Sheldon Cheney's "Theatre Arts Magazine": Promoting a Modern American Theatre, 1916-1921 (review)

Abstract

{ 140 } BOOK REV IEwS garding the culture of love into . . . gender and sexual relationships in modern China” (250). This book, rich in social and theatre history, puts this understudied genre center stage. —KATHY FOlEY University of California, Santa Cruz \ Sheldon Cheney’s “Theatre Arts Magazine”: Promoting a Modern American The­ atre, 1916–1921. By DeAnna M. Toten Beard. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2010. ix + 281 pp. $65.00 cloth. The sea change in the American theatre in the early twentieth century was ushered in by theatre progressives who challenged the day’s theatre, which was composed of colonial dramas, minstrel shows, foreign imports, translations, adaptations, small-town comedies, and melodramas of every stripe—with their italicized emotions and exaggerated story lines, peopled with stock characters. It was a theatre best serviced by the star system, directed by businessmen rather than artists. DeAnna M. Toten Beard devotes her volume to those progressives who, before, World War I, were ignored by Broadway—a theatrical system that served the nation easy, digestible, commercial fare, fare made less attractive by the war. The war annihilated the barriers of our cultural isolation and paved the way for an infusion of psychological expressionism and realism more suited to “modernity.” At the same time, theatrical progressives traveled abroad to witness the experiments of Max Reinhardt in Germany, of Jacques Copeau and his Theatre du Vieux Colombier in France, of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko at the Moscow Art Theatre, and the creations of Adolphe Appia and E. Gordon Craig.Thus,a“new”(American) stagecraft was born,embracing the principles of Appia and Craig,marrying theatrical methods to content and accenting the“inner spirit,”rather than skimming life’s surfaces. The enemy was“Belascoism”— shorthand for David Belasco’s flashy productions, thin plotlines, and overwrought naturalistic scenery. Sheldon Cheney, America’s zealous “missionary for modernism,” prime mover of the New Stagecraft, led the charge. Author of the 1914 The New Move­ ment in Theatre, defining the limits and aims of the new movement, Cheney edited and published the quarterly Theatre Arts Magazine from 1916 to 1921. { 141 } BOOK REV IEwS In the publication, he highlighted the experiments of the nation’s Little Theatre groups, published texts of new plays, reviewed books and plays, and invited critical commentary from the day’s leading dramatic progressives, upon which Toten Beard draws for her volume. She provides critical and insightful background to the selected articles in chapters devoted to Sheldon Cheney, the“Conditions in the American Theatre,”“International Influences,”the“New Stagecraft,” and “American Plays and Playwrights.” Cheney’s editorials occupy a prominent position in the volume. Read here, they situate Cheney’s historic and visionary contribution to American theatre. In “What We Stand For,” Cheney encourages “professionalism”: artists working within the theatre, yet maintaining an “amateur spirit”; he calls for the abolishment of the star system and for drawing clear lines between the commercial and the artistic, or poetic, drama enhanced by simple staging. Elsewhere, Cheney praises the experiments of the nation’s Little Theatres, defines “stylization ,” argues for a municipal theatre, supports experimental dance, and extols the Moscow Art Theatre. Cheney ignores actors and the acting profession, realizing that they would follow—not lead—the movement. Cheney’s interests gravitated to the visual side of the New Stagecraft, yet they did not end there—he was aware that the theatre depended not only on stagecraft but also on strong, modern playwrights and knowledgeable, committed directors to escape being “swallowed by the movies” (21). His mission was to ignite a theatrical revolution touching all practitioners of drama, his manifesto being“to help conserve and develop creative impulse in the American theatre ; to provide a permanent record of American dramatic art in its formative period; to hasten the day when the speculators will step out of the established playhouse and let the artists in” (2). Cheney’s task was Herculean: more needed to be created than destroyed. As this volume proves, the path to theatrical reform was uncertain at best. Kenneth Macgowan questions, were we“to emerge from the war into a new theatre ? Will we find ourselves in that theatre of beauty and expressiveness towards which Russia and Germany and, to...