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As the cost of the theater mounts up—the price of seats, the price of achieving Broadway productions—the Fireside Theater audience is steadily recruited. If there has existed a prejudice against reading plays, it is melting. The mere force of conditions would tend to destroy such a prejudice. The path to Broadway becomes steadily more difficult and the path away from Broadway narrower—all because it costs too much to produce a play on Broadway, and far too much to take the play, once so produced, on the road. Soon the Broadway theater will survive as the horse survives; and Broadway productions, inspired by the same motives as the production of horse races, will be nobly upheld by the same justificatory excuse—it will be argued that they improve the breed of plays.
It does no harm to have a few horse shows or to have a few Broadway productions; but the truth must be stated that the theater in America no longer depends upon the amusement business in the vicinity of Forty-second Street. To an extent never before equaled, plays are now published in America regardless of their production; are bought and read; are read aloud for an exceptional evening’s entertainment; and are acted under license, and with payment of very moderate fees, by people to whom a play is a play and not a pair of high-priced tickets.
For amateur actors, many of them amazingly capable, there are now available plays of every length and of every conceivable variety of type, settings, and casts; of extreme, moderate and very slight demands upon the actors’ skill; tragic, comedic, farcical. And for readers of plays there are certain immutable advantages that have been pointed out before but will bear stressing again, such as that the performance always begins on time, and at your chosen time, and that the actors, being your own creatures, are always ideal.
I shall try to speak first of some anthologies of plays, then of plays by individual authors, and finally of a few books about the drama and the theater.
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First I would put Montrose J. Moses’s ample works. His Representative British Dramas: Victorian and Modern is not only a complete history of the British stage, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to 1914; it presents the complete texts of twenty-one English and Irish plays superbly representative of its century. Representative Continental Dramas: Revolutionary and Transitional does much the same thing for Europe as a whole. Eight European countries are represented in this anthology, which contains the complete texts of fifteen plays, with a general survey of the development of Continental drama and individual bibliographies. But the greatest demand is for anthologies of one-act plays; a demand richly met by the following standard works:
Representative One-Act Plays by American Authors, compiled by Margaret G. Mayorga, contains the complete texts of twenty-four, all of which have been produced in Little Theaters. Among the dramatists included are Percy Mackaye, Stuart Walker, Jeannette Marks, George Middleton, Susan Glaspell, Eugene O’Neill, and Beulah Marie Dix.
Fifty Contemporary One-Act Plays edited by Frank Shay and Pierre Loving, is an international selection of astonishing variety and exceptional merit.
Twenty Contemporary One-Act Plays—American, edited by Frank Shay, is an anthology which affords variety of choice for acting and ample variety for the reader.
Barrett H. Clark’s Representative One-Act Plays by British and Irish Authors contains complete texts of twenty one-act plays. Some of the authors are Pinero, Jones, Arnold Bennett, Yeats, Oscar Wilde, Granville Barker and Lord Dunsany. Mr. Moses is the compiler of Representative One-Act Plays by Continental Authors. Maeterlinck, Arthur Schnitzler, Strindberg, Andreyev, Franz Wedekind, Sudermann, von Hofmannsthal, Lavedan are some of the playwrights whose work is included; and the book is equipped with bibliographies.
Frank Shay is the compiler of Twenty-Five Short Plays: International, in which is much exotic work—plays from Bengal and Burma, China and Japan and Uruguay, as well as from countries with whose drama we have more contact. But as an example of Mr. Shay’s selections we may note, from among the writers whose work is fairly familiar, that Austria is represented by a Schnitzler piece, Italy by one of Robert Bracco’s comedies, Hungary by Lajos Biro’s “The Bridegroom,” Russia by an example of Chekhov and Spain by Echegaray.
I may at this point advantageously call attention to Mr. Shay’s One Thousand and One Plays for the Little Theatre, and his new One Thousand and One Longer Plays—not anthologies, but exhaustive lists. The plays are listed alphabetically by authors and by organizations, and the title, nature of the work, number of men and women characters, publisher, and price of each play is given.
