The passionate 1879 battle over ‘The Passion’

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 land-speculation 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-year-old 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

Article source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/The-passionate-1879-battle-over-The-Passion-6922896.php