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THE GIFT OF
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 DELHI UNIVERSITY LIBRARYo

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 THE
DRAMATIC
IMAGINATION
Reflections and Speculations

on

The Art of the Theatre

ROBERT EDMOND JONES

Theatre Arts Books

NEW YORK
 COPYRIGHT, I94I, BY

ROBERT EDMOND JONES

All rights reserved, including

the right to reproduce this book
or portions thereof in any form.

To My Wife

Eighth Printing, 1967

oraterui acKnowieagment is made

to the editors of the Yale Review,
Theatre Arts, and the Encyclopaedia
Britannica for permission to reprint
parts of this book.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

 CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION by John Mason Brown 5

I. A NEW KIND OF DRAMA 15

II. ART IN THE THEATRE 23

III. THE THEATRE AS IT WAS AND AS IT IS 43

IV. TO A YOUNG STAGE DESIGNER 6q

V. SOME THOUGHTS ON STAGE COSTUME 87

VI. LIGHT AND SHADOW IN THEATRE 111

VII. TOWARD A NEW STAGE 131

VIII. BEHIND THE SCENES 151

 INTRODUCTION

by John Mason Brown

T„b theatre Bobby Jones believed in and

created was a theatre that did not take the dim
view and had not lost its sense of wonder. It was
an extension of life, not a duplication, a heighten¬
ing rather than a reproduction. The vision of what
the theatre might be, as opposed to what it is,
was present in almost every word Bobby ever
wrote or spoke. On the printed page, as in his
settings, he was our stage’s high priest of evoca¬
tion. No one who heard him could doubt his dedi¬
cation, no one who saw his work question his
genius. He was an unashamed pleader for beauty
and, far more important, an unsurpassed creator
of it.
“The artist should omit the details, the prose
of nature, and give us only the spirit and the
splendor,” Bobby contends in The Dramatic
5
6 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

Imagination, and he practiced what he preached.

“The spirit and the splendor,” plus “an excite¬
ment, a high rare mood, and a conception o£ great¬
ness,” were with him life-long dreams which he
turned into realities.
The theatre for him was always “an excep¬
tional occasion.” That is why Bobby hated it
when its dialogue was dictaphonic, its concerns
humdrum, or when it fed the eye on the drab,
the non-selective, or the undistinguished. At one
point in The Dramatic Imagination he says in a
parenthesis, “It would be hard perhaps, to make
the waterfront saloon setting of Anna Christie
lustrous.” Then he added, “But I am not so sure.”
In his case he had no reason to be unsure. Just as
Midas had the touch of gold, Bobby had the
quickening touch of radiance.
The ugliest scenes in real life throbbed with
beauty when he had transformed them into scen¬
ery. Not as insipid or self-advertising prettiness.
Not that at all. Instead they acquired a tension,
a sense of mood, a luminosity, and a quality of
drama which made spectators at once aware that
reality had been lifted into theatre, and theatre
into art. “Lustrous” was precisely what Bobby
did make that waterfront saloon in 1921, even as
 INTRODUCTION 7
“lustrous” to a greater extent is what he made
the backroom and bar of Harry Hope’s saloon in
The Iceman Cometh twenty-five years later.
Throughout his career this very attribute of being
“lustrous” was an outstanding characteristic of
his work, and one that set it apart.
I have to write about Bobby and his career in
personal terms. Not to do so would be as false
as referring to him as “Mr. Jones” and pretend¬
ing that I had not known him long and fairly
well. Since we were friends in spite of occasional
disagreements, he was “Bobby” to me and his
career is one that I followed almost from its be¬
ginning. As a matter of fact, the first article about
the theatre I ever wrote for a newspaper was about
him. It appeared in the Louisville Courier-Journal
in the winter of 1919 under the title of “Crafts¬
manship of Robert Edmond Jones.” I was then a
freshman at Harvard who had been introduced
the year before to a new world by “Mr. Jones’s”
unforgettable settings for Redemption and The
Jest,
The first time I ever saw Robert Edmond Jones
was when he came to speak at Harvard during
my sophomore year. To those of us already stage-
struck his coming was the cause of considerable
8 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

excitement. “Art” with a capital “A” was very

much in the theatrical air and this Jones man was
known to us as one of its chief votaries and prac¬
titioners. We undergraduates who cared about the
stage had not read our Kenneth Macgowan for
nothing. We were steeped in Gordon Craig’s On
the Art of the Theatre and The.TJieAtre _Advanc¬
ing, in Hiram Motherwell’s The Theatre of To¬
day, in Sheldon Cheney’s The New Movement
*tn the Theatre and The Art Theatre, and in the
pages of Mrs. Isaacs’ Theatre Arts (still a quar-

•“rIy)'

Bobby stepped onto the pink and white plat¬

form of the Music Building, wearing evening
clothes as if they pained his spirit. His face was
paler than the moon. He looked young, incredibly
young. His hair was full and black, and in addi¬
tion to the mustache he wore throughout his life
he then sported a beard which, more than being
“Left Bank,” was almost sacrilegious.
He seemed shy, frightened really, and there
was something about him of the holy man which
he did not try to hide. It seemed to come naturally
to him and we sophomores accepted him on his
own terms. His speech, though hesitant, was
sonorous. Most of what he said I do not now re-
 INTRODUCTION 9
member. I can, however, hear the richness of his
voice. I also recall surrendering to his gift for
conjuring visions with words.
Towards the lecture’s end he confessed that he
looked forward to the time (he seemed to see it
right in front of him, too) when in the theatre
the imagination would be set free, and realism
abandoned because no longer necessary.
It was during that same season that Bobby did
his celebrated settings for the Arthur Hopkins
production of Macbeth in which Lionel Barry¬
more and Julia Arthur appeared. The revival,
though a brave attempt, was a resounding failure.
One reason was that the all too solid flesh and real¬
istic performances of Mr. Barrymore and Miss
Arthur were constantly at war with the symbolical
abstractions of Bobby’s scenery. On the Sunday
before this Macbeth opened, however, Mr. Hop¬
kins contributed an article to the Times which,
tattered and yellowed is still pasted in my Temple
edition of the play. I continue to cherish it as a
statement of courageous intentions and particularly
value the opening line which reads, “In our in¬
terpretation of Macbeth we are seeking to release
the radium of Shakespeare from the vessel of
tradition.” When I came to know Bobby after
IO THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

my graduation and during my years on Mrs.

Isaacs’ Theatre Arts Monthly, I realized more and
more that he was always trying to release the
radium not of Shakespeare alone but of whatever
he touched “from the vessel of tradition.”
There are the cathedral and the Broadway
approaches to the theatre. These are the two ex¬
tremes. Bobby’s approach, though he worked
brilliantly on Broadway, was unquestionably the
former. But it would be both unfair and untrue
to suggest that he was a kind of grave St. Cecilia
of scenic art. He loved life and he loved laughter,
and his own laughter was the merriest of music.
He was as ready to welcome the theatre of Valeska
Suratt, Eva Tanguay, Olga Petrova, the Fratel-
linis, Bill Robinson, Florence Mills, or the Marx
Brothers, as he was the theatre of Sarah Bernhardt,
Duse, Chaliapin, Nijinsky, John Barrymore or
the Lunts. His own desire was that what he saw
on a stage, regardless of its level or kind, should be
something different from life and more highly
voltaged, something that had vitality and style,
something that he could recognize and respond
to at once as “theatre.”
Jo Mielziner, who once was his assistant, says
that Bobby was “the most practical of all
 INTRODUCTION 11

dreamers.” He assures me that, beautiful as his

drawings were, Bobby never sketched for the sake
of making beautiful drawings. The lines that he
put down were always capable of realization on a
stage. The Renaissance glories of his backgrounds
for The Jest; the ominous outline of the Tower
of London which dominated his Richard 111; the
great arch at the top of the long flight of steps in
John Barrymore’s Hamlet; the brooding austerity
of his New England farmhouse in Desire Under
the Elms; the background of mirrors, as bright as
Congreve’s wit, in Love for Love; the lovely Sun¬
day-school innocence of his cutouts for The Green
Pastures; the way in which he connected the
portico of the Mannons’ Greek revival home in
Mourning Becomes Electra with the house of
Agamemnon; the subtle suggestions of decadence
in his living room for The Green Bay Tree; the
bold bursts of Chinese red in Lute Song; or the
George Bellows-like depth and shadows of his bar¬
room for The Iceman Cometh—all these are
stunning proofs of how completely Bobby was
able to turn his dreams into realities and produce
settings which lived as characters in the plays for
which they were designed.
His driving hope was to give the theatre glory
12 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

and dignity and excitement. This he did again

and again in visual terms and as no one else has
done for our stage. If only more people at present
dared to talk and write as Bobby did because they
shared his determination and ability to restore
dreams to our almost dreamless theatre!
T„, reflections and speculations which I
have set down here are the fruit of twenty-five
years of almost continuous work in the American
theatre, during which I have had the good fortune
to be associated with the foremost artists of my
time. These thoughts have come to me in the
midst of rehearsals and in dress-parades and on the
long journeys to out-of-town tryouts and in the
continual collaboration with playwrights and man¬
agers and actors and stagehands and costumers
and electricians and wigmakers and shoemakers
which has made up my life in the theatre. Out of
the manifold contacts of my experience the image
of a new theatre has gradually formed itself—a
theatre not yet made with hands. I look forward
to this ideal theatre and work toward it.

ROBERT EDMOND JONES

 I
A NEW KIND OF DRAMA

In art .. . there is a spark which defies fore¬

knowledge . . . and all the masterpieces in the
world cannot make a precedent.
—LYTTON STRACHEY

In the last quarter of a century we have begun

to be interested in the exploration of man’s inner
life, in the unexpressed and hitherto inexpressible
depths of the self. Modern psychology has made
us all familiar with the idea of the Unconscious.
We have learned that beneath the surface of an
ordinary everyday normal casual conscious exist¬
ence there lies a vast dynamic world of impulse
and dream, a hinterland of energy which has an
independent existence of its own and laws of its
own: laws which motivate all our thoughts and
our actions. This energy expresses itself to us in
our conscious life in a never-ending stream of
images, running incessantly through our minds
from the cradle to the grave, and perhaps beyond.
The concept of the Unconscious has profoundly
is
16 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

influenced the intellectual life of our day. It has

already become a commonplace of our thinking,
and it is beginning to find an expression in our
art.
Writers like James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Dos
Passos, Sherwood Anderson—to name only a few
—have ventured boldly into the realm of the sub¬
jective and have recorded the results of their ex¬
ploration in all sorts of new and arresting forms.
The stream-of-consciousness method of writing is
an established convention of literature. It is read¬
ily accepted by the public and is intelligible to
everyone. We find it easier today to read Ulysses
than to read Lord Ormont and His Aminta, and
we are no longer bewildered by A Rose Is a Rose
Is a Rose Is a Rose.
Our playwrights, too, have begun to explore
this land of dreams. They are casting about for
ways in which to express the activity of the sub¬
conscious mind, to express thought before it be¬
comes articulate. They are seeking to penetrate
beneath the surface of our everyday life into the
stream of images which has its source in the deep
unknown springs of our being. They are attempt
ing to express directly to the audience the un
spoken thoughts of their characters, to show us
 A NEW KIND OF DRAMA
l7
not only the patterns of their conscious behavior
but the pattern of their subconscious lives. These
adventures into a new awareness of life indicate a
trend in dramatic writing which is bound to be¬
come more clearly understood. But in their search
for ways in which to embody this new awareness
they have neglected to observe that there has re¬
cently come into existence the perfect medium
for expressing the Unconscious in terms of the
theatre. This medium is the talking picture.
In the simultaneous use of the living actor and
the talking picture in the theatre there lies a
wholly new theatrical art, whose possibilities are
as infinite as those of speech itself.
There exists today a curious misconception as
to the essential nature of motion pictures. We ac¬
cept them unthinkingly as objective transcripts
of life, whereas in reality they are subjective im¬
ages of life. This fact becomes evident at once if
we think of some well-known motion-picture star
appearing in person on a stage and then of the
same star appearing on the screen, a bodiless echo,
a memory, a dream. Each self has its own reality,
but the one is objective and the other is subjec¬
tive. Motion pictures are our thoughts made visi¬
ble and audible. They flow in a swift succession
18 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

of images, precisely as our thoughts do, and their

speed, with their flashbacks—like sudden up-
rushes of memory—and their abrupt transitions
from one subject to another, approximates very
closely the speed of our thinking. They have the
rhythm of the thought-stream and the same un¬
canny ability to move forward or backward in
space or time, unhampered by the rationaliza¬
tions of the conscious mind. They project pure
thought, pure dream, pure inner life.
Here lies the potential importance of this new
invention. A new medium of dramatic expression
has become available at the very moment when it
is most needed in the theatre. Our dramatists now
have it in their power to enlarge the scope of their
dramas to an almost infinite extent by the use of
these moving and speaking images. Some new
playwright will presently set a motion-picture
screen on the stage above and behind his actors
and will reveal simultaneously the two worlds of
the Conscious and the Unconscious which to¬
gether make up the world we live in—the outer
world and the inner world, the objective world
of actuality and the subjective world of motive.
On the stage we shall see the actual characters of
the drama; on the screen we shall see their hid-
 A NEW KIND OF DRAMA
l9
den secret selves. The drama will express the be¬
havior of the characters set against a moving back¬
ground, the expression of their subconscious mind
—a continuous action and interaction.
All art moves inevitably toward this new syn¬
thesis of actuality and dream. Our present forms
of drama and theatre are not adequate to express
our newly enlarged consciousness of life. But
within the next decade a new dimension may be
added to them, and the eternal subject; of drama
—the conflict of Man and his Destiny—will take
on a new significance.
 II

ART IN THE THEATRE

 II

ART IN THE THEATRE

Art .. . teaches to convey a larger sense by sim¬

pler symbols.
—EMERSON

Ihere seems to be a wide divergence of opin¬

ion today as to what the theatre really is. Some
people say it is a temple, some say it is a brothel,
some say it is a laboratory, or a workshop, or it
may bean art, or a ^plaything, or a corporation.
But whatever it is. one. thing is true about it.
There is . not, enough, fine-workmanship .in it.
There is too much incompetence in it. The thea-
tre demands of its craftsmen that they know their
jobs .Tho theatre is a school.. We shall never have
done with studying and learning. In the theatre,
as in life, we try first of all to free ourselves, as
far as we can, from our own limitations. Then we
can begin to practice “this noble and magicall
art.” Then we may begin to dream.
When the_curtain rises, it is the scenery that
sgLts the key of rhp pl^y A stage setting is not a
23
24 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

background; it is an environment. Players act in

abetting, not against it. We say, in the audience,
when we look at what the designer has made, be¬
fore anyone on the stage has time to move or
speak, “Aha, I see! It’s going to be like that!
Aha!” This is true no matter whether we are
looking at a realistic representation of Eliza cross¬
ing the ice or at the setting for one of Yeats’
Plays for Dancers, carried to the limit of abstract
symbolism. When I go to the theatre, I want to
get an eyeful. Why not? I do not want to have
to look at one of the so-called “suggestive” set¬
tings, in which a single Gothic column is made
to do duty for a cathedral; it makes me feel as if
I had been invited to some important ceremony
and had been given a poor seat behind a post. I
do not want to see any more “skeleton stages”
in which a few architectural elements are com¬
bined and re-combined for the various scenes of
a play, for after the first half hour I invariably
discover that I have lost the thread of the drama.
In spite of myself, I have become fascinated,
wondering whether the castle door I have seen
in the first act is going to turn into a refectory
table in the second act or a hope-chest in the
last act. No, I don’t like these clever, falsely eco-
 ART IN THE THEATRE 25

nomical contraptions. And I do not want to look

at a setting that is merely smart or novel or chic,
a setting that tells me that it is the latest fashion,
as though its designer had taken a flying trip like
a spring buyer and brought back a trunk full of
the latest styles in scenery.
I want my imagination to be stimulated by
what I see on the stage. But the.mommtl .get. a
^ense^oLingenuity^ a sense.of effort^ my. imagina¬
tion is not stimulated: itJs_starved. That play is
finished as iar as I am concerned. For i .have come
to the theatre to see a play, not to see the work
done. on.a.p»lay.
A good scene should be, not a picture, but an
image. Scene-designing is not what most people
imagine it is—a branch of interior decorating.
There is no more reason for a room on a stage to
be a reproduction of an actual room than for an
actor who plays the part of Napoleon to be Na¬
poleon or for an actor who plays Death in the old
morality play to be dead. Everything that is ac¬
tual must undergo a strange metamorphosis, a
kind of sea-change, before it can become truth in
the theatre. There is a curious mystery in this.
You will remember the quotation from Hamlet:
2.6 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

My father!—methinks 1 see my father.

