BY KENNETH MACGOWAN
THE THEATRE OF TO-MORROW.

The Redoutensaal, a great and splendid eighteenth-century ballroom in the Hofburg in Vienna, with an arrangement of curved walls, staircases and platforms newly built into one end. Here, under the light of crystal chandeliers, surrounded by the baroque beauty of Maria Theresa’s palace, audience and players unite in a relationship freed from all the associations of modern stage-setting, a relationship essentially theatrical in the newest and the oldest sense of the word. The stage is here shown cleared of all but a few chairs for the wedding scene in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.

CONTINENTAL
STAGECRAFT

KENNETH MACGOWAN
ROBERT EDMOND JONES

NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO THE
PLAYWRIGHTS
OF AMERICA

Certain of the chapters and illustrations of Continental Stagecraft have appeared in Vanity Fair, The Century Magazine, Arts and Decoration, The Bookman, The Theatre Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, The Theatre Arts Magazine, The Freeman, and Shadowland.

PREFATORY NOTE

This book is a record of impressions gained from ten weeks of travel through the theaters of France, Sweden, Germany, Czecho-Slovakia, and Austria during April, May, and June, 1922. These impressions are partly reinforced, partly orientated, through previous visits to Paris and London, and through a long sojourn of Mr. Jones in Germany just before the war.

For the purposes of this book, the journey excluded England, because observation and reliable report showed little there that was not a faint echo of what was to be found on the Continent. Russia was regretfully excluded for reasons of time and the difficulties of travel; but fortunately we were able to see in Stockholm a performance by the touring company of the Moscow Art Theater. Though the most interesting evenings of our trip were spent in the Redoutensaal in Vienna, and in the Vieux-Colombier and the Cirque Medrano in Paris, the larger part of our time was passed in Germany, and the greater number of illustrations come from productions seen there. In Berlin, in particular, there were things to be seen which had been much discussed by American visitors—Masse-Mensch, the Grosses Schauspielhaus, and the work of Leopold Jessner,—and these, we felt, demanded lengthy study and analysis.

In our ten weeks Mr. Jones and I saw close to sixty performances. We had expected to find it difficult, if not impossible, to see in this time as much as we should have liked of the really significant new work of the Continental theater. But, as it happened, good fortune and the great courtesy shown us everywhere enabled us to see almost everything that we wished. Through special performances arranged by the managements of the Royal Swedish Opera and the Berlin Volksbühne, and by Jacques Copeau, director of the Vieux-Colombier, we saw half a dozen most important productions which we might otherwise have missed. Luck and the repertory system found us at various German theaters in time to witness the most characteristic and significant work of the past few years. Finally, we were fortunate enough to come upon two theaters—one accomplished, the other potential—of extraordinary interest and importance, which had not as yet been seen or discussed by American visitors, the Redoutensaal in Vienna and the Cirque Medrano in Paris. Continental Stagecraft cannot pretend to be so exhaustive a study as a year’s visit would have made possible, but, in view of the exceptional circumstances, I think that it is more than proportionately representative.

With the exception of one sketch of a supposititious production in the Cirque Medrano, the illustrations show exactly what we saw and nothing else. Mr. Jones’s drawings are in themselves a kind of criticism which the modern theater stands much in need of. They give the actual visual quality of the best productions on the Continental stage far better than could photographs of settings and actors, which are usually flashlights innocent of the atmosphere produced by the stage lighting, or the designs of the scenic artists, which are sometimes imperfectly realized and sometimes bettered in actual production. Mr. Jones made his drawings as soon as might be after the performance, working from many rough notes made during the progress of the play. They are, I believe, uncommonly true to the impression gained by the audience. My only reservation would be that they catch the scene and the lighting always at the best moment, and, through the quality of the drawing, they sometimes add a beauty that is perhaps a little flattering to the original.

The text is a collaboration in ideas, though not, with the exception of the captions under the pictures, in writing. It is a compilation of our impressions, reactions, and conclusions. Because the words are my own, I have taken the liberty of the personal pronoun “I” when “we” would be editorially pompous or inexact.

The book began as an attempt to supplement the International Theater Exhibition held in Amsterdam and London during the first half of 1922. This large, varied, and arresting collection of sketches and models showed the art of the theater largely as it existed in the imaginations of the stage designers. Many of these sketches were for productions never made, some had been greatly altered for better or for worse in the course of production. It was our feeling that we might be able to add something to the knowledge which this important exhibition was spreading abroad if we could make some record, however incomplete, of the actual accomplishment of the artists upon the stage, and particularly of the directors and actors, who, after all, have the major share in the art of the theater.

We have seen so much that is interesting, so much that is significant, and a few things so stimulating and inspiriting, that we have been tempted often to push our report of impressions into an anticipation of future progress. We have, I fear, substituted our own imaginations in many places for those of the artists of the International Exhibition.

Kenneth Macgowan.

Pelham Manor, N. Y.,
1 August, 1922.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

CONTINENTAL STAGECRAFT

CONTINENTAL STAGECRAFT

CHAPTER I
BEYOND REALISM

It is a pity to begin a book by being dull. But a time of change is upon us in the theater, and a time of change is a time for definitions.

We have passed through such times before, and we have come out after some years—a century or so—with categories neatly fixed. We can look back along the history of English literature and place a judicial finger there and there and there and say Middle English, Classicism, Romanticism. All this is pretty well set. Then we come to Realism and its quagmires—quagmires of balked creation and quagmires of discussion—and we wallow about gesticulating and shouting and splashing the mud into our immortal eyes. What is this bog we have been so busy in? And what is the fitful and rather blinding storm of illumination which plays about the horizon and calls itself Expressionism?

Of course these things are just what we care to make them. Various parties to the argument choose various definitions—the kinds that suit their themes. I claim no more for mine than that they will make clear what I am talking about, and save a certain amount of futile dispute.

There are plenty of sources of confusion in discussions about art. To begin with, it is not an easy thing to limit a dynamic organism by definition. Creative efforts in drama, fiction or painting run out of one category and into another with distressing ease. More than that, there are apt to be many parts to a whole, many divisions to a category; and the parts or the divisions can be extraordinarily different. Finally, fanatics and tea-table gossips are equally unscrupulous when it comes to “proving” a point. They make the definitions of friends and foes mean what they like. They take the part for the whole, the division for the category. They pin down a lively and meandering work of art at just the place where they want it. Two disputants, bent on exhibiting the more indecent side of human intelligence, can make the twilight of discussion into a pit of black confusion.

Let us bring the thing down to the present quarrel in the theater: the quarrel with Realism, which has moments of clarity; the quarrel with Expressionism, which is murky as hell.

What are we going to mean when we talk about Realism? So far as this book goes, the word Realism means a way of looking at life which came into vogue about fifty years ago. It sees truth as representation. It demands a more or less literal picture of people and happenings. It insists that human beings upon the stage shall say or do only those things that are reasonably plausible in life. Resemblance is not always its end, but resemblance is a test that must be satisfied before any other quality may be admitted. Realism is not, of course, a matter of trousers, silk hats, and machinery. The realistic attitude can invade the sixteenth century, as it does in Hauptmann’s Florian Geyer. Trousers, silk hats, and machinery can be the properties of a non-realistic play like O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape. The test of Realism, as the term is here employed, is the test of plausibility: Would men and women talk in this fashion in real life under the conditions of time, place, and action supplied by the playwright? It is the business of the realistic playwright to draw as much as possible of inner truth to the surface without distorting the resemblance to actuality.

There should not be a great deal to quarrel about in such a definition of Realism, though its adherents may deny hotly the natural assertion that the method of Realism is barren either in whole or in part. At any rate, people generally understand what the row is about, and the disputants can kick up only about so much dust on this battle-field. Non-realism is another matter.

That the thing is the opposite of Realism is obvious in just one respect: It does not admit the test of resemblance. It denies in the theater, as furiously as do the works of Cézanne or Picasso in the picture gallery, the validity of representation. But what will it substitute for the technique of Realism and what will it call the substitute? It will go back to romantic periods for a free technique, but it will look forward for its materials along paths which psychological research has lately opened to men and women outside the ranks of true poetic genius. By this it may arrive at the inner truth of Shelley and Goethe, Shakespeare and Æschylus, while it sacrifices the outer truth of Ibsen and Bataille, Pinero and Galsworthy. The question is both of technique and of materials, for an inner truth is to be found in a study of the unconscious mind which will not brook the obstructions of actuality and resemblance. Inner truth is so much more important than actuality that the new type of drama will not bother itself to achieve both, and if one must infringe on the other—which must happen in almost every case—then it chooses quickly and fearlessly the inner truth.

To give this anti-Realism a name involves confusions dear to the heart of the controversialist. To give it the name Expressionism multiplies these confusions. Yet it is hard to see any alternative at the moment. We must embrace the name—and the confusions.

The chief confusion is due to the fact that there are two kinds of Expressionism, as there are doubtless two kinds of Realism. There is the larger and there is the smaller. Realism can be a mere technique—resemblance; and it can also be a resemblance through which you catch a vision of the soul. Expressionism can be seen by the friends of Realism only as the narrow, neurotic, violent, and formless art which displays itself in the dramas of the new German writers like Georg Kaiser. I should be prepared to defend this sort of Expressionism against the Realism of Augustus Thomas or even of John Galsworthy; but I should not admit that it was the end of the reaction against resemblance. Expressionism may be applied—and for the purposes of this book it shall be applied—to the whole tendency against Realism, just as Romanticism is applied to the whole tendency against Classicism. Many who dislike Realism and neurotic German Expressionism equally, prefer to give the form they seek some such well-worn and inoffensive label as Poetry. This finickiness doesn’t matter—except as it admits new confusions and dodges the issue. This issue is plain and should be kept plain. Realism, in any but a very extraordinary sense, is a cramp upon art. Instinctively artists of the theater are beginning to recognize this and to seek some way out. This involves new qualities in the play. For practical purposes let us call the way of escape Expressionism. Some other term may establish itself in the course of years, but for the moment this is all we have.

It is fairly easy to apply these terms and definitions to the current theater—if you are not too doctrinaire or too partizan. Realism yawningly enfolds ninety-nine out of a hundred playwrights. Maeterlinck and D’Annunzio require a little special attention and Shaw and Barrie raise nice points. But, in general, the distinction holds; resemblance shepherds the realistic plays, emanations of the unconscious guide us to the expressionistic. Even the purely representational performances which most of our actors and directors give do not always succeed in hiding the cleavage.

The most startling and disturbing experience that any friend of Expressionism can have is to sit through a performance of Tchehoff’s The Cherry Orchard by the Moscow Art Theater—even by that portion of Stanislavsky’s celebrated company which was cut off by Wrangel’s army while playing in Southern Russia and compelled to tour Europe for two years before repatriation was possible. Here is a play of a generation ago written by the man whose dramas were the cornerstone of success for the world’s greatest realistic theater. It is a genre study almost without plot: decayed aristocrats, old servants, newly-rich peasants and the incident of the sale for debt of an ancestral property. There is no more violence in it than the violence of life which rots an oak. There is no more distortion than is to be expected in light reflected from the troubled surface of life. And it is played with an almost utter perfection of realistic detail, complete impersonation, and rounded ensemble.

Yet if this is Realism we have never known Realism in our theater. It carries us through life and out on the other side. It drenches us with a mystic sense of existence. And when we read the text of the play and separate it from the extraordinary emotional actuality of the performance, we discover again and again and again speech that drives straight at free expression instead of resemblance, and action and character permeated with an almost religious symbolism. All this fused by playwright and players into what seems a work of the most perfect resemblance, but what is actually only the appearance of appearance.

The surface of the play is the surface of life. Mme. Ranevsky has returned to her estates after a turmoil of years in France. There are the usual appendages: a daughter, an adopted daughter, a governess, a housemaid, a major-domo, and a man-servant who have grown into the life of the house, a brother, an old, impoverished friend, a village clerk with his eye on the maid-servant, an up-and-coming merchant whose grandfather was a serf on the estate. These people talk a great deal, and in talking they make certain matters plain. One of these is that no one can save the estate, the beautiful cherry orchard, from the consequences of the family temperament. Madame and her brother have always spent their money as becomes gentlefolk, and some one has forgotten the secret of how the cherries used to be dried and sent to the markets of the far cities every year. They flounder about in self-deception, always hoping for succor, never willing to accept the scheme of the friendly merchant for cutting the estate up into villa lots, and never able to do anything themselves to save it from the auctioneer. Ultimately the merchant buys it in, and in blissful callousness puts the ax to the trees as the family leave the old house. Out of these people and their dilemma rises the most curious and moving symbolism. A suggestion of symbols, rather; for there is nothing bald about it. Truths of Russian temperament, even Russian politics, are figured with the hidden yet revealing quality that so often rises out of life like an odor from old fields, freighted with memories and anticipations. Perhaps the simplest and most moving example of this comes at the very end of the play. Through it all has moved a mumbling, bent old man who has been the loving guardian of the household for two generations, one of those rare and ancient servants who, by sheer servility, have lifted themselves out of servantage and into a share in the family life. In the end, the house is sold, the furniture removed, the shutters closed. The family depart. Then into the dim room comes the old man, forgotten. He totters across to the derelict sofa that has been left behind. He curls up on it like some old leaf. There in the darkness he dies. The soul of old Russia.

Realistic production at its best. The final moment of Tchehoff’s The Cherry Orchard as produced by the touring company of the Moscow Art Theatre. The ancestral house has been sold, curtains and pictures have been taken down, the furniture is shrouded. The shutters are closed. The lights are so dim that the room is no longer a room but a vague, brooding presence. The old servant gropes his way through the darkness, crawls upon the couch and dies.

As the old man dies something occurs that gives us all the license we need in order to see in other portions of the play methods and attitudes far indeed from Realism. The stage directions read: “A distant sound is heard, as if from the sky, and the sound of a string breaking, dying away, melancholy.” It is a sound that occurs also in the second act, unexplained, ominous. Symbolism. Arbitrary and very expressive sounds from heaven. Is it at all surprising to find the characters of this play indulging in lengthy accounts of their lives without taking the least trouble to find some stranger who might plausibly be ignorant of it all?

Perhaps this is Realism, perhaps not. Certainly it is both sharp with actuality and mystic with life’s intensity as these Russian players act it. The company did not contain the greatest of the group which Stanislavsky has gathered about him since he opened his theater in 1897. The director himself was not there to play the maundering brother. On this night Kachaloff was out of the cast. But Mme. Knipper, the widow of Tchehoff, played Mme. Ranevsky, and P. A. Pavloff played the old servant. How many of the other players acted parts long familiar to them I cannot say; but their work gave the impression not only of exceptionally fine individual performances but of an ensemble long and lovingly built up into perfection. It is an old cliché as well as a sad comment on acting as an art to say that a player does not play a character but literally is the character. In the case of this company from the Moscow Art Theater, there is a deep intensity in the performance and a frank desire for absolute impersonation which make such a comment on their playing of The Cherry Orchard the obvious and revealing truth. It is a comment that applies to the ensemble as much as to the individual acting.

The wedding of an utterly realistic performance with a play of mystic overtones is justified by the sense of an old and complete life which both possess. The intimacy of the actors with one another is as evident as the intimacy of the characters they play, and the intimacy of masters and servants in this Russian family. The welcome of the mistress on her return may be a matter of the clever rehearsal of off-stage noise—amazingly clever, you can believe; but when this adoration comes out of the wings and walks upon the stage, it is seen as the perfection of emotion and impersonation. A performance in so foreign a tongue as Russian gains because our eager imagination is at work to interpret in the acting the gaps left by the lack of words. It also loses, because the meaning of the play is not always there to show the linking of character and character, and of incident and incident; great spaces of action are blank and without emotion; we carry away fewer and shorter memories. How many and how continuous, however, are the memories of this performance, and how piercingly keen are the sharpest of them! Mme Knipper: a welling flood of emotion at the old nursery of her childhood; blind affection for the lovely, ancient orchard; childlike prodigality in her gesture as she scatters money that might once have saved the estate, followed by childlike penitence; and then the moment when she hears at last that the orchard is sold, when her ability to ignore and forget slips from her and she turns old before our eyes. Pavloff, prince of impersonators of old men, hobbling about the room; a bent and shuffling figure eternally mumbling, eternally nursing; a watery-eyed kiss for madame’s hand, a pat for the twisted collar of the brother, a touch to the turn of a curtain; an old, old, devoted shape speaking its fullness of character in every movement. Other figures almost as fully felt and seen. Each one doing the least little thing with an arresting significance. Here for once are actors who realize the importance of crossing a stage, as a display not of themselves but of their characters. Here, equally, are actors who have got by all the small egoisms of their kind. It is said that Stanislavsky found his players among artists, writers, students, shopkeepers, anywhere but in “the profession.” At any rate in twenty years he has made them into selfless but distinguished parts of a new organism. Their intimacy as people must be as great as the intimacy which they give their characters on the stage. They are an orchestra; their playing is a music, a harmony. They seem to have lived into this play in the eighteen years that they have given it until now they are part one of another. It does not matter that some may have had their rôles only five years, perhaps only five months. They are enveloped in the mother-liquor of this mature, well-aged performance. You recall the stew that Anatole France described: “To be good it must have been cooking lengthily upon a gentle fire. Clemence’s stew has been cooking for twenty years. She puts into the pot sometimes goose or bacon, sometimes sausage or beans, but it is always the same stew. The foundation endures; this ancient and precious foundation gives the stew the quality that in the pictures of old Venetian masters you find in the women’s flesh.”

Such Realism as this of the Moscow Art Theater compares most curiously with the best we know of realistic acting in the productions of David Belasco and Arthur Hopkins. It has the care and minutiæ of Belasco sharpened by far greater ability on the part of players and director, and mellowed by time. It has the naturalness of Hopkins; but, because it is secured by deliberate direction and not by the indirection of the American’s method, the naturalness fits into a general design and is never slipshod. (So far Stanislavsky denies life and its accidents!) It is, of course, worse than futile to compare such acting with our own for any purpose but understanding. We cannot achieve a performance of this kind so long as we have no permanent companies, no repertory system. It is not alone a matter of the leisurely method of production which Stanislavsky can employ,—months spent in study of the script, long readings and discussions over every character. Repertory keeps the actors playing a piece for years. They are not repeating themselves evening after evening with mechanical devotion. They come back to the play from other parts. They see it anew. If it is such a piece as The Cherry Orchard, they plunge into its depths with a sense of refreshment. They are the parts of a whole which they can never greatly alter, but which they can enrich by new contributions.

We have, then, in this performance an almost perfect example of minute and thorough Realism, fused into something beyond Realism through its union with a play distinctly expressionistic in certain qualities. It would be easy to see how frank, non-realistic acting could be applied to The Cherry Orchard. It is, in fact, very hard to see how the players can act some of the speeches as they do, notably the descriptions of themselves and their lives which the governess and Madame Ranevsky furnish to fellow-characters fully acquainted with all they say, characters who very rightly pay not the slightest heed. If ever a player had an opportunity to bridge directly the gap which has existed between stage and audience for the past fifty years, and to present emotion as simply and honestly and theatrically as do the gravestones in Spoon River, it is the actress who plays the governess. She begins the second act with the following speech, virtually a soliloquy, to which none of the others on the stage pay the least attention, even the attention of boredom:

I have no proper passport. I don’t know how old I am; I always feel I am still young. When I was a little girl my father and mother used to go about from one country fair to another, giving performances, and very good ones, too. I used to do the salto mortale and all sorts of tricks. When papa and mamma died, an old German lady adopted me and educated me. Good! When I grew up I became a governess. But where I come from and who I am I haven’t a notion. Who my parents were—very likely they weren’t married—I don’t know. I don’t know anything about it. I long to talk so, and I have no one to talk to, I have no friends or relations.

