Anderson's Winesburg and the Hedgerow Theatre

ANDERSON'S WINESBURG AND THE HEDGEROW THEATRE SHERWOOD ANDERSON ASPIRED to be a playwright for over twenty years, but one half-forgotten volume, Plays: Winesburg and Others,! contains all he ever published for the stage: The Triumph of the Egg, adapted by Raymond O'Neil from Anderson's story; Mother, suggestive of episodes in the Winesburg tales, though the characters have been given different names; They Married Later, an original; and Winesburg, Ohio, with which the present study is concerned. All but Winesburg are short one-acters. Anderson the story-teller is popularly remembered for a single book, the Winesburg tales; and whoever remembers him as playwright will likely recall a single play, the dramatization of that book. Such success as the play has had was largely the result of a happy collaboration between its author and a theater peculiarly suited to his needs, the Hedgerow Theatre of Rose Valley, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. In this utopian arts-and-crafts community, imbued with the spirit of Ruskin, Morris, and Horace Traubel, disciple and literary executor of Walt Whitman, Jasper Deeter, a fonner actvr-director with New York's Provincetown Playhou~e, began his avant-garde experiment in repertory with a perfonnance of Shaw's Candida in 1923. Hedgerow's home, a century-old stone mill, was fonnerly the "Guild Hall," cultural and social center of the Rose Valley idealists before the equally idealistic Hedgerovians moved in to stay.2 The idea of dramatizing parts of Winesburg was suggested to Anderson by Jacques Copeau in 1919, the year of the book's publication and phenomenal success. At the request of Georges Clemenceau, wartime premier of France, and with Otto Kahn's financial support, Copeau's Vieux Columbier troupe left Paris for a season in New York in 1917. Anderson, in the city on business, admired the perfonnances and became friendly with Copeau, whom he entertained in Chicago a short while later. "He wanted me to dramatize Winesburg," Anderson recalls in his Memoirs,3 "and he did me the honor to say that the stories were the first full rich expression of something he, a Frenchman , after living among us, had come to feel about American life," 1. New York: Scribner'S, 1937. 2. For a detailed account of Hedgerow, see "The Hedgerow Theatre: An Historical Study" by the present writer (University of Pennsylvania dissertation, 1954). 3. Sherwood AndeTson'. Memoirs (New York, 1943), p. 300. Anderson's account of the Copeau visit is found in Book IV, Chapter 3, from which the next few quotations are taken. See also James Schevill, Sherwood Anderson: His Life and Work (Denver, 1951), p. llO. 42 1960 ANDERSON'S WINESBURG 43 Anderson makes Copeau enthusiastic: "'Try, Sherwoodio. You must try.' He puts a thought in my head. 'Who knows. There is a great new drama ill America. You may be the American dramatist. You may be it without knowing what you are.''' "A sweet thought," Anderson continues. "I held it for a time." But the two men never got to work, and Anderson put the idea aside. Characteristically, and with some justification, he complained of the inhospitality of the contemporary theater to the sort of writing he believed in. "In respect to the commercial stage there is always this difficulty," he points out in the Memoirs, "that it costs a lot of money to produce a play; and whenever money is involved, there is inevitably caution." A visit to the pioneer Edison studios at Fort Lee, New Jersey, heightened his interest in the movies. "Now," he told himself, "if the impulse to write for the theatre comes I will not need to confine my imaginations [sic] within the proscenium arch. I can let my fancy roam over the wide world. Short stories may be done in pictures. It is even possible to do novels in pictures." But his conviction that the actors were regimented and the producers materialistic soon disillusioned him. "There was a place for me," he concluded, "but not in the theatre or in movies." By 1926, however, Anderson seems to have changed his mind. "I have got a hunch that if the matter was . . . worked just right," he wrote Horace Liveright, then...