Abstract
In December 1904, a reporter from the New York Dramatic Mirror visited play broker Alice Kauser in her Broadway office. Asked to take a seat until Kauser was available, the reporter describes “waiting some time in an atmosphere of clicking typewriters and whirring ’phone bells, while the demands of waiting clients were being satisfied by the chief of her busy staff.” Three photographs accompany this account, translating the office’s technological soundscape into a sequence of silent images.1 In the central photo, Kauser sits at her desk talking on the telephone, a sheaf of papers scattered before her. In the second photo, her personal representative, Herbert Percy, glances up from a similarly cluttered pigeonhole desk. Behind him two open transom windows and a rotating fan hint at the warmth and stuffiness that plagued even the most modern of offices before the invention of air conditioning. In the third photo, a young typist prepares a financial statement (Figure 3.1). A young man, possibly an office boy, sits across from her before a large cabinet filled with shelves of bound paper. Through the open door to this office, Kauser sits at her desk, visible to and within ear reach of the typist. Collectively, the photographs project the image of a professional, highly functioning business network.
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Notes
On the decline of the stock company see Alfred L. Bernheim, The Business of the Theatre: An Economic History of the American Theatre, 1750–1932 (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1932), 30–1;
Jack Poggi, Theater in America: The Impact of Economic Forces, 1870–1967 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), 6–7;
Peter A. Davis, “From Stock to Combination: The Panic of 1873 and Its Effects on the American Theater Industry,” Theater History Studies 8 (1988): 1–9.
Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (New York: Routledge, 2001).
Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York: Routledge, 2006), 237.
See, for example, Angel Kwolek-Folland, Engendering Business: Men and Women in the Corporate Office, 1870–1930 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994);
Nikil Saval, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace (New York: Doubleday, 2014);
Lisa M. Fine, The Soul of the Skyscraper: Female Clerical Workers in Chicago, 1870–1930 (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1990).
Some of the most important studies of theatrical space as it relates to theatre buildings include Nicholas van Hoogstraten, Lost Broadway Theatres (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997);
Mary C. Henderson, The City and the Theatre: The History of New York Playhouses: A 250 Year Journey from Bowling Green to Times Square (New York: Back Stage Books, 2004);
Mary C. Henderson and Alexis Greene, The Story of 42nd Street: The Shows, Characters, and Scandals of the World’s Most Notorious Street (New York: Back Stage Books, 2008);
Carlson, Places of Performance; Michael McKinnie, City Stages: Theatre and Urban Space in a Global City (University of Toronto Press, 2007);
Ric Knowles, Reading the Material Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2004). While theatre offices are occasionally referenced in discussions of actors’ relationships with management—for example, in stories of actresses auditioning for David Belasco or Florenz Ziegfeld—they have received little critical attention as sites of performance themselves.
Kim Marra’s Strange Duets: Impresarios and Actresses in the American Theatre, 1865–1914 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006) is an important exception.
See Knowles, Reading the Material Theatre; Timothy R. White, Blue Collar Broadway (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014);
Aoife Monks, The Actor in Costume (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), esp. ch. 2. Christin Essin is also undertaking a new ethnographic study of theatre trade unions.
John Law, “Notes on the Theory of the Actor Network: Ordering, Strategy and Heterogeneity,” Systemic Practice and Action Research 5.4 (1992): 379–93, at 385.
Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York: Routledge, 2011), 7.
Isaac F. Marcosson and Daniel Frohman, Charles Frohman: Manager and Man (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1916), 149.
Mary N. Woods, From Craft to Profession: The Practice of Architecture in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).
Robert Grau, The Business Man in the Amusement World: A Volume of Progress in the Field of Theatre (New York: Broadway Publishing Company, 1910), 204.
Gail Fenske and Deryck Holdsworth, “Corporate Identity and the New York Office Building: 1895–1915,” in The Landscape of Modernity: Essays on New York City, 1900–1940, ed. David Ward and Oliver Zunz (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1993), 129–59, at 129.
