On January 19, 1824, New York City’s African Theatre staged its last known production: a one-man character sketch show performed by its principal actor James Hewlett.[1] The theatre had opened in 1821, when William Alexander Brown, a businessman, theater producer, and playwright, established it as an outgrowth of the African Grove, a backyard “ice cream garden” or “tea-garden,” which offered music and refreshments and was located at 38 Thomas St. in present-day Tribeca.[2] The first to feature an all-Black acting troupe and the first created for the entertainment of New York’s Black community, the African Theatre staged its first performance on September 17, 1821: Colley Cibber’s adaptation of Richard III, starring James Hewlett.
The African Theatre offered its audiences a program of opera, ballet, pantomime, and classical and modern drama, including Shakespeare’s Othello and the abovementioned Richard III; John Home’s Douglas; Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Pizarro; John O’Keefe’s comic opera The Poor Soldier, the pantomimes of Don Juan; or, The Libertine Destroyed by Carlo Delpini, and Obi; or, Three-Fingered Jack by John Fawcett; and William Thomas Moncrieff’s Tom and Jerry, or Life in London. Brown himself authored for his company the first-known play by a Black American, The Drama of King Shotaway, based on the life of Joseph Chatoyer, the Garifuna chief who led rebellions opposing British rule on the island of St. Vincent: the First Carib War (1769-1773) and Second Carib War (1795-1797). Brown’s drama, which was never published and is considered lost, focused on the events of the Second Carib War and is mentioned as being slated for performance in the Commercial Advertiser of January 16, 1822.[3]
The African Theatre mounted several such anti-colonial and anti-slavery dramas. The January 19, 1824, performance was itself staged “For the Benefit of the Greeks” during their 1821-1829 war of independence from the Ottoman Empire—a campaign Lord Byron joined in 1823. (He died from fever a year later in Missolonghi, three months after the African Theatre’s final performance.) Keeping the African Theatre open and active had been a struggle. Brown was forced to relocate it soon after its inaugural staging of Richard III due to noise complaints, and he moved the theatre several times thereafter, often under duress. Company actors were arrested and, on several occasions, attacked, and in January and August 1822, thugs hired by Stephen Price, the manager of the neighboring Park Theatre, disrupted African Theatre performances and incited a riot, causing an estimated two hundred dollars in damage to costumes, scenery, the stage curtain, benches, and the lamp over the pit.[4] Brown’s liberal politics, the theatre’s performance of Shakespeare (the province of British high culture) and of politically charged dramas, its competition with the neighboring Park Theatre, and a climate of pervasive racial discrimination and intolerance all contributed to the African Theatre’s short yet vibrant, three-season existence. Errol G. Hill summarizes the theatre’s predicament: “Company members and Brown himself were harassed by police, physically assaulted by white roughnecks during performance, and victimized without compensatory redress in law courts.”[5]
By the date of the theatre’s last known performance, Brown had stepped down as manager of the African Theatre and was replaced by Hewlett. Just months later, Hewlett left for London, possibly to confront Charles Mathews over A Trip to America (1824), which featured caricatures of Black Americans and a scathing depiction of Hewlett’s acting.[6] Hewlett never actually met with Mathews, returning home that same year to continue his career performing dramatic excerpts and imitations of prominent actors and singers such as Mathews, Angelica Catalini, John Braham, Edmund Kean, and William Macready. But around the same time, another New Yorker with ties to the African Theatre (likely attending performances and acting there) travelled to London: Ira Aldridge (1807-1867).[7] At just seventeen years of age, Aldridge made his London debut at the Royalty Theatre on May 11, 1825, in the role of Othello.[8] It was the start of a lifelong journey that would see him become one of the most famous performers of his age and one of the most celebrated Shakespearean actors of all time. And so it was that, in Aldridge, the legacy of Brown, Hewlett, and the African Theatre lived on.
Terry F. Robinson is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. https://www.english.utoronto.ca/people/directories/all-faculty/terry-f-robinson
[1] This is the last performance for which a playbill exists. See Bernth Lindfors, Ira Aldridge: The Early Years, 1807-1833 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011), p. 45. See also George A. Thompson, A Documentary History of the African Theatre (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), pp. 17, 144-46.
[2] Thompson, p. 5. See also Errol G. Hill, “The African Theatre to Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” A History of African American Theatre, ed. Errol G. Hill and James V. Hatch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): 24-60, p. 25.
[3] See Thompson, pp. 87-88.
[4] Lindfors, pp. 30-31.
[5] Hill, p. 26.
[6] The performance’s success leaned heavily on caricatures of Black Americans, including “Agamemnon, a fat, lazy, runaway slave; Maximilian, a jolly waiter; an unnamed itinerant fiddler; and most unforgettably, a black tragedian,” patterned after Hewlett himself (Lindfors, p. 51). In the performance, Mathews’s Hewlett, styled as “the Kentucky Roscius,” botches Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” and Richard III’s “Now is the winter of our discontent” soliloquys and breaks into song extempore, voicing “Opossum up a Gum Tree.”
[7] Lindfors, p. 33.
[8] Lindfors, pp. 61-65.