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ONE-ACT PLAYS
BY MODERN AUTHORS
EDITED BY
HELEN LOUISE COHEN, Ph.D.
Chairman of the Department of English in the
Washington Irving High School in the
City of New York
Author of "The Ballade"
NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
_All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form, by mimeograph or any other
means, without permission in writing from the publisher._
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. BY
QUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC.
RAHWAY, N. J.
To
M. S. S.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Had not both authors and publishers acted with the greatest
generosity, this collection could not have been made. Though the
editor cannot adequately express her sense of obligation, she wishes
at least to record explicitly her indebtedness to Mr. Harold
Brighouse, Lord Dunsany, Mr. John Galsworthy, Lady Gregory, Mr. Percy
MacKaye, Miss Jeannette Marks, Miss Josephine Preston Peabody,
Professor Robert Emmons Rogers, Mr. Booth Tarkington, and Professor
Stark Young. The editor also desires to thank Chatto & Windus,
Duffield & Company, Gowans & Gray, Ltd., Harper & Brothers, Little,
Brown & Company, John W. Luce & Company, G. P. Putnam's Sons, Charles
Scribner's Sons, and The Sunwise Turn, for permissions granted
ungrudgingly.
Through the courtesy of Mr. T. M. Cleland, director of the Beechwood
Players, the pictures of the Beechwood Theatre appear. Miss Mary W.
Carter, chairman of the Department of English in the High School in
Montclair, New Jersey, contributed the photographs of the Garden
Theatre. Other illustrations appear through the kindness of _Theatre
Arts Magazine_, and of The Neighborhood Playhouse.
The editor is grateful to Mrs. John W. Alexander, Mr. B. Iden Payne,
and Mrs. T. Bernstein for the privilege of personal conferences on the
subject of the book. To Mr. Robert Edmond Jones, who has allowed three
of his designs to be reproduced and who has read and corrected that
part of the Introduction that deals with The New Art of the Theatre,
the editor takes this opportunity of expressing her warm appreciation.
Finally, the editor wishes to thank her friend, Helen Hopkins Crandell
for her indefatigable work on the proofs of this book.
PREFACE
Perhaps the student who is going to read the plays in this collection
may have felt at some time or other a gap between the "classics" that
he was working over in school and the contemporary literature that he
heard commonly discussed, but he does not know that until recently few
books were studied in the high school that were less than half a
century old. Consciousness of the gap often drove him to trashy
reading. He recognized Addison as respectable but remote, and yet he
had no guide to the good literature which the writers of his own day
were producing and which would be especially interesting to him,
because its ideas and language would be more nearly contemporary with
his own.
Even though the greatest literature has the quality of universality,
it has been almost invariably my experience that, only as one grows
older, is one quite ready to appreciate this quality. When one is
young, it is easier to enjoy literature written from a point of view
nearer to one's own life and times. Reading good contemporary
literature is likely also to pave the way for a deeper appreciation of
the great masterpieces of all time.
This is a collection of one-act plays, some of them less than five
years old, chosen both because their appeal seems not to be limited to
the adult audiences for which they were originally written, and
because they may well serve the purpose of introducing the student to
contemporary dramatists of standing. Some of them, it is true, make
use of old stories and traditions, but the treatment is in all cases
modern, if we except the literary fashion that we find in Josephine
Preston Peabody's _Fortune and Men's Eyes_. This, though it is a
one-act play, a modern development, is written more or less in the
Shakespearian convention; but whether we are bookish or not, we can
hardly help having a knowledge of Shakespeare's plays, because,
popular with all kinds of people, they are continually being revived
on the stage, and quoted in conversation.
The plays in this book, though intended for class-room study, may be
acted as well as read. The general introduction will be found helpful
to groups who produce plays, to those who live in cities and go to the
theatre often, and to those who like to experiment with dramatic
composition. For this book was planned to encourage an understanding
attitude towards the theatre, to deepen the love that is latent in the
majority of us for what is beautiful and uplifting in the drama, and
to make playgoing a less expensive, more regular, and more intelligent
diversion for the generation that is growing up.