Is this Realism? Is it Expressionism? Is it something between, some Realism of the Spirit opposed to the Realism of Flesh which we know? Can we say that we know true Realism of the Flesh as yet? Even if we do know it in a few fugitive productions, are we ready to give up not only such Realism but also the possibility of deeply moving performances like this of The Cherry Orchard, and to go seeking a fresh and debatable thing far on the other side of experience? If we are, it is because, we see that such perfection as this of The Cherry Orchard is a very rare thing for which we pay with hours of the commonplace, and because we recognize that when a play reaches such spiritual quality it has traveled so far from Realism that the journey is almost over.

CHAPTER II
THE LIVING STAGE

There is something in the nature of the theater that makes Realism a natural and a thoroughly unsatisfactory method of expression. Its principal material, the actor, is too near actuality. It is no triumph of art to make a flesh-and-blood man named Grant Mitchell into a flesh-and-blood man named Andrew Lane. Especially when the heart of the whole business is an elaborate pretense that there really isn’t any actor, and there really isn’t any theater, and we are really looking through the fourth wall of a room in the next village.

Obviously no other art is so close to life or so quick with life’s vitality. Literature uses printed signs of a very arbitrary and formal nature, which we translate into words forming ideas and mental pictures, which, in turn, may suggest human beings and their emotions. Music employs sounds some of which faintly suggest bird-notes or the rumble of the heavens, but none of which comes within shouting distance of the human voice. Painting has pieces of canvas and lumps of colored clays, and these it arranges in patterns, through which, by custom and habit, we are able to gain an impression of a curiously flattened life. Even sculpture, literal as its rounded, three-dimensional shapes ordinarily are, must use the intermediary of clay or rock. The theater is the one art that works in the materials of life itself. It employs life to render life. Painting, architecture, and sculpture may supply a background to the actor, but the actor is the center of the play, and when he speaks the words of literature he speaks them as the actual human being from whom they are supposed to come.

The actor brings the theater far too close to life to please some of its great lovers. The actuality of the actor affrights them. Gordon Craig, once an actor and always a true partizan of the theater, has felt this. He has found the actor too much a piece of life, too much a creature of the emotions of existence, and too little an impersonal and dependable tool of the artist. “The actions of the actor’s body, the expression of his face, the sounds of his voice, all are at the mercy of the winds of his emotions.” He is not clay, he is not stone, he is not curves of ink, he is not arbitrary sounds produced from wood or brass. He is life itself, and a very irregular and undependable part of life. Therefore, says Craig, the thing that the actor gives us is not a work of art; “it is a series of accidental confessions.”

Now the contrast between the pliant and well-behaved clay and the intractable actor is interesting. And there is a certain significance in the fact that when Craig describes the work of the actor as a series of “accidental confessions,” he uses a phrase which would delight the harshest of the realists—the writers who practised Naturalism, the literal transcription of the irregularities of life. But the issue goes deeper. The actor is essential to the theater. He cannot be turned out for a glorified puppet, an Ubermarionette. But perhaps he can be told that he is far too near life and its accidents to spend his time imitating them. To give us life and its significance the dramatist, like workers in the other arts, needs an intermediary. If the actor is not a true intermediary, because he is a part of life, the dramatist has only to see that he can go beyond the actuality of the physical actor to Form. With the creative vitality of the living actor to awaken us and make us sensitive and responsive, the dramatist may strive to reach beyond outward truth to that inner truth which presents itself to us in deliberate and natural arrangements of life.

It is no easy thing to tell what is meant by the word Form when we take it past the idea of the design of things in a literal sense, and apply it to significance in the design of life. But it is easy to say that Form has nothing whatever to do with representation or illusion. As Clive Bell points out in his book Art, in which he makes a brilliant plea for what he calls “significant form” as the test of visual art, the fact that a thing is representative, does not at all suggest either the presence or the absence of Form. It does not preclude its having Form just as it does not in the least assure it. The theater will always have the physical body of the actor, and to that extent it will always be representational. But that is certainly all it need have of illusion. What the actor says and the atmosphere in which he appears may be absolutely non-representational. Even his physical body, as he uses it, may take on qualities outside and beyond illusion.

It remains the dramatist’s special business to master the extremely difficult task of fighting through to Form while retaining the realistic technique, or else—which seems far better—frankly to desert Realism, representation, illusion, and write directly in significant terms, no matter how unplausible they may be. After all, common sense sees that it is better to concentrate all of an artist’s technical energies on the major thing he wishes to accomplish. Bell says of the men and women of the future: “When they think of the early twentieth-century painters they will think only of the artists who tried to create Form—the artisans who tried to create illusions will be forgotten.” It is equally true that the artist who tries to create illusion is more than likely to forget to create Form.

Now creating Form does not mean hiding the actuality of the actor under strange robes. There seems to be a curious notion abroad that the alternative to Realism is Romance. It is true that in trying to escape out of Realism a number of playwrights have avoided reality and wandered into the never-never-land of Thalanna and Kongros. It is also true that modern sciences, history, archeology, and psychology, have made the past new and real and alive again, and that certain playwrights have seen in the rejuvenated ages a chance to escape the realistic and to attain more permanent values. But it is not true that the present offers smaller opportunities. Expressionist playwrights have already shown this conclusively enough; witness Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape.

Theatrical history has never been as popular with theatrical reformers as it should be. It shows not only that the realistic technique is a matter of the last half century, and that the greatest periods of the theater’s history were non-realistic. But it shows also that even when Realism was an impossible idea, and when expressive, significant Form was the only thing at which the playwright aimed, the theater and its audiences usually lived frankly and healthfully in the present.

Greek tragedy, to be sure, was not a thing of the present—except in the reality of its religious emotion. Its heroes came out of the past. They did not talk or act like the Athenians that watched them. They even dressed according to a set convention of their own. In every way the Greek tragic theater embraced Form, directly and naturally. It was in the temperament of the Greeks. Their sculpture was realistic to a degree never before reached and not surpassed in physical truth to-day; yet from these statues we gain a sense of Form far more significant than the sense of life which they give us. Representation was not an end to the Greek artist. The dramatist of Athens felt no desire to “humanize” his heroes or to make them like the people about him in any particular. The drama was religious in origin and had not yet grown temporal. So long as the Greek mind had its fondness for Form, there could be no demand for the smallest actuality.

But man’s natural fondness for “humanness” and “recognition” found plenty of opportunity for expression after the passing of the great Greeks. And it was satisfied in almost every case without breaking in too sharply on the heart of the drama, expression of Form. The medieval religious drama was both religious and temporal. The saints were very much of the times in clothes and in habits. The Bible characters lived the lives and wore the garments and exercised the minds of people of the Middle Ages. Shakespeare dipped back into history and into romance, too, but his Italian nobles dressed like Londoners, his Roman “mechanicals” were British workmen, and his Athenian yokels came out of the English countryside. Molière “modernized” the Roman rascal Phormio into the Neapolitan rascal Scapin, and the ordinary Parisian gentleman served him for Alceste. Phèdre and Iphigénie were not so very Greek. In England tragedians played Shakespeare in the costumes of their own day down through Garrick, Siddons, and Kemble. And do you imagine that all this had the slightest effect on the plays, any bearing on their expression of the inner Form rather than the outward shape of life? In spite of the flesh-and-blood actor, clothed in the costumes of the time, the playwright was saved from mere representation, from all this peep-hole business of Realism. Doubtless he was saved because the temper of his time was not corrupted and twisted and tortured by the unholy union of science and capitalism. But it is rather interesting to remember that the actors appeared in theaters so utterly unreal, so essentially theatrical, that nobody could imagine for a moment that he was standing with his eye glued to a chink in the fourth wall.

The theaters of the past united the temporal and the eternal, the passing moment and the permanent Form partly in innocence, and partly from a natural ability to understand things better in their own terms. We, too, can grasp more of the Form of life if we see it derived from the life we know. But this does not mean that the Elizabethans had the slightest interest in the thing that has absorbed our stage—plausibility, representation, resemblance. To-day we are beginning again to desire reality of soul instead of mere reality of body. We want to know about our own time and our own people, but we don’t give a hang to learn how imperfectly, how haltingly, a modern, realistic Hamlet would express his thoughts on suicide.

It is easy enough to see how much Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy would have lost if he had written like a Galsworthy. Poetry of word is not the only thing that would have gone by the board. Poetry of idea would have disappeared, too. More than that, the ability of a character to express himself would have been hideously confined within the formula of plausibility. Perhaps so great an artist could have written his tragedy without permitting a single person to speak an inner thought that time and circumstance could not bring out, but I am a little inclined to doubt it. And I am very much inclined to assert that the vitality and the effectiveness of such a work of unnatural and straining effort would have been nothing beside the vitality and effectiveness of the Hamlet we know.

George Pitoëff’s arrangement of He Who Gets Slapped in Paris. The stage is draped in black curtains. Narrow scarlet ribbons looped from the proscenium arch indicate a circus tent. The actors make their entrances and exists from behind a huge circus poster, which is changed from act to act.

For twenty years the European stage has struggled over the problem of plausibility and resemblance in setting. The thing called the new movement in the theater has spent half the time devising mechanisms and technique for achieving genuine representation instead of the bastard thing that tried to make a dining room out of badly painted and flimsy canvas. And it has spent about half the time trying to get rid of this machinery and this technique in order to escape the Realism which demanded such things. In Stockholm you see the touring company of the Moscow Art Theater playing realistic plays in just the sort of ugly, cheap, old setting that Craig, Reinhardt and Belasco equally set their faces against. In Dresden you see Shaw’s Pygmalion played at the State Schauspielhaus in settings as solid and illusive as stone and wood. In Paris you see the Russian Georges Pitoëff giving Andreyeff’s He Who Gets Slapped in black curtains with four ribbons looped up to indicate the form of a circus tent, and Tchehoff’s The Seagull in settings which go back to the old flapping canvas flats again, admitting that the theater is a place of pretense, and which then attempt—not very successfully—to give these flats, in color and outline, the Form of the play.

Still further along the way from Realism to an expressionist stage, you find Copeau’s naked stage in Paris that unites frankly with the auditorium, and changes very little from The S. S. Tenacity to Les Frères Karamazov. Finally in Vienna, you find, in the Redoutensaal made from the ballroom of Maria Theresa’s palace, a theater without proscenium, machinery or scenery, a theater where the actor is frankly the actor. Here you have the culminating expression of the growing sense in Europe that, because the stage is so close to life in the presence of the living actor, it need not and it must not attempt to create the illusion of reality. Through such a conception the theater is freed once more to seek the Form of life.

CHAPTER III
THE PATH OF THE PLAY

The story of the attempt of the theater to escape from Realism is a curious story. As a deliberate effort of the playwrights to see life in the terms of Form instead of accidental actuality it goes back only half a dozen years through the dramas of the Germans who adopted the word Expressionism to describe their aim and technique. It has hung potential for ten or fifteen years in the work of the more advanced and philosophic designers and directors of the new stagecraft, a waiting stimulus to the playwrights. As an unconscious impulse to reach beyond the limits of Realism its beginnings are to be traced back twenty, thirty, almost forty years in the work of some of Europe’s ablest realists.

The two greatest figures in the modern theater—which is the realistic theater—give the same demonstration of the limitations of Realism, and turn in the same fashion away from actuality and towards an intense spiritual vitality. Both Ibsen and Strindberg come out of Romanticism into Realism, and pass on into a Symbolism that is far on the way towards Expressionism. In Ibsen the new tendency is clearly marked in The Wild Duck (1884) and develops gradually through The Master Builder (1892) to completion in When We Dead Awaken (1899). Strindberg’s Towards Damascus (1898) carries strong hints of the spiritual intensity which threatened the outer reality of so many of Strindberg’s earlier plays; and by 1902, in Swanwhite and The Dream Play, he is well embarked on a type of non-realistic drama which finds a bizarre culmination in The Spook Sonata in 1907.

Two other European playwrights of distinction—Tchehoff and Wedekind—show a similar dissatisfaction with pure Realism, though neither passes through the three stages of development to be traced in Ibsen and Strindberg. The work of Tchehoff and the work of Wedekind is all pretty much of a piece. It is never wholly realistic in the narrowest sense. Each has a peculiar quality and method throughout. Tchehoff, beginning in 1896 with The Seagull, keeps to a Realism of such intense spiritual truth that, in a performance of his The Cherry Orchard by the Moscow Art Theater such as I have described, its extraordinary virtues are the virtues of Expressionism. Wedekind’s first play, the thesis-drama The Awakening of Spring, written in 1891, is stamped with his curious and violent intensity, and his sense of the spiritual overtones of life. In 1895 and 1903 he produced in the two parts of Lulu—Erdgeist and Pandora’s Box—dramas horrifically actual in their pictures of sexual aberration and at the same time so intense psychologically and so sharply defined and apt in action that their Realism treads close on the boundaries which Expressionism has over-passed.

There is a curious distinction in end and means between such plays as these of Ibsen, Strindberg, Tchehoff, and Wedekind, and the newer expressionist dramas of Germany and America. The earlier plays indulge in symbolic, fantastic, deeply spiritual ideas, but their language is almost always highly realistic. They are still bound to the past of their authors and to the present of their theater. The newer expressionist dramas, on the other hand, are as free in speech as they are in idea. It is a freedom that often makes a harmonious wedding of end and means. Sometimes, as in plays of Der Sturm group, the language is so completely free from the bonds of actuality that it approaches the onomatopoetic verse of Mallarmé depending on sound for its sense. In Eugene O’Neill’s distinguished piece of Expressionism, The Hairy Ape, the playwright strikes a happy medium with speech which is realistic and characteristic in idiom but which is developed in idea, intensity and length of utterance clean past the possibilities of the people of the play. Occasionally you find a pseudo-expressionist piece like Vatermord, by Arnold Bronnen, whose action is naturalistic—grossly naturalistic—but whose language is often far from natural. This piece was first produced in Berlin in the summer of 1922 when the mind of the German capital could safely be described as neurotic. Its subject matter—the incest and patricide of the Œdipus complex, with a little adventitious homosexuality, all circling about a boy in his ’teens—produced a stormy session between adherents and opponents, a session finally ended by the Schutzpolizei with rifles and the command: “Sei ruhig, meine Herrschaften!” The run which followed at one of the theaters formerly directed by Max Reinhardt may be explained by the notorious subject matter, but there were critics to assert that Bronnen had a style of considerable power as well as novelty. The boy’s final speech, as he staggers onto the stage from an inner room, where he has killed his father, and rebuffs the passionate entreaties of his mother, is translated from the printed version, retaining the one form of punctuation used, the slanting dash to indicate the end of a line, though not necessarily of a sentence:

I’m through with you / I’m through with everything / Go bury
your husband you are old / I am young / I don’t know you /
I am free /
Nobody in front of me nobody next to me nobody over me father’s
dead / Heaven I spring up to you I fly / It pounds shakes groans
complains must rise swells wells up springs up flies must rise must
rise
I
I bloom

Before such an arrangement of words The Spook Sonata seems almost mid-Victorian. The Student speaks to the ghostly Milkmaid in the most matter of fact fashion. Even the old Mummy, the mad woman who always sits in a closet, talks like a most realistic parrot when she is not talking like a most realistic woman. Here it is the ideas that stagger and affright you, the molding minds, the walking Dead, the cook who draws all the nourishment out of the food before she serves it, the terrible relations of young and old; all of them are things having faint patterns in actuality and raised by Strindberg to a horrible clarity.

To follow the banner of Expressionism in playwriting—I say nothing of stage setting, for that is, happily, another matter—requires all three Graces and a strong stomach. The bizarre morbidity, the nauseating sexuality, the lack of any trace of joy or beauty, which characterize the work of most of those who labeled themselves expressionists in Germany during the past few years, match Strindberg at his unhappiest, while the vigor with which they drive their ideas forth in speech far outdoes him. Expressionism, in the narrow sense in which such plays define it, is a violent storm of emotion beating up from the unconscious mind. It is no more than the waves which shatter themselves on the shore of our conscious existence, only a distorted hint of the deep and mysterious sea of the unconscious. Expressionism, as we have so far known it, is a meeting of the fringes of the conscious and the unconscious, and the meeting is startling indeed.

Germany’s reception of the expressionist plays was open-minded, as is Germany’s reception of almost all new effort. The dramas of the best of the expressionists—Georg Kaiser and Walter Hasenclever—were produced in leading theaters, on the official stages of Dresden and of Frankfort, and in Reinhardt’s playhouses, for example. But by the summer of 1922 they had disappeared from the very catholic and long-suffering repertories of these houses, and while Wedekind and Strindberg were produced from Stockholm to Vienna, the simon-pure expressionists, the playwrights of what I think it is fair to call the lesser Expressionism, were hardly to be seen. Only the one-act opera, Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen, a composition by Paul Hindemith on a playlet by the artist-author, Oskar Kokoschka, was being played.

This piece, produced at the City Opera House in Frankfort, points an interesting union and parallel between at least one sort of Expressionism and music. The action, passing in some indefinite olden time, is symbolically very difficult—quite as difficult as its title, Murderer, Hope of Women. The emotion of the scenes, on the other hand, is clear enough, and it receives from the music a background of color, a tonal reinforcement, that is most welcome; at the same time the composer finds in the vigorous and intense, if somewhat arbitrary, feeling of the playwright a provocative challenge.

A setting by Ludwig Sievert for Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen, an expressionistic opera by Kokoschka. Ramps lead from the center of the stage to raised platforms right and left. Dark walls rise at the back, broken by triangular entrances at either side and by a grilled doorway in the center, flanked by tall triangular pylons of red-orange.

Kokoschka himself designed a setting for Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen when it was first produced at the Albert Theater in Dresden as a play. A photograph of the production betrays an uneasy setting, hardly stage-worthy in arrangement and composition, and rather badly executed. The pages of Die Neue Schaubühne have shown several other expressionist stage designs as unsatisfactory, but in the more widely known productions these pieces have been lucky enough to fall into the hands of first-rate men like Adolf Linnebach of Dresden and Ludwig Sievert of Frankfort. Sketches made from Linnebach’s production of Hasenclever’s Jenseits in Dresden show a simple and effective use of light and shadow and of little else, with certain necessary elements of design projected by a sort of magic-lantern technique upon the background of dome or curtain. In actual performance Sievert’s setting for the Kokoschka opera is strong and arresting with dark surfaces massed in triangles symbolic of the feminine element dominant in the piece, and with a successful, if not very subtle, use of red and red-orange on the pylon surfaces guarding the prison door. The direction of the singers and chorus, under the hand of Dr. Ernst Lert, is a thoroughly expressive part of music and setting.

Though the most celebrated plays of the expressionist pioneers have failed to make a place for themselves in the German repertory, they have had their effect. Playwrights who might have written in the conventional mode have been turned towards a freer technique, and they have succeeded in accomplishing interesting and promising things. The most notable of the plays thus produced, Masse-Mensch, deserves a chapter to itself. I shall write here of two lesser works by Karel Capek, one seen in the Czech National Theater, where it was first produced, the other read in a German translation.

