Playwrights on playmaking

by Brander Matthews

III

The abandonment of the permanent stock-companies and the practice of engagements only for the run of the piece, was brought about in Great Britain by economic pressure due in part to geographic conditions. And it was brought about in the United States almost simultaneously by a similar economic pressure due to widely different geographic conditions. The organization of the American theater prior to 1870 was very much what the organization of the British theater had been a century earlier. In every town of any importance there was at least one theater, occasionally owned by the manager but more generally leased by him. It was his private enterprize; he engaged the actors and the actresses, who were likely to remain with him season after season; he accumulated his own scenery, his own costumes and his own properties; he stood ready always and at forty-eight hours’ notice to put up ‘Hamlet’ or the ‘School for Scandal,’ the ‘Lady of Lyons’ or ‘Camille,’ ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ or ‘Ten Nights in a Bar-room,’ ‘Mazeppa’ or the ‘Naiad Queen,’ without invoking any outside assistance.

If wandering stars came along, Forrest or Booth, “Jim Crow” Rice or Lotta, they were supported by his company clothed from his wardrobe, with properties from his own storehouse and with the primitive stock-scenery which had been seen in a hundred other plays. The manners and customs of those distant days are preserved for us in the autobiographies of Anna Cora Mowatt, of Joseph Jefferson, and of Clara Morris. More often than not, the manager was himself an actor, Burton or Wallack appearing now and again on his own stage; and his wife was not infrequently the leading lady. Sometimes the manager was a playwright, William Dunlap or Augustin Daly; and then he found his profit in presenting his own pieces. Sometimes he had been recruited from some other calling, R. M. Field or A. M. Palmer; but always was he devoted to the drama, thoroughly familiar with the traditions of the stage, and thoroughly enjoying his association with the theater. He was a local institution; and sometimes, Caldwell in New Orleans or Rice in Chicago, he was one of the leading citizens of the town.

When a popular minstrel-company wanted the theater for a week or two, the manager was sometimes obliging enough to send his company to play in a smaller city if its “opera-house” chanced to be unoccupied. He did this more willingly when a glittering spectacle, the ‘Black Crook’ or the ‘Twelve Temptations’ asked him to turn out; but this complaisance hastened his downfall, since his well-worn scenery had a pallid look after the effulgent splendor of the interloper. Then, after a while, one and another of the more prominent stars (Joseph Jefferson, first of all, as he confesses in his autobiography), dissatisfied with the inadequacy of the mounting of their plays and disgusted by the carelessness and incompetence with which they were only too often supported by the stock-actors, began to engage companies of their own, with all the performers specially chosen for the characters they were to impersonate; they arranged to carry with them the special scenery required by the plays they intended to present that season. Soon there were so many of these, that at least one theater in each of the larger cities gave up its own company and relied exclusively upon these combinations, as the travelling companies were then called.

For a few years the managers of the stock-company houses made a valiant fight; but in the end they had to retire from the field, defeated. It had been a severe blow to them, when they were deprived of the potent attraction of the stars. Without these stars, and in fact in opposition to them, the performances given by the stock-companies were found to be inferior. The local scenery, the local costumes and the local properties were discovered to be mere make-shifts, unworthy at their best, and often worse than unworthy, especially when they were compared with the stricter propriety of the scenic equipment provided for the elaborate productions sent out from New York. The local offerings appeared to be provincial, whereas those which were brought from afar had on them the stamp of metropolitan approval.

So it was that sooner or later the managers of stock-companies had to withdraw from a lost battle. Some of them kept their theaters and sank to the humble position of janitors. Some moved to New York and became producers on their own account and managers of travelling companies. Some retired to obscurity; and some died in time to escape bankruptcy. Whether the vanquishing of the local stock-companies by the travelling companies was advantageous or not, it was inevitable since it was the result of inexorable economic conditions, in conjunction with equally inexorable geographic conditions. It was a swift and startling change in the methods of conducting the business of the theater, a change brought about by forces wholly beyond the control of those engaged in that business.

Before the end of the nineteenth century the organization of the theater in the United States became what it is now. In New York, in all the larger cities and in most of the smaller, the playhouses are controlled by one or the other of the two rival syndicates. The resident managers of these playhouses are scarcely more than caretakers, since they can exercise little or no choice as to the attractions which play engagements in their theaters. The producing managers choose plays, engage actors and are responsible for all the accessories. Most of these producing managers are in partnership with one or the other of the syndicates, because these syndicates control all the important theaters in all the important towns. Thus it is that the artistic guidance of the drama is in the hands of the producing managers, and the financial government is in the hands of the syndicates.

Many of the producing managers are akin in type to the managers of the resident stock-companies, that is to say, they are sometimes actors, sometimes playwrights and sometimes men drawn from other callings by the lure of the theater. Most of the members of the syndicates are men of affairs, who have gone into the theater-business as they would go into any other business, mainly for their own profit; and their interest in the drama as an art is intermittent, whereas their interest in the theater as a business is incessant. Their attitude and their actions have called for sharply hostile criticism, summed up in the accusation that they have commercialized the theater. Now, all students of stage-history know that there has always been a commercial side to the theater, excepting in ancient Greece and in the Middle Ages, when the drama was more or less religious in its associations. In modern times we have ascertained that the drama cannot flourish as an art unless the theater prospers as a business. No art can survive unless it affords a fairly satisfactory living to those who devote themselves to it; and as the appeal of the drama is to the people as a whole it can never be independent of the takings at the door. Even in the few subsidized theaters of Europe, national or municipal, the grant in aid made by the government is never enough to support the enterprize.