III.

Nationhood: The 1800s

American plays, while still a minority, began to appear in the theater repertory in the 19th century. Although American plays were still styled after British models, their subject matter came to be based on specifically American incidents or themes. In the United States as in Britain, many plays reflected the influence of romanticism, a European literary and artistic movement. Melodrama, with its outpourings of emotion, was the most prevalent dramatic form in the 19th century. Gothic melodramas, which emphasized horror, mystery, and the supernatural, and melodramas with tragic endings appeared regularly in American theaters from the 1790s on—in many cases adapted or translated from German, French, and British plays.

A.

American Themes

The first prolific writer of melodramas was William Dunlap, who also translated several German plays for production in the United States. Dunlap adapted Revolutionary War history in André (1798), a fictionalized account of the final days of British spy Major John André. In 1803 Dunlap reshaped the play as a musical, Glory of Columbia, in which George Washington is elevated to divine status. It was an early example of spectacle dominating dramatic content. Dunlap took spectacle even further in A Trip to Niagara (1828) by making the play’s purpose the duplication of scenic wonders that the audience would recognize, such as Niagara Falls.

Replication of local color, as in A Trip to Niagara, became the norm in 19th-century American melodrama and encompassed details of scenery, dialects, and gestures representative of specific locations; contemporary slang; and historical incidents. An early example is She Would Be a Soldier (1819) by Mordecai Noah. The play depicts the military spectacle of the War of 1812 between the United States and Britain and features a heroine who disguises herself as a soldier to help the American cause and join the man she loves.

Although American drama of the 19th century usually followed European models, its subject matter often came from specifically American situations. Superstition (1824), a romantic tragedy by James Nelson Barker, for example, was set in New England of 1675. It discussed conflicts between Native Americans and white settlers, British interference in local affairs, Puritan xenophobia (fear and dislike of foreigners), and the idea of witchcraft. Superstition, in which the hero is tried and executed for witchcraft, was the first of many American plays to explore themes of isolationism, bigotry, and intolerance.

Barker’s The Indian Princess (1808) was the first professionally produced play to explore Native American characters and themes. It told the story of Pocahontas, a Native American who married an English colonist. A vogue for so-called Indian plays began in the 1820s and continued through the 1840s. While the Pocahontas story was popular in these plays, the most famous such drama was Metamora, or The Last of the Wampanoags (1829) by John Augustus Stone. It was written as a vehicle for American actor Edwin Forrest, who began in 1828 to offer annual awards for new plays on American themes and gave Metamora first prize. This melodrama was typical of most Indian plays in its setting in an earlier period of frontier history (the 1670s) and its characterization of the Native American hero. Metamora was viewed as natural but uncivilized—that is, living in harmony with nature but unfamiliar with what European settlers saw as civilized ways. The play put forth sentiments in harmony with white values and ended with Metamora’s inevitable death as the representative of a displaced race that cannot survive with the white man. By midcentury the waning importance of Indian plays was signaled by works that lampooned them. Irish-born playwright John Brougham, for example, wrote Metamora, or the Last of the Pollywogs (1847), a musical burlesque that made fun of the idealized and earnest original.

Also in the 1820s an African American acting troupe called the African Theatre was organized in New York City by dramatist William Henry Brown. The troupe produced plays by Shakespeare as well as African American plays, including The Drama of King Shotaway (1823) written by Brown. Although Indian plays of the 1820s and 1830s written by whites preached tolerance and understanding for Native Americans, white toughs chased Brown’s company off the stage, and no copies survive of the African American plays it produced.

American romantic plays took various forms. But without the American slant in subject matter, it would be difficult to distinguish these plays from British melodrama and romantic tragedy. What may be the best American play of the time, Francesca da Rimini (1855), is a romantic verse tragedy by George Henry Boker about an Italian noblewoman of the 14th century. It presents a villainous fool, a forbidden love affair, and a grotesque, semi-villainous hunchback in the role of the protagonist. However, nothing in the play’s characters and setting or its imitation of Shakespearean style marks the play as American.

B.

Forms of Melodrama

Melodrama was the most pervasive dramatic genre of the 19th century. Melodramas were typically overflowing with emotion, set in mysterious locations, and peopled with stereotypical characters: heartless villains, heroines in distress, and strong heroes who faced almost insurmountable odds in rescuing those heroines.

