Forms and Norms: Melodrama’s Reimagining at the Dawn of Modern American Theatre, 1890–1929

Chris Corbo is a Ph.D. Candidate in the English department at Rutgers University. His research and teaching interests include 19th- and 20th-century transatlantic theatre and performance, melodrama, modernism, the modernist novel, queer studies, and affect theory. He spent his short-term fellowship in the Billy Rose Theatre Division researching two plays as part of his work looking at melodramatic theatre created between 1890 and 1929.

There’s an enduring myth about early 20th-century American theatre that still fundamentally shapes the way in which we think about and teach this period of performance. As the story goes, the messianic arrival of playwright Eugene O’Neill onto the scene in the late 1910s brought about a dramatic change to the field, introducing homegrown realism and expressionism to the American stage and driving out the last vestiges of popular melodrama.

Undoubtedly, the first half of this tale is quite true, if somewhat embellished: O’Neill—along with contemporaries like Susan Glaspell, The Theatre Guild, and the Lafayette Players—found success at a time when both critical opinion and emerging middle-brow tastes were receptive to the experimentation of such works. Yet O’Neill’s success did not lead to the demise of stage melodrama, as many have claimed. My dissertation, “Forms and Norms: Melodrama’s Plasticity at the Dawn of Modern American Drama,” instead examines several stage melodramas from between 1890 to 1929, works that have been largely overlooked by the canon but which were incredibly popular upon their premiere. I link the formal innovations of these plays to evolving popular ideologies about race, gender, and class, arguing that these melodramas rehearsed what forms of identity could and could not be incorporated into societal norms.

At The New York Public Library’s Billy Rose Theatre Division, my goal was to conduct research for two interrelated dissertation chapters. The first focuses on playwright and actor William Gillette, specifically his star-making turn in his 1895 Civil War melodrama Secret Service; the second chapter pivots to Bayard Veiller’s 1912 play Within the Law, in which a falsely accused shop girl takes revenge on her former employer by exploiting loopholes in the justice system, acting unethically but always “within the law.”

In these two chapters, I contrast the “cool” masculinity of Gillette’s performance with the “unsensational” femininity of actress Jane Cowl, who starred in the lead role of Mary Turner during the initial run of Within the Law. Whereas Gillette’s coolness seems to provide an enviable new model of white masculinity, the cold, unemotional Mary Turner is ultimately made to “give the woman in [her] a chance,” abandoning her life of crime for the man she’s come to love. Both plays thus flirt with new, distinctly un-melodramatic ideas of character and identity but resolve in radically different ways, suggesting not only a misogynistic double standard but also hinting at unique, historically situated pressures requiring either the adaptation or solidification of existing gender roles.

I had developed these arguments about the plays based on my own close readings, but I needed to conduct primary research to see how they had been received by their audiences at the time. For a project deeply invested in popular culture and popular politics, I wanted to track how reviews of and discussion about these works and their stars circulated in the popular press. While this sometimes requires laboriously sifting through a mountain of different periodicals, it’s also common to find clipping books and scrapbooks in which some previous archivist—known or unknown—has already done the work of compiling these articles.

In the Billy Rose Theatre Division, I hit the motherload in the Robinson Locke collection, a sprawling archive containing over a thousand volumes filled with theatre reviews, interviews, programs, and other clippings from the turn of the 20th century. Locke spent nearly thirty years collecting materials on nearly every major theatre-maker of the period, making this archive an invaluable source for anyone interested in early-20th century performance culture.

I began with a deep dive into the materials on Gillette, whose lengthy career was documented across two volumes of material in the Locke collection. While reading reviews of Secret Service, ranging from its premiere in 1895 to revivals through the 1910s, it became clear that Gillette’s performance remained deeply affecting and admired, even as enthusiasm for the play itself had waned. Gillette’s idiosyncratic acting style—which relied on strict bodily and facial choreography and restraint in order to provide audiences with what he called “the illusion of the first time”—was consistently praised for the new ways in which it displayed the virility of his characters. In her 1899 book Some Players, Amy Leslie praised the “delightful, manly, and beautifully quiet” delivery of Gillette’s lines, while Clayton Hamilton remarked in 1915 that the actor “present[s] a man of extraordinary calmness in a series of situations that would fling and ordinary person into flutters.”

Gillette’s performance onstage thus modelled a new performance of masculinity that centered on calmness and quietude, a model that audiences seem to have found deeply enviable. While cool masculinity has long been associated with midcentury aesthetics, Gillette seems to provide an alternative genealogy, one embedded both in theatre history as well as in the shifting economic and racial realities of the turn of the century.

In contrast to the warm reception of Gillette’s performance, quite the opposite can be said of Jane Cowl’s performance as Mary Turner in Within the Law. My research helped me discover that while critics praised her performance in the first act—in which she makes an emotional appeal to her employer to recognize the plight of his workers—they found Cowl’s performance in the rest of the play underwhelming. A reporter for the New York Sun wrote that “the role was completely beyond Miss Cowl’s grasp,” while another writer for the New York Evening Sun claimed that “Miss Jane Cowl… made nothing of Mary after [the first act] except a clotheshorse.”

I see in these reviews not necessarily a reliable critique of Cowl’s acting, but rather a notable confusion over the character of Mary Turner herself. Mary is a remarkably “unsensational” character in a play that was itself praised for being a “relief from the usual roaring devastating racket” of other melodramas. The spectacle of the play comes in the form of a pistol equipped with a silencer that’s noiselessly fired in the dark, an inversion on the typical bombast that usually accompanied scenes of visual spectacle in melodramas. But just as this “noiseless” spectacle is itself in defiance of existing conventions, Mary too is playing against type. Here, the pitiable wronged woman transforms into a cold, unfeeling antihero who exploits the loopholes of the law. The fact that critics were unable to appreciate Cowl’s performance after this transformation speaks to their inability to conceive such a model of femininity; in turn, it is this popular incomprehension of the character that perhaps requires her to be disciplined back to her feeling self by the play’s end.

The discoveries I made during my time at The New York Public Library were crucial for my research, but perhaps what I enjoyed most was getting to perform hands-on research again after the isolating experience of COVID. There was a distinct pleasure in working my way through drawer after drawer of the Theatre Division’s card catalog, frame after frame on the microfilm reader, folder after folder at my desk. The entire experience reminded me how much I love not just the research I do, but the act of researching and sharing my discoveries with others. It’s a role I cherish, and I’m grateful that NYPL let me reprise it.