USA > New York > New York City > New York panorama : a comprehensive view of the metropolis > Part 28
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Evaluating the drama of the Bowery era, and of the decades immedi- ly following it, is a matter that demands caution in the use of gener- zations. If some of the offerings seem at this date incredibly puerile,
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:ely no one could complain of the frequent presentations of Shake- Parti eare, of Congreve and Steele, of The Beggar's Opera. And if there is a ief today that much of the old-time acting was overdone, full of sound d fury, it must be noted that theatrical conventions change. Authorities ica thave pointed out that the lighting of the early stage was so uncertain and h
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dim that the actor, fearful of not being seen, at least wanted to inake su of being heard.
With the middle of the 19th century, the pace of affairs in the theat perceptibly quickened. Dion Boucicault arrived from London in 1853, become later on, with his novel production devices, "the upholsterer the American stage." Boucicault, a man of prodigious energy, staged ai adapted many plays that did much to set the fashion of the period. Asi from his many activities as writer, actor, director and producer, he e erted sufficient pressure on Congress to secure the first passably soul copyright laws protecting the previously victimized dramatist. Althou dominated for the most part by European models and tastes in the th ater, with Joseph Jefferson he adapted and produced Rip Van Wink which helped to focus attention on American folklore as fertile mater for the playwright.
Such offerings as Fashion, Under the Gas Light, The Black Crook, Af Dark and The Drunkard were the popular highlights of a period that ab tolled violent melodrama, permeated with moral fingerpointing. It is structive to note that these plays, taken so seriously in their day, serv as satires on the same period when revived in the early 1920's and playlist as faithfully as possible to the original versions. But their melodrama structure may be partly justified from the fact that life itself in relation these subjects was then something of a melodramatic experience. Str laced Victorian morality, however, was slow to disappear from the theat It is difficult today to take seriously an innocence that could be shock by Maude Adams in a role calling for feigned tipsiness. Not until post-war period was Victorianism laughed from the boards. It had, nev theless, its triumphs, notably in the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan & of Victor Herbert.
The period from the middle of the 19th century to well into the 2 was the halcyon age for actors, when individual stars and such all -: stock companies as Augustin Daly's dominated the stage. Edwin Forr Edwin Booth, Mrs. Gilbert, Ada Rehan, James Lewis, John Drew, Mai Adams, the Barrymores, Mrs. Fiske and many other Americans, along w a host of noted artists from abroad-Sarah Bernhardt, Eleanora Di Salvini, Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, Forbes-Robertson, the two Coquel Réjane, Mounet-Sully, and others-attracted large audiences that cared for the content of the plays produced than for the brilliance of the acti
ce la The star system is still prominent on the New York stage, though
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:w present-day actors and actresses wield the compelling influence that as exercised by the great figures of the theater's halcyon period.
As early as 1847, Walt Whitman had been calling for a distinctly merican drama. "If some bold man," he wrote, "would take the theater hand in this country, and resolutely set his face against the starring stem . . . some American it must be, and not moulded in the opinions ad long established ways of the English stage . . . {if such a man would] volutionize the drama, and discard much that is not fitted to present stes and to modern ideas-engage and encourage American talent, look "pove merely the gratification of the vulgar and of those who love glitter- g scenery-give us American plays, too, matter fitted to American opin- ns and institutions-our belief is he would do the Republic service, and fimself too, in the long run."
Even the European-minded Augustin Daly in the late 1860's and 1870's ad challenged certain restrictions under which the native playwright bored. Why, he asked, must American dramatists select a foreign back- found for a play about a "wild, whooping American girl" when "a re- "bectable New York, Boston or Philadelphia family would be equally Bylistressed and amazed by such a girl"? This may seem an extremely left- na anded plea for an American drama, but Daly's conception of the latter's n iture was a large one. He predicted that "our national drama will be ratablished without restriction as to subject or plot. The coming dramatist at ill be indifferent on that score. Neither Shakespeare nor any of his contemporaries ... made the national drama of their native lands by he delineation of national character only. We must not exact of the er merican dramatist more than has been demanded of its dramatists by hy other country." Daly pictured "the silent brooding observant boy in le gallery" who was to write the play of the future-a perennial picture hd prophecy, it must be noted.
