“THE THEATER OF THE FIVE THOUSAND”
Over some fifteen years a growing number of minds have been more or
less actively seeking a way towards a new type of theater. They have
been abusing the picture-frame stage, stamping on the footlights,
pulling out the front of the apron, pushing the actors into the loges,
down the orchestra pit, onto the prompter’s box, out upon runways or
up the aisles. They have even gone clear out of the playhouse and into
circuses, open air theaters, and public parks. All to set up a new and
mutual relationship between the actor and the audience.
You might almost say to set up any mutual relationship at all; for the
players of the peep-hole theater of Realism, the picture-frame theater,
the fourth wall theater, can hardly be said to have anything resembling
a relationship to the spectator. The thing peeped at can’t be aware
of the peeper. A picture does not know that it has an audience. Walls
may have ears, but the fourth wall has no eyes. It is the essence of
Realism and of realistic acting that they have their justification in
the thing they resemble, not in the people who may or may not be able
to recognize the resemblance. A perfect realistic performance is a
thing so close to life that it cannot permit itself to be aware of even
its own existence. Its perfection is so much more related to the thing
it imitates than to the audience which looks at it, that it would be no
less perfect if there were no one at all to look. The fourth wall _is_
a fourth wall. It might just as well be as real as the other three.
Alexander Bakshy wrote of Stanislavsky’s company: “It would have made
scarcely an atom of difference to the adequacy and completeness of the
Art Theater’s performance if the audience had been entirely removed.”
Such performances can be very interesting in their way, extraordinarily
interesting, in fact, when such players as Stanislavsky’s bring
spiritual distinction to their Realism. But there is another sort
of thing that can be interesting, too. Some think it can be more
interesting; at any rate they want to find out what it was that kept
the theater contented for the twenty-five centuries before it knew
Realism. They want to draw out the actor and the spectator; the actor
out of the picture frame and the spectator—if the actor is good
enough—out of his seat. They want to make the actor an actor once more.
And they think that a new sort of theater—or a very old sort—might have
something to do with it.
Directors have thought about it, and playwrights, dancing teachers,
architects, scenic artists, actors, and critics. Max Reinhardt put a
runway over the audience in _Sumurûn_ more than a dozen years ago and
staged Sophocles in a circus. Percy MacKaye developed the community
masque as a new form of outdoor theatrical performance through _The
Masque of St. Louis_ and _Caliban_, and brought it indoors with _The
Evergreen Tree_ and _The Will of Song_. Jaques-Dalcroze, deviser of the
eurythmic system of dance-education, created in Hellerau-bei-Dresden,
before the war, a hall holding the stage and the spectators within
translucent walls lit by ten thousand lights, and there, with the aid
of Adolphe Appia, he gave Paul Claudel’s drama _L’Annonce faite à
Marie_. Frank Lloyd Wright, designing a theater for Aline Barnsdall of
Los Angeles, created a model showing an adjustable proscenium, which
was hardly a proscenium, a domed stage which curved into the lines
of the auditorium, and a permanent architectural setting consisting
of a wall twelve feet high running across the stage. Herman Rosse,
the scenic artist, took to sketching theaters with all manner of odd
forestages and portals. Norman-Bel Geddes threw off in 1914 a plan
for a theater with stage and audience housed under a single dome, and
in 1921 designed a magnificent project for the production of Dante’s
_The Divine Comedy_ in Madison Square Garden in a permanent setting of
ringed steps, towering plinths, and light. Gémier, the French actor,
introduced the Reinhardt circus-theater to Paris. Jacques Copeau left
his reviewing of plays to create in the Vieux-Colombier a theater
without a proscenium, and with a forestage and a permanent setting,
in order to give his troupe of actors a fresh and truly theatrical
relation to their audience.
The first attempts to escape from the realistic theater were
Gargantuan. It seems as if there were something so essentially small
about our theater that a huge thing was the natural alternative. Max
Reinhardt and Percy MacKaye, the two men who began the break with
the realistic theater, and who carried their conceptions furthest,
plunged immediately to the huge, the magnificent. They could have found
inspiration in Gordon Craig, as practically every innovator in our
playhouse has done. For Gordon Craig, too, saw a gigantic vision of the
break between this peepshow of ours and the next theater:
“I see a great building to seat many thousands of people. At one end
rises a platform of heroic size on which figures of a heroic mold shall
move. The scene shall be such as the world shows us, not as our own
particular little street shows us. The movements of these scenes shall
be noble and great: all shall be illuminated by a light such as the
spheres give us, not such as the footlights give us, but such as we
dream of.”