H. L. C.
Washington Irving High School,
New York, 1 February, 1921.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION Page
The Workmanship of the One-Act Play xiii
Theatres of To-day
The Commercial Theatre and the Repertory Idea xx
The Little Theatre xxiii
The Irish National Theatre xxvi
The New Art of the Theatre xxix
Playmaking xxxiv
The Theatre in the School l
ROBERT EMMONS ROGERS
THE BOY WILL xxxviii
BOOTH TARKINGTON
Introduction 3
BEAUTY AND THE JACOBIN 5
ERNEST DOWSON
Introduction 53
THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE 55
OLIPHANT DOWN
Introduction 77
THE MAKER OF DREAMS 79
PERCY MACKAYE
Introduction 97
GETTYSBURG 99
A. A. MILNE
Introduction 113
WURZEL-FLUMMERY 115
HAROLD BRIGHOUSE
Introduction 139
MAID OF FRANCE 141
LADY GREGORY
Introduction 157
SPREADING THE NEWS 159
JEANNETTE MARKS
Introduction 179
WELSH HONEYMOON 181
JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE
Introduction 195
RIDERS TO THE SEA 198
LORD DUNSANY
Introduction 211
A NIGHT AT AN INN 213
STARK YOUNG
Introduction 226
THE TWILIGHT SAINT 227
LADY ALIX EGERTON
Introduction 241
THE MASQUE OF THE TWO STRANGERS 244
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
Introduction 265
THE INTRUDER 268
JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY
Introduction 287
FORTUNE AND MEN'S EYES 289
JOHN GALSWORTHY
Introduction 323
THE LITTLE MAN 325
ILLUSTRATIONS
Page
_Twelfth Night_ on the stage of the Theatre du Vieux
Colombier in New York xxiv
Design for _The Merchant of Venice_ by Robert Edmond Jones xxx
Design for _Good Gracious Annabelle_ by Robert Edmond Jones xxxii
Design for _The Seven Princesses_ by Robert Edmond Jones xxxiv
The Beechwood Theatre. Exterior and Interior lviii
The Garden Theatre. The original site, and the theatre as it
looks to-day lx
Setting for _The Maker of Dreams_ at The Neighborhood Playhouse
designed by Aline Bernstein 79
Costumes for _The Masque of the Two Strangers_ designed at the
Washington Irving High School.
Plate 1 240
Plate 2 253
Setting for _The Intruder_ designed by Sam Hume 268
INTRODUCTION
THE WORKMANSHIP OF THE ONE-ACT PLAY
The one-act play is a new form of the drama and more emphatically a
new form of literature. Its possibilities began to attract the
attention of European and American writers in the last decade of the
nineteenth century, those years when so many dramatic traditions
lapsed and so many precedents were established. It is significant that
the oldest play in the present collection is Maeterlinck's _The
Intruder_, published in 1890.
The history of this new form is of necessity brief. Before its vogue
became general, one-act plays were being presented in vaudeville
houses in this country and were being used as curtain raisers in
London theatres for the purpose of marking time until the late-dining
audiences should arrive. With the exception of the famous Grand
Guignol Theatre in Paris, where the entertainment for an evening might
consist of several one-act plays, all of the hair-raising,
blood-curdling variety, programs composed entirely of one-act plays
were rare. Sir James Matthew Barrie is usually credited with being the
first in England to write one-act plays intended to be grouped in a
single production. A program of this character has been uncommon in
the commercial theatre in America, but three of Barrie's one-act
plays, constituting a single program, have met with enthusiastic
response from American audiences.
There are two new developments in the history of the theatre that have
encouraged and promoted the writing of one-act plays: the one is the
Repertory Theatre abroad and the other is the Little Theatre movement
on both sides of the Atlantic. The repertory of the Irish Players, for
example, is composed largely of one-act plays, and American Little
Theatres are given over almost exclusively to the one-act play.
The one-act play is in reality so new a phenomenon, in spite of the
use that has been made of the form by playwrights like Pinero,
Hauptmann, Chekov, Shaw, and others of the first rank, that it is
still generally ignored in books on dramatic workmanship.[1] None the
less, the status of the one-act play is established and a study of the
plays of this length, which are rapidly increasing in number,
discloses certain tendencies and laws which are exemplified in the
form itself. Clayton Hamilton sums up the matter well when he says:
"The one-act play is admirable in itself, as a medium of art. It shows
the same relation to the full-length play as the short-story shows to
the novel. It makes a virtue of economy of means. It aims to produce a
single dramatic effect with the greatest economy of means that is
consistent with the utmost emphasis. The method of the one-act play at
its best is similar to the method employed by Browning in his dramatic
monologues. The author must suggest the entire history of a soul by
seizing it at some crisis of its career and forcing the spectator to
look upon it from an unexpected and suggestive point of view. A
one-act play in exhibiting the present should imply the past and
intimate the future. The author has no leisure for laborious
exposition; but his mere projection of a single situation should sum
up in itself the accumulated results of many antecedent causes.... The
form is complete, concise and self-sustaining; it requires an
extraordinary force of imagination."[2]
[Footnote 1: See, however, Clayton Hamilton, _Studies in
Stagecraft_, New York, 1914, and B. Roland Lewis, _The
Technique of the One-Act Play_, Boston, 1918.]
[Footnote 2: Clayton Hamilton, _Studies in Stagecraft_, New
York, 1914, pp. 254-255.]
To follow for a moment a train of thought suggested by Mr. Hamilton's
timely and appreciative comment on the technique of the one-act play:
All writers on the short-story agree that, to use Poe's phrase, "the
vastly important artistic element, totality, or unity of effect" is
indispensable to the successful short-story. This singleness of effect
is an equally important consideration in the structure of the one-act
play. A short-story is not a condensed novel any more than a one-act
play is a condensed full-length play. There is no fixed length for the
one-act play any more than there is for the short-story. The one-act
play must have its "dominant incident" and "dominant character" like
the short-story. The effect of the one-act play, as of the
short-story, is measured by the way it makes its readers and
spectators feel. Neither the short-story nor the one-act play need
necessarily "be founded on one of the passionate _cruces_ of life,
where duty and inclination come nobly to the grapple." One has but to
consider the short-stories of Henry James or the one-act plays of
Galsworthy or of Maeterlinck to be convinced that a _violent_ struggle
is not necessary to the art of either form.