In the first, The Insect Comedy, Karel Capek’s brother, a scenic artist, has a share as collaborator. It is a fantastic and picturesque piece of satire providing excellent opportunities for the newer methods in production. It is a comment on post-war conditions as symbolized in the life of butterflies, beetles, and ants. The prolog finds a young man wandering in the woods, and puts him comfortably to sleep on a grassy bank after a little talk with an absurdly pedantical entomologist. He sleeps through the three succeeding acts surrounded and occasionally disturbed by figures of insects grown life-size. The first act passes with the brilliant butterflies, who stand for the heedless, unproductive men and women of the social and pseudo-artistic worlds with time for only chatter and flirtation while disaster rumbles beneath them. In the production of this scene, the régisseur, K. H. Hilar, keeps the players moving ceaselessly, their hands and heads lightly undulating, with the restlessness of the antennæed world, while high around the back of the scene various of the brightly costumed insects constantly dance behind the translucent curtain of the woods.

In the second scene the humble grubs crawl in and out of their burrows on busy errands of accumulation. These are the assiduous profiteers and misers of war-time society. The act ends in a broad touch of comedy. A beetle has been murdering passing insects and dragging their bodies down below for his wife to hoard. There enters The Parasite, a tramp bug. He does not work. Why should he? He has only to wait for the busy capitalists of his world to fill their larders. Then, when the time comes, he will rise—or more accurately descend—and the wealth of the world will be his. He ducks into the beetle’s hole, and in a few moments he comes up, a swollen and jovial Communist, dancing in glee. The ever-present prompter’s box serves conveniently for one of the holes, and the background of green and black woods is projected instead of painted; otherwise there is little of interest in the staging of this scene.

The third act carries us to the ants. Here are the eternal laborers, tramping in an endless circle upon their work, under the eye of superiors very like officers and to a rhythm beaten out by a more privileged one of their own number. The Capeks costume the army of ants in khaki, puttees and all, and provide a desolate hill for a background. It might be blasted by either war or commerce. Into its surface descend shafts that might lead to either mines or dugouts. A glowering background of crazy chimneys and telegraph poles and smoke—all projected on the cyclorama—completes the picture. Presently there come shouting and a courier. More couriers. War threatens. The ants drop their burdens for rifles and continue their march. The officer-ants assume a higher station and even loftier phrases of command; from the back they philosophize and give orders in good old Kaiser-fashion. The act culminates with a conflict and the lordship of a new race of ants.

The epilog is divided between the appearance from her chrysalis of an ephemera of whom the sleeping man has been dimly and hopefully conscious in the last two scenes, her death after a dance with other short-lived mayflies, and the despairing end of the human visitor. This end is commented upon in a half satiric and half aspiring vein through the introduction of a group of wanderers who come upon the dead body, gaze at it in astonishment and sadness for a moment, and then pass on, singing, upon the ever-creative way of the peasant.

R. U. R., Karel Capek’s other play (in German, W. U. R.) is a tale of a Frankenstein such as H. G. Wells might have written in his earlier days. It seems both gruesomely effective and at times philosophic. The letters “R. U. R.” are an abbreviation of the name of a firm engaged in manufacturing “Roboters,” or workmen stamped out and given life by a machine. After a not very skilful exposition of the nature of this new device for lightening the world’s work, the play passes on to show the degenerating effect upon mankind of ceasing to labor. The “Roboters” are given pain in order to remind them not to be careless and break their legs and arms. Thereupon they acquire something not unlike a soul. Presently comes a consciousness of their station and their power. They rise and kill all mankind—except one man. Later they find to their dismay that the secret formula of the materials from which they were stamped out has been destroyed. They wear out in twenty years. And there will be an end. The last act shows their frantic appeal for a way to perpetuate themselves. The one man finds it at last when he recognizes love awakening in a male and a female “Roboter.” The process of mankind will begin once more. Rather the sort of end that Anatole France would have put to the story—Frankenstein turned man.

None of this, of course—either Kaiser or Capek—is Expressionism very far on its way. Some of it is trivial. Some is interesting enough. Much is decadent or uncertain. But it is not difficult to believe that there is something of the future in it. It is a sign. There is a starlike gleam in even the worst of the mire. Vitality, though often a morbid vitality, animates it. When we see Eugene O’Neill saying Nay to Realism in the same fashion, and turning out so strong and significant a play as The Hairy Ape—a play that grows greater in the perspective of Europe—it is not very difficult to hope and to look forward.

In the artists who give Expressionism a physical form and a pictorial atmosphere upon the stage we find still more of hope. They have gone more quickly and more securely towards their goal. They have had a disciplinary practice upon the plays of an earlier time, a time before Realism. They are freed from the moral problems of the writer; and where their work is distempered with the morbidity, the unhealthiness, of so much of our time, the result is less obvious in color or design than it would be if it took the form of words. And they have had behind them the history and the example of the movement in art which we once called Post-Impressionism, but which follows logically into Expressionism, the movement of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Duchamp.

The problem for the expressionist play is the problem of music. And yet not its problem; for music, being so markedly apart from actuality in its materials, has made few and not very successful attempts at the Realism which has swamped our stage. Music has been by very nature expressionistic. It has failed whenever, as program music, it approached the suggestion of the actual. For the rest, it has soared, soared easily, surely, towards direct expression of spiritual reality. Expressionism in the theater has to seek the way of music, the way towards beauty and ecstasy. The difficulty of the playwright is that he must always feel the pull of the actual life about him; he must make his drama out of human beings and not out of pure vision or pure emotional response. The world about him is corrupt and corrupting outwardly, as well as beautiful and wonderful within. He cannot, like the musician, leap away from its entanglements by putting his hands to an instrument of abstract art. But he can gain a certain release by forswearing as much as possible the reproduction of the actual.

CHAPTER IV
BLACK CURTAINS

To-day we are thinking more and more of the future of the theater, the future of the play and the playwright, the future of production, of direction and the actor.

If we are to think of the future to any effect, we must think of the past as well as the present. The path of to-morrow strikes off from the maze of to-day. To guess at its direction with much chance of success, we must look now and then at the map of the settled roads of yesterday.

If we want to estimate the chances of the non-realistic play to advance beyond its expressionist beginnings in Germany, we must try to understand the present state of the art of theatrical production, and the past of play and players, the theater and its stagecraft. A share of the future—a very large share, I believe—may lie with America; but the past is Continental. And a surprising amount of the past is German.

The past of the play shows one interesting peculiarity. The great plays of the romantic movement were developed where there were great theaters, in France and in Germany. Quite otherwise with Realism. Its greatest works—the plays of Ibsen and Strindberg—were created in small countries almost outside the consciousness of the nineteenth century theater. This was natural enough. Realistic plays were, in the last analysis, lonely literary rationalizations. They were not theatrical. They did not spring out of the theater. Instead they altered the theater to suit their needs. The theater that they altered most was the German theater, and there the dramas of the Scandinavians found their best audience.

But the German theater, being a healthy theater, could not stop at the point where it became an almost perfect mechanism for presenting these plays. Its directors and its artists went on experimenting. They had old plays to mount, also, plays out of the romantic and classic periods. They put their brains and their machines at work upon these pieces, as well as upon the realistic, and soon they had developed methods of production for non-realistic plays quite as admirable for the purpose as any of their tricks for lifting the fourth wall before our very eyes. The German theatrical organization became more and more restive under the realistic plays and the old “classics.” It was preparing for something new. The Zeitgeist was working. Soon it began to work upon the playwrights. There came abortive beginnings in the expressionist plays I have written about in the last chapter. And the German theater went on—and goes on—experimenting.

Let us look at this theater a little more closely. For it is the Continental theater to-day as it was yesterday; France has only Copeau, England experiments in little theaters as America experimented ten years ago. And where the Continental theater is, there we are very likely indeed to find the Continental play of the future. The expressionist drama, like every school of drama except the realistic, is a product of the theater in form and vitality, quite as much as it is a product of society in its mind and materials.

The story of the artistic development of the German theater past the realistic stage is familiar enough. It began in 1905, it was fairly complete by 1914. It was founded upon Gordon Craig and Adolphe Appia, and it is symbolized in the name of Max Reinhardt. It made Realism still for Ibsen and Strindberg; but it plowed past the Realism of Otto Brahm—which is the Realism of Belasco—and it achieved a pregnant actuality so direct and simple that it soon gave birth to a new imagination.

The new methods of production are fairly easy to grasp. They rest on a few general principles. The pretenses of the theater had to be successful pretenses. To begin with, certain tricks of the old theater were forsworn, tricks in the main that failed to succeed. Such an obvious pretense as painted perspective had to go. Footlights had to be curbed; for the illumination must be both more natural and more beautiful. But, beyond these negative things, the directors sought to achieve positive effects for which they had to call into the theater artists of first-rate ability. The business of these artists, whether working on a realistic play or an imaginative one, was to evoke the atmosphere of the piece in setting and in lights. They fell back on three general principles to aid their sense of line and color in visually dramatizing the action. In the first place they simplified the stage picture. They subordinated or eliminated detail. They put as little as possible on the stage that might distract the spectator from the meaning of the general design (which was the meaning of the play), or from the actions and speeches of the characters. Then, by an adroit use of simple materials and forms, they enriched the setting—along the lines of the play—through suggestion. One detail suggested the nature of the whole. The base of a huge column made the audience visualize for itself the size of the building. Half an arch springing off into darkness created the impression of a great vaulted structure. Finally came a synthesis of all the available and appropriate forces of the theater, and of all the qualities of the play; this implying for the director the establishment of a certain apt rhythm in the performance.

This pictorial reform, backed by such direction and acting as the German theater alone was able to supply, and utilizing all manner of mechanical devices for scene-shifting and lighting, has stood to us for some ten years as the so-called new movement in the theater. It has been familiar through the names of Craig and Appia as pioneer theorists, of Reinhardt, and of artists like Ernst Stern and Alfred Roller; through an occasional production from abroad, like Reinhardt’s Sumurûn; and, at last, through the exceptional work of our own artists in America and the men—from Arthur Hopkins to directors of little theaters—who have given them their opportunities or amplified their conceptions.

Fringing the outside of all this in the past have been bastard minglings of old technique and new spirit, such as Bakst and the Ballets Russes displayed, and the beginnings of theory and experiment leading towards a new—or a very old—sort of theater, a theater cut off from the whole peep-hole convention of the proscenium and the fourth wall.

The Palace: a setting by Hans Strohbach for Der Traum, ein Leben, a fantasy by Calderon. Columns of dull gold, painted to suggest a spiral shape, are spaced against a black curtain, which is later drawn aside to reveal a blood-red sky. In the foreground a group of plotting Orientals.

The strength of this movement in Germany lay partly in a very few talented directors like Reinhardt and artists like Stern, but very greatly in the vigorous and healthy organization of the German theater. Because of the division of Germany in small kingdoms and duchies, there had always been many centers of artistic life, each about a court in the capital. In a score of cities, enriched by industrial development, there were theaters endowed by the state or the city, and directed towards the highest artistic accomplishment. In the larger cities privately owned theaters followed the lead of the public institutions. The strength of these houses lay in their endowment, their ideals, and their system of organization. This was the repertory system. Here, as nowhere in England or America and only here or there in France, were theaters directed by a single mind, employing a permanent company of players, maintaining a repertory of plays, old and new, given in recurring succession night after night, theaters retaining therefore a permanent audience, dependable both in pocketbook and in taste. Supplementing these theaters were organizations of playgoers among the middle and lower classes, such as the Freie Volksbühne in Berlin, which widened the audience of subscribers to good work in the theater. Between endowment and the security of a permanent audience, it was possible for these German theaters to give uncommonly fine performances at uncommonly low prices.

Along with the development of new methods in production went a good deal of activity in theater building. In practice, as well as in theory, Max Littmann and Oskar Kaufmann, following Schinkel and Semper, who had worked with Goethe and Wagner, did much to improve the auditoriums of German theaters. The result is not so marked as in the case of the scenic artists. Most of the theaters are old indeed and awkwardly shaped, and too many of the new ones continue the tradition of a parquet surrounded and surmounted by three or four shallow, horseshoe-shaped balconies. These balconies are not so good to see or hear from as our own. A realization of the awkwardness of these shelves or Rangen, as they are termed in German, produced an opposition, headed by Littmann, that called for their elimination and for the substitution of an amphitheater type of house with no balconies and with a steeper floor to allow of better sight-lines. The fight of Ring vs. Rang has resulted in several auditoriums designed by Littmann, the Prinzregenten Theater and the Künstler, for example, in Munich, the slant of whose floors is far too sharp; from the upper rows, the players are seen as in some far-off pit. The slant is greater than necessary, and absolutely straight; the practice of the American architect, H. C. Ingalls, of grading the floor in a gradually increasing curve, produces a far better effect. A compromise between Rang and Ring might be found in a development of the American house with only one balcony; a more steeply slanting floor than we ordinarily have would thus bring two amphitheaters or Rings into a single auditorium. Germany possesses, however, some admirable playhouses in the Kammerspielhaus formerly directed by Reinhardt in Berlin, in the Volksbühne designed by Oskar Kaufmann, and in many features of the Künstler Theater. The seating arrangements have formed one of the best features of the German houses. The chairs are almost always too thinly padded; but the elimination of aisles more than compensates. The whole audience is united in a single responsive body. And because each row is a little wider than ours and the side walls of the auditoriums are liberally supplied with doors, the audience empties out more quickly than ours and in an orderly manner that puts American fire-regulations to shame. I have seen the three thousand spectators of the Volksbühne walk out in a single minute. It takes from three to four for a small theater in New York, seating only six hundred, to clear itself.

A factor that has done a great deal for the progress of the German theater and the reputation of the new stagecraft, is the liberal attitude of the German periodicals and publishing houses towards new things in the theater. Editors and writers have been so eager to present to the public every smallest reform in setting or theater that the world has gained rather an optimistic view of the extent of production progress in Germany. Just as it is a fact that only in a few theaters will you find model auditoriums in Central Europe, in a similar way you discover that the outstanding work of design before the war was done by two men, Stern and Roller, and that the other men whose names decorate the records of the new stagecraft were each responsible for only a few productions.

One thing further you may learn about the past of the German movement, even in an investigation so late as the summer of 1922. And that is that the color in a great majority of the stage settings has been very far from good. The German has an ear, a very marvelous ear; only the Russian can approach him in music, and it is not a near approach. But his eye is bad. Germany has produced no first-rate artists except Dürer, Schongauer and perhaps Cranach, and Dürer and Schongauer are celebrated as etchers rather than as painters. That should have been caution enough for those of us who had to study the German stage at the distance of the half-tone. The fact of the matter is that the German is a splendid theorist, a man of large conceptions, and that therefore in the theater he has been able to design settings of simple and excellent proportions, which create a good effect in black-and-white. It is his sense of color that is at fault. Stern, with the mixture of the Oriental in his blood which did so much for Bakst, and some of the artists from Vienna and the South brought something to the stage besides dramatic imagination and sense of proportion. The test of color downs the rest.

When we think of the future of the German theater we must naturally think of the present also, and it is a black present. Germany has been shattered spiritually as well as economically. It has fallen from dreams of world-dominion to bankruptcy and enslavement. The effect of this upon the mind of the citizen who has come through four years of danger and privation, is staggering. One incident of the fall, which you learn upon visiting Germany, is sharply significant. Until the soldiers from the broken German armies began to stream back into the Rhine provinces in November, 1918, the men and women behind the front believed that their forces were victorious. It is possible for the theater to go on physically under almost any conditions of privation; but you must reckon spiritually with an extraordinary state of the public mind when you prophesy the future of the German theater. Two things, perhaps, make optimism possible. One: Germany and the German people have gone through terrible things before; there was the Thirty Years War. Two: Germany still has the wonderfully trained audience of pre-war days; it was a broad democratic audience, and no shift in economic circumstances can destroy so large a part of the cultured playgoers as war-poverty has done in England, in France, and even to some extent in America.

War—backed by the movies—has done its worst in the Berlin theater. Here we find another example of the exchange of ideals and personalities which has often been noted between victor and vanquished. Just as America has been Prussianized in its attitude towards the foreigner and the liberal or radical minority, Berlin has adopted many of the most evil features of the American theatrical system. Within three years of the close of hostilities Berlin was being rapidly Broadway-ized. Repertory was practically dead at all but three or four theaters. Facing economic difficulties and the competition of the movies for the services of the actors, Berlin found it was a large enough city to support long runs for exceptionally great or exceptionally mediocre plays. Even the three theaters that Reinhardt formerly directed broke from repertory, and where they had once shown ten or a dozen productions in two weeks, they showed only three or (counting Sunday matinees of some old favorites) four. Outside Berlin, repertory continues in the State and City theaters and even in private ventures; but many artistic playhouses are badly crippled by the economic troubles of the nation, and some are forced to close down.

There are certain good signs. The theaters were full in 1922. In fifty or sixty visits to the theater it was only at musical comedies that I saw more than one row of vacant seats; in all but half a dozen cases every seat was sold and occupied. The prices were not high. In Frankfort, an average city of the larger size, the highest prices ranged from sixty marks (at that time twenty cents) to one hundred and twenty marks, depending on the expensiveness or the popularity of the production; while the lowest prices for seats were twenty marks to seventy marks, with standing room at six marks.

At such prices even full houses do not make budgets easy to balance. The theater of post-war Germany must be economical in its expenditures. That is not, however, such an artistic hardship as much of the talk of elaborate machinery and handsome productions in pre-war days might suggest. Rigorous physical simplicity and a reliance on the genius of design instead of elaboration of mechanics are the vital needs in stage setting to-day. Germany has done fine things in the simplifying of production, and it has done them in spite of the temptations of bulging pocketbooks. What it may be forced to do now through poverty is a matter for real hope.

The danger—for there is a danger—is that smaller minds may find an excuse for a mean sort of simplicity, a bareness and barrenness of spirit. There has always been a tendency among the modern directors and designers to economize spiritually as well as economically. The results have been seen in some of our dry, meager “little theater” productions, full of bare formalism—a sort of “simplism” that has no place in any art, let alone in the live, varied, rich, and vigorous theater. Occasionally a German artist of real talent falls into this thin manner; Ludwig Sievert has mounted Towards Damascus at the Frankfort Schauspielhaus upon a scheme which is physically interesting, but he has given his settings a mean, arid, spiritually poverty-stricken appearance which is never beautiful, and does not express in the least the intense quality of Strindberg’s play.

The movies break up ensemble in Germany, and bear down on repertory. They offer salaries that the actor, impoverished quite as much as the worker, cannot resist. Moreover they demand from him the daylight hours which must be given to rehearsals of old and new pieces if repertory is to exist. The German actor cannot appear in a repertory theater in the evenings, as our actor can appear upon Broadway, and put in his days in front of the camera, as ours often does. But—and this is highly important—the German actor has been trained in a school of ideals and self-expression which makes him demand more than the movies can give him. He must have some sort of serious work in the theater, and he is finding it more and more in special summer engagements or Festspiele. Thus many of the greatest of the nation’s players are often assembled at salaries which, by comparison with their motion picture earnings, are hardly salaries at all.

There remains the spirit of the German people. The audiences are intact and intelligent, but what about their spirit? Can these people live down their sufferings or lift them up to something great outside themselves? The prospect is not so dark in the southern parts, in Bavaria, perhaps; it is certainly bright in Austria, where hunger and economic misery are the realest and where the divinity of the human spirit is asserted again and again in every happy gesture of this lovely people. In Berlin it is another matter. Spiritual dejection and gnawing misery are in the face of every one. They are to be seen on the stage, too. Berlin does not go to the theater to be taken out of itself; it seems to neglect the prime use of art. Berlin demands an echoing misery from its playhouses. It goes to see a blacker and more despicable Richard III than Shakespeare ever imagined. It suffers the torments of disillusioned revolution in Masse-Mensch at the working people’s theater. It throngs the glowering caverns of the Grosses Schauspielhaus. And everywhere the stage is hung in black curtains. “Warum immer die schwarzen Vorhänge?” we ask again and again. Perhaps they are only an accident of the attempt to get a background of emptiness; but they become a yawning gulf of spiritual blackness. The only colors to break the pall are the red of blood, and the blue that strikes across the black a symbol of a sinister cruelty.

