Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2007 - 12

I offered to present the Fellows Address this year because I thought it was time an older person gave this talk. Three
years ago we had the address presented by the ever youthful
Sarah Nash Gates, two years ago it was given by the ageless
Richard Pilbrow, and last year the address was from that young
buck, Rick Stevens. It's time for the elderly! So, here I am.
As you know, the elderly tend to look back into the past
more than other people. One day I remembered when I was
a sophomore in high school in the 1940s. My drama teacher
taught us a Delsarte acting exercise. Delsarte was an old nineteenth-century technique stressing that all emotions begin in
the center of the body, then progresses outward in a "thrust"
of arm gestures, and finally ending in a "flourish" through the
hand and fingers. So, in class it was "Beautiful, beautiful, die
again Dick, die again."
Remembering this, I thought to myself, "How did we get
here from there?"
But then I realized this acting exercise wasn't just an
anomaly. All aspects of theatre production in the mid-twentieth
century were primitive, old-fashioned, and crude.
Examples are plentiful. Scenery construction involved
clout nails and clinch plates. Electric glue pots were used to
heat animal glue for canvas glue formulas and as a binder for
dry scenic pigments. Stage lighting employed resistance dimmers and plano-convex spotlights, and lighting catalogs still
sold lamp dip. Need I go further?
How did we get here from there?
The era of the 1940s and 1950s was a low point in American theatre. The Great Depression in the 1930s severely hurt
the business of theatre. Fewer shows were produced. The number of active theatres dwindled in New York and other cities.
By 1950, only one-fourth as many plays were produced in New
York City as were mounted in the 1920s and only one third of
the theatres for drama existed (Selden 1954, 97).
American theatre in mid-century was labeled in two distinct parts. One was Broadway, geographically a small section
of New York City. The other part was geographically the entire
rest of the country. This was called the Tributary Theatre and
referred to the regional theatre across the country consisting
at that time mainly of non-professional community and educational theatres. It was given the name "tributary" suggesting
it should be a small stream flowing into the main stream of
commercial Broadway theatre by contributing trained theatre
people, new plays, and new techniques to increase the quality
and quantity of theatre.
Unfortunately, in mid-century the tributary theatre was doing very little of any of these contributions.
The tributary theatre was developing very few new plays.
Recent Broadway plays and tried and true classics were the
main fare of regional theatres across the country.
Furthermore, the old apprentice system that provided theatre training no longer existed. Without the old city theatres, the
resident and traveling stock companies, a new source for train-

ing theatre personnel, was greatly needed. It fell to the colleges
and universities to attempt to train people for the professional
theatre. Unfortunately they were not fully prepared for the challenge because intense vocational training was not the usual fare
of universities.
Theatre education had been introduced into colleges and
universities several decades earlier. Thomas Wood Stevens is
credited with establishing the first Department of Drama at
Carnegie Tech in 1914 and about the same time George Pierce
Baker had his 47 Workshop at Harvard. So, college theatre programs grew during the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. By 1960, over
1,400 colleges and universities offered courses and/or extracurricular activities in drama (Hobgood 1960, 4-57). Only
twenty percent (280 schools) offered drama degrees. But the
quality of theatre education was uneven and most programs
did not train graduates for the professional theatre. Critics
maintained theatre training was "disorganized, superficial and
almost always insufficient." (Zimmerman 1946, 380) Productions were called mediocre. The teaching staffs were often not
highly talented.
Part of the problem lay in the nature of theatre education in the traditional college liberal arts setting. In 1942, Rosamond Gilder observed that George Pierce Baker at Harvard
"had already inspired a brand of theatre workers, playwrights,
actors, artists, teachers-but as far as official Harvard was concerned he was teaching the history of drama and the principles
of argumentation, not theatre." (Gilder 1942, 461) In fact, in
mid-century the word "theatre" was rarely used to identify an
educational program. Only about four percent of programs
were labeled Theatre or Theatre Arts (Hobgood 1960, 4-57).
Higher education at that time was not prepared to accept the term
theatre. Drama or Dramatic Art sounded more academic, less vocational, and more acceptable as a traditional field of study.
Therefore, for theatre graduates in the 1950s, there was
a very limited chance of employment in professional theatre.
Colleges and universities were not contributing to the "main
stream" Broadway theatre.
There also were very few publications in our field. In
1952, two people you know, James Hull Miller and Joel Rubin,
published a list titled "Basic Technical References." (Miller and
Rubin 1952, 350-355) This included books on scenery, lighting, costume, sound, make-up, theatre architecture, and general play production. There were only nineteen books in that
list to cover all of these fields.
As theatre production increased across the country, space
for performances was needed. However, it often became difficult to find experienced theatre architects and qualified theatre
consultants. In 1950, Horace Robinson made the brazen assertion that theatres should be planned by people who use the
theatres (Robinson 1950, 8-10). Of twenty-nine new theatres
built in the previous five years he found that only twelve percent
(six theatres) were satisfactory to the theatre personnel working in them.
THEATRE
SUMMER

2007

DESIGN

TECHNOLOGY

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2007