Over some fifteen years a growing number of minds have been more or less actively seeking a way towards a new type of theater. They have been abusing the picture-frame stage, stamping on the footlights, pulling out the front of the apron, pushing the actors into the loges, down the orchestra pit, onto the prompter’s box, out upon runways or up the aisles. They have even gone clear out of the playhouse and into circuses, open air theaters, and public parks. All to set up a new and mutual relationship between the actor and the audience.

You might almost say to set up any mutual relationship at all; for the players of the peep-hole theater of Realism, the picture-frame theater, the fourth wall theater, can hardly be said to have anything resembling a relationship to the spectator. The thing peeped at can’t be aware of the peeper. A picture does not know that it has an audience. Walls may have ears, but the fourth wall has no eyes. It is the essence of Realism and of realistic acting that they have their justification in the thing they resemble, not in the people who may or may not be able to recognize the resemblance. A perfect realistic performance is a thing so close to life that it cannot permit itself to be aware of even its own existence. Its perfection is so much more related to the thing it imitates than to the audience which looks at it, that it would be no less perfect if there were no one at all to look. The fourth wall is a fourth wall. It might just as well be as real as the other three. Alexander Bakshy wrote of Stanislavsky’s company: “It would have made scarcely an atom of difference to the adequacy and completeness of the Art Theater’s performance if the audience had been entirely removed.”

Such performances can be very interesting in their way, extraordinarily interesting, in fact, when such players as Stanislavsky’s bring spiritual distinction to their Realism. But there is another sort of thing that can be interesting, too. Some think it can be more interesting; at any rate they want to find out what it was that kept the theater contented for the twenty-five centuries before it knew Realism. They want to draw out the actor and the spectator; the actor out of the picture frame and the spectator—if the actor is good enough—out of his seat. They want to make the actor an actor once more. And they think that a new sort of theater—or a very old sort—might have something to do with it.

Directors have thought about it, and playwrights, dancing teachers, architects, scenic artists, actors, and critics. Max Reinhardt put a runway over the audience in Sumurûn more than a dozen years ago and staged Sophocles in a circus. Percy MacKaye developed the community masque as a new form of outdoor theatrical performance through The Masque of St. Louis and Caliban, and brought it indoors with The Evergreen Tree and The Will of Song. Jaques-Dalcroze, deviser of the eurythmic system of dance-education, created in Hellerau-bei-Dresden, before the war, a hall holding the stage and the spectators within translucent walls lit by ten thousand lights, and there, with the aid of Adolphe Appia, he gave Paul Claudel’s drama L’Annonce faite à Marie. Frank Lloyd Wright, designing a theater for Aline Barnsdall of Los Angeles, created a model showing an adjustable proscenium, which was hardly a proscenium, a domed stage which curved into the lines of the auditorium, and a permanent architectural setting consisting of a wall twelve feet high running across the stage. Herman Rosse, the scenic artist, took to sketching theaters with all manner of odd forestages and portals. Norman-Bel Geddes threw off in 1914 a plan for a theater with stage and audience housed under a single dome, and in 1921 designed a magnificent project for the production of Dante’s The Divine Comedy in Madison Square Garden in a permanent setting of ringed steps, towering plinths, and light. Gémier, the French actor, introduced the Reinhardt circus-theater to Paris. Jacques Copeau left his reviewing of plays to create in the Vieux-Colombier a theater without a proscenium, and with a forestage and a permanent setting, in order to give his troupe of actors a fresh and truly theatrical relation to their audience.

The first attempts to escape from the realistic theater were Gargantuan. It seems as if there were something so essentially small about our theater that a huge thing was the natural alternative. Max Reinhardt and Percy MacKaye, the two men who began the break with the realistic theater, and who carried their conceptions furthest, plunged immediately to the huge, the magnificent. They could have found inspiration in Gordon Craig, as practically every innovator in our playhouse has done. For Gordon Craig, too, saw a gigantic vision of the break between this peepshow of ours and the next theater:

“I see a great building to seat many thousands of people. At one end rises a platform of heroic size on which figures of a heroic mold shall move. The scene shall be such as the world shows us, not as our own particular little street shows us. The movements of these scenes shall be noble and great: all shall be illuminated by a light such as the spheres give us, not such as the footlights give us, but such as we dream of.”

