Theatre Symposium

In April and May of 1855, a San Francisco weekly, The Golden Era, printed a three-part serial entitled “The Drama on the Pacific: First Theatricals in California,” providing future theatre scholars with the first published history of theatre in the Golden State.¹ That journalistic chronicle contains a description of the first recorded theatrical production in what is now the city of Los Angeles: a series of performances mounted during the occupation of that city by US soldiers near the end of the US-Mexico War of 1846–48.² For the theatre historian, J. E. Lawrence’s account is maddeningly uneven—by turns painstaking and imprecise, chauvinistic and culturally aware, and frequently contradictory. But if the text is closely read through the context of subsequent scholarship on nineteenth-century Californio (Mexican Californian) society, a remarkable tale emerges from the confusion: one of power, class, resistance, and collaboration (in both the theatrical and wartime senses). Bringing this story to light requires challenging the assumptions about theatrical space that lie at the heart of Lawrence’s account. That this should prove necessary serves as a reminder to theatre historians that spaces of performance are not only a reflection of how a given culture defines performance, but also of how it perceives power.

Lawrence’s serialized history begins with the assertion that “theatrical representation in California commenced with the first unfurling of the American Flag on the Western border of our Continent,” a statement revealing an unabashed Anglo-centric bias. And yet, Lawrence’s nationalist fervor led the author to extensively document the theatrical activities of the US soldiers who came to California during the US-Mexico War, inadvertently contributing to the history of theatre in Los Angeles.³ [End Page 64]

In the second installment, Lawrence tells of an entire theatrical season offered in Los Angeles by the soldier-actors of a unit known as the New York Volunteers, beginning in June of 1848 and lasting until September of that year. In a three-hundred-seat theatre apparently built for the occasion, the Volunteers gave performances of The Golden Farmer, The Idiot Witness, Bombastes Furioso, and “several more dramas and farces,” together with The Marble Statue and “other pantomimes.” Lawrence goes on to identify eleven “members of the Thespian corps” by name, and details the warm reception the Volunteers received from the populace of occupied Los Angeles.⁴ Given Lawrence’s patriotic tone, these details paint a picture of industrious and talented New York boys, sharing the theatrical blessings of liberty with the art-starved inhabitants of “a distant and almost unknown dependency of a semi-barbarous Mexico,” and in so doing winning the hearts and minds of the locals.⁵

In the very next installment of the history, however, appearing only two weeks later, this tale of Los Angeles theatrical genesis is revised. Lawrence admits to “performances in Spanish which preceded the advent of the Volunteers,” productions that “alternated” with those of the Volunteers, once they arrived. These plays were apparently mounted in a theatre that “cost between five and six thousand dollars,” a structure financed by “a gentleman from Mexico.”⁶ In order to incorporate this new information, the narrative must expand from a tale of magnanimous victors proffering the gift of art to a story of a bicultural rotating repertoire, or maybe even a multicultural theatre district.

In either of those scenarios, the story of the first theatrical performance in Los Angeles appears to demonstrate the power of art as an intercultural bridge, even when the cultures in question are separated by the great gulf of war. Theatre may indeed have that power, and a bridging of Anglo American and Mexican Californian cultures may well have been at work with these productions. However, the contradictions apparent in Lawrence’s two accounts, particularly as they involve the performance space, suggest that the shows reflected a more ambiguous reality: one of the powerful forces engaged in the complex intercultural negotiation of California’s future. In short, the performances spatially represented a microcosm of events playing out beyond the theatre’s walls.

Precisely locating these wartime productions requires a careful dissection of Lawrence’s multiple accounts. In the first rendering of the events, the chronicler provides a good deal of information about the space: “In the month of June, 1848, a theatre was erected at Los Angeles. The stage was covered, and provided with a proscenium, drop curtain, and a tolerable supply of scenery. The auditorium was surrounded with adobe walls, [End Page 65] and its occupants had only the heaven for their canopy. For choice seats, to be occupied by ladies and officers, there were balconies extending from the house, and the servants of the Spanish senoras [sic] brought chairs to be occupied by the latser [sic], who frequently graced the dress circle in considerable numbers. The whole place was fitted up to accommodate about three hundred persons.”⁷ At first glance, this seems to be a description of a typical Euro-American metropolitan theatre, complete with proscenium arch, balconies, and a dress circle. And yet, certain elements refuse to fit easily within that established architectural model for theatre spaces. Among them is the mention of adobe walls. Adobe was a common building material of Mexican California, but its manufacture and use was unfamiliar to the New Yorkers Lawrence seems to be crediting with the construction. Similarly, the lack of a roof would have set the theatre apart from contemporaneous New York theatres (or Mexico City ones, for that matter).⁸

