HYLAND
What a scene of general relaxation! The
"perspiration of delight" … stands upon every
forehead; handkerchiefs, as signals of distress,
are flagging with their owners in all directions;
curls, unwinding into lankness like cotton balls;
and collars curling off from the obnoxious
glowing cheek, like the leaves of the American
sensitive plant. The thin pale gentleman on our
right looks cool, but he is only at a white heat
… That stout lady's visage in the left-hand box
might pass for Aurora's,—intensely rosy,—and
a leash of pearls—(are they not?)—escaped,
perhaps, from her tiara, are stealing down her
brow … we think the simple glare of the lamps
might have accounted of themselves for the
head-splitting symptoms of the playgoer.
themselves for a night of piercing headaches, with
clothing completely soaked from their woolen underwear
all the way out to their coats. Women, crushed into their
corsets, tended to faint from the heat. Or perhaps they
would slip out to the ladies' lounge in order to vomit in
privacy.
Like it or not, suffering from the heat was a part
of summer playgoing. The Courier and Enquirer had
once called it "a two hours' seething with four thousand
mortal men and women in a huge cauldron of brick and
mortar." The humorist Thomas Hood had gone into even
more unappetizing detail, describing the genteel horror
of sitting through a play in hot weather:
