“Who he?” I thought. Or make that “hooey!” The “he” in question is Walter Prichard Eaton (1878–1957), a theater critic and academic of whose voice I first took note while flicking through the digitized pages of Vanity Fair’s April issue. April 1926, mind. The “hooey!” is Eaton’s, or rather, it is my response to his sweeping dismissal of motion pictures in an article titled “The Strangling of Our Theatre,” the first in a series of reports from the cultural battlefield that Vanity Fair billed as a “Symposium” on the “Future of the Theatre in America.”
In a succession of articles, prognostications on the fortunes of the theater in the United States were made by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sydney Howard (May issue), theater mogul Lee Shubert (June), independent theater manager Brock Pemberton (July), Ralph Block, production manager of the Famous Players-Lasky Film Corporation (August), and John Emerson, President of the Actor’s Equity Association (September). Eaton’s response to them in the October 1926 issue of Vanity Fair drew the curtain on the “Symposium.”
Now that “Motion Picture Producers” were beginning to exert “direct control of the drama,” as the editors of Vanity Fair put it, a number of questions, however leading, arose:
Will this result in the production of only such plays as will make good motion pictures, in other words, cheap, obvious and sensational plays?
Will the intelligent minorities who are sponsoring non-commercial playhouses succeed where the commercial houses have failed?
Is our stage to lend itself still more to the standards of Moronia, or will a new theatre of the Intelligent Minority arise, overthrow the theatre of commerce and release the latent dramatic talent of America?
Now, “Symposium” literally means “drinking together.” Perhaps the water cooler was contaminated to begin with, given this set-up, but the intemperance of Eaton’s verbiage has no convivial air about it.
What follows, which may well be “hooey” to you—or “flap-doodle,” to borrow the term used by Eaton that started me off on this tangent—is an attempt at having a word on having words: words as thought, words as theatrics, and words as troll.
Continue reading ““99% slush, hokum and flap-doodle”: Having Words with a Pugnacious Pundit”
Harry Heuser 