This point is further illustrated in what Galsworthy himself says in
general about drama in his famous essay, _Some Platitudes Concerning
the Drama_, which should be read in connection with his satirical
comedy, _The Little Man_. In that essay Galsworthy writes: "The plot!
A good plot is that sure edifice which slowly rises out of the
interplay of circumstance on temperament, and temperament on
circumstance, within the enclosing atmosphere of an idea. A human
being is the best plot there is.... Now true dramatic action is what
characters do, at once contrary, as it were, to expectation, and yet
because they have already done other things.... Good dialogue again is
character, marshaled so as continually to stimulate interest or
excitement." This commentary of Galsworthy's on dramatic technique
offers to the student of _The Little Man_ an unusual opportunity to
verify a great critic's theory by a great playwright's practice. It is
indeed the _character_ of the Little Man that is the plot in this
case; the plot may be said to begin when, according to stage
direction, the hapless Baby wails, and to be well launched with the
Little Man's deprecatory, "Herr Ober! Might I have a glass of beer?"
These words distinguish him immediately from his bullying companions
in the buffet. The highest point of interest, like the beginning of
the plot, is to be found in the play of the Little Man's personality,
at the point where he is left alone with the Baby, now a typhus
suspect, and after an instant's wavering, bends all his puny energies
to pacifying its uneasy cry. Again, the end of the plot comes with the
tribute of the bewildered but adoring mother to the ineffably gentle
Little Man.
But a one-act play that has any pretensions to literature must be
looked upon as a law unto itself and should not be expected to conform
to any set of arbitrary requirements. As a matter of fact, there are
only a very few generalizations that can be made with regard to the
structure or to the classification of the one-act play. Even this book
contains plays that are not susceptible of any hard and fast
classification. _The Intruder_ and _Riders to the Sea_ are indubitably
tragedies, but _Fortune and Men's Eyes_, dealing, as it does, with the
tragic theme of love's disillusionment, belongs not at all with the
plays of Maeterlinck and Synge, shadowed, as they are, by death. And
though the deaths are many and bloody in _A Night at an Inn_, the
unreality of the romance is so strong that there is no such wrenching
of the human sympathies as we associate with tragedy. _The Pierrot of
the Minute_ is superficially a Harlequinade, but Dowson's insistence
on the theme of satiety brings it narrowly within the range of satire.
_Beauty and the Jacobin_ is rich in comedy; so is Lady Gregory's
_Spreading the News_, and in both, the situations change imperceptibly
from comedy to farce and from farce back to comedy.
The laws of the structure of the one-act play are in the nature of
dramatic art no less flexible. It can be said that in order to secure
that singleness of impression that is as essential to the one-act play
as to the short-story, a single well sustained theme is necessary, a
theme announced in some fashion early in the play. Indeed since the
one-act play is a short dramatic form, it may be said in regard to the
announcing of the theme that, "'Twere well it were done quickly." In
_Spreading the News_, the curtain is barely up before Mrs. Tarpey is
telling the magistrate: "Business, is it? What business would the
people here have but to be minding one another's business?" And at
approximately the same moment in the action of _The Intruder_, the
uncle, foreshadowing the theme of the mysterious coming of death,
says: "When once illness has come into a house, it is as though a
stranger had forced himself into the family circle."
The single dominant theme for its dramatic expression calls also for a
single situation developing to a single climax. In the case of
_Fortune and Men's Eyes_, it is the ballad-monger, who in crying his
wares,
"Plays, Play not Fair,
Or how a _gentlewoman's_ heart was took
By a player, that was King in a stage-play,"
gives us in the first few minutes of the play his ironical clue to the
theme. And this theme is worked out in Mary Fytton's shallow intrigue
with William Herbert, which culminates in the shattering of the
Player's dream on that autumn day in South London at "The Bear and the
Angel."
The single situation exemplifying the theme of _The Intruder_ is found
in the repeatedly expressed premonitions of the blind Grandfather,
stationary in his armchair, whose heightened senses detect the
presence of the Mysterious Stranger. The unity of effect secured in
this play is only rivaled, not surpassed, by the wonderful totality of
impression experienced by the reader of _The Fall of the House of
Usher_. The unity of effect in _The Intruder_ is secured also by
Maeterlinck's description of the setting, which reminds the playgoer
or the reader inevitably of Stevenson's familiar words: "Certain dark
gardens cry aloud for murder; certain old houses demand to be
haunted."
In general, as has been said, the plot of the one-act play, because of
the time limitations, admits of no distracting incidents. For the same
reason the characterization must be swift and direct. By Bartley
Fallon's first speech in _Spreading the News_, Lady Gregory
characterizes him completely. He needs but say: "Indeed it's a poor
country and a scarce country to be living in. But I'm thinking if I
went to America it's long ago the day I'd be dead," and the
fundamental part of his character is fixed in the minds of the
audience. From that moment it is just a question of filling in the
picture with pantomime and further dialogue.
The characterization of the Player in _Fortune and Men's Eyes_ begins
at the moment that he enters the tavern, when Wat, the bear-ward,
calls out:
"I say, I've played.... There's not one man
Of all the gang--save one.... Ay, there be one
I grant you, now!... He used me in right sort;
A man worth better trades."
Wat's verdict on the fair-mindedness of Master William Shakespeare of
the Lord Chamberlain's company is borne out by the Player's own,
"High fortune, man!
Commend me to thy bear."
[_Drinks and passes him the cup._]
The entrance of the ballad-monger gives Master Will an opening for a
punning jest and, the action continuing, shows him sympathetic to the
strayed lady-in-waiting, tender to the tavern boy, magnanimous to the
false friend and falser love.
One method of characterization which the author allows herself to use
in this play, no doubt to heighten the Elizabethan illusion, is rare
in the contemporary drama: when this "dark lady of the sonnets" flees
"The Bear and the Angel," the Player breaks forth into the
self-revealing soliloquy, found so frequently in his own plays, and
continuing as a dramatic convention until the last quarter of the
nineteenth century.[3]
[Footnote 3: The Elizabethan platform stage survived until
then in the shape of the long "apron," projecting in front of
the proscenium. The characters were constantly stepping out
of the frame of the picture; and while this visual convention
maintained itself, there was nothing inconsistent or jarring
in the auditory convention of the soliloquy. See William
Archer, _Play-Making_, Boston, 1912, pp. 397-405.]
Characterization rests in part on pantomime. In _The Little Man_, the
Dutch Youth is dumb throughout the play, but he is sufficiently
characterized by his foolish demeanor and his recurrent laugh. The
part of the Little Man himself is one long gesture of humility and
dedication. In those one-act plays in which the old characters of the
Harlequinade reappear, like _The Maker of Dreams_ and _The Pierrot of
the Minute_, pantomime transcends dialogue as a method of
characterization. In the plays of the Irish dramatists, Synge, Yeats,
and Lady Gregory, pantomime and dialogue contribute equally to the
characterization, which is of a very high order, since all these
dramatists were close observers of the Irish peasant characters of
their plays.
Synge, especially, illustrates the following critical theory of
Galsworthy: "The art of writing true dramatic dialogue is an austere
art, denying itself all license, grudging every sentence devoted to
the mere machinery of the play, suppressing all jokes and epigrams
severed from character, relying for fun and pathos on the fun and
tears of life. From start to finish good dialogue is hand-made, like
good lace; clear, of fine texture, furthering with each thread the
harmony and strength of a design to which all must be subordinated." A
study of the dialogue of _Riders to the Sea_ reveals just this harmony
between the dialogue and the inevitability of the plot, the dialogue
and the simplicity of the characters.
The dialogue in _The Little Man_ is the very idiom one would expect to
issue from the mouth of the German colonel, the Englishman with the
Oxford voice, or the intensely national American, as the case may be.
The characters, though they have type names, are, as Mr. Galsworthy
would probably be the first to explain, highly individualized. The
author does not intend us to think that all Americans are like this
loud-voiced traveler, or all Englishmen like the pharisaical gentleman
who gives his wife the advertisements to read while he secures the
news sheet for himself.
The function of dialogue is the same both in the long and in the short
play. For, of course, both forms have many things in common. For
instance, as in the full-length play it is necessary for the dramatist
to carry forward the interest from act to act, to provide a "curtain"
that will leave the audience in a state of suspense, so in the one-act
play, the interest must be similarly relayed though the plot is
confined to a single act. In _The Intruder_, every premonition
expressed by the Grandfather grips the audience in such a way that
they await from minute to minute the coming of the mysterious
stranger. The tension is high in _A Night at an Inn_ from the moment
the curtain rises. In _Riders to the Sea_, the beginning of the
suspense coincides with the opening of the play and lasts. "They're
all gone now, and there isn't anything more the sea can do to me,"
says Maurya, and the audience experiences a rush of relief and a sense
of release that the last words, "No man at all can be living for ever,
and we must be satisfied," seem only to deepen.
A one-act play, then, has many structural features in common with the
short-story; its plot must from beginning to end be dominated by a
single theme; its crises may be crises of character as well as
conflicts of will or physical conflicts; it must by a method of
foreshadowing sustain the interest of the audience unflaggingly, but
ultimately relieve their tension; it must achieve swift
characterization by means of pantomime and dialogue; and its dialogue
must achieve its effects by the same methods as the dialogue of longer
plays, but by even greater economy of means. But when all is said and
done, the success of a one-act play is judged not by its conformity to
any set of hard and fast rules, but by its power to interest,
enlighten, and hold an audience.
THEATRES OF TO-DAY
THE COMMERCIAL THEATRE AND THE REPERTORY IDEA
The term "Commercial Theatre" is rarely used without disparagement.
