Designing American Modernity: David Belasco's The Governor's Lady and Robert Edmond Jones's The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife

{ 32 } \ Designing American Modernity David Belasco’s The Governor’s Lady and Robert Edmond Jones’s The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife —CHRISTIN ESSIN On September 12, 1912, director and producer David Belasco opened The Governor ’s Lady at the Republic Theatre on Broadway. Written by Alice Bradley, the play told the story of a tumultuous marriage between Daniel Slade, a nouveau riche millionaire with political aspirations, and Mary, his unsophisticated, increasingly burdensome wife. After staging the first three acts in domestic locations around Denver, Belasco created a homecoming for his Broadway audience, setting the final scene in an authentically reproduced Childs cafeteria. Actually, spectators at the Republic on Forty-second Street were sitting mere steps away from one of the restaurant chain’s better-known locations around the corner of Seventh Avenue.1 Many had passed the Childs on their way to the theatre, and even more would likely pass by after the performance, some perhaps stopping to enjoy a late-night meal before returning home. The Childs setting capitalized on spectators’ familiarity with the popular eatery and the chain’s visually distinct character.As a director/designer, Belasco was notorious for his dedication to realistic detail, using the latest lighting and scenic technology to replicate the locations depicted on his stage with meticulous authenticity. He ensured that the Childs onstage was identical to the cafeteria that audiences encountered in Times Square by ordering equipment directly from the Childs supply company, including the same white tiles, tables, bentwood chairs, cash registers, coffee boilers, and griddle-cake cookers found at each location. His design was not merely a faithful reproduction of a Childs; { 33 } DESIGNING AMERICAN MODERNITY it literally was a Childs, the only difference being that actors instead of customers occupied its tables eating the cafeteria’s signature baked apples. That circumstance, of course, could be reversed after the show when audiences left the Republic Theatre, walked around the corner, and ordered the same menu items they had seen and smelled only moments ago. In 1912, Childs was one of the few restaurants where customers could order the same reasonably priced, similarly prepared food they received at other chain locations. For the twenty-first-century consumer who frequents chains like McDonald’s or Starbucks, such dedication to consistency of taste and experience is expected; for early-twentieth-century New Yorkers, however, food standardization was an innovation, one more sign of their city’s evolving modernization . Belasco’s choice, therefore, to stage this visually recognizable chain location tapped into his spectators’ interest in the commercial practices that were increasingly changing the urban landscape and influencing their daily lives. Public interest in Belasco’s staging, however, was tempered by derisive reviews from progressive critics who decried the Childs setting as a gimmick, merely the latest illustration of the director’s tendency toward the excesses of photographic realism.2 Arthur Feinsod notes that attacks against “Belascoism” increased in 1912, a year that witnessed not only The Governor’s Lady but also the emergence of art theatre projects like Maurice Brown’s Little Theatre in Figure 1: The Childs Cafeteria onstage at the Republic Theatre in Alice Bradley’s The Governor’s Lady (1912). Published in the October 1912 issue of Theatre Magazine. { 34 } CHRISTIN ESSIN Chicago, the Toy Theatre in Boston, and the beginning of George Pierce Baker’s Workshop 47 at Harvard University.3 Belasco’s ode to standardization may have captured the spirit of modern living, but his literalness stood in direct opposition to the theories and practices of stage modernism. Critics like Sheldon Cheney, Clayton Hamilton, and Kenneth Macgowan advanced the New Stagecraft theories of European artists like Edward Gordon Craig and Max Reinhardt , who rejected painterly, illusionary staging in favor of simplified, architectural environments that, they believed, gave fuller expression to the central ideas of dramatic texts.4 The“new”stagecraft, as opposed to the“old,”was more than surface decoration or imitation; it was a deliberate process of visual interpretation that drew inspiration from the subjectivity and minimalist aesthetics of modern painters during the same period. Cheney, editor of Theatre Arts Magazine, the journal linked to the art theatre movement, argued that Belasco’s productions were...