T he Russian, more than anyone else, is infected with the passion for spectacles,” writes Stanislavski. “The more the spectacle excites and captivates the soul, the more it attracts him. The simple Russian spectator loves a drama at which one can weep a little, philosophize about life, listen to words of wisdom, more than any noisy vaudeville act after which nothing is left to feed the soul.”
Stanislavski knows his fellow countrymen. One night I went to the Music Hall in Moscow. It is a poor imitation of the London music hall. Half the seats were empty, the audience was apathetic. Another night I went to see Tolstoy’s five-act tragedy “Resurrection.” The house was sold out, there was cheering at the end of the performance. The Russians had found something “to feed the soul.”
A study of the Russian theatre which stopped at the footlights would fail to consider what is to my mind its most vital element—the audience. In England and America there is talk about a “people’s theatre.” One can have no idea what that means unless one has been to Russia. For America has no conception of a theatre which exists for the audience, and that is what the Soviet theatre does. It has served many functions during these strenuous years. It has allowed hungry men and women to forget for a little that they had nothing to eat; it has given them glimpses of future happiness; it has encouraged and excited them; it has relaxed them and made them laugh; it
has given them brightness and color when all about was drab and bleak; it has talked to them about their problems of work, has shown an interest in what they were doing at the factory or on the farm; it has given them self-confidence and hope; it has helped to give them an education, has opened up the host of art treasures which the world holds as its common heritage. Always the theatre has done all this for its audience; it has done it because the people want it—it is fulfilling a demand. The audience, therefore, is not a contribution to the theatre at all, it is the end and purpose of its existence.
In Moscow one cannot use the term "theatre-going public” as we do to define a certain part of the populace. The whole populace is the theatre-going public. The servant girl in the house where I lived in Moscow, who washed the dishes and cleaned and hauled the firewood, went to the opera more than I did—she doubtless sat in a better seat.
Come with me to a Moscow theatre and let us take another look at this audience together. It is so different from a house full of spectators in New York or Chicago or London or Paris or Prague or Berlin that if the play bores you, you can spend the four hours watching those around you and be well repaid.
The appearance of the Moscow audience is the first thing that interests one. The Second Five Year Plan has done a great deal toward raising the standard of dress, but a crowd in Moscow still puts forth a pretty drab appearance. There are no evening clothes in the audience, only simple cotton frocks, the inevitable beret, heavier dresses of old-fashioned cut when the cold nights come, shawls, fur in abundance, for fur in Russia is a necessity and not a luxury; many men still wear the Russian blouse, white on warm evenings, gray, khaki or dark blue in winter, their trousers may be stuffed into high boots; those who attempt Western dress look uncomfortable, many of their
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ill-fitting shirts are worn without ties. These people appear to have come to the theatre as though it were an every-day occurrence which required no gala raiment (if they have it). They look as though they had just come from work, as no doubt many of them have.
We get the feeling that here theatre-going is a habit. These people come to the theatre as though they belonged there. They appear to feel perfectly at home. In America theatre-going is something of a rite. We put on our good clothes, slick down our hair, enter the place with a certain awed and slightly ill-at-ease manner. I strongly suspect that the average American who enters the theatre (not including that hardened species known as the New York First-Nighter), seldom feels that he really belongs there at all, even though he has paid for his ticket. You can tell it in the way he moves restlessly and self-consciously in his seat, his forced conversation, the surreptitious way in which he examines the drapery behind the boxes as though trying to discover a quick way out if it should all prove too much for him in the end. Now at the movies it is different. The "Average American” feels at home there. It is all a question of habit. In America we have the moviegoing habit. In Russia they have the theatre-going habit and the opera-going habit and the ballet-going habit.
When the Russians enter the theatre they give themselves over to it completely. They are required to check their hats and coats in the garde-robe . Therefore they cannot give the impression as they wander through the foyer, top hat on head and wrap drawn around shoulders, that they are on the point of leaping forth at any moment into the night. They have surrendered themselves into the theatre’s custody and they make themselves as much at home there as possible. Before the performance they read the evening newspaper. In the intermissions they buy sausage sandwiches and apples and rich cream pastries from the
buffets and drink tea or a deadly looking but insipid pink beverage called "kvas.” Every theatre has a large buffet and there are many little tables each with its bunch of flowers or pot of chrysanthemums. Bolsheviks love to eat and to look at flowers. The Russians have the European custom of the promenade, and boys and girls, men together, old couples, go arm in arm round and round in a sober circle. Then three bells ring and back to their seats they go.
