Another Book on The Theatre Author:George Jean Nathan Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: WHEN GREEK MEETS GRANVILLE I AM disposed to regard outdoor drama as of a kidney with indoor baseball. That such dubious things have existed and do exist I sta... more »nd, if surprised from the rear, ready to admit; but else, though the antiquarian evangelists of both forms of bizarrerie marshal a magnum of facts against me, I affirm I shall to my dying day stoutly deny the probability of any such existence. Fresh from a vision of the benevolent Mr. Gran- ville Barker's dramatic Fresh Air Fund in the divers university stadia, I am inspired to record the impression that it seems as logical and " educational " to play Euripides out-of-doors (merely because Euripides was originally played thus) as it would be to compel students to glimpse the Homeric epics off goat-skin merely because they were originally transcribed upon goat-skin. The entire business is still another illuminating commentary first, on the extravagant and transparent tomfooleries with which this Mr. Barker has been fetching the impressible American public (Mr. Barker was sharp enough to produce both Iphigenia and The Trojan Women indoors in his less buncombe-swallowing London) ; second, on the inappropriateness and comic futility of al fresco drama as a whole; andthird and finally, on that class of persons which accepts any such slaughter of Greek drama as a post- impressionist Roman holiday. [That the ancient Greeks gave matinees of Euripides, when they gave them at all, only on cloudy days, days when the heavens were sad and sullen, and that their best effect with his dramas was, after all, achieved by night with the glaring fringe of torches, should in some measure cool the whoopings of the professors for these modern Greek daylight shows. That the drama, of whatever sort, cannot endure in the sun is, of course,...« less