Broadway: 1941: Europe and the American Theatre

I

AMONG the casualties of fascism and the A present war is the European theatre. For more than a decade after 1918 it voiced the aspirations and struggles of a continent engaged in repairing the ravages of war and building new foundations for old. It assimilated the new ideas of Freudian psychology, relativity, and sociology; it aligned itself with the modernist movements in painting, architecture, and music; it extended the art of stage production in accordance with the latest mechanical developments. Today this theatre is in shambles from one end of Western Europe to the other, and one mourns the wreckage with the same sense of loss that follows the news that another English landmark has been erased by indiscriminate bombing.

Before the curtain was rung down by counter-revolution and conquest, the stage began to reflect a general distemper and actually to promote its spread in European society. These insufficiently noted symptoms have historical significance, and they even remind us that we can do worse than examine our own dramatic art at this time. Today America is virtually the last sanctuary of the free theatre, and its practitioners in this country must be keenly sensible of the obligation that has devolved upon them. More than ever it becomes incumbent upon us to keep a great medium of human expression alive and virile.

The First World War produced merely a stalemate in the progress of the modern theatre. No sooner was the Versailles Treaty signed than the momentum was resumed and actually accelerated. Dramatic realism, which had become somewhat discredited before 1914, acquired new material and new incentives. In England, for instance, Shaw brought the realistic historical drama to his highest peak with Saint Joan, and Galsworthy’s pen resumed its objective vigor when he dramatized the tarnishing effects of hatred in The Skin Game or exposed insidious prejudice in Loyalties. Along with many continental playwrights, Robert C. Sherriff remembered the holocaust with blistering reality in Journey ‘s End, and both Somerset Maugham and Noel Coward digressed from their comic style to paint such bleak pictures of the aftermath as For Services Rendered and Post Mortem. The former’s comedies, The Circle and The Constant Wife, reflected a realistic attitude toward social conventions in the post-war period, while the latter’s farces gave accurate recognition to its excess of sophisticated hedonism in reaction to the bleak war years. The reawakening of the Irish theatre was accomplished by Sean O’Casey with Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars, plays with a deepened sympathy for the underdog.

The social drama was restored to a position of importance everywhere from Dublin to Helsinki. Even the Russian theatre, which had endured a dozen years of ineffectual symbolism before the October Revolution, as well as rabid post-revolutionary fantasies that extended the uprising as far as the planet Mars, settled down to what it called ‘socialist realism.’ Two of its products — Gorky’s picture of the abolished middle class, Yegor Bulychov, and Bulgakov’s tragedy of the liquidated aristocracy, The Last of the Turbins — would make distinguished realistic drama in any man’s language; and although many of the Soviet plays were hampered by utilitarian concepts of art, they acquired a fascination far beyond their shoddy dramaturgy by presenting the problems of the individual under collectivism. The psychological drama also added new dimensions to realism; the motivation of Freud is clearly to be seen in such work as Edouard Bourdet’s The Captive, Coward’s The Vortex, Besier’s The Barrets of Wimpole Street, and Mordaunt Shairp’s The Green Bay Tree.

No single approach, however, could exhaust the theatre in this fluctuating and dynamic period. The art of fantasy and symbolism, which had previously proved so tepid or ‘precious’ in many of the writings of the Maeterlinck school, acquired new substance and meaning. This was apparent even in a conservatively written play like Outward Bound, and in Molnar’s masterpiece Liliom, which first achieved recognition in post-war Budapest. Fantasy was deepened by disillusionment and by the new psychological science in the best work of Luigi Pirandello, who contributed such fascinating studies of self-delusion and multiple personality as Six Characters in Search of an Author, Henry IV, and Right You Are, If You Think You Are. Protesting against the obtuse complacencies of society, which he once defined as ’a league of brigands against men of good will,’Pirandello acclaimed the vagaries of the inner self. Even more incisive, because more socially oriented, were Shaw’s rueful obituaries on Europe in HeartbreakHouse and Too True to Be Good, and his fugue on longevity as a solution for human stupidity, Back to Methuselah. Noteworthy, too, wrere such Central European fantasies as Franz Werfel’s representation of revolution as the selfperpetuating seed of social corruption in The Goat Song and Karel Capek’s famous robot drama, R.U.R, And to successful endeavors like these one must add a veritable whirligig of abortive experiments; although the deliberate gyrations or distortions of subjective expressionism may have been bewildering and sometimes even puerile, they led to tentative extensions of dramatic form that may stimulate future playwrights.

