Civic Virtue

(See front cover*)

Monday night: The Sea Gull (Anton Tchekov)

Tuesday night: The Would-Be Gentleman (Moliere)

Wednesday night: Mile. Bourrat (Claude Anet)

Thursday night: The Cradle Song (the Sierras)

Friday night: Inheritors (Susan Glaspell)

Saturday morning: Peter Pan (Barrie)

Saturday matinee: Peter Pan

Saturday night: The Sea Gull

Above is last week's schedule--the ninth week of the fourth season of Manhattan's Civic Repertory Theatre. It is a sample week in the current career of that theatre's galvanic founder-directrix, Actress Eva Le Gallienne. Monday and Saturday nights she was the dour daughter of a Russian steward. Tuesday she was a sleek and satined marquise. Saturday she was Peter Pan both morning and afternoon, zooming on concealed wires out over the heads of gasping, wonder-struck children.

Typical also were the capacity crowds which last week, while a sinking stock-market thinned most theatre audiences, filled the Civic Repertory Theatre. Situated on drab 14th Street, it is theatrically "downtown" (28 blocks below Times Square), a dilapidated structure with a facade of fire escapes, balcony pillars obstructing the view, and an unusually oppressive heating plant. It offers few conveniences either to audience or actors except vast, barnlike spaces in which many sets of scenery may simultaneously be hung. Yet last week, and every week this season, it was jammed. It was Mrs. Hoover's first choice of a theatre to go to when she visited Manhattan last month.

Top price at the Civic Repertory is only $1.50. The audience always contains many sheerly personal admirers of Directrix Le Gallienne, including mannish-looking women in suits tailored like hers and carrying canes. But these are minor causes for the Repertory's success. The major significance of the theatre is that it proves, like a corollary to the Theatre Guild, that fine dramatic art treated studiously, "artistically," is appreciated in Manhattan./- And though Miss Le Gallienne's chief associates--Jacob Ben-Ami, Josephine Hutchinson, Leona Roberts, Egon Brecher and Paul Leyssac--would merit headlines anywhere, major credit for a serious venture which is one of Manhattan's greatest civic virtues, which has won all but the crustiest critics, must inevitably be Eva Le Gallienne's. At 30 she has become a prominent citizen.

Far from being the hypersensitive and woeful person she often appears on the stage, Actress Le Gallienne has always been busy and capable as a dynamo. Her parents were Poet Richard Le Gallienne, now of Rowayton, Conn., and the second of his three wives, Julie Norregaard, a Danish-born London journalist. Born and raised in England, Eva was a dauntless member of the Girl Guides. One night of ferocious wind, she alarmed her family by not returning home. Next morning she reported that when her tent had collapsed she had "crawled out from under and put it up again." In Paris, where she lived when her parents separated, she used to borrow the goat-cart in the Luxembourg Gardens and sell the rides herself. When she was 14 she copied out the entire memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt in longhand, an act of adolescent devotion which may have helped form her whole character and to which the great stage lady was not insensible. Debunkers have labelled this tale a myth but Actress Le Gallienne still has her copybooks, inscribed by Bernhardt, to prove it.

One of her favorite plays is Peter Pan but she can be, and customarily is, as empirical as a banker. Unlike John Barrymore, who wanted to be an artist, she was early convinced that the theatre would be her life. Living in Paris from her third to fourteenth years, she attended the College Sevigne, developed a linguistic talent which now allows her. to talk French, German, Danish and Russian. In England she studied dramatics at Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree's Academy, made her debut in London (1915) as a cockney girl in The Laughter of Fools. She reached the U. S. by making friends with Actress Elsie Jam's, whom she accosted at a stage door.

Her first U. S. part, given her by Director Harrison Grey ("Mr. Minnie Maddern") Fiske was that of a Negro maid in Mrs. Boltay's Daughters. She acted hither and yon until Arthur Richman's sweetish comedy Not So Long Ago remained on Broadway for two seasons. Two greater successes followed: Liliom, The Swan.

While touring the provinces with her own group of Ibsen players, Miss Le Gallienne conceived the idea of the Civic Repertory Theatre. It was in Cincinnati that she put the proposition to her company. Many of them are still with her. Her backers included Otto Herman Kahn, Adolph Lewisohn, Ralph Pulitzer, John Davison Rockefeller Jr. She opened on a Monday night in 1926 with Jacinto Benavente's Saturday Night, gave Tchekov's The Three Sisters on Tuesday and, scorning to start gradually, added some Ibsen later in the week. The Pictorial Review Achievement Award for that year ($5,000) helped solve her financial troubles.* Since the first season her project has paid its own way.

The essence of the Civic Repertory idea is that a new play shall be introduced every five or six weeks, that those already in repertory shall be constantly repeated. The theory is that, as actors become increasingly familiar with a part, their performances improve in understanding, and that, with several parts in mind, they will not stagnate. Directrix Le Gallienne would like to install a Civic Repertory Theatre in every principal U. S. city. But at present her life is fairly full. Each morning at 9:30 she fences in the big library of her theatre with Professor Santelli, a Hungarian who tells her that she is one of the great swordswomen and should forsake the stage. At 10:30 she writes letters, attends to odds & ends. From 11:30 to 3:30 she rehearses a new play. There is no time out for luncheon--she eats raw eggs and drinks coffee on the go. From 3:30 to 5:30 she rehearses an old play which is being put back in repertory. Then there is a half-hour before dinner for interviews or seeing friends. After dinner she naps for a half-hour before going to her dressing room for the evening's appearance. For efficiency's sake she lives on the roof of her theatre, with her four dogs and several canaries. The predominant color of the menage and all that is Le Gallienne--suits, stationery, draperies--is a rich blue.

During the summer and over winter weekends she leaves this apartment in which her staff can account for her actions and whereabouts during each minute of the day and goes to her Connecticut farmhouse, isolated on a bad road branching off other bad roads. Often she drives there speedily, expertly in her blue Studebaker. In Connecticut she turns herself over to her caretaking couple, her gardens, her guitar. There she entertains her closest friends--Elsie Janis, Ethel Barrymore, Clare Eames, Constance Collier, Mrs. Stuart Benson (business manager of the Civic Repertory Theatre), Madame Ouspensky (directrix of the American Laboratory Theatre), Mercedes de Acosta, Helen Lohmann, Irma Kraft et al.

*Painted by Artist Eleanor Harris of Manhattan.

/- Besides the list above, Civic Repertory bills have included: La Locandiera (Goldoni); The Master Builder, Hedda Gabler, John Gabriel Borkman (Ibsen); Twelfth Night (Shakespeare); The Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard (Tchekov); L'Invitation au Voyage (Bernard); A Sunny Morning, The Lady from Alfaqueque (the Quinteros).

*This award was made last week, for 1928, to Dr. Florence Rena Sabin, 58, of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, for her research on tuberculosis.