DURING THE FIRST DECADE OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, AN IRISHAmerican missionary named Alexander Irvine found in the city of New Haven a formative training ground for his remarkable trajectory between the Protestant pulpit and the vaudeville stage. Born in 1863 to an illiterate Protestant cobbler and his Catholic wife in Ulster, Irvine had journeyed toward America on a path of evangelical self-improvement. Prior to his emigration, this path had led him from laboring for Ireland's landed aristocracy through a stint in the Scottish coalfields to an adolescent education in the British Royal Marines, where he learned to read and began to study Western history and English literature. Arriving in America in 1888, Irvine worked for a decade at urban missionary posts in New York City and the midwest before becoming the first religious work director of New Haven's Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). He used these positions to recommend to working-class audiences a path of spiritual uplift and cultural self-