William Dunlap, Father of American Theatre—and American Antitheatricality

William Dunlap, Father of American Theatre—and American Antitheatricality David Carlyon Consideration of antitheatricality inevitably points at those who would censor theatre, diminish it, control it, or shut it down. Jonas Barish’s book The Antitheatrical Prejudice powerfully conveys the battle between outside pressure and hardy defense.1 Even for those who have not read the book, its title has become a byword for prejudice against our ¤eld. We, the People of the Theatre, it says, are besieged, sometimes laughably, sometimes dangerously, by antitheatricality . That sense of oppression ¤gures heavily in accounts of the career of William Dunlap (1766–1839), “Father of the American Theatre.” (Current practice usually puts that grandiloquent phrase in quotation marks to acknowledge past usage and to indicate scholarly discomfort with the thorny nature of such usage.) As Barish points out, however, antitheatricality rumbles inside theatre as well. He argues that it is a fundamental human trait and that the urge of theatricality is matched by equally strong suspicion of theatricality. As Barish titles his last chapter , it’s “Theater Against Itself.” Though American theatre has focused its energy on ¤ghting external foes, the internalized suspicion of theatricality remains. That manifestly applies to Dunlap. Though he deserves honor for his pioneering role, he also pioneered a strong ambivalence in and about theatre. He did not create American antitheatricality any more than he created American theatricality, yet his in®uential writing exhibits his distaste for actors, distrust of audiences, and appeals for censorship. Those hesitations about dramatic representation reveal in this model and source for what would follow the antitheatricality deep within the heart of American theatricality.2 Dunlap’s many early contributions to the ¤eld led to the label “Father of American Theatre.” He was the country’s ¤rst professional manager, a nonactor running the John Street Theatre, and then Park Theatre, with the actors Lewis Hallam Jr. and John Hodgkinson (1796–97), with Hodgkinson (1797–98), then on his own (1798–1805), and ¤nally for Thomas Abthorpe Cooper (1806–11). He was the United States’ ¤rst professional playwright, author of more than ¤fty translations and plays, the most well-known of which is André, the 1797 play usually mentioned in accounts of Dunlap. He was its ¤rst historian, author of A History of the American Theatre in 1832, giving him pride of place in the ¤eld of American theatre history; one might say he was the ¤rst Americanist. Finally, in 1837 he wrote one of the ¤rst American novels using theatre as its setting, Thirty Years Ago; or, The Memoirs of a Water Drinker. (Remarkably Dunlap probably had greater prominence as a pioneer in American ¤ne arts, as a painter who studied in London with Benjamin West and painted George Washington, made his living as an itinerant creating miniature portraits, led the American Academy of Fine Arts, and helped found the National Academy of Design, as well as writing a seminal work in this ¤eld, the 1834 History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States. Theatre students may know this aspect of Dunlap without realizing it, through his frequently reprinted frontispiece image from The Contrast.)3 Dunlap’s life and times certainly ¤t the familiar notion of Theatre Besieged. His History recorded examples we still employ. In 1774 the Continental Congress, discouraging theatre, offered the insult of lumping it with gambling and cock¤ghting. The Puritans of Massachusetts banned theatre in 1750 after a crowd’s eagerness to see a show at a coffeehouse led to a public disturbance; the ban was not lifted until 1793, and even at that late date it required a protracted ¤ght. The many instances cataloged in Dunlap’s book continue to show what the philistines have done and, by inference, what they are doing or might do. Here is the antitheatrical prejudice in blatant and cautionary array.4 Dunlap’s own career reinforced that message of antitheatrical prejudice from forces outside theatre, as his endeavor to make plays a force for social good constantly butted against pressure and unsympathetic audiences. He went bankrupt as a manager, struggling to reconcile his tastes with the tastes of his audiences. His dramatic writing made little...