Transatlantic Broadway

The Infrastructural Politics of Global Performance

M. Schweitzer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137437341
• eBook ISBN: 9781137437358
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Arte generale

Transatlantic Broadway traces the infrastructural networks and technological advances that supported the globalization of popular entertainment in the pre-World War I period, with a specific focus on the production and performance of Broadway as physical space, dream factory, and glorious machine.

1

Networking the Waves: Ocean Liners, Impresarios, and Broadway’s Atlantic Expansion

In The Great Wet Way, a humorous account of transatlantic travel, American theatre critic Alan Dale characterizes ocean liners as sites of transformation, frivolity, and performance:

You go on board sane, logical, level-headed and serious; you become comparatively insane, unlevel-headed, and trivial. You lose your balance, and why you lose it, is something that I have never been able to explain ... When I find myself opera-glassing the passing ship, raving over a shoal of porpoises, in fevered quest of passengers’ autographs, and playing bridge in the smoke-room, I am convinced that I have left my other self on shore. I am somebody else whom I scarcely recognise, and certainly do not admire. My real self would cut my ship self dead on Fifth Avenue or Broadway.¹

In this passage, Dale ponders the peculiar metamorphosis that overtakes him whenever he crosses the Atlantic. Cut off from the bustling world of Broadway and Fifth Avenue, he loses his “real self,” becoming instead an autograph-hunting, bridge-playing, opera-glassing “ship self.” Within this remade mobile world, new sights become old sights, and eccentric clothing or mannerisms seem commonplace. Dale recalls seeing a young woman wearing a Panama hat covered with autographs from her fellow passengers. If the woman dared to “walk down Broadway or Fifth Avenue wearing that hideous autograph hat,” he writes, “[s]he would probably be followed by a howling and derisive mob ... Yet on board she was unmolested. After the first few days nobody noticed the autograph hat.”² The hat’s disappearance into the environment of the ship is, for Dale, both fascinating and frightening; it foregrounds the liner’s ability to transform human interactions with the non-human world and to make the “hideous” appear quite ordinary.

Dale’s travelogue acknowledges the power of the ocean liner as a modern machine and an engine of modernity that profoundly affects the physical, emotional, and psychological well-being of its human cargo. The ship shapes him, almost against his will, turning him from a “logical, level-headed and serious” critic into an “insane, unlevel-headed, and trivial” traveler.³ Taking a cue from Dale’s observations, this chapter charts the theatrical life of the transatlantic ocean liner during the period frequently described as the “golden age of travel” (1880–1920) and treats liners as star actors who not only accelerated the cross-border exchange of theatrical commodities but also participated in the formation of a decidedly transnational theatre culture. As Dale’s narrative makes clear, ocean liners acted upon the human and non-human cargo they carried (the stereotypical image of the seasick traveler offers the most vivid example of this), while the passengers, the crew, the ocean, and (most notoriously) enemy vessels and icebergs acted upon them.

Simultaneously performing objects, stages, and environments, sea-going vessels animate objects and bodies through mobility. In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy describes ships as “the living means by which the points within the Atlantic world were joined ... mobile elements that stood for the shifting spaces in between the fixed places that they connected.” For this reason, he argues, “they need to be thought of as cultural and political units rather than abstract embodiments of the triangular trade. They were something more—a means to conduct political dissent and possibly a distinct mode of cultural production.”⁴ Gilroy’s project is decidedly different from my own: the elegant liners that ferried actors and managers across the Atlantic in the early 1900s can hardly be compared to the slave ships that carried African slaves in the 1700s and 1800s. Yet his reference to ships as living entities and cultural and political units offers a useful starting point for a performance history of the ocean liner.

Actor-network theory offers additional tools for tracing the theatrical life of the ocean liner and the many other actors that constituted transatlantic Broadway in the pre-World War I period. In “Objects and Spaces,” ANT scholar John Law insists on treating “architectures, ships, aircraft or firearms ... as enactments of strategic logics.” As actors, or actants, these materials perform in tandem with “[s]peech, bodies and their gestures, subjectivities” and other human elements to constitute the social and inform relationships within the world. Collectively, they “participate in holding everything together. All are made in, and help to produce, those relations.”⁵ Yet some actors inevitably assume larger roles than others in any given network. To acknowledge such variation, Bruno Latour distinguishes between intermediaries, actors that play a passive role in a network, and mediators, “actors endowed with the capacity to translate [that is, change or transform] what they transport, to redefine it, redeploy it, and also to betray it.”⁶ In the example from Alan Dale, the autographed hat of the young woman slipped from being a mediator to being an intermediary, naturalized by other actors in the network (that is, the ocean, the other passengers, the ship decks). By contrast, the liner maintained its status as a mediator, at least for Dale.

In defining transatlantic ocean liners and the people, goods, machines, organizations, and ideas that traveled upon them as actors in a continually forming, always shifting network, this chapter offers a different perspective on theatre makers, the objects they used, and the ideas they encountered. Of course, theatre scholarship has long acknowledged the importance of transportation networks in the establishment and formation of theatre culture, particularly in the mid-nineteenth century, when the construction of extensive railway lines across North America and Europe made theatrical touring a much more viable and profitable endeavor.⁷ In the United States, the popularity of touring combination companies eventually displaced the local stock company as audiences made known their preferences for star actors and productions originating in New York.⁸ Yet while most historical narratives emphasize the role of railroads in the gradual nationalization of theatre in the United States and elsewhere, few consider the extent to which transatlantic ocean liners encouraged the globalization of theatre practices and cultures.⁹ This tendency is understandable given the twentieth-century project of writing national theatre histories, but it also misses and, in some cases, misrepresents the relationships, structures, and networks that gave rise to theatrical innovation and cultural exchange. Looking at the role of ocean liners in the development of early twentieth-century commercial theatre extends the traditional geographic focus of American theatre history, especially the history of Broadway theatre.¹⁰ This analytical model is likewise applicable to studies of airplanes, automobiles, subways, and other modes of transport that condition the rhythms, shapes, and movements of performing artists (and objects) today.¹¹