The easy manner of the Russian audience when the lights are on is lost as soon as the curtain rises. These folk may make a habit of theatre-going, but never does it lose its excitement for them. Many times they remind one of a football crowd in America. They sit forward on the edges of their seats, sometimes almost fall off them in their excitement; they laugh loudly, they weep copiously, they applaud vigorously. “How well he is playing,” you hear someone behind you whisper to her companion, a spontaneous comment often heard in our grandstands but seldom while our plays are in progress. When the performance is over, they run down to the footlights to applaud exuberantly and cheer their favorites by name. No hired claque here and no need for it.
When the audience in America and England goes to the theatre, it sits back with a sort of an “all right, you show me” attitude, waiting to be amused, waiting for the actor to come to it. Not so in Moscow. There the audience reaches out to the stage, it goes more than halfway to meet the actor; the artist comes more than halfway to meet the audience, and in that something-more-than-one- hundred-per-cent which is engendered lies the greatness of the Soviet theatre.
The fact that the theatres of Moscow are permanent has much to do with the organization of the audience and makes it possible for the different theatres to cater to dif-
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ferent elements of the people, just as no doubt in my descriptions of these Moscow theatres, certain ones have sounded more interesting and congenial to the reader than others. One of the most erroneous impressions entertained in the West is that all Bolsheviks are alike, that under Communism a great regimentation of personality has been effected so that the proletariat looks alike, thinks alike, feels alike, and acts and reacts alike. While it is perhaps true that more solidarity and unity of purpose has been created among these people, perhaps even thrust upon them, than is true in other places, individuals continue to respond in ways as different as their personalities continue to be.
The Moscow Art Theatre and the Maly Theatre are the most universally popular (after the Bolshoi Opera) in Moscow today, if one is to judge from the demand for seats. They seem to be perpetually sold out and one sees all kinds of people there. This is particularly interesting in view of the fact that both are "academic” theatres. The audiences seem more quiet and refined, and you see more better dressed people at the Art Theatre than elsewhere in Moscow. The traditions associated with this theatre have probably had something to do with this. Stanislavski once wrote an interesting account of the conversion of the early proletarian audience into this civilized gathering of citizenry one sees today:
But yesterday our Theatre had been filled by the old public which we had educated through many decades, and today we were faced by an altogether new audience which we did not know how to approach. Neither did the audience know how to approach us, and how to live with us in the theatre. We were forced to begin at the very beginning, to teach this new spectator how to sit quietly, how not to talk, how to come into the theatre at the proper
time, not to smoke, not to eat nuts in public, not to bring food into the theatre and eat it there, to dress in his best so as to fit more into the atmosphere of beauty that was worshiped in the theatre. At first this was very hard to do, and two or three times after the end of an act the atmosphere of which was spoiled by the crowd of still uneducated spectators, I was forced to come before the curtain with a plea in the name of the actors who were placed in an impasse.
On one occasion I could not restrain myself, and spoke more sharply than I should have spoken. The crowd was silent and listened to me very attentively. Until the present day I cannot imagine how these two or three audiences managed to tell of what had happened to all the other visitors in our Theatre. Nothing was written about it in the papers, no new decrees were issued on the score of what had happened. Why did a complete change in the behavior of the audience take place after ivhat had happened? They came to the theatre fifteen minutes before the curtain, they stopped smoking and cracking nuts, they brought no food with them, and when I, unoccupied in the performance, passed through the corridors of the Theatre which were filled with our new spectators, boys would rush to all corners of the foyers, warning those present:
"He is coming.”
To be sure, in other theatres than the MX AT, in fact, everywhere in Moscow, audiences are in these days perfectly behaved; nut-cracking seems to have universally disappeared, and the differentiations which I make are subtle and apparent only to one who has gone often to many theatres and sought grounds for comparisons. But one is aware in every theatre that one could only be in the Soviet Union.
