back then. Having now outstripped him in years, I recognize some of the devil that gnawed at him: the compromises of middle age, the burdens of family, the urge to secure your place in a country that disappoints as often as it inspires. Sinclair Lewis called America “the most contradictory, the most depressing, the most stirring, of any land in the world today.” Perhaps Michael Lewis shared that view. Perhaps as he stormed onto the Fulton stage in his silk waistcoat that long-ago August night he was invoking his father’s spirit.
We called our season the American Heritage Festival; exactly what that meant I couldn’t have said. It made me squirm whenever I heard John Proctor defend his integrity that summer. Week after week I sat offstage listening to him, my fingers on the light board, waiting for the cue to illuminate his desperate face. “My name!” he’d cry. “My name!” I pushed the levers up. What had provoked the madness of Salem, I wondered, never mind the madness that prompted Arthur Miller to write those lines? One night toward the end of our season, Richard Nixon resigned. The audience that evening was small, and I hurried home after the show to catch the real theater on my parents’ TV. The Vietnam War was raging; that year in college I’d read Arthur Kopit’s Indians and for the first time been urged to consider the connections between what we were doing in Asia and what we’d done on our own frontier.
I was too fixed on the future to realize a portion of that frontier lay under my feet every time I walked onto the Fulton stage. Scrambling up onto the pin rail to hang lights, I was a sailor charting the swells of my own possibility. Occasionally I went downstairs into the storage tunnel below the auditorium to retrieve a lamp or gel. Inside the subterranean gloom I could see the log piers the first Fulton architect had installed to help hold up the place. They’d since been reinforced with concrete, but beyond them lay soft earth you could touch. I had no idea how long that soil had been there, probably centuries. Further off in the dark were the limestone walls that ran like a maze through the underbelly of the opera house. They were the old jail walls, I knew, and without them the theater would collapse. But I seldom thought more about their presence, about the American saga they’d helped beget. I hadn’t yet learned the pull of the backward gaze.
The notion of the theater as a memory machine dates back at least to the sixteenth century, when an Italian scholar named Giulio Camillo suggested using components of a stage and auditorium as mnemonic prompts. The metaphorical implications of his choice have beguiled theater people ever since. “We all know these buildings are haunted,” a director friend said to me when I told him about my obsession with the Fulton. Camillo was after personal as well as collective memory, and for me, of course, the Fulton holds both. The lamps I hauled up from the basement and helped string over the Salem courtroom where John Proctor repeatedly went on trial in the summer of 1974 belong to more than one narrative.
I’ve been told that cells from Julius Caesar still circulate in the world, that with each breath I draw I’m inhaling molecules from ancient Rome. If I keep going back to the Fulton, it’s to suck in the past, of which my own is just a fraction. A child sees little but herself until one day she wakes and discovers she occupies a sliver of chronology in a ticking universe. I’d spent most of my life dreaming of what was to come, but that summer I shifted my gaze by a degree, and I’ve been turning counterclockwise ever since. I see now that we belong equally to the dead and the living, that if you put your hand out and touch the cold stone walls of history you can feel the thrum of your predecessors, those dim beings who’ve faded into the earth. I know now that if you race down a street at dusk, carrying a silk waistcoat in your arms, you just might make it in time for their story to begin.
MR. YECKER OPENS A THEATER: 1866
Six months had passed since the end of the War between the States, and Lancaster was thriving. The funerals of boys too young to die had stopped; the papers no longer published accounts of battles so ghastly they defied belief. Instead of troops, trains carried ordinary men and women back and forth to places like Philadelphia and Baltimore. Ships on the Susquehanna heaved under the weight of new merchandise: plows and threshing machines, carriages, firearms, wagons, umbrellas, cigars, hats, distilled liquors. Soon the cotton mills would be back in business and gaslights would flicker in every home in the city. Soon work would begin on a granite monument in the center of town to commemorate those who had given their lives in the terrible fight to preserve the Union. Already those brave men had begun to lapse into memory, their vibrant selves reduced to quicksilver images inside little cases their mothers and widows kept on the parlor table or carried in their pockets.
The circus came to town, and families went in throngs to see the clowns and acrobats. From time to time someone lit a gas valve under a giant balloon and rose from downtown into the blue sky over south-central Pennsylvania, while hundreds below watched in wonder. People craved amusement. They wanted to laugh at minstrel shows and see cowboys shoot Indians and hear famous actors declaim Shakespeare.
Blasius Yecker thought it might be a good time to open a theater. A small man with a round face and dark hair who spoke English with a German accent, he said little publicly about why he wanted to go into show business. He was in his early thirties. He’d come to America from Europe at thirteen, leaving his widowed mother and traveling by diligence to Paris from his Alsatian birthplace, then by train to Le Havre, then by boat across the Atlantic in the dead of winter to New York and finally to Lancaster, where he’d worked first as a farmer and miller, then apprenticed as a saddler and opened a harness shop. Now he wanted to be Barnum.
He had a petite, German-born wife and four children, soon to be seven, and they belonged to a large German community whose members attended German-language churches and sang in German choirs and drank lager at picnics in the woods on the edge of town. Yecker had fled hunger and revolution in Europe and survived a war in his adopted land, and he was an optimist. The saddlery business had prospered during the war—the demand for trunks and bridles and knapsacks ever mounting—and he now had the means to buy property. Accordingly, on November 23, 1865, he and a business partner, Hilaire Zaepfel, a former saddler turned hotelkeeper, paid $16,200 for a “three-story brick tenement” with a creamy white façade near the corner of Prince and King Streets, in downtown Lancaster. The building, Fulton Hall, was thirteen years old, although its stone foundations went back more than a century.
Behind its pale veneer, Fulton Hall was little more than an assortment of meeting rooms and a large auditorium with rows of wooden benches and a small platform at one end. Since 1852, this building had served the citizens of Lancaster as a courthouse, stage, chapel, armory, auditorium, boot camp, warehouse, meeting place, concert hall, lecture room, exhibition space, ballroom, campaign rally ground, and occasional funeral parlor. Yecker wanted to turn it into a theater, a place to see and be seen. He envisioned a wide stage and a drop curtain with scenes of Europe, tiered seats, a domed ceiling, low footlights. It’s doubtful he knew anything about Thespis or the Teatro Olimpico or London’s Globe, about the myriad ways theater had entered people’s imaginations through history and shaped civilizations and occasionally threatened governments. He simply saw a chance to make money and perhaps his mark.
Competition was scarce. One block up the street, a stereoscope belonging to the Messrs. Hambright offered fifty different views of battlefields and landscapes. There were occasional concerts by German men’s choirs and traveling singers. The Fulton had its own bookings. Two days after Yecker bought the place, a local fire company held a fair inside the hall, with flags and prizes and music by a cornet band. From an arch suspended over the stage, gas jets spelled out the company’s motto: “When Duty Calls ’Tis Ours to Obey.” Below it stood a pedestal with a statue of the goddess of Liberty cradling an American flag in the hollow of one arm. In her other arm she held a scroll inscribed with the names Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Meade, Reynolds, and Hooker.
Within the month, the famous Siamese twins Chang and Eng would play Fulton Hall on their farewell tour, together with a pair of “wild” Australian children who had reportedly been captured by gold hunters and who, according to the ads, had “long, sharp teeth” and curiously small heads.
On New Year’s Day 1866, two months