B

ACK in the quiet seventies and eighties, it took the animosities of a political campaign to make the country feel united. There was no radio to bring down in Texas the bad music that should have been allowed to expire in Tacoma. There were no automobiles to flit from coast to coast in an endeavor to outstrip boredom. Modern advertising had yet to create the great national magazine, which civilizes and centralizes by assuring that all Americans wear the same kind of underwear and eat the same breakfast food. In an inland town the daily passage of "the train" was an event; but the train came from the unknown and swept on into a void.

Nevertheless the isolated American town had two links with the outside world. Each of them was an American institution and a contribution to primitive culture. In summer the circus brought its gypsy canvas, its fascinating compound smell, its ladies who rode bareback and smiled as they rode, its clowns and elephants and its gorgeous ring master. And it was all so "educational!" Would that all education went down so easily.

In winter the small town had the native American drama. American drama has long been the pet child of a lot of people who would have been lonesome without some pet child. They have founded societies to foster the drama, have appointed committees as lavishly as only Americans appoint them, have written at length and talked endlessly about "the drama." In fact they have done almost everything for the drama except to lay down their money and go into the theatre to see it. Yet they have ignored our one indigenous drama, which was also for many years our greatest cultural institution.

That play was Uncle Tom's Cabin. At least once every winter an Uncle Tom troupe arrived in town, travelling in its car, or in the early days in its own wagon. It gave a parade in the morning, with the authentic blood hounds duly exhibited, and the members of the cast playing in the band. In the evening the "Opera House" was lighted; or if there were no Opera House, the town hall, or some vacant room above a warehouse. Early English drama was done in inn yards; and the trouper of the eighties was as courageous and resourceful as his English forerunner.

Moreover he was bred to his job. Most actors are born in the profession. The Uncle Tommer was born in a highly specialized branch of it. He was not simply the child of two troupers and born on tour. He was the child of two Uncle Tommers and born in the Uncle Tom car.

He grew up in his trade. When he could toddle he played Little Harry and Little Eva; in default of a fresh supply, he sometimes continued to play them until he reached the tip of Eliza's ear, and rather marred her crossing the ice because she had to lead instead of carrying him. But if luck were with him, by the time he reached Eliza's ear the young Uncle Tommer had been advanced to playing Topsy. Doubtless he would

willingly have stuck in that delightful part but time continued to work against him. Maturing years and deepening voice might advance him to the comic importance of Mr. Marks or the tragic dignity of Uncle Tom. On the other hand, he might be forced for years to "double," which in the case of an Uncle Tommer often meant to triple or quadruple. The cast was large and the troupe small. The utility actor must be a Quaker in one act, a slave up for sale in another, the Southern gentleman, St. Clair, in a third.

Of course the Uncle Tommer knew the whole play by heart. And whether he played one role or a dozen, he lived in a social circle bounded by other Uncle Tommers, married within that circle, begot other Uncle Tommers, and died at length in the car and the cast. If at his death there was no available youngster to promote, the manager put an advertisement in the New York Clipper, and absorbed the surplus population of some other car. The tradition and the succession remained unbroken.

The acting of Uncle Tom's Cabin was highly traditionalized and formal. Every line, every bit of business, every pathetic inflection and every “laugh" was brought out exactly according to rule. Actors are conservative at best, and like to practice their trade as they have learned it. Uncle Tommers were fairly a priestly caste. They would stand for no innovation.

Their priestly conservatism reacted on the play. To begin with Uncle Tom's Cabin was a dramatized novel. It had all the characteristics of the dramatized novel: knowledge of the book was taken for granted, and scenes from the book were strung together, shallow stage and back stage alternating, and the story getting itself along without too much attempt at connection or coherence.

Yet as the play was acted there were certain scenes and episodes which were not in the book at all, and which must have made Mrs. Stowe writhe if she ever witnessed them. For instance, there was Little Eva's burst of song at her father's knee, when for a single instant the play became opera: "Uncle Tom, oh set him free! This, oh papa, do for me!" There was the comic interlude in the slave market scene. Mr. Marks the lawyer bids "Seventy five," and has a slave knocked down to him; then it turns out that his bid was seventy five cents. Another and even worse comic interlude is after Uncle Tom's death, when the son of his old master comes to buy back the faithful slave and take him once more to the pleasant plantation in Kentucky. He finds that he has come too late. On the front stage he encounters the omnipresent Mr. Marks, with his gaiters and umbrella. Mr. Marks asks him his full name. Young Shelby, who is invariably the worst actor in the cast, carefully articulates, "George U. Shel-by." Mr. Marks retorts, "George, you shall be allowed to pay for my dinner," and marches him off the scene.

