Thursday, June 25, 2009

This Day in Theater History (Philly Stage Opens Despite Quaker Opponents)


June 25, 1759—The first playhouse to be built in Philadelphia, the Society Hill Theatre, opened on the southeast corner of Vernon and South Streets, just beyond the city limits of the time, all the better to avoid the ire of Quakers who had sought every means to contain what they perceived as a moral pestilence.

In October 2005, while attending a delightful performance of the musical Finian’s Rainbow at Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theatre, I marveled at all the memorabilia downstairs in the bar, called, appropriately enough, Barrymore’s Café. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the City of Brotherly Love was the first important theater center in the American colonies.

Surprisingly, though, the tolerance for which the city was becoming famous was not very much in evidence at all in the half century it took to get any kind of enduring theater built at all there.

Now, you’d expect that kind of hostility from the Puritans, whose idea of fun was to hang witches in Salem, drive out heretics they didn’t like, and, because Prozac hadn’t been invented yet, spend countless hours confiding their deepest fears to their diaries instead of psychiatrists or bartenders.

Indeed, as I noted in a prior post, Samuel Adams represented a particularly virulent form of this killjoy during the American Revolution and shortly afterward, even seeking to deny theater as a much-needed psychological release to the men fighting for independence against Great Britain.

But the Society of Friends represented another matter entirely. As late as 1785, at a yearly meeting, the Friends were being warned to “avoid the attendance of vain sports, and places of amusement which divert the mind from serious reflection, and incline it to wantonness and vanity.”

Before the Society Hill Theatre went up, then, the dramatic muse had a distinctly checkered history with the Quakers:

* From 1700 to 1713, on three different occasions, the Provincial Assembly, at the behest of the Quakers, passed laws banning “stage plays, masks and revels,” only to be forced to repeal them.
* James Logan, mayor of the city, complained in a 1723 letter that the “sober people” of the town wanted him to ban itinerant players from passing through—a real political problem, as Governor William Keith loved such performances.
* In 1749, the same year that the first actors’ performance was held in the city—Joseph Addison’s tragedy Cato—the Common Council urged magistrates on toward “sending for the actors and binding them to their good behavior.”

I don’t understand, I hear you saying. What’s the big deal with a little fun?


Well, to some extent, the reputation that theaters had developed in Europe as dens of sin and decadence carried over here. A good girl didn’t go to these establishments. But Pennsylvania’s Common Council listed other reasons, too, for the prohibition, noting “the encouraging of idleness and drawing great sums of money from weak and inconsiderate people.”

That was the state of affairs when David Douglass took it upon himself to build, at last, a playhouse in this great colonial urban center.

If you want to know the truth, Douglass was hardly the Olivier of his time, let alone his own troupe (which, within four years, would be known as the American Company). That honor belonged to his stepson, Lewis Hallam Jr., who became the earliest known American actor to tackle Hamlet. (He’s the guy in the image accompanying this post.)

Nor was Douglass a great box office draw. That distinction belonged to his wife, young Hallam’s mother, who was still enough of a looker to play decidedly younger women (and all this before cosmetic surgery).

But other words come to mind besides “stars” when it came to Douglass, words with their own peculiar magic that came in handy when dealing with difficult people: “tactful,” “elegant,” and “gentleman.” Two government officials found these qualities particularly endearing:

* Governor Denny, who allowed Douglass to proceed, with the stipulation that the soon-to-be dubbed "American Company" stage a benefit for the Pennsylvania Hospital (which they were happy to do); and
* Judge Allen, who, after ruling in favor of Douglass, remarked that he’d sometimes learned more about morality from plays than from sermons.

Douglass became the colossus of American theater in the two decades before the Revolutionary War, keeping the dramatic arts alive despite the periodic need to hitch up and move elsewhere because of the disapproval of bluenoses. At the beginning of the Revolutionary War, he left for Jamaica, where he became a magistrate on the island. After the war’s outbreak he was forced to flee to Jamaica, where he died in 1786.

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