An Ideal Theater: Founding Visions for a New American Art

Chapter 1

What Is America? / What Is an American Theater?

Democracy speaks in many voices . . .

—Hallie Flanagan

The Hull-House Dramatic Association (later, Hull-House Players)

FOUNDED 1897

Jane Addams

The American art theater begins as a search for American identity. It is forged in the melting pot. That our stages can be a place where the American Babel celebrates cultural distinctions while finding a common tongue is evident in the vision of the nation’s first art theater, founded by reformer Jane Addams in a settlement house in the urban ghetto of Chicago near the end of the nineteenth century.

Credited by many as the first little theater in the U.S., the Hull-House Dramatic Association—or, as it came to be known, the Hull-House Players—was one of many artistic, cultural and educational activities of the Chicago-based settlement house from which its name comes. Hull-House proper was founded in 1889, and started offering classes and staging plays in the late 1890s, including some of the earliest American productions of work by Shaw, Ibsen, Gerhart Hauptmann and Lady Gregory, to audiences of immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Italy, Bohemia, Greece, Russia, Poland and Mexico, all clustered in the tenements surrounding the corner of Halsted and Polk, where the house stood.

At this crossroads, Hull-House was a contradiction of identification and assimilation, as the transplanted played out the stories of their national identities and began to steep in the American melting pot. Although the organization announced it would cease operations in January 2012, the first-ness of Hull-House reminds us that ethnic, racial and cultural diversity was an originating premise of our theater, not a late-twentieth-century concept applied after the fact.

A house, easily accessible, ample in space, hospitable and tolerant in spirit, situated in the midst of the large foreign colonies which so easily isolate themselves in American cities . . . This was how Jane Addams, Hull-House’s founding, guiding angel pictured it. Inspired by British social reformers and, especially, by the Toynbee Hall settlement in the London slums, Addams’s utilitarian fervor—her belief in education, progressive reform, self-expression and democracy—led not only to the birth of this American art theater, but to other firsts as well—public baths, pools, gymnasiums and kitchens in Chicago; women’s labor unions; local investigations of sanitation, tuberculosis, infant mortality and cocaine distribution. Though not widely remembered today, Addams was, by 1931—when she became the first American woman awarded the Nobel Peace Prize—one of the most famous women in the nation.

The following excerpt from her 1910 autobiography, Twenty Years at Hull-House, tackles the question of what makes an American theater. And she poses a bigger question, one that we’re still grappling with more than a century later: What is America?

—TL

SOURCE: Twenty Years at Hull-House, by Jane Addams, 1910.

One of the conspicuous features of our neighborhood, as of all industrial quarters, is the persistency with which the entire population attends the theater. The very first day I saw Halsted Street, a long line of young men and boys stood outside the gallery entrance of the Bijou Theater, waiting for the Sunday matinee to begin at two o’clock, although it was only high noon. This waiting crowd might have been seen every Sunday afternoon during the twenty years which have elapsed since then. Our first Sunday evening in Hull-House, when a group of small boys sat on our piazza and told us about things around here, their talk was all of the theater and of the astonishing things they had seen that afternoon.

But quite as it was difficult to discover the habits and purposes of this group of boys because they much preferred talking about the theater to contemplating their own lives, so it was all along the line; the young men told us their ambitions in the phrases of stage heroes, and the girls, so far as their romantic dreams could be shyly put into words, possessed no others but those soiled by long use in the melodrama. All of these young people looked upon an afternoon a week in the gallery of a Halsted Street theater as their one opportunity to see life. The sort of melodrama they see there has recently been described as the ten commandments written in red fire. Certainly the villain always comes to a violent end, and the young and handsome hero is rewarded by marriage with a beautiful girl, usually the daughter of a millionaire, but after all that is not a portrayal of the morality of the ten commandments any more than of life itself.

Nevertheless the theater, such as it was, appeared to be the one agency which freed the boys and girls from that destructive isolation of those who drag themselves up to maturity by themselves, and it gave them a glimpse of that order and beauty into which even the poorest drama endeavors to restore the bewildering facts of life. The most prosaic young people bear testimony to this overmastering desire. A striking illustration of this came to us during our second year’s residence on Halsted Street through an incident in the Italian colony, where the men have always boasted that they were able to guard their daughters from the dangers of city life, and until evil Italians entered the business of the white slave traffic, their boast was well founded. The first Italian girl to go astray known to the residents of Hull-House was so fascinated by the stage that on her way home from work she always loitered outside a theater before the enticing posters. Three months after her elopement with an actor, her distracted mother received a picture of her dressed in the men’s clothes in which she appeared in vaudeville. Her family mourned her as dead and her name was never mentioned among them nor in the entire colony. In further illustration of an overmastering desire to see life as portrayed on the stage are two young girls whose sober parents did not approve of the theater and would allow no money for such foolish purposes. In sheer desperation the sisters evolved a plot that one of them would feign a toothache, and while she was having her tooth pulled by a neighboring dentist the other would steal the gold crowns from his table, and with the money thus procured they could attend the vaudeville theater every night on their way home from work. Apparently the pain and wrongdoing did not weigh for a moment against the anticipated pleasure. The plan was carried out to the point of selling the gold crowns to a pawnbroker, when the disappointed girls were arrested.

All this effort to see the play took place in the years before the five-cent theaters had become a feature of every crowded city thoroughfare and before their popularity had induced the attendance of two and a quarter million people in the United States every twenty-four hours. The eagerness of the penniless children to get into these magic spaces is responsible for an entire crop of petty crimes made more easy because two children are admitted for one nickel at the last performance when the hour is late and the theater nearly deserted. The Hull-House residents were aghast at the early popularity of these mimic shows, and in the days before the inspection of films and the present regulations for the five-cent theaters, we established at Hull-House a moving picture show. Although its success justified its existence, it was so obviously but one in the midst of hundreds that it seemed much more advisable to turn our attention to the improvement of all of them or rather to assist as best we could the successful efforts in this direction by the Juvenile Protective Association.

