Kerosene Circuit

   Low-budget touring companies of no more than eight troupers might be relegated to performing in country towns so small that kerosene lamps were still used for lighting the halls. "Playing the kerosene circuit" meant making the best of a long succession of one-night stands in ill-equipped second-story halls over commercial space in towns of perhaps 300 to 1,000 inhabitants. Anecdotes about the travails of trouping "the tank towns on the kerosene circuit" appear in the Kansas City Star (18 November 1906; 10 October 1909). Describing conditions in the hall over the hardware store in Humphreys, Missouri, during those years, for example, one actor recalled that the footlights were "four kerosene lamps with tin reflectors, sitting on a rough board in front of the stage." For a setting that required a buffet cabinet and a large painted rock, the company manager asked the manager of the hall in Mound City, Missouri, "Have you a sideboard and a set rock?" The local man promised to provide the items before curtain time, and indeed, that night he pulled his wagon up to the opera house door and left a heavy rock along with the sideboards from his wagon.