Schuster School - Proscenium Yearbook (Cincinnati, OH)

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THE SMILING NINE Page nineteen

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Page eighteen THE JUNIORS OF F ICERS Marie Daugherty . . . President Gertrude Cash . . . . Treasurer Laura Hoffman . . . Secretary Class Flower . . Violet Class Colors, Blue and Cold MEMBERS OF THE jUNIOR CLASS Marie Daugherty Gertrude Cash Laura Hoffman Dorothy McCord Elizabeth Ebersole Elizabeth Langmeier Mary Harrington Madelaine Mitchell Anna Purcell Esther McHenry Crystal Levy Lucile Livingston John S. Alexander May Hardy-Burke Loraine IngersolldSchultz May Koch Louise Benninger

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THE LITTLE THEATRE Ever since Ibsen revolutionized the drama, taking us as he does into a room, one wall of which - the one toward the audience- is missing, there has been a growing feeling that very large theatres are not well aciapted to this newer kind of play. Since that time, in European countries as well as in America, a movement has been set afoot to decrease the size of playhouses. This tendency has resulted today in what is called the Little Theatre Movement. The object of the little theatre is to bring intimate drama into a small place where subtleties of dialogue and situation will not he lost, and to produce plays, interesting to a select few, that do not interest the general public, and which the general public fails to support. During the last decade there has been a great dramatic awakening in this coun- try. The people, those who make up the audiences, have wakened to a sense that they have a right to have some voice as to the conduct of the theatres. For long the audiences were merely paying spectators, accepting what Broadway pleased to send them. Now there is a more and more clearly defined feeling throughout the country that the people do not necessarily have to accept Broadwayis ultimatum. Amateur theatres have sprung up in the colleges as a result of this feeling. Young men and women are studying piay-writing, playeproducing, directing and managing. The time when the managers of theltheatres are recruited from the ranks of call boys and ushers is fast passing away. In the future the managers will be recruited from the colleges. Of the work done in the universities, Professor Bakeris Work Shop at Cambridge is the most prominent. English 47 is not a little theatre, how- ever. It is a workshop. in it are produced the plays written by the students at Harvard and Radcliffe, in order that the authors may study their work from a pro- ducing standpoint. Thus they are able to determine from seeing their plays pro duced, wherein their work is lacking, and what qualities go to make it good, bad or indifferent. ProfeSSOr Baker was the pioneer in establishing this kind of dramatic study as an essential in education. Yale University has a dramatic department of this kind under Professor Phelps. Professor Brander Matthews of Columbia is an- other working along these lines. The Little Country Theatre, North Dakota Agri- cultural College, is a reai theatre under college auspices, where the students direct and have an opportunity to act in the plays. Page twenty