second-rate professional with intelligence. All the more reason, then, why the actors in the experimental theatres should be trained at least to do well what they can do well, and what the conventional professional actors do badly, while they are learning slowly in the hard school of practice to create the illusion of character. What are some of the things they could be trained to do? In the first place, they could be trained to speak. The new stagecraft, so far as it has been practised here, seems to have forgotten that as long as it is dedicated to the spoken drama, part of its task will be to make that speech audible, and consequently to make it effective to the last degree. Ask yourself this question: if you were witnessing "Hamlet," which would you rather find, a glorious, illusive setting with a bad actor mumbling "To be or not to be. . . .", or a bare stage and Booth speaking those words as only he could speak them? Certainly, most people would choose Booth, and they would be quite right in so doing. Yet, under the influence of our bald, colloquial modern drama, beautiful speech, clean enunciation, a sense for rhythm, has almost perished from the professional stage. Let a modern author write a speech which he wants to hear delivered like music as well as human conversation- and he weeps bloody tears at each rehearsal. There are no actors to read it. It cannot be read properly without proper feeling for verbal felicities, and without practice. But a feeling for verbal felicities is just what genuine devotees of the new stagecraft should have, or their boasted devotion to beauty is a one-sided thing; and practice in correct, clean, felicitous utterance is just what the stages of our experimental theatres should afford. The rankest amateur ought to. be able to pronounce correctly, and enunciate all the syllables of a polysyllabic word without swallowing the penult. If he cannot, he should be politely invited to become a professional and join Mr. Cohan's company. When you enter a little theatre you ought at least to be confident of hearing better speech than in any Broadway production. Our experimental theatres are not dedicated to realism. They do not neglect it, but the new stagecraft needs the fanciful, the poetic, the suggestive, for its full expression. And the fanciful, the poetic, the suggestive in drama cannot be acted as the realistic drama is acted. The instinct which leads the opera singer to gesticulate like a windmill, which leads Lou-Tellegen to strike romantic attitudes, is a perfectly sound instinct. Convention has made the result grotesque, to be sure, but in their hatred of Acting and the New Stagecraft I I convention too many experimental theatres have quite lost sight of the rightness of the instinct, and as a result play a scene of romance or poetry, in a setting not of this world but of the abstract land of beauty, with actors who stand about as stiff as freshmen at the President's first reception, talking in the nasal, colloquial tones of the average American. This may be unconventional, but it isn't good art, and it is holding back the new stagecraft, in popular regard. If the new stagecraft is to play fantasy and poetry, in imaginative, beautiful sets, it must train its actors to beauty and grace of carriage, to fluidity of pose, to expressive gesture (there is nothing poetic about keeping your hands in your pockets, as the mere public very well knows), to that general charm of romantic bearing which certain of the older actors even in our generation possessed, which is as old as histrionic art, indeed, and will always be as young as the latest lyric. To try to foster and develop this charm should be a task of the experimental theatres. If they cannot keep those who possess it from the affectations and absurdities of conventional romance, from the posturings of a Lou-Tellegen, that is merely a confession of weakness on their part. It is no sign of strength, certainly, to be so afraid of the excesses that you abolish the essentials. Indeed, in the revolt from the conventions of the "commercial" theatre, it is rather to be feared that we have tended to throw overboard a good deal that is sound and necessary. Enough light to see the actors' faces is one thing. The downright force and predominant importance of good acting is another. When all is said, the spoken drama is brought to life for an audience by the actors, not the electrician nor the scenepainter, not the costume designer nor the orchestra conductor nor even the stage-manager, but by the actors. It is they the audience watches, recking not of the director who may have trained them; they who are, for three hours traffic, the protagonists of the play. It can be no better than they are, and with the great public its success will depend upon them. Little theatres, experimental theatres of all sorts, may help the new stagecraft in a hundred ways, and bring various kinds of pleasure to us, but they will never ultimately persuade the public unless they can show illusive acting, unless they can train players to impersonate, to bring the characters of the drama to vivid life. Too many of our experimental theatres are weakest on this most important side; they have neglected the art of acting, the foundation stone of the dramatic structure, and the stone which changes least of all with the changing styles of architecture. They ask patronage to behold beautiful scenery, to hear brilliant "lines," to witness the play of magic lights; but what the public primarily pays for is a story, so well acted that it cheats them into belief. The new stagecraft has got to play the game. It has got to furnish the actors. Nor is that so impossible a task, if once we realize its necessity. Exhibitions of Stage Art One who watches for signs of re-awakened interest in the arts of the theatre, in this country, must find satisfaction in the increasingly frequent exhibitions of costume designs and models for stage