“Nothing More Infernal”: Verisimilitude and Voyeurism in Salvation Nell

Abstract

Increasingly recognized as a milestone in US theatre today, Edward Sheldon’s Salvation Nell was, nonetheless, minimized in theatre history during the early twentieth century. Scant mention of Sheldon or Salvation Nell can be found in Oliver Sayler’s Our American Theatre (1923) and Thomas Dickinson’s Playwrights of the New American Theater (1925) and none at all in Montrose J. Moses’s The American Dramatist (1925) and Arthur Hobson Quinn’s A History of The American Drama: From the Civil War to the Present Day (1927). Recovery of Salvation Nell began in 1957 with Albert Cohn’s appropriately entitled essay, “Salvation Nell: An Overlooked Milestone in American Theatre.” Although Cohn argued that Salvation Nell was important in many ways, he highlighted the innovations in setting and scenography that would become the production’s hallmark: the East Side saloon from the opening act, which the producer Harrison Grey Fiske bought and reconstructed on the stage (a full year before David Belasco did the same with the flophouse for The Easiest Way); and the street scene from the Cherry Hill district during the third act, which was so stunning that audiences applauded the set for several minutes.¹ Innovations like these prompt Cohn to contend that Salvation Nell “may emerge as the one play of its period which contributed more than any other to American theatrical evolution by bringing to our stage … a mature application of realistic technique.”²