THREE MONOGRAPHS
I.—DRAMATIZING COMMUNITY SONG
By Percy MacKaye
The allurement of the communal field in drama is its freshness of opportunity—its infinite potential variety.
Definitions have not yet hedged it; criticism has not yet charted, nor pedagogy catalogued its boundless horizons and creative streams; commercialism has not yet invaded its unstinted harvests, to store and can them for the market, under the labels of middlemen.
So, in approaching this realm of “The Evergreen Tree,” I have felt something of that thrill of discovery which must more often have been felt in earlier days on American soil: a feeling, I think, such as John Muir once told me he experienced when he gazed first, from the top of a great tree, over uncharted miles of the redwood region. Only here I have seemed to look upon the conjoining of a great, structural continent—the Drama—with a primal sea—the tides of Community Song, now carolling in quiet inlets, now choral with tempestuous music from fathomless deeps.
If, then, I were to suggest the nature of this kind of community drama by a topographical line, rather than by a definition of theory, I would do so perhaps by a line such as this:
wherein the rising pyramid would represent an emerging contour of that continent (the Drama), whose base is submerged and fused with those singing tides (Community Music).