The Theatre Guild next season will make a radical change and produce with a permanent company in repertoire. Just as in the past they have worked toward a creative standard of good plays, they are now concentrating, though not at the expense of the play, on a standard of ensemble acting. The experiment will also test the value of repertoire in comparison with the usual system of playing a play for the longest possible run with its accompanying inartistic results.

So far these people have been signed for the permanent company, Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, Clare Eames, Margalo Gillmore, Henry Travers, Edward G. Robin

an

BARRETT H. CLARK

son and Helen Westley. VOL. 16 More names will be nounced shortly. There will also be a supplementary group of younger actors.

Establishing this acting group in a repertoire system of production is the first step in an effort to develop the actor as the present system of casting and producing is unable to do. For seven years the Guild has been thinking about it and promising its subscribers that repertoire For this would be its aim. reason the stage of the new theatre was built so as to house four plays at once.

The permanent company is the first consideration. As the idea of the fixed company takes hold, the degree of repertoire will be increased. Six plays will be presented as in previous years. During the first fifteen weeks, three plays will be alternated according to a special system of alternation which is being worked out to fit the Guild's subscription policy.

The Guild feels that the advantage to the actors is clear. They will not all appear in every play but some of the group will. Plays will

KANELLOS AND KANELLOU IN AN EARLY GREEK DANCE

Frontispiece

EXPRESSIONISTIC DRAMA IN THE AMERICAN THEATRE
Grace Anschutz 245

THREE SOULS IN SEARCH OF A DRAMATIST, a Farce..... 247 Esther Dresden Schwartz Barrett H. Clark 250 Jack Crawford 251 Percival Wilde 252 Florence Ryerson 253 Mary Grahn 255 257 258 261

EXPERIMENTS AND FANTASIES..
A BROADWAY EXPLORER.
AS TO PLAY CONTESTS.
LETTERS, a Comedy.
IDYLL, a Play.
Books...

IMMORTALITY, a Fantasy.

J. Vandervoort Sloan Charles Pattison MacInnis

Two Unique University Productions. The Little Theatre Play List.

Reviews of Newly Printed Plays..

Through the Clearing House.
Workshop Notes.....

Recent Significant Productions.
On the Bill-board..

THE LITTLE THEATRE MONTHLY.

The Little Theatre Movement in Ireland..

J. J. Hayes 261

Amateur Theatre Notes from Coast to Coast......263 Editorial..

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269

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272

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273

Contests and Tournaments..
Personalia.....

DRAMA LEAGUE OF AMERICA...

Junior List.

NOTES FROM THE THEATRE GUILD.

be chosen far in advance. With the company already under contract no time will be lost in casting. The actor can read and study long before rehearsals begin. The actor himself will be a delicate sensitive instrument ready to act the part, not chosen to fit the part and play himself, and it is expected that a play will receive more understanding, fuller performances than from actors chosen to, in some measure, act themselves. The actor will find variety. The business man hates to do the same job throughout the year. The actor needs change to bring freshness to his work, and besides giving him variety in rôles, alternation will permit him to come back to the same rôle with a fresh attack. By developing in the company a unified spirit, by enlarging experience with different kinds of rôles, by forcing a creative attitude towards the repetition of the same rôle, the Guild hopes gradually to establish a company second to none.

There is of course a conscious sacrifice of the commercial value of each play, but if the system makes better actors, better productions will result. The author may come, too, to feel a willingness to have a play presented for successive years rather than drained utterly by one production. With this system it will be possible not only to repeat the fine and vital productions of preceding years but to present plays which are sure to have an appeal for a few performances only.

The public may find real interest in watching a group of players develop, in seeing past productions kept alive, and some alleviation worked out of a situation which permits such fine actresses as Katherine Cornell and Pauline Lord to be locked up in a success for two seasons.

