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Astor Place before Starbucks

January 31, 2011 in City on Stage, Writing New York by Bryan | 3 comments

As many times as I’ve given my lecture on nineteenth-century theater in Writing New York, I’ve almost never been able to pace it right to conclude as planned with the Astor Place Riots, which is probably how I came to write this post last year.

I’ll supplement my rushed conclusion from today, then, with a video from a blog I’ve only recently discovered, Little Bytes of the Big Apple, written by novelist Robert Westfield. His video episode on Astor Place’s history covers much of the ground I would have at the end of lecture today and also usefully illustrates a few places I mentioned, including Colonnade Row. Enjoy!

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19th-century Theater Round-up

January 30, 2011 in City on Stage, Writing New York by Bryan

Monday morning we’re wrapping up the opening unit of our Writing New York lecture, which starts us off with the early New York stage. From last week’s discussion of Royall Tyler’s The Contrast in the post-Revolutionary city, we’ll turn to the emergence, by the mid 19th century, of theaters catering to specific class interests. We’ll focus in particular on Anna Cora Mowatt’s 1845 play Fashion and Benjamin Baker’s 1848 play A Glance at New York. The former was designed for middle-class audiences, written by and starring a popular actress and playwright who devoted a lot of energy to demonstrating that middle-class women could act without compromising their character. Baker’s play was a working-class play written by a working-class actor and designed for working-class audiences.

We’ve written previously about these plays and some of their contexts. So let this post serve to point you in the direction of prior discussions. Baker’s Glance is famous for introducing to the stage the character of Mose, the prototypical Bowery B’hoy. A couple springs ago I wrote about Mose as the subject of studies by the pioneering American folklorist Richard Dorson, who treated the flannel-clad fireman as something like New York’s own version of the legendary Paul Bunyan. I also wrote briefly about the nineteenth-century leisure spot Vauxhall Gardens, where Baker’s play concludes, noting its significance as contested ground in class struggles at mid century. Vauxhall Gardens stood between Broadway and Astor place and was bisected when John Jacob Astor developed Lafayette Place as a tony street for some of Manhattan’s wealthiest families, including his own. The remnants of those luxurious settings are the Public Theater, formerly the Astor Library, and Colonnade Row, the deteriorating Greek Revival residences now partially owned and occupied by the Blue Man Group. Not far from either of these sites, the Astor Place Opera House witnessed one of the most famous theater riots in the nineteenth century, which also provided the first occasion for national guardsmen to fire on and kill American citizens who were protesting what they saw as the aristocratization of the American theater.

We’ve written less here about Anna Cora Mowatt. Maybe I’ll have a chance to remedy that this over the next few days. In the meantime, here’s a nice introduction to her career, along with her page on the Perspectives in American Literature site. And here’s a review of the Metropolitan Playhouse’s 2003 revival of Fashion.

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The contrasts in The Contrast

January 26, 2011 in City on Stage, Writing New York by Bryan | 5 comments

We’ve written here before about Royall Tyler’s 1787 play The Contrast, which was the first American play to be professionally staged. Set in Manhattan following the Revolution, the play takes Sheridan’s comedies of manners as a model for its send-up of New York society. I have a brief treatment of the play in my essay “The City on Stage” in our Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York, in which I write about comparisons the play sets up between the theater and urban life, particularly in moments we would recognize as metatheatrical. (For another take on metatheatrical commentary in the play, see John Evelev’s 1996 essay in Early American Literature; institutional subscription required for that link.)

The most exemplary of the play’s many metatheatrical moments involves a visit to the theater by Jonathan, a “waiter” (not a servant, he explains!) to the play’s ostensible hero, the grave Revolutionary War veteran Colonel Manly. Jonathan is the prototypical “Stage Yankee,” a bumpkin character that appeared in American drama and folklore through the nineteenth century. Jonathan and his successors are bewildered by the city but often enjoy some form of moral triumph in the end, either by virtue of native simplicity or what we might call farm-smarts. Think Forrest Gump but from Western Mass; another descendant, the “Stage West Texan,” is the character George W. Bush created for The American Presidency. (Oh, wait … that was real life?)

