The Problems of Melodrama
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph ? Shipley The Problems Of Melodrama The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana. By Dion Boucicault. Directed by Stuart Vaughan. Presented by T. Edward Hambleton and Theatre...
...The Peyton plantation is about to be auctioned because its former manager, the Yankee McCloskey, has killed the slave boy who carries a check to save the estate...
...while the New York Herald protested that such subjects were inflammatory and should be avoided on the stage...
...George wants to take her to Paris as his bride, but she rejects him because her one drop of colored blood "creates a chasm between us as wide as your love and as deep as my despair...
...Some of the problems it left—especially integration—press upon us still...
...The members of the company here in smaller roles are also sound performers: Bette Henritze as the old widow Peyton whose lifelong home is being sold...
...The permanent Phoenix company is good enough to make us hope for better things...
...we have seen spectacular effects that dim those that startled the playgoers of a hundred years ago...
...McCloskey is too leering and too swaggering a villain for our serious acceptance, and at moments the genial overseer, Scudder, is too piously pure...
...The author withdrew as stage manager early in the New York run, saying that his life was in danger if he continued...
...Boucicault was a master of melodrama...
...In the years of tension before the open conflict flamed, several plays on the plight of the Negro were vividly controversial...
...At the Phoenix Theatre...
...but the Indian Wah-NoTee tracks him through the swamp and in a desperate duel overcomes him...
...The Octoroon, said the New York Times in 1929, was "a piece packed with dynamite when it was first produced and still tingling with perfectly sound theatrical thrills...
...Making the decision to present The Octoroon "straight," however, the Phoenix had then to note that patterns in melodrama change, and that one generation's deep concern may be a later generation's amused laughter...
...Juliet Randall is appealingly tender as Zoe...
...Even more explosive today than the question of integration is that of miscegenation, and the theme of mixed marriage certainly can be presented in serious drama...
...Such an olden melodrama presents problems to a producer today...
...but in 1859 The Octoroon won an almost equal amount of praise and abuse...
...Presented by T. Edward Hambleton and Theatre Incorporated...
...His story is full of dramatic incident and spectacular effect...
...The villain escapes by setting a cotton boat on fire and jumping into the water...
...John Heffernan as McCloskey and Franklin Cover as Scudder are good performers, though their acting should have been tempered to a quieter earnestness...
...The most famous of these was Uncle Tom's Cabin, the first version of which was performed in 1852...
...It is well worth seeing...
...The Civil War is being memorialized in many works in this centennial year...
...We have grown too blase for the old stage villain...
...It might even be easier, though a surrender to uncouth palates, to exaggerate it a bit more and play it wholly for laughs...
...Gerry Jedd is archly delightful as the wealthy neighbor girl, Dora Sunnyside, who loves George and will ultimately marry him...
...Then a photographic plate reveals McCloskey is the slave boy's murderer...
...It is unfortunate that a little re-toning did not preserve these for the theater audience of 1961...
...A few of the speeches, also, are over-ripe, too obviously striking an attitude of womanly virtue or manly defiance...
...In 1929 and 1932 it was vividly and successfully revived, but a generation of film has since unrolled...
...perhaps after the opening night reaction, the director may remove the old-fashioned melodrama effects and give the play the realistic drive and power it so badly needs...
...The New York Tribune hailed the play, roaring out against a civilization that kept lovers apart because one was an octoroon ("out of eight parts of her nature one was derived from African blood...
...Judicious altering of a few crucial speeches and a toning down of some performances might have averted the titters and the inappropriate applause and hissing that occasionally broke the mood of the evening...
...Jared Reed—who with Lee Hoiby contributed the music and choral effects—as the unwilling but dutybound auctioneer...
...Ray Reinhardt is impressive as the Indian, especially in his ritual chants...
...Phoenix Director Vaughan has minimized the spectacle (the camera trick, the flaming boat, here rather crudely done, and the eerie manhunt through the swamp, which O'Neill found so fertile in The Emperor Jones) though the wrestling match between Wah-No-Tee and McCloskey rolls all across the stage to its grim scalping climax...
...McCloskey lusts after Zoe, the beautiful octoroon whom George Peyton loves...
...But there are greater problems the director did not solve...
...The Octoroon still has power, both in its drama and in its theme...
...McCloskey buys Zoe for $25,000 and to escape the Yankee's loathed embrace, she takes poison...
Vol. 44 • February 1961 • No. 6
