How Canons Are Formed

In 1916, theater critic Alan Dale made a shocking discovery. He’d recently declined an invitation from a women’s club to speak “on the subject of the woman playwright” to explain why there were supposedly so few of them in existence. But he remained intrigued by the question, so he dug into his decades’ worth of papers. Was this scarcity “due to the fact that the theater was conducted by men and for men, and that women were satisfied with interpreting roles that were made to fit them by the masculine playwright?” After a week of wrestling with the evidence, Dale wrote an article claiming, “I was armed with facts that absolutely controverted the assertion that few women write for the stage, and the records surprised me so utterly that they made a sort of revelation.”¹ Dale had come to realize what many had known for years: while they were mostly ignored, women made up a substantial number of the playwrights writing for Broadway during the Progressive Era.

Alfred J. Cohen, alias Alan Dale, 1910 (Wikimedia Commons).

One of the women whom Dale mentioned in his article was Lottie Blair Parker. When her hit melodrama Way Down East premiered in 1898, the New York Times dismissed it as a “pumpkin and dialect drama” aimed at an undiscerning audience. But that audience turned out again and again, both in New York and on the road. In 1903, a San Francisco publication observed that “There are people in every city who would not miss seeing Way Down East for worlds, and they go to see the piece every time it strikes their town.” A 1920 movie adaptation by D.W. Griffith netted producer William A. Brady, who owned the rights to the play, $175,000.²

Parker only saw a fraction of the money her play earned. Born Charlotte Blair in Oswego, New York circa 1858, she’d lived the peripatetic life of a working actress, including a stint as the lead in a touring company of the hit 1880s melodrama Hazel Kirke. When her entry for a 1891 playwriting contest attracted the attention of powerful Broadway producer Daniel Frohman, she retired from acting to focus on writing plays. 

Lottie Blair Parker, 1905 (Wikimedia Commons).

At the time, the blueprint for success as a Broadway playwright looks, to our eyes, more like the sort a modern screenwriter would follow. Plays frequently adapted existing properties or blatantly copied successful elements of previous hits. With both theater and vaudeville coming under the control of monopolistic concerns like the Theatrical Syndicate³, the business of writing and producing plays resembled the standardized, industrialized processes that had revolutionized so many other facets of American economic life. Plays also were often written as star vehicles for an established performer, whose involvement would guarantee an audience and many productions were the collaborative effort of two or more writers.

Parker worked within this paradigm, borrowing from plays like Hazel Kirke and pitching her new work, titled Annie Laurie, to Effie Ellsler, who’d originated the role of Hazel on Broadway almost two decades earlier. But Ellsler declined, and it wasn’t until Parker’s husband and business manager, Harry, got the script in front of Brady that it began to go somewhere. Brady wasn’t the most reputable producer, perhaps stemming from his early days as an intellectual-property pirate. He’d earned the nickname “Manuscript Bill” from the stack of plagiarized scripts he carried around, which gave him a cheap repertoire of material that his troupe could perform in out-of-the-way markets where it simply wouldn’t be cost-effective for authors to track him down and sue him.⁴

Whatever his other, colorful qualities, Brady knew how to make money, and when he read Annie Laurie, “At the end of the first act I knew it was a great thing; at the end of the fourth, I knew it would make a fortune.” He paid Parker a fairly generous $10,000 for the rights to the play. But this also meant the work no longer belonged to her, which Brady soon emphasized by changing the title to Way Down East. He also brought in his longtime business partner, Joseph A. Grismer, who now shared ownership of the play and proceeded to make changes to the script in collaboration with Parker.⁵ Grismer knew something about theatrical effect: in addition to his extensive experience as a director⁶ and script doctor, he was married to Phoebe Davies, the production’s star, and was a decent actor in his own right, taking on the role of the play’s villain. 

William A. Brady, 1915 (Library of Congress) .

The end result of their work is effective in its use of well-worn melodramatic tropes to gently push against prevailing moral codes of the time regarding the sexual double standard. The plot of Way Down East follows Anna Moore, a young woman whose status as a servant of the well-off Bartletts is threatened when she discovers that none other than Lennox Sanderson, the man who seduced and abandoned her, lives nearby. The revelation of her shameful past as a woman who gave birth to a (now-deceased) baby out of wedlock nearly drives her to despair and a freezing death amidst howling winter winds. Anna however is not ultimately punished for her sexual transgressions, instead finding acceptance and love from the Bartletts and their son, David.⁷

Way Down East’s success led to an impossible situation for Parker. On the one hand, she didn’t receive full credit for her work. Brady disparaged her talent, later referring to her early draft as “the most dramatic example of a theatrical ugly duckling that I ever ran into” and praising Grismer for turning it into a hit.⁸ When people were willing to credit her as the author, they often did so only to disparage her work. Lillian Gish, the star of Griffith’s 1920 movie, dismissed it as a “horse-and-buggy melodrama” and recalled that, “As I read the play I could hardly keep from laughing.”⁹Theater critic Alexander Woollcott even used Parker’s name as a byword for old-fashioned sentimentality in a 1922 pan, referring to a play as being “written and, for the most part, acted in the early Lottie Blair Parker manner.”¹⁰

Parker knew how much she’d missed out financially, commenting to an interviewer in her later years that, “It has made thousands, I suppose, for every one connected with it, but I have had nothing to do with that. I wrote the play and I sold it. Today I’d know better and I wouldn’t sell it that way. But then it was different, especially for a woman playwright.” It took a number of additional successes to build her estate to over $100,000 when she died in 1937.¹¹

There was one more unfortunate result of the play’s popularity. “Manuscript Bill” knew that publishing the play might make it easier to pirate, while the creation of multiple film adaptations led to legal complications that prevented the original script from making it into print. The best-known play by one of Broadway’s earliest professional woman playwrights now only exists as a handful of scripts in various libraries and archives.