John W. Frick, New York’s First Theatrical Center: The Rialto at Union Square (1983; Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985), esp. 107–50; “The ‘Rialto’ a Generation Ago,” Theatre Magazine (July 1912): 57; Henderson, The City and the Theatre, 106–47.
Kwolek-Folland, Engendering, 98; Saval, Cubed, 100, 105; Winston Weisman, “The Problem of the First Skyscaper,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 12.1 (Mar. 1953): 13–21, at 15.
On department store design strategies, see William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon Book, 1993)
and Elaine S. Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (Oxford University Press, 1992).
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday and Anchor, 1959).
For a lengthier discussion of the anti-Syndicate rhetoric, see ch. 1 of Marlis Schweitzer, When Broadway Was the Runway: Theater, Fashion, and American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
John William Schulze, The American Office: Its Organization, Management, and Records (New York: Key Publishing Co., 1913), 63.
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 51.
On Marbury and de Wolfe, see Kim Marra, “A Lesbian Marriage of Cultural Consequence: Elisabeth Marbury and Elsie de Wolfe, 1886–1933,” in Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American History, ed. Robert Schanke and Kim Marra (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998).
Priya Srinivasan, Sweating Saris: Indian Dance as Transnational Labor (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 13.
Gregory J. Downey, Telegraph Messenger Boys: Labor, Technology, and Geography, 1850–1950 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 7.
Gregory J. Downey, “Telegraph Messenger Boys: Crossing the Borders between History of Technology and Human Geography,” The Professional Geographer 55.2 (2003): 134–45.
J.A. Tarr, T. Finholt, and D. Goodman, “The City and the Telegraph: Urban Telecommunications in the Pre-Telephone Era,” Journal of Urban History 14.1 (1987): 38–80, at 42.
See Russell Freedman, Kids at Work: Lewis Hine and the Crusade Against Child Labor (New York: Clarion Books, 1994).
Mikhael Uhlin, “Nighingales and Mascots,” Marxology: The Marx Brothers, www.marx-brothers.org/marxology/mascots.htm, accessed 19 June 2014; Frank Cullen, Florence Hackman, and Donald McNeilly, “Gus Edwards,” in Vaudeville Old and New: An Encyclopedia of Variety Performances in America, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2006), 350.
Ed Lowry, My Life in Vaudeville (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011), 38.
Laura Levin, Performing Ground: Space, Camouflage, and the Art of Blending In (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 112–19;
Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York: Routledge, 2011), 75–103.
Charles M. Schwab, Succeeding With What You Have (New York: Cosimo, 2005 [New York: The Century Co., 1917]).
Grau, Business Man, 151. See also Robert Grau, Forty Years of Observation of Music and the Drama (New York: Broadway Publishing Company, 1909). 34.
Edward D. Jones, The Administration of Industrial Enterprises, with Special Reference to Factory Practice (New York: Longmans, Green, 1916), 135. My emphasis.
Key studies of scientific management in the early twentieth century include Elspeth H. Brown, The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884–1929 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005);
Sharon Hartman Strom, Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern American Office Work, 1900–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992).
Anni Dugdale, “Materiality: Juggling Sameness and Difference,” in Actor Network Theory and After, ed. John Law and John Hassard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 113–35, at 118.
Observations drawn from viewing materials in the Byron Collection, Museum of the City of New York. On the Company, see Peter Simmons, Gotham Comes of Age: New York Through the Lens of the Byron Company, 1892–1942 (New York: Pomegranate Communications, 1999).
Sally Stein, “Making Connections with the Camera: Photography and Social Mobility in the Career of Jacob Riis,” Afterimage 10.10 (May 1983): 9–16.
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 23–4.
On the troubling relationship between women and machinery, see Martha Banta, Imaging the American Woman: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987);
Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford University Press, 2013);
Mark Selzer, Bodies and Machines (London: Routledge, 1992);
Mark Franko, The Work of Dance: Labor and Identity in the 1930s (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003),
and of course, Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 1995).
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© 2015 Marlis Schweitzer
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Schweitzer, M. (2015). White Collar Broadway: Performing the Modern Office. In: Transatlantic Broadway. Transnational Theatre Histories. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137437358_4
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