIONPICTURES. AMES, ROBERT (1889–1931). 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 resident 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). AMES, WINTHROP (1870–1937). 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

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AMUSEMENTS

first PRODUCERS to bring European modernist theatrical concepts to America, Ames produced and DIRECTED at Boston’s Castle Square Theatre from 1904–1907, 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 1909–1911. This attempt was unsuccessful in part because the theatre 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 -AX2EINHARDT’s Sumurun and employed .ORMAN"EL 'EDDES to develop innovative LIGHTING techniques for use in his theatres. 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. AMUSEMENTS. 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 theatre. Thus, the word “amusements” often served both as the header for the theatre column in newspapers and as the category under which opera houses were listed in city directories. Meanwhile, theatre managers took up the term “attractions.” Amusements were regarded as wholesome distractions from the cares of everyday life.

ANDERSON, MARY

• 25

ANDERS, GLEN (1890–1981).† Anders was born in Los Angeles, 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). Besides matinee-idol good looks, he demonstrated considerable range in his characterizations. ANDERSON, GARLAND (1886–1939). An !FRICAN!MERICAN born in Wichita, Kansas, Anderson spent part of his youth in Sacramento, California. He left home at 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 "ROADWAY. ANDERSON, JOHN HARGIS (1896–1943). The Pensacola, Florida– born drama CRITIC 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. ANDERSON, JOHN MURRAY (1886–1954). The Canadian-born writer, DIRECTOR, and PRODUCER was educated abroad. In 1919, he began his theatre career in New York with The Greenwich Village Follies, which he continued to write and produce annually. He staged many MUSICALS and revues, notably Jumbo at the Hippodrome in 1935. ANDERSON, MARY (1859–1940). 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 and educated at a convent school in Louisville, 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

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ANDERSON, MAXWELL

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, and they settled in England, where they raised their two children. Despite calls for her return to the stage, she performed only for charity functions after her marriage. However, she worked with Robert S. Hichens to dramatize his novel, The Garden of Allah (1911). ANDERSON, MAXWELL (1888–1959).† 0LAYWRIGHT 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 The White Desert (1923). His fellow journalist at the New York World, Lawrence Stallings, had fought in World 7AR 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 0ULITZER0RIZE 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. 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. ANGLIN, MARGARET (1876–1958). The Canadian-born ACTRESS and MANAGER attended convent schools in Toronto and Montreal, then went to New York to train at the Empire Dramatic School asso-

ANIMALS

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ciated with Charles Frohman’s theatre. In a school production, she attracted Frohman’s attention and he engaged 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 actor 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 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 fivedecade career encompassed over 80 roles. ANIMAL CRACKERS. 'EORGE3+AUFMAN 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 "ROADWAY 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 MOTIONPICTURE was a screen version of Animal Crackers in 1930. As they had done in The Cocoanuts (1925), their previous collaboration with Kaufman, to his chagrin, the Marxes improvised wildly. 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 wacky Spalding, with his secretary (Zeppo), encounters high society denizens as well as two anarchic musicians (Harpo and Chico). A particular highlight was Groucho’s parody of the famous “internal monologues” spoken out loud that had been introduced earlier that year by %UGENE/.EILL in his 0ULITZER0RIZE–winning drama Strange Interlude (1928). ANIMALS. The use of performing animals was a staple of late 19thcentury melodrama. For example, dogs are integral to the action in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which held the stage for over half a century.

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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 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. ANNA CHRISTIE. %UGENE/.EILL won a second 0ULITZER0RIZE 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 ,YNN &ONTANNE in the role of Anna. $IRECTED by !RTHUR(OPKINS with SCENE DESIGNS by 2OBERT %DMOND *ONES 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 MOTIONPICTURE 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 'EORGE!BBOTT. 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 return. Anna Christie has been revived on "ROADWAY in 1952 (with Celeste

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Holm*), 1977 (with Liv Ullmann*), and 1993 (with Natasha Richardson* and Liam Neeson*). ANSPACHER, LOUIS K. (1848–1947). After studying law and doing some ACTING, Anspacher wrote plays, a number of which were PRODUCED in the 1910s and 1920s. His wife, actress Kathryn Kidder, STARRED in A Woman of Impulse (1909). For !LLA .AZIMOVA, he adapted a Hungarian melodrama, Dagmar (1923). His most successful play was The Unchastened Woman (1915), with an original run of 193 performances and a 1926 revival. APPEARANCES. Garland Anderson’s play about an !FRICAN !MERICAN hotel bellhop wrongfully accused of raping a white woman opened on 13 October 1925 and ran for 23 performances at the Frolic Theatre, TOURED 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. APPLESAUCE. 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, “applesauce” meant doublespeak, hyperbole, flattery. Ultimately, Hazel finds a precarious happiness with Bill. ARBUCKLE, MACLYN (1866–1931). The popular stage and silent MOTION PICTURE ACTOR was born in San Antonio, and admitted to the Texas bar in 1887. In 1888, he made his stage debut with Peter Baker in Shreveport, Louisiana. For the next four years he played 3HAKESPEAREAN roles with R. D. MacLean’s company. Later he played Marc Antony in Louis James’s TOURING production of Julius Caesar. In London, he played the title role in Why Smith Left Home (1898). The hefty actor’s physique contributed to the comic characterizations of his later years. Some of Arbuckle’s memorable homespun characters included Jim Hackler in The County Chair-

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man (1903) and Slim Hoover in The Round Up (1907). In 1912, he performed in his own play The Reform Candidate. He retired after a stroke in 1926. ARC LIGHT. 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 produced by the 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. ARCHITECTURE. The decades after the Civil 7AR saw the rise of the opera house as a venue to attract more fashionable people than those who would attend the traditional theatre. While a theatre could be anything from a barn to a third-floor hall above commercial space, the opera house was specifically 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), ACTOR dressing rooms (eventually with fixed washstands), and SCENERY and equipment. Few theatres, 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 3TEELE-AC+AYE at his Madison Square Theatre, which he remodeled in 1879. Leading theatre architects and firms during the modernist period included John Eberson, Thomas

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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 theatres in the 1900s and 1910s. New York saw many new theatres constructed throughout the 1920s. See also PARQUETTE; THEATRE FIRES. ARIA DA CAPO. 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 AMATEUR and ACADEMIC theatre troupes. ARIZONA. 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 was revived in 1913 by William A. Brady, made into three MOTION PICTURES (1913, 1918, 1931), and adapted into a "ROADWAY operetta by Sigmund Romberg, titled The Love Call (1927). ARLISS, GEORGE (1868–1946). Born in London as Augustus George Arliss-Andrews, he spent most of his career on "ROADWAY

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ARMSTRONG, PAUL

stages as well as MOTIONPICTURES. Arliss debuted in 1901, coSTAR RING 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 7AR I, Arliss appeared in J. Hartley Manners’s Out There, costarring with 'EORGE-#O HAN, James K. Hackett, Chauncey Olcott, ,AURETTE4AYLOR, 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. ARMSTRONG, PAUL (1869–1915). The high-energy PLAYWRIGHT, born in Kidder, Missouri, was a Chicago sports writer before getting his first "ROADWAY production, The Superstition of Sue, in 1904. His 25 or so “virile dramas” (Sherman 1951) 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).

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ARNEAUX, J. A. (1855–?). 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-!FRICAN !MERICAN company devoted to productions of classics, particularly 3HAKESPEARE. 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. ARONSON, RUDOLPH (1856–1919). A theatre MANAGER and a composer, Aronson was born in New York and built his career there, managing MUSICAL theatre performers. He built the Casino Theatre at 39th and "ROADWAY 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. ARROW MAKER, THE. 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 .ATIVE!MERICAN chants and dances, while COSTUMES and objects from the Museum of Natural History were copied in the SCENEDESIGN elements. See also ETHNICITYIN !MERICANDRAMA; WOMENINTHEPROFESSION. ARTHUR, JOSEPH (1848–1906). The Indiana-born newspaperman turned PLAYWRIGHT was the author of some of the period’s most frequently performed melodramas: The Still Alarm (1887), Blue Jeans (1890), The Cherry Pickers (1896), and The Salt of the Earth (1898). ARTHUR, JULIA (1869–1950). 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

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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 3HAKESPEARE 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 about 200 leading roles. AS A MAN THINKS. Opening on 13 March 1911 at the 39th Street Theatre, the 3HUBERT-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 2ACHEL#ROTHERS’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 ETHNICITYIN!MERICANDRAMA; WOMENINTHEPROFESSION. ASBESTOS CURTAIN. 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 THEATRE FIRES.

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ASCH, SHOLOM (1880–1957). The Yiddish 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 ETHNICITYIN!MERICAN DRAMA ASIAN AMERICAN THEATRE.† 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. !MATEUR groups sprang up in Asian communities, but only in cities like New York and San Francisco were there professional troupes performing traditional music-based theatre. ASIDE. 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 theatre, but by around 1900 was generally regarded as a creaky artifice reminiscent of old-fashioned melodrama. %UGENE/.EILL’s 1928 play Strange Interlude used a variation of the aside with the actors speaking their thoughts alongside their actual dialogue. ASSOCIATED ACTORS AND ARTISTES OF AMERICA (AAAA). 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 !CTORS’ %QUITY !SSOCIATION, 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 MANAGE MENT and supported Actors’ Equity in its strike in 1919. ATKINSON, BROOKS (1894–1984).† 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

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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 "ROADWAY 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 0ULITZER0RIZE in 1947 for his writings on the Soviet Union. In 1960, New York’s old Mansfield Theatre was renamed the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. ATTRACTION. Because of the great variety of entertainments on the ROAD from the 1870s to the 1910s, theatre MANAGERS used the umbrella term “attractions” to cover all kinds of bookings: legitimate plays, operas, MUSICAL revues and burlesques, lectures, minstrel shows. See also AMUSEMENTS. ATWILL, LIONEL (1885–1946). Born in Croyden, England, Lionel Atwill gained significant ACTING experience in provincial theatres before TOURING the United States in the company of Lillie Langtry. He debuted on "ROADWAY, DIRECTING himself in The Lodger (1917), which was well-received. His next few endeavors failed until he appeared opposite !LLA .AZIMOVA in a series of (ENRIK )BSEN’s plays produced by !RTHUR (OPKINS, 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 19th-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 (ELEN(AYES in 'EORGE"ERNARD3HAW’s Caesar and Cleopatra (1925). Later, he went to Hollywood and became a venerable character actor in over 75 MOTIONPICTURES. AUCTIONEER, THE. 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,

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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 MOTIONPICTURE version. AUDITORIUM THEATER. “The greatest room for music and opera in the world—bar none” was Frank Lloyd Wright’s assessment of Chicago’s 4,200-seat theatre. Designed by Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler in 1886, the Auditorium remains one of the most acoustically perfect theatres 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. The cornerstone was laid in October 1887 by President Grover Cleveland, 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 theatre closed in 1941, then reopened as a recreation center for servicemen during World 7AR 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 theatre stood empty. In the 1960s, Beatrice T. Spachner spearheaded a drive to restore the Auditorium Theater. It reopened in 1967, yet restoration work continued for two decades. AUSTIN, MARY HUNTER (1868–1934). Mary Hunter was born in Carlinville, Illinois, and moved with her family to California in 1888.

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BABY MINE

She had begun writing and teaching before she married Stafford Wallace Austin in 1890. Apart from her 1911 play The Arrow Maker, she wrote novels and nonfiction books on the environment.

n"n BABY MINE. Margaret Mayo’s farce opened on 23 August 1910, ran for 287 performances at Daly’s Theatre in New York, had as many as six ROAD companies at once, and was translated into several languages. William A. Brady PRODUCED the play with a cast that included Marguerite Clark, Ernest Glendenning, Humphrey Bogart,* and Fatty Arbuckle. Zoie is a childishly wheedling wife whose businessman husband Alfred leaves her to make his own life in another city. Her friend suggests that she lure him back by adopting a baby and letting Alfred believe it is his. On the evening of Alfred’s return, Zoie and her friends circulate as many as three newborn babies while the complications multiply. The play’s popularity was manifested in “Baby Mine” dolls, hats, and cocktails as well as a Hippodrome elephant named “Baby Mine.” BACON, FRANK (1860–1922). Born in Marysville, California, Bacon worked on a sheep ranch from the age of 14. He drifted successively into photography, soliciting newspaper ADVERTISING, reporting, publishing, and ACTING. During his 17 years as a STOCK company actor at San Francisco’s Alcazar Theatre, Bacon played over 700 roles. The 1906 earthquake motivated him to try New York, where he performed in Stop Thief (1912), The Miracle Man and Second Thoughts on First Nights in 1914, and The Cinderella Man (1916). Bacon was over 50 when he created the role with which he became identified: Lightnin’ Bill Jones in his own play Lightnin’. Bacon had been working on the script off and on from the 1880s. After a recordbreaking long run at New York’s Gayety Theatre from 1918 to 1921, Bacon TOURED the play, performing it over 2,000 times before his death from overwork in Chicago. BAD MAN, THE. Porter Emerson Browne’s COMEDY set on a ranch near the Mexican border opened on 30 August 1920, ran for 320 performances at the Comedy Theatre, and earned a 0ULITZER0RIZE

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nomination. The title character, Pancho Lopez, is a bandit who robs a bank to save the ranch and protect a good woman from a truly bad guy. Then he heads back to Mexico, asking only that the future baby be named Pancho. BAINBRIDGE, A. G. (1885–1936). Alexander Gilbert (“Buzz”) Bainbridge was born in Pittsburgh. At 17, he was hired as a bill poster for Sells-Forepaugh Brothers #IRCUS and quickly rose to be advance agent. From 1905 to 1911, he was a press agent for Barnum and Bailey Circus. He spent the circus’s winter layoffs in Chicago as general MANAGER for E. J. Carpenter’s theatre enterprises. After gaining managerial experience with Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Wild West Show, Buzz Bainbridge settled in Minneapolis to run a STOCK company with Willard Mack. For the 3HUBERTS, he oversaw construction of their theatres in Minneapolis and St. Paul and served as an advance agent for Shubert attractions. Bainbridge served in France during World 7AR I as a first lieutenant in field artillery. For 20 years, he ran his own stock company with his wife Marie Gale as leading lady. Elected mayor of Minneapolis in 1933, he served a two-year term. BAINTER, FAY (1891–1968).† Born in Los Angeles, California, where she began ACTING in CHILDHOOD, Fay Bainter made her first New York stage appearance in The Rose of Panama (1912), a MUSI CAL. She also appeared in The Bridal Path (1913) and TOURED with Minnie Maddern Fiske in Mrs. Bumpstead-Leigh (1914) before achieving her first important successes in Arms and the Girl (1916) and The Willow Tree (1917). Although most of Bainter’s later career would be as a versatile character actress in all genres on stage and in MOTIONPICTURES, she often appeared in musicals and operettas such as The Kiss Burglar (1918) and The Dream Girl (1924). Bainter attained STARDOM as the hoyden Ming Toy in the COMEDY East Is West (1918). She had a very active period in the 1920s in a variety of contemporary and classical roles, including The Enemy (1925), The Two Orphans (a 1926 revival), Noël Coward’s Fallen Angels (1927), She Stoops to Conquer (1928), The Beaux’ Stratagem (1928), Lysistrata (1930), and The Admirable Crichton (1931). Bainter made periodic returns to "ROADWAY throughout the remainder of her career, but she acted more frequently in films after the dawn of the sound era.

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BAKER, GEORGE PIERCE (1866–1935). A native of Providence, Rhode Island, George Pierce Baker studied literature at Harvard University. He graduated in 1887, returning to the ACADEMIC life there in 1905 to teach. Baker sponsored the Harvard Dramatic Club from its founding in 1908 and established his 47 Workshop for aspiring dramatists in his English 47 course, many of whom became the most significant playwrights of the first half of the 20th century, including %UGENE /.EILL, 3IDNEY (OWARD, Edward Sheldon, and 0HILIP"ARRY. In 1925, Baker left Harvard for Yale University to chair its drama department and teach theatre history, as well as DIRECT plays for the university theatre. He retired in 1933. Baker helped establish the National Theatre Conference in 1927 and served as its first president in 1932. As a scholar, Baker published several important works, including The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist (1907), Some Unpublished Correspondence of David Garrick (1907), Dramatic Technique (1919), and Modern American Plays (1920). BALDERSTON, JOHN L. (1889–1954). The Philadelphia-born writer spent most of his early career in journalism, including positions as WAR correspondent for the Philadelphia Record during World WAR I, editor for the Outlook (London, 1921–1923), and London correspondent to the New York World (1923–1931). His best-known plays were Berkeley Square (1926) and Dracula (1927), the latter becoming a perennial in the American dramatic REPERTORY. During the latter part of his career, he wrote for MOTIONPICTURES. BANDMANN, DANIEL E. (1840–1905). Born in Cassel, Hesse, Germany, Bandmann came to New York and performed in the German-language theatre in the 1860s. Later he formed a company and barnstormed throughout the western United States, gaining a reputation as a pioneer. Lewis C. Strang described him in an essay on Julia Arthur (1899, 165) as “an eccentric German tragedian, who probably played Shakespeare in more outlandish places than any actor that ever lived.” At the end of his life, he settled on a ranch near Missoula, Montana, where the university’s players eventually honored his memory by establishing the annual Daniel E. Bandmann Achievement Award for Outstanding Success in All Phases of Theatre [awarded to one of the authors of this book in 1962]. Band-

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mann’s memoir An Actor’s Tour; or, 70,000 Miles with Shakespeare was published in 1886. BANKHEAD, TALLULAH (1903–1968).† This deep-voiced, drawling Huntsville, Alabama, native became an icon of the tempestuous, flamboyant ACTRESS, but she often transcended this image as a dominant figure of the popular theatre. If not the greatest actress of her age, Bankhead was undoubtedly one of its most fascinating, publicized for both her onstage brilliance and her offstage antics. She debuted in Squab Farm (1918), but spent much of her early career replacing the original STARS of 39 East (1919), Footloose (1920), Danger (1921), and Her Temporary Husband (1922). Bankhead attracted attention when she originated roles in 2ACHEL #ROTHERS’s Nice People (1921) and Martin Brown’s The Exciters (1922). Unable to rise above secondary status, she moved to London and for over a decade dazzled English audiences, beginning with The Dancers (1923). Returning to "ROADWAY with the cachet of her London triumphs, Bankhead created a range of memorable roles, the finest of which were her definitive characterization of the avaricious Regina Giddens in Lillian Hellman’s* drama The Little Foxes* (1939) and her romp as the saucy Sabina Fairweather in Thornton Wilder’s* The Skin of Our Teeth* (1942), a role that brought Bankhead the Best Actress award from the New York Drama Critics Circle.* BARBARA FRIETCHIE. Clyde Fitch’s historical romance deals with the Civil 7AR episode known to all Americans from John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem of the same title. 0RODUCED by Charles Frohman, the play opened on 23 October 1899 at the Criterion Theatre and ran for 83 performances. Barbara Frietchie, unlike Whittier’s poem, creates romantic interest for Barbara (played by Julia Marlowe), who is torn between her family’s Southern sympathies and her love for a Union officer. It is the death of her beloved that impels Barbara to fly the Stars and Stripes from her balcony, and despite Stonewall Jackson’s famous command, she is shot and joins her love in death. It became the basis for the 1927 operetta My Maryland. BARNABEE, HENRY CLAY (1833–1917). Sometimes called “the dean of the comic opera stage,” Barnabee began his career in 1866 as Toby Winkle in All That Glitters Is Not Gold at the Boston Museum

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and won his greatest renown in Robin Hood as the Sheriff of Nottingham, a role he played nearly 1,900 times. He estimated that he had sung “The Cork Leg” 5,000 times. Barnabee was also a proprietor of the celebrated Bostonians, the leading TOURING company for light opera. It was Barnabee who gave Alice Nielsen her big break, when he hired her for the Bostonians. BARNABY. !CTORS who noticed that a fellow performer was dominated by his wife would refer to him as Barnaby. Judge Horton adds that it was Barnaby’s lot to “jump through,” a term that probably derived from animals trained to jump through hoops at the behest of their master. BARNES, DJUNA (1892–1982). Born in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, Djuna Chappell Barnes became best known as a novelist. Early in her career, however, she was an ACTRESS and PLAYWRIGHT. The Provincetown Players PRODUCED three of her one-acts in 1919: Three from the Earth, Kurzy of the Sea, and An Irish Triangle. Another one-act, She Tells Her Daughter, was published in Smart Set (November 1923). Barnes was an original member of the 4HEATRE 'UILD. BARNES, MARGARET AYER (1886–1967). Margaret Ayer was born in Chicago. In 1925, needing something to do while recovering from an automobile accident in France, she began writing her novels and short stories. Her two plays, Jenny (1929) and Dishonored Lady* (1930), were written with Edward Sheldon, who had then been immobilized by paralysis. Barnes also dramatized Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence (1928), and won the 1931 0ULITZER0RIZE for her novel Years of Grace. BARNSTORMERS. !CTORS who traveled in areas where there were no established theatres had to perform in found spaces like hotel dining rooms, dance halls, warehouses, and barns. Barnstormers, according to Bernheim (1964, 11), were distinguished by “their lack of association with a specific theatre.” The term “barnstormer” was sometimes applied to overacting performers given to crude and elaborate gestures (also known as “hams”), presumably the sort of acting popular with provincial audiences.

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BARRATT, WATSON (1884–1962). During his 50-year career as a SCENEDESIGNER, Barratt designed more than 1,000 productions. He was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and began his artistic career as a magazine illustrator. From 1932 to 1934 and again in the 1940s, Barratt was art DIRECTOR for the St. Louis Municipal Opera. His "ROAD WAY design credits began in 1917 and continued with major 3HUBERT productions, including Bombo (1921) and The Student Prince (1924). He also dabbled in COSTUME and LIGHTING design as well as directing and PRODUCING. Shortly before his death, he directed the revival of Brigadoon at the New York City Center. See also SCENERY. BARRETT, LAWRENCE (1838–1891). Barrett was born in Paterson, New Jersey, and worked his way through an apprenticeship at Detroit’s Metropolitan Theatre to an ACTING debut there in 1853. His New York debut came in 1857 and he quickly moved into leading man roles. After serving in the Union army during the Civil 7AR, he resumed his acting career with an emphasis on 3HAKESPEAREAN roles: Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Shylock. Slight of build with sunken eyes and a reserved manner, Barrett hardly seemed equipped for the great tragic roles. Yet he was capable of unleashing a burst of passion for dramatic effect. His approach to acting could be seen as intellectualized or coldly calculated, yet his status as a STAR was never questioned. By all accounts, his great role was Cassius in Julius Caesar. After two decades of TOURING as a star, he joined forces with Edwin Booth for two seasons, 1887–1889, serving as tour manager while performing opposite Booth. William S. Hart, a member of the company on Barrett’s 1889 Ganelon tour, recalled in his memoir that “his voice sometimes was a peculiar whine. But, oh, the moving quality! It seemed as though a breaking heart was in it!” See also JAMES, LOUIS. BARRIE, SIR JAMES M. (1860–1937). Although born in Scotland and associated with the London theatre, Barrie wrote plays that joined the standard American repertoire, several of them becoming vehicles for the beloved Maude Adams. Among his most popular plays on the American stage were The Little Minister (1897), Quality Street (1902), The Admirable Crichton (1902), Peter Pan (1904), and What Every Woman Knows (1908). See also FOREIGNPLAYSADAPTED TOTHE!MERICANSTAGE; PLAYWRIGHTS.

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BARRY, PHILIP (1896–1949).† Son of prosperous Irish American parents from Philadelphia, Philip Jerome Quinn Barry was a sickly child who filled his lonely days with books. He entered Yale University in 1914 and made an impression by his literary activities. Rejected for military service at the time of America’s entry into World 7AR I, Barry instead worked for the State Department in London. He continued his education at Yale after the war and began to write plays before enrolling in George Pierce Baker’s PLAYWRITING class at Harvard. Barry had an initial success with You and I (1923), originally titled The Jilts, a work that established his style of mixing sophisticated, witty COMEDY with astringent social commentary. Barry’s lasting contribution stems from this combination, a formula permitting him to create a 20th-century American equivalent to British COMEDY of manners. Many of his plays feature the “Barry girl,” seen most vividly in Tracy Lord of The Philadelphia Story* (1939). The “Barry girl,” personified by Hope Williams on stage and Katharine Hepburn* on both stage and screen, is typically a pampered, headstrong young woman who both profits from and rejects the social expectations of wealth and privilege. The Philadelphia Story has proven the most durable of Barry’s dramatic accomplishments, a frequently revived work that provided the source for the MGM MUSICAL MOTION PICTURE High Society (1956), with music and lyrics by Cole Porter. Among Barry’s other pre–World War II plays, Holiday (1928) and The Animal Kingdom* (1932) were particularly well-received and became popular films. His dramatic output prior to 1930 includes In a Garden (1925), White Wings (1926), Paris Bound (1927), Cock Robin (1928; coauthored by %LMER 2ICE), and Hotel Universe* (1930). Barry’s brand of high comedy declined after World War II, but he remains the singular proponent of sparkling, sophisticated, socially conscious "ROADWAY comedy. See also COMEDY; PLAYWRIGHTS. BARRYMORE, ETHEL (1879–1959).† Born in Philadelphia to AC TORS Maurice Barrymore and Georgiana Drew, Ethel Barrymore, along with her brothers John and Lionel, went on the stage at an early age, appearing with her grandmother Mrs. John Drew in The Rivals, after which she played opposite William Gillette in Secret Service and with Henry Irving’s company at the Lyceum Theatre in London. Barrymore’s 1901 New York debut in Clyde Fitch’s

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COMEDY Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines made her a major STAR. Her career on stage and in MOTION PICTURES extended over more than 50 years. She was considered a great beauty, and Winston Churchill famously proposed marriage to her. Barrymore mellowed into a versatile character actress, capable of moving easily from comedy to drama and from classics to contemporary works. Her regal appearance and impressive voice helped make her a favorite of CRITICS. Under Charles Frohman’s MANAGE MENT in her earliest years, she acted in both England and America in mainstream popular plays written for her, including J. M. Barrie’s Alice-Sit-By-the-Fire (1905), John Galsworthy’s The Silver Box (1907), W. Somerset Maugham’s Lady Frederick (1908), George V. Hobart and %DNA&ERBER’s Our Mrs. McChesney (1915), as well as important modernist dramas including (ENRIK )BSEN’s A Doll’s House (1905). Barrymore also appeared in short plays in vaudeville, notably in Barrie’s The Twelve-Pound Look. In 1917, Barrymore scored a success with her favorite role, Marguerite Gautier, in Edward Sheldon’s adaptation of The Lady of the Camellias (1917), and followed this with a triumph in :ÚE!KINS’s Déclassée (1919), but she failed in her attempt at 3HAKESPEARE’s Juliet in 1922. Barrymore had better luck as Ophelia and Portia, both in 1925, as well as in a revival of The Second Mrs. Tangueray (1924). Two attempts at playing Lady Teazle in The School for Scandal (1923 and 1931) won her good reviews and short runs. Then Barrymore gave one of her most critically acclaimed performances, as Constance Middleton in Maugham’s The Constant Wife (1926). In her next vehicle, Gregorio Martinez Sierra’s The Kingdom of God (1928), translated by Harley Granville-Barker, she played a nun at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, named in her honor during the play’s run. When sound films arrived, Barrymore, who had appeared in a dozen silent movies, began to act with greater frequency on screen. She made several notable films, appearing for the only time with both of her brothers in Rasputin and the Empress (1932) and winning a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for None but the Lonely Heart (1944). She returned to "ROADWAY in Whiteoaks (1938), a modest success. Critics regarded her performance as a devoted Welsh schoolmistress in Emlyn Williams’s The Corn Is Green* (1940) as her greatest. Barrymore’s last Broadway appearance in Embezzled Heaven (1944) was only a modest success. She appeared in The

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Joyous Season on tour in 1945 before retiring permanently from the stage, although she continued to act in films into the mid-1950s. BARRYMORE, GEORGIANA DREW (1856–1893). The daughter of John and Louisa Lane (Mrs. John) Drew, Georgiana Drew spent her formative years as an ACTRESS at her mother’s Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia. When she made her New York debut at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in 1876 in Arnold Daly’s Pique, she coSTARRED with Maurice Barrymore and married him later that year. Admired for her charm in COMEDY roles, she played opposite William H. Crane in The Senator (1889) and appeared with Frohman’s Comedians in Mr. Wilkinson’s Widows (1891), Settled out of Court (1892), and The Sportsman (1893). Barrymore also acted in her husband’s play, Nadjezda (1884), and appeared in Jack (1887), Balloon (1890), and The Woman of the World (1890). Her early death ended a promising career, but she gave birth to three dynamic stage personalities of the next generation, Lionel, %THEL, and John Barrymore. BARRYMORE, JOHN (1882–1942). The most mercurial and perhaps the most talented of the Drew-Barrymore theatrical dynasty, John Barrymore, son of Maurice and Georgiana Drew Barrymore, was born in Philadelphia. Like his siblings, %THEL and Lionel Barrymore, he resisted going on the stage, working for a time as a newspaper illustrator in hopes of becoming a serious artist. He finally gave in to the family business, beginning as a light comedian of virile good looks in generally superficial plays. Barrymore’s debut in Chicago in Magda and in New York in Glad of It, both in 1903, were in innocuous vehicles, but a series of supporting roles in The Dictator (1904), Yvette (1904), Sunday (1905), Alice Sit-by-the-Fire (1905), and Miss Civilization (1906) led to larger roles in The Boys of Company B (1907), Toddles (1908), A Stubborn Cinderella (1909), and The Fortune Hunter (1909), which was a long-running hit. #RITICS began to take notice of Barrymore with his performance in The Affairs of Anatol (1912), followed by The Yellow Ticket and Kick In, both in 1914, but he expended much of his energy on drinking and countless love affairs. Barrymore won acclaim and STARDOM in more demanding roles beginning with John Galsworthy’s Justice (1916) and Leo Tolstoy’s Redemption (1918), and in two plays in which he costarred with his

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brother, Lionel: Peter Ibbetson (1917) and The Jest (1919), for which they both won plaudits. In the early 1920s, Barrymore became a star in silent MOTIONPICTURES, appearing in such classics as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), Beau Brummel (1924), The Sea Beast (1926), and Don Juan (1926). His most important stage achievements in this era came in 3HAKESPEARE when he performed in two !RTHUR(OP KINS productions with SCENE DESIGNS by 2OBERT %DMOND *ONES: Richard III (1920) and Hamlet (1922). In the latter, he played 101 consecutive performances, one more than Edwin Booth’s record of 100 performances. These modernist productions featured Jones’s stylized designs enhanced by Barrymore’s poetic and emotionally intellectual ACTING. Although he was hailed as the greatest stage actor of his age, he turned almost exclusively to screen work after the mid-1920s. With the dawn of sound films, Barrymore’s screen fame grew even greater and he acted with distinction in many movies in the early 1930s, including Svengali (1931), Grand Hotel (1932), Dinner at Eight* (1933), Counsellor-at-Law* (1933), and Twentieth Century* (1934), but his persistent carousing took a toll. He made a final "ROADWAY appearance in an unworthy vehicle, My Dear Children (1940), in which he parodied himself, although in one scene he deeply moved critics when, while playing a ham actor, he delivered one of Hamlet’s soliloquies with flashes of the brilliance he had demonstrated nearly 20 years before. BARRYMORE, LIONEL (1878–1954). The oldest son of Maurice and Georgiana Drew Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore was born in Philadelphia. He apprenticed at the Arch Street Theatre, under the MANAGEMENT of his grandmother, Mrs. John Drew, and appeared with her in The Rivals and The Road to Ruin. In roles of varying size, Barrymore ACTED in The Bachelor’s Baby (1895), Mary Pennington, Spinster (1896), Squire Kate (1896), Cumberland ’61 (1897), Uncle Dick (1898), and Honorable John Grigsby (1898). After a small role in James A. Herne’s Sag Harbor (1900), Barrymore played an Italian organ grinder opposite his uncle, John Drew. In The Mummy and the Humming Bird (1902), he established himself as a master of richly drawn character roles. Augustus Thomas wrote a substantial part for Barrymore in The Other Girl (1903), followed by the title role in J. M. Barrie’s one-act Pantaloon (1905). In 1906, he left the stage to live in France with his first wife, Doris Rankin.

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Like his brother John, Lionel Barrymore preferred to pursue an interest in painting, but within a few years he returned to the United States and again took up his acting career in films, beginning in 1912, and on the "ROADWAY stage, scoring notable successes in The Copperhead (1917), and coSTARRING with his brother in Peter Ibbetson (1917) and The Jest (1919). These were followed by solo successes in The Claw (1921) and Laugh, Clown, Laugh! (1923), but when he attempted Macbeth in 1921, PRODUCED by !RTHUR (OPKINS with SCENEDESIGNS by 2OBERT%DMOND*ONES, he was not well-received. Barrymore’s few remaining stage appearances—in The Piker (1925), Taps (1925), and Man or Devil (1925)—could not save those plays, so he turned exclusively to films, acting in almost 200 and winning an Academy Award for A Free Soul (1931). Much of his later career was spent in a wheelchair as the result of arthritis and a fall on a movie set, although this did not prevent him from giving strong performances as crusty Dr. Gillespie in the 1940s Dr. Kildare film series and in such screen classics as Grand Hotel (1932), Dinner at Eight* (1933), Treasure Island (1934), Camille (1936), Captains Courageous (1937), On Borrowed Time* (1939), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), A Duel in the Sun (1946), and Key Largo* (1948), among others. BARRYMORE, MAURICE (1847–1905). Born in Fort Agra, India, Herbert Blyth, who changed his name to Maurice Barrymore when he left Oxford University to go on the stage, became the AMATEUR middleweight boxing champion of England before his 1872 stage debut at the Theatre Royal, Windsor. After serving an apprenticeship for three years on provincial English stages, Barrymore emigrated to the United States, appearing for several MANAGEMENTS, including those of Augustin Daly, Lester Wallack, and A. M. Palmer, where his good looks and witty charm made him an audience favorite. His American debut in Boston in Under the Gaslight* established him, after which he replaced John Drew in The Big Bonanza and appeared with his future wife, Georgiana Drew, in Pique (1875). Barrymore’s most noted stage successes were in 3HAKESPEARE opposite Helena Modjeska, beginning in 1882, and in Alabama and Captain Swift, both in 1888. The latter was a significant popular success that Barrymore failed to fully exploit, as was the case with the eight plays that he wrote, including Nadjezda (1884), The Robber of the Rhine (1892), and Roaring Dick & Co. (1896). He unsuccessfully

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sued Victorien Sardou, claiming that the French PLAYWRIGHT plagiarized the plot of Nadjezda for Tosca. Barrymore appeared with Mrs. Leslie Carter in David Belasco’s The Heart of Maryland (1895), and was widely praised as Rawdon Crawley opposite Minnie Maddern Fiske in Becky Sharp (1899). He fathered Lionel, %THEL, and John Barrymore, among the most celebrated stage and MOTIONPIC TURE ACTORS of the first half of the 20th century. After his wife died in 1893, however, Barrymore’s profligate ways spun out of control, and his career was cut short when he died of paresis. BARTHOLOMAE, PHILIP H. (1880–1947). Born in Chicago, the PLAYWRIGHT-lyricist had his first "ROADWAY show, Over Night, PRODUCED by William A. Brady in 1911. Bartholomae formed a producing company to stage his plays, including Little Miss Brown (1912) with Madge Kennedy and When Dreams Come True (1913) with Joseph Santley. He also wrote the first edition of the Greenwich Village Follies (1919) and wrote MOTIONPICTURES during the latter part of his career. BARTON, RALPH (1891–1931). The talented artist grew up in Kansas City and saw his drawings regularly published in the Kansas City Star when he was in his teens; by 1909, he was a staff artist there while also drawing for the Kansas City Post. In 1912, he settled in New York, quickly earning success as an artist for Puck, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and other leading publications. Regarded as a dandy, he enjoyed considerable celebrity among theatre people. He caricatured virtually all the stage STARS of the 1920s, and his reputation remained preeminent in the field until superseded by Al Hirschfeld’s* theatrical caricatures. Barton developed close friendships with Charlie Chaplin, 0AUL 2OBESON, and many others. He was married to Carlotta Monterey before she left him for %UGENE /.EILL. Barton was manic-depressive and committed suicide. BAT, THE. This COMEDY thriller by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood was based upon a 1908 story titled “The Circular Staircase.” It opened on 23 August 1920 at the Morosco Theatre and ran an amazing 878 performances, starring May Vokes and Effie Ellsler as a maid and her employer contending with odd events in a country house.

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BATES, BLANCHE (1873–1941). Born in 1872 to the MANAGER and leading ACTOR of the Oro Fino Theatre in Portland, Oregon, Blanche Bates enjoyed three decades of STARDOM. Performing a one-act play for a benefit in San Francisco ignited her interest in acting, and in 1894 she joined T. D. Frawley’s STOCK company as a utility actress. After a season of TOURING the west, she joined Augustin Daly’s company in 1894, making her New York debut as Bianca in support of Ada Rehan in The Taming of the Shrew. In 1899, she played Hannah in The Children of the Ghetto and opposite James O’Neill in The Musketeers. Under David Belasco’s management, she starred in Madame Butterfly (1900), The Darling of the Gods (1902), and the role for which she was most remembered, the title role in The Girl of the Golden West (1905). BEAU BRUMMEL. The first major success for PLAYWRIGHT Clyde Fitch, this four-act drama STARRING Richard Mansfield opened on 19 May 1890 at the Madison Square Theatre for 150 performances. Popinjay Beau Brummel, an irresponsible hedonist served by a loyal valet, attempts to restore his sagging financial fortunes by marrying Mariana Vincent, daughter of a London businessman, unaware that his nephew, Reginald, is also courting Mariana. Brummel insults the Prince of Wales and is publicly humiliated when the prince returns a peace offering. Brummel learns of the relationship between Mariana and Reginald and, to save his pride, leaves London for Paris, where he is discovered years later in poverty-stricken old age with only his valet for comfort. In an eerie scene, the old man entertains imaginary guests at supper. #RITICS and scholars have accounted this as Mansfield’s greatest triumph as an ACTOR. It remained in his repertoire for the remainder of his career, with no less than five New York revivals and TOURS between 1899 and 1907. Arnold Daly revived it in order to play Brummel in 1916. BEAUCAIRE. Collaborating with Evelyn Greeleaf Sutherland, Booth Tarkington transformed his story Monsieur Beaucaire into a five-act COMEDY PRODUCED by the 3HUBERTS as a vehicle for Richard Mansfield. It opened on 2 December 1901 for 64 performances at the Herald Square Theatre. A mild satire on social position and class, Beaucaire focuses on the Duc d’Orleans, who lives incognito in Bath, England, as a humble barber, Monsieur Beaucaire, following

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his hasty departure from France as a result of his many adventures. Catching the Duke of Winterset cheating at cards, Beaucaire blackmails the Duke into introducing him into society in the guise of a French gentleman. Beaucaire initially charms the social denizens, but he is brutally rejected when they discover that he is merely a barber. When Beaucaire returns in his real guise, he charmingly puts the social butterflies in their place and wins the hand of Lady Mary Carlisle, whom he previously courted. Mansfield was acclaimed in the role and it remained in his repertoire for the rest of his career, including a major New York revival in 1904. Another revival, in 1912, was produced by and STARRED Lewis Waller. The play was subsequently adapted into an operetta by André Messager and a 1924 MOTIONPICTURE titled Monsieur Beaucaire, starring Rudolph Valentino. Another film of the same name starred Bob Hope in 1946, but retains little of the Tarkington-Greenleaf play. BECK, MARTIN (1865–1940). The flamboyant PRODUCER emigrated from his native Austria and got his first job as a waiter in a Chicago beer garden, where he talked the proprietor into letting him stage a show. “Two Beers” Beck then formed an association with Morris Meyerfield in San Francisco and helped to build the chain of theatres that became the Orpheum Circuit; Beck was president from 1920 to 1923. Meanwhile, he built the Palace Theatre (1913) on "ROADWAY and so managed it that it became the mecca of vaudeville. After making his fortune in vaudeville, Beck turned to the legitimate theatre. He built the Martin Beck Theatre at 302 West 49th Street in New York; it opened on 11 November 1924 with Madame Pompadour. Beck was a shrewd and ruthless businessman as well as the subject of endless anecdotes for his often-eccentric behavior. BECKY SHARP. Based on William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair, Langdon Mitchell’s four-act play opened on 12 September 1899 at the Fifth Avenue Theatre for 116 performances STAR RING Minnie Maddern Fiske, Maurice Barrymore, and Tyrone Power, despite attempts by the Theatrical Syndicate to prevent its opening. Syndicate honchos were angered that Mrs. Fiske and her husband, PRODUCER Harrison Grey Fiske, were attempting to break the Syndicate’s monopoly. Mrs. Fiske played unscrupulous social climber Becky Sharp, who rises from poverty to high society

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via a secret marriage to Rawdon Crawley, although she also accepts financial aid from the Marquis of Steyne. When the two men learn of her deception, she manages to retain her social position by charming two other gentlemen. Mrs. Fiske, who had one of her greatest successes in Becky Sharp, revived the play in New York in 1904 and 1911, and frequently performed it on TOUR. She also appeared in a 1915 silent MOTIONPICTURE version called Vanity Fair, and under its original title Mitchell’s play was one of the first all-color feature films in 1935. Remakes and television* productions have abounded and Becky Sharp was frequently revived on stages, including a short-lived 1929 production by The Players, DIRECTED by $UDLEY $IGGES. BEECHER, JANET (1884–1955).† Born Janet Meysenburg in Jefferson City, Missouri, Janet Beecher was raised in Chicago and studied there and in New York before her first stage appearance in a bit role in 1903. In 1904, she scored a hit in The Education of Mr. Pipp, and the show ran for two years. She subsequently appeared in numerous plays, including The Lottery Man (1909), The Concert (1910), Fair and Warmer (1915), A Bill of Divorcement (1921), and Courage (1928), but her greatest successes were in COMEDIES. After 1930, Beecher played character roles in MOTIONPICTURES, but returned to the stage for John P. Marquand and 'EORGE3+AUFMAN’s The Late George Apley* (1944). BEGGAR ON HORSEBACK. 'EORGE3+AUFMAN and -ARC#ON NELLY mixed elements of European expressionism with middleAmerican COMEDY at the behest of PRODUCER Winthrop Ames, who gave them a German play, Paul Apel’s Hans Sonnenstösser’s Höllenfahrt, to adapt. Kaufman and Connelly tried, but instead Beggar on Horseback emerged as a wholly original work when it opened at the Broadhurst Theatre, under Ames’s MANAGEMENT, on 12 February 1924 for a 224-performance run. The central consciousness is that of aspiring composer Neil McRae, who cannot get his music performed and survives by doing orchestrations for others. Neil’s kindly neighbor, Dr. Albert Rice, and Cynthia Mason, who has feelings for Neil, try to help as he contends with the manipulative Gladys Cady, daughter of a wealthy widget manufacturer, who is hell-bent to marry him, but only if he makes a

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million dollars as a songwriter. Neil, a nervous wreck, takes a sleeping pill and dreams that he marries Gladys (who carries a bouquet made of currency at the ceremony), that they live in a mansion with a huge staff, and that Gladys’s grasping family demand that he fill out a requisition for a pencil with which to write a song. He finally cracks and murders his in-laws. At his trial, the judge reprimands him for daring to use his imagination. Neil is sentenced to work in an art factory, producing fake masterpieces. Awakened from his nightmare, Neil determines to marry the sweet-natured Cynthia instead of Gladys. A 1925 MOTION PICTURE version STARRED Edward Everett Horton. Beggar on Horseback was given a major revival in 1970 at the Lincoln Center.* BEL GEDDES, NORMAN.† See 'EDDES .ORMAN"EL. BEHOLD THE BRIDEGROOM. 'EORGE +ELLY’s 1927 drama opened on 26 December and ran for 88 performances at the Cort Theatre. Antoinette Lyle, a wealthy, high-living young woman played by Judith Anderson,* begins to have second thoughts about her wanton ways when she meets a sensitive young man who intrigues her. By the time they meet again, she has fallen seriously ill. The ending is ambiguous. BEHRMAN, S. N. (1893–1973).† Samuel Nathaniel Behrman was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, and studied PLAYWRITING under George Pierce Baker at Harvard University. Between 1927 and 1964, he had a steady stream of drawing-room COMEDIES with an edge of social criticism PRODUCED on "ROADWAY, including The Second Man (1927), Meteor (1929), Biography* (1932), and No Time for Comedy* (1939). BELASCO, DAVID (1853–1931). Born David Valasco in San Francisco, he learned theatre as a CHILD, frequenting Maguire’s and other theatres there. When the STARS TOURED to San Francisco, young Belasco would find a spot in the company, and thus at age 11 he played the Duke of York to Charles Kean’s Richard III, followed by stints with Edwin Booth, John McCullough, and other notables. He moved up from call-boy to prompter to assistant stage MAN AGER, while performing at every opportunity, including imitations

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of the stars before audiences of gold miners. However, two PLAY WRIGHTS—Dion Boucicault and James A. Herne—gave Belasco his breakthrough opportunities. With Herne, Belasco coauthored Hearts of Oak (1880) and DIRECTED it, which led to his move to New York in 1882. Belasco became stage manager and resident dramatist of the Madison Square Theatre for a time in 1882. Two years later, he took over similar duties at Daniel Frohman’s Lyceum Theatre, where he directed and collaborated on writing as many as 35 plays before his first solo success, May Blossom (1884). Between the 1880s and the 1920s, Belasco was recognized as one of the most influential and prolific PRODUCERS, directors, and playwrights of the American stage. He relished being dubbed the “Bishop of "ROADWAY” (due, in part, to his habit of wearing clerical garb). Known for flashes of temperament, Belasco frequently threw his watch to the ground and crushed it to make a point, but associates later revealed that he kept a stock of inexpensive watches for this purpose. 'EORGE!BBOTT ACTED in Belasco’s production of Daddies and recalled the watch gambit in his memoir “Mister Abbott” (1963, 95). Abbott commented further that Belasco “had developed most of the great female stars of the previous decade. He had created a legend about himself; to work under Belasco was the ambition of any actor, and for someone like me, who aspired to direct and to write, it was a stroke of good fortune beyond any hopes” (93). Belasco was both admired and criticized for the ultraREALISM of his productions, which, in one case, included brewing real coffee and making pancakes onstage for a restaurant scene. In 1907, Belasco built the Stuyvesant Theatre, later renamed the Belasco. He kept this and his other venue, the Republic Theatre, in continual operation. He continued producing plays until his retirement in 1930, but his influence waned after World 7AR I since the plays he wrote and produced were declining in popularity as a new generation of writers led by %UGENE/.EILL began to dominate American drama. Most of Belasco’s plays were collaborations with Henry C. DeMille, including The Wife (1887), Lord Chumley (1888), The Charity Ball (1889), and Men and Women (1890). In 1888, Belasco directed Sophocles’ Electra for the !MERICAN!CADEMY OF $RAMATIC !RTS, noted for its trailblazing use of a simple, stark setting. He had a success with The Girl I Left Behind Me (1893), written in collaboration with Franklin Fyles. With The Heart of

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Maryland (1895), he produced a long string of successful plays he wrote or coauthored (often with Charles Klein or John Luther Long), including Zaza (1899), Naughty Anthony (1900), Madame Butterfly (1900), Under Two Flags (1901), The Auctioneer (1901), Du Barry (1901), The Darling of the Gods (1902), Sweet Kitty Bellairs (1903), Adrea (1905), The Girl of the Golden West (1905), The Rose of the Rancho (1906), A Grand Army Man (1907), The Return of Peter Grimm (1911), The Governor’s Lady (1912), and The Son-Daughter (1919). Belasco also produced plays written by others, including The Music Master (1904), The Fighting Hope (1908), The Easiest Way (1909), The Woman (1911), The Boomerang (1915), Polly with a Past (1917), Tiger Rose (1917), Daddies (1918), and Lulu Belle (1926). BELASCO THEATRE. The well-established DIRECTOR-PRODUCER David Belasco built his signature theatre in 1907 at 111 West 44th Street in New York City. Designed by George Keister, it was named the Stuyvesant until 1910. The theatre opened on 16 October 1907 with A Grand Army Man starring David Warfield. Belasco maintained a penthouse apartment for himself in the theatre (hauntingly evoked in The New Yorker, 3 July 2006), as well as studio space where he could tinker with innovative LIGHTING equipment and the mechanics of stage effects. BELLEW, KYRLE (1855–1911). Harold Kyrle Bellew, son of a clergyman, ACTED in his native England, served in the Royal Navy, and made a fortune at gold mining in Australia before launching his American stage career in 1901. He performed opposite Eleanor Robson in A Gentleman of France in 1901, Romeo and Juliet in 1903, and She Stoops to Conquer in 1905. His attractive stage presence was well suited to COSTUME dramas, including swashbucklers, but his major roles also included suave contemporaries like the title characters in Raffles (1903) and The Thief (1907). See also FORD, HARRIET FRENCH. BEN-AMI, JACOB (1890–1977). Born in Minsk, Russia, as Jacob Shtchirin, Jacob Ben-Ami was one of the few STARS of Yiddish theatre to also find success on the English-speaking American stage. Before immigrating to the United States in 1912, Ben-Ami

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performed with the Hirshbein Theatre and the Vilna Troupe in Russia, after which he worked for the Fineman Art Theatre in London. In New York, Ben-Ami joined the Irving Place Theatre in 1918, but clashed with PRODUCER Maurice Schwartz over the quality of the works being staged. He brought a modernist view to the Yiddish theatre, seeking to abandon the star system and what he regarded as old-fashioned, mediocre works. Ben-Ami founded the Jewish Art Theatre, where he produced plays by Sholom Aleichem, Leo Tolstoy, and Gerhardt Hauptmann. "ROADWAY producer !RTHUR(OPKINS cast Ben-Ami in Samson and Delilah (1920). He appeared in %UGENE/.EILL’s Welded (1924), Evening Song* (1934), and The Tenth Man* (1959) before retiring in 1974. Ben-Ami was also a member of %VA,E'ALLIENNE’s #IVIC2EPERTORY4HEATRE, acting in The Cherry Orchard (1929), Romeo and Juliet (1930), The Green Cockatoo (1930), and Siegfried (1930), and winning particular plaudits from CRITICS as Trigorin in The Seagull (1929). He also worked with the 4HEATRE'UILD as an ACTOR and DIRECTOR, TOURED Africa and South America with Yiddish theatre productions, and founded several groups with the goals of promoting Jewish culture and production of Yiddish classics in translation. BENCHLEY, ROBERT C. (1889–1945). The wry humorist, CRITIC, and sometime ACTOR was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, and graduated from Harvard University in 1912. His journalistic career took him from the New York Tribune to the editorship of Vanity Fair, even as he wrote for numerous other publications. He was drama editor of Life (1920–1929) and The New Yorker (1929–1940) and made his acting debut when Irving Berlin asked him to read one of his humorous pieces in the Music Box Revue of 1923–1924. Thereafter, Benchley occasionally performed his work on stage, in MOTIONPIC TURE short subjects, and on radio. His books were humorous looks at his own travails as an ordinary man besieged by the trivial demands of daily life. BENEFIT. The practice of designating a specific performance as a benefit for a particular ACTOR has been traced back to Restoration England. In the 19th century, the benefit became part of the fabric of the theatre throughout Europe and the United States. When the

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MANAGER of a resident STOCK company allotted benefit evenings to certain company members, the date could be fixed well in advance, allowing the beneficiary to choose a work that would show herself to advantage and attract the fans who might even pay inflated prices as a manifestation of their respect. After deduction of the house share, the entire proceeds of a benefit performance went to the announced beneficiary. The terms of a benefit were often part of a performer’s original contract negotiations. Benefit performances in a resident stock company often occurred at the end of a season. While a leading actor/actress each got an individual benefit, other benefit evenings could be announced for several lesser actors collectively. Among TOURING companies of the latter half of the 19th century, a benefit might be announced for the end of an engagement, however short, before the troupe moved on to the next town. Occasionally a local group of male citizens would together tender a benefit to a performer who had captivated them. To tender a complimentary benefit, the locals might publish a card in the newspaper with the offer to pay all the expenses of a performance of a play on a date of the beneficiary’s choosing. For example, as the Breslaw Theatrical Company neared the end of its month-long run in Kansas City in June 1866, the Journal of Commerce published an open letter to Mrs. Breslaw, signed by 20 individuals, with a collective reference to “forty others,” offering—in appreciation for her qualities both as an actress and a lady—“a complimentary testimonial” at whatever time she might choose. Her graciously worded acceptance in the next day’s newspaper named the date and the play. Having the invitation and the response printed in the newspaper gave the transaction a legal basis and served to publicize the benefit. BEN-HUR. William Young’s dramatic adaptation of General Lew Wallace’s historical novel, Ben-Hur: A Life of the Christ, arrived at the Broadway Theatre at the height of a vogue for RELIGIOUS DRAMA. It opened on 29 November 1899 for 194 performances before becoming one of the most popular TOURING productions of the first decade of the 20th century. Staged with extraordinary spectacle (widely advertised as utilizing 120,000 square feet of SCENERY), including a climactic chariot race on treadmills, Ben-Hur recounts the conflict between the title character, a Jew, and his boyhood friend, Messala, a Roman officer. The episodic play follows their various

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encounters and near brushes with the life of Jesus Christ, who cures Ben-Hur’s mother and sister of leprosy. After defeating Messala in a chariot race, Ben-Hur is united with his love, Esther, and converts to Christianity. Numerous tours (often with considerably less spectacle) remained popular into the 1920s when a lavish 1925 MOTION PIC TURE version won vast audiences, as did the 1959 Academy Award– winning remake. BENNETT, RICHARD (1873–1944).† A native of Deacon’s Mills, Indiana, Richard Bennett began his long ACTING career in 1891 at Chicago’s Standard Theatre in The Limited Mail, before appearing in the same play at New York’s Niblo’s Gardens that year. After a decade of STOCK and TOURING shows, Bennett returned to New York and London in The Lion and the Mouse (1905) and The Hypocrites (1906). He coSTARRED with Maude Adams in the first American staging of J. M. Barrie’s What Every Woman Knows (1908), followed by Stop, Thief (1912), Damaged Goods (1913), and The Unknown Purple (1918), then played Rob Mayo in %UGENE/.EILL’s 0ULITZER0RIZE–winning drama Beyond the Horizon (1920). During the 1920s, Bennett, whose intellectual, graceful performances were praised by CRITICS, made notable appearances in The Hero (1921), He Who Gets Slapped (1922), The Dancers (1923), and as Tony in 3IDNEY (OWARD’s 0ULITZER 0RIZE–winning drama They Knew What They Wanted (1924). Following his 1928 performance in Jarnegan, he toured as Cyrano de Bergerac and acted occasionally in MOTIONPICTURES. Bennett, who fathered film actresses Joan and Constance Bennett, generated controversy through his public criticism of audiences and drama critics, demonstrating his frustration with what he regarded as too slow a progression away from romantic melodramatic plays toward the modernist works of O’Neill, Howard, and others. Bennett made his last stage appearance as Judge Gaunt in -AXWELL !NDERSON’s Winterset* (1935), a role he repeated on screen. BENRIMO, J. HARRY (1874–1942). The ACTOR, DIRECTOR, and PLAYWRIGHT was born in San Francisco and began acting in 1892 with the Alcazar Theatre’s STOCK company there, playing supporting roles to such STARS on TOUR as Helena Modjeska and James O’Neill. He made his New York debut in 1897 in The First Born. In

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PRODUCER Charles Frohman’s Empire Theatre company from 1898, he performed both in London and New York. He then appeared in several David Belasco productions, including The Rose of the Rancho (1906). After 1911, he gave up acting to write plays: The Yellow Jacket (1912, with George C. Hazelton) and The Willow Tree (1917, with Harrison Rhodes). BERGMAN’S STUDIO. Robert Bergman’s scene-painting studio was located on West 39th Street, across from the south side of the old Metropolitan Opera House. Bergman and his partner William Pennington ran the establishment most respected by top SCENEDESIGN ERS of the 1920s for those who wanted their sketches reproduced exactly. 2OBERT%DMOND*ONES kept a hideaway office there, and thus Bergman’s became a popular meeting place for designers. According to Claude Bragdon, who called it not only a place where scenery was painted, but “also a Republic of the Arts, a club, a salon” (1938, 203), it was frequented by .ORMAN"EL'EDDES, ,EE3IMONSON, *O -IELZINER, $ONALD/ENSLAGER, and James Reynolds, among others. If an artist wanted to see Jones, according to designer John Ezell, one had to get to the studio before four in the afternoon, because that was the hour of the “Bergman bath,” when all the paint water would be emptied onto the lower floor to drain, thus making the path to Jones’s upper-level drafting room inaccessible. Thus barricaded, the convivial designers could begin their drinking. Ezell adds that the mix of paint and water was actually sloshed over the scenery that had been meticulously painted that day as a way of glazing “the scenic surfaces with swirling, richly mottled, transparent washes of color. That is why the water and color were sometimes ankle deep and the floor was impassable until the scenery had dried—or the whiskey ran out—whichever came first.” Lee Simonson, whose book The Art of Scenic Design is dedicated to Bergman, wrote that “a setting painted in this way is astonishingly rich in texture and responds to the slightest variation in light” (1950, 40). BERKELEY SQUARE. John L. Balderston’s bittersweet fantasy of romance across the centuries was inspired by a Henry James tale, A Sense of the Past. ,ESLIE(OWARD played the American who travels back in time. The play opened on 4 November 1929 at the Lyceum Theatre in New York and ran for 227 performances.

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BERNARD, SAM (1863–1927). The popular comic ACTOR was born in Birmingham, England, and was brought to the United States by his parents when he was four. At 14, he began performing variety sketches. He performed “Dutch” dialect COMEDY in MUSICALS, including engagements with Weber and Fields. With the advent of vaudeville, Bernard found his niche, earning $1,000 per week as a single. In 1924, he helped to found the Jewish Theatrical Guild and became its vice president. BERNHARDT, SARAH (1844–1923). Undoubtedly the most celebrated ACTRESS in the world for much of her career, the “divine” French actress with the “golden voice” made nine American TOURS between 1880 and 1918. She docked in New York on 27 October 1880 for her first nationwide tour under the MANAGEMENT of Henry Abbey and Maurice Grau. The publicity had been phenomenal even before her arrival, with frequent news stories about her wardrobe, her skeletally thin silhouette, her frizzy red hair, her inscrutable French manners, her temper tantrums, and even some attempts to analyze her talent. Booking Bernhardt was initially regarded as financially risky for local theatre managers, as her tour managers asked $4,500 per performance, Bernhardt being personally guaranteed $1,500 per performance beyond expenses. However, her bookings quickly proved profitable and remained so, even after audiences discovered that they did not magically understand the French language in which Bernhardt and her company performed. Bernhardt’s subsequent American tours were in 1886–1887, 1891, 1896, 1900–1901, 1905–1906, 1910, 1912–1913, and 1916–1918. The last four were billed as her “farewell” tours of America. From 1905 also she often performed in unconventional venues—tents, skating rinks, sports arenas—in order avoid playing theatres controlled by the Theatrical Syndicate. For the last two tours, she was booked by PRODUCER Martin Beck on the Orpheum vaudeville circuit, supposedly as a means of giving popular-price audiences an opportunity to see her. In 1915, she had to have a leg amputated as a result of a fall some years earlier, yet she soldiered on, treading the boards with one wooden leg. Her actual farewell tour, in 1916–1918, got her out of war-torn Europe, and yet she did her part for the cause in that the one-act play she performed on the vaudeville bill was a patriotic piece titled From the Theatre to the Field of Honor. Un-

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doubtedly, Camille (The Lady of the Camelias) by Alexandre Dumas, fils, was her most popular play with American audiences, for the play had become familiar to them in English. But she usually brought several of her COSTUME melodramas. In 1901, when she toured with Constant Coquelin, she played a breeches role, the title character in Edmond Rostand’s L’Aiglon. BERNSTEIN, ALINE (1880? 1882?–1955). Born Aline Frankau in New York City, she enjoyed three decades as a designer of theatrical SCENERY and COSTUMES. Her costumes for Shakuntala, followed by sets and costumes for Little Clay Cart at the .EIGHBORHOOD0LAY HOUSE in 1924 marked her initial success, and she continued her association with the Lewisohn sisters even as she advanced to greater opportunities. She worked with .ORMAN"EL'EDDES on the lavish costuming for the American tour of -AX2EINHARDT’s The Miracle. In 1926, Bernstein became the first WOMAN admitted to the United Scenic Artists Union (then called Brotherhood of Painters, Decorators, and Paperhangers of the American Federation of Labor) and that year she joined %VA,E'ALLIENNE’s #IVIC2EPERTORY#OMPANY, designing numerous productions for that company (1926–1933) as well as for the 4HEATRE'UILD. She was a founder of the Museum of Costume Art, which later became a part of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. BERTHA, THE SEWING MACHINE GIRL. Although it achieved only nine performances in New York, where it opened on 13 August 1906 at the American Theatre, Theodore Kremer’s melodrama based on an earlier pulp serial found favor with popular audiences on the ten, twent,’ thirt’ circuit. In the thrilling climax, the hapless Bertha is tied to a conveyer belt that carries her toward the jaws of a machine. Virtue triumphs, of course. BEST PEOPLE, THE. Avery Hopwood brought his expertise to a play by David Gray titled Goodness Knows, and the result was a very funny COMEDY that ran for 144 performances at the Lyceum Theatre, opening 19 August 1924. Acts 1 and 3 are set in the home of the “best people,” the snobbish Lenox family. The flaws of the younger generation show up particularly in act 2, at a not-entirely-respectable "ROADWAY restaurant. Perhaps the decent, hard-working chorus girl

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and the chauffeur to whom the Lenox siblings are attracted are truly the “best people.” BEST PLAYS, THE.† New York drama CRITIC "URNS-ANTLE began in 1920 to compile the annual anthology of excerpts from the 10 best plays of the season. Although the summaries of stage action interspersed by exemplary dialogue passages cannot substitute for reading the entire text of a play, the volumes are invaluable for their roundup of data on all the plays on "ROADWAY. The series continued without interruption under the successive editorships of John Chapman,* Louis Kronenberger,* Henry Hewes,* Otis L. Guernsey, Jr.,* and Jeffrey Sweet.* BETTELHEIM, EDWIN SUMNER (1865–1938). The drama CRITIC and publisher was born in Albany, New York. Bettelheim was best known as the founder of the Dramatic News, which he ran in opposition to the 3HUBERT organization’s New York Review. He died on 15 January 1938, less than two months after the suicide of his son, Spencer D. Bettelheim, treasurer of "ROADWAY’s Music Box Theatre. BEYOND THE HORIZON. The first full-length play by %UGENE /.EILL to reach "ROADWAY, where it won O’Neill the first of four 0ULITZER0RIZES, Beyond the Horizon was, to some extent, a culmination of themes and characters O’Neill had explored in his one-act plays during the preceding decade. It opened in a series of tryout matinees, but postive response from CRITICS and the efforts of ACTOR 2ICHARD "ENNETT (who played Rob Mayo) led to a regular run. $IRECTED by Homer Saint-Gaudens, it opened on 3 February 1920 at the Morosco Theatre for 111 performances. Two brothers, Rob and Andrew Mayo, living on a hardscrabble New England farm, vie for the love of Ruth. Andrew wants no more than to be a farmer and to marry Ruth, but she prefers Rob, an aspiring artist longing to leave the farm and see what lies “beyond the horizon.” However, Rob stays on the farm with Ruth and the rejected Andrew leaves instead. This reversal of destinies leads to tragic outcomes for both brothers as seen in three acts set five years apart. In 1920, many critics and audience members recognized that O’Neill’s play was the true beginning of a serious, modern American drama. Beyond the Horizon was revived in 1927 by the Actors Theatre featuring Robert Keith,* Thomas

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Chalmers, and Aline MacMahon.* A 1975 revival was broadcast on public television.* BILL, BILLING. A bill announcing a lineup of plays to be performed during a troupe’s engagement would serve as ADVERTISING in newspapers or on exterior walls of buildings where bill posters would plaster those notices. A STAR would expect top billing; that is, to have his or her name placed first on the bill. The term “bill topper” was sometimes used for the headliner in variety. BILLBOARD. First published in Cincinnati, Ohio, as a monthly, this professional theatre publication started in 1894 with news of the stage. After 1900, Billboard became a weekly and retooled its approach to include news of AMATEUR theatre and other amusements such as carnivals and CIRCUSES. Beginning in 1920, Billboard also published an annual, the Billboard Index of the Legitimate Stage, before competition from many New York theatre publications led its editors to focus exclusively on popular music news. BINGHAM, AMELIA (1869–1927). Born Amelia Smiley (or Swilley, according to Robert L. Sherman) in Hicksville, Ohio, she grew up waiting tables in her father’s hotel. She attended Ohio Wesleyan University, but was at home when Lloyd Bingham, advance man for the Negrotto troupe, came to the hotel and enlisted her to play the piano during the company’s engagement there. Soon she was performing with the company on TOUR and then moved up to McKee Rankin’s company. She married Bingham in 1891. In 1892, she made her New York debut in The Struggle for Life. By 1900, she was a STAR touring with her own company. Indeed, she was chosen to inaugurate Kansas City’s Willis Wood Theatre in 1902. BIRD OF PARADISE, THE. Opening on 8 January 1912, the melodrama set on exotic Hawaii was written and DIRECTED by Richard Walton Tully. ,AURETTE4AYLOR played Luana, the native princess who sacrifices herself for her man by throwing herself into the crater of a rumbling volcano. After 112 performances at Daly’s Theatre in New York, it made a lot of money on the ROAD before being made into a MUSICAL titled Luana (1930), as well as two MOTIONPICTURE versions (1932 and 1951).

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BLACKFACE. This term refers to performers “blacking up” with burnt cork to play exaggerated versions of !FRICAN!MERICANS, typically in minstrel shows and early MUSICALS, although white actors in blackface often played African American characters in straight plays as well. The minstrel show, one of the most durable entertainments of the 19th and early 20th centuries, ostensibly began in the 1820s when entertainer T. D. Rice adopted the practice in a performance in Baltimore after supposedly witnessing an elderly black man doing an eccentric dance. The “Jump Jim Crow” routine Rice perfected was widely imitated when minstrel shows, which were essentially variety attractions featuring songs, dances, and COMEDY, sprang up around the United States. By the 1840s, Dan Emmett founded the Virginia Minstrels, an early prototype of the tradition continued by E. P. Christy and others. Blackface was dropped for a time in all-white, all-black, and mixed-race troupes, but by the 1880s, audiences who had seen it for generations demanded its return. As the popularity of minstrel troupes declined, blackface transferred into vaudeville and MUSICAL comedy, used by many white entertainers, including Al Jolson, Eddie Leonard, Eddie Cantor, Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, and by Ziegfeld Follies STAR Bert Williams, an African American. The technique of applying blackface is wonderfully shown as a part of Jolson’s performance in the 1927 motion picture The Jazz Singer. By the 1930s, most performers had abandoned blackface as an outmoded and demeaning stereotype. BLAIR, MARY (1895?–1947). Born in Pittsburgh, Mary Blair made her New York debut in the first play PRODUCED by the 4HEATRE 'UILD, The Bonds of Interest, and had a successful decade-long career marked by her appearances in several Provincetown Players productions of %UGENE/.EILL’s plays, including Diff’rent (1921), The Hairy Ape (1922), Before Breakfast (1929), and All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1924). The latter caused a furor over its depiction of an interracial relationship. As white Ella Downey involved with an !FRICAN!MERICAN man, played by 0AUL2OBESON, Blair’s action of kissing Robeson’s hand in one scene was the focus of vitriolic attacks on the production. Blair also ACTED in revivals of Fashion (1924), Patience (1924), and East Lynne (1926), as well as the first "ROADWAY staging of August Strindberg’s Spook Sonata (1923).

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Blair was married to CRITIC Edmund Wilson for a time in the 1920s and made her last Broadway appearance in American Dream (1933), a failure. BLANEY, CHARLES E. (1866–1944). !CTOR, PRODUCER, and PLAY WRIGHT Charles Blaney was born in Columbus, Ohio. With Joseph M. Gaites, Blaney produced and acted in his own first play, A Railroad Ticket, in his hometown when he was 20. He then went to New York and became a producer for Stair and Havelin, the popularprice legitimate circuit. He became a major stockholder in Stair and Havelin, and sometimes had a dozen or so shows on their loop. As producer of around 200 melodramas, half of which he wrote himself, Blaney was known by 1900 as “King of the Melodramas.” Among his titles were More to Be Pitied than Scorned, King of the Opium Ring, Across the Pacific (starring his brother Harry Clay Blaney), For His Brother’s Crime, and The Millionaire’s Revenge (inspired by the Harry Thaw-Evelyn Nesbit-Stanford White news story). Blaney developed STARS by putting promising actors in STOCK companies in the two theatres he built in New York. He also ran a chain of east coast theatres. By his shrewd investments in theatres and real estate, Blaney became wealthy. BLEDSOE, JULES (1898–1943). Born in Waco, Texas, the !FRICAN !MERICAN singer and ACTOR originated roles in a few significant "ROADWAY productions. In 0AUL'REEN’s 0ULITZER0RIZE–winning In Abraham’s Bosom (1926), Bledsoe played Abraham McCranie, a deeply troubled mulatto who is thwarted by his all-white brother in bringing education to Southern blacks. Bledsoe followed this with a role in the MUSICAL Deep River (1926), and then he made a lasting mark as Joe, the kind-hearted deck hand, in Show Boat (1927), introducing “Ol’ Man River.” He appeared in the MOTIONPICTURE Drums of the Kongo (1942) and in prologues featuring original cast members of Show Boat that accompanied the partial “talkie” 1929 version. BLINN, HOLBROOK (1872–1928). Holbrook Blinn was born in San Francisco and made his ACTING debut there at six years in The Streets of London. He attended Stanford University, but returned to the stage and rose to STARDOM. His distinguished career included TOURING and leading roles on "ROADWAY from the 1890s, including

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The New South (1893), The Clansman (1906), A Woman of No Importance (1916), The Famous Mrs. Fair (1920), The Bad Man (1920), The Dove (1925), and The Play’s the Thing (1926, which he also DIRECTED). He was a leader in forming the Actors’ Fidelity League during the actors’ strike of 1919. BLOODGOOD, CLARA (1870–1907). Born Clara Stevens in a wellto-do New York family, Clara Bloodgood won immediate success under the MANAGEMENT of Charles Frohman, who presented her in The Conquerors (1898), Catherine (1898), Phroso (1898), and Miss Hobbs (1899). Positive reviews in Clyde Fitch’s The Climbers (1901) led the PLAYWRIGHT to write other roles with Bloodgood in mind, including The Way of the World (1901), The Girl with the Green Eyes (1902), and The Coronet of the Duchess (1904). When she played Violet Robinson in the American premiere of 'EORGE "ERNARD3HAW’s Man and Superman (1905), Bloodgood was firmly established as a STAR. Fitch wrote the role of congenital liar Becky Warder in The Truth (1907) for Bloodgood, but it received negative reviews in New York. Bloodgood took the play on a successful TOUR, but unexpectedly committed suicide while appearing in it in Baltimore. Her death prompted sensational headlines and rumors that she killed herself because Fitch had dedicated the published version of the play to its London star, Marie Tempest. Fitch issued a denial, but Bloodgood’s death ended a fruitful collaboration. BLUE JEANS. This is the melodrama that originated the suspenseful situation of the hero placed unconscious on a log while the mill machinery—an enormous rotating buzz saw—is set in motion to cut him in half. Joseph Arthur wrote the hit that opened on 6 October 1890 and ran for 176 performances at the Fourteenth Street Theatre. Set in the Indiana village of Rising Sun, the slight piece was praised in the New York Times (7 October 1890) as “the first play treating of Hoosier life” with “personages and scenes evidently studied from nature.” Jennie Yeamans proved an engaging ingénue who rescues the hero in the thrilling buzz-saw scene. BLUE MOUSE, THE. Clyde Fitch’s three-act COMEDY opened on 30 November 1908 at the Lyric Theatre for 232 performances. Augustus Rollett, hoping for a promotion, arranges with nightclub entertainer

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Paulette Divine, known as “The Blue Mouse,” to pose as his wife so his boss, Lewellyn, a railroad president and unrepentant philanderer, might flirt with her. All goes well until Lewellyn’s wife, Rollett’s wife, and other friends and family turn up to complicate matters. Fitch’s slight play was adapted from a German comedy by Alexander Engel and Julius Horst. In turn, it was adapted as The Little Blue Devil, a 1919 MUSICAL STARRING Lillian Lorraine. BOLAND, MARY (1880–1965).† Born in Philadelphia, Mary Boland became one of the most durable comic ACTRESSES of the "ROADWAY stage in the first half of the 20th century. She made her debut in A Social Highwayman in Detroit in 1901, after which she TOURED with STOCK companies until her first New York appearance in Strongheart (1905), for which she won good reviews and a two-year run. Her initial fame derived from her physical appeal and light touch in roles requiring allure, including such parts in The Ranger (1907) and When Knights Were Bold (1907), before PRODUCER Charles Frohman cast her as John Drew’s leading lady in a series of plays, most notably Jack Straw (1908), Inconstant George (1909), Smith (1910), The Perplexed Husband (1912), Much Ado About Nothing (1913), The Will (1913), and A Scrap of Paper (1914). Shortly before Frohman died in the sinking of the Lusitania, Boland left his MANAGEMENT to STAR in My Lady’s Dress (1914). In Booth Tarkington’s Clarence (1919), she played Mrs. Wheeler, the first of a long line of dizzy society matrons that characterized her next 30 years on stage and screen. During the 1920s, she appeared in The Torch-Bearers (1922), Meet the Wife (1923), and Cradle Snatchers (1925). When sound MOTIONPICTURES began, Boland appeared in over 50 films, but returned notably to Broadway for The Vinegar Tree (1930), and two MUSICALS, Face the Music (1932) and Jubilee (1935). Despite success in these, Boland’s returns to the stage became rare, although she was well-received as Mrs. Malaprop in a 1942 revival of The Rivals and in her last appearance in Don Appell’s short-lived COMEDY Lullaby (1954). BOLESLAVSKI, RICHARD (1889–1937). Born Boleslaw Ryszart Srzednicki in Warsaw, Poland, Boleslavski trained at the Moscow Art Theatre and worked with Konstantin Stanislavski there. He came to the United States in 1920 and became an American citizen in 1928. Indeed, he might be credited with paving the way for ac-

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ceptance of Stanislavki’s approach to ACTING among American actors. With Maria Ouspensakya, Boleslavski founded the American Laboratory Theatre (1923–1930) to teach the system. The financial strain of running the company impelled him to DIRECT commercial productions on "ROADWAY, including Twelfth Night (1925), The Taming of the Shrew (1925), and Mr. Moneypenny (1928). In 1924, he assisted -AX2EINHARDT with the staging of The Miracle in New York, and subsequently directed it in Cleveland. BOLTON, GUY (1884–1979). Guy Reginald Bolton was born in England to American parents and studied architecture before beginning a PLAYWRITING career. Collaborating with 'EORGE-#OHAN and George Middleton on Hit-the-Trail Holliday (1915), Bolton had his first success, after which he almost exclusively collaborated on books for some of the most popular MUSICALS from 1915 to the 1960s, including Very Good Eddie (1915), Lady, Be Good (1924), Oh, Kay! (1926), Girl Crazy (1930), and Anything Goes (1934), among others. BONNER, MARITA ODETTE (1898–1971). The !FRICAN!MERI CAN writer was born in Boston, where she attended public schools. She studied English and the classics at Radcliffe College, graduating in 1922. Moving to Washington, D.C., in 1924 to teach at Armstrong Colored High School, she participated in salons at the home of Georgia Douglas Johnson. Her plays were not PRODUCED during her lifetime, but three were published in Crisis or Opportunity magazine. The Purple Flower (1928) uses expressionist techniques to convey the call of blood in response to long repression. She married William Almy Occomy in 1930. BONSTELLE, JESSIE (1872–1832). Laura Justine Bonesteele was born in Greece, New York, and began ACTING professionally at 15. She played the heroine in Bertha, the Sewing Machine Girl, then performed with Augustin Daly’s company, and rose to leading lady roles at Proctor’s Theatre, followed by other STOCK work. She was in stock in Northampton, Massachusetts, when the little theatre movement gathered steam, and thus she was encouraged to form her own company. She gained a reputation for developing actors of promise, notably +ATHARINE#ORNELL and Melvyn Douglas.* Although she

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returned occasionally to act and DIRECT in New York City and spend some summers in Buffalo, Bonstelle is largely associated with theatre in Detroit, Michigan, where she ran a stock company and, in 1926, opened the Bonstelle Playhouse, followed a few years later by the Detroit Civic Theatre. She was tenacious in her belief that Little Women could be successfully dramatized and it long remained central to her REPERTORY. BOOKING AGENT, BOOKING OFFICE, BOOKINGS. From the 1870s, the burgeoning number of theatres nationwide as well as the great number of TOURING attractions made a very complicated business of the scheduling of companies on the ROAD into available theatres while avoiding too great a jump between cities. This gave rise to centralized booking agencies or booking offices in New York. A booking agent had to know railroad schedules as well as the requirements of local theatre MANAGERS. Most bookings for the season ahead were negotiated in August when managers from across the nation converged on New York to visit the various booking agencies that were clustered around Fourteenth Street. Until the 1890s, booking agencies were merely the middlemen in charge of distribution of the theatrical product. As managers began to form circuits of theatres to cooperate in getting advantageous bookings, there was a growing tendency toward consolidation of booking and management. It was this situation that gave rise to Klaw & Erlanger, also known as the Theatrical Syndicate, paralleled by Keith-Albee in vaudeville. BOOM. “To boom” a show was to swell the attendance. One might say that a certain town could not be counted on to boom a certain type of attraction, or one might try a new kind of ADVERTISING to boom a show. BOOMERANG, THE. Opening 10 August 1915 at the Belasco Theatre, this COMEDY by Winchell Smith and Victor Mapes was PRO DUCED and DIRECTED by David Belasco and enjoyed an excellent run of 522 performances. Good performances, especially by Arthur Byron as the young doctor, Martha Hedman as the nurse, and the lovely ingénue Ruth Shepley lifted the somewhat predictable script into the realm of solid, laugh-provoking entertainment.

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BOOTH, AGNES (1846–1910). The third wife of Junius Brutus Booth Jr. was herself an experienced ACTRESS before she married him in 1867. Marian Agnes Land Rookes was born in Sydney, Australia, and came to San Francisco as a CHILD. She acted there at Maguire’s Opera House as Agnes Land and married actor Harry A. Perry (1826–1962). As an accomplished emotional actress, Agnes Booth maintained a solid string of good roles throughout the 1870s and 1880s. Her third husband was John B. Schoeffel, a theatrical MANAGER in partnership with Henry Abbey and Maurice Grau. BOOTH, EDWIN (1833–1893). Generally acknowledged as the greatest ACTOR in American theatre history, Edwin Booth was born on Junius Brutus Booth’s Maryland farm, reportedly on a night of shooting stars. In his youth, he TOURED with his father and even on occasion substituted for his father, although he developed a far more restrained and natural style in contrast to the romantic excess of the earlier generation. His physical attributes contributed to his compelling portrayals: a lithe body, luminous and expressive eyes, and a melodiously caressing voice. Booth toured with Laura Keene to Australia (1854–1855) and had two successful European tours (1861–1862 and 1881–1882). In 1860, he married actress Mary Devlin (1840–1863), and in 1869, Mary McVicker (d. 1881). In 1864, Booth famously played 3HAKE SPEARE’s Hamlet for 100 consecutive performances. His other great roles included both Iago and Othello in Othello, Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, and the title roles in Richelieu, Macbeth, and King Lear. Devastated by his brother’s assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, Booth left the stage for a year. He built the exquisitely appointed Booth’s Theatre in New York. It opened in 1869, but proved to be financially draining, and he had to sell it in 1873. Edwin Booth toured extensively during the 1880s, including two noteworthy “joint STAR” tours with Lawrence Barrett. In this same era, he was the first major actor to have his voice recorded by Thomas A. Edison. In 1888, Booth founded The Players, a theatrical club that continues to this day in his New York home on Gramercy Square, where he died. See also BOOTH, JOHN WILKES; BOOTH, JUNIUS BRUTUS, JR.

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BOOTH, JOHN WILKES (1838–1865). The darkly attractive tragedian, son of Junius Brutus Booth, was born on his father’s farm near Baltimore, Maryland. He made his debut in Baltimore, then joined the STOCK company at Philadelphia’s Arch Street Theatre. Billed as a STAR for his New York debut at Wallack’s Theatre in 1862, he transfixed audiences with his intense portrayal of Richard III. He made his last stage appearance at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., performing in a benefit for John McCullough. He is largely remembered to posterity as the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln during a performance of Our American Cousin by Laura Keene’s company at Ford’s Theatre on 14 April 1865. Although his life ended well before the modernist era, Booth was frequently referred to or appears as a character in many plays and MOTIONPICTURES to the present day. See also BOOTH, EDWIN; BOOTH, JUNIUS BRUTUS, JR.; REIGNOLDS, KATE. BOOTH, JUNIUS BRUTUS, JR. (1821–1883). The eldest of Junius Brutus Booth’s ten CHILDREN to make a career on stage was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and made his debut in Pittsburgh in 1834. His New York debut was at the Bowery Theatre in 1851. His three wives were Miss DeBar, Harriet Mace, and Agnes Land Perry (see Agnes Booth). On 23 November 1864, he appeared in Julius Caesar with his brothers Edwin Booth and John Wilkes Booth. After several seasons in California and a MANAGEMENT stint at the Boston Theatre, he retired from the stage. BOOTH’S THEATRE. The lavishly appointed theatre at Sixth Avenue and 23rd Street in New York was constructed at a cost of more than a million dollars, while Edwin Booth TOURED strenuously to pay for its construction. Among its innovations—which may be credited to his designer Charles W. Witham—were a flat-floor stage (as opposed to the raked stages that were still prevalent then) and a scene construction shop within the facility. Heavily mortgaged, it opened to critical acclaim on 3 February 1869. However, even capacity audiences could not sustain it, given Booth’s insistence on high standards of production. In 1875, Booth succumbed to bankruptcy and lost his theatre. Subsequent MANAGERS were similarly unable to run it at a profit. The final performance at Booth’s Theatre, on 30 April 1883, starred Helena Modjeska and Maurice Barrymore, after which the

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real estate was turned to more lucrative commercial interests. Booth’s Theatre (1869–1883) is not to be confused with the Booth Theatre at 222 West 45th Street, which opened in 1913. BOSS, THE. This four-act melodrama by Edward Sheldon had its first performance in Detroit on 9 January 1911 prior to its New York opening on 30 January 1911 at the Astor Theatre, where it ran for 88 performances, PRODUCED by William A. Brady. Sheldon’s interest in REALISM can be seen in this play, despite the melodramatic trappings. Holbrook Blinn played the title character, Regan, “the type of self-made man who, born in the back room of a saloon, and with nothing to start on, has risen from the best ‘scrapper’ in his ward to be the biggest politician and the most influential and successful business man in his town” (New York Times, 31 January 1911). Having unscrupulously gained control of grain contracts that are the basis of James Griswold’s wealth, Regan offers to cover up the information if he can marry Griswold’s daughter Emily, a move that will gain Regan the social position he craves. Emily (played by Emily Stevens) agrees to marry Regan to spare her father, but she makes it clear to Regan that she cannot love him. Emily’s brother, Donald, teams up with Regan’s childhood pal and reformer, Archbishop Sullivan, to bring Regan to justice by organizing the workers in their ward. Regan plans to escape to Canada, but Emily confronts him and insists that he face his punishment. He then realizes that she cares for him. The play’s depiction of class warfare between immigrant Irish Americans and bluenosed capitalists remained relevant for a MOTION PICTURE version in 1915 (STARRING Blinn and !LICE"RADY) and a successful revival in New York at the Chelsea Theatre Center as late as 1976. BOUCICAULT, DION (1820–1890). Born Dionysius Lardner Boursiquot in Dublin, the colorful ACTOR, MANAGER, and prolific PLAY WRIGHT launched his career in London. From 1853, he made his career in America, managing various theatres in New Orleans and New York, and TOURING with his own company. He wrote a steady stream of plays, many of which were cribbed from French sources. Nevertheless, Boucicault had a good sense of what the public wanted and the dramatic skills and theatrical flair to create remarkably successful melodramas. He often used Irish themes and settings, incorporating gripping suspense and dazzling sensations. The best of his 200 or so

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plays were written before the modernist era, but were frequently performed well into the 20th century, including The Streets of New York (1857), The Octoroon (1859), The Colleen Bawn (1860), Rip Van Winkle (1865, for Joseph Jefferson III), and The Shaughran (1874). See also FOREIGNPLAYSADAPTEDTOTHE!MERICANSTAGE BOUGHT AND PAID FOR. This COMEDY-drama by George H. Broadhurst opened on 26 September 1911 and ran for 431 performances at New York’s Playhouse. A telephone girl played by Julia Deane rescues her family from lower-middle-class drudgery by marrying a millionaire, but—in a scene deplored for its vulgarity—she resists his husbandly attentions when he is drunk. Her sister’s husband, a shipping clerk played with comic verve by &RANK#RAVEN, helps to save their marriage. Craven milked the role for all its humor, and it made him a STAR. BOWERY THEATRE. The theatre on New York’s Lower East Side enjoyed its heyday earlier in the 19th century, particularly under the MANAGEMENT of Thomas Hamblin. In 1879, the fifth theatre on the site had its name changed from the Bowery to the Thalia Theatre. It burned down in 1929. BOX SET. The first use of a box set is difficult to pinpoint, but the Mannheim Court Theatre may have employed something like a box set as early as 1804. This practice of enclosing the action of a play in a three-walled room (with the invisible fourth wall separating the play from the audience) was largely a European convention, which slowly gained favor when Madame Vestris famously employed it in 1832 and later in a staging of Dion Boucicault’s London Assurance in 1842. With the rise of REALISM, the use of the box set became commonplace, although at first shifting scenes was more difficult than with the old system of painted wings and backdrops. In the United States, box sets were seen frequently in David Belasco’s works and those of PRODUCERS who prized greater realism. When the postrealistic New Stagecraft emerged in Europe after 1900 and powerfully influenced American SCENE DESIGN, new techniques were explored, but by then the box set had become a standard stage setting for professional and AMATEUR theatres in America. See also SCENERY.

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BOYCE, NEITH (1872–1951). Daughter of the cofounder of the Los Angeles Times, Neith Boyce initially chose a career in journalism, and in 1899, became the first woman reporter on the Commercial Advertiser in New York, while writing novels on the side. That year she married Hutchins Hapgood, a colleague on the newspaper. They joined the ferment of artistic life in Greenwich Village. Spending the summer of 1915 in Provincetown on Cape Cod, Boyce and Hapgood—with 3USAN 'LASPELL, George Cram Cook, and %U GENE /.EILL—founded the Provincetown Players. Her one-act play Constancy was PRODUCED that summer and was revived there in summer 1916 along with her Winter’s Night and one coauthored with her husband, Enemies. Her one-act The Two Sons was produced as part of the Provincetown Players’ first full season in New York (1916–1917). See also PLAYWRIGHTS. BRADLEY, ALICE (1875–1926). Although The Governor’s Lady (1912) appears to have been her only play, it is one often signaled by theatre historians as emblematic of its DIRECTOR-PRODUCER David Belasco’s characteristic attention to REALISTIC detail. For the final scene, set in a Child’s Restaurant (a chain in which all the restaurants were furnished identically), an actual Child’s Restaurant was purchased for the stage. BRADLEY, LILLIAN TRIMBLE (1884–1959). Born in Milton, Kentucky, the wife of PLAYWRIGHT George H. Broadhurst was a playwright, DIRECTOR, and SCENE DESIGNER. Broadhurst PRODUCED her COMEDY The Wonderful Thing (1920), STARRING Jeanne Eagels, and it ran for 120 performances. She directed several plays and with Broadhurst wrote The Woman on the Index (1918), The Red Falcon (1924), and Izzy (1924). BRADY, ALICE (1892–1939).† Born in New York, the daughter of theatrical PRODUCER William A. Brady and French dancer Rose Marie Rene attended the Convent of St. Elizabeth in Madison, New Jersey, before studying opera at the New England Conservatory of Music. Her father disapproved of her desire to be an ACTRESS, so she made her debut without his knowledge in a New Jersey production of As You Like It starring Robert Mantell. When she appeared successfully in The Mikado in 1910, her father relented. She won plaudits

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as Meg in Little Women (1912), TOURED in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas with De Wolf Hopper, and by the mid-1920s, acted in over 30 silent MOTIONPICTURES for the Famous Players Company. In the theatre, she appeared under her father’s MANAGEMENT in /WEN $AVIS’s Forever After (1918), and it was a long-running hit. She also appeared successfully in Zander the Great (1923), Bride of the Lamb (1926), Bless You Sister (1927), A Most Immoral Lady (1928), The Game of Love and Death (1929), Karl and Anna (1929), and Love, Honor and Betray (1930). She joined the 4HEATRE'UILD in 1928 and won the opportunity of playing her most significant stage role, Lavinia Mannon, in %UGENE/.EILL’s trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra* (1931). During the 1930s, Brady appeared in a string of films, winning a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her performance in In Old Chicago (1938). BRADY, WILLIAM A. (1863–1950). The flamboyant ACTOR, author, and PRODUCER was born in San Francisco, where he ushered at a theatre and became determined to go into MANAGEMENT. William Aloysius Brady’s 1937 memoir, Showman, colorfully recounts his first season as an actor TOURING the west in Bartley Campbell’s The White Slave in the 1880s. Then he joined Joseph R. Grismer’s company as a utility man and learned every aspect of the business while playing remote mining camps. After a stint with Lewis Morrison, Brady formed the Webster-Brady Company (with George Webster). He bought the stage rights to Dion Boucicault’s melodrama After Dark, which proved lucrative. Brady came to New York as a producer in 1896. He featured James J. “Gentleman Jim” Corbett in several productions and even managed him as a heavyweight prizefighter. In 1938, when he was 75, Brady estimated that he had already produced over 260 shows. Among his most successful were Way Down East (1898) and %LMER2ICE’s Street Scene (1929). In 1899, Brady married actress Grace George. Brady built two New York theatres, the Playhouse (1911), where he had his offices, and the nearby 48th Street Theatre (1912). He was the father of actress !LICE"RADY. BRADY, WILLIAM A., JR. (1900–1935). The son of the showman William A. Brady and ACTRESS Grace George, and half-brother of !LICE "RADY, was born in New York. In partnership with Dwight

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Deere Wiman, he PRODUCED Lucky Sam McCarver (1925), The Road to Rome (1927), The Little Show (1929), and others before his death in a fire at a vacation bungalow. BRAGDON, CLAUDE (1866–1946). Born in Oberlin, Ohio, Claude Bragdon studied at the University of Michigan. After a President’s Award–winning career as an architect, Claude Bragdon turned to theatre at the age of 53, when he designed SCENERY, COSTUMES, and PROPERTIES for 7ALTER (AMPDEN’s production of Hamlet (1919; revived 1925, 1934). Bragdon continued to serve as art DIRECTOR for Hampden until 1937, a total of 15 new productions plus revivals. His 1923 designs for Cyrano de Bergerac (revived 1932) were particularly admired and were published in The Architectural Review (1923). Bragdon was also a prolific author. His autobiography, More Lives than One, published in 1938, covered his personal, architectural, theatrical, literary, and occult lives. BRIDE OF THE LAMB. William Hurlbut’s turgid drama opened on 30 March 1926 and ran for 103 performances at the Greenwich Village Theatre. When a charismatic tent evangelist visits a conservative Midwestern town, Ina (played by !LICE "RADY) becomes dissatisfied with her life as the wife of a secret alcoholic and mother of an obnoxious daughter. Planning to run off with the preacher (revealed to be a former vaudevillian), she poisons her husband. Then the preacher’s wife arrives and accosts him. In a denouement that prefigures Blanche Du Bois’s exit at the end of A Streetcar Named Desire,* Ina has dressed herself as a bride when the sheriff comes to escort her to prison. BRITISH INFLUENCES ON AMERICAN THEATRE.† A London engagement was regarded as validation for a rising American player. Among British ACTORS who trod the American boards, no STAR shone more brightly than Sir Henry Irving along with his leading lady Ellen Terry. Irving’s TOUR MANAGER Bram Stoker published his Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, which includes amusing anecdotes of the 1899–1900 tour. Great numbers of performers came from England in their youth and established themselves as American theatre artists; a few examples are Maurice Browne, Richard Mansfield, and Julia Marlowe. Many managers maintained inter-

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ests in both London and New York, PRODUCER Charles Frohman prominent among Americans over there. The historical melodramas of PLAYWRIGHT Edward BulwerLytton (1803–1873) remained a staple of the American stage during much of the modernist period. His The Lady of Lyons (1838) and Richelieu (1839) often figured alongside 3HAKESPEARE in the repertoires of tragedians like Edwin Booth, Thomas W. Keene, and Robert Mantell as late as the 1890s. The impact of (ENRIK)BSEN during that decade, though widely regarded as “unwholesome,” came via the translations performed on the London stage, as well as the early plays of 'EORGE"ERNARD3HAW, which were inspired by Ibsen. Given the close ties that developed between London and New York theatre, it is difficult to trace direct influences, though one can certainly note affinities, such as might be seen in the work of English playwright T. W. Robertson and the American William Dean Howells. See also BARRIE, J. M.; FOREIGNPLAYSADAPTEDTOTHE!MERICANSTAGE; FOREIGNSTARSANDCOMPANIESONTHE!MERICANSTAGE. BROADHURST, GEORGE H. (1866–1952). Born in London, George Howells Broadhurst (not to be confused with tramp COMEDIAN George Broadhurst, who died in 1937) became a prominent PLAY WRIGHT and MANAGER. He began as treasurer of Baltimore’s Academy of Music, which was then under the DIRECTION of his brother Thomas W. Broadhurst (1858–1936). After managing theatres in Milwaukee and San Francisco, Broadhurst turned to writing plays that combined venerable melodramatic devices with more modern idea content. Particularly popular among his nearly 30 plays were What Happened to Jones (1897), Why Smith Left Home (1899), The Man of the Hour (1906), and Bought and Paid For (1911). He married playwright Lillian Trimble Bradley. The theatre named after him on West 44th Street in New York was built by the 3HUBERTS in 1917, and Broadhurst comanaged it for a time. BROADWAY.† This prominent street in New York City runs the length of Manhattan island from north to south. As early as 1735, a map depicts a playhouse on this street, but not until the modernist era did Broadway come to represent the New York commercial theatre as a whole. The word continues to be used thus broadly, although New York theatre after 1960 splintered, with theatres having fewer

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than 299 seats designated as “off-Broadway”* and, ultimately, even smaller theatres dubbed “off-off Broadway.”* Broadway was the heart of the American theatre from 1880 to the 1960s. It was also known as “The Great White Way” because of the electric LIGHTS illuminating theatres and businesses along that street. Despite the thriving ROAD as well as resident STOCK theatres established in various regions, a PRODUCER, PLAYWRIGHT, ACTOR, or SCENEDESIGNER was not considered to have succeeded unless he or she had worked on Broadway. In plays of the late 1910s and the 1920s, the terms “Broadway” and “Broadway style” were sometimes used pejoratively to refer to cheap taste or to flashy wardrobes associated in the public mind with chorus girls and street hustlers. BROADWAY. 'EORGE!BBOTT coauthored (with Philip Dunning) and DIRECTED the remarkably successful COMEDY-melodrama set backstage at a nightclub, mingling chorus girls, bootleggers, and a sweet romance. The 75-week (603 performances) run at the Broadhurst Theatre, opening 16 September 1926, helped to launch the PRODUC ING career of *ED(ARRIS. In 1987, at Great Lakes Theater Festival* in Cleveland, Abbott, then 100 years old, directed a revival of the play that went on to a brief run on "ROADWAY. BROADWAY JONES. 'EORGE - #OHAN wrote, PRODUCED (with 3AM((ARRIS), and STARRED in this four-act COMEDY that opened on 23 September 1912 for 176 performances. As Jackson Jones, Cohan appeared with his parents, Jerry and Helen Cohan, in the tale of a wastrel living off a widow. Jones unexpectedly inherits a chewing-gum factory and a large fortune from his grandfather, a windfall he promptly squanders in New York City. Calling himself “"ROADWAY” Jones, he returns to Jonestown, Ohio, aiming to close down his grandfather’s factory to realize some ready cash. However, Josie Richards, a bright young secretary, informs him that the community’s entire economy depends on the factory. Jones is attracted to Josie and shamed by the example of her compassion for the local citizenry, so he resolves to take responsibility for the company and stay in Ohio, even though he loves the bright lights of Broadway. Cohan made a rare MOTIONPICTURE appearance in the 1917 Famous Players screen version of Broadway Jones.

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BROUN, HEYWOOD (1888–1939). The Brooklyn-born and Harvard University–educated CRITIC reviewed plays during the 1920s for the New York Morning Telegraph, the Morning World, and Vanity Fair. Broun’s theatre reviews always had gripping introductory paragraphs—a bold assertion or a humorous observation—followed by incisive analysis of the work. He also tried ACTING, political activism, radio, and lecturing on the drama at Columbia University. His books reflect his social activism. Broun’s death came shortly after he joined the New York Post and had written only one column. BROWN, ALICE (1857–1948). Born in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, the novelist wrote a village drama in 1914 that won a $10,000 PLAYWRITING competition sponsored by PRODUCER Winthrop Ames. The resulting publicity suggested that Brown might be the longawaited “great American playwright,” an ironic circumstance in that her play, Children of Earth, ran only 39 performances at Booth’s Theatre in January and February 1915, while the true “great American playwright,” %UGENE/.EILL, would not yet see his first produced play until the following summer in Provincetown. BROWN, JOHN MASON (1900–1969). The eminent drama CRITIC, born in Louisville, Kentucky, studied under George Pierce Baker in the 47 Workshop at Harvard University, where he graduated in 1923. In 1925, Brown became the first-string critic for THEATRE ARTS, then for the New York Post (1929–1941), and the World-Telegram (1941). His Post story on Mae West (25 March 1933) illustrates the clever use of allusions that characterizes his writing. He noted that West’s characters conquer too easily: “One slight roll of her Police Gazette figure, four measured tosses of her unholy head, and every man for miles around is supposed to be hers.” After WAR reporting until 1944, he wrote a theatre column for the Saturday Evening Post. He taught COLLEGE courses at the University of Montana and Yale University among others, lectured widely, and wrote a dozen books, most of them on theatre. BROWNE, MAURICE (1881–1955). The ACTOR, PLAYWRIGHT, DI RECTOR, and PRODUCER Maurice Browne was born in England. He was best known for running the Little Theatre in Chicago for five seasons from 1912 with his wife, actress Ellen Von Volkenberg. He

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subsequently directed and produced plays on "ROADWAY and wrote Wings over Europe (1928). See also LITTLE THEATRE; NEW STAGECRAFT. BROWNE, PORTER EMERSON (1879–1934). Born in Beverly, Massachusetts, Browne published many short stories and saw quite a few of his plays PRODUCED in New York, including A Fool There Was (1909), The Spendthrift (1910), and his 0ULITZER0RIZE–nominated play The Bad Man (1920). BRYANT, LOUISE FRANCES STEVENS (1885–1956). The beautiful and tempestuous writer remains best known for her liaisons with John Reed and %UGENE /.EILL. However, her one-act play The Game was PRODUCED by the Provincetown Players in 1916. Bryant was portrayed by Diane Keaton in the Academy Award–winning 1981 MOTIONPICTURE, Reds. BUFFALO BILL. See CODY, WILLIAM FREDERICK. BURGESS, NEIL (1846–1910). Born in Boston, Neil Burgess began as a variety performer, but found his niche as a FEMALEIMPERSON ATOR in legitimate drama. His best roles, which he long kept active, were the Widow Bedott in a play of that title and Aunt Abby Prue in The County Fair (1889). BURKE, BILLIE (1886–1970).† Mary William Ethelbert Appleton was born in Washington, D.C., but spent her childhood in England, where her father was a popular CIRCUS clown. On stage as Billie Burke, she made her first appearances with Charles Hawtrey and in a series of successful British MUSICALS before PRODUCER Charles Frohman hired her to play opposite John Drew in My Wife (1907). She subsequently ACTED in a series of successful productions, including Love Watches (1908), Mrs. Dot (1910), The Mind-the-Paint Girl (1912), The Amazons (1913), The Land of Promise (1914), and Jerry (1914) for Frohman and remained under his MANAGEMENT until his death aboard the Lusitania in 1915. In 1914, Burke married showman Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., but she worked for other producers in A Marriage of Convenience (1918), Caesar’s Wife (1919), The Intimate Strangers (1921), and Rose Briar (1922). Finally, under

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her husband’s management, Burke STARRED in her only "ROADWAY musical, Annie Dear (1924). When Ziegfeld lost his fortune in the 1929 stock market crash, Burke went to work in MOTIONPICTURES, becoming one of the bestloved character actresses from the dawn of sound into the 1950s, appearing in such classics as A Bill of Divorcement (1932), Dinner at Eight* (1932), and most enduringly as Glinda, the Good Witch, in The Wizard of Oz (1939), a role she said reminded her of the lighthearted parts she had played in her early stage career. Burke’s final Broadway appearance was in Mrs. January and Mr. X (1944). She continued to act on TOUR, including the national company of The Solid Gold Cadillac,* in STOCK and on radio and television* until she retired. BURLESQUE. Most commonly understood today as a bump-andgrind entertainment featuring strippers and COMEDY, burlesque in the 19th century derived from 18th-century travesties (satires) of wellknown works. This spilled into minstrel shows, which often featured burlesques of other forms and popular songs, and into vaudeville and MUSICALS. Sometime in the mid-19th century, due in part to the runaway success of The Black Crook (1866), which featured a line of ballerinas in pink tights, and Lydia Thompson’s British Blondes, the more recent form of burlesque began to evolve. When PRODUC ERS Tony Pastor and B. F. Keith attempted to rid vaudeville of its more prurient elements, those entertainments found their way into burlesque houses, thus creating a clear separation between familyoriented vaudeville bills and increasingly risqué burlesque shows. Two burlesque circuits formed: The Empire, established in 1897 to service the western part of the United States, and the Columbia Wheel, founded in 1902 by Sam A. Scribner to cover eastern cities. Scribner attempted to cut back the more vulgar aspects of burlesque, but he failed. The suggestive dress (or undress to the point of nudity) and bawdy low comedy became the most lucrative aspects of burlesque productions in the first half of the 20th century. Striptease artists were particularly appreciated, with the Minsky Theatre’s “ecdysiast” Gypsy Rose Lee translating her burlesque fame into legitimate stage and MOTIONPICTURE opportunities. Other performers rose from burlesque, including COMEDIANS Bobby Clark,* Willie Howard, Fanny Brice, Phil Silvers, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, and Jackie Gleason, while many others were never able to leap the

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chasm separating legitimate stages and burlesque houses. See also SEXUALITYONTHE!MERICANSTAGE. BURLESQUE. This three-act play by George Manker Watters and !RTHUR (OPKINS was PRODUCED and DIRECTED by Hopkins at the Plymouth Theatre, where it opened on 1 September 1927 for 372 performances featuring Hal Skelly as comic Skid Johnson and a very young Barbara Stanwyck as Bonnie, his loyal partner. The couple is featured in a mediocre burlesque troupe where Skid overindulges in drink and flirts with tough-cookie chorus girl Sylvia Marco. Marco is preparing to leave the show to appear in a "ROADWAY revue and wants Skid to go with her. This causes Bonnie to flirt with a wealthy Texas rancher to get Skid’s attention, but the relationship of Bonnie and Skid is put to a severe test when Skid is offered a role in the Broadway revue and Bonnie learns that he may be having an affair with Marco. She decides to marry the rancher, but when Skid learns of this, he goes on a bender and loses his job in the revue. Bonnie realizes that Skid loves her, and they are reunited as the good news comes that a friend will produce a Broadway MUSICAL to STAR them. The success of Burlesque was matched by a 1946 revival, also directed by Hopkins, starring Bert Lahr* and Jean Parker. The original Skid, Skelly, appeared in a 1929 MOTIONPICTURE version titled The Dance of Life. Burlesque was also adapted for a 1936 Lux Radio* Theatre broadcast starring Al Jolson and his wife, dancer Ruby Keeler, and adapted into a 1948 screen musical, When My Baby Smiles at Me. BURNETT, FRANCES HODGSON (1849–1924). The English-born author of plays and children’s books came to the United States with her parents in 1865. She remains best known for three of 50 or so books: Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), A Little Princess (1905), and The Secret Garden (1911). She attained wealth dramatizing several of her own novels, notably Little Lord Fauntleroy (1888). A lawsuit to prevent unauthorized adaptation of her work in England helped to promote copyright laws to protect authors. BURNSIDE, R. H. (1870–1952). Robert Hubber Thorne Burnside was born into a theatrical family in Glasgow, Scotland. In 1894, he came to New York to DIRECT Lillian Russell. Beginning with Sergeant Kitty (1903), he devoted himself largely to PLAYWRITING and wrote

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lyrics for MUSICALS. Burnside was best known for his association with the Hippodrome (1909–1923), where he staged many of the spectacles, notably Chin Chin (1914). He also served five years as Shepherd of the Lambs’ Club. BURRILL, MARY P. (1884–1946). A high school teacher of English for 40 years in Washington, D.C., Mary Burrill wrote two powerful one-act plays based upon !FRICAN!MERICAN experience: They That Sit in Darkness (1919) and Aftermath (1919). BURROUGHS, MARIE (1866–1926). Born Lillie Arrington in San Francisco, the pretty Marie Burroughs made her New York debut in Rajah in 1884 with the Madison Square Theatre 3TOCK Company, where she eventually became leading lady, appearing in a steady stream of plays until 1900. BUSH, ANITA (1883–1974). The !FRICAN!MERICAN theatre MAN AGER was born in Washington, D.C. In 1903, she began TOURING as a dancer with a black company in vaudeville, and worked with Bert Williams and George Walker. After an injury, she organized a legitimate company of black ACTORS in Harlem at the Lincoln Theatre in 1915. The Anita Bush All-Colored Dramatic 3TOCK Company moved to Harlem’s Lafayette Theatre in 1916. Under the name ,AFAYETTE 0LAYERS, the company became well-known in its original location, on tour, and after 1928, in Los Angeles. BUSINESS. See ECCENTRIC BUSINESS; LINES OF BUSINESS. BUTLER, RACHEL BARTON (1888–1920). Butler began writing short plays in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she was born. She attended Radcliffe College and studied PLAYWRITING under George Pierce Baker. Her three-act COMEDY, Mama’s Affair, won the $500 Harvard Prize and was PRODUCED by Oliver Morosco, opening on 19 January 1920 at New York’s Little Theatre, where it ran for 98 performances. She married ACTOR Boyd Agin in 1919 and was planning a CHILDREN’s theatre project at the time of her death. BUTTER AND EGG MAN, THE. One of the few plays written by 'EORGE 3 +AUFMAN without a collaborator, The Butter and

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Egg Man won praise for its wit and lively characterizations when it opened at the Longacre Theatre on 23 September 1925 for a 243-performance run. The title of the COMEDY was suggested by nightclub hostess Texas Guinan’s way of describing bumpkins and rubes, and the term fits Kaufman’s Peter Jones of Chillicothe, Ohio, who arrives in New York anxious to invest money in a "ROADWAY play. Jones falls into the hands of a desperate PLAYWRITING team, Joe Lehman and Jack McClure, who have lost their gangster backer. Jones buys 49 percent of the play, but when it receives bad reviews during its out-of-town tryout, Lehman and McClure sell their half to Jones, only to watch him fix the play’s weaknesses, bring it to New York, and score a profitable hit. Upon learning that he is being sued for plagiarism, Jones sells the play back to Lehman and McClure for a substantial profit and, with his hometown girlfriend in tow, returns to Chillicothe to open a hotel. A MOTIONPICTURE version of The Butter and Egg Man was released in 1928. BYRON, ARTHUR WILLIAM (1872–1943). The son of ACTOR Oliver Doud Byron (1842–1920), who worked with Joseph Jefferson III, James K. Hackett, John Wilkes Booth, Edwin Booth, and Kate Crehan (sister of Ada Rehan), was born in New York and began performing in his father’s company. Though he never rose to STARDOM, Arthur Byron was regarded as a skilled light COMEDIAN. His greatest successes were in The Boomerang (1915), Tea for Three (1918), and Spring Cleaning (1923). In 1938, he was elected president of !CTORS %QUITY, but illness forced his retirement in 1939.

n#n CAIN’S WAREHOUSE. By the early 1890s, entrepreneur John J. Cain had established a facility for storing scenery from closed "ROADWAY shows. The scenery was rented to STOCK companies and TOURS. The business operated successfully until 1938 when the steadily diminishing ROAD forced its closure. During its nearly 50 years of operation, the phrase “going to Cain’s” meant that the show in question was about to close.

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CALCIUM LIGHT. See LIMELIGHT. CALDARA, ORME (1875–1925). Orme Caldara was born in Empire City, Oregon, and was acting in New York from 1903. His career peaked when he became *ANE#OWL’s leading man, appearing with her in Lilac Time (1917) and Smilin’ Through (1919). His marriage to Julia Dean ended in divorce. He was a central figure in the Lambs’ Club. CALDWELL, ANNE (1867–1936). Born in Boston, the prolific PLAY WRIGHT and lyricist wrote for the New York MUSICAL stage from 1906 until she went to Hollywood in 1929. Major shows to which she contributed included Chin Chin (1914), The Bunch and Judy (1920), Hitchy Koo (1920), The Night Boat (1920), Good Morning, Dearie (1921), and Three Cheers (1928). Jerome Kern composed the music for some of her lyrics. She also wrote legitimate plays, including The Nest Egg (1910), Uncle Sam (1911, with her husband James O’Dea), and When Claudia Smiles (1914). CALL-BOY. The main task of a stage MANAGER’s “go-fer” was to give the ACTORS their calls, summoning them to the stage at the appropriate time. CAMERON, BEATRICE (1863–1940). Born Susan Hegeman in Troy, New York, Cameron acted with various companies, including that of Robert Mantell in Called Back (1884). In 1886, she joined Richard Mansfield’s company, performing with him in Prince Karl at Madison Square Theatre. She continued as his leading lady, divorcing her first husband George R. P. Phoebus to marry Mansfield in 1891. In 1889, she was the first to play Nora in (ENRIK)BSEN’s A Doll’s House in English in New York. She played Raina to Mansfield’s Bluntschli in Arms and the Man (1894), the first production of a play by 'EORGE"ERNARD3HAW in America. Cameron retired after 1900. CAMPBELL, BARTLEY (1843–1888). Bartley Thomas Campbell was born in Pittsburgh, where he got his first newspaper job. He worked in various cities as a drama CRITIC, but quit journalism with the production of his 1871 play Through Fire.

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He developed his skill as a writer of melodrama at Richard M. Hooley’s Theatre in Chicago. When that company TOURED in San Francisco in 1875, Campbell discovered his affinity for the West, which inspired his best work, notably My Partner (1879) and The White Slave (1882). Campbell was long hailed as a leading PLAY WRIGHT, while his ventures as a PRODUCER were less successful. CAMPBELL, MRS. PATRICK (1865–1940). The imperiously beautiful British actress (born Beatrice Stella Tanner) made the first of her frequent American TOURS in 1902, managed by Liebler & Co., and with a repertoire in which she played women of questionable reputation, notably Magda, The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, and The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. After her New York engagement of 1933, she went into MOTIONPICTURES and taught speech to early “talkie” actors, including Colleen Moore. CAPTAIN JINKS OF THE HORSE MARINES. Clyde Fitch’s threeact COMEDY, which opened at the Garrick Theatre on 4 February 1901 for 168 performances, made a star of its leading lady, %THEL "ARRYMORE, who played Aurelia Johnson of Trenton, New Jersey. Aurelia returns home after she has become the operatic prima donna known as Madame Trentoni. She charms the locals, including Captain Robert Carrolton Jinks, who has made a $1,000 bet with some friends that he can make her fall in love with him. She does, despite the disapproval of Captain Jinks’s pretentious mother, and all is well until Aurelia learns of the bet. The distress leads her to claim that she cannot perform at a homecoming concert, but she does and is a great success. Jinks, who has fallen in love with her, finally convinces her that his affections are sincere. Barrymore appeared in a 1907 revival and there was a 1916 MOTIONPICTURE version, but a 1938 Federal Theatre Project* revival managed only four performances. When the play was adapted into the MUSICAL Captain Jinks in 1925, it ran for a season. CARBON ARC. See ARC LIGHT. CARLE, RICHARD (1871–1941). Born Charles Nicholas Carleton in Somerville, Massachusetts, Carle made his debut in a minor role in Niobe at New York’s Bijou Theatre in 1891. Two years later, he

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played the same theatre in the featured role of Worthington in A Mad Bargain. His comic character portrayals made him extremely popular on "ROADWAY, on the ROAD, and in London. Carle’s comic songs in MUSICALS often stopped the show. He wrote or adapted a great deal of his material, including The Tenderfoot (1904), The Spring Chicken (1906), and Mary’s Lamb (1907). After his last Broadway appearance—in The New Yorkers (1930)—Carle capped his nearly 40 years on stage with a decade of MOTION PICTURE ACTING in character roles. See also COMEDY. CARLETON, HENRY GUY (1856–1910). The PLAYWRIGHT, whose name is given as Guy Carlton in his VARIETY obituary, was born in Fort Union, New Mexico. According to Sherman, he was the son of General Carleton, the Indian fighter. Carleton worked in journalism before writing his first play. He was married for a time to ACTRESS Effie Shannon. Beginning with Memnon and Victor Durand, both in 1884, he had a dozen or so plays PRODUCED in New York, notably A Gilded Fool (1892) and The Butterflies (1893), the latter STARRING John Drew. CAROLINA PLAYMAKERS.† University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor Frederick H. Koch founded this group in 1918, eight years after he had set up a similar company at the University of North Dakota. Goals for the Playmakers included developing PLAY WRIGHTS and fostering plays by Southern writers, particularly North Carolinians. Thomas Wolfe and 0AUL 'REEN were among those whose new plays were staged. The Playmakers published new plays in a Carolina folk-plays series and earned the epithet “America’s Folk Theatre.” See also FOLK DRAMA. CARPENTER, EDWARD CHILDS (1872–1950). The respected novelist and PLAYWRIGHT Edward Childs Carpenter was born in Philadelphia. He began writing plays during his years with the Philadelphia Inquirer, 1905–1916, beginning with The Dragon Fly (1905, with Luther Long), followed by a dramatization of his own 1906 novel Captain Courtesy. His longest-running plays were The Cinderella Man (1916, 192 performances), The Bachelor Father (1928, 264 performances), and Whistling in the Dark (1932, with Laurence Gross, 144 performances). He was president of the Dra-

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matists’ Theatre Inc., 1924–1927, and of the $RAMATISTS 'UILD, 1930–1935. CARPENTER SCENES. Interspersing full-stage settings, carpenter scenes were those played on the apron in front of a painted drop curtain, through which could often be heard the hammering of the carpenter as the next full-stage setting was being assembled. CARRIAGE TRADE. A clientele wealthy enough to arrive at the theatre in horse-drawn carriages—either privately owned or hired—was desirable to MANAGERS, who might even pander to the carriage trade. CARTER, MRS. LESLIE (1862–1937). Caroline Louise Dudley was born in Lexington, Kentucky, where her beauty, red hair, and tempestuous nature led to a stage career following a sensational divorce case in which she was found guilty of adultery. With an eye toward the box office, David Belasco STARRED Mrs. Leslie Carter, as she was billed, in The Ugly Duckling (1890). It flopped and CRITICS complained of her overly emotive ACTING while also acknowledging her physical charms. The following year, Carter appeared successfully in Belasco and Charles Frohman’s production of the operetta Miss Helyett (1891), but her real triumph came in 1895 as the intrepid heroine Maryland Calvert in Belasco’s Civil 7AR melodrama The Heart of Maryland. Carter scored additional successes as scandalous characters in Zaza (1899) and Du Barry (1901), in which the roles of a prostitute and courtesan, respectively, were well served by the sensational aspects of her personal life. Carter parted company with Belasco shortly after appearing as the tragic heroine of Adrea (1905), which critics considered her finest performance to date. She then TOURED in revivals of Camille and The Second Mrs. Tangueray, and had one additional major New York success as Lady Catherine in W. Somerset Maugham’s The Circle (1921). She later toured as the duplicitous Mother Goddam in The Shanghai Gesture (1926). Carter made her final "ROADWAY appearance in a revival of She Stoops to Conquer in 1928, after which she was reduced to bit roles in MOTIONPICTURES, never recapturing the glamour of her earlier starring roles in silent film versions of Du Barry and The Heart of Maryland (both 1915).

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CARTER, LINCOLN J. (1865–1926). Born into a theatrical family in Rochester, New York, on the day of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, Carter grew up on the ROAD with the company in which his parents performed, but discovered early in life his preference for writing. He settled in Chicago in 1885 and saw his first play, Sidonia, produced at the Academy of Music there in 1886. There followed a steady flow of old-time blood-and-thunder melodramas, most of which premiered at Chicago’s Criterion Theatre. Their popularity supplied material for 20 or so ROAD companies and a number of silent MOTION PICTURES. Among Carter’s thrillers of the 1890s were The Fast Mail, The Tornado, The Defaulter, Under the Dome, The Heart of Chicago, Remember the Maine, and Chattanooga. Carter also designed SCENERY for plays by other dramatists as well as his own, and he patented the panoramic effect he devised for Bedford’s Hope (1906). See also PLAYWRIGHTS. CASTING. As long runs and the combination system became the norm during the decades following the Civil 7AR, the old practice of casting according to lines of business declined. By 1900, MANAGERS no longer prized the versatility of the STOCK company ACTOR who could perform a variety of roles in REPERTORY, nor was possession of a theatrical wardrobe essential for an actor seeking to join a company. As the repertoire itself evolved from historical melodrama to drawing-room social drama, an educated manner could compensate for histrionic shortcomings and range (Burge 1986, 215–16). In any event, casting became more and more specific to a given role in a single play. CAT AND THE CANARY, THE. 0LAYWRIGHT John Willard achieved his only "ROADWAY success with this long-running (349 performances) COMEDY-mystery thriller, which opened on 7 February 1922 at the National Theatre. Florence Eldridge played the ingénue who claims her inheritance after spending a night in a creepy mansion where it turns out that the frightening apparitions were orchestrated by conniving relatives who hoped to drive her insane. CAUGHT IN THE RAIN. The 1906 farce by William Collier and Grant Stewart, PRODUCED by Charles Frohman, opened on 31 December at the Garrick Theatre and ran for 161 performances. Collier wrote the piece to exploit his own comedic style and played the

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ostensibly misogynist leading man who falls in love. The New York Times review (2 January 1907) found that “sheer excess of laughter” compensated for the negligible plot. See also COMEDY. CAWTHORN, JOSEPH (1867–1949). Born in New York City, Cawthorn performed in minstrel shows as a CHILD. As an adult performer, he specialized in German dialect COMEDY and MUSICALS. According to CRITIC Austin Latchaw (Kansas City Star, 7 May 1935), Cawthorn “could pronounce any word seventeen ways and play the concertina horizontally, vertically, upside down or in circles and never miss a note. Joe was a merry soul, a source of constant amusement.” He went to Hollywood in 1926 and appeared in over 50 MOTIONPICTURES. CAYVAN, GEORGIA (1858–1906). Born in Bath, Maine, Cayvan began her career as a reader on lyceum programs throughout the New England states. In 1879, she made her musical stage debut in H.M.S. Pinafore with the Boston Ideals and her legitimate debut a month later, 10 April, in Sketches in India, also at the Boston Theatre. Her New York debut came a year later at the Madison Square Theatre when she played Dolly Hutton in Hazel Kirke. She moved into the title role in 1881 and TOURED with the company for two seasons. In 1882, she originated the role of Liza in The White Slave, and there followed a long succession of heroines, including the title role in May Blossom (1884). She played the female comic in Sweet Lavender in 1888 and in its 1893 revival. CENSORSHIP.† The censoring of theatre existed from its beginnings, and in America this proclivity initially stemmed from Puritans who viewed the stage as a den of idleness and iniquity. Over time, censorious forces focused on controversial thematic content, certain forms of human behavior (especially sexuality), and language. In the mid-19th century, performances featuring scantily clad WOMEN both titillated and outraged audiences, culminating in a major controversy over Adah Isaacs Menken’s Mazeppa (1861) and the MUSICAL melodrama The Black Crook (1866); the latter was decried for its chorus of ballerinas dressed in little more than tights. After 1880, the focus of censorship began to shift toward the content of social problem plays and REALISM, with frequent closings

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(and arrests) associated with the earliest American productions of plays by (ENRIK )BSEN and 'EORGE "ERNARD 3HAW. James A. Herne’s Margaret Fleming (1890), written in the Ibsenite mode, was not permitted performances in either New York or Boston. In 1905, when Arnold Daly produced Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession, which had been written in the early 1890s, both he and leading lady Mary Shaw were arrested. Other plays running afoul of authorities include Clyde Fitch’s Sapho (1900) and George Scarborough’s The Lure (1913). While musicals, revues, and burlesque were able to employ limited nudity and risqué subject matter, the legitimate stage met with greater difficulty. %UGENE/.EILL encountered resistance to several of his plays, including moral objections to Desire Under the Elms (1924) and his 0ULITZER0RIZE–winning Strange Interlude (1928), as well as considerable distress over race issues in All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1924). The antiWAR sentiments and soldierly language of Laurence Stallings and -AXWELL!NDERSON’s What Price Glory (1924) incited calls for censorship, and Edwin Justus Mayer’s The Firebrand (1924), 3IDNEY (OWARD’s They Knew What They Wanted (1924), John B. Colton’s The Shanghai Gesture (1926), and Edward Sheldon and Charles MacArthur’s* Lulu Belle (1926) all raised hackles. Censors focused particularly on the plays of Mae West, whose sexually liberated play, Sex (1926), in which she also played the lead, led to her arrest for indecency. She spent 10 days in jail and was fined $500, but attendant publicity made her a major STAR. West’s next play, The Drag (1927), depicted a homosexual ball and was closed by authorities before it could reach "ROADWAY. West’s exploits led to the enactment of the Wales Padlock Law of 1927, which permitted authorities to arrest personnel, lock theatres, and ban productions viewed as indecent. This law was rarely enforced, partly because defining indecency proved complicated, but it remained on the books until the 1960s and was significant in forcing PRODUCERS to tread lightly in sensitive areas. CHANGELINGS, THE. Opening on 17 September 1923 at the Henry Miller Theatre, Lee Wilson Dodd’s COMEDY ran for 139 performances and was nominated for the 0ULITZER0RIZE. Two couples in their forties are longtime friends, but it is readily apparent that each is married to the wrong person. The balance is temporarily upset when

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it appears that the daughter of one couple is leaving her husband, the son of the other couple. Dodd prefaced the play with a defense of the comic value of such material, given the foibles of being human. The impressive cast included Henry Miller, Blanche Bates, Laura Hope Crews, and Ruth Chatterton. CHARACTER ACTOR/ACTRESS. This familiar term refers to those ACTORS especially adept at creating varied characterizations from play to play, moving easily through all genres of dramatic performance. Character actors usually played supporting or bit roles, although some became STARS as a result of their uncanny skill at developing diverse characterizations, moving easily from playing young or old as well as every type of persona. Some worked steadily playing one character type (Mrs. Thomas Whiffen, for example, played old women from virtually the beginning of her long career to its end). Conversely, many stars developed into character actors as they aged or moved from stage to MOTIONPICTURE roles. During the modernist era, some of the most successful character actors were James Lewis, Mrs. G. H. Gilbert, &AY"AINTER, $UDLEY$IGGES, 4HOMAS-ITCHELL, and *OSEPHINE(ULL. CHARITY BALL, THE. David Belasco and Henry C. DeMille’s fouract drama opened on 19 November 1889 for 200 performances at the Lyceum Theatre, PRODUCED by Daniel Frohman and STARRING Georgia Cayvan. Mildly sensational, this intense drama focused on the Reverend John Van Buren, who takes blind Phyllis Lee under his protection after her father’s death. John learns that his brother, Dick, a Wall Street opportunist, has previously seduced Phyllis and abandoned her in order to court Ann Cruger, whose father is a financial tycoon. John forces Dick to marry Phyllis and repent his ways. As the play ends, John is drawn to Ann, who has loved him all along. CHATTERTON, RUTH (1893–1961). Born in New York, Ruth Chatterton made her stage debut in 1909 in STOCK in Washington, D.C. Her "ROADWAY debut in The Great Name (1911) flopped, but with the guidance of PRODUCER Henry Miller, Chatterton revived her fortunes with The Rainbow (1912). Her grace and beauty were praised by CRITICS, who also admired her ACTING in Daddy Long-Legs (1914), a long-running hit that made her a STAR. A series of popular

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successes followed: Come Out of the Kitchen (1916), Moonlight and Honeysuckle (1919), Mary Rose (1920), La Tendresse (1922), and The Changelings (1923). An ill-advised switch to MUSICALS with The Magnolia Lady (1924), an adaptation of her previous hit, Come Out of the Kitchen, failed, but she rebounded in a TOUR of Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat (1926). Lured to Hollywood, she starred in nearly 30 MOTION PICTURES in the first decade of sound; these included Madame X (1929), Charming Sinners (1929), and Dodsworth* (1936). Chatterton made periodic returns to the stage until 1951. CHEATING CHEATERS. This four-act COMEDY by Max Marcin opened on 9 August 1916 at the Eltinge Theatre for 286 performances, PRODUCED by A. H. Woods. Nan Carey brings together a group of thieves in support of her scheme to pose as the wealthy Brockton family so that she may befriend the rich Palmers and steal their jewels. It turns out that the Palmers are also a gang of crooks trying the same scheme. Ferris, an unseen detective, dogs the actions of both groups, but it is ultimately revealed that Nan is Ferris, and she arrests both gangs. Marjorie Rambeau’s performance won admiration from CRITICS and the play had a long life in STOCK. CHENEY, SHELDON (1886–1980). Born in Berkeley, California, Sheldon Cheney graduated from the University of California in 1908 and studied theatre with George Pierce Baker at Harvard University in 1913, after which he spent five years TOURING the theatres of Europe. Cheney was among the first American writers to promote the New Stagecraft. In his books The New Movement in Theatre (1914), The Art Theatre (1917), The Open-Air Theatre (1918), and Stage Decoration (1927), as well as through numerous essays in THEATRE ARTS magazine (which he founded in 1916, serving as its editor until 1921), Cheney stressed modernist resistance to REALISM, calling for more emphasis on simplified, symbolic approaches to stimulate the imagination. His subsequent books include The Theatre: 3000 Years of Drama, Acting and Stagecraft (1929), considered the first important comprehensive theatre history written by an American. CHERRY PICKERS, THE. Joseph Arthur’s 1896 four-act melodrama is a story of the renowned Eleventh Hussars “Cherry Picker” Regiment in northern India during the British-Afghan 7AR. The

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exciting action peaked in act 3, set in a gun room of the fortress under siege. There the half-caste hero is rescued by the half-caste heroine, who escapes the clutches of the English officer attempting to seduce her, and who manages to unchain the hero a mere split second before a slowly revolving cannon is fired at his chest. Augustus Pitou arranged an initial performance on 18 June 1896 at the Academy of Music in Newburg as a means of establishing copyright, particularly for the thrilling effect in the gun room. The New York production opened on 12 October 1896 at the Fourteenth Street Theatre. Edward A. Dithmar’s review in the New York Times (18 October 1896) noted that he had “rarely seen melodrama so effectively mounted, even in a Broadway theatre.” Comic relief came in the form of “the quick wit and generous impulses of the much-married, hot-tempered Irishwoman in India.” The role even provided ACTRESS Jennie Satterlee with a “tipsy scene.” CHICAGO. This three-act COMEDY with a prologue by Maurine Dallas Watkins opened on 30 December 1926 for 172 performances at the Music Box Theatre. Watkins (1901–1969), a Chicago newspaperwoman and student of George Pierce Baker, imbued Chicago with a cynical, satiric flavor. Roxie, a flapper, murders her husband. With the assistance of a “sob sister” columnist and predatory lawyer, Roxie manages to manipulate her trial into a media carnival. She dreams of vaudeville success and, upon acquittal, embarks on a showbiz career. But Roxie’s front-page celebrity instantly evaporates when a new murderess lures away her audience along with the reporters. Capturing Prohibition-era yellow journalism rampant in Chicago in the 1920s, Watkins’s play has proven remarkably durable. -OTION PICTURE versions include a 1927 silent and the 1942 Roxie Hart STARRING Ginger Rogers. In 1975, John Kander and Fred Ebb’s MUSICAL adaptation, Chicago, ran for 898 performances in New York and inspired a series of revivals beginning in 1996, leading to an Academy Award–winning 2002 film version. CHILD PERFORMERS.† During the heyday of the TOURING STOCK company, when whole families traveled and performed together, children grew up filling out crowd scenes. At mid-century there was a fad for putting talented children into adult roles and presenting them as novelties; the little Bateman sisters as Richard III and

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Richmond best exemplify the practice. On the modernist stage, however, it was more usual to put child performers into plays with strong roles for children like Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the title character in Little Lord Fauntleroy. Plays written for children were part of the American theatre from its beginnings, and World 7AR I children’s theatre* emerged as a potent subgenre. See also GERRY SOCIETY; JUVENILE; EDDINGER, WALLACE; ELLIS, EDITH; ELLSLER, EFFIE; GISH, DOROTHY; GISH, LILLIAN; GLEASON, JAMES; KEANE, DORIS. CHILDREN OF THE MOON. Opening on 17 August 1923 at the Comedy Theatre, Martin Flavin’s offbeat play ran for 109 performances. Flavin called it a COMEDY, but this strange play deals with family madness brought on by moonlight, the romance and danger of aviation, and the WAR in France, with dollops of symbolism of fog and sea. At the end, the heroine, unbalanced by her mother’s machinations, goes into a moon trance and asks the aviator whom she loves to fly her to the moon. He agrees, although he knows there is but a drop of fuel in the plane and a thick fog is rolling in. The play ends with the sound of the airplane motor and the mother’s belated realization of what she has wrought. CHIP WOMAN’S FORTUNE, THE. This 1923 one-act folk drama was the first nonmusical !FRICAN!MERICAN play to reach "ROAD WAY, and remains the best-known among Willis Richardson’s works. The title character is a kindly old woman who picks up stray chips of wood and coal to sustain herself, but has managed to save up some money to give her son when he returns from prison. The son unhesitatingly gives the money to the family with whom his mother has been staying, so that their victrola will not be repossessed. Originally PRODUCED by Raymond O’Neil’s Ethiopian Art Players on a triple bill, it went on to the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem, and thence to "ROADWAY. See also HARLEM RENAISSANCE. CHORUS GIRL. The life of the chorus girl was a topic regularly explored in the press of the modernist era. Many stage-struck young WOMEN saw it as a means of entrée into the theatre, but most would drop out quickly while others advanced to speaking roles. Thus there was constant turnover in the chorus. A chorus girl interviewed for

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the Kansas City Evening Star (8 March 1888) explained, “managers when they make up a chorus want fresh, good looking women. They don’t care so much for the voice. Any girl with a tolerable fair voice will do, so she’s got a good form and a pretty face. Chorus music is generally simple and one or two principals carry it anyhow, so that part is not hard.” Although the chorus got its COSTUMES furnished by the management, other aspects of the life were difficult: “If anything happens or the troupe smashes up the chorus girls are always the ones to suffer. A manager will pay his leading people if he possibly can, because they would advertise him and ruin him in his business if he didn’t, but if he breaks up little he cares whether the poor chorus girls have a dollar or not.” She added, “Three or four seasons are apt to spoil a chorus-girl pretty badly unless she takes care. The late hours and travel and hard work all tell . . . When a girl gets past 26 she may as well think of doing something else for a living.” Thus it is not surprising that “a famine of chorus girls” was reported 12 years later in a story (Kansas City World, 20 September 1900) about how managers were having trouble filling the ranks. By 1908, there was a movement to ease the chorus girl’s difficulties by creating club homes for impecunious chorus girls in cities like Boston, Chicago, and New York. Philadelphia’s Cushman Club House for Chorus Girls was a three-story building in a good part of town, supported by local philanthropies. Conditions improved over the years, as indicated by 7ALTER7INCHELL’s comments in Vanity Fair (reported by the Kansas City Star, 6 January 1928): “The chorus girl has become one of America’s most glamorous figures. There is a certain aura about her. She is definitely not as scarlet as she is painted.” Extolling the chorus girl’s brains as well as beauty, Winchell credited her ability to get “everything out of life that can be derived from it.” CHORUS LADY, THE. The slight COMEDY by James Forbes originally opened on 13 June 1904 as vaudeville sketch material. Enlarged to a two-act play, it opened on 1 September 1906 at the Savoy Theatre and moved to London in April 1909. Rose Stahl played the leading role in all three venues. The play appealed to audiences for the glimpses it afforded of backstage life and stage folks’ lingo. CHRISTIAN, THE. Opening on 10 October 1898 at the Knickerbocker Theatre in New York, Hall Caine’s dramatization of his own novel

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ran for 160 performances, largely on the strength of Viola Allen’s performance as Glory Quayle, a pure-minded but ambitious young woman. She is loved by John Storm, an earnest, uncompromising missionary, who somehow wins her despite their apparently incompatible temperaments. The play made Allen a STAR and did well on the ROAD. In Lewis C. Strang’s assessment (1899, 135), The Christian “chiefly appeals to persons on whom the theatre-going habit is not permanently fixed, and who, therefore, are not analysers, consciously or unconsciously, of dramatic effects. The sentiments in the speeches of John Storm, speeches that are uttered by the actor with all the solemnity of complete conviction, strike the unsophisticated with peculiar force, and these hifalutin words and preachy conventionalities, together with a certain dramatic power that is the only reason for existence of the mechanical drama, account easily enough for the popular success of the play.” CINDERELLA MAN, THE. Opening on 17 January 1916 at the Hudson Theatre, the charming COMEDY by Edward Childs Carpenter ran for 192 performances. The Cinderella of this fantasy is a starving poet (played by Shelley Hull) whose “Prince Charming” turns out to be a poor little rich girl. Frank Bacon turned in a fine comic character performance as the butler. CINEMA. See MOTIONPICTURE. CIRCUS.† The modernist era might be considered the golden age of the white-tent circus. The visit of a circus to a small town or a city was long and eagerly anticipated by the locals. The menagerie, the sideshows, the clowns, the exotic exhibitions, the dazzling feats under the big top: all were thrilling to people of all social classes. Thus it is not surprising that a number of plays were written on circus themes, including Circus in Town and The Circus Rider (both 1887), The Circus Girl (1897), Polly of the Circus (1907), The Circus Man (1909), and The Wisdom Tooth (1926). Many performers, including Dan Rice, made their fame in circuses and remained there, while others moved on to vaudeville, legitimate theatre, and MUSICAL comedy. CITY, THE. Clyde Fitch’s three-act drama, subtitled “A Modern Play of American Life,” opened on 21 December 1909 at the Lyric Theatre

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for 190 performances. By the standards of its time, Fitch’s play was bold in its REALISM, focusing on the impact of big city life on those unprepared for its temptations. Fitch died prior to the play’s much anticipated opening and The City aroused controversy both in New York and on TOUR (and near pandemonium on opening night), in part because the drug-addicted character Hannock (played by Tully Marshall) calls another character a “God damn liar.” The action involves Rand, a respected small-town businessman mixed up in a few shady deals, who confesses to his son George that Hannock is Rand’s illegitimate son. Rand dies, and his son George confronts Hannock with the truth, a shocking bit of news compounded by the fact that Hannock has secretly wed George’s sister Cicely. Distraught that he has married his half-sister, Hannock shoots Cicely and attempts suicide. George prevents this, but Hannock blackmails George in an attempt to ruin his budding political career with public revelations of family secrets. George foils Hannock by withdrawing from politics and confessing the truth to his fiancée, heiress Eleanor Vorhees, even though he fears the revelation will end their relationship. Eleanor, impressed by George’s integrity, reaffirms her love for him. Regarded as Fitch’s finest play, The City was made into MOTIONPICTURES in 1916 and 1926. CIVIC REPERTORY THEATRE (CRT).† One of several attempts to establish a REPERTORY theatre in New York City patterned on the English repertory system, the CRT was a signal forerunner of the American repertory movement that flourished after 1960. Established by %VA,E'ALLIENNE, who DIRECTED and/or STARRED in most of its productions, the CRT addressed the need for American ACTORS to develop their craft by playing diverse classical and contemporary roles in a repertory structure. Troubled from its start, but sustained by Otto Kahn’s philanthropy, the CRT suffered from its original location at the Fourteenth Street Theatre, situated away from most "ROADWAY theatres. The CRT’s first season commenced with a production of Spanish dramatist Jacinto Benavente’s Saturday Night, much admired by CRITICS, followed by similarly well-received productions of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, (ENRIK)BSEN’s The Master Builder and John Gabriel Borkman, and Carlo Goldoni’s La Locandriera. The CRT survived for 10 tumultuous, financially strained seasons, PRODUCING 37 plays in all, including much-admired productions of

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The Good Hope, Peter Pan, Hedda Gabler, Romeo and Juliet, and Camille. Modernist classics, especially works by Chekhov and Ibsen (five Ibsen dramas were produced during CRT’s tenure) were emphasized, but the theatre also premiered of three American plays, notably 3USAN'LASPELL’s Alison’s House,* winner of the 1931 0ULITZER 0RIZE. The CRT company included !LLA.AZIMOVA, Burgess Meredith,* and Jacob Ben-Ami, but Le Gallienne remained the dominant attraction. The CRT’s emphasis on WOMEN professionals provided important early opportunities to designers !LINE "ERNSTEIN and Irene Sharaff,* among others. Le Gallienne’s desire to keep ticket prices low while offering first-rate productions consigned the CRT to persistent financial difficulties exacerbated by the Great Depression. A surprise hit with Le Gallienne’s 1933 adaptation of Alice in Wonderland provided a temporary reprieve when it transferred to a Broadway theatre for an extended run. Unable to keep the company afloat despite this success, Le Gallienne disbanded the CRT in 1933, but not before inspiring the 4HEATRE'UILD and The Group Theatre,* among other serious-minded theatre organizations. Along with Cheryl Crawford* and Margaret Webster,* Le Gallienne attempted to resuscitate the CRT model as the American Repertory Theatre* in 1946, but it was a short-lived experiment. CIVIL WAR DRAMA. A number of modernist plays used the Civil 7AR as the backdrop to a sentimental or melodramatic action, but they seldom treated specific issues related to the war. With the Union having won, the South could be safely romanticized on the stage, and plays depicting antebellum plantation life were popular on the ROAD. Among the most successful of the Civil War dramas were Shenandoah (1889) by Bronson Howard, Alabama (1891) and The Copperhead (1918) by Augustus Thomas, May Blossom (1884) and The Heart of Maryland (1895) by David Belasco, Held by the Enemy (1886) and Secret Service (1896) by William Gillette, A Grand Army Man (1907) by Belasco, Pauline Phelps, and Marion Short, and The Warrens of Virginia (1907) by William C. deMille. CLAPP, HENRY AUSTIN (1841–1904). Born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, the drama CRITIC and 3HAKESPEARE specialist graduated from Harvard in 1860, served in the Union Army, practiced law, and

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wrote drama criticism for the Boston Daily Advertiser from 1868 to 1902, followed by two years with the Boston Herald. In 1902, Clapp published his Reminiscences of a Dramatic Critic. CLARENCE. A four-act COMEDY by Booth Tarkington, Clarence opened on 20 September 1919 at the Hudson Theatre for 300 performances. An early success for !LFRED,UNT in the title role, supported by -ARY "OLAND, Glenn Hunter, and (ELEN (AYES, this George C. Tyler production generated humor from the exploits of a milquetoast veteran wounded during target practice. Clarence, an expert on bugs, is taken in by the Wheelers, a dysfunctional family including a frustrated father, flighty mother, flapper sister, and lazy brother, all of whom are brought closer together by the ineffable Clarence who falls in love with the governess. The innocuous domestic travails provide a glimpse of middle-class American life at the beginning of the Jazz Age. Clarence had two screen versions, in 1922 and 1937. CLARK, BARRETT H. (1890–1953).† Barrett Harper Clark was born in Toronto, Canada. After TOURING as an ACTOR, he moved into academia and publishing. He taught dramatic literature at Columbia University while writing numerous articles and books on the theatre. From 1918 to 1936, he was the literary editor for 3AMUEL&RENCH )NC, after which he founded and headed Dramatists Play Service.* He was drama editor of Drama Magazine and edited the 20 volumes of America’s Lost Plays. His European Theories of the Drama (1918) was widely used as a textbook for several decades. He served on the board of directors of the Drama League of America. CLARK, MARGUERITE (1883–1940). Born in Cincinnati, Marguerite Clark began her career in the chorus of a Milton Aborn touring MUSICAL. Bit roles in musicals like The Belle of Bohemia (1900) led to a leading role in The Wild Rose (1902) and a stint as De Wolf Hopper’s coSTAR in a series of musicals including Mr. Pickwick (1903), a revival of Wang (1904), Happyland (1905), and The Pied Piper (1908). Clark also won acclaim in Margaret Mayo’s COMEDY Baby Mine (1910) and costarred with John Barrymore in The Affairs of Anatol (1912). She received approving notices in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1912) and as the title character of Winthrop Ames’s production of Harley Granville-Barker’s harlequinade,

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Prunella (1913), after which she spent most of her career in MOTION PICTURES, repeating roles like Prunella and Snow White, as well as Little Eva and Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1918). CLAXTON, KATE (1848?–1924). Daughter of a theatrical MANAGER, the popular ACTRESS was born in Somerville, New Jersey, and made her debut in 1870 in a supporting role with Lotta Crabtree. After seasons with Augustin Daly’s company and at A. M. Palmer’s Union Square Theatre, she formed her own company in 1874. Three times she was performing at theatres when they caught fire: in Brooklyn, St. Louis, and La Crosse, Wisconsin. The play with which she was most associated in popular memory was The Two Orphans, which she TOURED widely. See also THEATRE FIRES. CLEMENT, CLAY (1863–1910). Born Clement Laird Geiger in Green Township, Illinois, the ACTOR-PLAYWRIGHT could always count on his own play The New Dominion (1897) to sustain him. As CRITIC Austin Latchaw observed (Kansas City Star, 19 June 1935), when all else failed, Clement “went down into his trunk and brought out the old favorite, paid his debts and made enough margin again to produce something new. He was a genial, goodly man and a beloved actor.” The earliest New York Times review of The New Dominion (30 March 1897) noted Clement’s “originality and personal force” and that he was “a rather wide person.” His STARRING character role was that of a learned German baron who “goes to Virginia to study the flora and fauna of the country, and remains to make love in broken English.” CLEVELAND PLAY HOUSE.† Founded in 1915, Cleveland Play House opened in 1916 with The Garden of Semiramis under the leadership of Raymond O’Neil. The AMATEUR group PRODUCED 16 plays—all international classics by authors that included Kalidasa, Claudel, Andreyev, Molière, and Goldoni—in the five years before it turned professional in 1921. The story of those early years is the subject of a book titled The Cleveland Play House: How It Began (1965) by Julia M. Flory, one of the founders. In 1921, the Board of Trustees recognized the need for a professional operation and chose Frederic McConnell as DIRECTOR. In a converted church, he produced seasons of as many as 20 plays, though the repertoire remained predominantly European. Working

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with Play House president Charles S. Brooks, McConnell opened two theatres (one seating 160, the other 500) in the gardens of the Francis Drury estate. An additional, larger complex opened in 1949. McConnell was succeeded as director by K. Elmo Lowe, who guided the Play House through financial challenges until his retirement in 1969. After a difficult transition period, Richard Oberlin was named director in 1972. Oberlin modernized many aspects of the business operation, launched innovative community programs, and in 1983 oversaw the opening of a new Play House complex. Cleveland Play House today holds the record as the longest continuously operating regional REPERTORY theatre in the United States. CLIMAX, THE. Edward Locke’s four-character melodrama about an opera singer and her Svengali-like throat doctor opened on 12 April 1909 at Weber’s Theatre in New York and ran for 240 performances. Two of the four roles called for significant musical talent. The New York Times CRITIC (18 April 1909) found the play to be “an interesting sentimental comedy in a fresh and charming vein.” CLIMBERS, THE. Clyde Fitch’s four-act drama opened at the Bijou Theatre on 21 January 1901 for 163 performances. Blanche Sterling sadly returns from her father’s funeral, knowing that he died bankrupt and that her mother and siblings are greedy social climbers. Various social parasites appear, but Blanche has a good friend in Edward Warden. On going through her father’s papers, however, she discovers that her husband has indulged in unscrupulous business practices. Sterling’s remorse prompts his self-sacrificing suicide, knowing that Warden will care for Blanche. Amelia Bingham PRODUCED the play and STARRED as Blanche, with supporting roles ACTED by Robert Edeson and Clara Bloodgood. #RITICS found it uncommonly good drama. Bingham revived The Climbers for a brief run in 1904, and MOTIONPICTURES versions were released in 1915 and 1927. CLOTHES. Opening on 11 September 1906 at the Manhattan Theatre, the COMEDY-drama by Avery Hopwood and Channing Pollock ran for 113 performances. Grace George played the young woman so driven by her desire to dress well that she considers marrying a man for his money. The excellent cast included Robert T. Haines and Douglas Fairbanks.

