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Uncle Tom’s Cabin: The Play
by
Lauren Roberts
This year, for the first time in more than three quarters of a century, there was no company playing Uncle Tom’s Cabin in all America.
“Uncle Tom is Dead,” Theatre Guild, January, 1931
The history of stage entertainment probably goes back to pre-history
days when a storyteller would enthrall his listeners around the fire
after a successful hunt. Certainly, entertainment was a large part of
all cultures. Greeks had the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes
and Aristophanes. Roman playwrights included Plautus, Terence, Seneca
the Younger, Quintus Ennius and Marcus Pacuvius. Theatre in medieval
times was popular, though religious themes also known as morality plays
may have dominated the secular-based ones. By the time Shakespeare came
along, theatre was well established in the culture, and America was not
immune. According to John Kenrick in “A History of the Musical”:
American vaudeville, more so than any other mass
entertainment, grew out of the culture of incorporation that defined
American life after the Civil War. The development of vaudeville marked
the beginning of popular entertainment as big business, dependent on
the organizational efforts of a growing number of white-collar workers
and the increased leisure time, spending power, and changing tastes of
an urban middle class audience. Business savvy showmen utilized
improved transportation and communication technologies, creating and
controlling vast networks of theatre circuits standardizing,
professionalizing, and institutionalizing American popular
entertainment.
The origin of the term “vaudeville” is obscure, but it apparently came
into common use around 1871 with the founding of “Sargent’s Great
Vaudeville Company” of Louisville, Kentucky. There has been a
suggestion that the name was selected because of “its vagueness . . .
and connotation of gentility,” an irony considering that Leavitt and
Sargent’s shows were not substantially different from the coarser
materials of early traveling entertainments. It did, however, give the
effort to widen audiences for stage entertainment a boost by widening
the perception of what one might find.
The growth of the middle class with its increasing economic power was
on the mind of Tony Pastor, a former circus ringmaster turned theatre
manager with several theatres in New York City. On October 24, 1881, he
staged the first billing of what he termed “polite” entertainment that
would draw an audience from female and family-based shopping traffic.
Pastor barred the sale of liquor, eliminated questionable material from
his shows and even went so far as to offer gifts of coal and hams to
attendees. His strategy was a success and others soon followed.
One of the most successful was the man who came to be known as the
“father” of American vaudeville, Benjamin Franklin Keith. Having begun
his show business career as a grafter and barker with traveling
circuses in the 1870s, he was familiar with entertainment promotion. In
1883, he established a museum in Boston that featured odd acts. With
money gleaned from that, he went on to build the Bijou Theatre, a
sumptuous, state of the art building that set the standard. His policy
of cleanliness and order included, among other things, a ban on the use
of vulgarity or other course material “so that the house and
entertainment would directly appeal to the support of women and
children.” And he meant it. Signs posted backstage were specific about
transgressions and their consequences (The term “Hully gee” was an
abbreviation of “Holy Jesus!” and at the time considered offensive):
Don’t say “slob” or “son of a gun” or “hully gee” on the
stage unless you want to be canceled peremptorily. Do not address
anyone in the audience in any manner. If you do not have the ability to
entertain Mr. Keith’s audience with risk of offending them, do the best
you can. Lack of talent will be less open to censure than would be an
insult to a patron. If you are in doubt as to the character of your act
consult the local manager before you go on stage, for if you are guilty
of uttering anything sacrilegious or even suggestive you will be
immediately closed and will never again be allowed in a theatre where
Mr. Keith is in authority.
Keith even went so far as to invite, with attendant publicity, a Sunday
School representative to “judge propriety at rehearsals.” Because he
had a strong instinct for the growth of the emerging middle class, he
made sure what his theatres offered was suitable for everyone. That
proved to be a smart business decision because the Catholic Church
began promoting the Keith theatres as places of clean entertainment
and, in an astonishing display of communal interests, provided
financial help to Keith and his partner Albee, enabling them to build a
circuit of elaborate theatres.
Their success was noted and soon duplicated by entrepreneurs around the
country. Though by the 1890s, numbers of theatre circuits and booking
offices were established, Keith and Albee owned the majority of them
through two organizations, United Booking Artists and later, the
Vaudeville Manager’s Association.
