People's Theater

“ Frankly, the People's Theater must be of the people, or it will never thrive. You protest that the drama should have nothing to do with politics, and yet you are the first—as I proved in connection with your performance of Tartuffe—to insinuate a political significance into your productions of the classics in order to attract the people. ”

“ This, it seems to me, is the third requisite of our People's Theater:
The theater ought to be a guiding light to the intelligence. It should flood with light the terrible brain of man, which is filled with shadows and monsters, and is exceeding narrow and cramped. We have just spoken of the need of guarding against giving every product of the artist to the people; I do not wish, however, to imply that they must be spared all incentive to thought. The workingman does not as a rule think while his body is working. ”

“ The people can no longer be deceived. No one who is really concerned about the people's art will allow himself to be duped by any such trick; and their determination to establish a true People's Theater at Paris is not in the least shaken. ”

“ Melodrama
The People's Theater is the key to a new art world, which art has hardly caught sight of. We have reached a parting of the ways, beyond which lies an almost totally unexplored land. Two or three more venturesome spirits have gone ahead. But the instinct of the people should have guided these artists. The people speak frankly, and their preferences leave no possible room for doubt. But what artist cares in the least what the public wants? They consider it contemptible not to feel contempt for the people. ”

“ A civic theater cannot be created by money, although it requires it. Intelligence demands, therefore, when we say 'Civic Theater,' that we think at once and foremost of these other more vital ways of support.
Fortunately we can appeal to historic life for light on these other and more vital ways of support by city or community. Historic life can show us well-ascertained facts concerning drama that has been supported by the civic life of its whole people, and expresses, in consequence, the life of its men of genius, and of its interpretative artists and artisans, along with its racial genius. ”

“ What conditions are necessary to a real People's Theater?
I shall not try to lay down absolute rules of procedure: we must remember that no laws are eternally applicable, the only good laws being made for an epoch that passes and a country that changes. Popular art is essentially changeable. ”

“ It is a huge factory of sentiment, of character, of points of honor, of conceptions of conduct, of everything that finally determines the destiny of a nation. The theater is not only a place of amusement, it is a place of culture, a place where people learn how to think, act, and feel." Seldom, however, do we associate the theater with our plans for civic righteousness, although it has become so important a factor in city life. ”

“ As I see it, there is but one primary physical requisite for a real People's Theater: the stage and auditorium must be large enough to accommodate large masses of people. [5] The other requisites are corollaries of this. Plays performed before thousands of spectators must be adapted to the sight and hearing. ”

“ I dedicate the work of a free man to a free nation. ... Your scene ought to change with the others that have just changed. A theater in which there are only petty females and slaves is no longer suited to a nation of men and of citizens. There was one thing lacking to your dramatic poets; it was not genius, and not subjects, but an audience. ”

“ The rapid growth to-day in what may be called social consciousness has quickened our sense of the social significance of an institution that, whatever its esthetic and intellectual status, is an enormous influence in the daily life of the multitude. Gradually those who think have come to see that the theater, this people's pleasure, should offer drama that is rational, wholesome amusement; that society in general has a vital stake in the nature of an entertainment so widely diffused, so imperatively demanded and so surely effective in shaping the ideals of the people at large. ”

“ In giving the people recreation, the theater is obliged to render them better able to set to work on the morrow. The happiness of simple and healthy men is never complete without some sort of action. Let the theater be an arena of action. Let the people make of their dramatist a congenial traveling-companion, alert, jovial, heroic if need be, on whose arm they may lean, on whose good humor they may count to make them forget the fatigue of the journey. ”

“ To the upper-class attendant at the play the unity of the piece must have been less dominant. And surely this must have tended to shape the play, to make it a democratic people's product. For it is an axiom that the dominant element in an audience settles the fate of a play.
But this new plaything, the theater, was not only the physical embodiment of the drama, it became a social institution as well. Nor was it without its evils. The splendors of Elizabethan literature have often blinded criticism to the more sleazy aspects of the problem. ”

“ It appropriated Rousseau's two ideas: popular festivals and education through the theater. The idea of a People's Theater was not the exclusive property of any one party, for we find men of opposite and antagonistic creeds united in an effort to establish a popular form of dramatic art. Mirabeau, Talleyrand, Lakanal, David, Marie-Joseph Chénier, Danton, Boissy d'Anglas, Barère, Carnot, Saint-Just, Robespierre, Billaud-Varennes, Prieur, Lindet, Collot d'Herbois, Couthen, Payan, Fourcade, Bouquier, Florian, and many another, defended the cause in words, on paper, and with deeds. ”

“ In considering the theater as one of the properest instruments for furthering the development of society and rendering men more virtuous and more enlightened, you will, I am sure, not allow it to become solely an object of financial speculation, but make it a national enterprise. ”

“ Of late years, a few splendid attempts have been made in France—not to mention other countries—to open the doors of the bourgeois theater to poetry and to the people, but although we can observe in them a more sympathetic treatment of the soul and the problems of the people, they are stigmatized for the most part by the touch of what is most unpopular and aristocratic. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A theater of this sort requires powerful fresco effects. Great masses of the people are used, as individuals are in our ordinary theaters. Group dialogues must be introduced, double and triple choruses, but care should be taken not to return to neo-classic archaism, as Schiller did in his Braut von Messina. Each group should also be allowed the greatest liberty within itself. Individual conflicts should little by little give way to mass conflict. ”

