THEATER CHRONICLE
543
Broadway-justified
its
existence only as a feeder, and that the artists
and the new ideas which emerged in the workshops would continue to
grow and develop when Broadway brought them up-that they would
reach maturity and fulfillment in the market. And there are many who
still agree with Mrs. Isaacs, who think that the off-Broadway theater
is all very well until the show-shops buy it up in pieces.
I do not myself believe that Mrs. Isaacs' diagnosis is quite correct.
I think that our playwrights, and especially our directors and actors,
are likely to enjoy their real growth and development off Broadway;
and that when they are obliged to devote their energies to the arts of
the merchandizer instead of the art of the theater, they are often some–
what thwarted and bewildered. The same applies to many European
artists who try to cope with our entertainment industry. But this, of
course, is a matter of judgment. Some artists make enough money so
that they are relatively independent of the market and can indulge in
the luxury of pursuing their arts. And we do not know whether an
Odets or a Robert Edmund Jones would have gone even farther if they
had had real theaters to work in: we do not know for sure, because
they, like all the others, were compelled, at a certain point, to make
their way in the market. We have never had a chance to see what would
happen if we had a theater with some stability, and enjoying a public
sanction quite unlike that of the market, in which our artists could
continue to work beyond their youth and their apprenticeship. I wish
we had such a theater. And this brings me back to the possibilities in a
theater intelligently patronized by a university.
The off-Broadway theaters which we have had- the little or art
theaters culminating in the '20s, and the socially conscious theaters of
the '30s-had their own patronage, and their own public sanction,
which the mysterious Zeitgeist, the moods of their times, made possible.
The little theaters, like Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom, were on the
whole the creation of cultivated old-style Americans who knew Europe,
and wished to acclimatize the ancient arts of the theater in America.
Both patrons and artists thought of their theater as akin to the sym–
phony orchestras and the art museums, which had been established by
the same kind of money. Their motive was sound and idealistic, but at
this distance it looks a bit innocent and gentlemanly, not to say genteel–
like Wilson himself, with his pince-nez and hard collar. They did not
know what it would take to relate the art of the theater to the perma–
nent values and problems of our culture, as Moliere and Racine did
in their time and place-and when the public mood of idealism was re–
placed by the period of the Big Money, and then the Big Crash, the
art theaters seemed utterly irrelevant to the national life. The theaters