Of course, black curtains are no Teuton monopoly. When the Russian Pitoëff uses them in Paris, when we see them on Broadway and in our “little theaters,” we do not look for the words “Made in Germany” on the selvage. But in Germany they seem numerous and more significant. If the curtains were sometimes dappled with gray or if they were opalescent with hidden lights, they might be significant of nothing more than the Germans’ immensely active experiments with a formal stage. Perhaps bunte Vorhänge are coming. Perhaps it is always a little dark before dawn.

CHAPTER V
THE TWILIGHT OF THE MACHINES

There are many things upon the German stage besides black dawn. The twilight of the machines, for instance, and all the past of the new stagecraft lagging superfluous.

Even the past of the old stagecraft. In the same theater in Frankfort where one of the three significant pairs of German directors and artists labors, I have seen Peer Gynt given as incompetently as any patron of an American small-town stock company could demand. The settings were hideous; the same badly painted backdrop served for two or three scenes in different localities; the revolving stage rumbled noisily and did nothing to shorten intermissions. While the orchestra played Grieg’s introductory music in the wings and the stage was dark, waiting actors, who imagined that thereby ears as well as eyes were dimmed, restlessly shifted from one foot to another in squeaky shoes. At the beginning of each scene the lights came up like thunder. Through as many scenes as could be endured, the same players who gave a sharp, almost electric performance of Maria Stuart the next night, acted Peer Gynt dully and sloppily to a running fire of assistance from the prompter’s box. It is worth remarking, incidentally, that the souffleur, as he is euphemistically called, is no necessity in the repertory theater. He may give a complete and studied reading of the text one lap ahead of the actors in the Grosses Schauspielhaus, the Frankfort Schauspielhaus, the Burgtheater in Vienna, the Lessing Theater in Berlin, and a dozen other first-class theaters; but you don’t hear his voice in the State Schauspielhaus of Berlin under Jessner, in Copeau’s Vieux-Colombier in Paris, or during a performance of Masse-Mensch at the Volksbühne.

The sleep-walking scene from Macbeth as produced by Harald André at the Royal Opera in Stockholm. Moonlight slants down through four tall windows making alternate bars of light and shadow, through which moves the white-robed figure of Lady Macbeth. The Doctor and the Gentlewoman are half-hidden at one side in the darkness of the foreground.

The past of the German stage is seldom slovenly, but it is often disturbing. To see in 1922 a setting by Roller for Die Meistersinger is like encountering at a fashionable New York thé dansant the girl you used to take to high school dances in St. Louis in 1907. The German stage is full of such disquieting reminders of juvenile infatuations; Sweden is not exempt. The work of the pioneers and imitations of the work of the pioneers are still to be seen. Verdi’s Macbeth à la Craig at the Stockholm Opera; The Sunken Bell at the Grosses Schauspielhaus with Stern’s hill from Penthesilea; Reinhardt effects in Maria Stuart in Frankfort; good old Russian painting in faked perspective in Florian Geyer in Munich; a wedding of Heinrich Leffler and Maxfield Parrish at Dresden in the Verdi opera which the Germans so cheerfully translate as Der Troubadour; the style, if you can call it that, of the Washington Square Players in Towards Damascus in Frankfort. Everywhere traces of Reinhardt and Craig and Roller.

Roller, alone of the artists who were new fifteen years ago, is still busy in the theater. The mood he arouses is mixed. It is thoroughly annoying to find him so unable to grasp the problem of setting in the remarkable new theater in the Redoutensaal in Vienna, unable to see that the Gobelins and the crystal, the golden moldings and the rich baroque ornament of that marvelous room which is both stage and auditorium, must set the style and color of the screens and formal set pieces of the stage. It is a little sad to see Roller trying in Kain at the Burgtheater to adopt the steps and black curtains and the one or two plastics of the newer and younger men. When he is decking out some war-horse like Die Meistersinger in the good old style of the revolutionists of 1910, you have to forgive him much, even while you wonder at the limitations of so many of the stage designers outside Russia. Take the first scene, for example. Dramatically the thing is right in proportion and arrangement. It is an interesting composition of wall spaces and doors, which becomes all the more interesting when the director has arranged the many costumed characters in waves that ripple along the shore of the picture and roll up here and there about some promontory of the design. But when you look away from composition to color, you see a lack. It is not the difficulty of bad color, which besets most of the Germans; Roller and Stern generally escape that. The fact of the matter is that there simply isn’t any color—in spite of a furnace of dulled orange smoldering on the walls, and some gray-greens damping it down for contrast. This is not color in the sense that the Russians know it. Roller does not think in color as does Nicolas Roerich. What Westerner does—or ever has? Roller thinks in line and mass and proportion. Then he goes to his paint-box, and selects two nicely contrasting tones, more or less appropriate to a large medieval building. He never bothers his head over the dramatic problem of whether they mean anything in relation to the action, or the artistic problem of whether he has made one of those subtle arrangements of many curiously harmonizing colors, which, in the alchemy of the eye, take on a psychic significance.

A setting by Alfred Roller for the first act of Die Meistersinger at the State Opera in Vienna. An example of the purely decorative setting at its best.

Such laggard things—the relics of Craig-ideas and the work of various of the elder directors and artists—play a more or less normal part in the life of the German stage. They would find a parallel in any age. They know their place and keep to it. Something that is only just beginning to learn its proper and subordinate part in the advance of the theater is the far-famed stage machinery of Germany.

It was the most natural thing in the world that the Germans should turn their stage into a machine shop. When they build one of their great five-story office buildings they begin by laying a railroad along two sides on the street level and another up in the air above it, and putting in a traveling elevator, dump-cart, and crane that runs along on the tracks; after they have this gigantic apparatus in order, building the building is mere child’s play. Der verrückte Krieg was all that prevented the development of a most ingenious mechanism for erecting the erector that builds the building.

The German stage machine is a Frankenstein stage-hand. It is intended to do the work of scene shifting at great economy of effort and time. Actually the German theaters seem to employ more stage hands than the American theaters, and the waits are no shorter on the whole than those we are able to manage if we want to.

There are two main divisions to the species. Lewis Carroll, listing the different varieties of Snarks, supplied a formula. There are those, it is said, that are round and revolve, and those that have rollers and slide. The revolving stage—made famous by the cohorts of Reinhardt—and the sliding stage—which includes a sinking variety.

The revolving stage has its furious adherents. They include Reinhardt, Stern, who utilized its shortcomings quite as marvelously as its good points in his productions for Reinhardt, and the host of Reinhardt disciples. It came from Japan in 1896 through Lautenschläger of Munich. It is a great circle cut out of the stage floor and mounted on wheels so that it may be freely turned by hand or power. The circle is from forty to sixty feet across, and usually occupies the greater part of the stage space. On it the different settings are placed back to back, anywhere from two to ten fitting snugly together. One after another of these settings is presented in the opening of the proscenium as the stage revolves. It retains its reputation because it is the simplest and handiest scene-shifting machine to use with the great solid plaster dome which Reinhardt and so many other directors found essential as a substitute for the flapping and wrinkling canvas sky.

The sliding stage pure and simple is just a couple of low platforms the size of that part of the stage usually acted on. These carry the settings and slide out sideways into the wings. While one platform is in front of the proscenium with the actors giving the play in its setting, the other is being reset at the right or the left. It is easy to see that these platforms cannot slide past either end of the plaster dome if it is far enough down front to be of any use. The Deutsches Opernhaus in Charlottenburg, Berlin, gets around this by having the whole gigantic dome slide, too; hung from tracks and carrying its lights with it, the dome is pushed back into the depths of the stage when the platforms at the front have to slide. The amusing feature is that the present director of the theater has so little notion of what it is all for that in Don Giovanni he makes a number of changes by rigging his flats and drops on lines, as we might do, and hoisting them into the flies in full view of the audience on what is by a polite fiction called a dark stage.

All this whirling of palaces and scuttling of skies is child’s play beside the sinking stage. As developed by Adolf Linnebach, technical director of the State Schauspielhaus in Dresden, it almost defies understanding or description. The simplest variety is to be found across the National Gallery and the Theaterplatz under the guiding and inventive hand of Max Hasait of the State Opera House, Linnebach’s great mechanical rival. The stage of the Opera is divided into seven sections from the proscenium opening to the spot a hundred feet back where the Hinterbühne or auxiliary rear-stage begins. These seven sections can rise some feet above the stage level or sink into the basement. While the front sections are in the basement, carrying a setting that has already been used, the rear sections, with another setting on them, can, by a complicated arrangement, be rolled down on tracks to take the place of the front sections in the proscenium opening. While the front sections are in the basement the setting upon them is changed; the same thing happens to the rear sections when they are rolled back again. The stage of the Schauspielhaus is far more complicated. It is divided in only three sections, but when the two forward sections are in the basement, sliding stages of the ordinary sort, which rest upon them, can be slid out to the sides for changes of scene. On these sliding stages small “wagon stages” or mechanical stage hands operate, carrying large pieces such as stairs and mantels into place. Under the orchestra pit at the front is another contrivance, like a small stage on stilts, which can be trundled onto the first sinking stage straddling the setting. Thus two stages are super-imposed, and a sort of elevator stage produced, such as Steele MacKaye once invented. Hasait is nursing a scheme for rearranging his sinking and sliding stages so that the seven stages may run forward, sink to the basement, slide back, rise, and run forward again in rapid succession like an endless chain. The prospect is distinctly startling. Opponents of the new stagecraft have often claimed that the scenery ignores the actor. With the sliding and sinking stage a little further advanced, you can imagine the scenery taking a really furious interest in the actor, pursuing him from floor to basement and back again. You can imagine some new director working out a drama in which a cathedral chases an apostate priest about the stage, or a phallic column pursues the heroine into the darkness of the cellar only to lose her as she rises triumphantly on the last of the seven mystic stages guided and blessed by that unique functionary of the German theater, the Obermaschineninspektor.

Der Schatzgräber: the cottage of the epilogue in Schrecker’s opera. An extreme conventionalization of the old scenic materials. The artist, Emil Pirchan, has indicated a cottage by the shape of the opening in the flat drop. Here, design replaces machinery in securing a quick change of scene.

There are peculiar disadvantages to these expensive mechanisms. The revolving stage simply can’t handle certain scenes without ceasing to be a revolving stage. It is impossible to use the entire width or depth of the stage for an exterior without shoving all the other scenes off the “revolver,” and giving up its use. All exterior scenes on the revolving stage have to go up over the rooms set at the back. The western prairies and the North German sea coast are equally unpopular with the friends of the revolving stage. The exceptionally fine production of Masse-Mensch—with its various great steps the whole width and half the height of the stage, alternating with flat open scenes—received almost no assistance from the “revolver” at the Volksbühne in Berlin. The technical director, putting this stage through its paces and exhibiting such amusing tricks as its ability to rise or sink some six feet at either end, thus producing a slanting floor, confessed that he much preferred some other type of stage.

The sliding and sinking stage has fewer disadvantages; but it is an elaborate, expensive, and cumbersome machine to do the work that designers and stage hands might quite as well accomplish. On the matter of expense, it is disquieting to hear at a scene-rehearsal of Das Rheingold that one hundred and fifty men, including electricians, are busy with this labor-saving device. It is still more disturbing to the machine-worshiper to time the intermissions in German theaters, and to find that waits of from two to five minutes are quite as frequent as in America. The explanation, of course, is the costumes. “The stage was all set in half a minute, but we had to wait for the tenor to get into his blue tights.” It looks very much as if the Maschineninspektoren should have introduced sliding wardrobes or adapted the harnessing devices of fire-houses before they put thousands of dollars into sliding stages.

The German technical men are beginning to chafe at the limitations of the machines, to be content to push them into second place. If you talk to Linnebach, at Dresden, once high priest of the sliding stage, you will note with some surprise that the word einfach has a Carolinian way of getting into the conversation. Things must be simpler. No big solid sets; instead, some curtains and lights and a dome on which to project painted designs. The word Podium also crops out. Like almost all forward-looking artists and directors in Germany, Linnebach wants to put the actor on a sort of tribune thrust out into the audience. He wants to give him back the vital heritage of the Greek and the medieval stages. Linnebach is content mechanically with the devices of the electrician; when he mounted Hasenclever’s expressionist drama, Jenseits, he made the setting out of light and shadow, a few chairs and tables, only one or two set pieces, and some projected backgrounds.

Machinery like the sinking stage has advantages apart from its ability to change heavy realistic sets. It is difficult to see how the opening scene of Shaw’s Pygmalion, looking out to the street from under the portico of Covent Garden, could be better created or more quickly shifted than in Linnebach’s production. Certainly without the ability to sink with ease the rear part of the stage three or four feet, he could not have given us the natural effect of the street level below the eyes of the audience and the actors. The great virtue of a mechanical stage of this kind is not to shift scenery, so much as to supply economically and quickly different levels for the actors to play upon. The use of levels is one of the important advances of the Continental theater since the war, and the sinking stage helps greatly with this. With a few inner prosceniums and simple backgrounds, it can supply, as it were, an infinite variety of formal stages such as the Continental theater seems slowly to be tending toward.

Das Rheingold: Alberich’s Cave. A setting by Linnebach and Pasetti at the National Theater in Munich. An atmospheric scene produced by lights playing across a frankly painted background which emphasizes the rocky converging lines of a cavern.

Barring the realistic and the formal, there is a middle ground in which the machine is of little value compared with the designer. In Linnebach’s theater—though not from his designs—a Hindu romance, Vasantasena, was mounted frankly and freshly against flat settings in the style of Indian miniatures. This was accomplished, without the aid of stage machinery, by the use of a permanent setting or portal of Indian design, with steps and a platform, on which, framed within an inner proscenium, drops and profiles were changed much as we would change them. The artist, Otto Hettner, supplied a style, as well as a formal stage, which made the machine taboo. Working with Pasetti at the National Theater in Munich, Linnebach accomplished the changes of Das Rheingold quite as easily. In an older production at Dresden, under Hasait, the fields of the gods opposite Valhalla were made of bulky platforms and plastic rocks, which went rolling back behind the cyclorama while up from the basement came in one piece the cave of the Nibelungen with its nooks and corners, its overhanging ceiling, and its whole equipment of plastic canvas rocks, which might have come out of some cavern on a scenic railway. In Munich the simpler levels of the fields in the second scene served in the cave scene also. They were lost in the shadows, along with the side walls, which were hardly more than masking curtains. The rocky cave was suggested wholly by the backdrop. This was painted in broken, converging lines of rock formations. Because of the magic of light, it did not seem like some conventional old backdrop.

The spirit of the theater as it has developed since the war seems to call upon the designer and régisseur instead of the mechanician. When artists were building heavy and cumbersome settings, elaborate in physical proportions if not in design, sliding and revolving stages were unquestionably necessary, though we may well ask how much the presence of the mechanisms tempted the artists into such excess. To-day, however, the setting is being stylized, the stage itself made formal. Machinery becomes irrelevant. Copeau does not need it even for the realistic Les Frères Karamazov; the Redoutensaal is almost too innocent to suspect its existence. Régisseurs of the new sort want something more theatrical than a turntable that any round-house might boast.

The playwright works with the régisseur and the artist to this same end. While Dorothy Richardson, Waldo Frank, and James Joyce are busy taking the machinery out of the novel, the playwrights are making machinery unnecessary for drama. They drop “atmosphere,” and take up the soul. They seek the subjective instead of the physical. They want to thrill us with the mysteries and clarities of the unconscious, instead of cozening us with photographic detail or romantic color. For all this they need imagination in setting, not actuality. Form carries the spirit up and out. Indications speak to it louder than actualities. Design, which is of the spirit, drives out mechanism, which is of the brain.

The day of the machine is over in the theater, the day of its domination at any rate. For a time it looked as though the name of the old theater in the Tuileries would have to be painted over every stage door in Germany—La Salle des Machines. Now the stage machine is sinking into its proper place—the cellar. A new device is lording it in the theater, but it cannot be called a machine. The electric light is not a mechanical thing. It is miraculously animated by something very like the Life Force, and night by night its living rays are directed to new and unforeseen ends.

CHAPTER VI
LIGHT AS SETTING

In the ’eighties and the ’nineties, when electricity came into the theater to take the place of gas, light was only illumination. By the first decade of the twentieth century it had become atmosphere. To-day it is taking the place of setting in many Continental theaters. To-morrow it may be part of drama itself.

In 1893 a Swiss doctor named Adolphe Appia published a little book in French on the production of Wagner’s music-dramas; six years later he elaborated his ideas in a volume published in a German translation as Die Musik und die Inscenierung, the first and perhaps the greatest book of theory on the new art of the theater. Among other things, he discussed lighting at great length. He made a very important observation. He noted that the lighting of the stage of his day was hardly more than mere illumination—something to make all objects equally bright and visible. It was quite as necessary, he believed, to make certain objects more visible than others, and to make them more living, more dramatic. At the time the lighting apparatus of the theater was crude, because the electric light was in its infancy. There were only small electric bulbs, arranged in rows for footlights below and borderlights overhead, to supply flat illumination, and arc lights, which were movable and could be made to “spot” out figures more brilliantly. Appia recognized in these last the means for making the figure of the actor brilliant and dynamic. With his eye on these spotlights he made an unheard-of demand. He asked for shadows. He said that light and shade gave three dimensions to the player and three dimensions to the setting (provided, as he suggested, the setting be made plastic instead of flat). By means of light he wanted to link the living actor and the dead setting. He went further than using shadows and animating the background. He proposed that the play of light throughout an act should express the mood and action. He wanted it to change with the development of the play. He made elaborate analyses of the Wagner music-dramas to show how the light could play a part—an active part—in the setting and the action.

During the next decade, the beginning of the twentieth century, an Italian named Fortuny began the first practical work of progress in stage lighting. Not very permanent work, perhaps, but certainly valuable because it struck out in new directions. His devices have all but disappeared from the German theater; but only because they have been replaced by improvements along the lines he indicated. Fortuny tried to improve the quality of the light by using indirect illumination. He threw light from powerful arcs against colored bands of silk, which reflected it onto the stage. This had two advantages. The light was diffused and broken up. The color could be controlled at a distance by cords that moved the various silk bands past the light. Fortuny also tried to improve the surface on which the light fell. He devised a domed silk sky or Kuppelhorizont, into which the greater part of his diffused light was thrown, to be diffused still further. Incidentally he hoped to achieve a better sky-effect. Disadvantages hampered both his devices. Indirect lighting required far more current than direct and created a great deal of heat. The dome was produced by exhausting air from between two curved surfaces of silk, the outer one fastened to a folding frame of steel; creases and joints showed in the silk and air was likely to leak in and collapse the sky.

In the course of another ten years engineering ingenuity supplied substitutes for both these elements of the Fortuny System. Most important was the discovery of how to manufacture incandescent bulbs almost as powerful as arc lights. Such bulbs, equipped with frosted glass and glass mediums or color screens, could not only supply light sufficiently diffused in tone and under easy control, but they also produced the shadows, as well as the light, which Appia wanted. The sky-dome became literally a fixture in the German theater when some one decided to make it out of plaster instead of silk. To-day the high-powered bulb and the plaster sky are everywhere in the German theater. Schwabe in Berlin and Phillips in Holland have succeeded in making bulbs of the enormous power of 3,000 watts or 6,000 candle-power, bulbs about three times as strong as any incandescent lights used in America in 1922. The dome, or some variety of it, is found in practically every German theater. Linnebach estimates that there are twenty true Kuppelhorizonts, cupping the whole stage with a curving dome; ten permanent Rundhorizonts, plaster cycloramas curving like a great semi-circular wall around the stage; and thirty canvas cycloramas which are quite as large as the Rundhorizont, and some of which are so hung as to make a most convenient and efficient substitute for either variety of plaster sky.

