1938: Drama

Outstanding Plays.

A few productions launched in 1937 must be included as part of the 1938 record; Odets' Golden Boy, because its unsatisfactory denouement was more than forgiven in New York as in London, in return for superb dialogue and memorable characterizations; The Women because of its malicious wit; You Can't Take It With You and Room Service by virtue of freshly invented and hilarious farce-situations; I'd Rather Be Right because its topical fooleries remained pat, and George M. Cohan's playing, crisply contagious; Of Mice and Men because — to quote the Drama Critics' Circle citation as the best play written by an American author in 1937-38 — it revealed 'direct force and perception in handling a theme genuinely rooted in American life,' refusing 'to make the study of tragical loneliness and frustration either cheap or sensational.' On Nov. 27, 1938. Labor Stage's revue, Pins and Needles, marked its first anniversary as one of the most intelligent musical satires of many seasons. The fresh good humor and vigorous bite of the songs 'One Big Union for Two.' 'Chain Store Daisy' and 'Four Little Angels of Peace' continue to throw into relief the staleness of many an over-dressed extravaganza equipped with 'chic' rhymes and the sprightly inconsequence 'one has come to expect.'

To pass in rapid review the drama's offerings during the year 1938 is to confirm, in most respects, the customary pattern. There were the 'shows' whose entertainment value gave them currency; there were gambles which failed expensively; there were managers who hitched their creaking vehicles to a star with a following. And there were plays, which sought to prove and sometimes did that there is a theater of ideas, written by men of proven talents who addressed themselves not only to personal problems which long have vexed humanity, but to the conflicts of more than individual importance which were faced by a world which saw Munich. To those organizations which, like the Group Theatre and the Guild, provided customary fare, were added newly-formed producing groups. There were actors of talent, and a handful who gave brilliant performances. In the field of stage design were solid craftsmen and inspired originators, though many a superbly designed setting went prematurely to the storage warehouse. And there was the much-maligned Federal Theater maintaining its own high record while its spokesmen defended its motives and methods from the inquisitorial Mr. Dies.

First, the 'shows.' Bachelor Born has almost a year's run to prove how persistently amusing can be the simple fable of a middle-aged pedagogue whose romantic past overtakes him. This comedy is by Ian Hay, its locale is Marbledown School in England, and it will doubtless enjoy, after its professional career, a vogue among amateur players in search of 'something not too heavy.' What a Life combined nostalgia with farce comedy, retailing the pranks of High School boys and girls; its cast was chosen with George Abbott's uncanny skill. Clare Booth's Kiss the Boys Good-bye was written, as John Mason Brown remarks, with malice toward everybody; it crackles with venomous wise-cracks, and has to date repeated the success of The Women. It retails the adventures of a detestable Southern girl who yearns to play the principal rôle in what audiences at once identify as Gone with the Wind.

Although Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman claim for The Fabulous Invalid a more serious purpose than the above-mentioned laugh-contrivances, — namely, to suggest by backward glances over the life of an ancient playhouse from the palmy days to the days of striptease, how valiantly the theater has eluded its own obituary — nevertheless one needs more than a series of vaudeville turns, black-outs and the ghosts of three long-dead celebrities to make the kind of play its authors had in mind. The Fabulous Invalid remains a patchwork of scenes which, more wisely chosen, might have suggested the best, not the trashiest moments in America's theatrical history. Donald Oenslager's settings re-created more tellingly than did the 'script, the proud Alexandria Theater.

Knights of Song, by Glendon Allvine, described itself as a 'musical excursion into the lives of Gilbert and Sullivan.' It combined second-rate biographical drama with generous excerpts from the operas themselves; but although Oscar Hammerstein, 2nd, and Laurence Schwab were its producers, and although Nigel Bruce skillfully played W. S. Gilbert, a twelve days' run proved that New Yorkers prefer their Gilbert and Sullivan straight. Another musical biography, Great Lady, celebrated the weaknesses of Madame Jumel, and rapidly succumbed to its own. A comedy with Alison Skipworth, entitled Thirty Days Hath September, cleverly opened on September thirtieth and sadly closed before October was two weeks old. Although Jacques Deval had written the previous success, Tovarich, his new play Lorelei lasted only a fortnight. To be described as amiable but unimportant were these entertainments offered during the final weeks of 1938: A Woman's a Fool — To Be Clever; a farce of college fraternity life called Where Do We Go from Here?; the pleasantly dull Michael Drops In, by William Du Bois; Doris Frankel's tedious debate between housebound radicals and conservatives, Don't Throw Glass Houses; and Thornton Wilder's farce with Jane Cowl. The Merchant of Yonkers, which was directed in the continental manner by Max Reinhardt.

