THE jOURNAL OF

AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 10, Number 1 Winter 1998
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Fe I icia Londre
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THE jOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE
Volume 10, Number 1
Contents
LEWIS E. SHELTON, David Belasco
and the Scientific Perspective
GERALDINE MASCHIO, Effeminacy or Art?
The Performativity of julian Eltinge
BRUCE A. MCCONACHIE, The Dining Room:
A Tocquevi II ian Take on the
Decline of WASP Culture
DOROTHY CHANSKY, Theatre Arts Monthly
and the Construction of the
Modern American Theatre Audience
VINCENT LANDRO, The Mythologizing of
American Regional Theatre
CONTRIBUTORS
Winter 1998
1
28
39
51
76
102
journal of American Drama and Theatre 10 (Winter 1998)
David Belasco and the Scientific Perspective
LEWIS E. SHELTON
The directing career of David Belasco (1853-1931) represents the first
significant synthesis of theatre arts on the American stage. Belasco was
the "Wizard" and the "Bishop of Broadway"-the creator of "Belascoism".
His life from his youth onward was in theatre and in many respects was
theatre-Belasco's persona may have been his greatest creation. Belasco
was successful both as a playwright and a producer-manager as well as
a director, his success resulting from a thorough grounding in all
elements of the stage process and stemming from his experiments in
actuality in staging. Belasco's realism was based on his efforts to put the
absolute truth of his observations on the stage. His directorial perspective
may be described as scientific, and it had a revolutionary impact on
staging, particularly in terms of scenic investiture. Belasco was America's
first director of artistic consequence as an assessment of his career will
indicate. After briefly reviewing his career, I will analyze Belasco's
scientific perspective as it affected his work in the areas of settings,
lighting, and acting and his aesthetic of theatre.
Born in San Francisco and reared there and in Victoria, British
Columbia, Belasco supposedly made several stage appearances as a child
in Victoria, including one with Charles Kean in Richard Ill, and staged
theatricals in his family's basement.
1
His imagination fired, Belasco had
his ambition set on the theatre from very early in life. He wrote and
produced, he claimed, 15 dramas as a juvenile.
2
As a youth at Lincoln
Grammar School in San Francisco, Belasco was noted for his declamatory
1
William Winter, The Life of David Belasco (New York: Moffat; Yard, 1918), vol.
2, 473; and Davi d Belasco, "My Life's Story," Hearst Magazine (March 1914), 301-
302. These two works plus Craig Timberlake, The Bishop of Broadway: David
Belasco (New York: Library Publishers, 1954) are the chief sources for biographical
information in this paper. "My Life' s Story" was publi shed between March 1914 and
December 1917 in various issues.
2
David Belasco, Plays Produced Under the Direction of David Belasco (New
York: 1925), 5-6.
2
SHELTON
abi I ities and was featured in school programs,
3
and he also made stage
appearances before graduating from Lincoln in 1871.
His first professional appearance on the stage came in that same
year.
4
Thereafter, Belasco began his remarkable apprenticeship in theatre
on the West Coast. During the next 11 years he engaged various
positions in several theatres in San Francisco-including the Grand Opera
House, Maguire's Theatre, the California Theatre, and the Baldwin
Theatre. He was an actor, prompter, assistant stage manager, stock
dramatist, secretary to theatre managers, and stage director. Belasco also
toured the western mining towns, usually serving several functions as
actor, writer, and stage manager. In the mining towns and camps,
Belasco often played leading parts, including Hamlet; however, in San
Francisco, never quite good enough to be a star, he primarily performed
minor or subsidiary roles.
Belasco's theatre experience was vast. In Plays Produced Under the
Stage Direction of David Belasco,
5
he claimed to have directed more
than 237 productions during his years in California. By his own account,
his first ventures after his juvenile years involved directing 30 plays
(farces and burlesques) at different theatres between April and October
of 1873.
6
Between May and December 1874, he directed 23 produc-
tions at the Maguire Theatre where James A. Herne was the manager and
Belasco supposedly was the stage director.
7
By the end of 1875, the
productions he listed amounted to more than 70-and Belasco was only
20 years old. Belasco claimed to have often staged plays for visiting stars
3
"Exhibition of the Lincoln Grammar School on Saturday Eve'g, Dec. 19, 1868,"
Clipping files, Billy Rose Theatre Collection of the Performing Arts Research Center,
The New York Public Library at Lincoln Center.
4
Winter, Life, vol. 2, 475.
5
Belasco, Plays Produced, 6-8. This listing is suspect; it is doubt ful that he
actually operated in the manner of a true stage director but rather as a stage manager.
Production circumstances were usually minimal and crude, and he often was
expected to write a play (based on a novel or another play) in a week and then have
it ready to be performed in another week (David Belasco, "About Play Producing,"
The Saturday Evening Post Uan. 10, 1920, 36; and Winter, Life, vol. 1, 1 09) .
Additionally Belasco was writing and acting-some 170 roles according to Winter
(Life, vol. 2, 434) among other duties and non-theatre jobs. After 1879 he
concentrated on writing and adapting scripts and on directing.
6
Belasco, Plays Produced, 5-6.
7
Ibid., 8-9.
David Belasco 3
such as Barry Sullivan, Clara Morris, Adelaide Neilson, and others.
8
(Actually, these star turns did not allow for the kind of duty later
associated with stage direction.) Most tellingly, in 1878, Belasco
associated with the New York Union Square Theatre Company on its
Western tour, directing 5 plays for them from March to May. The
occasion resulted in a letter from F. F. Mackay who praised Belasco's
work, thanking him for
your able direction of our efforts .... Your quick apprehension
of and remarkable analytic ability in discovering the mental
intentions of an author are so superior to anything we have
heretofore experienced that we feel sure that the position of
master dramatic director of the American Stage must finally fall
on you.
9
Regardless of the extent to which Belasco actually directed the company
and in whatever way Mackay intended the compliment, the prophecy
was to come true.
While associated with several San Francisco theatres, Belasco's most
fortunate affi I iation was with the Baldwin Theatre where, beginning in
1876
10
and off and on thereafter, James A. Herne was stage manager and
Belasco was assistant stage manager. (In Plays Produced Belasco claimed
to have actually staged the Baldwin productions.) During his last years
in San Francisco, Belasco kept trying to get East to make his fame and
fortune in theatre.
In the spring of 1879, Belasco staged Salami Morse' s The Passion
Play with james O'Neill playing Jesus Christ. This production became
notorious, for after complaints from citizens, the authorities closed it.
When O'Neill continued to perform, he was arrested.
11
The next year
Belasco was back at the Baldwin Theatre working with Herne. He and
Herne created a play called Chums, later to be named Hearts of Oak,
which toured, through much adversity, in Salt Lake City, Chicago, and
Indianapolis. When it finally was presented in New York, the production
8
Ibid., 15. Winter suggests that for the Neilson engagement, Belasco served as
assistant stage manager and prompter (Life, vol. 2, 492).
9
Belasco, Plays Produced, 14-15.
10
Winter, Life, vol. 2, 482.
11
Belasco, "Life's Story," December 1914, 610. Timberlake notes that William
Seymour may have actually staged this production (Bishop, 72).
4 SHELTON
lost money; Belasco sold his interest to Herne-who later took sole credit
for the play and had success with it-and broke, went back to San
Francisco, his first attempt in New York a failure.
12
In 1881 back in San Francisco, he directed his own plays, La Belle
Russe and The Stranglers of Paris. In New York, his play, The Creole,
was produced. In 1882, La Belle Russe was produced in New York
(Belasco did not direct), and he staged his play, The Curse of Cain, in San
Francisco. He adapted and staged Boucicault's The Octoroon and staged
his own play American Born that same year. Finally attracting the
attention of an eastern producer, Gustave Frohman, he left San Francisco
in July with the Frohman Dramatic Company, headed for the East. That
company disbanded, but hired to be the stage manager for the Madison
Square Theatre, Belasco went on to New York.
13
By the end of his years
in California, he was an experienced and able stage director, one who
had worked with stars, written and/or adapted plays, worked with all
types of drama and learned all the theatre tricks. His career as a hack
writer, stage manager, touring player, man-of-all-work was finished, and
he was about to launch an exciting and outstanding New York theatre
career.
At this time, Belasco was a short, lean young man approaching 30,
with a shock of black hair, a lock of which fell over his forehead. Highly
energetic, dynamic, and animated, he would tug that forelock when
thinking and working on a production. Cultivating the aura of a spiritual,
mystical artist, Belasco romanticized his past, wore black suits and shirts
with reversed collars, and played the Bishop of Broadway to the hilt. He
would become portly and gray over the years, but he was still animated,
still pulled the lock of hair, and still wore the garb of a cleric until he died
in 1931.
14
Belasco started his New York career as a director at the Madison
Square Theatre run by the Rev. George Mallory and his brother, Marshall.
The Mallorys were interested in Sunday school drama, theatre that was
12
Belasco reports that the play failed in one of New York's hottest and most
humid summers. Actually the performances were in March and April; therefore, the
quality of the production and not the weather may have been the reason for poor
business (Belasco, "Life' s Story," Nov. 1914,464, and Winter, Life, vol. 2, 491).
13
Winter, Life, vol. 2, 489-496.
14
Belasco claimed to wear this particular garb in tribute to a Father McGuire
who educated him in a monastery in Victoria for several years. Winter accepted this
story and Belasco told it to interviewers, but Timberlake could find no evidence of a
Father McGuire or of a monastery in Victoria in the 1850s. Belasco, "Life's Story,"
March 1914, 302-304; Timberlake, Bishop, 15.
David Belasco 5
inoffensive, innocuous and sentimental and that would provide whole-
some entertainment for a Christian pub I ic.
15
Belasco's first attempt for them was a big success. At a time when
100 performances constituted a hit, he staged Bronson Howard's Young
Mrs. Winthrop which ran for 190 performances. That same season he
staged A Russian Honeymoon which had 55 performances and The
Rajah, or Wycot's Ward with 220 performances. After one season, he
attracted enough attention to be the subject of an article in the New York
Dramatic Mirror.
16
The next season, 1883-84 was not so fortuitous. He
staged his own play, The Stranglers of Paris (30 performances) at the Park
Theatre and directed three productions at the Madison Square Theatre:
Delmar's Daughters (8 performances), Alpine Roses (70 performances),
and his own May Blossom (170 performances). By the end of the season,
he had left the Mallorys after a dispute with their new partner, A. M.
Palmer, over directorial control
17
and begun a freelance directing career
that continued for the next few years.
For the 1884-85 season, Belasco staged only one production and
during the 1885-86 season had no productions. In 1886-87, he began
directing for Daniel Frohman at the Lyceum Theatre as well as at other
theatres, but he had no substantial successes unti I The Highest Bidder
with 110 performances in 1886-87 and The Wife (239 performances) in
1887-88. He did not have another outstanding success until The Charity
Ball (200 performances) in the 1889-90 season. In 1890-91, Men and
Women ran for 203 performances, and in 1891-92, Miss Helyett had 100
performances. Belasco had no productions in 1892-93 or 1893-94 and
only one in the 1894-95 season. In his first 13 seasons in New York,
Belasco staged 23 productions, of which eight ran for 100 performances
or more. Four of these- The Wife, Lord Chumley, The Charity Ball, and
Men and Women-were collaborations between Belasco and Henry C.
de Mille, and they accounted for much of what success Belasco had in
these early years.
15
Timberlake, Bishop, 112-114. As personalities the Mall orys were actual ly
quite rapacious. They paid Belasco $35 a week and $10 a week royalty on any of his
plays they produced, plus they were to get 50% of the royalties of any of his plays
produced elsewhere (Belasco, "Life's Story," Dec. 1914, 794) . This was not a good
financial arrangement for Belasco, but he accepted the terms as the price for being
able to work in New York.
16
New York, Dramatic Mirror, 3 November 1883, clippi ng file, Lincoln Center.
17
Winter, Life, vol. 2, 500.
6 SHELTON
By 1893, however, the New York Clipper was calling Belasco "the
ablest stage director in America" and noted that his playwriting royalties
rivaled those of the very popular Bronson Howard;
18
nevertheless,
Belasco wanted to be a manager of his own theatre and kept looking for
opportunities to establish himself as an independent producer. In 1890,
a propitious event occurred. A divorced socialite from Chicago, Mrs.
Lesli e Carter, seeking a way to support herself, asked Belasco to help her
to a stage career. Her divorce trial had attracted national pub I icity, and
as she had been convicted of adultery, she was notorious. Belasco
undertook her training, but it would be five years before they achieved
the goals they sought. He presented Mrs. Carter in The Ugly Duckling in
1890 which was not successful and in Miss Helyett in 1891 which was
moderately successful. However, not until 1895 did Belasco present
Mrs. Carter in a play which was the ultimate success he sought-The
Heart of Maryland, a Civi l War drama written by himself. The produc-
tion ran for 240 performances in its initial presentation and toured for
three years. It made a star of Mrs. Carter and made enough money for
Belasco that he was able to become his own producer. After a long and
hard struggle, at the age of 42, his days of directing for other producers
were over.
Over the following few years, Belasco undertook a number of
productions specifically for Mrs. Carter, all of which were hits: Zaza
(1899), Du Barry (1901 ), Adrea (1905). He also developed other stars
such as Blanche Bates in Naughty Anthony (1900), Madame Butterfly
(1900), Under Two Flags (1901 ), The Darling of the Gods (1902), The
Girl of the Golden West (1905), The Fighting Hope (1908), and Nobody's
Widow (191 0). Frances Starr also became a star attraction under his
direction in such plays as The Rose of the Rancho (1906), The Easiest
Way (1909), The Case of Becky (1912), Marie Odile (1915), and Little
Girl in Blue (1916). His major male star was David Warfield whom
Belasco presented in The Auctioneer (1901 ), The Music Master (1904),
A Grand Army Man (1907), The Return of Peter Grimm (1911 ), and The
Merchant of Venice (1922). Belasco was loyal to his stars, but he
expected fidelity from them also. In 1906, Mrs. Carter married, and her
new husband became her manager; Belasco never employed her or
spoke to her again, and after Blanche Bates married in 1912, she was
dropped by Belasco.
19
18
Herbert Kleinfi eld, "The Theatri cal Career of David Belasco," (Ph.D. di ss.,
Harvard, 1941 ), 202.
19
Winter, Life, vol. 1, 187; Timberlake, Bishop, 300.
David Belasco 7
As his own producer, Belasco found incredible success. After
Maryland, he curbed his writing efforts, adapting only six plays and
authoring or coauthoring another eight through his death in 1931. Of the
78 new productions he staged between Maryland and his death, 53 ran
for more than 1 00 performances and another five had at least 90
performances. From 1904 to 1 91 0 Belasco directed 11 hits ( 1 00 or more
performances) in a row, and of the 17 productions staged between 1904-
1913, 16 ran for at least 100 performances. Belasco's success allowed
him to lease the Republic Theatre and rename it for himself in 1902. By
1910 he owned his own theatre, named it the Belasco Theatre, and
continued to lease the other, renamed the Republic. Over the years,
three Belasco productions ran for more than 500 performances, marking
them as among the top ten longest running plays for several years: The
Boomerang (522 performances) in 1915, The Gold Diggers (720) in
1919, and Kiki (600) in 1921. Among his longest running Broadway hits
were: The Rose of the Rancho (359) in 1906, The Concert (264) in 1910,
The Woman (247) and The Return of Peter Grimm (231) in 1911, Polly
with a Past (315) and Tiger Rose (384) in 1917, Daddies (340) in 1918,
Lulu Belle (461) in 1926, The Bachelor Father (263) in 1928, It's a Wise
Child (378) in 1929. His last production, Tonight or Never, ran for 232
performances in 1930. Most seasons Belasco staged two or three new
productions and occasionally a revival or two, giving him a long and
profitable career. During his New York years, Belasco directed 103
productions of which 62 were hits, an astounding record.
His name synonymous with high quality production values through-
out the years, Belasco became a famous and controversial figure, in part
due to his public writings which he began in 1902. While his private life
contained no scandals, he was occasionally accused of plagiarism-never
proved-and in 1905 he fought the monopoly of the Theatrical Syndicate
which tried to shut him out of its theatres around the country. He joined
with the Shubert Brothers and effectively ended the monopoly,
20
and he
gained more attention by opposing the Actors' Equity association in
1919.
21
As the New Stagecraft came into being, Belasco began writing
articles defending his practices and getting his contributions on the
record. Although long noted for his improvements in the quality of play
production, by the 1920's he was considered by some critics, notably
George Jean Nathan, Sheldon Cheney, and Stark Young, as old-fashioned
for his realism and as a foe to the new movement.
20
Winter, Life, vol. 2, 16-20, 274-275.
21
Timberlake, Bishop, 339.
8 SHELTON
Beginning with his early work in San Francisco and continuing
throughout his nearly 50 years in New York, Belasco approached the
mise en scene from a scientific perspective, as can be seen particularly
in his emphasis on milieu and scenic investiture, his stress on lighting, his
work with actors, and his very idea of theatre-his aesthetic.
The late 19th century emphasis on a scientific approach to theatre as
embodied in naturalism owes its impetus to French philosopher Auguste
Comte (1798-57) and to his countryman, the writer Emile Zola (1840-
1902). Between the 1820's and the 1850's, Comte created Positivism,
his idea for the application of scientific method to the study of society.
Seeking a scientific approach to all of life, Comte invented a new science,
sociology, which would use observation, experimentation, and compari-
son to explore social development. The function of sociology was to
examine social phenomena objectively and to explain their relations by
connecting them to the whole of the social situation. Further, the new
science represented "the whole human race, past, present, and future, as
constituting a vast and eternal social unit, whose different organs,
individual and national, concur, in their various modes and degrees, in
the evolution of humanity.'
122
In brief, Comte attempted to replace
imaginative speculation regarding human nature and social interaction
with scientific analysis of fact in an effort to ascertain the natural laws
which he thought governed society. He envisioned a future of progress
and order based upon the scientific spirit.
Comte contemplated that art could be of use in his scientific world,
and he drew parallels for it with science:
Art may be defined as the ideal representation of Fact; its
purpose being to cultivate our sense of perfection. Its sphere
therefore is co-extensive with that of Science. Both deal in their
own way with the world of Fact; the one explains it, the other
beautifies it. The contemplations of the artist and the man of
science follow the same encyclopedic law; they begin with the
simple objects of the external world; they gradually rise to the
complicated facts of human nature.
23
22
The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, edited and condensed by Harriet
Marineau (New York: Calvin Blanchard, 1855), 473. Comte's discussion of sociology
is in Chapter Ill, "Characteristic of the Positive Method in Its Application to Social
Phenomena," 451-485, of Book VI, "Social Physics," 339.
23
Auguste Comte, System of Positive Polity (New York: Burt Franklin, 1973),
227. Comte discusses art in Chapter V, "Relation of Positivism to Art," 220-250.
David Belasco 9
Comte's guidelines regarding fact, the real, and a faithful and complete
representation of human nature were essential to the aesthetic of David
Belasco; however, the chief exponent of experimental science as a force
in artistic endeavors was Emile Zola, French novelist, critic, and
playwright.
Beginning in 1865 with newspaper articles and his preface to Therese
Raquin (1873), continuing with the essays, "The Experimental Novel"
(1879) and "Naturalism in the Theatre" (1881), Zola championed the
cause of applying scientific method to art. His approach influenced
naturalism and the "slice of life" drama
24
and reali sm of stage settings
developed by Andre Antoine and others in the 1880's. Whether or not
Belasco was familiar with the writings and ideas of Zola, he was
influenced by the move toward naturalism.
Zola saw the artist as the "examining magistrate of men and their
passions" who was to look to nature, use the experimental method, and
base his work upon observation.
25
He wanted art to be "the study of
natural man, man as the subject of physico-chemi cal laws, a being
determined by the influences of his environment."
26
For Zola, "the
experimental idea is not arbitrary, nor purely imaginary, it ought always
to have a support in some observed reality, that is to say, in nature."
27
Ideally, the artist would merely report what he observed: " ... you simply
take the I ife study of a person or a group of persons, whose actions you
faithfully depict. The work becomes a report, nothing more; it has but
the merit of exact observation, of more or less profound penetration and
analysis, of the logical connection of facts. "
28
Zola applied these ideas to the theatre in the preface for Therese
Raquin, calling for plays that reflected the scientific spirit of the century,
that would "delve into the living drama of the twofold life of the character
and its environment, bereft of every nursery tale, historical trapping and
24
Samuel Waxman, Antoine and the Theatre Libre (New York: B. Blom, 1925),
80.
25
Emile Zola, The Experimental Novel and Other Essays (New York: Haskell
House, 1964), 10-11.
2
& Quoted in William K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: a
Short History (New York: Vintage Books, 1957), 458.
27
Zola, Novel, 11-12. Zola is quoting medical doctor Claude Bernard.
26
Zola, "Naturalism on the Stage," Novel, 123-124.
10
SHELTON
the usual conventional stupidities."
29
In Raquin, a human study based on
the inner struggles of the characters, he sought to "place side by side with
the fearful agony of my protagonists the drab life of every day: I tried
continually to bring my setting into perfect accord with the occupations
of my characters, in order that they may not play, but rather live, before
the audience."
30
The drab, plain, and unrelenting reality of the setting
was important in establishing the theme and action of the play which was
suffused with a grim determinism.
While he did not subscribe to the determinism of lola, Belasco did
reflect lola's ideas. He also had early contact with lola's drama, for in
1879 he adapted and staged L'Assommoir in San Francisco. This
unrelenting story of a poor family's chance for a better life being ruined
by drunkenness certainly exhibited the deterministic features lola
pressed. But even he modified them for the stage version,
31
and Belasco
probably softened those features even more. In fact, while Belasco
highlighted the realistic details of the piece, the outstanding aspect of his
production was the fight between two women (taken from the novel) in
which they pour water on each other.
32
Belasco used the story of
L'Assommoir for its sensationalistic and melodramatic effect rather than
for producing a drama of social responsibility or serious purpose.
Symptomatically, this production represented both the promise and
problems of Belasco's use of the scientific perspective, for Belasco was
to adhere to the naturalists' aesthetic principle of imitating nature in great
detail without having adopted Zola's philosophical determinism. In
practice, he beautified and idealized reality-as Comte suggested the
artist should-to such a degree that the sociological point was lost.
Reflecting both Comte and lola, Belasco's scientific perspective
derived from his intense curiosity, keen observation, and belief in
copying nature. In effect, Belasco's scientific approach manifested itself
in three ways: first, in an emphasis on detail in furnishings and actual
three-dimensional sets-no canvas flats or papier mac he for him;
secondly, he sought lighting effects that were natural in that they copied
29
Emile Zola, "Preface to Therese Raquin," in Barrett H. Clark, ed., European
Theories of the Drama, rev. ed. (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1965), 378.
30
Ibid.
31
Lawson A. Carter, lola and the Theater (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1963), 108.
32
Lise-Lone Marker, David Belasco: Naturalism in the American Theatre
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 29.
David Belasco 11
nature; finally, he coached his actors in natural dialogue and behavior.
The result was a realistic mise en scene, Belasco's major contribution to
American directing.
Ultimately Belasco's scientific mode come to fruition in a passion for
the literal.
33
He was the master of detail, as many play reviews pointed
out, and he made his productions smack of reality.
34
A famous example
of this literalism concerned his setting for the final scene of The
Governor's Lady. The scene in a Child's Restaurant, a well-known locale
in New York City, was described in the script:
The interior in one of Child's Restaurants in New York City. The
restaurant is done in the usual white tiling. The egg boiler,
standing coffee urns, steaming hot water heater, wheat cake
griddle, egg frying apparatus, etc., are all in evidence. In fact,
the place is exactly reproduced in every detail. The piles of
oranges, apples, grape fruit, etc., are arranged in the window.
The pastry counter is well stacked, not forgetting the doughnuts.
Baked apples and prunes are set out. Thick crockery dishes,
cups, saucers, pitchers, small individual patterns, etc., are in
evidence.
35
Belasco had even gone so far as to purchase the equipment from the
Child's company; such actuality was a Belasco hallmark.
36
Another
example of Belasco's authenticity of setting was the production of The
Easiest Way, in which one scene took place in a run down theatrical
boarding house. Supposedly, Belasco located just such a lower East side
house and purchased the furnishings and perhaps even the wallpaper of
a room and used them as his stage setting-down to the wardrobe with
the doors that would not stay closed because it was packed so fully.
37
33
Montrose Moses, "David Belasco: The Astonishing Versatility of a Veteran
Producer," Theatre Guild Magazine (November 1929): 30.
34
Moses, "Belasco," 28.
35
Alice Brady, "The Governor's Lady," Typescript, Epilogue. Lincoln Center.

~ Wendel P. Dudge, "Staging a Popular Restaurant," The Theatre Magazine

(October 1912): 104, x, xi .
37
Moses, "Belasco," 30 and "WW" clipping, Theatre Collection, Lincoln Center.
Another theatre director, Hugh Ford, doubted the reports about Belasco transferring
a real room to the stage: "Mr. Belasco knows better than that. A real room would be
flat and uninteresting on the stage." "Successful Stage Manager Says Detail is the
12
SHELTON
Belasco used furniture from Bath for Sweet Kitty Be/lairs, furnishings from
Paris for Ou Barry, and costumes and props from Japan for Darling of the
Cods.
38
He wanted authentic locales to aid his actors in their belief as
they "live their roles. How can they do this in an atmosphere of papier
mache and net and tinsel, when it is as easy, even though more costly,
to surround them with reality? . .. The point at issue is to give the player
every aid to perfect interpretation of his role. "
39
"The exact milieu is his motto," one critic noted.
40
Belasco sought
scenery and setting that was true to the place portrayed,
41
and for him,
scenery and props created the atmosphere.
42
He related that in one
production even a small article such as a basket carried by an actor had
to be just right:
I recall to mind an episode in a certain scene which called for an
old basket to be carried by a fisher-lad. The completion of that
scene was delayed for days unti I I unearthed a basket of the
shape and color I felt to be right. I doubt very much if the
people in front took any special notice of my poor fisher-lad's
basket, but it constituted a harmonious note in the whole, and
audiences "sense" perfection of detail in a way quite in contrast
with their actual knowledge of it.
