Straw Hat Season

No plays opened on Broadway last week. None had opened for a fortnight nor would for two months. For, the sun having swung south from the Tropic of Cancer, the U. S. Drama swung out across the city limits.* In a hundred remodeled barns, churches and casinos, on college campuses and at amusement parks, several thousand professional, semiprofessional and amateur performers greased up and caught their cues as the summer theatre season got under way.

There are a few summer theatres in the U. S. that are more than 30 years old. But the migration of show business to the country in pursuit of vacationing customers did not become a general movement until the early, depressed 19305. It had started, however, in the preceding decade when stage-struck Eastern collegians--notably the Princeton group headed by James Stewart, Myron McCormick, Joshua Logan and Bretaigne Windust--began spending their vacations doing old and new plays in New England resort communities. In 1930 there were 15 active "straw hat" companies within a night's railroad ride of Manhattan. By 1934, numerically the peak season, Variety could list 105 summer stock companies. At first Broadway producers thought that summer playhouses could be advantageously used to try out shows under consideration for the following season in town. Result was that three years ago 135 new plays were given rural premieres. But as time went on it became clear that limited resources of every sort, plus the abbreviated rehearsal periods common to all stock companies, prevented summer theatres from being able to give an adequate tryout. Nowadays, as a rule, only the least gifted writers permit their plays to be given a summer production. Significantly, of the 75 plays tried out by summer companies last year, only ten were rated at the time as "possibilities" and none that reached Broadway clicked even softly. This year there will be hardly more than 50 country premieres.

This year, also, there will be fewer country theatres. In 1936, Equity counted 55. This summer season's total will fall about ten behind, but on the average the survivors will be considerably healthier than their predecessors of previous seasons. Instead of depending on brand new shows whose authors are willing to waive royalties on the chance of a producer's seeing and liking their work, typical 1937 rural playhouse will stick to tried & true, love & laughter shows from bygone seasons. More than one summer stock company will offer Let Us Be Gay, Candlelight, The Second Man, Meet the Wife, not the least of whose virtues is that royalty rates are low. They will be performed by ambitious youngsters from little theatres, conscience-stricken celebrities temporarily on leave from the films, Broadway people with their futures before and behind them. New York and New England will as usual see the largest concentration of these plays and players (see map). A representative, but by no means comprehensive, summary of summer theatricals there and elsewhere:

Elitch's Gardens is the great-grand-father of all U. S. summer stock corn-panies. In 1890 a sentimental showman named John Elitch established in a grove of big cottonwoods outside Denver a combination zoo, amusement park and botanical garden. Main attraction was a theatre where vaudeville was performed. Julia Marlowe, Nat Goodwin and Phineas T. Barnum were on hand to open Elitch's Gardens, and Eugene Field was there to report it for the Denver Republican. The place has been a repository of big names ever since. After John Elitch's death in 1891, his widow switched to legitimate shows and nearly every personage in U. S. show business, from General & Mrs. Tom Thumb to Douglas Fairbanks, has at one time or another played Elitch's. This season's company features such names as Ona Munson and Kenneth MacKenna. Helen Bonfils, stage-struck heiress to the late Gambler Frederick Bonfils' Denver Post, will do bits.

Most pretentious summer repertory will be presented by the Pasadena Community Playhouse. The Playhouse was founded by oldtime Actor Gilmor Brown 19 years ago. This year the Legislature bestowed on it the title of "The State Theatre of California" (but no subsidy). To signalize this honor, Founder Brown had for months been bustling about his office full of goldfish, canaries and tiny turtles, arranging an imposing sequence of seven plays, which began June 28, called "The Story of the Southwest." Five of the plays are old: Gerhart Hauptmann's Montezuma, Maxwell Anderson's Night Over Taos, Franz Werfel's Juarez and Maximilian, David Belasco's Girl of the Golden West and Rose of the Rancho. Two are new: Miracle of the Swallows, a play about San Juan Capistrano's annual bird visitors by Ramon Romero, Hollywood correspondent for Spanish-language magazines; and Miner's Gold, a '49er show by Agnes Peterson, a Los Angeles school board official. Founder Brown will play the title role in Montezuma. Young Onslow Stevens, who with Gloria Stuart is the Playhouse's gift to the films, will come back from Hollywood to take the lead in the Romero show. There will be lectures preceding each week's bill and "festival breakfasts" to discuss what the plays are about.

