Little Theatre Movement

As the new medium of cinema was beginning to replace theater as a source of large-scale spectacle, the Little Theatre Movement developed in the United States around 1912. The Little Theatre Movement served to provide experimental centers for the dramatic arts, free from the standard production mechanisms used in prominent commercial theaters. In several large cities, beginning with Chicago, Boston, Seattle, and Detroit, companies formed to produce more intimate, non-commercial, non-profit-centered, and reform-minded entertainments.

Sensational melodramas had entertained theatre audiences since the mid-19th century, drawing larger and larger audiences. These types of formulaic works could be produced over and over again in splendid halls in big cities and by touring companies in smaller ones. During the last decades of the century, producers and playwrights began to create narratives dealing with social problems, albeit usually on a sensational level. While not yet totally free of melodramatic elements, plays reflecting a style more associated with realism gradually emerged. During a secret meeting in 1895, the owners of most of the theatres across America organized into a Theatrical Syndicate "to control competition and prices." This group, which included all major producers, "effectively stifled dramatic experimentation for many years" in search of greater profits. Nevertheless, by the second decade of the 20th century, pure melodrama, with its typed characters and exaggerated plots, had become the province of motion pictures.

Chicago's philanthropists and arts patrons Arthur T. and Mary Aldis established an artists' colony called The Compound in Lake Forest, Illinois. In 1910, Mary founded there the Aldis Playhouse, "a predecessor to the 'little theater' movement". The Hull House settlement theatre group, founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, was the first to perform several plays by Galsworthy, Ibsen, and Shaw in Chicago. Maurice Browne, director and co-founder of the Chicago Little Theatre with Ellen Van Volkenburg, responding to having often been called the founder of the Little Theatre Movement, instead credited Hull House director Laura Dainty Pelham with being the "true founder of the 'American Little Theatre Movement'". Nevertheless, Browne and Van Volkenburg's company had, as the first little theatre to use the term, provided the movement with its name and inspired the creation in 1914 of Margaret Anderson's influential Chicago periodical The Little Review.

Alice Gerstenberg, an original member of the Chicago Little Theatre, expanded the movement to include children, founding the Chicago Junior League Theatre for Children in 1921. Gerstenberg was also producer and president of The Playwrights' Theatre of Chicago, 1922–1945. She was active in the Alice Gerstenberg Experimental Theatre Workshop in the 1950s and the Alice Gerstenberg Theatre in the 1960s, which helped to cultivate the legacy of the Little Theatre Movement of the early 20th century.

In 1912, two theatre groups were formed, the Toy Theatre in Boston and the Chicago Little Theatre; these events often being cited as the official start of the Little Theatre Movement in the United States. Continuing to react against commercialism, amateur companies began to write and produce their own works as well as new plays from Europe that had been ignored by the syndicates. A wide variety of experimental groups, clubs, and settlement houses undertook to reform the theater, bringing more inwardly directed plays to a wider public audience. New forms of drama, some influenced by or parodying the new science of psychoanalysis, began to be presented in smaller venues, many converted from other uses into makeshift theatres. The new groups began to experiment with new forms of storytelling, acting styles, dialogue, and mise-en-scene. This experimentation, influenced by European models, ranged from an ultra-detailed naturalism to, by the early 1920s, a wildly provocative expressionism, part of a new stagecraft. Women were pervasive throughout these companies, although their efforts were often belittled, dismissed, or undervalued. Several theaters also sprang up during this period. The Wee Playhouse reading theater in Alfred, New York, traces its origin to Fall 1920 and still holds meetings today, making it probably the oldest continuous reading theater in the country.

The movement achieved high-water marks in artistic significance, community involvement, and international recognition with the Pasadena Community Playhouse. Originally a community theatre, the Playhouse boasted at its peak capacity six stages, each featuring a new production every two weeks, making it, for most of the early 20th century, the world's most prolific theatrical production organization.^{[citation needed]} This palatial venue was, at the time of its construction in 1925, the largest theatre complex west of Chicago.^{[citation needed]} The organization was able to complete many projects beyond the scope of professional companies, thanks to volunteer labor, widespread community support and the directorship of Gilmor Brown. Notable undertakings of the Pasadena Playhouse include the staging of the entire canon of Shakespeare for the first time on a single stage and a Midsummer Drama Festival showcasing the work of local writers. In 1928, the Playhouse produced the massive theo-philosophical epic Lazarus Laughed by Eugene O'Neill. The first fully realized production of this play, the cast included 250 primarily local amateur actors, often doubling in roles that required more than three hundred masks and costumes.

Actor Harold Lloyd and others founded the Beverly Hills Little Theatre for Professionals in 1931. It was originally housed at the Wilkes Vine Street Theatre, and by 1938 had moved to Santa Monica boulevard. This 400-seat theater bore the names of the founder-subscribers on the seat backs. A piece in Variety noted that Lloyd's mother, Sarah Elisabeth Fraser, along with Gladys Lloyd Cassell (wife of Edward G. Robinson), and their friend Sam Hardy raised funds for it. Even before it opened there were rumors in Hollywood that something from the little theatre movement was on its way. Cal York (a Photoplay gossip column pseudonym for an amalgam of California and New York), overheard Franc Dillon ask Kenneth Harlan to be in one of the future plays. They were all at Estelle Taylor's estate when this conversation occurred, and from the beginning it attracted a film industry crowd. It served as a showcase for young talent, as a place for stars of the silent era to demonstrate their voices for talking pictures, and as an elegant way to transition from stage to film by being seen by Hollywood talent scouts. MGM dramatic coach Oliver Hinsdell was a frequent director there in the early years.

The Little Theatre Movement began in the early 20th century and was a result of young theatre practitioners, dramaturges, stage technicians, stage designers, and actors, who were influenced by European Theatre. More specifically, they were interested in the ideas of Max Reinhardt, a German director, the designing techniques of Adolphe Appia and Gordon Craig, and the staging methods at the Théâtre Libre in Paris, the Freie Bühne in Berlin, and the Moscow Art Theatre.