The A to Z of American Theater by James Fisher & Felicia Hardison Londré

Author:James Fisher & Felicia Hardison Londré
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2008-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

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MACDOWELL, MELBOURNE (1856–1941). The Canadian-born ACTOR ran away from home when he was 11 and went to sea. In his twenties, he joined his brother’s theatre company in Montreal. He played heroic roles in the tradition of John McCullough. He joined the company of Fanny Davenport, whom he married in 1889. Amy Leslie wrote of him in Some Players (1901, 358): “Melbourne MacDowell is Fanny Davenport’s greatest work of art. She took this stalwart Jovian animal, wild from the plains of Canada, lifted him to her own estate in the world of art, and imprinted upon his personality something of her own magnetism and exceptional power. He is to-day one of the handsomest, most forceful and influential actors on the stage. His voice is grown mellifluous and golden, his rash athletic gestures modulated to grace, and his splendid physique brought in from the lines of the giants.” After Davenport’s death, MacDowell COSTARRED with Blanche Walsh for several seasons, followed by a stint in silent MOTION PICTURES.

MACGOWAN, KENNETH (1888–1963).† One of the most influential PRODUCERS and drama CRITICS between the world WARS, Kenneth Macgowan was born in Winthrop, Massachusetts. He attended Harvard University and worked as a dramatic critic for the Boston Evening Transcript and the Philadelphia Evening Ledger before becoming the drama critic for the New York Globe in 1919, a position he held until 1923. Macgowan also wrote criticism for Vogue and THEATRE ARTS. In 1924, he became a producer when he joined ROBERT EDMOND JONES and EUGENE O’NEILL in managing the Provincetown Playhouse in New York. Macgowan’s friendship with O’Neill was particularly significant, not only because he produced several of O’Neill’s early plays (All God’s Chillun Got Wings, Desire Under the Elms, The Fountain, and The Great God Brown) when they and Jones operated the Greenwich Village Theatre (1925–1927), but because he encouraged O’Neill’s inclination to move beyond REALISM in his plays. Macgowan presented the first New York production of August Strindberg’s Spook Sonata in 1924, as well as a hit revival of Anna Cora Mowatt’s Fashion (1924). He produced on BROADWAY and for MOTION PICTURES. His books on theatre, including The Theatre of Tomorrow (1921), Continental Stagecraft (1922, with Robert Edmond Jones), Masks and Demons (1923, with Herman Rosse), and Footlights Across America (1929), did much to encourage acceptance of modernist production practices emanating from Europe’s stages and ushering in the New Stagecraft.

MACHINAL. The expressionist drama by Sophie Treadwell, PRODUCED and DIRECTED by ARTHUR HOPKINS with SCENE DESIGNS by ROBERT EDMOND JONES, opened on 7 September 1928 at the Plymouth Theatre and ran for 93 performances. Having worked as both a “stunt” and “sob sister” journalist, Treadwell had followed with interest the 1927 trial of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray for the murder of Snyder’s husband, events which became the basis for her play about a sensitive working woman (played by Zita Johann) who marries her boss to escape her insensitive mother and the dehumanizing effects of urban life. She falls for a younger man (the yet-unknown Clark Gable) and, motivated by the dream of romance, kills her husband.

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