Nesbitt Memorial Library Journal, Volume 1, Number 4, March 1990 Page: 117
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The Glory Days of the Stafford Opera House
in West Virginia, provided one of the largest troupes in the
country.
For a spectacular, the season offered The Pay
Train, which featured a train wreck on stage, a boiler
explosion, the uncoupling of two cars running at full speed
across the stage, and a lynching. The play, though, was a
failure in Columbus. Evidently, the company could not figure
out a way to put a train on the small Stafford Opera House
stage for the Citizen reported that many of the expected
scenes had been left out and commented "When one pays
money to see a play, he expects what is on the program or
he feels that his money has been obtained by fraud."14
A Barrel of Money, in which a young girl is about
to be killed by the churning machinery of an iron mill when
it suddenly is stopped, and Paul Kauvar, scored major suc-
cesses. The latter play is a story of the French revolution,
complete with a guillotine scene, and features a cast of more
than one hundred.
The play was so successful that a different
company brought it to Columbus the following season. But
it was eclipsed by two other spectacular productions featur-
ing trains, The Fast Mail and A Royal Pass, and the
appearance of James O'Neill in his new play, Fontenelle.
Somehow, the production of The Fast Mail,
mounted on October 28, 1892, contained a scene in which
a train whizzed by a station and grabbed a mail bag. Even
more incredibly, A Royal Pass, given two weeks later,
featured a chase across the stage with escaping prisoners on
one train and pursuing officers on another. The Citizen
reported that the presentation was very realistic, saying that
"steam comes from the whistles, bells clang, headlights
glow, [and] wheels whirl and rumble."15
O'Neill had been a genuinely ambitious and
talented actor in his youth. He had made his name in Chicago
in 1874, acting with Booth in Othello. The city's critics had
been raving about the performance of Italian actor Tommaso
14 Colorado Citizen, October 1, 1891
15 Colorado Citizen, November 24, 1892117
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Nesbitt Memorial Library. Nesbitt Memorial Library Journal, Volume 1, Number 4, March 1990, periodical, March 1990; Columbus, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth151377/m1/17/?rotate=90: accessed July 16, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Nesbitt Memorial Library.