43
Most Essential Thing in 'Building' a Scene." Philadelphia Times, 1909. Lincoln
Center, Ford clipping file.
38
David Belasco, "The Evolution of a Belasco Play," Saturday Evening Post (2
September 191 6): 48.
39
David Belasco, "Why I Produce Unprofitable Plays," Theatre Magazine (March
1929): 22, 68.
40
James G. Huneker, "American Producers Ill. David Belasco," Theatre Arts
I
Magazine (October 1921): 264.
41
David Belasco, "Stagecraft," Green Book Magazine (August 1915): 354.
42
David Belasco, "Artistic Achievements and Possibilities of the Stage," The New
Metropolitan (April 1903): 29.
43
Belasco, "Artistic Achievements," 30.
David Belasco 13
He wanted to maintain the illusion of reality so he could play on the
emotions of the audience.
44
By recreating the dining room of a Child's
restaurant or using the actual furniture and wallpaper from a tenement
room, he allowed the audience to be comfortable with the familiar, that
is, something that was real. If the audience members recognized that
background as real, they would be undisturbed by any incongruities or
questions about what the set was supposed to mean. Further, they would
be more likely to accept the activities which unfolded upon the stage as
believable and accurate.
Belasco worked diligently, and for many productions he went so far
as to "fit up gorgeously a second room, opening from that in which the
main action is taking place and, at a favorable moment, to open the door
between, leaving the audience to gaze through .. . " creating thereby an
even stronger sense of naturalness.
45
Such care in creating the proper
atmosphere turned the stage into a laboratory for the portrayal of human
emotions and activities. Belasco used naturalism in setting, to create the
iII us ion that the action on stage was real.
On into the twentieth century, Belasco continued to use such
authentic settings and rejected the symbolic approach to stage setting as
it gained attention. By the teens and twenties, however, many of his
interior scenes of middle or upper class settings looked very similar,
almost interchangeable. Photographs of sets for plays such as Call the
Doctor (1920), The Grand Duke (1921 ), Kiki (1924), The Harem (1924),
It's a Wise Child (1929), and Tonight Or Never (1930), usually include
a table-with-chairs arrangement, a sofa and some armchairs, perhaps a
piano, and seemingly very solid walls with windows and fireplace.
46
Belasco did make some departures from such architecturally realistic
settings but not very often. The most notable change occurred in his set
for the 1915 production of Marie-Odile. The action of this play occurred
in one set, the kitchen in a convent. This production lacked the usual
excessive detail; the room was bare and stark. Further, Belasco elimi-
nated the footlights and draped the proscenium opening in hangings in
44
David Belasco, "Stage Art-Old and New, " Saturday Evening Post (20 March
1920): 69.
45
"An Indictment of David Belasco as the Evil Genius of the Theatre, " Current
Opinion (February 1915): 96.
46
Belasco production photographs, Lincoln Center.
14 SHELTON
a neutral tint.
47
Such was the simplicity of the scenery that it resembled
the New Stagecraft which was emerging at this time (Belasco decried the
New Stagecraft with its bizarre sets for distracting the audience).
48
Ultimately, scenic investiture and mise en scene were the major
contributions of David Belasco. As unnecessary as such real ism may
appear today, when Belasco first started directing, his approach appeared
as a significant and major reform of stage practices, for quality of
production was not always at a high level until Belasco raised the ante.
While authentic setting was paramount, proper lighting was also
important to Belasco both in supporting the actor and in creating
atmosphere. Throughout his career he was proud of his experiments with
lights, claiming that colors in particular had a strong influence on both
the actors and the audience.
49
Again in this area, Belasco relied upon his
powers of observation and believed in the value of the real: '"Nearer
sunlight nearer perfection in stage lighting.' That is the ideal toward
which I have been striving all my life."
50
According to him, he could tell
the difference between a Japanese sunset and a California one; and
further, he claimed to know the psychology of color. His theatre had a
laboratory in the basement in which his employees conducted experi-
ments in lighting color, techniques, and instruments.
51
Although his lighting effects were spectacular, Belasco's stated goal
was "only to stimulate the illusion."
52
He further claimed that:
I have found, too, that not only can the effect exercised on an
audience by a given speech be either modified entirely or
strikingly enforced by changing the quality and quantity of light
shed upon the scene wherein it is spoken, but also that with
actors of finely strung, highly sensitized organizations I can, by
changing the lights upon them, get from them feelings and tones
47
Clayton Hamilton, "Romance and Realism in the Drama," The Bookman
(March 1915): 61.
48
Belasco, "Stage Art," 69.
49
Augusta Victor, "David Belasco," The Reflex Uune 1928): 67.
50
David Belasco, " How I Make Stage Sunlight, " Popular Science Monthly Uuly
1924): n.p.
5 1
Victor, "Belasco, " 66-67, Belasco, "Evolution," 14.
52
Belasco, "Stagecraft," 356.
David Belasco
not to be obtained to anything like the same degree under
ordinary lighting. I have many times succeeded in getting what
I wanted from actors by that means when every other has
failed.
53
15
All in all, Belasco placed a great deal of faith in his scientific use of
lighting.
Belasco expended considerable' time and money on getting just the
right lighting effect. The final sunset from The Girl of the Golden West
was a costly and famous creation, but Madame Butterfly contained one
of his most incredible lighting effects, used to create a mood and place
and to further the action. In the key scene in which Cho-cho-san,
Madame Butterfly, awaits the arrival of her husband, she readies herself
and the house and then sits and waits.
During the vigil, the night comes on. Suzuki [the maid] lights
the floor lamps, the stars come out, the dawn breaks, the floor
lights flicker out one by one, the birds begin to sing, and the day
discovers Suzuki and the baby fast asleep on the floor, but
Madam Butterfly is awake, still watching, her face white and
strained. She reaches out her hands and rouses Suzuki.
54
While she sits, the light changes from night to early morning to
daylight-a fourteen minute light change with no dialogue.
55
As in all
other areas, Belasco claimed that nature was his guide and that his
sunsets, sunrises and other lighting effects were exact imitations of reality.
As indicated, Belasco used mise en scene not only to draw the
audience into the production but also to aid the actors. For Belasco, all
things in a stage production pointed to the acting, for he believed that
"acting-and, properly, only acting-is stage art. The settings, all the
details of investiture, environment and dressing are. but the scenic
art-the background against which and within which acting is to be
53
Belasco, "Play Production, " 38.
54
David Belasco, Madame Butterfly, a reproduction of Belasco's own library
copy. Theatre Collection, Lincoln Center.
55
Walter Prichard Eaton, "Madame Butterfly's Cocoon: A Sketch of David
Belasco," American Scholar (Spring 1936): 177.
16 SHELTON
displayed."
56
Here again, he advocated that nature should be the model
for the actor.
57
From the beginning in New York, Belasco received good reviews for
the acting in his productions. Of his first production, Young Mrs.
Winthrop, the New York Times praised its "delicacy and sense of
bearing."
58
The New York Dramatic Mirror also praised the acting in this
play and noted that it was "in the repressed style of modern acting."
59
In
later years, Belasco claimed that he was responsible for reforming acting,
making it more natural and quieter:
When I first began my career as a stage-director, I put the soft
pedal on the actor. In those days he screamed and ranted and
intoned his lines. He thought it was the only way he could get
them to his audience. I made my players speak in their natural
voices because it was natura/.
60
The Dramatic Mirror's review of Young Mrs. Winthrop, however,
suggests that New York was already familiar with a restrained acting style,
and Belasco biographer William Winter agrees that Belasco should not
receive credit for introducing it.
61
Belasco definitely had a way with actors. Both gentle and harsh, he
was a master manipulator. He could adopt whatever pose was necessary
to get the effect that he wanted: "I adapt myself to their temperaments."
62
His fame grew as an acting master after his success with Mrs. Carter in
The Heart of Maryland. Belasco preferred to use obscure players rather
than established stars,
63
but these unknowns often became stars under his
56
Belasco, "Stage Art," 69.
57
David Belasco, "About Acting," Saturday Evening Post (24 September 1921 ):
94.
58
New York Times, 10 October 1882.
59
Dramatic Mirror, 14 October 1882.
60
Belasco, "Stagecraft," 357; and Moses, "Belasco," 27.
61
Winter, Life, vel. 1, 161-162.
62
Ada Patterson, "David Belasco Reviews His Life Work," Theatre Magazine
(December 1906): 248.
63
Belasco, "Stagecraft," 358.
David Belasco 17
guidance. He developed several actors and furthered their careers,
including Blanche Bates, Frances Starr, David Warfield, Lenore Ulric, and
Ina Claire. For his major stars, he developed plays around them. David
Warfield was so successful under Belasco's guidance that he had a
twenty-year career in just five roles in The Auctioneer, The Music Master,
A Grand Army Man, The Return of Peter Crimm, and The Merchant of
Venice.
Belasco had an uncanny ability to cast just the right person for a role
and I iked to cast actors who resembled the characters-he wanted to
keep close to nature
64
-and he spent a long time in selecting a cast for a
production.
65
After the initial reading rehearsals, Belasco turned the
actors over to a stage director for a couple of weeks until the actors
learned their lines. Then he would begin to drill them, often in long
rehearsals: "I have kept my people on the stage twenty hours at a stretch,
making some of them read a single line perhaps fifty times, experimenting
with little subtleties of intonation or gesture, and going over bits of
business again and again."
66
One commentator's observation of Belasco
at rehearsals verifies this assessment:
A glutton for work, he exacts the same of his players. The
present writer personally knows of days he gave to the proper
reading and development of a soliloquy a printed page long.
Over and over the tired actress was drilled into the reading of
the I ines, hours being devoted to the inflections of a single
sentence.
67
Some of the best acting in a Belasco production may possibly have
been presented by Belasco himself at rehearsals. At one for Marie-Odile,
a group of nuns was supposed to scream when told the attacking Pruss ian
army was coming. Belasco was not satisfied with their girlish shrieks. He
grabbed some clay pots and started ranting to the stage manager about
how poorly they had been painted.
64
Belasco, "Evolution," 46.
65
David Belasco, " How I Stage My Pl ays," Theatre Magazine (December 1902):
32.
66
Bel asco, "Evolution," 46.
67
Edward F. Coward, "The Men Who Di rect the Desti ni es of the Stage," Theatre
Magazine Uuly 1906): 187-188.
18 SHELTON
"What do you mean by this!" he roared. "How dare you bring
these things into my theatre!" Then he started throwing pots at
the feet of the women. As he continued, they backed away
screaming with terror and volume. So he just dropped the piece
of clay, resumed his easy conversational tone and said, "That's
more like it. Why couldn't you do that the first time?" The
scene was a sensation later.
68
Screams were important in Belasco's plays as refl ected in another
incident. He was rehearsing Frances Starr for the climax of The Easiest
Way in which her character has just learned that she has been abandoned
by both her intended husband and her former lover. She grabs a pistol
to kill herself. Belasco wanted her to scream and then throw down the
gun in realization of the drastic action she was about to take. As Starr
was not getting the proper emotional intensity, Belasco decided to work
on her:
It was not a moment when facial pantomime or frozen emotion
would produce the right thrill. What I wanted was a scream
which would denote a soul in torment, the abject terror of a little
weakling whose life had been wasted in careless pursuit of gay
things and who suddenly found herself brought face to face with
death.
Then I saw it would be necessary to be harsh, to torment the
little girl [Starr], and by humiliating her before the company, to
drive her to the point of hysterics. I was sure, if only once I
could force her up to the pitch of frenzy which the scene
demanded, that she would be able to master it and repeat it.
69
Belasco had her repeat and repeat the scene. Then he remembered that
Starr desired to be regarded as a serious actress, one who could create the
emotional impact of Sarah Bernhardt. The director began to taunt her
about her dream, reviled her with that wish, and badgered her. He kept
after Starr unmercifully- until she finally screamed and fainted. "That's
what I want!" Belasco exulted.
66
John H. Walker, "From David Belasco's Gas Lights to Radio City's Many
Kilowatts," New York Herald Tribune, 9 October 1938.
69
David Belasco, "The Truth About Theatre," Ladies Home Journal (December
1917): n.p. Clipping file, Lincoln Center.
David Belasco
19
Such tactics may have been exceptional, for his methods were not
always so flamboyant as indicated by some of Belasco's instructions
which playwright George Middleton recorded during a rehearsal of
Accused:
"Don't think: agree with him."
"You're talking to his brain: don't look at him."
"You bring the feeling of uncertainty with you into the room."
"Punctuate. Pause and yet no pause. Only a comma's worth.
His hesitation makes you supplicate."
"You mustn't anticipate that. It's a new movement, and a new
passage of interest."
"Almost get into the chair without the audience seeing it. They
must be thinking of him, not watching you."
"Now you're building up the air of mystery."
"This line is just as big as though we had the kick of an ele-
phant."
"That's what I call a dangerous moment. Get over it quickly.
Don't give the audience time to think."
70
These directions suggest Belasco's attempts to add color, meaning and
focus to line readings and movements and to make each moment as
telling as possible. They reflect both theatrical practicality-"get into the
chair"-and psychological motivation-"you're talking to his brain. "
They also reveal Belasco's liking of theatrical effects.
Middleton also observed another Belasco technique in the rehearsal
of another play as the director built a scene in which a woman was to
call a man a coward. Belasco thought that her interpretation lacked the
period subtlety the costume drama demanded. He had the prop man
bring him a fan:
Presto-it arrived. Then Belasco gave it to the actress. " Here ..
. . You have been fanning yourself . .. before ... so . . . so ...
it won't seem like a device .... See? Fan slowly ... See, this
way .... Now ... when he speaks-What is the line? Oh, yes!
When he hesitates to go to fight for his country ... You smile .
. . Lady on top-claws underneath ... See? Now-fan yourself .
. . . That's it. ... Look at him ... Look at the fan ... Yes ...
Now you get an idea ... See? Feather? See? It's a white feather
70
George Middleton, These Things Are Mine (New York: Macmillan and Co.,
1947), 283.
20 SHELTON
. .. See? Now you pluck one out. .. . No emotion .. . Brain .
. . Yes . . . Wait. . .. Now throw it into the air .... No, blow it
up-over your head ... Yes. Natural-as though amused .. .
See? Now fan it. ... Not too much . . .. Fan it-and watch it as
it settles slowly to the ground . .. You both watch it. Now .. .
you speak." He turned abruptly to the playwright: "Now get me
a line there for her to say." And for a hundred nights the actress
murmured what she thought of a man "who showed the white
feather."
71
This example of Belasco in a rehearsal illustrates several factors in his
development of a scene: his rei iance on the visual, his strong sense of the
detailed acting out of a line, his use of props to add reality to a moment,
his sense of psychology-the claws beneath the lady-and his intense
theatricality. Belasco regarded acting as a game of psychology,
72
and he
certainly tried to use psychology in motivating and coaching actors. He
considered his methods as "cooperative help"
73
; however, while he had
a high regard for acting talent, he did think of actors as adult or emotional
children
74
and the behavior described above reflects that attitude.
In interviews, Belasco's main stars, Mrs. Carter, David Warfield, and
Frances Starr, revealed that his practices not only called for psychological
bases but anticipated modern acting methods. Mrs. Carter rejected the
ideas of academic or technique acting by declaring that "every creation
reflects an experience in actual feeling." She continued:
To me every important situation in a play has its analogy in some
stress of past experience. Somehow or other in that scene of
Zaza's renunciation, I never played it but what there came
before me a picture of my father's grave on the hillside. I did not
encourage the memory, but it seemed to have a direct emotional
relation to the sentiment of ren unciation.
75
71
Ibid., 281-282.
72
Belasco, "About Acting," 98.
73
Coward, "Men," 187.
74
Belasco, "Play Production," 38; Belasco, "Evolution," 49.
75
W. De Wagstaffe, "Mrs. Leslie Carter-A Summer Study," Theatre Magazine
(October 1902): 22.
David Belasco 21
This use of analogy amounts to a type of emotional recall or substitu-
tion-techniques that came into conscious practice decades later-by the
actress who had received her experience and training through Belasco.
Warfield's comments on a particular performance reflect natural,
restrained acting that Belasco encouraged. At a point in The Music
Master, Warfield's character realizes that a music pupil is actually his
own lost daughter. Warfield rejected playing the moment in an
exaggerated emotional manner: "I believe a man would stand there in
silence, his body rigid with pain, but still silent. That, I think, is life, and
to life I always go for my models."
76
Obviously Warfield had been well
coached by the master to take nature as his model. .
Francis Starr indicated that she relied heavily upon observation and
experience in developing characters. To gain insight into the life of a nun
for Marie-Odile, she visited a convent and lived in its isolation, routine,
and serenity for a time. She came to appreciate the impact of such an
environment on a young woman. By the time she played the role,
putting on the nun's habit and assuming the character made her, she
averred, "utterly unconscious of Francis Starr."
77
All three of these actors
are expressing ideas about how to experience the part by use of
emotional memory and by understanding the given circumstances.
These comments by his actors reflect Belasco's stated ideas about
acting as natural, observational, and psychologicai-"AII that an actor
does is but reveal to the minds and souls of observers the workings and
experiences of the mind and soul of an assumed personality."
78
He noted
that it may be difficult to determine what was natural in any given
situation because different people would behave differently and that "in
many situations it is the disposition of most persons to repress their strong
emotions-and as a rule the stronger those emotions are, the stronger will
be the effort to control and conceal them."
79
Belasco acknowledged that repression was not the sole objective of
the actor:
In acting, however, the object must be expression, not repres-
sion. The actor must not attempt to do merely what would be
76
Ada Patterson, "David Warfiel d-The Actor and the Man," The Theatre
Uanuary 1905): 18.
77
Frances Starr, "How I Prepare a Role," The Delineator Uune 1920): 99.
78
Belasco, "About Acting," 98.
79
Ibid.
22 SHELTON
natural for him to do; he must first ascertain what would be the
natural reaction to and conduct in a given situation, of the
special character he is to represent; and he must then display
them by means of symbols common to and recognizable by
humanity-for acting, like all the arts, is symbolic.
80
In these surprisingly modern comments about character, playing the
moment and understanding the circumstances, Belasco expresses the
duality that pervaded his working aesthetic: the emphasis on the
natural-based on observation and experimentation-and the theatri-
cal-the necessity of getting the idea across to the audience. His
scientific perspective was constantly tempered by his practicality as a
man of the theatre. Belasco strove for natural acting in his productions,
and while on the whole his productions were praised for the quality of
acting, occasionally critics sometimes condemned his players for
overacting. Given the reports of Belasco's demonstrations and behavior
in rehearsals, that his actors might occasionally overdramatize should be
no surprise.
An evaluation of Belasco's contributions to and place in the
American theatre must end with a review of his idea of theatre. His
aesthetic cannot be summarized concisely, but his dictum that art is the
copy, imitation, and transcript of Nature
81
and a concomitant statement
that" ... humanity is the basis of theatre; and that the theatre will live
only through its actors and actresses. All else is machinery"
82
come close.
Belasco's motto was "use Nature as your model." In addition, Belasco
wrote that "we must make the theatre a temple of imagination where a
sufficient realism is created to crowd from the mind every outside
condition and circumstance."
83
He held that the first law of the stage was
to convince the audience of the truth and logic of the work,
84
and
believed that his realistic mise en scene freed the imagination-" it clothes
a situation in what the mind and eye expect."
85
Therefore Belasco filled
80
Ibid.
81
Belasco, "Stage Art," 69.
82
Belasco, "Stagecraft," 357.
83
David Belasco, "Plagiarism," Green Book Magazine (April 1915): 617.
64
Belasco, "Evolution, " 13.
65
Belasco, "Stagecraft," 357.
David Belasco 23
his stages with real items, three dimensional, solid scenery, and actors
who were taught to use nature as their guide in detailed performances;
however, there were other components to his idea of theatre.
Concurrent with this emphasis on a naturalistic stage setting (and
often in contradiction to it) was a strain of romanticism in Belasco. His
stage settings, while in many ways slices of life, were often also pictur-
esque and romantic. Further, as much as Belasco tried to make the
audience accept what they saw on stage by making it as real as possible,
he also wanted to touch their hearts:
For the completed play is impressive and fulfills its purpose only
to the extent that it carries an audience back to its own experi-
ences. If my productions have had an appealing quality it is
because I have kept this important fact constantly in mind and
have tried, while concealing the mechanisms of my scenes, to
tug at the hearts of my audiences.
86
What nineteenth century society considered natural was actually an
idealized view of character, one that Belasco never really escaped in spite
of the rise of naturalistic drama. Belasco wanted realism in character and
action, but he did not want the "harrowing" of the audience, as he put
it.
87
Belasco continued to put characters on stage who could have come
out of late nineteenth century melodrama. Even his notorious women
such as DuBarry and Zaza were sentimental creatures in dramas that
usually ended happily. His heroines were idealized models of a type,
and they did not meet the tragic ends of Ibsen heroines. As one
commentator wrote, "The Belasco formula depended, in short, upon the
real thing for the eye and the right thing for the heart."
88
Another aspect of his theatre aesthetic, again perhaps counter to his
naturalism, was his theatrical ism. Putting items on stage such as actual
Japanese furniture and robes and real champagne
89
became a theatrical
trick. Belasco knew how to keep an audience's attention through his
66
Belasco, "Evolution, " 13.
6 7
Ibid.
66
Kleinfiel d, " Belasco, " 4.
69
A review of The Gold Diggers (1919) noted that the audience was so taken
with the fact that upon opening a bottle of champagne the cork popped that they
applauded-"lt seemed so reckless-so lavish-so tremendous." Alan Dale, "Ina Claire
in A New Comedy at Lyceum," New York American, 30 September 1919.
24 SHELTON
emphasis on detail. If the mise en scene were to be believable, the entire
exhibition of acting and stage business must also be believable.
Unfortunately for any naturalistic purpose, ultimately the theatrical ism
and beauty of Belasco's stage pictures became part of the message. For
Belasco beauty was truth; further, truth was simple and life was full of
romance.
90
Belasco accomplished a synthesis of mise en scene-the stage picture
was of a high quality, represented his sense of reality and truth, and was
at the same time, elaborate and theatrical, and as Comte demanded of art
but Zola did not, idealized and beautiful. Based on his keen observations
and experiments, Belasco's perfectionism gave him nevertheless a flair for
realistic illusion that suggested a creative ingenuity.
91
In fact, he
considered the entire production and attempted, by his lights, a holistic
interpretation.
In spite of Belasco's fame and reputation that he "had no peer as a
director"
92
and that he was "the greatest theatrical producer in this
country,"
93
at Belasco's death, Stark Young (one of Belasco's harshest
critics) claimed that the director had no supreme gift of any sort.
94
Indeed, years earlier, the dichotomy of Belasco's aesthetic was evident:
even while The Heart of Maryland was being almost universally praised,
and by some as the greatest production of the decade,
95
The Illustrated
American was calling it unsubstantial, not of flesh and blood but of a
paltry and potent theatricalism.
96
Perhaps, as Montrose Moses wrote,
Belasco's mystical quality was overcome by his practicality: "Problems
of stagecraft have intrigued him away from any belief in a central idea,
a steadying spiritual need, a reticence in accentuation, a simple use of
90
David Belasco, "Beauty As I See It," Arts and Decoration Uuly 1923): 9.
91
Eaton, "Madame Butterfly's," 175.
92
Cowar, "Men," 187.
93
Patterson, "Belasco," 247.
94
Stark Young, "Belasco," New Republic (17 June 1931): 123.
95
Dunlop's Stage News, 2 November 1895; and "New Plays," 28 October 1985,
clipping files, Lincoln Center.
96
Charles F. Nirdliner, "Plays and Players," The Illustrated American (9
November 1895): 586-587.
David Belasco 25
ornament and decoration"
97
; so that he created what George jean
Nathan called Belasco's "show shop piffle."
98
In spite of his own
revolutionary past as an innovator and even as some critics credited his
experiments as pointing the way toward the New Stagecraft,
99
Belasco
decried the revolutionary practices of the new designers, deriding
symbolism and abstract settings as not imitating nature. By the end of his
career, Belasco's emphasis on mise en scene was both a blessing and a
curse.
Further, for all of his talk of psychology and motivation, Belasco did
not explore (as he claimed) certain crannies of his characters' inner lives
because his romanticism and his idealized sense of character kept him
from contemplating the disquieting sordidness that authors such as Ibsen
found in those crannies.
100
Or as Young put it, he did not go to the
bottom of a scene.
101
Finally, and most importantly in assessing the significance of
Belasco's directorial perspective, for all his attempts at being true and
natural, Belasco ultimately relied on plays that would evoke sentimental
emotional reactions in the audience. His productions were often
standard melodramas which depended heavily upon "situations." For
example, The Heart of Maryland was constructed around an incident
recalling the poem "Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight." At a crucial
moment in the play, Maryland Calvert climbs a church bell tower and
leaps to and holds onto the bell clapper to prevent the bell from sounding
the warning that her lover has escaped captivity. Her actions save his
life.
102
Similarly, a key moment in The Girl of the Colden West involves
another romantic situation. The heroine has hidden her lover, a bandit,
in the loft of her cabin. The sheriff questions her about the bandit and is
about to leave when suddenly a drop of blood hits the sheriff's hand,
97
Moses, " Belasco, " 28.
98
George Jean Nathan, " Legends End-David Belasco, " quoted in Alan Downer,
ed., The American Drama and Its Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965),
232.
99
Belasco, "Stage Art, " 66; Marker, Belasco, 50.
100
Huneker, "Belasco," 267.
101
Stark Young, "Belascosity," The New Republic (19 December 1923): 94.
102
David Belasco, The Heart of Maryland, in The Heart of Maryland and Other
Plays, ed. by Glenn Hughes and George Savage, (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1941), 235.
26 SHELTON
exposing the hiding place of the outlaw.
103
Such an actual incident was
related to Belasco by his father; therefore, for the director, no matter how
romantic it seemed, it was real.
104
These plays made their impact from
just such situations. In theme and content, his productions were
throwbacks to the romantic-sentimental era and drama of his youth. For
all of his artistic posturing, Belasco wanted popular success,
105
and
although the great director pretended to be a litterateur, he actually
disdained the literary drama.
