The Platform Versus the Stage: Circuit Chautauqua's Antitheatrical Theatre

Abstract

The Platform Versus the Stage: The Circuit Chautauqua’s Antitheatrical Theatre* Charlotte Canning (bio) [Chautauqua] is our oasis—our life belt. The music we hear . . . is the music we sing . . . all through the year. The lectures we discuss for months. My husband remembers all the jokes and the politics and I try to remember . . . all the new ideas set forth. . . . Sometime I think we could not endure [our] privations and loneliness . . . if it were not for the Chautauqua. “The Uplift of Chautauqua Week” 1 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Towns on the Circuit were decorated in anticipation of the coming Chautauqua. Chautauqua Collection, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City. Reprinted with permission. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. A typical Chautauqua tent could seat up to one thousand people. Chautauqua Collection, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City. Reprinted with permission For most rural Americans before World War I, the annual arrival of the Circuit Chautauquas offered the only experience of live performance, a stimulating array of new faces and ideas, and a relief from quotidian labors and isolation. 1924, for example, saw Chautauquas in over ten thousand communities performing to over forty million spectators. Begun in 1904, the Chautauquas were a commercialized, touring version of the institution in upstate New York; they supplied four to seven days of entertainment and enlightenment in the form of lectures (from the serious or informational to the comic or sentimental), music, readings, and (eventually) theatrical performances, all housed in a brown tent. They promised and delivered a spectacle that was both diverting and wholesome, that conformed to the standards, norms, and behaviors of their communities despite the standardized program that toured without variation from town to town. Yet, their evident success aside, the Chautauquas were not quite consistent in their claims. According to Harry Harrison, manager of the Redpath Bureau, the most influential Chautauqua: Nowhere was . . . inconsistency more evident than in the attitude toward theatre and all its works. Many people wanted the thrill of the drama, the fun of make-believe, but none of the trappings of the play. They wanted performers who for a rapturous hour could transport them out of a drab, mud-bound world into fictional far places and other, better times, but they did not want actors. They had seen what they called “actors” in that disreputable free medicine show last year and all the other tawdry outfits that straggled into town to corrupt impressionable youth. 2 [End Page 303] If the tension between the standardized product and centrally planned touring format, on the one hand, and the claim to respond to local, community-specific demands, on the other, could be described as an “inconsistency,” as Harrison had it, then that between the desire for the “thrill of the drama” and the distaste for the “trappings of the play,” or between the appeal of “transport” to “far away places” and the threat of “disreputable . . . tawdry outfits,” can only be described as a contradiction. Audiences wanted dramatic, even theatrical, entertainment but they did not appear to want theatre. The desire for the “thrill of the drama” as against the “trappings of the play,” in other words, for theatrical experience without the label “theatre” presents a seemingly insoluble paradox. The challenge of the Chautauquas was to answer the audience’s demand for “a rapturous hour,” without provoking the abhorrence for “corrupt . . . shows” that usually went hand in hand with rural Protestant Americans’ anti-theatrical prejudice. 3 In order to demonstrate how, despite this anti-theatrical prejudice, theatre eventually became a celebrated part of the Chautauquas, I will show how the tensions between different definitions of theatre that circulated during this period affected not only the history of the circuits but the history and historiography of American theatre more generally. The Chautauquas were able to present theatre, I will argue, because they ingeniously redefined it by separating out reputable dramatic literature from the material attributes of theatrical illusion—costumes, scenery, and particularly make-up—which its audiences regarded as signs of corruption and immorality. In part because of their peculiar negotiation of America’s anti-theatrical prejudice, the Circuit Chautauquas have been marginalized in theatre...