The production of Ibsen's best work and the early plays of Bernard Thaw, who was successful as a playwright in New York before he was in ondon, and of the problem plays of Arthur Wing Pinero and Henry W rthur Jones, was destined to exert the most considerable influence, how- urer, on the theater to follow, particularly upon the playwrights. Previ- sly in the theater, controversial social subjects had been either ignored 11 together or glossed over with romanticism. After Ibsen and Shaw (with the latter's provocative prefaces ), the serious-minded playwright could Vfel that almost any subject was material for dramatic treatment. Even
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such a Messianic play as Jerome K. Jerome's The Passing of the Thi Floor Back may be considered one of the first steps toward a more robu and serious theater.
The immediate American predecessors of today's celebrities, the my who made possible the achievements of our contemporary drama, we David Belasco and Charles Frohman among the producers, and Cly Fitch, Augustus Thomas, Eugene Walter, Edward Sheldon and Willia Vaughn Moody among the playwrights. Belasco's chief contribution co sisted of innovations in the mounting of plays. He was the first to i troduce from Europe such important devices, now an integral part stagecraft, as reflectors, borders and spotlights. He had also, at times, a fon ness for literal realism in his settings. But Frohman, a less legendary figu than Belasco, probably made the more substantial contribution by encou aging many young writers and by his skillful production of classic a: modern plays. Under these two men, the stage presentation tended to I come more the group-effort that it is today, rather than a blind gamble which the efforts of designer, producer, director and actor were pieced gether at random. 5
Augustus Thomas, who died in 1934, was "the playwright to who America turned with confidence for the drama that clothes significant id Pro with power and restraint and the comedy that delights through kindly a adroit revelation of human frailty." This appraisal by Arthur Hobs Quinn is doubtless accurate. Even today Thomas is regarded as the m completely American playwright of the pre-war years. His plays dealt w themes of sectional, historical and social interest. They were plays ab cowboys, Mexicans and army officers, plays that popularized certain hom American situations.
The career of Clyde Fitch as a playwright began in 1890 with his rom: tic Beau Brummel, and for twenty years thereafter he was one of Americ leading dramatists. For the most part he pictured the life of New Yor upper classes; and although his plays were rarely profound or origin he was an unusually accurate observer of externals, of the curious amusing, and his work discloses a groping for fresh values.
Eugene Walter first attracted attention in 1907 with Undertow, a dra of journalism, politics and railroads. The Easiest Way, produced two ye later, brought him his greatest fame. Contemporary critics hailed it "realistic" and "epoch-making," though critical opinion today commo regards it as no more than skillful melodrama.
Edward Sheldon rendered some aspects of American life never bef
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rtrayed on the stage. His first success, Salvation Nell, gave a realistic cture of slum existence; and his next play, The Nigger, dealt with a cial theme in the tragedy of a southern governor who discovers that he ichis Negro blood.
William Vaughn Moody, as far as his prose plays are concerned, is iefly remembered for The Great Divide, which ushered in the "drama revolt" and which many critics consider of permanent value. The Faith healer, produced four years later, was a failure on the stage, though it still "fids readers to whom anything written by Moody has importance.
In 1909, a group headed by Winthrop Ames built the New Theater no Sixtieth Street and Central Park West. Structurally, the New Theater gulas considered a progressive step in theater architecture. But it seated 4500 people, its acoustics were bad, and Ames soon found it unsuited to ans purposes. In accord with his altered conception of the drama as requir- Dig an intimate relationship between audience and the stage, in 1913 he ilt his Little Theater, seating only 299, on Forty-Fourth Street. Ames ought to the New York theater an elegance and a refinement that were on to be adopted by a number of other producers. He represented a action against the growing power of the chain-producers, exemplified so e
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de ongly for the next two decades by the Shuberts, and set an example for afe many "independents" who despite economic handicaps have long osmaintained a measure of idealism and held to a relatively high standard in ngeir productions. Arthur Hopkins, Jed Harris, Guthrie McClintic and Whers owe much to Ames.
bo As far as the commercial theater is concerned, one of the peculiar fea- mộtes of its post-war history is its continued concentration in what is gener- y known as the theater district. Forced by high rentals, huge production masts and the fickle taste of the public to be highly competitive in every ric anch of his trade, the New York producer regards as more than dan- rous any attempt to show his wares very far east or west of Broadway @low Forty-Second Street and above Fifty-Second. An occasional attempt als been made to break away from this area; but the spell of the "Great hite Way" continues to hold, and both audience and producer are soon rafind back in the district.
