Curiosities of the American Stage Part 3

If an American character was drawn at all, he was too apt to be a Solon Shingle or a Mose; if an American play was written at all, its scenes were laid on _Sandy Bars_, or in the false and unhealthful atmosphere of _Saratoga_ or _Long Branch_. While London managers presented _Orange Blossoms_ and _Two Roses_, the managers of New York and Boston set _Diamonds_ and _Pearls_. The English flowers were fresh and fragrant; the American jewels, although they had a certain sparkle, were too often paste. The exotics flourished and bloomed on our soil for a time, it is true; but if they had been native buds they would have withered in a week, or else, like so many other indigenous plants, have been left to waste their sweetness in the pigeon-holes of managers' desks. So strong was this unnatural prejudice against the production of an American picture of American home-life upon the American stage, that in one of the brightest American comedies ever taken from the French Mr. Hurlburt was forced to go abroad with his characters, and to place his _Americans in Paris_.

All this is not so true of the stage of to-day as it was at the beginning of the second century of our national drama. Scores of native writers, during the past decade or two, have presented American plays which have been clean and clever, even if they have not yet become cla.s.sic. But it is a striking fact that the first three original "society plays" which were in any way successful upon the American stage were from the pens of women--Mrs. Mowatt's _Fashion_, Mrs. Bateman's _Self_, and Miss Heron's _The Belle of the Season_--and that since their production the name of a woman has very rarely appeared upon the bills as the author of a play.

During the ten years which followed the first performance of _Fashion_ it had a few rivals--comedies and dramas, satirical or otherwise--which treated, or pretended to treat, of that which a.s.serts itself to be "the higher stratum of American society." Among the longer lived of these were _Extremes_, a local New York play, which ran for three weeks at the Broadway Theatre in 1850; a dramatization of Mr. Curtis's _Potiphar Papers_, brought out at Burton's Theatre in 1854, in which Charles Fisher made a great hit as Creamcheese; and Mr. De Walden's _Upper Ten and Lower Twenty_, also at Burton's, in 1854, in which Mr. Burton himself, as Christopher Crookpath, a serious part, was a genuine surprise to his audience, and created a profound impression. _Extremes_, by a Baltimore gentleman, was never repeated here; the version of Mr. Curtis's work--happily called _Our Best Society_--was merely an adaptation; Mr. De Walden was not a native writer; and only one of these productions, and that one the least successful, was an original American play.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BRANDER MATTHEWS.]

"_Self_, an original New York comedy in three acts," by Mrs. H. L.

Bateman, was seen for the first time in New York at Mr. Burton's Chambers Street house on the 27th of October, 1856. The plot was slight, and the play was long and a trifle dull. It was the story of a young girl (Mrs. E.

L. Davenport) with a few thousands of dollars of her own, which both of her parents were determined to possess. She gave the money to her father (Charles Fisher); the mother (Mrs. Amelia Parker) instigated the son (A.

Morton) to forge a check for the amount; the forgery was discovered; the girl, to save her mother and her brother, confessed the crime which she did not commit, and was turned out-of-doors in ignominy and disgrace, Mr.

Burton, the traditional stage uncle, rescuing and righting her in the end.

All of this was not new, was not cheerful, and, it is to be hoped, was not "society"; but it was received with great praise, and it took its place in popular favor by the side of Mrs. Mowatt's comedy. _Self_ was frequently repeated in New York, notably at Wallack's Theatre, now the Star, in the Summer of 1869, when it introduced John E. Owens as Unit, and where it ran for three weeks, Miss Effie Germon playing the heroine, and playing it well. Mr. Owens made of Unit what is called a "star part." It gave him an opportunity for the display of his peculiar comedy powers, and he presented it with a variety and force of expression which was not always to be seen in his acting. In it he appealed more to the hearts of his audiences than in Solon Shingle; and, next to his Caleb Plummer, his Unit is the pleasantest and most perfect picture he has left in the memory of his friends.

Mrs. Bateman was the daughter of Joseph Cowell, a well-known theatrical manager in the South and West, who came to this country from England in 1821, and whose _Thirty Years Among the Players_ is known to all collectors of dramatic books. She went upon the stage at New Orleans in 1837 or 1838, but did not long remain an actress. She was successful as a manager; and she was the author of _Geraldine_, a tragedy, and of a dramatization of Longfellow's _Evangeline_. For many years she was known only as the mother of the Bateman Children.

