BELASCO, AND THE LITTLE THEATRES

Signs That the Pocket Playhouses Have Come to Stay

LOUIS SHERWIN

WHEN the older generation begin to abuse the new I am always alarmed. For it is a sign that the youngsters are winning their fight, that they are not knocking on the door any longer, but climbing in through the window. And that is an unhealthy process.

Now Mr. David Belasco is annoyed about the pocket theatres, community players and semi-amateur acting organizations that have sprung up all over the country. He poured out his annoyance in an article of two columns sprinkled freely with vituperation. I always read abuse—not in the hope of learning anything from it, but, as Frank Moore Colby says, in the hope of being warmed by the heat of the language. For this reason I am sure everybody enjoyed Mr. Belasco's article immensely. The words "sordid," "diseased," "salacious," "degenerate," "perverted," "incompetent," "dirty" are scattered around with a lavish hand. He is not quite as fluent as Clement Scott was when he exhausted the English vocabulary of invective over Ibsen and "Ghosts," an article I commend Mr. Belasco to study if he is to continue being annoyed when young people succeed in the theatre without his permission.

AT a superficial glance, though, it is difficult to perceive why he should be so irritated. For with one breath he finds these toy theatres a menace to dramatic art, a peril and a pitfall against which the drama must be defended and the unsuspecting public warned. "It is high time that the producing managers who give their lives and best efforts to the theatre should denounce such an unhealthy condition of affairs." Almost the very next moment he sweeps them away as negligible and "not to be taken seriously by legitimate producers" while the growth of these organizations is "a craze that will, of course, pass out." In one sentence he accuses them of "trying to encroach upon the legitimate theatre." Later on he assures us that there is "no fear of their encroachment upon the legitimate theatre." Where, then, the menace?

One paragraph of Mr. Belasco's article was such as to provoke the mirth of Gargantua. In it he accused the Washington Square Players and others of attempting to "reform and uplift the drama." Herein he is bestowing upon them motives and purposes they have never in their wildest and most exuberant moments claimed. Now, I don't deny that this movement—or cult, as Mr. Belasco prefers to call it—is not without its preciosities and affectations. But the "reformer" pose happens to be about the only one they have not. "How they overwork the word 'uplift'!" exclaims Mr. Belasco. If he knew anything about the sort of people he is denouncing he would know that "uplift" is the one word they most volubly shrink from! To do them justice they started acting and writing plays for the sheer fun of the game. Nobody has a better time than these youngsters. They work hard, but get an immense fund of amusement out of it. This accounts largely for their surprising success. Mr. Belasco accuses them of trying to "point the way and tell me and my fellow producing managers, who have achieved their positions as such through long years of study and experience, how to do that which these same youngsters as yet have to learn the very rudiments of." The ridiculous aspect of this accusation is that according to the prospectives of the Washington Square Players they are avowedly conducting an "experimental theatre!"

BUT here, of course, Mr. Belasco is engaged in the beloved old game of setting up a straw man for the sake of knocking him down. It is only to be expected that there should be crudity in many of these pocket theatres. They are avowedly arid consciously learning their trade. Mr. Belasco does not like them because they are not learning it from him or anybody else on Broadway. They have the courage to do it in public and without his permission or advice. Nothing is farther from their intentions than an attempt to "encroach upon" or "uplift the legitimate theatre." I fancy that the more the "legitimate theatre" goes its own way the more delighted these young people will be.

THE truth is that they do not seek to replace the commercial theatre. They do, however, supplement it. They have undoubtedly brought fresh air into the drama. They have opened a field of dramatic literature that Broadway never would have tackled. For instance, it is to the Neighborhood Playhouse on Grand Street, in the heart of the East Side, that we owe the first production of the works of Lord Dunsany in this country, including "A Night in an Inn," to my mind the most stirring and at the same time poetic one-act play in all dramatic literature. Broadway managers could have given us the Dunsany plays if they had wanted to. They were published here in book form long before the Neighborhood Players performed "The Glittering Gate." Mr. Belasco, had he so chosen, could have produced "The Gods of the Mountain" years ago. But not until Stuart Walker, formerly on Mr. Belasco's staff, came along with his Portmanteau Playhouse were we able to see that superb work of poetic irony on the stage. It is on Grand Street that Shaw's "Great Catherine" and "The Inca of Perusalem" were first produced. Without the Washington Square Players, I doubt whether anybody in this country would have had a chance to see the works of Tchekov and Andreyef or Maeterlinck's "Miracle of Saint Anthony" and "Interior."

Nobody is writing articles about Mr. Belasco nowadays calling him a "wizard" and proclaiming the sentimentalities of "The Grand Army Man" and "The Return of Peter Grimm" to be works of genius. "I find certain of our newspapers devoting column after column in overpraise of strictly amateur work and .... failing to give proper attention to the serious work in the theatre." Ay, there's the rub! But along come the Washington Square Players, the Portmanteau Players, the Neighborhood Players with plays by really great contemporary authors about which, whether we critics like them or not, there is at least a great deal to say. Nobody is more delighted than the critics when Mr. Belasco's productions interest them, but they can not help it when they do not. He is by a long way the head and front of managers, American or English, of his generation. The pains that he takes with everything he does should be a model to all managers. But he usually lavishes these pains on trivial or even worthless material. He has presented a host of plays—just two of them are worth remembering: Herman Bahr's "The Concert" and Eugene Walter's "The Easiest Way."

In his choice of dramas Mr. Belasco has revealed himself as a man of incurably sentimental tendencies. He always overplays the sentimental note. The more one admires his talents, the more one deplores the way he has overlooked his opportunities and the small share he has contributed towards raising the English speaking stage from its puerile standards.