At the top of New England, and close to the top of summer theatricals, stands the Lakewood Theatre near Skowhegan. Me. Lakewood was established in 1901 to bolster up a trolley line. Herbert L. Swett had just taken charge of the five-mile line between Skowhegan and an amusement park on the shore of what was then called Hayden's Pond. On the grounds was an auditorium in which were held spiritualist meetings. Mr. Swett thought that a company of actors would encourage a larger volume of traffic for the carline, and he was right.

Hayden's Pond is now called Lake Wesserunsett and Lakewood is now a summer colony whose residents are people like the Owen Davises and Arthur Byrons, first families of the U. S. stage. Under oldtime Director Melville Burke, a permanent troupe of performers like Owen Davis Jr., Mary Rogers and Ben Lackland will help guest players like James Rennie, Blanche Yurka, Jean Dixon and Edith Barrett put on plays like The Wild Duck, Reno and Tovarich.

Guests and regulars alike at Lakewood get $50 a week. Like other Maine summer stock theatres such as the Garrick Players (Kennebunkport), Ogunquit Playhouse (where for one week Bubble Dancer Sally Rand will appear as the freak draw in They Knew What They Wanted), and the new Boothbay Play house, Lakewood gets its customers from all over the State. Usual week's gross is $2,500. Three years ago, when Groucho Marx appeared in Twentieth Century, the take was doubled. Skowheganites say that fish came out of the lake to see that show.

A typical smaller summer theatre is lodged in a barn on a hill outside Peterborough, N. H. The Peterborough Players opened typically this week with The Guardsman. The audience, summer people from Dublin and Antrim plus a few wandering Bostonians, was scarcely more anonymous than the cast. The White Mountain State has numerous similar organizations to divert vacationists from the cinema, such as the New London Players, Tarn worth's Barnstormers and the Keene Summer Theatre, which will present The Sap next week with Rosamond Castle Page in the leading role. Miss Page says she is John Wilkes Booth's great-granddaughter. Over the border in Vermont, the Brattleboro Theatre, on whose board sit Constance Morrow Morgan (see p. 56) and Thornton Wilder, begins its season late in July. The Front Page and The Sea Gull will be featured. Burlington's Green Mountain Playhouse started doing business last week.

Cape Cod bristles with summer theatres.

At Chatham the Little Theatre, at Centerville the Mary Young Theatre (leading lady: Dorothy Stone) start their seasons this week. Provincetown's historic Wharf Theatre, a descendant of George Cram Cook's and Mary Heaton Vorse's old Provincetown Playhouse where Eugene O'Neill's work was first performed, carries on with a ten-week season opening with Leona Powers in Her Master's Voice. Most successful of Cape summer companies is Raymond Moore's Cape Play-house at Dennis. A landscape painter fresh from Leland Stanford, Director Moore served a hitch at the Wharf Theatre, then set up his own group in a barn. Next he took over a church, and has since spent $40,000 remodeling it.

Also within smell of the sea are the Rice Playhouse on Martha's Vineyard, the South Shore Players at Cohasset. Inland Massachusetts offers the summer playgoer the famed Berkshire Playhouse at Stockbridge. The big show at Stockbridge this summer opened this week with experienced little Helen Ford (No Other Girl, Dearest Enemy, Peggy-Ann) in the title role of Director William Miles's new adaptation of Sacha Guitry's and Oscar Straus's musical, Mariette. Mr. Miles expected heavy attendance from Miss Ford's nearby hometown of Troy, N. Y.

Rhode Island's straw hat drama will be partially provided by the Theatre-by-the-Sea at Matunuck and the Casino Theatre at Newport, where Eric Swift's new play Sweet Sorrow will be on the boards next fortnight.

