PENDULUM SWINGS AWAY FROM REALISM

"It is not the business of the drama to prove anything," declared Kenneth Macgowan '11 in an interview with a CRIMSON reporter yesterday. "The drama should provide a release for the audience from the cares and drudgery of every-day life."

Mr. Macgowan, who addressed the Ford Hall Forum last night, has been dramatic critic for three metropolitan newspapers, has been Director of the Provincetown Playhouse and the Green-which Village Theatre, and is at present Director of the Actors' Theatre in New York.

Drama Was Form of Escape

"The Greeks recognized the need of some temporary escape of the human soul from the homely bounds of every day," he continued, "and in their theatre, in their great tumultuous plays that searched deep into the spirit of man, they provided this. A great moral lesson might be taught in a Greek play, but it was purely secondary, and was borne home to the mind only after long and careful consideration of the action. The feature of the Attic drama was its power of lifting the human soul out of itself, and causing the mind in a contemplation of spiritualities mightier than itself, to lose sight of petty earthly troubles.

"In the exercise of this archaic mode of expression, the drama continued until some 50 years ago, when there came the craze for realism. This, in its demand for photographic reproduction of life and its problems, which later evolved into the social drama of Ibsen and Galsworthy, ousted the spiritual element in the drama, killed imaginative dramatic writing, and was all of a piece with the growing materialistic tendency of the latter quarter of the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth century.

Realism Now In Decline

"This realistic trend is broken now, and we are returning to the older dramatic ideals. The looseness of form and physical structure of the modern plays, the greater range and diversity of subject, and the fantastic staging that has recently been the vogue, all point to a renaissance of the primary function of the drama.

Mr. Macgowan was instrumental in the choice of "The Orange Comedy" for production by the Dramatic Club this fall. This play, an adaptation by Gilbert Seldes '14, from the eighteenth century Italian original by Carlo Gozzi, has never been played in America.

"This play is at present owned by the Actors' Theatre," explained Mr. Macgowan, "and we are most anxious to see it played by the Dramatic Club before we attempt to produce it in New York.

"In the early eighteenth century Italian comedy was flourishing, but was written and produced in slap-stick style, with stock characters and stereo typed jokes. Gozzi broke from this familiar fashion, and while he kept most of the stock characters, like Harlequin and Pantaloon, he wove around them a romantic story, taken from the Arabian Nights and embellished with a good deal of humor not entirely of the slapstick variety. His work is in some sense the flower of the Comedie del Arte of early Italian drama, and it-will be interesting to see on the modern stage his combination of the old slapstick and the later romance."