The cupboard was bare

JOHN MASON BROWN

For more seasons than is good for it, the American theatre lias gone surf-bathing in the wake of the talents of the men and women who first entered it a decade or so ago. Night after night, and year after year, houselights have been lowered and curtains raised on productions of all sorts and kinds. But with very few exceptions, the new plays which have been worth sitting out, and the new performances which have earned the greatest amount of adjectives and applause, have been the work of men and women whose abilities had begun to be recognized some time before there was a tempest in the Tea Pot Dome.

These men and women who made the theatre their own in the days when the George Washington was replacing the Mayfloiver as a presidential yacht, have deserved the prominence which has come their way. As playwrights, as designers, as managers and actors, as groups and individuals, they have put their stamp upon the stage, changing its character, raising its standards, and giving it a maturity it could not claim in those carefree years before Sarajevo, when Broadway was still at prep school, and when The Easiest IFay, As A Man Thinks, Nobody's Widoiv, Baby Mine, and Bought and Paid For were listed among the native drama's upperclassmen.

The American theatre, as we now know it at its best in Times Square, or, for that matter, in Timbuctoo, is largely the result of what they brought to it and are still bringing to it. They had ideas. They were discontented with what they found. They were young enough to think they could change things, and confident enough to act as though they were a generation which had, as Mr. Lippmann has phrased it, an appointment with destiny. At times they were precious. At other times they were pretentious. Many of them were mediocrities. And none of them may have been real titans. But whether they embarrassed the old-time commercial managers by issuing manifestoes on the art of the theatre, or set quietly to work to make the best of a bad job on Broadway, they did succeed in making the theatre seem as important and exciting as they believed it to be.

• There was something contagious about their talents and their youth, just as there was something immensely hopeful about their numbers. They literally invaded the side alleys that lead to theatrical fame. They swarmed the stage-doors, and toted brief-cases to the managers that bulged with plays, some of which at least were decidedly worthy of production. They banded themselves together into "Art Theatres", talked about Reinhardt and Stanislavsky, dreamed of repertory, canonized the director and the designer, began to look upon Mr. Belasco as "The Wizard of '88" (to quote Mr. Woollcott), took advantage of the rich harvest of European plays which the timid impresarios of earlier years had been afraid to produce, burned incense before the altars of Craig and Appia, went mad over German stagecraft, toyed with Expressionism, saturated themselves in the traditions of the Moscow Art Theatre, wrote about American subjects with a new honesty, forgot about Charles Frohman and his star system, commenced to abandon the road, persuaded bankers to function as patrons of the drama (this was at a time when bankers were still thought of as "angels"), and in general remade the map of Broadway as completely as ever the Big Four remade the map of Europe.

These men and women who refashioned our theatre and upon whose talents we still rely for what is most notable in it, may not have been of the same age, but they made themselves heard during the same post-war years and gained their present preeminence within the same decade. As clowns and as actors, as Composers and as dancers, as playwrights and directors, as costumers and designers, they endowed the stage of the '20's— especially the early '20's, when they were still finding themselves—with the kind of excitement the theatre cannot at present claim. Such was the variety and quality of their contribution that even now, when they and we are far from the wheel-chair age, they incline us to salute their burgeoning years with those nostalgic sighs and head-shakings that the graybeards are fond of using for "the good old days" of Tony Pastor's and of Booth's, when the theatre, my children, was really the theatre.

Fortunately for all of us, most of these men and women are still with us. Their talents have matured with the years. As they have passed the thirties or the forties, they find themselves at that happy period when their powers are at the zenith. And the better of them still have things to say, to which audiences can listen with profit for many seasons. But the very security which some of them have achieved, raises a question—a grave, almost an alarming question—to which no definite answer can now be given. And that is, what young people has our present-day theatre in reserve who, when the time comes, can fill the places of these men and women of the front rank?

