Worlds Elsewhere (27 page)

In 1848, San Francisco had been a slumbering, fogbound garrison town of 800 souls; twelve months later 25,000 people had surged into what was fast, too fast, becoming a metropolis. Many were on their way to the Sierra foothills to find a claim, but others decided to create a life for themselves right here, in what has nicely been called the ‘instant city'. The historian H. W. Brands captures the paradox well: ‘San Francisco,' he writes, ‘[was] unique in American history to that point: it was at once urban and a frontier.'

What brought me west was the question of how theatre had experienced its own rush in California. Actors had joined the stampede, either as miners or (more sensibly) as performers, taking advantage of the opportunities on the frontier to make a fast buck. The instant city needed instant entertainment; among many less salubrious recreations, theatre became part of the burgeoning metropolis.

My first morning in California, I arranged to visit the San Francisco Museum of Performance and Design, where Bill Eddelman, a theatre historian who taught at Stanford for many years, guided me towards a teetering stack of material. I spent the day digging into my own seam of gold.

Like everyone else, probably, I had my images of the Old West, as firmly etched as the lines in a photogravure – the wagon trains, the teeming gambling dens, the spit-and-sawdust saloons and dance halls. I dimly remembered watching
How the West Was Won
on television as a child, with Spencer Tracy intoning parables of Manifest Destiny in a voice hewn from granite, and Debbie Reynolds trilling ‘A Home in the Meadow' on a Sacramento riverboat, dressed – had I got this right? – as a Venetian blind.

Gambling dens and brothels there certainly were in Gold Rush San Francisco, a dime a dozen, spread among the zinc-covered frames and dust-choked tents. But there were also other, more sophisticated ways to blow your earnings, or – far more likely – your savings. In the museum's holdings were theatrical histories of the period, compiled at the behest of the Californian Works Projects Administration during the Great Depression, when much of this material was first written up.

The twenty volumes of
San Francisco Theatre Research
were a touch
feverish themselves. But they also contained hard evidence, sifted from newspaper reports, handbills and other primary sources. One statistic was captivating: between 1850 and 1859, no fewer than 1,105 theatrical productions were given in San Francisco – 66 minstrel shows; 84 ‘extravaganzas' (a catch-all that includes circus, ballet and pantomime); 48 operas in five different languages; 907 straight plays. A single day's entertainment listings in the early 1850s includes everything from comedy skits and
Babes in the Wood
to gala stagings of Donizetti's
Lucia di Lammermoor
and Verdi's
Rigoletto.
If an aspiring argonaut had half a day to spare, he could catch an entire Italian opera while he waited.

As it happens, California's first purpose-built theatre was in Sacramento, which – conveniently placed on the route up to the goldfields – had swelled from a forested staging post to a giddy boom town. The theatre was called the Eagle. It wasn't grand: the walls were canvas nailed on to a wooden frame, the roof was sheet iron and tin, the stage made from packing boxes. When it opened on 18 October 1849 it was acclaimed as ‘this oasis in the great desert of the mind'. On 4 January 1850, the oasis lived, unluckily, up to that description: when the Sacramento river flooded, the Eagle washed away. (A replica was raised in the 1970s, but no longer functions as a theatre.)

But San Francisco itself was soon pimpled with theatres, hurriedly thrown up – perhaps seventy-five separate auditoriums between 1850 and 1861. Back east, under the lingering shadow of puritanism, it had taken decades for theatre culture to become established; here, out west, it was taken to be an immediate and essential part of life.

One thing I discovered in the archives: American soldiers in the nineteenth century were hearty fans of am-dram, willing to put on a show at the faintest provocation. In 1845, none other than Ulysses S. Grant – later nicknamed ‘Unconditional Surrender' for his devastation of the South – rehearsed the role of Desdemona as a beardless, twenty-three-year-old lieutenant at Corpus Christi, Texas, awaiting action against the Mexicans. (Grant was decreed to lack ‘sentiment', whereupon he was sacked for a professional actress.)

