The Cutprice Guignol

“You see, there are times in which I can see clearly, such as now, when I am sane and free to use my own mind…but there are other times when I can’t, when I don’t know what I am doing. It’s like – a prison to which I must return captive, despite myself…”

– Irène De Montcel, La Prisonnière

When the curtains opened on the first Broadway performance of The Captive in 1926, audiences were enthralled – but they could never have imagined that the cast would face arrest a mere matter of months later, and usher in a new act aimed at censoring “sexual perversion” from Broadway stages.

The Captive initially started life across the pond in Europe, when Édouard Bourdet, a French playwright, penned La Prisonnière for production in Paris, France in early 1926. Bourdet, still early in his career as a playwright, would go on to create works which garnered a warmer public reaction (perhaps most notably The Weaker Sex, which was adapted into a film in 1933), but La Prisonnière has remained his most historically significant work due to its depiction of a lesbian relationship.

The play follows a young woman, Irène De Montcel, who has become a source of much contention for her family after she has rejected a number of proposals from various suitors while she studies painting in Paris under the watchful eye of her increasingly-frustrated father. Eyebrows have been raised by the amount of time she’s been spending with the married d’Aiguines; “a rather odd life for a young unmarried girl”, as her governess observes early in the play. When her father insists that she leave with him to Rome, she pleads to stay, inventing a would-be betrothal to her beloved male cousin, Jacques – but, in fact, Irène wants to remain in Paris to continue her affair with her female lover, none other than Mademoiselle d’Aiguines. Though d’Aguines does not appear directly in the play, she makes herself known via the delivery of violets, which become a symbol for their relationship over the course of the story’s unfolding.

The play wasn’t just significant for the very fact of its central sapphic romance, but because of the somewhat happy ending that d’Aiguines and Irène are granted. Of course, the play reflects many contemporary social mores about lesbians, many of them outdated by today’s standards; the large age gap between d’Aiguines and Irène fed into conceptions of the lesbian relationship being an attempted fix for an absent mother figure, and Irène’s loaded language about the compulsive nature of her desire for d’Aiguines frames the relationship as much as a vice and a risk as a romance. When d’Aiguines’ husband tries to warn the hapless Jacques of the situation, he tells him that “it is not only a man who may be dangerous to a woman…it can also be another woman.” Despite that, the play ends with Irène ultimately rejecting the possibility of a heterosexual marriage with Jacques, only for her maid to deliver a box of flowers to her. Though the flowers come with no note, they are the same violets that have become symbolic of her connection with her lover. Her final moments in the play come as she wordlessly leaves, perhaps in pursuit of her relationship with d’Aiguines, as described in stage directions:

“[Irène slowly turns and looks at the violets. She walks towards them, lifts them from the box, caresses them. Her eyes become fixed and hard. She turns towards the door through which Jacques went out. She looks at the flowers again, seems to hesitate, and then abruptly gets her hat and rushes out.]”

The play premiered in Paris, on March 6th, 1926, a city perhaps uniquely receptive to the content of the play, at least at the time. During the late 19th and early 20th century, Paris had earned a reputation as something of a hotbed for the sapphic community and literati in particular, even earning the nickname “Paris-Lesbos”. Legendary authors of lesbian literature such as Collette, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein were central to the lesbian scene at the time, with Radclyffe Hall writing her legendary The Well of Loneliness during a stay in Paris in the 1920s. In the Montmartre area, Lulu de Monparnasse opened Le Monocle, a bar which is recognized as one of the earliest lesbian-specific establishments on record. Perhaps as a result of this cultural backdrop, one far more permissive to sapphic romance and desire than many others, La Prisonnière was met with general approval and little controversy. It proved popular enough that legendary producer Max Reinhardt staged productions in Austria and Germany over the following summer, with other versions staged in the Netherlands and Switzerland too.

But the play’s success did not go unnoticed by audiences across the pond, and soon, American producer Gilbert Miller announced his intentions to create a translation of the play for production on Broadway in New York City. It would not be the first time that a lesbian-centric play from Europe had landed on American stages, with 1923’s adaptation of God of Vengeance by Polish playwright Sholem Asch featuring a romantic subplot between a female sex worker, Manke, and the daughter of a brothel owner, Rivkele. Most of the debate around the play had revolved around its use of the Torah and references to Jewish culture which some viewed as indecent against the backdrop of such a story, with the lesbian relationship gaining more notoriety in years to come.

Miller’s production opened in September in the legendary Empire Theatre on Broadway, renamed The Captive, with a cast including a pre-Sherlock Basil Rathbone and Helen Menken as Irène. The play took few liberties with the original text, including explicit references to the lesbian romance between d’Aiguines and Irène, and ending with Irène choosing to be with her lover as in the original.

