The Tavern the Articles in This Study Guide Are Not Meant to Mirror Or Interpret Any Productions at the Utah Shakespeare Festival

Insights A Study Guide to the Utah Shakespeare Festival

The Tavern The articles in this study guide are not meant to mirror or interpret any productions at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. They are meant, instead, to bean educational jumping-off point to understanding and enjoying the plays (in any production at any theatre) a bit more thoroughly. Therefore the stories of the plays and the interpretative articles (and even characters, at times) may differ dramatically from what is ultimately produced on the Festival’s stages. The Study Guide is published by the Utah Shakespeare Festival, 351 West Center Street; Cedar City, UT 84720. Bruce C. Lee, communications director and editor; Phil Hermansen, art director. Copyright © 2017, Utah Shakespeare Festival. Please feel free to download and print The Study Guide, as long as you do not remove any identifying mark of the Utah Shakespeare Festival.

For more information about Festival education programs: Utah Shakespeare Festival 351 West Center Street Cedar City, Utah 84720 435-586-7880 www.bard.org.

Cover photo: Andrew May as The Vagabond in the Utah Shakespeare Festival’s 2017 production of The Tavern. The Tavern

Contents Information on the Play Synopsis 4 Characters 5 About the Playwright 6 Scholarly Articles on the Play Can You Find Superman In A Tavern 8

Utah Shakespearean Festival 3 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 Synopsis: The Tavern

On a dark and stormy night, a wild wind blows a slew of odd characters into a southern Utah tavern run by Freeman, his son Zach, and their hired help. A peculiar vagabond with a penchant for theatrics soon becomes ringmaster for the events that unfold throughout the night. They discover a strange woman with a mysterious past asleep in the shed, and, when she wakes, is adamant about getting to Salt Lake City to seek an audience with the new governor. When the governor and his family suddenly arrive at the tavern, seeking shelter from the storm, things only get more unusual. And to top it off, there is a thief on the loose, and everyone has their suspicions. The storm continues, the sheriff and his posse arrive, as does a gentleman named Stevens who helps to answer some of the madcap questions before the storm subsides and the crazy night comes to an end.

4 Utah Shakespearean Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 Characters: The Tavern

Zach: The tavern owner’s son

Sally-Mae: The hired girl at the tavern

Zachariah Freeman: The tavern owner

Wile Ed Coats: The hired man at the tavern

The Vagabond: The stranger

The Woman: Another stranger

Selwyn Shotwell: The governor of the territory of Utah

Mrs. Shotwell: The Governor’s wife

Rosalind: The Governor’s daughter

Tom Allen: The Governor’s daughter’s fiancé

Elijah Tull: The Sheriff

Ezra: The Sheriff’s deputy

Blaze, Bart, and Buck: The Sheriff’s posse

Stevens: The attendant

Utah Shakespearean Festival 5 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 About the Playwright: The Tavern By Rachelle Hughes Self-proclaimed “song and dance man” George M. Cohan spent all but eight of his sixty-four years involved with theatre. His body of work and his undeniable musical, dancing, writing, and acting talent made him a theatrical legend. Cohan was born to famous vaudeville performers Jeremiah and Helen Costigan Cohan, known as Jerry and Nellie, in Rhode Island. There is some question as to the date of his birth as he and his family always said he was born on the Fourth of July, but a baptismal certificate lists his birth as July 3, 1878. But he chose to claim the Fourth of July birthdate as it catered to his “Yankee Doodle Dandy” image. Cohan’s parents toured the country with their vaudeville act and by age eight Cohan was good enough on the violin to be in the orchestra pit. However, he was not fond of playing the violin and by the time he was eleven, he joined his parents and older sister Josie on the stage as the song and dance act, The Four Cohans. The family toured on the prestigious B.F. Keith circuit for many years. Despite Cohan’s obvious talent he was a bit of a backstage troublemaker in his youth. He often told off directors and stagehands and caused a bit of a ruckus as a teenager. When his family was billed as the dreaded first act in Vaudeville he would fly into a rage telling the theatre manager that someday he would buy the theatre “just to throw you out” (“George M. Cohan, 64, Dies at Home Here,” www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0703.html). Ironically, he was, even- tually, the owner of a string of theatres. While his temper was well-known in his youth, a few humbling experiences taught him to keep his emotions to himself as he got older. While Cohan’s father insisted that they were more successful on the road, Cohan wanted his chance at stardom in New York City. At fourteen he tried to run away to Manhattan, but his father caught up to him in time and declared that the whole family would run away to New York together. Unfortunately, The Four Cohans were billed sepa- rately at Keith’s Union Square Theatre. George had little success as he got first billing, but his sister Josie’s dance act paid the family’s bills for a year. So, Cohan funneled his energies into writing skits and songs. It was during his teen years that he discovered his gift for writing. “Why Did Nellie Leave Her Home” (1893) became his first published melody. Soon he had a few minor song hits, and other vaudeville acts in search for new material were asking him to write skits. Between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one Cohan wrote 150 skits and by the age of nineteen Cohan’s father put his son in charge of the family’s skits. Josie gave up her solo act and the family reunited. Soon, the family became the highest paid vaudeville four act production. It was during this time that he started using the line that would become his signature throughout his life. In response to audiences’ request for encore bows he would say, “Ladies and gentlemen, my mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I assure you, I thank you.” In 1901, Cohan stretched his writing talent even further when he wrote, composed, directed, and produced his first Broadway production The Governor’s Son. The Four Cohans were off vaudeville for a short stint on Broadway. The show saw little success on Broadway but became popular on tour. In 1899, Cohan married vaudeville comedian and singer Ethel Levey. While she often performed on her own, she occasionally joined the Cohan family in their performances. They had one daughter, Georgette, before their divorce in 1907. Within months he married Agnes Mary Nolan. Their marriage lasted

