What Happened in 1870? (Not So Fast) (Part 2 of The Rooted Stage)

Jan 27, 2025 · 6 min read

As I wrote in The Rooted Stage: Beginnings, part 1 of this series, the first century of the American theater was dominated by the resident stock company which had the following characteristics:

rooted in a single place
in a single theater
using a consistent group of actors
performed a variety of plays
independent (i.e., the capital invested in the company came from those within the company itself)
organized as a cooperative

But all of that changed around 1870, and again in 1896. (Ooh, 1896! Another teaser.) So what happened in 1870?

Not so fast. It didn’t happen all at once–poof! There were several intermediate steps that were based on decisions that seemed pragmatic at the time, but that eventually would lead to the collapse of the resident stock companies entirely. That resident stock companies were locally-owned and self-contained were a mirror of American society in general. As historian Robert Wiebe wrote, “the entire nation at this time was composed of ‘island communities,’ each self-contained, self-sufficient, and loosely connected to other communities. Local autonomy was still the ‘heart of democracy…'”

In the introduction to The Cambridge History of American Theatre (Volume 2) co-editor Christopher Bigsby makes an important connection between Wiebe’s idea of “island communities” and resident stock companies:

In its decentralization, the stock company was fully consistent with Wiebe’s model. Under the stock system, every local community with a theatre constituted an independent producing center, and, in fact, each individual company, in its organization, working relationships, and functional independence, was the theatrical equivalent of Wiebe’s “island community.” Accordingly, actors in stock companies normally led stable, settled lives and enjoyed working conditions comparable to workers in other fields.

Actors performed three nights a week, for instance, until the latter half of the 19th century–how humane is that! But those performances were demanding, to say the least. As Douglas MacDermott outlines in The Cambridge History of American Theatre (Volume 1), a typical performance included:

a five-act main piece and a two-or three-act farce or musical afterpiece, with songs and dances by members of the company between plays and sometimes between acts. A provincial company would have a repertory of at least two dozen main pieces and half as many afterpieces, any combination of which could be performed on a day’s notice. The main pieces included three to six Tudor and Stuart plays, as many as eight others had been written between 1700 and 1750, and ten or more were recent London successes. The afterpieces were normally all of current authorship. Provincial companies did not, except in rare cases of local authorship, introduce new plays."

It was the overlap of plays in the repertory, especially those of Shakespeare, that made the first step toward the rupture of 1870 possible. In the early part of the 19th century, well-known actors, usually from England, began to tour the US. They would contract to perform a set number of plays from their repertoire with the members of the local stock company. Shakespeare was a particular draw. Indeed, as Lawrence Levine writes in Highbrow/Lowbrow, the famed American actor-manager Joseph Jefferson “held Shakespeare responsible for the star system that prevailed for so much of the nineteenth century since “his tragedies almost without exception contain one great character on whom the interest of the play turns, and upon whom the attention of the audience is centered.”

In the paragraph above, I bolded the first step toward 1870: the birth of the star system. It was a very attractive option for resident stock companies, who could provide their audiences with some variety while also charging higher ticket prices and packing the house. Thus, the star actor made an excellent living, and the company members made more than they’d usually make while he was visiting. A win-win. “From the 1820s on,” Bigsby writes, “it became common for a traveling star to be attached to a local stock company for at least part of a season, and increasingly American audiences came to demand nothing less than a star in every performance.” The process, as described by Bigsby and co-editor Donald Wilmeth, was simple:

“A star often arrived the day before the first performance and rehearsed with the company the morning before playing each role. Having played all of his or her roles at least once, the star departed for the next engagement while the company played without a star until the next one arrived.”

The ease of touring was enhanced with the expansion of the railroad system in the US, and soon The Road was seen as being paved with gold by foreign and US stars alike. Famous actors like William Charles Macready, Edwin Forrest, Edwin Booth, Charlotte Cushman, Matilda Heron, and Julia Dean were stars of the first magnitude who made their fortunes touring.

But soon a problem developed for the local companies. Whereas prior to the star system, an actor in a resident stock company had the opportunity to play a great many roles in rotation and gradually, as they developed their craft, take on larger and more challenging roles. But with the arrival of the star system, this process was truncated, and the best local actors, frustrated in their ambitions, eventually began heading for the major theater towns in order to have a chance at playing more challenging roles and thus becoming stars themselves. The actors of the resident companies who stayed behind, on the other hand, soon became mere backdrops for star turns. But the money was good. For a while.

Predictably, as the stars realized their drawing power, they began demanding a larger and larger percentage of the house, which meant the company remembers saw smaller and smaller profits themselves. However, there seemed to be no other options: audience expectations had been changed. Jack Poggi:

“Tired of the same old faces in the stock companies, audiences came to expect an unbroken succession of new personalities. The managers, realizing that they could not make much money without a star, and that with a famous star they could make a great deal, began competing for the services of the most popular actors by paying higher and higher percentages of the receipts. The biggest stars often demanded so much that the management lost money, even with a full house and increased prices. The only recourse was to cut expenses; the salaries of the local actors were reduced (impelling the better ones to set off in search of stardom, leaving the worse behind), and budgets for scenery and costumes were cut. These economies made for further deterioration of the local company and greater dependence on visiting stars.”

As the quality of the resident company actors deteriorated, the stars began to bring along a co-star, so that they were more fully in control of the quality of their performances. And as the railroad expanded, the stars could travel in comfort, making an excellent living.

Meanwhile, the stock companies began to totter.

Next: Part 3: 1870 [Finally!]