Percy MacKaye

Percy MacKaye, (born March 16, 1875, New York City, New York, U.S.—died August 31, 1956, Cornish, New Hampshire), American poet and playwright whose use of historical and contemporary folk literature furthered the development of the pageant in the U.S.

MacKaye was introduced to the theatre at an early age by his father, actor Steele MacKaye, with whom he first collaborated. Graduating from Harvard University in 1897, he studied abroad for two years and returned to the United States to write and lecture. In 1912 he published The Civic Theatre, in which he advocated amateur community theatricals. He attempted to bring poetry and drama to large participant groups and to unite the stage arts, music, and poetry by the use of masques and communal chanting. He wrote, among others, the pageants The Canterbury Pilgrims (published in 1903) and, as co-author, St. Louis: A Civic Masque (performed in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1914 with 7,500 participants).

A trip to the Kentucky mountains in 1921 stimulated MacKaye’s interest in folk literature. In 1929 he became advisory editor to Folk-Say, a journal of American folklore; he also conducted research in collaboration with his wife, Marion Morse MacKaye; and taught poetry and folklore at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. His most noteworthy contributions to American drama and pageantry are The Scarecrow (1908), a historical play; Caliban (1916), an elaborate pageant-masque; This Fine Pretty World (1923), a regional play; and The Mystery of Hamlet: King of Denmark (1949), a study of past and present tragedy seen by a contemporary American poet. (Encylopedia Britannica)

MacKaye, Percy (16 Mar. 1875-31 Aug. 1956), poet and playwright, was born Percy Wallace MacKaye in New York City, the son of James Morrison Steele MacKaye, an actor-dramatist, and Mary Keith Medbery, a writer. MacKaye was schooled chiefly at home and in public schools in New York City, though he also attended Lawrence Academy in Groton, Massachusetts, for a short time.

In 1897, at his undergraduate convocation from Harvard University, MacKaye addressed the assembly with a paper titled "The Need for Imagination in the Drama of Today." He married Marion Homer Morse, his third cousin, in 1898; they had three children. Unable to secure a teaching post, he traveled for two years with her in Europe. On returning, MacKaye taught at the Craigie School for Boys in New York City from 1900 to 1904.

The American actor E. H. Sothern commissioned MacKaye to write The Canterbury Pilgrims (published in 1903, but not performed by Sothern) and Fenris, the Wolf (published in 1905). Both in verse, the former dramatized The Canterbury Tales, the latter a Scandinavian folk tale. The first of MacKaye's plays to receive a professional performance was Jeanne d'Arc, also in verse. It was produced by Sothern and Julia Marlowe at the Lyric Theatre in Philadelphia on 15 October 1906.

For Sappho and Phaon, produced in 1907, MacKaye engaged a University of Michigan professor, Albert A. Stanley, to compose the music for his lyrics and choruses. MacKaye's The Scarecrow, a prose drama inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Feathertop," was first produced by the Harvard Dramatic Club in 1909 and staged in New York two years later. Its success earned MacKaye productions in England (by the Theatre Royal, Bristol), Germany (by Max Reinhardt), and Russia (by the Moscow Art Theater).

Not content with publishing and producing drama alone, MacKaye wrote and performed commemorative poems in the hope that poetry might regain its oral importance in American culture. In a typical recitation, he read his epic poem "Ticonderoga" for the 1909 tercentenary celebration of the discovery of Lake Champlain, New York. Satirizing misappropriators of Henrik Ibsen and other modern thinkers, MacKaye wrote Anti-Matrimony, produced first in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1910 and staged later that year in New York. The 1912 publication of his drama on eugenics, To-morrow, provoked a mixed critical response to the topic and to his treatment of it; it was produced the following year in Philadelphia.

