[The lamp on the hood of the chimney-piece has burned down, leaving only the red glow from the fire upon their faces, as the curtain whispers down to hide them.]

GETTYSBURG[31]
A WOOD-SHED COMMENTARY
By
PERCY MACKAYE

Percy MacKaye was born in New York, March 16, 1875, the son of Steele MacKaye, a well-known dramatist and theatrical inventor of his day. "My own early dramatic training," writes the son, "was in the theatre in relation with my father's work there as dramatist, actor, and director." In another place he says: "I have not sought to conceal, or to put aside, the grateful enthusiasm I feel, as a son and comrade of Steele MacKaye, for those examples of untiring devotion to the theatre and of constructive achievement in its art, by which his life has been an inspiration to my own, to follow—however haltingly and through different means—the trail of his large leadership." Percy MacKaye was graduated from Harvard in 1897 and later spent a year studying at the University of Leipzig. After travel abroad, he returned to New York in 1900 and taught there in a private school till 1904. He spent some time in the next five years lecturing on the Drama of Democracy and the Civic Theatre at various American universities. In 1904 he joined the colony of artists and men of letters at Cornish, New Hampshire, the home of Saint-Gaudens, Maxfield Parrish, Winston Churchill, and others. Since that date Percy MacKaye has devoted himself wholly to poetry and the drama, writing community masques, plays of various kinds, and operas.[32] It is interesting to note that one of the latest products of his pen, Washington, the Man Who Made Us, A Ballad Play, was translated into French and presented by M. Copeau's players, at the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier, during their second season in New York, and later acted in English by Walter Hampden, the scene designs being made by Robert Edmond Jones. In October, 1920, he was invited to Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, not to teach but to continue his own creative work, quite untrammeled, filling there the first fellowship in creative literature ever established in this country.

Yankee Fantasies, a collection of five one-act plays of which Gettysburg is one, is the expression of Percy MacKaye's belief that the American dramatist may find "north of Boston," or, in fact, in almost any rural neighborhood, material for "quaint and lovely interpretation of our native environment now ignored." These plays, published in 1912, testified also to his conviction that the time had come for the development of the one-act play in this country, not only because this form is distinctive and capable of expressing what the full-length play cannot, but also because a receptive audience was already organized. He found even then that amateurs in schools, colleges, and elsewhere were clamoring to perform one-act plays, to see them performed, and to read them. At that date Little Theatres were just beginning to be, but in the preface to Yankee Fantasies, the author advocated the establishment of Studio Theatres, in essence experimental, many of which have since come into existence under different names, wherein playwrights might practice the new craft of the one-act play as in a workshop. The one-act play may be said to have arrived in the nine years that have elapsed since Gettysburg was published.

The one-act play has shown no tendency, however, to rival the short-story in the matter of local color. Kentucky, California, Iowa, Louisiana, to name but a few of the favored states which have served as rich backgrounds for many finely flavored narratives of American life, have been neglected as sources of dramatic material. But though Percy MacKaye may perhaps be matched with Mary Wilkins, there is no writer who has made notable use in the one-act play of localities, associated, for example, with the art of George W. Cable, Bret Harte, James Lane Allen, or Hamlin Garland. One of the paths of glory for the American dramatist lies undoubtedly in this direction.

GETTYSBURG

The Place is country New Hampshire, at the present time.

SCENE.—A woodshed, in the ell of a farm house.