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Percy MacKaye

 
American Theater Guide: Percy [Wallace] Mackaye
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Mackaye, Percy [Wallace] (1875–1956), playwright. One of the most curious figures in American dramaturgy, he was the son of Steele MacKaye and was born in New York. Upon graduating from Harvard, he began teaching as well as writing poetry and plays. While scholars over the years have admired MacKaye's work, only one of his plays ever found a public: the fantasy The Scarecrow (1911). The rest of his work ranges from historical drama to political satire and spectacle. Such important theatrical figures as E. H. Sothern and Walter Hampden saw fit to mount a few of these, always without success. Shortly before his death he completed a tetralogy, The Mystery of Hamlet, King of Denmark; or, What We Will (1949), which purports to show the events leading up to Shakespeare's play. His books, such as The Playhouse and the Play (1909), The Civic Theatre (1912), and Community Drama (1917), argue for a subsidized, noncommercial theatre and suggest why his theatre pieces today seem more like closet drama.

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Works: Works by Percy MacKaye
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(1875-1956)

1911The Scarecrow. MacKaye's 1908 dramatic adaptation of Hawthorne's short story "Feathertop" was given a short-lived Broadway production but remains a popular choice for production among amateur and collegiate groups. Son of playwright Steele MacKaye, the dramatist was admired by some but never managed to find a popular audience. His books, The Playhouse and the Play (1909) and The Civic Theatre (1912), argue for a subsidized, noncommercial American theater.

Wikipedia: Percy MacKaye
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Percy MacKaye as Alwyn the poet in MacKaye's play Sanctuary: A Bird Masque. Photographed in 1913 by Arnold Genthe.

Percy MacKaye (1875–1956) was an American dramatist and poet.

He was born in New York City, New York. He studied at Harvard (1897), before returning to New York City (1900-4) to teach. He subsequently settled in Cornish, New Hampshire.

He wrote the plays The Canterbury Pilgrims in 1903, Sappho and Phaon in 1907, Jeanne D'Arc in 1907, The Scarecrow in 1908, Anti-Matrimony in 1910, and the poetry collection The Far Familiar in 1937. In 1950, MacKaye published The Mystery of Hamlet King of Denmark, or What We Will, a series of four plays written as prequels to William Shakespeare's Hamlet.

In the 1920s, MacKaye was poet in residence at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He was the son of actor Steele MacKaye and brother of philosopher James MacKaye and of conservationist Benton MacKaye.

Percy MacKaye is considered to be the first poet of the Atomic Era because of his sonnet "The Atomic Law," which was published in the Christmas 1945 issue of The Churchman.

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Civic Theatre

In 1912 he published The Civic Theatre in Relation to the Redemption of Leisure; A Book of Suggestions. Here he presented a concept of Civic Theatre as "the conscious awakening of the people to self-government in its leisure". To this end he called for the active involvement of the public, not merely as spectators, professional staff not dominated by commercial considerations and the elimination of private profit by endowment and public support.[1] This concept was influential on Platon Kerzhentsev and the Soviet Proletcult Theatre movement.

Works

Poetry

Plays

Fenris the Wolf, 1905

Opera

Non-fiction

External links

References

  1. ^ The Civic Theatre in Relation to the Redemption of Leisure; A Book of Suggestionsaccessed 7 December 2008


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American Theater Guide. The Oxford Companion to American Theatre. Copyright © 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Works. The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Percy MacKaye".  Read more