Dunlap, the historian of the American Stage, informs us that the drama
was introduced in this country by William Hallam, the successor of
Garrick in Goodman’s Field Theatre, who formed a joint stock company
and sent them to America under the management of his brother Lewis
Hallam in the year 1752, and that the first play ever acted in America
was the “Merchant of Venice,” represented by this company on September
5, 1752, at Williamsburg, then the capital of Virginia, in an old
store-house which they converted into a theater within two months after
their arrival at Yorktown. Dunlap’s familiarity with the subject,
the fact that he derived his information from Lewis Hallam, Jr., who
came out a boy twelve years of age with this early company, and the
circumstance that Burke, in his “History of Virginia,” has the same
statement, have been deemed sufficiently satisfactory, and William
Hallam, whom Dunlap calls “the Father of the American stage,” has been
accepted as the person who first introduced the drama in America.[1]
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