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

plays and players. Thus, the Southwark Theatre was built, in 1766, at South and Fourth Streets, just outside official city limits and city regulation. Philadelphia’s Southwark was the first “permanent” building in America erected expressly as a theater. Historian and theater manager William Dunlap remembers the building was “of sufficient size for the population at that time and long afterwards, and well adapted for theatrical representations,”⁵ although its unadorned red exterior was “no ornament to the city.” Seating, mostly on benches, filtered the audience by price, and thus, largely, by class: seven shillings sixpence for the luxury of a box, five shillings for the ground-level pit, and two shillings for gallery seats. A laborer’s weekly food would cost nearly four shillings and his shoes nine, making the price of a theater ticket, even in the gallery, substantial.⁶ That ticket bought eighteenth-century audiences a long evening of entertainment, and plenty of opportunity for their own participation. They commented loudly during performances, threw nuts and fruit at the stage and orchestra, demanded encores or favorite songs, hailed favorite players and booed others, chatted, flirted, drank, smoked, and occasionally brawled. Thus was the motto over the Southwark’s stage “Totus mundus agit histrionem” (The whole world acts the player).⁷

A theater evening started as early as 6:00 or 6:30 p.m. to accommodate the four or five hours of performance. In addition to a serious “mainpiece,” drawn from the standard repertory of classical, tragic, and heroic plays, each evening included a light afterpiece to cheer the audience. Prologues, epilogues, inserted songs and dances, and entr’actes extended the fare.⁸

The American Company’s autumn 1767 season opened with two staples of the British—thus American—repertory.William Whitehead’s The Roman Father, adapted by David Garrick, based on Corneille’s Horace, was a heroic tragedy that premiered in London in 1750 with Garrick playing the lead. Another Garrick production was the evening’s afterpiece, his long-played farce, Miss in her Teens. Lewis Hallam Jr.—son of the American Company’s first manager, Lewis Hallam, and later himself a manager—played the lead in The Roman Father, with company manager David Douglass as the king. Hallam also played the juicy