Filed by Lance at 2:05 pm under General, Social Issues

I’ve always liked Fall. I don’t like hot temperatures, for one thing, and I love seasons. I’m not talking about a slight increase in average precipitation, either. I mean, gimme 100 degree swings between snow (I love snow) and that other season when I wish there were snow (I love snow). The colors, little kids running around in adorable costumes, cider, fireplaces, and everything else make it all the better.

Fall and the end of summer seem to be analogous to heartache, too. My sister just told me that her guy just ended it with her, and I just went through a Cubs-playoff-hopes-and-Chicago-2016-Olympic-Bid sized disappointment, myself. It’s really poetic, actually: the leaves fall off the trees, the wheels fall off the wagon.

But there is great gain in this (besides the snow and Halloween candy)!

I just finished Glenn Hughes’ A History of the American Theatre 1700 - 1950, which isn’t a remarkable book, but it’s nice to have some sense of the ebb and flow of American theater beyond the reach of the memory of the men who have been my teachers. My next book to finish on the ‘L’ will be one (I swear) I’ve started to read a dozen times, but have never finished: Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther, The Sorrows of Young Werther. If you don’t have my nerdy familiarity with German lit, Werther is credited with being the first international bestseller. It was translated into every language imaginable, which is not bad, considering it’s a novella that can be summed up in one sentence: A guy named Werther can’t have the woman he wants, so he kills himself. There! Now you don’t have to scrounge up some outdated translation in a public library for yourself!

Please don’t mistake me: the first time I started slogging through Werther was 2001, a full seven years before I met the lovely Miss R–, so don’t get any funny ideas. Young Mr. Werther and his beloved, (Char)Lotte, have been sitting on my bookshelf for a decade now, and since both my sister and I won’t be curling up with anything but a good book by the fire this Fall, I might as well read one that I’ve been putting off for a while. A long while. In addition, considering the events of the last few weeks (I’m referring to the Cubs, and the IOC convention in Copenhagen, of course), I think I can manage to slice through Goethe’s “Dearest friend, what is the heart of man?” and “O mankind’s condition!” Romanticism this time.

Going back to the unremarkable Mr. Hughes: here’s a challenge.

When was the last time you saw a play performed by an American author who predates Eugene O’Neill? Can you even name an American playwright who predates Eugene O’Neill? I couldn’t.

One of the most important was Dion Boucicault, in case you’re wondering. To my surprise, however, a lot of early American theaters adapted a majority of their work from European sources, among whom Germans were very well represented, with names like August von Kotzebue.

This is really interesting to me, since I’ve been thinking about the turn of the 19th to the 20th century a lot lately, and what it means for acting, and theater. The acting technique we use is basically from the 1880’s, and the celebrated Mr. O’Neill was born in 1888. American theater as we know it grew up in the 20th century with acting technique as we now know it. This is, oddly enough, when movies grew up, and a little later, radio. If you look at the American Canon, O’Neill is really the first playwright in it. Everything before that has been largely forgotten, or was Shakespeare and I don’t care how conservative a Republican you are, he wasn’t an American. European national theaters, though, are still performing plays written in the 1750’s, or even back into the 17th century. More to come.

If that ’s not good enough, here’s some uniquely American trivia for you:

Later the Drews moved to the Walnut [Theatre], where they filled a long engagement. It was during these years that Mrs. Drew bore three children (Louisa, John, and Georgiana), and thus founded the most distinguished theatre-family (Drew-Barrymore) in modern America.

-Hughes, 210

Georgiana Drew married an actor named Herbert Arthur Chamberlayne Blyth, aka Maurice Barrymore (I would’ve taken a stage name, too), and that’s why Drew Barrymore’s name pops up in a book written 23 years before she was born.

I can’t find any reasonable way to fit this in, but I love it, so here’s a song by Franz Ferdinand. Watch it once for the song in general, then once for the lyrics, then watch it a third time for the lighting!