O where, my lord?
In my mind's eye, Horatio.

Stage-designing should be addressed to this eye

ofjthe mind. There is an outer eye that_observ.es,
and_.there is an inner eye that sees. A setting
should not be a thing to look at in itself. It can,
of course, be made so powerful* so expressive, so
dramatic* thatjde actors have nothing to do after
die curtain rises but to_ embroider, variations on
the theme the scene has already given away. The
designer must always be on his guard against be¬
ing too explicit. A good scene, I repeat, is nota
picture. It is something seen, but it is something
conveyed as well: a feeling, an evocation. Plato
says somewhere, “It is beauty I seek, not beautiful
things/’ This is what I mean. A setting is nut
just a beautiful thing, a collection of beautiful
things. It is a presence, a mood, a warm wind fan-
ning the drama to _flame. Jt echoes, it enhances,
inanimates. It is an expectancy, a foreboding, a
tension. It says nothing, but it gives everything.
Do not think for a moment that I am advising
the designer to do away with actual objects on
the stage. There is no such thing as a symbolic
 ART IN THE THEATRE 27
chair. A chair is a chair. It is in the arrangement
of the chairs that the magic lies. Moliere, Gordon
Craig said, knew how to place the chairs on his
stage so they almost seemed to speak. In the bal¬
cony scene from Romeo and Juliet there must be
a balcony, and there must be moonlight. But it is
not so important that the moon be the kind of
moon that shines down on Verona as that Juliet
may say of it:

O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon . . .

Lest that thy love ■prove likewise variable.

The point is this: it is not the knowledge of

the atmospheric conditions prevailing in north¬
ern Italy which counts, but the response to the
lyric, soaring quality of Shakespeare’s verse.
Thejlesigner creates^ an environment in which
all noble emotions are possible. Then he retires.
The actor enters. If the designer’s work has been
good, it disappears from our consciousness at that
moment. We do not notice it any more. It has
apparently ceased to exist. The actor has taken
the stage; and the designer’s only reward lies in
the praise bestowed on the actor.
Well, now the curtain is up and the play has
begun.
28 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

When I go to the theatre to see a play per¬

formed, I have got to be interested in the people
who are performing it. They must, as the saying
goes, “hold” me. It is my right as a member of
the audience to find men and women on the stage
who are alive. I want to respect these players, to
look up to them, to care for them, to love them.
I want them to speak well, to move well, to give
out energy and vitality and eagerness. I do not
wish to look at the physically unfit, the mentally
defective, or the spiritually violated. They bring
to my mind Barnum’s cruel remark that normal
people are not worth exhibiting. I wish to see
actors in whom I can believe—thoroughbreds,
people who are “all there.” Every play is ^living
dream: your dream, my dream—and that dream
must not be blurred or darkened. The actors must
be transparent to it. They may not exhibit. Their
task is to reveal.
To reveal. To move in the pattern of a great
drama, to let its reality shine through. There is
no greater art than this. How few actors live up
to its possibilities! Some actors have even made
me feel at times that they were at heart a little
bit ashamed of being actors. I call this attitude
offensive. The right attitude is that of the dis-
 ART IN THE THEATRE 29

tinguished old English character actor who, when

engaged to play a part, was accustomed to say,
“Sir, my fee is so-and-so much,” as if he were a
specialist from Harley Street. It is easy, of course,
to understand why there are not more good actors
on the stage today. The metier is too hard. This
art of acting demands a peculiar humility, a con¬
centration and dedication of all one’s energies.
But when an actor moves before us at last with
the strange freedom and calm of one possessed by
the real, we are stirred as only the theatre can
stir us.
I am thinking of the company of Irish Players
from the Abbey Theatre in Dublin who first gave
us the dramas of Synge and Yeats in 1910. As
one watched these players, one saw what they
knew. I kept saying to myself on that first eve¬
ning: Who are these rare beings? Where did they
come from? How have they spent their lives?
Who are their friends? What music they must
have heard, what books they must have read,
what emotions they must have felt! They literally
enchanted me. They put me under a spell. And
when the curtain came down at the end of the
play, they had become necessary to me. I have
often asked myself since that time how it was
30 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

that actors could make me feel such strange emo¬

tions of trouble and wonder; and I find the an¬
swer now, curiously enough, in an address spoken
by a modern Irish poet to the youth of Ireland—
Keep in your souls some images of magnificence.
These Irish players had kept in their souls some
images of magnificence.
Exceptional people, distinguished people, su¬
perior people, people who can say, as the old
Negro said, “I got a-plenty music in me.” These
are the actors the theatre needs.
I think it needs also actors who have in them
a kind of wildness, an exuberance, a take-it-or-
leave-it quality, a dangerous quality. We must
get clean away from the winning, ingratiating, I-
hope-you’re-all-going-to-like-me-because-I-need-
the-money quality of a great deal of the acting
we find today. I remember Calve’s entrance in the
first act of Carmen. Her audiences were actually
afraid of her. Who has seen Chaliapin in the mad
scene of Boris? Some of the best actors in the
world are to be found on the operatic stage. What
a Hedda Gabler Mary Garden would have made!
It seems as if these actor-images were set free by
the very limitations of opera—the fixed melodies,
the measured steps and pauses. They cannot be
 ART IN THE THEATRE 31
casual for one instant. They must be aware. They
must know how to do what they have to do.
They must have style. And they must have
voices.
It is surprisingly difficult to find actors who
seem to mean what they say. How often one is
tempted to call out to them from the audience,
“It’s a lie! I don’t believe a word of it!” A deep
sincerity, a voice that comes from the center of
the self, is one of the rarest things to be found on
the stage today. It seems odd that this quality of
conviction should be so hard to find in the thea¬
tre.
But I have been speaking of actors, not of act¬
ing.
Great roles require great natures to interpret
them. Half our pleasure in seeing a play lies in
our knowledge that we are in the presence of
artists. But this pleasure of watching the artists
themselves is soon forgotten, if the play is well
performed, in the contagious excitement of
watching a miracle: the miracle of incarnation.
For acting is a process of incarnation. Just that.
And it is a miracle. I have no words to express
what I feel about this subtle, ancient, sacred art—
the marvel of it, the wonder, the meaning. The
 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION
32

designer creates with inanimate materials: canvas,

wood, cloth, light. The actor creates in his living
self. And just as the good designer retires in favor
of the actor, so does the good actor withdraw his
personal self in favor of the character he is play¬
ing. He steps aside. The character lives in him.
You are to play Hamlet, let us say—not narrate
Hamlet, but flay Hamlet. Then you become his
host. You invite him into yourself. You lend him
your body, your voice, your nerves; but it is
Hamlet’s voice that speaks, Hamlet’s impulses
that move you. We may be grateful to Pirandello
for showing us, in his Six Characters in Search of
an Author, the strange reality of the creations of
the playwright’s mind. Hamlet is as real as you
or I. To watch a character develop from the first
flashes of contact in the actor’s mind to the final
moment when the character steps on the stage in
full possession of the actor, whose personal self
looks on from somewhere in the background, is to
be present at a great mystery. No wonder the an¬
cient dramas were initiation-ceremonies; all act¬
ing is an initiation, if one can see it so, an initia¬
tion into what Emerson calls “the empire of the
real.” To spend a lifetime in practicing and per¬
fecting this art of speaking with tongues other
 ART IN THE THEATRE
33
than one’s own is to live as greatly as one can live.
But the curtain is up, and the play has begun.
We look into a scene that is filled with excite¬
ment. See. That man is playing the part of a beg¬
gar. We know he is not a real beggar. Why not?
How do we know? We cannot say. But we know
he is not a beggar. When we look at him we re¬
call, not any particular beggar we may happen to
have seen that day, but all beggars we have ever
seen or read about. And all our ideas of misery
and helplessness and loneliness rush up in our im¬
aginations to touch us and hurt us. The man is
acting.
How is he dressed? (And now I am speaking
as a costume-designer.) The man is in rags. Just
rags. But why do we look at him with such in¬
terest? If he wore ordinary rags we wouldn’t look
at him twice. He is dressed, not like a real beggar,
but like a painting of a beggar. No, that’s not
quite it. But as he stands there or moves about
we are continually reminded of great paintings—
paintings like those of Manet, for instance. There
is a curious importance about this figure. We shall
remember it. Why? We cannot tell. We are look¬
ing at something theatrical. These rags have been
arranged—“composed” the painters call it—by
34 the dramatic imagination

the hand of an artist. We feel, rather than see, an

indescribable difference. These rags have some¬
how ceased to be rags. They have been trans¬
formed into moving sculpture.
I am indebted to the great Madame Freisinger
for teaching me the value of simplicity in the
theatre. I learned from her not to torture materials
into meaningless folds, but to preserve the long
flowing line, the noble sweep. “Let us keep this
production noble,” she would say to me. The cos¬
tume-designer should steer clear of fashionable¬
ness. That was the only fault of the admirable
production of Hamlet in modern dress. It was so
chic that it simpered. I remember that in the
closet scene, as the Queen cried out:

O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain.

and her son answered:

O, throw away the worser fart of it.

And live the purer with the other half,

a voice near me whispered, “I wonder if she got

that negligee at Bendel’s?” And the program told
us all that Queen Gertrude of Denmark did, in¬
deed, get that negligee at Bendel’s. And, further¬
more, that Queen Gertrude’s shoes came from the
 ART IN THE THEATRE 35

firm of I. Miller, Inc., and that her hats were

furnished by Blank and her jewels by Dash, and
so on. Think of it. Two worlds are meeting in
this play, in this scene—in the night, in Elsinore.
And we are reminded of shoes and frocks!
Many of the costumes I design are intention¬
ally somewhat indefinite and abstract. A color, a
shimmer, a richness, a sweep—and the actor’s
presence! I often think of a phrase I once found
in an old drama that describes the first entrance
of the heroine. It does not say, “She wore a taffety
petticoat or a point lace-ruff or a farthingale”; it
says, “She came in like starlight, hid in jewels.”
There she is in that phrase; not just a beautiful
girl dressed up in a beautiful dress, but a presence
—arresting, ready to act, enfolded in light. It
isn’t just light, it is a stillness, an awareness, a
kind of breathlessness. We ought to look at the
actors and say, Why! I never saw people like that
before! I didn’t know people looked like that!
The subtlety of stage lighting, the far-flung
magic of it! When a single light-bulb wrongly
placed may reveal, as Yeats said, the proud fra¬
gility of dreams!
Shakespeare knew more than all of us. How he
uses sunlight, moonlight, candlelight, torchlight,
 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION
36
starlight! Imagine Hamlet as he stands with
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on the forestage of
the Globe Theatre, under the open sky, looking
up at the stars, saying:

. . . this brave o’ erhanging firmament,

this majestical roof fretted with golden fire. . . .

I have often wondered whether the Globe

Theatre and the Swan Theatre were not oriented
towards the east as ancient temples are, in order
to take advantage of the lighting effects of na¬
ture. Think of the play of Macbeth. It begins on
a foggy afternoon before sundown. The day goes.
The sun sets. Torches are brought in. We enter
deeper and deeper with the play into an extrava¬
gant and lurid night of the soul. Or take the trial
scene from The Merchant of Venice. The scene
is played by torchlight. The auditorium is dark.
We see the sky overhead. The trial draws to an
end. Shylock is defeated. There is a gay little in¬
terlude, the byplay with the rings. The stage
grows lighter. The torches are carried off. Now
the scene is finished. Portia, Nerissa, and Gra-
tiano go away. . . . The full moon rises over the
wall of the theatre and touches the stage with
silver. Lorenzo and Jessica enter, hand in hand
 ART IN THE THEATRE
37
... on such a night
Did Thisbe fearfully o’ertrip the dew. . . .

The sole aim of the arts of scene-designing,

costuming, lighting, is, as I have already said, to
enhance the natural powers of the actor. It is for,
the director to call forth these powers and urge
them into, the pattern of the play.
The director must never make the mistake of
imposing his own ideas upon the actors. Acting
is not an imitation of what a director thinks about
a character; it is a gradual, half-conscious unfold¬
ing and flowering of the self into a new person¬
ality. This process of growth should be sacred to
the director. He must be humble before it. He
must nourish it, stimulate it, foster it in a thou¬
sand ways. Once the actors have been engaged,
he should address himself to their highest powers.
There is nothing they cannot accomplish. In this
mood, ignoring every limitation, he fuses them
into a white energy. The director energizes; he
animates. That is what Max Reinhardt under¬
stands so well how to do. He is an animator. A
curious thing, the animating quality. Stanislav¬
sky had it; Belasco had it; Arthur Hopkins has
it. One feels it instantly when one meets these
30 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

men. One sees in them what Melville calls “the

strong, sustained and mystic aspect.” The great¬
est stage director I ever heard of, incidentally, is
Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby Dick. Turn to
the scene of the crossed lances and read how Ahab
incites the crew of the Pequod to hunt the white
Whale to the death: “It seemed as though by
some nameless, interior volition, he would fain
have shocked into them the same fiery emotion
accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own
magnetic life. ...” That is stage-directing, if
you please.
Now I come to the playwrights. I am not one
of the calamity-howlers who believe the theatre
is in a dying condition. On the contrary. The
American Theatre, as the advertisements of the
revue, Americana, said, is a “star-spangled wow.”
And at all times we have before us the hearten¬
ing example of Eugene O’Neill, whose work
would be outstanding in any period of the world’s
dramatic history. But to my way of thinking,
many of the playwrights of today are being
swamped by their own facility, snowed under by
their very cleverness. A kind of tacit conspiracy
seems to be on foot to rob the theatre of its an-
 ART IN THE THEATRE 39

cient mystery and its ancient awe. We seem

somehow to have lost the original immediate ex¬
perience of the theatre. Familiarity has bred con¬
tempt. In the dramas of today one feels an odd
secondary quality. They are, so to speak, acces¬
sories after the fact. Our playwrights give us
schemes for drama, recipes for drama, designs for
drama, definitions of drama. They explain drama
with an elaborate, beguiling ingenuity. But in so
doing they explain it away. Instead of trying to
raise us to the imaginative level of true dramatic
creation, they have brought the theatre down to
our own level. And so the ancient audacity has
vanished, the danger, the divine caprice. The
wonderful wild creature has been tamed. Our
theatre has become harmless, and definite, and
amiable. The splendid vision has faded into the
light of common day.
There is nothing wrong with this recipe-theatre
of ours except that it isn’t the real thing. There
is no dramatic nourishment in it. We are hungry,
and we are given a cook-book to eat instead of a
meal. We expect to go on a journey, and we have
to be satisfied with a map and a time table. So
long as this secondary art, this substitute theatre,
continues to be their image of the theatre, our
40 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

playwrights will continue to belong not with the

artists but with the fabricators of the theatre.
And now I have come to my real point. I know
that there are young people in this country who
will really create for the theatre of their time, who
will bring something into existence there that has
never existed before. A few. Not many. The
theatre will be fortunate if it can claim a half-
dozen of them. But it is this half-dozen to whom
we look to lift our common experience into a
higher region, a clearer light. We do not want
shrewdness or craftiness or adroitness from them.
We have had enough mechanism in the theatre,
and more than enough. Let them go beyond this;
let them give us the sense of the dramatic mo¬
ment, the immortal moment.
Think of this moment. All that has ever been
is in this moment; all that will be is in this mo¬
ment. Both are meeting in one living flame, in
this unique instant of time. This is drama; this
is theatre—to be aware of the Now.
But how is one to come aware? someone may
ask. I answer, Listen to the poets. They can tell
you.
Of all people in the world, Sir Philip Sidney
 ART IN THE THEATRE 41
said, poets are the least liars. Poets are reporters.
They set down what they see. I will give you an
example from Hamlet:

O good Horatio . . .
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart
Absent thee from felicity awhile. . . .