106
While he attempted to deliver plays that
were out of the conventional groove,
107
he worked at a time of contro-
versy and revolution in dramatic writing but never produced a play by
Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw or even Pinero or Jones. Additionally he paid
great homage to Shakespeare, but because he thought his time lacked
actors worthy of Shakespeare, he only produced one Shakespearean work
in his long New York career.
Nevertheless, Belasco's contribution to the American theatre was
great. Behind his. lust for perfection and urge to rouse emotional
excitement through situation lay one guiding intelligence:
His mind grasped all phases of a production, just as his vision
saw the whole, and thanks to his years of practical training he
was able to realize, as few ever have, the ideal of the theatre-a
single intelligence which can create or at least definitely control
text, scenery, and lights, can train and direct the players, and can
therefore achieve a complete and unique unity. He thus
established in our theatre a standard of artistic accomplishment
which was tonic and enduring.
108
103
David Belasco, The Girl of the Golden West, in Six Plays (Boston: Little,
Brown and Company, 1929), 377.
104
Timberlake, Bishop, 284.
105
Belasco, " How I Stage My Plays," 31.
106
Timberlake, Bishop, 270.
107
Belasco, "Evolution," 12.
108
Eaton, "Madame Butterfly's," 180.
David Belasco 27
In many respects Belasco was an auteur,
109
the guiding force behind his
productions-the first director as star-and for a time the only art there
was in the American theatre came from him. Even Stark Young admitted
that he produced a great variety of plays expertly.
11 0
In his way, Belasco had some of the same ideas as Zola, for he
claimed to have made his plays and productions from observation. Thus
he sought realistic, believable acting for his productions, and the
exactness and extreme detail in his settings and lighting effects gave the
illusion of replicating nature. Ultimately, milieu became the summum
bonum for Belasco. In effect, he was attempting to express the impact of
environment on his characters. Unfortunately, he did not develop the
interior life of the characters, for his psychological view was too
simplistic. He tried to motivate everything which occurred on stage, but
what Belasco really created were effects-as George Middleton's
rehearsal notes reflect. He used his rich milieu to make the actor and the
audience comfortable with familiar surroundings and characters, not to
present drama of sociological or psychological impact or meaning except
of the most obvious and sentimental sort.
Belasco did provide, nevertheless, an outlook which improved the
quality of American theatre. Belasco's art was the first important
synthesis of theatrical art in modern American theatre. His sense of the
emotions and of psychology may have been sentimental and his truth
may have been largely an exterior truth-theatre awaited Elia Kazan's
synthesis for an interior truth-but his brand of theatre was driven by
ideas representative of a scientific perspective. Both fortunately and
unfortunately, Belasco's career came at the juncture of the end of
romanticism and the beginning of realism/naturalism. His theatre
aesthetic reflects both of those forms, for he was romantic in his soul and
realistic in his technique of staging. His scenic investiture was scientific;
his themes were romantic and his treatment of them was sentimental.
109
Stanley Kaufmann, "Two Vulgar Geniuses: Augustin Daly and David Belasco,"
Yale Review (Summer 1987): 496-513, discusses Belasco as auteur.
110
Stark Young, " Belasco," New Republic (17 June 1923): 123.
journal of American Drama and Theatre 1 0 (Winter 1998)
Effeminacy or Art?
The Performativity of Julian Eltinge
GERALDINE MASCHIO
Acknowledged as the leading female impersonator of all time, Julian
Eltinge performed his glamourous women during the first decades of the
twentieth century. His success on both sides of the Atlantic, on stage and
in film, made him and his producer, AI Woods, wealthy men. Indeed, to
celebrate his box office value, Woods named a Broadway theatre in
Eltinge's honor. While such acknowledgment for a female impersonator
may be difficult for those in the late twentieth century to imagine, cross-
dressing had long been a legitimate part of the American theatre and,
until Eltinge's era, was considered a wholly respectable act. But with the
new century, the legitimacy of female impersonation was called into
question, and Eltinge's performances situated this critical debate.
Born William Dalton in 1882, Julian Eltinge began his career in
amateur theatricals in Boston, first appearing as a female in the "First
Cadet Corps" show sometime during his early teenage years. From these
amateur revues, Eltinge moved on to minstrelsy and vaudeville, eventu-
ally performing on the Keith-Aibee circuit and in 1904 on Broadway in
Mr. Wix of Wickham, a loosely-constructed musical comedy. Through-
out the first decades of the twentieth century, Eltinge headlined in two-a-
day vaudeville and in musical comedies written expressly for him; he
earned more than $50,000 a year. He also appeared in a number of films
and performed in Europe, including before the British Royal Family.
Eltinge performed during a time when female impersonation was
especially popular. Seen in all forms of comic entertainment, female
impersonators had captivated audiences since the earliest days of the
rep ubi ic. Initially, "dame" impersonation, the rough burlesque of the
older, unattractive woman by a clearly seen male, was more common.
However, during the late nineteenth century, "prima donna" imperson-
ation, or "glamour drag," became the dominant type of female imperson-
ation. Here, the male performer subsumed his gender under the
glamourous costumes of the beautiful woman he created on his body;
only at the final moment did he reveal his "true" gender. Glamour
impersonators delighted audiences with the hocus-pocus of their gender
julian Eltinge 29
transformations. They were quick-change artists, seeming to change not
only their costumes but their "sex."
As scholars have noted, the dawn of the twentieth century brought
forth economic, political, and sexual turmoil. The processes of capitalism
and industrialization, the women's rights movement, and immigration
seemed to threaten white male privilege and shake the very foundations
of hegemony. To reinscribe their power, white males attempted to assert
control, creating representations that slaked their need for authority. The
glamour impersonator's embodiment of hegemonic sexuality served these
ends. According to Peggy Phelan,
A man imitates an image of a woman in order to confirm that
she belongs to him. It is necessary and desirable to perform her
image externally and hyperbolically, however, because he wants
to see himself in possession of her. Performing the image of
what he is not allows him to dramatize himself as "all."
1
The glamour impersonator's dramatizations enabled many male
audience members to enjoy the display of power that female imperson-
ation signified. Women were reduced to cipher, an artificial construction
of paint and powder, created, dominated, and controlled by men. In this
schema, men were men and women remained the second sex. Such
iconography stabilized and reinscribed gender norms and provided a
sense of security to many men and, presumably, to many women as well.
However, this hegemonic reading of glamour drag denies the reality
of the growing awareness on the part of the general public of differing
sexualities. As Foucault has claimed, the late nineteenth century
"invented" homosexuality; the sexologists provided a taxomony of
sexual behavior that challenged the simple binary of male and female.
The categorization and labeling of sexual behavior helped to identify
those individuals whose sexual orientation stood outside of the binary.
Homosexuals and the general public now could explain sexual difference
as an identifiable if non-normative type, naturally occurring but
"unnatural." Concomitantly, heterosexuality assumed its paradigmatic
place. As Jonathan Ned Katz has explained,
In the first years of the twentieth century ... the nineteenth
century's tentative, ambiguous heterosexual concept was
stabilized, fixed, and widely distributed as the ruling sexual
1
Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge,
1993), 17. .
30
MASCHIO
orthodoxy-The Heterosexual Mystique- the idea of an essen-
tial, eternal, normal heterosexuality. As the term heterosexual
moved out of the smal l world of medical discourse into the big
world of the American mass media, the heterosexual idea moved
from abnormal to normal, from normal to normative.
2
The possibility of sexual multiplicities outside of this heterosexual
orthodoxy engendered anxiety among many individuals. The male/
female binary had become complicated, tainted, perhaps even replaced,
by the binary of heterosexual/homosexual. jonathan Dollimore suggests
how fear emanated from this new binary:
whatever a culture designates as alien, utterly other, and
incommensurably different is rarely and perhaps never so.
Culture exists in a relationship of difference with the alien,
which is also: a relationship of fundamental, antagonistic,
discursive dependence-most obviously (though not only) in
terms of the binary opposition. . . . The absolutely other is
extricably within.
3
Within the heterosexual matrix, perversion rests, dormant perhaps, but
ready to be awakened by unknown and therefore feared forces; the
heterosexual/homosexual binary perforce was read as normal/abnormal.
Perhaps most threatening was the association of male homosexual ity
with female passivity. It was one thing to be less of a man and another
to want to act like a woman, to be effeminate. Moreover, the notion
promoted by many scientists and doctors that such passive homosexual
men were women trapped inside a male body provided a way of
explaining (and denouncing) any man whose performance of gender
seemed inadequately male-that is, effeminate.
This concern with effeminacy on the part of middle class white male
culture resulted in part from the emergence of the homosexual known as
the "fairy." With the creation of homosexuality as a specific category of
sexual behavior and with the performance of a homosexual identity by
2
Jonathan Ned Katz, Invention of Heterosexuality (New York: Penguin Books,
1996), 82.
3
Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence (New York: Oxford University Press,
1991), 182.
Julian Eltinge 31
Oscar Wilde at his trials,
4
many men looked to ways of signifying their
participation in this new sexual category. As George Chauncey has
written, during the first decades of the twentieth century many homosex-
ual men employed effeminate behavior as "the first step ... in the
process of making sense of their apparent sexual and gender differences
and reconstructing their image of themselves."
5
The effeminate
homosexual male, "the fairy," became the dominant identifier of male
homosexuality among the general public as many homosexual men made
themselves visible in the streets.
6
Thus, glamour drag served both heterosexual and homosexual
individuals. It confirmed and reinscribed hegemonic values while at the
same time it destabilized them, allowing for alternative (i.e. homosexual)
readings. Glamour drag appealed to male heterosexual performers and
audience members who could enjoy the demonstration of power and
privilege suggested by the embodiment of the Other. It also appealed to
male homosexual performers and audience members who could delight
in "dressing out," in the signing of their sexual identity. As Judith Butler
has noted, "[a]s much as drag creates a unified picture of 'woman' ( ...
), it also reveals the distinctness of those aspects of gendered experience
which are falsely naturalized as a unity through the regulatory fiction of
heterosexual coherence."
7
Thus, both male and female homosexuals
could find a place within the clearly fictive world of female imperson-
ation. On a more mundane level, producers as well as performers noted
that glamour drag held great favor among female audience members who
enjoyed the haute couture fashions typically worn by most imperson-
ators.8
Glamour drag may have. encouraged male homosexuals to enter the
theatre, where they could publicly and safely wear female clothing.
9
Indeed, as Eltinge's critics suggested, there appeared to have been more
4
See Moe Meyer, "Under the Sign of Wilde, " in The Politics and Poetics of
Camp, ed. Moe Meyer (london: Routledge, 1994), 75-109.
5
George Chauncey, Cay New York (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 102.
6
Ibid., 1 03.
7
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), 137.
8
See for example, Theatre Magazine Ouly 1921 ), 15; and " Karyl Norman Heads
Cast in Musical Comedy," Philadelphia Public Ledger, 7 June 1927.
9
See Lawrence Seneli ck, " Boys and Girls Together, " in Crossing the Stage, ed.
Lesley Ferris (London: Routledge, 1993), 80-95.
32 MASCHIO
homosexual female impersonators in the theatre at the beginning of the
new century than heterosexual ones.
10
Pol ice raids and vice squad
attacks on homosexual bars and parties helped to make unsafe the
performance of drag in any public venue but the theatre. The pub I icity
garnered by these raids also raised public awareness of the homosexual
man in drag.
11
Once the average person associated cross-dressing with
homosexuality and thus abnormality, theatrical female impersonation,
particularly glamour drag, became tainted with effeminate blood.
To succeed with mainstream audiences and critics the performance
of the female gender by the impersonator had to be carefully staged so as
to avoid the appearance of effeminacy. In this Julian Eltinge performed
brilliantly. Whether in his vaudeville routine or in his full-length musical
comedies, Eltinge attempted to present wholly feminine stereotypes of the
female body. Extremely well-dressed and graceful, these women
implicitly demurred to their male creator. Eltinge's vaudeville act, which
generally lasted between twelve and twenty minutes, presented such
female representations as the "Sweet Sixteen Girl," the "Young Bride,"
and the "Gibson Girl." As was standard among female impersonators,
the act involved a number of impersonations and concluded with the
reassertion of the male body (usually by the removal of the female wig) .
On occasion, Eltinge presented female types of a slightly more
assertive nature, such as the "Suffragette" and "Salome." In these cases,
he poked gentle satire at the character type rather than parodying her
with the broad humor that marked the work of some other female
impersonators. Of whatever type, Eltinge always presented his females
as respectable, decorous, wholly feminine, and fully inscribed by
hegemonic values; they were also devoid of sexuality.
12
Eltinge attempted to maintain clear gender distinctions, whether
portraying female character types or performing his male gender at the
end of the routine. As one critic noted, "Back of his gorgeous presence
and wonderful frocks, he always makes you realize that it is a college boy
playing a hair-brained prank."
13
Whether a prank or not, Eltinge was
careful to restrain his representations, for to engage in any vocal or
10
See subsequent discussion of critical responses to Eltinge's performances.
11
Marybeth Hamilton, "Female Impersonation and Mae West," Crossing the
Stage, 11 7.
12
Senelick, 93 .
13
Acton Davies, "Julian Eltinge Triumphs in 'The Fascinating Widow,'" New
York Evening Sun, 12 September 1911.
Julian Eltinge 33
gestural excesses would be to risk signifying behavior now associated in
the public's mind with homosexuality.
In some ways, Eltinge's appearances in full-length musical comedies
made his performance of gender less fraught with potential danger.
These shows afforded him the luxury of time and plot: he could fully
establish his male and female characters and juxtapose their male and
female genders. Typically, the plots required Eltinge to appear as a male
character who for some acceptable reason (e.g. to "get" the girl or help
her in a moment of distress) must dress in female clothing. By playing
both male and female characters, Eltinge was able to clearly mark his
body with distinct and wholly suitable gender signs. The excuses of the
plot allowed him to frame his drag performances with seeming quotation
marks; the shows began and ended with Eltinge in male clothing.
Concluding the narrative with a return to a male persona created the
same effect as removing his female wig at the end of his vaudeville
routine: his female characters were artificial, his male gender the real
stuff.
Following his performance in Fascinating Widow, Eltinge provided
further evidence as to the artificiality of his characters. In a lengthy article
in The Theatre, Eltinge discussed how he used make-up and clothing to
transform himself into a female, and offered advice to women as to how
they might accomplish these tasks. Perhaps most importantly, he
explained in great detail the "tricks of the trade":
I usually wear a bracelet on each arm to shorten the length of the
arms . . .. the size of the hands can apparently be decreased by
the way in which they are held . . . the first rule is never to allow
the breadth of the back of the hands to be seen, but to hold the
hands so that the narrowest portion, for instance, the thumb and
forefinger or little finger, will show . ... the hands are powdered
very white, and then the fingers from the second knuckle to the
tip are rouged very red. This gives the effect of tapering fingers
no matter how blunt and square they may actually be.
14
The details provided in this article clearly demonstrated that Eltinge
consciously and meticulously constructed his female characters out of
paint, fabric, and gesture that had little to do with "natural inclinations"
or predispositions.
14
juli an Eltinge, "How I Portray a Woman on the Stage," The Theatre (August
19 13): 58.
34
MASCHIO
Many applauded Eltinge's abilities at such transformations and
emphasized the degree to which the performance of his characters
manifested dominant gender and sexual values. As the Pittsburgh
Dispatch's reviewer wrote, "Mr. Eltinge's types are feminine .. .. lovable
creatures, delightfully, charmingly girlish, innocent. ... he is exquisitely
feminine on the stage, playing the girl to perfection in dress, in voice, in
step, in poise, in shyness, in the handling of fan and parasol-just such
a girl as a fellow ought to fall in love with" (emphasis mine) .
15
The critic
for the 21 September 1907 edition of the New York Mirror underscored
Eltinge's normative masculinity: "From first to last there is nothing in his
performance that can offend, and the impression he gives is that of an
exuberant youth who has put on skirts for a lark, just to amuse his
friends." Although positive, these reviews demonstrate to what degree
appropriate gendering had become a major factor in the evaluation of
performance.
Other reviewers of both the musical comedies and the vaudeville
performances explicitly voiced their concerns with the performance of
gender and, by implication, sexuality. On 11 September 1911, Acton
Davies, the New York Evening Sun reviewer, commented that "never for
an instant . . . does [Eitinge] stoop to effeminacy. . . . he avoids all
unpleasant features and keeps the masquerade which makes his portrayal
a feat of genius." The New York Telegraph's reviewer wrote that
"Eitinge's act is free from much of the effeminate affectation that seems
the chief stock and trade of the majority of female impersonators."
16
In
an article entitled "A Real Man in Skirts," published in the November
1911 issue of Munsey's Magazine, the author justifies Eltinge's work as
art not abnormality: "Julian Eltinge succeeded .. . because of his strongly
sensed masculinity that makes his work an art, not a mere transference of
an unhappy personal handicap to the stage." Another writer emphasized
the uneasy relationship of off stage behavior and on stage performance:
"This is not said to give the impression of our supersqueamishness
regarding the impersonation of the female. We are forced to remember
now and then, however, that persons get arrested for such things on the
street ... We wi II say, nevertheless that of female impersonators Mr.
Eltinge is possibly one of the best."
17
15
"Grand Refined Vaudeville," Pittsburgh Dispatch, 9 April 1907.
16
"Chapin's Lincoln at 125th St.," New York Telegraph, 30 October 1907.
17
"Mr. Eltinge at Illinois is a 'Perfect Gelmun,"' Show World, 10 December
1911.
Julian Eltinge 35
Denouncing Eltinge, some saw only perversion not art. The writer
for Leslies claimed that there is nothing more objectionable on stage than
"the man who tries to act like a woman, " likening the effect to the
"unpleasant memories of painted male creatures conspicuous wherever
the tourist in foreign lands gather in numbers."
18
In the 28 February
1908 issue, Vanity Fair's critic claimed that Boston's amateur theatricals,
where Eltinge began his career, encouraged "the younger male popula-
tions [who are] simply crazy to put on skirts and smirk and simper and act
sissified for the public's entertainment. The amateur shows are at the
bottom of this perverted image." Another writer clearly stated his
objections to female impersonation without bothering to comment upon
Eltinge's performance:
It is good neither for the stage nor the public that there should be
any toleration of the stage performer whose only claim to
recognition is that he is able to resemble in speech, manner and
apparel members of the opposite sex. It is a morbid proposition
which should be of less interest to the theatregoing public than
to doctors and criminologists .... Eltinge has just opened, and
for the credit of the community it is to be hoped that he will also
be starved out.
19
Such critical comments suggest that these writers disapproved of
homosexuality and conflated it with female impersonation in the theatre.
Although known for his "gentlemanly" way and attitude toward
others, Eltinge did try to distance himself from other female impersonators
and from the profession. One newspaper quoted Eltinge as saying
There are some disagreeable features about the work . ... I have
been at the theatre and seen female impersonators that have
made me rather disgusted with the whole business, and, as a
matter of fact, I think I would prefer some other line of work, but
no matter where I go they want the specialty by which I am best
known.
20
18
"The Fascinating Widow at the Liberty Theatre, " New York Les/ies, 28
September 1911 .
19
"Men in Women's Clothing," [n.p.], 16 September 1911.
20
[n.d., n.p.], Julian Eltinge Clippings File, New York Public Library; similarly,
" Without a Rival in His Impersonations," 13 January 1912.
36
MASCHIO
In an article pub I ished in The Theatre, Eltinge claimed that
[t]he whole thing is simply a business proposition with me. If
the public is puzzled with the problem of my "transformation,"
that is all I ask, for curiosity is the biggest paying factor in an
audience. But believe me, I'm mighty glad at the end of the
day's work to be a man again.
21
However disingenuous this might sound, Eltinge knew that his success
depended upon his self-promotion as the "right kind" of man, and he
apparently was the only female impersonator to visit and befriend
journalists in the towns he playedY
Eltinge understood that to succeed, his masculinity and heterosexual-
ity could not be in any way questioned, and he attempted to manipulate
this bodily discourse by clearly defining, articulating, and enacting
feminine and masculine behaviors. Thus, he drew sharp i s t i n ~ t i o n s
between the male and female genders in his performances. Acknowledg-
ing to what extent these discussions with their implied question of
sexuality could jeopardize his career, the unmarried Eltinge also carefully
crafted promotional campaigns to demonstrate his masculine identity off
the stage.
Of the major female impersonators of the day, such as Bothwell
Browne, Lind? (sic), and Stuart, Eltinge was the only one to take this
initiative. He frequently staged photo opportunities on his Long Island
farm, where he posed for photographers wearing overalls, a straw hat,
and brandishing a pitchfork. Newspaper articles discussed his delight in
rolling up his sleeves and working his farm during the off season. Stories
about his boxing prowess were circulated, with either a bar patron's or
stage hand's insinuating remark occasioning the brute force of his punch.
Presumably, the desire to believe such narrations superseded the press's
(and the public's) need to question their performativity. Just as he did on
stage, Eltinge calculated his performance of gender off stage,
essentializing masculine and feminine for easy consumption by the
audience and by the press.
In his most brilliant strategy, Eltinge published the julian Eltinge
Magazine. Available at the theatres where he performed, this magazine
of beauty tips, fashion advice, and "up close and personal" articles,
marked Eltinge as a normative male. By demonstrating that his
21
Eltinge, ix.
22
[n.p.], 19 January 1906. Julian Eltinge Clippings File, New York Public Library.
Julian Eltinge
37
"femininity" was artificial, an outcome of the careful application of his
own line of beauty products and the masterful wearing of endorsed
garments and fashion accessories, Eltinge maintained his position as
authoritative male. Indeed, his endorsement was sought by many
advertisers, such as the Nemo corset company, whose ad made clear in
both copy and image, the veracity of Eltinge's prescription. This ad
showed Eltinge as a pretty young bride and claimed that if the corset
could make the manly Eltinge into a beautiful woman it could certainly
do the same for a woman blessed with a womanly body. Few ads could
match this one for persuasiveness of its message, for the hourglass figure
of Eltinge's bride was most assuredly the result of some "unnatural'.'
apparatus.
In the magazine's articles, Eltinge proffered advice to women on how
to maintain their physiques through exercise and diet and how best to
apply makeup. Other articles featured Eltinge at home on his farm,
happily surrounded by animals, and his parents. These "at home"
articles set the actor-the female impersonator-within traditional
surroundings. He was not featured "on the town" but on a farm; a
regular fellow more interested in crops than nightlife. Given that the bulk
of Eltinge's success came on the road rather than in New York City, the
image of his farm life was critical to the performance of his masculine
persona.
By articulating how he created his female characters and by staging
masculine acts, Eltinge assured audiences that the female behavior they
saw him enact on stage was in no way "natural"; that is, that he was not
effeminate, was not homosexual. Despite his ability to promote the
constructedness of his female characters and the essentialism of his
masculine self, Eltinge performed with decreasing frequency after 1914.
His last appearance in a Broadway musical comedy was in the 1914
production of Miss Crinoline Girl. Thereafter he performed only in
vaudeville, mainly at selected road venues. By the mid-1920s, Eltinge
had retired to his California ranch.
The reasons for his retirement at a relatively young age, and at the
height of his popularity, are not known. However, given his
acknowledgments of the critical debate situated on his body, he may
have also understood the cultural forces against him. When financial
necessity forced him to look again for stage work he found that California
laws were not conducive to his line of work, legislating against cross-
dressing on stage.
23
Indeed, in California, in New York, and on the road,
23
Anthony Slide, The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville, (Westport: Greenwood Press,
1994), 117.
38 MASCHIO
female impersonation, specifically glamour drag, had become
inextricably associated with homosexuality and made other readings by
the general, increasingly middle class public difficult.
The development of middle class audiences during the first decades
of the twentieth century influenced the nature, shape, and meaning of the
theatre and mitigated against its vitality and against alternative readings.
As Stallybrass and White have argued, "the bourgeois subject
continuously defined and re-defined itself through the exclusion of what
it marked out as 'low'-as dirty, repulsive, noisy, contaminating."
24
Thus,
as the middle classes emerged as a dominant force, they began to
determine cultural products, and the entertainment value of glamour drag
increasingly could not be seen because of the sexual contamination it
suggested.
During the 1920s, the revue replaced vaudeville as the preferred
entertainment, especially in New York. For a time it appeared that these
audiences enjoyed glamour drag, particularly those impersonators who
performed it transgressively, such as Bert Savoy, whose camp humor
clearly marked his homosexuality. The middle classes could dabble in
transgressive activities of all sorts as long as their privileged voyeuristic
position was not threatened. However, as historians have noted, the
Twenties reminisced more than they roared; the middle classes' need for
normative sexual and cultural identities far outweighed their delight in
transgressions and the neoteric possibi I ities they suggested.
25
Clearly, by the 1930s, respectability had disrobed glamour drag and
relegated it to the homosexual subculture. Talented men of whatever
sexual orientation or persuasion could no longer perform glamour drag
in the mainstream theatre without also signing the effeminate,
homosexual body. The debate that Eltinge's impersonations coalesced
had concluded; a compulsory heterosexuality conscripted the male body
for its own performance on Broadway, irrevocably resolving the question
of effeminacy or art.
24
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics Of Transgression
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 137.
25
Lawrence W. Levine, "Progress and Nostalgia: The Self-Image of the 1920's,"
in Readings in American Culture and Society, eds. Lawrence W. Levine and Robert
Middlekauff, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanich, 1972), 291.
Journal of American Drama and Theatre 10 (Winter 1998)
The Dining Room:
A Tocquevillian Take on the
Decline of WASP Culture
BRUCE A. MCCONACHIE
"Nonprofits Love Dining Room," hummed Variety in April of 1984.
The arbiter of show biz economics touted a "whopping 43 productions"
of A. R. Gurney's social comedy since its opening in February 1982; it
estimated the playwright's income from these performances at between
two and three hundred thousand dollars. "It's hard to find a resident
theatre that hasn't presented The Dining Room," Variety continued.
