Читать книгу Staging Ground - Leslie Stainton - Страница 14
ОглавлениеMR. YECKER OPENS A THEATER: 1866
Six months had passed since the end of the War between the States, and Lancaster was thriving. The funerals of boys too young to die had stopped; the papers no longer published accounts of battles so ghastly they defied belief. Instead of troops, trains carried ordinary men and women back and forth to places like Philadelphia and Baltimore. Ships on the Susquehanna heaved under the weight of new merchandise: plows and threshing machines, carriages, firearms, wagons, umbrellas, cigars, hats, distilled liquors. Soon the cotton mills would be back in business and gaslights would flicker in every home in the city. Soon work would begin on a granite monument in the center of town to commemorate those who had given their lives in the terrible fight to preserve the Union. Already those brave men had begun to lapse into memory, their vibrant selves reduced to quicksilver images inside little cases their mothers and widows kept on the parlor table or carried in their pockets.
The circus came to town, and families went in throngs to see the clowns and acrobats. From time to time someone lit a gas valve under a giant balloon and rose from downtown into the blue sky over south-central Pennsylvania, while hundreds below watched in wonder. People craved amusement. They wanted to laugh at minstrel shows and see cowboys shoot Indians and hear famous actors declaim Shakespeare.
Blasius Yecker thought it might be a good time to open a theater. A small man with a round face and dark hair who spoke English with a German accent, he said little publicly about why he wanted to go into show business. He was in his early thirties. He’d come to America from Europe at thirteen, leaving his widowed mother and traveling by diligence to Paris from his Alsatian birthplace, then by train to Le Havre, then by boat across the Atlantic in the dead of winter to New York and finally to Lancaster, where he’d worked first as a farmer and miller, then apprenticed as a saddler and opened a harness shop. Now he wanted to be Barnum.
He had a petite, German-born wife and four children, soon to be seven, and they belonged to a large German community whose members attended German-language churches and sang in German choirs and drank lager at picnics in the woods on the edge of town. Yecker had fled hunger and revolution in Europe and survived a war in his adopted land, and he was an optimist. The saddlery business had prospered during the war—the demand for trunks and bridles and knapsacks ever mounting—and he now had the means to buy property. Accordingly, on November 23, 1865, he and a business partner, Hilaire Zaepfel, a former saddler turned hotelkeeper, paid $16,200 for a “three-story brick tenement” with a creamy white façade near the corner of Prince and King Streets, in downtown Lancaster. The building, Fulton Hall, was thirteen years old, although its stone foundations went back more than a century.
Behind its pale veneer, Fulton Hall was little more than an assortment of meeting rooms and a large auditorium with rows of wooden benches and a small platform at one end. Since 1852, this building had served the citizens of Lancaster as a courthouse, stage, chapel, armory, auditorium, boot camp, warehouse, meeting place, concert hall, lecture room, exhibition space, ballroom, campaign rally ground, and occasional funeral parlor. Yecker wanted to turn it into a theater, a place to see and be seen. He envisioned a wide stage and a drop curtain with scenes of Europe, tiered seats, a domed ceiling, low footlights. It’s doubtful he knew anything about Thespis or the Teatro Olimpico or London’s Globe, about the myriad ways theater had entered people’s imaginations through history and shaped civilizations and occasionally threatened governments. He simply saw a chance to make money and perhaps his mark.
Competition was scarce. One block up the street, a stereoscope belonging to the Messrs. Hambright offered fifty different views of battlefields and landscapes. There were occasional concerts by German men’s choirs and traveling singers. The Fulton had its own bookings. Two days after Yecker bought the place, a local fire company held a fair inside the hall, with flags and prizes and music by a cornet band. From an arch suspended over the stage, gas jets spelled out the company’s motto: “When Duty Calls ’Tis Ours to Obey.” Below it stood a pedestal with a statue of the goddess of Liberty cradling an American flag in the hollow of one arm. In her other arm she held a scroll inscribed with the names Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Meade, Reynolds, and Hooker.
Within the month, the famous Siamese twins Chang and Eng would play Fulton Hall on their farewell tour, together with a pair of “wild” Australian children who had reportedly been captured by gold hunters and who, according to the ads, had “long, sharp teeth” and curiously small heads.