Although marred by didactic exhortation and obviousness, the left political movement’s ‘epic’ plays (sometimes called ‘learning plays’) extended dramatic structure to include documentary drama. The effectiveness of this genre has already been demonstrated by American ‘Living Newspapers’ like Power and One-Third of a Nation, and by American documentary films like The River and The Fight for Life.

This, then, was the drama that flourished in the post-war years. Yet it remains only a short chapter in the vastly larger chronicle of the stage during those exciting years. No country was devoid of fascinating productions designed in many styles, supplied with revolving stages and the latest inventions, and intended for enormous audiences by comparison with which our playgoing public seems minuscule.

From Russia, for instance, the traveler brought home rhapsodic tales of huge audiences, of colorful productions by numerous racial groups, and of infinite inventiveness. The tale grew in wonder as it recounted, in addition to the Moscow Art Theatre’s new triumphs, the experiments of Vsevolod Meyerhold: his constructivist stage which employed the viscera of skyscrapers for acting levels, his ‘biomechanics’ or ‘organization and geometricization of movement,’ and his later revivals of classics that became glinting, if somewhat dehumanized, social satires. To meet the need of revitalizing old plays for new Russia, Meyerhold often followed the path of least resistance by reconstructing scenes and adding new ones. But he revealed remarkable ingenuity in direction when, for example, he had the small society scenes of Gogol’s famous comedy, The Inspector General, wheeled in as if they were being served on a tray. (In another cleverly staged episode, the intoxicated hero, who is mistaken for a government inspector, reels home, and frightened petty racketeers, bringing bribes, peer at him through fifteen doors!) Visitors applauded the untimely deceased Vakhtangov for his spontaneous imaginativeness, and Alexander Tairov for the brilliant theatricalism he compounded of superbly managed mass movement, formal gestures, and more or less intoned speech. Even the fiery revolutionism of the director Okhlopkov, who tried to unite playgoers and actors in a common experience by placing the stage in the centre of the auditorium, was no deterrent to admiration.

In Central Europe, Max Reinhardt continued to display his inventive theatricality and sensuousness. But although he experimented with his vast theatre, the Grosses Schauspielhaus, and involved the audience by planting actors in the auditorium, he was overshadowed by the younger directors who gave themselves up to expressionism. The new technique achieved remarkable intensity under Jürgen Fehling, whose staging of Ernst Toller’s revolutionary Masses and Man (later reproduced for the Theatre Guild by Lee Simonson) consisted of dramatically lighted masses appropriately balanced against a single individual. Still more galvanic was the artistry of Leopold Jessner, who revitalized the Berlin State Theatre with simplified settings consisting of suggestively lighted levels or steps, known as Jessnertreppen, on which vigorous actors like Fritz Kortner executed breath-takingly rapid, exciting movements. And Jessner was followed by Erwin Piscator, whose work in the political theatre was nothing short of sensational. Applying modern technology to the stage, he amplified its expressiveness by means of conveyor belts or treadmills on which actors could traverse distances, films that provided a background of landscapes or events for the stage picture, and architectural constructions. For a piece about Rasputin, Piscator erected a huge globe, segments of which would open up for scenes in various countries that related Rasputin’s intrigues to international imperialism. It is impossible, however, to continue this inventory of European stagecraft without writing an encyclopædia. One can only refer to such other notable productions as Jacques Copeau’s, Louis Jouvet’s, and Gaston Baty’s in France, Pirandello’s at the Odelaschi Theatre and the Italian Futurists’ unique mechanizations, the Spanish poet Lorca’s La Barraca people’s theatre, and the work of brilliant Czech and Scandinavian directors.

