The most interesting problem which confronts the Little Theatre movement is its relation to the professional and commercial theatre. In England both the Stage Guild (the representative body of the professional actors) and the Touring Managers' Association have taken official cognizance of the amateur movement ; relations between the professional and the amateur have continued to be friendly. Unemployment in the theatre is a pressing and often a tragic condition, but it would be difficult to maintain that the smaller amateur groups attract a sufficient audience to make them in any real sense competitive with professional theatres. The few really important amateur theatres, some of them combining pro fessional and amateur players, which tend to develop into full time professional undertakings, thereby become at once new cen tres for professional employment.
Exactly the same tendency is seen in other countries wherever an amateur undertaking has found itself under the control of an amateur producer whose gifts and opportunities have been such as to draw him to professionalize the undertaking. The most famous instance of this is undoubtedly to be found in the genesis of the Moscow Art theatre, which began as a small enterprise of amateur theatricals in a country house near Moscow. The history of this movement is written in full by Constantin Stanislayski in My Life in Art, a book which should be in the hands of every student of community drama.
The municipally endowed theatre, as the logi cal extension of the community theatre idea, has been widely canvassed in England. On the continent of Europe, where pub lic taste is usually considered to have reached a higher and more widespread level than elsewhere, State or municipal endow ment has for long been a normal feature of the theatrical system. In France or Germany it is freely admitted that the more noble manifestations of stage art are seldom paying propositions, and that private enterprise cannot be expected to make impossible and continual sacrifices for the general good. The result is that few of the continental nations are without their national and munici pal theatres. In many towns in central Europe the municipal theatre is the only reputable playhouse. Among English speaking peoples a great deal of the contemporary enthusiasm for com munity drama arises from dissatisfaction with the fare provided by the professional theatre. The amateur does his best to fill the gap, but to confine the work of the community stage within ama teur limits is to narrow its scope unduly. The national theatre problem and the influence it might exercise upon the art of the professional stage will, in its solution, determine the future of the community theatre, for a national theatre is nothing more or less than the community theatre on a large scale.
For many years there have been theatres and amateur acting groups in America with features similar to those of present-day Little Theatres. Some of the early experiments made by Mary Austin in the west and south-west bore the stamp of authentic community theatre and community drama. But during the years 1906 and 1907 three groups were organized in Chicago which may safely be said to represent the beginning of the Little Theatre movement. Two of these groups were the New Theatre, directed
by Victor Mapes, and the Robertson Players, under the leadership of Donald Robertson. The theatre of the trio that survived and that has had a vigorous and intensely useful life was the Hull House theatre, under the direction of Laura Dainty Pelham. In 1911 came the Wisconsin Dramatic Society, which exists under the direction of Laura Sherry. In the next year Maurice Browne started the Little Theatre of Chicago, and Mrs. Lyman Gale the Toy Theatre of Boston. In New York city organizations like the Festival Players of the Henry Street Settlement, which later be came the Neighborhood Playhouse, the Provincetown Players, the Washington Square Players, which later became the Theatre Guild, form a vital part of the little theatre movement. Soon the Arts and Crafts Society of Detroit, with Sam Hume as director, founded a magazine of the theatre as a part of its activities. This journal, Theatre Arts Magazine, edited by Sheldon Cheney and published in New York, established a means of communication be tween little theatre adventurers throughout the country.
In the next 15 years little theatres sprang up like mushrooms in cities and towns all over the United States, hundreds of new organizations and scores of new playhouses being added to the record every year as the impulse toward a fuller dramatic life grew in strength and volume. The theatres ranged from rebuilt barns and bowling alleys, seating from 5o to 10o people, giving five or six single performances a year with amateur actors and makeshift scenery and lighting equipment, to theatres having the most complete modern building and equipment, including the most advanced stage mechanisms, and giving repertories of from 8 to 20 plays during a long season. The prices at these theatres range from $.50 to $2.00 or more. Most of them have some form of membership organization and subscription audience. Increasingly they are under the leadership of a professional director with the additional professional service of designer, stage carpenter, electrician and so forth, as the budget and necessity require. But the spirit still is and probably will remain always largely amateur. A great many of the ideals of the little theatre come directly from Europe, where experimental theatre organizations, variously called "Free Theatre," "Inde pendent Theatre," "Art Theatre," "Stage Society," etc., have thriven under the leadership of distinguished men like Gordon Craig, Andre Antoine, Max Reinhardt, Constantin Stanislayski, Jacques Copeau, Granville-Barker and others. The American movement is distinguished from the European by its largely ama teur leadership and following and its importance comes from the fact that it seems gradually to be evolving an American drama and a typically American art of the theatre. Moreover, within itself, the movement has had its ultimate source in three fairly distinct native impulses—economic, artistic, educational—and these usu ally have been reflected in the types of theatres they developed.