Lawrence’s second description of this (or some other) Los Angeles theatre, the one that appeared in the later May 13 issue, does little to explain the odd mixture of architectures suggested by the earlier account: “The Volunteers . . . opened the new theatre in the house of Don Antonio Coronel, on the 4th of July, 1848. Before this event, a gentleman from Mexico had, with the aid of several citizens of Los Angeles, constructed a theatre in which representations were given by a company of amateurs, Mexicans and native Californians, which were alternated in the latter part of 1848 with the performances by the N.Y. Volunteers. This theatre cost between five and six thousand dollars.” ⁹ The first question raised by these two accounts is this: just how many theatres are being described? If the answer is two, then why did the soldiers not use the preexisting space for their shows? The next oddity is Lawrence’s revised statement that the Volunteers’ “new theatre,” which he had earlier credited them with erecting, was apparently located “in the house of Don Antonio Coronel.”

The most likely resolution of Lawrence’s conflicting accounts is that they both refer to a single playing space. This possibility is supported by both an absence and a presence in the wider historical record of the period. As intriguing as is Lawrence’s mention of a “five or six thousand dollar” theatre built by local elites, the existence of such a space in 1848 Los Angeles is extremely unlikely. The population of California before US conquest (estimated at 18,000) was not sufficiently large or concentrated enough to support a commercial theatre industry.¹⁰ Dedicated spaces built to support such an industry were unknown to the region. If such a structure had been erected in Los Angeles in 1848 or before, its rarity would certainly have received the attention of contemporaries. The [End Page 66] deafening silence of the historical record prior to 1848 seems to discredit Lawrence’s account.

By contrast, the “house of Don Antonio Coronel” was a well-documented structure. Antonio Coronel, future mayor of Los Angeles, would have been the perfect host for the Volunteers. Among his many artistic interests, he was a devoted collector of plays.¹¹ Nevertheless, in the summer of 1848, Antonio could not have built a theatre within his own house for two simple reasons. First, he was away at the mines in Northern California, where many of his fellow angelenos had gone after gold was discovered in January of that year.¹² Second, even when in Los Angeles, Antonio did not have a house to do with as he wished; the as-yet-unmarried man still lived with his father, Ygnácio. The elder Coronel brought his family from Mexico to California in 1834. He worked temporarily for the local government and finally settled in Los Angeles in 1837. There he ran a small store and acted as the pueblo’s schoolmaster, later serving in city government and becoming a local landowner.¹³ For his growing family, Ygnácio built a large adobe townhouse at the corner of Calle de los Negros and Calle del Aliso in Los Angeles, a block from the plaza. This is clearly the structure Lawrence references, for in June of 1848, it was the only house Antonio Coronel could call home.

When Lawrence belatedly places the Volunteers’ performances within the Coronel house, the seeming oddity of the Anglo American soldiers’ choice of building materials is explained: the adobe walls that surrounded the audience were obviously those of Ygnácio Coronel’s house. The theatre’s lack of a roof is similarly demystified. The Coronels’ home was a typical example of elite household construction in Mexican California. Although the ubiquitous adobe building material provided exceptional stability in an earthquake-prone region, it was not well suited to the construction of large, roofed interior spaces or multiple stories. When wealthy landowners sought to express their social position through space, their only option was to build outward. The layouts of elite Californio town-houses were characterized by long, narrow wings delineating a central courtyard. Although the interior rooms of such houses were not expansive, the footprints of the structures could be—and usually were—expanded by the addition of covered verandas extending beyond the exterior and/or interior walls. A photograph of the decaying Coronel house taken in the 1870s clearly indicates such exterior porches.¹⁴

When the floorplan of the Coronel adobe is superimposed upon Lawrence’s initial account of the soldiers’ playing space, the incongruity of an elaborate three-hundred-seat proscenium arch theatre in frontier Los Angeles is resolved. Lawrence, it would seem, borrowed the architectural terminology of contemporary metropolitan theatre spaces for use [End Page 67] in depicting the Coronel house performances, possibly in an attempt to better characterize the theatrical activity of the soldier-performers as a civilizing act. Lawrence’s description of “balconies extending from the house” for the use of “ladies and officers” who have their servants save seats for them recalls the boxes found in the theatres of Europe and the eastern United States, as does the author’s characterization of these seating areas as “the dress circle.”¹⁵ Given our knowledge of the Coronel house, however, these “balconies” were almost certainly interior porches, no more than a few feet off the ground. Lawrence’s choice of words must therefore be read as a cultural translation—one most likely aimed at appropriating the performances staged at this Mexican house for use in an Anglo American cultural history.

