An Ideal Theater

Founding Visions for a New American Art

Todd London

• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781559364256
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Storia e critica del teatro

• Books covers theatre movement from 1890s to present times
• First ever collection of writings by the founding visionaries
• over 45 essays
  
• Contributors:
  Jane Adams, Julian Beck, Herbert Blau, Robert Brustein, Joseph Chaikin, Harold Clurman, Dudley Cooke, Alice Lewisohn Crowley, RG Davis, Gordon Davidson, W.E.B. DuBois, Zelda Fichandler, Hallie Flannagan, Robert Gard, Susan Glaspell, Andre Gregory, Tyrone Guthrie, John Houseman, Jules Irving, Margo Jones, Lawrence Langer, Eva Le Gallienne, Charles Ludlam, Judith Malina, Theodore Mann, Joseph Papp, Robert Porterfield, Jose Quintaro, Bill Rauch, Bernard Sahlins, Richard Schechner, Peter Schumann, Gary Sinise, Ellen Stewart, Lee Strasberg, Luiz Valdez and others.
• Theatres include: Arena Stage (Washington DC), ACT (San Francisco), Actors Studio (NYC), Actors Workshop (SF), Barter Theatre (Abingdon, VA), Bread and Puppet (Glover, VT), Carolina Playmakers (Chapel Hill), Cornerstone Theatre (LA), El Teatro Campesino (CA), Federal Theatre Project, Free Southern Theatre (New Orleans), Group Theatre (NYC), Guthrie Theatre (Minneapolis), La Mama (NYC), Living Theatre (NYC), Mark Taper Forum (LA), Open Theatre (NYC), Public Theatre (NYC), Roadside Theatre (Whiteside, KY), SF Mime Troupe (CA), Steppenwolf Theatre (Chicago), Yale Repertory Theatre (New Haven), Among others.

Chapter 1

What Is America? / What Is an American Theater?

Democracy speaks in many voices . . .

—Hallie Flanagan

The Hull-House Dramatic Association (later, Hull-House Players)

FOUNDED 1897

Jane Addams

The American art theater begins as a search for American identity. It is forged in the melting pot. That our stages can be a place where the American Babel celebrates cultural distinctions while finding a common tongue is evident in the vision of the nation’s first art theater, founded by reformer Jane Addams in a settlement house in the urban ghetto of Chicago near the end of the nineteenth century.

Credited by many as the first little theater in the U.S., the Hull-House Dramatic Association—or, as it came to be known, the Hull-House Players—was one of many artistic, cultural and educational activities of the Chicago-based settlement house from which its name comes. Hull-House proper was founded in 1889, and started offering classes and staging plays in the late 1890s, including some of the earliest American productions of work by Shaw, Ibsen, Gerhart Hauptmann and Lady Gregory, to audiences of immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Italy, Bohemia, Greece, Russia, Poland and Mexico, all clustered in the tenements surrounding the corner of Halsted and Polk, where the house stood.

At this crossroads, Hull-House was a contradiction of identification and assimilation, as the transplanted played out the stories of their national identities and began to steep in the American melting pot. Although the organization announced it would cease operations in January 2012, the first-ness of Hull-House reminds us that ethnic, racial and cultural diversity was an originating premise of our theater, not a late-twentieth-century concept applied after the fact.

“A house, easily accessible, ample in space, hospitable and tolerant in spirit, situated in the midst of the large foreign colonies which so easily isolate themselves in American cities . . .” This was how Jane Addams, Hull-House’s founding, guiding angel pictured it. Inspired by British social reformers and, especially, by the Toynbee Hall settlement in the London slums, Addams’s utilitarian fervor—her belief in education, progressive reform, self-expression and democracy—led not only to the birth of this American art theater, but to other firsts as well—public baths, pools, gymnasiums and kitchens in Chicago; women’s labor unions; local investigations of sanitation, tuberculosis, infant mortality and cocaine distribution. Though not widely remembered today, Addams was, by 1931—when she became the first American woman awarded the Nobel Peace Prize—one of the most famous women in the nation.

The following excerpt from her 1910 autobiography, Twenty Years at Hull-House, tackles the question of what makes an American theater. And she poses a bigger question, one that we’re still grappling with more than a century later: What is America?

—TL

SOURCE: Twenty Years at Hull-House, by Jane Addams, 1910.

One of the conspicuous features of our neighborhood, as of all industrial quarters, is the persistency with which the entire population attends the theater. The very first day I saw Halsted Street, a long line of young men and boys stood outside the gallery entrance of the Bijou Theater, waiting for the Sunday matinee to begin at two o’clock, although it was only high noon. This waiting crowd might have been seen every Sunday afternoon during the twenty years which have elapsed since then. Our first Sunday evening in Hull-House, when a group of small boys sat on our piazza and told us “about things around here,” their talk was all of the theater and of the astonishing things they had seen that afternoon.

But quite as it was difficult to discover the habits and purposes of this group of boys because they much preferred talking about the theater to contemplating their own lives, so it was all along the line; the young men told us their ambitions in the phrases of stage heroes, and the girls, so far as their romantic dreams could be shyly put into words, possessed no others but those soiled by long use in the melodrama. All of these young people looked upon an afternoon a week in the gallery of a Halsted Street theater as their one opportunity to see life. The sort of melodrama they see there has recently been described as “the ten commandments written in red fire.” Certainly the villain always comes to a violent end, and the young and handsome hero is rewarded by marriage with a beautiful girl, usually the daughter of a millionaire, but after all that is not a portrayal of the morality of the ten commandments any more than of life itself.

