On the Boards and Riding the Rails

Playwright and Connecticut native Eugene O’Neill probably arrived in Provincetown, Massachusetts on the tip of Cape Cod by train when he first met up with the Provincetown Players. He wrote in his Nobel Prize autobiographical note that as the son of a stage actor:

First seven years of my life spent mostly in hotels and railroad trains, my mother accompanying my father on his tours of the United States….

In celebration of National Train Day this Saturday, we might observe that for much of the 20th Century, theatre was brought to most small towns and large cities by train. When Gertrude Lawrence played the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, or when Dion Boucicault played at the Boston Museum, they arrived by train. When Joseph Cotten played at the summer theater in Surrey, Maine, a young apprentice named Henry Fonda picked up his trunk at the railroad depot.

Much later on theaters which had been habitually been built close to train stations developed into large entertainment complexes built by interstate highways, but our formative years of theatre in this country have a lot to do with train travel.

Ruth Gordon, in her My Side - The Autobiography of Ruth Gordon (Harper & Row, NY 1976) recalls the amazement on first taking the ultra swank Twentieth Century Limited from New York to Chicago, a step up from the days of rattling train coaches and butcher boys hawking sandwiches in the aisle,

“Memories of damp linen handerkerchiefs on our faces to keep the cinders off were a thing of the past.”

We have another more whimsical episode on the train called the Twentieth Century Limited when John Barrymore rode the rails to his next gig (referred to last year in this Another Old Movie Blog post). Biographer John Kobler writes in his biography of John Barrymore, Damned in Paradise - The Life of John Barrymore (Athenaeum, NY 1977):

“Ensconced in his stateroom aboard the eastbound Twentieth Century, John sent for two Pullman porters, old friends from previous trips. Handing one of them a book, he explained, ‘Now, this is really the skull of Yorick and you are the grave digger.’ And to the other, ‘You are Polonius.’ Fed his cues in this fashion, he rehearsed himself all the way across the continent.”

This Saturday marks National Train Day, sponsored by Amtrak. For more on National Train Day, have a look at this website.

Ada Dyas, Comedienne

Ada Dyas, comedienne, must have taken the train from Norwalk, Connecticut to reach her stage work in New York. This ad in the Byrnes’ Dramatic Times from the 1880s is ambiguous for its very simplicity. Was she looking for work? Was she merely announcing she had arrived? Maybe both.

Ada Dyas, born in 1843, was an Irish actress who played in “Henry IV” in London in 1861, and would later become famous for her featured or starring roles in comedies. One of these most famous plays was Dion Boucicault’s “The Shaugraun.” We mentioned in this previous post that playwright/actor Mr. Boucicault played at Boston’s Hollis Theater in the late 1880s.

Here is link to a photo of Ada Dyas in “The Shaugraun.” We have another portrait of her as described by novelist Edith Wharton in “The Age of Innocence” (D. Appleton & Co., NY, 1920). In the book, the character Newland Archer is captivated by the scene in the play where Dyas and the hero part in romantic silence.

“The actress, who was standing near the mantlepiece and looking down into the fire, wore a gray cashmere dress, without fashionable loopings or trimmings, moulded to her tall figure and flowing in long lines down her back….” Wharton goes on to describe the famous scene where the actor in silent parting kisses one of the ribbons.

Edith Wharton, less romantically, remarks, “Miss Dyas was a tall red-haired woman of monumental build,” with a “pale and pleasantly ugly face…”

Her ungainly appearance, even more than her talent for it, would have consigned Miss Dyas to the comedienne’s roles. But, in her obituary in the New York Times, March 13, 1908, Ada Dyas is recalled in more dignified terms.

“She belonged to a school of actresses taught to pronounce the English language with marked accuracy.” Truly, a product of a bygone era was Miss Dyas of London, New York, and Norwalk, Connecticut.

Hollis Street Theater - Boston

This ad in Byrne’s Dramatic Times is a bit cryptic about this unnamed new theater to be constructed in Boston, but evidently somebody was so confident that Harry E. Dixey in “Adonis” was going to be such a good show that people needed to mark their calendars even before the theater was completed.

“Adonis” was an operetta, one of Broadway’s most successful at the time, running 600 performances. Mr. Dixey, in the title role, was fittingly handsome and brought the popular play and his popular self on tour.

This ad likely referred to the old Hollis Street Theatre, which opened in November 1885. The ad mentions Isaac Rich was the manager, and he did own the Hollis Street Theater, which was managed by Charles J. Rich. The theater replaced an old Congregational church that had been built in 1811, and designed by Charles Bulfinch. That church had been the renowned American architect’s first building.

Today, the theater which replaced the church is also gone, replaced in turn by a parking garage. Each age has its own needs and its own priorities.

Some of the players who appeared here were actor and playwright Dion Boucicault, Augustin Daly, E. H. Sothern, the great Sarah Bernhardt, Ada Rehan, John Drew of the Barrymore-Drew theater family dynasty, Edwin Forrest, William Warren, Henry Irving, and Eva Le Gallienne. William Gillette, Sherlock Holmes to a generation, appeared in Sherlock Holmes in 1901. Maude Adams played Peter Pan, her signature role, here in 1906. Ellen Terry appeared with her company on April 15, 1907, in George Bernard Shaw’s play Captain Brassbound’s Conversion.

The final show, on June 8, 1935, featured the Abbey Theatre Players from Dublin. The theater was demolished August 21, 1935. It was the middle of the Great Depression, and 19th Century theatre took its last breath. "Theatre ghosts" are said to haunt old playhouses, but perhaps not parking garages.