Introduction: Popular Entertainment and American Theater Prior to 1900

COMPARATIVE F?9??19 Volume 40 · No. 4 · Winter 2006-07 Introduction: Popular Entertainment and American Theater Prior to 1900 Nicolas S. WiTSCHI Although Col. George A. Custer's defeat at the Little Big Horn on 25 June 1876 was anythingbut a theatrical event,it certainlybecame one very soon after. By the middle ofAugust, theatergoers in New York City were flocking to Wood's Theatre for Harry Seymour's blood-andthunder re-enactment SittingBull;or, Custer'sLast Charge.1 Meanwhile, out on the Plains a scout and part-time actor and playwright named William F."Buffalo Bill" Cody accidentally found himself on 17 July face to face with a Cheyenne warrior namedYellow Hair. The two exchanged a single, simultaneous blast of gunfire, which only Cody survived. Takinghis opponent's scalp in hand,Codyalmost immediatelybegan to weave the brief skirmish into a larger and more complex battle of deliberately taken revenge for Custer, with Cody as the hero. Moreover, according to most reports, Codyfought while decked out in"a stage costume ofblack velvet slashed with scarlet and trimmed with silver buttons."2 Although he was at this particular moment in the employ ofthe U.S. Fifth Cavalry, 406Comparative Drama Codyhadbythis time become something ofa celebrityon the East Coast for his highly stylized (some might say cliché-riddled) touring stage reenactments of his own exploits. Thus, his wearing of a stage costume both arises from his ongoing interest in performing a frontier persona and inflects the event with a theatrical note. And in the autumn of 1876, Codyfurther embellished the importance ofthe skirmish, and hence his reputation,bystarring in NewYork in a playhe had commissioned about his killing ofYellow Hair called The RedRightHand, or The FirstScalp for Custer. The printed programs for this show reportedly included"poetryand news releases about [the Little Big Horn battle],"bywhich"Cody and his managers traded on the audience's belief that they were transmitting news from the front, representing events actually unfolding on the plains even as spectators sat watching them in Boston, NewYork, or Omaha."3 The transmutation ofcurrent events into theater represents but one ingredient in the United States'long history of imbuing popular modes of entertainment with matters of cultural or national consideration. As a further example of this phenomenon, consider Royall Tyler's The Contrast (1787),where the character Jonathan goes out in search ofa circuslike place he had heard ofwhere"a hocuspocus man . .. could eat a case knife" only to find himself in a proper playhouse watching Sheridan's School for Scandal. The joke is that when "they lifted up a great green cloth," Jonathan naively believed he and the rest of the audience were merely looking "right into the next neighbor's house."4 The Contrast is generally credited as "the first comedy written by an American to be produced professionally" and the character of Jonathan as the first instance ofthe now-familiarYankee rube character type.5 Jonathan's misapprehension of the nature of the space in which he finds himself one evening once again points to a relationship between popular theatrical entertainment and the crafting of the very frameworks within which knowledge ofthe world couldbe organized orproduced.Which is to say, Jonathan's search for a performer of tricks leads him and, by extension, those who have come to the theater to watch an actor perform this role to a lesson in theatrical verisimilitude. In 1993 GaryA. Richardson observed that"Whether out ofreligious, aesthetic, or ideological bias,the nation's cultural arbiters have tradition- Nicolas S. Witschi407 ally been, at best, ambivalent about America's drama and its functions. This is especially true ofdrama before O'Neill, about which the prevailing opinion seems to be that the less said the better."6 Fortunately, this assessment is far less true than it may have been a decade ago, for much admirable scholarship has in recent years given serious consideration to American theater prior to the advent of literary Modernism.7 Nevertheless , compelling and important questions still remain, among them questions about the extent to which developments in American popular entertainment prior to 1900 contributed contemporaneously to the culture's questions about such matters as high- and lowbrow art, popularityversus artistic...