The recent appointment of well-regarded Broadway producer and Little Rock native Will Trice as executive artistic director of the Arkansas Repertory Theatre is an important step in the rebirth of that cultural institution. Trice should take some inspiration from the fact that professional theater had a very early introduction to frontier Little Rock.
Arkansas had been a state for only two years when on the night of Dec. 3, 1838, the Sam Waters troupe performed The Young Widow, a five-act comedy written by Thomas Middleton. The showpiece was followed by a one-act farce, The Two Gregories. Thus professional theater came to Little Rock--not bad for a village described by historian Allen Stokes as "a town of 1,431 souls, 309 of them slaves."
Efforts to bring theater to Little Rock began five months earlier on July 23, 1838, with a meeting to discuss erecting a "theater house." Organizing the meeting was John S. Potter, the self-described "manager of the Natchez and Nashville Theatre." Historian Stokes described Potter as "something of a flesh-and-blood theatrical counterpart of Johnny Appleseed." Potter would eventually build theaters across America, from Vicksburg, Miss., to Dubuque, Iowa, to the Pacific coast.
Potter's plan was to form a joint stock company with capital of $15,000 to finance construction of a theater building. Both Little Rock newspapers endorsed the plan, with the Whig-oriented Arkansas Times & Advocate noting that a theater would improve the taste, manners, and morals of the frontier town. The Little Rock business elite agreed to serve on the board of the joint stock company, including both presidents of the two state-chartered banks in the town.
Despite reassuring initial reports, the company was unable to raise the needed funds. Thus, when Sam Waters brought his troupe to Little Rock for his scheduled performance of Dec. 3, a commercial warehouse had to be fitted up to serve as a temporary theater.
Following the initial performance of The Young Widow, a comedy, Waters staged a performance of The Iron Chest, a tragedy, and Loan of a Lover, a farce. The Iron Chest was a three-act play by George Colman first performed in London in 1796. It tells of the trials and tragedies faced by a poor family of poachers living in "poverty and wretchedness." One daughter sums up the family's plight: "Father has grown desperate; all is fallen to decay. We live by pilfering on the Forest--and our poor mother distracted, and unable to look to the house. The rafter, which fell in the storm, struck so heavy upon her brain, I fear me, 'twill never again be settled." One modern scholar described the play as "aggressively mediocre."
During its second week, Waters' theater presented Richard III, the first known performance of a Shakespearean play in Arkansas. The illness of Mrs. Waters forced a delay in performing a popular tragedy of that time, Virginius, but several others were performed. During Christmas week of 1838, the versatile cast presented several popular plays of the day, including Tom Cringle's Leg.
By Jan. 16, 1839, Waters was ready to open his new theater. He had purchased a local commercial structure and expanded it to seat "four or five hundred." Waters also contracted for a saloon to be attached to the new theater "where coffee and a variety of other refreshments of the thirsty can be obtained at short notice and modest prices."
Waters hired a local man, Horace Chadwick, to paint "an elegant drop scene ... which does much credit to his talents and taste as an artist." Waters went to some length to assure women that the new Little Rock Theatre was a tasteful and respectable place. Noting that "the whole of the interior is ornamented in handsome style," Waters stressed that "the boxes are comfortably arranged for the accommodation of the ladies, who may now venture to lend the light of their countenance to the first attempt to introduce the drama into our infant State, without the fear of personal inconvenience or discomfort."
On opening night Mrs. Waters delivered a "poetic address," a dramatic reading of a poem written for the occasion by pioneering Arkansas writer and jurist Albert Pike. Admission was $1 for adults and 50 cents for children. Box seating would have been more costly.
As the season progressed crowds grew thinner, but newspaper accounts remained positive. During the week of Feb. 4, 1839, the "great American nautical drama" Paul Jones, the Pilot of the German Ocean, was extremely popular according to the local press, which described "almost incessant applause." The popular reception might have been influenced by the use of several locals in the performance--described in the local newspapers as "supernumeraries." The use of pantomime on two evenings was said to meet "with tolerable success."
As winter turned to spring in 1839, the Waters troupe continued to perform a steady stream of plays. On April 3, Little Rock audiences had their first opportunity to see a production of MacBeth, followed not long after by Othello. An elaborate "fairy drama," Cherry and Fair Star, staged later that month required closing the theater for several days for constructing sets.
The final play presented during this inaugural season was written by a resident of Hempstead County, John Field. Titled Man of the West and performed on April 24, the play was described by the Arkansas Gazette reviewer as "wretchedly butchered, and if it had any merit we were unable to discover it."
Professor Blake Perkins of Williams Baptist College in Walnut Ridge will give a lecture at 6 p.m. Tuesday on the history of federal defiance in the Ozarks. The talk, based on Perkins' book Hillbilly Hellraisers, is sponsored by the Arkansas State Archives with assistance from the Friends of the State Archives. It will be at the Department of Arkansas Heritage, 1100 North St., Little Rock, starting with a reception at 5:30 p.m.
Tom Dillard is a historian and retired archivist living in Hot Spring County. Email him at Arktopia.td@gmail.com.
Editorial on 01/13/2019