Little Women Acted: Responding to H.T.P.’s Response

In 1912 the first authorized full-length dramatization of Little Women was a hit on Broadway. “One of the greatest matinee plays of the day,” noteworthy for bringing children to the theater, it was popular with the old as well as the young, and with both males and females (Hatfield 5; see Bordman 718).¹ The play and its success have now been all but forgotten. Hardly any critic or historian of Louisa May Alcott’s work even mentions them. Yet examining the play and its reception allows one to explore the impact of Alcott, the positioning of women in the early twentieth century, and indeed the functions of audience. Of the hundreds of reviews and notices of both the New York production and the road shows that toured the country in 1913 and 1914, perhaps the most revealing was a review by the Boston critic who called himself H.T.P. His penetrating assessment of Little Women is worth close reading in its own right because it indicates the extent to which the stage version of Little Women transformed Alcott’s story into a sentimental domestic idyll, even as it lays out the range of responses that contemporary playgoers had to the drama and meditates on issues of adaptation that continue to interest theorists today. The act of literary recovery that drives this essay is thus a multiple one: recovering a forgotten play and recovering the response of an undeservedly forgotten critic, while also gaining a sense of the theatrical audience a century ago and tracking Alcott’s reception.

During the early years of the twentieth century, children were not sharply differentiated from adult members of the theater audience.² Indeed Nellie McCaslin, in her pathbreaking history of children’s theater, finds this territory so hard to map that she misses the 1912 Little Women, even though she mentions regional productions of it in the 1920s (see 49, 54). The two Broadway productions that McCaslin does note from the 1910s are Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which opened a few days after Little Women, and Treasure Island (1915). For the theater manager William A. Brady, Little Women was as much associated with the young as Snow White was: he had heard of the forthcoming Snow White, and “it struck me that other people thought it was time for a play to interest children and grownups at the same time, and as long as I had the play [Little Women], I made up my mind to bring it in ahead of theirs” (“Dramatizing” 1). It was a given that children would be part of the audience for Little Women.

The driving force behind the production, the person who finally found in Brady a theater manager willing to take it on, was Jessie Bonstelle, who directed both the Broadway play and the later London one—or at least she performed most of the roles that we now associate with a director.³ She had tried for eight years to get permission from the Alcott nephews for a dramatization; only after one of the two died was she successful. Her first playwright died too, and she turned to Marian de Forest, a Buffalo drama critic and Alcott fan, in part because de Forest had never written a play before and would be likely to accept revisions, including any required by Alcott’s surviving nephew. De Forest wrote a first draft from memory, then filled in with quotations from parts 1 and 2 of Alcott’s Little Women and other Alcott writings (see A. Richardson).

For most Americans, a century ago, Alcott’s novel was associated not only with young people but also with a young America: it provided a nostalgic glimpse of a traditional past, of a “simple home life,” “beautiful and wholesome,” when women were domestic, not trying to be New, which is to say, independent (“Little Women,” Troy; Rev.). In newspaper and other commentaries at this time, the novel, and Alcott herself, are associated with domesticity, tradition, and self-sacrifice. De Forest’s play retains many of Alcott’s incidents and much...