Long before the Hull-House theater was built we had many plays, first in the drawing room and later in the gymnasium. The young people’s clubs never tired of rehearsing and preparing for these dramatic occasions, and we also discovered that older people were almost equally ready and talented. We quickly learned that no celebration at Thanksgiving was so popular as a graphic portrayal on the stage of the Pilgrim Fathers, and we were often put to it to reduce to dramatic effects the great days of patriotism and religion.

At one of our early Christmas celebrations Longfellow’s Golden Legend was given, the actors portraying it with the touch of the miracle play spirit which it reflects. I remember an old blind man, who took the part of a shepherd, said, at the end of the last performance, Kind Heart, a name by which he always addressed me, it seems to me that I have been waiting all my life to hear some of these things said. I am glad we had so many performances, for I think I can remember them to the end. It is getting hard for me to listen to reading, but the different voices and all made this very plain. Had he not perhaps made a legitimate demand upon the drama, that it shall express for us that which we have not been able to formulate for ourselves, that it shall warm us with a sense of companionship with the experiences of others? Does not every genuine drama present our relations to each other and to the world in which we find ourselves in such wise as may fortify us to the end of the journey?

The immigrants in the neighborhood of Hull-House have utilized our little stage in an endeavor to reproduce the past of their own nations through those immortal dramas which have escaped from the restraining bond of one country into the land of the universal. A large colony of Greeks near Hull-House, who often feel that their history and classic background are completely ignored by Americans, and that they are easily confused with the more ignorant immigrants from other parts of southeastern Europe, welcome an occasion to present Greek plays in the ancient text. With expert help in the difficulties of staging and rehearsing a classic play they reproduced the Ajax of Sophocles upon the Hull-House stage. It was a genuine triumph to the actors, who felt that they were showing forth the glory of Greece to ignorant Americans. The scholar who came with a copy of Sophocles in hand and followed the play with real enjoyment did not in the least realize that the revelation of the love of Greek poets was mutual between the audience and the actors. The Greeks have quite recently assisted an enthusiast in producing Electra, while the Lithuanians, the Poles and other Russian subjects often use the Hull-House stage to present plays in their own tongue, which shall at one and the same time keep alive their sense of participation in the great Russian revolution and relieve their feelings in regard to it. There is something still more appealing in the yearning efforts the immigrants sometimes make to formulate their situation in America. I recall a play, written by an Italian playwright of our neighborhood, which depicted the insolent break between Americanized sons and old country parents so touchingly that it moved to tears all the older Italians in the audience. Did the tears of each express relief in finding that others had had the same experience as himself, and did the knowledge free each one from a sense of isolation and an injured belief that his children were the worst of all?

This effort to understand life through its dramatic portrayal, to see one’s own participation intelligibly set forth, becomes difficult when one enters the field of social development, but even here it is not impossible if a Settlement group is constantly searching for new material.

A labor story appearing in the Atlantic Monthly was kindly dramatized for us by the author, who also superintended its presentation upon the Hull-House stage. The little drama presented the untutored effort of a trades-union man to secure for his side the beauty of self-sacrifice, the glamour of martyrdom, which so often seems to belong solely to the nonunion forces. The presentation of the play was attended by an audience of trade-unionists and employers and those other people who are supposed to make public opinion. Together they felt the moral beauty of the man’s conclusion that it’s the side that suffers most that will win out in this war—the saints is the only ones that has got the world under their feet—we’ve got to do the way they done if the unions is to stand, so completely that it seemed quite natural that he should forfeit his life upon the truth of this statement.

The dramatic arts have gradually been developed at Hull-House through amateur companies, one of which has held together for more than fifteen years.¹ The members were originally selected from the young people who had evinced talent in the plays the social clubs were always giving, but the association now adds to itself only as a vacancy occurs. Some of them have developed almost a professional ability, although contrary to all predictions and in spite of several offers, none of them have taken to a stage career. They present all sorts of plays from melodrama and comedy to those of Shaw, Ibsen and Galsworthy. The latter are surprisingly popular, perhaps because of their sincere attempt to expose the shams and pretenses of contemporary life and to penetrate into some of its perplexing social and domestic situations. Through such plays the stage may become a pioneer teacher of social righteousness.

I have come to believe, however, that the stage may do more than teach, that much of our current moral instruction will not endure the test of being cast into a lifelike mold, and when presented in dramatic form will reveal itself as platitudinous and effete. That which may have sounded like righteous teaching when it was remote and wordy will be challenged afresh when it is obliged to simulate life itself. This function of the stage, as a reconstructing and reorganizing agent of accepted, moral truths, came to me with overwhelming force as I listened to the Passion Play at Oberammergau one beautiful summer’s day in 1900. The peasants who portrayed exactly the successive scenes of the wonderful Life, who used only the very words found in the accepted version of the Gospels, yet curiously modernized and reorientated the message. They made clear that the opposition to the young Teacher sprang from the merchants whose traffic in the temple He had disturbed and from the Pharisees who were dependent upon them for support. Their query was curiously familiar, as they demanded the antecedents of the Radical who dared to touch vested interests, who presumed to dictate the morality of trade, and who insulted the marts of honest merchants by calling them a den of thieves. As the play developed, it became clear that this powerful opposition had friends in Church and State, that they controlled influences which ramified in all directions. They obviously believed in their statement of the case and their very wealth and position in the community gave their words such weight that finally all of their hearers were convinced that the young Agitator must be done away with in order that the highest interests of society might be conserved. These simple peasants made it clear that it was the money power which induced one of the Agitator’s closest friends to betray him, and the villain of the piece, Judas himself, was only a man who was so dazzled by money, so under the domination of all it represented, that he was perpetually blind to the spiritual vision unrolling before him. As I sat through the long summer day, seeing the shadows on the beautiful mountain back of the open stage shift from one side to the other and finally grow long and pointed in the soft evening light, my mind was filled with perplexing questions. Did the dramatization of the life of Jesus set forth its meaning more clearly and conclusively than talking and preaching could possibly do as a shadowy following of the command to do the will? The peasant actors whom I had seen returning from Mass that morning had prayed only to portray the life as He had lived it and, behold, out of their simplicity and piety arose this modern version which even Harnack² was only then venturing to suggest to his advanced colleagues in Berlin. Yet the Oberammergau folk were very like thousands of immigrant men and women of Chicago, both in their experiences and in their familiarity with the hard facts of life, and throughout that day as my mind dwelt on my faraway neighbors, I was reproached with the sense of an ungarnered harvest.