And, at first, it seemed that The Captive had been something of a success, both critically and commercially. Performances, which were primarily attended by woman, saw respectable audiences, and contemporary newspaper reviews remarked on the deft handling of the scandalous subject matter. Coverage of the play in the New York World described it as “unprecedented…a study of an abnormal erotic passion made with infinite tact and reticence”, while another wrote that the quality of the play and the handling of the subject matter “cleared the humid air like a Northwestern breeze”. The play’s depiction of romance between women, it seemed, was enough of a selling point to keep audiences turning out, as the play ran for more than 160 performances.

And perhaps the cast and crew would have seen out the rest of those shows with little excitement, had it not been for a newspaper magnate’s personal vendetta against its subject matter. William Randolph Hearst, at the time of the play’s release in America, was amongst the most influential men in the nation, given his ownership of more than two dozen major newspapers distributed in major cities across the country. In one 1920s advertisement for the Hearst empire, it was claimed that his newspapers were read by “more than 20,000,000 people in 18 key cities of the United States” – while exact numbers are hard to quantify, there’s no doubt that Hearst, who had editorial oversight on their releases, had an enormous influence over the information the public received regarding certain topics, and, soon enough, The Captive would fall victim to his biases.

Hearst placed what he viewed as essential American morality – truth, justice, public service, according to one of their slogans – at the heart of his newspapers’ branding. This morality, it seemed, did not extend to fidelity in his own marriage, as it was the niece of his then-mistress, Marion Davies, who initially stoked his ire against the lesbian community. Pepi Lederer, Davies’ niece, was relatively open about her sexuality, which Hearst found deeply objectionable, particularly affronted by Lederer’s unwillingness to keep her involvement with women under wraps.

Within weeks of the play’s release, the positive reviews were soon overwhelmed by negative articles published in Hearst-owned newspapers in New York. Morning and afternoon editions of papers including The Daily Mirror and the American disparaged the play, despite its continued success at the Empire Theatre. The campaign against the play proved effective, and soon, outrage began to swirl around the alleged indecency of the play’s contents. The Captive’s first encounter with censorship came when it was submitted to the Citizen’s Play Jury, an informal organization intended to protect theatre-goers from the indecent or needlessly disturbing. While the jury had no legal power, its decisions were often respected by producers, who had pulled plays over condemnation from the citizen-led jury before; however, the jury found nothing objectionable in The Captive’s contents, and the play continued its run.

However, it soon found itself in the crosshairs of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, then led by John Sumner. The group posed itself as a protective force against moral decay, pursuing censorship of novels including Ulysses and God’s Little Acre, with a particularly frothing focus on anything that dealt explicitly with sex in a way the members of the society deemed unacceptable. They had, prior to The Captive’s production on Broadway, clashed with the theatre world over their definition of indecency. In 1900, the society had campaigned for the arrest of the cast of Sapho (which, despite the name, did not draw ire due to lesbian content but because of an implied sex scene), which had led to a fifteen-minute farce of a trial where the judge dismissed charges against the lead actress. The Captive, with its relatively frank discussions of lesbian relationships, was a prime target for the puritanical group’s campaign, alongside other controversial plays such as Mae West’s SEX which also landed under fire.

The society began to pressure New York politicians to take action against the play, though were initially met with little movement. James Walker, then mayor of the city, had attended both plays and expressed his enjoyment of both; “they’re not family entertainment,” he remarked. “But there’s nothing wrong with having plays for mature audiences”. However, when Walker left for a trip to Cuba in early February 1927, acting mayor Joseph B. Mckee – nicknamed “Holy Joe” – took matters into his own hands, and ordered district attorney Jaob Banton to “banish nudity and obscenity” from the New York stage.

On February 5th, an order was received by officers in the city to monitor several controversial plays, including SEX – which drew disdain due to its depiction of a Toronto sex worker – , The Virgin Man, and The Captive. Once they had, presumably, sat through both plays enough times to ascertain that they truly were as sexy and scandalous as the accusations suggested, on February 9th, officers were issued orders by Chief City Magistrate McAdoo to arrest the casts of the offending plays.

Police assigned to the case were instructed to proceed in such a way as to cause “a minimum of inconvenience to the public and to their prisoners”. However, according to Rathbone, who later recounted the incident, it was rather less casual than it sounded: “As we walked out onto the stage to await our first entrances we were stopped by a plainclothes policeman who showed his badge and said, ‘Please don’t let it disturb your performance tonight but consider yourself under arrest!”.