Promotional poster for Way Down East, 1898, (Library of Congress).

The story of Way Down East is one example of how Parker and her contemporaries rapidly faded from public consciousness, to the point that a prominent theater critic like Dale could forget about them less than 20 years after the play’s premiere. Partly this was due to the shortsightedness of men like him, but it also had to do with the nature of the theater for which women like Parker wrote. Way Down East ultimately was a collaborative effort, and one made for the purposes of entertaining audiences in the space of an ephemeral theatrical performance, rather than standing as a lasting literary achievement. 

Dale’s ignorance of women’s contributions to the stage is less surprising to us, attuned as we are to the systemic gender disparities that characterize our economy and society. But it’s hard not to notice the timing of his discovery: the February 1917 article in which he revealed his findings appeared at a time when, far away from New York City, the Provincetown Players were beginning to make a name for themselves in a ramshackle theater on Cape Cod. Out of that organization would come Eugene O’Neill, the prevailing attitude towards whom is summed up by Tony Kushner: “There’s really not much in the way of serious American theater before he came along.”¹²This was a point of view reinforced by O’Neill himself, who frequently derided the “Broadway show shop” and, in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, portrayed his own father’s regret and bitterness over a lucrative but artistically unfulfilling lead role in a melodramatic adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo.

The fact that Dale’s discovery and O’Neill’s rise roughly coincided with one another points to some uncomfortable truths about how canons are formed, and how we tend to value certain types of cultural production over others. Women had been writing entertaining plays, which often subtly challenged prevailing social attitudes about sex and gender roles, for the American stage almost from the beginning, and with sustained commercial success since at least the end of the nineteenth century. The crucial difference, however, was that they were doing so as parts of a big, industrialized enterprise, a mode which doesn’t fit the traditional conception of playwrights as lone — and usually male — geniuses, concerned only with lofty artistic truths.

1. Alan Dale, “Women Playwrights: Their Contribution has Enriched the Stage,” The Delineator (Feb. 1917), 7. “Alan Dale” was the pen name for Alfred J. Cohen.
2. “The Week at Theaters,” New York Times, Feb. 6, 1898 (first quotation); “The Blair-Grismer Drama,” Town Talk, Dec. 5, 1903, p. 25 (second quotation); William A. Brady, Showman (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1937), 185–86. Unfortunately, a third adaptation, made before the others by pioneering filmmaker Alice-Guy Blache, appears to be lost.
3. An organization of six theatrical managers and bookings agents that controlled much of the booking decisions for U.S. theaters in the late 1800 and early 1900s.
4. Lottie Blair Parker, “My Most Successful Play,” in The American Stage: Writing on the Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner, ed. Laurence Senelick (New York: Library of America, 2010), 205; Brady, Showman, 62–64.
5. William A. Brady, The Fighting Man (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1916), 156; David A. Mayer, Stagestruck Filmmaker: D.W. Griffith & the American Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), 268. The fullest account of Parker and Grismer’s collaborative revision of the play comes from Parker in “My Most Successful Play,” which was published in The Green Book Magazine in 1911. She credits Grismer and others with enhancing the play by adding dialogue to certain scenes and inventing many of the minor characters who provide much of the play’s comic relief. Parker also asserts that she prevented him and Brady from making substantive changes to the main plot, such as revising the final act. The final performance script was arguably the product of an even broader group of collaborators than just Parker and Grismer; for example, Brady recalls how Grismer “developed” one of those comic roles by hiring a vaudeville performer and incorporating his preexisting act into the text of the play.
6. It’s worth noting that the concept of “director” — someone charged with developing and executing a specific and unified artistic vision for a given production — was just emerging around the turn of the 20th century. It would still be some time before it became standard practice to credit someone who performed the functions that Grismer did in preparing Way Down East for performance as having fulfilled that role.
7. Way Down East: A Pastoral Drama in Four Acts, typescript in the Theatre Collection at Houghton Library, Harvard University. The New York Public Library also possesses a number of scripts, and the Lord Chamberlain’s Collection at the British Library has a copy of Annie Laurie, submitted for copyright purposes.
8. Brady, Showman, 185.
9. Quoted in Mayer, Stagestruck Filmmaker, 186.
10. Alexander Woollcott, “The Play: Old Style Melodrama,” New York Times, Sept. 7, 1922, p. 21.
11. Lottie B. Parker, Playwright, Dies,” New York Times, Jan. 6, 1937, p. 23 (quotation); Felicia Hardison Londre, “Money Without Glory: Turn-of-the-century America’s Women Playwrights,” in The American Stage, ed. Ron Engle and Tice L. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 134.
12. Robert M. Dowling, Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 9.

Michael Lueger

Michael Lueger is a contingent lecturer in theater at Boston College and Emerson College. He hosts and produces the Theater History Podcast and has written about theater for publications including WBUR, JSTOR Daily, The Awl, and Howlround.