Our American Cousin

When American businessman Asa Trenchard arrives at his English cousin's estate to claim his inheritance, he crashes into a world of embroidered waistcoats and withering disapproval. His blunt American manners and utter lack of social graces send the aristocratic Trenchard family into varying degrees of horror and fascination. Florence, the spirited daughter, finds his brashness strangely refreshing against the pallid Englishmen who've courted her. Lord Dundreary, the family's resident fool, provides a perfect counterweight, equally baffled by Asa's commerce and the family's stuffiness. Tom Taylor's 1858 farce functions as gleeful class warfare through the eyes of an outsider who refuses to play by anyone's rules. The comedy derives from watching inherited authority confront raw American confidence, and the play captures a particular historical anxiety: what happens when the brash New World shows up on the Old World's doorstep demanding a seat at the table? The production ran for years on both sides of the Atlantic, cementing Taylor as the era's most produced playwright. Today it remains infamous for one dark reason: the night Abraham Lincoln died watching this very comedy, his assassination echoing through Ford's Theatre and into history.