Who among the younger dramatists, as yet unheard from, will prove such a master of topsy-turvy and topical satire that he can carry on the tradition of George S. Kaufman, or be so accomplished at the felicities of whimsicomical dialogue that he can write comedies which are a match for Philip Barry's, or tragedies of such a powerful and earth-sprung sort that their strength will command the world audience that is O'Neill's? What young actresses just emerging will some day have scrapbooks that read like Katharine Cornell's or Eva Ee Gallienne's? What boy actor will fill the void left long ago by John Barrymore when he deserted Elsinore for Hollywood, or face a justice of the peace to form a team that is comparable with the Lunts? What amiable eccentric will fill the shoes of Mr. Wynn (as though that weren't a very large order), or turn out inventions equal to Joe Cook's, or be mortified in Jimmy Durante's fashion? What budding designers will do for the next decade what Robert Edmond Jones and Lee Simonson and Norman-bel Geddes have done for this? What monologists will master a difficult medium with Ruth Draper's or Cornelia Otis Skinner's ease? What directors will he trained to do for their generation what Philip Moeller, Jed Harris and Worthington Minor have done for theirs? What young managers will he ready to duplicate, or, better still, extend, the work of Arthur Hopkins, Gilbert Miller, the Civic Repertory Theatre, or the Theatre Guild? In short, what present indications have we of the future of our theatre?

The real truth is that we have precious few. The future of our theatre is on the knees of the gods, and as Otis Skinner has observed, the knees of the gods grind slowly. The auguries that are now at hand are not encouraging. On the strength of them, even Charles M. Schwab would have to exercise his ingenuity in order to issue an optimistic proclamation.

In spite of hard times and the strong competition Hollywood now offers, plenty of young people are still drawn to the theatre as a profession. Apparently it has not lost its fascination for them. The Little Theatres, the drama departments of the larger universities and the acting schools are still crowded with stage-struck tyros who make those pathetic sacrifices for the sake of future fame that read so nicely in success stories. A1 Smith's sidewalks of New York are daily pounded by the feet of tired applicants who play a tragic game of Musical Chairs, going from one casting director's office to another. Postmen still bend their hacks under the strain of manuscripts that young dramatists have sent off to the managers. But the results are no longer what they once were, and our theatre remains safely (perhaps dangerously is the more accurate word) in the hands of the men and women who first entered it in the years following the war; an institution that is fast approaching middle-age and one in which—-except for a small group of actors, a few designers, a young director or so—almost everyone who is of any real importance will never see thirty again.

• That is doubtless as it should he, because it takes time for playwrights to grow up, for actors and directors to master their crafts, for managers and designers to learn their trades. But if the relay race is to go on; if that apostolic succession of writing talents, which Mr. Shaw once claimed in a moment of picturesque exaggeration was as continuously inspired from Aeschylus to himself as the apostolic succession of the Christian Church, is not to be interrupted, some young people should by now he appearing whose talents are of such a kind that they invite hopes to he invested in them. To say such young people do not exist, or to imply they will not he mothered by necessity, would he ridiculous, but no sillier than it would he to claim that at present they are plentiful, or for that matter even discernible.

On the face of it, there seems to he less cause for worry about the actors than about any of the stage's junior servitors. Apparently they belong to a hardier and more common breed than the others. These youngsters may have no futures. The first crow's foot may he enough to imperil their careers. But while they are young, they cannot help hut have their youth. As that most frequently is the major gift they are asked to contribute, they are not difficult to find. The drama's irresistible young women are fairly numerous. Almost every season some of them emerge as comely débutantes, possessed of those ingenue virtues which are the most deceptive of dramatic assets. They are fresh. They have beauty and charm. But when their flapper days are past, you may be sure that hardly any of them will be able to follow Helen Hayes's example and grow up into actresses. There is no prophesying what will become of them, for, as Percy Hammond has asked, where are the Phyllis Povahs of yesteryear and the rest of those gifted maidens from whom so much was expected a brief decade ago? Either they have dwindled into matrimony or the screen has gobbled them up.

