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Book Reviews • VINTAGE YEARS OF THE THEATRE GUILD, 1928-1939, by Roy S. Waldau. Cleveland and London: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1972. 519 pp. $12.95. This book by Roy S. Waldau is a careful, well-researched, and complete history of the Theatre Guild, beginning at the point where Walter Prichard Eaton's earlier work, The Theatre Guild: The First Ten Years, leaves off. Despite the earlier work, Waldau here devotes a full but concise chapter to the history of the period from 1917 to 1927, noting a number of important matters which are prerequisites to understanding the history of the Guild during the period from 1928 to 1939 upon which he focusses. Wa1dau, for example, notes in this early chapter that in 1917, perhaps for the first time in American history, the moment was appropriate for the founding of an enterprise such as the Guild. Waldau suggests that the increasing aesthetic awareness of Americans during the period immediately prior to World War I gave rise to the desire to found theatrical ensembles that would rival the accomplished work being done in Europe by such organizations as the Moscow Art Theatre, the Deutsches Theater, and the Abbey. Such groups as the Provincetown Playhouse, the Neighborhood Playhouse, and the Washington Squar:e Players comprised the first wave of art theatres, but it was not until the founding of the Theatre Guild, growing from the experiments of the Washington Square Players, that America had what might be considered its first true national theatre. Chapters Two through Twelve deal individually and in minute detail with each of the seasons of the so-called "vintage years" of the Guild. By 1928-1929, the first season upon which Waldau focusses, the Guild had become internationally famous for world premiere productions of such plays as Shaw's Heartbreak House, Back to Methuselah, and Saint Joan, in addition to producing artistically successful works by writers such as Kaiser, Claudel, Toller, Andreyev, Rice, and O'Neill. By 1928-1929 as well, the Guild had 207 208 BOOK REVIEWS moved from its more limited quarters in the Gar~ck Theatre (which seated only 550) to its own well-equipped building (which seated 930). Waldau suggests that despite the enlarged facilities, the new building was more of a financial drain upon the Guild's resources than it ought to have been. Another essentially detrimental factor which Waldau discusses during the period he covers was the increasing number of secondary travelling companies emanating from successful productions of the Guild in New York. Such travelling ensembles served generally to diminish the Guild's reservoir of talent in New York as well as to force the Guild to produce plays of more popular appeal for less theatrically sophisticated audiences. All of these factors, coupled with the advent of talking pictures, the problem of perhaps too large and unwieldy a Board of Managers, and the financial depression of the 1930s, forced the Guild to become less and less what its founders had originally envisioned - a theatre for the intellectual elite. By 1939 and after, the Guild was hardly to be distinguished from other commercial theatre enterprises. As Waldau states in one of two concluding chapters, this one titled "What Went Wrong? What Went Right?", the Guild's managers had allowed the organization "to drift slowly away from experimentation and artistic excitement that characterized its early days toward a more popular type of theatre which invariably must cater to mass tastes, employing all the paraphernalia of compromise: big stars, big productions, and the inevitable big budgets, with the expectations of big returns." Such, unfortunately, has been too often the story of the theatre in America. Artistic vision inevitably has had to compromise with financial necessity. Waldau's book on the Theatre Guild is an excellent one. Twenty-four full-page illustrations of important Guild productions complement the discussion. Waldau tells the story of the Guild's rise, flourishing, and eventual decline in intelligently scholarly but readable prose. ROBERT R. FINDLAY University of Kansas HENRIK IBSEN: THE DNIDED CONSCIOUSNESS, by Charles R. Lyons. Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, 1972. CATILINE'S DREAM. AN ESSAY ON IBSEN'S PLAYS, by James Hurt. Urbana: University of Illinois...

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