Absent thee from felicity awhile. Here are some

of the most beautiful words ever written in the
English language. But this is not all. These words
are a plain record of fact. Hamlet, drawing his
last breath as he spoke them, was not interested
in phrasemaking, nor was Shakespeare. Hamlet
did not think up an exquisite phrase at that mo¬
ment. He spoke out of a real vision of felicity,
immortal. He saw the clear light, the happy
forms. He saw the felicity. He called it felicity.
I could give you hundreds of examples. Poets
know that what they see is true. If it were not
so, they would have told you.
Nothing can stop progress in the American
theatre except the workers themselves. To them I
say: There are no limitations there except your
own limitations. Lift it. Get the personal you out
of your work. Who cares about you? Get the
42 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

wonder into it. Get your dreams into it. Where

are your dreams?
Great drama does not deal with cautious peo¬
ple. Its heroes are tyrants, outcasts, wanderers.
From Prometheus, the first of them all, the thief
who stole the divine fire from heaven, these pro¬
tagonists are all passionate, excessive, violent, ter¬
rible. “Doom eager,” the Icelandic saga calls
them. If we are meant to create in the theatre—
not merely to write a well-constructed play or sup¬
ply nice scenery, but to create—we shall imagine
ourselves into these heroic moods. They will
carry us far. For the soul is a pilgrim. If we fol¬
low it, it will lead us away from our home and
into another world, a dangerous world. We shall
join a band of poets and dreamers, the visionaries
of the theatre: the mummers, the mountebanks,
the jongleurs, the minstrels, the troubadours.
 Ill

THE THEATRE AS IT WAS AND AS IT IS

 Hi
THE THEATRE AS IT WAS AND AS IT IS

Magic may be real enough, the magic of word or

an act, grafted upon the invisible influences that
course through the material world.
—SANTAYANA

Life moves and changes and the theatre moves

and changes with it. By looking at the theatre of
the past, we may come to see our own theatre
more clearly. The theatre of every age has some-
thing to teach us, if we are sensitive enough and
humble enough to learn from it.
I am going to ask you to do the most difficult
thing in the world—to imagine. Let us imagine
ourselves back in the Stone Age, in the days of
the cave man and the mammoth and the Alta-
mira frescoes. It is night. We are all sitting to¬
gether around a fire—Ook and Pow and Pung
and Glup and Little Zowie and all the rest of us.
We sit close together. We like to be together. It
is safer that way, if wild beasts attack us. And
besides, we are happier when we are together. We
45
46 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

are afraid to be alone. Over on that side of the fire

the leaders of the tribe are sitting together—the
strohgest men, the men who can run fastest and
fight hardest and endure longest. They have
killed a lion today. We are excited about this
thrilling event. We are all talking about it. We
are always afraid of silence. We feel safer when
somebody is talking. There is something strange
about silence, strange like the black night around
us, something we can never understand.
The lion’s skin lies close by, near the fire. Sud¬
denly the leader jumps to his feet. “I killed the
lion! I did it! I followed him! He sprang at me!
I struck at him with my spear! He fell down! He
lay still!”
He is telling us. We listen. But all at once an
idea comes to his dim brain. “I know a better way
to tell you. See! It was like this! Let me show

In that instant drama is born.

The leader goes on. “Sit around me in a circle
—you, and you, and you—right here, where I
can reach out and touch you all.” And so with
one inclusive gesture he makes—a theatre! From
this circle of eager listeners to Reinhardt’s great
 THE THEATRE AS IT WAS AND AS IT IS 47

Schauspielhaus in Berlin is only a step in time.

In its essence a theatre is only an arrangement of
seats so grouped and spaced that the actor—the
leader—can reach out and touch and hold each
member of his audience. Architects of later days
have learned how to add convenience and comfort
to this idea. But that is all. The idea itself never
changes.
The leader continues: “You, Ook, over there—
you stand up and be the lion. Here is the lion’s
skin. You put it on and be the lion and I’ll kill
you and we’ll show them how it was.” Ook gets
up. He hangs the skin over his shoulders. He
drops on his hands and knees and growls. How
terrible he is! Of course, he isn’t the real lion.
We know that. The real lion is dead. We killed
him today. Of course, Ook isn’t a lion. Of course
not. He doesn’t even look like a lion. “You
needn’t try to scare us, Ook. We know you. We
aren’t afraid of you!” And yet, in some mys¬
terious way, Ook is the lion. He isn’t like the
rest of us any longer. He is Ook all right, but he
is a lion, too.
And now these two men—the world’s first ac¬
tors—begin to show us what the hunt was like.
48 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

They do not tell us. They show us. They act it

for us. The hunter lies in ambush. The lion
growls. The hunter poises his spear. The lion
leaps. We all join in with yells and howls of ex¬
citement and terror—the first community chorus!
The spear is thrown. The lion falls and lies still.
The drama is finished.
Now Ook takes off the lion’s skin and sits be¬
side us and is himself again. Just like you. Just
like me. Good old Ook. No, not quite like you
or me. Ook will be, as long as he lives, the man
who can be a lion when he wants to. Pshaw! A
man can’t be a lion! How can a man be a lion?
But Ook can make us believe it, just the same.
Something queer happens to that man Ook some¬
times. The lion’s spirit gets into him. And we
shall always look up to him and admire him and
perhaps be secretly a little afraid of him. Ook is
an actor. He will always be different from the rest
of us, a little apart from us. For he can summon
spirits.
Many thousands of years have passed since
that first moment of inspiration when the theatre
sprang into being. But we still like to get to¬
gether, we still dread to be alone, we are still a
 THE THEATRE AS IT WAS AND AS IT IS 49

little awed by silence, we still like to make be¬

lieve, and when an artist like Duse or Chaliapin
or Pauline Lord speaks aloud in our midst a thing
that is in the minds of all of us and fuses our vari¬
ous moods into one common mood, we are still
lost in wonder before this magical art of the thea¬
tre. It is really a kind of magic, this art. We call
it glamour or poetry or romance, but that doesn’t
explain it. In some mysterious way these old, sim¬
ple, ancestral moods still survive in us, and an
actor can make them live again for a while. We
become children once more. We believe.

Let us glance at another scene, another drama.

We are listening to the first performance of the
Antigone of Sophocles.- Again I must rely on
your imagination. You have all read this play at
one time or another. You all know what Greek
actors looked like, with their masks and high
buskins. The play has been performed in your
own time and perhaps some of you have even
acted in it. But we are not in America now, and
this is not a revival. We are in a great half-circle
of stone seats built into the side of a hill. In front
of us is the stage—a long, raised platform backed
5° THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

by a high screen-like wall of marble set with

pillars of marble and gold. Something noble,
something wonderful will presently happen on
this stage. That is what it was made for. That is
why we are here. It waits. We wait. We are not
restless. We are content to stay in one place. Pres¬
ently, in its own time, the day will come. The
sun will shine upon us once more, as it has always
done—the sun, too bright for our mortal eyes to
look at. The sky grows lighter, but the stage is
still dim and shadowy. Now the morning wind
comes. We shiver a little. There is a sound of
faraway doors opening “their ponderous and mar¬
ble jaws.” Two great dark figures steal out from
opposite sides of the stage and meet in the center.
They are Antigone and her sister Ismene. Their
voices are lifted in a strange chant:

Do you know? Did you hear? Or have you failed

to learn? . . . There is no grief, no degradation,
no dishonor, not to he found among our woes.
. . . What is it then?

They breathe a dreadful secret in the darkness.

The first beams of the sun smite the stage. There
is a fanfare of brass. The chorus enters.
 THE THEATRE AS IT WAS AND AS IT IS 51

Thou hast appeared at last . . . shining brighter

on our seven-gated city than ever light shone be¬
fore. O, eye of the day of gold!

And now the dawn has come, calm, serene, mer¬

ciless as justice, inexorable as law. The drama pur¬
sues its course in the light of a new morning,
marching steadily toward its climax while the sun
marches steadily on toward high noon. All things
are to be made clear. All things move from dark¬
ness into light. The sentence is pronounced.
Antigone must go alive into the tomb. The beau¬
tiful masked figure speaks:

Men of my land, you see me taking my last walk

here, looking my last upon the sunshine. Never
more.

She is standing now in the shadow of the great

center portal. She covers her face with her veil.
Sorrow, and dread and ruin. . . . The elders of
the city answer her:

And yet in glory and with praise you pass to the

secret places of the dead. Alone among mankind
you go to the grave alive.
52 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

Strange shadows stir in the darkness behind

her. Her voice seems to come from a great dis¬
tance:

/ have heard of the pitiful end of the stranger

from Phrygia, the daughter of Tantalus . . .
most like to her, God brings me to my rest.

She speaks from another world. She is already

a memory.

Cut off from friends, still living, 1 enter the cav-

erned chambers of the dead. I who revered the
right.

The great doors close. . . .

If we would recapture the mood of this drama
today, we must turn to the music of Bach or
Brahms, or to the dancing of Isadora Duncan, or
to the high words of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettys¬
burg Address:

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we

cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground
... The world will little note, nor long remem¬
ber, what we say here; but it can never forget
what they did here. . . .
 THE THEATRE AS IT WAS AND AS IT IS 53

It is our right to be made to feel in the theatre

terror and awe and majesty and rapture. But we
shall not find these emotions in the theatre of
today. They are not a part of our theatre any
more.

Let us imagine ourselves now at the Bankside

Theatre in London, in the days of Queen Eliza¬
beth. We know today just where this theatre
stood and how large it was and how it looked. Let
us go there.
We are standing in the middle of a high cir¬
cular building, open to the sky, with rows of bal¬
conies all around us, one above the other. At one
end is the stage, a raised platform with entrances
at either side and a space curtained off in the cen¬
ter. Above this is a balcony and above this again
a kind of tower, high up against the sky. The pit
where we are standing is crowded and a little
dangerous. Life is cheap here at the Bankside
Theatre. A stiletto under the ribs and no one is
the wiser. ... It begins to get dark. Lanterns
and torches are lighted. A trumpet calls. We
quiet down. High up on the platform a sentry
moves—
54 the dramatic imagination
Who's there?
Nay, stand, and unfold yourself.

We are at Elsinore. We are listening to the trag¬

edy of Hamlet.
Horatio arrives with Marcellus. A bell strikes.
The Ghost appears.
Nowadays, we don’t believe in ghosts any
more. Or at least we say we don’t. But not so very
many generations ago our own ancestors were
burning witches for trafficking with the spirits of
the dead. And I observe that when we are out in
the desert, away from home, at night, sitting
around a camp-fire, everyone has a mighty good
ghost-story up his sleeve. And he always swears
it is a true story, too. At any rate, here, in the
Bankside Theatre, we do believe, and we are
shaken with terror and pity at the sight of this
thing out of hell. And now there is a flourish of
trumpets and drums. The curtains part. The
King and Queen enter in their glistering apparel,
in the midst of their retinue—the counselors, the
Swiss guards in bright armor, the ladies-in-wait-
ing, the whole court of Denmark—proud, splen¬
did, unimaginably rich in the glare of the torches.
Nowadays royalty doesn’t mean much in our
 THE THEATRE AS IT WAS AND AS IT IS 55

lives. Kings and queens are curiosities, some¬

thing to read about in the newspapers along with
some movie Sheba’s latest re-marriage. But at the
Bankside, Claudius and Gertrude are literally
“hedged with divinity.” This very morning
Queen Elizabeth herself held an audience and
laid her hands on us for “king’s evil,” and this
very afternoon we saw her go by on the Thames
in her gilded barge—Elizabeth, Gloriana, Bel-
phoebe, Star of the Sea. We know what royalty
is. We have seen it. We know what great ladies
and gentlemen are. We have seen them. Kings
and queens and princes are all real to us; and as
we watch the delicate wayward Prince Hamlet,
standing there in his black, emotions of awe and
affection and adoration come thronging into our
minds, all blending into wonder.
What a storm of energy there is in this play!
How swiftly it moves! What a rush and whirl!
Now on the forestage, now on the balcony, now
behind the arras, now high up on the platform.
And how these players perform it! They are
trained entertainers—singers, dancers, clowns—
actors. Tomorrow they will do The Merry Wives
of Windsor, and the next day Christopher Mar¬
lowe’s Tamburlane and after that A Midsummer
56 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

Night’s Dream or Troilus and Cressida. They

have acted these “hits” (for that is what they are,
the “hits” of their day) all over England, all
over Europe. Sometimes they play before kings
and queens, sometimes they play in stable-yards,
before audiences of plowboys and truck drivers
and sailors. They know the ways of courts and
they know what it is to go hungry. They have
learned their profession in a hard school of ex¬
perience.
These Elizabethan actors know how to speak
poetry. Hear their voices ring out in the tremen¬
dous phrases. Nowadays if we want to hear a
good voice on the stage, we must go to opera.
We do not expect to find one in the theatre.
Music is no longer an integral part of drama. Our
dramatists write for the eye, for the mind. But
Shakespeare wrote for the ear. The soliloquy, “To
be or not to be,” is nothing more nor less than a
great spoken aria. Turn to this play and read it
once for the music alone.
So the drama goes on—the play, the murder,
the closet-scene, the mad scene, the duel . . .
mounting to its majestical end. Hamlet’s body is
borne to the platform. The last peal of ordnance
is shot oR. The rest is silence. . . .
 THE THEATRE AS IT WAS AND AS IT IS 57

And now the players are gone. What a strange

thrill an empty theatre gives us! What echoes it
carries, and what memories! Here was a dream,
a high, swift, passionate, terrible dream. We
have been brought face to face with the majesty
and splendor of destiny. Perhaps all the sins and
energies of the world are only the world’s flight
from an infinite blinding beam.

In the early days of the eighteenth century an

English playwright named William Congreve
wrote a comedy which he called The Way of the
World. Let us go to London to see this play.
We are in a great hall lighted by crystal chan¬
deliers. How did the drama get indoors? Nobody
seems to know. The thing that is going to hap¬
pen in this playhouse is neither religious ritual
nor great popular art. There is a feeling of privacy
here. A curtain covers one end of the room. A
curtain . . . ? What is behind it? Something
intimate, something personal, something ... a
little indiscreet? perhaps . . . Congreve will tell
us. A servant trims the candles that burn in a row
at the foot of the curtain. There is a preluding of
fiddles. The curtain is lifted. We look at a room
that is not a real room, but a kind of thin, deli-
58 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

cate, exaggerated echo of a room, all painted on

screens of canvas. The actors enter, each one bow¬
ing to the audience. They look like nothing
human, like nothing ever seen on this earth. The
ladies’ cheeks are rouged with a high hectic red.
They wear frail iridescent dresses of silk and lace.
They are laden with jewels. They carry masks
and fans. The men wear periwigs and rapiers.
Their heels click on the polished floors. Their
hands are covered with long lace ruffles and they
glitter with diamonds. The sense of luxury has
come into the theatre. The players float and waver
in the warm air that streams up from the tapers,
like butterflies, like ephemera, born to shine a mo¬
ment for our pleasure, for our humor, for our dis¬
tinguished indulgence. Et puis—bon soir! Life?
Don’t come too near it! Life is just something
that effervesces for a moment and goes flat. Life
is a nuance, a gesture, a flicker . . . rouge . . .
blood . . . ashes. . . . Love? Whoever said
there was such a thing as love in the world? We
know better. But while we are here we will keep
up the show. And a brave show it is, a dazzling
show. Distinguished manners, effrontery, phrases
2ike fireworks. . . . But here comes Mistress
 THE THEATRE AS IT WAS AND AS IT IS 59

Millamant, i’faith, full sail, with her fan spread

and her streamers out, and a shoal of fools for
tenders:

You seem to be unattended. Madam—you

used to have the beau monde throng after you;
and a flock of gay fine perukes hovering round
you.
O, l have denied myself airs today, I have
walked as fast through the crowd—
As a favorite just disgraced; and with as few
followers.
Dear Mr. Witwoud, truce with your simili¬
tudes; for 1 am as sick of ’em—
As a physician of a good air.—/ cannot help it.
Madam, though ’tis against myself.
Yet, again!—Mincing, stand between me and
his wit.
Do, Mrs. Mincing, like a screen before a great
fire.—/ confess / do blaze today, l am too bright.

Flutes and hautboys in the air around us. . . .

There is a remarkable actress in London,
Miss Edith Evans, who can speak lines like these
with the precision and variety of a Heifetz. It is
a very special pleasure to listen to her, and you
have only to hear her go through an act of The
6o THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

Beaux' Stratagem to realize that she has perfected

an art of musical speaking that is almost un¬
known in our day. When a playwright begins to
awaken the music that lies in the spoken word,
and when an actor begins to give this music its
value, a new theatre springs into being.
Plot? Oh, yes, to be sure, there is a plot. But
if it should ever chance to obtrude itself too
much, someone on the stage will cry out, “Come,
I have a song for you, and I see one in the next
room who will sing it.”
And then Congreve will carelessly toss us an
incomparable lyric like this:

I tell tbee, Charmian, could I time retrieve.

And once again begin to love and live.
To you l should my earliest offering give;

I know my eyes would lead my heart to you.

And 1 should all my vows and hopes renew;
But to be plain, 1 never would be true. . . .

There is a moral lesson in this play, too, thrown

in for good measure. Certainly, there is a moral
lesson. Virtue triumphs in the end, as virtue
should. But we shall not take it too seriously. It
is all a part of the graceful ephemeral dance.
 THE THEATRE AS IT WAS AND AS IT IS 61

The epilogue is spoken. The players bow them¬

selves out in a minuet. We shall meet them a
little later in the evening at one of the fashionable
chocolate-houses. As for living, our servants can
do that for us, a Frenchman said, a century and a
half later.