These included the McCarter Theatre, Syracuse Stage, the Cleveland
Playhouse, the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, the Arizona Theatre
Company, the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, the Goodman, the Kennedy
Center, the Public Theatre in Pittsburgh, the Philadelphia Drama Guild,
the Alley Theatre, and the Old Globe in San Diego. The Dining Room
proved even more popular in the hinterlands than it had in New York
City, where it ran off-Broadway for eighteen months at the Playwrights
Horizon Theatre.
1
The critics' response to Gurney's play suggests that audiences in New
York and throughout the country enjoyed what they believed was a
warm-hearted evocation of the decline of WASP culture, deftly character-
izing its strengths as well as its foibles and failings. Echoing other
reviewers, one Boston critic termed the effect of the play like "a tour
through a museum ... guided by a knowledgeable, witty, mildly amused
and very perceptive curator."
2
"Dining Room is pure but incisive
Americana," wrote a reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, "an
anthropological study of the style and rituals of that maligned, misunder-
1
Richard Humml er, "Nonprofits Love Dining Room: 43 Editions for Gurney
Pl ay," Variety (18 April 1984): 223.
2
Jon Lehman, Review of The Dining Room, The Patriot Ledger, 4 December
1982, 25.
40
MC(ONACHIE
stood ethnic majority, the well-off."
3
A local critic in Westport, Connecti-
cut, dubbed Gurney's depiction of WASP ethnicity "stingingly on-target,"
but added that the play "emerges as affectionate ribbing nonetheless."
4
In a similar vein, Dan Isaac in Other Stages noted the comedy's "political
and anthropological" focus on "the American upper-class as a delinquent,
dying culture," but concluded that "The Dining Room will probably enter
the permanent repertory and join Our Town and Ah, Wilderness! as a
model of vintage Americana."
5
Gurney disagreed that he intended his play as a Chekhovian swan
song for American aristocracy. In an interview two months after the New
York opening of The Dining Room, he claimed that the critics had largely
missed the point:
Essentially, it's a Marxist-feminist conflict. Things really start
happening when the women start saying "no." Up until that
time they are servants, or they preside over the servants and the
family. But when they change, everything else changes too. The
men remain pretty much the same over the years, but the
women show the effects of economic and social change.
6
Gurney's comments suggest that conflicts of class and gender structure
the architecture of his Dining Room-even that WASP women emerge as
a possible vanguard for progressive change during the course of the
action.
But does this occur in the play? And if it does, is Gurney's Marxist-
feminist critique prominent enough in the rhetoric of the action to call
forth spectator identification and affirmation? To approach the I ikely
rhetorical positionings of audiences for The Dining Room, we need to
3
Gerald Nachman, Review of The Dining Room, San Frandsco Chronicle, 24
August 1982, 34.
4
Tom Killen, "WASPs Get Stung at Westport Playhouse," Westport News, 24
August 1983, 18.
5
Dan Isaac, Review of The Dining Room, Other Stages (3 june 1982): 2. For
similar sentiments, see also Leah D. Frank, Review of The Dining Room, New York
Times, 13 November 1983, [n.p.]; Kevin Kelly, Review of The Dining Room, Boston
Globe, 4 December 1982, [n.p.]; john j. O'Connor, "Review of the WNET production
of The Dining Room aired in October 1984," New York Times, 19 October 1984, sec.
C, p. 4; and Robert Viagas, Review of The Dining Room, Fairpress, 24 August 1983
sec. C, p. 5.
6
Mimi Leahey, "A. R. Gurney: Serious At Last," Other Stages (8 April 1982): 3.
The Dining Room
41
take a closer look at the structuring of history in Gurney's comedy and
the roles played by gender and class in his conception of historical
change. From this perspective, Gurney's description of the play as a
"Marxist-feminist conflict" carries little validity. Jibes at American
aristocrats do occur, but they are folded into an explanation of the demise
of WASP culture close to that of E. Digby Baltzell, a prominent sociolo-
gist of the American upper class. Gurney's Tocquevillian framework of
history (so like Baltzell 's) effectively diffuses the beginnings of a radical
critique in The Dining Room and hence the potential for a progressive
response from Gurney's audiences.
The similarities between Gurney's and Baltzell's views concerning
upper-class aristocrats and historical change are not accidental. Both
came from elite WASP backgrounds and lived to regret their culture's loss
of influence and prestige. Only sixteen years younger than the sociolo-
gist, Gurney grew up in what he has termed the "privileged affluence" of
an Establishment family in Buffalo, New York. Like Baltzell, the
playwright attended St. Paul's prep school in New England and graduated
from an Ivy League college. Both pursued primarily academic careers.
And both share a sense of loss, even betrayal, about the decline of WASP.
culture. In 1982, Gurney admitted that he is obsessed with
the contrast between the world and the values I was immersed
in when I was young and the nature of the contemporary world.
The kind of protected, genteel, in many ways warm, civilized,
and fundamentally innocent world in which I was nurtured
didn't seem in any way to prepare me for the late twentieth
century. I tend to write about people who are operating under
these old assumptions, but are confronting an entirely different
system of values.
7
These sentiments already modify, if they do not openly contradict,
Gurney's assertion that progressive politics undergird The Dining Room.
The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America
(1964) established Baltzell as the leading interpreter of the American
WASP. According to the sociologist, his landmark study was "inspired
by [Alexis de] Tocqueville' s classic analysis of the Old Regime and the
French Revolution, which showed how viol ent revolution came to France
because the nobility degenerated into a caste when it refused to
7
Leslie Bennetts, "Hi s Obsession Is a Culture in Decl ine," New York Times, 30
May 1982, 5.
42 McCONACHIE
assimilate new men of power and affluence-the bourgeoisie."
8
Expressing a sentiment that echoes throughout Baltzell's scholarship,
Tocqueville writes that "an aristocracy in all its vigor not only carries on
the affairs of a country, but directs pub I ic opinion, gives a tone to
literature, and the stamp of authority to ideas."
9
From Baltzell's point of
view, the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant elite-for which he coined the
acronym "WASP"-had, like the French aristocracy, turned its back on
the burdens of authority and become a privileged caste rather than a
ruling class. Its decline, together with increasing social disorder, was the
inevitable result.
Baltzell's Tocquevillian response to the waning power of the WASP
Establishment countered Marxian analyses of class and caste in America
offered by C. Wright Mills and others in the mid-1950s and early 1960s.
In The Power Elite, Mills describes an upper-class relatively open to new-
comers and new ideas and exerting nearly unchallenged control over
American society. . The difference between Baltzell and Mills-a
distinction central to Gurney's take on the decline of WASP
power-hinges on their different valuations of upper-class hegemony. As
sociologist Howard Schneiderman explains,
Whereas Marxists see hegemony as a social evil, Baltzell,
following Tocqueville, sees it as necessary to the well-being of
society. Hegemonic establishments give coherence to the social
spheres of greatest contest. They don't eliminate conflict, but
prevent it from ripping society apart.
10
For Baltzell, the lure of a classless society with the equal social and
economic opportunity favored by Mills was a chimera that would lead to
disorder and bloodshed. Baltzell urges that opportunity be made more
equal but assumes that class hierarchy is a necessary prerequisite for
social order and gradual change.
From this conservative orientation to social stratification, Baltzell
traces the rise and decline of the American Protestant Establishment and
scolds his class for abandoning its traditional values and commitments.
In Baltzell's history of WASPdom, most elite families emerged around the
8
E. Digby Baltzell, The Protestant Establishment Revisited (New Brunswick, New
Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1991), 30.
9
Quoted in Baltzell (1991), 30.
10
Howard G. Schneiderman, //Introduction," The Protestant Establishment
Revisited (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1991), xxii.
The Dining Room 43
time of the Civil War, their power based on the economic success of the
family firm. The second generation of WASP leaders consolidated the
gains of the first through private schools, intra-class marriage, exclusive
clubs, business sinecures, and political influence. By the third
generation, however, historical changes were undermining the hegemony
of WASP culture and economic power. Family firms, a significant source
of paternal authority in elite households, folded or merged with larger
corporations. Talented members of minority groups, especially Jews,
gained positions of business leadership and forced open previously
closed doors to Ivy League schools and exclusive clubs. Many WASPs
who came of age in the 1930s (Baltzell's own generation) expected to
inherit the world of their fathers but could no longer support the servants,
the family estates, and the social position of their tradition.
By the 1960s, notes Baltzell , the decay of WASP culture was
apparent on a number of fronts: once-proud families measured their
status by money and success, not lineage; American aristocrats were
abandoning their traditional inner-direction and becoming "other-
directed," worrying about their social images; personal morality was in
decline as WASPs no longer policed their own social relationships; and
the Protestant Establishment, already atomized economically and socially,
also lost its political coherence and clout. For Baltzell, the decline of
WASP authority let to social chaos. In 1988, he wrote that in
Philadelphia,
in 1938 a WASP business class dominated the city, while
members of ethnic and racial minorities were more or less
second-class and powerless citizens. Today, nobody-no social
group or class-dominates the city. As all values are now equal,
no values have any real authority. Thus social conflict and
disorder reign.
11
Clearly, Baltzell would trade the more egalitarian world for the more
ordered world of 1938.
12
11
Baltzell (1991), 35.
12
Other sociologists and historians have also commented extensively on WASP
culture and its decline. See, for example, Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the
American Status System (New York: Summit Books, 1983) and Peter Schrag, The
Decline of the WASP (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971 ). For a critique of the
psycho-social dynamics of WASP culture and its largely negative effects on American
society see Richard C. Robertiello and Diana Hoguet, The WASP Mystique (New
York: Donald I. Fine, 1987).
44 MCCONACHIE
Does Gurney encourage his spectators to opt for a similar tradeoff in
The Dining Room? Despite a playful irony that generally keeps political
engagement at a distance, the play's construction of the historical descent
of WASP culture does reinforce nostalgia for the past hegemony of the
Protestant Establishment. Although Gurney's many short scenes do not
occur in chronological order, he charts the demise of the WASPs through
clearly marked, successive generations, a pattern of generational change
that follows the rough outline of Baltzell's history. And like the
sociologist, Gurney locates the main cause of their decline in distant
historical forces and the internal dynamics of WASP culture and society
not in conflicts over gender roles or with other social groups.
Gurney's first generation, two aging patriarchs in separate scenes,
show the Protestant Establishment at its best. In the first episode, a
grandson must come before a likeable curmudgeon to ask him for money
for schooling and travel. Grandfather teases the adolescent about not
making it on his own as he had to do: "Don't you want to be self-made?
Or do you want other people to make you? Hmmmm?"
13
In the second,
an old man instructs his eldest son on the plans for his funeral, specifying
the details of the organ music in the church and the wording of his
obituary. The latter centers on his family, his "business career," and his
"civic commitments/' including chairman of "the symphony drive" (347).
Both episodes applaud the traditional WASP virtues of independence,
restraint, civic mindedness, optimism, and ironic good humor.
However, as the second scene emphasizes, these men of character
and authority from the first generation are dying out. In a line that might
have been written by Baltzell, the grandfather from the first scene asks his
grandson to consider who might be sitting in the patriarch's dining room
chair when he and his siblings return from Europe: "I'll tell you who'll be
sitting right in that chair. Some Irish fella, some Jewish gentleman is
going to be sitting right at this table" (324). Despite their premonitions,
first-generation patriarchs financed the softer lives of their third-
generation grandchildren, underwriting-Gurney would have us
believe-the gradual demise of their dominance.
Gurney presents several of his second-generation WASPs as
fussbudgets, philanderers, and snobs. Obsessed with the privileges of
their caste, they are more concerned with good manners, the appearance
of morality, and their elite status than with paternal authority or civic
leadership. The first upbraids his son at breakfast for making
"wisecracks" and for agreeing with his teacher, who believes the
13
A. L. Gurney, The Dining Room, Plays from the Contemporary American
Theater, Ed. Brooks McNamara (New York: NAL, 1988), 323. All subsequent
references to the play wi II be cited in the text.
The Dining Room 45
government ought to help poor people during the Depression. Father
uses the rituals of the breakfast table, however, to bring junior into line.
In one second-generation episode, the long arm of the family firm and the
small world of the elite society keep a man and a woman from having an
extra-marital affair with each other. This richly ironic scene has both
adults urging repression on their children during a birthday party as they
struggle to keep their hands off each other. Another episode centers on
a clash of wills between a second-generation mother and her daughter.
Attempting to shoehorn the girl into dancing school and coming-out
parties, the conventional path to WASP marriage, the mother instead
sparks her daughter's rebellion. Gurney primarily encourages his
daughter to laugh at these second-generation types for their selfishness
and rigidity. Adopting the Tocquevillian values of Baltzell, Gurney gently
criticizes these WASPs for enhancing their status at the expense of their
moral leadership.
One second-generation character, however, triumphs over her fourth-
generation nephew. Tony is snapping pictures of Aunt Harriet's Irish
table linen, silverware, bone China, and Steuben glass for a classroom
anthropology project on the "eating habits" of a "vanishing culture," "the
Wasps" (338) . When the grand dame of the Establishment hears his
intentions, she kicks him out of her dining room and delivers the punch
line of the scene-arguably the punch line of the play:
Vanishing culture, my eye! I forbid you to mention my name in
the classroom! Or show one glimpse of my personal property!
And you can tell that professor of yours, I've a good mind to
drive up to Amherst, with this pistol-handled butter knife on the
seat beside me, and cut off his anthropological balls! (338)
Aunt Harriet's rousing rhetoric probably animated many in the audience
to cheer her on through appreciative laughter. The doyenne may be a
cultural dinosaur, Gurney seems to be saying, but better to preserve a
caste than kill off a culture. WASP hegemony, though antediluvian, can
still be feisty and fun!
Gurney's third generation, however, has lost its will and its way.
Perhaps because this is the playwright's own generation, scenes centered
on these characters dominate the play. Of the roughly nineteen episodes
in The Dining Room, fourteen involve characters from the third
generation. Like those of Baltzell's set who grew up in the 1930s (and of
Gurney's a bit later), the WASPs from this era have lost the privilege and
power that came with large estates, family firms, and exclusive schools
and clubs. Would-be patriarchs from this generation flounder in hysteria,
rebellion, shame, and alcoholism. In one farcical scene, Gurney explores
46 MCCONACHIE
the demise of the WASP ethic of masculine honor when a head of his
household overreacts to the news that his brother has been accused of
homosexuality at Jthis club." Another features an architect
psychologically tormented by his father's treatment of him at the dinner
table. When asked by a client about possible uses for dining rooms in
today's world, the architect snaps, Jilt's time to get rid of this room" (316).
In pointed contrast to the earlier episode between the almost-adulterers
at the birthday party, two third-generation characters have just entered
the dining room from the bedroom when they are discovered by the
woman's son arriving home from college. #Uncle Gordon/' his authority
in shreds, flees in embarrassment from the knowing stare of the son.
Perhaps the most poignant scene in the play centers on a third-
generation alcoholic father and his despairing daughter. In the course of
their conversation, Dad learns that Meggie has gotten a divorce, wants to
move back home with the kids, is seeing a married man, and has been
involved in a lesbian relationship. Dad's only response to these
mounting revelations is to increase his intake of alcohol and deliver
advice about character and making an effort; he's too sodden and
comfortable to offer genuine help. Meggie longs for the happy security
of her childhood, but both father and daughter realize it is gone forever.
The scene comes the closest in the play to evoking the immense distance
between the idyllic world of Gurney's WASP past-"protected, genteel,
in many ways warm, civilized and fundamentally innocent"-and the
moral chaos of the present. Without WASP hegemony to hold it
together, American society has fallen apart, and the WASPs themselves
are among the walking wounded. Gurney laces his nostalgia with ironic
humor, in proper WASP fashion, but it remains nostalgia nonetheless.
Most of Gurney's fourth-generation characters ignore or reject the
mandates of WASP culture. For them, the traditional functions of the
dining room are superfluous. Two teenage girls use the room to knock
down some stolen drinks before their boyfriends come over with "pot."
A former stockbroker turned carpenter, having consciously rejected the
lure of WASP power, now repairs the symbol of that culture, the dining
room table, and falls in love with a WASP divorcee. A young married
woman sets up her typewriter on the table to finish her M.A. thesis. In
these scenes, the glue holding together the traditional Protestant
Establishment-like the glue no longer binding the table in the carpenter-
divorcee scene-has come unstuck. Baltzell notes that the "central
values" of a previously WASP neighborhood in Philadelphia after 1960
were becoming "increasingly egalitarian, competitive, and extremely
The Dining Room 47
atomizing."
14
The same could be said of the values of most of Gurney's
fourth-generation characters. Nearly indistinguishable from other upper-
middle-class Americans, they live their lives with little or no regard to
their cultural past.
One critic sums up the generational history of Gurney's WASPs with
this statement:
In the end, [their world] seems to be careening into sad chaos,
its young people fleeing to alcohol and drugs, its elder citizens
obsessed with the past and keeping up appearances that the rest
of the world finds merely quaint.
15
"Sad chaos" does indeed permeate the lives of his third-generation
characters, the main focus of the comedy, but the playwright seems more
optimistic about the next generation, if only because most of them no
longer labor under the expectations of the past. In this sense, Gurney is
somewhat less pessimistic about the moral order of American society in
the early 1980s than Baltzell. Overall, however, the Tocquevillian
decline of the American aristocracy from authoritative class, to privileged
caste, to superfluous cluster is as apparent in The Dining Room as it is in
Baltzell's sociology.
Within such a framework, conflict centering on class and gender can
have only peripheral importance. An early scene in act 1, for instance,
has an Irish maid telling the little boy she tends that she is giving up
domestic service. And the first act ends with Establishment ladies
abandoning the traditional rituals of Thanksgiving dinner and exiting into
the kitchen to help the maid with the dishes. These are minor acts of
rebellion, however; no maid openly questions the legitimacy of the class
system and no WASP wife demands a chair in the board room of the
family firm. Such incidents exemplify the frustrations of WASP
hegemony, but do not challenge its power to define and enforce class
and gender relations.
Indeed, the final gesture of the play invites the audience to
completely identify with a confl ictless vision of past WASP domination.
A middle-aged Establishment woman, probably third generation, speaks
at length of a "recurrent dream" in which she gives the "perfect party."
She would use "Grandmother's silver, before it was stolen," invite "all of
our favorite people," including "the man who fixes our Toyota," and hire
14
Baltzell (1991) 42.
15
O'Connor, sec. C, p. 4.
48
MCCONACHIE
"a first-rate cook in the kitchen, and two maids to serve, and everyone
would get along famously!" (351). Gurney seems to have intended that
his spectators take this utopian vision of classless harmony semi-
ironically. The same woman had just tried to play Lady Bountiful with
the maid, receiving a stiff response for her hug and extra pay. But an
ironic response to her speech is undercut by the beauty of the table
setting in candlelight and the ensuing action, in which the wine is
poured, other cast members are "talking animatedly, having a wonderful
time," and a male host proposes a toast to "all of us" (351) . Because of
the maid's earlier exit, "all of us" on stage are only upper-class WASPs.
Gurney has the lights fade to black on this final tableau. It may be that
Gurney wants his audience to question the traditional class and gender
roles that make such a celebration possible-even to gag at the
presumption that such historic inequalities can be elided by an elite white
male's attempt at inclusivity-but the rhetoric of the final image reduces
these concerns to quibbles. The candle lit tableau evokes bittersweet
nostalgia, not Brechtian distancing.
The shimmering vision at the end of the play caps an evening in
which the spectators have been encouraged to view the dining room
itself as the primary symbol of the comforting solidity of a vanished
WASP past. Gurney's script calls for "a lovely, burnished, shining dining
room table" with six chairs on a "hardwood floor" with a "good, warm
oriental rug" and flanked by a "swinging door on one side and an
"archway" on the other, the setting masked so as to appear floating in a
"limbo" (297). With six actors playing fifty characters in the comedy, the
table itself becomes "the omnipresent dramatic anchor" for one
reviewer.
16
Another remarks that the room for a Boston production
reminded him of houses "built in those pre-income tax years when there
still really was an upper middle class."
17
The critic for a McCarter Theatre revival of the play in 1984 was the
most explicit about the setting's effect. For Frank Occhiogrosso, the
image of the dining room was "a source of stability and permanence ..
. in a world of flux." Characters change and their relationships alter, he
notes, but this movement occurs "within an ambience that does not
move, that stays the same. This is a fact which, for the characters, is
sometimes appreciated, sometimes lamented, sometimes unnoticed. It
is always observable to the audience." The "order and stability" of the
dining room, he concludes, offers "an antidote to our current, rootless
16
Ibid.
17
Lehman, 25.
The Dining Room
49
lives."
18
To judge from these reviewers, The Dining Room in production
played the comic-pathetic lives of present WASPs off against an idealized
image of order and harmony from the WASP past. In effect, the setti ng
massively reinforces Gurney's narrative about the Tocquevillian decay in
the moral authority of his generations.
The similarities between Gurney's and Baltzell's understanding of
WASP decline explain much of the rhetorical coherence of the play, but
they do not altogether account for its popularity. Why, after all, would
1982 American audiences, most of whose heritage was not exclusively
white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant, identify with the host's toast to "all
of us"? Although limitations of space prevent a full explanation, I'd like
to conclude with a brief overview of changes in American ethnicity that
made such identification possible. Interestingly, the results of these
alterations for the ethnicity of American theatre audiences accord with
their appreciation of the Tocquevillian rhetoric of the play.
After 1960, American ethnicity began to undergo some surprising
transformations. Instead of ethnic identity being anchored in working-
class social structures, such as churches and clubs, "symbolic ethnicity"
gradually took its place among European ethnic groups. According to
sociologist Richard D. Alba, symbolic ethnicity involves "the desire to
retain a sense of being ethnic, but without any deep commitment to
ethnic ties or behaviors."
19
Unlike earlier forms of ethnicity,
identification with the symbolic type tends to rise with the educational
level of participants and often finds expression in their leisure activities,
such as cooking and dancing. Alba also found that many Americans with
ancestors from Ireland, Poland, England, Italy and other European
countries were no longer identifying themselves by their country of
origin, but saw themselves in more general terms as "European
Americans." Pan-European ethnicity emerged in the 1960s as a response
to African-American activism and increased with the influx of Asian and
Hispanic immigrants in the 1970s and 1980s. Consequently, many white
Americans of European ancestry both identify themselves symbolically as
"ethnics" and also believe they have much in common with other ethnic
groups from Europe.
White Americans of European ancestry constitute the overwhelming
majority of spectators at professional theatres in the U.S. Given the
changes in ethnic identification since the 1960s, these theatregoers would
have welcomed the representation of a WASP dinner party on stage, even
18
Frank Occhiogrosso, Review of The Dining Room, Stages (May 1984): 17.
19
Richard D. Alba, Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 306.
50
McCoNACHIE
though many of their ancestors only a generation before would probably
have felt excluded from the ritual. Alba's research suggests that the
ethnic homogenization of the white American upper class has produced
a new theatre audience, one more open to exploring such symbols of
ethnicity as WASP dining rooms. In particular, Alba notes that ethnic
symbols tend to circulate as "cultural capital," used by European
Americans in "the complex signaling by which individuals establish
relations with one another." "To fulfill this function," Alba continues,
ethnic identities need not occupy more than a small portion of
the identity "masks" individuals present to others, and need not
be deeply felt. Moreover, it is apparent from our survey that
ethnic identities can be used to establish a degree of intimacy
with individuals of other ethnic backgrounds; a shared ethnicity
is not required.
20
From this perspective, most playgoers could see in WASP culture a
synecdoche for the European experience of their own family. And after
the show, The Dining Room could continue to provide inducement for
everyone in the theatre party to discuss his or her own ethnic
background. Nonetheless, Gurney's play might very well have
marginalized some minorities in the audience. "All of us" in 1982
included upper-class "European-American" whites, but pointedly
excluded African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asian-Americans.
20
Ibid., 308.
journal of American Drama and Theatre 10 (Winter 1998)
Theatre Arts Monthly
and the Construction of
the Modern American Theatre Audience
DOROTHY CHANSKY
The audience of the theatre has changed. It has lost caste and gained
self-respect, it has lost cultivation and gained vitality.
-Ashley Dukes
In 1916, when it first appeared, Theatre Arts (a quarterly later to be
renamed Theatre Arts Monthly) was a wholly new phenomenon in the
United States-a theatre journal with intellectual and aesthetically
revolutionary pretensions and with no commercial theatre affiliations or
interests.
1
When the first issue came out, under the auspices of the
Drama Committee of the Arts and Crafts Society of Detroit, the American
Little Theatre Movement was officially five years old, but for most
Americans it was still esoteric and unfamiliar. Theatre Arts helped
broaden the audience for non-commercial theatre. It also shaped the
thinking of its readers about commercial theatre. This essay considers the
role of Theatre Arts in audience construction with a focus on the first nine
years of its publication-the years during which the Little Theatre
Movement was solidifying its multipronged reformation of American
theatre practices and ideas about theatre.
By "audience construction" I mean the creation of attitudes, beliefs,
and behaviors concerning theatregoing in the minds and bodies of actual
or potential spectators. A theatre audience is, in this sense, what
Benedict Anderson calls an "imagined community," that is, a group
united by shared ideas of themselves which are fi ctively invented and
reified by behaviors and self-images which make community members
identify with each other even though they may never meet or even see
1
For a di scussion of other American theatre magazines just before, at, and after
the turn of the century, see Frank Luther Matt's A History of American Magazines
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), val. 4, 255-258.
52
CHAN SKY
one another.
2
I use the designation "Little Theatre Movement" to refer to
a nexus of activities begun in the 191 Os by "Bohemians," educators,
women's clubs, and writers-American idealists with time, money,
political goals, cultural theories, and access to outlets-who began to
found alternative, amateur theatres modeled on European art theatres and
who began to introduce playwriting and play production into university
and secondary curricula. These projects arose from a desire to combat
commercialism for the sake of the founders' own tastes and for what they
saw as the good of the nation. The common goals of all these projects (of
which the Provincetown Players' work and George Pierce Baker's 47
Workshop at Harvard are probably the best known) were to get Ameri-
cans to see American theatre as art and not as mere frivolity; to get
people to appreciate and use theatre as a site of emotional fulfillment and
personal enrichment; to include theatre as a worthy field of study at the
university level; and to consider theatre as a valuable means of building
good citizens and communities. Prior to the Little Theatre Movement,
none of these ideas or practices were much more than a dream. After the
Little Theatre Movement all were more or less noncontroversial. A key
tool in implementing these changes was the serious theatre journal, of
which Theatre Arts Monthly remains the best-known.
