22. Theater of Cruelty

Text copyright, Peter Schmitz. All Rights Reserved.

[OPENING THEME MUSIC]

Hi Everyone, and welcome once again to Adventures in Theater History: Philadelphia.

I wanted to follow up on some additional material I uncovered while researching the early years Philadelphia theater, but was unable to fit in to our first episodes. Or, rather, I was perhaps a bit unwilling to show this side of the Philadelphia theater world to the general public, at such an early stage in the podcast. At the beginning of things I was trying to burnish and expand the city’s image in theatrical history, not airing out its dirty laundry. But by this point, maybe we’ve earned the ability to deal with some uncomfortable truths.

We all know that the city of Philadelphia has a bit of a reputation, nationally, as a place with unruly, rude and even violent sports fans. Now I’m not here to argue whether that is true or not, sports are not really our topic here. But we have to acknowledge that the reputation is there. 

Well there were times in the first two decades of the Nineteenth Century when Philadelphia theater audiences fully lived up to that reputation for unruliness, rudeness and even cruelty

Now Philadelphia audiences were not alone in that respect. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, theater audiences everywhere fully expected to be allowed to freely voice their opinions. Shouting at the actors, shouting at other audience members, catcalls, jeers - that was all par for the course. Disputes about political and social issues could easily erupt. If your political opponent was in the house, you could speak to him, directly, or you could do so indirectly by what you chose to applaud, or what songs you and your friends demanded that the orchestra play in between acts. Theaters were a mix between private and public spaces, and people felt they had a right to be there, since they had paid their money. They could express their ardent approval and disapproval, it was part of the experience. Sometimes objects were even thrown at the actors, and we’re not talking just rotten tomatoes or other objectionable, but at least soft, items. While reading through the source books for this material, in memoirs of actors who performed on Philadelphia stages, I can find references to buttons, firecrackers, musket balls, even knives being occasionally tossed onto the stage. 

In this, as other things, Philadelphians were following the lead of British theatergoers. In 1809, after all,  were the infamous London OP (or Old Price) Riots, for example. Covent Garden Theatre had just been rebuilt (after a fire) on a HUGE scale - twice the size as before, holding about 3000 people,and to cover their costs, management raised ticket prices, especially for ’The Pit’, which from time immemorial had been the province of rougher, ruder types. The deeply resentful Pit regulars, in retaliation, came up with a plan. They came to the theater, but night after night, they refused to pay attention to the performers! They held dances, played cards, shouted and chanted: We Want the Old Prices! In the Full view and to the dismay of the toffs and swells in the Private boxes, they kept up the demonstrations every show for months. The actor-manager of the theater, John Philip Kemble, tried berating the mob from the stage. That didn’t work. Nor did hiring professional boxers to spar with troublemakers in the crowd. After the show was over the OP demonstrators carried on their dances and protested on the streets. Eventually, the theater managers gave in, and the Old Prices were restored.

Similar examples of organized audience misbehavior could be found in Philadelphia. In Episode 8, we saw how Army officers deliberately harassed Congressman John Randolph during the performance of a play in 1800.

There were several other deliberate personal attacks by audience members, but these particular times I’m going to tell you about today, they were directed against an actor, while he performed on the stage.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

First story: In 1801 the New Theatre company had been in search of a new tragedian, since the popular leading man Thomas Cooper had broken his contract with the company and gone off to New York seeking more lucrative arrangements. Thomas Wignell, the manager, had recruited a promising young man named Fullerton, who had been a leading actor at the Theatre Royal in Liverpool, to fill some of Cooper’s former roles, though apparently he was not considered handsome enough to be assigned such parts as Hamlet. The role of the Melancholy Dane went instead to another new member of the company, Still, Fullerton was tapped by Wignell to play Macbeth, Hotspur, Pizzaro, Petruchio, as well as several other comic roles. He would also take on the roles in melodramas of what were generally termed “serious fathers”. But he was never popular with the Philadelphia crowds, who still missed Cooper. Professional critics felt something was missing, too. Joseph Dennie, writing as Oliver Oldschool in the Port Folio called his Petruchio “more vehement  than [the part] demanded” and that ``his voice was too loud”. Members of the general public, sensing a weakness of spirit in Fullerton, took out their frustration on him. As the season first began, solitary jeers and insults would be shushed by other members of the audience, but as time went on, the number of his detractors grew. As actor William Wood wrote later, in his memoirs:

“The disaffected . . increased nightly in numbers and violence, until at length some eight or ten different disturbers, distributed throughout the house, contrived to confuse and distract the performer who happened to appear in the same scenes with Fullerton.”

