City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2-2016 Animal Performance in Big-Time Vaudeville Catherine M. Young Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/775 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] ANIMAL PERFORMANCE IN BIG-TIME VAUDEVILLE by CATHERINE YOUNG A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Theatre in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York, 2016 ii © 2016 CATHERINE YOUNG All Rights Reserved iii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Theatre to satisfy the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ______________ ____________________________________ Date David Savran Chair of Examining Committee ________________ ____________________________________ Date Jean Graham-Jones Executive Officer ____________________________________ Maurya Wickstrom ____________________________________ James F. Wilson Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iv Abstract ANIMAL PERFORMANCE IN BIG-TIME VAUDEVILLE by Catherine Young Adviser: David Savran Animal vaudevillians have been neglected by academic accounts of vaudeville. Drawing on the rapidly proliferating and highly interdisciplinary field of animal studies, this dissertation combines archival research and cultural theory to fill an important gap in our understanding of how animal bodies and images circulated during the vaudeville era. Taking up Nicole Shukin’s notion of animal capital as both animal sign and substance circulating in cultures of capital, I argue that vaudeville animal acts theatricalized animal capital for US citizen-consumers and often circulated animalized capital via racist ideologies and performance modes. Theatre bookers balanced their reliance on animal acts with fears of diminishing vaudeville’s ambitions for refinement and this tension is clear in the marketing materials for the animal acts. Vaudeville’s animal acts both destabilized and reified important categories of child/adult and lowbrow/middlebrow. Contemporary ethical debates about animal welfare resonate with critiques from animal activists who wanted performing animals removed from vaudeville. These acts influenced and were influenced by circus, melodrama, and even newly forming fields of scientific inquiry. Primate and canine acts mobilized associations with evolution and coevolution, theatricalizing the mysteries of human origins. Animal vaudevillians were much more than diverting novelties shoved at the end of shows for audience members who chose to stay in their seats. Animal vaudevillians’ fur, feathers, and anthropomorphic antics created discourses of animality that mediated audience members’ own humanity and embodied a simultaneous ambivalence and nostalgia for nature in the increasingly urban and industrial United States. v Acknowledgements I’ve daydreamed about the pleasure of filling this page space for years. Adequately thanking the people who have supported my research and labor is a precious delight I do not take lightly. Thank you to the committee members at the Graduate Center who gave my life a radical new direction by offering five years of fellowship funding, and those who continued supporting my research in the form of a Doctoral Student Research Grant and Dissertation Fellowship. These awards made it possible to study theatre in an unethically expensive city and to travel to valuable archives at the University of Iowa, Harvard University, and Buffalo State College. The staff at the University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections, particularly Kathryn Hodson, warmly welcomed me for two weeks of intense ledger reading. This is where I really developed an unhealthy obsession with my subject matter. The librarians at the Billy Rose Collection at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Buffalo State College’s Butler Library Special Collections, and the Harvard Theatre Collection were gracious and accommodating. David Savran, Maurya Wickstrom, and Jim Wilson provided great encouragement and guidance. They helped me shape a bewildering mass of material into something attempting cohesion. I love knowing that I can spend the rest of my life looking to their scholarship as model texts. In various ways, they inspire me professionally, personally, and pedagogically. University of Manchester Emeritus Professor David Mayer has been sending me archival treasures and cheering me on since we met last year. I am honored and happy to benefit from his tutelage. Jennifer Parker-Starbuck has served as an irreplaceable model to emulate and I thank her and Lourdes Orozco for including me in their edited collection Performing Animality. Sarah Alexander, Elizabeth Early, Jessica Johnson, and Ann Price offered much needed time and assistance. Heather Samples’ amazing writing guides transformed everything in the nick of time. When I first started teaching in