Of course such a generally uplifted state comes only at rare moments, while the development of the little theater at Hull-House has not depended upon the moods of anyone, but upon the genuine enthusiasm and sustained effort of a group of residents, several of them artists who have ungrudgingly given their time to it year after year. This group has long fostered junior dramatic associations, through which it seems possible to give a training in manners and morals more directly than through any other medium. They have learned to determine very cleverly the ages at which various types of the drama are most congruous and expressive of the sentiments of the little troupes, from the fairy plays such as Snow-White and Puss-in-Boots, which appeal to the youngest children, to the heroic plays of William Tell, King John, and Wat Tyler for the older lads, and to the romances and comedies which set forth in stately fashion the elaborated life which so many young people admire. A group of Jewish boys gave a dramatic version of the story of Joseph and his brethren and again of Queen Esther. They had almost a sense of proprietorship in the fine old lines and were pleased to bring from home bits of Talmudic lore for the stage setting. The same club of boys at one time will buoyantly give a roaring comedy and five years later will solemnly demand a drama dealing with modern industrial conditions. The Hull-House theater is also rented from time to time to members of the Young People’s Socialist League, who give plays both in Yiddish and English which reduce their propaganda to conversation. Through such humble experiments as the Hull-House stage, as well as through the more ambitious reforms which are attempted in various parts of the country, the theater may at last be restored to its rightful place in the community.

—JA

The Carolina Playmakers

FOUNDED 1918

Frederick H. Koch

We have cherished the locality, believing that if the locality were interpreted faithfully, it might show us the way to the universal. For if we can see the lives of those about us with understanding—with imagination—why may we not interpret that life in significant images for all? It was so with the Greeks before us, and with our own English forebears. It has been so in all lasting art. It should be so for us here in America.

—Frederick H. Koch

The question of what America is goes hand in hand with another question: Where is America? In our theater, this question of identity and geography was posed, initially, in universities, far from the historical—and commercial—center of New York’s Broadway. In the early years of the twentieth century, a group of intrepid educators pioneered theater training in the U.S., fighting great resistance to establish the practices of theater—indeed, arts training at all—as a legitimate area of study. They initiated courses in acting, production, technical theater and playwriting, often as part of college extension programs, at such schools as Cornell (1912), Carnegie Institute of Technology (1912), Harvard (George Pierce Baker’s influential 47 Workshop launched in 1912) and the North Dakota Agricultural College (circa 1907).

One of these pioneers, Frederick H. Koch, affectionately known as Proff Koch, most fervently tied place and playwriting together, aimed at generating a distinctly American—local and universal—dramatic literature or, as he put it, folk plays. Koch founded two companies out of this drive to create a new kind of theater from the heart of a young nation, the Dakota Playmakers in North Dakota (which began in 1910 as the Sock and Buskin Society) and its offspring, the Carolina Playmakers at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill in 1918–19. His vision included cultivating the native soil for drama and spreading the fruits of that labor through touring, a project he carried out with missionary zeal.

As an early observer, Sheldon Cheney, wrote in 1925, Koch has been able to win over a whole state to a desire for drama in a few short years, so that dozens of towns look forward to the coming of his troupe as one of the red-letter events of the year. He accomplished it by forgetting that the business of theater existed, digging up native actors, stimulating native playwrights to dramatize familiar materials, and then going out and offering his resultant productions wherever there were enough people living to make an audience. His long association with the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright laureate of the South, Paul Green, and his early support of novelist Thomas Wolfe helped propel the indomitable Koch’s cause. Koch became, as producer Norris Houghton put it, the arch prophet of regional drama in this country.

In the following 1940 speech, Koch commemorates the founding of the Carolina Playmakers—which still exists, as PlayMakers Repertory Company—twenty-plus years earlier.

—TL

SOURCE: Drama in the South, an address delivered by Frederick H. Koch at the Playmakers Theatre in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on April 5, 1940, for the Southern Regional Theatre Festival, commemorating the founding of the Carolina Playmakers.

Today the Playmakers of Carolina welcome you to our home town of Chapel Hill, to our historic little theater building, the first state-owned theater in America to be dedicated to the making of its own native drama. We are thinking today of the simple beginnings of the Carolina Playmakers on the improvised stage in our village high school auditorium twenty-one years ago. And the little homespun plays that found an eager and lusty response. Before this, Barrett Clark³ avers that North Carolina was regarded by Samuel French, leading publisher of plays in the United States and England, as a dead state so lacking in dramatic interest that the entire state had been stricken from their mailing list as not being worth the price of postage to carry their catalogs! The immediate success of the first little Carolina Folk Plays suggested to us here the hope for a possible oasis in the South, dubbed by H. L. Mencken, the Sahara of the Bozart.

