Percy Mackaye's Dramatic Theories

PERCY MACKAYE'S DRAMATIC THEORIES Michael J. Mendelsohn Of the tributes which were showered upon Percy MacKaye at a fiftieth birthday dinner in 1925, a surprisingly large number ignored both his poetry and his plays. A great many of MacKaye's friends and fellow artists focused instead on MacKaye as theoretician, as prophet, as community conscience, as preacher ofthe gospel. Running through these tributes was a note of some sadness. There was the sense of the mournful realization that MacKaye was the admirable idealist whose hopes for the American drama could never be fulfilled. If MacKaye was indeed a prophet of American literary idealism, his voice was that of Isaiah, destined to go virtually unheeded. Percy MacKaye was a bona fide product of the New York theater district , since he was the son of the intriguing 19th-century actor-managerplaywright , Steele MacKaye. In spite of a prodigious outpouring of literature and a very long life, Percy MacKaye is rarely mentioned today; however , in the pre-Freudian, pre-O'Neill days of American drama, MacKaye was a major figure. While writing an amazing quantity of poetry, plays, and combinations of the two, MacKaye produced four significant volumes of essays between 1909 and 1917. Actually the formulation of MacKaye's dramatic theory had begun as early as 1897, the year he delivered his Harvard commencement speech, "On the Need of Imagination in the Drama of Today." During his direct initiation into the frosty world of the commercial Broadway theater, MacKaye, like many dramatists before and since, gradually became disillusioned with the entire process. Since MacKaye was the son of a practical and knowledgeable genius of the theater, it is not likely that the facts of Broadway life came as a complete shock to him. Nonetheless, it is evident from his essays that he was not happy with what he found. With all the wisdom and energy at his command, MacKaye threw himself into the battle for a new kind of drama. The four works which set forth his ideas on a new approach to drama are The Playhouse and the Play, The Civic Theatre in Relation to the Redemption of Leisure, and two shorter essays, "A Substitute for War" and "Community Drama." In a number of his prefaces, MacKaye supplemented the ideas which he first expressed in these works. More important, he began to envision putting some of his theories into practice in a series of masques and community dramas which were eventually to become his main interest during his most creative years. In The Playhouse and the Pfoy,1 MacKaye attacks the completely commercial orientation of modern American drama. 1NeW York, 1909. 86RMMLA BulletinJune 1970 As we find it, die nature of die playhouse is twofold. It is— A house in which to produce plays; A house in which to sell die product. Thus, on die one hand, it is the complex instrument of a special art; and on die otíier, it is ri«? saleshouse of a special business, (p. 45 ) Obviously, MacKaye considers the saleshouse function to be the predominant one. He recognizes the manner in which the playhouse shapes die kind of play which must be written, and he discusses this interrelationship intelligently and confidently. And so the picture-scenes of our modern stage, its curtain, its foodights, its wings and scenery, its modern time-limit of performance, based on die exigencies of our evening hours, and die anxieties of "commuters"; its time-divisions into acts, adjusted psychologically to die concentrative power of our audiences: diese tíiings, and more, determine our modem dramaturgy, (p. 47) Perhaps a greater inhibiting factor, MacKaye recognizes, is the star system: To die majority of our play-goers, even to-day, die words drama and acting are practically synonymous. To diem dramaturgy is a term of vague or no import; for diem, die actors are "die show." This confusion in die public mind between die arts of actor and dramatist—of interpretation and creation—has been nurtured by dieatrical tradition from die earliest advent of the strolling player in America to die present acme of die star system (p. 202). ... It still remains true diat no American dramatist has yet attained such...