Washington Square Plays Part 1

Washington Square Plays.

by Various.

INTRODUCTION

The rigid conventionality of the theatre has been frequently remarked upon. Why the world should ever fear a radical, indeed, is hard to see, since he has against him the whole dead weight of society; but least of all need the radical be dreaded in the theatre. When the average person pays money for his amus.e.m.e.nts, he is little inclined to be pleased with something which doesn't amuse him: and what amuses him, nine times out of ten, is what has amused him. That is why changes in the theatre are relatively slow, and customs long prevail, even till it seems they may corrupt the theatrical world.

For many generations in our playhouse it was the custom to follow the long play of the evening with an "afterpiece," generally in one act, but always brief, and almost always gay, if not farcical. Audiences, which in the early days a.s.sembled before seven o'clock, had to be sent home happy. After the tragedy, the slap-stick or the loud guffaw; after "Romeo and Juliet," Cibber's "Hob in the Well"; after "King Lear," "The Irish Widow." (These two ill.u.s.trations are taken at random from the programs of the Charleston theatre in 1773.) This custom persisted until comparatively recent times. The fathers and mothers of the present generation can remember when William Warren, at the Boston Museum, would turn of an evening from such a part as his deep-hearted Sir Peter Teazle to the loud and empty vociferations of a Morton farce. The entertainment in those days would hardly have been considered complete without the "afterpiece," or, as time went on, sometimes the "curtain raiser." It is by no means certain that theatre seats were always cheaper than to-day.

In some cases, certainly, they were relatively quite as high. But it is certain that you got more for your money. You frequently saw your favorite actor in two contrasted roles, two contrasted styles of acting perhaps, and you saw him from early evening till a decently late hour.

You didn't get to the theatre at 8.30, wait for the curtain to rise on a thin-spun drawing-room comedy at 8.45, and begin hunting for your wraps at 10.35. One hates to think, in fact, what would have happened to a manager fifty years ago who didn't give more than that for the price of a ticket. Our fathers and mothers watched their pennies more sharply than we do.

For various reasons, one of them no doubt being the growth of cheaper forms of amus.e.m.e.nt and the consequent desertion from the traditional playhouse of a considerable body of those who least like, and can least afford, to spend money irrespective of returns, the "afterpiece" and "curtain raiser" have practically vanished from our stage. They have so completely vanished, in fact, that theatre goers have lost not only the habit of expecting them, but the imaginative flexibility to enjoy them.

If you should play "Romeo and Juliet" to-day and then follow it with a one-act farce, your audience would be uncomfortably bewildered. They would be unable to make the necessary adjustment of mood. If you focus your vision rapidly from a near to a far object, you probably suffer from eye-strain. Similarly, the jump from one play to the other in the theatre gives a modern audience mind- or mood-strain. It is largely a matter of habit. We, to-day, have lost the trick through lack of practice. The old custom is dead; we are fixed in a new one. If Maude Adams, for instance, should follow "The Little Minister" with a roaring farce, or Sothern should turn on the same evening from "If I Were King"

to "Box and c.o.x," we should feel that some artistic unity had been rudely violated; nor am I at all sure, being a product of this generation, but that we should be quite right.

Matters standing as they do, then, it seems to me that the talk we frequently hear about reviving "the art of the one-act play" by restoring the curtain raisers or afterpieces to the programs of our theatres is reactionary and futile. All recent attempts to pad out a slim play with an additional short one have failed to meet with approval, even when the short piece was so masterly a work as Barrie's "The Will," splendidly acted by John Drew, or the same author's "Twelve Pound Look," acted by Miss Barrymore. Nor is it at all certain that the one-act plays of our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, the names of which you may read by the thousands on ancient playbills, added anything to the store of dramatic literature. Some of them are decently entombed in the catacombs of Lacy's British Drama, or still available for amateurs in French's library. Did you ever try to read one? Of course, there was "Box and c.o.x," but it is doubtful if there will be any great celebration at the tercentenary of Morton's death.

For the most part, those ancient afterpieces were frankly padding, conventional farces to fill up the bill and send the audiences home happy. To the real art of the drama or the development of the one-act play as a form of serious literary expression, they made precious little contribution. They were a theatrical tradition, a convention.