In Tyler’s play, Jonathan visits the John Street Theater but thinks he’s attending church. (His minister had warned him against the theater and he never would have gone in had he known where he really was.) When the curtain goes up, he assumes he’s somehow peeping on the family next door.  He describes his visit later to two New York servants, Jenny and Jessamy, who have a lot of fun at his expense: “Did you see the family?” Jenny asks, in on the joke.

JONATHAN: Yes, swamp it; I see’d the family.
JENNY: Well, and how did you like them?
JONATHAN: Why, I vow they were pretty much like other families—there was a poor, good-natured curse of a husband, and a sad rantipole of a wife.
JENNY: But did you see no other folks?

To this point Jonathan has inadvertently been responding to opponents of the theater who believed that the stage was not like life. Now, again without realizing it, he begins to describe Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, the play he mistook for the family next door. Sheridan’s play had been performed at the John Street Theatre only weeks before Tyler’s:

JONATHAN: Yes. There was one youngster; they called him Mr. Joseph; he talked as sober and pious as a minister; but, like some ministers that I know, he was a sly tike in his heart for all that. He was going to ask a young woman to spark it with him, and—the Lord have mercy on my soul!—she was another man’s wife.
JESSAMY: The Wabash!
JENNY: And did you see any more folks?
JONATHAN: Why, they came on as thick as mustard. For my part, I thought the house was haunted. There was a soldier fellow, who talked about his row de dow, dow, and courted a young woman [HERE HE’S TRANSITIONED INTO AN ACCOUNT OF THE SECOND PLAY, THE POOR SOLDIER, ALSO ON THE BILL AT JOHN STREET ONLY WEEKS EARLIER]; but of all the cute folk I saw, I liked one little fellow–
JENNY: Aye! Who was he?
JONATHAN: Why, he had red hair, and a little round plump face like mine, only not altogether so handsome. His name was—Darby;–that was his baptizing name; his other name I forgot. Oh! It was Wig—Wag—Wag-all, Darby Wag-all; . . .

Okay. Let’s pause here for a moment. The layers of inside joking here are multiple: not only is the audience at the John Street theater listening to a character’s description of the audiences and performers in the John Street theater, but also to a discussion of plays staged only a few weeks prior to The Contrast’s debut, and starring the same company of actors. These jokes culminate in Jonathan’s description of “Darby Wag-all”: both characters—Jonathan in The Contrast and Darby in The Poor Soldier—were played by the actor Thomas Wignall; when Jonathan proclaims that Darby “is a cute fellow,” in other words, the actor is talking about his own appearance in a previous role.

Jonathan’s theater escapade helps us catalog the play’s many “contrasts”: country vs. city, republican virtue vs. urban or European luxury, sentiment vs. politeness, revolutionary gravity vs. frivolity, democracy vs. aristocracy, veteran vs. beau, age vs. youth, New England vs. New York, marriage vs. seduction, patriarchal authority vs. filial insubordination, American homespun vs. imported European fashions.

All these things, as you’d expect, boil down to the most obvious contrast in the play: between American patriotism and the unhealthy residue of British manners and fashion—between Manly, Maria, Jonathan, and country homespun on one side and Dimple, Charlotte, Jessamy, and imported British tastes and behaviors on the other.

But we’re offered yet another contrast here that seems to undermine the ones I’ve already identified: the contrast between a sophisticated theater audience (represented by Jessamy and Jenny in the scene quoted above) and a bumbling rube, which is to say the contrast between theater-goers and the theater’s ignorant opponents. To the extent that Jonathan functions as an audience member he is a rather naive one, the object of multiple audiences’ scorn. Jonathan continually misreads the city: he assumes Jessamy is a member of congress, a brothel is a church, a prostitute is a deacon’s daughter, and the stage is a neighbor’s house. He’s been trained, also, to think of the theater as “the devil’s drawing-room” and actors as “wicked,” attitudes that place him at odds with the very form Tyler has taken up, and dangerously so, considering the theater was still illegal in his native Boston.