A study of the plays, which have been labelled expressionistic, yields the suggestion that their dominating quality is emphasis of the inner life behind the surface action. The spirit of such a play actually is its shaping power,-it controls the form which its expression shall take. From this factor rise all the unreal and startling effects by which we recognize expressionism. Everything about the play,—lights, setting, language, action,-must emphasize the inner life, so that the play is not merely a series of scenes of developing action, but a completely harmonious presentation of a truth. There is, of course, nothing essentially new in this. Shakespeare must have shaped his plays so as to express the inner life of his people; Coleridge in his essay, On Poesy and Art, is thrilled to the point of incoherence over the idea of such a harmony of spirit and form that the form becomes the spirit. The essential difference between the new and the old lies in the author's ideas as to what means are available for this expression. The older playwright felt that he must meet certain traditional demands of the theatre as to the structure of his play and that he must keep within the realm of possibility and of plausibility as to its outward action. The presentday playwright recognizes neither tradition nor reality as a limitation: he accepts no shaping power but his own interpretation of the truth which he would voice.

Production may, however, place hindrances in the way of the author's full expression,-hindrances which the expressionistic playwright cannot ignore, but which he attempts to counteract. Pirandello's play, Six Characters in Search of an Author, makes vivid the fact that one thing that hinders a dramatist from presenting emotional life as he sees it is the world, is that these characters, who have come to life in his own mind, must be given to the world through the medium of actors,-they cannot speak for themselves. In the hands of the actors, the characters, and as a result, the whole spirit of the play, may become altogether different. The tendency is, therefore, to create types rather than individuals, and often to present them by means of puppets, or at least of stylized characters.

The new playwright is convinced also, that if he is to make a play really impressive to his audience, he must awaken their emotional response: he must create and accentuate an emotional atmosphere. To this end he frequently places the action against a background of startling light and shadow or color, and of musical or monotonous sound.

If expressionism may be taken to mean the untrammeled presentation of the author's vision of the spirit of man,a presentation hindered neither by the traditional technique which demands adherence to surface reality, nor by

the ultra modern technique which repudiates realty-then the plays of Eugene O'Neill and of Luigi Pirandello are expressionistic, although they are not always so labelled, and although they lack many of the commonly accepted ear-marks. The absence of the ear-marks makes them all the more truly the author's own. One wonders, however, if some of our American writers of expressionistic plays are not merely following the German model. This is, of course, no indication even, that they will not work through this, already established form, into a free expression of their own.

Two obviously expressionistic plays by American authors were produced in New York for the first time in March. 1923. These were The Adding Machine, by Elmer Rice, and Roger Bloomer, by John Howard Lawson. The greater popularity of Mr. Rice's play was due perhaps to a general recognition that it comes close to every day life. We are, most of us, more or less aware that we are slaves, if not to an adding machine, then to the comfortable environment in which we find ourselves. Most of us feel a need for a self expression which we have not the courage to attempt.

The play falls into two parts. In the first we see Mr. Zero, an adding clerk, who has worked for twentyfive years in the same place, at the same desk, doing the same work. His life is made up of figures and a starved sex longing. Mrs. Zero finds her chief expression in voicing her contempt for her husband and in telling him "where to get off at," and in contemplation of the moving pictures with her friends, Mrs. One, Mrs. Two, Mrs. Three, and on up to Mrs. Twelve. One afternoon when Mr. Zero has been pleasantly convincing himself that he would have the courage to ask the Boss for a raise, the Boss comes to his desk and announces that since adding machines are to be installed, his services will be needed no longer. Now Mr. Zero, slave though he may be, has clung with tenacious pride to the idea of his twenty-five years of service. "Valuable man," he calls himself when he considers asking for an increase. The idea then that he is being "canned" is hard to grasp, and when grasped turns his mind so topsy-turvy that a brain storm ensues and he kills the Boss with a paper file. This is a most effective scene. Zero's desk is on a circular platform in the center; nothing else is on the stage except wood and glass partitions suggestive of a department store office. When Zero begins to understand that he is being dismissed, the circular platform starts to revolve slowly to the accompaniment of merry-go-round music. They are facing each other. The Boss talks pleasantly, trying to let him down easily, but the revolutions become faster and faster and the noise be

comes louder and louder until the words from his moving jaws cease to be audible. The noise becomes deafening, there is a terrific peal of thunder, a flash of red, then utter blackness. So we share in his emotional crisis as he murders his employer.