The most interesting and significant departures in the use of light on the Continental stage have to do with this substitute for the old backdrop. It began as an imitation of the sky, an attempt to put one more piece of Realism into the theater. It has got to the point now where its really interesting and important uses have nothing whatever to do with realistic fake-heavens. It is being employed as a formal element in a stage design, or else as a surface on which to paint scenery with light.

Perhaps it was economy, perhaps a flash of genius, but it occurred to the Germans that there was no particular necessity of lighting the dome or cyclorama. In these huge stages it stands at least sixty or seventy feet back of the footlights. It is possible, therefore, to make it a dim emptiness by merely turning off the lights that ordinarily shine upon it, or to give it some vague neutral quality from the light upon the stage which is reflected onto the Horizont. In Othello at the State Schauspielhaus in Berlin, Jessner uses his cyclorama, an ordinary canvas one, as a formal background bounding the space in which his strictly conventionalized indications of settings are placed. Thus it is in some scenes a pale neutral wall, in some a curious violet emptiness, in others a faintly salmon background, in still another a yellow light against which figures move in tiny silhouettes. At the Volksbühne in Masse-Mensch the dome becomes a misty void in one of the dream-scenes; and then upon this void move vast, mysterious shadows in circling procession.

Shadows on the dome carry us to a final development of lighting in Germany—the “projection” of scenery, the substitution of light for paint as a means of expression. Many minds have worked and are working on devices to be used for this purpose, but the most important mechanisms find their home in Dresden at the theaters of Linnebach and of Hasait.

As might be expected, Linnebach’s is the simpler. He has a dome in his theater, the State Schauspielhaus, and upon this dome or through varnished silk from the back, he throws, by means of a very simple lantern containing an arc light but no lenses, the designs painted on glass. This lantern and the transparent method of projection were used in America with much success by Lee Simonson when the New York Theater Guild mounted Shaw’s Back to Methuselah in the spring of 1922. Linnebach has made the mountains of Wilhelm Tell with projection and the settings of Grabbe’s Kaiser Heinrich VI, and of the expressionist dramas Das Bist Du, Gas, and Jenseits.

Hasait’s simplest method of projection brings you up sharp against the true origins of the thing, and they are almost as old as drama. The puppeteers of old Java had shadow-marionettes centuries before the technical director of the Dresden State Opera made shadow-settings. For Weber’s Oberon and for Mozart’s Zauberflöte, Hasait provides a plastic arrangement of inner proscenium and steps, with a translucent curtain at the back. From one side of the curtain he projects a design in shadows by means of a frame hardly two feet wide across which are fastened various thicknesses of gauze. The light that comes through the clearer portions of the gauze is one color, while from a light on the other side of the translucent curtain he stains the shadows with a second color. The hue of both these lights can be changed quickly or slowly as desired, producing harmonies and contrasts of color.

The other devices used by Hasait for projection are embodied in a scheme of stage equipment called the Ars System by the Swedish company that controls the patents for its exploitation abroad. The basis of the system is a canvas cyclorama. This cyclorama runs on a semi-circular track hung from the gridiron high above the stage. At one end of the track is a great roller upon which the cyclorama may be wound up, to get it out of the way during an elaborate change of scene. It takes only half a minute for the cyclorama to be run out on the track ready for use. The track itself may be swung downward from its two front corners to permit particularly large drops to be hoisted or lowered; but it is wide enough and deep enough not to interfere with the ordinary use of the gridiron. The cyclorama is made of common light canvas, but it is so cut and joined, and hung on a slight slant that it takes up of itself the bulges and wrinkles ordinarily produced in our cycloramas by a change in weather. The invention of this cyclorama is in dispute between those ancient but courteous rivals, Hasait and Linnebach.

With this cyclorama goes an elaborate system of lighting manufactured by Schwabe. There are floor lamps, contained in wheeled chariots, to illuminate the bottom of the cyclorama. Above the proscenium opening hangs a battery of different colored lights—seventy-two in the Stockholm State Opera—which play directly upon the cyclorama, and three high-powered bulbs to light the stage floor. Besides these, the Ars System, as installed at Stockholm, includes three special projection devices also hung above the proscenium, all the adjustments of which are controlled electro-magnetically from the switchboard. One of these is the large cloud-machine, an arrangement of two tiers of eight lamps each, raying out from a common axis. These tiers can move at different speeds and in different directions, while each lamp can be turned up and down and sideways at will. These projectors each house a 6,000 candle-power bulb and hold a photograph or drawing of a cloud. The complex motion of these static clouds when projected on the cyclorama gives an effect of every-varying cloud formations. Almost absolute Realism can thus be obtained. A second and smaller and less flexible cloud-machine with a single central lamp and reflecting mirrors is, for some reason, included in the equipment.

Besides these cloud-machines there is a battery of three high-powered bulbs and lenses, by means of which designs painted on glass slides may be projected after the fashion of a magic lantern upon the cyclorama or any object on the stage. This is the really important feature of the Ars System from an artistic standpoint. Its possibilities are extraordinary. Harald André, chief régisseur of the Stockholm Opera, has experimented little as yet with this device, utilizing it only in one ballet. But he has speculated much on the opportunities that it presents for uniting a large group of theaters, similarly equipped, in the exchange of scenic designs for the productions in their repertory. André believes that the economy of projected scenery is important artistically, as well as financially, because it will permit of experiment with many new works at slight expense, and of the rapid reproduction of the successful pieces in many cities at once.

From the absolute, artistic viewpoint of the effect obtained, projection is most satisfactory, though as yet almost undeveloped. Americans who saw the translucent projections of Simonson’s designs in Back to Methuselah realized how little these drops had the visual disadvantages of the painted variety. They enjoyed a certain incorporeal quality. The landscapes were not defined like huge oil paintings in false perspective. They went into some new category which, for the moment, defeated our analysis. Such projections may in time take on the shallow pretense of painted backdrops, though I am inclined to doubt it.

Das Rheingold: Valhalla. A setting by Linnebach and Pasetti. The gods are grouped in deep shadow on a conventionalized arrangement of rocky levels in the foreground. The castle becomes slowly visible in the sky beyond, built of beams of light, hanging in the air like a great cumulus cloud. At the National Theater, Munich.

In the case of the Valhalla of Das Rheingold, as projected in Linnebach’s production at the National Theater in Munich, the ethereal quality of this kind of “painting” again stands out. The scene is most successful when the lighting is dimmest. In the central portions of the second and fourth scenes, when the stage is fully lighted, the image of Valhalla holds its own against the illumination of the foreground, but the foreground itself fails dismally to match the beauty of the gods’ castle. When the plastic foreground is not to be seen, Valhalla hangs in the heavens like one of the shapes of Wilfred’s Color Organ, a thing that seems to have three dimensions. When the lights upon the stage floor bring out the rocks of the foreground, Valhalla loses the reality of three dimensions. It still seems truer, as well as more beautiful, than the rocks in front. In fact it shows up pitilessly the trivial canvas life of those boulders. But it loses the impression of depth, which it had at first created. This was doubtless a false impression, a foolish illusion.

The projected setting is certainly in another dimension spiritually from those two ordinarily employed in old-fashioned scene painting. It is not in any of the planes of stage-rocks or houses. It does not, however, war with the human figure, curiously enough. It seems likely that the artist or director using projected design must formalize his foreground, as Simonson did, or else hide its commonplace actuality in shadow. Ordinary stage pretenses cannot stand beside the spiritual plastics produced by light.

As for the cloud-machine, so long as it is trying merely to reproduce nature it is utterly unimportant. Something imaginative must be done with it before it can expect serious consideration. In the productions of André at the Stockholm Opera there are at least two hints that the cloud-machine can be used for the purposes of art. One of these, rather poorly managed, is the use of designed clouds instead of natural clouds in one of the scenes of Samson and Delilah. The other, not perfectly executed by any means, but most suggestive, occurs in Verdi’s Macbeth. There in the first scene André sets a wild storm sky in motion. He uses negative or black photographs of clouds instead of positive or white, and he starts them moving from on high and at the sides, sweeping in and down upon the witches. As these dark shapes descend in tumult, it seems as though the black earth were drinking black clouds, curious and evil portent of the powers of the infernal.

Movement in projection has obviously great possibilities as part of the action of new drama. In Kaiser’s expressionist play From Morn to Midnight, produced by the Theater Guild, Simonson used Linnebach’s lantern to make the tree in the snow scene change into a skeleton, an effect that Kaiser was able to foresee only as a shifting of snowflakes upon naked boughs.

Light itself seems destined to assume a larger and larger part in the drama. It is a playing force, quite as much as the actors. It can be a motivator of action as well as an illuminator of it. Jessner at the State Schauspielhaus in Berlin uses it as an arbitrary accompaniment and interpreter of action. Lights flash on or off as some mood changes. They create shadows to dramatize a relation of two men. They seem to control or to be controlled by the action. The extent to which a change of light may express the dramatist’s conception is most interestingly suggested in the scene of Macbeth’s death in André’s production of the opera. It is an uncommonly well handled scene in all respects, perhaps the best example of this director’s fine imagination. The fight between the armies begins in a gray light before the walls of Dunsinane. There is no absurd effort of supers to look like death-crazed warriors. The quality of pursuit and conflict is caught in the pose of the bands of the soldiers as they run past the walls bent down like dogs upon a blood-scent. Macbeth and Macduff meet for a clear moment of conflict, then they are surrounded and covered by the troops that rush to see their champions do battle. At the moment when Macbeth falls, the crowd clears for a moment. And then the grayness of morning breaks sharply into dawn as evil goes out of the play. An obvious symbolism, perhaps, but obviousness is not so great a failing in the theater. The fault of the scene is only in André’s over-emphasis upon the light, or rather his under-emphasis upon the cause of the light—the death of Macbeth. At the moment when the light goes on, there should come some supreme, arresting gesture, something to absorb every atom of our attention so that we may wonderingly discover the light as a thing caused by Macbeth, not by an electrician.

Such a scene suggests wide possibilities. Light as the compelling force of a play; light as a motivator of action; light and setting, not as a background to action, but as part of it, as something making characters exist and act; light as an almost physical aura of human bodies; light, therefore, in conflict. Physical contacts are not a necessity of the theater. Under Jessner, the murderer of Clarence in Richard III does not try to seem to stab him; he simply plunges the dagger at him. That is enough. In Francesca da Rimini as Duse sometimes gave it, I have heard that when the husband killed Paola with his sword the space of the whole room separated them. It was as if the sword possessed an aura, and as if the aura slew. In Masse-Mensch the crowd of revolutionaries go down to the mere rattle of machine guns before the curtains are drawn to show the soldiers.

If light can do such things, even if it can do no more than signal the downfall of evil or set Valhalla glowing in the heavens, it will take a place in the theater that no other product of inventive ingenuity can reach. Light, at the very least, is machinery spiritualized.

CHAPTER VII
THE GERMAN ACTOR

Four years of war left the elaborate machinery of the German theaters intact. Four years of the purgatory called peace have even seen a sharp advance in electrical equipment. Critics and managers of the victorious nations and of the neutrals that enjoy a sound exchange may complain of the quantity and quality of theater-goers; but the vanquished have suffered less. At forty performances in Germany and Austria we saw hardly two rows of vacant seats all told in the dramatic theaters, though one or two musical shows were no more than two-thirds full.

The German theater has suffered, however, in one spot. The unfortunate truth is that it is a vital spot—acting. Only the richness of trained talent in its post-war companies enables it to suffer the drain of the past years and still give performances far better than we see in England or America.

War affected the German actor less than it did the actor in the allied countries; Germany kept her players on the home front fighting disheartenment. Peace and the movies, however, brought dispersal. Companies were scattered, players exiled. The spectacular collapse, of course, was the dissolution of Max Reinhardt’s famous company that filled his two Berlin theaters. Moissi, Bassermann, Pallenberg, Konstantin, Eibenschütz, Wegener, Dietrich, Arnold, Lehman, Eysoldt, Bertens, Diegelmann, Heims, Jannings, Schildkraut—not one of these names appears on the Zettel outside the old Reinhardt houses. Some are in the movies and some are stars, but all are gone.

If American films could have entered Germany in the face of the depreciated mark, Reinhardt’s theaters might still be giving true repertory, Reinhardt himself might still be there, and certainly many of the old company would be playing together in Berlin. Other factors, personal, financial, and artistic, gradually drew Reinhardt out of production, but he himself declared with much truth that repertory was impossible when actors had to give their days to the movies, instead of to rehearsals, and that the theater was impossible for him without repertory and actors. As for the players themselves, with the mark at a cent and pomade at two hundred marks, it had to be either the movies or stardom.

The star system of England and America, imported into Germany, has done little to keep even the popular players in Berlin. The audience is exhausted sooner than in New York or London, and then tours must come. Alexander Moissi knocks about Switzerland and Austria. Leopoldine Konstantin, the flashing slave girl of Sumurûn, is supposed to be starring in Vienna, but you find her one night at Der Blaue Vogel, the imitation Chauve-Souris which one of Balieff’s assistants installed in Berlin. Pallenberg goes up and down the country with Der Wauwau, the German edition of Grumpy.

Even the younger stars are wanderers. That fresh exotic, Maria Orska, competes with the traveling troupe of the Moscow Art Theater for the patronage of Stockholm. She plays in the cosmopolitan German of a Russian, against the Swedish of a resident company. The play is Wedekind’s Erdgeist, first half of that staggering duology of sex which ends with Pandora’s Box and Jack the Ripper, and goes under the name of Lulu. In Berlin Mme. Orska is thought a little sensational. Her Lulu is anything but that. She does not dwell on the corporeality of this daughter of earth’s joy. Her Lulu is not a human being made hideous and fascinating with eternal lures. She is a kind of mask, a thin mask, a shell of tinted and whitened silks over a face sucked dry of all but passion and the shrunken charms of decadence. She is a sort of doll—a Pritzelpuppe—with her long black legs and her pale face thrust out from either end of a pierrot’s costume. Very much of a doll when the play is most bitterly cruel. Dr. Goll flops to the floor, dead, when he finds her with Schwartz. Orska tiptoes stiffly towards him, manœuvers past his body like some marionette, pokes him with a stiff toe and squeaks the squeak of a doll. Is it fear or pleasure or both? A clever way to do Wedekind. But, in the end, night after night with only self-display to remember.

But Berlin—or Stockholm—is not Germany. There is ensemble left in some of the lesser cities—there is even ensemble in Berlin at the State Schauspielhaus, if there is no great individual playing there.

The illustrious old Burgtheater in Vienna still has a company, if it lacks a distinguished director. They manage portions of Tolstoi’s The Living Corpse very well. They give the episode of the gypsies’ singing to Fedya and Mascha as it was never given in our own Redemption. In the Burgtheater it is no discreet cabaret turn. The women and the men hang over the lovers. Their song is a frank and touching celebration of the love that their Mascha has won. It is an open display of sentimental interest in love-making, which people only admit when wine or perhaps gypsy blood have stilled inhibitions. But all this is doubtless more a matter of direction than of acting. It is in the old mother of Frau Senders, the aristocrats of Frau Wilbrand and Herr Herterich, not quite so much so in the Fedya of Herr Treszler that you find real playing. It is hardly possible that the performance of Vildrac’s The S. S. Tenacity is the best that the Burgtheater gives; but it is a most excellent performance. It is peculiarly excellent, because, while it is not French, it seems so little German in a racial sense. Artistically, of course, it is most decidedly Teuton. It has the hard, firm quality of German acting. Copeau’s production in Paris is a rational thing; it is almost like a reading, a very intelligent, sensitive reading. In New York we played it in flashes of misgiving and determination; it was unctuous in Augustin Duncan’s roustabout and in Claude Cooper’s English sailor, and fine and sensitive in Marguerite Forrest’s rather ladylike barmaid; but the rest dropped in and out of illusion. The Viennese actors play for a bright and firm actuality, which they imagine is French. It isn’t precisely German, but technically it is as Teuton in thorough-going emotionalism as the passionate kiss with which the Viennese players replaced the salute on the nape of the neck with which the French Bastien begins his wooing.

Individual acting as well as ensemble flourishes in the large company that serves the four State theaters of Munich. It is a piece of good fortune that both opera and drama are under a single management, and that pieces may be given in any one of four houses—the small modernist Künstler Theater of Max Littmann in the Ausstellungspark, the tiny, wickedly cheerful old Residenz Theater, the reformist “amphitheater” which Littmann created in the Prinzregenten Theater, or the National Theater, just as much the conventional old-fashioned German opera house as when it was called the Hoftheater. The large company and the breadth of repertory which these theaters permit to be given efficiently and properly, provides some exceptional players exceptionally well-trained and in an interesting variety of parts.

The Munich group can give that shock of virtuosity which the German repertory theaters provide, and give it to you at highest voltage. On one evening, for example, you discover in The Taming of the Shrew a most exceptional Grumio. His name is Richard Kellerhals, and he is the sort of clown that happens once in ten years in America. He is not a Charlie Chaplin, because that is a little too much to ask. But he outdoes any other movie-comic that I can recall. He is not a Jim Barton, because he does not drive ahead at just one thing—Gargantuan burlesque. Kellerhals plays Grumio with his face and his legs and his brain. His odd, wizened little face, inordinately simple, just a bit loony; his acrobatic legs, quick and comic, getting him into all manner of strange places; his brain, always alert behind the mask of the loon, working out a dozen amusing twists of business. It seems a highly original performance, though perhaps it is merely tradition in Germany that Grumio should sniff the clothes of Biondello, and be sniffed at, all within the bounds of decency, but very like two dogs of their masters. At any rate, original or not, it is the sort of sharp, brilliant fooling that would make Kellerhals a musical comedy specialist in America, perhaps a star.

An evening or two later, out at the Ausstellungspark you see Hauptmann’s play of the Peasants’ Rebellion, Florian Geyer. Almost the first figure you notice among the peasants who are trying desperately to make themselves far-seeing leaders in the fight against the trained nobles, is a gaunt fellow with his head in a bloody bandage, and with fever in his eyes. This is Geyer’s brother-in-law and secretary in the field, a boy almost on the point of death who looks like a sickened man of thirty. The desperate impatience of the worn is mingled in his face with the fanatical devotion of the men who win lost causes. The cause is lost in the end, and after he has watched this disillusion pile upon quarrels and jealousies and treasons, he crumples up and dies. Every word of his tragedy you can read in his face. When you look at your program you find that the name of the actor is Richard Kellerhals. In America—if Kellerhals had acted this part before Grumio—he would be competing with William B. Mack in the playing of tortured gunmen the rest of his life.

Quite as good acting and almost as varied impersonations are to be seen in the work of Friedrich Ulmer as Petruchio and as Geyer. His Geyer—strong, simple, desperate in anger—is easy to imagine on our stage; Lionel Barrymore could do it. But his Petruchio—a coarse, bull-necked, and most amusing devil—is another matter. It sins against the pretty romance of our Van Dyked Shakespeare. And it is famously good fun, along with the whole riotous show.