But the one-act play, nonetheless, has an obvious right to existence, as much as the short story, and there are plentiful proofs that it can be as terse, vivid, and significant. Most novelists don't tack on a short story at the end of their books for full measure, but issue their contes either in collections or in the pages of the magazines. What similar chances are there, or can there be, for the one-act play, the dramatic short story?

An obvious chance is offered by vaudeville. The vaudeville audience is in the mood for rapid alterations of attention; it has the habit of variety. This is just as much a convention of vaudeville as the single play is now a convention of the traditional theatre. Indeed, anything longer than a one-act play in vaudeville would be frowned upon. Any one wishing to push the a.n.a.logy can find more than one correspondence between a vaudeville program and the contents of a "popular" magazine; each, certainly, is the present refuge of short fiction. Yet vaudeville can hardly be considered an ideal cradle for a serious dramatic art.

(Shall we say that the a.n.a.logy to the "popular" magazine still holds?) The average "playlet"--atrocious word--in the variety theatres is a dreadful thing, crude, obvious, often sensational or sentimental, usually very badly acted at least in the minor recircles, and still more a frank padding, a thing of the footlights, than the afterpiece of our parents. It has been frequently said by those optimists who are forever discovering the birth of the arts in popular amus.e.m.e.nts that vaudeville audiences will appreciate and applaud the best. This is only in part true. They will appreciate the best juggler, the cleverest trained dog, the most appealing ballad singer such as Chevalier or Harry Lauder. But they will no more appreciate those subtleties of dramatic art which must have free play in the serious development of the one-act play than the readers of a "popular" magazine in America (or England either) would appreciate Kipling's "They," or George Moore's "The Wild Goose," or de Maupa.s.sant's "La Ficelle." To expect them to is silly; and to expect that because the supreme, vivid example of any form is comprehensible to all cla.s.ses and all mixtures of cla.s.ses, therefore the supreme example is going to be developed out of the commonplace stuff such mixed audiences daily enjoy, is equally to misunderstand the evolution of an art product in our complex modern world. But, indeed, the matter scarce calls for argument. Vaudeville itself furnishes the answer. Where are its one-act plays which can be called dramatic literature? It is a hopeful sign, perhaps, that certain of the plays in this volume have percolated into the varieties! But they were not cradled there.

If the traditional theatre, then, is now in a rut which affords no room for the one-act play, and if vaudeville is an empty cradle for this branch of dramatic art, where shall we turn? The one-act play to-day has found refuge and encouragement in the experimental theatres, and among the amateurs. The best one-act plays so far written in English have come out of Ireland, chiefly from the Abbey Theatre in Dublin where they were first acted by a company recruited from amateur players. Synge's "Riders to the Sea," Yeats's "The Hour Gla.s.s," the comedies of Lady Gregory and others of that school, have not only proved the power of this form to carry the sense of reality, but its power as well to reach tragic intensity or high poetic beauty. The sombre loveliness and cleansing reality of Synge's masterpiece are almost unrivaled in our short-play literature. Not from the Abbey Theatre, but from the pen of an Irishman, Lord Dunsany, have come such short fantasies as "The G.o.ds of the Mountain" and "The Glittering Gate," which the so-called "commercial"

theatre has quite ignored, but which have been played extensively by amateurs and experimental theatres throughout America; and the latter piece, especially, has probably been provocative of more experimental stagecraft and a greater stimulation of poetic fancy among amateur producers than any drama, short or long, written in recent years.

When the Washington Square Players, for the most part amateurs of the theatre, began their experiment in the spring of 1915, they began with a bill of one-act plays. With but two exceptions, all their succeeding productions have been composed of one-act plays, usually in groups of four, the last one for the evening sometimes being a pantomime. (It should be noted that a program of four one-act plays has the unity of a collection. A short play following a long one is overbalanced and the program seems to most of us awry.) The reason for this choice was not entirely a devotion to the art of the one-act play. When players are inexperienced, it is far easier to present a group of plays of one act than it is to sustain a single set of characters for an entire evening.