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CLUBS. The three most important New York City clubs for members of the theatrical profession are the Lambs’ Club (founded 1874), The Players (1888), and the Friars (1907). Many bons mots have been devised over the years to differentiate among them. As a broad generalization, one might say that most Players came from legitimate theatre, Lambs from MUSICAL COMEDY, and Friars from nightclubs and variety entertainment. It has been quipped that the Lambs are players pretending to be gentlemen, Players are gentlemen pretending to be ACTORS, and Friars are neither, pretending to be both. Another saying is that Players smoke pipes, Lambs smoke cigarettes, and Friars smoke cigars. 'EORGE - #OHAN belonged to all three clubs. See also ACADEMICTHEATRE; THEATRICAL CLUBS. COBURN, CHARLES (1877–1961) and IVAH WILLS COBURN (1882?–1937). Charles Douville Coburn was born in Macon, Georgia, and after a theatrical apprenticeship made his New York debut in Up York State (1901), followed by a TOUR of The Christian (1904). Coburn and his wife Ivah Wills Coburn founded the Coburn 3HAKE SPEAREAN Players in 1906, a troupe that toured performing Shakespeare and the classics. Coburn also appeared notably on "ROADWAY in The Yellow Jacket (1916), The Imaginary Invalid (1917), The Better ’Ole (1918), The Bronx Express (1922), So This Is London (1922), The Farmer’s Wife (1924), Trelawny of the “Wells” (1925), Ghosts (1927), Diplomacy (1928), and Three Wise Fools*(1936). From the beginning of sound MOTIONPICTURES, Coburn emerged as one of the screen’s most beloved character ACTORS playing befuddled fathers (and grandfathers) and benign or corrupt businessmen. Coburn continued in motion pictures into the 1950s and occasionally returned to the stage. With his wife’s assistance, Coburn established the Mohawk Drama Festival (1934) at Union College in Schenectady, New York. COCK ROBIN. Opening on 12 January 1928, the backstage COMEDY murder mystery by %LMER2ICE and 0HILIP"ARRY ran for 100 performances at the 48th Street Theatre. An ACTOR is killed on stage, and virtually everyone associated with the little theatre production had a motive. Melodrama is spoofed and comedy triumphs. COCOANUTS, THE. Part MUSICAL and part farce, this wacky 'EORGE 3+AUFMAN (book) and Irving Berlin (music and lyrics) collaboration

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opened on 8 December 1925 for 377 performances STARRING the Marx Brothers and PRODUCED by 3AM ( (ARRIS. The Cocoanuts, along with Animal Crackers (1928), coauthored by Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind,* made stars of Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo, who went on to achieve legendary status in MOTIONPICTURES with their first appearance in the screen version of The Cocoanuts in 1929 at the dawn of the “talkies.” Florida-boom hotel owner Henry W. Schlemmer (Groucho) is a charlatan attempting to sell swamps as prime property to anyone unfortunate enough to check into his hotel. This simple plot, coupled with Kaufman’s wit, Berlin’s songs (although his best one, “Always,” was cut before the show opened because Kaufman hated love songs), and the lunatic improvisations of the Marxes, made The Cocoanuts a hit. CODY, WILLIAM FREDERICK (1846–1917). Born in Iowa, Cody became a popular stage attraction in plays depicting his exploits as a frontiersman and scout before, during, and after the American Civil 7AR. When Ned Buntline wrote of “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s adventures in serial form in 1869, various actors, including John B. Studley, played Cody in melodrama adaptations, leading Buntline to craft a play, The Scouts of the Prairie (1872), in which Cody played himself in a Chicago production. Despite Cody’s lack of ACTING experience and the play’s pedestrian quality, urban audiences were thrilled to see a genuine frontier hero. Cody appeared in similar melodramas during the 1870s and early 1880s, continuing to work as a scout for the Army between theatrical seasons. Cody partnered with William F. Carver in 1883 to stage an outdoor Wild West Show, but disagreements ended their collaboration. Nate Salsbury took over to exploit the Wild West Show for a remarkable 34 years, generating publicity with American and European TOURS, despite occasional financial problems that finally shuttered the show in 1915. Among the many acts to appear in Cody’s Wild West Show were sharpshooter Annie Oakley, who joined his company in 1885, and Chief Sitting Bull. COGHLAN, CHARLES (1842–1899). Born in Paris, France, Coghlan began his ACTING career in his native England and in 1876, followed his sister Rose Coghlan to New York. He had a polished manner that worked well in society COMEDIES like Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Money. His strong dramatic roles included the title character in Jim,

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the Penman. #RITIC Austin Latchaw (Kansas City Star, 16 April 1935) noted that although Coghlan was “one of the very finest actors of his period, he was so irresponsible in his personal affairs that he was a constant worry to his managers.” Stricken ill during a TOUR, he died in Galveston, Texas. COGHLAN, ROSE (1851–1932). Born in Peterborough, England, Rose Coghlan performed as a CHILD there and made her New York debut in 1872 at Wallack’s Theatre. After performing in England again, she returned to Wallack’s in 1877 as leading lady for nine years. The versatile ACTRESS could play intense melodrama or light COMEDY. Her brother Charles Coghlan wrote the romantic drama Jocelyn to feature her abilities. During her 1909–1910 season with the New Theatre company in New York, she played Paulina in The Winter’s Tale and Mistress Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor, among other roles. COHAN, GEORGE M. (1878–1942).† Born in Providence, Rhode Island, to vaudevillian parents, George Michael Cohan went on stage as a toddler and continued to the end of his life. He gained his first success as part of the Four Cohans, his family’s vaudeville act (including his father Jerry, mother Helen, and sister Josephine), TOURING in Daniel Boone (1888) and in Peck’s Bad Boy (1890). By the late 1890s, he was a major figure of the burgeoning "ROADWAY theatre as composer, lyricist, librettist, PRODUCER (often with his longtime partner, 3AM ( (ARRIS), DIRECTOR, and STAR of popular MUSICALS, plays, and revues. In 1911, Cohan opened the George M. Cohan Theatre, and often veered from musicals to write straight plays, even though the first of these, Popularity (1906), flopped. Other nonmusical works include Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford (1911), Broadway Jones (1912), Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913), The Miracle Man (1914), Hit-the-Trail Holliday (1915), The Tavern (1921), Madeleine and the Movies (1922), The Song and Dance Man (1923), American Born (1925), The Home Towners (1926), The Baby Cyclone (1927), Whispering Friends (1928), Gambling (1929), Friendship (1931), Pigeons and People (1933), and Fulton of Oak Falls (1937). The Return of the Vagabond (1940), a failed sequel to The Tavern, marked Cohan’s last Broadway appearance.

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When Cohan’s later works declined in popularity, he acted to acclaim in two productions he did not write, %UGENE/.EILL’s only COMEDY, Ah, Wilderness!* (1933), and 'EORGE 3 +AUFMAN and Moss Hart’s* musical satire (with music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Lorenz Hart) lampooning Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, I’d Rather Be Right (1937). Cohan appeared in a few silent MOTION PICTURES of his plays, and also ACTED in The Phantom President (1932) and Gambling (1934) in the “talkies.” Near the end of his life, Cohan was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his songs “Over There” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” and he was the subject of a lavish (and highly fictional) biographical film, Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY THEATRE.† See ACADEMIC THE ATRE; AMATEURTHEATRE. COLLEGE WIDOW, THE. George Ade’s four-act COMEDY opened at the Garden Theatre on 20 September 1904 for 278 performances. This lightweight play set at Atwater College focuses on Jane Witherspoon, daughter of the college president. Liked by all, Jane’s mental acuity is challenged when she is called upon to prevent Billy Bolton, an outstanding football player, from playing for rival Bingham College. Jane’s efforts lead to a romance between the two. The collegiate humor made The College Widow a prototype for other campus comedies on stage and screen. -OTIONPICTURE versions of The College Widow were made in 1915 and 1927, but it attained its most enduring form when Jerome Kern, Guy Bolton, and P. G. Wodehouse adapted it into the hit MUSICAL Leave It to Jane (1917). COLLIER, WILLIAM (1866–1944). Born in New York City, the dapper comedian was known as the “master of repartee” both on the stage and on the page. He was frequently called upon to add gags to average scripts, which allowed him to claim coauthorship credit. From 1900, he performed on "ROADWAY for over two decades, mostly under the MANAGEMENT of Charles Frohman, and was considered the quickest wit on the stage. After doing Friars’ Club shows with 'EORGE-#OHAN, the two men teamed up for a time. Collier performed in plays, MUSICALS, revues, and vaudeville, and in 1929 he went into MOTIONPICTURES. See also COMEDY.

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COLLINGE, PATRICIA (1892–1974).† Born in Dublin, Ireland, she made her stage debut in London before emigrating to the United States in 1908 to appear in a small role in the MUSICAL The Queen of the Moulin Rouge. Her varied and long career on stage and screen included the ingénue in The Show Shop (1914) and the title role in Pollyanna (1915), which she played for three years in New York and on TOUR. She ACTED in revivals of Hedda Gabler (1926), The Importance of Being Earnest (1926), She Stoops to Conquer (1928), Becky Sharp (1929), and others. COLTON, JOHN (1886–1946). Born in Japan, the son of an English diplomat began his professional career as the Minneapolis Tribune drama CRITIC before turning to PLAYWRITING. Colton’s first play, Drifting (1922), written with D. H. Andrews, focused on the life of a prostitute, as did his first major hit, Rain (1922), adapted with Clemence Randolph from W. Somerset Maugham’s story. Jeanne Eagels scored a personal success playing the tawdry heroine, Sadie Thompson. Rain became one of the most popular plays of the era and was made into a MOTIONPICTURE several times. Colton’s The Shanghai Gesture (1926) was also a popular success, but his later plays, Saint Wench and Nine Pine Street, both in 1933, failed. COMBINATION. A combination was an entire production—cast and SCENERY—assembled in New York to be sent on the ROAD as a unit. During the 1890s, the combination system largely displaced the touring REPERTORY company (which had displaced the resident STOCK company in the 1870s), because it was cheaper to TOUR a single contemporary play than a repertory of old favorites. COME OUT OF THE KITCHEN. Opening on 23 October 1916 at the 'EORGE - #OHAN Theatre, the COMEDY by A. E. Thomas, based upon the serial story published in Harper’s Bazaar (1915) by Alice Duer Miller, ran for 224 performances, was made into a 1924 MUSICAL (The Magnolia Lady), and was made into a 1930 Paramount picture, Honey. The New York Times (24 October 1916) review headlined it as a “polite and amusing farce (with tears).” Henry Miller DIRECTED, and Ruth Chatterton played the Virginia lady who pretends to be the hired cook when the family home is rented to a wealthy Yankee.

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COMEDY.† Aristotle’s articulation of the distinct genres of tragedy and comedy in Ars Poetica was largely ignored in the long evolution of comedy on the American stage. Occasional productions ranging from classical Greek and Roman comedies to those of 3HAKESPEARE, Molière, and their contemporaries could be seen on early American stages, but the earliest comedies written by American citizens tended to imitate late 18th-century British comedies of manners plays. Royall Tyler’s The Contrast (1787) was inspired by English plays of the era, but its satire of contemporary fashions and values praised American qualities over European mores, as did Anna Cora Mowatt’s Fashion (1845). Broad STOCK characters and romantic situations were often borrowed from various European forms. Throughout the first half of the 19th century, purely comedic plays tended to be ramshackle vehicles for dynamic comic ACTORS and the stock characters they created from emerging national stereotypes drawn from gender, racial, and ethnic characteristics. Comedy was more effectively employed within other popular genres of this period, including burlesques and travesties, minstrel shows, vaudeville entertainments, and the emerging MUSICAL theatre. Significantly, comedy was also a central component of melodramas, with a range of secondary characters often supplying comic relief from the suspenseful main actions of the plays. From the 1870s, comedies of greater wit and style appeared with increasing frequency. 0RODUCER-PLAYWRIGHT Augustin Daly led the way by showcasing his venerable stock company, John Drew, Ada Rehan, Mrs. G. H. Gilbert, and James Lewis, in classical and contemporary comedies for fashionable New York audiences. As a rule, however, the more sophisticated comedies seen on "ROADWAY at the turn-of-the-century were foreign imports, including the plays of Oscar Wilde, J. M. Barrie, and the early, lighter works of 'EORGE "ERNARD 3HAW, such as the witty romance Arms and the Man, which won favor with STAR Richard Mansfield as leading man in 1894. William Dean Howells was the American who came closest to achieving a light, sophisticated touch with his insightful comedies about fashionable and would-be fashionable people. Most new American comedies after 1880 were less sophisticated, usually depicting middle- and lower-class values and characters and rural settings. Female impersonator Neil Burgess scored success in the role of an old lady in Widow Bedott (1879) and a similar charac-

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ter, Aunt Abby Prue, in The County Fair (1889). Similarly, Denman Thompson scored as the title character of the rustic comedy Joshua Whitcomb (1878), honing a role he revisited for the hugely successful The Old Homestead (1887). Charles H. Hoyt won a following with A Texas Steer (1894), A Trip to Chinatown (1891), and other broad farces. Also popular were the many Mulligan Guard plays created by Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart and set on New York’s Lower East Side. !CTOR-playwrights of the era often included comedies in their repertoires. For example, James A. Herne crafted several comic vehicles for himself, as did William Gillette, although both found far greater success with melodramatic works, and Clyde Fitch, perhaps the most promising dramatist to emerge during the 1890s, wrote several light comedies, but gained his lasting recognition near the end of his career with hard-hitting dramas of contemporary life. The finest of melodramatic plays of the era featured comedy with an increasingly satiric edge, such as Bronson Howard’s The Henrietta (1887), one of the most popular plays of the late 19th century due to its insider view of Wall Street speculation. From 1900 to the Great Depression, comedies and farces predominated on "ROADWAY stages and found more lucrative second lives on provincial TOURS and in stock. The modernist era saw many variations on the genre of comedy that had once stood clearly defined in classical terms or as an embellishment to other forms. By the beginning of the 20th century, a proliferation of high comedies, low comedies, light (or romantic) comedies, farce-comedies, comedymelodramas, rural comedies, and others appeared with regularity. 'EORGE - #OHAN wrote popular comedies (along with musicals) setting rural characters (or “rubes”) against Broadway wiseguys to mildly satirize contemporary American values and slang. Cohan’s comedies frequently depicted the experiences of the Irish American immigrant class, and the flood of European immigrants pouring into New York from the 1880s to World 7AR I led other playwrights to similarly exploit their experiences in the comic form. These writers, and the actors appearing in their works, created new American stock characters by broadly caricaturizing Irish, German, Greek, Asian, and Eastern European Jewish figures in ethnic comedies of assimilation. The most popular of such comedies, Abie’s Irish Rose (1922), written by Anne Nichols, ran for a staggering, record-setting 2,327 performances and created a subgenre of romantic ethnic comedies.

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More unfortunately, !FRICAN!MERICANS were similarly depicted in broadly stereotypical caricatures that clung to American theatre well into the mid-20th century. Despite the rise of serious drama after World War I, light situation comedies and broad farces were plentiful. The most noted writers of such works, Max Marcin, George H. Broadhurst, Montague Glass, Frank Craven, Margaret Mayo, Edward Peple, Clare Kummer, Frederic and Fanny Hatton, A. E. Thomas, Winchell Smith, Porter Emerson Browne, Roi Cooper Megrue, William Anthony McGuire, Barry Conners, Samuel Shipman, and Aaron Hoffman, among others, found frequent success and healthy income perfecting the form, but increasingly less so on Broadway. Their plays often had comparatively brief New York runs before lucrative extended tours and in stock productions. This was certainly true of the greatest purveyor of farces in this era, Avery Hopwood, whose prolific output of mildly risqué comedies populated American stages for the first half of the 20th century and were adapted as MOTION PICTURE successes after the dawn of sound. In the 1910s and 1920s, rural comedy shifted from onedimensional stereotypical characters to more realistic images in sentimentalized portraits of small-town life, as in stage adaptations of Booth Tarkington’s novels and in the rural and collegiate comedies of George Ade. A touch of nostalgic longing emerged in J. Hartley Manners’s comedy Peg O’My Heart (1912), a much-imitated vehicle written for his wife, ,AURETTE4AYLOR. Jesse Lynch Williams’s mildly satiric comedy, Why Marry? (1917) was awarded the first 0ULITZER0RIZE, but comedies rarely won this acknowledgment in subsequent years. During the 1920s, the only other comedy awarded a Pulitzer was 'EORGE +ELLY’s Craig’s Wife (1926). Among directors, former actor 'EORGE !B BOTT became a potent force in the development of popular comedies and musicals from the early 1920s, while a generation of writers contributed a more sophisticated brand of comedy in this era. The prolific 'EORGE 3 +AUFMAN stood out among this generation, working with a series of collaborators, including Morrie Ryskind,* -ARC #ONNELLY, %DNA &ERBER, and Moss Hart,* in the writing of popular stage comedies stressing character and gently satirizing contemporary mores. Kaufman also wrote broader comedies for the Marx Brothers, among the best of a generation of comic performers

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who had honed their skills in vaudeville before turning to Broadway comedy and musicals. In the 1920s, 0HILIP "ARRY developed an Americanized brand of comedy of manners in such plays as Holiday (1928), while 3. "EHRMAN brought a more satiric edge to his sophisticated comedies and Preston Sturges, who would spend most of his career writing and DIRECTING MOTIONPICTURES, brought a screwball sensibility to his hit comedy, Strictly Dishonorable (1929). Mae West sexualized the comic form with bawdy plays and musicals in which she played the lead, and often found herself embroiled in controversy for pushing past the boundaries of accepted proprieties, while !NITA ,OOS explored the sexual liberation of the flapper in Gentleman Prefer Blondes (1926), an enduringly popular comedy. "EN (ECHT and Charles MacArthur* merged broad comedy with melodramatic embellishments in their rambunctious satire, The Front Page (1928), but after 1930, Kaufman, Barry, and Behrman dominated Broadway stages with their sophisticated, character-driven comedies, inspiring subsequent generations of comic writers, from (OWARD,INDSAY and Russel Crouse* to Neil Simon,* all of whom kept Broadway comedy alive and well into the 1980s. COMIC RELIEF. The melodramas that dominated the 19th-century American stage until the 1890s used comedic elements to heighten by contrast the emotional intensity of the main action. A comic character, often a dialect role, could give the audience a chance to catch its breath before the suspense would start to build again. Sometimes the eccentric comedian’s role—Snorkey in Augustin Daly’s Under the Gaslight, for example—was more prominently featured than that of the leading man. See also COMEDY. COMMON CLAY, THE. Cleves Kinkead’s manipulative tearjerker, PRODUCED by A. H. Woods, managed to run for 316 performances at the Republic Theatre, where it opened on 26 August 1915, after a run of 22 weeks in Boston. *ANE#OWL played the housemaid, Ellen, who is seduced and abandoned by the scion of a prominent Boston family. When Ellen sues for child support, she and the judge at the trial discover that she is his illegitimate daughter. Ellen flees, ending up in New York as an opera singer before the repentant seducer turns up to take responsibility for her and his child. The winning entry in a

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competition sponsored by Boston’s Castle Square Theatre for the best play written by a Harvard student, Common Clay spawned MOTION PICTURE versions in 1915 and 1930. COMSTOCK, F. RAY (1880–1949). The noted PRODUCER was born in Buffalo, New York, and produced his first play at 27. He built the Princess Theatre, 104 West 39th Street, New York City, in 1913 and made it a home for intimate MUSICALS. In association with Morris Gest, he produced -AX2EINHARDT’s The Miracle and many musical successes as well as presenting Eleonora Duse and the Moscow Art Theatre. CONNELLY, MARC (1890–1981).† Born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, Marcus Cook Connelly had a long and distinguished career as a PLAYWRIGHT, occasional ACTOR, PRODUCER, and DIRECTOR, which began with AMATEUR theatricals in his hometown. His first "ROADWAY contribution was as librettist and lyricist of a failed MU SICAL, The Amber Princess (1916), but his career truly began when he agreed to collaborate with 'EORGE 3 +AUFMAN. Their fruitful partnership began with the acidic COMEDY Dulcy (1921), which made a STAR of ,YNN&ONTANNE, and included the comedy To the Ladies (1922), the short-lived musical The ’49ers (1922), the long-running hit satire of Hollywood called Merton of the Movies (1922), the musical Helen of Troy, New York (1923), the failed The Deep Tangled Wildwood (1923), and the expressionist farce Beggar on Horseback (1924). The last was a long-running success, followed by the musical Be Yourself (1924), which marked the end of the Connelly-Kaufman collaboration. On his own, Connelly wrote The Wisdom Tooth (1926), which ran a season. He collaborated with Herman Mankiewicz on The Wild Man of Borneo (1927). Working solo again, Connelly won a 0ULIT ZER0RIZE for The Green Pastures* (1930), which he also directed, a long-running adaptation of Roark Bradford’s folk tales of !FRICAN !MERICAN life. CONNERS, BARRY (1883–1933). Born in Oil City, Pennsylvania, the PLAYWRIGHT originally studied law at St. Thomas College in Scranton and was admitted to the New York bar, but took up trouping instead. It was while he was prospecting for gold that he took up writ-

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ing as a distraction. His situation COMEDIES, PRODUCED in New York and popular in little theatres, include Nothing Doing (1920), The Blackmailers, The Clean-Up, and The Mad Honeymoon (all 1923), So This Is Politics and Applesauce (1924), The Patsy and Hell’s Bells (1925), Girl Trouble (1928), and Unexpected Husband (1931). CONNESS, ROBERT (1868–1941). Born in La Salle County, Illinois, Robert Conness grew up in Kansas City and worked as a stenographer for a railway company in Kansas City while indulging his passion for theatre by ushering at Coates Opera House. After testing his wings in AMATEUR theatricals, he made his professional ACTING debut in 1894. He worked with a number of important STOCK and TOURING companies, playing both leading man and character roles. Among his successes were the title role in Robert Emmet (1903) and featured roles in The Reckoning (1907) and The Boomerang (1915). CONSTANCY. Neith Boyce’s one-act play has the distinction of being the first play PRODUCED by the Provincetown Players. Loosely basing her characters Moira and Rex upon Mabel Dodge and John Reed, Boyce explored the toll taken on a relationship by the man’s desire for free love, while the woman prefers constancy. When the woman loved the man, she virtually gave up her identity for him, and now that she finds herself happier, having forgiven him for his infidelity and viewing him as a friend, he self-absorbedly sees her as the inconstant one. CONWAY, JACK (1888–1928). Born John White Conway in the vicinity of Albany-Troy, New York, VARIETY’s master of slang grew up in the Bronx and hung around newspaper offices as a boy. Later he tried streetcar conducting, baseball, performing in vaudeville, and assisting a Navy doctor during the WAR. In the 1910s a friend got him a job selling ads for Variety. When that did not work out, Conway tried reviewing vaudeville in his own voice—"ROADWAY slang—and, except for a brief stint as a Hollywood title card writer, remained an influential Variety CRITIC for the rest of his life. The tall, handsome denizen of 4IMES3QUARE signed all his pieces “Con.” In an essay for Variety on his use of slang (quoted in Besas 2000, 109), he noted that slang paid for his “seven flops weekly and three scoffs daily” and allowed him to avoid “the three-syllable racket.” Con

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invented a host of words, including “bimbo” and “palooka,” and did not hesitate to use them even in reviews of highbrow shows. When the popular mug died suddenly at 40, Variety published a full-page obituary (10 October 1928). COOK, GEORGE CRAM (1873–1924). Born in Davenport, Iowa, “Jig” Cook studied at the Universities of Iowa, Heidelberg, and Geneva as well as at Harvard University. He became a professor of Greek, a novelist, and most significantly, the intellectual leader of the group that became the Provincetown Players in 1915. His oneact Change Your Style was performed on Lewis Wharf in September 1915. With his third wife 3USAN 'LASPELL, whom he married in 1913, Cook wrote two one-act plays: Suppressed Desires, a satire on Freudian psychoanalysis, and Tickless Time. Cook’s own plays include The Athenian Women (1918) and The Spring (1921), both full-length. Cook’s idealism made him uncomfortable with commercial success, and he wrote a “Provincetown valedictory” (quoted in Sarlós 1982, 142–44). In 1922, Cook and Glaspell went to live in Greece; he died there and was buried in Delphi. Glaspell then wrote his biography, The Road to the Temple. COPPERHEAD, THE. Opening on 18 February 1918 at the Shubert Theatre, the four-act drama by Augustus Thomas ran for 120 performances. The action of the first two acts takes place during the Civil 7AR, and the remainder 40 years later. The title refers to the central character, played by Lionel Barrymore, who is believed to have been a Southern-sympathizing pacifist—a Copperhead—when his country was at war. In the stirringly poignant finale, he finally breaks his silence and shows a letter from his friend Abraham Lincoln who had asked him to infiltrate the Copperheads in service to the Union cause. Although the three-hour play tested the patience of audiences, the climax—when an old Union soldier took off his Union blue jacket and hat to put them on the long-despised Copperhead—always elicited tears followed by fervently patriotic ovations. COQUETTE. Opening on 8 November 1927 at Maxine Elliott’s Theatre, the three-act play by 'EORGE!BBOTT and Ann Preston Bridgers ran for 366 performances and was nominated for the 0ULITZER0RIZE (which it lost to Strange Interlude). (ELEN(AYES earned praise for

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her performance as Norma, the flirtatious southern belle who loves a man of lower social status in defiance of her father’s strictures. After the young man blurts out that he will marry Norma “because we’re just as good as man and wife now,” Norma’s father shoots him through the heart. With her father on trial, Norma is told that he can be exonerated if he was defending a virgin’s honor. Knowing that she is with child, Norma commits suicide. When Hayes left the cast due to a pregnancy, PRODUCER *ED(ARRIS sued her; Hayes won, establishing the “act of God” clause in ACTOR contracts. CORBETT, JAMES J. (1866–1933). Born in San Francisco, the pugilist turned ACTOR was known as “Gentleman Jim” from the time he defeated John L. Sullivan in 1892, demonstrating the triumph of brains over brawn. 0RODUCER William A. Brady managed Corbett before and after that world championship, claiming in his memoir Showman that he regarded the Sullivan fight as a publicity stunt for Corbett’s appearance in a play. “You only had to see Corbett walk on stage to see that he was a natural actor” (1937, 83). Brady found vehicles in which to STAR Corbett: Gentleman Jack (1892), which he presented in London, and the Naval Cadet (1896). In 1906, Stanislaus Stange DIRECTED Corbett in Cashel Byron’s Profession by 'EORGE"ERNARD3HAW. Corbett later ventured into vaudeville as a monologist, ran a saloon at 34th and "ROADWAY, and wrote his memoir The Roar of the Crowd (1925). CORBIN, JOHN (1870–1959). Born in Chicago, the distinguished drama CRITIC graduated from Harvard University in 1892 and over the years held positions on various newspapers and magazines, including Harper’s Magazine, the New York Times, and the New York Sun. From 1908 to 1910, he was literary MANAGER of the New Theatre in New York. CORMACK, BARTLETT (1898–1942). Hammond, Indiana-born Bartlett Cormack was educated at the University of Chicago before embarking on a journalistic career. He became involved in little theatre there, where his only successful play, The Racket (1927), encountered attempts to ban it. The play had a solid "ROADWAY run, but Cormack spent most of his working life as a press agent and MOTIONPICTURE screenwriter with screenplay credits including The

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Front Page (1931), Fury (1936), and Sidewalks of London (1938). See also ADVANCE AGENT; CENSORSHIP. CORNELL, KATHARINE (1893–1974).† Katharine Cornell was among the most versatile, respected stage ACTRESSES of the early 20th century, moving easily from COMEDY to drama, from the classics to contemporary plays. Her father had been a theatre MANAGER, but moved to Berlin to study medicine, and there Cornell was born. Her first significant stage appearance was with the prestigious Washington Square Players in 1916, followed by stints with various theatrical companies including that of Jessie Bonstelle. She then scored notable success in Nice People (1921) and in Clemence Dane’s A Bill of Divorcement (1921). In 1923, she STARRED in Will Shakespeare and The Enchanted Cottage, but her performance in the title role of the 1924 revival of 'EORGE "ERNARD 3HAW’s Candida further elevated her stature. Other great roles included Iris March in The Green Hat (1925), Leslie Crosbie in The Letter (1927), Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence (1928), Madeline Carey in Dishonored Lady* (1930), and her most emblematic character, Elizabeth Barrett in The Barretts of Wimpole Street* (1931). She became a manager in partnership with her husband, DIRECTOR Guthrie McClintic,* whom she married in 1921. Like her contemporaries (ELEN (AYES and 4ALLULAH"ANKHEAD, Cornell committed herself to lengthy, arduous TOURS, which continued unabated after 1930 until her retirement in 1961. #/345-%3. See WARDROBE. COULDOCK, C. W. (1815–1898). Born Charles Walter Couldock in London, England, he established himself as a leading man there, then made his American debut in 1849 at Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theatre in support of Charlotte Cushman. He TOURED extensively as a STAR in tragedies. In his later years, he moved to character roles, notably the heavy father in Hazel Kirke (1880). COUNTY CHAIRMAN, THE. George Ade made his first foray into nonMUSICAL theatre with this four-act COMEDY, a popular success that opened on 24 November 1903 at Wallack’s Theatre and ran for 222 performances. Rural county chairman Jim Hackler aims to defeat

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Judge Rigby in an upcoming election for prosecutor. He nominates his bright young associate Tillford Wheeler to run against Rigby, but the situation is complicated by Wheeler’s courtship of Rigby’s daughter, Lucy. When Hackler comes into possession of a story concerning Rigby’s crooked dealings, he is persuaded by Lucy and her mother not to use it to win the election. Hackler, a decent man, decides to suppress the injurious story, but Wheeler defeats Rigby anyway and the lovers are united. #RITICS admired Ade’s skill at creating local color through supporting character types. The County Chairman was adapted to MOTION PICTURES first in 1914 and later proved a worthy vehicle for Will Rogers in 1935. COUNTY FAIR, THE. Opening on 5 March 1889 as the inaugural production at Proctor’s 23rd Street Theatre, the four-act rural COMEDY by Charles Barnard ran for 105 performances and was often revived by Neil Burgess, who played the mortgage payment–challenged Abigail Prue in drag. Her prize possession, a horse named Cold Molasses, saves the day when it wins a $3,000 purse in a race at the county fair. Burgess won acclaim for his comic performance, but he found greater popularity in a similar role in David Ross Locke’s Widow Bedott. Compared to other “barnyard and farmhouse kitchen” plays of the era—like Vim and The Old Homestead—The County Fair was found wanting by the CRITICS. A 1920 MOTION PICTURE adaptation, without the broad humor of a female impersonator, was undistinguished. COURTENAY, WILLIAM (1875–1933). Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Courtenay made his ACTING debut in a Ten Nights in a Barroom TOURING company in 1892. Within the year he secured an engagement with Milton and Dolly Nobles, and soon distinguished himself enough to perform in support of Richard Mansfield. In 1902 he became leading man to Virginia Harned, whom he married in 1913. Regarded as a matinee idol, he played a long string of light COMEDIES, capitalizing on his good looks. COWBOY AND THE LADY, THE. The vehicle written by Clyde Fitch for Nat C. Goodwin and his wife Maxine Elliott was presented in London and various American cities before opening at New York’s Knickerbocker Theatre on 25 December 1899. Some good COMEDY

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and a well-liked cast, including Minnie Dupree, were not enough to save this much-anticipated piece from sinking into predictable melodrama. COWL, JANE (1884–1950).† Born in Boston, Jane Cowl made her "ROADWAY debut in David Belasco’s Sweet Kitty Bellairs (1903), after which she ACTED in several Belasco productions, including The Music Master (1904), The Rose of the Rancho (1906), A Grand Army Man (1907), and Is Matrimony a Failure? (1909). She had a modest success in Charles Klein’s The Gamblers (1910), but did not attain stardom until her performance in the long-running Bayard Veiller thriller Within the Law (1912) won acclaim. Cowl scored further successes in Cleves Kincaid’s The Common Clay (1915) and Edgar Selwyn and Channing Pollock’s The Crowded Hour (1918). Also a PLAYWRIGHT, she acted in plays she wrote or cowrote, including Lilac Time (1917), Daybreak (1918), Information Please (1918), and Smilin’ Through (1920). Cowl impressed critics with her sensitive performance in Romeo and Juliet (1923), a major success that ran for 174 performances. #RITICS also applauded Cowl in Noël Coward’s Easy Virtue (1925) and 2OBERT%3HERWOOD’s The Road to Rome (1927). She continued to act until the end of her life. Her later notable appearances were in First Lady (1935), Thornton Wilder’s* failed The Merchant of Yonkers* (1938), and Old Acquaintance* (1940). Cowl appeared in two silent MOTION PICTURES and five sound films. CRABTREE, LOTTA (1847–1924). The pert, red-haired, banjoplaying, singing ACTRESS began her stage career as a CHILD in the California mining camps of the 1850s. After winning popularity on the San Francisco stage, she came under the MANAGEMENT of J. F. Whitman of Chicago, where she performed soubrette roles in a STOCK company. She was subsequently managed by her mother, Mary Ann Crabtree, a severe watchdog over her daughter’s behavior and reputation. As one of the most beloved performers on the ROAD, Crabtree would play to sellout houses in response to posters announcing simply “Lotta tonight!” Her sprightly energy, improvisational skills, and winning ways shone through all her roles, and she would usually find a moment to interpolate some banjo-playing and clog dancing or an Irish jig. Among her perennially popular offerings

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were both of the title roles in Little Nell and the Marchioness as well as the title roles in The Little Detective, Musette, and The Firefly. When she retired in 1891, she had accumulated a fortune of $4 million, which she left to charity. CRADLE SNATCHERS, THE. Opening on 7 September 1925 at the Music Box, the hilarious COMEDY by Russell Medcraft and Norma Mitchell, PRODUCED by 3AM ( (ARRIS, ran for 485 performances and became the basis for the Cole Porter MUSICAL Let’s Face It (1941). Three wives hire three college boys to carry on flirtations with them and pique their husbands’ jealousy. The three wives—played by -ARY"OLAND, Edna May Oliver, and Margaret Dale—got to wear lovely clothes, while Humphrey Bogart’s* turn as a Latino youth earned accolades from CRITICS. “Capacity audiences rocked in riotous laughter at the absurdly amusing situations,” reported The Jewish Chronicle (Kansas City, 10 December 1926). “Soon people from all parts of the country were flocking to New York to see this flip and roguish comedy.” CRAIG’S WIFE. Opening on 12 October1925 at the Morosco Theatre, the 0ULITZER0RIZE–winning drama by 'EORGE+ELLY ran for 360 performances. Chrystal Herne played Harriet Craig, an obsessive, controlling woman who cares more for her tidy home and its furnishings than for the people in her life. At the end of act 2, Mr. Craig defiantly smashes a mantelpiece ornament, lights a cigarette and throws the match into the fireplace, and sits in the living room to smoke. In act 3, the next day, he leaves her, as do her relatives and servants. Mrs. Craig will have her house all to herself alone. CRANE, WILLIAM H. (1846–1928). Born in Leicester, Massachusetts, Crane began acting at 18 and went on to become one of the most beloved comic ACTORS of the modernist era. From 1877 to 1889, he performed in partnership with Stuart Robson in a long succession of COMEDIES, and they enjoyed notable success as the two Dromios in The Comedy of Errors as well as their great vehicle The Henrietta. After amicably dissolving the partnership, Crane found a number of vehicles for his talent, notably Fool of Fortune (1896) and David Harum (1900). He also commissioned David Lloyd to write a political play that would give him the role of an honest senator as

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opposed to a caricature. For The Senator (1890), Crane modeled his portrayal of Senator Hannibal Rivers on Senator Preston B. Plumb of Kansas, which was much appreciated in Washington, D.C. Over the years, Crane was frequently asked to revive The Senator, and the role became so identified with him that newspapers sometimes referred to him as Senator Crane. CRAVEN, FRANK (1875–1945). Born in Boston, Craven ACTED from childhood and TOURED widely in the 1900s. The New York Times review of his performance in Bought and Paid For (27 September 1911) noted that the role of Gilley “provides the first real New York opportunity that has come to a very excellent character actor, Frank Craven, who, as fat as the part is, succeeds in extracting every bit of fat there is in it and adds his own value in a personality and method that suit the part exactly.” From the 1910s, he wrote many of his own vehicles: Too Many Cooks (1914), This Way Out (1917), The First Year (1920), Money from Home (1927), The Nineteenth Hole (1927). Then he went into MOTIONPICTURES, but returned to "ROADWAY occasionally, most notably to originate the role of the Stage -ANAGER in Thornton Wilder’s* Our Town.* CREWS, LAURA HOPE (1880–1942). Born in San Francisco, she made her debut there at four years in Bootle’s Baby. In 1898, she joined the Alcazar Theatre STOCK company. She moved to New York in 1901 and worked in stock for several seasons before moving into major roles with Henry Miller’s company. Although primarily a comedienne, she made a strong impression in the dramatic role of the selfish mother in The Silver Cord (1926). Crews appeared in many MOTIONPICTURES, most memorably as the flustered Aunt Pittypat in Gone with the Wind (1939). CRIMINAL CODE, THE. Opening on 2 October 1929 at the National Theatre, this prison melodrama by Martin Flavin ran for 174 performances. A sympathetic prisoner due for parole succumbs to the criminal code he learned there and thus loses his chance for a better future. CRITIC.† Drama critics have always exercised considerable influence over the American theatergoer. A positive newspaper review translates into box office revenue. Thus PRODUCERS have long sought

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to court critical favor quite apart from simply getting a good show onto the stage. In the early part of the modernist era, anonymous reviewers often “puffed” or praised a production extravagantly; some such reviews were undoubtedly “paid puffs.” The practice gradually abated as bylines began to appear on drama criticism. The bylines gave the critics who wrote for prestigious newspapers a degree of celebrity. American drama criticism began coming into its maturity after the Civil 7AR. Tice L. Miller’s important study, Bohemians and Critics, profiles five critics of the formative generation: Henry Clapp, Jr. (1814–1875), Edward G. P. Wilkins (1829–1861), Stephen Ryder Fiske, Andrew C. Wheeler, and the preeminent William Winter. Winter represented the old school of sentimental values and flowery prose. Just as plays of psychological REALISM were displacing melodrama on American stages at the turn of the century, so too did fashions in dramatic criticism evolve. Important critics early in the 20th century moved toward more probing analysis. Among them were John Ranken Towse, Edward Dithmar, Alan Dale, John Corbin, James Huneker, Walter Prichard Eaton, Norman Hapgood, and Brander Matthews. Reviewing in the 1920s again reflected the spirit of the times as more hard-edged and even sometimes satirical notes were struck by critics like 'EORGE *EAN .ATHAN, Robert Benchley, John Hargis Anderson, Percy Hammond, Joseph Wood Krutch, Montrose J. Moses, 3TARK9OUNG, and !LEXANDER 7OOLLCOTT. Writing for VARIETY, Jack Conway and Sime Silverman employed wisecracking styles full of theatrical slang. Critics whose careers spanned the era from modernism to post–World 7AR II theatre include "ROOKS!TKINSON and *OHN-ASON"ROWN. Critics outside New York who achieved some renown include Robinson Locke and Austin Latchaw. Chicago critic Amy Leslie got away with a florid, effervescent style, while New York journalist Ada Patterson wrote thoughtfully for various publications, often focusing on WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS. The slang term for a theatre critic was “aisle sitter,” as critics were given aisle seats so that they could rush from the theatre to the newspaper office in time to bang out a review for the morning edition. A critic might find himself barred from a particular theatre if he published some comment at which the theatre MANAGER took offense. Bernheim (1964, 4) recounts an instance when Augustin

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Daly attempted to have the San Francisco Evening Post critic ejected from the theatre where his company was performing, because a prior review had failed to mention the STAR, Ada Rehan. CROMWELL, JOHN (1887–1979). Born Elwood Dager Cromwell in Toledo, Ohio, the ACTOR made his professional debut with a TOURING company in 1906 and his New York debut in Baby Mine (1910). Besides acting and stage MANAGING for William A. Brady, he became a DIRECTOR and from 1913 to 1921, directed all of Brady’s productions. Later directing credits include Tarnish (1923), Lucky Sam McCarver, in which he also played the title role (1925), and The Silver Cord (1926). He directed MOTIONPICTURES until Hollywood’s political blacklist impelled his return to "ROADWAY, where he won a Tony Award* for his performance in Point of No Return (1951). CROSMAN, HENRIETTA (1861–1944). Born in Wheeling, West Virginia, the ACTRESS made her New York debut in The White Slave in 1883. She worked successively with Augustin Daly’s and Charles Frohman’s STOCK companies, and belatedly achieved STARDOM as Nell Gwynn in Mistress Nell (1900). Her ability to play both highbrow and lowbrow is exemplified in her great success as Rosalind in As You Like It (1902) and on the vaudeville stage. Her husband, Major Maurice Campbell, MANAGED her career for 40 years. CROTHERS, RACHEL (1878–1958).† Born in Bloomington, Illinois, she grew up to be the most renowned American WOMAN PLAYWRIGHT before Lillian Hellman.* Between 1903 and 1937, she had 28 plays produced on "ROADWAY. Her early experience of ACTING (including a TOUR with Hortense Rhéa’s company in The Christian) contributed to her understanding of stagecraft. Most of her COMEDY-dramas depict the difficulties faced by women, particularly those trying to earn their way as artists. Noteworthy are The Three of Us (1906), A Man’s World (1909), He and She (1911), Nice People (1921), Mary the Third (1923), Expressing Willie (1924), Let Us Be Gay (1929), and Susan and God* (1937). She often lectured on drama. CUSHING, CATHERINE CHISHOLM (1874–1952). The PLAY WRIGHT, songwriter, and librettist was born in Mt. Perry, Ohio. She had a number of her COMEDIES and farces PRODUCED in New

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York: The Real Thing (1911), Widow by Proxy (1913), Kitty Mackay (1914), Jerry (1914), Pollyanna (1916), Gloriana (1918), The Master of the Inn (1925), and others.

n$n DADDIES. David Belasco PRODUCED John L. Hobble’s COMEDY, which ran for 340 performances at the Belasco Theatre beginning on 5 September 1918. Several happy bachelors who resist marriage and raising children are persuaded to adopt WAR orphans. The play explores their varied experiences, with particular focus on writer Robert Aubrey, who is shocked to discover that his orphan is actually vivacious 17-year-old Ruth Atkins. She convinces Aubrey to use his skills as a writer to win support for the plight of other war orphans. Aubrey falls in love with Ruth and surrenders his prized bachelor status. 'EORGE !BBOTT played one of the bachelors. Mae Marsh STARRED as Ruth in the 1924 MOTION PICTURE version. DADDY LONG-LEGS. Opening on 28 September 1914 at the Gaiety, the COMEDY by Jean Webster ran for 264 performances. Ruth Chatterton attained STARDOM as the orphan who knows her educational benefactor only by the long-legged shadow he cast on the wall when he arranged for her to leave the orphanage and get an education. Henry Miller PRODUCED and DIRECTED the long-popular heart-warmer. DADDY’S GONE A-HUNTING. Opening 31 August 1921 at the Plymouth, the provocative drama by :ÚE !KINS, PRODUCED by !RTHUR (OPKINS, ran for 129 performances. Marjorie Rambeau played the wife who sacrifices to support her selfish husband’s career as a painter, while his behavior hints at homosexuality. DAISY MAYME. This lightly satiric three-act COMEDY by 'EORGE +ELLY opened on 25 October 1926 at the Playhouse Theatre. Cliff Mettinger, a lifelong bachelor caring for his deceased sister’s daughter, horrifies his other two sisters, both small-minded gossips, by becoming betrothed to the title character, a vulgar, good-natured spinster from the wrong side of the tracks. Despite attempts by his

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sisters to break up the relationship, Cliff prevails, persuading Daisy that she means more to him as a person than simply as a prospective mother for his orphaned niece. Accepting Cliff’s proposal, Daisy gets her wish to become a “lady.” Kelly’s play overcame middling reviews to achieve 112 performances and numerous AMATEUR productions. DALE, ALAN (1861–1928). Born Alfred J. Cohen in Birmingham, England, the renowned drama CRITIC came to New York in 1885 and learned all about theatre while working as secretary for Leander Richardson. In 1887, he joined the Evening World as drama critic, and later moved to the Evening Journal. From 1895 to 1915, Dale reached the height of his influence as reviewer for William Randolph Hearst’s New York American, but left apparently because he refused to tone down his vitriolic pronouncements. After freelancing for a time, he returned to the American, but wrote in a softened vein. Green and Laurie pronounced him “a triton among minnows” (1953, 116). Dale also wrote many books and one unsuccessful play. DALY, ARNOLD (1875–1927). Peter Christopher Arnold Daly was born in Brooklyn, New York, and found his first theatrical work as an office boy for PRODUCER Charles Frohman before making his debut as an ACTOR in a small role in a TOURING production of The Jolly Squire (1892). Daly achieved his first success as Chambers in an adaptation of Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1895), after which he gave well-received performances in Barbara Frietchie (1899), Hearts Aflame (1902), and Major André (1903). Thanks to the intercession of Irish relatives acquainted with 'EORGE"ERNARD 3HAW, Daly and his partner Winchell Smith attained rights to stage the American premiere of Shaw’s Candida (1903) with Daly playing Marchbanks, after which he staged a 1904–1905 season of Shaw’s plays, including How She Lied to Her Husband (which Shaw wrote for Daly), You Never Can Tell, The Man of Destiny, John Bull’s Other Island, and, most notoriously, Mrs. Warren’s Profession. New York authorities found the latter so indecent that they arrested Daly and his coSTAR, Mary Shaw, but both were ultimately acquitted. Condemnations from CRITICS caused Daly to abandon his hope for creating a “theatre of ideas” in the United States. He spent most of his remaining career acting in popular entertainments, notably as the

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Vagabond in 'EORGE - #OHAN’s COMEDY mystery The Tavern (1920). Daly also staged classical Japanese plays and William Butler Yeats’s poetic dramas. DALY, AUGUSTIN (1838–1899). Born John Augustin Daly, son of a sea captain, the PLAYWRIGHT and PRODUCER began his theatrical career as a drama CRITIC. His first play, Leah, the Forsaken, adapted from S. H. von Mosenthal’s Deborah, scored a success in 1862. Daly had an even greater triumph with his sensationally popular melodrama Under the Gaslight (1867). He began producing plays at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in 1869. He established an innovative REPERTORY company, staging both contemporary and classic works (frequently adapted by Daly) and broke away from the standard lines of business, expecting his performers to play a wide range of characters. Daly operated the Fifth Avenue Theatre successfully until the building burned in 1873, but he pressed on in other facilities until he briefly retired in 1877. Back at work in 1879, Daly established an acclaimed company at the Daly Theatre (formerly Woods’s Museum) that included the “Big Four,” as they became known: Ada Rehan, Mrs. G. H. Gilbert, James Lewis, and John Drew, with William Davidge and Charles Fisher in strong support. Performing every manner of play, from works by 3HAKESPEARE and Tennyson to new American plays, including works credited to Daly, as well as popular operettas and MUSICALS, Daly’s company dominated the New York theatre in the last two decades of the 19th century. The troupe TOURED the United States and England frequently, and had three residencies in France and one in Germany. Daly is credited with writing as many as 100 plays, mostly adaptations of classics or European plays. It is believed that Daly’s brother Joseph, an attorney, was an uncredited coauthor. The most appreciated Daly plays—Frou-Frou (1870), Horizon (1871), Divorce (1871), and Pique (1875)—were staples of his company’s repertory. Later Daly successes include Needles and Pins (1880), Dollars and Sense (1883), Love on Crutches (1884), and The Lottery of Love (1888). Daly’s most successful Shakespearean production, The Taming of the Shrew, performed at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1888, was billed as the first production of the play there.

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DANCING MOTHERS. Opening on 11 August 1924 at Booth’s Theatre, the provocative drama written by Edmund Goulding with PRODUCER and DIRECTOR Edgar Selwyn ran for 311 performances. Mary Young played the mature wife who responds to her husband’s infidelities and her flapper daughter’s partying by beating them at their own game. She goes out with the man who has been seeing her daughter Kittens (played by (ELEN(AYES) and enjoys her freedom so much that she heads off to Europe, leaving her suddenly distraught husband and daughter. It was the Doll’s House–like ending that particularly captured the fancy of audiences in 1924. DANITES, THE. Western poet Joaquin Miller’s 1877 melodrama of Mormon revenge remained popular on the ROAD, especially in the West, throughout the 1880s, and was particularly identified with actor McKee Rankin. Among the strong appeals of the action was a defenseless WOMAN who disguises herself in male dress and lives in a crude mining camp in order to escape the Danites who seek to kill her. DARLING OF THE GODS, THE. David Belasco and John Luther Long scored a success with their collaboration on their one-act Madame Butterfly (1900), leading Belasco to suggest they work together on a full-length play with a Japanese setting. The resulting five-act tragedy, The Darling of the Gods, opened on 3 December 1902 at the Belasco Theatre for 182 performances, and the BelascoLong collaboration continued with Adrea (1905). The Darling of the Gods, a fantastic play of enduring love across time, was considered contrived by CRITICS, but it was popular with audiences for its exotic setting and the visual splendor and REALISM typical of Belasco. The play focuses on the machinations of WAR minister Zakkuri to kill Prince Kara, a renegade outlaw who has gained the favor of Prince Saigon of Tosan for saving his daughter from death. Kara and Saigon’s daughter, Princess Yo-San, fall in love, but when Zakkuri attempts to have Kara assassinated, Yo-San hides him for 40 days. This liaison is idyllic, but Kara is obliged to return to his band of outlaws. He is captured and when Yo-San goes to Zakkuri to plead for his life, Zakkhuri attempts to make her his mistress. Yo-San rejects him and Kara is killed after pledging to meet her in a thousand years in the First White Heaven. Yo-San commits suicide and after a thousand

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years passes they meet in the other world. The cast included George Arliss as Zakkuri and Blanche Bates as the tragic Yo-San. DAVENPORT, BUTLER (1871–1958). Born in New York, Davenport was an ACTOR from his youth when he understudied Augustin Daly and later performed with Richard Mansfield, Eleonora Duse, Sarah Bernhardt, and John Drew. He then turned to PLAYWRITING and achieved one notable success, Keeping up Appearances, which was produced by the 3HUBERTS in 1910. From 1923 until his death, Butler Davenport devoted himself to running an admission-free theatre, which he sustained by passing the hat at each performance. He lived at the theatre, 27th Street and Lexington Avenue, where he presented the classics, occasionally interspersed by his own plays. His idea was to give New Yorkers free theatre to parallel the city’s many free music and art events. DAVENPORT, FANNY (1850–1898). Born in London, Fanny Lily Gipsy Davenport was the first child of American ACTOR E. L. Davenport (who had come to London as Anna Cora Mowatt’s leading man) and English actress Fanny Vining. The Davenports moved to America in 1854 and settled in Boston, where Miss Fanny was educated. She soon began playing CHILD roles at the Howard Athenaeum, which her father managed from 1859. Her early adult line of business was soubrette roles in a STOCK company in Louisville, Kentucky, and then at Philadelphia’s Arch Street Theatre. On 29 September 1869, she made her very successful debut with Augustin Daly’s company at his Fifth Avenue Theatre in New York. She remained with Daly until 1877, triumphing notably as Mabel Renfrew in Pique, which Daly wrote for her and which achieved a run of 238 performances. She then toured as a STAR with a REPERTORY of 3HAKESPEARE, melodramas, and English COMEDIES. In 1883, she began acquiring the American rights to the French actress Sarah Bernhardt’s vehicles (Fedora, La Tosca, Cleopatra, and Gismonda), all of which she performed with considerable success. In 1889, she married her second husband, matinee idol Melbourne MacDowell. DAVID HARUM. Opening on 1 October 1900 at the Garrick Theatre, the COMEDY by R. and M. W. Hitchcock, based upon a bestselling book by David Westcott, was DIRECTED by Edward E. Rose and

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PRODUCED by Charles Frohman. It ran for 148 performances. The title character is a shrewd, horse-trading, homespun philosopher, a New England small-town banker who manipulates the plot. It was perfect for the popular comedian William H. Crane, who won unprecedented accolades for his portrayal, and yet the play proved popular on the ROAD in other hands as well. “I never enjoyed playing any part so much,” Crane reminisced in his memoir Footprints and Echoes (1927, 187). DAVIES, ACTON (1870–1916). Born in St. John’s, Quebec, Canada, the preeminent drama CRITIC of the 1890s came to New York in 1887, joined the staff of the New York Evening Sun in 1890, and moved into drama criticism there in 1893. Green and Laurie called him “the master of the verbal stiletto” (1953, 116). With a change in MANAGE MENT at the Sun, Davies left reviewing and became a press agent for the 3HUBERTS. DAVIS, CHARLES LINDSAY (1848?–1900). The ACTOR known as Charles “Jumbo” Davis was born in Baltimore, Maryland. Alvin Joslyn (1882), the vehicle he wrote for himself, about a rube in the big city, became a popular piece in middle America and made Davis a fortune, which he used to build the Alvin Theatre in Pittsburgh. DAVIS, HENRIETTA VINTON (1860–1941). Born in Baltimore, the !FRICAN!MERICAN ACTRESS was educated in Washington, D.C., where she began her career as an elocutionist. 4OURING widely with a program of speeches by 3HAKESPEARE’s heroines, she held her mostly white audiences spellbound with her recitations. Racial segregation precluded the blossoming of her remarkable talent as an actress, for she performed in only four legitimate dramas: Damon and Pythias (1884), Dessalines (1893), Our Old Kentucky Home (1898), and Henri Christophe (1912). After 1912, she channeled her energies into political activism. DAVIS, OWEN (1874–1956).† Born in Portland, Maine, Owen Davis attended Harvard University and after exhausting his youthful desire to be a writer of blank-verse tragedy, he became one of the most successful writers of melodrama and COMEDY during the first three decades of the 20th century. He may have written as many as

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200 plays for STOCK and TOURING companies, the best of which was Through the Breakers (1899). Davis’s first "ROADWAY contribution, The Battle of Port Arthur (1908), was a MUSICAL spectacle produced at the Hippodrome. Although Making Good (1912), his first straight play PRODUCED in New York, failed, he had better luck with his 1913 play, The Family Cupboard, and subsequent works, including Sinners (1915), Forever After (1918), and Opportunity (1920). When Davis switched to serious drama with The Detour (1921), he found critical approval as well. Icebound, a drama of an avaricious family disinherited by its matriarch, won the 0ULITZER0RIZE in 1923. Most of Davis’s subsequent plays were comedies or in the melodramatic style of his early work. Among these, The Nervous Wreck (1923) and Mr. and Mrs. North (1941) were popular successes, but the style was considered outmoded by 1930. In 1936, Davis collaborated with his son, Donald, on an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome.* DAVIS, RICHARD HARDING (1864–1916). Born in Philadelphia, the exuberant journalist and PLAYWRIGHT earned the epithet “Beau Brummell of the Press.” Renowned particularly as a WAR correspondent, he translated his experiences into short stories, which he then dramatized. Among his 20 or more plays to reach the stage were Soldiers of Fortune (1902), The Dictator (1904), and The Blackmailer (1912). DAWN OF TOMORROW, THE. Opening on 25 January 1909 at the Lyceum, the three-act drama by Frances Hodgson Burnett ran for 152 performances. Eleanor Robson played the poor but optimistic Glad, who shows how good deeds can brighten one’s outlook even in dreary London. DAY, EDMUND (1866–1923). New York–born Edmund Day began his theatrical career as an ACTOR, but turned to PLAYWRITING. His farce The Head-Waiters (1902) found an audience, but Day had his greatest success with the melodrama The Round Up (1907), produced on "ROAD WAY by Klaw & Erlanger. Day’s other plays, including The Cardinal’s Edict (1905) and Behind the Mask (1906), achieved only short runs, but he fared better when he wrote two STAR vehicles. For prizefighter James J. “Gentleman Jim” Corbett, Day crafted Pals (1905), and for Lillian Russell he provided The Widow’s Might (1909).

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DAZEY, CHARLES TURNER (1853? 1855?–1938). Born in Lima, Ohio, Dazey earned his lasting renown as the author of In Old Kentucky (1893), a melodrama with local color that broke national records by its continuing popularity on the ROAD and in STOCK. Dazey attended the College of the Arts in Lexington, Kentucky, and Harvard University. When his first play, Rusticana, was PRODUCED at college, it led to its professional staging, followed by many more plays on "ROADWAY, including Elsa (1882), For a Brother’s Life (1885), The Rival Candidates (1894), The War of Wealth (1895), In Mexico—1848 (1896), The Tarrytown Widow (1898), The Suburban (1903), The American Lord (1906), The Three Lights (1911), and The Stranger (1911). Others were produced on the road. W. H. Thompson made a specialty of performing Dazey’s vaudeville sketch The Old Flute Player. Dazey married Lucy Harding, and they had one son, Frank Dazey, a Hollywood screenwriter. Dazey was a member of the Lambs’ Club in New York, but made his home in Quincy, Illinois, where he died on 9 February 1938. DE CORDOBA, PEDRO (1881–1950). Born in New York, Pedro De Cordoba enjoyed a stage career before settling in Hollywood to work in MOTIONPICTURES. He made his stage debut with E. H. Sothern’s company in 1902 and continued to perform with Sothern until 1907. After a TOUR in support of John Griffith’s 3HAKESPEAREAN REPER TORY, De Cordoba worked steadily in New York in a variety of roles, playing opposite Margaret Anglin in 1914 and in Minnie Maddern Fiske’s company in 1928. DE FOE, LOUIS VINCENT (1869–1922). Born in Adrian, Michigan, De Foe began his career in journalism with the Chicago Tribune. In 1899, he became drama CRITIC for the New York Morning World and held that position until his death. According to Green and Laurie, he was unmitigatedly honest in his regular reviews, but then he would mollify the ADVERTISING department by reflecting back on the preceding week and offering more generous assessments in his Sunday column (1953, 116). DEAN, JULIA (1880–1952). Not to be confused with the more famous ACTRESS named Julia Dean (1830–1868) in the previous generation, this Julia Dean was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. She began acting

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with a STOCK company in Salt Lake City, later TOURED with Joseph Jefferson III and James O’Neill, and made her New York debut in 1902 with Nat Goodwin. She married Orme Caldara. In the mid1930s, 10 years after retiring from stage acting, she became a MOTION PICTURE actress. DÉCLASSÉE. The high society drama by :ÚE!KINS opened on 6 October 1919 at the Empire Theatre, PRODUCED by Charles Frohman, and ran for 257 performances. %THEL"ARRYMORE played the graceful heroine, Helen, who maintains her poise after she is divorced and loses her social position. Though some snub her, she snubs no one, and even charmingly takes tea with some comic bohemian acrobats, but in a cruel twist of fate, she lies dying (hit by an automobile) just when the long-lost love of her life returns with money to propose marriage. DEMILLE, HENRY CHURCHILL (1850–1893). North Carolina native Henry Churchill DeMille, who had originally intended a career in the ministry, took a position as a play reader for the Madison Square Theatre in 1882, the year before his first play, John Delmer’s Daughter (1883), flopped. Collaborating with Charles Barnard, DeMille scored his first success with the melodramatic The Main Line (1886), a play so popular that he revised it, retitled The Danger Signal in 1891, in collaboration with Rosabel Morrison to ensure its continued popularity. DeMille’s greatest triumphs, The Wife (1887), Lord Chumley (1888), The Charity Ball (1889), and Men and Women (1890) were all written with PRODUCER $AVID "ELASCO. After his partnership with Belasco ended, DeMille adapted The Lost Paradise (1891) from Ludwig Fulda’s Das verlorene Paradies. With his wife, Beatrice Samuel, a successful agent, DeMille fathered PLAYWRIGHT William C. deMille (who altered the family name) and legendary MOTIONPICTURE DIRECTORCecil B. DeMille. DEMILLE, WILLIAM CHURCHILL (1878–1955). Born in Washington, North Carolina, William Churchill deMille (who altered the family name from DeMille) attended Columbia University and the !MERICAN!CADEMY OF $RAMATIC!RTS. Along with his brother, Cecil B. DeMille, deMille embarked on a career as a PLAYWRIGHT, following the lead of their father, Henry Churchill DeMille. Their

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collaborations, including the COMEDY The Genius (1906) failed, so Cecil focused exclusively on a MOTION PICTURE DIRECTING career, while William wrote several successful plays, the first of which, Strongheart (1905), offered a rare exploration of interracial love between a white girl and a .ATIVE !MERICAN man. In collaboration with Margaret Turnbull, deMille scored a success with a West Point comedy, Classmates (1907), before an even greater hit with his solo work, The Warrens of Virginia (1907), a romantic Civil 7AR melodrama. Two more failures in collaboration with his brother, The Royal Mounted (1908) and After Five (1913), sent him to Hollywood despite a final theatrical triumph with The Woman (1911), an indictment of political corruption. Subsequent plays, A Tragedy of the Future (1913), Food (1913), After Five (1913), Poor Old Jim (1929), and Hallowe’en (1936), were all short-lived. With his first wife, Anna George, deMille fathered choreographer Agnes de Mille (who again altered the family name). DERWENT, CLARENCE (1884–1959).† Born in London, Derwent had been ACTING in England for 13 years before making his New York debut in 1915 opposite Grace George in Major Barbara. He enjoyed a long distinguished career in both countries, playing as many as 500 roles. Having performed in all but three of 3HAKESPEARE’s plays, he could claim as his favorite role Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. He served two terms as president of !CTORS’%QUITY and was president of the American National Theater and Academy* (ANTA) from 1952 until his death. DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS. %UGENE/.EILL’s three-part drama opened on 11 November 1924 at the Greenwich Village Theatre. In it, O’Neill revisited themes from his 0ULITZER 0RIZEnwinning play Beyond the Horizon. Commercial success (208 performances) resulted from the authorities’ attempt to close it after moral crusaders objected to its steamy subject matter. The play is set on a rocky New England farm, a stark environment powerfully evoked in the SCENE DESIGN by 2OBERT%DMOND*ONES. The elderly, morally rigid Ephraim Cabot weds a much younger widow, Abbie Putnam. Ephraim’s oppressive manner drives Abbie toward his grown son Eben. When she becomes pregnant by Eben, Ephraim believes the child to be his own. Eben learns that Abbie

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wanted the child so that she could inherit the farm, which had belonged to his mother, and so Eben rejects Abbie. She then kills the baby in a misguided attempt to demonstrate her love for Eben. Only then does Eben realize his love for Abbie, and he insists on sharing responsibility for the child’s murder. 7ALTER(USTON scored a personal success playing Ephraim. This unsparing study of family strife, greed, and untamed sexuality is now regarded as one of O’Neill’s finest early plays. Karl Malden* appeared in a 1952 "ROADWAY revival. Anthony Perkins,* Sophia Loren, and Burl Ives* STARRED in a 1958 MOTIONPICTURE version. See also CENSORSHIP. DESMOND, MAE (1887–1982). Born Mary Veronica Callahan to Irish immigrant parents in Philadelphia, the ACTRESS-manager grew up reciting for family and church members and attending performances of the local STOCK company. She joined the Chestnut Street Theatre’s stock company and took Mae Desmond as her stage name. She married actor Frank Fielder in 1908. She held leading lady positions in various theatres and cities, but in 1917, formed her own company, the Mae Desmond Players, in Schenectady. Two seasons later, she established a foothold in her native Philadelphia. The Desmond Players gained a loyal following for their moral tone and family-friendly productions over a period of 50 years. Desmond and her husband lived into their nineties, becoming icons of Philadelphia theatre. DESMOND PLAYERS. Established by Mae Desmond and her husband, Frank Fielder, this STOCK company, offered “popular-priced” tickets to patrons in Schenectady, New York, beginning in 1917. The Players moved for a time to Elmira, New York, and then to Scranton, Pennsylvania, before settling in Philadelphia, where they operated successfully until 1929. In the Kensington neighborhood, the Players presented a REPERTORY aimed at German and Irish audiences in the vicinity. DETOUR, THE. Opening 23 August 1921 at the Astor Theater, the poignant rural drama by /WEN$AVIS ran only 48 performances. Effie Shannon played the farm wife who resents the years of drudgery and channels her frustration into secretly squirreling away money to send her daughter to New York City to be an artist. Her dream is dashed when her daughter realizes that she has no artistic talent and prefers

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to marry the local boy, while her husband uses the money she saved to buy more land. DIALECT ROLE. Ethnic and national dialects were a popular source of COMEDY not only on the variety stage, but also in legitimate plays from the 1890s to the 1930s, when immigrants were coming to the United States in record numbers. Before the racial integration of the American stage in the 1920s, !FRICAN !MERICAN characters were portrayed by white ACTORS in blackface using linguistic clichés. Similarly, the stage Irishman or Irish cook and the stage Jew were portrayed largely through exaggerated speech patterns and vocabularies. Dialect comedians were consistently popular in musical and vaudeville entertainment into the 1930s. See also ETHNICITYINDRAMA. DIAMOND LIL. By the time Mae West wrote and STARRED in this bawdy COMEDY-drama, she was a major box office draw as a result of Sex (1926), which garnered the attention of audiences, CRITICS, and the police. Similarly, her follow-up play, The Drag, which featured homosexual characters, met with so much controversy that it closed out of town. In Diamond Lil, which opened on 9 April 1928 at the Royale Theatre for 176 performances, West effectively balanced the play’s risqué elements with humor and melodrama, a formula which served her well in a string of 1930s MOTION PICTURES she scripted and starred in beginning in 1932. Lil is the prototype of West’s screen persona, a sexually liberated, good-hearted 1890s adventuress from the “wrong” side of town who lives by her own code in a man’s world. Despite her involvement with the unfaithful, two-fisted Gus Jordan, owner of a Bowery saloon and a white slave trafficker, Lil develops relationships with other men. Among them is Captain Cummings, a policeman in disguise as a Salvation Army preacher, who ends Jordan’s white slave trade while protecting Lil from involvement. Drawn to Cummings, Lil contemplates “reforming.” West toured with the play and revived it in London in 1947 for a year-long run that inspired her to bring it back to "ROADWAY in three limited engagements between 1949 and 1951. See also CENSORSHIP; SEXUALITYONTHE!MERICANSTAGE. DICKINSON, ANNA (1842–1932). Born in Philadelphia, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson began as a platform lecturer, then intertwined careers

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as an ACTRESS and PLAYWRIGHT. In 1876, she played Anne Boleyn in her own play A Crown of Thorns; or, Anne Boleyn in Boston. The savage reviews of both her acting and her writing did not deter her from reviving it in New York a year later and again in 1882. The New York Times reviewer of Dickinson’s performance as Hamlet at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in 1882 acknowledged that she was “an intelligent and a gifted woman in her manner,” yet she made “a conspicuous example of pretentious and presumptuous incompetence” (21 March 1882). She was fortunate enough to get Fanny Davenport to play the title role in her play An American Girl (1880) at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, and still it was found dull. DICTATOR, THE. The 1904 farce by Richard Harding Davis, PRODUCED by Charles Frohman, opened on 4 April and ran for 64 performances at the Criterion Theatre. William Collier played an American playboy caught in a mistaken identity quandary in a revolution-prone Latin country. John Barrymore’s performance as a cocktail-swilling telegraph operator won special notice. DIFF’RENT. %UGENE/.EILL’s early full-length drama of romance stunted by puritanical attitudes was PRODUCED by the Provincetown Players on 27 December 1920, achieving an initial 74-performance run. In 1921, it transferred to "ROADWAY. Thirty years pass between the two acts, during which period the ingénue (played by Mary Blair) evolves into a foolish spinster who seems to adumbrate the grotesque virgins of Tennessee Williams.* DIGGES, DUDLEY (1879–1947).† Born in Dublin, Dudley Digges worked with the Irish National Theatre as a young man, but his long career in a wide range of drama found its fullest expression in America. He came to the United States in 1904 and within a few years he was playing opposite Minnie Maddern Fiske in The Rising of the Moon (1908) and George Arliss in Disraeli (1911). He worked for several seasons as stage MANAGER for Arliss before returning to ACTING when he joined the 4HEATRE 'UILD in 1919 for a role in their first production, The Bonds of Interest. During 11 years with the Guild, Digges played every manner of character with distinction and was often associated with important new dramas, including the original productions of The Adding Machine (1923), Outward

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Bound (1924), Marco Millions (1928), and Dynamo (1929), as well as a range of American productions of European works including Heartbreak House (1920), Liliom (1921), The Brothers Karamazov (1928), and Major Barbara (1928). Also a respected director, Digges staged several Guild productions, including three 'EORGE "ERNARD3HAW plays, Candida (1925), Pygmalion (1927), and The Doctor’s Dilemma (1927), among others. After leaving the Guild in 1930, Digges found success in On Borrowed Time* (1938), George Washington Slept Here* (1942), and a revival of Candida (1942). He served as vice-president of the !CTORS’ %QUITY !SSOCIATION and appeared in nearly 50 MOTION PICTURES, including %UGENE /.EILL’s The Emperor Jones (1933). Given his association with several O’Neill plays, it was fitting that Digges’s final "ROADWAY role, that of Harry Hope in O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh* (1946), won him critical plaudits. DILLINGHAM, CHARLES BANCROFT (1868–1934). Born in Hartford, Connecticut, he moved from journalism to theatre MAN AGEMENT to PRODUCING. He enjoyed associations with Charles Frohman, Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., and Abraham Erlanger in addition to his own Dillingham Theatre Corporation. In 35 years, he produced over 200 plays in New York, with a predilection for clean, classy MUSICALS like those of Victor Herbert. Among the STARS he managed were Margaret Anglin, Kyrle Bellew, Elsie Janis, Julia Marlowe, and Fritzi Scheff. In 1910, he built the Globe Theatre, which he managed while also running the Hippodrome from 1910 to 1923. So beloved was the dapper bon vivant known as “Good Time Charlie” that friends contributed to maintain his trademark wardrobe after his 1933 bankruptcy. DINEHART, ALAN (1890–1944). The ACTOR, PLAYWRIGHT, stage and MOTION PICTURE DIRECTOR was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. After participating in ACADEMIC theatricals, Dinehart joined a TOURING company. He acted in STOCK and on "ROADWAY, interspersed with stints in vaudeville, including a 1915 Palace engagement in his sketch The Meanest Man in the World, later made into a full-length play for 'EORGE-#OHAN. In the 1920s, he both directed and acted in light COMEDY, including plays like Applesauce (1925) and Treat ’em Rough (1926). In 1934, he acted in and directed his own play Alley Cat.

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DIRECTING/DIRECTOR.† The rise of the modernist director began in the last decades of the 19th century. The ACTOR-MANAGER of the 18th century and first three-quarters of the 19th century slowly evolved into a dominant interpretive force who claimed artistic responsibility for every facet of production. As pioneered by Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meningen, in the 1870s in Europe, the modern director guided actors, SCENEDESIGNERS, and technicians to achieve an aesthetically unified production. At the dawn of the 20th century, American theatre practitioners had largely embraced this model, although program credit for directing did not become standard until after World 7AR I. The prior control of actor-managers, particularly those who were STAR actors, continued into the 20th century as the star often remained the strongest presence in a commercial theatre production, while artistically inclined producers such as 'EORGE- #OHAN (who often directed, while also PRODUCING, acting, and writing) or Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. (strictly a producer) employed directors as little more than glorified stage managers while they continued to control all aspects of production. Indeed, in England, the practice of directing continued to be ascribed to a “producer” for several decades after the term “director” became current in American theatre. The rise of REALISM in American drama, first evident in James A. Herne’s social problem play Margaret Fleming (1890) and in the painstakingly detailed stage productions of David Belasco, along with significant advances in theatrical technology, increased the need for a strong director to guide actors through the intricacies of challenging plays and to supervise complex technical productions. By the 1910s, with the emergence of the little theatre movement and, after World War I, the formation of ambitious producing organizations (the Provincetown Players, the 4HEATRE 'UILD, etc.), directing required a fervent artistic vision coupled with sensitive interpretive skills. The Russian-born theatre artist Theodore Kommissarzhevsky worked in the United States from 1934 and was instrumental in demonstrating directorial artistry as distinct from producing or management. DITHMAR, EDWARD AUGUSTUS (1854–1917). The eminent drama CRITIC, born in New York City, became a reporter for the New York Evening Post at 17. From 1877, he worked at the New York Times, where he served as critic from 1884 to 1901.

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DITRICHSTEIN, LEO (1865–1928). The Hungarian-born ACTOR and PLAYWRIGHT came to America in 1890 after establishing his career in Berlin. He acted at the German-language Amberg Theater in New York while learning English. In 1893, he made his English-language debut in Mr. Wilkinson’s Widows. After the success of his Zou-Zou in Trilby in 1895, he enjoyed a long string of comic character roles. His many playwriting credits from the 1890s until his retirement in 1924 include translations, adaptations, and collaborations, notably The Great Lover (1915), which he wrote with Frederic and Fanny Hatton and which gave him one of his outstanding roles. DIX, BEULAH MARIE (1876–1970). The prolific author of plays, novels, and MOTION PICTURE scripts was born in Kingston, Massachusetts. She graduated summa cum laude from Radcliffe in 1893 and began writing plays and historical novels in the 1890s. Among those PRODUCED in New York were A Rose o’ Plymouth Town (1902), Boy O’Carroll (1906), The Road to Yesterday (1907), and The Lilac Room (1907), all with Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland. Among her solo pieces were the antiWAR plays Across the Border (1915, one-act) and Moloch (1916). She was married to George H. Flebbe. Around 1916, Cecil B. DeMille brought her to Hollywood, where Dix scripted several Sherlock Holmes films as well as others for STARS like Norma Shearer. DIXEY, HENRY E. (1859–1943). Although largely associated with the MUSICALS, Dixey (born Henry E. Dixon in Boston) also STARRED in a number of legitimate plays. He made his debut in Under the Gaslight in Boston when he was nine. For his adult debut in 1874, he played eight roles (including half of a dancing cow) in the burlesque Evangeline. He was long associated with the title role in Adonis (1884), as he cut such a handsome figure in the formrevealing COSTUME. His major roles on the legitimate stage included David Garrick in Oliver Goldsmith (1900), Marquis of Steyne in Becky Sharp and Peter Swallow in Mrs. Bumpstead-Leigh (both 1911, with Minnie Maddern Fiske), Malvolio in Twelfth Night (1914), Long John Silver in Treasure Island (1916), Sir Benjamin Backbite in The School for Scandal (1923), and many others. In 1909, he married Marie Nordstrom, with whom he starred in Mary Jane’s Pa (1908).

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DODD, LEE WILSON (1879–1933). Born in Franklin, Pennsylvania, Dodd graduated from Yale University and New York Law School. He gave up legal practice after five years in order to write novels and plays. He was best known for his 0ULITZER 0RIZE–nominated play The Changelings (1923). Shortly before his death, he was appointed to succeed George Pierce Baker as head of the Yale Drama School. DONNELLY, DOROTHY (1880–1928). The ACTRESS-PLAYWRIGHT was born into a theatrical family in New York City. She acted in her brother’s Murray Hill STOCK company for three years, followed by 20 years of good roles in New York, including the title role in Madame X (1909). However, she soon devoted herself more to writing librettos as well as song lyrics. She worked with Sigmund Romberg on the adaptations and lyrics for the operettas Blossom Time (1921) and The Student Prince (1924). DORO, MARIE (1882–1956). Née Marie Stuart, the pretty ACTRESS with delicate features was born in Pennsylvania but grew up in Kansas City. She performed in local AMATEUR productions as a CHILD and was often engaged by professional TOURING companies as an extra; thus she played Little Eva with a visiting Uncle Tom’s Cabin company. She began her adult career in STOCK in St. Paul, then toured in MUSICAL chorus parts. In 1903, she reached New York, playing opposite Jerome Sykes in the comic opera The Billionaire. As a protégée of PRODUCER Charles Frohman, Doro enjoyed a succession of major roles and a London engagement. She was William Gillette’s leading lady in three plays, including a tour. She gave up singing for straight COMEDY, finding her greatest success in The Morals of Marcus in 1907 in New York and on a long national tour. In the 1910s, Doro turned to MOTION PICTURE acting. Kansas City drama CRITIC Austin Latchaw remembered that “Miss Doro had pretty little tricks.” To show petulance, for example, “she had a way of screwing up her face as if to sneeze.” DOUBLING. It was common practice for utility and even supporting ACTORS to play two or more roles in the same play, especially in TOURING companies. 3TARS occasionally doubled roles as a tour de force, as when Mary Anderson became the first ACTRESS ever to play both Hermione and Perdita in The Winter’s Tale.

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DOWNING, ROBERT (1857–1944). The ACTOR, born in Washington, D.C., encompassed classical tragedy, contemporary vehicles, and vaudeville in his stage career. Among many 3HAKESPEAREAN roles, he played Romeo to Mary Anderson’s Juliet. He formed companies to TOUR Joaquin Miller’s Tally Ho, J. C. Nugent’s An Indiana Romance, and the temperance melodrama Ten Nights in a Barroom. In 1908, he left the theatre to become an evangelist. DRACULA. Although of English origin, the vampire thriller by John Balderston and Hamilton Dean based upon the Bram Stoker novel would continue to haunt the American stage for many years following its original "ROADWAY debut, opening 5 October 1927 at the Fulton Theatre, with Bela Lugosi in the title role. Frank Langella* scored a major success in a lavish 1977 revival with SCENEDESIGNS by illustrator Edward Gorey. DRAMA LEAGUE. While the mass audience for theatre was being diverted to vaudeville and MOTIONPICTURES, the Drama League was formed with a goal of educating audiences by fostering good plays and legitimate theatre, whether AMATEUR or professional. Founded in 1910 by a women’s literary circle in Evanston, Illinois, the organization grew to more than 100 local centers in little over a decade. According to Karen J. Blair in The Torchbearers, membership peaked in 1915 at 100,000. Part of the movement’s success lay in their ability to draw professional men to participate in the cultural work of forming public taste. In The Twentieth Century Theatre (1918), William Lyons Phelps wrote that “both managers and dramatists are glad to have the League’s endorsement; it means increased business. The League flourishes in every part of America.” Although a center was not founded in Kansas City until 1927, it hosted in 1928 the Nineteenth Annual Convention of the Drama League of America. The national organization disbanded in 1931, but some centers continued their activities, notably the New York Drama League. DRAMATISTS GUILD, INC.† The professional organization of American PLAYWRIGHTS grew out of earlier clubs that had been formed to protect dramatists. The American Dramatic Authors’ Society (1878) was succeeded by the American Dramatists Club (1891). Because the latter did not admit WOMEN, Martha Morton organized

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a Society of Dramatic Authors (1907) with a charter membership of 30 women. The two groups soon consolidated as the Society of American Dramatists and Composers (SADC), with Bronson Howard as president and Morton as vice president. The Dramatists’ Guild (DG), which supplanted it, was founded in 1920. DRESS CIRCLE. In the 1890s, when “theatre” began to sound almost as respectable as “opera house,” and when fixed seating replaced chairs on the auditorium floor, the term “dress circle” began to supplant parquette to designate the section on the main floor behind the orchestra seats. DRESS PARADE. When costumes are nearly ready, the DIRECTOR and COSTUME designer will view the ACTORS in their costumes on stage under stage LIGHTING in order to consider the effect of the color and intensity of the lighting. In his memoir More Lives Than One, the 1920s costumer Claude Bragdon recalled that “the dress parade was my most harrowing ordeal, for then each member of the cast appears in costume, to be passed upon as to its suitability, becomingness, style, fit, workmanship, down to the last shoestring, for all of which I was officially responsible” (1938, 202). The dress parade is often in tandem with the dress rehearsal, which occurs just before the official opening of the play when all elements are in place and the actors are fully dressed in COSTUMES, wigs, and makeup. The dress rehearsal comes at the point when all of the technical elements are completed and allows the DIRECTOR and SCENEDESIGNER to perfect details and solve problems. DRESSER. An individual or individuals assisting ACTORS in applying makeup, wigs, and COSTUMES for a performance was a dresser. Most STARS employed personal dressers. DRESSING ROOM. Space was designated backstage where ACTORS could prepare for performances. By 1880, such spaces in newly constructed theatres were individual rooms for the leading players and larger common rooms for the supporting cast and chorus. Typically, the STAR dressing room was elaborately appointed. Most dressing rooms featured a dressing table, a mirror surrounded by lights to aid the actor in applying makeup, and a rack for COSTUMES. A major

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innovation of the 1890s was fixed washstands in theatrical dressing rooms. DRESSING THE HOUSE. To dress the house is to create the illusion of a large audience by sprinkling a smaller audience throughout the auditorium, leaving occasional seats vacant and using as many rows of seats as possible. Theatre MANAGEMENTS also “papered the house” by giving away complimentary tickets to create the impression of a larger audience when ticket sales were weak. DRESSING THE STAGE. Decorating the stage setting usually involved filling a box set with furnishings, wall hangings, and other items in order to create the illusion of a genuine room. However, the term is freely applied to stage decoration and also refers to arranging ACTORS on the stage decoratively to fill the acting area. DRESSLER, MARIE (1868–1934). Born Lelia Maria Koerber in Cobourg, Canada, the daughter of a hot-tempered Prussian cavalry officer and a long-suffering musician began performing in AMATEUR theatricals as a CHILD and soon realized her ability to make audiences laugh. At 14 she left home and changed her name to make her professional debut with a cheap traveling STOCK company in the dramatic role of Cigarette in Under Two Flags. After three years with the Nevada Stock Company, she TOURED briefly in the Robert Grau Opera Company chorus, then held chorus parts with Frank Deshon’s Starr Opera Company and then George A. Baker’s Bennett and Moulton Opera Company, followed by a Chicago engagement with Eddie Foy in Little Robinson Crusoe. After her 1892 New York debut in a MUSICAL play, Dressler faced the fact that she was destined not to be a diva but a COMEDY performer. Despite her full-figured 200 pounds, she had stamina and athletic grace. She often bicycled with Lillian Russell and relished the epithet “Beauty and the Beastie” describing them. Dressler’s ability to improvise comic business and to captivate audiences with her double takes and other facial expressions blossomed in the role of Flo Honeydew in The Lady Slavey (1896), which ran two years in New York and then toured, taking her to STARDOM. After a long string of "ROADWAY and London successes, she began a MOTIONPICTURE career in 1914 with Tillie’s Punctured Nightmare, featuring the Tillie

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Blobs character she had created on Broadway in 1910. In 1931, she won the Academy Award for her performance in Min and Bill. She wrote two memoirs, The Life Story of an Ugly Duckling (1924) and My Own Story (1934). DREW, JOHN (1853–1927). Named for his father, the manager of Niblo’s Theatre, John Drew shied away from a life in the theatre, working for a time as a clock salesman in Philadelphia. Returning to the family profession, Drew made his 1873 stage debut at Philadelphia’s Arch Street Theatre with his mother, Mrs. John Drew (Louisa Lane). After two seasons in her company, Drew made his New York debut in The Big Bonanza (1875) for PRODUCER Augustin Daly, who guided Drew’s career for many years. As one of the Daly STARS, including Ada Rehan, James Lewis, and Mrs. G. H. Gilbert, Drew won critical approval as Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew and other 3HAKESPEAREAN and Restoration COMEDIES. Drew’s good looks secured his position as a popular box office attraction. When he switched allegiance to producer Charles Frohman, Drew won approval in The Masked Ball (1892), W. Somerset Maugham’s Jack Straw (1908) and The Circle (1921), and revivals of The School for Scandal (1923) and Trelawny of the “Wells” (1925 and 1927). Through his sister, Georgiana Drew Barrymore, he was the uncle of Lionel, %THEL, and John Barrymore. DREW, MRS. JOHN (1820–1897). Daughter of ACTORS Thomas Frederick and Eliza Trenter Lane, Louisa Lane took to the provincial stage as a CHILD following her father’s death, making her debut in The Spoiled Child (1828) and impressing audiences by playing five characters in Twelve Precisely. She acted opposite Junius Brutus Booth in Richard III and Edwin Forrest in William Tell and Macbeth. She married for the third time to John Drew (1827–1862), a 3HAKE SPEAREAN actor, in 1850. He MANAGED the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia and, following his death, Lane, billed as Mrs. John Drew, managed the theatre for 30 years and continued to act into the 1890s, most notably in Shakespearean roles and Restoration comedies, scoring a particular success as Mrs. Malaprop in The Rivals. See also BARRYMORE ETHEL; BARRYMORE, GEORGIANA DREW; BARRYMORE, JOHN; BARRYMORE, LIONEL; WOMEN IN THEPROFESSION.

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DRIFTING APART. One of James A. Herne’s earliest plays, and one of his first to exhibit his interest in European REALISM in the (ENRIK )BSEN mode, Drifting Apart, which was originally named Mary, The Fisherman’s Child, was first PRODUCED at Boston’s Park Theatre on 11 June 1888. Although the drama’s depiction of heredity and environment on an alcoholic sailor failed to find favor with audiences, Herne’s achievement was recognized by several important CRITICS, including Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells, whose praise encouraged him to continue in the realistic social problem drama style that would reap his finest play, Margaret Fleming. DU BARRY. David Belasco’s five-act historical extravaganza opened on 25 December 1901 at the Criterion Theatre for 165 performances. Staged with considerable historical detail in the visual elements, the sensationalized Du Barry involves French milliner Jeanette Vaubernier, who is loved by soldier Cosse-Brissac. When she is attracted to a gambling house by Comte Du Barry, she becomes a scandalous adornment to French society. She is married to Du Barry’s brother to create some semblance of respectability, but feelings linger for Cosse-Brissac. As the French Revolution begins, Jeanette goes to the guillotine with many other members of her social set. Following the play’s opening, a lawsuit caused headlines with the news that Belasco had plagiarized French writer Jean Richepin’s La Du Barry. The notoriety, as well as a fine central performance by Mrs. Leslie Carter, Belasco’s typical visual REALISM, and a cast of 200, helped the play to a healthy run and a 1915 MOTIONPICTURE version. DUBOIS, W. E. B. (1868–1963). William Edward Burghardt DuBois, born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, is best known as an !FRI CAN!MERICAN activist and cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909). However, he loved the theatre and encouraged African American PLAYWRIGHTS in the pages of his journal The Crisis, which held contests, and on the stage of the KRIGWA players. DuBois also wrote Star of Ethiopia (1913), a pageant of African American history that was produced in several cities in the 1910s and 1920s. DULCY. 'EORGE3+AUFMAN and -ARC#ONNELLY collaborated on this hit COMEDY based on a character created by humorist Franklin

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P. Adams. Dulcy, the first of their eight collaborations, opened on 13 August 1921, produced by George C. Tyler and H. H. Frazee, running for 246 performances at Frazee’s Theatre, making a "ROADWAY STAR of ,YNN&ONTANNE in the title role. Dulcy Smith is a scatterbrained busybody who causes problems for her husband, Gordon, when she plans a weekend gathering to help him in his business. Meddling in various relationships, Dulcy’s interference nearly causes disaster, but through a series of revelations all works out well in the end and Dulcy half-heartedly promises Gordon she will never interfere in his affairs again. -OTIONPICTURE versions appeared in 1923 and 1940. DUMMY, THE. The 1914 COMEDY-melodrama by Harriet Ford and detective Harvey O’Higgins opened 13 April 1914 at the Hudson Theatre and ran for 200 performances. A 1929 MOTIONPICTURE version STARRED Ruth Chatterton and Fredric March.* DUNCAN, AUGUSTIN (1873–1954). The ACTOR, DIRECTOR, and PRODUCER (brother of the dancer Isadora Duncan) began his career in San Francisco, where he was born, making his debut in 1893 at Stockman’s Theatre. After years on the ROAD, he made his New York debut in Richard Mansfield’s Henry V company in 1900. He continued performing even after he lost his eyesight in the 1920s. He produced about 40 plays and directed such landmark productions as Kempy (1922), The Detour (1921), %UGENE/.EILL’s The First Man (1922), and Hell-Bent fer Heaven (1924). DUPREE, MINNIE (1875–1947). Born in La Crosse, Wisconsin, she began ACTING in 1887 and continued until her death six decades later. Early in her career, she played opposite Richard Mansfield and David Warfield, excelling in popular melodramas at the turn of the century. She served as a Red Cross nurse during World 7AR I. DUSE, ELEONORA (1858–1924). Italy’s dominant ACTRESS of the generation following Adelaide Ristori, Duse made four American TOURS (1893, 1896, 1902, 1923–1924) with mixed success. She was noteworthy for her expressive hands and for her ability to portray various ages without the aid of makeup, which she never used. Along with a REPERTORY of Italian plays, Duse was also a major

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disciple of the REALISTIC dramas of (ENRIK)BSEN. She died in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 21 April 1924. See also FOREIGNSTARSAND COMPANIESONTHE!MERICANSTAGE. DYNAMO. %UGENE/.EILL planned Dynamo as the first part of a trilogy of plays about the ways in which science and modern technology were emerging as a new American religion, while continuing his experimentation with expressionist form. The trilogy was abandoned, however, for the play failed to impress CRITICS and audiences at its opening on 11 February 1929 at the Martin Beck Theatre, and it attained a mere 50 performances. Ada Fife, an atheist’s daughter, falls in love with Reuben Light, a minister’s son. Reverend Light disapproves of Reuben’s relationship with Ada, the daughter of his enemy. Angrily, Reuben denounces the faith of his family and leaves home. Attracted to the technological wonders of the day, Reuben makes science his only faith. When Ada seduces him in a hydroelectric plant, he kills her and then ecstatically allows himself to be electrocuted by the dynamo. In her first important role, Claudette Colbert played Ada opposite 'LEN!NDERS. Despite 0HILIP-OELLER’s direction and ,EE3IMONSON’s impressive set designs for the hydroelectric plant, the significance of the play’s subject was obscured for many critics by its grim plot.

n%n EAGELS, JEANNE (1894–1929). Born Amelia Jean Eagles in Kansas City, Missouri, she acted as a child and played Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream there. She changed the spelling of her surname and made an inauspicious New York debut in a bit role in the MUSICAL Jumping Jupiter (1911), followed by similarly insignificant roles in The Mind-the-Paint Girl (1912) and Outcast (1916). George Arliss recognized her potential and cast her in plays with him: Paganini, The Professor’s Love Story, Disraeli, and Hamilton. Success in Daddies (1918) and A Young Man’s Fancy (1919) adumbrated her legendary performance as the amoral prostitute Sadie Thompson in W. Somerset Maugham’s Rain (1922), a role she played continually for more than four years on "ROADWAY and on TOUR. Eagels scored another

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success in her final role as Simone in Her Cardboard Lover (1927). From 1915, she ACTED in a half-dozen silent MOTIONPICTURES. Her only surviving “talkie,” The Letter (1929), captures her beauty and talent. This mercurial, fiery, and beautiful actress was perhaps the most promising stage performer of the time. But her offstage life was tumultuous and marred by drugs and alcohol. Her premature death enshrined her as a tragic legend of the American stage. EAMES, CLARE (1896–1930). The ACTRESS was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and was trained by Sarah Cowell LeMoyne. Eames made her debut in 1918 at the Greenwich Village Theatre and rose quickly to stardom. She married PLAYWRIGHT 3IDNEY (OWARD in 1922 and created leading roles in his Lucky Sam McCarver (1925) and Ned McCobb’s Daughter (1926). She made her London stage debut in Howard’s The Silver Cord in 1927. However, he divorced her for desertion in 1930 when she returned to London, where she died after a career of only 12 years. EARL OF PAWTUCKET, THE. Opening 23 March 1903 at the Manhattan Theatre, the farce by Augustus Thomas ran for 191 performances. Lawrence D’Orsay played the English lord who assumes an American identity and faces a host of complications. EASIEST WAY, THE. Eugene Walter’s brutally honest treatment of a kept woman, PRODUCED and DIRECTED by David Belasco, opened on 19 January 1909 at the Belasco-Stuyvesant Theatre. Frances Starr played Laura, who yearns for love but ultimately takes “the easiest way,” culminating in the sensational curtain line: “I’m going to Rector’s to make a hit, and to hell with the rest.” Belasco revived the play in 1921 with Starr recreating her role for a 63-performance run. While praising the “remarkable drama,” the New York Times reviewer (20 January 1909) noted that “a more biting arraignment of an evil could scarcely be imagined.” EAST IS WEST. Samuel Shipman and John B. Hymer’s three-act COMEDY with prologue opened on 25 December 1918 at the Astor Theatre for a remarkable 680 performances despite critical derision. &AY "AINTER STARRED as Ming Toy, a Chinese girl who resides in San Francisco’s Chinatown. She falls in love with Billy Benson, an

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American boy. However, she has been sold to Charlie Yang, a cynical Chinese-American wastrel. When it is revealed that Ming Toy is, in fact, Spanish-born, Yang is foiled and Ming Toy and Billy are united and will face together the era’s laws and beliefs that make their interracial union difficult. Bainter’s performance was highly praised, as were the lavish settings by Livingston Platt. A popular 1922 silent MOTION PICTURE version starred Constance Talmadge, and Lupe Velez took the role in a 1930 “talkie.” EASY COME, EASY GO. Opening on 26 October 1925 at the Cohan Theatre, the farce by /WEN $AVIS ran for 125 performances. Two bungling bank robbers end up among the snooty guests at a health farm. The one who did not really want to be a bad guy ends up with the pretty girl. EATON, WALTER PRICHARD (1878–1957). Born in Malden, Massachusetts, he graduated from Harvard University in 1900 and became a reporter on the Boston Herald. As drama CRITIC, he wrote for the New York Tribune (1902–1907), the New York Sun (1907–1908), and American Magazine (1909–1918). From 1933, he taught PLAY WRITING at Yale University. Besides numerous books and articles on the theatre, he published widely on Boy Scouting and the outdoors. EBERSON, JOHN (1875–1959). The eminent theatre architect was born in Austria, came to America in 1901, and settled in St. Louis. He traveled around the Midwest to find towns that had no theatre. Convincing the locals that they needed one, he would design it. Thus Eberson became known as “Opera House John.” He designed over 500 legitimate and MOTIONPICTURE theatres, winning particular renown in the 1920s for his “atmospherics,” palatial theatres with sky, garden, and fantastic architectural details. Among his dazzling accomplishments were the Majestic in Houston, the Avalon in Chicago, the Paradise in New York, and the Uptown in Kansas City. ECCENTRIC BUSINESS. The stage direction “eccentric business” sometimes appears in playscripts of the era, often when a featured ACTOR in COMEDY is alone on stage. The performer would be expected to draw upon his or her personal tricks of the trade for comic effect. These amusing idiosyncratic activities might involve some

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anomalous handling of props or simply grotesque movement and gesture. “Eccentric comedian” was another term for a character actor specializing in quirky comedy. ECONOMICS OF THE STAGE. In his seminal work, The Business of the Theatre: An Economic History of the American Theatre 1750–1932, Alfred L. Bernheim found that the economic organization of the American theatre changed little from colonial times to the middle of the 19th century, but thereafter “the star system was the ferment which brought about a new economic order in the theatre” (1964, 26). The proliferation of STARS in the 1880s only increased the public’s demand for them; this caused MANAGERS to bid their salaries up, which necessitated reducing expenses elsewhere. The consequent demise of resident STOCK companies coincided with the rise of traveling combinations, which led to centralized production and booking out of New York. The entertainment industry ranked among America’s big businesses, but sending combinations on the ROAD for a season was complicated, all too often causing companies to be stranded. As early as the 1880s, regional circuits began to be formed to facilitate the annual booking of attractions, each circuit represented by one theatre manager traveling to New York to visit the booking offices. Abraham Erlanger and Marc Klaw formed the Klaw & Erlanger booking agency in 1887, while Charles Frohman teamed up with Al Hayman. Those two partnerships joined with a third, Nixon and Zimmerman, in 1896 to form the Theatrical Syndicate or Trust with the intention of controlling distribution to the first-class theatres in every city across the nation. By 1903, the Syndicate exercised direct control over 70 theatres and indirectly influenced bookings in as many as 500 others (Bernheim 1964, 51–52), as well as powerfully influencing newspaper coverage. During the first decade of the 20th century, the Syndicate’s monopoly was challenged and broken by the 3HUBERTS, who proceeded to operate every bit as ruthlessly as their rivals did. Bernheim notes that the period of most intense rivalry between the Syndicate and the Shuberts, 1909 to 1913, was also the period of decline of the road: “From being the backbone of the theatre business, the road became its diseased member” (1964, 79). Inferior plays were sent out, often performed by third-rate companies, while ticket prices steadily in-

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creased. Legitimate theatre also lost customers to vaudeville, MO TIONPICTURES, radio, and the pleasures of the automobile. The response of rank and file theatre workers to management’s high-handedness was unionization: !CTORS %QUITY !SSOCIATION (1912), 5NITED 3CENIC!RTISTS OF!MERICA (1918), the $RAMA TISTS’'UILD (1919), and others. During the 1920s, theatre thrived in New York; the 1927–1928 season set the all-time record number of productions opening: 264. Meanwhile, the little theatre movement compensated for the dearth of professional productions in cities outside New York. See also SPECULATION. EDDINGER, WALLACE (1881–1929). The son of ACTORS Lawrence and May Eddinger was born in Albany, New York, and made his debut at seven in Among the Pines, followed by Little Lord Fauntleroy. As Wallie Eddinger, he played CHILD roles until the mid-1890s, then left the theatre to study mining engineering. Returning to the New York stage in 1902, he worked steadily for a quarter century as a light comedian. EDESON, ROBERT (1868–1931). Born in New Orleans, he was the son of George R. Edeson, a notable stage DIRECTOR and AC TOR. At 19, Robert Edeson made his debut in Fascination (1887) at Brooklyn’s Park Theatre. He soon joined Augustin Daly’s STOCK company, where his performances earned him a London engagement. On returning to New York in 1900, he joined Lester Wallack’s stock company. One of his popular successes was the title role in Strongheart (1905), a .ATIVE!MERICAN role that allowed him to show off his athletic build. Charles Frohman presented it in London in 1907. In 1914, Edeson joined the Famous Players and thereafter devoted himself more to MOTIONPICTURES than to the stage. With newspaperwoman Ada Patterson, he wrote Love’s Lightning, produced at New York’s Lexington Theatre in 1918. As a screen actor, he appeared in every one of William and Cecil B. DeMille’s films. ELECTRICITY. The novelty of electricity in the 1890s and early 1900s inspired its use in COSTUMES as well as for scenic illumination. Performers could be wired for illuminated headdresses or small lights on the garment. Theatres constructed in the 1890s were often equipped for both electric and gas LIGHTING.

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ELITCH’S GARDENS THEATRE. The oldest summer playhouse in continuous operation since its founding in 1890, Elitch’s Gardens Theatre presented vaudeville entertainments for its first seven years, before establishing a STOCK company in 1897. The theatre itself was a wooden octagon expanded to include a modern theatre in the 1950s. ELLIOTT, GERTRUDE (1874–1950). Born May Gertrude Dermot in Rockland, Maine, Gertrude Elliott made her ACTING debut in 1894. With her elder sister Maxine Elliott, she appeared in An American Citizen (1897), Nathan Hale (1899), and The Cowboy and the Lady (1899). After TOURING to London with the latter production, she joined the company of the English actor Sir Johnston ForbesRobertson to tour in Hamlet in 1900. She married Forbes-Robertson that year and thereafter lived in England. She and her husband made two American tours, 1903 and 1906. He retired in 1913, but she played several American engagements. Lady Forbes-Robertson died in Kent, England. ELLIOTT, MAXINE (1868–1940). Born Jessie C. Dermot in Rockland, Maine, ACTRESS Maxine Elliott demonstrated an independent spirit from childhood, which a convent school could not correct. In 1884, she married New York lawyer George MacDermott, but they soon separated and eventually divorced. A tall, striking beauty with black hair and luminous complexion, she realized that the stage was a career path open to ambitious WOMEN, so she sought out Dion Boucicault to teach her to act; he also helped her choose her stage name. Elliott’s social skills as well as her beauty enabled her to find a succession of opportunities following her 1890 New York debut; she acted with the companies of T. Henry French and Augustin Daly in New York, T. Daniel Frawley in San Francisco, and Nat C. Goodwin on an 1896–1897 Australian TOUR. She and Goodwin were married in 1898, and they toured together for five seasons. An English COMEDY, When We Were Twenty-One by Henry V. Esmond, became the mainstay of their REPERTORY. Clyde Fitch wrote Nathan Hale (1899) and The Cowboy and the Lady (1899) as vehicles for Goodwin and Elliot. After their separation in 1903, Fitch continued to write plays for Elliott, including Her Own Way (1903) and Her

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Great Match (1905). She personally oversaw construction of the elegant Maxine Elliott Theatre, which she opened in 1908, STARRING in The Chaperon. Although she continued to act sporadically, and even ventured into silent MOTIONPICTURES, Elliott preferred to live as a socialite in England, where she bought a country manor and became a frequent companion of King Edward VII. During World 7AR I, she devoted her wealth to transporting food and supplies to the Allies in Belgium. #RITIC Austin Latchaw recalled (Kansas City Star, 18 June 1935) that “Maxine Elliott was one of the most beautiful women the spotlight ever shone upon. There was something more, and I believe it was a degree of technique that went far to cover the limitations most of us would concede, the employment of that keen intelligence that incidentally and subsequently marked Maxine Elliott as one of the shrewdest business women the age of freedom has developed. Instead of not being able to act ‘a little bit,’ as some would have it, I believe Miss Elliott, in her way, was a particularly good actress.” Her niece, Diana Forbes-Robertson, published a biography of her, My Aunt Maxine (1964). ELLIS, EDITH (1876–1960). Born in Coldwater, Michigan, into a Chicago-based theatrical family, Edith Ellis TOURED with her parents and was on stage from the age of three. Soon she was billed as “Little Edith, the Rising 3TAR,” and had plays written to feature her. She wrote her own first play, A Batch of Blunders (1897), to rescue the company with which she and her brother Edward Ellis were touring when it was stranded on the ROAD by the MANAGE MENT. After she married Frank A. Baker, they leased two theatres in Brooklyn, where she ACTED and DIRECTED under the name Edith Baker. In 1903, she took her own play The Point of View to the Berkeley Lyceum in New York. After her husband’s death in 1907, she resumed her maiden name and focused on PLAYWRITING. Bzowski lists 59 plays by Ellis. Her most successful was Mary Jane’s Pa (1908), which starred Henry E. Dixey, ran for 89 performances in New York, and had a long life on the road. Others were Seven Sisters (1911), which starred ,AURETTE4AYLOR, The Devil’s Garden (1915), and White Collars (1924). She married C. Beecher Furness, a Canadian. Her later work included screenplays and books about the afterlife. This prolific American playwright should

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not be confused with the British dramatist Edith Ellis (1861–1916), author of three one-acts, who was married to Havelock Ellis. See also CHILDPERFORMERS. ELLSLER, EFFIE (1855?–1942). She was the daughter of John A. Ellsler, a well-known ACTOR-MANAGER who built the Euclid Avenue Opera House in Cleveland, where she was born. She acted in STOCK as a CHILD and grew up to perform opposite Edwin Booth, John McCullough, and other TOURING STARS during their Cleveland engagements. She went to New York in 1880 and immediately achieved stardom when she created the title role in Hazel Kirke at Madison Square Theatre. Under Daniel Frohman’s MANAGEMENT, she toured extensively until settling in Hollywood in the 1930s to play character roles in MOTIONPICTURES. EMENS, HOMER FARNHAM (1862–1930). The SCENE DESIGNER was born in Volney, New York, and learned his skill as an apprentice to Philip Goatcher at the Madison Square Theatre, followed by a few seasons at Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street Theatre. On returning to New York, he created the sensational illusion of a freight car wreck in The Main Line at the Lyceum in 1886. He was the original designer of the legendary sawmill in Blue Jeans (1890). He spoke about changes he had seen in stage design practices in an interview for Theatre Magazine (August 1908). EMERSON, JOHN (1874–1956). Born in Sandusky, Ohio, John Emerson studied for the ministry at Oberlin College, in Heidelberg, and at the University of Chicago, but abandoned his studies in 1904 to become an ACTOR. He made his first appearance in Tit for Tat that year and TOURED with Minnie Maddern Fiske before switching from acting to DIRECTING under the banner of the 3HUBERTS, Charles Frohman, and A. H. Woods. Among the important productions Emerson staged, Clyde Fitch’s drama The City (1909) and the Julian Eltinge MUSICAL The Crinoline Girl (1914) stand out as demonstrations of his versatility. He was centrally involved in the !CTORS%QUITY!SSOCIATION strike in 1919, serving as president, and he collaborated on plays with his wife, Anita Loos, including The Whole Town’s Talking (1923) and the enduringly popular Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1926).

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EMERY, GILBERT (1875–1945). Born Gilbert Emery Bensley Pottle in Naples, New York, he was educated at Amherst College and became a reporter. He then turned to writing short stories, a novel, and poems. He served in World 7AR I as a lieutenant in the United States Army and drew upon that experience for his first play The Hero (1920). His other most successful plays were Tarnish (1923) and Love in a Mist (with Amélie Rives, 1926). Meanwhile he took up ACTING, appearing notably in The Truth about Blayds (1922) and Paris Bound (1927). He turned to MOTION PICTURES in the final phase of his career. EMMET, J. K. (1841–1891). Joseph Kline Emmet was born in St. Louis, where he remained a popular favorite throughout his ACT ING career. Despite his Irish parentage, he specialized in playing a German STOCK character called Fritz. According to CRITIC Austin Latchaw (Kansas City Star, 30 April 1935), his “Fritz comedies” were “replete with sentiment, song and romance, with moments of drama or pathos. We had ‘Fritz in a Madhouse,’ ‘Fritz in Ireland,’ ‘Fritz in Prosperity,’ and so on. . . . In all of these pieces Emmet appeared in the dress (including the funny little cap) of the German immigrant.” EMOTIONAL ACTRESS. Matilda Heron was said to have founded the “emotional school” of ACTING. According to Reignolds-Winslow, “Matilda Heron was dramatic to the last degree on every occasion” (1887, 111). Emotional intensity also characterized performances by Lucille Western. It was Clara Morris who pushed that mode of acting to the heights. For her alternating restraint and release of strong feelings, according to CRITIC Austin Latchaw (Kansas City Star, 4 April 1935), “Morris was unsurpassed. There was a poignancy in the break of her voice, in the very pauses she prolonged, that touched the most cynical audience. We used to go to the old Coates night after night and weep over Clara Morris’s heartrending experiences behind the footlights.” He added that she became “the most moving emotional actress of her time. She could sound the depths of passion, of sorrow, and could compel us to go into the depths with her. There was no embarrassment when we wept at a Clara Morris performance. When we went to see this actress we had tears to shed and prepared to shed them.” See also BOOTH, AGNES.

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EMPEROR JONES, THE. The Provincetown Players won its first significant acclaim with The Emperor Jones when it opened at the Playwrights’ Theatre in New York on 1 November 1920. On 27 December 1920, it moved uptown to the Selwyn Theatre and achieved a total run of 204 performances. %UGENE /.EILL’s eight-scene expressionist tragedy, DIRECTED by George Cram Cook with SCENE DESIGN by Cleon Throckmorton, provided the first important role for an !FRICAN!MERICAN ACTOR in a serious drama on "ROADWAY. Charles Gilpin originated the title role, but 0AUL2OBESON revived it, playing it also in London and in a 1933 screen adaptation. The play was renowned for its expressionist experiment with sound: a tom-tom that begins thumping at normal pulse rate—72 beats per minute—and steadily accelerates during Jones’s increasingly hallucinogenic flight through the jungle by night. Brutus Jones, a former Pullman porter, came as a stowaway two years earlier to an island in the West Indies, where he managed to set himself up as emperor. Emulating the greed he had observed in white businessmen traveling on trains, Jones has been stealing from his subjects and planning to escape with his riches before they can organize a revolt, as he brags to Smithers, a white Cockney trader. Smithers warns Jones that the ominous drumbeat heard in the distance signals preparations for an uprising. Jones assumes that escape will be easy, as he has convinced his subjects that only a silver bullet can kill him. However, Jones’s arrogance dissolves when he gets lost in the jungle and in his own mind. His increasingly phantasmagoric visions show his own past experience and then his subconscious racial memory, including a witch doctor who attempts to persuade Jones to offer himself as a sacrifice. The incessant drumbeats reflecting Jones’s mounting terror cease only when a silver bullet—cast by the natives from melted coins—ends his life. ENGAGEMENT. The engagement of a STAR or a full company meant that they were contracted to perform in a given theatre for a specified length of run. One-night stands were debilitating, so it was preferable to play towns large enough to support half-week engagements (usually three evenings and a matinee) or full-week engagements (six evenings and two matinees). ENSEMBLE. This word for a well-unified performance by a group was used in music and dance long before it gained currency in theatre

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after 1900. With the gradual decline of the STAR system, this term suggested an approach to staging in which every player’s contribution contributed to an artistic wholeness. ENTER MADAME. Coauthor Gilda Varesi STARRED as the prima donna in this COMEDY, which opened on 16 August 1920 at the Garrick Theatre and ran for 366 performances. Varesi based her material on memories of her mother, Elena Boccadabati Varesi, a turn-ofthe-century Italian opera star. Dolly Byrne coauthored. "ROCK0EM BERTON PRODUCED and DIRECTED. A 1935 MOTIONPICTURE version featured Cary Grant. ENTRANCE. At the beginning of the modernist period, most entrances were from the wings. As box sets became prevalent, there were better opportunities for a STAR to make an entrance, as the ACTOR could pause, framed in a doorway, while the stage composition drew all eyes to the focal point. The custom of applauding a star’s initial entrance in a performance persisted beyond the modernist era. EQUESTRIAN ACTRESS. A WOMAN who could both ACT and perform stunts on horseback was needed for plays like Mazeppa. The audience appeal was not the horse, for the streets outside the theatre were full of horses, but the woman who was willing to put herself in danger on an easily spooked horse in a restricted space. Moreover, whether she played a breeches role or not, there was likely to be a glimpse or display of normally covered lower limbs. Equestrian acting was certainly dangerous, and tales are legion of horses that attempted to leap the orchestra pit or that fell off of scenic units. See also ACCIDENTS; ANIMALS; EQUESTRIAN DRAMA. EQUESTRIAN DRAMA. Plays that made a spectacle of horsemanship were expensive to tour, but their popularity with audiences seems to have justified the cost. While the earlier Mazeppa required only one horse, Ben-Hur (1899) multiplied the thrills with many horses; its climactic chariot race was performed with live horses on treadmills. Some melodramas not specifically written as equestrian dramas used horses on stage as an element of spectacle. For example, William A. Brady’s 1901 revival of Uncle Tom’s Cabin included “horses, carriages, pony carts, donkeys, and dogs” (New York Times, 5 March 1901). A 1900

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production of Quo Vadis!, performed by Kansas City’s Auditorium Stock Company, touted the horses in its advertisements and became the longest continuously running play in Kansas City history. EQUITY PLAYERS. Besides revivals of classics, the short-lived PRODUCING group formed in 1922 by members of !CTORS%QUITY presented such new works as Why Marry? (1922) and Expressing Willie (1924). ERLANGER, A. L. (1860–1930). In Cleveland, Abraham Lincoln Erlanger began his theatrical association by selling opera glasses at Ellsler’s Academy of Music. Mark Hanna bought the theatre and hired Erlanger as treasurer, instructing the young man in ruthless business practices. Erlanger later joined Marc Klaw in what would become a long, profitable producing partnership. They set up the Klaw & Erlanger Exchange in New York, an agency representing stage STARS including Joseph Jefferson III, Effie Ellsler, and Fanny Davenport. The chaotic booking practices that existed for TOURING companies in the 1890s impelled Klaw & Erlanger to join with other PRODUCERS to organize the Theatrical Syndicate or Trust. The Syndicate became virtually all-powerful, able to effectively blacklist rebellious performers or producers by preventing their use of Syndicate-owned theatres. With the advent of MOTIONPICTURES, Klaw & Erlanger’s control declined significantly. Loathed by many in the theatrical profession, Erlanger had defenders, including 'EORGE - #OHAN, Charles Dillingham, and Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., for whom he bankrolled the first Ziegfeld Follies in 1907. Erlanger produced many plays in his own name and quietly financed others, including The Great Metropolis (1890), Ben-Hur (1899), Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1910), Kismet (1911), and numerous MUSICALS, including Cohan’s Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway (1906). Despite his harsh business tendencies, Erlanger was a lover of culture who traveled frequently and was obsessed with collecting memorabilia and art about Napoleon. Erlanger sold off most of his theatrical interests by 1921, but he continued to produce plays until his death. ESMERALDA. William Gillette and Francis Hodgson Burnett adapted Burnett’s story into this four-act COMEDY, which opened

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on 29 October 1881 at the Madison Square Theatre for 350 performances. Esmeralda provided a vehicle for Annie Russell as Esmeralda Rogers, a North Carolina farm girl in love with a neighbor boy, Dave Hardy. Her ambitious mother resolves to send Esmeralda to Europe to marry a marquis when gold is discovered on what her parents believe to be their property. When it turns out that the gold is actually on Dave’s land, Esmeralda’s parents change their views. Esmeralda gets to marry Dave. Russell’s performance and the play’s light charm and romanticism made it one of the longest-running plays of its time. Mary Pickford STARRED in a 1915 silent MOTIONPICTURE version of Esmeralda, and it was a popular TOURING vehicle well into the 20th century. ETHNICITY IN AMERICAN DRAMA.† While ethnicity spawned numerous comic stereotypes on variety stages, legitimate drama depicted its share of first-generation Americans or recent immigrants, either for comic relief or to liven up utility roles and only rarely to make a social statement. Plays like Street Scene, Gods of the Lightning, The Front Page, and They Knew What They Wanted bring together characters from various ethnic backgrounds, all treated with respect despite lingering clichés. Edward Harrigan’s Mulligan Guard plays and others like Squatter Sovereignity depicted New York City’s Lower East Side “melting pot.” The juxtaposition of Irish and Jewish occurs in numerous plays, epitomized by Abie’s Irish Rose by Anne Nichols. Aaron Hoffman also focused affectionately upon Jewish and Irish characters in COMEDIES like Two Blocks Away. Italians and Russians tended to be found in comedies, while Asians began to appear in melodramas like The Shanghai Gesture after the turn of the century. Plays about !FRICAN!MERICAN characters or folk life appeared with increasing frequency in the 1920s. See also DIALECT ROLE; EMMET, J. K.; IRISH STAGE CHARACTER; POTASH AND PERLMUTTER; STRONGHEART; YIDDISH THEATRE. EVANS, CHARLES EVAN (1856–1945). Born in Rochester, New York, and on stage from age 13, the “dean of American comedians” and sometime MANAGER racked up 75 years in theatre. He made his CHILD debut in legitimate theatre, but launched his adult career in variety, as part of a trio, Bryant, Evans, & Hoey, then in the two-act,

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Evans & Hoey. In 1885, they began performing Charles H. Hoyt’s A Parlor Match, which “gave Messrs. Evans & Hoey an opportunity to display their peculiar and entertaining antics” (New York Times, 28 April 1885). Evans set a record of 3,600 performances in that play, capped by Bill Hoey’s return to the show for an 1896 revival, with the same “energy and effectiveness” animating “all the old absurdities” (New York Times, 22 September 1896). Evans had already ventured into MANAGEMENT with his lease of the Herald Square Theatre, which he opened in 1894 with the first American production of 'EORGE "ERNARD 3HAW’s Arms and the Man, STARRING Richard Mansfield as Bluntschli and Beatrice Cameron as Raina. In association with Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., Evans brought Anna Held to America in 1896. After managerial vicissitudes, he returned to ACTING, enjoying STAR appearances under B. C. Whitney’s management in 1909, TOURING with the Henry Duffy Players, playing the Orpheum vaudeville circuit with his wife Helena Phillips, moving into character roles, and finally, MOTIONPICTURE acting. EXCESS BAGGAGE. Fans of a certain combination or a particular STAR performer sometimes followed a show from town to town, traveling on the same trains and yet having no connection to the company, who referred to such people as “excess baggage.” EXCESS BAGGAGE. John McGowan’s 1927 COMEDY of backstage life on a small-time vaudeville circuit opened 27 December 1927 at the Ritz and ran for 216 performances. The wife in the two-act feels that her part is no more than “excess baggage.” A separation shows that she and her husband need each other. The play was noteworthy as the only popular success of the 11 shows that opened on that same night on "ROADWAY. EXCURSION TRAIN. For STAR engagements in major cities of the Midwest and south, special trains would be scheduled for theatergoers from smaller towns in the region. For example, when Edwin Booth played Kansas City in 1887, residents of Fort Scott, Kansas, could take a train that would get them to the city in time for a dinner (included in the fare along with the theatre ticket) at the hotel across the street from the opera house. Also included was transportation

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back to the depot after the performance for the night train that arrived back in Fort Scott early in the morning. EXPERIENCE. Opening on 27 October 1914 at the Booth Theatre, Experience was directed by its author, George V. Hobart, who had originally written it as a one-act for a Lambs’ Gambol. In true morality play fashion, all 13 characters had allegorical names: Youth (appealingly played by William Elliott), Love, Wealth, Work, Grouch, Law, Degradation, Crime, and others. Simple and obvious though it was, audiences loved it enough to give it a run of 255 performances. EXPRESSING WILLIE. 2ACHEL #ROTHERS wrote this three-act COMEDY that opened on 16 April 1924 at the 48th Street Theatre and ran for 293 performances. The 35-year-old bachelor Willie has become insufferable with his ostentatious wealth, so his mother invites the mousy Minnie to the house along with an assortment of social parasites, in hopes that Willie will recognize sincerity. Minnie is at first humiliated, then redeems herself, then causes Willie new embarrassment, and finally—just when he becomes interested in her again—sees how shallow he is. Audiences loved the glamorous setting and fashions, witty dialogue, humorous character types, and the women characters who knew best. EXPRESSIONISM. Identified in European art and literature as early as 1900, expressionism was a reaction against impressionism and sentimentality (not to mention REALISM), but it was not fully articulated in modernist theatrical terms until the 1910s. German expressionists reacted to WAR industrialization by focusing on the machine’s threat to human values, using dialogue reduced to the staccato rhythms of a telegram and dramatic action broken into short episodes. The inner angst of the central character was externalized through a distortion of reality as represented in the scenic elements, sound effects, and performance styles. In 1921, 2OBERT %DMOND *ONES designed a "ROADWAY production of 3HAKESPEARE’s Macbeth (1921) in the expressionist mode, using masks suspended above the playing area to represent the three witches. He and +ENNETH-ACGOWAN then spent ten weeks traveling in Europe and observing productions that they described in their influential book Continental Stagecraft (1922).

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The book inspired other American scene designers to experiment with nonrealistic shapes and color, bold lighting, and shadows. Thus the European movement enjoyed a brief fling on the American stage in the 1920s. %UGENE /.EILL toyed with expressionist elements in some of his early plays, including The Emperor Jones (1920), The Hairy Ape (1922), The Great God Brown (1926), and Dynamo (1929). Beggar on Horseback (1924) by 'EORGE3+AUFMAN and -ARC #ONNELLY employed expressionist techniques, as did Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal (1928) and %LMER2ICE’s The Subway (1929). Perhaps the definitive example of American expressionism is Rice’s The Adding Machine (1923), in which its antihero, Mr. Zero, is seen climbing over the keys of an enormous adding machine, a technological wonder that has rendered his bookkeeping job (and his life) superfluous. Several European expressionist plays, including Ernst Toller’s The Insect Comedy (1922) and Karel Cäpek’s R.U.R. (1922), won commercial success on "ROADWAY, usually produced by the 4HEATRE'UILD. EXTRA. See SUPERNUMERARY. EYES OF YOUTH. Charles Guernon and Max Marcin collaborated on this popular melodramatic COMEDY STARRING Marjorie Rambeau. Eyes of Youth opened on 22 August 1917 for a remarkable 414 performances at Maxine Elliott’s Theatre (the production transferred to the 39th Street Theatre for the last month of its long run) in an A. H. Woods-3HUBERT production. A mystic identifies four possible life paths to Gina Ashling, but must not tell her one of the four forecasts. The three choices that are told range from a career as an incompetent schoolteacher with an unhappy love life to success as an amoral prima donna or a descent into prostitution. Instead of choosing the revealed paths, Gina decides on the unknown. The impressive "ROADWAY run of Eyes of Youth was matched by great popularity on TOUR. A 1919 silent MOTIONPICTURE version, starring Clara Kemble Young, with a young Rudolph Valentino in a supporting role, was modestly successful. EYTINGE, ROSE (1835–1911). The beautiful and temperamental AC TRESS, born in Philadelphia, was one of the favorites of the American

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stage in the 1860s and 1870s, but she made fewer appearances after 1880, making her final stage appearance in 1907. In 1905, she wrote a play, Golden Chains, and published a novel, It Happened This Way, as well as her memoirs, The Memories of Rose Eytinge.

n&n FAIR AND WARMER. This Avery Hopwood farce, which opened on 6 November 1915 at the Eltinge Theatre, PRODUCED by Arch Selwyn, won the approval of CRITICS for its bright cast and ran for 377 performances. The innocuous plot is based upon an innocent indiscretion: two married friends, played by John Cumberland and Madge Kennedy, get drunk and are “caught” by their spouses, played by Ralph Morgan and *ANET"EECHER, Fair and Warmer offered a mixture of mild titillation with wholesome humor to suit "ROADWAY audiences and on TOUR. June Mathis adapted it for the 1919 MOTIONPICTURE. FAIRBANKS, DOUGLAS (1883–1939). Although best known as a MOTIONPICTURE ACTOR, Fairbanks performed for about 12 years in legitimate theatre as well as two years in vaudeville. He was born Douglas Elton Ulman in Denver, Colorado, the son of a New York lawyer whose unfortunate investment in a silver mine turned him to drink and ruined his marriage in 1889. The boy’s mother, Ella Marsh Fairbanks, provided for her three sons by running a boarding house, and insisted that Douglas swear he would never drink. Eventually the family moved back east. Under the name Elton Thomas, Fairbanks first tried acting in 1892 in Richmond, Virginia. By 1898, he was a supernumerary in the company of Frederick Warde and Louis James, and in 1900, he acted in support of Herbert Kelcey. After a hiatus, during which he tried other pursuits, he returned to the stage and earned his first mention in the New York Times for a supporting role in The Pit (11 February 1904). William A. Brady cast Fairbanks in support of Grace George in Clothes (1906) and recalled the physical energy that characterized Fairbanks’s work on stage as well as in film: “One of the sets for Clothes included a long flight of steps to a high platform. During rehearsals, which always wear everybody else to a frazzle, Fairbanks’

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idea of resting up was to walk up and down that flight of steps on his hands” (Brady 1937, 262). Audiences, especially women, loved Fairbanks, who sustained The Man of the Hour for a run of over a year. According to the review (New York Times, 5 December 1906): “Douglas Fairbanks played his now familiar, breezy, attractive youth, and his opportunities to score were frequent in a part of many well directed lines.” After 1914, he made his career in Hollywood as one of the legends of silent cinema. FAIRFAX, MARION (1879–1970). She was born Marion Neiswanger in Richmond, Virginia, ACTED for about a decade, and married character actor Tully Marshall. The pretty little PLAYWRIGHT told an interviewer (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 23 July 1911) that she had once aspired to a career as an engineer but that a woman’s choices were limited. Taking the role of women as her constant theme, she had four plays PRODUCED in New York, beginning with The Builders (1907) in which she and her husband both performed to mixed reviews. The Chaperon (1909) STARRED Maxine Elliott. Her best COMEDY, The Talker (1912), ran for 144 performances with starring roles for Marshall and Pauline Lord. She also wrote A Modern Girl (1914) with Ruth C. Mitchell. FAITH HEALER, THE. William Vaughn Moody’s last play, a threeact drama PRODUCED by Henry Miller, who also ACTED in it, had a tryout in St. Louis on 15 March 1909. Miller was certain the play would fail in New York, but Moody was dying and Miller brought it to "ROADWAY to please his old friend. It opened on 19 January 1910 at the Savoy Theatre for a mere six performances despite a strong cast, including Jessie Bonstelle, Laura Hope Crews, and Miller. #RITICS hastened its demise by referring to it as a closet drama, but scholars have concluded that it is a richly imaginative work that may be superior to Moody’s better-known The Great Divide. Miller played traveling faith healer Ulrich Michaelis, whose success in helping crippled Mary Beeler walk incurs the wrath of the local doctor, Littlefield, as well as Reverend Culpepper, both of whom suspect that Ulrich is a charlatan dabbling in the occult. Ulrich falls in love with Mary’s niece, Rhoda, who confesses to him that she has been Littlefield’s lover. The shock of this revelation causes Ulrich to lose his healing powers, but he regains them when he resolves to forgive

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Rhoda. Moody’s complex and imaginative exploration of love, science, and faith gave it a long stage life despite its initial failure. Through the efforts of Moody’s widow, The Faith Healer was successfully adapted to a MOTIONPICTURE in 1921. FALK, BENJAMIN (1853–1925). The New York photographer is credited with capturing on film for the first time ever the entire stage picture at the end of an act. This occurred following the performance of A Russian Honeymoon at the Madison Square Theatre on 1 May 1883. The play by Mrs. Burton Harrison managed to crib both from Eugene Scribe and from 3HAKESPEARE’s Taming of the Shrew with a suitably striking tableau for the act 2 curtain. FAMOUS MRS. FAIR, THE. The timely and topical COMEDY-drama by James Forbes opened on 22 December 1919 at the Henry Miller Theatre, ran for 343 performances, and was nominated for the 1920 0ULITZER0RIZE. Probing such serious themes as the integration of the returned WAR veteran, womansuffrage, women’s desire for freedom of movement outside the home, divorce, and changing mores for youth, the play nonetheless incorporates humor in the trio of women who served in France with Mrs. Fair. Whisked onto the lecture circuit after her TOUR of duty, Mrs. Fair neglects her family to the extent that her husband takes up with another woman and her daughter narrowly escapes becoming a "ROADWAY floozie. Luckily, her son marries a level-headed stenographer who brings a reasonable perspective to the action. FARNUM, DUSTIN (1874–1929). Born into a theatrical family in Hampton Beach, Maine, Dustin Farnum began ACTING with his brothers Marshall and William Farnum. His seasons on TOUR with Ethel Tucker 2EPERTORY company from 1897 were formative in developing his craft. Forever associated with the leading role in the dramatization of Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian (1903), he also played in the original MOTION PICTURE version. According to the New York Times (6 January 1904): “His form and features are heroic; his mimique, always well within the character of the cow puncher, has a most appealing natural grace. His voice is of a richness and a temperamental quality positively splendid. In his effects he was, it is true, well backed up by his authors, who have made the character

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sentimentally real, humorous, and emotionally very appealing. But he added as much as he was given.” Farnum’s other stage roles included Arizona (1901), The Squaw Man (1911), and The Littlest Rebel (1911). FARNUM, WILLIAM (1876–1953). The younger brother of Dustin Farnum was born in Boston, where he ACTED in STOCK before TOUR ING with various companies, including those of Margaret Mather, Olga Nethersole, and Viola Allen. He supported his brother in The Littlest Rebel (1911), but did his most important work in MOTION PICTURES. FAVERSHAM, WILLIAM (1868–1940). Born and educated in England, the ACTOR made his New York debut in 1887 at Union Square Theatre. He joined the Empire Theatre company and played Romeo to Maude Adams, then made his debut as a STAR in 1902. Best known for his leading role in The Squaw Man (1905), he also TOURED extensively in 3HAKESPEARE and was long regarded as a matinee idol. FAWCETT, GEORGE (1860–1939). The ACTOR-MANAGER was born in Fairfax County, Virginia and studied law at the University of Virginia before transferring to the Sargent School of Acting. In 1886, he made his New York debut in The Maid and the Moonshiner. In 1890, he acted in support of Tommaso Salvini, and later with Salvini’s son Alexander. With Maude Adams, he played in The Little Minister (1897) before founding the Fawcett 3TOCK Company in Baltimore in 1900. In 1912, he TOURED with Viola Allen, and in 1916, he toured as Long John Silver in Treasure Island. Numerous other fine roles filled out his career before he went to Hollywood in the mid-1910s. FEMALE IMPERSONATION.† Before the 20th century, men who donned dresses and adopted the movements and manners of WOMEN were mostly seen in minstrel shows. There, Francis Leon (“The Only Leon”) achieved renown. Leon also appeared in MUSICALS and VAUDEVILLE, which also made occasional use of female impersonators. Tony Hart, who became Edward Harrigan’s stage partner, carried over his female impersonations from minstrelsy to the legitimate stage.