As MacKaye's theater work gained recognition, his concurrent efforts to formulate a theory of the role of participatory drama in democracy also received more attention. The principles in his The Civic Theatre, in Relation to the Redemption of Leisure (1912) were esteemed in civic and artistic quarters by such readers as President Woodrow Wilson and the theater theorist and practitioner Edwin Gordon Craig. The work of his suffragist sister Hazel MacKaye, conservationist brother Benton, and economist-philosopher brother James informed some of the principles of his dramatic theories and the themes in his plays and masques.

Many of his works suited the time and place in which they were first produced, drawing on local history or topical contemporary issues for their appeal. For the 150th anniversary of St. Louis, Missouri, MacKaye organized an open-air civic performance, Saint Louis, a Masque of American Civilization, involving a cast of 8,000 citizens and playing before audiences of more than one million people during its run from 28 May to 1 June 1914. Caliban, by the Yellow Sands, his masque to celebrate the Shakespeare tercentenary while Great Britain was involved in World War I, dramatized the evolution of democratic and peaceful community drama. It included designs by Robert Edmond Jones, folk dances by the British ethnographer Cecil Sharp, an opening dance by Isadora Duncan, and an amateur cast of 2,500 when it opened in New York in 1916. A 1917 revival of Caliban at the Harvard Stadium in Boston involved a cast of 5,000. In 1920 Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, awarded MacKaye the first American fellowship in poetry, a chair of creative literature with no formal teaching duties.

With the momentum of the civic drama movement broken by World War I, MacKaye's theoretical treatises on the power of drama to "redeem leisure" and to serve as a "substitute for war" also lost favor. Masque-making by pageant societies became a segregated and formulaic practice of questionable artistic quality as fewer professionals devoted their efforts to them. MacKaye, who had idealized the transformative powers of participatory civic drama, failed to find sponsors for his urban masques and pageants.

Inspired by Cecil Sharp, MacKaye turned his dramatic and poetic talents to depictions of the people and landscape of rural America. In 1921 he and his wife spent a summer in Kentucky collecting Appalachian folktales. Affecting the mountain dialect, MacKaye produced a biting three-act comedy, This Fine-Pretty World (1924); an edition of three short plays, Kentucky Mountain Fantasies (1928); a poem, "The Gobbler of God" (1928); and a collection of twelve stories, Tall Tales of the Kentucky Mountains (1926). He also published poems on New England.

MacKaye devoted the years 1923 to 1927 chiefly to compiling a two-volume biography and bibliography about his father titled Epoch. During this period MacKaye experienced bouts of ill health, and in the 1930s he had a series of heart attacks. In 1932 his Wakefield, a federally sponsored masque to honor the 200-year anniversary of George Washington's birth, was produced at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., and in 1949 the Pasadena Playhouse produced his tetralogy, The Mystery of Hamlet. He published two tales for children in 1951 and 1952 and continued to write poetry until his death at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire.

The large casts of his pageants and the specific locales or occasions required to produce them make MacKaye's works unlikely candidates for theatrical revivals. However, his transition away from classical themes and pageantry toward American folk and historical subjects, his use of American dialects, his integration of poetry, music, and dance, and his theories of community drama make him an important precursor in the emergence of American performing art forms.

Bibliography

The MacKaye Family Papers at Dartmouth College include materials before 1932; papers of the MacKaye family and of George Pierce Baker in the Harvard University Theater Collection are also valuable. Edwin Osgood Grover, Annals of an Era: Percy MacKaye and the MacKaye Family, 1826-1932 (1932), includes a narrative biography, indexes, and writings by and about MacKaye. See also the reminiscence by MacKaye's daughter Arvia MacKaye Ege, The Power of the Impossible: The Life Story of Percy and Marion MacKaye (1992). Critical assessments by MacKaye's contemporaries include "The Playwright as Pioneer," in Thomas H. Dickinson, Playwrights of the New American Theatre (1925), and Arthur Hobson Quinn, "Percy MacKaye as a Dramatist of Revolt," English Journal 12, no. 10 (Dec. 1923). David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry (1990), places MacKaye's work in the national movement toward community drama. An obituary appears in the New York Times, 1 Sept. 1956.

Libby Smigel

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