Theatre Arts's agenda and the kinds of subjects it covered seem
ordinary by late twentieth-century standards. But it is crucial to recognize
that no other theatre magazine in America had ever come close to
approximating the nexus of topics and concerns in Theatre Arts and that
virtually all of the century's later journals were to take its tenets as
axiomatic.
It is also important to note that Theatre Arts came into existence
during the heyday of a new kind of magazine. The appeal to a "gentle
reader" had given way, even in magazines aimed at elite readerships, to
a stance in which up-to-the-minute reporting and currency were of key
concern. In fact, topical magazines offering expert information and
"inside dope" on any subject achieved a centrality in American life during
the Progressive Era which was never duplicated before or since.
3
Therefore, it is especially crucial to consider journalistic influence and
2
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (london: Verso, 1983).
3
See Christopher P. Wilson, "The Rhetoric of Consumption: Mass-market
Magazines and the Demise of the Gentle Reader, 1880-1920," in The Culture of
Consumption, eds. Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears (New York:
Pantheon, 1983), 39-64, for a discussion of the new rhetoric and how it constructed
readers. The importance of topical magazines in American life is also Wilson's idea,
42.
Theatre Arts Monthly 53
magazines in particular as commonly-used information sources and
vehicles of social construction in every area of American life during the
period under examination here.
Theatre Arts Magazine from its earliest years provided information
about European and American experimental theatres. It published new
playscripts, reviews of performances and theatre books, and it featured
editorials, production photographs, reproductions of scenic and costume
designs rendered in various mediums, sketches of theatre auditoriums,
information about how to build scenery, and profiles of important theatre
artists and innovators. In a few articles it dealt directly with audience
attitudes and organization. Most of all, it addressed-and thereby
constructed-readers as a wholly new kind of theatre audience. The
magazine assumed an educated readership, but it never allowed readers
to treat their social position or university education alone as adequate
grounds for coming to terms with innovative theatre. Its stance was that
"new" meant not merely stylish or topical, but rather obligatory as part of
maintaining sophisticated reading strategies in the complicated, stimulat-
ing field of serious theatre. Theatre Arts maintained that theatre needed
to be understood as wholly separate from movies or popular entertain-
ment forms.
The magazine was founded by Sheldon Cheney (1886-1980), a
graduate of the University of California at Berkeley. Cheney had worked
as a drama critic for five years before becoming part of the Theatre
Committee of the Society of Arts and Crafts in Detroit. He wrote thirteen
books about theatre, art history, and architecture, including The Theatre:
Three Thousand Years of Drama, Acting, and Stagecraft, which, in 1929
was reputed to be the first comprehensive English language history of the
theatre.
4
In 1916, as Theatre Arts got underway, Cheney was completing
The Art Theater: Its Character as Differentiated From the Commercial
Theater; Its Ideals and Organization; and a Record of Certain European
and American Examples. He was already known for The New Movement
in the Theatre, pub I ished in 1914.
Cheney's passion was the so-called New Stagecraft, a catchall term
for the sort of non-realistic settings and evocative lighting favored by
Gordon Craig, Adolph Appia, Lee Simonson, Norman-Bel Geddes,
Robert Edmond jones, and Sam Hume.
5
Cheney was firm in his
4
E.R. Shipp, Obituary of Sheldon Cheney, New York Times, 14 October 1980,
sec. B, p. 23.
5
See Orville K. Larson's Scene Design in the American Theatre: A chronicle of
the activities of the New Stagecraft designers and their followers with an appraisal of
the state of the art and the European influences previous to their appearance
54
CHAN SKY
preferences for high art and abstraction. But Theatre Arts was more than
merely a forum for Cheney's ideas.
6
True to its advance publicity, the
journal did "offer to the new generation of artist-craftsmen in the
playhouse a news medium, and a forum for the expression of original
ideas. To the theatregoer it would offer the only complete record of the
really significant activities of the modern theatre" to the extent that those
were American or European.
7
Most importantly, from its inception the
pub I ication created a national network of reader-participants, focussing
on coast-to-coast coverage and marketing.
To read and accept Theatre Arts was to map the new into one's own
thinking about theatre. It is easy to see that much of the writing,
especially in the early years of the journal was "vague and near-precious
in its invocation of beauty, art, spirit, and the ideal."
8
In its first nine
years, however, Theatre Arts evolved from a journal that addressed the
elite few who had an eye on the European avant-garde and the leisure to
experiment with an American avant-garde to a journal that considered
Broadway, educational theatre, community theatre and art theatre. It also
possessed a key difference from Theatre or any other previous theatre
publication because it took the values and goals of the Little Theatre
Movement as its touchstone, making them central rather than optional.
Like all magazines, Theatre Arts addressed and constructed its
audience by means of its materiality and extra-editorial content. The
magazine was small (6"x 9 3/4" at the outset, then 7 3/4"x 9 3/4" by
1924; it did not go to an 8 Y2"x 11" format until 1930) and had a plain
yellow cover of non-coated stock featuring, at first, a simple sketch of a
single costumed figure below the title, and then, for several years, an
(Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1989). Hume, who organized the 1914
exhibition of New Stagecraft, which introduced interested Americans to the mostly
European-based work, was a friend from Berkeley. He was invited by the Arts and
Crafts Society to run a theatre under its aegis and it was he who invited Cheney to
come to Detroit.
6
For instance, in 1917 Cheney published an essay of Eaton's in Theatre Arts in
which Eaton criticized the New Stagecraft and its practitioners for "forgetting the
unscenic, perhaps pedestrian, but pretty essential drama of American problems or
American people." "Realistic Drama and the Experimental Theatre," Theatre Arts
2, 1 (Autumn 1917): 18.
7
Program, Arts and Crafts Playhouse, Dedicatory Performances, November 17
and 18, 1916.
8
Oscar Brockett and Robert Findlay, Century of Innovation: A History of
European and American Theatre and Drama Since the late Nineteenth Century
(Boston: Allyn and Bacon 1991), 278.
Theatre Arts Monthly 55
image suggesting modernist proscenium surrounding the magazine's
title.
9
It ran very few advertisements. In these ways it was wholly unlike
its contemporary, Theatre. The ads that Theatre Arts did run at first were
for literary journals-Poetry, The Quarterly Notebook, The Dial-and for
books about theatre. The connection was a means of creating what
Charles U. Larson calls "sophisticated nuances of meaning" by "the
brushing of information against other information."
10
Later Theatre Arts
added a directory advertising theatrical goods and services such as
schools, manuscript typists, costume rentals, and vocal coaches. Except
for pianos, one interior decorator's services, and a small number of
exclusive jewelers (whose ads were always understated and restricted to
the inside front and back covers plus one succeeding side of one page of
the magazine), Theatre Arts did not advertise consumer goods.
By contrast, Theatre ran many pages of advertisements for expensive
stockings, cruise ships, luxury resorts, automobiles, personal hygiene
goods, liquor, phonographs, and cigarettes. In general, Theatre focussed
on personalities and lifestyles, favoring photo layouts of actors and
actresses in their many roles or at their sumptuous homes. Theatre
always had a full-color cover featuring a performer-usually a
woman-looking either very glamorous or very theatrical. In addition,
Theatre embraced movies early on and wrote about film stars. Generally,
Theatre addressed its readers as consumers for whom theatre and opera
were sources of titillation, unproblematic entertainment, and vicarious
high living.
Theatre Arts, on the other hand, saw its readers as participants in
theatre rather than as consumers for whom theatregoing was just one
more social activity. Even when the reader's role in the actual theatre
was as audience member, Theatre Arts suggested that the he or she was
only useful as an intelligent co-maker of meaning in the performance
event. Cheney dedicated the journal to "a new generation of
artist-workers" and to "the theatregoer who is awake artistically and
intellectually." These were to take up the "good fight to fight" and to
"conserve and develop [the] creative impulse in the American theatre."
9
Volumes II through VII featured on the cover an image of Razullo, one of the
Commedia dell'arte characters, as depicted in a 1621 engraving by Callot. The
magazine did not identify the figure, however.
1
Charles U. Larson, Persuasion: Reception and Responsibility (Belmont CA:
Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1995), 18.
56 CHAN SKY
By implication then, the audience as well as the artist was active and
creative.
11
On the most obvious level, Theatre Arts built a new American theatre
audience by means of its editorial content. What the editors chose to
discuss and their mode of address were key elements in directing the
thinking and the allegiance of audiences. The first volume of the journal
made several things abundantly clear. First, movies and commercialism
in theatre were expressly labeled the enemy. Second, Theatre Arts
conveyed the idea that important theatrical work in the United States
need not originate in New York and need not be rendered only in terms
of Anglo-Saxon conventions.
12
The four numbers of the magazine issued
between November 1916 and August 1917 presented information about
American theatres in Wisconsin, Illinois, San Francisco, Los Angeles,
Texas, Indiana, Ohio, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C. "The Colored
Players and Their Plays" were the subject of an article by Zona Gale in
the August issue. In April, an all-Negro company of actors had presented
in the commercial Garden Theatre a program of three one-acts
specifically portraying black characters. Gale offered the prescient
observation that the integrity of the project confronted white Americans
with representations that did not follow American models of stereotyping
minorities, foreigners, or regionalists.
Here is a race, infinitely potential, moving before one in
individuals highly differentiated, and as terribly intent . .. on
their own living as any Anglo-Saxon is intent on his own. The
Colored Players strike at a provincialism which has been in one's
way, it appears, not only socially, but artistically.
13
Provincialism of many sorts was challenged. In a "think globally/act
locally" strategy, Cheney provided demographics about subscriptions in
order to exhort caring Americans from various parts of the country to sign
up to learn about theatre from all over the nation. At the end of the first
11
"Foreword," Theatre Arts, 1, 1 (November 1916): 1.
12
The issue of conventions and of who or what is literally represented on the
stage is not the same as the question of reception. Theatre Arts encouraged forays
into non-mimetic and non-Anglo-American productions, but it always assumed that
the spectator/consumer for these was a white American, or someone reading from a
white American stance.
13
Zona Gale, "The Colored Players and Their Plays," Theatre Arts 1, 3 (May
1917): 139.
Theatre Arts Monthly 57
season of publication, Cheney announced that following Detroit, the
home base of the magazine, and New York, the center of American
theatre, Berkeley had more subscribers (thirty) than any other place in the
United States.
14
Philadelphia was in last place with just one. Chicago,
with only eight, was told that its lack of interest was "both disgraceful and
intolerable."
15
Cambridge had more subscribers than Boston, and Oregon
had more than all the southern states combined. California outdid New
England, but Northampton, Massachusetts alone put Indianapolis and
Milwaukee to shame. Cheney was frankly out to sell subscriptions, but
he was also out to map America and American theatre beyond the
products and ethos of two or three large cities.
A third crucial motif in the early years of Theatre Arts was that the
most significant work in the theatre was being done by (or in the footsteps
of) the designers, theorists and architects of Europe-most notably
Germany and Russia (primarily at the Moscow Arts Theatre), with nods
to particular artists in Italy (Gordon Craig), France (Romain Rolland and
Andre Antoine), and Great Britain (Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory, and
William Poel). Linked to this was Cheney's belief that "The Most
Important Thing in the Theatre" was something called "the synthetic
ideal," which had to do with a unity of effects and was primarily
extratextual.
16
It involved stylization, lighting effects, and a strong regard
for rhythm and was the province of the director and designers.
17
Concern
for the synthetic ideal, in fact, underlay many assumptions about what
was worth the journal's attention.
A significant byproduct of Cheney's unflagging admiration for certain
European theatre ideals was Theatre Arts' message about the relation
14
Berkeley was, of course, Cheney's home town and the site of his alma mater,
which employed his biological mater as placement director.
15
"Editorial Comment," Theatre Arts 1, 4 (August 1917): 185-6.
16
Sheldon Cheney, "The Most Important Thing in the Theatre," Theatre Arts 1,
4 (August 1917): 167-171 .
17
See, for example, Walter Prichard Eaton's "Acting and the New Stagecraft," Theatre
Arts 1,1 (Nov. 1916): 9-12. Helen Crich Chinoy explores the varying degrees of interest in
the synthetic ideal among directors at three famous Little Theatres, the Chicago little
Theatre, the Provincetown Players, and the Washington Square Players, in her 1963
Columbia University dissertation, "The Impact of the Stage Director on American Plays,
Playwrights, and Theatres: 1860-1930." See Chapter 3, "The Little Theatre and its Big
Directors." While Maurice Browne in Chicago was devoted to his own version of the
synthetic ideal, other directors, especially those who were also playwrights, often had little
interest in it at all. For some, especially if they had experience in professional theatre,
keeping actors from making complete fools of themselves was a far more important concern.
58 CHAN SKY
between art and politics. The final issue of the magazine's first season
featured a photograph of a German theatre designed by architect Oskar
Kaufmann. Cheney announced that the Germans had "the best theatres
in the world," as evidenced in the photo by the comfortable chairs,
continental seating, and absence of boxes except at the back of the
theatre behind the last row of the balcony.
18
Although admitting that "we
may dislike their politics," Cheney still held up the Germans as
exemplary, "hoping that some Americans may be so humiliated that they
will try to create in this country playhouses as comfortable, as democratic
and as simple in decoration as this German one."
19
The United States had entered World War I four months prior to
Cheney's remarks. While President Wilson had been at pains to insist
that Americans were not fighting the German people but a system,
American popular sentiment had been wildly anti-German in a hysterical
and often crude way. The press-created image of the Kaiser and the
"Hun" as subhuman beasts had highbrow counterparts in the likes of the
Metropolitan Opera, which banned German works from its 1918-1919
season. Pacifists, liberals, and academics who presumably put German
lives (or any lives) above warfare were overridden and put under
suspicion by powerful Republicans and by some scholars who supported
the war.
2
Cheney's stance, then, was either a naive one, an attempt to
18
There is a certain irony in using a photograph and discussion of the auditorium of
a theatre to tout aesthetic superiority. Clearly Cheney and his Contributing Editors admired
much besides seating about German theatre. One of the Contributing Editors, Hiram Kelly
Moderwell, devoted major portions of his 1914 book, The Theatre of To-Day, to the
wonders of German stagecraft and audience organization. Cheney's choice of comfy chairs
and good sightlines-the lowest common denominator means of stroking an
audience-might have been an ironic, if oblique, means of saying that American theatres
fail, to paraphrase J.J. Shubert, to "put asses in seats" because the seats themselves are too
uncomfortable.
19
"Those Germans!" Theatre Arts 1, 4 (August 1917): 166.
2
For an accessible account of anti-German sentiments, representations, and behavior
across class and geographic lines in pre-and immediately post-war America, see William D.
Miller's Pretty Bubbles in the Air: America in 1919 (Urbana and Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 1991), especially 1-42 and 117-124. Miller makes interesting connections
between the rhetoric of "democracy" and higher values where a distant continent is
concerned and the simultaneous capacity to enact brutal racism, violating many
Constitutional rights where blacks, Jews, and socialists were concerned Stateside. Regarding
Republi can support for the War, it is important to remember that Wilson, a Democrat, was
reluctant to become involved. His commitment to "make the world safe for Democracy"
by involving American troops was far more appealing to the likes of archconservative
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts than to Wilson himself. Miller documents this
sympathetically. Concerning the evolution (some would say capitulation) of liberal
intellectual thinking to pro-war sentiment, see David Seideman's The New Republic: A
Theatre Arts Monthly 59
tweak sensibilities he found stuffy, a thinly-veiled but pointed statement
of pacifism, or an idealistic attempt to separate the "private" realm of "art"
from the public realm of "politics." Whatever was the case, the trustees
of the Detroit Arts and Crafts Society did not approve, and the second
volume of Theatre Arts was issued from New York, where the journal
moved and stayed for the rest of its existence.
The audience for Theatre Arts was apparently being told several
simultaneous and not necessarily easily reconcilable things. Despite the
publication's national agenda, New York was the center of American
theatrical activity, even for avowed pan-American experimentalists. To
be at the center of theatrical activity, however, could mean being at the
margins of popular sentiments in other areas. Moreover, political
marginalization was (and is) subject to different interpretations. For
aesthetes wishing to separate the high realm of theatrical art from the
sullied realm of politics-as-usual, here was a validated escape route to a
completely acceptable margin, at least to fellow aesthete-isolationists.
The same route could serve equally well for those who saw political
needs in global rather than nationalist terms. It could also serve as a
springboard for those whose political concerns were both local and
mainstream. For the latter, to eschew national or international concerns
in the name of the local-that arena in which an individual might hope
to have some direct influence-was to see oneself as powerful and
pragmatic. In the 1920s, as American drama came into its own, the plays
regarded as most significant and serious-work by O'Neill, Elmer Rice,
Sherwood Anderson, Paul Green, Sophie Treadwell, Susan Glaspell, Lula
Vollmer, and Zoe Akins, to name merely a few-focussed on personal
concerns within the context of a changing society fraught with problems
for the principled, sensitive, or independent individual.
21
In short, elitist
theatre seemed to encourage the idea that struggling with the personal
constituted adequate political activism, a flattering and reassuring idea to
the capitalist consumer.
Voice of Modern Liberalism (New York: Praeger, 1986), 19-59.
21
For instance, Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine treats the dehumanization of the
individual in a world of accounting, machines, and spiritually meaningless work. However,
the protagonist's dilemma is "humanized" in terms of a nagging wife and an ultimate
inability, even in heaven, to accept the affection of a co-worker with whom he once flirted.
Trouble with romance and domesticity stand for the ultimate ills of the assembly line and
mass culture. Lula Vollmer's Sun-Up (which was hugely popular with Little Theatres across
the country) features an illiterate, rural, Southern widow in 1917 unaware of World War I,
or even that the country extends much beyond her farm and county. She ultimately assists
an escaping soldier because she is able to relate his plight to her son's. The play is set in
her kitchen.
60
CHAN SKY
The final way in which the editorial content of Theatre Arts
constructed a national audience was its promotion and publication of
plays and playwrights. Again, like design sketches and blueprints, texts
are easier to circulate than performance traditions. Although the
magazine did not begin to publish plays until its third volume, in 1919,
it pointed its audience in certain directions from the beginning.
Significantly, however, Theatre Arts never posited anything analogous to
the "synthetic ideal" where dramatic texts were concerned. If anything,
it was as likely to reflect tastes as to lead them. Theatre Arts served as an
audience guide to drama in the face of social change. At all times it
promised to offer the most socially significant and dramaturgically
interesting playsY
A single, early example concerns Theatre Arts' treatment of the plays
of Lord Dunsany (18th Baron, born Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett,
[1878-1957]). Dunsany was one of the most produced playwrights of the
early Little Theatre Movement.
23
The 1917 publication of four of his
plays collected under the title Plays of Gods and Men, was hailed by
Theatre Arts as "the most important dramatic publication of the quarter."
24
Another book reviewed three months before Plays of Gods and Men was
Dunsany the Dramatist by Edward Hale B ierstadt. The reviewer
applauded the recognition of this major poet-dramatist by means of a
22
This is not, of course, to deny that "significance" meant significance to those sharing
what Joseph Roach calls "a cultural point of view- a cosmography, if you will- that defines
(and mythologizes) a set of attitudes, positions, practices and values." Joseph Roach,
"Normal Heartlands," Text and Performance Quarterly 12 (1992): 3 77.
23
See, for example, the lists of plays produced by little and experimental theatres
through 1917 in both Thomas Dickinson, The Insurgent Theatre, (Reprint, New York:
Benjamin Blom, Inc., 1972) and Contance D'arcy Mackay's The Little Theatre in the United
States (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1917). Many of the theatres featured plays
by local members which were not done anywhere else; Shaw was by far the most often
produced overall. Other European "names" whose plays were popular but who made their
reputations before or outside of the American Little Theatre movement were Ibsen,
Strindberg, Barrie, Wilde, followed at some distance by Maeterlinck, Pirandello and
Chekhov. Of the playwrights who had more than one play produced by numerous early
little Theatres (thereby excluding, for example, Alice Brown for her popular one-act, "Joint
Owners in Spain" and Alice Gerstenberg for "Overtones"), Susan Glaspell and Lord
Dunsany head the list, with Glaspell present for two plays, "Trifles" and "Suppressed
Desires" (the latter co-written with her husband George Cram Cook) and Dunsany for at
least five: "The Tents of the Arabs," "The Glittering Gate," "The lost Silk Hat," "A Night at
an Inn," and "The Queen's Enemies."
24
"The New Published Plays," Theatre Arts 1,4 (August 1917): 203.
Theatre Arts Monthly 61
full-length book about his work published during his own lifetime. By all
accounts, Dunsany was a "find. "
25
Today, Dunsany's plays seem precious and even heavy-handed, and
the ones in Plays of Gods and Men all use a sort of O'Henry trick ending.
In three of the plays, the spirit is pitted against material gain or worldly
recognition, and a disaster wrought by a god occurs, destroying the
faithless. "The Tents of the Arabs"-the one play that doesn't end with a
disaster-features a Pri nce and the Pauper setup in which the real king
chooses to live a simple life in the desert while a restless Bedouin who
resembles the monarch moves into the palace and takes up a life of
splendor and public responsibility. The playwright's sympathy is clearly
with the king. Dunsany favored exotic settings, foreign-sounding names,
occult concerns, and lines like "The jungle is sinking! It has fallen into
the earth!"
26
In 1919, just two years later, the formerly lionized poet was labeled
as being l imited in "Dunsany Reestimated." His major flaw was that in
his quest for the cosmic he ignored the human:
Having carefully excluded from his work all trace of "the human
round of passions and regrets," Dunsany is now to find that his
intensely human audience is beginning to lose interest. . . . A
poet who deals wholly with the imagination, that essentially
intellectual quality, finds himself cut off almost entirely from real
contact with mankind at large, which acts and reacts largely
through its emotionsY
The pre-Little Theatre formula with which general-interest, high-tone
magazines had addressed readers is reversed here. By virtue of reading
Theatre Arts the reader is presumed to have acquired authority about
plays. The spectator who is knowledgeable about poeti c drama and the
synthetic ideal is a spectator whose "passions and regrets" should
construct the drama. The Theatre Arts audience is the "intensely human
audience."
Sheldon Cheney remained an editor of Theatre Arts until 1922, but
only the first two volumes-eight issues published from November 1916
through September, 1918-were edited by him alone. In 1919 he was
25
"New Books About the Theatre," Theatre Arts 1, 3 (May 191 7): 147.
26
Lord Dunsany, "The Laughter of the Gods," Plays of Gods and Men (Boston: John
W. Luce and Company, 1917), 128.
27
Edward Hale Bierstadt, "Dunsany Reestimated, " Theatre Arts 3, 3 (July 1919): 161 .
62
CHAN SKY
joined by Kenneth Macgowan, S. Marion Tucker, and Edith j.R. Isaacs
(1878-1956). Tucker left after three years, at which time Isaacs' name
was moved to first place on the roster, and she and Macgowan were
joined by Stark Young. Isaacs remained as editor until 1945 and as
publisher until shortly before the magazine was sold in 1948. She was an
unusual figure in the Little Theatre movement because she was a woman
with institutional power in a visible, important project, positioned to
make a difference at a national level. She was, moreover, Jewish and not
conventionally pretty. Perhaps only Hallie Flanagan, director of the
Federal Theatre Project in the 1930s, has been as influential with
American audiences in a major way.
With Isaacs' arrival, Theatre Arts started to include play texts,
covered Broadway productions without apology, and decreased its focus
on the most precious, poetic aspects of the early Little Theatres. "The
Unity of Production" remained a favorite topic for a time, as did
class-unifying critiques of American speech (in which, not surprisingly,
Britons were admired and Midwesterners execrated, supposedly
reminding readers what excellence meant without needing to resort to
explanations). But important news now included how "our serious
American playwright seems at last to have definitely discovered the
existence of our middle classes."
28
Readership increased and subscribers came to be identified as
teachers and community leaders as well as Arts and Crafts aficionados
and socialites. Accordingly, Theatre Arts reflected and guided the values
of its expanded readership into the 1920s as it had reflected and guided
its few, mostly privileged readers in the late teens. But it never ceased to
promote the underlying idea that to be a good audience member took
28
Lloyd Head and Mary Gavin, "The Unity of Production," Theatre Arts 5, 1 Uanuary
1921): 60-68. Cheney had carped about the American voice in his "Editorial Comment"
Theatre Arts 1, 4 (August 1917), saying "Slovenly speech is a national vice," 184. Even
Walter Prichard Eaton shared the early complaint about the lack of "proper feelings for
verbal fel icities" in the modern theatre, chiding that "the rankest amateur ought to be able
to pronounce correctly, and enunciate all the syllables of a polysyllabic word without
swallowing the penult." ("Acting and the New Stagecraft," 10.) Stark Young wrote "The
Voice in the Theatre" for April, 1921 issue. Windsor P. Daggett, in "The Lineage of
Speech," fussed that English is "a language of l iterature and art" but that Americans were
awash in local dialects and badly in need of an educated standard. The article appeared in
Theatre Arts 9, 9 (September 1925): 597-604. It is worth remembering that the New
Theatre (see Chapter Four) had promised its patrician supporters a "purity in English
pronunciation" subject to arbitration by experts from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and
Princeton where, presumably, if one walked the walk one talked the talk. The observation
about middle class concerns in major plays belongs to Kenneth Macgowan, "Year's End,"
Theatre Arts 6, 1 Uanuary 1922): 3-10.
Theatre Arts Monthly 63
work, reading, open-mindedness, willingness to change, and a certain
capacity for wonder and surprise.