MacKaye had a family tradition to urge him towards large experiments. His father, Steele MacKaye, irritated no doubt by the limitations of the nineteenth century theater as we are irritated by the limitations of the theater of the twentieth century, conceived and all but launched a grandiose and extraordinary scheme for a playhouse at the Chicago World’s Fair. The Spectatorium, which was to seat ten thousand people and give a spectacle of music and drama, movement and light, dancing and action, on land and on water, was burned, however, before it could be completed.

The dominating idea in the younger MacKaye was to create a dramatic form of and for the people. It was to celebrate the works of humanity; The Masque of St. Louis commemorated the founding of the western city, and Caliban the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death. The MacKaye masque was to be acted and danced by the community with the assistance of a few trained players, and it was to be seen by as many as possible; in St. Louis 7,000 took part and 200,000 looked on. The experience of these community masques led MacKaye to want the active participation of the citizens as audience as well as of the citizens as actors, and in The Evergreen Tree he arranged a Christmas festival, to be given either out of doors or within, in which the spectators sang with the chorus and the actors, who passed through the midst of them. Another desire of MacKaye’s was the enlarging of the characters of his masques to gigantic size. He did this literally in The Masque of St. Louis with the huge figure which stood for Cahokia. In The Will of Song, given its first production indoors, he began to work upon the idea of the “group being,” a single dramatic entity visualized through a mass of players.

Whether or not Reinhardt began his first great circus-production, Sophocles’ Œdipus Rex, with an esthetic philosophy, he had one before he was finished with Orestes, Hauptmann’s Festspiel, and Everyman, the productions which followed. This was visible in his works as well as in the outgivings of his Blätter des Deutschen Theaters.

Like MacKaye, Reinhardt found a tremendous fascination in the relationship of this sort of production to man in the mass. In the “theater of the five thousand,” as he called it, audiences are no longer audiences. They are the people. “Their emotions are simple and primitive, but great and powerful, as becomes the eternal human race.” This follows from the nature of the theater and the relation of the actors to the audience. Monumentality is the key note of such great spaces. It is only the strongest and deepest feelings—the eternal elements—that can move these great gatherings. The small and the petty disappear.

Yet the emotion is direct and poignant, according to Reinhardt, because of a spiritual intimacy established by the new relation of actors and audience. In the Circus Schumann in Berlin Reinhardt revived the Greek orchestra. At one end of the building was the front of a temple. The actors came out in great mobs before the temple, upon an acting floor surrounded on three sides by banks of spectators. In the theory and the practice of Reinhardt there should be no curtain to conceal the setting. When the spectator enters he finds himself in the midst of great spaces, confronted by the whole scene, and himself a part of it. When he is seated and the play begins he finds that “the chorus rises and moves in the midst of the audience; the characters meet each other amid the spectators; from all sides the hearer is being impressed, so that gradually he becomes part of the whole, and is rapidly absorbed in the action, a member of the chorus, so to speak.” This is a point that Reinhardt has always stressed in his big productions. This desire to make the spectators feel themselves participants is the same desire that MacKaye has carried to the point of actually making them so.

Reinhardt stressed the importance of the actors being made one with the audience through appearing in their midst. This maintained the intimacy which, he felt, was the most valuable contribution of the realistic movement in the theater—an intimacy produced in the main by the small auditoriums required if conversational acting were to be audible. Gigantic conceptions and tremendous emotional emphasis could thus be brought home to the spectator.

