[In the following historically-grounded essay, Dalsimer argues that the Abbey's American tours between 1911 and 1914 (at the height of the Irish Literary Renaissance) and between 1931-1938 consolidated the Abbey's international reputation but alarmed Irish nationalists, who feared that the Abbey's representation of Ireland and the Irish would adversely affect American support for Irish independence.]

Between 1911 and the outbreak of World War II, the Abbey Theatre made seven tours of the United States and Canada—three between 1911 and 1914, and four between 1931 and 1938.¹ Undertaken at times when the Abbey's fiscal situation was most grave, the American visits were crucial to the Theatre's survival, yet its historians and critics have paid the tours little attention.² Their neglect is more surprising when one considers the unusual, if fortunate, relationship that developed between the Abbey Theatre and its American audience during those seven stays.

The initial tour of the United States in 1911-1912 resulted from the Theatre's need to develop a reputation outside of Ireland in order to gain financial support within the country. The tour produced shock waves in both theatrical and Irish-American nationalist circles. The Abbey's realistic plays of Irish rural life, emphasizing language and character over action; the simple sets, costumes, and staging; and the seemingly effortless simplicity of the acting were theatrical conventions new to the American stage. Most American drama critics were overwhelmed; they praised the Abbey for presenting a true and honest portrait of the Irish and hailed as revolutionary the realism and naturalness of its productions.

But the supposed truth of the Abbey plays alarmed Irish-American nationalists. Hoping to find aid for the cause of Irish independence in America, they believed that the view of the Irish offered by certain of the plays would prejudice the American audience against the Irish. They feared that Americans would come to view the Irish as unfit to rule themselves, and, thus, they protested the realism of the plays at every major engagement of the first tour. The protesters insisted that the Abbey's offerings were libellous rather than realistic portraits. The more drama critics hailed the Abbey's verisimilitude, the louder were the Irish-American cries of protest. When the Abbey plays failed to affect the cause of Irish independence adversely, the outcry subsided, and the reality of the Abbey's portraits of the Irish went largely unchallenged in the remainder of the tours preceding the onset of World War I.

The Players did not return to the United States and Canada for twenty years. Their second long sojourn in the 1930s was necessitated by financial need. The Abbey could not fill the theatre in Dublin, and, thus, good box office receipts in the United States were essential. This time they brought with them 41 plays, only eight of which had been produced on earlier tours. The most significant number of the new works were the light comedies that had become the Abbey's hallmark during the intervening years. These plays were very different from the early dramas concerned with peasant life in rural Ireland. These were social comedies depicting the foibles of a middle class as suited to an English or American milieu as to an Irish one. The Abbey's new comic offerings were not distinctively Irish; nevertheless, the Theatre's genius for presenting the “real” Irishman was once again heralded, and the tours of the 1930s were even more financially and critically successful than the earlier ones. The Abbey was frequently lauded, however, for attributes it no longer possessed; acclaim justly awarded during the first tours was proffered lavishly, but often erroneously, in the later ones.

Without its successful American tours, the Abbey Theatre may never have survived; at two crucial points in its development, American hospitality sustained the Theatre and enabled its works to continue. My concern here is to examine the growth of the Abbey's reputation in the United States and to trace the problematic process whereby legitimate successes developed into generous, but often misdirected, praise.

The Abbey Players' first visit to the United States lasted approximately five months from September, 1911, until March, 1912. Led first by W. B. Yeats and then by Lady Augusta Gregory, the fifteen members of the company performed sixteen plays by nine authors during major engagements in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, and shorter stays in 25 other cities. Among the sixteen plays offered during the first tour were the peasant plays of J. M. Synge—Riders to the Sea, The Well of the Saints, and The Playboy of the Western World—and of W. B. Yeats—Kathleen Ni Houlihan; the folk comedies of Lady Gregory—The Rising of the Moon, The Image, and The Workhouse Ward—and of William Boyle—The Building Fund and The Eloquent Dempsey; and the problem plays of St. John Irvine, Lennox Robinson, and T. C. Murray—Mixed Marriage, Harvest, and Birthright. These works dramatized situations peculiar to Irish country life, presented characters whose language and dialect conveyed a truly local flavor, and confronted issues specific to Ireland's emergence as a modern nation. If they were not all works of genius, the honesty of their portrayal of rural Ireland was compelling.

