Theatre Design & Technology - Feb 1972 - 7

attempting to go on with the play just as the audience caught sight of the flames and began to
stampede. The actors on stage, although shaken
by the rapidly spreading fire behind them, joined
hands and stepped forward to the footlights. They
pleaded with the crowd to stay calm, shouting that
they themselves stood between the audience and
the fire. The terrified audience, however, was by
that time incapable of hearing or understanding
anything that was being said to them. 1s
Records of ticket sales showed that there were
250 people seated in the orchestra and parquet of
Conway's Theatre that night, plus 350 in the dress
circle. There were 405 people in the upper gallery. At the first sight of flame, the gallery audience became a mob, climbing over the seats and
over each other in a desperate flight to reach the
outside. To be sure, there was some jamming up
in the lower part of the house, but nothing to compare with the tangle at the gallery exits. The stairway to the gallery was very narrow, and it made a
sharp bend just over the entrance to the main corridor. Twenty minutes aher the first alarm was
tu rned in, the roof of the theatre crashed through
to the cellar. It took with it the upper gallery, the
dress circle, and all of those people who had been
unable to escape. Only about one in four of the
gallery audience got out alive. 16
M iss Claxton and another actress fl ed the theatre
at the last minute. With all other escape routes
blocked by the fire or the crowd, Miss Claxton recalled an underground passage which Mrs. Conway had had built to connect her dressing room
with the box office. It was through this tunnel that
Miss Claxton and her companion made their way to
the front of the theatre, fortunately finding the
door at the lobby end unlocked! Poor Harry Murdoch, who was on stage at the same time, went
back to his dressing room in an effort to save his
costumes and was killed. 17
Although Miss Claxton and the others on stage
with her had risked their lives trying to quiet the
audience and prevent a panic, for years after the
Conway Theatre fire audiences regarded Kate Claxton as an omen of disaster. 18
One of Kate Claxton's fans at the ti me of the
fire was Steele MacKaye, who had squeezed himself into the orchestra pit at Conway's Theatre in
order to hear Miss Claxton in The Two Orphans.
He spotted the fire almost as soon as it caught.
Slipping up the aisle to warn the ushers to dismiss the audience, MacKaye was caught in the
panic which broke out before he could do anything
to prevent it. In the uproar, he lost his coat and
nearly lost his life.

THEATER DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY

FEBRUARY, 1972

In an instant, an insidious, stifling gas penetrated
our lungs, creating a mad desire for air and freedom, and a struggle for animal existence forced
the weaker to the wall. Once outside, breathing
freely, the illusion passed and we returned to the
rescue work. Not until the next day did we learn of
the appalling extent of the catastrophe. 19

Writing about the event later, MacKaye commented on the worst hazards of the Brooklyn disaster and compared them to those in other theatres
around the country:
The primary danger at the Brooklyn Theatre lay in
the inflammable nature of the scenic department,
behind the proscenium wall, but this danger was
enormously reenforced by the character and arrangement of the seats, and the insufficient number of aisles allowed for the exit of the audience.
In all these respects, however, the Brooklyn Theatre was superior to most of those crowded by the
public, during the regular season, throughout the
United States. 20

Perhaps because of his experience at the burning of Mrs. Conway's Theatre, Steele MacKaye
later devoted a major portion of his time and energy to the development, installation, and training
for efficient use of safety apparatus in the American theatre. MacKaye believed that the fear of suffocation and consequent danger of panic might be
overcome by turning the proscenium theatre's
deadly resemblance to a fireplace to an advantage.
MacKaye argued that suffocation was the thing
people feared most in a theatre fire. By making
suffocation less likely, the danger of panic might
be greatly reduced. He recommended closing off
the proscenium opening with a fire-resistant curtain which could be lowered to block this opening
during a fire. Used in combination with smoke
vents in the roof of the fly loft, such a device
would convert the space back of the proscenium
wall into a ~reat chimney up which all smoke
and flame would go rather than being forced out
into the auditorium to panic and kill the spectators. 21 Equipment of this kind was partially installed at the Iroquois Theatre in Chicago. Had it
been permitted to function properly, the death toll
there might have been greatly reduced.
Most gruesome of all the disasters by fire in the
theatres of the United States, certainly the one
best known to the public, was the burning of the
Iroquois Theatre in Chicago on December 30,
1903. Six hundred and two people died as a direct result of the fire. The terrible list of dead was
the more stunning because the fire occurred in a
building which was supposedly fireproof. This was
at a time when fireproof construction was a relatively new craft, and the innovation had caught
popular as well as professional interest. The idea

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Feb 1972