Hey there!
I’m Mike Rugnetta, this is Crash Course Theater, and today we’re continuing our
discussion of nineteenth-century American theater with a look at some upsetting parts
of our theatrical past.
In the nineteenth century, race and racism contributed to a unique and troubling performance
culture, which helped create and spread racist stereotypes that are still with us today.
And just - to be super clear - the stuff we’re talking about in this episode is … tough.
The images are upsetting, and much of the language is … fraught, to put it lightly.
So, just an upfront content warning, so you know what’s coming up.
While some theatrical versions of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” contributed to the abolitionist
cause, other melodramas used racial themes to titillate white audiences and even to support
slavery’s values.
America’s original theatrical form, the minstrel show, reinforced ugly caricatures
even as it made some African-American performers stars.
We’re also going to look at the history of African-American theater, which is a tradition
as old as America.
[INTRO MUSIC]
Before we get into all the disturbing details
about minstrel shows, we should take a moment to note that there’s a vital tradition of
African-American theater actually made by African-Americans that’s almost as old as
America itself.
In 1816, William Alexander Brown, a former ship’s steward turned theatrical impresario,
opened the African Grove Theatre in New York.
The theater’s resident company, the African Company, was all-Black.
They played to mostly Black audiences with a Shakespeare repertory: “Richard III”
and “Othello” were particularly popular.
Brown also wrote original plays: “The Drama of King Shotaway” was performed at the Grove
in 1823.
This play about a revolt against British colonists on the island of St. Vincent was probably
the first play by an African-American performed in the U.S. Sadly, it has been lost.
Unsurprisingly, the African Grove Theatre faced hostility:
on at least one occasion, rowdy white spectators,
hired by a rival theater, caused trouble,
yelling during performances, and threatening to riot.
Other times, neighbors objected to the “noise” at the theater, complaining that the conduct
of the patrons was unacceptably boisterous.
The theater was shuttered in 1823.
One young actor who got his start at the African Grove was Ira Aldridge.
Faced with bigotry and a lack of available roles, he left New York as a young man,
sailing for England.
There, he became a widely celebrated performer of classical roles, playing Othello and the
rebel slave Oronoko.
Sometimes he also acted in whiteface, playing Shylock, Richard III, and King Lear.
He toured Europe, and was especially popular in Russia and Prussia.
The first published play we have by an African-American
author is by William Wells Brown,
a leading abolitionist thinker and lecturer.
Brown was an escaped slave, and his 1858 play “The Escape” is partly autobiographical.
In it, two slaves, Melinda and Glen, who have different masters, marry in secret.
Each is horribly mistreated, and together they plan a daring escape to Canada.
But Wells Brown’s characters are “escaping” from the American nineteenth-century theater, too.
The play shakes off nineteenth-century theatrical tropes and racist stereotypes.
Wells Brown transforms minstrel songs, which we’ll discuss very soon, into hymns of freedom.
The ideas behind the “The Escape”—that African-Americans are fully human,
that they resent their masters,
and also that the dominant genres of nineteenth-century American theater
were complicit in racist ideology—
were incendiary enough that “The Escape” wasn’t performed in Brown’s lifetime.
He did read from it himself at abolitionist
rallies, though, which must have been amazing—giving
an African-American voice and perspective to a theatrical moment featuring almost entirely
white performers and playwrights.
Sadly, nuanced or thoughtful portrayals of African-Americans were far from the norm.
African-Americans were largely subjects of caricature,
”comedy,” and racism in American theater.
The minstrel show was a wildly popular and deeply racist nineteenth-century genre
created by white Americans.
It allowed other white Americans to laugh at stereotyped portrayals of African-Americans.
Initially, it was performed by white actors in blackface, a kind of theatrical makeup
that used burnt cork, grease paint, and even shoe polish to darken the skin, and other
makeup to exaggerate the eyes and lips.
Later on, when African-Americans began to perform in minstrel shows, they had to use
blackface, too, transforming themselves into the caricatures that white audiences demanded.
The genre is usually credited to T.D. Rice or “Daddy” Rice, a New York actor who
sang and danced in blackface in variety entertainments.
He styled himself as an “Ethiopian delineator,”
created a character named Jim Crow, and popularized
the song “Jump Jim Crow.”
In the late nineteenth century, racist laws enforcing segregation in the Southern United
States became known as Jim Crow Laws, after Daddy Rice’s character.
Rice wasn’t the first white man to use blackface in America.
Blackface servant characters had appeared on U.S. stages since the eighteenth century—
and let’s not forget Othello.
But Daddy Rice was the first to become famous for it, even taking his act to London.
He later became even more famous for playing Uncle Tom in a pro-slavery version of “Uncle
Tom’s Cabin,” which we’ll discuss in a minute.
For a while, there was a statue of him, in blackface, on Broadway.
Performers such as Al Jolson performed on Broadway
in blackface well into the twentieth century.
Initially, performances like Rice’s were solo acts, but in the 1840s,
minstrelsy formalized and became a team effort.
In the first act, the troupe would gather onstage in a semicircle, with a figure named
Tambo, who played the tambourine, on one end, Bones, who played the bone castanets, on the
other, and an Interlocutor in the middle.
They would tell jokes and sing songs,
some of which were originals, some derived from folk songs.
We still have some of these songs today, like “Oh, Susannah,”
though the lyrics have been… adjusted.
The second act, the olio, was devoted to variety entertainment,
and usually included a nonsense speech delivered in dialect.