Now the point is not that these jokes are hackneyed and feeble. An Uncle Tom audience was glad of any joke, and any popular audience prefers a hackneyed joke, so that it will know when to laugh. The point is that these jokes, and these bits of pathos as well, sound like improvisations; yet they always recur in exactly the same form.

The explanation is that they were once improvisations, the invention of some especially gifted Mr. Marks, or of some parent whose Little Eva was supposed to possess a singing voice. Once in the play, these improvisations were seen to possess a certain dramatic effectiveness. Little Eva's song drew tears. Mr. Mark's bid and Mr. Marks' pun drew laughs, which no true actor can ever resist drawing. Moreover Mr. Marks' bad jokes had a certain dramatic effectiveness. Like the drunken porter scene in Macbeth, they were comic relief when the proper business of the play threatened to become too poignant for the nerves of the audience.

A similar scene of a different character was the gloss of Little Eva's death. To weep over a dying child, an effectively, rhetorically dying child, was much to the taste of the age. But it is a canon of the theatre that the feelings which have been harrowed must be soothed: you may have your minute of tragedy, but after it you must have the touch of reconciliation. It is got very simply by showing Little Eva in Heaven. The audience has the evidence of its senses that the dead child was not dead after all, and will shortly come through the audience between the acts to sell her photographs.

The insertion of these impromptus in the text was made possible by the fact that Uncle Tom's Cabin was never taught from a script. It was handed down verbally. Now when you have a verbal text, from which the name of the original dramatist has long ago disappeared, and which has been modified by generations, each of which left its bit and failed to leave its name, you have a genuine folk drama. This folk drama was sustained by a priestly caste, which gave its life to Uncle Tom's Cabin. It was upheld by an audience that did not scruple to put down its quarter for a play which it knew as well as the actors knew it. And it resulted in the formation of a native school of acting.

The acting of Uncle Tom's Cabin was very bad indeed, because it was acting in a false school. Each rôle crystallized in the course of time. Each character became a type. Legree was incarnate cruelty, Uncle Tom sheer fidelity, Miss Ophelia the Meddlesome Mattie type of spinster, Little Eva pathos with the screws on. Any attempt to act one character naturally and spontaneously, or to make it effective by other than traditional means, would have thrown the whole performance out of key. Sympathy for Shylock is the invention of a generation that is not satisfied to treat the classics as classics. The Uncle Tommers knew better. They never tried to create sympathy for Simon Legree. He was not a cruel man: there might be thousands of them. He was simply the perfect synonym for cruelty.

A highly specialized institution, upheld by a caste that gives its life to the institution and makes a living out of it, is due to continue for a long time. When it perishes it perishes at a stroke, like any highly specialized organism when conditions change abruptly. Uncle Tom's Cabin went on playing after its subject had dated, its acting traditions were obsolete, its proper audience had outgrown the naïve receptivity of the early days. The audience guyed the play, but they continued to attend in sufficient numbers to send the Uncle Tom car on from town to town.

It is commonly supposed that Uncle Tom died his second and worse death because he could not survive the competition of the movies. In the economic interpretation of history, this may hold: Uncle Tom at a quarter could not draw against the early movies at five cents. But the glory of Uncle Tom was paling before Charlie Chaplin first thrust the wrong end of a mop into the face of some underling who was earning his salary. The sacrilegious touch of the professional showman had already been laid upon the traditions of the priestly caste. Al W. Martin of accursed memory was the man who walked out on the limb and then sawed it off. He was one of those natural geniuses who cannot let well enough alone. He reddened the bill boards and darkened the dramatic with his bastard proclamations of "two little Evas and two Topsys," not to mention a "fifty thousand dollar production." A "fifty

thousand dollar production" seems scarcely worth mentioning in these days when "a million dollar film" is the common currency of the trade. But it was the entering wedge of commercialism. And not even Simon Legree was a good business man. He beat his slaves to death for sheer love of it.