The second part of the play, comprising the last three scenes, shows Zero, who has been executed for the murder, in the life after death. They add little to our understanding of his soul, but they afford insight into what Mr. Rice thinks of it all. In the Elysian Fields, Zero meets Shrdlu, a gentleman who had been kindly but firmly forced by his mother into a groove of life in which he must suppress his natural emotions, and who suddenly, for no apparent reason, had killed her. Shrdlu, finds the after life very puzzling. He wants to suffer the torture of the damned in expiation of his crime, but no suffering seems to be forthcoming. The people whom he would expect to find in Heaven are not there: his mother, the minister. There are very few ministers. "The two who seem most beloved," he tells Zero, “are Dean Swift and the Abbé Rabelais. They are both much admired for some indecent tales which they have written."

Mr. Rice seems to think that the most favored, as he designates those who choose to remain in the Elysian Fields, though any one may remain, are the people who are capable of throwing off whatever shackles may have bound them and of living sweetly and serenely their own lives.

Miss Daisy Diana Dorothea Devore, a middle aged female clerk, who had killed herself for love of Zero, almost achieves beauty in the after life, through the expression of her love. He responds to her advances and for a moment is able to free himself and be truly happy. He is still a slave, however, for when he learns that it doesn't matter there, whether they are married or not, he beats it out of Heaven; he "don't want to mix with people that ain't respectable."

In the last scene he has become so completely a slave that he can't, of his own will, stop operating an adding machine. He is told that his time in Heaven is up; he must go back to Earth, to endure it all again. He is in despair over this, but on being made to believe that he sees a beautiful girl, Hope, who will accompany him, he goes gayly on his way, and the play is done.

The second piece, Roger Bloomer, was less popular than The Adding Machine. It presents the struggle of an adolescent youth to understand himself and to establish relationships with life. He struggles with the baffling answers which life gives to his questions, answers which apparently have no connection with the tangled desires within him, but he finds ultimately the power within himself to face and solve these problems.

He is a sensitive boy, a student and a dreamer perturbed by sex. He is the son of a common-place Middle-Western father, who cannot comprehend him. His struggle is first against the proprieties, respresented by his father, the citizens of the town, and the college examiner; he must accept their ideas of established truth. After he has seen a girl snap her fingers at their propriety, throw up her job, and leave for New York for no other reason than that she is tired of it, he runs away from home to seek his fortune in the same city. Here his struggle is against obscenity and sex, represented by his horrible land-lady. He is not willing to accept what he finds as being the truth of life, but it oppresses him.

In desperation he goes to discover this girl, who helps him. When she loves him, he thinks the riddle of life is almost solved. But to her, love is merely sex, and sex is unclean. Her puritan ancestors and her early training have impressed this idea upon her, and the knowledge of sex, which life in the city has given her, has only intensified her feeling. Although she loves Roger, she realizes that they cannot finance a marriage. that they are caught by this terrible sex joke; that in spite of her vaunted purity, the clamor of the flesh is in her voice, and that they can not hold out against it. Feeling,

She feels

too, that he is like a child, depending upon her to reveal the meaning of life, and that, within himself, he must face his problems and conquer them, she kills herself to free him. He is put into prison until the cause of her death can be ascertained, and while there he reviews in a dream his emotional experiences, in grotesque scenes and dances. The last scene represents peace and strength in the figure of the girl: the dream that cannot die. Before the final curtain, Roger is released and goes from his prison, confidently, into the world.