Beginning in 1920, the table of contents page of the magazine l isted
bookstores where current issues of Theatre Arts were on sale, suggesting
an outreach to more than only in-the-know subscribers. The stores were
located in New York, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco,
Washington, and London. london was more than an idle addition. In
1924 Theatre Arts became Theatre Arts Monthly, subtitled "The
International Magazine of the Theatre." Ashley Dukes became the
English Editor. That year Theatre Arts was ready to historicize its origins:
it published an article by Macgowan called "little Theatre Backgrounds."
Macgowan traced the evolution of the art theatre and posited a quarter
to a half million patrons for Little Theatre shows in the United States in
the preceding year. "All the professional producers of Broadway and the
Road do not mount so many plays in any season as these five hundred
little theatres with their two to ten bills a year."
29
Where audiences were
concerned, The little Theatre Movement was not above playing the
numbers game. Bigger was now often understood as better.
Most significantly, Theatre Arts reversed its opinion of David Belasco,
at one time portrayed as archfiend of commercialism, shallow ideals, and
photographic realism.
30
In a laudatory 1921 feature which was part of a
series on American producers, Belasco was quoted as saying that the true
realism-in full agreement with early littl e Theatre rhetoric-"is not to
reproduce material things ... it is to reproduce the realities of inner life."
31
Theatre Arts also cautiously embraced Belasco's idea concerning
American audiences: the article's author admitted in a telling third
person plural that "in the theatre we Americans like to sip sweets, not to
think. "
32
The little Theatre ideal had worked its way into Belasco's
consciousness (or his sense of press agentry) enough that he was willing
to adopt its rhetoric. He was even willing to provide a theatre and offer
a prize cup for an annual Little Theatre Tournament. Pragmatism about
exactly who comprised even the best of Ameri can theatre audiences was
29
Kenneth Macgowan, "Little Theatre Backgrounds," Theatre Arts Monthly 8, 9
(September 1924): 579.
30
Editorial, Theatre Arts 1, 2 (February 191 7): 96.
31
james G. Huneker, "American Producers Ill, David Belasco," Theatre Arts 5, 4
(October 1921): 266.
32
Ibid., 266-7. Al so, Walter Prichard Eaton, The American Stage of To-Day (Boston:
Small, Maynard and Company, 1908), 330, 33 1.
64 CHAN SKY
beginning to temper Theatre Arts' proclamations, even as-perhaps from
an opposite direction-it was altering Belasco's rhetoric about his
customers.
33
Theatre Arts was also paying increasing attention to theatre in
education and to the role of schools in building audiences. Early in 1920
the opening editorial had mused about a proliferation of plays performed
by and for children all around the country, suggesting approvingly that
"if we want our American trees inclined toward the love and appreciation
of the drama, we must begin to bend our American twigs that way."
34
Also in 1920, Sam Hume, the close friend of Theatre Arts' founder and
first artistic director of the Arts and Crafts Theatre of Detroit, organized
the Drama Teachers Association of California.
35
Dina Rees Evans, who
was later instrumental in founding the American Educational Theatre
Association, cited Theatre Arts as a key influence early in her career in
making her "revolt" against the painted scenery "held sacred through the
years against any violation of change" when she arrived to take up her
teaching duties as a high school teacher in Bozeman, Montana.
36
By 1924 Theatre Arts was helping to circulate the sort of thinking that
would become an accepted feature of mainstream pedagogy in the near
future and that spelled both recognition of and restrictions on the values
of the Little Theatre Movement. Helen Louise Cohen's "Education in the
Theatre Arts" stressed the importance of seeing and doing theatre for New
33
Certainly the tenets of modernism in all the arts-a preference for anti-pictorialism
either by means of surrealism or formalism, and the use of chaos, montage, si multaneity,
and discontinuous time-were available to Belasco many more places than just the pages
of Theatre Arts. Picasso, james joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Freud, at the very least, were
recognizable names with visual or philosophical correlatives for the cosmopolite of the
1920s whether or not he liked or even understood their works. See Arnold Hauser, The
Social History of Art, vol. 4, Naturalism Impressionism The Film Age (New York: Vintage
Books, 1958 and 1985), 226-259. Interestingly, Hauser seemed to believe that drama is
almost inherently incapable of bending to these tenets and of accommodating the "time
experience" of the modern age. "The technique of the drama does not permit the
playwright to go back to past stages in the course of a progressively developing plot and to
insert them directly into the sequence of events, into the dramatic present." He reluctantly
added that only recently (he was writing in 1958) has drama "begun to permit it, perhaps
under the immediate influence of the film, or under the influence of the new conception of
time, familiar also from the modern novel," 242.
34
Editorial, Theatre Arts 4, 1 Uanuary 1920): 69.
35
Kenneth Macgowan, Footlights Across America: Towards a National Theatre (New
York, Harcourt Brace and Company, 1929): 171.
36
Paul Kozelka, "Dramatics in the High Schools, 1900-1925," in History of Speech
Education in America, ed. Karl Wallace (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1955): 601-2.
Theatre Arts Monthly 65
York City's high school students. In a throwback to earlier ideas about
creating good Americans from flawed foreigners by means of salutary
Anglo-Saxon theatre experiments, Cohen cited the "inestimable
assistance" to students of theatre in realizing "worthy citizenship, worthy
use of leisure and ethical character.'t37
Theatre, both as a creative endeavor and also as a spectator sport that
stimulated participatory feelings, meshed with John Dewey's ideas about
education, popularly understood in the phrases "learning by doing,"
"child-centered," ''innovative," and "experimental."
38
Of course, theatre
that reinforced popular cultural norms also served to ratify and legitimate
those norms. Theatre Arts reflected these emerging traits in the national
ethos, even as it stood by many of its earliest principles. By invoking
terms I ike "love and appreciation" and "ethical character," educators
could persuade people that their subtle disciplinary ventures in the realm
of theatre were serving a higher, more interior goal.
Although Theatre Arts was far more influential for what it said about
aesthetics to emerging audiences than what it told them directly about
themselves, in its first nine years it did publish a handful of articles
overtly concerned with audiences and audience construction. These
articles are valuable indicators of where and how the new ideals were
being aimed and-although this is harder to pinpoint-where they were
taking effect.
Walter Prichard Eaton, whose interest and identification in the theatre
community had long been with the audience, published "The American
Theatre and Reconstruction" in the January, 1919 issue of the magazine.
Eaton's piece was a reprint of the address he had given to the New York
Drama League the previous tenth of December. The essay is a
remarkable balancing act of pragmatism and idealism and it cannily
flatters its audience, even while exhorting them to do better and to see
beyond their own back yards. Since the original auditors' back yard was
Manhattan and Broadway, Eaton's bid was against sophisticated
provincialism in the interest of national improvement. His argument was
for a national network of theatres that would enable many people from
many parts of the country to see the same new play at roughly the same
37
Helen Louise Cohen, "Education in the Theatre Arts, " Theatre Arts Monthly 8, 10
(October 1924): 689.
38
See Miller, Pretty Bubbles in the Air, 216.
66 CHAN SKY
time rather than having to travel to New York to see it, wait for it to arrive
on tour, or just do without.
39
Americans, Eaton charged, had no "national art consciousness" or
"national art unity."
40
Our playgoing habits during the war showed a
"radical divorce between life and art." Hungry Russian audiences had
"dodged machine gun bullets and shrapnel to enjoy Gorky's Night
Refuge superbly acted at the Moscow Art Theatre" while "well fed, we
dodged, at the same time, nothing more deadly than a taxicab, to view
the silliest and most blatantly chauvinistic of melodramas ... or the
trivialities of musical comedy."
41
Americans, cast in the Saxon mold, have the wrong attitude towards
the theatre, Eaton declared. He was careful, however, not to lay the
blame on race, but on a system "which ... has developed the worst side of
our relations to art and smothered the possibilities of a better side." The
system, which he names "the blessed old doctrine of laissez-faire," has
resulted in a nation where only in two cities, New York and possibly
Chicago, could peo.ple see theatre that was not aimed at lowest common
denominator taste. The system required overhauling. If it was hard for
New Yorkers to grasp what such deprivation meant, Eaton reminded
them that "New York, unfortunately, is not America."
42
His strategy cleverly played two kinds of identification against each
other. As Americans "we" had failed to integrate theatre into the fabric
of our national life. But as New Yorkers "we" were in a position to know
and to do better. Eaton's actual audience for the speech was
geographically, as well as educationally and psychically, situated
between Europe and something he was calling America. Walking a thin
line, he told his listeners,
At present our dramatists do not address America; consciously
or unconsciously, more often the former, they address
Broadway. . . . But to address Broadway is not to make that
intensely local, or parochial appeal which so often results in
39
Hall ie Flanagan used this idea when the Federal Theatre Project simultaneously
opened twenty-one productions of It Can't Happen Here around the nation on October 27,
1936. These included an English as well as a Yiddish production in New York City and a
black production in Seattle which used whites to represent the fascist threat to America.
40
"The American Theatre and Reconstruction," Theatre Arts 3, 1 Oanuary 1919): 11.
4 1
Ibid., 8.
41
Ibid., 9, 10.
Theatre Arts Monthly
art of Synge, for example. . . . I have faith in the hundreds of
sincere artists in our theatres-much more faith, indeed than I
have in our audiences.
43
67
The members of the New York Drama League presumably knew both
their Synge and their Broadway, but they were the ones dodging taxis to
take in musicals. They were the problem, not the deprived rubes in the
hinterlands. Yet because they were members of the Drama League,
valued both Synge and the Moscow Art Theatre (as well as musicals), and
were gathered to hear Eaton, they were held up as the beacons of
salvation. Except that they were not, quite. Once again, the true beacon
in the theatre was the "sincere artist" and the problem was the audience.
Presumably, however, the audience now knew that the sincere artist was
the artist imbued with Little Theatre aesthetics; this audience could
redeem itself by coming to said artist's rescue.
Eaton's solution took stock of some harsh realities, even as it
rhetorically undercut them to fan the flames of activism. Using the
Northampton, Massachusetts Municipal Theatre as an example, he baldly
stated that it, like almost every other theatre in the nation, "depends for
its patronage almost entirely on the adult bourgeois class of the town."
Millworkers never darkened its door except when it showed sensational-
ist movies, and Smith College students in general patronized movies over
theatre.
44
Eaton might have been writing of any small city with a town
and gown population in 1997. Yet even as he plainly identifies the
American theatregoer as adult and bourgeois, he eschews money and
elitism in the invention of his hypothetical American audience:
so long as the play is presented, even simultaneously, only to a
small, economically select, and, through their common interest,
homogeneous class of people-such as our little theatres still too
exclusively represent-its value to unify national consciousness
and stimulate national thought and taste, remains relatively
slight, although certainly worthwhile as a beginning.
45
The existing audience-even for serious theatre-is being blamed for
theatre's failure to unite the nation.
43
Ibid., 13.
44
Ibid., 11 .
45
Ibid., 13.
68
(HAN SKY
But Eaton had a blind spot. Even as he pointed out that the only
meeting place for the elite and the proletariat was at the movie house, the
one thing he could not see or say was that he might be staring squarely
at his national audience at the movies. And there is no question who was
setting the agenda at the mythic-although now multi-sited-national
theatre. Non-bourgeois people and ideas may have served as subjects
for serious drama and theatre, but there was never any question in
Theatre Arts' rhetoric that the point of view on all subjects would be
bourgeois, white, and basically Protestant.
46
To print the essay in a national magazine was to position a new
audience-the readers-as simultaneously "we" and "they." Well aware
that New York was not America, readers in other parts of the country
presumably were closer to the actual ground on which the battle would
be waged, and sympathetic to the idea that they and their communities
were important. At the same time, readers of Theatre Arts had exposure
to sophisticated critiques of Broadway fare and to information about
other interesting theatre ventures, allowing them to feel knowledgeable
and urbane-that is, more like New Yorkers than their less enlightened,
movie-going neighbors.
Who, exactly, were these knowledgeable, urbane, and supportive
readers? Predictably, they included members of groups whose activities
were reported in regular columns called "At the Little Theatres" (later "At
the Little and Experimental Theatres,") "Theatre Arts Chronicle," and, after
1925, the "Little Theatre Yearbook." But a 1918 article by Claire Dana
Mumford seemed to suggest that readers could be an ordinary Joe or
Jane. The article began with the blunt statement that "any sort of person
can have adventures at the theatre." Mumford identified herself as one
about to drop "a bomb from Philistia." She complained that the new
movement of the theatre seemed to be "moving in every direction at
once-save towards us-the Audience-and towards the professional
theatre." Was Theatre Arts allowing a critique of its preciosity? Mumford
46
Point of view on a subject is not the same as subject of discourse, or as character or
setting. Characters in plays could be Catholic, Jewish or Black, but their concerns needed
to be legible and engrossing to mainstream audiences. So, for instance, in his 1921 book,
Producing in Little Theatres (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1921 ), Clarence Stratton
discussed the power of a one-act drama called "Their Country" by N.M. Kahn and M.
Leishin in which a Jewish father and mother who have been opposing their son's efforts to
enlist as a soldier, "are brought by the headline in the newspaper of the capture of Jerusalem
to the astounding realization that through 'their country' the world struggle concerns them
nearly," 52. Outsiders become American as they adopt mainstream ideals, making the play
legible and palatable to the point of view of a certain viewing community.
Theatre Arts Monthly 69
blasted so-called artists who imagined themselves as anything more than
ineffectual if they failed in "unceasing reference to an audience."
47
Of course Mumford assumed that an audience meant a group whose
reading strategies would be validated by the art they were gathered to
witness. Yet the real purpose of the piece emerged soon after the
attention-grabbing opening. The essay was a paean to Rollo Peters'
scenic artistry in a production of an otherwise forgettable play called
josephine and it was a lecture on "good" new stagecraft. In josephine the
hypersensitive Mumford was "wrought upon by needles, when the
triangular shaft of light cut the high Dark of Notre Dame."
48
The essay suggests a not-so-subtle example of self-congratulation on
the part of Theatre Arts for successfully getting its audience to feel that
their responses had emerged from their own, inner experiences.
Basically, the journal had planted the experiences, knowing they would
then be cued in some way.
49
Mumford acted as though esoteric ideals in
stagecraft had offended her until a consummate artist's work elicited from
her a spontaneous, positive response, galvanizing her into a recognition
that she had stumbled upon the real thing all by herself. That she would
have had no vocabulary with which to define the real thing without prior
instruction did not occur to her. Exactly where she acquired her
knowledge of design (she mentions Gordon Craig, joseph Urban, Leon
Bakst, and playwrights Dunsany and Maeterlinck) she does not say, but
it could easily have been from the pages of Theatre Arts. The magazine,
in its efforts to construct a new theatre audience, repeated its message in
many different ways. The supposedly resistant reader and theatregoer
had joined the imagined community when, through an evoked
"recollection," she or he had "experienced" a conversion that seemed
spontaneous. In fact, that conversion was the result of careful
germination, waiting only for the proper cue in order to flower.
In 1921 Theatre Arts published an article by Theresa Helburn that
could still stand as a mission statement for a mainstream American
institutional theatre seeking to develop a committed audience. The piece
is impressive not because it eschews bourgeois values, legislation of taste
47
Claire Dana Mumford, "A New Master and the Audience," Theatre Arts 2, 2
(February 1918): 67,74.
48
Ibid., 70-3.
49
Advertising and persuasion theorist Tony Schwartz calls this phenomenon "evoked
recall." Operating on the idea that it is better to "get a message out of receivers than to put
one into them," persuaders who want to enable that feeling plant the experiences and then
summon them. See Tony Schwartz, The Responsive Chord (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1974), 24-25, 65, 67, 69 and 79.
70
CHAN SKY
by committee, or middlebrow prejudices. It disdains none of these
things. It speaks of serious theatre as serious business. Further, it
explains that only by embracing the actual tastes of an actual theatregoing
population-whatever their shortcomings-a theatre desirous of doing
more than vaudeville, melodrama, or musicals might hope to make
inroads. What is of interest in the development of an American theatre
audience is that a particular segment of the publ ic is deemed adequately
educated in its theatrical preferences. A producer of serious theatre was
proposing to curtail a taste for experimentalism in the name of an
audience.
Helburn was writing as a manager of the Theatre Guild, then in its
third season. The Theatre Guild was the post-war reincarnation of the
Washington Square Players, one of the best known Little Theatres. The
Washington Square Players had begun in 1915, emerging from the same
Greenwich Village community as the Provincetown Players, and
presenting chiefly one-act plays for the four seasons of its existence.
Unlike the Provincetown Players, the Washington Square Players was not
primarily concerned with fostering new plays and playwrights. Unlike
the Neighborhood Playhouse, it was not concerned with developing an
"underprivileged" audience. Unl ike the Chicago Little Theatre, it was not
under the aegis of a visionary (Maurice Browne) nor did it favor poetry,
or rhythmic expression. Unlike the Boston Toy Theatre, its members,
although comfortable and well-connected, were not blue-bloods. The
founders were working professionals with the energy and the money to
support the venture. From the beginning they performed outside their
bohemian neighborhood, moving to a Broadway theatre at the end of
their second season and undertaking a seven-city tour at the same time.
The mission statement in their first program diplomatically and rather
vaguely stated,
We have only one policy in regard to new plays-they must
have artistic merit. Preference will be given to American plays,
but we shall also include in our repertory the works of
well-known European authors who have been ignored by
commercial managers.
50
In spite of its artistic mandate, in every way it was a Little Theatre that
could influence national thinking about serious theatre because it was
50
Washington Square Players, quoted in Oliver Sayler, Our American Theatre (New
York: Brentano's, 1923), 78.
Theatre Arts Monthly 71
flexible about what constituted "art" and because its managers were
concerned with business.
51
The Theatre Guild, founded in 1918 shortly after the Washington
Square Players disbanded for financial reasons, was to survive into the
1940s. The Guild operated in New York, where its plays ran on
Broadway and generally garnered good critical notices. Equally
important, the Guild took its plays on tour annually to five other cities
around the nation. A look at the 1936 Theatre Guild Anthology suggests
how many widely-recognized plays the Guild introduced to America,
among them Liliom, The Adding Machine, St. joan, Porgy, Strange
Interlude, Hotel Universe, Mary of Scotland, Heartbreak House, Back to
Methuselah, and Marco Millions.
52
The focus of Helburn's article was not, however, the aesthetics of
production or the value of particular dramas. It was the necessity of
organizing audiences if one was to do anything at all about circulating
good theatre. Helburn was a wise choice to write such an article. Her
company's subscription audience had grown from a hundred and fifty in
1919 to six hundred in 1920, then to thirteen hundred in 1921. By 1925
the Guild would have 14,000 subscribers, and in the mid-1930s there
would be 25,000 in New York and 25,000 in the rest of the country.
53
Helburn showed the most startling of her colors at the start of the piece:
Pure art, she said, was an impossibility in the theatre. Such an imagined
purity was impossible because theatre was, in Cheney's favorite word,
"synthetic."
54
For Cheney synthesis usually implied subsuming the egos
and projects of previously independent workers in the vision of a single
artist, director, or designer. For Helburn synthesis meant an organized
compromise with the front of the house.
5
' See Vito N. Silvestri, "The Washington Square Players: Those Early Off-Broadway
Years" in The Quarterly journal of Speech 51, 1 {February 1965): 35-44 and Helen Crich
Chinoy, "The Impact of the Stage Director on American Plays." Chapters on the Washington
Square Players appear in Thomas H. Dickinson's The Insurgent Theatre and Constance
D'Arcy Mackay's The Little Theatre in the United States.
52
"Introduction," Theatre Guild Anthology, by the Board of Directors of the Theatre
Guild (New York: Random House, 1936), ix-xii i.
53
Sheldon Cheney, The Art Theatre {New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925), 222.
Helburn's own numbers in the article are 135 for the first season, 500 for the second, 1500
before the third, and 3,000 for the start of the 19 21 -22 season.
54
Theresa Helburn, "Art and Business: A Record of the Theatre Guild, Inc.," Theatre
Arts 5, 4 {October, 1921 ): 268-274.
72 CHAN SKY
Helburn succinctly invoked the "a few good men" argument. The
Guild's audience was "special." It liked the "genuine article" in the
theatre. For anyone still wondering whom that meant, she added "It is
the public that buys Edith Wharton and Bernard Shaw rather than Ethel
M. Dell or Robert H ichens. "
55
Shaw, who had aroused tremendous
controversy with his plays early in the century, was now an established
name. Wharton's fiction presented acceptably upper-class, WASP
characters experiencing angst over social constraints and lacking inner
fulfillment. No foreign languages, rhythmic ideal, or poetic bent were on
the list of Guild subscribers' reading tastes.
56
The successful theatre was to marshall the forces at 8:30 of a given
night; unlike published books, plays needed to be consumed on a set
time schedule. The way to facilitate this was membership. Subscriptions
were not as costly as patronage and they made possible limited
experimentation, since they guaranteed in advance a budget with which
to take risks. The key to enticing Theatre Arts readers to become
subscribers (probably part of the goal of the article) was to assure them
that the Board that selected the plays represented "an audience in
miniature."
57
Board diversity was supposed to parallel audience makeup,
especially since this Board was "all keenly interested in the theatre, [but]
not all of it. "
58
The invitation to readers to see themselves in the Board
is simultaneously reinforced and undercut as the Board members'
professions are listed: banker, lawyer, artist, actress, producer, and
playwright. The last four were "of" it, surely, but the mix allowed
potential audience members as well as potential audience organizers to
try out different fits. Upper echelon businessmen were deemed sensitive
and astute while the theatre practitioner became worthy of executive
responsibility. That the sciences, labor, and education didn't appear on
the I ist was not deemed a problem. The idea of an adult, white,
professionally-affiliated bourgeoisie was confirmed without ever being
called by that name.
55
Ibid., 272.
56
Here was the assurance of what Herbert Blau calls "meaning in performance" that
was "transparent" to its audience. "Which is to say created in its own image"- an image
dedicated to preserving the bourgeois self as "mystified subject." Herbert Blau, The
Audience, (Baltimore: johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 280.
57
Helburn, "Art and Business, " 270.
58
Ibid.
Theatre Arts Monthly 73
The last article published in the first years of Theatre Arts to directly
address audiences and audience construction was, once again, by Walter
Prichard Eaton. It appeared in 1923. Simply titled "Audiences," the
piece had been commissioned by the editors of the magazine. Eaton
divided the article into two parts: New York and the rest of the country.
He repeated his ideas that New York had many audiences for many kinds
of theatre and that theatregoers did not lose their individuality when they
were part of a group. But the country at large actually enjoyed no such
luxury as multiple theatre audiences. In the "theatrical Sahara," movies
had siphoned off the "morons" and Little Theatres had worked in a
"strange" dramatic idiom al ien to most theatregoers .. Eaton stood up fo'r
"the sound core of 'middle class' America," those people with an "innate
taste for good things and no desire to squander their money on sham."
59
Eaton believed firmly in the possibility that schools could create the
audiences for future theatre. He also touted the value of community
theatre because through it, citizens had a stake in projects that were their
own. Eaton's attempt at a rousing conclusion was that
there is a potential audience across this continent for good plays,
which our theatre as now organized cannot reach, but whi ch
could be reached by amateur effort (beginning in the schools)
rightly directed along true community lines.
60
What is remarkable about the essay is how accurately it predicted
what the American theatrical landscape would become and how blind it
was to the very pitfalls it mapped. Eaton was clear about the fact that
Americans were skepti cal concerning endeavors that were not clearly
professional. Achievement for its own sake was, and is, suspect. Why,
then, should the amateur community theatre-whatever sense of
investment or power it might provide local participants-have serious
impact on national thinking?
Moreover, Eaton noted that most high school and amateur groups
were already commercial in their thinking in that they chose sure-fire
comedies and sought to raise money for clubs and causes. Were teachers
"who desire and who are able to put on better plays, in a better spirit"
really supposed to be able to overhaul systems that already expressed the
wi II of the community?
61
Was amateur effort supposed to aid a
59
Eaton, "Audiences," Theatre Arts 7, 1 Oanuary 1923): 24, 28, 25.
60
Ibid., 28.
61
Ibid., 26.
74 CHAN SKY
commercial theatre that could not seem to muster an effective delivery
system on its own? Eaton offered no answers and forged ahead as though
the questions did not exist. Yet Americans did embrace Eaton's
suggestions (and they inherited his conundrums and frustrations).
Universities, high schools, and amateur groups became the sites of
burgeoning theatrical activity in the 1920s.
In fact, Eaton had argued more eloquently (and with better examples)
for the value of local production in an earlier article, "The Real Revolt in
Our Theatre."
62
Again taking as his starting point that the commercialized
professional theatre had "broken down" as a means of supplying drama
to America as a whole, his real focus was on examples of successful
endeavors in American amateur theatre, largely in universities, high
schools, and in rural areas that university projects sought to serve.
Repeatedly Eaton cites "self-expression," "self-consciousness," and
"artistic impulses," along with a burgeoning population of teachers
trained in production.
His article for Theatre Arts looked to a future in which an
as-yet-imperfect training program for audiences would emerge. Its
graduates would be ready to embrace excellence and support good,
professional plays and playwrights. In Scribner's-perhaps not bound by
editorial pol icy to accommodate the theatre and its devotees-he
focussed on what was surely a larger drawing card for many amateurs:
a chance to recognize the familiar onstage and to be a central part of the
undertaking. In addition, for the emerging graduates of normal schools
and colleges offering practical training in theatre, the wave of amateur
activity created a respectable job market close to home. For Theatre Arts
the national audience efforts were about a future when enlightened
audiences would support the best of professional theatre. For Scribner's
the national audience efforts were about self-expression with cachet. Of
course the two overlapped to some extent.
Right through most of the 1940s, Theatre Arts remained a remarkable
source of information about unusual, experimental, and topical
productions and practitioners, as well as a bulletin board for Little Theatre
activities in addition to moving well beyond its own ardent, somewhat
single-purpose original tone. For example, "The Audience on the Road"
included Indian festivals of the north and southwest United States. A
1929 special issue on motion pictures included a sophisticated essay by
Andre Levinson on the advances of silent cinema over most drama in
regard to time, linearity and sequence. Silent films at their most
62
Walter Prichard Eaton, "The Real Revolt in Our Theatre" Scribner's Magazine 72
Uuly-December 1922): 596-605.