Recognizing the ways in which the play’s alignment with its own sophisticated audiences undermines some of its republican fervor, it’s easier to see ways in which the play savages its ostensible hero and heroine, Manly and Maria, as well as Jonathan, who has often been understood as an emblem of “native worth.” There’s something a little more rebellious at play in The Contrast than has sometimes been noticed. It comes out in the humor, which was much more evident when I saw the play performed at the Metropolitan Playhouse a while back than it ever had been when I’d read and taught it from the page. Here’s part of what I wrote here after seeing the performance:

Cold War critics, this production suggests, were completely snookered by Colonel Manly’s patriotic platitudes. He seemed boring or priggish, sure, but no one really talked about him as the object of Tyler’s satire in the same way Tyler was clearly sending up the Anglophile fops and coquettes, Dimple and Charlotte, or the class-climbing servants, Jessamy and Jenny. But in this production — and I suspect in the original as well — Manly and his sentimental counterpart Maria are shown to be as much the objects of Tyler’s satire as anyone else in the play. Manly’s declamations (as delivered by Rob Skolits) are meant to ring hollow and self-serving — to the point of hilarity, given his inability to see his own blind devotion to republican cliche. Maria Silverman’s performance as Maria leaves no doubt (from her first entrance singing a popular tune about a stoic Indian chief — her model of manly behavior) that Tyler was lampooning her rather than making her a virtuous alternative to the foolish, fashion-obsessed Charlotte, played pitch-perfect by Metropolitan veteran Amanda Jones. The Metropolitan’s cast and director have unlocked a hilarious streak in this play too long overlooked by literary scholars.

It’s a subtle humor that has more sympathies with New York’s precariously polite urban society than scholars have previously tended to notice.

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Boulevard of Broken Dreams

January 13, 2011 in City on Stage, Pop Culture, Uncategorized by Cyrus | 2 comments

Last week my J-Term class went to the Whitney Museum to see the exhibition Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time, which is on display through April 10. In our course, Hopper represents one strain of what William B. Scott and Peter M. Rutkoff call “New York Modern,” a realist strain that is distinct from the avant-garde formal experimentations of “modernism” and his links to the vernacular free verse of Walt Whitman, the painting of Thomas Eakins, and the prose of Edith Wharton, among others. We made explicit connections to Whitman and Eakins as well as to the verismo of Puccini’s 1910 opera La Fanciulla del West, which we caught at the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday.

Yesterday evening we went to see American Idiot, the Broadway adaptation of the 2004 album by the second-generation punk band Green Day. Separated in time by about four decades, Hopper and Billie Joe Armstrong, the band’s songwriter, guitarist, and lead singer, lived in different eras but they each produced art that takes a bleak view of urban modernity. Hopper’s paintings depict what E. B. White would term”the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.” Although he experienced the same crowded city streets depicted by Whitman’s poetry and by early silent films shot in New York, Hopper’s depictions of New York modernity invariably focus on lone individuals, often with their backs turned to the viewer, or individuals literally marginalized by their milieus and pushed to the margins of Hopper’s frames. In an essay from the show’s catalogue entitled “Urban Visions: The Ashcan School and Edward Hopper,” Rebecca Zurier writes, “For all the beauty and resonance of Hopper’s art, however, I would argue that its urban vision is somewhat limited. It fails to consider the ways in which cities have brought people together, both in Hopper’s time and since, and fails to take into account the complexity of the urban population.” I’d probably put it a different way: Hopper’s art deliberately limits itself in order to express an urban loneliness that exists despite the ways in which cities bring diverse peoples together.

Urban loneliness is a theme that runs throughout American Idiot as well. The narrator of the song “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” sings

I walk a lonely road
The only one that I have ever known
Don’t know where it goes
But it’s home to me and I walk alone
I walk this empty street
On the boulevard of broken dreams
Where the city sleeps
And I’m the only one and I walk alone …

The similarity between these visions isn’t accidental, because Armstrong’s song is indirectly in dialogue with Hopper’s art.

