BLACK CURTAINS
To-day we are thinking more and more of the future of the theater, the
future of the play and the playwright, the future of production, of
direction and the actor.
If we are to think of the future to any effect, we must think of the
past as well as the present. The path of to-morrow strikes off from the
maze of to-day. To guess at its direction with much chance of success,
we must look now and then at the map of the settled roads of yesterday.
If we want to estimate the chances of the non-realistic play to
advance beyond its expressionist beginnings in Germany, we must try to
understand the present state of the art of theatrical production, and
the past of play and players, the theater and its stagecraft. A share
of the future—a very large share, I believe—may lie with America; but
the past is Continental. And a surprising amount of the past is German.
The past of the play shows one interesting peculiarity. The great
plays of the romantic movement were developed where there were great
theaters, in France and in Germany. Quite otherwise with Realism. Its
greatest works—the plays of Ibsen and Strindberg—were created in small
countries almost outside the consciousness of the nineteenth century
theater. This was natural enough. Realistic plays were, in the last
analysis, lonely literary rationalizations. They were not theatrical.
They did not spring out of the theater. Instead they altered the
theater to suit their needs. The theater that they altered most was the
German theater, and there the dramas of the Scandinavians found their
best audience.
But the German theater, being a healthy theater, could not stop at
the point where it became an almost perfect mechanism for presenting
these plays. Its directors and its artists went on experimenting. They
had old plays to mount, also, plays out of the romantic and classic
periods. They put their brains and their machines at work upon these
pieces, as well as upon the realistic, and soon they had developed
methods of production for non-realistic plays quite as admirable for
the purpose as any of their tricks for lifting the fourth wall before
our very eyes. The German theatrical organization became more and
more restive under the realistic plays and the old “classics.” It was
preparing for something new. The _Zeitgeist_ was working. Soon it began
to work upon the playwrights. There came abortive beginnings in the
expressionist plays I have written about in the last chapter. And the
German theater went on—and goes on—experimenting.
Let us look at this theater a little more closely. For it is the
Continental theater to-day as it was yesterday; France has only
Copeau, England experiments in little theaters as America experimented
ten years ago. And where the Continental theater is, there we are
very likely indeed to find the Continental play of the future. The
expressionist drama, like every school of drama except the realistic,
is a product of the theater in form and vitality, quite as much as it
is a product of society in its mind and materials.
The story of the artistic development of the German theater past the
realistic stage is familiar enough. It began in 1905, it was fairly
complete by 1914. It was founded upon Gordon Craig and Adolphe Appia,
and it is symbolized in the name of Max Reinhardt. It made Realism
still for Ibsen and Strindberg; but it plowed past the Realism of
Otto Brahm—which is the Realism of Belasco—and it achieved a pregnant
actuality so direct and simple that it soon gave birth to a new
imagination.
The new methods of production are fairly easy to grasp. They rest
on a few general principles. The pretenses of the theater had to be
successful pretenses. To begin with, certain tricks of the old theater
were forsworn, tricks in the main that failed to succeed. Such an
obvious pretense as painted perspective had to go. Footlights had to
be curbed; for the illumination must be both more natural and more
beautiful. But, beyond these negative things, the directors sought to
achieve positive effects for which they had to call into the theater
artists of first-rate ability. The business of these artists, whether
working on a realistic play or an imaginative one, was to evoke the
atmosphere of the piece in setting and in lights. They fell back on
three general principles to aid their sense of line and color in
visually dramatizing the action. In the first place they simplified
the stage picture. They subordinated or eliminated detail. They put as
little as possible on the stage that might distract the spectator from
the meaning of the general design (which was the meaning of the play),
or from the actions and speeches of the characters. Then, by an adroit
use of simple materials and forms, they enriched the setting—along the
lines of the play—through suggestion. One detail suggested the nature
of the whole. The base of a huge column made the audience visualize
for itself the size of the building. Half an arch springing off into
darkness created the impression of a great vaulted structure. Finally
came a synthesis of all the available and appropriate forces of the
theater, and of all the qualities of the play; this implying for the
director the establishment of a certain apt rhythm in the performance.
