The Little Theatre movement reacted against this pervasive quality in Victorian theater, as typified by Augustin Daly’s Under the Gaslight and Dion Boucicault’s (“DYE-ahn BOO-sih-koh’s”) The Octoroon. For 10 points each:
[10e] Give this generic term for sensational plays. It originates from plays that used music to heighten exaggerated plots about stock heroes and villains.
ANSWER: melodramas [or melodramatic plays]
[10h] A Gilded Age champion of “real melodrama” with this first name wrote realistic comedies like The Truth. A villain with this name torments ex-prisoners at a purgatorial truck stop kitchen in a recent play by Lynn Nottage.
ANSWER: Clyde [accept Clyde’s; accept Clyde Fitch or William Clyde Fitch; prompt on William by asking “he typically went by what first name?”; prompt on Floyd’s by asking “the play was retitled for what name?”]
[10m] Richard Mansfield starred in Clyde Fitch’s 1890 play about this paradigmatic English dandy, who is called an “emperor among… insects” in William Hazlitt’s essay about his vacuous wit.
ANSWER: Beau Brummell [or George Bryan Brummell; accept “Brummelliana”]
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