The Copeland Opera House

Abstract

\ The Copeland Opera House —BRIAN LEAHY DOYLE The scholarship of American popular theatre of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has focused almost exclusively on theatre in New York and other larger U.S. cities. By comparison, very little has been written about the development and history of theatre in America’s small towns and smaller cities. While traveling troupes considered these theatres, or opera houses, the “small time,” in these small towns the opera house nonetheless served as a symbol of civic pride and cultural aspiration as well as a public space adaptable to a wide range of theatrical and nontheatrical events. These theatres often presented an array of professional theatre and amateur, or “home talent,” entertainments, as well as hosted dances, fund-raising bene¤ts, high school graduations, political rallies, farmers’institutes, Memorial Day observations, and more. The Copeland Opera House, situated in my hometown of Shullsburg,Wisconsin,is representative of such a theatre and played a signi¤cant role in the community’s development in the late nineteenth century (¤g. 1). Yet while growing up in Shullsburg during the 1960s and 1970s, I remained largely unaware of the Copeland Opera House’s history and signi¤cance, and barely aware of its existence—except for its name in faded block letters on the building’s second-story facade. By the time of my high school graduation, the theatre had long lain dormant, having been supplanted by the movie theatre built in 1949. The opera house lay still and abandoned, inhabited by raccoons, squirrels,pigeons,and bats.The theatre became emblematic of Shullsburg itself, a once proud, civic-minded, small-town community that, with the last zinc mine’s closing in 1978 and family farming’s decreasing pro¤tability in the 1980s, had begun spiraling downward into rural poverty. Boarded storefronts and a disproportionate number of bars and taverns marked Shullsburg’s once active downtown business district. { 1 } Faced with the town’s imminent demise, a group of its citizens nominated a number of buildings built in the nineteenth century for preservation on the National Historic Register of Buildings as well as the Wisconsin Historic Register. Among the buildings listed on the National Historic Register is the Copeland Opera House, which Amy Ressler and Marc Muhleip of the Great Midwestern Educational Theatre Company purchased in 1992. They are in the process of restoring the theatre to a fully functional performance space. Since the mid-1990s, Shullsburg has evolved slowly from a small midwestern town poised on the brink of oblivion into a growing tourist destination with restaurants , craft shops, a mining museum, a cheese factory, and antique stores. Through tourism, Shullsburg is coming full circle, returning to its status as a vital small-town community in southwestern Wisconsin. Discovering background information about nineteenth-century popular theatre in America’s Midwest has proven dif¤cult, for little has been written about small-town theatre in the nineteenth century. Two notable exceptions are Robert C. Toll’s essay “Plays for the People,” in On with the Show: The First Century of Show Business in America, and Albert E. Bernheim’s The Business of Theatre: An Economic History of the American Theatre, 1750–1932. Of even greater value was the information I gleaned from Shullsburg’s three weekly newspapers—the Shullsburg Free Press (1882–84), Southwestern Local (1886– 1902), and Pick and Gad (1882–1965)—which I obtained on micro¤lm from the Figure 1. The Copeland Opera House, ca. 1900. Photo courtesy of Margaret Spillane. BRIAN LEAHY DOYLE { 2 } State Historical Society of Wisconsin. All three newspapers published valuable information about the construction and management of the Copeland Opera House as well as about the dates and descriptions of the performers and performances, the variety of theatrical fare (both professional and amateur), community and civic events, advertising and promotion, audience behavior, and more. (This information was printed invariably in the “Brief Items” or “Brie®ets”section of each newspaper and also included advertisements for liver pills, descriptions of brutal accidents and murders, obituaries, wedding announcements , and other listings.) Of particular interest were the newspapers’ extensive descriptions of the home-talent entertainments that graced the opera house’s stage from its...