As for your “too ruthless a theory” of having silence in the theatre, or rather just the hum of conversation, let me tell you of the “midnight-movies” in our town: Can you imagine a crowd of people standing in line outside a theatre at one or a quarter after in the morning? And inside an audience—or optience?!—which for interest and variety can equal any of the moving-pictures shown or yet to be shown. I wish you could hear the ludicrous, cutting, knowing remarks made by these people about your pictures, when, after twelve-thirty the piano stops, and the oppressive silence outweighs the interest of the picture. (The piano formerly stopped at eleven, but the management decided that the only way to maintain order was to keep the piano going.) Well, the silence never lasts: snoring, wheezing, roaring, shouting and laughing and calls for “Silence”, “Wake up, the rest of us wanna sleep”, “You’re off key”, or “What time shall I call, sir?” These people are here: business men; newsboys, hobos, drunks, who sleep here all night; salesmen; night clerks; telegraphers; bell-boys; hotel and restaurant maids; scrub-women; actors; vaudevillians; cabaret singers; pressmen; newspapermen; chauffeurs, teamsters; traveling men; gentlemen of leisure; painted youths and scented women. They “get” the psychology of the pictures. Helen’s hazards call forth telegraph tappings to each other; close-ups showing jealousy, rage, or overdone emotion get “woof-woofs” and howls and hoots; the murder prevented “just in time” gets its sarcasms; and “immoral situations” their due appreciation. But—this, which seemed on the way to become our most individual phase of night-life, is passing. The jolly manager, who passed up and down the aisle like a hen among her brood, keeping us awake until one o’clock, has been replaced by a uniformed policeman; the council has legislated women out after two o’clock; and a “ride in the wagon” or ejection faces the one who would “get gay”. Now, as a place of interest, it is passing in this day of short-lived gayety and censored originality. The Law, Lindsay, will not allow your plan to work. In the neighborhoods?—the audiences themselves do not know why they are there. Why disturb them?
Your educational film also I have seen applied. Saved From the Flames worked out in co-operation with the New York Fire department. It teaches a lesson. So does The Human Cauldron—your own phrase, I believe, taken from the first line of page forty-two, your book. This picture was done with the aid of the New York Police department. Both were stupid, inane in story and treatment, and on the whole a bore. Even Walthall couldn’t save The Raven from cardboard clouds and angels and “visions”.
Your scenario, the “second cousin to the dream that will one day come forth”, seems quite symbolic of your prophecies. Pallas Athena, Jeanne D’Arc, and Our Lady Springfield; a treeless hill top in Washington Park: this then is the rank of the Goddesses. Springfield is to have secular priests and her patriots are irresolute! “Without prophecy there can be no fulfillment. Without Isaiah there can be no Christ”.—A truly Christian interpretation of the Hebrew’s great Isaiah, to whom Christ was but a disciple! But so you will have it.... We need Isaiahs and John the Baptists, but they were prophets and fore-runners of a Christ, a personality—not a Utopia, World State or International Brotherhood. If you appear before us as an Isaiah we demand to hear of your Christ. You recognize the demand of Confucius for rectification of names. Do you realize Nietzsche’s transvaluations for our day? Faith as opposed to affirmation! Zarathustra has spoken! There is now the mountain peak—and you are still rhyming about a hill top.
Announcements
“The Weavers”
Gerhardt Hauptmann’s Weavers is coming to Chicago! It begins a limited engagement at the Princess Theatre Sunday night, April 2. If you don’t go—well, we will pray for you.
It is to be the same production with which Emanuel Reicher stirred New York this winter. Mr. Reicher is no longer with the company, having finally given up the struggle of trying to make a financial success of art and truth. His stage director, Augustin Duncan, who is a man of vision and ability, has formed the actors into a co-operative company, and they have been struggling through various cities where their efforts have been intensely though not largely appreciated. This is to be expected; but surely in Chicago they ought to find an audience.
P. S.—Since I wrote the above The Weavers has opened, and I have heard how the first-night audience laughed where it should have applauded and guffawed when it should have recognized something fine.
Margaret Sanger in Chicago
There is an announcement on the cover page of two of Margaret Sanger’s lectures in Chicago, and others may be arranged after she gets here. We have got into the habit of looking upon birth control as a thing in which everybody believes, and which almost everybody practices whether they believe in it or not. It seems quite superfluous to keep on talking about it. But then you remember that Emma Goldman has been arrested for talking about it, and that when her trial comes up—some time this month or in May—it is quite within the possibilities that she may spend a year in prison for her crime. That is something none of us could face without a kind of insanity. So please don’t be content with merely abusing the government: send your protests to the District Attorney and it may help a great deal.