The first step in unselfishness must be taken by me. I must renounce at the outset all temptation to be conspicuous in direction, to issue commands, to show how well I can read a line or play a scene, or slam a door; to ridicule or get laughs at a confused actor's expense, to criticize openly. I must renounce all desire to be the boss, or the great master, or the allknowing one.

My feeling about the birth of the play is that it gradually becomes an individuality, that it becomes a personality of which the different actors are organs or members. I do not see ten or twenty individuals moving about. I see only one thing made of ten or twenty parts that is moving. So long as it moves properly I am totally unconscious of its parts. The moment I become conscious of a part and lose the movement of the whole I know that something is wrong. This is the time to stop the play and investigate. It may be a very tiny thing—a movement at a time when all should be still-a speech when there should be silence—a pause when something should be happening - an unwarranted change of tempo, or any one of a hundred minor or major things that remove concentration from the whole.

The stripping process begins early. I eliminate all gesture that is not absolutely needed, all unnecessary inflections and intonings, the tossing of heads, the flickering of fans and kerchiefs, the tapping of feet, drumming of fingers, swinging of legs, pressing of brows, holding of hearts, curling of moustaches, stroking of beards and all the million and one tricks that have crept into the actor's bag, all of them betraying one of two things-an annoying lack of repose, or an attempt to attract attention to himself and away from the play.

The whole system of personal emphasis in the American theatre has led to the present unadvanced state of the actor. There is no greater proof of its fallacy than its failure. All are straining for personal success. If they only knew that the greatest success will come to those who can most completely submerge the personal! Theirs is essentially an art where they must serve unreservedly, and the great vacancies in the theatre are awaiting actors big enough in mind and character to surrender themselves completely, strip themselves of every conscious trick, disdaining to court approval but commanding it by the very honesty of their aims. . . .

The playwright must regard himself as the instrument, not the virtuoso. He must be a free medium, refraining from all

conscious temptation to express his opinions or to reveal his rare gifts of expression. If his opinion is honestly founded, it will come out inevitably through the conflict of characters. characters will speak and not the playwright.

The

When a playwright talks, the spell is broken. The audience must be as unconscious of design on his part as it is on the part of the ideal actor. The whole thing must just happen. It is not something to be made in the window.

As to the "new" scenery, much has been said and written, and most of it beside the point. One's position in the matter is entirely determined by which mind he thinks the stage has to do with, the conscious or the unconscious.

Realistic settings are designed wholly for conscious appeal. An attempt at exact reproduction challenges the conscious mind of the audience to comparison. Unfortunately while the audience has been doing its conscious checking up, the play has been going, and going for nothing, since any form of conscious occupation must necessarily dismiss the play.

All that is detail, all that is photographic, is conscious. Every unnecessary article in a setting is a continuing, distracting gesture beckoning constantly for the attention of the audience, asking to be noticed and examined, insisting upon its right to scrutiny because it belongs. But what of the play in the meantime?

Isn't it a palpable fact that the only mission of settings is to suggest place and mood, and once that is established let the play go on? Do we want anything more than background?

The whole realistic movement was founded on selfishness-the selfish desire of the producer or scene painter to score individually, to do something so effective that it stood in front of the play and shrieked from behind it. . . . .

Author, Actor, Artist, Director, all working as a harmonious unit, each supplying just the suggestion that is needed at the time it is needed-all speaking the same language, as it wereeach fusing into the other so there is no telling where one begins and the other leaves off-that is what lifts performance from the one-finger exercise to the orchestrated composition.

It isn't dramatic schools we want or courses in playwriting. All these are purely surface-scraping efforts that get nowhere. What we all need is a thorough mental house-cleaning. We need some one to bring home to us clearly that ours is a profession that deals solely with the public mind. It is that which we must satisfy, and the only instrument that we can employ is our

mind-the mind of the theatre, and before we can make it effective it must be high-high in purpose, high in performance— for the low mind must fail, must destroy itself.

EDITOR'S NOTE:-The material above is part of a longer essay by Arthur Hopkins, which is to appear in book form later this month. The book's title will be How's Your Second Act? The publisher is the Philip Goodman Company, New York.