According to an interview with Billie Joe Armstrong on VH1′s Storytellers, the title of the song comes from the artist Gottfried Helnwein‘s famous reinterpretation of Edward Hopper’s iconic painting Nighthawks (1942).

Here’s Nighthawks:

And here’s Helnwein’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams, which places James Dean, Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley into Hopper’s setting:

Here’s Green Day’s video for “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”:

Frankly, I wish the video were more Hopper-like, because its images don’t seem to me to capture the loneliness depicted in the song’s lyrics: Billie Joe, after all, never does walk alone in it, because he’s always accompanied by bandmates Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool. Nor does the video capture the duplicitous promise of Hollywood that lurks behind Helnwein’s painting.

But the musical does. It’s a rich elaboration and extension of the band’s depiction of the dead-end culture of America in the Age of Bush and Beyond, made all the more poignant by the fact that even though Bush has left the scene the mark he left on the country is a scar that refuses to fade.

Getting to Know The Drunkard

October 14, 2010 in City on Stage by Cyrus

The Metropolitan Playhouse‘s tenth season is devoted to an exploration of the dynamics of stereotypes, theatrical and otherwise. This fall’s opening production, W. H. Smith’s 1844 temperance play The Drunkard; or The Fallen, Saved, makes use of theatrical stereotypes — the fallen man with the heart of gold, the sneering villain, the faithful wife, the stalwart friend and sidekick, the laughable old maid prone to malapropisms — in order to get its audience to question the validity of stereotypical thinking in the world beyond the theater.

The play’s title immediately typecasts its protagonist, whose fall into alcoholism is stipulated rather than motivated: young Edward Middleton becomes a drunkard more or less because the play requires him to become a drunkard. It isn’t a matter of growing up with alcoholic parents or any kind of childhood trauma, as far as we can tell. It isn’t a matter of an unhappy domestic situation. Edward has a convivial personality, which leads him to indulge the occasional drink, and before long he’s hiding bottles in the woods so that he can wet his whistle on the way home from the tavern. It all happens rather quickly.

The first act establishes Edward as a worthy young man, who inherits land and a cottage from his late father but refuses the entreaties of Squire Cribbs (the lawyer who is the villain of the piece) to sell the cottage for a profit. Edward doesn’t want to displace the cottage’s longtime inhabitants, Mary Wilson and her mother, who were “highly esteemed” by Edward’s father, despite the fact that they frequently had trouble paying the rent on time. Once Edward meets Mary, he falls in love with her, and at  by the end of the first act, they are married. Two scenes later, we realize that time has passed, that Edward and Mary now have a daughter, and that Edward has begun to take up the role promised by the play’s title.

Aptly named, Edward is a sort of middling fellow. He’s everyman, and the play wants us to see that alcoholism is a disease rather than a disorder: anyone can catch it, even someone as good as Edward. The play imagines drunkenness, however, as a disease that is not necessarily morally corrosive: The Drunkard asks us to disregard the attributes that we commonly associate with the type of “the drunkard.” Edward runs away from his family in a drunken fit, but Mary refuses to lose faith in him. Following him to New York City, she defends her husband  against the accusations made by the scheming Cribbs (accusations that are baseless, we are never allowed to doubt): “The only fault of my poor husband is intemperance, terrible, I acknowledge, but still a weakness that has assailed and prostrated the finest intellects of men who would scorn a mean and unworthy action.” Cribbs tries to convince Mary that Edward must have fallen prey to loose men — because all drunkards do — but Mary steadfastly refuses to believe that such a stereotype could apply to her husband. And she’s right.

