Helen Louise Cohen

There are certain facts about the artistic transformation that the theatre is undergoing in the twentieth century with which students of the drama need to be familiar in order to picture for themselves how plays can be interpreted by means of design, color, and light. The transformation is definitely connected with a few famous names. In Europe two men, Edward Gordon Craig and Max Reinhardt, stand out as reformers in matters connected with the construction, the lighting, and the design of stage settings. In this country the artists of the theatre are, generally speaking, disciples of one or both of these great Europeans and their colleagues. The new stage artist studies the characterization and the situations in the play, the production of which he is directing, and tries to make his setting suggestive of the physical and emotional atmosphere in which the action of the drama moves.

Gordon Craig has written several books and many articles embodying his ideas on play production. In all his writings he emphasizes the importance of having one individual with complete authority and complete knowledge in charge of coordinating and subordinating the various arts that go to make the production of a play a symmetrical whole, his theory being that there is no one art that can be called to the exclusion of all others the Art of the Theatre: not the acting, not the play, not the setting, not the dance; but that all these properly harmonized through the personality of the director become the Art of the Theatre. The kind of setting that has become identified in the popular mind with Gordon Craig is the simple monochrome background composed either of draperies or of screens. It is unfortunate that this popular idea should be so limited because, of course, the name of Gordon Craig should carry with it the suggestion of an infinite variety of ways of interpreting the play through design. His screens, built to stand alone, vary in number from one to four and sometimes have as many as ten leaves. They are either made of solid wood or are wooden frames covered with canvas. The screens with narrow leaves may be used to produce curved forms, and screens with broad leaves to enclose large rectangular spaces. The screens are one form of the setting composed of adjustable units, which can be adapted in an infinite variety of ways to the needs of the play.

The new ideas in European stagecraft began to be popularized in America in the year 1914-15, when under the auspices of the Stage Society, Sam Hume, now teaching the arts of the theatre at the University of California, and Kenneth Macgowan, the dramatic critic, arranged an exhibition that was shown in New York, Chicago, and other great centres, of new stage sets designed by Robert Edmond Jones, Sam Hume, and others who have since become famous. The models displayed on this occasion brought before the public for the first time the new method of lighting which, as much as anything else, differentiates the new theatre art from the old. It introduced the device of a concave back wall made of plaster, sometimes called by its German name "horizont," and a lighting equipment that would dye this plaster horizon with colors that melted into one another like the colors in the sky; a stage with "dimmers" for every circuit of lights, and sockets for high-power lamps at any spot from the stage.

In the same year that the Stage Society showed Robert Edmond Jones's models, he was given an opportunity to design the settings and costumes for Granville Barker's production of Anatole France's The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife, which may be said to have advertised the new practices in America more than any other single production.

The Merchant of Venice. A room in Belmont. Design by Robert Edmond Jones. A great round window framed in the heavy molding of Mantegna and the pale clear sky of Northern Italy.

Writing of his own work shortly after, Mr. Jones says: "While the scenery of a play is truly important, it should be so important that the audience should forget that it is present. There should be fusion between the play and the scenery. Scenery isn't there to be looked at, it's really there to be forgotten. The drama is a fire, the scenery is the air that lifts the fire and makes it bright.... The audience that is always conscious of the back drop is paying a doubtful compliment to the painter.... Even costumes should be the handiwork of the scenic artist. Yes, and if possible, he should build the very furniture."[11] Robert Edmond Jones has not only designed settings and costumes for poetic and fantastic forms of drama, but he has also been called upon to plan the productions of realistic modern plays.

Three of his designs introducing three different aspects of his work have been here reproduced. The model for Maeterlinck's The Seven Princesses is an example of an attempt to present the essential significant structure of a setting in the simplest way conceivable and by so doing to stimulate the imagination of the spectator to create for itself the imaginative environment of the play. His design for a room in Belmont for The Merchant of Venice shows a great round window framed in the heavy molding of Mantegna and the pale, clear sky of Northern Italy. The scene for Good Gracious Annabelle is a corridor in an hotel. This scene is a typical example of a more or less abstract rendering of a literal scene. It was designed primarily with the idea of giving as many different exits and entrances as possible, in order that the action of the drama might be swift and varied.[12]

When Sam Hume was connected with the Detroit Theatre of Arts and Crafts, he used a symbolic and suggestive method for the setting of poetic plays the scene of which was laid in no definite locality. In this theatre he installed a permanent setting, including the following units: "Four pylons [square pillars], constructed of canvas on wooden frames, each of the three covered faces measuring two and one-half by eighteen feet; two canvas flats each three by eighteen feet; two sections of stairs three feet long, and one section eight feet long, of uniform eighteen-inch height; three platforms of the same height, respectively six, eight, and twelve feet long; dark green hangings as long as the pylons; two folding screens for masking, covered with the same cloth as that used in the hangings, and as high as the pylons; and two irregular tree forms in silhouette.