This pictorial reform, backed by such direction and acting as the
German theater alone was able to supply, and utilizing all manner of
mechanical devices for scene-shifting and lighting, has stood to us
for some ten years as the so-called new movement in the theater. It
has been familiar through the names of Craig and Appia as pioneer
theorists, of Reinhardt, and of artists like Ernst Stern and Alfred
Roller; through an occasional production from abroad, like Reinhardt’s
_Sumurûn_; and, at last, through the exceptional work of our own
artists in America and the men—from Arthur Hopkins to directors of
little theaters—who have given them their opportunities or amplified
their conceptions.
Fringing the outside of all this in the past have been bastard
minglings of old technique and new spirit, such as Bakst and the
Ballets Russes displayed, and the beginnings of theory and experiment
leading towards a new—or a very old—sort of theater, a theater cut off
from the whole peep-hole convention of the proscenium and the fourth
wall.
[Illustration:
The Palace: a setting by Hans Strohbach for _Der Traum, ein Leben_,
a fantasy by Calderon. Columns of dull gold, painted to suggest a
spiral shape, are spaced against a black curtain, which is later drawn
aside to reveal a blood-red sky. In the foreground a group of plotting
Orientals.
]
The strength of this movement in Germany lay partly in a very few
talented directors like Reinhardt and artists like Stern, but very
greatly in the vigorous and healthy organization of the German theater.
Because of the division of Germany in small kingdoms and duchies,
there had always been many centers of artistic life, each about a
court in the capital. In a score of cities, enriched by industrial
development, there were theaters endowed by the state or the city, and
directed towards the highest artistic accomplishment. In the larger
cities privately owned theaters followed the lead of the public
institutions. The strength of these houses lay in their endowment,
their ideals, and their system of organization. This was the repertory
system. Here, as nowhere in England or America and only here or there
in France, were theaters directed by a single mind, employing a
permanent company of players, maintaining a repertory of plays, old
and new, given in recurring succession night after night, theaters
retaining therefore a permanent audience, dependable both in pocketbook
and in taste. Supplementing these theaters were organizations of
playgoers among the middle and lower classes, such as the Freie
Volksbühne in Berlin, which widened the audience of subscribers to good
work in the theater. Between endowment and the security of a permanent
audience, it was possible for these German theaters to give uncommonly
fine performances at uncommonly low prices.
Along with the development of new methods in production went a good
deal of activity in theater building. In practice, as well as in
theory, Max Littmann and Oskar Kaufmann, following Schinkel and
Semper, who had worked with Goethe and Wagner, did much to improve
the auditoriums of German theaters. The result is not so marked as
in the case of the scenic artists. Most of the theaters are old
indeed and awkwardly shaped, and too many of the new ones continue
the tradition of a parquet surrounded and surmounted by three or four
shallow, horseshoe-shaped balconies. These balconies are not so good
to see or hear from as our own. A realization of the awkwardness of
these shelves or _Rangen_, as they are termed in German, produced an
opposition, headed by Littmann, that called for their elimination and
for the substitution of an amphitheater type of house with no balconies
and with a steeper floor to allow of better sight-lines. The fight
of _Ring vs. Rang_ has resulted in several auditoriums designed by
Littmann, the Prinzregenten Theater and the Künstler, for example, in
Munich, the slant of whose floors is far too sharp; from the upper
rows, the players are seen as in some far-off pit. The slant is
greater than necessary, and absolutely straight; the practice of the
American architect, H. C. Ingalls, of grading the floor in a gradually
increasing curve, produces a far better effect. A compromise between
_Rang_ and _Ring_ might be found in a development of the American house
with only one balcony; a more steeply slanting floor than we ordinarily
have would thus bring two amphitheaters or _Rings_ into a single
auditorium. Germany possesses, however, some admirable playhouses in
the Kammerspielhaus formerly directed by Reinhardt in Berlin, in the
Volksbühne designed by Oskar Kaufmann, and in many features of the
Künstler Theater. The seating arrangements have formed one of the best
features of the German houses. The chairs are almost always too thinly
padded; but the elimination of aisles more than compensates. The whole
audience is united in a single responsive body. And because each row
is a little wider than ours and the side walls of the auditoriums are
liberally supplied with doors, the audience empties out more quickly
than ours and in an orderly manner that puts American fire-regulations
to shame. I have seen the three thousand spectators of the Volksbühne
walk out in a single minute. It takes from three to four for a small
theater in New York, seating only six hundred, to clear itself.
