Pudd'nhead on Stage

Performing Pudd'nhead Wilson

Less than a year after its publication, The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson was dramatized as a melodramatic comedy in a prologue and four acts. The play was the work of Frank Mayo, an American actor best known for his portrayal of Davy Crockett. I haven't been able to locate a script, but from the various reviews it is possible to get some idea of how Mayo dramatized MT's text.

Rehearsals began 19 March 1895. It opened out of town in Hartford, on April 8th. After a number of one-night stands, it premiered at the Herald Square Theatre on Monday, April 15th. Reviews were favorable but not enthusiastic. The critics regularly mentioned the problems of translating a work of fiction to the stage, though not all of them seem to have read the novel. Mayo's work in the title role and the dramatic force of the final, courtroom act were cited as the play's most taking points. MT attended a performance on 22 May 1895, and in his remarks afterward expressed complete satisfaction with Mayo's handling of the story.

The production was booked into New York for a six-week run, and then seems to have gone straight on the road. Mayo died while touring with the play, on route to Omaha for what would (according to his obituary in the Times on 9 June 1896) have been his 368th performance as Pudd'nhead. According to letters in the Barrett Collection from H.H. Rogers to MT, by March, 1896, the production was "at last" on its feet, and beginning to pay royalties; for that month it paid MT over $1400. There was apparently some complication involving Mayo's estate and his partner. Within a year after Mayo's death, however, the show did go on, with a new actor as Pudd'nhead and much of the same company behind him. By the spring of 1897 that production was in Boston as part of what seems to have been a national tour. Writing in 1912, Paine added that the play "is by no means dead, and still pays a royalty to the Mayo and Clemens estates."

I would like to know more about the play's reception: where it played and what reviewers across the country responded to. Like the novel, the play climaxes with the trial at which the fingerprints prove that "Tom" is not just the criminal, but also a "negro and slave." Courtroom scenes tend to make for good drama, but I'd like to know if this trial also served American audiences as a kind of ritual. Without a script we have to speculate, but the reviews clearly suggest that "Tom" was portrayed as a villain in more melodramatic terms than the novel uses. In one of the announcements accessible below, for example, he is referred to as "devilish and diabolical." Perhaps the play's appeal was derived in part from the idea of labeling, condemning and casting out the racial Other. Several reviews accessible below, particularly the second one in The New York Times, seem to attribute "Tom's" villainy to his racial heritage.