The Irish-Americans were galled, however, when—first in spite of their protests, and later because of them—the plays were hailed for giving the “non-Irish public … a glimpse of real peasant life as it is lived in Ireland day by day.”³ The Abbey's opposition attempted censorship in Boston, threw eggs and potatoes in New York, had the cast arrested in Philadelphia, and worked for its arrest in Chicago. That a segment of the Irish-American community objected to a number of the plays is well known. What is less familiar is the intensity of the attack orchestrated by Irish-American Republican groups and newspapers. The outcry was initiated in a letter to the Boston Post, by a Dr. J. T. Gallagher who responded to Yeats's public claim that the Abbey had come to America “to try to recreate Ireland in an Irish way” and that its “folk-art [was] an exact expression of the Irish mind of today.” Gallagher's retort was extreme:

Saturday evening … I beheld three specimens of the material with which the new national structures are to be builded … and my soul cried out for a thousand tongues to voice my unutterable horror and disgust.

They were an abomination. … I never saw anything so vulgar, vile, beastly and unnatural, so calculated to calumniate, degrade and defame a people and all they hold sacred and dear. …

Nothing but a hell-inspired ingenuity and satanic hatred of the Irish people and their religion could suggest, construct, and influence the production of such plays. On God's earth the beastly creatures of the plays never existed. They could not exist in Ireland. … [The plays] are not only anti-national and anti-Catholic, but anti-Christian. … Through every play one purpose runs. And that is to show that the Irish people are too savage, crude and unreliable to be trusted with Home Rule: in fact for anything but fettered slavery. …

Irishmen of Boston, what are you going to do about it? Writing letters will not do any good. The time has arrived to call the Health Board or Public Opinion to coffin and seal up these festering plays and consign them to oblivion without a candle or a wake.⁴

The Post published Yeats's reply to Gallagher in which he argued against Gallagher's narrowly literal interpretation of the plays. Recognizing the obviously good copy to be found in the dialogue, the paper headlined the following day's edition with “Revolt Against the Irish Players: Both Sides of the Discussion in Tomorrow's Sunday Post,” and Sunday's paper contained a lively discussion of the three initial plays by various Irish-Americans and by the Theatre's founders. From this point on the Theatre made headlines wherever it went.

The Boston drama critics were virtually unanimous in their admiration for the opening bill, as they would be for most of the plays that followed, and applauded In the Shadow of the Glen and Birthright for their compelling realism. The critic for the Boston American was typical: “In both the ‘Shadow of the Glen’ and in ‘The Birthright,’ [sic] the spectator who knows his Ireland forgets the theatre and for the time being, finds himself watching scenes that are indeed as real and true as any he has seen himself in many scores of places.”⁵

Praise of this sort for Birthright was particularly offensive to Dr. Gallagher and his supporters, who feared that the play would be considered an authentic portrait of the Irish and were outraged when it was. In the play an Irish farmer, loving his younger son more than his elder, attempts to deprive the elder of his inheritance. The two sons quarrel, finally come to blows, and the younger strangles the elder in a fierce and tragic combat. Birthright is an anguished drama of confused familial emotions, but Dr. Gallagher saw it as one in which a “low villain” robs the rightful heir of his birthright and in which “two sons fight not as Irishmen do with their fists, but with their fingers and they strangle and murder one another right before the spectators … like two infuriated wild beasts. It is the most hellish thing imaginable.”⁶ As the Theatre's success grew in Boston, objections escalated. Several Irish-American groups demanded that the mayor's office censor The Playboy of the Western World. In addition to sending a representative to judge the play, the mayor himself and the police commissioner attended the opening night of The Playboy. They found nothing in the play to warrant censorship or suppression.

Once the outcry in Boston was initiated, official policies towards the Abbey Players and their offerings were adopted by Irish-American organizations in nearly every city on the tour. As it had in Ireland, The Playboy of the Western World became the chief focus of the objections. The Gaelic American reported that the United Irish-American Societies of New York—75 organizations in number—issued the following statement:

Whereas, the play is a gross libel on the Irish people, depicting them as barbarians of a very low type, with ideals and manners little removed from those of the savage; their women as brutal and debased creatures, rivaling each other in marital advances to a complete stranger, whose only claim to their admiration is the belief that he had murdered his own father; and their religion is scoffed at and misrepresented in words put into the mouths of the characters of the play, with the apparent purpose of holding it up to ridicule and contempt; and

Whereas Mr. William Butler Yeats … persists in describing this outrageous misrepresentation of the Irish people as a true picture of “the mind of Ireland” and press notices inspired by him applaud it as such, thereby inflicting on the Irish race a grievous wrong, which, if allowed to pass without protest, could not fail to injure the standing which they have won in this country after many years of struggle; therefore be it