Frontier melodrama enthralled audiences in the first half of the 19th century. Nick of the Woods (1838) by Louisa Medina capitalized on the spectacle, romance, and danger of the frontier—for example, when the title character escapes his pursuers by plunging over a waterfall in a burning canoe. Playwrights repeatedly glorified backwoodsmen and moved toward making Native American characters into villains. One of the most successful frontier melodramas, Davy Crockett (1872) by Frank Murdoch, featured the so-called natural gentleman. This character had developed from an earlier view of the Native American but was now white and considered a gentleman, despite his life outside society and his uncouth ways.

Another form of melodrama was the temperance play, which illustrated the evils of alcohol and supported a ban on its sale. An example is The Drunkard; or, The Fallen Saved (1844) by W. H. Smith. Temperance plays had American locations and were staged frequently from the 1830s until the Civil War (1861-1865), though they continued to be produced until passage in 1917 of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcohol. Most of these plays included scenes of the acute stages of alcoholism; featured protagonists who are lured into alcoholism by villains; and showed the victims losing everything until the play’s climax, when they convert to abstinence and regain their life and family. Because the formulas of the plays accommodated moral lessons important to social crusaders and reformers of the period, temperance plays attracted audiences formerly opposed to the theater.

Melodramatic comedy appeared frequently in the 1800s, while comedies of manners, so popular in the previous century, were rare. A notable exception and one of the most successful and well-written plays of the 19th century was Fashion (1845) by Anna Cora Mowatt. Yet what most tellingly distinguished Fashion from earlier American comedies, such as The Contrast, was its melodramatic subplot and its heroine in distress. In the play, a newly wealthy woman attempts to marry her unwitting daughter to a morally corrupt French count. While satirizing Americans who imitate European manners, it also prescribed a cure for this so-called disease of imitation through extended exposure to a rural environment. Like frontier melodramas, the play urged Americans to resist British cultural models.

Racial, social, and economic tensions in American society before the Civil War period found a way into popular drama, most successfully in stage adaptations of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Sentimental versions of the novel filled so many professional stages that this material was performed more often than any other American play of the time. An 1852 adaptation by George Aiken was the most enduring version. Stage adaptations of novels proliferated from the 1850s until motion pictures took over the tradition in the 20th century. Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859), a stage adaptation of the novel The Quadroon (1856) by Mayne Reid, is the most well-crafted melodrama on the subject of slavery and racism in the mid-19th century. It combines local color from Louisiana, ethnic mixes, spectacle in the form of a burning steamboat, and a tragic heroine whose ancestry (a black great-grandparent) prevents her from marrying the man she loves.

C.

A Shift Toward Realism

Drama after the Civil War was marked by greater realism. Playwrights created plays in three-dimensional settings with characters speaking authentic-sounding dialogue. Beginning in the late 1870s European theater reached profound levels of psychological realism, prompted by the work of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. While melodramatic plots still prevailed in late-19th-century American theater, several American playwrights began to move in the direction of Ibsen. Shenandoah (1888) by Bronson Howard told the story of two friends who attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point together, fought on opposite sides in the Civil War, and loved the other’s sister. Despite the plot complications, the play revisited the war with realistic detail and found enormous popularity with audiences because of its combination of melodramatic tension and comic romance. A master of melodrama in a realistic style was actor and playwright William Gillette, who excited audiences with his own Civil War thrillers. In Secret Service (1896), for example, Gillette played a Northern spy working in Virginia.

Other late-19th-century playwrights whose works marked the gradual move toward realism included Steele Mackaye and William Dean Howells. In Hazel Kirke (1880) by Mackaye, the title character defies her father by marrying the man she loves, rather than the man he has chosen for her. A melodrama without a villain, the play was also notable for its more natural dialogue. Howells, best known as a novelist and critic, advocated realism in literature generally. Many of his short comic plays, such as The Mouse Trap (1889), were set in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood, focused on a single incident involving a married couple, and incorporated believable dialogue.

Howells also championed the work of other writers, including actor and playwright James Herne, whose work came closest to Ibsen’s. However, Herne’s Margaret Fleming (1890) upset too many American audiences with its harsh, raw treatment of infidelity and marital distress, and its power was recognized only by later generations. Herne had more success with gentler realism in such plays as Shore Acres (1892), in which two brothers finally gain an understanding of one another in old age.