6 Utah Shakespearean Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 until his death, and they had three children: Mary Helen, Helen Frances, and George Michael. At age twenty-six, he began a friendship and producing partnership with Sam Harris. Their collaborations from 1904 to 1920 would build both their reputations and their fortunes in the theatre world and on Broadway during which they produced more than fifty comedies, plays, and revues. The production/management team also branched out to running theatres, and at one time they controlled five theatres in New York, including the George M. Cohan Theatre at Broadway and Forty-Second Street, and one in Chicago. They cashed in on the patriotic sentiments sweeping the country when their first production Little Johnny Jones (1904) became one of Broadway’s greatest hits. Cohan wrote the script and the songs and starred in the title role. The musical made songs like “Yankee Doodle Boy” and “Give My Regards to Broadway” famous. Cohan’s patriotism continued to pay off with his songwriting as well. During World War I he wrote the inspirational march, “Over There!” This piece and his song “It’s a Grand Old Flag,” (1905) received a Congressional Gold Medal under a special act of Congress dated June 29, 1936. The medal was presented to Cohan at the White House by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. By the end of the war, as written by John Kenrick on Musicals101.com, “George M. Cohan was now at the top of his profession, a position he relished for years to come. In an age with no electronic mass media, he was the first superstar of American show busi- ness, his name familiar from coast to coast” (www.musicals101.com/cohanbio3.htm). In 1908 The Four Cohans made their final appearance together in The Yankee Prince, directed and co-produced by Cohan. His parents retired in 1912, and while Cohan also threatened to retire he continued to produce, act, and write more than ever. In 1919 Cohan’s popularity took a serious hit when he refused to join the Actors’ Equity Association. Cohan had a reputation as a fair producer, but he felt that acting was a profession and therefore above unionism. He lashed out against Equity, but Sam Harris led a delegation of producers who agreed to meet Equity’s demands. Rather than make problems for Harris, Cohan and Harris dissolved their partnership. For the rest of his life Cohan was the only actor on Broadway who worked under a non-Equity contract (Kenrick, Musicals101.com). Despite his rift with the acting world, Cohan continued to produce successes like The Tavern (1920) and the musical Nellie Kelly (1922). However, Cohan was feeling the pressure of changing theatrical tastes. In 1933 he ignored his distaste for Hollywood and appeared in the musical film The Phantom President. However, he quickly returned to theatre where he received critical acclaim for his role of the father in Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! (1933). In 1937 he teamed up with old friend Sam Harris when he played the role of Franklin D. Roosevelt in I’d Rather Be Right, produced by Harris. Roosevelt expressed his approval of the show, and Cohan, at the age of sixty, went on a grueling but successful tour with the show. As Cohan’s health started to fail, Warner Brothers approached him about producing a movie about his life. Cohan approved former vaudeville performer James Cagney as the actor to portray him in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1932). Despite reservations, Cohan saw the show become a success before he died from his lingering illness on November 5, 1942.

