Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [322]
Like the city itself, New York’s playhouses were in fact increasingly divided into distinct social zones, their boundaries defined as much by deportment as dress. At John Street, occupants of the pit and gallery—“Blacksmith’s apprentices and Canvastown girls,” in the words of Grant Thorburn—smoked and drank incessantly, talked loudly, traded punches, besieged the orchestra with calls for their favorite tunes, harangued the players, clambered onto the stage, and consorted with the numerous prostitutes who worked the halls. Box seats offered no immunity from the commotion: a series of incidents in 1795 prompted Hallam to place an announcement in local papers reassuring boxholders that bolts would be placed inside the door of each box “to prevent any interruption” and that “no persons of notorious ill fame will be suffered to occupy any seat in a box where places are already taken.”
It was the same at the Park. Not long after opening night, the management offered a fifty-dollar reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of “certain illdisposed persons [who] have made a practice of throwing at the performers in the Orchestra and on the Stage.” It did no good. Several years later, in his Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent. (1802), the youthful Washington Irving described how the “honest folks in the pit” milled about near the Park’s stage, noisily commenting on the play before them, while rowdy “gallery gods,” including platoons of prostitutes, added to the general din by “stamping, hissing, roaring, whistling,” “groaning in cadence,” and flinging “apples, nuts & ginger-bread” at those below. Even some boxholders carried on as if they were in “a coffee house, or fashionable lounge, where [they can] indulge in loud conversation, without any regard for the pain it inflicts on their more attentive neighbors.”
Their more attentive neighbors knew better than to object, too. The theater rules and idioms accorded audiences extensive powers of self-regulation as well as a voice in the content, length, and pacing of performances. Irving’s gallery gods and honest folks in the pit considered themselves, and were considered by others, an integral part of the production, with a right, even a duty, to make their views known.
Managers, accordingly, arranged programs and assembled troupes calculated to appeal to plebeian sensibilities. For the 1789 season at the John Street Theater, Hallam advertised thirty-one comedies, twenty-six farces, nine comic operas, six tragedies, and two pantomimes. Thirty-five different authors were represented, the most frequently produced of whom included David Garrick (Clandestine Marriage), Richard Sheridan (School for Scandal), and William Shakespeare (The Tempest, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Richard HI)—a repertoire that seems remarkable only because (thanks partly to critics like Irving) the behavior of audiences has become confused with the extent of their sophistication. Shakespeare was a perennial favorite at both the John Street and Park theaters (a full-length statue of the bard stood in the Park’s lobby). By day, journeymen recited passages from Shakespeare to their shop mates; by night, they cheered, booed, argued, and whistled in possessive familiarity with the drama unfolding on both sides of the footlights.
Increasingly popular were plays that linked patriotism and republicanism. In 1787 John Street patrons hailed The Contrast, a sentimental comedy set in contemporary New York, which demonstrated the superiority of republican honesty and simplicity over European sophistication (at one emotion-charged point in the production, the entire house rose to sing “Yankee Doodle”). When the