PREFACE
No one can deny the present Dramatic Renaissance. Plays profitable and unprofitable, popular and unpopular, proper and improper, plays priggish and plays profane, are being presented, read, discussed, revised, written about and quarrelled over. The Drama is furiously to the fore and, in spite of the “Movies,” continues to hold the absorbed interest of an increasing number of people.
In the midst of all this dramatic stir, this unrest of expression, certain ones, weary of being onlookers, arise and announce, “We too will act,” and others cry out, “We too will write.” So the Amateur providing his own cue, makes his entrance, and after being regarded a bit askance by “The Profession” is allowed to play his part.
In the Spring of 1911 I cast an affectionate and calculating eye upon a small frame house next door. It was shortly acquired; partitions and ceilings were pulled out, the lean-to kitchen became the stage; dressing-rooms were added and a miniature theatre which we called The Playhouse was ready.
In the five Summers since, a group of amateur players have presented some fifty one-act plays to the great pleasure and interest of themselves and the alternate, sometimes mingled, amusement, surprise, disapproval and horror of their neighbors.
Many of the plays given were written by the players themselves or adapted from short stories. Others were translated from the French, German or Italian. All were experimental, undertaken in a spirit of adventure with the simple motive of amusing the players and their friends. The five plays in this book were written for production at “The Playhouse.” They have all gained in rehearsal by suggestions from the actors. In the comedies much is left to the interpretation of the players. Often amusing lines or “business” comes to a player from the response of the audience, but he and his fellows must be quick of wit that such improvisation may seem entirely natural.
Amateurs have one great advantage, they give a play only once or twice and so attain a freshness and spontaneity that it would take years of technical training to enable them to keep up through a long run. H. T. Parker, commenting in The Boston Transcript upon a performance of the “Lake Forest Players” on a dramatic visit to the Toy Theatre in Boston says:
“Time and again amateurs attain simplicity because they do not suspect intricacy, and truth because they see it and embody it in their acting with no veils of habit, method or precedent. Given histrionic instinct, aptitude and observation, they act with ease, freedom and variety, and with full self-surrender to their parts. If the means are not the professional means they do their office which is to bring the personages to life in the terms of the play. Acting for themselves and in their own way, they are not weighted with self-consciousness, tradition or imitative effort.”
The word self-consciousness is the key-note. “Drop self-consciousness and get under the skin of the character you portray” might be considered the theory of amateur acting.
Occasionally efforts have been made at The Playhouse to select a stage director, but as each participant takes advice and direction in inverse ratio to the firmness with which he is able to maintain his own views the plan has not proved effective. Our composite results are obtained by a process of mutual suggestion and recrimination, and if these simple means fail it is never from any shyness on the part of a fellow-actor in expressing an honest opinion.
There are two rules posted in the Green Room:
KEEP YOUR TEMPER
AND
RETURN YOUR MANUSCRIPTS.
The second is imperative, the first variable in application.
In selecting plays we have departed radically from the amateur tradition of resuscitating “plays with a punch,” which have fared well in the hands of professionals. In the established “tricks of the trade” of course the amateur cannot compete with the professional. This is the true significance of the well-known Green Room hoot that “The worst professional is better than the best amateur.”
We generally try to give our audiences something they have not heard before, and seek plays in which the expressed word, the mental attitude and the interplay of character are of more importance than the physical action. Here, if anywhere, although such plays may seem difficult, lies the amateur’s opportunity. So we are not afraid of plays with little action and much talk, for is not the most intense drama of all, the drama of the soul, the struggle between mind and mind, heart and heart? There lies all the pain, the joy, the perplexity of life. It is in talk, low and intense, gay and railing, bitter and despairing, as the case may be, that we moderns carry on our drama of life, the foundation for the drama of the stage.
Mary Aldis.
Lake Forest, Illinois.
July, 1915.