The connection between cities and theater

Luc Sante on theatrical urbanism in New York City:

There were also businesses that could hardly be found anywhere else: black-eye fixers, for instance, who were essentially makeup artists, and whose ability to maintain sufficient trade to set themselves up in storefronts, while only occasionally keeping a second line in something more workaday like barbering, is a testament to the continuous cycle of violence of the neighborhood.

Again:

The Grand Duke's Theater was not only owned, managed, and operated by adolescent boys; its casts, crews, corps of playwrights and, for the most part, audiences, were likewise made up of boys ranging in age from three to twenty. Just as the sets were improvised from found and stolen materials, so was the house's physical equipment similarly scavenged: six kerosene lamps made up the footlights, the stalls were benches, two sawdust-stuffed red plush lounges were the boxes, and stepladders and piled boxes functioned as the gallery. Such makeshift was forced not only by the impecuniousness of the youths but by the provisional nature of their establishment: it was under constant attack—bombardment with bricks and stones—by rival gangs.

Living in a community of strangers means being attuned to superficial signals, since there's nothing deeper to go on. It's interesting how performativity turned into an enthusiasm for the actual theater, and by "enthusiasm for" I mean "willingness to riot on its account":

The Astor Place Opera House was just two years old when the celebrated English actor George Macready was engaged to play, coincidentally, Macbeth. [Instigator Ned Forrest was also playing Macbeth at a Bowery theater.—HEAR] Its patrons were the city's leaders and substantial citizens, none of whom, by that time, would venture into any of the playhouses on the Bowery, the upper portion of which lay a mere two blocks from the Opera House. At Macready's first appearance, on May 7, when he was driven from the stage by "groans, jeers, hisses, cat-calls, and cock-crowing," and a shower of rotten apples, lemons, eggs, potatoes, pieces of wood, and finally a bottle of asafetida that broke at his feet, the hecklers shouted not only "Down with the English hog!" and "Three groans for codfish aristocracy!" but also a bizarre slogan meant to bring race into the picture, "Macready and Nigger Douglas!" oddly connecting the Britannic tragedian with Frederick Douglass.

. . . Whatever the actual sources of this uprising, in Ned Forrest's jealousy or Macready's arrogance, there is little question that the red rag used to incite the mob was simply Macready's nationality, a convenient tool for uniting the various Bowery factions, and that the crowd's ire was further aroused simply by that visible analogue of the cast system—the Bowery theater vs. the uptown theater.

All quotes from Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York.