Melodrama a la Disney.

Click for a "mellerdrammer" starring Mickey Mouse. Watch for claptraps, stage machinery, audience participation, and standard gestures!!

Maria Marten or, Murder in the Red Barn

Contemporary drawing of The Red Barn






If not the most popular Victorian play, then certainly a close runner, Maria Marten or, Murder in the Red Barn was inspired by a real-life murder in Polstead, Suffolk in 1827. The story had all the hallmarks of melodrama: an unsuspecting woman, an upper-class deceiver, illicit sex, murder, a hidden body, and a gruesome exposure through a series of dreams. William Corder, the murderer, who lured Maria to the Red Barn, then shot and buried her, was hanged, his body flayed, and the skin used to bind an account of the murder. Broadside ballads and stage representations were an immediate consequence of the immense public interest in the case. (Visit http://music.metafilter.com/4337/The-Murder-of-Maria-Marten for one version of the song.)



1859 playbill for Murder in the Red Barn

The fictional representations of Maria and her lover fitted them to familiar characters of ingenue and heavy villain, deleting Maria's previous affair with Corder's brother and her illegitimate children (and possible child-murder). Her stepmother, only a year or so older than she, became an elderly doting mother. The maternal nightmares which led to the digging up of a decayed body were taken at face value as ghostly messages, while in real life they may have been the a subterfuge of a scorned woman. Maria's stepmother had been intriguing with William Corder and did not report any nightmares until she received word of his marriage to another woman.





















Still playing in 1928

In the 20th-century, the play continued to draw theatre audiences, and at least three silent films were made of the story, one on the site of Maria's death. In 1935, Tod Slaughter filmed a suitably creepy version, well worth watching for his claustrophobic atmosphere and his effective use of melodramatic stage conventions. Especially interesting for Victorian theatre fans is the opening scene of a period theatre company presenting the characters, ending with Death himself. The play is still performed in the UK.


Tod Slaughter as William Corder (1935)

ROMANCE IN REAL LIFE

John Maddison Morton subtitled Box and Cox as "A Romance in Real Life," signalling his parody of contemporary melodrama. Rather than heroes fighting bandits, enemy soldiers, or other villains, Morton shows two young Cockneys struggling with housing and marital problems. The setting is not a castle, island, cave or mountain retreat, but a rooming house in London. Instead of a blooming young ingenue, we have the "majestic", middle-aged widow Penelope Ann. Instead of a scheming lawyer, we have a scheming landlady. The hidden will or delayed pardon from execution meant to rush forward the action and resolve the plot(the meaningful artefact of melodrama) becomes letters from Cox's (or Box's) intended. And the stereotyped long-lost family member, identified by a birthmark or token, is rather found by the absence of a strawberry mark!

BOX AND COX FOR CHILDREN

Grace Chetwin, a children's author, was inspired by Morton's play to write Box and Cox (1990), the story of a hatter and a printer who are "always in the same place, but not at the same time." The author mistakenly believed the story to come from vaudeville so she set the story circa 1900, with charming color illustrations of Box, Cox, and Mrs. Bouncer, the landlady they both want to marry.

FEATHERING HER NEST

This is an upper-class version of the bed and bolster, with canopy, Mrs. Bouncer furnished her tenants (see picture in September 3 post). A bolster is a long cylindrical cushion, used on sofas as well as beds. Box and Cox had only one bolster between them, which Mrs. Bouncer moved from end to end to accommodate their different tastes. This bolster probably had the only feathers in the bed furniture, the mattress made of wool or straw. Feather beds were for the rich. Here is a list of London prices for a pound of feathers in 1847 (for a decent mattress, about 50 pounds were needed):



This explains the flatness Cox complains of: Mrs. Bouncer has been "tapping the mattress"! -- extricating feathers from the stuffing to sell on the street. Landladies and servants often appropriated candles, coal, grease and alcohol for their own use or to sell for extra income. Compare the street price of about ten pence for a pound of feathers with the daily pay for a matchbox maker (about 18 pence for a day's labor, figure from Henry Mayhew, 1849).

BOX AND COX PLAYBILL (1878)

BOX AND COX ILLUSTRATION

Mrs. Bouncer is summoned by two irate tenants.

From Lacy's Acting Editions.

MRS. WIGGINS' BATHING MACHINES

Box and Cox's Mrs. Wiggins made a fortune by running bathing machines in the seaside towns of Margate and Ramsgate. Bathing machines were small huts on wheels, drawn out by horses, and later by steam, into the water, where a visitor could descend into the waves with some privacy, as well as assistance from the attendants or "dippers". While beaches were segregated by gender till late in the century, observers (of both sexes) were known to stand on cliffs and balconies, using spyglasses. (This was especially intimidating in the early part of the century, when swimming was generally done in the nude.)