Somewhere around 1840 a very strange thing

happens. A man named David Hill discovers how
to make a thing he calls a photograph. It is a pic¬
ture made on a sensitive plate of metal by rays
of light, a picture of things exactly as they are.
All art is profoundly influenced by this discovery.
We all become fascinated by actuality. We want
to see everything just as it is. We want people on
the stage to walk and talk just as they do off the
stage. Soon afterward the first real Brussels carpet
makes its appearance in the theatre. Scene-paint¬
ing becomes realistic, acting becomes casual, dia¬
logue is modeled after the speech of everyday life.
Let us drop in at a performance of Ibsen’s Hedda
Gabler in the early ’90’s.
The curtain goes up. We are looking at a room.
At first glance it seems just like a real room with
one wall taken off. It is a tasteful, agreeable room,
62 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

furnished, exactly as a real room would be, with

tables and chairs and sofas and bric-a-brac. We
might have taken tea here this very afternoon.
This room has been lived in. It has an atmos¬
phere. We can tell what the people who live here
are like. The room has taken on something of
their quality, just as an old coat gets molded to
the person who wears it, and keeps the impress
of his body afterward. See, there is General Gab-
ier’s portrait in the room beyond, and there are
his pistols on the old piano, and the room is filled
with flowers, and over there is a stove with a fire
in it.
The play begins. How odd! Here is no solemn
public ritual, no spoken opera, but a kind of be¬
trayal. We are all eavesdroppers, peering through
a keyhole, minding other people’s business. We
look in at the private affairs of the Tesmans, and
we listen to them with the same eager, shocked,
excited interest with which we might read the
details of some court-room revelation. We see a
spoiled, hysterical woman, dressed in the latest
fashions from Paris. She pokes fun at Aunt Julia’s
bonnet. She pulls Mrs. Elvsted’s hair. She burns
Lovborg’s manuscript. She is going to have a
 THE THEATRE AS IT WAS AND AS IT IS 63

baby and she doesn’t want it. She plays the piano
and shoots herself. The characters talk like this:

Well, well, then . . . My hat—? My over¬

coat—? Oh, in the hall— / do hope I shan’t come
too late, Heddal Eh? . . . Oh, if you run—

and

Mrs. Elvsted. . . . Oh, yes. Sheriff Elvsted’s

wife . . . Miss Rysing that was . . . that girl
with the irritating hair that she was always show-
ing off ... an old flame of yours, someone told
me. . . .

It is all given to us in the language of everyday

life. Just like a living picture. We might be lis¬
tening to people on the street. . . . Little by
little we become aware of a strange deep tragic
play and interplay of motives behind the conven¬
tional surface. We are overcome by an inescapable
sense of fatality. The ancient terror spreads its
shadow over the drama. The pistol-shot at the
end is the finale of a great tragic symphony.

And here we are back again. Our theatre is

concerned with Little Theatre Movements and
talking pictures and censorship and unions and
64 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

interlocking dimmer-boxes. Fashions change. In

Uncle Tom's Cabin, written not so long ago,
little Eva’s father clasps her to his heart and mur¬
murs:

O Evangeline, rightly named? Thou art indeed

an Evangel to me!

In Maurice Watkin’s Chicago, a sensational

success in New York, the show-girl heroine yells:

You Goddamned louse!

and drops her man with a pearl-handled revolver.

Fashions do, indeed, change. We are not living in
the Stone 'Age any more, nor the time of the
Renaissance, nor the time of the Restoration, nor
in the Mauve Decade. These are the days of the
candid camera and the comic strip and television
and reducing diets and strange new dance-steps.
We have to work in the theatre of our own time
with the tools of our own time. ... I will tell
you now why I have made these images of the
theatre of other days. In all these dramas of the
past there is a dream—an excitement, a high,
rare mood, a conception of greatness. If we are
to create in the theatre, we must bring back this
mood, this excitement, this dream. The plain
 THE THEATRE AS IT WAS AND AS IT IS 65

truth is that life has become so crowded, so hur¬

ried, so commonplace, so ordinary, that we have
lost the artist’s approach to art. Without this, we
are nothing. With this, everything is possible.
Here it is, in these old dramas. Let us see it. Let
us learn it. Let us bring into the theatre a vision
of what the theatre might be. There is no other
way. Indeed, there is no other way.
 IV

TO A YOUNG STAGE DESIGNER

 IV

TO A YOUNG STAGE DESIGNER

Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.

—MICHELANGELO

Behind the words and movements, imperturbable,

withdrawn, slumbered a strange smoldering power.
—HENRY BROCKEN

A stage designer is, in a very real sense, a

jack-o£-all-trades. He can make blueprints and
murals and patterns and light-plots. He can de¬
sign fireplaces and bodices and bridges and wigs.
He understands architecture, but is not an archi¬
tect: can paint a portrait, but is not a painter:
creates costumes, but is not a couturier. Although
he is able to call upon any or all o£ these varied
gifts at will, he is not concerned with any one of
them to the exclusion of the others, nor is he in¬
terested in any one of them for its own sake.
These talents are only the tools of his trade. His
real calling is something quite different. He is
an artist of occasions.
69
JO THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

Every play—or rather, every performance of a

play—is an occasion, and this occasion has its own
characteristic quality, its own atmosphere, so to
speak. It is the task of the stage designer to en¬
hance intensify this characteristic quality by
every means in his power. The mastery of this
special art demands not only a mastery of many
diverse techniques but a temperament that is
peculiarly sensitive to the atmosphere of a given
occasion, just as the temperament of a musician
is peculiarly sensitive to the characteristic quali¬
ties of a musical composition. Stage designers,
like musicians, are born and not made. One is
aware of atmospheres or one/ isn’t, just as one has
a musical ear or one hasn’t.
A stage setting has no independent life of its
own. Its emphasis is directed toward the perform¬
ance. In the absence of the actor it does not exist.
Strange as it may seem, this simple and funda¬
mental principle of stage design still seems to be
widely misunderstood. How ofted^n critics’ re¬
views one comes upon the phrase “the settings
were gorgeous!” Such a statement, of course, can
mean only one thing, that no one concerned with
producing the drama has thought of it as an or¬
ganic whole. I quote from a review recently pub-
 TO A YOUNG STAGE DESIGNER 71

lished in one of our leading newspapers, “Of all

the sets of the season, the only true scenic sur¬
prise was . . The only true scenic surprise,
indeed! Every stage designer worth his salt out¬
grew the idea of scenic surprises years ago. If the
critics only knew how easy it is to make a scenic
surprise in the theatre! Take two turntables, a
great deal of— But, no. Why give away the
formula? It is not surprise that is wanted from
the audience; it is delighted and trusting accept¬
ance. The surprise inherent in a stage setting is
only a part of the greater surprise inherent in the
event itself.
And yet a stage setting holds a curious kind of
suspense. Go, for instance, into an ordinary empty
drawing-room as it exists normally. There is no
particular suspense about this room. It is just—
empty. Now imagine the same drawing-room ar¬
ranged and decorated for a particular function—a
Christmas party for children, let us say. It is not
completed as a room, now, until the children are
in it. And if we wish to visualize for ourselves
how important a part the sense of expectancy
plays in such a room, let us imagine that there is
a storm and that the children cannot come. A
scene on the stage is filled with the same feeling
72 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

of expectancy. It is like a mixture of chemical

elements held in solution. The actor adds the one
element that releases the hidden energy of the
whole. Meanwhile, wanting the actor, the vari¬
ous elements which go to make up the setting
remain suspended, as it were, in an indefinable
tension. To create this suspense, this tension, is
the essence of the problem of stage designing.
The designer must strive to achieve in his set¬
tings what I can only call a high potential.
The walls, the furniture, the properties, are
only the facts of a setting, only the outline.
The trutlyis in everything but these objects, in
the space they enclose, in the intense vibration
they create. They are fused into a kind of em¬
bodied impulse. When the curtain rises we feel a
frenzy of excitement focused like a burning-glass
upon the actors. Everything on the stage becomes
a part of the life of the instant. The play becomes
a voice out of a whirlwind. The terrible and won¬
derful dynamis of the theatre pours over the foot¬
lights.
A strange, paradoxical calling, to work always
behind and around, to bring into being a power¬
ful non-being. How far removed it all is from the
sense of displayl One is reminded of the portraits
 TO A YOUNG STAGE DESIGNER 73
of the Spanish noblemen painted by El Greco in
the Prado in Madrid, whose faces, as Arthur
Symons said, are all nerves, distinguished nerves,
quieted by an effort. What a phrase for stage de¬
signers to remember! Quieted by an effort. . . .
It is to the credit of our designers that they
have almost made a fetish of abnegation. But let
me remark parenthetically that it is sometimes
difficult to go into the background when there is
nothing in front of you. These pages are hardly
the place in which to perpetuate the centuries-
old squabble between playwrights and stage de¬
signers begun by peevish old Ben Jonson, who
scolded Inigo Jones so roundly for daring to make
his productions beautiful and exciting to look at.
This kind of petty jealousy makes sorry reading
even when recorded in verse by the great Ben
himself. It is enough to say that the jealousy still
persists and is as corroding in the twentieth cen¬
tury as it was in the seventeenth. The error lies
in our conception of the theatre as something set
aside for talents that are purely literary. As if the
experience of the theatre had only to do with
words! Our playwrights need to learn that plays
are wrought, not written. There is something to
74 the dramatic imagination

be said in the theatre in terms of form and color

and light that can be said in no other way.
The designer must learn to sense the atmos¬
phere of a play with unusual clearness and exact¬
ness. He must actually live in it for a time, im¬
merse himself in it, be baptized by it. This
process is by no means so easy as it seems. We are
all too apt to substitute ingenuity for clairvoy¬
ance. The temptation to invent is always present.
I was once asked to be one of the judges of a com¬
petition of stage designs held by the Department
of Drama of one of our well-known universities.
All the designers had made sketches for the same
play. The setting was the interior of a peasant
hut on the west coast of Ireland. It turned out
that these twenty or thirty young designers had
mastered the technique of using dimmers and
sliding stages and projected scenery. They had
also acquired a considerable amount of informa¬
tion concerning the latest European developments
of stagecraft. Their drawings were full of expres¬
sionism from Germany, constructivism from Rus¬
sia, every kind of modernism. They were com¬
pilations of everything that had been said and
done in the world of scenery in the last twenty
 TO A YOUNG STAGE DESIGNER 75

years. But not one of the designers had sensed the

atmosphere of the particular play in question.
I recalled for them my memory of the setting
for the same play as produced by the Abbey
Theatre on its first visit to America. This setting
was very simple, far simpler and far less self-con¬
scious than any of their designs. Neutral-tinted
walls, a fireplace, a door, a window, a table, a few
chairs, the red homespun skirts and bare feet of
the peasant girls. A fisher’s net, perhaps. Noth¬
ing more. But through the little window at the
back one saw a sky of enchantment. All the
poetry of Ireland shone in that little square of
light, moody, haunting, full of dreams, calling
us to follow on, follow on. ... By this one ges¬
ture of excelling simplicity the setting was en¬
larged into the region of great theatre art.
Now here is a strange thing, I said to the de¬
signers. If we can succeed in seeing the essential
quality of a play others will see it, too. We know
the truth when we see it, Emerson said, from
opinion, as we know that we are awake when we
are awake. For example: you have never been in
Heaven, and you have never seen an angel. But
if someone produces a play about angels whose
scenes are laid in Heaven you will know at a
76 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

glance whether his work is right or wrong. Some

curious intuition will tell you. The sense of recog¬
nition is the highest experience the theatre can
give. As we work we must seek not for self-
expression or for performance for its own sake,
but only to establish the dramatist’s intention,
knowing that when we have succeeded in doing
so audiences will say to themselves, not, This is
beautiful, This is charming, This is splendid, but
—This is true. This is the way it is. So it is, and
not otherwise. . . . There is nothing esoteric in
the search for truth in the theatre. On the con¬
trary, it is a part of the honest everyday life of
the theatre.

The energy of a particular play, its emotional

content, its aura, so to speak, has its own definite
physical dimensions. It extends just so far in space
and no farther. The walls of the setting must be
placed at precisely this point. If the setting is
larger than it should be, the audience gets a feel¬
ing of meagerness and hollowness; if smaller, a
feeling of confusion and pressure. It is often very
difficult to adjust the physical limits of a setting
to its emotional limitations. But great plays exist
outside the categories of dimension. Their bounty
 TO A YOUNG STAGE DESIGNER 77
is as boundless as the air. Accordingly we need
not think of a stage-setting, in a larger sense, as a
matter of establishing space relations. Great plays
have nothing to do with space. The setting for a
great play is no more subject to the laws of space
composition than music is. We may put aside
once and for all the idea of a stage-setting as a
glorified show-window in which actors are to be
exhibited and think of it instead as a kind of
symphonic accompaniment or obbligato to the
play, as evocative and intangible as music itself.
Indeed, music may play a more important role
than we now realize in the scenic evocations of
the future.
In the last analysis the designing of stage scen¬
ery is not the problem of an architect or a painter
or a sculptor or even a musician, but of a poet. By
a poet I do not mean, of course, an artist who is
concerned only with the writing of verse. I am
speaking of the poetic attitude. The recognized
poet, Stedman says, is one who gives voice in
expressive language to the common thought and
feeling which lie deeper than ordinary speech. I
will give you a very simple illustration. Here is
a fragment of ordinary speech, a paraphrase of
part of Hamlet’s soliloquy, To be or not to be:
78 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

I wish I were dead! I wish I could go to sleep

and never wake up! But I’m afraid of what might
happen afterward. Do people dream after they
are dead? . . . But Hamlet does not express
himself in this way. He says, To die, to sleep; to
sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the mb;
for in that sleep of death what dreams may come.
. . . Here are two ways of saying the same
thing. The first is prose. The second is poetry.
Both of them are true. But Shakespeare’s way—
the poetic way—is somehow deeper and higher
and truer and more universal. In this sense we
may fairly speak of the art of stage designing as
poetic, in that it seeks to give expression to the
essential quality of a play rather than to its out¬
ward characteristics.
Some time ago one of the younger stage de¬
signers was working with me on the scenes for
an historical play. In the course of the production
we had to design a tapestry, which was to be
decorated with figures of heraldic lions. I sent
him to the library to hunt up old documents. He
came back presently with many sketches, copies
of originals. They were all interesting enough,
but somehow they were not right. They lacked
something that professionals call “good theatre.”
 TO A YOUNG STAGE DESIGNER 79
They were not theatrical. They were accurate and
—lifeless. I said as much to the designer. “Well,
what shall we do about it?” he asked me. “We
have got to stop copying,” I said. “We must try
something else. We must put our imaginations
to work. Let us think now. Not about what this
heraldic lion ought to look like, but what the de¬
sign meant in the past, in the Middle Ages.
“Perhaps Richard, the Lion-Heart, carried this
very device emblazoned on his banner as he
marched across Europe on his way to the Holy
Land. Richard, the Lion-Heart, Coeur de Lion
. . . What memories of childhood this name con¬
jures up, what images of chivalry! Knights in
armor, enchanted castles, magic casements, peril¬
ous seas, oriflammes, and gonfalons. Hear the
great battle-cries! See the banners floating
through the smoke! Coeur de Lion, the Cru¬
sader, with his singing page Blondel. . . . Do
you remember Blondel’s song, the song he sang
for three long years while he sought his master
in prison? ‘O Richard, O mon Roi! UUnivers
t’abandonne! . . .’
“And now your imagination is free to wander,
if you will allow it to do so, among the great
names of romance. Richard, the Lion-Heart,
8o THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