The critic or the playwright who speaks of the Commercial Theatre
usually does so either for the purpose of reflecting on the cheapness
of the entertainment afforded, or in order to call attention to
spectacular receipts.
In this country the Commercial Theatre stands for that form of big
business in the theatrical world that produces dividends on the money
invested comparable to those earned by the most prosperous of the
large industries. This system has been, on the whole, a bad thing for
the drama, because managers with their eye on attractions that should
yield a return, let us say, of over ten per cent on the investment,
have been unable to produce the superior play with an appeal to a
definite, though perhaps limited audience, and have had to offer to
the public the kind of play that would draw large audiences over a
long period of time. The "longest run for the safest possible play" is
thus conspicuously associated with the Commercial Theatre. As Clayton
Hamilton says: "The trouble with the prevailing theatre system in
America to-day is not that this system is commercial; for in any
democratic country, it is not unreasonable to expect the public to
defray the cost of the sort of drama that it wishes, and that,
therefore, it deserves. The trouble is, rather, that our theatre
system is devoted almost entirely to big business; and that in
ignoring the small profits of small business it tends to exclude not
only the uncommercial drama, but the non-commercial drama as well."[4]
Here he makes a distinction between an "uncommercial" play, that is, a
play that is a failure with all kinds of audiences, and the
"noncommercial" play, which is capable of holding its own financially
and yielding modest returns.
[Footnote 4: Clayton Hamilton, _The Non-Commercial Drama_.
_The Bookman_, May, 1915.]
In the days before the pooling of theatrical interests in this
country there were indeed long runs, but in many of the large
American cities "stock companies," composed of groups of actors and
actresses all of about the same reputation and ability, were
maintained that kept a number of plays, a "repertory," before the
public in the course of a season and gave scope for experiment with
various kinds of plays. But the "star system," which has now become
common, has tended to drive out the "stock company" idea, with the
result that the average company rests on the reputation of the "star"
and dispenses with distinction in the "support." With the decay of the
stock company, the repertory system, in the form in which it did once
exist here in the Commercial Theatre, has also declined.
Both in Great Britain and in America the repertory system, long
established on the Continent, has been reintroduced in order to combat
the practices of the Commercial Theatre. For the most part the new
repertory theatres have been endowed either by the State or by private
individuals. "Absolute endowment for absolute freedom,"[5] has seemed
to at least one American the only means of delivering the drama from
commercial bondage. This phrase of Percy MacKaye's expresses his
cherished belief that endowed civic theatres, which should encourage
the participation of whole communities in a community form of drama,
are what is needed in a democracy. John Masefield, in the following
lines from the prologue written for the opening of the Liverpool
Repertory Theatre, has found a poetic theme in this idea of an endowed
theatre:
"Men will not spend, it seems, on that one art
Which is life's inmost soul and passionate heart;
They count the theatre a place for fun,
Where man can laugh at nights when work is done.
If it were only that, 'twould be worth while
To subsidize a thing which makes men smile;
But it is more; it is that splendid thing,
A place where man's soul shakes triumphant wing;
A place of art made living, where men may see
What human life is and has seemed to be
To the world's greatest brains....
O you who hark
Fan to a flame through England this first spark,
Till in this land there's none so poor of purse
But he may see high deeds and hear high verse,
And feel his folly lashed, and think him great
In this world's tragedy of Life and Fate."[6]
[Footnote 5: Percy MacKaye, _The Playhouse and the Play_, New
York, 1909, p. 86.]
[Footnote 6: Quoted by Percy MacKaye in _The Civic Theatre_,
New York, 1912, p. 114.]
In Great Britain repertory is associated with the interest and
generosity of Miss A. E. F. Horniman, who will be mentioned in
connection with the Irish National Theatre, and through whom, after
some preliminary experiment, the Gaiety Theatre at Manchester was
opened as the first repertory house in England, in the spring of 1908.
Fifty-five different plays were produced in a little over two
years--"twenty-eight new, seventeen revivals of modern English plays,
five modern translations, and five classics."[7] In Miss Horniman's
own words, her interest was in a Civilized Theatre. "A Civilized
Theatre," she has written, "means that a city has something of
cultivation in it, something to make literature grow; a real theatre,
not a mere amusing toy. What we want is the opportunity for our men
and women, our boys and girls to get a chance to see the works of the
greatest dramatists of modern times, as well as the classics, for
their pleasure as well as their cultivation.... Young dramatists
should have a theatre where they can see the ripe works of the masters
and see them well acted at a moderate price. There should be in every
city a theatre where we can see the best drama worthily treated."[8]
Owing to war conditions, the Manchester project has had to be
abandoned, and so, for the most part, have other similar enterprises.