In keeping with ANT’s emphasis on close description, I follow a mode of “technological storytelling” that emphasizes how “humans and non-humans perform together to produce effects.”¹² These stories overlap and intersect, echoing Latour’s striking descriptor of the network as an “Ariadne’s thread” that weaves together narratives.¹³ Rather than trace a single network (for example, the various actors present on a single liner, like the passengers, the crew, the decks, the engine room, and the cargo), I examine different scales of networks to develop a more thorough understanding of how, where, and with whom/what ocean liners acted.¹⁴ In so doing, I stress the accuracy of Alan Dale’s playful pun on the Great White Way, for while Broadway cut a swath through Manhattan, it also arose from the Atlantic, the “highway that made empire possible.”¹⁵ This attention to variances in scale illuminates the many modes of mobility at play in a single Atlantic crossing, from the grand mobility of the liners themselves to the smaller-scale mobility of the humans on board, to the perceived immobility of the architectural and other design elements that directed, or in some cases impeded, human movement.

The great Atlantic “sister act”

In 1907, the British-owned Cunard Steamship Company sent its two sister ships, the Mauretania and the Lusitania, on their maiden voyages across the Atlantic. These massive, elegantly appointed vessels offered a range of amenities to first- and second-class passengers, including special writing rooms, luxurious parlors, wood-paneled dining halls, Turkish and Russian baths, and elevator service between decks.¹⁶ And they were fast, achieving speeds of over 25 knots an hour with the help of huge turbine engines that had an estimated horsepower of seventy thousand. The Scientific American congratulated Cunard for “being the first to place in service a ship of this maximum speed, particularly when it is borne in mind that to the distinction of being the fastest, the new flyer adds also those of being the largest, the most commodious, and the steadiest ship afloat.”¹⁷ Articles in mass-circulation newspapers likewise published details about the Lusitania’s technological inner workings, photographs of her stately rooms, and imaginative comparisons to other large structures including the US Capitol, New York skyscrapers, and the pyramids.¹⁸ Such accounts framed the liner as a technological wonder caught up in an actor-network of whirring machinery and polished wood, while deemphasizing her participation in other, much larger actor-networks, chiefly those characterized by capital investment, imperial struggle, and mass immigration.

Alert to the liner’s potential as spectacle, the Cunard Company transformed the Lusitania, the first of its sister ships, into a huge public stage before she¹⁹ left Liverpool. On 2 September 1907, ten thousand onlookers paid 2 shillings, 6 pence each for the privilege of exploring the great ship and her elegant accommodations.²⁰ The excitement this preview generated was merely a prelude to the noise and festivities that surrounded the ship five days later, when a cheering, singing crowd of a hundred thousand from across the country gathered at the Mersey Docks to watch the Lusitania depart.²¹ Mary, Lady Inverclyde, performed the christening ceremony in front of an audience of distinguished guests that included representatives from Cunard, the British Admiralty, and the US government.²² Newspaper representatives from around the world vied for privileged access to the liner at the launch proceedings and reported back to their readers with a sense of breathless excitement.²³ “It was not an event merely for Liverpoolians [sic] but for the entire nation,” a special cable to the Chicago Daily Tribune declared.²⁴ Arriving by special trains, motors, and “wagonettes,” thousands of well-wishers “covered every vantage point from the Princess landing stage to Seaport,” singing “Rule Britannia” as the great ocean liner made her way out to sea.²⁵

The Tribune account situates the Lusitania within a much larger actor-network than the one described in the Scientific American; this network includes trains, motors, wagonettes, wire cables, and more than 100,000 flag-waving people. Within this setting, the Lusitania gains visibility as a single unit rather than an assemblage of parts, while the networks of labor and machinery that produced the liner disappear. Latour likens this kind of transition to closing a black box,²⁶ also sometimes referred to as punctualization,²⁷ a process whereby a heterogeneous network is reduced to a “good machine” or “black box” that behaves in predictable ways and “shields complexity and controversy from view.”²⁸ Like the theoretical neutrality of a “black box” theatre, a “black-boxed” actor-network appears neutral until it dissolves or breaks or is interrupted, as, for example, when the lights go up on a stagehand placing a prop or shifting a set piece. In such moments, the black-boxed production (distinct from but nevertheless embedded within the actual black box theatre space) is disrupted, exposed by what Bert States calls “the upsurge of the real.”²⁹ As they watch the embarrassed stagehand scurry off the stage, audiences are reminded of the physical labor that literally “props up” the actors and their onstage environment; the existence and complexity of the network is exposed.³⁰ To return to the Lusitania, then, in the moment of her triumphant departure, the liner acted as a single, black-boxed unit, inspiring spontaneous and collective outbursts of “Rule Britannia.” The crowd in turn acted upon the great ship, transforming it from a functional vessel into a symbol of imperial glory.

For five days, US and British newspapers published breathles...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface: Transatlantic Crossings
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Networking the Waves: Ocean Liners, Impresarios, and Broadway’s Atlantic Expansion
• 2 Along the Wires: Telegraphic Performances and the Wiring of Broadway
• 3 White Collar Broadway: Performing the Modern Office
• 4 “My Word! How He is Kissing Her”: The Material Culture of Theatrical Promotion
• Epilogue: Transatlantic (Re)Crossings
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index