The Meierhold Theatre draws young radical students but nowadays few workers. There are many empty seats
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there except when "La Dame aux Camelias” is being performed. Then the theatre is crowded and I was amused to note that at this production, which Meierhold claims that he has produced in order to show the degeneracy of the nineteenth-century bourgeois morals, the audience weeps copiously! The Kamerny Theatre appeals more to the white collar workers and a few of the more conservative intelligentsia than to the factory laborers. The many foreign plays and the musical productions of Tairov attract a limited public, but "The Optimistic Tragedy” always fills the house and with a different kind of audience altogether, many soldiers.
Many of the smaller theatres cater particularly to the workers’ districts in which they happen to be located. At the Krasnaya Presnaya, MOSPS, Zavadski Studio, the now defunct New Theatre, and several of the smaller studios, the audiences are largely composed of factory workers living in the neighborhood, and they give a more obviously proletarian appearance to the house. Outstanding productions, like Okhlopkov’s "Aristocrats” or Zavadski’s "The Devil’s Disciple” or "Wolves and Sheep” draw people from all over town, but as a rule one feels a difference between the type of people at these theatres and at the larger and more centrally located state theatres.
The Jewish, Gypsy and German theatres play to much more specialized audiences, since they perform in their native tongue. The Theatre of the Red Army is supposed to play principally to the soldiers and its repertoire is designed to appeal to such a public. Outsiders, however, may attend this theatre—a beautiful hall in the handsome House of the Red Army, and of course the army may and does go to plays in other theatres than their own. Its presence elsewhere is, as I have said, one of the characteristic features of the Moscow audiences.
The most specialized theatres are those for children, of
which the Moscow Theatre for Children, founded and directed by Natalie Satz, is the finest. It has been in existence for sixteen years and in that time has presented about 4,500 performances to 3,500,000 children. This theatre’s relationship to its young audience is the most significant thing about the whole undertaking, so an account of it comes more appropriately in this chapter than elsewhere.
When Natalie Satz began her work she found that she was virtually a pioneer in the field. Plays written for children were very few, and were usually merely dramatizations of children’s fairy stories and not really plays at all. Satz found that she had to create children’s drama for her theatre either by herself or with the help of writers who would create the kind of plays she felt should be given to children, for she wished her theatre to be a social as well as a cultural factor in the development of youth. Her theatre could best be of service if it was an auxiliary to education. "Education Through Art” is a slogan of the U.S.S.R. and nowhere more appropriately applied than in this work. This gave it a realistic and a purposeful existence and took it out of the class of Saturday morning, dramatized- nursery-rhyme, play-time children’s theatres.
"It was once argued,” writes Satz, "that all a child seeks in a performance is food for the eye; that the fairy style is the best kind of performance for children. The forms of our plays are various, but we are in fundamental disagreement with this assertion. A child wants above all to understand what is happening on the stage, to follow the sequence of the action, to live through the events of the play together with the characters. Food for the heart and for the mind—that is what a play for children must be above all else. While we take into consideration the educational significance of merry laughter and of artistic impressions, we do not at all aspire toward bare amusement;
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our main aim is that the performance should be imbued with ideas, with content.”
If the theatre was to be a constructively educational project, it would have to be carefully and scientifically carried on. The study which Satz and her staff of research assistants under the direction of Professor E. A. Arkin, have made of their audience and the way they have worked out their productions accordingly, is one of the interesting stories of the Soviet theatre.
The audiences of the Children’s Theatre are carefully organized. Most of the children come in groups or classes from school. Certain plays are for certain aged audiences, and boys and girls are admitted only to those performances which are designed for their age. They may not attend a play which is intended to appeal to and be understood by older children, and they are not encouraged to go to a play for their juniors. Thus there are plays for the younger ones, from six to eight years old, then those for children from about eight to ten, and on into the plays for high-school age, although there are fewer of these at present in the theatre’s repertoire.