To Jacques Copeau

THERE are those of us who, amidst the welter and the squalor of our theatre, through the perversion of clear expression which has become common there, stubbornly hold faith with our ideal. Through the dust of the false morality and false technique of our stage a vision builds itself of a theatre of nobility, of clean beauty and of truth; a theatre where the soul of man, which is closer to him than life even, can, through a true representation of life, stand before us in its beauty and its awfulness; a theatre stripped of this false morality, unencumbered by a false technique. To these believers comes occasionally a constructive promise, an encouragement.

In the last four years in New York I can remember two magnificent symphonic productions in which the action and the actors were fused in a fusion incredibly suggestive of life: Emanuel Reicher's presentation of The Weavers, and now Jacques Copeau's production of Les Freres Karamazov. Life is a flickering in a storm, a ring of comfort in a terrible universe: terrible with beauty and with mystery. Life is a suffering and a song, shared by all men. There can be no false optimism as there can be no deep skepticism with him who lives close to life.

The Weavers is the world of suffering. Les Freres Karamazov is a group of men symbolic of this world, alternately tortured and exalted. There is the magnificence of stark truth in it.

Jacques Copeau has realized fully the sense of life in this production. It is as if all facets of existence were stripped of lies and deceit; the naked body of life quivers before us in its beauty and its pity. The fusion of the actors into a symbolic group is accomplished without effort; passion whips them like a master torturing his slaves, hate burns them and love comes to them all, differently. There is something beautifully common here. . . .

Those who are skeptical as to the true value of what this French Theatre has brought to us-something for the American Theatre to feel and profit by: a sincerity, a mastery of a true technique—will forget a certain artificiality in the plays produced earlier in the season. Les Freres Karamazov burns with sincerity. Through the passion of this sincerity, out of the fusion of the individual actors, Life rises before us.

Here is the epitome of art: not a comfort or a shallow myth, but the intensification of life itself. The faults in the production, in the play, of the separate actors, become as the common faults of the World of Men.

To Jacques Copeau and to his confreres all thanks. He has reassured us ; has given us strength to labor and to struggle for a Theatre which will become stronger than the Church, in that it has league with Life. ROLLO PETErs.

Comment on Current Plays

IN PLANNING a department which would pass in review all new plays coming to the New York stage, we intended to provide for our readers one more check on the development of a better theatre in America. After enduring more than thirty New York productions in three months, the Editor confesses that he no longer has faith that a record of such offerings can be said largely to concern the real art of the theatre. In future issues we shall continue to list all professional productions (exclusive of musical comedies) - but a new classification will be attempted which will separate the wheat from the chaff more effectively than does the grouping which follows.

It is clear that the quarter-year just past has brought forth nothing to change the verdict published in our December issue: that this is the worst season artistically that the New York theatres have known for years. Of nearly thirty productions which have appeared on the commercial theatre stages in the three months since mid-November, only four can with any justice claim consideration as examples of serious theatre art. And, excepting the revival, no one of these four could stand comparison with the best offerings of last season-say with The Yellow Jacket, Pierrot the Prodigal, A Kiss for Cinderella, and Getting Married, all of which were on the boards at this time last winter.

We regard the following as the best four productions:

MADAME SAND, written by Philip Moeller and produced by Mrs. Fiske at the Criterion Theatre in November, is artificial comedy of a type too seldom seen in American theatres. Despite a somewhat colorless interpretation by a cast that should do better, and in spite of the episodic nature of the action, the production affords some brilliant scenes, a remarkable character-study, and much fun of a satiric sort. If the whole thing is superficial in general design and philosophy, it at least has a brilliant surface-play of wit and epigram—and that is a blessed relief in these dull days.

THE GIPSY TRAIL by Robert Housum, at the Plymouth Theatre, is a better-than-ordinary romantic comedy. The plot is not original, telling how a romance-loving youth wins a beautiful girl from the conventional ninny she was about to marry. But there is so much incidental fun that the stock sentimentalities do not cloy. In addition there is enough of philosophical observation and of incidental poetry to lift the piece out of the list of merely diverting comedies. The settings are beautifully simple, and the stage management again proves Arthur Hopkins a master of the details of staging.

WHY MARRY? is one of the best American comedies of recent years. Jesse Lynch Williams endowed the play with both the virtues and the faults which a literary man usually brings to a stage-piece. The faults: lack of unified action, and a tendency to discussion rather than drama. The virtues :