"AROMA OF ATHENS" STRIKES NEW NOTE IN THE DRAMA. Katherine Tingley to Open Greek Theater to the Public: Unrivaled Natural Scenery: Marvelous Acoustics. Notes by a Dramatic Critic

A NEW-OLD note in drama has been struck here on the Pacific Coast, which, we feel quite safe in prophesying, will be recorded in many histories. The English-speaking world has been fretting after some new inspiration. We are tired of imitating the Elizabethans; for the time being, that spring would seem to have run dry. What belongs to our own day peculiarly tends to be mere boisterous horseplay or flippant shallowness; vulgar both, and not in any way to be called art. What we have that is good, the work of a few writers, is not so startling in quantity or quality, nor so profoundly original, as to cause us to hope for a new great art period in our own or our children's day. And yet there has been the demand. The public has turned to strange well-springs and found the waters bitter, cloying, soon to run dry; the critics have filled their press columns, both here and in England, with clamorings, prognostications, hasty or timorous judgments, a sense of a great need and expectations. Decidedly the time is ripe for a new birth in the drama.

MEETS NEEDS OF THE TIME

Now the question arises, what needs must this new birth and order meet? Great art meets the needs of its time, sternly turning away from its mere wants; for that reason it is often rejected for awhile by a public clamorous after lower levels of things. Such a clamor we find in our own day after sensationalism—give us action, more action, say the managers; but is this a real need? The world is agog with action as it is; such a riot of action as one might imagine the Gadarene swine indulged in on their seaward last tumultuous journey. The motif is threadbare; we have torn it to tatters and it is time to turn to new modes. Personalism, too, is rampant and bears fruit in an ugly and jangled civilization. What is needed, then, is an art that shall be calm, dignified, beautiful, impersonal; a pointer to and promise of better ways of living.

One turns back to the great art of the Greeks with a sense of relief after all our modern, breathless, tom-tom beating. There we find beauty, calm movement, dignity, national, and not merely personal motifs; above all, an insistence on the higher and eternal verities. We need the Aroma of Athens on our modern stage; because it is precisely that that we need in our modern life.

PLAY DELIGHTED AUDIENCE

A few weeks ago Katherine Tingley presented a new play, The Aroma of Athens, at her Isis theater in San Diego, which struck all who saw it with profound surprise and delight. There was first the ideal poetic beauty of the setting, a thing unrealizable unless seen. The foremost of the London managers—men like Tree—have made a specialty of beautiful setting, astonishing the theatrical world with the splendor of their work in this line—and with its good taste. They have had enormous resources to draw upon, and have spared no expense in time, money, or thought. It may safely be said that none of them has produced anything more beautiful than this Aroma of Athens; it may safely be said that none of them has produced anything so beautiful. One rubbed one's eyes in astonishment, wondering how such things could be, and concluded that Madame Tingley at Point Loma had greater resources to draw upon than are to be found in London, Paris, Berlin, or New York. It is a wonderful thing, prophetic of the time when the culture-metropolis of the world will be right here among us on the Pacific Coast. Madame Tingley long ago said that San Diego would be the Athens of America, and today this is far nearer than we dream. If one would learn what those greater resources of hers are, one must examine her teachings, one must look into that marvelous scheme of education of hers, the Râja Yoga system, which enabled, for example, those little children on the stage to be as graceful, as un-self-conscious as any figures on a Grecian vase. Have you seen children, young children, on the stage, do well, wonderfully well; and then, when the applause rolled in, do better still, remaining sublimely unconscious of the applause? We applauded these children and looked to see, as a matter of course, the aroma of Athens vanish in a series of smirks. But no; clapped we never so loudly, it made no difference to them. They played their Greek games; they were merry and classical; they were Grecian, unstilted, poetic, faery. One's mind went back to Keats' ode:

And the answer was: Athens, Periclean Athens in all her superb flawless beauty and splendor; yes, those were real Athenians; of whom we have read in Keats and Swinburne; that we have seen sculptured in the Elgin marbles. Here they were, in the flesh and blood; here was the heyday of historic beauty, shedding its supreme aroma on us; with these tones Plato and Aeschylus would have spoken; in this manner Phidias and Pericles would have moved. It was a revelation, a marvelous artistic realization—indeed, it is a shame to use such cant hackneyed phrases for a thing so beautiful, so august—and yet so completely natural and unstrained.

GREATER THINGS PROMISED

So much for its performance in a modern theater, but greater things are promised. If all this is true of a play which was first thought of ten days before it was presented—and that is the fact—what is not to be hoped from the new presentation of it on April 17, a presentation of which, we are told, the former ones were but little more than sketches, and which is to be given in a real Greek open-air theater?

The Greek theater at Point Loma, the first in America, was built by Madame Tingley in 1901. It has the true Greek setting, looking out over the sea. A wild cañon runs down from it seaward, full of miniature hills and precipices, among which, now visible and now unseen, winds the path by which the players enter or leave the stage. There will be torchlight processions under the moon new-risen, moving along that path and over the broad stageplace; Greek chanting will be heard; real Greek music, and music with that ineffable something in it lacking in all, or nearly all, modern music, which suggests the hidden life of nature, the weird majesty of Delphi, of Nemesis, of the pipes of universal Pan; the very aroma of Sophoclean drama, plus an echo of that older and even more entrancing Greece,

When—

KINGDOM OF PAN UNCONFINED

One has long suspected that, with luck, one might well come upon a faun in the wild places of that cañon, at least in April, when the rains are newly over and the hillside a riot of bloom and delight. For indeed the kingdom of Pan is not confined; he has provinces here in California, and you may come upon the dales of Arcady in any of the four quarters of the world.

Were Pan or some legate of his to be piping far down the cañon, you would not fail to catch every note of it from every part of the auditorium in the theater; what is whispered on the stage is clearly heard on the topmost tier of seats. The place is a Wonder of the West if only for its marvelous acoustic properties. It has never been opened to the public before for a performance. And it should be remembered that Madame Tingley leaves nothing to chance; she stands out grandly independent in her art; leaves no detail to be excused by the generosity of the audience; permits nothing whatever of which you could say: "This is excellent—for amateurs; this is splendid—considering what a short time it has taken to get up." It may be quite safely affirmed that this presentation on April 17 will have a prominent place in all future histories of the drama.—San Diego Union, Friday morning, April 7, 1911.