"An All-American Riot" director Sydney Richardson and playwright/actor Alexander Richardson
Alexander Richardson’s new play is set in the 1840s, but it feels painfully contemporary.
An All-American Riot, which makes its world premiere at Moline's Black Box Theatre September 19 through 28, invites audiences to 1840s America, when the country was growing increasingly divided and couldn’t agree on a best path forward. An influx of immigrants was bringing new values and beliefs into our culture, while the rich were squeezing every dime they could out of the working class. The feud between two competing actors – England's William Charles Macready and America's Edwin Forrest – served as the lightning rod for all-American outrage and rioting in the streets of New York City on May 10, 1849.
The Astor Place Riot, as it was called, was a violent episode involving thousands of people confronting a detachment of uniformed militia. According to ThoughtCo.com, more than 20 people were killed, and many more injured, when soldiers fired into an unruly crowd. Also known as “the Shakespeare riots,” this turbulence appeared to have been sparked by the presence of famed Shakespearean actor Macready at an upscale opera house. As Richardson explained, bitter rivalry with fellow actor Forrest festered until it led to violence, which mirrored deep societal divisions in the rapidly growing city. And according to prolific East Moline playwright (and Reader theatre reviewer) Richardson, his play is funny, dark, and all too familiar to the country we know today.
“This is such a weird chapter in American history,” he said, “and I want the audience to really understand what America was like in that moment.” The world of An All-American Riot, he added, “is unfortunately a little too familiar to where we are today.”
Richardson was inspired by James Shapiro's 2021 book Shakespeare in a Divided America, which explores different chapters of American history through the lens of how Shakespeare was performed. An All-American Riot is consequently centered around a performance of Shakespeare’s notorious “Scottish play” Macbeth, although it's referenced almost in passing in Shapiro's book. “The more I dug into it,” said Richardson, “the more I thought ‘This would be a really good play.'”
He found articles written just a day after the riot, which provide some quotes in the new play, one of which said, “Americans despise the sight of one another.”
“We’re having the same issues today,” Richardson said. “I don’t need to mold this story to make it reflect today. We are having the same conversations.”
The venue for Macready’s performance, the Astor Opera House, had been designated as a theatre for the upper class. It was owned by the Astors, the wealthiest family in America, and the opera house was not only wildly expensive to enter, but had a strict dress code that included gloves. This apparently added to the class tensions, and All-American Riot covers periods before, during, and after the riot.
More than 170 years after the events of Richardson's play, in 2020 and 2021, the nation was roiled by Black Lives Matter riots and the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and as Richardson said, “We somehow haven’t gotten past that. In a lot of ways, we’re still fighting about immigrants; we’re still fighting about the poor and where they fit in society, and how the rich take advantage of them. We seem to be stuck. And so my goal in telling this story is to show people we’re stuck, and we need to get out of this cycle.”
Rioters in each case felt they were vindicated and were doing the right thing, Richardson said. “All riots come from somewhere. People like to dismiss the roots of these issues out of hand.” In the case of January 6, 2021, there were a lot of Americans who felt they weren’t heard by their system of government and that there was only one option left. “When you pull together a huge group of people and get them riled up, they’re going to riot.”
A Four-Person Marathon
An All-American Riot features Adrienne Jane Evans as Macready and Micah Bernas as Forrest alongside Jo Vasquez and the playwright himself. Collectively, the actors portray more than 50 roles in the show. Richardson said that each has a main character and then play a number of roles beyond that, with costume pieces and accents helping the audience tell the characters apart.
He added that the feat “sounds way more intense than it is,” as some of the characters “are there for a page and then go away, and you never see them again.”
Richardson did, however, concede that “It’s a marathon. Something about it makes it feel very dynamic – things are constantly changing, and hopefully in a way that’s not confusing, but keeps the audience engaged and focused on what’s happening.”
In 1849, said Richardson, New York City didn’t have a formal police department. Volunteer militia members called by the mayor did the shooting, and the riot led to the formation of the city’s first police department. Meanwhile, all of the riot's deaths were of protesters, mostly lower-class citizens forced to live in slums. Many were Irish immigrants coming from the potato famine who were pushed into poverty, and most of the protesting was against William Macready.
“They had these rich people saying 'You can’t come to our theatre,' and to add insult to injury, 'We’re going to have a famous British actor play this role,” Richardson said, noting anti-British sentiment. “It boiled over when they marched to burn down the theatre.”
Richardson cast Evans (rather than a man) as Macready after loving her portrayal, this past spring, of a Brit in Quad City Music Guild’s Kinky Boots, a show for which Richardson served as sound designer. “She’s not afraid to be really funny and crass on stage, so I thought she’d be really perfect for this,” he said, noting that An All-American Riot has a good deal of humor. “I tailored the role for her.”
Over recent years, Richardson’s original plays, all produced in the area, include [a work in progress], Their Town, Your Better Self, and The Stacks, an immersive work co-written by Ben Gougeon. (He also wrote an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People.) His wife, Sydney Richardson, is a veteran actress making her directing debut here.
“I’m excited, but nervous,” said Sydney, who performed with An All-American Riot co-star Vasquez in the Mockingbird on Main's Your Better Self in 2022. “It helps that we have a pretty stacked cast. I trust everyone in this show, and have worked with them all in one way or another,” as she and Evans were on high-school speech teams (though at different schools) at the same time.
Evans, said Sydney, is “just wonderful, and I’ve known Micah forever, and I know he can do any character at the drop of a hat.”
“This sounds like a heavy, intellectual piece, but I’d say it’s 90-percent funny,” said Sudney's husband Alex. “We’re also doing a bit of a story on American theatre, with bits of vaudeville and scenes of classic Shakespeare.”
An All-American Riot is produced under the banner of Barely There Theatre, which began as a podcast during the pandemic, presenting some short original plays and public-domain works from authors such as Shakespeare and Susan Glaspell.
“I wanted people to do theatre things while they were still trapped inside,” Richardson said, noting that this is Barely There's first live stage production. “And I had so much fun doing it, I wanted to keep the ball rolling.”
An All-American Riot runs at the Black Box Theatre (1623 Fifth Avenue, Moline, IL) from September 19 through 28, with performances Thursdays through Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. Admission is “Pay what it's worth” following the performances, and reservations and more information are available by visiting Facebook.com/BarelyThereTheatreQC.
