On the Performance Front

US Theatre and Internationalism

C. Canning

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137543301
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Arts de la scène

This book argues that US theatre in the 20th century embraced the theories and practices of internationalism as a way to realize a better world and as part of the strategic reform of the theatre into a national expression. Live performance, theatre internationalists argued, could represent and reflect the nation like no other endeavour.

1

Theatre Arts: The Tributary Theatre

Margo Jones had much in common with Hallie Flanagan. They were directors, they began their theatre work in higher education, and they were very ambitious. Both women yearned to reinvent the American theatre, and themselves with it. They were both products of small-town America—Flanagan’s itinerantly employed father moved them from South Dakota to Nebraska to Illinois to Iowa before she was ten and Jones grew up in Livingston, Texas which rarely had a population that reached a thousand. Even though they were born a generation apart (Flanagan in 1890 and Jones in 1911) both knew that small towns of the US were not where they were destined to make their careers. Most of Livingston, during the time Jones lived there, made their living in the fertile fields of humid East Texas, although Jones’ father was a prominent lawyer. The town was only 70 miles from Houston, but it might as well have been on the moon. “When I went to college from a tiny town in Texas,” she wrote much later, “I had seen only a few high school plays.”¹ Her options as an undergraduate were not much better. She attended a small women’s school in Denton, Texas, in the northern part of the state where it is hot, flat, dry, and prone to tornados. But when she arrived the city was nearly ten times larger than Livingston, and the Girls’ Industrial College of Texas (now Texas Woman’s University) had a library.

It was working in this library to help pay for college that she discovered the publication that would not only shape her career, but give her the courage even to imagine such a career. “Deep in the stacks of the library I buried myself every day after work, and read every word in every issue of the magazine. At first it was like on a great big glorious binge. When I began to sober up a little, I found Theatre Arts was more than a great record of our American and world theatre; it was a standard, a credo, a philosophy.”² After college, when she pondered how to begin a theatre career, she headed out to California because “she had read in Theatre Arts about the Pasadena Playhouse, a renowned amateur community theatre in southern California.”³ While the magazine cannot take credit for her impressive career—founding one of the first regional theatres in the country (Theatre ’47 in Dallas), directing many influential premieres including The Glass Menagerie and Summer and Smoke by Tennessee Williams, and writing the 1951 Theatre in the Round, a book that would influence many US theatre artists—it certainly helped her envisage and plan such a career. As she noted in 1948, the magazine “has been so strong and imprinted itself so indelibly upon me, that I feel sure the same thing has happened to thousands of others.”⁴ When she taught at the University of Texas from 1942 to 1944 she brought her collection of back issues to campus to provide students with opportunities to “binge” as she had.⁵

If some aspiring theatre students across the country had found Theatre Arts the answer to the isolation of those outside large urban centers and the lack of extant books on the theatre, theatre faculty too found the magazine to be fundamental to their work. Barclay Leathem was hired by the English Department at Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University) in 1921. For him the magazine enlarged the scope of his teaching and allowed him to introduce his students to work they might otherwise never have known. “Theatre Arts was a window to world drama,” he affirmed.⁶ Other faculty across the US confirmed that Leathem was not an outlier, and they too shared his sense that Theatre Arts kept them in touch with the world. Hubert Heffner, of Stanford University and later Indiana University and who taught scholars as diverse as Oscar Brockett and Herbert Blau, noted that the magazine “served to keep Broadway theatre international-minded.”⁷ But the magazine was also how they were able to teach at all. Heffner emphasized: “In our colleges and universities Theatre Arts was not merely a magazine; it was a significant and important text book.”⁸ Hallie Flanagan, who by the time Theatre Arts ceased to be a serious publication in 1948 was a leading and influential figure in both academic and professional theatre, was adamant: “Theatre Arts has become so much a part of theatre work in colleges and universities that it is impossible to see how we can get along without it.”⁹ Alexander M. Drummond of Cornell University, echoing Flanagan, said simply: “What would we have done without it; what will we do without it?”¹⁰

Theatre Arts was in no small measure responsible for those academics to be able to teach theatre in higher education. When Leathem founded the Dramatic Arts Department at Case Western after ten years in English and Speech, he was part of a very small cohort of theatre academics across the US. It is possible that 15 years of the magazine emboldened Leathem to urge his university to join the modest but growing trend of treating theatre and drama as serious subjects of academic study. Certainly, there were few precedents in the US in 1921. The first professor of dramatic literature in the country was Brander Matthews at Columbia University and he had been appointed in 1900. Drummond started in Cornell University’s Department of Public Speaking in 1907, and by the time he became chair in 1920, he had made theatre a permanent part of the curriculum, but not a discrete department. George Pierce Baker, perhaps the most influential theatre professor in US history, started teaching a course in drama at Harvard University in 1905 and founded the Yale School of Drama in 1925 (in part because Harvard refused to establish a theatre department). The Carnegie Institute of Technology Drama School (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh where Leathem’s Cleveland theatre colleague Frederic McConnell had earned his degrees, was founded in 1914. Even by the time of Theatre Arts’ 1948 sale to a commercial publisher there were not many more discrete departments of theatre or drama in US universities; most were content to let theatre remain an extracurricular activity, usually in a student-run drama club.