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Neil Burgess had been a blackface entertainer at Tony Pastor’s theatre, but turned to female impersonation in 1877 at Harrigan and Hart’s Theatre Comique and found his true niche. In 1879, he STARRED in Widow Bedott, playing the title role and finding a character he would perform throughout the remainder of his career. He also appeared in Vim; or, A Visit to Puffy Farm (1882) and The County Fair (1889). A sign of the growing acceptance of female impersonation came in 1891 when Burgess played Lady Teazle in the first Lambs’ Gambol. Julian Eltinge and Bert Savoy were considered female impersonators of the first rank. FERBER, EDNA (1887–1968).† Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the novelist also wrote several popular plays. The Eldest (1920), her first solo effort, failed, but as a collaborator she fared better. In collaboration with George V. Hobart she wrote Our Mrs. McChesney (1915), a sturdy vehicle for %THEL"ARRYMORE. With Newman Levy, she wrote $1200 a Year (1920). Ferber’s fruitful collaboration with 'EORGE 3 +AUFMAN resulted in Minick (1924), The Royal Family (1927), Dinner at Eight* (1932), and Stage Door* (1936), all of which garnered critical acclaim, long runs, and popular MOTION PICTURE versions. Show Boat (1926), her durable novel of itinerant performers on the Mississippi River, became a celebrated Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.-PRODUCED 1927 MUSICAL with a score by Jerome Kern and lyrics and libretto by Oscar Hammerstein II.* Another Ferber novel, Saratoga Trunk (1941), was adapted into a 1959 musical. Two later collaborations with Kaufman, The Land Is Bright (1941) and Bravo! (1948), were less successful. FERGUSON, ELSIE (1885–1961). Although born in New York City, she grew up with no connection to the theatre and was expected to become a teacher. To correct her slumping shoulders, her mother enrolled her in a fencing class and there the theatrical connections began to be made. She TOURED as a chorus girl for several seasons, making the transition to legitimate theatre in The Second Fiddle (1904) in support of Louis Mann. Her breakthrough to STARDOM came in 1909 in the title role of Such a Little Queen. Among a long string of successes, her great role was Miriam in Outcast (1914). She switched to MOTIONPICTURE ACTING in 1917, but made occasional returns to the "ROADWAY stage, notably in The Varying Shore (1921).

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FERGUSON, WILLIAM J. (1845–1930). William Jason Ferguson was born in Baltimore and began his career as a call-boy at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. During his six decades as an ACTOR, he performed with Richard Mansfield, Robert Mantell, and Helena Modjeska. At the time of his death, he was the oldest living member of the Lambs’ and the last surviving member of the cast of Our American Cousin that had been in performance at Ford’s Theatre on the night President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by actor John Wilkes Booth. FERNANDEZ, BIJOU (c. 1877–1961). The New York City–born ACTRESS was on stage from CHILDHOOD, including appearances as Prince Arthur in King John with Edwin Booth, as Meenie in Rip Van Winkle with Joseph Jefferson III, and as Puck in Augustin Daly’s celebrated production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1888). After taking a few years for schooling, she returned to the stage in 1891. She acted throughout the 1890s and 1900s, but then took over her late mother’s business as a theatrical agent and play broker. She also worked as a MOTIONPICTURE talent scout for Samuel Goldwyn. She acted again in 1953, with +ATHARINE#ORNELL in The Prescott Proposals.* FIELD, KATE (1838–1896). The multitalented activist was born Mary Katherine Keemle Field in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of wellknown 3HAKESPEAREAN ACTORS Joseph M. Field and Eliza Riddle. Like her father, who built the Varieties Theatre and founded the St. Louis Daily Reveille, she devoted herself to both theatre and journalism. After her father’s death, her millionaire uncle Milton L. Sanford financed her education and took her to Italy. Although the uncle disinherited her when she began sending abolitionist travel articles to the Boston Courier, she found a surrogate family in Anthony Trollope and other writers living in Florence. Beautiful and outspoken, she became a model for several of Trollope’s intelligent women characters in his novels. She supported herself by writing for newspapers and magazines, lecturing on the Lyceum circuit, and writing plays in which she performed. Field made her ACTING debut at Booth’s Theatre on 14 November 1874 in the title role of Peg Woffington. Despite the harsh response from CRITICS, she continued to perform on TOUR for three seasons,

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including a season as John T. Raymond’s leading lady in The Gilded Age. Under the name Mary Keemle, she performed her own “brilliant little comedy” Extremes Meet in London and on tour in England in 1877 (Whiting 1900, 341). In 1880, she performed her own MUSICAL monologue Eyes and Ears in London, which included a burlesque of Italian opera. According to the New York Times (10 April 1880), the “wittily and charmingly elaborated” monologue was “full of sharp hits at persons and things” and “flavored with a delicate, yet incisive, humor.” For five years, she published her own newspaper, Kate Field’s Washington, which included theatrical news as well as her own playlets. FIGHTING HOPE, THE. William J. Hurlbut’s melodrama opened on 22 September 1908 at the Stuyvesant Theatre and ran a solid 231 performances, thanks largely to the performance by Blanche Bates as a wife who is determined to clear her husband’s name, only to find that he is indeed guilty and that her destruction of evidence will incriminate a truly good man. All ends well, because the police shoot her philandering husband, thus clearing the way for the good man to express his feelings for her. “Miss Bates brings a most appealing sincerity and much variety in the role of the wife. She delivers several hysterical scenes with complete and convincing abandonment to the emotions demanded” (New York Times, 23 September 1908). David Belasco PRODUCED it. FIREBRAND, THE. The bedroom farce disguised as historical COM EDY opened on 15 October 1924 at the Morosco Theatre and ran for 287 performances. Edwin Justus Mayer’s first PRODUCED play was set in the Italian Renaissance and centered upon the amorous activities of sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, played by *OSEPH3CHILDKRAUT. Frank Morgan played the duke, a henpecked husband, and appeared again in the 1934 MOTION PICTURE version, The Affairs of Cellini. The 1945 MUSICAL version, The Firebrand of Florence, failed despite the estimable talents of Kurt Weill, Ira Gershwin, and Lotte Lenya. FIRST-CLASS THEATRE. The most prestigious theatre in any town was the one that booked the top attractions for which the top prices could be charged for tickets, thus drawing the carriage trade. A large Midwestern city might have one or two first-class theatres while the

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others would be popular-price theatres. When the Theatrical Syndicate set out to gain control of the American theatre, they systematically got the first-class theatres into their orbit. FIRST-NIGHT AUDIENCE. Those who attend the opening-night performance should logically be the most open-minded and avid theatergoers. However, this audience—which has not yet consciously or unconsciously assimilated the opinions of the CRITICS—tends to be restrained in its responses, thus provoking trepidation among the artists. In his book Encore, PRODUCER Daniel Frohman observed that each ACTOR needs that first performance as a means of encountering the impression that the character makes in order to “grasp its true proportions” (136). Therefore, asserted Frohman, “criticism should be delayed until after three or four performances” (136). FIRST YEAR, THE. Frank Craven’s slight three-act COMEDY opened on 20 October 1920 for a remarkable run of 725 performances, PRO DUCED by *OHN 'OLDEN. Craven, remembered as the ACTOR who originated the role of the Stage -ANAGER in Thornton Wilder’s* Our Town,* appeared as Tommy Tucker in The First Year. Tommy loves Grace Livingston, but lacks the good looks and fast charm of Dick Loring, who also courts Grace. With the help of Grace’s sympathetic Uncle Myron, Tommy proposes to Grace and she accepts. Their marriage is threatened by Loring’s continued presence and Tommy’s struggle to put over a real estate deal. After a marital squabble, Grace goes home to her mother. Tommy’s deal makes him wealthy, so he goes to see Grace. Loring is visiting when Tommy arrives and they get into a fight that ends only when Grace, attempting to aid Tommy, accidentally knocks him out with a vase. Uncle Myron’s intercession (aided by news of Grace’s pregnancy) reunites the couple. The First Year was made into a MOTIONPICTURE in 1926 and 1932, the latter version as a vehicle for Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor. FISKE, HARRISON GREY (1861–1942). Born in New York to a wealthy family, Harrison Grey Fiske worked in his teens as a drama CRITIC for the Jersey City Argus, but quit to attend New York University. In 1880, his father bought the New York Dramatic Mirror and made him its editor. Fiske’s editorials promoted improvements in the quality of American theatre, helped establish the !CTORS&UNDOF

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!MERICA (AFA), and launched a fierce campaign against the dominance of the Theatrical Syndicate. In 1890, Fiske married Minnie Maddern, a young actress subsequently billed as Mrs. Fiske, but her promising career was endangered by Fiske’s assault on the Syndicate. He leased small theatres and tents to help her continue her work, which, in part, was important in establishing new trends in drama that included the acceptance of REALISM and the social problem dramas of (ENRIK)BSEN. Fiske leased the Manhattan Theatre for his wife in 1901 and established the Manhattan Theatre Company. He wrote several successful plays, including Hester Crewe (1893), The District Attorney (1895), Marie Deloche (1896), and The Privateer (1897). Fiske ceased editing the Dramatic Mirror in 1911 and worked exclusively as a PRODUCER, scoring his greatest commercial success with Kismet (1911), STARRING Otis Skinner. FISKE, MINNIE MADDERN (1864–1932). Born Marie Augusta Davey in New Orleans, the diminutive redhead was the only CHILD of TOURING ACTORS Thomas W. and Lizzie (Maddern) Davey. As a toddler, she sang and danced between the acts in her parents’ company. At three, she made her legitimate debut when another company playing Little Rock, Arkansas, at the same time as the Daveys borrowed her for the Duke of York in Richard III. She worked steadily as a child performer with occasional bouts of education in convent schools. Minnie Maddern made her adult New York debut in 1882 in Fogg’s Ferry, which she subsequently toured. In 1884, she opened Caprice in New York, then toured it, and revived it in New York in 1887. Already, in her teens, her uniqueness was recognized: “She has her own way of expressing the emotions, and seems to have learned the principles of dramatic art from no recognized model” (New York Times, 22 June 1887). With her marriage to Harrison Grey Fiske in 1890, she retired from ACTING and devoted herself to writing one-act plays. The success of her performance as Nora in a one-night benefit performance of (ENRIK )BSEN’s A Doll’s House in 1894 impelled her return to the stage as well as her championing of the new REALISM of Ibsen’s plays. She was thereafter referred to as Mrs. Fiske. She scored particular successes in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1897), Becky Sharp (1899), Mary of Magdala (1902), Hedda Gabler (1903), Leah Kleschna (1904), and The New York Idea (1906), among many others.

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Claude Bragdon concurred with the general view that Minnie Maddern Fiske was “the greatest American actress of my time.” Through her, “the New Woman dawned on our astonished gaze in the person of Nora” (1938, 209). Referring to dramatizations from Thomas Hardy and William Thackeray respectively, Bragdon wrote, “The mere memory of her enactment, as Tess, of the scene following the murder of her seducer causes a cold shiver to run down my back, and it was only after seeing Becky Sharp played by another actress that I realized how much of tragedy and humour which were not in the lines Mrs. Fiske had infused into that last act” (1938, 210). The Fiskes took a stand against the Theatrical Syndicate, leasing the Manhattan Theatre in order to avoid her playing a Syndicate house, but their struggles took a toll on the marriage and on his newspaper, the New York Dramatic Mirror. She used her celebrity to speak out against the fashion for egret feathers, which threatened to drive the bird to extinction. Among the outstanding work of her late career, one must signal Salvation Nell (1908) and Mrs. Bumpstead-Leigh (1911), both examples of the new playwriting she encouraged. FISKE, STEPHEN RYDER (1840–1916). Born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and educated at Rutgers University, he practiced law, then served as a WAR correspondent. After working with theatre MANAGERS, including Augustin Daly, he worked as a drama CRITIC for The Spirit of the Times (1879–1902). He was a founder of the New York Dramatic Mirror and of 4HE!CTORS’&UNDOF!MERICA !&! . FITCH, CLYDE (1865–1909). William Clyde Fitch was born in Elmira, New York, and felt isolated as a child because of his effeminacy. His sensitive manner brought him the leading female roles in Amherst College theatrical productions, while he studied for a career in architecture. After schooling, he moved to New York City and wrote short stories and plays, some of which were PRODUCED at the Boston Museum with success. Encouraged by CRITICS Edward A. Dithmar and William Winter, Fitch wrote Beau Brummel (1890), which became a long-running success with ACTOR Richard Mansfield in the title role. From this success until his death, Fitch completed 33 original plays and 27 adaptations or translations of foreign works.

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Fitch’s most acclaimed works include Nathan Hale (1898), The Moth and the Flame (1898), The Cowboy and the Lady (1899), Barbara Frietchie (1899), The Climbers (1901), The Girl with the Green Eyes (1902), The Truth (1907), The Blue Mouse (1908), and The City (1909), as well as Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines (1901), a romantic COMEDY that provided %THEL "ARRYMORE her "ROADWAY debut role. Among Fitch’s adaptations, Sapho (1900), taken from Alphonse Daudet’s novel and STARRING Olga Nethersole, was closed by authorities as immoral. Many critics consider Fitch the most important American playwright of the early 20th century, despite his penchant for writing artificial happy endings to guarantee commercial success. Others applaud Fitch’s eye for detail and facility for working effectively in a range of styles, from historical and romantic melodramas to REALISTIC social problem plays and comedies. See also CENSORSHIP, SEXUALITYONTHE!MERICANSTAGE. FLAVIN, MARTIN (1883–1967). Martin Archer Flavin was born in San Francisco. Although he began PLAYWRITING in 1905, success eluded him until 1923, when Children of the Moon achieved 109 performances. The 1928–1929 season brought three of his plays to New York: Cross Roads, Broken Dishes, and The Criminal Code. FLEXNER, ANNE CRAWFORD (1874–1955). Born Anne Laziere Crawford in Georgetown, Kentucky, she graduated from Vassar College in 1895 and married educator Abraham Flexner in 1898. Her first play, Miranda of the Balcony, was the inaugural presentation at Harrison Grey Fiske’s Manhattan Theatre in 1901. She then obtained the rights to dramatize Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (1903), and it became her most PRODUCED play. Her other plays include The Marriage Game (1913), The Blue Pearl (1918), All Soul’s Eve (1920), and Aged 26 (1936). FLORENCE, W. J. (1831–1891). William Jermyn Florence was born Bernard Conlin in Albany, New York. The versatile character ACTOR excelled in COMEDY and was said to equal Joseph Jefferson III when they performed together in The Rivals, beginning in 1889: Jefferson as Bob Acres and Florence as Sir Lucius O’Trigger. “Billy” Florence also excelled in Irish character roles. Above all, he was remembered for the role of the Honorable Bardwell Slote, written for him

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by Benjamin E. Woolf in The Mighty Dollar (1875), which he played for the remainder of his career. Mrs. Florence, his wife, played Mrs. Gilflory opposite him, and they enjoyed a successful "ROADWAY revival of the play in 1884, which the audience appreciated “with as much zest as if the rollicking humor of the play was new and fresh” (New York Times, 9 December 1884). FOLK DRAMA. This term generally refers to noncommercial plays depicting rural life or local history. Little definable folk drama was seen in the United States prior to the late the 19th century, when several PLAYWRIGHTS and scholars identified plays, particularly in the American South and West, as folk plays. Percy MacKaye, among others, promoted folk drama and saw it as analogous to pageants and experimental plays, all encouraged by the little theatre movement. After Frederick H. Koch founded the Carolina Playmakers at the University of North Carolina in 1918, a number of folk plays by North Carolina writers began to capture the slowly vanishing lives of mountain people. 0AUL'REEN extended such plays into historical pageants inspiring the birth of symphonic dramas, often called outdoor dramas,* and Lula Vollmer, also a North Carolinian, wrote Sun-Up (1923), The Shame Woman (1923), and Trigger (1927), all with flavorful portraits of women living hardscrabble lives in the North Carolina mountains. English playwright Louis N. Parker and French ACTOR-MANAGER Maurice Pottecher were also outspoken enthusiasts of folk drama. Various immigrant groups brought a taste for folk plays to the United States, and all sorts of street festivals, carnivals, and community celebrations are often related to the tradition of folk drama. In the next generation, Josefina Niggli* would write many one-acts of Mexican folk life. FOLKSBIENE (PEOPLE’S STAGE). One of the outstanding as well as long-lived Yiddish AMATEUR theatre groups that paralleled the little theatre movement of the 1910s and 1920s was the Folksbiene or People’s Stage in New York. It grew out of several initiatives that merged under various names. Beginning in 1915, the Folksbiene PRODUCED at least one play each winter, performing on weekends. Professional DIRECTORS were hired and high standards upheld for the material in deliberate contrast to the exuberant trashiness or shund of the Yiddish popular theatre. The group never had a permanent home, but maintained its loyal following as it moved to various venues.

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FONTANNE, LYNN (1887–1983).† Born in England, Lillie Louise Fontanne debuted at the age of 17 in Cinderella (1905) after studying ACTING with the great Victorian STAR Ellen Terry. Fontanne’s American debut came five years later in the innocuous Mr. Preedy and the Countess (1910), after which she returned to England. In 1916, she returned to the United States to appear with her future husband, !LFRED,UNT, in A Young Man’s Fancy (1916). Shortly before their marriage in 1922, Fontanne scored a personal success as the meddling title character of 'EORGE3+AUFMAN and -ARC#ONNELLY’s COMEDY Dulcy (1921), and she remained a major stage star for the next four decades in an impressive succession of varied plays, including 4HEATRE 'UILD stagings of 'EORGE "ERNARD 3HAW’s Arms and the Man (1925) and Pygmalion (1926), as well as The Goat Song (1926) and The Brothers Karamazov (1927). She appeared with Lunt in Ferenc Molnár’s The Guardsman (1924), a triumph for the couple as a team, although again on her own Fontanne had a notable success as Nina Leeds in %UGENE/.EILL’s 0ULITZER0RIZE–winning drama Strange Interlude (1928). During the 1920s, the Lunts won acclaim in 3 . "EHRMAN’s The Second Man (1927) and Meteor (1929), a revival of Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma (1927), Sil-Vara’s Caprice (1928), and -AX WELL !NDERSON’s historical verse drama, Elizabeth the Queen* (1930). The Lunts achieved an impressive ability to work as a complementary unit, with Fontanne’s beauty, poise, and subtlety balanced by Lunt’s suave, impassioned acting. They were particularly applauded for their well-honed effect of seeming to interrupt each other’s lines which, to CRITICS of the time, created a higher level of REALISM than had previously been seen. The Lunts TOURED the United States intrepidly in most of their vehicles, considering it a duty to bring first-rate theatre to the provinces. The Lunts reached the peak of their joint achievement in the decade prior to World War II in a series of notable plays, including 2OBERT % 3HERWOOD’s Reunion in Vienna* (1931), Idiot’s Delight* (1936), and There Shall Be No Night* (1940), Behrman’s Amphitryon 38* (1937) and The Pirate* (1942), and Noël Coward’s Design for Living (1933), in which the British playwright joined the Lunts onstage in a memorable threesome. Subsequent vehicles during the 1940s and 1950s proved less worthy of their unique talents, although their final appearance in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s drama The Visit (1958) once

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again provided an appropriate challenge met by the greatest acting couple in "ROADWAY history. FOOL, THE. Channing Pollock’s sincere but turgid drama opened on 23 October 1922 at the 4IMES3QUARE Theatre and ran for 272 performances, while the text, published by Brentano’s, went through several printings. The action pits the self-absorbed rich against the less fortunate. Young preacher Gilchrist was changed by his WAR service in France and is giving away his fortune, which has the unexpected side effect of alienating his fiancée. Gilchrist bull-headedly continues to do good even as his problems multiply, but the play ends on a hopeful note as he finds a soul mate in the crippled Mary Margaret. FOOL THERE WAS, A. This melodrama by Porter Emerson Browne opened on 24 March 1909 at the Liberty Theatre, ran for 93 performances, and was made into the 1915 silent film of the same title that launched Theda Bara to STARDOM as the vampire woman who seduces and abandons men. Browne’s play took its title from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Vampire,” which begins “A fool there was. . . .” On "ROADWAY, Robert Hilliard played the straying husband who comes to a bad end, and Katharine Kaelred played the irresistible woman. According to the New York Times review (25 March 1909): “When it was all over at the Liberty last night except the shouting, they showed the Vampire Lady and her victim, beautifully lit up with calciums, very much after the fashion of Little Eva on her way to glory. Only, of course, this pair was bound in the other direction, a fact frequently emphasized in the course of the evening.” FOOL’S GOLD. This was the published title of the play by Barry Conners that was PRODUCED on "ROADWAY in 1925 as Hell’s Bells. Samuel French published the text in 1928. FOOTLIGHTS. Although the use of footlights in the theatre can be traced back to the 17th century, it was during the years just prior to the modernist era that they became synonymous with the stage itself. For example, Olive Logan’s 1870 memoir was titled Before the Footlights and Behind the Scenes, and Otis Skinner’s in 1923 was Footlights and Spotlights. The row of LIGHTS set into a trough across the front of the stage complemented lighting from above the

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stage so that actors would not have harsh shadows beneath the brow and chin. Many ACTORS believed that footlights erased wrinkles and brightened the eyes. The type of footlights described in The Autobiography of Joseph Jefferson could still be found in rural areas during the early modernist period: “The footlights of the best theaters in the Western country were composed of lamps set in a ‘float’ with the counter-weights. When a dark stage was required, or the lamps needed trimming or refilling, this mechanical contrivance was made to sink under the stage” (Jefferson 1964, 27). Like other lighting components, footlights progressed from candles to oil lamps to gas to electricity. FORBES, JAMES (1871–1938). James Grant Forbes was born in Salem, Ontario, Canada. He began as a drama CRITIC for the Pittsburgh Dispatch, then joined the New York Herald. He held various positions in theatre MANAGEMENT and as a press agent, while successfully launching his PLAYWRITING career with The Chorus Lady (1904), followed by The Traveling Salesman (1908), The Commuter (1910), and others. During World 7AR I, he organized the Over There Theatre League to entertain soldiers in the trenches in France. The aftermath of the war brought his most important play, The Famous Mrs. Fair (1919). Forbes was a founder of the $RAMATISTS'UILD (DG) and an honorary vice president of the Authors’ League of America (ALA). In 1922, he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. FORD, HARRIET FRENCH (1863–1949). The PLAYWRIGHT was born in Seymour, Connecticut, and began as an ACTRESS, working with such luminaries as Sol Smith Russell, Robert Mantell, and Clara Morris. After winning a British poetry competition, she turned to writing in earnest with a play for actress Sarah Cowell LeMoyne, who attained STARDOM in Ford’s first work to reach the stage, The Greatest Thing in the World (1900). A Gentleman of France (1900) pleased the gallery gods with its swashbuckling action performed by the popular Kyrle Bellew and Eleanor Robson. She later collaborated with Robson on a mystery drama, In the Next Room (1923). She enjoyed working with collaborators, notably newspaperman J. M. Patterson on The Fourth Estate (1909) and Harvey O’Higgins on COMEDY-thrillers like The Argyle Case (1912), Polygamy (1914), and

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The Dummy (1914). Earning considerable respect in the profession, she was often consulted for play doctoring. Sweet Seventeen (1924) was her last professionally PRODUCED play on "ROADWAY, after which she wrote numerous one-acts for AMATEUR production. FOREIGN PLAYS ADAPTED TO THE AMERICAN STAGE.† Most historical melodramas in the standard REPERTORY of TOUR ING companies in the 1880s were of foreign origin. This included plays like the English Lady of Lyons by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the German Ingomar the Barbarian by Bellinghausen, the French Count of Monte Cristo by Charles Fechter from Dumas père, and Lady of the Camelias (Camille) by Alexandre Dumas fils. Translations were often uncredited, and STARS freely adapted plot and dialogue to suit their own needs. While 3HAKESPEARE was somewhat immune to excessive adaptation because players often performed the same roles with different companies, there were endless parodistic variations on his plays. The adapting, translating, and production of foreign plays on American stages became a center of some controversy in the late 19th century as the REALISTIC social problem plays of (ENRIK)BSEN were first presented and often met with considerable controversy. This was similarly true of 'EORGE"ERNARD3HAW’s early plays in the Ibsen formula, but most foreign plays were met with respectful, often enthusiastic response. The Irish-born Dion Boucicault, a prolific PLAYWRIGHT and MANAGER, drew from many uncredited French and English sources for the numerous plays that flowed from his pen, and others emulated the practice. Even after the United States joined the International Copyright Agreement in 1891, it could be difficult to trace the origin of a foreign play whose title and character names had been changed and the action Americanized. Thus as late as the 1920s there were many light COMEDIES on "ROADWAY, ostensibly by American authors, that had originated in Hungary and other countries. However, the 4HEATRE'UILD set a standard of presenting good translations of important European plays like The Bonds of Interest from the Spanish of Jacinto Benavente in 1919, Liliom from the Hungarian of Ferenc Molnár in 1921, R.U.R. from the Czech of Karel Capek in 1922, and others. See also FOREIGNSTARS AND COMPANIES ON THE !MERICAN STAGE; MAUGHAM, W. SOMERSET; PLAYWRIGHTS.

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FOREIGN STARS AND COMPANIES ON THE AMERICAN STAGE

FOREIGN STARS AND COMPANIES ON THE AMERICAN STAGE.† By 1880, the regular appearance of European STARS and companies on "ROADWAY and on TOUR was commonplace. Between 1880 and 1930 most frequent visitors were British ACTORS, including such major figures (with the year of their first appearance) as Adelaide Nielson (1880), Oscar Wilde (1882; as a lecturer only), Lillie Langtry (1882), Henry Irving (1883), Ellen Terry (1883), Johnston Forbes-Robertson (1885), Wilson Barrett (1886), the Kendals (1889), Marie Tempest (1890), Olga Nethersole (1894), Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1895), Robert Loraine (1901), George Arliss (1901), Mrs. Patrick Campbell (1902), Ben Greet (1902), Dudley Digges (1904), Sybil Thorndike (1904), Cathleen Nesbitt (1911), ,ESLIE (OWARD (1920), "ASIL 2ATHBONE (1922), John Martin-Harvey (1923), Jack Buchanan (1924), Gertrude Lawrence* (1924), Noël Coward* (1925), John Gielgud* (1928), and Laurence Olivier* (1929). Many visited frequently, some stayed permanently, and some, like Henry Irving who toured the United States eight times between 1883 and 1904, were influential in raising the quality of theatrical production by demonstrating a superior level of craftsmanship. British music hall, vaudeville, and MUSICAL entertainers also crossed the Atlantic. Richard D’Oyly Carte’s Opera Company in productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas first appeared in 1879, and often enlisted American performers to supplement its company. Dublin’s Abbey Theatre company brought the Irish players to New York in the first years of the 20th century, garnering lukewarm response to plays by J. M. Synge, Sean O’Casey, William Butler Yeats, and Lady Gregory. Among non-English-speaking stars and companies, the most notable include Italians (Eleonora Duse, Tommaso Salvini and his son Alexander Salvini, Ermete Novelli, Ernesto Rossi, Adelaide Ristori), Germans (Emma Carus, Ludwig Barnay), Czechs (Francesca Janauschek), Poles (Helena Modjeska, Bogomil Dawison), Russians (!LLA.AZIMOVA), Belgians (Hortense Rhéa), and French (Sarah Bernhardt, Constant-Benoît Coquelin, Gabrielle Réjane). Among all of these, Bernhardt, who toured the United States nine times between 1880 and 1918, was the most popular. The Moscow Art Theatre’s (MAT) New York season of 1922–1923 generated considerable interest in the American theatre community for its REPERTORY, which included works by Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov,

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Maxim Gorky, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Ivan Turgenev. The high quality of the MAT’s ensemble acting inspired American actors to explore the “system” for acting developed by the troupe under the guidance of its DIRECTOR, Konstantin Stanislavski. Israel’s Habima Theatre presented a New York season in 1926–1927 and the companies of -AX2EINHARDT (1912), Jacques Copeau (1917), and Nikita Baileff (1922) similarly inspired American artists and generated critical interest in their diverse repertories during "ROADWAY seasons. By 1930, visiting actors and troupes extended beyond Europe. For example, Chinese actor Mei Lanfang appeared in New York that year, and for the next 75 years performers from virtually every culture have appeared regularly in the United States. See also FOREIGNPLAYS ADAPTEDTOTHE!MERICANSTAGE. FOREVER AFTER. William A. Brady PRODUCED /WEN $AVIS’s romantic drama when it opened on 9 September 1918 for 312 performances at the Central Theatre. Conrad Nagel appeared as a seriously injured World 7AR I soldier reunited with his lost love, a nurse played by !LICE"RADY, and it won popular favor despite the author’s own misgivings about its quality. Davis parlayed the success of Forever After into a more serious run of new works over the subsequent decade, abandoning the popular but poorly constructed melodramas of his early career. A 1926 MOTIONPICTURE version of Forever After STARRED Mary Astor. FORREST, SAM (1870–1944). Samuel Forrest was born in Richmond, Virginia. Theatre people piqued his interest at the hotel where he worked as a bellhop. He tried ACTING and running a STOCK company, then found his forte as a DIRECTOR, beginning with Springtime (1909). From 1910 to 1942, he was associated with 'EORGE-#O HAN and 3AM((ARRIS. He directed over a hundred plays, including such landmark productions as Little Old New York (1920), Six-Cylinder Love, Nice People, and The Hero (1921), Icebound (1923), and Rain (1935). He was a member of the Friars, the Lambs, and the Players. FORTUNE HUNTER, THE. Opening on 4 September 1909 at the Gaiety, this enthusiastically received farce-COMEDY ran for 345 performances and established John Barrymore as living up to the

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expectations raised by his name. Intending to marry wealth, the title character falls instead for the daughter of an impoverished druggist. The scene in which he learns his new job as soda fountain clerk allowed some rich comedy. The play pleased audiences for its depiction of small-town wholesomeness and its buoyant American optimism. Winchell Smith, the author, also DIRECTED the play. 47 WORKSHOP. The famous extracurricular laboratory to foster the writing of new plays was an offshoot of Professor George Pierce Baker’s English 47 class at Harvard University. After initiating the study of plays as literature at Radcliffe and Harvard, Baker encouraged his students to write their own plays, and the workshop allowed them to experiment with the transfer from page to stage. Among those who took his courses were 'EORGE!BBOTT, 3IDNEY(OWARD, %UGENE/.EILL, 0HILIP"ARRY, and Edward Sheldon. Sheldon’s Salvation Nell became the first play from the workshop to be PRO DUCED professionally when Minnie Maddern Fiske staged it in 1908. See also COLLEGEANDUNIVERSITYTHEATRE. FOUR WALLS. 'EORGE!BBOTT’s taut DIRECTION of the thriller he coauthored with Dana Burnet brought 0AUL-UNI to attention in his first leading role on "ROADWAY. It opened 19 September 1927 at the John Golden Theatre and ran for 144 performances. FOURTEENTH STREET. “The lights of Fourteenth Street,” as Dolly sings in the MUSICAL Hello, Dolly!, were synonymous with New York City’s theatre district for nearly two decades from the mid-1870s. Clustered around Union Square were such theatres as the Union Square, Wallack’s, and the Fourteenth Street; concert halls and museums; offices of booking agents; COSTUMERS and wigmakers; play publishers and brokers (Samuel French was at 38 East 14th Street); theatrical trade newspaper offices; hotels, restaurants, and saloons. By the 1890s, the hub of theatrical activity was moving northward toward 42nd Street. While 4IMES3QUARE emblematizes theatre in the era of electric lights, Fourteenth Street was fondly remembered in association with theatre of the gaslight era. See also "ROADWAY. FOURTEENTH STREET THEATRE. Designed by Alexander Saeltzer, this theatre began as a home for French-language drama and

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opera for its first few years before it exclusively housed legitimate, mostly American theatre. Various MANAGERS operated the 1,000-seat theatre during the 19th century, but it was virtually abandoned in 1911. Although most mainstream playhouses had moved uptown after World 7AR I, %VA,E'ALLIENNE leased the theatre in 1926 and established her #IVIC 2EPERTORY4HEATRE there until 1933, when the CRT folded. Seldom used following Le Gallienne’s departure, the Fourteenth Street Theatre was torn down in 1948. FOURTH ESTATE, THE. 0LAYWRIGHT Harriet French Ford collaborated with newspaperman Joseph Medill Patterson to achieve authenticity in this melodrama, which opened on 6 October 1909 at Wallack’s Theatre and ran for 93 performances. Signaled as “the first of the modern newspaper plays,” this work had a fourth act set in a composing room at press time with the noisy Mergenthaler machines in operation. FOY, EDDIE (1856–1928). A popular Irish American entertainer, Eddie Foy was mostly associated with lightweight MUSICALS and vaudeville. His career began inauspiciously in variety entertainments in 1869, after which he TOURED frontier towns as a minstrel. He ACTED in numerous musicals from The Crystal Slipper (1888) to The Wild Rose (1902). Foy stepped into theatrical legend as the star of Mr. Bluebeard (1903), a role he was playing when Chicago’s Iroquois Theatre was destroyed in a devastating fire that killed over 600 people. Foy was considered a hero of the tragedy for his attempts to calm the audience during the ensuing panic. Foy went on to perform in musical vehicles that included Piff! Paff!! Pouf!!! (1904), The Earl and the Girl (1905), and Mr. Hamlet of Broadway (1908). From 1910, he returned to his variety-stage roots when he toured with his CHILDREN in an act called “Eddie Foy and the Seven Little Foys,” a popular attraction recreated in the 1955 MOTIONPICTURE, The Seven Little Foys. When the children matured, the act ended. Foy toured as a solo, then retired and wrote his memoir Clowning Through Life (1928). The success of that publication impelled him to return to the stage for a farewell tour despite signs of heart trouble. Audiences found him as engaging as ever with his lisping comic delivery and soft shoe dance routines. He died following a performance at the Orpheum in Kansas City, where he had first performed 50 years earlier (1878) in a honky-tonk.

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FRAWLEY, T. D. (1864–1936). Born Timothy Daniel Frawley in Washington, D.C., the ACTOR-manager played juveniles in STOCK, then made his New York debut in the original Old Homestead company with Denman Thompson in 1887. He performed with Daniel Frohman’s Lyceum stock company and in The Senator with William H. Crane. Eventually, he put together his own respected stock company based in San Francisco. The T. D. Frawley Stock Company toured the northwestern United States and Asia. FREE SOUL, A. Willard Mack’s crime melodrama based upon Adela Rogers St. John’s novel of the same title opened at the Playhouse Theatre on 12 January 1928 for a run of 100 performances. George Cukor DIRECTED Lester Lonergan as a hard-drinking attorney with unsavory connections whose daughter marries a gambler (Melvyn Douglas’s* New York debut role). 0RODUCER William A. Brady moved into Lonergan’s role during the run and played the big courtroom scene with theatrical flair. FRENCH, SAMUEL (1821–1898). Born in Randolph, Massachusetts, Samuel French became a publisher of inexpensive editions of various literary works by the 1830s. In 1854, French, who also published plays via his French’s American Drama series, made enough capital to buy out his major competitor, William Taylor and Company. French opened a branch of his growing organization in London in 1872 and during the late 19th century his company provided all manner of theatrical services, but ultimately settled on the publication of ACTING editions of plays and the licensing of those plays for performance, just as the company bearing his name continues to do today. FRIARS, THE. Founded in 1904 as a press agents’ club, the organization formally became a theatre club called The Friars in 1907. 0LAYWRIGHT Channing Pollock recalled in his memoirs that he had founded the group “which, with myself as first president, became the Friars Club” in order to “provide an exchange of information as to people who got free theatre tickets without reason” (1943, 145). They began in 1906 to fête distinguished men of theatre at dinners. In 1907, the group aligned itself specifically with the theatrical profession, took the name Friars, and elected 'EORGE-#OHAN as Abbot (presiding officer), a position he held until he resigned in 1919.

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Vaudevillians, who were not eligible for membership in the Lambs or The Players, were welcomed to the Friars. Beyond their social function, the Friars sponsored the Frolics for charitable fundraising. Today’s Friars club is located at 57 East 55th Street in New York City. The dining rooms of the elegant facility have chairs emblazoned with the names of illustrious members. FRIENDLY ENEMIES, THE. Despite the sweltering heat inside the Hudson Playhouse during the opening of The Friendly Enemies on 22 July 1918, the audience responded enthusiastically to the COMEDY and the patriotic feeling. The play by Samuel Shipman and Aaron Hoffman ran for 440 performances. Louis Mann and Sam Bernard, as old friends divided over the pro-German sentiments of one of them, found moments of pathos in their verbal slapstick, which recalled the earlier routines of Weber and Fields. FROHMAN, CHARLES (1860–1915). Born in Sandusky, Ohio, Charles Frohman worked in various capacities in the theatre before succeeding as a PRODUCER with Bronson Howard’s Shenandoah (1889), a long-running hit acclaimed for introducing a heightened REALISM and social commentary to the melodrama-inclined commercial theatre. The income from this success permitted Frohman to establish the Empire Theatre STOCK company with John Drew as its STAR. Frohman created a stable of young ACTORS who emerged from the company to be exploited by Frohman as stars in TOURING productions. His “star and combination” system also worked effectively in the English theatre, when Frohman ran the Duke of York Theatre in a similar fashion beginning in 1898. Among the major stars in Frohman’s stable besides Drew were Maude Adams, Arnold Daly, Annie Russell, Margaret Anglin, Julia Marlowe, William H. Crane, Otis Skinner, and %THEL"ARRYMORE. Frohman was one of the six businessmen who formed the Theatrical Syndicate in 1896. He continued to produce as many as a dozen new productions a year until his death in the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. Among his notable offerings were Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), William Gillette’s Secret Service (1896), J. M. Barrie’s The Little Minister (1896) and Peter Pan (1904), and Clyde Fitch’s Barbara Frietchie (1899). His brothers, Daniel and Gustave, were also producers.

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FROHMAN, DANIEL (1851–1940). Born in Sandusky, Ohio, the brother of PRODUCERS Gustave and Charles Frohman, Daniel Frohman worked as a newspaperman before becoming a business manager for 3TEELE -AC+AYE at the Madison Square Theatre. He might be credited with the idea of an auxiliary ROAD company to TOUR plays across the United States while the original production continued its run in New York (Dion Boucicault had operated similarly in London and the rest of England). From 1887 to 1902, Frohman ran his own STOCK company at the Lyceum Theatre (continuing at a new theatre until 1909). He developed a strong company of ACTORS, including at various times E. H. Sothern, Henry Miller, William Faversham, Effie Shannon, Richard Mansfield, Maude Adams, and James K. Hackett. Frohman’s company focused on works by contemporary PLAYWRIGHTS, including Clyde Fitch and current English writers. Sothern STARRED in Frohman’s productions of Lord Chumley (1888), The Charity Ball (1889), and The Prisoner of Zenda (1895). Frohman also presented a series of English MUSI CALS at Daly’s Theatre beginning in 1899 and produced the American premieres of The Case of Rebellious Susan (1894) and Trelawny of the “Wells” (1898). Frohman served as president of the !CTORS &UND OF !MERICA from 1903 to 1940 and got in on the ground floor of the MOTION PICTURE industry, working with the Famous Players-Lasky Film Company beginning in 1912, a company with the purpose of bringing major stage STARS to the screen. He also wrote several books, including Memories of a Manager (1911), Daniel Frohman Presents (1935), and Encore (1937). FRONT PAGE, THE. A brash, fast-paced cynical, no-holds-barred COMEDY-melodrama on the excesses of yellow journalism in 1920s Chicago, The Front Page, co-authored by "EN(ECHT and Charles MacArthur,* remains one of the most frequently revived plays of that era. The Front Page, STARRING /SGOOD 0ERKINS, ,EE4RACY, and $OROTHY3TICKNEY, was PRODUCED by *ED(ARRIS and DIRECTED by 'EORGE3+AUFMAN. It premiered at New York’s 4IMES3QUARE Theatre and ran for 276 performances following its 14 August 1928 opening. The main storyline follows star reporter Hildy Johnson in his attempt to quit the beat and marry a well-to-do small-town girl. His editor, Walter Burns, organizes a series of subterfuges to prevent the loss

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of his best reporter. Burns is aided in this by the escape of Earl Williams, a death-row inmate and alleged “Bolshevik,” on the eve of his execution. Williams turns up in the press room of the Criminal Courts Building, leading Burns and Johnson to hide him, while contending with rival reporters, con men, and corrupt city officials. The Front Page spawned three major "ROADWAY revivals (1946, 1969, and 1986), several MOTIONPICTURE versions (1931, 1940, 1974), television* productions (including a 1949 series), and stage adaptations including a 2003 London version by John Guare* called His Girl Friday, borrowing its title from the classic 1940 screen adaptation directed by Howard Hawks in which Hildy Johnson is a woman. FRONTIER DRAMA. By 1880, the American frontier depicted in the drama was a romanticized version of the West. There were plays about Jesse James and his gang even while the originals were still at large, but most of these were the fare of the ten twent’ thirt’ circuits. Aiming higher, Joaquin Miller’s The Danites (1877) remained popular well into the modernist period. Other plays of Western life include Bartley Campbell’s My Partner (1879), David Belasco’s The Girl I Left Behind Me (with Franklin Fyles, 1893) and Rose of the Rancho (1906), Augustus Thomas’s In Mizzoura (1893) and Arizona (1900), the dramatization of Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1904), and Porter Emerson Browne’s The Bad Man (1920). The great classics of the genre came early in the 20th century: Belasco’s Girl of the Golden West (1905), Edwin Milton Royle’s The Squaw Man (1905), and William Vaughn Moody’s The Great Divide (1906). FRONTIER THEATRE. As the frontier pushed westward, TOURING companies quickly followed. California scarcely qualified as frontier by the 1880s, but many towns between Chicago and San Francisco still had the volatile populations that craved lively entertainment. Performances in frontier towns were usually presented in a second- or third-floor hall above commercial space; often ACTORS and spectators used the same exterior staircase. Audiences in such venues tended to be almost entirely men. Legitimate plays were presented with MUSI CAL or specialty numbers between the acts. Not until a town built its first opera house could it offer a better class of attractions, but by then it could no longer be called a frontier town.

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FURNISS, GRACE LIVINGSTON (1864–1938). The London-born PLAYWRIGHT began seeing her work on the New York stage in 1898. Her plays include A Colonial Girl (1898), Americans at Home (1899), The Pride of Jennico (1900), Mrs. Jack (1902), Gretna Green (1902), The Man on the Box (1905), The Man on the Case (1907), and A Dakota Widow (1915). FYLES, FRANKLIN (1847–1911). After gaining newspaper experience in Troy, New York, where he was born, Fyles moved to New York. For 25 years, he was drama CRITIC for the New York Sun. His collaboration with David Belasco on The Girl I Left Behind Me (1893) prompted him to continue PLAYWRITING with such works as Cumberland ’61 (1897) and Kit Carson (1901). From 1908 until his death, he was a syndicated writer on theatre topics.

n'n GAIGE, CROSBY (1881–1949). Roscoe Conkling Gaige was born in Nelson, New York, and started out as a play broker. He became a PRODUCER in partnership with Edgar Selwyn and Arch Selwyn, presenting such hits as Within the Law (1912) and Lilac Time (1917), both STARRING *ANE#OWL. Among his successes as an independent producer was The Butter and Egg Man (1925). He associated with *ED (ARRIS to produce Broadway (1926) and Coquette (1927). He left the theatre to devote himself to writing about food and wine. GALE, ZONA (1874–1938). A native of Portage, Wisconsin, PLAY WRIGHT Zona Gale attended the University of Wisconsin, after which she made effective use of her Midwestern small-town roots in a series of successful novels. Most of Gale’s attention was devoted to fiction writing, but she also adapted plays from her novels. Gale was the first woman to win the 0ULITZER0RIZE in drama, awarded for Miss Lulu Bett (1920), a poignant COMEDY/drama about a small-town spinster who reluctantly participates in a mock marriage ceremony that turns out to be genuine. At the request of University of Wisconsin professor Thomas Dickinson, Gale wrote the one-act play The Neighbors (1912) for use by little theatre groups. After its premiere by the Washington Square Players, Gale made it available for royalty-free

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production by Wisconsin Players or by any group that would plant a tree for each performance. She dramatized her 1918 novel Birth as Mr. Pitt (1924); PRODUCED by "ROCK0EMBERTON, with 7ALTER (USTON in the title role, it ran for 87 performances. Her success at capturing the Midwestern flavor of dialogue made her other plays popular with little theatres: Uncle Jimmy (1922), Evening Clothes and The Clouds (1932), and Faint Perfume (1934). GALLERY. The highest level of theatre auditorium seating, usually a tier above the balcony, held the cheapest seats, sometimes called “the heavens.” In many cases, a theatregoer paid admission for unreserved seating in the gallery, and thus there could be considerable jockeying for position. William A. Brady recalled in his memoirs how as a youth he spent his evenings “scrunched up on the edge of a hard gallery bench” 50 feet above the stage. He paid the 20-cent admission when he had it; otherwise he sneaked past the gallery doorkeeper. “The gallery-patrons had a grudge against the swells down in the orchestra who’d paid as much as seventy cents to get in” and sometimes pelted them with peanuts. Long after the practice of munching peanuts during the performance had been banned, the derogatory term “peanut gallery” persisted. “The proudest moment of my early life,” Brady reminisced, “was the time I hit the bass-drum with a marble from the top gallery of Booth’s Theatre on 23rd Street during the sleep-walking scene in Macbeth” (1937, 10–11). See also GALLERY GODS. GALLERY GODS. Although the cheap admission price attracted some rowdies to the gallery seating, the majority of theatergoers who bought gallery seats were low-salaried working people who spent their discretionary income to attend the theatre several times a week. Thus they developed strong opinions about performers, plays, and production values, and they did not hesitate to express their pleasure or derision. They were called “gallery gods” partly because their seats were the closest to heaven and partly because of their power to advance or destroy stage careers. GARDEN OF ALLAH, THE. Opening on 21 October 1911 at the Century Theatre, the opulently staged drama ran for 241 performances. Mary Anderson emerged from retirement to collaborate with Robert

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Hichens in dramatizing the popular novel of the same title by George Tyler; the authors were present at the sold-out premiere, which lasted four hours. Processions of camels and other scenes of Arabic culture interspersed the dialogue sequences that advanced the romantic love story culminating in Christian renunciation. Mary Mannering as Domini Enfilden and Lewis Waller as Boris Androvsky declare their love in Count Anteoni’s verdant garden. They marry and conceive a child before Domini learns her husband’s secret: Boris is a Trappist monk who has broken his vows. They bid each other a poignant farewell before the monastery gates, but the audience gets a final glimpse of the eponymous garden in an epilogue showing mother and child five years later. One of the most impressive scenes of spectacle was the night scene in the desert. Out of an azure sky with twinkling stars came a terrific sandstorm: “At one side stands the flapping tent of the wanderers, while from all sides pour the heaps of sand forced by the gale, rolling, tumbling, sweeping along, in a seeming race with the wind-driven clouds” (New York Times, 22 October 1911). See also RELIGIOUSDRAMA. GATES, ELEANOR (1875–1951). The PLAYWRIGHT, born in Shakopee, Minnesota, had two important stage successes: Poor Little Rich Girl (1913), based upon her own novel of that title, and We Are Seven (1913). She was married first to ACTOR Richard Tully, and later to Frederick Moore. GAZZOLO, FRANK A. P. (1873–1959). The Chicago-born MAN AGER, PRODUCER, and agent started as a program boy at J. H. Haverly’s Eden Musee Theatre on Chicago’s west side. He became an advance agent for Jacob Litt, traveling in advance of an In Old Kentucky company. In partnership with George Klimt, he produced the successful melodrama The James Boys in Missouri, followed by many other melodramas sent out on the Stair and Havelin circuit. Leasing Chicago’s Imperial Theatre in 1910, Gazzolo and Klimt operated a STOCK company, the first of several in his career. He was also a partner in the Central States Amusement Company. GEDDES, NORMAN BEL (1893–1958).† Born Norman Melancton Geddes in Adrian, Michigan, Norman Bel Geddes studied art in

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Cleveland and Chicago before beginning his distinguished career in design at the Los Angeles Little Theatre in 1916. Profoundly influenced by European modernist SCENEDESIGNERS, including Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig, Geddes abandoned the proscenium for some of his productions and brought current trends in art into his productions, as his art deco designs for MUSICALS demonstrate. Brought to New York to design for the Metropolitan Opera under the aegis of Otto Kahn, Geddes collaborated with -AX2EINHARDT on The Miracle (1924), for which he converted the Century Theatre into the interior of a medieval gothic cathedral. Even more ambitious was his unrealized design for The Divine Comedy, which called for a performance area 100 feet wide and over 70 feet high. Geddes demonstrated originality and versatility in his designs for such 1920s "ROADWAY productions as Erminie (1920), The Truth about Blayds (1922), The Rivals (1922), The School for Scandal (1923), Lady, Be Good! (1924), Jeanne d’Arc (1925), Ziegfeld Follies (1925), Julius Caesar (1927), The Five O’Clock Girl (1927), The Patriot (1928), and Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929). His later notable productions include Hamlet (1931), Dead End* (1935), The Eternal Road* (1937), and Seven Lively Arts (1944). He was also an industrial designer, designed a few theatres, pioneered the use of lenses in LIGHTING instruments, and was the father of actress Barbara Bel Geddes.* See also SCENERY. GENTLEMAN FROM MISSISSIPPI, A. Harrison Rhodes and Thomas A. Wise wrote the COMEDY, which opened on 29 September 1908 at the Bijou and ran for 407 performances. Wise played the gentlemanly laid-back southern senator, who forms a friendship with a snappy reporter (Douglas Fairbanks). Together they foil the plans of some corrupt congressmen. According to the New York Times review (30 September 1908): “The audience laughed until its sides ached, and then it laughed some more.” GENTLEMAN OF FRANCE, A. The second PRODUCED play by Harriet Ford opened on 30 December 1901 at Wallack’s Theatre and ran for 120 performances. The casting of Kyrle Bellew and Eleanor Robson as the romantic interest enhanced the appeal of this sevenscene historical drama set in Renaissance France. The swordplay and other physical activity brought shrieks, cheers, and whistles of delight

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from the gallery. Ford herself later referred to it as “the slaughter of eighteen” and “the last of the swashbucklers” (Patterson, 18). GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES. A three-act COMEDY by Anita Loos and John Emerson adapted from Loos’s novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, opened on 28 September 1926 for 199 performances. Lorelei Lee, a flapper from Little Rock, Arkansas, travels to Europe with her friend Dorothy thanks to the largesse of Lorelei’s “sugar daddy,” a button manufacturer, Gus Eisman. The gold-digging Lorelei cuts a swath through England where she charms a knight into giving her a diamond tiara and becomes enamored of Henry Spofford. When she learns that Spofford and Dorothy are an item she returns to Eisman. A MOTIONPICTURE version was released in 1928. In 1949, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes became a hit MUSICAL by Jule Styne, Leo Robin, Joseph Fields, and Loos, making a STAR of Carol Channing* as Lorelei, the role originally played by *UNE7ALKER. The musical was filmed in 1953, starring Marilyn Monroe as Lorelei. GEORGE, GRACE (1879–1961). Born Grace Doughtery in New York, Grace George spent much of her childhood in a convent school. She then attended the !MERICAN !CADEMY OF $RAMATIC !RTS and made her New York debut playing a schoolgirl in The New Boy (1894). George’s first significant role, in The Turtle (1898), capitalized on her beauty, vivacity, and the sharp intelligence that led to STARDOM in such plays as Pretty Peggy (1903), The Two Orphans (revived 1904), The Marriage of William Ashe (1905), and a major success as Cyprienne in a revival of Victorien Sardou’s Divorçons (1907). This was followed by further successes in A Woman’s Way (1909) and The School for Scandal (1909). George’s husband, PRODUCER William A. Brady, built The Playhouse for her in 1911 and she established a REPERTORY company there in 1915, presenting and starring in the first American production of 'EORGE"ERNARD3HAW’s Major Barbara (1915), as well as Shaw’s Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (1916). During the 1920s, George appeared in The Merry Wives of Gotham (1924), She Had to Know (1925), and The First Mrs. Fraser (1929), which she also DIRECTED to long-running success. George also appeared successfully in Kind Lady* (1935), The Velvet Glove (1949), and opposite +ATHARINE#ORNELL in a revival of W. Somerset Maugham’s The

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Constant Wife in 1951, after which she retired. George appeared in two MOTION PICTURES, Tainted Money (1915) and Johnny Come Lately (1943), costarring with James Cagney* in the latter. Her career encompassed over 50 productions in which she figured as ACTOR, director, MANAGER, or translator. GERRY SOCIETY. A group of civic-minded citizens, led by lawyer and banker Elbridge T. Gerry, established the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to #HILDREN, in 1875. The society’s intention of preventing abuses by PRODUCERS and exploitive parents was largely covered by child labor laws passed during the same era, but the society focused much attention on the stage and was often criticized for overzealousness. Eddie Foy and his children, “the seven little Foys,” famously ran afoul of the Gerry Society. Well into the 20th century, producers were compelled to seek the society’s approval before employing child performers on the legitimate stage and in vaudeville. The society continues its functions today. GERSTEIN (or GERSTEN), BERTHA (1894–1972). Born in Krakow, Bertha Gerstein (also spelled Gersten) immigrated to the United States at an early age and began her stage career in vaudeville before a transition to dramatic ACTING, often as a member of the Yiddish Art Theatre company and as coSTAR of Jacob Ben-Ami. GERSTENBERG, ALICE (1885–1972). The author of the widely PRODUCED one-act Overtones (1915) was born in Chicago and attended Bryn Mawr College. She began writing novels in 1908, but turned to PLAYWRITING when her first full-length play, Alice in Wonderland (1915), was produced at New York’s Booth’s Theatre. That same year, Washington Square Players produced her Overtones, which tapped into the craze for Freudian psychology by showing the subconscious alter egos of the two female characters. Returning to Chicago, Gerstenberg was a charter member of the Chicago Little Theatre and continued writing one-acts that experimented with dramatic form. GEST, MORRIS (1881–1942). Born in Vilna, Russia, Morris Gest immigrated to Boston as a child. He began his theatrical career PRO DUCING plays there in 1903. By 1905, he had formed a successful

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New York production partnership with F. Ray Comstock. Spectacles like The Story of the Rosary (1914) and The Wanderer (1917) characterized their years at the Manhattan Opera House (1914–1920) and the Century Theatre (1917–1919). They presented Jerome Kern’s MUSICAL Leave It to Jane (1917) at the Century. However, their crowning efforts were foreign attractions, including the longrunning British musical Chu Chin Chow (1917), Nikita Baileff’s Chauve Souris revue (1922), an acclaimed New York season of the Moscow Art Theatre (1923), Italian actress Eleonora Duse’s triumphant 1923–1924 tour (which ended abruptly when she died in Pittsburgh), and -AX2EINHARDT’s production of The Miracle (1924). The GestComstock partnership ended in 1928, but Gest continued producing until his death, including American tours by Reinhardt’s leading ACTOR, Aleksandër Moisiu, and the Freiburg Passion Play, as well as the Al Jolson musical The Wonder Bar (1931). See also FOREIGN PLAYSADAPTEDTOTHE!MERICANSTAGE. GET-RICH-QUICK WALLINGFORD (1910). The first of song-anddance man 'EORGE - #OHAN’s successful nonMUSICAL works, Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford is based on George Randolph Chester’s Saturday Evening Post short stories. This lighthearted COMEDY ran for 424 performances at the Gaiety Theatre in a Cohan and 3AM( (ARRIS production beginning 19 September 1910. Cohan DIRECTED, but did not appear in this amusing glimpse of all-American confidence man J. Rufus Wallingford, who moves from one town to the next, setting up fake businesses to bilk the local “rube” populace. In Battleburg, however, he falls for Fanny Jasper, a local girl whose belief in him propels Wallingford to succeed with a company that makes carpet tacks to match any carpet. As the curtain falls, to his great surprise, Wallingford becomes an accidental millionaire, legitimate, and engaged to Fanny. #RITICS approved of the typically American character types and values, finding the show colorful and fast-paced in the Cohan tradition. It was revived on "ROADWAY in 1917 and spawned three screen versions (1916, 1921, 1931). GHOST LIGHT. This term refers to a freestanding pole with a single illuminated bulb that remains on stage as a safety precaution when the theatre is otherwise dark. “Ghost light” comes from the days of gas-lit theatres and refers to the dim lighting maintained to relieve

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pressure on gas valves, along with the myth that a light in a theatre kept ghosts away. The ghost light is sometimes called the “Equity Light” or “Equity Lamp” in reference to an !CTORS %QUITY!S SOCIATION regulation that resulted from—according to theatrical legend—a lawsuit lodged against a "ROADWAY theatre by a burglar who successfully broke into the theatre but fell in the dark and injured his leg. GILBERT, MRS. GEORGE HENRY (1821–1904). Born Anne Hartley in London, England, the character actress began as a dancer in the corps de ballet at Her Majesty’s and Drury Lane Theatres. In 1846, she married dancer George Henry Gilbert, and three years later, they immigrated to America. By 1851, they were performing with a Chicago company. In 1861, she played Lady Macbeth opposite Edwin Booth during his brief engagement in Louisville. After her New York debut in 1864, Mrs. Gilbert’s career as a performer of eccentric woman roles became well established, marred only by the death of her husband in 1867. From 1869 until her death, with only a threeyear hiatus (1877–1880), she acted in Augustin Daly’s company in New York, becoming familiarly known as “Grandma Gilbert.” Her memoir, The Stage Reminiscences of Mrs. Gilbert, was published in 1901. GILLETTE, WILLIAM (1853–1937). One of the major stage STARS of the late 19th century, William Gillette, a native of Hartford, Connecticut, was the son of a U.S. senator and received his education at Yale University, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Fine Arts Institute before making his stage debut in Faint Heart Ne’er Won Fair Lady in 1875. He played secondary roles in several productions at the Boston Museum. He made his New York debut in George Densmore’s The Gilded Age (1877). While Gillette toured in Bronson Howard’s Young Mrs. Winthrop, he began to write plays as vehicles for himself, notably The Professor (1881) and Digby’s Secretary (1884). His other early plays include Esmeralda (1881), which he adapted with Frances Hodgson Burnett, Held by the Enemy (1886), She (1887), All the Comforts of Home (1890), Mr. Wilkinson’s Widows (1891), and Settled Out of Court (1892). Gillette’s dual careers peaked with Too Much Johnson (1894), Secret Service (1896), and his major triumph in Sherlock Holmes

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(1899), a melodrama adapted from Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories of the fictional Victorian detective. Gillette was admired as a more natural ACTOR than many of his contemporaries, and in 1913 he published his lecture “The Illusion of the First Time in Acting.” Gillette’s later plays, including Clarice (1905) and Electricity (1910), were mildly successful, but after 1900 he was preferred in plays by others, including J. M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton (1903) and Dear Brutus (1918). The exception was Sherlock Holmes, a character Gillette frequently performed on stage and in MOTIONPICTURES (1916), reviving the play in New York for the last time in 1931 at the age of 76. Gillette is believed to have given over 1,300 performances in the part. Like many of his star contemporaries, Gillette was both blessed and cursed by finding that one iconic role. See also DORO, MARIE. GILPIN, CHARLES (1878–1930). !FRICAN!MERICAN actor Charles Sidney Gilpin was born in Richmond, Virginia. He worked for a time in a printing firm before joining a black STOCK company in 1903. At times Gilpin also worked as a train porter, a barber, and an elevator operator. He TOURED with numerous troupes, including the all-black Pekin Stock Company in Chicago, then, in 1916, became a director of Harlem’s ,AFAYETTE0LAYERS, the first black stock company in New York in a century. Appearing on "ROADWAY as Custis, a minister, in John Drinkwater’s Abraham Lincoln (1919) led to his getting cast in the title role of %UGENE/.EILL’s expressionist drama The Emperor Jones (1920). Race prejudice and his sudden fame led Gilpin to overindulge in alcohol. After he was passed over in favor of 0AUL2OBESON for the Broadway and London productions of The Emperor Jones, he rarely worked again. GIRADOT, ETIENNE (1856–1939). Despite the French name, Etienne Giradot was born in London and worked as an ACTOR there before scoring a major "ROADWAY success as Lord Fancourt Babberley in the 1893 American debut of Brandon Thomas’s enduring farce, Charley’s Aunt. Giradot appeared opposite Minnie Maddern Fiske in Leah Kleschna (1904) and in other roles. He was in constant demand for revivals of Charley’s Aunt and became so associated with that role that it proved difficult for him to find others. His final stage appearance, as the deranged religious zealot in "EN(ECHT and Charles MacArthur’s* Twentieth Century* (1932), won plaudits. He

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appeared occasionally in silent MOTIONPICTURES as well as in small roles in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) and The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939). GIRL AND THE JUDGE, THE. Clyde Fitch’s four-act drama opened on 4 December 1901 at the Lyceum Theatre for 125 performances, PRODUCED by Charles Frohman. Based on an actual incident Fitch heard from an Ohio judge, the play follows Winifred Stanton, who stays with her kleptomaniac mother when her parents separate. Winifred becomes engaged to Chartris, a young judge. After Winifred’s mother swipes jewelry from her fiancé’s mother, Winifred compels her mother to confess. The erring mother is taken to a sanitarium, leaving Chartris and Winifred free to marry. Annie Russell won positive reviews as Winifred. The cast also included Mrs. McKee Rankin and Mrs. G. H. Gilbert as the two mothers. GIRL I LEFT BEHIND ME, THE. David Belasco collaborated with Franklin Fyles on this melodrama, which opened on 25 January 1893 for 208 performances at the new Empire Theatre, PRODUCED by Charles Frohman. Lieutenant Hawkesworth, in love with Kate, daughter of General Kennion, the commander of Fort Assiniboine in hostile Blackfoot Indian territory in Montana, is branded a coward by Lieutenant Parlow, who is also in love with Kate. When the fort is cut off by the clever maneuvers of Indian chief Scar Brow, Hawkesworth proves his courage, and wins Kate, by making a dangerous ride through Indian territory to seek reinforcements. The play was extremely popular on TOUR. Robert Edeson STARRED in a 1915 silent MOTIONPICTURE version. GIRL OF THE GOLDEN WEST, THE. David Belasco’s three-act melodrama, which opened on 14 November 1905 at the Belasco Theatre for 224 performances, became the first American play to be converted into a grand opera when Giacomo Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West opened at the Metropolitan Opera House on 10 December 1910. The enduring popularity of the opera ultimately submerged the source play, but not before Belasco exploited it through his characteristic use of visual REALISM in scenes depicting sunsets, snowstorms, and an impressive opening sequence in which a panorama moves vertically to take the audience from the heroine’s cabin in

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the mountains down to the entrance of the saloon in town. Blanche Bates STARRED as The Girl (whose name turns out to be Minnie) and played return engagements of the play in 1907 and 1908. The Girl of the Golden West is set in a California mining camp. The Girl falls in love with Dick Johnson, who turns out to be Ramirez, a bandit hunted by Sheriff Jack Rance. She hides the wounded Dick in her loft, but his blood drips through a crack in the ceiling while Rance is there. Rance wants The Girl for himself (although he has a wife elsewhere). He agrees to play a hand of poker with the Girl to decide the presumed outlaw’s fate. The Girl wins by cheating. Back at the saloon, the locals still want to hang Dick, but he and the Girl get away and together face the eastern sunrise. Several MOTIONPIC TURE versions were released (1915, 1923, 1930), as well as a version combining Belasco’s play with music from Puccini’s opera in 1938. See also FRONTIER DRAMA. GIRL WITH THE GREEN EYES, THE. Opening on Christmas Day 1902 for 108 performances at the Savoy Theatre in a Charles Frohman production, this four-act Clyde Fitch drama was DIRECTED by its author. Clara Bloodgood STARRED as the jealous Jinny, who learns that her brother Geoffrey has committed bigamy, marrying Ruth Chester despite his previous drunken union with a maid. Geoffrey confides his dark secret to Jinny’s husband John Austin, the maid’s brother, who refuses to divulge the information, despite Jinny’s machinations, including a suicide attempt. John saves her, but CRITICS complained that the happy ending marred the play’s inherent tragedy. A MOTIONPICTURE version was made in 1916. GISH, DOROTHY (1898–1968). The beloved sister of Lillian Gish was born in Massillion, Ohio, and first performed on stage at age four as Little Willie in East Lynne. She played CHILD roles on the ROAD and in New York until 1912. That year, she and her sister joined D. W. Griffith’s MOTIONPICTURE company, for which Dorothy made 61 films before obtaining her first STAR contract in 1915. Her performance as the Little Disturber in Hearts of the World (1917) endeared her to the public. She returned to legitimate theatre in 1928 to perform in Young Love on "ROADWAY, followed by a London engagement. Most of the remainder of her career was on stage, with only occasional films.

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GISH, LILLIAN (1896–1993).† Born in Springfield, Ohio, the ACTRESS was always protective of her younger sister Dorothy Gish. As “Baby Lillian,” she made her debut in a TOURING melodrama in 1902. Occasionally during her childhood she toured apart from her mother and sister. After she was hired by D. W. Griffith in 1912, Gish devoted most of her acting career to MOTIONPICTURES. Her work on the legitimate stage included Uncle Vanya (1930), Within the Gates* (1934), Hamlet (1936), and The Trip to Bountiful* (1953). Her autobiography, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, was published in 1973. GLASPELL, SUSAN (1882–1948).† A native of Davenport, Iowa, Susan Glaspell was educated at Drake University and the University of Chicago. She worked as a journalist before embarking on a career writing novels and plays. She was one of the founders of the Provincetown Players along with her husband, George Cram Cook, with whom she wrote one-act plays that were performed by the company in its little wharfside theatre on Cape Cod. Glaspell’s Suppressed Desires (1914; coauthored by Cook), Trifles (1916), Close the Book (1917), A Woman’s Honor (1918), and Tickless Time (1918; coauthored by Cook), are diverse in topic and style, ranging from COMEDY to drama. Her full-length plays, including The Inheritors (1921), The Verge (1921), and Alison’s House* (1930), a fictionalization of Emily Dickinson’s life, for which she won the 0ULITZER 0RIZE, were well-received. Like %UGENE /.EILL, another dramatist whose career was forged by the Provincetown Players, Glaspell merged contemporary themes with dramatic techniques influenced by modernist European PLAYWRIGHTS. Expressionist and symbolist elements are found in her plays, which often depict the “new woman” as a central character. In collaboration with her second husband Norman Matson, Glaspell wrote The Comic Artist, a play that met with success in Europe, but failed in its 1933 New York production. During the Great Depression, Glaspell headed the Midwest bureau of the Federal Theatre Project.* GLASS, MONTAGUE (1877–1934). Montague Marsden Glass was born in Manchester, England, and was brought to America as a child. He published humorous magazine stories about New York City’s garment district, and these became the basis for plays he wrote in collaboration with other dramatists: Potash and Perlmutter (1913) with

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Charles Klein, Business before Pleasure (1917) and several others in the 1920s with *ULES%CKERT'OODMAN. See also ETHNICITYIN !MERICANDRAMA. GLEASON, JAMES (1886–1959). Born in a showbiz boardinghouse in New York City, Gleason grew up performing in his parents’s STOCK company, with his first significant role coming when he was five. After years of TOURING, he served in the U.S. Army. He made his New York debut as a blackface waiter in Pretty Mrs. Smith (1912). With the success of his play Is Zat So? (1925), in which he wrote the role of boxing manager Hap Hurley for himself, Gleason initiated a long succession of tough-fight MANAGER characters first on stage and then in MOTIONPICTURES. Other plays by Gleason include The Fall Guy (1924), The Shannons of Broadway (1927, with his wife, Lucille Webster), Rain or Shine (1928), and Puffy (1928). GODS OF THE LIGHTNING. Opening on 24 October 1929 at the Little Theatre, the powerful drama by -AXWELL !NDERSON and Harold Hickerson ran only 29 performances. Inspired by the injustice of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, the play centers upon an Irish and an Italian labor organizer who are framed for the murder of a paymaster. A corrupt court system allows tainted evidence and coached witnesses. The execution of the two innocent men is confirmed in the last scene. GOLD DIGGERS, THE. Avery Hopwood’s three-act COMEDY of backstage life, PRODUCED by David Belasco, opened on 30 September 1919 for 720 performances at the Lyceum Theatre. A template for numerous similar comedies and a string of popular 1930s MUSICAL MOTIONPICTURES beginning with Golddiggers of 1933 (which borrowed many elements of this play’s plot), The Gold Diggers depicted the machinations of a staid rich man, Stephen Lee, who attempts to stop his nephew from marrying a chorus girl. Lee turns to a chorus girl he has known, Jerry Lamar (played by Ina Claire), to break up the engagement. Jerry attempts to convince Lee that all chorus girls are not seeking rich husbands, but several of her friends, played by Jobyna Howland, Lilyan Tashman, Luella Gear, and Gladys Feldman, seem to refute her argument. Offended by Lee’s pompous assertion that he could never be tricked into marriage to a chorus girl, Jerry

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gets him drunk and, under the influence, he proposes to her. When he sobers up, she confesses her trickery because she truly loves Lee, who feels the same way and forgives her ruse. A television* adaptation as late as 1952 testified to the story’s durability. GOLDEN, JOHN (1874–1955).† The legendary showman who ACTED, wrote songs, and produced over a hundred plays was born in New York City. In his youth, he worked as a bricklayer on the Garrick Theatre and as a supernumerary at Niblo’s Garden. After a stint as actor-MANAGER with a TOURING company, he wrote songs for such "ROADWAY musicals as Chin Chin (1914) and The Big Show (1916), the royalties of which financed his first venture into PRODUCING. Turn to the Right! (1916), produced with Winchell Smith, began their successful partnership. Golden had an unerring sense of what the public wanted. His long-running hits included the record-setting Lightnin’ (1918) and The First Year (1920). Later Golden became involved in philanthropy, creating funds to assist needy theatre artists. GOLDFADN (or GOLDFADEN), AVROM (1840–1908). Born Avraham Goldenfudim in Russia, Avrom Goldfadn spent most of his working life there as the “Father of Yiddish Theatre.” He first visited New York in 1887 to establish an American Yiddish theatre in a similar style. Many of his plays became major successes, including Koldunye; or, The Witch (1877), The Fanatic; or, The Two Kuni Lemls (c. 1880), Bar-Kokhba; or, The Last Days of Jersusalem (1883), and Schulamis; or, The Daughter of Jerusalem (c. 1883). His final play, Ben-Ami; or, Son of My People (1908), was PRODUCED in New York shortly before Goldfadn’s death. Although his work was by then considered passé, over 30,000 people participated in his funeral procession in Brooklyn, New York. Goldfadn’s dramas were recognized as Yiddish theatre classics to be frequently revived. Comic characters like Shmendrik and songs like the lullaby “Raisins and Almonds,” composed for Schulamis, won enduring fame. GOOD GRACIOUS ANNABELLE. The sparkling COMEDY by Clare Kummer opened on 31 October 1915 at the Republic Theatre and ran for 111 performances. Kummer had originally hoped to have her script made into a MUSICAL, but !RTHUR(OPKINS chose to PRODUCE and DIRECT it as a play. Lola Fisher played the title role, a perky girl

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who rediscovers her long-lost and now wealthy husband, played by 7ALTER(AMPDEN. May Vokes excelled as a comic kitchen wench. Sets and COSTUMES were by 2OBERT%DMOND*ONES. GOODMAN, EDWARD (1888–1962). The drama CRITIC for New York Press also wrote plays, translated plays, and DIRECTED. He joined the Washington Square Players in 1915 and founded the Stagers in 1925. GOODMAN, JULES ECKERT (1876–1962).† Born in Gervais, Oregon, he moved from journalism to PLAYWRITING. His plays include The Man Who Stood Still (1908), Mother (1910), The Silent Voice (1914), The Trap and Treasure Island (1915), The Man Who Came Back (1916), and Chains (1923). He collaborated with Montague Glass on the popular Potash and Perlmutter COMEDIES. GOODMAN, KENNETH SAWYER (1883–1918). The privileged son of a Chicago lumber millionaire, Kenneth Sawyer Goodman was drawn away from his family business toward the arts. After working as a volunteer with the Art Institute of Chicago, Goodman crafted nearly 50 one-act plays, masques, and pageants at the height of the Chicago arts and literary renaissance in the decade prior to World 7AR I. Goodman collaborated with both "EN (ECHT and Thomas Wood Stevens, but he also wrote many plays on his own, including The Game of Chess (1912) and Back of the Yards (1913). With Hecht, Goodman collaborated on The Wonder Hat (1914) and The Hero of Santa Maria (1915), the last of which was produced by the Washington Square Players in 1917. His collaborations with Stevens were mostly masques and pageants. Poised to write a full-length play and working on a plan for a REP ERTORY theatre and drama school, Goodman died suddenly during the 1918 influenza epidemic while serving in the U.S. Navy. His untimely death may have cost the American theatre a significant PLAYWRIGHT, but his passing led his grieving parents to establish Chicago’s 'OODMAN4HEATRE and school, a posthumous realization of their son’s dream. GOODMAN, PHILIP (1880–1940). The PRODUCERPhilip Goodman, born in Philadelphia, made money in business, which he used to

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present such shows as The Old Soak (1922) and The Five O’Clock Girl (1927). GOODMAN THEATRE.† Founded in 1925 as a memorial to Kenneth Sawyer Goodman, a promising PLAYWRIGHT of Chicago’s art and literary renaissance of the 1910s, the theatre was built on Lake Shore Drive behind Chicago’s Art Institute. The design, by Howard Van Doren Shaw, was hampered by a city ordinance limiting the height of downtown buildings. Thus, much of the theatre, which also housed a drama school, was constructed underground. Its resident company thrived in REPERTORY productions of original plays and classics. The Great Depression forced the termination of the company in 1930. The Goodman remained a drama school until the resident company was reestablished in 1969. GOODWIN, NAT C. (1857–1919). Born Nathaniel Carl Goodwin in Boston, he attended school at the Little Blue Academy in Farmington, Maine, where he ACTED in school dramatics. This led to an acting career, beginning with the role of a shoeshine boy in MANAGER John B. Stetson’s production of Law in New York (1874) at Boston’s Howard Atheneum. Goodwin worked in vaudeville for Tony Pastor in 1875 and starred in E. E. Rice’s MUSICALS for a few seasons before setting up his own COMEDY troupe, the Froliques, where he was applauded for his imitations of famous actors and for his eccentric comedic style. Goodwin was successful in a series of light comedies, including The Skating Rink (1885), Little Jack Sheppard (1886), Turned Up (1886), and Lend Me Five Shillings (1887), but he had his greatest hit in A Gilded Fool (1892). He gradually added dramatic roles to his repertoire, including the role of Sheriff Jim Radburn in Augustus Thomas’s In Mizzoura (1893). He failed in several attempts at 3HAKESPEARE, including Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (1901) and Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1903), but found great successes opposite his wife, actress Maxine Elliott, in Nathan Hale (1899) and When We Were Twenty-One (1900). He continued to act until shortly before his death, scoring one final hit as Uncle Everett in Jesse Lynch Williams’s 0U LITZER0RIZE–winning comedy Why Marry? (1917). GORDIN, JACOB (1853–1909). The Yiddish PLAYWRIGHT—author of between 35 and 60 plays—was born in Mivgorod, Ukraine,

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and arrived in New York’s Lower East Side in 1891. Like other Russian-Jewish intellectuals, he scorned the vulgar lower-class Yiddish theatre called shund. His first play, Siberia (1891), began the transformation of Yiddish theatre into something more serious, leading to a Golden Age of Yiddish Theatre. Championed by Jacob Adler, Gordin went on to write The Pogrom in Russia, Sappho, Mirele Ephros, and God, Man, and Devil. In 1897, Gordin cofounded the Freie Yidische Folksbiene, and he later published Yiddish theatrical newspapers. Gordin’s dramatization of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata (1902) was revived in English on "ROADWAY in 1906, STAR RING Bertha Kalish. GORELIK, MORDECAI (1899–1990). Born in Russia, Mordecai Gorelik came to America in his youth to study at the Pratt Institute and under several SCENEDESIGNERS, notably 2OBERT%DMOND*ONES, .ORMAN"EL'EDDES, and Serge Soudeikine. His first designs were on a modest scale for the Provincetown Players beginning in 1920, but he developed into one of "ROADWAY’s most important scenic artists, creating designs for John Howard Lawson’s Processional (1925), Sidney Kingsley’s* 0ULITZER0RIZE–winning Men in White* (1933), three Clifford Odets* plays—Golden Boy* (1937), Rocket to the Moon* (1938), and Night Music* (1940)—and, after World War II, Arthur Miller’s* All My Sons* (1947) and Michael Gazzo’s A Hatful of Rain* (1957), among many others, as well as contributing set designs to productions of the .EIGHBORHOOD 0LAYHOUSE and for The Group Theatre.* Inspired by Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig, as well as Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre, Gorelik also taught design and wrote several books on theatrical art, including New Theatres for Old (1940). See also SCENERY. GRAND ARMY MAN, A. David Belasco collaborated with Pauline Phelps and Marion Short on this four-act vehicle for David Warfield. A Grand Army Man opened on 16 October 1907 for 149 performances at the Stuyvesant Theatre, with Warfield as Bigelow, a veteran of the Civil 7AR, raising Robert, son of a fallen fellow soldier. Robert falls under the influence of some nefarious friends and is jailed for unwisely giving to one of them the money entrusted to him. With Bigelow’s support, Robert is cleared and marries Hallie (played by !NTOINETTE0ERRY), daughter of the judge who passed

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sentence on Robert. *ANE#OWL was featured in a small role in the production. GREAT DIVIDE, THE. William Vaughn Moody’s three-act drama opened at the Princess Theatre on 3 October 1906 for 238 performances, winning acclaim as one of the greatest plays of its time, due in part to its REALISM and the complexity of its human drama, as well as its more sensational aspects. Originally titled The Sabine Woman, the play premiered in Chicago, STARRING Margaret Anglin. Moody revised it for the New York production, also starring Anglin with Henry Miller. Ruth Jordan, who has moved to Arizona to escape the stifling conventions of her New England hometown and to assist in one of her brother’s business ventures, is not afraid when left alone at the cabin one night, for she is attuned to the “sublime abstraction” of the American West. Three men come to rape her, but she appeals to one of them, Stephen Ghent, to buy off his compatriots and in return she will marry him. Ghent is successful in business and treats her well, but Ruth cannot forgive his original intentions and, earning enough money on her own, she returns to her puritanical New England family. Ghent secretly follows her. Ruth learns that he has saved her brother’s business. She defies her upbringing to return with Ghent across the great divide of the United States and their vast cultural differences. Moody claimed that the play was based on a true incident. The original production toured the United States and Europe with its stars, generating considerable publicity. Hailed as the greatest American play to date for its depiction of the division between shifting urban civilization and the wild, untamed passions of the West, The Great Divide was revived on "ROADWAY for a brief run in 1917 and made into three MOTIONPICTURES (1915, 1925, 1929). See also FRONTIER DRAMA. GREAT GOD BROWN, THE. %UGENE/.EILL’s expressionist play, which opened at the Greenwich Village Theatre on 23 January 1926, ran for 271 performances despite the bafflement of some CRITICS and audiences over O’Neill’s use of masks, which were employed to display the dual natures of his characters. Two young men, William A. Brown and Dion Anthony, are the sons of business partners and wear masks displaying appealing personas. A young woman, Margaret, attracts the attention of both men, but she is drawn to

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Dion’s gentle, sensitive mask. He has rejected business to become an artist, but when they find themselves in a moment of passion, Dion removes his mask, revealing a darker persona underneath. Margaret is appalled and Dion dies in grief. She marries Brown after he takes up Dion’s sensitive mask, but he too dies as a result of denying his true persona, finding his only comfort with Cybel, a prostitute. Years after the death of both men, Margaret remains true to Dion’s idealistic mask. At the time, O’Neill considered The Great God Brown his finest work, but it had few revivals. Its first revival on "ROADWAY was an unsuccessful 1959 production featuring Fritz Weaver.* A 1972 Phoenix Repertory* production won critical approval. GREAT LOVER, THE. Frederic and Fanny Hatton wrote the COMEDY with Leo Ditrichstein as a vehicle for him. It opened on 10 November 1915 at the Longacre and ran for 245 performances. 'EORGE-#OHAN and 3AM((ARRIS PRODUCED the play, which was DIRECTED by Sam Forrest. Ditrichstein played a philandering baritone. Part of the appeal of the play was the sense that it offered a glimpse behind the scenes of a great opera house. GREAT WAR (WORLD WAR I) IN DRAMA. The end of American isolationism in 1917, when American forces were sent to fight in the trenches of France, had a profound impact on the public and found expression in the plays of the immediate postwar years and well into the 1920s. The Famous Mrs. Fair (1919) deals with the reintegration of a wife and mother into her family after having served in the military abroad. Some plays show the impact of war upon those at home, as in The Hero (1921). Others directly convey the horrors of war, as in What Price Glory (1924). Numerous COMEDIES and family dramas simply contain a dialogue passage or two about American exposure to European ways in the course of the war, as in, for example, Abie’s Irish Rose (1922), Sun-Up (1923), Hell-Bent fer Heaven (1924), The Wisdom Tooth (1926). See also WARSIN!MERICANDRAMA. GREAT WHITE WAY.† As the clusters of New York theatres moved northward from Fourteenth Street in the 1880s, they reached 4IMES 3QUARE in the mid-1890s just when the new electric street LIGHTING began to be supplemented by electric signs. The Astor Hotel at 41st Street claimed to be the world’s “most electrified hotel.” Illuminated

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theatre marquees added to the nighttime illumination that around 1900 gave "ROADWAY between 37th and 42nd Streets the epithet “Great White Way” or “the Rialto.” See also ELECTRICITY. GREEN, PAUL (1894–1981).† Paul Eliot Green was born in Lillinton, North Carolina, and wrote many one-act plays beginning during his schooling at the University of North Carolina, where he studied with Frederick H. Koch, and at Cornell University. His one-act The No ’Count Boy (1925) exemplifies the many folk dramas he wrote. In 1926, Green’s drama of racial conflict in the South, In Abraham’s Bosom, was awarded the 0ULITZER 0RIZE, although the play had already closed. Green’s leftist politics, often evident in his plays, frequently focused on racial inequities. From the mid-1920s to World 7AR II, he wrote several critically applauded works, including The Field God (1927), The House of Connelly* (1931), Roll, Sweet Chariot (1934), Hymn to the Rising Sun (1936), the libretto and lyrics for the antiwar MUSICAL Johnny Johnson (1936; with music by Kurt Weill), and a collaboration with Richard Wright* on a stage adaptation of Wright’s Native Son* (1941). In 1937, he wrote the first outdoor drama* (or symphonic drama), The Lost Colony, set on Roanoke Island, North Carolina. Green also taught drama at the University of North Carolina. GREENE, CLAY M. (1850–1933). Clay Meredith Green was, according to his VARIETY obituary, the first American born in San Francisco. He presided as Shepherd of the Lambs for 12 years before returning to San Francisco, where he was the oldest member of the Bohemian Club. Among his 80 or so plays and MUSICAL librettos were such successes as M’liss (1878, based upon a Bret Harte story), Forgiven (1886), Bluebeard, Jr. (1889), Under the Polar Star (1896), A Man from the West (1900), and The Silver Slipper (1902). GRIMKÉ, ANGELINA WELD (1880–1958). Not to be confused with her great-aunt Angelina Grimké Weld (1805–1879) after whom she was named, the PLAYWRIGHT was born in Boston to legally married interracial parents. Like her abolitionist namesake, Grimké used her literary talent to call attention to injustices suffered by !FRICAN !MERICANS. Her play Rachel was staged by the Nathaniel Guy Players at Myrtill Miner Normal School in Washington, D.C., in 1916, at

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New York’s .EIGHBORHOOD0LAYHOUSE in 1917, and by numerous AMATEUR groups after its publication in 1920. In response to lynchings of black males, the tragic heroine Rachel, who loves children and has longed for motherhood, sends away the man she loves after she solemnly vows never to bring a black child into this world. GRISMER, JOSEPH R. (1848–1922). The ACTOR, MANAGER, PRO DUCER, and PLAYWRIGHT Joseph Rhode Grismer was born in Albany, New York. He was a leading man at the Grand Opera House and the Baldwin 3TOCK Company. His plays were collaborations that involved “doctoring” the author’s script, notably Way Down East (1898) by Lottie Blair Parker. He was a two-term Shepherd of the Lambs. He died as a result of a streetcar accident. GROS, ERNEST M. Born in Paris, France, Gros had come to New York by the 1890s. He flourished during the 1890s through the 1920s and designed SCENERY for nearly 200 productions, including many for David Belasco. His work exemplified Belasco’s exacting standards of REALISM, as in The Music Master (1904), The Governor’s Lady (1908), The Easiest Way (1909), and others. GUNTER, ARCHIBALD CLAVERING (1847–1907). Born in Liverpool, England, and educated in California, he discovered a facility for writing plays and novels. His first New York production, Two Nights in Rome (1880), had a complicated plot interspersed with exciting incidents. Noteworthy among his dozen or so produced plays were Fresh, the American (1881), which STARRED John T. Raymond, and Prince Karl (1886), a popular success for Richard Mansfield.

n(n HACKETT, JAMES K. (1869–1926). The STAR ACTOR and MANAGER James Keteltas Hackett was born in Wolf Island, Canada, the son of American actors on TOUR in Canada. He rose quickly to prominence after his debut in Philadelphia in 1892 and at 24 was considered the youngest leading man on the American stage. The Prisoner of Zenda (1896) was one of his early acting successes. He married his leading lady, Mary Mannering, in 1897, but they later divorced; in 1914, he

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married actress Beatrice M. Beckley. After his matinee idol years, he turned to PRODUCING and DIRECTING. His 1918 charitable all-STAR production of J. Hartley Manners’s Out There raised over $700,000 for the Red Cross. HAIRY APE, THE. With this eight-scene drama, %UGENE /.EILL concluded his formative years as a PLAYWRIGHT with the Provincetown Players. It opened on 9 March 1922 for 120 performances at the Provincetown Theatre. The expressionist SCENEDESIGN elements by 2OBERT %DMOND *ONES and Cleon Throckmorton created a nightmarish quality admired by CRITICS of the original production. “Yank” Smith (played by Louis Wolheim) is a grimy, inarticulate stoker on a steamship. A wealthy young socialite, Mildred Douglas, is allowed to visit the boiler room, and she faints upon seeing Yank. This disturbing vision of another mode of existence sparks Yank’s soul-searching journey. When the ship docks in New York, he visits Fifth Avenue where his rage at the swells results in his arrest. Even in jail, Yank doesn’t fit in. Upon release he visits the IWW (the leftist International Workers of the World or “Wobblies”) and offers to blow up the Douglas Steel Works for them, but they reject him. Seeking to belong somewhere, Yank visits the gorilla at the zoo. He attempts to set it free, but it crushes him in its powerful embrace. The play, subtitled “A Comedy of Ancient and Modern Life,” stresses the alienation of the individual in a technological, capitalist society, and is among O’Neill’s most-revived works. A 1944 MOTION PICTURE version STARRED William Bendix and Susan Hayward. HALE, LOUISE CLOSSER (1872–1933). A Chicago native trained at the !MERICAN !CADEMY OF $RAMATIC !RTS (AADA), Louise Closser Hale made her first stage appearance in In Old Kentucky in an 1894 production in Detroit. She TOURED in Arizona (1900) and with William H. Crane before making her first New York appearance in ACTOR-PRODUCER Arnold Daly’s 1905 production of 'EORGE "ERNARD 3HAW’s Candida, playing Prossy. From her earliest performances, Hale was a character actress often cast in maternal or “old maid” roles. She was also a successful novelist and appeared in several important "ROADWAY productions, including the American premiere of Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird (1910), Ruggles of Red Gap (1915), and two 0ULITZER0RIZE–winning dramas, %U

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GENE/.EILL’s Beyond the Horizon (1920) and Zona Gale’s Miss Lulu Bett (1920). She also appeared as Ase in a 1923 production of (ENRIK)BSEN’s Peer Gynt and in 2ACHEL#ROTHERS’s COMEDY Expressing Willie (1924), as well as many MOTIONPICTURES in the early “talkie” era, including Big Boy (1930) with Al Jolson, The Man Who Played God (1932) with George Arliss, and the all-STAR COMEDY-drama Dinner at Eight* (1933). HAM (or HAMMING IT or HAMFATTER). These terms imply overACTING as a product of egotism or lack of talent. Sometimes ham acting is intentional, in farcical or melodramatic plays intended for broad overplaying, but usually it is undesirable. The term seems to have been born as a result of the habit of blackface entertainers smearing their faces with ham fat before blacking up when playing in “Tom shows,” the innumerable productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that TOURED the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. HAMMERSTEIN, OSCAR I (1847–1919). Born in Berlin, Oscar Hammerstein I ran away from his Prussian home in 1863 and worked in a cigar factory on his arrival in the United States, because he could not find employment as a musician. An enterprising young man, Hammerstein developed several improvements in manufacturing cigars that merited patents. The income gave him the leisure to write several one-act plays, which were PRODUCED by the Germania Theatre. He also earned the resources to build several theatres, beginning with the Harlem Opera House in 1889. Careless MANAGEMENT cost him this theatre, but Hammerstein soon built several others, including the lavish Manhattan Opera House, where his successful operatic productions led the Metropolitan Opera to buy him out. He also built the Olympic Theatre, the Columbus Theatre, and the Republic Theatre, earning the label “The Father of 4IMES3QUARE.” With the opening of Hammerstein’s Victoria Theatre, he was forced to present variety entertainments when the Theatrical Syndicate blocked his attempts to produce legitimate theatre. Under the management of his son, Willie, the Victoria became the top venue for vaudeville in the United States between 1904 and 1915. Hammerstein also wrote a few MUSICALS, including Santa Maria (1896), In Greater New York (1897), and WAR Bubbles (1898). His most successful production was

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the first "ROADWAY staging of the enduring Victor Herbert operetta, Naughty Marietta (1910). Hammerstein’s other son, Oscar Hammerstein II* (1895–1960), became one of the most significant figures in 20th-century musical theatre. HAMMOND, PERCY (1873–1936). One of the better-known "ROAD WAY theatre CRITICS of the era, Hammond was born in Cadiz, Ohio. He served as drama critic for the Chicago Evening Post (1898–1908), the Chicago Tribune (1908–21), and the New York Herald-Tribune (1921–1936). During his 15 years with the New York “Trib,” he earned a reputation as unflinchingly honest, often brutally caustic in his witty salvos, and stylistically scrupulous. HAMPDEN, WALTER (1879–1955).† One of the last prominent ACTORS in the 19th-century romantic style, Brooklyn-born and Harvard-educated Walter Hampden apprenticed with F. R. Benson’s British stage company, where he received theatrical training in 3HAKESPEARE and in the classics. Hampden’s 1907 American debut as !LLA.AZIMOVA’s leading man in productions of The Comtesse Coquette, The Master Builder, and A Doll’s House led to a long career in which he vacillated between popular contemporary plays and the classics. Among new plays, Hampden scored successes in The Servant in the House (1908), The City (1909), and Good Gracious Annabelle (1916), but much of his reputation was built in Shakespearean roles in Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and others. Hampden made a noteworthy Cyrano de Bergerac in a 1923 "ROADWAY revival of Edmund Rostand’s 1898 romantic drama, as well as the title role in another 19th-century staple, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Richelieu, which he first performed in 1929. During the 1940s, Hampden was a member of the American Repertory Theatre* ensemble and his career continued well into the 1950s in MOTIONPICTURES. He made a final stage appearance in Arthur Miller’s* The Crucible* (1953). See also BRAGDON, CLAUDE. HANFORD, CHARLES B. (1859–1926). Born in Sutter Creek, Amaden County, California, he was engaged by a STOCK company in Washington, D.C., in 1881, then TOURED with Thomas W. Keene. He earned invaluable experience and recognition when he toured

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with Edwin Booth and Lawrence Barrett, which then enabled him to form his own company and tour as a STAR. During World 7AR I, he became known for his recitation of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” HAPGOOD, NORMAN (1868–1937). Like his brother Hutchins Hapgood, Norman Hapgood was born in Chicago and became a journalist and drama CRITIC. However, he was also a socially active lawyer and a considerably more prolific writer. As a journalist, he wrote for New York Commercial Advertiser and The Bookman (1897–1902), then went on to major editorships, including Collier’s. His theatre books include The Stage in America (1901) and Why Janet Should Read SHAKESPEARE (1929). HARLEM RENAISSANCE. Embracing all of the arts—literature, painting, music, dance, and theatre (in all of its forms)—the !FRI CAN!MERICAN cultural flourishing first known as “The New Negro Movement” and later renamed “The Harlem Renaissance,” is usually identified with the decade of the 1920s, although purists would situate it more precisely between 1917 and 1935. A number of factors converged to generate the extraordinary outpouring of African American arts, beginning with the return of black soldiers who had participated in World 7AR I in France, followed by the “great migration” of southern blacks bringing their rural songs and stories into northern cities. The death of Booker T. Washington in 1916 left the way open for W. E. B. DuBois’s more militant leadership and commitment to the arts. His activist predilection for didactic drama was balanced by Alain Locke’s emphasis on the aesthetic qualities of work that was integral to a self-defined black culture. As the author of several seminal essays, Locke emerged as a strong, nurturing influence on African American artists like poet-PLAYWRIGHTS ,ANGSTON(UGHES and Georgia Douglas Johnson. He also encouraged Negro folk dramas like those of white playwright Ridgely Torrence, whose three one-acts—Granny Maumee, The Rider of Dreams, and Simon the Cyrenian—were both published (as Plays for a Negro Theatre) and performed (by Emily Hapgood’s company of Negro Players at the Garden Street Theatre) in 1917. Interest in black culture was taken up by white intellectuals like Carl Van Vechten and by socialites, who frequented Harlem night spots like the Cotton Club and helped

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make jazz rhythms so prevalent in the 1920s. :ORA.EALE(URSTON invented the term “Niggerati” for talented blacks who were suddenly fashionable among whites. In theatre, the all-black MUSICAL Shuffle Along (1921), written by Eubie Blake, Noble Sissle, Flournoy Miller, and Aubrey Lyles, ran for 484 performances on "ROADWAY. It ushered in a second blossoming of African American musicals (the first had been in the 1890s with works by Cole and Johnson, Williams and Walker, and others): Put and Take (1921), Strut Miss Lizzie (1922), The Chocolate Dandies (1924), and many others. Anita Bush founded the ,AFAYETTE 0LAYERS to perform legitimate drama; among the ACTORS who worked there were Charles Gilpin, 0AUL 2OBESON, Evelyn Preer, and Abbie Mitchell. Other theatre groups followed: Raymond O’Neil’s Ethiopian Art Theatre in Chicago (1922), Gilpin Players in Cleveland (1922, later at +ARAMU (OUSE), KRIGWA Players (1926), New Negro Art Theatre (1927), Harlem Experimental Theatre (1928), and many others. African American legitimate drama came to Broadway with Garland Anderson’s Appearances (1926). Actress Rose McClendon earned acclaim in In Abraham’s Bosom (1926) and in Porgy (1927). Academic theatre participated in the renaissance led by African American educators, including Randolph Edmonds (1900–1983), Owen Dodson (1914–1983), and cofounder of Howard Players with Alain Locke, Montgomery Gregory (1887–1971). HARNED, VIRGINIA (1868–1946). Born Virginia Hickes in Boston, Massachusetts, she began ACTING at 16. In 1895, she created the title role in Trilby opposite Wilton Lackaye as Svengali. Another major creation was the title role in The Adventures of Lady Ursula (1898), which allowed her to wear a boy’s clothing for part of the action. The breeches were not always appreciated in the conservative heartland when she TOURED the play with her husband E. H. Sothern (whom she divorced in 1910). Of her performance as Lady Ursula, Edward A. Dithmar wrote on 4 September 1898 in the New York Times, “Miss Harned’s talent is amply illustrated. She has never given a more delightful portrayal, and one hopes, after seeing her vivacious and refreshing expression of the harmless vanity, coquetry, and sentiment of Ursula never again to see her as a cigarette-smoking adventuress of the ‘society’ novel and drama of the departed eighties.”

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HARRIGAN, EDWARD (1845–1911). Born in New York City, Ned Harrigan began as a minstrel performer and eventually tried writing his own material. He made his professional debut as a legitimate AC TOR in San Francisco in 1867. In Chicago, he met Tony Hart, and they began in 1872 to perform together, using some COMEDY sketches Harrigan had written. Continuing the partnership in New York, they leased a theatre and created a series of light and lively comedies that bring together the city’s ethnic types. Harrigan and Hart’s “Mulligan Guard” series between 1879 and 1883 included The Mulligan Guard’s Ball, The Mulligan Guard’s Picnic, The Mulligan Guard’s Chowder, The Mulligan Guard Nominee The Mulligan Guard’s Christmas, The Mulligan Guard’s Surprise, and The Mulligans’ Silver Wedding. Other successes included Squatter Sovereignty (1882), Cordelia’s Aspirations (1883), and The Last of the Hogans (1891). Harrigan was married to his leading lady Annie T. Braham. HARRIS, HENRY B. (1866–1912). The St. Louis–born MANAGER Henry B. Harris, son of William Harris Sr., started out as a program boy at Boston’s Howard Atheneum. He rose from treasurer to business manager of Boston’s Columbia Theatre in three years. He became an independent manager in 1901. Among the important plays he PRODUCED were Strongheart (1905) and The Lion and the Mouse (1905). He managed such STARS as Amelia Bingham, May Irwin, and others. His VARIETY obituary (27 April 1912) notes that “the children in Stageland lost the best friend they ever had,” because of his fair treatment of the little people in his dealings with the big people. HARRIS, JED (1900–1979).† Born Jacob Horowitz in Vienna, Jed Harris arrived in America as a child and attended Yale University before working as a newspaper reporter for the New York Clipper. Despite the failure of his first theatrical venture, Weak Sisters (1925), he became so successful as a PRODUCER (and later as a DIRECTOR) that he was often described as the “wonder boy” of "ROADWAY, although many coworkers disliked him for his eccentric and rude behavior, ruthless business practices, and scathing sarcasm. 'EORGE!BBOTT called him the “Little Napoleon” of the American stage, an apt description capturing Harris’s brilliance, flamboyance, and dictatorial manner. Two mild successes with Love ’Em and Leave ’Em (1926) and Spread Eagle (1927) were mere precursors to a nearly unbroken

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string of Harris hits during the 1920s, including the original productions of Broadway (1926), Coquette (1927), The Royal Family (1927), and The Front Page (1928). Harris famously sued (ELEN(AYES, the STAR of Coquette, when she became pregnant and left the show during its run. She countered that her pregnancy was an “act of God,” prompting the addition of a clause in contracts protecting actors from lawsuits in such situations. Harris productions appeared more sporadically during the 1930s and after, but his staging of Uncle Vanya (1930) was well received and his production of the early gay-themed drama, The Green Bay Tree (1933), provided Laurence Olivier* with one of his first Broadway appearances. The same year, Harris presented Katharine Hepburn* in The Lake, a failure that nearly ended Hepburn’s career. More important later productions included Thornton Wilder’s* Our Town,* also DIRECTED by Harris, and The Heiress* (1947). He also directed Arthur Miller’s* The Crucible* in 1953 and his last, Guy Bolton’s Child of Fortune (1956), was a failure. He wrote two memoirs, Watchman, What of the Night? (1963) and A Dance on the High Wire (1979). HARRIS, SAM H. (1872–1941).† A native of New York’s Lower East Side, Samuel Henry Harris worked as a newsboy, salesman, and in a laundry before becoming MANAGER of boxer Terry McGovern, who appeared in a touring burlesque show, The Gay Morning Glories, between fights. When Harris bought a piece of the show, his PRODUC ING career began and it expanded in 1900 when he embarked on a four-year partnership with A. H. Woods and P. H. “Paddy” Sullivan to mount TOURING melodramas, including The Fatal Wedding and The Bowery After Dark. In 1904, Harris formed a legendary partnership with 'EORGE - #OHAN. As the MANAGEMENT team Cohan and Harris, they staged innumerable productions, including virtually all of Cohan’s plays and MUSICALS from Little Johnny Jones (1904) to The Royal Vagabond (1919), at which point they dissolved their partnership. On his own, Harris kept up a prodigious producing schedule, including The Music Box Revues and many of the most successful musicals and plays of the 1920s and 1930s. Before 1930, these included The Hero (1921), Six-Cylinder Love (1921), Rain (1922), Icebound (1923), The Nervous Wreck (1924), The Jazz Singer (1925), Cradle Snatchers (1925), The Cocoanuts (1925),

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Chicago (1926), Animal Crackers (1928), and June Moon (1929). He continued to produce until the year of his death, including the 0U LITZER0RIZE–winners Of Thee I Sing! (1933) and You Can’t Take It with You* (1936), and mounted a reunion with Cohan, who STARRED in the Harris-produced Richard Rodgers-Lorenz Hart musical satire, I’d Rather Be Right (1937). Harris was well-respected for his taste, attention to every detail of production, and his genial manner. HARRIS, WILLIAM, JR. (1884–1946). The brother of Henry B. Harris was born in Boston and became a PRODUCER. His successes included The Yellow Jacket (1912), Abraham Lincoln (1919), The Bad Man (1920), and The Criminal Code (1929). His production of East Is West (1918) made a STAR of &AY"AINTER. HARRIS, WILLIAM, SR. (1844–1916). The Prussian-born PRO DUCER was brought to America when he was six. Starting as a jig dancer, he worked his way up in show business, eventually acquiring and MANAGING several theatres. Through his partnerships in various enterprises with Charles Frohman, with Al Hayman, and with Klaw & Erlanger, he was involved in the formation of the Theatrical Syndicate in 1895. According to M. B. Leavitt, Billy Harris was always popular with his colleagues and had not a single enemy in the entire business of theatrical management (1912, 291). His sons William Harris Jr. and Henry B. Harris both became producers. HART, TONY (1855–1891). Born Anthony J. Cannon in Worcester, Massachusetts, he made his professional debut as “Master Antonio” with the Howard Atheneum in Boston. At 16, he met Edward Harrigan, and the two discovered complementary personae and skills. When they settled in New York to present legitimate COMEDIES, Harrigan wrote major roles for Hart, who often performed in drag. The partnership ended in the mid-1880s. See also FEMALE IMPER SONATION. HART, WILLIAM S. (1870?–1946). Although best known as the major MOTION PICTURE cowboy STAR of the silent era, Hart had a significant legitimate ACTING career, which he colorfully recounts in his memoir My Life East and West (1929). He made his debut in 1889 in Daniel Bandmann’s company. He performed with Lawrence

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Barrett on the Ganelon TOUR. He acted 3HAKESPEAREAN leads opposite Julia Arthur, Hortense Rhéa, and Helena Modjeska, and created the role of Messala in Ben-Hur (1899). HATTON, FANNY LOCKE (1870–1939) and FREDERIC H. HATTON (1879–1946). Known familiarly as “The Hattons,” this husband-and-wife PLAYWRITING team supplied "ROADWAY with a steady stream of COMEDIES during the 1910s and 1920s. Fanny Cottinet Locke was born in Chicago and given an excellent education in Connecticut and Germany. While married to her first husband, John Kenneth MacKenzie, Fanny was familiarly called “Mrs. Jack” among the social elite of Chicago. MacKenzie was killed by the Yaqui in Mexico, and four years later, in 1909, the vivacious young widow married the Chicago Evening Post’s drama CRITIC, Frederic Hatton. They began collaborating on the play reviews, which were signed simply “The Hattons” after he moved to the Chicago Herald in 1914. The Hattons’ playwriting collaboration began in 1911 with Years of Discretion, which David Belasco PRODUCED in New York, where it ran for a year, STARRING Effie Shannon. The “debonair couple” had a gift for creating sophisticated light comedies with innuendos that seemed daring without really offending polite sensibilities. Percy Hammond later saw them as “the pioneers of polite indecorum in the Drama” (New York Herald Tribune, 24 September 1932). Upstairs and Down (1916) ran for 320 performances and its “baby vampire” character was sometimes signaled as the origin of the 1920s flapper. Among their many other plays were The Call of Youth (1914), The Great Lover (1915, with Leo Ditrichstein), Lombardi, Ltd. (1917), We Girls (1921), and Treat ’em Rough (1926). HAVLIN, JOHN H. (1847–1924). Although he was born in Covington, Kentucky, “Johnny” Havlin grew up in Cincinnati, where he would hang around the theatres as a child. He rose through local MANAGEMENT and borrowed the capital to build the Havlin Theatre (later called Lyceum) in Cincinnati. Soon he expanded to building theatres in St. Louis and managing concessions for the St. Louis World’s Fair. He underwrote several CIRCUS ventures and backed the first lucrative Hagenbeck Show. Havlin was already experienced in

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theatre management when he joined with E. D. Stair to form Stair and Havlin, a pioneering organization for booking popular-priced melodrama into their circuit of theatres which extended from the east coast to Kansas City. Havlin eventually returned to Cincinnati to build the Walnut Street Theatre and to manage the Grand Opera House there. According to Robert Grau, Havlin was “noted for his benevolence. His charities knew no bounds” (1910, 175). HAWORTH, JOSEPH (1858–1903). Although born in Providence, Rhode Island, it was in Cleveland, Ohio, that he made his debut as a CHILD ACTOR with the Ellsler 3TOCK Company there. He sold tickets to earn the right to act with Charlotte Cushman when she appeared in Cleveland in 1875. When Edwin Booth played Cleveland, Haworth supported him, and this led to his performing four seasons at the Boston Museum. He TOURED with John McCullough in 1881. Many other good roles followed. HAYES, HELEN (1900–1993).† Born Helen Brown in Washington, D.C., to an ACTRESS and a salesman, Helen Hayes debuted at the age of five with a STOCK company. She then appeared in Lew Fields’s "ROADWAY MUSICAL Old Dutch (1909). After other musicals, Hayes graduated to teenage roles with Polyanna (1917), Penrod (1918), and playing opposite William Gillette in Dear Brutus (1918). Beginning with Clarence (1919), her demure, natural acting, which departed from the more histrionic approach typical in the 1920s, elevated her stature. During the early 1920s, flapper roles in To the Ladies (1922), We Moderns (1924), and Dancing Mothers (1924) won her a following, but Hayes wisely challenged herself in a 1925 revival of She Stoops to Conquer (1924) and 'EORGE "ERNARD 3HAW’s Caesar and Cleopatra (1925). In 1926, Hayes assayed her favorite role, Maggie, in a revival of What Every Woman Knows, which she followed with Coquette (1927), battling the show’s PRODUCER, *ED (ARRIS, who sued her when she became pregnant (her husband was PLAYWRIGHT Charles MacArthur*) and left the show during the run. After 1930 and throughout her long career, Hayes appeared with distinction in a range of classic and contemporary roles, almost all of which enhanced her title as one of the “First Ladies of the American Theatre,” along with contemporaries ,YNN&ONTANNE and +ATHARINE#OR

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NELL. Among her many standout performances after 1930 was her signature role as Queen Victoria in Victoria Regina* (1935). HAYMAN, AL (1851?–1917). Known in theatre history as one of the six men who created the Theatrical Syndicate, Hayman may be considered its actual founder, according to M. B. Leavitt (1912, 267), who had pioneered the circuit concept in the west while Hayman worked for him. Hayman took the idea to Klaw & Erlanger, and the Syndicate was born in 1895. As his health declined during the decade before his death, he left the MANAGEMENT of his business to his brother Alf Hayman (1865–1921), who was born in Wheeling, West Virginia. He worked for Charles Frohman, first as publicity man and then as general manager of Frohman’s interests. HAZEL KIRKE. 3TEELE -AC+AYE’s four-act melodrama, which opened on 4 February 1880 for a remarkable 486 performances at the Madison Square Theatre, became the longest-running nonMUSICAL play of its time. Its innovations included the omission of an obvious villain and unusually subtle characterizations. Hazel Kirke is disowned by her father, a morally rigid Scotsman named Dunstan Kirke, when she decides to marry Arthur Carrington instead of the man he has selected for her. Hazel’s troubles are compounded when Arthur’s mother, Emily, considers her beneath their social status since Arthur is also Lord Travers. When Emily convinces Hazel that the marriage to Arthur is illegal, the despondent Hazel attempts suicide by drowning, but has a change of heart and calls for help. Her father, Dunstan, who is now blind, is unable to assist Hazel, but Arthur arrives in time to save her. The success of Hazel Kirke, hinting at the rise of the independent woman, was so significant that five ROAD companies played while the original continued on "ROADWAY. Among the first plays to spawn TOURS (14 were on the road by 1882), it also provided a STARmaking role for Effie Ellsler, the original Hazel, who established her own company and continued to play Hazel until 1905. Other ACTRESSES scored successes with the role, including Georgia Cayvan, Annie Russell, and Phoebe Davis. Since Lottie Blair Parker had acted in a Hazel Kirke company, it is perhaps not surprising that her own hit play Way Down East (1898) bore some resemblances to the earlier work.

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HAZELTON, GEORGE C. (1868–1921). Born in Boscobel, Wisconsin, the PLAYWRIGHT first practiced law with his brother. His notable writing for the stage includes Mistress Nell (1900) and The Yellow Jacket (1912, with J. Harry Benrimo). HAZZARD, JOHN E. (1881–1935). New York–born John E. Hazzard went on the stage as a COMEDIAN in The Yankee Consul (1904), followed by numerous performances in MUSICALS and comedies. He also wrote plays and musicals, most notably Turn to the Right! (1916), coauthored by Winchell Smith, which was his longestrunning success, but also Go to It (1916) and Houseboat on the Styx (1928). Hazzard continued ACTING until shortly before his death, appearing last in Champagne, Sec* (1933). HE AND SHE. Originally PRODUCED in Boston in 1912 as The Herfords, this renamed and lightly revised version of 2ACHEL #ROTH ERS’s play opened 12 February 1920 and ran for 28 performances at the Little Theatre. A compelling treatment of the difficulties faced by the new woman, the play focuses on Ann Herford, a sculptor married to a sculptor. On the verge of attaining the recognition for which she has worked hard, she ultimately defers the career opportunity to her husband so that she can do the right thing as the mother of a teenage daughter. HEART OF MARYLAND, THE. David Belasco’s four-act melodrama opened on 22 October 1895 at the Herald Square Theatre, racking up 229 performances. Set during the American Civil 7AR, the play examines the painful division within a Maryland family. Young Colonel Alan Kendrick chooses to fight for the North, while his father sides with the South. Complicating matters, Alan’s fiancée, Maryland Calvert, is a Confederate sympathizer and her brother, Lloyd, is a Northern spy. Alan sneaks across the battle lines to see Maryland, but he is captured by Thorpe, a Confederate officer whose prewar court-martial had been carried out by Alan. Thorpe is bent on revenge and orders Alan shot as a spy. When the heartsick Maryland pleads for Alan’s life, Thorpe attempts to seduce her. She stabs Thorpe, allowing Alan a chance for escape. The wounded Thorpe orders the church bell rung to signal Alan’s escape, but Maryland prevents this by grabbing the bell’s clapper to absorb the sound with

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her own body. Alan leads a raid with Federal troops and not only captures Thorpe, but also finds a cache of letters from Robert E. Lee denouncing Thorpe. As the curtain falls, Alan and Maryland are reunited. Mrs. Leslie Carter played Maryland opposite Maurice Barrymore as Alan. The Heart of Maryland TOURED for three seasons and was instrumental in the establishment of Belasco’s PRODUCING predominance on "ROADWAY. HEARTS OF OAK. One of James A. Herne’s earliest plays, Hearts of Oak had a plot and themes suggested by David Belasco, who encouraged Herne’s PLAYWRITING aspirations. Originally titled Chums, the “six tableaux” play was written and first PRODUCED under that title on 17 November 1879 at Hamlin’s Theatre in Chicago. Reworked, it toured successfully to several cities and opened at New York’s Fifth Avenue Theatre on 29 March 1880, but achieved only a short run there. Hearts of Oak deals with an old sailor, Owen Garroway (critics noted a striking similarity with Charles Dickens’s old salt, Dan Peggotty), raising two orphans, a boy and a girl, Little Chrystal (a character Herne named for his own daughter). Owen falls in love with Chrystal, but ultimately loses her to the boy. Herne was accused of plagiarizing aspects of the play and, in turn, he later sued a troupe performing a play called Oaken Hearts. Herne later reused elements of this play in his last dramatic work, Sag Harbor (1899). $IRECTOR John Ford made Hearts of Oak into a 1924 MOTIONPICTURE, but it is presumably lost. HECHT, BEN (1894–1964).† Born in New York and reared in Wisconsin, Ben Hecht is identified with Chicago, the locale used in his best-known play, coauthored with Charles MacArthur*: The Front Page (1928), a scathing and hilarious melodrama of 1920s yellow journalism and corruption in the Windy City during the Jazz Age. After working as a CIRCUS performer and musician, Hecht became a Chicago reporter and dabbled in PLAYWRITING with Kenneth Sawyer Goodman, with whom he collaborated on several one-acts including The Wonder Hat (1914) and The Hero of Santa Maria (1915). His collaboration with MacArthur also yielded the farce Twentieth Century* (1932). On his own, he wrote The Egotist (1922), The Stork (1925), the libretto for the Richard Rodgers-Lorenz Hart MUSICAL

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Jumbo (1935), Ladies and Gentlemen (1939), and Swan Song (1946). Most of his career was spent writing novels and over 150 MOTION PICTURES from the beginning of the sound era into the 1960s. HEGGIE, O. P. (1876–1936). Otto Peters Heggie was born in Angaston, South Australia. His career took him from law practice to the MUSICAL stage in London to the legitimate theatre in New York to MOTIONPICTURE ACTING in California. Above all, he preferred stage acting, to which he would regularly return even after he became a Hollywood favorite. He played many character roles as well as the title role in Minick (1924) by 'EORGE3+AUFMAN and %DNA &ERBER. HELD BY THE ENEMY. This five-act melodrama by ACTOR William Gillette opened on 16 August 1886 at the Madison Square Theatre for 70 performances. Regarded by CRITICS as the first worthy play to deal with the Civil 7AR, it depicts the capturing of a Confederate city by Northern forces. Federal Brigade Surgeon Fielding falls in love with Southerner Rachel McCreery despite the fact that she is the fiancée of Confederate Lieutenant Gordon Hayne. When Hayne is captured as a spy, Fielding is appointed judge in his trial. The resourceful Hayne escapes, but is wounded in the process. Pretending to be dead, Hayne is hidden by Rachel and her family. Fielding is not fooled, however, but agrees to allow Hayne’s escape if Rachel will promise to marry him. Hayne does escape, but ultimately returns and forces Fielding to release Rachel from her promise. The play was popular in the American heartland. 0RODUCER Charles Frohman revived Held by the Enemy in 1910 with Gillette himself in the lead. A MOTIONPICTURE version was released in 1920. HELL-BENT FER HEAVEN. The Carolina mountain drama by Hatcher Hughes opened on 4 January 1924 at the Klaw Theater, ran for 128 performances, and won the 0ULITZER0RIZE in a controversial decision, as members of the selection committee who had chosen 'EORGE +ELLY’s The Show-Off for the award were overruled by Columbia University officials who preferred Hughes’s play. Sid Hunt comes home after fighting in the WAR in France, eager to marry Jude Lowry, which will certainly end the long-ago feud between the Hunts and the Lowrys. However, while Sid was away, the shiftless Rufe

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Pryor “got that camp-meetin’ brand o’ religion,” which he has tried to foist on everyone and has been having some success with Jude. Rufe plots to have Sid killed, justifying it on religious grounds. A deluge, a dynamited dam, and a flood bring matters to an exciting climax. See also FOLK DRAMA. HELL’S BELLS. Opening on 26 January 1925 at Wallack’s Theatre, this COMEDY by Barry Conners ran for 139 performances. Published by Samuel French with the title changed to Fool’s Gold, presumably to make it safe for AMATEUR production in middle America, it became a frequent STOCK vehicle. Humphrey Bogart* and Shirley Booth* played the romantic interest, but the true appeal of the play lies in its still-viable hilarity. A couple of rough-edged Arizona gold miners stay at the Tanglewood Lodge in Connecticut, and their presence brings out the greed in some family members. In one funny sequence, the girl Gladys “registers her emotions,” showing what she has learned in the Delsarte course she takes from Professor Boggs, hoping to prove how worthwhile it would be for the two old codgers to invest in her talent. HENIGER, ALICE MINNIE HERTS (1870?–1933). Born and educated in New York City, Alice Herts found her way to her life work as a PRODUCER of CHILDREN’s theatre* by implementing social reforms in the city’s immigrant communities. As manager of the entertainment division of the Educational Alliance of New York City, she pursued opportunities to take live theatre to children. The Children’s Education Theatre program she established in 1903 can be signaled as the beginning of children’s theatre in America. Her business partner and eventual husband Jacob Heniger DIRECTED productions. Although illness and financial reverses ended her Educational Theatre for Children and Young People in 1909, the impact of her work was lasting. Her ideas are fortunately preserved in her two books: Children’s Educational Theatre (1911) and The Kingdom of the Child (1918). HENRIETTA, THE. Although a theatre fire caused it to close prematurely, Bronson Howard’s melodrama of Wall Street opened on 26 September 1887 at the Union Square Theatre for 158 performances to become one of the most popular plays of its era. The Henrietta

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engrossed Gilded Age audiences and spawned continual revivals into the early 1910s (an updated version called The New Henrietta was first performed in 1913). Its exploration of the corrosive aspects of money matters on a grand scale, mixed with romantic intrigue, was inspired, in part, by William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. In The Henrietta, Nicholas Van Alstyne, portrayed in the original production by W. H. Crane, has amassed a fortune in the stock market. His nefarious son, Nicholas Jr., resents his father’s success and attempts to manipulate the market (in part by stealing some of his father’s securities) to make his own fortune and undermine his father’s wealth. Nicholas Jr. has also been cheating on his loyal wife Rose, but his younger brother Bertie destroys incriminating evidence to protect both of them. As the financial panic started by Nicholas Jr. commences, Nicholas Sr. confronts him and the profligate son dies of a heart attack. The loving Bertie gives all of his money to his father to save the family fortune and Rose, who has refused to believe the truth about Nicholas Jr., finds true love. The financial turmoil resulting from rises and falls in the market and the manipulations of monopolies created a welcome climate in the late 19th century for a play exploring Wall Street’s growing significance in American life. Many theatre historians rank The Henrietta as one of the most influential "ROADWAY plays prior to the emergence of %UGENE/.EILL. HERMAN, DAVID (1876–1930). Spending much of his early DI RECTING career in European Jewish theatre, beginning in Odessa in 1908 with Peretz Hirshbein’s troupe, David Herman worked with Warsaw’s Arts Corner in 1910 and the Vilna Troupe in 1917, for whom he staged a highly stylized version of S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk. Herman subsequently immigrated to the United States to direct for the Jewish Art Theatre and the Folksbiene, a Yiddish theatre company founded in 1915. HERNE, CHRYSTAL (1883–1950). Born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, Katherine Chrystal Herne began her career in 1899 ACTING in the plays of her father, James A. Herne. She never attained STARDOM, but she was a respected character actress excelling in roles requiring stature and imperiousness. She appeared in As a Man Thinks (1911), and was particularly well-received in the first U.S. production of W. Somerset Maugham’s Our Betters (1917). In the 1920s, Herne’s

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notable appearances included Expressing Willie (1924) and Craig’s Wife (1925). See also HERNE, KATHARINE CORCORAN. HERNE, JAMES A. (1839–1901). Born in Cohoes, New York, son of a poverty-stricken Irish immigrant family, James Aherne left school in early adolescence to work in a brush factory. His family’s Dutch Reformed religious beliefs forbade attending theatre, but when he saw Edwin Forrest ACT he determined to pursue a theatrical career, changing his name slightly to James A. Herne. His first acting experience was in melodrama with a STOCK company in West Troy, New York, after which he worked with John T. Ford in Washington and Baltimore. He also acted at Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theatre and in both Montreal and New York, appearing in Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne (1869) at Niblo’s Gardens. Herne was married briefly to actress Helen Western, and later to actress Katharine Corcoran Herne. He worked for a season MANAGING the Grand Opera House in New York and then journeyed to California, where David Belasco encouraged his budding PLAYWRITING interests. Collaborating with Belasco, Herne wrote his first significant drama, Hearts of Oak (1880), which veered from the typical melodramas of the day in its greater REALISM. A break with Belasco motivated Herne to solo writing for a panoramic historical drama, The Minute Men of 1774–75 (1886), which failed. Herne’s Drifting Apart (1888) gained approval from CRITICS for its realistic style, inspired by the plays of Norwegian dramatist (ENRIK)BSEN. Herne’s major dramatic accomplishment, Margaret Fleming (1891), which depicts an upper-class woman’s response to her faithless husband, also won critical acclaim, but was generally rejected by audiences who found the similarity to Ibsen’s controversial plays unsettling. Herne’s next play, Shore Acres (1893), in which he played the leading role, found more appreciative audiences and was often revived. Herne’s subsequent works, including Sag Harbor (1900), in which the author also acted, won favor, as did The Reverend Griffith Davenport (1899). The difficulty of making a living as a playwright is illustrated by Herne’s example; he often acted in or DIRECTED plays by others while writing new plays of his own. He appeared successfully in Joseph R. Grismer and Clay Greene’s The New South (1893), and he revised and directed Israel Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto (1899) for its American premiere. Herne was sometimes called “The American

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Ibsen,” and his fame rests mostly on his enlightened interest in modernist trends in drama. See also HERNE, CHRYSTAL. HERNE, KATHARINE CORCORAN (1856–1943). The wife of PLAYWRIGHT James A. Herne and mother of ACTRESS Chrystal Herne was herself a reputable actress. Born Katharine Corcoran in Ballyleeks, County Cork, Ireland,* she came to New York with her parents and siblings in 1860. In her youth, she became an ardent theatergoer, first in New York and continuing in San Francisco when her family moved there. After two years of acting lessons with Mrs. Julia Melville, she joined Herne’s company, soon rose to leading lady, and married Herne in 1878. She played Chrystal in his play Hearts of Oak as well as featured roles in most of his subsequent plays, but it was for the title role in Margaret Fleming (1891), which Herne wrote for her, that she earned her greatest plaudits. The subtle truthfulness of her portrayal helped to promote the new REALISM, and she steadily encouraged his writing in the vein of (ENRIK)BSEN, despite the resistance of some CRITICS. After Herne’s death, she became active in Chicago theatre, serving as a DIRECTOR of the New Theatre and overseeing a revival of Margaret Fleming with her daughter in the title role. HERO, THE. Gilbert Emery’s tragiCOMEDY of the aftermath of the WAR opened at the Longacre Theatre on 14 March 1921 for a limited run of four matinee performances. Revived on 5 September 1921 at the Belmont Theatre, it ran for 80 performances. When the scapegrace younger brother, Oswald, comes home from the war, he is treated as a hero, although his older brother Andy knows that he went only because he had ruined a girl and stolen some money. Andy’s wife Hester becomes interested in Oswald, but he resists her. After a struggle with himself, Oswald steals the church money with which Andy was entrusted. On his way out of town, Oswald dies saving a child from a fire. Hester knows about the stolen money, but saves her brother-in-law’s posthumous reputation by saying he was taking it to deposit. Oswald will indeed be remembered as a hero. HERTS, HENRY B. (1871–1933). The eminent theatre architect was born in New York City and studied abroad. In partnership with Hugh Tallant (1869–1952), Herts developed steel cantilevers to avoid the

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sight-line problem of pillars to support the balcony. In 1903, Herts and Tallant opened their first two theatres, the New Amsterdam and the new Lyceum. These were followed by the Liberty (1904), the Gaiety (1909), and the (ELEN(AYES (1911). On his own, Herts designed the Sam S. 3HUBERT, Booth’s, and the Longacre Theatres, all opening in 1913. See alsoARCHITECTURE. HEYWARD, DOROTHY HARTZELL KUHNS (1890–1961) and DUBOSE (1885–1940).† The Heywards crafted two of his novels into important folk dramas of !FRICAN!MERICAN life. A native of South Carolina, Heyward was an insurance man who published short stories and poetry in the early 1920s. With his wife’s collaboration, he adapted his novel Porgy into a 1927 0ULITZER 0RIZE–winning drama depicting a crippled black beggar’s doomed love for a faithless woman. Heyward collaborated when George Gershwin composed a folk opera, Porgy and Bess (1935), from this play. Heyward’s 1931 drama Brass Ankle, written specifically for the stage, is the tale of a woman who plans suicide when she learns she has Negro blood. Another dramatized Heyward novel, Mamba’s Daughters* (1939), a melodrama concerning three generations of a black family, benefited from the compelling performance of Ethel Waters.* HILLIARD, ROBERT C. (1857–1927). Born in New York City, he began his ACTING career in Brooklyn at the Criterion Theatre, which he leased with Wesley Sisson. In 1886, he made his debut there as Arthur Chilton in False Shame. He moved quickly into leading man roles opposite STARS like Georgia Cayvan. Hilliard found his best role in A Fool There Was (1909). him. Opening on 18 April 1928 at the Provincetown Playhouse in New York, the inscrutable play by e. e. cummings ran for 21 performances. Two characters—Him and Me—represent the central consciousness of expressionist drama, but the piece could also be called surrealist, and it has elements of symbolism, abstract poetry, Freudian psychology, and burlesque. It might also be interpreted as a parody of %UGENE/.EILL’s The Great God Brown. HIT-THE-TRAIL HOLLIDAY. 'EORGE-#OHAN’s breezy four-act farce based on an idea given to Cohan by George Middleton and

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Guy Bolton, who collaborated with him, was PRODUCED by Cohan and 3AM((ARRIS at the Astor Theatre for 336 performances beginning on 13 September 1915. Billy Holliday (played in the original production by Fred Niblo, Cohan’s brother-in-law) is a New York City saloonkeeper who arrives in a small New England hamlet with the intention of opening a hotel. When he runs afoul of the local liquor distributor, he becomes a prohibitionist and is so good at it that he runs all of the saloons and hotels in the area out of business. His strict “no alcohol” stance aids him in his romance with Edith Holden, the local minister’s daughter. Some critics and audiences believed that Cohan was satirizing evangelist Billy Sunday, but Middleton claimed in his autobiography that the inspiration for the story was a bookmaker he knew who similarly crusaded against racetracks to ensure clients would bet with him. Cohan himself ACTED the role in a 1918 MOTIONPICTURE version. HITE, MABEL (1885–1912). Although born in Ashland, Kentucky, Hite was claimed as a product of Kansas City, where she grew up. As a CHILD, she performed in local productions DIRECTED by Georgia Brown. At 15, she played the daughter of the regiment in Charles Hoyt’s A Milk White Flag. Despite her vocal talent well suited for MUSICAL COMEDY, she preferred to perform rapid-fire comedy sketches in variety. She married baseball player Mike Donlin and together they played the Orpheum vaudeville circuit. Her "ROADWAY credits included the STARRING role in A Certain Party (1911). HOBART, GEORGE VERE (1867–1926). The prolific PLAYWRIGHT, born at Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, was first employed as a telegraph operator. United Press put him in charge of a telegraph key in Cumberland, Maryland, which became his hometown. There he moved into journalism and worked his way up to the Baltimore Daily News, where he could indulge his flair for writing character sketches. His Dinkelspiel sketches regaled newspaper readers for 16 years. From 1900, Hobart devoted himself to writing for the theatre, including lyrics for his MUSICAL librettos. His many legitimate plays include Wildfire (1907, with George H. Broadhurst), Experience (1914), and Our Mrs. McChesney (1915, with %DNA&ERBER). His numerous musicals include Sally in Our Alley (1902) and revue skits for several editions of the Ziegfeld Follies.

