Kenneth Macgowan

Of all of our American dramatic critics, Kenneth Macgowan is probably the best known in England. This is partly because in his books he has chosen to discuss the drama as a whole, its development and its experiments, rather than to confine his efforts entirely to current reviewing. Also, he has allied himself with such experimenters as Robert Edmond Jones, the scene designer, and Eugene O’Neill. Macgowan is of Scotch-New England descent. He was born in Winthrop, Massachusetts, and was graduated from Harvard. He gravitated to New York City journalism via the Boston “Transcript” and the Philadelphia “Public Ledger”. Macgowan is slight, forceful, capable of great enthusiasm and of violent prejudice. He has always been an apostle of the new, of the slightly bizarre. His “Continental Stagecraft” is a book which challenges the American producer. His “The Theatre of Tomorrow” was a sort of glorified modern footnote to Craig and Moderwell. A young man much interested in trends and ideas, his influence has already been marked in the development of the American theatre.

RELIGION AND THE THEATER

For twenty years now there has been a great fuss going on about something called the new movement in the theatre. Craig, Appia, Reinhardt; Bakst, Urban, Jones; simplicity, suggestion, synthesis; Drehbühne, pointillage, régisseur; art theatre, little theatre, circus theatre—in spite of the confusion of such catchwords, it is hard to escape the belief that this ferment in the theatre means something. Something for life and from life; something for art and from art. Something immensely important to the sense of godhead in man which is life and art together, life and art fecundating one another.

It seems peculiarly clear that the new forces in the theatre have been working toward a spiritual change far more novel, far more interesting, and naturally far more important than any of the technical changes which they have brought about.

The technical changes have been confusing. First this business of scenic designers and revolving stages and all manner of show and mechanism; and now the “naked stage”, the permanent setting, abdication of the artist, scrapping of the machines, the actor alone on a podium or in a circus ring. All in the name of drama.

There is only one explanation. These changes have come as part of an attempt to restore the theatre to its old functions. They are two very extraordinary functions. One may be debauched into titillation, or may rise to that fulness of vitality, that excitation, upon which the second function of the theater is based—the function of exaltation.

Between the old theatre, in which these functions worked as potently as they worked seldom, and the theatre in which they may work again, lay the theatre of realism. It was the product of a tremendous force, a force for evil as well as good—twentieth century science. Science made the theatre realistic and realism made the drama scientific. It ceased to be a show. It became a photograph. The drama was made “truer”, but only in the sense that a photograph may be truer to fact than a drawing by Picasso. It achieved resemblance to life. And then it ceased to have excitement or exaltation, because excitement, in the vivid sense in which I use it here, is a most uncommon thing in modern life, and because exaltation is rare and hidden, showing seldom in outward relations. Both are too exceptional for realism.

The restoration of excitement to the theatre may appear to degrade it from the exact and austere report of life which realism demanded. But the thrill of movement and event is the element in the theatre which lifts our spirits to the point where exaltation is possible. The power of the theatre lies in just this ability to raise us to ecstasy through the love of vitality which is the commonest sign of divinity in life. And when the theatre gives us ecstasy, what becomes of science? And who cares?

The new forces in the theatre have struggled more or less blindly toward this end. They have tried beauty, richness, novelty to win back excitement. They have only just begun to see that the liveliest excitation in the playhouse may come from the art of the actor and the art of the régisseur when they are stripped to the task of providing exaltation. Present the actor as an actor and the background as an honest material background, and you are ready for what glories the playwright and the peculiar genius of the theatre can provide. The drama is free again for its eternal task—the showing of the soul of life.

Just how much this may mean is perhaps the test of your belief in the theatre. It is the conviction of some of us that there has resided in the theatre—and our hope that there may reside once more—something akin to the religious spirit. A definition of this spirit is difficult. It is certainly not religion. It goes behind religion. It is the exaltation of which formal creeds are a product. It is the vitality which informs life, and begets art. Out of the intensity of spiritual feeling which rises from the eternal processes of the universe, and in turn becomes conscious of them, the thing is born which made Greek tragedy noble, and which called drama back to life in the Middle Ages. Then it was the spirit of religion. To-day we might call it the spirit of life.

Both consciously and unconsciously men of the theatre have sought to win back this exaltation. The latest attempt is in some ways the most daring and the most interesting. Max Reinhardt, leaving the playhouse altogether, has tried to find it in a wedding of the drama and the church. Before this is in print Reinhardt will have produced Calderon’s mystic drama, “The Theatre of the World”, under the high altar of the Collegien Kirche in Salzburg. It is impossible now to speak of how far he has been able to effect an æsthetic union between the handsome rococo edifice and the platform for his players; it is only possible to speculate on the spiritual feeling which spectators may gain through looking up at the actors from a flat floor instead of looking down upon them. I cannot speak of the actual presence of exaltation in the audience, but we can speculate together on the possibilities of winning back spiritual vitality for the drama by union with the church.

First of all, there comes the disquieting thought that the theatre presents the spectacle these days of a bird that lays eggs in other birds’ nests. It isn’t content with the one it has used for some centuries. It must go snooping about looking for a new haven for the drama. It tries the circus. It tries the ballroom. It shows us the Grosses Schauspielhaus in Berlin, and the Redoutensaal in the palace of Marie Theresa in Vienna. It even seems to have got a notion of laying its eggs on the fourth wall. As this wall was the only thing not thoroughly real in the realistic theatre, the result—the motion picture—is a bit of a scramble. And now the cuckoo theatre has its eye on the church.