A similar act of translation can be seen in the author’s recording of the theatre’s audience capacity. For readers accustomed to the metropolitan theatres of 1855, a crowd of “about three hundred persons” was likely to be visualized within a theatre of three hundred seats, a structure requiring significant floorspace even given the small chairs and benches of nineteenth century theatres.¹⁶ If, however, most of those audience members were standing in the courtyard of a home such as Coronel’s, they would have taken up significantly less room.

Given the limitations on interior space characteristic of buildings like the Coronel adobe, any theatre on the premises must have been constructed fairground-style in the courtyard adjoining the house’s wings. Lawrence’s note that “the stage was covered” indicates such a detached structure. That such a temporary stage was “provided with a proscenium, drop curtain, and a tolerable supply of scenery” suggests considerable industry on the part of the builders.¹⁷ As was the case with the so-called “balconies,” Lawrence’s vocabulary transforms the prosaic realities of spatially limited frontier staging into heroic acts of theatrical evangelization: by seemingly erecting a metropolitan-style theatre in 1848 Los Angeles, the New York soldier-actors brought the artistic benefits of their superior East Coast culture to a woefully uncivilized corner of the world.

But placing the Volunteers’ performances in the house of Ygnácio Coronel, on a stage that may or may not have been built by them, complicates the picture of Anglo ingenuity and magnanimity that Lawrence paints. In fact, it suggests an altogether different interpretation, one that aligns the soldiers’ plays with the theatrical production practices of Mexican California. Though Mexican California was connected to world markets through the export of its agricultural products, the penetration of capitalist forms of social exchange into local society was limited. Hard currency, for instance, was scarce. Large-scale economic exchanges were handled through an elaborate system of credit; smaller and more personal [End Page 68] interchange happened through traditional gift-exchange structures of social mediation.¹⁸ This largely moneyless economy offered little to attract touring theatre artists from either Mexico or the United States, even if audiences might be interested or if dedicated theatre spaces had existed to house them.

This is not to say that Mexican California had no experience of theatre. Antonio Coronel’s love for the art attests to that, as do recorded productions going back as early as 1789, when the play Astucias por heredar un sobrino a su tío was mounted in Monterey.¹⁹ But the mode of theatrical production and consumption in Mexican California was markedly different than that of large metropolitan centers, so much so that the blindness of a chronicler like Lawrence to Californio theatre may be attributed not only to national bias, but also perhaps to a failure to recognize local performance as theatre.

In the brief three decades between Mexican Independence in 1821 and US statehood in 1850, California transitioned from a colonial outpost economically dependent upon a string of Catholic missions to a semi-autonomous frontier society—made viable through trade with English, US, and Russian firms—and ruled by an oligarchy whose monopolization of agricultural land placed them at the center of local life. Decades of Spanish mercantilism had ensured that agriculture (specifically cattle ranching) was the only industry of significance, which meant that Californio ranchers were often the only ones offering a living to California laborers.²⁰ At the same time, however, the remoteness of California from other population centers meant that the limited labor force of California could not easily be replaced. As a result, the new oligarchs that divided California’s ranchlands amongst themselves following Mexican independence were far more reliant upon their workers than were the capitalists of the European and American industrial revolutions. The Mexican Californian economy was thus shaped by a mutual dependency that dictated a social structure that has been termed “seigneurial culture.”²¹ Within such a system, relationships between workers and ranchers were regulated primarily through close interpersonal exchanges dictated by mutually agreed upon expectations and properly performed behaviors. For landowners, these obligations included occasional acts of largesse, ranging from individual gifts to large communal celebrations. Fiestas involving feasting and dancing were common seigneurial offerings.

The production of theatre found its place in Mexican Californian society as just such a symbolically performed act of oligarchic benevolence. Though plays were infrequent events in the years before US conquest, when they were offered they were always mounted in the homes of elite Californios, and admission was never charged. Theatre was not [End Page 69] a commercial venture; rather, it was a gift of local oligarchs to their dependents. Workers considered such entertainments to be their due, elites thought of them as patriarchal generosity but also obligation, and all understood them to be links that helped keep society in seigneurial balance.