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HODGE, WILLIAM T. (1874–1932). The ACTOR-PLAYWRIGHT was born in Albion, New York, and acted from CHILDHOOD. He TOURED with James A. Herne in Sag Harbor. He found his longest-running leading role in The Man from Home, which opened in Chicago in 1907 and ran a year there before moving to a 496-performance run in New York; he toured in it until 1913. Hodge also wrote plays as STARRING vehicles for himself: Eighteen Miles from Home (1904), The Road to Happiness (1913), A Cure for Curables (1917), For All of Us (1922), The Judge’s Husband (1926), and others. HOFFMAN, AARON (1880–1924). The prolific author of ethnic COM EDIES and vaudeville monologues was born in St. Louis. Among his plays, which often feature Jewish and Irish American characters are The Friendly Enemies (1918, with Samuel Shipman), Nothing But Lies (1918), Welcome Stranger (1919), and Two Blocks Away (1921). HOLIDAY. One of the quintessential 0HILIP "ARRY high COMEDIES, Holiday opened for 229 performances at New York’s Plymouth Theatre on 26 November 1928, PRODUCED by !RTHUR (OPKINS, and STARRING Hope Williams. Frequently revived, including "ROADWAY productions in 1973 and 1995, Holiday is essentially a satire on New York high society, with a strong dose of moral philosophizing about the value of living life to the fullest. Johnny Case, a bright young man of means, is engaged to Julia Seton, also from the privileged class. Julia wants Johnny to move into her father’s business, but Johnny prefers to use his means to live a fuller life away from the strictures of unfulfilling work and what he sees as the hypocrisies of high society. Johnny finds an unexpected ally in Julia’s sister, Linda, who shares his desire to break away from the constraints of her pompous father’s expectations. Julia pressures Johnny to acquiesce, but Johnny sees in Ned, Julia, and Linda’s alcoholic brother, what he might become. Johnny breaks off his engagement to Julia and runs away with his soulmate, Linda. A 1980 MUSICAL adaptation, Happy New Year, failed despite a score of recycled Cole Porter tunes, but the 1938 George Cukor–directed MOTIONPICTURE (a remake of a 1930 version) starring Katharine Hepburn* and Cary Grant is a screen classic. HOLLAND, EDMUND MILTON (1848–1913). A son of ACTOR George Holland (1791–1870), E. M. Holland began acting at age

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seven. From 1867 to 1879, he was a member of Lester Wallack’s* company. After a London engagement, he joined the Madison Square Theatre company in 1883 and performed there until 1890. One of his great roles was Captain Redwood in Jim, the Penman (1892). He played Fag in the famous 1896 all-STAR revival of The Rivals, as well as an impressive list of roles in New York and on TOUR. See also CHILDPERFORMERS. HOLLAND, JOSEPH (1860–1926). Named Joseph Jefferson Holland for the great ACTOR Joseph Jefferson III, he was born in New York City, a son of actor George Holland and brother of actors George Holland and Edmund Milton Holland. He earned early recognition as Theseus in Augustin Daly’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, then acted in COMEDIES PRODUCED by Charles Frohman from 1890 to 1902. He joined the Lambs’ Club in 1883, a membership continuing 43 years. HOPKINS, ARTHUR (1878–1950).† Born in Cleveland, Arthur Melancthon Hopkins worked as a newspaper reporter covering President William McKinley’s assassination before becoming a vaudeville press agent doing publicity for Vernon and Irene Castle. His first "ROADWAY PRODUCING effort, Poor Little Rich Girl (1913), was successful and he followed it with %LMER 2ICE’s first important play, On Trial (1914), coproduced by 'EORGE-#OHAN and 3AM ((ARRIS, and Good Gracious Annabelle (1916), A Successful Calamity (1917), and Redemption (1918) STARRING John Barrymore. Hopkins produced two 3HAKESPEAREAN productions, Richard III (1920) and Hamlet (1922), for Barrymore, who won great acclaim in both roles. Hopkins also produced The Jest (1919) for Barrymore and his brother, Lionel Barrymore, which CRITICS praised, but when Hopkins presented Lionel in Macbeth (1921), it was a failure. These productions and a series of (ENRIK)BSEN’s plays starring !LLA.A ZIMOVA enhanced Hopkins’s prestige. When he DIRECTED %UGENE /.EILL’s 0ULITZER0RIZE–winning Anna Christie (1921), as well as O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape (1922), he began a decade of producing and/or directing many of the most important plays of the era, including Laurence Stallings and -AXWELL !NDERSON’s What Price Glory (1924), two 0HILIP "ARRY plays, Paris Bound (1927) and

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Holiday (1928), Burlesque (1927; which he coauthored), Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal (1928), and his own play, Conquest (1933), a retelling of Hamlet. Hopkins worked closely with SCENEDESIGNER 2OBERT%DMOND *ONES for many of these productions and he is credited with discovering Pauline Lord and Katharine Hepburn.* Although Hopkins produced and directed with less frequency after 1930, he was associated with a few more important plays, including 2OBERT%3HERWOOD’s The Petrified Forest* (1935), which starred ,ESLIE (OWARD and provided Humphrey Bogart* with his first significant role, and The Magnificent Yankee* (1946). Hopkins believed it was the role of the producer to introduce new talent to the theatre and his polished productions did just that, also providing support to established stars and writers. HOPPER, DE WOLF (1858–1935). The popular COMEDIAN was born William DeWolf Hopper in New York City, performed AMATEUR theatricals in his youth, and made his professional debut in 1878 in New Haven, Connecticut. After two seasons of TOURING, he was cast as the hero in Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart’s The Blackbird (1882) on "ROADWAY, then went back on the ROAD with the Madison Square Theatre company’s Hazel Kirke. An invitation to join McCaull’s Opera Company precipitated Hopper’s move to MUSICALS, and he stayed five seasons with that company. Most of his work thereafter was in musicals, but one staple of his ACTING repertoire merits mention. For over four decades, beginning 13 May 1888, Hopper made a specialty of reciting Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s poem “Casey at the Bat,” often as between-the-acts entertainment. He married musical comedienne Della Fox, with whom he often coSTARRED. His memoir Once a Clown, Always a Clown was published in 1927. He died on tour in Kansas City. HOPWOOD, AVERY (1884–1928). The PLAYWRIGHT was born in Cleveland, Ohio, graduated from Michigan University in 1905, and joined the staff of the Cleveland Leader. Sent to New York as correspondent for the Leader, Hopwood tried to peddle his COMEDY Clothes, but the agency sent it to Channing Pollock for rewrites, to which Pollock agreed on the understanding that Hopwood had assented to the play doctoring. Pollock recalled in his autobiography

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that “Avery had written a crisp, witty satire on the society of our day, with touches of excellent melodrama, and I believed care in revision might give us a noteworthy success” (1943, 150). Pollock was surprised at a tryout to meet the playwright, who had never been informed that he had a coauthor. But Hopwood complimented Pollock on the improvements, and the two became friends. The success of the 1906 production initiated Hopwood’s switch to playwriting, and his numerous successes brought him a fortune. These include This Woman and This Man (1909), Nobody’s Widow (1910), Fair and Warmer (1915), The Gold Diggers (1919), The Demi-Virgin (1921), Why Men Leave Home (1922), Little Miss Bluebeard (1923), The Best People (1924, with David Gray), Naughty Cinderella (1925), The Garden of Eden (1927). With Mary Roberts Rinehart, he wrote Seven Days (1909), The Bat (1920), and Spanish Love (1920). With Willison Collison, he wrote The Girl in the Limousine (1919) and Getting Gertie’s Garter (1921). Pollock suggests that Hopwood’s death by drowning at JuanLes-Pins, France, may have been premeditated. HORNBLOW, ARTHUR (1865–1942). The CRITIC was born in Manchester, England, studied in Paris, and came to the United States in 1889 to join the staff of the New York Dramatic Mirror. He was a play reader for A. M. Palmer from 1892 to 1894. From 1901 to 1926, he was the founding editor of Theatre Magazine. He wrote several books on theatre, including A History of the Theatre in America (1919). His son, Arthur Hornblow Jr. (1893–1976) was a successful MOTIONPICTURE PRODUCER. HOUSE OF GLASS, THE. Max Marcin’s first play, The House of Glass, opened on 1 September 1915 for 245 performances at the Chandler Theatre PRODUCED by 'EORGE-#OHAN (although he did not claim writing credit, Cohan worked with Marcin on polishing the script). Businessman Harry Lake hires a detective to find out which of his employees is stealing from the firm. The detective unearths the secret of Lake’s wife, Margaret, who spent time in prison for a crime she did not commit. Lake is shocked, but the couple reconcile. Clara Kemble Young STARRED in a 1918 MOTIONPICTURE version. HOUSE OF MIRTH, THE. Clyde Fitch adapted Edith Wharton’s novel about Lily Bart (played by Fay Davis), whose hopes for love

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are thwarted by the vicious machinations of the New York social scene. Fitch’s adaptation, which opened on 22 October 1906 at the Savoy Theatre, PRODUCED by Charles Frohman, achieved only 14 performances, proving a rare failure for Fitch. HOUSE STAFF. The MANAGER of any theatre employed a number of people to keep it running smoothly: box office personnel, ticket takers, doormen, ushers, cleaning crew, house electrician, engineer, and night watchman. Some cities required that theatres hire firemen to be on duty during all performances. In some cases, policemen were on hand to calm unruly spectators or to protect the treasurer in the ticket office. HOWARD, BRONSON (1842–1908). Born in Detroit, Bronson Crocker Howard is often described as the first professional PLAY WRIGHT in the United States, but his more significant “firsts” include his manifesto, “The Laws of Dramatic Composition,” as well as his pioneering depiction of Wall Street businessmen in several works, including his most acclaimed play, The Henrietta (1887). Following schooling at Yale University and while working as a newspaperman, Howard wrote his first major play, Fantine (1864), based on Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Other Howard plays include Saratoga (1870), a study of social classes adapted for English audiences as Brighton (1874), a COMEDY of manners called Diamonds (1872), the melodramatic Moorcroft (1874), The Banker’s Daughter (1878; adapted from his 1873 play Lillian’s Last Love) about a woman falling in love with an older man she married for money, and Young Mrs. Winthrop (1882), a character study of a neglected wife. Howard contrasted American and French women in One of Our Girls (1885), but this play’s success paled in comparison with Shenandoah (1888), a melodrama depicting two friends fighting for the opposing armies during the American Civil 7AR. Howard is credited with elevating the quality and status of playwrights, as exemplified by his founding of the American Dramatists’ Club in 1891. HOWARD, LESLIE (1893–1943)†. British-born Leslie Stainer, who changed his last name to Howard, made his first U.S. appearance in Just Suppose (1920). He appeared on stage and in MOTIONPICTURES in England, but by the mid-1920s he was performing more frequently

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in America. Howard’s most significant "ROADWAY appearances of the 1920s were in Outward Bound (1924), The Green Hat (1925), Her Cardboard Lover (1927), Escape (1927), Berkeley Square (1929), and Candle Light (1929). After 1930, he STARRED in three important productions, 2OBERT%3HERWOOD’s The Animal Kingdom* (1932) and The Petrified Forest* (1935), and Hamlet (1936), which he PRO DUCED. Admired for his sensitive, intellectual ACTING, Howard acted in films frequently from the dawn of sound, notably repeating his role of the disillusioned poet in the 1936 screen version of The Petrified Forest. On screen, Howard DIRECTED and starred in Intermezzo (1939), which introduced Ingrid Bergman* to American audiences, and Of Human Bondage (1934), The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), Pygmalion (1938), and Gone with the Wind (1939). Howard died in a plane crash while serving in the British military during World 7AR II. HOWARD, SIDNEY (1891–1939).† Born in Oakland, California, the eminent PLAYWRIGHT studied under George Pierce Baker in 1915–1916. He served in Europe during World 7AR I, then wrote for Life magazine (1919–1922). He was married to ACTRESS Clare Eames from 1922 to 1930. In 1938, he was a founding member of the Playwright Company.* His 25 or so plays include the 0ULITZER 0RIZE–winning They Knew What They Wanted (1924) as well as Lucky Sam McCarver (1925), Ned McCobb’s Daughter (1926), The Silver Cord (1926), The Late Christopher Bean* (1932), and Alien Corn* (1933). Despite occasional turgid sequences, his plays hold up well as REALISTIC treatments of ordinary people in emotionally fraught situations. Howard, who also wrote for MOTION PICTURES (most notably, Gone with the Wind [1939]), died as a result of a tractor accident on his farm. HOWELLS, WILLIAM DEAN (1837–1920). The eminent CRITIC, novelist, poet, and PLAYWRIGHT was born in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, and was contributing to Ohio newspapers by age 15. In 1871, he became editor of the Atlantic Monthly. His close friendship with Mark Twain was a source of inspiration and material for several works. He was an early proponent of REALISM in the arts. He wrote 35 plays, most of them charming one-act “parlor farces” like The Mousetrap (1886) and The Unexpected Guests (1893). He also wrote full-length plays, notably A Foregone Conclusion (1886) and Yorick’s Love (1886).

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HOYT, CHARLES HALE (1860–1900). The popular and prolific author of light farces was born in Concord, New Hampshire, and began his writing career on the staff of the Boston Post. As drama CRITIC, he discovered his proclivity for theatre and wrote approximately one play every season from 1881 to 1899. Having traveled widely and observed people in various social milieux, Hoyt had a strong sense of both how to portray and how to entertain Americans. His COMEDIES are thinly plotted excuses for exposure of social foibles and interpolation of occasional songs. After the success of A Bunch of Keys (1883), A Rag Baby (1884), and A Parlor Match (1884), The Maid and the Moonshiner (1886) failed; thus the superstitious Hoyt henceforth began all his play titles with A, not The. His most successful play, A Trip to Chinatown (1891), ran a record-breaking 650 performances and included three perennially popular songs: “The Bowery,” “After the Ball,” and “Reuben, Reuben, I’ve Been Thinking.” Among his other successes were A Midnight Bell (1889), A Texas Steer (1890), and A Milk White Flag (1894). HOYT, HENRY E. (1834–1906). The SCENE DESIGNER was born in New Hampshire. Working in New York from the early 1880s, he designed and painted sets for the Park Theatre and others. He created the opulently painted settings for Augustin Daly’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1888. Later, he was head scenic artist at the Metropolitan Opera. In 1896, he was elected president of the American Society of Scenic Painters. HUGHES, HATCHER (1883–1945). Born in Polkville, North Carolina, Hatcher Hughes attended the University of North Carolina and Columbia University, after which he taught drama at Columbia for several years before his first play, Wake Up, Jonathan (1921), written in collaboration with %LMER 2ICE, met with "ROADWAY success thanks to the presence of Minnie Maddern Fiske in the cast. Hatcher’s solo effort, Hell-Bent fer Heaven (1923), was a controversial recipient of a 0ULITZER 0RIZE when it was chosen over 'EORGE +ELLY’s The Show-Off. Most of Hughes’s subsequent plays were only mildly successful, including Ruint (1925), Honeymoon (1927), It’s a Grand Life (1930), and The Lord Blesses the Bishop (1934).

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HUGHES, LANGSTON (1902–1967).† James Mercer Langston Hughes, one of the most celebrated !FRICAN !MERICAN poets of the first half of the 20th century, was among the few black writers to present serious dramas on "ROADWAY. Raised by a grandmother who had lost her first husband in John Brown’s Harper’s Ferry raid at the start of the Civil 7AR, Hughes grew to love literature through her encouragement. Although his first published play, The Gold Piece, appeared in 1921, the first Broadway staging of one of his plays, Mulatto,* did not appear until 1935. Hughes struggled to get works PRODUCED until the late 1940s, when his contributions, including the book and lyrics for the MUSICAL Street Scene (1947), were wellreceived. His 1930 play, Mule Bone,* coauthored with :ORA.EALE (URSTON, premiered in 1991 at Lincoln Center.* HULL, HENRY (1890–1977).† Brother of ACTOR Shelley Hull, this durable stage and screen actor was born in Louisville, Kentucky. During the first decade of his career, he played leading man roles in The Man Who Came Back (1916), The Cat and the Canary (1922), The Youngest (1924), Lulu Belle (1926), and Grand Hotel* (1930). In the 1930s, his only stage success was a significant one in the role of sharecropper Jeeter Lester in the long-running Tobacco Road* (1933), after which he spent much of his career as a respected character actor in MOTIONPICTURES. HULL, JOSEPHINE (1886–1957).† Josephine Sherwood, a native of Newtonville, Massachusetts, was educated at Radcliffe and studied with ACTRESS Kate Reignolds before gaining practical experience in several STOCK companies, including Boston’s Castle Square Theatre. Her few attempts at "ROADWAY were failures and in 1910 she retired from acting to marry actor Shelley Hull. When Hull died in 1919, his wife, now billed as Josephine Hull, returned to the theatre as a character actress. She won strong reviews in Neighbors (1923), Fata Morgana (1924), Craig’s Wife (1925), and Daisy Mayme (1926), but her greatest successes came after 1930 in comic character roles in You Can’t Take It With You* (1936), Arsenic and Old Lace* (1941), Harvey* (1944), and The Solid Gold Cadillac* (1953). Hull also appeared in MOTION PICTURES, including the screen version of Arsenic and Old Lace,* DIRECTED by Frank Capra in 1944.

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HULL, SHELLEY (1883–1919). A native of Louisville, Kentucky, where his father was drama CRITIC for the Louisville CourierJournal, Shelley Hull made his first New York stage appearance in a small role in The Crossing (1906). He worked steadily, but without particular success, and in 1910 married ACTRESS Josephine Sherwood, who, as *OSEPHINE(ULL, had a long stage and MOTIONPIC TURE career. Hull finally attained STARDOM opposite "ILLIE"URKE in The Mind-the-Paint Girl (1912), and he continued to play opposite her in a series of popular hits, including The Amazons (1913), The Land of Promise (1913), and Jerry (1914). Critics acknowledged his good looks and natural manner on stage, and for the remaining five years of his life he demonstrated promise in several successful plays, including The Cinderella Man (1916), Jesse Lynch Williams’s 0ULITZER 0RIZE–winning COMEDY Why Marry? (1917), as Petruchio to ,AURETTE4AYLOR’s Kate in The Taming of the Shrew (1918), and in dual roles in Under Orders (1918). HULL-HOUSE THEATRE. From the beginning, Jane Addams made the arts integral to her social work at Chicago’s Hull House, which she founded with Ellen Gates in 1889. There were play readings, concerts, and art exhibits offered with the aim of inculcating good values among the laboring poor through “recreation and education.” Addams shunned the cheap appeals of the popular melodrama of the day and instead fostered theatre through a 3HAKESPEARE club. The first fully staged production at Hull House—indeed, the first settlement house theatrical performance in the United States—was The Sleeping Car by William Dean Howells, presented in 1896 on a platform in the gymnasium. Others followed, and the success of Shakespeare’s As You Like It in 1897 resulted in the hiring of Walter Pietsch as DIRECTOR of drama for Hull House. A new theatre was completed in 1899. After a group of Greek immigrants performed a dramatization of The Odyssey in Greek, other ETHNIC groups mounted plays in their own languages. In 1900, retired actress Laura Dainty Pelham became director and brought the theatre to a new level of professionalism, eventually changing the name from Hull-House Dramatic Association to Hull-House Players. Because of Addams’s insistence on PRODUC ING plays of literary merit, Hull House was recognized as a leading proponent of the art theatre movement. Maurice Browne credited

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the Hull-House Players as the true origin of the little theatre movement in America. HUME, SAMUEL J. (1885–1962). As a SCENEDESIGNER who studied with Edward Gordon Craig at the Arena Goldoni in Florence, Italy, he was associated with the modernist theatrical art called the New Stagecraft. Hume founded the Detroit Arts and Crafts Theatre, one of the notable little theatres in the United States. He incurred Craig’s wrath when he adapted Craig’s famous movable screens for his own productions. Yet he contributed significantly to leading American scene design away from painted REALISM toward simplified, symbolic settings. HURLBUT, WILLIAM J. (1883–?). The PLAYWRIGHT was born in Belvedere, Illinois, and trained to become an illustrator, but switched to playwriting with the "ROADWAY success of his first play, The Fighting Hope (1908). He had a steady stream of plays produced in the 1910s, but did his best work in the 1920s with Lilies of the Field (1921) and his powerful melodrama of a revivalist who taps into the frustrations of a small-town wife and mother, The Bride of the Lamb (1926). HURSTON, ZORA NEALE (1901–1960).† Born in Eatonville, Florida, Hurston achieved an excellent education and became a leading !FRICAN!MERICAN writer. During her lifetime, her novels tended to overshadow her plays, some of which were not successfully staged until long after her death. Mule Bone* (1930), which she coauthored with ,ANGSTON(UGHES, remains her best-known play. HURWITZ, MOISE (1844–1910). Moise Hurwitz, like his contemporary Jacob Lateiner, wrote lightweight sentimental melodramas called shund, the least sophisticated type of Yiddish theatre, in the 1890s. He is credited with writing nearly 90 plays aimed at appealing to newly arrived Eastern European immigrants. HUSTON, WALTER (1884–1950).† Canadian-born Walter Huston spent most of his career on American stages and in MOTIONPICTURES following his 1902 stage debut in Toronto. Huston’s first "ROADWAY appearance, in the melodrama In Convict’s Stripes (1905), led to a

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long and varied career on vaudeville stages between 1909 and 1924. The breadth of Huston’s experience paid off when he turned to the legitimate stage and scored a major success as the crusty 75-year-old farmer Ephraim Cabot in %UGENE/.EILL’s New England tragedy, Desire Under the Elms (1924), after which Huston played Ponce de Leon in O’Neill’s The Fountain (1925). Other Huston successes included roles in Kongo (1926), The Barker (1927), and Elmer the Great (1928). With the advent of sound films, Huston shifted his attention to screen work, beginning with D. W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln (1930), but he made periodic returns to the stage, notably in the title role of 3IDNEY(OWARD’s Dodsworth* (1934). He repeated this performance in a lavish 1936 screen adaptation, then returned to Broadway to introduce “The September Song” in the Kurt Weill-AXWELL!NDERSON MUSICAL, Knickerbocker Holiday (1938).

n)n IBSEN, HENRIK.† See )BSENONTHE!MERICANSTAGE. IBSEN ON THE AMERICAN STAGE.† The social problem plays of Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) are fundamental to drama in the modern era, but from the beginning his works met with resistance from American CRITICS and audiences. There are few parallels for a PLAYWRIGHT whose work has inspired such impassioned debate or has been as influential over the long term as Ibsen, much of it generated by his depiction of WOMEN resisting traditional social roles. A Scandinavian troupe presented Ibsen’s Ghosts on TOUR in some Midwestern cities, including Chicago, in 1882. The first known American production of one of Ibsen’s plays was an AMATEUR staging of A Doll’s House in Milwaukee that same year, with a happy ending tacked on and a new title, The Child Bride. The following year Helena Modjeska staged her own adaptation of the same play, this time titled Thora, in Louisville, Kentucky, but it met with controversy and was withdrawn after a single performance. Beatrice Cameron’s 1889 New York appearance in A Doll’s House also met with resistance. Throughout the remainder of the 19th century, Ibsen’s plays were rarely PRODUCED and, as in European cities, were

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occasionally banned. A few American STARS were willing to appear in Ibsen’s plays during the 1890s, especially Minnie Maddern Fiske, who played Nora Helmer in A Doll’s House in 1894, 1895, and 1902. Mrs. Fiske also appeared in a 1903 New York production of Hedda Gabler, the same year that Mary Shaw presented Ghosts. In the first decade of the 20th century, %THEL "ARRYMORE in A Doll’s House (1905) and Nance O’Neil in Hedda Gabler (1905) braved critical hostility in Ibsen productions. Florence Kahn played Hilda Wangel in the first American staging of The Master Builder (1900). Thereafter, ACTORS were increasingly drawn to Ibsen’s plays. Dramatists were also inspired by Ibsen, beginning with James A. Herne, whose 1890 play Margaret Fleming won him the epithet “The American Ibsen.” From the 1920s, playwrights including %UGENE/.EILL, Thornton Wilder,* and later Arthur Miller* were influenced by Ibsen’s dramatic formula. !LLA.AZIMOVA, a Russian actress who spent most of her career on American stages, scored successes with several Ibsen plays, first in her 1906 debut in Hedda Gabler and continuing with A Doll’s House and The Master Builder the following year. In 1910, Nazimova also appeared in Little Eyolf while Mrs. Fiske offered The Pillars of Society. This increase in Ibsen productions was only temporary. By the early 1910s, Ibsen, who was viewed as profeminist, met with a new resistance from American audiences as the battle over female suffrage became increasingly divisive. Ghosts and Peer Gynt were produced in 1915, Hedda Gabler in 1917, and A Doll’s House in 1917 and 1918, but these were among the few Ibsen productions before 1920. Changing values in the post–World 7AR I era led to a significant increase in Ibsen productions. This was furthered by critics like *OSEPH 7OOD +RUTCH, who advocated for modernist theatre in general, and Herman Wiegand, whose critical study The Modern Ibsen (1925) applied Sigmund Freud’s psychological theories to the plays, influencing contemporary interpretations. In 1923, *OSEPH 3CHILDKRAUT headed a cast including Louise Closser Hale and a young %DWARD ' 2OBINSON in a 4HEATRE 'UILD production of Peer Gynt, which ran for a remarkable 240 performances. Significant excitement was generated in 1923 during a rare American tour by Italian actress Eleonora Duse, a longtime proponent of Ibsen’s plays. She included The Lady from the Sea and Ghosts in the REPERTORY.

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The Actors’ Theatre presented Hedda Gabler (1924, 1926), The Wild Duck (1925), and Ghosts (1927), while various productions of Rosmersholm (1925), Little Eyolf (1926), and An Enemy of the People (1928) starring 7ALTER(AMPDEN were also presented in New York. During the 1928–1929 "ROADWAY season, Blanche Yurka appeared in three Ibsen works, The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler, and The Lady from the Sea, and in 1930 Yurka also starred in and directed the first American production of The Vikings, Ibsen’s early play of Icelandic history. %VA ,E 'ALLIENNE’s #IVIC 2EPERTORY 4HEATRE (CRT) presented several Ibsen works during its tenure, including The Master Builder and John Gabriel Borkman, both in 1925. The CRT also produced Hedda Gabler in 1928 at the same time as Yurka’s production was running. At the beginning of the Great Depression, there was a precipitous fall-off in Ibsen productions, with only Le Gallienne regularly offering his plays as part of her repertoire. Broadway productions of Ibsen were comparatively rare between 1930 and the 1960s, but with the rise of professional regional theatre companies* Ibsen became a central part of the repertory of the American stage. See also CENSORSHIP. ICEBOUND. This three-act drama won its author /WEN$AVIS a 0U LITZER0RIZE and elevated his reputation. Prior to Icebound, Davis generally wrote wafer-thin COMEDIES and potboiler melodramas, but this character-driven drama of a Maine clan greedily awaiting the death of the family matriarch, Mother Jordan, was a radical departure for him. Mother Jordan is cared for by a distant cousin, Jane Crosby, with assistance from Hannah, a loyal farmhand. When Mother Jordan dies, the family is shocked to learn that she has left her estate to Jane. Ben, one of Mother Jordan’s profligate sons, is transformed by Jane’s positive influence and, with the aid of the ever-loyal Hannah, Ben and Jane wed. #RITICS applauded Davis’s skill at imbuing Icebound with a richly textured atmosphere and depth of character. 0RODUCED by 3AM((ARRIS, Icebound opened on 10 February 1923 at Harris’s Theatre for 145 performances with a cast including Phyllis Povah and Edna May Oliver, who repeated her role in a 1924 MOTIONPICTURE version STARRING Richard Dix. Despite its critical and commercial success, Davis returned to the formulaic comedies and melodramas that make up much of his dramatic achievement.

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IF I WERE KING. Irish politician and writer Justin Huntly McCarthy’s play, which opened on 14 October 1901 for 56 performances in a Daniel Frohman production, STARRED E. H. Sothern as François Villon, a wandering poet who claims that he could be a better king than the one on France’s throne. When King Louis IX, in disguise, hears this boast, he forces Villon to spend a week in his place, after which the poet will be executed for his arrogance. While on the throne, Villon defeats an invading army and falls in love with a noblewoman. The King chooses not to carry out the death sentence. The play made Sothern a major star. He TOURED it and returned to New York in revivals (1908, 1909, 1913, 1916). If I Were King is most remembered as the source material for the perennially popular Rudolf Friml operetta, The Vagabond King (1925), with a script adapted by Brian Hooker, who also wrote the lyrics. William Farnum played Villon in a 1925 silent MOTIONPICTURE version, and Ronald Colman assayed the role in a popular 1938 film version adapted from McCarthy’s play by Preston Sturges. The Friml operetta was filmed twice (1930, 1956). ILLINGTON, MARGARET (1881–1934). Born Maud Light in Bloomington, Illinois, she created her professional name by combining syllables from Illinois and Bloomington. She first ACTED in New York in 1900 in The Pride of Jennicho, then spent a season with a STOCK company in Richmond, Virginia. She returned to New York to perform with E. H. Sothern in If I Were King (1901). As Henrietta in The Two Orphans (1904), she achieved her greatest acclaim. Other well-regarded performances include A Maker of Men (1905), His House in Order (1906), The Thief (1907), and Kindling (1911). She retired after A Good Bad Woman (1919). In 1903, she married Daniel Frohman, but divorced him in 1910. She later married Major Edward Bowes. IN ABRAHAM’S BOSOM. “The Biography of a Negro in Seven Scenes” by 0AUL'REEN opened on 30 December 1926 at Provincetown Playhouse for a 277-performance run. Set in 1885 in the turpentine woods of North Carolina, the folk tragedy traces the difficulties of Abe, a black youth who aspires to education for himself and other blacks, but he seems to be thwarted at every turn, first by his white half-brother Lonnie and, 15 years later, by his own son Douglass, who

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does not share his ideals. Abe’s mother and his wife Goldie (played by Rose McClendon) provide steadying influences, but Abe’s frustration and temper get the best of him. In an expressionistic flashback, he tries to stop the ghosts of his black mother and white father from conceiving him. In the final scene, Abe is shot. The play won the 0U LITZER0RIZE in 1927. See also !FRICAN!MERICANTHEATRE. IN MIZZOURA. Augustus Thomas’s rural four-act COMEDY opened on 4 September 1893 for 64 performances at the Fifth Avenue Theatre as a vehicle for Nat C. Goodwin. In Bowling Green, Missouri, the good-hearted sheriff, Jim Radburn, secretly pays to send an impoverished neighbor’s daughter, Kate, to a private school. Radburn loves Kate, but she falls for Travers, who turns out to be a thief. For Kate’s sake, Jim helps Travers escape. The local citizens initially turn against him when they learn of his actions, but forgive all when various misunderstandings are unraveled. Silent MOTION PICTURE versions appeared in 1914 and 1919, with Noah Beery acting in the latter. IN OLD KENTUCKY. Charles T. Dazey’s four-act melodrama, which opened on 23 October 1893 for 160 performances at the Academy of Music, was a perennially popular play on American stages for decades following its initial New York production. Dazey’s simple plot, drawn from his time as a student in Kentucky, focuses on Madge Brierly, a young Kentuckian, who longs to flee her rural mountain home when she meets Frank Layson, a wealthy young man. Overcoming resistance from his society friends, Madge, a first-rate horsewoman, rides Frank’s Thoroughbred in the Ashland Oaks Derby. She wins, and Frank is smitten by Madge. No less than three silent MOTIONPICTURE versions of In Old Kentucky appeared. The first, in 1909, was DIRECTED by D. W. Griffith, with subsequent versions (1919, 1927) prior to a 1935 adaptation using only a few elements from Dazey’s play, which was also the last film STARRING Will Rogers.* INGÉNUE. This term refers to the character of an attractive, virtuous young WOMAN who is usually the object of romantic interests in the play. The ingénue differs from a soubrette, who is typically a saucy, comic character.

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INHERITORS, THE. 3USAN 'LASPELL’s 1921 play opened on 21 March 1921 at the Provincetown Playhouse in New York and ran for 26 performances. %VA ,E 'ALLIENNE DIRECTED a revival by her #IVIC2EPERTORY4HEATRE, opening on 7 March 1927, for 21 performances. The action of the play spans three generations, from the pioneering settlers on the prairie in 1879 in act 1 to the remaining three acts set in 1920, with descendents at the college that was founded on the land and a granddaughter who questions the injustices she perceives. See also ETHNICITYIN!MERICANDRAMA. IRISH STAGE CHARACTER. Many slight plays were written as vehicles for Irish singer-comedians like Joe Murphy, W. J. Scanlan, and Chauncey Olcott. The “stage Irishman” was an ETHNIC type popularized in plays by Dion Boucicault, followed by Edward Harrigan’s series of Mulligan Guard plays. The characterizations built upon a Hibernian accent, considerable physical activity, and references to the “auld sod” as well as vagrancy, fisticuffs, drinking, and singing. IROQUOIS THEATRE. The most disastrous theatre fire of the modernist era was the one in which over 600 people died at the Iroquois Theatre (seating capacity 1,724) on Randolph Street in downtown Chicago. At the sold-out matinee performance of Mr. Bluebeard, starring Eddie Foy, on 30 December 1903, a spark from a calcium arc light in the flies above the stage ignited a drop curtain there. The asbestos curtain snagged and could not be lowered. When somebody opened the loading doors to the alley, the rush of air caused the flames to blow out to the auditorium. Foy was long remembered as the hero of the occasion for his efforts to keep the audience from panicking. When theatergoers reached the inexplicably locked exit doors, they pushed and piled up in a crush. Others were asphyxiated in their seats. The ensuing investigation of what had happened in the “absolutely fireproof” theatre resulted in numerous reforms to ensure safety in theatres. See also 4HEATRE&IRES. IS ZAT SO? The farce by James Gleason and Richard Taylor opened on 5 January 1925 at the 39th Street Theatre and ran for 634 performances. The boxing world’s infiltration of a Fifth Avenue mansion was the mainspring of the mindless hilarity.

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ISAACS, EDITH (1878–1956).† Edith Juliet Rich was born into a Hungarian immigrant family in Milwaukee and was already established as a reporter on the Milwaukee Sentinel when she married Lewis Montefidretu Isaacs in 1904. They moved to New York, where he practiced law and she wrote for various magazines, including THEATRE ARTS, of which she became editor in 1922, leading it to monthly publication with expanded coverage until she retired from the post in 1946. She was instrumental in the founding of the National Theatre Conference in 1925. Among her several books on theatre is The Negro in the American Theatre (1947). IT PAYS TO ADVERTISE. Roi Cooper Megrue and Walter Hackett got 399 performances out of their farce that opened on 8 September 1914 at the Cohan Theatre, produced by 'EORGE - #OHAN and 3AM ( (ARRIS, and DIRECTED by Sam Forrest. “Not often in the course of a season is it given to the first-nighters to roar so heartily,” wrote the New York Times reviewer (9 September 1914), surmising that Cohan and Harris had the Midas touch with the pile of play manuscripts from which they extracted such entertainment.

n*n JAMES, LOUIS (1842–1910). This versatile, respected ACTOR found his greatest success on the ROAD. Born in Illinois, Louis James made his debut in 1863 at Macauley’s Theatre in Louisville. He joined a succession of excellent STOCK companies: that of Mrs. John Drew at Philadelphia’s Arch Street Theatre, Augustin Daly’s in New York, McVicker’s in Chicago, and Maguire’s in San Francisco. For five years he TOURED as support to Lawrence Barrett, but a quarrel led him to form his own company and tour as a STAR with his second wife, Marie Wainwright. It was said that James performed in nearly every 3HAKESPEARE play, both COMEDIES and tragedies, including such roles as Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Caliban, Bottom, Falstaff, and Benedick. He was also an inveterate practical joker; as Brutus to Barrett’s Cassius in Julius Caesar, James spoke the line “Till then, my noble friend, chew upon this,” and slipped a raw oyster into Cassius’s hand. James died of a heart attack at the makeup table in Helena, Montana,

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and is buried in Kansas City, next to his third wife, actress Aphie James (née Alphia Hendricks). JANAUSCHEK, FANNY (1830–1904). Although Czech by birth (née Francesca Romana Magdalena Janauschek in Prague), Fanny Januaschek first ACTED in the United States in German (as Medea in 1867) and was afterward often mistakenly thought to be German. As an internationally lauded tragedienne in the grand manner, she impressed American audiences favorably enough that she decided to learn English and develop an American stage career. Despite a foreign accent and short stature, Janauschek was admired for her interpretation of the title roles in Mary Stuart and Deborah. Her eruptions of temperament may have hampered her ability to attract good supporting players, and by the turn of the century her style was regarded as old-fashioned. JANIS, ELSIE (1889–1956). Although her "ROADWAY stage career was in MUSICALS, Elsie Janis merits inclusion here for her authorship of PRODUCED plays. Born Elsie Janet Bierbower in Marion, Ohio, “Little Elsie” began performing at age five. At 10, she was noted for her impersonations of celebrities. During the period of American involvement in World 7AR I, Janis entertained on the front lines and was regarded as the “Sweetheart” of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF). She wrote the book for Elsie Janis and Her Gang, produced at the 'EORGE-#OHAN Theatre in December 1919 and revived at the Gaiety in 1922, performed by soldiers. Her other produced plays were A Star for a Night (off-Broadway for the !CTORS &UND, 1911), It’s All Wrong (London, 1920), and Puzzles of 1925 (Broadway, 1925). JAZZ SINGER, THE. Remembered now as the source for the first feature-length sound MOTION PICTURE STARRING Al Jolson in 1927, 3AMSON2APHAELSON’s The Jazz Singer became a popular stage hit a few years before the film. The original "ROADWAY production, which opened at the Fulton Theatre on 14 September 1925, featured singerCOMEDIAN George Jessel in a rare dramatic turn as Jack Robin, son of a devout cantor, who wishes to break with tradition and sing in popular theatres. Jack runs away from home and climbs the ladder of show business success, but yearns for connection with his family. When he

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is cast in a starring role in a Broadway MUSICAL revue, Jack must decide whether to open in the show or return home to replace his dying father as cantor on the Day of Atonement. The play, which ran for 303 performances (followed in 1927 by a brief revival, again with Jessel in the lead), was reportedly based on Jolson’s life, but Raphaelson took pains to reject this rumor. However, when Jolson appeared in the film, The Jazz Singer became indelibly linked with him. Subsequent screen versions (1953, 1980) fell short of the original that is credited with ushering in the era of sound movies. See also MOTIONPICTURES. JEFFERSON, JOSEPH, III (1829–1905). Born in Philadelphia, the son of scene painter and ACTOR Joseph Jefferson II (and grandson of Joseph Jefferson I, a popular Philadelphia actor in the early 18th century), made his first stage appearance as a toddler with T. D. Rice. He TOURED the United States and Europe with his family before joining Laura Keene’s troupe in the 1850s, where he scored personal successes in productions of The Heir-at-Law and Our American Cousin. He acted at the Winter Garden Theatre and toured Australia for four years. In the 1850s, he appeared as Caleb Plummer in Dion Boucicault’s Dot and won approval as the comic bumpkin Salem Scudder in Boucicault’s melodrama, The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana. In 1859, Jefferson’s production of a stage adaptation of Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle failed in the United States, but he had a triumph in a Boucicault adaptation of it in London in 1865. The role of the laconic Dutchman of old New York who falls asleep for 20 years made Jefferson a major STAR and he played the role frequently (some said incessantly) over the next 40 years. Jefferson’s career was dominated by this role, but he also had a significant success playing Bob Acres to Mrs. John Drew’s Mrs. Malaprop in his own 1880 version of The Rivals. In 1890, Jefferson published his autobiography, a vivid account of 19th century theatrical life. He succeeded Edwin Booth as president of The Players in 1893. Among his children, four went into theatrical work and one son, Charles Burke Jefferson (1851–1908), was as his stage MANAGER. Despite his identification with Rip Van Winkle, Jefferson reprised Caleb Plummer in Dot for his final stage appearance in 1904. JELLIFFE, ROWENA WOODHAM (1892–1992). Rowena Woodham was born in Albion, Illinois. In 1914, she graduated from

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Oberlin College, where she met Russell Jelliffe, whom she married in 1915. An activist for WOMAN suffrage, she worked with Jane Addams at Hull House in Chicago, and conducted research to choose a city where she and her husband might create a racially integrated cultural center. The Jelliffes settled in Cleveland and devoted their lives to +ARAMU (OUSE and Karamu Theatre there. She made a point of attracting !FRICAN!MERICANS to participate in the arts at Karamu. Directing most of the plays at Karamu for 30 years, she was an early practitioner of interracial (or color-blind) casting in American theatre. JERRY. The COMEDY by Charlotte Chisholm Cushing opened on 28 March 1914 at the Lyceum, PRODUCED by Charles Frohman, and ran for 41 performances. Cushing’s earlier comedy Kitty Mackaye had begun its long run only two and a half months before the opening of Jerry, which STARRED "ILLIE"URKE. “Jerry is Billie Burke raised to the nth power, Billie Burke laid on thick, Billie Burke very much overdone. Of course she is altogether charming to look upon,” wrote the New York Times reviewer (30 March 1914). Jerry is a modern girl who sets her cap for an older man and goes about winning him. JESSOP, GEORGE H. (1851?–1915). The Irish-born ACTOR, CRITIC, and PLAYWRIGHT had over 20 plays PRODUCED in the 1880s and 1890s, some written with collaborators, several on Irish subjects. Among his most successful were Sam’l of Posen (1881), Mam’zelle (1884), Myles Aroon (1888), A Gold Mine (1889, with Brander Matthews), On Probation (1889, with Matthews), The Power of the Press (1892, with Augustus Pitou), and Mavourneen (1891). After he inherited a fortune, he returned to Ireland. JEWETT, HENRY (1862–1930). The Australian-born ACTOR came to the United States in 1892 to perform in San Francisco. He was soon TOURING as leading man to Julia Marlowe. He later acted in support of Richard Mansfield, Ada Rehan, and Viola Allen. He formed his own company, the Henry Jewett Players (later merged into the 2EPERTORY Theatre), in Boston, where he also opened and MANAGED the Copley Theatre. A 1927 celebration of his career recognized his remarkable achievement in having performed 400 weeks in repertory under his own DIRECTION.

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JEWISH ART THEATRE, THE. Yiddish theatre ACTOR Jacob BenAmi founded this company in 1919 based on the model of the Moscow Art Theatre. Ben-Ami chose Emanuel Reicher, an associate of -AX2EINHARDT and founder of the Freie Bühne, as stage DIRECTOR. The theatre survived for two seasons and 14 productions, including acclaimed stagings of Peretz Hirshbein’s The Haunted Inn and Green Fields, David Pinski’s The Dumb Messiah, Ossip Dimov’s Bronx Express, and Leo Tolstoy’s The Power of Darkness. -ANAGERIAL disagreements led to the closing of this pinnacle of Yiddish theatre in America. JIM, THE PENMAN. The English melodrama by Sir Charles Young ran for almost a year in London before it opened on 1 November 1886 at the Madison Square Theatre. The New York Times CRITIC (2 November 1886) hailed its “quotable wit,” ingenious “air of reality,” and well-drawn personages that made it “a thoroughly good acting play.” Beyond "ROADWAY success, the play had a long life on the ROAD, with 30 years of revivals throughout middle America. The title character is a skilled forger, James Ralston, who lives comfortably in London with the wife he won by fraud. He sent her and her fiancé each letters in the other’s handwriting, breaking the engagement. When the ex-fiancé also loses his fortune through a forgery, he goes looking for the one who robbed him. The ACTRESS playing the wife gets a powerful and moving scene when she accidentally discovers that her husband had forged the letters that broke the betrothal to the man she loved. Jim, the penman, is about to be brought to justice when he fortuitously dies of heart disease, thus sparing the wife any shame that would accompany exposure of his fraudulent life. JOHNNY. Any callow youth who made a practice of hanging around the stage door in the alley to catch a glimpse of the STARS was in the company view a “Johnny.” JOHNSON, GEORGIA DOUGLAS (1886–1966). The noted !FRI CAN!MERICAN poet and activist also wrote plays of enduring interest, notably the one-act folk tragedies A Sunday Morning in the South (1925) and Plumes (1927). Born in Atlanta, Georgia, she graduated from Oberlin Conservatory of Music and married Henry Lincoln

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Johnson in 1903. They moved to Washington, D.C., in 1909, and she became active in various causes, attracting educational and arts leaders to her home. Besides several volumes of poetry, her published plays include Blue Blood (1927) and Frederick Douglass (1935). JOLSON, AL (1886–1950). Born Asa Yoelson in Szredzius, Lithuania, the singer-COMEDIAN was brought to Washington, D.C., as a CHILD by his cantor father. Although his career belonged to the minstrel, MUSICAL, and vaudeville stages, as well as MOTIONPICTURES, recordings, and radio, his influence over all of the American performing arts in the modernist era was profound. He was unquestionably “The World’s Greatest Entertainer,” who inspired the careers of Eddie Cantor, Judy Garland, Bing Crosby, George Burns, Bob Hope, and many others, all of whom acknowledged their debt to Jolson. His personal magnetism on stage was described by CRITICS as electrifying. When he performed in the 3HUBERT musicals during the 1910s and 1920s, he would sometimes stop the show, dismiss the cast, and simply sing to the audience, to their delight. For his Sunday solo concerts at the Winter Garden, when other theatre folk could attend, he had a runway installed through the middle of the seating so he could get closer to his listeners. Jolson was the first to talk and sing in a feature-length film (The Jazz Singer, 1927), the first to sing pop in an opera house, the first to have a million-selling single recording (Sonny Boy, 1928) and a box office blockbuster (The Singing Fool, 1928), the first to volunteer to entertain American troops abroad during wartime (which he did at his own expense during three wars), and the first openly Jewish entertainer to be celebrated by Americans of all economic and ethnic classes. Not only did he import jazzy !FRICAN!MERICAN rhythms into his singing, but he did more than any other celebrity of his day to encourage black artists, from financing Garland Anderson’s Appearances to seeking out black musicians Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake to compensate for the racism they endured to inviting Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, and other black performers to appear as guests on his radio shows. Above all else, there was that voice that could sell a song as no other could, including “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob-Bob-Bobbin’ Along,” “April Showers,” “Let Me Sing and I’m Happy,” “Toot, Toot, Tootsie,” “Rock-a-bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody,” “My Mammy,” “California, Here I Come,”

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“Carolina in the Morning,” “Avalon,” and “Swanee River,” among dozens of pop music standards. JONAH. A Jonah was any ACTOR, no matter how talented, whose presence in the cast seemed to bring bad luck. According to the Kansas City Times (13 November 1926), “Theatrical history is full of ‘Jonahs.’ Because they are clever, capable men and women, MANAGERS will keep giving them another chance, but only to be disappointed. All sorts of mishaps befall the players and the play; sometimes it is a fire in the flies, sometimes the leading lady is taken ill in the first act and the understudy has to read her part, sometimes the scenery collapses and buries a few stagehands in the canvas ruins. All of these mishaps are set to the account of the ‘Jonah’ in the cast.” JONES, ROBERT EDMOND (1887–1954).† A native of Milton, New Hampshire, Robert Edmond Jones was educated at Harvard University, did some SCENEDESIGN work in New York in 1912, then spent a year observing -AX2EINHARDT’s work at the Deutsches Theatre in Berlin. With his renowned setting for The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife in 1915, he began his long upward trajectory of scene designs (and often LIGHTING and COSTUMES) for "ROADWAY productions. Most importantly, he implemented the revolution in theatrical practice called the New Stagecraft that was begun by Joseph Urban. The theories of Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig were central to his work; using a limited color palette and simplified visual images and symbols, he rejected 19th-century painted REALISM. Jones’s influence continued with his acclaimed productions of 3HAKE SPEARE for PRODUCER !RTHUR(OPKINS: Richard III (1920), Macbeth (1921), and Hamlet (1922). Jones also enjoyed a long association with %UGENE /.EILL, first with the Provincetown Players, and later as designer of many of O’Neill’s dramas on Broadway, including Desire Under the Elms (1924), The Fountain (1925), The Great God Brown (1926), Mourning Becomes Electra* (1931), Ah, Wilderness!* (1933), and The Iceman Cometh* (1946). Through his long, prolific career Jones designed a range of classic and contemporary plays, including Love for Love (1925), The Green Bay Tree (1933), The Philadelphia Story* (1940), and Lute Song (1946), and he wrote several important books, including Continental Stagecraft (1922; with +ENNETH -ACGOWAN) and his widely influential The Dramatic Imagination (1941).

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JUDAH, ABRAHAM (1849–1915). The nationally respected theatre MANAGER was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, but made his career in Kansas City from 1883, beginning with a dime museum. He opened a cyclorama in 1886, but quickly moved into legitimate theatre at the Ninth Street Theatre in partnership with Melville Hudson. From 1891, Judah was primarily associated with the Grand Opera House, which he built that year and managed until his death. Judah’s integrity was such that company managers would trust him to count the receipts alone, and his quiet works of charity benefited many ACTORS. His birthday would bring telegrams from all over the country. Robert Grau, in The Business Man in the Amusement World, called Judah “the best liked showman in the West” (1910, 155). JULIUS CAHN’S OFFICIAL THEATRICAL GUIDE. The bible of booking agents and advance men was published annually from 1896. The heart of it was the listing of theatre facilities in each state. For each town with a theatre, the guide indicated the population, theatre contact information, dimensions of the stage and its accoutrements (rigging, traps), seating capacity, ticket prices, printing requirements, local transfer company, local physician, local newspapers, hotels and their rates, and railroads serving the town. The 1899–1900 edition shows that theatres in large cities were equipped with electricity, and the guide specified the voltage, which varied from one facility to another. A wealth of additional information is found in the ADVERTISING, in the listing of companies on the ROAD that season, in the railroad maps, and even booking sheets for every date in the year, including listings of holidays. The full text of copyright laws pertaining to theatre is also included. JUMP. In the days of TOURING by railroad, a STAR or a combination might be booked to “jump” between two fairly distant cities while bypassing the towns between. JUNE MOON. Ring Lardner and 'EORGE3+AUFMAN collaborated on this three-act COMEDY inspired by Lardner’s short story, “Some Like ’Em Cold.” 0RODUCED by 3AM ( (ARRIS, it opened on 9 October 1929 for 273 performances at the Broadhurst Theatre. A light satire of Tin Pan Alley, the burgeoning New York City center of songwriting and publishing activity, the play focuses on Fred M.

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Stevens, who quits a steady job in a Schenectady, New York, shipping firm to become a songwriter. When he scores a hit writing “June Moon” in partnership with Paul Sears, who is living on the proceeds of his hit song “Paprika: The Spice of My Life,” Fred’s inflated ego causes him to abandon his naïve girlfriend, Edna Baker, in favor of a fling with Sears’s avaricious sister-in-law, Eileen, who is only too pleased to spend Fred’s new fortune. Maxie, a sarcastic piano player, finally opens Fred’s eyes to Eileen’s gold-digging just as Fred is about to sail to Europe with her. He returns to Edna as the curtain falls. A 1933 revival managed only 49 performances, but a 1974 public television* production was well-received. JUVENILE. Any ACTOR who could play simple, appealing, youthful roles was a juvenile. The juvenile lead was the male version of the ingénue. #HILD PERFORMERS who grew a bit long in the tooth might become juveniles and many actors continued in juvenile roles even as they aged. Before child labor laws put an end to the practice, there were TOURING companies in which all roles were performed by children. The appeal was largely novelty, but economics must also have been a MANAGEMENT incentive. For example, in 1885, the very year of the premiere of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, Alice Nielsen toured Missouri as Nanki Poo in a juvenile Mikado company.

n+n

KAHN, OTTO (1867–1934). Born in Mannheim, Germany, Kahn came to America in 1893, made a fortune in railroads and other investments, and became an American citizen. While the Metropolitan Opera probably ranked as the prime beneficiary of his largesse, Kahn became a legendary patron of all the arts. He had an important impact on theatre with his patronage of individual artists like 0AUL2OBE SON, of specific productions like -AX 2EINHARDT’s The Miracle (1923), of American engagements by foreign companies like Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (1916) and Jacques Copeau’s Théâtre du Vieux Colombier (1917–1918), and of companies like the Provincetown Players, the Washington Square Players, and the 4HEATRE 'UILD, to name but a few.

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KALISH (or KALICH), BERTHA (1874–1939). Born in Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bertha Kalish studied at the Lemberg Conservatory before ACTING in Polish opera and Yiddish theatre, where she achieved success before moving on to the Bucharest National Theatre. Anti-Semitism forced her immigration to America with her husband and children in 1896. Kalish became one of the leading figures in New York’s burgeoning Yiddish theatre community, with her beauty, lyrical voice, and grace enhancing performances in a range of important modern works and new Yiddish plays. She was particularly well-received in Avrom Goldfadn’s Shulamis and Jacob Gordin’s Sappho and The Kreutzer Sonata, as well as Yiddish-language versions of A Doll’s House and Madame Sans-Gêne, among others. Beginning in 1905, PRODUCER Harrison Grey Fiske presented Kalish in English-language productions of Fedora (1905), Monna Vanna (1905), Sappho and Phaon (1907), Marta of the Lowlands (1908), The Unbroken Road (1909), The Witch (1910), and The Riddle: Woman (1918). Failing eyesight curtailed her career around World 7AR I, although she occasionally returned to the stage in Yiddish revivals of her earlier successes. KANE, WHITFORD (1882–1956). Born in County Antrim, Ireland, the character ACTOR made a specialty of playing the First Gravedigger in Hamlet, playing the role in 23 productions with STARS that included John Barrymore and 7ALTER(AMPDEN. During his 50-year stage career, he appeared in 56 plays on "ROADWAY. KARAMU HOUSE.† Founded in Cleveland by Russell and Rowena Jelliffe, graduates of Oberlin College, Karamu (Swahili for “a place of enjoyment for all”) House remains the oldest active !FRICAN !MERICAN theatre in the United States, although it began its life as a multiracial theatre. Started in 1915, the original facility was destroyed by fire in 1939. A larger space was built and opened after World 7AR II. Initially called the Gilpin Players in honor of noted black actor Charles Gilpin, Karamu House focused its efforts around inner-city black life in Cleveland, presenting an annual season of as many as 11 productions, including straight drama, MUSICALS, and occasional operas. During the 1920s and 1930s, six ,ANGSTON(UGHES plays premiered there.

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KARLOFF, BORIS (1887–1969).† Born William Henry Pratt in London, the ACTOR had a solid stage career before his name became synonymous with Frankenstein in MOTION PICTURES. Beginning in 1910 in British Columbia, Canada, he acted with STOCK companies and TOURED with a REPERTORY company, playing numerous roles. In Chicago he joined a company of The Virginian, which ended its tour in Los Angeles in 1917, leaving him in a position to go into movies. From 1916 to 1958, he acted in over 50 films, with occasional returns to the legitimate stage, as when he played Jonathan Brewster in Arsenic and Old Lace* (1941), Captain Hook in Peter Pan (1950), and Cauchon in The Lark* (1955). KAUFMAN, GEORGE S. (1889–1961).† George Simon Kaufman was born in Pittsburgh and worked for newspapers in Washington, D.C., and New York before teaming with playwright -ARC #ONNELLY. Their first play, Dulcy (1921), was a hit and made a STAR of ,YNN &ONTANNE. Kaufman and Connelly collaborated on seven additional plays, including To the Ladies (1922), Merton of the Movies (1922), and the expressionist Beggar on Horseback (1924). Throughout his career, Kaufman worked with writing partners. His only solo effort, The Butter and Egg Man (1925), while successful, is among his slighter works. After parting company with Connelly, Kaufman collaborated with %DNA &ERBER on Minick (1924) and several major hits including The Royal Family (1927), Dinner at Eight* (1932), and Stage Door* (1936). Kaufman also DIRECTED plays, notably the original production of "EN (ECHT and Charles MacArthur’s* The Front Page (1928), and was appreciated for his varied talents as writer, director, and play doctor, as well as for his barbed wit as a member of the fabled Algonquin Hotel Round Table. In the 1920s, Kaufman cowrote two MUSICALS for the vaudeville team the Marx Brothers: The Cocoanuts (1925; with music and lyrics by Irving Berlin) and Animal Crackers (1928; with Morrie Ryskind* and songs by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby). With Ryskind, Kaufman wrote librettos for three musicals in collaboration with George and Ira Gershwin: Strike Up the Band (1930), Let ’Em Eat Cake (1933), and the first musical to win a 0ULITZER0RIZE, Of Thee I Sing (1931). With Ring Lardner, Kaufman cowrote June Moon (1929), but his most enduring partnership, with PLAYWRIGHT and director Moss Hart,* began in 1930 with the hit COMEDY Once in a

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Lifetime.* Kaufman and Hart’s You Can’t Take It With You* (1936) won a Pulitzer Prize and their other works include Merrily We Roll Along* (1934), I’d Rather Be Right (1937), The Man Who Came to Dinner* (1939), and George Washington Slept Here* (1940). KAUSER, ALICE (1872–1945). Born in Budapest, Hungary, she was the daughter of Wagnerian opera singer Berta Gester and grew up among artists. She had already established herself as a play broker when she came to New York in the 1890s. As an author’s agent, she represented some leading European dramatists (including Sardou, Hauptmann, Schnitzler); reportedly, (ENRIK)BSEN received his only American royalty payment from Kauser. More importantly, she promoted American PLAYWRIGHTS, including Margaret Ayer Barnes, Lee Wilson Dodd, Loften Mitchell, Channing Pollock, Edward Sheldon, and others. KEANE, DORIS (1881–1945). Born Dora Keane in St. Joseph’s, Michigan, she was the daughter of ACTORS and performed as Little Dora from age two. After training at the !MERICAN !CADEMY OF $RAMATIC!RTS, she made her New York professional debut in 1903 as Rose in Whitewashing Julia. Among her many roles on "ROAD WAY and in London, she was most identified with that of Margherita Cavallini in Edward Sheldon’s Romance (1913), which made her a STAR and followed its New York success with a record-breaking run of 1,049 performances in London; she also performed in the 1921 New York revival. In 1918, she married Basil Sydney, her leading man in Romance, but they divorced in 1926. Keane’s second-greatest role, Catherine the Great in The Czarina (1922), was also written for her by Sheldon, with whom she had once had a romantic relationship. She retired after her 1929 performance in The Pirate at the Belasco Theatre in Los Angeles. KEENAN, FRANK (1858–1929). Born James Francis Keenan in Dubuque, Iowa, the ACTOR had careers in legitimate theatre, vaudeville, and MOTIONPICTURES. He made his debut in 1879 with the Boston Museum 3TOCK Company. From the 1890s through the 1920s, he acted frequently on "ROADWAY. The New York Times review (4 December 1907) of his performance as General Warren in The Warrens of Virginia (in which little Mary Pickford made her stage debut in

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a CHILD role) observed, “Indeed, the acting is generally of an excellent quality, Mr. Keenan, as is his habit, getting into the skin of the part and developing in Gen. Warren a character that must have had at least one counterpart among the sincere and chivalrous defenders of the lost cause. His performance has a quality of rich and mellow humor, and is fluently expressive of deeper feelings.” Keenan’s own play The Oath was PRODUCED in 1910. In 1927, he DIRECTED The Praying Curve. KEENE, THOMAS W. (1840–1898). Born Thomas R. Eagleson in New York City, the ACTOR enjoyed considerable acclaim on the ROAD during his years of TOURING as a STAR at the head of his own company. He presented the standard historical melodramas and 3HAKESPEAREAN tragedies in rotating REPERTORY. His Richard III was a popular favorite, which he played more than 3,000 times. The Kansas City Star CRITIC Austin Latchaw recalled (5 May 1935) that he “acted this part in the traditional, tempestuous fashion, charged from the first entrance with heavy and relentless villainy. . . . We used to wait for Keene’s combat on Bosworth Field. It was a terrific encounter, taxing the strength and swordsmanship of both Richard and Richmond. It was one of Keene’s tricks, when forced to the ground near the end of the fight, to rattle his sword on the floor before regaining his feet. It was great stuff for the galleries, but was not so far under the heads of even the first floor crowd. He was unquestionably the best American Richard, dramatically, for a good many years.” KEITH-ALBEE CIRCUIT. The Keith-Albee Circuit, which sprang from the Keith Circuit and controlled vaudeville east of the Mississippi River from the early 1900s, was influenced by and somewhat modeled on the Theatrical Syndicate. KELCEY, HERBERT (1856–1917). Born Herbert Henry Lamb in London, England, the ACTOR made his London debut in 1880, and was brought to America in 1882 by Henry Wallack* to appear in Taken from Life. He played a number of roles at Wallack’s and at Madison Square Theatre before joining Daniel Frohman’s company at the Lyceum in 1887; he was leading man for that company until 1897. His first STAR billing came in 1898 when he performed in The Moth and the Flame with Effie Shannon, whom he married. An

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interesting assessment of Kelcey appears in Kansas City Star CRITIC Austin Latchaw’s retrospective (10 May 1935): “Kelcey rather ‘stood out from the crowd,’ as we say. It was not because of genius or any superlative art. But he had his qualifications, real and superficial. He was almost too handsome for words. He was a faultless dresser. Indeed, one might have gained the impression that the first law of his being was clothes. He had a leisurely manner. He acted as if he had just drifted into the profession because of having nothing else to do. Yet he could get away with rough characters, too, and so demonstrated in a few instances.” KELLERD, JOHN E. (1863–1929). The ACTOR was born in London, England, and came to America for the opening of the Boston Museum in 1883. He acted in support of Frederick Warde, and then TOURED in a 3HAKESPEAREAN REPERTORY. His long list of "ROADWAY credits from 1886 to 1914 is mostly contemporary fare, but his reputation truly rested on his outstanding work in Shakespearean roles. KELLY, GEORGE (1887–1974).† George Edward Kelly, born in Philadelphia, began his theatrical life as an ACTOR and vaudevillian. His brother, Walter C. Kelly (1873–1939), was a popular variety performer and while following in his footsteps, Kelly wrote and acted his own sketches. He shifted permanently to PLAYWRITING with The Torch-Bearers (1922), a satire of AMATEUR theatre, which led to three more satiric COMEDIES, The Show-Off (1924), the 0ULITZER 0RIZE–winning Craig’s Wife (1925), and Daisy Mayme (1926), all among the most popular plays of the era with both audiences and CRITICS who responded to his solid craftsmanship and keen observation of human foibles. Kelly wrote sketches for a MUSICAL revue, A la Carte (1927). His later, and less successful, plays include Behold the Bridegroom (1927), Maggie the Magnificent (1929), Philip Goes Forth (1931), The Deep Mrs. Sykes (1945), and The Fatal Weakness (1946). Reflected Glory* (1936) served as a vehicle for 4ALLULAH "ANKHEAD. KELLY, GREGORY (1891?–1927). The ACTOR was born in New York City and loved theatre from boyhood. He was appearing in "ROADWAY productions by 1908. In 1911, he performed in Kismet with Otis Skinner, who then hired him as assistant stage MANAGER.

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he enjoyed many years of playing juveniles for companies that included Stuart Walker’s Portmanteau Theatre and the Walker 3TOCK Company in Indianapolis, with which he TOURED in a dramatization of Booth Tarkington’s Seventeen. His last role was the naïve title character in The Butter and Egg Man, which he was performing in Pittsburgh when he had a fatal heart attack. He was married to actress Ruth Gordon.* KEMPER, COLLIN (1870–1955). The PRODUCER was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He had ACTED on the ROAD for several years when he met Lincoln A. Wagenhals, with whom he formed a producing partnership in 1887. For a decade they MANAGED STARS and TOUR ING companies, enjoying associations with such major figures as Louis James, Frederick Warde, Helena Modjeska, and others. Then they centered their activities in New York, where they inaugurated the Astor Theatre on "ROADWAY in 1906 with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Besides numerous 3HAKESPEARE productions, they produced hits like Paid in Full (1908), Seven Days (1909), and The Bat (1920). KEMPY. The “COMEDY of American Life in Three Acts” opened on 15 May 1922 at the Belmont Theatre and ran for 212 performances. Written by father and son J. C. Nugent and Elliott Nugent* with the uncredited assistance of (OWARD ,INDSAY, the play afforded good comedic roles for both authors. The title character, played by Elliott Nugent, is a would-be architect supporting himself as a plumber. He comes to fix the plumbing at the Bence house, where he meets the sweet Ruth, the youngest of three sisters. But the older sister Kate quarrels with her fiancé Duke and impulsively lures Kempy into marrying her. While Kate and Kempy are away, Ruth polishes his wrench for him. Kempy realizes that he loves Ruth, Kate realizes she loves Duke, and Duke realizes that, as a lawyer, he can get the marriage annulled in the morning, since Kempy is only 20. KENNEDY, CHARLES RAN (1871–1950). Born in Derby, England, he first ACTED in America in 1903 and continued performing until his retirement in 1927. Meanwhile, he also wrote plays, notably a religious drama titled The Servant in the House (1908). His other plays include The Winterfeast (1908), The Terrible Meek (1912), The

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Army with Banners (1918), The Chastening (1922), Flaming Ministers (1932), Face of God (1935), and The Seventh Trumpet (1941). He became a naturalized citizen in 1917. KENNEDY, MADGE (1892–1987). Born in Chicago, Madge Kennedy began her theatrical career in 1910, but did not make a mark until she appeared in the long-running Salisbury Field-Margaret Mayo farce Twin Beds (1914), in which she played an innocent wife pursued by a drunken opera tenor. She followed this success with another farce, Avery Hopwood’s Fair and Warmer (1915), coSTARRING with Ralph Morgan and *ANET "EECHER, before embarking on a successful career in silent MOTION PICTURES. In the 1920s, Kennedy had three particular theatrical successes: the MUSICAL Poppy (1925) costarring with W. C. Fields, 0HILIP"ARRY’s COMEDY of manners Paris Bound (1927) as a young wife reckoning with her husband’s infidelity, and the Albert Hackett* and Frances Goodrich* play Bridal Wise (1932). In the 1960s, Kennedy returned to the screen in small roles. KEROSENE CIRCUIT. Low-budget TOURING companies of no more than eight troupers might be relegated to performing in country towns so small that kerosene lamps were still used for LIGHTING the halls. “Playing the kerosene circuit” meant making the best of a long succession of one-night stands in ill-equipped second-story halls over commercial space in towns of perhaps 300 to 1,000 inhabitants. Anecdotes about the travails of trouping “the tank towns on the kerosene circuit” appear in the Kansas City Star (18 November 1906; 10 October 1909). Describing conditions in the hall over the hardware store in Humphreys, Missouri, during those years, for example, one ACTOR recalled that the footlights were “four kerosene lamps with tin reflectors, sitting on a rough board in front of the stage.” For a setting that required a buffet cabinet and a large painted rock, the company manager asked the MANAGER of the hall in Mound City, Missouri, “Have you a sideboard and a set rock?” The local man promised to provide the items before curtain time, and indeed, that night he pulled his wagon up to the opera house door and left a heavy rock along with the sideboards from his wagon. KESSLER, DAVID (1860–1920). The Yiddish ACTOR-MANAGER began his stage career in Russia, where he was born. He came to

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America around 1883 with several other Yiddish actors, who soon became rivals to Boris Thomashefsky. Although Kessler had little education and was physically well suited to the big hearty peasant roles, he aspired to good material. As an actor and as a manager, he showed a preference for plays by Jacob Gordin, which offered a degree of REALISM, and he found his greatest success in the leading role of Gordin’s God, Man, and Devil. Most of his work, however, was standard Yiddish fare with strong effects; for example, the title role in Leon Kobrin’s Yankl Boyle (The Village Youth). In 1907, he ventured away from Yiddish theatre to "ROADWAY in The Spell by Samuel Shipman. The New York Times reviewer (22 September 1907) referred to him as “a natural actor . . . of the old German school,” using “emotional gymnastics and physical contortions.” The Second Avenue Theatre was built especially for Kessler in 1909. KESTER, PAUL (1870–1933). The PLAYWRIGHT was born in Delaware, Ohio. His sentimental plays began to be staged in the 1890s, but he was more successful with dramatizations from other sources than with his original dramas. The best known were Sweet Nell of Old Drury (1901), When Knighthood Was in Flower (1901), and Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall (1903). Besides his 30 or so plays, some written with his brother Vaughn Kester, he wrote books about gypsy life. KICK IN. Opening on 15 October 1914 at the Longacre Theatre, the four-act “crook play” by Willard Mack, PRODUCED by A. H. Woods, ran for 188 performances. John Barrymore showed his talent as a serious ACTOR in the role of the convicted forger who has done time in prison and is trying to go straight. According to the New York Times review (20 October 1914), “the second and third acts are almost uncomfortably tense, and the violence of the scene that brings down the third-act curtain is of the sort to draw the spectator to the very edge of his seat and keep him there.” KIDDER, EDWARD E. (1846–1927). The PLAYWRIGHT-MANAGER was born in Charleston, Massachusetts. Among the ACTORS he managed were John T. Raymond, Julia Marlowe, Joseph Murphy, and, notably, Lotta Crabtree, with whom he traveled to England. From the 1880s, he focused on playwriting and had many PRODUCED

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works, including A Poor Relation (1889), One Error (1890), and Easy Dawson (1905). KING-COIT SCHOOL AND CHILDREN’S THEATRE.† The children’s school and theatre company were founded in New York City in 1923 by Edith Lawrence King (1884–1975) and Dorothy Coit (1889–1976) and continued in operation until 1958. King had begun her career as a painter, even exhibiting in the landmark 1913 Armory Show in New York. She met Dorothy Coit, a history and English teacher, when they both taught at Buckingham School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their first theatre collaboration at the school was an all-girl production of Milton’s Comus (1915), followed by The Tempest and many others until they moved to New York City in 1920. There they staged Aucassin and Nicolette in 1921 at the 39th Street Theatre; Beatrice Straight* and Jane Wyatt were among the children in the cast. The King-Coit School and Children’s Theatre opened in 1923. Classes for children between 3 and 15 were offered on weekends and after regular school hours. The intention was not to train theatre professionals, but to stimulate imaginations and interest in history and the arts through the three Ds: dance, drama, design. The productions, aiming always at perfection, achieved remarkable beauty and attracted close critical attention. Despite the difficulties of constant fundraising to supplement income from tuition and problems with child labor laws, King and Coit persevered for 35 years, working with the children of many celebrities as well as those on scholarship. See also GERRY SOCIETY. KISMET. Edward Knoblock’s three-act play, which opened on 25 December 1911 for 184 performances at the Knickerbocker Theatre (following a successful run in London), is mostly remembered as the source for the 1953 MUSICAL of the same name, adapted by Charles Lederer and Luther Davis, with lyrics by Richard Wright and a score adapted by George Forrest from Aleksandr Borodin’s music. The musical ran for 583 performances and was successful again in 1978 with an all–!FRICAN!MERICAN cast under the title Timbuktu. Set in ancient Baghdad, Kismet focuses on Hajj the poet, who is arrested and reluctantly agrees to the Wazir’s demand that he kill the Caliph Abdullah. Hajj fails to kill the Caliph and is thrown into the same

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cell with an old enemy, Sheik Jawan. Hajj kills the sheik and steals his identity, escaping in the sheik’s clothing. Hajj saves his daughter, Marsinah, from the harem of the Wazir, whom he drowns in the process. Meanwhile, the Caliph, who loves Marsinah, succeeds in wooing her in the guise of a gardener. With the Wazir dead, the Caliph must by law banish Hajj, but chooses to look the other way when Hajj returns to the city to live simply as a poet. Otis Skinner won praise as Hajj, also appearing in the 1920 and 1930 MOTIONPICTURE versions. A lavish film version in 1944 starred Ronald Colman and Marlene Dietrich. Kismet proved a gold mine for PRODUCERS Marc Klaw and Abraham Erlanger, in association with Charles Frohman. KITTY MCKAY. The COMEDY by Charlotte Chisholm Cushing opened on 7 January 1914 at the Comedy Theatre for a run of 278 performances. The New York Times review (8 January 1914) headlined it as “a Scotch Cinderella” with “some excruciatingly funny scenes.” The title character, a Scottish orphan raised by religious zealots, is another of Cushing’s spirited heroines like the title character in her comedy Jerry. The review quotes a great chunk of still-hilarious dialogue in which Kitty and her friend Mag plan revisions to the Bible. KLAUBER, ADOLPH (1879–1933). Born in Louisville, he intertwined stage and newspaper careers. Early in his career, he worked for the New York Commercial Advertiser and the Tribune, and ACTED with Charles Frohman’s Empire Theatre STOCK company. He performed with Viola Allen and Henry Miller in Liberty Hall (1893) and played one of the Italian twins in Pudd’nhead Wilson (1895). From 1906 to 1918, he was the New York Times drama CRITIC. He left that position to become a PRODUCER of such plays as Nighty Night (1919), Scrambled Wives, The Emperor Jones, and Diff’rent (all 1920), Like a King (1921), and The Charlatan (1922). He was also associated as a silent partner with productions STARRING his wife *ANE#OWL: Lilac Time (1917), Smilin’ Through (1919), Romeo and Juliet (1923), Pelleas and Melisande (1923), Antony and Cleopatra (1924), The Depths (1925), and others. KLAW & ERLANGER. Sometimes referred to as K & E, the partnership formed in 1888 by Marc Klaw and Abraham Lincoln Erlanger grew to be the foundation for the Theatrical Syndicate

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or Trust, which they created in 1896 with four additional theatrical businessmen. Klaw and Erlanger are often credited as pioneers in the application of business principles to the theatre. Within the Syndicate, they exercised control over the central booking office. Their partnership ended in 1919. KLAW, MARC (1858–1936). Born in Paducah, Kentucky, Marc Alonzo Klaw moved to Louisville with his widowed mother and later completed a law degree and practiced law before PRODUCERS Gustave and Daniel Frohman hired him to stop pirated productions of their hit play, Hazel Kirke. This brought him in contact with A. L. Erlanger, who partnered with him to buy out the Taylor Theatrical Exchange to form the Klaw and Erlanger Exchange. Within a few years, they transformed it into one of the major theatrical agencies in the United States (particularly dominating the South), with STARS Joseph Jefferson III and Fanny Davenport among their clients. They managed to maintain a partnership for many years, despite vastly different personalities; Klaw was as cultured and mannerly as Erlanger was brusque and coarse. With several other producers, Klaw and Erlanger set up the Theatrical Syndicate or Trust, a powerful monopoly that dominated theatre MANAGEMENT and booking for more than a decade before it was challenged by the 3HUBERTS and disbanded in 1916. As producers, Klaw and Erlanger presented many shows, including Ben-Hur (1899), 'EORGE-#OHAN’s Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway (1906) and The Yankee Prince (1908), the first American production of 'EORGE"ERNARD3HAW’s Caesar and Cleopatra (1906), Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1910), Kismet (1911), The Pink Lady (1911), and Disraeli (1917). KLEIN, CHARLES (1867–1915). Born in London, the PLAYWRIGHT came to America in 1882 and ACTED juvenile roles before turning to playwriting. His first play to get a New York Times review was By Proxy (1892), a clever but somewhat tedious farce. Willie (1894) was panned, but The District Attorney, coauthored with Harrison Grey Fiske (1895), STARRED Wilton Lackaye and Effie Shannon. By 1897, Klein was regarded as “a rising playwright who seems to have plenty of ideas” (New York Times, 20 April 1897) when Heartsease and Dr. Belgraff both opened early that year. His best plays were produced by David Belasco and starred David Warfield: The Auctioneer (1901,

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revived 1913) and the phenomenally popular The Music Master (1904). Other successes included The Lion and the Mouse (1905), The Daughters of Men (1906), The Third Degree (1909), and The Gamblers (1910). Klein was also a play reader for Charles Frohman, and both died when the Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine. KLIMT, GEORGE (1861–1942). Born in St. Louis, Missouri, the ACTOR-MANAGER began by starting a repertoire company, the KlimtHeran company, to tour the south. His advance agent, Frank Gazzolo, later became his partner in PRODUCING melodrama. Klimt and Gazzolo struck it rich with The James Boys in Missouri. At their apogee, they had as many as ten companies on the ROAD while operating STOCK companies in Chicago. They opened the Imperial Theatre there in 1911. As an actor, Klimt was “the west side’s leading man.” According to Robert L. Sherman, he later lost his fortune and lost his mind and died in an institution. KNOBLOCK, EDWARD (1874–1945). Born Edward Knoblauch in New York City, the PLAYWRIGHT graduated from Harvard in 1896 and went into ACTING to prepare himself to write plays. During his 40 years as a playwright, he was said to have been second only to /WEN $AVIS in the number of his works that had been staged. Many of his plays were adapted from novels or foreign plays. Best known were The Faun and Kismet, both 1911 and both revived in later years, the latter STARRING Otis Skinner. Other plays by Knoblock include The Shulamite (1906), Milestones (1912), My Lady’s Dress (1914), The Lullaby (1923), Simon Called Peter (1924), The Good Companions (1931), Evensong (1932). He became a British citizen in 1916. KOMMISSARZHEVSKY, THEODORE (1882–1954). The Russianborn (in Venice, Italy) son of operatic tenor Fyodor Petrovich Kommissarzhevsky and half-brother of the actress Vera Kommissarzhevskaya became a noted SCENEDESIGNER–DIRECTOR in England and America. He left his theatre career in Russia in 1919, a dangerous and difficult departure recounted in his autobiography Myself and the Theatre (1929), to direct opera in London. For seven seasons, he directed 3HAKESPEARE plays at Stratford-upon-Avon. There he developed his conceptual approach to production in a theatre that did not yet understand directing as an art separate from company MANAGEMENT. He came to New York in

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1922 to direct for the 4HEATRE'UILD, and thereafter divided his career as director and designer between London and New York. KRAUSE, ALVINA (1893–1981). The revered ACTING teacher was born in New Lisbon, Wisconsin. After earning her B.S. and M.A. in speech at Northwestern University, she was invited to join the faculty there. She developed a three-year program of actor training. In 1945, she and Lucy McCammon founded a summer STOCK playhouse at Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania, and presented nearly 200 productions during its twenty seasons. After her 1963 retirement, she conducted workshops and lectured at various universities. KREMER, THEODORE (1871?–1923). The PLAYWRIGHT was born and died in Cologne, Germany. He ACTED in Europe before coming to America where he turned to writing melodramas for popularprice theatres. A few were produced in New York; for example, The Fatal Wedding and For Her Children’s Sake, both 1902; The Evil That Men Do and Wedded and Parted, both 1903. More important was his fodder for middle American theatre, notably Bertha, the Sewing Machine Girl (1906). KREYMBORG, ALFRED (1883–1966).† Born in New York City, the poet-journalist also wrote one-act plays and about 40 books. He fostered poetry publications and was called a patron saint of the little magazine movement. His association with theatres include the Provincetown Playhouse from its inception and the Manhattan-Bronx Federal Theatre Project.* Among his collections of plays are Plays for Merry Andrews (1920), Rocking Chairs and Other Comedies (1925), and Puppet Plays (1926). KRIGWA. Using Crisis, the journal he edited from 1910 to 1934, as a platform for encouraging !FRICAN!MERICAN drama, W. E. B. DuBois in 1926 formed a theatre group to PRODUCE the journal’s prizewinning plays and others by black writers. The name KRIGWA was an acronym for CRIsis Guild of Writers and Actors. It was during the heyday of the little theatre movement that the Harlem group began presenting plays in the basement of the public library at 135th Street. Among the plays produced during KRIGWA’s 1925–1927 existence at the Harlem location were The Broken Banjo and The Compromise

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by Willis Richardson, The Church Fight by Ruth Ada GainesShelton, Foreign Mail and The Fool’s Errand by Eulalie Spence, and Blue Blood by Georgia Douglas Johnson. Branches of KRIGWA were established in Washington, D.C., New Haven, Baltimore, and Cleveland, some of which remained active until the 1930s. See also HARLEM RENAISSANCE. KRUGER, OTTO (1885–1974). The ACTOR was born in Toledo, Ohio, and trained as a musician for the concert stage. However, he chose an acting career, beginning in the Durham & Caroline 3TOCK Company. The Natural Law (1915) was his first important "ROADWAY production. He played Adam in Adam and Eva (1919) and many other major roles throughout the 1920s. He acted frequently for the 4HEATRE'UILD, but devoted himself mainly to MOTIONPICTURES from the 1930s. KRUTCH, JOSEPH WOOD (1893–1970).† Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, he earned his PhD at Columbia University (1923), where he eventually became a professor of journalism. He was drama CRITIC for The Nation from 1924 to 1952. His books on theatre include The American Drama since 1918 (1939), “Modernism” in American Drama (1953), and several anthologies of plays that he edited. KUMMER, CLARE (1873?–1958). Clare Rodman Beecher was related to Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her professional name was that of her first husband, PLAYWRIGHT Frederick Arnold Kummer, which she kept after their divorce and during her longer marriage to Arthur Henry. As Clare Kummer, she became well known as a songwriter in the 1900s, so the name recognition served her well when she turned to playwriting in 1912. Good Gracious Annabelle (1916) remained the best-known of her many sprightly COMEDIES, which included A Successful Calamity (1917), Be Calm, Camilla (1918), Rollo’s Wild Oat (1920), and Her Master’s Voice* (1933). See also YOUNG, ROLAND.

n,n LACKAYE, WILTON (1862–1932). Born William Lackaye in Loudon Country, Virginia, the ACTOR made his New York debut in 1883 in

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Francesca da Rimini with Lawrence Barrett. He played many roles until 1925, but was most identified with that of Svengali in Trilby, which he originated in 1895 and continued performing until 1897, reviving it in New York in 1907, in 1915, and in 1921. His makeup for that role remarkably transformed his appearance. Kansas City Star CRITIC Austin Latchaw recalled Lackaye’s Svengali (16 May 1935): “Lackaye had wonderful eyes. They were huge and brilliant. Their penetrating effect was enhanced in the part of Svengali by the heavy black beard. The bearing, action and motionless expression of the character were almost creepy in their sinister import. . . . No one who saw the performance can forget Lackaye’s death scene. The stricken Svengali swayed, tottered backward toward the audience, fell on a narrow table, his arms outflung, his head hanging down from the top of the table, facing us upside down, while the glare of the footlights added to the weirdness of the spectacle. Melodramatic, of course, but sensationally effective.” Lackaye was an active member of the Lambs, a quick wit, and a popular after-dinner speaker. LADDER, THE. Opening on 22 October 1926 at the Mansfield Theatre, the AMATEURISHLY written play by J. Frank Davis ran an amazing 794 performances. Edgar B. Davis (no relation to the author), a Texas oil millionaire who wanted to promote the idea of reincarnation, underwrote the lavish production DIRECTED and PRODUCED by "ROCK 0EMBERTON, with SCENE DESIGN by Raymond Sovey,* and COSTUMES by 2OBERT%DMOND*ONES. !NTOINETTE0ERRY played the young woman who has visions of previous lives in 1300, 1670, and 1844, finally returning to 1926 to the beau (Vernon Steele) she had not married in the past. Davis was willing to keep the play running at a deficit, and would even admit theatergoers free. LADIES’ NIGHT. Avery Hopwood and Charlton Andrews collaborated on this three-act farce, also billed as Ladies’ Night in a Turkish Bath, which opened on 9 August 1920 at the Eltinge Theatre and was PRODUCED by A. H. Woods for 360 performances. In an effort to loosen him up, friends take painfully shy Jimmy Walters to an artists’ ball. All goes well until a police raid. Jimmy escapes, but his only route is through the window of a nearby Turkish bath, where it happens to be “ladies-only” night. Jimmy and his friends are forced into drag and go through many other subterfuges until they are able

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to end the charade. Remarkably durable, Ladies’ Night was revived on "ROADWAY in 1950 and off-Broadway* in 1961 and has had innumerable STOCK, TOURING, and AMATEUR productions. LAFAYETTE PLAYERS.† In the 17 years of its operation (1915– 1932), the Lafayette Players, an !FRICAN!MERICAN STOCK company founded by Anita Bush, aimed to provide a venue for serious drama by and about black life in the United States. The goal was to counter stereotypical roles and minstrel traditions clinging to "ROADWAY theatre and to provide a serious dramatic complement to the black MUSICAL entertainments offered at the Apollo Theatre and in nightclubs. The company was established for its first 13 years in Harlem’s Lafayette Theatre before moving to Los Angeles in 1928. Among the important African American ACTORS and PLAYWRIGHTS who worked with the Players, both at the theatre and on TOUR, were Charles Gilpin, Clarence Muse, Dooley Wilson, Inez Clough, Evelyn Preer, and Abbie Mitchell. Presenting performances on a weekly basis, the company offered abridgments of Broadway COMEDIES and melodramas with the aim of proving that black performers could excel in all types of theatre, not just vaudeville and musicals. Before the financial catastrophes of the Great Depression forced the termination of the Lafayette Players, they had presented approximately 250 productions. LAMB, THOMAS (1871–1942). The great theatre designer, known for his palatial interior décors, was born in Dundee, Scotland, and came to America at age 12. He studied architecture at Cooper Union Institute, then worked as a New York City building inspector until 1909. A commission from William Fox to design the City Theatre on Fourteenth Street launched Lamb’s career, during which he drafted plans for over 300 legitimate and MOTIONPICTURE theatres. While Lamb quickly proved himself as an innovator in structural components and use of space, he remains associated in the public mind with the opulence of his “deluxe style” that borrowed from various cultures. The Eltinge 42nd Street Theatre (1912) in New York, for example, brought together Greek and Roman figures and classical Egyptian motifs. Others incorporate Persian, Hindu, Spanish, Renaissance, Louis XVI, or Second Empire features. The size and opulence of Lamb’s theatres made them expensive to maintain, and most no

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longer exist. Among the surviving Thomas Lamb–designed theatres are the Hippodrome (1914) in Baltimore; the Winter Garden (1914) and the Elgin in Toronto; the Capitol (1920) in Windsor, Ontario; the Capitol (1921) in Winnipeg; the Tivoli (1924) in Washington, D.C.; the Palace (1926) and the Ohio in Columbus; Loew’s Midland (1927) in Kansas City; and B. F. Keith’s Memorial (1928) in Boston. LAMBS, THE. The origin of the Lambs of New York City may be traced to a Christmas dinner at Delmonico’s in 1874, when some members of Lester Wallack’s company, then ACTING in Dion Boucicault’s The Shaughran, socialized with their host, George H. McLean, and other cultured gentlemen, and conceived of forming a supper club to repeat such pleasant and instructive gatherings. Actor Henry Montague had belonged to the Lambs of London, which was then adopted as a model. Montague was elected the first Shepherd, with Harry Beckett as Boy (treasurer). After a few years of informal gatherings, the Lambs incorporated in 1877 as a New York institution with a charter membership of 60. During the early decades, the membership comprised three theatre professionals to every nonprofessional. As a precaution against conflict of interest, no CRITIC or booking agent could be a Lamb. After several moves, the clubhouse settled at 34 West 26th Street in 1880, and it was there that the Lambs began presenting their in-house monthly Gambols in 1888. The Gambols were original skits and songs under the DIRECTION of a Collie. The remunerative success of opening a Gambol to the public in 1891 brought financial solvency and led to the practice of presenting an annual public Gambol. Eventually, it became customary for the STARS to play walk-on roles while the large roles went to lesser-known members. First-year members, called Lambkins, got the “dame” parts. No WOMAN ever became a Lamb or was even allowed inside the Fold (the clubhouse) until 1952. The Lambs prospered during the 1890s with Clay Meredith Greene as Shepherd and Augustus Thomas as Boy. In 1897, the Lambs moved into their first permanent clubhouse, a four-story building at 70 West 36th Street. They presented the public Gambol of 1898 at the Metropolitan Opera House, and it paid off the mortgage. The Lambs moved again in 1913, to an expanded facility at 128 West 44th Street, which remained the Fold until 1975. A number of skits written for the Gambols at that venue were later developed

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into full-length plays, including Edwin Milton Royle’s The Squaw Man, Her Way Out, and Struggle Everlasting; Augustus Thomas’s The Witching Hour, As A Man Thinks, and The Copperhead, among others. In May 1975, the clubhouse was sold to the Manhattan Church of the Nazarene, and its contents were sold at auction, but the club continues as a group of members. LANG, EVA (1885–1933). Born Eva Clara Lang in Columbus, Ohio, she grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, studied ACTING with Georgia Brown, and further developed her talent in O. D. Woodward’s STOCK company (playing a Kansas City, Omaha, Denver circuit), where she long remained a favorite of matinee girls, indeed a mainstay of the company from 1905 to 1913. As an ingénue, she TOURED the Midwest with particular success in Under Two Flags. Her more mature role as Mary Magdalen in The Holy City in 1907 made a powerful impression. Married to actor John Halliday from 1918 to 1928, she appeared with him in New York in Main Street (1921). After a period of retirement, she had a very emotional homecoming performance in Kansas City in 1930 and another, in 1932, as Stella Dallas. LANGNER, LAWRENCE (1890–1962).† A native of Wales, Lawrence Langner worked in London theatre and as a patent lawyer before coming to the United States in 1911. Once established in the legal profession, Langner reignited his theatrical interests by becoming one of the founders of the Washington Square Players in 1914. For the Players, he wrote plays including The Red Cloak (1916), Another Way Out (1916), and The Family Exit (1917). Most of his later plays were unsuccessful, with the exceptions of Henry-Behave (1926) and The Pursuit of Happiness* (1933), the last of which was written under his pseudonym (Alan Child) and had a long run. Langner also adapted the libretto of Champagne, Sec* (1933). Langner worked with the Washington Square Players until it disbanded in 1917. He then became one of the founders of the 4HEATRE 'UILD in 1918, coMANAGING with Theresa Helburn during its most productive period. He is credited with supervising as many as 200 Guild productions. Following the popular success of the Guild’s second production, John Ferguson (1919), Langner pushed for more European works, including plays by Ernst Toller, Georg Kaiser, Ferenc

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Molnár, Luigi Pirandello, and particularly 'EORGE"ERNARD3HAW, whose Heartbreak House (1919), Back to Methuselah (1921), and St. Joan (1923) were prestige triumphs for the Guild. Langner admired the plays of %UGENE/.EILL and prevailed upon the Guild to present O’Neill’s Strange Interlude (1928), which won a 0ULITZER 0RIZE. In collaboration with his wife, Armina Marshall,* Langner built the Westport Country Playhouse* in 1931, established a company there, and he founded the American* 3HAKESPEARE Festival* at Stratford, Connecticut, in the 1950s. LANGTRY, LILLIE (1853–1929). Born in Jersey, England, as Emilie Charlotte Le Breton, Lillie Langtry shocked London society when she became an ACTRESS despite having married into the wealthy elite. She had a notorious affair with the Prince of Wales and was celebrated as one of the great beauties of the age, often referred to as “The Jersey Lily.” Langtry’s American stage debut in a revival of Tom Taylor’s The Unequal Match in 1882 was a success and she attempted 3HAKESPEARE (Macbeth and As You Like It), but she was most appreciated in contemporary plays. Langtry acted in the United States as frequently as she did in England and had popular successes in Gossip (1895) and The Degenerates (1900), a play which generated considerable controversy over its depiction of high society scandals. #RITICS tended to praise Langtry’s beauty and charm more than her acting, but she had won respect for her talent by the time she retired in 1918. LARDNER, RING (1885–1933). Born in Niles, Michigan, Ringgold Wilmer Lardner became one of America’s greatest humorists with his numerous short stories. He occasionally worked as a songwriter and PLAYWRIGHT, and he wrote songs for PRODUCER Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. for the Ziegfeld Follies editions of 1917 and 1922 and the Ziegfeldproduced MUSICAL Smiles (1930). 2OBERT % 3HERWOOD adapted Lardner’s story The Love Nest into a play in 1927. Lardner had a mild success with the COMEDY Elmer the Great (1928) in a 'EORGE - #OHAN production. His biggest hit came in collaboration with 'EORGE 3 +AUFMAN on June Moon (1929), a comedy satirizing Tin Pan Alley. His son, Ring Lardner Jr., became a MOTIONPICTURE writer and was famously blacklisted for a time during the McCarthy Communist “witch hunt” era in the 1950s.

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LARIMORE, EARLE (1899–1947).† The stage and MOTIONPICTURE ACTOR was born in Portland, Oregon, and made his debut at seven. He served in World 7AR I, then joined a STOCK company in Astoria, Oregon. He made his New York debut in 1925 and enjoyed a solid decade of good roles, mostly in 4HEATRE 'UILD productions. He is perhaps best known for his roles in two %UGENE/.EILL plays, as Sam Evans in Strange Interlude (1928) and as Orin Mannon in Mourning Becomes Electra* (1931). LARRIMORE, FRANCINE (1898–1975). Born Francine La Remée in Verdun, France, she was brought to New York in CHILDHOOD and made her debut in 1910. From 1913, she was performing regularly on "ROADWAY, but her first big hit came in 1921 as a flapper who gets redeemed in 2ACHEL#ROTHERS’s Nice People. The 1920s also gave her leading roles in Nobody’s Business (1923), Nancy Ann (1924), Arms and the Man (1925), Chicago (1926), and Let Us Be Gay (1929). She was related to the Adler family, as a niece of Jacob Adler and cousin of ,UTHER and 3TELLA!DLER. LA SHELLE, KIRKE (1862–1905). Born in Wyoming, Illinois, Kirke La Shelle worked with various companies as business MANAGER before launching himself as a PRODUCER in the 1890s. Most of his career was associated with MUSICALS, but he produced such legitimate hits as The Earl of Pawtucket (1903) and The Virginian (1904). He dramatized the latter in collaboration with novelist Owen Wister. LAST WORD, THE. Opening on 28 October 1890 at Daly’s Theatre, the romantic COMEDY by Augustin Daly STARRED Ada Rehan and John Drew, and ran for 101 performances. The New York Times reviewer (2 November 1890) appreciated its lack of “everyday realism,” noting that “the personages are real human beings, to be sure; we sympathize with them and understand them, but they do not bore us with the petty details of their everyday lives. They love and suffer; they banter and jest; they charm and refresh us and lift our minds above the toil and discomfort of dreary everyday.” LATCHAW, AUSTIN (1861–1948). Born David Austin Latchaw in Venango County, Pennsylvania, the drama CRITIC came to Kansas City in 1886 on business for a publishing house and stayed in the

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crude frontier town on the verge of a culture boom. He began reviewing plays for the Kansas City Times in 1888, moved to the Kansas City Journal in 1895, and from 1902, worked for the Kansas City Star. He loved the stage STARS of the glory days of the ROAD, 1880s to 1912, and developed warm friendships with many. His criticism may have been overly generous, but it was also passionate and funny. He had a remarkable memory for details of performances, as shown in his 60-chapter retrospective, “The Enchanted Years of the Stage,” published in the Star from 31 March to 23 June 1935. LATEINER, JACOB (1853–1935). Along with Moishe Hurwitz, Jacob Lateiner was one of the major writers for the shund theatre, the bottom rung of New York’s Yiddish stage, during its formative period in the United States in the 1890s. Lateiner is credited with writing over 150 plays, mostly simple melodramatic and sentimental works aimed at the unsophisticated tastes of newly arrived immigrants. LAW, H. ROBERT (1876–1925). Beginning in 1915, H. Robert Law did SCENEDESIGNS for many "ROADWAY productions as well as some in collaboration (notably with P. Dodd Ackerman) and some as a product of his H. Robert Law Studio, 502 West 138th Street, New York City. He designed five plays in 1915, his first season on Broadway—Maid in America, Three of Hearts, The Ware Case, The White Feather, and A World of Pleasure—in addition to the studio design for Mr. Myd’s Mystery. Among his many others were The Man Who Came Back (1916) and The Intimate Strangers (1921). LAWSON, JOHN HOWARD (1895–1977). A New York native, John Howard Lawson attended Williams College, where he began writing plays with a Marxist bent. Lawson’s leftist politics led him to develop a dramatic approach he labeled “political vaudeville,” and was first seen on "ROADWAY in Roger Bloomer (1923), an expressionist satirizing of a young man’s revolt against materialism. The 4HEATRE 'UILD PRODUCED his next play, Processional (1925), a success that featured ACTORS 'EORGE!BBOTT, *UNE7ALKER, and Philip Loeb* in a fiery account of a West Virginia coal miners’ strike. Lawson’s next three plays, including Nirvana (1926), Loud Speaker (1927), and The International (1928), all failed, but Success Story* (1932),

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produced by The Group Theatre,* was well-received. When sound MOTION PICTURES began, Lawson spent much of his time writing screenplays until he was blacklisted as one of the “Hollywood Ten” during the House Un-American Activities anti-Communist “witch hunts” in the late 1940s. LAWSON, KATE DRAIN (1894–1977). Born Katharine Drain in Spokane, Washington, she went to France as an ambulance driver in World 7AR I, then studied art in Paris and performed there as a dancer in 1921. Her marriage to PLAYWRIGHT John Howard Lawson lasted from 1918 to 1924. She designed COSTUMES for his play Roger Bloomer (1923). During the 1920s, she held various stage MANAGEMENT, technical, and design assistant positions on "ROAD WAY, and created SCENE DESIGNS for two plays: The Chief Thing (1926) and Mr. Pim Passes By (1927). Most of her set and costume designs on Broadway were during the 1930s, after which she focused on costuming in Los Angeles. For over 23 years, she was costume designer for Bob Hope. LAZARUS LAUGHED. %UGENE/.EILL’s only major drama of the 1920s not given a "ROADWAY production, Lazarus Laughed premiered instead at California’s Pasadena Playhouse, where it opened for a limited run on 9 April 1928. In this epic, Biblically inspired work, O’Neill continued his experimentation with masks, a device he had first employed in The Great God Brown (1926). In this case, the entire cast wore masks with the exception of Lazarus, who lives fearlessly because he is not afraid of death. When a jealous woman, Pompeia, kills Lazarus’s wife, he forgives her and when the insane Caligula condemns Lazarus to be burned at the stake, the repentant Pompeia throws herself on the fire. Lazarus only laughs as he is engulfed by the flames, calling out “Fear not, Caligula! There is no death,” as the horrified Caligula begs forgiveness. California CRITICS applauded the lavish production, featuring Irving Pichel as Lazarus and Victor Jory* as Caligula, but were muted in their response to the play, which was similarly disliked by reviewers when it was published in book form. LEADING MAN, LEADING WOMAN/LADY. In a STOCK company, the leading man and leading woman roles were the major roles in the

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play and were cast according to those lines of business. However, if a STAR performed with the stock company, the star would take that role while the leading man or leading lady would either step down to a supporting role or be at rest during the star’s engagement. LEAH KLESCHNA. C. M. S. McLellan’s five-act drama, written as a vehicle for Minnie Maddern Fiske, opened on 12 December 1904 for 131 performances at the Manhattan Theatre. Mrs. Fiske played Leah, a thief, who attempts to steal jewels intended for Paul Sylvaine’s fiancée. When he catches Leah in the act, she recognizes him as the man who saved her during a shipwreck years before and they become friends. When the wastrel Raoul Berton (played by George Arliss), the brother of Sylvaine’s intended, steals the jewels, framing Leah in the process, Sylvaine protects Leah, but loses his fiancée. Reformed, Leah marries Sylvaine. McLellan’s original version offered a more ambiguous ending, but he changed it under pressure from Mrs. Fiske and her husband, Harrison Grey Fiske, PRODUCER of the play. It was a popular work in Mrs. Fiske’s REPERTORY, but was made into a MOTIONPICTURE without her in 1913, and was revived by William A. Brady in 1924 with McLellan’s original ending, achieving only 32 performances. LEAVITT, M. B. (1843–1935). Michael Bennett Leavitt was born in Posen, Prussia, brought to America before his second birthday, and made his debut with the Mrs. W. B. English Company in Bangor, Maine, performing alongside Mrs. English’s two daughters, Helen and Lucille Western. By age 14, he was performing in minstrel shows, playing banjo, bones, tambourine, and piano as well as ACT ING in the burlesque sketch and serving as advance man. As impresario of Madame Rentz’s Female Minstrels (later the Rentz-Santley troupe), he popularized burlesque performed by WOMEN. He moved easily into MANAGEMENT of legitimate theatre and formed a chain of theatres that became the prototype later imitated by the Theatrical Syndicate. During his career, he worked with virtually every person in American show business, much of which is recounted in his magisterial memoir, Fifty Years in Theatrical Management (1912). LEG BUSINESS. The success of The Black Crook, often referred to as the first MUSICAL, in New York in 1866 demonstrated that there was

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a huge paying audience for visual spectacle that included scantily clad women. The “leg business” was any endeavor that seemed to privilege female form over literary content. Olive Logan emerged as a vociferous CRITIC of such degradation of theatrical art. LEGAL WRECK, THE. This light romantic four-act play by William Gillette opened on 14 August 1888 for 102 performances at the Madison Square Theatre with a cast including Sidney Drew, George Fawcett, and Nina Boucicault. Drew played a lawyer who convinces two men, his rivals for the affections of a young woman, that each has killed the other. His goal is to eliminate the rivals and to reunite the girl with her mother and sister, thereby winning her love. Gillette adapted the play into a novel, beginning a trend that continues in the 21st century. LE GALLIENNE, EVA (1899–1991).† Distinguished ACTRESS and DIRECTOR Eva Le Gallienne was the daughter of noted writer Richard Le Gallienne. Born in London, she trained for the stage at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) and made her "ROADWAY debut in Mrs. Boltay’s Daughters (1915), but toiled with little success before scoring a triumph as Julie in the American premiere of Ferenc Molnár’s Liliom (1921), following this with another success in Molnár’s The Swan (1923). Le Gallienne’s most significant achievement was founding the #IVIC2EPERTORY4HEATRE#24 , a bold attempt to establish the REPERTORY system on Broadway with the goal of bringing classics of international drama to American audiences at bargain prices. Established in 1926 with the financial aid of Otto Kahn, the CRT ran for six seasons before financial strains ended the experiment, although Le Gallienne herself gave well-received performances in a range of CRT productions, including roles as Masha in Three Sisters, Viola in Twelfth Night, Sister Joanna in The Cradle Song, Elsa in the 0ULITZER0RIZE–winning 3USAN'LASPELL drama Alison’s House,* the White Queen in her own adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, as well as Peter Pan and Hedda Gabler. Among those acting with the CRT were !LLA.AZIMOVA, with whom Le Gallienne had a lesbian relationship. Le Gallienne also directed many CRT productions and continued acting in New York and on TOUR, scoring a particular success as Lettie in Thomas Job’s* Uncle Harry* (1942).

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After World War II, in partnership with Cheryl Crawford* and Margaret Webster,* Le Gallienne attempted once again to establish a New York company, the American Repertory Theatre* (ART), but it, too, failed. She continued to act until late in her life, occasionally appearing in MOTIONPICTURES. Le Gallienne may have rivaled +ATHARINE#ORNELL or (ELEN(AYES had she chosen a more commercial career, but she preferred experimenting with the classics and serious modern drama, especially the plays of (ENRIK)BSEN, Anton Chekhov, and 'EORGE"ERNARD3HAW. LEGITIMATE. The legitimate drama, stage, or theatre, called “legit” in VARIETY slang, meant straight plays without MUSICAL interpolations. The term originated when strict regulations during the 17th and 18th centuries were intended to protect the theatres that were licensed for the performance of plays. Nonlicensed theatre groups would get around the restrictions by adding snatches of song or dance, which theoretically changed the piece into a different (unregulated) genre. By extension, the term “legitimate” came to imply works of some literary merit. LEIBER, FRITZ (1883–1949). Born in Chicago, he made his ACTING debut there in 1902. Beginning with the role of Macduff in the Ben Greet Players’ 1905 production of Macbeth in New York, he established himself as a 3HAKESPEAREAN actor, playing perhaps a hundred different Shakespearean roles. From 1908 to 1915, he TOURED with Robert Mantell. In 1920, he organized his own company. He acted and DIRECTED for Chicago Civic Shakespeare Society from 1929 to 1932. LENIHAN, WINIFRED (1898–1964). Born in New York City and trained at the !MERICAN !CADEMY OF $RAMATIC !RTS (AADA), she made her ACTING debut in 1918. She played the title role in the American premier of 'EORGE"ERNARD3HAW’s Saint Joan (1923). Her other "ROADWAY appearances include For the Defense (1919), The Dover Road (1921), Will SHAKESPEARE (1923), White Wings (1926), Major Barbara (1928), and her own play, Blind Mice (1930), which was a failure. LESLIE, AMY (1860–1939). The irrepressible Chicago drama CRITIC was born Lillie West in West Burlington, Iowa. She graduated from

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the conservatory of music at St. Mary’s Academy, South Bend, Indiana, and spent several years performing in light opera in New York and on TOUR. After she and her first husband, Frank Brown, divorced, she returned to Chicago and, in 1890, began a 40-year career as critic for the Chicago Daily News, using the pen name Amy Leslie. In 1901, she married the much younger Frank “Bring ’em Back Alive” Buck, but they divorced 15 years later. Leslie’s style might be described as gushing, enthusiastic, and ornate. Her 1891 book Some Players is a collection of vividly written sketches of many ACTORS of the day, interspersed by the photographs they autographed to her. LESLIE, ELSIE (1881–1966). Born Elsie Lyde in Orange, New York, the CHILD ACTRESS captivated New York theatergoers in Editha’s Burglar (1887), Little Lord Fauntleroy (1888), and The Prince and the Pauper (1890). After a hiatus, she returned in The Rivals (1898), The Christian (1901), and others, without achieving her earlier level of success. LET US BE GAY. Opening 21 February 1929 at the Little Theatre, the sophisticated COMEDY by 2ACHEL#ROTHERS ran for 132 performances. *OHN'OLDEN PRODUCED it and Crothers DIRECTED her own work. Francine Larrimore played the charming divorcée whose erring husband wins her back in the course of an elegant house and garden party. The 1930 MOTION PICTURE version STARRED Norma Shearer and Marie Dressler. LETTER, THE. W. Somerset Maugham’s drama opened at the Morosco Theatre on 26 September 1927 for 104 performances. +ATHA RINE#ORNELL scored a triumph with CRITICS as Leslie Crosbie, the unfaithful wife of a South American plantation owner who murders her lover. Claiming the man attempted to rape her and, as such, that she was justified in shooting him, Leslie is acquitted with the aid of a lawyer friend and her supportive husband. However, the lover’s Asian wife takes matters of justice into her own hands. The play became a STOCK staple and memorable MOTION PICTURES, notably filmed twice, first as an early “talkie” STARRING Jeanne Eagels in 1929 and again in 1940 with Bette Davis.* Two television* adaptations (1969, 1982) also appeared.

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LEWIS, JAMES (1838–1896). Born in Troy, New York, this popular COMEDIAN, one of the “Big Four” of Augustin Daly’s company (a group including Ada Rehan, Mrs. G. H. Gilbert, and John Drew), began his theatrical apprenticeship in Mrs. John Wood’s troupe, performing in burlesque. Lewis joined Daly in 1869 and remained in the company until his death. He scored personal successes in a range of classic and contemporary comedies, particularly in 3HAKESPEARE, with his Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1888), Touchstone in As You Like It (1891), and Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night (1893) as particular standouts. LEWISOHN, ALICE (1883–1972) and IRENE LEWISOHN (1892– 1944). The sisters—Alice, a DIRECTOR and SCENE DESIGNER, and Irene, a PRODUCER, designer, and choreographer, both best remembered as cofounders of the .EIGHBORHOOD 0LAYHOUSE—were the eighth and tenth children of Leonard Lewisohn, a Germanimmigrant founder of American Smelting and Refining Company and Amalgamated Copper Company, and Rosalie (Jacobs) Lewisohn, from a family of New York bankers. The death of both parents at the turn of the century left over $2 million dollars for each of the 10 children. Their father had encouraged Alice’s and Irene’s artistic inclinations and had also exposed them to philanthropy and social work at New York City’s Henry Street Settlement House, where they formed a friendship with Lillian D. Wald. Irene traveled to Asia with Wald, while Alice studied ACTING with Sarah Cowell Le Moyne and made her professional debut in 1906. In 1912, Alice organized the Neighborhood Players at the Henry Street Settlement House, and the AMATEUR group produced several plays. In 1915, the sisters opened the 390-seat Neighborhood Playhouse, with construction financed by them, and modeled upon theatres they had visited in Europe. For 12 years, the company produced plays from the international repertoire, turning professional in 1920 and garnering particular acclaim from CRITICS for The Little Clay Cart (1924) and The Dybbuk (1925). Alice married designer Herbert E. Crowley in 1924; they were later divorced, but she is often referenced under the name Alice Crowley. Irene remained active in theatre after the Lewisohns closed the playhouse in 1927 due to unsustainable financial losses. She also founded the Museum of Costume Art, which was later absorbed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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LIBERTY THEATRES. During World 7AR I, temporary structures were erected at military training camps, where soldiers were entertained by professional troupers. LIEBLER, THEODORE A. (1852–1941). Born in New York shortly after his father was forced to depart from Germany for political reasons, Theodore A. Liebler studied art and worked as a lithographer. A fire at his studio forced him out of business, but he recouped by partnering with George C. Tyler to PRODUCE The Royal Box (1897). The play was a hit, leading Liebler and Tyler to establish a producing firm, Liebler & Co., that year, which became one of the dominant producing organizations prior to World 7AR I. Among his remarkable 240 productions were some of the most popular plays of the era, including The Christian (1898), Children of the Ghetto (1899), Sag Harbor (1900), In the Palace of the King (1900), A Gentleman of France (1901), Raffles (1903), Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (1904), The Squaw Man (1905), Salomy Jane (1907), The Man from Home (1908), Alias Jimmy Valentine (1910), Pomander Walk (1910), Disraeli (1911), and The Garden of Allah (1911). Liebler also produced American TOURS STARRING Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Eleonora Duse, Rejane, and the Abbey Theatre’s Irish Players. The tour of the Irish Players set off riots of Irish-Americans who found J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World objectionable. Liebler’s seemingly unerring sense for the tastes of the theatre-going public prior to World 7AR I declined after the war and, following several failures, the company folded and he retired. See also FOREIGN STARSANDCOMPANIESONTHE!MERICANSTAGE. LIGHT, JAMES (1894–1964). Born in Pittsburgh, the stage DIRECTOR studied painting and architecture at Carnegie Institute of Technology. After meeting %UGENE /.EILL, he joined the Provincetown Players, first as an ACTOR and then directing for the company for 13 years from 1917, staging O’Neill’s S. S. Glencairn and All God’s Chillun Got Wings, both in 1924. Light also directed for the Federal Theatre Project* and taught at the New School for Social Research, serving as dean of drama from 1939 to 1942. LIGHTING.† Theatre lighting at its most primitive during the period before electricity consisted solely of candlelight, and this was often

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the condition in small-town halls in rural America even very late in the 19th century. Schoberlin (1941) cites an instance in which only 12 candles served an entire facility—both stage and auditorium. Plays were written in acts that could be played before the candles burned down and had to be changed. Still, a smoking candle might require wick-trimming or snuffing during a scene. Safety, convenience, and illumination all improved with the use of oil lamps, which first replaced candles in the footlights. According to The Autobiography of Joseph Jefferson, during the first half of the 19th century in Midwestern towns, “a second-class quality of sperm-oil was the height of any manager’s ambition.” Gas lighting was the norm for theatres in most cities during most of the 19th century, with steady improvements in the equipment and ability to control its effects. The gas table allowed centralized control of the valves that regulated the gas lines to individual instruments. Gaslight required fairly large backstage crews of gasmen. This was also the era of the limelight. Toward the end of the 19th century, electric lighting began to replace gas lighting in theatres. It was safer, more economical, and easier to control. Similarly, the carbon arc replaced the limelight. Yet many artists remained partial to gaslight, and many turn-of-thecentury theatres were built with both gas and electric lighting in compatible systems. 3CENEDESIGNER Ernest Gros told an interviewer (Theatre Magazine, August 1908): “The electric light is brutal. We try to control it by the use of different media, but in no way can we get the softness and mystery of gas.” Thus, even after electric lighting replaced gas in theatres, the great English ACTOR Sir Henry Irving preferred the softer effects of the calcium light (limelight) and, on his 1899–1900 American TOUR, he brought his own gas tanks along on the train. His MANAGER Bram Stoker recalled in his Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906) that when they played Kansas City and stacked the scarlet oxygen tanks outside the stage door, a reporter published his assumption that Irving was a dying man, kept alive only by using oxygen. See also ARC LIGHT; THEATRE FIRES. LIGHTNIN’. Winchell Smith and Frank Bacon collaborated on this remarkably long-running hit, which opened on 26 August 1918 for a phenomenal 1,291 performances at the Gaiety Theatre, PRODUCED

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by *OHN'OLDEN. Bacon played “Lightnin’” Bill Jones, a bragging drunk, who owns a hotel sitting on the California/Nevada border. The hotel, run by Jones’s wife, features a line painted down the middle of the lobby indicating the borders of the two states. Mrs. Jones, along with Lightnin’s young friend, John Marvin (played by Ralph Morgan), are bilked by two shady speculators who convince Mrs. Jones to sell the hotel to them, but when Lightnin’ refuses to cosign the agreement, Mrs. Jones threatens divorce. However, Lightnin’ saves his marriage and John’s fortunes by revealing the duplicity of the speculators. Lightnin’ was the longest running play of its day until Abie’s Irish Rose surpassed it in the mid-1920s. John Ford made a MOTION PICTURE version in 1925. An early “talkie” STARRING Will Rogers was a hit in 1930. Revived on stage in 1938 with Fred Stone, Lightnin’ closed after 54 performances. LIMELIGHT. Invented by Thomas Drummond in 1826, limelight (or calcium light) was not regularly used in London theatres until much later. It was adopted by American troupes after the Civil 7AR, but was gradually replaced by the cheaper carbon arc light. The bright glow of limelight, directed through a lens, was produced by heating a block of limestone to incandescence with the spark of combined oxygen and hydrogen through hoses from their separate containers, allowing it to give off a misty white light. American theatres employed limelights during the later half of the 19th century mostly for spotlighting leading players. The term “in the limelight” is frequently employed to suggest an ACTOR at the center of attention. See also LIGHTING. LINDSAY, HOWARD (1889–1968).† Born in Waterford, New York, Howard Lindsay became a versatile theatre man, with notable successes as PLAYWRIGHT, ACTOR, DIRECTOR, and PRODUCER. Educated at Harvard University, Lindsay attended the !MERICAN !CADEMY OF$RAMATIC!RTS, after which he worked as an actor. He TOURED with McKee Rankin, worked in vaudeville and burlesque, and was a member of Margaret Anglin’s company beginning in 1913 and continuing until he went into the military during World 7AR I. Anglin acted in Lindsay’s first produced play, Billeted (1917). After the war, Lindsay’s A Young Man’s Fancy (1919) failed, but he directed and acted in 'EORGE3+AUFMAN and -ARC#ONNELLY’s COMEDY

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Dulcy (1921). During the 1920s, he directed Booth Tarkington’s The Wren (1921), Kaufman and Connelly’s To the Ladies and The ’49ers (1922), Sweet Nell of Old Drury (1923) STARRING !LFRED ,UNT and ,YNN&ONTANNE, Aaron Hoffman’s The Good Old Days (1923), Kaufman and Herman J. Mankiewicz’s The Good Fellow (1926), Edwin Burke’s This Thing Called Love (1928), and his own play Tommy (1927), written in collaboration with Bertrand Robinson, with whom he also wrote Your Uncle Dudley (1929) and Oh, Promise Me (1930). Lindsay acted in several of these. After 1930 he collaborated almost exclusively with Russel Crouse* and they won the 0ULITZER0RIZE for State of the Union* (1945) and a Tony Award* for their libretto of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s* The Sound of Music (1959) and scored a record-setting success with the comedy Life with Father* (1939), in which Lindsay played the lead opposite his wife, $OROTHY3TICKNEY. LINE PARTIES. In the 1880s and 1890s, fashionable young people would attend the theatre in groups, booking their seats in a continuous row, thus forming “line parties.” LINES OF BUSINESS. From the 18th century until the rise of the combination system, ACTORS were hired according to certain categories of roles that they would play throughout the REPERTORY of plays presented by that company. Apart from the leading man and leading lady roles, the usual lines of business in any late 19th-century TOURING company, presenting mostly melodramas interspersed by COMEDIES and Shakespeare* plays, were: juvenile, ingénue, heavy man (or villain), eccentric (often ETHNIC types), light comedian, character actor, low comedian, old man, walking gentleman, and utility. There were, of course, female counterparts to many of them, as well as endless variations like the Yankee, the soubrette, and the respectable utility. LION AND THE MOUSE, THE. Opening on 20 November 1905 at the Lyceum Theatre, the drama by Charles Klein ran for 586 performances. The New York Times reviewer (21 November 1905) saw its theme as “the dominant power of money in American politics.” Edmund Breese played “Ready-Money” Ryder, a corrupt corporate figure whose chicanery has brought disgrace on an upright judge.

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The judge’s daughter, as an author using a pen name, gains access to Ryder’s papers and finds the evidence needed to clear her father’s name. Of course, her conflicted romantic feelings incline toward the judge’s son. It was not difficult for the public to see the parallels with corporate genius John D. Rockefeller and investigative journalist Ida Tarbell, whose two years of research into the oil industry had resulted in the 1904 publication of her classic study, The History of the Standard Oil Company. LIPTZIN, KENI (1856–1918). The Yiddish tragedienne had ACTED with Jacob Adler and others in Europe and traveled with him to New York in the mid-1880s. Small of stature but powerful in her intensity, she emerged as a leading lady, specializing in plays by Jacob Gordin, and established her own Liptzin Theatre. Supported by her husband Michael Mintz, a publisher, she did not need to pander to popular appeal and thus became Gordin’s ideal actress. LITT, JACOB (1860–1905). Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the impresario worked theatre jobs from boyhood, learning the business and working up to acquisition of his own theatres in his hometown, where he PRODUCED melodramas that then lucratively TOURED the Midwest. The self-made man eventually also held theatres in Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Paul, and the "ROADWAY Theatre in New York. He had a MANAGEMENT association with Charles Frohman, and in 1901, formed a partnership with A. W. “Sandy” Dingwall, who in 1890 had left his position as drama CRITIC on the Milwaukee Sentinel to work with Litt. Litt became a millionaire after his STOCK company produced In Old Kentucky by Charles T. Dazey in 1893 and then sent it on the ROAD, where it remained perennially popular, returning annually to many cities for two decades. Illness forced his early retirement in 1902. LITTLE ACCIDENT. This three-act COMEDY by Floyd Dell and 4HOMAS -ITCHELL, PRODUCED by Crosby Gaige, opened at the Morsoco Theatre on 9 October 1928 for 303 performances. Based on a novel by Dell, the play was adapted by ACTOR Mitchell, who played hapless Norman Overbeck who learns that he is the father of Isabel Drury’s baby shortly before he is to marry Madge Ferris. Following complications, he realizes he loves Isabel. Little Accident

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found its way to MOTION PICTURE screens twice (1930, 1939), and Dell and Mitchell collaborated on another Mitchell vehicle, Cloudy with Showers (1931). LITTLE JOURNEY, A. Opening 26 December 1918 at the Little Theatre, the 3HUBERT-PRODUCED COMEDY written and DIRECTED by 2ACHEL #ROTHERS ran for 252 performances. %STELLE 7INWOOD played an impoverished society belle on a train heading west. She made a credible emotional trajectory of her learning through the disaster of a train wreck to think of someone other than herself. LITTLE OLD NEW YORK. Opening on 8 September 1920 at the Plymouth Theatre, this COMEDY by Rida Johnson Young ran for 311 performances. 0RODUCED by 3AM((ARRIS and DIRECTED by Sam Forrest, its slight plot appealed to audiences for its evocation of the Dutch era in New York City’s history. LITTLE THEATRE. Small theatre groups formed in order to promote new PLAYWRIGHTS and experimental techniques without commercial pressure sprang up around the United States in the 1910s and 1920s. The designation as a movement came after the 1915 openings of Washington Square Players and the .EIGHBORHOOD0LAYHOUSE, followed in 1916 by the Provincetown Players, but the phenomenon can be traced back earlier. Percy MacKaye may be the first American theatre artist to promote the notion of such theatres in his book, The Playhouse and the Play (1909). However, earlier initiatives can be signaled, notably Jane Addams’s Hull-House Players in Chicago, begun in 1900. An article by Constance D’Arcy Mackay in The American City (September 1918, 206–12) promoted the concept. Chicago became a hotbed of little theatres between 1900 and 1925, with many—like Maurice Browne’s Chicago Little Theatre (1919)—operating only briefly. Detroit’s Arts and Crafts Theatre run by Samuel J. Hume did significant work, as did many others. Some little theatres produced new plays, a trend exemplified by the Provincetown Players, who gave early opportunities to %UGENE /.EILL and 3USAN'LASPELL. Others stressed European plays and techniques, particularly those in the social problem play style perfected of (ENRIK)BSEN and 'EORGE"ERNARD3HAW. Still others devoted their attention to the cultures of immigrant groups, while some,

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like New York’s ,AFAYETTE 0LAYERS and Cleveland’s +ARAMU (OUSE, focused on elevating the quality of theatrical opportunities for !FRICAN!MERICANS. The little theatre movement laid the foundation for the community theatres* of the 1930s and after, which in turn prepared audiences for the great network of professional regional resident nonprofit theatres* that developed in the 1960s. LITTLE WOMEN. Persistent in her quest for a successful dramatization of Louisa May Alcott’s novel, Jessie Bonstelle tried and tweaked various versions on the ROAD. She DIRECTED it in New York at the Playhouse, where it opened on 14 October 1912 and ran for 184 performances. William A. Brady PRODUCED it and !LICE "RADY played Meg. LOCKE, ALAIN (1886–1954). The !FRICAN!MERICAN scholar and CRITIC was born in Philadelphia and educated at Harvard and Oxford Universities, the latter on a Rhodes scholarship. From 1911, he taught at Howard University and wrote prolifically on African American culture to the extent that he can be credited as a progenitor of the Harlem Renaissance. In a running polemic with W. E. B. DuBois, Locke upheld the value of folk drama as opposed to DuBois’s more propagandist approach. As an essayist and editor, Locke supported Georgia Douglas Johnson and other playwrights of her circle. With Montgomery Gregory, he founded the Howard Players. LOCKE, EDWARD (1869–1945). The ACTOR-PLAYWRIGHT was born in Sturbridge, Worcester, England, and came to America in 1884 to perform with a STOCK company. After acting with David Warfield in The Music Master, he left the stage to devote himself to writing plays. His notable success came in 1909 with The Climax, which was taken on the ROAD by six different companies and revived on "ROAD WAY in 1919. His other plays include The Case of Becky (1912), The Silver Wedding (1913), The Bubble (1915), and The Dancer (1919). LOCKE, ROBINSON (1856–1920). Born in Plymouth, Ohio, the nationally renowned Toledo Blade drama CRITIC and arts activist followed in the footsteps of his father, David Ross Locke, who had purchased the Blade after the Civil 7AR. After travels in Europe, Locke returned to Toledo to write theatre and music reviews under the name

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Rodney Lee. Meanwhile, he corresponded with artists and amassed a monumental collection of rare books, theatre memorabilia, and clippings. He was a founder of the Toledo Museum of Art in 1901 among many other civic involvements in arts organizations. Locke’s name is known today for the invaluable Robinson Locke Collection, more than 500 bound volumes in addition to thousands of unbound clippings, playbills, photographs, and letters, now housed at Lincoln Center* Theatre Library in New York City. LOCKRIDGE, RICHARD (1898–1982).† Born in St. Joseph, Missouri, Richard Lockridge began his journalistic career after World 7AR I, reporting for the Kansas City Kansan, the Kansas City Journal, and the Kansas City Star. In 1923, he joined the New York Sun, where he was drama CRITIC from 1928. He wrote a biography of Edwin Booth titled Darling of Misfortune (1932), and with his wife, Frances Lockridge, wrote the popular Mr. and Mrs. North detective novels. LOEW, MARCUS (1870–1927). The PRODUCER was born into poverty in New York City and left school to take odd jobs when he was nine. From penny arcades he moved to acquire a dime theatre in Brooklyn, and then began to build his remarkable chain, which by 1921 totaled 47 theatres in 12 states and, at the time of his death, about 150 theatres with an additional 24 under construction. Although primarily associated with vaudeville and MOTIONPICTURES, Loew was described in his VARIETY obituary (7 September 1927) as “the outstanding individual figure of the amusement industries of all times—substantially, sentimentally, financially and constructively.” Moreover, Loew was extolled for his honesty and kindliness. He was a close friend and sometime business partner of ACTOR David Warfield. LOFTUS, CISSIE (1876–1943). Born Marie Cecilia Loftus Brown in Glasgow, Scotland, the versatile ACTRESS began performing professionally at 15 and won a following with her impersonations of celebrities. She made her American debut in vaudeville in 1895, but then moved into comic opera and legitimate drama. She TOURED in 3HAKESPEAREAN roles with Helena Modjeska and later with William Faversham. She enjoyed particular success with E. H. Sothern in If I Were King, which was written for her by her first husband, J. Huntley McCarthy. Between these engagements, she would return to

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vaudeville, triumphing when she played the Palace in 1923. In later years, she drank heavily between engagements, but was never known to miss a performance. LOGAN, OLIVE (1836–1909). Born in Elmira, New York, the activist ACTRESS and PLAYWRIGHT grew up in a theatrical family, often playing CHILD roles in her father’s company. She made her adult debut in 1854 at Philadelphia’s Arch Street Theatre. From 1855 to 1863, she lived abroad, during which period she married the first of her three husbands. In 1864, she acted in her own play, Evaleen, at Wallack’s Theatre in New York City, and then TOURED it under the title The Felon’s Daughter. Having begun publishing essays in periodicals about her life in Paris while she lived there, she decided to pursue writing as a profession instead of acting. She wrote voluminously, not only about the theatre, but also about WOMEN’s issues, on which she also lectured widely. She championed decency of behavior and dress for women, gaining national celebrity. Her 1870 memoir Before the Footlights and Behind the Scenes colorfully evokes changes in theatrical customs during the post–Civil 7AR years and recounts the controversy following publication of her famous essay on “the leg business,” condemning scantily clad women on stage, in Galaxy magazine (summer 1867). She followed that book with another, The Mimic World (1871), and also began to see her plays PRODUCED in New York: Surf (1870), A Business Woman (1873), A Will and a Way (1874), her translation of La Cigale (1878), and Newport (1879). LOMBARDI, LTD. Opening on 24 September 1917 at the Morosco Theatre, the COMEDY by Frederic and Fanny Hatton ran for 296 performances. Leo Carrillo (originally spelled Carillo) played an Italian dressmaker with a fashionable clientele, who becomes infatuated with a gold-digging showgirl. He made a hit with lines like “Such talkings from you! Each-a time you open your mouth you make-a the indecent exposure of your mind.” Carrillo revived the play to renewed success in 1927. LONERGAN, LESTER (1869?–1931). The Irish-born ACTOR came to California in 1886 and soon found employment with STOCK companies. He gained a popular following as leading man with the Woodward Stock Company in Kansas City for several seasons at the

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turn of the century. He played both contemporary and 3HAKESPEAR EAN roles, including Hamlet. In 1901, he organized an open-air production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It in Kansas City’s Troost Park, with electric LIGHTS and an orchestra in the shrubbery; he played Orlando and DIRECTED. In New York, he acted with major figures like John Barrymore and Minnie Maddern Fiske, but increasingly turned to directing. Two of his own plays were PRODUCED in New York: The Golden Age (1928) and House Unguarded (1928). LONG, JOHN LUTHER (1861–1927). Pennsylvania-born John Luther Long gave up a thriving law career to write short stories before collaborating with David Belasco on three plays, Madame Butterfly (1900), The Darling of the Gods (1902), and Adrea (1904). With Edward Childs Carpenter he wrote The Dragon Fly (1905), but he also penned several plays on his own, including Dolce (1906), which STARRED Minnie Maddern Fiske, and Kassa (1909), a vehicle for Mrs. Leslie Carter. Long’s final play, Crowns (1922), found scant favor. LOOS, ANITA (1888–1981). Born in Mount Shasta, California, Anita Loos scripted over 200 MOTION PICTURES from the silent era to sound, but also wrote novels and plays. Her most successful play, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1926), adapted from her novel by Loos and her husband, John Emerson, is a COMEDY about Lorelei Lee, a gold-digging flapper in the Jazz Age. With Emerson, Loos also wrote The Whole Town’s Talking (1923), The Fall of Eve (1925), and The Social Register (1931). On her own, Loos’s Happy Birthday* (1946), a modest success, STARRED (ELEN (AYES, and Loos also adapted Colette’s novel Gigi* (1951). Her screenplays include classics, from D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) to San Francisco (1936), Saratoga (1937), and The Women* (1939). LORD, PAULINE (1890–1950). The ACTRESS was born in Hanford, California, and educated in San Francisco, where she often attended plays at the Alcazar Theatre. At 13, she performed with the Belasco 3TOCK Company there. She TOURED with various companies before making her New York debut in The Talker in 1912. She performed in a number of well-received plays, but finally made the leap to STAR DOM in %UGENE /.EILL’s Anna Christie (1921), with continuing

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acclaim for her performances in They Knew What They Wanted (1924), The Late Christopher Bean* (1932), and Ethan Frome* (1936). As ,YNN&ONTANNE’s replacement in the role of Nina Leeds in Strange Interlude in 1928, she again won praise for her compelling qualities: the emotional truth of her characterizations, her tremulous vulnerability, and subtle power. LOST PARADISE, THE. Opening on 16 November 1891 at Proctor’s 23rd Street Theatre, Henry C. DeMille’s adaptation of a German play by Ludwig Fulda, DIRECTED and PRODUCED by Charles Frohman, ran for 138 performances. This drama of the conflict between Capital and Labor ends happily with the wealthy manufacturer’s daughter choosing the factory superintendent (an engineer who sides with the striking workers) over the socially superior young man whom her father has made a partner and who alienates the workers. Finally, it is revealed that the superintendent actually invented the device that enabled the manufacturer to prosper! LOTTERY MAN, THE. Opening on 6 December 1909 at the Bijou Theatre, the 3HUBERT-PRODUCED farce by Rida Johnson Young ran for 200 performances. An engaging but debt-ridden young journalist hits upon the idea of raffling himself off in marriage at a dollar per ticket. Just as the money starts to pour in, he meets the girl of his dreams. He then enlists his friends to buy as many tickets as possible in her name. This makes her indignant when she learns of it, but all ends well. LOTTERY OF LOVE, THE. Opening on 9 October 1888 at Daly’s Theatre, the three-act COMEDY, freely adapted by Augustin Daly from the French hit Les Surprises du divorce, ran for 105 performances. Ecstatically received by CRITICS and audiences, the play provided wonderful comic roles for John Drew, Mrs. G. H. Gilbert, and James Lewis, while Ada Rehan skillfully milked values from the less substantial role of Miss Buttercorn. The opening night audience cheered the STARS and called for a speech from Daly. The comedy continued its success on the ROAD. LOVERS’ LANE. 0RODUCER William A. Brady balked at presenting Clyde Fitch’s four-act play because of its subject matter, but

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following a well-received tryout in Trenton, New Jersey, he brought it to the Manhattan Theatre for 127 performances opening on 6 February 1901. Rev. Thomas Singleton, played by Ernest Hastings, contends with a narrow-minded congregation shocked by his efforts to feed the undeserving poor and house orphans, while permitting a divorced woman to sing in the church choir. They are horrified when he allows card playing and shooting pool, which leads conservative Deacon Steele to attempt to remove him. However, Singleton prevails and continues his compassionate work. A MOTIONPICTURE version of Lovers’ Lane was released in 1924. LOWELL, HELEN (1866–1937). Helen Lowell Robb was born in New York City and began her ACTING career at 17 in the title role of the operetta Iolanthe. By 1885, she was performing in New York. She was most remembered as Miss Hazy in Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (1903), among many roles, some performed on TOURS abroad. In The Lottery Man (New York Times, 7 December 1909), she had “the dry, acrid humor of real comedy, never once overdoing or underdoing, and creating a sense of sympathy underneath the laughter.” After 1934, she made her career in MOTIONPICTURES. LUCKY SAM MCCARVER. Opening on 21 October 1925 at The Playhouse, 3IDNEY(OWARD’s play, PRODUCED by William A. Brady Jr., ran for 30 performances. The published text (Scribner’s, 1926) includes a 21-page preface by Howard and is subtitled “Four Episodes in the Rise of a New Yorker.” In act 1, Sam is a speakeasy owner who persuades Carlotta, a slightly “tarnished” socialite (played by Clare Eames), to marry him. Although he is clearly using her social position to promote his ambitions, their act 2 scene in their Park Avenue apartment hints that there could be genuine affection beneath the tensions in their relationship. She is embarrassed to have her family meet him, but her aunt finds Sam refreshing and invites him to the family villa in Venice. At the villa in act 3, Sam is chafing with irritation at the decadent rich. Sam and Carlotta quarrel bitterly. In the final scene, Sam comes to the dying Carlotta’s bedside. She tests his motives, but he cannot bring himself to express his true feelings for her. Her cousin goes to get a doctor. Carlotta dies. Sam looks at his watch and decides that his business appointment is more important than staying with the body until her cousin returns. The lack of

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sentimentality and of a traditionally satisfying ending may account for the play’s relatively short run. LULU BELLE. This lurid, melodramatic four-act drama by Edward Sheldon and Charles MacArthur* was PRODUCED by David Belasco at his theatre on 9 February 1926 for 461 performances, an impressive run inspired, in part, by highly publicized attempts to ban the play. Lulu Belle, a black prostitute in Harlem, seduces white family man George Randall, but leaves him for a boxer. She similarly deserts the boxer for the wealthy Vicompte de Villars, who sets her up in a luxurious Paris apartment. Tragedy befalls all of the characters, including Lulu Belle, who is strangled to death by the obviously insane Randall. Aside from moral protesters, there were also outcries from !FRICAN!MERICAN organizations condemning the play’s content and the fact that leading lady Lenore Ulric was white and played Lulu Belle in blackface makeup, an increasingly outmoded stage tradition by the 1920s. Heavily rewritten, Lulu Belle became a MOTIONPICTURE in 1948. See also CENSORSHIP. LUNT, ALFRED (1892–1977).† Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Alfred David Lunt attended Carroll College to study architecture, but instead he became an ACTOR. He appeared in STOCK with Boston’s Castle Square Theatre and TOURED with Lillie Langtry and Margaret Anglin. He had his first "ROADWAY part in a failure, Romance and Arabella (1917), but won acclaim in the title role of Booth Tarkington’s Clarence (1919). When he married actress ,YNN&ON TANNE in 1922, they began working together almost exclusively, first in a revival of Sweet Nell of Old Drury (1923) and the next year in their first dual triumph in Ferenc Molnár’s The Guardsman (1924), appearing in a 1931 MOTIONPICTURE version, their only significant screen appearance. In a few rare solo roles, Lunt was well-received as Mr. Prior in Sutton Vane’s Outward Bound (1924), as bootlegger Babe Callahan in 3IDNEY (OWARD’s Ned McCobb’s Daughter (1926), and as Marco Polo in %UGENE /.EILL’s Marco Millions (1928), among others. In the 1920s, Lunt and Fontanne began a long string of critical and commercial successes establishing them as the greatest acting couple in the history of the American theatre, admired for their individual gifts and the skill with which they worked together. Their

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major joint appearances include a revival of 'EORGE "ERNARD 3HAW’s Arms and the Man (1925), C. K. Munro’s At Mrs. Beam’s (1926), Jacques Copeau and Jean Croue’s adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov (1927), 3."EHRMAN’s The Second Man (1927), Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma (1927), Sil-Vara’s Caprice (1928), and Behrman’s Meteor (1929). From 1930 to the late 1950s, their careers continued unabated from Elizabeth the Queen* (1930) to Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit (1958). Lunt also DIRECTED many of their vehicles, as well as Candle in the Wind* (1941), Ondine* (1954), and First Love* (1961). Lunt and Fontanne were respected for their exacting professionalism and for the exhausting tours they did, bringing the finest plays and acting of the period to all corners of the United States.

n-n MACDOWELL, MELBOURNE (1856–1941). The Canadian-born ACTOR ran away from home when he was 11 and went to sea. In his twenties, he joined his brother’s theatre company in Montreal. He played heroic roles in the tradition of John McCullough. He joined the company of Fanny Davenport, whom he married in 1889. Amy Leslie wrote of him in Some Players (1901, 358): “Melbourne MacDowell is Fanny Davenport’s greatest work of art. She took this stalwart Jovian animal, wild from the plains of Canada, lifted him to her own estate in the world of art, and imprinted upon his personality something of her own magnetism and exceptional power. He is to-day one of the handsomest, most forceful and influential actors on the stage. His voice is grown mellifluous and golden, his rash athletic gestures modulated to grace, and his splendid physique brought in from the lines of the giants.” After Davenport’s death, MacDowell coSTARRED with Blanche Walsh for several seasons, followed by a stint in silent MOTIONPICTURES. MACGOWAN, KENNETH (1888–1963).† One of the most influential PRODUCERS and drama CRITICS between the world WARS, Kenneth Macgowan was born in Winthrop, Massachusetts. He attended Harvard University and worked as a dramatic critic for the Boston Evening Transcript and the Philadelphia Evening Ledger before

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becoming the drama critic for the New York Globe in 1919, a position he held until 1923. Macgowan also wrote criticism for Vogue and THEATRE ARTS. In 1924, he became a producer when he joined 2OBERT %DMOND *ONES and %UGENE /.EILL in managing the Provincetown Playhouse in New York. Macgowan’s friendship with O’Neill was particularly significant, not only because he produced several of O’Neill’s early plays (All God’s Chillun Got Wings, Desire Under the Elms, The Fountain, and The Great God Brown) when they and Jones operated the Greenwich Village Theatre (1925–1927), but because he encouraged O’Neill’s inclination to move beyond REALISM in his plays. Macgowan presented the first New York production of August Strindberg’s Spook Sonata in 1924, as well as a hit revival of Anna Cora Mowatt’s Fashion (1924). He produced on "ROADWAY and for MOTIONPICTURES. His books on theatre, including The Theatre of Tomorrow (1921), Continental Stagecraft (1922, with Robert Edmond Jones), Masks and Demons (1923, with Herman Rosse), and Footlights Across America (1929), did much to encourage acceptance of modernist production practices emanating from Europe’s stages and ushering in the New Stagecraft. MACHINAL. The expressionist drama by Sophie Treadwell, PRO DUCED and DIRECTED by !RTHUR(OPKINS with SCENEDESIGNS by 2OBERT%DMOND*ONES, opened on 7 September 1928 at the Plymouth Theatre and ran for 93 performances. Having worked as both a “stunt” and “sob sister” journalist, Treadwell had followed with interest the 1927 trial of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray for the murder of Snyder’s husband, events which became the basis for her play about a sensitive working woman (played by Zita Johann) who marries her boss to escape her insensitive mother and the dehumanizing effects of urban life. She falls for a younger man (the yet-unknown Clark Gable) and, motivated by the dream of romance, kills her husband. The lover escapes, but she is brought to trial and executed. It was the stylization of settings and lighting with the staccato sounds of modern city life, the mechanized characterizations, and spare, rhythmic dialogue that made the slender plot so compelling. Not only is the play frequently revived, but it has remained in print. MACK, WILLARD (1878–1934). Born in Morrisburg, Ontario, Canada, Charles Willard McLaughlin graduated from Georgetown

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University and began a newspaper career, but joined the Guy Hichman Players as an ACTOR. Later he formed his own STOCK company in South Bend, Indiana. In San Francisco, he was leading man with the Alcazar Theatre’s stock company. He went into vaudeville, performing his own sketches, some of which he expanded into fulllength plays. The 1910s and 1920s brought him considerable success as a PLAYWRIGHT, and he continued to act in some of his own works. His plays include Kick In (1914), So Much for So Much (1914), Tiger Rose (1917), The Big Chance (1918, with Grant Morris), Near Santa Barbara (1921), Canary Dutch (1925), Honor Be Damned (1927), and many others. MACKAY, CONSTANCE D’ARCY (1887–1966). At the turn of the century, she was an advocate for community pageantry as a way of bringing diverse populations together. She was also a leading exponent of CHILDREN’s theatre.* Mackay published over 30 volumes of plays for children in addition to handbooks for AMATEUR production and a 1917 classic, Little Theatre in the United States. MACKAYE, PERCY (1875–1966). Born in New York, Percy Wallace MacKaye, son of theatrical luminary 3TEELE -AC+AYE, emerged from his father’s shadow as a PLAYWRIGHT and visionary who adopted theories emerging from modernist European theatre, inspired the little theatre movement, and promoted the New Stagecraft. He studied at Harvard University, wrote poetry and taught courses, then embarked on a career as a playwright. His finest play, The Scarecrow, adapted from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Feathertop, managed only 23 performances on "ROADWAY in 1911 after its first presentation by the Harvard Dramatic Club in 1909. MacKaye also wrote masques and pageants, including St. Louis Masque (1914), marking the 150th anniversary of the city’s founding, and Caliban of the Yellow Sands (1916), staged in Central Park in acknowledgment of the 300th anniversary of 3HAKESPEARE’s death. His interest in Shakespeare also included a massive tetrology, The Mystery of Hamlet, King of Denmark; or, What We Will (1949). MacKaye wrote the libretto for an operatic adaptation of Rip Van Winkle (1919) with music by Reginald De Koven. His seminal 1909 book The Playhouse and the Play, which called for the establishment of community theatres aimed at dramatic experimentation and issues of significance to their

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audiences, may be his most lasting contribution. MacKaye continued to promote these themes in other works, including The Civic Theatre (1912) and Community Drama (1917), as well as writing a biography of his father, Epoch (1907). MACKAYE, STEELE (1842–1894).† James Morrison Steele MacKaye was born in Buffalo, New York, son of a lawyer and art fancier who sent his son to Paris to study art. MacKaye returned to join the Union army during the Civil 7AR and rose to the rank of major before illness ended his service. After recovering, MacKaye returned to Paris and in 1869 studied expression with François Delsarte. Returning to the United States, MacKaye lectured on Delsarte’s theories and opened a school in New York in 1871 to teach Delsarte’s techniques. MacKaye launched himself as an ACTOR and PLAYWRIGHT with Monaldi (1872), coauthored by Francis Durivage, but it failed to find an audience. He played Hamlet in London’s Crystal Palace in 1873, then scored New York successes with two plays, Rose Michel (1875) and Won at Last (1877). MacKaye assumed management of the Fifth Avenue Theatre and refurbished it with a LIGHTING system designed by Thomas A. Edison and other state-of-the-art equipment, including an innovative elevator stage that permitted fast scene shifts. Renamed the Madison Square Theatre, MacKaye opened it with his hit play Hazel Kirke (1880), which achieved the longest run of a nonMUSICAL work in the history of the American theatre to that time. -ANAGEMENT problems led to his loss of the theatre, so MacKaye designed another theatre, in which he planned to include a hotel, but it was never built. In 1885, MacKaye designed the Lyceum Theatre, which again incorporated technical innovations and a space for a drama school. Among MacKaye’s later plays, Paul Kauvar; or, Anarchy (1887), a French Revolution melodrama, won favor, as did The Drama of Civilization (1887). MacKaye also designed a Spectatorium for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair in which he planned to present The World Finder, a pageant of Columbus’s life, but the elaborate plan had to be scaled back due to a national economic downturn. He was the father of Percy MacKaye. MADAME BUTTERFLY. David Belasco and John Luther Long collaborated on this one-act tragedy that opened on 5 March 1900

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at the Herald Square Theatre for 24 performances. Conceived as an afterpiece for Belasco’s farce, Naughty Anthony, Madame Butterfly proved more popular. Although critics carped about this slight character study, Madame Butterfly attained theatrical permanence via Giacomo Puccini’s 1904 opera version, as well as the London and "ROADWAY MUSICAL, Miss Saigon (1990) and David Henry Hwang’s* play, M. Butterfly* (1989). In the Belasco-Long play, geisha Cho-Cho-San falls in love with Pinkerton, an American naval officer, who promises to remain true to her when he sails away with his fleet. Cho-Cho-San later learns from the American consul that Pinkerton has married another woman. When the story is confirmed, she commits suicide. Mary Pickford STARRED in a 1915 silent MO TIONPICTURE version. MADAME X. The French melodrama La Femme X by Alexandre Bisson became a mainstay of the early 20th-century American stage, largely for the histrionic opportunities afforded an emotional AC TRESS in the portrayal of an erring WOMAN who has sunk to the gutter and committed murder. She is brought to trial and finally redeemed by reunion with her son, who—in a wonderful coincidence—is the attorney appointed to defend the woman he does not recognize. She also gets to play a death scene. Charles Frohman presented an English version in London, opening 2 September 1909, and 12 days later, Henry W. Savage opened the first American production in Rochester, New York. Translated by John N. Raphael and edited for the American stage by William Henry Wright, it opened at New York’s New Amsterdam Theatre on 2 February 1910. Dorothy Donnelly elicited floods of tears in the title role, which was taken up on TOUR by Amelia Bingham, among others, as well as PRODUCED by resident STOCK companies to feature actresses like Eva Lang. MADISON SQUARE THEATRE. The fairly small theatre located on 24th Street near "ROADWAY in New York was built in 1862 and operated under various MANAGEMENTS as the Fifth Avenue Opera House, Brougham’s Theatre, and from 1869 until it burned in 1873, Daly’s Fifth Avenue. Rebuilt, redesigned by 3TEELE -AC+AYE, renamed Madison Square Theatre, it opened in 1879 and earned renown for its air conditioning (air circulated over tons of ice and blown into the auditorium) and for its unique elevator stage (two stages, one above the

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other, so that one was in view of the audience, while the other, above or below, could be undergoing a change of SCENERY, thus reducing the time between acts to less than a minute). Renamed Hoyt’s Theatre in 1891, it continued in use until it was razed in 1908. MAJOR, CLARE TREE (1880–1954). The English-born PRODUCER of CHILDREN’stheatre* began as an ACTRESS in London, then came to New York in 1916 to perform with the Washington Square Players. From the 1920s, she devoted herself entirely to theatre for young people, writing the plays and sending professional actors on TOUR in them. In 1927, she founded the Clare Tree Major Theatre Company, headquartered in Pleasantville, New York. MAKE AN ENTRANCE. In his essay on Otis Skinner (reprinted in Moses and Brown 1934, 300–305), CRITIC John Mason Brown comments on “the difference between coming on stage and making an entrance.” While anyone can move into the playing space, it was the actors of Skinner’s generation who employed the old aggressive trick: “to swoop down on a play, and tuck it and its cast into their vest pockets,” “a kind of pillage, a hold-up staged in public.” Specifically, it was the actor’s first opportunity to score a point, that is, “a dramatic moment in itself—studied, built up and sustained—which usually rumbles in the wings long before it bursts into view but which, when once made, defies any eye to leave it.” MAKEUP. !CTORS in the modernist era carried individual makeup kits, created their own makeups, and were adept at the application, although techniques evolved along with advances in LIGHTING from kerosene to gas to electricity. Tubes of grease paint came in various tones that could be blended in the palm of the hand. The greasepaint base was supplemented by liners for highlight and shadow, crepe hair applied with spirit gum, bald caps and wigs—all used in the service of characterization. The time spent at the dressing table applying one’s makeup was part of the process of transforming oneself into the role. Blackface makeup was widely used by white actors in the days before the integrated stage. That long-abandoned process of applying burnt cork is preserved for us in a sequence from the 1927 MOTION PICTURE The Jazz Singer in which Al Jolson “blacks up.” For removal of makeup, any cheap lard would do. It was a point of

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pride for an actor to remove all traces of makeup using no more than two pieces of toilet tissue. In Next Week—East Lynne!,* Gladys Hurlbut’s memoir of STOCK company acting at the dawn of the 20th century, she recalled that “every drug store used to carry a complete line of stage make-up . . . The grease paint was laid out in rows, every color from clown white to Indian red. There were rabbits’ feet to spread on your dry rouge and big cans of cold cream that looked like lard. There were little iron pans with holders in which to melt your wax over a candle so you could bead your eyelashes. Every lash carried a big load of wax on it then! The face powders had wonderful names for their different shades: ‘Juvenile—flesh’ and ‘Character—old man.’ Then there was crepe hair for moustaches and beards and bolemania, a dark powder for making you look dirty or very foreign and dark” (31). MAMOULIAN, ROUBEN (1897–1987).† Son of an ACTRESS, Rouben Mamoulian was born in Russia and studied law at the University of Moscow. He abandoned his legal pursuits to study at Eugene Vakhtangov’s Studio Theatre. He DIRECTED The Beating on the Door (1922) in London, then headed George Eastman’s Theatre in Rochester, New York, from 1923–1926. In 1926, Mamoulian joined the 4HEATRE'UILD as a teacher, and in 1927, he directed $UBOSE and $OROTHY (EYWARD’s Porgy. In 1928 alone, Mamoulian directed six "ROADWAY productions, including %UGENE /.EILL’s Marco Millions and Robert Nichols and Maurice Browne’s Wings over Europe. His other productions in this period range from a revival of Karel Cäpek’s R.U.R. (1929) to Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country (1930). After 1930, Mamoulian continued to direct for the stage with some frequency, but mostly for MUSICALS including such seminal productions as Porgy and Bess (1935), Oklahoma! (1943), Carousel (1945), and Lost in the Stars (1949). With the arrival of sound MOTION PICTURES, Mamoulian also turned his attentions to directing movies: Applause (1929), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932), Golden Boy* (1939), Blood and Sand (1941), and Silk Stockings (1957), among many others. MAN FROM HOME, THE. This four-act play by Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson opened on 17 August 1908 at the Astor Theatre for 496 performances. Its nationalistic views caused some CRIT

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ICS to dismiss it, but The Man from Home remained a popular play in STOCK for a decade and was made into MOTIONPICTURES in 1914 and 1922. Daniel Voorhees Pike, a lawyer from Kokomo, Indiana, travels to Italy to check up on his ward, Ethel Granger-Simpson. He is horrified to find her engaged to the feckless son of the duplicitous Earl of Hawcastle. Through various machinations, Pike exposes the Earl’s corruption and brings Ethel and her brother, Horace, who has also run afoul of European sophisticates, back to the homey safety of rural Indiana. Tarkington and Wilson collaborated on several other plays over more than twenty years. MAN OF THE HOUR, THE. George H. Broadhurst’s political melodrama, PRODUCED by William A. Brady and Joseph R. Grismer, opened on 4 December 1906 at the Savoy and ran for 479 performances. According to the New York Times (5 December 1906), “it is a familiar tale of love and duty, with incidentals of politics, stock manipulation, and judiciary corruption,” but it entertained with good comic material in the mix of suspense and romance, as well as captivating performances by George Fawcett and Douglas Fairbanks. MAN ON THE BOX, THE. Opening on 3 October 1905 at Hoyt’s Theatre, the “polite parlor farce with melodramatic trimmings” by Grace Livingston Furniss, from the novel of that title by Harold MacGrath, ran for 111 performances. Henry E. Dixey played a lieutenant home on leave, who plans to surprise his sister by taking the place of her coachman to drive her home from a ball. He unwittingly responds to the wrong carriage call, drives the young woman and then gives her a brotherly embrace. She responds by calling a policeman. Of course, they are destined for each other, but only after two more acts of comic complications that include a Russian spy. MAN WHO CAME BACK, THE. Opening on 2 September 1916 at the Playhouse, the melodrama by Jules Eckert Goodman was PRO DUCED by William A. Brady and ran for 457 performances. (ENRY (ULL gave a full-blast performance as the wastrel son of a wealthy man. His progressive degradation takes him to the lurid depths of a Shanghai opium den, where a San Francisco dance hall girl (ACTED by Mary Nash) hits bottom with him. Together the prodigal and his girl struggle to recover their humanity before the moment when he

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must choose between his dying father and the floozy. He chooses the latter “to the audible satisfaction of the first and second balconies” (New York Times, 4 September 1916). MAN WHO MARRIED A DUMB WIFE, THE. This one-act French play by Anatole France is important in American theatre, because its 1915 production as a curtain-raiser to 'EORGE"ERNARD3HAW’s Androcles and the Lion at Wallack’s Theatre in New York is regarded as having launched the New Stagecraft in American SCENEDESIGN. Although one can see the influence of Joseph Urban’s act 2 setting for Madame Butterfly at the Boston Opera in 1912 (which was in turn influenced by a kimono that singer Alice Nielsen brought back from Japan, as well as Viennese Werkstatte style), 2OBERT%DMOND *ONES’s set design simplified the geometric elements and had a more revolutionary impact, as Aronson notes, because of the greater visibility of a "ROADWAY production. Against the grey, white, and black of the exterior of the judge’s house, the stained-glass colors of the late medieval costumes took on special vibrancy. MANAGER.† Broadly used, the term “manager” could encompass the activities of the PRODUCER, the entrepreneur, and the local theatre lessee. A company manager would need to interact with a theatre’s manager, and both might deal with the management of a circuit of theatres. 3TAR performers who managed their own companies often found the business side overwhelming, as did Edwin Booth during the period of construction of Booth’s Theatre, when he exhausted himself with touring to raise funds, was taken advantage of by unscrupulous operators, and lacked the financial acumen to keep business matters entirely in order. On the other hand, Mrs. John Drew ran a tight ship in her long management of Philadelphia’s Arch Street Theatre. Bernheim (1964, 4) quotes two comments about managers made in 1883: “Most of our managers are thick-skulled people and few of them are gentlemen. They seem to have been born on the ROAD, and how they got to New York and succeeded is only to be accounted for on the principle of ignorance and the almighty dollar.” “As a general thing they are financiers and brokers, who, like their Wall Street brethren, watch the market and go as that goes.” And an observation from 1879, also quoted by Bernheim: “The manager, if he would

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succeed, must cater to the taste of his patrons, both in the selection of his company and of his plays. He must give the public what they want, not what he thinks they ought to want.” As those remarks suggest, it was not such a long step from managing to producing. At the top of the field, it becomes impossible to distinguish between a producer and a manager. Indeed, Michael B. Leavitt’s memoir Fifty Years in Theatrical Management, 1859–1909—an impressive record of practices and personalities from all aspects of theatre management, including minstrels, burlesque, and other variety forms—uses the terms virtually interchangeably. Among the dozens of managers profiled in his book are Theodore A. Liebler, George C. Tyler, William Harris, Henry B. Harris, Henry W. Savage, and William A. Brady. Augustus Pitou rose to managerial prominence in legitimate theatre. In opera, Maurice Grau and Milton Aborn were outstanding. Nate Salsbury proved his managerial acumen first in operetta and later in Wild West shows. See also ACTOR-MANAGER. MANHATTAN THEATRE COMPANY. Harrison Grey Fiske, editor of the New York Dramatic Mirror, leased the Manhattan Theatre in 1901 to establish a REPERTORY company (PRODUCING up to nine plays a year) STARRING his wife, Minnie Maddern Fiske. Rivaling the powerful Theatrical Syndicate, the Fiskes TOURED the country between 1906 and 1914 with a troupe that impressed CRITICS and audiences with its strong ensemble acting and highly REALISTIC details in SCENERY and COSTUMES. MANN, LOUIS (1865–1931). Born in New York City, the comic AC TOR and PLAYWRIGHT was on stage from the age of three. He studied at the University of California before joining a STOCK company run by Lawrence Barrett and John McCullough in San Francisco. In 1882, he performed REPERTORY in support of Tommaso Salvini. Other greats with whom he performed include E. H. Sothern and Daniel E. Bandmann. He formed his own company to TOUR certain plays, and in 1910, wrote his own play, The Cheater, to give himself the comic role of Godfried Plittersdorf. His greatest success came in The Friendly Enemies (1918), in which he coSTARRED with Sam Bernard, and which he toured as well as revived in New York. He was married to actress-playwright Clara Lipman.

