Toby tent show
Years before the WPA’s Federal Theatre Project, the tent show with its later addition of a popular character, Toby, was a major theatrical force that was responsible for keeping rural theatre alive. From the turn of the twentieth century through the nineteen thirties, the most prevalent form of rural American popular entertainment represents an integral chapter of American theatre history; a facet of theatre that is unfamiliar to most people, theatre historians included. The term “Toby show” denoted a traveling vaudeville-type melodramatic tent show. Toby is defined in The Oxford Companion to the Theatre, which draws from material by early Toby show scholar, Robert Downing, as “a stock character in the folk theatre of the United States, a bucolic comedy juvenile leading man in provincial repertory companies of the Mississippi Valley and the Great Southwest.” Though tent shows were most popular during the first two decades of the twentieth century, Toby shows peaked somewhat later, in the late 1920s and through the 1930s. More than 400 traveling companies toured the rural US providing communities a week’s worth of entertainment per year, sometimes their only diversion from a very difficult existence. Though much of the scholarship states that the last traveling tent company retired from the road in 1963, in fact, there were a very few companies that struggled, with the assistance of private and governmental funding, into the early 2000s. In 1997, Waunetta Rosier Oleferchik, widow of Midwestern Toby comic, Harold Rosier, donated her tent show equipment collection to a Tennessee Toby company called The Hard Corn Players. The collection included such historical pieces as a 1929 model 45’ x 90’ dramatic end tent, one 1941 and three 1942 restored stake trucks, 300-400 original scripts, costumes, painted drops (some 100 years old), and other necessities of the road. As executive director, I toured the show in Tennessee, Kentucky and Illinois using college actors. My show resonated with my twentieth century audiences in many of the same ways that historic shows did with their audiences. When I moved to South Carolina in 2007, I donated the show to the city of Parsons, Tennessee, which was on a very famous tent show circuit. They have embraced the show and use it for a fall festival each year. They are unable to tour the show because the equipment needs repair and the cost of a tour is more than the city can encumber. This show is a landmark and the ONLY one left of its kind. Its impact on American culture is significant. Andy Griffith was a Toby. The Grand Old Opry comedians were Tobys. Our country was founded (for better or worse) on agrarian principles and these shows reflect those principles. I argue that a historic culture’s popular entertainment is the most accurate barometer of that culture. Because popular entertainments reflect the values of the common person, they mirror the heart, as well as, the majority of the culture. Tent theatre merits study, as well as STUDY THROUGH PERFORMANCE because it was an extremely popular entertainment, more popular in its time than the legitimate theatre. Traditionally, theatre scholars have ignored tent theatre because it was not considered “legitimate” theatre, therefore not valid as a theatrical form.
Tweet