MacKaye had a family tradition to urge him towards large experiments.
His father, Steele MacKaye, irritated no doubt by the limitations of
the nineteenth century theater as we are irritated by the limitations
of the theater of the twentieth century, conceived and all but launched
a grandiose and extraordinary scheme for a playhouse at the Chicago
World’s Fair. The Spectatorium, which was to seat ten thousand people
and give a spectacle of music and drama, movement and light, dancing
and action, on land and on water, was burned, however, before it could
be completed.
The dominating idea in the younger MacKaye was to create a dramatic
form of and for the people. It was to celebrate the works of humanity;
_The Masque of St. Louis_ commemorated the founding of the western
city, and _Caliban_ the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death. The
MacKaye masque was to be acted and danced by the community with the
assistance of a few trained players, and it was to be seen by as many
as possible; in St. Louis 7,000 took part and 200,000 looked on. The
experience of these community masques led MacKaye to want the active
participation of the citizens as audience as well as of the citizens as
actors, and in _The Evergreen Tree_ he arranged a Christmas festival,
to be given either out of doors or within, in which the spectators sang
with the chorus and the actors, who passed through the midst of them.
Another desire of MacKaye’s was the enlarging of the characters of his
masques to gigantic size. He did this literally in _The Masque of St.
Louis_ with the huge figure which stood for Cahokia. In _The Will of
Song_, given its first production indoors, he began to work upon the
idea of the “group being,” a single dramatic entity visualized through
a mass of players.
Whether or not Reinhardt began his first great circus-production,
Sophocles’ _Œdipus Rex_, with an esthetic philosophy, he had one
before he was finished with _Orestes_, Hauptmann’s _Festspiel_, and
_Everyman_, the productions which followed. This was visible in his
works as well as in the outgivings of his _Blätter des Deutschen
Theaters_.
Like MacKaye, Reinhardt found a tremendous fascination in the
relationship of this sort of production to man in the mass. In the
“theater of the five thousand,” as he called it, audiences are no
longer audiences. They are the people. “Their emotions are simple and
primitive, but great and powerful, as becomes the eternal human race.”
This follows from the nature of the theater and the relation of the
actors to the audience. Monumentality is the key note of such great
spaces. It is only the strongest and deepest feelings—the eternal
elements—that can move these great gatherings. The small and the petty
disappear.
Yet the emotion is direct and poignant, according to Reinhardt, because
of a spiritual intimacy established by the new relation of actors and
audience. In the Circus Schumann in Berlin Reinhardt revived the Greek
orchestra. At one end of the building was the front of a temple. The
actors came out in great mobs before the temple, upon an acting floor
surrounded on three sides by banks of spectators. In the theory and
the practice of Reinhardt there should be no curtain to conceal the
setting. When the spectator enters he finds himself in the midst of
great spaces, confronted by the whole scene, and himself a part of it.
When he is seated and the play begins he finds that “the chorus rises
and moves in the midst of the audience; the characters meet each other
amid the spectators; from all sides the hearer is being impressed, so
that gradually he becomes part of the whole, and is rapidly absorbed
in the action, a member of the chorus, so to speak.” This is a point
that Reinhardt has always stressed in his big productions. This desire
to make the spectators feel themselves participants is the same desire
that MacKaye has carried to the point of actually making them so.
Reinhardt stressed the importance of the actors being made one with the
audience through appearing in their midst. This maintained the intimacy
which, he felt, was the most valuable contribution of the realistic
movement in the theater—an intimacy produced in the main by the small
auditoriums required if conversational acting were to be audible.
Gigantic conceptions and tremendous emotional emphasis could thus be
brought home to the spectator.
Technically the circus-theater made interesting demands. From the
_régisseur_ and the scene designer it required the utmost simplicity.
Only the biggest and severest forms could be used. Light was the
main source of decoration; it emphasized the important and hid the
unessential. Acting, too, underwent the same test. The player had to
develop a simple and tremendous power. He had to dominate by intensity
and by dignity, by the vital and the great. There had to be music in
him, as there had to be music in the action itself.
