American Drama 1916 Part 1
A SPECIAL YEAR OF AMERICAN DRAMA:
BY EDITH J. R. ISAACS
(Chairman American Drama Committee, Drama League of America)
IN China, any man who writes an unmoral play is threatened by the social religious code with a purgatory lasting as long as his play continues to be produced. This is exactly as it should be. It is a delightfully simple and obvious means of placing the responsibility of art to society where it finally belongs—with the artist, relieving society of the burden of obligation— so large a one with us—of being the receivers of bad art.
It is easy to conceive the peace and satisfaction that comes to the soul of an ardent and devout Chinese first-nighter in the knowledge that the author of some frightful farce will suffer at least as great a share of torture through his performance as the audience has suffered. The difficulty is that to make such a law prohibitive and such a remedy effective, an artist must possess not only a living fear of purgatory, but a Chinese faith in the law, and a nation must possess a Chinese assurance in regard to the changelessness of morals.
None of these avenues of escape is open to the American. With us, of the growing West, the last alone is more than a minor difficulty. We are not very old nor very wise; we know just enough of right and wrong to know how little we know of what is really good or bad in the spirit, in the theater or in the communal life of which any national theater should be the mirror. We are composite of a score of nations, to each one of which social and artistic right and wrong is a different thing and a thing differing with each generation that passes. We look back over our history and see how variously men have reckoned morals, especially dramatic morals. It is less than two hundred years ago that a deputation of our Puritan forefathers, on their way from a cock-fighting and bull-baiting exhibit, pulled down a building in which some young radicals in art were attempting to give a performance of “Hamlet” (or was it “Othello”?), the very thought of which shocked their sensibilities. It is within the memory of most of us that “The Doll’s House” was accounted a play too immoral for any young woman to see, and the day when “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” was censored, although too close to be history at all, has been followed by the greedy reception of “Damaged Goods” as a twentieth century Morality.
With such a record behind us, Americans with imagination and a sense of humor will not set themselves up as judges of the morality of any serious art or art work. But to judge the theater, to measure its worth as a factor in national life, is not to judge art, but an institution. And institutions, especially in a nation that is fortunate enough to be still in the making, should have their value tested daily, like electric wires, even if there is no gauge more definable than our “national consciousness” to test them by. Are they American? one may always ask. Are they sincere? Are they true to the times in which we live, true to the actualities of life or to the things of which we dream?
EVER since the theater became an established fact in America, which, let us hopefully remember, is not so very long, the people have passed judgment upon it as they have upon the constitution, the prison system, the steel trust and the army. Conservatives, reformers and radicals alike have been more nearly agreed than they ever were about anything else. It was not related to our literature or our life; it did not aid our social, economic or artistic progress; it did not reflect our character nor mirror our hopes and fears. It was un-American, it was undemocratic, it was unethical, it was material ; worst of all, it was dull.
Having delivered themselves of this opinion, the people paused. Those who were unconnected with the theater, as an institution, turned their backs upon it, and, as their ancestors had shouted “Caterpillars of the commonwealth,” they shouted “The Syndicate,” “the Commercial Manager,” “The Vain and Selfish Star.” Theatrical folk, on the other hand, stood with shocked but eager faces watching an ever-lengthening line at the box-office, and groaned “The Public.” The playwright—not the mechanic who revamped foreign models, but the young American to whom the drama was the living art and the theater its natural home—usually stood between the two, his untried play in his hands.
What was there to do about it? Whose concern was it? About ten years ago it occurred to a great many people at the same time that the condition of the theater was the concern of every one who was interested in it; that here was a public question on which men and women alike shared the all-powerful suffrage of the box-office; that if this suffrage was abused and the theater we elected to have was unworthy, there was something to do about it besides exchanging unpleasant personalities or writing big words about the decay of the drama.
Edgar Allan Poe, who ought to be, but is not, as well known for his illuminating dramatic criticism as for “The Pit and the Pendulum,” has this to say, apropos of the revival of American drama at the time of Mrs. Mowatt’s “Fashion”:
“That the drama, in general, can go down, is the most untenable of all untenable ideas. When sculpture shall fail, and painting shall fail, and poetry, and music; when men shall no longer take pleasure in eloquence, and in grace of motion, and in the beauty of woman, and in truthful representations of character, and in the consciousness of sympathy in their enjoyment of each and all, then, and not till then, may we look for that to sink into insignificance, which, and which alone, affords opportunity for the conglomeration of these infinite and imperishable sources of delight.”
Poe knew that the trouble with the American theater was, not the American drama, but the American theater which rendered the best of American drama impotent and homeless. It was un-American behind the footlights because we had imported it, managers, actors, plays, traditions and all, from England at a time when the drama was too unpopular with the fathers of the nation to win a native home; because, with our Puritan heritage of hatred for the theater, we had never had the artistic strength to throw off the foreign fetters. It was un-American in the pit because the audience was conglomerate and had no common art tradition.
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