The emergence of academic theatre departments signaled major changes to come in the relationship between the arts and the academy. This shift in higher education closely paralleled the transformation of US theatre during the same time and the two were closely imbricated. Leathem’s strategy at Case Western was particularly notable. He did not simply found the department from resources within the university. He collaborated with the most important theatre in Cleveland. The Cleveland Playhouse had begun in 1915 inspired by a larger movement that encouraged people to create the theatre they wanted and needed in their own towns and cities. Little theatres, as they were called, were a mixed bag—some were small and never rose above a community theatre level. Others, like the Cleveland Playhouse, would transform into influential professional theatres. Diverse cities like Louisville, Dallas, Chicago, Pasadena, Seattle, Pittsburgh, and Atlanta have not-for-profit theatres today because of the little theatre movement. Across the US in the 1920s there were a thousand Little Theatres and they provided roles for well over 300,000 actors performing for 12.5 million spectators annually.¹¹

No one championed the Little Theatres more than did Theatre Arts. McConnell enthused: “As editors Mrs. Isaacs and Rosamond Gilder pushed beyond the commerce of theatre to its foundation as an art and its place in our lives…. Theatre Arts was more than a magazine—it was a challenge to greater achievement.” Gilmor Brown of the Pasadena Playhouse, which started as a community theatre in 1916 and within ten years was nationally respected, knew that without Theatre Arts it would have been impossible to reach such a level. He attested, “that wonderful magazine has been a constant source of help.”¹²

Despite being the champion of “tributary theatre,”—editor Edith Isaacs’ term for the variants of non-commercial theatre—professional and commercial theatre artists knew too that Theatre Arts had made their work possible. Brock Pemberton, director and producer of almost 40 Broadway shows, was quick to credit the magazine: “Once a month it brought a fresh approach to theatre to those of us steeped in Broadway.”¹³ “We drew a good part of our inspiration from its pages,”¹⁴ was Barrett H. Clark’s admission. Clark ran Dramatists Play Service (DPS) and wrote several books on theatre. DPS was founded in 1936 by the Dramatists’ Guild and Society for Authors’ Representatives as a theatrical publishing and licensing house. This was a key way that the work of many of the playwrights championed in Theatre Arts was available for production. Another prolific director and producer, Arthur Hopkins, tried to get at the affective impact of the magazine. “Appreciation of the best in theatre was long stimulated by [Edith Isaacs’] unfaltering perception and devotion…. As to how she heightened the aspirations of others, there is no way of assuring. Contributions such as hers cannot be tabulated in annual statements, but they are written in the grateful hearts of many who know their debt to her.”¹⁵ Hopkins was not alone in his belief that the publication’s value was not simply determined by the information it provided, but could be found in the empowerment and sociality it engendered. In the end that may have been Theatre Arts’ most important contribution to the US theatre.

This chapter will document that contribution. The journal began during World War I just as the US “emerged, quite suddenly, as a novel kind of ‘super-state,’ exercising a veto over the financial and security concerns of the other major states of the world,” historian Adam Tooze describes.¹⁶ While the US may have been able to take on global economic and military questions, it was far from ready to influence the arts worldwide. The leadership of Theatre Arts, as well as its readers, knew that art, especially live performance, could play an important role in public life, even beyond national borders. What they needed to do was articulate this knowledge to everyone else. The chapter’s first two sections, “Theatre plus art” and “Theatre wipes out distance,” follow how the magazine emerged from the community-based arts movement. It built on Progressive reform politics to reinvent theatre as a national institution and permit US theatre people to see themselves as a national force. These initial steps were less about leadership than about learning, as the US imported ideas and practices from Europe. Designer Jo Mielziner commented in the late 1940s that “Theatre Arts always has held a unique place in both the American theatre and the international theatre,”¹⁷ but that place took time to achieve. It was not until US theatre had a coherent national identity that it could engage internationally in any meaningful or unified way.

“Theatre’s unfinished business,” the third section, considers how Theatre Arts engaged in the urgent national debate over race, a debate which had profound international repercussions. In the interwar years, historian Robert Boyce asserts, “race prejudice contributed to America’s isolationism and its weak and potentially destructive role in international affairs at precisely the moment when American interests demanded that it assume a responsible, indeed leading, role…. But so massive were the consequences for America and the whole world that … its influence should not be overlooked.”¹⁸ Theatre Arts was trying to do exactly that—through theatre to provide a way to move beyond the current state of affairs. The magazine championed “Negro theatre,” its leadership, and the white people who made the cause their own. Constructions of white supremacy were never entirely absent, but the contributions Theatre Arts made had a tangible impact.

Finally, the journal’s direct participation in internationalism is the subject of “The world and the theatre.” As it helped to bring about national theatre activism, Theatre Arts was also preparing theatre people to voice their ideas to the world. Theatre, writ large, was located in no single country. It was one of the ways the world could be brought together regardless of boundaries and regional differences. In fact, theatre was also a place where differences were not necessarily divisive, difference was instead one of the reasons theatre people wanted to know about each other, so they could learn and grow. How Theatre Arts enabled that growth through the specific choices it made would have a definitive impact on the internationalism practiced by US theatre for the rest of the century and beyond.

Theatre plus art

Theatre Arts was founded in 1916 by Sheldon Cheney under the auspices of the Theater Committee of the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts (DSAC) in Michigan. Cheney, born in California in 1886, was raised in a household that valued the arts and writing (his father was an author, poet, and editor), majored in architecture, and had a brief career in visual design. By 1913 he had been a critic for three years and wanted to deepen his understanding of theatre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Theatre Arts: The Tributary Theatre
• 2 Onstage I: The Marriage Proposal, 1927
• 3 ANTA: The US (Inter)National Theatre
• 4 Onstage II: Hamlet, 1949
• 5 ITI: Tomorrow’s Theatre Today
• 6 Onstage III: Porgy and Bess, 1952–1956
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index