The war prevented Reinhardt from continuing his experiments in
mass-production, and bringing them to fruition in a theater built
especially for the purpose. With the coming of peace he was able
to remodel and re-open the old Circus Schumann as the Grosses
Schauspielhaus. But in less than two years Reinhardt had left it in
discouragement, his great dream shattered. By the summer of 1922 it
could definitely be stamped an artistic failure—crowded to the doors
every night.
[Illustration:
An impression of the Grosses Schauspielhaus in Berlin. In the center
rises the great dome, dimly lit. At the left of the picture the
looming shadow of the hood above the forestage. A shaft of light from
the dome strikes across the space to the figure of Judith, standing
lonely and brave. Beyond, row after row of faces just visible in the
darkness.
]
It is not easy to trace the cause of failure, but it seems to lie in
the curious fact that here Reinhardt was both careless and too careful.
Physically the theater was wrong, if the theory was right, and its
physical mistakes can be traced to Reinhardt. He was too careful in
planning it and not courageous enough. Because he feared for its future
as a financial undertaking, he seems to have compromised it in form,
in order that it could be used as an ordinary, though huge playhouse
if it failed as a new kind of theater. He put in the Greek orchestra
surrounded on three sides by spectators. He made the floor flexible in
its levels, and led it up by adjustable platforms to a stage at one
side of the house. This much was right enough. But then he made
the thing a compromise between the Greek theater, a circus, and the
modern playhouse, by slapping a proscenium arch into the side wall and
installing behind it a huge stage with all the mechanical folderols of
the day—great dome, cloud-machine, revolving stage. It was beyond human
nature to resist the temptation of playing with the whole gigantic toy.
Neither Reinhardt nor the directors who succeeded him could be content,
as they should have been, to lower the curtain across the proscenium,
to plaster up the fourth wall. Perhaps there were not enough great
dramas like _Œdipus_ to draw for months the gigantic audiences needed
to support the venture; but this only meant that such a theater must be
maintained for festival performances, not that it must be filled with
bastard productions requiring a picture stage and largely inaudible
across the spaces of the Grosses Schauspielhaus.
Reinhardt was as careless in his selection of an architect as he
was careful in compromise. His original conception of the place was
excellent. He wanted it primitive and grand. He wanted it to soar. And
he thought of early Gothic. Between the pillars that had to be there to
support the roof of the old circus, he wanted a dark blue background, a
background of emptiness. The dome over the middle was to vanish into a
deep presence, lit sometimes by dim stars. Some one got to Reinhardt,
and persuaded him that he must be “modern;” he must assume a leadership
in architecture; he must give a chance to the greatest of the new
architects, Hans Poelzig. Reinhardt consented. And Poelzig produced a
very strange affair.
Some of the mistakes of the Grosses Schauspielhaus may be laid to the
old building. The banks of seats are rather close against the roof,
while the middle of the house is bridged by a gigantic dome. These
conditions might have been minimized by giving the low portion lines
that seemed to mount, and perhaps by closing in a large part of the
dome or darkening it. Instead Poelzig has made the dome the only
lovely and aspiring part of the architecture. It is a dream of soaring
circles. If the building could only be turned upside down, and the
actors could play in this flashing bowl, while the audience looked down
upon them—!
The whole house, its innumerable corridors, its foyers and promenades,
the walls of the auditorium, the ceiling, the capitals of the columns
that support the dome, the dome itself—every inch of the whole is
dominated by a single decorative _motif_, a very shoddy, cheap
_motif_. This is a pendant, stalactite arch, borrowed from the Moorish
architecture of Spain, and reduced to the lowest terms of mechanical
rudeness. The theater is of concrete and stucco, and this dull shape
is repeated endlessly and tediously, as if it had been scalloped out
by a machine. Only in the dome, or when it is no more than hinted
at in certain wall surfaces, does this shape do anything but bore
and depress. On top of this, Poelzig had stained the walls of many
corridors and rooms in a yawping red, and turned the main foyer into a
ghastly sea-green cavern. The theater is nervous, horrific, clangorous,
glowering. There is nothing fountain-like. No spirit wells up in
beauty. There is no dignity and no glory.
