American theater

“ So strong is the popular appreciation of spectacle that the drama, the true theater as distinguished from the mere show business, has always to fight for its right to exist, and to hold its place in competition with less intellectual and more sensational entertainments. The playhouses of any American city are likely to have a lean week whenever the circus comes to town, and perhaps the chief reason why the most of them now close in summer is to be sought not so much in the frequent hot spells, as in the irresistible attraction exerted by the base-ball games. ”

“ I am not condemning the theater. It has its legitimate place, and a large place it is, in normal, healthy, American life. I am merely declaiming against these lower forms as usually conducted for commercial gain—these perversions of the true theater idea—these institutions that deal so largely in the sensational elements and appeal so strongly to the passions. I am told that the cheap theater is the poor man's club. ”

“ Since that time the theaters of America have been administered as well, perhaps, as the system will allow; but it is a mistaken system that puts a fine art in the market place and demands that it maintain itself because “business is business.”
The first really great attempt to ask anything less of the modern drama in America, to demand no more of the play than is demanded of the opera or the symphony, was the founding of the celebrated and short-lived New Theater in New York (1909–1911) . ”

“ In the growth of most national literatures the theater has developed side by side with the drama, the stage doing for the play what the printing press did for the essay, poem, and novel. But in America, the land of a transplanted civilization, the order was changed and the first plays were supplied from abroad just as the other forms of literature were. In the history of the American stage, therefore, the successive steps were the presentation of English plays by American amateurs in regular audience rooms with improvised stages ”

“ The field into which we are led is so broad and so near that in a brief excursion we can undertake only a rough classification of the main products and the soil in which they are growing. Such a classification may be found if we consider in turn first the better play written for a better theater, which began to appear about 1890, then the various new types of theater which grew from the people’s interest instead of from managerial enterprise, and, finally, the literary drama in poetry or prose which profits from the coöperation of actor and stage-manager, but can survive in print unaided. ”

“ Costumes, 1910.
An outstanding success on Broadway. Its theme is the battle for power that goes on in an old New York family and culminates on the verge of murder. "This one deserves especial thanks and hearty praises. It returns us to expertness and fascination and fine mood in the theater." Gilbert Gabriel, in New York American. "At last a play has come to town that can be heartily recommended. Sturdy theater, compelling. Once you are within the radius of Double Door you will remain transfixed until you know what's behind it." ”

“ The artist of the theater who is to create ecstasy by finding [Pg 221] it, must see deeper than the architects behind the shams of American life. He must grasp the Spirit of America in a sense so extraordinary that the use we ordinarily make of that phrase will seem impossibly and blasphemously cheap. ”

“ Once Frohman made this discriminating difference between English and American audiences:
"In England the pit and the gallery of the audience come to the theater, turn in their hard-earned shillings, and demand much. Failing to get what they expect, the theater is filled with boos and cat-calls at the end of the play. ”

“ There was among the people a great deal of refinement and cultivation. They were much more disposed to enjoy the recreation of the theater than the mixed English, French, and Dutch population of New York, and consequently the theater there was a permanent institution, and continued to be so for many [Pg 12] years. ”

“ The people of New York City have the reputation of being the most tireless theater-goers in all America; a statement which is verified by the ever-increasing number of large and well-filled places of amusement. Of late years the growth of the popularity of the style of entertainments which are classed under the name of “vaudeville” has called into existence a special type of theater, which, in addition to the regulation stage and auditorium, includes special halls of entertainment, with lounging-rooms, cafés, etc., and, for use in the hot summer months, the inevitable roof garden. ”

“ The connection of the drama with the show business is intimate, and it always has been. In the long history of the theater there is no period without its successful pieces, the appeal of which was mainly sensuous—to the eye and to the ear, rather than to the emotions and to the intellect. While the drama is an art, and perhaps the loftiest of the arts, the show business is a trade. ”

“ Next the art theatre must correct the evils of the commercialized theatre with its destructive practice of creating and exploiting “stars.” The real art of the theatre, he thinks, must be established thru the development of fixed local playhouses with resident companies dedicated to repertory production of the best that dramatic art has to offer.
“As a man of experience and vision, he does not fall into the error of trying to ‘uplift’ the commercial theater. It can’t be done, and he knows it.” ”

“ It is the most attractive of all amusements, and that this attraction, as an amusement, has continued to increase, or, at least, has not diminished, would seem to appear from the number of theaters there is now in London, in New York, in Paris, and in other cities of Europe. ”

“ We have hints of what the artist must see and understand in Sandburg’s sense of Chicago, in Vachel Lindsay’s sense of the Middle West, in Waldo Frank’s sense of New Mexico.
When theatrical genius has grasped the truth of America, it must be his business to make of himself and his theater a magnifying glass for the rest of his fellows. What he has been able to seize by sheer intuition, he must put in such form that it can seize all America. It is the hope of the theater that it can make the vision of one man become the vision of many. ”

“ The emphasis of our interest has been placed on the American playwright, because we feel that no American theatre can be really successful unless it develops a native drama to present and interpret those emotions, ideas, characters, and conditions with which we, as Americans, are primarily concerned. ”

