The Performance of Jewish Ethnicity in Anne Nichols' Abie's Irish Rose

TED MERWIN


WHAT HUMORIST H. L. Mencken in the 1920s called "America's third-largest industry" was a Broadway play about Jewish-Irish intermarriage called Abie's Irish Rose which ran for 2,327 performances, opening on 23 May 1922 at the Fulton Theatre on West 46th Street and closing on 22 October 1927 at the Republic Theatre on West 42nd Street. The play opened to mostly negative—if not downright damning—reviews and struggled for the first two months of its run. But it then found its audience and quickly became a sensation. By the time it closed on Broadway in October, 1927 after a record-setting 2,327 performances (a record it held for fourteen years), productions of Abie's Irish Rose had been seen throughout the world; the play had attracted audiences totaling an estimated eleven million people, and it had grossed close to five million dollars. The play's success was a watershed in the evolution of regional theatre in America as well; it ran for months in cities across the country which had never supported a single production for more than a few weeks at a time.