ye The Broadway theaters have to some extent been in forced competition it|th the Hollywood producers from the early days of the silent screen; nort since the advent of "talkies" and color films this situation has grown ite. Producers are often subsidized by Hollywood and plays are written efad produced with the picture rights in mind, the New York production
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being regarded as a sort of preview test before an audience and a meal of securing preliminary publicity for the picture version. The playwright who is eager to reach a large audience is forced to yield to this procedur since even the most successful play on Broadway is seen by only a smal portion of the American public and Hollywood controls the only mediu that reaches the masses.
That the legitimate theater has been able to survive at all under the conditions, or to save itself from deteriorating beyond any semblance dramatic respectability, has been due largely to the work of a number special groups-principally the Provincetown Players, the Neighborho Playhouse, the New Playwrights, the Theater of Action, the Theat Union, the Theater Guild, the Group Theater and the Mercury Theat In their various theories and methods, these groups have done more invigorate the theater, both legitimate and otherwise, than any other ford They gathered audiences for new playwrights and artists that Broadw producers were often quick to take advantage of, and their ideas are i flected in Hollywood pictures; for Hollywood, with all its technical ef ciency and splendor, still relies largely on the legitimate theater for idea
The earliest and perhaps the most important of these groups was t. Provincetown Players. In 1915, a few summer residents at Provincetow Massachusetts, organized for the purpose of presenting original plays wr ten by members of the group. In 1916, they made their first New Yo appearance in MacDougal Street, in what soon became known as t Provincetown Playhouse. Although the leadership and personnel of t organization underwent many changes during its career, it clung consi ently to one important principle-that the playwright's work should r. be a mere vehicle for the actor, the designer and the director, but rath that the work of these theater craftsmen should serve the dramatist. Lea ership and inspiration for the early Provincetown group came largely fro George Cram Cook, although John Reed was very active and had much do with its success. Later a triumvirate composed of Eugene O'Neill, Ke neth MacGowan and Robert Edmond Jones assumed control; while in final period on MacDougal Street it was under the direction of Her Alsberg, M. Eleanor Fitzgerald and James Light.
The Provincetown Players presented play after play by Eugene O'Ne before he was taken up by commercial managers and became a popu playwright; and it gave a first hearing on the stage to many other write
0 Sherwood Anderson, Djuna Barnes, Louise Bryant, E. E. Cummin Floyd Dell, Theodore Dreiser, Max Eastman, Edna Ferber, Virgil Gedd
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isan Glaspell, Paul Green, Michael Gold, Alfred Kreymborg, Edna St. incent Millay, David Pinski, John Reed, Michael Swift, Edmund Wilson, id Stark Young are some of the authors who at one time or another fig- ed in its program. Such sensitive directors as Jasper Deeter and James ght were developed here, while more than a score of actors and actresses mous today had their start at the Provincetown. A notable accomplish- ent of this group was its work in bringing the Negro actor to the legiti- ate stage. Paul Robeson, Charles Gilpin, Frank Wilson, Jules Bledsoe, d Rose McClendon were made known to the public largely by way of acDougal Street. No more brilliant array of literary and theatrical talent s enriched the American stage than that assembled by the Provincetown ayers.
The Neighborhood Playhouse, organized in 1915, was the pioneer of e Little Theater movement in and around New York City. Originally Nå. is group had been an expression of East Side settlement activity, in- aded to provide slum-dwellers with good drama and to give people in et e neighborhood who had talent a chance to act in it. Later, under the ea th anagement of Irene and Alice Lewisohn, the small house on Grand reet became a significant drama center that attracted discriminating the- WI ergoers from all parts of the city and assumed a degree of national im- rtance. The project was abandoned in 1927, by which time it had made arly a hundred productions, many of them New York premières. It first oduced The Dybbuk, and a number of dramatic curiosities such as James yce's Exiles. Its Grand Street Follies became such a success in 1922 that SIS th
e versions of this and later seasons were reproduced in an uptown play- use.