A factor that has done a great deal for the progress of the German
theater and the reputation of the new stagecraft, is the liberal
attitude of the German periodicals and publishing houses towards new
things in the theater. Editors and writers have been so eager to
present to the public every smallest reform in setting or theater
that the world has gained rather an optimistic view of the extent of
production progress in Germany. Just as it is a fact that only in a
few theaters will you find model auditoriums in Central Europe, in a
similar way you discover that the outstanding work of design before the
war was done by two men, Stern and Roller, and that the other men whose
names decorate the records of the new stagecraft were each responsible
for only a few productions.
One thing further you may learn about the past of the German movement,
even in an investigation so late as the summer of 1922. And that is
that the color in a great majority of the stage settings has been very
far from good. The German has an ear, a very marvelous ear; only the
Russian can approach him in music, and it is not a near approach. But
his eye is bad. Germany has produced no first-rate artists except
Dürer, Schongauer and perhaps Cranach, and Dürer and Schongauer are
celebrated as etchers rather than as painters. That should have been
caution enough for those of us who had to study the German stage at the
distance of the half-tone. The fact of the matter is that the German
is a splendid theorist, a man of large conceptions, and that therefore
in the theater he has been able to design settings of simple and
excellent proportions, which create a good effect in black-and-white.
It is his sense of color that is at fault. Stern, with the mixture of
the Oriental in his blood which did so much for Bakst, and some of
the artists from Vienna and the South brought something to the stage
besides dramatic imagination and sense of proportion. The test of color
downs the rest.
When we think of the future of the German theater we must naturally
think of the present also, and it is a black present. Germany has been
shattered spiritually as well as economically. It has fallen from
dreams of world-dominion to bankruptcy and enslavement. The effect of
this upon the mind of the citizen who has come through four years of
danger and privation, is staggering. One incident of the fall, which
you learn upon visiting Germany, is sharply significant. Until the
soldiers from the broken German armies began to stream back into the
Rhine provinces in November, 1918, the men and women behind the front
believed that their forces were victorious. It is possible for the
theater to go on physically under almost any conditions of privation;
but you must reckon spiritually with an extraordinary state of the
public mind when you prophesy the future of the German theater. Two
things, perhaps, make optimism possible. One: Germany and the German
people have gone through terrible things before; there was the Thirty
Years War. Two: Germany still has the wonderfully trained audience
of pre-war days; it was a broad democratic audience, and no shift in
economic circumstances can destroy so large a part of the cultured
playgoers as war-poverty has done in England, in France, and even to
some extent in America.
War—backed by the movies—has done its worst in the Berlin theater. Here
we find another example of the exchange of ideals and personalities
which has often been noted between victor and vanquished. Just as
America has been Prussianized in its attitude towards the foreigner and
the liberal or radical minority, Berlin has adopted many of the most
evil features of the American theatrical system. Within three years
of the close of hostilities Berlin was being rapidly Broadway-ized.
Repertory was practically dead at all but three or four theaters.
Facing economic difficulties and the competition of the movies for the
services of the actors, Berlin found it was a large enough city to
support long runs for exceptionally great or exceptionally mediocre
plays. Even the three theaters that Reinhardt formerly directed
broke from repertory, and where they had once shown ten or a dozen
productions in two weeks, they showed only three or (counting Sunday
matinees of some old favorites) four. Outside Berlin, repertory
continues in the State and City theaters and even in private ventures;
but many artistic playhouses are badly crippled by the economic
troubles of the nation, and some are forced to close down.