Dresden has a company that makes no difficulty over playing Shaw’s Pygmalion one night, in German provincial accents that are supposed to approximate the English dialects pursued and recorded by Professor Higgins under the portico of Covent Garden, and over playing the next night a comic and poetic romance of India called Vasantasena by a king called Sudraka. Here the women come out rather more sharply than most of the men, two fine performances in particular by Melitta Leithner as Eliza, the flower girl, and Alice Verden as Vasantasena. The company cannot escape, however, a beefy German tenor-hero, one of the sort that seems in danger any moment of turning into a leading woman with a heavy beard.

Frankfort has perhaps less real acting talent than is to be found in any of the State theaters of the larger cities. It shows an atrocious performance of Peer Gynt. Yet, given direction such as Richard Weichert furnishes in Schiller’s Maria Stuart, and it seems a company of genius. Carl Ebert, a bad Peer Gynt, manages a Leicester of real subtlety; the Elizabeth of Gerda Müller seems a tempestuous horror, and the whole thing is lighted by many excellent small bits of acting.

There seems to be a certain hard, uncompromising insistence in all German acting. It is a thing, perhaps, of narrow spirit and deep intensity. It has unquestioned vitality. In Grabbe’s old drama, Napoleon, which Jessner gives at the State Schauspielhaus in Berlin, this vitality leaps to union most happily with the intoxication that Bonaparte spread about him always, and never more extraordinarily than in the Hundred Days which this play chronicles. It is all vitality, the impatient vitality of the soldiers of Wolfgang Heinz and Lothar Müthel, who await Napoleon’s return, the besotted and sinister vitality of the new mob of the carmagnole, the energizing vitality of Rudolf Forster’s Wellington, the sober, slow but potent vitality of Arthur Krauszneck’s Blücher, and that font of indomitable self-assertion Napoleon himself, played by Ludwig Hartau. Even the old Humpty-Dumpty Louis of Leopold von Ledebur, and the courtiers who prop him up on his throne take on a certain fixity of purpose—perhaps a deathly fixity—from the vitality flowing round them.

In other performances of Jessner’s company this vitality flows over into mere vigor, even into violence. That is the besetting sin of the German actor. Fritz Kortner, celebrated for his Richard III and his Othello, ranges from unnatural suppression of feeling, from studied and almost whispered restraint, to mad screechings. An almost neurotic violence crops up somewhere in every other performance in Germany. Even the women fall into it. Gerda Müller’s Elizabeth, after an evening of excellent, mastered power, breaks out into the hoarse-voiced raving that seems more a mark of the male players. Sudden spurts of laying it on too thick appear in some of the secondary players of Florian Geyer. The comic villain of Vasantasena plays the whole thing in a knot of petty passion. It is ranting, this sort of thing, no matter how far it may be from the orotund mouthings of our old-school players, no matter how much sharp characterization and genuine passion may be forced into it.

The performance of Masse-Mensch at the Volksbühne in Berlin stands out because it manages to carry intensity of feeling to a point just short of violence, and then, with every excuse provided in this desperate story of thwarted revolution, to bring it up short at the right moment into high-pitched but beautiful vehemence. The outstanding impression must be the astounding diction of the mob that speaks clearly, rhythmically, and most movingly with a single common voice; it gives you a sudden vision of what the Greek chorus may have been, and why thirty thousand people listened. But the power of Mary Dietrich as the Christ-figured, Christ-tortured woman is almost as unforgettable.

Looking back across these forty-odd performances, I find that a very simple and very brief bit of acting stands out as sharply as any. It is the quiet, sadly amusing, little Buddhist priest in Vasantasena as played by Erich Ponto. It is not a thing the German stage often discloses, this delicate mingling of humor and reverence. If it were, the people from Moscow who played The Cherry Orchard would not have seemed to come from the one land where acting is a rounded and tempered perfection.

CHAPTER VIII
NEW ACTING FOR OLD

Acting is the oldest thing in the theater. It comes before the play, because in the beginning the actor and the playwright are one. Drama originates when two or three people are seized with a desire to give an old legend or an old ritual a living form. They want to act. As they act they make up their play. The theater becomes the spot that seems a good place—either spiritually, physically, or by force of tradition—in which to give the play. In time comes a division of labor. One of the actors begins to specialize on the play. This actor studies how he can develop the form of the play to make better use of the theater; and then, with some leader among the actors, he begins to speculate on how to change the theater in order to give more scope to the playwright and to the player who interprets him.

That is the history of the theater through twenty-five centuries. It begins with the actor, and it comes very close to ending with him.

It is rather a good thing to understand about the history of the theater. It gives you a certain respect for the actor which actors do not always inspire. It makes you patient with the difficulties of writing anything intelligible on this most ancient and most complex and most unsubstantial of all the things of the theater. It makes you realize the dangers of dogmatizing on the subject. And, if you can look back with imagination to the day of Garrick and his great apron stage and his Hamlet in knickerbockers, back to the day of Burbage and his sunlit platform in the midst of an Elizabethan mob, back to Æschylus answering the chorus of the Furies in the half circle of Athenians that piled up the hillside of the Acropolis; perhaps, then, you will see that the actor was not always a fellow with a false beard or the manners of a soda water clerk, who expects you to believe that he is no actor at all, but a family doctor or an employee of Mr. Liggett who has taken to living in a room with one side gone. At any rate a little hint of theatrical history, full of amazing surprises, might make you tolerant of such speculations as the following on the four types of acting to be seen in the theater to-day and on what is to come of them.

The art of acting is a miscellaneous sort of art. I imagine that types of acting which we think very new and modern were to be found in every age except the first. Probably some famous Greek comedian made his entrance in The Frogs looking so amazingly like the statue of Herakles on the Acropolis that for half a minute nobody could be sure that this was really the actor whom they had expected to see. In Shakespeare’s day it is not unlikely that the man who played Caliban got together a collection of false hair and wooden tusks which made every one wonder who the new member of the company could be. And probably among the Greeks and the Elizabethans there were players so amazingly like servants or kings in face and carriage that they never played anything else. Yet it is safe to say, nevertheless, that the actor’s trick of trying to look like a different human being in each new play and never at all like himself, and his other trick of never looking like anything but himself and always playing exactly the same kind of part, are histrionic symptoms of the disease called Realism. There was never so much literal and deliberate impersonation as in Europe to-day, and so much “type casting” as along Broadway.

These are two very different methods of work, but they both reach the same end—absolute resemblance—and neither has necessarily anything to do with art. The first—for which the word “impersonation” is commonly and very loosely used—is pretty generally esteemed to-day. It is considered to mark off the actor, even the artist, from the crowd of clever mummers. It is hard to deny an instant and hearty interest in any player who can look like and act like a tramp one night, and like a barbaric king the next. The emotion he creates as a king, or the artist’s vision he displays in selecting his material and making Form out of it, may be great or small. But his ingenuity in masquerade will always win admiration. In fact we are pretty sure to spend our time praising such an actor as Ben-Ami for looking like a neurotic artist in Samson and Delilah, and like a husky young horse-thief in The Idle Inn, instead of recognizing the artistic distinction these impersonations show.

Examined in cold blood, the virtue of this sort of acting is the virtue of the wig-maker. The difference between a Van Dyke and a pair of mutton chops; the difference between Flesh Color No. 1 and Flesh Color No. 3; the difference between a waiter’s dress suit bought on the Bowery, and a doublet designed by James Reynolds and made by Mme. Freisinger—that is the secret of this kind of acting. Not the whole secret, of course, for the pose of the actor’s body, the grace or awkwardness of his carriage, the lift of an eyebrow, or the droop of a lip is quite as important. Such things, however, have no more of art or emotion in them than the tricks of make-up. They can give us recollections of real persons or figures in literature, in painting, or in other plays, about whom we have felt emotion. But it is not until the actor puts Form of his own into this lay figure, by the movement of his body, and the emotion of his voice, that anything approaching art can be said to exist.

Stanislavsky may look like a colonel in The Three Sisters, and like a spineless gentleman in The Cherry Orchard; but that is not the measure of his art. Stanislavsky might even be a colonel on leave who took a fancy to acting, or a spineless gentleman who lost his patrimony and fell back on his university reputation as an amateur actor; and he would still have to prove himself an artist.

There is an amusing similarity and contrast between the two varieties of realistic actors. The first impersonates a different character in every play, and never himself. The second impersonates the same character in every play and always himself. The first impersonates by changing; the second by remaining the same.

Provided that there is a large and varied supply of types—military men, bar-keeps, politicians, artist-neurotics, criminal-neurotics, he-men, she-men, rabbit-men, not to mention all sorts of women—the result on a play should not be so very different whichever system of acting is adopted. If a play-goer were to see only one play, he couldn’t detect any difference. If he were to see two, he would be likely to get some added pleasure out of the knowledge that the same people were acting both, and he would probably use up on the business of spying out the tricks of it all a good deal of the energy and attention that he ought to give to the play.

There is one practical difference, however, in these two ways of casting a play. You cannot make a repertory company out of types. In spite of the old jargon about Leading Man, Leading Woman, Juvenile, Old Man, Ingenue, Heavy, Character Man, and so forth, no permanent company giving realistic plays can get along without actors who can achieve some sort of differentiation. Since the German theater and most of the European theater is run on the repertory system, the Continental actor is generally a man adept in masquerade. Because America has no repertory theater, because producers in New York pick new actors out of the apple barrel for every new play, and because almost all the legitimate actors of America make New York their headquarters, the system of casting by type is the natural, workable system for us.

Type acting need not mean that the type the actor plays is absolutely identical with his own personality in private life. It usually isn’t. But it does mean that, because of his own personality, his physical and mental equipment, the actor is able to play a very similar type to his own. Two excellent examples of this are Frank Craven and Ernest Truex. In real life they are never Tommy Tucker of The First Year or the hero of Six Cylinder Love, but on the stage they are never anything else. It is just possible that they could be something else, but they began this way, and this way the managers and the public will probably make them continue.

All of which brings up a single artistic point upon which varied impersonations and the repertory theater defeat type casting. Type casting is apt to tie a man to the kind of part he first acts with any ability, and not the kind he can act best. He may be able to play ten different sorts of characters, and one or two of these may release something in him that permits him to be a true artist in his impersonation. But if he happens to play some other of the ten characters first, and play it reasonably well, our casting system may keep him from ever reaching those characters in which he might excel. For another thing, the constant change of parts in a repertory theater gives an actor practice that he cannot get if he repeats type parts in fewer plays, as he must do in America. Through this practice with varying parts, he may come to add something of artistic significance to his work.

A nice esthetic point arises if you find a type-actor—say Craven—giving an extraordinarily good performance. He is playing himself, we will say; yet within that familiar personality, he is achieving just as interesting emotion as some other actor of a different personality, but possessing the knack of varied impersonation, could achieve; he is even reaching a sense of Form, selecting out of his own personality, experience, and emotion, and combining these into a shape that moves us esthetically—whether to laughter or to tears. Is this art? Would it be art if the actor were Georgie Price imitating Craven, or somebody from the Moscow Art Theater impersonating Craven? Would it be art if Craven played a character so different from himself as the savant in He Who Gets Slapped, and played it as successfully as he has played Tommy Tucker? Unquestionably the answer to the last question would be Yes. As for the others, there is legitimate room for argument.

This business of varied impersonation versus self-impersonation arouses a great deal of dispute. The most interesting feature of the squabble is that usually the opponent of self-impersonation or type-acting points back with mournful pride to some of the great actors of the past like Booth or Forrest. When he does this, he passes clean outside of realistic acting. Moreover, he brings into the argument actors, who, while they played a wide variety of parts, never took the trouble to hide behind the wig-maker or to pretend to be anybody else physically than the great Edwin Booth or the celebrated Edwin Forrest.

To-day we have this same kind of acting, I imagine—and this is the third kind that I want to list—in the work of Sarah Bernhardt, Giovanni Grasso, Margaret Anglin, or Clare Eames. If you started out to list the players who use their own mask frankly for every part, achieving impersonation and emotion by their use of features and voice as instruments, you would find many more names of women than of men; for the actress has far fewer opportunities than the actor to employ the ingenuities of make-up. You would also find, I think, that your list was not so very long, and that it contained the names of most of the players of great distinction from Eleanora Duse to Charlie Chaplin. There is magic in the soul of such players, not in their make-up boxes. They create their impersonations before your eyes, not in their dressing rooms. You may, perhaps, be tempted to say that their art lies in the voice, that the face is a mask. But the face is obviously not a permanent mask; it changes not only from character to character in many subtle ways, but from scene to scene, and emotion to emotion. Also, there is Chaplin, the voiceless; his face speaks. It seems a mask, too, but it is articulate.

Such acting may be given—and usually is given—to the interpretation of realistic drama. It belongs at heart to another thing, to almost another age, past or to come. It achieves the necessary resemblance through the inner truth of its art. But it never submits to submergence. It reaches out towards a kind of acting that we used to have and that we will have again, while it meets the necessities of Realism.

This fourth kind of acting may be called presentational—a word that derives its present use from a distinction set up by Alexander Bakshy in his The Path of the Russian Stage. Presentational acting, like presentational production, stands in opposition to representational. The distinction is clear enough in painting, where a piece of work that aims to report an anecdote, or to photograph objects, is representational, and a piece of work striving to show the relation of forms which may or may not be of the everyday world, is presentational. In the theater Bakshy makes a parallel distinction between a scenic background that attempts to represent with canvas and paint actual objects of wood or rock or whatnot, and a background that presents itself frankly as what it is—curtains, for instance, or an architectural wall. The distinction applies to acting as well. A Broadway actor in a bald wig or an actor naturally bald, who is trying to pretend that he is in a room off in Budapest, and who refuses to admit that he knows it is all a sham, and that a thousand people are watching him, is a representational actor, or a realist. An actor who admits that he is an actor, and that he has an audience before him, and that it is his business to charm and move this audience by the brilliance of his art, is a presentational actor. The difference deserves better terms, but they do not yet exist.

It is obvious enough that the first actors were presentational. The Greek men who shouted village gossip from the wains, and made plays of it, were villagers known to every one. The actors in the first dramatic rituals may have worn masks, but they were frankly actors or priests, not the gods and heroes themselves. Roscius was Roscius, Molière was Molière; even the Baconians cannot deny that Shakespeare was Shakespeare when he appeared as old Adam. I would maintain that Garrick and Siddons, Talma and Rachel were frankly actors; did they not see the audience out there under the light of the same chandeliers that lit their stage?

To-day our greatest players reëstablish to some extent the bond with the audience when they abandon any attempt to represent their characters through wigs and make-up, and present their own faces frankly as vehicles of expression. In comedy and in tragedy presentational acting comes out most easily. There is something in really great sorrow—not the emotions of the thwarted defectives of our realistic tragedies—that leaps out to an audience. Hecuba must speak her sorrow to the chorus and over the chorus to the people who have come to the theater for the single purpose of hearing it. There can be no fitting communion with the characters who have caused the tragedy or been stricken by it. The sufferer must carry her cup of sorrow to the gods; they alone can drink of it and make it less. And the great fact of the theater is that the audience are gods. It is a healthy instinct that causes many an actress in a modern tragedy to turn her back on the other characters of the play, and make her lamentation to the audience as though it were a soliloquy or an aside.

There are gods and gods, of course, and it is to Dionysus and Pan that the comedian turns when he shouts his jokes out across the footlights. In fact he takes good care, if he is a wise clown, that the footlights shan’t be there to interfere. If he is Al Jolson, he insists on a runway or a little platform that will bring him out over the footlights and into the lap of the audience. If he is a comedian in burlesque like Bobbie Clark, he has the house lights turned up as soon as he begins a comedy scene. He must make contact somehow with his audience. If the fun-maker is Fanny Brice, the method is a little less obvious, and it draws us closer to the sort of presentational acting which will dominate many theaters in the future, the sort of acting that presents an impersonation, and at the same time stands off with the audience, and watches it. If the player is Ruth Draper or Beatrice Herford, you have something that seems to me almost identical with the kind of acting I am trying to define.

I present these four categories of acting for what they are worth. They are frankly two-dimensional. They are divisions in a single plane. Other planes cut across them, and the categories in these planes intersect the ones I have defined. Consider almost any player, and you will find a confusion of methods and results which will need more explanation than I have provided. There is Richard Kellerhals, for instance, the Munich player whose strikingly different work in The Taming of the Shrew and Florian Geyer I have described. This is not impersonation achieved with make-up. It is a thing of expression, a spiritual thing. Take the actors of the Moscow Art Theater. They use make-up to the last degree, but there is always a spiritual differentiation far more significant than the physical, and there is always a sense of the Form of life more important than either. Harry Lauder has one impersonation—The Saftest of the Family—which is so different from his others in almost every way that for the moment he might be a different player. Here is a presentational actor indulging in the tricks of the realistic impersonator, and showing that, while the fields of realistic impersonation and presentational acting are not absolutely exclusive, at least they are somewhat incongruous or at any rate mutually hampering. Louis Jouvet of the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier presents an opposite phenomenon when he appears in the realistic drama Les Frères Karamazov as the horrific old father, Feodor, and in Twelfth Night as Aguecheek. These are absolutely contradictory impersonations. In each case Jouvet completely disguises his own personality. The interesting point is that the physical impersonation which he brings to the Russian play is essentially unrealistic. It is all very carefully designed in costume, make-up, and gesture as a broad and striking expression, but not as a representation, of rough dominance. The red face and the green coat mix in the olive-bronze hat. His hair and his hat, his coat and his elbows flare out in lines of almost comic violence. He is very close to caricature in a thoroughly realistic play. Here is a curious mixture of methods and ends—planes and categories cutting across one another and creating new figures.

Copeau’s Vieux-Colombier is to-day the most interesting forcing bed of the new acting in Europe—unless the Kamerny Theater of the Russian expressionists is nourishing more than scenery. Copeau’s theater, with its naked stage and almost permanent architectural setting, its lack of proscenium and footlights, and its steps and forestage leading down to the audience, makes unquestionably for presentational acting. The illusion of Realism and representation is extremely difficult to attain. In four plays, Les Frères Karamazov, Twelfth Night, The S. S. Tenacity, and Le Carrosse du St.-Sacrement, varied as they are, we see no great amount of the sort of masquerading which Jouvet does so well in the first two. In the main, the actors keep their own normal appearance throughout; but they are not, of course, playing types. To some extent, therefore, they are working in the vein of Bernhardt and Grasso, striving for impersonation in emotion rather than in physique. Except for a gouty foot and a simple change in costume, Copeau’s Peruvian governor in the comedy Le Carrosse du St.-Sacrement, and his impersonation of the intellectual brother of the house of Karamazov are outwardly very much alike. It is in the mood alone that he registers the difference. In both, but particularly in the comic governor, there is a touch of the presentational attitude which fills the rest of the company in varying degrees and informs most of Twelfth Night. The difference between this acting and what we are accustomed to, is particularly plain in a comparison of the English sailor as played in the New York production of The S. S. Tenacity, and in the Paris production—the oily reality of Claude Cooper’s impersonation against the rather brash, certainly very dry version of Robert Allard. Allard’s performance has the stamp of almost all the acting at the Vieux-Colombier. It is something intellectually settled upon as an expression of an emotion, and then conveyed to the audience almost as if read and explained. In the school of Copeau, who was once journalist and critic, there is ever something of the expounder. It is a reading, an explanation, in the terms of a theatrical performance. It is, to a certain degree, presentational, because in every reading, in every explanation, there must be an awareness of the existence of the audience.

CHAPTER IX
THE REINHARDT TRADITION

Plays of a new expressionist quality—profound, grave, ecstatic, and as far from the neurotic as from the realistic—may be written in the next few years without the stimulus of a great expressionist theater or a great expressionist director. How they are going to get themselves properly produced is another matter. They may be conceived out of the spirit of the time, under the stimulus of the expressionist settings of the scene designers; but the accouchement will demand a rather expert midwife.

