Yet by 1916, when they moved into Macdougal Street in Greenwich
Village, it was probably too late, if ever there had been hope, for
them to turn professional as the Washington Square Players were to
achieve metamorphosis into the Theatre Guild. A line had been sharply
drawn through the center of the organization, and on either side of it
stood the two men chiefly responsible for the Provincetown’s
survival. The extent of the quarrel between the group’s leader,
George Cram Cook, and Eugene O’Neill is now impossible to determine,
but “Jig” Cook’s summation of the Provincetown’s achievement
suggests strongly that he felt O’Neill’s success had destroyed the
Players. Although O’Neill was what Cook claimed he was seeking, an
American playwright of genius, and although he cooperated with him to
the full, he was temperamentally unable to come to terms with what
O’Neill released in the organization. Cook’s was a life of
dedication to an ideal that was never fully formulated, a seeker after
a shrouded goal, a man for whom the search was more important than the
good being sought. Susan Glaspell rightly titled her memoir of her
husband, The Road to the Temple:
it was the road and not the temple that mattered. Speaking of
Cook’s particular power “to riddle, to defend, to invite,” she
added: “Sometimes I wish the Provincetown Players had been a
magazine.” The magazine, she seems to have felt, would have
permitted him to experiment in endless amateurism, to live as if he
had tasted Ponce de Leon’s fountain and was thereafter free to seek
perpetually and not to find. It was O’Neill’s discovery of his own
power, his increasing mastery of the drama, bringing with it new needs
and giving to the group new goals, that in the end sent Cook to a
self-imposed exile in Greece, from where, whenever he looked back, he
viewed the course of the Players with resignation and a touch of
bitterness.
What moved Cook in
the beginning was probably not the quest for a native playwright or
for a native drama. One suspects that this idea—stated as the
Players’ raison d’ętre—was formulated to mark a difference from
the predilection of the Washington Square Players for foreign plays.
In the absence of interesting American playwrights, such a goal was
born of necessity, but it continued as a hallmark of their activity as
the Theatre Guild. The Provincetown, searching out a cause, joined the
hunt for native playwrights, a quest that reaches far back into the
history of this country and from time to time has assumed something of
the comic proportions of the quest for the Great American Novelist.
Before O’Neill, there was no reputable candidate for the dramatic
honors, and his existence gave the group’s devotion to native drama
some validity. Later, Cook was to say that the failure of the Players
was evidenced by its inability to uncover other American dramatists of
a stature comparable to O’Neill’s. As the group came together,
however, the stated aim sufficed, and when it moved to New York,
O’Neill’s suggestion was followed: that the group be called “The
Playwrights’ Theatre.” So far as Cook himself was concerned,
however, the purposes of the theatre closest to his heart were less
literary.
Cook’s interest
was caught by an idea of theatre as a community. “One man,” he
wrote, “cannot produce drama. True drama is born only of one feeling
animating all the members of a clan—a spirit shared by all and
expressed by the few for the all. If there is nothing to take the
place of the common religious purpose and passion of the primitive
group out of which the Dionysian dance was born, no new vital drama
can arise in any people.”2
His animating idea
clearly was not the quest for American drama or even for a theatre.
His words, which were accepted as the credo of the Players, center
firmly on the idea of the communal spirit. Unlike
the later Group Theatre, Cook fixed no political point of rallying,
nor did he advocate such localized aesthetics as gave rise to the
rural drama in regional theatres a few years later. What was important
was the clan, united in festal ceremony in honor of Dionysius, late
sprung up in America. Cook looked upon the theatre as an inevitable
ritualistic outcropping of a group so oriented, but for him the group
came first, the theatre second. The theatre, he said, was “Work done
in the spirit of play,” a way of working that had “the only true
seriousness.”3 He remained an amateur of theatre and, in
the word’s French sense, of life. Throughout his active association
with them, he sought to maintain the Players as an oasis of spirit in
a dusty world.*
Behind his
amateurism lay an abiding admiration for Athenian Greece. His was not
an antiquary’s interest in the past, nor did professional
scholarship inhibit his idealistic, visionary attempt to summon to the
present, for the spiritual resuscitation of himself and others for
whom he cared, something of the qualities he sensed in the Greek Idea.
