The Poor of New York (also known as The Streets of New York) premiered in December of 1857 at the Wallack Lyceum Theatre in New York City. Its author, Dionysis "Dion" Boucicault, was an Irish actor, theatre manager, and absurdly prolific playwright famed for his melodramas.

Just look at his fancy little hat!

Dion was ostensibly the son of a Huguenot wine merchant and an Irish woman 26 years his junior, but it's much more likely that his actual father was a younger Irish man named Dionysus Lardner, a scientist and lecturer. Dion was forced to apprentice briefly under Lardner as a civil engineer, but he hated the work and quickly abandoned his apprenticeship to seek out a life in the theatre. 

He also had a wealthy first wife who died in a mysterious mountaineering accident in the Swiss Alps, but that's a rabbit hole for another day. 

The Poor of New York (also called The Streets of New York) was adapted from a French play called Les Pauvres de Paris by one Edouard Brisemarre. Boucicault simplified the plot, adjusted the dates to coincide with the New York financial crises, and punched up the characters and emotional conflicts to draw from more American social morays. He also established the quippy, fast-paced dialogue and sharp sense of humor that would become a hallmark of the genre.

The first production of the play also featured a massive spectacle piece in Act V in which the whole set was literally set ablaze and a real life fire engine came on stage to quench it. This was the first of what came to be known as "sensation scenes," which became a staple of 19th and 20th century melodrama. 

The trick involved a metal set covered in highly flammable fabric and soaked in naphtha, which would burn fast and bright. Part of the set was rigged to collapse, and behind it all was a drop painted to look like flames, which cycled continually upwards. Boucicault explained the method in an 1890 editions of The Scientific American. I have yet to read the details, but I can only imagine it would have given OSHA a heart attack. 

The play went over so well in New York that Boucicault later brought it to England and revamped it as The Poor of Liverpool. He would repeat this recipe for success four more times, with The Poor of Leeds, The Poor of Manchester, The Streets of Islington and The Poor of London. 

Maxim Gorky was hugely popular Russian writer and political activist whose short stories catapulted him into success near the end of the 19th century. Born Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov, he chose his psuedonym "Gorky" ("bitter" in Russian) as a reflection of his experience as a young man in Russia. Gorky was orphaned at 11, spent his adolescence working various menial jobs, then -- after a failed suicide attempt at 21 -- he walked across Russia as a tramp, doing all kinds of odd jobs.

He published his first short story in 1892, and by the 1900s, he was being mentioned in the same breath as Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekov. His writing often revolved around people struggling at the very bottom of the Russian social structure and contained strong critiques of capitalism and the Tsarist regime. An outspoken Marxist, Gorky spent seven years in Italy in political exile, returned to Russia for a time, then left again to spend a decade in Germany and Italy, during which time he hosted many Russian writers and artists. Over the course of his 40 year career, he published an impressively long list of successful novels, stories, and plays, as well as an autobiographical trilogy that is hailed as one of the best autobiographies of Russia.

Gorky wrote Children of the Sun in February of 1905 while he was briefly imprisoned in St. Petersburg during the 1905 Russian Revolution. The play is set during a 1865 cholera outbreak, but it was abundantly clear to readers as a reflection of current events, featuring furious workers and peasants rising up violently against the privileged and self-important upper class. The play was so controversial, in fact, that it was banned as soon as it was published.

Finally, in October of 1905, the play opened at the Moscow Art Theatre, which was founded by that most exalted of theatrical practitioners, Constantin Stanislavky. At the end of the play, the estate is swarmed by an angry mob of peasants, and at the premiere Stanislavky staged the actors playing the mob to stream in from all sides of the audience and storm the stage. A gunshot is heard, and the character of Pavel is meant to fall to the ground. However, the political climate at the time was so tense that the audience panicked, believing the actors to be actually in danger. The crowd leapt to their feet, screaming and pulling out pistols, which prompted the much-beloved actor Kachalov (who was playing Pavel) to quickly spring "back to life" and walk to the edge of the stage to reassure the audience that everything was fine.

Originally, this was conceived as a piece for collaboration with university students. We wanted to produce a show that, in keeping with PAC's history of centering the stories of women (Mary Stuart, Fair Maid of the West, The Captive, Maria Marten to name a few) we thought this was a great vehicle. As we looked into published adaptations, though, we were dismayed to discover that the scripts centered the romance (Rochester's arc) rather than the key relationships Jane forms with the women in her life. 
 
Given the success of our partnership on The Complete Works of Jane Austen, Abridged, it made sense to fire up the team once more to create our own adaptation.

My name is Charlotte for a reason. My mother is a Brontë fan and I am named after the writer. When I was little, I was plunked in front of all the great adaptations of the novel and my fifth grade book report was on Jane Eyre. So you could say, I've been building up to this for a while. Jane resonates with me because she is described as 'plain and little' and yet she carves out such a life for herself that, at the time of publication, it was thought scandalous. Not because she does outrageous things but simply because she asks to be treated as she is - a woman of intelligence and curiosity in a world that didn't always embrace that.

I've always been little. I don't generally wear makeup. It's not part of who I am. But I take up space. I probably cross more lines than I should and sometimes people don't expect that. I'm hoping to meld my affinity with Jane with the life that Brontë gives her in the novel and come up with something vital and new.

That artists are mercurial. That being an actor and a writer coalesces into something else at a certain point: being a storyteller. That, by being a part of the genesis of the work and then inhabiting the role, I have benefited from seeing the story from all angles. Overall, though, I want them to become lost in the story, just as I was the first time I encountered it. There are so many layers to it, so many thorny questions and perhaps not enough answers, but something to discuss and chew on for the ride home.

Combination of pure grunt work and long thinks. The grunt work is hammering the lines in and feeling out the world which can feel so bumpy and awkward at first. The long thinks are how, as a woman looking back on her life and retelling it (which is the framework of the novel), can I best inhabit the memories of Jane while also giving them the perspective of someone in the present? It's a strange juggling act and one I'm still working on.