Resolved—That we, the United-Irish-American Societies of New York, make every reasonable effort, through a committee, to induce those responsible for the presentation of “The Playboy” to withdraw it, and failing in this we pledge ourselves as one man to use every means in our power to drive the vile thing from the stage … and we ask the aid in this work of every decent Irish man and woman, and of the Catholic Church, whose doctrines and devotional practices are held up to scorn and ridicule in Synge's monstrosity.⁷

The campaign against the Abbey and its dread offspring The Playboy lasted for the duration of the first tour and was marked by vitriol and racial abuse. John Devoy's weekly Gaelic American manned the attack with such headlines as “Native Wasps Delighted” and such articles as “Here are a few specimens from the anti-Irish editorial wasps who rushed to the assistance of the anti-Irish Irish players in defense of ‘freedom of the theatre’ when that freedom puts the Irish in an odious light.”⁸ Not atypical of the papers' coverage of the Abbey was the following:

The outburst of malignant abuse and misrepresentation of the Irish people in the Jew-controlled daily papers of New York … was characteristic and a natural result of the Yeats-Gregory anti-National campaign. It was to bring about such a state of things that the British Government pensioner and his female Loyalist assistant brought the little band of weak amateurs here from the Abbey Theatre with their insulting play.

The impudence, ignorance, and cheap flippancy of the scribblers from the banks of the Jordan in lecturing the Irish people on a subject on which the Irish are fully informed and the lecturers wholly ignorant is quite characteristic. They run a newspaper as they run a cheap dry goods store, a junk shop or a moving picture show, thinking they can bilk their readers as easily as they do their customers by clamorous assertions of grotesque falsehoods about their wares. …

The Irish men and women who protested were … respectable, well dressed, substantial people. … The Irish women who were ejected were as well dressed and far better looking than the divorce court patrons who showed their scrawny necks in low cut dresses. Some of them had “vashed for a low-necked dress” that night and kept calling to their plain-clothes co-religionists, “Dere's anoder voon; put him ould.”⁹

It was not only the Irish-American newspapers that engaged in such abuse. The “American” newspapers carried their share of anti-Irish sentiment in reporting the Theatre protests. Describing the events in Philadelphia, a reporter for the Evening Star wrote,

Again in the third act the protest was taken up. A very red-faced individual in the middle of the parquet rose to his feet. … The rubicund individual fortified himself with a long pull at a very black bottle and struck an attitude.¹⁰

In a similar vein the Press commented, “Those in the parquet were well dressed but the disturbers in the gallery are said by those who witnessed the outbreak to have been of a rough class.”¹¹

Behind the racial abuse in the Irish-American press, however, lay the fear that the American audience would believe that all Irishmen were playboys and patricides. This concern expressed itself not only in abusive remarks towards those who supported the Theatre, but in exaggerated and frequently hilarious attacks on the plays themselves. About the supposed realism of The Playboy, for example, the Gaelic American exclaimed:

The scenes where the barefooted girls in gaudy and dowdy attire rush in and swarm around the fellow they believe to have murdered his father, were as disgraceful as ever were presented on the stage. They were typical of nothing in rural Ireland, but they were of the lowest kind of Dublin slums of fifty years ago. They were an exact reproduction of the attempts of prostitutes … near the Royal Barracks, to get possession of a drunken soldier with some of his fourpence a day left, or of other fallen women of the lowest grade … to grab a sailor returning from a three month's cruise with his pocket full of money. … The only difference was the bare feet. And such feet. No such feet ever came out of Ireland before. They were typically Anglo-Saxon feet—big, clumsy and flat. … Irish women have the daintiest feet in Europe.¹²

To assure readers of the veracity of their claim against the Abbey, the paper presented the Theatre as a failure and distorted reviews and reports from other papers. When the Theatre's visit in New York was extended because of its critical success, the Gaelic American wrote,

The Irish players, who came here under the leadership of a British Government pensioner who ran away and left them in charge of a female Loyalist, are to stay another month. … Who is to pay the piper is still a mystery, for that the box office receipts are not doing it is “as clear as mud.”¹³

In the same article, the paper claimed that

There has been trouble with the contracts, and the trouble was about The Playboy. Some of the girls objected to the production of The Playboy and refused to appear in it. They appealed to Lady Gregory, but their appeals fell on a heart of stone—a heart trained in the pitiless school of Galway landlordism, accustomed to trample on Irish feeling and treat the mere Irish with contempt and cruelty. Lady Gregory held them to their contract: it is in her English blood to play the tyrant and she could not throw away the opportunity. She brought them here to insult the Irish people and hold them up to contempt, and, like Shylock, she demanded her pound of flesh.¹⁴

