Edward Harrigan

Edward Harrigan RICHARD MOODY • EDWARD HARRIGAN WAS the undisputed master of "melee," and "general melee." His plays, particularly the famous "Mulligan" series - The Mulligan Guard Ball, The Mulligan Guard Chowder, and others - were Dickens -like documentaries of life among the immigrants on New York's Lower East Side. Harrigan and his chubby-faced partner, Tony Hart, were Broadway's farcical favorites in the 1880s. This much is common knowledge to most students of American theatre. Two other facets of the Harrigan phenomenon are less well known: the serious critics of his day took him seriously, perceived that he was more than a song-and-dance man turned playwright; Harrigan himself occasionally took time out from his writing and acting to contemplate what he'd done - the how and why - and to share some of his thoughts on drama and theatre. Among the big critical guns of the late nineteenth century, none carried heavier ammunition nor a surer aim on his targets than William Dean Howells. In the July, 1886, issue of Harper's Howells wrote: Mr. Harrigan accurately realized in his scenes what he realizes in his persons ; that is, the actual life of this city .... Irish-American phases in their rich and amusing variety, and some of its African and Teutonic phases. It is what we call low life, though whether it is essentially lower than fashionable life is another question .... In his own province we think he cannot be surpassed. The art that sets before us all sorts and conditions of New York Irishmen, from the laborers in the street to the most powerful of the ward politicians and the genteelest of the ladies of that interesting race, is the art of Goldoni - the joyous yet conscientious art of the true dramatist in all times who loves the life he observes .... In fact, nothing could be better than the neatness, the fineness, with which the shades of characters 319 320 RICHARD MOODY are given in his Irish people; and his literary conscientiousness is supplemented by acting which is worthy of it .... Mr. Harrigan is himself a player of the utmost naturalness, delicate, restrained, infallibly sympathetic ; and we have seen no one on his stage who did not seem to have been trained to his part through entire sympathy and intelligence. In certain moments the illusion is so perfect that you lose the sense of being in the theatre ; you are out of that world of conventions and traditions, and in the presence of the facts .... Loving reality as we do, we cannot do less than cordially welcome reality as we find it in Mr. Harrigan's comedies. Consciously or unconsciously, he is part of the great tendency toward the faithful representation of life which is now animating fiction. Howells compared Harrigan with Goldoni; others pointed to Hogarth, Balzac, and Dickens. George Edgar Montgomery writing in The Theatre (also July, 1886) detected a "distinct Zolaesque realism; a similar logical sequence." Montgomery traced the Harrigan history. First acclaimed by the newsboys, he was then adopted by the Bowery B'hoys, the Eastside shopgirls, and the common people of his neighborhood; the uptowners who normally never traveled below Union Square di~covered him, and finally the dramatic critics and literary men recognized his genius. And his audience expanded because Harrigan's ambition did not "stop short at the climaxes of broken heads, horseplay, and copious dust"; he probed the low life of the town with humorous accuracy, never deviating from the truth, though maintaining a friendly freedom with facts. Richard Harding Davis, writing in Harper's Weekly (21 March 1891), speculated that there were only a few hundred people in New York who did not know and love Edward Harrigan. And for good reason : he had been reproducing and delineating characters from the life of the city, authentic, living men and women, providing New Yorkers a mirror of their times. "As a historian of the war of the races Mr. Harrigan makes no mistakes" and has no equals. With the door opened by Howells, reporters solicited Harrigan's thoughts on the theatre, on his writing, on his success; editors tempted him with a conspicuous byline if he would oblige with an...