Expressionist acting, on the contrary, will never achieve more than a hint of existence without a director to call it forth. A Copeau is necessary to bring out the freshness of the company of the Vieux-Colombier, and the hints it gives of the new acting. A rather extraordinary director will be needed to banish representational acting, and to put in its place a presentational ensemble, and to fuse it with the new play.

Is there such a man in Europe to-day? Is there already an indication of his coming in the modifications that other men have wrought in acting, in setting, and even in theater?

We may as well begin with Reinhardt. He has been the greatest man of the theater of this century. He fled from his Berlin theaters in 1920, to find in Salzburg a retreat from disillusion and a place of new beginnings. We found him there in the summer of 1922 preparing to issue forth from the baroque beauty of the loveliest palace of this lovely city to the conquest of America, and to an experiment in Vienna which may make him again the one figure of the theater—the director we seek. And here and there about Europe we came on spasmodic signs of his continued activity—extraordinary plans for a Festspielhaus in Salzburg or in Geneva, and productions of Orpheus in the Underworld and Strindberg’s The Dream Play in Stockholm.

It would be better, perhaps, to call Orpheus and The Dream Play efficient pot-boilers, and to let them go at that. They give no true measure of the man whose strength and vision grew from art-cabarets to which Balieff owes the inspiration for his Chauve-Souris, and naturalistic beginnings with Gorky and Wedekind, until he had assembled the most striking company and repertory west of Moscow, and centered about himself the whole theatrical movement which Craig and Appia began. The Swedish productions are worth a moment’s attention only, for they show some of Reinhardt’s faults, and hint at a virtue.

I write of Orpheus alone, because the qualities of the Strindberg drama were only to be guessed at from photographs and reports, all uniting in dispraise. There were lovely things in this performance of Offenbach’s operetta for which neither director nor composer could claim credit—the light, clear, nightingale voices of the women of the Swedish Opera, their superb figures, and the icy beauty of blue eyes and ashen hair. But the things I remember from Orpheus in which Reinhardt had a share are often disappointing things, scenes slighted, episodes badly lit, above all carelessness of detail. It has been Reinhardt’s major fault, this failure to bring every feature of a production to the highest point of perfection within his grasp. He has always been satisfied to slight one part if the whole could be “put over” by emphasis on another part. Those who remember Sumurûn will recall things in this brilliantly exciting pantomime that struck them as impossibly slack—bad painting on the canvas flats, a bald contrast between the flimsy front scenes and the solid structure of the court of the harem behind.

In Orpheus his negligence seems to have begun in the choice of a designer. A Dane, Max Rée, makes a mess of the scene on Olympus, and gets to nothing better elsewhere than a golden gate from a chapel in Nancy set against a blue night; Cupid against a gray sky, and, for the descent into Hades, white rays from out a great cloud, down one of which the company dances against the velvet black of the back drop. Before now, Reinhardt has let himself wander from his first instincts and desires—which are usually the instincts of Ernst Stern, his notable designer; there are the horrors of Poelzig’s decoration of the Grosses Schauspielhaus to testify to this.

The Cathedral Scene from Faust. A Reinhardt production of 1912, designed by Ernst Stern. Two huge columns tower up against black emptiness. Crimson light from the unseen altar at one side streams on the congregation and throws quivering shadows of a cross on the nearer column.

The three moments of Orpheus which electrified Swedish audiences are common enough in conception, but they have something of the simple directness and smash which characterized Reinhardt’s earlier work. The three episodes are closely linked and make the climax of the piece. There again you can see Reinhardt’s method—the expenditure of so much of his care and energy upon the most important action of the play. In Orpheus the place for such emphasis is the revolt on Mt. Olympus, and the descent of Jupiter and the gods to Hades. Reinhardt begins with the carmagnole of the revolutionists, with their red banners upon long poles rioting about in the light blue of the celestial regions. For the beginning of the descent into Hades, Reinhardt sees to it that there shall be a high point at the very back of the stage, and from here, clear down to the footlights and over them on a runway beside the boxes, he sends his gods and goddesses cakewalking two at a time down into the depths of the orchestra pit. After a very brief darkness, while the cloud and its rays of light are installed down stage, Reinhardt sets the gods prancing down this white and black path into the flaming silk mouth of hell. By recognizing an opportunity for an effect at the crucial point of the piece, and concentrating upon it whatever energies he has for Orpheus, he makes the descent of the gods far more memorable than it can have been in any other production. Yet it all seems a trivial and half-hearted effort for the man who made Shakespeare so tremendously vital at the Deutsches Theater, and lifted Sophocles’ Œdipus into crashing popularity at the Circus Schumann.

In his day Reinhardt was all things to all men. He began with the great naturalist director Brahm of the Freie Volksbühne. He made a Night Lodging of utter Realism. He put on A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a forest of papier-mâché. He brought an austere symbolic quality to Hamlet, closing the play with those tall, tall spears that shepherded the body of the Dane upon its shield. He made the story of Sister Beatrice into a gigantic and glorious spectacle in The Miracle. He championed intimacy in the theater, took the actor out upon a runway over the heads of the audience in Sumurûn and finally, at the Grosses Schauspielhaus, he put the spectators half around the players, and thrust the players in among the spectators in the last scene of Rolland’s Danton.

Instinct led him to the heart of plays, as it led him from Realism and the proscenium frame back to the Greek orchestra and the actor as a theatrical figure. He grasped the emotional heart of a drama with almost unerring judgment, and he bent a tremendous energy to the task of making the heart of the audience beat with it. Occasionally he ignored or could not animate some secondary but important phase of a play. In The Merchant of Venice, though he made Shylock rightly the center of the play and built up a court scene of intolerable excitement, his Portia and his Nerissa were tawdry figures. But his successes were far greater and far more significant than his failures. Romeo and Juliet he made into a thing of youthful passion that was almost too deep, too intimate for the eyes of strangers. Hamlet with Moissi was an experience of life itself, asserting again the emotional quality of Reinhardt as against the esthetic quality of Craig.

It is hardly necessary to speak of the part that Reinhardt played in establishing the vogue of the designer in the theater, of his attempt to bring Craig to his stage, of his experiments with stage machinery and lighting equipment, or of the extraordinary personal energy which made so much work possible. The German theater testifies continually to his influence. Dozens of younger men must be working in his vein to-day. As far north as Gothenburg, the commercial city of Sweden, and as far south as Vienna his influence spreads.

In Gothenburg works a young director, Per Lindberg, who is as patently a disciple as he was once a student of Reinhardt. There in the Lorensberg Theater is the revolving stage, with settings by a young Swede, Knut Ström, which might have been seen at the Deutsches Theater ten years ago. A large repertory brings forth scenery often in the heavily simplified fashion of ten years ago, but sometimes fresh and ambitious. Romeo and Juliet appears against scenes like early Italian paintings, with one permanent background of hill and cypresses and a number of naïve arrangements of arched arcades from some Fra Angelico. The artist turns régisseur also in Everyman, and manages a performance fresh in its arrangement of setting, platforms, and steps, if a little reminiscent in costumes and poses and movements.

In Richard Weichert, of the State Schauspielhaus in Frankfort, you find a régisseur who suggests the influence of Reinhardt without losing distinction as one of the three really significant directors of Germany to-day. It is not so much an influence in an imitative sense, as a resemblance in effectiveness along rather similar lines.

Maria Stuart: the throne-room at Westminster. Tall screens of blue and gold are ranged behind a dais surmounted by a high, pointed throne of dull gold. At either side curtains of silvery blue. Queen Elizabeth wears a gown of gleaming gold. A Weichert production in Frankfort designed by Sievert.

Weichert, like so many of the outstanding directors of Germany, has a single artist with whom he works on terms of the closest coöperation—Ludwig Sievert. It is a little hard, therefore, to divide the credit in Maria Stuart for many of the dramatic effects of people against settings and in light. You might put down the scenic ideas wholly to Sievert, since Weichert has permitted the use of a particularly poor setting for the scene of Queen Mary’s tirade against Elizabeth; a setting which is a sloppy attempt at lyricism in keeping with Mary’s speech at the beginning of the scene, but quite out of touch with the dramatic end. If Weichert could dictate the fine prison scene reproduced in this book, he would hardly allow Sievert to include the greenery-yallery exterior to which I have taken exception. On the other hand, can it be only an accidental use that Weichert makes of the curtains in the throne room scene? The act begins with a curious arrangement of square blue columns in an angle of which the throne is set. When the audience is over, pages draw blue curtains from each side of the proscenium diagonally backward to the columns by the throne. This cuts down the room to terms of intimacy for the council scene. The point at which Weichert must enter definitely as régisseur comes when Elizabeth steps to one side of the room away from her group of councilors to read some document; then the down-stage edge of the curtain at the side by the councilors is drawn back far enough for a flood of amber light to strike across in front of the men, and catch the white figure of the queen. Here in this light she dominates the room; and Leicester, when he steps into it for a scene with Mortimer, does the same. It is a device of great use to the actor in building up the power and atmosphere of the moment.

The dramatic vigor of Weichert never goes so high in Maria Stuart as Reinhardt’s, but he is never so careless of detail or of subordinate scenes. Almost every inch of the play seems painstakingly perfected. Not only are the actors who give so sloppy a performance in Peer Gynt under another director, strung up constantly to their best effort; but every detail, from contrasts in costuming and the arrangement of costumed figures, to the motion of hands and bodies, seems calculated to heighten the play’s emotion. Take the first scene, for example, the prison in which Queen Mary is confined with her few retainers. The drawing shows the interesting arrangement of the scene with bars to indicate a prison but not to obstruct action. It pictures the final scene in a later act, when the queen receives her friends and says good-by before going to her death. The contrast of the queen in white and the others in black is excellent. In the first act, even the queen is in black; the only note of color, a deep red, is given to the heroic boy, Mortimer, who is to bring something like hope to Mary. The long scene between Mortimer and the queen is handled with great dignity, and at the same time intensity. It is studied out to the last details. The hands alone are worth all your attention.

Weichert’s direction passes on from atmosphere and movement to the expression that the players themselves give of their characters. It is here perhaps that the resemblance to Reinhardt is closest. You catch it in many places: the contrast between Mortimer’s tense young fervor, and the masterful, play-acting nonchalance of Leicester; this red and green horror of an Elizabeth, looking somehow as bald beneath her wig as history says she was, and bursting with pent energies and passions; towards the end of the play, Leicester, the deliberate fop, leaning against the wall like some wilted violet, Mortimer exhausted but still strong beside him; then the death of the boy, the quick stabbing, and the spears of the soldiers raying towards his body on the floor. It is all sharp, firm, poised—and very, very careful.

Maria Stuart: a room in the castle where Queen Mary is imprisoned. High black grills fill the proscenium arch on either side. Behind, a flat wall of silvery gray. The sketch shows the moment when Mary, gowned and veiled in white, bids farewell to her attendants. A Weichert production in Frankfort designed by Sievert.

This is the past of Reinhardt—continued into the present and the future by other men. What of his own continuation of it? Some have thought him finished. Fifteen, twenty years of such accomplishment in the theater are likely to drain any man. And indeed Reinhardt does seem to have run through his work in Berlin, and finished with it. No one will know just how much was personal, how much professional, how much philosophic, in the force that drove him to give up the leadership of his great organization, and see it destroyed. The difficulties of management, with increasing costs and actors lost to the movies, undoubtedly weighed heavily. But it is certain that he felt the failure of his big, pet venture, the Grosses Schauspielhaus. It was to have been the crown of his efforts and beliefs—the “theater of the five thousand,” as he had called it from the days when he astounded the world with Œdipus. In structure and design it was badly handled; it proved a bastard thing and won the severe condemnation of the critics. Added to this was a desire, unquestionably, to shake loose, to get a fresh prospect on the theater, to strike out again if possible towards a final, sure goal. Germans spoke of Reinhardt as vacillating and uncertain in his first years in Salzburg. But is anything but uncertainty to be expected when a man has given up a long line of effort, and is seeking a new one? It is a virtue then to be unsure, to be testing and trying the mind, to be seeking some sort of truth and repeatedly rejecting error.

Certainty began to creep in with Reinhardt’s plan for a Festspielhaus in Salzburg—a Grosses Schauspielhaus of simpler and more conservative pattern built truer on a knowledge of the mistakes of the first. It was to unite Reinhardt, Richard Strauss, the composer, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the playwright. It reached some sort of tentative plan at the hands of Poelzig, who mis-designed the Grosses Schauspielhaus, and Adolf Linnebach, then passed on to Max Hasait, who laid out a stage scheme for some new architect to build his plans around. This scheme called for a semi-circular forestage, with a revolving stage in its center, a traveling cyclorama of the Ars pattern behind this revolving stage, a larger cyclorama taking in still a deeper stage, and another and a larger cyclorama behind that. The proscenium was to be narrowed or widened to suit the size of production and cyclorama. The house itself was to be as adjustable, with a ceiling that let down in such a way as to cut the seating capacity from three or four thousand to fifteen hundred.

While this project waited on capital, an almost hopeless condition in Austria, and hints began to come that the Festspielhaus would have to be built in Geneva instead, a new opportunity came to Reinhardt’s hands through President Vetter, head of the Austrian State theaters, an opportunity of working in a playhouse that agreed with much that Reinhardt had felt about the relations of audience and actor. He was invited to produce five or six plays in the fall of 1922 in the new theater in the Redoutensaal in Vienna. Here, upon a stage practically without setting, and within a room that holds actors and audience in a matrix of baroque richness, Reinhardt will have produced, by the time this book appears, the following plays: Turandot, Gozzi’s Italian comedy, Clavigor and Stella by Goethe, Molière’s Le Misanthrope, and Dame Cobalt by Calderon. Here he will have to work in an absolutely non-realistic vein, he will have to explore to the fullest the possibilities of the new and curious sort of acting which I have called presentational. This adventure in Maria Theresa’s ballroom will measure Reinhardt against the future.

CHAPTER X
THE ARTIST AS DIRECTOR

The director of the future may not be a director of to-day. He may not be a director at all. He may be one of those artists whose appearance has been such a distinctive and interesting phenomenon of the twentieth century theater. While we examine Max Reinhardt to discover if he is likely to be the flux which will fuse the expressionist play and the presentational actor, it may be that the man we seek is his former designer of settings, Ernst Stern.

The relation of artist and director in the modern theater has been a curious one, quite as intimate as that of pilot-fish and shark, and not so dissimilar. Attached to the shark, the pilot-fish has his way through life made easy and secure; he is carried comfortably from one hunting ground to another. Often, however, when the time comes to find food, it is the pilot-fish that seeks out the provender, and prepares the ground, as it were, for the attack of the shark. Then they both feast, and the pilot-fish resumes his subordinate position.

We may shift the figure to pleasanter ground by grace of Samuel Butler, the Erewhonian. This brilliant, odd old gentleman, a bit of a scientist as well as a literary man, had a passion for transferring the terms and conceptions of biology to machinery and to man’s social relationships. Departing from the crustaceans, which grow new legs or tails as fast as the old are cut off, he said:

“What ... can be more distinct from a man than his banker or his solicitor? Yet these are commonly so much parts of him that he can no more cut them off and grow new ones than he can grow new legs or arms; neither must he wound his solicitor; a wound in the solicitor is a very serious thing. As for his bank,—failure of his bank’s action may be as fatal to a man as failure of his heart.... We can, indeed, grow butchers, bakers, and greengrocers, almost ad libitum, but these are low developments and correspond to skin, hair, or finger nails.”

I do not know whether it would be right to say that directors have grown artists with great assiduity in the past twenty years, or that the greatest of the directors have become as closely associated with particular artists as a well-to-do Englishman is with his banker or his solicitor. At any rate the name of Reinhardt is intimately associated with the name of Stern; Jessner has his Pirchan, Fehling his Strohbach; I have spoken of the close relationship of Weichert and Sievert, and I could point out similar identifications in America. An artist of a certain type has come into a very definite, creative connection with the art of production, and he has usually brought his contribution to the theater of a particular director.

The designer is a modern product. He was unknown to Molière or Shakespeare; the tailor was their only artist. Except for incidental music, costume is the one field in which another talent than that of actor or director invaded the theater from Greek days until the last years of the seventeenth century. There were designers of scenery in the Renaissance, but they kept to the court masques. Inigo Jones would have been as astonished and as shocked as Shakespeare if anybody had suggested that he try to work upon the stage of the Globe Theater. The advent of Italian opera—a development easy to trace from the court masques—and the building of elaborate theaters to house its scenery, brought the painter upon the stage. The names of the flamboyant brothers Galli-Bibiena are the first great names to be met with in the annals of scene painting. And they were the last great names until Schinkel, the German architect, began in the early nineteenth century to seek a way of ridding the stage of the dull devices of the current scene painters. Scenery was not an invention of Realism; it was a much older thing. I doubt if any one more talented than a good carpenter or an interior decorator was needed to achieve the actuality which the realists demanded. When artists of distinction, or designers with a flair for the theater appeared at the stage door, it was because they saw Shakespeare or Goethe, von Hofmannsthal or Maeterlinck sending in their cards to Irving or Reinhardt or Stanislavsky.

The Desert: a setting by Isaac Grünewald from the opera, Samson and Delilah. A vista of hills and sky, painted and lit in tones of burning orange, is broken at either side by high, leaning walls of harsh gray rock. The director, Harald André, has grouped his players so as to continue the triangular form of the opening through which they are seen. At the Royal Opera in Stockholm.

Now what are the relations that this modern phenomenon has established with the theater through the medium of the director? Ordinarily they differ very much from the attitude that existed between the old-fashioned scenic artist and the director, and the attitude that still exists in the case of most scenic studios. This is the relation of shopkeeper and buyer. The director orders so many settings from the studio. Perhaps he specifies that they are to be arranged in this or that fashion, though usually, if the director hasn’t the intelligence to employ a thoroughly creative designer, he hasn’t the interest to care what the setting is like so long as it has enough doors and windows to satisfy the dramatist. Occasionally you find a keen, modern director who, for one reason or another, has to employ an artist of inferior quality. Then it is the director’s ideas and conceptions and even his rough sketches and plans that are executed, not the artist’s. In Stockholm, for example, Harald André so dominates the official scene painter of the Opera that the settings for Macbeth are largely André’s in design though they are Thorolf Jansson’s in execution. Even in the case of the exceptionally talented artist, Isaac Grünewald, with whom André associated himself for the production of Samson and Delilah, the director’s ideas could dominate in certain scenes. For example, in the beautiful and effective episode of the Jews in the desert which André injected into the first act—a scene for which the director required a symbolic picture of the fall of the walls of Philistia to accompany the orchestral music which he used for this interlude. The brilliance with which Grünewald executed the conception may be judged from the accompanying illustration.

The commonest relationship of the director and the designer has been coöperative. The artist has brought a scheme of production to the director as often, perhaps, as the director has brought such a scheme to the artist. The director has then criticized, revised, even amplified the artist’s designs, and has brought them to realization on the stage. And the artist and the director, arranging lights at the final rehearsals, have come to a last coöperation which may be more important to the play than any that has gone before.

Samson and Delilah: the mill. A remarkable example of an essentially ornamental theatrical setting, designed by Isaac Grünewald for the Royal Opera in Stockholm. Black emptiness. A slanting shaft of light strikes the millstone in a vivid crescent. As the wheel travels in its track this crescent widens to a disk of blinding light, and then shrinks again. The actual forms of this setting are sublimated into an arresting composition of shifting abstract shapes of light.

