29. The Black Booth: Part Two

© Podcast text copyright Peter Schmitz. All rights reserved.

[OPENING THEME]

Peter
Welcome back once again to Adventures in Theater History. This episode is the second of a two-part narrative about the newspaper editor and actor John A. Arneaux, aka “The Black Booth”. If you haven’t heard Part One yet, you’re welcome to listen, of course, but I would think you’d want to go back and find Part One first, and it will make Part Two much more enjoyable for you. But if you’re a regular listener to the podcast and you’re all caught up, great! Here we go.

I’m pleased that once again we have Philadelphia actor Aaron Bell to provide the voice of John A. Arneaux - and we have several other guest voices from the Philadelphia theater community of the present day. I will give a complete list of credits at the end of the episode.

When we left the story, Arneaux had just announced in his newspaper at the end of November 1886, that he was going to do a star turn in Shakespeare’s Richard III at Philadelphia's enormous grand theatrical space, the Academy of Music - for one night only at the end of January 1887 - and that he was going to bring several members of his own group of supporting actors, the Astor Place Tragedy Company down to Philadelphia, where they would be joined by a group of Black Philadelphia actors, the Standard Acting Company. At long last, at the age of 32, Arneaux’s star was in the ascendant.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

Peter
But at that very moment, which should have been the most satisfying period of his life, the moment when after years of struggle, things were finally coming together for him, there was a problem: John Arneaux was not well. He was confined to his bed at his apartment on Sullivan Street, suffering from what he described as a severe attack of vertigo. He stayed home from the office of his newspaper, The New York Enterprise at 156 Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village.

Then, early in the morning of Saturday, December 4th, 1886, disaster struck:

A fire broke out at Enterprise Hall, right in the newspaper’s composition room. The blaze quickly spread through an adjoining wall in the three story building to the upper floors of six other nearby structures, which among them contained a Chinese laundry, a furniture store, an upholsterer, a dressmaker, and other businesses, as well as apartments and the meeting room of a Temperance organization. A policeman on the street saw the flames shooting out of the upper windows and pulled the alarm bell, but by the time the firefighters arrived, they found there was little they could do but contain the fire from spreading any further. All these blazing buildings’ unfortunate occupants, twenty families in all, scurried out into the cold in their nightclothes, watching their homes and businesses burn. No one was hurt, but the New York Times estimated the total financial loss at almost $20,000.

John Arneaux, who lived only a short distance away at 115 Sullivan Street, just half a block from his newspaper, was not at the scene of the fire - by his own account he was asleep - he’d been sick in bed at the time. So it wasn’t until the next day that he learned of his newspaper’s building was completely destroyed, including his offices, an upstairs meeting hall, the composing room, and the archives. This fire, presumably, is why so few examples of Arneaux’s writing for The Enterprise exist today. His articles and editorials only survived if they were quoted in other newspapers, or were preserved in some collector’s scrapbook. The monetary loss to Arneaux himself was listed as three to four thousand dollars by the Times, which noted that the building was well insured. Nonetheless, when his friend and fellow Black newspaperman T. Thomas Fortune dispatched a reporter to look in on the ailing editor and tragedian in his moment of misfortune, Arneaux claimed he could not speak directly, and sent back out an odd message:

Aaron Bell, as Arneaux
“It was quite a severe shock to me and I had just recovered from a short illness.  . . No, I cannot determine how the fire originated. Mr Lanson, who has the job department, and Miss Emeline Bird, the proof-reader, were there last, and they say they extinguished the fire[place] before leaving. It may have caught from the benzene which was upon the mantel there. Yes, I was insured for a trifling sum, only $500.”

Peter
I’m not sure what to make about this discrepancy in the amount of insurance coverage for his losses. I must admit that part of me, the part that wants to make this an even more exciting story, certainly has entertained the possibility that Arneaux could have set the fire himself for the insurance money to finance his play. A few years ago, on a trip to New York I even visited the site of the fire, and got a bit carried away, playing history detective -  and indeed I found that it would only have taken a few short minutes for a person to walk from his home to the newspaper and back in the middle of the night. But there is no other evidence to back my pet theory up. And at the time nobody seems to have thought to accuse Arneaux of having anything to do with it. Insurance investigators of the day were certainly actively aware of arson fraud- there’s even an article on the very same page of the New York Times on December 4th about someone else being arrested for starting another similar fire elsewhere in the city just to collect the insurance.

All I can say is that it certainly was very convenient, and Arneaux definitely wasn’t very broken up about losing his business. Indeed he seems to have lost all interest in running a newspaper from this point, and never made any real attempt to resume publication of the Enterprise. He would later claim that despite its apparent success, the business had never made him any money, even when it was a going concern. At any rate, he could not continue to devote his time to both editing a newspaper while also advancing his dramatic career, which he clearly valued more. Indeed as he later said peevishly to another inquiring reporter, he had never really had enough readership among New York City’s Black population to make the venture truly profitable. 

Aaron, as Arneaux
 “People ask me wherever I go, ‘When will you start the Enterprise again?’ My answer is, when you make up your minds to support it, and I am let off. I love my race and I would necessarily go through fire for it, but to torture and eventually sacrifice yourself in the interest of the race, as some have done, while the race laughs and calls you a fool, is [it] indeed not folly[?]”.