King Arthur, Sir Percival and the mystery of

the Holy Grail, the Song of Roland, the magic
sword, Durandal, Tristan and Isolde, the love-
potion, the chant of the Cornish sailors, the ship
with the black sail; the Lady Nicolette of whom
Aucassin said, Beau venir et bel aller, lovely when
you come, lovely when you go; the demoiselle
Aude, who died for love; the Lady Christabel;
the Ancient Mariner with the Albatross hung
about his neck; the Cid, Charlemagne, Barba-
rossa, the Tartar, Kubla Khan, who decreed the
pleasure-dome in Xanadu, in the poem Coleridge
heard in a dream. . . . And there are the leg¬
endary cities, too, Carcassonne, Granada, Tor-
cello; Samarkand, the Blue City, with its facades
of turquoise and lapis lazuli; Carthage, Isfahan,
Trebizond; and there are the places which
have never existed outside a poet’s imagination—
Hy Brasil, Broceliande, the Land of Luthany, the
region Elenore, the Isle of Avalon, where falls
not hail, or rain, or any snow, where ever King
Arthur lyeth sleeping as in peace. . . . And
there is the winged Lion of St. Mark in Venice
with the device set forth fairly beneath it, Pax
Tibi, Marce, Evangelista Meus; and there are the
mounted knights in the windows of Chartres,
 TO A YOUNG STAGE DESIGNER 81

riding on, riding on toward Our Lady as she

bends above the high altar in her glory of rose.
“These images of romance have come to our
minds—all of them—out of this one little symbol
of the heraldic lion. They are dear to us. They
can never fade from our hearts.
“Let your fancy dwell and move among them
in a kind of revery. Now, in this mood, with
these images bright in your mind, draw your
figure of the lion once more.
“This new drawing is different. Instead of
imitating, describing what the artists of the Mid¬
dle Ages thought a lion looked like, it summons
up an image of medieval romance. Perhaps with¬
out knowing it I have stumbled on a definition of
art in the theatre; all art in the theatre should be,
not descriptive, but evocative. Not a description,
but an evocation. A bad actor describes a charac¬
ter; he explains it. He expounds it. A good actor
evokes a character. He summons it up. He re¬
veals it to us. . . . This drawing is evocative.
Something about it brings back memories of
medieval love-songs and crusaders and high ad¬
ventures. People will look at it without knowing
why. In this drawing of a lion—only a detail in
a magnificent, elaborate setting—there will be a
#2 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

quality which will attract them and disturb them

and haunt them and make them dream. Your
feeling is in it. Your interest is in it. You have
triumphed over the mechanics of the theatre and
for the time being you have become a poet.”
The poetic conception of stage design bears
little relation to the accepted convention of realis¬
tic scenery in the theatre. As a matter of fact it is
quite the opposite. Truth in the theatre, as the
masters of the theatre have always known, stands
above and beyond mere accuracy to fact. In the
theatre the actual thing is never the exciting
thing. Unless life is turned into art on the stage
it stops being alive and goes dead.
So much for the realistic theatre. The artist
should omit the details, the prose of nature and
give us only the spirit and splendor. When we
put a star in a sky, for example, it is not just a
star in a sky, but a “supernal messenger, excel¬
lently bright.” This is purely a question of our
point of view. A star is, after all, only an electric
light. The point is, how the audience will see it,
what images it will call to mind. We read of
Madame PitoefFs Ophelia that in the Mad Scene
she handled the roses and the rosemary and the
rue as if she were in a Paradise of flowers.
 TO A YOUNG STAGE DESIGNER 83

We must bring into the immediate life of the

theatre—“the two hours’ traffic of our stage”—
images of a larger life. The stage we inhabit is a
chamber of the House of Dreams. Our work on
this stage is to suggest the immanence of a vision¬
ary world all about us. In this world Hamlet
dwells, and Oedipus, and great Juno, known by
her immortal gait, and the three witches on the
blasted heath. We must learn by a deliberate
effort of the will to walk in these enchanted re¬
gions. We must imagine ourselves into their vast¬
ness.
Here is the secret of the flame that burns in the
work of the great artists of the theatre. They
seem so much more aware than we are, and so
much more awake, and so much more alive that
they make us feel that what we call living is not
living at all, but a kind of sleep. Their knowl¬
edge, their wealth of emotion, their wonder, their
elation, their swift clear seeing surrounds every
occasion with a crowd of values that enriches it
beyond anything which we, in our happy satis¬
faction, had ever imagined. In their hands it be¬
comes not only a thing of beauty but a thing of
power. And we see it all—beauty and power
alike—as a part of the life of the theatre.
 V

SOME THOUGHTS ON STAGE COSTUME

 V

SOME THOUGHTS ON STAGE COSTUME

Let us have a glimpse of incomprebensibles: and

thoughts of things, which thoughts but tenderly
touch.
—SIR THOMAS BROWNE

In learning how a costume for the stage is de¬

signed and made, we have to go through a cer¬
tain amount of routine training. We must learn
about patterns, and about periods. We have to
know what farthingales are, and wimples, and
patches and caleches and parures and godets and
appliques and passementerie. We have to know
the instant we see and touch a fabric what it will
look like on the stage both in movement and in
repose. We have to develop the brains that are in
our fingers. We have to enhance our feeling for
style in the theatre. We have to experiment end¬
lessly until our work is as nearly perfect as we can
make it, until we are, so to speak, released from
it. All this is a part of our apprenticeship. But
there comes to every one of us a time when the
problem of creating presents itself.
87
88 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

If wc are to accomplish anything in any art

we must first see what our problem is before we
can proceed to solve it. What we do in the theatre
depends upon what we see. If we are to design
for the theatre we must have the clearest possible
image in our minds of the nature and the purpose
and the function of the theatre.
Now this theatre we are working in is a very
strange place. It deals, not with logic, but with
magic. It deals with witchcraft and demoniac
possession and forebodings and ecstasies and mys¬
tical splendors and legends and playthings and
parades and suspicions and mysteries and rages
and jealousies and unleashed passions and thrill¬
ing intimations and austerity and elevation and
luxury and ruin and woe and exaltation and se¬
crets “too divinely precious not to be forbidden,”
—the shudder, the frisson, the shaft of chill
moonlight, the footfall on the stair, the knife in
the heart, the face at the window, the boy’s hand
on the hill. . . . The air of the theatre is filled
with extravagant and wheeling emotions, with
what H. L. Mencken calls “the grand crash and
glitter of things.”
In the theatre, the supernormal is the only
norm and anything less is subnormal, devitalized.
 SOME THOUGHTS ON STAGE COSTUME 89

If we try to bring the theatre down to our own

level, it simply ceases to be. When we see Oedi¬
pus Rex in the theatre, when we hear Pelleas
and Melisande, when we examine a stage design
by Adolphe Appia, we realize that great artists
like Sophocles and Debussy and Appia create as
they do, not only because they are more skilled,
more experienced than the rest of us, but because
they think and feel differently from the way the
rest of us do. Their orientation is different from
our own. When we listen to what artists tell us
in their work—when we look at what they look
at and try to see what they see—then, and only
then, do we learn from them.
There is no formula for inspiration. But to ask
ourselves, why did that artist do that thing in
that particular way instead of in some other way?
is to take the first step toward true creation.
Nature has endowed us all with a special
faculty called imagination, by means of which
we can form mental images of things not present
to our senses. Trevisa, a seer of the late fourteenth
century, defined it as the faculty whereby “the
soul beholds the likeness of things that be ab¬
sent.” It is the most precious, the most powerful,
and the most unused of all human faculties. Like
9° THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

the mantle o£ rainbow feathers in the Japanese

No drama, Hagoromo, it is a treasure not lightly
given to mortals. Many people confuse imagina¬
tion with ingenuity, with inventiveness. But im¬
agination is not this thing at all. It is the peculiar
power of seeing with the eye of the mind. And it
is the very essence of the theatre.
Many of you are familiar with the region of
the Ardennes, in Belgium. Now this country¬
side, charming and poignant though it is, may
seem no more beautiful than many parts of our
own country, nearer and dearer to us. But Shake¬
speare once went there. And in his drama, As
You Like It, the familiar scene is no longer the
Ardennes we know, but the Forest of Arden,
where on every enchanted tree hang the tongues
that show the beauties of Orlando’s Rosalind.

Atalantas better fart, sad Lucretia’s modesty.

Shakespeare’s imagination joins with our own to

summon up an ideal land, an image of our lost
paradise. Or let us take another example: King
Lear had, I dare say, a life of his own outside the
limits of Shakespeare’s play, a daily life of routine
very much like our own. He got up in the morn¬
ing and put on his boots and ate his breakfast and
 SOME THOUGHTS ON STAGE COSTUME 91

signed dull documents and yawned and grumbled

and was bored like everyone else in the world. But
the drama does not give us those moments. It
gives us Lear at his highest pitch of living. It
shows him in intensest action, a wild old man
storming at heaven, bearing his daughter Cor¬
delia, dead in his arms.
In these examples we may divine Shakespeare’s
own intention toward the theatre. His attitude—
the true dramatic attitude, the mood, indeed, in
which all great art is created—is one of intense
awareness, of infectious excitement. If we are to
create in the theatre, we must first learn to put
on this creative intention like the mantle of rain¬
bow feathers. We must learn to feel the drive
and beat of the dramatic imagination in its home.
We must take the little gift we have into the hall
of the gods.

A stage costume is a creation of the theatre.

Its quality is purely theatrical and taken outside
tHe theatreTlt loses its magic at once. It dies as
a plant dies^when uprooted. Why this should
be so I do not know. But here is one more proof
of the eternal enchantment which every worker
in the theatre knows and feels. The actual ma-
92 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

terials of which a stage costume is made count for

very little. Outwardly it may be nothing more
than an arrangement of shabby velvets and cheap
glass “glits.” I remember Graham-Robertson’s de¬
scription of a costume worn by Ellen Terry as
Fair Rosamund:

She looked her loveliest in the rich gown of

her first entrance, a wonderful Rosettian effect of
soft gold and glowing color veiled in black, her
masses of bright hair in a net of gold and golden
hearts embroidered on her robe. ... The foun¬
dation was an old fink gown, worn with stage
service and reprieved for the occasion from the
rag-bag. The mysterious veiling was the coarsest
and cheapest black net, the glory of hair through
golden meshes was a bag of gold tinsel stuffed
with crumpled paper, and the broidered hearts
were cut out of gold paper and gummed on. The
whole costume would have been dear at ten shil¬
lings and was one of the finest stage dresses that
l have ever seen.

The wardrobes of our costume-establishments

are crammed with hundreds of just such cos¬
tumes. I can see them now, with their gilt and
their fustian and their tinsel and their bands of
 SOME THOUGHTS ON STAGE COSTUME 93

sham ermine. You all know them—the worn

hems, the sleeves shortened and lengthened and
shortened again, the seams taken in and let out
and taken in, the faded tights, the embroidery
hastily freshened with new bits from the stock-
room, the fashions of yesterday gone flat like stale
champagne. . . . But in the theatre a miracle
takes place. The dramatic imagination transforms
them. They become dynamic. They become a
surprise, an adventure, a reminder of things we
once knew and now remember with joy. The
actors wearing them become ambassadors from
that bright other world behind the footlights.
But a_stage costume has an added significance
in the theatre in that it is created to enhance the
particular quality of a special occasion. It is de-
signed foFa particular character in a~particular
scene in a particular play—not just for a character
in a scene in a play, ^utloFthat character, in that
scene, in that play—ana accordingly it js an or¬
ganic ancT necessary part of the drama in which
it appearsTOrielnighrsay that an ordinary cos¬
tume, an ordinary suit or dress, is an organic and
necessary part of our everyday living. And so it
is. But—and here is the point!—drama is not
everyday living. Drama and life are two very dif-
94 the dramatic imagination

ferent things. Life, as we all live it, is made up

of troubles and blunders and dreams that are
never fully realized. “The eternal ever-not-quite,”
William James called it. We go on from day to
day, most of us, beset by uncertainties and frus¬
trations, and try to do the best we can, not seeing
very clearly, not understanding very well. And
we say, Life is like that! But drama is not in the
least like that. Drama is life, to be sure, but life
seen through the eye of a dramatist, seen sharply
and together, and given an arbitrary form and
order. We see our own lives reflected as in a magic
mirror, enlarged and simplified, in a pattern we
had not perceived before. Everything on his stage
becomes a part of that otneh order—the words,
the situations, the-actors, the setting, the lights,
the costumes. Each element has its own particu¬
lar relation to the drama^ndj^lays its^pwn part in
the drama. And each element—the word, the
actor, the costume—has the exact significance of
a note in a symphony. Each separate costume we
create for a play must be exactly suited both. to
the ^character it helps to express and to the pcca-
sion it graces. We shall not array Lady Macbeth
in pale blue organdie or Ariel in purple velvet.
Mephistopheles will wear his scarlet and Hamlet
 SOME THOUGHTS ON STAGE COSTUME 95

his solemn black as long as the theatre continues

to exist. A Hamlet in real life may possess a
wardrobe of various styles and colors. But in
the theatre it is simply not possible for Mr. John
Gielgud or Mr. Maurice Evans to say, ’Tis not
alone my tawny cloak, good mother, nor custom¬
ary suits of tender green. . . .

With these two essentials of stage costume in

mind—theatricality and appropriateness—let us
consider a particular illustration of the problem of
costume designing. I have purposely chosen an
example that is as remote as possible from our
everyday experience, in order that it may give
more scope for our imaginations. Let us go back
three hundred years in history, to another theatre
altogether. John Milton wrote a poetic tragedy,
Samson Agonistes, thought by many to be the
most sublime example of drama in this or any
language. As we read this tragedy, we presently
come upon the following curiously evocative pas¬
sage of description:

But who is this, what thing of Sea or Land?

Female of sex it seems.
That so hedeckt, ornate, and gay.
Comes this way sailing
9O THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

Like a stately ship

Of Tarsus, bound for th’ Isles
Of Javan or Gadier
With all her bravery on, and tackle trim.
Sails fill'd, and streamers waving.
Courted by all the winds that hold them play.
An amber scent of odorous perfume
Her Harbinger . . .

Here is an example of the dramatic imagina¬

tion in action, full blown, at the top of its bent.
This Titan among dreamers, the man who could
write lines like And now on earth the seventh
evening arose in Eden, is describing a costume.
A stage costume, if you please. Let us try to
visualize this costume.
Fortunately we all have—or at least we ought
to have—a reasonably clear idea of what a
woman’s costume looked like in Milton’s day.
We have all seen pictures of the tight bodices and
the full stiff skirts and the ruffs and the jewels.
And we can find plenty of documents, if we need
them, on the shelves of our libraries. But docu¬
ments will not help us here, or at most they will
serve only as a starting-point from which to pro¬
ceed. What we are after at the moment is not eru-
 SOME THOUGHTS ON STAGE COSTUME 97

dition, but evocation. We are to evoke a mental

image of this costume. We are to allow it to
appear to us of itself, to manifest itself to us, to
occur to us, as it were. We shall find this exercise
a difficult one, entirely outside of our usual rou¬
tine, but in the end strangely rewarding. We
shall discover that our imagination possesses a
curious focusing and projecting power. I have
often inquired in vain as to the precise nature of
this visioning faculty. Does the costume we are
about to discuss already exist in some ideal pla¬
tonic world of images? Have our imaginations
bodies? I do not know. I only know that this
faculty of strong inward viewing functions in
accordance with an old, old law. I cannot pretend
to explain it. I can only affirm it. It simply is so.
Perhaps this is what Leonardo da Vinci had in
mind when he declared that the human eye not
only receives but projects rays of light.
Our first step is to visualize this costume in
relation to Milton’s own time. We know that
the costumes of any period in history are typical
of that period. For example, let us think of the
costumes of today in relation to the life of today.
Here are a few catchwords chosen almost at ran¬
dom out of the daily papers: television, airplane.
98 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

jitterbug, streamline, New Deal, A. F. of L.,

C.I.O., C.C.C., P.W.A. And so on. As we read
them we instantly get an impression—broad,
general, rough, to be sure, but still an impression
—of the characteristic quality of our own epoch,
swift, direct, inclusive, brilliant, staccato. Now
what could be more expressive of this quality
than the snappy chic nervous little tailored suits
we see by the dozens in our fashion magazines
and in our shop windows? Look at the tight little
sweaters and coats and skirts and the closely
wrapped turbans, all so simple and practical, all
made, not to charm, but to surprise and excite,
all like quick bold sketches, to be rubbed out to¬
morrow. They are creations of—and for—this
unique moment in time. Seen in retrospect, they
may give the historians of the future as clear an
idea of this particular era in the world’s history
as a sixteen-millimeter camera or the Grand
Coulee Dam. They are an inseparable part of our
own special idiom.
In the same wray a costume of Milton’s own
time will inevitably express the characteristic
qualities of life at that time. Let us bring to mind
what we know of these qualities. Great names
rise in the memory: England: Elizabeth the
 SOME THOUGHTS ON STAGE COSTUME 99