“ While the stage may and does much to maintain a healthy moral feeling in society, in the powerful effect that is produced by the dramatic representation of virtuous deeds and of guilty actions, and the consequences that attend the latter, as an institution the theater does not retard society in its downward course, but may be said rather to accelerate it. ”

“ But when managers began to consider the whims of their patrons, when the King’s Players petitioned the People’s Parliament for leave to continue their vocation because “they will not entertain any comedian that shall speak his part in a tone as if he did it in derision of some of the pious,” then the theatre ceased to be a looking-glass that could image life truthfully. ”

“ All this and more, arising from the same interest, offers a vast range of subject-matter to drama and a new spirit in treating it on the stage. Within the last half century the two great changes that have come in human life are the growth in the democratic ideal, with all that it suggests, and the revolutionary conception of what life is under the domination of scientific knowledge. All art forms, including this of the theater, have responded to these twin factors of influence. ”

“ They at present are the people’s favourites, and all have individually a large public following. It was but just to these men to ask them to come into the scheme as honorary members of the institution, in the hope that they would associate themselves with those parts and plays of more than ordinary merit which undoubtedly have a claim to be admitted into the repertory of a National Theatre, and with which they individually were specially identified. ”

“ For two movements that are bound to affect the theatre of the future are bringing the lay public clambering over the footlights and crowding in at the stage door. One, the Little Theatre Movement, is almost altogether a lay insurgency. In scores of communities, it has made its way; tradesmen, students, clerks, mechanics, people of leisure and working people with a little leisure, have come together and in a short time have plumbed the silly little mysteries of back-stage, and have brought into their theatres a little bit of the real Mystery of life and art that belongs there. ”

“ When we examine those treatises that have been written against the stage, the material upon which they rely is almost invariably derived from its abuse, without considering that that abuse is not due to the theater as an institution, but to the state of society that gives rise to it. ”

“ There is no doubt about it that the theater, as at present conducted, is pulling the stones from the foundations of public morality, and weakening, and in many quarters endangering, the whole structure of society. ”

“ The people will have theatres. Good or evil, noble or degraded, the stage will be demanded by the people. Is it a thing indifferent to our rulers, to supply them with this powerful and universal excitement in its highest degree of moral influence, or in its lowest degree of impurity ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In every community of moderate size and culture there is a releasing to-day of dramatic impulse, and folks turn more and more toward the theatre as a mode of group expression. The Little Theatre movement, with its eighty-five or more centers renewing their life, now that the war is over, is an evidence of the birth of a new theatre in this country. Innumerable community pageants and masques are an indication that people turn to the drama as a means of expressing their corporate æsthetic. ”

“ There is evidence that the lack of experience in the theatrical field created problems for the political leaders' efforts to foster its development. Periodically, articles appear in the press that criticize various shortcomings in the production of drama and variety shows. The targets of criticism range from content to the skills of the performers to the management of the stage and theater. ”

“ The theatre is reactionary, and has good reason to be: it is to its commercial interest to range itself alongside privilege and tradition, against change and [Pg 299] progress. It is on the side of those who have money in their pockets, and who wish to amuse themselves, for these are the people to whom it opens its doors. ”

“ The performers themselves are at their best and leave the stage to make the audience a part of their act. There are no conventions considered, no reserve is manifested. Everyone has a jolly good time, and after the theater there are parties or work according to the wealth and inclinations of the individual. ”

“ The theatre, having ceased to form an integral part of our social life, has come to be the pastime of people with nothing better to do,—the floating population of our hotels, the shop-girl and her young man enjoying an evening out. The plays produced by the gentlemen who, I am told, control the stage in this country for the moment, are adapted to the requirements of an audience that, having no particular standard from which to judge the literary merits of a play, the training, accent, or talent of the actors, are perfectly contented so long as they are amused. ”

“ But the great annual excitement to the peasant under normal conditions is the theatrical performance that takes place in every district. The company brings its own theatre, an enormous mat-shed erection capable of accommodating an audience of a thousand people. This is erected in a few days, and for a week or more historical or social plays are performed. The actors make up and dress upon the stage, on which the more prominent members of the audience are sometimes accommodated. All the actors are men, as women are not allowed to perform ”

“ I could well imagine his comments on the venom of demagogues, on the despotism of mobs, on the weaknesses of strong men, and on the need, in great emergencies, of a central purpose and firm control. His view of the true character and mission of the theater he has given at various times, and one of his talks with the actors in the Royal Theater, shortly after my arrival, may be noted as typical. ”

“ The Theatre, as I have said, will take the lead in preparing for the new day by presenting plays which will teach the People courage and confidence in their destiny, teach them to scorn the ideals of the traditional past, deepen their sense of community with the People in all lands in their world-wide struggle for freedom, and make them face the future with a clear and unshakable resolution, an indomitable will to victory. ”