An outgrowth of the Washington Square Players, founded in 1915 and ganized in 1919 on a season subscription basis, the Theater Guild der Philip Moeller, Theresa Helburn, Helen Westley, Lawrence Lang- r, Lee Simonson and others did much in its early period to encourage gher standards of playwriting and production and the treatment of con- versial themes. Its first production, Bonds of Interest, failed in a finan- l sense; but its second offering, John Ferguson, was a great success. By fourth season, the Guild had 12,000 subscribers, and was planning : its own million-dollar theater on Fifty-Second Street. The latter opened 1925 with an elaborate presentation of Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra.
Operating at times as many as three theaters at once, the Guild has been the nearly twenty years of its existence the most prolific and consistent ducing stage organization in New York-perhaps in the world. Its
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repertory has ranged through a wide variety of classics, modern plays an revivals. It has produced most of the later plays of Eugene O'Neill and he considerable number of European adaptations. Its productions of Elmera Rice's The Adding Machine in 1923 and John Howard Lawson's Proce sional in 1925 were important events, while From Morn to Midnight Liliom and R.U.R. had a stimulating effect upon the American theatelle
Although a few foreign language groups and occasionally an independy ent producer brought the social dramas of Ibsen, Galsworthy, Gorkut Hauptmann and others to New York, and pageants had been staged 1l further the interests of labor, notably at the old Madison Square Garden under the direction of John Reed, it was not until 1926 that New Yor had its first organization to concentrate on labor drama for a labor audit ence. This was the Workers' Drama League, which is mentioned farth on in this article. In 1927, a few writers, most of them previously assodens ated with this league, organized the New Playwrights. The enterprise wier not self-sustaining (the late Otto Kahn financed it), but it paved the whe for numerous successors. Its productions of plays by Paul Sifton, UptoP Sinclair, Michael Gold, John Howard Lawson, Em Jo Basshe, and Joller Dos Passos provoked controversy and helped to clarify issues to be dat bated later on a wider front.
In 1926, Eva LeGallienne founded her Civic Repertory Theater for Fourteenth Street. Devoted principally to modern classic dramas, Miete LeGallienne's company had a considerable following. But although tow admission rates were low in comparison with other New York houses, spe was not a self-sustaining venture; and when its subsidy gave out in 19 the enterprise was discontinued.
Other important influences on the New York theater of the 1920 were the visits of the Irish Players from the Abbey Theater, Dublin, a of the Moscow Art Theater company. The Irish Players came first befcad the World War, bringing plays by Synge and others that set a new star ed ard for serious playwrights. Later, their presentation of plays by Sett O'Casey and other Irish dramatists, left an indelible impression. In 1922at Morris Gest brought to New York the Moscow Art Theater, with tp great actors taught by Stanislavsky and its repertory of plays by Chekhad Andreyev, Tolstoi, and other Russian writers. The Stanislavsky method acting has been adopted, in its most complete form, by the present Gro Br Theater. The Habima Players, a Hebrew group from Russia, played fo fad time in New York in the late 1920's to a considerable following.
It was not until the economic misery of the depression began to perlske
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late more and more deeply that increasing numbers of people, rejecting e commercial theater that breathed no hint of this, turned to the social ama and gave it a variety of forms. The sponsors of this development lieve that drama should reflect the lives and problems of the masses. Workers, labor organizers, the people of average or sub-average economic jeans, are the heroes and heroines of their new plays. The theater, they dy, must be no longer preoccupied with drawing-room and boudoir crises, kit with current issues in political and economic affairs.
In 1929, the Workers' Laboratory Theater found an audience for a lew type of stage production that needed no more than a hall or a street rner for its production. Using a technique that could easily adapt the dtal news of the day to stage production, this group, later known as the heater of Action, adopted methods later expanded and employed with considerable success by The Living Newspaper unit of the Federal The- er Project. Unemployed, Scottsboro and Newsboy were typical titles and waemes among its productions.
tol Peace on Earth, an anti-war play, inaugurated the activities of the The- pher Union in 1933. It was received by the labor press and audience with d thusiasm but by the Broadway critics with anguish. This play was fol- wed by Stevedore, an analysis of race prejudice and oppression that dought down both the left and the right sides of the house. Plays by Paul Milters, George Sklar, Friedrich Wolf, Albert Maltz, Albert Bein and John Howard Lawson figured in the Theater Union program. When the group es, 191 spended its collective activities in 1937, it announced that the purpose r which it had been formed was being adequately served by other or- nizations and individuals.