Dakota Folk Plays

And in thinking of our adventure in native playwriting in Chapel Hill, now coming of age, we remember too the twelve years of pioneer experiment at the frontier University of North Dakota before that time—when the Little Theater Movement was still to come. Maxwell Anderson, now a distinguished American playwright, was one of the founders of our first dramatic society there and out of the group of which he was a charter member came the Dakota Playmakers and the first Prairie Folk Plays. On receiving a playbill of the first original Dakota plays young Anderson wrote from California, where he was then engaged in teaching: If there is anything that would bring me back to the old sod, it is a dramatic revival; and honestly, it seems to me that if the interest and enthusiasm keep up we may yet have one comparable to the recent flowering in Ireland. I would be willing to walk all the way back to the Dakota prairie to get in on that. And when later he went to New York the first play he wrote, you remember, was White Desert, a play of the vast winter plain of Dakota—its loneliness—a native play of the prairie. He had made a beginning.

The plays of Dakota were often crude, but they were honest. Simple folk plays, near to the good, strong, wind-swept soil—plays telling of long, bitter winters in the little sod shanty. But plays singing, too, of the prairie springtime; of unflected sunshine, of the wilderness gay with wild roses, of the fenceless fields welling over with lark song; plays of the travail and achievement of a pioneer people!

The Beginnings in Carolina

The only male member of the first playwriting course at Chapel Hill in the fall of 1918 was Thomas Wolfe, Tom to us, a lanky six-and-a-half-foot-tall mountain lad with burning eyes. The other twelve members of the class were co-eds. After the meeting of the class that first day he said, by way of apology, Proff, I don’t want you to think that this Ladies Aid Society represents Carolina. We have a lot of he-men seriously interested in writing here, but they are all disguised in army uniforms now. I tried to get into one myself but they didn’t have one long enough for me.

His first play—and his first published work—The Return of Buck Gavin, a tragedy of a mountain outlaw, included in the second volume of Carolina Folk Plays, was one of the plays in our initial production that first season. We couldn’t find anyone to play the part and I said to him, I guess you’ll have to play it yourself, Tom. You may not know it, but you really wrote that part for yourself!

But I can’t act, Proff, I’ve never acted.

You’re a born actor, I assured him, "and you are Buck Gavin."

I shall never forget his first performance. With free mountain stride, his dark eyes blazing, he became the hunted outlaw of the Great Smokies. There was something uncanny in his acting of the part—something of the pent-up fury of his highland forebears.

In his foreword to The Return of Buck Gavin, Tom wrote for all beginners: It is the fallacy of the young writer to picture the dramatic as unusual and remote . . . The dramatic is not unusual. It is happening daily in our lives.

Of his playwriting that first year he wrote: "I have written about people I have known and concerning whom I feel qualified to write. [The plays] have suggested a train of thought that intensely interests me, and is, I believe, of vital importance to me. My writing, I feel sure, has been made easier and better by their production.

If they have affected my writing to this extent—if they have indirectly caused an analysis of my work, and a determination of my future course—are they not worthwhile, even though they be but the amateurish productions of a youngster?

It is interesting to recall now the first efforts of the young writer. Like Anderson, he wrote what he knew. Those who have followed him through the years cannot fail to see in his first hastily written little plays the indications of his later achievement in Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River.

The Carolina Folk Plays

As far as we have been able to determine, the first use of the term folk play in the American theater was the Carolina Playmakers’ announcement: "Carolina Folk Plays," on the playbill of their initial production in Chapel Hill twenty-one years ago. The first play presented was When Witches Ride, about folk superstition in Northampton County, by Elizabeth Lay of Beaufort, North Carolina (now Mrs. Paul Green). Now the term is not unfamiliar in the expanding scene of our American theater. Witness Paul Green’s In Abraham’s Bosom, Lula Vollmer’s Sun-Up, Dorothy and DuBose Heyward’s Porgy, Jack Kirkland’s dramatization of Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, Lynn Riggs’s Green Grow the Lilacs, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and Robert Sherwood’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois.

From the first our particular interest in North Carolina has been the use of native materials and the making of fresh dramatic forms. We have found that if the writer observes the locality with which he is most familiar and interprets it faithfully, it may show him the way to the universal. If he can see the interestingness of the lives of those about him with understanding and imagination, with wonder, why may he not interpret that life in significant images for others—perhaps for all? It has been so in all lasting art.

Folk Drama Defined

The term folk, as we use it, has nothing to do with the folk play of medieval times. But rather it is concerned with folk subject matter: with the legends, superstitions, customs, environmental differences and the vernacular of the common people. For the most part these plays are realistic and human; sometimes they are imaginative and poetic.

The chief concern of the folk dramatist is man’s conflict with the forces of nature and his simple pleasure in being alive. The conflict may not be apparent on the surface in the immediate action on the stage. But the ultimate cause of all dramatic action we classify as folk, whether it be physical or spiritual, may be found in man’s desperate struggle for existence and in his enjoyment of the world of nature. The term folk with us applies to that form of drama which is earth-rooted in the life of our common humanity. For many years our playwrights of the South—indeed of all America—were imitative, content with reproducing the outlived formulas of the old world. There was nothing really native about them. Whenever they did write of American life, the treatment was superficial and innocuous.

Trouping

From the first the Carolina Playmakers have been interested in the making of a native theater throughout the state and beyond their own borders. Traveling in their Show-Bus, with three sets of homemade scenery atop, portable lighting equipment, costumes and stage properties, they have played all over North Carolina, in crossroads villages in the mountains and in neighborhoods by the sea—in school auditoriums, old-time opera houses and outlived town halls.

