Max Reinhardt

He Comes to us Because We Won the War

There are three outstanding dramatic institutions in the world today: the Moscow Art Theatre, Gordon Craig of England, Max Reinhardt of Germany. Almost everything that we owe to the modern developments in the theatre--to Realism, to Naturalism, to Expressionism, to the revolution in stage setting, scene designing, lighting, grouping, producing, directing, in short, to the whole new art of the drama, can be traced to these three sources.

Max Reinhardt has arrived in America to discuss with Morris Gest and Otto H. Kahn the production of The Miracle in Madison Square Garden next fall. He will remain in New York two weeks perfecting plans for this mammoth production, which has a cast of 2,000 persons, and then re-turn to Germany for the summer to assemble his staff of artists for the six productions he will make under Mr. Gest's management next year, and to produce in Berlin Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape and Zoe Akins' Papa.

Disappointed and disillusioned by the failure of his greatest enterprise, the Grosses Schauspielhaus, the national German theatre which housed five thousand, and essayed epic dramas on a grand scale, Reinhardt stopped producing for several years. His American venture is viewed by the critics as an attempt to "come back." In the heyday of his fame he was all things to all men.

His early fame resulted from his work" with the great naturalistic director Brahm of the Frie Volks-buehne, but in Gorky's Night Lodging (played by the Moscow Art Theatre as The Lower Depths) he brought Realism to its highest point. Together with Gordon Craig he was the father of intimacy in the theatre. But in his Berlin and Munich productions he showed himself the master of large scale dramatic pageantry as well.

The European theatre testifies continually to his influence. In Germany a dozen younger men are following the Reinhardt tradition. As far north as Gothenburg, the commercial city of Sweden; as far south as Vienna, his disciples acknowledge him as their inspiration and master.

The advent of Reinhardt, like that of the Moscow Art Theatre, may be considered as one of the most important things which the United States won in the war. Had it not been for the economic impoverishment of Germany and Russia, these artists would have doubtless continued their careers in their native lands.