Theater

The theater was an important cultural institution in cities, towns, and frontier settlements throughout the 19th century. Performances, plays, actors, and the theaters themselves were all elements of the vibrant public and participatory culture that existed in the United States. At a time when politics was overtly theatrical, the theater was often a venue for political acts. Nowhere was this fact demonstrated more dramatically than in the ASSASSINATION OF Abraham Lincoln in 1865. A lifelong fan of the theater, Lincoln was attending a play at Ford’s Theatre in WASHINGTON, D. C., when he was shot and killed by the famously handsome and talented actor JOHN WiLKES BOOTH of Maryland.

From the 1790s to the 1870s the theater offered a fairly democratic setting for audiences of all classes and economic groups to enjoy plays, opera, dancing, minstrel shows, and magicians, sometimes all appearing together on the same stage. Whether attending a play in the impressive St. Charles Theater in New Orleans, New York City’s vast Bowery Theater, or one of the many more modest establishments in Louisville, Cincinnati, Denver, Chicago, or Natchez, the American patron of the arts could generally expect performances of high quality received by an enthusiastic audience.

Most theaters were divided into separate sections to address the needs of different social classes. The boxes (in front) were reserved for the upper class, the pit for the middle class, the gallery for the working class, and sometimes, way in the back, special rows for African Americans. In some theaters a section called “the third tier” was where prostitutes met their clients. American audiences were known for their boisterous behavior, often indicating displeasure with poor acting performances by shouting and booing, or even throwing eggs and vegetables at the stage. One newspaper review described the unlucky actor who drew an angry response from the audience: “Cabbages, carrots, pumpkins, potatoes, a wealth of vegetables, a sack of flour, and one of soot, and a dead goose, with other articles, simultaneously fell upon the stage.”

Americans reserved their most passionate approval and disapproval for the plays of the English playwright William Shakespeare. Shakespeare was widely read in the United States, where his melodramatic tragedies and comedies seemed to strike a powerful chord with many citizens. Hamlet and Macbeth were two of the most popular of his plays and were performed in countless venues across the country. In part, Shakespeare’s stage dominance can be attributed to the droves of English actors who came to the United States to make their fortunes. Edmund Kean, Charles and Fanny Kemble, William Charles Macready, and Ellen Tree all attracted great crowds to their performances.

One of the most brilliant and famous of English actors that came to America’s shores was Junius Brutus Booth. Unlike most of his peers, Booth became a citizen. He married and raised his large family on a farm in Maryland. Three of his sons, Junius Jr., Edwin, and John Wilkes, followed in his footsteps. In stark contrast to his Confederate - loving brother, Edwin Booth was a staunch supporter of the Union and, after the war, the greatest actor of his generation. Booth and fellow Shakespearean actor Edwin Forrest also represented the emergence of an American style of acting that emphasized a vigorous style over the more genteel English approach. In a very real sense, actors were instrumental in creating an American identity based on a more informal, democratic, and personal method of stage performance.

The engine that drove the theater during the decades of the middle to late 19th century was commercialization. In an effort to expand the audience base, theater owners sought to appeal to the growing middle class, especially women and families. Laura Keene, an actress who became a stage manager in New York, was instrumental in bringing an influx of middle-class women theatergoers to view the sentimental plays that resonated with their lives. Increasingly, theaters presented different kinds of plays to different types of audiences: minstrel shows, vaudeville, opera, burlesque, ethnic and racial comedies, serious plays, and melodrama. Two of the most profitable and successful plays were about SLAVERY: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon. Specialized touring companies spread out across the country, drawing huge crowds and filling the wallets of their producers. Touring was facilitated by urbanization and far-reaching and sophisticated TRANSPORTATION system. By the late 1870s the theater was flourishing as never before, with New York City’s Broadway as the centerpiece of both highbrow and lowbrow American culture.

Further reading: Faye E. Dudden, Women in the American Theatre: Actresses and Audiences, 1790-1870 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994); Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990); Bruce A. McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820-1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992).