Free for All

Stuck away in Manhattan's drowsing East 27th Street is an old, cuckoo-clock, three-story building. Once it was a haunted private house, later, among other things, a Knights of Columbus hall, an Armenian church. Since 1915 it has been a theatre, since 1923 (except for one season) a free one.

Manhattan's only free theatre, which a Broadway wisecracker once termed "the flophouse of the drama," came billowing out of the imagination of a frankly stage-struck playwright named Butler Davenport, who looks like Edwin Booth (see cut). Taking over the building in 1915 left Davenport $3.17. But $3.17 floated plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Moliere and Butler Davenport, with unpaid casts made up of starry-eyed young amateurs, sad-faced old professionals, milliners' assistants, postmen, stenographers, clerks. Now & then there might be a familiar Broadway name like Mary Shaw in the cast, or future Broadway names like Rose McClendon and Frank Wilson. In the audience might be neighborhood old-faithfuls, loafers and youngsters, or Margaret Sanger, Otto Kahn, Prince Hubertus zu Loewenstein.

Producer Davenport keeps his playhouse going by the sale of a few reserved seats and by passing the hat during intermissions. Most nights, during the final intermission, Davenport steps before the curtain draped in a sheet, harangues the audience for 15 or 20 minutes. The theatre is unqualifiedly his to run. He chooses plays, writes them, directs them. He also stokes the furnace and sweeps the aisles.

The Davenport Theatre was last week performing Zunguru by an African playwright-composer, Asadata Dafora Horton, whose Kykunkor got rave notices from Broadway critics in 1934. Primitive in plot, Zunguru was a kind of savage vaudeville, with three blacks pounding African drums, brown girls strutting their stuff, a witch doctor gabbling and shrieking, a fire-eater munching lighted torches--all of it "background" for Boy Meets Girl in Senegal.

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