An Early American Theater Lost...and Found

It all started with an old hole in the ground discovered on the 301-acre site of the Colonial Williamsburg living museum in Virginia.
And then another hole, and another.

Their spacing at eight-foot intervals was the first clue that these could be the remains of a building of some sort. There had been a public theater on the site, long ago lost to time. Was this it?

	Odai Johnson.Photo by Kathy Sauber.

Around the time of this discovery, Odai Johnson—UW associate professor
in the School of Drama, author, and a historian well-versed in the colonial American theater—came into the picture. He was nearby, doing research at the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond.

“The curator knew someone down in Williamsburg and heard there was a dig under way looking for this theater,” says Johnson, who has published two books on the theaters of colonial America. “He let them know they had a theater scholar in residence.”

The story since then is one of sparse clues leading to the hope of restoring a splendid, centuries-old theater to performing life.

It was known that there had been a theater somewhere at Colonial Williamsburg in the mid-1700s, run by an impresario named David Douglass, who managed his own theatrical company and owned as many as 16 theaters from Rhode Island to Barbados. Such a performing house may have been located across from the historic Blue Bell Tavern on the Williamsburg site, where 148 other buildings had already been restored to historic accuracy.
But that hunch wasn’t enough to begin excavation. As Johnson says, “‘Near’ is no place to put a shovel in the ground.”

The ground provided no obvious relics of an old theater, such as footlights or stage mechanism. One of the few discovered hints was residue revealing what had years before been a nine-inch iron spike. These were used in colonial times to separate the audience from the stage area, keeping the actors and scenery safe from encounters with unsatisfied or offended audience members.
Johnson inspected the site and researched theaters built during Douglass’s long career. “I was able to offer a composite picture of what this building may have looked like,” he says.

The holes seemed to suggest that the building had been about 70 by 44 feet, “but what sold it for us was a brick dividing line at 30 feet,” Johnson says. That indicated a 70 by 30-foot playhouse space—the right size for the time—with another 15 feet or so along one long side for various dressing rooms and a green room.

Research showed the theater had been built in a quick eight weeks, and on a sort of generic, no-frills building plan.

“Theater-going was not frivolous” at that time, Johnson says. Audiences went to the theater as much to be seen there as to take in the dramas offered. “The playhouse helped to bring a genteel culture to the colonies.”

Even the Founding Fathers attended the theater for recreation and social mingling. Johnson discovered that Thomas Jefferson, then a young attorney on his way up, attended the theater six nights out of seven in one particular week. Johnson learned this not from Jefferson’s writings but from his expense books showing his payments for theater tickets.

The next step for this project? Although the hope is that the theater can one day be restored, first there must be more research and a set of drawings indicating “what we think David Douglass’s theater looked like, inside and out, in great detail,” says Cary Carson, vice president of Colonial Williamsburg’s research division.

All the digging, speculation, and research lead to one overarching question, says Johnson: “What do you do with a great 18th century theater once you open it?”

The hope is that it will be once again used as a theater. The challenge will be to make it as historically accurate as possible while also making it comfortable for modern audiences. Public theater seating in the 18th century was not spacious—the seats usually comprised a small space along a nine-inch-wide bench with about a foot of leg room in front. “It was a different dynamic of theater-going,” Johnson explains. “You didn’t own your own seat, you were just there. It was a much more social experience, by force. This was worse than coach seating [on an airplane]!”

Also, questions of satisfying audience needs with air conditioning—unknown in the 1700s, of course—and handicapped access will have to be addressed, as well as the intricate requirements of the Uniform Building Code.

Johnson has been writing a book about the Colonial Williamsburg theater project—titled Absence and Memory on the Colonial American Stage—which is due out this month, as well as a biography of the professional life of David Douglass.

While stressing that restoring the theater is a multimillion dollar project still very much in the “hoping” phase, Carson says it is his wish to see a working theater at Colonial Williamsburg to entertain tourists during the day and other theater-goers in the evening.

So a hole in the ground in Virginia has led to a fascinating research project about the 18th century that may evolve into a creative place for the 21st century.

Excerpted and updated from an article by Peter Kelley in University Week, April 21, 2005.

[Winter-Spring 2006 - Table of Contents]