Theatre Arts Monthly 75
interesting, said Levinson, were free of the "reason" of drama and showed
things "in the order in which they appear to our imagination."
63
If Little Theatre in the 1920s and 1930s evolved into a middlebrow,
albeit sincere version of its earlier, impassioned, iconoclastic self, Theatre
Arts managed to stay fresh and intelligent, and a remarkable source of
information. It remains a superb resource concerning a quarter of a
century of Broadway and experimental theatre. Its photographs and its
eclecticism are a treasure trove, even if only as a starting place for
investigating the many forms of theatre that were available to Americans
between the World Wars. The magazine is filled with trenchant,
informed writing about a variety of theatre phenomena by a number of
largely interesting thinkers, many of whose names remain well-known as
artists, historians, and critics.
63
Andre Levinson, "The Nature of the Cinema," Theatre Arts 13, 9 (September 1929):
684-693.
journal of American Drama and Theatre 10 (Winter 1998)
The Mythologizing of American Regional Theatre
VINCENT LANDRO
A standard narrative has evolved since the 1960s about the history
of the American regional theatre. This narrative portrays the evolution of
nonprofit regional theatre in America as having its origins in the
pioneering work of like-minded visionaries through the 1940s and 1950s
whose dream was to fill a national cultural vacuum by bringing the
world's great stage works to communities outside New York City. The
four pioneering companies were, of course, those of Margo Jones in
Dallas in 1947, Nina Vance in Houston in that same year, Zelda
Fichandler in Washington in 1950, and Jules Irving and Herbert Blau at
Actors' Workshop in San Francisco in 1952. The scenario, as sketched
out by such commentators as Martin Gottfried, Julius Novick, Joseph
Zeigler, and Robert Brustein, describes how these few theatres, united in
their rebellion against the "Broadway Establishment" and existing as
artistically pure harbingers of a true national theatre uncontaminated by
greed or the search for profit, spawned successors who have compro-
mised their potential to become an essential cultural force in American
life.
This mythic scenario has at least four major problems. First, it uses
hindsight to oversimplify into a national "movement" with a single
direction and mission a collection of diverse and separate theatres that,
more than ever, resist easy definition. The most cursory examination
reveals substantial differences even among the early theatres in terms of
how they produced theatre art. All may have sought a decentralized
theatre, but Margo Jones's theatre used Equity actors cast out of New
York while the Houston theatre of Nina Vance began as an amateur
organization whose board strongly fought against professional status.
1
In
a 1989 interview, Zelda Fichandler recalled the individualistic nature and
separate development of the early theatres:
1
See Helen Sheehy, Margo, The Life and Theatre of Margo jones (Dallas, Texas:
Southern Methodist University Press, 1989), 133-143, and Sue Dauphin, Houston By
Stages (Burnet, Texas: Eakin Press, 1981), 96-101 .
Mythologizing Regional Theatre
In the beginning, the pioneers in the movement were separated
one from each other. We were puttering around with decentral-
izing and institutionalizing an art form. We didn't know about
each other, and we were all working very separately. It was like
scientists working on the same research project in different parts
of the globe and then coming together.
2
77
The second problem with the scenario described by Brustein and
others is that it is difficult to accept a portrait of those early pioneers as
artistic visionaries who turned their backs on the commercial theatre
when we recall that Arena Stage was originally organized as a profit-
making operation and that Margo Jones's efforts to continue a Broadway
directing career both gave her a glamorous aura back home and
conflicted with her responsibilities in Dallas almost, at one point, causing
her to abandon the Texas venture altogether.
3
The goals of the first
generation of leaders may have been more com pi icated than simply an
artistic revolution against Broadway. Although jones, for example, felt a
duty to dream that "we should have at least one hundred such theatres
in this United States, so that a cross-country traveler could stop off every
night to see a different play," she also wanted "a theatre of my own,
where I could do new plays and the classics."
4
At the Alley Theatre, an
early financial crisis was averted when Nina Vance signed Broadway star
Albert Dekker to do Death of a Salesman. When that success could not
be extended because of Equity rules, Vance took the next step and
created an Equity company-and brought in more Broadway stars.
5
Vance revealed in 1971 the personal and, indeed, selfish motivation
behind her founding of the Alley:
I didn't start a theatre, I sought to express myself. . .. Therefore,
it did not occur to me in any way that I could not direct plays or
act in them-or anything-unless I clawed it out of the earth
2
Fichandler quoted in Nina Jane Stanley, " Nina Vance: Founder and Artistic
Director of Houston's Alley Theatre, 1947- 1980." (Ph. D. Diss., Indiana University,
1990), 146.
3
Sheehy, 90-93, 124, 244-45.
4
Margo Jones, "Theatre ' 50: A Dream Come True," in Ten Talents in the
American Theatre , ed. David H. Stevens (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1957), 105.
5
Dauphin, 99-100.
78 Landro
myself! Therefore, I didn' t set out to start a theatre, I set out to
start a place where I could express myself, and others could
come along.
6
As Herbert Blau noted in 1964, "If the new growth of the regional theatre
constitutes a sort of revolution in the American theatre, it is also
substantially without revolutionaries."
7
From the beginning, regardless of the idealism inherent in a new
idea, survival was the primary goal. And survival meant economic
stability-careful planning, cost control, and selling tickets. The
apocryphal story of the first meeting between Margo Jones and Nina
Vance conveys the intense commercial pragmatism of the early founders.
Expecting to discuss playwrights or acting techniques, Vance was taken
aback when Jones instead is reported to have said: "You're new, baby.
How many tickets can you sell?"
8
Asked what was the most important
thing she had learned during her years at the Alley, Nina Vance replied
"To survive."
9
The third problem with the scenario is that it posits a linear model
which assumes an evolutionary development from small, shoe-string
operations into today's large institutions. This assumption ignores both
the variety of different beginnings and the several pivotal changes and
retrenchments that successful companies have undergone since the
sixties. We should remember that the presence of charismatic founders
in Houston and Dallas is only one possible organizational pattern. In
some cities, amateur theatres gradually turned professional or, as in
Minneapolis and Seattle, the city fathers went out and bought a theatre
as a venture in community boosterism. In other cases, the founding
influence came from a local university. Even these categories fall short
of encompassing the huge difference between Fichandler sleeping on the
floor of her first make-shift premises in 1953 (a facility so small that an
actor who exited from the left side of the stage could not reenter from the
right side without leaving the theater and trotting around the building)
10
6
Nina Vance, interview by William Trotman, 31 May 1971, in Stanley, 5.
7
Herbert Blau, "I Don't Wanna Play," Saturday Review (22 February 1964): 39.
8
Sheehy, 36.
9
Nina Vance, interview by Orville Perkins, in Stanley, 65.
10
Irvin Molotsky, " Behind the Scenes, for 35 Years, at Arena Stage," New York
Times, 13 August 1985, p. 6.
Mythologizing Regional Theatre 79
and Tyrone Guthrie moving into a brand-new, custom-designed, two
million dollar theatre in 1963.
11
The American regional theatre did not
develop along a single trajectory; rather, the developmental narratives of
these theatres vary according to the highly individualistic purposes of
their founders, the accidents of geographic location, the levels of local
support, and the trial-and-error methods by means of which they evolved.
Finally, the success of early regional companies may have had less
to do with the purity of their visionary art as the myth makers would have
it than with the absence of competition. Other than touring productions
of Broadway hits, neither Dallas, Washington, nor Houston appeared to
have contained any variety of professional theatregoing possibilities prior
to the establishment of regional theatres. One of the most serious initial
problems Margo Jones faced, for example, was finding a space for her
theatre in a city of 350,000 in which most theatre space was controlled
by movie chains.
12
Similarly, when the Arena opened in Washington in
1950, there were no other resident theatres and the new operation had
the theatregoing public to itself.
13
In Houston, Nina Vance found that,
although there were many people returning to the area after the war, the
city had just one theatre: the Houston Little Theatre.
14
As late as 1964,
the planned opening of an ANTA theatre caused panic at the Alley
because Vance believed such competition would prove disastrous to her
operation; Vance mobilized nationwide support from the Ford Founda-
tion and regional theatre directors to defeat the idea.
15
The inherent problems of the conventional narrative of the develop-
ment of American regional theatre-oversimplification of its diversity into
a one-dimensional movement, mischaracterization of its pragmatic
founders as idealistic visionaries, imposition of a linear narrative of
evolution that ignores critical differences in original goals and values, and
inattention to the importance of lack of competition-all obscure the
multi-faceted nature of these theatres.
If we are to evaluate the success of the newest breed of theatre
leaders whose will to diversity has propelled them to the most unlikely
11
julius Novick, "The Theater," The Performing Arts and American Society, ed.
W. M. Lowry (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978), 104-106.
12
Sheehy, 124.
13
Molotsky, 6.
14
Stan ley, 32.
15
Ibid., 173-76.
80 Landro
spots, then we must first demythologize the early pioneers and accept
them as idiosyncratic, charismatic artists who started theatres according
to their own tastes because they wanted to work in a commercial theatre
whose prospects, especially for women, were slim. Next, we should
attempt to separate critical assumptions from actual achievements.
Towards this end, I will briefly review the ways in which some critics of
regional theatre over the last thirty years, despite evidence to the contrary
provided by actual practice, have created a set of idealized expectations
that has often led them to characterize the success of regional theatre as
failure.
The 1960s
Between 1965 and 1966, two landmark studies of the performing
arts in America-The Rockefeller Panel Report, The Performing Arts:
Problems and Prospects, and The Performing Arts: The Economic
Dilemma by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen-established the
foundation for an operational model by which nonprofit theatres could
fulfill their artistic potential. The Rockefeller report maintained that the
most radical changes in American theatre were the bypassing of
Broadway by the development of nonprofit theatres outside of New York
and the beginning of the decentralization of professional theatre
throughout the country. Since costs cannot be expected to be entirely
covered by box office receipts, the report argued that the success of
nonprofit theatres should be measured not by financial performance but
by the extent to which they fu lfi lied their artistic "obi igations," such as
the development of new works. In other words, professional artistic
achievement should define success.
16
One year later, the Twentieth Century Fund sponsored a landmark
study by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, that explored the
economics of the arts. In their study, Baumol and Bowen argued that
since the performing arts are labor intensive and, like a handicraft
industry in a machine age, incapable of raising the productivity of that
labor per man-hour, operating costs will rise over time relative to costs in
the economy as a whole. Because the costs of producing a live perfor-
mance would always grow more rapidly than the revenues from it,
because arts managers would continue to resist increases in ticket prices
for fear of discouraging audiences, and because fierce competition
existed from other arts and entertainment forms, they predicted that the
16
Rockefeller Panel Report, The Performing Arts: Problems and Prospects (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 43, 55-56.
Mythologizing Regional Theatre 81
earnings gap-or "cost disease"-would increase from year to year. The
resulting state of permanent crisis would force upon the companies
constantly rising fundraising needs.
17
Because nonprofit theatre "cannot" pay for itself nor control its
deficit growth, the general acceptance of this model not only created a
shift in focus from earned to unearned income, but also an acceptance of
deficit funding. This analysis suggested a new economic strategy for the
sixties: nonprofit theatres would need increasing subsidies in order to
grow because costs could not be controlled and deficits would inevitably
increase. Subsidy money was readily available. The Ford Foundation
alone contributed almost $18 million to fifteen companies between 1962
and 1974. Ford's objective was to help struggling companies with
general operating support in order for them to "turn the corner in their
quest for acceptance in their own communities and in the theater world
in general."
18
Regional theatres adapted their operations to this strategy. They
added fundraising staffs and learned how to ask for the available subsidy
money. Their budgets-and earnings gaps-grew. More important, they
became accustomed to big deficits. As the avai labi I ity of capital
increased, so did the number of regional theatres, which numbered about
forty by 1967. Audiences were also increasing, and theatres were
moving from makeshift premises into new downtown buildings.
Increased government funding was available from the National Endow-
ment for the Arts (NEA) and the Elementary and Secondary Education
Act.19
However, by 1967 and continuing into the early 1970s, critics,
responding to late sixties idealism and suspicion of institutions of the late
sixties, concluded that the search for subsidies to meet increasing deficits
had become a corrupt way of life that prevented regional theatre from
fulfilling what they considered its activist potential. Julius Novick, for
example, who surveyed thirty-three regional theatres of the 1967-68
season, believed that the primary problem was not economic, but artistic.
In his 1968 book, Beyond Broadway, Novick accused the people who
17
William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, Performing Arts, The Economic
Dilemma (New York: Twentieth-Century Fund, 1966), 8-11, 390-405.
18
See Richard Magat, The Ford Foundation at Work (New York: Plenum Press,
1979), 183, and John Lahoud, Theatre Reawakening: A Report on Ford Foundation
Assistance to American Drama (New York: Ford Foundation, 1977), 8, 39-41 .
19
Joseph Zeigler, Regional Theatre (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1973), 172. .
82 Landro
ran these theatres of the inability to connect means to ends with any
urgency and of peddling "standard merchandise in which they have no
personal stake."
20
Making the questionable assumption that these
theatres should have become mature organizations in only three or four
seasons, Novick criticized their leaders' failure to achieve stability as
institutions.
In A Theatre Divided (1967), Martin Gottfried similarly criticized the
dream of regional theatre as contaminated by the race to gain subsidy,
which had transformed a vital new force into a business "ultradependent
on the giant balloon blown up with the funds of American Subsidy."
21
In his view, the artistic founders, desperate idealists willing to work for
little more than satisfaction, had lost their innovative energy and their
independence and would do anything to get money. As a result, "the
running of a resident theater becomes a highly institutional job requiring
poI itical dexterity, trustee-juggling, foundation infighting, tea-time
community relations and, not least, boxing out the other resident theaters
i.n the power pattern of American Subsidy."
22
Gottfried especially considered the gradual institutionalization of
these theatres as abhorrent. Using a simplistic bipolar model of theatre
history typical of the polarized thinking in the 1960s, the author declared
that regional theatres had gone from "independent leftists fleeing
Broadway philistinism to ultramodern institutionalists who know every
trick of the rightist American subsidy game."
23
Totally dependent upon
subsidy, American regional theatre had become, in Gottfried's view,
repetitious and faddish, its decision-making contaminated by the need to
attract mainstream audiences and funding. This was an astonishingly
early declaration of failure. Ford Foundation and NEA money had begun
to fuel the regionals' growth only a year or two before, but Gottfried
decided that these theatres had already lost their credibility. He believed
that only when resident theatre directors had regained their individual is-
tic vision and drive would they create a true national theatre.
The crux of the disappointment expressed by commentators such as
Gottfried and Novick was the expectation that regional theatres existed
primarily to produce new and revolutionary plays. Embracing the
20
Julius Novick, Beyond Broadway (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), 8, 21.
21
Martin Gottfried, A Theater Divided, the Postwar American Stage (Boston:
Little, Brown and Co., 1967), 127.
22
Ibid., 105.
23
Ibid., 104.
Mythologizing Regional Theatre 83
idealism of such pioneers as Margo Jones, who wrote of her belief that
"the only way a theatre can be progressive is to do new plays," they
ignored Jones's equally emphatic insistence on balanced programming:
"At the same time, I do think that it [regional theatre] should present the
classics, because these have been proved through the ages to be I iterary
and dramatic masterpieces. They must be kept alive for our audiences of
today."
24
Perhaps the study that best conveys the sense of disappointed
expectations of the 1960s is Joseph Zeigler's Regional Theatre: The
Revolutionary Stage, publ ished in 1973. Zeigler argued that the
appearance of regional theatres was not simply a new decentralization
from Broadway, but an anti-Establishment "revolution" that began with
Margo Jones and ended with Joseph Papp when productions of the New
York Shakespeare Festival succeeded on Broadway.
25
Zeigler believed
that the institutional approach that had once been the means of survival
had now become a curse. The combination of overstructuring and the
achievement of Establishment status that promoted a homogenization of
programming and philosophy had led to a
1
' malaise" caused by the
desire for stability, quality, and centrality:
The thrust toward stability bred uneasiness over the theatre' s
service function in the community. The thrust toward quality
bred a horror of sameness toward theatres. The thrust toward
centrality bred fears that the thrust itself might not succeed.
These last fears constitute the regional dilemma: the nagging
suspicion in people who have given their lives to the movement
that they might have thus relegated themselves to a minor
position on the periphery.
26
Regional theatres had failed to continue Zeigler's revolution in two ways:
either they went financially bankrupt because they could not achieve a
solid financial foundation or they became artistically bankrupt because
they achieved stability as an institution. Within this circular reasoning,
success was not really success.
The assumption that regional theatre had not fulfilled its artistic
potential was challenged by theatre artists who stressed the practical
underpinnings of their operations. Tunc Yalman, artistic director of the
24
Jones, "Theatre,' 50," 109.
25
Zeigler, 170, 193.
26
Ibid., 200.
84
Landro
Mi !waukee Repertory Theatre, for example, responding to a set of
questions from the Tulane Drama Review (TOR) in 1968, angrily rejected
the assumption of failure and reminded his critics that the classics, not
new plays, were the primary thrust of most regional companies:
Who the hell are these critics? And if they exist, how many
productions at how many regional theatres have they seen
recently? To imply that the regional theatre has failed to set a
high artistic standard for itself is a negation of the very reason for
regional theatres. If we do not at least set a high standard for
ourselves, then why exist? If we don't, who will? David
Merrick? .. . TOR seems to forget that regional theatres, just like
symphony orchestras, by their very nature, are not formed and
do not exist for the sake of artistic innovations, but rather as a
source (usually the only source) for an entire community to get
acquainted with the great works of the past and the
contemporary era.
27
By the early seventies, then, the basic elements of the regional theatre
mythology were already in place. A collection of highly individualistic,
geographically separate approaches to producing quality theatre away
from the Broadway Establishment, had, despite little organizational
precedent, succeeded in attracting enough mainstream funding and
audiences to establish more than eighty stable nonprofit institutions
offering year-round professional theatre. Yet these remarkably successful
theatres were considered to have failed to fulfill their promise as
alternatives to commercialism because they had not fulfilled a sixties
scenario that demanded they reject the "contamination" of mainstream
money and audiences and remain small, revolutionary collectives.
Although theatre leaders had proven their ability to create stable, if
fragile, institutions capable of continuity and growth, and although,
according to Variety, by 1966 there were more professional actors
working in regional companies than in Broadway and touring
productions/
8
critics faulted them for not realizing their potential to
27
Tunc Yalman, in " The Regional Theatre: Four Vi ews, " The Drama Review 13
(Fall 1968) : 22-23.
28
Tom Morse, " Hinterland legits Top B'Way," Variety (9 March 1966): 1.
Mythologizing Regional Theatre 85
become a "dynamic and expressive force in this country's artistic life
. .. doomed to suckle at the shrinking breast of Broadway and become
another last hope in the annals of the American theater."
29
The 1970s
While we usually consider the sixties as the boom period of growth,
it was in the seventies that America's regional theatre experienced its
greatest increases in number of companies, budget and audience growth,
and productivity. Until 1959, for example, the Theatre Communications
Group (TCG) had 28 member theatres; that number grew to 55 between
1960 and 1969.
30
By 1979, however, TCG membership included 160
nonprofit professional theatres in 85 cities. Minneapolis, for example,
had by 1979 not only the Guthrie, but the Minneapolis Children's
Theatre Company, the Cricket Theatre, the Actors Theatre of St. Paul, the
Playwrights' Lab, the Mixed Blood Theatre Company, and Penumbra;
San Francisco possessed, in addition to the American Conservatory
Theatre with its $5.7 million budget, the Magic Theatre, the San
Francisco Mime Troupe, the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the Berkeley
Stage company and the julian Theatre.
31
Chicago, a latecomer to the
regional theatre structure, experienced during the seventies an unprece-
dented growth in its theatrical community with the Goodman, the St.
Nicolas Theatre company that grew from a 1974 operating budget of
$12,000 to one of over $1 million by 1979, the Victory Gardens Theatre,
the Organic Theatre Company, the Body Politic Theatre, The Wisdom
Bridge Theatre, the North Light Repertory Company, and The
Steppenwolf Theatre Company.
32
Much of this growth was funded with
foundation and government grants.
33
29
Robert E. Gard, Marston Balch, Pauline B. Temkin eds., Theater in America:
Appraisal and Challenge (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1968), 162.
30
Theatre Profiles 11 (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1994), 178-
79.
31
Theatre Profiles 4 (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1979), 24.
32
See Glenna Syse, "Chicago Theatre Finally Plays Second to None," Chicago
Sun Times, 30 December 1979, sec. 3, p. 3., and Theatre Profiles 4, 256-57.
33
The Ford Foundation continued to support major companies unti I 1977. Arena
Stage, for instance, received $600,000 from Ford in 1970; the Seattle Repertory,
$300,000; and San Francisco's ACT, $1.5 million. By 1977, Ford had given away
nearly $26 million to theatre companies throughout the country. In addition, the NEA
86 Landro
During this decade, regional theatres were developing their own
distinctive profiles. Some artistic leaders, for example, discovering that
rotating repertory or a permanent acting company were seldom workable
ways of running a successful regional organization, adapted their goals
to standard stock runs and jobbed-in actors. In addition, several theatres,
noting the successful transferring of Arena's The Great White Hope to
New York in 1967, discovered that closer relations with Broadway could
be financially profitable and garner the national recognition necessary to
attract major actors and directors. The ultimate Broadway recognition
came in 1976, when Arena Stage received the first Antoinette Perry
Award given to regional theatres. A distinctly New York accolade, the
award has continued to be given each year to individual regional
theatres. Zelda Fichandler provided a list of the achievements that she
shared with other founders during this period:
We taught ourselves how to direct, produce, administer, raise
money, work with acting companies, work without acting
companies, make grant applications, raise budgets, raise
standards, build buildings, teach and involve a community,
change the taste of a community, fai I and rise again like the
phoenix or, in some ways, fail and not rise again, play a season
of plays, then another season and another, search out new
playwrights, learn about the crafts of the theater almost without
teachers.
34
Noting the growth in size and number of regional companies,
however, critics saw only continued betrayal and a loss of integrity.
35
Yes, critics seemed to say, they grew into efficient producing
organizations, but at the cost of quality and vision; yes, they achieved
high professional standards, but at the cost of becoming commercialized.
One of the most outspoken critics was Robert Brustein, whose scenario
about how regional theatres had been debauched by the temptations of
Broadway and the influence of outside funders reached a crescendo of
Shakespeare Festival; $117,500 to Arena Stage; $95,000 to ACT, all in 1971). See
Lahoud, 39-41 , Zeigler, 245, and Magat, 183.
34
Zelda Fichandler, in Rustom Bharucha, "Anatomy of the Regional Theater,"
Theater (Summer 1979): 11.
35
See Martin Gottfreid, "What Shall It Profit a Theatre If ... ?," New York Times,
23 August 1970, sec. 2, p.l.
Mythologizing Regional Theatre 87
outrage by the mid-seventies.
36
Brustein characterized the relationship
between arts organizations and funders as polarized, with private
enterprise "gradually crushing the delicate quasi-socialist membrane of
the communal performing arts."
37
The notion that foundation subsidy led to outside control over artistic
policy would have amazed someone like Nina Vance. According to Che
Moody, a long-time staff member at the Alley, Vance would have rejected
any such suggestion:
I used to get so angry; I would say in speeches that it was
ludicrous to think the Ford Foundation was dictating policy to
Nina. That is the last thing she would have put up with. I was
in her office when she talked to Mac Lowry once-l've forgotten
what it was they wanted her to do. And she said, "O.K., I'll tell
you what I'm going to do. I refuse the grant. You can take the
grant back. No one is dictating artistic policy to me under any
circumstances, and I do not want the grant." She meant every
word of it, and they backed off like crazy because Mac Lowry
wanted her to have that grant. She was ready to hand it back.
She absolutely wasn't going to be dictated to.
38
Duncan Ross, the artistic director of The Seattle Repertory Theatre,
defended the regionals' accomplishments at a 1980 TCG conference and
wisely placed the issue into a national cultural context:
There probably is a "malaise," a word I have heard often at this
conference, but I don't believe it is a malaise of the American
people or the American spirit. I think it may be a consequence
of an enormous cultural jump that this country has made in 20
years in our art. I came to this country in 1961, and what has
happened in theatre across the whole country in those 20 years
represents something that would have taken maybe 50 years in
other countries.
39
36
Robert Brustein, "Art Versus Arts Advocacy In the Non-Commercial Theater,"
New York Times, 4 July 1976, sec. 2, p. 5.
37
Robert Brustein, "Can the Show Go On?," New York Times, 10 July 1977, 59.
38
Che Moody, interview by William Trotman, in Stanley, 184.
39
TCG, "Proceedings," 41-42.
88 Landro
New financial data tended to confirm the views of artistic leaders that
regional theatres had done a remarkable job of solving their economic
problems. A major financial study of the performing arts, produced in
1974 by the Ford Foundation, provided information from 166 theatres,
operas, symphonies, and dance companies from 1965-66 through 1970-
71.40 Among the twenty-seven resident theatres included in this study,
an accumulated earnings gap amounted to $6.6 million but, after
unearned income was added, this gap was reduced to a minuscule
$46,000, the lowest of all the arts categories. In effect, the impact of the
"cost disease" had been nullified by successful uncovering of new
contributions. Despite a degree of financial fragility, these twenty-seven
theatres, through a combination of aggressive fundraising and budget
control, appeared to be holding their own.
In 1981, the National Endowment for the Arts compiled data from
over 1600 theatres, including Broadway theatres, road companies, dinner
and summer theatres, and nonprofit theatres to produce a research report
for the United States Senate. The report was entitled Conditions and
Needs of the Professional American Theatre, and used data from the
previous Ford study, plus financial statements from sample theatres,
information from the National Endowment files and from the New York
State Council on the Arts. Among the sample theatres were 59 members
of the League of Resident Theatres (LORT) and 113 small theatres spread
all over the country.
41
NEA researchers found that regional theatre
between 1966 and 1977 had experienced an extraordinary growth.