There is much satire of pompous Americanism in the play: smug satisfaction with one's own conclusions about life, horror at any open disrespect for the authority of the government or of established opinion, blatant pride in a superficial education and social success. The moneydominated, mechanical spirit of modern business is presented as a menace. With the exception of two or three scenes, the action is fairly realistic, much more so than the constantly exaggerated action of The Adding Machine, Roger Bloomer resembles Wedekind's The Awakening of Spring as a tragedy of adolescence, though it is broader in scope and attacks a larger problem. Wedekind's play protests against keeping youth in ignorance of sex facts, and maintains that if children were informed, the problem would be solved. But Mr. Lawson's play strikes at the attitude of mind, behind this reticence: society's snug dismissal of sex as obscene and its resulting satisfaction with itself as being nice and respectable. He pleads for presenting sex to youths as something essential to personality; not as something unclean and degrading, of which they must be ashamed.

The play holds out a hope of better times, for in the dream, the girl whom Roger loves says to the obscene old women who are torturing him:

"Away! Away, ghosts of yesterday, for the young are coming, marching, marching, marching; can't you hear the echo of their feet, can't you hear them singing a new song?" And again to Roger she exclaims:

"Face the music; what music falling about you like rain; what splendor of broken chords, brass trumpets braying in the morning, and whisper of harps in the dusk. . . and far off, listen, the tread of a marching people singing a new song."

Beggar on Horseback by George Kaufman and Marc Connelly was produced in New York in February, 1924. It is a dream play with realistic first and last scenes. The technique is that of the obviously expressionistic play, and yet, as the presentation of a dream the piece possesses realistic justification. Kenneth Macgowan, in his book, The Theatre of Tomorrow, says that the drama of the future "will attempt to transfer to dramatic art the illumination of those deep and vigorous and eternal processes of the human soul which the psychology of Freud and Jung has given us through the study of the unconscious, striking to the heart of emotion and linking our commonest life today with the emanation of the primitive mind."

It seems that the unconscious is revealed to us largely through dreams. Perhaps, after all, the expressionists have merely taken dreams as the model for these strange new plays. In this connection, the following quotation from Roger Fry's chapter on Blake in his book, Vision and Design, is interesting.

"All art gives us an experience freed from the disturbing conditions of actual life. Blake's art, more concentrated than most, is removed more entirely from bodily and physiological accompaniments, and our experience has the purity, the intensity and the abstraction of a dream."

Beggar on Horseback is much gayer and swifter than either of the above mentioned plays. We can laugh in the presence of the tragedy, because we know it to be a dream. The play shows what might happen to the struggling young musician who marries for money in order that he may have leisure for his art; it suggests that the beggar who, through a wish could find himself on horseback, might much prefer to walk.

(Continued on page 278.)

Miss Wilks [Very professional. Hornrimmed glasses, tailored dress and the rest]: It's about time you started on her, [Looking at wristwatch] it's almost midnight. We've only gotten as far as the name and your play is billed to appear in three weeks.

Alexson: That's all right Miss Wilks. The main thing is the name. If a play has a catching title it is assured of a successful run. Now if you don't mind my keeping you working so late, we'll go on.

Miss Wilks: As for myself, Mr. Alexson, I don't expect literary gentlemen to keep regular hours, but what will the watchman think when he sees your light going at this time of the night.

. that's a

Alexson [Easily]: Oh well, when it's time for him to come around we can draw the shades. Let's see now. How about Claudia Kingsley for the heroine pretty good sounding name. Miss Wilks: Yes, it will look well on the programs.

Alexson: That's just the point, Miss Wilks. All these little details help to give the proper illusion. [He goes on dictating.] Take this. Medium height, slim, vivacious, dark eyes

petite."

Miss Wilks: But Mr. Alexson, your last heroine in "The Flapper Age" was also dark and petite.

Alexson: Ah, so she was, Miss Wilks. But it doesn't matter a bit. That's the present style in heroines-the public is slave to fashion whether it's hats or heroines. [He dictates.] Go on. "The spoiled darling of wealthy parents goes in for jazz, road-parties-smokes." N-no, I'm afraid it will have to be something stronger than cigarettes.

Miss Wilks: It made a most touching scene in your last play when Audrey's fiancé asks her to choose between himself and the ashtray. The audience fell for that and if you remember, there was much favorable press comment.