Technically the circus-theater made interesting demands. From the régisseur and the scene designer it required the utmost simplicity. Only the biggest and severest forms could be used. Light was the main source of decoration; it emphasized the important and hid the unessential. Acting, too, underwent the same test. The player had to develop a simple and tremendous power. He had to dominate by intensity and by dignity, by the vital and the great. There had to be music in him, as there had to be music in the action itself.

The war prevented Reinhardt from continuing his experiments in mass-production, and bringing them to fruition in a theater built especially for the purpose. With the coming of peace he was able to remodel and re-open the old Circus Schumann as the Grosses Schauspielhaus. But in less than two years Reinhardt had left it in discouragement, his great dream shattered. By the summer of 1922 it could definitely be stamped an artistic failure—crowded to the doors every night.

It is not easy to trace the cause of failure, but it seems to lie in the curious fact that here Reinhardt was both careless and too careful. Physically the theater was wrong, if the theory was right, and its physical mistakes can be traced to Reinhardt. He was too careful in planning it and not courageous enough. Because he feared for its future as a financial undertaking, he seems to have compromised it in form, in order that it could be used as an ordinary, though huge playhouse if it failed as a new kind of theater. He put in the Greek orchestra surrounded on three sides by spectators. He made the floor flexible in its levels, and led it up by adjustable platforms to a stage at one side of the house. This much was right enough. But then he made the thing a compromise between the Greek theater, a circus, and the modern playhouse, by slapping a proscenium arch into the side wall and installing behind it a huge stage with all the mechanical folderols of the day—great dome, cloud-machine, revolving stage. It was beyond human nature to resist the temptation of playing with the whole gigantic toy. Neither Reinhardt nor the directors who succeeded him could be content, as they should have been, to lower the curtain across the proscenium, to plaster up the fourth wall. Perhaps there were not enough great dramas like Œdipus to draw for months the gigantic audiences needed to support the venture; but this only meant that such a theater must be maintained for festival performances, not that it must be filled with bastard productions requiring a picture stage and largely inaudible across the spaces of the Grosses Schauspielhaus.

Reinhardt was as careless in his selection of an architect as he was careful in compromise. His original conception of the place was excellent. He wanted it primitive and grand. He wanted it to soar. And he thought of early Gothic. Between the pillars that had to be there to support the roof of the old circus, he wanted a dark blue background, a background of emptiness. The dome over the middle was to vanish into a deep presence, lit sometimes by dim stars. Some one got to Reinhardt, and persuaded him that he must be “modern;” he must assume a leadership in architecture; he must give a chance to the greatest of the new architects, Hans Poelzig. Reinhardt consented. And Poelzig produced a very strange affair.

Some of the mistakes of the Grosses Schauspielhaus may be laid to the old building. The banks of seats are rather close against the roof, while the middle of the house is bridged by a gigantic dome. These conditions might have been minimized by giving the low portion lines that seemed to mount, and perhaps by closing in a large part of the dome or darkening it. Instead Poelzig has made the dome the only lovely and aspiring part of the architecture. It is a dream of soaring circles. If the building could only be turned upside down, and the actors could play in this flashing bowl, while the audience looked down upon them—!

The whole house, its innumerable corridors, its foyers and promenades, the walls of the auditorium, the ceiling, the capitals of the columns that support the dome, the dome itself—every inch of the whole is dominated by a single decorative motif, a very shoddy, cheap motif. This is a pendant, stalactite arch, borrowed from the Moorish architecture of Spain, and reduced to the lowest terms of mechanical rudeness. The theater is of concrete and stucco, and this dull shape is repeated endlessly and tediously, as if it had been scalloped out by a machine. Only in the dome, or when it is no more than hinted at in certain wall surfaces, does this shape do anything but bore and depress. On top of this, Poelzig had stained the walls of many corridors and rooms in a yawping red, and turned the main foyer into a ghastly sea-green cavern. The theater is nervous, horrific, clangorous, glowering. There is nothing fountain-like. No spirit wells up in beauty. There is no dignity and no glory.

