"AROMA OF ATHENS" STRIKES NEW NOTE IN THE DRAMA. Katherine Tingley to Open Greek Theater to the Public: Unrivaled Natural Scenery: Marvelous Acoustics. Notes by a Dramatic Critic
A NEW-OLD note in drama has been struck here on the Pacific Coast, which, we feel quite safe in prophesying, will be recorded in many histories. The English-speaking world has been fretting after some new inspiration. We are tired of imitating the Elizabethans; for the time being, that spring would seem to have run dry. What belongs to our own day peculiarly tends to be mere boisterous horseplay or flippant shallowness; vulgar both, and not in any way to be called art. What we have that is good, the work of a few writers, is not so startling in quantity or quality, nor so profoundly original, as to cause us to hope for a new great art period in our own or our children's day. And yet there has been the demand. The public has turned to strange well-springs and found the waters bitter, cloying, soon to run dry; the critics have filled their press columns, both here and in England, with clamorings, prognostications, hasty or timorous judgments, a sense of a great need and expectations. Decidedly the time is ripe for a new birth in the drama.
MEETS NEEDS OF THE TIME
Now the question arises, what needs must this new birth and order meet? Great art meets the needs of its time, sternly turning away from its mere wants; for that reason it is often rejected for awhile by a public clamorous after lower levels of things. Such a clamor we find in our own day after sensationalism—give us action, more action, say the managers; but is this a real need? The world is agog with action as it is; such a riot of action as one might imagine the Gadarene swine indulged in on their seaward last tumultuous journey. The motif is threadbare; we have torn it to tatters and it is time to turn to new modes. Personalism, too, is rampant and bears fruit in an ugly and jangled civilization. What is needed, then, is an art that shall be calm, dignified, beautiful, impersonal; a pointer to and promise of better ways of living.
One turns back to the great art of the Greeks with a sense of relief after all our modern, breathless, tom-tom beating. There we find beauty, calm movement, dignity, national, and not merely personal motifs; above all, an insistence on the higher and eternal verities. We need the Aroma of Athens on our modern stage; because it is precisely that that we need in our modern life.
PLAY DELIGHTED AUDIENCE
A few weeks ago Katherine Tingley presented a new play, The Aroma of Athens, at her Isis theater in San Diego, which struck all who saw it with profound surprise and delight. There was first the ideal poetic beauty of the setting, a thing unrealizable unless seen. The foremost of the London managers—men like Tree—have made a specialty of beautiful setting, astonishing the theatrical world with the splendor of their work in this line—and with its good taste. They have had enormous resources to draw upon, and have spared no expense in time, money, or thought. It may safely be said that none of them has produced anything more beautiful than this Aroma of Athens; it may safely be said that none of them has produced anything so beautiful. One rubbed one's eyes in astonishment, wondering how such things could be, and concluded that Madame Tingley at Point Loma had greater resources to draw upon than are to be found in London, Paris, Berlin, or New York. It is a wonderful thing, prophetic of the time when the culture-metropolis of the world will be right here among us on the Pacific Coast. Madame Tingley long ago said that San Diego would be the Athens of America, and today this is far nearer than we dream. If one would learn what those greater resources of hers are, one must examine her teachings, one must look into that marvelous scheme of education of hers, the Râja Yoga system, which enabled, for example, those little children on the stage to be as graceful, as un-self-conscious as any figures on a Grecian vase. Have you seen children, young children, on the stage, do well, wonderfully well; and then, when the applause rolled in, do better still, remaining sublimely unconscious of the applause? We applauded these children and looked to see, as a matter of course, the aroma of Athens vanish in a series of smirks. But no; clapped we never so loudly, it made no difference to them. They played their Greek games; they were merry and classical; they were Grecian, unstilted, poetic, faery. One's mind went back to Keats' ode:
"What little town by river or sea-shore,