textIn the years between 1870 and 1920, while Chicago
solidified its status as “second city,” outranked only by
New York in metropolitan might, American theatre
underwent its own industrial revolution. Like other
service-oriented businesses of the time, theatre became a
centralized, consolidated industry, managed from the top
down by profit-maximizing producers. During this same
time, railroads transformed the nation’s cultural and
geographical landscape, quite literally laying the tracks
for mass (re)production and distribution, and, by
extension, consumer capitalism itself. The connection
between these events was more than coincidental. In this
x
half-century, theatre and railroads both thrived in
cocksure Chicago – indeed, railroad’s success fueled
theatre’s, and theatre’s reliance on touring in turn
influenced rail development. These three main characters
– the city of Chicago (and, to a lesser extent, the
surrounding Midwest), the railroad business, and the
touring theatre business – guide the following study,
which seeks to answer the question “how did railroads
affect Chicago-area theatre, 1870-1920?”
On economic, social, and aesthetic levels, railroad
reliance changed American theatre in ways that remain
apparent today. From the rails, theatre learned the
strategies of this nation’s paradigmatic big business –
and these strategies would in turn influence the everyday
lives of actors and audience alike. As railroads grew to
be an assumed part of daily routines, they infected the
imaginations of the American public in ways that were
reflected in the artwork of this period, from lithography
and literature to musical and stage compositions.
Overall, the sense of what it meant to be “transported” –
both literally and figuratively – became a central issue
to Americans grappling with Modern life at the turn of
the twentieth century.
Based largely on archival research, my dissertation
explores how this transportation sensibility resonated in
the locomotive leisure of midwestern America. It does so
through two trajectories: the first, focusing on the
effects railroads had on theatre business, looks at the
managers, actors, and spectators of locomotive leisure.
In the second, I consider how some of the same concerns
wrought by the rails (efficiency, urbanization, and
nervousness) surfaced in theatre practice, using a
popular extravaganza as my case study.Theatre and Danc