A truer charge might be that the human animal has a perverse liking for novelty, but even that could be countered with the assertion that out of the stimulation of novelty, as out of almost any stimulation, man can make art—if he has it in him. As to that strange bird, the theatre, it has never had good homekeeping habits. It laid its eggs on Greek altars, and in mangers of Christian chapels. It nested in inn yards in England, and in tennis courts in France. The fact that the theatre has a habit of roaming is worth about as much in this discussion of its chance in the modern church, as the fact that it once found ecstasy by the Greek altar and never produced anything approaching dramatic literature while it was in the Christian church.

In the relation of the church and the theatre there seems to be a problem for Europe and a problem for America. The possibility of the two uniting appears much greater in Europe. Europe—particularly central and southern Europe, where Catholicism flourishes—holds far more of genuine religious spirit than does America. Moreover, the church there has the strength of tradition and of art behind it. The æsthetic-emotional grip of the churches themselves, their architecture, their atmosphere, the sense of continuity that lives in them, grips men and women whose minds reject or ignore the authority of dogma. Even an American, cut off from the traditional side of this life, would feel a thrill in a drama in the Collegien Kirche in Salzburg or in the Cathedral of Chartres that no performance in a theatre could give him. The beauty of the ages would bless the drama in almost any European building except a theatre. But come to America and try to imagine “Everyman” in Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street, or “The Theatre of the World” in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, not to bring it down to the level of a Methodist meeting house. The theatre can always make religion more dramatic; witness the experiments of the Reverend William Norman Guthrie and Claude Bragdon with lighting and dance in St. Mark’s in the Bouwerie. But I do not think that any American church short of some Spanish Indian mission in the southwest can make the drama more religious.

For America—and, I suspect, for Europe, too—the problem is to find a way to the spirit independent of the church. It is not a question of producing plays in cathedrals but of producing the spirit of life in plays. It is not: Can religion make itself theatrical? but: Can the theatre make itself—in a new sense—religious?

If modern life, particularly the life of America, were spiritual in any degree, all this would be simple. Church and theatre would both minister—as neither of them does now—to the life of the spirit. America has no art and no religion which can make drama religious. America doesn’t believe, in any deep sense. Science has shattered dogma, and formal religion has not been able to absorb an artistic or a philosophic spirit great enough to recreate the religious spirit in men.

The thing is still more difficult because there is nowhere in this country—unless, again, it is in the southwest—a sense of the age-long processes of life which are part of the soil and which leave their mark in men and women through the physical things that have always cradled them. In Europe even the cities hold this ancient and natural thing; they are shaped by man and time even as the fields and the hills are shaped by time and man. These cities bask and lie easy. There is a sense of long, slow growth in the very stones. In America, it is not only that our cities are new and brash. Our countryside is the same. Even our farmhouses stick out of the land like square boxes. As simple a house in Europe has a width that reconciles it with the sweep of the fields. The American farmhouse is a symbol of our separation from the soil. We are out of touch with the earthy vitality of life which might bring us at least a little sense of the eternal.

If the man of the theatre gives up the American church as a path to the spirit of life, and if he finds no religion in modernity from which to bring religion to the stage, what can he do? Is it possible that he can create spiritual affirmation in the people by creating it in the theatre? Can he see the vision himself, and if he sees it and embodies it, can it make over the people?

Clive Bell, writing in “Art”, has described how such artists as William Blake and a very few others have reached the spiritual reality of existence—the thing we should call religion—directly, by pure intuition: “Some artists seem to have come at it by sheer force of imagination, unaided by anything without them; they have needed no material ladder to help them out of matter. They have spoken with reality as mind to mind.”

Vision of this sort is so inordinately rare that it seems as though some other way must be found to open spiritual truth to the artist of the theatre. The only other way is through the deepest understanding of life itself. What can the artist find in American life to bring the vision? Nothing, surely, on the surface. Our architects have reached a more noteworthy expression than perhaps any of our painters, because they have somehow managed to identify themselves with a spirit of affirmation behind those industrial forms that our commercial imperialism presents to view in our men of position like Morgan and Ford, our periodicals like “The American Magazine” and “The Saturday Evening Post”, our subways, our cigarette ads, our patent medicines, and our Kuppenheimer clothes.

The artist of the theatre who is to create ecstasy by finding it, must see deeper than the architects behind the sham of American life. He must grasp the Spirit of America in a meaning so extraordinary that the use we ordinarily make of that phrase will seem impossibly and blasphemously cheap. We have hints of what the artist must see and understand in Sandburg’s sense of Chicago, in Vachel Lindsay’s sense of the middle west, in Waldo Frank’s sense of New Mexico.

When theatrical genius has grasped the truth of America, it must be his business to make of himself and his theatre a magnifying glass for the rest of his fellows. What he has been able to seize by sheer intuition, he must put in such form that it can seize all America. It is the hope of the theatre that it can make the vision of one man become the vision of many.

There is no reason why a man of the theatre should not have the vision; it has come to other artists. They have been able to transfer some share of it to the sensitive, the developed, the intellectual. The artist of the theatre can perhaps transfer it to millions, to the uneducated and the dull as well as to the receptive. In the theatre he has a very extraordinary instrument. It is the art nearest to life; its material is almost life itself. This physical identity which it has with our very existence is the thing that can enable the artist to visualize with amazing intensity a religious spirit of which he has sensed only the faintest indications in life. He can create a world which shines with exaltation and which seems—as it indeed is—a world of reality. He can give the religious spirit the pervading presence in the theatre which it once had in the life of the Greeks and of the people of the Middle Ages. And when men and women see eternal spirit in such a form, who can say that they will not take it to them?