and a fourth, Ricardo and Viola, was rehearsed there long enough to make manifest its poignant theatric merit. The fifth, Doctor Faustus, was successfully, beautifully, and most effectively produced, though not precisely as it stands herein, by Sam Hume at the Arts and Crafts Theater, Detroit, in January, 1918. In its most abbreviated form, there presented, it played about an hour. Ricardo and Viola may take as long a time. The other three fit readily into a one-act bill, and no director need dread to try them singly, as he would justly dread, at first, to devote a whole production to such unsure experiments. The plays have been rendered presentable even by amateur societies without a trained artist to produce them, if such societies understand simple stage terms like the verb "to drop", meaning to move unnoticeably, while attention is fixed elsewhere, "up" or "down" (that is, away from or towards the audience), or "off" or "on" (that is, laterally away from or towards the center of the stage). Stage "right" and "left", of course, are contrary to the spectator's right and left. "Tormentors" and "wings" mean both the "flats", or painted cloth stretched on tall wooden frames, at the sides of the proscenium and stage, and also the openings before or between these flats. "Borders" likewise mean both the long "strips" of electric lamps suspended above the stage and the "masking" or concealing strips of cloth that hang before them. The "apron" is the part of the stage that is left in front of the lowered curtain. A "cyclorama)" is a semicircular "back-cloth" or 'drop" of dyed or painted stuff, suggesting the sky and hiding the actual walls of the stage. Real literal 66 masks, recommended for use in Doctor Faustus (and made for the Detroit production with extraordinary success by Miss Katherine McEwen), are very new in our theaters; but the noted artist, Robert Edmond Jones, designed a number of them for Caliban at New York in 1916 and Boston in 1917 which proved extremely effective. They are molded out of papier maché to fit snugly over the whole head, padded within, and painted as desired. The adapter, the editor, it should be remembered, is primarily a producer, schooled in the European theatric innovations and experienced in the American Little Theater. As a producer in the theater he has arranged these five plays, not for literary curiosity or academic pleasure, but for the test of artistic production which four of them have successfully survived. They are stage plays, offered to our rising art theaters at merely nominal royalties, and they have unsurpassed stage qualities to commend them, with splendid opportunities for our new artists of the theater gladly to seize upon. SAMUEL A. ELIOT, JR. |