20; Although critics were reluctant to see the value of the social-minded adeater, the militant and vital theater folk were not without their propa- efondists. In April 1931, the Workers' Laboratory Theater issued two hun- tanled mimeographed copies of its bulletin, Workers' Theater. In Septem- Sear 1933, this bulletin was renamed New Theater Magazine, and under 192e audacious editorship of Herbert Kline it soon became the most impor- th hit publication of its kind in America. It fought for truth in the theater, khad introduced in its pages such sensational hits as Waiting for Lefty, ry the Dead and Hymn to the Rising Sun.
Broadway, however, was slow to accept the strongly motivated social- founded play. Grand Hotel, employing all the old tricks of melodrama, s among the hits in a season when the theater was beginning to be berekened by a crisis the existence of which it did not openly admit. Paul
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and Claire Sifton's 1931, a tragic transcript of unemployment, produced bl the Group Theater, drew so little of the Broadway trade that it close within a week and a half.
It was the Group Theater, originally a subsidiary of the Theater Guild that reacted most sensitively to the drama with a strictly social or labch theme and (despite the failure of 1931) proved the box-office value c such drama. Its announced policy was to present plays based upon cor temporary social issues. It has shown some confusion in following th aim; and had it not been for the short but vivid career of the Theatero Union, it might not have reached its present importance. The organization produced Sidney Kingsley's Pulitzer Prize play Men in White, Para Green's House of Connelly and Johnnie Johnson, and several plays ERi Clifford Odets.
It would be wrong to assume, however, that until the voice of labdb was heard within the independent theater movement there had been rian plays or playwrights with keen social awareness. Prior to the World Wager such plays as Augustus Thomas' The Copperhead, Eugene Walter's Thor Easiest Way, Edward Sheldon's The Nigger and William Vaughn Moody of The Great Divide were concerned with themes certainly no further ro- moved from the reality of their times than, for instance, such major wor t of Eugene O'Neill as All God's Chillun Got Wings, The Emperor Joneu and Mourning Becomes Electra. A comparison of the works of the 1 dramatists brings to light more similarities than differences. All were mo eh concerned with the stage possibilities of their material than with the u the derlying import of their themes. All wrote more or less around and (perl the surface of important questions; none was a dramatic genius whofit ideas and methods have had much to do with revolutionizing either wadina of thinking or the stage, and all wrote in a similar romantic and mel fon dramatic vein.
Furthermore, these men were not the first dramatists to deal with cc seek troversial social themes. Before and after the Civil War, many plays vital and even revolutionary issues of the day were produced on the Ne York stage. On December 16, 1859, just fourteen days after the executi of John Brown at Harper's Ferry, a dramatization of the event was pi pega duced at the Bowery Theater, under the title of The Insurrection, Kansas and Harper's Ferry. As a forerunner of The Living Nev A paper type of theater, so popular at the moment, this is not without stage nificance. Technical innovations have been added aplenty since then, E the idea of dramatizing current issues close on their happening is not ne
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Uncle Tom's Cabin was also an early social play, and the New York Herald in 1852 advised "all concerned to drop the play at once and for- ver. The thing is in bad taste-is not according to good faith to the constitution ... and is calculated, if persisted in, to become a firebrand of the most dangerous character to the peace of the whole country."
Nor would it be correct to assume that outside the independent theater movement the New York stage was altogether lacking in vitality. Max- nivell Anderson dramatized current issues in What Price Glory (written in collaboration with Laurence Stallings), Gods of the Lightning (an ex- position of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial and its implications, written in col- aboration with Harold Hickerson), and a few of his other plays. Elmer blice has been consistently sensitive to major conflicts and modern prob- ems. Plays like Martin Flavin's The Criminal Code, John Wexley's dThe Last Mile and They Shall Not Die, Sidney Howard's Yellow Jack, mend Sidney Kingsley's Dead End show to what extent the theater in ageneral has become socially conscious. Ever since the production of Be- Hond the Horizon in 1920 and The Hairy Ape in 1922, the many plays f Eugene O'Neill have had their considerable influence on both the o-called sophisticated and the socially responsible playwrights, and have Attracted international attention, climaxed in 1936 by the award to their uthor of the Nobel Prize for literature. y
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