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3. Theatrical Apprenticeship in Cleveland
- Southern Illinois University Press
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35 3 Theatrical Apprenticeship in Cleveland ON 17 MAY 1893, Clara Morris joined actresses Georgia Cayvan, Julia Marlowe, and Helena Modjeska in Chicago at the World’s Congress of Representative Women, a weeklong colloquium designed to showcase the advancement of women in various fields and “departments of intellectual activity.” Convened during the World’s Columbian Exposition, the congress drew almost two hundred thousand to its seventy-six sessions and featured more than six hundred speakers. The topic the four actresses discussed was “Woman and Her Relations to the Drama.” Several thousand packed the Hall of Columbus and the Hall of Washington for their presentation, with an overflow crowd spilling into anterooms and corridors.1 Cayvan, Marlowe, and Modjeska approached the subject historically, acknowledging female pioneers and voicing hope that women’s growing power and influence would shape a new theatrical era. Morris spoke more personally. Focusing on her own experience, she expressed gratitude to a profession that had given her “every good thing” and praised the theater as a splendid teacher, particularly for someone whose schooling had been haphazard. She explained the transformational impact of a stage career: “It takes you by the hand and leads you by paths of romance and dramatic incident from land to land, from age to age, and, best of all, from poet to poet, till you reach the knees of Shakespeare’s self. There our greatest and mightiest have stood with the humility of little children to learn the A B C of that great art we call acting.”2 Morris’s “education” began in Cleveland in 1862. After the Portage County fiasco, she and her mother were back at Mrs. Miller’s boardinghouse. It was spring, and as she writes in Life on the Stage, she was “a great girl of thirteen.” (Actually, she was fifteen, having just celebrated her birthday in March.) Upset because her mother was being “cruelly overworked,” she did not know what to do. Another young boarder, Blanche Bradshaw, suggested that she try acting. Morris thought she was joking until Bradshaw told her about an opportunity in the theater company to which she belonged. John A. Ellsler, actor-manager 36 Theatrical Apprenticeship in Cleveland of the Academy of Music, needed ballet girls for an upcoming production. Although Morris was skeptical, Bradshaw encouraged her to meet him. The two girls set off for the theater the next morning, Morris with her “heart beating almost to suffocation.”3 Having recently assumed the management of the Academy of Music, Ellsler was anxious to establish it as Cleveland’s most prestigious theatrical venue and to ensure the stability of its resident troupe. He understood the challenges such a venture entailed, because Cleveland had been surprisingly slow to embrace the idea of a permanent theater company. Notwithstanding the theatrical boom that much of the country had enjoyed in the 1850s, the “Forest City” lagged behind Midwestern neighbors Chicago, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati in making a demonstrable commitment to theater. “Can Cleveland support a theatre?” the Cleveland Leader wondered in an article about the most recent attempt to solve this “old problem” in 1861. The paper answered its own question three days later, when it reported that the Academy of Music’s resident company “had disbanded because of private difficulties.”4 The career of its new actor-manager was as checkered as Cleveland’s theater history.5 After years of frustration and failure, he and his wife, Effie (Euphemia Emma Myers), hoped to build a successful theater there. The model they chose, the resident stock company, still dominated the nation’s theatrical activity. Based on a British model and established well before the Civil War, it remained the leading organizational system in American theater throughout the 1860s, although its end was closer than the Ellslers realized. Headed by an actor-manager and hired by him (or, rarely, her) for a season that usually ran from fall through spring, the stock company performed a variety of works in repertory rotation, either in a permanent house or on tour. Counting fulllength plays and shorter afterpieces, the repertoire could include well over one hundred attractions.6 In addition to featuring their own actors throughout the season, stock companies showcased the work of traveling stars. The expansion of the nation’s railroad lines made it possible for guest artists to visit major cities, as well as smaller towns, in the central part of the United States. Firmly entrenched in the American theater by midcentury, the “star system” was an excellent...