The Playmakers’ present trouping facilities offer a striking contrast to the first tour of the Dakota Playmakers over eight hundred miles of treeless plains, when it was necessary to spend several hours at a junction point sometimes, waiting for an accommodation train to take them to a little prairie town at the end of a branch line. Then the players drew lots to see who would peddle the handbills to advertise their arrival in town. Now the Playmakers ride in royal fashion over the hills and through the valleys of the Blue Ridge, blossoming with dogwood and flaming with the Judas trees of a Carolina spring; now announced in three-sheet posters in gay colors, and by high praise in the newspapers, their coming is like a triumphal entry.

The thirty-six tours of the Playmakers have not been confined to North Carolina. We have played in 121 different towns and cities—all the way from south Georgia to Boston, Massachusetts, and as far west as the National Folk Festivals at St. Louis and at Dallas, Texas, playing 322 performances to a total audience of more than three hundred thousand. In their thirty-six tours the Carolina Playmakers have played forty-five of the folk plays written and produced originally at Chapel Hill. They have played in the beautiful University Theatre at Yale, on three successive tours at Columbia University in New York City, and twice at the Fine Arts Theatre in Boston, where the troupe was greeted by Governor Frank Allen at the Massachusetts State House. On our first visit to Washington, D.C., we were cordially received at the White House by President Calvin Coolidge, who actually went so far as to say he thought our work was very interesting.

Of the Playmakers’ first appearance in New York the reviewer of Theatre Magazine wrote: "The rare characters and the homely qualities of these plays linger in one’s memory long after some of the more sophisticated plays of Broadway have been forgotten. In fact, each time we witness a program of the Carolina Folk Plays, we feel for the moment that we, too, are just ‘folks’—along with those other folks on the other side of the footlights, who transport us for a brief but happy period back to their hill country, with its rich traditions, legends and folklore."

The Carolina Play-Book

Besides publishing plays the Playmakers have issued twelve volumes of a unique little quarterly, the Carolina Play-Book, devoted to the making of a native theater. The Play-Book has the distinction of being included for two seasons in the International Exhibit of Periodicals at the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago as one of only three American theater journals—the other two being Theatre Arts and Stage. A valuable supplement to the Play-Book is the Carolina Stage, an attractive publication in mimeographed form, designed to meet the practical needs of the members of the Carolina Dramatic Association.

Communal Drama of American History

Paul Green’s The Lost Colony, you recall, was written and produced originally in the summer of 1937 to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the first English settlement in America. It has played for three seasons now on Roanoke Island to tens of thousands of people in an outdoor theater on the actual site of the landing of our first English colonists. Brooks Atkinson, in an article in the New York Times not long ago (Ought We to Found a National Theater?), is eternally right in saying that The Lost Colony has become a permanent part of the culture of the people on Roanoke Island. He goes on, As long as they live, these people will have a grander notion of our heritage than they had before this reverent drama was written.

In November of the present year Mr. Green wrote a second drama for the American people’s theater, The Highland Call, commemorating the bicentennial of Scotch settlement in the Cape Fear River valley of south eastern North Carolina, the stirring events of revolutionary times and the heroic leadership of bonny Flora MacDonald. Extending the idea of communal playmaking in The Lost Colony, The Highland Call was produced in Fayetteville by the Carolina Playmakers in collaboration with the citizens of that historic town. It evoked such enthusiasm there that plans have been completed for its annual production.

Now Mr. Green is at work on the third drama of his trilogy of early American history. It is to be given for the first time in old Williamsburg, Virginia, beginning early in June and closing before the opening of the summerlong run of The Lost Colony on Roanoke Island. Mr. Green holds that America was regarded by the underprivileged classes in the old world as a land of opportunity, and that this was the compelling motive and promise which brought all classes to our shores and which America must fulfill to validate her beginnings.

Brooks Atkinson observes further in the above-mentioned article that we are just coming to realize that our country is rich in folklore and should yield an abundant harvest of drama, and a national theater that will serve the entire country should develop regional plays and contribute to a deeper national understanding. I know of no better way toward an imaginative, a spiritual expression of our tradition of democracy.

Coming of Age

From the first we have thought of our Playmakers as a fellowship of young people working happily together toward a single ideal—the making of a communal, a people’s theater in America. Walt Whitman happily expresses it, An institution of the dear love of comrades. Important as the individual is in the theater, it is well for us to remind ourselves constantly that the dramatic is essentially a social art. Whatever the Playmakers have achieved is due primarily to their holding fast together to such an objective. Whatever we have done, we have done together.

We have come a long way in twenty-one years. Beginning traditionally in the Department of English as a one-man theater, we now have a separate Department of Dramatic Art with a full-time theater staff; and, in lieu of the traditional research thesis in English for the Master of Arts degree, a student may submit an original play.

A year ago the department entered the field of cinema and radio. Films from the Museum of Modern Art library are shown regularly in the Playmakers Theatre, and old favorites from the Playmakers’ repertory (and new scripts, too) are now being broadcast from the university radio studio over a network of the Mutual Broadcasting System every Saturday afternoon at 3:30. The production this week is the first Carolina Folk Play of twenty-one years ago, When Witches Ride, by Elizabeth Lay.

Now we are wondering how long it will be before we take on television!

Those Who Come After

Time alone can tell what will be the effect, for good or bad, of our folk playmaking. According to the editor of Holland’s, The Magazine of the South, the influence of the Carolina Playmakers has spread indubitably into the associated fields of the novel, the short story and even nonfiction works. From the basic idea underlying their work and philosophy stem such writings as those of [Erskine] Caldwell, [DuBose] Heyward, [Caroline] Miller, [Roark] Bradford, [William] Faulkner, [T. S.] Stribling and other younger novelists. Not that many more influences have not impinged sharply and deeply on Southern writers and on Southern thought generally; but the Carolina Playmakers and their example have been a centralizing, crystallizing and vitalizing force unequaled in Southern literature to date.