"The pylons, flats, and stairs, and such added pieces as the arch and window, were painted in broken color ...[13] so that the surfaces would take on any desired color under the proper lighting."[14] The economy of this method is illustrated by the fact that in one season nineteen plays were given in the Arts and Crafts Theatre at Detroit, and the settings for eleven of these were merely rearrangements of the permanent setting. This kind of setting is sometimes called "plastic"—a term which refers to the fact that the separate units are in the round, and not flat. The effect secured in settings representing outdoor scenes was made possible only by the use of a plaster horizon of the general type described in connection with the exhibition of the Stage Society.

Robert Edmond Jones and Sam Hume are two of an increasingly large number of artists in America, among whom should be mentioned Norman-bel Geddes, Maurice Browne, and Lee Simonson, who are experimenting with design, color, and light. Underlying the work of all of these is the belief that the whole production, the play, the acting, the lighting, and the setting, should be unified by some one dominating mood. In the work of these new artists, there is no place for the old-fashioned painted back drop, the use of which emphasizes the disparity between the painted and the actual perspective, though their backgrounds are by no means necessarily either screens or draperies. Another new style of background is the skeleton setting, a permanent structural foundation erected on the stage, which through the addition of draperies and movable properties, or the variation of lights, or the manipulation of screens, may serve for all the scenes of a play. A permanent structure of this sort, representing the Tower of London, was used by Robert Edmond Jones in a recent production of Richard III in New York, at the Plymouth Theatre. When Jacques Copeau conducted the ThÉÂtre du Vieux Colombier in New York he had a permanent structure built on the stage of the Garrick Theatre, (p. xxxiii) that he used for all the plays he produced; at times the upper half of the stage was masked, at times the recess back of the two central columns was used. The aspect of the stage was often completely changed by the addition of tapestries, stairs, panels, screens, and furniture.

In the description of the equipment of the Detroit Theatre of Arts and Crafts, reference has been made to a method of painting the plastic units in broken color. This is so important a principle that it should be more generally understood by those who are interested in the theatre. The principle was put into operation by the Viennese designer, Joseph Urban. In practice it means that a canvas painted with red and with green spots upon which a red light is played, throws up only the red spots blended so as to produce a red surface, and that the same canvas under a green light shows a green surface; and, if both kinds of lights are used, then both the green and red spots are brought out, according to the proportion of the mixture of green and red in the light.

Color is being used now not only for decorative purposes, but also symbolically. The decorative use of color on the stage is, obviously, like the decorative use of color in the design of textiles, or stained glass, or posters. The symbolic use of color is less easy to interpret, but it is plain that in most people's minds red is connected with excitement and frenzy, and blues and grays, with an atmosphere of mystery. This is a very bald suggestion of some of the very subtle things that have been done with color on the modern stage.

The new methods of stage lighting make possible all kinds of color combinations and effects. The use of the plaster horizon (or of the cyclorama, a cheaper substitute, usually a straight semi-circular curtain enclosing the stage, made of either white or light blue cloth), combined with high-powered lights set at various angles on the stage, makes outdoor effects possible, the beauty of which is new to the theatre.[15] Nowadays footlights are not invariably discarded, but where they are used they are wired so that groups of them can be lighted when other sections are dimmed or darkened. When the setting shows an interior scene with a window, though the scene may be lighted from all sides, the window seems to be the source of all light. A good deal of the lighting on the stage is what is known in the interior decoration of houses as indirect lighting; colored lights are produced most simply by the interposition between the source of light and the stage of transparent colored slides, gelatine or glass.

In any production that is made under the influence of the new stagecraft, the costumes, like the setting of the play, are considered in connection with the resources of lighting. The costumes, whether historically correct or historically suggestive, whether of a period or conventionalized, are conceived in their three-fold relation to the characters of the play, the background, and the scheme of lights, by the designer or the director under whose general supervision the play is staged.

In general, American audiences are hardly conscious of the existence of these reforms. Here and there, it is true, the manager of a commercial theatre or an opera house has called in an artist to supervise his productions and has thus given publicity to the new way of making the arts of the theatre work together. Certain Little Theatres, also, have educated their followers in the significance of the new use of light and design to represent the mood of a play. The demands that the new method makes on craftsmanship have also commended it to students in schools and colleges interested in play production. Both the Little Theatres and the school theatres are doing a real service when they educate their communities in these new arts, for not only will this education increase the capacity of these particular audiences to enjoy the good things of the theatre, but the influence of these groups is bound in the long run to popularize the new stagecraft.