Peter
It is difficult to explain how he could have survived such a financial blow as losing his paper, if it was indeed underinsured, and he’d been losing money all this while. Maybe the box office from his previous performances of Shakespeare in New York had been lucrative enough to cushion him, or perhaps he had found some other financial backers. Certainly, for the next two months after the fire he was able to devote himself to what must have been complex preparations for his Richard III in Philadelphia.

And this part of his endeavors, we do have evidence that he had one definite stroke of good luck. The touring company of the English-born actor Frederick Warde had come through Philadelphia in November 1886, and Warde played for a full week at the Academy of Music. He did pretty good business. And like many old-style actor-managers Warde had appeared in a range of classical roles, including, naturally, Richard III. But Richard wasn’t Warde’s strongest role the critics agreed, and he had only played it once at the Academy, on a Tuesday, and then evidently quietly dropped it from his repertoire. Warde put his Richard III sets and costumes into storage in Philadelphia and continued on with his tour to other cities. Arneaux had seized the opportunity to rent these sets, props and costumes from Warde for his own night of Richard III a couple of months away, and Warde’s costume stock, enough for a full company of actors, which had been advertised as “new and brilliant and historically correct” were happily collected by Arneaux and his local producers.

Arneaux did use his experience in journalism to set about a public relations campaign, drumming up interest and pride in the African American communities in Philadelphia and elsewhere for Shakespearean theater. The January 2, 1887 edition of the New York World featured a lengthy article entitled “Our Colored Star Actors”, which was signed by “Gloster”, and that was undoubtedly Arneaux’s nom de plume. Eight African American classical actors and actresses were described in the piece, but Arneaux himself, as well as Philadelphia’s Henri Strange, were the ones most heavily featured. Intriguing portraits of each of the actors were included with the article. Here, and elsewhere, Arneaux used his newly- acquired, and self-awarded “Black Booth” designation as often as possible.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

Peter
Meanwhile down in Philadelphia, the Standard Dramatic Company, the city’s own African-American semi-professional Shakespearean troupe, was working hard on their own preparation for the big night at the Academy. With about a dozen or so regular members, over the previous few years the Standards had slowly built up their local reputation - performing scenes and selected speeches at Black church fund-raisers and concerts. Having no regular rehearsal space of their own, they practiced their parts in their own cramped apartments near South Street. The previous May, they had presented a fully-staged version of Othello at the small Arch Street Opera House, although since this venue was far from the neighborhoods where most of their natural audience lived, they had to entice attendees by changing only ten to thirty cents for the tickets. A close-knit group, some of them were in fact family to each other. The young R. Henri Strange acted Othello, while his sister, Miss Flora Pedro, played Emilia. 

So who was Henri Strange, now being billed as Philadelphia’s leading Black classical actor? As a boy, Richard Henry Strange’s parents had brought him and his siblings to Philadelphia from Virginia in the years just after the Civil War, seeking better opportunities and educations for them. Like the young Edwin Forrest, six decades previously, the young Henry Strange was stage-struck after watching many plays in Philadelphia’s theaters, and he had received some private tutelage from an older white actor, Edmund Connor. Evidently Henry Strange had taken to spouting long speeches of classical verse, and had impressed everyone in his class at the Hannibal and O.V. Catto Lyceum with his declamatory skills.

Changing his name to the more elevated sounding ‘R. Henri Strange’, he had then studied speech and performance at Philadelphia’s National School of Elocution and Oratory, a newly-founded academy at 1418 Chestnut Street. Music schools and elocution programs were springing up in all American cities at the time, often by artistically-trained liberal-minded German immigrants. And in the heady days following the American Civil War and Reconstruction, many of them gladly trained Black students such as Henri Strange.

Like his New York counterpart John Arneaux, Henri Strange regarded plays of the standard classical theatrical repertory as the true calling for African-American actors - a way to raise them culturally and socially to a higher level. That’s why he named his group The Standard Dramatic Company. These were the texts, he felt, that would serve to open career possibilities that were once barred to his people. He knew how things had gone in the past, and had no doubt heard the story about the Black Philadelphia actor Samuel Morgan Smith, who had left America entirely back in 1866, because he felt that, like Ira Aldridge before him, as a Black man he would never have a career in his own country. S.M. Smith had actually had some success for about ten years in London, but there his career had eventually collapsed after a string of misfortunes, and he never returned home to Philadelphia again. Twenty years on, R. Henri Strange felt that his story would be different, and unlike Morgan he could make a theater career right where he was.

Davon Johnson, as Strange
“The only thing that has kept down colored actors is race prejudice . . . I know no reason why the colored man should not see a brilliant future in the drama. This prejudice cannot exist forever.”

