THE AUTHOR of Hole in the Wall was born in New York in 1883, has long been a pioneer in the American arts and has made many contributions to poetic drama. Indifferent to the Broadway of his native city, he joined the Provincetown group in 1917 and his earliest plays were produced there: Lima Beans, Manikin and Minikin, Jack's House, and Vote the New Moon, a satire on Fascism in advance of the present era. A socially minded poet as well as a lyric dramatist, he wrote plays reflecting class differences, plays for dancers and marionettes, and plays in which human language is informed with a musical design. He also composed five full-length plays and the first fulllength radio drama in verse: The Planets, an anti- war allegory. This was followed by ten fables about animals, birds, fishes, and insects in which Man is the hero and villain in a shifting background of problems, biologic, social, economic, revolutionary, and evolutionary. The fables are in ballad form and run an embryonic gamut of tragedy, comedy, tragi-comedy, farce, and buffoonery. One of these, The Four Apes, is a genial satire on the Munich Conference. Hole in the Wall, concerning a family of mice and their economic terror, reveals the problem of relief in a not yet perfect democracy. And the author's wellknown mass recital, America America! has been performed throughout the country in workers' theaters. He is, in short, an ardent humanist.
In his sixty plays in various forms, experimental or classical, he has tried to break down the conventional walls of the commercial theater and to bring the stage back to the wider fields of the imagination. While his earlier work suffered from too great a concern with the abstract, the stylized and the fantastically individual, his later work has progressed to a more objective concern with common denominators and with the language of American people as a natural source for deeper poetic drama. Commercial theaters have not dampened his faith in a people's theater similar to the guilds of the Middle Ages which gave birth to the later Elizabethan drama. The Federal Theater, recently destroyed in Washington, was such a movement, and the present author was director of the Manhattan and Bronx project which had eight companies including a Poetic Theater, so called. This group was disbanded after a gay production of Auden Dance of Death on Broadway.
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