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Jacques Copeau's “The Spirit in the Little Theatre”: Contexts and Texts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 May 2024

J. Ellen Gainor  and
John Un
J. Ellen Gainor*
Affiliation:
Department of Performing and Media Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
John Un
Affiliation:
Department of Comparative Literature, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
*
Corresponding author: J. Ellen Gainor; Email: jeg11@cornell.edu
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Extract

The story of influential French stage director Jacques Copeau's 1917–19 residency in New York City was documented at the time by Copeau himself and subsequently analyzed by Copeau scholars.1 Copeau (1879–1949) is remembered today for his innovative, experimental theatre work in the early twentieth century; he developed core practices that became foundational for modernist stage artistry, including mime and physical theatre as well as devised theatre techniques.2 In 1913, he established his Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris, breaking away from traditional ornate design practices and envisioning an ensemble of actors trained in methods comparable to those used by Konstantin Stanislavsky, although Copeau knew comparatively little of his techniques at this time.3 Copeau's “‘attempt at dramatic renovation’”4 included staging plays to be performed in repertory and maintaining modest budgets and ticket prices to secure financial stability. In these and other regards, his vision paralleled those of other modernist colleagues not only in Europe, but also in the United States, where the Little Theatre movement was already underway,5 although Copeau similarly had little knowledge of US theatre at this early moment.

Type
Article
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 65 , Issue 2 , May 2024 , pp. 113 - 124
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors, 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Society for Theatre Research, Inc.

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Footnotes

The authors wish to thank editors La Donna Forsgren and Telory D. Arendell for their support of this essay, the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful recommendations, and copyeditor Michael Gnat for his expert guidance toward publication.

References

Notes

1 See Copeau, Jacques, Journal 1901–1948: Deuxième Partie, 1916–1948, ed. Sicard, Claude (Paris: Seghers, 1991)Google Scholar; Crowder, Douglas, “Jacques Copeau in New York,” South Central Bulletin 29.4 (1969): 125–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Donahue, Thomas John, Jacques Copeau's Friends and Disciples: The Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in New York City, 1917–1919 (New York: Peter Lang, 2008)Google Scholar; Harrop, John, “‘A Constructive Promise’: Jacques Copeau in New York, 1917–1919,” Theatre Survey 12.2 (1971): 104–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kurtz, Maurice, Jacques Copeau: Biography of a Theater (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Norman Henry Paul, “Jacques Copeau: Apostle of the Theatre,” Ph.D. diss. (New York University, Graduate School of Arts and Science, 1961); Paul, Norman H., “Jacques Copeau Looks at the American Stage, 1917–1919,” Educational Theatre Journal 29.1 (1977): 61–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Mark Evans and Cass Fleming, “Jacques Copeau,” The Great European Stage Directors, vol. 3: Copeau, Komisarjevsky, Guthrie, ed. Jonathan Pitches (London: Methuen, 2019), 15–67, at 15.

3 Ibid., 19–21; Kurtz, Jacques Copeau, 12–16, 39.

4 Qtd. in Kurtz, Jacques Copeau, 13.

5 Simon Shepherd, “Introduction to the Series,” Great European Stage Directors, 3:1–5, at 2. For background on the Little Theatre movement in the United States, see, for example, Chansky, Dorothy, Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Constance D'Arcy Mackay, The Little Theatre in the United States (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1917); and Macgowan, Kenneth, Footlights across America: Towards a National Theater (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1929)Google Scholar.

6 Paul, “Jacques Copeau: Apostle,” 180–1; Donahue, Jacques Copeau's Friends and Disciples, 23–38; Kurtz, Jacques Copeau, 44–9.

7 Paul, “Jacques Copeau Looks,” 61.

8 See Copeau, Jacques, “The New School of Stage Scenery: And a Word on the Art of Joseph Urban and Richard Ordynski,” Vanity Fair 8.4 (1917): 36, 114Google Scholar; Copeau, Jacques, “The True Spirit of the Art of the Stage, As It Is Being Interpreted at the Vieux-Colombier,” Vanity Fair 8.2 (1917): 49Google Scholar.