His associate on the board of the Provincetown Players, Edna Kenton,
described his enthusiastic purpose: “Back to Greece!—that was
Jig’s solution for every modern ill. Back, rather, to the spirit of
Greece for its lesson, and then a return to re-evoke the group spirit
from modern life.”5 In the end, his desire led him away
from America, back physically to Greece, where before he died he
convinced himself that he had indeed found among the shepherds of
Mount Parnassus the community of feeling and endeavor that he called
“Greek” and that provided the serenity of his dreams.
The concept of
Grecian “group spirit” was supplemented by the writing of
Friedrich Nietzsche whom Cook had read with awareness and whose
doctrine he preached with enthusiasm. Nietzsche’s description of the
Dionysian way seems especially to have appealed to him. The worship of
Dionysius that underlies the manifesto of the Provincetown Players is
as Nietzschean as it is Greek. Nietzsche’s popularity in America was
high in the second decade of the twentieth century as English
translations of his work began to appear. After 1910, he became
required reading for any young intellectual, but Cook had read him in
German as early as 1899 and wrote of him,
Nietzsche
brings not only new ethical feeling but new ethical ideas. Not every
one has the courage, and ability, to admit these new ideas with no
fear or favor, and let them win if they can. But those who do so
admit the ideas of Nietzsche find in the fight they wage against old
ideas, more drama, more story, more poetry, than is generally found
in drama, story, or poetry. . . . The spiritual passion of
Nietzsche’s writing is too keen, too intense, to be readily
endured in those times when life keys one’s own nerves high. It is
precisely to our times of dullness that Nietzsche offers the sting of
his perpetual pain and joy. He is a creator of the creative mood.6
Importantly for
O’Neill, as well as for the other members of the Provincetown
Players, Cook served as Nietzsche’s prophet, selecting and teaching
those elements of Nietzschean doctrine that best combined with his
romanticized view of ancient Greek ideals. By these lights, his
theatre was to become a Dionysian outgrowth of classic culture, a
theatre truly of the group, amateur in the best sense, and far removed
in its ceremonial spirit, in its methods and in its products from
the commercial theatres of New York.
Cook gave the group
the best he had, both of his dreams and his physical energies. His
best was good. He dreamed of a theatre to be built in New York, and,
as he planned it, perhaps an analogy with the development of the Greek
theatre from ritual dancing places occurred to him, for his theatre
was conceived as a sophisticated metamorphosis of the wharf shed at
Provincetown on which the Players had first formally convened. He
wrote,
The first
stage of the Players on the wharf at Provincetown was in four
sections which could be picked up by hand and set at various angles
and levels. These reappear in the new stage—four transverse
sections lifted or lowered or tilted by obedient hydraulic jacks
into a zig-zag ascent, any hillside slope or tower or terrace. The
new dome, so planned as not to interfere with a well-equipped
fly-gallery (counter weights permitting operation from the stage
level), is used in connection with the new structural invention
which makes it possible to raise the curtain and play your play in
pure space. Nothing is there but infinity and the stage broken into
big plastic elements with which you may compose. Also the
proscenium. You push a button to make it higher, lower, wider,
narrower, shallower, deeper. The four elements combine into one deep
stage; they separate into three stages—fore stage, main stage,
inner stage, to be used in swift succession of changing scenes—and
so restoring to the drama its Elizabethan power of story telling.
Behind,
around, above this trinity of stages there is nothing to
mask—nothing to conceal—a pleasant symbol of artistic sincerity.
Permitting
the swift handling of bulky scenery—as massive as any play may
need—this playing space does not compel the use of a single inch
of scenery. With flats and drops, flies and borders out, with no
surfaces put there to hide other surfaces, the artist of the theatre
shall at last be free to let his human figures and chosen objects
receive mystically deep significance from their background of
infinity.7
Cook’s projected
theatre anticipated, although it may have reflected some of their
early talk in this vein, the efforts of such designers as Robert
Edmond Jones to build a temple for “the artist of the theatre.”