The action moves more rapidly, the tale is told before the monotony of the actors becomes too apparent. Moreover, the difference between the plays helps to furnish that variety which the players themselves cannot supply by their impersonations. Still again, it was no doubt easier for the Washington Square Players to find novelties within their capacity in the one-act form than in the longer medium. At any rate, they did produce one-act plays, and are still producing them.

Four of these plays are presented in this book, four which won approval first on the stage of the Bandbox Theatre and later, acted by other players, in various other theatres. One of them, "Overtones," is a theatrical novelty which if prolonged beyond the one-act form would become monotonous. Another, "Helena's Husband," is a bantering satire, an intellectual "skit," which would equally suffer by prolongation.

"Eugenically Speaking" could certainly bear no further extension, unless its mood were deepened into seriousness. Finally, "The Clod" approaches the true episodic roundness of the one-act drama, or the short story, in its best estate. Here is a single episode of reality, taken from its context and set apart for contemplation. It begins at the proper moment for understanding, it ends when the tale is told. There is here more than a hint of the art of Guy de Maupa.s.sant. And the episode is theatrically exciting--a prime requisite for practical performance, and spiritually significant--a prime requisite for the serious consideration of intelligent spectators. In these four plays, then, written for the Washington Square Players, the one-act form demonstrates its right to our attention and cultivation, for it takes interesting ideas or situations which are incapable of expansion into longer dramas and makes intelligent entertainment of what otherwise would be lost.

Because such organizations as the Abbey Theatre have demonstrated the value of the one-act play in portraying local life, in stimulating a local stage literature; because such organizations in America as the Washington Square Players have demonstrated the superior value of the one-act play as a weapon with which to win recognition and build up the histrionic capacity to tackle longer works; and, finally, because the one-act play offers such obvious advantages to amateurs, it seems fairly certain that in the immediate future, at least, the one-act play in America, as a serious art form, will be cultivated by the experimental theatres, the so-called "Little Theatres," and by the more ambitious and talented amateurs. As our experimental theatres increase in number--and they are increasing--it will probably play its part, and perhaps no insignificant a part, in the development of a national drama through the development of a local drama and the cultivation of a taste for self-expression in various communities. It is only when these experimental theatres are sufficient in number, and the amateur spirit has been sufficiently aroused in various communities, that the commercial theatre of tradition will be seriously influenced. When that time comes--if it does come--one of the results will undoubtedly be a more flexible theatre, the growth of repertoire companies, the expansion of the activities of popular players. In a more flexible theatre, where repertoire is a rule rather than a strange and dreaded experiment, and where actors pride themselves on versatility and the public honors them for it, the one-act play will again have its place, but not then as a curtain raiser or afterpiece, to pad out an evening or "send the suburbs home happy," but as a serious branch of dramatic art. In that happy day Barrie will not be the only first-cla.s.s talent in the commercial playhouse daring the one-act form, or at least able to induce a commercial manager to produce his work in that form.

But that time is not yet. The one-act play in our country to-day is an ally of the amateurs and the innovators. For that very reason, perhaps, it is the form which will bear the most watching for signs of imagination and for flashes of insight and interpretative significance.

WALTER PRICHARD EATON. Stockbridge, Ma.s.sachusetts.

PREFACE TO THE PLAYS

If fools did not rush in where theatrical angels fear to tread, this Preface would never have been written. Two years back the Washington Square Players were called, by many who had theatrical experience, fools. Now some term us pioneers. The future may write us fools again, or something better--the conclusion being that the difference between the fool and the pioneer lies in the outcome; the secret, that the motive power behind both is enthusiasm.

Without enthusiasm the Washington Square Players could never have come into existence, nor survived. From the first, when we had barely enough money for rent and none for the costumes and properties we borrowed and disguised, ours was an enthusiasm strong in quant.i.ty as well as quality.

The theatre is a peculiar art. Both in production and reception it requires numbers and an enduring faith. Many a similar attempt has failed because its experimentation and expression have been restricted by a single point of view. Many have not continued because the desire has waned in the face of the hardships and sacrifices entailed. But the Players rightly had a plural name. We were, and are, a collection of many individuals--actors, authors, artists, and art-lovers--all fired with the sincere desire to give to playgoers something they had not been able previously to find on the American stage. And our desire has been strong enough to face and fight, and to continue to face and fight, the ever-growing, ever-changing problems of finance, art, and human inter-relations, which are the inescapable factors of the theatre.

