Play House

The oathsome brutality, lusty wine-quaffing, noisy swordplay, sly bedroom tactics, swoony madrigals, neurotic vengeance and gory fratricide of Medicean times, as set forth lavishly in The Jest by Playwright Sem Benelli, were last week introduced in Cleveland. It was the play's first U. S. performance outside of Manhattan, inevitably provoking whispered comparisons by those in the audience who had seen the John-and-Lionel-Barrymore production of 1919. But never were comparisons more idle. The occasion was the opening of the new home of the Cleveland Play House, an outstanding "little" theatre now made unique in the U. S. through its possession of a self-contained theatre plant with two stages--regular and studio size. The aims and achievements of the "little" or independent theatre movement, of which the Play House is a product and an exponent, bear about the same relation to commercial drama as English cricket bears to big-league baseball.

The so-called "little" theatres operate on several principles--to encourage playwrights, to develop actors, to please an audience, to absorb the self-expressive energies of a community. The Provincetown Players were founded by the late George Cram Cook on premises including all these principles. Some results: the bringing-to-light of Playwright Eugene O'Neill, Actor Charles Gilpin, Stage-Designer Robert Edmund Jones.

Examples of pure community self-expression, without fruits of creation, are the Dallas Little Theatre, strictly amateur, celebrated for its capture of the Belasco Cup for one-act productions the past three years; and the Pasadena Community Playhouse, where what counts is the number of citizens performing. The Boston Repertory, strictly professional, is an opposite type--a non-profit-making institution with a permanent staff and inveterate audience.

The Cleveland Play House, founded in 1916 on a strictly amateur basis, has become professionalized to the extent of a paid staff of 20 persons--as able a repertory ensemble as may be found in this country--under Director Frederic McConnell. It has paid its own way from a small stagecraft shop in a small, abandoned church, where bankers and butchers, housewives and schoolteachers, came of an evening to sew costumes, paint scenery or strut the boards, to a resident repertory company in which there is still work for all comers but big roles only for the very, very proficient amateur, be she pretty co-ed from Western Reserve University or temperamental coal baroness. It is still a non-profit-making community theatre, but with increased dramatic proficiency, the community interested has become increasingly specialized--almost a guild of onlookers to watch the guild of craftsmen.

Director McConnell, a diminutive person of perpetual vigor, has put his players through 68 plays in six years. Some of his actors (Elmer Lehr, Russell Collins, Carl Benton Reid) have performed more than 650 times in some 50 roles, "an experience, incidentally," says Director McConnell, "which the trained European actor takes as a matter of course." At their Play House, alert Clevelanders see many a play, from Shakespeare to Shaw, invisible elsewhere.

In Manhattan, the endowed Neighborhood Playhouse, introducer to the U. S. of The Dybbuk and other famed plays, announced that it would close its doors at the close of the current season, pending material expansion prompted by success.