In other words, the play sanitizes the life of the typical drunkard. Edward is violent enough to be believable as a drunk, but he is tricked into violence in a tavern and he isn’t allowed by the play to be violent toward his family. Moreover, he retains a self-consciousness about his behavior throughout. He is a thinking, rather than a thoughtless, drunk. We are therefore happy to see him redeemed, because the particularities of his character and behavior always make him redeemable. The play’s sleight-of-hand is to suggest that Edward is nonetheless a type — the drunkard — and that if Edward is redeemable, all drunkards are redeemable. Yes, it’s a faulty syllogism because it inverts the major and minor premises. (Instead of claiming that  “all drunks are redeemable, Edward is a drunk, therefore Edward is redeemable,” the play suggests that “Edward is redeemable, Edward is a drunk, therefore all drunks are redeemable.”) But apparently it was effective enough on stage. The play was a huge hit in Boston when it premiered, and it played in New York for a quarter-century after P.T. Barnum staged it in 1850.

There’s one other stereotype that the play overturns: the idea of New York as a den of vice and iniquity, an impersonal and heartless place. Sure, it’s the place to which Edward naturally flees once he realizes that he is a drunkard. But — improbably — it is a place where the play’s protagonists all end up within a few blocks of each other, running into one another as if they were back in their village. It’s the place where the play’s deus ex machine — the philanthropist and temperance activist Rencelaw — can work his redeeming magic. And remember, it’s in the country, not in the city, where Edward experiences his fall from grace. The city functions in the play as if it were Shakespeare’s forest of Arden — the fallen are saved and lovers are reunited. It’s something like an enchanted space of transformation. Talk about overturning stereotypes!

The production, inventively directed by Frank Kuhn , cleverly adds temperance songs performed at intervals by the whole cast and, eventually, the audience. The cast is uniformly excellent, bringing the play’s stereotypical characters to very idiosyncratic life.

The Drunkard continues at the Metropolitan Playhouse through the weekend with performances Friday at 8:00 p.m., Saturday at 3:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m., and Sunday at 3:00 p.m. The final performance features a talk by Sarah Chinn (Hunter College) entitled “Why Edward Middleton Sees Snakes: Sensationalism and the Temperance Movement.” The investigation of stereotypes continues with a staging of George Aiken’s adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Losing My Sign

June 23, 2010 in Architecture, City on Stage by Cyrus | 1 comment

Playwright Steve Willis, one of the participants in our Lost New York seminar earlier this month, alerted us to this video, a parody of Stephen Sondheim’s classic number, “Losing My Mind.” The parody (or is it an homage) is by Fred Landau, who rewrote the lyrics and performed the song.

Thinking about the issues that Ward Dennis raised for us, we ask, how are we supposed to respond to the video? Does the renaming of the theater represent some sort of loss or erasure: poor Henry Miller! Though one might suggest that poor Henry Miller was already erased — by his namesake Henry Miller. (Come on, how many of you walking by the theater assumed it was named in honor of the author of Tropic of Cancer?) Or is this an example of productively re-purposing a building and giving it new life? (NYU occasionally renames its buildings and other spaces when a new donor gives [enough] money. I’ve often wondered how that makes the old donors feel.)

Rich Rodriguez, another participant in the seminar, wrote to us: “It was kind of hard to tell, but from what I could glimpse and despite the nostalgic tone, this is the kind of restoration we would like to see more of.  It looks as if they tried to minimize the damage and change to the original facade.  But then again, I am no architect, so I am not sure.”

Click here to read about the re-dedication of the theater last March.

Passion Play Extended

May 26, 2010 in City on Stage by Cyrus

It’s a pleasure to note that the Epic Theatre Ensemble’s production of  Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play at the Irondale Center in Fort Greene has been extended an extra week and now finishes its run on June 5. I wrote about the play here earlier this month, and you can read a glowing review in the New York Times here. (You can read New Yorker critic John Lahr take on an earlier production of the play here .)

My advice: go see it if you’re interested in a riveting evening of theater.

Ruhl Reviewed

May 13, 2010 in City on Stage by Cyrus

This morning’s New York Times has a lengthy and very favorable review of the Epic Theatre Ensemble’s production of  Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play, about which I wrote last weekend. Click here to read the review.

