The basal idea in all branches of the Workshop is to discover what special ability, if any, each person has, and to help him to develop it. Consequently, at a first rehearsal the actors move as they like, except when they get into bad groupings. This freedom is given that, "finding themselves in the parts," they may make the broader interpretive action as personal as possible. When the main positions have been obtained in this way, the director does more in suggesting the movement which reveals characterization or adds beauty to the grouping; but always there is the repeated question, after a movement or position has been tried successfully: "Now do you feel easy, comfortable? If not, what do you want to do?" If the actor has a definite suggestion, it is tried. If possible, it is not discarded until the actor is convinced of its undesirability. Usually the first week goes into main positions, the general interrelating of the acts, and memorizing lines; the second into details of position which are interpretive or which give beauty to the grouping, to finer points of characterization, and to the climactic movement of the play; and the last week to polish, dress rehearsals, and final performances. It has been proved that the actors of the Workshop get better results by rehearsing three or four hours a day six times a week for three weeks than twice or thrice a week for a longer period.

Students, until trained, even those who are interested, watch rehearsals very ineffectively. It is useless to attend now and then, or to come for part of a rehearsal and leave when other attractions call. It is equally useless to watch eagerly for corroboration of one's own ideas as to coaching or for ideas to combat. Each producer has his methods. If he gets good results, the points to be watched for are, what fundamentally he strives for, and how this is attained. Nor should his ideas or ways be slavishly adhered to, but used or discarded later by any watcher as his judgment, matured by experience, deems wise. Rehearsals have no steadily climactic movement. Some advance the play or individual scenes with great strides. Some move jerkily. Some

hang fire. Some seem almost to retrograde. Any wise director knows that his cast may at times grow a bit stale on one side of the work. Then he shifts them to another, or subordinates everything to bringing an actor or a group up to standard. The watcher, failing to keep his eye on the advance in the whole play, deems these slow rehearsals signs of the director's ineptness, or unimportant, and cuts them. A few days later he is greatly surprised at what seems to him the sudden, unexplainable betterment in the rehearsing. When a final rehearsal goes badly, young coaches are too ready to rest on that silliest of traditions, "A bad dress rehearsal makes a good performance." Correctly understood, this means one of two truths. The badness may result from the nervousness or weariness of the company. If so, because of the bad rehearsal, the effort of every actor to do his very best on the first night may make the play go brilliantly. More probably the saying means that an experienced producer, facing a bad dress rehearsal, will arrange meetings within the next few hours with the actors and his aids by which he will bring the play into far better condition. If, on the contrary, the company on the first night does not believe that the producer has done his utmost for them, and that, therefore, the fate of the play is wholly in their hands, they will, from lack of steadiness, turn a bad dress rehearsal into a bad first performance. Discipline must lie back of all good rehearsing, but not the immediate, unquestioning obedience of militarism. The producer works mainly through persons, not groups or masses. To work, not in spite of, but with, the individual, there lies the difficulty, the everlasting problem, and the inspiration of producing. Moreover, putting on a play is not, properly, to find a field for the exhibition of the producer's fads, a very common fault among amateurs, and certainly not unknown among professionals. Students of producing must be made to understand that a play is not its scenery; its lighting; its theories of movement, gesture, voice-handling; its schemes of color: but recorded emotional states which will fail of their proper effect if they are not made to

produce in any audience the emotional response desired by the author. This they must do with whatever aid settings, lighting, or other accessories may give, but not as secondary to them or despite them. The producer's art is interpretation by all these aids not of his own individuality read into the play, but of the author's purpose divined by close study of the piece and, better still, by sympathetic consultation.