II

This, in short, was the institution that became one of the victims of a gradually exploding world. Its experience reflected the disintegrative processes in that world before the major political detonations finished it.

Understandably enough, the unhealthy symptoms made their most sensational appearance in Germany. There was a distinct pathology in the early expressionist theatre, which coincided with the inflationary period and its aftermath. It seethed with such chaotic frenzy that the revolt against the Hohenzollern monarchy too often became a frenzied negation of all human values. Rebellious sons were constantly flying at their parents’ throats in the early expressionist plays. In the first of them, Walter Hasenclever’s The Son, a son is incited to shoot his father by a friend who shouts, ‘Destroy the tyranny of the family. . . . Do away with laws! Restore Freedom.’ Even more typical were Arnolt Bronnen’s Parricide, in which a young man suffering from an Œdipus complex murders his mother’s husband, and Paul Kornfeld’s The Seduction, in which a young man’s revulsion against philistinism leads him to strangle his sister’s bridegroom; following this he escapes from prison, is then injected with poison by an enemy, and finally induces his murderer to commit suicide! More murders abound in such monstrosities as Hanns Henny Jahn’s Medea and The Coronation of Richard III, in which people were continually slaughtered, tortured, and buried alive. So tolerant a critic as Alfred Kerr, who reported that ‘on one occasion a gentleman’s liver was cut out and eaten,’ could not help exclaiming, ‘They actually produced that in the theatre. Oh, you know too little of this era in the German drama!’

Perhaps this curious taste for blood was an inevitable consequence of four years of mass slaughter, but in retrospect it looks more like a foretaste of the sadism of the National Socialist terror. However unintentionally, German expressionism’s assumption that man is a mass of sacrosanct instinctive drives also foreshadowed the later worship of ruthlessness. Nor is it difficult to detect totalitarian trends in the left-wing theatre’s well-intentioned representations of individuals as cogs in the wheel of social action.

After this came the cataclysm of 1933. The freedom of the stage disappeared, and the racial laws deprived it of most of its leaders. Among those who were sent into exile by their views or race were Reinhardt, Jessner, Piscator, Toller (who later hanged himself in a New York hotel), Werfel, Kortner, and Hasenclever, a lineal descendant of Goethe who killed himself in a French concentration camp to escape capture by the German army. (It was one of the ironies of his fate that the last play he wrote before the fall of the Weimar republic, The Man of Wax, should have contended that the world would never again tolerate a Napoleon.) The theatre fell into the hands of Goebbels, hitherto a frustrated author; second-rate playwrights like Hans Johst came to the fore with glorifications of Horst Wessel and other strongarm men of National Socialism, while the competent writers and directors who chose or were compelled to remain in Germany found scant opportunity to operate as independent artists. The greatest of them, Gerhart Hauptmann, had long outlived his international fame; evidently his age and his acceptance of the régime earned him forgiveness for The Weavers, the one play for which he will be remembered. The state was at first glutted with chauvinistic harangues and spectacles. When these had to be supplemented with other entertainment, only aseptic musical comedies, peasant dramas, and old-fashioned historical pieces were acceptable to the Gestapo.