Of that familiar type of play whose action revolves about one character, and whose theatrical effectiveness depends on the skill of the actor who portrays him, the year saw no less than five. Lightnin' was such a play, and twenty years ago Frank Baton played its ingratiating old hero in what became one of the longest runs in stage history. Its 1938 revival, however, with all Fred Stone's charm, failed to add substantially to Lightnin's performance record. Whiteoaks, made by Mazo de la Roche from her own novel, Whiteoaks of Jalna, depended on Ethel Barrymore's crusty characterization of the century-old Gran. Grace George brought her mellow talents to the rôle of Lady Catherine Champion-Cheney in Mr. Brady's revival of Somerset Maugham's The Circle. Eva LeGallienne played Marie Antoinette — for four nights only — in George Middleton's adaptation of a play by Marcelle Maurette called Madame Capetand John Cromwell tried in vain to breath life into the Lord Byron which Stanley Young had made the hero of his play, Bright Rebel. Better than the average actor-play was the study of Oscar Wilde's disintegration which Leslie and Sewell Stokes wrote, and Robert Morley acted. The scenes of Oscar Wilde take that brilliant and tragic man down through the degrading years which followed his London trial and his flight to Paris. Whatever may be the merits of a play which derives no little part of its power from appealing to the morbid curiosity of its audience. Mr. Morley accomplishes a re-incarnation of Wilde that can be set beside one's recollections of George Arliss' Disraeli by virtue of its understanding of the personality portrayed, and of its amazing verisimilitude.

Although such musical offerings as The Girl from Wyoming at the American Music Hall, and that harum-scarum vaudeville. Hellzapoppin' at the Winter Garden, conformed to pattern, more than the customary inventiveness and wit entered into the making of the year's revues. Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1939 was, to be sure, average entertainment; nor did the oft-exploited talents of Clifton Webb, Libby Holman, Lupe Velez and the dancing Hartmans manage to keep alive Cole Porter's You Never Know. But I Married an Angel had Vera Zorina, amusing actress and superb dancer, as the angel who loses her wings. It sparkled with Rodgers-Hart lyrics and was played in Jo Mielziner's ingenious settings with brilliant choreography by George Balanchine, and proved to be, visually and musically, a thoroughly sophisticated performance. Even more independent of revue formula was Sing Out the News, written by Harold Rome and Charles Friedman who fashioned Pins and Needles and, like that entertainment, a musical show with a social conscience. The production of Sing Out the News is more lavish, the tone more uptownish, than was possible in the Labor Stage classic; but the wit that drives deep into the absurdities of our time without for a moment becoming sententious, makes it worthy of its impudent predecessor. The Spewacks have recast their comedy, Clear All Wires as the musical Leave It to Me, in which Sophie Tucker plies her lusty talents, and William Gaxton is a foil to 'Throttlebottom' Victor Moore, now the Ambassador to Moscow who is homesick for Topeka. Tamara daintily sings Cole Porter's songs and Albert Johnson handsomely sets the stage. In The Boys from Syracuse, Abbott, Rodgers and Hart have achieved the feat of presenting a former burlesque comic in a Shakespearean rôle. Jimmy Savo and Teddy Hart play two clowns whose origin is in the Comedy Of Errors, the general outlines of whose plot are the basis for ludicrous and occasionally bawdy anties. The exquisite settings were designed by Mielziner, and the dancing is indebted to Balanchine. In Knickerbocker Holiday one of America's most famous playwrights, Maxwell Anderson, and one of its leading actors, Walter Huston, enter the field of musical comedy. Huston is vastly entertaining as the peg-legged Picter Stuyvesant of New Amsterdam, rendering full value to the flavorsome lines Anderson has given him, and singing and dancing in the bargain. Mielziner recreates the Battery, and the composer Kurt Weill contributes a delightful score. As a whole, Knickerbocker Holiday owes more to the resourceful Walter Huston and to the musical distinction of Weill than to the somewhat cumbersome 'book' in which the author of Winterset warns us that now, as in our national beginnings, that government is best which governs least, and employs an historical parallel to attack by implication the New Deal's social program in terms which will delight anti-Rooseveltians.