There are certain good signs. The theaters were full in 1922. In
fifty or sixty visits to the theater it was only at musical comedies
that I saw more than one row of vacant seats; in all but half a dozen
cases every seat was sold and occupied. The prices were not high. In
Frankfort, an average city of the larger size, the highest prices
ranged from sixty marks (at that time twenty cents) to one hundred and
twenty marks, depending on the expensiveness or the popularity of the
production; while the lowest prices for seats were twenty marks to
seventy marks, with standing room at six marks.
At such prices even full houses do not make budgets easy to balance.
The theater of post-war Germany must be economical in its expenditures.
That is not, however, such an artistic hardship as much of the talk of
elaborate machinery and handsome productions in pre-war days might
suggest. Rigorous physical simplicity and a reliance on the genius
of design instead of elaboration of mechanics are the vital needs in
stage setting to-day. Germany has done fine things in the simplifying
of production, and it has done them in spite of the temptations of
bulging pocketbooks. What it may be forced to do now through poverty is
a matter for real hope.
The danger—for there is a danger—is that smaller minds may find an
excuse for a mean sort of simplicity, a bareness and barrenness of
spirit. There has always been a tendency among the modern directors and
designers to economize spiritually as well as economically. The results
have been seen in some of our dry, meager “little theater” productions,
full of bare formalism—a sort of “simplism” that has no place in
any art, let alone in the live, varied, rich, and vigorous theater.
Occasionally a German artist of real talent falls into this thin
manner; Ludwig Sievert has mounted _Towards Damascus_ at the Frankfort
Schauspielhaus upon a scheme which is physically interesting, but he
has given his settings a mean, arid, spiritually poverty-stricken
appearance which is never beautiful, and does not express in the least
the intense quality of Strindberg’s play.
The movies break up ensemble in Germany, and bear down on repertory.
They offer salaries that the actor, impoverished quite as much as the
worker, cannot resist. Moreover they demand from him the daylight
hours which must be given to rehearsals of old and new pieces if
repertory is to exist. The German actor cannot appear in a repertory
theater in the evenings, as our actor can appear upon Broadway, and put
in his days in front of the camera, as ours often does. But—and this
is highly important—the German actor has been trained in a school of
ideals and self-expression which makes him demand more than the movies
can give him. He must have some sort of serious work in the theater,
and he is finding it more and more in special summer engagements or
_Festspiele_. Thus many of the greatest of the nation’s players are
often assembled at salaries which, by comparison with their motion
picture earnings, are hardly salaries at all.
There remains the spirit of the German people. The audiences are
intact and intelligent, but what about their spirit? Can these people
live down their sufferings or lift them up to something great outside
themselves? The prospect is not so dark in the southern parts, in
Bavaria, perhaps; it is certainly bright in Austria, where hunger and
economic misery are the realest and where the divinity of the human
spirit is asserted again and again in every happy gesture of this
lovely people. In Berlin it is another matter. Spiritual dejection
and gnawing misery are in the face of every one. They are to be seen
on the stage, too. Berlin does not go to the theater to be taken out
of itself; it seems to neglect the prime use of art. Berlin demands
an echoing misery from its playhouses. It goes to see a blacker and
more despicable _Richard III_ than Shakespeare ever imagined. It
suffers the torments of disillusioned revolution in _Masse-Mensch_
at the working people’s theater. It throngs the glowering caverns of
the Grosses Schauspielhaus. And everywhere the stage is hung in black
curtains. “Warum immer die schwarzen Vorhänge?” we ask again and again.
Perhaps they are only an accident of the attempt to get a background of
emptiness; but they become a yawning gulf of spiritual blackness. The
only colors to break the pall are the red of blood, and the blue that
strikes across the black a symbol of a sinister cruelty.
Of course, black curtains are no Teuton monopoly. When the Russian
Pitoëff uses them in Paris, when we see them on Broadway and in our
“little theaters,” we do not look for the words “Made in Germany” on
the selvage. But in Germany they seem numerous and more significant.
If the curtains were sometimes dappled with gray or if they were
opalescent with hidden lights, they might be significant of nothing
more than the Germans’ immensely active experiments with a formal
stage. Perhaps _bunte Vorhänge_ are coming. Perhaps it is always a
little dark before dawn.