Early Spanish and French Plays.

According to Gaspar Perez de Villagra's Historia de la Nuevo-Mexico (1610), the first European play produced within the modern boundaries of the United States was a comedia Capt. Marcos Farfan de los Godos, staged on the banks of the Rio Grande in New Mexico on 30 April 1598. Villagra described this lost play as a drama about the willing conversion to Christianity of huge numbers of Native Americans. He also mentioned a production of the medieval Spanish drama Morosy Cristianos (The Moors and the Christians) and a comedia, perhaps by Farfan, at San Juan de los Caballeros, near present-day El Paso, in September 1598. Throughout the Southwest Spanish priests made extensive use of ecclesiastical plays in their attempts to convert Native Americans to Christianity, and drama became part of the oral literary tradition of the region. The French also brought their theater traditions the...