A denial of these charges was sent to the paper by Sara Allgood, Eileen O'Doherty, Cathleen Nesbitt, Maire nic Shiubhlaigh, and Eithne Magee. The Gaelic American printed their rejoinder but with the provocative heading “Denial from Irish Girls / Say They Did Not Protest Against The Vile Playboy and Got Their Money—Do They Also Approve Robinson's Viler Harvest and Expect Decent People to Respect Them.”¹⁵

While the Theatre's nationalist detractors railed against the plays, the majority of the drama critics praised them for their accurate portrayal of the native Irishman. The critic for the Boston Globe was representative: “The Shadow of the Glen … is absolutely faithful in its portrayal of Irish peasant life, as, indeed, are all the other plays in this company's repertory. They are as far removed as the poles from any relation to the romantic and idyllic Irish plays common to the stage.”¹⁶ These remarks were echoed wherever the troop appeared: “For three-quarters of an hour you have been looking into a bare farmhouse kitchen … fascinated by the harshness, the bitterness, the tenderness, and the pathos of the life therein—a simple, racy pageant of primary passion and action, represented simply, and with the utmost reality.”¹⁷ In fact, Theodore Roosevelt, who witnessed the company during its New York engagement, was so moved by the plays' focus on the actualities of the society which they attempted to portray that he wrote, “The Irish plays are of such importance because they spring from the soil and deal with Irish things, the familiar home things which the writers really knew. They are not English or French; they are Irish.”¹⁸

Similarly, the Abbey's distinctive style of naturalistic acting, which contributed to the plays' success at capturing the Irish mood, enchanted most of the critics:

Passionate sincerity provides a novel experience for the auditor in these days of polished stage artifice, for the playing is as simple and honest as the plays. For the most part, they appear not to be acting but living their roles. … Each player speaks in the tempo that is natural to him, some fast, some slow, as people always do in life and actors almost never do. … As often as not they talk with backs to the audience, a realistic detail. … In their excitement their speeches overlap as do eager people's everywhere in real life. They move but little. There is none of the restlessness or exchange of chairs insisted upon by some of our stage managers under the fond delusion that they are thus simulating action.¹⁹

Even when the veracity of the play's perspective was called into question, the acting was praised for its simplicity and its naturalness; the reviewer for the Boston Post commented,

The cruel and unnecessary fratricide in Birthright, the gross inhuman brutality of The Shadow of the Glen, and the fierce revenge of The Well of the Saints was [sic] not quite what I anticipated. … But never mind the plays. The acting more than compensates, for it is well nigh impossible to pick a flaw in the work of any of the members.²⁰

A few reviewers, however, particularly those in large cities, who were used to elaborate theatrical productions and stylized acting, criticized the Abbey, claiming that the Players lacked technique and that their naturalism was simply a lack of art, expertise, and experience. Adolph Klauber, the drama critic for the New York Times, was representative of the attitude, as the title of one of his reviews suggests: “Acting of the Irish Players—A Lack of Method Which Has Been Unduly Regarded as a Sign of Greatness—No Stage Illusion Without Art—The Plays and the Cause.”²¹ In this review Klauber wrote, “They are, for the greater number, merely indifferent amateurs, sincere enough, no doubt, in their desire to do well, but as yet unversed in the best manner of the art …. [of that] they know nothing, or next to nothing, as it has been practiced on the professional stage from early days down to the present time.”²² In a similar vein, the critic for the Sun wrote, “There could be no greater injustice to these players than to say that they are experienced or that they are revealing in their very well meaning, intelligent, and appreciative efforts any new or inspired message as to the art of the actor, any new evangel of a new method of interpretation.”²³

Percy Hammond of the Chicago Tribune defended the Abbey against both its political and critical detractors, and his comments explained and refuted such objections as Klauber's. In defending the Abbey's productions, Hammond insisted that the dramas which Klauber viewed as art were nothing more than artifice, and he maintained that what the Abbey lacked in sophistication, it compensated for in simple, straightforward renderings of reality. In one of his reviews he wrote:

The rock the Abbey Players split on in our fair city is the paradox that American theatergoers want realism in the theater rather than reality. That is, we want what we call realism, which is of all things the most unreal. If there is a stage telephone in the room we call that realism. … Ravished by … legerdemain, we accept the falsest of plays and the most unlifelike acting. We are a nervous people, perpetually on the move as do our actors in a realistic play. The Irish players could keep quiet when movement meant nothing. Also the Irish plays were true to human nature, sincere, naive in their quiet honesty. … But to our playgoing tastes they were tame and slow. Neither in the plays, nor in the stage management, were there any tricks.²⁴

