The original star

Philadelphia —  BRAD and Angelina and George and Reese will likely never achieve the stature of Edwin Forrest, but they can learn from the man’s last couple of weeks.

We need not weep that so little attention was paid to the 200th birthday of the actor who inspired thousands to riot in the streets of New York -- 20-plus dead over Shakespeare! -- for he at least had a delegation from the Edwin Forrest Society to lay a wreath on his grave two Thursdays ago, in a cemetery where time has sandblasted most other names off the tombstones.

Then last week they unveiled a new play based on his life in the historic Walnut Street Theatre, where he first took the stage at just 14 and once performed Hamlet and Lear, and where his marble statue still holds court and where a glass case displays a lock of his hair, clipped off his head on his deathbed.

Edwin Forrest thus is not faring badly for a celeb at 200, except for the minor detail of where they’re showing this play about him -- in the narrow theater upstairs, with seating for all of 80 -- and what part of his life it portrays. That would be his divorce from Englishwoman Catherine Sinclair and the weeks of testimony about their mutual philandering, hers with the Iago from his “Othello,” his with professional ladies of the night.

So for Brad, Angelina et al., the lesson is ... if you’re lucky, and really make it, the vultures will still be picking over your scandals two centuries from now.

When Edwin Forrest died at 66 in 1872, of what they used to call apoplexy, now a stroke, the New York Times obituary said: “In the life of Mr. Forrest is to be found much of the history of the American stage. Before his time no American actor had appeared whose delineations of Shakespearean characters equaled those of the best actors on the English boards. With his debut as Othello, in the summer of 1826, the previously undisputed superiority of the English actors ceased. Edwin Forrest, at twenty years of age, became a ‘star.’ ”

Almost overnight, Forrest was earning $200 a show, funding new plays by American writers -- then performing in them to ensure their success -- and buying mansions here in his hometown and along the Hudson. He collected art as well, including a portrait of Thomas Jefferson by Thomas Sully, who naturally painted him too. Sculptor Thomas Ball captured him larger-than-life in marble, in the robes of Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s ill-fated Roman warrior.

Forrest’s popular roles included Spartacus, the gladiator, and Metamora, an Indian chief who tells the White Man, “I do not want to live in a world you are in.” But the Shakespearean parts defined his rivalry with the English tragedian William Charles Macready.

Some of their enmity was substantive: the barrel-chested Forrest was said to have perfected a more physical and melodramatic style than the cerebral -- he might say foppish -- Brit. Some was class-based: Forrest played to the masses, which in New York meant the Irish immigrants, not the evening-coat elite.

And some was personal: Forrest was convinced that an envious Macready had undermined his bid to play Paris. Soon after, he personally booed Macready’s Hamlet in Edinburgh, then mocked the Englishman for complaining of the actions of “an American actor.” Forrest wrote, “Why not openly charge me with the act? For I did it

The spat escalated in late 1848, when Macready came to the States for a tour. The two men at one point offered competing Macbeths in New York, where it climaxed in May 1849 when Macready began a run at the Astor Opera House. Forrest’s lower-crust “Bowery Boys” supporters bought up many of the seats so they could throw rotten eggs at him and shout, “Down with the codfish aristocracy,” while a rival faction yelled back, “Shame!”

Days later, 10,000 to 15,000 “Friends of Forrest” gathered outside the opera house and soldiers fired into the mob, leaving 22 or 23 dead, depending on the account, before Macready fled, disguised as a policeman.

After the Astor Place Riot, New York’s mayor distributed fliers saying that “the peace of the city must be maintained,” a copy of which is displayed, 157 years later, over the souvenir counter of the theater that also has, under glass, Edwin Forrest’s hair.

Prized possessions

“I won it,” explains Bernard Havard, artistic director of the Walnut Street Theatre, which advertises itself as the longest continuing-running stage “in the English-speaking world.”

The hair for years adorned a wall of Philadelphia’s Charlotte Cushman Club, named for the 19th century actress who performed with Forrest and sometimes played male leads, including Hamlet. The club was created in 1907 as a boardinghouse for “women of the dramatic profession” but eventually became an anachronism, and its possessions were auctioned off in 2000. “I got a few pieces given to me, but I had to bid on the hair,” Havard recalled, “[as] part of a small collection. There was a castor holder from his bed -- glass that held the castor in place so the bed didn’t roll. So I got that and a couple of photos ... and the lock of hair,” paying a bargain-basement $325.

Now it’s part of the 200th birthday exhibit, with Forrest’s ornate toiletry kit and props such as the shield he used to play Spartacus and cigarette trading cards bearing the actor’s likeness. There’s also a photo paying tribute to the theater’s prop man from Forrest’s era, who truly gave for the cause: He willed his skull for use in Hamlet’s “Alas, poor Yorick” scene.

Some 19th century accounts have Forrest performing earlier as a child, but as folks at the Walnut Street Theatre tell it, he was working on the docks at 14 when their manager spotted him and asked, “Do you want to be in a show?” The 1820 poster for “Douglas, or the Noble Shepherd” listed Young Norvel as being played by “A Young Gentleman of This City.”

As for how they got the statue of Forrest ... well, that produces not only another story but also a speech from Havard, who has spent 22 year at the theater.

The story begins with the statue residing peacefully at Forrest’s brownstone mansion, which became a home for aging actors thanks to a bequest leaving all his assets to that cause. Much as with the Cushman club, however, time eliminated the need for such a facility here, evidenced by the population of the home by the mid-1980s: two. The mansion became the headquarters of the Freedom Theater, an African American performing group, and the Forrest statue went to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania until it decided to “de-accession” its art in 1997.

The statue was offered to a couple of institutions, except “none of those parties would take it,” recalled Havard, who very much wanted it, but “there were obviously people who did not want me to have it ... so I had to petition the court.”