In Connecticut, the Stony Creek Theatre, the Chapel Playhouse (Guilford), the new Litchfield Playhouse and Connecticut Players (Milford) were all to be going full blast by July 4. The Ivoryton Playhouse, now seven years old, revives shortly thereafter. An unusual arrangement has been made by Day Tuttle and Richard Skinner of the Westchester Playhouse at Mt. Kisco, N. Y. Lawrence Langner, one of the few urban producers who still retains an interest in summer stock, has handed over to them the management of his Country Playhouse at Westport for the summer. Shows which open in the Mt. Kisco theatre will play their second week in the Country Playhouse. Mt. Kisco's and Westport's weekly bills this summer will be something for cinemaddicts as well as theatregoers to see. Henry Fonda will enact The Virginian, Phillips Holmes and Frances Farmer will do The Petrified Forest, following the opening of Eva LeGallienne, on three-year holiday from the Manhattan stage, in Mirandolina.

Besides Westport and Mt. Kisco, more than a score of other summer companies are within reach of the fevered Manhattanite who is looking for an evening's fun in the country. Long Island is dotted with them from the Red Barn Theatre at Locust Valley to the John Drew Memorial Theatre at East Hampton. There are also the Starlight Theatre at Pawling, the Maverick Theatre at Woodstock, the Country Theatre at Suffern, the Reginald Goode Theatre at Clinton Hollow. Upstate and outstate the summer theatre season becomes even more substantial. At Ithaca performances will be given by summer students of Ithaca College and of Cornell's University Theatre. Union College at Schenectady is also very summer theatre-minded. Dixon Ryan Fox had just become president of Union three years ago when he persuaded his trustees to set up an Institute of the Theatre which would sponsor an annual Mohawk Drama Festival in July and August. Governor Lehman, the Boy Scouts and civic bodies all over the Mohawk Valley have enthusiastically sponsored the Festival. Colonel Frederick S. Greene, State Superintendent of Public Works, had Festival road signs posted in a 50-mi. radius of Schenectady, and this year, the Festival's third, he will be rewarded with a small part in The Farmer Takes a Wife. And this week another series of carefully presented revivals begins at Chautauqua, N. Y. when the able, 22-year-old Cleveland Playhouse company moves for the seventh summer to the shores of Lake Chautauqua for six weeks of repertory.

Good average summer playing will be provided by two new groups in New Jersey at the Morris County Playhouse (near Morristown) and Peapack's Auditorium Theatre; in Delaware at Arden's well established Robin Hood Theatre; in northern Pennsylvania by the Buck Hill Players (Buck Hill Falls). Well above average is Jasper Deeter's Hedgerow Theatre at Moylan, Pa., ten miles out of Philadelphia. Jasper Deeter is a disorderly looking individualist who prefers that his actors remain as anonymous as possible. An oldtime Provincetown Player, he was the original Smithers in The Emperor Jones. Fourteen years ago he took over an old stone mill near Moylan. His troupe gets no reward besides its board and lodging; their names do not appear in the program. Under these circumstances, Ann Harding is almost the only Hedgerow alumna who has attracted much attention. However, Producer Deeter's year-long repertory (30 plays) is appreciated by Philadelphia playgoers and this summer he will give his fourth and greatest Shaw Festival. From July 19 to Aug. 14, Hedgerow will present eleven Shavian works from Arms and the Man to Too True to Be Good. It is billed as the first time any theatre has ever presented 40 years of a living playwright's work.

To get into any of the above theatres this summer, the lay spectator will have to give from 50-c- to $2. But he can watch the Barter Theatre at Abingdon, Va. put on The Petrified Forest for a couple of quarts of motor oil, a peck of tomatoes or a good-sized piece of cheese. Established by a stout-hearted youngster named Robert Porterfield in a bankrupt and abandoned girls' college in the teeth of the Depression, the Barter Theatre overcame the original prejudice its neighbors had against actors, has flourished and now plays a full summer season with side tours to such towns as Roanoke, Bristol, Johnson City, Tenn., and Linville, N. C. Pride of the company last week were a lamb and a litter of pedigreed fox terrier pups, good for two season tickets.

*Notable exception: San Francisco's theatrical event of the year took place last week when Alfred Lunt & Lynn Fontanne appeared in the U. S. premiere of S. N. Behrman's adaptation of Jean Giradoux' Amphitryon 38, the 38th dramatic version of the legend of how Jupiter (Mr. Lunt) wooed Alkmena (Miss Fontanne) while disguised as her husband. Mr. Lunt said the play is ''naughty--not dirty."

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