Cornerstone

Last week, Governor Smith of New York journeyed down the Hudson to Manhattan to lay one of the numerous cornerstones for which the gubernatorial trowel is thought appropriate. It was the cornerstone of a theatre, a new home for the New York Theatre Guild, paid for by the Guild's $500,000 bond issue without the aid of any rich "good fairies." Six years ago, the Theatre Guild consisted only of a few theatre enthusiasts with $500 in cash and a desire "to produce plays of a character not ordinarily given a hearing by the commercial managers." Many a movement has had more initial assets, few have had less. In Manhattan, a movement of this kind in dramatics has usually become invisible after six years.

The Theatre Guild grew out of such a movement, to wit, the Washington Square Players, who led a desultory corporate existence and disbanded at the War's outbreak. Some of the Players came together in 1919, started afresh as the Guild, began producing in the Garrick Theatre. Theatreland cocked its eye at John Ferguson by St. John Ervine, the Guild's second offering; kept the eye cocked when Masefield's The Faithful and Ervine's Jane Clegg appeared the next year; declared that the "art theatre" had achieved new and notable dimensions in the U. S. when the Guild gave Heartbreak House, Mr. Pirn Passes By and Liliom among other plays of its third season. With He Who Gets Slapped, Ambush, Back to Methuselah, R.U.R., Peer Gynt, The Adding Machine, The Devil's Disciple, Fata Morgana and still others the Guild continued its conquest of an ever-growing public that looks to it for all that is broadly and deeply discerning in U. S. stage production.

The Guild's Board of Managers, responsible for its choice of plays and general policy, consists of "a banker, a lawyer, an actress, an artist, a producer and a playwright"; that is, in the same order, Maurice Wertheim, Lawrence Langner, Helen Westley, Lee Simonson, Theresa Helburn, and Philip Moeller. Of these, Theresa Helburn, tireless and ubiquitous Executive Director and Mrs. Westley, an accomplished actress of vigorous originality, were the pair chiefly accountable for the birth and rise of the Guild. Finding the theatre "frankly commercial," the Guild has never posed as a society of pure artists.

Some years ago, wealthy, public-spirited Manhattanites sought to create a theatre similar to that which the Guild has become. They called their project the New Theatre and spent much money. The New Theatre has languished, but one of its backers was among those who made speeches over the Guild's cornerstone. This was Otto H. Kahn, Manhattan Maecenas, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Metropolitan Opera Co. Said he of the Guild Theatre: "It is impressive . . . eloquent . . . that this building was erected not by the munificence of a rich man or the support of the municipality, but by the confidence, the loyalty and the eager interest of those whom you have made your patrons."