At Winter Garden, on the evening of March 12, 1862, Miss Matilda Heron produced for the first time _The Belle of the Season_, advertised as "a new and original home play," and as written by Miss Heron herself. Its scenes were laid in the parks of Niagara and in Fifth Avenue drawing-rooms, but it suggested too many familiar plays of _The Lady of Lyons_ school to be altogether free from the suspicion of imitation. That it came from Miss Heron's own brain and pen, however, there could be little doubt; it had, as a literary effort, many of the faults and virtues and strong characteristics so curiously blended in the acting of its author. The production, as a whole, was what is termed "emotional," the part of the heroine being peculiarly so. Unquestionably Miss Heron wrote it to fit herself, and unquestionably it did not fit her so well as did Camille, upon which so much of her fame as an actress now rests. She had all of an author's fondness for the part and for the play. She considered both her greatest works. She produced the comedy many times in many cities of the Union, not always to the benefit of her purse or of her professional reputation, and when urged by her business manager to withdraw it altogether, she is said to have replied, with characteristic determination, that _The Belle of the Season_ she wanted to play, _The Belle of the Season_ she would play, and that when she died she wished nothing placed over her grave but the epitaph, "Here lies _The Belle of the Season_!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: BRONSON HOWARD.]

Matilda Heron was one of the most remarkable actresses our stage has ever produced. With an intensity and pa.s.sion in her performances which, at times, were magnificent and carried everything before them, she displayed professional shortcomings and infirmities which were often glaring and unpardonable; but she made and held, by the force of her own genius--and genius she certainly possessed--a position which few modern actresses have ever reached. Her personal faults were of the head rather than of the heart, and may they now rest lightly on her!

Miss Heron's immediate successors as native playwrights of society dramas were Miss Olive Logan, with _Surf; or, Summer Scenes at Long Branch_, at Daly's Theatre in 1870; Bronson Howard, with _Saratoga_ in 1870-71, with _Diamonds_ in 1873, and with _Moorcroft_ in 1874; James Steele Mackaye, with _Marriage_ in 1873; and Andrew C. Wheeler, with _Twins_, and Mr.

Marsden, with _Clouds_, in 1876.

Anything like an enumeration of the original American society plays written and produced here during the last ten or fifteen years is not possible within the limits of a single chapter. They have been very many, and of all degrees of merit, the best and most creditable perhaps being _Young Mrs. Winthrop_, _Old Love Letters_, _A Gold Mine_, _Esmeralda_, _Conscience_, and _The Charity Ball_; but how long these are to live, and how they are to be regarded by the next generation--if the next generation has ever a chance to regard them at all--of course remains to be seen. _Fashion_, the first of the lot, survives only in its printed form, and the sh.e.l.l of the locust gives but a faint dry rattle, while the locust itself is as much alive as when _The School for Scandal_ was first seen in America over a century ago. Have we a Sheridan among us? or is he still twenty years away?

ACT II.

THE AMERICAN STAGE NEGRO.

THE AMERICAN STAGE NEGRO.

_Bottom_: "I have a reasonable good ear in music: let's have the tongs and the bones."--_Midsummer Night's Dream_, Act iv. Sc. 1.

Shakspere's Moor of Venice was one of the earliest of the stage negroes, as he is one of the best. If the _Account of the Revels_ be not a forgery, he appeared before the court of the first English James in 1604, and he certainly was seen at the Globe Theatre, on the Bankside, on the 30th of April, 1610. Oth.e.l.lo is hardly the typical African of the modern drama, although Roderigo speaks of him as having thick lips, and notwithstanding the fact that he himself is made to regret, in the third act of the tragedy, that he is "black, and has not those soft parts of conversation that chamberers have." Shakspere unquestionably believed that the Moors were negroes; and as he made Verges and Dogberry c.o.c.kney watchmen, and altered history, geography, and chronology to suit himself and the requirements of the stage, so he meant to invest his Moorish hero with all of the personal attributes, as well as with all of the moral characteristics, of the negroes as they were known to Englishmen in Shakspere's day.

