Little Theatre Movement

The Community Theatre.

The community theatre is or ganized to provide good entertainment for the average taste of the average family in a community, at a cost not above what the average man can afford. To be successful it must give the largest possible number of people an opportunity each to have some part in the work, not only as playwright, director, designer, actor, but as scene-painter, seamstress, electrician, business manager, play reader, ticket taker, house manager, usher, etc., which, taken to gether, make the community theatre in itself a working com munity. Moreover, it must be run with enough economy and eco nomic security not to be an undue financial burden. The success of such a theatre depends on many special features. A com munity that is far away from the centre of theatre distribution, with an element of wealth or at least of leisure, and with a certain homogeneity, lends itself more readily to the experiment than one that is too near a metropolis, too largely industrial, too varied in its citizenship and citizen interest. The success of such a theatre depends, moreover, on certain important and rare qualities in the director, who must be at once a competent artist, a good manager and a good leader; somebody who will understand the many-sided problems of securing and spending municipal funds, who can pro duce good plays well, gauge the popular taste well enough to satis fy and improve it, interest his workers and create an enthusiastic and responsive audience. There are good community theatres all over America, many of them unknown outside their community and yet doing important work. Several of the best known are, as might be expected, well out of range of New York production and touring companies. In California, the Pasadena Community The atre, under the direction of Gilmor Brown, seems to have solved most of the problems of a community theatre. This organization has interested the citizens of the town enough to induce them to finance and build a beautiful playhouse with every modern equip ment. The audience increases every year.

The Art Theatre.

The measure of the community theatre's success is the response it gets from the community. The measure of an art theatre's success is the freedom and creative quality of its production, the contribution it makes to the growth of the in dividual artist and to theatre progress. The art theatre that is most apt to succeed is one that starts with a director who is at once a man of aesthetic instinct and of broad sympathy, who can use the talents of other artists creatively and gain impetus from the force of a creative failure as well as from an artistic success.

Because experiment in the theatre is by its nature so expensive, because a successful artist developed by an art theatre naturally turns to professional fields of larger opportunity, as well as be cause good directors are scarce, there are not many art theatres in the country, except in New York, which have been permanent.

The Little Theatre at Dallas, Texas, under the professional direc tion of Oliver Hinsdell ; the Kenneth Sawyer Goodman memorial theatre in Chicago under the direction of Thomas Wood Stevens; the Theatre du Vieux Cane of New Orleans, now directed by Walter Sinclair, and a few others have achieved fine theatres, good repertories and a fair permanence of cast by steadiness of pur pose. The only art theatre which has come through from amateur beginnings to professional stature in its building, its direction, its repertory and its productions, is the Cleveland playhouse, under the direction of Frederic McConnell.

What is the general trend of the little theatre movement is difficult to indicate. It is for the first time in America establish ing the theatre as a force in the social life of cities large and small, it is using the dramatic impulse in education to the full, it is developing the talents of hundreds of theatre artists of various kinds, it is serving as a tributary stream to the larger stream of professional theatre life which still centres in New York. There is no end to what it can do from these beginnings. (E. J. R. I.) BIBLIOGRAPHY.-Theatre Arts Monthly (1916-28) and especially Little Theatre Year Books (No. 1-5, September issues 1924-28) ; S. Cheney, The Art Theatre, Knopf (1925) ; The New Movement in the Theatre, Kennerley (1914) ; Stage Decoration, John Day (1927) ; Kenneth Macgowan, The Theatre of Tomorrow, Boni and Liveright (1921) ; H. K. Moderwell, The Theatre of Today (new edition), Dodd, Mead (1927) ; E. J. R. Isaacs (editor), Essays on the Arts of the Theatre, Little, Brown (1927) ; I. Pichel, Modern Theatres, Harcourt, Brace (1925) ; 0. Hinsdell, Making the Little Theatre Pay, Samuel French (1925) ; M. M. Smith, The Book of Play Production, Appleton (1926) ; A. Dean, Little Theatre Organization and Management, Apple ton (1926) ; F. Shay, The Practical Theatre, Appleton (1926) ; B. H. Clark, How to Produce Amateur Plays, Little, Brown (1917) ; A. G. Arvold, The Little Country Theatre (1923) ; C. Stratton, Producing in Little Theatres, Henry Holt (1923) ; C. M. Wise, Dramatics for School and Community, Stewart, Kidd (1923) ; T. H. Dickinson, The Insurgent Theatre (1917) ; C. J. de Goveia, The Community Playhouse (1923) ; L. Burleigh, The Community Theatre (1917).