Thanks mostly though not exclusively to Keith, vaudeville was the most
popular form of entertainment between 1875 and 1930. Most towns and
cities had at least one venue, and performers traveled between them.
Such venues were also suited and used for theatre productions. And the
most popular and long lasting of those was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the popular novel that was turned into a large number of stage plays. The “Tom Shows,”
as they were called, first began to appear while the novel was still
being serialized because of lax copyright laws. Harriet Beecher Stowe
never authorized any of them. In fact, her refusal to give official
permission to Asa Hutchinson of the Hutchinson Family Singers, a man
who shared her antislavery politics, to produce the play, combined with
the weak copyright laws of the day, allowed a number of adaptations
that did not always fit her views.
This best-selling novel, published in 1852 by Harriet Beecher Stowe,
was apparently first dramatized by George C. Howard, a veteran of
theatre and the manager of Peale’s Theatre in New York. Howard had been
born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1815. He appeared in amateur
theatricals in Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore, and in 1842 joined
the company at Tremont Theatre where he met his wife-to-be, Caroline
Fox, already an experienced actress. They married in 1844.
In 1852, Howard commissioned her cousin, playwright and actor George L. Aiken, to write a dramatization of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
(His compensation was $40 and a gold watch.) It was produced at the
Troy Museum in New York in September. Howard played St. Clare, Caroline
was Topsy and their daughter, four-year-old Cordelia, played Little
Eva. Aiken played the role of George Harris.
On August 19, 1852, a brief unsigned notice appeared in the New York Times
noting that “an experienced writer is now engaged in dramatizing Uncle
Tom’s Cabin, with a view to its representation upon the stage. The
story is rather long, and the characters are quite numerous, but the
incidents are well adapted for dramatic effect, The blending of the
ludicrous with the pathetic, in the drama, has been a great element in
the success of the stage; and if the dramatist of the story of Uncle
Tom succeeds with anything like the tact and ability displayed by the
authoress of the original story, it will put money in the treasure of
the establishment at which it is produced.”
The dramatization was not well received by all. James Gordon Bennett,
in a September 3, 1852 unsigned review of the play for the New York Herald,
excoriated one of the early performances. The paper felt that the
popularity would heighten tensions over the slavery question, “playing
directly into the hands of the abolitionists and abolition kidnappers
of slaves”:
The practice of dramatizing a popular novel, as soon as it
takes a run, has become very common . . . But in the presentation of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin upon the boards of a popular theatre, we apprehend
the manager has committed a serious and mischievous blunder, the
tendencies of which he did not comprehend, or did not care to consider,
but in relation to which we have a word or two of friendly counsel to
submit.
The novel of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is at present our nine days literary
wonder. It has sold by thousands, and tens, and hundreds of
thousands—not, however, on account of any surpassing or wonderful
literary merits which it may be supposed to possess, but because of the
widely extended sympathy, in all the North, with the pernicious
abolition sympathies and “higher law” moral of this ingenious and
cunningly devised abolition fable. The furore which it has thus
created, has brought out quite a number of catchpenny imitators, pro
and con, desirous of filling their sails while yet the breeze is
blowing, though it does appear to us to be the meanest kind of stealing
of a lady’s thunder. This is, indeed, a new epoch and a new field of
abolition authorship—a new field of fiction, humbug and deception, for
a more extended agitation of the slavery question—than any that has
heretofore imperiled the peace and safety of the Union.
True, the audience appears to be pleased with the novelty, without
being troubled about the moral of the story, which is mischievous in
the extreme.
The institution of Southern slavery is recognized and protected by the
federal constitution, upon which this Union was established, and which
holds it together. But for the compromises on the slavery question, we
should have no constitution and no Union—and would, perhaps, have been
at this day, in the condition of the South American republics, divided
into several military despotisms, constantly warring with each other,
and each within itself. The Fugitive Slave Law only carries out one of
the plain provisions of the constitution. When a Southern slave escapes
to us, we are in honor bound to return him to his master. And yet, here
in this city—which owes its wealth, population, power, and prosperity,
to the Union and the constitution, and this same institution of
slavery, to a greater degree than any other city in the Union—here we
have nightly represented, at a popular theatre, the most exaggerated
enormities of Southern slavery, playing directly into the hands of the
abolitionists and abolition kidnappers of slaves, and doing their work
for them. What will our Southern friends think of all our professions
of respect for their delicate social institution of slavery, when they
find that even our amusements are overdrawn caricatures exhibiting our
hatred against it and against them? Is this consistent with good faith,
or honor, or the every day obligations of hospitality? No, it is not.
