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A Plea for an American Drama 159 the neighborhood who were a third of the audience, an annual baby show and a nursery. One of the innovations was the ‘‘tabloid drama,’’ the one-act play popular as a vaudeville turn. What was remarkable, reported Hartley Davis, was that ‘‘realism is not successful. Audiences want something apart from the routine of their own lives.’’ The plays involved commonplace characters in sensational exploits. Critic Harry James Smith found the Thalia’s melodramas overwrought but lively, compared with Broadway’s pale creations. What the ‘‘shop girls’’ and their ‘‘steadies’’ enjoyed, he noted, was the gamut of emotions , however implausible and bewildering the plot. ‘‘The melodrama,’’ he concluded, ‘‘is full of comedy; it is sure to follow every scene of pathos or violence.’’9 When theatrical syndicates were at their peak, the Stair-Havlin group had thirty-five houses across the country where touring ‘‘combination’’ companies presented a different melodrama weekly. Numerous repertory tent shows also visited small towns offering scaled-down versions of popular plays. The cheap-theater market proved intensely competitive. Always challenged by vaudeville and musical comedy, by 1910 the ten-twenty-thirty theaters faced the threat of the new nickelodeons recast as grand ‘‘palaces.’’ When movie producers switched from documentary realism to dramatic fiction, the melodrama theaters were too expensive to operate. In 1924 the experienced journalist Marian Spitzer reported on the cheap theater’s demise. The revival of the old favorite, Theodore Kremer’s Fatal Wedding, or, the Little Mother, which had run for years in the Bowery, failed after only eight performances. Movie melodramas had triumphed over melodramatic theater.10 A Plea for an American Drama The novelist James Kirke Paulding was one of the most passionate advocates for a drama celebrating American nationality. He was stung by the jibes of British commentators like the Rev. Sydney Smith that the new republic lacked cultural achievement of note, and wrote the satirical Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan (1812). Others looked to literature, but Paulding also had high hopes for the theater as a moral and intellectual force, and he spurned both spineless deference to English traditions and absurd, sensationalist, crowd-pleasing melodrama. Later, his comedy The Lion of the West (1830) cast as hero, good-natured frontiersman Nimrod Wildfire chiding English snobs and their servile American imitators. [James Kirke Paulding,] ‘‘American Drama,’’ American Quarterly Review 1 (June 1827): 332, 333–34, 336, 338, 356. Of all popular amusements ever devised, dramatic exhibitions are, when properly conducted, the most elegant and instructive. They address themselves both to the MELODRAMA 160 understanding and the senses, and carry with them the force of precept and example. In witnessing them, we are excited by the passions of others instead of our own. . . . It is by this mode of giving play and excitement to the mind, by mimic representations , that the force of the operations of the passions in real life, is unquestionably tempered and restrained; and hence it has always been held with justice, that the stage, in its legitimate and proper state, is a most powerful agent in humanizing and refining mankind. It operates also in other ways in bringing about this salutary result. It allures the people from an attendance upon barbarous and brutifying spectacles— from brawls, boxing-matches, and bull-baitings;—it accustoms them, in a certain degree , to intellectual enjoyments and rational recreations; and substitutes innocent amusement, if not actual instruction, in the place of those which afford neither one nor the other. A theatre, where the price of admittance is within the means of the ordinary classes of the people, is a substitute, and a most salutary one, for tavern brawls and low debauchery. Those whose faculties are too obtuse to relish or comprehend the intrinsic excellence of a plot, the lofty morality or classic ease of the dialogue, are still instructed and amused through the medium of their eyes, and actually see before them examples to imitate or avoid. If it be said, that these examples are too removed from the ordinary sphere of those who witness them, to be of any use, still it may be replied, that chastity, fortitude, patriotism, and magnanimity, are virtues of all classes of mankind, and that all can feel and comprehend them, though they may be exercised in circumstances and situations in which they never expected to be placed. . . . It is generally, we believe, considered a sufficient apology in behalf of the persons who preside over...

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