From the first we have believed in the South, we have held that the South had something rich and strange to contribute to America, something of native honesty and of beauty. Dr. Albert Shaw, in writing of the beginnings in Dakota and in Carolina, interpreted our hope in an editorial article in the American Review of Reviews of September 1919: When every community has its own native group of plays and producers, we shall have a national American Theater that will give a richly varied, authentic expression of American life. We shall be aware—which we are only dimly at present—of the actual pulse of the people by the expression in folk plays of their coordinated minds. It is this common vision, this collective striving that determines nationalism, and remains throughout the ages the one and only touchstone of the future.

In thinking of the next twenty-one years I go back to a conversation of my high school days with one of Walt Whitman’s friends. On his last visit to the Singer of America he remembered Old Walt standing in the door of his little home in Camden and calling out in farewell, Expecting the main things from those who come after.

—FHK

Barter Theatre

FOUNDED 1933

Robert Porterfield

Among the tales of American theater foundings, there may be none as vivacious as that of Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Virginia:

•Imagined in the depths of the Great Depression by a sometimes-employed actor;

•Established in a farming community of fewer than two thousand people;

•With a repertoire of plays given rights-free by luminary Broadway producers and playwrights;

•Performed by a company of New York actors, many of whom hitchhiked six-hundred-plus miles to southern Virginia, near the North Carolina and Tennessee borders;

•Tickets sold not for coin but for local livestock and produce, brought nightly to the box office.

That story is told here by founder Robert Porterfield, who in the summer of 1933 returned to his hometown and the farmland where he’d grown up to bring live theater to a skeptical, even hostile, population, some of whom saw actors as kin to the devil. At the heart of the story—of the vision—is the method of payment that gives the theater its name. With vegetables you cannot sell, you can buy a good laugh, the theater boasted when it opened its doors, filling its seats with customers who paid in eggs, produce, jam and livestock—"hams for Hamlet." Porterfield died in 1971, leaving behind a continuously operating theater (it’s still going) and this unfinished memoir.⁴ Its voice captures something of Porterfield’s charming persona—a gentleman farmer and theatrical raconteur with a well-oiled story to tell.

—TL

SOURCE: An unpublished memoir by Robert Porterfield.

Patron Saint of the Impossible

The year was 1932, a year that anyone who lived through the Depression remembers. The closing days of the Hoover Administration, sullen, silent, hopeless. The year wages had been dropping steadily ever since the great crash of 1929; the year unemployment was still climbing as more and more employers had to cut down their payrolls. National income that year dropped to less than half of what it had been only four years earlier; American business, they say, was running at a loss of more than five billion dollars a year; and twelve million unemployed Americans were out looking desperately for jobs.

It’s hard to make today’s generation understand what the appalling statistics in business failures and unemployment accounts meant in terms of human living. The spectacular legends of stockbrokers leaping from hotel windows to their deaths do not convey the daily struggle for all the rest for mere existence, a struggle that was sometimes tragic, more often simply grim. The American standard of living which had fattened on luxury dropped suddenly to the sharp edge of necessity. Banks were closing, savings were disappearing, and on every street corner in Manhattan people were selling apples for five cents apiece.

Men with PhDs turned hobo for lack of anything better to do, and traveled across country skipping from boxcar to boxcar. Farmers watched land they had labored all their lives to own disappear on the auctioneer’s block as banks foreclosed their mortgages. Whole families—women, children and old people—were working at factories for as little as fifteen cents an hour. Hotheaded young men, their idealism deprived of all other outlet, took fire with the excitement of the new doctrine of Communism, and gathered in little cell groups to remake the world. Capitalism had failed, they declared, and they looked out at the idle factories, and the bread lines; it was time to bring in a new order.

I was just another hungry young actor in New York then, out of work like almost everybody else I knew, so what touched me most about the Depression was the way it had affected the theater. A friend of mine who is an orchestra leader said that the first thing people can do without in a depression is symphonies, but if that is true then the second thing they can do without is drama. They were certainly doing without drama nicely in 1932.

On the surface, the Broadway season kept up appearances. Even after four out of five of its playhouses had closed down indefinitely, those that were left made a respectable showing. In a stroke of touching bravado, the Stage, a highbrow theatrical magazine of the era, outlined a solid week of playgoing, including matinees, which a visitor to New York might enjoy. The selection it offered him was not, in fact, undistinguished. Dinner at Eight, Dangerous Corner, The Late Christopher Bean and The Threepenny Opera opened that year, though none of them lasted very long. That was the year Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s Music in the Air introduced I’ve Told Every Little Star, and Cole Porter’s Gay Divorce featured Fred Astaire and a song called Night and Day.

There was little reflection inside the theater that a disaster had befallen outside. Squalor had not yet become the fashion of the stage—farce, romance and murder, laid in elegant surroundings and dressed in jewels and furs, befitted the fancy of the season. The imperishable stars—Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Tallulah Bankhead, Judith Anderson, Osgood Perkins—all had vehicles designed to display their art and graces. Lillian Gish, I remember, was in a melodramatic dramatization of the famous Lizzie Borden murder case in Nine Pine Street, and Ina Claire delighted her fans in one of S. N. Behrman’s most polished drawing room comedies, Biography. That was the year Burgess Meredith got discovered.