Certain other books, though offering a number of one-act plays, have too few inclusions to be described as anthologies. Such are One-Act Plays from the Yiddish, translated by Etta Block and presenting half a dozen effective pieces; Three Modern Japanese Plays, translated by Yozan T. Iwasaki and Glenn Hughes, and showing the direct result of Western influences on the Japanese theatre; and Double Demon and Other One-Act Plays, by A. P. Herbert and others, one of the British Drama League series.
Colin Campbell Clements, whose Plays for a Folding Theatre is known to most amateurs, has a new book this season called Plays for Pagans, containing five entertaining short plays, all easy of stage production. Another such group is to be found in Garden Varieties, by Kenyon Nicholson, six plays, most of them farcical and amusing.
Certain other one-act plays I shall speak of later in this chapter. But the record of excellent anthologies is not yet completed. A Treasury of Plays for Children, by Mr. Moses, provides fourteen dramas with the abundance of incident and action which young people demand but with considerable literary merit besides. Mr. Shay, again, is the compiler of A Treasury of Plays for Women, eighteen in all, requiring only women to cast or containing only such male characters as may easily be enacted by women; and also of A Treasury of Plays for Men, twenty-one altogether, which men may stage without feminine help. A Treasury of Plays for Men also offers a working library list for the Little Theater and a bibliography of other anthologies.
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In coming to the work of individual playwrights, I am afraid the method of conscientious enumeration must to a great extent go on. Granville Barker’s work is almost too well-known to require special comment. His plays, some one of which is almost certain to be found in any comprehensive anthology, are published in seven volumes, each a single drama except the Three Short Plays. Anatol, to be sure, is simply Mr. Barker’s splendid version of Arthur Schnitzler’s gay satire on a gilded youth of Vienna. Probably Waste, at once intimate in its discussions and intensely serious, is the best-known drama by Barker; but The Madras House, with its humors of feminine psychology, and The Voysey Inheritance, that fine study of middle-class English family life, are both popular. The others are The Marrying of Ann Leete, at once a comedy and a satire, and the three-act play called The Secret Life, a play of present-day England touched with philosophy and mysticism and occasional cynicism, but of the same distinctive quality as Barker’s other work.
Three plays by Lewis Beach have been published. A Square Peg presents the tragic results of a mother’s unflinching rule of her family. The Goose Hangs High is a comedy of family loyalty and affection which brings the younger generation face to face with its elders; it has been a success of the last New York season. But the one to which I want to direct attention especially is Ann Vroome, a play in seven scenes giving the story of a girl’s long wait for happiness when she postpones marriage to care for her parents. This play has a very fine acceleration of dramatic interest, of emotional intensity; and its literary quality is of a high order. It is evident that Mr. Beach does nothing badly.
The history of Owen Davis has been told many times, but I do not suppose its impression of the extraordinary is ever lessened. He wrote, for years, melodramas of the “Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model” order; I am by no means sure he did not write “Nellie.” In those days he supplied the theaters of the Bowery and other avenues no better as to art if less notorious. It should be said that however cheap were these works, they were infinitely more respectable and of a better moral character than some pretentious affairs playing uptown. Mr. Davis had two reasonable purposes—to learn play writing and to make necessary money. When he had accomplished both, being still a young man, he turned to work of a different description. His play, The Detour (1921), the story of a woman’s never-dying aspiration and hope, was one of the finest things of its season. Clear-cut, dramatic, with comedy and pathos interwoven, it depicted mental and spiritual force pitted against solely material ambition in a way that those who saw or read it did not forget. The evidence was clear that a new American dramatist of the first rank had been born. Icebound (1922), had immediate attention and very marked critical praise, crowned by the award to it of the Pulitzer Prize by Columbia University as the best American play of the year.
