A Sustainable Theatre

Jasper Deeter at Hedgerow

B. Witham

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137121851
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Begun as an audacious experiment, for thirty years the Hedgerow Theatre prospered as America's most successful repertory company. While known for its famous alumnae (Ann Harding and Richard Basehart), Hedgerow's legacy is a living library of over 200 productions created by Jasper Deeter's idealistic and determined pursuit of 'truth and beauty.'

1. Inheritors: Growing a Theatre

The Hedgerow produced Susan Glaspell’s “American play” every Memorial Day and every Independence Day for nearly 30 years. It was, in many ways, their signature piece. She had written the powerful drama about democracy and individual conscience in 1920 against the background of the Palmer Raids, the Sedition Act, and a wave of “true Americanism,” which swept up aliens and suspected “reds” for prison sentences or deportation. Inheritors also drew deeply upon Glaspell’s Midwestern roots, the pioneering adventures of her Iowa family, and the stories that she had heard as a girl about the bravery and despair of Blackhawk, Chief of the Sauk. While the play resonated clearly with a post–World War I generation, it also invoked the cruelty and injustice of the Indian Wars that resulted in the expulsion of the Sauk and Fox from their Midwest tribal lands in the 1830s.

Jasper Deeter directed the premiere production in New York at The Playwright’s Theatre in 1921. He was 28 and had had a checkered career in vaudeville and theatre before attaching himself to the young rebels and iconoclasts at Provincetown in 1919. Like his contemporaries there—Edna St. Vincent Millay, Djuna Barnes, and Ida Rauh—Deeter was attracted to the bohemianism of Greenwich Village and to progressive ideas about sexual identity, race relations, and gender equality.¹ He was also intrigued with the dedication and the mission of Provincetown, especially their commitment to producing new American plays in a noncommercial repertory system.

There was little in Deeter’s background, however, which suggested the impact that he would have at Provincetown or in the creation of Hedgerow. He had failed at two colleges, Lafayette (1912) and Dickinson (1915), at newspaper reporting, and after finally landing a New York part in Charles Coburn’s The Better Ole in 1918, was fired for excessive ad-libbing and “improper care of costumes.”² Along the way he had tried his hand at vaudeville, Chautauqua performances, and stock at the Little Theatre in Philadelphia. All without particular distinction. But he was passionate about acting and performing. His mother, who aspired to a singing career, had given him vocal training and he performed as a choir boy at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, where he grew up. She also encouraged him to attend acting classes taught by Silas Clark—Barrett Clark’s father—at Chautauqua, New York, where he deferred part of his tuition by working as a cook’s assistant. Just prior to joining Provincetown he had secured a small role as “2nd Policeman” in Frank Conroy’s production of Shakuntala, the classic Sanskrit Hindu drama, which was performing at the Greenwich Village Theatre.

Figure 1.1 Inheritors at Hedgerow, 1932. Courtesy of the Hedgerow Theatre.

In spite of his limited resume, contemporaries often remarked about Jasper Deeter’s magnetic presence: his “riveting eyes,” chiseled features, and an electrifying effect offstage and on. Dorothy Haworth remembered the “comber of black hair which broke over his forehead, his piercing eyes and the aquiline nose which thrust forward like a prow breaking into stormy and untried waters.”³ Mordecai Gorelik, who met him in Greenwich Village and later designed at Hedgerow, was fascinated by his personal magnetism. “A true leader but also the most baffling and dangerous man I have ever come across.”⁴ He found him “brilliant and erratic,” but with typical Gorelik paranoia also accused Deeter of deceit: “taking orders with great meekness then going off in a corner and spitefully and maliciously causing trouble.”⁵ Henry Miller called him “a man without dross. A man who has been through the fires. No artifice, no conventionality, no histrionics.” And he was effusive about Deeter’s impact: “communicating through his beautiful brown eyes a magnetic ray which bathed one in an electric effluvium.”⁶

It was a heady time to be an ambitious actor in Greenwich Village. The Washington Square Players were reforming themselves into what would become the Theatre Guild, and talk of an actors’ union monopolized the discussions at the Sheridan Square saloons. Some railed against the Theatrical Syndicate and the power and excesses of the Shuberts and the Producing Managers Association. Others called for a return to the repertory system that, in spite of its failure eight years earlier at the New Theatre, still held a fascination for those seeking a better life in the theatre. Actors’ Equity, fighting for a legitimate existence, finally called a general strike in August and dozens of actors were out of work. Tempers flared as the managers threatened retaliation, but the so-called white way went dark. Youngsters at the Theatre Guild were allowed to continue playing John Ferguson because they were legally a private organization and not a commercial theatre, and they had a captive audience of summer tourists. Provincetowners were struggling to clarify their own goals, as a younger generation pushed for more “professionalism” against the will of their founder and philosopher, Jig Cook, who believed that their success and destiny was rooted in their untarnished amateur status. Deeter saw the plays on MacDougal Street and found the work promising and erratic. But he was excited by the idea of Provincetown and eager to join the ranks of a group who seemed to embody his idea of a company of actors working together to make a better theatre.⁷