Rathbone, along with the rest of the cast of The Captive and several other cast members of SEX and The Virgin Man, were arrested when the performance ended and held overnight on charges of offending public morals. That night’s performance, as it transpired, would be the last of The Captive at the Empire Theatre, as management at the theatre agreed to bring an end to the show’s run in return for the release of the accused cast and crew. Gilbert Miller, the play’s producer, attempted to appeal the decision and find a way to get the play back on stage, but it was rejected, and The Captive remained firmly out of production.

And this attack on the New York theatre scene did not end there – Joseph B. Mckee, according to the New York Times, intended this to be the opening salvo of a much larger campaign of censorship aimed at the content of Broadway productions – “the arrests were not isolated gestures, he explained, but the beginning of a continuous application of the processes of criminal law to stop what he described as an indecent situation that had become the scandal and disgrace of New York.” Within two months of the arrests at The Captive performance, the Wales Padlock Act had been passed in New York, which granted officials the right to prosecute cast and crew involved in plays “depicting or dealing with the subject of sex degeneracy, or sexual perversion.” While it did not make outright mention of homosexuality, it certainly fell under the banner of sexual perversion as defined by the mores of the time, effectively banning explicit depictions of homosexuality from New York theatres. It took its name from the ruling that any theatre found to be hosting a play that defied this act could be padlocked shut for up to a year. Passed in March 1927, it took only a matter of days for the first play to fall foul of its strict rules, with the play Maya closed by producers after only three performances after a meeting with the district attorney.

Of course, despite the legislation that targeted homosexuality on stage, the theatre was and has remained a place for creatves in the LGBTQ community to express themselves. Even after the passing of the Wales Padlock Act, playwrights and actors alike found ways to explore the topics in more coded ways, with iconic writers like Tennessee Williams featuring heavily gay-coded characters in several plays (including The Glass Menagerie and the legendary A Streetcar Named Desire) that were produced on Broadway from the 1930s onwards, and musicals, such as Pal Joey, including nod-and-a-wink numbers like “What Do I Care for a Dame?”.

The actual number of plays prosecuted under the Padlock Act is difficult to parse, given that there may well have been less formal applications of it as described in the Maya case, where producers were warned of potential issues arising from continuing a production. Mae West once again found herself the target of the act in 1928, when her play The Pleasure Man (which featured drag queens and other cross-dressing characters) was raided by police after reviewers described it as “the queerest play” featuring “all the Queens”. The charges were eventually dismissed after a vitriolic trial aimed at disgracing the actors involved. In 1944, the play Trio, written by Dorothy Baker, which depicted a lesbian relationship between a college professor (ironically, given the origins of The Captive, teaching French) and her live-in PhD student, became the last play directly impacted by the Padlock Act. The Belasco Theatre where it was staged threatened with losing their licence if they did not cancel the production, though the charges

The Wales Padlock Act was eventually repeated in 1967, forty years after its introduction, ushering in a period of modern gay theatre which began with the likes of Boys in the Band and Angels in America and continues to this day with modern classics like Fun Home and & Juliet. While the act had functionally ceased to be enforced by the time it was formally repealed, its eventual dismissal marked the official embrace of a more welcoming theatre culture, and one where LGBTQ people did not have to drape themselves in coding to escape scrutiny.

A hundred years after its first appearance on the Broadway stage, The Captive remains an evocative and vital part of the gay and lesbian history of American theatre and media at large. While it might have been driven from the stage upon its first run, it has cemented itself in theatre history – and its legacy has long outlived the act which tried to make its depiction of lesbian love a crime.

If you enjoyed this article, please check out my other work on lesbian and LGBTQ history in general below, or consider dropping me a tip to help me keep running this blog!

A “Jaunt into Journalesbianism”: Lisa Ben and America’s Gayest Magazine, Vice Versa

Satan Was a Lesbian: The Lurid Rise and Profound Impact of Lesbian Pulp Fiction

A Deep Dive into The Queerbaiting Heist of the Century: t.A.T.u.’s All The Things She Said

Sources:

Translation of The Captive

Paris-Lesbos by David C. Rose

Who’s Afraid of Stephen Gordon?: The Lesbian in the United States Popular Imagination of the 1920s by Sherrie A. Inness

Banned Plays: Censorship Histories of 125 Stage Dramas by Dawn B. Sova

The Secret Life of Humphrey Bogart: The Early Years (1899-1931) by Darwin Potter

Contemporary newspaper articles – 1 – 2

Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility by Michael Bronski

Three Plays by Mae West: Sex, The Drag and Pleasure Man by Lillian Schissel

(header image via PopMatters)