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.