100 Years of the Cornish Theater Department
Theater Department Centennial Arrives: Why It's
a Big Deal
(continued)
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At the Armory Show, 1913: Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase. Public Domain, US only. |
Italian actress Eleonora Duse
turned public tastes away from declamation and bombast and inclined them towards
naturalism. Companies beginning with Antoine’s Théâtre Libre in the 1880s and
including the Moscow Arts Theatre and the Abbey Theatre of Augusta, Lady Gregory,
and Jacques Copeau with his Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier showed the way for creating
new forms of theatrical companies with fresh aesthetics.
The end of the 19th century saw the rise of modern art, and the 20th brought
striking and revolutionary works from Cezanne, Picasso, Renoir, and, of course,
the iconoclastic Marcel Duchamp. In the midst of this rise of modernism in
the visual arts, scenographers such as Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig
were introducing a whole other kind of dramatic scenery for the stage. Vibrant
designs and a new theatricality were a hallmark of the Ballets Russes in Paris
which brought a whole new wave of music to the European scene, with works by
Stravinsky, Debussy, and Prokofiev.
So where was the US amidst this excitement and tumult? Just about nowhere. The theater in America in the first decade of the 20th century was dominated by frothy entertainments, such as melodramas, musicals, and comedies, punctuated with the occasional Shakespeare production for a little bit of culture. George M. Cohan was the “king of Broadway,” with his musicals like Little
Johnny Jones and George Washington, Jr. Also a hit on Broadway was David Belasco’s 1905 melodrama The
Girl of the Golden West. But come 1912, all that was about to change—and it would lead directly to the founding of Cornish’s Theater Department.
The Chicago Little Theatre and the Little Theatre Movement
At the height of Maurice Browne’s fortunes as a theater producer in London just before the Second World War, he was introduced at at a reception by George Bernard Shaw.
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"Fourth-floor-back": interior of the Chicago Little Theatre, 1915, set for
The Trojan Women. Pen and ink drawing and stage set by Raymond Johnson.
University of Michigan Libraries (Special Collections), Ellen Van Volkenburg
and Maurice Browne Papers. |
The “fourth floor back” referenced by one of the greatest playwrights in the English language was the home of the Chicago Little Theatre in the Fine Arts Building, just steps down Michigan Avenue from the Art Institute of Chicago.
The company that lent its name to the movement, the Little Theatre Movement,
was the Chicago Little Theatre, the recognized avante garde of art theater
in this country. The name may strike us as unfortunate: today it sounds as
though it’s about children’s dramatics, but it was in dead earnest. The movement
was in fact a rejection of the frothy shows of the American professional stage
that played in “big theaters.” The little theaters were meant to house the
new European drama and aesthetic.
The date of the founding of the Chicago Little Theatre (CLT) was auspicious,
coming mere months before New York’s Armory Show that shocked and energized
the country with the new visual art from the Continent. Incredibly, after it
closed in New York, the show—formally known as the International Exposition
of Modern Art— moved to the Art Institute of Chicago in late March, and for
several weeks, both movements converged within two blocks. Browne and Volkenburg
brought to their small house in Chicago’s Fine Arts Building a potent mix of
the new masters of the drama together with a fresh interest in Greek classic
plays and even works for the marionette theater, which Van Volkenburg revolutionized
as a fine art form. Between the Armory Show and the Chicago Little Theatre
and birth of its movement, the season of 1912–13 opened the eyes of the American
public to the wealth of new ideas pouring out of Europe.
There were a number of “little theatres” in the period, some very fine, most very bad—bad enough that the legacy of these art theaters became muddled. The ascendency of the CLT over the others—to the point of lending its name to the movement—was due to several things. First, Browne was European and had extensive contacts among English poets and writers where other theatres didn’t. This gave his company personal access to Synge, Yeats, and Shaw, and because of this, influence with the rest. The second reason is that Browne was not only a good producer and director, he had a keen interest in the new scenography coming out of Europe. That gave CLT productions a special look. A third reason, and perhaps most important, the CLT had a powerful leading lady and producer in Van Volkenburg, who more than matched Browne in inventiveness. Lastly, bursting out of their Chicago home, the company toured, and toured successfully. The Chicago Little Theatre’s production of The
Trojan Women by Euripides, with Van Volkenburg as Hecuba, was seen throughout the Midwest and West. The production, billed as an anti-war play in the first years of World War I before America’s involvement, brought Nellie Cornish’s attention to Browne and Van Volkenburg during a stop in Seattle.
The CLT had formed itself with the personal encouragement of Lady Gregory. She
and the Abbey Theatre toured to Chicago and spent time with Browne and Van
Volkenburg. Lady Gregory urged the Brownes not to recruit professional actors,
but to train their own company: “By all means start your own theatre; but make
it in your own image. Don’t engage professional players; they have been spoiled
for your purpose. Engage and train, as we of the Abbey have done, amateurs
…”[Browne, Maurice. Too Late to Lament, p 116] Van Volkenburg and Browne
thus began a program of actor training that went beyond forming the company
and became a school.