We believed in the democracy of the drama. But we understand democracy to mean, not the gratification of the taste of the many to the exclusion of that of the few, but the satisfaction of all tastes. We had no quarrel with the stage as it was, save that there wasn't enough of it.

We felt there was a public that wanted something other than it could get--as evidenced by the rise of such inst.i.tutions as the Drama League--and that that public was large enough to support what it wanted once it learned where to find it. The problem was to bridge the gap of waiting. And it was met by the sacrifices of all those who worked at first for nothing, and then for little more, so that the Players would not fall into debt in the process of reaching an audience. As an able New York dramatic critic stated, the establishment of the Washington Square Players was merely one more proof that in America, as elsewhere, joy was a greater incentive to work than money.

This enthusiasm among the workers, both in quality and quant.i.ty, was generously shared by the spectators. The public which looked for plays, acting and producing different from what it could find on the regular stage, proved us right in believing that it was sufficiently large and interested to warrant our experiment. Critics and patrons gave us from the first, and we hope will continue to give us, that personal interest and sympathetic appreciation which have been among the most vital factors contributing to our growth.

So far we have produced thirty-two plays, of one-act and greater length, and of these twenty have been American. The emphasis of our interest has been placed on the American playwright, because we feel that no American theatre can be really successful unless it develops a native drama to present and interpret those emotions, ideas, characters, and conditions with which we, as Americans, are primarily concerned.

Of these twenty American plays the Drama League has selected four for this volume of its series. Excluding comment on my farce--for an author is notoriously unfit to judge his own work--I think it may be said that these represent a fair example of the success the Players have met with in trying to encourage the writing of American plays with "freshness and sincerity of theme and development; skilful delineation of character; non-didactic presentation of an idea; and dramatic and esthetic effectiveness without theatricalism." They are the early products of a new movement in the American theatre of which we are happy to be a part, and if their publication meets with the sympathetic, appreciative reception that has been accorded their production, we feel and hope that not only these authors, not only the Washington Square Players, but all of the workers in this new movement will be encouraged and stimulated to a further effort, a greater mastery, and a bigger achievement.

EDWARD GOODMAN, Director of the Washington Square Players. Comedy Theatre, New York, 1916.

I. THE CLOD

A One-Act Play

By Lewis Beach

Copyright, 1914, by Emmet Lewis Beach, Jr.

(Note--The author acknowledges indebtedness to "The Least of These," by Donal Hamilton Haines, a short story which suggested the play.)

"The Clod" was produced by the Washington Square Players, under the direction of Holland Hudson, at the Bandbox Theatre, New York City, beginning January 10, 1916.

In the cast, in the order of their appearance, were the following:

MARY TRASK. Josephine A. Meyer THADDEUS TRASK. John King A NORTHERN SOLDIER. Glenn Hunter A SOUTHERN SERGEANT. Robert Strange A SOUTHERN PRIVATE. Spalding Hall

The Scene was designed by John King.

"The Clod" was subsequently revived by the Washington Square Players at the Comedy Theatre, New York City, beginning June 5, 1916. In this production Mary Morris played the part of Mary Trask.

Later it was presented in vaudeville by Martin Beck, opening at the Palace Theatre, New York City, August 21, 1916, with the following cast:

MARY TRASK. Sarah Padden THADDEUS TRASK. John Cameron A NORTHERN SOLDIER. Glenn Hunter A SOUTHERN SERGEANT. Thomas Hamilton A SOUTHERN PRIVATE. Gordon Gunnis

"The Clod" was first produced by the Harvard Dramatic Club, in March, 1914, with the cast as follows:

MARY TRASK. Christine Hayes THADDEUS TRASK. Norman B. Clark A NORTHERN SOLDIER. Dale Kennedy A SOUTHERN SERGEANT. James W. D. Seymour d.i.c.k. Richard Southgate

THE CLOD

CHARACTERS

THADDEUS TRASK MARY TRASK A NORTHERN SOLDIER A SOUTHERN SERGEANT d.i.c.k