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BRICKBATS AND JOLLIFICATION: MASKED COERCION, COLLUSIVE POWER, AND RECIPROCAL PRODUCTIVITY IN AMERICAN VAUDEVILLE A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Patrick Robert Reynolds August 2009 © 2009 Patrick Robert Reynolds BRICKBATS AND JOLLIFICATION: MASKED COERCION, COLLUSIVE POWER, AND RECIPROCAL PRODUCTIVITY IN AMERICAN VAUDEVILLE Patrick Robert Reynolds, Ph. D. Cornell University 2009 This project establishes the crucial role vaudeville played in the legal reforms, cultural evolution, and ideological development of American Progressivism. Spectators and vaudevillians frequently embraced and promulgated the image of vaudeville as an avowedly trivial performance genre, a reputation that has lingered in crippling fashion. I employ performance reviews, records of corporate censorship, and previously unexamined protected material files, however, to demonstrate that vaudeville helped further the concerns toward social justice and economic betterment that lay at the root of American Progressivism. Beginning with vaudeville’s troubling of cultural hierarchy, this work finds vaudeville as a key agent in the creation of a highly variegated taste culture, one that frustrates the usual demarcations between the offerings of “sacred” and “popular” cultures. I argue that the performers used this admixture to critique the economic oppression symbolically enacted through ossified sacred cultural offerings. Additionally, this project focuses on the productive capacity displayed in the reciprocal relationship of live performance. Prior to the adoption of a cinematic mode of spectatorship in the consumption of variety theatre, I find, vaudeville audiences evinced a high degree of productivity during the performance. I trace the decline of this spectatorial power occasioned by the introduction of stand- alone cinema acts and turns that combined live performance with cinema. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Patrick Robert Kilby Reynolds was born in Salem, Oregon in 1970. In 1992 he graduated from Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon with a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre Arts. During his time at Linfield, he acted in, directed, and designed several productions. He was named Best Supporting Actor by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts/American College Theatre Festival in 1991 for his performance in The Jeremiah. His senior thesis was “Orson Welles as Theatrical Auteur: The Mercury Theatre’s Julius Caesar (1937).” Following graduation, he acted professionally before beginning graduate study at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He graduated from Brown with a Master of Arts in Theatre Studies in 1994. His cumulative project at Brown, completed under the direction of Don B. Wilmeth, was “Generic Dissolution in Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido.” During his study at Brown he began his scholarly work on American vaudeville. He continued this work at Cornell University, where he studied theatre history in the Theatre Studies graduate program. During leave from graduate work at Cornell, he acted professionally, served as an Acting/Directing Fellow with the Cornell Interactive Theatre Ensemble, and was the directing mentor for Ordinary People, a justice theatre collective. Subsequently, he was Acting Chair and Visiting Assistant Professor at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Scores of librarian, archivists, and research staff members have made this project possible. In particular, I am indebted to those folks at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin; the Harvard Theatre Library at Harvard University; the University of Iowa’s Art Library; the New York Public Library; the Library of Congress; and the University of Southern California. Don B. Wilmeth, who worked tirelessly to promote serious inquiry into American popular entertainments during his several decades in the Brown University theatre program, first sparked my interest in vaudeville through his loving rigor in coursework and private discussion. J. Ellen Gainor read countless drafts of seemingly endless chapters with an incredibly discerning eye. Her catholic scholarly interests—spanning ballet, Shaw, and Greenwich Village culture—have often challenged this project beyond my own skills. I am fortunate to have had her as my adviser. David Bathrick and R. Laurence Moore also contributed their keen minds to many questions raised in the chapters that follow. