Theater

Theater was a form of popular entertainment. Larger cities might have several theaters, and traveling companies would play smaller venues. The plays offered were both newly written works and revivals of old favorites and classics. The newly written works included stage adaptations of popular fiction such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The year 1860 saw productions in New York City of works by William Shakespeare including “Hamlet”, “Richard the Third”, “Romeo and Juliet”, and “Macbeth”. In addition Fitzgerald Tasistro recited “Othello” and “Hamlet” entirely from memory, each on its own evening.

Theater thrived on controversy, as it does today. In December 1859 the Winter Garden Theatre produced “The Octoroon”. The timing was either fortuitous or deliberate, opening just days after the execution of a militant abolitionist, John Brown, who had raided a federal armory in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Wild rumors about the play circulated before it opened as its subject was slavery, but the play, although intense, was more melodrama than abolitionist invective. The story involved a woman named Zoe who was born to a slave mother and a slaveholder father and whose appearance and education “places her on a footing of equality with whites”. Zoe had been wooed by a man named McCloskey, whom she had rejected. The slaveholder father died impoverished, and his estate was being sold to repay the debts. Zoe was one of the assets, and McCloskey was a prospective buyer. According to the reviewer, the “defect in the play” lay “in the fact that the serious interest outweighs the comic to the extent that there is barely a moment of relaxation permitted to the spectator.”