Staging Ground. Leslie Stainton
of two distinct but complementary narratives: the story of Blasius Yecker, who ran the Fulton during its heyday as an American roadhouse, from 1866 until his death in 1903, and whose experience as an immigrant-turned-entrepreneur-and-civic-leader struck me as quintessentially American; and the story of my own coming of age in the 1970s and ’80s, a period when the Fulton reclaimed its status as a venue for live plays, and I worked in the theater as an actress, stagehand, seamstress, office assistant, and member of a children’s theater company. “All history is biography,” said Emerson. That truism underpins much of this book.
Staging Ground is thus both a history and a memoir. I am far from alone in feeling a personal attachment to this building, and my hope is that by filtering the Fulton’s larger story through the smaller lens of my own, I can shed light on both the public and private meanings of this extraordinary space—and convey some sense of the intricate ways that the past and present overlap inside its walls. I could have written about any of the nearly four thousand theaters that existed in towns across America in the late nineteenth century and that shaped the way Americans saw and thought about themselves. Fewer than three hundred of these buildings survive, and most occupy a special place in their communities, as they should. Whether they’ve been lavishly restored or merely spared from the wrecking ball, these are all haunted houses. But the Fulton Theatre has long seemed to me uniquely ghosted—not just because it’s in my hometown or because I worked here in my teens and twenties, but because it is built on sacred ground. Its foundations occupy the site where in 1763 a band of vigilantes murdered the last indigenous people to inhabit Lancaster County when the land was still a wilderness. Those same foundations later served to incarcerate African Americans fleeing slavery. Thus is the Fulton implicated in the two great crimes on which this nation was built. That a working theater should function for nearly two centuries in such a place strikes me as both absurd and acutely poignant. It’s as if someone had deliberately tried to create a metaphor for the complicated realities of American culture.
The nineteenth-century Shakespearean actor E. L. Davenport called the Fulton “the most beautiful temple of art in the United States,” and it remains one of the most irresistible of American theaters—a crimson and gold wedding cake of a place inside, outside a stately monument to Lancaster-born Robert Fulton, who tinkered with submarines in the Seine and built America’s first commercially viable steamship. Here is a building where America invented itself—where actors shed their European roots to create a genuinely American style of performance, where audiences confronted an image of themselves and who they might become, where a nation wrote and rewrote its history. This singular space resonates in ways no other American theater does. Hence this book, a small gesture of gratitude to a place that has given so much to so many.
One Christmas morning I came downstairs in my pajamas and found a pink plastic showboat waiting for me under the tree. The boat was small but ornate, with a waterwheel at one end and shallow bas-relief railings at the other. Along the length of one side, the exterior wall had been cut away, like an anatomical model, except that instead of intestines and lungs this opening revealed a drawing room with a cardboard stage set.
I was six and knew already that I loved the theater. With my finger I traced the outline of the proscenium and touched the stage floor. Somewhere behind me, my father switched on the floodlights and began filming me and my brother and sister, as he did every Christmas morning. Stacked neatly inside the box that had come with the showboat were tiny cardboard flats, props, pieces of furniture, lights, figures on plastic stands. There was a complete cast of Heidi, including the Alm-Uncle and Clara in her wheelchair. There were mountain goats and a miniature tea service.
My father, still filming, drifted into view on my right and gestured for me to play. I picked up a character from the box and lowered her onto the stage through an open slot in the top of the showboat. I found another character. Soon I had them bobbing back and forth on their circular stands and jabbering. “Good,” my father mouthed, and gave me a thumbs-up. The camera clattered as the reel of film unspooled. I’d tried to understand how the machine caught and preserved our movements in a long sequence of frames, but I couldn’t grasp it. In the artificial glow of that Christmas morning, my cardboard actors were more real. They cast long shadows onto the stage. Back and forth they went, talking and arguing, making exits and entrances. I added a footstool and a chaise. A maid sailed down into the room in my hands to ask if anyone wanted supper. Long after my father had shut down his camera and turned off the floodlights, I went on playing.
The word itself was thrilling. Play. I’d seen a real one a year earlier in Philadelphia when my Aunt Betty had taken me to The Sound of Music for my birthday. The show had just opened, and we had front-row seats. Everything inside the theater glowed: the walls, the gold trim along the edges of the balconies, the lights at the base of the aisle seats, the playbill itself, which I’ve kept to this day. The curtain lifted, and I saw dozens of nuns at prayer in a chapel that stretched to the top of the proscenium and beyond. Someone, I couldn’t imagine who, had built a glittering rood screen behind which the women in their dark habits seemed to float. I was besotted. At intermission the curtain dropped and to my disappointment veiled whatever was taking place onstage. I leaned across the railing of the orchestra pit to get a closer look. From somewhere below me, a cellist reached up and tapped my elbow with his bow. I looked down; he smiled. Perhaps he said something, I don’t remember. What I wanted him to say was, “Follow me. I’ll take you to the other side.”
Late at night you feel them. Underneath the stage, in the long tunnel that stretches the length of the theater, the stone walls of the old prison ooze a cold sweat, and in the shadows you think you see shapes huddled under blankets, shivering. You tell yourself they’re only curtains piled in the corners, but even so they make you start, and you hurry upstairs.
Onstage, a single lightbulb on a metal stand sheds enough glow for you to make out the ropes and pipes hanging overhead, the canvas flats meant to be someone’s front porch, a one-sided automobile. Props from the night’s performance lie in a chalked grid on a table in the wings. On a lectern in the corner, the stage manager has left her prompt book open, each page annotated like a medical chart. Out in front in the dark are rows of empty red seats and the curving white edges of two balconies, and on the ceiling, peering down, a pair of plaster angels who’ve been holding their comic and tragic masks, respectively, for more than a century. Here too you sense you’re not alone.
Somewhere in the curlicues of the proscenium is the smudge of a bullet fired by Buffalo Bill. He’s standing beside you now, dressed in leather chaps and a fringed coat, smelling of prairie. Over there is Ethel Barrymore, running lines, and George M. Cohan, warbling a patriot song, cane in hand, feet thrumming, and here’s Bert Williams in blackface, cradling a tuba. Behind you Thaddeus Stevens slams his fist down on the podium and cries, “Abolition! Yes: abolish everything on the face of the earth but this Union; free every slave—slay every traitor—burn every rebel mansion.” Soldiers are upstairs drilling, and President James Buchanan is sitting downstage, lost in thought, and the voices of the slain and their survivors mingle in the high reaches of this space, beyond the pin rail, and suddenly you catch a whiff of scent as Sarah Bernhardt makes her way through the house, skirts sighing, on her way to the dressing room. She refuses to come in by the backstage door, unseen.
Hold still for a moment and feel the stream of time, feel your place in it. Outdoors the city is quiet. The market is locked tight, the nail salon next door is closed, the banks and restaurants empty. Over on Chestnut Street, at the spot where Abraham Lincoln addressed the citizens of this town on his way to his first inaugural, nothing stirs, and it’s equally silent at the site of the old railroad depot where his funeral train edged its way through weeping crowds four years later. The bars have issued their last calls, the mayor is asleep, and only the police station and the hospital where I was born in the middle of the twentieth century bristle with life. Gone are the taverns whose painted signs once lined