Laura Keene (1826-1873)

It is ironic that America's first actress-manager should be remembered for the tragedy that befell her company during a performance of Our American Cousin on Good Friday, April 14, 1865 at Ford's Theatre in Washington D.C. She was a beautiful and capable actress, especially in melodrama and light comedy and she was a superior businesswoman, but all her accomplishments are overshadowed by the horror of that spring night when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.

Born Mary Frances Moss in Westminster, England, the future actress/manager was raised in a gentleman's household and acquired the musical and social skills and graces of a lady of the time. At eighteen, she married the godson of the Duke of Wellington, one Henry Taylor. Seven years, and two children later, the marriage abruptly ended and Mary Frances, with no professional background in the theatre, decided she must take to the stage, one of the few, "respectable" professions open to a woman. Realizing her lack of preparation, Mary Frances paid to study with Emma Brougham where she learned the basics and prepared a number of ingenue roles. Her debut as Laura Keene in Mrs. Brougham's theatre in Richmond, while not spectacular, attracted the attention of Charles Matthews, who offered her a role in The Chain of Events, with the famous Mme. Vestris at the Lyceum.

If Mrs. Brougham was a skilled craftsman, Mme. Vestris was an artist. And Laura saw the great aesthetic advances which that remarkable woman had brought to the stage. It was no doubt during this fertile period that Laura formulated what would be her credo in the coming years: "The influence of an elegant theatre, presided over by an accomplished woman, is superior to all other influences..." She truly saw the theatre as the arbiter of taste, not merely the mirror of society. Laura's meager preparation eventually forced her to look for greener pastures, and within a year of her debut with Mme. Vestris, she left for America where she would debut in The Merchant of Venice on the centennial of the first professional production in America by the Hallams. It was necessary that a facade of respectability be maintained in America where divorce was looked down on. She did so by explaining the presence of her daughters as nieces. They were taught to call her "Auntie."

She then joined the fledgling company of James W. Wallack, who patiently taught her a number of new roles and techniques. Perhaps her most successful role with Wallack's was Pauline in Dion Boucicault's play of the same name. After a year playing 34 roles on 250 nights opposite Wallack's son Lester, she again split off, this time to form her own company in Baltimore.

Having formed an alliance by this time with man about town John Lutz, she took the Charles Street Theatre and made history as the first woman to manage a theatre in America on Christmas Eve 1853 by opening a season of plays with Hearts Are Trump. She and Lutz had assembled a remarkable company. It included Charles Wheatleigh and British newcomer E. A. Sothern. By March, she and her company had performed thirty four plays on sixty nights.

Almost immediately, she set sail for San Francisco to take starring roles with a stock company there, which included a young Edwin Booth. seen at the left in a photograph from 1857. But she was not a mere star. Her strength lay in her ability to unify a production in the way she had learned from Mme. Vestris. In the face of unfavorable reviews in San Francisco, she determined to launch her own company at the Union. Wheatleigh was summoned from Baltimore and the new venture met with some measure of success. But when John Lutz had to return to the bedside of his terminally ill wife, Laura and her daughters and her mother were obliged to travel to Australia where she would again act with Edwin Booth. While in Sydney, she encountered her estranged husband who had managed to amass a small fortune and begged her to return to him, but she refused, asking instead for a legal separation. This he refused. After only twelve productions down under, she (and Booth) returned to San Francisco and assembled a company at the American Theatre, where she played A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, The Comedy of Errors, The Tempest and Henry VIII with success (Midsummer ran for a full week) and critical acclaim. But she returned to New York (and John Lutz, whose wife had died in June) to take up management there.

She and Lutz secured a lease for the Metropolitain Theatre, which she renamed Laura Keene'sVarieties, and set about assembling a company which included the gifted Thomas Baker, whowas to provide music for many of her productions in the future. She also took on a great many actors who chose to leave William E. Burton's (right) rival company. These included his leading man George Jordan, Kate Reignolds, his ingenue, the beautiful Lotty Hough, soprano Rosalie Durand, and character actors John Dyott and T. B. Johnston. Burton was known to be an avid scholar, but also a ruthless business man. He had tried to force rival companies in Philadelphia into bankruptcy. The defections did not please him. Mysteriously, Miss Keene's scenery was vandalized, forcing her to postpone her Christmas Eve opening night.

On December 27, she opened at last and began a personally gruelling season of a constantly changing bill. It soon became clear that her own skill and beauty were the reasons critics and audience were coming to the Varieties. In addition to planning the bill, casting and conducting rehearsals, she was obliged to play the leading roles as well. She dramatized her plight in a flexible little afterpiece called Novelty, in which she played a theatre manager seeking ways to please the public. A sort of mid-Nineteenth Century precursor of Forbidden Broadway, it included songs and dance and parodies of actors and could be changed to include topical references. Then in March, she opened her Camille. She framed the story as a dream apparently to avoid the censure of those who might regard the plight of a grande horizontal to be an unfit subject for the stage in 1856 New York. Despite reviews that praised Laura and excoriated the scenery, etc., the production was an immediate hit and ran for what seemed like an astonishing run of three weeks, which provided a brief respite from the punishing grind of daily changes of bill. Next came Marco in The Marble Heart, a role in which (said William Winter years later) she was "perfection." Then came a totally new production of a new play My Wife's Mirror, which was at last greeted with what we now call rave reviews for the entire enterprise. This last success cemented the success of the entire season. Laura Keene and John Lutz had mounted 153 nights of 45 different plays.

And then, she lost the lease. Owner John LaFarge refused to honor Laura's option to extend her lease for another five years and sold the property to William Burton who planned to move his company into the newly successful venue. This was a devastating blow as there was no other suitable theatre available for the following season. A solution was not long in coming. The leading theatre architect of the day, John M. Trimble, volunteered to build her a new theatre of her own. Hastily financed, but beautifully planned and executed, the 1538 seat theatre cost twice the first estimates, the cost overruns being borne by the architect. It was heralded as unequalled for its "gorgeous" appointments, and its perfection as a home for the light comedies at which Laura and her company were known to excel.

While waiting for the completion of the building in mid-November, Laura took her entire company, scenery and all, to Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia, an unprecedented and financially daring step. It proved financially successful and, some would say, broke ground for the grand tours that would follow decades later.

The new Laura Keene Theatre was an artistic and a social success. The opening night November 18, 1856, was the social event of the season. The next two seasons solidified the artistic reputation of Laura Keene and her artistic abilities in mounting a production, but the financial success of the operation was not assured until 1858 when she chose to produce a play by Tom Taylor that came to be known as Our American Cousin. It was the first long run in modern history, and it set the course for commercial theatre for the future.

The play itself was fairly standard fare for its day. The city-mouse/ country-mouse theme of the American cousin coming to claim his heritage in England was rescued by the outrageous guying of E. A. Sothern in the role of Lord Dundreary. At first reluctant to take so thankless a role, he was persuaded to stay with the company by his friend Joseph Jefferson (seen right in the more substantial role of Asa Trenchard) who talked Miss Keene into allowing the two to take whatever liberties they liked with Taylor's script. The tomfoolery soon eclipsed the script and theatrical history was made. The play proved so successful that its run was extended again and again so that the practice of selling tickets in advance of the day of performance was adopted to meet the demand. Miss Keene hated her own relatively minor role of Laura Trenchard and took the play off to substitute her favored production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

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