There were also early fascist elements in Italian Futurism. Its mechanistic view of man and art was expounded by Mussolini’s friend Tommaso Marinetti, who recently delivered himself of a lecture on ‘ the æsthetics and beauty of war ‘ and of an ‘Aero-Song of the Bombing Plane’ composed of edifying lines like ‘Women don’t love silent, gentle little airplanes that don’t know how to bomb.’ Symptomatic, too, were the cynicism of the ‘grotesque school’ of Italian playwrights and its master Pirandello’s denial of the reality of the human personality. Pirandello could continue to deny it after Mussolini’s march on Rome without coming into conflict with the new ideology. That is precisely what he did, turning out monotonous variations on the same theme with increasing tenuousness until he lost all semblance of artistic importance almost a decade before he died. In 1934, two years before his death, he ran afoul of fascism by composing a libretto, The Fable of the Exchanged Sons, in which an idiot is exchanged for a prince at birth. Since later the prince decides to relinquish his claims and to let the idiot run ' the king business,’ the play had uncomplimentary implications concerning the present dictator t.of Italy, and Pirandello was assailed on the ‘grounds of moral incongruity.’ At that point his cynical doctrine that ‘ nothing is true ‘ was discovered to be at variance with fascist doctrine, and therefore ‘bad art.’ He soon made his peace with the régime so completely that he even defended the Ethiopian war when he visited the United States. But his contretemps illustrates the conditions that have faced any thinking dramatist. It is not surprising that Italian playwrights ceased making contributions to world drama even before the present war.

In Soviet Russia the situation has been similarly difficult. The theatre has continued to be interesting, but it is carefully regulated. Meyerhold fell into such deep disfavor that his present fate is uncertain. Moreover, it has long been impossible for Soviet playwrights to operate as free artists; a number of them ran afoul of the government, and at least two of them are known to have been executed as Trotzkyites.

Unhappily, moreover, the situation became dispiriting even in the great democracies — in France, which remained wedded to sophistication and domestic triangles, and in England. During the protracted years of the international crisis, English drama became, in the main, elementary entertainment; some of its successes, like George and Margaret and French Without Tears, were rightly met with derision by New York’s critics. Serious efforts were mostly confined to psychological melodramas, Priestley’s time-relativity tracts, some ingenious but tenuous social satires in incisive verse by Auden and Isherwood, and several Anglo-Catholic mystic plays like T. S. Eliot’s distinguished Murder in the Cathedral. The author of French Without Tears, Terence Rattigan, explained the dearth of important drama in Great Britain pointedly when he told the New York Times readers about two years ago that ‘the dread of war, of civil strife, of national upheaval is far too real, far too intense in England at the present time. . . .’ With only one exception, Emlyn Williams’s humane and democratic The Corn Is Green (the current Broadway season’s best play), the English theatre began to piddle along with the English Government. The resurgent spirit of the people under Winston Churchill was recently reflected by the popularity of the American Robert Ardrey’s pæan to courage, Thunder Rock, and by heroic efforts to keep the theatres open. But under present circumstances it is obviously impossible to expect a revitalization of the stage in embattled Britain.

III

Today America is the last haven. Here alone dramatists can still have their say and theatricians can experiment to their heart’s content without interference by the state. Here, too, the condition of the country still makes possible an intelligent and tolerant audience. To us have come many of Europe’s ablest playwrights, actors, and directors, among them Maeterlinck, Molnar, Henri Bernstein, Werfel, Reinhardt, Jessner, and Piscator. It is to us that they look for the vital theatre that they knew and helped to create.

Throughout the nineteen-twenties we drew heavily upon Europe. Our leading stage organization, the Theatre Guild, owed most of its early triumphs to the foreign drama, both old and new. The visits of the Moscow Art Theatre, Reinhardt productions, and the Abbey Theatre enriched our seasons. The example of Europe galvanized all our theatre arts; it stimulated directors like Arthur Hopkins and scenic designers like Robert Edmond Jones, Norman Bel Geddes, and Lee Simonson, and it led to notable experimentation by our playwrights. It is difficult to think of the realistic and expressionistic work of O’Neill, Anderson, Howard, Rice, and Lawson without reference to Strindberg, Wedekind, and the German expressionists; of the comedies of Sherwood, Barry, and Behrman without Shaw and European high comedy.