On New Year’s Day 1866, two months after Yecker’s purchase, Fulton Hall presented a series of sixty-three tableaux based on Milton’s Paradise Lost. The spectacle had enjoyed a long run in London, including a performance at Buckingham Palace before Queen Victoria, and was said to be an ideal vehicle for teaching children “the solemn and sublime truths of man’s disobedience and fall, and God’s omnipotence.” Perhaps young Americans needed such instruction, although it’s likely the recent war had taught them plenty about man’s disobedience.
Still, it was a new era. For the first time in four years, Americans could wake on the first of January free from the cloud of battle. There were problems, of course: what to do with the nation’s newly emancipated black population, how to reunite North and South. Lancaster’s representative to Congress, Thaddeus Stevens, a Radical Republican who had often used the stage of Fulton Hall to trumpet abolition, wanted to remake the South entirely, to take land from plantation owners and distribute it to former slaves and to give every African American the right to vote. He decried the bigotry that had oppressed black men and women for two centuries and was now depriving them “of every right in the Southern states. We have joined in inflicting these wrongs,” he said.
But Stevens hadn’t long to live, and his vision of a beneficent South would die with him. Meanwhile, people north of the Mason-Dixon Line were interested in a new kind of America. The nation was pushing west. Photographs and prints brought radiant mountain vistas home to citizens in the eastern United States, and dime novels and frontier dramas captured the exploits of scouts and buffalo hunters. The Union Pacific had already reached Nebraska. In another year, General William Tecumseh Sherman would be sent west to help clear the way for trains, much as he’d cleared Georgia for federal troops. “Eastern people must not allow their sympathy with the Indians to make them forget what is due to those who are pushing the ‘frontier’ farther and farther west,” Sherman declared. In three years, rail lines would span the continent.
If some Americans believed in progress more than God, it was understandable. There were new deities to exalt: the self-made man, entrepreneurs like Yecker, exemplars of a budding plutocracy. If some Americans found greater solace in entertainment than prayer, that too was understandable. God’s hand “is amputated now / And God cannot be found,” Emily Dickinson would write. People worshipped capital and technology, sought redemption not just at church but in nature and on the stage. Why not put your faith in the giant redwoods of northern California or in a $60,000 theatrical extravaganza whose sixty-three scenes included depictions of the Creation, the Garden of Eden, Adam’s fall, and a massive spectacle in which heaven’s hosts put down a rebellion by Satan’s followers?
Hundreds of Lancastrians turned out to see the Miltonian Tableaux at Fulton Hall on the first of January 1866. Hundreds more were turned away. Inside the auditorium, which could hold a thousand, it was standing room only. The show’s popularity, wrote the Lancaster Evening Examiner, “proves the good taste and moral worth of the community in which we live.” But Blasius Yecker had a hunch his tasteful community wanted even more.
He had avoided military service himself. When Abraham Lincoln imposed a draft in 1863—the first in the country’s history—Yecker and twenty other Lancaster men had each put $50 into a common fund with the understanding that should any of them be called up, $300 would be withdrawn to buy the draftee’s way out of the army. Thus did the burden of preserving the nation pass from its older immigrants to its newest and poorest, notably the Irish, who were often dragooned into service the moment they stepped off the boat. Yecker (whose name never did appear on the long lists of the conscripted) stayed home and watched his fortunes and family grow.
He was a savvy businessman. He would eventually buy out his partner’s share of the Fulton and take over management of the theater himself, but for now, in the first months of 1866, he focused on turning their musty hall into a posh attraction. Inside the Fulton’s main auditorium, the sight lines were bad, and you couldn’t reach the stage except by walking from the back of the room to the front. Ventilation was poor, and, thanks partly to a shooting gallery upstairs and a basement full of beer and tobacco, the hall stank.
Shortly after the Miltonian Tableaux closed, Yecker hired a crew of workmen to overhaul the Fulton. They cut a new door into the rear of the building, replaced its two dingy dressing rooms with four clean compartments, tore out the dilapidated sets and rolling stage machinery, and installed modern fixtures, including footlights low enough to see over. They introduced a new ventilation system, widened the makeshift stage to fifteen feet, and exchanged the uncomfortable wooden benches in the auditorium for orchestra chairs that rose in tiers toward the lobby, so that people at the back of the room no longer had to stand or “roost” on the backs of the seats in front of them in order to see what was happening onstage.