Peter
The African American Philadelphia politician and journalist Alexander G. Davis had taken the Standard Dramatic Company under his wing, and was managing their joint appearance with the New York tragedians. It was Davis, evidently, who had become acquainted with Arneaux in their mutual world of politically-minded Black newspapermen. Even though he was a beneficiary of Democratic Party patronage, Davis had been instrumental in bringing the Republican partisan Arneaux to Philadelphia, and used his connections to facilitate the event. In fact, Davis’ presence explains an important aspect of why this performance of Richard III was taking place at all, and why the Academy has been chosen for it.  An important battle was taking place in Philadelphia local politics in the late 1880s, and the Republican political machine that would eventually dominate City Hall for most of the next sixty years was on the ascendant. The matter was not yet settled - the Democratic Party, dominated by Irish immigrants, was losing ground in Philadelphia, but was fighting to hang on. 

Philadelphia’s Black men were perhaps going to be a deciding factor. Turning out their respective African-American voters would be essential to either party gaining victory from then on. Many white politicians, Democratic and Republican, were already planning to make it their business to be seen attending the evening of ‘colored tragedians’ at the Academy on January 29th, as a way of keeping the good will of Alexander Davis and other important figures in their constituencies. In a manner of speaking, Shakespeare’s history play, which was all about shifting political alliances and personal ambition, was being enlisted in a drama that would play out as much in the audience of the Academy of Music as it would on the stage.

[ TRANSITION MUSIC]

Peter
Having arrived in Philadelphia in late January to finalize preparations for the biggest day he had ever known as an actor, John A. Arneaux was staying at some very nice accommodations, the Continental Hotel at the corner of 9th and Chestnut. I’m not sure where his supporting players were staying - Thomas  Symmons, who was to undertake the role of Buckingham, as well as the Toney sisters, who were playing Lady Anne and the Duke of York. But they, along with him, had evidently been rehearsing all day with the Philadelphias, including Henry Strange would be playing the heroic Earl of Richmond, and Flora Pedro who was to play Richard’s mother, the Duchess of York.  

On the evening of Friday, January 26, a reporter from the Philadelphia Press knocked on his hotel room door (possibly sent by Davis) and secured an interview. Arneaux answered the reporter's questions confidently. However, he seemed aware that rehearsals with his newly combined company during the day had perhaps gone a little unsteadily.

Aaron, as Arneaux
“I think I can safely promise you a good performance. But you must overlook some crudities, as it is hardly possible for people who have only been playing at intervals to give as smooth a performance as those who tread the boards every night.” 

Peter, as Reporter
Is your version of Richard any different from Cibber’s?

Aaron, as Arneaux
“Yes; I have made a number of alterations for, what I think, its improvement.”

Peter, as Reporter
Have you any favorite scenes?

Aaron, as Arneaux
“The two which I like best are the dream scene and the last part of the play, where the humpbacked king is killed. I have given a great deal of study as to how cripples walk, and whenever I see one I follow him for squares [blocks], noticing his every movement.”

Peter
Finally ushering the reporter out, Arneaux’s head must have been filled with thoughts of the myriad of details and demands of the coming day. A military ball was being held at the Academy of Music that Friday evening, and would last late into the night. Clearing away the parquet dance floor, loading in the sets he had rented from Frederick Warde, distributing and fitting costumes to the company, and the final staging rehearsals of Richard III would all take place within a few crowded hours on Saturday.

However the hustle and bustle of the day’s activities went unrecorded in any extant source, however, and the next we hear of Arneaux, the hour of the performance - 8 pm - had finally arrived.

A reporter for a major newspaper, The Times of Philadelphia, was on hand at the Academy of Music, preparing a planned feature article for its Sunday edition. Worried about meeting his deadline, he could see with a mixture of both dismay and bemusement that the evening was already starting well behind schedule. Even the audience had been slow to make their entrances. 

The Academy, which could comfortably hold about 4000 people, was almost full. Although we do know there were many out of town guests, this would have meant that a significantly large proportion of the total Black population of the city was present, as it only numbered about 30,000 people at the time. And we know the audience was overwhelmingly African American, because the Times reporter made careful notice of it. 

Bill Van Horn, as Times Reporter
 “Many of those who attended the performance came in carriages. A crowd of colored men stood in front of the Academy, and the arrival of each carriage created a sensation.  . . [Inside] All the proscenium boxes were filled with colored box parties. Colored belles in evening dress, wearing huge corsage bouquets, sat in the front seats and fanned themselves. The balcony boxes were all occupied by colored aristocracy and young colored men in full evening dress were scattered all over the house. The gallery, the family circle and the balcony were filled and about half of the seats in the parquet were occupied.”

Peter
But the reporter also pointedly observed how the front seats of the orchestra section were occupied by a large sampling of the white political leadership of the city, some with their wives. The Philadelphia Chief of Police was there, as well as members of the Union League and the Philadelphia Club. The “stockholders” of the Academy (investors in the building who had been given the right of free admission to all events) were out in force. And the audience wasn’t the only thing that was integrated. The orchestra members, the reporter noted, included both black and white musicians.

