Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 183, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 August 1911 — Simplifying the Drama. [ARTICLE]

Simplifying the Drama.

“No one who has seen a play staged out of doors at night, where the darkness eliminates all need of wing pieces and proscenium, where the characters grow into the sight or melt out of it, can fall to have been impressed by the heightened, almost dreamlike, illusion,’’ writeß Walter Prichard Baton in the American Magazine. “If, now, you hang In front of a suggestively painted back drop—a real picture-some negative draperies on eltKer sldV, eliminatr tag formal wing pieces and sharp edges; if you light this picture from behind the draperies, so that-to the audience they tell rather as folds Of shadow, leaving between your actors and the audience a transparent region of darkness, as It were, an intangible glass of illusion, you have achieved an effect of possible beauty and increased suggestlveness by the simplest of means. Certainly, by some such method, the production of Shakespeare could be greatly simplified, many of the scenes now omitted restored to the acting text, the ’waits’ cut down, narrative made more coherent and rapid.”