It was a volunteer company from New York, stationed at Santa Barbara during the same Mexican wars, who first brought Shakespeare to California. Bored of guard duty, they spent the summer of 1847
busily remodelling a Spanish adobe house as a theatre. The debut performance was
Richard III,
with two blankets for a curtain, wigs made from lambskin, and a grand orchestra of two guitars, a violin and a drum. Drafted to Los Angeles in the spring of 1848, they promptly erected a 300-seat theatre. Their thespian activities were only halted when news leaked about Sutter's Mill, followed quickly by the peace treaty with Mexico.

The same economic and social forces that drove westward expansion in the nineteenth century spread East Coast culture in all its forms. Shakespeare, as I had discovered on Capitol Hill, had been regarded as a central part of American identity since the Founding Fathers at least; it must have seemed only natural to many pioneers that he came along for the ride.

In the mid-nineteenth century Shakespeare was experiencing his own relentless expansion. ‘Stereotype' technology, in which printers used plaster casts to take an impression from pages of pre-existing metal type (the origin of the word), enabled American publishers to produce still-cheaper editions. These made the plays available to more readers than ever before – nearly two hundred and fifty separate editions printed between 1795 and the 1860s, with fifteen published in 1850 alone.

The texts – or at least expurgated chunks of them – also loomed large in schoolrooms, where they had long been valued for their usefulness in teaching elocution. Primers such as
McGuffey's Reader,
first published in 1836, introduced generations of American schoolchildren to stirring speeches by Mark Antony in
Julius Caesar
and Prince Arthur in
King John,
and became as substantial a part of American culture as the King James Bible and John Bunyan's
Pilgrim's Progress.

The easy familiarity with which popular writers such as James Fenimore Cooper and Louisa May Alcott cite Shakespeare in their frontier tales merely hints at the reality. In the words of the historian Ashley T. Thorndike, ‘in the West the travelling elecutionist, the lecturer, the company of actors on a Mississippi showboat became his emissaries and evangels … no other writer was so quickly assimilated into the wilderness'. The mid-nineteenth-century cult of Anglo-Saxonism, which proclaimed the idea of Manifest Destiny and the supremacy of white, English-speaking Americans over all others (especially those others who were recent immigrants), bolstered still further the importance of Shakespeare.

As Thorndike suggested, while Shakespeare may have been recited
in log cabins and rehearsed by beardless lieutenants, it was because of professional travelling actors that his plays reached new and much broader audiences on the frontier than they had ever done back east. The famous seven-strong Chapman acting family bought a flatboat in Pittsburgh in 1831, and sailed it up and down the Ohio river, offering mixed bills everywhere from major cities such as Cincinnati to straggling riverside villages. Other companies played hotel ballrooms, billiard parlours, food cellars, converted barns – anywhere that would have them.

After 1849, professional performers began to descend on California in their hundreds. Although many actors stayed in San Francisco, others assembled touring companies to take on what became known as the ‘gold circuit' across the Sacramento valley and up into the Sierras. Of necessity these were small groups: according to the historian Helene Wickham Koon, perhaps eight to ten people made up each, the leading man or woman usually doubling as an actor-manager – booking whatever theatre (or billiard parlour, or food cellar) they could get into.

What drew them, as it drew everyone, was lucre. For those prepared to put up with the hardships of a mountain tour, the money was dizzying: an average of $300 a night (the best part of $8,000 today). Miners were appreciative audiences. If you had a fan on the other side of the oil footlights, your share of the box office could be supplemented by a nugget or bag of gold dust tossed your way.

