Crash Course Theater

SENTIMENTAL THEATRE to AMERICAN MELODRAMA

Study Guide
1. Sentimental comedy, the only kind of that replaced
restoration comedy…
2. Eighteenth-century writers used it to mean…(corny or sappy or overly emotional)…
.
By exciting emotions like pity or sorrow playwrights thought that they could encourage an audience to
make better moral choices.

3. Sentimental comedy is all about “ ”

Sentimental comedy promotes the Enlightenment idea that people are mostly good unless they
encounter bad influences. In plays by Richard Steele and his contemporaries, good people triumph over
adversity and bad people get their comeuppance.

.Sentimental plays aren't hilarious; though some of the funny when sentimental
comedy into The Laughing Comedies or The Comedies of
Manners that Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan wrote.
4. Bourgeois Tragedy is all about using recognizable characters and situations to
in appropriate behavior.
5. Bourgeois Tragedy did this by encouraging the audience to the tragic
hero.
6. To help with the , writers of sentimental tragedies often looked to
newspapers and ballads instead of myths and legends.
7. Remember how every so often decide that theatre is
dangerous and needs a lot of regulating? …This is one of those times.
In the 1730's regulation of the theaters was divided up haphazardly among the Lord Chamberlain, The
Treasury and the occasional Judge. Which means it wasn't being regulated much at all.

A lot of theatres got around this; they charge for a concert or a beer or an option and then
accidentally stage a play whoops! But sometimes theaters were caught and many of them closed.

8. Another was to avoid presenting spoken dramas by dancing

them, miming them or using puppets; a rule known as the Burletta Rule, said that a drama wasn't
spoken as long as there were five pieces of incidental music in it.
A version of commedia dell'arte also appeared in this period now called pantomime.

9. Acting also underwent some changes in the 18th century; the main style of the period was
.
10. Like other actors, Garrick delivered his speeches facing front but he departed from the singsong
style of verse speaking and tried to make his lines and .
At the time actors would only rehearse a new play three hours per day for two weeks, but
Garrick extended that rehearsal period and asked the other actors to actually act during
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SENTIMENTAL THEATRE to AMERICAN MELODRAMA
Study Guide
rehearsals…
11. Melodrama gets going right at the turn of the about a decade after the
French Revolution and a few decades after the American one
12. Melodrama is an and well attended form then and now.
It's significant that melodrama starts in a period between revolutions after the 18th
century ones but before most of the 19th century ones.

13. Melodrama has all the emotional fervor of but it dulls and
contains that fervor with comforting Moral Sentiments.
14. Melodrama begins in .
As you'll remember from our episode on sentimental drama the licensing act of
1737 means that only two theaters in London are licensed to provide serious
drama with a third in the summer months.

15.Eventually melodrama that the licensed theaters basically

have no choice but to produce it as well.
16. There are in melodrama.
The Mean Villain / The Sensitive Hero / The Persecuted Heroine / The Clown /
The Faithful Friend / The Villain’s Accomplice

17. Audiences to cheer and boo where appropriate.

At certain moments the actors would pause while music played so that audiences could have
a moment to appreciate just how exciting the situation was and how awesome the actors
looked.

18.These moments called are kind of like the held poses in kabuki.
19. Melodrama demanded an unprecedented level of from its set
designers…this for productions of serious drama…
20. The genres is an Irishman named Dionysius Boucicault, who churned
out melodrama after melodrama and sensation after sensation.
21. Remember all of those cartoons where they
just as the train is coming; that starts here.
22.Underneath all the sensationalism of the play … is some .

As you'll remember from our episode on Sor Juana, performance in the Americas doesn't begin
with colonizers. In North America, many of the indigenous communities practiced

, including song and dance and varieties of storytelling.

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SENTIMENTAL THEATRE to AMERICAN MELODRAMA
Study Guide
23. Before and after the American Revolution, governments often
these performances…

24. But indigenous performance traditions do eventually with the theatrical

traditions of colonists in sometimes surprising ways, surviving efforts to stamp them out or
starve them of an audience.

25. In the colonies to the south of Canada, theater has some trouble .
A lot of the first American colonists are Puritans, and if there's one thing we know about
Puritans, it's that they hate themselves… some theater. Theater is sinful and America is gonna
be a city on a hill, which means a city with no theaters, apparently.

