John Durang: Man of the American Stage By Lynn Matluck Brooks

The next important theatrical season in Philadelphia did not occur until 1759 when a reorganized group of the London Company again braved petitions and protest letters, but also found supporters. By 1763, David Douglass, then managing the company, had sniffed the restive colonial winds and changed the troupe’s name to the American Company, although in personnel, repertory, and production it was all British. The name change failed to endear the players to their Philadelphia opponents. In 1767, when Jacob Durang and wife arrived as immigrants, the theater season again inspired hot debate in legislature and newspapers, although the recent building of the Southwark Theatre suggested the players’ confidence in their investment. Newspaper debate over theater became yet more heated, shaped by concerns about the “worship of images” that the stage was said to encourage, theater’s “grossly sinful” nature, and the “blasphemous Speeches, wanton Amours, profane Jests, and impure Passions”⁴⁰ exhibited on the stage.

Prohibitory acts against theater were typically voted by the Assembly in Philadelphia, and often repealed by the Crown or its representative, the Governor of Pennsylvania, highlighting the political and cultural contest between England and the colonies. Sentiments expressed in some dramatic works, such as the morally unwavering Cato and the “Whiggish” Roman Father, were seen by colonists as expressions of liberty and a new patriotism.⁴¹ Some protest leaders saw theater, if presented correctly, as a political weapon, while others viewed all theater as a remnant of morally enfeebled British culture. In 1766, a crowd of agitated “Sons of Liberty” attacked a New York theater where Douglass’s company was playing, expelling the crowd and destroying the building.⁴²

The actors responded. In addition to becoming the “American Company,” Douglass presented songs and speeches extolling “liberty.” Once hostilities between England and the colonies erupted, a few American propagandists wrote revolutionary plays with such titles as The Defeat (Mercy Otis Warren), The Blockheads (possibly Warren), The Fall of British Tyranny; or, American liberty triumphant (John Leacock), and The Battle of Bunkers-Hill (Hugh Henry Brackenridge). Yet the Continental Congress ruled against theater as early as October 1774, when it resolved