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MANNERING, MARY (1876–1953). Born Florence Friend in London, England, she rose to STARDOM there. In 1896, Daniel Frohman brought her to New York to perform in his Lyceum 3TOCK Company. She made her American debut in The Courtship of Leonie opposite James K. Hackett, whom she married in 1901. They costarred until their separation in 1907 and divorce in 1910. Among her best roles were those in Trelawney of the “Wells” (1898 and revived twice), Janice Meredith (1900), A Man’s World (1909), and The Garden of Allah (1911). She retired after her 1911 marriage to Frederick E. Wadsworth, head of the Detroit Boat Company. MANNERS, J. HARTLEY (1870–1928). John Hartley Manners was born in London, England, but spent most of his career as a PLAY WRIGHT and DIRECTOR working in the American theatre. His play, Crossways (1902), written for Lillie Langtry, brought him to New York as a member of its cast. In collaboration with Henry Miller, Manners wrote Zira (1905), which STARRED Margaret Anglin, and was a moderate success. When he married ACTRESS ,AURETTE4AY LOR in 1911, Manners turned his attentions to writing stage vehicles for her. The first of these, Peg O’My Heart (1912), was the best and most successful, a work she TOURED in for years. Subsequent Manners plays, mostly sentimental COMEDIES, found success, although typically more on tour than in New York. These include The Harp of Life (1916), Out There (1917), Happiness (1917), One Night in Rome (1919), and The National Anthem (1922). His plays suited popular tastes in the first two decades of the 20th century, but he rarely challenged his skill as a dramatist or the talents of Taylor, who would be seen to better advantage in her legendary performance in Tennessee Williams’s* The Glass Menagerie* (1945) at the end of her career. MAN’S WORLD, A. Opening on 8 February 1910, the protofeminist drama written and DIRECTED by 2ACHEL#ROTHERS ran for 71 performances at New York’s Comedy Theatre. Set in a boarding house inhabited by artistic people, the play vividly demonstrates the double standard in action. A WOMAN novelist named Frank Ware (played by Mary Mannering) has adopted a boy, whom she has not yet named, even though he is old enough to be given a penknife by her beau Gaskell. Nor does Frank think she owes anyone an explanation of why she is a single mother. Then it turns out that Gaskell is the very one

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who fathered the child in Paris and abandoned the mother, who died, confiding her son to Frank’s care. Frank cannot accept the prevailing view that Gaskell can get away with having a child out of wedlock, while she could not. She sends him packing. MANSFIELD, RICHARD (1854–1907). Born in Berlin, Prussia, he spent his early childhood in European travels with his parents, Maurice Mansfield and opera singer Emma Rudersdorff. After his father died, his eccentric mother left him in boarding schools in London and Switzerland. When she achieved popularity as a singer in Boston, in 1872, his mother sent for him. Mansfield tried various business and artistic pursuits in Boston with little success, so he returned to England. For several years he barely subsisted on the streets of London until W. S. Gilbert hired him for a TOURING company of H. M. S. Pinafore. In 1882, he returned to America and began his quartercentury as one of the finest intellectual ACTORS of his day. Despite his acclaimed performances in A Parisian Romance (1883), Prince Karl (1886), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1887), Richard III (1889), Beau Brummel (1890), Cyrano de Bergerac (1895), King Henry V (1900), and many others, his career path was uneven, largely due to his legendarily hot temper and his lack of social graces. William Winter wrote a biography, The Life and Art of Richard Mansfield (1910). MANTELL, ROBERT (1854–1928). Robert Bruce Mantell was born in Ayrshire, Scotland, and ran away from home in order to be an ACTOR in England. After two brief, unsuccessful visits to America, he made his New York debut in 1883, opposite Fanny Davenport in Fedora at the Fourteenth Street Theatre. His performance the following season in Called Back was hailed in the New York Times (2 September 1884): “His graceful stage presence and musical voice, which is managed with great skill, are as effective as they were in Sardou’s play, and in the two most striking scenes . . . , Mr. Mantell is given the opportunity to exhibit some of the power which made him the lion of the day among theatre-goers last season.” After TOUR ING for several seasons in old romantic historical melodramas like Monbars, he remade himself as a 3HAKESPEAREAN actor and, according to Lewis C. Strang, was “remarkably successful in catching the popular ear” through his personal magnetism and direct rapport with his audiences.

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MANTLE, BURNS (1873–1948).† Robert Burns Mantle was born in Watertown, New York, where he apprenticed as a printer. He became a drama CRITIC in 1898, writing reviews for the Denver Times and the Denver Republican before moving to Chicago for a six-year stint as critic for the Inter-Ocean. In 1907, Mantle joined the staff of the Chicago Tribune. Later he became critic for the New York Evening Mail (1911–1922) and then the New York Daily News (1922–1943). As a strong proponent of American drama, Mantle’s most lasting contribution may be the BEST PLAYS annual he founded in 1919 (and edited from its founding to the 1947–1948 volume). It featured abridged versions of what he regarded as the most important American plays of the year, as well as narrative and statistical information on that year’s "ROADWAY theatre season. Mantle’s other books include American Playwrights of To-Day (1929) and Contemporary American Playwrights (1938). MARBLE FAMILY. The Marbles are less known than other American ACTING dynasties like the Booths, the "ARRYMORES, or Chapmans because the Marble family remained devoted to REPERTORY in the Midwest. Dan and Anna (Warren) Marble had four children in the profession during the modernist era: William “Billy” (1840–1912), John (1844–1919), Edward (1846–1900), and Emma (1848–1930). Edward’s daughter Anna (1880–1946) was a PLAYWRIGHT and press agent, who married Channing Pollock. MARBLE, SCOTT (1845?–1919). Born in New York City, he ACTED with many STOCK companies and on "ROADWAY, then became a prolific author of melodramas that tended to find their audiences on the ROAD more than in New York. His plays include The Police Patrol (1892), The Sidewalks of New York (1895), and The Heart of the Klondike (1897). See also PLAYWRIGHTS. MARBURY, ELISABETH (1856–1933). America’s first PLAYWRIGHTS’ agent as well as a PRODUCER, Elisabeth Marbury was born into a wellestablished New York City family. Educated in the classics, in bookkeeping, and in social skills, she defied the expectations of her fashionable upbringing to undertake her own business enterprises. She was drawn to theatre through her charitable work on benefit performances in the mid-1880s, the success of which led to Daniel Frohman’s rec-

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ommendation that she make a career in theatre MANAGEMENT. It was also through a charity event that she met actress Elsie de Wolfe, with whom she maintained a liaison for more than 40 years. Marbury’s first professional venture in theatre was the management of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy in 1888. She was in Paris to arrange the French production of it when she offered to manage the American productions of plays by the commercially successful playwright Victorien Sardou. That association led to her becoming in 1890 the only English-language representative for all French playwrights. From her head office in the Empire Theatre Building (where she channeled a steady stream of international plays to Charles Frohman in offices a floor below hers), Marbury opened play-brokering offices in Berlin, London, Madrid, Moscow, and Paris. Among her many other ventures were The American Play Company (1914), the Castle House ballroom dancing school, the intimate-scale Princess Theatre MUSICALS she produced (1915– 1918), WAR relief activities, and various offices in the Democratic Party. Marbury’s partner de Wolfe retired from ACTING, and, with Marbury’s encouragement, became a fashion leader and interior designer, often designing SCENERY for plays produced by Marbury. Marbury published her autobiography My Crystal Ball in 1923. See also FOREIGNPLAYSADAPTEDTOTHE!MERICANSTAGE. MARCIN, MAX (1879–1948). Born in Poznan, Prussia, Max Marcin attended school in the United States and worked as a journalist before attempting PLAYWRITING. His first "ROADWAY success, The House of Glass (1915), was a light melodrama, but he demonstrated versatility in popular theatre with his next play, the hit COMEDY Cheating Cheaters (1916). In collaboration with Charles Guernon, Marcin had another hit with Eyes of Youth (1917) and continued with only slightly diminished success during the next decade writing wellconstructed entertainments, including The Woman in Room 13 (1919; written with Samuel Shipman), Silence (1924), and Badges (1924; in collaboration with Edward Hammond). Never averse to writing on demand, Marcin crafted a stage vehicle for champion prizefighter Jack Dempsey called The Big Fight (1928). MARCO MILLIONS. %UGENE/.EILL’s indictment of the excesses of capitalism in an opulently staged historical drama about Marco

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Polo opened on 9 January 1928 at the Guild Theatre and ran for 102 performances. $IRECTED by 2OUBEN-AMOULIAN and designed by ,EE 3IMONSON, the 4HEATRE 'UILD production featured !LFRED ,UNT as the Venetian traveler who becomes ever more crassly materialistic, to the point that the Princess of Cathay (played by Margalo Gillmore*) dies heartbroken in her love for him. Morris Carnovsky* played the Khan of Persia. The Theatre Guild’s 1930 revival achieved only eight performances. MARGARET FLEMING. Considered the first American drama to adopt the “social problem play” REALISM pioneered by (ENRIK )BSEN, James A. Herne’s drama focuses on Margaret Fleming’s discovery that her husband, Philip, has fathered a child by a young woman working in his mill. When the child’s mother dies in childbirth, Margaret, who suffers from near blindness due to the birth of her daughter, takes responsibility for the child. Devastated by her husband’s deceit and its sudden revelation, Margaret loses her eyesight. In a sequence that shocked audiences, Margaret suckles the illegitimate child at her own breast. In the original version Margaret rebuffed Philip’s plea for reconciliation, but Herne’s revision concludes with a reconciliation. First produced on 4 May 1891 for one performance at Boston’s Chickering Hall, Margaret Fleming shocked audiences with what Hamlin Garland called its “radical” depiction of marital infidelity and its consequences. Herne won the label of the “American Ibsen.” His wife, Katharine Corcoran Herne, played Margaret. William Dean Howells called Herne the greatest U.S. PLAYWRIGHT of the era. MARION, GEORGE (1860–1945). Born in San Francisco, the ACTOR got his start with Lew Dockstader’s Minstrels. By the mid-1890s, he was acting in legitimate theatre in New York. From the 1900s to the 1940s, he DIRECTED and PRODUCED plays on "ROADWAY, but often returned to acting, notably to create the role of Chris Christopherson in %UGENE/.EILL’s Anna Christie in 1921. MARLOWE, JULIA (1866–1950). Born Sarah Frances Frost in Upton Caldbeck, Cumberland, England, she was brought to the United States when she was four. The Frost family lived in a suburb of Kansas City in 1872. Her ACTING career began after the family moved

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to Cincinnati. From 1880 to 1884, she TOURED with juvenile companies, performing under the name Fanny Brough. After taking three years to study under actress Ada Dow, she returned to the stage as a STAR, using the name Julia Marlowe. With Dow taking the financial risk, Marlowe made her debut as Parthenia in Ingomar. In 1887, Marlowe first appeared in her great 3HAKESPEAREAN roles, Juliet and Viola, followed by Rosalind in 1889. She married her leading man Robert Taber in 1894 and for several seasons was billed as Mrs. Taber; they divorced in 1900. In the early years of the twentieth century, Marlowe was one of the top names in New York and on the ROAD, for she projected an appealing wholesomeness, and she had a distinctive beauty with her expressive eyes and cleft chin. She worked hard to develop her vocal quality and used her plaintive tones intelligently. In 1904, Charles Frohman teamed Marlowe with E. H. Sothern as costars in Romeo and Juliet, and the symbiosis was magical. Together, Sothern and Marlowe restored to the American stage the Shakespearean repertoire, which had fallen into neglect. They played Beatrice and Benedick, Ophelia and Hamlet, Katharine and Petruchio, Portia and Shylock, Viola and Malvolio in lushly mounted productions. They married, toured to London, retired for a time, entertained the troops during World 7AR I, and always advocated for the art of the theatre in the life of a nation. MARSDEN, FRED (1843–1888). Born William A. Sliver in Baltimore, he gave up his law practice and changed his name to become an ACTOR. However, it was as a writer of stage material for celebrities that he made a fortune. He wrote regularly for stage Irishmen including Joe Murphy (for whom Marsden wrote Kerry Gow, 1880), Roland Reed (Cheek, 1883), and W. J. Scanlan (The Irish Minstrel, 1884). Among his other plays PRODUCED in New York were Zip, or Point Lynde Light (1874), Musette (1876), and Otto, a German (1881). See also PLAYWRIGHTS. MARSHALL, TULLY (1864–1943). Born William Phillips in Nevada City, California, he found his calling as an ACTOR when he studied dramatic literature at Santa Clara College. He joined a STOCK company in San Francisco and later TOURED with Helena Modjeska. The versatile actor enjoyed a 40-year stage career before going

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into MOTIONPICTURES. Some of his best roles were in The Builders (1907), Paid in Full (1908), The City (1909), and in a COMEDY by his wife Marion Fairfax, The Talker (1912). MARY THE THIRD. Opening on 5 February 1925 at the Thirty-Ninth Street Theatre, 2ACHEL#ROTHERS’s popular COMEDY-drama focused on the new woman and ran for 163 performances. The title character is a flapper who wrestles with ideas about love and marriage, issues thrown into relief by a prologue showing her grandmother, Mary the First, manipulating her man in the 1870s. A scene set in the 1890s shows her mother, Mary the Second, as a conflicted Gibson girl. The bulk of the play is set in 1923, when Mary III witnesses a fight between her parents that reinforces her misgivings about marriage. Ultimately, she is able to reconcile a woman’s desire for economic independence with the romantic ending that pleased audiences. Crothers DIRECTED her own play, and Louise Huff played all three Marys. See also WOMENINTHEPROFESSION. MASH ACTOR. In the slang of the 1880s, “to mash” was to excite the admiration of one of the opposite sex. Thus an attractive ACTOR might have numerous female fans who were “mashed” on him. The usually unwelcome attentions could range from “mash notes” delivered at the stage door to more aggressive pursuits like an incident in New York City that was reported in the Kansas City Times (15 April 1888): “The proud position of being a ‘mash actor,’ though envied by a brainless few, has its drawbacks. The sight last week of Bob Hilliard rapidly transporting his Apollo-like form across Twenty-sixth street, while a discarded female acquaintance made frantic efforts to detain him by means of a firm grip upon his coat-tails, was both inspiriting and educational, and has been the talk of the town. By Hilliard’s seeking the refuge of a china shop, and enlisting the sympathies of its proprietor and staff of clerks, the petticoated Lochinvar was despoiled of her prey.” To be “mashed” on an actor or actress went significantly beyond the passive admiration expressed by stage-door Johnnies and matinee girls. “Mashed on Rhéa” was the headline on a front-page story (Kansas City Evening Star, 12 September 1883) during the Kansas City engagement of Hortense Rhéa, reporting that “a Boston merchant of considerable means” had been following the actress from town to town, never missing a performance, repeatedly sending up

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his card at the stage door, but never receiving any encouragement from her after an initial interview granted in response to his claim to have crossed from Europe on the same steamship with her. Theatre audiences particularly attracted mashers, youths who would hang around in public places in hopes of attaining some physical contact with a girl or WOMAN. Local mashers did not necessarily seek the attention of any particular actress, but mooned over the fair sex opportunistically. The Kansas City Evening Star (29 November 1880) ran a four-paragraph commentary on “Opera House Mashers,” teens who could be seen under the street light, wearing “natty handme-downs,” as the audience came out after the performance. “He don’t go inside and mash the fascinated darlings, like the famous professional matinee mashers of Chicago. . . . He was never known to make a mash. He does not possess the necessary nerve to follow up a mash. He simply exhibits himself, and expects some poor stricken thing to kiss him. He is no good.” MASK. The theatrical mask is of ancient origin. The modernist theatre offers only occasional examples when the mask is integral to the production, notably in %UGENE /.EILL’s The Great God Brown. 2OBERT %DMOND *ONES also used masks to good scenic effect in Macbeth (1921) and as COSTUME pieces in O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape. W. T. Benda was the supreme mask-maker in New York. MASON, JOHN (1857–1919). Born in Orange, New Jersey, into the wealthy family that manufactured Mason & Hamlin organs, he made his ACTING debut with the Boston 3TOCK Company. With his first wife, Marion Manola, he performed in MUSICALS. After their divorce, he turned to legitimate theatre and earned respect, according to his VARIETY obituary, as “one of America’s foremost actors.” In 1886, he played Edmund to Edwin Booth’s King Lear. He played a supporting role to Viola Allen in The Christian. Among his numerous stage appearances in the 1900s and 1910s, he played leading roles in two plays by Augustus Thomas: the gambler hero in The Witching Hour (1907) and the kindly Jewish Dr. Seelig in As a Man Thinks (1911). Mason’s second wife was actress Katherine Grey. MATHEWS, FRANCES AYMAR (1855–1935). Born in New York City, she was a prolific PLAYWRIGHT, beginning with Bigamy (with

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E. Henderson, 1881). !CTRESS Fanny Davenport commissioned her to write a play about Joan of Arc, and the result was Joan (1898). Her most successful play, Pretty Peggy (1902), about Peg Woffington, STARRED Grace George. MATINEE. Any performance scheduled during daylight hours could be called a matinee. Family fare was often scheduled for the Saturday matinee slot. Full-week engagements by TOURING STARS usually included two matinee performances, a Saturday and a weekday, often Wednesday. See also MATINEE GIRL; MATINEE IDOL. MATINEE GIRL. Since it was considered appropriate for women to attend the theatre during daylight hours without male escort, matinee audiences were predominantly women. Young ladies often attended in small groups on a regular basis, enjoying—perhaps as much as the plays—the freedom from adult supervision as well as the justification for daytime wardrobe enhancement. The matinee girl made an obsession of her theatergoing and became a devoted fan of certain attractive ACTORS known as matinee idols. She would imitate an admired actress’s style of dress or manner of wearing a hat. When the STOCK company actress Eva Lang developed a matinee girl following in Kansas City during the 1900s, the young women would go home after the play to practice in front of a mirror the Eva Lang gestures and the Eva Lang walk. MATINEE IDOL. A term applied to handsome leading men who attracted large audiences of WOMEN to matinee performances of popular melodramas and COMEDIES, it also applied to MOTION PICTURE actors. In the case of matinee idol John Barrymore, for example, the term applied to him at the height of his stage career (1910s–1920s) and onscreen (1920s–1930s). MATTHEWS, ADELAIDE (b. 1886). The PLAYWRIGHT was born in Kenduskeag, Maine. She wrote many successful COMEDIES in collaboration with Martha Stanley, including Nightie Night (1919), Scrambled Wives (1920), Puppy Love (1926), and The Wasp’s Nest (1929). With Anne Nichols, she wrote Heart’s Desire (1916) and Nearly Married (1929).

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MATTHEWS, BRANDER (1852–1929). Born in New Orleans, the son of wealthy parents, James Brander Matthews moved to New York and attended Columbia University. He began law school in 1871, but when his family’s fortunes collapsed, he took a job writing for The Nation (1875–1895). Matthews also completed several plays, including Margery’s Lovers (1878), A Gold Mine (1889), and On Probation (1889). He had a deep interest in French literature and theatre, and this led to a position teaching literature at Columbia in 1891. In 1902, Matthews became the first American ACADEMIC to be a professor of dramatic literature. He did much to elevate theatre as an academic discipline, stressing that plays were not simply literature, but must be studied in light of performance issues. He continued at Columbia until his retirement in 1924. Among his two dozen books are The French Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century (1882), Actors and Actresses of Great Britain and the United States (1886; a fivevolume work coauthored with Laurence Hutton), Development of the Drama (1903), Principles of Playmaking (1919), and two autobiographies, These Many Years (1917) and Rip Van Winkle Goes to the Play (1926). MAUGHAM, W. SOMERSET (1874–1965). Born William Somerset Maugham in Paris, this distinguished British novelist also wrote several plays. Jack Straw (1908), the first of his sophisticated COMEDIES produced in New York, STARRED John Drew. Charles Frohman’s productions of Maugham’s relatively slight works—including Lady Frederick (1908), Mrs. Dot (1910), and Smith (1910)—were precursors to Maugham’s finest high comedies: Our Betters (1917), Too Many Husbands (1919), The Circle (1921), and The Constant Wife (1926), all of which were revived. Moving from comedy to drama, Maugham had a major hit with The Letter (1927). One of his short stories was adapted as Rain (1922) by John B. Colton and Clemence Randolph to become one of the most successful plays of the era. MAVOURNEEN. Written by George H. Jessop and Horace Townsend, this sentimental play featuring a ballad-singing stage Irishman opened 28 September 1891 at the Fourteenth Street Theatre and ran for 102 performances. It was this production that launched Chauncey Olcott to STARDOM in Irish character roles in 1892, after he replaced W. J. Scanlan as Terence Dwyer.

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MAYER, EDWIN JUSTUS (1897–1960). The PLAYWRIGHT and MO TION PICTURE writer was born in New York City. He did freelance writing while working at various jobs, and published his autobiography, A Preface to Life (1923), when he was 25. He was press agent for !RTHUR (OPKINS. His two major "ROADWAY plays were The Firebrand (1924) and Children of Darkness* (1930), both of which were later revived. He also wrote The Last Love of Don Juan (1955). MAYO, MARGARET (1882–1951). Born Lilian Slatten on a farm near Brownsville, Illinois, she left home at 16 to escape an unwelcome suitor. In New York City, she drifted into ACTING, taking her stage name and performing mostly on tour. In 1901, the petite blond character actress married the tall, handsome actor Edgar Selwyn, with whom she appeared in Arizona. After 1903, she devoted herself entirely to PLAYWRITING and won considerable success with Polly of the Circus (1907), Baby Mine (1911), and Twin Beds (1914). She and Selwyn collaborated on the book for a MUSICAL, The Wall Street Girl (1912). During World 7AR I, she headed a unit of the Over There League to entertain American troops in France. She and Selwyn divorced in 1919. Mayo retired to Harmon-on-the-Hudson, New York, and became active in social causes. MAZEPPA; OR, THE WILD HORSE OF TARTARY. Lord Byron’s poem, based upon the legend of the 17th-century Ukrainian folk hero Isaac Mazeppa, was dramatized in 1831 by H. M. Milner. At the climax of the three-act melodrama, the title character—a youth whose real name is not yet known to the other characters—is stripped and tied onto the back of a “fiery untamed steed” that is sent galloping over mountainous terrain, through torrential storms with thunder and lightning, followed by ravenous wolves, while a vulture circles above. The effect might be handled cheaply with a cardboard cut-out horse and victim manipulated upstage, but more elaborate productions used a treadmill with a moving panorama to depict the ride through a hostile landscape. When a live horse was used for that scene, Mazeppa was often represented by a dummy strapped to its back, unless the ACTOR was also an accomplished horseman. The turgid play got a second lease on life beginning in 1861 when the MANAGER of the Green Street Theatre in Albany hit upon the idea of casting a woman in the role of Mazeppa and creating the illusion

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of seminudity by costuming her in a flesh-colored body stocking under a flimsy bit of tunic. Adah Isaacs Menken caused a sensation in the role, which launched her to national and international celebrity. For the wilderness ride, she was strapped to a trained horse that negotiated a narrow winding ramp on scaffolding camouflaged by painted SCENERY. That production moved to "ROADWAY, and Menken subsequently TOURED nationwide in the role. Other actresses closely associated with the role of Mazeppa are Kate Raymond at Donnelly’s Olympic Theatre, Brooklyn, in 1869; Vernona Jarbeau on national tours in the 1880s; and Leo Hudson, who died as a result of her horse’s fall from the scaffolding. See also ACCIDENTS; EQUESTRIAN DRAMA. MCCLENDON, ROSE (1884–1936). Born Rosalie Virginia Scott in Greenville, South Carolina, the !FRICAN!MERICAN ACTRESS came to New York City with her family when she was six. In 1904, she married Dr. Henry Pruden McClendon, a chiropractor and Pullman porter. A 1916 scholarship enabled her to study under Frank Sargent at the !MERICAN !CADEMY OF $RAMATIC !RTS, and professional engagements followed. She rose to STARDOM on the New York stage and recognition as “the Negro race’s first lady” through her performances in Deep River (1926), In Abraham’s Bosom (1926), Porgy (1927), and The House of Connelly* (1931). She contributed to planning for the Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre Project* and performed for a time in Mulatto* (1936) until her final illness necessitated her leaving the cast. MCCULLOUGH, JOHN (1832–1885). The Irish-born ACTOR came to the United States at 15, learned his craft by performing with AMATEUR companies, and made his professional debut on 15 August 1857 at the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia. During the 1860s, he TOURED as second lead to Edwin Forrest. He then entered management, running a San Francisco theatre in partnership with Lawrence Barrett. McCullough’s last decade was spent touring as a STAR in historical melodramas and 3HAKESPEARE. He was physically imposing and handsome, with a grand heroic style that was already seen as old-fashioned in the 1880s, when he suffered periods of mental instability. The respect felt for McCullough by his fellow players is touchingly evoked in Footlights and Spotlights (1924) by Otis Skin-

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ner, who called “Genial John” one of the “finest spirits” he ever met, and in Fifty Years of Make-Believe (1920) by Frederick Warde, who praised McCullough as “an honor to the profession that he so conspicuously adorned.” MCEVOY, J. P. (1897–1958). Novelist and PLAYWRIGHT John Patrick McEvoy was born in New York. After completing a degree at Notre Dame, he worked as a journalist before scoring a theatrical success with the long-running COMEDY, The Potters (1923). Another play, God Loves Us (1926), was a failure. Most of McEvoy’s writing for the stage consisted of sketches for the revue series Americana (1926, 1927, 1932), Ziegfeld Follies of 1925, and librettos for MUSICALS, including Allez-oop (1927) and Stars in Your Eyes (1939). His novel, Show Girl, was the source for the 1929 Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.–PRODUCED musical of the same name, which starred Ruby Keeler and Jimmy Durante. He also wrote nearly two dozen MOTIONPICTURES, including Glorifying the American Girl (1929), The Lemon Drop Kid (1934), Love in Bloom (1935), and W. C. Fields’s vehicle It’s a Gift (1934), as well as movie adaptations of The Potters (1927) and Show Girl (1928). MCGUIRE, WILLIAM ANTHONY (1885–1940). Born in Chicago, William Anthony McGuire worked as a newspaperman, although he wrote plays in his youth. His most successful plays were SixCylinder Love (1921) and Twelve Miles Out (1926), but he also DIRECTED, PRODUCED, and wrote librettos and sketches for nine Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.–produced MUSICALS and revues, including Rosalie (1928), Whoopee (1928), and The Three Musketeers (1928). MCINTYRE, FRANK J. (1879–1949). Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the stocky comedian worked as a newspaper reporter before making his ACTING debut in 1901 in Rome, New York, as Crumpet in The Honorable John Grigsby. That play took him to "ROADWAY when it opened at the Manhattan Theatre on 28 January 1902. He soon achieved STARDOM with notable performances in Becky Sharp with Minnie Maddern Fiske (1903), in Strongheart (1905 and for his 1907 London debut), and many others until he turned to radio in the 1930s. Above all, McIntyre was identified with the title role of drummer Bob Blake in The Traveling Salesman (1908), the hit COMEDY that ran for 280 performances.

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MCNALLY, JOHN J. (1852?–1931). The CRITIC and PLAYWRIGHT was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Although he studied law at Harvard University, he went into newspaper work, becoming drama editor for the Boston Times, and later editing or writing for the Boston Star and the Boston Herald. Revels (1880) was the first in his series of plays for the Rogers Brothers. Besides his original works, including The Widow Jones and The Night Clerk (both 1895), he adapted spectacles from London’s Drury Lane Theatre for American audiences. MCRAE, BRUCE (1867–1927). The English ACTOR, nephew of Sir Charles Wyndham and of Bronson Howard, was born in India and educated in France. He made his stage debut in 1891 at Proctor’s 23rd Street Theatre in Thermidor and quickly rose to popularity. He played Dr. Watson to William Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes (1899) and was leading man to %THEL "ARRYMORE for several seasons from 1902. Besides his TOURING engagements, he played two seasons (1911–1912) with STOCK companies in Denver. He was often cast in society roles, though he held those character types in disregard. He continued to act despite chronic heart ailments, and even persisted with his last role, in Legend of Leonora with Grace George, after a heart attack. MCWADE, ROBERT (1835–1913). The eminent ACTOR was born in Long Sault Rapids, Canada, and made his stage debut at Detroit’s Metropolitan Opera House. His long career encompassed engagements with Charlotte Cushman, Edwin Booth, and many others. His own version of Rip Van Winkle was a mainstay of his career for 23 years and rivaled that of Joseph Jefferson III. His son, also named Robert McWade (1872–1939), enjoyed a substantial "ROADWAY career during the 1910s and 1920s. MEEK, DONALD (1878–1946). Born in Glasgow, Scotland, he ACTED there in his youth, then TOURED abroad. He made his American debut with an acrobatic troupe in Boston in 1912. After breaking his leg, he turned to the legitimate stage, making his New York debut in Going Up (1917). During the 1920s, he acted in plays as varied as Six-Cylinder Love, Spread Eagle, and Mr. Moneypenny. He played approximately 800 stage roles and then went into MOTIONPICTURES as a much admired character actor.

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MEGRUE, ROI COOPER (1883–1927). The PLAYWRIGHT and agent was born in New York City, educated at Trinity School and Columbia University, and worked with Elisabeth Marbury as a play broker. His familiarity with playwrights’ contracts and negotiations with theatre MANAGERS took him to a leadership role in the $RAMATISTS 'UILD. His own plays were PRODUCED on "ROADWAY throughout the 1910s. Noteworthy among these were It Pays to Advertise (with Walter Hackett, 1914), Under Cover (1914), Under Fire (1915), Under Sentence (with Irvin S. Cobb, 1916), and Tea for Three (1918). According to his VARIETY obituary (2 March 1927), the unmarried playwright’s “affectionate relationship with his mother was epic.” He and his widowed mother, Mrs. Stella (Cooper) Megrue, shared an artistically furnished apartment. MELODRAMA. The dominant dramatic genre on the American stage throughout the entire 19th century, melodrama lost its edge only in the 20th century when the influence of (ENRIK)BSEN and a growing preference for plays of psychological REALISM relegated the cheap appeals of melodrama first to the ten, twent’, thirt’ theatres and then to the silent MOTIONPICTURES. Melodrama had taken hold in Europe by 1800 with the widespread translation and staging of Germanlanguage plays by August Kotzebue and French plays by Guilbert de Pixérécourt, both of whom deployed gripping plots leavened by sentimentality and humor. Adaptations of their work by William Dunlap and Mordecai Noah established the fairy-tale melodrama on the early 19th-century American stage, followed by romantic historical melodramas like those written for Edwin Forrest. Historical melodramas that continued to be revived throughout the 19th century include Ingomar, the Barbarian and The Two Orphans. By mid-century, Thomas S. Hamblin, manager of New York City’s Bowery Theatre, had demonstrated the viability of maintaining a STOCK company to perform blood-and-guts melodrama for working-class audiences. After the Civil 7AR and the enduring example of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, melodrama was often co-opted by social reformers, with temperance melodramas as a prominent subcategory. A growing demand for scenic spectacle spawned what Bruce McConachie has termed “apocalyptic melodramas,” featuring conflagrations, shipwrecks, natural disasters, street riots, and battlefield action. Among the most successful authors of plays with sensational effects

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were Augustin Daly, Dion Boucicault, David Belasco, and later, /WEN$AVIS. While the spectacular effects of sensation dramas like Mazeppa, Ben-Hur, Blue Jeans, and The Heart of Maryland continued to draw popular audiences throughout the modernist era, the genre also took a turn toward depicting the familiar reality of its patronage after 1870. Those who kept their stories more grounded in everyday experience included Bronson Howard, Clyde Fitch, 3TEELE -AC+AYE, and William Gillette with plays like Shenandoah, The City, Hazel Kirke, and Secret Service respectively. While certain aspects of melodrama—clear distinctions between good and evil, suspenseful situations, tight and logically structured action—will always have a place in some form of the drama, the genre itself gradually fell out of fashion as the motion picture siphoned off its strongest customer base. By the early 20th century, the grand manner of ACTING that was so effective in scenes of pathos or terror appeared overwrought and laughable. MEN AND WOMEN. Henry C. DeMille and David Belasco based this four-act melodrama on an actual case of embezzlement drawn from newspaper headlines. Men and Women featured Maude Adams and William Morris when it opened on 21 October 1890 for 204 performances at Proctor’s 23rd Street Theatre, PRODUCED by Charles Frohman. A financial panic is set off when two young bank tellers, Edward Seabury and William Prescott, are suspected in the theft of bonds from their bank’s vault. Edward’s engagement to Dora, William’s sister, is jeopardized when Calvin Steadman, a rival for Dora’s love, frames him. When Governor Rodman supports Edward, Steadman reveals the governor’s shady past, leaving Edward in jeopardy until a repentant William confesses that in a moment of weakness he took the bonds. There is no prosecution, but William cannot find a job and fears he will lose his fiancée, Agnes, daughter of the disgraced governor. The bank president, taking pity on the lovers and convinced of William’s remorse, gives the young man a second chance. #RITICS applauded the play and the cast, but it was to be the last collaboration of DeMille and Belasco. Lionel Barrymore appeared in a 1914 MOTIONPICTURE adaptation of Men and Women. DeMille’s son, William C. deMille, DIRECTED a 1925 screen version.

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MENCKEN, H. L. (1880–1956). Henry Louis Mencken was born in Baltimore, son of a cigar manufacturer. Remembered as a journalist whose cynical style epitomized intellectual attitudes of the first quarter of the 20th century, Mencken and his friend, dramatic CRITIC 'EORGE *EAN .ATHAN, edited The Smart Set and The American Mercury. Mencken also wrote two unsuccessful plays, The Artist (1912) and Heliogabulus (1920). The character of sarcastic reporter E. K. Hornbeck in Inherit the Wind* (1955) was inspired by Mencken, who covered the famous Stokes “monkey trial” that is recreated in the play. MENKEN, HELEN (1901–1966).† She and her sister, actress Grace Menken, were born in New York City to deaf parents. As a CHILD PERFORMER, Helen played a fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to open the Astor Theatre in 1906, followed by engagements with De Wolf Hopper in The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1908) and with Eddie Foy in Mr. Hamlet of Broadway (1909), and others. She made her adult debut on "ROADWAY in Major Pendennis (1919) with John Drew. The first of her three husbands was the then little-known Humphrey Bogart.* Her long list of credits as a leading lady include the role of Queen Elizabeth in the 4HEATRE 'UILD production of Mary of Scotland* (1933). Increasingly troubled by facial paralysis from the 1940s, she turned to radio and PRODUCING. For the American Theatre Wing,* she produced the Stage Door Canteen* series, organized the !NTOINETTE0ERRY(Tony) Awards,* and served as president. At the 1966 Tony Awards, she was posthumously recognized with a Special Award for a lifetime of service to Broadway theatre. MERINGTON, MARGUERITE (1860–1951). Born in Stoke Newington, England, she immigrated with her parents to New York City. She became a teacher of Greek, but for over 50 years devoted herself to writing. Captain Lettarblair (1891), her first play to reach the stage, was PRODUCED by Daniel Frohman, often revived, and published in a handsome edition. It remained her most popular work, although she preferred Love Finds the Way (1898). Thereafter she wrote fairy-tale plays for CHILDREN’s theatre* and historical dramas for high school students, many of which were published in collections. MERIVALE, PHILIP (1886–1946).† Born in Rehutia, near Mankipur, India, the ACTOR was educated in England. He abandoned a London

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business career in 1905 in favor of acting. He performed with English actor-MANAGERS Frank Benson, Sir Herbert Tree, and others. He played his first New York engagement in 1910 in The Scarlet Pimpernel and returned to America in 1914 in Pygmalion with Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Thereafter, he made his career in American theatre, with notable successes in the 1930s. MERTON OF THE MOVIES. This four-act COMEDY by 'EORGE 3 +AUFMAN and -ARC#ONNELLY opened on 13 November 1922 for 398 performances at the Cort Theatre. In Simsbury, Illinois, Merton Gill is enamored of the newly popular MOTIONPICTURES to the point that he is mocked by his fellow townspeople and loses his job as a clerk at Gashwiler’s General Store. He rushes to Hollywood and meets a bathing beauty turned queen of slapstick comedies, Flips Montague, a character inspired by Mabel Normand, who gets him bit roles in movies, but he is disillusioned by what he regards as the phoniness of it all. When he is cast in a slapstick comedy, Merton acts his role with such gravity that it becomes hilarious. Now a STAR, he marries Flips. This popular comedy, inspired by Harry Leon Wilson’s Hollywood spoofs in the Saturday Evening Post, was filmed in 1924 and 1947. METCALFE, JAMES STETSON (1858–1927). Born in Buffalo, New York, the CRITIC graduated from Yale University in 1879. He held prestigious positions in the newspaper and magazine publishing world, but gained notoriety in 1905 when the Theatrical Syndicate responded to his reviews by preventing him from attending plays. Barred from 47 Manhattan theatres, Metcalfe took the matter to court, which resulted in a ruling that no ticket buyer could be refused admission. METEOR. Opening on 23 December 1929 at the 4HEATRE'UILD, 3 ."EHRMAN’s drama ran for 92 performances. !LFRED,UNT played ruthless capitalist Raphael Lord, whose pursuit of money propels his lust for power. A third-act miscalculation almost redeems him, but the curtain falls on his return to wheeling and dealing. MIDDLETON, GEORGE (1880–1967). Born in Paterson, New Jersey, the PLAYWRIGHT graduated from Columbia University and got

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his first New York production, both in 1902. That play, The Cavalier (with Paul Kester), initiated a string of successes, some written in collaboration. With Guy Bolton, he wrote his two best-known plays: Polly with a Past (1917) and Adam and Eva (1919). The prolific author had 15 volumes of published works, with five plays PRODUCED by David Belasco. From 1942 to 1958, Middleton also worked in the United States Copyright office, specializing in alien property. He held a number of offices, including president of the $RAMATISTS 'UILD (1927–1929) and honorary vice president of an international playwrights confederation (1929). MIELZINER, JO (1901–1976).† Born in Paris, but educated at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the National Academy of Design, Jo Mielziner became the most important SCENEDESIGNER on "ROADWAY after 2OBERT%DMOND*ONES. He began his career ACT ING and designing for the Jessie Bonstelle STOCK company in Detroit and for the 4HEATRE 'UILD, where he gained recognition for his design of Ferenc Molnár’s The Guardsman (1924). His remarkable output spanned every form of drama, from the classics to contemporary works, from MUSICALS to tragedy. In his early years, Mielziner worked in both REALISTIC and expressionist veins pioneered by others, but steadily moved toward a more uniquely poetic, painterly simplicity achieved, in part, through skeletal or fragmentary settings and sensitive LIGHTING. He pioneered new lighting techniques in collaboration with Edward F. Kook.* Mielziner designed two 0ULITZER 0RIZE winners, %UGENE /.EILL’s Strange Interlude (1928) and %LMER 2ICE’s Street Scene (1929). Most of his major work came after 1930 and included such classic American plays and musicals as Of Thee I Sing (1931), Winterset* (1935), The Glass Menagerie* (1945), A Streetcar Named Desire* (1947), Death of a Salesman* (1949), South Pacific (1949), Guys and Dolls (1950), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof* (1955), and Gypsy (1959). MILLAY, EDNA ST. VINCENT (1892–1950). Most remembered as a poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote several plays from the time of her ACTING apprenticeship with the Provincetown Players in 1917. Her theatrical reputation is based almost entirely on a one-act play, Aria da Capo (1919), first PRODUCED by the Players, a work that became one of the most frequently produced one-acts of the early 20th

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century. Millay’s few other plays include The Princess Marries the Page (1918) and The Lamp and the Bell (1921), and her libretto for the Deems Taylor opera The King’s Henchman (1927). MILLER, GILBERT (1884–1969). The son of ACTORS Henry Miller and Bijou Heron (1863–1937) was born in New York City and sent to schools in Europe. After a stint as company MANAGER for his father’s 1907 TOUR of The Great Divide, Miller managed all of his father’s productions until 1915. He went to London in 1916 to produce Daddy Long-Legs. He acquired two London theatres during his six years there in addition to the Henry Miller Theatre on "ROADWAY. Specializing in high COMEDY, he PRODUCED a total of 99 shows in New York and London, most of which he underwrote without seeking additional backers. The jovial but hot-tempered bon vivant was credited with discovering Audrey Hepburn,* whom he imported for Gigi* in 1951. In 1965, he received the American Theatre Wing’s* !NTOINETTE 0ERRY (Tony) Award* for his distinguished career of nearly 50 years in theatre. MILLER, HENRY (1860–1926). !CTOR and PRODUCER Henry John Miller was born in London, moved with his family to Canada, and began acting in Toronto at 18. He made his New York debut at Booth’s Theatre in 1880. Subsequent engagements included a stint with Augustin Daly’s company in 1882, the Madison Square Theatre (1882–1885), and Daniel Frohman’s Lyceum in 1887. Miller rose to STARDOM under Charles Frohman from 1889 to 1897. The New York Times review of Heartsease (12 January 1897) described him as “an actor of good presence, sensibility, ambition, and zeal, not endowed with a very expressive countenance, though he makes good use of his small natural equipment; possessing a rather monotonous voice, and no extraordinary share of physical power. He has been a popular favorite, and is likely to increase his popularity under the shrewd management of Charles Frohman.” Miller maintained his star status for over 15 years, and it was claimed that he played more roles than any other leading actor. In 1902, he began playing opposite Margaret Anglin, with whom he starred in the play still most associated with his name, The Great Divide (1906), in which he made his London debut in 1909. The role of Stephen Ghent served the handsome, manly actor well, and he revived the play in New York in

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1917. In 1918, he opened his own theatre, Henry Miller’s Theatre, in New York. An affectionate biography, Backstage with Henry Miller by Frank P. Morse (who maintained that Miller’s voice was “melodious,” 9), was published in 1938. MILLER, JOAQUIN (1837–1913). Born Cincinnatus Heine Miller in Liberty, Indiana, the poet, journalist, and PLAYWRIGHT spent his formative years in the gold mining camps and among the Native Americans of the Pacific coast. His poetry earned him the epithets “poet of the Sierras” and “the Byron of the Rockies.” He wrote the story upon which the popular western drama The Danites (1882) was based. Although the dramatization was long credited to Miller, it was ultimately found to have been the work of a hired writer. MILLER, MAY (1899–1995). The daughter of Howard University dean and professor Kelly Miller, May Miller grew up among the !F RICAN!MERICAN intellectuals of Washington, D.C. With the encouragement of Mary P. Burrill, Miller wrote her first play, Pandora’s Box (1914). While teaching high school in Baltimore, she returned regularly to Georgia Douglas Johnson’s salon in Washington, D.C. She wrote about 15 plays as well as poetry. Several of the plays are written on historical subjects, for educational purposes. Among these are Graven Images (1929), Sojourner Truth (1935), and Harriet Tubman (1935). Riding the Goat (1929) is a folk drama. MINICK. 'EORGE 3 +AUFMAN and %DNA &ERBER collaborated for the first time on this three-act COMEDY based on Ferber’s short story, “Old Man Minick,” produced by !NTOINETTE 0ERRY at Booth’s Theatre on 24 September 1924 for 141 performances, with Perry and Phyllis Povah in leading roles. The story dealt with an elderly man struggling with the dilemma of living with his son and daughter-inlaw or choosing a lonely life in a retirement home. Under the title Old Man Minick, it was made into a MOTIONPICTURE in 1932. A superior screen version STARRING Fred Stone was released in 1939 under the title No Place to Go. MINSTRELS, MINSTRELSY. Although both minstrel singing and blackface performance can be traced back to the Middle Ages, the origin of this American entertainment is usually credited to Thomas

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D. Rice, who was performing a “Jim Crow” song and dance in blackface by the 1830s. In 1843, a group calling itself the Virginia Minstrels began to set the pattern for a minstrel show, which was perfected by the long-lived Christy Minstrels. Numerous others followed, and after the Civil 7AR, minstrelsy became a ready foothold for !FRICAN!MERICANS who wished to find a way into show business. Thus the latter part of the century saw a proliferation of “genuine” Ethiopian minstrels. Yet the stylized production values called for blackface or burnt cork makeup, even by black performers. The minstrel chorus wore identical bright-colored COSTUMES, often shiny satin, cut in fancy evening dress style with top hats. They would sit in a semicircle, sometimes several rows deep, during the comic patter between the whiteface straight man called the Interlocutor and the two end-men, Tambo and Bones. A cakewalk culminated the songs and patter of the first part of the show. The second part comprised olio acts, often including a male in drag. The third part was a short play, either a “plantation spectacle” or a burlesque of well-known highbrow material. MINUTE MEN OF 1774–75, THE. Written by James A. Herne with ACTOR Harry M. Pitt in mind, this melodrama of the American Revolution was Herne’s first completely solo effort as a dramatist. It opened on 6 April 1886 at Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street Theatre to critical approval, but proved of only moderate interest to audiences. Herne was influenced by American literary romanticism, particularly the works of James Fenimore Cooper, and showed little of the influence of (ENRIK )BSEN’s REALISTIC plays that marked some of Herne’s subsequent dramas. Dorothy Foxglove, daughter of a British commander, wears a locket revealing her true identity. She has been separated from her family and raised by Reuben Foxglove. Buffeted by various forces and battles (tableaux depicted the Battles of Bunker Hill, Lexington, and Concord, and George Washington is glimpsed on his white horse in the final tableau), Dorothy falls in love with the Indian Roanoke, who, like her, turns out to be the lost child of a colonial officer. MIRACLE, THE. The spectacular pantomimic drama created by Austrian DIRECTOR -AX2EINHARDT premiered in London in 1911 and was staged in 16 other European cities before World 7AR I. After

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the war, a New York production was arranged by American arts philanthropist Otto Kahn and impresario Morris Gest. With SCENE DESIGNS and COSTUMES by .ORMAN "EL 'EDDES, it opened at the Century Theatre on 15 January 1924 and ran for 298 performances. The city of Cleveland arranged for it to transfer there over Christmas of that year. During the next five years, The Miracle was performed in 12 American cities that could raise a guarantee of a quarter of a million dollars for a minimum run of three weeks. In each city, a public auditorium would be virtually transformed into a cathedral. The spectacle required 40 boxcars of SCENERY, a TOURING company of 400, in addition to 200 local extras. MIRACLE MAN, THE. 'EORGE - #OHAN crafted this melodramatic play from Robert Hobart Davis’s novel. It opened on 21 September 1914 for 97 performances at the Astor Theatre, PRODUCED by Cohan and 3AM((ARRIS. The play focuses on some con men attempting to bilk a small community that believes its blind minister is a faith healer. The scheme works for a time, until they are moved by the minister’s fervor and the simple belief of his congregation, “healing” them of their evil impulses. The Miracle Man was made into a MOTIONPICTURE twice, most famously in 1919 STARRING Lon Chaney in a film now considered lost, and in a 1932 version with Boris Karloff. The Miracle Man was a longtime staple of STOCK and TOURING companies. MISS LULU BETT. This 0ULITZER0RIZE–winning COMEDY-drama by novelist Zona Gale, adapted from her novel of the same name, was the most acclaimed of several stage adaptations Gale crafted from her literary works. The simultaneously touching and satiric portrait of Midwestern small town life focuses on “old maid” Lulu, who is teased into participating in a mock wedding ceremony. When the “fake” marriage is found to be legal, Lulu awkwardly embarks on a honeymoon with her husband, Ninian, only to return unexpectedly after she learns that he is already married. Public dissatisfaction prompted Gale to rewrite and substitute an alternate ending after the show had opened in which Lulu and Ninian are reunited. 0RODUCED by "ROCK0EMBERTON at the Belmont Theatre, Miss Lulu Bett ran for 198 performances beginning on 27 December 1920. A silent MOTION PICTURE version appeared in 1921.

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MISTRESS NELL. The romantic COMEDY by George C. Hazelton Jr. opened on 9 October 1900 at the Bijou and ran for 104 performances. Henrietta Crosman played the renowned orange wench-turnedking’s mistress Nell Gwynne. Because theatergoers had seen other plays about Nell Gwynne, the interest of this one centered upon the witty repartee and the period COSTUMES. MITCHELL, GRANT (1874–1957). John Grant Mitchell was born in Columbus, Ohio, educated at Yale and Harvard Universities, and tried both newspaper work and law before turning to the stage. He studied at the !MERICAN!CADEMYOF$RAMATIC!RTS and made his ACTING debut in Julius Caesar with Richard Mansfield in Chicago in 1902, followed by his New York debut in that production. He remained a staple of "ROADWAY casts until he went to Hollywood in 1933 and switched to MOTIONPICTURE acting. MITCHELL, LANGDON ELWYN (1862–1935). Born in Philadelphia, the son of prominent fiction writer S. Weir Mitchell, Langdon Mitchell later adapted some of his father’s Civil 7AR novels for the stage. He studied abroad, graduated from Columbia Law School, and was admitted to the New York Bar in 1886. His earliest PRODUCED plays were in London in 1892: the full-length Deborah, a Civil War drama starring his ACTRESS wife Marion Lea, followed three months later by three one-acts, notably In the Season. Mitchell remains best remembered for his eyebrow-raising satire of divorce, The New York Idea (1906). Many of his plays were based on novels, notably Becky Sharp (1899), which he wrote for Minnie Maddern Fiske, and Major Pendennis (1916). In 1928, he became the first professor to hold the Mask and Wig Club Chair in PLAYWRITING at the University of Pennsylvania. MITCHELL, MAGGIE (1832–1918). Margaret Julia Mitchell was born in New York City. She began ACTING at 19 and quickly developed a specialty in young boy’s roles. For a quarter century, beginning in 1861, the tiny, energetic actress played Fanchon in Fanchon, the Cricket, a dramatization of a story by George Sand. Her portrayal of Jane Eyre (1885) was admired, and Maggie the Midget (1888) was created for her, but the public continued to demand Fanchon until she retired at 58.

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MITCHELL, THOMAS (1895–1962).† Born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Thomas Mitchell became one of the most beloved MOTION PICTURE character ACTORS in scores of films during the Golden Age of Hollywood, appearing in Stagecoach (1939), Gone with the Wind (1939), and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), among other. His roots were in the theatre, where he debuted with Ben Greet’s company in 1913 and TOURED in 3HAKESPEARE with Charles Coburn’s troupe. Mitchell scored popular successes in -ARC #ONNELLY’s COMEDY The Wisdom Tooth (1926) and in Little Accident (1928), which he coauthored with Floyd Dell. MIZNER, WILSON (1876–1933). Along with his brother Addison Mizner, Wilson Mizner led a controversial but fascinating life, working as a shill in medicine shows, professional gambler, and fight promoter before turning to theatre to write a play, The Only Law (1909), with George Bronson Howard. His later plays, cowritten with Paul Armstrong, were successful, including The Deep Purple (1911) and The Greyhound (1912). He also assisted Armstrong with writing the hit Alias Jimmy Valentine (1910). Mizner wrote MOTION PICTURE scripts and, along with his brother, was the subject of Stephen Sondheim’s* MUSICAL Bounce (2003). MODJESKA, HELENA (1840–1909). Born Jadwiga Benda in Poland, she established herself as an ACTRESS there, first using the name Helena Opid, then Helena Modrzejewska. In 1876, she came to the United States with her second husband Karol Chlapowski, Count Bozenta and bought a ranch in California, where she worked on her English in preparation for restarting her career on the American stage. There she hired young Sophie Treadwell as her secretary. Modjeska made her English-language acting debut in San Francisco in 1877 and developed a REPERTORY that included 16 3HAKESPEAREAN roles (notably Rosalind and Viola) as well as provocative characters in contemporary plays. Her memoirs, Memories and Impressions (1910), include vivid tales of her TOUR with Edwin Booth in 1899. MOELLER, PHILLIP (1880–1958).† Born in New York, Philip Moeller attended New York University and Columbia University. He began his theatre career as one of the founders of the Washington Square Players, staging several of the group’s productions. When the Players broke

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up during World 7AR I, Moeller went on to become a distinguished DIRECTOR with the 4HEATRE 'UILD, staging their first production, Jacinto Benavente’s The Bonds of Interest (1919), among many others. Admired for his skill at directing COMEDY, Moeller also staged important dramas. He used improvisational techniques to reach his desired ends. Among the plays he directed are The Guardsman (1924), 3IDNEY (OWARD’s 0ULITZER 0RIZE–winning drama They Knew What They Wanted (1924), Ned McCobb’s Daughter (1926), The Second Man (1927), %UGENE/.EILL’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Strange Interlude (1928), Hotel Universe* (1930), Elizabeth the Queen* (1930), Mourning Becomes Electra* (1931), Biography* (1932), Ah, Wilderness!* (1933), and End of Summer* (1936), among others. Moeller also directed MOTIONPICTURES, before retiring in the late 1930s. MOGULESKO, SIGMUND (1858–1914). Born in Romania, the Yiddish COMEDIAN pleased Bucharest audiences as Shmendrik, a comic character written for him by Avrom Goldfadn. His talent rested a great deal upon the radiance of his personality. After 1886, he appeared in New York’s burgeoning Yiddish Theatre where he founded the Rumanian Opera House. MOLINEUX, ROLAND BURNHAM (1866–1917). The murderer turned PLAYWRIGHT had his one-act Was It a Dream? PRODUCED at Proctor’s 23rd Street Theatre in 1903, following his acquittal, after mistrials and appeals, of the murder of Katherine Adams. Ten years later, his full-length crime drama, The Man Inside, was produced by David Belasco. Molineaux married Margaret Connell, who had helped with the play, but he soon suffered a mental breakdown and spent his last four years in the New York State Hospital for the Insane. MONTGOMERY, JAMES (1882–1966). Born in New York City, he ACTED for 12 years in STOCK companies and on "ROADWAY, notably in The Fortune Hunter (1909) with John Barrymore. He then turned to PLAYWRITING and PRODUCING. His plays included The Aviator (1910), Ready Money (1912), Nothing But the Truth (1910), and the MUSICAL Irene (1919). MOODY, WILLIAM VAUGHN (1869–1910). Born in Spencer, Indiana, William Vaughn Moody attended Harvard University. He taught

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there for a time, and also at the University of Chicago. Moody made his mark initially as author of A History of English Literature (1902) and some poetry. He also worked with Donald Robertson’s New Theatre and wrote two verse plays with Harriet Brainerd. When Moody switched to prose, he crafted one of the most significant dramas of the first decade of the 20th century. The Great Divide (1906), starring Margaret Anglin in a David Belasco production, employed melodramatic elements and provided depth of character and seriousness of theme well beyond other plays of its period. The success of The Great Divide led to a few other dramatic works, including The Death of Eve (1907) and The Faith Healer (1909), the latter another harbinger of modernism in American drama despite failure at the box office. Moody married Brainerd in 1909, but his health rapidly declined and he died the following year of a brain tumor. The promise of his work for a serious American drama was left unfulfilled until the appearance of %UGENE/.EILL a decade later. MORGAN, AGNES (1879–1976). The ACTRESS, PLAYWRIGHT, and DIRECTOR was born in Le Roy, New York. After earning her BA and MA degrees at Radcliffe College, she participated in George Pierce Baker’s 47 Workshop at Harvard University in 1904. In 1910, her play When Two Write History was staged in Chicago. In 1912, she codirected, with Sarah Cowell LeMoyne, The Shepherd for the settlement house run by the Lewisohn sisters. She continued to serve as the resident playwright and director at the .EIGHBORHOOD 0LAY HOUSE for 12 years, directing 35 productions. She earned her greatest recognition for the satirical sketches she created for the annual Grand Street Follies for five years in the 1920s. MORGAN, FRANK (1890–1949). Born in New York as Francis Philip Wupperman to a wealthy family, ACTOR Frank Morgan studied at the !MERICAN!CADEMY OF $RAMATIC!RTS. He had his first professional engagements in A Woman Killed with Kindness and Mr. Wu, both in 1914. #RITICS remarked on his handsomeness and refinement of manner, but he was most typically cast in dithering character roles in COMEDIES and MUSICALS, including Rock-a-Bye Baby (1918), Seventh Heaven (1922), The Firebrand (1924), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1926), Rosalie (1928), Topaze (1930), and The Band Wagon (1931). In the early sound era of MOTIONPICTURES, Morgan

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became one of the best-loved character actors during Hollywood’s golden age, gaining screen immortality playing the Wizard in the classic film, The Wizard of Oz (1939), a part in which his skill in befuddled roles served him to perfection. He was the younger brother of actor Ralph Morgan. MORGAN, RALPH (1883–1956). Born Ralph Wupperman in New York, Ralph Morgan worked as a lawyer before turning to the stage in 1908. He appeared in Clyde Fitch’s The Bachelor (1909), but his first notable "ROADWAY success came in Avery Hopwood’s comedy Fair and Warmer (1915), which was followed by a succession of roles demonstrating his versatility, including Lightnin’ (1918) and Cobra (1924). He replaced Tom Powers in the important role of Charlie Marsden in %UGENE /.EILL’s 0ULITZER 0RIZE–winning drama Strange Interlude (1928). Much of the rest of Morgan’s career was spent in character roles in MOTIONPICTURES. He occasionally returned to the stage as late as 1952 in the MUSICAL Three Wishes for Jamie, but he was somewhat less celebrated than his younger brother, Frank Morgan. MOROSCO, OLIVER (1875–1945). The renowned PRODUCER was born Oliver Morosco Mitchell in Logan, Utah. After performing as an acrobat in his father’s troupe, he went into MANAGEMENT in 1892 at the San Jose Theatre. By 1908, he was managing six California theatres. In 1909, he began his 20-year producing career. In 1917, after the 3HUBERTS honored their West Coast producing ally by naming a new theatre for him, Morosco began producing in New York. He leased the Morosco Theatre from the Shuberts and opened it with Canary Cottage, which STARRED Trixie Friganza and marked Eddie Cantor’s "ROADWAY debut. Morosco’s top hits were The Bird of Paradise (1912), Peg O’My Heart starring ,AURETTE4AYLOR (1912), Help Wanted (1914), The Unchastened Woman (1915), So Long Letty (1916), The Cinderella Man (1916), Lombardi, Ltd. (1917), and others until 1927. He would bill his attractions as having “a typical Morosco cast,” calling attention to his eye for performers who attained stardom. During the 1920s, his office on the top floor of the Morosco was legendarily well stocked with bootleg liquors, but the decade also marked his decline as he ventured into schemes outside of show business. He died with

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only eight cents in his pocket after being hit by a streetcar on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. MORRIS, CLARA (1847–1925). Born Clara LaMontagne in Toronto, Canada, she was raised by her mother in Ohio. Their poverty meant that she received little formal schooling, but she was an avid reader. As a teen, she danced or ACTED small parts in Cleveland theatres. An invitation to join Augustin Daly’s Fifth Avenue Theatre took her to New York, where she triumphed in her debut performance in Man and Wife (1870). During her three seasons with Daly, she established herself as the leading emotional actress of her day. Matinee girls and WOMEN in the 1880s flocked to weep with her as they watched the travails of her heroines. A New York Times review (6 January 1882) analyzed her art: “It is sometimes hard to believe that Miss Morris’s presentments of sorrow and distress are, after all, mere artistic effects; there is about them a poignancy of truth which commands more than fictitious sympathy—an agony as black as that of life.” Morris TOURED extensively until the 1890s, continuing to perform the old melodramas in which she used exaggerated gestures and vocal intonations. Audiences were spellbound at the intensity of her mad scene in Article 47, the pathos of her “Camille” in The Lady of the Camelias, and the whispered suffering of her Mercy Merrick in The New Magdalen. Following her retirement from the stage, she wrote plays, novels, and memoirs. MORRIS, MARY (1895–1970). Born in Swampscott, Massachusetts, she attended Radcliffe College and participated in George Pierce Baker’s 47 Workshop. The ACTRESS made her debut with the Washington Square Players in 1916. Her outstanding role was that of Abbie Putnam in %UGENE/.EILL’s Desire Under the Elms (1924). She performed less frequently after 1932, when she joined the drama faculty at Carnegie Tech. She also served on the boards of the American National Theatre and Academy,* National Theatre Conference, and !CTORS’%QUITY. MORRIS, WILLIAM (1861–1936). Born in Boston, Massachusetts, the ACTOR is not to be confused with his contemporary (1873–1932), “the dean of the golden age of vaudeville,” of the same name. The actor Morris began his stage career in 1876 with the Boston Museum,

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made his New York debut in 1882 with Augustin Daly’s company, TOURED with Minnie Maddern Fiske (1886–1887) and with Helena Modjeska (1887–1888), and performed in STOCK in San Francisco (1889–1890). Returning to New York, he played several major roles on "ROADWAY in the 1890s. He toured with Olga Nethersole in 1909. He continued his legitimate stage career in New York and San Francisco until 1932. MORTIMER, LILLIAN (d. 1946). The ACTRESS-PLAYWRIGHT was active in theatre by 1895. She wrote and PRODUCED her own material during her early career in melodrama and her later career as a headliner in vaudeville. The outstanding work in her long roster of plays is the 1905 melodrama No Mother to Guide Her, which she TOURED for a decade on the popular-price melodrama circuit, performing the comic soubrette role of Bunco. During the 1920s, she wrote full-length COMEDY dramas, often spoofing ETHNIC types but always reaffirming strong moral values. MORTON, MARTHA (1865?–1925). Born in New York City, the trailblazing WOMAN PLAYWRIGHT was well-read and had traveled internationally when she tried to make a career of writing for the stage. Her self-PRODUCED initial effort, Helene (1888), failed, but it hardened her resolve. Submitting her next play under a male pseudonym, she won a playwriting competition and saw the work, The Merchant, produced at Madison Square Theatre, starring Rose Coghlan, in 1891. Augustus Pitou produced her next play, Geoffrey Middleton, Gentleman (1892), and then she really hit her stride in a series of plays she wrote for comedian William H. Crane: Brother John (1893), His Wife’s Father (1895), A Fool of Fortune (1896), and The Senator Keeps House (1911). For comedian Sol Smith Russell, she wrote A Bachelor’s Romance (1896). Unable to gain admittance to the American Dramatists’ Club, she organized the Society of Dramatic Authors, with a charter membership of 30 women, in 1907. When the two organizations consolidated as the Society of American Dramatists and Composers, Morton served as its first vice president. MORTON, MICHAEL (1864–1931). The PLAYWRIGHT was born in London and began his American career as an ACTOR with Daniel Frohman’s company. Frohman PRODUCED his play Miss Francis of

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Yale (1897), and Morton thereafter wrote plays that were staged in New York, some of which he DIRECTED, until 1932. His plays include Resurrection (1903), Colonel Newcome (1906), The Little Stranger (1906), Detective Sparkes (1909), Woman to Woman (1921), and The Guilty One (1922). MOSCOW ART THEATRE (MAT) IN THE UNITED STATES. 0RODUCER Morris Gest brought the prestigious Moscow Art Theatre to the United States, ostensibly to demonstrate the value of ensemble ACTING over the STAR-dominated "ROADWAY theatre. Many American actors, DIRECTORS, and PLAYWRIGHTS were dazzled by the quality of the MAT’s achievement under the direction of Konstantin Stanislavski. The MAT’s first TOUR from 8 January–31 March 1923 featured all Russian plays, including Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich, The Lower Depths, Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard, and A Provincial Lady. The engagement was a critical and commercial success despite the fact that the MAT performed only in Russian. Although Stanislavski reportedly felt that Anton Chekhov’s plays were no longer relevant, they were included in the REPERTORY anyway and proved to be the more successful selections with American audiences. American artists embraced the MAT’s dynamic ensemble playing, and the company’s influence long reverberated in American theatre. The MAT returned for an eight-city tour from November 1923 to May 1924, with an expanded repertory: (ENRIK)BSEN’s An Enemy of the People, Carlo Goldoni’s The Mistress of the Inn, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko’s adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov, A. N. Ostrovsky’s Diary of a Scoundrel, and Chekhov’s Ivanov. Due to sociopolitical upheavals in postrevolutionary Soviet Russia, several MAT members chose to remain in the United States, including Richard Boleslavsky, Maria Ouspenskaya, Leo and Barbara Bulgakov, Akim Tamiroff, and Vera Soloviova. MOTION PICTURES.† Thomas A. Edison’s 1887 invention of the kinetoscope drew upon ideas and inventions from numerous sources, and other inventors rapidly explored the creative possibilities of the new medium of moving pictures. Many actors in the legitimate theatre and vaudeville at first remained aloof from the “flicks,” which they viewed as a passing novelty or beneath their status. Others braved it, as did two stage ACTORS moonlighting from the "ROADWAY

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MUSICAL The Widow Jones (1905) in one of the earliest short films to gain notoriety (and controversy), The Kiss Between May Irwin and John C. Rice (1896). Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, and Dorothy Gish were CHILD PERFORMERS on the stage who easily made the transition to the 12-minute features that followed in the wake of The Great Train Robbery (1906). Between 1905 and 1930, the motion picture became live theatre’s greatest competitor. Before World 7AR I, most storytelling films were shot in New York and New Jersey, thus allowing stage actors to work in the movies during the day while also appearing on stage at night. Minnie Maddern Fiske, James O’Neill, 'EORGE-#OHAN, James K. Hackett, and many others appeared in condensed film adaptations of their stage vehicles. In April 1912, theatrical PRODUCER Daniel Frohman, in partnership with Adolph Zukor and Edwin Porter, founded Famous Players Film Company with a goal of bringing noted stage stars to the screen in their iconic roles. That summer they arranged a gala showing of their first product, Queen Elizabeth STAR RING Sarah Bernhardt. During the 1920s, John Barrymore became a particular cinematic favorite and retained his popularity as an early star of sound films. The new era in cinema was introduced by MUSI CAL star Al Jolson in the partial “talkie,” The Jazz Singer (1927), based on 3AMSON2APHAELSON’s popular stage drama from 1925. The early sound era was a financial boon for stage actors. Some silent stars had little experience with dialogue or were hampered by inadequate voices or foreign accents. Stage workers went to Hollywood in droves, to act, to provide vocal coaching, and to write and direct. Not surprisingly, many of the most popular films of both the silent and sound eras were adaptations of plays. Once sound films became popular, both major theatres and the “ROAD” diminished. Many cinema houses combined films and live performances of tab plays and vaudeville, but the rise of film was the death knell for vaudeville, which virtually expired in the early 1930s. Live theatre began to make use of cinematic elements in plays, a trend that continues into the 21st century. Although films harmed live theatre, they also provide tangible evidence of the talents of stage actors. Many theatre stars appeared in early sound films, including Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, Jeanne Eagels, 7ALTER(USTON, Mae West, (ELEN (AYES, 4ALLULAH"ANKHEAD, !LICE"RADY, "ILLIE"URKE, Ruth Chatterton, 0AUL-UNI, George Arliss, and all three Barrymores,

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John, %THEL, and Lionel. Others, like +ATHARINE #ORNELL, !L FRED,UNT, and ,YNN&ONTANNE, avoided the screen. MR. MONEYPENNY. The prototypical expressionist drama by Channing Pollock opened on 17 October 1928 at the Liberty Theatre and ran for 62 performances. A bank clerk dissatisfied with the daily grind makes a pact with Mr. Moneypenny to pursue wealth above all else, even sacrificing faith and loyalty. His ruthless pursuit of money is set in contrast with his daughter Molly’s willingness to enjoy the simple happiness of marriage to a professor. The professor defends the arts against the pervasive jingle of coin that seduces so many to the fast life on "ROADWAY and even to crime. MR. WILKINSON’S WIDOWS. William Gillette’s three-act farce, based on Alexandre Bisson’s Feu Toupinel, opened at Proctor’s 23rd Street Theatre on 20 March 1891 for 140 performances. The risqué French source was sanitized in Gillette’s depiction of the discovery that Mrs. Dickerson and Mrs. Perrin, both recently remarried widows residing in the same boarding house, were married on the same day to the same man. Comic confusion over the situation is amplified by supporting characters, particularly Major Mallory, who labors to resolve the dilemma. #RITICS admired the performances of Henrietta Crosman and Louise Thorndyke Boucicault as the two confused widows. MRS. BUMPSTEAD-LEIGH. Opening on 3 April 1911 at the Lyceum Theatre, the satirical COMEDY by Harry James Smith ran for 64 performances. The play is memorable as one of Minnie Maddern Fiske’s great vehicles, which she also TOURED successfully. She played a woman of humble Midwestern origins who goes to England and acquires a well-born husband in order to gain her family’s entrée into New York’s higher social circles. It was PRODUCED and DI RECTED by Mrs. Fiske’s husband, Harrison Grey Fiske. Mrs. Fiske performed more broadly than usual, but appropriately so, according to the New York Times review (4 April 1911): “She is delightfully skillful in making the passages from the speech and manner of the artificial English type—beautifully characterized in her playing—to the more natural, if somewhat vulgar American type—equally true in her suggestion of a common origin and unrefined surroundings.

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Her sudden deflections from the purity of the English speech to the true-blue ‘Ammurican,’ as, for instance, in the scenes where she is alone with her female parent and addresses her as ‘Maaw’ are sidesplittingly funny.” MRS. LEFFINGWELL’S BOOTS. The COMEDY of mock innuendo by Augustus Thomas, PRODUCED by Charles Frohman, opened 11 January 1905 at the Savoy Theatre and ran for 123 performances. The play was hailed for its originality, ingenuity, and the eliciting of steady laughter throughout the action that hinges upon the discovery of the blue silk “boots” belonging to the respectable title character (played by Margaret Illington) in the bedroom of a notorious bachelor (William Courtenay). The risqué complications, generating a great deal of explanation, culminated in a satisfactorily sentimental ending. MRS. WIGGS OF THE CABBAGE PATCH. Basing her three-act play on popular stories by Alice Hegan Rice, Anne Crawford Flexner crafted this good-natured COMEDY for a Liebler & Co. production. It opened on 3 September 1904 for 150 performances at the Savoy Theatre after a year-long national TOUR featuring Madge Carr Cook as the kindly Mrs. Wiggs, who brokers a relationship between a newspaper editor and a local girl, as well as the romance of her son Billy and an orphan girl. When her errant, alcoholic husband returns home after a long absence, the forgiving Mrs. Wiggs takes him back. Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch became a perennially popular touring vehicle during the first two decades of the 20th century and proved remarkably durable in MOTIONPICTURE adaptations, leading to no less than five versions between 1914 and 1942, notably the 1934 version, with Pauline Lord, W. C. Fields, and Zasu Pitts. MUNI, PAUL (1895–1967).† A native of Lemberg, Austria, Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund immigrated with his parents, Yiddish theatre ACTORS, to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1902. He made his debut in Yiddish theatre in 1908, often cast as a female or old man, but in 1920 Muni was hired as leading man by the Yiddish Art Theatre to appear in Sholom Aleichem’s Hard to Be a Jew. Muni began acting on "ROADWAY in 1930, appearing in two failures, This One Man (1930) and Rock Me, Julie (1931), before scoring a major success as Jewish

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lawyer George Simon in %LMER2ICE’s Counsellor-at-Law* (1931), after which he embarked on a distinguished Hollywood career in such classic MOTIONPICTURES as Scarface (1932), I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), The Story of Louis Pasteur (1935), The Good Earth (1937), and The Life of Emile Zola (1937). Muni returned to the stage periodically, notably as army deserter King McCloud in -AXWELL !NDERSON’s Key Largo* (1939) and as Henry Drummond, the character based on Clarence Darrow, in Jerome Lawrence* and Robert E. Lee’s* Inherit the Wind* (1955). MURDOCH, JAMES E. (1811–1893). The eminent ACTOR-MANAGER was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He made his debut in 1829 at the Arch Street Theatre in a single performance underwritten by his hesitant father. His long slow rise in the profession culminated in star engagements in the Union states during the Civil 7AR. His 1880 book The Stage recalls anecdotes from 50 years in the theatre. MURFIN, JANE (1892–1955). Born in Quincy, Michigan, the PLAY WRIGHT enjoyed four "ROADWAY hits before she moved to Los Angeles as a PRODUCER and MOTIONPICTURE writer. Her plays, all written with ACTRESS *ANE#OWL, were Lilac Time (1917), Daybreak (1917), Information Please (1918), and Smilin’ Through (1919). She was married to actor Donald Crisp. MUSIC. During the heyday of TOURING companies, most opera houses maintained their own orchestras to perform incidental music during the action of the play as well as two or three set pieces during an interval. According to a November 1908 playbill, for example, when !LLA.AZIMOVA played Nora in A Doll’s House at the Willis Wood Theatre in Kansas City, the musical programme was “Overture: Des Marionettes” by C. Gurlitt, “Norwegian Dances Nos. 1 and 2” by Edvard Grieg, and “Poeme Erotik” by Edvard Grieg. Thus the musical selections echoed the play in spirit, even to equating the doll and the marionette. In a city with several opera houses, the orchestra would be a factor in a given theatre’s local following. Often, the conductor emerged as a local personality. MUSIC MASTER, THE. David Warfield found one of his most enduring vehicles in this three-act Charles Klein melodrama,

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PRODUCED by David Belasco, which opened on 26 September 1904 for 627 performances at the Belasco Theatre. Warfield played Anton von Barwig, a formerly admired Viennese conductor who abandoned his career to search for his daughter. The baby had been taken to New York by his wife when she deserted him for another man. In New York, Barwig subsists by giving music lessons to wealthy girls. Barwig discovers that one of them, Helen Stanton, is his daughter. Before he can reveal himself to her, the girl’s stepfather intervenes, threatening to ruin Helen’s forthcoming marriage unless Barwig gives up all contact with her. The music master selflessly assents for the sake of the girl’s happiness. Of course, the action culminates in an emotional father-daughter recognition scene. The play’s phenomenal popularity on the ROAD led to the publication of a novelized version. Warfield revived it in New York in 1916 for 159 performances. A MOTIONPICTURE version was released in 1927. MUSICALS (MUSICAL THEATRE, MUSICAL COMEDY).† The origins of the American musical are foggy at best. Music and drama have been inextricably linked since the dawn of theatre, but the American musical, as it came to be recognized in the 20th century, undoubtedly emerged from a range of 19th-century cultural traditions including folk music, minstrel shows, vaudeville, burlesque, European opera and operetta, and sundry other entertainments. Many historians identify the 1866 production of the melodrama The Black Crook as an inciting event, since the play, set in an enchanted forest, featured ballet sequences with dancers in pink tights playing wood nymphs. The influence of English operettas by W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan had an impact after 1870, but by the 1880s U.S. audiences had developed a taste for European-style operettas. These entertainments took on a decidedly “American” character after the mid-1890s, particularly through the contributions of 'EORGE-#OHAN, who wrote, composed, and STARRED in a series of musical COMEDIES featuring simple plots about “"ROADWAY” wiseguys, country bumpkins, and one-dimensional villains, all bundled together with mainstream values and the infectious patriotism typical of the varied ETHNIC groups crowding into the United States. The melodic tunes featured witty, colloquial lyrics celebrating the vigor and inventiveness of Cohan’s stage persona as a brash, goodnatured, proud Irishman.

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The vitality springing from the immigrant experience also produced a generation of Jewish-American composers and lyricists led by Irving Berlin (1888–1989), a remarkably prolific songwriter who preferred writing for musical revues, but who also composed scores for notable “book musicals” late in his career, including Annie Get Your Gun (1946) and Call Me Madam (1950). That same generation produced Jerome Kern (1885–1945), whose Princess Theatre musicals in the 1910s brought greater sophistication, cohesion, and wit to the musical comedy prototype Cohan had created. In this era, musical comedies typically emphasized interpolated tunes and star performers over story or a consistent score. In this period, Al Jolson (1885–1950) soared to stardom under the 3HUBERT PRODUCING banner, and he dominated musical comedy into the late 1920s when he moved to Hollywood to star in the first feature-length “talkie” MO TIONPICTURE, The Jazz Singer (1927). The definitive star-maker of this era was Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., who produced an annual revue called The Follies beginning in 1907. His earliest stars included his first wife, French soubrette Anna Held (1873–1918), for whom he produced some European-style musical vehicles. The stars of the Ziegfeld Follies have endured in the cultural memory since many moved from Ziegfeld to stardom in book musicals, films, and radio and television,* including Will Rogers (1879– 1935), Bert Williams (1874–1922), Fanny Brice (1891–1951), Eddie Cantor (1892–1964), W. C. Fields (1880–1946), and others. Virtually every important songwriter of the period contributed material to the Follies, but in association with Kern, Ziegfeld produced book musicals Sally (1920) and Sunny (1925) for Marilyn Miller (1898–1936), who introduced Kern’s “Look for the Silver Lining” in the former. Ziegfeld also produced the book musical Whoopee (1928) to star Eddie Cantor and its score featured several enduring hits, including “Makin’ Whoopee” and “Love Me or Leave Me,” by the songwriting trio of B. G. De Sylva (1895–1950), Lew Brown (1893–1958), and Ray Henderson (1896–1970), whose collegiate musical Good News (1927) became one of the biggest hits of the era. Ziegfeld’s most enduring production was the 1927 musical drama Show Boat, adapted by Oscar Hammerstein II* (1895–1960) from %DNA&ERBER’s novel of the same name, with a score by Kern and lyrics by Hammerstein. The result was a milestone in the evolution of the musical form, featuring a mix of comedy and drama (with tragic

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overtones) in a story of itinerant performers working on a Mississippi River showboat between the 1880s and the 1920s. Although some of its elements are typical of musical entertainments of the time (including minstrel shows and operetta), Show Boat’s fully dimensioned characters and a dramatic story daring to explore the previously taboo subject of miscegenation were boldly adventurous by popular entertainment standards of the time. An uncommonly cohesive book providing a strong framework for a rich score well-integrated into the plot and the personas of the characters were matched by standout songs, including “Make Believe,” “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” “You Are Love,” and the show’s leitmotif “Ol’ Man River,” which attained classic status. In the late 1920s, Show Boat demonstrated that the musical stage could present serious stories, well-dimensioned characters, and important themes, but its model did not immediately inspire imitators. Show Boat’s original production was not a popular success despite a cast including legendary “torch singer” Helen Morgan (1900–1941) as Julie La Verne, the racially mixed tragic catalyst of the plot. Most musicals before 1930 remained light-hearted, loosely constructed amusements, although the period produced a generation of composers and lyricists destined to perfect the musical theatre form and expand its content and the variety of its form, including composer George Gershwin (1898–1937) and his lyricist brother, Ira (1896–1983), Cole Porter (1891–1964), Richard Rodgers (1902– 1979), Lorenz Hart (1895–1943), and others. Their contributions, as well as the continued achievements of Berlin, Kern, Hammerstein, and others, created a golden age of American musicals from 1930 to 1960.

n.n NASH, MARY (1885–1976). Born Mary Ryan in Troy, New York, the ACTRESS took the name of her stepfather, booking agent Philip K. Nash, and attended the !MERICAN!CADEMYOF$RAMATIC!RTS in 1900. She made her legitimate stage debut in Alice-Sit-by-theFire with %THEL "ARRYMORE in 1905. She acted numerous roles on "ROADWAY until 1933, after which she switched to MOTIONPIC TURES. She originated roles in such noteworthy successes as The City

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(1909), The Woman (1911), The New York Idea (1915), The Man Who Came Back (1916, and London in 1920), and Man and Woman (1920). Her sister Florence Nash (1888–1950) was also an actress. NATHAN, GEORGE JEAN (1882–1958).† Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the son of wealthy parents, he graduated from Cornell University in 1904, then spent a year studying at the University of Bologna. As a reporter for the New York Herald, he published his first theatre reviews in 1906. After stints reviewing for Outing and The Bohemian, Nathan became drama CRITIC of The Smart Set in 1909, working closely with H. L. Mencken. They coedited the publication for a decade, from 1914–1924, and cofounded The American Mercury, for which Nathan wrote dramatic criticism until 1932. Nathan and Mencken also wrote two unsuccessful plays, The Artist (1912) and Heliogabulus (1920), but more importantly Nathan championed modernist theatre in his writings, emphasizing the significance of the plays of (ENRIK )BSEN, 'EORGE"ERNARD3HAW, and August Strindberg. He assailed the quality of American theatre prior to the emergence of %UGENE /.EILL, whose plays Nathan actively promoted. In 1932, Nathan founded The American Spectator with the aid of O’Neill and others, and he edited it until 1935, after which he wrote criticism for an array of publications, including Puck, Judge, Vanity Fair, The Saturday Review of Literature, Newsweek, THEATRE ARTS, and Esquire. Nathan’s many books, some of which collected his criticisms, include Mr. George Jean Nathan Presents (1917), The Popular Theatre (1918), Comedians All (1919), The Theatre, The Drama, The Girls (1921), The Critic and the Drama (1922), The Testament of the Critic (1931), Since Ibsen (1933), The Theatre of the Moment (1936), and Encyclopedia of the Theatre (1940). Beginning in 1943, he published an annual, The Theatre Book of the Year, which ended with his death. Nathan married actress Julie Haydon* in 1955 and endowed an annual George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. After World 7AR II, his influence declined. NATIONAL ALLIANCE OF THEATRICAL AND STAGE EMPLOYEES (NATSE). In 1893, the American Federation of Labor chartered NATSE as the labor union for a broad range of workers in theatre-related jobs from SCENEDESIGNERS to box office personnel. In 1902, the name was changed to the International Alliance of Theatrical

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Stage Employees (IATSE), and over the years the scope of entertainmentindustry activities has encompassed ever more union members. NATIONAL THEATRE CONFERENCE (NTC). The organization was founded in 1925 at a conference hosted by Carnegie Tech to foster the best interests of the American theatre by bringing together distinguished members of the theatre community from ACADEMIC theatres, little theatres, and commercial theatres. Early initiatives promoted theatre libraries and lobbied to protect not-for-profit theatres, led by such luminaries as George Pierce Baker, %DITH*2 )SAACS, Gilmor Brown, E. C. Mabie, and Rosamond Gilder.* Gradually, the regional structure and open membership policies were found to be unworkable. A reorganizing meeting was held in December 1936, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. Under the new plan, members were elected from leaders in the field. Active membership in the NTC is today limited to 120. While the purposes and projects of the organization have varied considerably throughout its sometimes bumpy existence, one ideal emerges consistently: support of new and established American PLAYWRIGHTS. The annual meeting has been an important forum for communication among academic, not-for-profit, and commercial theatres. NATIVE AMERICANS ON THE STAGE.† From the 18th century, Native Americans have been depicted in theatrical works, but the first to gain wide popular recognition was John Augustus Stone’s Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags (1828). Many 19thcentury plays depicted Indians as villains or as tragically romantic figures. Variety entertainments, from minstrel shows and CIRCUS to MU SICALS and vaudeville, tended to encourage the familiar stereotypes. Stereotypical depictions continued into the early 20th century in William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West Show (and its competitors), and plays like Strongheart (1905) and The Squaw Man (1905). Other dramatists, including James A. Herne, David Belasco, William C. deMille, and Mary Austin, sought to offer more REALISTIC depictions of Native Americans, but white audiences preferred the familiar stereotypes. NATURALISM. Naturalism as a pure form was pioneered by Emile Zola, who imagined theatre as a “slice of life” in which romantic

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and sentimental elements, as well as the well-made play structure, would give way to a scientific examination of unmediated reality. Russian PLAYWRIGHT Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths (1902) is recognized as the most enduring example of this manner of pushing REALISM to extremes along with a focus on sordid environments where the many factors influencing behaviors in the human organism could best be controlled. In American theatre, the attention to mundane details figured prominently in David Belasco’s "ROADWAY productions, as in a restaurant scene with actual coffee brewing and pancakes being made. While American audiences have always been most comfortable with literal realism on the stage, naturalism did not mesh as well with American optimism. However, there have been important exceptions. Naturalistic elements inform %UGENE /.EILL’s early sea-faring plays. %LMER2ICE’s 0ULITZER0RIZE–winning Street Scene (1929) depicts life in a New York tenement. Sidney Kingsley’s* Dead End* (1935) probably represents the apogee of American naturalism before the infamous broadcasting of the Loud family’s daily life in the 1970s and the subsequent flood of reality television* and Internet sites. NAUGHTY ANTHONY. David Belasco wrote and PRODUCED this COMEDY, which opened on 8 January 1900 for 90 performances at the Herald Square Theatre STARRING Blanche Bates. Its healthy run was due, in part, to the addition of Madame Butterfly as an afterpiece, but this innocuous farce about the effect of Parisian silk stockings on hoydenish Cora, played by Bates, was titillating to Victorian audiences. The “stocking scene,” in which Cora demonstrates the newly fashionable legwear, was made into a short MOTION PICTURE by American Mutoscope in 1900 with Bates recreating her role. NAZIMOVA, ALLA (1879–1945).† Born Alla Leventon at Yalta in the Crimea, Russia, she first studied music, but at 17 began training for the stage under Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, and joined the Moscow Art Theatre’s school in 1898. In 1905, she came to the United States with Paul Orlenoff’s company from St. Petersburg, where she had been performing since 1903, including the role of Mrs. Alving in (EN RIK)BSEN’s Ghosts. Nazimova remained in the United States when the Orlenoff company returned to Russia. She reportedly learned English in six months, then made her English-speaking debut as Hedda Gabler

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in 1906. It was A Doll’s House in 1907 that made her a STAR of the American stage. In 1910, the 3HUBERTS inaugurated the Nazimova Theatre with her starring in Ibsen’s Little Eyolf. After performing on TOUR and in a number of melodramas, she joined the #IVIC2EPER TORY4HEATRE in 1928, developing a personal as well as professional relationship with its artistic DIRECTOR, %VA,E'ALLIENNE. NED MCCOBB’S DAUGHTER. 3IDNEY (OWARD’s three-act melodrama opened on 29 November 1926 for 156 performances at the *OHN 'OLDEN Theatre in a 4HEATRE 'UILD production featuring !LFRED ,UNT in a rare appearance without his wife, ,YNN &ON TANNE. Carrie, daughter of Captain McCobb, marries the philandering George Callahan, who impels McCobb to mortgage his farm for two self-serving purposes, to repay money he has embezzled from a ferry company and to fund his mistress’s abortion. Despite this, George is arrested and his brother, Babe, a bootlegger, gives Carrie the money to pay off the mortgage and George’s legal expenses if he can keep his illegal alcohol in McCobb’s barn. Carrie turns him in to the police and washes her hands of George, choosing an independent future. #RITICS praised the depiction of Carrie as an enlightened WOMAN and applauded the strongly defined characters typical of Howard’s work. Ned McCobb’s Daughter was made into a MOTION PICTURE in 1928, although it is believed to be lost. NEEDLES AND PINS. Augustin Daly’s adaptation of Julius Rosen’s German farce Starke Mitteln opened at Daly’s Theatre on 9 November 1880, was successfully TOURED to London in 1884, and revived in 1888. The COMEDY of matrimonial mix-ups benefited from Daly’s lavish production and strong performances by members of his company, notably John Drew, James Lewis, Ada Rehan, and, in the comic role of the middle-aged spinster sister who sees herself as a tender maiden, Mrs. G. H. Gilbert. NEIGHBORHOOD PLAYHOUSE, THE.† In 1915, Alice and Irene Lewisohn built the Neighborhood Playhouse on New York’s Grand Street in tandem with the Henry Street Settlement House, which tended to the needs of the neighborhood’s immigrant population. Its goal, like those of the Provincetown Players and the Washington Square Players, was to establish a REPERTORY theatre free

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of commercial pressures. The Neighborhood Playhouse began as an AMATEUR operation, but by 1920 it was fully professional and presented a diverse range of ETHNIC and folk works, including The Little Clay Cart (1924) and The Dybbuk (1926), as well as a 14thcentury French mystery play, a Japanese Noh drama, Celtic dances, a Norse fairy tale, and a medieval interlude, as well as modernist works including John Galsworthy’s The Mob (1920), %UGENE /.EILL’s The First Man (1922), and James Joyce’s Exiles (1924). Popular entertainments were also staged, and the Playhouse found particular success with five annual editions of their MUSICAL revue, The Grand Street Follies. The troupe disbanded in 1927, but the Lewisohns and Rita Wallach Morgenthau established a theatre school there in 1928, and it continues to the present. Among its faculty, Sanford Meisner,* who had been a member of The Group Theatre,* emerged as the most important, teaching techniques based on the ACTING innovations of Konstantin Stanislavski and the Moscow Art Theatre. Meisner taught there from 1935 to 1990. NERVOUS WRECK, THE. This popular three-act farce by /WEN $AVIS opened on 9 October 1923 at the 3AM((ARRIS Theatre and ran for an impressive 279 performances. Henry Williams, a shy hypochondriac, journeys to an Arizona dude ranch. Assisting Sally Morgan, a runaway bride, Henry escapes with her while a posse follows in pursuit. Henry and Sally hide out at a ranch and work in disguise as cook and maid. When Sally’s father agrees not to force her into an unwanted marriage, she chooses to wed Henry. Davis based the play on E. J. Rath’s magazine story, “The Wreck.” The Nervous Wreck was made into a MOTIONPICTURE in 1926. Adapted as the 1928 Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.–PRODUCED MUSICAL Whoopee, it became a hugely successful vehicle for comedian Eddie Cantor. Its score, by B. G. De Sylva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson, featured “Makin’ Whoopee” and “Love Me or Leave Me.” Whoopee (with an exclamation point added to the title) was filmed in 1930 STARRING Cantor and supervised by Ziegfeld in one of the first all-Technicolor movies. NETHERSOLE, OLGA (1866–1951). Olga Isabella Nethersole was born in London, England. Although the ACTRESS-PRODUCER remained a British citizen, she was well-known on the American stage from 1894. In addition to her many STARRING roles on "ROADWAY, she

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TOURED widely, often scandalizing middle Americans with portrayals of less-than-respectable WOMEN in plays like The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith (1895), Carmen in 1896, Clyde Fitch’s Sapho (1900), Magda in 1906, and Mary Magdalene in 1910. Kansas City Star CRITIC Austin Latchaw (Star, 20 June 1935) recalled of her “tropical love-making” on stage that “Nethersole respected no traditions when she believed she was delineating a character truthfully. She gave Carmen a very bad reputation before she got through with her. It was the same in Sapho. . . . When she first acted the role in New York, she was arrested and prosecuted for giving an immoral play. A jury of twelve men not only acquitted her, but sent her a special exoneration, signed by all of them.” See also CENSORSHIP; SEXUALITY ONTHE!MERICANSTAGE. NEW AMSTERDAM THEATRE. The beautiful "ROADWAY theatre fronting on 42nd Street, designed by Henry Herts and Hugh Tallant for Klaw & Erlanger, opened on 26 October 1903 with a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The gorgeous art nouveau décor of the interior was meticulously restored in 1995–1997. One of the first theatres constructed with steel framing, it was housed in an 11-story office building. A second performance space in the structure was the Aerial Gardens, an enclosed rooftop café and theatre reached by elevator from its main-floor lobby; it opened on 6 June 1904. NEW SOUTH, THE. !CTOR turned PLAYWRIGHT Joseph A. Grismer collaborated with Clay M. Greene on this 1892 melodrama ostensibly exploring racial animosity in the South following the American Civil 7AR. The U.S. government sends an army captain south to arrest moonshiners, but he falls in love with a local girl whose nefarious brother attempts to frame the captain for a murder he did not commit. However, the Southerners’ resentments against him for sympathizing with !FRICAN!MERICAN agitators put him in great danger. Rife with racial stereotypes, this exploitive work was made into a 1916 MOTION PICTURE, alternately titled The New South or Broken Chains. NEW STAGECRAFT. Modernist techniques of theatrical production derived from European innovations in SCENE DESIGN and stagecraft came to America through the pioneering work of Viennese designer Joseph Urban. His stage decors at the Boston Opera, the

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Metropolitan Opera, and for the Ziegfeld Follies led the way to a new emphasis on controlled line, mass, and color, as opposed to the old box sets and painted literalism associated with REALISM. The New Stagecraft gained momentum when 2OBERT %DMOND *ONES and +ENNETH-ACGOWAN published their book Continental Stagecraft in 1922. The move to simplified or stylized impressionistic settings in the tradition of Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig coincided nicely with the little theatre movement, as those small ventures found the new approach more accommodating to their limited means. See also CHENEY, SHELDON; -IELZINER *O; PLATT, LIVINGSTON; SCENE DESIGN; SCENERY; 3IMONSON ,EE; ZIEGFELD, FLORENZ, JR. NEW THEATRE. Built in 1909 on Central Park West at 62nd Street in New York, this magnificent structure, designed by Carrere and Hastings and underwritten by prominent New Yorkers, was intended by DIRECTOR Winthrop Ames to be a “people’s theatre.” No expense was spared in creating a beautiful interior design and lavish comforts, marred only by poor acoustics. The inaugural production, Antony and Cleopatra, STARRING Julia Marlowe and E. H. Sothern, was deemed slow-paced, perhaps even weighted down by production values and by inflated expectations. The plan to present classical plays in REPERTORY could not be long sustained, for the theatre’s location well outside the "ROADWAY theatre district meant that “the people” did not attend in sufficient numbers. Renamed the Century Theatre in 1911, it was operated with little success by various MANAGERS, including Charles Dillingham. In 1920, the 3HUBERTS acquired the building. It was there that .ORMAN "EL 'EDDES created a Gothic cathedral for -AX2EINHARDT’s The Miracle in 1924. In her biography of Eleonora Duse, who performed there in 1923, %VA,E'AL LIENNE referred to the Century Theatre as “the vast auditorium built in 1909 to house the ill-fated New Theatre Company, nicknamed ‘the Millionaires’ Theatre’” (1973, 65). The theatre was razed in 1930. NEW WOMAN. The British idea of the “progressive” modern WOMAN appeared on the London stage in Sydney Grundy’s COM EDY titled The New Woman (1894). The eponymous heroine of David Belasco’s The Girl of the Golden West (1905) is sometimes signaled as the American version of the “new woman,” although

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the concept traces back to the earlier woman suffrage movement as well as to the 1890s craze for bicycle riding and other physical recreations newly available to women. Like most actresses, the women PLAYWRIGHTS associated with the Provincetown Players in the 1910s would be considered “new women,” whether or not such women figured prominently as characters in their plays. See also )BSEN (ENRIK; 3HAW 'EORGE"ERNARD. NEW YORK DRAMATIC MIRROR. Founded as the New York Mirror in 1879, the trade paper of the theatrical profession added the word Dramatic in its official name in 1884, but was popularly known as The Dramatic Mirror. Editor (and for a time, sole proprietor) Harrison Grey Fiske led it to an impressive circulation by including gossipy pieces of interest to a general readership, even as he used it in the fight against the Theatrical Syndicate. Fiske ended his association with the journal in 1911 and its fortunes declined as VARIETY gained ascendancy, and in 1922, the Dramatic Mirror ceased publication. NEW YORK IDEA, THE. Langdon Mitchell’s four-act high COMEDY satirizing marriage and divorce in New York society opened on 19 November 1906 for 66 performances at the Lyric Theatre. 3TARRING Minnie Maddern Fiske as Cynthia Karslake, who is divorced from her husband, John, and plans to marry the recently divorced Judge Phillimore. The judge’s ex-wife, Vida, becomes engaged to John, but the plans of both couples are unsettled by Sir Wilfred Cates-Darby (played by George Arliss), who flirts with both women. Cynthia regrets her divorce from John, but she arrives at his home and discovers that a wedding has just concluded. She is relieved to learn that Cates-Darby has married Vida and that John, who also regrets their divorce, wants to remarry. The New York Idea was revived on "ROADWAY in 1915 (with Grace George) and in 1933, but neither production was successful. !LICE"RADY played Cynthia in a 1920 MOTIONPICTURE version. NICE PEOPLE. The 1921 COMEDY by RACHEL CROTHERS opened on 3 March at the Klaw Theater and ran for 247 performances. The glamorous setting and fashions of act 1 afforded a glimpse of Park Avenue wealth tainted by the decadent behavior of three beautiful young WOMEN in their twenties, played by Francine Larrimore,

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+ATHARINE#ORNELL, and 4ALLULAH"ANKHEAD. One of the flappers, Teddie, defies her father and sneaks out with a young man, Scotty. In act 2, stuck at her mother’s cottage with Scotty, Teddie sees that he is only a fortune-hunter. However, her father feels that her reputation is now compromised unless she marries Scotty. Teddie refuses. Three months later, she has shown that she can sustain herself by hard work, and it remains only for her to work out an understanding with a true-blue young man who has no interest in her money. NICHOLS, ANNE (1891–1966). A native of Dales Mills, Georgia, Anne Nichols wrote several plays, but her dramatic reputation is based entirely on one success, Abie’s Irish Rose (1922), a sentimental romantic COMEDY about the marriage of a Jewish boy and an Irish girl in New York’s melting pot. Reviled by CRITICS, the play found its audience when Nichols expended her own capital and that of gangster Arnold Rothstein to keep it running. The ploy worked as Abie’s Irish Rose became the longest running play of the era, racking up 2,327 performances and spawning numerous TOURS and STOCK productions. Nichols also wrote touring plays for MANAGER Augustus Pitou and had a minor success with her libretto for the MUSICAL, Linger Longer Letty (1919). NICHOLSON, KENYON (1894–1986). A native of Crawfordsville, Indiana, Kenyon Nicholson completed his undergraduate studies at Wabash College in 1917 before studying PLAYWRITING at Columbia University. His first "ROADWAY play, Honor Bright (1921), garnered scant attention, but in collaboration with 3."EHRMAN he scored a hit with The Barker (1927), STARRING 7ALTER (USTON, which achieved a 221-performance run at the Biltmore Theatre. Sailor, Beware! (1933), Nicholson’s most successful play, coauthored with Charles Robinson, played 500 performances at the Lyceum Theatre. Later works, most of which were COMEDIES or light dramas, included Love Is Like That (1927), Confession (1927), Eva the Fifth (1928), Before You’re 25 (1929), Stepdaughters of War (1930), Torch Song (1930), Swing Your Lady! (1936), Dance Night (1938), and Apple of His Eye (1946). Nicholson also wrote scripts for about 20 MOTION PICTURES during the early sound era, several of which were adaptations of his stage plays.

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NIELSEN, ALICE (1871?–1943). Born in Nashville, Tennessee, the singing performer grew up in Kansas City and conquered the worlds of operetta, grand opera, and theatre. Victor Herbert composed operettas for her before she switched to opera in 1902, which led to her singing opposite Enrico Caruso. She was instrumental in bringing Joseph Urban to American SCENEDESIGN, and she worked closely with such illustrious theatre artists as David Belasco and Eleonora Duse. NIGGER, THE. A three-act play by Edward Sheldon, The Nigger was PRODUCED by Winthrop Ames on 4 December 1909 and presented as part of a REPERTORY season at the New Theatre. The explosive title was decided upon by Sheldon, who abandoned his original title Philip Morrow in order to make clear the attitudes of his white characters about the black ones in the play. Southern governor Philip Morrow is elected as a white supremacist, but is blackmailed by his cousin Clifford Noyes, a disreputable liquor distiller. Noyes is angry about Morrow’s refusal to veto prohibition legislation and holds a letter proving that Morrow’s grandmother was a Negro slave. Refusing to capitulate to Noyes’s blackmail, and with the support of his loyal fiancée Georgiana, Morrow faces his constituency with the truth of his past and a newfound commitment to work for the betterment of !FRICAN!MERICANS. #RITICS were divided over the play and some felt that its race issues were sublimated to the play’s romantic story. The Nigger spawned TOURING companies and a 1915 MOTION PIC TURE version retitled The New Governor. NIGGER HEAVEN. Seating was racially segregated in most theatres during the modernist era, although the !FRICAN!MERICAN MUSICALS of the 1890s created some exceptions. African Americans were often obliged to buy their tickets at a separate box office on one side of the playhouse, after which they would ascend to the top gallery through a separate entrance and a narrow stairway, sometimes even by stairs on the exterior of the building. NINETY AND NINE, THE. Opening on 7 October 1902 at the Academy of Music, the melodrama by Ramsay Morris ran for 128 performances. The old-fashioned cheap thrills still had the power to please, as hinted in the New York Times review (8 October 1902): “Quick music, lights down, then a sudden flare and the stage at the Academy

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reveals a giant engine, wheels revolving, autumnal landscape swiftly moving, and the forest fire fiercely burning. Tom Silverton, the hero, stands at the throttle fighting smoke and flame and death, rushing on to his work of mercy. And when the engine, with its cars, apparently arrives at the endangered village, the three thousand (there were somewhat less) anxious villagers, instead of piling pell mell into the cars to be whisked away to safety, forget all about the danger, fall on their knees, and sing the Doxology. But a little incongruity like that couldn’t deter that Fourteenth Street audience last night, which at this point was apparently transported to the very pinnacle of melodramatic transports.” NIXON-NIRDLINGER, SAMUEL F. (1848–1918). Sammy Nirdlinger was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and worked in the family’s clothier business before going into theatre MANAGEMENT under the tutelage of George K. Goodwin (d. 1885), an amusements entrepreneur in Philadelphia. In partnership with J. Fred Zimmerman, Nixon soon controlled the first-class theatres in Philadelphia, which poised them to join the four other theatre businessmen in forming the Theatrical Syndicate in 1896. NOBODY’S WIDOW. Avery Hopwood’s popular three-act drawing room COMEDY was PRODUCED by David Belasco to provide his protégé Blanche Bates with a rare departure from dramatic roles. Nobody’s Widow opened on 15 November 1910 for 215 performances at the Hudson Theatre. Bates played Roxana Clayton, who is so disturbed by catching her husband (played by Bruce McRae) kissing another woman that she tells their friends he died. He struggles to win her back, but obstacles stand in the way until the final curtain. A silent MOTIONPICTURE version of Nobody’s Widow appeared in 1927. NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH. James Montgomery’s slender COM EDY based upon a story by Frederick Isham opened at the Longacre Theatre on 14 September 1916 and ran for 332 performances. William Collier ACTED the young businessman who takes a bet that he can tell only the truth for 24 hours, a feat that nearly loses him his girlfriend as well as the brokerage firm for which he works. Two MU SICALS, Yes, Yes, Yvette (1927) and Tell Her the Truth (1932), and two MOTIONPICTURES, 1929 and 1941, were spun off of this play.

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n/n OENSLAGER, DONALD (1902–1975).† The prolific SCENE DE SIGNER was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, graduated from Harvard University in 1923, and saw the first of his more than 200 designs on "ROADWAY in 1925. The earliest of his designs were for MUSICALS and operettas, including Good News (1927), The New Moon (1928), and Girl Crazy (1930). He also designed COSTUMES for about 20 shows, and after 1946, branched into LIGHTING design. As a professor of theatre arts at Yale University from 1925, he taught and influenced many leading designers, just as he had learned from 2OBERT%DMOND*ONES. OFFICER 666. Opening on 29 January 1912 at the Gaiety Theatre, this farce by Augustin MacHugh (with uncredited revisions by Winchell Smith) ran for 192 performances. The mistaken identity plot involves a policeman (played by Francis D. McGinn) who lends his badge and uniform to a wealthy art collector, Gladwin (Wallace Eddinger), who disguises himself to investigate the theft of his identity by a burglarizing art expert (George Nash) who moved into his house while the real Gladwin was abroad and who is also about to win the girl (Vivian Martin). It was “carried out in the broadest farcical spirit, with plenty of humorous situations, a large number of surprises, and considerable bright dialogue” (New York Times, 30 January 1912). OLCOTT, CHAUNCEY (1860?–1932). The “Irish” singing COME DIAN was born Chancellor John Olcott in Buffalo, New York. He began his career as a light opera singer, making his New York debut at the Union Square Theatre in 1886. When the leading stage Irishman William J. Scanlan retired in 1891, Olcott stepped into the position. A rich voice and engaging presence compensated for unremarkable ACTING ability. According to CRITIC Austin Latchaw (Kansas City Star, 30 April 1935): “He was tall, well built and handsome, and his voice was particularly well suited in quality and serviceability to the music allotted to him.” Rida Johnson Young, 2ACHEL #ROTHERS, and others wrote vehicles for him, including A Romance of Athlone (1899), Barry of Ballymore (1911), Macushla (1912), Shameen Dhu (1914), The Heart of Paddy Whack (1914), and Once Upon a Time (1918). See also ETHNICITYIN!MERICANDRAMA.

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OLD HOMESTEAD, THE. The famous, frequently revived rural drama by Denman Thompson (with uncredited contributions by George W. Ryer) opened at the Fourteenth Street Theatre on 10 January 1887 and ran for 160 performances. It began as a variety sketch that Thompson developed early in the 1870s, in which he portrayed a New England farmer, Joshua Whitcomb. The sketch’s popularity and longevity prompted Thompson to expand it into a full-length play, which he performed on the ROAD for the remainder of his career. In sum, Thompson played Joshua Whitcomb a total of 35 years; that is, more than 10,000 times. The Old Homestead always played well in the American heartland, where people remembered their farm antecedents and relished the story of simple human warmth and decency. Even after Thompson’s death, the piece was taken up by others, as in a three-week revival at Manhattan Opera House in 1913. OLD SOAK, THE. Opening 22 August 1922 at the Plymouth Theatre, the folksy small-town COMEDY by Don Marquis ran for 423 performances. One appeal for Prohibition-decade audiences was the sentimental portrayal of the kindly lush (played by character comedian Harry Beresford), who is reduced to bootleg alcohol, which he always has tested on his parrot, and yet who manages to save the family fortune from the conniving banker played by Robert McWade. Minnie Dupree played the title character’s wife, !RTHUR(OPKINS PRODUCED it, and Cleon Throckmorton designed the scenery. The 1937 Metro-GoldwynMayer MOTIONPICTURE version was titled The Good Old Soak. ON THE QUIET. The farce by Augustus Thomas opened at the Madison Square Theatre on 11 February 1901 and ran for 160 performances. Thomas wrote it as a vehicle for William Collier, who combined the role of romantic lead with his own comic mannerisms to portray a Yale man who tries to keep his marriage secret despite many complications, including mistaken identities. The action proceeded from the conservatory of a billionaire’s mansion to New Haven hotel parlor to a yacht stuck in the mud. ON TRIAL. This early play by %LMER 2ICE (billed under his real name, Elmer L. Reizenstein) opened on 19 August 1914 at the Chandler Theatre for 365 performances, PRODUCED by 'EORGE - #OHAN, 3AM ( (ARRIS, and !RTHUR (OPKINS. Innovative in its

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employment of a cinematic “flashback” technique (perhaps the first American play to use it effectively) and its depiction of a REALISTIC courtroom environment, On Trial was a significant success for Rice, who emerged as one of the American theatre’s most promising dramatists. Robert Strickland is on trial for the murder of Gerald Trask. Strickland, in debt to Trask for $10,000, claims to have paid back the loan, but the prosecutor insists that Strickland went to Trask’s house to steal back the money and killed Trask in the process. Strickland’s wife confesses on the stand to having been seduced by Trask, adding that on the night of the murder she begged Trask not to reveal their past indiscretion, although she denies killing Trask. Glover, Trask’s secretary, is caught in some contradictory testimony, but he, too, denies murdering Trask. The jury acquits Strickland, and Trask’s actual murderer is never revealed. On Trial reached the MOTION PICTURE screen in three versions (1917, 1928, 1939). ONE-NIGHT STAND. During the heyday of TOURING, one-night engagements in relatively small population centers represented the drudgery of the profession, for it meant drayage and setup for only one performance, often with not even a night at a hotel, if the train schedule accommodated departure after the final curtain. Yet even STARS like Edwin Booth included some one-night stands in their itineraries on the jumps between longer engagements. ONE OF OUR GIRLS. Bronson Howard’s four-act COMEDY opened at the Lyceum Theatre on 10 November 1885 for 200 performances. #RITICS found the play to be inferior to Howard’s previous Young Mrs. Winthrop (1882), and he was also accused of plagiarizing plot devices from Victorien Sardou’s Les Pattes de mouche, although he claimed to have no knowledge of Sardou’s work. However, a bright cast, including E. H. Sothern and Helen Dauvray, brought Howard’s slight comedy to life. It centers on Kate Shipley, whose French mother was cut off from her family fortune for marrying Kate’s American father. In France, Kate befriends her cousin, Julie Fonblanque, who is in a similar situation. Her parents wish her to marry the Comte de Crebillon, but she prefers Henri Saint-Hilaire. Kate goes with Julie to a secret rendevous with Henri, but when the Comte finds out about it, Kate tries to convince him that it was she meeting Henri, not Julie. A duel ensues and Henri is wounded. Julie’s parents relent.

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O’NEIL, NANCE (1874–1965). Born Gertrude Lamson in Oakland, California, the ACTRESS made her debut in 1893 at San Francisco’s Alcazar Theatre. She TOURED in McKee Rankin’s popular melodrama The Danites. Her New York debut came in 1896 at Weber and Fields’s Theatre. One of her great roles that long remained in her REPERTORY was Leah in The Jewess, which she performed successfully in London in 1902 as well as for many years on tour. Her VARIETY obituary signals The Lily in 1909 as the role that brought her STARDOM as an emotional actress. Her stage career peaked with Raimunda in The Passion Flower (1920), and she eventually went into MOTIONPICTURES. O’NEIL, RAYMOND. The white PRODUCER of !FRICAN!MERICAN theatre founded the Ethiopian Art Theatre in Chicago with the intention of reaching integrated audiences with a mix of classics and folk drama. Among the black actors in his short-lived company (1922– 1923) was Evelyn Preer, who played the title role in his premiere of The Chip Woman’s Fortune (1922), which O’Neil then took to Washington, D.C., and New York. O’NEILL, EUGENE GLADSTONE (1888–1953).† “Born in a hotel room—and God damn it—died in a hotel room!” were reportedly among the Nobel Prize–winning PLAYWRIGHT’s last words. The son of the renowned ACTOR James O’Neill and Ella Quinlan O’Neill was born in a hotel near today’s 4IMES3QUARE in New York, died in a Boston hotel, and spent part of his childhood in hotels on the ROAD with his father. Two sons preceded Eugene: James Jr. and Edmund. The latter’s death in infancy haunted Eugene with the guilty feeling that he had usurped the boy’s place in the family, and those guilt feelings were compounded when he learned as a teen that his difficult birth had initiated his mother’s addiction to morphine. Those concerns surface notably in his autobiographical posthumous play Long Day’s Journey into Night.* Indeed, most of his plays were strongly autobiographical. O’Neill was educated at various Catholic boarding schools, but spent summers with the family at their Monte Cristo Cottage in New London, Connecticut. He tended to be a loner who read voraciously, from popular romantic novels to the works of such modernist icons as (ENRIK)BSEN and 'EORGE"ERNARD3HAW. One academic year

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at Princeton University, 1906–1907, was followed by various jobs and ventures into dissipation in unsavory districts of New York City. His unfortunate first marriage, to Kathleen Jenkins in 1909, impelled him to escape by joining a mining expedition to Honduras, where he caught malaria. His son Eugene O’Neill Jr. was born in May 1910, but O’Neill was already preparing to embark on his next sea voyage, which took him to Buenos Aires for the winter of 1910–1911 and inspired his early plays of seafaring men. Returning to New York in 1911, he was divorced and moved into a waterfront dive called Jimmythe-Priest’s, from which he later conceptualized the setting of Anna Christie (1922). It was there, in 1912, that he attempted suicide. Despite his chronic drinking, O’Neill managed to hold a summer job as a reporter for the New London Telegraph in 1912 while writing poetry on the side. Diagnosed with tuberculosis, he convalesced at Gaylord Farm Sanitarium. Reading the plays of August Strindberg during those months was a formative experience for him, and he wrote his own first one-act play, A Wife for a Life, in 1913. A steady flow of one-acts from his pen confirmed his discovery of a vocation. He enrolled in George Pierce Baker’s playwriting class at Harvard University in 1914. He began to socialize with Greenwich Village intellectuals and bohemians in 1915, but it was the summer of 1916 that marked his real beginning as a PRODUCED PLAYWRIGHT. A group of friends spending the summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts, began performing plays in a fish-house on a wharf, and that was the venue for O’Neill’s first produced play, Bound East for Cardiff, on 28 July. The group’s endeavors continued in New York as the Provincetown Players, and O’Neill’s one-acts continued to be produced, with the playwright himself performing in some of them. The oneacts produced during this period include Before Breakfast (1916), In the Zone (1917), The Long Voyage Home (1917), and The Moon of the Caribbees (1918). Some of his one-acts of the sea were later collected under the umbrella title S. S. Glencairn. In 1918, O’Neill married Agnes Boulton, with whom he had two children: Shane (1919–1977) and Oona (1925–1991). Oona broke with her father over her marriage to Charlie Chaplin in 1943. O’Neill and Boulton spent the theatre seasons in New York and summers in a remodeled coast guard station at Peaked Hill Bars near Provincetown. Despite friction in his marriage, the 1920s were one of O’Neill’s most productive decades and truly established him

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as the long-awaited “great American playwright.” Three of his four 0ULITZER 0RIZES were awarded during the modernist era: Beyond the Horizon (1920), Anna Christie (1922), and Strange Interlude (1928). He experimented with expressionist techniques in The Emperor Jones (1920), The Hairy Ape (1921), The Great God Brown (1925), and Dynamo (1928). He explored racial issues in All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1923). He wrote searing psychological dramas, Desire Under the Elms (1924) and Strange Interlude (1927), and a historical costume drama that also served as an indictment of capitalism, Marco Millions (1925). O’Neill’s achievements before 1930 were remarkable and would already have assured him his preeminent stature in American drama. The end of this phase of his life coincided with his liaison with Carlotta Monterey and 1929 divorce from Agnes Boulton. The 1930s and 1940s would bring fewer but even more important plays. O’NEILL, JAMES (1846–1920). Born in County Kilkenny, Ireland, the great ACTOR was brought to America as a child by his family, who settled in Buffalo, New York. His labors in childhood did little to alleviate the family’s miserable poverty and constant hunger, but formed his own lifelong habit of penny-pinching. His career began by accident in 1865 when he was paid to go on as an extra in Cincinnati and discovered his inclination. Blessed with a good voice and attractive appearance, he worked hard to learn the craft. By 1870 he obtained a leading man engagement with a Cleveland STOCK company. In 1872, he became leading man at McVicker’s Theatre in Chicago. For a month during his two seasons there, he alternated the roles of Othello and Iago with Edwin Booth, and he long regarded that as a highlight of his career. In 1877, he married Mary Ellen “Ella” Quinlan; their two surviving sons were James O’Neill Jr. and the PLAYWRIGHT %UGENE/.EILL. James O’Neill first played the title role in The Count of Monte Cristo in 1883, and its popularity was such that O’Neill became closely identified with it. O’Neill saw himself as a 3HAKESPEAREAN actor, but audiences wanted him only as Edmond Dantes in the melodrama. He eventually felt trapped in the role he played over 6,000 times, and although it served him well financially, it frustrated him artistically. The problem this caused for his family is a subject of his

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son’s play Long Day’s Journey into Night,* in which the character of James Tyrone represents James O’Neill. OPERA HOUSE. Before the late 1880s, the word “theatre” carried unsavory connotations of cheap variety performances. Thus the grand 2,000-seat playhouses constructed in major cities during the early modernist period were labeled “opera houses,” even though the fare included legitimate drama as well as MUSICALS, minstrel companies, and lectures. See also ARCHITECTURE; GALLERY; PARQUETTE. OPERETTA. The term “operetta” derives from French, German, and Italian sources, but in common usage it suggests a small or light opera. In America, operetta gained popularity when Jacques Offenbach’s opéra bouffe works first appeared in the 1860s and, in part, through the popularity of the English operettas of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, beginning with a highly successful New York run of The Pirates of Penzance in 1879. American operetta emerged in the same period, with the triumph of The Black Crook (1866), which is also referred to as the first MUSICAL. Erminie (1886), with music by Edward Jakobowski, scored a great success, playing over 1,250 performances, after which many operettas filled American stages well into the 20th century. A number of TOURING companies gave Americans everywhere an appetite for operetta. Best of all were the Bostonians, led by Henry C. Barnabee. The Bostonians’ greatest success, Robin Hood (1891), was also the finest work by composer Reginald De Koven (1859–1920), in collaboration with his frequent librettist Harry B. Smith (1860–1936), who also created The Fencing Master (1892), The Knickerbockers (1893), The Algerian (1893), Rob Roy (1894), The Tzigane (1895), The Mandarin (1896), The Highwayman (1897), Maid Marian (1902), and The Jersey Lily (1903), among many others. Other popular touring companies were the Whitney Opera Company, McCaull’s Opera Company, and the Salsbury Troubadours. “March King” John Philip Sousa (1854–1932) wrote operettas, including El Capitán (1896). Victor Herbert (1859–1924) became the predominant composer of operettas when his more cohesive scores in support of each work’s libretto elevated the form. For Alice Nielsen, Herbert wrote The Fortune Teller (1899) and The Singing Girl

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(1900). Others by Herbert include Babes in Toyland (1903), Mlle. Modiste (1905), The Red Mill (1906), Naughty Marietta (1910), The Enchantress (1911), The Lady of the Slipper (1912), Sweethearts (1913), The Madcap Duchess (1913), The Princess Pat (1915), and Eileen (1917). Other operettas found popularity before the gradual decline of the genre from the World 7AR I years: The Whirl of the Town (1897; music by Gustave Kerker) and The Prince of Pilsen (1903; music by Gustav Luders, lyrics by Frank Pixley). Rudolf Friml (1879–1972) composed The Firefly (1912), Rose Marie (1924), The Vagabond King (1925), The Three Musketeers (1928), and Luana (1930). Key elements of operetta fueled developments in musical theatre, and thus in the same era, Sigmund Romberg (1887–1951) walked the line between operetta and musical comedy. Among his "ROADWAY musicals, Romberg wrote several vehicles for Al Jolson, including Dancing Around (1914) and Sinbad (1918), but made his lasting mark with the operettas Maytime (1917), Blossom Time (1921), The Rose of Stamboul (1922), The Student Prince (1924), Princess Flavia (1925), The Desert Song (1926), Rosalie (1928), The New Moon (1928), and Up in Central Park (1945). Usually claimed by musical theatre, Show Boat (1927), by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II,* contains elements of operetta. Among the many notable American performers of operetta, standouts include Lillian Russell, De Wolfe Hopper, Marie Dressler, and Fritzi Scheff. Operetta survived during the 1930s mostly through lavish MOTIONPICTURE versions of works by Herbert, Friml, and Romberg, many starring Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald, and a brief revival in the 1950s starring Ann Blyth, Gordon MacRae, and others. See also MUSIC. OTHER GIRL, THE. Opening on 29 December 1903 at the Criterion Theatre, the COMEDY by Augustus Thomas, PRODUCED by Charles Frohman, ran for 160 performances. The New York Times review (30 December 1903) extolled the convulsive laughter provoked by “its vernacular wit, vivid character drawing, and one or two deliciously fresh, dramatic rencontres.” The superb cast included Lionel Barrymore contributing his “trick of genius in character parts,” 2ICHARD"ENNETT “with his frank smile and easy aplomb,” and Elsie De Wolfe, a fount of “sympathetic grace and charm.”

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OUR MRS. MCCHESNEY. Charles Frohman PRODUCED this %DNA &ERBER and George V. Hobart collaboration, based on Ferber’s short stories, which opened on 19 October 1915 at the Lyceum Theatre for 151 performances. With a cast led by %THEL"ARRYMORE, the play focuses on a department store buyer, Emma McChesney, who impresses her boss by designing a boldly innovative line of WOMEN’s clothing. She parlays her success into a job at the store for her feckless son, Jack, and a finishing school education for Jack’s girlfriend, Veva, a chorus girl. Jack is falsely accused of embezzlement and once Emma manages to clear his name, she makes a great success of a fashion show in which Veva models her dress designs. Barrymore also appeared in a popular 1918 MOTION PICTURE version. OUSPENSKAYA, MARIA (1876–1949). Born in Tula, Russia, Maria Ouspenskaya joined the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) and appeared in Russian MOTIONPICTURES before the Revolution. When the MAT visited New York for a season in 1922–1923, Ouspenskaya decided not to return to Russia and, with Richard Boleslavski, cofounded the American Laboratory Theatre (ALT), which aimed to bring the ACTING theories of Constantin Stanislavsky to American actors. While devoted to her ALT classes, Ouspenskaya occasionally acted on "ROADWAY in productions of The Saint (1924), The Witch (1926), The Passing Present (1931), Abide With Me (1935), Daughters of Atreus (1936), and Outrageous Fortune (1943), most of which were short-lived. During the 1930s and 1940s, she appeared in about two dozen Hollywood movies in character roles, most memorably as Maleva, the gypsy fortune-teller, in The Wolf Man (1941), and its sequel, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943). OUT THERE. J. Hartley Manners wrote this three-act play for his wife, ,AURETTE 4AYLOR, but it also featured ,YNN &ONTANNE in an early role. 0RODUCED by George C. Tyler in collaboration with A. L. Erlanger and Marc Klaw, Out There opened at the Globe Theatre on 27 March 1917 for 80 performances. Inspired by the tragedies of World 7AR I, which the United States entered shortly after the play opened, Taylor played a Cockney girl living in London slums and facing the deprivations of the Great War. For the benefit of the Red Cross, a week-long "ROADWAY run with an

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all-STAR cast, led by Taylor, 'EORGE-#OHAN, Minnie Maddern Fiske, Beryl Mercer, George Arliss, Helen Ware, Julia Arthur, James K. Hackett, Chauncey Olcott, H. B. Warner, George MacFarlane, O. P. Heggie, Elenora de Cisneros, Burr McIntosh, and De Wolf Hopper was presented, followed by a three-week TOUR of major American cities. OUTSIDE LOOKING IN. -AXWELL!NDERSON’s satiric drama based upon Jim Tully’s Beggars of Life opened on 7 September 1925 at the Greenwich Village Theatre and ran for 113 performances. A cross-section of down-and-out humanity travels cross-country in a railroad boxcar where the action includes a trial in which the good guy (played by James Cagney) is found guilty. An older hobo, played by Charles Bickford, takes a protective interest in the young man and helps him to get away with the girl he loves, a waif who killed her stepfather for turning her to prostitution. OVER THERE THEATRE LEAGUE. During World 7AR I, theatre people pitched in to entertain American soldiers abroad. With the support of the YMCA, ACTORS and variety artists traveled to perform at the front, in hospitals, and at 39 leave areas established in France for the allotted one week off for every four months of active duty in the Army. According to Joe Laurie Jr.’s Vaudeville, the idea for the league originated with E. H. Sothern and Winthrop Ames. Presiding at an organizational meeting on 23 April 1918 at the Palace Theatre, 'EORGE - #OHAN asked who would be willing to go “over there” during wartime and the entire audience stood up to volunteer. OVERTONES. Alice Gerstenberg’s popular one-act play exploiting the craze for Freudian psychology was PRODUCED by the Washington Square Players, opening on 8 November 1915, on a bill with three other one-acts. The four-WOMAN cast comprises the cultured Harriet and her primitive self Hetty, the cultured Margaret and her primitive self Maggie. Harriet married for money and is jealous of Margaret’s marriage to a painter who has reportedly earned success. She is eager to have her portrait painted by him, but hides that motive when Margaret comes to tea. Margaret puts up a good front to hide the fact that she and her husband are starving and that she is desperate to get Harriet to sit for a portrait.