The fault may not be Poelzig’s, but the lighting of the stage and
orchestra seems unfortunately handled. Some of the lights for the inner
stage are placed in front of the arch of the proscenium instead of
behind it, and thus they illuminate it, and emphasize something that
ought not to be there at all, let alone pointed out. The lights for
the orchestra originally came wholly from the lower edge of the dome.
It was necessary, however, to supply more, and they have been placed
in an ugly red hood, which sticks out from the proscenium with no
relation to the rest of the house. The lights in the dome stab with a
glorious brilliance; the great beams seem to descend unendingly before
they reach the tiny figures of the actors, and spot them out of the
darkness. But these lights make the first mistake of trying to hide
themselves, and the second mistake of not succeeding in doing so. How
much better it would be if they were treated frankly as part of the
theater; if their source were admitted; if these lamps were hung in
great formal chandeliers made a part of the decorative design of the
production. For Romain Rolland’s _Danton_ the astute Ernst Stern hung
huge lanterns over the scene of the revolutionary tribunal; it was a
method that should have been perpetuated.
The productions that Reinhardt made are no longer to be seen in the
Grosses Schauspielhaus, for repertory vanished from his theaters along
with Reinhardt. You hear, however, of many interesting and beautiful
things in _Danton_, in _Œdipus_, in _Hamlet_, in _Julius Cæsar_, in
Hauptmann’s _Florian Geyer_. But you see no such things now, or at
least we did not see them when we were in Berlin. We saw the orchestra
filled with seats—perhaps to swell the meager seating capacity of three
thousand which was all Poelzig could include after he had wasted front
space on rows of boxes and wide-spaced chairs, and perhaps because the
new directors feared to use that glorious and terrible playing floor.
We saw the forestage shrunk to a platform jutting out perhaps twenty
feet. We saw a tedious performance of _Die Versunkene Glocke_, with the
action shoved into the realistic proscenium, with the scenic artist
fooling about with sloppily expressionist forms, and with the mountain
spirit hopping down the hillside with a resounding wooden thump. We saw
Hebbel’s _Judith_ done with much more effectiveness, though without
real daring or vision.
[Illustration:
The Inner Stage of the Grosses Schauspielhaus as set for the gates of
Holofernes’ palace. Designed by Ernst Schütte.
]
_Judith_, however, shows some of the possibilities of such a theater.
The beginning strikes in on the imagination with the impact of the
shaft of light that beats down on Holofernes, sitting like some idol
on his throne. Though he is almost back to the curtain line, instead
of out in the midst of the people, he drives home the effect of
seeing life in the round which such a theater can give. Here is talking
sculpture. The costumer, as well as the actor, is given a new problem:
the problem of clothes and the body that, like a statue, must mean
something from every angle, must have beauty and significance from
the back as much as from the front. The costume of Holofernes, at
least, achieved this. The actor has another problem, the problem of a
different movement and a different speech, movement slower and grander,
or else long and swift, speech that is more sonorous, more elaborately
spaced. The actor’s part—in spite of rather second-rate players—is
the part best done at the Grosses Schauspielhaus. There is a natural
aptitude in the German player for the grand, slow speech, the roaring
tempest. It is like the aptitude of the German people for the grand
slow play. They like drive, rather than speed. They want to hear dull
sonorous platitudes driven out by sheer belly-muscle.
There is one thing very beautiful in _Judith_ and in this theater. It
is the way a player can come forward to the edge of the forestage,
and stand there alone, stabbed at by a great white light, surrounded
first by emptiness, and beyond that by crowds, a brave figure alone
in a great dim space. That is something you cannot feel in the chummy
confines of a picture-frame.
The Grosses Schauspielhaus is a gigantic failure if you look at it
with vision—and also a great portent. The place is ugly, and its
purpose now debased, yet it hints at how beautiful a great, formal
theater could be, how moving and inspiring its drama. Even in the
wreckage, the idea still lives.
And if you try to bring a little of that same vision to the spectacle
of the man who made this failure, and who ran away, you cannot deny an
admiration for the courage to give up, to admit defeat, and then to go
to the church, and to try to do there, in the sanctified birthplace of
the modern theater, something to lift the spirit as high as the theater
of the five thousand was to have lifted it.