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.