They rarely became self-supporting, but depended on subsidy of one
kind or another, which under new economic conditions is no longer
forthcoming. The Birmingham Repertory Theatre continues, however,
under the direction of John Drinkwater, and has become famous through
its production of his _Abraham Lincoln_. "John Drinkwater, I see, has
recently defined a Repertory Theatre," writes William Archer, in his
latest article on the subject, "as one which 'puts plays into stock
which are good enough to stay there.'" Enlarging this definition, I
should call it a theatre which excluded the long unbroken run; which
presents at least three different programs in each week (though a
popular success may be performed three or even four times a week
throughout a whole season); which can produce plays too good to be
enormously popular; which makes a principle of keeping alive the great
drama of the past, whether recent or remote; which has a company so
large that it can, without overworking its actors, keep three or four
plays ready for instant presentation; which possesses an ample stage
equipped with the latest artistic and labor-saving appliances; and
which offers such comfort in front of the house as to encourage an
intelligent public to make it an habitual place of resort.
[Footnote 7: P. P. Howe, _The Repertory Theatre_, New York,
1911, p. 59.]
[Footnote 8: A. E. F. Horniman, _The Manchester Players_,
_Poet Lore_, Vol. XXV, No. 3, p. 212; p. 213.]
"That there exists in every great American city an intelligent public
large enough to support one or more such playhouses is to my mind
indisputable. But the theatre might have to be run at a loss for two
or three opening seasons, until it had attracted and educated its
habitual supporters. For even a public of high general intelligence
needs a certain amount of special education in things of the theatre."
This testimony is in a highly optimistic vein.
A talk with B. Iden Payne, once director of the Manchester Players,
reveals the fact that in England at the present time the repertory
idea is being taken over with more promise of success by the small
groups that represent the Little Theatre movement in that country. The
repertory theatre there did succeed in arousing in the locality in
which, for the time being, it existed an interest in intelligent
plays, but it was not equally successful in confirming a distaste for
unintelligent plays. The study of these experiments will repay
Americans who are interested in seeing the repertory idea fostered
over here by endowment or otherwise.
THE LITTLE THEATRE
The year 1911 saw the beginning in the United States of the Little
Theatre movement, which has grown with phenomenal rapidity and has
spread in all directions. The first Little Theatres in this country
were located in large cities; but in the course of time the idea has
penetrated to small towns and rural communities all over the United
States. Barns, wharves, saloons, and school assembly halls have been
transformed into intimate little playhouses. There were European
precedents for this idea. The Theatre Libre, opened in Paris in 1887
by Andre Antoine as a protest against the kind of play then in favor,
is generally called the first of this type. In the years from 1887 to
1911 Little Theatres were opened in Russia, in Belgium, in Germany, in
Sweden, in Hungary, in England, in Ireland, and in France. In Europe
these theatres came into being, generally speaking, in order to give
freer play to the new arts of the theatre or for the purpose of
encouraging a more intellectual type of drama than was being produced
in the larger houses.
There are two conceptions of the Little Theatre current in the United
States. According to one, it is a theatrical organization housed in a
simple building, that makes its productions in the most economical
way, does not pay its actors, does not charge admission, and uses
scenery and properties that are cheaply manufactured at home.
[Illustration: _Twelfth Night_ on the stage of the Theatre du Vieux
Colombier, New York.]
The Little Theatre is, however, more commonly conceived of as a
repertory theatre supported by the subscription system, producing its
plays on a small stage in a small hall, selecting for production the
kind of play not likely to be used by the Commercial Theatre, most
frequently the one-act play, and committed to experiments in stage
decoration, lighting, and the other stage arts. The Little Theatre and
the one-act play have developed each other reciprocally, for the
Little Theatre has encouraged the writing of one-act plays in Europe
and in this country. The one-act play is the natural unit of
production in the Little Theatre, both because it requires a less
sustained performance from the actors, who have frequently been
amateurs, and because it has offered in the same evening several
opportunities to the various groups of artists collaborating in the
productions of the Little Theatre. Though the movement has had the
effect of stimulating community spirit and has been the means of
solving grave community problems, the Little Theatre is not, in the
technical sense, a community theatre; in the sense, that is, in which
Percy MacKaye uses the word. It is not, in fact, so portentous an
enterprise, because it does not enlist the participation of every
member of a community. The community theatre is an example of civic
co-operation on a large scale; the Little Theatre, of the same kind
of co-operation on a small scale.
Notably artistic results have been achieved by such Little Theatres as
The Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, built in 1914 by the Misses
Irene and Alice Lewisohn, in connection with the social settlement
idea, to provide expression for the talents of a community that had
been previously trained in dramatic classes for some years; by the
Chicago Little Theatre, founded in 1911, now no longer in existence,
but for a few years under the direction of Maurice Browne, a disciple
of Gordon Craig's; by the Detroit Theatre of Arts and Crafts, once
under the direction of Mr. Sam Hume, also a follower of Gordon
Craig's; by the Washington Square Players, who during several seasons
in New York gave a remarkable impetus to the writing of one-act plays
in America; by the Provincetown Players, whose first productions were
made on Cape Cod, who later opened a small playhouse in New York, and
who gave the public an opportunity to know the plays of Eugene
O'Neill; by the Portmanteau Theatre of Stuart Walker, that uses but
one setting in its productions, but varies the effect with different
colored lights, and as its name implies, is portable, one of the few
of its kind in the world; by the 47 Workshop Theatre that has arisen
as the result of the course in playwriting given at Harvard University
by Professor George Pierce Baker, and the productions of which have
served to introduce many new writers; and by the Theatre du Vieux
Colombier, that came to New York from Paris in 1917, and remained for
two seasons to illustrate the best French practice. These theatres
also enjoy the distinction of having experimented with repertory.