In the decade of the thirties, the influx of plays and influences was on a somewhat smaller scale, but up to about two years ago it was still appreciable. In one respect it was even greater than before, since the Soviet theatre’s progress was ttoo dazzling not to evoke some response from our artists, especially at a time when many of them were being pushed to the left, by the depression. Some Soviet plays began to appear on our stage, but they were at best only moderately impressive. Far more important was the effect on our younger playwrights and on new companies like the Theatre Union and the Group Theatre. Their work became surcharged with revolutionary criticism of the status quo; and although extremism vitiated their art and reduced their persuasiveness, the so-called leftwing theatre was for several years an exhilarating phenomenon. Not only did it reveal such exciting drama as Stevedore, Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing, Golden Boy, Bury the Dead, and The Cradle Will Rock, bringing to the fore new playwrights, but it heightened the significance of our entire theatre by giving a social direction to the later work of old practitioners like Maxwell Anderson, S. N. Behrman, and Robert Sherwood. Even the ‘escapist’ genre of musical comedy assumed a critical and social direction when Kaufman and his collaborators contributed Of Thee I Sing and Let ”Em Eat Cake, when ‘the perfect fool’ Ed Wynn appeared in the munitions satire, Hooray for What?, when the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union surprised the æsthetes with its infectious revue Pins and Needles, The Moscow Art Theatre’s or Stanislavsky’s notable production methods were belatedly incorporated by the American stage in the work of the Group Theatre, which became the best acting company in the country. Meyerhold’s manner of revitalizing classics intruded into the Mercury Theatre’s moderndress production of Julius CŒsar which catapulted Orson Welles into the headlines; the documentary drama of the Federal Theatre’s ‘Living Newspapers’ paralleled the German ‘epic theatre.’

For its immediate future the American theatre must depend on its own resources, which may, however, be augmented by an occasional contribution from Irish writers (Sean O’Casey’s new play is promised for the present season) and by the work of our refugees once they adapt themselves sufficiently to American stage conditions and find the right opportunities. (Among our new acquired directors, Jessner is at present working for a film company, Piscator heads the Studio Theatre of the New School for Social Research in New York, Reinhardt directs a dramatic school in Hollywood. Otto Preminger, who had less of a reputation in Europe, adapted himself almost instantly, scoring a quick success as the director and leading actor of last season’s Margin for Error.) However, the chief problem is that of developing plays which will respond to the new spirit in America, and to this end both refugees and American playwrights will have to reconsider their approach.

Gossamer continental drama like Molnar’s recently produced Delicate Story is passé; it is not that Molnar has lost his old spell, but that the world has changed. If such a play as John Van Druten’s Old Acquaintance gratifies the current season’s public, it is because it roots flimsy British comedy in some substantial characterization of two women novelists. The excavations of Freudianism in the theatre have also exhausted their value for audiences that can no longer afford to contemplate their libido. Even the militant class-struggle drama has lost its attractiveness for most of our playwrights and audiences under the blows of disillusionment that culminated in the Finnish war and Soviet-Axis coöperation. Regardless of the eventual course of Soviet policy, and despite the economic problems and irritations that still confront us, enthusiasm for the class struggle and faith in the panacea of revolution have suffered a setback.

Fortunately, however, the past twenty years have taught our dramatists and directors self-reliance, and we are no longer in the position of mere vassals to European art. Even in the years of our greatest dependency our talent was becoming vigorously independent and self-confident. Most of O’Neill’s work was native in characterization, setting, and flavor. Sidney Howard’s and Paul Green’s regional realism, Elmer Rice’s and Clifford Odets’s pictures of meltingpot New York life, Kaufman’s comedies of middle-class society and of the popular arts — these and numerous other works were essentially as indigenous as Paul Bunyan and John Henry. We have tended to be vigorously brash in farce, breezily democratic in comedy, considerate of the common man in tragedy, and homespun in social drama. More and more we have favored plays and productions that dispense with frills and furbelows, monocles and polite mutterings.