Theatre activity had increased dramatically. The larger theatres had
doubled their audience attendance since 1966; and, as a result of these
loyal audiences, artistic leaders felt they could take more programming
risks. As the number of theatres increased, the number of new plays
produced each year seemed to have doubled since 1961. Financial
needs were being met; contributions had been steadily growing.
Although their prognosis for the future remained guarded, researchers
concluded that the theatre had adjusted well to the changing economic
conditions. The underlying sense of health reflected in the report was
captured in a 1979 interview wHh Arvin Brown, artistic director of the
Long Wharf:
4
Ford Foundation, The Finances of the Performing Arts (New York: Ford
Foundation, 1974), 7-8.
41
National Endowment for the Arts, Conditions and Needs of the Professional
American Theatre (Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 1981 ), 17.
Mythologizing Regional Theatre
There are plenty of reasons to be frightened for the future of the
theater, but only frightened as to what extreme events or
pressures might bring. I think there's an essential health
radiating from within. We've been around long enough to have
found our audiences. One of the interesting things, which I'm
sure you'll find as you do these interviews, is that the problem
of most of us is not audiences. Long Wharf cannot have any
more audiences than we have now, and we're not alone in that.
That's a big change. The thing I also feel excited about is that the
discrimination and adventurousness of the audience has
changed tremendously. We do our most . exciting, most
immediate business with new plays. All it takes is to announce
that we're putting a new play on that stage, and the interest is
immediate. That's a complete reversal from what was true five
to seven years ago, and it can only be because, over those years,
the audience has seen enough new plays that have proved to be
satisfying and challenging evenings that they're not afraid.
42
89
One of the last book-length studies of the regional theatre in the
seventies, Gerald Berkowitz's New Broadways (1982), served as a
transition to the eighties by examining a number of large regional
companies and stressing the previous decade's achievements. As its title
implies, Berkowitz attempted to break the habit of evaluating regional
theatre using the outdated standards of Broadway centrism. For
Berkowitz, despite the closing of some theatres because of financial
pressures, personality clashes or the simple fact that "their cities were just
not ready to support a resident theatre,"
43
there was no question of the
region a Is' success: "The growth of the resident theatre movement and the
spread of vital and fertile theatrical activity independent of New York is
clearly the most significant development in the American theatre since
1950."
44
Moreover, the study placed the growing relationship between
the regionals and Broadway in a non-judgmental context, explaining that
even though transfers of regional productions to Broadway had created
identity problems for both sides, it was not a question of either/or, as
42
Janice Paran and Joel Schechter, "Long Wharf: An Interview with Arvin
Brown," Theater (Summer 1979): 46.
43
Gerald Berkowitz, New Broadways, Theatre Across America, 1950-1980
(Totowa, NJ: Rowan and Littlefield, 1982), 76.
44
Ibid., 87
90
Landro
some watchdog critics such as Gottfried had argued. The question,
instead, was one of geography:
The power that Broadway still bore in 1980 was borrowed
power; it came from being located in the intellectual, cultural,
commercial and communications capital of the country . ...
Broadway's continuing importance was a function, not of its
centrality in the American theatre, but of New York City's
centrality in American societyY
By 1980, the lines had been drawn more firmly between the
operational performance of regional theatre and its critics. The former
had achieved a remarkable growth sustained by an expanding foundation
and government funding base combined with effective internal cost
control. Audiences were growing, and new plays gradually combined
with the classics to create a healthy and increasingly commercialized
operating environment. Moreover, the theatres were proving surprisingly
adaptable. Faced with increased need for cash to fuel their growth,
with in a decade their managements had become successful fund raisers
across a range of funding opt ions. In addition, smaller "niche" theatres
had appeared as both complements and competitors to the larger
institutions. Critics such as Brustein, however, continued to refuse to
acknowledge this success and argued that such growth meant increased
dependence, loss of artistic innovation, and conservatism. In the sixties,
theatres that had been founded to produce the classics were criticized for
not doing new plays; in the seventies, now possessing the audiences
necessary for taking programming risks, the regionals were criticized for
becoming too conservative.
Had the regional theatres become more conservative as they grew
larger? Ruth Mayleas, director of the National Endowment for the Arts'
Theater Program, did not think so. Writing in 1979, she confirmed what
the growing data was suggesting:
One hears in certain quarters that, as the theaters grew larger
and had more at stake economically, they became more cautious
in their choices. My own observation, backed up by information
contained in hundredsof National Endowment applications over
the course of 12 years, indicates the opposite: as these theaters
became more established in their communities and as a genuine
rapport with audiences developed, their artistic scope seemed to
45
Ibid., 183.
Mythologizing Regional Theatre
broaden. Today new plays-American and otherwise-are
produced widely; the new play is out on the main stage, as well
as being developed on second and even third stages. Theaters
that ten years ago had no interest in new plays-or maybe their
directors did, but their audiences didn't-are actively seeking
them out; they are also less concerned about world premieres
and more about the quality of the plays themselves . . .. On
balance, the repertoires today reflect a far greater diversity in
general and certainly more attention to new plays in part icular.
46
91
Alan Schneider in 1982 expressed the frustration of artists who found
it impossible during the seventies to satisfy the critical nay-sayers who
seemed unable to evaluate regional theatre with any consistent criteria:
When we were not doing nearly so many new plays, we were
blamed for timidity (when in fact we were as yet simply unable
to convince the playwrights and agents to join our cause). When
we started to produce new plays in steadily increasing quantity
and quality, we got bawled out for being interested only in
doing tryouts for New York (which was not always so) and for
selling our non-profitable souls. When we were able, before TV
got them all, to field compani es of actors and have them stick
around for a season or two, we were blamed for encouraging
mediocrity and for imitating the Europeans so abominably.
When most of our theatres had to go back to casting for
individual productions only, we were accused of giving into the
Broadway system, which we weren't.
At a time when theatres were doing mostly classics (as the
Guthrie is doing now), we were told that we were just playing
it safe. When we weren't doing classics, we were blamed for
being afraid to tackle the grand themes. And if a theatre failed,
as many did and always do for a host of reasons, it was always
only because it was made up of fools and knaves-not because
the criti cs or the audiences might have had any limitations of
thei r own. If a theatre happened through some good fortune to
46
Ruth Mayl eas, " Resident Theaters as National Theatres," Theater (Summer
1979): 7-8.
92
Landro
survive and prosper, as a few have managed from time to time,
that could only be because it was conservative and "dull."
47
Such challenges made little difference to the critics. Their tendency to
find failure in success would lead to an even greater degree of critical
indictment in the 1980s, when real financial crises appeared.
The 1980s
If the seventies were a decade of dynamic growth for regional
theatre, the mid-eighties confronted these theatres with an economic
reversal that has continued to threaten their stability. The extent of the
financial reversal was evident from TCG reports. In 1984, TCG
published the first of its annual "Theatre Facts," a combination of leading
indicators, such as income, expenses, deficits, and audience growth
statistics presented in a five-year trend drawn from a membership
population of over 230 regional theatres nationwide. The data from 37
sample theatres spanned 1980 through 1984 and revealed a theatre
continuing to expand in budget growth until the 1981-82 season, when
contributed income, especially federal support, suddenly ded ined to
almost one-half of its former level. The decline produced sudden and
severe deficits for the sample theatres.
48
This financial reversal seemed
proof to the critics of regional theatre that the dream had been all but lost.
Despite a national recession that surprised even the largest American
corporations and forced economic retrenchment throughout the decade,
regional theatre was held up to higher standards of fiscal health than the
corporate sector. Peter Zeisler, for example, wondered in a 1985
editorial whether a "profound malaise" had gripped the regionals and
worried about a "growing sense of chaos within the field as various
players desperately try to maintain a tenuous foothold."
49
Regional theatre directors, meanwhile, tried to help the public to
understand the core strengths of their organizations. Responding in 1983
to the question of "Has the Regional Theater Fulfilled Its Promise?,"
Zelda Fichandler was adamant in setting the record straight:
47
Laura Ross, Theatre Profiles 5 (New York: Theatre Communications Group,
1982), xi.
48
See Samuel G. Freedman, "Financial Problems Are Compromising Nonprofit
Theaters," New York Times, 14 March 1984, sec. C, p.19. and Holley, "Theatre Facts
1984," 5.
49
Peter Zeisler, "A Growing Chaos," American Theatre (March 1985): 3.
Mythologizing Regional Theatre
I would say that regional theater has fulfilled its mission far more
than one would have suspected 25 or 30 years ago. That's not
to say it's on the cutting edge of genius. But considering it was
creating an administrative form as well as an art form in an
environment where financial support has been capricious, I
think it's amazing how it has grown and cleaved to itself. This
theater is run by people who are self-questioning, not
complacent. Consequently, it runs, changes, twists, erupts, and
survives.
50
93
Commentators usually refused to share Fichandler's confidence. They
believed that financial survival had come at the cost of an uartistic
deficit," that is, in seeking ways to economize, theatrical producers had
cut back along some dimensions of quality.
51
When the question of uls There An Artistic Deficit?" was put to
several directors of regional companies in 1985, however, their responses
showed little sense of malaise; instead, they revealed a struggle to adapt
to a different way of doing business in a tougher and less heady
environment. Gordon Davidson, artistic director of the Mark Taper
Forum, put it this way:
The needs we were fulfilling at the time we began our lonely
journey have changed. Our needs, our sense of accomplishment
and the people we try to communi cate with have changed. We
can neither become servants of the audiences that we talk with,
nor can we ignore them. The complicated partnership which
exists between the community in which we work and the work
which we do is a very delicate one.
We have created extraordinary vessels in which we can work,
one way or another. And we can work within limitations-that's
what the whole business has been about. 5
2
50
Zelda Fichandler, in Don Shewey, " Has The Regional Theater Fulfilled Its
Promise?," New York Times, 7 August 1983, sec. 2, p. 1.
51
See Freedman, " Financial Problems," Peter Zeisler, "Taking the Next Step, "
American Theatre (September 1985): 28, and Peter Zei sler, " Cost of Doing Business,"
American Theatre (May 1984): 3. In the latter article, Zeisler accused theatre leaders
of allowing economic survival to dominate over artistic concerns and buying stability
at the price of unreali zed artistic potential.
52
" The Art of the Possible," American Theatre (Apri l 1985): 18.
94
Landro
In a similar vein, Arvin Brown insisted that controlling general production
costs at the Long Wharf was a stop-gap measure only and not a
permanent artistic way of thinking. He expressed the same determination
as Davidson to meet this new challenge:
Yes, there is a financial crunch. Yes, to a certain extent
institutions are taking on a life of their own. But there are no
problems which cannot be solved if we, our staffs, and our
boards are capable of communicating what it is that makes us
continue to pursue this incredibly difficult-and finally,
supremely reward i ng-med i urn.
53
In fact, the evidence for an "artistic deficit" was largely anecdotal.
Smaller cast plays or single stage sets cannot be used to measure
production quality. In a 1993 work, economists james Heilburn and
Charles M. Gray agreed with the artistic leaders: "A cautious observer
would have to conclude that the existence of an artistic deficit is an
interesting hypothesis that has not yet been fully tested."
54
Nonetheless,
critical evaluators, in the grips of their own preconceptions, continued to
ignore the achievements of theatre practitioners.
By the end of the 1980s, the artistic directors and staffs of the major
theatres once again confuted the predictions of their critics that regional
theatre would not meet its goals. In its 1989 five-year trend of total
regional income and expenses, TCG reported that, as a result of budget
growth reductions beginning as early as 1986, the earnings gap which
had grown by twenty-one percent in 1985 was kept to around nine
percent growth by the end of the decade. Regional theatre, therefore,
had engineered a financial turnaround in only seven seasons.
55
Production activity had attained a new peak, the percentage increase in
box office income for 1988 and 1989 being double that of the previous
three seasons. Flat government funding had been offset by rises in
individual and corporate giving. 5
6
Although the improved picture was far
from universal, "programming success and sophisticated marketing
53
Ibid.
54
James Heilburn and Charles M. Gray, The Economics of Art and Culture
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 146.
55
Barbara Janowitz, "Theatre Facts 1989," American Theatre (April 1990): 35.
56
Ibid., 33-34.
Mythologizing Regional Theatre 95
techniques combined to result in impressive audience growth throughout
the season."
57
Rather than an "artistic deficit," audiences were offered
more performances of a greater number of productions than ever before.
Interviews with artistic leaders demonstrated how these theatres, now
numbering nearly 300, had transformed themselves into more effective
and productive institutions that were learning how to reinvent themselves
for the 1990s.
Furthermore, a new generation of artistic leaders, such as Garland
Wright at the Guthrie, Mark Lamos at the Hartford Stage, Robert Falls at
the Goodman, and Des McAnuff at the La Jolla Playhouse, had grown up
entirely within an institutional theatre. As Garland Wright commented
on the challenges for the new leadership, "If one assumes that doing art
and running an institution are antithetical, then you took the wrong
job."sa
Instead of founding a new operation, this new generation of artistic
leaders joined an organization with a history and set of Des
McAnuff, although one of the few new leaders who had the opportunity
to start a LORT theatre-the La Jolla Playhouse-from scratch, understood
the new situation:
The founding producer-directors are being replaced by a
peculiar panel consisting of artistic director, managing director,
production manager and sometimes dramaturg, in some weird
relation to a board of trustees which is supposedly protecting a
statement of purpose created by someone who is no longer
around. Our theatres are passing from a generation of leaders
who began institutions out of a sense of need to a generation
that is inheriting them.
59
Hired to replace an outgoing predecessor, the new artistic director of the
1980s was often greeted by a board of directors and a staff with long
associations and faced with an entirely different set of questions than the
original founders.
Even more than the previous decade, regional theatre of the 1980s
underwent a major and difficult reinvention. It changed its economic
57
Ibid., 35.
58
Hilary De Vries, " New Paths for Regional Theatre," New York Times, 3
September 1989, sec. 2, p. 27.
59
Des McAnuff, "The Next Generations," Theatre Profiles 7 (New York: Theatre
Communi cations Group, 1986), 63.
96 Landro
basis, embraced a diversity that seriously challenged previous
organizational models, and produced a remarkable record of innovative
programming. By 1989, the American regional theatre had regained its
balance and inherited a new generation of artistic leaders just in time to
meet yet another f inancial recession and a more chaotic period of
challenge.
The 1990s
If the regional theatres needed to reorganize themselves to meet the
unexpected funding losses of the eighties, the economic realities of the
nineties exerted even harsher and more dangerous pressures. In the 1994
Theatre Facts, Barbara Janowitz reported that American regional theatre
was experiencing a new and disturbing level of deficits and instability.
In her sample five-year study of sixty-eight theatres, overall theatre
attendance and number of subscribers continued to decline while
expenses continued to grow at a faster rate than earnings. Earnings
covered only 58.6 percent of expenses-the smallest percentage in five
years. The resulting earnings gaps and aggregate operating deficits were
by far the largest reported in the five-year period. Moreover, real income
growth for the sample group was stagnant and more than half the sample
group played to a smaller total audience in 1994 than they did in 1990.
60
The combination of subsidy dependence of the sixties and the
expansionist habits of the seventies often proved lethal. The five-year
total of theatres that were forced to terminate operations was now 21
companies, including San Francisco's Eureka Theatre, The Theatre Project
in St. Louis, Santa Fe's New Mexico Repertory Theatre, The Los Angeles
Theatre Center, The Fairfield County Stage Company of Connecticut, and
Ohio's Players Theatre Columbus.
61
Several of these closings occurred
with a disconcerting suddenness which left many unanswered questions
and a bitter legacy of blame among local boards, staff, and audiences.
Theatre leaders, however, recognized their growing vulnerabilities
and attempted to prevent such collapses. Managements tried to
maximize audience attendance while conserving expenses by offering
more performances of fewer productions; they also increased special
production activity and used new marketing techniques, pared down
60
Barbara Janowitz, "Theatre Facts 1994," American Theatre (Apri I 1995): 1-5.
61
Barbara Janowitz, "Theatre Facts 1993," American Theatre (April 1994): 2;
Janowitz, "Theatre Facts 1994, " 1.
Mythologizing Regional Theatre 97
budgets, shared productions with other theatres, downsized casts, and
increasingly sophisticated means of soliciting donations.
62
As early as 1995, the tenacity of the regional leaders in attempting to
adapt their operations to the nineties began to demonstrate positive
results. In "Theatre Facts 1995," for example, a sample of 66 theatres
reported higher productivity in performances. Although their
subscription base had declined to its lowest level in the survey years,
increases in single and group ticket sales raised overall attendance.
Earned income grew more than two and a half times the growth rate of
expenses. The editors of "Theatre Facts 1995" concluded that "the
artistic and managing directors of member theatres are proving
themselves quite capable of recal ibrating their cultural strategies to
reposition their institutions within an increasingly consumer-oriented,
competitive marketplace."
63
In the 1990s, nonprofit theatres remain the
primary source of new works and talent for theatres across the country.
Since 1989, The Seattle Repertory, for instance, took The Heidi
Chronicles, The Sisters Rosensweig, I'm Not Rappaport, and
Conversations with My Father to New York for successful runs. Tony
Kushner's Angels in America won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for drama and
began its Broadway run after its earlier journey to regional theatres.
Similarly, Robert Schenkkans' The Kentucky Cycle-1992's Pulitzer Prize-
winner-reached Broadway after its origin in the nonprofit theatre.
Although the data convincingly showed new patterns of growth and
success amidst new pressures, the rhetoric of failure from commentators
continued to obscure that success. Robert Brustein, for example,
continued his campaign to cast the leaders of regional theatre as the
villains in his morality play in which the once-pure virgins had been
corrupted-put "back in the brothel " -by the evil knight of
commercialism. In Brustein's opinion, the best and most imaginative
directors had deserted a regional system which continued "so
remorselessly and inexorably, to suck the idealism and adventure-and
pleasure-out of any promising theatrical venture. "
64
A final example of the unwillingness to let go of the sixties myth was
a 1992 article by Todd London. The author, former literary director of
Robert Brustein's American Repertory Theatre, described himself as being
62
Janowitz, " Facts 1993," 11.
63
Steven Samuels and Alisha Ton sic, " Theatre Facts 1995," American Theatre
(April 1996): 6.
64
Robert Brustein, Reimagining American Theatre (New York: Hill and Wang,
1991), 10.
98 Landro
"in mourning," and attacked the institutional theatre as an establishment
that had:
preached and practiced its own well-intentioned brand of trickle-
down Reaganomics that, simply stated, argues that the only way
to sustain artists is through the institutions. Keep money and
resources flowing to Daddy-Bear and he can hire and protect
acting ensembles, resident directors, playwrights-of-the-house
and assorted other associate artists.
65
His solution was just as oversimplified as his prose-return to the sixties
no matter what the cost:
What seems necessary now for the American theatre
establishment to move past its chronic troubles ... is for it to
revise itself with the same chutzpah and abandon that infused its
founding ... even if it means risking our jobs and institutional
survival.
66
Fortunately, London's entreaty to find the future of regional theatre
by imitating the past is not representative of recent attitudes toward
regional theatre. American Theatre magazine, for example, recently has
shown shows signs of revising its editorial and reporting assumptions. A
1996 editorial entitled, appropriately, "New Glasses," admitted that, after
reviewing a collection of previous "Theatre Facts," what had once been
a straightforward recitation of facts had become a political document:
"Assumptions originally made to bring order to analysis ... hardened
into assertions of need, which weren't being met. The yearly review of
theatre operations and financing evolved into a drama of its own, with
annual crises required to sustain the rhetoric."
67
In addition, the author
acknowledged that previous predictions of cultural catastrophe had been
short-sighted and that regional theatres had both achieved a snug position
within their local communities and had demonstrated a new surge of
success based on adaptability:
65
Todd London, "What's Past is Prologue," American Theatre (July/August
1992): 22.
66
Ibid., 24.
67
John Sullivan, "New Glasses," American Theatre (April 1996): 3.
Mythologizing Regional Theatre
Earned income has taken a pronounced leap upwards; expenses
appear to be under control; single-ticket and group sales are
expanding. It seems safe to say . .. that our theatres may survive
these tumultuous times because they have leadership that knows
how to bend with shifting winds, to turn with the tides of change
and to swim with the economic currents.
68
99
In sum, the mythology of American regional theatre, embracing a
utopian revolutionary ideology and a set of exaggerated expectations,
has for thirty years not only been at variance with much of the
documented practice of these theatres, but has actually obscured their
remarkable success. What began as a new postwar consciousness of
expansive optimism, endless possibilities-the concept of progress in
Margo Jones's one hundred theatres stretching from coast to coast-was
transformed by foundation and government funding into exuberant
growth during the 1960s and 1970s. Nostalgia for the social activism of
the sixties and the boom years of the seventies, however, led
commentators to believe that these years were the norm and sustainable.
As financial resources necessary to sustain early levels of growth failed to
keep up with expectations, commentators became increasingly frustrated
and tended to give the worst side of the issue more exposure than ever
before. Their culture of complaint sustained itself by denying success and
often wildly exaggerating the problems. As a result, the more regional
theatre succeeded, the worse things seemed to feel for its artistic
leadership. Concentration on a false sense of failure has been so
relentless and so undiscriminating that every regional theatre in America
has seemed threatened with crisis or collapse.
A more useful scenario would show that the American regional
theatre did not originate full-blown from the head of Nina Vance and
Margo Jones, but grew from a variety of small, obscure, and struggling
companies (based frequently on a strong commercial thrust) led by a
disparate collection of individualistic entrepreneurs, often isolated from
one another and devoted as much to their own careers as to the initiation
of a theatre movement. Their purpose was perhaps less about banishing
Broadway than ending the dominance of the single-show, boom-or-bust
syndrome. These theatres made up their operating procedures and
artistic programming as they went along, never really lost their
connection to New York City and the Broadway stage, and created over
the past fifty years less an easily defined movement than a collection of
fragmented, community-based enterprises that continue to defy easy
68
lbid.
100 Landro
categorization. As late as 1991, Zelda Fichandler was still trying to
counter the impression of herself as a crusading visionary and explain the
true situation:
You have to understand the humbleness of the thought. Starting
Arena Stage was not a grandiose idea. That
1
S why I bristle a little
bit at the word vision, because it's too large a word. It was an
idea. A modest enthusiastic, improvisational, bumptious, ill-
thought-out idea.
69
It is understandable that the social idealism of the 1960s and 1970s
would influence expectations of the regional theatre during this period.
But why has it persisted into the 1980s and 1990s when the available
data and practice no longer support such assumptions? Because the myth
has been projected over and over, perhaps we no longer question its
oversimplified assumptions; the sense of failure has become a self-
fulfilling prophecy. Perhaps the myth endures because the current
generation of commentators formed their assumptions during the 1960s
and have not been able to grow beyond them. Or perhaps we are
convinced that regional theatre is rolling inexorably toward the edge of
a cliff because, as Robert Samuelson suggests, since the end of World
War II Americans in general have become so imbued with unrealistic
expectations that unattainable ambitions have, despite a half century of
success, led to a free-floating discontent:
Our attitudes are shaped more by unattained ambitions than
actual achievements. We seem to have lapsed into a selective
view of the American condition and into tortuous self-criticism.
We are hypersensitive to all of America's flaws and limits ... .
Our societal performance is judged against impossible standards
and, naturally, found wanting.
70
Regardless of the cause, now is the time to rethink our expectations,
jettison the old myths, and seek an honest reassessment of our basic
assumptions in a way that more closely matches the actual practice of a
new generation of regional theatre leaders. Rethinking expectat ions
might begin as Nello McDaniel and George Thorn suggest, with the
69
Des McAnuff, "The Times of Zelda Fichandler," American Theatre (March
1991): 23.
70
Robert J. Samuelson, The Good Life and Its Discontents (New York: Random
House, 1995), 7.
Mythologizing Regional Theatre 101
assumption that there are no longer models, only examples and that our
focus ought to begin with process rather than fixed models.
71
The old
mythology must be replaced with an exploration that captures the
fragmentation, pragmatism, adaptability, complex nature, and, above all,
success of regional theatre that is clearly reflected both in the original
records and in the most recent evidence.
71
Nella McDani el and George Thorn, "Restructuring: The Method Is the
Message," The }ourn'a/ of Arts Management, Law and Society 22 (Spring 1992): 11.
CONTRIBUTORS
DOROTHY CHANSKY is Assistant Professor of Theatre at University
of New Mexico in Albuquerque. She received her Ph.D. from
New York University Department of Performance Studies in
January of 1997.
VINCENT LANDRO is Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre in The
Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University. He
has published articles on American regional theatre management
practices and playhouse management in Renaissance London. He
is currently working on a study of the Theatrical Syndicate.
GERALDINE MASCHIO is the 1997 Carnegie Foundation State
Professor of the Year and Associate Professor of Theatre at the
University of Kentucky. Her articles on cross-dressing in the
American Theatre have appeared in the journal of Popular
Culture, Women and Performance, and the New England Theatre
journal. She is currently writing a book on this topic.
BRUCE McCONACHIE is Director of Graduate Studies in Theatre
Arts at the University of Pittsburgh. His recent books include
Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society 1820-
18 70 (1992) and Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the
Historiography of Performance (1989), co-edited with Thomas
Postlewait.
LEWIS E. SHELTON is Professor of Theatre at Kansas State Univer-
sity, Manhattan, where he teaches acting and directing, as well as
directing productions. He has published essays on Ben Teal, Alan
Schneider (both in journal of American Drama and Theatre), and
Elia Kazan. He continues to research the history of American
directing.
102
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33 West 42nJ Street
New York, NY 1()(>36
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An indispensable resource in keeping abreast of the latest theatre
developments in Western Europe. Issued three times a year- Spring,
Winter, and Fall - and edited by Marvin Carlson, each issue contains
a wealth of information about recent European festivals and
productions, including reviews, interviews, and reports. Winter
issues focus on the theatre in individual countries or on special
themes. News of forthcoming events: the latest in changes in artistic
directorships, new plays and playwrights, outstanding performances,
and directorial interpretations. - $15 per annum ($20.00 foreign).
Please send me the following CASTA publication:
Western European Stages
_@ $15.00 per year
(Foreign) _@ $20.00 per year
Total
Send order with enclosed check to:
CAST A, CUNY Graduate Center
33 West 42nd Street
New York, NY 10036