You find, however, constant evidence of the artist running ahead of the director in the creation of details of production which have a large bearing on the action as well as on the atmosphere of the play. Grünewald brought a setting to the mill scene in Samson and Delilah which was not only strikingly original and dramatic, but which forced the direction into a single course. The usual arrangement is the flat millstone with a long pole, against which Samson pushes, treading out a large circle as the stone revolves. The actor is always more or less visible, and there is no particular impression of a cruel machine dominating a human being. Grünewald changed all this by using a primitive type of vertical millstone. The sketch shows the stage in darkness except for one shaft of light striking sideways across. The great wheel is set well down front within a low circular wall. Along the wall Samson walks, pushing against a short pole that sticks out from the center of one face of the high narrow, millstone. As he pushes, the stone swings about and also revolves. This allows the beam of light to catch first a thin crescent at the top of the curving edge of the wheel, then a wider and wider curve, until suddenly, as Samson comes into view, the light brings out the flat face of the wheel like a full moon. Against this the actor is outlined for his aria. Then, while the orchestra plays, he pushes the wheel once more around. This arrangement is extraordinarily fine as a living picture and as an expression of the mood of the scene. Moreover, it is a triumph for the artist, because it is an idea in direction as well as setting. It dictates the movement of the player and manages it in the best possible way. No other action for Samson is possible in this set, and no other action could be so appropriate and effective.

Examples of similar dictation by the artist—though none so striking—come to mind. In Frankfort Sievert arranged the settings for Strindberg’s Towards Damascus in a way that contributed dramatic significance to the movement of the players. The piece is in seventeen scenes; it proceeds through eight different settings to reach the ninth, a church, and from the ninth the hero passes back through the eight in reverse order until he arrives at the spot where the action began. Sievert saw an opportunity to use the revolving stage, as well as elements of design, in a way interpreting and unifying the play. He placed all nine scenes on the “revolver,” and he made the acting floor of each successive setting a little higher than the last. This results in rather narrow rooms and a sea shore bounded by formal yellow walls, but it permits an obvious unity, it shows visually the path that the hero has to follow, and it symbolizes his progress as a steady upward movement towards the church.

The artist dictating a particular kind of direction is obvious enough in Chout (Le Bouffon), the fantastic comic ballet by Prokofieff which Gontcharova designed for the Ballets Russes. Gontcharova’s settings are not particularly good, but at least they have a definite and individual character. They are expressionist after a fashion related more or less to Cubism. They present Russian scenes in wildly distorted perspective. Log houses and wooden fences shatter the backdrop in a war of serried timbers. A table is painted on a wing, the top tipping up at an alarming angle, one plate drawn securely upon it, and another, of papier-mâché, pinned to it. All this sort of thing enjoined upon the régisseur a kind of direction quite as bizarre, mannered, and comic. Chout seems to have had no direction at all in any creative sense. The régisseur failed to meet the challenge of the artist.

The first scene of Tchehoff’s Uncle Vanya. Here Pitoëff indicates a Russian country side by a rustic bench and slender birch trees formally spaced against a flat gray curtain.

It is ordinarily very hard to say what share the artist or the director has had in the scheme of a setting, or whether the director has bothered his head at all about the setting after confiding it to what he considers competent hands. It is an interesting speculation just how much the physical shape of Reinhardt’s productions has been the sole creation of his artist, Stern. Certainly Stern delighted in the problems which the use of the revolving stage presented, and only in a single mind could the complexities of these sets, nesting together like some cut-out puzzle, be organized to a definite end. It is entirely possible that, except for a conference on the general tone of the production, and criticisms of the scheme devised by Stern, Reinhardt may have given no thought at all to the scenery. Stern was a master in his own line, and for Reinhardt there was always the thing he delighted most in, the emotional mood produced by the voices and movements of the actors. His carelessness of detail even in the acting, suggests that for him there were only the biggest moments, the important elements and climaxes, that put over the emotion of the play.

Sometimes artist and director are the same, as with Pitoëff in Geneva and Paris, or with Knut Ström in Gothenburg. In such a case setting, direction, and acting are one. But ordinarily there is a division of responsibility, and an opportunity for the artist to play a part in the production of a drama far more important than Bibiena’s. Just how important it may prove to be is bound up, I think, with the future of the theater as a physical thing, and with the temperament of the artist. Working as a designer of picture-settings, the artist can only suggest action, but not dictate it, through the shapes and atmospheres he creates. The important thing is that almost all the designers of real distinction in Europe are tending steadily away from the picture-setting. They are constantly at work upon plans for breaking down the proscenium-frame type of production, and for reaching a simple platform stage or podium upon which the actor shall present himself frankly as an actor. This means, curiously enough, that the designers of scenery are trying to eliminate scenery, to abolish their vocation. And this in turn should indicate that the artist has his eye on something else besides being an artist.

The director who works in such a new theater as the artists desire—in the Redoutensaal in Vienna, for example,—requires an artist to work with him who sees art in terms of the arrangement of action upon steps, and against properties or screens. This is ordinarily the business of the director in our picture-frame theater; with the work of the artist enchantingly visible in the setting behind the actors, the director can get away reasonably well with the esthetic problems of the relations of actors and furniture and of actors and actors. Nobody notes his shortcomings in this regard. Put him upon an almost naked stage, and he must not only make his actors far more expressive in voice and feature, but he must also do fine things with their bodies and their meager surroundings. This is far easier for a pictorial artist than for the director, who is usually an actor without a well-trained eye. The director must therefore employ an artist even in the sceneryless theater, and employ him to do what is really a work of direction. The two must try to fuse their individualities and abilities, and bring out a composite director-artist, a double man possessing the talents that appear together in Pitoëff.

A scene from Grabbe’s Napoleon. The Place de Grêve in Paris is indicated by a great street lamp set boldly on a raised platform in the center of the stage. A Jessner production designed by Cesar Klein.

The immediate question is obviously this: If the director cannot acquire the talents of the artist, why cannot the artist acquire the talents of the director? If the knack of visual design, and the keen appreciation of physical relationships cannot be cultivated in a man who does not possess them by birth, is it likewise impossible for the man who possesses them to acquire the faculty of understanding and of drawing forth emotion in the actor?

The problem narrows down to the temperament of the artist versus the temperament of the director. There is a difference; it is no use denying it. The director is ordinarily a man sensitive enough to understand human emotion deeply and to be able to recognize it, summon it, and guide it in actors. But he must also be callous enough to meet the contacts of direction—often very difficult contacts—and to organize not only the performance of the players, but also a great deal of bothersome detail involving men and women who must be managed and cajoled, commanded, and worn down, and generally treated as no artist cares to treat others, or to treat himself in the process of treating others. The director must be an executive, and this implies a cold ability to dominate other human beings, which the artist does not ordinarily have. The artist is essentially a lonely worker. He is not gregarious in his labor.

So far as the future goes, the hope for the artist is that he will be able to reverse the Butlerian process which held in the relations of director and designer. He must be able to “grow a director.” This may not be so very difficult. It may very well happen that an artist will employ a stage manager, as an astute director now employs an artist, to do a part of his work for him. He will explain to the stage manager the general scheme of production that he wants, much as a director explains to an artist the sort of settings he desires. The stage manager will rehearse the movements of the actors towards this end. When the artist sees opportunities for further development of action and business, he will explain this to the stage manager, and perhaps to the players involved, and the stage manager will again see that the ideas of his superior are carried out. Something of the kind occurs even now where a director employs a subdirector to “break in” the company. Both Reinhardt and Arthur Hopkins, though thoroughly capable of “wading into” a group of players, and enforcing action by minute direction and imitation, generally use the quiet method of consulting with players, and suggesting changes to them, not during the actual rehearsal, but afterwards in the protection of a wing or the privacy of a dressing room.

The first scene from Othello as staged by Leopold Jessner in Berlin. On long curved steps which remain throughout, and against the neutral background of the cyclorama, the artist, Emil Pirchan, puts the barest indications of place. Here, Brabantio’s house gleams like a moonstone against a background of neutral-tinted distance.

The presence of the artist as director in some future theater without scenery, implies a decided influence on the type of acting.

Such a stage itself, thrust boldly at the spectators, if not actually placed in the midst of them, tends to dictate a frank, direct contact between players and audience. In such a house an actor will be all but forced to desert the purely representational style of to-day, and to present himself and his emotions in an open, assertive, masculine manner as objects of art and of emotion.

The tendency of the artist towards this kind of theater implies, I think, a tendency towards presentational acting. Certainly I have talked with few who were not receptive to it.

Put together a stage that tends towards presentational acting and an artist whose instincts run to the same ends, and the outcome is not difficult to foresee.

The problem at present is, what artist? And where? And how soon?

CHAPTER XI
A NEW ADVENTURE IN DIRECTION

The outstanding director in the German theater to-day is also the most radical director. And the most radical director is at the head of the Prussian State Theater, the Schauspielhaus, in Berlin. His name is Leopold Jessner, and he is the only man who has threatened to fill the place made vacant by Reinhardt’s retirement. Some say that he has already filled it, and—with disarming logic—that Reinhardt was only a mountebank anyhow. Some think Jessner a clever eccentric. Certainly he is the most discussed personality in the German theater, and his methods are the most debated.

One word crops up whenever his name is mentioned—Jessnertreppen. The German language has boiled down into a single word an idea that we would have to phrase as “those crazy steps of Leopold Jessner.” It makes a handy stone for the anti-Jessnerites to throw at the director’s friends. Jessner’s friends are beginning to have the good sense to pick up the stone and throw it back. For the word Jessnertreppen hits off a virtue—perhaps, the main virtue of the man.

Othello: act III, scene 3. A towering column, with its lower end sharpened like the point of a lead pencil, is seemingly driven into one end of the central platform. Othello and Iago stand at the base.

IAGO: Have you not sometimes seen a handkerchief
Spotted with strawberries in your wife’s hands?

Jessner fills his stage with steps. He seems unable to get along without them. He must have platforms, levels, walls, terraces. They are to him what screens, towering shapes, great curtains are to Gordon Craig. In every production Jessner, through his artist, Emil Pirchan, provides some permanent foundation besides the stage-floor for the actor to play upon, some arrangement of different levels. In his Richard III it is a wall all across the stage, with a platform along the top at the base of another wall, and for certain scenes a flight of steps like a pyramid placed against the lower wall. In Othello Jessner uses two platforms, one on top of the other, each reached by two or three steps, the lower a long ellipse almost as large as the stage, the upper one smaller and proportionately broader; upon the upper platform Jessner places certain indications of setting. For Grabbe’s Napoleon he uses four or five steps rising sharply to a platform perhaps four feet high. Sometimes this platform is supplemented by a high one pulled apart in the middle to make opposing hills, redoubts, vantage points in the battle scenes.

The Jessnertreppen are the key to the physical things in this director’s productions. They give the stage one general shape for each play. They establish a formal quality. They tend to banish representation in scenery, since only indications of setting harmonize with their frank artificiality. And—their main purpose—they provide the director with most interesting opportunities for manœuvering his actors.

One of the simplest and most obvious of these is a new way of making entrances. Such steps as are used in Othello and Napoleon go down at the back as far as they rise in the front, and below that the director opens a trap or two in the floor. Thus he is able to have an actor walk straight up out of the back of the stage, and appear in a dominating position in the middle of the action. Jessner uses this novel means of entrance again and again in Othello, and it is always fresh and effective. For the return to Cyprus the Moor marches triumphantly up these steps, to the welcome of his wife.

Far more important, however, is what Jessner does with the front of the steps. They may be there to help a formal stage with very little scenery to seem steadily interesting even to audiences that expect the conventional gauds of the theater. But their true office is to make possible a sort of three-dimensional direction for which Jessner has become renowned. Ordinarily the actor moves in only two directions upon the stage—right and left, and towards the footlights and away from them. As a matter of fact, the latter movement is so unsatisfactory from the point of view of any spectators except those in the balconies, that the actor really has only one plane in which he can move visibly and expressively. Jessner does more than add a third dimension when he sends his actors up and down the steps. He also gives a great deal more significance to the movement towards and away from the audience.

Othello: act 4, scene 2. Cyprus. The castle. On the central platform are set two curved screens of dull salmon pink. Behind, the quivering darkness of the unlighted cyclorama. Emilia, dressed in deep crimson, stands in the foreground.

Beside the sense of movement—always an intriguing thing in the theater—Jessner provides in his steps a mechanism for solving many dramatic problems. His actors do not spend their time getting out of the way of the actors behind them. They are not shuttling back and forth in an effort to let the audience see all the players at the same time. One actor cannot “cover” another if he stands on steps. Even a very large crowd can appear on such a stage without the individual speakers being lost. As Lee Simonson showed in his use of different levels for the Theater Guild’s production of He Who Gets Slapped, with the proper sort of elevations on the stage a large number of actors can play a very complicated scene without confusing their relationships or assuming awkward positions.

But a great deal more important than this negative virtue is the positive contribution of steps in permitting many more and much finer compositions than the flat floor permits. Jessner composes freely in three dimensions. He composes both for esthetic and for dramatic effect.

There are times when you can see him arranging his actors with nothing but the esthetic aim in mind. Take the first scene in which Napoleon himself appears in Grabbe’s drama. It is not a particularly good setting in some ways; it is a rather obvious and ugly silhouette of a bastion and a slanting parapet leading up to it. The scene shows Napoleon receiving reports from an officer and giving orders. Jessner deliberately places Napoleon on top of the bastion against the sky and stands the officer stiffly on the parapet below; the relation of the two men as characters in the play is thus established visually as well as through the text. The relation of the two men as a composition—not as characters—has to be disturbed by the entrance of a second officer. It is obviously impossible for Napoleon and the first officer both to retain their positions if the second officer is to fit into a composition. Accordingly the first moves just enough to establish a new esthetic relation embracing all three.

Jessner is free with his dramatic compositions and occasionally altogether too obvious. He keeps his dominant people at the top of the Jessnertreppen, or brings them down as they lose command. He handles the accession of Richard III as Shakespeare did, and as very few directors have since done. When the burghers come to ask Richard to be king, they find him “aloft, between two bishops,” in compliance with Buckingham’s advice: “Go, go up to the leads.” Jessner has Richard walk upon the platform above the wall; it is his first appearance on high and he maintains his place until the battle at the end. At the close of Napoleon, the emperor, who has appeared hitherto only at the top of the steps, is seen seated, broken and disconsolate, on the lowest step of all, with a sinking sun behind him, and the soldiers above.

Othello: act 4, scene 2. Iago lurks in the shadow of a great black shape distorted like the trunk of some fantastic tree. Cassio pursues Roderigo along a narrow path which skirts the base of the cyclorama; you see their running figures, far away and small.

It would seem safe to infer from all this that Jessner is not a realistic producer. He might, of course, have achieved many of these effects within a natural setting, but only at the cost of a great deal of laborious planning and manœuvering. As a matter of fact, Jessner doesn’t use one ounce of energy trying to be either natural or plausible. His method is openly expressionistic.

Jessner distorts the natural in a hundred ways to achieve something expressive of the drama. The first scene in Napoleon, as he gives it, is supposed according to the text to pass in the arcades of the Palais Royal, lined with booths. Various episodes, dialogues, and harangues take place between different speakers and different knots of the crowd. The usual method of handling such a scene is to turn on and off the speech of the different groups of actors at will, making certain speakers and parts of the crowd obligingly inaudible to the audience. There is little enough of nature in such a business, but Jessner banishes even that. He keeps the stage empty except for small crowds that rush out, along with the speakers or show-barkers, for particular episodes.

Jessner handles crowds even more arbitrarily at times. Later in Napoleon, during a riot preceding the news of Napoleon’s return from exile, a revolutionist kills a tailor. As his body sinks to the steps, the crowd of red-clothed men and women falls upon him, almost as if to devour the corpse, and covers the steps as with a great blood-red stain. In Richard III, when Gloucester appears as king in a red cloak upon the top of the red steps, which are placed for this purpose against the wall, his eight retainers, also in red, sink down in a heap below him like a pile of bloody skulls. In Othello, when the Moor returns in triumph to Cyprus a cheering crowd comes with him up the steps from the back. When he has reached the top and can go no higher, the crowd sinks prostrate. For a moment he seems to grow in stature, and his triumph to tower upward.

The prison scene from Richard III. A triangular patch of light discloses a low arched opening in the nearer wall of the permanent setting where Clarence sits in chains.

CLARENCE: Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels....

These are all compositions in three dimensions, as well as violations of ordinary human conduct. Jessner can also create symbolic action out of unnatural action without any particular aid from the steps. The scene of Napoleon’s entrance into the throne room of Louis XVIII is an interesting example. The steps give prominence to the throne, and enable the audience to see better; but Jessner’s symbolism has nothing to do with the steps. The scene is made up of some curtains masking each side, two wings cut in rococo curves and ornamented with lilies in rococo patterns. A flat backdrop of the same design and colors—not a very good design or very French colors—completes the room. In this room in an earlier scene Louis has held audience, a fat, yellow-and-white egg of a man, like some Humpty-Dumpty caught in a flood of the fierce white light that is supposed to beat about a throne, and all too seldom does anything of the kind. But now Louis is gone, and the lilies of the wall are shadowed by curtains of Napoleonic blue, which have, for some unaccountable reason, got themselves hung in the room. Napoleon enters through the gap in the curtains, reaches up, seizes the edge of one of them, and pulls it down over the glory that was Bourbon. Then he turns and faces the audience while two files of soldiers march stiffly past him to the opposite side from which each entered. The gesture to the curtains, and the staccato march of the soldiers back of Napoleon, set out the drama of his returning power.

Naturally Shakespeare, even more than Grabbe, gives Jessner exceptional opportunities to symbolize and formalize in direction. He is quick to seize them—particularly in the soliloquies. He begins Richard III with Gloucester speaking to the audience as Prologue; he ends it with Richmond as Epilogue. Jessner always flings asides directly at the spectators. When he comes upon soliloquies—as in Brakenbury’s musings after Clarence has fallen asleep in his cell—he cuts them off sharply from the previous action by altering the lighting, and bringing the actor down-stage to speak full at the audience. He places the murderers squatting on the prompter’s box for much of their chatter. He has the scrivener read Hastings’ condemnation to the audience from the same vantage point, and upon this relic, in poses fashioned a little after Rodin’s Burghers of Calais, he places the three citizens who discourse of the old king’s death and the sorry state of the realm.

Jessner is quite as arbitrary in his handling of light as in his handling of people. He does not use light merely to illumine the stage, as directors did thirty years ago. He does not use light and shadow merely to define action by making faces and figures more dynamic, as Appia set modern producers doing. He uses light and shadow as a parallel expression to the play. Light and shadow act the drama almost as much as do the players. The light is not in the least “natural.” It suits the mood of the scene. It waxes and wanes with the progress or the action. When the little princes enter in Richard III the light shines out more brightly. When Othello dies, it grows dim, then a sharp shaft of light shoots out from the prompter’s box, and throws the shadow of Iago over the tragedy he has caused, and the shadow of the great canopied bed spreads out over the cyclorama, which has stood as a sort of limit of space about the play. Jessner is particularly fond of shadows. When one rival meets another and vanquishes him, Jessner will have him literally “throw him into the shade.” Spotlights, flashing on, create meaningful shadows. An amusing example occurs in the soliloquy of Richard ending:

Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass,

That I may see my shadow as I pass.

As Richard says this, the lights on the stage go down, and a spotlight from the prompter’s box throws his humped shadow on the wall.

Richard III: Gloucester and his shadow. A high green-gray wall extends straight across the stage; in front, a lower wall. As Gloucester speaks,

Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass,

That I may see my shadow as I pass,