A pair of artists from Philadelphia created twenty new pieces of scenery for the stage—ten flats and ten wings—showing landscapes, cities, parlors, and streets. But the pièce de résistance was the Fulton’s new drop curtain, for which Yecker reportedly paid $200. It featured a panorama of Venice: the Rialto and Grand Canal, Saint Mark’s Basilica, sundry palaces, gondolas and barges. Beneath it Yecker hung a quote from Byron: “Those days are gone—but Beauty still is here.” The poet was referring to Venice, but Lancastrians would have understood it to mean them. Here in this small town sixty-five miles west of Philadelphia, once the nation’s largest inland city, inside this newly refurbished hall—this theater—here too was beauty and myth, a longing for the past and a conviction that the best was still to come.
Yecker engaged a Philadelphia company under the management of actor George W. Harrison to provide nightly shows in Fulton Hall. Harrison’s was a permanent troupe of “artistes from the first-class Eastern Theaters,” not a “strolling company,” the Lancaster Intelligencer informed readers. The Evening Express assured those who might fear the idea of a theater in their midst—might fear, especially, the drunken brawls theater so often provoked, the sordid personalities it attracted—that Harrison would impose “the strictest decorum in the hall” and present “the best and most unexceptionable plays.” Months earlier, the same paper had called for an end to the “disorderly conduct of boys and young men at public exhibitions at Fulton Hall.”
Despite above-average ticket prices, Harrison drew a healthy crowd on February 10 with the first of his offerings, a comedy and two farces, preceded by an orchestral overture. Over the next week audiences grew, and reporters gushed. The Examiner and Herald: “Lancaster has never been famed for its support of the Stage, but this was owing more to the character of the actors who visited us, than to any want of inclination upon the part of the public to patronize a well ordered and respectable theater.” The Evening Express: “We are pleased to see a class of persons visiting Fulton Hall who heretofore rarely patronized similar exhibitions. These performances have thus far been entirely free from those objectionable features which are urged—and with good reason—against most of the entertainments of this character.”
In his second week at the Fulton, Harrison presented Our American Cousin, the comedy Lincoln had been watching ten months earlier when the actor John Wilkes Booth stole into his flag-trimmed box at Ford’s Theatre and shot the president below his left ear. Walt Whitman would note the paradox—that in the middle of the farce occurred “the main thing, the actual murder” of “the leading actor in the stormiest drama known to real history’s stage.”
Lancaster audiences understood the play’s significance, and perhaps for that reason a sizable crowd came out to see the show. Among them, almost certainly, were men and women who had gone to the city’s rail depot ten months earlier to glimpse Lincoln’s funeral train on its way from Washington to Illinois. All told, more than seven million Americans witnessed the train’s sixteen-hundred-mile odyssey. Lancastrians spent six hours that day draping their depot in black, and when the somber train finally pulled in, they removed their hats and bonnets and stood bareheaded, many in tears, and stared at the funeral car. Through its windows they could see Lincoln’s casket and two soldiers standing guard. The whole spectacle lasted a matter of minutes, but forty years later those who were there could describe it in detail.
“Why, if the old Greeks had had this man,” Whitman would write of the slain president, “what trilogies of plays—what epics—would have been made out of him!” But Americans didn’t need epics: they had the artifact itself, the guilty play.
In the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination, people across America had lashed out against the theater, against actors in particular, reviving prejudices that went back to Plato, who believed mimesis provoked foul thoughts and dreams. Within minutes of Booth’s lurid plunge to the stage and Shakespearean cry—Sic semper tyrannis!—audience members in Ford’s Theatre were calling for the building to be burnt and its actors killed. A Washington shopkeeper who dared to suggest that the cast of Our American Cousin was not responsible for the president’s death had his neck put in a noose. In Detroit a minister barked, “Would that Mr. Lincoln had fallen elsewhere than at the very gates of Hell—in the theater.” An Illinois clergyman announced that by going to see a play, Lincoln had forfeited God’s “divine protection.”
Actors everywhere were suspect. Booth’s brother Edwin, one of the most celebrated of American players, declared his career ended. Papers in Lancaster carried this statement: “While mourning in common with all other loyal hearts, the death of the president, I am oppressed by a private woe not to be expressed in words. But whatever calamity may befall me or mine, my country one and indivisible, has been my warmest devotion. Edwin Booth.” His assurances fell on mostly deaf ears; in the next weeks death threats poured into Booth’s New York apartment, where he remained under house arrest.
