26 
THE AMERICAN-SCANDIN AVIAN REVIEW 
tiimes must work with the actor and the playwright with the same 
desire to make an organic production into the life of which the audience 
must enter. Again the idea of co-operation in the arts. Co-operative 
effort to the end of producing unity has been urged and practiced 
by a group of enlightened people until at last it is spreading its in¬ 
fluence throughout the immense public that goes to the play. And 
the active awakening of that idea dates back but little farther than the 
ten years fixed by our convenient yardstick. 
Gordon Craig in England was an early if not the first prophet 
of the new ideal of stage decoration in obedience to which each stage 
set conforms to the mood of the drama produced, and his epochal book 
The Art of the Theatre appeared in 1905, planting a seed that imme¬ 
diately began to grow and develop naturally from the simple to the 
complex. Now in this country experimental “art theatres,” as they 
are afflictingly entitled, have sprung up everywhere, presenting the 
new ideas from all possible angles. The plays given in these theatres 
may be literary, poetic, or social in theme and treatment, but always 
they are the result of a sincere e A>rt to solve a psychological problem 
and give unstereotyped form to a dramatic mood or intellectual idea. 
For these plays backgrounds are devised ranging from the “no 
scenery” screen or curtain, in which the emotional suggestion is given 
by the elimination of all conflicting detail, to the settings in which the 
emotional reaction is determined by a kaleidoscopic play of color, a 
stylistic representation of dynamic emotion in the terms of post-impres¬ 
sionist painting. But the background, however conceived, must be 
relative to the experience the audience is going through in sympathy 
with the play—it must play for the audience as truly as the actors 
play for it and in harmony with them. This new art of the theatre is 
perhaps the most important of all of the newer movements in art, 
attracting and focusing the attention of a larger public than is drawn 
to any or all of the picture galleries, but it is impossible to more than 
touch the outer edge within the limits of a general article. Two quota¬ 
tions from writers who have been intimately associated with the idea 
will serve at least to define its intention and illustrate certain funda¬ 
mental principles: Mr. Lee Simonson in the Theatre Arts Magazine 
draws the following definite little picture of the value to an emotional 
drama of an interpretative setting: “Let Melisande,” he says, “wander 
under the unrelenting glare of electric light, against huge chromo¬ 
lithographs of an American public park in the year 1850, and her cry 
c Je ne suis pas hereuse’ is the ludicrous bleat of a silly child, and the 
cadences of Debussy the merest gibberish. But let me see her, as I 
did more recently, among the cavernous rooms and gaunt terraces of a 
king’s dwelling, as visibly strange and forbidding as Copeau made it, 
and her terror becomes mine and her cry the voice of my most inartic¬ 
ulate sorrow.” 
