How Willa Cather Chronicled the Development of American Theater

It’s almost impossible to grasp how deeply theater was woven into the fabric of American life, from coastal cities to frontier towns, before the rise of Hollywood. It helps to see this through the eyes of a young woman, born in 1873, who grew up in Red Cloud, Nebraska, went to college in the state capitol, Lincoln, and as an undergraduate began reviewing local productions for the Nebraska State Journal.

Lincoln had fallen on hard times in the 1890s, its population dropping sharply from fifty‑five thousand to forty thousand in the course of that decade due to an extended drought and a nationwide economic depression. Despite financial hardship, a great many people in Lincoln continued to flock to the theater, frequenting the Funke Opera House as well as the newer Lansing Theatre. The two houses could hold well over three thousand playgoers, and there were smaller venues in town as well.

Remarkably, for a rural and mostly agricultural state with just over a million inhabitants, Nebraska had more than fifty playhouses in 1890, with new ones being built as rail service made transportation faster and more dependable, enabling some of the finest talent in the country to tour the state.

That young theater reviewer in Lincoln was the future novelist Willa Cather, later celebrated for her portrayal of frontier life. In the course of one especially busy week in April 1894, Cather reviewed five plays: Black Crook (one of America’s earliest musicals), The Fencing Master (another New York transfer, which played to “uttermost capacity”), Panjandrum (“the best comic opera of this or of many seasons,” that also played to “a packed” house), Brother John (by Martha Morton, one of America’s first women playwrights), and Police Patrol (a “ponderous and patriotic” melodrama).

On top of that she took in a minstrel show at the Lyceum Hall. Cather reports that the run of plays seems to have lifted spirits in town: “Despite the sleepiness which is a necessary result of attending five good plays in one week everyone seems more cheerful for the dissipation.”

Twenty‑five hundred playgoers could cram into the Lansing for a standing‑room‑only show, paying from twenty‑five cents to a dollar. With at least two packed shows and three at half capacity, it’s likely that eight thousand tickets were sold that week at the Lansing (the aging Funke, which would soon be refurbished, was dark).

If you subtract the third of the population not yet fifteen years old, so likely too young to spend an evening at the theater, and subtract as well those too old or infirm, you are left with roughly thirty thousand adults who could go to the theater (and many, like Cather, went more than once). So it’s likely that as many as one in four adults in Lincoln went to a play that week, a percentage approaching a theatergoing intensity not seen since London in Shakespeare’s day.

Lincoln was not exceptional; playgoing was a national pastime. In 1896 Julius Cahn published the first of his annual Official Theatrical Guide: Containing Information of the Leading Theatres and Attractions in America. Cahn listed every town in every state that had a playhouse, and provided information on train schedules, hotel accommodations, stage dimensions, admission charges, and much else.

Cather’s reflections on the recent season in Lincoln in 1894, in which dozens of companies had passed through town, convey the effect of this touring on rural America: “There were poor companies here, but there were also good ones,” and she writes excitedly about the international stars of the stage, including Sarah Bernhardt, who reportedly “will play in all the smaller cities of America and will, of course, include Lincoln in her dates.” A local historian recalled that a “list of the names of the players who came to Lincoln in those days reads like a Who’s Who of the American stage.” Acting companies touring Nebraska knew that even small towns had their own theaters; Red Cloud, where Cather grew up, with a population of two thousand, had its own opera house that could seat eight hundred.

Looking back years later, Cather recalled how her town’s “opera house was dark for most of the year, but that made its events only the more exciting. Half a dozen times each winter—in the larger towns more oftener—a traveling stock company settled down at the local hotel and thrilled and entertained us for a week.” Theater connected Americans, and Cather took care to keep her readers abreast of the latest news about actors and plays from California and Texas to Chicago and New York. For Cather, “the people of this century have a right to demand something that is close to them, something that touches their everyday life,” and touring companies provided that.