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n0n PAGEANTS. During the first two decades of the 20th century, the public taste for secular spectacles merging text, dance, music, and theatrical artifice led to a proliferation of pageants across the United States. These community celebrations might commemorate historical events, indulge in mythology, or air social concerns. They were performed by largely AMATEUR casts (usually numbering in the dozens, but occasionally in the thousands) in outdoor settings (often site-specific or otherwise appropriate spaces for the events depicted), which might include little theatres, the courtyards in front of public buildings, stadiums, or ACADEMIC facilities. The creators, whose budgets varied considerably, were often aspiring PLAYWRIGHTS and DIRECTORS, drawing upon the Progressive era’s reformist spirit. Pageantry came to the fore just as the earliest academic theatre programs developed at Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia University, the University of North Carolina, Carnegie Institute of Technology, and the University of North Dakota. Among faculty members with an abiding interest in pageants were George Pierce Baker, Frederick H. Koch, and Thomas Wood Stevens. Stevens, for example, worked closely with Kenneth Sawyer Goodman to coscript and stage several pageants in Chicago. Before moving to Carnegie Tech, Stevens also managed the 'OODMAN4HEATRE and School (named for his deceased collaborator in the 1920s). Another influence on pageants was Percy MacKaye, who lectured and wrote about pageantry as a reflection of democracy in an evolving community, seeing it as a means by which citizens expressed their concerns and celebrated their goals. His ideas on the subject were published in three books, The Playhouse and the Play (1909), The Civic Theatre (1912), and A Substitute for War (1915). MacKaye’s sister Hazel brought together the idea of pageantry and the interests of the WOMAN suffrage movement, as did Mary Porter Beagle who, with Jack Randall Crawford, coauthored Community Drama and Pageantry (1916), which stressed the importance of dance. In 1913, the American Pageant Association was established and it published newsletters and served as a connecting link among those staging pageants. The Association folded in 1921, after which pageants slowly disappeared from the dramatic landscape. See also W. E. B. DUBOIS

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PAID IN FULL. Eugene Walter’s astringent four-act melodrama opened on 25 February 1908 for 167 performances at the Astor Theatre. Despite some leavening farcical humor, this tale of Joseph Brooks, a self-centered and morally corrupt young man, played by Tully Marshall, was a grim portrait of selfishness. Brooks exploits Emma, his loving wife, insisting that she offer herself to the boss from whom he has embezzled funds. Too unpleasant for popular acceptance by a "ROADWAY audience, even though the wife, finally realizing her husband’s vile nature, does leave him, Paid in Full was generally well-received by CRITICS. They especially appreciated Marshall’s performance, which he repeated in a 1914 MOTION PICTURE version, with another screen adaptation appearing in 1919. PALMER, A. M. (1838–1905). Connecticut-born Albert Marshman Palmer studied law at New York University, but chose to pursue political opportunity through a friendship with New York’s Internal Revenue collector Sheridan Shook, who ultimately made Palmer MANAGER of the Union Square Theatre, where he PRODUCED Rose Michel (1870) and The Two Orphans (1874). The theatre failed at vaudeville, so Palmer established a REPERTORY company to rival those of Lester Wallack and Augustin Daly. The company scored successes with several new plays, but a falling out with Shook led Palmer to take over the Madison Square Theatre, where he built a reputation for high quality productions of both American and European plays, the most successful of which were Anselma (1885), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1887), Partners (1888), Beau Brummel (1890), Alabama (1891), Lady Windermere’s Fan (1893), New Blood (1894), Trilby (1895), and His Absent Boy (1896). Palmer served as president of the !CTORS&UNDOF!MERICA from 1885–1897. During his years of declining health, he served as Richard Mansfield’s manager and as manager of Charles Frohman’s Herald Square Theatre. PANORAMA. Although panoramas cannot be called a form of theatre, they had an important impact on SCENE DESIGN for both the legitimate and MUSICAL stage, and they were marketed to the public, along with live theatre and dime museums, under the category of amusements. After paying admission, a patron would climb a spiral staircase to a viewing platform from which one could contemplate an encircling painted vista of a city or a battlefield, with three-

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dimensional elements in the foreground. Panoramas were novelties in Europe around 1800, but enjoyed worldwide popularity by the 1880s. Kansas City, for example, had two panoramas in operation in 1887, each showing a Civil 7AR battle scene. A mid-19th-century variation was the moving panorama; this involved scrolling across the stage a huge canvas depicting the changes of SCENERY over a vast distance. When ACTORS or horse-drawn chariots (as in Ben-Hur) moved in the opposite direction on a treadmill in front of the spooling canvas, the illusion of a journey past changing scenery was effected. PAPA. This wickedly delicious little “amorality play” by :ÚE!KINS was published in 1913, PRODUCED in Los Angeles in 1916, and professionally staged in New York in 1919. Opening on 10 April 1919 at the Little Theatre, it ran a week and a half. John L. Shine played the charmingly effete title character, and Jobyna Howland brought her COMEDY skills to the role of one of his two daughters. PARIS BOUND. 0HILIP "ARRY’s three-act COMEDY premiered at the Music Box Theatre on 27 December 1927 for 234 performances under the DIRECTION of !RTHUR(OPKINS and with SCENEDESIGNS by 2OBERT%DMOND*ONES. After six years of what she believes has been a model happy marriage, Mary Hutton learns that her husband, Jim, has not always been faithful. Angry and intent on divorce, Mary recalls the advice of her father-in-law not to let meaningless infidelities damage their marriage as his had been. Facing the truth of her own flirtation with a young composer, which Jim has chosen to ignore, Mary heeds her father-in-law’s advice. Praised by CRITICS for its social commentary and wit, this early success for Barry was a prototype of his sophisticated comedy of manners style. A MOTION PICTURE version of Paris Bound was released in 1929. PARKER, DOROTHY (1893–1967).† Dorothy Rothschild was born in West End, New Jersey, and as Dorothy Parker became a celebrated writer. As a CRITIC, Parker wrote during the 1910s for Vogue and Vanity Fair before joining the staff of the New Yorker as book reviewer “Constant Reader” and, later, as a drama critic. Parker’s sarcastic, witty condemnations of plays and ACTORS are legendary, as when she described The House Beautiful (1931) as “the play lousy,” or when she wrote that Katharine Hepburn,* STARRING in

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The Lake (1934), ran the gamut of emotions “from A to B.” Parker wrote sketches for the MUSICAL revue The 49ers (1922), contributed the lyrics for No, Sirree! (1922) and Shoot the Works (1931), and collaborated on two successful plays, Close Harmony; or, The Lady Next Door (1924; with %LMER 2ICE) and Ladies of the Corridor* (1953; with Arnaud D’Usseau). With D’Usseau she also wrote the unproduced play The Ice Age (1955). She collaborated with Ross Evans on the The Coast of Illyria (1949). One of Parker’s books, After Such Pleasures, was adapted to the stage by Edward F. Gardner in 1934. With her second husband, writer Alan Campbell, Parker wrote MOTIONPICTURE scripts (including A Star Is Born [1937]) and the play The Happiest Man (1939), which was never PRODUCED. Parker also contributed lyrics to the musical Candide (1956), wrote 20 screenplays and several collections of poetry, and is also remembered as founder and resident “wit” of the famed Algonquin Round Table, along with 'EORGE3+AUFMAN, Robert Benchley, Harold Ross, and James Thurber.* PARKER, H. T. (1867–1934). Born Henry Taylor Parker in Boston, he dropped out of Harvard University because it then lacked courses in dramatic literature and instead worked as a journalist. He became New York correspondent for the Boston Transcript from 1892–1898, and again from 1901–1903. Parker reviewed drama for the New York Commercial Advertiser (1898–1900) and the New York Globe (1903–1905). In 1905, Parker began a long tenure as resident drama CRITIC for the Boston Transcript, signing his reviews H. T. P. Widely considered a perceptive and fair-minded critic, Parker gained a reputation as one of the most distinguished critics of his era. PARKER, LOTTIE BLAIR (1868–1937). A native of Oswego, New York, Lottie Blair Parker began her career ACTING opposite John McCullough, Mary Anderson, and Dion Boucicault before becoming a PLAYWRIGHT of a dozen popular potboilers. Her plays include White Roses (1892), Under Southern Skies (1901), Lights of Home (1903), and The Redemption of David Corson (1906). Parker’s greatest success, Way Down East (1898), was a "ROADWAY and TOURING hit revised by Joseph Grismer and produced by William A. Brady and Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. This popular melodrama was a major silent MOTIONPICTURE triumph DIRECTED by D. W. Griffith in 1920.

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PARLOR, BEDROOM AND BATH. C. W. Bell and Mark Swan’s risqué three-act farce opened at the Republic Theatre on 24 December 1917 for 232 performances, PRODUCED by A. H. Woods. Angelica Irving is titillated to think that her mild-mannered husband, Reggie, has been a ladies’ man prior to their marriage. Reggie, fearing she will be disappointed, writes love letters to himself from fictional “other women.” Chaos ensues and Angelica is satisfied that her image of Reggie is what she hoped. A silent MOTIONPICTURE version appeared in 1920, remade in 1931 as a “talkie” STARRING Buster Keaton. PARLOR MATCH, A. Charles H. Hoyt’s three-act farce, which opened on 22 September 1884 for 16 performances at Tony Pastor’s Theatre, was little more than an excuse for interpolated songs and dances within the lighthearted plot of two small-time hustlers who convince Captain William Kidd that he is a medium. Working with Kidd’s daughter, ironically named Innocent, they hold séances while searching Kidd’s house for items to steal. In the play’s most memorable scene, one of the thieves is forced to hide in a drawer. The play became a popular TOURING attraction and ACTOR William F. Hoey interpolated the music hall song “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo.” A Parlor Match was revived in 1896 as a vehicle for Anna Held’s American stage debut. PARQUETTE. The parquette section of seating on the main floor of the opera house was behind the orchestra chairs. With the balcony over them and standing room behind them, these seats were often slightly less expensive than the orchestra and yet they were prized for the prestige of their proximity to the best seats. PASSING REGIMENT, THE. Augustin Daly’s five-act COMEDY with music, adapted from the German comedy Krieg im Frieden, opened at his theatre on 10 November 1881 for 103 performances. This genial, innocuous play depicts the Excelsior Regiment of the National Guard stationed at New York’s Narragansett Pier where romantic entanglements ensue, including between characters ACTED by John Drew and Ada Rehan. PASTOR, TONY (1835–1908). Antonio Pastor was born in New York and began performing as a CHILD on the temperance circuit and as a

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child prodigy at P. T. Barnum’s Museum in 1846. He also worked in minstrel shows and as a CIRCUS entertainer. Pastor opened his first theatre in New York in 1865 with the goal of making the variety stage family friendly. In 1881, Pastor built a large theatre on Fourteenth Street as a home to what he billed as vaudeville, a field in which he became known as a premiere PRODUCER. Pastor served as a participating master of ceremonies and was a significant force in nurturing performers, including 'EORGE - #OHAN, Emma Carus, Maggie Cline, Nat C. Goodwin, Lillian Russell, and Joe Weber and Lew Fields, among many others. PATSY, THE. Opening on 23 December 1925 at Booth’s Theatre, the three-act domestic COMEDY by Barry Conners ran for 242 performances and was nominated for the 0ULTIZER0RIZE. The title refers to the henpecked husband whose wife and elder daughter make his life miserable. They are also cruel to the Cinderella-like younger daughter, Patricia, but she remains generous and decent, ultimately to win from her sister the man she truly loves. Her father finally learns to stand up to his wife, after which he comes into a happy-ending bundle of money. PATTERSON, ADA (?–1939). The journalist and CRITIC flourished in the 1900s and 1910s, writing for The Green Book and other publications, often on the subject of WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS. For 10 years before her 1924 retirement, she was critic for the New York American and wrote plays, including Love’s Lightning (1918, with Robert Edeson). PAUL KAUVAR; OR, ANARCHY. 3TEELE-AC+AYE’s five-act melodrama of the French Revolution opened on 24 December 1887 at the Standard Theatre for approximately 100 performances. Paul Kauvar behaved heroically during the French Revolution, but by 1794 he is horrified by the rampant violence and intrigue under Robespierre. Paul helps the Duc de Beaumont and his daughter Diane to hide from the terror, but he is recaptured and nobly takes the guise of a royalist general in order to save him. Before Paul can be executed, he is reunited with Diane and learns that Robespierre is dead and that the Reign of Terror has ended. PAYNE, B. IDEN (1881–1976). The distinguished theatre MANAGER and DIRECTOR emigrated from England to the United States in 1913 to

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manage little theatres in Philadelphia and Chicago, with occasional "ROADWAY productions, including the first stagings of Langdon Mitchell’s Major Pendennis and John Galsworthy’s Justice, STAR RING John Barrymore, both in 1916. His final Broadway ventures, Embezzled Heaven (1944), a rare failure for %THEL"ARRYMORE, and The Winter’s Tale (1946), were not well-received, but Payne spent most of his career (1919–1934) as professor of drama at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, followed by other ACADEMIC jobs. PAYTON, CORSE (1867–1934). Despite his semi-serious billing as “The World’s Best Bad !CTOR,” Centreville, Iowa, native Corse Payton MANAGED his own successful theatre in Brooklyn, New York, for two decades after long stints TOURING the western half of the United States with his family. The secret to his success was a STOCK company of bright young talents, including &AY"AINTER, 2ICHARD "ENNETT, Dorothy and Lillian Gish, and Ernest Truex, and keeping ticket prices between a dime and 30 cents. PEABODY, JOSEPHINE PRESTON (1874–1922). Born in New York, the lifelong poet attended Radcliffe and, after studying with William Vaughn Moody, turned to PLAYWRITING. Her major success, The Piper (1911), was, like all of her dramatic works, written in blank verse with romantic settings. Other Peabody plays, often PRODUCED by little theatres, include The Wayfarers (1898), Marlowe (1901), The Wolf of Gubbio (1913), and Portrait of Mrs. W. (1922). PECK’S BAD BOY. Based on George Peck’s “Bad Boy” sketches, first published in the Milwaukee Sun and later collected and published as Peck’s Bad Boy and His Pa (1883), Charles Pidgin’s stage adaptation of the stories opened on 10 March 1884 at Haverly’s New York Comedy Theatre for 40 performances, although it became a durable TOURING vehicle which later launched 'EORGE - #OHAN (in an 1891 production), among others, to STARDOM. Peck’s Bad Boy lacks a distinct plot, but focuses on Henry Peck, a boldly mischievous Milwaukee youngster who, along with his cohort Jimmy, wreaks community havoc. Never repentant when caught, the character of the “bad boy” became a prototype for similar figures on stage, in MOTION PICTURES (first in a 1921 silent version with Jackie Coogan), and television,* including his logical descendant, “Dennis the Menace.”

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PEG O’MY HEART. J. Hartley Manners, author of this sentimental, charming COMEDY, created a perennial vehicle for his wife, ,AURETTE4AYLOR, who became one of the most beloved stage STARS of the time in the title role. The bankrupt Chichesters are offered a financial reprieve if they will look after their orphaned cousin, teenager Peg, who arrives at the Chichester estate in time to catch her cousin Ethel in a secret tryst with Brant, a scheming philanderer. The snobby Chichesters look down on waif-like Peg, whose unfashionable clothes and beloved mutt appall them. Peg befriends a neighbor, Jerry, and manages to rescue Ethel from eloping with the nefarious Brant. When Jerry reveals himself as Peg’s wealthy guardian, she wins approval of the Chichesters, her own riches, and Jerry’s heart. Opening at the Cort Theatre on 20 December 1912, Manners’s play and Taylor’s touching performance won acclaim from CRITICS and audiences, leading to an impressive 603 performances. Multiple TOURS, frequently with Taylor in the lead, popularized the play. A 1921 revival, starring Taylor, was as successful as the original production. -OTIONPICTURE versions appeared in 1919, 1922 (starring Taylor), and 1933. Manners wrote the book for a 1924 MUSICAL version titled Peg O’My Dreams, but its quick demise did nothing to undermine the enduring popularity of Peg O’My Heart. PEMBERTON, BROCK (1885–1950).† Born in Leavenworth, Kansas, Brock Pemberton attended the University of Kansas, after which he pursued a journalistic career, serving as drama editor for the New York Mail and the New York World. In 1917, he took a position as assistant to PRODUCER !RTHUR(OPKINS before branching out on his own to produce Enter Madame and The Tavern, both in 1920. He continued producing a diverse array of American and European plays with considerable success until shortly before his death, including Miss Lulu Bett (1920), Six Characters in Search of an Author (1922 and 1924), The Mask and the Face (1924), Mr. Pitt (1924), Loose Ankles (1926), The Ladder (1926), Strictly Dishonorable (1929), Personal Appearance* (1934), Ceiling Zero* (1935), Kiss the Boys Goodbye* (1938), Lady in Waiting (1940), Janie* (1942), and Harvey* (1944). PEPLE, EDWARD (1867–1924). Born Edward Henry Peple in Richmond, Virginia, he was a railroad man before becoming a PLAY WRIGHT. He scored major hits with two plays, The Prince Chap

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(1905) and A Pair of Sixes (1914), both of which had "ROADWAY runs and further success on TOUR. Peple’s The Littlest Rebel (1911) was later adapted into the popular 1935 Shirley Temple MOTION PICTURE of the same name. His libretto and lyrics for the 1912 MUSI CAL The Charity Girl caused a scandal when it was closed by New York police because of objectionable lyrics in the song “I’d Rather Be a Chippie than a Charity Bum.” His other plays include The Love Route (1906), The Silver Girl (1907), The Call of the Cricket (1910), The Spitfire (1910), and Friend Martha (1917). 0%2+).3 /3'//$ (1892–1937). A native of West Newton, Massachusetts, Osgood Perkins graduated from Harvard University in 1914, where he studied with George Pierce Baker at Harvard University, where he graduated in 1914. He served in World 7AR I and acted in silent MOTIONPICTURES, forming the Film Guild. Perkins made his "ROADWAY debut in a supporting role in 'EORGE3+AUFMAN and -ARC#ONNELLY’s Beggar on Horseback (1924), followed by Lynn Starling’s Weak Sister (1925). His greatest stage success came as the cynical newspaper editor Walter Burns in The Front Page (1928), which amply demonstrated Perkins’s versatility in moving easily from COMEDY to drama. He subsequently appeared in a variety of innocuous plays, including The Masque of Venice (1926), Pomeroy’s Past (1926), Loose Ankles (1926), Say It with Flowers (1926), Spread Eagle (1927), Women Go On Forever (1927), and Salvation (1928). After 1930, Perkins was well-received as Astrov in a revival of Uncle Vanya (1930), and also appeared in Point Valaine* (1935), Ceiling Zero* (1935), and End of Summer* (1936), among others. Perkins also ACTED in several films, including Scarface (1931), and was the father of actor Anthony Perkins.* PERRY, ANTOINETTE (1888–1946).† Born in Denver, Colorado, Antoinette Perry made her ACTING debut at age 17 in 1905, appearing in Lady Jim (1906) and A Grand Army Man (1907) before marrying wealthy businessman Frank Freauff in 1909. She retired until his death in 1924, after which she returned to the stage under PRODUCER "ROCK0EMBERTON’s guidance, acting in Mr. Pitt (1924), Minick (1924), The Ladder (1926), and Electra (1927). She became Pemberton’s assistant and DIRECTED plays under his aegis, including Strictly Dishonorable (1929), Personal Appearance* (1934), and the

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0ULITZER0RIZE–winning Harvey* in 1944. Beginning in the 1930s, Perry actively involved herself in several theatrical service organizations. In collaboration with *ANE #OWL and 2ACHEL #ROTHERS, Perry established the American Theatre Wing* and the Stage Door Canteen* during World 7AR II. Her service work led to the annual Antoinette Perry Awards,* nicknamed the “Tony Awards,*” being named for her in 1947, the year after her death. PETER PAN. British PLAYWRIGHT J. M. Barrie’s fantasy about a boy who refuses to grow up has endured as one of the most beloved works on the American stage. Having premiered in London in January 1905, it opened in New York on 6 November 1905 STARRING Maude Adams, for whom Barrie had written the play. It ran for 223 performances, and Adams scored a major triumph in the breeches role of Peter, returning to New York in revivals in 1906, 1912, and 1915, and playing it on TOUR. Numerous revivals, tours, MUSICAL, and MOTION PICTURE adaptations proliferated through the 20th century starring diverse Peters, including Marilyn Miller, %VA ,E 'ALLIENNE, Jean Arthur,* Mary Martin,* Sandy Duncan, and Cathy Rigby, among others. PETERS, ROLLO (1892–1967). Charles Rollo Peters III was born in Paris, but spent his early life in California as the son of painter Charles Rollo Peters. His theatrical career offered a rare combination—ACTOR and SCENE DESIGNER—with successes in each area. Peters acted and designed for the Washington Square Players and provided settings for Minnie Maddern Fiske’s production of Madame Sand (1917) before becoming a founding member of the 4HEATRE 'UILD, acting in and designing their first production, Jacinto Benavente’s The Bonds of Interest (1919). He also acted in the Guild’s production of St. John Ervine’s John Ferguson (1919) and played Romeo opposite *ANE#OWL in a production he designed in 1923, partnering Cowl again in Antony and Cleopatra (1924). Peters also played significant roles in Trelawny of the “Wells” (1928), Diplomacy (1928), The Age of Innocence (1928), and The Rivals (1930), and he acted in and designed revivals of The Streets of New York* (1931) and The Pillars of Society (1931). PETIT THÉÂTRE DE VIEUX CARRÉ, LE. Established in 1916, New Orleans’ oldest theatre company was set up in the little theatre

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style. The theatre found a home almost immediately in an 18thcentury Spanish colonial building in the French Quarter, later renovated to include a 450-seat space and a modest CHILDREN’s theatre* facility. The theatre’s operation has continued to the present day and aside from a regular season of plays, it presents the annual Tennessee Williams*/New Orleans Literary Festival. PHYSIOC, JOSEPH A. (1865–1951). Joseph Allen Physioc was born in Richmond, Virginia, but spent much of his youth in Columbia, South Carolina, before working as a SCENEDESIGNER in Alabama. On the scene painting staff of the Metropolitan Opera for a time (after a brief stint as an ACTOR), Physioc collaborated with Henry E. Hoyt on designs for Raymond De Koven’s operetta Rob Roy. From the mid1890s, he designed scenery for a series of important American plays including Richard Mansfield’s production of Richard III (1896), Beau Brummel (1900), The Climbers (1901), Resurrection (1903), Strongheart (1905), The Lion and the Mouse (1905), The Traveling Salesman (1908), Within the Law (1912), Peg O’My Heart (1912), Lightnin’ (1918), Seventh Heaven (1922), and Dracula (1927). His work as a disciple of the painted REALISM of the late 19th century seemed old-fashioned by the 1920s when the New Stagecraft came to the fore. PICON, MOLLY (1898–1992). Born in New York, Molly Picon grew up in Philadelphia where she and her mother sewed COSTUMES for Yiddish theatre actors. She made her debut in an English-language vaudeville act in 1904, although she spent much of her career on the Yiddish stage. Admired in the STOCK role of Shmendrick, Picon also demonstrated versatility in old and new Yiddish plays and MUSICALS during her long career. She became one of the most beloved STARS on Second Avenue, mixing an infectious gamin charm with a tomboyish feistiness. Often working with her husband, Jacob Kalich, Picon wrote and PRODUCED many of her vehicles, made occasional appearances on "ROADWAY, in vaudeville (playing the fabled Palace Theatre in the 1920s), MOTION PICTURES, radio, and television,* and won rave reviews in the Jerry Herman Broadway musical Milk and Honey (1961). PIGS. Opening 1 September 1924 at the Little Theatre, this COMEDY by Anne Morrison and Patterson McNutt ran an astonishing 347

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performances. It found a continuing life with little theatre groups, presumably on the basis of its Midwestern setting and easy-to-cast roles for six men and four women. Junior’s scheme to buy 250 sick pigs, cure them, and sell them at a profit leads to silly family complications before the plan succeeds. PINSKI, DAVID (1872–1959). Born in Poland, David Pinski began his PLAYWRITING life in Warsaw before immigrating to the United States in 1899, where he wrote most of his 38 plays for Yiddish theatre companies. He demonstrated impressive versatility in style for works including the REALISTIC tragedy Isaac Sheftl (1896) and two symbolic treatments of Jewish history, The Tsvi Family (1904) and The Eternal Jew (1906). His Yankl the Smith (1906), a drama about love and jealousy, was made into a 1938 MOTIONPICTURE, The Singing Blacksmith. Pinski’s greatest success, The Treasure (1910), was first DIRECTED by -AX 2EINHARDT in German, then in Yiddish, after which it was PRODUCED in English in 1920 by the 4HEATRE'UILD with a cast including Celia Adler, $UDLEY$IGGES, and Henry Travers. A COMEDY about the role poverty plays in human greed, The Treasure is Pinski’s most enduring work. The Provincetown Players staged Pinski’s The Final Balance in 1928 at their New York theatre, but it ran for only 28 performances. PIPER, THE. Josephine Preston Peabody’s verse dramatization of the tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin opened at the 3HAKESPEARE Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, on 26 July 1910, having won the Stratford prize for the best play (among 315 submissions) with action set before 1800. Peabody, wife of an English-born Harvard University professor, had taken up the subject at the suggestion of AC TOR Otis Skinner, who sought a legitimate play on the subject even as De Wolf Hopper was TOURING in a MUSICAL Pied Piper. Skinner was unavailable when she completed it, so she submitted The Piper to the English competition. The New York premiere, on 30 January 1911 at the New Theatre, was PRODUCED by Winthrop Ames with Edith Wynne Matthison. It was quickly published and widely translated, although the large number of CHILDREN in the cast, including five child speaking roles, precluded frequent productions. PITOU, AUGUSTUS (1843–1915). Born in New York, Augustus Pitou began his ACTING career in a small role in Edwin Booth’s Hamlet

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in 1867 and continued in Booth’s company for a few seasons. He was a member of the inaugural company at Kansas City’s Coates Opera House during the 1870–1871 season. Then he settled in New York to MANAGE, at various times, Booth’s Theatre, the Fifth Avenue Theatre, the Fourteenth Street Theatre, and the Grand Opera House. He also managed several STARS, including Robert B. Mantell, Rose Coghlan, William Scanlan, and Chauncey Olcott, and served as Olcott’s agent as well as PRODUCING and writing librettos for romantic MUSICAL dramas for the Irish tenor, including Sweet Inniscarra (1897), A Romance of Athlone (1899), Garrett O’Magh (1901), Old Limerick Town (1902), Terence (1904), Edmund Burke (1905), Eileen Asthore (1906), O’Neill of Derry (1907), Ragged Robin (1910), Barry of Ballymore (1911), and Macushla (1912). His 1914 memoir is titled Masters of the Show. PIXLEY, ANNIE (1858–1898). Brooklyn-born Annie Shea spent her youth in San Francisco in supporting roles to TOURING STARS Joseph Jefferson III in Rip Van Winkle and McKee Rankin in The Danites in the 1870s, taking her stepfather’s surname as her stage name. Pixley made her Eastern debut in Philadelphia in H.M.S. Pinafore, but gained fame (and favorable comparisons with Lotta Crabtree) as an Irish soubrette in operettas and light COMEDIES (with MUSICAL sequences) such as M’liss, the Child of Sorrow (1878), Zara (1873), Eily (1885), The Deacon’s Daughter (1887), and Kate (1890). PLATT, LIVINGSTON (1885–1968). A native of Plattsburg, New York, Livingston Platt was a force in the triumph of European-inspired New Stagecraft through his work at Boston’s Toy Theatre following a period of art studies in Europe. For Margaret Anglin, Platt created SCENEDESIGNS and COSTUMES for The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, and As You Like It, all in 1914. In these and most of his subsequent productions (for which he usually designed LIGHTING as well), Platt created stylized settings resisting the REALISM typical prior to World 7AR I. He demonstrated versatility in a wide range of plays, including East Is West (1918), Shakuntala (1919), Rain (1922), Daisy Mayme (1926), The Racket (1927), Behold the Bridegroom (1927), The First Mrs. Fraser (1929), Grand Hotel* (1930), Dinner at Eight* (1933), and The Pursuit of Happiness* (1933), after which an arrest on a morals charge ended his career.

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PLAY DOCTOR. The term refers to an individual (usually a PLAY WRIGHT) who works over another writer’s script to make it viable for production or who steps in to observe rehearsals of another writer’s play to offer CRITICISMS, usually at the behest of the PRODUCER or DIRECTOR. Seldom does the play doctor claim public credit for the changes. Many established playwrights served as play doctors, including 'EORGE - #OHAN, 'EORGE!BBOTT, Harriet Ford, and Channing Pollock. It is widely believed that (OWARD,INDSAY and Russel Crouse* significantly rewrote Joseph Kesselring’s* Arsenic and Old Lace* (1941), transforming it into a long-running hit. Neil Simon,* one of the most successful comic writers of the 1960s– 1980s, was nicknamed “Doc” Simon by friends and coworkers for his skill as a play doctor. See also HOPWOOD, AVERY. PLAYBILL.† Printer Frank Vance Strauss established a company to PRO DUCE programs for New York theatrical productions in 1884. These programs were of the four-page variety typical of the period, but in 1911 Strauss created a longer format filled with articles and ADVER TISING, varying only in a unique cover for each play and the pertinent production information and credits. First called the Strauss Magazine Theatre Program, the name was simplified to Playbill in 1934. With modest changes, this format continues to be employed by "ROADWAY and off-Broadway* theatres, and serves as a model for many regional REPERTORY theatres and AMATEUR and ACADEMIC groups. PLAYERS, THE. The prestigious club for theatre people elected to membership has been headquartered since 1888 in a remodeled mansion at 16 Gramercy Park in New York City, which was also Edwin Booth’s last home. Incorporated earlier that year by Booth and 15 other stage professionals, The Players was intended to provide its members with a venue for civilized discourse while demonstrating to the world the refined qualities of ACTORS and other artists. Booth and Lawrence Barrett contributed their personal libraries to form the collection housed there, augmented by a wealth of theatrical portraits and memorabilia. Booth’s third-floor bed-sitting room remains as it was the night he died there, with his slippers beside the bed. PLAYERS’ EQUAL SUFFRAGE LEAGUE. Established in 1913 by ACTRESS Mary Shaw as a theatrical WOMEN’s organization with the

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main goal of promoting woman suffrage, the League membership included several STARS, among them Margaret Anglin, "ILLIE"URKE, and *ANE#OWL. Lotta Crabtree was vice president. Members gave curtain speeches in favor of a woman’s right to vote and dispensed literature and organized consciousness-raising activities. The League continued until women were enfranchised. PLAYWRIGHTS.† One of the standard clichés of American theatre history is that no significant playwrights emerged prior to World 7AR I, and that the appearance of %UGENE/.EILL and his generation transformed "ROADWAY drama after 1920 from a marketplace of frivolous entertainments to a center for drama of serious purpose. Though it may well be true that few dramatists of lasting international significance appeared in the 19th century, several generations of diverse and challenging playwrights filled American stages with intriguing dramas and COMEDIES from the end of the American Revolution to World War I, when O’Neill and his contemporaries established themselves. In the first half of the 19th century, the outstanding literary figures of the age—Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe—generally avoided playwriting (although many tried their hand at it) perhaps because theatre was considered an inferior form in intellectual circles. The problem was compounded by the fact that much serious drama was imported from Europe or, more significantly, was adapted from other sources by lesser writers or ACTOR-MANAGERS. At mid-19th century, little had changed, although a few dramatists, particularly Dion Boucicault, demonstrated facility in a range of genres. The most celebrated play of the era, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was adapted from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel by George L. Aiken, a little-known actor-manager. Aiken’s hack job aimed at exploiting the novel’s huge popularity. Many dramatists adapted popular fiction or were compelled to custom-tailor vehicles to showcase actors. Few could make a comfortable living as a playwright, which may account for the fact that many dramatists of the era also worked as actors or managers. As the first tremors of modernism were felt in the 1870s, American dramatists tentatively broke away from the grip of melodrama to explore new European trends in drama, particularly the much-vaunted

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REALISM and, in general, the greater seriousness of purpose inherent in it. Bronson Howard, for example, scored a major success with The Henrietta (1887), an assault on corrupt Wall Street speculation, while other writers looked to the tragedies of the Civil 7AR and its aftermath for subject matter. The emergence of the “new woman” brought realistic social problem plays by (ENRIK)BSEN and 'EORGE "ERNARD 3HAW to American stages, often inspiring considerable controversy. Actor-playwright James A. Herne modeled his 1890 drama Margaret Fleming on works along those lines by Ibsen. Controversy kept Herne’s play from public stages, but European developments would continue to inspire playwrights like William Vaughan Moody, Clyde Fitch, Edward Sheldon, and others in form and content after 1900. The early deaths of Moody and Fitch may well have slowed the emergence of a more serious American drama, but by the 1910s a new generation of dramatists appeared, many profoundly influenced by what became known as the New Stagecraft, which flourished alongside the little theatre movement. Typically, little theatres, which proliferated in most major American theatres between 1910 and the mid-1920s, allowed playwrights, actors, DIRECTORS, and SCENEDESIGNERS to experiment in style and techniques, as well as to explore previously taboo subjects, often in one-act form and all without major commercial constraints. Many of the finest U.S. dramatists of the post–World War I era found their first opportunities through little theatres, with O’Neill the most exalted example. In the wake of World War I, Broadway audiences and CRITICS began to reject melodramatic and sentimental plays, instead lionizing the “serious” dramatist as exemplified by O’Neill, %LMER2ICE, -AXWELL !NDERSON, 2OBERT % 3HERWOOD, and others, all of whom had their first important Broadway successes in the 1920s. These writers, and others following in their wake, experimented not only with the realistic form and socially conscious themes, but also explored expressionism, symbolism, and other innovations emerging on European stages. Women playwrights asserted themselves in this era, with 3USAN'LASPELL, :ÚE!KINS, and Sophie Treadwell leading the way. !FRICAN!MERICAN playwrights found some space in all-black little theatres like the ,AFAYETTE 0LAYERS and made inroads into the mainstream, with the work of writers ,ANGSTON (UGHES and :ORA.EALE(URSTON establishing a beachhead.

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While serious dramatists like O’Neill dominated the attention of CRITICS, a generation of sophisticated comic dramatists also appeared, led by 'EORGE 3 +AUFMAN, 0HILIP "ARRY, 3 . "EHRMAN, and others. Playwriting steadily evolved into a respected profession and even moderately successful dramatists could expect to make a living through Broadway productions, publication of their plays, and TOUR ING, STOCK, and AMATEUR royalties. Many specialized in particular genres, while others demonstrated versatility writing dramas, comedies, and MUSICALS. Some turned to directing and producing as well. In the 1920s, playwrights created organizations like the $RAMATISTS’ 'UILD to protect their interests. These writers created a golden age of American drama on Broadway that stretched to the early 1960s. PLEASURE MAN, THE. After a brief run at the Bronx Opera House (17–22 September) and a week (commencing 24 September) at the Boulevard Theatre in Queens, Mae West’s provocative COMEDY drama opened at the Biltmore Theatre on "ROADWAY on 1 October 1928 and ran only two performances despite a heavy advance sale. Each performance was raided by police who took the cast to the police station; bail was provided for over 50 people in each instance. The play was deemed indecent and immoral because of its emphasis on SEXUALITY with some homosexual implications. The action is set among vaudeville performers playing a Midwestern engagement. The title character, a sexual predator, incurs the wrath of two men, whose wife and sister have been compromised by him, and he dies after being mutilated by one of them. The 14-day trial began on 13 March 1930 and resulted in the dismissal of all indictments. Although West reportedly lost $60,000, she deemed it good value in publicity. See also CENSORSHIP. PLUMES. Among the most frequently anthologized !FRICAN!MERI CAN one-act plays of the 1910s and 1920s, Plumes was written by Georgia Douglas Johnson and won first prize in the 1927 playwriting contest sponsored by the magazine Opportunity, which published it that year. Produced the following season by Harlem Experimental Theatre, the play focuses on a laundress whose 14-year-old daughter lies ill in the next room. The doctor says that an operation might save her, but the woman hesitates because if her daughter dies after she pays for the operation, there would be no money left for a proper

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funeral with plumes on the horses. While she ponders what to do, the daughter dies. PLYMPTON, EBEN (1853–1915). Born in Boston, Eben Plympton worked as a bookkeeper before migrating to California. He began ACTING in Stockton, California, in 1871, after which his robust masculinity and confidence won him a place in Lester Wallack’s company. A few years’ apprenticeship led to leading roles in Rose Michel (1875) and Our Boarding House (1878), and he won plaudits as Romeo in 1877. Plympton scored triumphs in Hazel Kirke (1880) and Esmeralda (1881), after which he STARRED opposite Mary Anderson and played Laertes to Edwin Booth’s Hamlet. Between 1894 and 1914, he appeared in a diverse range of plays, including Cotton King (1894), Gossip (1895), In the Palace of the King (1901), The Hunchback (1902), Romeo and Juliet (1903), The Man from Blankley’s (1903), London Assurance (1905), The Duel (1906), Divorce (1909), The Garden of Allah (1911), and Twelfth Night (1914). POINTS. When melodrama ruled the stage, “points” were the ACTOR’s stock in trade. Playing for points was a way of underscoring certain lines, poses, or dramatic moments to get a reaction from the audience. Actors who knew how to perform that kind of flourish still trod the boards in the modernist era, but CRITIC John Mason Brown noted (Moses and Brown 1934, 303) that “‘points’ are more or less looked down on by the moderns.” POLLOCK, CHANNING (1880–1946). Born in Washington, he became drama CRITIC for the Washington Post in 1898. Later he was press representative for William A. Brady (1900–1904) and for the 3HUBERTS (1904–1906). During his long stint as drama critic for The Green Book (1905–1919), Pollock began writing plays. He was best known for his high-minded dramas of the 1920s: The Fool (1924), The Enemy (1925), and the expressionist drama Mr. Moneypenny (1928). His memoir Harvest of My Years (1943) conveys his readiness to speak out for a cause and captures his colorful career and associations. POLLY OF THE CIRCUS. A three-act romance by Margaret Mayo (with unbilled collaboration from Winchell Smith), Polly of the Circus opened on 23 December 1907 at the Liberty Theatre for 160

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performances. When CIRCUS entertainer Polly, played by Mabel Taliaferro, is injured in a fall during a small-town appearance, she is taken to recover in the home of the local minister, John Douglass. They grow close, but Polly is conscious of her low status as a circus performer and departs with the circus. John follows and convinces her to marry him. The circus scenes were impressive and the romantic plot left its audience satisfied. The play was made into a MOTION PICTURE twice, in 1917 with Mae Marsh, and in 1932 STARRING Marion Davies and Clark Gable. POLLY WITH A PAST. George Middleton and Guy Bolton’s threeact COMEDY opened on "ROADWAY on 6 September 1917 at Belasco Theatre for 315 performances, PRODUCED by David Belasco. Ina Claire played Polly, a minister’s daughter from Ohio, who is studying for a singing career in New York. To meet expenses, Polly works as a maid for friends of Rex Van Zile, who is trying to break off with a girlfriend. Polly is persuaded to pretend to be a French temptress on the prowl for Rex, who, by curtain fall, is in love with Polly. Claire repeated her role in a 1920 MOTIONPICTURE version. POLYGLOT PRODUCTIONS. In the era of international TOURING STARS, audiences wanted to see celebrity performers like Sarah Bernhardt despite their inability to perform in English. This posed little problem since audiences knew their 3HAKESPEARE and other works of the standard REPERTORY. If the star did not travel with a company performing in the same language, American ACTORS might be hired to support the star. Thus the lines would be given and cues picked up in two different languages, or sometimes even three. For example, the Polish-born actor Bogomil Dawison (1818–1872) performed in German opposite Edwin Booth in 1866. Booth also played Iago to the Italian-speaking Othello of Tommaso Salvini in 1886. See also FOREIGNSTARSANDCOMPANIESONTHE!MERICANSTAGE. POPE, CHARLES (1832–1899). Charles Pope was born in Germany, not far from Weimar, but was brought to the United States before his first birthday. From his youth he was attracted to the stage and found employment as an ACTOR with various theatres in New York City. From 1854, he played leading roles with Benedict De Bar’s company in New Orleans and St. Louis. He MANAGED the inaugural season of

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Kansas City’s first opera house (1870–1871), then TOURED for a time as a leading man. His career peaked at his own theatre, Pope’s Theatre, in St. Louis. POPULAR-PRICE THEATRE. As an alternative to high-priced attractions at first-class theatres for elite audiences, theatres that booked attractions geared to popular audiences scaled their ticket prices lower. This term was later adopted by the Federal Theatre Project* for one of its wings, the Popular Price Theatre, which offered cheap tickets for plays by new PLAYWRIGHTS. PORGY. Opening on 10 October 1927 at the 4HEATRE'UILD, the folk drama of !FRICAN!MERICAN life by Dubose and Dorothy Heyward, based upon Dubose Heyward’s 1925 novel Porgy, ran for 367 performances. Frank Wilson played the crippled Porgy, who goes about on a wagon pulled by a goat. Porgy loves the wayward Bess and wins her from Crown, but she is in thrall to the “happy dust” purveyed by Sporting Life. Cleon Throckmorton’s settings evoked the Charleston, South Carolina, slum known as Catfish Row. 2OUBEN -AMOULIAN DIRECTED, and Rose McClendon played Serena. It was made into the 1935 opera Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin. POTASH AND PERLMUTTER. Montague Glass, with assistance from an uncredited Charles Klein, based this three-act COMEDY, PRODUCED by A. H. Woods, on a series of short stories he wrote for the Saturday Evening Post. The play opened on 15 August 1913 for a whopping 441 performances. Mawruss Perlmutter and Abe Potash, two garment merchants, played in the original production by Alexander Carr and Barney Bernard, are the comedy’s central focus. Rife with Jewish stereotypes, the play’s simple plot involves two bickering partners having to put aside petty differences to save their business from an embezzling employee. Overcoming all obstacles, Perlmutter also finds a bride in their new designer, Ruth Snyder, played by Louise Dresser. The phenomenal success of Potash and Perlmutter inspired a long series of popular sequels including Abe and Mawruss (1914), Business before Pleasure (1917), His Honor Abe Potash (1919), Partners Again (1922), and Potash and Perlmutter, Detectives (1926). Potash and Perlmutter became a MOTION PICTURE in 1923 with Carr and Bernard repeating their roles. With George Sidney

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taking over for Bernard, Carr appeared in two films, In Hollywood with Potash and Perlmutter (1924) and Partners Again (1926). POTTER, PAUL M. (1853–1921). Born Walter McEwen (or McLean) in Brighton, England, Paul M. Potter changed his name and left his homeland for the United States after a journalistic scandal forced his departure. He worked as a newspaperman in Chicago before turning to PLAYWRITING. Potter achieved modest success with The City Director and The Ugly Duckling (coauthored by A. D. Gordon), both in 1890. His first major hit was an adaptation of George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1895). Then came The Conquerors (1898), Under Two Flags (1901), The Honor of the Family (1908), The Girl from Rector’s (1909), and the books and/or lyrics for several MUSICALS. POTTERS, THE. J. P. McEvoy’s three-act COMEDY, produced by Richard Herndon, opened on 8 December 1923 at the Plymouth Theatre for 245 performances. Feisty Ma Potter nags her nebbish husband, Pa, about his meager paycheck. Pushed to action, Pa invests in an oil speculation. To complicate matters, their daughter Mamie elopes, but a surprise gusher in Pa’s oil field stifles Ma’s complaints. #RITICS found that the innocuous plot was bolstered by McEvoy’s charmingly believable depiction of the title family, a quality carried over to a 1927 silent MOTIONPICTURE version STARRING W. C. Fields. POWER, TYRONE (1869–1931). Grandson of PLAYWRIGHT and AC TOR Tyrone Power, Frederick Tyrone Edmond Power was the son of Harold Power. Born in London, Power immigrated to America in 1886 and made his stage debut in St. Augustine, Florida, before joining Augustin Daly’s company. Acting under the shortened name Tyrone Power, he was well-received in Minnie Maddern Fiske’s productions of Becky Sharp (1899) and Mary of Magdala (1902), after which he appeared in numerous plays, including Ulysses (1903), Adrea (1905), The Redskin (1906), and The Servant in the House (1908). Power also appeared in the long-running MUSICAL Chu Chin Chow (1917) and in secondary roles in 3HAKESPEAREAN plays. He was the father of popular MOTIONPICTURE STAR Tyrone Power.* POWERS, JAMES T. (1862–1943). Born James McGovern in New York, he began his theatrical work in CIRCUS and vaudeville before

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rising to prominence in the MUSICAL Evangeline (1882) and a series of farcical COMEDIES, including Dreams (1882), A Bunch of Keys (1883), and A Tin Soldier (1886). A founding member of the Casino Theatre company, Powers moved into Augustin Daly’s celebrated company in 1893 to replace James Lewis. He acted in various plays and musicals, including The New Boy (1894), San Toy (1900), The Messenger Boy (1901), The Jewel of Asia (1903), A Princess of Kensington (1903), The Medal and the Maid (1904), The Blue Moon (1906), Havana (1909), Two Little Brides (1912), The Geisha (1913), and Somebody’s Luggage (1916). Much of his later career was spent in European musicals on "ROADWAY and TOUR, but he also appeared in a string of all-STAR revivals, including Out There (1918), The Rivals (1922, 1923, 1930), Henry IV, Part I (1926), Julius Caesar (1927), The Beaux’ Stratagem (1928), Becky Sharp (1929), and Seven Keys to Baldpate (1935). POWERS, TOM (1890–1955). Owensboro, Kentucky-born Tom Powers attended the !MERICAN!CADEMYOF$RAMATIC!RTS (AADA), after which he appeared in a Pennsylvania production of In Mizzoura (1911). He gained notice in two New York productions, Mr. Lazarus and Mile-a-Minute Kendall, both in 1916, then made an auspicious debut in MUSICALS, introducing Jerome Kern’s “Till the Clouds Roll By” in Oh, Boy! (1917). Most of his subsequent work was in nonmusicals, with notable performances in Why Not? (1922) and in 4HE ATRE'UILD productions of (ENRIK)BSEN’s The Wild Duck (1925) and three 'EORGE "ERNARD 3HAW plays: Androcles and the Lion (1925), The Man of Destiny (1926), and Arms and the Man (1926). Powers scored later successes in 0HILIP "ARRY’s COMEDY White Wings (1926) and in %UGENE/.EILL’s 0ULITZER0RIZE–winning drama Strange Interlude (1928). He replaced Orson Welles* in the Mercury Theatre* production of Julius Caesar (1938). He also had a lengthy MOTIONPICTURE career, appearing most memorably as the victim in Double Indemnity (1944). PREER, EVELYN (1896–1932). Born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, the !FRICAN !MERICAN ACTRESS grew up in Chicago and discovered theatre in high school. She joined Raymond O’Neil’s Ethiopian Art Players and traveled with the integrated cast to Washington and New York, where she reached "ROADWAY in May 1923 in the title roles of

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Salome and The Chip Woman’s Fortune, performed in REPERTORY with The Comedy of Errors. She joined the ,AFAYETTE0LAYERS under Anita Bush in Harlem, and also ACTED under David Belasco’s DIRECTION in Lulu Belle. She continued to play leading roles in New York, but relocated to Los Angeles with the Lafayette Players, where she won acclaim as Miss Sadie Thompson in Rain in 1928. She also made jazz recordings and STARRED in MOTIONPICTURES PRODUCED by Oscar Micheaux between 1918 and 1941. PRESBREY, EUGENE W. (1853–1931). Born Eugene Wiley Presbrey in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, he started on Boston stages in 1874 before becoming a DIRECTOR under the auspices of PRODUCER A. M. Palmer. In the mid-1890s he began writing romantic COM EDIES and dramas, directing their initial productions. These included The Courtship of Miles Standish (1895), A Ward of France (1897), A Virginia Courtship (1898), Worth a Million (1898), Marcella (1900), New England Folks (1901), and his greatest success, Raffles (1903), written with E. W. Hornung, based on Hornung’s stories. He turned to MOTION PICTURE writing around World 7AR I, mostly drawing material from his plays. PRESS AGENT. See ADVANCE AGENT. PRIDE OF JENNICO, THE. Abby Sage Richardson and Grace Livingston Furniss collaborated on this four-act play, based on a novel by Agnes and Egerton Castle, PRODUCED by Charles Frohman and DIRECTED by Edward E. Rose at the Criterion Theatre, where it opened on 6 March 1900 for 111 performances. James K. Hackett played Basil Jennico, a nobleman living in Bohemia, whose intended, Princess Marie, switches places with her maid to see if Basil will love her as a commoner. The romantic machinations, which include a royal plotter and a gypsy, end with Basil and Princess Marie betrothed. The Pride of Jennico played a return engagement the following fall, for an additional 32 performances and it was made into a MOTIONPICTURE in 1914. PRINCE CHAP, THE. 0RODUCED at the Madison Square Theatre, Edward Peple’s first play, a three-act drama, opened on 4 September 1905 for 106 performances, followed by a lengthy TOUR and a

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return engagement in New York in 1907. Sculptor William Payton is given the young child of a deceased model to support. Alice, Payton’s fiancée, believing the child, Claudia, to be Payton’s, breaks their engagement and marries another man. When Claudia grows to maturity (different actresses played the successively older Claudia in each act), Alice, now a widow, learns that Payton told her the truth and she hopes to rekindle their relationship. Payton, however, has fallen in love with the adult Claudia. The cast included Cecil B. DeMille, although he did not DIRECT either of the two MOTIONPICTURE versions in 1914 and 1920, the last directed by his brother, William C. deMille. The Prince Chap had a short-lived revival in 1907. PRINCE KARL. Richard Mansfield played the title character in this four-act A. C. Gunter COMEDY at the Madison Square Theatre when it opened on 3 May 1896 for 122 performances, following a run at the Boston Museum. Thinking he will gain wealth by courting beautiful widow Florence Lowell, Prince Karl breaks his engagement with a rich old woman by faking suicide in order to pose as his own brother. Florence is on to his trickery, but falls in love with him despite it, informing him that her fortune came from Karl’s deceased uncle so, in a sense, it belongs to him. Prince Karl was revived successfully on 20 November 1899 at the Garden Theatre. PROCESSIONAL. Opening at the Garrick Theatre on 12 January 1925 for 90 performances PRODUCED by the 4HEATRE'UILD, John Howard Lawson’s “jazz symphony of American life” reflected the author’s leftist politics in its vaudeville-style depiction of events surrounding a West Virginia coal miners’ strike. Lawson assailed racial prejudice (including the Ku Klux Klan), corporate and governmental indifference to economic conditions, and the inherent corruption of small town politics. Its remarkable cast included 'EORGE!BBOTT, Philip Loeb,* Sanford Meisner,* Lee Strasberg,* and *UNE7ALKER. Revised for a production by the Federal Theatre Project,* it opened at Maxine Elliott’s Theatre on 13 October 1937 for 81 performances. Lawson’s play was a rare foray into nonREALISTIC and overtly political drama on "ROADWAY. PRODUCER.† This term typically refers to an individual or an organization providing financial and organizational support for a play.

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Between 1880 and 1930, producers were often theatre owners and many were creative forces, as well as savvy business people. Prior to the 20th century, plays were often produced by STAR ACTORS who were also MANAGERS of REPERTORY companies and, in many cases, owned and operated their own theatres. In the late 19th century, to consolidate power, several prominent producers established the Theatrical Syndicate with the goal of dominating ownership and operation policies. Other producers and stars battled the Syndicate, especially Minnie Maddern Fiske and her producer husband, Harrison Grey Fiske, but its dominance was ultimately destroyed by another powerful producing organization, the 3HUBERTS. Producers often sprang from the ranks of theatre workers; some were box office or publicity managers while others, increasingly, were actors and PLAYWRIGHTS. To protect their interests, dramatists created producing organizations. Other high-minded production organizations sprang from the little theatre movement (Provincetown Players) and those writers, SCENE DESIGNERS, DIRECTORS, and actors striving to elevate the quality of the American stage (4HEATRE 'UILD). 'EORGE - #OHAN, a leading actor, playwright, and composer, entered into a nearly twenty-year partnership with 3AM ( (ARRIS to produce not only his own plays, but many by others under the banner of Cohan and Harris Productions. Other individual producers, like Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., had less discernible specific talents, but provided artistic vision and marketing acumen. See also !CTORS %QUITY !SSOCIATION; BELASCO, DAVID; BRADY, WILLIAM A.; DALY, AUGUSTIN; ERLANGER, ABRAHAM; FROHMAN, CHARLES; FROHMAN, DANIEL; 'OLDEN *OHN; HAMMERSTEIN I, OSCAR; HARRIS, WILLIAM, SR.; KLAW, MARC; LEAGUE OF NEW YORK THEATRES AND PRODUCERS*; -AC'OWAN +ENNETH; Nixon-Nirdlinger, Samuel F.; PASTOR, TONY; ZIMMERMAN, J. FRED. PRODUCING MANAGERS’ ASSOCIATION (PMA). 0RODUCER 3AM((ARRIS led this producers’ organization established in 1918 at the behest of *OHN'OLDEN in the face of mounting tensions between the !CTORS%QUITY!SSOCIATION and the United Managers’ Protective Association. The PMA resisted negotiations with Equity, leading to the actors’ strike of 1919. Compelled by Equity’s resolve, the PMA signed the first American labor-MANAGEMENT contract. In

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1924, several producers broke with PMA to establish the Managers’ Protective Association, which evolved into the League of New York Theatres and Producers* in 1930. PROFESSOR, THE. William Gillette’s four-act COMEDY opened on 1 June 1881 at the Madison Square Theatre for 151 performances. Gillette referred to The Professor as a character study, with himself in the central role of Hopkins, a bookish young Yale professor pursued by many young women, to the dismay of the Yale University students who are pursuing the girls themselves. Hopkins is also distracted from his studies by a kidnapper and the young woman victim, as well as the sudden arrival of a brother and sister he has not seen in many years. One of Gillette’s slightest works as a dramatist, it provided a popular vehicle in the early years of his ACTING career. PROLET-BUEHNE. This New York–based workers’ theatre group styled on similar socialist theatre troupes in Berlin and Moscow was established in 1925 by immigrant German activists. Employing agitprop techniques under the leadership of John E. Bonn, their productions inspired the Workers’ Laboratory Theatre* and the creation of the Living Newspaper* techniques of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP).* The Prolet-Buehne ceased functioning in 1934, and Bonn became DIRECTOR of the German wing of the FTP. PROPERTIES. This term describes stage objects (furnishings, decorations, and personal props) used in the presentation of a play. Except for SCENERY and COSTUMES, the word “properties” would describe virtually any other object on the stage. PROTEAN COMIC. Lotta Crabtree and Sol Smith Russell were protean comics; that is, they could switch rapidly among very different characterizations. The term “protean” came to mean generally versatile, but because of the theatricality of the technique, most opportunities for protean display occurred in COMEDY. PROVINCETOWN. Located on the harbor side of the far end of Cape Cod, Provincetown marks the spot where the Mayflower Pilgrims first made landfall before putting in at Plymouth Rock. Before the 20th century, Provincetown was primarily a fishing port, sending out

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fleets of whalers and other commercial fishing vessels. Numerous wooden wharves were built to support those industries, and it was on one of those wharves that American modernist theatre can be said to have begun. Mary Heaton Vorse was a well-educated WOMAN who spent summers in Provincetown from 1906. Little by little she attracted other creative people from Greenwich Village. By the summer of 1915 a group of writers that included Neith Boyce and her husband Hutchins Hapgood, George Cram Cook and his wife 3USAN'LASPELL, and others were reading and performing their own plays on the Hapgoods’ veranda overlooking the harbor. Needing more space, they moved the productions to a fishhouse at the end of Lewis Wharf, which Vorse owned. The following summer marked the turning point, for a young writer named %UGENE/.EILL joined the group and his one-act play Bound East for Cardiff was chosen for production on the wharf. A week before its opening, a fire destroyed one of the three buildings on the wharf, but the fishhouse survived. On 18 July 1916, with fog rolling in and water lapping beneath the floor, the playwriting talent that would galvanize the American stage made its debut. The excitement of that work impelled the group to organize themselves as the Provincetown Players in order to continue producing new plays in Greenwich Village in New York City in the fall. O’Neill spent nine summers in Provincetown and wrote many of his early plays there. Lewis Wharf collapsed in 1922, but other venues in Provincetown attracted successive theatre groups. Among them were Provincetown Theatre on Whalers’ Wharf (from 1919), the Barnstormers (intermittently after 1922), the Wharf Theatre (1923–1940), Provincetown Playhouse on the Wharf (1941–1977). Tennessee Williams* began summering in Provincetown in 1940. A new playhouse, the Provincetown Theatre, opened in 2003 and serves as home for both Provincetown Theatre Company and Provincetown 2EPERTORY Theatre. Leona Rust Egan has chronicled much of the history of theatre in Provincetown in various publications. PROVINCETOWN PLAYERS. George Cram “Jig” Cook was the visionary leader who rallied the PLAYWRIGHTS and SCENEDESIGN ERS of the new plays presented on the wharf in Provincetown in summer 1916 to continue the venture that fall in Greenwich Village in New York City. Besides Cook and his wife 3USAN 'LASPELL,

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these trailblazers of American modernist theatre included Neith Boyce, Louise Bryant, Michael Gold, 2OBERT %DMOND *ONES, Mabel Dodge, John Reed, Edna St. Vincent Millay, %UGENE /.EILL, Cleon Throckmorton, and William and Marguerite Zorach. Otto Kahn was an important patron. After two seasons in a space at 139 Macdougal Street, the company made its permanent home in a former stable at 133 Macdougal Street. According to Robert K. Sarlos in Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players, they produced 97 plays by 47 American authors in eight seasons. Various theories have been advanced for the group’s demise in 1922 at the peak of its success, when O’Neill’s expressionist play The Hairy Ape was transferred to a theatre uptown. Some have signaled this move as evidence that commercial success was diverting the players from their mission to nurture new plays. Others have conjectured that Cook’s departure for Greece left them rudderless. In any case, the Provincetown Players must be credited with launching the career of O’Neill as well as of numerous others. The Women of Provincetown by Cheryl Black records the contributions of WOMEN DIRECTORS, scene designers, ACTORS, and MANAGERS, in addition to the more frequently lauded dramatists. PUFF. This term, which dates back to the 17th century, refers to excessive hype in ADVERTISEMENTS, publicity, and reviews of a theatrical production. Richard Brinsley Sheridan immortalized the word when he used it as the name of his flamboyant Mr. Puff in The Critic (1779), but in the United States “puff” became prevalent as theatre MANAG ERS sought any means to win the battle for audience attention. PULITZER PRIZE FOR DRAMA.† Established according to provisions in the will of newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer (1847–1911) in 1917, this honor is bestowed annually on a new American play performed in New York deemed to have “best represented the educational value and power of the stage in raising the standards of good morals and good manners.” Over the years, many of the choices made met with disagreement, encouraging CRITICS to set up the New York Drama Critics Circle.* Jesse Lynch Williams’s Why Marry? was the first play awarded in 1918, with no winner named in 1919. During the 1920s, the award went three times to %UGENE/.EILL for Beyond the Horizon (1920), Anna Christie (1922), and Strange Interlude

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(1928). In 1921, Zona Gale was the first WOMAN to receive the award for the dramatization of her novel Miss Lulu Bett. The most controversial award of the period occurred when rumors circulated that 'EORGE +ELLY’s The Show-Off was to win, but behind-the-scenes manipulations led to the announcement of Hatcher Hughes’s HellBent fer Heaven as the winner for 1924. Kelly subsequently won in 1926 for Craig’s Wife (1926). The remaining winners prior to 1930 were /WEN $AVIS’s Icebound in 1923, 3IDNEY (OWARD’s They Knew What They Wanted in 1925, 0AUL 'REEN’s In Abraham’s Bosom in 1927, and %LMER2ICE’s Street Scene in 1929. 0500%429.† Puppets, inanimate figures manipulated by a puppeteer, have been seen by audiences since the beginning of American theatre. Whether hand puppets or marionettes (puppets manipulated by strings), these iconic human symbols date to the beginning of theatrical history. Spanish puppeteers first performed in North America as early as the 16th century and .ATIVE!MERICANS were known to use puppets in ritual performances. English puppet shows were frequently seen during the 18th century, with the earliest documented performance in Barbados in 1708. Chinese shadow puppets were seen in America in this era, as were puppet performances from Central and South America, France, Italy, and elsewhere. Puppets were popular with American CHILDREN from the early 18th century and many shops sold puppet stages and puppets to youngsters. Tony Sarg (1880–1942) was perhaps the first important modern puppeteer, beginning with performances in his studio in 1915. He TOURED and performed The Rose and the Ring, Don Quixote, and Rip Van Winkle with frequency. Prior to 1930, other major American puppeteers included Helen Haiman Joseph, Edith Flack Ackley, Remo Bufano, Marjorie Batchelder, and especially Paul McPharlin (1903–1948), whose seminal book, The Puppet Theatre in America: A History (1949), provides a detailed record of the often overlooked history of the puppet and its manipulators in the United States. PUPPY LOVE. Opening 27 January 1926 at the 48th Street Theatre, the farcical COMEDY in three acts by Adelaide Matthews and Martha Stanley ran for 112 performances. Matthews and Stanley were a prolific PLAYWRITING team whose work included COMEDIES of innuendo like Nightie Night (1919) and mystery comedies like The Wasp’s Nest

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(1927). Puppy Love incorporates topical references to bootlegging, WOMEN’s clubs, motorcars, and flappers. PURPLE FLOWER, THE. This one-act expressionist drama is one of three plays written by Marita Bonner, an !FRICAN!MERICAN teacher and writer. The angelic-looking White Devils occupy the sides of the hill and dance on the Thin-Skin-of-Civilization to prevent the darker-skinned Us from reaching the top where the purple Flower-of-Life-At-Its-Fullest grows. Neither talk nor work nor studies nor prayer enables Us to make headway. The music of Us is appropriated. Ultimately, one of Us named Finest Blood goes forth with the understanding that blood must be shed.

n1n QUINN, ARTHUR HOBSON (1875–1960). An important scholar on American theatre, Arthur Hobson Quinn was born in Philadelphia. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and joined its faculty in 1895, continuing his distinguished career in ACADEMIA until retirement in 1945. Quinn’s many books, mostly anthologies and histories, include Representative American Plays (1917), The Early Drama (1917), History of the American Drama from the Beginning to the Civil WAR (1923), Contemporary American Plays (1923), and History of the American Drama from the Civil War to the Present Day (1927). He also edited Harper’s Plays and PLAYWRIGHTS series.

n2n RACE ON THE AMERICAN STAGE.† See !FRICAN !MERICAN THEATRE; ETHNICITYIN!MERICANDRAMA; .ATIVE!MERICANSON THESTAGE; YIDDISH THEATRE. RACHEL. This three-act drama by Angelina Weld Grimké was performed twice, on 2 and 4 March 1916, by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Drama Committee. Recognizing the value of theatre techniques in service of promoting racial understanding, the NAACP backed Rachel, which

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focused on a young woman’s decision to deny herself what she most desires—motherhood—because she does not want to raise a child in a world of racial prejudice and lynchings. It was later revived at New York City’s .EIGHBORHOOD0LAYHOUSE. RACKET, THE. Bartlett Cormack’s three-act drama had a controversial initial run in Chicago, where local officials attempted to CENSOR it. The play opened on "ROADWAY at the Ambassador Theatre on 22 November 1927 for 119 performances. Ruthless Chicago gangster Nick Scarsi has kept honest police Captain McQuigg from promotion through his influence with corrupt officials. When Scarsi expands his bootlegging operation into McQuigg’s suburban precinct, McQuigg is determined to bring him to justice. When a crooked judge orders Scarsi’s release from custody, McQuigg refuses to release him. Losing his temper, Scarsi admits a murder in front of State Attorney Welsh, but insists they cannot prosecute him because he can bring down the city’s political machine. Scarsi meets justice only when he is shot while attempting to murder McQuigg. %DWARD'2OBINSON had an early success as Scarsi. Louis Wolheim took on the role for a 1928 MOTIONPICTURE version. Robert Ryan played the character, renamed Nick Scanlon, in a 1951 remake. RAFFLES, THE AMATEUR CRACKSMAN. E. W. Hornung and Eugene W. Presbrey collaborated on this four-act COMEDY based on Hornung’s stories, PRODUCED by Liebler & Co. at the Princess Theatre, where it opened on 27 October 1903 for 168 performances. Presbrey DIRECTED Kyrle Bellew as Raffles, an English gentleman who indulges his desire for excitement as a jewel thief. Visiting a nobleman’s home as a guest, Raffles steals family jewels while courteously rebuffing flirtations with both the lady of the house and her daughter. An amateur sleuth catches on to Raffles’s theft, but when the jewels are returned, no harm is done. The play won popularity on TOUR and Charles Frohman revived it in 1910 with Bellew once again playing Raffles. “Broncho Billy” Anderson STARRED in the 1905 MOTION PICTURE. This enduringly popular character was also played in movie versions by John Barrymore (1917), House Peters (1925), Ronald Colman (1930), and David Niven (1939). There were innumerable sequels and television* adaptations.

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RAILROAD OF LOVE, THE. Augustin Daly freely adapted this fouract COMEDY from Franz von Schoenthan and Gustav Kadelberg’s Goldfische for his company. It opened on 1 November 1887 for 108 performances at Daly’s Theatre, with key roles acted by Daly’s leading players, James Lewis, John Drew, Otis Skinner, Ada Rehan, and Mrs. G. H. Gilbert. Aging roué Phenix Scuttleby complains of the impact of the pace of modern life on flirtation, which he compares to a railroad schedule. A rich widow, Mrs. Osprey, will lose her fortune to Scuttleby if she remarries, according to her late husband’s will. She wants to marry an artist, but can only do so if, as the will specifies, Scuttleby marries first. Through a series of machinations involving other would-be couples foiled by Scuttleby, he is married off to a country woman, allowing all lovers to be united. RAILROAD TOURING. The rapid growth of railroads in the decades following the Civil 7AR may have been the primary factor underlying the golden age of legitimate theatre on the ROAD. Individual STARS in the 1870s would travel from town to town to perform with the local STOCK company. The 1880s brought the heyday of TOUR ING companies, each headed by a star, with a troupe of 10 or 12 AC TORS, offering several plays in REPERTORY. A major company might carry its own SCENERY on the train, while many relied upon the local theatre’s stock settings. Schedules had to be planned carefully, especially when a company was booked for a succession of onenight stands. Often the trunks had to be ready to take to the depot immediately following a performance, so that the company could catch a night train to the city of the next evening’s engagement. For Sarah Bernhardt’s 1887 American tour, she had a special train rather than relying on regularly scheduled routes; according to the Kansas City Journal (9 May 1887), “the Bernhardt train consisted of a baggage car carrying about thirty trunks, a coach for the members of the company, all French, madame’s private car and kitchen.” See also JUMP. RAIN. This John Colton and Clemence Randolph stage adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s short story about an American prostitute, Sadie Thompson, languishing in exotic Pago Pago, was one of the great "ROADWAY successes of the 1920s. It opened on 7 November 1922 at the Maxine Elliott Theatre, in a 3AM((ARRIS production,

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and ran for 648 performances. Rain made a STAR of Jeanne Eagels, whose performance as the gaudy, promiscuous Sadie impressed audiences and CRITICS, even those who were shocked by the play’s content. Rain is set in Trader Joe Horn’s hotel, where Sadie encounters Rev. Davidson, whose desire is to reform both the natives and the faithless denizens of Horn’s hotel. Davidson meets his match in Sadie, who calls his motives into question, and he must face his lustful feelings. Davidson commits suicide. Sadie, philosophically musing on the struggles between the spirit and the flesh, departs for Australia. Rain proved a sturdy vehicle for many young ACTRESSES and was frequently revived. It has also been the source for several MOTION PICTURES (1928, 1932, 1953) and a 1970 British television* movie. A MUSICAL adaptation, Sadie Thompson (1944), failed to find favor. RAMBEAU, MARJORIE (1889–1970). Born in San Francisco, Marjorie Rambeau worked in STOCK companies there and in Los Angeles before scoring a "ROADWAY hit in the title role of Sadie Love (1915). The following year, she consolidated her success as detective Nan Carey in Max Marcin’s hit Cheating Cheaters. #RITICS commented on Rambeau’s beauty and strong stage presence, which served her well in her most critically acclaimed role, Gina Ashland in Marcin’s COMEDY-drama Eyes of Youth (1917). She rejected the leading role in Rain (1922), instead appearing in modest successes like Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting (1921), The Goldfish (1922), The Valley of Content (1925), and Antonia (1925), and failures including The Road Together (1924), The Night Duel (1926), and her 1923 performance as Rosalind in As You Like It. When her looks faded, Rambeau became a successful character actress in MOTION PICTURES, often playing hard-boiled old WOMEN. RANKIN, MCKEE (1841–1914). Born in Sandwich, Canada, Arthur McKee Rankin debuted as an ACTOR in 1861 under the stage name George Henley in Rochester, New York. After a few seasons in England, Rankin made his first New York appearance in A Regular Fix in 1866 before joining the Union Square Theatre in 1872. There he appeared in leading roles before finding enduring popularity as miner Alexander McGee in The Danites (1877) opposite his wife, Kitty Blanchard. Initial success as a PRODUCER and MANAGER, and frequent revivals of The Danites (later opposite Nance O’Neil), kept him in

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the public eye, but various personal and managerial failings led to bankruptcy in 1904. In attempts to find another vehicle as popular as The Danites, Rankin appeared with modest success in ’49 (1881) and The Canuck (1891). Rankin’s daughters, Gladys and Doris, married actors Sidney Drew and Lionel Barrymore, respectively. RAPHAELSON, SAMSON (1896–1983).† A native of New York City, Samson Raphaelson was educated at the University of Illinois. His most enduring play was also his first. The Jazz Singer (1925), on stage with George Jessel and in MOTION PICTURES STARRING Al Jolson in the first feature-length sound (“talkie”) film, expressed the strains of immigrants caught between the ways of the old world and the rapidly changing modern age. Raphaelson moved easily between popular COMEDY and light drama, but his theatrical success was hitand-miss. He followed The Jazz Singer with Young Love (1928), The Wooden Slipper (1934), Accent on Youth* (1934), White Man (1936), Skylark* (1939), and others. Raphaelson was perhaps more successful writing for the screen and is responsible for collaborating on classics including Trouble in Paradise (1932), The Merry Widow (1934), The Shop around the Corner (1940), and Heaven Can Wait (1943), as well as movie adaptations of his plays. RATHBONE, BASIL (1892–1967).† Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, Basil Rathbone worked for 10 years in London theatre before his New York stage debut in The Czarina (1922). He played opposite %VA,E'ALLIENNE in Ferenc Molnár’s The Swan (1923), followed by roles in Arthur Hornblow Jr.’s The Captive (1926) and Rudolf Lothar and Fritz Gottwald’s The Command to Love (1927). Rathbone’s own play, Judas (1929), in which he also ACTED, flopped. He played Romeo to +ATHARINE#ORNELL’s Juliet in 1934 and, after a long stint in Hollywood MOTION PICTURES, Rathbone returned to the stage in Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s* adaptation of Henry James’s Washington Square called The Heiress* (1947). More remembered for his screen work, Rathbone played both heroes (notably Sherlock Holmes) and villains, both of which were well-served by his tall, stately presence and his imperious, intellectual manner. RAYMOND, JOHN T. (1836–1887). Born John O’Brien in Buffalo, New York, the ACTOR had a distinguished career as a comic

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character actor from his debut in 1853. During the modernist period he was known primarily for his Colonel Mulberry Sellers in Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age, which remained in his repertoire from 1874 until his death. The original New York Times review (17 September 1874) hints at why the character and the performer continued to draw audiences for well over a decade: “The comicalities of Col. Sellers kept the audience merry throughout the whole four acts. . . . for breadth and zestiness, the plans developed by the Western settler are literally unprecedented. Utterly insane as some of Col. Sellars’ theories appeared, . . . Mr. John Raymond assumed this role with an earnestness which insured his success. . . . the perfect heartiness of all his speeches, together with the absence of self-consciousness in his wildest excentricities [sic], rendered his personation as artistic as it was striking.” REALISM.† This term describes a production approach in which the theatre attempts to represent everyday life and characters as they are or appear to be. Fidelity to observable life is a goal to be achieved through a natural ACTING style, colloquial speech, and visual detail. Recognizing that what passes for realism varies considerably from one era to another, it might be said that the term “realism” is frequently used in such a general way as to be almost meaningless. However, (ENRIK)BSEN’s social problem plays set in contemporary society linked the term with his work and that of his American disciple James A. Herne. In America, realism—sometimes pushed to naturalism—was most effectively seen in late 19th- and early 20thcentury productions staged by David Belasco, who insisted on an extraordinary degree of visual reality, including such details as actual sawdust on the stage floor in a butcher shop scene or the installation of authentic elements from a Child’s Restaurant for a scene in one of the chain’s lunchrooms. Between James A. Herne’s Margaret Fleming (1890) and World 7AR I, only Bronson Howard, William Vaughn Moody, Clyde Fitch, and Edward Sheldon made halting steps toward a greater realism in their plays. After World War I, American dramatists, influenced by modernist literature and thought in Europe, sought a deeper realism. %UGENE/.EILL, %LMER2ICE, 3USAN'LASPELL, and others adapted to the seriousness suggested by Ibsen’s plays, while not only employing realistic devices but also experimenting with other

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forms, including expressionism and symbolism, and expanding the use of language from the merely colloquial toward a great lyricism, as in S. S. Glencairn, Street Scene, and The Verge, respectively. After 1930, PLAYWRIGHTS continued to expand the boundaries of realism to include many nonrealistic devices (-AXWELL!NDERSON, for one, attempted to revive verse drama) while retaining a fidelity to actual life, even when including elements of fantasy. American lyric realism, as it is often called, found its first vivid expression in the plays of Tennessee Williams* at the end of World War II. REBECCA OF SUNNYBROOK FARM. Adapted by Kate Douglas Wiggin and Charlotte Thompson from Wiggin’s 1903 story, this fouract sentimental COMEDY PRODUCED by Marc Klaw and Abraham Erlanger opened on 3 October 1910 for 216 performances at the Republic Theatre. Essentially a character study of an optimistic orphan sent to live with a grouchy aunt, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm became a perennial for young audiences. A silent MOTION PICTURE version (1917) STARRED Mary Pickford, followed by a 1932 sound film with Marian Nixon, a MUSICAL adaptation (1938) with Shirley Temple, and a 1978 television* movie with Julia Lewis. RECALL. To be called back by the audience after the curtain call was a sign of genuine appreciation. Newspapers always reported when a star got one or more recalls. Eleanor Ruggles (266) recounts a joke made by Edwin Booth at the funeral of ACTOR John Brougham, a very large man. His coffin was partially lowered into the grave but had to be raised again so the grave could be widened, at which Booth quipped that it was Brougham’s “last recall.” REED, FLORENCE (1883–1967).† The daughter of ACTOR-MANAGER Roland Reed, Florence Reed was born in Philadelphia and spent a long apprenticeship in STOCK at New York’s Fifth Avenue Theatre beginning in 1901, after which she TOURED as E. H. Sothern’s leading lady in If I Were King and Hamlet. On her own, Reed appeared in Seven Days (1909), The Typhoon (1912), and The Master of the House (1914), but found her true niche in exotic roles, scoring her first great success as a Russian prostitute in The Yellow Ticket (1914). She also appeared in the long-running MUSICAL, Chu Chin Chow (1918) and in The Mirage (1920). Most memorably, she played the

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vengeful madam Mother Goddam in John B. Colton’s melodrama The Shanghai Gesture (1926). Despite its success, Reed never again had a STARRING vehicle on "ROADWAY, although she acted in silent MOTIONPICTURES and headed national companies of Mourning Becomes Electra* and Elizabeth the Queen* before creating the role of the Fortune Teller in Thornton Wilder’s* 0ULITZER0RIZE–winning The Skin of Our Teeth* (1942; and in the 1955 American National Theatre and Academy* revival) and she played the Nurse to Judith Anderson’s* Medea in 1947. REEVES-SMITH, H. (1862–1938). Born in England as Harry ReevesSmith, he immigrated to the United States in 1887, TOURING at various times with John Sleeper Clarke, Henrietta Crosman, and Grace George. On "ROADWAY, Reeves-Smith had particular successes opposite a young %THEL"ARRYMORE in Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines (1901) and ,AURETTE4AYLOR in Peg O’My Heart (1912). He also appeared in (ENRIK)BSEN’s The Master Builder with !LLA .AZIMOVA in 1907, as well as Mid-Channel (1910), The Unchastened Woman (1915), Polly with a Past (1917), The Gold Diggers (1919), and The Great Waltz* (1934). REHAN, ADA (1860–1916). Born Ada Delia Crehan in Limerick, Ireland, the ACTRESS came to America with her family at age five. Her two older sisters and a brother became actors, and she unexpectedly followed them into the profession as a last-minute replacement. A typesetter’s error, listing her as Ada C. Rehan in a program, created her stage name. She made her little-noticed New York debut in 1873, then performed two seasons at Philadelphia’s Arch Street Theatre, followed by TOURING. Most of her career was associated with PRODUCER Augustin Daly, whose company she joined in 1879. As the leading lady of his companies for 20 years, she excelled in light COMEDY. She was tall, graceful, and energetic, with an apparent spontaneity that worked well in the superficial fare of her first decade with Daly. In the late 1880s, he began featuring her in 3HAKESPEARE productions, and she won particular acclaim as Kate in The Taming of the Shrew. However, she became emotionally as well as artistically dependent upon Daly, and his death in 1899 was a setback to her. After an absence from the stage, she toured with Otis Skinner, but never recovered the spirit of her Daly years.

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REID, HAL (1873?–1920). Born James Halleck Reid in Minneapolis, Minnesota, he worked as an ACTOR throughout his career, but he was also a prolific writer of melodramas intended for rural audiences, including among many others Logan’s Luck (1895), The Knob’s o’ Tennessee (1899), Old Sleuth (1902), The Peddler (1902), A Mother’s Love (1903), A Wife’s Secret (1903), A Midnight Marriage (1904), Custer’s Last Fight (1905), A Millionaire’s Revenge (1906), From Broadway to the Bowery (1907), and The Confession (1911). With the arrival of silent MOTIONPICTURES, Reid went to Hollywood to become a DIRECTOR, screenwriter, and actor. His son, Wallace Reid, became a major silent film STAR but died from a drug overdose in 1923. REIGNOLDS, KATE (1836–1911). Born Catherine Mary Reignolds near London, England, she came in 1850 with her mother and sisters to Chicago, where they performed under the MANAGEMENT of John B. Rice. As Kate Reignolds, she made her New York debut opposite Edwin Forrest in 1855. Among the companies with which she subsequently performed were those of Laura Keene, John Brougham, Benedict De Bar, and Charlotte Cushman, all of whom are described in her 1887 memoir Yesterdays with Actors. Her five years with the Boston Museum STOCK company included a stint playing opposite John Wilkes Booth, whom she regarded as “an irresponsible person, . . . this sad-faced, handsome, passionate boy” (1887, 140). During the modernist period, she devoted herself largely to dramatic readings and giving elocution lessons. REINHARDT, MAX (1873–1943).† Born Max Goldmann in Baden, Austria-Hungary, Max Reinhardt became one of the most admired and prolific DIRECTORS and PRODUCERS in Europe. His early work was seen in America in 1912 when Winthrop Ames brought Reinhardt’s Asian pantomime Sumurun (1912) to "ROADWAY. In 1924, Reinhardt recreated his acclaimed production of The Miracle at the Century Theatre, which was transformed by SCENEDESIGNER .OR MAN "EL 'EDDES into the interior of a medieval gothic cathedral. #RITICS lavished praise on this production, leading to an American season for Reinhardt’s troupe in 1927–1928, during which they TOURED his celebrated productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Danton’s Death, and others. With the rise of the Nazis, Reinhardt fled Europe, abandoning his home and theatres in Germany and Austria to

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settle in Hollywood, where he directed a lavish stage production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Hollywood Bowl in 1934. This led to the 1935 all-STAR Warner Brothers MOTIONPICTURE version. Returning to Broadway, he directed The Eternal Road* (1937), The Merchant of Yonkers* (1938), and Sons and Soldiers* (1943). RELIGIOUS DRAMA.† Resistance to theatrical activity by the Christian church in early America had the effect of keeping overt religious drama to a minimum. However, through the 19th century, Christian values were the unquestioned foundation of most plays, as exemplified by temperance dramas. Plays drawn from biblical sources and other aspects of Judeo-Christian religious history did not appear with any regularity until the turn of the century, although ministers, and the occasional rabbi, appeared as peripheral characters. Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Richelieu (1839), for example, a popular play with American audiences, portrayed the title character, but did not explore religious issues. Other British plays such as Henry Arthur Jones’s Saints and Sinners (1895) and Jerome K. Jerome’s The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1909) won some acceptance for religious drama, but when PLAYWRIGHT Salmi Morse offered The Passion Play (1879), a retelling of Christ’s final hours, some Christian clergy fought to suppress it because Morse was a Jew. The 19th century concluded with William Young’s stage adaptation of General Lew Wallace’s novel Ben-Hur (1899), which became one of the most popular plays of the time, perhaps more for its melodramatic components and onstage chariot race than for its religious story. A few other plays with religious themes appeared in the three decades following Ben-Hur, including Hall Caine’s The Christian (1898) and Charles Rann Kennedy’s The Servant in the House (1908). Religious stories were sometimes presented in pageants, a grassroots form of drama popular in the first two decades of the 20th century. The rising Yiddish theatre explored Jewish religious themes in many plays, particularly regarding the tensions emerging between the beliefs of the Old World set against modern American life. After World 7AR I, these concerns filtered into popular theatre, most successfully in Anne Nichols’s Abie’s Irish Rose (1922), in which the interfaith marriage of a Catholic girl and a Jewish boy tests traditional values, and in Sampson Raphaelson’s The Jazz Singer (1925), in which the son of a rabbi chooses a life on the vaudeville

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stage over the faith of his father. However, these plays, and others like them, did not probe beneath the surface of religious difference. A few notable religious dramas from Europe attracted audiences on "ROADWAY, particularly 'EORGE "ERNARD 3HAW’s Saint Joan (1923) and -AX 2EINHARDT’s lavishly presented pageant The Miracle (1924), as well as J. Frank Davis’s reincarnation drama, The Ladder (1926), which, despite critical dismissal, became one of the longest-running plays of its era. The outstanding American dramatist of the 1920s, %UGENE/.EILL, probed Catholic doctrine in several of his plays, most overtly in Lazarus Laughed (1927) and Days Without End* (1934). Religious dramas appeared on Broadway infrequently until the 1960s, after which the profound social changes of the era led playwrights to offer works depicting human striving for spiritual fulfillment and works critical of aspects of traditional religious doctrines. REPERTOIRE. The French word répertoire had two usages. Primarily, it meant the selection of plays that a STAR or a company was prepared to perform in a given season. By extension, a performer might refer to a given role as part of his or her repertoire. For example, Hortense Rhéa kept Beatrice (Much Ado About Nothing) in her repertoire for over a decade. A second, pejorative use of the word “repertoire” came to apply to low-budget TOURING companies that tended to perform melodramas, as opposed to the 3HAKESPEAREAN plays and other historical dramas in the repertoire of a REPERTORY company. The hardy players who comprised a repertoire company sometimes referred to themselves by the slang term “reptile company.” Tent repertoire and the Chautauqua and Lyceum circuits may be considered offshoots of repertoire companies that played the small towns of middle America. REPERTORY.† Many ACTOR-MANAGERS between 1880 and 1930 adopted the repertory structure, hiring a corps of actors to appear in a season of plays. Typically, actors were cast according to lines of business, playing the same size and type of role in each play presented. Performing in repertory not only challenges an actor’s abilities at line memorization, but it stretches an actor as insights are transferred from one role to another. The system was economically feasible in the days of large companies and before strict union

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regulation. The repertory model was revived during the 1960s, the first decade of newly booming regional resident companies around the United States, but the labor costs of SCENERY changeovers quickly took a toll. By the 1980s, only two major regional theatres were still presenting plays in rotating repertory: the Guthrie Theater and Missouri Repertory Theatre. RETURN OF PETER GRIMM, THE. David Belasco’s fantasy-drama opened on 17 October 1911 at Belasco Theatre for 231 performances. The play provided veteran ACTOR David Warfield with a memorable role as the kind old man of the title. Grimm makes a pact with his doctor that whichever of them dies first will attempt to return from the grave with a message. Grimm convinces his ward Katrien to marry his nephew Frederick so that the family tree might continue to grow. Katrien, however, is in love with another man and strongly dislikes the wastrel Frederick, but she reluctantly agrees to the engagement out of affection for Grimm. When Grimm dies, he does return, although only the housekeeper’s sickly son, Wilhelm, can see him. Grimm sees that he erred in prevailing upon Katrien to marry Frederick, but he cannot find a way to get his message across. Finally, he tells Wilhelm the dark truth that Frederick is actually his father. This shocking news frees Katrien from her promise and she is able to marry the man she loves. When Wilhelm dies, the unseen Peter Grimm carries him into the other world accompanied by the CIRCUS music the little boy loves. The play’s success in New York inspired a two-year TOUR STARRING Warfield, who also appeared in a BelascoPRODUCED revival in 1921. RHÉA, HORTENSE (1844–1899). Born Hortense Barbe-Loret in Brussels, Belgium, the French-speaking ACTRESS studied English intensively in London in order to have an American TOUR. Using the role of Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing as her text, she worked diligently until deemed ready for a public performance, which she gave on 2 June 1881 and which garnered her an invitation to tour America as a STAR. For 17 seasons, she continued her tours, keeping Beatrice as the centerpiece of her repertoire, which expanded to include plays like Adrienne Lecouvreur, The Lady of the Camelias, and Josephine, Empress of the French. Although she never attained a New York following or ever shone with the magnitude of Sarah

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Bernhardt, she was much loved in the American heartland where she was appreciated not only for her charm, modest demeanor, and kindness to members of her troupe, but also for the Paris wardrobe that embellished her productions. Midwesterners also seemed more indulgent toward her use of English, which never became fully intelligible. Notable among the leading men who supported her on various tours was William S. Hart. RICE, DAN (1823–1900).† A CIRCUS clown who became a major icon of mid-19th-century American popular culture, Rice was born Dan McLaren in New York. He spent his early years living in frontier towns and working, at various times, as a jockey, as a minstrel man, and as agent for Mormon leader Joseph Smith. Choosing a life in the circus, Rice merged his lowbrow COMEDY with that of William Wallett, his sometime rival. In 1848, Rice and Wallett began performing together with Wallett imitating noted 3HAKESPEAREAN ACTORS of the day, while Rice offered rowdy parodies. His native American humor and mocking of the powerful, dressed in a red and white striped “Uncle Sam” costume, endeared him to audiences who were particularly amused when Rice ran a semi-serious campaign for the U.S. presidency in 1868. Despite frequent bouts with alcohol, Rice ultimately moderated his drinking and TOURED, giving temperance lectures. He became one of the most popular entertainers of his day, making his last one-ring circus appearances in New York in the early 1890s. RICE, ELMER (1892–1967).† Elmer Leopold Reizenstein was born in New York and studied law before giving it up for PLAYWRITING, renaming himself Elmer Rice. He wrote plays ranging from gritty REALISM to expressionist fantasy. His first successful drama, On Trial (1914), made use of his legal background in its depiction of a sensational murder case and employed cinematic-style flashbacks in the revelation of its plot. Rice’s next few plays also had legal settings, including For the Defense (1919) and It Is the Law (1922). He collaborated with Hatcher Hughes on a vehicle for Minnie Maddern Fiske called Wake Up, Jonathan! (1921). Rice’s most important work of the early 1920s was The Adding Machine (1923), which ranks alongside %UGENE/.EILL’s The Emperor Jones (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1922) as among the finest examples of expressionism seen on "ROADWAY. Rice collaborated with $OROTHY 0ARKER on

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Close Harmony (1924), but it flopped, after which he worked with 0HILIP"ARRY on Cock Robin (1928), a modest success. Following two 1929 plays, The Subway and See Naples and Die, Rice offered the 0ULITZER 0RIZE–winning Street Scene, a hardhitting naturalistic melodrama set on the steps of a tenement and focusing on the frictions in New York City’s immigrant melting pot. In 1931, Rice wrote two successful plays, The Left Bank and Counsellor-at-Law,* but his firebrand leftist politics led him to spend much of his energy in the 1930s on propagandistic plays. His biggest late-career hit, Dream Girl* (1945), was written as a vehicle for his wife, actress Betty Field.* Rice DIRECTED many of his own plays, including Street Scene and Counsellor-at-Law, as well as plays by others, notably 2OBERT % 3HERWOOD’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Abe Lincoln in Illinois* (1938). He served as regional director for the Federal Theatre Project,* but resigned when CENSORSHIP was threatened. Rice wrote two memoirs, The Living Theatre (1959) and Minority Report (1963), was a founder of the Playwrights’ Company* in 1938, and he was an outspoken opponent of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Communist “witch hunt” blacklisting of theatre and film writers. RICHARD CARVEL. This four-act Edward E. Rose drama was PRO DUCED by Charles Frohman at the Empire Theatre, where it opened on 11 September 1900 for 128 performances. Based on a Winston Churchill novel, the play STARRED John Drew in a rare departure from drawing-room COMEDY. In this swashbuckling 18th-century tale set in England and colonial America, Drew, whom CRITICS considered too old for the role, played a young man overcoming imprisonment for debt and a kidnapping by pirates to win the love of a beautiful woman before joining the navy under the legendary John Paul Jones. RICHARDSON, LEANDER (1856?–1918). The eminent newspaperman had many theatrical connections. He worked as press representative for William A. Brady, edited his own weekly Dramatic News, served as drama CRITIC for the New York Morning Telegraph, wrote for VARIETY, contributed theatre news to various dailies, and wrote plays. According to Green and Laurie, Richardson “was highly respected for both his integrity and his honesty. He engaged in several

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fist fights with actors who resented his notices, and was entrusted with backstage confidences by Broadway producers who knew he would not betray them” (117). His plays included The Nominee (1891), a vehicle for Nat C. Goodwin. RICHARDSON, WILLIS (1889–1977). Born in Wilmington, North Carolina, Willis Richardson moved to Washington, D.C., with his family and worked as a clerk in the U.S. Department of Engraving and Printing. Richardson’s first play, The Deacon’s Awakening, was published in Crisis magazine. He became the first !FRICAN!MERI CAN PLAYWRIGHT to have a nonMUSICAL work on "ROADWAY when his one-act folk drama The Chip Woman’s Fortune (1923) was presented at the Frazee Theatre under the auspices of the Lafayette Theatre following performances at Chicago’s Ethiopian Art Theatre. Richardson’s play Mortgaged was published in The New Negro in 1925, and that same year he won Crisis magazine’s playwriting contest with Compromise, the first play by a black writer staged by Cleveland’s Charles Gilpin Players. He won the Crisis award again in 1926 for Boot-Black Lover and in 1928 was the recipient of the Edith Schwab Cup at Yale for his play The Broken Banjo. Richardson founded the Washington, D.C., wing of the KRIGWA Players, edited three collections of black-themed plays, and wrote 30 one-acts and five full-length plays focusing on African American history and black life in America. RICHMAN, ARTHUR (1886–1944). Born Arthur Reichman in New York City, the fiction writer-turned-PLAYWRIGHT got his first "ROAD WAY production in 1920 with Not So Long Ago, a period COMEDY with a stellar cast (%VA ,E 'ALLIENNE, Sidney Blackmer,* and 4HOMAS-ITCHELL) that ran for 137 performances. Undoubtedly his finest play was the 0ULITZER0RIZE–nominated Ambush (1921), in which a decent man experiences the repercussions of his wife and daughter’s more materialistic values. Richman’s other plays include A Serpent’s Tooth (1922), The Awful Truth (1922), The Far Cry (1924), All Dressed Up (1925), A Proud Woman (1926), and Heavy Traffic (1928). He was president of the Society of American Dramatists and Composers (1925–1927), president of the Authors’ League of America (1928–1930), and served on the board of the American Theatre Wing* 7AR Services.

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RICHMAN, CHARLES J. (1865–1940). Chicago-born ACTOR Charles J. Richman rose to leading man status with Augustin Daly’s company a mere two years after making his stage debut in 1894. For Daly, he appeared in The Countess Gucki (1896) and won plaudits in both 3HAKESPEAREAN and contemporary roles, after which he played heroic characters for David Belasco in Rose of the Rancho (1906) and The Fighting Hope (1908), as well as Bought and Paid For (1911) under William A. Brady’s MANAGEMENT. Richman played important roles in 2ACHEL#ROTHERS’s A Man’s World (1910) and, late in his career, made a successful transition to character roles and was well-received by CRITICS in Strictly Dishonorable (1929) and Biography* (1932). RIGGS, LYNN (1899–1954).† A native of Claremore, Oklahoma, Lynn Riggs attended the University of Oklahoma before writing about his home state. His first play, Big Lake (1927), PRODUCED by the American Laboratory Theatre with a cast including 3TELLA!DLER, was a failure. Riggs’s next play, Roadside (1930), despite DIRECTION by !RTHUR (OPKINS and SCENE DESIGNS by 2OBERT %DMOND *ONES, also failed. His reputation is largely based on Green Grow the Lilacs* (1931), a 4HEATRE'UILD production featuring (ELEN7ESTLEY, *UNE 7ALKER, Lee Strasberg,* and Franchot Tone.* It provided the source material for Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s* landmark MUSICAL, Oklahoma! (1943). Riggs’s subsequent plays, Cherokee Night (1932), Russet Mantle (1936), Cream in the Well (1941), Borned in Texas (1950), and The Year of Pilar (1952) had short runs. RINEHART, MARY ROBERTS (1876–1958). Born in Pittsburgh, Mary Roberts Rinehart, best known as a novelist, wrote COMEDYmysteries under the pseudonym Rinehart Roberts, and also wrote a few successful plays, most in collaboration with Avery Hopwood. These include Seven Days (1909), Spanish Love (1920), and, based on her 1908 novel The Circular Staircase, The Bat (1920). Without Hopwood, Rinehart wrote The Double Life (1906), Cheer Up (1912), and The Breaking Point (1923), also based on one of her novels, but these works proved less popular than her Hopwood collaborations. RIP VAN WINKLE. The play and character that remain so indelibly identified with the beloved comic character ACTOR Joseph

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Jefferson III were based upon the story by Washington Irving in which the kindly, hard-drinking Rip leaves his New England colonial village to go hunting in the Catskills, encounters Henry Hudson’s men and is put to sleep for 20 years, finally returning home to what has become an American town. There had been several dramatizations of the story before Jefferson began the process of creating his own version in 1860. It was the version written for Jefferson in 1865 by Dion Boucicault that held the stage during four decades. RIVES, AMÉLIE (1863–1945). A Virginian who married a Russian prince, Amélie Rives dramatized her own novel, The Quick or the Dead? (1888), and composed several blank-verse tragedies, including Herod and Miriamne (1888), Athelwold (1893), and Augustine the Man (1906). She demonstrated greater versatility in later plays, including The Fear Market (1916) and Allegiance, a 1918 collaboration with her husband Prince Troubetzkoy that centered on GermanAmerican frictions during World 7AR I, after which she adapted Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper (1920) and collaborated with Gilbert Emery on a successful romantic COMEDY, Love in a Mist (1926). Turning to ancient Irish legends for her source, Rives also wrote The Sea-Woman’s Cloak (1925). ROAD, THE.† “The road” generally refers to the vast web of legitimate and vaudeville theatres across the United States. Opera houses and theatres in cities and towns across America presented a steady flow of performances for the local public, while providing employment for ACTORS, stage technicians, and musicians, many of whom spent their careers on the road. Going on the road, or TOURING, was corollary to any theatre career, for residing and working steadily in any given large city was rarely possible. Even the top STARS needed to maintain their aura of stardom by appearing before live audiences all across America. Some actors and PLAYWRIGHTS found little success in New York, while garnering a vast following on the road. Relying on railroad connections, the road flourished from the 1880s until World 7AR I. By 1912, the Theatrical Syndicate wars had taken a toll on the road, which was further damaged by MOTIONPICTURES, radio, and automobiles. Ironically, the demise of the road came even as "ROADWAY was building to its peak year, 1927.

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In his autobiography Once a Clown, Always a Clown (1927), De Wolf Hopper commented on the usual pattern for touring companies to play “week stands in the larger towns, one-night jumps in between. This was routine in the theater from the time when the railroads first pushed West to the Missouri River until labor and transportation costs and the movies virtually destroyed the legitimate stage in all save a handful of the greater cities. Hundreds of actors of the first rank did not play New York at all, or for no longer than a week or two in a season. The road was the theater and the theater the road until about 1910. Plays customarily were financed and cast in New York, and launched there, because the boast that a play had come from a run at such and such a theater on Broadway was worth money at the box offices in the hinterlands. The Broadway engagement frequently was played to a loss, but what of it? Six months’ losses in New York could be retrieved usually in three months on the road” (15–16). ROAD TO ROME, THE. 2OBERT%3HERWOOD’s first important play, an antiWAR COMEDY, opened on 31 January 1927 for 392 performances. 0RODUCED by William A. Brady at the Playhouse Theatre with SCENEDESIGNS by ,EE3IMONSON, and STARRING *ANE#OWL and 0HILIP -ERIVALE, The Road to Rome chronicles the efforts of Amytis, wife of Roman dictator Fabius Maximus, to sneak behind battle lines to broker peace with the Carthaginian conqueror Hannibal. After much discussion, Amytis allows Hannibal to make love to her if he will promise to withdraw his army and give up his plan of sacking Rome. The long run achieved by The Road to Rome was due, in part, to a furor over the illicit sexual encounter between Amytis and Hannibal, but CRITICS were impressed with the theme of love’s power to defeat conquest. ROAD TO YESTERDAY, THE. Beulah Marie Dix and Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland collaborated on this four-act romantic satire produced by ,EE3HUBERT on 31 December 1906 at the Herald Square Theatre. Achieving 216 performances, it became somewhat better known as the source for Victor Herbert’s final operetta, The Dream Girl, in 1924. The Dix-Sutherland play STARRED Minnie Dupree as Elspeth Tyrell, an American girl in London who dreams she is in Elizabethan England. Kidnapped by a handsome rogue in her dream, Elspeth awakes to realize that the rogue of her dreams resembles a man she

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knows, thus kindling romantic feelings. Cecil B. DeMille DIRECTED a 1925 MOTIONPICTURE version of The Road to Yesterday. ROBARDS, JASON, SR. (1892–1963). Born in Hillsdale, Michigan, Jason Nelson Robards trained at the !MERICAN !CADEMY OF$RAMATIC!RTS. His noted "ROADWAY performances were in Lightnin’ (1918), Spite Corner (1922), and The Disenchanted* (1958). He spent most of his career in character roles in over 200 MOTIONPICTURES beginning in 1921. Late in his career, Robards also appeared in television* dramas. He was the father of ACTOR Jason Robards Jr.* and the grandfather of actors Sam and Jake Robards. ROBERTS, FLORENCE (1871–1927). A California native, ACTRESS Florence Roberts debuted in 1889 in San Francisco. Engaged by the Alcazar Theatre STOCK company as its leading lady, Roberts won acclaim in both 3HAKESPEAREAN and contemporary roles, with particular success in Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, and as the title character in Camille. Roberts was highly appreciated by Western audiences, who called her “Zaza” when she TOURED, and Roberts seldom appeared in New York, although she had a short run in The Strength of the Weak (1906). She acted in silent MOTIONPICTURES and toured South Africa at the end of World 7AR I. ROBERTSON, AGNES (1833–1916). Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, the ACTRESS came to the United States as the wife of Dion Boucicault and performed in his company until he renounced her for a younger actress. However, she had won a considerable following for her portrayals of heroines in light COMEDIES. She was small-boned and projected an air of cultivated sweetness that particularly appealed to audiences on the ROAD. ROBESON, PAUL (1898–1976).† Princeton, New Jersey–born Paul Bustill Robeson graduated from Rutgers with four varsity letters, then earned his law degree at Columbia University while performing on the side. After singing in the chorus of the all-black musical Shuffle Along (1921), he appeared in Ridgely Torrence’s Simon the Cyrenian. He ACTED in England and on "ROADWAY in Taboo (1922)

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and sang at the Cotton Club, but encountered a paucity of roles available for !FRICAN!MERICANS. Robeson rose to prominence in %UGENE/.EILL’s controversial drama, All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1924), after which he acted in the Provincetown Players revival of O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones in 1925 (a role he recreated in an early Hollywood “talkie” MOTION PICTURE in 1931). He also appeared in the short-lived Jim Tully and Frank Dazey drama Black Boy (1926) before scoring a major hit as Joe in Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.’s London production of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s* Show Boat in 1928. He played Joe again in the 1932 Broadway revival and in a classic 1936 screen version, making Joe’s song, “Ol’ Man River” his trademark. Later, as an outspoken civil rights activist, Robeson refashioned the song’s lyrics into an anthem of protest. He also earned success as a concert artist. Robeson played Othello in three productions: in London opposite Peggy Ashcroft, in the longest-running 3HAKESPEARE play on "ROADWAY (1943), and at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1959. Robeson’s leftist politics hampered his career after World 7AR II, but he inspired generations of African American actors and activists, leading Philip Hayes Dean* to create a one-man drama Paul Robeson* (1978), in which James Earl Jones* recreated highlights of Robeson’s extraordinary life and career. ROBINS, ELIZABETH (1862–1952). Born in Louisville, Kentucky, ACTRESS Elizabeth Robins debuted at the Boston Museum in 1885, after which she TOURED with several STARS, including Edwin Booth, Lawrence Barrett, and James O’Neill. She married actor George Richmond Parks in 1885, but he killed himself two years later. Her staunch feminism was kindled when she visited London in 1889, remaining there in order to act in (ENRIK )BSEN’s plays, including productions of The Pillars of Society (1889), A Doll’s House (1891), Hedda Gabler (1891), The Master Builder (1893), Brand (1893), Rosmersholm (1893), Little Eyolf (1896), and John Gabriel Borkman (1897). She was closely identified with Ibsen’s plays, but in the United States, aside from appearing as Hedda Gabler at the play’s American premiere in 1898, she was not seen in Ibsen’s work. Robins retired from acting in 1902, but her interest in Ibsen continued. In 1928, she wrote her reflections on his plays in Ibsen and the Actress, and referred to his work in other books including Theatre

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and Friendship (1932) and Both Sides of the Curtain (1940). An accomplished writer, she wrote novels under the pseudonym C. E. Raemond and wrote one of the definitive “suffragette” plays, Votes for Women (1907), which played 16 performances in New York in 1909, and a novel on the same subject, The Convert (1907). ROBINSON, EDWARD G. (1893–1973).† Born Emanuel Goldenberg in Bucharest, he immigrated with his family to the United States as a child and was educated at the City College of New York, Columbia University, and at the !MERICAN!CADEMYOF$RAMATIC!RTS. Robinson debuted with a STOCK company in Binghamton, New York in 1913, but he did not make a mark until joining the 4HEATRE 'UILD, ACTING in their productions of Peer Gynt (1923), The Adding Machine (1923), Androcles and the Lion (1925), The Chief Thing (1926), The Goat Song (1926), Ned McCobb’s Daughter (1926), and Right You Are, If You Think You Are (1927). He also appeared on "ROADWAY in The Firebrand (1924) and Henry Behave (1926), and coauthored (with Jo Swerling*) Kibitzer (1929), a mild success in which he also acted. After Robinson played a ruthless gangster in Bartlett Cormack’s The Racket (1927), he was brought to Hollywood where he had a distinguished career in MOTIONPICTURES. In Little Caesar (1930), he again played a vicious hood, but ultimately he achieved considerable range. He returned to the stage in 1951 to TOUR in Sidney Kingsley’s* Darkness at Noon* (1951) and to STAR on Broadway in Paddy Chayefsky’s* Middle of the Night* (1956). ROBSON, ELEANOR (1878–1979). English-born Elise Robson came to the United States as a child with her mother, ACTRESS Madge Carr Cook. While her mother was playing in STOCKin San Francisco in 1897, Robson was called upon to replace a sick actress in David Belasco and Henry C. DeMille’s Men and Women. As Eleanor Robson, she continued to act in stock. Cast as Bonita in the Chicago premiere of Augustus Thomas’s Arizona (1899), she repeated the role in the "ROADWAY production. Her skill and beauty caught the eye of PRODUCER George C. Tyler, who gave her a leading role in In a Balcony (1900), after which he presented Robson in Romeo and Juliet in 1903 and in her most memorable role, as the title character of the romance Merely Mary Ann (1903 and 1907). She also STARRED in Nurse Marjorie (1906), The Girl Who Has Everything (1906),

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Salomy Jane (1907), and The Dawn of Tomorrow (1909). When she married the wealthy August Belmont III, she retired from the stage, continuing to support the arts through a long charitable involvement with the Metropolitan Opera. She also collaborated with Harriet Ford to write the successful melodrama In the Next Room (1923). ROBSON, STUART (1836–1903). Henry Robson Stuart was born in Annapolis, Maryland, and made his ACTING debut in the Baltimore Museum’s 1852 parody Uncle Tom’s Cabin as It Is. During the 1860s and 1870s, he appeared in the companies of Laura Keene, Mrs. John Drew, and William Warren before teaming with actor W. H. Crane in the farcical hit Our Boarding House (1877), after which they appeared together in a variety of COMEDIES including Our Bachelors (1878), The Comedy of Errors (1878), Sharps and Flats (1880), and in Bronson Howard’s The Henrietta (1887), which the PLAYWRIGHT is purported to have written with Robson and Crane in mind. Robson’s partnership with Crane ended amicably in 1889. Robson bought Crane’s share in The Henrietta and continued to play Bertie. Augustus Pitou quoted Robson’s wistful observation about his own talent: “I have the soul of a tragedian with the high squeaky voice of a low comedian” (105). He continued to act in their hits with other actors and appeared with success in an 1893 production of She Stoops to Conquer and, later, in new vehicles including The Meddler (1898), which he wrote himself, and Edward E. Rose’s The Gadfly (1899) and Augustus Thomas’s Oliver Goldsmith (1900). #RITIC Austin Latchaw described Robson (Kansas City Star, 14 May 1935) as “tall, slender, eccentric in bearing, squeaky in speech, with mannerisms so pronounced he could not have differentiated his roles very much no matter how he tried or how he dressed.” ROGER BLOOMER. John Howard Lawson’s expressionist play opened on 1 March 1923 in an Equity Players production at the 28th Street Theatre for 50 performances. With a cast led by (ENRY (ULL, Roger Bloomer focused on the disillusionment with the commercialism and human greed the title character encounters in present-day urban society. Escaping to the rural Midwest, Roger falls in love with Louise, but loses her when he commits a robbery. Louise kills herself, and Roger is jailed under suspicion of having murdered her. Imprisoned, Roger is released from his demons through an

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expressionistic nightmare. Roger Bloomer was a comparatively rare attempt at expressionism on "ROADWAY. ROMANCE. This three-act romantic melodrama by Edward Sheldon opened on 10 February 1913 at Maxine Elliott’s Theatre for 160 performances. When Harry Putnam sheepishly tells Bishop Armstrong, his grandfather, that he is engaged to an artist, he expects the old man to condemn his choice. Instead, the Bishop recounts his time as a young rector when he met the great opera diva Margherita Cavallini and fell in love with her. Noting her past as another man’s mistress, Cavallini realizes that they are from different worlds and although she loves him, ends their relationship so that he might continue his work. Harry is moved by his grandfather’s story and when the evening newspaper arrives revealing that Cavallini has died, the curtain falls on the old Bishop gently touching some faded mementos of his long-ago love affair. Romance toured and was frequently revived well into the 1920s, including a successful 1921 "ROADWAY revival STARRING Doris Keane and Basil Sydney, but a 1948 Sigmund Romberg operetta based on the play, My Romance, failed to find favor. ROOF GARDEN. From the 1880s, the roofs of certain theatres were fitted up with a stage and seating to serve as outdoor performance venues, complete with decorative greenery. The prime motive for creation of such theatres was to draw paying audiences during the summer months when the regular theatres had to be closed because of the heat. High above the traffic noises, one could enjoy performances in the cool evening breeze. Stephen Burge Johnson’s important study signals nine important roof gardens on or near "ROADWAY: the Casino, Madison Square Garden, Manhattan Opera House, American Theatre, Olympia, Victoria and Republic, New Amsterdam, New Theatre, and Weber and Fields’ New Music Hall. Roof gardens, like the one on Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.’s New Amsterdam Theatre, could also be used for rehearsals. Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic entertainments staged on the New Amsterdam roof in a nightclub style were nearly as popular as the annual editions of the Ziegfeld Follies presented on the theatre’s main stage. It was at the Madison Square Roof Garden in 1906, during a performance of Mamzelle Champagne, that Harry K. Thaw shot and killed architect Stanford White out of jealousy over Evelyn Nesbit.

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ROSE, EDWARD E. (1862–1939). Edward Everett Rose was born in Canada, but was educated at Harvard University and became one of the most admired adapters of novels for the theatre, creating at least 50 adaptations, most of which were highly successful. These include The Prisoner of Zenda (1895), Under the Red Robe (1896), David Harum (1900), Richard Carvel (1900), Janice Meredith (1900), Alice of Old Vincennes (1901), and Penrod (1918). Rose also DIRECTED plays, scoring hits with The Pride of Jennico (1900) and Alias Jimmy Valentine (1910). See also PLAYWRIGHTS. ROSE OF THE RANCHO, THE. David Belasco collaborated with Richard Walton Tully on this popular three-act melodrama acclaimed for its lavish, boldly theatrical production. It opened on 27 November 1906 for 480 performances at Belasco Theatre, with Charles J. Richman as Kearney, a government agent sent to California to investigate the seizing of Spanish land by American developers. He falls in love with Juanita, ACTED by Frances Starr, the half-American daughter of a Spanish landowner. The villain Kincaid, attempting to steal the land of Juanita’s family, makes it appear that Kearney has aided him. She is hurt, but ultimately learns that Kearney has been protecting her family’s interests. They are wed despite her father’s desire that she marry a Spaniard. Cecil B. DeMille DIRECTED a 1914 MOTIONPICTURE version and a 1936 semi-MUSICAL version STARRED opera great Gladys Swarthout. ROUND UP, THE. Marc Klaw and Abraham Erlanger PRODUCED Edmund Day’s four-act drama, which opened on 26 August 1907 at the New Amsterdam Theatre for 155 performances, with a return engagement in 1908. Jack Payson has stolen the affections of Dick Lane’s wife and, ridden with guilt, he heads to the desert to find Lane. When he finally reaches Lane, Payson finds himself caught up in an Apache attack during which the friends renew their bond. However, Lane is killed and Payton, having salved his conscience, returns to Lane’s wife. A 1932 revival failed to find favor, but The Round Up became a successful MOTIONPICTURE STARRING Richard Dix in 1941. ROYAL FAMILY, THE. A witty lampooning of the Drew-Barrymore family theatrical dynasty, The Royal Family, which opened on 28 December 1927 at the Selwyn Theatre, mixes humor and sentiment

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in its portrait of an eccentric family of stage performers spanning three generations. 'EORGE3+AUFMAN (who DIRECTED the original production) and %DNA&ERBER collaborated on this valentine to the theatre and its lovable eccentrics. The Royal Family focuses on the Cavendish clan, led by aging matriarch Fanny, a legendary ACTRESS in fragile health. Fanny’s daughter Julie is a STAR, and Julie’s daughter, Gwen, is an ingénue of great promise. Mother and daughter must choose between marriage and career, while Julie’s swashbuckling, philandering brother Tony (a thinly disguised portrait of John Barrymore) hides out at the family home to avoid publicity over a Hollywood love affair gone awry. Other characters include Fanny’s actor brother Herbert and flamboyant impresario Oscar Wolfe. The COMEDY is laced with pathos, culminating in Fanny’s death even as she plans yet another barnstorming TOUR. The Royal Family is frequently revived, notably in 1975 with %VA,E'ALLIENNE as Fanny, a production filmed for television.* ROYLE, EDWIN MILTON (1862–1942). Born in Lexington, Missouri, Edwin Milton Royle attended Salt Lake City’s Collegiate Institute, Princeton University, the University of Edinburgh, and Columbia Law School. He gave up the legal profession to ACT in his first play, Friends (1892), with his wife, Selma Fetter Royle (1860–1955). As a PLAYWRIGHT, he was versatile, writing in every style from farce and MUSICALS to tragedy. Among his 30 or so produced plays are My Wife’s Husbands (1903), Marrying Mary (1906), and Launcelot and Elaine (1921). Royle’s most remembered work is his melodrama The Squaw Man (1905), which depicts the noble suicide of a .ATIVE !MERICAN woman to protect her white husband. RUBE. Originally a rube was a farmer character in a play. Later the term came to refer to any scene or show with a rural setting or atmosphere. The term was frequently employed, for example by 'EORGE-#O HAN, who used the term in his song lyrics as well as in shows featuring a "ROADWAY type dropped into a rural environment, as in his hit MU SICAL Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway (1906), among others. See also THOMPSON, DENMAN; YANKEE COMEDIAN. RUSSELL, ANNIE (1864–1936). English-born ACTRESS Annie Russell spent her youth in Canada, making her stage debut as a CHILD in a

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Montreal production of Miss Multon (1872), STARRING Rose Eytinge, after which Russell made her first New York appearance in the operetta H.M.S. Pinafore (1879). She spent some years on arduous TOURS to South America and Australia, but returned to New York to score a personal triumph in the title role of Frances Hodgson Burnett and William Gillette’s Esmeralda (1881). #RITICS and audiences appreciated Russell in leading roles in Elaine (1887), an adaptation of Tennyson’s Lancelot and Elaine, as well as in Bret Harte’s Sue (1896) and Clyde Fitch’s The Girl and the Judge (1901). She also played Puck in a 1906 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream when she established the Old English Theatre Company, with which she played roles in 3HAKESPEAREAN and Restoration COMEDIES. Russell appeared in Edward Sheldon’s controversial drama The Nigger (1909) and (ENRIK)BSEN’s Brand in 1910. She retired from the stage in 1918. RUSSELL, LILLIAN (1851–1922). Born Helen Louise Leonard in Clinton, Iowa, the beautiful ACTRESS-singer began her New York stage career as Nellie Leonard, but made her debut as Lillian Russell at Tony Pastor’s Theatre in 1881. Although most of her career was in vaudeville and MUSICALS, she did play some legitimate COMEDY roles during a period of vocal recuperation. These included Barbara’s Millions (1906), The Butterfly (1906), Wildfire (1907), and In Search of a Sinner (1910). Known popularly as “the American Beauty,” Russell used her celebrity to further the cause of WOMAN suffrage and to promote physical fitness. RUSSELL, SOL SMITH (1848–1902). A native of Brunswick, Missouri, Sol Smith Russell debuted as a CHILD, but won enduring popularity as a monologist and comedian, particularly with the Berger family of bell ringers and in the STOCK company of Ben DeBar. Russell joined Augustin Daly’s ensemble in 1874, but achieved his greatest success as a country bumpkin in Edgewood Folks (1880), a rube role he is reported to have played more than 1,500 times. Similar roles followed in A Poor Relation (1889) and A Bachelor’s Romance (1897), among others, all of which won Russell a large following on TOUR. RYLEY, MADELEINE LUCETTE (1865–1934). Born in London, she began her theatre career as an ACTRESS using the name Miss

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Lucette and making her New York debut in 1879. However, it was as a PLAYWRIGHT that she gained particular recognition. Among Ryley’s many PRODUCED plays of the 1890s and 1900s, American Citizen (1897) was particularly successful as a vehicle for Nat C. Goodwin, also featuring Maxine Elliott.

n3n S.S. GLENCAIRN. During the mid to late 1910s, %UGENE /.EILL wrote a series of one-act plays prior to his first full-length drama, Beyond the Horizon. Four of these REALISTIC one-acts, often referred to as O’Neill’s “plays of the sea,” were ultimately grouped under the title S. S. Glencairn, the name of the ship on which the four dramas, The Moon of the Caribbees (1918), Bound East for Cardiff (1916), The Long Voyage Home (1917) and In the Zone (1917), are set. The Provincetown Players first staged the plays individually or on bills with works by other PLAYWRIGHTS, but the bill called S.S. Glencairn premiered on 3 November 1925 at the Provincetown Playhouse for 105 performances. The bill was revived for 90 additional performances on 9 January 1929 and MOTIONPICTURE DIRECTOR John Ford adapted the plays to the screen as The Long Voyage Home (1940). SAG HARBOR. James A. Herne’s last play, a four-act COMEDY, opened on 24 October 1899 at Boston’s Park Theatre for 107 performances, after which it played for 76 performances at New York’s Republic Theatre beginning on 27 September 1900. #RITICS noted similarities between this play and Herne’s earlier Hearts of Oak (1880) and were mixed on its merits, but Herne’s performance as Captain Dan Marble was applauded and the influence of PRODUCER David Belasco was acknowledged in the REALISM of the visual aspects. Brothers Ben and Frank Turner vie for the affections of Martha Reese. She is in love with Frank, but marries Ben out of a sense of duty. Frank leaves, but returns two years later and persuades Martha to run away with him. Before they do, wise old Captain Marble tells them of the tragic consequences of a similar situation, persuading them to accept their circumstances. Sag Harbor provided Lionel Barrymore with one of his earliest roles as Frank, and Herne’s daughter, Chrystal Herne, was also in the cast.

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SALOMY JANE. Paul Armstrong’s four-act drama, sometimes known as Salomy Jane’s Kiss and based on a Bret Harte story, opened on 19 January 1907 at the Liberty Theatre for 122 performances, PRODUCED by Theodore A. Liebler. #RITICS appreciated Eleanor Robson as a young woman molested by a would-be lover and H. B. Warner as a mysterious stranger who murders the molester. Salomy Jane helps the stranger escape lynch mob justice even though she knows he had his own reasons for killing her attacker. The play had a brief return engagement beginning on 2 September 1907 and MOTIONPICTURE versions were released in 1914 and 1923. SALSBURY, NATE (1846–1902). Born Nathan Salsbury in Illinois, he became an ACTOR, PLAYWRIGHT, and MANAGER after service in the United States Army during the Civil 7AR. Following the war, he acted with STOCK companies before finding success in 1875 when he founded Salsbury’s Troubadors, a five-man COMEDY troupe, for whom he wrote farces, including The Brook (1875). He gained fame in 1883 as general manager of William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West show, a position he retained for the rest of his life. Salsbury was instrumental in adding sharpshooter Annie Oakley and Chief Sitting Bull to the company and planning international TOURS. One digression from the Wild West Show was Black America (1895), a mammoth production in which 300 black performers appeared in scenes depicting !FRICAN !MERICAN life, but despite Salsbury’s PRODUCING skills it was a short-lived failure. Salsbury is immortalized in the character of “Charlie Davenport” in the 1946 Irving Berlin MUSICAL, Annie Get Your Gun, and he was the father of artist Rebecca Salsbury James. See also FRONTIER DRAMA. SALVATION NELL. This three-act melodrama by Edward Sheldon opened at the Hackett Theatre on 17 November 1908 for 71 performances STARRING Minnie Maddern Fiske. Sheldon’s first important play was DIRECTED by Harrison Grey Fiske with an eye for richly REALISTIC details emphasizing the lives of New York’s immigrant underclass. Nell Saunders, a cleaning woman at a 10th Avenue saloon, becomes pregnant by street tough Jim Platt. Jim is imprisoned for killing a man attempting to seduce Nell and she loses her job. Major Williams of the Salvation Army recruits her, saving her from falling into prostitution. Eight years elapse and Nell has become a leading

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force with the Army. Jim, newly released from prison, is at first put off by Nell’s attempts to reform him. When she threatens to turn him in to the police when he plans a robbery, Jim beats her before running away in fear of returning to prison. Williams expresses his love for Nell, but she and her child await Jim’s return. Hearing her address a congregation, Jim is deeply moved and asks her to help him change. #RITICS applauded the play’s realism and its emphasis on exposing the squalid conditions of turn-of-the-century New York City slums. -OTIONPICTURE versions of Salvation Nell were released in 1915, 1921, and 1931. SALVINI, TOMMASO (1829–1915). The great Italian tragedian, born in Milan, was a STAR long before his first of five American TOURS, in 1873–1874, when he performed with Edwin Booth in a polyglot production. On that and subsequent tours (1880–1881, 1882–1883, 1885–1886, 1889–1890), Salvini performed in Italian. He never learned much English, though he came to love America. Best known for the unbridled passion of his Othello, Salvini proved daunting to ACTRESSES playing Desdemona’s death scene opposite him. Salvini’s son, Alexander (1860–1896), and his English-born wife, Maud Dixon, toured extensively with a repertoire of romantic dramas during the 1890s. SAM’L OF POSEN; OR, THE COMMERCIAL DRUMMER. Theatrical legend suggests that ACTOR M. B. Curtis commissioned George H. Jessop to write a play in which the central character is a heroic Jew. Jessop’s four-act play, with Curtis playing the title character, opened on 16 May 1881 for 96 performances at Haverly’s Theatre. Jewish salesman Samuel Plastrick hopes to marry Rebecca, whose family he knew in the old world. Rebecca and Samuel work at a jewelry store owned by Jack Cheviot’s uncle, Winslow. Jack, who also works at the store, is framed for a crime he did not commit by Frank Kilday. Winslow fires Jack, as well as Rebecca and Samuel, forcing Samuel to discover that Frank is the real criminal. Curtis played Samuel for many years and took credit for an adaptation of the play, cowritten with Edward Marble. SAMUEL FRENCH, INC.† Samuel French, a publisher of inexpensive editions of literary works, also published plays via his

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French’s American Drama series. From this he raised enough capital to buy out his major competitor, William Taylor and Company, in 1854. The company bearing French’s name provided all manner of theatrical services from its beginnings, but by the end of the 19th century it ultimately settled on publication of ACTING editions of plays and licensing stage works for performance. Along with Dramatists Play Service, Inc.,* it is the most significant company serving this purpose. SAPHO. Clyde Fitch’s adaptation of Alphonse Daudet’s 1884 novel (which had been dramatized by A. Belot and Daudet’s widow) opened on 5 February 1900 at Wallack’s Theatre. The play focuses on a poverty-stricken French girl, Fanny Legrand, who becomes a wealthy, notorious courtesan. She becomes the mistress of an artist who sculpts her in the guise of Sapho, the Greek poet, and this sensual work becomes the talk of Paris, enhancing Fanny’s fame. Referred to as Sapho, she is a much sought-after model by other artists and has other affairs, but eventually falls in love with a poor art student, Jean Gaussin, with whom she lives quietly in the country. Their idyll is interrupted by Fanny’s city friends, causing Jean to leave, but he is so miserable without her that he returns despite the realization that he will never be at peace about her past. Sapho closed abruptly on 5 March 1900 after 29 performances by order of the police, ACTING on complaints from Anthony Comstock’s Society for the Suppression of Vice. 0RODUCER and STAR Olga Nethersole was arrested for what was described as her attempt to “corrupt public morals,” and Nethersole’s MANAGER, along with the manager of Wallack’s Theatre and leading man Hamilton Revelle, were called before a magistrate’s hearing. Nethersole, however, insisted on a trial and antiCENSORSHIP forces, led by several prominent writers, protested her arrest. After a sensational three-day trial, Nethersole was acquitted after the jury deliberated for less than 15 minutes. Sapho reopened for an additional 55 performances and played several return engagements between 1900 and 1908 as part of Nethersole’s repertoire. Sarah Bernhardt appeared in a 1910 "ROADWAY performance on one of her frequent TOURS of the United States and Nethersole was seen in a 1900 MOTIONPICTUREof a scene from the play. There were several screen adaptations of Daudet’s novel, but none made use of Fitch’s play. See also SEXUALITYONTHE!MERICANSTAGE.

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SATURDAY’S CHILDREN. Opening on 26 January 1927 at Booth Theatre, -AXWELL!NDERSON’s COMEDY ran for 310 performances. Guthrie McClintic* DIRECTED Ruth Gordon* and Roger Pryor as the young married couple trying to live on $40 a week, because the man insists that his bride quit her job as a stenographer and let him support her. The situation occurs in a number of plays of the decade, including The First Year by Frank Craven, Tarnish by Gilbert Emery, and Two Girls Wanted by Gladys Unger. Anderson’s treatment of the subject brings the couple to divorce, so that they can then live as individuals and recapture the romance of their relationship. SATZ, LUDWIG (1895–1944). A beloved Yiddish theatre COME DIAN, Ludwig Satz debuted in 1918 and was greatly admired for his skill creating diverse characters through mastery of makeup and improvisation. S. M. Melamed described him as the greatest Jewish comedian of his time in a 1925 New York Times article, but he made occasional departures from comedy, as in The Messiah Is Coming (1937). Satz appeared on "ROADWAY in Potash and Perlmutter, Detectives (1926) and Money Mad (1937) and in a few MOTION PICTURES, including The Lunatic (1927), What a Mother-in-Law! (1934), and His Wife’s Lovers (1931), billed as “the first Jewish musical comedy talking picture.” SAVAGE, HENRY W. (1859–1927). 0RODUCER Henry Wilson Savage was born in New Durham, New Hampshire. He moved from real estate into theatre and maintained offices in Boston and New York. As MANAGER of Boston’s Castle Square Opera House, he ran a successful STOCK company. His "ROADWAY productions included The College Widow (1904), The Girl of the Golden West (1905), Madame X (1909), and many others. He was also distinguished as the first to present grand opera in English. SCANLAN, W. J. (1856–1908). Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, Scanlan became the leading Irish ACTOR and singer of his day. #RITIC Austin Latchaw remembered him as a performer with “real charm, with romantic fervor, and a beautiful voice to express it” (Kansas City Star, 30 April 1935). He made his New York debut in The White Slave (1882). In 1885, he PRODUCED Shane-Na-Lawn, which he wrote as a vehicle for himself. His greatest hit, Myles Aroon

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(1888), remained in his repertoire until his 1891 retirement, which opened the way for Chauncey Olcott. SCARBOROUGH, GEORGE (1875–1951). Born George Moore Scarborough in Mount Carmel, Texas, he studied law at Baylor University and the University of Texas. He worked as a journalist and Secret Service agent prior to finding success writing modestly successful melodramas, including The Lure (1913), At Bay (1913), The Last Resort (1914), What Is Love? (1914), The Heart of Wetona (1916), Moonlight and Honeysuckle (1919), The Son-Daughter (1919; coauthored by David Belasco), Blue Bonnet (1920), The Mad Dog (1921), and The Heaven Tappers (1927). SCARECROW; OR THE GLASS OF TRUTH, THE. Percy MacKaye’s four-act drama (labeled a “tragedy of the ludicrous”) opened on 17 January 1911 at the Garrick Theatre for 23 performances, having been performed at the Harvard University Dramatic Club in 1909. Despite its brief run, the play, based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Feathertop,” became a staple of little theatres and ACADEMIC drama groups and was revived off-Broadway* in 1953. Set in 17th-century Massachusetts, The Scarecrow focuses on a witch seeking revenge. She transforms a scarecrow into a man she calls Lord Ravensbane and sends him to the house of Merton, a man who had betrayed her love. Ravensbane courts Merton’s niece, Rachel, who is loved by Richard Talbot. Talbot exposes Ravensbane, who has developed a compassionate heart. To undo the witch’s plans, Ravensbane destroys a brimstone-burning pipe and dies performing this selfless act. A 1972 public television* version of The Scarecrow STARRED Gene Wilder* and Blythe Danner.* SCENE DESIGN.† Scene design did not truly emerge as a distinct artistic contribution to theatre production until late in the 19th century, a development accelerated by the New Stagecraft in the 1910s. 2OBERT%DMOND*ONES was exemplary in his ability to design LIGHTING and COSTUMES, as well as settings, for all manner of plays, contemporary (%UGENE/.EILL) and classic (3HAKESPEARE). Before Jones and others of his generation, stage scenery had evolved from flat, painted LITERALISM to an extreme three-dimensional RE ALISM exemplified by David Belasco’s productions. Jones’s impres-

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sionistic approach, inspired by European designers, inspired the next generation of designers: ,EE 3IMONSON, *O -IELZINER, $ONALD /ENSLAGER, and others. See also JOSEPH URBAN. SCENE-PAINTING. The earliest American publication on scenepainting, according to Warren C. Lounsbury (xvii), was A Practical Guide to Scene Painting and Painting in Distemper (ca. 1883) by F. Lloyds, who described techniques, equipment, and SCENEDESIGN elements. Most colors had to be purchased as lumps to be crushed or else ground down with a palette knife in water. Some form of glue or “size” had to be mixed with the water as a binder. A good summary of the art of the scene painter appears in Claude Bragdon’s More Lives Than One (1938, 205): “First, the linen- or canvas-covered flats are arranged vertically on the paint-frame, a gigantic easel, sliding up and down through a slit running the entire length of the floor. The design is then drawn in charcoal, enlarged from the scenic designer’s sketch. The paint (opaque water-color with an admixture of liquid glue) is laid on rapidly with broad, flat brushes. To give tone, texture, ‘life,’ the painted surfaces are either spattered with a brush, stippled with a sponge, or rolled with a tightly twisted damp cloth. Sometimes the flats are laid out horizontally, free of the floor, and drenched with dashed-on pails of water, or paint of a different colour, causing the pigments to mingle and deposit themselves in delightful, sometimes unpremeditated ways. Silver or bronze powder, sparingly sprinkled on the still wet canvas, relieves the deadness of dark hues. For curtains and cycloramas dye is used instead of paint, which would stiffen the canvas and flake off. Effects of extraordinary richness are obtained by the use of so-called broken colour, where the mixing takes place in the eye of the beholder, instead of on the surface seen.” See also BERGMAN’S STUDIO; SCENERY. SCENERY.† At the beginning of the modernist era, wing-and-drop settings were still common, as was the use of STOCK scenery. The rise of the combination system meant that many companies traveled with their own scenery specific to the show, usually realistic box sets with practical elements. For transport by railroad, scenic units had to fit through the door of a boxcar, and all professional designers knew that 5’9” measurement. Claude Bragdon, art director (set and costume design) for 7ALTER (AMPDEN during the 1920s, observed in his

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memoir More Lives Than One (1938, 200–201) that even an elaborate production would have no more than six weeks from conception to opening, and that the schedule was relentless: “The scenery must go direct from the builder to the scene-painter, and from him to the theatre. It must neither lag nor hasten at any point in the journey, on account of lack of storage space.” Major developments in scenery occurred with the rise of the New Stagecraft in the 1910s, as more impressionistic European designs pioneered by 2OBERT%DMOND*ONES, ,EE 3IMONSON, *O -IELZINER, $ONALD /ENSLAGER, and others dominated the era between the two world WARS. See also LIGHTING. SCHILDKRAUT, JOSEPH (1895–1964).† Born in Vienna as the son of German ACTOR Rudolph Schildkraut, Joseph Schildkraut came to New York with his father and Rudolph became a celebrated Yiddish theatre actor. Joseph Schildkraut had studied with -AX 2EINHARDT in Germany and made his earliest appearances performing in Yiddish. His first major roles were for the 4HEATRE 'UILD, including the amoral carnival barker in Ferenc Molnár’s Liliom (1921) and as Benvenuto Cellini in The Firebrand (1924). He joined %VA ,E 'ALLIENNE’s #IVIC 2EPERTORY4HEATRE and appeared in MOTION PICTURES beginning in the silent era. Schildkraut returned to "ROADWAY periodically, most notably in Clash by Night* (1941), Uncle Harry* (1942), The Cherry Orchard (1944), The Green Bay Tree (1951), and The Diary of Anne Frank* (1955) as Otto Frank, a role he repeated in the 1959 screen version. SCHILDKRAUT, RUDOLPH (1862–1930). Born in Constantinople, Rudolph Schildkraut ACTED for -AX 2EINHARDT in Germany and Austria, scoring a notable success as King Lear and appearing in German MOTIONPICTURES. He immigrated to New York to become a leading man with the German-language Irving Place Theatre in 1910, after which he acted frequently in Yiddish theatre, most notably as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. Schildkraut had his greatest success in Sholom Asche’s God of Vengeance (1924), which he first played in Yiddish, but later performed in English for a Provincetown Players production on "ROADWAY. Schildkraut also appeared in Reinhardt’s New York production of The Miracle (1924) and in Hermann Bahr’s The Mongrel (1924). Schildkraut was the father of actor *OSEPH3CHILDKRAUT.