The country was closing up anyhow, and the doom of folk drama was at hand. Awakening intelligence is always a foe to theatrical effectiveness, and irritable modern nerves miss the poetry of a scene where Little Eva drives Uncle Tom as a horse with a wreath of artificial roses that has seen better days on his grizzled curls. The scene cannot be bettered by putting two wreaths of roses on Uncle Tom. It must be accepted in its native simplicity, or it must be repudiated and the doom of its proponents sounded.

Once, and once only, it was vouchsafed to me to see Uncle Tom's Cabin under perfect conditions, and that too in the days of its decline. I had seen it in villages and cities, as well as in a college town. Your true Uncle Tommer could play his part with simple heroism even in a college town, where the laughter and applause were carefully timed to come at exactly the wrong

moments.

The perfect performance was given in a Soldiers' Home. Now old soldiers-none of your fly by night World War veterans or half baked Spanish Americans, but the true whiskey drinking, tobacco chewing, hard swearing and hard boiled Civil War brand-old soldiers taken together form either the worst audience in the world or the best. If they do not like "the show" they leave, not singly at the end of an act, but by whole rows whenever displeasure happens to boil over. But if they happen to be suited they are there to hear the show. Comment or casual conversation among the audience is put down with a freedom that an outsider must envy. Even applause is saved for the end of the act; and when it comes, it is real applause, no feeble tapping inspired by ushers or by a stage manager's adroit use of the curtain.

The old soldiers were an ideal, and of course a practiced audience for Uncle Tom's Cabin. They knew when to guffaw and when to be quiet enough for the proverbial pin to be dropped. In fact the audience was for once much better trained than the actors. These particular Uncle Tommers may have been aware that their sands were running out. They fumbled the obvious points of their obvious play. They soon ceased even to be amusing. We young sophisticates turned for relief to the audience.

Halfway back in the auditorium we presently spied a coal black negro in the familiar blue uniform. He himself had been a slave, and had later fought to free the slaves. He watched the stage in absorption that was almost bewilderment, and down his poor old black cheeks the tears were running, and drying white against the black as he winked them away, not to miss a word of the play. To him this was no troupe of poorly trained actors who went through a tiresome routine because they knew no other way to make a living. Acting itself before his eyes was the drama of his race's long enslavement.

Somehow after that my connoisseurship palled. It wasn't quite such a funny show as I had thought it. In any case Uncle Tom's Cabin was retreating into history. The blood hounds—such very tame wild blood hounds they always were -galloped across the stage for the last time. For the last time Eliza attempted the "practical" ice, and Legree cracked his black snake whip and Mr. Marks his inevitable jokes. Even Little Eva must be grown up by this time.

Yet our one folk play is surely entitled to its little niche in dramatic history. The niche must be occupied only by a tradition. If the book of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" should come at last to the ignominy of print, the book itself would be nothing without the acting. And no feeble account can do justice to the perfection of that acting. It was the best bad acting any stage ever saw.

The Committee on Drama, organized by the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, under its Commission on Christian Education, will hold its third Summer School of Religious Drama in affiliation with the Summer School of Religious Education of Auburn Theological Seminary, Auburn, New York, July 12 to July 30. Courses will be offered in play directing and play study; religious music and religious pageantry; the writing of religious drama and in a graded dramatic program for a church school.

W

HEN Yale University called Professor George Pierce Baker of Harvard to New Haven to direct the department of drama in the School of the Fine Arts and teach the young idea how to write plays, it was something more than the recognition of Professor Baker's work for the drama at Harvard. It was an admission on the part of a great American University that the drama had come into its own as one of the important arts to be included in the curriculum of a modern institution of learning. It was also an admission of tremendous significance to the theatre at large, for it links New York's theatrical Rialto to the Yale Quadrangle, and this twinship of dramatic interests is bound to result in better plays for Broadway.

There was no department of drama at Harvard when Professor Baker was struggling at that sober and conservative seat of learning to make the Harvard overseers realize the importance of such a department. Harvard rather elevated its eyebrows at the drama. It was more interested in Big Business and Babbittry than art and dramaturgy. So a sort of Harvard International Correspondence School was founded, where future Babbitts might learn how to start Rotary Clubs, and English 47 moved to Yale. Now Drama II, which is the Yale equivalent of English 47, is by way of being the most popular college course in America.

