I have always felt that the hope of a new spirit in the theatre will come not so much from amateurs and their talking organizations as from the rebels within the theatre and the work they can accomplish. I agree with Gordon Craig when he says that no one has any right to meddle with, and potter about, the theatre who does not know it from the inside. In no other field is there such a gang of busy bodies—old women of both sexes, who have the ignorant reformers talking sense developed to such a pernicious degree. The air is dark with the empty words they belch forth, but from their deeds the world remains light and free. If the regeneration of the theatre from the base influences that now possess it, is to take place it will not, I am sure, be by the work of the drama leagues and so-called “art” theatres. The work of such managers as J. D. Williams and producers like Granville Barker and B. Iden Payne does more for the theatre by the working out of certain ideals than all the talk about those ideals and the jumbling with them by the old ladies’ leagues and the “arty” amateurs. A plague on them all! In New York this season a new theatre is to be opened. Helen Freeman, who for a time was a Belasco star and later the leading woman with William Gillette, is to own and direct this latest attempt to establish a new spirit in the theatre. With Miss Freeman will be associated a group of six professional actors. All of them, like their director, have ideals which they plan to work for. For the first few months they are to produce one-act things. Among them will be plays by Evreinov, a young Russian not yet “discovered” by this rapacious country; two plays by the Spanish dramatist, Jacinto Benveneto, of whose seventy-five excellent plays not one has yet been given here; plays by other unknown European dramatists; new plays by Zoë Akins, Witter Bynner, Rollo Peters, and other American writers. Miss Freeman has chosen as a name for this interesting theatre the hour of the curtain rise. It will therefore be known as “The Nine o’Clock Theatre.” Much is expected from Miss Freeman and much from her theatre. Success to it, and to her! _A New Play_ When I heard that a new fantastic play was to be produced by Arthur Hopkins, and that the scenes and costumes were to be designed by Robert Edmond Jones, I booked seats as early as I could. I remembered the work of Jones in Anatole France’s _The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife_ and his work on the inner scenes and costumes of the Shakespeare Masque. Both were the works of a new decorative genius who had much to give to our theatre that is barren of the work of artists. I expected much of the new play, and lo! what was disappointment was waiting there.