Ahnepee Dramatic Troupe

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Long before The Lion King, Wicked, and Miss Saigon came to Northeast Wisconsin stages, the Ahnepee Dramatic Troupe brought way off Broadway theatrical performances to Algoma and Kewaunee.

In 1870, a group of local young people formed a dramatic club to perform at the Ahnepee Opera House on the corner of Washington Avenue and Madison Street.  In Kewaunee, they performed at the Bohemian Hall, the meeting place where local Czechs held athletic competitions and dramatic plays.    

Farce and Comedy were the favored genres of the Ahnepee Dramatic Troupe.  In fact, the more buffoonery, the more improbable the plot could be, and the more exaggerated the characters were, the better.

On the programme for their first show were The Secret or Hole in the Wall,  That Wonderful Baby, and A Barber Shop in an Uproar.  According to a local newspaper, the dramatic club association performed “in a manner that reflects credit upon the industry as well as the good taste and ingenuity of its members”.

One of their most highly touted performances was a play called The Toodles.    Written in 1848, the story is about Timothy Toodle, a lovable, easy-going guy with a wacky wife.  She has a penchant for buying useless junk.  Shopping at auctions, she purchases foolish things for which she believes she will find a use.  For instance, she buys a doorplate with the name Thompson on it.  She says if they ever have a daughter who marries a man named Thompson who spells his name with a ‘p’, the doorplate will come in handy.  Her husband, Timothy Toodle, wants to end the wasteful spending so he attends an auction and brings home a coffin, in case his wife dies before him.   

December 28, 1870 newspaper ad for Ahnepee Dramatic Troupe

Theatre goers were told to “Look Out For Fun” in one newspaper advertisement for these shows.  Doors opened at 6:30 p.m. at the hall.  For the admission of 25 to 50 cents, (children half price) they could expect to see a programme such as this:  First, The Toodles after which the entire company would appear in The Maypole Dance, concluding with Funny Thomas.  The ads promised “Dancing after performance, as usual”.   After one holiday show, a Christmas gift was presented to each child under age 12 and a prize was awarded to the Handsomest Lady (Mrs. C. L. Fellows) and the Homeliest Man (Mark McCormick).  Sometimes the show included sleight of hand magic tricks.


Often the troupe manager, Andy McDonald, would appear as one of his favorite characters in an Irish comedy called Barney, the Baron.  First performed in New York in 1850 under the title Fortune’s Whims, in this play, Barney O’Toole, a poor Irish tinker--an itinerant traveler who roams Ireland--becomes a baron when he wins a German castle in a lottery.

The Troupe’s success surpassed their wildest expectations.  The hall was often crowded and it was reported that roars of laughter were conclusive evidence that their “equals had never before been seen…” in the area.    

There was a dark, not-so-funny side to their comic theatre.  Among the plays performed was what they described as an irresistible Ethiopian and Egyptian farce called The Virginia Mummy.   This play, written in 1835, remained popular into the second half of the century and came late to Ahnepee theatre in 1870, after the Civil War.  In the play, a scientist named Dr. Galen bans Captain Rifle, a soldier, from courting Galen’s young ward, Lucy.  When Rifle sees a newspaper ad that Galen has posted for a mummy, the soldier hires a black hotel waiter named Ginger Blue to be dressed as a mummy decoy.  Rifle pretends to be the mummy’s Egyptian owner so they can get into Dr. Galen's house so Rifle can court Lucy, the ward.  While Rifle and Lucy are offstage together, Ginger Blue is center stage with his masks and disguises.  He is left to rely on his wiles to figure a way out, jumping in and out of a box throughout the play.  By making the mummy a white man in blackface who is left to finagle his way out of the situation, the author created a farcical, under the thumb Jim Crow character.  This wasn’t the only such play the Troupe performed.   Especially degrading to black women, Oh! Hush!, written in 1833, featured the blackface wench.  Male actors played black women in drag.      

Essentially, many of these plays were comments on social hierarchy presented wryly as comedy.  Perhaps after all this time, some things haven’t truly changed in theater.