Fulton Hall stayed open after Lincoln’s assassination, even as local businesses hung black bunting from their windows and rumors circulated that John Wilkes Booth was on the run in Pennsylvania, not far from Lancaster. Within twenty-four hours of the president’s death, the Fulton presented an evening of comedy and burlesque that included both a “laughable farce” and a panorama of the recent war. Wittingly or not, those who attended the show were rendering homage to Lincoln, who had loved the theater. Even in the bleakest months of his presidency, as the number of Union dead and wounded climbed, Lincoln found time to go to plays—farces, melodramas, Irish comedies, Shakespeare. He had seen John Wilkes Booth in Richard III and other works, and he had liked the actor. Whitman marveled that so powerful a leader drew such pleasure from “those human jack-straws, moving about with their silly little gestures, foreign spirit, and flatulent text.” But Whitman too loved playgoing; he admired especially John Wilkes Booth’s late father, Junius Brutus Booth, an alcoholic rogue who had thrilled American audiences in the first half of the nineteenth century with his volcanic performances.
In a sense, Lincoln’s murder both cursed and sanctified the American theater. All faiths establish holy sites in places where significant events occurred or are presumed to have occurred, in places haunted by memory, and the secular faith of the American stage in 1865 was no different. Walk into a theater after April 14 of that year, and you beheld the setting for a crime: here were the audience, the actors, the melodrama. On the night of the actual assassination, some in the crowd thought Booth’s histrionics were part of the play. “Down in front!” people shouted when others stood to see what was happening. “Sit down!” What was real that evening? Certainly not the actress Laura Keene, who emerged from Ford’s Theatre in a yellow costume spattered with blood. Witnesses gasped: she looked like a ghost.
Harrison’s reenactment of the play that killed Lincoln drew a large crowd to Fulton Hall on February 22, 1866. Yecker must have been pleased; soon he would start filling a book with records of Fulton engagements. That same month in New York City, Edwin Booth returned to the stage in his signature role, Hamlet—a part he would later reprise at the Fulton. Passions had cooled since his brother’s capture and death the previous spring, and Edwin needed money. Despite threats from the public and attacks by the press (“Is the Assassination of Caesar to Be Performed?” the New York Herald asked), his return was a triumph, and the audience that evening showered Booth with flowers and applause. Watching him step into the light, they may have felt as Marcellus does when he sees the specter of Hamlet’s father: “What, has this thing appeared again tonight?”
Likewise at the Fulton, patrons of Our American Cousin must have felt a frisson when George W. Harrison, as Asa Trenchard, the play’s hapless Yankee hero, spoke the very words actor Henry Hawk had uttered at Ford’s just before Lincoln was shot: “Wal, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, you sockdologizing old man-trap.” Lest Lancastrians forget the horror of that moment, the Evening Express had published an account of it the day before the performance, noting how Hawk’s hilarious delivery had given way to the crack of a pistol and then chaos.
Now they were reliving the instant here in Lancaster, imagining the president in his box, the audience shouting, “Who was he?” and “Hang him!,” as the villain Booth, clad in black, leapt to the stage, and Hawk fled, afraid Booth would stab him. Later that February evening, as they made their way home along Lancaster’s gaslit streets or stopped for a glass of beer at Henry Struble’s Fulton Hall Restaurant, members of the Fulton crowd may have pondered the irony that it was an actor, of all people, who had conjured the shocking finale to the long war. As Thaddeus Stevens would observe, “In the midst of the most exquisite enjoyment of his favorite relaxation, [Lincoln] was instantaneously taken away.” That too was part of the theater’s spell.
Two weeks after Our American Cousin, the Harrison company presented Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon, the story of a mixed-blood Louisiana free woman who is sold back into slavery to save her family from debt. Harrison followed this with the antebellum hit Uncle Tom’s Cabin, well on its way to becoming the single most produced play in the history of the American theater. Slavery may have ended elsewhere in America, but it flourished onstage, and Yecker hoped to profit from it.
The novelty of his new theater soon faded, though, and by the end of Harrison’s inaugural season, in April 1866, ticket sales had plunged. One of Harrison’s actors returned for a six-day run in May, but audiences were so sparse he closed three days early. As it happened, Yecker’s fifth child was born the next day. He couldn’t afford to keep his theater dark, not even in the sticky heat of a mid-Atlantic summer, and so he improvised. In June he brought in a pair of pianists; in July, a minstrel show; in August, another acting company. For the next year Yecker kept up the pattern: theater troupes alternated with comedians, singers with magicians, lecturers, trained dogs, acrobats, and dioramas, among them the Great Lincoln Memorial Tableaux, a series of sixty “lifelike and thrilling” panoramas devoted to the late president’s memory and the pursuit, capture, trial, and execution of his killer. But audiences continued to dwindle, and the Fulton increasingly fell to local use: church fairs, commencement ceremonies, fundraisers for a monument to honor the city’s fallen soldiers and sailors.
