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Maurice Browne and the Chicago Little Theatre
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2010
Extract
Maurice Browne died on January 21, 1955, shortly before his seventy-fourth birthday. If his name is known at all to theatre people today, it is known as that of the man who was a prominent West End producer several decades ago, who produced Journey's End, and who, over fifteen years before the destruction of Hiroshima, collaborated with Robert Nichols on a play about the atom bomb, Wings Over Europe. Yet according to Bernard Shaw, “none of these things matter a tuppenny damn. The work this man …did… years ago on a fourth-floor-back in Chicago—this is what matters.”
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- Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1962
References
NOTES
1. Quoted in Browne, Maurice, Too Late to Lament (London, 1955), p. 105.Google Scholar
2. “Editorial Comment,” Theatre Arts Magazine, II (December, 1917), 50.
3. Sayler, Oliver M., Our American Theatre (New York, 1923), p. 9.Google Scholar
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5. Dell, Floyd, “Little Theater Opens to Nine and Ninety,” The Chicago Evening Post, November 13, 1912, p. 9.Google Scholar
6. Sayler, Oliver M., Our American Theatre, p. 294.Google Scholar
7. The Chicago Little Theatre Company, unpublished letter to Maurice Browne, April 5, 1913, in possession of Alice Gerstenberg. Capitals in original.
8. Interview with Alice Gerstenberg, November 17, 1956.
9. Browne, Maurice, Too Late to Lament, pp. 147–148.Google Scholar
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18. “Drama League to Examine Little Theater Exhibit,” The Christian Science Monitor, April 25, 1916, p. 8. These dimensions were given by Raymond Jonson during the Chicago Little Theatre's fourth season. In Too Late to Lament, p. 123, Browne gives the dimensions as fourteen feet wide, twenty feet deep, and eight feet high. Since the latter was written over three decades after the Chicago Little Theatre closed, I have chosen the contemporary account as probably more accurate.
19. Prospectus, The Chicago Little Theatre, First Season, in Maurice Browne Collection, University of Michigan Library. There are various accounts of the theatre's seating capacity. Contemporary newspapers referred to it as ninety-nine more often than any other number, but this was probably for purposes of alliteration. In Too Late to Lament, p. 120, Browne says that the seating capacity was ninety-one. The statement in the prospectus seems to be the most reliable.
20. Bennett, James O'Donnell, “Getting at the Meaning of the Experiments of Worthy Amateurs,” The Sunday Record-Herald, November 17, 1912, Part II, p. 2.Google Scholar
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23. Roeder, Ralph, “American Producers: I. Maurice Browne,” Theatre Arts Magazine, V (April, 1921), 122.Google Scholar
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25. Browne, Maurice, Too Late to Lament, p. 153.Google Scholar
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27. Bennett, Tames O'Donnell, “Pretty Toys at The Little Theater,” The Chicago Record-Herald, October 23, 1913, p. 6.Google Scholar
28. Ibid.
29. Craig, Edward Gordon, On the Art of the Theatre (Boston, 1924), p. 162.Google Scholar In his preface to this edition (p. viii), he declared, perhaps during a convenient lapse of memory, “someone put into my mouth the statement that I wanted to abolish the footlights…. What I had said was ‘some footlights.’”
30. Hatton, Frederic, “News Notes of the Theater,” Chicago Herald, November 21, 1914, p. 6.Google Scholar
31. Interview with Ellen Van Volkenburg, November 23, 1956; see also Browne, Maurice, Too Late to Lament, p. 121.Google Scholar Although they maintain that the Chicago Little Theatre was the first theatre in the United States to dim the auditorium lights in harmony with the mood of the play, I have not been able to find any evidence that this was not done in other theatres of the time. There is indirect evidence, however, in the fact that the critics frequently commented on the dimming of the house lights.
32. Hall, O. L., “Little Theater Offers ‘The Happy Prince’ and Biblical Pantomime,” The Chicago Daily Journal, December 27, 1913, p. 7.Google Scholar
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