Evidently, Cook had heard of the developments of the European theatre
which were shortly to revolutionize stage production in the United
States. It is an entirely workable idea for a stage. Yet in its
“pleasant” symbolism, in its careful practicality concerning
pushbuttons, counterweights and obedient jacks, it is a little naďve,
the work of a visionary seeking to pass as a master of his craft.
Cook’s practical
work in the theatre was equally clearheaded, equally amateur. To cite
a crucial, but typical example, in 1920 O’Neill showed him the
script of The Emperor Jones, then
titled The Silver Bullet. In
Cook’s view, the play could be staged only against a “background
of infinity.” Nothing, evidently, was more finite than the tiny
stage of the Provincetown Playhouse. Their scenic stock-in-trade had
been to that time small interiors giving vistas of too-colorful skies
wrinkling above painted ground rows. From Germany, however, had come
word of a scenic innovation, a plaster dome, curving to provide an
unequaled sense of space, even on a small stage. Against its
concavity, light could be played in flexible, infinitely variable
combinations, the texture of the plaster providing a reflecting
surface for light that no flat cyclorama could equal in depth or
subtlety. The dome, Cook realized, was the only means to give
O’Neill’s play significant scenic realization. Moreover, no
American theatre possessed such a device. The temptation to
innovation was as great as the artistic purpose, yet the Provincetown
treasury amounted to $360. Over Cook’s instant insistence that the
dome be built, the guiding committee of the theatre fell out. Such as
it was, the group spirit was severely shaken by simple economics.
Characteristically,
Cook walked over the opposition. When Dionysian group spirit became a
simple matter of majority rule, Cook turned dictator. Spending such
funds as he had for plaster, wire and steel, he built the dome
himself. As Edna Kenton tells the story, she went to the theatre to
discover Cook at work:
Jig was
there alone, at the back of the stage, in a cluster of steel
netting, iron bars, and bags of cement. He was making plaster, in
workmen’s clothes. I thought of A
Half Hour in Heaven (a play rejected for the Provincetown
theatre because it could not be adequately staged),
of God and his angels working in space. Jig was working
alone, creating space itself. It was a nice enough little
comparison, and I did not miss the irony of it—a dictatorial god .
. . “animating the group spirit.” In spite of all the dome was
going in, Jig’s “must” had found its only way.
He looked
up as I came down the aisle, then turned his back on me and finished
throwing in his batch of mixed plaster. I stepped on the stage and
sat down, waiting. He worked slowly until he had finished the work.
Then he turned.
“There’s
to be no argument about this,” he said suddenly. “I’ve had
enough from everybody. The Emperor has got to have a dome to play against. You see, Edna, it begins . . .
thick forest at first . . . steadily thinned out . . . scene after
scene . . . to pure space
He was telling me the story and the action and the scene of The
Emperor Jones, standing against the plaster ellipse that was
“space.” And as he went on, it began to happen— one of his
hours of creative talk of the rarest and finest. . . .
Jig
directed the first production of The Emperor Jones. I know this because I was there and watched him
do it. We were all there, all over the place. The group spirit was
rampant, and to play with the lights on the dome was the best game
of all.8
It is an account
revealing in its ironies. The force of Cook’s vitality speaks
through it, and it shows clearly the reverence he could command. Yet
it also betrays something of the amateurism that relies on happy
inspiration and the rushing in of fools. Miss Kenton is alive to the
irony of the dictatorial God “animating the group spirit,”
but a still deeper irony lies in the fact that Cook’s dedicated
efforts to serve O’Neill’s play, efforts that brought the
Provincetown Players their finest moments, destroyed the theatre for
which Cook was both God and day-laborer.
