There is blood in your mouth, Edward.
The enemy applauds your fate.
He decided Maginn must have lived all his life in this condition: full of desire and effort, but a creative cripple: inadequate strength to imagine the substance of the work, and an intelligence too arrogant to shape it. The love song of the wrong word.
Then Katrina died, and Edward sat at the desk in the parlor of his hotel suite and began a new ending for the play — already in production with the flawed ending. He wrote the night she died; wrote most of the following two days, except for some time with Martin, and arranging the funeral. After the mass, while waiting for the undertaker, he began yet another version of the final scene, one with promise. After the burial he reread the scene and let it stand.
The two as measured distance. The absence that grows in the fertile earth.
He hired the young woman typewriter-copyist in the hotel’s office to make three copies, and was at the theater to hand them to the director and actors when they arrived in the evening for the final run-through.
Too late to change this much dialogue, the director said. It absolutely must be changed, Edward said. I’ll never memorize it in time, the lead actor said. Oh yes, you will, said Edward. And the play opened Saturday night with the final dialogue dictated by Katrina.
Edward watched the performance from the aisle of the parquet. When the houselights went up on the clamor that greeted the end of the play, Edward saw Maginn in a forward box with a woman, and moved toward him immediately. But he was met by the exiting throng and lost Maginn in the crowd.
The play closed after one performance.
“Scandalous Play Closes”, Albany Argus, May 13, 1912
THE FORCES OF decency in the city dealt a sledgehammer death blow to the new play by Edward Daugherty Saturday night. The opening performance at Harmanus Bleecker Hall was greeted with hisses at the first scene of Act Four, and shouts of “unclean” and “filth” were heard as the play progressed to its conclusion. A score of people left the theater, which was packed to capacity for the performance, more than 2,500 seats filled. When the curtain came down, the hisses and boos were loud and relentless, especially from the gallery, and extra police were summoned to move the audience out of the theater.
Yesterday morning Episcopal Bishop Sloane and Catholic Bishop Burke, in concert with Mayor McEwan and many leading citizens of the city, pressed the owners of the Hall and the play’s producers to cease further performance. At midafternoon the producer announced the cancellation of the play’s two-week run. The Hall’s manager said he will offer, in its place, the return of last week’s immensely popular production of Regeneration, with Bert Lytell, the story of an Irish Bowery thug raised to manhood by the power of a woman’s prayer.
Daugherty’s play, titled The Flaming Corsage, purports to be a tragic love story, but is a thinly veiled excursion into the lower regions of human degradation, beginning with the murder, in a “love nest,” of an unfaithful wife, who is shot by her husband; and the husband then suicides. It carries on from there through such morally repugnant dialogue as has never been heard on the Albany stage. Some phrases would not be printable in this newspaper under any circumstances, yet they are uttered brazenly by two women characters.
“The shame of Albany” is what Bishop Sloane called the play; Bishop Burke said such a writer should be “damned to hell for such public sin”; and the Mayor, who had not seen the play, said, “From all accounts it is a degenerate assault on American womanhood. And we won’t stand for that in this city.”
It was agreed yesterday by seasoned theatergoers who saw the play that it is little more than a self-exculpation by the playwright, an apologia for his involvement in the Love Nest Scandal of 1908 in Manhattan, whose events closely parallel those of the play, with names of the characters changed so slightly from their real-life counterparts that all are recognizable. And so the old scandal is rekindled to a bright flame.
Letter to the Editor”, Albany Argus, May 14, 1912
Dear Sir,
I rush to correct the general misapprehension of the play The Flaming Corsage, which closed after a single performance on Saturday. The play is seen as a violation of our Magnificent Municipal Moral Code (would that it were!). But it was not that at all, and judgment of it on that basis should be left to the philistines. The play will have, most certainly, a secure place in the history of American theater, as a curiosity. It has kinship with dreadful Ibsen’s one great achievement, Peer Gynt, and may be as great a literary benchmark as Beowulf, that ossified ostrich egg of fictional narrative, though the Daugherty play resembles neither work.
The Flaming Corsage must be judged a failure, a great botch of a work that should probably have been a novel, just as Chekhov’s plays, overstuffed with characters and incident, would have shone as novels. Daugherty, the playwright, was, potentially, a novelist of the first rank, but abandoned the genre for playwriting, a major mistake, the success of his last play notwithstanding. That play, The Masks of Pyramus, owed its success to its paralleling of Romeo and Juliet, just as the Shakespeare work owed its nucleus to Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe. Plagiarism in the arts continues apace.
But The Flaming Corsage does have its merits. It casts aside the weeping and wailing of our mouldy melodrama and the contrived realism of our present potpourri of pygmy playwrights, and instead it offers up scenes rich with raw realism, as well as stinging satire of a high order. The bovinish women of the piece, and their hopeless husbands and lovers, all struggle between lofty intentions and hidden animal instincts, much the way Peer Gynt confronts the evil trolls of his life in the Ibsen play.
No one in American theater has ever written with as much insight into the dark quotidian reality as Edward Daugherty. It is a great pity that he is such a paltry buffoon when it comes to organizing his play, and sorting out the fates of his characters. He creates fine china, then destroys it all with his unruly hindquarters.
Like Beowulf, which was fated to be unreadable, this play is fated to be judged unplayable by future generations. But it will also be studied as a grotesque curiosity that broke new theatrical ground. It does not surprise me that it was closed, but it was closed for the wrong reasons.
THEATER LOVER
(Name withheld)
Edward Writes a New Play”, July 15, 1912
EDWARD SAT NOW in a long pause, staring out the second-floor window of his workroom at another grotesquely shadowed evening that had become abominably hot. The pages of his nameless play-in-progress lay on the desk beside the marble bust of Persephone, the only artifact of value to survive the fire. And beside that lay Emmett’s loaded.32-caliber revolver.
Emmett had bought the pistol to defend himself during labor trouble at the Fitzgibbon foundry, protection against men he’d fought for all his life; for when he became foreman, he became their enemy. Rise in the world and count your friends on your thumb.