[Photo: Kate Turnbull and Dominic Fumusa in the first act of Sarah Ruhl's Passion Play. Credit: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times]

Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play

May 8, 2010 in City on Stage, Writing New York by Cyrus

Last Thursday, I had the opportunity to see the Epic Theatre Ensemble’s vibrant production of  Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play at the Irondale Center in Fort Greene. The play dramatizes life in three villages that perform passion plays. Act I is set in a village in Northern England in 1575; Act II is set in Obergammerau in Bavaria in 1934. The final act takes place in Spearfish, South Dakota in 1969, 1984, and “the present.” The Irondale Center is located in the former Sunday School space of the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, and it’s an inspired setting for this funny, moving, and thought-provoking play.

Ruhl, a MacArthur Fellowship winner who has been nominated for a Tony Award for her latest work, In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), wrote the first two acts in the early 1990s as a pair of one-act plays, returning to the subject in 2003 when the Arena Stage in Washington, DC commissioned her to write “a play about America” (as Ruhl puts it in the “Playwright’s Note” for the current production).”I started thinking,” Ruhl writes, “how would it shape or misshape a life to play a biblical role year after year? How are we scripted? Where is the line between authentic identity and performance? And is there, in fact, such a line?

If you’re reading this and you’re currently in my American Literature I class, those would be good questions to ask as a way of thinking about Melville’s Captain Ahab. Indeed, if you’ve heard me lecture about Moby-Dick, you’ll appreciate the way in which the play dramatizes who religious discourses can be manipulated for political ends. Those of you who have heard Byran lecture in Writing New York or read his contribution to The Cambridge Companion will appreciate the play’s metatheatrical moments. (For example:  Queen Elizabeth, Adolf Hitler, and Ronald Reagan appear in the play — the first two in acts one and two respectively and then all three in the final act — and they’re played by the same male actor.)

Ultimately, the play finds much to fault in the practice of Christianity over the centuries, but it still finds hope in spirituality — particularly the spirituality that arises from the artistic imagination. (Again, worth thinking about in relation to Moby-Dick as well.)

If your interest in the play is now piqued, you can learn more about this production by watching the video below. You can also read this preview, “Sarah Ruhl’s Sunday School Lessons,” which appeared in the New York Times on April 13.

The ensemble cast is uniformly strong, and there are talk-backs after nearly every performances. The play’s run continues at the Irondale Center (85 South Oxford Street, Fort Greene, Brooklyn) until May 30. Opening night is May 12, after which (I suspect) tickets will be much harder to come by. Running time is about 3 and a half hours.

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Previously on PWHNY: Tony Kushner’s Angels in America

April 28, 2010 in City on Stage, Writing New York by Bryan

We’re nearing the end of the semester in our Writing New York class. Many years we’ve concluded with Kushner’s Angels in America. This year we still have Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker to discuss, and so this morning I don’t feel quite the relief I often do when finishing my lectures on Angels. Still, it’s one of my favorite texts we teach in this course.

We’ve built up quite a few posts on Kushner’s play over the last few years. Here are a few of the highlights: Last year Cyrus supplemented my lectures with a few additional thoughts on Kushner’s use of New York City as a setting and on the play’s engagement with cosmopolitanism (see this one, too, on that score). I’ve offered my own thoughts about the play’s conclusion, in which Prior breaks the fourth wall and blesses his audience, and a year earlier I’d written about the ways in which the play recycles a number of stories and symbols, Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain among them. (Because that post has some links that are now dead, I had to post again on the prior use of Bethesda in Godspell.) Several years ago, a highlight of our course was a guided tour of Central Park at sunset (or a tour of the sunset with Central Park as a backdrop) with our favorite ex-NYC tour guide, Speed Levitch. I provided a more detailed account of that afternoon elsewhere. It’s only indirectly related to Kushner’s play, but still important if you want to think about the ways in which Central Park has long been contested public space, something Kushner’s certainly aware of when he selects Bethesda as the setting for his final scene.

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