The artist of the theater who is to create ecstasy by finding it, must see deeper than the architects behind the shams of American life. He must grasp the Spirit of America in a sense so extraordinary that the use we ordinarily make of that phrase will seem impossibly and blasphemously cheap. We have hints of what the artist must see and understand in Sandburg’s sense of Chicago, in Vachel Lindsay’s sense of the Middle West, in Waldo Frank’s sense of New Mexico.

When theatrical genius has grasped the truth of America, it must be his business to make of himself and his theater a magnifying glass for the rest of his fellows. What he has been able to seize by sheer intuition, he must put in such form that it can seize all America. It is the hope of the theater that it can make the vision of one man become the vision of many.

There is no reason why a man of the theater should not have the vision; it has come to other artists. They have been able to transfer some share of it to the sensitive, the developed, the intellectual. The artist of the theater can perhaps transfer it to millions, to the uneducated and the dull, as well as to the receptive. In the theater he has a very extraordinary instrument. It is the art nearest to life; its material is almost life itself. This physical identity which it has with our very existence is the thing that can enable the artist to visualize with amazing intensity a religious spirit of which he has sensed only the faintest indications in life. He can create a world which shines with exaltation and which seems—as it indeed is—a world of reality. He can give the spirit a pervading presence in the theater which it once had in the life of the Greeks and of the people of the Middle Ages. And when men and women see eternal spirit in such a form, who can say that they will not take it to them?

THE END

INDEX

INDEX

In the case of a number of plays listed in this index, the names of the director and the artist responsible for the particular production in question are coupled in a parenthesis preceding the numbers of the pages on which the production is mentioned; a semi-colon separates references to such special productions from references to the play alone. In the case of theaters listed, the name of the city in which each is located appears in parenthesis.

Transcriber’s Notes