All in all, the revue makers of the year gave new brilliance and more substantial content to a dramatic genre which has been notoriously light-headed and which too often has relied upon routine plot and humors more strenuous than witty.

One rather amazing feature of 1938 was the production of at least half a dozen plays with metaphysical tendencies, into which the supernatural entered, and in which the dead mingled with the living. The first, and one of the most successful, of these was written by a Glasgow school-teacher whose ambition was to re-incarnate Dean Swift on the stage in the person of a Catholic scholar, Canon Skerritt, flawlessly played by Cecil Hardwicke, was the central character of Shadow and Substance. The Canon is a fastidious classicist, an intellectual snob who feels nothing but contempt for the 'boobs and footling triflers' who constitute the mass of mankind. The author shows him in crucial conflict with the rebellious school-master O'Flingsley. The victim of their conflict is the servant Brigid, naive and visionary embodiment of all the non-rational elements which the Canon scorns, but the reality of which Brigid's death brings home to him. One of the year's finest acting achievements was Julie Haydon's rapt and glowing Brigid, who believes that 'you're to try to love people when they're dirty because any ass can love them when they're clean.'

Death resolves the conflicts of Shadow and Substance; death more whimsically conceived stalks profane old Gramps through On Borrowed Time in the person of Mr. Brink, who finally takes Gramps and his grandchild Pud, but not before the old man has trapped his adversary in the magical back-yard apple tree and thus created a miraculous respite for all living things. Dudley Digges gave a richly colored interpretation of the canny old reprobate who cheats Death, and Peter Minor played Pud with none of the annoying mannerisms of the child actor. Mielziner's back-yard and apple tree were triumphs of imaginative realism.

Thornton Wilder dramatizes the whole cycle of New England village life in a play performed without conventional scenery on a stage which becomes Our Town because the Stage Manager peoples the stage, paints the scene for our imagination, and quietly explains that 'this is the way we were in our growing up and in our marrying and in our doctoring and in our living and in our dying.' This invaluable Greek Chorus with a Yankee twang, played by Frank Craven, does much to convince audiences that what they are seeing is not only the doings of those on the stage, but the life of a whole community. The strange final scene of Our Town shows the village cemetery where those who have died speak quietly and without envy of the living. Wilder's experiment received the Pulltzer Prize for 'the original American play performed in New York' in 1937-38 which best represented 'the educational value and power of the stage.'

What makes men good or evil? What is Truth? asks Philip Barry in his mystical play, Here Come the Clowns. Eddy Dowling produced it, and plays the vaudeville stagehand Clancy who searches the lives and hearts of a battered crew of vaudevillians for the answer to what Mr. Barry conceives as the riddle of existence. In the course of the author's quest, he probes far deeper into the minds of his people than he did in that earlier philosophical excursion, Hotel Universe. Even those who failed to find enlightenment at the end of Here Come the Clowns, have praised the author's vigorous analysis of character.

In a similar vein of imaginative writing, Outward Bound was produced some fifteen years ago with Dudley Digges. Alfred Lunt and Leslie Howard in its cast. Revived now with Laurette Taylor as the compassionate charwoman and Florence Reed as the haughty Mrs. Clivedon-Banks, Sutton Vane's unassuming fable of a ship's passengers who are dead and who come to realize it, meet the fact each in his own fashion, and prepare to face the inspector at the voyage's end, remains one of the most satisfactory plays about death, and is all the more impressive because it is lacking in metaphysical pretensions.

Only one outright failure among this group of dramatic flights into the unknown, must be recorded: J. B. Priestley's I Have Been Here Before. Built around a rather unconvincing theory of 'spiral' reincarnation, the piece groped awkwardly with ghosts, and will be remembered only for Wilfred Lawson's first-rate performance of its principal role.

Three plays dealt with themes of real importance but failed to win the approval which means Broadway survival. In the case of Oliver H. P. Garrett's Waltz in Goose Step, the author bit off more than he could chew, and in his desire to avoid sententious propaganda, produced an anti-fascist melodrama as exciting as it was brittle. Missouri Legend, by Elizabeth B. Ginty, celebrated the life and death of Jesse James with the romantic gusto of a ballad. Dean Jagger, Dorothy Gish, Russell Collins and Mildred Natwick contributed racy performances to a production which, although not a major success, revealed the talent of the authoress. All the Living deserved, like Missouri Legend, a warmer reception from playgoers. It was made by Hardie Allbright from a book by Doctor Victor R. Small entitled I Knew Three Thousand Lunatics, and it was produced by Cheryl Crawford. Splendidly cast, and expertly directed by Lee Strasberg, this study of a state hospital and of the struggle of Doctor Kromer to establish the value of his new formula by experimentation on the living, was in many ways an impressive achievement. Popular distaste for its subject matter may account for its having played only fifty-two performances.

