More and more, the better producing managers—men like Hopkins, William Harris, Jr., Ames, et al.—are coming to open their plays in New York “cold,” that is, without the former experimental performances in thitherward cities. And more and more, they are coming to realize to their sorrow that, unless New York supports these plays of the better sort, they can look for no support elsewhere. Chicago, boasting of its hospitality to sound artistic endeavour, spent thirty-five hundred dollars on a drama by Eugene O’Neill in the same week that it spent forty-five thousand dollars on Al Jolson’s Winter Garden show. Boston, one of the first cities to rush frantically forward with proofs of its old New England culture, has turned into a prompt and disastrous failure every first-rate play presented in its theatres without a widely advertised star actor during the last five years, and at the same time has made a fortune for the astute Mr. A. H. Woods, who, gauging its culture accurately, has sent it “Up in Mabel’s Room,” “Getting Gertie’s Garter,” and similar spicy boudoir and hay-mow farces, together with Miss Theda Bara in “The Blue Flame.” (It is no secret among the theatrical managers that the only way to bring the culture of Boston to the box-office window is through a campaign of raw advertising: the rawer the better. Thus the Boston Sunday newspaper advertisements of “Up in Mabel’s Room” were made to display a girl lying on a bed, with the suggestive catch-lines, “10,000 Visitors Weekly” and “Such a Funny Feeling.” Thus, the advertisements of another exhibit presented a rear view of a nude female with the title of the show, “Oh, Mommer,” printed across the ample buttocks. Thus, the advertisements of a Winter Garden music show, alluding to the runway used in these exhibitions, christened it “The Bridge of Thighs.”) No play presented in Philadelphia since “The Girl with the Whooping Cough” (subsequently suppressed by the New York police authorities on the ground of indecency) has been patronized to the extent where it has been found necessary to call out the police reserves to maintain order, as was the case when the play in point was produced. Washington is a cultural wilderness; I have personally attended the premières of ten highly meritorious dramas in the national capital in the last six years and can report accurately on the quality of the receptions accorded to them. Washington would seem still to be what it was some fifteen years or so ago when, upon the initial revelation of Barrie’s “Peter Pan,” it essayed to boo it into permanent discard. Baltimore, Detroit (save during the height of the war prosperity when the poor bohicks, wops, and Greeks in the automobile works found themselves suddenly able to buy theatre seats regularly), Cleveland, St. Louis, San Francisco—the story is the same. Honourable drama spells ruin; legs, lewdness and sentimentality spell riches.
In comparison with the taste of the great American cultural prairie whereon these cities are situated, the city of New York, as I have written, looms up an æsthetic Athens. In New York, too, there is prosperity for bare knees, bed humours, and “Peg o’ My Heart” bathos, but not alone for these. Side by side with the audiences that crowd into the leg shows, the couch farces, and the uplift sermons are audiences of considerable bulk that make profitable the production of such more estimable things as Shaw’s “Heartbreak House,” O’Neill’s “Emperor Jones,” the plays of St. John Ervine and Dunsany, of Tolstoy and Hauptmann, of Bahr and Benavente and Guitry. True enough, in order to get to the theatres in which certain of these plays are revealed, one is compelled to travel in a taxicab several miles from Broadway—and at times has to sit with the chauffeur in order to pilot him to far streets and alleyways that are not within his sophisticated ken—but, once one gets to the theatres, one finds them full, and their audiences enthusiastic and responsive. The culture of the American theatre—in so far as it exists—may be said, in fact, to be an alleyway culture. Almost without exception in the last dozen years and more have the best dramatists of Europe and of our own country been driven up alleyways and side-streets for their first American hearing. Up these dark alleys and in these remote malls alone have they been able to find a sufficient intelligence for their wares. Hervieu, Shaw, Echegaray, Strindberg, Björnson, Dunsany, Masefield, Ervine, Bergström, Chekhov, Andreyev, Benavente, O’Neill—these and many others of eminence owe their New York introduction to the side-street American who, in the majority of cases, is found upon analysis to be of fifty per cent. foreign blood. And what thus holds true of New York holds equally true in most of the other cities. In most of such cities, that is, as have arrived at a degree of theatrical polish sufficient to boast a little playhouse up an ulterior mews.
The more general American theatrical taste, reflected perhaps most fairly in such things as the idiotic endorsements of the Drama League and the various “white lists” of the different religious organizations, is—for all the undeniable fact that it seems gradually to be improving—still in the playing-blocks and tin choo-choo-car stage. Satire, unless it be of the most obvious sort and approach easily assimilable burlesque, spells failure for a producer. A point of view that does not effect a compromise with sentimentality spells failure for a dramatist. Sex, save it be presented in terms of a seltzer-siphon, “Abendstern,” or the Police Gazette, spells failure for both. The leaders in the propagation of this low taste are not the American managers and producers, as is commonly maintained, but the American playwrights. During the seventeen years of my active critical interest in the theatre, I have not encountered a single honest piece of dramatic writing from an American hand that could not get a hearing—and an intelligent hearing—from one or another of these regularly abused managers and producers. And during these years I have, by virtue of my joint professional duties as critic and co-editor of a sympathetic literary periodical, read perhaps nine-tenths of the dramatic manuscripts which aspiring young America has confected. This young America, loud in its inveighing against the managers and producers, has in the space of time indicated produced very, very little that was worth producing, and that little has promptly found a market. A bad workman is always indignant. But I know of no good American play that either has not already been produced, or has not been bought for future production. Any good play by an American will find its producer readily enough. The first manager who read “Beyond the Horizon” bought it immediately he laid the manuscript down, and this, recall, was its professionally unknown author’s first three-act play. The American theatre has altered in this department; the last fifteen years have wrought a tonic change.
