T HERE is no more persistent complaint, or one more just, than that many of the rarest and most beautiful things in the world of painting and sculpture remain hidden from the main-traveled roads of the public in any contemporary period. Museums collect historically and safely, college courses in appreciation end when they reach the day before yesterday, dealers in art make their living by selling old masters. The living artist, even if he has creative genius far beyond the accepted workers of his time, is likely to gain only half-appreciation on this side of the grave. There is one art-the theater-that might be expected, in the nature of its medium and the immediacy of its appeal, to escape any such limitation. But the indictment holds, at least in our American theater. It holds, indeed, to such an extent that no one can seriously contest the statement that probably two thirds of the finest things conceived by dramatists and stage artists never are brought before the larger public at all. For the most part, the really live art of the theater lies buried on library shelves, in the records of laboratory stages, and in the portfolios of "dreamers." The statement brings up, of course, the whole complex question of permanent and esthetic values as against popular values and newspaper judgment. One need not accept the view that crowd appreciation means fine art, else we should have to agree that the art center of the world has suddenly shifted from a point somewhere in western Europe across the Atlantic and America to a strange sort of resting-place on our west coast, as is claimed somewhat insistently in Hollywood and its environs. Nor is it necessary to grant that inspiration resides in retreats entirely apart from every-day life. But granting that there is a bit of truth in both ideas, one might still defend the thesis that art in her finer raiments walks constantly among us unrecognized, in metropolis and province alike. At the beginning of his search for infinity Dante is stopped by the three beasts All this is by way of introducing the opinion that of the very numerous and varied plays that have come to the attention of American theater-goers this season, there is none that rivals in value the unpresented production of Dante's "Divine Comedy" as devised by Norman-Bel Geddes, and illustrated in the series of pictures herewith. Understand, this Dante project is not merely the aloof, dreaming-artist sort of thing that can be called "precious" or "pretty, but impractical." Particularly it is not stage decoration substituted for drama, there being no scenery at all. To a remarkable degree it combines imaginativeness and practicality. One glance at the illustrations will indicate its visionary character. Not only does it try to pose in theatric form things that have never been so posed before, things dramatic and spiritual, but it presupposes an entirely new type of stage and theater, a structure absolutely independent of the picture-frame idea of the current traditional playhouse, and based on that plastic, unrealistic, purely theatric ideal that has grown up as part of the world-wide modern-art move The earth opens, and in the sulphurous green of the inferno Dante and Vergil descend ment. Yet the whole thing is designed and scaled to a particular existing building, and every detail of staging and lighting has been worked out to the last point. The project is built on the twin foundation posts of imagination and practical working knowledge of stage machinery. Mr. Geddes conceived the play in connection with the world-wide celebration recently of the three hundredth anniversary of Dante's death. He conceived it as a huge drama of light, movement, and words, and desiring a place where an existing stage would not limit his vision, he planned it definitely for Madison Square Garden. His stage is designed as a curving hillside rising away from the audience, with a pit in the center. It would have the effect of a cascade of steps, with platforms at related intervals around a central crater. A pair of enormous plinths rises at the back, without recognizable shape at first, but capable of taking on more or less suggestive form as the action progresses through earth, hell, purgatory, and paradise. All the general changes of scene are planned to be accomplished by changing Above Dante and Vergil winged creatures in yellow light, and in the shadows the damned emerge lights and by the massing of hundreds of actors. It is seldom that lighting has been called on to bear so much of the dramatic burden. From the time when the single figure of Dante is discovered mounting through the huge shadows toward the rim of the crater to the closing scene in all-enveloping white light, there is a planned progression of light controlled in color, direction, and intensity. To differentiate the three main divisions of the drama, all the lighting of the inferno scenes is from below, from within the crater; in the purgatory episode it comes apparently from beyond the stage; and during the paradise scenes it strikes from above. But the changes are, of course, imperceptible as such, just as the whole lighting scheme is planned to register as part of the dramatic whole and not merely as lighting. Several of the illustrations indicate how the massing of the actors, together with the placing of single emphatic figures, contributes to the sense of changing design; so that the progression seems to embrace several different settings, when in reality there is only one. The beginning of movement is in the single |