9 Paul, “Jacques Copeau Looks,” 63–4; Kinne, Wisner Payne, George Pierce Baker and the American Theatre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), 244CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Eugene Miller Wank, “The Washington Square Players: Experiment toward Professionalism.” Ph.D. diss. (University of Oregon, Department of Speech, 1973), 93, 105.

11 Ibid., 93.

12 Paul, “Jacques Copeau Looks,” 63 n. 7; Jacques Copeau, “L'Esprit des Petits Théâtres,” in “Le Petit Théâtre,” special issue, Cahiers de la Compagnie Madeleine Renaud–Jean-Louis Barrault 2.4 (1954): 8–20. Norman Paul titles the lecture “The Spirit of the Little Theatres,” plural, which tracks with the French title of the 1954 published version; see Paul, “Jacques Copeau Looks,” 62. The Copeau English manuscript title, “The Spirit in the Little Theatre,” is used here, however, and the nuance of difference in the preposition is, we suggest, significant and consonant with the content of the lecture.

13 Paul, “Jacques Copeau Looks,” 61.

14 Jacques Copeau, “The Spirit in the Little Theatre—Washington Square Players,” 1917 (hereinafter cited parenthetically in the text as SLT), Jacques Copeau Collection, Department of Performing Arts, Bibliothèque nationale de France, 4-COL-1(457), 6. The French manuscript version from this archive is untitled and is designated hereinafter as [Fr.].

15 See Evans and Fleming, “Jacques Copeau,” 34–7.

16 Perhaps especially in the noncirculating Copeau Registres III and IV, and what Paul (“Jacques Copeau Looks,” 64 n. 10) refers to as the “Journal d'Amérique,” as well as additional documents, notes, etc. in the Copeau archive in the BnF.

17 See the bibliography in Wank, “Washington Square Players” for a listing of relevant archives for the Players.

18 See Copeau, Journal, 39–77.

19 Collins, Theresa M., Otto Kahn: Art, Money, & Modern Time (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 112Google Scholar.

20 See Kobler, John, Otto the Magnificent: The Life of Otto Kahn (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988), 127–35Google Scholar; Wank, “Washington Square Players,” 112–00.

21 Qtd. in ibid., 129.

22 See Kurtz, Jacques Copeau, chap. 3. The war, of course, soon brought both instruction and production at the Vieux-Colombier to a halt.

23 Kobler, Otto, 129.

24 Jannarone, Kimberly, Artaud and His Doubles (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 142CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Donahue, Jacques Copeau's Friends and Disciples, 28–9; Ames's Little Theatre was the name of the venue, not to be confused with companies that were part of the Little Theatre movement, although Ames did champion the work of some writers who were part of that movement.

26 See Wank, “Washington Square Players,” 228–9 and Appendixes I and III. The Players had also recently hired an acting coach, Beverly Sitgreaves, affiliated with the Théâtre Anglais in Paris, to work with them; it is not known if Copeau had met her there.

27 Copeau, Journal, 47.

28 Ibid., 74.

29 In this regard, Copeau is really referencing only Western nations.

30 Wank, “Washington Square Players,” 4.

31 For a more detailed contrast of Duse's acting along these lines, see Bernard Shaw's 1895 analysis “Duse and Bernhardt” in his collection Our Theatres in the Nineties, 3 vols. (London: Constable & Co. Ltd., 1932), 1:148–54.

32 Copeau, Journal, 76–7.

33 Ibid., 77; translation ours.

34 Wank, “Washington Square Players,” 93.

35 Ibid., 185.

36 Ibid.

37 The United States declared war against Germany and the Central Powers on 6 April 1917.

38 Copeau, “New School of Stage Scenery,” 36, 114.

39 Wank, “Washington Square Players,” 193, 216.

40 Samuel A. Eliot Jr., “Le Théâtre du Vieux Colombier,” Theatre Arts Magazine 3.1 (1919): 25–30, at 30.

41 See Fishbein, Leslie, Rebels in Bohemia: The Radicals of “The Masses,” 1911–1917 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

42 Copeau, “L'Esprit des Petits Théâtres,” 10.