The fault may not be Poelzig’s, but the lighting of the stage and orchestra seems unfortunately handled. Some of the lights for the inner stage are placed in front of the arch of the proscenium instead of behind it, and thus they illuminate it, and emphasize something that ought not to be there at all, let alone pointed out. The lights for the orchestra originally came wholly from the lower edge of the dome. It was necessary, however, to supply more, and they have been placed in an ugly red hood, which sticks out from the proscenium with no relation to the rest of the house. The lights in the dome stab with a glorious brilliance; the great beams seem to descend unendingly before they reach the tiny figures of the actors, and spot them out of the darkness. But these lights make the first mistake of trying to hide themselves, and the second mistake of not succeeding in doing so. How much better it would be if they were treated frankly as part of the theater; if their source were admitted; if these lamps were hung in great formal chandeliers made a part of the decorative design of the production. For Romain Rolland’s Danton the astute Ernst Stern hung huge lanterns over the scene of the revolutionary tribunal; it was a method that should have been perpetuated.

The productions that Reinhardt made are no longer to be seen in the Grosses Schauspielhaus, for repertory vanished from his theaters along with Reinhardt. You hear, however, of many interesting and beautiful things in Danton, in Œdipus, in Hamlet, in Julius Cæsar, in Hauptmann’s Florian Geyer. But you see no such things now, or at least we did not see them when we were in Berlin. We saw the orchestra filled with seats—perhaps to swell the meager seating capacity of three thousand which was all Poelzig could include after he had wasted front space on rows of boxes and wide-spaced chairs, and perhaps because the new directors feared to use that glorious and terrible playing floor. We saw the forestage shrunk to a platform jutting out perhaps twenty feet. We saw a tedious performance of Die Versunkene Glocke, with the action shoved into the realistic proscenium, with the scenic artist fooling about with sloppily expressionist forms, and with the mountain spirit hopping down the hillside with a resounding wooden thump. We saw Hebbel’s Judith done with much more effectiveness, though without real daring or vision.

Judith, however, shows some of the possibilities of such a theater. The beginning strikes in on the imagination with the impact of the shaft of light that beats down on Holofernes, sitting like some idol on his throne. Though he is almost back to the curtain line, instead of out in the midst of the people, he drives home the effect of seeing life in the round which such a theater can give. Here is talking sculpture. The costumer, as well as the actor, is given a new problem: the problem of clothes and the body that, like a statue, must mean something from every angle, must have beauty and significance from the back as much as from the front. The costume of Holofernes, at least, achieved this. The actor has another problem, the problem of a different movement and a different speech, movement slower and grander, or else long and swift, speech that is more sonorous, more elaborately spaced. The actor’s part—in spite of rather second-rate players—is the part best done at the Grosses Schauspielhaus. There is a natural aptitude in the German player for the grand, slow speech, the roaring tempest. It is like the aptitude of the German people for the grand slow play. They like drive, rather than speed. They want to hear dull sonorous platitudes driven out by sheer belly-muscle.

There is one thing very beautiful in Judith and in this theater. It is the way a player can come forward to the edge of the forestage, and stand there alone, stabbed at by a great white light, surrounded first by emptiness, and beyond that by crowds, a brave figure alone in a great dim space. That is something you cannot feel in the chummy confines of a picture-frame.

The Grosses Schauspielhaus is a gigantic failure if you look at it with vision—and also a great portent. The place is ugly, and its purpose now debased, yet it hints at how beautiful a great, formal theater could be, how moving and inspiring its drama. Even in the wreckage, the idea still lives.

And if you try to bring a little of that same vision to the spectacle of the man who made this failure, and who ran away, you cannot deny an admiration for the courage to give up, to admit defeat, and then to go to the church, and to try to do there, in the sanctified birthplace of the modern theater, something to lift the spirit as high as the theater of the five thousand was to have lifted it.