Excerpt from The Plays and Books of the Little Theatre
Concerning the state of the little theatre today, two mutually exclusive but arresting viewpoints prevail in the critical diocese. One holds that having abundantly leavened the barren loaf of the legitimate stage, it has by that same token outlived its pristine fruitfulness. The other contends that the little theatre will, and must, continue to flourish cheek by jowl with the professional playhouse, thus completing the function of both laboratory and supply base.
Of late the latter commissary role of the little theatre has been most provocative of justified optimism, as well as highly prolific of actual results, more or less commendable and far-reaching. For quite a long interval, owing to huge moneyed syndicates, grimly intrenched, the legitimate theatres remained unmalleable to the repeated assaults of the new theatrecraft engineered, for the most part, by small outlawed groups. Despite this fact, perhaps because of it, these groups continue to multiply, springing up unforced in remodeled barns, canvas-roofed backyards or in transfigured garages. While Mr. Sara Shipman, for example, is at present doling out piecework in his Play Sweatshop on Broadway, such clear-eyed enthusiasts as The Provincetown Players and The Wisconsin Players are conducting brave little try-out theatres tending to encourage the beginning playwright and the scene-designer with a new idea. The enormous irony of the situation is apparent when one considers the strabismic boycott once launched on Broadway.
To cite the classic example: Mr. Belasco, during the first season of the Washington Square Players, deigned to honor the Bandbox with his Rhadamanthine presence. But he went away the more firmly rooted in an inexorable determination to pursue his wonted course of nice, denatured realism - a realism that obtrudes constantly on the wonder and attention of the audience - but which somehow fails to "realize." On the other side, a handful of legitimate producers, by attending the little theatre performances with open mind, were eventually won over to the cult of the new stagecraft. Foremost among the latter should be mentioned Mr. Winthrop Ames and, particularly, Mr. Arthur Hopkins, whose productions of the Clair Kummer comedies and "Redemption" and "The Jest," notwithstanding their faults, testify to the foreshadowed risorgimento of the commercial theatre.
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