The Theatre du Vieux Colombier was organized and is directed by
Jacques Copeau. It is no casual amateur experiment. Its actors are
professionals and its director is a scholar and an artist. In
preparation for the original opening the company went into the country
and established a little colony. "During five hours of each day they
studied repertoire but they did far more. They performed exercises in
physical culture and the dance: they read aloud and acted improvised
dramatic scenes. They worked thus upon their bodies, their voices and
their actions: made them subtle instruments in their command." They
learned that in an artistic production every gesture, every word,
every line, and every color counted. Naturally no group of amateurs or
semi-professionals can approach the results of a company trained as M.
Copeau's is. When he was over here, he was much interested in our
Little Theatres. He said in one of his addresses: "All the _little
theatres_ which now swarm in America, ought to come to an
understanding among themselves and unite, instead of trying to keep
themselves apart and distinctive. The ideas which they possess in
common have not even begun to be put into execution. They must be
incorporated into life."[9]
[Footnote 9: The kind of co-operation to which he looked
forward is beginning. For instance, the New York Drama League
announces a Little Theatre membership. "Its purpose is to
serve the needs of the large and constantly growing public
that is interested in the activities of the semi-professional
and amateur community groups who read or produce plays. Under
this new Membership there will be issued monthly, for ten
issues a Play List of five pages, giving a concise but
complete synopsis of new plays, both one-act and longer
plays. It will show the number of characters required; the
kind of audience to which the play would be likely to appeal;
the royalty asked for production rights; the production
necessities and other information of value to production
groups or individuals. One page will be devoted to three or
four standard older plays treated with the same detail of
information. The Little Theatre Supplement ... will continue
to be issued each month, but will hereafter be a feature of
the Little Theatre Membership only. It will contain the
programs of the Little Theatres throughout the country; short
accounts of what is going on among the various groups, and
articles on Little Theatre problems, with hints on new,
effective and economical methods of production."]
The native Little Theatres, much simpler affairs than the Vieux
Colombier, persist. They have made a place for themselves in American
life, among the farms, in the suburbs, in the small towns, and in the
cities. Sometimes, no doubt, they are like the one in Sinclair Lewis's
Gopher Prairie; or they hardly outlast a season. But new ones spring
up to replace those that have gone out of existence, and meanwhile the
ends of wholesome community recreation are being served.
THE IRISH NATIONAL THEATRE
About 1890 began the movement which has since been known as the Celtic
Renaissance, a movement that had for its object the lifting into
literature of the songs, myths, romances, and legends treasured for
countless generations in the hearts of the Irish peasantry. In the
same decade in Great Britain and on the Continent, tendencies were at
work looking to the reform of the drama and its rescue from commercial
formulas. The genesis of the Irish National Theatre, a pioneer in the
field of repertory in Great Britain, and one of the first of the
Little Theatres, is due to both of these influences.
Its first form was the Irish Literary Theatre, founded in 1899 by
Edward Martyn, the author of _The Heather Field_ and _Maeve_, George
Moore, and William Butler Yeats. The first play produced by this
organization was Yeats's _Countess Cathleen_. This enterprise employed
only English actors, and did not assume to be purely national in
scope. It came to an end in October, 1901. It was in October, 1902,
that in _Samhain_, the organ of the Irish National Theatre, William
Butler Yeats made the following announcement: "The Irish Literary
Theatre has given place to a company of Irish actors." The nucleus of
this new Irish National Theatre was certain companies of amateurs that
W. G. Fay had assembled. These companies were composed of people who
were unable to give full time to their interest in the drama, but who
came from the office or the shop to rehearse at odd moments during the
day and in the evening. The Irish National Theatre really developed
from these amateur companies. It was strictly national in scope. The
advisers, who were to include Synge, Lady Gregory, Padraic Colum,
William Butler Yeats, and others, looked to the Irish National Theatre
to bring the drama back to the people, to whom plays dealing with
society life meant nothing. They intended also that their plays
"should give them [the people] a quite natural pleasure, should either
tell them of their own life, or of that life of poetry where every man
can see his own magic, because there alone does human nature escape
from arbitrary conditions." This program has been carried out with
remarkable success.
October, 1902, is the date for the beginning of the Irish National
Theatre. At first W. G. Fay, and his brother, Frank Fay, were in
charge of the productions, the former as stage manager. Frank Fay had
charge of training a company, in which the star system was unknown. He
had studied French methods of stage diction and gesture, and the Irish
Players are generally said to show the results of his familiarity with
great French models. In 1913 a school of acting was organized in
order to perpetuate the tradition created by the Fays.