As time wore on, the unfortunate actor began to develop an understandable aversion to being seen in public at all. “He became melancholy and morose, frequently hinting that the death, either of his enemies or himself, should end his sufferings”, said Wood. Though the other actors of the company attempted to console him, anonymous letters, disparaging his talents, were even sent to his lodgings, at the home of another member of the company, William Francis. Apparently at least once Frances even had to stop his friend from doing serious injury to himself. Fullerton gave a performance at the New Theatre on January 29th, 1802 as an Abbot in the play Deaf and Dumb, but he and everyone else onstage could hear the immediate groans and whistles coming from the audience every time he tried to speak. Wood recalled that:

“Every effort possible was made to ascertain the cause of this continued persecution, but in vain. A nervous man at all times, poor Fullerton became near incapable of all effort. His terror and agony on entering the stage was truly pitiable.”

After the show, Fullerton went back to William Francis’ house, and brooded for a week. Everyone in the Francis family attempted to cheer him up by playing a nightly game of cards together. But on the evening of February 3rd, Fullerton suddenly rose from the table, grabbed his hat, and strode out into the night. Everyone anxiously waited for him to return, but he never did. At about midnight, Francis’ dog, who had been given the ominous name of Banquo, began to howl miserably, and everyone feared the worst. Fullerton never came home. In the morning, Mr. Gibbons, the master tailor of the wardrobe department of the theater went looking for him, and found the poor actor’s hat placed upon a pier of the Vine Street dock on the Delaware. The body rose to the surface of the river a few hours afterwards. It was retrieved and Fullerton was quietly buried later that same day.

The publisher Matthew Carey wrote a public letter castigating the actor’s persecutors, defending the dramatic profession from their cruelty. “Behold Fullerton’s monument,” he wrote. “The actor of manly and gentlemanly worth was stabbed to the heart in the temple of the muses by a band of Christian critics, even while offering his devotions on the altar of the arts.”

But, no one was ever called to account or even publicly apologized for their ill treatment of Fullerton. His parts were reassigned to others in the company, and the season continued. And I must say that reading through all the accounts I can find of his sad passing, despite Willam Cary’s pleas, people seemed to have hurriedly just put his memory away. Nobody, in their memoirs, even seemed to be able to remember his first name.

Fullerton’s sad end was not, at least, to be the fate of the next victim of a common public disapproval in a Philadelphia theater. But the story is not much prettier.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

Story Number Two: In the season of 1807-1808, with William Wood and William Warren now running the company, a young Irish tenor by the name of Webster was engaged, particularly to play the parts of young lovers in operas, though he also did speaking roles in pantomimes and comedies. Webster was, as we would say today, quite openly gay. Or, as Wiliam Wood, who did not share the generally tolerant sentiment towards homosexuality of our own day put it, unkindly: “His deportment and dress were marked and marred by a very disagreeable effeminacy, which the audience endured for the pleasure of his singing.” But by the middle of the season, some audience members began to feel the urge to do Webster public harm, noted Wood. “A sudden expression of dislike was seen to attend each of his songs, but seemed limited to a very few persons. Still it never failed nightly to occur, until the interruption became a serious evil to the [rest of the] audience, as well as to the manager.”

Though Wood was primly dancing around the subject of what set off the ‘sudden dislike’ of certain members of the audience, other memoirists were not so discreet: ‘It had been alleged publicly that Webster had been guilty of an attempt to commit a most revolting crime,” wrote historian Charles Durang. Translation: Webster had propositioned another man for sex, and his orientation had been publicly exposed.  The young bloods of the town, Durang reported, whose ringleader was named John Lohra, began to humiliate Webster nightly during his performances at the Chestnut Street Theatre.