Expense was a factor too, what it could cost the Forrest Trust to ship the thousands of pounds of marble and reinforce the lobby’s floor. But Havard also sensed the issue that dominated Forrest’s career, “elitism versus populism.”

He has positioned his theater in the latter camp, offering musicals, melodramas and Neil Simon plays to bring in the “honest blue-collar worker,” and more than 50,000 subscribers, but perhaps putting off “higher-brow art,” he says. “So bringing him here perhaps they thought is maybe a bit of a slumming act.”

Havard launches easily into his rap about how people forget that Shakespeare was of the common folk until the academics stole him for the swells, and how Forrest tried to take him back from “those effete English bastards,” and how arts foundations today will fund you if you get up naked on the stage and smear your body with chocolate, but not to do ‘The Music Man.’

“What I take from [Forrest] more than anything is what is very alive and relevant today,” he says, “and that is ... the clash of Eurocentric culture with what we perceive as native American culture. How many native Americans do we hire to run our orchestras and opera companies? We look to Europe to provide a sort of cachet.”

It’s a show in itself, the theater director going on about how he came from Canada, where arts institutions wanted English leaders because “they obviously are superior to us culturally” and how Forrest “was basically saying, ‘This is b.s. -- I can do it just as well as you can.’ And that’s still with us.”

The catch is the 64-year-old Havard’s own distinct accent. Though raised in part in western Canada, he was born in England, went to boarding school there, acted there and speaks much as Forrest’s great rival, William Charles Macready, might have.

“This accent goes over well in America,” he confesses. “It goes over well with the crowd that perhaps I’m not being so flattering about.”

A few hours later, it’s time for the world premiere of “Forrest: A Riot of Dreams,” and the sellout crowd starts filtering in, if 80 can be termed a crowd.

To be fair, Havard hoped to mark Forrest’s birthday at the 1,100-seat stage, which opened in 1809 to showcase circus horse acts. He explored staging Richard Nelson’s Tony-nominated 1991 play, “Two Shakespearean Actors,” which has Forrest and Macready doing competing Macbeths with their companies. But he decided that the large-cast show would be too expensive, so he’s producing, on the “intimate” stage, the Edwin Forrest Playwriting Competition winner.

Inspired by what the actor used to do, the theater offered $5,000 for the best drama “about Edwin Forrest, his life and times.” Taking home the money was Armen Pandola, a local attorney who in his spare time writes plays.

Pandola, who showed up for Thursday’s opening in his best lawyer’s suit, knew little about Forrest until he began researching his play. Then he learned that Forrest was the first American performer termed a “star,” he said, and also the first whose life became “public property.”

The actor’s 1851 divorce trial in New York drew the equivalent of today’s 24-hour cable coverage; the transcripts sold in two volumes. Havard has a set, of course, though he argues that Forrest’s frequenting of brothels did not technically qualify as adultery, for “you can’t have an affair if you pay for it.”

In the manner of biopic films today, the play takes liberty with the facts and invents two reporters to comment on the proceedings. The critic has a top hat and cane and lambastes the “papers that publish this tawdry nonsense,” saying they’re making it impossible for this to become a civilized nation.

The play also has Forrest’s divorced wife becoming a performer herself in later life, playing Desdemona in “Othello,” and meeting her ex one last time before his death, right here at Walnut Street Theatre. A sad, arthritic Forrest then promises to finally pay the $3,000 a year alimony he’s owed all those years -- a detail that earns the author a mild rebuke, when the premiere is finished, from the world’s foremost Edwin Forrest devotee.

“Oh, I loved the play,” says 82-year-old Gloria Justin, “but he always paid his alimony. He was a very proud person.”

Justin headed the board of the Edwin Forrest Home before it closed in 1986 and still can recall the names of its last two residents, a former theater manager and a ballet dancer. At the reception after the play, she relates how Forrest kept a portrait of his mother near the foot of his bed so “she was the first thing he saw every morning,” and how he was perhaps the first actor to research roles in depth, going into insane asylums to understand Lear. Forrest was said to have declared, “I do not play Lear! I play Hamlet, Richard, Shylock ... but by God, sir, I am Lear!”

Gloria Justin was the one who went out, a week before Forrest’s 200th birthday, to make sure his crypt was clean.

Theatrical salute

The “Family Vault of Edwin Forrest” is only a 10-minute walk from the theater, at Old St. Paul’s Episcopal Church cemetery. But in recent years, the turnout has been sparse for the March 9 wreath laying.

This year was special, and nearly 50 came to the resting place of Forrest, his parents and four sisters and brothers. Among those reciting the Actor’s Prayer were four from the New York branch of the Edwin Forrest Society, including actress Zoe Caldwell and Wallace Munro, director of planned giving at the Actors Fund of America.

The fund was the beneficiary when the Forrest Home closed, getting $1.75 million for its own home for aging show people, in Englewood Cliffs, N.J. A wing there now is named for Forrest, and it’s the other place that keeps alive his spirit. Much of the memorabilia in the Walnut Street Theatre is on loan from the home, which each year offers its own toast to Forrest on Shakespeare’s birthday, when a prominent actor performs for residents. Coming this year? “James Earl Jones,” says Munro.

Perhaps they’ll be laying a wreath to that fine actor on his 200th birthday. Or perhaps not.

“I’m disappointed, but not surprised,” Havard said of how the milestone for their theatrical hero passed with so few noticing.

All agreed that the turnout this year was promising, though several attendees were bothered by a plaque they noticed on the wall of the graveyard, alerting passersby to the dignitary within -- Gen. Thomas Proctor.

No offense to the fellow, who assembled a Revolutionary War unit of 114 men.

“We’ve got to get a plaque up there,” said Gloria Justin, “to Edwin Forrest.”