Our American Cousin

Our American Cousin is a three-act play written by English playwright Tom Taylor. The play opened in London in 1858 but quickly made its way to the U.S and premiered at Laura Keene’s Theatre in New York City later that year. It remained popular in the U.S and England for the next several decades. The play is a classic Victorian farce with a whole range of stereotyped characters, business, and many entrances and exits. The plot features a boorish but honest American cousin who travels to the aristocratic English countryside to claim his inheritance, and then quickly becomes swept up in the family’s affairs. An inevitable rescue of the family’s fortunes and of the various damsels in distress ensues. Our American Cousin was originally written as a farce for an English audience, with the laughs coming mostly at the expense of the naive American character. 3