There were quite a few other journalists in the audience, both white and Black, the latter including John Edward Bruce, who had come up from Washington DC to cover the event for the Cleveland Gazette and other negro publications of the day. But the rest of the house, as we said, was made up almost entirely by Black Philadelphians. All of the people in attendance were likely gratified by the presence in the Academy’s orchestra pit of F.J.R. Jones, one of the city’s most talented popular band leaders. But the musicians must have been surprised at how much of their repertoire they had to play, because things were running quite quite behind schedule:

Bill, as Times Reporter
 “Professor F.J.R. Jones, with an orchestra of fifteen musicians, began playing promptly at 8 o’clock. At half-past 8 the orchestra was still playing and then the applause of impatience broke out all over the house.”  

Peter
Professor Jones played another tune, but at 8:40 the curtain was still down. There was a renewal of hand-clapping, followed by cat-calls. No doubt the company backstage, who were likely still making some last minute costume and staging arrangements, were aware of the impatience out in the house.

Professor Jones played another tune and the crowd of men and boys up in the gallery began patting juba with their hands. The “colored aristocracy” (as the reporter had termed them) down in the family circle, who disliked this sort of common behavior, hissed their disapproval.

Suddenly one of the actors peeped out from one side of the curtain and he got a storm of applause. 

Professor Jones disappeared under the stage to see what was the matter and a young woman in the second row of the parquet remarked to her escort:

Journee Lutz, as Young Woman
“I expect the actors’ hearts is going pitty-patty-pitty-patty.”   

Peter
Finally, after over an hour of discomfort and growing unease among the gathered crowd, the show began at last.

This is where we began our last episode, with the Academy’s curtain rolling up, and Arneaux, resplendent in his own personally designed costume, revealed solo on the stage. 

Aaron, as Arneaux playing Richard III
“Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this sun of York/ And all the clouds that lowered upon our house in the deep bosom of the ocean buried . . “  

Peter
Arneaux had a clear voice and a good concept of character, thought the reporter from the Philadelphia Times, although he was a bit startled by the way Arneaux moved about the stage. The character of Richard III, as is well known, has a withered arm and a humpback, and actors of the day would typically hunch over and drag one leg while walking. Arneaux, however, used long and bouncing strides, leaping around the stage apparently to show Richard’s erratic and changeable nature. It was a startling innovation for anyone used to standard performances of Richard III, and evidently took some getting used to. It reminded The Times reporter of nothing so much as an ice skater doing the “Dutch Roll”.

After the opening monologue and exposition was complete, the next scene depicted the Duke of Gloster gleefully killing the deposed King Henry VI, surprising him sitting glumly in his prison cell.  The English actor Colley Cibber had rewritten lines and transplanted scenes from Shakespeare’s Henry VI, part 3 into the action of his Richard III back in the 18th century, and even now this version remained an expected feature of any 19th Century performance of the play. I ought to mention at this point that we’ve been using lines from this version for the podcast, so they don’t match what you might find in a modern standard version of the play, which is usually based on the First Folio text. (All right, just wanted to make that clear.)

Peter, as King Henry VI
“What bloody scene has Roscius now to act?”, 

Peter
the King asks, and starts to predict a dreadful future for his cackling assassin. He is immediately informed of his imminent demise.

Aaron, as Arneaux playing Richard III
“I’ll hear no more. Die, prophet, in thy speech./ For this, among the rest, was I ordained.”

Peter
The actor playing Henry VI this evening was Mr. M. O. Hulley, one of the Philadelphia actors, who had evidently received little direction on how to accomplish his character’s stage business, or else had forgotten it. He kept glancing desperately at the stage prompter to guide him. The Times reporter noted that:

Bill, as Times Reporter
When Richard decides to run his sword through King Henry VI, the King, a stout colored man, with a white beard and a powdered face, picked out a spot on the stage and kept his eyes on it. After Richard had stabbed him the prompter shouted to the King to fall up the stage. The King [instead] picked out another place on the stage and then fell with a sickening thud on the broad of his back. He died hard. Over his prostrate form Mr. Arneaux then said:

Aaron, as Arneaux playing Richard III
 “If any spark of life be yet remaining/ Down, down to hell, and say I sent thee thither.”

Bill as Times Reporter
 “Richard stood on the King’s stomach with his right foot and wiped his bloody sword blade on his handkerchief and flung it on the King’s dead body, amid great applause, and the curtain fell on the first act, which had lasted seven minutes.”

Peter
Mr. Hulley’s ordeal finally ended as the curtain came down on the scene. On the whole, though, even the most unsympathetic observers cautiously agreed the show was going . . .  tolerably well. “At least above mediocrity”, allowed the reviewer sent by The New York Mirror. “Quite a favorable impression”, said the Philadelphia Inquirer. Admittedly, those words were almost the totality of both papers’ reviews, whose editors evidently did not find the evening’s events very newsworthy. Some Philadelphia papers did not cover the event at all, I might add. We should all be grateful to the Philadelphia Times, for its detailed account.

The second act began with renewed anticipation on the part of the audience, because this act contained one of the most popular scenes of the play, one in which any leading actor was expected to score dramatic ‘points’. Here the conniving and audacious Duke of Gloster would woo Lady Anne, the widow of the late Prince of Wales, in the midst of the slain Lancastrian’s funeral procession. Even here, though, some of the hasty preparations for the production were still to be seen, as apparently not all the rented costumes had had time to be altered.