_Oth.e.l.lo_ was followed, in 1696, by _Oroonoko_, a tragedy in five acts, by Thomas Southerne. The real Oroonoko was an African prince stolen from his native kingdom of Angola during the reign of Charles the Second, and sold as a slave in an English settlement in the West Indies. Aphra Behn saw and became intimate with him at Surinam, when her father was Lieutenant-General of the islands, and made him the hero of the tale upon which the dramatist based his once famous play. With the more humble slaves by whom he was surrounded, the stage Oroonoko spoke in the stilted blank-verse of the dramatic literature of that period, and without any of the accent or phraseology of the original West Indian blacks. Mr. Pope was the creator of Oroonoko; and the part was a favorite one of the elder Kean in England and of the elder Booth in this country. It has not been seen upon either stage in many years. Oroonoko, of course, had a black skin and woolly hair. When Jack Bannister, who began his career as a tragic actor, said to Garrick that he proposed to attempt the hero of Southerne's drama, he was told by the great little man that, in view of his extraordinarily thin person, he would "look as much like the character as a chimney-sweep in consumption!" It was to Bannister, on this same occasion, that Garrick uttered the well-known aphorism, "Comedy is a very serious thing!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHARLES DIBDIN AS MUNGO.]

Mungo was a stage negro of a very different stamp, and the first of his race. He figured in _The Padlock_, a comic opera, words by Isaac Bickerstaffe, music by Charles Dibdin, first presented at Drury Lane in 1768. Mungo was the slave of Don Diego, a West Indian planter. It was written for and at the suggestion of John Moody, who had been in Barbadoes, where he had studied the dialect and the manners of the blacks.

He never played the part, however, which was originally a.s.sumed by Dibdin himself. Mungo sang:

"Dear heart, what a terrible life I am led!

A dog has a better that's sheltered and fed.

Night and day 'tis the same; My pain is deir game; Me wish to de Lord me was dead!

Whate'er's to be done Poor black must run.

Mungo here, Mungo dere, Mungo everywhere; Above and below, Sirrah, come, sirrah, go; Do so, and do so.

Oh! oh!

Me wish to de Lord me was dead!"

This is a style of ballad which has been very popular with Mungo's descendants ever since. It may be added that Mungo got drunk in the second act, and was very profane throughout.

The great and original Mungo in America was Lewis Hallam, the younger, who first played the part in New York, and for his own benefit, on the 29th of May, 1769, at the theatre in John Street. Dunlap says, "In _The Padlock_ Mr. Hallam was unrivalled to his death, giving Mungo with a truth derived from the study of the negro slave character which Dibdin, the writer, could not have conceived." Mungo is never seen in the present time. Ira Aldridge, the negro tragedian, played Oth.e.l.lo and Mungo occasionally on the same night in his natural skin; but Mungo may be said to have virtually died with Hallam, and to have gone to meet Oroonoko in that land of total oblivion to which Oth.e.l.lo is destined to be a stranger for many years to come.

[Ill.u.s.tration: IRA ALDRIDGE AS OTh.e.l.lO.]

In 1781 a pantomime ent.i.tled _Robinson Crusoe_ was presented at Drury Lane. It was believed by the editor of the _Biographia Dramatica_ to have been "contrived by Mr. Sheridan, whose powers, if it really be his performance, do not seem adapted to the production of such kind of entertainments. The scenery, by Loutherbourg, has a very pleasing effect, but, considered in every other light, it is a truly insipid exhibition."

Friday, in coffee-colored tights and blackened face, was naturally a prominent figure. The pantomime was produced at the Theatre Royal, Bath, during the next year, when Mr. Henry Siddons appeared as one of the savages. This gentleman, who played Oth.e.l.lo on the same boards a few seasons later, is only remembered now as having given his name to the greatest actress who ever spoke the English tongue. This same _Robinson Crusoe and Harlequin Friday_ was seen at the John Street Theatre, New York, on the 11th of January, 1786; while at the Park Theatre on the 11th of September, 1817, Mr. Bancker played Friday in _The Bold Buccaneers; or, The Discovery of Robinson Crusoe_, a melodrama which was very popular in its day.