Queen, the sovereign who once said, I could have

wept but that my face was made for the day: Sir
Francis Drake, the defeat of the Spanish Armada,
the streets of London all hung with blue, like the
sea: William Shakespeare, author and player,
the greatest master of public art the world has
ever known: Marlowe, with his “mighty line”—
Kit Marlowe, stabbed in the Mermaid Tavern in
Southwark over across the bridge; Sir Walter
Raleigh, with his cloak and his sea-knowledge
and his new colony, Virginia, in the west, on the
other side of the world; Spenser and Sir Philip
Sidney, Ben Jonson, Inigo Jones; Bacon, Leices¬
ter, Essex: Mary of Scotland, whose skin was so
fair, men said, that when she drank red wine you
could see the red drops running down in her
throat like fire. . . . These names out of history,
stirring, blood-swept, passionate, mingle and
blend in our minds in an overpowering sense of
splendor and reckless adventure and incredible
energy and high fantastical dreams. And then we
see John Bunyan’s Christian, accompanied by
Ignorance and Faith and Hope and Mistrust, on
his way to the Celestial City, his soul intent on
cherubim and seraphim. And Sir Thomas Browne
admonishes us in his echoing cadences to be ready
IOO THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

to be anything in the ecstasy of being ever. And

we hear John Milton as he dictates the “Sonnet
on His Blindness”—God doth not need either
mans work or His own gifts. The Reformation
is here, with its fervors and its exaltations and its
solemn preoccupations with moral grandeur.
As we dwell upon these things, the dramatic
imagination begins to sketch in our minds the
first vague outlines of a costume. It is bold and
fantastic and elaborate and ceremonious and
splendid, a typical expression of the Age of Dar¬
ing. So much we see. Let us pause for a moment
and consider the costume from another point of
view, this time in relation to the quality of Mil¬
ton’s own poetry. The chief trait of any given
poet, Walt Whitman reminds us, is always the
mood out of which he contemplates his subjects.
Milton’s mood is mature, noble, grand. His sea¬
son is autumn, splendid and serene, a “season of
mellow fruitfulness.” And we find in his poetry
a great elegance, a slightly rigid elegance perhaps,
like the elegance which is at times almost a con¬
straint in the music of Handel or Purcell. It is
often gay, jocund, buxom, one might say; hearty,
with a great natural health coursing through it;
but it is never merely funny, as Will Shakespeare
 SOME THOUGHTS ON STAGE COSTUME IOI

is funny, for instance, when he makes Juliet’s

Nurse say, Now, afore God, l am so vexed that
every fart about me quivers. Nothing so frivo¬
lous here. Milton’s verse is all in the noble heroic
vein, in the Dorian mode. It is ordered, splendid,
a great pavane, a gorgeous pageant, a concert of
organ and orchestra led by a master of sound. It
is laid out like a formal garden, all glowing in
autumn sunlight, along whose enchanted avenues
we may wander for hours. Until the tempest
comes, and lightning splits the sky, and the earth
reels, and we hear the voices in heaven chanting,
Of Mans first disobedience and the Fruit.
In the light of these “solemn planetary wheel¬
ings” our imaginary costume takes on new quali¬
ties. It is more triumphant, more astonishing,
than we had originally thought. But there is a
certain elegant sobriety about it which we had
not sensed at first. It is a Miltonian costume, the
creation of an adult miqd.
Let us imagine that we see it in its own proper
surroundings. It is a stage costume; let us see it
on a stage, then—in Whitehall, perhaps, or in
one of the theatres designed by Inigo Jones. A
figure appears before us like something seen be¬
tween sleeping and waking, or in a daydream,
102 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

vague, arresting, unfamiliar. It moves in a quiver¬

ing amber twilight, a romantic dusk made by
hundreds of tiny tapers placed about the pro¬
scenium. You will note that our imaginary Mil¬
tonian theatre has not the benefit of our modern
mechanisms for lighting the stage, our Leicas and
Fresnels and interlocking dimmer-boxes. Yet the
old theatre lighting, in spite of its crudeness, had
a quality which our modern lighting sadly lacks,
a quality which I can only describe as dreaminess.
Our plays are case-histories, not dreams, and for
the most part they are played in the pitiless light
that beats down upon an operating table. But in
that low shadowless amber radiance the unusual,
the extraordinary, the fabulous, came into its
own.
Accordingly the stage costumes of those times
were made to catch and drink up every stray wan¬
dering beam of light and reflect it back to the
audience. They gleam and flash and glitter. Glis¬
ter is the real word. They sparkle and twinkle
and blaze with gold and silver and color and
spangles and jewels. They transform the actor
into a being of legend.
We have examined our costume in the light—
figuratively speaking—of the wonderful period in
 SOME THOUGHTS ON STAGE COSTUME 103

history we call the Reformation, and in the light

of Milton’s own solemn poetic imagery. We see
that it has—indeed, that it must have—the quali¬
ties of boldness, fantasy, dignity, formality.
Now, as we look at it in the light of the theatre
of that earlier day, we add to it the qualities of
glamour and luster. Step by step it becomes
clearer in our minds. It becomes iridescent, be¬
comes radiant. It glows and shines.
And now let us be specific, and ask in Milton’s
own words, But who is this?
It is Delilah, the wife of Samson, the woman
whom he knew and loved in the valley of Sorek.
This curious figure, this living shell, this incredi¬
ble puppet encased in its elaborate dress, so stiff
it almost stands alone, is Delilah. In the argu¬
ment of the sixteenth chapter of Judges we may
read her story:

Delilah, corrupted by the Philistines, enticeth

Samson. Thrice she is deceived. At last she over-
cometh him. The Philistines take him and put
out his eyes. His strength recovering, he pulleth
down the house upon the Philistines, and dieth.

We are apt to look at such a story today too

exclusively from an analytic point of view. We
104 THE DRAMATIC imagination

take the cue from our doctors of psychology, with

their flair for definition, and we call Delilah a
vampire, or an anima-figure, it may be. Or we
take the cue from Kipling and think sentimen¬
tally of a fool and a rag and a bone and a hank of
hair. Or we take the cue from Hollywood and
call Delilah simply “the menace.” The fact is,
however, that in so doing we divest the story of
the emotional values that have crowded about it
ever since our infancy. We analyze it, delimit it,
and dismiss it from our minds. But it is precisely
these emotional values that should interest us
most. Our aim here is to recapture our childhood
memories and the mood they bring with them,
the atmosphere of nobility and betrayal and
vengeance and divine justice that broods over
them like a cloud. These memories, still so com¬
pelling, have become a part of the old story, in¬
separable from it. One might almost say, they are
the story. In the mood of awe with which we
first pored over the pages of the Dore Bible—if
we can but re-live it for an instant!—Delilah is
no longer a figure familiar to us, a human being
like ourselves. She is Delilah herself, straight out
of the pages of the Old Testament, the “Fury
with the abhorred shears.”
 SOME THOUGHTS ON STAGE COSTUME 105

Now the dramatic imagination invests our cos¬

tume with wonder and awe and a kind of dark
glory. It is a costume for Delilah. She—Delilah
the enchantress—is to wear it in her moment of
triumph over the husband whom she has be¬
trayed and blinded. Another light is thrown upon
it, the light of childhood recollection. Images of
Circe and Hecate and “dark-veiled Cotytto”
come thronging into our minds, with their phil¬
ters and their potions and their magic spells.
Our exercise draws toward an end. Now,
finally, let us see what Milton himself tells us.
He compares the figure of Delilah to a ship. A
stately ship of Tarsus. Not an English ship, you
will note, but Oriental, such a ship, perhaps, as
the one that brought Shakespeare’s Viola to the
stormy coast of Illyria. And what should l do in
Illyria? My brother, he is in Elysium. . . . The
ship of Milton’s dreams, sailing on, sailing on,
toward the islands of myrrh and cinnamon—!
This is not the only time we have seen a woman
compared to a ship in dramatic literature. The
comparison is a happy one always. The image
holds us, whether it is the image of this stately
galleon moving slowly athwart our fancy or of the
brisk little pleasure-boat, Mistress Millamant,
106 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

sweeping in with all sails set and a shoal of fools

for tenders. Or of the tight vessel, Mistress Frail,
well-rigged an she were but as well manned.
There is something feminine, as every man
knows, about all sailing-ships, with their bend¬
ings and glidings and swayings. How they set
sail for an occasion and float and veer and turn
and take the air and bow and hesitate and advance
and dissemble! Beautiful ships, beloved of mari¬
ners, beautiful women, who charm our hearts
away. . . .

A costume of the Reformation: a Miltonic cos¬

tume: a gleaming costume: a Biblical costume: a
costume for Delilah: and, finally, a costume that
reminds us of a stately ship. A strange mingling
of images. . . . All at once we see it. The figure
—I had almost said figurehead—draws near and
in our imagination we watch its majestic progress
across the stage. It towers above us on its high
chopines. There is a gleam and a moving of rich
stuffs and shapes and above all a countenance—is
it a mask?—topped by a high jeweled headdress
and bent down ever and again to catch the lights
from below. We have a sense of a thing all
golden, a gilded galleon riding the waves. Golden,
 SOME THOUGHTS ON STAGE COSTUME lO’J

carved, overlaid, crusted with gold on dark gold,

so heavy it can move only with a gliding step, a
slow, measured approach. The billowing folds of
the stiff brocaded Oriental silks make a whisper¬
ing sound like the sound of waves breaking on
the shore. There is a rippling of light and a soft
rustling and a foam of lace on the purfled sleeves
and a sheen of gems over all, a mirage of sapphires
and moonstones and aquamarines and drops of
crystal. Great triple ruffs float upon the air, and
veils—“slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn”—
droop and fall with the figure’s stately dippings
and fillings and careenings over the smooth floor
of the sea. We see it for an instant, plain and
clear.
Now it has vanished.
We saw it. And now we must make it.
 VI

LIGHT AND SHADOW IN THE THEATRE

 VI

LIGHT AND SHADOW IN THE THEATRE

Put out the light and then—put out the light!

—SHAKESPEARE

The artist . . . will give us the gloom of gloom

and the sunshine of sunshine.
»—EMERSON

Professor max reinhardt once said, “I am

told, that the art of lighting a stage consists of
putting light where you want it and taking it
away where you don’t want it.” I have often had
occasion to think of this remark—so often, in
fact, that with the passage of time it has taken
on for me something of the quality of an old
proverb. Put light where you want it and take it
away where you don’t want it. What could be
more simple?
But our real problem in the theatre is to know
where to put the light and where to take it away.
And this, as Professor Reinhardt very well knows,
iii
112 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

is not so simple. On the contrary, it demands the

knowledge and the application of a lifetime.

Future historians will speak of this period in

theatrical history as the spotlight era. Spotlights
have become a part of the language of the thea¬
tre. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that they
have created our contemporary theatre idiom.
Once upon a time our stages were lighted by gas-
jets and before that by kerosene lamps, and be¬
fore that by tapers and torches. And in the days
to come we may see some kind of ultra-violet
radiation in our theatres, some new fluorescence.
But today our productions are characterized—con¬
ditioned, one might almost say—by conical shafts
of colored electric light which beat down upon
them from lamps placed in the flies and along the
balconies of the theatre. Lighting a play today is
a matter of arranging and rearranging these lamps
in an infinite variety of combinations. This is an
exercise involving great technical skill and ih-
genuity. The craft of lighting has been developed
to a high degree and it is kept to a high standard
by rigorous training in schools and colleges. It has
become both exacting and incredibly exact. The
beam of light strikes with the precision of a mot
 LIGHT AND SHADOW IN THE THEATRE 113

juste. It bites like an etcher’s needle or cuts deep

like a surgeon’s scalpel. Every tendency moves
strongly toward creating an efficient engine be¬
hind the proscenium arch. Almost without our
knowing it this wonderful invention has become
a part of the general expertise of Broadway show-
business. We handle our spotlights and gelatines
and dimmers in the theatre with the same delight
and the same sense of mastery with which we
drive a high-powered automobile or pilot an aero¬
plane.
But at rare moments, in the long quiet hours
of light-rehearsals, a strange thing happens. We
are overcome by a realization of the livingness of
light. As we gradually bring a scene out of the
shadows, sending long rays slanting across a col¬
umn, touching an outline with color, animating
the scene moment by moment until it seems to
breathe, our work becomes an incantation. We
feel the presence of elemental energies.
There is hardly a stage designer who has not
experienced at one time or another this over¬
whelming sense of the livingness of light. I hold
these moments to be among the most precious of
all experiences the theatre can give us. The true
life of the theatre is in them. At such mo-
114 the dramatic imagination

ments our eyes are opened. We catch disturbing

glimpses of a theatre not yet created. Our imag¬
inations leap forward.
It is the memory of these rare moments that
inspires us and guides us in our work. While we
are studying to perfect ourselves in the use of the
intricate mechanism of stage lighting we are
learning to transcend it. Slowly, slowly, we begin
to see lighting in the theatre, not only as an ex
citing craft but as an art, at once visionary and
exact, subtle, powerful, infinitely difficult to
learn. We begin to see that a drama is not an en¬
gine, running at full speed from the overture to
the final curtain, but a living organism. And we
see light as a part of that livingness.

Our first duty in the theatre is always to the

actors. It is they who interpret the drama. The
stage belongs to them and they must dominate it.
Surprising as it may seem, actors are sometimes
most effective when they are not seen at all. Do
you remember the impact of Orson Welles’ broad¬
cast of a threatened Martian invasion? A voice
out of darkness. . . . But this, of course, is an
exception. In nine cases out of ten our problem
 LIGHT AND SHADOW IN THE THEATRE 115

is simply that of making the actors and their en¬

vironment clearly and fully visible.
Visible, yes. But in a very special way. The life
we see on the stage is not the everyday life we
know. It is—how shall I express it?—more so.
The world of the theatre is a world of sharper,
clearer, swifter impressions than the world we live
in. That is why we go to the theatre, to dwell for
an hour in this unusual world and draw new life
from it. The actors who reveal the heightened life
of the theatre should move in a light that is alto¬
gether uncommon. It is not enough for us to
make them beautiful, charming, splendid. Our
purpose must be to give by means of light an
impression of something out of the ordinary,
away from the mediocre, to make the perform¬
ance exist in an ideal world of wisdom and under¬
standing. Emerson speaks of a divine aura that
breathes through forms. The true actor-light—
the true performance-light—is a radiance, a nim¬
bus, a subtle elixir, wherein the characters of the
drama may manifest themselves to their audience
in their inmost reality.
Perhaps the word lucid best describes this light.
A lucid light. I think of the exquisite clarity in
the prints of Hiroshige. A light of “god-like in-
II6 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

tellection” pervades these scenes. They are held

in a shadowless tranquillity that cannot change.
The peace of the first snowfall is in them. Every¬
thing is perceived here; everything is understood;
everything is known.
Or I might use the word penetrating. If we
look at a portrait by one of our fashionable por¬
trait-painters and then at a portrait by Rem¬
brandt, we see that the one is concerned mainly
with the recording of immediate surface impres¬
sions. His approach is that of a journalist who as¬
sembles a number of interesting and arresting
facts for his leading article. The other penetrates
beneath the surface into the inner life of his sub¬
ject. In the portrait by Rembrandt we see not only
the features but the character of the sitter; not
only the character, but the soul. We see a life that
is not of this moment but of all moments. We
sense “the ultimate in the immediate.” The por¬
trait of an old man becomes a portrait of old age.
Or I might use the word aware. When we see
a good play well performed we are brought to the
quivering raw edge of experience. We are caught
up into the very quick of living. Our senses are
dilated and intent. We become pretematurally
 LIGHT AND SHADOW IN THE THEATRE 117

aware of each instant of time as it passes. In this

awareness we see the actors more clearly, more
simply, than we have ever seen human beings
before. They seem, in some strange way, more
unified. We no longer appraise them or criticize
them or form opinions about them. We forget all
that we have ever heard or read about them. We
gaze at them as we gaze at long-lost loved ones or
at those we look upon for the last time. Forever
and forever, farewell, Cassius. . . . And we see
them in a different light. It is this different light
that should be given in the theatre.
But more than all these necessary qualities, the
lighting of a play should contain an element of
surprise, a sense of discovery. It holds the prom¬
ise of a new and unforgettable experience. I will
give you an illustration. We are all familiar with
the lines from Keats’ sonnet, On First Looking
into Chapman’s Homer—

Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes

He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise—

Let us put out of our minds for a moment the

accustomed music of these lines and allow the
poet to take us with him on his high adventure.
Il8 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

Imagine this little band of explorers, lost in won¬

der, on the shore of an unknown ocean. See their
faces as the vision of a new world bursts upon
them. A scene on the stage should give us the
same sense of incredulity and wonder and delight.
As we enter the theatre we too are on the thresh¬
old of a new experience. The curtain rises. The
vision of a new world bursts upon us as it burst
upon these voyagers of an earlier day. A new
powerful life pervades the theatre. Our hearts
beat with a wild hope. Is this what we have
waited for? we ask. Shall we see at last? Shall we
know?

