After 40 years in the classroom, Peter Davis retired in 2017 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he served as Chair of the Theatre Studies and MA/PhD Programs, as well as Director of Graduate Studies. He is also a professional actor, director, and author. He is teaching "How Broadway Became Broadway" with us this winter.
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When did Broadway become Broadway as we know it?
That's the $64,000 question. It really depends on how you define it. Broadway existed for centuries as a trail, then as an actual functioning road in the 17th and 18th centuries. But the idea of Broadway as a performance venue — the center of an entertainment industry — didn’t take hold until the 19th century.
The story of how it came to be is really fascinating and encapsulates much of the development of New York City over the centuries. There are political issues, immigration issues, economic conditions all of which led to establishing this main drag up and down the center of Manhattan as the best place to put theaters.
Where were they before then?
In the 17th and 18th centuries, playhouses, as they were known, were something to hide and disguise. They were tucked away in nondescript buildings often in the seamier side of town. Then comes the 19th century where we find that the semiotics of theater changes substantially. Suddenly theaters became the pride of the city and Broadway became the place to house the cultural hallmarks of a great city.
What caused the shift from seamy to sophisticated?
There are several things. Much of it has to do with the Industrial Revolution and the redistribution of population. The demographics of cities changed substantially during that time. Cities were crowded and slums and poverty were exploding. Theater and entertainment came to be a way to mollify the masses, to keep them satisfied and distracted and out of trouble.
Prior to that, theater had largely been the venue of the wealthy, the well-to-do, the upper merchant classes. Suddenly, theater became the pride of a neighborhood and the pride of a city. People identified with their neighborhood theaters. They could go there for news, for community gatherings, for community information. Playhouses like the Bowery became identified with that district of New York, as did the Park Theatre further down.
To me, though, you can’t really understand Broadway in the 19th century without fully examining its start in the 17th century. There’s a lot to cover and we’ll go over much of it in this class.
Like what?
We’ll look at some of the antecedents that develop the core principles that allowed New York City to become this great center for theater. We’ll look at censorship and anti-theatricalism. We’ll examine demographic changes and the Colonial Theatre, such as it was. We’ll explore the very earliest professionals who came over from England in the 1750s. These were a group of people who were escaping censorship in London to try to find a more open environment in the New World, and they ended up creating the first real professional touring company.
Did they find the artistic freedom they were looking for?
Ironically, no. Most of the American colonies had attempted to pass anti-theatrical legislation, especially between about 1699 and 1711. They wanted theater banned not because they were morally opposed to it, but because they thought it was a waste of people's time in an environment where they really all needed to pitch together and work.
Ah, productivity. The “non-distraction” argument.
Exactly. This was an especially important issue during times of war. They didn't want young men being distracted by relatively unimportant or frivolous things like plays. Another issue that we'll talk about, too, is that the colonies were short on hard currency such as coins. Bills of credit, i.e., paper currency was relatively useless, especially for a traveling performer. That’s because paper money was only worth anything in that particular colony. Once you left the colony, it was basically worthless. Touring performers wanted to be paid in gold or silver, which no colony wanted taken out of its coffers.
In fact, when theater was banned by the Continental Congress in 1774, it was banned as part of a series of anti-British manufactured goods that were banned by the American colonies. They looked at theater as an English manufactured good. Theater was caught in the anti-British sentiment that was sweeping the colonies.
Theater has always been a source of political and social commentary. What was the commentary like back then?
The use of commentary throughout the 18th century was quite extraordinary. Most of the surviving scripts we have — American scripts, many of them unpublished — were in fact social commentary pieces, in which a countryman and a city-man meet on a street and talk about some political event. Mercy Otis Warren, one of the great American women writers, wrote a series of blistering attacks on the British in play form. They weren't intended to be performed, they were just intended to be read and passed around as political comment. And then in the 1820s and ‘30s, we see plays being written with social commentary and caricature. In the 1850s, Uncle Tom's Cabin was a crucial piece of social commentary adapted for the stage. And it really was the stage version that spread across the country.
Even during the Civil War, writers in New York City would rip headlines out of the news and throw them onto the stage within a few weeks after a battle. And so, you could have recreated on stage the Battle of Bull Run within two or three weeks after the battle occurred, almost like a news video.
How do you view today’s Broadway?
I think we tend to still look at Broadway as the pinnacle, the ultimate in professional theater. And as a result, it still shines outward as our national beacon of culture, for better or for worse.
For the better, it’s making enormous, long overdue strides in showcasing diverse voices and works, especially thanks to the We See You movement. Some of the greatest works now being done are works we would never have seen before like Hamilton.
Also, over the last 30-40 years, we've seen regional theaters do some spectacular stuff. Chicago, where I did much of my theater work, produced a lot of Broadway hits initially. But Broadway is where hits go to become hits, and it still is where that sort of thing happens.
For the worse, it’s still relatively elitist. It’s still very difficult to get tickets and ticket prices are going through the roof. In that sense, we’re going back to the early days where only people with money could attend the theater.
All that said, though, I think Broadway remains crucial to our outward projection of ourselves as a people. As one of my professors once said, “Theater is the best reflection of a people to themselves”.