When the players returned for their second tour in December, 1913, the political outbursts that greeted their first visit were muted but did not disappear entirely. The mayor of Boston requested that The Playboy not be performed in that city, and in Montreal, where the Players appeared for the first time, there was a move by the Irish citizenry to prevent its presentation. Indeed, at each new city the Abbey played, the battle over The Playboy was waged. On the other hand, in the majority of cities where the play had already appeared and where there was trepidation about its return, it was now accepted. The Chicago critics, for example, pointed to the changed attitude in that city towards the controversial play:

The Playboy aroused so much antagonism last year that many, even though they believe it to be a great play, and that it contains nothing to which objections should be taken, hoped for the sake of harmony that the Playboy would not be repeated during the present engagement. … But the large audience at the Fine Arts Theatre yesterday afternoon and the enthusiastic manner in which the play was received proved that Lady Gregory is not alone in thinking that the Playboy is one of the best things the Irish Players do.²⁵

Another Chicagoan commented, “The play is greater than the feud, so let the quarrel die.”²⁶ During this tour Birthright was met not with jeers but with acclaim: “The climax of this play of brother love turned brother hate was tremendous in its power. The audience responded with enthusiasm.”²⁷The Shadow of the Glen, which had proved equally problematic, was received with “much less misunderstanding on the audience's part that when it was presented during the first engagement.”²⁸ The question of whether these plays represented the real Irishman was no longer a political issue—or, at least, not in those cities where they were presented for a second time.

The realism of the acting and of the productions, however, remained a central issue for the critics. As on the first tour, the majority of the reviewers believed the Players' naturalism and lack of theatricality to be their greatest attributes. As a Philadelphia commentator wrote:

The Irish players are the foremost exponents today of successfully untheatrical theatricalism. All that they do has the appearance of the actual, although it is no more real than the superconscious acting of the American and English actors. And herein lies their remarkable art.²⁹

Although there remained those critics who decried the seeming absence of technique and deplored the understated acting, their negative comments were far less vitriolic than they had been the preceding year. The critic for Life typifies the new critical attitude:

There is a curious charm about the Irish players even in some of the dreary and undramatic playlets that are put forth. … Although some of their work violates the simplest rules of acting, not rules made for staginess, but for effectiveness of results, the virtues of sincerity and naturalness are so powerful in what the actors do that we easily forget their inexpertness.³⁰

Clearly the Theatre was beginning to influence even its detractors, and negative comments diminished with every tour. By the end of the third tour, which lasted from February through April of 1914, there were few political or critical objections to the Players or the plays—although when Toronto, was added to this tour, the Irish immigrants there raised a cry against The Playboy. In their other engagements, however, the Players were treated as returning heroes.

Twenty years elapsed before the Abbey Players again visited the United States. When they came for their second long sojourn in the 1930s, the political situation in Ireland and the theatrical scene in America had drastically altered. Ireland had achieved freedom from England, endured a brutal civil war, and was undergoing the painful process of emerging as an independent nation state in an industrial world. Both Ireland and America had experienced the social, political, and economic upheavals that followed World War I, and both were suffering severe economic depressions. In America, the audience that had been so overwhelmed by the realism of the Abbey's offerings, had since been exposed to the works of its own native realists, Maxwell Anderson, Elmer Rice, Clifford Odets, and Eugene O'Neill.

These conditions led the Abbey directors to exercise caution in the selection of the plays to be produced and in the places to be visited during the tour of 1931-1932. The troupe performed only the four most successful and widely praised plays of the earlier tours—The Rising of the Moon, The Playboy of the Western World, Riders to the Sea, and Kathleen Ni Houlihan. The new plays consisted of O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock, which had already been performed very successfully in New York several years before; three light comedies that had been among the greatest box office attractions at the Abbey during the previous decade—Lennox Robinson's The Whiteheaded Boy and The Far-Off Hills and George Shiels's Professor Tim; and only two realistic dramas of the sort with which the American audience had become familiar—John Fergusson by St. John Irvine and T. C. Murray's Autumn Fire. Unwilling to take any chances, the company offered none of the experimental or expressionistic dramas that were a part of its repertory. Travelling to 26 states, the Players visited mainly small towns and stayed in larger cities, such as Boston and Philadelphia, for no longer than two weeks. They avoided both New York and Chicago where they feared the greatest critical and political opposition. Their caution was rewarded; the Players and plays were once again rapturously received in the United States.