Lighting a scene consists not only in throwing

light upon objects but in throwing light upon a
subject. We have our choice of lighting a drama
from the outside, as a spectator, or from the in¬
side, as a part of the drama’s experience. The ob¬
jects to be lighted are the forms which go to make
up the physical body of the drama—the actors,
the setting, the furnishings and so forth. But the
subject which is to be lighted is the drama itself.
We light the actors and the setting, it is true, but
we illuminate the drama. We reveal the drama.
We use light as we use words, to elucidate ideas
 LIGHT AND SHADOW IN THE THEATRE 119

and emotions. Light becomes a tool, an instru¬

ment of expression, like a paint-brush, or a sculp¬
tor’s chisel, or a phrase of music. We turn inward
and at once we are in the company of the great
ones of the theatre. We learn from them to bathe
our productions in the light that never was on sea
or land.
One afternoon many years ago I was taken into
the inner room of a little picture gallery and there
I saw, hanging on the wall opposite me, Albert
Pinkham Ryder’s painting of Macbeth and the
Witches. I knew then in a sudden flash of per¬
ception that the light that never was on sea or
land was a reality and not an empty phrase. My
life changed from that moment. Since then I try
with all the energy of which I am capable to bring
this other light into the theatre. For I know it is
the light of the masters.
I find this light of other days in the paintings
of Ryder and Redon and Utrillo, in the etchings
of Gordon Craig, in Adolphe Appia’s drawing
of the Elysian Fields from the third act of the
Orpheus of Gluck. Flere it is for everyone to see,
achieved once and for all, so clearly stated that no
one can escape it. I find it implicit in certain
120 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

scenes from Shakespeare. It casts its spell upon

the lovers, Miranda and Ferdinand, as they meet
for the first time on Prospero’s magic island.
Miranda speaks—

What, ist a spirit?

Lord, how it looks about: Believe me, sir,
It carries a brave form. But ’tis a spirit . . .
/ might call him
A thing divine, for nothing natural
I ever saw, so noble. . . .

And Ferdinand—

Most sure the goddess

On whom these airs attend . . . my prime request.
Which 1 do first pronounce, is, O you wonder.
If you be maid or no? . . .

And again, when Prospero by his art calls down

the very gods and goddesses from Olympus to
celebrate their marriage, Ceres, and great Juno,
and Iris with her rainbow—

—and thy broom-groves,

Whose shadows the dismissed bachelor loves.
Being lass-lorn: thy pole-clipt vineyard.
And thy sea-marge, sterile and rocky-hard.
 LIGHT AND SHADOW IN THE THEATRE 121

Where thou thyself dost air, the Queen o‘ the

sky.
Whose watery arch and messenger am I. . . .

A rare light of the imagination is poured over the

scene, fresh and disturbing and strangely tender.
A new theatre draws near, bathed in “the name¬
less glow that colors mental vision.”
Lucidity, penetration, awareness, discovery, in¬
wardness, wonder. . . . These are the qualities
we should try to achieve in our lighting. And
there are other qualities too. There is a quality of
luster, a shine and a gleam that befits the excep¬
tional occasion. (It would be hard perhaps to
make the water-front saloon setting of Anna
Christie lustrous, but I am not so sure. It is the
occasion and hot the setting which should be lus¬
trous.) There is a quality which I can only de¬
scribe as racy, a hidalgo quality, proud, self-con¬
tained. And last of all, there is a quality of secu¬
rity, a bold firm stroke, an authority that puts an
audience at its ease, an assurance that nothing in
the performance could ever go wrong, a strength,
a serenity, flowing down from some inexhaustible
shining spring. Here, in a little circle of clear
122 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

radiance, the life of the theatre is going on, a life

we can see, and know, and learn to love.

But creating an ideal, exalted atmosphere, an

“intenser day” in the theatre is only a part of our
task, so small a part that at times it seems hardly
to matter at all. However, beautiful or expressive
this light may be, it is still not a dramatic light.
Rather, it is a lyric light, more suited to feeling
than to action. There is no conflict in it: there is
only radiance. Great drama is given to us in terms
of action, and in illuminating dramatic action we
must concern ourselves not only with light, but
with shadow.
How shall I convey to you the meaning of
shadow in the theatre—the primitive dread, the
sense of brooding, of waiting, of fatality, the
shrinking, the blackness, the descent into endless
night? The valley of the Shadow. ... Ye who
read are still among the living, hut 1 who write
shall have long since gone my way into the region
of shadows. . . . Finish, bright lady, the long
day is done, and we are for the dark. ... It is
morning, the sun shines, the dew is on the grass,
and God’s in His Heaven. We have just risen
from sleep. We are young, the sap runs strong in
 LIGHT AND SHADOW IN THE THEATRE 123

us, and we stretch ourselves and laugh. Then the

sun rises higher, and it is high noon, and the light
is clear, and colors are bright, and life shines out
in a splendid fullness. Jack has his Jill, and Bene¬
dick his Beatrice, and Millamant her Mirabell.
But then the sun sinks down, the day draws to its
close, the shadows gather, and darkness conies,
and voices fall lower, and we hear the whisper,
and the stealthy footfall, and we see the light in
the cranny of the door, and the low star reflected
in the stagnant tarn. A nameless fear descends
upon us. Ancient apparitions stir in the shadows.
We listen spellbound to the messengers from an¬
other world, the unnatural horrors that visit us in
the night.
I shall leave the doctors of psychology to ex¬
plain the connection between this ancient terror
and the dread of the unknown darkness in our
minds which they have begun to call the subcon¬
scious. It is enough for us to know that the con¬
nection exists, and that it is the cause of the curi¬
ous hold which light and shadow can exercise over
the imagination of an audience. At heart we are
all children afraid of the dark, and our fear goes
back to remote beginnings of the human race. See
the mood of an audience change, hear them chat-
12<f THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

ter or fall silent, as the lights in the theatre are

raised or lowered. See them rush to the nearest
exit at the sudden rumor, “The lights have gone
out!” See their instant reassurance as the broken
circuit is repaired and the great chandelier blazes
once more. It is such instinctive responses that
give light its dynamic power in the theatre.
Our greatest dramatists have woven light and
shadow into their creations. Dramatic literature is
filled with examples. We see Lavinia Mannon as
she closes the shutters of the Mannon house, ban¬
ishing herself forever from the light of day. We
see the moon shining fitfully through scudding
storm-clouds over the ramparts of Elsinore, where
the unquiet ghost of Hamlet’s father wanders,
wrapped in his black cloak, “for to go invisibell.”
We hear the tortured cry of Claudius, “Give me
some light! Away!” The dim shadows of Pelleas
and Melisande embrace one another far away at
the end of the garden;—Comme nos ombres sont
grandes ce soir! . . . Oh! quelles s’embrassent
loin de nous! . . . We watch the two women in
the anteroom of Lucio Settala’s studio as they
gaze at one another across the shaft of light that
falls along the floor between them. We wander
with Lear through a storm that is like a convul-
 LIGHT AND SHADOW IN THE THEATRE 125

sion of Nature, “a tyranny of the open night,” an

“extremity of the skies.”
Here is the most wonderful example of all, the
great classic example of dramatic insight:

Lo, you, here she comes! This is her very guise,

and, upon my life, fast asleep. Observe her:
stand close.
How came she by that light?
Why, it stood by her. She has light by her con¬
tinually, *Tis her command.
You see, her eyes are open.
Ay, but their sense is shut.
What is it she does now?

Shakespeare animates the scene with his own in¬

tense mood. The candle flame lives in the theatre.
It becomes a symbol of Lady Macbeth’s own life
—flickering, burning low, vanishing down into
> darkness. Out, Out, brief candle! . . . Where
the layman might see nothing more than an ac¬
tual candle, made of wax, bought for so much, at
such and such a place, the dramatist has seen a
great revealing image. He has seen deep into the
meaning of this terrible moment, and the taper
is a part of it. Animula, vagula, blandula, little
flame, little breath, little soul, moving before us
126 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

for the last time. . . . And the shadow on the

wall behind “that broken lady” becomes an
omen, a portent, a presage of her “sad and sol¬
emn slumbers,” a dark companion following her,
silent and implacable, as she passes from this to
that other world. She should have died hereafter.
Life’s but a walking shadow. . . . When we
think of this scene we remember, not only the
dreadful words and the distraught figure, all in
white like a shroud; we see vast spaces and en¬
veloping darkness and a tiny trembling light and
a great malevolent shadow. The icy fear that grips
us is built up out of all these elements. And when
we put the scene on the stage we do not serve
Shakespeare’s drama as we should serve it until
we have given each of these elements its full value
aryl its proper emphasis.
J As we dwell upon these great examples of the
use of light in the theatre we cease to think of
harmony and beauty and think instead of energy,
contrast, violence, struggle, shock. We dream of
a light that is tense and vivid and full of tempera¬
ment, an impulsive, wayward, capricious light, a
light “haunted with passion,” a light of flame and
tempest, a light which draws its inspiration from
the moods of light in Nature, from the illimitable
 LIGHT AND SHADOW IN THE THEATRE 127

night sky, the blue dusk, the halcyon light that

broods over the western prairies. We say with
D’Annunzio, / would that Nature could be round
my creations as our oldest forefathers saw her: the
■passionate actress in an immortal drama. . . .
Here before us as we dream is the frame of the
proscenium, enclosing a darkness like the dark¬
ness that quivers behind our closed eyelids. And
now the dark stage begins to burn and glow un¬
der our fingers, burning like the embers of the
forge of Vulcan, and shafts of light stab through
the darkness, and shadows leap and shudder, and
we are in the regions where splendor and terror
move. We are practicing an art of light and
shadow that was old before the Pyramids, an art
that can shake our dispositions with thoughts be¬
yond the reaches of our souls.

The creative approach to the problem of stage

lighting—the art, in other words, of knowing
where to put light on the stage and where to take
it away—is not a matter of textbooks or precepts.
There are no arbitrary rules. There is only a goal
and a promise. We have the mechanism with
which to create this ideal, exalted, dramatic light
in the theatre. Whether we can do so or not is a
128 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

matter of temperament as well as of technique.

The secret lies in our perception of light in the
theatre as something alive.
Does this mean that we are to carry images of
poetry and vision and high passion in our minds
while wc are shouting out orders to electricians
on ladders in light-rehearsals?
Yes. This is what it means.
 VII

I'OWARD A. NHW STAHK

 YU

TOWARD A NEW STAGE

What is called realism is usually a record of life at

a low fitch and ebb viewed in the sunless light of
day.
—WALTER DE LA MARE

In our fine arts not imitation but creation is the

aim.
—EMERSON

C3nce again the air of Broadway is filled with

the gloomy forebodings of the self-styled proph¬
ets of the theatre who are busy assuring us for the
thousandth time that the theatre is dying. In the
past we have not taken these prophecies of doom
too seriously, for we have observed that the thea¬
tre is always dying and always being reborn,
Phoenix-like, at the very moment when we have
finished conducting the funeral service over its
ashes. But this time there is a greater content of
truth in what the prophets are telling us. The
theatre we knew, the theatre we grew up in, has
131
I32 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

recently begun to show unmistakable symptoms

of decline. It is dwindling and shrinking away,
and presently it will be forgotten.
Let us look at this dying theatre for a moment.
It is essentially a prose theatre, and of late it has
become increasingly a theatre of journalism. The
quality of legend is almost completely absent
from contemporary plays. They appear to be un¬
easily conscious of the camera and the phono¬
graph. There are brilliant exceptions to this gen¬
eralization—I need mention only Green Pastures,
Strange Interlude, or Sophie Treadwell’s exciting
Saxophone—but in the main the dramas of our
time are as literal as if they had been dictated by
the village iceman or by a parlor-maid peering
through a keyhole.
It is this theatre that is dying. Motion pictures
are draining the very life-blood from its veins.
Disquieting as this may be to the purveyors of
show-business, there is a kind of cosmic logic in
it. The theatre of our time grew up on a photo¬
graphic basis and it would have continued to
function contentedly on this basis for many years
to come if motion pictures had not been invented.
But nothing can be so photographic as a photo¬
graph, especially when that photograph moves
 TOWARD A NEW STAGE 133
and speaks. Motion pictures naturally attract to
themselves everything that is factual, objective,
explicit. Audiences are gradually coming to pre¬
fer realism on the screen to realism in the theatre.
Almost insensibly Hollywood has brought an
irresistible pressure to bear upon the realistic thea¬
tre and the picture-frame stage. Future genera¬
tions may find it hard to believe that such things
ever existed.
These statements are not to be construed as an
adverse criticism of motion pictures. On the con¬
trary: motion pictures have begun to take on a
new life of their own, a life of pure thought, and
they are becoming more alive every day. The fact
is that in our time the theatre has become mixed,
confused, a hybrid. A play can be made from al¬
most any novel and a motion picture can be made
from almost any play. What this means is that
the theatre has not yet been brought to its own
perfection. Literature is literature and theatre is
theatre and motion pictures are motion pictures,
but the theatre we know is all these things mixed
together and scrambled. But now—fortunately,
some of us believe—we may note an increasing
tendency toward the separation of these various
134 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

arts, each into its own characteristic form. Motion

pictures are about to become a great liberating
agent of drama. By draining the theatre of its lit¬
eralness they are giving it back to imagination
again.
Think of it! No more copybook dialogue, no
more drug-store clerks drafted to impersonate
themselves in real drug-stores transferred bodily
to the stage, no more unsuccessful attempts to
prove to us that we are riding the waves of the
Atlantic Ocean with Columbus instead of sitting
in a theatre, no more tasteful, well-furnished
rooms with one wall missing. ... A theatre set
free for beauty and splendor and dreams—

Of late years realism in the theatre has become

more and more closely bound up with the idea of
the “stage picture.” But now it would seem that
this idea is about to be done away with once and
for all. The current conception of stage scenery
as a more or less accurate representation of an ac¬
tual scene—organized and simplified, to be sure,
but still essentially a representation—is giving
way to another conception of something far less
actual and tangible. It is a truism of theatrical
 TOWARD A NEW STAGE 135

history that stage pictures become important only

in periods of low dramatic vitality. Great dramas
do not need to be illustrated or explained or em¬
broidered. They need only to be brought to life
on the stage. The reason we have had realistic
stage “sets” for so long is that few of the dramas
of our time have been vital enough to be able to
dispense with them. That is the plain truth. Ac¬
tually the best thing that could happen to our
theatre at this moment would be for playwrights
and actors and directors to be handed a bare stage
on which no scenery could be placed, and then
told that they must write and act and direct for
this stage. In no time we should have the most
exciting theatre in the world.
The task of the stage designer is to search for
all sorts of new and direct and unhackneyed ways
whereby he may establish the sense of place. The
purpose of a stage setting, whatever its form,
whether it be for tragedy, comedy, history, pas¬
toral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-
historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene
individable or poem unlimited, is simply this: to
remind the audience of where the actors are sup¬
posed to be. A true stage-setting is an invocation
I36 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

to the genius loci—a gesture “enforcing us to

this place”—and nothing more. The theatre we
know occupies itself with creating stage “illu¬
sion.” What we are now interested in, however,
is not illusion, but allusion, and allusion to the
most magical beauty. / seek less, said Walt Whit¬
man, to display any theme or thought and more
to bring you into the atmosphere of the theme or
thought—there to pursue your own flight. This
is precisely the aim of stage designing, to bring
the audience into the atmosphere of the theme or
thought. Any device will be acceptable so long as
it succeeds in carrying the audience along with it.
The loveliest and most poignant of all stage
pictures are those that are seen in the mind’s eye.
All the elaborate mechanism of our modern stage
cannot match for real evocation the line, Tom's
a-cold. A mere indication of place can send our
imaginations leaping. We'll 'een to't like French
falcons, fly at anything we see. ... It is this de¬
lighted exercise of imagination, this heady joy,
that the theatre has lost and is about to find once
more. Call upon this faculty—so strangely latent
in all of us—and it responds at once, swift as Ariel
to the summons of Prospero.
 TOWARD A NEW STAGE
*37
Shakespeare could set his stage with a phrase.
Listen—

This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air

Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses. . . .

Listen again—

Now we bear the king

Toward Calais; grant him there; there seen.
Heave him away upon your winged thoughts
Athwart the sea. . . .

And here is William Butler Yeats’ introduction

to The Only Jealousy of Emer—

/ call before the eyes a roof

With cross-beams darkened by smoke.
A fisher s net hangs from a beam,
A long oar lies against the wall.
I call up a poor fisher s house. . . .

And here is the speech of Hakuryo the Fisher¬

man in the Japanese No drama, Hagoromo, so
beautifully translated by Fenollosa—

/ am come to shore. I disembark at Matsubara.

It is just as they told me. A cloudless sky, a rain
138 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

of flowers, strange fragrance all about me. These

are no common things. Nor is this cloak that
hangs upon the pine tree.

And finally—to take a more familiar example

—here is a passage from Thornton Wilder’s play,
Our Town. The narrator is speaking—

This is our doctor s house—Doc Gibbs’. This

is the back door.
Two arched trellises are pushed out, one by
each proscenium pillar.
There s some scenery for those who think they
have to have scenery.
There’s a garden here. Corn . . . peas . . .
beans . . . hollyhocks. . . .