Among the most famous playwrights who have written for the Irish
National Theatre are Padraic Colum, John Millington Synge, William
Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, St. John G. Ervine, AE (George W. Russell),
and Lord Dunsany. At one time the theatre sent out, in a circular
addressed to aspiring authors who showed promise, the following
counsel: "A play to be suitable for performance at the Abbey should
contain some criticism of life, founded on the experience or personal
observation of the writer, or some vision of life, of Irish life by
preference, important from its beauty or from some excellence of
style, and this intellectual quality is not more necessary to tragedy
than to the gayest comedy."[10]
[Footnote 10: Lady Gregory, _Our Irish Theatre_, New York,
1913, p. 101.]
In 1904 the Irish National Theatre was housed for the first time in
its own playhouse, the Abbey Theatre. This change was made possible by
the generosity of Miss A. E. F. Horniman, who saw the Irish Players
when they first went to London in 1903. It was she who obtained the
lease of the Mechanics' Institute in Dublin, increased its capacity,
and rebuilt it, giving it rent free to the Players from 1904 to 1909,
in addition to an annual subsidy which she allowed them. In 1910 the
Abbey Theatre was bought from her by public subscription. The next
year, the Irish Players paid their famous visit to the United States.
The Irish National Dramatic Company was organized as a protest against
current theatrical practices. Its founders purposed to reform the
various arts of the theatre. By encouraging native playwrights they
hoped to do for the drama of Ireland what Ibsen and other writers had
done for the drama in Scandinavian countries, where people go to the
theatre to think as well as to feel. It was not intended in any sense
that these new Irish players were to serve the purpose of propaganda;
truth was not to be compromised in the service of a cause. Acting,
too, was to be improved: redundant gesture was to be suppressed;
repose was to be given its full value; speech was to be made more
important than gesture. Yeats in particular had theories as to the way
in which verse should be spoken on the stage; he advocated a cadenced
chant, monotonous but not sing-song, for the delivery of poetry. The
simplification of costume and setting was also included in their
scheme, for both were to be strictly accessory to the speech and
movement of the characters.
They have been faithful to their ideals. The performances at the Abbey
Theatre continue, although from time to time certain of the most
eminent actors of the company have withdrawn, some to migrate to
America. Among the plays produced in 1919 and 1920 by the National
Theatre Society at the Abbey Theatre are W. B. Yeats's _The Land of
Heart's Desire_, G. B. Shaw's _Androcles and the Lion_, Lady Gregory's
_The Dragon_, and Lord Dunsany's _The Glittering Gate_.
THE NEW ART OF THE THEATRE
There are certain facts about the artistic transformation that the
theatre is undergoing in the twentieth century with which students of
the drama need to be familiar in order to picture for themselves how
plays can be interpreted by means of design, color, and light. The
transformation is definitely connected with a few famous names. In
Europe two men, Edward Gordon Craig and Max Reinhardt, stand out as
reformers in matters connected with the construction, the lighting,
and the design of stage settings. In this country the artists of the
theatre are, generally speaking, disciples of one or both of these
great Europeans and their colleagues. The new stage artist studies the
characterization and the situations in the play, the production of
which he is directing, and tries to make his setting suggestive of the
physical and emotional atmosphere in which the action of the drama
moves.
Gordon Craig has written several books and many articles embodying his
ideas on play production. In all his writings he emphasizes the
importance of having one individual with complete authority and
complete knowledge in charge of coordinating and subordinating the
various arts that go to make the production of a play a symmetrical
whole, his theory being that there is no one art that can be called to
the exclusion of all others _the_ Art of the Theatre: not the acting,
not the play, not the setting, not the dance; but that all these
properly harmonized through the personality of the director become the
Art of the Theatre.
The kind of setting that has become identified in the popular mind
with Gordon Craig is the simple monochrome background composed either
of draperies or of screens. It is unfortunate that this popular idea
should be so limited because, of course, the name of Gordon Craig
should carry with it the suggestion of an infinite variety of ways of
interpreting the play through design. His screens, built to stand
alone, vary in number from one to four and sometimes have as many as
ten leaves. They are either made of solid wood or are wooden frames
covered with canvas. The screens with narrow leaves may be used to
produce curved forms, and screens with broad leaves to enclose large
rectangular spaces. The screens are one form of the setting composed
of adjustable units, which can be adapted in an infinite variety of
ways to the needs of the play.
The new ideas in European stagecraft began to be popularized in
America in the year 1914-15, when under the auspices of the Stage
Society, Sam Hume, now teaching the arts of the theatre at the
University of California, and Kenneth Macgowan, the dramatic critic,
arranged an exhibition that was shown in New York, Chicago, and other
great centres, of new stage sets designed by Robert Edmond Jones, Sam
Hume, and others who have since become famous. The models displayed on
this occasion brought before the public for the first time the new
method of lighting which, as much as anything else, differentiates the
new theatre art from the old. It introduced the device of a concave
back wall made of plaster, sometimes called by its German name
"horizont," and a lighting equipment that would dye this plaster
horizon with colors that melted into one another like the colors in
the sky; a stage with "dimmers" for every circuit of lights, and
sockets for high-power lamps at any spot from the stage.