Clyde Fitch and the American Theatre by Dearinger Kevin Lane;

Author:Dearinger, Kevin Lane; [Dearinger, Kevin Lane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 17.1. Count Carlos (Arthur Byron) serenades Geraldine Lang (Mary Mannering) on the deck of their ship, in the first act of The Stubbornness of Geraldine (1902).

Source: Amherst College Archives and Special Collections.

The audience got their money’s worth in plot, but the shipboard setting of the first act proved the sensation of the theatrical season. The deck stretched across the stage, with the railing at the footlights and a row of steamer chairs facing the audience. In a well-publicized special effect, the ship tossed “heavily, and back,” accompanied by the sounds of “loud screams,” laughter, and “a great clatter of crockery.” A seasick woman, “enveloped in wraps of an indiscriminate sort,” suffered in silence in her deck chair, answering inquiries about her health with a rolling of her eyes. A man walked with his legs comically far apart to steady himself. Surveying the heaving deck, Fraulein Handt observed in Teutonic fashion, “Dat vas ein corker!”

Fitch garnished The Stubbornness of Geraldine with the details of life in New York in the early twentieth century, providing commentary on the incorporation of Brooklyn, the fashionable craze for playing bridge, elevated trains, the new subways, and recently completed Riverside Drive. Through most of the second act, the play’s characters scramble over mountains of luggage when deliverymen refuse to take Geraldine’s trunks further than the entry hall; their good-natured acceptance of the inconvenience gently lightens the tone of the scene, even when misunderstandings cause unhappiness.37

With Frank McKee as producer, Fitch rehearsed The Stubbornness of Geraldine for five weeks. The play premiered in New Haven and toured briefly before it opened at New York’s Garrick Theatre on November 3, 1902. Its author was still limping on his sprained ankle, but he was pleased by the reactions of the first-night audience.38

The critics were another matter. Forum hailed Fitch as “our contemporaneous Congreve,” but the Mirror complained that Fitch appeared less interested in plot than in “character drawing,” “clever lines,” and eccentric settings. “He has no bank notes of large denomination in his treasury,” wrote the critic, “but he is possessed of vast wealth in the small change of the drama.” The Stubbornness of Geraldine contained enough of this small change, however, to make it very valuable indeed. Ticket sales were strong, and Weber and Fields teased the new play in The Stickiness of Gelatine. Faye Templeton’s “Gelatine Pang” offered a wobbly impersonation of Mary Mannering and warbled a “coon song” to suit the taste of the time. When a stewardess on the wildly rolling deck of the “S. S. Pneumonia” remarked that lunch would be “up in a few minutes,” Weber’s cross-dressed Fraulein Krank replied that her breakfast would be up at about the same time.39

Fitch’s open-air rides in Central Park seemed cursed. On an afternoon drive, his driver lost control of his horse, and his coach careened violently up the West Drive. The Tribune reported with its usual malice that the playwright had reacted with unmanly panic, but propped on “a cushion covered with

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