THEATRE GUILD OF NEW YORK.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 19060, 3 May 1930, Page 25 (Supplement)

THEATRE GUILD OF NEW YORK.

REMARKABLE BODY OF ENTHUSIASTS.

The history, so far as it has gone, of the Theatre Guild of New York, has just been issued in book form under the title “ The Theatre Guild, the First Ten Years.” “ The book,” says a reviewer, “ is rather exciting for it is not written altogether in the tone of backslapping and self praise one might expect of a body that has been so successful in its aims and purposes. “ The compiler is friendly and enthusiastic, but prehaps not more so than his theme deserves, for to have faced conditions as the Guilders found them ten years ago, and to have steadily gone upward while the theatre around them was crashing amid dire predictions, by its pilots, of total extinction, is something to have accomplished. “ At the moment the Giuld has 60,000 subscribers, more than 30,000 of them in New York alone, the others in Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago, while other cities are now being organised on the subscription system and the hope of an ultimate 100,000 subscribers. “ The advantages of this subscription system are chiefly in the solidity of the audiences and the financial safety of the productions, for they have each year a working capital of 600,000 dollars, and when their list reaches the maximum they have set they will have 1,000,000 dollars. This insures the Guild against loss on productions the general public does not patronise and gives them an increasingly appreciative audience, educated to the finer sort of plays. “ Thus they are enabled to stage plays the commercial producer would not touch, and could not, if he would, for they present no possibility of profit, but with a ready-made audience they may be tried for the satisfaction of doing them and their cultural effect. “ One thing proved by the Guild experiment, although it has passed the experimental stage, is that a theatrical enterprise may be conducted by a board of managers. Nothing is done, no play selected, no money expended, no move made, without a majority of the board of directors favouring such action. “ Fortunately the greater number of these men and women are independent in a financial way and not dependent on salaries from the Guild for their living. They took 25 dollars a week at first, and held to that salary for several years. “ The managers write of their several departments, of their battles and of their devotion to the theatre, detailing some of the disasters of the Guild’s early years; the narrow margin that lay between its success and failure and the joy of its triumphs. ** An interesting feature of the book is the inclusion, as a sort of appendix, of the casts of the sixty-five plays produced between April 19, 1919, when they began with Benavente’s ‘ Bonds of Interest,’ and April 15, 1929, on which date Frantisek Langer’s * The Camel Through the Needle’s Eye ’ was presented.”