Clyde Fitch and the American Theatre

Clyde Fitch (1865-1909) was the most successful and prolific dramatist of his time, producing nearly sixty plays in a twenty-year career. He wrote witty comedies, chaotic farces, homespun dramas, star vehicles, historical works, stark melodramas, and adaptations of European successes, but he was best known for his society plays, mirroring themes found in the novels of Henry James and Edith Wharton. In fact, Fitch collaborated with Wharton on a stage adaptation of her House ofMirth. He was also a gay man, although that gentler adjective was not the term of his time. He was bullied in school and baited by critics throughout his career for what they supposed of his private life. He responded with impressive strength and integrity. He was, at least for a short time, Oscar Wilde's lover, and Wilde influenced his early plays, but Fitch's study of Ibsen and other European dramatists inspired him to pursue the course of naturalism. As he became more successful, he took greater control of the staging and design of his plays. He was a complete man of the theatre and among the first names enrolled in New York's theatrical hall of fame.

Kevin Lane Dearinger is a teacher, actor, and author of The Bard in the Bluegrass: Two Hundred Years of Shakespearean Performance in Lexington, Kentucky (2007), Marie Prescott: "A Star of Some Brilliance" (2009), and the play Regarding Mrs. Carter, the "American Bernhardt."

Acknowledgments
Prologue
Act One: Inciting Incident
Chapter One: "Not so delicate, my dear, as you think."
Chapter Two: "I think I'll stick it out."
Chapter Three: "I am not trying to teach, but I want to suggest."
Chapter Four: "Like the little boy with the ice-cream"
Chapter Five: "You must be happy just as you are, for you can't be different."
Chapter Six: "Invent me a language of love."
Act Two: Rising Action
Chapter Seven: "Isn't it an opportunity!"
Chapter Eight: "Certain temperaments of men"
Chapter Nine: "I shut myself up in my room& went to work."
Chapter Ten: "Born differently"
Chapter Eleven: "The right to call the heart in his bosom his own"
Chapter Twelve: "To tell the Truth in the Theatre"
Chapter Thirteen: "Bully!"
Chapter Fourteen: "Sapho hangs about my neck!"
Act Three: Plot Reversal and Recognition
Chapter Fifteen: "I can do the biggest things in my power."
Chapter Sixteen: "Somehow I can't stop working."
Chapter Seventeen: "Fool that I am, I write too m