On April 6th, 1808, matters came to a head. A performance of a new play by the American author James Nelson Barker, a dramatization of the life of Pocohontas, entitled The Indian Princess, was set to play.  Webster had the rather minor role of “Larry”, one the English settlers at Jamestown, but his tormentors did not care how important he was to the plot, they just hated him, and set about shouting insults as soon as he came on the stage.

But Webster also had his defenders. Due to the on-the-spot reportage of a short-lived publication called The Tickler, we actually have the names of his horrible chief assailants, and since they deserve being historically shamed, I will name them too. (And remember that Philadelphia was not that big a city at the time, everyone knew each other, and besides, the audience area was not in darkness, you could be seen if you stood up and yelled at the stage.) Besides Lohra, there  was Hugh Lindsay, a clerk, Harry Fries, Adam Traquair, Jack Smith the pill-maker, and two men whom The Tickler described as “A puppy dapper-looking counter-jumper who lives somewhere about the corner of Dock and Pearl Street . . and a monkey in men’s clothes who proves to be a Frenchman.” There were even others, said the reporter, ‘whose names we will not now mention, in hopes of their abandoning such disgraceful conduct in future . . in the upper boxes.’ (He lets the rich people off the hook, you see. T’was ever thus.) More than just making verbal threats, all these men’s behavior became alarmingly violent to all the actors who were valiantly attempting to continue with the performance. The rioters tore down pieces from the glass chandeliers in the theater, hurling them in Webster’s general direction. Lighted squibs, or firecrackers, were even thrown down onto the stage. 

But also jumping to Webster’s defense that night were his countrymen, his fellow Irishmen, who by that point formed a considerable minority in the city. Great fans of Webster’s voice, which often serenaded them with Irish songs, they immediately started fighting with the homophobic hecklers, blacking eyes  and bloodying noses throughout the lobbies and saloons of the theater. The fights even spread to the rooms of what was called “The Shakespeare Building” next door.

Meanwhile onstage, the managers of the theater decided to call a halt to the show, and brought down the curtain. The audience hurried out, as Philadelphia’s constables and watchmen (there was no constituted municipal police force at the time) ran inside to break up the fights. Meanwhile three hundred other Irishmen, by one estimate, gathered at the stage door of the New Theatre to protect and escort Webster home on their shoulders to his lodgings in George Street.

However, Webster was unable to appear on the stage in Philadelphia from that point on. Manager William Warren, quite unconscionably, seemed to blame the young tenor for the entire affair. Confronting him the following day, Warren lost his temper and fired Webster from the company. 

This was very rash of Warren, and ended up costing him quite dearly. Because Webster had a contract, and quickly insisted on his legal rights and sued Warren, demanding to be paid for the rest of the season. Warren, on the advice of his own lawyers, quickly folded, and was forced to give the young man one thousand dollars on top of it, to compensate him for the loss of his benefit night at the end of the season.

Despite this short term victory, in the long run Webster’s fate was not a happy one. He continued with a concert career at other theaters, and even married a lady of Philadelphia, but their union, predictably, did not last long. Nor was his sudden fortune of one thousand dollars well invested. Charles Durang, in his History of the Theatre in Philadelphia, reports that Webster died, poverty stricken, years later in a Baltimore alms-house. 

Meanwhile, the managers of the New Theatre installed a coffee house in the lobby, in order to attract more ladies to the building, you see.. It was thought that the presence of more females in the establishment would have a calming effect, or at least a restraining one, on bad behavior by Philadelphia’s young men.

But that was not necessarily going to work, it turned out, because William Wood’s memoir contains one more truly hair-raising story about a riot in the New Theatre on Chestnut Street. It is such a particularly alarming tale that I’m mostly going to let his own words narrate it, with some elisions. These all come from pages 143 to 154 of his memoir Personal Recollections of the Stage, which he wrote and published several decades later, but evidently the events remained quite vivid to him, for he recounts them in great detail, immediately following his narration of the story of George Frederick Cooke, which are detailed in Episode 10 of  our podcast. 

