The Wee Playhouse reading theater in Alfred, New York, traces its origin to Fall 1920 and still holds meetings today, making it probably the oldest continuous reading theater in the country. Several theaters also sprang up during this period. Women were pervasive throughout these companies, although their efforts were often belittled, dismissed, or undervalued. This experimentation, influenced by European models, ranged from an ultra-detailed naturalism to, by the early 1920s, a wildly provocative expressionism, part of a new stagecraft. The new groups began to experiment with new forms of storytelling, acting styles, dialogue, and mise-en-scene. New forms of drama, some influenced by or parodying the new science of psychoanalysis, began to be presented in smaller venues, many converted from other uses into makeshift theatres. A wide variety of experimental groups, clubs, and settlement houses undertook to reform the theater, bringing more inwardly directed plays to a wider public audience. Continuing to react against commercialism, amateur companies began to write and produce their own works as well as new plays from Europe that had been ignored by the syndicates. In 1912, two theatre groups were formed, the Toy Theatre in Boston and the Chicago Little Theatre these events often being cited as the official start of the Little Theatre Movement in the United States. She was active in the Alice Gerstenberg Experimental Theatre Workshop in the 1950s and the Alice Gerstenberg Theatre in the 1960s, which helped to cultivate the legacy of the Little Theatre Movement of the early 20th century. Gerstenberg was also producer and president of The Playwrights' Theatre of Chicago, 1922–1945. Īlice Gerstenberg, an original member of the Chicago Little Theatre, expanded the movement to include children, founding the Chicago Junior League Theatre for Children in 1921. Maurice Browne, director and co-founder of the Chicago Little Theatre with Ellen Van Volkenburg, responding to often having been called the founder of the Little Theatre Movement, instead credited Hull House director Laura Dainty Pelham with being the "true founder of the 'American Little Theatre Movement.'" Nevertheless, Browne and Van Volkenburg's company had, as the first little theatre to use the term, provided the movement with its name and inspired the creation in 1914 of Margaret Anderson's influential Chicago periodical The Little Review. In 1910, Mary founded there the Aldis Playhouse, "a predecessor to the 'little theater' movement." The Hull House settlement theatre group, founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, was the first to perform several plays by Galsworthy, Ibsen, and Shaw in Chicago. and Mary Aldis established an artists' colony called The Compound in Lake Forest, Illinois. Nevertheless, by the second decade of the 20th century, pure melodrama, with its typed characters and exaggerated plots, had become the province of motion pictures.Ĭhicago philanthropists and arts patrons Arthur T. During a secret meeting in 1895, the owners of most of the theatres across America organized into a Theatrical Syndicate "to control competition and prices." This group, which included all major producers, "effectively stifled dramatic experimentation for many years" in search of greater profits.
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While not yet totally free of melodramatic elements, plays reflecting a style more associated with realism gradually emerged. During the last decades of the century, producers and playwrights began to create narratives dealing with social problems, albeit usually on a sensational level. These types of formulaic works could be produced over and over again in splendid halls in big cities and by touring companies in smaller ones. Sensational melodramas had entertained theatre audiences since the mid-19th century, drawing larger and larger audiences. History Conventional theater in 19th-century America 1.5 Contemporary effect of the Little Theatre Movement.
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