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Percy MacKaye and the Drama of Democracy
Abstract
At the turn of the twentieth century, community drama in the form of outdoor pageants and masques became popular with civic groups, high schools and colleges throughout the United States. This movement grew rapidly in the early years of the century and reached its peak just before the First World War. During its apex, the outdoor pageant and masque movement was compared to the festivals of ancient Greece and medieval Europe. Fanciful histories of the pageant proliferated citing the "modern" pageant as a descendent of the festivals of medieval and renaissance Europe and inspired by the romantic novels of Sir Walter Scott. In addition, the movement's proponents assigned to it the power of curing numerous forms of civic ills and injustice, including the improvement of the common man's leisure time and the breaking down of social strata within a community. This dissertation examines the pageant and masque phenomenon in an attempt to determine why these productions became so popular both with producing groups and with their audiences. Special attention is given to the work of Percy MacKaye, the most important figure working within the movement, and most prolific in terms of articles, essays, books, and scripts. Specific detail is given on MacKaye's theories for a Drama of Democracy which would not only improve the lives and leisure of its participants and audiences, but would also be the impetus for community betterment. The productions of MacKaye's The Pageant and Masque of St. Louis (1914) and Caliban, by the Yellow Sands (1916) are given as examples and described in detail in an effort to determine whether the Drama of Democracy was an attainable goal. The conclusion that the Drama of Democracy was, for several reasons, an unrealistic goal, leads to an attempt to discovering whether this outdoor pageant movement had any lasting effect on the American theatre scene, and what dramatic forms, if any, are its descendants.
Subject Area
Theater|American studies
Recommended Citation
Bryant, Kenneth Graeme, "Percy MacKaye and the Drama of Democracy" (1991). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9200131.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9200131