ABC#063 Richard Penn Smith, Robert Montgomery Bird, Robert Taylor Conrad, George Henry Boker: Curtain Up! Four Early Philadelphia Playwrights

Americans struggled to establish their own identity as they separated from the British in the early 19th century.  It was a time of blossoming for American theater and its playwrights, despite their receiving little honor and even less compensation.

• Richard Penn Smith wrote more than 20 plays but is best remembered today for inventing much of what we know as the legend of Davy Crockett.
• Robert Montgomery Bird, MD, was a physician who wrote a play for Edwin Forrest that became the basis for plays and movies into the 21st century; Forrest became rich, while Bird became an embittered man.
• Robert Taylor Conrad was a polymath whose writing was praised by Edgar Allen Poe and whose play Aylmere, or Jack Cade became another favorite of Edwin Forrest’s.  He also served as Mayor of Philadelphia at the time of consolidation.
• George Henry Boker was one of Philadelphia’s most accomplished men – poet, playwright, politician, and co-founder of the Union League.  He also solidified copyright laws in the United States so creators could be fairly paid.  Oh – he was also minister to Turkey and Russia.

All four of these men are interred at Laurel Hill East and are little remembered today except by admirers and historians.  I tell their stories in this episode of “All Bones Considered: Laurel Hill Stories – Curtain Up!  Four Philadelphia Playwrights”.