No, the fault is not with the managers and producers, but with the playwrights. The latter, where they are not mere parrots, are cowards. Young and old, new and experienced, talented and talentless alike, they are in the mass so many Saturday Evening Post souls, alone dreaming of and intent upon achieving a sufficient financial gain to transmute the Ford into a Rolls-Royce and the Hudson Bay seal collar into Russian sable. A baby cannot be nourished and developed physically upon water; a theatrical public, for all its potential willingness, cannot be developed aesthetically upon a diet of snide writing. In the American theatre of the present time there are not more than two, or at most three, playwrights out of all the hundreds, who retain in their hearts a determined and uncorrupted purpose. Take away young O’Neill, and give a bit of ground to Miss Rita Wellman (whose accomplishment is still too vague for fixed appraisal), and there is next to nothing left. Flashes of talent, yes, but only flashes. Craven’s “Too Many Cooks” and “The First Year” are observant, highly skilful depictions of the American scene, but they are dramatic literature only in the degree that “Main Street” and “This Side of Paradise” are literature. With the extraordinary “Papa,” Miss Zoë Akins gave up and surrendered—at least temporarily—to the box-office skull and cross-bones. Until Tarkington proves that “Clarence” was not a happy accident in the long and unbroken line of “Up from Nowhere,” “Mister Antonio,” “The Country Cousin,” “The Alan from Home,” “Cameo Kirby,” “Your Humble Servant,” “Springtime,” “Getting a Polish,” “The Gibson Upright,” and “Poldekin,” we shall have to hold up our decision on him. George Ade, the great promise of authentic American drama, is no more; he pulled in his oars, alas, in mid-stream. Joseph Medill Patterson, an honest dramatist, fell through the bridge while not yet half way across. The rest? Well, the rest are the Augustus Thomases, left-overs from the last generation, proficient technicians with empty heads, or youngsters still dramatically wet behind the ears. The rest of the rest? Ticket salesmen.
In no civilized country in the world to-day is there among playwrights so little fervour for sound drama as in the United States. In England, they at least try, in a measure, to write well; in Germany, to experiment bravely in new forms; in France, to philosophize either seriously or lightly upon life as they find it; in Russia, to treat soberly of problems physical and spiritual; in Spain, to depict the Spanish heart and conscience and atmosphere; in Ireland, to reflect the life and thoughts, the humour and tragedy and encompassing aspirations, of a people. And in the United States—what? In the United States, with hardly more than two exceptions, there is at the moment not a playwright who isn’t thinking of “success” above honest work. Good and bad craftsmen alike, they all think the same. Gold, silver, copper. And the result is an endless procession of revamped crook plays, detective plays, Cinderella plays, boudoir plays, bucolic plays: fodder for doodles. The cowardice before the golden snake’s eye spreads to the highest as well as to the lowest. Integrity is thrown overboard as the ship is steered unswervingly into the Golden Gate. The unquestionable talent of an Avery Hopwood—a George M. Cohan—a George Bronson-Howard—is deliberately self-corrupted.
The American professional theatre is to-day at once the richest theatre in the world, and the poorest. Financially, it reaches to the stars; culturally, with exception so small as to be negligible, it reaches to the drains. For both of these reaches, the American newspaper stands largely responsible. The American newspaper, in general, regards the theatre with contempt. My early years, upon leaving the university, were spent on the staff of one of them—the leading daily journal of America, it was in those days—and I shall never forget its attitude toward the theatre: cheap, hollow, debased. If a play was produced by a manager who advertised extensively in the paper, it was praised out of all reason. If a play was produced by a manager who happened to be persona non grata in the office, it was dismissed with a brief reportorial notice. If a play was produced by a new and enterprising manager on the night of another production in a theatre patronized by fashionable audiences—the Empire, say—the former play, however worthy an effort it might be, was let down with a stick or two that there might be room to print the names of the fashionables who were in the Empire seats. The surface of things has changed somewhat since then, but the situation at bottom is much the same. A talented young reviewer writes honestly of a tawdry play in the Evening Sun; the producer of the play, an office favourite, complains; and the young reviewer is promptly discharged. A moving picture producer takes half-page advertisements of his forthcoming opus in the New York newspapers, and the screen exhibit, a piece of trash, is hailed as a master work. Let a new drama by Gerhart Hauptmann be presented in the Park Theatre to-night and let Mr. John Barrymore also appear at eight-thirty in a play by some obscure hack at the Empire, and there will not be a single newspaper in the whole of New York City that will not review the latter flashy affair at the expense of the former.