In recent years, moreover, we have turned our attention to the ‘American Way.’ Our playwrights have honored the unpretentious dignity of ordinary life both in proletarian pieces like Of Mice and Men and in middle-class pictures like Our Town. We have discarded the glib snobbery of Menckenism’s assault on the ‘booboisie,’ the borrowed Babbitt-baiting of the nineteen-twenties. We have also looked to our historic struggle for tolerance and freedom of opportunity in Kaufman and Hart’s The American Way, and in biographical drama like Robert Sherwood’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois. At the same time our dramatists have spurned any retreat into the hollow nutshell of isolationism; numerous anti-fascist plays, which were climaxed last season by Hemingway’s The Fifth Column and Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night, attest a sharpened consciousness of the international situation.

Finally, the theatre has been assuming a new attitude toward the social problems of American civilization. Although plays like Golden Boy and Rocket to the Moon, by the same Clifford Odets who inaugurated his career with the inflammatory Waiting for Lefty, have incorporated salutary social criticism, they have avoided solutions by revolutionary action, leaving the playgoer to draw his own conclusions regarding corrective measures. The tendency to divide the American people into embattled classes flying at each other’s throats has diminished; capitalist dragons no longer wear ten-twent’-thirt’ moustaches under egregious top hats, as they did in some militant plays of the early thirties, and angry workers no longer appear in profusion as knights in shining armor. It is not to be denied that the absence of passionate directness in our social drama represents a loss of dramatic force; Odets’s Night Music last season and this season’s Retreat to Pleasure (by the Irwin Shaw who wrote the impassioned anti-militaristic Bury the Dead several years ago) made the old convictions seem woefully threadbare. Compensations must be provided by depth and roundness of artistry, and a steady flame of humanitarianism will have to be substituted for revolutionary ardor if we are to avoid tepidity and insignificance.

This is, in fact, the major problem that confronts American playwrights. But it is not an insoluble one, since the widest range of sympathies has always produced the greatest dramatic literature. The stage is nearly set for a dramatic art that need not suffer, and can actually profit, from the dissolution of the European theatre and the dwindling of its influence.

IV

The current season has been undeniably meagre. As one half of it is being concluded at the present writing, the scarcity of productions reminds us that the professional theatre has been shrinking to about a third of its pre-depression dimensions. The disappearance of Orson Welles’s exciting Mercury Theatre and of the teeming Federal Theatre, which was abolished by Congress in the summer of 1939, the at least temporary clouding of the vital Group Theatre’s fortunes, the high costs and great risks of Broadway production — these and other factors have impoverished our stage. Misled by the tense international situation, commercially-minded producers have glutted the theatres with inept Hollywood comedies and melodramas. For the same reason they have also relied upon a greater proportion of musical comedies than has been customary. Seemingly, too, a number of playwrights have found the present world too much for them and require a breathing spell before they can become articulate again. The situation has seemed sufficiently alarming to raise the question whether we are not going the way of the European democracies that preferred to be coddled with sedatives and aphrodisiacs instead of being kept awake by trenchant drama.