“ Here, as nowhere in England or America and only here or there in France, were theaters directed by a single mind, employing a permanent company of players, maintaining a repertory of plays, old and new, given in recurring succession night after night, theaters retaining therefore a permanent audience, dependable both in pocketbook and in taste. Supplementing these theaters were organizations of playgoers among the middle and lower classes, such as the Freie Volksbühne in Berlin, which widened the audience of subscribers to good work in the theater. ”

“ Over some fifteen years a growing number of minds have been more or less actively seeking a way towards a new type of theater. They have been abusing the picture-frame stage, stamping on the footlights, pulling out the front of the apron, pushing the actors into the loges, down the orchestra pit, onto the prompter’s box, out upon runways or up the aisles. They have even gone clear out of the playhouse and into circuses, open air theaters, and public parks. All to set up a new and mutual relationship between the actor and the audience. ”

“ They're not afraid of any audience, and the way they throw themselves into it—perhaps not Broadway, but the more refined theaters in New York would just love them, and maybe they've been sent to us to elevate the drama. ”

“ In what sense is it a popular theater? The “people” are conspicuous by their absence. The worthy gentleman who is spending his money giving the public fifth-rate productions of English classics and such rejected modern masterpieces as May Magic had better go over to Broadway and learn his trade. ”

“ His prodigious body of work-over 1,000 songs and 108 complete scores for Broadway shows and Hollywood films-forms a major part of the core of musical theater as we know it in America and as it has spread throughout the world. ”

“ Her dramatic talent was already well known in fashionable private circles. At the conclusion of the round of readings given in New York and vicinity, she received a proposal from a theatrical manager to go upon the stage. For nine years she was a prime favorite with the American theatre-going public, and almost as popular abroad. ”

“ I had an early hankering for the national drama, a kind of juvenile patriotism, which burst forth, for the first time, in a few sorry doggerels in the form of a prologue to a play, which a Thespian company, of which I was a member, produced in the South-Street Theatre—the old American Theatre in Philadelphia. ”

“ It is a characteristic of those who object to the theater altogether that they rarely, if ever, give any consideration to the origin of the drama, to its long continuance, or appreciate that it will continue as long as civilization continues, and this applies as well to those who have written elaborate treatises against it, like Jeremy Collier, as to those who object to it generally. The briefest form of stating this consideration is that the theater has its origin in human nature. ”

“ Rooney and Miss Hawtry together and pound us into—into a play. I make that acknowledgment."
"If you ask the stage-manager he will say that the success of a play is his; the costumer will claim that success; the star knows it is his or hers, and the lead is sure that it is due to the support; the author surely has some claim to draw the huge royalties, and the location of his theater makes the theater-owner know that any play in that theater will go. Yes, the producer will always claim the whole show if it all goes well. ”

“ The theaters are still encumbered with the rubbish of the old régime, feeble copies of the masters, wherein art and taste are set at naught, of ideas and interests which are nothing to us, and of customs and manners foreign to us. ”

“ With that beginning the way was opened for the growth of superb stock-companies, in the early days of the American theatre. The English, next to the Italians, were the first among modern peoples to create a dramatic literature and to establish the acted drama, and they have always led in this field—antedating, historically, and surpassing in essential things the French stage which nowadays it is fashionable to extol. English influence, at all times stern and exacting, stamped the character of our early theatre. ”

“ If one speaks of the New York theatre as the American theatre, one speaks with an exaggerated degree of critical charity, for the New York theatre—so far as there is any taste in the American theatre—is the native theatre at its fullest flower. Persons insufficiently acquainted with the theatre have a fondness for controverting this, but the bookkeeping departments offer concrete testimony that, if good drama is supported at all, it is supported in the metropolitan theatre, not in the so-called “road” theatre. ”

“ Of the two theatres, the American is open during five, and the French during eight months in the year. The American theatre has the advantage of becoming more and more national and popular, although at present it is only resorted to by the lower class of the American population; boatmen, Kentuckians, Mississippi traders, and backwoods-men of every description. ”

“ Americans in all parts of the country have made theatre a part of their lives. We participate as performers and audience members in schools, community theatres, and at the professional level. Through these efforts, we have nourished an art form that proudly celebrates the diversity and creativity of all our people. ”

“ I have been thus particular in describing the place and its inhabitants to show that it was just the kind of capital that had alike the taste and the means to erect and support a theater, if not regularly, at least for a certain period of the year, or what, in theatrical parlance, is called a “season.” Although, according to another writer, it had only about eighty houses and consequently but a small resident population, there must have been a considerable influx of visitors for business or pleasure, and this is the class upon which [Pg 30] a theater is chiefly dependent for support. ”

“ Fashionable theater goers, actors, actresses and stage hands, chorus girls, belted policemen and grim firemen, all met on terms of temporary equality, forming a heterogeneous assemblage waiting the call to take the stand. ”

“ For then the theatre, in its splendid public examples and in its innumerable domestic reduplications, will be regarded as the unrivalled educational mirror of humanity.
Of no American actor has there yet been written a biography worthy of the name; though scarcely any other sphere of life is so crowded with adventure, with romance, with every kind of affecting incident, and with striking moral lessons. The theatre is a concentrated nation in itself. It is a moving and illuminated epitome of mankind. It is a condensed and living picture of the ideal world within the real world. ”

“ Some plays were highly popular inside those theaters. Were these the ones? Mr. Grant White has all reason, probability, and common sense on his side, when he insists that the theater most jealously guarded the manuscripts of the plays that were making its fortune ”