"OCEAN OF FACES"

Evening Post, Volume LXXXVIII, Issue 106, 31 October 1914, Page 11

"OCEAN OF FACES"

PAGEANT AT ST. LOUIS AMERICA'S FERVOUR FOR THE NEW ART.

Tho American drama is growing in bulk as \rell as in spirit (says Current Opinion, New York). We are no longei* content even with the hippodrome and the hippodrania. We need whole cities $.5 backgrounds, and thousands of people as actors. When Percy Mackaye's civio masque "Saint Louis" was produced in the city of that name; no fewet than 7500 actors took part in the performance. The stage, as described in the Bostoh Transcript, was nearly 1000 feet long from end to end and 200 feet in depth. In front of it, in a broad and graceful sweep, lay tho waters of» a> lagoon, and, beyond, the Hill of AM, the general sloping side of which stretched north and south, forming a natural iimphitheatre!. The hiil itself, the writer goes on to say, he could not see, not any part of it. It was covered ac with a fine checkered robe by an audience such "as no man ever saw before. "Since noon and in seemingly endless Btreams," the report rah, "the- 'p'eo'plo had been pouring in from every quarter of the city, until now, at half'pajst blx, hours after every available seat had beem taken, they still came on by thousands to patiently stand to see and hear two great dramatio stories of St. Louis which took five hours to tell. I had heard of a 'sea of faces' ; hero was an ocean of faces. t have seen the crowded auditorium at Chautauqua. N. V. : I have seen Madisonsquare Garden and the New York Hippodrome when they were packed to the doors ; and I havp seen • the , Harvard. Stadium when a big football match was in progress. But if those' foul 1 audiences were thrown into one and if every man, woman, ,and child in that one wore a Harvard sweater, they would have made but a crimson patch in the audience,before me. I can compare thnt crowdi witli nothing I have ever seen, save per* haps the growing corn on a rolling W<*s» tern prairie, and where it swept upward 1 toward the ends of the great arc it was hard to realise that what I saw against the skyline were not tassels of corn, buthuman heads. "And behind this vast concourse and) directly in front of the Art Museum which crowned the hill, the colossal bronzo figure of St. Louis, calm and. pround, sat his great fed stallion and looked down upon the scene. And such were the wonders which this crowd v?au to see that if in the middle of tho ma«quo St. Louis had struck spurs into •ins charger's flanks, leaped down from %'s pedestal and swum, horse and man, across the lagoon to the mystic land beyond, the miracle would have been regarded merely as a part of the play.'" We have indeed hero glimpses of a. new phase of art. The significance of thp movement, as Mr. Percy Mnskayo points out, is its civic afipect. Tn the cause *sjf war, he ipmarks ifi the preface to the^fmblished vewioit of his play (Doubled ayrPnge and Company), ctlics before now have banded thenlEOlvcs together for defence or aggression. But ncvoi perhaps bel'ofp this have_ official 'mvoys convened and acted their parts in symbol and reality to create for a civic nvl A League of the Cities. Vet •such » league 13 even now in process of fnrmalton.