It is a sad blunder; for when our stage shall become the deliberate
agent in the cause of abolitionism, with the sanction of the public,
and their approbation, the peace and harmony of this Union will soon be
ended.
We would, from all these considerations, advise all concerned to drop
the play of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, at once and forever. The thing is in bad
taste—it is not according to good faith to the constitution, or
consistent with either of the two Baltimore platforms; and is
calculated, if persisted in, to become a firebrand of the most
dangerous character to the peace of the whole country.
But reviews were mostly favorable, however, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin
soon found itself being presented on stages all over the country.
Adaptations varied wildly. Some were no better than minstrel shows with
caricatures and stereotypes, others more sensitive. A few even promoted
pro-slavery views. Some were run as commercial ventures, others for
political reasons. Even those productions that stayed relatively close
to the novel, according to Eric Lott, in Uncle Tomitudes: Racial Melodrama and Modes of Production,
downplayed the feminist aspects of the book and Stowe’s criticisms of
capitalism. Regardless of how sympathies ran, however, the shows were
exceedingly popular. Eric Lott estimates that at least three million
people saw these plays, a number that was ten times the novel’s first
year sales.
From the beginning, the play was a melodrama (a word formed by combining the words “melody” from the Greek melodia
meaning song and “drama.”), that is, a play with music. Melodrama, in
its original sense, refers to theatre in which music is used to
increase the audience’s emotional response or to suggest character
types. That’s certainly what the various productions set out to do, and
some of them, such as My Old Kentucky Home, even became
classics. A large number of songs were written for the play, and though
it’s impossible to give an exact number, more than 70 are listed here.
Beginning in the mid-1890s and lasting until World War I, one of the
more successful “Tom Shows” was the Al. W. Martin one. It advertised
itself as a “$25,000 investment that featured “3 magnificent brass
bands, 60 people on stage, and 25 ponies, mules, oxen and horses.”
It received rave notices nearly everywhere it played. Even Billboard
magazine paid particular attention to Martin’s “Tom Shows” by regularly
publishing the itineraries of both the “Eastern” and the “Western”
companies. As an example, from August 28, 1901 through May 31, 1902,
the Eastern Company gave 173 performances in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New
York, Connecticut, Vermont, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode
Island, New Jersey, Maryland, Michigan and Washington. The Western
Company was even busier: 188 performances in Illinois, Wisconsin,
Minnesota, Missouri, Iowa, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Arkansas,
Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Canada. Traveling among towns
was arduous, but Martin had organized it so well that few things went
wrong, truly surprising given the size of the company and the complex
schedules. A good overview of what audiences saw in Martin’s production
are seen in two reviews. The first is from the Washington Post, dated April 27, 1899:
A week’s performance of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” in five acts,
began yesterday at the Holliday Street Theater. The sterling qualities
of Harriet Beecher Stowe's ever green story of Southern life before the
war are warrant enough for the play’s drawing powers, but when it is
supplemented by the superb manner in which Al W. Martin has mounted
the drama and the clever company he has assembled together to present
it, it is made doubly attractive. Milt G.Barlow, an old-dime delineator
of negro character, made an ideal Uncle Tom, and received unstinted
applause for his excellent work, while Stella Thompson imbued the role
of Topsy with an impishness and vivacity that rivaled the performance
of Mrs. G.C. Howard, the original Topsy. Baby Beatrice is a sweet
little brunette, and, therefore, unique, as the stage has always
pictured Eva as a fair-haired maiden; but her acting was unaffected and
childlike. Eva French was a buxom Aunt Ophelia, and the Simon Legree
of R.A. Barker was artistic enough to win the ill-will of the audience
. . . The large company of colored persons gave an amusing cakewalk,
and also did some typical darky dancing, and the performance closed
with a series of beautiful allegorical tableaux.