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SCHWARTZ, MAURICE (1890–1960). Born in Sedikor, Russia, Maurice Schwartz came to the United States in 1901 to act in Yiddish theatre in Baltimore. He had considerable TOURING experience before joining David Kessler’s German-language company in 1912. At the outbreak of World WAR I, such theatres became unpopular, leading Schwartz to take over MANAGEMENT of the Irving Place Theatre, rechristened the Yiddish Art Theatre, a company he ran until 1950. Schwartz’s flamboyant ACTING style, coupled with a resonant voice and fierce intellectualism, won him the label of the “John Barrymore of Yiddish Theatre.” The Yiddish Art Theatre’s productions included Schwartz’s adaptations of I. B. Singer’s The Brothers Ashkenazi and Yoshe Kalb, and Sholom Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman, a particular triumph for Schwartz who also played the role in a MOTION PICTURE. Several YAT productions transferred to "ROADWAY, including If I Were You (1931), Bloody Laughter (1931), Wolves (1932), Yoshe Kalb (1933), The Water Carrier (1936), Borderline (1937), and Conscience (1952). SCOTT, CYRIL (1866–1945). Born in Banbridge, County Down, Ireland, the ACTOR made his stage debut in Paterson, New Jersey, in The Girl I Love in 1883. He TOURED with Minnie Maddern’s company (before she was Mrs. Fiske), performed a season with Richard Mansfield in 1886, supported Lotta Crabtree in The Little Detective and Pawn Ticket 210 in 1887, and acted with E. H. Sothern in Lord Chumley at the Lyceum in 1888. His list of "ROADWAY credits includes Shenandoah (1890), The Lost Paradise (1891), The Girl I Left Behind Me (1892), Dr. Syntax (1895) with De Wolf Hopper, The Heart of Maryland (1895), The Circus Girl (1897), The Lottery Man (1909), and many more. His memberships included the Lambs, the Players, and the !CTORS&UNDOF!MERICA. SEARS, ZELDA (1873–1935). Born Zelda Paldi in Brockway, Michigan, she went on the stage as Zelda Sears in 1896 in COMEDY roles in several Clyde Fitch plays, including Lovers’ Lane (1901), The Truth (1907), and The Blue Mouse (1908), as well as James Forbes’s The Show Shop (1914). Sears moved from ACTING to writing in the 1920s, finding success writing books and lyrics for MUSICALS, including Lady Billy (1920), The Clinging Vine (1922), The Magic Ring (1923), Lollipop (1924), and A Lucky Break (1925)

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before turning to MOTION PICTURE writing and a half-dozen film appearances. SECOND. As in a duel, the second could step in to cover for the leading man, but otherwise played a strong supporting role. In every line of business for which two or more ACTORS were employed, the second deferred to the principal. A STOCK company might include a second heavy, a second low COMEDIAN, a second old man, and (perhaps doubling as a low comedienne) a second old WOMAN. According to Gladys Hurlbut in Next Week—East Lynne!, “the thing to look for when you hired second people was a slight case of menace. If a man suggested betrayal more than rescue, he was a second man type, and if a girl was too tall for soubrettes and you could picture her as a correspondent, then she was a second woman. . . . Second people were often very good actors and popular too. . . . The second woman got some fat parts but not too many. She played the rough comedy leads, like the Florence Moore farces that were too naughty for the little leading lady, and I had to fight to get Craig’s Wife away from the second woman because the management thought it would hurt my popularity to be so mean all week” (1950, 154–55). SECOND MAN, THE. 3."EHRMAN’s first "ROADWAY play, a threeact COMEDY PRODUCED by the 4HEATRE'UILD and STARRING !LFRED ,UNT and ,YNN &ONTANNE, The Second Man opened on 11 April 1927 at the Guild Theatre for 178 performances. #RITICS carped about its slim plot, but most reviewers were dazzled by Behrman’s wit and language. Pleasure-seeking writer Clark Story is set to marry wealthy Mrs. Kendall Frayne, but he learns that Monica, a young woman with whom he has had a previous relationship, is pregnant. Clark initially accepts the necessity of marrying Monica, despite the fact that she is engaged to another man, but both eventually realize they are not right for each other. Monica goes back to her intended and Clark merrily returns to Mrs. Frayne, who accepts his free-and-easy ways. SECRET SERVICE. This four-act romantic melodrama, which opened on 5 October 1896 at the Garrick Theatre, was PRODUCED by Charles Frohman. It is set during the last days of the American Civil 7AR. It ran for 176 performances and proved to be the only vehicle written by and STARRING William Gillette that rivaled the

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enduring popularity of his Sherlock Holmes (1899). Northern agent Dumont is operating in disguise as Captain Thorne, a Confederate officer. His spying in Richmond is hampered by his growing affection for Edith Varney, a young Southern woman who obtains for him a commission as major in the Confederate army. Arrelsford, an officer from the War Office (and rival for Edith’s affections), suspects Thorne and obstructs his spying, but when Edith learns Thorne’s true identity she attempts to aid his escape despite conflicted loyalties. Thorne refuses her assistance in a highly charged telegraph office scene in which Thorne and Edith find their loyalties tested. He withdraws information he was sending to the North that would lead to a devastating attack on the city and, chastened by Edith’s love, Thorne allows himself to be arrested. She promises to await his release at the inevitable conclusion of the war. Secret Service is rarely revived, but a 1976 Phoenix Theatre* production starring John Lithgow* and Meryl Streep* was adapted for public television.* SELWYN, ARCH (1877–1959). Born Archibald Selwyn in Canada, he followed his brother, Edgar, to New York. Edgar, an ACTOR, secured Selwyn a position working in the Herald Square Theatre box office. The brothers branched out in the ticket brokerage business and eventually partnered with Elisabeth Marbury and John Ramsay to create the American Play Company. The brothers also set up as PRODUCERS, building three theatres (Apollo, Selwyn, and Times Square) and Selwyn and Company staged many popular plays and MUSICALS between 1912 and 1924, including Within the Law (1912), Under Cover (1914), Fair and Warmer (1915), the first 0ULITZER 0RIZE–winning play, Jesse Lynch Williams’s Why Marry? (1917), Smilin’ Through (1919), The Circle (1923), and *ANE#OWL’s Romeo and Juliet (1923), among others. Selwyn and his brother went their separate ways after 1924, but he continued to produce on his own, including Noël Coward’s* Easy Virtue (1925) and This Year of Grace (1928), and, in partnership with Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., he produced Coward’s operetta Bitter Sweet (1929). Most of his later productions were failures, with the exception of Revenge with Music (1934). SELWYN, EDGAR (1875–1944). Born in Cincinnati, ACTOR, PRO DUCER, and PLAYWRIGHT Edgar Selwyn debuted as an actor in William Gillette’s Secret Service (1896). He wrote the melodramas

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Pierre of the Plains (1908) and The Arab (1911) before establishing Selwyn and Company with his younger brother, Arch, in 1912. They produced popular plays and MUSICALS, including the first 0ULITZER 0RIZE–winning play, Jesse Lynch Williams’s Why Marry? (1917), but the brothers dissolved their partnership in 1924, after which Selwyn continued producing, including Gentleman Prefer Blondes (1926), The Barker (1927), and the George and Ira Gershwin musical, Strike Up the Band (1930). His final production was The Wookey (1941), after which Selwyn retired. SENATOR, THE. Sydney Rosenfeld was prevailed upon to finish this four-act COMEDY when author David D. Lloyd died before completing it. 3TARRING W. H. Crane and Georgiana Drew Barrymore, The Senator opened on 13 January 1890 at the Star Theatre, where it ran for 119 performances and spawned a 1915 silent MOTIONPICTURE version. Crane played Senator Hannibal Rivers, who wins the affections of a young woman bethrothed to a philandering Austrian count through the efforts of a flirtatious widow, played by Barrymore, and a government claim dating to the 7AR of 1812. SERVANT IN THE HOUSE, THE. Charles Rann Kennedy’s fiveact morality play won approval from CRITICS when it opened on 23 March 1908 at the Savoy Theatre in a Henry Miller production for 80 performances. It returned to the Savoy for an additional month of performances in October 1908. Manson, played by 7ALTER(AMPDEN, is a mysterious servant dressed in Eastern garb working for Reverend Smythe, whose snobbish, judgmental family is struggling to rebuild their crumbling church and dealing with the demands of several individuals requiring their assistance. The clergyman’s family is brought together through the quiet wisdom and compassion exuded by Manson, the embodiment of applied religious ethics. Kennedy employed the novel device of continuous action despite a five-act structure. The Servant in the House was revived four times (1918, 1921, 1925, 1926) with Hampden returning to the role at his own theatre in the last of these. Jean Hersholt played Manson in a 1921 MOTIONPICTURE version. SEVEN DAYS. Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood collaborated on this three-act farce, a major hit when it opened on 10 November 1909 at the Astor Theatre for 397 performances. Seven

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Days was adapted into the 1919 MUSICAL Tumble In, and MOTION PICTURE versions were released in 1914 and 1925. When James Wilson attempts to hide his divorce from a visiting aunt, he persuades a woman friend to pretend to be his wife, setting up innumerable farcical situations. &LORENCE2EED appeared as a fortune-teller who believes that a burglar is loose in Wilson’s house. SEVEN KEYS TO BALDPATE. Adapted by 'EORGE-#OHAN from an Earl Derr Biggers novel, Seven Keys to Baldpate became one of Cohan’s most popular nonMUSICAL works and one of his most enduring accomplishments. Billy Magee, a mystery writer staying at the Baldpate summer hotel, wagers that he can write a novel within 24 hours. Six intruders interrupt Billy’s efforts as they attempt to gain access to the hotel’s safe with duplicate keys. Billy finally completes his novel, and it is revealed that the intruders, including a young WOMAN reporter Billy has fallen in love with, are ACTORS playing his story. This staple of summer STOCK and ACADEMIC theatres opened on 22 September 1913 at the Astor Theatre, where it ran for 320 performances, and Cohan himself STARRED in a brief 1935 "ROADWAY revival and in a 1917 MOTIONPICTURE version. There were no less than six other screen adaptations between 1916 and 1947. 7–20–8; OR, CASTING THE BOOMERANG. Augustin Daly’s ACTING troupe, John Drew, James Lewis, Ada Rehan, and Mrs. G. H. Gilbert, won favor in his four-act COMEDY based on F. von Schoethan’s Die Schwabenstreich, which is credited with saving Daly’s company from bankruptcy. It opened on 24 February 1883 for 49 performances, but was revived often and TOURED successfully. The title refers to a number on a painting, Portrait of a Lady, that captivates two men, Courtney Corliss and Lord Lawntennis. The image’s real name is Flos Bargiss and the men track her to her father’s house where they vie for her affections while Flos’s mother, Mrs. Bargiss, publishes love poems her husband sent her, not realizing they are 3HAKESPEARE. Bargiss is forced to buy up all of the published copies while Flos decides in favor of Corliss before it is realized that Lawntennis only wants to purchase the dog sitting beside Flos in the painting. SEVENTEEN. Stanislaus Stange and Stannard Mears based their fouract COMEDY on Booth Tarkington’s popular novel of the same name.

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0RODUCED by Stuart Walker, Seventeen opened on 22 January 1918 for 225 performances. Capturing small-town Indiana life, the simple plot focuses on the machinations of teenager Willie Baxter, who is in love with Lola Pratt, a baby-talking local girl. Willie runs into trouble when he steals his father’s tuxedo to impress Lola. A MOTION PICTURE adaptation of Tarkington’s novel appeared in 1916, prior to this stage adaptation, and, a subsequent 1940 movie featured Jackie Cooper. A MUSICAL adaptation appeared on "ROADWAY in 1951. SEVENTH HEAVEN. 0RODUCED by *OHN'OLDEN at Booth Theatre, this three-act Austin Strong drama was a major hit despite complaints regarding its sentimentality. Opening on 30 October 1922, Seventh Heaven ran for a phenomenal 704 performances. (ELEN -ENKEN, whose touching performance was admired by CRITICS, played Diane, a street urchin saved from prostitution by Chico, a street sweeper. He falls in love with Diane and takes her to his seventh-floor garret that becomes their “seventh heaven.” Deeply in love, Diane and Chico are parted when he is sent to war. When Diane learns that Chico has been killed, she despondently falls into the arms of another man, Brissac. However, a blinded Chico returns and cannot see Brissac, so he and Diane are reunited. The play was as successful on TOUR as on "ROADWAY, and Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell STARRED in a hugely popular 1927 MOTIONPICTURE version, remade in 1937 with Simone Simon and James Stewart. A 1955 Broadway MUSICAL adaptation failed. SEX. One of the most scandalous stage works to reach "ROADWAY in the 1920s, Sex was a vehicle Mae West wrote for herself under the pseudonym Jane Mast. Its initial production on 26 April 1926 at Daly’s Theatre resulted in an impressive 375-performance run, due in large part to publicity surrounding West’s arrest for indecency and a citywide poster campaign exploiting the play’s title after newspapers refused to run ADVERTISEMENTS. West played Margie La Mont, whose crooked boyfriend drugs a rich woman who accuses Margie of robbing her, despite Margie’s attempt to prevent the theft. Angered, and resenting the inherent snobbery of this upper-class woman, street-smart Margie seduces the woman’s son for revenge. #RITICS unanimously condemned the play, but audiences flocked to see it.

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Although American theatre was prone to romanticized plays prior to 1930, frank discussion or exploitation of SEXUALITY was taboo except in MUSICAL comedies, where scantily clad chorines were an accepted fixture. West set out to break long-held taboos through humorous and melodramatic depictions of sexuality, always with herself as the central temptress who is usually good-hearted despite an unconventional lifestyle and questionable morality. West’s 1927 play, The Drag, may have been the first American play to depict homosexuality in its drag ball scene, but that play failed to open in New York, in part due to the ensuing scandal, as well as that which Sex had created the previous year. Despite the failure of The Drag, West continued to please audiences with subsequent plays, particularly Diamond Lil (1928), and in a series of popular MOTIONPICTURES in the 1930s. See also CENSORSHIP. SEXUALITY ON THE AMERICAN STAGE.† The depiction of sexuality on the American stage has always been fraught with controversy, challenging PLAYWRIGHTS, ACTORS, PRODUCERS, and CENSORS, not to mention audiences. By the middle of the 19th century, attention was focused on the revelation of the female form as most vividly exemplified by Adah Isaacs Menken’s illusion of nudity in Mazeppa (1861), which simultaneously scandalized and titillated audiences. From 1880 to 1930, the focus shifted from nudity (it was generally not permitted, although MUSICALS and burlesque featured scantily clad chorus girls throughout this period) to frank discussions of life’s realities, including sexuality, in the plays of (ENRIK)BSEN, 'EORGE "ERNARD 3HAW, and a few of their contemporaries. The earliest productions of these plays in American theatres inspired considerable controversy, mostly over depictions of marital infidelity, unwed mothers, social disease, prostitution, etc. American dramatists were slow to step into such areas except in the most moralizing ways. James A. Herne’s Margaret Fleming (1890), which dealt with a faithless husband forced to bring his out-of-wedlock child to his wife’s care, appeared in this period, although it was not widely seen. The plays of Ibsen and Shaw raised outcries, with producer Arnold Daly and actress Mary Shaw arrested for producing Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession in 1905, a play equating prostitution and marriage. Before World 7AR I, a few dramatists, including Edward Sheldon, touched on sexuality. After the war, sexual themes were often

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present, if only vaguely, in depictions of out-of-wedlock pregnancies, faithless spouses, and a somewhat more open awareness of sexuality. Interracial sexuality was occasionally depicted, although not without controversy, as in the case of Edwin Milton Royle’s The Squaw Man (1905), featuring a marriage between a white man and a .ATIVE !MERICAN WOMAN, but more significantly in %UGENE/.EILL’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1924), exploring a relationship between an !FRICAN!MERICAN man and a white woman. O’Neill received death threats and a significant censorship battle ensued. Mae West scandalized "ROADWAY with her play Sex (1926), in which she assaulted the hypocrisies of contemporary sexual mores, and her next play, The Drag (1927), delved into homosexuality. It so outraged the populace that it never opened in New York despite West’s box office clout. Explorations of heterosexuality were more frequently seen, but homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgender issues would not find dramatic voice until after the 1960s. SEYMOUR, WILLIAM (1851–1933). Born in New Orleans, William Seymour began a successful career as ACTOR, DIRECTOR, and stage MANAGER as a CHILD actor. In 1865, he became a call-boy at Booth’s Theatre and acted with Edwin Booth, Joseph Jefferson, Charlotte Cushman, and Edwin Forrest, after which he managed several theatres, including the Union Square Theatre, the Madison Square Theatre, the Metropolitan Opera House, and the Empire Theatre. His directorial credits include Clyde Fitch’s Barbara Frietchie (1899) and an all-STAR revival of Trelawny of the “Wells” in 1925. Seymour also managed the Boston Museum from 1879–1888 and was married to E. L. Davenport’s daughter, May. SHAKESPEARE IN AMERICA.† The plays of William Shakespeare (1564–1616) were frequently produced in North America from the earliest settlements by Europeans. Before American independence and well into the 19th century, English troupes, or British-trained ACTORS, included Shakespeare’s plays centrally in their REPERTO RIES. The first performance of Shakespeare in New York is believed to have been Richard III, staged in 1750 by Thomas Kean, but he used Colley Cibber’s bowdlerization of Shakespeare for his text. Resistance to English players in America came to a violent head in the Astor Place riot in 1849, pitting supporters of rivals William

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Charles Macready, an English actor, and Edwin Forrest, America’s greatest tragedian to date, against each other. !FRICAN!MERICANS made their first theatrical inroads when the African Grove Theatre launched careers for black Shakespeareans James Hewlett and Ira Aldridge. By the mid-19th century, Edwin Booth emerged as the premiere American Shakespearean, scoring a major triumph with his Hamlet, which ran for 100 consecutive performances in 1865. Shakespeare was central to the repertoires of Booth and other TOURING STARS: Thomas W. Keene, Lawrence Barrett, Frederick Warde, Louis James, Marie Wainwright, E. L. Davenport, Emma Waller, John McCullough, and Helena Modjeska. As European immigrants poured into New York beginning in the 1890s, foreign-language productions of Shakespeare were frequently seen, including notable Yiddish theatre performances by Jacob Adler in The Merchant of Venice and King Lear. In the first decade of the 20th century, E. H. Sothern and Julia Marlowe revived interest in Shakespeare on the ROAD with their elaborately staged productions, from their 1904 triumph in Romeo and Juliet until the 1920s. Charles Coburn and his wife Ivah Wills performed virtually the entire Shakespearean canon on tour with their company. Modern European staging techniques began to have an impact on Shakespearean production in the United States with English DIRECTOR Harley Granville Barker’s innovative A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1916 and others, but the New Stagecraft triumphed in the !RTHUR (OPKINS-2OBERT %DMOND *ONES collaborations on Richard III (1920) and Hamlet (1922), starring John Barrymore, whom many CRITICS considered to be the greatest Hamlet since Booth. SHAME WOMAN, THE. Lula Vollmer’s nine-scene drama opened on 16 October 1923 for 278 performances at the Greenwich Village Theatre. Vollmer, a North Carolina native, specialized in folk dramas of backwoods life. In The Shame Woman, she focuses on Lize Burns, a woman chastised by her neighbors because she had been violated by the boastful Craig Anson 20 years before. Known as the “shame woman,” Lize lives in her isolated cabin with only an adopted daughter, Lily. When Lize learns that Lily has been meeting a man, she feels compelled to reveal her own past as a warning. Lily runs away and kills herself, a fact Lize sadly accepts until she learns that Anson was Lily’s seducer. She kills him with a potato knife to prevent his

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bragging of his conquest of Lily. #RITICS praised the raw power of the play and its rich depiction of a rarely dramatized world. SHANGHAI GESTURE, THE. A four-act melodrama by John Colton PRODUCED by A. H. Woods, The Shanghai Gesture opened on 1 February 1926 for 331 performances at the Martin Beck Theatre. Mother Goddam, played by &LORENCE2EED, runs a Shanghai brothel and avenges herself on Sir Guy Charteris, her former lover who sold her into prostitution. With Charteris looking on, Mother Goddam sells a young woman to some junkmen, after which she reveals that the girl is her daughter by Charteris. When the girl later appears as a drug-addicted prostitute, Mother Goddam strangles her. Colton wrote Mother Goddam for Minnie Maddern Fiske, but she left the production during its rehearsals and Reed stepped in. #RITICS found the play lurid, but Reed’s acclaimed performance helped it to a long run in New York and on TOUR. Josef von Sternberg DIRECTED a 1941 MOTIONPICTURE adaptation and Bette Davis* played Mother Goddam in a 1970s television* film. SHANNON, EFFIE (1867–1954). Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the ACTRESS enjoyed a 70-year career that began with her billing as “La Petite Shannon” when she played Little Eva in a Boston production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin at age seven. In 1889, she became a member of David Belasco’s company and married leading man Herbert Kelcey, with whom she appeared in Clyde Fitch’s The Moth and the Flame (1891). Among her many credits are roles in Tangled Lives (1886), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1888), Shenandoah (1889), Her Lord and Master (1902), Widowers’ Houses (1907), Years of Discretion (1912), Pollyanna (1917), Under Orders (1918), Heartbreak House (1920), The Youngest (1924), She Stoops to Conquer (1924), Trelawny of the “Wells” (1927), The Admirable Crichton (1931), Morning’s at Seven* (1939), Juno and the Paycock (1940), and her last appearance in a three-year stint replacing Jean Adair* in Arsenic and Old Lace* in 1942. See also CHILDPERFORMERS SHANNONS OF BROADWAY, THE. This three-act COMEDY, written by ACTOR James Gleason, and PRODUCED by Crosby Gaige and Earle Boothe, opened on 26 September 1927 for 288 performances at the Martin Beck Theatre. Gleason played Mickey Shannon opposite

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his real-life spouse, Lucille Webster, in a lighthearted story of a vaudeville team who take over MANAGEMENT of a hotel, Swanzey’s House, when stage bookings dry up. Complications over a mortgage and a proposed airport that might improve the hotel’s sagging fortunes, drive the simple but pleasing action. The Gleasons STARRED in a 1929 MOTIONPICTURE version of The Shannons of Broadway. SHAW, GEORGE BERNARD.† See 3HAW ON THE !MERICAN STAGE. SHAW ON THE AMERICAN STAGE.† The slow, steady acceptance of the plays of George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) on the American stage began in the mid-1890s with his least controversial works: Arms and the Man, PRODUCED at the Herald Square Theatre in 1894, and The Devil’s Disciple, staged at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in 1897. Richard Mansfield was the driving force behind these early Shaw productions in the United States, but in the last days of the 19th century, ACTOR-MANAGER Arnold Daly offered a series of Shaw’s plays beginning with Candida, which he first presented in Chicago in 1899 (the play had been seen in two AMATEUR productions prior to this one) and later in Philadelphia in 1903, followed by a New York run later that year. Daly also produced other Shavian works, including The Man of Destiny (1904), You Never Can Tell (1905), and John Bull’s Other Island (1905). Mainstream audiences were clearly attracted to the vaguely scandalous reputation of Shaw, a socialist and WOMEN’s rights advocate inspired by the plays of (ENRIK)BSEN, but when Daly presented Shaw’s controversial Mrs. Warren’s Profession at the Garrick Theatre in October 1905, he and Mary Shaw, the play’s STAR, were arrested for indecency through the efforts of Anthony Comstock’s Society for the Suppression of Vice and a flurry of editorials in newspapers. Despite Comstock’s efforts, the play was performed and drew substantial audiences. Shaw’s plays were not always appreciated in England, as was the case with his Androcles and the Lion, which was hissed at its London premiere, but American audiences were receptive when Harley Granville-Barker staged it in New York in 1915. Grace George produced and starred in the American premiere of Major Barbara that same year and it became one of the most frequently revived Shaw plays in the United States. Other productions of Shaw’s works fol-

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lowed, as well as Oscar Strauss’s operetta based on Arms and the Man, a popular success called The Chocolate Soldier (1921). Most of Shaw’s plays premiered in England with United States productions following, but a few of his works had their initial performances in New York through the auspices of the 4HEATRE 'UILD, including Heartbreak House at the Garrick Theatre in 1920 and Saint Joan, also at the Garrick, in 1923. All told, the Guild produced American premieres of seven Shavian works, also including Back to Methuselah (1922) and The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1935). By 1930, Shaw’s plays were produced frequently on "ROADWAY and, later, became staples of REPERTORY theatres emerging after 1960 across the United States. Shaw’s influence on American drama can be seen to a greater or lesser degree in the works of a range of PLAYWRIGHTS, including Clyde Fitch, Langdon Mitchell, Edward Sheldon, %U GENE/.EILL, 2ACHEL#ROTHERS, 2OBERT%3HERWOOD, 0HILIP "ARRY, and 3."EHRMAN, among others, and many American actors made their reputations appearing in Shaw’s works. SHAW, MARY (1860–1929). Born in Boston, Mary Shaw debuted with the Boston Museum STOCK company in 1878. As a firebrand feminist, Shaw became a proponent of the plays of modernist dramatists (ENRIK)BSEN and 'EORGE"ERNARD3HAW. After appearing on "ROADWAY in David Belasco’s production of Ben-Hur (1899), Shaw’s early stage experiences were in support of several ACTRESSES who shared her feminist views or interest in Ibsen, including Helena Modjeska, Minnie Maddern Fiske, and Julia Marlowe, and she TOURED the United States in Ibsen’s controversial Ghosts in 1903. Shaw appeared in Hedda Gabler in Chicago in 1904 before STARRING in the first American production of Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession in New York in 1905, a production that landed Shaw and PRODUCER Arnold Daly in jail for indecency. Undaunted, she later appeared in 1918 and 1922 revivals of the play and usually acted in works focused on WOMEN’s rights and other controversial social issues, including Votes for Women (1909), Divorce (1909), and Polygamy (1914), and The Dickey Bird (1915). Shaw founded the Gamut Club, was a charter member of the Professional Women’s League, represented the United States at the International Congress of Women in London in 1899, and was a much sought-after lecturer.

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SHELDON, EDWARD (1886–1946). Edward Brewster Sheldon was born in Chicago to a wealthy family. He studied with George Pierce Baker at Harvard University and with Baker’s guidance presented his first "ROADWAY offering, the popular Salvation Nell, in 1908. Prior to the emergence of %UGENE /.EILL, Sheldon was one of a few American PLAYWRIGHTS demonstrating promise at merging modernist philosophy with contemporary popular drama. Salvation Nell was followed by the controversial, race-centered The Nigger (1909), after which The Boss (1911), The High Road (1912), and Romance (1913) seemed, in part, to fulfill his promise. However, other works, including Princess Zim-Zim (1911), Egypt (1912), and Sheldon’s adaptations of Song of Songs (1914), The Garden of Paradise (1914), The Jest (1919), and The Czarina (1922), leaned more toward the expectations of the commercial stage. Struck with illness that rendered him progressively blind and paralyzed, Sheldon thereafter worked with collaborators, including 3IDNEY(OWARD on Bewitched (1924), Charles MacArthur* on the controversial Lulu Belle (1926), and Margaret Ayer Barnes on the COMEDY Jenny (1929) and the thriller Dishonored Lady* (1930). SHENANDOAH. Charles Frohman’s first successful New York production was Bronson Howard’s rousing four-act drama set during the American Civil 7AR, but it was first PRODUCED in a poorly received version in Boston in November 1888. Howard’s revisions and a stronger New York production led to its triumph when it opened at the Star Theatre on 9 September 1889 for 250 performances. A sweeping melodramatic romanticism blended with social significance and touches of REALISM combined to make it one of the most popular plays of its day, although CRITICS carped about the complexity of its plot involving two West Point classmates who become officers in the opposing armies at the outbreak of the Civil War. Southerner Robert Ellingham is taken prisoner and his sister is arrested as a spy and brought to Kerchival West, who protects her because he is in love with her. Confederate prisoner Thornton stabs West, but to save himself attempts to frame him by claiming that West has been the lover of the wife of his superior, General Haverhill. Thornton believes he has prevailed when it is discovered that West has a locket containing a portrait of Mrs. Haverhill, but West says he took the locket from a young soldier, Lieutenant Bedloe, who turns

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out to be the Haverhill’s son fighting under an assumed name. Taken prisoner, Bedloe is exchanged for Robert and the two old friends continue to serve their respective armies until the war ends and they can be reunited with their lovers. The 1913 MOTIONPICTURE of the same name was adapted from the Howard play, but a 1965 film, and the 1975 "ROADWAY MUSICAL based on it, although similarly set in the Civil War, otherwise bear little resemblance to Howard’s play. SHERLOCK HOLMES. Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories of the Victorian detective are among the most durable sources for dramatic and MOTION PICTURE adaptation. Few treatments have attained the success of William Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes, PRODUCED by Charles Frohman on 6 November 1899 at the Garrick Theatre with Gillette himself as leading man. The adaptation conformed to the melodramatic techniques of 19th-century theatre as it focused on Holmes’s attempt to aid Alice Faulkner, a young woman in possession of the letters of her late sister, who died brokenhearted as a result of being jilted by a member of the royal family. Bent on avenging her sister, Alice is caught between attempts by the royals to save face and the unscrupulous Jim and Madge Larrabee, con artists who hope to secure the letters to demand a huge ransom from the royal family. Behind the Larrabee plot is the evil genius of crime, Dr. Moriarty, who is determined to outsmart Holmes. The resilient Holmes not only defeats the criminals, but restores the letters to Alice, with whom he has fallen in love. Sherlock Holmes won huge audiences, running for 256 performances in its original production, and Gillette spent much of his career playing the role in various TOURS and in a New York revival as late as 1931 and on radio. Other ACTORS have assayed Gillette’s role, particularly John Wood in a Royal 3HAKESPEARE Company revival in 1974 and Frank Langella* in a Williamstown Theatre Festival* production filmed for television* in 1981. Despite the fact that numerous other stage and screen versions of the Holmes tales have been popular, the troubled, erudite Holmes is forever associated with Gillette. SHERWOOD, ROBERT E. (1896–1955).† Robert Emmet Sherwood was born in New Rochelle, New York, and graduated from Harvard University, where he wrote and worked on theatricals for the Harvard Lampoon and studied with George Pierce Baker. Sherwood’s

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service with the Canadian Black Watch during World 7AR I led to his pacifist stance and mistrust of government. After various writing assignments with Vanity Fair, Life, and Scribner’s, Sherwood’s first important play, The Road to Rome (1927), was an antiwar COMEDY set in ancient times STARRING *ANE #OWL, but it was followed by more overtly commercial offerings, including The Love Nest (1927), The Queen’s Husband (1928), and This Is New York (1930). The tragic wartime romance of Sherwood’s Waterloo Bridge* (1930) was not well-received, but it proved enduringly popular in two MOTION PICTURE versions in 1931 and 1940. Sherwood’s post-1930 plays were his most important, including Reunion in Vienna* (1931), The Petrified Forest* (1935), and three 0ULITZER0RIZE–winners, Idiot’s Delight* (1936), Abe Lincoln in Illinois* (1938), and There Shall Be No Night* (1940). During World War II, Sherwood was a speechwriter for President Franklin D. Roosevelt and was appointed director of the Overseas Branch of the Office of War Information, but his postwar plays were less appreciated than his prewar works. SHIPMAN, SAMUEL (1883–1937). Born in New York as Samuel Shiffman, he began a PLAYWRITING career translating Jacob Gordin’s The Kreutzer Sonata (1904). Most of his plays were collaborations, including The Spell (1907; a rare solo effort), Elevating a Husband (1912; with Clara Lipman), The Friendly Enemies (1918; with Aaron Hoffman), East Is West (1918; with John B. Hymer), The Woman in Room 13 (1919; with Max Marcin), First Is Last (1919; with Percival Wilde), Crooked Gamblers (1920; with Wilde), Lawful Larceny (1922), Crime (1927; with Hymer), Scarlet Pages (1929; with Hymer), A Lady Detained (1935; with Hymer), and Behind Red Lights (1937; with Beth Brown). SHORE ACRES. James A. Herne’s four-act COMEDY, written in collaboration with his wife Katharine Corcoran Herne, opened at Chicago’s McVicker’s Theatre on 17 May 1892, after which it settled in at New York’s Fifth Avenue Theatre for 244 performances. Herne labored on the play in several versions titled The Hawthornes, Shore Acres Subdivision, and Uncle Nat. Particular praise was DIRECTED at Herne’s performance as avuncular Uncle Nat and the local color of its coastal Maine setting. A long New York run and five years on TOUR made a fortune for Herne, restoring a vast sum he had expended attempting

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to produce his controversial drama Margaret Fleming (1890), a play inspired by (ENRIK)BSEN’s REALISTIC social problem plays. Shore Acres, a domestic comedy, deals with Nathan’l Berry, “Uncle Nat,” a genial old man who has been ill-used by his brother, Martin, who married a woman Nat loved. Martin, keeper of the Berry Lighthouse, attempts to sell off family property, including a farm his mother is buried on, and stands in the way of his daughter, Helen, who is in love with a young doctor, Sam Warren. When Nat helps the lovers elope, they are caught at sea in a storm and Martin refuses to turn on the light to save them. Nat, rushing to the rescue, prevails in a fight with Martin and turns on the light, saving the lovers. Nat puts up his pension to save the family property, a selfless act which finally shames Martin into admitting his foolishness. Everyone goes to bed and, in one of the play’s most memorable scenes, Nat silently goes about the business of closing down the house for the night. -OTION PICTURE versions of Shore Acres appeared in 1914 and 1920. SHOWBOATS. Floating theatres were operating downriver on the Mississippi and Ohio rivers before the Civil 7AR, but the heyday of showboating came after mid-century as steam power allowed them to operate both up and downriver. Steamboats pulled separate boats fitted out as theatres. Eventually, some, including CIRCUS boats, became quite elaborate. From the Civil War to 1930, as many as 75 showboats operated on major American rivers. One of the leading showboat owners, Augustus Byron French, MANAGED five showboats (ADVERTISING some as “floating palaces”) between 1878 and 1901, pioneering the use of marching bands put ashore to attract the local community to the theatre. Another important manager in this period, E. A. Price, developed publicity devices, including calliopes and billboards, to call attention to the arrival of his theatres. The showboats featured all manner of AMUSEMENTS, from minstrels and variety acts to dramatic works, including the perennial melodrama Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Some operators PRODUCED 3HAKE SPEARE and other prestigious dramas, while others focused on “moral amusements” including lectures. E. E. Eisenbarth’s Temple of Amusement was renamed the Cotton Blossom and, under Ralph Emerson’s management, it presented "ROADWAY hits and popular melodramas until 1931. Showboats inspired %DNA &ERBER’s novel, Show Boat (1926), and the subsequent Broadway MUSICAL, Show Boat (1927),

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both presenting an epic story set on a Mississippi River showboat from the 1880s to the 1920s. The Great Depression and the arrival of sound MOTIONPICTURES significantly undermined the survival of the showboat phenomenon, although some operated as late as the 1940s. SHOW-OFF, THE. 'EORGE +ELLY’s three-act COMEDY opened at the Playhouse Theatre on 5 February 1924 for a remarkable 571 performances, followed by numerous TOURS and revivals, making it one of the most popular plays of its era. The 0ULITZER0RIZE committee selected it for the award, but Columbia University officials overturned the choice, selecting Hatcher Hughes’s Hell-Bent fer Heaven instead. In the lower middle-class Philadelphia home of the Fishers, news that their daughter Amy is in love with the ostentatious braggart Aubrey Piper sets off an uproar. Amy and Aubrey are married despite parental protests and the warning of Amy’s sister Clara that Aubrey will end up living in their house. Aubrey proves generally unsuccessful in his endeavors, a fact sarcastically remarked upon by his dour mother-in-law, Mrs. Fisher. When Aubrey borrows a car and crashes into a trolley car, it is left to Clara’s husband, Frank, to bail him out. Mr. Fisher dies and the family’s financial stability is in doubt, but Amy’s brother Joe is given $100,000 for an invention. When he informs the family that Aubrey had provided the necessary connections and muscled the backers into doubling Joe’s cut, Aubrey genially acknowledges that “a little bluff goes a long way sometimes.” All are impressed except a skeptical Mrs. Fisher, who remains unconvinced of Aubrey’s worth. Numerous revivals and STOCK productions, including a 1950 "ROADWAY staging ADVERTISED as the first “arena*” production in New York, abounded, and a 1967 revival STARRING (ELEN(AYES was well-received, as were MOTION PICTURE versions in 1926, 1934, and 1946. SHOW SHOP, THE. This four-act satire by James Forbes opened on 31 December 1914 for 156 performances at the Hudson Theatre in a Selwyn production. Zelda Sears played Mrs. Dean, a monstrous stage mother hell-bent on having her daughter Bettina STAR on "ROADWAY. Bettina is in love with Jerry Belden, but Mrs. Dean will not allow them to marry until her dreams for Bettina are realized. Jerry gives a producer $5,000 to stage a play certain to fail on its first

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night. The terrible play is a hit, however, forcing Bettina and Jerry to quit and marry, a decision Mrs. Dean finally accepts now that her dream has come true. 0ATRICIA#OLLINGE and Douglas Fairbanks were well applauded as the lovers and CRITICS appreciated the backstage humor. SHOW-STOPPER. A scene, song, or ACTOR is said to stop the show when the audience is so impressed that its applause momentarily prevents the performance from continuing. The term is most frequently applied to MUSICALS when a STAR and a great song inspires an overwhelming response. SHUBERT BROTHERS (SAM S. [1876–1905], LEE [1873?–1953], J. J. [1878?–1963]).† Levi, Samuel, and Jacob Szemanski were all born in Shervient, Lithuania, and all immigrated to the United States in 1882 when their family settled in Syracuse, New York. Americanizing their names to Lee, Sam S., and J. J. Shubert, they created a theatrical empire that bears their names over a hundred years after they bought the area TOURING rights to Charles Hoyt’s A Texas Steer (1894). Leading the way, Sam and Lee rented the Herald Square Theatre (and later, the Casino) and made a truce with A. L. Erlanger of the Theatrical Syndicate, allowing them to present Augustus Thomas’s Arizona (1900). Among the STARS of Shubert productions in their early years were Richard Mansfield, Sarah Bernhardt, and Lillian Russell. Within only a few years, the Shuberts managed to break the Syndicate’s monopoly, amassing a theatrical chain larger than any other. In 1905, Sam, the dominant partner, died in a train wreck after which Lee took over MANAGEMENT of their interests. J. J., who was more interested in staging productions, particularly operettas and MUSICAL comedies, left managerial tasks to Lee. Among the Shubert stars between 1910 and 1930, Al Jolson (1885–1950) was their greatest discovery. He starred in a long series of musicals at their Winter Garden Theatre beginning in 1911, among them La Belle Paree (1911), Vera Violetta (1911), The Honeymoon Express (1913), Dancing Around (1914), Robinson Crusoe, Jr. (1916), Sinbad (1918), Bombo (1921), and Big Boy (1925). Between their failed production of The Brixton Burglary (1901) and 1954, the Shuberts produced a remarkable 250 "ROADWAY productions, including Heidelberg (1902), Widowers’ Houses (1907), The City (1909), The

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Passing Show (1912), Ruggles of Red Gap (1915), Maytime (1917), He and She (1920), Blossom Time (1921), Artists and Models (first edition in 1923), The Student Prince (1924), and Countess Maritza (1926). Their principal New York theatres, the Winter Garden and the Princess, were seldom dark. The Shuberts were criticized for ruthless business practices, but they were also known to offer reduced rents to worthy productions or troupes struggling to make a go of it. SIBERIA. Bartley Campbell’s six-act melodrama divided CRITICS when it opened on 26 February 1883 for 40 performances at Haverly’s Fourteenth Street Theatre. Georgia Cayvan played one of two daughters of a Christian mother and Jewish father forced to flee oppression in the aftermath of the assassination of Czar Alexander II as political activists and Jews were persecuted. Despite its short run, the play remained popular in revivals and on TOUR until well into the 20th century. A 1905 revival ran for a month and a 1926 MOTION PICTURE version STARRED Alma Rubens and Edmund Lowe. SIDES. During the modernist era, ACTORS rarely saw the complete script of a new play they were to perform. Instead, each actor got the sides for his or her character: that character’s lines plus the three or four cue words preceding each line. Even after affordable Samuel French editions of plays became available for all, some old actors would retype their parts in the form of sides, because they felt that learning the role that way made them more alert on stage. SILVER CORD, THE. The 4HEATRE 'UILD production opened on 20 December 1926 at the *OHN 'OLDEN Theatre and ran for 130 performances. 3IDNEY (OWARD’s gripping portrait of a possessive, domineering mother (played by Laura Hope Crews) owed much to Freudian psychology. When her two adult sons bring home a wife and a fiancée to meet her, she begins maneuvering to drive the women away and keep her sons under her wing. But the wife proves a worthy opponent and manages to keep the elder son as her husband, while the younger son caves in to life with mother. SIMONSON, LEE (1888–1967).† Born in New York, Lee Simonson, along with 2OBERT%DMOND*ONES, .ORMAN"EL'EDDES, and *O -IELZINER, became one of the leading "ROADWAY SCENE DESIGN

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ERS of the years between the two world WARS. Simonson attended Harvard University, where he studied with George Pierce Baker, and his first designs were done for the Washington Square Players. Following military service in World War I, Simonson returned to become a founding member of the 4HEATRE 'UILD, designing settings for Jane Clegg (1920), Liliom (1921), He Who Gets Slapped (1922), R.U.R. (1922), From Morn to Midnight (1922), Peer Gynt (1923), The Adding Machine (1923), Man and the Masses (1924), The Road to Rome (1927), Faust (1928), Marco Millions (1928), and Dynamo (1929). After 1930, Simonson continued to design, but at a slower pace. In this period, he designed Elizabeth the Queen* (1930) and the 0ULITZER 0RIZE–winning Idiot’s Delight* (1936). Simonson’s design style owes much to the European modernist innovations known in America as the New Stagecraft and he wrote two important books on his design ideas, The Stage Is Set (1932) and The Art of Scenic Design (1950), as well as an autobiography, Part of a Lifetime (1943). SINNERS. William A. Brady PRODUCED this four-act /WEN $AVIS play at the Playhouse Theatre, where it opened on 7 January 1915 for 220 performances. #RITICS carped that the play was no better than the quickie melodramas Davis had written for producer A. H. Woods, but Davis himself considered it one of his finest works. The production was aided by !LICE"RADY’s performance as Mary Horton, a New Hampshire girl who leaves her mother for a try at New York. Her innocence is no defense for bad influences she encounters, and Mary indulges in behavior she must hide from her pious mother. When her mother becomes seriously ill, Mary returns to New Hampshire and endeavors to keep her moral lapses from her mother, despite the arrival of several of her New York friends. SIX-CYLINDER LOVE. William Anthony McGuire’s hit three-act COMEDY, which opened on 25 August 1921 at the 3AM ( (ARRIS Theatre, ran for 430 performances and became a TOURING and STOCK staple. Richard and Geraldine Burton are about to be evicted as the result of living beyond their income. To help with moving costs, they decide to sell their new car. The new bride living next door, Marilyn Sterling, sets about convincing her husband, Gilbert, that they should buy the Burtons’ car. However, this expenditure sets them on the

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same course that cost the Burtons their comforts. Matters are made worse when Gilbert’s boss, Mr. Stapleton, turns up unexpectedly and is so shocked by the Sterlings’ elaborate lifestyle that he fires Gilbert. After considerable effort, Gilbert manages to sell the car and convinces Stapleton to give him back his position. At this point, Marilyn indicates that a new vehicle will be required after all: a baby carriage. -OTION PICTURE versions of Six-Cylinder Love appeared in 1923 and 1931. SKELLY, HAL (1891–1934). Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Joseph Harold Skelley developed his COMEDY skills in the CIRCUS before making his legitimate theatre debut in Chicago in the MUSICAL The Time, the Place and the Girl (1908), after which he joined Lew Dockstader’s minstrel show. Although most of his "ROADWAY appearances were in musicals, he scored a major success in the George Mahker Watters and !RTHUR(OPKINS play Burlesque (1927) in the role of Skid, a dissolute comedian. Skelly appeared in 10 early sound MOTIONPICTURES, including an adaptation of Burlesque retitled The Dance of Life (1929). His post-Burlesque stage appearances, Melody (1933), The Ghost Writer (1933), Queer People (1934), and Come What May (1934), were all failures. He was killed when his car was struck by a train in Connecticut. SKIDDING. Aurania Rouverol’s mild three-act COMEDY opened on 21 May 1928 at the Bijou Theatre for 448 performances, capturing family life in its depiction of the relationship between a father, Judge Hardy, and his daughter, Marion, who breaks with her fiancé to aid her father’s reelection bid. In 1937, a MOTIONPICTURE version titled A Family Affair, STARRING Lionel Barrymore, inspired a series of popular Hardy family films with Lewis Stone replacing Barrymore and the focus shifted to Mickey Rooney as the incorrigible teenage son, Andy Hardy. SKINNER, CORNELIA OTIS (1901–1979).† Born in Chicago, the daughter of ACTOR Otis Skinner, Cornelia Otis Skinner was educated at Bryn Mawr before joining her father in his production of Blood and Sand (1921). She appeared in many plays, including Will Shakespeare (1923), Tweedles (1923), In His Arms (1924), White Collars (1925), Candida (1939), Theatre* (1941), The Searching

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Wind* (1944), Lady Windermere’s Fan (1946), Major Barbara (1956), and The Pleasure of His Company* (1958), which she coauthored with Samuel Taylor,* but Skinner gained enduring success with a long series of monodramas, including The Wives of Henry VIII (1931), The Empress Eugenie (1932), The Loves of Charles II (1933), and Paris ’90 (1952). SKINNER, OTIS (1858–1942). Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his father was a local minister, Otis Skinner began his long career at the Philadelphia Museum in 1877, followed by two seasons at the Walnut Street Theatre and small roles in productions STARRING Edwin Booth, Lawrence Barrett, and Joseph Jefferson. He joined Augustin Daly’s company for four years, after which he appeared with Booth and Helena Modjeska in a series of 3HAKESPEAREAN productions. In 1894, he achieved solo star status in His Grace de Grammont, followed by notable—and many critics felt flamboyant—performances in a 1901 revival of Francesca da Rimini, The Taming of the Shrew (1904), The Duel (1906), The Honor of the Family (1908), Kismet (1911), The Silent Voice (1915), Mister Antonio (1916), Pietro (1920), Blood and Sand (1921), A Hundred Years Old (1929), and his final New York performance in the title role of a 1933 revival of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. With his wife, Maud, he authored several books and Skinner was the father of ACTRESS-PLAYWRIGHT #ORNELIA/TIS3KINNER. SMITH, C. AUBREY (1863–1948). Born in England as Charles Aubrey Smith, he had a long ACTING career on stage and in MOTIONPIC TURES in the persona of a British gentleman. On stage, he appeared in The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith (1895), The Light That Failed (1903), The Runaway (1911), The Constant Wife (1926), The Bachelor Father (1928), and Spring Again (1941), and in a small role in Johnston Forbes-Robertson’s 1904 Hamlet. Smith became a respected character actor in Hollywood beginning in 1915. SMITH, HARRY JAMES (1880–1918). Connecticut-born Harry James Smith attended Williams College and Harvard University before embarking on a teaching career at Oberlin. In 1906, he left his ACADEMIC post for an editing job at Atlantic Monthly to pay the rent while he wrote plays. He scored a success with his first PRODUCED

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play, Mrs. Bumpstead-Leigh (1911), but his second, Blackbirds (1913), flopped. Smith had a major hit with the COMEDY A TailorMade Man (1917), followed by The Little Teacher (1918), but his career ended abruptly when he was killed in an accident serving with the Canadian Red Cross during World 7AR I. SMITH, WINCHELL (1872–1933). Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Winchell Smith inauspiciously commenced his theatrical career as an usher at the Herald Square Theatre where Richard Mansfield encouraged him to try ACTING. He debuted in a secondary role in William Gillette’s Secret Service (1896) and acted for several years in such plays as The New Clown (1902), The Two Schools (1902), The Girl from Kay’s (1903), The Man of Destiny (1905), and John Bull’s Other Island (1905), but within a decade became a highly successful PLAY WRIGHT and DIRECTOR. He won popularity with the farce Brewster’s Millions (1906), followed by Polly of the Circus (1907; coauthored by Margaret Mayo), Via Wireless (1908), The Fortune Hunter (1909), Love among the Lions (1910), Bobby Burnit (1910), The Only Son (1911), The Boomerang (1915; with Victor Mapes), Turn to the Right! (1916; with John E. Hazzard), and the highly successful Lightnin’ (1918; with Frank Bacon). He directed productions of his own plays, and works by others, including The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (1925), The Wisdom Tooth (1926), and The Vinegar Tree (1930). SNOW. The deadheads in a theatre audience were “snow.” SOCIETY DRAMA. The sophisticated COMEDIES of 0HILIP "ARRY in the 1920s–1930s best exemplify society drama, which focused on the values and fashions of the upper classes. Such plays might be highly charged dramas exploring class divisions or high comedies on social mores that showcased the latest styles in dress and home décor. 0LAY WRIGHTS as diverse as Clyde Fitch, 3."EHRMAN, 2ACHEL#ROTH ERS, 'EORGE3+AUFMAN, :ÚE!KINS, and others explored this terrain in their plays, as did European dramatists as varied as (ENRIK)BSEN, 'EORGE"ERNARD3HAW, Oscar Wilde, and Nöel Coward.* See also COMEDY; FOREIGNPLAYSADAPTEDTOTHE!MERICANSTAGE. SOTHERN, E. H. (1859–1933). Born Edward Hugh Sothern in New Orleans, the son of ACTOR E. A. Sothern, he was educated in England

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with hopes of becoming a painter. He chose acting instead and debuted in his father’s 1879 production, Brother Sam. After TOURING with John McCullough, Sothern joined Daniel Frohman’s Lyceum Theatre company for 10 years, scoring successes in The Highest Bidder (1887), Lord Chumley (1888), The Dancing Girl (1891), A Way to Win a Woman (1894), and The Prisoner of Zenda (1895). Following marriage to Virginia Harned, Sothern left Frohman in 1898 and STARRED for many years in 3HAKESPEAREAN productions, beginning with a 1900 staging of Hamlet. He began costarring with Julia Marlowe in 1904 in Romeo and Juliet, followed by innumerable Shakespeare productions and tours as “Sothern and Marlowe,” playing both COMEDIES and tragedies: Much Ado About Nothing (1904), The Merchant of Venice (1905), Twelfth Night (1905), The Taming of the Shrew (1905), Antony and Cleopatra (1909), As You Like It (1910), Macbeth (1910), and Cymbeline (1923). They married in 1911. His non-Shakespearean productions after 1900 included If I Were King (1901), John the Baptist (1907), Don Quixote (1908), and revivals of several 19th-century plays. When Marlowe retired in 1924, Sothern acted for a few more years before retiring in 1927. Contemporary CRITICS remarked on his comparatively natural acting, but Sothern’s romanticized style had fallen out of favor by the time he retired. SOUBRETTE. The French term refers to an ACTRESS playing a saucy or coquettish character (often a maidservant) in neoclassical COMEDY or opera, but the term has been freely used to describe secondary comic female characters in melodramas, comedies, MUSICALS, and operettas. SOUDEIKINE, SERGEI (1882–1946). Born in Russia, Sergei Soudeikine studied art in Moscow and became a SCENE DESIGNER, designing productions for Vsevolod Meyerhold and Alexander Tairov before immigrating to Paris. He came to the United States as designer of Nikita Baileff’s Chauve-Souris revue. For many years, Soudeikine designed for the Metropolitan Opera, Radio City Music Hall, and "ROADWAY productions of New Faces of 1934, The Chinese Nightingale (1934), and Porgy and Bess (1935). SPECULATION. The practice presently known as “scalping” was earlier called “speculation.” In towns and cities where a STAR was

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booked for a limited engagement of only a few performances, tickets could sell out quickly and the demand for tickets meant that they could be resold at inflated prices. Even more perniciously, bogus tickets might be sold on the street. The cost of bringing in a star of the magnitude of Edwin Booth for his April 1887 first appearance in Kansas City, for example, led Coates Opera House to increase its normal price of $1.50 for a reserved seat to $2.50, but then speculators were able to get as much as $35 for the $2.50 ticket. The theatre’s ADVERTISEMENT stated that “the management reserves the right to refuse the sale of seats to speculators,” and yet there was a frenzy of ticket speculation on that occasion. According to a report in the Kansas City Evening Star (28 April 1887), “License Inspector Caleb Huestis said: ‘Every one of these Booth ticket speculators should be arrested, but unfortunately there is no ordinance to prohibit speculating and dealing in theatrical tickets.’ One of the luckiest of the speculators was L. A. Jenkins, who runs the cigar stand in the Coates house. He secured forty-eight tickets and disposed of them at a sufficient advance to enable him to buy a good lot in Kenwood addition.” The problem was endemic, for the Kansas City Star reported (15 April 1900) that Atlanta had actually enforced its law against theatre ticket speculators; the Atlanta man—who had four men wait in line to buy the limit of 10 tickets each for Richard Mansfield’s engagement—had to pay a $100 fine (although the mayor remitted the 30-day jail sentence). SPELVIN, GEORGE. This name is believed to have first appeared in the cast list of Charles A. Gardner’s Karl the Peddler (1886), but it owes its long life to Winchell Smith. In the 1907 production of Smith and Byron Ongley’s Brewster’s Millions, this false name is given to a mysterious character and Smith used the name in several subsequent plays to keep the identity of similar characters a secret from the audience. “George Spelvin” is often employed in theatrical programs by male ACTORS playing more than one role or who, for whatever reason, wish to be anonymous. Actresses have used the name “Georgia” or “Georgina” Spelvin for similar purposes. A DIRECTOR wishing to disguise his identity typically adopts the pseudonym Alan Smithee. SPENCE, EULALIE (1894–1981). Born in the British West Indies, the !FRICAN !MERICAN writer and teacher came with her parents

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to Brooklyn as a child, focused on her studies, and earned an M.A. at Columbia University in 1939. She was an inspiring high school teacher in Brooklyn while becoming actively involved in theatre as an ACTRESS, DIRECTOR, and PLAYWRIGHT. Several of her plays were published, including Foreign Mail and The Starter (both in 1927) and Undertow (1929). The KRIGWA Players PRODUCED Her! and Fool’s Errand (both in 1927). SPOONER, MARY GIBBS (1853–1940). A Brooklyn, New York, resident who established a STOCK company at the Park Theatre there in 1901, Mary Gibbs Spooner went into theatre to support her children. The Spooner Stock Company established the practice of charging low ticket prices and to present plays popular with women. Spooner successfully moved the company to the Fifth Avenue Theatre in 1907 and, in partnership with PLAYWRIGHT Charles E. Blaney, she established Spooner Stock Companies in numerous American cities. SPREAD EAGLE. Opening on 4 April 1927 at the Martin Beck Theatre, the politically charged drama by George S. Brooks and Walter B. Lister was DIRECTED by 'EORGE!BBOTT, PRODUCED by *ED(AR RIS, and ran for 80 performances. A number of plays were inspired by the friction with Mexico a decade earlier, but the action of this one is complicated by American capitalist corruption. SQUALL, THE. Jean Bart’s three-act drama opened on 11 November 1926 for 444 performances at the 48th Street Theatre. Nubi, a gypsy girl, is taken in by the Mendez family, but disrupts the household by her flirtations with its male members. The play’s long run is explained, in part, by efforts of Leblang’s Ticket Agency to promote ticket sales for this lurid show. Myrna Loy played Nubi in a 1929 MOTIONPICTURE version. SQUAW MAN, THE. Edwin Milton Royle’s four-act play opened on 23 October 1905 at Wallack’s Theatre for 222 performances PRODUCED by Theodore A. Liebler. Written specifically for William Haversham, The Squaw Man featured the comparative rarity of a central .ATIVE!MERICAN character. Noble James Wynngate agrees to leave England in order to protect his cousin, a feckless young man who has stolen money. Wynngate has another motive,

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for he is in love with Lady Diana, his cousin’s wife. Using the name James Carston while in the American West, Wynngate is out of the reach of the authorities (who believe he is the thief) and away from Diana. He falls in love with an Indian girl, Nat-u-ritch, who has saved his life. They have son, but when Diana arrives to report that Wynngate’s innocence has been revealed and that he is now Earl of Kerhill. With a mind toward freeing her husband and the betterment of her child’s life, Nat-u-ritch takes her own. Frequently revived into the 1920s, Cecil B. DeMille DIRECTED The Squaw Man as the first feature length silent MOTION PICTURE adapted from a stage source. It was a great success, but DeMille directed a 1931 sound version that failed, as did The White Eagle, a 1927 MUSICAL based on it. STAGE-DOOR JOHNNY. Men sometimes wait around a theatre’s stage door in order to meet attractive performers, even lavishing flowers, jewelry, and other gifts on the object of their desire. STAGE EQUIPMENT. The various accoutrements of theatrical presentation, including all manner of rigging, LIGHTING, and soundmaking devices (wind machines, thunder sheets, etc.) were standard components of the well-equipped theatre. STAGE KISS. “They embrace” in the stage directions of a play script before the turn of the century was seldom realized in production as a kiss on the lips. Only with the more relaxed interactions between unmarried men and WOMEN after World 7AR I did the stage kiss become a basic technique to be mastered as part of the craft of ACT ING. That the stage kiss had not yet become a universally practiced bit of stage business (as opposed to a real kiss) is evident in “Kissing on the Stage,” a piece published in the Evening Star (Kansas City, 6 October 1883): “‘Nobody on the stage,’ said an old actress, who used to be a reigning STAR many years ago, to a New York Journal reporter, ‘neither man nor woman, kisses from choice. At least I have never known it to be so. It is not a pleasant operation, no matter how much the people might like one another. They are both covered with paint, grease and powder, and often with perspiration, for kissing is the usual wind up to an exciting and passionate scene, and the contact of the two faces, or even the lips, is usually unpleasant. Any sort of an actor or an

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actress, if they know anything of their art, can simulate kissing quite as effectively as if the kiss was real. No matter how much one is excited by the scene, a kiss invariably spoils the glamour of the actress. It dispels the illusion, and brings one back to earth. On that ground I always objected to being kissed on the stage, even beyond the paint and grease idea. Actresses who consent to being kissed on the stage must want to be kissed very badly—that’s my experience.’” STAGE WOMEN’S WAR RELIEF. This organization of theatrical WOMEN was founded during World 7AR I to provide assistance in the war effort. Founded by 2ACHEL #ROTHERS, *ANE #OWL, and other "ROADWAY STARS, the organization arranged free theatre tickets for military personnel passing through New York, among other contributions. STAIR AND HAVLIN. According to Robert Grau, the firm of Stair and Havlin, which booked melodramas on its circuit of up to 168 theatres, was “one of the largest and most successful in the world” (1910, 173). John H. Havlin and E. D. Stair formed their association in the 1890s and expanded rapidly by focusing on popularpriced melodramas, which retained their popularity on the ROAD into the early 1900s. STAIR, EDWARD DOUGLAS (1859–1951). E. D. Stair began working as a printer in his hometown, Morenci, Michigan. He moved into editing and publishing newspapers and always maintained involvement in journalism—including ownership of the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit Journal—even as he achieved success in theatre MANAGEMENT at Detroit’s Whitney Theatre beginning in 1892. His partnership with John H. Havlin, known as Stair and Havlin, built a circuit of melodrama theatres, which expanded to become the United States Amusement Company, which encompassed theatres they built in Canada. Stair devoted some of his wealth to building an auditorium in Morenci. STALLINGS, LAURENCE (1894–1968). Born in Macon, Georgia, Laurence Tucker Stallings was educated at Wake Forest University and Georgetown University before joining the United States Marines at the outbreak of World 7AR I. He lost a leg in combat and later

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wrote of his experiences in an autobiographical novel, Plume (1924), which was adapted by MOTION PICTURE DIRECTOR King Vidor into the classic film The Big Parade (1925). Stallings made his mark in theatre collaborating with -AXWELL!NDERSON on What Price Glory (1924), a play considered the first serious treatment of war in modern American theatre, as well as a potent demonstration of the deepening seriousness of "ROADWAY drama. Stallings collaborated with Anderson again on two unsuccessful plays, First Flight (1925) and The Buccaneer (1925), but he ultimately turned to journalism and screenwriting, working on over 30 films. STANDING ROOM ONLY.† When all seats for a performance were sold out, cheaper tickets might be sold to allow theatergoers to stand at the back of the house. Thus a notice of “S.R.O.” outside a theatre meant that the show was doing excellent business. Performers boasting of success might say, according to Judge Horton, “we stood ’em up.” STANGE, STANISLAUS (1862–1917). Born Hugh Stanislaus Stange in Liverpool, Lancashire, England, the ACTOR, elocutionist, PLAY WRIGHT, and librettist was in the United States by the late 1880s when he was DIRECTING AMATEUR productions in Kansas City. He then TOURED as a leading man with George C. Miln, followed by two seasons with Stuart Robson and William H. Crane. He settled in New York, where his one-act sketch Yesterday (1893) and his “ill-written, offensive, unimaginative piece” Mrs. Dascot (New York Times, 6 March 1894) appeared briefly. Stange became best known for his dramatization of Quo Vadis (1900) and his libretto for The Chocolate Soldier (1915). STAR.† Not every leading player in a "ROADWAY production or STOCK company is a genuine star. A star is typically a “name” AC TOR whose appearance guarantees an audience. From the early 19th century, a star system was in place with name actors like Edwin Forrest, Junius Brutus Booth, and others dominating a company of actors. The plays performed were often vehicles for the star, while the remainder of the company labored in supporting and utility roles. In the glory days of the ROAD, a moderately successful actor might declare himself a star and form a company, as William S. Hart did for a season, but this was financially risky. Occasionally,

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a star is born as an actor bursts into recognition through a worthy role exploiting the actor’s gifts. Among the greatest stars working in American theatres between 1880–1930 were European greats, including Sarah Bernhardt, Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, and Eleonora Duse, while American stars of particular note included Edwin Booth, Joseph Jefferson, E. H. Sothern, Julia Marlowe, and Minnie Maddern Fiske, to name just a few. Many stars were also MANAGERS and PRODUCERS, such as Grace George, and others gained as much fame as PLAYWRIGHTS, including William Gillette, James A. Herne, 'EORGE-#OHAN, and others. Various variety, MUSICAL, and vaudeville stages also spawned several generations of stars. See also FOREIGNSTARSANDCOMPANIES ONTHE!MERICANSTAGE. STARR, FRANCES (1881–1973). Born in Oneonta, New York, as Frances Grant, she debuted in the Albany STOCK company in 1901. Her big break came when PRODUCER David Belasco hired Starr to replace Minnie Dupree in The Music Master (1904) before STAR RING her as Juanita in The Rose of the Rancho (1906). Starr won her greatest acclaim playing a kept woman in Eugene Walter’s The Easiest Way (1909) and her long career continued into the 1950s, with roles in The Case of Becky (1911), Marie-Odile (1915), Little Lady in Blue (1916), Tiger! Tiger! (1918), Shore Leave (1922), Immoral Isabella? (1927), The Lake* (1933), Claudia* (1942), and her final "ROADWAY appearance in The Ladies of the Corridor* (1953). STEIN, GERTRUDE (1874–1946).† Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, the writer studied at Harvard University and in 1904 moved to Paris with her brother, Leo. Although Paris remained her place of residence, she was an American who wrote about America. Notable among her many plays are What Happened, a Play (1913), Ladies Voices (1922), Four Saints in Three Acts (1927), and The Mother of Us All (1946). STEVENS, ASHTON (1872–1951). San Francisco-born drama CRITIC Ashton Stevens began his writing career in his hometown for the News-Letter, and other local publications, in 1894. After three years as critic for the New York Evening Journal, Stevens moved to Chicago where he became a fixture, first on the Herald and Examiner (1910–1932) and then the Herald-American (1932–1951). Known as

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an exacting critic, Stevens was as critical of audiences and his fellow critics as he was of the qualities of Chicago theatre productions and TOURING shows. STEVENS, EMILY (1882–1928). New York–born Emily Stevens was the niece of Minnie Maddern Fiske and debuted in a bit role in her aunt’s production of Becky Sharp (1900). With Mrs. Fiske’s guidance, Stevens spent 10 years honing her craft, moving up to major roles in Leah Kleschna (1904) and The New York Idea (1906). She played an important part in Edward Sheldon’s The Boss (1911), and followed it with Today (1913) and her biggest success, as the unrepentant wife in Louis K. Anspacher’s The Unchastened Woman (1915). Following a few roles in MOTIONPICTURES, Stevens returned to "ROADWAY in The Madonna of the Future (1918), The Gentile Wife (1918), Sophie (1920), Footloose (1920), The Sporting Thing to Do (1923), A Lesson in Love (1923), Fata Morgana (1924), and Hedda Gabler (1926), and replaced ,YNN&ONTANNE in The Second Man (1927), but she died of a drug overdose at the peak of her career. STEVENS, THOMAS WOOD (1880–1942). Born in Daysville, Illinois, Thomas Wood Stevens was an energetic participant in the burgeoning little theatre movement in Chicago in the 1910s, where he collaborated on masques and pageants with Kenneth Sawyer Goodman. In 1913, Stevens set up the Carnegie Institute of Technology’s drama program, the first degree-granting school of theatre arts. Following Goodman’s untimely death in 1918, Stevens headed the 'OODMAN4HEATRE and School established by Goodman’s wealthy parents in 1925. Stevens continued in this position until 1930 when he returned to Carnegie, spending most of his remaining career there. Stevens’s only "ROADWAY work, as DIRECTOR of James Bridie’s The Anatomist (1932), failed. STEWART, DONALD OGDEN (1894–1980).† Born in Columbus, Ohio, the ACTOR, humorist, and PLAYWRIGHT was educated at Exeter and Yale University. As a writer for Vanity Fair, he developed his gift for parody. He made his New York stage debut in 1928 in 0HILIP "ARRY’s Holiday. In 1930, he acted in his own 0ULITZER 0RIZE– nominated play Rebound.* He was one of the wits who frequented the Algonquin Round Table.

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STICKNEY, DOROTHY (1896–1998).† A daughter of a country doctor born in Dickinson, North Dakota, Dorothy Stickney attended ACTING school in Minneapolis before touring with STOCK companies prior to her "ROADWAY debut in 1926 in The Squall. Later that year, Stickney appeared in a small role in the hit Chicago (1926) and a couple of failures before her first notable success as compassionate prostitute Molly Malone in "EN(ECHT and Charles MacArthur’s* The Front Page (1928). She also had successes in Another Language* (1932), On Borrowed Time* (1938) and, most importantly, as Vinnie in Howard Lindsay* and Russel Crouse’s* long-running hit, Life with Father* (1939), and its less successful sequel, Life with Mother* (1948). Stickney, who was married to Lindsay, also appeared in MOTIONPICTURES and made her last Broadway appearance in the MUSICAL Pippin (1973). STILL ALARM, THE. Although this popular four-act Joseph Arthur melodrama managed only 16 performances and dismissive reviews in its initial run, opening 30 August 1887 at the Fourteenth Street Theatre, it returned in March 1888 for a successful 104-performance run and was a TOURING and STOCK staple. The simple plot, in which jealous John Bird attempts to incinerate two lovers, Jack Manley and Elinore Fordham, was enhanced by spectacular stage effects, the most famous of which included fire engines racing from a firehouse and a burning building. -OTIONPICTURE versions of The Still Alarm appeared in 1918 and 1926. STOCK.† By the late 19th century, many cities and towns across the United States had stock theatres. Most involved the employment of a stock company of ACTORS, occasionally importing major stars to play dominant roles. More often, the company employed permanent leading actors and actresses, with supporting players of various kinds. These theatres typically presented a season of plays, although some offered a REPERTORY-style schedule. Many actors who would ultimately gain prominence started in stock theatres, while actors who had once been prominent ended their careers in stock. See also SUMMERSTOCK. STOCK COMPANY. An ensemble of ACTORS, led by a MANAGER or DIRECTOR and performing a season of plays in sequence during a

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residence at a theatre or in a town, a stock company was an important form of theatre management during much of the modernist period, despite economic vicissitudes. The essence of it was that the same actors, employed according to lines of business, worked together for an extended period. During the 1870s, before the rise of the ROAD, a city’s resident stock company would have to perform a different play almost every night, and thus, the early stock companies performed what amounted to rotating repertory. During the heyday of TOURING companies presenting several plays in REPERTORY in the 1880s, stock companies disappeared except in the biggest population centers like New York, Boston, and San Francisco. With the rise of the combination system in the 1890s, stock companies once again found audiences that relished the old familiar warhorses of dramatic literature. Typically, the leading player dominated (and often managed) the company, but in some cases—as with Augustin Daly’s company, the ensemble as a whole was more important than any single player. According to Gladys Hurlbut in Next Week—East Lynne!, stock companies were “the best chance that actors had of learning their business,” but the system was wiped out by silent MOTIONPICTURES and then the “talkies.” As late as the 1910s and 1920s, there were “over a hundred stock companies east of the Mississippi.” She recalled that “they lived in a town for a season of twenty to a hundred weeks and they put on a different play each week. They dished up last year’s hits in five rehearsals and in between they revived the old thrillers that still did business, East Lynne and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The [Old] Homestead and Trilby” (1950, 24). Gladys Hurlbut’s Next Week—East Lynne! provides a vivid glimpse into the world of the stock actor in the late modernist period: “Stock acting was the most sweatshop kind of work I ever heard of, and the most exhausting for the brain and the body. Fifteen hours a day in the theater, many towns played daily matinees and the Middle West played seven days a week, two of the old on Saturday, two of the new on Sunday. At night the actors studied, an act a day until they knew their parts. They furnished their own wardrobes and the women sewed and pressed and trimmed and washed—always with their crumpled, frayed, typewritten parts for next week propped up before them. At night they kept them under their pillows, firmly believing they soaked in that way” (1950, 25). The term stock also is used to refer to SCENERY. In a pinch, a few basic settings could serve the needs of most plays on the road prior

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to and during the early modernist period: the street scene, the forest, the garden, the humble interior, and the fancy interior. Opera houses kept wings, borders, and a drop for each of those scenes in stock at the theatre. Thus, the “stock sets” (as well as costumes and props from previous productions) could be pressed into service as an economy or whenever a troupe’s own stock was damaged or delayed on the road. STRANGE INTERLUDE. %UGENE /.EILL’s 0ULITZER 0RIZE– winning drama opened on 30 January 1928 at the *OHN 'OLDEN Theatre for a run of 426 performances. 0RODUCED by the 4HEATRE 'UILD, it was DIRECTED by 0HILIP-OELLER with SCENEDESIGNS by *O -IELZINER. Among its innovations were the characters’ private thoughts spoken aloud for the audience to hear, a daring focus on sexual psychology as a motivating factor, an abortion, and the extraordinary length of the nine-act play with action spread across 25 years, 1919–1944, in the lives of the characters. Starting at 5:15 p.m., the performance included a dinner break, which proved to be a boon to nearby restaurants. Nina Leeds, played by ,YNN &ONTANNE, is resentful of her father’s having prevented her marriage to her fiancé Gordon, a pilot, before the war. With Gordon dead, she will devote herself to nursing soldiers. A year later, Nina’s father has died, she has become openly promiscuous, and the three men in her life are concerned. They are the avuncular Charles Marsden (Tom Powers), the willowy Sam Evans (%ARLE,ARIMORE), and the rational-minded Edmund Darrell ('LENN!NDERS). All three are drawn to Nina even though they sense the presence of Gordon’s ghost in her life. Nina marries Sam Evans, but before she tells him of his impending fatherhood, Sam’s mother informs Nina that Sam carries a hereditary insanity, convinces Nina to get an abortion, and even suggests that Nina give Sam a child by another man. Eventually, Nina propositions Darrell and he agrees. By the time she is with child by Darrell, Nina has transferred her ardor to Darrell, though she carries on the charade with her husband, Sam, and Darrell escapes to Europe. Part 2 begins with conflicted emotions and culminates in a tableau scene: Nina dominates the men whom she sees as father-substitute or confessor (Marsden), husband (Sam), and lover (Darrell); her infant son Gordon is a fourth. The action jumps to Gordon’s 11th birthday,

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and it is clear that the boy has a visceral dislike for Darrell. Alone together, Nina and Darrell discuss the possibility that Gordon intuits their continuing relationship and is jealous of Darrell for taking his mother’s attention. They agree that Darrell will go away for two years. They kiss farewell, not realizing that young Gordon has returned and sees them. Gordon decides that he will grow up to emulate his namesake, the pilot, and thus win his mother’s love. On a yacht 10 years later, Nina has her three men around her, but is jealous of her son’s fiancée Madeline. Nina is tempted to reveal Gordon’s paternity to her husband, but Sam Evans collapses with a stroke and she vows to protect him. In the final scene several months later, Evans has died. Darrell and Nina get Gordon’s blessing to marry, but neither now wishes it. Gordon flies off with Madeline. Nina will marry faithful old Marsden, and her life has come full circle. The originality of Strange Interlude made it the subject of numerous articles in the popular and scholarly press as well as spawning many parodies: The Strange Inner Feud in The Grand Street Follies of 1928, a skit in George White’s Scandals, a sequence in the Marx Brothers MUSICAL (on stage and in MOTIONPICTURES) Animal Crackers, James Thurber’s* “Cross-country Gamut” in The New Yorker (11 February 1928), a parody poem in The Bookman (August 1928), and a satire in the Garrick Gaities of 1930. See also SEXUALITYONTHE !MERICANSTAGE. STREET SCENE. Although %LMER 2ICE experimented with many techniques emerging from the European modernist theatre, particularly expressionism (as in his 1923 drama The Adding Machine), he turned to naturalism with Street Scene (originally titled Landscape with Figures), a drama of the American melting pot set in a New York City tenement. Emphasizing the impact of poverty and the ethnic and religious tensions in 1920s urban life, this multicharacter work featured strains of humor, melodrama, and tragedy. It is set on a single day on which Sam Kaplan, a young Jewish intellectual, and Rose Maurrant, a working-class Irish girl, become soul mates. Their budding understanding is torn apart when Rose’s father, Frank, murders her mother, Anna, and her mother’s lover. Rose declines an offer to become a businessman’s mistress as well as Sam’s offer of marriage, deciding to rely on herself. After an emotional farewell with her father, Rose takes her young brother away to live in the suburbs where

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she will work to care for them. Rice stresses the socioeconomic plight of the various ethnic minorities depicted and the collisions resulting from their differences and deprivations. Despite a 0ULITZER 0RIZE and an impressive 601 performances in its original "ROADWAY run, which opened on 10 January 1929 at the Playhouse Theatre, Street Scene is rarely revived in part because of its large cast and technical requirements. A MOTIONPICTURE version of Street Scene appeared in 1930, but has had a more enduring life in a nearly operatic MUSICAL adaptation of the same name by Kurt Weill, with lyrics by ,ANGSTON (UGHES, first PRODUCED in 1947. STRICTLY DISHONORABLE. Much of Preston Sturges’s reputation is based on his MOTIONPICTURE DIRECTING and screenplays, but he also wrote several plays. Strictly Dishonorable was his only success, a three-act COMEDY PRODUCED by "ROCK0EMBERTON on 18 September 1929 for 557 performances at the Avon Theatre. A young Southern woman, Isabelle Parry, is abandoned at a New York speakeasy by her date, Henry Greene. She meets two men, opera star Count Di Ruvo and Judge Dempsey, who resides in a nearby apartment. Isabelle spends the evening with the count, known as Gus, even though he confesses that his intentions are “strictly dishonorable.” Despite this, by the end of the evening she and Gus are in love and when Henry returns for her, the judge informs him that he is too late. Strictly Dishonorable was filmed twice, in 1931 and 1951. STRONG, AUSTIN (1881–1952). San Francisco–born Austin Strong spent most of his childhood in Samoa, where he lived with his stepfather, Robert Louis Stevenson. As a PLAYWRIGHT and lyricist, his works include The Little Father of the Wilderness (1906), The Toymaker of Nuremberg (1907), The Pied Piper (1908), A Good Little Devil (1913), The Dragon’s Claw (1914), Bunny (1916), Three Wise Fools (1918), and his greatest success, Seventh Heaven (1922), which had a long run and was adapted into one of the most popular MOTIONPICTURES of the late 1920s. Strong’s subsequent works, including Drums of Oude (1928) and A Play without a Name (1928), were commercial failures. STRONGHEART. The 1905 play by William C. deMille, opening on 30 January 1905 at New York’s Hudson Theatre, became a popular

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favorite with audiences, was revived in August 1905, and TOURED to London in 1907. Robert Edeson played Soangataha (Strongheart), a chief’s son who excels at football at Columbia University. But after the flag-waving fun and the student slang of act 1, according to the reviewer (New York Times, 31 January 1905), “it turns into a play with a social problem involving the love of a white woman and an Indian. . . . a phase of the sometimes rather tiresome ‘race problem.’” Although the girl accepts him over her brother’s objections, Soangataha finally answers the summons to tribal leadership, along with the stricture that “you no bring the white woman.” The London Times review (quoted in the New York Times, 9 May 1907) expressed English bemusement: “The accent of the players is not our accent, their football is not our football, their racial difficulty is not our racial difficulty, the undergraduates are not our undergraduates, the crudity of the play is not the crudity of our plays, and so one spends a pleasant evening amid strange, if rather noisy, surroundings.” STURGES, PRESTON (1898–1959). Edmund Preston Biden was born in Chicago, where his extraordinary childhood included assisting his mother’s friend, Isadora Duncan, with her stage productions. He served in World 7AR I and worked as an inventor before turning to the theatre. Sturges’s only great success as a PLAYWRIGHT was Strictly Dishonorable (1929), a sweet-natured romantic COMEDY set in a speakeasy. It ran for 557 performances, but he never had another hit, although his 1932 play, Child of Manhattan, ran for a few months. Other Sturges plays include The Guinea Pig (1929), Recapture (1930), and The Well of Romance (1930), and he ACTED in Hotbed (1928). In the early 1930s, Sturges became a leading MOTIONPICTURE DIRECTOR and screenwriter, making a series of classics, but late in his career he returned to "ROADWAY as librettist of two unsuccessful MUSICALS, Make a Wish (1951) and Carnival in Flanders (1953). SUBWAY, THE. Opening 25 January1929 at the Cherry Lane Theatre, %LMER2ICE’s expressionist drama in nine scenes ran for 35 performances. A naïve 18-year-old filing clerk named Sophie (perhaps in homage to Sophie Treadwell, whose earlier play Machinal bears some similarities) yearns for beauty while her daily grind involves insensitive parents and the hysteria-inducing daily subway ride. She succumbs to a young man who is inspired to write an apocalyptic

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piece called “The Subway.” Guilt-ridden over her possible pregnancy, she throws herself in front of an oncoming subway train. SUFFRAGETTE PLAYS. Separating suffragette plays from those identified as WOMEN’s or feminist plays is difficult in American theatre. A generation of suffragette PLAYWRIGHTS, including Elizabeth Robins, Cicely Hamilton, and Elizabeth Baker, pressed their cause on London stages between 1905 and 1920, spurred by modernist plays by (ENRIK )BSEN, 'EORGE "ERNARD 3HAW, and others. Robins’s Votes for Women! (1907), perhaps the most emblematic suffrage play, made its first appearance in New York in March 1909. In America, ACTRESS-MANAGERS including Minnie Maddern Fiske and Mary Shaw produced works by Ibsen and Shaw with an eye toward inspiring women writers and DIRECTORS, as well as encouraging young actresses to take up the cause of suffrage and other issues of importance to women. American productions of the plays of the British suffragettes appeared more frequently in little theatres after 1910 than in major commercial venues, but by World 7AR I, women playwrights like 2ACHEL #ROTHERS, 3USAN 'LASPELL, and Alice Gerstenberg demonstrated that women’s issues, including suffrage, could be examined more fully if the writers were women. SUMMER STOCK.† From the early 19th century, country playhouses and outdoor gardens featured plays and other entertainments during the summer months when indoor theatergoing was curtailed by the heat. The golden age of summer stock may have begun with the opening of Elitch’s Gardens Theatre in Denver, Colorado, in 1890. Other such summer theatres sprang up around the country, particularly in the east, offering a season of plays, most often COMEDIES and MUSICALS. In the years prior to World 7AR I, the Provincetown Players on Cape Cod merged the penchant for summer entertainment with the New Stagecraft and provided opportunities for cuttingedge dramatists (including %UGENE/.EILL and 3USAN'LASPELL) and emerging DIRECTORS and ACTORS. Summer playhouses like the Hedgerow Theatre (Moylan, Pennsylvania) or the Williamstown Theatre Festival* (Massachusetts), were similarly ambitious, but most summer stock theatres were less inclined toward experimentation, preferring instead to present recent "ROADWAY successes or pre-Broadway tryouts. Some theatres packaged STARS in familiar

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vehicles, while other summer stock companies were made up of young actors and technicians gaining practical experience. Many summer stock theatres were established by 1930 and continued operation until well into the 1960s. Relatively few survived significant changes in audience tastes and economic realities post-1960. SUN-UP. Opening 24 May 1923 at the Provincetown Playhouse, the North Carolina folk drama by Lula Vollmer ran for 361 performances and was nominated for the 0ULITZER 0RIZE. All three acts are set in the remote mountain cabin of the corncob pipe–smoking Widow Cagle. It is 1917, and her son Rufe goes off to WAR in France, leaving his bride with his mother. The women learn of Rufe’s death and they shelter a deserter. When Widow Cagle learns that the deserter is the son of the man who shot her husband, she prepares to shoot him. Suddenly she hears Rufe’s voice telling her to end the hatred. She helps the stranger escape, as the room is flooded with morning sunlight. SUNDAY PERFORMANCES. Sunday performances had a checkered history during the modernist era. Blue laws in rural areas often prohibited Sunday performances, while urban theatre managers fought hard to gain or retain that major source of revenue. Sunday was often chosen for benefit performances. By the early 20th century, Sunday performances happened with greater frequency, most famously when Al Jolson gave Sunday night solo concerts at the Winter Garden while also appearing during the week in a 3HUBERT-PRODUCED MUSI CAL show. SUPERNUMERARY. During the last quarter of the 19th century, when TOURING companies presented 3HAKESPEARE or other historical dramas, they regularly engaged local AMATEURS as supernumeraries, often called supes, supers, or extras, to fill in the crowd scenes. Because they often swelled the ranks of an army for battle scenes, supers were sometimes pejoratively referred to as “spear-carriers.” Locally hired extras were also known as “jobbers.” Sometimes the gallery gods would call out “Supe! Supe!” when they recognized the awkwardness of the AMATEUR amid professional ACTORS. In professional eyes (according to the Kansas City Journal, 8 March 1927), supers were “lanky-limbed, raw-boned men with ill-fitting tights and

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no make-up.” They were the ones who looked nervous in a calm scene and perfectly unconcerned during a battle, or who shouted “Aye, Aye!” several seconds after the regular actors had given the cry. In those days before stage unions, the supers were sometimes ordered to carry furniture on or off stage or perform other menial tasks, all for the lowly fee of 25 cents per performance, except for the first performance, when the money went, “through an unwritten law backstage,” to the property man. As many as 200 supers might be hired for a spectacle like Richard Mansfield’s production of Henry V, but 15 usually sufficed for melodramas of the period. SUPPORTING. !CTORS playing secondary roles were said to support the leading players. Many actors made careers in supporting roles, never rising, whether by choice or ability, to STARRING roles. SUPPRESSED DESIRES. 3USAN 'LASPELL collaborated with her husband George Cram Cook on this one-act satire of psychoanalysis, in which Henrietta Brewster fancies herself a student of the Freudian school of psychology. When Henrietta discovers that her husband and sister seem to have suppressed desires for each other, she abandons her fashionable interest in Freud. With Glaspell and Cook ACTING the roles, the play was staged by the Provincetown Players in 1915, following an initial rejection by the Washington Square Players, who subsequently staged it in 1917. Suppressed Desires, and other works by Glaspell, along with one-act plays by %UGENE/.EILL in the mid-1910s, are among the finest works that helped define the little theatre movement. SUTHERLAND, EVELYN GREENLEAF (1855–1908). Born Evelyn Baker in Boston, she wrote her first play, the one-act Drifting (1892), with Emma Sheridan Fry, Her most successful works were typically collaborations, including Beaucaire (1901), written with Booth Tarkington (from his novel), and three plays with Beulah Marie Dix: A Rose o’ Plymouth Town (1902), The Road to Yesterday (1906), and The Lilac Room (1907). SWEET INNISCARRA. Augustus Pitou crafted this four-act romantic drama with MUSIC for Chauncey Olcott and PRODUCED it at the Fourteenth Street Theatre, where it opened on 24 January 1897 for

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104 performances. Irish Gerald O’Carroll, raised in England, returns home to the small town of Inniscarra and falls in love with a local girl. Her father objects and hires some toughs to kidnap Gerald, but he escapes and arrives back in Inniscarra in time to save his sweetheart from a forced marriage. SWEET KITTY BELLAIRS. David Belasco’s four-act play, which opened on 9 December 1903 for 206 performances at Belasco Theatre, was adapted from Agnes and Edgerton Castle’s The Bath Comedy. The simple romantic plot centers on the efforts of an Irish girl, Kitty Bellairs, originally played by Henrietta Crosman, to find social acceptance in 18th-century Bath. Kitty’s motives never become fully clear, but when she and her archrival are forced to hide behind the bed curtains in the rooms of her sweetheart, a young soldier, Kitty takes responsibility, thus sparing her rival a social disgrace. The result is that Kitty wins her soldier and the social position she craves. Sweet Kitty Bellairs was adapted into a Rudolf Friml operetta, Kitty Darlin’ (1917). SYMBOLISM. Symbolism had a fleeting vogue among aesthetes in European art theatres of the 1890s and is best represented in the work of poet-PLAYWRIGHT Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949). Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) was half-heartedly attracted to the quasi-mystical simplification of means, yet he mocked it through Treplev’s playlet in act 1 of The Seagull. In America, symbolism as an artistic movement had little impact other than in plays like Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Aria da Capo. However, the use of symbolist elements in plays was significant and can be seen in expressionist works by %U GENE/.EILL, %LMER2ICE, and 'EORGE3+AUFMAN after World 7AR I, and in plays by Tennessee Williams,* Thornton Wilder,* and others after 1930.

n4n TAB SHOWS. Scaled-down versions of successful "ROADWAY productions, usually MUSICALS but also multi-scene, large-cast dramas, were created for the purpose of TOURING. Not only might the text be shortened, but tab shows generally offered less ambitious SCENERY,

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effects, and COSTUMES than audiences would have seen in the original version of the play. The term was later used to describe short musical entertainments offered in conjunction with MOTION PICTURE showings in the “talkie” era. TABER, ROBERT (1865–1904). Born on Staten Island, New York, the ACTOR began his career in Helena Modjeska’s company as Silvius in As You Like It. A competent actor, he was good-looking enough to become a leading man, and his roles eventually included Romeo, Orlando, and Claude Melnotte. He is remembered largely for having been married to Julia Marlowe from 1894 to 1900, during which time she TOURED as Mrs. Taber. TABLEAU. This generic term refers to a scene (usually short) establishing location, atmosphere, or period, but a tableau is usually thought of as a picture or image presenting something like a living fresco. The expression “hold picture,” which literally indicates the idea of freezing action into an appealing image, is used interchangeably with tableau. A related term is tableau vivant, which involves performers frozen in decorous positions like a living painting. These were particularly popular in society, as described in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, as well as in MUSICALS and revues between 1880 and 1930. TAILOR-MADE MAN, A. Harry James Smith had his greatest success with this four-act COMEDY based on Gabriel Dregley’s German play when 'EORGE-#OHAN PRODUCED it at the Cohan and Harris Theatre on 27 August 1917 for 398 performances. Grant Mitchell played John Bart, a tailor’s assistant, who is in love with Tanya, the daughter of his boss. He reads a book written by Tanya’s arrogant fiancé in which it is explained that success comes through elegant dress and personal charm. In a tuxedo appropriated from the tailor shop, John makes a social success, but his ruse is revealed. Tanya, however, has fallen in love with him and John returns to his job at the tailor shop. A 1922 silent MOTIONPICTURE version was remade as a “talkie,” featuring William Haines, in 1931. TALIAFERRO, EDITH (1893–1958). Richmond, Virginia-born Edith Taliaferro was the CHILD of theatre workers and made her debut at age three in a STOCK production of Shore Acres. She ACTED for over

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40 years, but her greatest success came early, with the title role of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1910). Her other credits include The Girl with the Green Eyes (1902), The Evangelist (1907), Young Wisdom (1914), Captain Kidd, Jr. (1916), Mother Carey’s Chickens (1917), and The Hook-Up (1935). She was the sister of Mabel Taliaferro and married actor House Jameson. TALIAFERRO, MABEL (1887–1979). Like her sister Edith, Mabel Taliaferro began her long ACTING career as a toddler, playing in a STOCK production of Blue Jeans at the age of two. She made her New York debut in Israel Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto (1899), after which she appeared in Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (1904), You Never Can Tell (1905), and Pippa Passes (1906) before scoring a notable success in the title role of Polly of the Circus (1907). Later credits include Springtime (1909), The Call of the Cricket (1910), Young Wisdom (1914), Luck in Pawn (1919), The Piper (1920), Back Fire (1932), George Washington Slept Here* (1940), and Bloomer Girl (1944), among others. See also CHILD PERFORMERS. TALKER, THE. Opening on 8 January 1912 at the Harris Theatre, the WOMAN suffrage COMEDY written and DIRECTED by Marion Fairfax ran for 144 performances. Pauline Lord played the title role, supported by Tully Marshall (Fairfax’s husband). Henry B. Harris PRODUCED it. The press trumpeted the play as a portrait of the “new woman,” but Fairfax described her heroine as a woman who “swings midway between the old woman who is happy and content in her home and fills an economical place in her world, and the new woman, who has had the courage to carve out a place for herself in the present business world” (Rochester Times, 14 October 1912). TARKINGTON, BOOTH (1869–1946). Best known for his novels, Newton Booth Tarkington, born in Indianapolis, Indiana, also wrote plays and some of his novels were adapted for the stage. Twenty-one Tarkington plays were PRODUCED, and he was viewed as a romantic with an eye for the details of Midwestern American life, past and present, although he occasionally departed from this formula. Tarkington’s plays include Beaucaire (1901), written with Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland, which STARRED Richard Mansfield, followed by The Man from Home (1908), Springtime (1909), and

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Cameo Kirby (1909). The Man from Home, written in collaboration with Harry Leon Wilson, failed, as did their subsequent collaborations, Your Humble Servant (1910) and Getting a Polish (1910). With a similar fate for his solo effort, Beauty and the Jacobin (1912), Tarkington abandoned PLAYWRITING for several years, never quite shedding the notion that serious art was impossible in the theatre. He created vehicles for Otis Skinner (Master Antonio, 1916) and George Arliss (Poldekin, 1920) and collaborated with others on The Country Cousin (1917; with Julian Steel) and Tweedles (1923; with Wilson). His greatest stage success, and perhaps most characteristic work, Clarence (1919), provided early ACTING opportunities for !L FRED,UNT and (ELEN(AYES. Later, Tarkington wrote The Intimate Strangers (1921), Rose Briar (1922), The Trysting Place (1923), Magnolia (1923), and Colonel Satan (1931), while a few of his novels were successfully dramatized by others, including Seventeen (1918), Penrod (1918), and The Plutocrat (1930). TARNISH. Opening on 1 October 1923 at the Belmont Theatre, this drama by Gilbert Emery ran for 255 performances. With a cast of six women and two men, the play deals with strong sexual themes. Tishy, a decent young woman, works as a stenographer to support her sniveling, spendthrift parents. The bootlegger’s wife from upstairs lets slip that Tishy’s father was seen earlier in the day with a compromised woman, Nettie Dark. It is New Year’s Eve but Tishy nerves herself up to track down that woman in hopes of recovering the desperately needed money her father gave Nettie. Meanwhile, by a ruse, Nettie lures to her room a young man she used to know, who just happens to be the one courting Tishy. Tishy is distraught to discover her beau there and breaks off with him. But he truly loves Tishy, and the bootlegger’s wife counsels her that all men are somewhat tarnished and that a girl should settle for “one that cleans easy.” TAVERN, THE. 'EORGE-#OHAN’s facile parody adapted from Cora Dick Gantt’s melodrama provided him an enduringly popular play. The leading role of the mysterious Vagabond was originally played by Arnold Daly, but later ACTED by Cohan himself in a demonstration of his versatility. This spoof of melodramatic traditions is set in a small country inn where the guests complain of highwaymen plaguing travelers. Those stopping at the inn include the otherwise

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unnamed Vagabond, a mysterious woman, and the family of a governor. The daughter of the governor and the woman are both attracted to the charming Vagabond, who seems to be in control of the situation until the sheriff arrives to escort him back to the insane asylum from which he has escaped. First PRODUCED on 27 September 1920 at the Cohan Theatre, The Tavern won appreciative reviews and audiences for 252 performances, after which the play became a staple of STOCK and TOURING companies. In his declining years, Cohan, eager for another stage success following a string of failures during the 1930s, crafted a sequel, The Return of the Vagabond (1940), but it failed to find favor. TAYLOR, CHARLES A. (1864–1942). A native of South Hadley, Massachusetts, Charles A. Taylor ran away from home, supposedly after reading a biography of P. T. Barnum. He became a successful PRODUCER and PLAYWRIGHT of second-rate melodramas intended for rural audiences, several of which STARRED his wife, ,AURETTE 4AYLOR. Among his plays to appear on "ROADWAY were The Derby Mascot (1894), A Wife in Pawn (1900), The Queen of the Highway (1903), The Child Bride (1903), Through Fire and Water (1903), The White Tigress of Japan (1904), The Royal Chef (1904), Tracked Around the World (1904), and Yosemite (1914). TAYLOR, DEEMS (1885–1966). Born Joseph Deems Taylor in New York, he became a CRITIC and successful composer. His MUSICAL, The Echo (1910), won favor, and he wrote an operatic version of Peter Ibbetson for the Metropolitan Opera. His association with theatre was mostly in providing evocative incidental music for several important plays, including Liliom (1921), The Adding Machine (1922), Casanova (1923), Fashion (1924), and Beggar on Horseback (1924). TAYLOR, LAURETTE (1884–1946).† Laurette Cooney was born in New York and made her stage debut in Gloucester, Massachusetts, as a CHILD in vaudeville billed as “La Belle Laurette.” Her adult career began when she appeared at the Boston Athenaeum prior to her "ROADWAY debut in From Rags to Riches (1903). She worked continually in various STOCK companies with her first husband, Charles A. Taylor, whose surname she took as her stage name. Taylor TOURED in a series of cheap melodramas written by Taylor and

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did not have a major success until 1910 in Alias Jimmy Valentine, which she followed by playing a Hawaiian princess in The Bird of Paradise (1912). She divorced Taylor in 1910 and achieved stage immortality in her signature role, the title character in Peg O’My Heart (1912), written by her second husband, J. Hartley Manners. Taylor frequently returned to this role on tour, in stock, on radio, and in a silent MOTIONPICTURE in 1922. The role of a sweet-natured young woman from the lower class forced to live with snobbish relatives suited the charm and wit typical of Taylor’s ACTING. She then performed in revivals of Sweet Nell of Old Drury (as Nell Gwyn) and Trelawny of the “Wells.” When Manners died in 1928, the griefstricken Taylor retired from the stage and descended into alcoholism. After a dark period, she returned to the stage in two legendary performances: Mrs. Midget in a revival of Sutton Vane’s Outward Bound* (1938) and Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s* The Glass Menagerie* (1945). A highly fictionalized MUSICAL biography of Taylor called Jennie (1963) STARRED Mary Martin* and had a short Broadway run. TEA FOR THREE. Selwyn and Company PRODUCED this three-act Roi Cooper Megrue COMEDY at Maxine Elliott’s Theatre, where it opened on 19 September 1918 for 300 performances. The Husband is jealous, so the Wife and the Friend stage a harmless tryst to teach the Husband a lesson. When the Husband believes the Friend has committed suicide, he comes to his senses and all are reconciled. The novel use of generic descriptives instead of specific character names gave the otherwise lightweight play a universal quality. A silent MO TIONPICTURE adaptation was released in 1927. TEAL, BEN (1857?–1917). Born in San Francisco, the PLAYWRIGHT and DIRECTOR began as an ACTOR and assistant director under David Belasco there. With George H. Jessop, he wrote The Great Metropolis (1889) and directed it. 0RODUCED by Abraham L. Erlanger, The Great Metropolis led to Teal’s position as director for Erlanger and his partner, Marc Klaw. Most of the 80 New York productions staged by Teal were MUSICALS, but his legitimate stage successes included Sweet Nell of Old Drury (1900), The Mountain Climber (1906), and The Wanderer (1917). He also directed William Young’s hit stage adaptation of General Lew Wallace’s novel, Ben-Hur (1899).

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TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS.† Between 1880 and 1930, technological advances in theatrical practice were significant. The shift from gas to electrical LIGHTING was, perhaps, the major innovation. Use of electric lighting began in some American theatres as early as the 1880s, while many were built at the turn of the century with both gas and electricity. The catastrophic 1903 Iroquois Theatre fire in Chicago accelerated the transition to all-electric lighting. Painted flat SCENERY slowly gave way to three-dimensional and practical units. Improvements in stage machinery made scene-shifting and special effects more efficient, although until the early 20th century a style that might be described as painted REALISM dominated. Stage effects grew more impressive between 1880 and 1910, as PRODUCERS of melodramas attempted to draw audiences with spectacular scenes of train wrecks, fires, waterfalls, etc. The New Stagecraft, heralded in 2OBERT %DMOND *ONES’s design for The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife (1915), led to more stylized, skeletal designs depending on sensitive lighting and carefully staged scenes. TEMPERANCE PLAYS. Plays (mostly melodramas) that illustrated the evils of drink were mostly written during the decades before modernism and yet they proved surprisingly enduring. Thus, William H. Smith’s The Drunkard (1844), with its horrifying scene of delirium tremens, and Ten Nights in a Barroom (1858), with the CHILD singing “Father, dear father, come home with me now,” were still finding audiences on the eve of Prohibition. Others included The Bottle, The Drunkard’s Warning, and Life, or Scenes of Early Vice. George Aiken’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853), the most popular and frequently PRODUCED melodrama of the 19th century was still drawing audiences early in the 20th century, and it too conveyed the temperance message as St. Clare’s good impulses are overcome by his addiction to drink. TEMPLETON, FAY (1865–1939). Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, the daughter of the pioneering Midwestern trouper John Templeton grew up performing the CHILD roles in Ten Nights in a Barroom, East Lynne, and others. Later she TOURED widely as Buttercup in H. M. S. Pinafore. She performed in legitimate drama, operetta, burlesque, and vaudeville, and achieved "ROADWAY STARDOM in 1906 in 'EORGE-#OHAN’s Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway. She made

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her final "ROADWAY appearance in Jerome Kern’s MUSICAL Roberta (1933) introducing the song “Yesterdays.” TEN, TWENT,’ THIRT.’ The phrase was a slang term for popularpriced theatre attractions; that is, any theatre operation, whether an individual company or a whole circuit of theatres, for which the price of admission was 10, 20, or 30 cents, depending upon choice of seats. Melodrama dominated the ten, twent,’ thirt’ movement. In “Why They Loved the Ten, Twent,’ Thirt’” (Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Fall 2002), Barbara M. Waldinger analyzes the entertainment needs it fulfilled for the working classes, who far outnumbered legitimate theatergoers. The heyday of the ten, twent,’ thirt’ theatres was from the late 1890s until World 7AR I; they declined as the competition from MOTIONPICTURES became too great with the wave of construction of opulent movie palaces that replaced storefront nickelodeons. TENT SHOWS. A popular entertainment tradition in the Midwest in the 1850s, tent shows featured plays and variety amusements staged inside tents of brown canvas (to distinguish them from the white of circus tents) illuminated by naphtha lamps. Tent shows, also known as tent repertoire, and Chautauqua programs may both be considered offshoots of the repertoire companies that played small towns and rural areas. The Chautauqua circuit grew after 1904. Major STARS, including Minnie Maddern Fiske and Sarah Bernhardt, performed with tent shows when they battled the control of the Theatrical Syndicate. By World 7AR I, with improvements in transportation options, there were as many as 400 tent shows operating throughout the United States, with admission prices topping out at $1. After 1930, as the Great Depression set in, audiences for tent shows declined. TEXAS STEER, A. Charles H. Hoyt’s popular four-act farce opened at the Madison Square Theatre on 8 January 1894. Based on Hoyt’s own experiences in politics, A Texas Steer satirized the collision of Washington, D.C., elitism with a populist legislator. Tyrone Power Sr. ACTED in a 1915 MOTIONPICTURE version. Will Rogers STARRED in a 1927 remake. THEATER COMIQUE. This was a popular name used for variety theatres across the nation in the 1870s. Although generally regarded as

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the breeding ground for the vaudeville theatres that later sprang up, the Comiques also launched the careers of some legitimate theatre performers and writers. For example, J. K. Emmet, later renowned for his “Fritz” character, got his start at Philadelphia’s Comique, and Eddie Foy performed in a “two act” at Kansas City’s Theater Comique. Although most of the entertainment was of the “free and easy” variety, full-fledged plays frequently got thrown into the mix. Out West, cowboys tended to refer to the “The-ay-ter Com-ee-cue.” THEATRE ARTS.† Founded by Sheldon Cheney in Detroit, Michigan, in 1916, Theatre Arts was a quarterly devoted to the art of theatre, but it evolved into a monthly under its subsequent editors, Edith J. R. Isaacs* and Rosamund Gilder.* Its founding was perfectly timed to capture articles on all aspects of theatrical endeavor during the golden age of American drama. The influence of modernist European theatre, the New Stagecraft, "ROADWAY, and the emergence of a generation of significant American PLAYWRIGHTS, including %UGENE /.EILL, %LMER 2ICE, 3IDNEY (OWARD, 2OBERT % 3HERWOOD, -AXWELL !NDERSON, and others, were covered in considerable depth. Theatre Arts was lavishly illustrated and regularly included complete texts of new plays and MUSICALS. Theatre Arts Monthly, as it became known, merged with The Stage, a magazine previously published by the 4HEATRE 'UILD, in 1948, but changing times forced its discontinuation in 1964. THEATRE FIRES. From the time of the earliest permanent playhouses in the United States until the early 20th century, theatre fires were a continual danger. Mostly due to dangerous gas LIGHTING and highly flammable materials used in theatrical production, there were well over a hundred major theatre fires between the first serious one at Boston’s Federal Street Theatre in 1798 and a tragedy at the Brooklyn Theatre in 1876 during a performance of The Two Orphans when 197 people were killed. The greatest disaster occurred on 30 December 1903 when Chicago’s Iroquois Theatre burned during a performance of the MUSICAL Mr. Bluebeard STARRING Eddie Foy. Despite Foy’s heroic efforts to calm the audience, over 600 people were killed. The tragedy was also a public relations disaster for the Theatrical Syndicate. It led to the end of gas-lit theatres and to newly stringent laws mandating safety exits from theatres and other precautions.

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THEATRE GUILD.† This producing organization started at the end of World 7AR I, in part to replace the Washington Square Players, which had closed due to the war. The Theatre Guild was founded by Players board members, including ,AWRENCE,ANGNER, 0HILIP -OELLER, Rollo Peters, ,EE3IMONSON, and (ELEN7ESTLEY, with Theresa Helburn* and $UDLEY $IGGES becoming important forces within the organization when they joined shortly after the founding. The Guild’s first production, Jacinto Benavente’s The Bonds of Interest (1919), with SCENE DESIGN by Peters who also STARRED, was a succès d’estime, but it was the acclaim accorded their second production, St. John Ervine’s John Ferguson (1919), that began a remarkable era of PRODUCING. The Guild continues to the present, although its significance declined after the 1950s. In its heyday, the Guild produced some of the most important American plays of the mid-20th century, while staging many European works as well. The Guild’s productions prior to 1930 include Jane Clegg (1920), Heartbreak House (1920), Mr. Pim Passes By (1921), Liliom (1921), He Who Gets Slapped (1922), Back to Methuselah (1922), R.U.R. (1922), The Adding Machine (1923), Saint Joan (1923), The Guardsman (1924), They Knew What They Wanted (1924), The Garrick Gaieties (1925), Ned McCobb’s Daughter (1926), The Silver Cord (1926), The Second Man (1927), Porgy (1927), Marco Millions (1928), Strange Interlude (1928), and Dynamo (1929). Among the important works mounted after 1930 were several plays by %UGENE/.EILL, 3."EHRMAN, and -AXWELL!NDERSON, the first MUSICALS by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, 2OBERT % 3HERWOOD’s 0ULITZER 0RIZE– winning plays Idiot’s Delight* (1936) and There Shall Be No Night* (1940), the acclaimed 0AUL 2OBESON Othello (1943), Porgy and Bess (1935), and such varied plays as Reunion in Vienna* (1931), The Philadelphia Story* (1939), The Time of Your Life* (1939), and Come Back, Little Sheba* (1950). THEATRE MAGAZINE. Arthur Hornblow took over the pictorial Our Players, a quarterly that began publication in 1900, and transformed it into the monthly The Theatre beginning with its May 1901 issue. Later called Theatre Magazine or Theatre, it continued publication until 1931, ultimately eclipsed by its more serious-minded competition, THEATRE ARTS.

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THEATRE OWNERS BOOKING ASSOCIATION (TOBA). Established in 1912 by S. H. Dudley, this theatre chain aimed at supplying year-round employment for !FRICAN!MERICAN performers, although they eventually came to see TOBA as an acronym for “tough on black actors.” By 1916, Dudley had 28 theatres in the chain. In 1919, theatres managed by whites were admitted. Dubbed the “Chitlin Circuit,” it was criticized for paying small salaries to all performers except headliners. The TOBA folded during the Great Depression. THEATRICAL CLUBS. The first known theatrical club in the United States is believed to be the Actors’ Order of Friendship, which was established in 1849 in Philadelphia. In 1868, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks provided charitable efforts on behalf of performers, but its work was taken over by a New York lodge, set up in 1888, devoted to charitable efforts for members of the profession. This lodge, in turn, was supplanted by the !CTORS&UNDOF!MER ICA, which quickly became the main source of assistance to indigent theatrical workers. The Lambs, a purely social club for theatricals, was started in 1874, but was rivaled by the Players, the most prestigious of the era, established in 1888 by Edwin Booth and others. Along with theatre professionals, membership included celebrated literary and political figures such as Mark Twain and Civil 7AR hero, General William T. Sherman. Because of its all-male membership (until 1992), ACTRESSES founded the Twelfth Night Club in 1891 and the Professional Womens’ League in 1892. In 1907, the Charlotte Cushman Club was founded in Philadelphia to provide housing for actresses and to preserve Cushman’s papers. Nonprofessionals founded theatrical clubs in support of the little theatre movement in the early 20th century. College and university students organized themselves into clubs to raise funds to produce plays on their campuses. See also ACADEMICTHEATRE; CLUBS; FRIARS. THEATRICAL SLANG. Theatre artists developed their own lingo referring to backstage situations and life on the ROAD. Some of it entered general usage, like “winging it” for doing something without a considered plan, just as ACTORS sometimes had to go on stage in roles they had not learned and thus frequently popped off into the wings to consult the script. Other terms remained within the profession and are

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lost to posterity except for the occasional appearance in an old play or in vocabulary lists compiled by fans, like Judge Horton, who saved for us such terms as “chesty” for an actor who overrated his own ability, and “knocker” for one who would make unkind comments about a fellow performer. A big-name performer or “headliner” would get “top of the hangers,” meaning placement of the name near the top of the bills or posters that billposters hanged on walls about town. A “shape actress” was one who revealed the contours of her body by cross-dressing to play male roles; the term was mildly pejorative in that it implied a reliance on flaunting one’s physical attributes as opposed to genuine artistry. “On with others” designated a performer who had to appear in a scene without any dialogue to speak. A “choir snatcher” was a MANAGER whose quest for new talent would take him into local churches on Sundays to spot pretty faces and voices singing in the village choir. Audiences too had popular phrases to describe their theatergoing activities. A “carriage party” was a crush of horse-drawn carriages stopping in front of a theatre a half hour before curtain, a sure indication that the play was drawing a fashionable audience. In the early 20th century, the “subway circuit” referred to outlying theatres, as opposed to those conveniently located on "ROADWAY. Line parties were groups of friends who bought their theatre seats together, all in a row or “line.” VARIETY and even general newspapers popularized words like “ginger” to mean risqué content or suggestive dialogue; a show with too much ginger could face difficulties from local authorities in some cities. A “jay town,” populated with “jays” or rubes, was so small that it could support no more than a one-night stand. See also CONWAY, JACK. THEATRICAL SYNDICATE. Also referred to as the Theatrical Trust, the Theatrical Syndicate was set up in 1895 during a secret meeting of major PRODUCERS, A. L. Erlanger, Charles Frohman, William Harris Sr., Al Hayman, Marc Klaw, Samuel F. NixonNirdlinger, and J. Fred Zimmerman, with the initial plan of better organizing the chaotic booking procedures of the day. This admirable goal evolved into a virtual monopoly over nearly all theatres in the United States. The terms the Syndicate offered producers and ACTORS grew increasingly harsh. A few notables fought back, particularly

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Harrison Grey Fiske and his wife, Minnie Maddern Fiske, who, like Sarah Bernhardt, opted to perform in tents before acquiescing to the Syndicate’s terms. David Belasco also resisted. Even though the nationwide press assailed the Syndicate’s practices, its stranglehold on American theatre remained intact until the 3HUBERT brothers established their own producing empire in competition. The Syndicate ordered the Shuberts to cease acquiring theatres in 1905, but they fought back by building their own. By 1916, the Syndicate’s last agreement expired and the Shuberts became the major theatre monopoly until 1930. THEY KNEW WHAT THEY WANTED. Opening on 24 November 1924 at the Garrick Theatre, the 0ULITZER 0RIZE–winning drama by 3IDNEY (OWARD was PRODUCED by the 4HEATRE 'UILD and DIRECTED by 0HILIP-OELLER. It ran for 192 performances and was made into the 1956 musical The Most Happy Fella. With the California wine-producing country as local color, the poignant romantic triangle involves a waitress (played by Pauline Lord) who arrives to marry Tony (2ICHARD "ENNETT), a wealthy Italian vintner who proposed to her by mail, having sent the photograph of his handsome younger overseer ('LEN!NDERS). Although incapacitated by an automobile mishap en route to the station to get his bride, Tony insists on going through with the wedding. In her confusion, the waitress turns to the younger man and their brief fling results in her pregnancy. By the time Tony can walk again, she has come to love her husband and fears she will lose him when he learns of the child he could not have fathered. THIRD DEGREE, THE. This four-act muckraking drama by Charles Klein opened on 1 February 1909 for 168 performances at the Hudson Theatre, PRODUCED by Henry B. Harris. Howard Jeffries is accused of murdering an unscrupulous art dealer who had been his mother’s old sweetheart. Howard’s wife Annie comes to his defense, but he is estranged from his wealthy parents because he married a poor girl. At Annie’s behest, an important lawyer takes the case and discovers the art dealer’s suicide note, thus clearing Howard and forcing the authorities to admit their rush to judgment. No less than three MOTIONPICTURE versions appeared during the silent era (1913, 1919, 1926).

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THIRTEENTH CHAIR, THE. Written by Bayard Veiller as a vehicle for his wife, -ARGARET7YCHERLY, this three-act thriller opened on 20 November 1916 for 328 performances presented by father and son PRODUCING partners William Harris Sr. and Jr. at the 48th Street Theatre. Wycherly played Rosalie La Grange, a medium engaged by Mrs. Crosby to contact a murdered friend in hopes that his spirit will identify the killer. During the séance, Edward Wales, a friend of Mrs. Crosby, is stabbed, but no knife can be found. Helen, who is engaged to Mrs. Crosby’s son, Will, is suspected, particularly when it is revealed that she is the medium’s daughter. However, a second séance reveals the true killer. Wycherly appeared in the 1929 MOTION PICTURE version, but there were two others, in 1919 and in 1937, with Dame May Whitty playing Rosalie in the last. THOMAS, A. E. (1872–1947). Born Albert Ellsworth Thomas in Chester, Massachusetts, he was educated at Brown University and worked in journalism before turning to a PLAYWRITING career. Among his more than two dozen modestly successful plays and MU SICALS, Thomas had his longest run with an adaptation of an Alice Duer Miller story, Come Out of the Kitchen (1916). Others were: Her Husband’s Wife (1910), Little Boy Blue (1911), The Rainbow (1912), The Big Idea (1914), The Matinee Hero (1918), Just Suppose (1920), The Champion (1921), Only 38 (1921), The French Doll (1922), Our Nell (1922), The Jolly Roger (1923), Fool’s Bells (1925), Embers (1926), Lost (1927), The Big Pond (1928), Vermont (1929), Her Friend the King (1929), and No More Ladies (1934). THOMAS, AUGUSTUS (1857–1934). St. Louis-born Augustus Thomas worked as a railroad man and journalist, and he considered a law career before he adapted Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel Editha’s Burglar as a play for a local theatre. Revised in collaboration with Edgar Smith, it had a successful "ROADWAY run in 1889. He replaced Dion Boucicault as the resident play doctor at the Madison Square Theatre and this led to a string of highly successful melodramas that were among the most acclaimed of the time, including Alabama (1891), In Mizzoura (1893), New Blood (1894), The Man Upstairs (1895), The Capitol (1895), The Hoosier Doctor (1898), Arizona (1900), Colorado (1901), Soldiers of Fortune (1902), The Witching Hour (1907), As a Man Thinks (1911), Rio

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Grande (1916), and The Copperhead (1918). He also wrote popular comedies, including On the Quiet (1901), The Earl of Pawtucket (1903), The Other Girl (1903), Mrs. Leffingwell’s Boots (1905), The Education of Mr. Pipp (1905), The Embassy Ball (1906), Palmy Days (1919), and others. His plays were generally appreciated for his Americanizing of the enduring dramatic struggle of an individual against forces out of her/his control and they were varied in subject matter. Thomas was long-time president of the Society of American Dramatists. After Charles Frohman’s death in the Lusitania sinking, Thomas managed Frohman’s interests. THOMASHEFSKY, BORIS (1868–1939). Boris Thomashefsky was born in Kiev, Russia, immigrated to the United States in 1881, and found work in a shirt factory. He began ACTING in Yiddish theatre in a revival of Avrom Goldfadn’s The Witch on the Lower East Side of New York. He tried his hand as a PRODUCER, PLAYWRIGHT, and theatre owner, but lacked the ambition to provide the sort of challenging dramas his colleague Jacob Adler regularly offered. Known for his good looks and melodic voice, Thomashefsky STARRED in numerous Yiddish operettas, including Moshe Zeifert’s The Little Spark of Jewishness (1909). The romanticized roles he played onstage, enhanced by his frequently publicized offstage love life, elevated him to stardom. His wife, Bessie Baumfield-Kaufman (1873–1962), often costarred with him in Yiddish versions of literary classics such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Hamlet, Faust, Hedda Gabler, and Parsifal. Thomashefsky occasionally performed on "ROADWAY, notably in The Singing Rabbi (1931). He also acted in Yiddishlanguage MOTIONPICTURES. THOMPSON, DENMAN (1833–1911). Pennsylvania-born Denman Thompson grew up in New England and performed in CIRCUS and STOCK without gaining much attention. When he developed a vaudeville sketch about the definitive rube, a good-natured New England farmer, the character proved so popular that Thompson wrote a play about him called Joshua Whitcomb (1878), which did well on TOUR. Thompson then collaborated with George W. Ryer on a second Whitcomb play, The Old Homestead (1887), which achieved 160 performances at New York’s Fourteenth Street Theatre, phenomenal success on the ROAD, and returns to New York in 1899, 1904, 1907, and

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1908. Following Thompson’s death, a 1913 revival featured Edward L. Snader as Whitcomb. Despite attempts at other roles, Thompson’s audience demanded Joshua Whitcomb and he played the iconic character for the rest of his career. With Ryer, Thompson also wrote The Sunshine of Paradise Alley (1896) and Our New Minister (1903). THOMPSON, LYDIA (1836–1908). London-born Lydia Thompson TOURED to New York in 1868 with her “British Blondes” and generated major excitement with a series of burlesque MUSICALS, including Ixion (1868), Ernani (1868), The Forty Thieves (1869), and Sinbad the Sailor (1869), in which Thompson played the breeches role to show off her well-contoured figure. Some CRITICS found her performances scandalous, but others commented favorably on her beauty and skill at COMEDY. The popularity of Thompson’s entertainments led to American imitators and she toured frequently to the United States, making her last New York appearance in The Crust of Society (1894). THOMPSON, WOODMAN (1889?–1955). Born in Pittsburgh, Woodman Thompson was a prolific SCENEDESIGNER from the 1920s until the 1940s, teaching design at Columbia University on the side. His SCENERY graced the original "ROADWAY productions of Beggar on Horseback (1924), What Price Glory (1924), The Firebrand (1924), The Cocoanuts (1925), The Wisdom Tooth (1926), The Desert Song (1926), Deep River (1926), The Barretts of Wimpole Street* (1931), The Warrior’s Husband (1932), The Ghost of Yankee Doodle (1937), and The Magnificent Yankee* (1946). He also designed Winthrop Ames’s popular revivals of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas Iolanthe and The Pirates of Penzance, both in 1926, and +ATHARINE #ORNELL’s Romeo and Juliet (1934). THREE FACES EAST. Anthony Paul Kelly’s three-act thriller, heavily rewritten by PRODUCER-DIRECTOR 'EORGE-#OHAN, opened at the Cohan and Harris Theatre on 31 August 1918 for 335 performances. German spies enlist the aid of Fraulein Helene to take the place of a dead English woman and to contact Franz Boelke, who aims to plant a bomb at a cabinet meeting in London. However, the plan is foiled when Helene is revealed as a British counterspy and, in the process, falls in love. A silent MOTION PICTURE version appeared in 1926, remade as a “talkie” in 1930.

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THREE OF US, THE. 2ACHEL #ROTHERS had her first "ROADWAY success when this four-act drama opened on 17 October 1906 for 227 performances at the Madison Square Theatre. The play focuses on Rhy Macchesney, who, with her two brothers, owns the rich “Three of Us” mine in Nevada. Rhy’s fiancé Stephen Townley hears of a richer load and tells Rhy. One of Rhy’s brothers overhears the conversation and hands the information over to a speculator. Stephen thinks Rhy has betrayed him, but eventually learns otherwise. A silent MOTIONPICTURE adaptation was released in 1914. THREE PLAYS FOR A NEGRO THEATRE. Three one-act plays written by poet Ridgely Torrence between 1914 and 1917, Grammy Maumee, Simon the Cyrenian, and The Rider of Dreams, made up a 5 April 1917 bill called Three Plays for a Negro Theatre at New York’s Garden City Theatre, where it ran until 14 April, when it moved to the Garrick Theatre until 24 April. Torrence’s goal was to present !FRICAN!MERICAN life with more REALISM than it had been portrayed in American drama up to that time. The bill was the first to feature all-black casts on "ROADWAY. Partly due to America’s entry in World 7AR I, Three Plays for a Negro Theatre had a short run, but Torrence published the plays under the same title. THREE WISE FOOLS. Austin Strong’s drama, doctored by coPRO DUCER Winchell Smith, received mixed reviews, but became a longrunning success due to marketing efforts by its other coproducer, *OHN'OLDEN, who released unsold tickets through Leblang’s Ticket Office and with enormous signs touting the play’s merits placed outside the Criterion Theatre where Three Wise Fools opened on 31 October 1918. It subsequently racked up 316 performances despite its slight story of three old bachelors reminiscing about a lost love shared by all three. The woman married a man falsely convicted of a crime and she has since died. The bachelors are rejuvenated by the appearance of Miss Fairchild, the grown child of their old sweetheart, who attempts to take the blame for the crime that convicted her father. Gordon Schuyler, a nephew of one of the bachelors, is able to prove the innocence of the girl, as well as of her father, and they are subsequently married. Golden produced a 1936 revival featuring legendary ACTOR-PLAYWRIGHT William Gillette in his last "ROADWAY appearance, but the production managed only nine performances.

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-OTIONPICTURE versions of Three Wise Fools appeared in 1923 and 1946, with Lionel Barrymore appearing in the last. THROCKMORTON, CLEON (1897–1965). Born in Atlantic City, he began as a SCENEDESIGNER with the Provincetown Players for whom he famously created the sky dome first used for The Emperor Jones. Later Throckmorton designed for the 4HEATRE 'UILD, the .EIGHBORHOOD 0LAYHOUSE, the #IVIC 2EPERTORY 4HEATRE, and The Group Theatre.* He also owned a scenic supply company and supervised technical DIRECTION for the Federal Theatre Project.* TIGER ROSE. David Belasco PRODUCED this three-act melodrama by Willard Mack at the Lyceum Theatre on 3 October 1917, where it ran for 384 performances. Lenore Ulric scored a success playing Rose Bocion, a French-Canadian temptress, sought after by several men, including a mountie, Devlin, and Bruce Norton, who commits a justifiable murder. Devlin seizes on this as a way to eliminate Norton as a competitor for Rose’s affections, but she stands by Bruce until he can exonerate himself. #RITICS found the play less than exceptional, but Belasco staged a spectacular thunderstorm and other effects, all of which attracted audiences. Mack also appeared in the play. Ulric STARRED in a 1923 silent MOTIONPICTURE version, and Lupe Velez played the role in a 1929 “talkie.” TIMES SQUARE.† Originally known as Longacre Square, this area of Manhattan was renamed in honor of the New York Times building, a huge structure necessitating a subway stop to this part of the city in the early 20th century. The area became synonymous with "ROADWAY theatre as the rowdier amusements that had been part of Longacre Square’s rambunctious history receded and the area was revitalized. Many theatres were built in the vicinity. By World 7AR I, it had become the center of New York’s theatrical activity. Times Square remains the geographic center of the Broadway community into the 21st century. TIN PAN ALLEY. This term, purportedly coined by composer Monroe H. Rosenfeld, identifies two blocks of 28th Street between Fifth Avenue, "ROADWAY, and Sixth Avenue where many song publishing companies operated beginning in the late 19th century, thriving just

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prior to World 7AR I. The distinction between the Tin Pan Alley songwriter, whose creations were mostly for vaudeville and burlesque performers, and the Broadway songwriter, whose compositions were featured in MUSICALS and revues, did not hold for long as many of the leading composers and lyricists moved freely between both categories. Despite the fact that many of the song publishing firms eventually moved to New York’s Brill Building, “Tin Pan Alley” remained the way their business was described. In the popular mind, songs were often more associated with a leading performer than with the composer; thus a composer who performed his own material, as did 'EORGE-#OHAN, achieved the peak of recognition. Irving Berlin also wrote both words and music. Jack Norwoth, best remembered for “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” worked with various collaborators, notably singer Nora Bayes. Rida Johnson Young wrote hundreds of songs that entered the popular vernacular. Her “Mother Machree,” for example, like many of the Irish songs she wrote for Chauncey Olcott and other stage Irishmen, was widely believed to be an authentic Irish song. Edward Harrigan and David Braham scored hits with songs they wrote for Harrigan and Hart’s lively COMEDIES. Other songwriters whose work was frequently heard from the stage include Jerome Kern, Victor Herbert, Richard Carle, Paul Dresser, Charles K. Harris, Eddie Leonard, Edgar Selden, Harry Williams and Egbert Van Alstyne, Joseph Tabrar, Harry Kennedy, Will S. Hays. The most successful !FRICAN!MERI CAN songwriting team was Bob Cole and J. Rosamond Johnson with hits like “Under the Bamboo Tree.” Others whose songs won both black and white singers include Ernest Hogan, James A. Bland, Will Marion Cook, and Sam Lucas. See also MUSICALTHEATRE. TO THE LADIES. Opening on 20 February1922 at the Liberty Theatre, the COMEDY by 'EORGE 3 +AUFMAN and -ARC #ONNELLY, DIRECTED by (OWARD ,INDSAY, ran for 128 performances. (ELEN (AYES played the wife who unassumingly manipulates her husband’s success at his job. As the self-important but clueless husband, Otto Kruger helped to keep the laughs coming. TOBY SHOW. A subcategory of the tent show or tent repertoire, the Toby show featured a young red-haired, freckle-faced rube character named Toby, often accompanied by a pigtailed soubrette named

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Susie. The character seems to have originated around 1909 as a means of injecting COMEDY into a standard play. Toby quickly became a ubiquitous and popular figure among the small troupes that played rural America, particularly in the Midwest and South. Toby was a silly bumpkin, but he always managed to save the situation in the end. TOBIN, GENEVIEVE (1899–1995). Born in New York, Genevieve Tobin debuted in 1912 in a revival of Disraeli, and proved to be a winsome ingénue in Oh, Look! (1918), Palmy Days (1919), Little Old New York (1920), Polly Preferred (1923), The Youngest (1924), Dear Sir (1924), This Woman Business (1926), Murray Hill (1927), Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929), and as Cordelia in a 1923 production of King Lear. Tobin married MOTIONPICTURE DIRECTOR William Keighley. TODAY. George H. Broadhurst collaborated with Abraham S. Schomer on this four-act drama PRODUCED at the 48th Street Theatre on 6 October 1913 for 280 performances. Emily Stevens scored a personal success as Lily, a spoiled, difficult wife who cannot learn to live on a modest income when her husband’s business fails. To keep the luxuries she feels she must have, Lily goes to work in a highclass brothel. When her husband, working as agent for the brothel’s landlord, arrives and finds Lily there, he is understandably shocked and leaves her. Conrad Nagel starred in a 1930 MOTIONPICTURE version of Today. TOMMERS. !CTORS who made a career of appearing in the innumerable productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that TOURED the United States from its first performances in Troy, New York, in 1852 well into the 1930s were Tommers. These productions, often referred to as “Tom shows,” were enduringly popular, but being called a “tommer” was tantamount to being called a ham. TOO MANY COOKS. Frank Craven’s three-act COMEDY, in which he also STARRED, was PRODUCED by William A. Brady at the 39th Street Theatre, opening on 24 February 1914 for 223 performances. An engaged couple, Albert Bennett and Alice Cook, plan to marry and build a little bungalow on a piece of property Albert has purchased with his modest savings. Unfortunately, family and friends intrude to

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offer suggestions on the house plans and cause Albert and Alice to fight. The couple breaks up, and Albert sadly finishes building the house himself after the carpenters go on strike. He is about to sell it when Alice returns just as he notices a flower she has planted. The couple is reconciled, vowing to keep their families at bay. Craven later adapted the play into a hit MUSICAL, Up She Goes (1922), collaborating with Tin Pan Alley songwriters Joseph McCarthy and Harry Tierney. TOO MUCH JOHNSON. William Gillette’s three-act COMEDY opened on 26 November 1894 at the Standard Theatre for 216 performances, PRODUCED by Charles Frohman. Based on a French play, La Plantation Thomasin, Too Much Johnson starred Gillette as Augustus Billings, a confirmed philanderer, who dallies with his French mistress in New York while his wife and disapproving mother-in-law are told he is in Cuba managing a plantation. When the women insist on accompanying him on a trip to Cuba, he is forced to take them and pulls off the subterfuge by borrowing a friend’s hacienda and befriending an irascible old man, Johnson, whom Billings presents as his overseer. After a few close calls, Billings manages to convince his wife and her mother. Gillette appeared in a short-lived "ROADWAY revival in 1910. TORCH-BEARERS, THE. Opening on 29 August 1922 at the 48th Street Theatre, the hilarious send-up of little theatre by 'EORGE +ELLY ran for 128 performances. Mary Boland played the charming young society woman who is recruited as a last-minute replacement in the leading role of a play to be performed for charity. Act 1 shows the rehearsal at her home. Act 2 is set backstage during the disastrous performance when someone in the audience faints. In act 3, after the show, the wife learns that it was her husband who fainted in horror at the artistic travesty on stage. Will the marriage survive? Oddly enough, the target of the play’s satire—AMATEUR theatre groups— PRODUCED this play regularly for decades. TORRENCE, RIDGELY (1875–1950). Born in Xenia, Ohio, as Frederick Ridgely Torrence, he was educated at Miami University and Princeton University. He worked as a librarian and editor after graduating, but spent most of his career writing poetry, books, and occasional plays, including Grammy Maumee (1914), Simon the

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Cyrenian (1917), and The Rider of Dreams (1917), which made up Three Plays for a Negro Theatre (1917) produced at New York’s Garden City and the first to feature an all !FRICAN!MERICAN cast on "ROADWAY. TOUR, TOURING COMPANY.† A touring company on the ROAD between 1880 and 1930 might perform a single play or several plays in REPERTORY in opera houses with 2,000-seat capacities or in smalltown theatres seating 100 or so. Touring was arduous but highly lucrative and did not decline until World 7AR I, when sound MOTION PICTURES, radio, and automobiles took audiences away from live performances other than vaudeville, which continued touring until the 1930s. Tours of recent "ROADWAY hits and out-of-town tryouts of new works continue today, but are comparatively rare compared to the golden age of “the road” when live theatre was a constant in American cities and towns. See also TRAVEL. TOWSE, J. RANKEN (1845–1933). Born in Streatham, England, he came to the United States in 1869 and made his career in New York without ever becoming an American citizen; he died in England. After four years in various positions on the New York Post, he became drama CRITIC in 1874 and continued until 1927, when he retired. Despite his conservative tastes, he was respected for his high standards and seen as one of the most influential critics of the era. TRACY, LEE (1898–1968).† A native of Atlanta, Georgia, Lee Tracy moved freely between stage and MOTION PICTURE ACTING, making his theatrical debut as the inventor brother Joe in 'EORGE +ELLY’s The Show-Off (1924). Tracy really made his mark in Philip Dunning and 'EORGE!BBOTT’s Broadway (1926) as hoofer Roy Lane and in "EN (ECHT and Charles MacArthur’s* The Front Page (1928) as crack newspaper reporter Hildy Johnson. His "ROADWAY appearances included The Book of Charm (1925), Glory Hallelujah (1926), Oh, Promise Me (1930), Louder, Please (1931), Bright Star (1935), Every Man for Himself (1940), The Traitor (1949), Metropole (1949), Mr. Barry’s Etchings (1950), and, most notably, The Best Man* (1960). TRACY, SPENCER (1900–1967).† Born in Milwaukee, Spencer Bonaventure Tracy spent time in the Navy during World 7AR I, after

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which he attended Ripon College where, at the suggestion of one of his professors, he decamped for New York to enter the !MERICAN !CADEMYOF$RAMATIC!RTS!!$! . After a year at AADA, Tracy landed a small role as a robot in the 4HEATRE'UILD’s production of Karel Cäpek’s expressionist drama R.U.R. (1922). During the 1920s, he continually found ACTING roles on "ROADWAY, including A Royal Fandango (1923), STARRING %THEL"ARRYMORE, and Yellow (1926). Mentored by 'EORGE - #OHAN, who cast Tracy in a leading role in his COMEDY The Baby Cyclone (1927), Tracy continued in weak plays like Conflict (1929) and Nigger Rich (1929), but finally created a sensation as merciless “Killer” Mears, a death-row inmate, in John Wexley’s* prison drama, The Last Mile* (1930). This led to Tracy’s long Hollywood career as a major MOTIONPICTURE star. He returned once to Broadway in 2OBERT % 3HERWOOD’s The Rugged Path* (1945), winning strong reviews, although the play’s run was brief. TRANSFORMATION SCENE. The visual effect of one spectacular scene fading into another constituted a basic appeal of the fairy extravaganza, a type of production in which scenic effects trumped coherent narrative. Beginning with The Black Crook in 1866, transformation scenes found their way into burlesques, pantomime spectacles, and MUSICAL revues for three decades or more. TRAPS. These are openings cut into the stage floor or in the SCENERY to allow scenic effects or unusual appearances by ACTORS. Throughout most of the 19th century, the trapped stage floor was a standard feature of the well-equipped theatre, but their gradual neglect in the early 1900s paralleled the passing of melodrama and its cheap thrills. According to the Kansas City Star (18 November 1906), a modern stage of the 1890s had five traps: two quarter traps, one Hamlet trap, one STAR trap, and one vampire trap. The Hamlet trap, used in the gravedigger scene, was generally about seven feet by two-and-a-half feet and located slightly upstage of center. The two quarter traps, one at stage right and one at stage left, a little farther downstage than the Hamlet, were useful for emergencies as well as for pantomimes and extravaganzas with lots of special effects. In Faust, Mephistopheles always made his entrance from the vampire trap, near the footlights at stage right, as did any infernal or unpleasant characters. Some traps were named for the manner in which the doors were hinged to close

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behind the actor; thus “vampire trap” might also indicate two spring flaps in a piece of painted scenery, which allowed the illusion that an actor had materialized through a solid wall. The star trap was used for the sudden entrance down stage left of a good fairy, who would shoot up through segments that spread open in a star pattern, but which also snapped shut so quickly that hapless fairies were sometimes scratched, caught, or injured. Occasionally, theatres would install the ghost glide (known in England as the Corsican trap) by which the actor would rise into view as he moved parallel to the footlights, an effect achieved by having him ride a wagon up an incline beneath a long opening in the floor. TRAVEL. From its beginnings, American theatre seemed to be situated in a few East Coast cities, but as the United States expanded, AC TORS and productions took to the ROAD with great frequency. During the first half of the 19th century, rivers served as highways into the wilderness, and some troupes—like that with which Joseph Jefferson TOURED as a boy—made their way by a combination of boat and overland wagon, and sometimes even by using the wagon as a sleigh on frozen rivers. After the Civil 7AR, railroad travel rapidly replaced river travel. By the late 1880s, a vast network of trains connected the nation, and theatrical chains or circuits were formed to facilitate bookings along given railroad lines. Traveling was often arduous, particularly when it involved long jumps and one-night stands. Unknown actors built their reputations on tour, while a waning STAR could extend a career by touring. A few top stars (Sarah Bernhardt, Joseph Jefferson, Richard Mansfield, Adelina Patti) could afford private railroad cars. Circuses made use of entire trains to transport performers, equipment, and animals. Showboats—floating theatres—on the Mississippi River and elsewhere continued until the 1930s. The Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.–PRODUCED MUSICAL drama Show Boat (1927) offered a theatrical valentine to the era of touring by boat just as the tradition was dying away. TRAVELING SALESMAN, THE. Harry B. Harris PRODUCED this four-act James Forbes COMEDY at the Liberty Theatre, where it opened on 10 August 1908 for 280 performances. Frank McIntyre played traveling salesman Bob Blake, who falls in love with Beth

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Elliott, a local girl in a rural small town. When her family farm is auctioned for taxes, Beth believes that none of her neighbors will bid against her. She is manipulated into thinking Bob has cheated her out of the land by some con men who want to cheat her out of the farm, but Bob finds a satisfactory solution and the lovers are reunited. A MOTIONPICTURE version appeared in 1916. TREADWELL, SOPHIE (1885–1970). Born in Stockton, California, the PLAYWRIGHT served briefly as secretary to Helena Modjeska, then became a reporter. She traveled to France to cover World 7AR I. In 1921, she achieved a major coup by getting an interview with Pancho Villa in Mexico, and she drew upon that experience for her play Gringo (1922). She ultimately wrote 54 plays, including O, Nightingale (1925), Ladies Leave (1929), Lone Valley (1933), For Saxophone (1934), Plumes in the Dust (1936), and Hope for a Harvest (1941). Her significant success was Machinal (1928), an expressionist drama on the dehumanizing effects of a mechanized society, inspired by the Judd Grey-Ruth Snyder murder trial. In her later years, Treadwell wrote novels. TREASURE ISLAND. *ULES%CKERT'OODMAN adapted Robert Louis Stevenson’s popular novel with the intention of presenting it as a Christmas treat for children, but the adaptation proved so popular that it ran for 205 performances at the Punch and Judy Theatre, where it opened on 1 December 1915. With music by Maurice Rumsey, Treasure Island was PRODUCED and DIRECTED by Charles Hopkins, with Edward Emery codirecting, and featuring Hopkins’s wife as young Jim Hawkins searching for pirate treasure and contending with the duplicitous pirate, Long John Silver. Treasure Island had a long life on stages in numerous adaptations and MOTIONPICTURE incarnations. TRIAL OF MARY DUGAN, THE. Bayard Veiller’s three-act courtroom melodrama, PRODUCED by A. H. Woods, opened on 19 September 1927 for a hefty 437-performance run at the National Theatre. The murder trial of beautiful Follies entertainer Mary Dugan (played by Ann Harding) is going badly until her younger brother, Jimmy, takes over Mary’s defense from the experienced attorney Edward West. Mary’s admission of affairs with several men is mitigated by testimony that the spoils of these affairs financed Jimmy’s law

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degree. It turns out to be well-spent money when Jimmy proves that West, in love with the murdered man’s wife, framed Mary and provided a weak defense to guarantee her conviction. Norma Shearer scored a hit in the 1929 MOTIONPICTURE version, her first “talkie,” and Laraine Day reprised the role in a 1941 remake. TRIFLES. This one-act drama by 3USAN'LASPELL opened on 8 August 1916 at the Wharf Theatre, the little theatre used by the Provincetown Players on Cape Cod, after which the Washington Square Players PRODUCED it at the Comedy Theatre, where it opened on 30 August 1916. Based upon an actual case that Glaspell covered as a young reporter in Iowa, the tightly crafted play remains a perennial favorite. Two women explore small pieces of domestic evidence to discover that the absent woman must have murdered her abusive husband. The local authorities, all men, are unable to recognize clues among typical household items, nor are they able to decipher the emotional complexities of women’s lives. The turning point comes when the law-and-order-respecting sheriff’s wife decides not to reveal to her husband what the women have discovered. Trifles was briefly revived by the Manhattan Little Theatre Club in 1928. TRILBY. Paul M. Potter adapted George du Maurier’s novel into this popular four-act drama. It opened on 15 April 1895 for 208 performances at the Garden Theatre. Wilton Lackaye was acclaimed for his performance as Svengali, who molds Trilby, a beauty played by Virginia Harned, into an opera diva. Billee, an artist, wants to marry Trilby, but she chooses to continue performing under Svengali’s guidance. When Svengali dies, Trilby’s vocal talent dies with him. Billee reunites with her, but Trilby dies without the influence of Svengali. Lackaye appeared in well-received 1905 and 1915 "ROADWAY revivals, as well as a 1915 silent MOTION PICTURE version, but a 1938 revival with 7ALTER(AMPDEN proved most successful. Trilby also provided the source for a failed MUSICAL, The Studio Girl (1927), and the novel and/or play inspired at least a dozen film treatments, including a 1931 classic with John Barrymore retitled Svengali. TRIP TO CHINATOWN, A. Charles H. Hoyt’s popular play with music opened on 9 November 1891 at the Madison Square Theatre and ran for 657 performances. “Chinatown” is a fake destination posited

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by a lively group seeking an evening out at a restaurant, and there mishaps do occur. TRUEX, ERNEST (1889–1973). Born in Rich Hill, Missouri, Ernest Truex made his stage debut billed as a CHILD prodigy in 1894. His career spanned nearly 70 years. After ACTING in STOCK for several seasons, he made notable appearances in COMEDIES and MUSICALS, including Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1910), A Good Little Devil (1913), The Dummy (1914), Very Good Eddie (1915), Six-Cylinder Love (1921), The Fall Guy (1925), Whistling in the Dark (1932), and his biggest hit, George Washington Slept Here* (1940). He also spent a season with the American Repertory Theatre* in 1946. TRUEX, SARAH (1877–1958). Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the ACTRESS studied the Delsarte system of expression in her teens and later joined the Chicago Conservatory of Music and Dramatic Art. She made her debut with Otis Skinner’s company in 1894 and TOURED with him for three seasons. She became a respected STOCK actress. Her memoir A Woman of Parts (1949) recounts a demanding and colorful career. TRUTH, THE. This COMEDY by Clyde Fitch opened on 7 January 1907 at the Criterion Theater and managed only 34 performances despite its critical assessment as Fitch’s finest play. Some have seen the play’s action as similar to that in (ENRIK)BSEN’s A Doll’s House, although Fitch provided a happy ending. The title refers ironically to the web of deceit spun by Becky Warder, a congenital liar who loses her husband’s respect. She wins it back only upon repairing the damage done by her lies. Clara Bloodgood, the play’s STAR who had previously appeared in several Fitch plays, was a success on TOUR with the play during 1907. However, during her Baltimore engagement with the play, Bloodgood shot herself. It was speculated that her suicide was prompted by the play’s triumphant London production starring Marie Tempest, exacerbated by Fitch’s dedication of the published play to Tempest. Fitch denied any connection in the torrent of newspaper coverage of Bloodgood’s death. In 1914, The Truth was revived for 55 performances on "ROADWAY, starring Grace George. TULLY, RICHARD WALTON (1877–1945). Born in Nevada City, California, he graduated from the University of California. His first

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important play, the romantic melodrama The Bird of Paradise (1912), was PRODUCED by Oliver Morosco. Tully was sued for plagiarism, but won on appeal and went on to write The Rose of the Rancho (1906), Omar the Tentmaker (1914), and The Flame (1916). He DIRECTED some of his own plays, as well as works by others, including John Hunter Booth’s The Masquerader (1917) and Keep Her Smiling (1918), and Ernest Hutchinson’s The Right to Strike (1921). TURN TO THE RIGHT! *OHN 'OLDEN and Winchell Smith PRO DUCED Smith and John E. Hazzard’s three-act COMEDY on 18 August 1916 at the Gaiety Theatre for 435 performances. Joe Bascom, recently released from prison for a crime he did not commit, returns to his mother’s peach farm with two fellow prisoners, Muggs and Gilly, who are determined to go straight. However, when Joe learns that villainous Deacon Tillinger is planning to foreclose the mortgage on his mother’s struggling farm, he prevails upon Muggs and Gilly to help. They crack Tillinger’s safe, steal enough money to pay off the mortgage, and pickpocket the cash from Tillinger’s pocket and return it to his safe. June Mathis adapted the play for a 1922 silent MOTION PICTURE. A 1981 MUSICAL adaptation failed out of town. TWIN BEDS. This three-act Salisbury Field and Margaret Mayo farce opened on 14 August 1914 at the Fulton Theatre for 411 performances. Drunken Italian tenor Signor Monti wanders by mistake into the hotel room of Blanche and Harry Hawkins. He has disrobed for the night when Blanche arrives, initiating considerable confusion since the maid has sent Monti’s clothes to be cleaned and Harry arrives in a fury. When Monti’s wife turns up as well, confusion reigns. There were no less than three MOTIONPICTURE versions (1920, 1929, 1942), the last STARRING Joan Bennett and George Brent. TWO GIRLS WANTED. Opening 9 September 1926 at the Little Theatre, the light romantic COMEDY with corporate skulduggery ran for 324 performances. Gladys Unger wrote the play about two sisters who live in a cheap rooming house and work for rival companies. They relinquish their secretarial jobs to become parlor maid and cook at a swanky country house, which turns out to be the scene of machinations between the two companies. The sisters save the situation and one of them wins the man she fancies.

