Impassioned opposition to ‘ Passion’ play

During the Easter season in 1879, the biggest theatrical controversy in San Francisco history erupted. For weeks, all anyone talked about was whether a play depicting the life of Jesus titled “The Passion” should be banned.

As Alan Nielsen writes in his comprehensive study of the controversy, “The Great Victorian Sacrilege: Preachers, Politics and ‘ The Passion,’ 1879- 1884,” “The Passion” was written by one Salmi Morse — one of the odder figures in San Francisco history.

Morse was born to Jewish parents in Germany in 1826 and came to San Francisco during the Gold Rush. After a bizarre globe- trotting career that included managing an Australian hotel, traveling to Crimea during the Crimean War, running a ranch in Mendocino, and trying to pull off a landspeculation scheme in the Dominican Republic, he returned to San Francisco in

1875, abandoning his wife in Santo Domingo.

Claiming to be a wealthy Australian — Morse had a lifelong propensity to tell tall tales about himself — he began hanging around a theatrical circle that included Tom Maguire, the city’s leading theater impresario, a young stage manager named David Belasco who would go on to become one of America’s most famous directors and set designers, and a dashing 31- yearold Irish leading man named James O’Neill.

Reinventing himself as a playwright, Morse persuaded a producer to put on a play he had written titled “Anno Domini 1900.” The venture failed when Morse could not come up with any funds, but the failure only whetted his appetite for theatrical glory. He began telling everyone about his “masterwork,” a play titled “The Passion: A Miracle Play in Ten Acts.”

Full speed ahead

By writing a play about Jesus, Morse was venturing onto untrodden, and extremely risky, ground. As Nielsen writes, “No known American theater company had ever before attempted such a presentation.” From the days of the Puritans, America had always regarded theater as a sinful pastime, and in the late 19th century Christianity was sacrosanct. To Victorian sensibilities, allowing a lowly actor to depict the savior was blasphemous.

But Morse was undaunted. Convinced “The Passion” was a great work of art and would be staged at regular intervals like the famous Passion Play at Oberammergau, Germany, he lined up plutocrat “Lucky” Baldwin to underwrite it, Maguire to produce it and signed O’Neill to star as Jesus. Belasco was to do lighting, staging and scenery. To get the Catholic Church’s stamp of approval, he took it to Archbishop Joseph Alemany, who read it and critiqued it. Morse then issued the play with a title page reading “Revised and Approved by the Most Reverend Joseph S. Alemany, Archbishop of California.”

This apparently prudent act backfired. The city’s Protestant clergy were already outraged by Morse’s proposed sacrilege, and Alemany’s involvement led many of them to believe that “The Passion” was a conspiracy fomented by “the Romish altar and the priest’s chamber.” ( Almost nothing was made of Morse’s Jewishness.) Every Protestant church in town rang with impassioned denunciation of the proposed performance.

The Rev. W. J. Smith of the Central Presbyterian Church cried that if the play was put on, he hoped that “the earthquake throes that rent the rocks to twain on Mount Calvary shake the foundations of that building; and that the pall of darkness … may descend upon them, until actors and spectators shall fall like that Centurion, and with aching knees cry out, ‘ Truly this is the Son of God.’ ”

In fact, “The Passion” was entirely pious. But that was irrelevant to the clergy. As for the press, many of San Francisco’s newspapers realized that Morse’s play was not blasphemous, but their editors did not dare go against the clergy — resulting in some of the lamest arguments ever to appear in the local papers. The most vehemently anti“Passion” paper was The San Francisco Chronicle, which not coincidentally had been carrying on a poisonous feud with producer Maguire for years.

The decisive blow was struck by the city’s Board of Supervisors. On the very day “The Passion” was to open, a supervisor introduced an order making it illegal to stage for money any play that depicted “the life and death of Jesus Christ.”

That night, March 3, a huge crowd gathered at the city’s largest theater, the Grand Opera House on Mission Street. The tension was palpable. O’Neill’s wife begged him not to go on, saying “the people would kill me.” But the district attorney decided not to carry out the order — which hadn’t been passed into law yet but still held weight — and the tickets sold and the performance took place without incident.

‘ Like no other play ever’

The play itself, with a cast of 400, was flawed by uneven writing but was undeniably powerful. “It was like no other play ever performed in San Francisco,” Nielsen writes. “It virtually demanded the audience’s attention and respect, and got both.” One reporter called it “a representation of uninterrupted solemnity — one that is in some respects sublime.” O’Neill, whose immersion in the role was so deep that he was left in tears after many scenes, was magnificent: Belasco called his turn “the greatest performance of a generation,” an opinion he still maintained 35 years later. ( O’Neill later fathered the great playwright Eugene O’Neill.)

But “The Passion’s” artistic success only made its critics more determined to close it. The clergy kept up its attacks, and the Board of Supervisors unanimously passed the ordinance. When Mayor Andrew Bryant allowed it to stand, Ordinance 1493, Section 62 of General Order 1587 became law.

After a brief closure because of a scheduling conflict, the play reopened on April 15, Easter Tuesday. At the end of the play, with the audience “hushed and breathless,” Officer A. E. C. Bradford walked backstage, arrested James O’Neill on the charge of impersonating Jesus Christ, and hauled him off to jail.

Struggling to draw audience

While O’Neill’s lawyer unsuccessfully fought the case in the courts, “The Passion” continued its run. After a week, however, Baldwin and Maguire were forced to pull the plug. Audiences were thinning, and it was simply impossible to attract enough spectators to make money at the vast Grand Opera House. Morse tried to get the ordinance overturned, but even a new Board of Supervisors refused to overturn the law.

The obsessed Morse did not give up. He took “The Passion” to New York. But it met with the same fate there. Implacable opposition from churches and legal injunctions prevented it from opening. Morse was crushed. Less than a year after his final legal defeat, he was found dead in the Hudson River.

In a weird coda, “The Passion” was used to make an eponymous 1898 film. The play deemed too blasphemous to be staged made history as the first narrative staged specifically for a film.

Gary Kamiya is the author of the best- selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco.” All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: metro@ sfchronicle. com