The season's Hamlet was Maurice Evans' uncut version which plays a little over four hours without boring its audience. Mr. Evans and Margaret Webster, his director, base their production mainly on the Second Quarto edition of a play which, as we know it, has frequently been cut to fit a star performance, leaving situations half resolved, continuities broken, and certain characters undeveloped. Mr. Evans' restored version has the robust and well sustained movement which it must have had for Elizabethans. Playing the title role as both philosopher and man of action, the actor gives a vigorous and resourceful performance and proves, as he intended, that Shakespeare wrote 'a play and not a study of dyspepsia.'

Federal Theater Project.

No single agency for the renewal and extension of the theater's power in America compares in scope with the Federal Theater Projects, which were originally conceived as a means of providing relief for actors and other craftsmen of the stage who had become victims of economic depression. By 1938, the 'Federal' had not only become the source of theatrical enjoyment in regions untouched by Broadway, but on the Rialto itself had rivaled the best which the commercial playhouse had to offer. Under the provisions of the Coffee-Pepper Bill for establishing these and other art projects on a permanent basis under the jurisdiction of a Bureau of Fine Arts, we should have boasted a genuine National Theater governmentally supported, as are similar institutions in many other countries. The bill was defeated, but not before considerable and heated debate, some based on the imperfections of the scheme, some motivated by self-interest, had finally crystallized opposing attitudes. On the affirmative side were Project workers themselves; many liberals who saw in the Coffee-Pepper Bill a step toward democracy in the arts; and playwrights who, like William Du Bois, praised the Federal for having rescued his play Haiti and given it superb production after thirty-three managers had rejected it. Burgess Meredith, Acting President of Actors Equity, saw in the continuation of the F.T.P. a means toward cultural education for 'a nation that could sing and paint and act and play and write and dance' were not its native impulse 'submerged by the flood of mechanical entertainment which does not allow it to participate, only to watch and listen — the tabloid tendency.' The opposition included Broadway producers who tolerated the Federal so long as it stayed off Broadway; conservatives who feared 'regimentation'; and those influential drama critics who believed that 'politics,' administrative red tape and the influence of trade union organizations would destroy the qualitative standards and pervert the artistic motives which the measure aimed to foster.

Meanwhile, the Project continued to enrich the American theater, not content to rest upon such past laurels as Murder in the Cathedral, the Living Newspaper, Lawson's Processional revived, and a negro performance of O'Neill's Glencairn cycle — major events, all of them, in their respective seasons. Children's plays, puppet shows, vaudeville, revues, and revivals of the classics continued to renew theater, consciousness in many a community far from the great centers of show business. In 1937-38, Chicago saw nine Federal productions. San Francisco twenty-two, and Southern California more than forty. In New York, a repertory of five plays was offered at the Maxine Elliott Theater — among them Toller's brilliant satire No More Peace. Power closed in July after more than one hundred performances, Professor Mamlock after seventy-six. Trojan Incident was an experimental dance-drama based on Homer and Euripides. One-third of a Nation made of the housing problem as stirring a theme as any playwright of the year had dramatized. On the Rocks was a new Shaw piece. Prologue to Glory was written by an assistant professor at Iowa State University. E. P. Conkle quite simply takes Abraham Lincoln through the awkward, indecisive months when the young man of twenty-two wrestled with the town bully in New Salem, met Ann Rutledge, became Whig candidate for the State Legislature, and upon Ann's death started out for Springfield to study law. Prologue to Glory derives its strength from the quiet intimations of future greatness, the avoidance of hero worship, and a rugged honesty as characteristic of the play as of its subject.

Cooperative Groups.