Mr. Arneaux spoke his lines with great feeling, wrote the reporter while the actress Bertie Toney, playing Lady Anne wept beautifully and copiously, although she was a bit hindered by sleeves that were evidently too long for her.

One can imagine, however, Arneaux’s annoyance when John Butler, the young Philadelphian who was playing the funeral procession’s Captain of the Guard, emphatically delivered his only line during the scene, saying: “My lord, stand back and let the coffin pass!” and was given a huge storm of applause from his friends and supporters high up in the gallery. Nevertheless, on the whole it was Arneaux’s most effective scene in the play, declared J. E. Bruce for the Cleveland Gazette. “In so passionate and natural a manner did he portray Gloster’s well-concealed subtlety in his declaration to Lady Anne, and his supreme vanity upon his success in winning her . . that his ability as an actor was beyond question.”

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

 Peter
Next came the play’s central scenes, where Gloster manipulates events after the death of his brother King Edward IV, kills his little nephews who are imprisoned in the Tower, and triumphantly seizes the English throne for himself. It was at this point in the play, unfortunately, that the reporter from the Philadelphia Times had to leave the theater to meet his paper’s deadline, and file his story and was able to file a story only about the early parts of the show he had been able to witness. As much as we might regret losing his fine eye for detail thereafter, we can glean from the somewhat more spare account of reviewer J. E. Bruce (who stayed for the whole show) that the actor Thomas Symmons, playing Richard’s ally the Duke of Buckingham, acquitted himself especially well during the middle acts.

Then came Arneaux’s favorite scene, in which King Richard’s dreams were haunted by the ghost of Henry VI (Mr. Hulley again, no doubt wearing even more powder on his face). In Shakespeare’s original text, a succession of several ghosts, all representing murdered victims of King Richard, appear to him. In Arneaux’s version, perhaps wisely, it was reduced to just one.

Arneaux then went backstage to make his final costume change - into his battle armor - a procedure for which he had rearranged the scenes of the play in order to leave sufficient time.

[TRANSITION MUSIC] 

Peter
It was in the last act of the play the character of Richmond finally appeared, and R. Henri Strange had been given prominent billing in publicity in the run-up to the show, and his name was only one on the program besides Arneaux’s that appeared in large, bold type. Now Strange finally had the opportunity to make an impression on the hometown crowd. 

As he made his debut upon the cavernous Academy stage, all his previous elocution training and pent-up ambition were put to good use. His voice rang out: 

Davon, as Strange playing Richmond
“Let’s on, my friends:/ True hope never tires, but mounts with eagle’s wings;/ Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings!”

Peter
As the climactic Battle of Bosworth Field approached, both Arneaux and Strange were aware that they faced a final hurdle. The evening could still devolve into unintended hilarity if the inexperienced supernumeraries, playing all the soldiers, who had only recently been handed medieval costumes and stage weapons, got too enthusiastic and started comically knocking each other about. But evidently the management and preparation of Alexander Davis, who was in charge of the supernumeraries, had kept such matters well in hand. No laughter and horseplay was allowed, and instead a well-rehearsed corps of soldiers enacted a stylized and rhythmic series of duels. 

Plunging downstage through them, a desperate King Richard entered the fray:

Aaron, as Arneaux playing Richard III
I have set my life upon a cast,
And I will stand in the hazzard of the die!
I think there be six Richmonds in the field;
Five have I slain instead of him
A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!

Peter
Strange, as Richmond, entered from Stage Right, and the stage was quickly cleared of all other combatants. 

Davon, as Strange playing Richmond
One or the both of us, the time has come!

Peter
They fought, and down fell the usurping Yorkist, leaving the field and the kingdom to Richmond, the founder of the triumphant Tudor Dynasty. The play then ended on a properly dignified note. True, Arneaux had cut almost all of Shakespeare’s final speech for Richmond to say, leaving him only the brief proclamation: 

 Davon, as Strange playing Richmond
Hark! The glad trumpet speaks the field’s our own.

Peter
The actor playing Lord Stanley entered with the royal crown, a tableau was formed over the body of the slain Richard, and the final curtain came down.  The applause from the audience in Philadelphia was enthusiastic and generous. As the actors took their bows, multiple floral tributes were brought out on the stage, and most were laid at the feet of the triumphant and elated J. A. Arneaux.

This success at the Academy of Music was a level of achievement that John A. Arneaux was never again to equal in his life, nor would he ever return to perform again in Philadelphia. After going back to New York in the following days, he announced his intention to temporarily retire from the stage for a period of two years, during which he would devote himself to improving his vocal technique at New York’s Grand Conservatory of Music on Fourteenth Street, which was a real place, which one could find advertised in newspapers and periodicals of the day. But despite these grand declarations, Arneaux never seems to have actually enrolled or studied there. This seems to be yet another example of his tendency to boast and resume-padding.

Instead, for a period of time the actor basked in the glory of his great night at the Academy, and even some old friends found him difficult to deal with. From Tennessee, Ida B. Wells wrote to congratulate him, but his written reply to her, she noted with some asperity in her diary, “presumes to familiarity”. Whatever that phrase may have meant, she pointedly did not write him back ever again. 

