The Stage Struck Yankee

The rise of the amateur theatre in nineteenth-century Prescott, the territorial capital of Arizona, is told here in vivid and loving detail, with fifty-two illustrations that include portraits of amateur actors and theatre builders, maps of the town, and photos of the theatres. The talented and dedicated actor-settlers-including Fort Whipple's Fannie Kautz, wife of the Civil War hero General August V. Kautz; and attorney Thomas Fitch, "The Silver Tongued Orator of the Pacific" who founded the Prescott Amateur Dramatic Club-lived lives that were almost as dramatic as the comedies and melodramas that thrilled the local audiences. With a scholar's eye for the relationship between people and events and a dramatist's sense of a good plot, Collins has put together a valuable history of the actors, "opera houses," and the tastes and culture of Arizona's Wild West mining town between 1868 and 1903. Of special value for those interested in territorial history but unfamiliar with the post-Civil War theatrical repertoire are the author's concise but entertaining plot summaries of plays like "Led Astray, Lady Audley's Secret, Damon and Pythias, East Lynne, Richelieu," and the outrageously funny one-act farces in which Fort Whipple's military officers and Prescott's lawyers, businessmen, mining magnates, and their talented wives and daughters took time out from the rigors of frontier life to strut and fret their hour upon the stage.

An actor, a vaudevillian, and a dramatist before he became a filmmaker, D. W. Griffith used the resources of theatre to great purpose and to great ends. In pioneering the quintessentially modern medium of film from the 1890s to the 1930s, he drew from older, more broadly appealing stage forms of melodrama, comedy, vaudeville, and variety. In Stagestruck Filmmaker, David Mayer brings Griffith’s process vividly to life, offering detailed and valuable insights into the racial, ethnic, class, and gender issues of these transitional decades. Combining the raw materials of theatre, circus, minstrelsy, and dance with the newer visual codes of motion pictures, Griffith became the first acknowledged artist of American film. Birth of a Nation in particular demonstrates the degree to which he was influenced by the racist justifications and distorting interpretations of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era. Moving through the major phases of Griffith’s career in chapters organized around key films or groups of films, Mayer provides a mesmerizing account of the American stage and cinema in the final years of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century. Griffith’s relationship to the theatre was intricate, complex, and enduring. Long recognized as the dominant creative figure of American motion pictures, throughout twenty-six years of making more than five hundred films he pillaged, adapted, reshaped, revitalized, preserved, and extolled. By historicizing his representations of race, ethnicity, and otherness, Mayer places Griffith within an overall template of American life in the years when film rivaled and then surpassed the theatre in popularity.

Historical Dictionary of American Theater: Beginnings covers the history of theater as well as the literature of America from 1538 to 1880. The years covered by this volume features the rise of the popular stage in American during the colonial era and the first century of the United States of America, with an emphasis on its practitioners, including such figures as Lewis Hallam, David Douglass, Mercy Otis Warren, Edwin Forrest, Charlotte Cushman, Joseph Jefferson, Ida Aldridge, Dion Boucicault, Edwin Booth, and many others. The Historical Dictionary of American Theater: Beginnings covers the history of early American Theatre through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1000 cross-referenced entries on actors and actresses, directors, playwrights, producers, genres, notable plays and theatres. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the early American Theater.