The most successful American playwright of his day, Clyde Fitch was also one of the ablest. The Memorial Edition of the Plays of Clyde Fitch, edited, with introductions, by Montrose J. Moses and Virginia Gerson, and published in four volumes is a gallant and important affair. The edition is definitive and contains three plays that were never before in print, “The Woman in the Case,” “Lovers’ Lane,” and that most important of the Fitch plays, “The City.” The fourth volume of this edition contains Mr. Fitch’s address on “The Play and the Public.”[78]
The four volumes of Representative Plays by Henry Arthur Jones, edited, with historical, biographical, and critical introductions, by Clayton Hamilton, assemble in a splendid library edition the most interesting work of the British dramatist. Henry Arthur Jones wrote some sixty or seventy plays, printed mainly in pamphlet form—“scrips”—for the use, primarily, of actors, professional and amateur. These Mr. Hamilton sifted, at the same time making an effort to indicate the range and variety of Jones’s work. As a consequence, Representative Plays opens with a celebrated old-time melodrama, “The Silver King,” and illustrates the stages in the author’s progress until he arrived, in the composition of “The Liars,” at a really great accomplishment as a master of modern English comedy. Mr. Hamilton’s introductions carry the reader’s attention from play to play along a continuous current of historical, biographical and critical comment. Probably the best-known inclusions are the plays in the third volume: “Michael and His Lost Angel,” “The Liars,” “Mrs. Dane’s Defence,” and “The Hypocrites.”
Of Cosmo Hamilton’s Four Plays I have already made mention[79] and perhaps I should have spoken of Percival Wilde when dealing with one-act plays. Mr. Wilde’s work is itself an anthology of the one-act play. This New Yorker was for a while in the banking business; on the publication of his first story he received so many requests to allow its dramatization that he thought he would investigate the drama himself. That was not more than a dozen years ago; yet now Percival Wilde is commonly said to have had more plays produced—or rather, to have had a greater number of productions—in American Little Theaters than any other playwright.
His books to date (of this sort) are five. Eight Comedies for Little Theatres contains “The Previous Engagement,” “The Dyspeptic Ogre,” “Catesby,” “The Sequel,” “In the Net,” “His Return,” “The Embryo,” and “A Wonderful Woman.” Then there are his other collections—Dawn, and Other One-Act Plays of Life Today (six), A Question of Morality, and Other Plays (five), and The Unseen Host, and Other War Plays (five), and The Inn of Discontent and Other Fantastic Plays (five).
George Kelly, a young American born in a suburb of Philadelphia, had the daring to satirize the Little Theater movement in America in “The Torch-Bearers,” which had a New York success. In this past season his play, The Show-Off, has not only been a memorable success but has perhaps had more unqualified praise than any drama in years. “I might as well begin boldly and say that The Show-Off is the best comedy which has yet been written by an American,” writes Heywood Broun in his preface to the published play; and this does not much exaggerate the note of the general chorus. The committee named to recommend a play for the award of the annual Pulitzer Prize selected The Show-Off; and the overruling of their choice by the Columbia University authorities was the subject of considerable controversy not entirely free from indignant feeling. What is this play? “A transcript of life, in three acts,” the titlepage truthfully calls it. The chief character, Aubrey Piper, liar, braggart, egoist, is almost dreadfully real. It is perhaps possible, however depressing, to regard him as a symbol of all mankind, bringing us to realize the toughness of human fiber, as Mr. Broun suggests. But it seems to me much more likely that the play’s great merit and supreme interest lies in another point that Mr. Broun makes: there is no development of character in Aubrey, but only in ourselves, the audience, who come to know him progressively better, and finally to know him to the last inescapable dreg. Most critics have tended, I think, to overlook the splendid characterization of Mrs. Fisher, Aubrey’s perspicacious and unrelenting mother-in-law. The play is too true for satire, too serious for comedy, too humanly diverting for tears. It is certainly not to be missed.