Cather, who kept one eye fixed on the stage, the other on the audience, provides a rich sense of the social cohesion that theater was forging, which rival forms of entertainment (including college football, then in its infancy in Nebraska) could not match. Those of different social classes mingled and interacted, often noisily, in the playhouse. She describes nights when “the sons and daughters of toil greatly predominated,” the “kind of people who know how to enjoy themselves and who are thoroughly uncorrupted by any suspicion of taste,” who felt “at liberty at any time to call out the approval or disapproval in not unmistakable terms.”

For those born abroad (and at this time perhaps a quarter of those living in Nebraska were European immigrants, for many of whom English was not their native language), theater helped overcome this barrier. There weren’t many Black people living in Lincoln at this time, but Cather’s reviews—in one of which she describes the reaction of “a big happy negro” sitting in the front row of the Lansing balcony—confirm that casual racism persisted, and that its theaters were integrated. Cather also describes amateur performances, including one by members of the Nebraska National Guard, the Lincoln Light Infantry. And the wall between town and gown was breached when a “full standing capacity” crowd at the Lansing came to see students from the university perform plays by Plautus and Sophocles in the original Latin and Greek.

It’s hard not to feel the infectiousness of playgoing in Lincoln at this time, across the social spectrum, captured by Cather in her description of those who came to see a song‑and‑dance revue, Devil’s Action, at the Lansing in late September 1894. It was, she wrote, “one of the happiest crowds ever gathered in Lincoln. It was of course top‑heavy, the gallery element predominating. The gallery was full, so full it could not contain itself….It was a glorious audience, downstairs and up…the kind that can’t stand a specialty performance without something elevating and classical, something Shakespearean….It was a wildly enthusiastic audience; it enjoyed itself and it got its money’s worth.”

Even as automobiles were replacing the horse and buggy, movies were displacing theatrical performances across America. In 1900, nearly four hundred acting companies crisscrossed the country; two decades later that figure had dropped to forty‑two, and by 1935, half that. One of the most knowledgeable writers on theater at the turn of the century, William Winter, recalled that in 1880 there had been as many as five thousand theaters in 3,500 locales.

If Winter’s estimate is accurate, roughly a third of American towns and cities had hosted theaters, quite a few of them, like Lincoln, more than one. Close to half these theaters had resident stock companies, a cohort of local actors who were a bedrock of the local arts community. While there had been roughly 2,000 permanent stock companies in 1910, by 1923 only 133 remained, a hollowing out of local culture. By 1925, according to Billboard, the number of playhouses outside major cities had dropped to 674. Many had been turned into cinemas. A decade later, Thomas Gale Moore writes in The Economics of the American Theater, “the total of stock, repertory and tent theaters had dwindled to 110.”

Outside of big cities, playgoing was fast disappearing, and part of the decline was self‑inflicted, grounded in the conviction that theater, as Alfred L. Bernheim writes at the time in The Business of the Theatre, is “necessarily commercial,” so it was natural for there to be a drive to consolidate control of the industry in the hands of the few, in this case the powerful Theatrical Syndicate, established in 1896, a monopolization of power and profit that rendered the entire system vulnerable. The bottom seems to have fallen out in 1910 or so, the year in which Julius Cahn stopped publishing his annual guides.

That year nearly 30 million Americans were going to the movies every week; admission was seven cents, a fraction of what a theater ticket cost. Those attendance numbers doubled by 1927 and nearly doubled again to 110 million in 1929 after talkies were introduced (at which point admission, now that serious competition from plays was gone, had risen to a quarter). It meant that on the eve of the Depression, on average, nearly every American—the population in 1930 was 123 million—went to the movies once a week. Even during the depths of the Depression that figure only dipped to 80 million or so.

Hollywood soon elbowed its way onto Broadway, bankrolling shows at a loss, using theaters to try out plots and talent‑hunt for actors, writers, and directors. In 1929, reflecting on how film “has put an end to the old‑fashioned road companies which used to tour about in country towns,” Cather lamented what was lost. Having witnessed these changes, and having been so marked by theater herself, she was sensitive to the cost of Hollywood’s triumph.