Another important thing to be considered in connection with Professor Baker's new work at New Haven is the fact that all the theatrical interests at Yale will be housed under one roof when the new Gothic theatre, the gift of Edward S. Harkness, Yale '97, is ready for occupancy next September. It will be the most completely equipped laboratory in existence for playwriting and play production. This new University Theatre, which will be the first modern theatre of Gothic design in the world, will have lecture rooms; workshops, where scenery and costumes can be made and the lighting equipment kept and prepared; rehearsal rooms, so that more than one play, or different acts of the same play may be in rehearsal simultaneously; a green room as a social center for the actors, and adequate quarters for the Yale Dramatic Association, something which that organization has so long planned. In other words, it will be that ideal combination of laboratory and theatre that has been the futile dream of so many American producers, and the best equipped director in the country will be in charge of it-George Pierce Baker.

Messrs. Blackall, Clapp and Whittemore, the architects of

the new department of drama at Yale, have, at Mr. Baker's suggestion, adapted the Tudor Gothic style of architecture to the needs of the theatre and workshops. This unusual style of architecture, that is, for theatrical purposes, was made necessary in order that it might harmonize with Yale's beautiful Memorial Quadrangle. The front of the University Theatre will be of limestone and seam-faced granite, and the sides and rear will be a combination of stone and brick in the same style as the court of the Memorial Quadrangle.

While Professor Baker is the director of this playhouse, he has as his assistants, persons who have had long experience in their particular fields of dramatic endeavor. They are Hubert Osborne, assistant director; Donald M. Oenslager, instructor in scenic design; Stanley R. McCandless, instructor in lighting; and Evelyn Cohen in costume designing. There are a thoroughly equipped stage, two smaller experimental stages, workshops, dressing rooms, lecture rooms, classrooms, offices and a special rehearsal room.

At Harvard, Professor Baker was always handicapped by the decentralization of his forces. There was no one building that housed the various theatrical interests, and his students were brought together only by classes, rehearsals or actual performances. The present writer, who was a member of Professor Baker's playwriting course, well remembers the difficulties that had to be overcome when we were all cooperating with him at Harvard to put the 47 Workshop on its feet. It was only his patience, ingenuity and executive ability that kept the dramatic torch burning at Harvard, and he has been more than a torch-lighter: he has also been a torch-bearer, carrying with him wherever he goes this unquenchable flame, from which so many other dramatic candles have been lighted in various sections of the United States.

But where the new department of drama at Yale differs radically from the working organization at Harvard is in this: at Harvard, there were not the facilities for teaching all of the branches that spring from the play, which may be called the parent trunk. Professor Baker's courses at Harvard, English 39 and English 14, were courses in the history of the drama, and these formed the nucleus of the playwriting course known as English 47 and its more advanced course, English 47a. Whether these dramatic activities at Harvard would ultimately have grown into a department of drama is a moot question, for there was an antagonistic spirit toward Professor Baker's work which was felt by every student who worked with him. It

Professor George Pierce Baker. might be said here, to the credit of that sturdy and independent spirit, the late Barrett Wendell, so long a professor of English at Harvard, and author of the best text book on English composition in the language, that he was always in sympathy with Professor Baker's work, and in the pioneer days of the drama at Harvard, he was a tower of strength to his colleague, saw what he was trying to do, and was, in fact, the progressive force for the betterment of art that he always was up to the time of his death. However, as I have pointed out before, Big Business won the day at Harvard, and the Babbitts remained in possession of the field.

Now, at Yale, while the play will always be the thing, as it is bound to be, nevertheless the things that make the play, the invisible forces that are behind every performance, are not being neglected. Professor Baker knows their importance. How well I remember the day in Cambridge when that epochmaking book of Gordon Craig's on the art of the theatre first appeared, and how earnestly Professor Baker urged us all to read and assimilate it, impressing upon us then, the importance of knowing all that could be known about the theatre. Even in this he was the American pioneer, passing on the torch to such conspicuous disciples as Robert Edmond Jones, Kenneth Macgowan and Eugene O'Neill.