One doubts if any previous season could have boasted the existence of four cooperative producing groups working, to be sure, without governmental subsidy and under hazardous Broadway conditions, but with standards higher than the average, and often with the degree of artistic unity which depends on a group-feeling and a continued group-collaboration. The oldest of these enterprises, the Theatre Guild, has in these latter years too often lavished its acting and staging talents on inferior material. Of several years' standing also is the Group Theatre, patron at times of the socially-minded authors and players of the left wing, notably of Clifford Odets. No organization in our theater can match the subtlety and eloquence of its acting ensemble. The Mercury Theater was established by John Houseman and Orson Welles to present plays of contemporary significance and classics freshly interpreted, to an audience paying less than customary prices. Fourth and most recent is the Playwrights Producing Company, five solidly-established American playwrights producing their own works without the aid of a manager, at the rate of one play per member per season.

The Theatre Guild's new offerings were Wine of Choice. The Sea Gull and Dame Nature; they left Guild enthusiasts less than satisfied. S. N. Behrman wrote the first of these, a windy dialogue in which the inevitable Behrman types appear once more — the Senator, the Actress, the Communist, the Epigrammatic Foreigner. Chekhov's masterpiece, newly translated by Stark Young, with delicately designed settings by Robert Edmond Iones, will be remembered for a few vivid characterizations: Richard Whorl's neurotic Constantine, Alfred Lunt's Trigorin, and Lynn Fontanne's strident Irina. The Guild's Sea Gull never achieved that complex and self-sacrificial subordination of part to whole which Chekhov demands and Miss Fontanne's flamboyant impersonation, despite its effectiveness as 'theater,' remained obstinately outside the Chekhovian framework. Dame Nature, a comedy about precocious parenthood adapted by Patricia Collinge from the original by Andre Birabeau, stayed on the boards just long enough to prove its unworthiness as a Guild vehicle, and to inspire recollections of past years when the Guild set the town afire.

The Group Theatre, after a comparative failure with Casey Jones, the best-remembered feature of which was Mordecai Gorelik's extraordinary scenic realization of a locomotive, turned again to Odets and, in November, launched Rocket to the Moon, at once vindicating the high reputation of both playwright and playhouse. In Rocket to the Moon, a plain dentist is torn between conventional fidelity to his hateful wife, and a love affair with his secretary. No character in the play has that 'whole balanced normal life' of which one of its characters speaks as needful to any full experience of life; all are tortured people with jangled nerves and short-circuited emotions, who reveal themselves to us with almost unbearable intensity through the searing speech which only Odets can write — words spoken not by a hastily collected cast but by Luther Adler, Sanford Meisner and Morris Carnovsky, who long ago learned how to meet Odets halfway and who more than compensate for structural blemishes and the occasionally flagging inspiration of the author. Gorelik's designs for the settings become one with the play's mood.

At the very outset of its career The Mercury Theater faced a dilemma which has troubled pioneers before Mr. Houseman and Mr. Welles — namely, a box-office hit so successful that one must either prolong its run at the cost of repertory schedule, or kill it in midcareer and take the financial consequences. The modern-dress Julius Caesar was this perplexing kind of hit. The Mercury's sponsors realized how hazardous a venture is repertory, given the cost of producing several plays in rapid succession, the need to maintain a salary list which includes players relatively inactive for weeks at a time, the desirability of making one's successes pay for one's failures — in short, the enormous difficulty of staging a season, not a single show. Yet The Shoemaker's Holiday soon followed Julius Caesar, and was in turn followed by Shaw's Heartbreak House; the new productions characterized by the incisive direction, bold acting, and original staging that, with the Shakespearean revival, had become a Mercury hall-mark. The town praised Mr. Welles' performance of Captain Shotover in Heartbreak House, and a far greater audience has heard his trenchant condensations of dramatic masterpieces on the radio. In November 1938 the Mercury presented Georg Buchner's Danton's Death, with music by Mare Blitzstein. This romantic piece of a century ago swarms with the personalities and episodes of the French Revolution. The people of Paris play an ingloriously brutish role in Danton's Death; in Welles production their grinning faces look down on the leaders and seem thirstily to wait for the next crash of the guillotine. Vladimir Sokoloff acts Robespicrre in a turbulent evening which leaves little time for individual characterizations; Martin Gabel is Danton, and Orson Welles, a demonic St. Just. Trap doors, excessive spot-lighting and an elevator stage almost overwhelm the play, and lead audiences to wonder whether the grisly theatricality of which Mr. Welles has proven himself a master may not be inimical to good theaters whether the sound and fury which have become his mannerisms may not drown out the things he has to say, and said so well in the Mercury's first production. As 1938 ended, plans were announced for a production early in the new year of Five Kings, which will combine scenes from several of Shakespeare's plays.