Arneaux also attempted to capitalize on his fame by publishing and selling his own acting version of Richard III. Edwin Booth had done the same thing, after all, so why not him? In the introduction to the text, Arneaux wrote.

Aaron, as Arneaux
“In the adaptation of this play . . my sole object was  .  . to render it suitable for the drawing-room as well as the stage.”

Peter
That is, by taking out any rough Shakespearean language or difficult staging, he evidently hoped to make it more palatable for the respectable tastes of the rising Black middle class. The book was priced to the public at 25 cents a copy, and was available only by writing to him at his address on Sullivan Street.

Aaron, as Arneaux
“Photographs of Mr. Arneaux in costume can also be had at the same price, or the book and picture at 35 cents.” 

Peter
It is unknown how many were actually sold, or indeed whether he profited from this venture at all. The photographs of Arneaux in costume have been lost, but the book itself did include another striking portrait of him, his mustache waxed and so sharply pointed that it extended beyond his ears. It was printed with a facsimile of his signature.

Aaron, as Arneaux
“He who strives to reach the summit of excellence, is the happy possessor of a noble ambition. Yours for the Drama, J. A. Arneaux.”

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

Peter
In the spring of 1887, Arneaux announced that like many other great American artists had done, he was leaving America for Paris, in order to continue his studies in language and drama. A fundraising “Farewell Testimonial Banquet and Reception” for him was organized by the Manhattan League, a group of eminent Black New Yorkers. It is possible that it was for this occasion that the well-known portrait of Arneaux in the form of a classical bust was created. During the ceremony Harriet Vinton Davis, Thomas Symmons, and Bertie Toney performed with him in selected scenes from Shakespeare, and Walter Craig’s orchestra was on hand to play an “Arneaux Triumphal March”.

Unfortunately it seems that this grand event did not bring him either the needed financial or psychological resources he truly required, because shortly afterwards Arneaux again suffered some sort of physical or mental breakdown. He spent the summer recuperating at a Catskill resort, where his presence made quite an impression on other guests.  He seemed strangely reluctant, however, to make his oft-announced voyage to France, but instead kept putting it off, constantly making known his availability for booking plays, readings or recitations from his repertoire. A classified ad in August of 1887 read:

Aaron, as Arneaux
“Mr. J.A. Arneaux can be engaged for a limited number of Shakespearean performances previous to his departure for Paris, France, which will occur in the latter part of September. Contracts made with responsible parties for September only.”

Peter
But he did not leave in September, on October 1st, 1887, we find another ad:

Aaron, as Arneaux
“For special reasons, Mr. J.A. Arneaux will not go to Paris this fall, as has been announced. Responsible parties wishing to secure his services for dramatic exhibitions, may address their communications to 101 West Third Street New York. Repertoire: Richard III, Iago, and Macbeth.”

Peter
Indeed, he played Iago in Baltimore in late December of 1887, his last recorded public performance. Finally Arneaux left America but not for France! He went north of the border to Canada, where he stated he hoped to find some relief or treatment from the illness which was still plaguing him. His periodic announcements were getting increasingly puzzling and grandiose:

Aaron, as Arneaux
“J.A. Arneaux, of New York, is now in Montreal, Canada, where he intends to remain until June. Mr. Arneaux has been suffering the past year from vertigo for which reason he went to the Catskills last summer. Still suffering, he resolved to try the Canadian climate.  . . . Mr Arneaux will reside in Montreal until June or July, then return to New York where he will remain until after the Presidential campaign, after which he will go to France where he intends to devote one year to the study of the drama. He will then, if possible, arrange with either Dumas or Sardou to furnish him with a tragedy. While the play is being written he intends going to Germany, Italy and Spain, where he will devote six months (in each place) to the study of languages and the drama. He will then return to Paris, produce his play in Paris, and England if he can get an opening, after which he will return to America and devote the balance of his life to the stage ..”

Peter
It was not until the following year that he made the voyage to Paris at last. But once there, he seldom communicated with colleagues and friends back in America. Cryptic,and contradictory announcements regarding his plans and movements would occasionally appear in American newspapers, but eventually these too ceased. The last known article referencing Arneaux as an actor was a brief item in the New York Age from August 8th, 1891.

Aaron, as Arneaux
“Mr. J.A. Arneaux is expected to arrive in New York the first of October, where he will form a company to produce the play that was written for him while in Paris. After its first production in New York, Mr. Anreaux will play a season of about thirty weeks in the Western cities.”

[MUSIC UNDER, “DIRGE” BY FRANK JOHNSON]

Peter
But this tour never occurred. Indeed, no evidence of him returning to America has ever been found. The trail of newspaper stories and anecdotes about him just . . stop. Nobody knows where he ended up or even when he finally (presumably) passed away.

An intriguing and largely unexplored possibility exists that Arneaux fell in with a group of exiled Haitian revolutionaries while in Paris, and then travelled with them to the Caribbean while they attempted a failed coup against the Haitian government. I guess it is more likely that the “General Arneaux'' that we see in some newspaper accounts who joined this group was someone else entirely. Still, given John A. Arneaux’s tendency to imaginative self-invention, one can’t help but wonder, nonetheless. It would be kind of like him.