"The main principle in all the work of our theatre,” says Satz, "is to 'activize’ the audience, not only during the performances but also after them. The whole idea is that the children should be able to switch on to real life the 'electric charge’ they have received in the theatre.” (Incidentally, that is an excellent statement of the mainspring of the Marxian attitude toward the theatre.) "Only by taking into account the peculiarities of different ages is it possible to give the content in the correct dose; to give a content which the spectator will assimilate not superficially, but deeply, which will infect him emotionally. If the spectator has to make no effort whatsoever for the perception and digestion of the performance, then this theatrical food does not give the necessary 'activizing’ result. The per-
formance plus the independent work of the spectator— that is what we want.”
It is in conferences among the regisseurs, authors, psychologists and child specialists, where many carefully prepared charts and diagrams are used for illustration, that this work is carried on. Here there is talk of age evolution, of the role of social factors in the development of children’s personalities, of the relationship of games and organized children’s activities to the theatre, of the children’s speech and their creations. The theatre workers have borne in mind, to paraphrase a report of Professor Arkin, that the child is not a reacting apparatus but an active personality. They have considered it important to study not only his particular reaction during the performance of the play but his subsequent reactions in life. For sometimes a child who appears at the time to be getting little from the play, will later, by some chance act or remark, reveal what a profound impression has been made upon him.
Study is made of individual types and of group reactions by unseen observers during the performances. The most successful research has been made with individual types, which is done by selecting "polar pairs.” Two children, chosen with the advice of their teacher, who seem to be alike except in the one respect noted below, are watched by the theatre’s specialist and note is made of all their reactions throughout the play. A child with vividly expressed emotions will be paired with a child with dully expressed emotions, an introverted, introspective child with an extravert, a child who is an organizer with a strong resisting nervous system with a child who is disorganized, a child with highly developed intellect with one of an underdeveloped intellect. The "after acts” of these polar pairs continue to be observed after the performance is over. Notes are made by the teacher of what these par-
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ticular children do in school during the two or three days after the performance. The theatre’s own worker revisits the school to collect the information, and sometimes makes another visit even three weeks or more afterwards. The families are sometimes asked to cooperate in the study and furnish the theatre worker with observations about the child’s behavior at home which may have been affected by the play. The child’s own creative work and conversation often contribute the most to the study: the drawings or the remarks he makes, the games he invents, the stories he tells—these sometimes done voluntarily, sometimes provoked by suggestion.
Group observation is less effective because it is more subject to chance, the theatre’s psychologists believe. However, groups of five boys and girls have been studied. Children of the same age, social sphere (an interesting phrase to find in a Communist report), and of normal ability, have been grouped together, boys with boys, and girls with girls. If three of the five children had the same reaction it was counted as the group’s reaction. From these studies it was found that the girls were more conservative, reserved and unified in their reactions than the boys. Therefore, their reactions were more actually group reactions. Little else was concluded.
A further source of observation of the reaction of plays upon children, an indirect one, has been an analysis of the letters which the children are urged to write to the theatre. Most of them are addressed to Natalie Satz, but some are addressed to various characters in the plays which the children have seen. From these letters may be drawn information about the peculiarities of the children’s perceptions and their interpretations of the various aspects of the performances. The degree of subjectiveness of the audience may be judged in this way, as well as their opinions upon
contents and ideology, designs of scenery, and a dozen different things.
This work has a two-fold value. It is of much use to the schools and even to parents in their relationship with the child, for it often brings to light things about him which had been unknown or passed unnoticed before. Usually, of course, the children of the "polar pairs” react as one would expect, but sometimes there are upsets: children who were considered highly emotional seem phlegmatic beside duller children who turn out to be very excitable when subjected to the conditions of the theatre. Children previously thought dull catch things in dramatic representation which the brighter ones miss. Thus the schools profit by the research that is carried on by the theatre.
The theatre itself is directly benefited, for through watching the reactions of its young audience, it discovers many of its own mistakes. If children laugh at lines or incidents which were not intended to be funny, or if they fail to laugh where it was expected that they would, if their interest regularly seems to flag at certain points, then there is something wrong. If they cry when it was not intended that they should be so moved, or become more excited than is good for them, then those passages must be calmed down; if the duller and average ones fail to respond in certain parts and only the brighter-than-average react, then simplification or clarification will be ordered.