The new Playwrights Producing Company consists of Maxwell Anderson, S. N. Behrman, Sydney Howard, Elmer Rice and Robert Sherwood. Its first venture — if anything done by such securely established craftsmen can be called a venture — was the cumbrously comical Knickerbocker Holiday. The second was an instantaneous success; Sherwood's Abe Lincoln in Illinois, directed by Elmer Rice, in which Raymond Massey played Lincoln with almost unbelievable physical likeness and a sympathy with the character's thoughts which left the playwright greatly in his debt. Abe meets Ann Rutledge, marries Mary Todd, debates with Douglas, and at the play's close starts for Washington as President-elect. Mr. Sherwood senses the meaning of these episodes in relation to our time, and the words he gives to Lincoln — many of them are Lincoln's own — stir us deeply because they express a democratic idealism which is faced now, as it was in 1861, by intolerance, race persecution, and divided national counsels. 'This country with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. . . . The old issue of property rights versus human rights . . . will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall long have been silent. . . . There can be no distinction in the definitions of liberty as between one section and another, one class and another, one race and another.' The Playwrights' third production was Elmer Rice's American Landscape, this also a study of the democratic past and its inheritors of the present day confronted by new intolerances and new forms of self-interest. The play concerns the efforts made by the younger members of an old Connecticut family to prevent their father from selling his estate to a Nazi bund, his business to a fat monopoly. In a recent profession of faith, Elmer Rice has explained now, since he wrote The Adding Machine a decade and a half ago, he has steadily concerned himself with man's effort toward freedom. He describes American Landscape as an affirmation of the American way of life, and as a call to the democratic colors. Although his large cast of characters becomes unwieldy, his intention at times confused, and his tone preachy, nevertheless the effort is an impressive one, and the play speaks wisely, if not always well, to our time. Faithful to their announced program, the Playwrights Producing Company have scheduled plays by Behrman and Howard for production in the near future.

Summary.

In summary, the twelvemonth revealed unusual preoccupation with man's inner resources, and much eloquent writing on the theme of Democracy, a theme now constantly in our minds. Such dramatists of industrial strife and the conflict of political ideologies as Sklar, Maltz, Peters, Lawson and Irwin Shaw were silent, and social significance was set to music. Simple plays of the American legend continued to be written, whether of Casey Jones or of Johnny Appleseed, — this latter in a fantasy of pioneer days called Everywhere I Roam, by Arnold Sundgaard and Marc Connelly, which failed to live up to its own magnificent first act. Acting standards were maintained by Maurice Evans and Robert Morley, while Raymond Massey and Morris Carnovsky rose to the challenge of the year's best playwriting. Among designers, Jo Mielziner's range included the stylish I Married an Angel and the quietly evocative backgrounds for Abe Lincoln in Illinois. Gorelik's designs were, as always, profoundly functional. Oenslager was smart in I'd Rather Be Right, and so brilliant in The Fabulous Invalid that his scenery stole the show.

But the American theater is not limited to a few acres of Manhattan Island. The Federal Theatre Projects have accomplished much by way of healthy de-centralization, and when the Coffee-Pepper Bill, or one like it, again comes up for consideration, Americans will have another opportunity to decide whether art is a luxury or a necessity. Readers of the annual number of Theatre Arts Monthly devoted to the 'tributary theater' once more realized how much the vigor of our theater owes to amateurs who skillfully produce Sophocles, Hauptmann, Shaw, Paul Green, Goldoni and Toller on stages throughout the length and breadth of the land, — stages poorly equipped in many cases, and in others, like the newly opened Kirby Memorial Theatre at Amherst College, designed to solve the most complicated staging problems. At its best, the amateur theater performs miracles of enthusiasm and makes the drama live outside textbooks. At its worst, it repeats New York successes as soon as New York tires of them, blunting the experimental edge which was once the chief pride of the Little Theater movement. The tributary theater has found a new ally in Dramatists Play Service, through which the Dramatists Guild makes available to them the best in contemporary writing for the theater, and offers untried scripts for first production. On the professional level, the 1938 convention of the American Theater Guild Council saw producers, playwrights, actors and craftsmen sit down at the same table to discuss common problems. Even the most hardheaded individualists now realize that cooperation has its advantages, and that only through concerted effort can several of the theater's most persistent ills be cured — the 'road,' for example, reclaimed, and the ticket speculators driven from the temple.