The plays could be acted by the group who, season after season, have
secured the opera house for the annual amateur show. Other dramatic
ability could be found in the high-schools. There is enough talent in any
place to make an artistic revolution, if once that region is aflame with
a common vision. The spirit that made the Irish Players, all so racy of
the soil, can also move the company of local photoplayers in Topeka, or
Indianapolis, or Denver. Then let them speak for their town, not only in
great occasional enterprises, but steadily, in little fancies, genre
pictures, developing a technique that will finally make magnificence
possible.
There was given not long ago, at the Illinois Country Club here, a
performance of The Yellow Jacket by the Coburn Players. It at once seemed
an integral part of this chapter.
The two flags used for a chariot, the bamboo poles for oars, the red sack
for a decapitated head, etc., were all convincing, through a direct
resemblance as well as the passionate acting. They suggest a possible
type of hieroglyphics to be developed by the leader of the local group.
Let the enthusiast study this westernized Chinese play for primitive
representative methods. It can be found in book form, a most readable
work. It is by G.C. Hazelton, Jr., and J.H. Benrimo. The resemblance
between the stage property and the thing represented is fairly close. The
moving flags on each side of the actor suggest the actual color and
progress of the chariot, and abstractly suggest its magnificence. The red
sack used for a bloody head has at least the color and size of one. The
dressed-up block of wood used for a child is the length of an infant of
the age described and wears the general costume thereof. The farmer's
hoe, though exaggerated, is still an agricultural implement.
The evening's list of properties is economical, filling one wagon, rather
than three. Photographic realism is splendidly put to rout by powerful
representation. When the villager desires to embody some episode that if
realistically given would require a setting beyond the means of the
available endowment, and does not like the near-Egyptian method, let him
evolve his near-Chinese set of symbols.
The Yellow Jacket was written after long familiarity with the Chinese
Theatre in San Francisco. The play is a glory to that city as well as to
Hazelton and Benrimo. But every town in the United States has something
as striking as the Chinese Theatre, to the man who keeps the eye of his
soul open. It has its Ministerial Association, its boys' secret society,
its red-eyed political gang, its grubby Justice of the Peace court, its
free school for the teaching of Hebrew, its snobbish chapel, its
fire-engine house, its milliner's shop. All these could be made visible
in photoplays as flies are preserved in amber.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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