Nevertheless the theater, such as it was, appeared to be the one agency which freed the boys and girls from that destructive isolation of those who drag themselves up to maturity by themselves, and it gave them a glimpse of that order and beauty into which even the poorest drama endeavors to restore the bewildering facts of life. The most prosaic young people bear testimony to this overmastering desire. A striking illustration of this came to us during our second year’s residence on Halsted Street through an incident in the Italian colony, where the men have always boasted that they were able to guard their daughters from the dangers of city life, and until evil Italians entered the business of the “white slave traffic,” their boast was well founded. The first Italian girl to go astray known to the residents of Hull-House was so fascinated by the stage that on her way home from work she always loitered outside a theater before the enticing posters. Three months after her elopement with an actor, her distracted mother received a picture of her dressed in the men’s clothes in which she appeared in vaudeville. Her family mourned her as dead and her name was never mentioned among them nor in the entire colony. In further illustration of an overmastering desire to see life as portrayed on the stage are two young girls whose sober parents did not approve of the theater and would allow no money for such foolish purposes. In sheer desperation the sisters evolved a plot that one of them would feign a toothache, and while she was having her tooth pulled by a neighboring dentist the other would steal the gold crowns from his table, and with the money thus procured they could attend the vaudeville theater every night on their way home from work. Apparently the pain and wrongdoing did not weigh for a moment against the anticipated pleasure. The plan was carried out to the point of selling the gold crowns to a pawnbroker, when the disappointed girls were arrested.

All this effort to see the play took place in the years before the five-cent theaters had become a feature of every crowded city thoroughfare and before their popularity had induced the attendance of two and a quarter million people in the United States every twenty-four hours. The eagerness of the penniless children to get into these magic spaces is responsible for an entire crop of petty crimes made more easy because two children are admitted for one nickel at the last performance when the hour is late and the theater nearly deserted. The Hull-House residents were aghast at the early popularity of these mimic shows, and in the days before the inspection of films and the present regulations for the five-cent theaters, we established at Hull-House a moving picture show. Although its success justified its existence, it was so obviously but one in the midst of hundreds that it seemed much more advisable to turn our attention to the improvement of all of them or rather to assist as best we could the successful efforts in this direction by the Juvenile Protective Association.

Long before the Hull-House theater was built we had many plays, first in the drawing room and later in the gymnasium. The young people’s clubs never tired of rehearsing and preparing for these dramatic occasions, and we also discovered that older people were almost equally ready and talented. We quickly learned that no celebration at Thanksgiving was so popular as a graphic portrayal on the stage of the Pilgrim Fathers, and we were often put to it to reduce to dramatic effects the great days of patriotism and religion.

At one of our early Christmas celebrations Longfellow’s “Golden Legend” was given, the actors portraying it with the touch of the miracle play spirit which it reflects. I remember an old blind man, who took the part of a shepherd, said, at the end of the last performance, “Kind Heart,” a name by which he always addressed me, “it seems to me that I have been waiting all my life to hear some of these things said. I am glad we had so many performances, for I think I can remember them to the end. It is getting hard for me to listen to reading, but the different voices and all made this very plain.” Had he not perhaps made a legitimate demand upon the drama, that it shall express for us that which we have not been able to formulate for ourselves, that it shall warm us with a sense of companionship with the experiences of others? Does not every genuine drama present our relations to each other and to the world in which we find ourselves in such wise as may fortify us to the end of the journey?

The immigrants in the neighborhood of Hull-House have utilized our little stage in an endeavor to reproduce the past of their own nations through those immortal dramas which have escaped from the restraining bond of one country into the land of the universal. A large colony of Greeks near Hull-House, who often feel that their history and classic background are completely ignored by Americans, and that they are easily confused with the more ignorant immigrants from other parts of southeastern Europe, welcome an occasion to present Greek plays in the ancient text. With expert help in the difficulties of staging and rehearsing a classic play they reproduced the Ajax of Sophocles upon the Hull-House stage. It was a genuine triumph to the actors, who felt that they were “showing forth the glory of Greece” to “ignorant Americans.” The scholar who came with a copy of Sophocles in hand and followed the play with real enjoyment did not in the least realize that the revelation of the love of Greek poets was mutual between the audience and the actors. The Greeks have quite recently assisted an enthusiast in producing Electra, while the Lithuanians, the Poles and other Russian subjects often use the Hull-House stage to present plays in their own tongue, which shall at one and the same time keep alive their sense of participation in the great Russian revolution and relieve their feelings in regard to it. There is something still more appealing in the yearning efforts the immigrants sometimes make to formulate their situation in America. I recall a play, written by an Italian playwright of our neighborhood, which depicted the insolent break between Americanized sons and old country parents so touchingly that it moved to tears all the older Italians in the audience. Did the tears of each express relief in finding that others had had the same experience as himself, and did the knowledge free each one from a sense of isolation and an injured belief that his children were the worst of all?

This effort to understand life through its dramatic portrayal, to see one’s own participation intelligibly set forth, becomes difficult when one enters the field of social development, but even here it is not impossible if a Settlement group is constantly searching for new material.

A labor story appearing in the Atlantic Monthly was kindly dramatized for us by the author, who also superintended its presentation upon the Hull-House stage. The little drama presented the untutored effort of a trades-union man to secure for his side the beauty of self-sacrifice, “the glamour of martyrdom,” which so often seems to belong solely to the nonun...