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

Chapter 1:  Mise-en-Scène
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have been featured in the Whitehead play this Philadelphia season in 1767. John Durang, who confessed that his “greatest frailty was in dress”(24), would bring that indulgence to his theater costumes, which he would don a good eighteen years later.

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The Philadelphia in which Jacob and Joeann Catharine Durang arrived was then a leading New World metropolis. A contemporary enthused about the City of Brotherly Love:

The City of Philadelphia is perhaps one of the wonders of the World, if you consider its Size, the Number of Inhabitants, the regularity of its Streets, their great breadth and length, their cutting one another at right Angles, their Spacious publick and private buildings, Quays and Docks, the Magnificence and diversity of places of Worship…the plenty of provisions brought to Market, and the Industry of all its inhabitants, one will not hesitate to Call it the first Town in America, but one that bids fair to rival almost any in Europe.14

The recent building of the Southwark Theatre was one example of the developing cultural institutions, social forces, and physical design in this “second city of the British Empire.”15 The city plan had been designed by Thomas Holme for William Penn in 1682, following Renaissance ideals of symmetry, spaciousness, and reason. Holme’s plan laid out the city in a rectangle from the Delaware to the Schuylkill Rivers, and from Cedar to Vine Streets, with a central square and four surrounding squares equidistantly marking the city’s quadrants. By the 1760s, the city’s port and commercial activities had overwhelmed the westward balance of Holme’s layout. Jacob Duché, a visitor to the city in 1771, wrote:

The buildings from north to south, along the bank of the Delaware, including the suburbs, now extend near two miles, and those from east to west, about half a mile from the river. But according to the original plan, they are to extend as far…[as] the beautiful river, Schuylkill.16