Theater and War

War on Stage, 1770–1840

Although amateur and professional troupes initiated theatrical productions soon after European colonies were established in the Americas, it was not until the revolutionary era that American theater artists began to move away from European, particularly British, models. Colonial pamphleteers published several dramatic dialogues to protest purported British outrages in the 1770s. While most of these pieces were not intended for performance, they inspired Mercy Otis Warren, the chief dramatic propagandist for the American cause, to pen The Adulateur (1772), a five-act tragedy that called for an armed response to the “Boston [Page 835]Massacre.” She followed this piece with The Group (1775), which ridiculed the imposition of martial law in Boston, and The Blockheads (1776), which attacked British occupying forces and their Tory sympathizers.

Warren's plays never reached production, however. Patriots had come to associate the theater with English “extravagance and dissipation,” as the Continental Congress termed it in 1774, and they banned play production altogether for the duration of the Revolutionary War. Even George Washington was forbidden from staging Cato, a celebrated republican tragedy, as a means of inspiring his troops during the winter at Valley Forge. In contrast, British officers and Tories in occupied New York City enjoyed a thriving theater for most of the war. Although a few patriots understood that the theater might serve their cause, the anti-theatrical prejudices of revolutionary republicanism stamped out most theatrical activity from 1776 into the mid-1780s.

Most cities revoked their anti-theater laws, and performances resumed in the late 1780s, inducing several new playwrights to join most spectators in applauding the recent Revolution. Royall Tyler in The Contrast (1787), for example, honored the patriots' efforts by making his sentimental hero a colonel from the Continental Army who saves the heroine from the clutches of an Anglicized American fop. Bunker Hill, or the Death of General Warren (1797), by John D. Burk, celebrated American resistance to British tyranny with a miniaturized reenactment of the battle onstage, complete with cannon fire. Patriotism in the new republic, however, restricted as well as animated dramatic tastes. Manager-playwright William Dunlap found little success with his neoclassical tragedy Andre (1798), which was based on the hanging of a British spy, because his drama elevated enlightened reason over narrow-minded nationalism. Revised as The Glory of Columbia: Her Yeomanry (1803) and manned with patriotic American farmers to capture the spy, the renamed play was a hit at Fourth of July celebrations in playhouses for years.

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