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TWO ORPHANS, THE. A French play about two sisters, one of them blind, both caught up in the French Revolution, had a number of English-language versions and became one of the most frequently performed melodramas of the last decades of the nineteenth century. In 1904, PRODUCER George C. Tyler revived the old warhorse in a TOURING production with an all-STAR cast that included James O’Neill, Louis James, Grace George, Clara Morris, Thomas Meighan, Sarah Cowell Lemoyne, and Sarah Truex. It was a last sentimental revisiting of the already moribund genre. TYLER, GEORGE C. (1867–1946). George Clouse Tyler was born in a small town near Chillicothe, Ohio, and worked as a reporter before becoming James O’Neill’s manager. In 1897, he joined PRODUCING forces with Liebler & Co., which, under the guidance of Theodore A. Liebler and Tyler, emerged as an important turn-of-the-century producing organization, presenting such notable plays as The Christian (1898), Sag Harbor (1900), The Squaw Man (1905), The Man from Home (1908), Alias Jimmy Valentine (1910), and The Garden of Allah (1911). Liebler & Co. also produced TOURS of such international STARS as Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Eleonora Duse, and Gabrielle Réjane. After several failures, just prior to World 7AR I, Leibler & Co. folded and Tyler briefly worked for Marc Klaw and A. L. Erlanger before striking out on his own as a producer with Clarence (1919), Dulcy (1921), To the Ladies (1922), Merton of the Movies (1922), Young Woodley (1925), and The Plough and the Stars (1927). From the mid-1920s, Tyler produced a series of revivals including Diplomacy and Jim, the Penman, as well as classics such as She Stoops to Conquer, The Beaux’ Stratagem, and Macbeth, the last featuring the only designs by theatrical visionary Edward Gordon Craig to be seen on American stages. Tyler retired from the stage to write his autobiography, Whatever Goes Up (1934).

n5n ULRIC, LENORE (1892–1970). Born Leonora Ulrich in New Ulm, Minnesota, the ACTRESS spent some years in STOCK in Milwaukee and Chicago before making her "ROADWAY debut in Richard Walton Tully’s The Bird of Paradise (1912) with ,AURETTE4AYLOR, after

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which she appeared in The Mark of the Beast (1915). Specializing in exotic, tempestuous roles, Ulric STARRED in David Belasco’s The Heart of Wetona (1915) and had a long run in the Belasco-PRODUCED Tiger Rose (1917). Ulric stayed with Belasco for several hits, including The Son-Daughter (1919), Kiki (1921), The Harem (1924), and Mima (1928), and scored a particular triumph in blackface as a Harlem prostitute in the controversial Edward Sheldon-Charles MacArthur* melodrama, Lulu Belle (1926). After leaving Belasco, she appeared successfully, but with diminishing luster, in Pagan Lady (1930). The Social Register (1931), Nona (1932), Her Man of Wax (1933), The Fifth Column (1940), and, most effectively, as Charmian in Antony and Cleopatra, starring +ATHARINE #ORNELL, in 1947. Ulric also appeared in several silent MOTIONPICTURES, as well as half a dozen sound films, including Camille (1936). UNCHASTENED WOMAN, THE. This three-act drama by Louis Kaufman Anspacher opened on 9 October 1915 at the 39th Street Theatre, PRODUCED by Oliver Morosco, for 193 performances. Emily Stevens STARRED as Caroline Knollys, a despicable woman who attempts to seduce a married artist, is caught making a false declaration at customs by an official who was once her husband’s mistress. Caroline attempts to bribe the woman by publicly revealing this indiscretion, but her husband, played by H. Reeves-Smith, and others force her to withdraw the claim. Caroline, however, remains the “unchastened” woman. Violet Kemble-Cooper appeared in an unsuccessful 1926 revival and the second of two MOTIONPICTURE (1918, 1925) treatments starred Theda Bara. UNDER COVER. Roi Cooper Megrue’s four-act thriller opened on 26 August 1914 for 349 performances at the Cort Theatre STARRING William Courtenay as Steven Denby, who appears to be a jewel smuggler hiding a valuable necklace in the country. Denby is playing a game of cat-and-mouse with a detective, but before the final curtain Denby’s true identity is revealed. The long-running hit led to a 1916 MOTIONPICTURE version. UNDER THE RED ROBE. Charles Frohman PRODUCED this four-act Edward E. Rose play at the Empire Theatre, where it opened on 28 December 1896 for 216 performances. Rose’s play was adapted from

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a Stanley Weyman novel and premiered successfully in London before a New York production STARRING William Faversham as Gil de Berault, who defies Cardinal Richelieu’s ban on dueling. As punishment, the Cardinal cruelly gives Berault the choice of either losing his life or betraying the trust of the brother of his lover, Renée de Cochefort, played by Viola Allen. Outwitting the Cardinal, Berault is reunited with Renée. Three MOTION PICTURE versions appeared (1915, 1923, 1937) and it was adapted into a 1928 MUSICAL, The Red Robe. UNDER TWO FLAGS. Paul M. Potter’s five-act adaptation of Ouida’s (Marie Louise Ramé) popular novel was PRODUCED lavishly by Charles Frohman and David Belasco for Belasco’s STAR attraction Blanche Bates, despite the fact that various other dramatizations of the novel had previously TOURED. This production, which opened on 5 February 1901 for 135 performances at the Garden Theatre, became the definitive version of the story of Cigarette, a strong-willed girl following the French army through North Africa, battling opposing armies and a dust storm in the Chellelah Gorge to win the soldier she loves. Marie Dressler toured in one of many STOCK productions of it, and Theda Bara played Cigarette in a 1916 MOTIONPICTURE version with Claudette Colbert taking over the role for a 1936 release, with many screen subsequent adaptations. UNGER, GLADYS (1885–1940). San Francisco–born Gladys Buchanan Unger began her prolific PLAYWRITING career in 1903. Most of her successes were adaptations of French and German works, including The Marionettes (1911), The Goldfish (1922), The Love Habit (1923), The Business Widow, The Werewolf (1924), Starlight (1925), Stolen Fruit (1925), and Two Girls Wanted (1926), as well as books for operettas and MUSICALS and numerous MOTION PICTURE scripts in the 1930s. UNION SQUARE THEATRE. In 1871, Sheridan Shook, owner of the Union Place Hotel, opened a theatre within the hotel, turning it over to MANAGER A. M. Palmer the following year. Palmer staged a series of successful romantic plays, mostly with French origins, including Agnes, Camille, and The Two Orphans. The glory days of the theatre ended when Palmer passed the management to J. M. Hill in 1883. Destroyed by fire in 1888, the theatre was rebuilt and operated by the

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B. F. Keith-E. F. Albee vaudeville circuit until 1893, after which it continued as a burlesque and MOTIONPICTURE house. UNITED SCENIC ARTISTS OF AMERICA (USAA).† Founded on 20 September 1912, this organization of United States SCENEDESIGN ERS and artists eclipsed an earlier organization, the Protective Alliance of Scenic Painters of America, which had been founded on 11 September 1885 by Harley Merry and Richard Marston. The USAA, whose membership also included COSTUME and LIGHTING designers, worked for better working conditions and pay. In 1918, the USAA affiliated with the Brotherhood of Painters, Decorators and Paperhangers of America. UNITT, EDWARD G. (?–1920?). One of the most prolific SCENE DESIGNERS of his time, he was also associated with some of the most important PLAYS, operettas, and MUSICALS staged in New York between 1890 and 1920, including Aristocracy (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), Under the Red Robe (1896), The Little Minister (1897), The Conquerors (1898), The Liars (1898), Barbara Frietchie (1899), David Harum (1900), The Pride of Jennico (1900), Richard Carvel (1900), L’Aiglon (1900), Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines (1901), If I Were King (1901), Quality Street (1901), The Girl with Green Eyes (1902), The Red Mill (1906), Mlle. Modiste (1906), The Great Divide (1906), A Grand Army Man (1907), and The Blue Bird (1910). He often worked for MANAGERS Charles and Daniel Frohman, designed E. H. Sothern’s 1900 production of Hamlet and several 'EORGE-#OHAN musicals, including The American Idea (1908), The Man Who Owns Broadway (1909), The Little Millionaire (1911), Hello, Broadway! (1914), The Royal Vagabond (1919), and Mary (1920), as well as the 1911 edition of the Ziegfeld Follies. UNIVERSITY PLAYERS. Established in 1928 at Falmouth, Massachusetts, this STOCK theatre was first called the University Players Guild by founders Bretaigne Windust* and Charles Leatherbee. Although it closed in 1932, it became legendary for the numerous young theatre talents who began there and went on to distinguished careers, including Henry Fonda,* Joshua Logan,* James Stewart,* Margaret Sullavan,* Kent Smith,* Mildred Natwick,* and Myron McCormick,* among others.

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UNKNOWN PURPLE, THE. Roland West and Carlyle Moore collaborated on this three-act (plus prologue) drama produced by West at the Lyric Theatre, where it opened on 14 September 1918 for 273 performances. 2ICHARD"ENNETT’s performance as Peter Marchmont, an inventor framed for a crime by his cheating wife and her lover, was credited with much of the production’s success, as well as the use of flashbacks, a technique %LMER2ICE had pioneered effectively in On Trial four years earlier. Once out of jail, Marchmont invents a machine that makes him invisible (except for a telltale purple light), allowing him to seek revenge. West DIRECTED a 1923 MOTION PIC TURE version STARRING Henry B. Walthall. UP IN MABEL’S ROOM. Wilson Collison and Otto Harbach’s threeact farce opened on 15 January 1919 for 229 performances at the Eltinge Theatre, PRODUCED by A. H. Woods. Among the first of a long series of “sex COMEDIES,” Up in Mabel’s Room has a simple plot involving the efforts of Garry Ainsworth, an awkward new husband, to retrieve a bit of lingerie he gave to his ex-girlfriend, Mabel Essington. Hoping to spare his wife Geraldine any embarrassment, he goes to Mabel’s apartment and spends considerable effort to retrieve the garment while contending with a number of unwanted arrivals of friends and family. This slight COMEDY proved remarkably durable in STOCK and AMATEUR productions, and spawned MOTIONPICTURE versions in 1926 and 1944. UPSTAIRS AND DOWN. This three-act Frederic and Fanny Hatton satiric farce opened on 25 September 1916 for 320 performances at the Cort Theatre, where it was PRODUCED by Oliver Morosco. Nancy Ives, a well-to-do woman living on Long Island, is troubled by the selfishness and hypocrisy of her peers and opts for a life among her servants, only to discover that the same human frailties exist among the servant class. As a result, Nancy returns to the comforts of the world of the rich. Olive Thomas STARRED in a 1919 MOTIONPICTURE version. URBAN, JOSEPH (1872–1933). Born in Vienna, Joseph Urban became one of the most acclaimed theatre architects and SCENE DE SIGNERS in early 20th-century American theatre and may be credited with launching the New Stagecraft. He studied at the Vienna Art Academy with Baron Carl Hassauer and at the Polytechnicum, after

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which he designed palaces and even a bridge before coming to the United States in 1904 to design the Austrian Pavilion for the St. Louis World’s Fair. Urban returned to Europe upon completing the task; he worked for the Vienna Burgtheater and designed operas throughout Europe. He did not return to America until 1911 when Alice Nielsen invited him to be resident designer for the new Boston Opera Company. His settings for Madame Butterfly (1913) there were inspired by the design of a kimono Nielsen had brought from Japan, and they in turn inspired 2OBERT%DMOND*ONES’s innovative design for The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife. Impressed with Urban’s designs for The Garden of Paradise (1914), PRODUCER Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. began a long association with Urban, who designed 16 editions of Ziegfeld Follies from 1915 to 1931, the lavish Ziegfeld Theatre itself, and a series of Ziegfeld-produced MU SICALS and operettas, including Sally (1920), Sunny (1925), Rio Rita (1927), Show Boat (1927), The Three Musketeers (1928), Rosalie (1928), Whoopee (1928), and Music in the Air (1932). Between 1917 and 1933, Urban designed and supervised construction of settings for 54 productions. Urban also designed nonmusical plays, including 3HAKESPEAREAN revivals for ACTOR James K. Hackett and Smilin’ Through (1919), STARRING *ANE#OWL. UTILITY. An “all-purpose” ACTOR in a STOCK company was expected to be capable of playing all types of small parts. This line of business was low in the company hierarchy and the salary was correspondingly modest.

n6n VARIETY.† Founded in 1905 by Sime Silverman (1872–1933), this weekly trade newspaper covered all phases of show business, from theatre and vaudeville to the budding MOTION PICTURE industry, offering news, financial coverage, reviews, and ADVERTISEMENTS. Variety merged with the New York Clipper in 1924 and added a daily edition published in Hollywood in 1933. Characterized by its slangy style, Variety PRODUCED some legendary headlines: “Wall St. Lays an Egg” (front page news on the 1929 stock market crash) and “Hix Nix Stix Pix” (small towns reject rural films). Variety

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evolved through the 20th century, with coverage devoted to vaudeville disappearing as sections on movies, radio, television,* and video appeared and expanded. See also CONWAY, JACK; THEATRICAL SLANG. VAUDEVILLE. American “vaudeville” has little to do with the original French usage of the word, but borrowed it only to give a classy aura to bills of short variety acts, thus distinguishing them from the risqué variety acts presented in concert saloons and comiques. The word was employed by a few theatre MANAGERS as early as 1840, but the quintessential American vaudeville style was established by Tony Pastor, whose Fourteenth Street Theatre opened in 1881 and perfected a style of family oriented variety amusements of the highest quality. Pastor’s success spurred other variety PRODUCERS to elevate the quality of their work and to dispense with the more vulgar acts that offended family audiences. B. F. Keith and his associate E. F. Albee attempted a “store-show” at the Gaiety Theatre in Boston, and it was so successful that they expanded their operations to various entertainments in several theatres before opening their first exclusively vaudeville theatre in Boston in 1894. Other producers, including F. F. Proctor, Martin Beck, Oscar Hammerstein I, followed suit. The 1910s brought widespread acceptance of vaudeville throughout middle America, and theatres were built to accommodate it. Various vaudeville circuits were managed by different organizations, including the Orpheum Circuit in the western United States and the Keith-Albee Circuit in the East. Beck built New York’s fabled Palace Theatre, which became the pinnacle of achievement for entertainers. The circuits led vaudeville performers to a life of continual TOURING. Many performers who had their first successes in vaudeville, including 'EORGE - #OHAN, Al Jolson, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Bob Hope, and Bert Williams, moved into legitimate theatre or MUSICALS, while others fell from vaudeville into burlesque. Actors from the legitimate stage, like Lillie Langtry, %THEL"ARRYMORE, and !LLA.AZIMOVA, performed short plays on vaudeville bills between "ROADWAY stints. Among popular entertainments, vaudeville dominated between 1890 and 1930, after which the combination of sound MOTIONPICTURES and the economic pressures of the Great Depression essentially killed it.

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VEILLER, BAYARD (1869–1943). Born in Brooklyn, New York, Bayard Veiller worked as a crime reporter and press agent prior to becoming a PLAYWRIGHT. He specialized in mysteries and thrillers, among which are three standouts: Within the Law (1912), The Thirteenth Chair (1916), and The Trial of Mary Dugan (1927). Veiller’s other plays include The Primrose Path (1907), The Fight (1912), Back Home (1915), Damn Your Honor (1929; cowritten with Becky Gardiner), and That’s the Woman (1930). Veiller was married to ACTRESS -ARGARET7YCHERLY, who STARRED in The Thirteenth Chair and other Veiller plays. VERGE, THE. The three-act quasi-expressionist drama by 3USAN 'LASPELL was performed at the Provincetown Playhouse on 14 November 1921. Prefiguring %UGENE/.EILL’s Strange Interlude, this iconoclastic work focuses on a neurotic woman, Claire, and the men who play various roles in her life. She is a horticulturist who has bred two highly symbolic plants: the Breath of Life and the Edge Vine. Much is unexplained. VILLAIN. The villains of melodrama as well as those of 3HAKE SPEARE provided some of the juiciest roles for an ACTOR. Indeed, many of the great actors like Robert Mantell, John McCullough, and Thomas W. Keene made a specialty of Richard III. In lines of business, it was normally the heavy who got the villain roles, but the role of Richard III always went to the leading man instead of the heavy. Similarly, Othello’s malignant antagonist Iago was considered by many to be Edwin Booth’s best role. William A. Brady’s recollection of a basic technique for playing the villain in melodrama is worth quoting at length (1937, 18–19): “The small fry in the Old Bowery gallery had strict theories of how the villain ought to die, when the hero did him in in the final scene. The old melodrama villains had a specialized technique for kicking the bucket—elbows stiff, spine rigid, then fall over backward square on the back of your head. It took skill to do it right and not kill yourself in good earnest. We all practiced it—I’ve spent hours bruising myself to a pulp practicing a villain’s fall. And we valued villains in direct proportion to the stiffness of their falls. When J. B. Studley, a fine old-time actor, started doing villains at the Old Bowery and tried dying like a human being—a natural sprawling collapse—the whole house came

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right over the footlights at him with hisses and cat-calls and roars of protest—they wanted a real fall. It wasn’t till Studley had learned to stiffen up and crash in the conventional way—and he got to be one of the best fallers in the business—that they’d tolerate him at all.” VIRGINIAN, THE. This four-act play adapted from Owen Wister’s story by Wister and Kirke La Shelle opened on 5 January 1904 at the Manhattan Theatre for 138 performances, later playing a brief return engagement at the Academy of Music in 1905. Its popularity stemmed mostly from Dustin Farnum’s characterization of “The Virginian,” a gentlemanly cowboy in frontier Wyoming, and the rich local color of the play’s setting. “The Virginian” staves off various difficulties with rough cowboys and cutthroat cattle rustlers and, despite his toughness, maintains his decency as demonstrated when he gently courts a Vermont schoolmarm, Molly, who accepts his marriage proposal. The Virginian has rarely been revived, but has proven remarkably resilient on screen, with several MOTIONPICTURE versions (1914, 1923, 1929, 1946), a television* movie (2000), and a long-running television series that began in 1962. VOLLMER, LULA (1895–1955). Born in Keyser, North Carolina, Lula (sometimes called Lulu) Vollmer was educated at a school that became Asheville College, after which she moved to New York to seek a production for her first play, Sun-Up. Rejected by most PRODUCERS, including the 4HEATRE'UILD where she worked as a secretary, Sun-Up was finally produced in 1923 for a short run during which it garnered positive response from CRITICS for Vollmer’s unique brand of Southern folk drama. Her subsequent plays, including The Shame Woman (1923), The Dunce Boy (1925), Trigger (1927), Troyka (1930), Sentinels (1931), and The Hill Between (1938), similarly brought to life the mountain people of North Carolina, particularly women living hardscrabble lives in rural poverty. None of Vollmer’s works achieved long runs, although Sun-Up was revived by the Manhattan Little Theatre Club for one performance in 1930, was made into a MOTIONPICTURE in 1925, and was seen as an early British television* production in 1939. Vollmer’s Trigger became a film under the title Spitfire (1934) starring Katharine Hepburn.* Vollmer wrote an episode for television’s General Electric Theatre.

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n7n WAGENHALS, LINCOLN A. (1869–1931). Born in Ohio, Lincoln A. Wagenhals began his theatrical work as an ACTOR, but partnered with Collin Kemper, another Ohioan, to MANAGE a theatre in Binghamton, New York. They managed several STARS, including Arthur Byron, Helena Modjeska, Henry Miller, Annie Russell, and Frederick Warde between 1893 and 1906, when they leased the Astor Theatre and began a long string of successful productions, including The Kreutzer Sonata (1906), Clothes (1906), Paid in Full (1908), The Stronger Sex (1908), Seven Days (1909), The Greyhound (1912), Seeing Things (1920), Spanish Love (1920), The Bat (1920), Why Men Leave Home (1922), The Breaking Point (1923), Lovely Lady (1925), and The Joker (1925). WAINWRIGHT, MARIE (1853–1923). The Philadelphia-born AC TRESS, née Marie Page, reportedly came from a good family. Accepted for training with the Boston Museum STOCK company, she quickly moved into 3HAKESPEAREAN roles opposite Tommaso Salvini and Lawrence Barrett. Later she TOURED with her second husband Louis James. Best known as Viola in Twelfth Night, she played that role over a thousand times. Her melodious voice and delicate gestures enhanced her wistful, poetic characterization of Viola in contrast to other actresses’ more coquettish approaches. WALDRON, CHARLES D. (1874–1946). A native of Waterford, New York, Charles D. Waldron debuted in 1898 and spent several seasons in STOCK before his first major New York appearance in The Warrens of Virginia (1907). His long career, during which he made a seamless transition from leading man to character ACTOR, included the title role in Daddy Long Legs (1914), as well as The Woman in Room 13 (1919), The Passion Flower (1920), A Bill of Divorcement (1921), Coquette (1927), The Barretts of Wimpole Street* (1931), The Pursuit of Happiness* (1933), and Deep Are the Roots* (1945). Waldron also played Claudius to Basil Sydney’s Hamlet in 1925 and was Friar Laurence in the +ATHARINE #ORNELL Romeo and Juliet DIRECTED by Guthrie McClintic* in 1934. WALES PADLOCK LAW. As 19th-century proprieties declined in the aftermath of World 7AR I with the dawn of the Jazz Age, American

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drama sparked controversy through its explorations of previously taboo subject matter. 3EXUALITY—particularly as manifested in homosexuality and in interracial relationships—was a major area of concern for censorious forces. The Wales Padlock Law was enacted at the height of a period of change in American theatre as many post–World War I PLAYWRIGHTS brought greater seriousness of purpose and REALISM to their plays than had been seen before. At the same time, writers, performers, and PRODUCERS exploited a growing sense of freedom by breaking previously held unspoken boundaries of appropriateness. In 1927, after several works—Mae West’s Sex, John Colton’s The Shanghai Gesture, and Edward Sheldon and Charles MacArthur’s* Lulu Belle—overtly explored (and sometimes exploited) sexuality and mixed race relations, authorities enacted the Wales Padlock Law as a means of discouraging plays “depicting or dealing with the subject of sex degeneracy or sex perversion” on New York stages, with the provision that the theatres where such plays were presented could be padlocked and thus prevented from generating income. The law, which the theatrical community vigorously protested, was rarely enforced, but its mere existence kept offending dialogue and subject matter mostly out of American drama until the 1950s. The 3HUBERTS capitalized on front page stories about the law’s enactment by staging a MUSICAL revue, Padlocks of 1927, starring celebrated nightclub hostess Texas Guinan. See also CENSORSHIP. WALKER, JUNE (1900–1966).† A native of Chicago, June Walker made her first "ROADWAY appearance in the chorus of the MUSICAL revue Hitchy-Koo of 1918. That same year she ACTED in Winthrop Ames’s production of Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Betrothal and became a leading ingénue in popular COMEDIES, including My Lady Friends (1919), Six-Cylinder Love (1921), and The Nervous Wreck (1923). She appeared in John Howard Lawson’s Processional (1925) for the 4HEATRE 'UILD and scored a particular success as gold-digger Lorelei Lee in Anita Loos and John Emerson’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1926). Walker also appeared in The Glass Slipper (1925), Glory Hallelujah (1926), The Love Nest (1927), and The Bachelor (1928) during the 1920s. A petite blonde admired for vivacity on stage, Walker continued in increasingly diverse roles after 1930, including notable appearances in Waterloo Bridge* (1930),

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Green Grow the Lilacs* (1931), The Merchant of Yonkers* (1938), The Ladies of the Corridor* (1953), and Middle of the Night* (1956). She also acted in MOTION PICTURES and on television and was the mother of actor John Kerr.* WALKER, STUART (1888–1941). A native of Augusta, Kentucky, Stuart Walker became assistant DIRECTOR to David Belasco following a brief ACTING career. He also worked with Jessie Bonstelle before establishing the Portmanteau Theatre, actually a series of STOCK companies in Chicago, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Baltimore, among others, where many young actors had their first opportunities. Walker’s "ROADWAY credits include his direction of Seventeen (1918), The Goldfish (1922), and The Love City (1926). WALKING GENTLEMAN, WALKING LADY. These 19th-century lines of business were considered a step above supernumerary in that the characters that fell to these ACTORS might occasionally speak lines. In his 1880 memoir The Stage, James E. Murdoch notes that a walking gentleman would play a character who is “essential to the progress and development of the plot,” but who has “a merely mechanical part in the dialogue” (204–5). These parts, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet, were useful for giving young actors the opportunity to observe the techniques of their betters at close range. WALLER, LEWIS (1860–1915). Born William Waller Lewis in Spain, he first ACTED on the London stage as Lewis Waller in 1883, then worked in provincial theatres for several years before achieving major success in The Three Musketeers in 1895. He set up his own company and operated in several London theatres, with a notable stint in New York between 1911 and 1912, winning acclaim in The Garden of Allah (1911), Beaucaire (1912), The Explorer (1912), Discovering America (1912), and King Henry V (1912). His wife, Florence West (frequently billed as Mrs. Lewis Waller), often acted with her husband. WALTER, EUGENE (1874–1941). Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he worked as a reporter, served in the U.S. Cavalry, and entered the theatrical profession as an advance agent. He had been writing plays from his youth and was quite prolific. His plays include Sergeant

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James (1902), The Undertow (1907), Paid in Full (1907), The Wolf (1908), The Easiest Way (1909), Just a Wife (1910), The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1911), Fine Feathers (1912), Just a Woman (1916), The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1916), The Assassin (1917), Under Northern Stars (1921), Jealousy (1928). WALSH, BLANCHE (1873–1915). Born in New York City, she left school at 14 to make her stage debut as an ACTRESS with Marie Wainwright. She earned renown in 1892 in Bronson Howard’s Aristocracy. In 1895–1896, she TOURED as leading lady in Nat C. Goodwin’s company. She played the title role in Trilby (1895), Edith in Secret Service with William Gillette (1897), and such heroines as Tosca, Gismonda, Fedora, and many others. WARDE, FREDERICK (1851–1935). Born Frederick Barkham Warde in Oxfordshire, England, he gave up a law career for ACTING. Following his 1867 stage debut, he emigrated to the United States in 1874 and worked with John McCullough, Charlotte Cushman, Edwin Booth, Lawrence Barrett, and others before establishing his own company in 1881. He played 3HAKESPEAREAN roles and acted in 19th-century chestnuts including The Gladiator, The Lady of Lyons, and Virginius, but also a few contemporary characters, including the leading role in Percy MacKaye’s A Thousand Years Ago (1914). Following his 1919 retirement, Warde frequently lectured on theatre and wrote books, including The Fools of Shakespeare (1913) and his memoir Fifty Years of Make-Believe (1920). WARDROBE. Throughout most of the 19th century, designing and constructing COSTUMES for a specific production was seldom done. An ACTOR was expected to furnish his or her own theatrical wardrobe, and the ability to do so was a major factor in one’s employability. On the ROAD, actors spent much of their discretionary time plying the needle to keep their wardrobes in good repair. In those days, when most people owned only the clothes they wore every day, investment in a stage wardrobe was a major expense, especially for 3HAKESPEAREAN actors. Indeed, when Walker Whiteside lost his entire wardrobe in a theatre fire in 1901, he could not afford to replace it, and thus he changed the course of his career from Shakespearean acting to character roles in contemporary plays. Frank

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Chanfrau recalled (Kansas City Journal, 4 October 1891) that in his early days at the Chatham Street Theatre in New York, he was cast as the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet to Charlotte Cushman’s Romeo. The apothecary role required a pair of black tights. However, on a utility man’s 65-cents-a-week salary, Chanfrau could not afford to buy them. He sought out the stage manager and asked for help, but was told to find himself some tights or another actor would be hired as utility. In despair Chanfrau combed through the theatre’s wardrobe in search of anything that might serve the purpose. In a pile of moth-eaten royal robes, he found a rusty black domino. For the performance, he thrust his legs through the sleeves of the domino and wound the rest of the garment around his body. He succeeded in making his entrance without having been seen by the stage manager, but the audience roared with laughter at his appearance. This caused Chanfrau to forget his lines, so he rushed out of his shop, leaving Romeo to get his own poison. He expected to be discharged, but Miss Cushman learned the circumstances, interceded for him, and presented him with a pair of black tights, which he wore to success the following night. William S. Hart in his memoir My Life East and West tells a similarly pathetic and hilarious story of costuming himself in Lawrence Barrett’s TOURING production of Julius Caesar. The problems persisted beyond the turn of the century, as attested in Gladys Hurlbut’s entertainingly informative memoir (1950, 145– 50): “When the director said to me, ‘You’re poor for the first two acts,’ that was great good news, for the ‘Rags to Riches’ plays took less wardrobe. Clothes were a terrific problem to stock actresses. . . . A leading woman averaged four changes a week and often more. The higher salary we got, the better we were expected to dress. I always spent most of my wages on clothes.” Indeed, Hurlbut worked out a plan with several other leading women, whereby each would stay with a stock company in a given city long enough to use their wardrobes, which could be stretched over three or four months. Then they would give notice and exchange jobs. WARFIELD, DAVID (1866–1951). Born David Wollfeld (or Wohlfelt) in San Francisco, the ACTOR had inauspicious theatrical beginnings as an usher. He then played bit parts at the Bush Street Theatre in his hometown. A move to New York brought him comedic Jewish roles at the Casino Theatre. Major success came when David Belasco cast

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him as the title character in The Auctioneer (1901). More Belascoproduced triumphs followed: The Music Master (1904), A Grand Army Man (1907), and The Return of Peter Grimm (1911). These plays earned Warfield a fortune on TOUR even as he challenged the Theatrical Syndicate. He challenged himself in 1922 by playing Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. He received mixed reviews, but the production ran for 92 performances in New York, and Warfield toured in it for two years prior to retiring. WARNER, H. B. (1875–1958). Born Henry Byron Lickfold in London, the son of ACTOR Charles Warner, H. B. Warner took his father’s stage surname and began an acting career with important roles in London’s West End. Arriving in the United States in 1905, Warner was hired by Theodore A. Liebler to play opposite Eleanor Robson in a series of plays, including Israel Zangwill’s Nurse Marjorie (1906). His first great success came in Paul Armstrong’s Alias Jimmy Valentine (1910), after which he appeared with distinction in a number of lesser works, including Blackbirds (1913), The Ghost Breaker (1913), a revival of Out There (1918), Sleeping Partners (1918), and Danger (1921). Warner began a MOTIONPICTURE career in 1914 and became a major STAR during the silent era in The King of Kings (1927), playing Jesus Christ. Warner returned to "ROADWAY on occasion after 1920, notably to play Maitland White, the businessman who gives up his career to be a painter, in 0HILIP"ARRY’s You and I (1923), and then Jim Warren, a murder suspect who cannot defend himself to save his daughter from blackmail, in Max Marcin’s Silence (1924). This was Warner’s final stage role and he spent the remainder of his long career acting in more than 100 films, including such classics as A Tale of Two Cities (1935), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Lost Horizon (1937), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), and The Ten Commandments (1956). In the 1950s, he was one of Hollywood’s most beloved character actors. WARRENS OF VIRGINIA, THE. William C. deMille had his greatest PLAYWRITING success with this four-act romantic Civil 7AR melodrama PRODUCED by David Belasco. It opened at the Belasco Theatre on 3 December 1907 for 190 performances with Charles D. Waldron as the Union Army’s Lieutenant Burton, who visits his Southern fiancée, Agatha Warren, behind enemy lines. Burton is

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carrying fake Northern battle plans that, as he plans, fall into Confederate hands and allow the Northern army to defeat forces led by Agatha’s father, General Warren. She is hurt by Burton’s subterfuge and although the play ends without an obvious reconciliation, there are hints that Burton and Agatha will patch up their differences at the war’s imminent end. Cecil B. DeMille DIRECTED a 1915 silent MO TIONPICTURE of his brother’s play, and it was remade in 1924. WARS IN AMERICAN DRAMA.† War has been a frequent source for American PLAYWRIGHTS, and their attention has usually been focused on those conflicts in which America participated directly. Between 1880 and 1930, the wars most often represented on the stage were the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great War (World War I). The Revolution was dramatized in James A. Herne’s The Minute Men of 1774–75 (1886) as well as Clyde Fitch’s Nathan Hale (1898) and Major André (1903). Herbert Fields, Richard Rodgers, and Lorenz Hart’s MUSICAL COMEDY Dearest Enemy (1925) was praised for its colorful Revolutionary War background. However, it was not until the 1930s that this period received its most worthy stage depiction in -AXWELL!NDERSON’s Valley Forge* (1934). The War of 1812 inspired a few plays in the early 19th century, but it was the tragic conflicts of the Civil War that produced numerous plays on various aspects of the conflict. Dion Boucicault’s Belle Lamar (1874) was the first of many melodramas using the Civil War as its backdrop during the late 19th century. Some of these include David Belasco’s May Blossom (1884) and The Heart of Maryland (1895), William Gillette’s Held by the Enemy (1886) and Secret Service (1895), Bronson Howard’s Shenandoah (1889), Herne’s The Reverend Griffith Davenport (1899), Fitch’s Barbara Frietchie (1899; and the 1927 Sigmund Romberg operetta, My Maryland, based on it), the Julian Edwards and Stanislaus Stange musical When Johnny Comes Marching Home (1902), William C. deMille’s The Warrens of Virginia (1907), and Augustus Thomas’s The Copperhead (1918). Some plays focused on the Reconstruction era following the war, including Thomas’s Alabama (1891) and Joseph R. Grismer and Clay Greene’s The New South (1893) also appeared. As America’s involvement in World War I loomed, playwrights shifted attention to that conflict, first in wartime musicals including Irving Berlin’s all-soldier revue Yip Yip Yaphank (1918). Samuel

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Shipman and Aaron Hoffman’s The Friendly Enemies (1918) dealt with the effect of the war at home, while the 1920s found playwrights depicting the cruelty and hardship of war in such plays as -AXWELL!NDERSON and Laurence Stallings’s darkly comic What Price Glory (1924). Antiwar pleas included Channing Pollock’s The Enemy (1925). In the 1930s, 2OBERT%3HERWOOD’s The Petrified Forest (1935) reflected disenchantments resulting from the war and the Great Depression, while his 0ULITZER 0RIZE–winning Idiot’s Delight* (1936) marked a transition from dramas dealing with World War I to those anticipating World War II. WASHINGTON SQUARE PLAYERS. Among the most important progressive developments of the pre–World 7AR I American theatre was the rise of the little theatre movement. And among those theatres in various American cities, New York’s Washington Square Players emerged as one of the most significant, despite its relatively short existence. Founded in 1915 by AMATEURS ,AWRENCE,ANGNER, Edward Goodman, 0HILIP-OELLER, and (ELEN7ESTLEY, the Players aimed to raise the quality of New York theatre by adopting the little theatre style demonstrated by Maurice Browne in Chicago: presenting cutting-edge European dramas ((ENRIK)BSEN, 'EORGE"ERNARD 3HAW, Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Evreinov, Maurice Maeterlinck) and new American plays, including works by %UGENE/.EILL, 3USAN 'LASPELL, %LMER2ICE, "EN(ECHT, Kenneth Sawyer Goodman, :ÚE!KINS. From 1915 until the group disbanded in 1918, the Players PRODUCED nearly 75 one-act and full-length plays, first at the tiny Bandbox Theatre, then at the 600-seat Comedy Theatre. Among those working with the group were Roland Young, Rollo Peters, Frank Conroy, and +ATHARINE#ORNELL. Most of the founders, along with Peters and ,EE3IMONSON, established the 4HEATRE'UILD in 1919 to continue the work begun by the Players. WATSON, BILLY (1866–1945). “Dutch” comedian Isaac Levie (or Levine) was born in New York where he went on the stage as Billy Watson, a singer and COMEDIAN, in 1881. He PRODUCED and STARRED in Krausemeyer’s Alley, a comedy in which he played a Jewish father resistant to his son’s desire to marry an Irish girl (a work foreshadowing Anne Nichols’s 1922 hit, Abie’s Irish Rose). Watson owned and operated his own theatres and produced the

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popular burlesque TOUR Billy Watson’s Beef Trust, featuring a line of overweight chorus girls. WAY DOWN EAST. Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. and William A. Brady PRODUCED Joseph R. Grismer’s revision of Lottie Blair Parker’s four-act melodrama at the Manhattan Theatre, where it opened on 7 February 1898 for 152 performances. Annie Moore, who has lost an out-of-wedlock child, works as a servant on the farm of Squire Bartlett, who does not know of her past. When he finds out, he dismisses her and she becomes lost in a snowstorm. Narrowly escaping death, she is rescued by David, the squire’s son, who has fallen in love with her. Brady revived the play twice on "ROADWAY (1903, 1905), and several MOTIONPICTURE versions appeared (1908, 1914, 1935), with a 1920 adaptation DIRECTED by D. W. Griffith and STAR RING Lillian Gish regarded as a cinematic masterpiece for its time. WEBB, CLIFTON (1893–1966).† Born Webb Parmalee Hollenbeck in Indianapolis, Indiana, Clifton Webb began his career as a CHILD ACTOR under the firm guidance of his driven mother. Less interested in theatre than art and music, he tried both before returning to the stage in 1911 as a MUSICAL performer in The Purple Road. He appeared as a juvenile in a series of musicals in New York and London during the 1910s, returning to "ROADWAY in the nonmusical Meet the Wife (1923). Webb mostly appeared in musicals until the early 1930s, when he began acting more frequently in MOTIONPICTURES, returning successfully to "ROADWAY in two Noël Coward comedies, Blithe Spirit (1941) and Present Laughter (1946), after becoming a major movie star. WELCH, DESHLER (1854–1920). The writer and editor Deshler Welch wrote for newspapers in Buffalo, New York, for over a decade after the Civil 7AR, followed by several years on New York City newspapers before becoming editor and founder of The Theatre (1886–1893), a pictorial magazine on the stage and allied arts. He also served as publicist for Augustin Daly and wrote a book about President Grover Cleveland. WELCOME STRANGER. 3AM ( (ARRIS’s production of Aaron Hoffman’s popular four-act COMEDY opened on 13 September 1920

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for 309 performances at the Cohan and Harris Theatre. Gentle Isidor Solomon, played by George Sidney, becomes a haberdasher in a New England small town, overcoming local anti-Semitic feelings through his generosity and gentle nature. The only persistent hatred comes from the town’s mayor, but Solomon is able to mitigate the situation when he finds evidence that the mayor has hidden his own Jewish origins. A silent MOTIONPICTURE version was released in 1924. WEST, MAE (1892–1980). Remembered today as an early sound MOTIONPICTURE icon in a series of risqué COMEDIES and MUSICALS in the 1930s, West was also a PLAYWRIGHT (occasionally using the pseudonym Jane Mast) who crafted tailor-made roles exploiting her way with a double entendre. West’s hourglass figure and insouciant manner endeared her to audiences and frequently drew the ire of CENSORS. Following a career in vaudeville and musical comedy, West caused a scandal with Sex (1926), the first of a string of tabooshattering works. She was arrested for indecency, but the ensuing publicity surrounding the play made her a nationally known commodity. Barely a year later, in 1927, West again caused a sensation with The Drag, perhaps the first American drama to make explicit reference to homosexuality. More exploitive than serious, The Drag closed on the ROAD before reaching "ROADWAY. West’s next play, Diamond Lil (1928), was a popular success that she frequently revived, and The Pleasure Man (1928) also generated controversy. The role of a saloon hostess was perfect for her. In movies after 1932, West pushed the boundaries of propriety, testing censors and challenging studio bosses as she had on stage. She periodically returned to the stage, notably on Broadway with Catherine Was Great (1944), TOURED frequently, and became a popular attraction in nightclubs. West’s audiences joined her in laughing at sexual taboos and the inherent hypocrisy of both sexual mores and censorship. WESTLEY, HELEN (1879–1942).† Born in Brooklyn, New York, Helen Westley went on the stage in 1897, working in STOCK for several years before becoming one of the founders of the Washington Square Players, ACTING in their productions of The Age of Reason (1915), The Seagull (1916), Literature (1916), The Life of Man (1917), and Youth (1918). After a long run in Leo Tolstoy’s Redemption (1918), Westley became one of the founding members of the

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4HEATRE'UILD in 1919. A versatile character actress of formidable presence, Westley appeared in many of the Guild’s most prestigious offerings, including their second production, St. John Ervine’s John Ferguson (1919). For the Guild, she appeared in a series of 'EORGE "ERNARD 3HAW’s plays, Heartbreak House (1920), Caesar and Cleopatra (1925), Pygmalion (1926), The Doctor’s Dilemma (1927), Major Barbara (1928), and Getting Married (1931), and in two %UGENE /.EILL dramas, the 0ULITZER 0RIZE–winning Strange Interlude (1928) and Dynamo (1929). Her other important Guild appearances included He Who Gets Slapped (1922), From Morn to Midnight (1922), R.U.R. (1922), The Adding Machine (1923), The Guardsman (1924), Reunion in Vienna* (1931), Green Grow the Lilacs* (1931), and They Shall Not Die* (1934). Westley acted in nearly 40 MOTIONPICTURES, most memorably Roberta (1935), Show Boat (1936), and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938). WHAT PRICE GLORY. Opening on 9 March 1924 at the Plymouth Theatre, -AXWELL!NDERSON and Laurence Stallings’s unromanticized depiction of American soldiers in World 7AR I ran for 435 performances. It should be noted that the title is properly written without the often erroneously added question mark. Stallings drew upon his own experience in World War I to portray the horrors endured by American soldiers in France. The cynical side of heroics, dramatized in dialogue that controversially reproduced the kind of salty language actually used by soldiers in combat, was portrayed through the rivalry of career Army men, Captain Flagg (played by Louis Wolheim) and Sergeant Quirt (William Boyd). !RTHUR(OP KINS PRODUCED and DIRECTED. WHEELER, ANDREW CARPENTER (1835–1903). Born in New York City, the drama CRITIC who used the pen name Nym Crinkle began as a reporter for the New York Times in 1857, but resigned to seek adventure on the western frontier. After serving as war correspondent during the Civil 7AR, he returned to New York and wrote as Trinculo for The Weekly Leader. As Nym Crinkle he wrote for The World, The Sun, and even the front page of the New York Dramatic Mirror (1886–1889), to all of which he brought an acerbic wit. After 1892, he used the pen name J. P. Mowbray, which coincided with a more embracing critical outlook.

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WHEN KNIGHTHOOD WAS IN FLOWER. Julia Marlowe was criticized for departing from 3HAKESPEAREAN roles when she appeared in Paul Kester’s four-act play (based on a novel by Charles Major). Marlowe had the last laugh when the production’s success, both in New York and on TOUR, made her a fortune with which she financed her commitment to Shakespearean productions. When Knighthood Was in Flower opened on 14 January 1901 for 176 performances at the Criterion Theatre, PRODUCED by Charles Frohman. Marlowe played Mary Tudor, Henry VIII’s sister, who is ordered to marry France’s Louis II. In love with a commoner, Charles Brandon (played by Bruce McRae), Mary refuses. When she and Charles attempt to escape, they are arrested by Henry’s army and she is forced to marry Louis. Conveniently, Louis dies shortly thereafter and Mary is reunited with Charles. Marlowe brought When Knighthood Was in Flower back to New York for a brief run in 1904 and successfully toured with it. -OTIONPICTURE versions appeared in 1922 and 1953 (retitled The Sword and the Rose), but were based on Major’s novel, not Kester’s play. WHIFFEN, MRS. THOMAS (1845–1936). London-born Blanche Galton was educated in France and studied voice, immigrating to the United States in 1868 with an opéra bouffe company. In 1879, she played Buttercup in the first American production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta H.M.S. Pinafore, before moving into nonMUSICAL roles at the Madison Square Theatre and with Daniel Frohman’s Lyceum Theatre company and Charles Frohman’s Empire Theatre troupe. Even when relatively young, she specialized in old WOMEN roles and appeared in support of several major actors, including Mary Mannering, Eleanor Robson, Margaret Anglin, and Henry Miller, and scored notable successes with roles in Trelawny of the “Wells” (1898), Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines (1901) opposite a young %THEL"ARRYMORE, and William Vaughn Moody’s The Great Divide (1906). An intrepid performer, Mrs. Whiffen continued on the stage well into her eighties, appearing on "ROADWAY for the final times as Mrs. Mossop in a 1927 revival of Trelawny of the “Wells” and in the musical romance Just Fancy (1927). WHITE CARGO. Earl Carroll produced Leon Gordon’s lurid threeact melodrama at the Greenwich Village Theatre on 5 November

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1923, where it was a runaway hit scoring 702 performances despite predominately negative critical response. Longford, a moralistic young man, takes over a West African plantation and falls in love with Tondelayo, a half-caste girl. He desires marriage, but she becomes disenchanted and attempts to poison him. Longford leaves and his friends force Tondelayo to drink the poison she prepared for him. Carroll revived White Cargo in 1926 and an early sound MOTIONPICTURE version appeared in 1930. Its 1942 screen incarnation caused a sensation when Czech ACTRESS Hedy Lamarr played Tondelayo. WHITE SLAVE, THE. This antebellum melodrama written in “seven tableaux” by Bartley Campbell opened on 3 April 1882 for 40 performances at Haverly’s Theatre. The play, which became Campbell’s greatest success, featured Georgia Cayvan as Lisa, the mixed-race daughter of a judge’s black housekeeper. Expecting to be freed when the judge dies, Lisa and her mother instead find themselves caught up in the machinations of William Lacy, the unscrupulous man to whom Clay, the judge’s adopted son, sells his father’s property. Lacy lusts after Lisa and threatens to banish her to slavery unless she acquiesces to his desires. Lisa bravely refuses, offering the play’s famous line, “Rags are royal raiment when worn for virtue’s sake.” Clay learns that Lisa is the daughter of the judge, catches on to Lacy’s nefarious ways, rescues Lisa, and succeeds in sending Lacy to prison. Clay and Lisa acknowledge their love. #RITICS were decidedly negative, with the New York Times critic calling it “a luridly sensational affair, and overcrowded with merely theatrical effect—opens vigorously, compactly, and, after its fashion, effectively; it begins as a promising melodrama, and it fizzles out drearily.” Despite such brickbats, including unfavorable comparisons with the enduringly popular Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon, The White Slave was frequently revived before World 7AR I. WHITE WINGS. 0HILIP"ARRY’s four-act comic fantasy opened on 15 October 1926 at the Booth Theatre for a mere 27 performances despite positive reviews. 0RODUCED by Winthrop Ames, White Wings featured ACTOR George Ali, who specialized in playing animals, acting the role of a horse, Joseph. The horse belongs to Archie Inch, a young man who works as a street cleaner, or “white wings,” as they

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are known. His job cleaning up after horses nearly ends his courtship of Mary Todd. Archie refuses to seek more prestigious work, swearing that he will continue as a “white wing” until the last horse is dead. Toward that end, Mary has Joseph, the proverbial last horse, shot and Archie begins a new career as a cab driver. Not typical of Barry’s more sophisticated later work, the play’s failure was an unfortunate setback early in his career. WHITESIDE, WALKER (1869–1942). Born in Logansport, Indiana, Whiteside developed an early interest in theatre after being taken to Chicago to see Edwin Booth perform Hamlet. During a summer visit to his uncle in Kansas City, he had the opportunity to perform readings at the Gilliss Opera House, and this convinced his uncle to underwrite the teen’s professional debut in the title role of Richard III in Chicago. By the time he was 24, the small-statured but richvoiced ACTOR had his own company, with which he made his New York debut at Union Square Theatre on 10 April 1893. Audiences came to scoff at the unknown Hamlet, but quickly recognized his talent and kept the production running. Whiteside wrote a number of historical COSTUME dramas to intersperse his 3HAKESPEARE plays, but he switched to character roles after a theatre fire destroyed his entire stock of costumes and SCENERY in 1901. He continued to TOUR, outliving his reputation as the “boy Hamlet,” preferring to be remembered as “a good trouper.” WHITNEY, F. C. (1865?–1930). Born into the family of a successful Detroit theatre MANAGER, Fred C. Whitney became a successful PRODUCER of mostly MUSICALS and operettas, including The Fencing Master (1892), Rob Roy (1894), Marching Home (1902), Dolly Varden (1902), When Johnny Comes Marching Home (1902), Love’s Lottery (1904), Piff! Paff!! Pouf!!! (1904), an Eddie Foy vehicle, and the enduringly popular Oscar Strauss operetta The Chocolate Soldier (1909), adapted from 'EORGE"ERNARD3HAW’s Arms and the Man. Whitney also produced a few straight plays, including several by Stanislaus Stange: Quo Vadis (1900), which scored a major success, The School for Husbands (1904), and Divorce (1909), STARRING Mary Shaw. Whitney continued to produce until the mid-1920s, but with diminished success, although he brought Yiddish theatre star Bertha Kalish to "ROADWAY in Rachel (1913).

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WHY MARRY? The first 0ULITZER0RIZE–winning play, Jesse Lynch Williams’s three-act COMEDY Why Marry? opened on 25 December 1917 at the Astor Theatre, achieving 120 performances. Helen, a lab technician, is a modern woman who expects to continue working after her wedding to scientist Ernest, but she fears marriage will interfere with his important research. She decides to live with Ernest without marrying, which upsets her Uncle Everett, despite the fact that his own wife is off in Reno suing him for divorce. Everett manages to reconcile with his wife and to convince Helen and Ernest that however imperfect marriage may be it is all that society has to offer. This light, witty play ran for over 500 performances in its London production, perhaps because CRITICS noted parallels with 'EORGE "ERNARD3HAW’s socially conscious comedies. Veteran actor Nat C. Goodwin won glowing reviews as Uncle Everett, his last role. WHY NOT? Opening on 25 December 1922 at the 48th Street Theatre, the 0ULITZER0RIZE–nominated COMEDY by Jesse Lynch Williams ran for 122 performances. Williams had won the 0ULITZER0RIZE in 1917 for Why Marry?, and this was a response of sorts. Amid plenty of cocktail shaking, two couples exchange spouses, and even the children are happy about the new arrangements. WIDOW BEDOTT. Humorist David Ross Locke, whose writings were much admired by Abraham Lincoln, adapted his Widow Bedott Papers into a four-act COMEDY at the behest of FEMALEIMPERSONATOR Neil Burgess, who found in the title character a perfect vehicle. The production opened on 15 March 1880 for 56 performances at Haverly’s Lyceum Theatre, but Burgess revived it frequently over the subsequent decade. The simple plot provided Burgess with ample opportunity for comedy as it centers on gossipy, meddling Widow Bedott who sets her cap for remarriage to Elder Shadrack Sniffles, despite interference from her rival, Widow Jenkins. WIFE, THE. David Belasco and Henry C. DeMille’s four-act romantic drama opened on 1 November 1887 at the Lyceum Theatre, PRODUCED by Daniel Frohman. It ran for 239 performances, an impressive start for the long dramatic partnership of Belasco and DeMille. The play’s simple plot involves Helen Truman, who rejects Robert Gray when she finds out he has jilted another girl. Then Helen

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rushes into marriage with John Rutherford, who is devastated to learn that she has accepted him on the rebound. John decides to work at the relationship. Helen eventually falls in love with him. #RITICS applauded the play’s mix of drama and humor, as well as Georgia Cayvan, Henry Miller, and Mrs. Thomas Whiffen in principal roles, but noted its debt to Bronson Howard’s The Banker’s Daughter. The Wife played a successful return engagement in 1889. WILDE, PERCIVAL (1887–1953). Born in New York City, the PLAY WRIGHT graduated from Columbia University in 1906. His one-act plays long remained favorites of little theatres in the United States and Great Britain. The most frequently produced were The Aftermath, The Lady of Dreams, The Reckoning, Confessional, The Villain in the Piece, According to Darwin, A Question of Morality, The Unseen Host, Mothers of Men, Pawns, In the Ravine, Valkyrie!, The Noble Lord, Dawn, The Finger of God, and The Beautiful Story. Wilde also wrote detective stories, novels, scenarios for MOTIONPICTURES, and a textbook, The Craftsmanship of the One-Act Play (1923). WILLARD, E. S. (1853–1915). Born in England as Edward Smith Willard, he honed his ACTING skills in villain roles with American TOUR ING companies, first in The Middleman (1890). Then he branched into COMEDIES including J. M. Barrie’s The Professor’s Love Story (1892), John Needham’s Double (1892), The Rogue’s Comedy (1896), The Physician (1897), David Garrick (1900), and The Cardinal (1902). He established the Edward Smith Willard 2EPERTORY Company to PRODUCE revivals of plays from the first decade of his career. WILLIAMS, HOPE (1897–1990). Born in Manhattan as the daughter of a prominent lawyer, Hope Williams began ACTING in AMATEUR and charity shows for the Junior League. Her society background as a wealthy debutante served her well in her "ROADWAY successes in two 0HILIP"ARRY plays, Paris Bound (1927) and Holiday (1928). Subsequent stage appearances included Rebound* (1930), the Cole Porter MUSICAL The New Yorkers (1930), and a revival of The Importance of Being Earnest (1939) that coSTARRED #LIFTON7EBB and %STELLE7INWOOD. She made her only MOTIONPICTURE appearance in The Scoundrel (1935), starring opposite Noël Coward, and retired in 1939 to enjoy the life of privilege into which she had been born.

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WILLIAMS, JESSE LYNCH (1871–1929). Born in Sterling, Illinois, the PLAYWRIGHT attended Princeton University. He was first a short story writer and newspaperman, then attained fame as author of the first play to win a 0ULITZER0RIZE, Why Marry? (1917). Williams’s first play, The Stolen Story (1906), had flopped, and his post-Pulitzer work in theatre was comparatively undistinguished, including Why Not? (1922). Williams’s last play, Lovely Lady (1925), failed, but he authored several successful novels. WILLIAMS, JOHN D. (1886–1941). Born in Boston, John D. Williams worked for PRODUCERS Abraham L. Erlanger and Charles Frohman. When Frohman died on the torpedoed Lusitania in 1915, Williams began producing plays on his own, including Justice (1916), Our Betters (1917), The Copperhead (1918), Sleeping Partners (1918), Toby’s Bow (1919), and the "ROADWAY production of %UGENE/.EILL’s 0ULITZER0RIZE–winning drama Beyond the Horizon (1920). Subsequently, Williams produced O’Neill’s Gold (1921), as well as The Assumption of Hannele (1924), L’Aiglon (1927), A Man with Red Hair (1928), and Pagan Lady (1930). Also a DIRECTOR, Williams scored his greatest success staging Rain (1922). WILLS, IVAH (1882–1937). Often billed on stage as Mrs. Charles Coburn, Ivah Wills was born in Appleton, Missouri, and established the Coburn 3HAKESPEAREAN Players with her husband in 1906. Remarkably, Wills and Coburn appeared in virtually all of Shakespeare’s plays on TOUR before they acted together on "ROADWAY in the hit drama The Yellow Jacket (1916), followed by many joint appearances, including The Imaginary Invalid (1917), The Better ’Ole (1918), Three Showers (1920), French Leave (1920), The Bronx Express (1922), The Farmer’s Wife (1924), The Right Age to Marry (1926), Falstaff (1928), The Plutocrat (1930), and Troilus and Cressida (1932). WILSON, FRANCIS (1854–1935). Born in Philadelphia, the ACTOR and PLAYWRIGHT began his stage career in a minstrel troupe, but joined a STOCK company in 1877. Thereafter, he balanced the legitimate stage with comic opera. He was also a prolific writer, authoring two memoirs as well as books on fellow actors, including Joseph Jefferson III, with whom he performed in the “all-STAR” revival of The Rivals in 1896. Among Wilson’s plays are The Bachelor’s Baby

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(1909) and The Spiritualist (1913). He was the first president of !C TORS%QUITY. WILSON, FRANK (1886?–1956). New York–born !FRICAN!MERI CAN ACTOR Frank Wilson was trained at the !MERICAN!CADEMYOF $RAMATIC!RTS before serving as understudy and replacement for the leads in %UGENE/.EILL’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1924) and 0AUL'REEN’s In Abraham’s Bosom (1926). He scored a major success in the title role of $UBOSE and $OROTHY(EYWARD’s Porgy (1927), which he played for several years in New York, on TOUR, and in London. Wilson also wrote Walk Together Chillun (1936), produced at the Lafayette Theatre by the Negro Theatre Unit of the Federal Theatre Project,* where it ran for 29 performances. His later career, which included performances in They Shall Not Die* (1934), a revival of The Green Pastures* (1935), Watch on the Rhine* (1941), and The Big Knife (1949), illustrates the difficulty faced by black performers in that he was most often cast in servant roles. WILSON, HARRY LEON (1867–1939). Born in Oregon, Illinois, Harry Leon Wilson edited the magazine Puck from 1892 to 1902 and wrote numerous novels and short stories. His theatre work was almost exclusively as a collaborator with Booth Tarkington, beginning with their greatest success, The Man from Home (1908), a COMEDY that ran for nearly 500 performances. Other Wilson-Tarkington collaborations include Foreign Exchange (1909), Cameo Kirby (1909), Your Humble Servant (1910), Tweedles (1923), and How’s Your Health (1929), most of which were short-lived. Several of Wilson’s nondramatic writings were adapted to the stage by others, including Ruggles of Red Gap (1915), His Majesty Bunker Bean (1916), and Merton of the Movies (1922), which was crafted into a hit comedy by 'EORGE 3+AUFMAN and -ARC#ONNELLY. WINCHELL, WALTER (1897–1972).† Born in New York as Walter Wincheles, he worked as a CHILD ACTOR in vaudeville with Gus Edwards’s “kid” act. Winchell later became the most powerful of the "ROADWAY newspaper columnists. In 1922, Winchell worked as a reporter for The Vaudeville News, moving to the New York Graphic in 1924. In 1929, he joined the staff of the New York Mirror, widely syndicating his column through the William Randolph Hearst

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newspaper empire. His column continued until 1963. His jargonfilled writings and radio broadcasts (he had a regular program from 1929 to 1956) covered the stage, MOTIONPICTURES, night clubs, radio and television,* and all aspects of show business. WINGS. The term has two meanings. First, it is the area immediately offstage where ACTORS wait to make their entrances. They wait “in the wings,” because the second meaning is the painted canvas flats in a 19th-century wing-and-drop setting. Later varieties of stage settings might still use wing flats painted black to mask offstage areas on either side of the set. Before the advent of strict union regulations, theatres were remarkably casual about allowing special guests to stand in the wings to watch the show. There are numerous tales of actors who could play excruciatingly poignant scenes on stage and then drop character instantly as they moved into the wings. An actor who did not know his lines would contrive to get through a performance by keeping his sides in the wings to consult between entrances on stage; this practice was known as “winging it.” WINSLOW, HERBERT HALL (1865–1930). Born in Keokuk, Iowa, Herbert Hall Winslow wrote more than 100 PRODUCED plays, but few were performed in New York despite their popularity on TOUR and with STOCK companies. His plays were crafted as vehicles for touring ACTORS, and those produced on "ROADWAY usually had short runs, including The Great Northwest (1896; coauthored by Will R. Wilson), The Vinegar Buyer (1903), The Spellbinder (1904; coauthored by Charles Dickson), the MUSICAL The Girl from Broadway (1907), Just Around the Corner (1919; coauthored by George V. Hobart), Broken Branches (1922; coauthored by Emil Nyitray), What’s Your Wife Doing? (1923; with Nyitray), and He Loved the Ladies (1927). WINTER, WILLIAM (1836–1917). Born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the influential CRITIC was educated at Harvard University to become a lawyer, but gave it up when he was inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to become a writer. Winter wrote poetry and became literary editor of The Saturday Press in 1859 before joining the staff of the Albion as its drama critic in 1861. He was appointed the New York Tribune’s drama critic in 1865 and remained there until he retired in 1909. His penchant for writing florid memorial tributes

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to deceased actors and his affection for 19th-century romanticism earned him the nickname “Weeping Willie.” Winter was well respected in his early years. However, with the appearance of (ENRIK)BSEN’s social problem plays, Winter became a vocal opponent of the movement toward REALISM, believing that a clear moral outcome to a play was all-important. He found modernist drama inherently pessimistic and vigorously upheld old standards. Along with regular criticism in the Tribune, Winter wrote for numerous other publications and authored several books, including Other Days (1908), Old Friends (1909), and The Wallet of Time (1913), along with biographies of notable theatre artists, including Edwin Booth (1893), Ada Rehan (1898), Richard Mansfield (1910), Joseph Jefferson III (1913), Tyrone Power (1913), and David Belasco (1918, two volumes). WINWOOD, ESTELLE (1883–1984).† Born in Lee, England, Estelle Winwood began an ACTING career there in 1898 before emigrating to the United States in 1916, scoring her first notable success in Jesse Lynch Williams’s 0ULITZER 0RIZE–winning Why Marry? (1917). Winwood’s beauty was frequently remarked upon. She performed in W. Somerset Maugham’s Too Many Husbands (1919) and The Circle (1921), as well as new American and European dramas, including Molière (1919), Anything Might Happen (1923), The Buccaneer (1925), The Chief Thing (1926), Trelawny of the “Wells” (1927), Fallen Angels (1927), The Furies (1928), and The Admirable Crichton (1931). As she aged, Winwood made an easy transition into increasingly eccentric character roles on stage and screen, including "ROADWAY roles in The Distaff Side (1934), When We Are Married (1939), The Pirate* (1942), Ten Little Indians (1944), Lady Windermere’s Fan (1946), and The Madwoman of Chaillot (1948). Her remarkably long career continued on stage until 1966, when she appeared in the short-lived Nathan Weinstein, Mystic, Connecticut. She continued to work in television* and MOTIONPICTURES until 1976. WISDOM TOOTH, THE. -ARC #ONNELLY’s three-act COMEDY opened on 15 February 1926 at the Little Theatre for 160 performances. It was Connelly’s first play without his collaborator, 'EORGE 3 +AUFMAN. #RITICS appreciated Connelly’s gift for humor, but were less impressed with what they regarded as the play’s

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loose structure. 4HOMAS-ITCHELL won raves as Charley Bemis, a hardworking clerk, regarded as a milquetoast by one and all. Charley is relentlessly ill-used by his boss and fellow workers and can share his frustration only with Sally, a young woman who rooms in the same boardinghouse. Sally criticizes Charley for failing to stand up to his employer, after which he has a dream of a childhood visit to a CIRCUS and an encounter with Barnum and Bailey, who offer inspiration. When Charley awakens, he stands up to his boss, who promptly fires him, but now he has the courage to win Sally’s heart. WISE, THOMAS A. (1865–1928). Born in Faversham, England, Thomas A. Wise immigrated to California, where he debuted as an ACTOR. He TOURED with Joseph R. Grismer and William Gillette. He played character roles in Are You a Mason? (1902) and A Gentleman from Mississippi (1908), which he also cowrote with Harrison Rhodes. Wise also teamed with Rhodes to write An Old New Yorker (1911) and Mr. Barnum (1918). Wise appeared in Edward Peple’s The Prince Chap (1905) and Edward Sheldon’s The Song of Songs (1914), and was well received as Falstaff in a revival of The Merry Wives of Windsor in 1916, which he also DIRECTED. WITCHING HOUR, THE. Augustus Thomas had his greatest success with this four-act drama, PRODUCED by the 3HUBERTS at the Hackett Theatre on 18 November 1907 for 212 performances. John Mason played Jack Brookfield, a gambler, who helps Clay, the son of a former love, when he is accused of murder. Jack learns that Clay is being framed by Hardmuth, a district attorney in love with Violet, Clay’s fiancée. Employing telepathy, Jack believes he can persuade newspaper readers of Hardmuth’s complicity in the recent murder of the governor. Hardmuth confronts Jack, who uses hypnosis to make him drop his gun. The truth is revealed and Clay is acquitted. Popular on TOUR, the play was adapted to the MOTIONPICTURE screen three times (1916, 1921, 1934). WITHAM, CHARLES W. (1842–1946). Born in Portland, Maine, Witham studied art and became a landscape painter, but quickly moved into theatre when he was hired in the 1860s as Gaspard Maeder’s design assistant at Niblo’s Garden Theatre in New York. In 1863, as chief designer at the Boston Theatre, Witham painted SCEN

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ERY for Edwin Forrest. Then he joined Edwin Booth’s staff of SCENE DESIGNERS and exercised considerable influence on the construction of Booth’s Theatre. His renderings of that theatre, which opened in 1869, provide an important iconographic record. For a decade, Witham designed the scenery for Booth’s 3HAKESPEAREAN productions, overlapping with his work for Augustin Daly, beginning in 1873. During the 1880s, Witham designed site-specific New York settings for the ETHNIC COMEDIES at Edward Harrigan’s theatre. After 1890, he was a freelance designer. He retired in 1909. WITHIN THE LAW. First PRODUCED by William A. Brady as a vehicle for his wife, Grace George, Bayard Veiller’s four-act drama failed, but Holbrook Blinn convinced Veiller to rework the script. With a new production and cast led by *ANE#OWL at the American Play Company, Within the Law opened on 11 September 1912 for a whopping 541 performances at Eltinge’s Theatre. An embittered woman, Mary Turner, accused of a crime she did not commit by her boss, Gilder, goes to jail. When released four years later, Mary marries Gilder’s son, Richard, and recruits several criminals who operate just barely within the bounds of law. Members of Mary’s gang defy her orders and attempt a burglary of Gilder’s home, where one is killed. Fortunately, the other gang members confess, establishing Mary’s innocence. Within the Law was revived in 1928 with a cast including a young Claudette Colbert, but it managed only 16 performances. Within the Law was made into a MOTION PICTURE no less than five times between 1916 and 1939, with Joan Crawford STAR RING in a 1930 version retitled Paid. WOLHEIM, LOUIS (1881–1931). New York–born Louis Robert Wolheim worked as a mining engineer and taught at Cornell University before taking a role in The Jest (1919) at the behest of his friends, the play’s STARS, John and Lionel Barrymore. Wolheim’s comparatively brief acting career capitalized on his hulking physical presence in two important roles: the ape-like coal stoker in %UGENE /.EILL’s expressionist drama The Hairy Ape (1922) and the hardbitten soldier Captain Flagg in -AXWELL!NDERSON and Laurence Stallings’s REALISTIC World 7AR I comedy-drama What Price Glory (1924). Wolheim also appeared in MOTIONPICTURES, notably in the classic All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).

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WOMAN, THE. Produced by David Belasco, William C. deMille’s three-act melodrama opened on 19 September 1911 for 247 performances at the Republic Theatre. Illinois state representative Jim Blake disdains his constituency, but fears they will eventually wake up to his crooked dealings. He hopes to smear Standish, his idealistic opponent, by proving that Standish has been unfaithful to his wife. Blake tries to bribe telephone operator Wanda Kelly to reveal the identity of Standish’s mistress, but Wanda discovers that the woman in question is Blake’s daughter. The good-hearted Wanda manages to prevent any scandal and, in the process, falls in love with Blake’s honest son, Tom. A silent MOTIONPICTURE version was released in 1915. WOMEN IN THE PROFESSION.† The modern era was one of great change for women working in the theatrical profession. From the 18th-century beginnings of American theatre, women had been present as ACTRESSES, and sometimes as MANAGERS, but other opportunities seemed closed. In the mid-19th century, as actresses more frequently managed their own companies, liberation from traditional roles for women characters began to take place, beginning with more overt displays of sexuality. Charlotte Cushman and others performed in breeches roles, while Adah Isaacs Menken and Lydia Thompson’s “British Blondes” scandalized audiences with displays of the feminine form. European plays, particularly those by (ENRIK)BSEN and 'EORGE "ERNARD 3HAW, offered deeper, more complex women characters, allowing American actresses like Minnie Maddern Fiske and Mary Shaw, and later !LLA.AZIMOVA and %VA,E'ALLIENNE, to address inequities faced by women in contemporary life. The end of the 19th century saw a remarkable flourishing of women PLAYWRIGHTS, including Edith Ellis, Marion Fairfax, Harriet Ford, Eleanor Gates, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Margaret Mayo, Marguerite Merington, Martha Morton, Lottie Blair Parker, Josephine Preston Peabody, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Madeline Lucette Ryley, and Rida Johnson Young. Some of these, notably Ellis and Morton, DIRECTED their own work. 2ACHEL #ROTHERS, :ÚE !KINS, Sophie Treadwell, and 3USAN 'LASPELL stood out among a generation of women playwrights working after 1900. Zona Gale won the second 0ULITZER0RIZE for a dramatization of her novel Miss Lulu Bett (1920). The runaway success of Anne Nichols’s popular comedy Abie’s Irish Rose (1922)

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proved the commercial value of women playwrights. After World 7AR I, as Crothers and Glaspell continued to contribute challenging works with diverse female characters, the next generation of women dramatists emerged, including Edna St. Vincent Millay, %DNA&ER BER, Mae West, :ORA.EALE(URSTON, Clare Kummer, $OROTHY 0ARKER, Zelda Sears, and Lula Vollmer. Women drama CRITICS at the turn of the century included Amy Leslie, Kate Field, and Olive Logan. Ada Patterson promoted women playwrights in her Green Book articles. Inroads were made in other theatrical jobs that had typically gone to men, including PRODUCING, SCENE DESIGN, and running agencies. Jane Addams, the Lewisohn sisters, and Jessie Bonstelle produced plays and contributed to the little theatre movement. Aline Bernstein was an outstanding early woman set designer. Eva Le Gallienne established New York’s #IVIC 2EPERTORY 4HEATRE, serving as its producer, director, and STAR. Elisabeth Marbury was an outstanding playwrights’ agent. WOOD, PEGGY (1892–1978).† Born in Brooklyn, New York, Margaret Wood, known on stage as Peggy, began her career in operetta, singing in the chorus of Victor Herbert’s Naughty Marietta (1910). Her beauty and poise, coupled with a lilting soprano, led to her casting in Sigmund Romberg’s Maytime (1917), in which she introduced “Will You Remember?” She moved to legitimate drama, beginning with the classics, playing Portia in 3HAKESPEARE’s The Merchant of Venice in 1928. She enjoyed notable successes in Champagne, Sec* (1933), Old Acquaintance* (1940), and Blithe Spirit (1941). Wood occasionally appeared in MOTIONPICTURES, notably as the Abbess in the blockbuster screen version of The Sound of Music (1965), and she played Mama in the long-running television* series based on John Van Druten’s* play I Remember Mama,* in the 1950s. WOODS, A. H. (1870–1951). Born Aladore Herman Woods in Budapest, he came to the United States as an infant with his family. After working in the garment district, he began his theatrical career by doing publicity for a traveling show. He then produced TOURING melodramas in partnership with P. H. Sullivan and 3AM((ARRIS. The Evil That Men Do (1903), his first "ROADWAY producing endeavor, was followed by over 100 productions of mostly melodramas and COMEDIES, many among the biggest hits of the time, including

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The Littlest Rebel (1911), Potash and Perlmutter (1913), The Yellow Ticket (1914), Kick In (1914), The Common Clay (1915), Cheating Cheaters (1916), Business before Pleasure (1917), Eyes of Youth (1917), Parlor, Bedroom and Bath (1917), The Friendly Enemies (1918), Up in Mabel’s Room (1919), Too Many Husbands (1919), Ladies’ Night (1920), Getting Gertie’s Garter (1921), Lawful Larceny (1922), The Whole Town’s Talking (1923), The Green Hat (1925), The Shanghai Gesture (1926), The Trial of Mary Dugan (1927), Her Cardboard Lover (1927), Five Star Final* (1930), and Night of January 16* (1935). Woods also built the Eltinge Theatre, named for one of his top STARS, Julian Eltinge. WOODWARD, O. D. (1866–1946). Orville Delbert Woodward began his career as a MANAGER of theatres and STOCK companies by forming a partnership with W. J. Burgess of Omaha. In 1897, the Woodward and Burgess Amusement Company saw an opportunity to expand to Kansas City, and Woodward took it, while Burgess looked after their Omaha interests. Among his many enterprises, the self-styled “Napoleon” of Kansas City theatre managed to keep the mammoth Auditorium Theatre running a profit with a stock company well into the 1900s. Several who played a season of stock there went on to distinguished New York careers, including Lester Lonergan, Emma Dunn, and Harry Beresford. However, Woodward overextended himself and lost ground in a battle with the 3HUBERTS. WOOLLCOTT, ALEXANDER (1887–1943).† The CRITIC, raconteur, and self-styled cultural commentator may be best remembered as the inspiration for “Sheridan Whiteside,” the waspish, self-indulgent title character of 'EORGE 3 +AUFMAN and Moss Hart’s* classic COMEDY, The Man Who Came to Dinner* (1939). Between the 1910s and the early 1940s, Woollcott was both feared and admired as drama critic for the New York Times (1914–1922), after which he wrote for the Herald (1922–1924), the Sun (1924–1925), and the World (1925–1928). Beginning in 1928, he wrote a column, “Shouts and Murmurs,” for New Yorker magazine, and began a popular radio show, “The Town Crier.” Woollcott was also author of numerous books on theatre, art, and American culture, and collaborated on two plays with Kaufman, The Channel Road (1929) and The Dark Tower

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(1933). His urbane writing captures the tastes of his time, but his own taste often led him to overlook significant developments of the American stage. Woollcott’s friend, Kaufman wryly referred to him as “Louisa May Woollcott,” a crack simultaneously indicating sentimental literary tastes and Woollcott’s effeminacy. One of the famed “wits” of the Algonquin Round Table, Woollcott reveled in his predominance, but his critical writing, once admired, has lost much of its cachet since his death. WORLD WAR I. See GREAT WAR (WORLD WAR I) IN DRAMA; WARSIN!MERICANDRAMA. WORM, A. TOXEN (1866–1922). Born Conrad Henrik Aage Toxen in Denmark, he immigrated to America where he worked as a MANAGER and highly resourceful press agent for the 3HUBERTS beginning in 1910 and continuing until his death. He wrote for the Shuberts’ regular publication, New York Review. WYCHERLY, MARGARET (1881–1956).† Born Margaret De Wolfe in London, she was raised in Boston and studied at the !MERICAN !CADEMY OF $RAMATIC !RTS before taking the name Margaret Wycherly in her ACTING debut in 1898 opposite Fanny Janauschek in What Dreams May Come. She acted with Jessie Bonstelle’s STOCK company and PRODUCED and acted in the first American productions of new plays by William Butler Yeats and 'EORGE "ERNARD 3HAW. Wycherly appeared in several plays by her husband, Bayard Veiller, notably The Thirteenth Chair (1916), in which she played a medium who solves a murder. After 1920, Wycherly gave highly praised performances in "ROADWAY, Provincetown Players, and 4HEATRE 'UILD productions of numerous important plays, including Jane Clegg (1920), The Verge (1921), Back to Methuselah (1922), Six Characters in Search of an Author (1922), The Adding Machine (1923), and Rosmersholm (1925). After 1930, Wycherly’s notable successes were in Another Language* (1932), Tobacco Road* (1933), and she replaced ,AURETTE 4AYLOR in The Glass Menagerie* in 1945. Wycherly DIRECTED several productions and appeared in numerous MOTIONPICTURES as a character actress, notably in White Heat (1950) as the murderous “Ma” to James Cagney’s psychopathic gangster.

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n9n YANKEE COMEDIAN. The first “Yankee” character appeared in American plays as early as 1825 as a figure of New England origin and with a personality combining a variety of attributes, including sentiment, patriotic fervor, simple good-heartedness, rustic hominess (with a critical eye for urban and European opposites), an inclination toward frugality, and a penchant for storytelling. The character was often named “Jonathan,” although he appeared under other names. Perfected by a series of ACTORS beginning with Englishman Charles Mathews, the character was taken on by American actors including James H. Hackett, George Handel “Yankee” Hill, Danforth Marble, and Joshua Pilsee all before the mid-19th century. The character became a STOCK figure in American drama and can be seen in a range of “rustic” characters or “rubes,” as 'EORGE - #OHAN subsequently labeled them in his plays and MUSICALS. Such later guises of these characters, from James A. Herne’s New Englander “Captain Dan Marble” in Sag Harbor (1900) to the numerous Midwestern variations that populated numerous COMEDIES and MUSICALS from the 1910s to the 1930s, continued the tradition. YELLOW JACKET, THE. George C. Hazelton and J. Harry Benrimo’s three-act play inspired by Chinese drama was PRODUCED by William Harris Jr. and the Selwyns at the Fulton Theatre, where it opened on 4 November 1912 for 80 performances. When a Chinese concubine belonging to the emperor gives birth to an ugly child, she and the baby are handed over to a farmer who is charged with killing them. The farmer’s kind heart prevents him from doing so. The baby grows up and proves himself against a rival stepbrother by securing the yellow jacket that indicates that he is the new emperor. The production employed the novel device of a chain-smoking modern stagehand moving scenery during the play while a narrator recounted the story, which was purportedly based on aspects of several ancient Chinese plays. Charles Coburn and his wife Ivah Wills Coburn played the leading roles in the original production and two successful revivals, first on 9 November 1916 at the Cort Theatre for 172 performances, and again at the Coburn Theatre on 7 November 1928 for 69 performances.

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YELLOW TICKET, THE. Michael Morton’s drama opened at Eltinge’s 42nd Street Theatre on 20 January 1914 for 183 performances, PRODUCED by A. H. Woods and featuring &LORENCE2EED and John Barrymore. Reed scored a particular success as Marya Varenka, a Russian prostitute pursued by a lascivious official, in this popular play. The yellow ticket referred to is a passport indicating Marya’s profession. -OTIONPICTURE versions were released in 1918 and 1931. YIDDISH ART THEATRE. Yiddish theatre ACTOR Maurice Schwartz initially established the Yiddish Art Theatre in 1918 at the Irving Place Theatre, but built a new theatre for it on Second Avenue soon after. The company stressed Yiddish theatre traditions and was challenged when Jacob Ben-Ami founded the Jewish Art Theatre in 1919 in the style of the revolutionary Moscow Art Theatre. The Jewish Art Theatre only survived for two years due to internal disagreements, while the success of Schwartz’s endeavor, which survived until 1950, resulted from offering both classics and lighthearted amusements, a number of which moved from Second Avenue to "ROADWAY. YIDDISH THEATRE. Yiddish theatre, which emerged in Europe in the early 18th century, flourished in European capitals and in America, particularly New York City, from the late 19th to the mid20th century. Focused on dramas by Jews written and performed in Yiddish, the language of the Eastern European Ashkenazic Jewish community, Yiddish theatre was remarkably diverse, including plays in every genre as well as operetta and MUSICALS, revues, and variety entertainments. In America, Yiddish theatre also included a vast array of classic and contemporary plays from other cultures translated into the Yiddish language and cultural idiom. Avrom Goldfadn is generally regarded as the founder of the first professional Yiddish theatre troupe in Romania, after which he moved it to Bucharest and ultimately performed in New York. Initially an all-male company, Goldfadn’s troupe eventually included WOMEN, sometimes in male roles, as when Molly Picon became popular in the STOCK COMEDY role of Shmendrick, a type that was one of many stereotypical roles featured in every early Yiddish play. Although Goldfaden and others had long careers in Eastern Europe,

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the Russian ban on Yiddish theatre of 1883 pushed the entire industry to Western Europe and the United States. Remarkably, in the years between 1890 and 1940, over 200 Yiddish theatres or touring troupes were operating in the United States. As many as a dozen companies functioned in New York at any given time during this period. In 1903, the Grand Theatre, built on Second Avenue as the first edifice constructed with the specific purpose of presenting Yiddish theatre, opened and the greatest era of American Yiddish theatre reached its pinnacle. Dramatists including Jacob Gordin, who adapted 3HAKESPEARE’s King Lear and works by Leo Tolstoy, Solomon Libin (1872–1955), David Pinski, and Leon Kobrin (1872–1946) supplied the theatres and ACTORS with dramatic vehicles. This was also an era of great Yiddish theatre actors. Foremost among them was Jacob Adler, who sought to elevate Yiddish theatre through an emphasis on the classics and important new plays. Adler’s influence was also felt through his CHILDREN, Celia, 3TELLA, and ,UTHER, all of whom became noted actors (and moved between the Yiddish theatre and "ROADWAY) and, in Stella’s case, one of the most important acting teachers of the mid-20th century. Adler was one of the first to take Yiddish theatre to Broadway, after which other actors, including Bertha Kalish, Boris Thomashefsky, and Maurice Schwartz, did the same. Yiddish theatre began a slow decline in the 1930s, its demise hastened by the Holocaust in Europe and the assimilation of Jewish culture into mainstream American life. See also YIDDISH ART THEATRE. YOU AND I. Originally titled The Jilts, this dark COMEDY by 0HILIP "ARRY, his first successful professional production, mounted by Richard G. Herndon, opened at the Belmont Theatre on 19 February 1923 for 136 performances. Middle-aged businessman Maitland White, played by H. B. Warner, has abandoned his passion to become a painter in order to marry and attain material comfort for his family. However, he cannot resist the desire to paint, despite the fact that his work generates no interest beyond ADVERTISING copy. When White discovers that his son, Roderick, plans to give up his desire to become an architect to marry, he persuades the young man to pursue his dream. The play won the Harvard University Prize and demonstrated Barry’s gift for witty dialogue and intriguing moral dilemmas for his characters.

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YOUNG MRS. WINTHROP. Bronson Howard’s four-act play opened 9 October 1882 for 190 performances at the Madison Square Theatre, became a fixture in STOCK theatres well past World War I, and was made into a MOTIONPICTURE twice (1915, 1920). Constance Winthrop, a young social climber, and her businessman husband, Douglas, are obsessed with money and position. Douglas implores Constance to skip a prestigious ball to stay at home with their sick child while he attends to business. When Constance hears rumors of infidelity on Douglas’s part, she goes to the ball. Their child dies, a tragic event that leads to a split between them that is only mended by the intercession of Buxton Scott, their kindhearted lawyer, who brings the couple back together by confronting them over their excessive materialism and socializing. YOUNG, RIDA JOHNSON (1869–1926). Born into high society in Baltimore, Rida Johnson Young spent a brief apprenticeship ACT ING with E. H. Sothern and Viola Allen before she turned to writing plays, operettas, and MUSICALS. Her nonmusical plays include Brown of Harvard (1906), The Boys of Company “B” (1907), The Lancers (1907), Glorious Betsey (1908), The Lottery Man (1909), Next (1911), and The Girl with the Pennant (1913). She wrote a series of musical plays for Chauncey Olcott, including Ragged Robin (1910), Barry of Ballmore (1911), Macushla (1912), The Isle o’ Dreams (1913), and Shameen Dhu (1914). Her most enduring contributions were the books and lyrics for two operettas, Naughty Marietta (1910; music by Victor Herbert) and Maytime (1917; music by Sigmund Romberg), both of which were frequently revived and became popular MOTIONPICTURES. YOUNG, ROLAND (1887–1953). London-born Roland Young ACTED in England before making his United States debut in 1912. Scoring his earliest successes in "ROADWAY COMEDIES, particularly two Clare Kummer plays, Good Gracious Annabelle (1916) and A Successful Calamity (1918), Young consolidated his STARDOM in the hit MUSICAL Buddies (1919). In 1920, Kummer, Young’s mother-in-law, wrote the popular Rollo’s Wild Oat for him, as well as Her Master’s Voice* (1933). He also appeared to acclaim as the bumbling composer Neil McRae in the expressionistic 'EORGE3+AUFMAN and -ARC#ON NELLY comedy, Beggar on Horseback (1924), after which he became one of the best-loved comic character actors in MOTIONPICTURES in-

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cluding David Copperfield (1935), Topper (1937), and The Philadelphia Story* (1940). He returned to Broadway occasionally, including for long runs in Frederick Lonsdale’s The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (1926) and 2OBERT % 3HERWOOD’s The Queen’s Husband (1928), as well as lesser works like The Distant Shore (1935), A Touch of Brimstone (1935), Spring Thaw (1938), Ask My Friend Sandy (1943), and Another Love Story (1944). YOUNG, STARK (1881–1963).† Born in Como, Mississippi, Stark Young studied English at the University of Mississippi and Columbia, after which he held several ACADEMIC jobs. He became a contributor to the New Republic and associate editor of THEATRE ARTS magazine in 1921. The following year, Young ascended to the job of drama CRITIC for New Republic and, with a one-year respite in 1924–1925, he held the post until his retirement in 1947. Young wrote some unsuccessful plays, translated works by Anton Chekhov, and occasionally directed plays, notably %UGENE/.EILL’s Welded (1924). Beyond his drama criticism, Young also wrote books: The Flower in Drama (1923), Glamour (1925), Theatre Practice (1926), and The Theatre (1927), as well as a successful 1934 novel, So Red the Rose. YOUNG, WILLIAM (1847–1920). Playwright William Young was born near Chicago, studied for the law, and began a theatrical career as an ACTOR in order to learn the art of PLAYWRITING. He wrote several blank verse tragedies, including Jonquil (1871), Pendragon (1882), and Ganelon (1891), all STARRING Lawrence Barrett, but had his greatest success with a long-running 1883 COMEDY, The Rajah, PRO DUCED by Daniel Frohman. He subsequently translated and adapted Joan of Arc (1890) from Jules Barbier’s novel, and adapted A Japanese Nightingale (1903) from Onoto Wotanna’s novel. His major triumph was adapting General Lew Wallace’s novel Ben-Hur (1899) for the stage. Its spectacular Marc Klaw and Abe Erlanger production led to numerous revivals, TOURS, and MOTIONPICTURE adaptations. YURKA, BLANCHE (1893–1974). The versatile, well-respected Czech-born stage ACTRESS played a range of classic and contemporary roles, preferring classics and the REALISTIC dramas of (ENRIK )BSEN and 'EORGE "ERNARD 3HAW to commercial entertainments. Although she studied for opera, Yurka began an acting career in 1907

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under the guidance of PRODUCER David Belasco. She landed her first significant role in Is Matrimony a Failure? (1909) with *ANE #OWL. Yurka scored a notable success as Gertrude opposite John Barrymore’s Hamlet in 1922, subsequently playing serious roles like Gina in a 1925 production of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck. Among Yurka’s New York appearances, some of which she also DIRECTED, are Man and the Masses (1924), The Goat Song (1926), The Squall (1926), Hedda Gabler (1929), The Lady from the Sea (1929), The Vikings (1929), Electra (1932), and Troilus and Cressida (1932). Yurka made her last "ROADWAY appearance in a short-lived 1966 revival of Dinner at Eight* and also appeared in MOTIONPICTURES (and television*) beginning in the silent era. Although she never attained the fame of her contemporaries +ATHARINE#ORNELL, (ELEN(AYES, or 4ALLULAH "ANKHEAD, Yurka had a long career distinguished by her versatility.

n:n ZANGWILL, ISRAEL (1864–1926). Born in London, the novelist wrote about Jewish life, scoring his greatest success with Children of the Ghetto (1892), which he adapted as a play in 1899. 0RODUCED by Theodore A. Leibler and DIRECTED by James A. Herne, this REALIS TIC drama had a comparatively brief "ROADWAY run (49 performances), but won much publicity over its themes of poverty among immigrants in New York City’s melting pot. His other plays include The Moment of Death (1900), Merely Mary Ann (1903), The Serio-Comic Governess (1904), Jinny, The Carrier (1905), Nurse Marjorie (1906), The Melting Pot (1909), and We Moderns (1924). Much of Zangwill’s energy was devoted to Zionist organizations seeking a Jewish homeland. ZAZA. One of David Belasco’s most popular plays, Zaza opened at the Garrick Theatre on 9 January 1899 starring Mrs. Leslie Carter. Belasco based his play on an earlier work by Pierre Burton and Charles Simon, placing emphasis on Zaza, a sexy music hall performer pursued by a married aristocrat. Zaza successfully capitalized on Mrs. Carter’s notorious past (she had been divorced by her society husband, who proved adultery), and it played successful return engagements in 1900, 1904, and 1905. No less than three MOTION PICTURE versions were made (1915, 1923, 1939).

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ZIEGFELD, FLORENZ, JR. (1869–1932). Born in Chicago, Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. began his legendary PRODUCING career by bringing variety amusements to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Ziegfeld began producing plays in 1896 with Charles Hoyt’s A Parlor Match for his first wife, Anna Held. This was followed by plays and MUSICALS for Held, including The French Maid (1897), Papa’s Wife (1899), and The Little Duchess (1901). His most significant producing achievement, the annual revue that became known as the Ziegfeld Follies, began in 1907 and continued annually to 1925, with final editions in 1927 and 1931. The lavish, tasteful, spectacular Follies became the pinnacle of "ROADWAY glamour in its time. Ziegfeld, who conceived the producer’s role as an artistic one, discovered or nurtured the talents of some of Broadway’s greatest entertainers, including Nora Bayes, Bert Williams, Eddie Cantor, W. C. Fields, Marilyn Miller, Leon Errol, Will Rogers, and many others. The Follies were usually staged at the lavish New Amsterdam Theatre with SCENE DESIGNS by Joseph Urban, who also designed the Ziegfeld Theatre in 1927. Ziegfeld also produced book musicals, including Sally (1920), Whoopee (1928), and, most importantly, Show Boat (1927), a landmark achievement in the evolution of musical theatre. Ziegfeld’s second wife was ACTRESS "ILLIE"URKE. ZIMMERMAN, J. FRED (1841?–1925). Little is known of the early life of this theatre owner who worked as treasurer of Washington’s National Theatre before partnering with Samuel F. Nixon-Nirdlinger. Together, they monopolized Philadelphia theatres before joining the Theatrical Syndicate. Zimmerman ran his own opera company and PRODUCED mostly MUSICALS, but also Mauricette, Markheim, and Paolo and Francesca, all in 1906, and several revivals including Erminie (1899) and The Lyons Mail (1906). ZIRA. This four-act romantic reworking of Wilkie Collins’s The New Magdalen by J. Hartley Manners and Henry Miller was PRODUCED by Miller at the Princess Theatre, where it opened on 21 September 1905 for 128 performances. Margaret Anglin played Hester Trent, who takes on the identity of a supposedly dead woman, hoping to improve her lot in life. The woman reappears, leading to romantic complications. Mrs. Thomas Whiffen also performed in the original production.

"IBLIOGRAPHY

Contents Introductory Note Bibliographies and General Reference Works Historical and Critical Studies General Theatre Studies Modernism and Its Offshoots Cultural and Regional Studies Acting and Actors Playwriting and Playwrights Producing, Directing, Management, and Scenography Critics and Criticism Theatres and Architecture African American, Yiddish, and Ethnic Theatre Vaudeville, Musicals, and Other Popular Fare Women Biographies and Memoirs General Actors and Actresses Playwrights Critics Producers, Directors, Managers, and Scenographers Plays and Anthologies Theatre Practice, Management, Technology, and Terminology

535 535 539 542 542 544 544 546 548 550 550 551 552 554 556 556 556 557 560 562 563 564 565

).42/$5#4/29./4% The era of modernist theatre is the bibliophile’s delight, for it is still possible to collect many volumes with gilt-encrusted covers, lavish 535

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illustrations, and abundant anecdotes that were published during those decades. Pictorially, the 1880s and 1890s brought the transition from crude line drawings and gloomy engravings to abundant studio photographs of theatre artists. The theatergoing public was avid for books that afforded glimpses of backstage life, and theatre professionals obliged with a wealth of memoirs. Not only actors, but managers, playwrights, and critics all published retrospectives. Other writers produced a steady flow of books offering collective coverage of a selection of artists. While the books published between 1880 and 1930 were aimed at a general readership and tended to anecdotal coverage of mainstream theatre, recent studies by contemporary scholars have more often focused on placing the era’s theatre in its cultural, economic, and sociological contexts while embracing a broader range of theatrical activities, including ethnic and popular entertainments outside traditional venues. Trailblazing ventures like the Provincetown Players or the New Stagecraft have certainly attracted some superb scholars to reexamine them. There has also been a major surge of scholarly interest in vaudeville, among other popular forms. On the whole, however, the quaint charm of the era’s clichés and sentimentality has not attracted the great numbers of theatre historians that earlier and later periods in American history have, although in recent years there has been a surge of publications examining African American drama and performers, Yiddish theatre, and various aspects of women in American theatre. Most of the bibliographies and general reference works listed here are not specific to the modernist era, but cover a wider swath. The breakdown of the bibliography into categories is somewhat problematic. For example, the decision whether to place a collection of short biographies of actors under historical studies of actors or under biographies and memoirs of actors was resolved by considering where the reader would be most likely to look for it: under historical studies of actors. Only in very few instances have we duplicated listings under more than one category. The standard ready references for American theatre that reside on every theatre person’s bookshelf are Bordman’s Oxford Companion to American Theatre and Wilmeth and Miller’s Cambridge Guide to American Theatre. Although comparable in format, each has distinctive features. Bordman inclines toward the commercial theatre and takes an anecdotal approach. Wilmeth and Miller are more comprehensive, including more extensive coverage of ethnic theatres, written with an

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economy of words. Kennedy’s essay-style entries in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre & Performance encompass American as well as international theatre. Sherman’s labor of love is interesting for its inclusion of many otherwise neglected figures, but his spellings of names and other data need to be checked against other sources. For more details about performers, one turns to Variety Obituaries, always with the understanding that some inaccuracies inevitably lurk in newspaper accounts. Who Was Who in the Theatre, 1912–1976 is a good resource for virtually complete listings of plays in selected artists’ careers (British as well as American), although dates of productions are not always provided. And then one can comb the memoirs (see the next section of this bibliography), as theatre artists frequently included one another in their own stories. Two excellent finding guides for such material are Bryan’s Stage Lives and Moyer’s American Actors, 1861–1910. Data on plays (theatre, opening, length of run) may be found in Bronner, Leiter, Mantle, and Odell. While these offer capsule plot summaries, as do we, there is of course no substitute for reading the entire play. The data in those volumes can also be checked against the reviews reprinted in the series of volumes of the New York Times Theater Reviews, which provide comprehensive coverage from 1870 to the present. A range of Internet sources are readily available online; the Internet Broadway Database is a particularly useful quick resource for plays produced in New York, credits, dates, and production personnel; however, between 1880 and World War I the information included tends to be incomplete. Julius Cahn’s annual volume provides an amazing record of theatre across the nation at the turn of the century. It lists personnel and technical specifications for most opera houses in towns and cities served by the various railroad lines, which are also listed along with local newspapers and bill-posting firms. Bernheim’s economic history of American theatre remains invaluable and is long overdue to be reprinted. For general histories, volume 2 of Wilmeth and Bigsby’s Cambridge History of American Theatre and Londré and Watermeier’s History of North American Theater complement each other nicely. Earlier surveys include Coad and Mims, Hewitt, Hughes, Morris, and Wilson. Among regional theatre histories, Schoberlin’s 1941 study of Colorado theatre remains particularly engaging. Londré’s research for The Enchanted Years of the Stage gen-

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erated some tidbits that found their way into this volume. Shattuck’s Shakespeare on the American Stage is a fascinating text embellished by a wealth of illustrations. Mary Henderson’s several books on New York City’s theatres have contributed greatly to our understanding of the architecture and changing urban landscape there. Among a rapidly growing list of resources on African American theatre, Hill and Hatch’s History of African American Theatre merits particular attention. The theatrical memoir of the decades surrounding the turn of the century has given way in our contemporary media-obsessed era to celebrity reporting and interviews. Certainly, the top stars of our day become the subjects of biographies, but they seldom write their own accounts. Browsing in some of the memoirs listed here will make it clear how crucial that form is to our understanding of the era. Despite the artists’ faulty memories and inevitable omissions, there is an immediacy, authenticity, and color to personal recollections that no biographer can completely capture. The autobiography of William S. Hart, who had a substantial stage career before he became a cowboy movie star, for example, is a page turner (but beware of the bowdlerized reprint). In the most fascinating memoirs, the artist does not simply chronicle his or her own career, but also reminisces about friendships and influences in the profession. For example, several actors recount similar anecdotes about the remarkable actor and backstage personality Louis James. What a loss to posterity that James did not write his own memoir! While the lives of actors most readily attract our interest, the memoirs and biographies of playwrights and other artists are also compelling. Special mention must be made of published recollections of managers, for they necessarily had extensive interconnections with many artists as well as prodigious memories for people. M. B. Leavitt’s memoir is astonishing in its scope, and Grau’s two volumes are also important. Our listing of plays and anthologies of plays must be highly selective, considering the thousands of plays published during the modernist era. Hixon and Hennessee’s finding guide to Ninteenth-Century Drama (see bibliographies and reference works) is helpful in this regard. Fortunately, many libraries still house a plethora of single-play editions published during the 1910s and 1920s. Plays that did not get published may often be found in manuscript in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection at Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts or in other theatre archives. Practical manuals of theatrical techniques and technology have never been abundant, partly due to the limited market and partly due to how

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quickly they become outdated as new production methodologies are discovered. In addition to the works listed here, one may find nuggets in biographies of artists like David Belasco as well as of designers. Similarly, there are not many resources on theatrical terminology, although much can be gleaned from memoirs and histories written in or about the period.

")",)/'2!0()%3!.$'%.%2!,2%&%2%.#%7/2+3 Bartelt, Chuck, and Barbara Bergeron, compilers. Variety Obituaries, 1905– 1986. 11 vols. New York: Garland, 1989. Bloom, Ken. The Routledge Guide to Broadway. New York: Routledge, 2007. Bonin, Jane F. Prize-Winning American Drama: A Bibliographical and Descriptive Guide. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1973. Bordman, Gerald. American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1869–1914. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. ˆˆˆ. American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1914–1930. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. ˆˆˆ. The Oxford Companion to American Theatre. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Bordman, Gerald, and Thomas S. Hischak. The Oxford Companion to American Theatre. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Breed, Paul F., and Florence M. Sniderman, comp. and eds. Dramatic Criticism Index: A Bibliography of Commentaries on Playwrights from Ibsen to the Avant Garde. Detroit: Gale Research, 1972. Brockett, Oscar, and Robert Findlay. Century of Innovation: A History of European and American Theatre and Drama since the Late Nineteenth Century. 2nd ed. New York: Allyn and Bacon, 1991. Bronner, Edwin J. The Encyclopedia of the American Theatre, 1900–1975. San Francisco: A. S. Barnes, 1980. Brown, T. Allston. History of the American Stage: Biographical Sketches of Nearly Every Member of the Profession That Has Appeared on the American Stage, from 1733 to 1870. New York: Burt Franklin, 1870; reprinted 1969. Browne, Walter, and E. De Roy Koch, eds. Who’s Who on the Stage 1908. New York: B. W. Dodge, 1908. Bryan, George B. American Theatrical Regulation 1607–1900: Conspectus and Texts. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1993. ˆˆˆ. Stage Deaths: A Biographical Guide to International Theatre Obituaries, 1850–1990. 2 vols. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1991. ˆˆˆ. Stage Lives: A Bibliography and Index to Theatrical Biographies in English. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985.

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Bzowski, Frances Diodato, compiler. American Women Playwrights, 1900– 1930: A Checklist. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1992. Cahn, Julius. Julius Cahn’s Official Theatrical Guide, Volume 4: 1899–1900. New York: Empire Theatre Building, 1899. Cassell Companion to Theatre. London: Cassell, 1997. Chambers, Colin, ed. The Continuum Companion to Twentieth Century Theatre. New York: Continuum, 2002. Demastes, William W., ed. American Playwrights, 1880–1945: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1995. Dickey, Jerry. Sophie Treadwell: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1997. Durham, Weldon B., ed. American Theatre Companies, 1749–1887. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1986. ˆˆˆ. American Theatre Companies, 1888–1930. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1987. Gassner, John, and Edward Quinn, eds. The Reader’s Encyclopedia of World Drama. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1969. Griffiths, Trevor R. The Ivan R. Dee Guide to Plays and Playwrights. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003. Harbin, Billy J., Kim Marra, and Robert A. Schanke, eds. The Gay and Lesbian Theatrical Legacy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Hischak, Thomas S. Enter the Players: New York Stage Actors in the Twentieth Century. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 2003. Hixon, Don L., and Don A. Hennessee. Nineteenth-Century American Drama: A Finding Guide. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1977. Kennedy, Dennis, ed. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre & Performance. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Krasner, David, ed. A Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005. Larson, Carl F. W. American Regional Theatre History to 1900: A Bibliography. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1979. Leiter, Samuel L., ed. The Encyclopedia of the New York Stage, 1920–1930. 2 vols. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985. Mainiero, Lina, ed. American Women Writers. 4 vols. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1979. Mantle, Burns. The Best Plays of 1894 [and each subsequent year]. New York: Dodd, Mead. McGill, Raymond D. Notable Names in the American Theatre. Clifton, N.J.: James T. White, 1976. Meserve, Walter J. An Outline History of American Drama. New York: Feedback Books & Prospero Press, 1994.

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Moses, Montrose J., and John Mason Brown, eds. The American Theatre as Seen by Its Critics, 1752–1934. New York: W. W. Norton, 1934. Moyer, Ronald L. American Actors, 1861–1910: An Annotated Bibliography of Books Published in the United States in English from 1861 through 1976. Troy, N.Y.: Whitson, 1979. Nelson, Emmanuel S., ed. African American Dramatists: An A-to-Z Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2004. The New York Times Directory of the Theater [1920–1970]. Introduction by Clive Barnes. New York: Arno Press, 1973. New York Times Theater Reviews, 1870–1930. 8 vols. New York: The New York Times & Arno Press, 1971–1975. New York Times Theater Reviews Index 1870–1919. New York: The New York Times & Arno Press, 1975. Odell, George C. D. Annals of the New York Stage. 15 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1927–1949. Owen, Bobbi. The Broadway Design Roster: Designers and Their Credits. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2003. Patterson, Michael. The Oxford Dictionary of Plays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pavis, Patrice. Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Perkins, George, Barbara Perkins, and Phillip Leininger, eds. Benét’s Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Peterson, Bernard L., Jr. The African American Theatre Directory, 1816–1960: A Comprehensive Guide to Early Black Theatre Organizations, Companies, Theatres, and Performing Groups. Foreword by Errol Hill. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1997. Ranald, Margaret Loftus. The Eugene O’Neill Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1984. Rigdon, Walter, ed. The Biographical Encyclopaedia & Who’s Who of the American Theatre. New York: James H. Heineman, 1966. Robinson, Alice M., Vera Mowry Roberts, and Milly S. Barranger, eds. Notable Women in the American Theatre: A Biographical Dictionary. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1989. Sampson, Henry T. The Ghost Walks: A Chronological History of Blacks in Show Business, 1865–1910. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1988. Sherman, Robert L. Actors and Authors: With Composers and Managers Who Helped Make Them Famous: A Chronological Record and Brief Biography of Theatrical Celebrities from 1750 to 1950. Chicago: Robert L. Sherman, 1951. Stoddard, Richard. Stage Scenery, Machinery and Lighting: A Guide to Information Sources. Detroit: Gale Research, 1977.

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Whalon, Marion K. Performing Arts Research: A Guide to Information Sources. Detroit: Gale Research, 1976. Who Was Who in the Theatre: 1912–1976. 4 vols. Detroit: Gale Research (Omnigraphics), 1978. Wilmeth, Don B. The American Stage to World War I: A Guide to Information Sources. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research Co., 1978. Wilmeth, Don B., and Tice Miller. Cambridge Guide to American Theatre. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. ˆˆˆ. The Language of American Popular Entertainment: A Glossary of Argot, Slang, and Terminology. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1981. Woll, Alan. Dictionary of Black Theatre: Broadway, Off-Broadway and Selected Harlem Theatre. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1983.

()34/2)#!,!.$#2)4)#!,345$)%3 'ENERAL4HEATRE3TUDIES Balio, Tino, and Lee Norvelle. The History of the National Theatre Conference. The National Theatre Conference, 1968. Bernheim, Alfred L. The Business of the Theatre: An Economic History of the American Theatre, 1750–1932. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1964 (reprint of 1932 edition). Bigsby, C. W. E. A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama. Volume One: 1900–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Chinoy, Helen Krich, and Linda Walsh Jenkins. Women in American Theatre. New York: Crown, 1981. Churchill, Allen. The Great White Way: A Re-creation of Broadway’s Golden Era of Theatrical Entertainment. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1962. ˆˆˆ. The Theatrical 20s. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975. Coad, Oral Sumner, and Edwin Mims Jr. The American Stage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929. Conolly, L. W., ed. Theatrical Touring and Founding in North America. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1982. Csida, Joseph, and June Bundy Csida. American Entertainment: A Unique History of Popular Show Business. New York: Watson-Guptill, 1978. Durham, Weldon B. Liberty Theatres of the United States Army, 1917–1921. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Driver, Tom F. Romantic Quest and Modern Query: A History of the Modern Theater. New York: A Delta Book, 1970. Eaton, Walter Prichard. The Theatre Guild: The First Ten Years. New York: Brentano’s, 1929.

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Evans, James W., and Gardner L. Harding. Entertaining the American Army: The American Stage and Lyceum in the World War. New York: Association Press, 1921. Fields, Armond, and L. M. Fields. From the Bowery to Broadway: Lew Fields and the Roots of American Popular Theater. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Gewitz, Arthur, and James J. Kolb, eds. Art, Glitter, and Glitz: Mainstream Playwrights and Popular Theatre in 1920s America. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004. Gilman, Richard. The Making of Modern Drama. New York: Da Capo Press, 1987. Graham, Philip. Showboats: The History of an American Institution. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1951. Hewitt, Barnard. Theatre U.S.A. 1665–1957. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959. Hughes, Glenn. A History of the American Theatre, 1700–1950. New York: Samuel French, 1951. Hyde, Ralph. Panoramania! The Art and Entertainment of the “AllEmbracing” View. London: Trefoil Publications, 1988. Kinne, Wisher Payne. George Pierce Baker and the American Theatre. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954. Laufe, Abe. The Wicked Stage: A History of Theater Censorship and Harassment in the United States. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1978. Leonard, William Torbert. Broadway Bound: A Guide to Shows That Died Aborning. Metuchen, N.J., and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1983. Londré, Felicia Hardison, and Daniel J. Watermeier. The History of North American Theater: The United States, Canada, and Mexico from PreColumbian Times to the Present. New York: Continuum, 1998. McArthur, Benjamin. “Theatrical Clubs of the Nineteenth Century: Tradition versus Assimilation in the Acting Community.” Theatre Survey 23 (November 1982): 197–212. McCleery, Albert, and Carl Glick. Curtains Going Up. New York: Pitman, 1939. McConachie, Bruce A. Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre & Society, 1820–1870. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992. Morehouse, Ward. Matinee Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Our Theatre. New York: Whittlesey House, 1949. Morris, Lloyd. Curtain Time: The Story of the American Theater. New York: Random House, 1953. Nadel, Norman. A Pictorial History of the Theatre Guild. Special material by Lawrence Langner and Armina Marshall. Introduction by Brooks Atkinson. New York: Crown, 1969. Quinn, Arthur Hobson. A History of American Drama, from the Beginning to the Civil War. New York: F. S. Crofts, 1943.

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ˆˆˆ. A History of American Drama, from the Civil War to the Present Day. New York: F. S. Crofts, 1936. Wilmeth, Don B., and Christopher Bigsby, eds. The Cambridge History of American Theatre, Volume II: 1870–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Wilson, Garff B. Three Hundred Years of American Drama and Theatre. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973.

-ODERNISMAND)TS/FFSHOOTS Bocola, Sandro. The Art of Modernism: Art, Culture, and Society from Goya to the Present Day. Munich: Prestel, 1999. Conrad, Peter. Modern Times, Modern Places. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. Demastes, William. Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996. Dumenil, Lynn. Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995. Gaggi, Silvio. Modern/Postmodern: A Study in Twentieth-Century Arts and Ideas. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989. Kindelan, Nancy. Shadows of Realism: Dramaturgy and the Theory and Practices of Modernism. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1996. Marker, Frederick J., and Christopher Innes, eds. Modernism in European Drama: Ibsen, Strindberg, Pirandello, Beckett. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Miller, Tyrus. Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts between the World Wars. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Murphy, Brenda. The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. North, Michael. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language & TwentiethCentury Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Stansell, Christine. American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century. New York: Henry Holt, 2000. Walker, Julia A. Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre: Bodies, Voices, Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

#ULTURALAND2EGIONAL3TUDIES Bianco, Anthony. Ghosts of 42nd Street: A History of America’s Most Infamous Block. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005. Black, Cheryl. The Women of Provincetown, 1915–1922. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002.

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Casto, Marilyn. Actors, Audiences, and Historic Theaters of Kentucky. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000. Charyn, Jerome. Gangsters & Gold Diggers: Old New York, the Jazz Age, and the Birth of Broadway. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003. Cuoco, Lorin, and William H. Gass, eds. Literary St. Louis: A Guide. St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 2000. Demastes, William W., and Iris Smith Fischer, eds. Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1995. Egan, Leona Rust. Provincetown as a Stage: Provincetown, the Provincetown Players, and the Discovery of Eugene O’Neill. Orleans, Mass.: Parnassus Imprints, 1994. ˆˆˆ. Provincetown Theater: A Walking Tour of Historic Theater Sites. Provincetown: Cape Cod Pilgrim Memorial Association, 1996. Gaines, James R. Wit’s End: Days and Nights of the Algonquin Round Table. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. Gallegly, Joseph. Footlights on the Border: The Galveston and Houston Stage before 1900. Gravenhage: Mouton, 1962. Glenn, George D., and Richard L. Poole. The Opera Houses of Iowa. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1993. Goodson, Steve. Highbrows, Hillbillies and Hellfire: Public Entertainment in Atlanta, 1880–1930. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002. Hall, Roger A. Performing the American Frontier, 1870–1906. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Heller, Adele, and Lois Rudnick, eds. 1915: The Cultural Moment. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Hoyt, Harlowe. Town Hall Tonight! New York: Bramhall House, 1955. Kellner, Bruce. The Last Dandy: Ralph Barton, American Artist, 1891–1931. Foreword by John Updike. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991. Kendall, John S. The Golden Age of the New Orleans Theatre. New York: Greenwood, 1968. Koon, Helene Wickham. How Shakespeare Won the West. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1989. Kyvig, David E. Daily Life in the United States, 1920–1940: How Americans Lived through the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004. Londré, Felicia Hardison. The Enchanted Years of the Stage: Kansas City at the Crossroads of American Theater, 1870–1930. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007. ˆˆˆ. Much Ado about Shakespeare on Midwestern Frontier Stages. University of Nebraska-Lincoln: The Geske Lectures, 2005.

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MacMinn, George R. The Theater of the Golden Era in California. Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, 1941. McClymer, John. The Birth of Modern America, 1919–1939. Maplecrest, N.Y.: Brandywine Press, 2005. Mooney, Michael Macdonald. Evelyn Nesbit and Stanford White: Love and Death in the Gilded Age. New York: William Morrow, 1976. Murphy, Brenda. American Realism and American Drama, 1880–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Sarlós, Robert Károly. Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players: Theatre in Ferment. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1982. Schoberlin, Melvin. From Candles to Footlights: A Biography of Pike’s Peak Theatre, 1859–1876. Denver: The Old West Publishing, 1941. Segrave, Kerry. Ticket Scalping: An American History, 1850–2005. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Shattuck, Roger. The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant Garde in France, 1885 to World War I. New York: Vintage Books, 1968. Sova, Dawn B. Banned Plays: Censorship Histories of 125 Stage Dramas. New York: Facts On File, 2004. Taylor, William R., ed. Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Vacha, John. Showtime in Cleveland: The Rise of a Regional Theater Center. Kent: The Kent State University Press, 2001. Valgemae, Mardi. Accelerated Grimace: Expressionism in the American Drama of the 1920s. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972. Waller, Gregory A. Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896–1930. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995.

!CTINGAND!CTORS The American Stage of Today: Biographies and Photographs of One Hundred Leading Actors and Actresses. Introduction by William Winter. New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1910. Blum, Daniel. Great Stars of the American Stage: A Pictorial Record. New York: Greenberg, 1952. ˆˆˆ. A Pictorial History of the American Theatre 1860–1970. 3rd ed., enlarged and revised by John Willis. New York: Crown, 1972. ˆˆˆ. A Pictorial History of the American Theatre 1860–1985. 6th ed., updated and enlarged by John Willis. New York: Crown, 1986. Burge, James C. Lines of Business: Casting Practice and Policy in the American Theatre 1752–1899. New York: Peter Lang, 1986.

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Kellow, Brian. The Bennetts: An Acting Family. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2004. Krone, Charles A. “Recollections of an Old Actor.” Missouri Historical Collections (1906–1914). Lavery, Brian. Tallulah Bankhead. Bath, UK: Absolute Press, 1999. Le Gallienne, Eva. At 33. New York: Longmans, Green, 1934. ˆˆˆ. The Mystic in the Theatre: Eleonora Duse. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973. ˆˆˆ. With a Quiet Heart. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1974. Lee, Betty. Marie Dressler: The Unlikeliest Star. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1997. Leicer, Emily Wordis. Becoming Mae West. New York: Da Capo Press, 2000. Lobenthal, Joel. Tallulah!: The Life and Times of a Leading Lady. New York: Regan Books, 2004. Louvish, Simon. Mae West: It Ain’t No Sin. New York: St. Martin’s/Thomas Dunne Books, 2006. Malvern, Gladys. Curtain Going Up! The Story of Katharine Cornell. New York: J. Messner, 1943. McKay, Frederic Edward, and Charles E. L. Wingate, eds. Famous American Actors of To-day. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1896. McKenny, Margaret. Theatrical Sketches: Here and There with Prominent Actors. New York: The Merriam, 1894. Modjeska, Helena. Memories and Impressions of Helena Modjeska: An Autobiography. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969 (first published 1910). Morse, Frank P. Backstage with Henry Miller. Introduction by George M. Cohan. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1938. Mosel, Tad. Leading Lady: The World and Theatre of Katharine Cornell. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978. Murdoch, James E. The Stage: Recollections of Actors and Acting from an Experience of Fifty Years. Philadelphia: J. M. Stoddart, 1880. Murphy, Donn B., and Stephen Moore. Helen Hayes: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1993. Pederson, Lucille M. Katharine Cornell: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1993. Peters, Margot. Design for Living: Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Reignolds-Winslow, Catherine Mary. Yesterdays with Actors. Boston: Cupples and Hurd, 1887. Rice, Dan. Memoirs of Dan Rice. Long Branch, N.J.: n.p., 1901. Rosenfeld, Lulla. Bright Star of Exile: Jacob Adler and the Yiddish Theatre. Introduction by Harold Clurman. New York: Crowell, 1977.

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Ruggles, Eleanor. Prince of Players: Edwin Booth. New York: W. W. Norton, 1953. Schanke, Robert A. Eva Le Gallienne: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1989. ˆˆˆ. Shattered Applause: The Lives of Eva Le Gallienne. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992. Sentilles, Renée M. Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Birth of American Celebrity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Sheehy, Helen. Eva Le Gallienne: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1996. Skinner, Cornelia Otis. Life with Lindsay & Crouse. Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1976. Skinner, Otis. Footlights and Spotlights: Recollections of My Life on the Stage. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1924. Strang, Lewis C. Famous Actors of the Day in America. Boston: L. C. Page, 1900. ˆˆˆ. Famous Actresses of the Day in America. Boston: L. C. Page, 1899. ˆˆˆ. Players and Plays of the Last Quarter Century. 2 vols. Boston: L. C. Page, 1893. Truax, Sarah. A Woman of Parts: Memories of a Life on Stage. New York: Longmans, Green, 1949. Warde, Frederick. Fifty Years of Make Believe. New York: The International Press Syndicate, 1920. Watts, Jill. Mae West: An Icon in Black and White. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. West, Mae. Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1959. Wingate, Charles E. L., and F. E. McKay, eds. Famous American Actors of Today. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1896. Yurka, Blanche. Bohemian Girl. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1970. Zolotow, Maurice. Stagestruck: The Romance of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965.

0LAYWRIGHTS Bell, Archie. The Clyde Fitch I Knew. New York: Broadway Publishing, 1909. Ben-Zvi, Linda. Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Braunlich, Phyllis. Haunted by Home: The Life and Letters of Lynn Riggs. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988. Brown, John Mason. The Ordeal of a Playwright: Robert E. Sherwood and the Challenge of War. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.

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ˆˆˆ. The Worlds of Robert E. Sherwood: Mirror to His Times, 1896–1939. New York: Harper, 1965. Carey, Gary. Anita Loos: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1988. Connelly, Marc. Voices Offstage: A Book of Memoirs. Chicago: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968. Davis, Owen. I’d Like to Do It Again. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, Inc., 1931. ˆˆˆ. My First Fifty Years in Theatre. Boston: Little, Brown, 1950. Derleth, August W. Still Small Voice: The Biography of Zona Gale. New York: Appleton, 1940. Durham, Frank. DuBose Heyward: The Man Who Wrote Porgy. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1954. ˆˆˆ. Elmer Rice. Boston: Twayne, 1970. Fawkes, Richard. Dion Boucicault: A Biography. London: Quartet, 1979. Frerer, Lloyd Anton. Bronson Howard, Dean of American Dramatists. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 2001. Gelb, Arthur, and Barbara Gelb. O’Neill. New York: Harper and Row, 1973. ˆˆˆ. O’Neill: Life with Monte Cristo. New York: Applause, 2000. Gilbert, Julie Goldsmith. Ferber. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978. Glaspell, Susan. The Road to the Temple. New York: Frederic A. Stokes, 1927. Goldstein, Malcolm. George S. Kaufman: His Life, His Theatre. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Gurko, Miriam. Restless Spirit: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York: Ty Crowell, 1962. Hart, Moss. Act One: An Autobiography. New York: Random House, 1959. Hecht, Ben. A Child of the Century. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954. Kenny, Vincent B. Paul Green. New York: Twayne, 1971. MacAdams, William. Ben Hecht: The Man behind the Legend. New York: Scribner, 1990. Meade, Marion. Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? New York: Villard, 1988. Meredith, Scott. George S. Kaufman and His Friends. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974. Meserve, Walter J. Robert E. Sherwood: Reluctant Moralist. New York: Pegasus, 1970. Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York: Random House, 2002. Moses, Montrose J., and Virginia Gerson. Clyde Fitch and His Letters. Boston: Little, Brown, 1924. Nolan, Paul T. Marc Connelly. Boston: Twayne, 1969. Ozieblo, Barbara. Susan Glaspell: A Critical Biography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

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Palmieri, Anthony F. R. Elmer Rice: A Playwright’s Vision of America. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980. Perry, John. James A. Herne: The American Ibsen. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1978. Pollock, Channing. Harvest of My Years. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1943. Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. I: 1902–1941—I, Too, Sing America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. ˆˆˆ. The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. II: 1941–1967—I Dream a World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Rice, Elmer. Minority Report: An Autobiography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963. Roper, John Herbert. Paul Green, Playwright of the Real South. Athens: University of Georgia, 2003. Schanke, Robert A.“That Furious Lesbian”: The Story of Mercedes de Acosta. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. Sharrar, Jack F. Avery Hopwood: His Life and Plays. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989. Sheaffer, Louis. O’Neill: Son and Artist. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. ˆˆˆ. O’Neill: Son and Playwright. Boston: Little, Brown, 1969. Shuman, R. Baird. Robert E. Sherwood. Boston: Twayne, 1964. Stineman, Esther Lanigan. Mary Austin: Song of a Maverick. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989. Teichmann, Howard. George S. Kaufman: An Intimate Portrait. New York: Atheneum, 1972. Veiller, Bayard. The Fun I’ve Had. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1941. Woodress, James Leslie. Booth Tarkington: Gentleman from Indiana. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1969.

#RITICS Leslie, Amy. Some Players: Personal Sketches. Chicago: Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1901. Nolte, William H. H. L. Mencken: Literary Critic. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1964. Teichmann, Howard. Smart Aleck: The Wit, World, and Life of Alexander Woollcott. New York: Morrow, 1976. Thomas, Bob. Winchell. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971. Whiting, Lilian. Kate Field: A Record. Boston: Little, Brown, 1900. Winchell, Walter. Winchell Exclusive. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975. Woollcott, Alexander. Long, Long Ago. New York: Viking, 1943.

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0RODUCERS $IRECTORS -ANAGERS AND3CENOGRAPHERS Abbott, George. “Mister Abbott.” New York: Random House, 1963. Blumenthal, George, with Arthur H. Menkin. My Sixty Years in Show Business: A Chronicle of the American Theatre, 1874–1934. New York: Frederick C. Osberg, 1936. Brady, William A. Showman. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1937. Bragdon, Claude. More Lives than One. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938. Carter, Randolph, and Robert Reed Cole. Joseph Urban. New York: Abbeville, 1992. Cohan, George M. Twenty Years on Broadway, and the Years It Took to Get There: The True Story of a Trouper’s Life from the Cradle to the “Closed Shop.” New York: Harper & Bros., 1924. Curry, Jane Kathleen. Nineteenth-Century American Women Theatre Managers. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994. Frohman, Daniel. Encore. New York: Lee Furman, Inc., 1937. Geddes, Norman Bel. Miracle in the Evening. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960. Goldsmith, Berthold Henry. Arnold Daly. New York: J. T. White & Co., 1927. Gottfried, Martin. Jed Harris: The Curse of Genius. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984. Grau, Robert. The Business Man in the Amusement World. New York: Broadway Publishing Co., 1910. ˆˆˆ. Forty Years of Observation of Music and the Drama. New York: Broadway Publishing, 1909. Harris, Jed. A Dance on the High Wire: Recollections of a Time and a Temperament. New York: Crown, 1979. Huston, John. An Open Book. New York: Da Capo Press, 1994. Kellner, Bruce. The Last Dandy: Ralph Barton, American Artist, 1891–1931. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991. Kenton, Edna. The Provincetown Players and the Playwrights’ Theatre, 1915–1922. Ed. Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004. Langner, Lawence. The Magic Curtain. New York: Dutton, 1951. Leavitt, M. B. Fifty Years in Theatrical Management. New York: Broadway Publishing, 1912. McCabe, John. George M. Cohan: The Man Who Owned Broadway. New York: Doubleday, 1973. McClintic, Guthrie. Me and Kit. Boston: Little, Brown, 1955. McNamara, Brooks. The Shuberts of Broadway. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Morehouse, Ward. George M. Cohan: Prince of the American Theatre. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1943.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Pendleton, Ralph, ed. The Theatre of Robert Edmond Jones. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1958. Pitou, Augustus. Masters of the Show. New York: Neale Publishing, 1914. Shean, Vincent. Oscar Hammerstein I: The Life and Exploits of an Impresario. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956. Stagg, Jerry. The Brothers Shubert. New York: Random House, 1968. Timberlake, Craig. The Life & Work of David Belasco, the Bishop of Broadway. New York: Library Publishers, 1954. Winter, William. The Life of David Belasco. 2 vols. New York: Moffat, Yard, 1918. Zellers, Parker. Tony Pastor: Dean of the Vaudeville Stage. Ypsilanti: Eastern Michigan University Press, 1971. Ziegfeld, Richard, and Paulette Ziegfeld. The Ziegfeld Touch: The Life and Times of Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993.

0,!93!.$!.4(/,/')%3 Acosta, Mercedes de. Women in Turmoil: Six Plays by Mercedes de Acosta. Ed. Robert A. Schanke. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. Barlow, Judith E., ed. Plays by American Women, 1900–1930. New York: Applause, 2001. Clark, Barrett H., ed. and intro. Favorite American Plays of the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1943. Dickey, Jerry, and Miriam López-Rodríguez, eds. Broadway’s Bravest Woman: Selected Writings of Sophie Treadwell. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006. Friedl, Bettina, ed. On to Victory: Propaganda Plays of the Woman Suffrage Movement. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987. Gerstenberg, Alice. Ten One-Act Plays. New York: Longmans, Green, 1949. Gillette, William. Plays by William Hooker Gillette. Ed. Rosemary Cullen and Don B. Wilmeth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Glaspell, Susan. Plays. Ed. and introduction by C. W. E. Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Green, Paul. A Paul Green Reader. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Halline, Allan Gates, ed. American Plays. New York: American Book Co., 1935. Hatch, James V., and Leo Hamalian, eds. Lost Plays of the Harlem Renaissance 1920–1940. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996. Hatch, James V., and Ted Shine, eds. Black Theatre U.S.A.: Plays by African Americans, The Early Period, 1847–1938. New York: The Free Press, 1996.

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Hopwood, Avery. The Hopwood Anthology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981. Hughes, Langston. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Vol. 13: Autobiography: The Big Sea. Ed. and introduction by Joseph McLaren. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002. Johnson, Georgia Douglas. The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson. Ed. and introduction by Judith L. Stephens. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Macgowan, Kenneth, ed. Famous American Plays of the 1920s. New York: Dell, 1959. Mackin, Dorothy, ed. Famous Victorian Melodramas. New York: Sterling. Maslon, Laurence. Kaufman & Co.: Broadway Comedies. New York: Library of America, 2004. Matlaw, Myron, ed. Nineteenth-Century American Plays. New York: Applause, 1967. Nelson, Richard, ed. Strictly Dishonorable and Other Lost American Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1986. O’Neill, Eugene. Complete Plays 1920–1931. New York: The Library of America, 1988. ˆˆˆ. Nine Plays. New York: The Modern Library, 1954. Perkins, Kathy A., and Roberta Uno, eds. Contemporary Plays by Women of Color. New York: Routledge, 1996. Perkins, Kathy A., and Judith L. Stephens, eds. Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Quinn, Arthur Hobson. Contemporary American Plays. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923. Torrence, Ridgely. Plays for a Negro Theatre. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1917. Treadwell, Sophie. Broadway’s Bravest Woman: Selected Writings of Sophie Treadwell. Ed. Jerry Dickey and Miriam López-Rodríguez. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006. West, Mae. Three Plays by Mae West. Ed. Lillian Schlissel. New York: Routledge, 1997.

4(%!42%02!#4)#% -!.!'%-%.4 4%#(./,/'9 !.$4%2-)./,/'9 Ackerman, Alan J., Jr. The Portable Theater: American Literature and the Nineteenth Century Stage. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Aronson, Arnold. Looking into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bay, Howard. Stage Design. New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1974. Bernheim, Alfred L. The Business of the Theatre: An Economic History of the American Theatre, 1750–1932. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1964 (originally published 1932). Bowman, Walter Parker, and Robert Hamilton Ball. Theatre Language: A Dictionary of Terms in English. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1961. Briggs, Jody. Encyclopedia of Stage Lighting. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Co., 2003. Carrington, Ken. Theatricana. Chicago: n.p., 1939. Downs, Harold, ed. Theatre and Stage. London: Sir I. Pittman & Sons, 1934. Fay, W. G. A Short Glossary of Theatrical Terms. London and New York: Samuel French, 1930. Granville, Wilfred. The Theater Dictionary: British and American Terms in the Drama, Opera, and Ballet. New York: Philosophical Library, 1952. Hall, Ben M. The Best Remaining Seats: The Golden Age of the Movie Palace. New York: Da Capo, 1988. Henderson, Mary C. Mielziner: Master of Modern Stage Design. New York: Back Stage Books, 2001. Izenour, George C. Theater Design. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977. Jakle, John A. City Lights: Illuminating the American Night. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Jones, Robert Edmond. The Dramatic Imagination. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1941. Larson, Orville K. Scene Design in the American Theatre from 1915 to 1960. Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 1989. Lewis, Robert M., ed. From Traveling Show to Vaudeville: Theatrical Spectacle in America, 1830–1910. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Lounsbury, Warren C. Theatre Backstage from A to Z. Revised ed. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1972. Mielziner, Jo. Design for the Theatre: A Memoir and a Portfolio. New York: Atheneum, 1965. Mobley, Jonnie Patrica. NTC’s Dictionary of Theatre and Drama Terms. Chicago: NTC Publishing Group, 1992. Morrison, Craig. Theaters. New York: W. W. Norton; Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 2006. Pavis, Patrice. Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis. Trans. Christine Shantz. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Pendleton, Ralph, ed. The Theatre of Robert Edmond Jones. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1977. Simonson, Lee. The Art of Scenic Design. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950.

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ˆˆˆ. The Stage Is Set. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1933. Sokalski, J. A. “The Madison Square Theatre: Stage Practice and Technology in Transition.” Theatre History Studies 21 (2001): 105–31. Trapido, Joel, Edward A. Langhans, James Brandon, and June V. Gibson, eds. An International Dictionary of Theatre Language. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985. White, R. Kerry. An Annotated Dictionary of Technical, Historical, and Stylistic Terms Related to Theatre and Drama: A Handbook of Dramaturgy. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1995.

!BOUTTHE!UTHORS

James Fisher is professor and head of the department of theater at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Before that, he was a professor at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, where he was named McLain-McTurnan-Arnold Research Scholar in 1999–2000 and 1987–1988 and LaFollette Lecturer in 1992–1993. In 2007, Jim was awarded the Betty Jean Jones Award for Excellence in the Teaching of American Theatre from the American Theatre and Drama Society. In 1997, he was awarded the Indiana Theater Person of the Year Award for 1996 by the Indiana Theater Association. He joined the Wabash College faculty in 1978 and served as department chair for 13 years. Jim received a BA in drama and speech from Monmouth College (New Jersey) in 1973 and an MFA in acting/directing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1976. He is the author of several books, including The Theater of Tony Kushner: Living Past Hope (New York: Routledge, 2001), bio-bibliographies of Al Jolson (1994), Spencer Tracy (1994), and Eddie Cantor (1997) for Greenwood (Westport, Conn.), and The Theater of Yesterday and Tomorrow: Commedia dell’arte on the Modern Stage (Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen, 1992). Jim has edited Tony Kushner: New Essays on the Art and Politics of the Plays (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006) and the forthcoming “We Will Be Citizens”: Gay and Lesbian Drama: New Essays (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008), as well as six volumes of The Puppetry Yearbook. Jim served as book review editor for the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism for 15 years and currently edits book reviews for Broadside, the publication of the Theater Library Association. He has published on theatre and film in a wide variety of publications. Also a stage director and actor, Jim is the author of two plays, The Bogus Bride, which was produced off-Broadway in 2000, and The Braggart Soldier, a free adaptation of Plautus’s Miles Gloriosus. He is also at work on 569

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

The Historical Dictionary of the American Theater: Contemporary, as a companion to the modernism volume. Felicia Hardison Londré is curators’ professor of theatre at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where she has taught theatre history since 1978, originally specializing in French, Spanish, and Russian/Soviet theatre of the 19th and 20th centuries, but recently focusing more on turn-of-the-century American theatre. From 1978 to 2000, she served as dramaturg for Missouri Repertory Theatre under the successive artistic directorships of Dr. Patricia McIlrath and George Keathley. She is honorary cofounder of the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival and dramaturg for the Nebraska Shakespeare Festival. Felicia earned her BA (High Honors) in French at the University of Montana, then spent a year at the Université de Caen on a Fulbright study grant. After completing her MA in Romance Languages at the University of Washington, Seattle, she switched over to theatre for her PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She taught at the University of Wisconsin-Rock County, the University of Texas at Dallas, and has held visiting professorships at Hosei University in Tokyo and at Marquette University in Milwaukee. She has given her lecture on the Shakespeare authorship question in London, Tokyo, Beijing, and on a lecture tour of Hungary, and she was called to Houston in 2004 as an expert witness for Edward DeVere in a suit against William Shakspere. She gave invited lectures on Tennessee Williams at three French universities, including the Sorbonne in Paris. In 2005, she was the Geske lecturer at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Books by Felicia Londré include The Enchanted Years of the Stage: Kansas City at the Crossroads of American Theater, 1870–1930 (2007), Words at Play: Creative Writing and Dramaturgy (2005), The History of North American Theater: The United States, Canada, and Mexico from Pre-Colombian Times to the Present (with Daniel J. Watermeier, 1998), Love’s Labour’s Lost: Critical Essays (1997), The History of World Theater: From the English Restoration to the Present (1991), and Federico García Lorca (1984). In 2001, she received ATHE’s award for Outstanding Teacher of Theatre in Higher Education, and in 2006, her university’s Inspirational UMKC Faculty Award. She was given a University of Montana Distinguished Alumna Award in 1998, inducted as a Fellow of the American Theatre at the Kennedy Center in 1999, and elected to the National Theatre Conference in 2001.