Another review noted:
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” . . . will be
presented by Al W. Martin's mammoth company of sixty white and colored
people and $10,000 worth of scenery and effects. The cast is a strong
one, both from a dramatic and a numerical standpoint, and includes
Milt C. Barlow, the greatest of all old men negro impersonators as
Uncle Tom. Over fifty people appear on the stage, besides fifteen
horses, donkeys, oxen, eight Shetland ponies, and eight bloodhounds.
Every piece of scenery used, from the rise till the fall of the
curtain, is carried by the company. The entire aggregation travels in a
special train of cars magnificently fitted out and lavishly furnished
for the convenience of the players. The stage settings show the
Mississippi River, St. Clair's residence by moonlight, and the
thrilling ice scene on the Ohio River. A number of up-to-date
specialties are introduced by clever colored people. The company is
said to present one of the most perfect performances of its kind ever
seen in this country.
And here is a vivid description of the intricate staging:
The work of competent players is further enhanced by most
beautiful settings and clever stage devices, the most prominent of
which are the floating ice scene on the Ohio River, over which Eliza
makes her escape, pursued by the bloodhounds; the race between the
Natchez and the Robert E. Lee; cotton-fields in full bloom;
plantations, with negroes at play; St. Clair's residence by moonlight,
and the tableau and transformation of Eva in the golden realms . . .
The greatest novelty of the piece is the rabbit hunt, indulged in by
twenty-five colored members of the company . . . Altogether the
organization is one of the most thoroughly equipped aggregations on the
road, and travels in private Pullman Palace cars.
Not a review, but an interesting commentary on Martin and his troupe’s traveling accommodations, dated October 5, 1901:
Manager W.C. Cunningham, of Al. W. Martin’s big “Uncle
Tom’s Cabin” Company, while at Grand Rapids recently entertained
members of the local press at a dinner in his private apartment in the
palace car used by the company . . . The appointments of the car are
perfect, and the members of the company are as comfortable as though at
home. A car of similar design is set apart for the colored members of
the company, also one for the baggage, stock and scenery.
Though a number of actors played Uncle Tom, my bookmark features Frank Leo, an actor about whom nothing outside of this brief mention,
dated December 19, 1904, in an unidentified New York newspaper can be
found: “Frank Leo in physique and make-up was the typical Uncle Tom and
played the part quietly but effectively.
Though the novel is rarely read these days and no one would think of
putting on a performance, the dramatization of Uncle Tom’s Cabin has
the distinction of being the longest-lasting play in, I believe, the
history of American theatre. Its end finally came in 1931. Theatre
Guild magazine, in an article titled “Uncle Tom is Dead,” noted that:
This year, for the first time in more than three quarters
of a century, there was no company playing Uncle Tom's Cabin in all
America. This play, which boasts the longest continuous run in
theatrical history, incorporated in itself a whole era of American
drama and acting . . . There were dozens of Uncle Tom's Cabin
companies, and they came back year after year to every hamlet and
village in the nation. They played where even the circus could not play
and make it pay . . .
The true popularity of the play began after the Civil War, when its
propaganda value was gone. There were countless amateur productions,
stock company productions, and productions with added features. One
manager, Al W. Martin, with the Celtic genius for exaggeration, even
applied the technique of life three-ring circus to a classic, and
announced: “Al W. Martin's Uncle Tom's Cabin, with two funny Topsies,
two Little Evas, and two Simon Legrees” . . .
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was not only our most successful American play; it
was an American institution. Its day is done. If the play is revived,
it will be as a curiosity . . . we must pay a price for our
sophistication.
Bookmark specifications: Uncle Tom's Cabin
Dimensions: 7” x 3 3/4”
Material: Paper
Manufacturer: Al. W. Martin
Date: Early 1900s
Acquired: ebay
Almost since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has
been giving her opinion on books to anyone who will listen. That
“talent” eventually took her out of magazine writing and into book
reviewing in 2000 for an online review site where she cut her teeth (as
well as a few authors). Stints as book editor for her local newspaper
and contributing editor to Booklist and Bookmarks magazines
has reinforced her belief that she has interesting things to say about
books. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including
three cats, nearly 1,000 bookmarks and approximately 1,200 books that,
whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She is
a member of the National Books Critics Circle (NBCC) and Book
Publicists of Southern California as well as a longtime book design
judge for Publishers Marketing Association’s Benjamin Franklin Awards.
You can reach her at
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