26. Another problem with the theater? , and America is trying really hard to not be like
its parents.
27. After the Revolution, New York is like, hurray for America, down with the British but maybe we can
?
28. The repertory is still mostly English, Shakespeare and sentimental comedy, but after the war,
become increasingly popular.
29. The first homegrown hit is Royall Tyler's 1787 play, " ".

30. America's first American-born : macho-man Edwin Forrest… was

interested in theater from a young age and made his professional debut at 11 .

31. Forrest was an athletic, uninhibited actor. People called his school of acting ' '
or 'heroic'…And a lot of those roles were in blackface or redface.

32. …Redface, a racist American phenomenon stretching back at least as far as the Boston Tea Party,
in which dress up as Native Americans.

33. The Astor Place riots also that challenged theater in

America.

34. We're staying in America for another episode exploring ,

abolitionist drama, and minstrelsy.

We're gonna– keep talking about who gets to make theater and who gets to see it, and we're
gonna see some pretty disturbing trends in stage makeup.

35. In the 19th century, contributed to a unique and troubling

performance culture which helped create and spread racist stereotypes that are still with
us today, and just to be super clear, the stuff we're talking about in this episode is tough.
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Study Guide
36. America's original theatrical form,
, re-enforced ugly caricatures
even as it made some African-American performers stars.

37. Before we get into all the disturbing details about minstrel shows, we should take a moment to
note that there's a of African-American theater actually
made by African-Americans that's almost as old as America itself.

In 1816, William Alexander Brown, a former ship steward turned theatrical impresario, opened
the African Grove Theater in New York. The theater's resident company, the African Company,
was all black.

38. Unsurprisingly, the African Grove Theater .

39. The first we have
by an African-American author is by William Wells Brown, a leading abolitionist thinker and
lecturer.

40. Brown was an escaped slave and his 1858 play, "The Escape", is partly .
41. The play 19th century theatrical tropes and racist stereotypes.
42. Sadly, nuanced or thoughtful portrayals of African-Americans were .
African-Americans were largely subjects of caricature, comedy, and racism in American theater.
The minstrel show was a widely popular and deeply racist 19th century genre created by white
Americans. It allowed other white Americans to laugh at stereotyped portrayals of African
Americans.

43. Initially, it was performed by white actors , a kind of theatrical makeup

that used burnt cork, grease paint, and even shoe polish to darken the skin, and other makeup to
exaggerate the eyes and lips.
44. Later on, when African-Americans began to ,
they had to use blackface, too, transforming themselves into the caricatures that white
audiences demanded.
45. Performers such as Al Jolson ____________________________in blackface well into the 20th
century.

46. The genre is usually credited to T.D. Rice or “Daddy Rice… He styled himself as an Ethiopian
delineator, created a character named , and popularized the song 'Jub Jim Crow'.

In the late 19th century racist laws enforcing segregation in the Southern
United States became known as Jim Crow Laws after Daddy Rice's character.

47. In the first act, the troupe would gather on stage in a semi-circle with a figure named Tambo who
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SENTIMENTAL THEATRE to AMERICAN MELODRAMA
Study Guide
played the tambourine on one end...They would , some of which were
originals, some derived from folk songs.
48. The second act, the 'Olio', was devoted to and usually
included a nonsense speech delivered in dialect.
49. The third act, or 'Afterpiece', was a burlesque of a popular play or scene depicting
.
Performers began to specialize in certain character types such as the mammy, the
buck, the zip coon, the Jezebel, and the Pickaninny.

50. Minstrel shows promoted a racist image of African Americans as

. This continued even as African Americans began to perform them and were
expected to conform

51. Melodrama was big everywhere, but only America decided to melodrama and
the minstrel show, and this gets us Uncle Tom's Cabin, stage adaptations of Harriet Beecher
Stowe's abolitionist novel with frank discussions about the horrors and complexities of
slavery, and which depicts slaves shockingly at the time as people with relationships and
emotions.

52. Harriet Beecher Stowe any of those versions… because she

was a Puritan and what do Puritans hate? Theater.
53. Some of these adaptations, like Aikens', were on the
novel… Others were just an excuse for white actors to put on blackface and dance around,
undermining the novel's humanism.

54. American theater, like American society, .

55. The entertainment industry, in many respects, has come a long way, but still has very, very
far to go and many powerful recent works of theater and film

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