However, my own personal theory is that Arneaux really was just increasingly ill. Perhaps he never came back from France - because he was lost to whatever disease was plaguing him. Or maybe because at some juncture he couldn’t convince himself of the truth of America’s mythology of personal possibility and success, or even his own anymore, and just no longer saw the point of coming home. 

Back in Philadelphia, however, there were still those willing to take up Arneaux’s discarded mantle. The Standard Dramatic Company, led by R. Henri Strange, were determined to keep bringing Shakespeare to their community, and even to establish a permanent African American classical theater in the city. To raise the money, a week’s worth of Shakespeare at the Academy was announced for early November 1889, with Strange starring in full productions of Othello, Hamlet, and The Merchant of Venice. A tour of the country was planned to follow. But evidently they had trouble closing the deal for their ambitious plans because most Black business leaders - who were their natural source of funding - remained  unconvinced that the success of Richard III could  ever be repeated. The initial thrill that Philadelphia’s Black community had initially felt at attending Arneaux’s grand event at the Academy was beginning to fade. New popular theatrical venues were being built in or nearby Philadelphia’s colored neighborhoods. And musicals and variety shows were attracting more attention. 

True, Strange had secured one powerful backer, James W. Teagle. “Majah” Teagle was at various times a barber, an impresario and restaurant owner, with a colorful reputation all over the city of Philadelphia. Teagle was a formidable political operative in Republican circles, and was able to obtain the booking that the Standard Dramatic Company had long sought. It was announced that The Merchant of Venice, starring Strange as Shylock, would play at the Academy of Music on January 12, 1891.
 
Philadelphia politicians were once again encouraged to reserve boxes and the choicest seats. Indeed, Teagle offered them a stunning inducement to attend - a promise that the President of the United States, Benjamin Harrison, would be in the audience. Furthermore, he announced that proceeds from the evening would go towards building a new theater, one explicitly owned and run by Black businessmen and catering to the African American community. Teagle had even put a bid on a site at 13th Street, below Pine, and was having an architect draw up the plans. 

But the evening, when it came off, went only moderately well, and was far from the triumph they were hoping for. Most disappointingly, President Harrison did not show up after all. The poor turnout for The Merchant of Venice had evidently given possible investors further doubts. Nevertheless, in a final effort to rally support for their project, Majah Teagle doubled down, and booked the Academy of Music once more, on May 20th. This time Henri Strange would play the role he had watched Arneaux do four years previously: Richard III.

The preparations for this Richard III were even more elaborate than they had been for Arneaux, and the grandiose language of its promotional material seems familiar. Thomas Fitzgerald, the longtime publisher of the penny paper The Item, had joined forces with Majah Teagle, and described the show as a benefit for Strange “prior to his departure for Europe”, which was to have a cast of “one hundred colored artists”. No expense would be spared, it said, and the play would be presented “in the proper manner, and the costumes, scenery, and effects will be historically correct.” (They always liked that in the 19th Century - “historically correct” costumes.) Half of the total receipts of the evening would go directly to the fund to build the new theater on 13th Street, it was promised. 

But, once again, the representative audience did not come. Teagle had badly miscalculated the situation. Without a famous actor, they could not successfully draw crowds to a local production of Shakespeare, even at the Academy of Music. Despite all the political favors Teagle tried to call in, the audience who came to see Strange as Richard III was quite thin, and reviews were tepid, polite, and brief. 

Bill,  as Times Reporter
“He won the unmeasured applause of the audience. . . Miss Flora Pedro made a good Lady Anne and shared the honors of the evening with the star,”

Peter
 . . .  was all the reviewer for The Philadelphia Times had to say. Other papers did not even publish a review, perhaps out of kindness, or from fear of offending Teagle. The project of founding a Black classic theater in Philadelphia was a doomed effort. Even Teagle finally had to admit it, and he gave up. The Standard Dramatic company was completely disbanded.

Henri Strange evidently felt the disappointment of this failure keenly, and took to his bed in his tiny apartment. But theater people are often amazingly resilient. Two years later, R. Henri Strange was back on the Academy stage, playing scenes from Hamlet in an evening billed as “Music Versus Tragedy,” a benefit performance for the Bethel A.M.E. Church. And in May of 1894, he again made an appearance in the city playing Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, along with a comic farce entitled A Woman Won’t. He even tried for a period using Arneaux’s old moniker of “The Black Booth''.  Arneaux hadn’t been heard from for years by that point, so you know, why not? Even Edwin Booth himself wasn’t around, as the great actor had passed away in 1893, after a sad decline in his health in his late fifties.

R. Henri Strange would eventually achieve a small measure of fame, a few years later, when he appeared as the Ethiopian King Menelik in Williams and Walker’s 1906 musical comedy Abyssinia - which like their previous hit musical In Dahomey employed a farcical story about Black Americans traveling to an actual African country, and all the hijinks that ensued. On its way to a successful run in New York, Abyssinia even played at the Park Theatre in Philadelphia on North Broad Street. A photograph exists of Strange in the role of the King along with Bert Williams and  Ada Overton Walker, who was also in the show. I’ll share it with you on the blog post about this episode on our website www.AITHpodcast.com -  But this was his last hurrah. Richard Henry Strange died ten years later, in February 1916, of pulmonary tuberculosis.

