This is the First Time American Audiences Threw Vegetables at Performers

Humanity has a long and proud tradition of throwing vegetables at people who have the nerve to stand up and say things we don’t like. It goes all the way back to Ancient Rome, when politicians routinely dodged edible greenery, through to 19th-century Italy, when audiences began throwing tomatoes at performers who failed to entertain them. Either they really failed to appreciate the availability of cheap produce back then or they simply placed a higher value on botanical humiliation.

Regardless, we actually know the exact day the practice made its way to the United States. The first recorded instance of an American audience throwing vegetables at performers was on November 27, 1911, at the country’s first performance of the Irish play The Playboy of the Western World. The play had already generated a huge controversy in its homeland for what patriots considered an unacceptable depiction of the Irish people, specifically portraying them as violent, vulgar degenerates. They responded by rioting in the streets. (Okay, okay, it was a little more complicated than that. The content of the play — a man earning the admiration of a town and the thirst of its women for a story about killing his father, who then lethally turn on him when the story is revealed to be a lie — was pretty offensive to the Irish. Still. Rioting.)

When The Playboy of the Western World migrated to New York City, as many Irish citizens had by then, likeminded theatergoers were ready. At the first mention of patricide, a shower of potatoes rained down upon the actors. Again, it does seem like the audience wasn’t avoiding those Irish stereotypes quite like they thought they were. The tuberous torrent was so relentless that theater employees formed a whole production line for literally throwing out agitators, one at the top of the stairs to hurl offenders to the bottom and one waiting to pick them up and Uncle Phil them out the door. The play was so overshadowed by the agricultural action that at the end of the first act, it was announced that they were starting all over again, not that it made much of a difference.

In the end, 10 people were arrested, though no one was convicted specifically of throwing vegetables. One man was fined $10 for throwing four eggs, which is a pretty reasonable price these days, while others were ordered to pay after witnesses testified that they’d “hooted and jeered and stood upon the seats,” which really illustrates the differences between modern culture and the last century. Frankly, it’s a dull night on Broadway these days without at least a little hooting.