Continental stagecraft

by Kenneth Macgowan

Both consciously and unconsciously men of the theater have sought to win back this exaltation. The latest attempt is in some ways the most daring and the most interesting. Max Reinhardt, leaving the playhouse, has tried to find it in a wedding of the drama and the church. Before this book is published, Reinhardt will have produced Calderon’s mystic drama, The Theater of the World, under the high altar of the Collegienkirche in Salzburg. It is impossible now to speak of how far he has been able to effect an esthetic union between the handsome rococo edifice and the platform for his players; it is only possible to speculate on the spiritual feeling which spectators may gain through looking up at the actors from a flat floor, instead of looking down upon them. I cannot speak of the actual presence of exaltation in the audience, but we can speculate together on the possibilities of winning back spiritual vitality for the drama by union with the church.

First of all, there comes the disquieting thought that the theater presents the spectacle these days of a bird that lays eggs in another bird’s nest. It isn’t content with the one it has used for some centuries. It must go snooping about looking for a new haven for the drama. It tries the circus. It tries the ballroom. It shows us the Grosses Schauspielhaus and the Redoutensaal. It even seems to have got a notion of laying its eggs on the fourth wall. As this was the only thing that wasn’t thoroughly real in the realistic theater, the result—the motion picture—is a bit of a scramble. And now the cuckoo theater has its eye on the church.

A truer charge might be that the human animal has a perverse liking for novelty; but even that could be countered with the assertion that out of the stimulation of novelty, as out of almost any stimulation, man can make art—if he has it in him. As to that strange bird, the theater, it has never had good home-keeping habits. It laid its eggs on Greek altars, and in the mangers of Christian chapels. It nested in the inn yard in England, and the tennis court in France. The fact that the theater has a habit of roaming is worth about as much in this discussion of its chance in the modern church as the fact that it once found ecstasy by the Greek altar and produced little approaching dramatic literature while it was in the Christian church.

Jacques Copeau complains that the drama has no home to-day, and asserts that between the only choices open to it—the church and the street—he much prefers the street. The church doesn’t want the drama; its creed doesn’t want the drama; its spirit repels the drama. In this relation of the church and the theater there seems to be a problem for Europe and a problem for America. The possibility of the two uniting appears much greater in Europe. Europe—particularly central and southern Europe, where Catholicism flourishes—holds far more of genuine religious spirit than does America. Moreover, the church there has the strength of tradition and of art behind it. The esthetic-emotional grip of the churches themselves, their architecture, their atmosphere, the sense of continuity that lives in them, holds men and women whose minds have rejected or ignored the authority of dogma. Even an American cut off from the traditional side of this life would feel a thrill in a drama in the Collegienkirche in Salzburg or in the Cathedral of Chartres that no performance in a theater could give him. The beauty of the ages would bless the drama in almost any European building except a theater. But come to America, and try to imagine Everyman in Trinity Church at the head of Wall street, or The Theater of the World in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, not to bring it down to the level of a Methodist meeting house. The theater can always make religion more dramatic; witness the experiments of the Reverend William Norman Guthrie and Claude Bragdon with lighting and dance in St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie. But I do not think that any American church short of some Spanish-Indian mission in the Southwest can make the drama more religious.

For America—and, I suspect, for Europe, too—the problem is to find a way to the religious spirit independent of the church. It is not a question of producing plays in cathedrals, but of producing the spirit of life in plays. It is not: Can religion make itself theatrical? But: Can the theater make itself—in a new sense—religious?

If modern life, particularly the life of America, were spiritual in any degree, all this would be simple. Church and theater would both minister—as neither of them does now—to the life of the spirit. America has no art and no religion which can make drama religious. America does not believe, in any deep sense. Science has shattered dogma, and formal religion has not been able to absorb an artistic or a philosophic spirit great enough to recreate the religious spirit in men.

The thing is still more difficult because there is nowhere in this country—unless, again, it is in the Southwest—a sense of the age-long processes of life, which are part of the soil and which leave their mark on men and women through the physical things that have always cradled them. In Europe even the cities hold this ancient and natural aspect; they are shaped by man and time, even as the fields and the hills are shaped by time and man. These cities bask, and lie easy. There is a sense of long, slow growth in the very stones. In America, it is not only that our cities are new and brash. Our countryside is the same. Even our farmhouses stick out of the land like square boxes. As simple a house in Europe has a breadth that reconciles it with the sweep of the fields. The American farmhouse is symbol of our separation from the soil. We are out of touch with the earthy vitality of life which might bring us at least a little sense of the eternal.

If the man of the theater gives up the American church as a path to the spirit of life, and if he finds no religion in modernity from which to bring religion to the stage, what can he do? Is it possible that he can create the spiritual in the people by creating it in the theater? Can he see the vision himself; and, if he sees it and embodies it, can it make over the people?

Clive Bell, writing in Art, has described how such artists as William Blake and a very few others have reached the spiritual reality of existence—the thing we should call religion—directly, by pure intuition: “Some artists seem to have come at it by sheer force of imagination, unaided by anything without them; they have needed no material ladder to help them out of matter. They have spoken with reality as mind to mind.”

Vision of this sort is so inordinately rare, that it seems as though some other way must be found to open spiritual truth to the artist of the theater. The only other way is through the deepest understanding of life itself. What can the artist find in American life to bring the vision? Nothing, surely, on the surface. Our architects have reached a more noteworthy expression than perhaps any of our painters, because they have somehow managed to identify themselves with a spirit of affirmation behind those industrial forms that our commercial imperialism presents to view in our men of position like Morgan and Ford, our periodicals like The American Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post, our subways and our cigarette ads, our patent medicines and our Kuppenheimer clothes.