The hard truth for Strange, as it had been for Arneaux, and for other young African-American actors of his day who wished to perform classical texts, was that there was simply not yet a place for them in the American theater. They were both too late, and too soon. They were too late, in that by the 1890s the era of the old-school Actor-managers was over and lighter fare offered by large touring companies controlled by Syndicates ruled the theatrical marketplace in America. Their fellow performers Alice Franklin, Henrietta Vinton Davis, Benjamin Ford and others also eventually came to the same reluctant conclusion, and either curtailed their ambitions or retired from the stage altogether. Indeed a sea-change was occurring in all of American theater, towards more realism and sincerity, and the grand old school of Shakespearean acting was now increasingly out of fashion.

Arneaux and Strange were too soon, in that the social, economic, and physical infrastructure necessary for African American actors to achieve true success did not yet exist, certainly not enough for them to have a sustained career of any sort. If Arneaux had ever returned from Paris with a play he had supposedly had written for him by a French genius, where would he do it and who would come to see it? And Strange and Teagle’s vision for a classical theater serving the Black community of Philadelphia was also literally ahead of its time. There simply was not yet a sufficient population to support it. Soon enough would come the Great Migration, when arrivals from the South swelled the number of African-Americans in Philadelphia to over 220,000 people, only then would there finally be an audience sufficient to support theaters, movie houses, and nightclubs that catered directly to Black audiences. Still, it wasn’t until 1919 that the wealthy African American banker E.C. Brown would build the Dunbar Theater, a legitimate house intended to serve the Black community, on the corner of Broad and Lombard Streets, just a few blocks down from the Academy of Music. It is true that the offerings were primarily popular plays and musicals, and not Shakespeare. 

[MUSIC UNDER TEXT Dvorak's "New World Symphony” second movement.]

Peter
I’d like to end this episode with some final thoughts about our main subject, John A. Arneaux. As I’ve tried to gently point out, perhaps he was a bit more of a con man and a fabulist than has previously really been admitted by most theater historians. But I don’t really see the problem with that. Theater has often been the province of those who were prepared to imaginatively re-create themselves, and write a story bigger than they have any right to. After all, as Arneaux himself wrote: “He who strives to reach the summit of excellence, is the happy possessor of a noble ambition.” I really admire him, and wish I had had one tenth of his drive and audacity back when I was attempting to build my own theater career. Perhaps the yawning gap that he could see, a Black man in Post-Reconstruction Era America, caught between his ambition and the disappointing reality he could clearly see, just caused him to aim even higher, to a future that he could only imagine - but still wanted to claim as his own.

But after spending so much time studying and thinking about John A. Arneaux, I don’t want to fall prey to the all-too-easy Researcher’s Syndrome of overstating his importance. His Richard III was just one night in Philadelphia, after all. People saw it, enjoyed it, and moved on. Nevertheless, he, along with other Black actors of his day that we’ve mentioned like Ira Aldridge, Samuel Morgan Smith, Henrietta Vinton Davis, the Hyers Sisters - or others that we haven’t talked about here like Hurle Bavardo and Powhatton Beatty did make an impact. They really did, as the saying goes, elevate the race. People took pride in them and felt like they’d made some space, created possibilities, made something that could be built upon afterwards. Obviously Henry Strange’s confident assertion back in the 1880s that race prejudice in America would eventually pass away was just never going to happen. We all know that, by now. But still, something moved. Things did change, and kept moving on. Not as much as we want it to, but every time it does, it feels right. 

In the year 1916, right after Henry Strange had passed away, the Black newspaper the Indianapolis Freeman, published two sentences that really struck me when I came across them, and which I put away right at the end of my files of all my clippings on this topic. “The Renaissance of the Negro in drama is here. Ira Aldridge, Hurle Bavardo, R. Henri Strange, J.A. Arneaux and others from their dwellings across the mysterious river, are smiling their approval.” 

I’m Peter Schmitz. The sound effects and engineering were by Christopher Mark Colucci. Our guest voices in this episode included Aaron Bell as John A. Arneaux, Bill Van Horn as the reporter, Davon Johnson as R. Henri Strange, and Journee Lutz as the young woman in the audience. 

Much of the band music that you heard throughout the episode was from the album The Music of Francis Johnson and His Contemporaries; Early 19th Century Black Composers, performed on original instruments by The Chestnut Band Company & Friends - Diane Monroe, violin, conducted by Tamara Brooks. (Although that last clip there was of course the second movement from The New World Symphony by Antonin Dvorak, recorded by the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Eugene Ormandy in 1956 - at the Academy of Music.)

Thank you for listening and for your kind attention. Next time we will complete our exploration of 19th Century Theater in the Quaker City, and bring Season One of our podcast to a close. Join us again on another Adventures in Theater History: Philadelphia.

[AITH CLOSING THEME]

© Podcast text copyright Peter Schmitz. All rights reserved.