These actors travelled with the barest essentials: a change of costume or two, a handful of props, the whole lot thrown into an open wagon. In Britain, the movement towards historically informed design – the practice of setting
Henry VIII,
say, in elaborately researched Tudor costume or
Much Ado About Nothing
in Renaissance Italian garb – was just getting started, courtesy of pioneers such as William Macready, his contemporary Charles Kean (the rather more straight-backed son of Edmund) and the designer William Telbin. Out in California, however, these were luxuries no one could afford. According to one possibly sardonic account, ‘six dresses, two wigs and an iron sword constitute an ample wardrobe for a company of six to travel in the mountains'. McKean ‘Buck' Buchanan, a larger-than-life actor who cut his teeth in the US Navy, was known to play Macbeth in the gloriously inexact costume of slouch hat, cape, yellow gauntlets and riding boots.

Tight-knit troupes trekked through such sprawling, brawling tent-and-tarpaper cities as Hell's Delight, Port Wine Diggings, Skunk Gulch, Flapjack Canyon and Yankee Jim's. Koon estimates that by 1850, just a year into the Gold Rush, fifty stock companies were plying gold-mining towns.

Nearly all the immigrants to California – as many as nine out of ten – were men. But in theatre, at least, different rules applied. One of the many side effects of this topsy-turvy new world was that female actors and managers were permitted much greater autonomy than they were back east. The name of Lola Montez – a strong-featured, blue-eyed Irish immigrant whose ‘Spanish dances' made her transcontinentally famous and eventually led her to the bed of King Ludwig I of Bavaria – is still spoken of with fondness. There were countless others: operatic prima donnas, leading ladies, child stars, equestrian divas …

I read about the life of Sarah Kirby Stark, acclaimed as California's first female tragedian, for whom the Gold Rush seems to have been the opportunity of a lifetime. Born in New Orleans, by the time she arrived in San Francisco in early 1850 at the age of thirty-seven, Sarah had already buried one husband, and her second would be dead within the year. In short order she met and married the rugged Nova Scotian James Stark. Dark-haired and slight, Sarah had a sharp intensity on stage, but also a much rarer talent – the ability to keep a theatre in business. Between 1850 and 1864, she would manage no fewer than five separate theatres in Sacramento and San Francisco.

Before they met, both Starks had travelled to London to study with Macready (somewhat ironically, in view of events in New York in 1849). Perhaps it was from Macready that they acquired an adoration for Shakespeare, but whatever the source, it would change American theatre history. Together they offered the first professional
Hamlet
to be seen on the West Coast (James as the Prince with Sarah, pre-Freudianly, playing Gertrude), and gave the Californian premieres of at least seven other plays, among them
Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew, King John, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night's Dream
and even the romance
Pericles
– one of only a handful of performances on record anywhere in the world during the nineteenth century.

Sarah seems to have seized on Shakespeare's rich female roles: according to the press her Portia was fittingly ‘lawyerly', her Katherine
(in
The Taming of the Shrew
) ‘truthful', and her Lady Macbeth ‘a woman of powerful, but ill-balanced mind, ambitious, but by no means devoid of her finer womanly qualities'. After she and James divorced, Sarah went on to marry twice more and moved to New York. In 1896, having outlasted five husbands, she retired to California, the golden state that had brought her so much.

More snapshots of the early years come courtesy of the Edinburgh-born artist and travel writer J. D. Borthwick, who had been living in New York in 1850 when – in the formula that became a catechism – he had been ‘seized with the California fever'. He boarded a barque bound for the Panama isthmus (an instinctive gambler, Borthwick took his chances with malaria and the shortcut through the jungle) and arrived in summer 1851.

In San Francisco Borthwick was surprised – and impressed – to find beached ships being used as warehouses and salmon ‘equal in flavour to those of the Scottish rivers'. In this hectic environment, he observed with gruff approval, ‘people lived more … in a week than they would a year in most other places'.

It wasn't the only thing he observed. Holed up for the night in a town in the Nevada mountains called Nevada City (despite its name, neither in Nevada nor a city, but ‘a mixture of staring white frame-houses, dingy old canvas booths, and log cabins'), Borthwick had just retired to his berth in a boarding house after a pleasant evening's gambling when he was abruptly awakened: