The Flaming Corsage

“Scandalous Play Closes”, Albany Argus, May 13, 1912

THE FORCES OF decency in the city dealt a sledgehammer death blow to the new play by Edward Daugherty Saturday night. The opening performance at Harmanus Bleecker Hall was greeted with hisses at the first scene of Act Four, and shouts of “unclean” and “filth” were heard as the play progressed to its conclusion. A score of people left the theater, which was packed to capacity for the performance, more than 2,500 seats filled. When the curtain came down, the hisses and boos were loud and relentless, especially from the gallery, and extra police were summoned to move the audience out of the theater.

Yesterday morning Episcopal Bishop Sloane and Catholic Bishop Burke, in concert with Mayor McEwan and many leading citizens of the city, pressed the owners of the Hall and the play’s producers to cease further performance. At midafternoon the producer announced the cancellation of the play’s two-week run. The Hall’s manager said he will offer, in its place, the return of last week’s immensely popular production of Regeneration, with Bert Lytell, the story of an Irish Bowery thug raised to manhood by the power of a woman’s prayer.

Daugherty’s play, titled The Flaming Corsage, purports to be a tragic love story, but is a thinly veiled excursion into the lower regions of human degradation, beginning with the murder, in a “love nest,” of an unfaithful wife, who is shot by her husband; and the husband then suicides. It carries on from there through such morally repugnant dialogue as has never been heard on the Albany stage. Some phrases would not be printable in this newspaper under any circumstances, yet they are uttered brazenly by two women characters.

“The shame of Albany” is what Bishop Sloane called the play; Bishop Burke said such a writer should be “damned to hell for such public sin”; and the Mayor, who had not seen the play, said, “From all accounts it is a degenerate assault on American womanhood. And we won’t stand for that in this city.”

It was agreed yesterday by seasoned theatergoers who saw the play that it is little more than a self-exculpation by the playwright, an apologia for his involvement in the Love Nest Scandal of 1908 in Manhattan, whose events closely parallel those of the play, with names of the characters changed so slightly from their real-life counterparts that all are recognizable. And so the old scandal is rekindled to a bright flame.