In comparison with the taste of the great American cultural prairie whereon these cities are situated, the city of New York, as I have written, looms up an æsthetic Athens. In New York, too, there is prosperity for bare knees, bed humours, and “Peg o’ My Heart” bathos, but not alone for these. Side by side with the audiences that crowd into the leg shows, the couch farces, and the uplift sermons are audiences of considerable bulk that make profitable the production of such more estimable things as Shaw’s “Heartbreak House,” O’Neill’s “Emperor Jones,” the plays of St. John Ervine and Dunsany, of Tolstoy and Hauptmann, of Bahr and Benavente and Guitry. True enough, in order to get to the theatres in which certain of these plays are revealed, one is compelled to travel in a taxicab several miles from Broadway--and at times has to sit with the chauffeur in order to pilot him to far streets and alleyways that are not within his sophisticated ken--but, once one gets to the theatres, one finds them full, and their audiences enthusiastic and responsive. The culture of the American theatre--in so far as it exists--may be said, in fact, to be an alleyway culture. Almost without exception in the last dozen years and more have the best dramatists of Europe and of our own country been driven up alleyways and side-streets for their first American hearing. Up these dark alleys and in these remote malls alone have they been able to find a sufficient intelligence for their wares. Hervieu, Shaw, Echegaray, Strindberg, Björnson, Dunsany, Masefield, Ervine, Bergström, Chekhov, Andreyev, Benavente, O’Neill--these and many others of eminence owe their New York introduction to the side-street American who, in the majority of cases, is found upon analysis to be of fifty per cent. foreign blood. And what thus holds true of New York holds equally true in most of the other cities. In most of such cities, that is, as have arrived at a degree of theatrical polish sufficient to boast a little playhouse up an ulterior mews.