The
Emperor Jones was an amateur
production of a professional’s play. Miss Kenton’s assertion that
Cook directed the first production reflects a rumor that Arthur
Hopkins had taken over the directorial position in the final stages of
rehearsals. Whether true or not, many members of the group appear to
have felt a need for a professional director. A similar situation
developed with the settings against the dome. Having built it, the
group was uncertain how to use it most effectively. Cumbersome
settings in the usual manner proved so unsatisfactory that a few days
before the opening, Cleon Throckmorton was called in to save the
situation. His solution was to start over and to use simple cutouts,
which, in silhouette against the dome, served to frame the play in
space. Thus even in rehearsal, the production requirements of The
Emperor Jones made clear that Cook’s ideal for the Players had
never been a substantial, central motive for the group. Evidently, a
professional playwright brought with him obligations that amateurs
were unable to fulfill, however willing they were to give of their
substance for his play’s eventual triumph.
After the production
had brought world fame to the Players, Cook, for a moment, felt
professional longings and so far deserted his ideal as to urge his own
play, The Spring, for uptown
production. Its failure and his own integrity of spirit caused his
idealism to reassert itself. He left the United States to live in
Greece, from where, in 1923, he wrote the obituary for the group as he
had envisioned it:
Three
years ago, writing for the Provincetown Players, anticipating the
forlornness of our hope to bring to birth in our commercial-minded
country a theater whose motive was spiritual, I made this promise:
“We promise to let this theater die rather than let it become
another voice of mediocrity.”
I am now
forced to confess that our attempt to build up, by our own life and
death, in this alien sea, a coral island of our own, has failed. The
failure seems to be more our own than America’s. Lacking the
instinct of the coral-builders, in which we could have found the
happiness of continuing ourselves toward perfection, we have
developed little willingness to die for the thing we are building.
Our
individual gifts and talents have sought their private perfection.
We have not, as we hoped, created the beloved community of
life-givers. Our richest, like our poorest, have desired most not to
give life, but to have it given to them. We have valued creative
energy less than its rewards—our sin against our Holy Ghost.
As a
group we are not more but less than the great chaotic, unhappy
community in whose dry heart I have vainly tried to create an oasis
of living beauty.
Since we
have failed spiritually in the elemental things—failed to pull
together—failed to do what any good football or baseball team or
crew do as a matter of course with no word said—and since the
result of this is mediocrity, we keep our promise: We give this
theater we love good death; the Provincetown Players end their story
here.
Some
happier gateway must let in the spirit which seems to be seeking to
create a soul under the ribs of death in the American theater.9
The “richest”
member of the group was Eugene O’Neill, and there can be little
question that he was desirous of a fuller professional life and
greater recognition as an artist than any pseudo-Grecian attempt to
realize the Dionysian spirit in Greenwich Village could offer him. Not
that fame, as Broadway offered it, was his spur, nor even that
Cook’s Nietzschean concepts were alien to him. Rather, he reached
out for something more than the Provincetown could ever offer,
because, as he worked, he began to learn that fine theatre, like any
art, involves the total mastery of all relevant disciplines and that,
in the end, all serious artists are in the best sense professional.
Without doubt, the
Provincetown Players provided him with a convenient standing place. By
the time of the opening of The Emperor Jones on November 1, 1920, they had staged the original
production of twelve of his one-act plays.** In his formative years in
their theatre, O’Neill evidently
had ample opportunity to learn and to experiment. Yet he had other
footings. During the same four-year period, the Washington Square
Players staged the first production of In
the Zone on October 31, l917,*** J. D. Williams staged Beyond
the Horizon early in 1920 with a professional cast, George C.
Tyler opened Chris Christopherson in an out-of-town tryout the same spring and
had also agreed to produce The
Straw, well in advance of the triumph of The
Emperor Jones. With the exception of the Glencairn
plays and The Emperor Jones,
O’Neill’s most ambitious work depended for its hearings on the
professional managers, Tyler and Williams. Nevertheless, the
Provincetown was his first atelier,
and in considering O’Neill’s development as a playwright, it
is important to look at what he was before he met Cook at Provincetown
in the summer of 1916, and at what, with his aid, he shortly became.
For both the man and the Players, it was a decisive meeting.
