BY DOROTHY CHANSKY AND TIMOTHY KERNER
BIG IDEAS & LITTLE THEATRES Most of what Americans understand today about the worth and place of theatre in the national cultural landscape came into focus during the Little Theatre Movement between 1912 and 1929. Two built manifestations of this movement are the Plays and Players Theatre in Center City and the Hedgerow Theatre in Rose Valley, both of which, to some degree, continue to serve their original missions. Despite their shared intentions, the stories and surroundings of these two theatres provide a compelling study of contrasts.
12 WINTER 2022 | context | AIA Philadelphia
PHOTO: TIMOTHY KERNER
The Little Theatre Movement comprised a web of amateur and semi-professional theatrical activities that arose in opposition to the dominant commercialism of Broadway productions. Nineteenth-century railroad expansion had enabled New York producers to transport their stars and tours across the country, contributing to the demise of locally based, resident companies. The proponents of Little Theatre opposed these overly commercial spectacles and aspired towards theatre as a form of artistic expression and a means to improve American society. Little Theatre founders and participants — typically but not always accurately regarded as “bohemians” — included playwrights, professors, political activists, civic boosters, socialites, poets, actors, journalists, housewives, and students. The Progressive Era (18901920) that provided the soil in which they planted their seeds, saw an influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and rapid economic expansion driven by heavy industrialization. Mass production, consumerism, and the newly arrived non-English speakers created a perfect storm of anxiety and opportunity. Little Theatre drew artistic inspiration from the best-known production models of the European Independent Theatre Movement and from the design aesthetics of Adolphe Appia, Edward Gordon Craig, and Max Reinhardt — pioneers known for treating space on both sides of the footlights as plastic. Theatrical experimentation was a defining element of the movements on both sides of the Atlantic. Playwrights whose work defined the Little Theatre Movement include Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Frank Wedekind, and Eugene O’Neill. Well-known American Little Theatres include the Provincetown Players, the Washington Square Players, and the Chicago
Little Theatre. In 1915, sixty-three organizations called themselves Little Theatres and by 1926 a writer for Vanity claimed a total of 5,000.1 The Provincetown Players got their start in 1915, when a group of New York-based writers and activists assembled at their summer beach haunt on Cape Cod to present short, original plays. The group is perhaps best known for giving Eugene O’Neill his start as a produced playwright. The Washington Square Players (1914-1918) was also founded by a group of iconoclastic New Yorkers. The group’s mission was not the production of member-written plays, but rather the production of a variety of plays from many sources. The “Little” in “Little Theatre” referred not only to budgets, but also to the size of the venues, which were meant to bring audiences and actors in close proximity at a time when large theatres and extravagant scenery were the norm. Little Theatres ranged in size from seventy to three hundred seats, and the intimacy allowed a direct, visceral connection with the performance. In Philadelphia, the Movement got a jump start in 1913 when Beulah E. Jay, a native of Boston and sometime student of acting and opera, opened the doors of her Little Theatre. The year prior, she founded the Metropolitan Dramatic School at 15th and Chestnut and purchased three residential lots on the 1700 block of Delancey Street with her husband, Edward G. Jay, and her husband’s business partner, Frederick H. Shelton. Architect Amos Warren Barnes was hired to draw up the plans and
