American Stage Designs (Classic Reprint): An Illustrated Catalogue of the Models, Drawings and Photographs Exhibited at the Bourgeois Galleries in New ... to 26th, 1919 with Articles (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

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Excerpt from American Stage Designs

Without the theories, progress for them or progress for us would have been impossible. Without their accomplishment, progress for us would be only a thing to dream of. For under the Shuberts — which is only an impolite and impolitic way of saying under the Broadway system of piecemeal production America could never study, experiment and accomplish as the old world did in those German and Russian producing theatres where groups of artists worked constantly together. Fortunately that work has been done for us. Of course we need more ex periment, and we need and are getting the theatres where that is possible; yet, now that we have models to work from, even our Broadway system can reproduce and to some extent develop the types of production given us by the recent and international past before the war. It had even begun to do so while Europe fought. Indeed, America is at the point where criticism should begin to take the place of indiscriminate enthusiasm. The exhibition Of sketches and models at the Bourgeois Galleries in New York and the essays by native stage artists to which this is, in a cer tain sense, an introduction, demonstrate how far things have already moved. We need not fear to injure our cause by eriti cism. We are more likely now to kill it with kindness. There was a time when the faintest buds of the footlights had to be nour ished with applause. We hailed much extremely bad work. Per haps it was because we craved excitation and the bizarre, as relief from drab emotions. Perhaps it was because we knew that even from such beginnings the good art could spring — certainly better and more easily than from the old. It was thus that we applauded much work of the worst Washington Square Players sort. The old was so bad that we accepted an even worse ver sion Of the new. Now we must criticize.

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