A COMMENT Theater Theater, Little LITTLE THEATRES AND POETIC PLAYS × Lelete theaters RECENT visit to St. Louis enabled me to see Alfred Kreymborg's three Plays for Poem-mimes, which were given by the Players' Club at the theatre of the Artists' Guild on the evening of Monday, December 3d. The performance gave me quite a thrill, for the plays acted extremely well-indeed, sprang to life in the presentation with a power which proclaimed the born playwright. Two of the plays I had read, Lima Beans in print and When the Willow Nods in manuscript-read with admiration for the humane wit of the first and the searching poetic beauty of the second. But as the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so that of a play is in the acting: it required the excellent performance of the Players' Club to convince me that we have in Mr. Kreymborg a poetic and interpretive playwright of original and authentic power, a claimant for wide recognition on the American stage. It was the first performance on any stage for When the Willow Nods and Manikin and Minikin. The former is a monologue in free verse, a running comment half-whimsical, half-pitiful, uttered, Greek-chorus fashion, by a quiet, seated, cloaked and hooded figure, while a boy and girl act and dance out their little love-affair in pantomime. It would be impossible to over-state the beauty of Orrick Johns' interpretation of the enigmatic speaker. Mr. Johns, being a poet and having a fine voice, might be expected to read the lines simply and with full sense of rhythmic values but only a true histrionic instinct could have kept him always in the picture, always the master of the stage. Manikin and Minikin is a dialogue between two Louis Quinze ornaments on a mantel-piece, the figures beautifully dressed and posed. And Lima Beans, which has been played a little east and west, is a more or less satiric farce conceived in the gayest possible whimsical spirit; and it was set and acted in the same mood. Besides this Players' Club, St. Louis has another amateur company, that of the Artists' Guild, which this year has engaged a professional director, Irving Pichel. I was delighted to find that Mr. Pichel has designs upon the play by Wallace Stevens to which POETRY gave a prize over a year ago, Three Travellers Watch a Sunrise. If all goes well, St. Louis may get ahead of Chicago, which printed this play, and New York, the home of the poet, by producing it next February. The advance of dramatic art in this country, especially of the poetic drama, is now the affair of the so-called "little theatres," which have sprung up so numerously since Maurice Brown started the Chicago Little Theatre about the time POETRY began. In fact, Chicago's precedence antedates even the Little Theatre, for the New Theatre started the ball rolling in the season of 1906-7, the Drama Players under Donald Robertson pushed it along in 1907-9; and the Hull House Theatre, which had been giving plays even earlier, was reorganized for progressive work under Mrs. Pelham in 1907. The movement started by these courageous pioneers has gained such headway that now. even Broadway is trembling-opening its dazed eyes to the vitality of a demand for more imaginative and beautiful work in the theatre than the typical commercial manager has believed the public would stand for. The typical commercial manager and the typical newspaper critic has spent much time and space laughing at the efforts of these amateurs, who, out of love of the art, with little thought of self or pelf, have done the pioneer experimental work which the professionals, preoccupied with self and pelf, refused to do. While the professionals have walked in their rut and stuck to the sure thing, these amateur companies have offered the new thing, the uncertain thing, have given the young playwright a chance to try out his experiments and thereby learn his trade, the young poet a chance to test his capacity for the stage. And now the professionals find, to their amazement, that the sure thing is no longer sure, and that a group of young playwrights-poets and prosers both-is springing up in whose introduction to the public they have had no share. They will have to take lessons of the little theatres-indeed, the process is beginning. And when Broadway bends a suppliant knee, may our young playwrights of the new movement accept no compromise! It is a matter of deep regret to POETRY that the Chicago Little Theatre, whose work has been so essential in the movement, has found the financial problem too difficult and has now definitely brought its labors to a close. Since its curtain first rose in November, 1912, its director, Maurice Browne, has given important and significant productions, and its chief scenic artist, Raymond Johnson, has introduced beautiful and original effects of line, color and lighting. As I review its five-year list of forty plays, besides nine for puppets-plays comic and tragic, old and new, foreign and native the most important and significant of all seems to me Cloyd Head's Grotesques. If I give this production precedence over Ibsen, Strindberg, Schnitzler and Andrews, over Oscar Wilde and Synge and Yeats, over Shaw and Allan Monkhouse and Leonard Merrick, over even the beautiful productions of The Trojan Women and Medea— with Mrs. Browne wonderful beyond words in the latter play it is because the special purpose of the little theatre seems to me to produce the modern and native thing, to try the immediate experiment, rather than to present old plays or foreign plays, which, in many cases, have had other local productions. Mr. Head's play was a modern and native poetic interpretation of life, involving moreover a scenic scheme of great beauty and originality; and therefore the success of it, the special thrill that it gave, was of more value to the art, to "the movement," than the success of Medea, of Rosmersholm, of The Shadowy Waters, or even of Dierdre of the Sorrows, beautiful and significant as these are. It was more valuable because it was ours, because it uttered our own immediate feeling, because the poet who wrote it was on the spot to see it and learn from it. Other plays by modern poets produced by Mr. Browne are Rupert Brooke's dark tragedy, Lithuania, Gibson's Womenkind, Lord Dunsany's Lost Silk Hat, Mrs. Frank's Jael, three short plays by Mrs. Aldis, a gay comedy by Alice Brown, and Mr. Browne's own King of the Jews. The list should be longer and more adventurous, perhaps, and one might wish that the curtain had rung down on a more experimental play than Candida. But the record of the Chicago Little Theatre is a proud one, and fundamental in any consideration of the new dramatic movement, as the authors of four recent books on the subject agree. I intended to discuss the work in poetic drama done by some of the other little theatres, but space forbids more than a brief mention. In Chicago the Players' Workshop tried numerous experiments last year, among them Brown, by Maxwell Bodenheim and William Saphier, which beautifully symbolized the growth and final obliteration of life on earth; and a fanciful thing called The Wonder-hat, by Kenneth Goodman and Ben Hecht. This year the Workshop's successor, the Philistine Theatre, has given two poetic plays; one, Dead Eyes, by H. H. Ewers, being tiresomely conventional, and the other, Lady Lotus Eyes, by Benjamin Purrington, of San Francisco, a delicate Japanese idyl, delicately played. The Philistine hopes for a new theatre on the North Side next year, and an ambitious group on the far South Side has been given possession of a disused schoolhouse in which to develop its large plans. In New York the Washington Square Players were, I believe, first in the field-if we except the Neighborhood |