I was one of the people who realized that the Broadway scene was not so gay as it appeared by footlights. Being out of work, a more or less chronic condition among actors in good times or bad, was new to me. But most of the other actors I knew were out of work, too, not only the extras and bit players. For all the stars that I have named by their performances, I could name a larger number who were all about jostling me in the bread line. Even among the plays that opened to such promising notices, there was scant chance of a long run. A hit might be good for two or three months, and its houses might be half empty even at that. Hollywood was, if anything, bleaker; and television, the great bonanza of actors between jobs, was not yet in existence. A good many of America’s twelve million unemployed, it seemed to me, were actors out looking for work. As we watched closing notices posted on theater after theater, the chances of things getting any better seemed to be dwindling away altogether.

One night late in 1931 I came home to my small apartment on 58th Street to find the room stripped of everything including the bed sheets, every stitch of clothing, even the knives and forks I had borrowed from Horn & Hardart. They didn’t amount to much, but to me they were everything. Dismayed, I went to a friend and I learned that Walter Hampden was casting for a cross-country tour of Cyrano de Bergerac. I went to see him the next day. He looked at me as though he might have heard of my loss. At any rate, he gave me a part and I went into rehearsal. I borrowed a blanket and a couple of sheets until we went on the road. Then I gave up my apartment.

After the tour started I realized that the theater outside of New York had been even harder hit than the theater in Manhattan. Rural areas might not have been suffering so acutely as some of the cities because there was still food to eat, but no one could afford to buy it. Prices on farm crops had never been lower. Cotton was bringing less than five cents, wheat less than fifty cents and corn only thirty-one cents a bushel. It shocked me to see panhandlers and beggars roaming the streets, in the midst of this wasted abundance, to see wagonloads of sharecroppers traveling westward, escaping the first of the dust bowl disasters of the Southwest. I watched from the train windows and saw ramshackle farms and idle factories. And while the bread lines in cities grew longer, the box office lines outside our ticket windows got shorter and shorter. People didn’t have the money to spend on theater tickets, even to see a matinee idol like Walter Hampden in one of the greatest hits of his career. Banks were closing on all sides of us; one closed just in time to swallow up our weekly paychecks before they could be forwarded to another bank. Mine was, I must admit, quite small. I was playing a cadet of Gascony at the time, and doubling as the cardinal, and on the nights we played theaters too small to accommodate our horse, I helped Edward Everett Hale III⁵ cart Roxane’s carriage into the fourth act. (The horse usually remembered the cue better than we did.) For all this I was getting the minimum road salary, which was not large in 1931. But when it was lost, I was absolutely broke.

Through it all, Walter Hampden was wonderful. He was the last of the great actor-managers—a great and generous man. He was a great manager and an actor with a magnificent command of technique, but he was above all a gentleman. I never saw him lose his temper. The week the banks closed on our paychecks, he paid our expenses out of his own pocket. All this couldn’t change one hard fact, though; we were closing the tour ahead of schedule because of poor business.

Some of us were sitting in the club car, heading across the prairies back to Broadway and another fruitless job hunt, when I first found expression for the wild idea that was beginning to form in my mind. The rich-looking fields and grazing cattle and crops piled outside of farm doors seemed to contradict the long lines of people on relief in the cities; nature had been bountiful that season. Save for the dust storms in western Kansas and eastern Colorado, there had been none of the great droughts or floods or pestilence that one usually associates with economic disaster. Prices on farm crops had never been lower. I think it was said that the price of wheat was lower than it had been since the days of Queen Elizabeth I. It was piling up and rotting away, nevertheless, because nobody had any money to buy it with.

To anyone who ever grew up on a farm, or to any boy who ever traded jackknives for marbles, the idea comes naturally to swap what you can’t buy. It occurred to me that we had something to swap, too—culture, entertainment, spiritual nourishment for body nourishment. Why not? My fellow actors and I talked late into the night, taking fire with the novelty of the idea. The next morning I went to Walter Hampden—a job that took a deal of courage for a simple cadet. Following the tradition of the great actor-managers, he had always kept himself aloof. He always traveled with his wife, for he was a devoted family man. To his company he was an ever-courteous, ever-thoughtful manager, but hard to know. However, I gathered up my courage. Mr. Hampden, I said, people aren’t buying tickets because they haven’t got the money. Why don’t we let them pay for their tickets in farm produce, things we could eat—vegetables, eggs, corn, turkey, ham . . .

I got to that word ham and his face fell. It wasn’t a very happy choice of words. He was an actor of the old school who had come to stardom through years of touring the English provinces. Perhaps he could still envision vegetables hurled across the footlights. Or perhaps he was just sensitive on the topic of pork, for the popular swashbuckling heroic style of acting had gained him and his contemporaries the reputation as hams. At any rate he shook his head. With his unfailing courtesy, he told me that my idea, though novel, was completely impractical.

Walter Hampden was the first to tell me that my scheme wouldn’t work, but he wasn’t the last. I kept thinking about it and talking about it when we got back to New York the end of that season, and it seemed to me that my idea was the most positive, the most concrete solution anybody had to suggest for meeting the crisis of the theater.

Earlier in the Depression I had always been able to find some kind of job. I had done some modeling for art students. I had worked for the New York Athletic Club, collecting tips from time to time—a dime from John D. Rockefeller, one from Mayor [James J.] Walker, another from Lindbergh—and worked my way up from back elevator operator to front elevator operator to desk clerk to dining room supervisor to official host. That was a miserable year, I remember. I learned more about running a residence and about serving and preparing and handling of food than I expected to use in half a dozen lifetimes, and I had hated it.

Now I couldn’t even find a job doing that. I juggled my budget to about three dollars a week, salvaged from what savings I had managed to accumulate. I lived on a box of graham crackers and a quart of milk a day, which I had figured out gave me the greatest amount of nourishment for my money, but all the while I couldn’t help thinking about my father’s farm, Twin Oaks in Glade Spring, Virginia, and the one he managed in Saltville.

