The Cranbrook Masque

5

June the lights were manipulated to throw first the back stage and again the front stage into prominence, producing an effect of magical change of time and place. There was a sense of unreality, of the accomplishment of the impossible, that was marvelously effective in the more romantic incidents, and yet a feeling at all times that the material was absolutely real, not distorted but spiritualized by its treatment.

Every resource of the theatre was brought into play during the masque. The Greek chorus entered from the greatest distance possible, with the darkened front stage forming a frame of columns for the procession, warmly colored by the lights of the actual sunset. The procession came forward clear into the orchestra, where it formed a subdued foreground of color for the Greek episode, played on the fore-stage in the deep blue of twilight, with the back temple now faintly gleaming against a somber background of pointed cedars and evening sky.

The second episode, the medieval, was intimately played, with brilliant figures of the townsfolk swarming in from the side entrances and filling the orchestra. It ended with the middle entrance of the front stage filled with a mediæval church window, against which the Virgin and two angels were seen. The perfect lighting throughout this scene subordinated, almost obliterated, all sense of the Greek theatre, and threw into dramatic relief the jongleurs, the monks, the brilliantly clad townsfolk, and the beautiful picture of the Virgin.

The Elizabethan episode used the whole theater again, but with warm color, a wealth of detail, and a riot of merry dances. Diccon o' Bells flashed the whole length of the theatre with a rout of children behind him, and Maid Marian appeared from the audience to accept his challenge and dance him down. The sea-rovers and the pirates were almost a silhouette against the dimly lighted pool.

The fourth episode, set in the Italian Renaissance, was played on the front stage, with warm light for its gay artificiality of Columbine and Clown, and the cold blue of the pool for the background of its most spiritual moment. In the final scene, the Beloved came in her wonderful blue boat across the pool, from the darkness that shrouded its farther end and made it seem to stretch away into infinity; and she met her poet in the clear bright light that flooded the front stage.

In short, Mr. Hume played upon the theatre a tune in lights, a marvelous tune that kept the audience in a state of rapt expectation, but a tune that was designed only to make harmony

with the place and the time and the story. The lights were never obtrusive; in fact lights, story, place were all one, and it is only in the days that follow that a spectator is able to separate the causes that produced each subtle effect—or, to be more exact, to determine that the causes are never to be separated, but always to be seen as a force remarkably combined from many.

Perhaps it is not so hard to understand how Mr. Hume and Mr. Howard so perfectly fused their work, when it is known that they worked out their plans together with the theatre as the starting-point. But it is difficult to see how the Arts and Crafts Society could step in at this point, and so delicately fit in every detail of color and design as to reinforce the effects, never contradict the light scheme or the emphasis of grouping, and yet give an impression of historical accuracy which was always subordinate to emotional and imaginative effect.

As much might be said of Frederick Alexander's music, if it were within the scope of this paper; and the text of the masque deserves detailed analysis because of its structural qualities and its delicate adaptation of verse-forms to bigger effects. Certainly it showed unusual knowledge and skill on the part of the author. Its theme was the triumph of romance and imaginative beauty over the forces that have opposed those qualities in every age. The theatre and masque alike stand for that triumph.

Whatever may have been the forces against which romantic beauty has had to contend in other ages, it is evident enough that commercial aims are its greatest foes to-day. It needs no Cranbrook Masque to point out that fact. But it does need a Cranbrook Masque to show how strong already are the counterforces on the side of romantic beauty. When a man is willing to put into a purely artistic venture the money (it is a pity to speak of it, but after all that is our point in this commercial age) that Mr. Booth has put into his theatre, and the thousands that must have gone into the production, and then to insist on subordinating himself absolutely to the result, even though his own time and taste are represented more accurately than a chance audience would guess, there cannot be great reason to fear for the future of imaginative drama. And when he can command to help him such ideals and such loving care in workmanship as he found in Sam Hume, in Sidney Coe Howard, in the Arts and Crafts Society, in Frederick Alexander, and in the hundred or so actors and artists who caught the spirit of the whole and lent their help to bring about the final success, then romantic beauty has certainly had its renaissance in America.

Acting and the New Stagecraft

By WALTER PRICHARD EATON

THE new spirit of experimentation in the arts of the theatre has, so far at least, affected the American theatre but little, so little, indeed, that the result is almost negligible. By the American theatre I mean, of course, the professional theatre patronized by the great public, which sends its productions out through the land and is, when all is said, the stronghold which must be stormed and captured before Progress can claim a victory. Robert Jones and Joseph Urban and Livingston Platt, to be sure, have designed certain settings, some of them beautiful settings; and Maxfield Parrish is now being called in to give his talent to the theatre. Yet one would scarcely call the Ziegfeld "Follies" an experiment in the new stagecraft, though Mr. Urban did design the settings; while the ballet at the Hippodrome, devised by Bakst and Pavlowa, was, after the first night or two, so befuddled with Hippodrome chorus girls (who finally were hauled up on wires as a climax!) that it could hardly be distinguished from the Good Old Stuff. We must, I fear, face the fact that the experimental spirit in America is still an amateur spirit, and in the immediate future, at least, we must look for its flowering, for the results of genuine experiment, in the various "little theatres" and other refuges of the dissatisfied or the dilettantes. After all, there can be no progress without dissatisfaction, and it is often enough the dilettante with talent who becomes the professional with power.

But in my own observations of these experimental theatres, I have been struck with one odd fact. While the experimenters were eager to produce fresher and more vital drama, to create more illusive and effective lighting effects, to paint more suggestive and beautiful scenery, to get away from the dull rut of conventional "realism," at the same time they were, almost without exception, apparently quite neglectful of showing us fresher, more vital, more illusive acting, or at any rate ignorant of how to do it. In the case of such an organization as the Washington Square Players, say, we must of course be mindful of the fact that the scene-painters are frequently professional artists, the dramatists professional dramatists, while the actors have been for the most part amateurs. No amateur, however gifted, can walk out on the boards and give at once a performance without a flaw, can give a performance as illusive of character as any