It is not that the newspapers, in New York as elsewhere, are dishonest—few of them are actually dishonest; it is that they are suburban, shoddy, cheap. With only four exceptions that I can think of, the American newspaper, wherever you find it, treats the theatre as if it were of very much less importance than baseball and of but a shade more importance than a rape in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Two columns are given freely to the latest development in bootlegging in Harlem, and a begrudged half-column to a play by John Galsworthy. A society woman is accused by her husband of having been guilty of adultery with a half-breed Indian, and the allotment is four columns. On the same day, a Shakespearean production is mounted by the most artistic producer in the American theatre, and the allotment of space is two-thirds of a column. The reply of the newspapers is, “Well, we give the public what it wants! And it is more greatly interested in scandal than in Shakespeare.” Have not then the theatrical managers the right to reply in the same terms? And when they do, some of them, disgustedly reply in the same terms, what is the hypocritical appraisal of their offerings that the selfsame newspapers vouchsafe to them? If the New York Times devotes three columns to a dirty divorce case, I fail to see how it can with justice or reason permit its theatrical reviewer indignantly to denounce Mr. A. H. Woods in the same issue for devoting three hours to a dirty farce.
The American drama, like the American audience, lacks repose. This is ever logically true of a new civilization. Time must mellow the mind and heart before drama may achieve depth and richness; time must mellow the mind and heart before an audience may achieve the mood of calm deliberation. Youth is a rare and precious attribute, but youth, for all its fine courage and derring-do, is inclined to be superficial. Its emotions and its reactions are respectively of and to the primary colours; the pastels it is impatient of. The American theatre, drama, and audience are the theatre, drama, and audience of the metaphysical and emotional primary colours: substantial, vivid, but all too obvious and glaring. I speak, of course, generally. For there are a few notable exceptions to the rule, and these exceptions portend in the American theatre the first signs of the coming dawn. A producer like Arthur Hopkins, perhaps the first American man of the theatre gifted with a genuine passion for fine and beautiful things and the talent with which to do—or at least try to do—them; a dramatist like young O’Neill, permitting no compromise or equivoke in the upward sweep of his dynamic imagination; an actor like Arnold Daly and an actress like Margaret Anglin to whom failure in the service of honest drama means absolutely nothing—these are they who inspire our faith in the future. Nor do they stand alone. Hume and Moeller, Jones, Peters, Simonson and Bel-Geddes, Glaspell, Wellman and Pottle—such youngsters, too, are dreaming their dreams, some of them, true enough, still silly dreams, but yet dreams. And the dreaming spreads, spreads....
But in its slow and brave ascent, the American theatre is still heavily retarded by the insular forces that, as in no other theatre save the English, operate in the Republic. The fight against outworn convention is a brave and bitter fight, but victory still rests mainly on the banners of the Philistines. The drama that dismisses sentimentality for truth, that seeks to face squarely the tragedy and comedy of love and life, that declines to pigeon-hole itself, and that hazards to view the American scene with cosmopolitan eyes, is confronted at every turn by the native Puritanism (as often shammed as inborn), and by the native parochialism and hypocrisy. The production that derides all stereotype—all the ridiculous and mossy rubber-stamps—is in turn derided. The actor or actress who essays to filter a rôle through the mind of a human being instead of through the mind of a rouged marionette is made mock of. Here, the playgoing public finds its leaders in three-fourths of the newspaper reviewing chairs, chairs influenced, directly or indirectly, by an intrinsic inexperience and ignorance, or by an extrinsic suggestion of “policy.”
The American theatre and drama have long suffered from being slaves to the national hypocrisy. Only on rare occasions have they been successful in casting off the shackles, and then but momentarily. The pull against them is stubborn, strong. Cracking the black snake across their backs are a hundred padrones: newspapers trembling at the thought of offending their advertisers, religious orders poking their noses into what should not concern them, corrupt moral uplift organizations and lecherous anti-vice societies itching for the gauds of publicity, meddling college professors augmenting their humble wage by writing twenty-dollar articles on subjects they know nothing about for the Sunday supplements, ex-real estate reporters and divorcée interviewers become “dramatic critics,” notoriety seeking clergymen, snide producers trying to protect their snide enterprises from the dangers of the invasion of truth and beauty. Let a group of drama-loving and theatre-loving young men, resourceful, skilful, and successful, come upon the scene, as the Washington Square Players came, let them bring flashes of authentic dramatic art into their native theatre, and against them is promptly hurled the jealous irony of the Old Guard that is dead, but never surrenders. Let a young playwright like Zoë Akins write an admirable fantastic comedy (“Papa”), and against her are brought all the weapons of the morals-in-art mountebanks. Let a producer like Hopkins break away from the mantel-leaning histrionism and palm-pot investiture, and against him is brought up the curt dismissal of freakishness.