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to benefit from the gentle probing and profound decency of the late Joel Porte. A renowned scholar, he was a better man. My own family, particularly my mother and father, have been of invaluable support during the research and writing of this dissertation. I would also be remiss if I did not acknowledge the support of St. Luke’s Lutheran Church, Pastor Rick Bair, David Feldshuh, Marie Morris, Eastern Mennonite University, Heidi Winters Vogel, David Vogel, Phil Grayson, Erin West, Bruce Levitt, Martha Dewey, Annie Frazer, the Telluride Association, Michelle Milne, Jane Barnette, Dave Robertson, Larissa Kokernot, Debbie Hansen, Sharon Tregaskis, and Jerry Holsopple. Finally, not a page would have been written without the friendship and advice of Richard Canedo, who has forgotten more about vaudeville than E.F. Albee ever knew. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Biographical Sketch iii Acknowledgements iv Preface vi Chapter 1 1 Chapter 2 98 Chapter 3 200 Chapter 4 276 Conclusion 358 Appendix 377 Works Cited 378 v PREFACE Finding that Noah Webster was not “as well posted on things theatrical as he was on most every other subject,” Will Cressy, noted vaudeville actor and sketch author, suggested the lexicographer missed a vital vaudeville phrase: “putting it over.” This ability to instantaneously “cause an audience to see, understand, comprehend, and appreciate the intention and meaning” of even the briefest jot of performance, Cressy held, “is an absolute necessity in vaudeville. … If [a performer] does not possess this quality, the probabilities are that he will never get into vaudeville. And if he does, he will get out much quicker than he got in.” The veteran performer conceptualizes the skill of putting a moment over as the sole characteristic that binds otherwise disparate acts together, the element that joins juggling dogs and Shakespearean monologists under the mantle of American vaudeville performance. During an era riven along fault lines of gender, class, race, and ethnicity, vaudeville’s prizing of putting it over also flowers as an embrace of the most egalitarian of stage connections. “There is not a nationality in the world” absent from the vaudeville stage, Cressy holds, further noting that “vaudeville entertainers of to-day come from every class.” Moreover, his ability of instantaneous and successful self- commodification functions for Cressy as a characteristic almost wholly lodged within the performer, divorced from any consideration of the appeal or quality of the material. Indeed, the worst material, he argues, “cannot hold [the vaudevillian] back.”1 Cressy’s argument contains three strains of approaching the cultural and artistic phenomenon that was vaudeville, each of which has, in its fashion, limited a 1 Will M. Cressy, “Putting it Over,” Selected Vaudeville Criticism, ed. Anthony Slide (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1988) 218-322. vi nuanced appreciation of the genre’s force and importance. The foundation of vaudeville’s success, to follow the lines of Cressy’s formulation, was almost entirely due to the performer’s ability to engage the audience through sheer dint of personality. Beggared by the passing decades, the ephemera of such a connection fades beyond the fumbling grasp of the historian into the fossilized ether of memoirs and tantalizingly suggestive newspaper reviews. Taking into account vaudeville’s massive economic and cultural presence from the late 1880s though the early 1920s, it would be fair to say that historians agree less about vaudeville in performance than about any other genre of American live performance, a stunning fact for a theatre whose heyday intersected with the high point of American reportage and the birth of cinema and radio. Yet Cressy also helps promulgate an image of vaudeville in which what Mikhail Bakhtin would term the content-aspect of the various pieces were of little import. If even the worst material could be put over successfully by a skilled vaudevillian, notable performances become suspect in regard to their literary excellence, socio-critical acuity, or performance expertise. While celebrating Charlie Chaplin’s unerring dissections of classism and trumpeting Ida Tarbell’s faithful rendering of the modern life, such critics neatly fence in the era’s most popular entertainment as a mere palliative to the otherwise harried Progressive Era mind. Finally, Cressy highlights one’s ability to put over an act as essential to retaining employment. His understandable absorption with finding work as a performer should not be surprising in a medium that often hired employees by the week. Much of the surviving personal and corporate records echo time and again this fixation on the economics of the genre. Vaudeville, partly defined by is adoption and refinement of a corporate structure and its life-long embroilment in labor discord, made no claim to eschewing box office concerns for the greater good of art. Yet vii neither were all decisions driven