The Performance of Jewish Ethnicity in Anne Nichols' Abie's Irish Rose.(Critical Essay)

WHAT HUMORIST H. L. Mencken in the 1920s called "America's third-largest industry" [1] was a Broadway play about Jewish-Irish inter marriage called Abie's Irish Rose which ran for 2,327 performances, opening on 23 May 1922 at the Fulton Theatre on West 46th Street and closing on 22 October 1927 at the Republic Theatre on West 42nd Street. The play opened to mostly negative--if not downright damning--reviews and struggled for the first two months of its run. [2] But it then found its audience and quickly became a sensation. By the time it closed on Broadway in October, 1927 after a record-setting 2,327 performances (a record it held for fourteen years), productions of Abie's Irish Rose had been seen throughout the world; [3] the play had attracted audiences totaling an estimated eleven million people, and it had grossed close to five million dollars. [4] The play's success was a watershed in the evolution of regional theatre in America as well; it ran for months in cities across the country which had never supported a single production for more than a few weeks at a time. [5]

Turned into two films (produced in 1928 and 1946) and a weekly radio show which aired in the early 1940s, Abie's Irish Rose was also revived twice on Broadway (in 1937 and 1954), both times unsuccessfully. The original production of Abie's Irish Rose was perfectly fitted both to its cultural moment and to its era in American Jewish social history. The play which leading theatre critic Heywood Broun had called a "synthetic farce" and the "worst play of the season" and another critic had called a "cheap farce dependent upon stock lines and forced situations" had, according to a Boston newspaper, "not only pleased its public" but "created its public." [6]

This article will argue that Abie's Irish Rose, like other popular plays of the period such as Samson Raphaelson's The Jazz Singer (and like numerous silent films and vaudeville routines) indeed "created" an ethnic Jewish public--by reflecting images which both reinforced that group's image of itself as "Americanized" and flattered its continuing attachment to its ethnic roots. At a time when Jewish sociologists were inventing the very concept of ethnicity to defend Jews from the growing popularity of theories of biological racial difference which consigned Jews to inferior social status, ethnicity took on an increasingly performance-like dimension in American popular culture. Furthermore, as Werner Sollors has pointed out, ethnicity emerges from "dynamic interaction and syncretism" [7] between ethnic groups, rather than from a single ethnic group's history or tradition. Intermarriage could thus be seen, paradoxically, as itself helping to construct each partner's ethnicity.

Anne Nichols, the author of Abie's Irish Rose, was born in Dales Mill, Georgia, in 1891. Her parents were both Baptists, but she converted as an adult to Roman Catholicism. (She was married for ten years to an Irish Catholic actor and producer, Henry Duffy, but it is not clear whether or not her conversion took place prior to her marriage.) She ran away from home at the age of sixteen to find a role in a play; her first job was in the chorus of a Biblical play called The Shepherd King. She then toured in vaudeville, but turned to writing when she and Duffy ran out of money to buy vaudeville sketches. But although she had considerable success in having her plays produced-a play she had co-authored with Adelaide Matthews called Just Married broke stock company records in New York, Chicago and London in 1921 [8]--she had a much harder time selling Abie's Irish Rose to the New York producers, who did not believe the play would be popular. In Moss Hart's autobiography, Act One, he tells the story of one producer, Augustus Pitou, who was offered a half-share of the play's profits in return for a $5,000 investment. Pitou turned down the deal! [9]

The play reached Broadway only after the author produced the play herself, mortgaging her suburban home in Douglaston, Long Island, and borrowing money from Arnold Rothstein, the king of New York's criminal underworld. [10] Nichols was the only female producer of her day [11] and she became extraordinarily wealthy from the production. Still, a play about marginalized ethnic groups in American culture was produced by an intermarried Protestant woman who was herself an outsider to the Broadway establishment (dominated not just by men, but by Jews like the Shubert brothers and David Belasco) and by a Jewish gangster who purportedly turned to crime when he was disowned by his father for marrying a non-Jewish girl. [12]

This play by and about ethnic outsiders helped to transform the nature of ethnicity itself by destabilizing notions of Jewishness as given or immutable. Sollors could be writing about Abie's Irish Rose when he argues that ethnicity is a social construct which purports to be an unchanging quality or characteristic of identity and social organization. Although ethnic groups "may pretend to be eternal and essential," he asks, "are they not of rather recent origin and eminently pliable and unstable?" [13] Similarly, the semiotician and literary critic William Boelhower writes that ethnicity emerges out of an essentially visual process founded on different ethnic groups' reciprocal gazes, so that ethnicity resides in the "flux" or force field generated by the activity of looking and being looked at. [14]

Furthermore, how Jewish life was portrayed on the Broadway stage both mirrored and determined how second-generation New York Jews defined their emergent "ethnic" identities. The growth of Jewish audiences for Broadway entertainment coincided with the movement of Jews out of the ghetto--the Lower East Side of Manhattan--and into expanding Jewish neighborhoods in the outer boroughs of New York City. As Jews climbed into the lower middle class, came into greater contact with other ethnic groups in their new neighborhoods (especially the Irish and Italians) and began to acculturate into American society, they still built and sustained Jewish communal institutions like synagogues and charitable organizations. For the children of European immigrants, Jewish life outside the ghetto took shape in the fruitful tension between the ardent desire to shed definably "ethnic" characteristics (including the Yiddish language and its distinctive vocal inflections, facial hair and heavy clothes, and even many religious rituals and observances) and an abiding sense of ethnic Jewish pride and loyalty.