The Lilies of the Field, a comedy by John Hastings Turner, author of several novels, including that very engaging story, Simple Souls, is one of the British Drama League series and will probably have a New York production this season. The desire of twin daughters of an English village clergyman to become the wives of young men met in London—young men who toil not, neither do they spin except at dances—produces the complications, which are both entertaining and somewhat satirical. Of the other British Drama League plays, The Prince, by Gwen John, deals with Queen Elizabeth, and is “a study of character, based on contemporary evidence,” while Laurence Binyon’s Ayuli is drama in verse, telling a picturesque story of Eastern Asia. Mr. Binyon has made studies of Oriental art and his drama is of quite exceptional literary quality.
Of novel interest is The Sea Woman’s Cloak and November Eve, a volume containing two plays by the American writer, Amelie Rives (Princess Troubetzkoy), that are as Irish as work by Lady Gregory, Yeats, or J. M. Synge. “The Sea Woman’s Cloak” is based on an old legend of Ganore’s mating with a mortal; “November Eve” tells how Ilva, who is fairy-struck, saves a soul the godly folk won’t risk their own souls to save.
Dragon’s Glory, a play in four scenes by Gertrude Knevels, is based on an old Chinese legend, and makes very amusing reading and a most actable comedy. Yow Chow has purchased the finest coffin in China (“Dragon’s Glory”) and the action of the piece centers about this treasure, in which the estimable Yow Chow reposes until a crisis which is the climax of the play.
The two series known respectively as the Modern Series and the Little Theatre Series consist of plays published in pamphlet form at a low price for the convenience of amateur theatrical organizations. Included in these series are separate plays by such authors as Booth Tarkington, Christopher Morley, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eugene O’Neill, Stuart Walker, Floyd Dell, Rupert Brooke, and others, to a present total of thirty titles. The Modern Series, edited by Frank Shay, has two particularly striking new titles in Lord Byron and Autumn.
Lord Byron, a play in seven scenes by Maurice Ferber, is of the genre of Drinkwater’s Abraham Lincoln and Mr. Eaton’s and Mr. Carb’s Queen Victoria. Byron is one of the most dramatic of the possible subjects for a biographical play, and Mr. Ferber’s work will undoubtedly be frequently staged and very much read at this time of the Byron centenary.
Autumn, in four acts, by Ilya Surguchev, translated by David A. Modell, is the picture of jealousy between a young wife and an adopted daughter. “This is one of the strongest plays I have ever read,” says Frank Shay. It is our first introduction to the work of the Russian author and part of its novelty consists in the last act, which “achieves a monotony that is real and genuine. It does not bring husband and wife together in happiness, but shows that there is nothing else for them to do but to go on.”
But the other new titles in the Modern Series deserve brief mention. Words and Thoughts, by Don Marquis, presents John and Mary Speaker, who utter the usual banalities of the world, and John and Mary Thinker, who utter their true and less pleasant thoughts. John L. Balderston’s A Morality Play for the Leisure Class pictures a rich collector’s boredom in heaven when he finds that his treasures there have no monetary value. There is an O. Henry twist to the ending. Walter McClellan’s The Delta Wife is a genre play of the Mississippi River mouth, in type resembling Hell-Bent fer Heaven. The Lion’s Mouth, by George Madden Martin and Harriet L. Kennedy, deals with the relations of blacks and whites. A white doctor ignores a black child in his efforts to save a white baby. An old mammy has an invaluable herb cure; but finding that the doctor cares nothing for her grandson’s life, she refuses to save the white infant. Wilbur Daniel Steele’s The Giant’s Stair is a study in mood and atmosphere, like many of his short stories. Before the play opens a man has been murdered. A terrific storm is raging. The scene is between the widow and her demented sister and the sheriff. Action! by Holland Hudson is a swift-moving, melodramatic comedy. The son of a silk dealer returns from selling airplanes to protest that the life of a silk salesman is dull. His objections are interrupted by the entry of two silk loft burglars and two bootleggers—followed by Federal officers and policemen with drawn weapons.