An instructive parallel to the Mexican Californian experience, at least in terms of spatial arrangements, might be taken from the staging practices of Renaissance Europe. In his history of Western theatrical space, Places of Performance, Marvin Carlson details the development of court and private theatres, a phenomenon that began in Renaissance Italy and continued through the nineteenth century. Carlson traces the private theatres of the European nobility and bourgeois elite back to the ducal great halls of the Italian Renaissance, in which “performance space and audience space were now completely absorbed into the body of the palace and could be reached only by penetrating that space.”²² Carlson directly links the development of the ducal theatres to the earlier utilization of cortiles, public squares incorporated into the ducal palaces by surrounding them with a ring of official structures, leaving the center open to the sky. For Carlson, the prime example of such architectural and theatrical innovation is the enclosing of such a cortile by the Duke of Ferrara in the fifteenth century, and his subsequent staging of performances within the newly created, semi-public space. Carlson relates how, beginning with the second of those performances, staged in 1487, “the duchess and other aristocratic ladies did not enter the cortile at all, but remained in a more private space, the loggia to the west of the cortile, above and behind the more general audience space.”²³ From the enclosed, roofless playing space to the prescribed seating areas for elite women, the physical similarities between the entertainments offered by the Duke of Ferrara within his cortile and the productions at the Coronel adobe are striking. Of far greater interest, however, is the light that the Renaissance example sheds on the spatial expression of power represented by the 1848 Los Angeles shows.

Within the context of local Californio patterns of theatrical production, the spatial placement of the New York Volunteers’ performances in the house of Ygnácio Coronel suggests a far more complex relationship between actors and audience than Lawrence takes into account. What may at first glance be seen as simple acts of diplomatic cultural exchange are transformed into contestations of sovereignty between conquered Mexican elites and the occupying US authority. In such negotiations, the Volunteers always retained the ultimate trump card of military force. Coronel, as a representative of the Californio ruling class, needed as much leverage as he could muster, and by hosting the performances within the bounds of his private property, he gained some of that needed leverage. In this manner, Coronel’s courtyard functioned similarly to the [End Page 70] ducal great hall, as “an unmistakable element of the prince’s own spatial domain, the performance his possession, and the audience his guests.”²⁴ In Coronel’s case, not only were the audience members his guests, but the soldier-actors were as well.

Of course, the relationship between Coronel and the performers was obviously very different from the one between the Duke of Ferrara and the players he enlisted to perform in the ducal cortile. Within the power structure of occupied Los Angeles, even the lowest ranking of the US soldier-actors enjoyed some measure of authority over the wealthiest of Californios. But by drawing the occupiers into his “spatial domain,” Coronel wrested back some measure of control over the political and social negotiations taking place outside his walls. By opening his house to the performances, Coronel made certain that the production of theatre in Los Angeles society remained firmly within the established Californio system of social exchange. The Spanish-language performances that he facilitated only further reinforced that arrangement. Through a production partnership with the conquerors, Coronel and his fellow Californios maintained their oligarchic status in the local political arena.

Evidence that the Volunteer shows functioned within a traditional Californio mode of theatrical production can be found within Lawrence’s account. The description of an elite audience seating area—the porches figured as “balconies”—reveals more than an Anglo author’s desire to translate local Californio architecture into a metropolitan theatrical idiom. At elite household entertainments in Mexican California, social hierarchy was always delineated spatially: the closer one was situated to the house, the higher one’s rank. When feasting was involved, the owner and elite Californio guests dined in the large central room of the house, the sala, while laborers took the meals provided them standing or sitting in the courtyard of the house. Similarly, if and when dancing began, dependent workers would begin the festivities in the courtyard. At some point later in the evening the doors of the house would open, and the master and mistress would emerge with their elite entourage to claim the center of the courtyard as their stage, where they performed the highbrow dances that marked them as cultured, such as the very much in vogue waltz.²⁵

Given the complex social meanings of theatrical production in Mexican California, the observations provided by Lawrence require a more nuanced reading. The porches of the Coronel adobe were not being used simply because they provided a better view of the action. The seating area of the “Spanish señoras” was the part of the makeshift theatre auditorium closest to the interior of the Coronel house. By claiming this privileged penumbra, the oligarchs of Los Angeles not only better enjoyed the show, but they also spatially performed their close personal connection to [End Page 71] Coronel, the local elite under whose aegis the shows were gifted to the community. The presence of the “officers” (one assumes US) in these same seats must also be read within the context of Californio seigneurialism. While the leaders of the occupation may have thought of their prominent seating as a sign of their own de facto ownership of the performances, Californios would have likely seen the sharing of the privileged space as an invitation extended to US elites to share in the existing power structure.

