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Robins Hits the Road: Trouping with O'Neill in the 1880s
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2009
Extract
Several years ago an article in this journal called attention to the Elizabeth Robins Collection then acquired by the Fales Library of New York University. In addition to her many other accomplishments, Robins was a gifted writer who kept extensive diaries and exchanged voluminous letters with her family, friends, and associates. All these, as well as her accounts, manuscripts, drafts, and scrapbooks, constitute a massive assemblage that had been barely sifted at the time of the article and that is still not fully catalogued. It comprises a treasure-trove for scholars of the history of the theatre, literature, and American and English history.
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- Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1988
References
Notes
1 Cima, Gay Gibson, “Elizabeth Robins: The Genesis of an Independent Manageress,” Theatre Survey XXI:2 (November 1980), 145–163CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Unless otherwise identified, all quotations are from mss. in this collection. I am grateful to Backsettown, Trustee of the Robins Estate, for permission to use it and quote from its contents. Special acknowledgment and thanks for their friendly assistance are due to Frank Walker, Curator of the Fales Library, and to Dr. Joanne Gates, biographer of Elizabeth Robins; their unrivalled familiarity with the Collection has been invaluable to this study.
3 Robins, letters to her father (2 January 1882) and to her grandmother (29 November 1881). Robins' diary and letters, whose lively writing anticipates the future novelist and playwright, are almost totally free of spelling errors — except for her persistent misspelling of O'Neill's name. Her longest and most uninhibited letters are to her grandmother and her father, the two people she felt closest to.
4 Undated letter to Robins by Grace Middleton, a minor young actress who at the time went by the curious stage name of Nita Sin, which she then changed to Grace Raven. Her letters, which provide glimpses into O'Neill's Monte Cristo Company for the year after Robins departed, are those of a foolish, gossipy (often back-biting) but lonesome and insecure actress. She had been convent-educated and was pious, which perhaps explains Ella's particular “kindness” to her. In 1889 O'Neill made her his Mercedes, which she played for several years. Though successful, she left the stage in 1901, and entered a convent. (Unidentified newspaper clipping, dated 29 May 1901, in the Theatre Collection of the NYPL.)
5 See, for example, Alexander, Doris, The Tempering of Eugene O'Neill (New York: Harcourt, Brace& World, Inc., 1967), pp. 41–44Google Scholar.
6 Une Cause Célèebre, by Adolphe D'Ennery and Eugene Cormon, an adaptation by A. R. Cazauran, the playreader of the Union Square Theatre, where it was originally performed. A thriller based on a true event, it portrays the tribulations of Jean Renaud, a gallant French soldier who is wrongly accused of murder and sent to the galleys for life; over a decade later his now-adult daughter recognizes the tattered convict as her father whose imprisonment she had unwittingly caused when she was a child. His innocence is established and all ends happily. O'Neill was so popular in this play that for a time he seriously considered forming a “Celebrated Case Company.”
7 “James O'Neill and C. T. Dazy [sic] have executed a contract wherein the former is to pay the latter a royalty of $50 a week for An American King and give it the preference in his repertoire,” the New York Mirror reported on 27 January 1883. The date is significant: three weeks before the opening of the Union Square Theatre production of O'Neill's Monte Cristo. His entering into such a contract — it was actually signed a week earlier — underlines two things: (1) O'Neill's eagerness to associate himself with a single play (as noted above, he had also considered A Celebrated Case) and (2) his total unawareness that that play would turn out to be the one whose script he was then studying, The Count of Monte Cristo. It is further interesting to note that even after he started touring Monte Cristo, O'Neill still was thinking of returning to An American King. The Morning Call on 15 June 1884 quoted his intention to do so, after getting Charles T. Dazey to rewrite and improve the play. The item is cited in O'Neill, Patrick, History of the San Francisco Theater, Vol. XX: James O'Neill (San Francisco: Writers' Program of the WPA in Northern California, 1942), pp. 93–94Google Scholar.
8 “I told him I objected to going to Z—” (i.e., Zanesville, Ohio, her family's hometown), she wrote her father on 9 November 1882, “& he promised not to take the date offered him there; & to-night he surprised me by saying he thought of trying to change the Louisville engagement so I would not have to appear there at present. I hope he may effect this change he knows how greatly I desire it.”
9 The texts of John Stetson's telegram and O'Neill's reply are in the Rochester Post Express, 10 January 1883. Details of the final agreement are reported on 3 February 1883 in the New York Mirror and three days later in The Chicago Tribune. In the absence of more reliable information, however, those accounts of the agreement's terms should be taken with a grain of salt. More detailed and apparently more reliable figures are available for the Monte Cristo Company tour for the 1883–84 season. O'Neill's salary then — which was probably a bit higher than it had been during the New York run — was $400 a week. But he received additional pay for all matinés, and an extra $100 for every week in which Stetson cleared $600. These figures and others pertaining to the company were released by the company's accountants. See New York Mirror (2 August 1884), p. 7.
10 Letter to her father, 9 November 1882. At the time she received a little financial help from relatives, which made such expenditures possible.
11 Quoted in Alexander, p. 45.