The new titles in the Little Theatre Series, edited by Grace Adams, include Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Aria da Capo and her The Lamp and the Bell.
Edna St. Vincent Millay’s work is known throughout America. The Lamp and the Bell, a Shakespearean play written for a Vassar College anniversary, has for its theme woman’s friendship, and is very nearly unique among compositions for an occasion in having solid literary and dramatic merit. Its fresh, vigorous, creative quality is enriched by some lovely lyrical inclusions. Aria da Capo, Miss Millay’s bitterly ironic, beautiful and interesting one-act fantasy, has been played, one is tempted to believe, everywhere; and will for years be played again and again. No contemporary Pierrot and Columbine composition excels it, if, indeed, any matches it.
Mary MacMillen’s Pan or Pierrot is a play for children, to be acted out of doors. And I must again call attention to John Farrar’s charming plays for children in The Magic Sea Shell.
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Books about the theater are various, of course, ranging from æsthetic studies down to the most practical handbook for amateurs. Of the latter, I should certainly put first Barrett H. Clark’s How to Produce Amateur Plays, now in a new and revised edition. This manual is as nearly indispensable to amateur actors as anything can be. It tells how to choose a play, how to organize, the principles of casting, and the methods of rehearsing. It gives very necessary information about the stage itself, lighting, scenery and costumes, and makeup. There is also a list of good amateur plays and information about copyright and royalty.
Another book that will be particularly welcomed by schools and social organizations is Claude Merton Wise’s Dramatics for School and Community, which covers much the same fields as Mr. Clark’s work.
I have already spoken of Percival Wilde’s astonishing success as an author of one-act plays; it makes his book on The Craftsmanship of the One-Act Play the last word on the subject. But the special value of Mr. Wilde’s book is that it considers everything having to do with the construction of the one-act play from the point of view of the stage director as well as that of the author.
Granville Barker’s The Exemplary Theatre, though by one of the best-known men of the group interested in and influencing modern dramatic theory and esthetics, is preëminently a practical book. It considers the theater as a civic institution and has a valuable chapter on the inner and outer organization of a repertory theater; but the chapters on a director’s duties, choosing the best plays, training the company, scenery and lighting, and audiences are of widespread applicability.
A mention of books about the theater is fated to omit many excellent volumes, but can scarcely fail to include a series of books which give a complete circumspection of contemporary drama. The most recent volume in the series is The Contemporary Drama of Russia, by Leo Wiener, professor of Slavic languages and literature at Harvard. This entirely new study is likely to create a commotion, for it belies utterly the conclusions generally arrived at as to the relative value of the work of such playwrights as Chekhov, Gorki, Andreyev, Solugub, Evreinov and others, and it brings into prominence many names never heard of before outside of Russia. Its picture of the origin and development of the Moscow Art Theater is not the one of popular legend, and should probably be narrowly compared with that given by Constantin Stanislavsky in his My Life in Art[80] and with other accounts. Professor Wiener has relied, however, upon letters, theatrical annals, and other contemporary records. His bibliographies contain fairly full accounts of plays from Ostrovski to the present, lists of books and articles on the contemporary Russian drama, and lists of all English translations of plays.
The Contemporary Drama of England, by Thomas H. Dickinson, covers adequately the history of the English stage since 1866. Ernest Boyd’s The Contemporary Drama of Ireland presents the Irish literary movement and the work of Irish dramatists. The Contemporary Drama of Italy, by Lander MacClintock, traces the development of the modern Italian theater from its inception down to the present day, and has interesting chapters on Gabriele d’Annunzio and the writers now popular in Italy. Frank W. Chandler’s The Contemporary Drama of France, a longer work than the three preceding, presents a survey and interpretation of French drama for three decades, from the opening of the Theatre-Libre of Antoine to the conclusion of the world war.