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queencallipygos (![[info]](http://www.journalfen.net/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} queencallipygos) wrote in ![[info]](http://www.journalfen.net/img/community.gif){kind=small} unfunny_fandom, |
I didn't know that; makes sense.
Oh, yeah -- theater was SERIOUS business to many in the early 1800's, because a lot of people were turning to theater to kind of make a statement about what the United States' identity was. A lot of the first plays written in the U.S. had some kind of subtext along the general theme that Europe was all old and backward, and how Europeans were vapid and put on airs and were all fancypants -- but AMERICANS, now, Americans were common-sense, moderate, temperate, down-to-earth, honest folks who didn't go in for any of that fancy-ass crap. Looking at the timing, a lot of that was just growing pains being experienced by a very new nation, but a lot of people took it to heart.
And so theater companies really, really tried to encourage "Americana" in their productions. One of the very first playwriting contests in this country was sponsored by a theater company that just really wanted to do some American-written plays, and came up with the idea that the contest should have a theme: "Make the hero of the play be an Indian." The winning play, Metamora, was ostensibly about Metacomet, the leader of the Wampanoags who'd clashed with settlers in Massachusetts in the 1600's. But in "Metamora" he was presented as being a whole "noble-savage" kind of guy who managed to save a virginal colonial maiden from a cruel forced marriage to a foppish magistrate just over from England, and safely delivering her into the arms of her beloved common-sense swain -- before tragically killing himself because he could not live free (or something like that). It reads like MASSIVE cheese today (fun fact: I was the stage manager for the "Metropolitan Playhouse" production in that Wikipedia link), but at the time people ate it up because it made the English governor look bad and anything American look good.
The rivalry between Forest and Macready may have been more just a catalyst for outside tensions that had already been building, but the reason why it WAS a catalyst was all tied into "is the European or the American way of doing things better when it comes to art," and that was a question the theater community had really been dealing with in the early 19th Century.
Oh, yeah -- theater was SERIOUS business to many in the early 1800's, because a lot of people were turning to theater to kind of make a statement about what the United States' identity was. A lot of the first plays written in the U.S. had some kind of subtext along the general theme that Europe was all old and backward, and how Europeans were vapid and put on airs and were all fancypants -- but AMERICANS, now, Americans were common-sense, moderate, temperate, down-to-earth, honest folks who didn't go in for any of that fancy-ass crap. Looking at the timing, a lot of that was just growing pains being experienced by a very new nation, but a lot of people took it to heart.
And so theater companies really, really tried to encourage "Americana" in their productions. One of the very first playwriting contests in this country was sponsored by a theater company that just really wanted to do some American-written plays, and came up with the idea that the contest should have a theme: "Make the hero of the play be an Indian." The winning play, Metamora, was ostensibly about Metacomet, the leader of the Wampanoags who'd clashed with settlers in Massachusetts in the 1600's. But in "Metamora" he was presented as being a whole "noble-savage" kind of guy who managed to save a virginal colonial maiden from a cruel forced marriage to a foppish magistrate just over from England, and safely delivering her into the arms of her beloved common-sense swain -- before tragically killing himself because he could not live free (or something like that). It reads like MASSIVE cheese today (fun fact: I was the stage manager for the "Metropolitan Playhouse" production in that Wikipedia link), but at the time people ate it up because it made the English governor look bad and anything American look good.
The rivalry between Forest and Macready may have been more just a catalyst for outside tensions that had already been building, but the reason why it WAS a catalyst was all tied into "is the European or the American way of doing things better when it comes to art," and that was a question the theater community had really been dealing with in the early 19th Century.
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