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

Story Number Three: This is about one Donald McKenzie, an actor in the company who was originally from Scotland. The story begins in 1811, during a time of economic downturn in the country. It is also a time when many of the actors of the New Theatre company were getting restive about what they were getting paid for their efforts. Many of them were trying to break away, and find more lucrative employment elsewhere in some rival theaters that were just starting to spring up.

Here’s how Wood tells it:

“In my early days I had been struck with the natural performance of a novice at the John Street Theatre, New York, in a trifling character. . . represented by a young man named McKenzie. .  . .This novice was quite young, and a strong Scotch accent perhaps tended to strengthen the effect. . . . [years later, employed and] Regularly attached to [our] company, he gradually overcame the impression which his strong accent occasionally made, and he became in the course of five years a decided favorite in parts of severity or harshness.  . .Useful on the stage, and not uncivil, his manner was yet of that character which can be better understood by the terms ‘dogged’ and ‘sulky’.  . .

In the summer of this year, 1811, to which we have now come. . on a day previous to a performance [of The Deserted Daughter] fixed, when our bills announced Mr. McKenzie as [the character of] Mordent . . a counter-announcement was circulated, of Mr. McKenzie’s first appearance at the Walnut Street House, to be opened on that night. This announcement was not known, however, until noon, McKenzie having attended our rehearsal [in the morning].  The circumstance was wholly inexplicable, as not the slightest complaint or difficulty had occurred; the rest of the day was employed with vain attempts to find the absentee.”

(At this point I should break in and say that the managers of the theater never did find McKenzie, and Wood himself was forced to step into the role of Mordent.)

“No message or information was received from McKenzie, and the theatre opened as usual. At the rising of the curtain a stormy scene soon commenced. With [my first entrance] as Mordent, a brutal effusion of hisses, howlings, imprecations, and all other expressions most offensive, were heard from different parts of the house. The [rest of the] audience, unconscious of the cause, as were the actors, endeavored to suppress the interruption by applause, but were soon overpowered by the organized disturbers.  . . on [my] next appearance the savage clamors increased to a degree so alarming, as to cause the hurried departure of the largest portion of the lady audience. Numerous respectful efforts were made to attain a hearing, but without effect. Whenever [I] approached the stage boxes in [my] scenes,  . . the cries “Kill him! Drive him from the stage! Kill him!” were repeated. . . . [Mr.] Dwyer, who was playing with me, was excessively mortified, and pronounced it a more ferocious riot than he had ever witnessed in the rudest Irish theatres.  . . The play concluded, as it began, in noise and confusion, without the slightest intimation of what the disturbance arose for.  . . Romeo and Juliet [was scheduled for the following evening]. Perfect quiet prevailed until the appearance of Romeo, which I was performing, when the former disgusting scenes were repeated, and continued without intermission. In the last act, where Romeo brought forward the awakened Juliet from her tomb, the lady (my wife acting this part) received a violent blow in the arm from a musket ball, thrown from an upper box, near the stage.  . . advancing to the front, I demanded to be heard . . and offer[ed] a large reward for the discovery of the miscreant who had disgraced manhood and decency by such a murderous outrage. A universal cry from the audience to ‘put down the curtain’ concluded the scene. . . . I resolved to call on our legal counsel. I proceeded alone by the stage door to the corner of Sixth and Chestnut streets, when at once it was evident that the mob had got sight of me. They recommenced the brutal yells and hooting which I had just experienced in the theatre. At this moment I was joined by a gentleman, Mr. Edward Tilghman, Jr., who had been at the play, and was induced by the noise outside to leave the theatre, suspecting that something was wrong . . He put his arm through mine, and coolly remarked that we were in for it. . .. Handing him one of the pistols with which I had prepared myself on leaving the theatre, and retaining the other as well as my sword cane, which I usually carried, we proceeded on our way. . . By the time we reached the front of the State House building . . . many attempts were made to press upon us.  . at each attempt Mr. Tilghman .  . warned them of their danger [from our weapons] . . The crowd, although individually  . . . reluctant to encounter peril, yet [as a group] were endeavoring to press forward  . . upon us, shouting like savages.  . . At this important moment two gentlemen rushed down the steps of the Hall, and forced their way . . until they reached us. They anxiously inquired in a very firm, foreign accent how it happened that two men should thus be surrounded by so fierce a crowd.    . . The two strangers whom I always supposed to be French officers . .  placed themselves at our side, and in the calmest of manners assured us that they should accompany us wherever we were going, and if needful share in our fate. . . we four  .  proceeded to Walnut Street below Fifth, where my legal counsel then lived, unmolested.”