Of course the play could not be produced in three weeks were there not the discipline already mentioned and hearty coöperation by many skilled people. Just before a piece goes into rehearsal it is read to the artistic and producing force as well as to the actors, all of whom watch it for the special problems it may have for them. Immediately after the reading, copies of the play are handed to the costumer, designer of scenery, property mistress, the person in charge. of lighting, and the stage-manager. As soon as possible, these meet individually with the author to make sure that they know exactly what he wants, and, as groups, to establish their plans cooperatively. Within a few days the director sees either a rough drawing or a model of the scenes. If the settings submitted are known to be satisfactory to the author, the director makes no changes unless important stage business already in mind requires them. wants to give the author and other persons at work as complete self-expression as he can, and he relies on his aids to see that costumes, properties large and small, lighting, and scenery are satisfactory to him when the first rehearsal is called. Till that time, when he will know just what he thinks the play demands in all these respects, he reserves further discussion. Moreover, he trusts the author, who attends all rehearsals, to see that the different departments give him or her what the play, as it is developed from day to day, requires. He knows that, if the author makes undue demands, the head of any department will come to him for arbitration. The Workshop is no place for the furthering of personal idiosyncrasies or the fostering of fads. The desired result is to make the play, when produced, as nearly as the equipment of the Work

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shop will permit, what the author thinks he wrote. Then, if the play fails in part or as a whole, its author will not seek to find excuses, but will painstakingly search out how the faults may be remedied.

Except for the making of scenery flats and a few of the more bulky properties, the organization does all its own work. To-day this may not be unusual with experimental theaters, but it was when the Workshop began its history in 1913. It is the undeniable evidence provided by the Workshop that such an enterprise may depend wholly on itself, which has in large part made the practice wide-spread. How are all these needed workers gathered? Admission to English 47 and 47a has already been explained. For the other activities any student in either college and even outsiders of all ages may volunteer. This is because, with one exception, there is as yet no course offered in the other activities. The exception is instruction in designing and painting scenery, a course offered in the school of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Though this is no part of the Harvard or Radcliffe curriculum, a student may enroll himself in it as outside work. Its members design much of the Workshop scenery, and paint virtually all of it. It is high time that this and playproducing should be accepted at both colleges as course work, though not to count for any degree. There is the demand, and from very promising students, but till such work is part of the curriculum, naturally it cannot be so organized as exactly to meet the needs of the Workshop. On the other hand, when established, such courses must be the expression of more than one set of theories or one personality. Otherwise they will soon become set in method. The Workshop is not a place for the mere systematizing of established practice. Its very breath of life should be rebellious experimentation. Only by feeding in new material constantly and by giving all sorts and kinds of persons a chance can that breath be kept stirring.

Naturally, with all these activities centering in lower Massachusetts, the room is rarely vacant. The inclosed space in one corner, grandiloquently

called "office," is so crowded with its desk and two chairs that a necessary filing-case must be placed outside, among the scenery. So constant is the coming and going through this "office" that it is really a passageway. Round the director's rehearsing-table meet three times a week the Harvard classes in play-writing. At whatever hours are free from other engagements, students, or members of the company who have had some experience in production, rapidly prepare for presentation to the classes and the director the second kind of plays already mentioned. Here all carpentry goes on, and large properties are made. Here the scenery is painted. Here committees meet. Here the director holds the innumerable consultations which the work entails. Is it any wonder that the activities sometimes clash and that, as something must give way, an important rehearsal must often be transferred to strange and unfavorable conditions, in order that scene-painters or other workers may finish their labors in time? Cramped, overcrowded, bursting with the energy which all this youth, working coöperatively, insures, the Workshop pleads for an adequately equipped building of its own. Without this it cannot do properly the work which it is called on to do; without it there can be no development of instruction for which there is a steady, insistent demand from people so competent that their needs should be met-needs in play-producing, lighting, and stage design.

After two weeks of rehearsing in these conditions, a Workshop play goes to its first dress rehearsal. Two nights before, the producing force, except the director and his immediate subordinates who are still at work in the rehearsalroom, meet in the auditorium of Agassiz House, Radcliffe College. Here, on the only stage in the two colleges available for the Workshop, they labor for the next forty-eight hours to perfect the details of setting, lighting, and properties that must be settled before the first dress rehearsal. They are badly hampered because during the day the room is in almost constant use for lectures or various student interests, and the stage force is not allowed to keep the building open after eleven P.M.

