Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [390]
In the fall of 1821 Brown moved his entertainments inside, a shift hastened by complaints from white neighbors about the noise, and launched his African Theater. Brown offered mostly Shakespeare—Hewlett, who proved a gifted thespian, opened as Richard III—and modern plays as well. As in white theaters, hornpipes were danced and comic songs sung between acts. The African Theater was a great success with black men and women. More remarkable, white patrons began showing up in substantial numbers, allowing Brown to move to a thrice weekly schedule, and he replaced “African” with “American” in the company’s name.
The entrepreneurial Brown decided to expand still further. He rented a house way uptown, on the southeast corner of Mercer and Bleecker, and again whites turned out, especially “laughter loving young clerks,” though some were more interested in heckling than listening. The National Advocate noted in October 1821 (with conventional condescension) that the troupe had “graciously made a partition at the back of their house, for the accommodation of the whites” who, the group’s handbill said, “do not know how to conduct themselves at entertainments for ladies and gentlemen of color.”
Giddy with success, Brown now overreached. He audaciously rented space in a hotel right next door to the Park Theater and put on three performances a week during January 1822. The Park’s manager hated the competition and hired ruffians who cracked jokes, threw crackers onto the stage, and started a riot. The watch responded but, rather than ejecting the provocateurs, arrested the cast, with Hewlett wittily tossing off Shakespearean lines as he was hauled away.
Brown set up shop again at his former quarters, and his patrons, now predominantly white, followed him. For a brief time, audiences could watch the earliest work of one of the era’s great actors, Ira Aldridge, until the teenager’s father, a deacon at Mother Zion, made him quit to pursue a ministerial career. (To no avail: Aldridge, aware he had no chance to develop his talents in race-bound New York, fled to London, where he would play Othello at the Royal Theatre, and become the rage of Europe for a quarter century.)
Brown’s troupe carried on through the summer of 1823, surviving a nasty assault in August 1822, when fifteen members of a nearby circus, camped above Canal Street, attacked the theater, beat Brown severely, stripped the actors and actresses, and demolished the furniture and scenery. Whether the company fell victim to further white violence, a yellow fever epidemic, or limited financial resources is unknown, but Brown closed on a militant note, offering a drama of his own creation, The Drama of King Shotaway, Founded on facts taken from the Insurrection of the Caribs in the Island of St. Vincent.
Apart from a final attempt to establish a black theater later in the 1820s, African Americans would not again stride the boards in New York City for many decades. What replaced genuine black performance was “blackface minstrelsy,” in which white men, painted up as black men, mimicked what they alleged to be Negro culture.
Blackface “masking” had been familiar to colonial Americans, in the form of rioters blacking up to hide their identity and in onstage portrayals of Negroes by Caucasians. But probably the first white person to deliberately appropriate elements of black culture for the purpose of performance was Charles Mathews, an English actor who toured the United States in 1822-23. Mathews, known for his benignly humorous renderings of Scots, Yorkshiremen, and other regional British “types,” quickly added a “Yankee” characterization for local audiences. He also began assembling scraps of song and dialect from black preachers, stagecoach drivers, and the actors