Whew! Now that was a rough night on the stage! Wood doesn’t remark on the possibility, but I like to think that the two Frenchmen were members of the New Circus Company, perhaps even Pepin and Breschard themselves. But there is no way of knowing, now.

It later transpired that the crowd of rioters and hecklers were all Scotsmen, members of the weaving trade who were then arriving in great numbers from Perth and Glasgow to work in the textile mills then rising in Frankford and Kensington north of the city. It turned out that the actor McKenzie had purposely spread rumors that his boss, Wiliam Wood, was anti-Scotch, and that “the manager habitually indulged publicly and  privately in most insulting attacks upon the Scotch portion of our citizens, as well as upon mechanics in masses.” This rumor was meant to cause exactly the uproar that it did, in order to extort from Wood an agreement to let McKenzie out of the company, so that he might be free to pursue an independent career without being sued for breach of contract. But his plans being foiled, and upon actually being sued by Warren and Wood, McKenzie quickly sent abject letters of apology, and left town, trying to keep his theatrical career alive in other American cities. Wood notes with sour satisfaction that McKenzie, ended up in abject poverty and alcoholism, living in Boston. “Like many other [actors], he was too fond of putting an enemy into his mouth, and was more than once discharged for indulging in this vice. Confined to his room, owing to his indulgence, he sent for a physician, who seeing his condition, wrote a receipt: Water - use it freely. McKenzie, glancing at the prescription exclaimed: “Why, doctor, water will be the death of me” and sure enough it was, for the last that was to be seen of him alive was walking towards Back Bay, where his body was found after he had been missing several days.”

And then Wood, rather coolly turns towards discussing the receipts of the next week at the theater. He was, after all, both an artist and a man of business. 

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

Well, that’s my three tales of Bad Behavior by Philadelphia theater audiences in the early 19th Century. I’ll try to remember them the next time I get a mere bad review. Time was, of course, when a mob of critics that didn’t like you might be waiting for you outside the stage door.

Back in Episode 11, we described in detail some more alarming behavior by Philadelphians, most particularly the riot at Vauxhall Gardens on Broad Street in the year 1818, when the crowd, disappointed that a planned balloon ascent did not come off, burned the entire place down - go back and listen to that one, if you missed it. But, as the 19th Century continued, expectations of audience behavior began to change. More and more the upper classes began to separate themselves from places where the working classes would go to be entertained. We’ll learn soon about the construction of the Academy of Music in the mid-19th Century and how that shifted the entire social framework of Philadelphia theater going. And as the burgeoning middle classes - with their emphasis on private manners and public respectability - began to predominate in the huge majority of American places of entertainment, those expectations began to affect what would be tolerated in theater. We already saw, for instance, how Louisa Lane Drew tidied up the Arch Street Theatre. By the end of the 1800s, Philadelphia theater became so safe and so ubiquitous that almost everybody, of every age and class and religion were going into a theater of some sort during the course of a year.

Now there was the story of the fights and demonstrations that broke out in Philadelphia in the year 1912, over a performance of J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. Amazingly, both people in the audience and the actors ended up getting arrested. But that is a story for another day. It’s quite a tale, and I’m still in the process of researching it. 

There’s always another amazing story to tell about this town - some of them are just a bit more alarming than others, that’s all. But in our NEXT episode, we’ll talk about building something up, not burning something down - we’re going to learn about the founding and construction of the Academy of Music on Broad Street - the grandest theatrical space in Philadelphia, one that still stands there today. And it’s the place, really, that taught Philadelphia audiences how to be on their Best Behavior, from then on, thank goodness.  I’m Peter Schmitz, and the sound and the music are by Christopher Mark Colucci.

Thanks for listening and for coming along with us on another Adventure in Theatre History: Philadelphia. 

[CLOSING THEME MUSIC]

Text copyright, Peter Schmitz. All Rights Reserved.