The Rise of the Combination Company and the Death of the Resident Stock Company
This post could be called “The Enshittifcation of Theater,” and so could the next one.
By 1870, all the pieces were in place to overthrow the resident stock companies across the nation:- a railroad system connecting many of the cities coast to coast;- a canal that connected travel from New York to the Great Lakes;- a large metropolis (New York City) at the head of both the train and canal system;- a burgeoning star system that was much in demand across the country.
As Christopher Bigsby wrote, “The advent of the combination company marked the theatre’s entrance into the modern, industrialized era.”
What is a combination company? If a resident stock company was an independent, self-sufficient, permanent company rooted in a single community and managed locally, a combination company was its opposite: a single production originating in New York City which, after its long run, loaded the entire production–full cast, scenery, costumes, props–onto a train to tour the country over the course of a year. Other than the replacement of trains with trucks and buses, little has changed over the past 150 years.
The collapse of the resident stock companies nationwide happened suddenly. Christopher Bigsby: “the transformation from a resident stock system to a traveling combination system was more in the nature of a rupture, an abrupt cultural shift or break, than it was a gradual evolution.”
As Jack Poggi wrote in Theatre in America: The Impact of Economic Forces, 1870-1967:
“In 1870 the traveling companies played only important cities and did not appear frequently enough to disrupt the local stock companies. But during the seventies they penetrated to the smaller towns, where the custom of the one-night stand developed, and they took up more and more time in the larger cities, where the usual run was a week. The local stock companies were gradually forced out of the theaters. In the season of 1871-72 there were fifty permanent stock companies in the larger cities; in 1880 there were only seven or eight. Even the oldest and most famous companies in the largest cities did not survive.”
At the same time, the number of combination companies touring the US exploded. Alfred Bernheim notes, “during the season of 1876-77 there were already, according to The New York Dramatic Mirror, nearly one hundred combination companies on the road. In the “Dates Ahead” list printed by this publication on December 11, 1886, 282 combination companies are listed.” Almost all of them originated from New York.
According to Jack Poggi, that production for the entire country became centralized isn’t surprising:
“It was easier for producers to cast their plays, rehearse their actors, prepare their scenery, and arrange their bookings in a single location. That New York should have become this center is not surprising either. Even under the stock system, it had been the leading theatrical city since 1830. It had more theaters than any other city, and it had a large population that was growing at a faster rate than the total population of the country.”
Of course, the collapse of the stock companies put thousands of actors out of work, forcing them to pack up their lives and move to New York City if they wanted to continue their career. 1
And while that was bad enough, it was that they were required to live their lives on the road that was particularly galling. It only took a few years of this life before actors were outraged about the toll this was taking on their personal lives, so much so that, in January 1880, the New York Dramatic Mirror felt the need to weigh in with an “Editorial in Support of the Combination System.” He writes:
“There is very little truth in the oft-reiterated statement that the “combination” system is not conducive to the actors benefit, that it is the means of severing his family ties and home associations, and that it reduces him, in short, to the levelof a genteel tramp. The actor has been a bird of passage since the earliest days of the acting drama. His existence is migratory: the very name of player is associated distinctively with the wandering habits of a bohemian. Your professional bears the objections of the combination in mind when he accepts the life of a nomad. He does not complain of the detriments which are inseparably connected with the stroller’s vocation: he does not lament the stern fact that the figurative berth he has chosen is not a bed of roses, teeming with the delights and comforts of an Arcadia: he knows that the path he has selected is to be the scene of an unflinching, prosaic struggle for bread and butter-a struggle in which a sentimentallove of art is generally made subservient to the puzzling questions of unromantic profit or how to make both ends meet.”
Dear Reader, now is the time that I need you to remember everything you’ve learned in this history so far. Need I point out that this anonymous editorial writer’s grasp of theater history overall is superficial at best–one need only point at the many, many important permanent companies throughout theater history, such as Shakespeare’s King’s Men or Moliere’s company’s residence in the Palais-Royal to destroy this strawman regarding vagabondage. But his willful failure to acknowledge how theater was done just ten years before throughout his own country is breathtakingly shameless.
I would remind you that actors, working within the resident stock system, “normally led stable, settled lives and enjoyed working conditions comparable to workers in other fields.” (Bigsby) This is a rewriting of history by someone who has skin in the game–this is, after all, the New York Dramatic Mirror, a newspaper that was benefitting greatly from the centralization theater in its own city.
Pardon my outrage, but this editorial pushes all my buttons. It bandies about many of the same arguments still being used today to shut down reasonable complaints concerning the abominable pay and working conditions of theater artists today: “you knew what the theater is like–nobody held a gun to your head and forced you to go into the theater. You chose it. It’s always been a tough life. So either quit complaining or do something else.”
And while actors saw an enormous change in the way their professional lives had to be conducted, if anything the lives of the actor/managers were disrupted even more. Remember that, prior to the emergence of the combination company, the managers of resident stock companies were leading artists who owned the theater buildings themselves and made all the decisions regarding what plays would be done by the resident company.
Suddenly, everything changed. Poggi:
“Under the combination system the functions of producing and housing plays were split: the local managers remained in control of the theater buildings, but all the producing was done in New York. The job of managing a playhouse became very much like that of managing any other piece of real estate, and those managers who retained an interest in the art of the theater gradually gave up their jobs.”
In other words, as Douglas McDermott writes, there was a “gradual shift in control of the theatre from those who were artists or who were motivated by a love of the art, to those who were not artists and who were motivated solely by profit.”
What a horrific sentence that is. This is the birth of “show biz,” to which we owe the abysmal nature of today’s commercial theater.
With the artists disempowered and the theaters bought up by real estate men, the situation was ripe for abuse. Our next, and final, article about the destruction of the rooted stage, will describe the birth of the Theatrical Syndicate in 1896, when our current centralized, commercialized theater was locked in.
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This has been the case ever since. I am reminded of a keynote speech by Broadway musical actress Beth Leavel to assembled high school and college students at the Southeastern Theatre Conference in 2009. Asked by an undergraduate whether he should go to Chicago or New York to pursue his career, Leavel responded: “Really? Chicago? I mean, I don’t know much about Chicago, except there are some important rep theatres there. I suppose you can make a living there. All I know is that if I want to work in Chicago, I have to be in New York; if I want to work in Seattle, which is a great theatre town, I have to be in New York; if I want to work in my home town of Raleigh, I have to be in New York.” ↩︎