The bathing machine was perfected at Margate by Benjamin Beale, who added a hoop and canvas device to the exit for added seclusion. Here are some contemporary pictures of the machines:





Please read the articles here and
here to enjoy more about this this topic, and to see a delightful collection of pictures of machines and the people who used them.

COX AND BOX

Box and Cox inspired composer Sir Arthur Sullivan (later half of the Gilbert and Sullivan team)to create the musical Cox and Box or, the Long Lost Brothers with playwright F.C. Burnand. Mrs. Bouncer the landlady became Mr. Bouncer the landlord, and all events were sung. You can read more about the play and listen to the music by clicking
here.

NEW OLD THEATER PRESENTS BOX AND COX

The 1847 farce Box and Cox will be performed this September as Double the Rent! at the locations and dates listed below. Box and Cox was popular for decades; it involves a greedy landlady who rents out her room simultaneously to two boarders -- one works the day shift and one the night shift. Eventually, however, they are home at the same time...come see what happens next.



Fri, Sept 11, 7:30 pm The Old Parish House, 4711 Knox Road, College Park (near the Metro!) Tickets $5

Sun, Sept 13, Fri-Sun Sept 25-27, 8:00 pm Time and Tide Theater at the Fell's Point Visitor Center, 1724 Thames Street, Baltimore
PAY-WHAT-YOU-CAN EVERY EVENING EXCEPT SAT SEPT 26 ($15)

AMERICA-IN-PLAY TREASURES "LOST" WORKS

New Old Theater has been working to interest audiences in our dramatic heritage, so it's encouraging that last year Washington's Shakespeare Theatre Company did a reading of Dion Boucicault's London Assurance (1841) and this year's Capital Fringe Festival included a modern production of The Drunkard (1844) by W.H. Smith. Theater professionals and scholars have shown similar interest:

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

American Theater, Lost and Found
By FELICIA R. LEE
Published: March 24, 2007
When the lights went down at the TriBeCa Performing Arts Center for a series of readings earlier this week, characters like Pocahontas took the stage in new short plays with vintage twists. The works had drawn from the hugely neglected legacy of American popular drama from the American Revolution to World War I, which gave birth to many of the themes and characters that still linger in popular culture.

The audience heard Erin Browne’s “Farmer’s Quartette,” her take on the enduring American theme of the contrast between city and country. Ms. Browne’s work was “borrowed from and inspired” by Denman Thompson’s 1886 play “The Old Homestead.” Likewise, “The Next Big Thing,” by Jenny Levison, about a New York socialite who longs to adopt a baby from abroad, was inspired by “Fashion,” by Anna Cora Mowatt, an 1845 comedy about high society.

“These plays represent our shared cultural inheritance,” Lynn M. Thomson, the founder and artistic director of a project called America-in-Play, told the audience. The 10-minute plays and monologues, which were read by actors, were created over a year, Ms. Thomson said. The idea is that by reading and studying these forgotten plays, writers get a better sense of America’s common culture, which in turns enriches playwriting.

America-in-Play is one of the artist-in-residence programs at the center. Tuesday night’s reading of work by six playwrights represented the first in a series. The final two are set for Monday and Tuesday, showcasing the work of 16 playwrights who spent eight workshops studying some 50 vintage plays and delving into topics like the history of the minstrel show, the iconographic cartoons of the period and paintings from the Hudson River School.

“For a variety of reasons, we have neglected our own cultural history,” Ms. Thomson said in an interview. “American writers have struggled. It’s hard to have a rich life with no past. We need a shared cultural vocabulary to talk to each other, to discover in a new way what we share. ”

They’re not after revivals, Ms. Thomson said. “I’m talking about understanding our vocabulary and using it for new work.”

Most of the playwrights in the project had all been taught that true American drama began with Eugene O’Neill, Ms. Thomson said. They knew little or nothing of earlier work that explored archetypes like the stage Yankee or such near-forgotten genres as the race dramas of the Civil War era.

Ms. Thomson has taught, directed and developed new plays and now teaches theater at Brooklyn College. She gained some notoriety for arguing that she was owed partial authorship credit for the hit show “Rent,” on which she served as dramaturg; her lawsuit was settled in 1998.