Another sign that Californio production modes held sway at the Volunteers’ shows is Lawrence’s silence on the subject of admission. Throughout the serialized history, Lawrence assiduously records the pricing of each and every soldier performance given during the occupation. Such data no doubt put a stamp of professionalism on all of the martial playmaking. But Lawrence provides no such information regarding admission fees in Los Angeles. The performances of the New York Volunteers were apparently offered free of charge. This was not an acting company renting a space for a short-term run; rather, Don Ygnácio Coronel, following the production traditions of prewar California, had invited the actors into his own home to perform for the pleasure of himself and his guests.

The interplay of space, power, and repertoire also suggests an interpretation of the Volunteers’ theatricals in the Coronel home as a wartime negotiation. In the April 29 issue of the Golden Era, Lawrence lists the Volunteers’ fare in detail, singling out Bombastes Furioso as one of the “favorites of the season.”²⁶ William Barnes Rhodes’ 1810 play, subtitled “A Burlesque Tragic Opera,” is a send-up of the romantic tragedies popular on US and European stages in the early nineteenth century. Coincident to the present analysis, one of the likely literary sources Bombastes plays upon is the epic poem Orlando Furioso, penned by Ludovico Ariosto and dedicated to his sponsor, the Duke of Ferrara.²⁷ The play is a satire on military posturing, centered on its title character, a Miles Gloriosus type.²⁸ Although the satire is accomplished through the characterization of Bombastes as, indeed, bombastic, Rhodes does not confine his lampooning of martial pretense to the preposterous general. In the play’s first scene, Bombastes enters at the head of his troops. The stage directions indicate that this army is to consist of “one Drummer, one Fifer, and two Soldiers, all very materially differing in size,” the drastically uneven heights of the soldiers immediately marking them as objects of ridicule.²⁹ In the final moments of the play, nearly all of the main characters lie dead, victims of each other’s vanity and stupidity. They then all miraculously arise, assuring the audience that “if some folks please, We’ll die again to-morrow.”³⁰ Such a play hardly seems calculated to inspire awe of military power. [End Page 72]

Not only did the Volunteers play Bombastes multiple times over their four-month run, but Lawrence records that they chose it for the final performance marking the disbandment of the regiment in September of 1848. The playing of this piece by the Volunteers no doubt resonated variously across a spectrum of power differentials. The comic portrayal of Bombastes, for instance, gave the US soldiers a chance to laugh at their officers in public. The popularity of the piece among locals must have arisen, at least in part, from the spectacle of the conquering US soldiers sending up their own dominance. But all of this master-servant role reversal, so characteristic of the ancient comic texts from which Rhodes’ script borrowed, ultimately served a more serious diplomatic function. To the “balconies” packed with Californio elites and their invited US officer guests, Bombastes would have played as a peace offering—an assurance to Californios that the future of California would not be determined by the might of US arms, but through the new oligarchic connections blossoming within the “dress circle.”

Reading against the grain of Lawrence’s text, and paying particular attention to space and the power relationships of performance, one can see the shows of the New York Volunteers and their Californio collaborators as an artistic and spatial representation of the intercultural negotiations that characterized the early years of US California. Through such power plays, theatrical and otherwise, Coronel and his fellow Californio elites were able to maintain their social position for the next twenty years. But beginning in the 1870s, a combination of economic factors and rising racial tensions led to the rapid decline of Mexican American influence in Southern California. What followed were decades of racial violence and segregation, including the development of separate and unequal English-and Spanish-language theatrical industries. Yet there is reason to hope that the Los Angeles theatre scene may finally be living up to its early intercultural potential. In October of 2014, the City of Los Angeles sponsored an unprecedented month-long celebration of Latina/o theatre, Encuentro 2014.³¹ For the first time in the modern era, local civic leaders chose to celebrate and promote their city by highlighting theatre created by Latinas/os. Significantly, the site of that event, the Los Angeles Theatre Center, is located just a few short blocks from where the Coronel adobe once stood.