So now, for the first time in the history of the stage, a great university is teaching those things that go to the making of theatre directors, teachers, producers, costumers, electricians, designers and actors. All have their place in this new department of drama at Yale. In the catalogue for 1926, one reads:

"The Department of Drama is intended for persons who wish to become professional playwrights or producers, or specialists in scenic design, stage costuming or stage lighting. Its students should have in view work later in the professional theatre, in the experimental theatres of the country, or in community settlements, colleges, and high schools. Though no regular courses in acting are given, the production by the Department of the plays written by its students affords unusual opportunities to persons primarily interested in acting, to acquire valuable experience, especially in the creating of new roles. Such persons will be given every chance to show their ability as actors if they take regular work in the Department, such as, for instance, the courses Drama 9 and 10 a."

Applicants for admission to any of these courses must make their applications by June 1, preceding the opening day of the first term, September 30. A certificate of accomplishment will be awarded to regularly enrolled students upon the successful

completion of the entire course in the Department of Drama. Ordinarily, for holders of college degrees, the course should fill two years. Students of both sexes are admitted.

One may get some idea of the scope of this dramatic work at Yale by consulting the catalogue of the School of the Fine Arts, which gives a complete description of each course. Drama 9, for instance, treats of the theatre, its history, organization and maintenance, with lectures by Professor Baker, Mr. Osborne, Mr. McCandless, Mr. Oenslager and Miss Cohen. Drama 10a treats of forms of the drama. Drama II is the playwriting course that compares with English 47 at Harvard. In this course, three plays are required of each student: an adaptation in one act; an original one-act play, and a play of at least three acts. Drama 12a is a history of stage design, and Drama 13b treats of practice and theory of stage design. The other courses are Drama 14, stage lighting; Drama 15, history of costume and practice of costume design; Drama 23, advanced stage design; Drama 24, advanced stage lighting; Drama 25, advanced costume design; Drama 27b, dramatic criticism, open only to advanced and professional students; Drama 30, producing, treating of the practical problems that confront the producer of a play; Drama 35, a course on the history, theory and practice of pageantry; Drama 40, advanced producing, treating of problems in difficult producing and Drama 47, which is the equivalent of English 47a at Harvard. This is an advanced course, open only to students who have taken Drama II with distinction.

The great value of these correlative courses to the prospective playwright is that he learns, before tackling Broadway, enough of lighting, designing, costuming and directing, to realize the obstacles that he may be placing in the path of his prospective producer, obstacles which might well prevent the production of his own precious manuscript when he finds himself facing the hard-boiled gentlemen who control destinies along a certain well-lighted thoroughfare that is the goal of every would-be playwright. He is taught the practical as well as the idealistic values of the modern theatre, and, as a result, he is saved many of the heartaches that are a part of the curriculum in the University of Hard Knocks, as Elbert Hubbard christened the school of experience.

One of the greatest advantages of Yale over Harvard for the man or woman seriously intent upon writing for the professional stage, is the proximity of New York City to New Haven. This makes it possible for the student who husbands his means to take occasional trips to the metropolis and see the reigning plays of the hour, study their construction, the psychology of their appeal, the way they are staged, the reaction on the audience, and all those other cumulative details that tend to make a play a success or a failure. For instance, last winter, the students in English II went in a body to study Abie's Irish Rose, in an endeavor to discover why, like Tennyson's brook, it was going on forever. Such trips as this were impossible to the Harvard student, unless he lived on the Gold Coast. His only outlet was the road production of some popular New York success in Boston, generally a year after it had been seen on Broadway.

However, it seems to me that the greatest service Professor Baker can render in the cause of drama is to inculcate in his students a proper regard for dramatic values in the making of good plays. Drama, with its sister arts, Music, Painting and Poetry, has been passing through a storm and stress period of experimentation. Just as in music, painting and poetry, there are mediocre workers who potter around with imitations and try to make the public believe that it is the real thing. That is why New York had so many revivals of Ibsen, Shaw, Strindberg and other European dramatists last season. The producers, seemingly, could not get hold of enough good native material to fill the seventy-five theatres that now demand public patronage in New York. They were forced to revive old masterpieces and old successes in the hope of keeping their home footlights burning.

Professor Baker at Yale is in a wonderfully strategic position. With so many anaemic plays struggling for existence dramatic clinic at New Haven, and, over the corpses of many in the playhouses along Broadway, he can hold, as it were, a horrible examples, point out effectively what not to do, as well as what to do in order to become a working dramatist. He can teach his students to steer a midway course between the Scylla (Continued on page 318)