THE people concerned in the Little Theatre movement—a purely spontaneous growth— are, on the other hand, very sensible of their opportunities. It is notorious that there is a very numerous class of people who, until recently, avoided the theatre because, to put it bluntly, so much that goes on in the "legitimate" theatre is stupid and boring. The sort of people who go to the best concerts have avoided the theatre because they outgrew the sort of stuff the theatre offers when they were fifteen years old. The meaning of this pocket theatre business is not merely an adolescent craze for the "different." It means the revolt of a considerable section of the audience. People who were tired of the childish rumble-bumble offered by most of the professional managers decided that if the managers would not give them what they wanted they would produce it themselves. They are taking nothing away from the Broadway theatres because the public they attract had long ceased to visit the Broadway theatres.

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That it is a spontaneous growth is proved by the fact that it is so widespread. The Washington Square Players company was the first of its kind in New York, but by no means in America, The Wisconsin Players are, I believe, the oldest. They began in Madison as the Dramatic Club of the University of Wisconsin. They had the intelligence not to follow the example of the silly dramatic clubs at Harvard, Yale and Columbia, who devote their intellects to giving infantile imitations of Broadway musical comedies or revivals of obsolete Victorian or Elizabethan plays that were best forgotten. The Wisconsin youngsters entertained no passion for pinafores or old clothes. They sought an entirely undeveloped field. In addition to giving live works by well known European authors, they are developing young American playwrights. There are numerous fiction writers in America who would like to write for the stage, but object to turning out the sort of pap the stage seems to want. The Wisconsin Players found such a demand for their offerings that they moved to Milwaukee, where they have a theatre of their own with various activities on the side, including the publication of a magazine.

THE Provincetown Players are at present the most talked of group in New York. They are less than a year old. But in their first season they have made several remarkable productions. They are different from all other organizations in that they are almost all writers, with a few painters. They produce no foreign plays, but are developing a school of dramatists that I am sure will eventually be of real influence, although this docs not happen to be their purpose. What amuses them is the sheer fun of writing, producing and acting plays. For them to have turned out in one short season a round half dozen plays really worth while is no mean achievement. It is a most interesting experiment In the theatre they were nearly all amateurs to begin with. But experience is bound to give them power and—a tiling I hate to mention— a technic of their own. Any experiment that develops a technic devoid of the jejune claptrap of Broadway is to be encouraged by every possible means. This group includes Eugene O'Neill, a son of James O'Neill the actor. Two of his pieces, "Bound East for Cardiff" and "Before Breakfast," showed real vitality and a feeling for drama. A satire on the psycho-analysis extravagance, by Susan Glaspell and George Cram Cook, was a delightfully clever piece of humor. But the best of them all was a play by Pendleton King called "Cocaine." Not since I saw Dunsany's "A Night in an Inn" had I been so thoroughly moved as by this lurid piece of irony and ludicrous little tragedy. Sordid? Well, yes, Mr. Belasco would call it sordid. But it was real, vital, tremendous.

New organizations seem to be sprouting every month. One called "The Theatre Workshop" is no%v established at the Lenox Theatre on the upper East Side. It is still to be heard from. A new theatre is to be built for the Greenwich Village Players. Their director is Frank Conroy, formerly one of the best actors of the Washington Square Players and at present acting in Chesterton's "Magic." The Greenwich Village theatre is to be a sort of colony affair, I understand, combined with a studio apartment, restaurant and what not.

I HAVE counted no less than forty-seven of these vest-pocket playhouses and community players all over the country. Five of them are in New York, three in Chicago. They exist in towns I did not even know were on the map, such as Galesburg, Ill., and Bartlesville, Okla. Agricultural centers such as Fargo, N. D., have their "Little Country Theatres" where groups of various nationalities give characteristic entertainments. There is not room here to publish a complete list, but they are springing up all the time. They are not to be sneered at, although in some places they have their elements of freakishness and self-advertising dilettanteism. •

I, for one, do not believe this movement is a temporary fad, cult, or whatever you choose to call it. If it were, for one thing, it would not annoy Mr. Belasco so much. And secondly, such organizations as the Wisconsin Players and the Washington Square Players would not show such healthy progress. Some people think the Washington Square people made a mistake in moving over to Broadway. They are undoubtedly beginning to worry more about the box-office with an expensive theatre on their hands and heavy overhead costs to meet. But at least two of their programmes this season were really worth while. If they had done nothing but the touchingly beautiful Japanese "Bushido"—which was an artistic sensation —and Andreyev's. "Life of Man," they would have justified their existence.

FURTHERMORE, professional people from the "legitimate" theatre are being more and more attracted into the movement. Margaret Wycherly, for instance, says if she had her own way she would give all her time to it. It was she who directed the production of "Cocaine" for the Provincetown Players in such spare hours as she could snatch from acting in her husband's melodrama, "The Thirteenth Chair." In Chicago, Maurice Browne, himself a professional of experience, has several professionals associated with him. Richard Ordvnski went West in the autumn to direct the Little Theatre at Los Angeles, where he had excellent results. On his return he and Josef Urban took the.Bandbox Theatre for a season, beginning with a production of Ossip Dymow's "Nju." And of their professional standing there is, I take it, no question. No less an actress than Grace George saw one of the earlier performances of the Washington Square Players and came away declaring that if our self-appointed Maecenases wanted to do something worth while for the American stage they might far better give these youngsters financial support than waste money on second-rate English mountebanks. Somebody took the hint, and it was this that enabled the youngsters to take the Comedy Theatre.

Of their achievements in scenic, lighting and costume effects I have no room to speak here. No need to damn it by calling it "new" art. The sheer visual and spiritual beauty of many of these effects speaks for itself.

In short, these groups are contributing something wholly worth while to the theatre in America.