These stage directions (for that is what they

are; they direct us) evoke the locale and the mood
of the particular drama in question with great ease
and with great economy of means. How simple
they are, and how telling, and how right! A few
words, and the life-giving dramatic imagination
answering the summons, fresh, innocent, im¬
mensely powerful, eagerly obedient.
In Shakespeare’s day the written and the
spoken word held a peculiar magic, as of some-
 TOWARD A NEW STAGE *39
thing new-born. With this exciting new medium
of dramatic expression at hand it was simple for
a playwright to transport his audience from place
to place by a spoken stage-direction,

In fair Verona, where we lay our scene . . .

or by a legend, this is master jonah jack-

DAWE’s HOUSE, or, PLAIN NEAR SALISBURY,

painted on a signboard. A printed legend seen on

our stage today would arouse only a momentary
curiosity, or at most a pleasure akin to that of ex¬
amining some antique stage trapping in a mu¬
seum, a sword once handled by Burbage, a letter
penned by Bernhardt. There is little to be gained
by attempting to re-establish such purely literary
indications of place in the theatre. But the spoken
word still retains its power to enchant and trans¬
port an audience, and this power has recently
been enhanced to an extraordinary and altogether
unpredictable degree by the inventions of the
sound amplifier and the radio transmitter. The
technicians of the radio learned long ago to in¬
duce the necessary sense of place by means of
spoken descriptions and so-called “sound-effects.”
These devices have caught the imagination of
radio audiences. They are accepted without ques-
140 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

tion and cause no surprise. We can hardly im¬

agine a radio drama without them. It is odd that
our playwrights and stage designers have not yet
sensed the limitless potentialities of this new en¬
hancement of the spoken word. A magical new
medium of scenic evocation is waiting to be
pressed into service. Imagine a Voice pervading a
theatre from all directions at once, enveloping us,
enfolding us, whispering to us of scenes “beauti¬
ful as pictures no man drew” . . .
Today we are more picture-minded than word-
minded. But what we hear in the theatre must
again take its place beside what we see in the thea¬
tre. If we are to enhance the spoken Word by any
means whatever we must first be sure that it is
worth enhancing. Here is a direct challenge to
our dramatists and our actors to clothe ideas in
expressive speech and to give words once again
their high original magic.

Imaginative minds have been at work in our

theatre for years and they stand ready to create
new scenic conventions at a moment’s notice. We
may look with profit at a few of the outstanding
productions of these years. The Cradle Will
Rock: A neutral-tinted cyclorama. A double row
 TOWARD A NEW STAGE 141

of chairs in which the members of the cast are

seated in full view of the audience. An upright
piano set slantwise near the footlights. The au¬
thor enters, sits at the piano, plays a few bars of
music, announces the various members of the
cast, who bow in turn as their names are men¬
tioned. Then he says simply, The first scene is
laid in a night court. Two actors rise and speak
the first lines. The play has begun. . . . Julius
Caesar: The bare brick walls of the stage of the
Mercury Theatre stained blood-red from floor to
gridiron. The lighting equipment fully visible. A
wide low platform set squarely in the center of
the stage. A masterly handling of the crowds and
some superb acting. . . . Stravinsky’s Oedipus
Rex presented by the League of Composers: The
great stage of the Metropolitan Opera House a
deep blue void out of which emerge the towering
marionettes who symbolize the protagonists of
the drama. Their speeches declaimed in song
by blue-robed soloists and a blue-robed chorus
grouped in a pyramid on the stage below them.
. . . The procession of wet black umbrellas in
the funeral scene of Our Town. The little toy
Ark in Green Pastures. The Burning Bush in the
same play, a tiny faded Christmas tree with a few
142 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

colored electric light bulbs hanging on it. Best of

all, and ever to be remembered, the March of the
Pilgrims to the Promised Land on a treadmill re¬
trieved from a musical comedy and put by the
author to an exalted use of which its original in¬
ventor had never dreamed. And there are many
others.
Audiences have found these productions thor¬
oughly convincing. Their delighted acceptance of
the imaginative conventions employed gives proof
—if proof be needed—that the unrealistic idea
has come into the theatre to stay. Whether the
particular devices I have noted are to be adopted
in future or not is a matter of no importance. We
may take courage from them to move forward
boldly and with confidence.

Newer and more imaginative scenic conven¬

tions will presently become firmly established in
the theatre and representations of place will be
superseded by evocations of the sense of place.
Then the stage designer can turn his attention
away from the problem of creating stage settings
to the larger and far more engrossing problem of
creating stages. For the primary concern of the
stage designer is with stages, and not with stage
 TOWARD A NEW STAGE M3
settings. All our new devices for scenic evocation
will be ineffective except in an exciting environ¬
ment. The new drama and its new stage setting
will require a new type of stage. What will this
new stage be like?
First of all it will be presented frankly for what
it is, a stage. I have never been able to under¬
stand why the stages of our theatres should in¬
variably be so ugly. Theatre owners take great
pains to make the auditoriums of their theatres
glowing and cheerful and comfortable, but what
we call a stage today is nothing more than a bare
brick box fretted with radiator pipes. Why should
this be so? One would .think that a stage was
something to be ashamed of, to be hidden away
like an idiot child. Surely the first step toward
creating a new stage is to make it an exciting
thing in itself.
This stage will be simple, with the simplicity
of the stages of the great theatres of the past. We
shall turn again to the traditional, ancient stage,
the platform, the treteau, the boards that actors
have trod from time out of mind. What we need
in the theatre is a space for actors to act in, a space
reserved for them where they may practice their
immemorial art of holding the mirror up to na-
144 THE DRAMATIC imagination

ture. They will be able to move with ease to and

from this space, they will be able to make their
appropriate exits and entrances. We shall find a
way to bathe these actors in expressive and dra¬
matic light. And that is all.
I am looking forward to a theatre, a stage, a
production, that will be exciting to the point of
astonishment. Behind the proscenium will stand
a structure of great beauty, existing in dignity, a
Precinct set apart. It will be distinguished, aus¬
tere, sparing in detail, rich in suggestion. It will
carry with it a high mood of awe and eagerness.
Like the great stages of the past, it will be an in¬
tegral part of the structure of the theatre itself,
fully visible at all times. Will this stage be too
static, too inflexible, too “harshly frugal” for au¬
diences to accept? Not at all. If it is beautiful and
exciting and expressive we shall not tire of it.
Moreover, its mood will be continually varied by
changes of light.
Our new-old stage—this architectural structure
sent through moods by light—will serve as never
before to rivet our attention upon the actors’ per¬
formance. It will remind us all over again that
great drama is always presented to us in terms of
action. In the ever-shifting tableaux of Shake-
 TOWARD A NEW STAGE J45
speare’s plays, in the flow o£ the various scenes,
he gives us an incessant visual excitement. Once
we have arrived at an understanding of the inner
pattern of any one of his plays and can externalize
it on Shakespeare’s own stage we discover an un¬
suspected visual brilliance arising directly from
the variety of the action. It is the performance,
not the setting, which charms us. The fixed stage
becomes animated through the movement of the
actors. All good actors will respond like thorough¬
bred race-horses to the challenge.
This fixed, impersonal, dynamic environment
will be related to the particular drama in question
by slight and subtle indications of place and
mood—by ingenious arrangements of the neces¬
sary properties, by the groupings of the actors,
by an evocative use of sound and light. Then the
actors will be left free to proceed with the busi¬
ness of performance. In this connection we may
again note a striking characteristic of radio drama.
A stage setting remains on the stage throughout
the action of any particular scene. But the setting
of a radio drama is indicated at the beginning of
the performance and then quietly dismissed.
Radio audiences do not find it necessary to remain
conscious of the setting during the action of the
146 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

drama. They become absorbed in the performance

at once. Why should not this be true of theatre
audiences as well? Here is an idea that is filled
with far-reaching suggestion for our stage de¬
signers. Can it be that the stage settings of today
are too much with us, late and soon? Would not
a setting be more effective if it were merely an
indication of the atmosphere of the play offered
to the audience for a moment at the beginning of
the performance and then taken away again?
If we discard for a moment the idea of a setting
as something that must act all through a play
along with the actors and think of it instead as a
brief ceremony of welcome, so to speak, a toast to
introduce the speakers of the evening, all sorts of
arresting and exciting visual compositions occur
to us. Scenery takes wings, becomes once more a
part of the eternal flight and fantasy of the thea¬
tre. Let us imagine a few of these “transitory
shows of things.” A curtain lifted at the back of
the stage to reveal a momentary glimpse of a
giant painting of the park on Sorins estate—the
First Act of The Sea Gull. A delicate arrange¬
ment of screens and ironwork laced with moon¬
light for the setting of a modern drawing-room
comedy, visible at the rise of the curtain, then
 TOWARD A NEW STAGE
*47
gliding imperceptibly out of sight. A motion-
picture screen lowered at the beginning of the
performance of He Who Gets Slapped, the life of
the little circus given to the audience in a series
of screen “wipe-outs.” A group of actors arranged
in a vividly expressive tableau at the rise of the
curtain to evoke a battle-scene from Richard III,
dissolving into the action of the play. And so on.
Such ideas may seem far-fetched, but they are by
no means so far-fetched as we might be inclined
to believe.

No one seriously interested in the theatre can

be anything but overjoyed at the encroachments
of Hollywood upon Broadway. Hollywood is do¬
ing what the artists of our theatre have been try¬
ing to do for years. It is drawing realism out of
the theatre as the legendary madstone—the Be-
zoar of the ancients—drew the madness from a
lunatic patient. The only theatre worth saving,
the only theatre worth having, is a theatre mo¬
tion pictures cannot touch. When we succeed in
eliminating from it every trace of the photo¬
graphic attitude of mind, when we succeed in
making a production that is the exact antithesis
of a motion picture, a production that is every-
148 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

thing a motion picture is not and nothing a mo¬

tion picture is, the old lost magic will return once
more. The realistic theatre, we may remember, is
less than a hundred yeats old. But the theatre—
great theatre, world theatre—is far older than
that, so many centuries older that by comparison
it makes our little candid-camera theatre seem like
something that was thought up only the day be¬
fore yesterday. We need not be impatient. A bril¬
liant fresh theatre will presently appear.
 VIII

BEHIND THE SCENES

 VIII

BEHIND THE SCENES

And now the play is played out, and of rhetoric

enough.
—SOCRATES

And is life not like the play? The gods who watch
the drama know that somebody must play the vil¬
lains part, and somebody the paupers. . . . He,
therefore, who is wise plays pauper, king, or villain
with the gods in mind.
—TALBOT MUNDY

T™ taxi drops me at the old Nixon Theatre in

Pittsburgh. I have traveled all day to come here.
It is late. I go up the dark dirty alley littered with
newspapers and refuse, to the grimy old sign,
stage door. Inside, the doorman, the letter-rack,
the dark stage with its one tiny pilot-lamp, a pin¬
point of light in a region of shadows. The stage is
lonely, and forlorn, and as silent as midnight.
Ropes descend from the darkness of the flies, dim
curtains fade away into mystery. How well I
know these stages, with their chill, brooding at-
151
I52 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

mosphere, their echoes and their memories! Here,

in this Cimmerian darkness, in this strange sun¬
less Acheron, dwell the great spirits o£ the Thea¬
tre. I feel them in the air around me.
A partly assembled setting is standing on the
stage. I see the walls of a room hung with pic¬
tures and elaborate window-draperies. I walk
around the setting and go behind it. There is no
back. Only a wooden framework covered with
canvas, stamped with the name of the scene-
painter and blackened by the handling of num¬
berless stage-hands. Behind this scene, which will
presently seem so real when viewed from the
front, there is nothing. Nothing at all. Only the
empty echoing stage, desolate, ominous, pro¬
phetic.
I stand for a while in the shadowy wings, in
the half-light that brings dreams. Here, I say to
myself, is where actors spend their lives. It is their
only home. A strange home for anyone to have,
this comfortless chill void.
I go into the old green-room. I look at the
faded photographs of bygone celebrities, the sons
and daughters of Thespis, yellowed and blurred.
The mask of Lear’s fool seems laid over these
 BEHIND THE SCENES
*53
faces, with their mobile features, their large eyes,
their sensitive mouths, their sad wise air of the
seasoned player—over-emphatic brave faces of
those who have dared to pass out of life into the
life of the theatre. There is a certain pathos about
these figures. I think of the Saturday night par¬
ties, the jumps on trains, the bustling up alleys
in the dark, the knowledge of a life backstage,
behind the scenes. . . .
Why did these actors go into the theatre?
Why did they choose to paint their faces, learn
endless lines, get up on the stage before audi¬
ences? Perhaps they themselves did not know.
They were drawn to the theatre by some name¬
less ambition to dominate, it may be, some desire
to “show off,” or by some half-grasped intuition
as to the nature of their chosen calling. But no
matter how they began, they presently became
part of the Body of the Theatre, as people become
part of the Body of the Church. They became the
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Theatre.
Not all of them were born in the theatre, but
all of them were born for the theatre, born to
tread the boards, to wear the sock and buskin.
They sensed the theatre with a Mnd of sixth
154 THE dramatic imagination

sense. In due time they came to look at life in a

way that was peculiarly theatrical. They came to
see all life in terms of impersonation.
We speak of a scientific attitude toward life, or
of a philosophical attitude, or of a religious atti¬
tude. But of all conceivable attitudes the theatri¬
cal attitude is the most truly creative. To see life as
these actors saw it is to move in a realm of truth
inhabited by few. Our poets and visionaries attain
to this truth in rare and isolated moments of de¬
tachment. But audiences come face to face with
it every night of their lives—yes, and twice a day
on Wednesdays and Saturdays—in every theatre,
at every performance. It lies at the root of all dra¬
matic instinct, and it is the essence of the art of
acting.
It happens to each one of us at times to feel
separated from ourselves, going through the busi¬
ness of living as if we were at once a character in
a play and the actor who impersonates that char¬
acter. Two people dwell in us, an outer self, a
being who answers to the name of John Doe or
Richard Roe, a kind of character-part, so to speak,
and an inner self, a mysterious essence, a hidden
flame, a shy wild Harlequin who plays this part
 BEHIND THE SCENES
s55
before the world. We feel the presence of this
other self when some moment of stark reality
strikes through the conventions of our everyday
lives. There is no one who has not experienced at
some time or other the sense of inward with¬
drawal. All life is indeed a play in which we act
out our roles until the final curtain falls. This idea
of the theatre goes deep. We recognize its truth
in our inmost hearts. We know that it is true as
we know that our souls are immortal. I am per¬
suaded that the consciousness of a dual person¬
ality—the sense of otherness, of apartness, the
sense that we are possessed, that another’s voice
ever and again speaks through us—is a thing that
is very common in human experience and that it
is the only thing that separates us from the
brutes. Perhaps it was the sense of theatre that
made us human, ages ago.
If it is true—as Shakespeare makes the melan¬
choly Jaques say—that all the world’s a stage,
and all the men and women merely players, play¬
ing our many parts on “a vaster place than any
stage,” it follows that we must be playing these
parts before an audience. Who and what is that
audience? Shall we ever know? Perhaps it is an
156 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

unseen audience, a hierarchy of invisible powers,

the Great Republic of “etherial dominations” that
Blake and Shelley saw. I think of the unseen au¬
diences of Toscanini, made free of his art by the
miracle of radio transmission. ... Or is the
earth itself a living, sentient being, as the poets
have told us, and is it her approval for which we
strive, all unknowing, in our performances? And
when the curtain has fallen on the last act of our
lives, if we have played our parts to the best of
our ability, may we hope to hear from beyond
the curtain some vibration of divine reassurance,
some echo as of ghostly applause?
And is there an Author of the piece, who as¬
signs to each of us his part and makes us “masters
of all this world”? And shall we one day be al¬
lotted other parts to be acted on other and yet
vaster stages? Or shall we return again and again
until all parts are played and drama itself is fin¬
ished?
These players became aware of the profound
duality of life at the moment when they spoke
their first lines on a stage, and thereafter all their
acting was animated by it. They called it giving
a good performance. But what they meant was
 BEHIND THE SCENES
*57
that a spirit was present in them for a time, mak¬
ing them say things that they themselves did not
know they knew. This knowledge took its toll of
them. They paid for it with a part of their souls.
No wonder theirs was a Profession set apart.
The thing that is absent from these records is
the thing that never can be recorded, the emotion
that these artists aroused in our hearts, the sense
of triumph they gave us. Their peculiar power
lay in this, that in their impersonation.1 they
could show us man’s creating spirit, in action, be¬
fore our eyes. They did not teach or preach about
life or explain it or expound it or illustrate it. They
created it—life itself, at its fullest and truest and
highest.
And in the end they put aside the make-up
and the vesture and went away into the darkness,
leaving us only a few fading photographs and old
playbills, and their imperishable memories.

Alone with their secret, in the old green-room,

I think of the words of Plotinus: For the soul, a
divine thing, a fragment as it were of the primal
Being, makes beautiful according to their capacity
all things whatsoever that it grasps and moulds.