Why dwell on dress rehearsals-times of necessary adjustments to the actual stage, of confusions hard to clear away, of weariness and even discouragement to persons who should know better? No matter how bad a dress rehearsal, all is not lost. There is still time between it and the next evening for special rehearsing of actors, groups, scenes, acts, for consultation with actors and committees, which may bring the desired improvements. If the repeater of that phrase about a bad dress rehearsal could be present in any producer's office the day after one, he would not dare utter it again, for he would learn that, if the director and his forces have been busy before, the intensity of their work is tenfold increased in these hours before the first performance.

The Workshop usually produces a play for only two nights. Very rarely it repeats it for a charity. Its principle has been that it exists for its authors and its own audience, and that it should be seen under its own conditions rather than exhibited elsewhere merely as an entertainment. Of course it disregarded all this in war-time, playing in Cambridge, Boston, or at Camp Devens for sailors, soldiers, and radio students.

One must be prompt at any regular performance. The doors, which open at seven-thirty, are closed at eight. Five or ten minutes later, when the director has finished a brief talk to his audience, the doors are opened to latecomers. Thereafter no one may enter until the end of the first act. No doubt this seems hard, but at a Workshop performance a first act is not confused by belated footfalls, slamming seats, or bits of dinner conversation. So well known is the rule now that very rarely is any one obliged to wait outside.

Passing up the staircase, one will notice on one's left a table where any of the printed plays from the two courses may be had. At the door of the small auditorium-with its gallery it seats four hundred people--Radcliffe seniors in cap and gown give programs to all entering. There are no reserved places, and consequently the floor is usually filled within fifteen minutes after the door is opened. Therefore, unless one is early, one may have to go to the

gallery, where there are very few good seats. Unfortunately, the auditorium was built for lectures, and out of four hundred places, only a little over two hundred have a view of the whole stage. That is why the Workshop confines its audience to four hundred members, providing for some two hundred each night, and restricting guests to the number of tickets returned each time by members who cannot use them. The audience is of all ages and in all kinds of dress, for an effort to make "no evening dress" the rule has not been wholly successful. Scraps of overheard conversation will show one that this is not a homogeneous group. Here are members of the faculty and, of course, students from both colleges, but here also are professional musicians, artists, writers, architects, and a fair representation of the general public. Now and again one will recognize some playplacer or manager watching a play which may become available. There is no orchestra, but conversation is as general as if there were.

At first the Workshop welcomed any one willing to watch the trying out of plays admittedly not yet ready for the professional stage. As a gain in the quality of its plays and their presentation increased requests to see the performances, it carefully developed methods by which people coming irregularly or not complying with the rules of membership are removed from the audience. Membership now comes as in a club, on proposal and seconding by persons already in the audience. First chance is given people practising one of the arts which, in the broadest use, are applicable to the theater. All members must agree to attend regularly, and within a week after each performance to send to the Workshop office written comment on the production. To each member is sent annually a card detailing the ways in which he may coöperate. This he is to return with a check against the ways he will aid, if called on. may do something as little laborious as lending properties, or may share actively in any of a dozen or more kinds of coöperation. Though no membership fee is charged, as many of the audience as care to contribute may send in any

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sum they wish. The amounts, ranging from one dollar to three hundred and fifty, the cost of any entire performance,-pay for all the performances, the office expenses, and an occasional lecture.

A Workshop audience on a first night. is unusual in this respect: no critic there is burdened by the sense that, in making his criticisms, he must so phrase them as to entertain or at least interest his readers. Everybody has come to see the trying out of a play guaranteed by the director to be interesting in itself and to contain problems which only production can solve. Just what those are only the small part of the audience also in the courses knows. This gathering is well aware, too, that comments written to be clever at the expense of the dramatist the director reserves the right to throw into his waste-basket. It knows it must give its reasons for its likes and dislikes, and that all comments, except of the selfexploiting kind, will be read both by the director and, when the names have been removed, by the author. That the director knows who writes each criticism produces responsibility. That each comment is for the author anonymous promotes honesty of statement. Comment is asked for not merely on the play itself, but on any part of the production-lighting, setting, stage-management, the acting, or the producer's own work. This audience meets, then, not idly to be entertained, but to do its part in making the subsequent performance of the play produce on the outside public the emotional effect the author desires.