The third act, or afterpiece, was a burlesque of a popular play
or a scene depicting idealized plantation life.
Performers began to specialize in certain character types, such as the Mammy, the Buck,
the Zip Coon, the Jezebel, and the Pickaninny.
Some of the shows were grotesque and profane, others were sanitized.
Some shows even tried to unite Blacks and white working-class audiences as
mutual victims of oppression.
But as the Civil War approached, most shows encouraged white animosity and presented
happy visions of plantation life.
Minstrel shows promoted a racist image of African-Americans as childish, dim, and lazy.
This continued even as African-Americans began to perform them, and were expected to conform
to the expectations of white audiences.
But these African-American minstrel shows also introduced new songs and characters and
eventually led to African-American musical plays.
Though minstrel shows waned in popularity
in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth,
the minstrel tradition continued—in literature, on Broadway, in silent film, in not-so-silent
film, on the radio, in cartoons, and even on early television shows.
Melodrama was big everywhere, but only America decided to link melodrama and the minstrel show.
This gets us “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,”
stage adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel,
with frank discussions about the horrors and complexities of slavery,
and which depicts slaves–shockingly, at the time– as people, with relationships, and emotions.
Also, yes, adaptations.
Plural.
The novel, serialized in 1852, set off such a craze that everyone
with a pen and some actors tried to stage it.
some versions were staged before the serial had even finished!
Harriet Beecher Stowe didn’t approve any versions, by the way... because she was a Puritan.
And what do Puritans hate? Theater.
But later she went to see the standard version, George Aiken’s, and she seemed to like it,
especially Topsy.
Some of these adaptations, like Aiken’s, were faithful takes on the novel,
zhuzhed up with stagecraft to make Eliza’s river escape to New France
—sorry, Canada, Canada—more exciting.
Others were just an excuse for white characters to put on blackface and dance around,
undermining the novel’s humanism.
Some of the versions were explicitly pro-slavery, and titles were changed to stuff like
“Happy Uncle Tom” or “Uncle Dad’s Cabin.”
These versions came to be called Tom shows,
intercutting scenes from the book with circus and spectacle.
Because everyone knows that what “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” really needed was a dog act.
Also in one case, a crocodile act.
Tom shows, even the more abolitionist ones, relied heavily on minstrelsy and stereotyped
character, and, to be fair, so does the novel.
In their heyday, there were literally hundreds of Tom shows crisscrossing the country.
Also, just to be clear, African-American roles in plays like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, even
versions without a silly name, were played by white actors throughout
the nineteenth century, and even sometimes into the twentieth.
We’re going to look at one more melodrama today, Dion Boucicault’s 1859 play “The Octoroon.”
This play tried to have it every which way when it comes to slavery.
And “The Octoroon” was second in popularity only to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
Take it away, Thought Bubble: George Peyton has inherited a plantation,
but it has to be sold.
The evil and Irish Jacob McClosky wants to buy it.
Meanwhile, George is attracted to Zoe, his uncle’s daughter,
who his uncle had with one of his slaves.
But Zoe refuses to marry George, admitting
she is an octoroon, a woman who is one-eighth black.
That would make their marriage illegal.
The villainous McClosky is also attracted to Zoe.
She rejects him, because McClosky is the worst.
So he’s like, I’m totally going to buy you.
There’s also a whole subplot involving a murder and a letter and a camera and a Native
American but we only have 300 words in this here Thought Bubble.
There’s a slave auction, and George is shocked to find Zoe up on the platform.
Turns out his uncle forgot to free her.
McClosky outbids everyone and buys Zoe.
Which is upsetting!
Before McClosky can take her away, he’s arrested for murder.
But he escapes!
And blows up a steamboat!
But then he’s killed by Wahnotee, the Native American character.
But that news comes too late for Zoe, who has already taken poison.
She dies as George kneels beside her.
Now maybe you were thinking—wow, how about that steamboat!?
But also isn’t melodrama supposed to end happily?
You’re not alone.
Audiences loved the steamboat.
But not the ending.
They wanted Zoe and George to go somewhere they could make their love legal.
Was the unhappy ending a way to emphasize the cruelty of slavery or a way to reassure
an audience who might have been made queasy by an interracial marriage?
Unclear!
Thanks, Thought Bubble.
When the play came to London, English audiences also REALLY wanted the ending changed.
For a while, Boucicault refused, writing,
“Had this girl been saved, and the drama brought to a happy end,
the horrors of her position, irremediable from the very nature
of the institution of slavery, would subside into the condition
of a temporary annoyance.”
This doesn’t mean that Boucicault was anti-slavery.
He had previously written that “The Octoroon” would instead include
“sketches of slave life, truthful I know, and I hope gentle and kind.”
This was supposed to be in contrast to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,”
which he thought had treated slavery too harshly.
Eventually, he caved and gave the play a happily-ever-after
conclusion where Zoe doesn’t die.
American theater, like American society, still hasn’t shaken off the legacy of minstrelsy,
the portrayal of racist stereotypes, or kowtowing to the expectations of intolerant audiences.
The entertainment industry, in many respects, has come a long way.
But it still has very, very far to go.
And many powerful recent works of theater and film have shown just how much we carry
the legacy we’ve discussed…. with us today.
We’ll see you next time when we’re off to France for naturalism.
Until then… curtain.
Crash Course Theater is produced in association with PBS Digital Studios.
Head over to their channel to check out some of their shows, like The Art Assignment.
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