Charles C. Moreau, of New York, possesses a very curious and almost unique bill of "The African Company," at "The Theatre in Mercer Street, in the rear of the 1 Mile Stone, Broadway." _Tom and Jerry_ was presented by a number of gentlemen and ladies entirely unknown to dramatic fame, and the performance concluded with the pantomime of _Obi: or, Three Finger'd Jack_. Unfortunately the bill is not dated. Mr. Ireland believes this to have been a company of negro amateurs who played in New York about 1820 or 1821, but who have left no other mark upon the history of the stage; and the historians know nothing of the "theatre" they occupied. Broadway at Prince Street is one mile from the City Hall, although the stone recording this fact has long since disappeared.

A number of stage negroes will be remembered by habitual theatre-goers, and students of the drama--two very different things, by-the-way, for the man who sees plays rarely reads them, and _vice versa_: Zeke, in Mrs.

Mowatt's _Fashion_; Pete, in _The Octoroon_; Uncle Tom; Topsy, whom Charles Reade called "idiopathic"; a cleverly conceived character in Bronson Howard's _Moorcraft_; and the delightful band of "Full Moons," led for many seasons by "Johnny" Wild at Harrigan and Hart's Theatre, who were so absolutely true to the life of Thompson Street and South Fifth Avenue.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

In the absence of anything like a complete and satisfactory history of negro minstrelsy, it is not possible to discover its genesis, although it is the only branch of the dramatic art, if properly it can claim to be an art at all, which has had its origin in this country, while the melody it has inspired is certainly our only approach to a national music. Scattered throughout the theatrical literature of the early part of the century are to be found many different accounts of the rise and progress of the African on the stage, each author having his own particular "father of negro song." Charles White, an old Ethiopian comedian and manager, gives the credit to Gottlieb Graupner, who appeared in Boston in 1799, basing his statement upon a copy of Russell's _Boston Gazette_ of the 30th of December of that year, which contains an advertis.e.m.e.nt of a performance to be given on the date of publication at the Federal Street Theatre. At the end of the second act of _Oroonoko_, according to Mr. White, Mr.

Graupner, in character, sang "The Gay Negro Boy," accompanying the air with the banjo; and although the house was draped in mourning for General Washington, such was the enthusiasm of the audience that the performer had to bring his little bench from the wings again and again to sing his song.

W. W. Clapp, Jr., in his _History of the Boston Stage_, says that the news of the death of Washington was received in that city on the 24th of December, and that the theatre remained "closed for a week;" and was reopened with "A Monody," in which "Mrs. Barrett, in the character of the Genius of America, appeared weeping over the Tomb of her Beloved Hero"; but there is no mention, then or later, of Mr. Graupner or of "The Gay Negro Boy."

Mr. White says further that "the next popular negro song was 'The Battle of Plattsburg,' sung by an actor vulgarly known as 'Pig-Pie Herbert,' at a theatre in Albany, in 1815"; but H. D. Stone, in a volume called _The Drama_, published in Albany in 1873, credits "a member of the theatrical company of the name of Hop Robinson" as the singer of the song; while "Sol" Smith, an eye-witness of this performance, gives still another and very different account of it. According to Smith's _Autobiography_ published by Messrs. Harper and Brothers in 1868, Andrew Jackson Allen produced at the Green Street Theatre in Albany, in 1815, a drama called _The Battle of Lake Champlain_, the action taking place on real ships floating in real water. "In this piece," says Smith, "Allen played the character of a negro, and sang a song of many verses (being the first negro song, I verily believe, ever heard on the American stage)." Two verses of this ballad, quoted by Smith "from memory," will give a very fair idea of its claims to popularity:

"Backside Albany stan' Lake Champlain-- Little pond half full of water; Plat-te-burg dar too, close 'pon de main: Town small; he grow big, dough, herea'ter.

"On Lake Champlain Uncle Sam set he boat, An' Ma.s.sa Macdonough he sail 'em; While General Macomb make Plat-te-burg he home, Wid de army whose courage nebber fail 'em."