Utah Shakespearean Festival 7 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 Can You Find Superman in a Tavern? By Ryan D. Paul Submitted for your approval—one Miss Cora Dick Gantt, a stenographer for the local Y.M.C.A. preparing herself to enjoy a night at the theatre. The year is 1920. The date is September 27. The play, The Tavern based upon her manuscript, The Choice of a Superman. She had sent this unsolicited work to Broadway producer Arthur Hopkins who had already produced over twenty shows, many of them huge hits. Hopkins passed on Gantt’s work, believing it too strange and unusual. However, he thought his friend George M. Cohan would find it worth a laugh or two. In fact, the very things that Hopkins dis- tained, Cohan loved. Cohan would later say it was “the damnedest play I have every read in my life.” However, what Miss Gantt was about to see, would have little resemblance to her original work. At this point, you would begin to hear Rod Serling’s famous voice-over, “You are travelling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, The Twilight Zone!” Cohan had become strangely obsessed with Gantt’s play, especially some of her characters. According to The Actor’s Company Theatre, “He offered Gantt $40,000 for the complete rights to the play, including the right to make any revisions he deemed necessary. Gantt thought highly of her play and was opposed to alterations, but she liked $40,000 better” (The Actors Company Theatre, The Tavern Notes, http://tactnyc.org/the-tavern- notes/). Cohan tossed the original plot in the trash and started all over. In his autobiogra- phy, he refers to this plot dissection as “sprinkling the Cohan salt and pepper all over the script” (Ibid). What emerged that night on the stage became one of the first of its kind, a parody of a melodrama—in early twentieth-century speak, a burlesque. In our modern lexicon, the word burlesque has connotations of risqué behavior, but for Cohan’s genera- tion, it meant something else. “Burlesque comes from burla, Spanish for “joke.” Comedy has always been an essential part of burlesque art, but it’s comedy of a particular kind. Burlesque is satirical, and it uses exaggeration that can be extreme” (https://www.vocabulary. com/dictionary/burlesque). The Tavern, essentially, became a parody of many of the serious dramatic works on the stage at the time. The catch, however, was that none of this was communicated to the audience. They were left to figure out, to process, what they were see- ing on the stage for themselves. The Tavern soon became the hit of Broadway and would run for 252 performances. Life Magazine theatre critic Robert Benchley would write of opening night “There can no longer be any doubt that George M. Cohan is the greatest man in the world. Anyone who can write The Tavern and produce it as The Tavern is produced places himself automatically in the class with the gods who sit on Olympus and emit Jovian (or is it Shavian) laughter at the tiny tots below on earth. In fact, George M. Cohan’s laughter is much more intelligent than that of any god I ever heard of. . . . Every line and situation in it can be either serious or burlesque, according to the individual powers of discernment of the listener. In the second act even the most naive of the newspaper writers felt the force of the burlesque and commented on it indulgently” (http://davecol8.tripod.com/id37.htm). The Tavern takes place on a dark and stormy night (how’s that for melodrama) in a remote tavern. A wild wind blows in all sorts of oddball characters—a mysterious vagabond, who delights in the theatrics that surround the night’s events, a damsel in distress, with a mysterious past, a politician, his daughter, and her fiancé. A thief is on the loose, suspicions abound, and no one is who they seem! The Vagabond soon became Cohan’s favorite charac-

8 Utah Shakespearean Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 ter and when original actor Arthur Daly left the show, “Cohan himself stepped in, turning the Vagabond into one of his most celebrated roles. He performed on Broadway for over a year, and continued playing the role on tour afterwards. Recognizing a virtuoso comic role to die for, Cohan revived the play ten years later in 1930, reprising his role. Even at the end of his career, Cohan couldn’t escape The Tavern, and his last completed show was a 1940 sequel called The Return of the Vagabond” (The Actors Company Theatre). This fall, in true Cohan fashion, the Utah Shakespeare Festival will present a world- premiere adaptation of The Tavern adapted and directed by Joseph Hanreddy who recently helmed 2016’s production of Julius Caesar and co-adapted both Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, the latter of which he directed for the Festival. This year’s production of The Tavern, is “set in Old West southern Utah. The whimsy and broad- ness of the comedy are such that there is only a superficial nod to accurate history. As to specific period, Utah was a US Territory and not a state until 1896. Governors prior to 1896 were appointed by the U.S. President as part of a “spoils system” where government jobs, including Governorships, were given to supporters, friends and relatives as a reward for working toward political victory. Understandably, appointed governors were not always beloved of or respected by, the first settlers.” (Joseph Hanreddy, Director’s Notes, unpub- lished). Hanreddy’s adaptation of The Tavern is a mash-up of local and regional history, roman- tic melodramas, classic Western fiction and film, the physical comedy of silent film greats such as Buster Keaton, (check out the cyclone scene in 1928’s Steamboat Bill Jr. (https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmyNiMjXMUw), with a little bit of Shakespeare on top. I can guarantee that as this madcap farce reaches its conclusion you will be laughing outloud.

Utah Shakespearean Festival 9 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 10 Utah Shakespearean Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880