Baruch College’s Fine and Performing Arts Department, students sometimes mistook me for a fellow student. That does not happen anymore. I’d like to thank Debra Caplan, Skip Dietrich, Eric Krebs, and Susan Tenneriello for their support and mentoring. I know how lucky I am that Erika McLean, Casey Miller, and Maria Young spent several hours over several years pretending to be interested in animal vaudevillians. Thank you for all the listening, generous presents, and visits. Thanks to Ellen Rosenbush and Glenn Smith for bucolic respites and to Marilynn Scott for chocolate and persimmons. My boundless affection and profound gratitude go to Jason Smith, Maura Young, and Suzanne Smith for support that cannot be described with a simple list of tasks done or gestures made. For all the love that is possible in a circle swirling from Buffalo to Saratoga to Inwood. My ecstatic maternal passion goes to formidable and zany Hazel, who led me to really listen to Oklahoma! and understand urban parents’ desperate need to leave cramped domestic spaces and seek commercial leisure. Finally, Scrappy hasn’t said so explicitly, but he seems to know his preternatural charisma and harmonica singing probably started it all. More than once this process seemed insurmountable. But, guess what, I finally surmounted. I would like to dedicate my dissertation to my parents, Mary Anne Confer Young and Patrick Joseph Young. With much sorrow, however, I must dedicate it to their memories. vi Table of Contents Title Page i Copyright ii Approval Page iii Abstract iv Acknowledgements v Table of Contents vi List of Figures vii-viii List of Archives ix Chapter 1: Theatricalizing Animal Capital in Big-Time Vaudeville 1 Chapter 2: Circus’ Spheres of Influence 40 Chapter 3: Ethics, Economics, and Animal Abuse 85 Chapter 4: Animal and Animalized Capital in Vaudeville 130 Chapter 5: Evolution and Co-Evolution or, Kinship and Companionship 166 Conclusion 206 Bibliography 212 vii List of Figures 1.1 Kern’s Mimic Dog 21 KAC, Series II, 38, 130 1.2 Sea-Lion Band 22 KAC, Series II, 32, 137 (January 1903) 1.3 Gillette’s Dog 33 KAC, Series II, Keith News clipping 2.1 Lockhart’s Elephant 64 KAC, Series II, 32, 154 (February 1903) 2.2 Zena Keife on pony 70 KAC, Series II, 39, 242 2.3 Equestrian Milly Capell 81 KAC, Series II, 32, 112 3.1 Film stills from “Tom Tinker’s Pony Patter” 92 Library of Congress, American Memory, public domain 3.2 Film stills from “Animal Act with Baboon, Dog, and Monkey” 93 Library of Congress, American Memory, public domain 4.1 Doherty’s Poodles 136 KAC, Series II, 46, 129 (October 1910) 4.3 “A Pair of Blackbirds” 145 KAC, Series II, 29 4.4 “Two Black Crows” 156 KAC, Series II, clipping 5.1 Wormwood’s Monkey Doctor 171 KAC, Series II, 32, 5 (September 1902) 5.2 Monkey barber shop 175 KAC, Series II, 32, 102 5.3 Chimp and baby 192 KAC, Series II, 104, 66 viii 5.4 Don the Talking Dog 194 KAC, Series II, 48, 214 (November 2012) 5.5 Joe Reichen and Dog 197 KAC, Series II, clipping Images labeled KAC appear courtesy of the Keith/Albee Collection, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa. ix Archives Michael Shea Papers, Butler Library Special Collections, Buffalo State College, Buffalo, NY Keith/Albee Collection, University of Iowa Libraries, Special Collections, Iowa City, Iowa Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts Billy Rose Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York, New York 1 Chapter 1: Theatricalizing Animal Capital in Big-Time Vaudeville A black bear named Bedelia teeters on a tricycle. Baboons balance on bicycles. Romping poodles drive chariots and sulky carts as they loop around a temporary circus ring framed by an ornate proscenium arch. A mock fight between fox terriers and baboons follows various tightrope tricks. An anteater from Brazil does nothing; its physical peculiarities render stunt work unnecessary. Its very existence entertains. These were some of the offerings of Apdale’s Zoological Circus, a top-of-the-line animal act that worked in big-time US vaudeville for over a decade, including a stint at the illustrious Palace Theatre in New York City. The act was sometimes billed simply as “Apdale’s Animals,” and theatre managers described it as “a very superior children’s act”1 and were impressed James Apdale did not brandish a whip on stage and, yet, the highly trained mammals seemed to perform “without the least urging.”2 Enthusiasm for Bedelia the black bear changed, however, when she sauntered into the glittering afternoon sun of Coney Island on Sunday, 23 June 1912. At about 4:00pm, Bedelia escaped her restraints, walked out the stage entrance of the New Brighton Theatre, and began meandering through the alarmed crowd. She looked “forbiddingly ferocious” and “uttered strange, gruff noises.”3 Mothers in street clothes reportedly raced into the Atlantic Ocean with their children.