Across the Continent

In this play Maude Adams was five years old and appeared in only one scene. She played a street urchin, Dolores,brought to the U.S. by and Italian who passes himself off as her father and sends kids out onto the streets to make money for him.

The scene occurs in a bar-room where Giovanni, the Italian, grabs her and demands any money she has made for him. He's very rough with her and the bartender intervenes and picks a fight with him, and Giovanni kills the bartender.

Dolores is terrified and he chases after her until one of the bystanders catches her. Giovanni continues to pretend he is her father Joe, the bystander, says he will protect Dolores but Giovanni plots to kill him. He turns out the lights and attacks but ends up killing his own brother.

The part was a rather rough one for such a young child and it is possible that the part was meant to be played by someone older.

=====American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1869-1914 by Gerald Bordman; Oxford University Press, 1994=====

Daly's Horizon, the work many observers considered the most intrinsically worthwhile, was a commercial disappointment. However, the well-written, hugely successful Saratoga earned an honored position in our theatrical history, while two rattlingly effective actor's vehicles, Across the Continent and Kit, the Arkansas Traveller, held the stage as long as their stars remained active. Yet not all theatergoers were pleased by what they saw. In his 1871 pamphlet Democratic Vistas, Walt Whitman complained, "Of what is called drama, or dramatic presentations in the United States, as now put forth at the theatres, I should say it deserves to be treated with the same gravity, and on a par with the questions of ornamental confectionery at public dinners, or the arrangement of curtains and hangings in a ball-room--nor more, nor less." Happily, many others were less censorious.

Across the Continent ( 3-13- 71), Wood's) was the sort of exaggerated melodrama critics loved to tear to shreds; they seemed to save their most scathing adjectives and expressions for the time when they could review just this kind of play. After all, it was a sitting duck. Its characters were drawn in shadeless blacks and whites; its breathless progression of thumpingly dramatic incidents renounced all claim to probability and time and again wrenched the long arm of coincidence. Yet while critics railed, playgoers roared with delight, for Across the Continent unquestionably was what the next generation would call "an audience show."

For the third time in the season the American West had provided the setting for a native melodrama. That Kit and Across the Continent became far more popular than Horizon can be attributed to their stars' appeal, to the more sensational elements in their stories, and to their principal characters being depicted in primary colors instead of Daly's more subtle shadings. Kit , in fact, outlived Chanfrau, drawing patrons in lesser theatres and in backwaters well into the 1890s.