Yecker was thirty-two and handsome, with brooding, almost melancholy eyes and dark hair, which he combed back from his face in immaculate waves. In the few photographs of him that survive, he is a model of bourgeois respectability in a tailored suit, crisp white shirt and bow tie, glistening black shoes. It’s hard to know what drove this immigrant saddler to create a theater in the middle of his adopted city. Civic pride? A thirst for adventure? The conviction that he could make money as a showman? If so, he was reckoning against the odds. A fellow nineteenth-century theater manager said he could recall “scarcely a single instance . . . of a persevering manager dying in comfortable circumstances.”
In his 1855 Autobiography, Phineas Taylor Barnum had set forth ten rules for entrepreneurial success, among them “select the kind of business that suits your natural inclinations.” Yecker, like Barnum, chose entertainment, the presentation of “varieties.” “Work at it if necessary early and late,” Barnum advised, “in season and out of season, not leaving a stone unturned, and never deferring for a single hour that which can be done just as well now.” P. T. Barnum had made a fortune in show business, largely by peddling humbug—a black woman whom he advertised as the 161-year-old former nanny of George Washington, the desiccated remains of a supposed mermaid, an African American man who dressed in a suit of black hair, grunted on cue, and shambled across the stage like a monkey. Barnum labeled him “What Is It?”
Yecker had little interest in hawking tricks, but he shared Barnum’s eye for spectacle and grasp of middlebrow taste, and both men understood the need for propriety, personal as well as professional. Yecker attended Mass on Sundays and during his first years at Fulton Hall continued to operate his harness shop, turning out bridles and martingales for his neighbors even as he tried to lure them into his theater with the promise of escape.
Fulton Hall did not tower as high as Saint Mary’s Roman Catholic Church, where Yecker worshipped. It had no steeple whose chimes pealed repeatedly through the day, as did Trinity Lutheran Church a few blocks up the street. It lacked the stained-glass windows and stately pews of the city’s Episcopal and Presbyterian sanctuaries, but Yecker’s hall did have an unmistakable grandeur. The beveled stones at the base of its façade evoked the mansions of Florence, its arched windows the lagoons of Venice, its Gothic lines the cathedrals of northern Europe. Everything conspired to lift your eyes up to the top of the building, where a gabled roof erupted in tiny crenellations pointing heavenward. “Whenever men have become skillful architects at all, there has been a tendency in them to build high,” John Ruskin had written a decade before Yecker bought his hall, “not in any religious feeling, but in mere exuberance of spirit and power—as they dance or sing—with a certain mingling of vanity—like the feeling in which a child builds a tower of cards.”
A white building in a red-brick city, a pleasure palace in a workaday world—Fulton Hall was indeed exuberant. Cross our threshold, its doors seemed to proclaim, and you will find harmony and goodwill, laughter, the strangeness of other worlds. Above all you will encounter actors, men and women possessed of a curious energy, whose resonant voices and powerful bodies recount the myths on which our lives rely. “Those days are gone,” the curtain inside Yecker’s spacious auditorium read, “but Beauty still is here.” Beauty, yes, and hope, an image of the epic future.
Here too was the ghosted past. If you were to tunnel down through Yecker’s hall, from its pitched roof through its wood floors and timber joists to the stone foundations of the building and beyond, into the earth, you would find arrowheads and clay pipes, the precolonial beginnings of the country, and if you were to dig further, into the soft, erosion-prone bedrock of this place, you would touch the skeletons of fish swimming in stone. Long before Blasius Yecker bought Fulton Hall, before the magistrates of colonial Lancaster picked this site for their jail, before Charles II granted this land—with all its “fields, woods, underwoods, mountains, hills, fenns, isles, lakes, rivers, waters, rivulets, bays and inlets”—to William Penn, long before Susquehannocks walked here in search of berries and deer, water covered the surface of this particular earth, and pale creatures glided along its currents in the dark. It was even then a place of enchantment, a penumbral world where anything could happen, and from its depths would come a continent whose immense, unstoried wilderness took your breath away.