A visitor to the Theatre for Children, even though he were ignorant of this scientific work which is being carried on, could not help being interested in this most unique of Moscow’s audiences. The children arrive some time before the play is to begin and assemble in a large downstairs room. Here they play group games and learn songs. Then they go upstairs to the auditorium. There are no programs. Instead Satz or one of her assistants comes before the curtain and talks to the children, telling them what they are
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to see, what to look out for, urging them to write their letters, asking a question or two. Then in the intermissions one of the staff stands in a front corner of the auditorium under a sign which invites any of the audience who have questions to ask to come to her. The children do not hesitate to do so. For those who have no questions, there are more group games downstairs.
The Theatre for Children is one of Moscow’s most spectacular examples of the theatre dedicated to its audience, and one of the most absorbing places to study the Bolshevist public—this time a public in the making. With such mature and carefully considered plays offered to the Russians from the age of eight, what wonder that the theatre-going habit and an appreciation for good work in the art of the theatre is common to the adult population and will continue to grow as the youth grows.
2
One of the most widely publicized features of the early Revolutionary theatre was its custom of admitting workers free, and I am frequently asked whether this is still practiced. It is not. The Moscow theatres still do, however, provide facilities for group theatre-going and for reduced rates to workers. This is effected through what are known as "closed performances.” These are performances which are bought out—all the seats in the house—by some one factory or institution at a slightly reduced rate offered by the theatre. The factory then sells the seats to its employees at a further reduction which makes it possible for the workers to buy the seats at about fifty per cent of the original cost. The difference is divided between the theatre and the patronizing factory or organization.
The choice of play and theatre is made by the factory, and the popularity of a theatre and its plays is exhibited
by the number of "closed performances” it is requested to give. Factories also have certain boxes and permanently reserved seats at the opera and a few dramatic theatres for most performances. These are given to "udarniki” or special workers, as rewards for outstanding accomplishment. The government also has a box in all state theatres to which certain high Communist leaders and their friends may have access without pay. The theatres themselves set aside a certain number of free tickets for all open performances which are allotted to Red Army men and to a few others. The members of any theatre are supposed to be allowed admission to any other theatre as its guests, providing the "complimentary” list has room for them. But with the demand for tickets at the box office as great as it is, theatre managers give few passes.
There are certain theatres which have subscription series open to individuals, but the majority of people buy their seats for open performances at whatever time they find convenient and as often as finances will allow. The cost of tickets in Moscow varies in the different theatres. The Bolshoi Opera is most expensive, its best seats costing thirty roubles. Of the dramatic theatres, the Art Theatre and the Maly are the most costly, the smaller theatres are less. In no theatre are there unreserved seats, no "pit,” and there is a range of price extending in the average theatre down to about four roubles for a gallery seat. This price range means little, insofar as its figures are concerned, for no doubt costs of seats will have changed by the time this book appears, or, if not, then the buying power of the rouble will have fluctuated. Because of the peculiar monetary situation in Russia it is impossible for me to tell you how much a man is paying in dollars and cents for his ticket. But if the worker who gets an average of three hundred roubles a month spends eight roubles for a theatre ticket which would cost $1.50 in New York, he is ob-
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viously spending a larger per cent of his income than a worker in New York who earns one hundred dollars a month. But one of the most interesting facts of all is that it is not the theatres with the cheapest rate for seats which draw the biggest crowds, but theatres with the most expensive tickets.
The theatres have another tie with their audiences through a system of theatrical patronage to various organizations. The Moscow theatres have certain detachments of the Red Army and certain factories or collective farms to which they serve as artistic counselors, and for the cultural life of whose members they are responsible. The theatre sends artists to help this affiliated organization with the building and maintenance of its dramatic circle and amateur art work. Other artists make periodic excursions to the factory or barracks or farm to present dramatic programs, "concerts,” there. And often when a new production is presented at a Moscow theatre, the affiliated factory will be invited to a special dress rehearsal and the audience will be asked for its opinion about the ideological and artistic content of the play. The factory workers, soldiers, or farmers, as the case may be, flattered by this contact with a big Moscow theatre, are encouraged to cultivate their opinion and taste in dramatic affairs, guided and sponsored through their association with the members of the patronizing artistic collective.
CHAPTER TEN