Staging Ground. Leslie StaintonЧитать онлайн книгу.
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.
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