settings. Certainly the visual side of theatre art is receiving its due. Since Sam Hume collected and arranged his comprehensive exhibition of stage art, which was shown in Chicago, New York and other centers two years ago, there has been a notable quickening of interest among craftsmen in and out of the playhouse. Already this season New York has seen one exhibition of the sort, and another is announced for January. Under the direction of Thomas Raymond Ball an exhibition of costumes and costume drawings, with a few designs and models for stage settings, was shown at the galleries of the National Society of Craftsmen, from October 18 to 28. Some of the best recent work in the field of costume design for the theatre was shown, including plates by Willy Pogany, Maxwell Armfield, Raymond Johnson, Robert Edmond Jones, Frank Zimmerer, and George Wolfe Plank. The models exhibited were by Rhea Wells and John Wenger. Early in January Mrs. John W. Alexander will arrange for the Arden Studios, 599 Fifth Avenue, an historical exhibition of costumes and stage settings. May Allah increase the tribe of exhibition makers! Cloyd Head's Grotesques BY SHELDON CHENEY "GROTESQUES, a Decoration in Black and White," was written by Cloyd Head, and produced briefly by the Chicago Little Theatre last season. It was daringly original in conception, and bravely poetic in handling. I say "bravely" because most American dramatists are literally afraid of the verse medium and of poetic delicacy of statement. Chicago critics, who have been gradually trained in appreciation of the finer things of the stage, were in general enthusiastic over the production; but the public, as usual when confronted with an original work of art, was puzzled, and soon stopped coming-for the originality did not border on either the bizarre or the risqué. The text, recently published in Poetry, a Magazine of Verse, makes clear why the plot-loving American audience lost interest; for the story of the play is not a little vague in outline, if indeed a story is there at all. Nevertheless, the text does prove that there is a new poetdramatist of remarkable promise; and the production proved that not all purely poetic plays are destined to die unproduced. The play is called "A Decoration in Black and White." The sub-title has misled many into believing that the production was conceived primarily as a visual spectacle, as a changing series of designs in black against white, or white against black. But "Grotesques" was not merely one more novel experiment in staging. It is true that the setting was a design in black and white, and that the figures moved always within their frame to make decorative groupings against the background. But the word "decoration" applies first, not to the outward presentation, but to the inner philosophy of the play. The whole decoration as seen is merely a symbol of life as a changing pattern of human relationships. Life is shown as a mere decoration in someone's hands, to be shaped this way or that by the whim of an unsympathetic power. Or is it that life, as commonly lived, is a void, in which only a rare god with the sense of design finds material for artistic fashioning? The philosophy-since that largely takes the place of storyis set forth through six characters: Capulchard, and five Gro- ✓ tesques. The latter are called simply the Man-motive, the Woman-motive, the Girl-motive, the Sprite-motive, and the Crone-motive. The scene is "the theatre of the reader's imagination," and when the curtain "between the reader and the play" is drawn upward, a conventionalized design of slender white trees against a black background is seen. Before this design, and behind a frame of gauze, the Grotesques are discovered, as yet inanimate. Behind them stands Capulchard, "master of the decoration." At first this Capulchard appears to be a god, playing sardonically with the helpless Grotesques, at will giving them life and a place in the decoration, or quite as lightly erasing them from it. He is an artist-god, withal, one who properly hates anti-climax and the obvious, and who weaves the figures and their bits of life into true designs-having "tang," as he is somewhat overfond of saying. But gradually the revelation comes that he is merely a figure playing the god, achieving a certain permanence, and reverenced by the Grotesques, but later bowing to the real gods, the audience, whose priest he is. The figures, to whom he gives such vices and virtues as will make them true to character, at first speak blindly what he orders, and again as comprehending but willing tools; and occasionally-rare flashes of immortality!—they rebel and seek to make their own design. But they only learn How slight A breath would puff them pell-mell into space, when Capulchard tears away their background and leaves them groping in a void. Nor is the tragedy that of the Grotesques only. The story of their doings is too episodic to bring unity to the series of designs; and it is rather Capulchard's tragedy in the end. A second or third reading brings the meaning even closer that we, the audience, who are the ultimate gods, do not exert our divine imagination to compose life as an artist would; that the human mind, the true director of the decoration we call life, too often confuses the lines and spaces, lets the motives run wild, or fails to lift existence from the void to any plane that can be called design. From such slender materials, from such intangible thoughts, does Cloyd Head weave his play. Can anything so elusive be made really intelligible and absorbing on the stage? The great American public was not interested. But that need not dishearten the poet. In these times when American dramatic art is in a wholly experimental phase, certain things are more important than interesting large audiences. If one can break a trail in a new direction, it is far more valuable than amusing people along the old overcrowded highways. In the theatre |