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

Durang’s youthful, pioneering spirit was prepared to wrestle with the world’s “multitude,” his forthright religious faith in no conflict with seeking “fortune.” Yet he regretted his clandestine departure from Philadelphia. He surely knew his father would forbid his leaving with this stranger for Boston, but the opportunity was irresistible. However, he insisted this was the one disobedience he ever committed; perhaps acknowledging it in his writing yielded a kind of absolution.

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Durang would show great curiosity for places and people all his life; recording each town on the journey between Philadelphia and Boston is typical of his Memoir. The route, which took about six days, went through New Jersey towns, including Princeton, where he noted the “stately college.” He arrived by boat at New York; then Durang and sponsor sailed by packet up the East River to New Haven, and by land stage through Hartford. In Massachusetts, after passing through the surrounding marshes, they reached Boston. Although Durang gives no dates for this journey, he reports that he was fifteen, which would place it in 1783, but his typical vagueness on dates makes this far from certain. The nature of travel and the easier living and performing conditions in mild weather suggest that the journey probably occurred during the summer of 1783 or 1784.

The presenter with whom Durang traveled must have had a taste for challenges, for if theater in Philadelphia had a troubled history, in Boston it had almost no history beyond the military theatricals produced by British officers before and during the War of Independence, to the moral outrage of the town’s citizens. The Puritans’ association of theater with Catholicism, their great enemy, made the Quaker battles look mild.⁴⁹ Although Boston was a rough and riotous city, its citizens enjoyed some genteel diversions: musical concerts, sometimes followed by a ball, an occasional puppet show, and the services of a few dancing masters who taught there during the eighteenth century. The occasional odd spectacle also appeared: a man descended by ropes head-first from the steeple of Christ Church, landing on a pile of feather beds.⁵⁰ But even a public reading of a play raised suspicions in Boston. In 1750 the General Court