The toll ,of Hollywood becomes annually more alarming. Let a Katharine Hepburn or a Franchot Tone appear—indeed, let any young players win recognition on Broadway —and the movie magnates, with a foresight not shown by the managers of Broadway, offer them tempting contracts, whisk them west, and set to work building up their reputations. The actors who permit themselves to be kidnapped in such a way are not to be blamed too severely. But so regularly has Hollywood begun to function as Broadway's baby-snatcher that one almost dreads to welcome a young player too warmly, for welcoming him warmly is almost the surest way of bidding him goodbye.

The past season has yielded an unusually large crop of young actresses, and, what is rarer still, young actors. Lloyd Nolan as the blustering dentist in One Sunday Afternoon and Francesca Bruning as his loyal wife; Elizabeth Young, first as the ruined daughter in Firebird and more recently as the daughter who came near to suffering a similar fate in A Saturday Night; Peggy Conklin as the frightened girl who got into trouble in Mademoiselle; and Elisha Cook. Jr., as one of the mad Rimplegars in Three-Cornered Moon—all these have not only taken advantage of their opportunities, but acquitted themselves creditably. More than that can be said of Shepperd Strudwick as the young idealist in Mr. Anderson's Pulitzer Prize Winner Both Your Houses, and Jane Wyatt, who in three failures—The Mad Hopes, Evensong and For Services Rendered—has established herself as the most promising of the younger actresses who have recently been heard from in our theatre. Stella Adler, by herself in Big Night and Hilda Cassidy, and with her gifted brother, Luther, in Success Story, has amply demonstrated that her talents are genuine ones. And a special interest attaches itself, for dynastic as well as sentimental reasons, to the capable manner in which John Drew Colt, Ethel Barrymore's son, played a reform school bully—his first important assignment—in Little OT Boy.

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But the question which is bound to follow even so brief a listing of these promising young people whose futures are really unpredictable, is what plays they will have to act in if they do turn out to be the actors one hopes they will? The most optimistic of the drama's Sister Annes strain their necks in vain from Broadway's watch towers to discover a single younger playwright on the horizon who seems to be galloping to the theatre's rescue.

The past few months are a case in point. With the exception of a very light but diverting comedy called Goodbye Again (which, as Allan Scott and George Haight have written it, can hardly be said to have broken new ground), the successes of the winter have all been the work of well-established dramatists. It is such familiar names as George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber, Sidney Howard, Rachel Crothers, S. N. Behrman, George M. Cohan, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur which have figured longest on the billboards and the programs; even as last year it was Eugene O'Neill. George S. Kaufman, Robert E. Sherwood, Paul Green, Philip Barry, Elmer Rice, S. N. Behrman and Rose Franken (a new playwright belonging to the older generation) who merited the same distinction.

Certainly, on the basis of their first plays, produced this winter, it is impossible to place much, if any, real faith in Gertrude Tonkonogy, the young lady from Barnard who attempted in Three-Cornered Moon to do for the Brooklyn Rimplegars what Mrs. Franken had succeeded in doing for the New York Hallams in Another Language; or George O'Neil, whose desperately muddled American Dream was something of a nightmare as produced by the'Theatre Guild; or Albert Bein, whose Little OT Boy was taken quite seriously in some quarters.

Ingenues may come and go, young directors may learn all there is to know about their business, young designers can turn out sketch after sketch that finds its way into the exhibition halls, and bands of dedicated young people, like those all too earnest members of the Croup Theatre, can infest the country's cowsheds every summer in the hope of becoming like the Moscow Art Theatre by fall, hut unless some playwrights come along who are worthy of these youngsters' talents, all of them might just as well call it a day and become salesladies at Macy's or ushers at Radio City.

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It works both ways, of course, because the theatre is now, as it has always been, a vicious circle. When, and if, the new playwrights do appear, they will have to depend upon actors, designers, directors and producing organizations that will be able to preserve, or enhance, the values of their scripts. That, heaven knows, is obvious enough, but it is no more obvious than the theatre's need has been, for several seasons now, of new blood, of new talents and new ideas.