Andrew Allen was a very quaint character, and he deserves a paragraph to himself. Born in the city of New York in 1776, he appeared, according to his own statement, as a page in _Romeo and Juliet_ at the theatre in John Street in 1786, on the strength of which, as the oldest living actor, he a.s.sumed for years before his death the t.i.tle of "Father of the American Stage." He was more famous as a cook than as a player, however, and he is the subject of innumerable theatrical anecdotes, none of which are greatly to his credit. He was called "Dummy Allen" because he was very deaf and exceedingly loquacious; he adored the hero of New Orleans, whose name he appropriated when Jackson was elected President of the United States; and he was devoted to Edwin Forrest, whose costumer, dresser, and personal slave he was for many years. He invented and patented a silver leather much used in the decoration of stage dresses; and he kept a restaurant in Dean Street, Albany, and later a similar establishment near the Bowery Theatre, New York, being a very familiar figure in the streets of both cities. Mr. Phelps, in his _Players of a Century_ (Albany, New York, 1880), describes him in his later years as tall and erect in person, with firmly compressed features, an eye like a hawk's, nose slightly Romanesque, and hair mottled gray. He wore a fuzzy white hat, a coat of blue with bright bra.s.s b.u.t.tons, and carried a k.n.o.bby cane. He spoke in a sharp, decisive manner, often giving wrong answers, and invariably mistaking the drift of the person with whom he was conversing. He died in New York in 1853, and Mr. Phelps preserves the inscription upon his monument at Cypress Hills Cemetery, which was evidently his own composition: "From his cradle he was a scholar; exceedingly wise, fair-spoken, and persuading; lofty and sour to them that loved him not, but to those men that sought him sweet as summer."

[Ill.u.s.tration: ANDREW JACKSON ALLEN.]

Apropos of Allen's a.s.sociation with Edwin Forrest, and of Smith's a.s.sertion that Allen sang the first negro song ever sung on the American stage, it may not be out of place here to quote W. R. Alger's _Life of Forrest_. Speaking of Forrest's early and checkered experiences as a strolling player in the far West, Mr. Alger says that perhaps the most surprising fact connected with this portion of his career is "that he was the first actor who ever represented on the stage the Southern plantation negro with all his peculiarities of dress, gait, accent, dialect, and manner." In 1823, at the Globe Theatre, Cincinnati, Ohio, under the management of "Sol" Smith, Forrest did play a negro in a farce by Smith, called _The Tailor in Distress_, singing and dancing, and winning the compliment from a veritable black in his audience that he was "n.i.g.g.e.r all ober!" Lawrence Barrett, in his _Life of Forrest_, quotes the bill of this evening, which shows Forrest as a modern dandy in the first play, as Cuffee, a Kentucky negro, in the second, and as Sancho Panza in the pantomime of _Don Quixote_, which closed the evening's entertainment.

Forrest was by no means the only eminent American actor who hid his light behind a black mask. "Sol" Smith himself relates how he became a supernumerary at the Green Street Theatre, in Albany, in his fourteenth year, playing one of the blood-thirsty a.s.sociates of _Three-fingered Jack_ with a preternaturally s.m.u.tty face, which he forgot to wash one eventful night, to the astonishment of his own family, who forced him to retire for a time to private life.

At Vauxhall Garden, in the Bowery, a little south of and nearly opposite the site of Cooper Inst.i.tute, a young lad named Bernard Flaherty, born in Cork, Ireland, is said to have sung negro songs and to have danced negro dances in 1838 to help support a widowed mother, who lived to see him carried to an honored grave in 1876, mourned by the theatre-going population of the whole country. In 1840, as Barney Williams, he made a palpable hit in the character of Pat Rooney, in _The Omnibus_, at the Franklin Theatre, New York. He certainly played "darky parts," such as they were, for a number of years before and after that date; and he is perhaps the one man upon the American stage with whom anything like negro minstrelsy will never be a.s.sociated, not so much because of his high rank in his profession as on account of the Hibernian style of his later-day performances, and of the strong accent which always clung to him, and which suggested his native city rather than the cork he used to burn to color his face.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BARNEY WILLIAMS IN DANDY JIM.]

In 1850, when Edwin Booth was seventeen, and a year after his _debut_ as Tressel at the Boston Museum, he gave an entertainment with John S.

Clarke, a youth of the same age, at the court-house in Belair, Maryland.