The three subsequent tours of the 1930s were marked by similar caution—and by similar success. Of the thirty new plays offered, more than one third were the social comedies that had been very popular in Dublin, among them Robinson's Drama at Inish, Shiels's The New Gossoon and Grogan and the Ferret, and Brinsley MacNamara's Look at the Heffernans. There were carefree pieces of make-believe that had none of the satiric or sombre overtones characteristic of the earlier comedies of Synge, William Boyle, or Lady Gregory. Designed to amuse, they said nothing profound, but they would not offend. Very few realistic or experimental dramas were presented. Needing good box-office receipts, the Abbey could not afford to offer what would be too familiar or too radical for the American audience and, thus, the Players chose the safe middle road of the comedies.

The acclaim awarded the tours of the 1930s exceeded that of the first series, and the comedies, particularly those of Shiels and Robinson, were singled out as being particularly fine and true to Irish life:

Robinson and Shiels walk in the sunlight. They increase the joy of living for those harkening to their drolleries. … They are as finely human writers as the stage boasts today.³¹

Surprisingly, in spite of their differences, the new comedies were cheered for precisely the same attributes as the older dramas, and the Theatre's genius for presenting the “real” Irishman was once again heralded: “The performances of the Abbey Theatre became a mirror of contemporary Irish life and history,”³² and: “If you have ever been in an Irish household, you would know that the Abbey Players were perfectly at home.”³³

If one examines the comedies, however, both their distinctive Irishness and their relationship to the earlier dramas appear highly questionable. Although set in Ireland, these works have little in their subjects, situations, or characters that is peculiar to Irish life. Robinson's Drama at Inish, produced during the 1934-1935 tour, is typical, and its reception is representative of the Abbey's experience in the United States during this period. The comedy concerns the effects that the presentation of “psychological and introspective drama … the great plays of Russia, an Ibsen or two, a little Strindberg,”³⁴ have on the inhabitants of a small seaside Irish town. Performed the year before—in New York by an American cast as Is Life Worth Living?—the play had been very poorly received. The situation was quite different, however, when the Abbey offered it the following year; Burns Mantle's review in the New York Daily News exemplifies of the play's reception when performed by the Abbey Theatre. He claims that Drama at Inish is still the “same dull play” as Is Life Worth Living? but “seen through the eyes of the Abbey Players it takes on a new interest, and new color.” Before it was an “artificial little comedy”; now it is a “folk play offered by natives.”³⁵ When presented by the Abbey, a previously mediocre work not only became interesting, it became Irish. The explanation for this can be found in the actors of this period, who remained unmistakably Irish. In fact, some of them, such as Barry Fitzgerald and Maureen Delaney, emphasized their Irish characteristics to the point of caricature. Hearing their voices, witnessing their antics, and recalling the claims made for the plays and Players of the earlier tours, the American audience believed that the Abbey was offering authentic images of Irish life. The birth and brogues of the actors were sufficient cause to convince them that they were viewing an Ireland very much akin to the one that had so moved Americans twenty years earlier. As one reviewer put it,

A group of Irish men and Irish women brought a slice of the real Ireland to Atlanta Thursday night. They planted it upon the stage … and through two hours of brilliant stagecraft, cleverest comedy, and brogues so think it [sic] could be almost felt, they nourished a very genuine delight in this product of their country in the heart and minds of an audience that filled the theatre to its utmost.³⁶

Even when the critics noted weaknesses in the plays, they tended to discount their perceptions. During the 1931-1932 tour, for example, in Pittsburgh, a city where the earlier Abbey tours had kindled much admiration, the critic for the Post Gazette called Robinson's The Far-Off Hills a “superb Irish comedy,” and, although he acknowledged that it was “slim stuff,” he went on to say,

Yes, but as done by the Abbeyites, entirely satisfactory and that is due to the perfection of projection. You have no idea what a treat it is to hear those Irish voices. … Stay away if you wish, but if you do you are missing one of the notable treats of the season and that's the Abbey Theatre.³⁷

Similarly, the critic for the Boston Transcript discredited the flaws he himself had perceived in Professor Tim:

“Hokum and Hackneyed at that,” whispered the sophisticate in the row behind. “A little too much of the simplicities” suggests the emigré from Paris as he lent a French cigarette in the lobby. “Quite so”—to make an English retort; but consider the way of these Irish players with both. Do they treat hokum as a vendible commodity of the Theatre for which they are stage-sales persons, often with tongue in cheek? They do not. To the contrary, they regard it as the stuff of ordinary human nature—which it originally was before it began to be messed and cheapened on the counters of entertainment.³⁸