His success was immediate although not spectacular. The competing egos on MacDougal Street were foreboding even for someone as “cantankerous” as Jasper Deeter. Cook and Susan Glaspell were technically on a writing sabbatical in 1919, and the theatre was being overseen by Ida Rauh and James Light who were charged with identifying the season’s work as well as mounting the productions. Deeter made his debut in December 1919 in a play by Lewis Beach called Brothers, directed by Light, and was subsequently cast in all the remaining programs in the sixth season. He played “Al” in Edna Ferber’s The Eldest in January and had a substantial role as “Town Crier” in Vote for the New Moon. He met and bonded with Eugene O’Neill, and in February 1920, Deeter played Ned Malloy, the self-absorbed and suicidal lead in O’Neill’s lost, autobiographical drama, Exorcism.⁸ Nine months later, his career found sudden traction when Jig Cook, back from his writing retreat, poured all of Provincetown’s resources into producing O’Neill’s stunning new play, The Emperor Jones. Deeter was cast as the craggy Cockney, Smithers, a role that was tailored to his ability to play distinctive character parts, and he vaulted to prominence at Provincetown.

The enormous success of The Emperor Jones split the ever-squabbling players into two sharp camps: those who wanted to capitalize on the notoriety of the production and go uptown, and those who wanted to add it to their list of accomplishments and continue their quest for excellence in the village. Deeter was a strong spokesman for the latter and in the ensuing weeks—while commuting uptown for Jones—he became an articulate spokesman for the artistry of the group. He’d learned some directing from Light and Edmund Goodman and developed his skills of observation and his sense of how actors could be coaxed into truthful choices. When Goodman recommended him to codirect the new play that Jig had been working on during his sabbatical year, Deeter was delighted with the opportunity.

The Spring, in Cook’s fervent imagination, demonstrated the presence and the power of a universal consciousness through the “gift” of a young woman who could communicate with Native Americans and record their rituals in her automatic writing. Set in modern times among the Sac nation in Illinois, the play was a poetic attempt to endow the modern drama with a true Dionysian spirit. But its language was stilted and its philosophical musings strained credibility. Deeter struggled to make the relationships believable, but the tension between character behavior and Cook’s desire for a Dionysian revival confused or bored small audiences. While there were some positive notices, the play faced diminishing crowds in the village, and Cook moved the production uptown where it played briefly and closed.⁹ Glaspell, however, was intrigued with Deeter’s work on the play, and when the players scheduled her dramatic story of the Blackhawk legacy for production in 1921, Jasper Deeter was invited to direct.

Inheritors unfolds over a sprawling map of ideas, identity, and politics.¹⁰ It invokes racial tolerance, conscientious objecting, and personal commitment and integrity. But at its heart it’s about the land: who possesses it and for what purpose? The first act takes place in a rural Iowa farmhouse in 1879 on the anniversary of the end of the American Civil War. But to Grandmother Morton the festivities recall an earlier conflict—the Blackhawk War of 1832—which sealed the fate of native nations and conveyed 15 million acres of the Missouri Valley to the white settlers for $22,000. Now in 1879, that land has become the target of developers and speculators who want to convert it into valuable properties for their emerging Midwest empires.

But Silas Morton, who owns the farm and the magnificent hill that overlooks it, refuses to sell to the “rich and fat” because he has a dream that one day a college will grow in the cornfields and provide the aspiration and joy that was lost when the land was taken. “Look at the land we walked in and took! Was there ever such a chance to make life more? God damn us if we sit here rich and fat and forget that man’s in the makin’.”¹¹ For Silas, the idea of a thinking man aspiring to make life better for all is embodied in his future college, and at the end of the act he gives the deed away so that Morton College can be born.

