Our American Cousin
It is a farce featuring awkward, boorish American Asa Trenchard, who is introduced to his aristocratic English relatives when he goes to England to claim the family estate.
Among Our American Cousin's cast was British actor Edward Askew Sothern, playing Lord Dundreary, a good natured but brainless English aristocrat.
Sothern had already achieved fame on the New York stage in the play Camille in 1856, and had been reluctant to take on the role because he felt that it was too small and unimportant.
After several weeks of performances, Sothern began portraying the role more broadly, as a lisping, skipping, eccentric, weak-minded fop prone to nonsensical references to sayings of his "bwother" Sam.
[1] His ad-libs were a sensation, earning good notices for his physical comedy and spawning much imitation and mockery in both the United States and England.
The Morning Post praised Sothern, but said that the play could scarcely be said to be worthy of his talents;[3] The Athenaeum found the piece humorous and outrageous, and Sothern's performance "certainly the funniest thing in the world ... a vile caricature of an inane nobleman, intensely ignorant, and extremely indolent";[4] The Era thought the play "a hasty work, manufactured to suit the American market ... a sort of dramatic curiosity".
"[7] It was not long before the success of this play inspired an imitation, Charles Gayler's Our Female American Cousin, which opened in New York City in January 1859.
Florence Trenchard, an aristocratic young beauty, loves Lieutenant Harry Vernon of the Royal Navy, but she is unable to marry him until he progresses to a higher rank.
They relay to Ned that great-uncle Mark Trenchard had, after angrily disinheriting his children and leaving England years ago, found these cousins in Brattleboro, Vermont.
Meanwhile, her other daughter Georgina is courting an imbecilic nobleman named Dundreary by pretending to be ill. Florence's old tutor, the unhappy alcoholic Abel Murcott, warns her that Coyle intends to marry her.
At her dairy farm, Asa tells Mary about her grandfather in America, but he fibs about the end of the tale: He says that old Mark Trenchard changed his mind about disinheriting his English children and burned his will.
Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal – you sockdologizing old man-trap!During the ensuing laughter, Booth, a famous actor and Confederate sympathizer who was not part of the play's cast, entered Lincoln's box and fatally shot him in the back of the head.
Booth then leapt from Lincoln's box onto the stage and made his escape through the back of the theater to a horse he had left waiting in the alley.
[13] In 1862 Charles Kingsley wrote a parody, the "Great Hippocampus Question", in the style of Lord Dundreary, and incorporated parts of this in The Water-Babies published in 1863.
In a move that earned him a rebuke from CBS management, director, producer, and actor Elliott Lewis aired it in the same hour as his show Crime Classics' episode "The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln".
[14] Eric W. Sawyer's 2008 opera Our American Cousin presents a fictionalized version of the night of Lincoln's assassination from the point of view of the actors in the cast of Taylor's play.
