American college and university theater programs took over that repertoire in the training of young theater artists. They produced both new plays and neglected classical works. Little Theatres arose to meet a need not being met by other theaters. More recent alumni of our community theatres include Kristen Bell, Robert Pattison, Jane Krakowski, Anna Kendrick, and Kristen Chenoweth. Eugene O’Neill, Marlon Brando, Henry Fonda are but three of thousands.
#Norfolk little theatre professional#
The Cleveland Playhouse, the Longwharf Theater, the Guthrie Theater, the Dallas Theatre Center, the Carolina Playmakers, the American Repertory Theater, and the Yale Repertory Theatre are but a few regional theaters which owe their existence to the Little Theatre MovementĬountless professional theatre artists who would shape and define America’s theatre history got their start in Little Theaters. Many of the Little Theaters paved the way for the Regional Theatre Movement in America during the 1960s and 1970s, and many of the Little Theaters on university campuses developed into the theater degree granting programs which exist today. Roger Boyle, a student of George Pierce Baker and Alexander Dean, at the University of Virginia’s 210 seat Little Theatre of Minor Hall. Drummond at Cornell University, George Pierce Baker at Harvard University, Thomas Wood Stevens at Carnegie Tech, Fredrick Koch at the University of North Carolina, Althea Hunt at the College of William and Mary, and my own E. Mabie at the University of Iowa, Lee Norvelle at Indiana University, Monroe Lipman at Tulane University, Warner Bentley at Dartmouth College, A,M. Little Theatres eventually introduced theater and drama to American colleges and universities : Garrett Laverton did so at Northwestern University, E.C. Boston had The Toy Theatre, New York had both the Neighborhood Playhouse and the Washington Square Playhouse, Massachusetts had the Provincetown Playhouse, California had the Pasadena Playhouse, and architect Finlay Ferguson (1875-1936) started the Little Theatre of Norfolk. Soon Little Theatres were popping up all over America. So famous did the group become that they toured the country on two occasions. Gibson’s Womankind, two plays which were definitely not properties the Syndicate would ever produce.īrowne’s theater soon began to attract celebrities from around the world, including Harley Granville Barker, Frank Lloyd Wright, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, and Amy Lowell. Finding their planned production of The Trojan Women not ready to open, the enterprising duo opened their theater with a double bill of W.B. On November 12, 1912, the Chicago Little Theatre, a room in the back of the Fine Arts Building’s Fourth Floor, presented its first play on a fourteen by twenty-foot platform stage facing 99 seats. Over coffee, they decided to start an independent theater of their own in Ms.
In America, Maurice Browne (1881 – 1955), a tutor travelling in Florence, met the daughter of an American meat salesman named Ellen Van Volkenberg. Otto Brahm opened the Freie Buhne in Germany and Constantin Stanislavski began his Moscow Art Theater in his family’s Moscow home. Soon independent art theaters were popping up all over Europe. In France, Andre Antoine (1858-1943), an uneducated bookstore clerk and gas company employee, found himself planning for a bill of short plays which included Emile Zola’s Jacques Damour in 1887 under the name Theatre Libre. His first offering was Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts in1891.
#Norfolk little theatre free#
Grein (1862-1935), an employee of the Dutch East India Company, organized a subscription theater, thereby free from both the monopoly and the censor to produce plays of “literary and artistic” merit. Theater-loving amateurs, wanting to see plays which, under the theatrical monopolies, could exist only on the printed page, organized themselves to produce the new, non-commercial plays. The Syndicate was interested in making money, so only those shows which could attract the widest possible audience were selected.Ī comparable situation in Europe was challenged by what was known as “The Independent Theater Movement.”
Known as “The Syndicate,” a cabal of New York producers had divided the country into zones and determined what shows would play in the giant theaters they owned. Question: Why is it called a “Little” Theatre?Īnswer: Because the first one, The Little Theatre of Chicago, had just 99 seats.Īt the turn of the twentieth century powerful monopolies and trusts controlled and regulated just about everything in America.
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