It is eight o'clock. The director comes to a place just in front of the stage, and for a few minutes reports to the audience, as to a large committee, on the developments in the Workshop since the last production and on any matters of special interest concerning the play to be performed. As he retires, a few latecomers enter. Chimes sound, and the house is darkened. As the curtain draws aside, a very small stage is revealed, but its extremely cramped conditions have been skilfully disguised by the designers of scenery. Originally a recessed lecture platform, twenty feet

wide by eight feet deep, and not as broad at the back as at the front, it is shut in on both sides by steel-girdered walls, with one door on each side, down stage, close to the proscenium. There

is no room between the scenery and the walls for storing scenery between the acts, not even, indeed, for an actor to pass. Overhead the iron-girdered floor of an upper story comes nearly to the top of the curtains; consequently, nothing may be rolled up out of sight. Between scenes everything must be taken off stage. To carry a piece of scenery to a room near by necessitates six turnings. Nothing could be more cramped, more laborious, more unrepresentative of ordinary stage conditions. It is necessary to emphasize all this, because the director has frequently been blamed for his critical and uncomplimentary attitude toward a stage which seems to many who have not examined it to do whatever is needed. Is it not clear, however, that a stage which does not provide and cannot be made to provide representative or even adequate lighting conditions, where all scenery must be specially designed, constructed, and painted for it, where all scene-shifting is far more complicated and time-consuming than it would be on the stages of high schools or club buildings, where stage positions cannot be freely handled, but become largely a question of avoiding the furniture, is not a just place on which to ask any one to train people either as playwrights or producers? How to meet the problems of production on a normally equipped stage should be the question, not the performance of acrobatic feats in adjustment not likely to be called for anywhere else in the country.

The play is on. Unquestionably the majority of the pieces are realistic, for students are encouraged to write of what they know; but satire, fantasy, and romance are also seen. In the acting well defined characterization and sincerity are offered instead of finished technic. No playing to the audience is allowed. Applause for an actor on his first appearance is deprecated as unfair to new-comers or persons entrusted with parts likely to become unsympathetic as the play develops.

No flowers are sent over the footlights. If kind friends cannot be restrained, the flowers are sent to the dressing-room. The Workshop gives no opportunities for uncomfortable comparisons of the number of flowers sent one member of the cast rather than another. Applause may accompany an exit if it is spontaneous recognition of notable acting, but every effort is made to hold applause till the end of an act. Even then there is no parading before the curtain.

Waits are usually short,-from five to ten minutes-except for a pause which usually comes before the last act, but is sometimes shifted earlier to cover some time-consuming change of scenery. In this twenty minutes as many of the audience as wish go into a large room just across the corridor for coffee. Here a special committee looks after new members, guests of the organization, or any one who may wish to meet officers of the Workshop not busy behind the scenes. When the chimes sound, this coffee-room group drifts slowly back into the auditorium.

After the last act the audience frankly shows its immediate response to the play, applauding warmly and long, calling for the cast and even for the author; merely calling the cast; or only applauding perfunctorily; or going out puzzled, dissatisfied, without applause. Sometimes there is even the hum of querying protest.

The director watches every play from his place at the back of the auditorium. Immediately after the final curtain he joins the cast in the coffee-room, criticizing, making appointments for special rehearsals, and trying to convey his impression of the play from the front of the house. When he finishes, there follows the one period of relaxation in the evening. Author, working force, actors, and director interchange comment and comparison.

Within a week the written comments are in, over ninety per cent. of them and sometimes a clear one hundred being helpful. The director considers carefully to what extent they justify or negative questions which class-room, rehearsing, and production have raised in his mind. Of course there are many