The Depression had hit rural Virginia, of course; no one had escaped it. Banks had closed, never to reopen. You rarely saw cash for no one had money to buy the tobacco and corn and pork that were our mainstays. On a visit home I saw Haviland china hidden under attic floorboards lest it fall victim to the auctioneer’s hammer, and heirloom sterling and silver tea sets offered for sale at the price of a song. The two private schools in nearby Abingdon had been forced to close as luxuries nobody could afford.

My own father, like so many rural Virginians, had become land poor, buying up property through the wooded hills and cattle pasture of my native Washington County. Now, unable to meet the mortgages which the banks were calling in, he had to give up everything except the home place, abandoning his dream of leaving to each of his five sons a farm along with a good education. But the family, at least, was eating as well as they had ever eaten before. The only food we actually bought anyway was coffee and sugar, and after the Depression came we tapped our maple trees and used the syrup for sweetening. We had even made our own soap at home; I still have the recipe in my mother’s old cookbooks.

I was luckier than a lot of people; I could go home to eat if I wanted to. But the last job I had in Glade Spring was painting outhouses. It gave me painter’s colic, and I had left home determined to make my career in the theater, by damn. What did that leave—the bread line?

Because the gamble of life is part of an actor’s daily existence, there were few theatrical people, if any, so shattered by the Depression that they took to leaping out of windows. Some of them fled to Hollywood and dreams of a Bolshevist Theater there.

Others—not an appreciable number of the whole—turned to the radicals and the lure of Marxism. Down at the Workers’ Laboratory Theatre, close to Union Square, a handful of young playwrights got together to speak with the voice of revolution. Clifford Odets was among them, living, he said later, on ten cents a day while he was writing his first play. They wrote impassioned pieces of propaganda. The Communist Party, riding on the crest of such enthusiasms, organized the New Theatre League to propagate the workers’ drama, and make its plays available to avant-garde little theaters everywhere without charge. It soon died out, however, for lack of suitable scripts—more politicians were attracted than playwrights and propaganda is not art. Most of us in the theater didn’t care about bringing in a glowing new order for the ages; we just wanted to act.

Our chance to do so got smaller every day. But although eight out of ten shows were total flops in that 1932–33 season, although two-thirds of our playhouses had been shut since 1931, although thousands of us couldn’t so much as get jobs operating elevators, there was a warm, poverty-based esprit de corps rarely found among so self-centered a group of people as actors. Among ourselves, we managed by and large to take care of our own. A Stage Relief Committee had been set up, composed of some of the outstanding theatrical personalities of the decade—Brock Pemberton, Arthur Hopkins, John Golden, Antoinette Perry, Austin Strong, Jane Cowl and a half-dozen others. A little canteen was set up in the Actors’ Chapel, where actors could stand in line for bread and soup. There you were as likely to meet stars whose latest show had just folded as you were to find young understudies just out of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. At the Little Church around the Corner, traditionally the actor’s church under the pastorate of Dr. Randolph Ray, a theater guild had been set up to make sure that actors got their bite to eat. Everybody helped. Things were set up on a voluntary basis, not unlike at the Stage Door Canteen of the war years to come. We took turns cooking and serving.

I had never been lured by the hotheaded idealism of the young radicals. Too much of the downright country boy remained in me for that. But I found it awfully easy to get used to living off somebody’s donation, particularly if you had the self-righteous feeling there wasn’t anything you could be doing about it. I don’t know what there was in me that kept me from staying in the bread line like so many others. Pride, to some extent, of course, but I think it also had something to do with the fact that the actor’s philosophy had always been giving, not getting. And it also must have had something to do with the sense of responsibility I had been brought up to in Virginia.

For almost all of my boyhood that I can remember, I lived on a farm of twenty thousand odd acres. I grew up as a child thinking of it as the end of the world, because when the train got to Saltville it turned around and went back again. My father was manager of the entire farm, which extended for miles around and included all the village of Saltville, the Mathieson Alkali Company and thousands of cattle fattening on the good Virginia bluegrass. Whenever anyone was sick or in trouble they came to my mother—I guess there were literally hundreds of babies named Miss Daisy for her. When people needed clothes it was often our clothes they got. We grew up, my brothers and I as well as my mother and father, with a sense of responsibility for everyone who lived on those twenty thousand acres and, willingly or not, I couldn’t shake off that same sense of responsibility for myself and my fellow actors who were walking up and down Broadway looking for jobs that didn’t exist.

I suppose this is what kept me going in the months to come, as I waited in the offices of actors, producers and directors, of the Stage Relief Committee and the Dramatists Guild and Actors’ Equity. My impossible dream seemed more urgent than ever and when everybody told me that the idea of a barter theater was insane, I kept at it harder than before. I even compounded my lunacy by saying that we should not only sell our tickets for butter and eggs; we should perform our plays in hinterland towns that never before had known professional theater.

All through the Cyrano tour, looking out the train windows, I had become aware that we were taking our drama not to the farmers and the small towns, but to the cities. Being small-town bred myself (I had never seen a professional play until I was in my freshman year in college), I kept wanting to ask, Why don’t we ever stop at the towns and the rural communities? Why shouldn’t they have the niceties of life, too? Ever since I fell in love with the theater, I have wanted to share it with other people. I didn’t like to see the country people—my people—discriminated against. I didn’t ask my question, of course; I knew only too well that the answer would be dry and economic. Who could afford to play Cyrano for a town with a population of 3,005?

I could, I decided. With the boldness of youth and madness, I marched into the Algonquin Hotel one afternoon and made an appeal to the Stage Relief Committee. They presented an awesome spectacle to a struggling young actor living on three dollars a week. I couldn’t help thinking that any one of them could have given me a job had he been so minded. There was John Golden, producer, writer and musician, one of the wealthiest men in the theater. He could make you