One-Man Shows and the Woman Who Perfected Them

Never ever, under any circumstances, tell people you’re doing a “one-person show.” Never ever, under any circumstances, tell people you’re seeing a “one-person show.”

There’s no faster way to turn off a potential audience than those three words. A night of “monologues” is equally deflating.

Of all the monikers, “solo performance” feels the least indulgent, but it hardly captures what I aspire to in the theater. I’m a playwright, and even though there’s a cast of one, the pieces reflect complex characters and cohesive plots, just like a proper play. Interestingly enough, I found my inspiration for one-man shows (doh!) from a brilliant, pioneering female actor/writer.

Ruth Draper started it all, really—character monologues woven together to form a thematically linked theatrical performance. She called them “monodramas,” and though many of them were comedic, odd regional accents and quirky behavior eventually gave way to deeper observations about human psychology. In addition to her dazzling, chameleon-like transformations, audiences were also getting a digestible dose of well-crafted, if not scathing, social critique.

It’s disheartening how obscure her name remains today, even among experienced theater folk, as she invented an oeuvre that has increased in popularity over the last 100 years. Without Ruth Draper, there probably wouldn’t be Lily Tomlin, Whoopi Goldberg, Eric Bogosian, Spalding Gray, or Anna Deavere Smith, to name but a few.

George Bernard Shaw was a fan. So were Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud. Henry James was so fond of her that he wrote her a monologue of his own. Edith Wharton consoled her after the death of her boyfriend (Draper was never married). Helen Keller attended several performances with Anne Sullivan, diligently tapping the text out on her wrist.

“My God, how brilliant she was,” said Katharine Hepburn.

Not a bad legacy for a gal who began performing in her parents’ living room.

Draper was born in 1884 into a family of high pedigree. Her father was a surgeon, and her maternal grandfather was Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War and later the editor of the New York Sun. Her choice to pursue acting did not sit well with either.

The Industrial Revolution had pushed the classes further apart in New York, and those in the upper class (and upper Manhattan) simply did not pursue careers in theater. Touring was grueling, paid little, and prohibited proper relationships. Most saw actors as a notch above prostitutes, which sometimes they were. And if not, they were probably cavorting around with them—drinking late at night in mixed company or philandering in the cheap seats, just like they did in the galleys of Shakespeare’s Old Globe. (It’s rumored there was more action in the stalls than on the stage.)

But the parlors and drawing rooms of estates were a different story. The wealthy took pride in hosting cultural gatherings, and there was certainly room to do it. Musicians, authors, and poets were the mainstays of their soirées, and performing in someone’s mansion was far from the pedestrian environment of a public theater—and significantly harder to get an invitation to.

This is where the young Ruth Draper cut her performing teeth. It was a pianist friend of her parents, a highly respected artist in the parlor circuit himself, who first noticed Ruth’s exceptional ear for mimicry and encouraged her parents to cultivate it.

It was only a matter of time before Ruth was captivating the salons of her peers, many of whom were up-and-coming patrons of the arts. She could imitate any class of character, from the Teutonic German nanny who homeschooled her to the family’s language-butchering Yiddish tailor. She had an especially acute ear for her own kind: the educated, the privileged, and the well-intentioned superficial.

Her most famous monologue, The Italian Lesson, parodied a middle-aged socialite gossiping more about how her Italian lessons made her erudite than actually learning to speak a word of the language. It was spot on. And when heard today—alarmingly contemporary.

She also wielded a rather nasty, if not accurate, impression of her sister Dorothea. Though she claimed not to base her characters on real people, one can only imagine the plethora of material she culled from her seven siblings.

Her peers couldn’t articulate what it was that made her so engrossing, but they lined up to see her perform. She said of her creative process, “…if you’re completely given over to what you’re portraying, you will convince other people.” She had not lost her youthful imagination or enthusiasm. The popular Nietzsche aphorism (of whom she was a fan) comes to mind: “Maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play.” Ruth had artistic “maturity” in spades.

Some critics thought she was a snob. But it was never about social status with Draper—it was about taste. There were those who had a finely tuned aesthetic sense and sought fulfillment from nuance, and then there were blockheads. The Twenties unearthed a good bit of nonsense along with its literary highlights, and for Draper, the spectacles that passed for art were utter nonsense. Her few visits to Hollywood left a bad impression of what “second-rate taste” looked like.

Ruth was at the height of her powers when New York entered its pre-crash golden age. The Twenties were roaring, and for every wannabe Gatsby fighting for a seat at the Algonquin Round Table, there was a hidden gem like Ruth beginning to sparkle. Her reputation spread quickly throughout the city, and performances at parlors began to reach capacity weeks in advance.

At her busiest, she was doing forty bookings in five months—all without an agent or manager. She would “wow” one gathering, and another would instantly materialize. She went from one living room to the next, literally across the country. Her hosts were a who’s who of recognizable names: Astor, Stuyvesant, Whitney, Roosevelt (yes, Eleanor). They were epic evenings.

It didn’t take long for word to cross the pond. Draper became a mainstay with the royal families in Britain and Sweden. Though not formally paid, she was sometimes bestowed with priceless jewelry. It was a phenomenon that surprised even her. “Another sold-out night in Paris,” she would say with a sarcastic sigh. But it was real.

Though a petite 5’4’’, Draper knew how to command attention. Her portrayals were bold and convincing. And she never pandered. Her characters were treated with the utmost respect, no matter how ignorant or destitute they may have been underneath. She inhabited them completely and with dignity. The spectators felt privileged just to watch.

She was generous with her fans, answering mail and cultivating friendships with admirers. After one performance, a story goes, Ruth offered two sycophants a ride in her carriage during a thunderstorm. The fans sang her praises and then lamented that they had never heard The Italian Lesson in all their years of seeing her. Draper performed it for them on the spot.

She had many close friends but remained single for most of her life, struggling with it in her voluminous letters. Her vocation might have intimidated many men, but Ruth claimed she would have given it up for Mr. Right. No one believed her. The more famous she became, the more her schedule (which at one point included tours in Africa, India, and South America) prohibited her from maintaining a sustainable relationship.

One man capable of handling a girlfriend who was performing for heads of state and earning more money than he ever would was Lauro De Bosis, an Italian poet twenty years her junior. It was a passionate affair, but three years into their relationship, Lauro was killed while flying a small plane. Draper would never replace him.

Interestingly, she did not perform in a theater proper until her late 30s. She eventually conquered Broadway late in her career.

On December 29, 1956, after another sold-out performance at the Playhouse Theatre, Ruth took a carriage uptown to dinner and returned to her home, where she died peacefully in her sleep. The funeral at Grace Church was standing room only. Her coffin was shrouded in the many shawls she wore when bringing her irreplaceable repertoire of characters to life.