Tom Shows

In Waukegan, Ill. last week, a stage show started on its rounds billed as Uncle Tom's Cabin in Swing. The swing was all there, in a noisy, nickel-in-the-slot sort of way; but Uncle Tom's Cabin was not. In his 87 years in the theatre, Uncle Tom has taken some awful beatings--from stagefolk as well as from Simon Legree--but never a worse one than at Waukegan, where there was no auction block, no whipping post, no bloodhounds, no Eliza crossing the ice. Topsy and Little Eva remained--but precious little Eva.

Yet nobody seemed to care. The present generation, still curious about Uncle Tom's Cabin as the greatest propaganda novel in the history of the U. S., has little feeling for it as the greatest hokum play in the history of the world. Harriet Beecher Stowe fought against having her book dramatized, on the ground that if people began going to Christian plays they would end up going to un-Christian ones. But in an age before U. S. copyright laws protected the author's dramatic rights, Uncle Tom was pirated (by Actor G. L. Aiken and others), with never a cent of royalties for Mrs. Stowe.

The play did well before the Civil War, but its unparalleled popularity really began afterwards, when its propaganda value was gone and the monkeyshines started. In the '70s and '80s barnstorming troupes (known ever after as Tom Shows) went to every tank town in the U. S., to places where even the circus never went, playing in tents, in showboats, in rooms over warehouses.

Many actors played Uncle Tom their whole lives through. A real "Uncle Tommer" always knew his part (ad libs included) when hired; if he had to rehearse, he was considered a fraud. Though dozens of notables like Joe Jefferson, Mrs. Fiske, Maude Adams, Otis Skinner at one time or another appeared in Tom Shows, good actors almost always flopped in them. It took a ham to bring home the hokum.

Famous is an old-time two-line review: "Uncle Tom's Cabin played here last night. The dogs were good." Anything went in a Tom Show. Eliza might cross the ice against a backdrop of the tropics. There were comedy teams, minstrel troupes, animal acts. There were "double shows"--two Uncle Toms, two Topsies, two Legrees; there were even triple shows. Harriet Beecher Stowe once went to see Uncle Tom's Cabin in Hartford and had to have the plot explained to her.

The sure-fire moments were the bloodhounds chasing Eliza, and Little Eva's ascent to Heaven on a block & tackle:

To die and go to Heaven was her only hope; But one of the stagehands forgot to fix the rope: So she didn't get to Heaven Till a quarter past eleven, Little Eva, Little Eva.

When The Players revived it in Manhattan in 1933, Critic Percy Hammond claimed he detected tears in the eyes of such sophisticates as Edna Ferber, Rollin Kirby, Katharine Hepburn.

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