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 asserts 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.
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!”
BRONSON HOWARD.