Not all of the critical responses in 1931-1932 were positive, however, particularly in Philadelphia, the Players' first stop, where the opening bill was Professor Tim. The Philadelphia Daily News called the play an “innocuous little trifle … [that] bears the stamp but has little of the rich flavor, and spirited humor—of the old-time conventional Irish play. … Its theme is most tenuous, due mainly to the fact that it tells us in three acts something that could easily have been told in one.”³⁹ What is most suggestive about such criticism is the fact that it was quickly dissipated by the praise awarded the Players at subsequent stops. The critic for the Philadelphia Exchequer wrote aptly that Professor Tim was “amusing enough, decked out with innumerable comic situations and plenty of racy witty dialogue, but one looks for better things from the group that gave Synge to the world.”⁴⁰ Such objections, however, were not raised later in the tour. In fact, when Professor Tim was offered in Philadelphia the following year, these cavils were not heard again, even there.

Buoyed by this tour, the Abbey Players returned to the United States in 1932-1933, and ventured into large cities for long periods of time with great success. They visited both New York and Chicago where the receptions proved to be warmer than they had been during the early tours: “All of these varied works are played with that racy honesty and fine, simple directness, with that inescapable vocal loveliness, which makes the Abbey Players the most widely acclaimed of theatrical travelers.”⁴¹ This time even the New York Times succumbed: “Even if you knew every turning in the plays you would have to be tone-deaf to find them familiar or uninteresting.”⁴²

Although there was little to fear from the drama critics in New York, there was still some political opposition. The year before there had been signs of protest in Boston against Juno and the Paycock by Irish-American groups who were sensitive to the image of the newly established state. This year Fianna Fáil, Inc. and the Irish-American Societies of New York objected to the Free State subsidy of a theatre that continued to produce both Juno and The Playboy. Once again they feared that the characters would be considered representative Irishmen. These groups voiced their objections not through disturbances at the theatre, as they had done previously, but through diplomatic channels. There was also some anti-Abbey campaigning in the Irish-American newspapers, although it was milder than it had been in 1911-1912. One headline in the Gaelic-American read, “Irish Players are Giving Americans Bad Impression of Ireland. Plays which the Visiting Company is Presenting are More Harmful Than the Stage Irishman Stunts Which Have Been Driven From the Stage, Intellectual Pose which Misleads Public.”⁴³ Concerned about Irish-American relations, the de Valéra government requested the Abbey to withdraw The Playboy and Juno. The directors, however, were willing to forego the government subsidy rather than submit to censorship. A compromise was found whereby the Theatre was able to retain both its subsidy and the right to decide on its presentations. In the future the program would say that, although the Irish government subsidized the Theatre, a fact frequently applauded by American drama critics, it would not accept responsibility for the plays selected.

During the remainder of this tour and the two that followed there were no further political objections to the plays, and the critical response was almost universally laudatory. One exception was Lennox Robinson's Big House, a play that concerned the plight of the Anglo-Protestants after the Irish Civil War. While not a great work, this play is an interesting one—more interesting, in fact, than any of the plays that had been highly praised. It is, moreover, Irish in both subject and situation. Ironically, the critics panned it, claiming that it was too Irish, “too parochial and too conversational to interest any but an especial audience.” It seemed a “slow propagandist Irish play,”⁴⁴ and talk of Irish politics kept it a “good bit this side of boredom.” It was “too absorbed in the calamities of the most distressful nation … [to be] an ingenious play.”⁴⁵ Clearly the American idea of what constituted an interesting Irish play was limited, but, then, the Abbey agreed to these limitations in the majority of its offerings. Thus, the hit of the 1932-1933 season was George Shiels's comedy The New Gossoon, praised for “transplanting Irish soil” to the United States. Going to the theatre was better than a trip to Ireland, for “no casual visitor to that country could possibly see the heart of the Irish people as clearly as George Shiels. … It is more life than theatre.”⁴⁶ In The New Gossoon, Shiels grafts a modern situation onto a rural scene: in a farm house kitchen generations clash over the use of motor bikes and cigarettes. The play is an attempt to modernize the old peasant drama and, although it has some interesting characters, The New Gossoon emerges as a strange hybrid, a pastiche highly questionable as a representation of Irish life. One critic perceptively remarked, “The characters were natural and interesting, but at times it seemed that an American company with a few shifts here and there, and a trifle less Hibernian atmosphere, might have presented a more interesting version of the same story.”⁴⁷