For her, film didn’t quite measure up: “Only a living human being in some sort of rapport with us, speaking the lines, can make us forget who we are and where we are, can make us (especially children) actually live in the story that is going on before us, can make the dangers of that heroine and the desperation of that hero much more important to us, for the time much dearer to us, than our own lives.” “Cinematic “pictures of them, no matter how dazzling, do not make us feel anything more than interest or curiosity or astonishment.”

It was the touring actors who embodied for Cather “the old glory of the drama in its great days,” and “why its power was more searching than that of printed books or paintings because a story of human experience was given to us alive, given to us, not only by voice and attitude, but by all those unnamed ways in which an animal of any species makes known its terror or misery to other animals of its kind.”

She would find herself studying the audiences who went to the movies, even as she had once watched fellow playgoers, and put her finger on the difference: “I see easy, careless attention, amusement, occasionally a curiosity that amounts to mild excitement; but never that breathless, rapt attention and deep feeling that the old barnstorming companies were able to command….Only real people speaking the lines can give us that feeling of living along with them, of participating in their existence.”

When, in 1936, the Federal Theatre “brought the theatre back to the people” of Nebraska and, as the Omaha World-Herald added, “filled, to some extent, the gap that was made when the movies took over,” it was for many something new and strange: “Our actors” in Nebraska, Hallie Flanagan writes, “found that 90 per cent of their audience had never seen a play and could not believe that the actors were not moving pictures. After each performance they would wait in the doorway to see ‘whether the people are real.’”

It’s hard to determine how many Americans still earned a living in theater in the early decades of the twentieth century or how many had drifted away into other jobs before the Depression hit. Even in the best of times, there were always actors looking for work. In 1920, the U.S. Census counted 48,172 “actors and showmen,” of which 28,361 were actors, including, presumably, those employed in film. No unemployment figures were given.

A decade later, the 1930 census lumped together “actors and showmen,” reporting that there were over 75,000, with 64,695 currently employed. If the proportion of actors and showmen remained the same, that meant there were roughly 38,000 actors. In 1932, more than 22,000 of them, hungry for work, had registered with Hollywood casting bureaus, though few would find employment, almost all as extras.

It wasn’t just actors who had depended on theater for their livelihood; there were also playwrights, prop makers, musicians, prompters, stagehands, producers, ushers, designers, managers, carpenters, bill posters, advertising agents, scenic artists, electricians, dancers, and costume makers. Thirty‑five separate unions represented these and other workers, from the Ushers, Doormen and Cashier’s Union to Actors’ Equity. With theater in decline, many no doubt used their skills to seek employment in other fields, including film and radio, which was still possible when the national unemployment rate remained, on the average, around 5 percent from 1900 to 1929.

But when that percentage spiked to nearly 16 percent in 1931, and then climbed to an unprecedented 25 percent in 1933, there were very few jobs of any kind available. In New York City that year, impoverished actors lined up for clothing, cash, and the three hundred thousand meals dispensed by the Stage Relief Fund and the Actors’ Dinner Club.

Several things, all of them unprecedented, had to fall into place before this crisis would lead to the creation of the Federal Theatre. The first was a radical shift in relief policy, providing jobs for the unemployed rather than, as in the past, putting them “on the dole.” “Work relief,” an oxymoron for many, was a new concept, driven largely by the emerging influence of social workers whose experience of the early years of the Depression had convinced them, as one put it, that if you give “a man a dole and you save his body and destroy his soul,” but “give him a job and pay him an assured wage, and you save both the body and the spirit.”

But, since work relief cost more than handouts, there had to be political will to legislate it, and a leader and a political party bold enough to dispense funds, given the entrenched hostility to such policies by business interests fearful of their impact on the labor market. Taxpayers and legislators then had to be convinced of the value of giving a paycheck to unemployed violinists to perform concerts and actors to stage plays, rather than, as one unnamed congressman put it, handing them shovels and expecting them to dig ditches.

Concerns about the government getting into the theater business—especially from unions worried about lower salaries and those who ran commercial theaters opposed to subsidized competition—also had to be allayed. The only time in American history that all these factors aligned, briefly, was the mid‑1930s.

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Excerpted from The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War by James Shapiro. Copyright © 2024. Published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.