The next three acts take place in the present (1920) on the fortieth anniversary of the college. From the interior of the library on the dramatic hill where Silas Morton made his peace with Blackhawk, you can look down on the campus that has become the legacy of Silas’s dream. His portrait overlooks the playing area, and the stage is populated with his heirs and friends. Felix Fejevary, the son of his neighbor and closest friend, is now a prominent trustee of the college, and his granddaughter, Madeline, is a student. But the ideals that nourished both the foundation of the college and its populist mission is under attack in the aftermath of a world war and an America bent on enacting a reactionary ideological vision.

The freedom to search for truth and the commitment to a just society are now in danger of compromise in a world where corporate profits have become the lubricant for the social machine, and where Emerson and Whitman are suspected as “radicals.” Morton needs the financial support of the steel mill down the hill, and many of its students are proud to serve as strikebreakers in the name of corporate profits. Hindu students who march and advocate for an India free from British rule are denounced by “American” students who are suspicious of any red taint of radical politics. In addition, a truly gifted professor is threatened with dismissal unless he repudiates his defense of a student who has been imprisoned for advocating conscientious objecting.

Glaspell filled Inheritors with her loathing for those who, under the guise of patriotism, advocate intolerance and racism and who imagine success in terms of accumulating wealth. Professor Holden, who came to the college 40 years earlier at the express urgings of Silas Morton, is clearly modeled on Jig Cook with his love of the Greeks and an imagined idea of beauty in life.

I spoke of the tenth anniversary. I was a young man then, just home from Athens. I don’t know why I felt I had to go to Greece. I knew then that I was going to teach something within sociology, and I didn’t want anything that I felt about beauty to be left out of what I formulated about society . . . Not so much because they created beauty, but because they were able to let beauty flow into their lives—to create themselves in beauty.¹²

But Holden does not emerge unscathed in Inheritors. Because of his wife’s ill health and his own need for security, he allows himself to be silenced. Unlike Jig Cook who could make the grand gesture, Holden agrees to the pragmatic compromise—“You don’t sell your soul. You persuade yourself to wait.”¹³

For Madeline, however, Holden’s best student, Silas Morton’s granddaughter, and one of Glaspell’s most compelling heroines, there is no thought of compromise. Stunned by the police response to the Hindu demonstration and the thuggery of her cousin and other students, Madeline slams a policeman with her tennis racket and ends up in jail on the eve of her twenty-first birthday. When she is released by her influential uncle she discovers that the Hindu students remain imprisoned and confronts her family about the injustice of American democracy. In a dramatic coup de théâtre, Madeline chalks out the dimension of a prison cell and then confines herself to that imaginary space dramatizing the dream of freedom. Invoking her fellow classmate Fred Jordan, who is currently in prison for resisting the draft, Madeline refuses the special treatment offered to those who have acquired money and power and opts to return to prison. For her—like Thoreau and others—courage to pursue the true American dream is the only path to peace with herself.

Madeline Fejevary was one of Glaspell’s most vivid creations and casting the part was critical to the success of Inheritors. Accounts vary about who actually chose the amateur and untrained Ann Harding, but the decision had enormous consequences for the play, for Jasper Deeter’s career, and for Hedgerow. Harding, at the time, was nearly the same age as Madeline, a stagestruck amateur whose stern, military father was opposed to anything having to do with the theatre. Christened Dorothy Gatley, she had been raised on army bases and loved horseback riding and entertaining young officers at tea parties supervised by her father, then colonel, but eventually general George Grant Gatley. She had performed in school plays and had some vague fantasies of being a writer but was working at an insurance company in Manhattan and living with her mother in the fall of 1920. She was a strikingly beautiful young woman who had also managed to secure a part-time position reading manuscripts for Lasky pictures, and had a vague sense of having an “adventure” when she answered an ad to audition for a role at Provincetown. Glaspell and Deeter were both taken by her youthful enthusiasm, wholesome beauty, and stunningly blonde hair. Provincetown recorder Edna Kenton thought that Deeter believed she might do for one of the “giggling girl” parts, but, in reality, Glaspell was so awed by her surface res...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1.  Inheritors: Growing a Theatre
• 2.  The Emperor Jones: A Passion for Equality
• 3.  Winesburg, Ohio: Democracy between the Hedgerows
• 4.  An American Tragedy: Whose Social Conscience?
• 5.  The Cherokee Night: Riggs and the Power of Place
• 6.  Too True to Be Good: Consequences of Integrity
• 7.  Uncle Vanya: A Way of Acting
• 8.  The Hedgerow Story: Celebrity and Disappointment
• 9.  Aftermath
• Epilogue
• Appendix A: Hedgerow Repertory 1923–1956
• Appendix B: Repertory for Shaw Festival, July 19–August 14, 1937
• Appendix C: Repertory Calendars
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index