The United States entered the European war in 1917. The country’s involvement in World War I had two deleterious effects on the fortunes of the CLT: it turned the public attention away from the supposed frivolities of the arts and the aroused patriotic fervor created a backlash against artists associated with an anti-war stance. Never awash in funds, the Chicago Little Theatre could not survive in reduced circumstances. The theater closed its doors that year.
The Chicago Little Theatre at Cornish
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Ellen Van Volkenburg at Cornish as Nora
in A
Doll's House, 1919, production photo detail.
University of Michigan Libraries (Special Collections), Ellen Van Volkenburg
and Maurice Browne Papers. |
Van Volkenburg and Browne began casting about for new employment. They were, by 1918, nationally known figures of the American stage and had a number of directions in which they could go. One was in arts education. Art in general and the theater in particular were studied as history and literature, but not in themselves at American universities and colleges. Only a handful offered degrees, among them the universities of Utah and Washington. Both these offered to take on the Brownes to run their departments.
The couple had, by chance, fallen in love with life along the Hood Canal in Washington
State. A natural fiord rather than what we think of as a canal, the area was
nearly wild in the first decades of the 20th century. Coming from England and
Chicago, respectively, Browne and Van Volkenburg were enchanted by a way of
life in the hamlet of Nellita on the canal that neither could have imagined.
Nellie Cornish was nothing if not accomodating in her pursuit of the couple,
giving them the flexibility they needed to teach in Seattle and spend time
in Nellita.
Making one of the best decisions of her life, Cornish allowed the two to organize
a professional company to run parallel with their teaching at her school. What
this allowed amounted to reopening the Chicago Little Theatre in Seattle with
students working alongside professionals. Between 1918 and 1921, their company
remounted many of the productions that had made the name of the CLT. First
under the name of the Maurice Browne and Ellen Van Volkenburg Repertory Company,
the theater soon became known as the Cornish Little Theatre. When in 1921 Cornish
opened a new building, its theater was called the Cornish Little Theatre, too.
The new department and company with the Chicago pedigree was an instant success,
drawing students from all over the country.
How the New Department and Theatre Company Changed Cornish
It was the success of the Brownes at the school coupled with the plans
for a new building in 1920 [MAN 120] that drove the name change from
the Cornish School of Music to simply the Cornish School. The addition
of dance as a department in 1916 had functionally changed the structure of
the school, but music was still clearly its prime attraction. Mary Anne Wells,
founding director of the Dance Department, was a wonderful teacher and a natural,
but she was a novice with no professional reputation of note. The music department
featured concert pianist Boyd Wells—Mary Anne Wells’s uncle—as its head, and
that provided real clout. Having music educator Calvin Brainerd Cady on staff
from 1916 as head of teacher training added equal, if not greater, weight.
With the addition of what was originally called the Department of Drama, however,
the balance of the curriculum changed decidedly. The presence of Boyd Wells
and Cady couldn’t compete with the star power of Browne-Van Volkenburg, who
weren’t just good, but the acknowledged leaders in their field. With its departments
on an equal footing, Nellie Cornish’s dream of a school teaching all the arts
together truly began to take shape.
Browne and Van Volkenburg brought a fierce and infectious energy to their work at Cornish. They had, after all, quite independently, created a first-rate company and school from scratch and in difficult circumstances. Nellie Cornish had thought to add drama to round out the dance program, just as she had added dance to augment music. MAN 109 But the Brownes weren’t coming to Cornish hat in hand, they were driving events forward from their first moments in Seattle. Landing on the school like a dervish, Browne set to work upgrading the performance space of Cornish’s original home, the Booth Building on the south end of Capitol Hill.
Nellie Cornish writes of the frequent upset and squabbles brought on by Browne’s
demands, but with a year or so to reflect, she realized how important a theater
department had become to her school. When the school’s original plan to build
a theater downtown fell through, it seemed that Van Volkenburg and Browne would
leave. Nellie had to reckon with their potential loss; with a few exceptions,
she wrote that theater was “the most important part of the School. The theatre
coordinated the several arts, and without it, I felt we couldn’t function properly.” p
121 The
theater, by its very nature, incorporated multiple arts, including music and
dance, a quality well recognized by the 20th century with its own term gesamtkunstwerk (German:
"total work of art"). The inclusion of theater allowed everything
the school taught to not only be presented together, but to work together.
Now the arts were supporting one
another, coordinated, and Nellie Cornish could see that they brought her ideas
to a whole different level. She
had not dreamed big enough. The inclusion of theater offered a new vision in
which all
her students in every field
pulled together, learned together, produced together: "It was a new world
for all of us."
Lastly, the inclusion of a theater department opened the school to the visual
arts. Cornish had taken a stab at teaching painting, but it hadn’t really taken
hold as a department. Now the theatrical productions and marionette shows created
a huge internal market for visual elements—lighting, scene painting and construction,
costume design, and so forth—and this would lead in a few short years to departments
in the visual arts.
The Theater Department brought the school into its final shape as an institution
teaching both the visual and performing arts, a shape we would recognize today.
— MMB