For America-in-Play, she hopes eventually to commission full-length plays. It would be the culmination of a process that Ms. Thomson traces to 1991, when she stumbled on the old plays while working on her dissertation on George S. Kaufman at New York University.

In several dusty library boxes, she found “Columbia Readex Microprint of Early American Plays, 1831-1900.” Over the next few years, Ms. Thomson sought out other examples of early American theater. From anthologies, she already knew “The Contrast” (1787) by Royall Tyler and “Fashion,” but eventually unearthed other plays like “The Stage-Struck Yankee” by Oliver Durivage
(1847)* and “The Vermont Wool-Dealer” by Cornelius Logan (1838).

In 2005, after Ms. Thomson landed a two-year residency at the TriBeCa center to write a musical, she was also able to begin assembling the America-in-Play project. A flier went out soliciting playwrights; those responding ranged from a tenured professor to Ms. Browne, a graduate student at Columbia University.

“People are always saying theater is dead,” Ms. Browne said. “But this is making me realize how many groundbreaking things happen in theater. We read a play about the American Revolution from the British point of view; we saw recurring stereotypes about Pocahontas.”

C. S. Hanson wrote a comedy called “Falutin” about an affair between two orchestra members that is inspired by “The Vermont Wool-Dealer.”

“So many of the early plays were about a divided country — city versus country, people who looked to England,” Ms. Hanson said. “People struggled with the same issues of identity that we face now.”

One reason the past is neglected is that it’s complicated, suggested Dominic Taylor, a playwright who is also the associate artistic director of America-in-Play. On Tuesday night there was a reading of his “Literal Lineage,” in which the African-American abolitionist Maria Stewart confronts Glen, a character from “The Escape, or a Leap for Freedom,” an 1858 play by William Wells Brown.

“There are more complicated questions about race and identity than we want to confront,” said Mr. Taylor, who teaches playwriting at Bard College. “For example, blackface started in 1829 with a character named Jim Crow, and I know people who grew up in the Jim Crow South who don’t know where the phrase came from. Why perform in blackface? Why is it that minstrelsy is arguably the first American art form that gained international popularity?”

Morgan Jenness, a dramaturg who spent more than a decade at the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater and is on the board of advisers to the America-in-Play project, called the idea of new playwrights exploring this vintage material a thrilling one.

“I think it’s an exploration that is really resonant right now because the continued shifting of the U.S. identity is so crucial — who are we really?” she wrote in an e-mail message. “From the anti-Tory Revolutionary War plays of Mercy Otis Warren to the whole Philadelphia group, to the playwrights Frederick Forrest** commissioned to write roles for himself, to the pre- and post-Civil war melodramas dealing with race, to the immigrant ‘ethnic’ works of the late 19th century, all of them are key in the reflection and molding of the American identity.”

Todd London, the executive director of New Dramatists, put it this way: “Playwrights are writing plays based on types they don’t even know. It’s always good to reconnect. A novelist who writes American realistic novels would not sit down without knowing Dreiser or Hemingway.”

If you are interested in Ms. Thomson's work, you can visit the website of the organization she founded, "America-in-Play." I've added a link to the list on the left.

*This is the play New Old Theater is performing next month.
**I believe Ms. Jenness is referring to Edwin Forrest, the eminent American Tragedian who started the first playwriting contests in America, through which he found Metamora, The Gladiator, and The Broker of Bogota, extremely popular vehicles showcasing his acting strengths.

SOUVENIR PHOTO ALBUM

These photos are of a souvenir album from an 1875 performance of The Two Orphans. It was photographed by Sarony Studios, New York photographers of the more important celebrities and stars. The pictures tell a lot about acting presentation and costumes. You should be able to pick out the comic character easily; also the pathetic orphan. (It is interesting to see how large the casts were at the bigger theatres.)

Check the posture -- no one takes a neutral position with weight evenly distributed on both feet, direct frontal presentation and ramrod straight posture. The "S" curve was considered the most speaking and beautiful, and actors tried to create one with their arms and legs, and often bending their heads as well, to keep a "line of beauty" in their bodies.

Also look at the eyes: especially the nun and the low comedian. And do you see any differences in male and female carriage?

This type of acting, when done crisply and with strong intent, carries the story along and creates immediate connection between actor and audience.

PLAYS MENTIONED IN "THE STAGE STRUCK YANKEE"

The manager-and-star couple, Douglas Double and Fanny Magnet, speak to each other in allusive theatre jargon, often using play titles that reflect their situation.

The playbills here include the titles the Doubles quote. Notice the format of a typical evening at the theatre: a long play and a farce, generally, often studded with musical interludes.