John P. Harrington - The Irish Play on the New York Stage, 1874-1966

ON THE

1874-1966

John P. Harrington

Publication of this volume was made possible in part
by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Copyright 1997 by The University Press of Kentucky

Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,
serving Bellarmine College, Berea College, Centre
College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University,
The Filson Club Historical Society, Georgetown College,
Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University,
Morehead State University, Murray State University,
Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University,
University of Kentucky, University of Louisville,
and Western Kentucky University.
All rights reserved

Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky
663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008

01 00 99 98 975 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Harrington, John P.
The Irish play on the New York stage, 1874-1966 / John P. Harrington
p. cm. (Irish literature, history and culture)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-8131-2033-0 (alk. paper)
English dramaIrish authorsHistory and criticism. 2. English dramaIrish authorsAppreciationUnited States. 3. TheaterNew York (State)New YorkHistory20th century. 4. TheaterNew York (State)New YorkHistory19th century. 5. Public opinionNew York (State)New YorkHistory. 6. IrelandForeign public opinion, American. 7. IrishTravelUnited StatesHistory. 8. IrelandRelationsUnited States. 9. United StatesRelationsIreland. 10. IrelandIn literature. I. Title. II. Series.
PR8789.H37 1997
792.9509747109034dc21 97-17688

This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper
meeting the requirements of the American National Standard
for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America

INTRODUCTION

In the lovely Metalogue to the Magic Flute, written for the bicentenary of Mozarts birth in 1956, W.H. Auden celebrates the tribulations and triumphs of performing arts. He attributes a large part of the kind of appreciation accorded an artist to shifting expectations:

Each age has its own mode of listening.

We know the Mozart of our fathers time

Was gay, rococo, sweet, but not sublime,

A Viennese Italian; that is changed

Since music critics learned to feel estranged.

Auden also counts the fashions of an age for many of the tribulations put upon a work of art, and in this poem he imagines that the characteristic Magic Flute of 1956 would include a Queen of the Night cast as a college dean, a Sarastro as a professor of history, Tamino as a Ph.D. candidate, and Papageno as a juke-box boy. In addition, Auden acknowledges the many intermediaries of the artist as a test of a work of arts resilience:

The Diva whose

Fioriture and climactic note

The silly old composer never wrote,

Conductor X, that over-rated bore

Who alters tempi and who cuts the score,

Director Y who with ingenious wit

Places his wretched singers in the pit

While dancers mime their roles, Z the Designer

Who sets the whole thing on an ocean liner,

The girls in shorts, the men in yachting caps;

Yet Genius triumphs over all mishaps.

The last line states Audens conviction throughout the poem. It is immediately reiterated and punctuated for emphasis: It soothes the Frank, it stimulates the Greek: / Genius surpasses all things, even Chic. Steiners confidence is no less than Audens, and without the humor. His assertion is that artistic genius transmits its vision against all forms of interference, the things that Auden has genius surpassing.

Genius is a much-abused word, but even so the frequent abuse of that term in conjunction with the word Irish is striking. The artists themselves are not shy of the term, or even of its power over impediments. When Sean OCasey departed from the realistic and specifically Irish mise en scne of his first plays, Bernard Shaw pleaded his colleagues case to Lady Astor as follows: Sean OCaseys all right now that his shift from Dublin slums to Hyde Park has shown his genius is not limited by frontiers. The chapter that follows on OCaseys Hyde Park play, Within the Gates, shows that those frontiers, the cultural differences and contemporary expectations that hinder vision, were not negligible when OCasey came to New York in 1934. In America, before and after OCaseys visit, the notion of Irish genius has special resonance. Apart from the innumerable appearances of that phrase in the following chapters, it is worth noting here that The Genius of Irish Theater was published in New York in 1960 as a companion to The Irish Genius, an anthology of poems and stories. These were very literate anthologies, and the genius of the title no doubt had more to do with publishers packaging than with editorial policy. But in the large number of related publications, there was no Genius of French Theater, for example, but a Landmarks of French Theater. Nor was there any volume called The Dutch Genius. This phenomenon is interesting because the whole celebration of Irish genius in America frequently patronizes and so departs from the sense of Auden or Steiner.

In 1914, or three years after Lady Gregory led a company of Abbey Theatre players on a first tour of America, Emma Goldman gave lectures on the Social Significance of Modern Drama at the Berkeley Theatre in New York. Only in reference to Ireland did she depart from her ordinarily rigorous and revolutionary critique. On the topic of Irish drama she celebrated how only a people unspoiled by the dulling hand of civilization and free from artifice can retain such simplicity of faith and remain so imaginative, so full of fancy and dreams, wild and fiery, which have kindled the creative spark in the Irish dramatists of our time.) is a quite formidable test of the power of genius to transcend frontiers and elaborate a specific vision. The chapters that follow record the formidable tests given Irish genius in New York from Dion Boucicault to Brian Friel.

W.B. Yeats, consistently a figure in the background of the productions described in this book, was always very articulate about the theaters resistance to individual genius and the high probability in production of mishap. His essay A Peoples Theatre, first published in 1919, was a reflection on Irish drama after his tours in America as advance publicity for the Abbey company. We had not set out to create this sort of theatre, he wrote, lamenting the popularity of work not of his first choice, and its success has been to me a discouragement and a defeat. Even earlier, he had described the theaters resistance to genius in these famous lines from The Fascination of Whats Difficult:

The fascination of whats difficult

Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent