I’m on a one man crusade to make Blanche Walsh a household name. Now almost completely forgotten, in the Belle Epoque period (1890 - 1910) corresponding politically to the first great Progressive movement, Blanche Walsh was arguably America’s version of Sarah Bernhardt.
Walsh’s most famous role was as the peasant prostitute Maslova, in the play version of Tolstoy’s neglected third novel, Resurrection—his most radical, political, and best-selling book—one rich with themes that could easily be ripped from today’s headlines. Wealth inequality: check. Russian oligarchy: check. The prison-industrial complex: check. Along with a romance for the ages, and a recognition of the redemptive power of human love.
In a 2013 essay, noted short-story writer George Saunders suggested that Resurrection, more so than War & Peace and Anna Karenina, had political repercussions that helped spark the 1917 Russian Revolution. Not only did Blanche Walsh star in the original play version of Resurrection, which was the hit of the 1903 season at Hammerstein’s famed Victoria Theater in Times Square, she also starred in a 1912 silent film version that helped Adolph Zukor create the very notion of a Hollywood star.
Who knew Tinseltown had such radical political roots! It’s almost too delicious to be true. But it is.
Blanche Walsh was also the original advocate of an American National Theater. Long dreamed about, but yet to be achieved, there were several attempts at a National Theater in the 20th century—most notably in the 1930s with FDR’s Federal Theater Project, where Orson Welles came to prominence—till the program was defunded by Republicans in congress who felt the plays were too “left-wing.” Sound familiar? Walsh believed we needed a National Theater to resist the greedy forces reducing quality theater to commercial fluff, a problem we still have today. England, on the other hand, has a thriving National Theater—mostly due to the efforts of Laurence Olivier.
Walsh also starred in a fascinating play called Trilby, about a young gal who dreamed of being a famous singer: only she couldn’t carry a tune in a wheelbarrow. Until she met her Svengali, who put her in a trance and convinced her that she could, in fact, sing. Viola! She became world famous overnight. The play was a fin de seicle sensation. It inspired the name of a hat, the renaming of Macon, Florida to Trilby, the word svengali (recently applied to a certain presidential adviser), and influenced Gaston Leroux when he wrote Phantom of the Opera. The French artist Toulouse- Lautrec even named his yacht “Trilby.”
If truth be told, though, I wouldn’t be here today to write this essay if it weren’t for a great act of love by Blanche Walsh—on the stage of her real life—when she rescued my seven year old grandmother from a London orphanage, and brought her to live in New York: becoming her dear “second mother.” I call it my real life fairy tale. I have a poignant memory from my 1970s childhood of my grandmother, pointing to the fading, sepia toned photo of Blanche Walsh in her dining room, and expressing sadness that this great American actress—a Wonder Woman of theater history—has been completely forgotten.
So when I read a recent piece in the New York Times about how women continue to be relegated to the margins of theater (Arts section: 7/7/17), I felt compelled to educate the world about Blanche Walsh. Given the current polarization of our society, along with talk of “dumbing down” and a rising tide of anti-intellectualism, it would also seem the opportune moment to revisit Walsh’s Belle Epoque dream of a National Theater: to help educate, inspire, and unite our fragmenting democracy.
My hope is that this essay inspires others to research Blanche Walsh (so easy with Google!) and that university theater departments will offer her a greater place in the curriculum. I could also imagine a play or film dedicated to this great actress, who was clearly the Meryl Streep of her day. In the meantime, my wife and I co-produce a nonprofit TV show on education, the arts, and social change called Public Voice Salon. We see our show as a non-corporate, humanizing curriculum (tuition free on You Tube) that does for television what Walsh imagined a National Theater might do for the dramatic arts.