Little Theatre Movement

The Little Theater Movement was a social development of theater in the United States starting in 1912. After the new cinema replaced theater as a source of large-scale spectacle, much American drama became focussed, intimate, noncommercial, and reform-minded. Chicago seems to have played an important part in the development of the Little Theatre Movement. Community theater is an outgrowth of the Little Theater Movement.

History

The "Little Theater" was founded in response to the great melodramas that had entertained audiences in the late 1800s, which had now become the province of motion pictures. The new theater was smaller, more intimate, more psychological. [Marcia Noe, "The Women of Provincetown, 1915-1922/Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience" (review) "American Drama", Winter 2005]

A wide variety of experimental theater groups, amateur companies, clubs, and settlement houses undertook this theater reform, bringing smaller, more inwardly-directed plays to a wider public audience. [Marcia Noe, "The Women of Provincetown, 1915-1922/Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience" (review) "American Drama", Winter 2005] The Hull-House settlement theater group, under the direction of Laura Dainty Pelham, was the first to perform several plays by Galsworthy, Ibsen, and George Bernard Shaw in Chicago. Maurice Brown, founder of the Little Theater in Chicago, credited Ms. Pelham with being the "true founder of the 'American Little Theatre Movement'." [Peggy Glowacki and Julia Hendry, "Images of America: Hull-House", Arcadia Publishing, Chicago, Illinois, 2004 p. 34, ISBN 0-7385-3351-3] Women were pervasive throughout the Little Theatre Movement, although their efforts were often belittled, dismissed, or undervalued. [Dorothy Chansky, "Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience", Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, Illinois 2004 ISBN 978-0809325740]

Chicago philanthropists and arts patrons [Arthur T. Aldis] and Mary Aldis founded an artists' colony called "The Compound" in Lake Forest, Illinois, and in 1910, Mary founded the "Aldis Playhouse" there, "a predecessor to the 'little theater' movement." [Andrew Martinez, "A Mixed Reception for Modernism: The 1913 Armory Show at the Art Institute of Chicago", "One Hundred Years at the Art Institute: A Centennial Celebration", The Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, Volume 19, no. 1, 1993, p. 36]

In 1912, two theater groups were founded, the Toy Theatre in Boston and the Little Theater in Chicago. This was the official start of the "Little Theater Movement" in the United States. [Marcia Noe, "The Women of Provincetown, 1915-1922/Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience" (review) "American Drama", Winter 2005] Also in 1912 George Pierce Baker offered Harvard's first playwriting course.Fact|date=August 2008

"Little" not only refers to the smaller (and eventually black box) sized houses they played for, but also the focus of the plays. Unlike the great melodramas that had entertained audiences in the late 1800, these plays had more subtle conflicts.Fact|date=August 2008 Often there was no clear villain or hero but rather human beings with crossed purposes. The acting style was also a more subtle precursor to the naturalistic style of acting that would become popular in the '60s and '70s.Fact|date=August 2008

The Little Theatre Movement revitalized the American theatre and led to the rise of giants like Arthur Miller and Eugene O'Neill.Fact|date=August 2008

Notes