John Adams, Royall Tyler, and Woody Allen

Today Bryan is lecturing on Royall Tyler’s 1787 play The Contrast, which he discusses in the context of anitheatrical prejudice in the early national period. (Click here for the online illustrated edition at the University of Virginia.)

Last week, I quoted from the introduction to Kenneth Jackson and David S. Dunbar’s anthology of New York writing, Empire City: New York Through the Centuries.

In 1624 when the Dutch first set up a trading post on Manhattan, their goal was not to convert the Indians or to practice a special religion but to make money. Visiting Manhattan in 1774 from Puritan Boston, John Adams expressed disdain: ‘I have not seen one real gentleman, one well-bred man, since I came to town. They talk very loud, very fast, and altogether. If they ask you a question, before you can utter three words of your answer, they will break out on you again and talk away.’

Jackson and Dunbar feel the need to rebut Adams.

Poor breeding? Perhaps. But New Yorkers established the first chamber of commerce in the Western Hemisphere in 1768, developed the first regularly scheduled shipping service in 1818, built the Erie Canal by 1825, and established the nation’s dominant stock exchange by the 1840s.

Adams rears his head as a sourpuss again in Bryan’s lecture. He refuses to give his approval to the courtship between Royall Tyler and his daughter, Abigail, nicknamed “Nabby.” In the introduction to play in the edition that we use, Early American Drama, Jeffrey H. Richards writes:

As a college student at Harvard, he participated in illicit theatricals with his classmates, complete with guards posted to warn of coming proctors, but with the intervention of the Revolution, further opportunities for such rash behavior would be few. He wrote poems and studied law and hoped by that combination to earn the good graces of one of his countrywomen, Nabby Adams, daughter of John Adams, his reputation in some circles as a frivolous youth damned Tyler in the father’s eyes.

Note that the Wikipedia entry for Nabby (to which we linked above) offers a different story. Nabby ultimately married a man ten years her senior Colonel William Stephens Smith, her father’s secretary. The wedding took place  in London on June 12, 1786. The Contrast was published the following year, and Bryan notes the similarities between Smith and the play’s Colonel Manly. Perhaps the play is more ambivalent about Manly than readers and audiences sometimes assume.

We were fortunate enough to see a production of Tyler’s play at the Metropolitan Playhouse last fall. Click here and especially here for Bryan’s thoughts on that production.

For us, The Contrast serves as a commentary on New York’s social theatricality, a point well captured by Luc Sante in Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York:

Manhattan was a theater from the first. When, early on, it was a walled city, and further surrounded by a forest of masts, it enclosed in its ring a small universe. This enclosure is the model of cities as it is of theaters, as can be seen when one compares old representations of fortress cities and of Greek amphitheaters and later theaters like the Globe. In Manhattan, social stratification followed a course in which the waterfront and the area environs near it became undesirable, became like the galleries [in theaters], while the dead center, Fifth Avenue, would be the orchestra stalls. In Manhattan, social stratification followed a course in which the waterfront and the area environs near it became undesirable, became like the galleries [in theaters], while the dead center, Fifth Avenue, would be the orchestra stalls. . . . The other answer has to do with the street that runs diagonally up the island—Broadway—putting itself on display and carrying in its train its dark twin, the Bowery. (pp. 71-72)

The Contrast is also the first of the texts that belong to the tradition of manners, which in our course will include not only this week’s plays, but also (at least) the novels by James, Cahan, and Wharton. Bryan illustrates the interplay of ideas about social theatricality, manners, and the experience of theater-going in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with two film clips: the opening sequence of Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of The Age of Innocence (1993) and this scene from Woody Allen’s Love and Death (1975). These scenes underscore — one more humorously than the other — the significance of a long tradition of theater audiences watching themselves as much as, or more than, the actors on stage. The relevant scene here begins at 52 seconds in.