Alexson: Ah, but that was written six months ago! The dramatist must be like the weathercock. Alert to every passing breeze he must veer with the slightest change of wind. Take bobbed-hair for example. Won't lift an eyebrow anymore. [Miss Wilks pats her elaborate coiffure.] Now don't you erfeel conspicuous wearing your hair long, Miss Wilks?

Miss Wilks [Defiantly]: That's why I let them grow out again. They certainly attract attention and arouse comment wherever I appear.

Alexson: Then you understand, Miss Wilks. That's precisely the case with smoking. Why there's Emily Post herself, laying down the

*Copyrighted. For permission to produce address the THE DRAMA,

law that after-dinner cigarettes are quite the proper thing for ladies. No, that's quite passé.

Miss Wilks [Helpfully]: Then why not have her married and have her desert her helpless husband and innocent babes for a career. That always takes.

Alexson [Reflectively]: Yes, so it does. Do you recall my play "The Business Wife"? [Miss Wilks nods her head.] Well, it ran a hundred weeks on Broadway. And the ministers just deluged me with requests to preach to their congregations on "How to Save the Home." The only trouble, Miss Wilks, is that it's run to death by the women's magazines. In my estimation this career business is overdone.

Miss Wilks: Yes, that's true. [She bites her pencil thoughtfully.]

Alexson: Ah, Miss Wilks, being a dramatist in the days of the good, old-fashioned heroine wasn't the strenuous job it is now. All that was required of her then was to be innocent of both life and brain-matter, to blush and courtesy prettily and swoon gracefully. But now [He gestures] we have to make them sophisticated on everything from Einstein to birth-control, blasé to every emotion and adepts of every elegant vice-the naughtier, the louder the applause.

Miss Wilks: Well, that heroine of yours in "Gladys Runs Amuck," surely hit the high spots. [She laughs. That was a screamer where she comes in tipsy and makes love to the floor-lamp. The audience went wild over it

Alexson: Yes. That went over big and mind you that was put on before prohibition came in. It has lots greater possibilities now. [Decisively] I believe I'll just have her stick to cocktails and go in for effervescent sprees. The eighteenth amendment has been a boon to the dramatist.

Miss Wilks: Naturally. The public is so cowardly. It just loves to see others break the laws and do the things that most people don't have the nerve to do themselves.

Alexson [Returning to his desk, he prepares for further dictation]: That's why naughty plays are so popular, Miss Wilks. The audience imagines itself in the place of the actors and gets a vicarious thrill doing forbidden things.

*

Surely not at this unholy hour. They are the bane of a writer's life. He can't turn around without stumbling over one. Is there no escape! [The tap becomes more insistent.] Heavens! How can I admit anyone? They are certain to misrepresent your presence here alone with me at this time of the night. Miss Wilks [She is about to open the door]: But your secretary-isn't that all right?

Alexson Running after her]: Oh, but an author must be so circumspect. He has to make up for the morals of all his characters. [Suddenly he thinks of the closet.] Miss Wilks, if you don't mind staying in the clothes-closet. It won't be but a moment.

Miss Wilks [Turning back]: Shucks. They'll stick. [She giggles.] But I'll do anything to preserve your reputation, Mr. Alexson. [She goes in with a mock courtesy, but leaves the door of the closet slightly ajar. She peers out at intervals, vastly amused. Alexson goes to the

door. As he opens it a portly, middle-aged woman, short and florid, with ample bosom and greyish hair, rushes in.]

Mrs. Gray [She speaks quickly as if out of breath]: Oh, I knew you would not refuse me an audience. You, with your marvelous soul and great understanding.

Alexson: Of course, otherwise they'd have no excuse for returning to their virtuous and dull lives. Punishment is the invention of the coward. [There is a tap at the door.]

Miss Wilks [Startled]: Why, it's someone knocking.

Alexson [Irritably]: Now, who can that be at this hour? I thought that if we worked in the evenings we would surely be safe from interruption.

Miss Wilks: Probably it's one of your admirers.