In the decades that had elapsed between the Abbey's United States tours of 1914 and 1931, the nature of its offerings had changed significantly, but the American audience never took cognizance of that change. What was admired about the early works was consistently applied to the later ones. Among the countless reviews there were only a very few that suggested any understanding of the difference in the Abbey's plays. In 1933, the critic for the Boston Herald wrote, “It is a curious fact about the Abbey Theatre, well illustrated last night, that its ideals have been gently put aside in the course of its career. That is to say that the old indignant denial of the Irishman as a mere figure of low comedy is no longer stressed.”⁴⁸ In the Toronto Mail and Empire the following year, one reviewer wrote of Look at the Heffernans as a

warm, cozy comedy about village Irish folk, based truly on characterization. But how strange! This was not the sort of thing on which the famous Dublin Theatre built its renown. Indeed, it was the very thing against which the Abbey Theatre rebelled, as giving too limited an idea of Irish talents.⁴⁹

But these were isolated comments. To most of the critics the Abbey had become synonymous with Ireland, and its new offerings were considered representative of modern Irish life. The Ireland of the early plays had been reconstructed in the later ones—but only by the audience. The “real” Irish play had become a conventional comedy dealing with marriage or property differences suffered and settled in an Irish setting. Lacking the power of place of Kathleen Ni Houlihan and Riders to the Sea or of The Rising of the Moon and The Mineral Workers, the new comedies delighted the American audience, nevertheless; for the Irishman was for them now a simple, jovial fellow endowed with a thick brogue and a lilting voice.

One might be disturbed by this misplaced appreciation were it not for the fact that American theatre-goers and critics were responsible for the Abbey's survival. They went to see the Abbey to find Ireland, and believing they had, went back for more. As a result, American dollars kept the Theatre alive when Irish pounds would no longer support her. Twice in the Theatre's history, journeys to the Western World sustained the Abbey, and twice with American help, the Theatre continued to go “romancing through a romping lifetime”—a “likely gaffer in the end of all.”

Notes

1. I am most grateful to Tomás Mac Ana of the Abbey Theatre for making the review of these tours available to me. My discussion will be limited to only the first six of these tours as the Abbey's record of the tour of 1937-1938 was not available.

2. Robert Hogan, Richard Burnham, and Daniel Poteet considered the first tour in The Abbey Theatre: The Rise of the Realists 1910-1915 (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1979). In The Abbey: Ireland's National Theatre 1904-1978 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1979), Hugh Hunt devotes a paragraph or two to the tours that succeeded the first. Edward Abood, in his unpublished doctoral dissertation “The Reception of the Abbey Theatre in America 1911-1914” (University of Chicago, 1962), considers all the early tours in some detail and makes reference to the later ones. Abood did not have access to the records of the later tours, however, and his consideration is necessarily incomplete.

3. Boston American, September 24, 1911.

4. Boston Post, October 4, 1911.

5. September 24, 1911.

6. Boston Post, October 8, 1911.

7. October 14, 1911.

8. November 11, 1911.

9. December 9, 1911.

10. January 17, 1912.

11. January, 16, 1912.

12. December 2, 1911.

13. December 9, 1911.

14. Ibid.

15. December 30, 1911.

16. Sunday Globe, September 24, 1911.

17. Chicago Tribune, February 22, 1912.

18. Lady Gregory, Our Irish Theatre, (Gerrards Cross: Colyn Smythe, 1972) p. 245.

19. Christian Science Monitor, September 25, 1911.

20. January 10, 1911.

21. November 26, 1911.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. March 3, 1912.

25. Chicago Examiner, January 2, 1913.

26. Inter-Ocean, January 1, 1913.

27. Boston Evening Record, April 15, 1913.

28. Ibid.

29. (No Name), March 1, 1913.

30. February 27, 1913.

31. Newark Evening News, February 3, 1933.

32. Rochester Times Union, April 1, 1932.

33. Washington Post, (no date).

34. Is Life Worth Living? (London: Macmillan 1933), p. 15.

35. November 15, 1934.

36. Atlanta Constitution, March 4, 1932.

37. November 7, 1931.

38. Boston Transcript, April 20, 1932.

39. October 24, 1931.

40. October 24, 1931.

41. New York Herald Tribune, November 4, 1932.

42. October 21, 1932.

43. December 10, 1932.

44. New York Herald Tribune, June 5, 1933.

45. New York Times, January 5, 1933.

46. Detroit Evening News, (no date).

47. Washington Herald, December 7, 1932.

48. April 21, 1933.

49. November 6, 1934.