Fortunately there are signs that we have other preferences. The critics and the public lost no time in interring all the Hollywood comedies and all the melodramas except a hilarious one called Arsenic and Old Lace, which may be described as a comedy designed to end all murder mysteries. The musical comedies that have been tolerated belong to a vigorous species far removed from lacy trumperies; their gusto is actually reassuring as a reflection of still youthful vigor even if, with the exception of the breezily critical revue Meet the People, they have contributed little stimulation to thought. Buddy de Sylva and Cole Porter’s Panama Hattie exudes a brashly democratic spirit, deflating superficial respectability in deference to rugged naturalness, deified as usual by the invincible Ethel Merman; John O’Hara’s Pal Joey is a vigorously realistic excoriation of the cheaper aspects of American entertainment and night-club enterprise. If we have been kind to a champagne bubble like the current dramatization of My Sister Eileen it is because it sparkles with youthful spirit. If we have accepted a British high comedy like Old Acquaintance which leaves the state of the world untouched, we have done so because it treats human nature instead of airy sophistication. It will not be long, too, before S. N. Behrman gives us another of his searching comedies of ideas. The single fantasy that has captivated Broadway, Cabin in the Sky, is a Negro morality play characterized by racial humor and vigor. Another fantasy, Philip Barry’s allegory of American democracy, Liberty Jones (which is having its pre-Broadway tour as this report is being written), should prove sparklingly provocative if it receives some necessary clarification. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, interpreted by Margaret Webster’s direction as a festive masque, has received new vitality from the fresh performances of Helen Hayes and Maurice Evans.

In the more neglected field of serious dramatics, Broadway has also revealed some encouraging vitality. King Lear,which was Piscator’s first production in New York, suffered from the limitations of a studio production in personnel and mechanics. It was a noteworthy, if only partially successful, effort to revive this rarely seen, difficult tragedy in modern terms as a tragedy of power politics and evil. Maxwell Anderson’s verse play, Journey to Jerusalem, was defeated by its author’s choice of the inactive period of Christ’s adolescence, but it drew a suggestive parallel between Judæan history and our own day, and it provided a stirring portrait of a rebel against Roman tyranny. Emlyn Williams’s three-yearold English play, The Corn Is Green, was finally staged by Herman Shumlin. A remarkable production, graced by Ethel Barrymore’s best acting in years, its story of a spinster’s educational efforts in an illiterate Welsh mining district that culminated in her discovery of a genius is an eloquent testimony to democratic ideals. Finally, the gift of tongues also came to the veteran social dramatist Elmer Rice. His Flight to the West may be discursive and its purple patches sparse, but its contrast between fascist ruthlessness and the human aspirations that form the bulwark of democracy proved both provocative and stirring. Even a half-successful exposé like the recently closed Cue for Passion scored some well-aimed hits at social dangers. The theatre has not been darkened in America even if it needs much more illumination than Broadway has provided during the past six months.

Moreover, the lights are on in numerous college and ‘little theatre’ communities, as well as in the touring stops of last season’s There Shall Be No Night, The Time of Your Life, and other meritorious plays. (Patronage for these has been abundant; the so-called ‘road’ has been extended by the Theatre Guild, which now has subscription audiences in important cities; and a National Playgoers’ Guild is planning to reach many sections of the country.) The American theatre is larger than Broadway. Paul Green’s pageant, The Lost Colony, which celebrates the colonization of Virginia, has become an annual festival in the South. There is even a Barter Theatre in West Virginia which accepts payment in smoked hams and vegetables. Universities in particular have been giving increasing attention to the study and presentation of drama. They are providing regional productions like those of the Chapel Hill Players, directed by Professor Frederick H. Koch and Paul Green, and experimental work like the socially oriented productions of Miss Hallie Flanagan at Vassar College and Professor Glenn Hughes’s Penthouse Theatre’s intimate staging at the University of Washington, which uses a centrally located platform like Okhlopkov’s in Russia. The Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research has established a subscription theatre for experimentation in the downtown section of New York City. Wonderfully equipped new plants like the University of Wisconsin building are arising. More progressive instruction and the assimilation of professional talent to assist student actors and playwrights alone are needed to make this auxiliary theatre a far-reaching enterprise.

A vigorous Broadway and auxiliary stage seems a distinct possibility at present. It can be America’s answer to the responsibility of preserving one of the greatest mediums of human expression, and it is not the least of our privileges to be entrusted with this assignment. The last outpost of free civilization is necessarily also the last outpost of the free theatre. To strengthen it is, moreover, one way of looking to our defenses, which include spiritual resources as well as material ones.