Percy MacKaye

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Percy MacKaye on a 1913 Autochrome as Alwyn the poet in his play Sanctuary: A Bird Masque . Photographer: Arnold Genthe

Percy Wallace Loring MacKaye (born March 16, 1875 in Manhattan , † August 31, 1956 in Cornish , Sullivan County , New Hampshire ) was an American playwright and poet .

Life

His father was the actor, theater producer and inventor Steele MacKaye (1842-1894), his mother Mary was also connected to the theater, for example she adapted Jane Austen's pride and prejudice for the stage. His brothers were the engineer and philosopher James MacKaye (1872-1935) and the environmentalist and forest scientist Benton MacKaye (1879-1975). Shortly after MacKaye's birth, the family moved to Brattleboro , Vermont, where his father worked in the same house that Rudyard Kipling would later live in. MacKaye studied at Harvard . After graduating in 1897, he spent two years in Europe, visiting Rome , Brunnen SZ in Switzerland, and London and studying at the University of Leipzig . He returned to New York in 1900, where he worked as a teacher in a private school and wrote plays. After 1904 he wrote full-time. In 1908 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters . In 1920 he was Poet in Residence at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He also taught poetics and folklore at Rollins College in Winter Park , Florida , a college where his brother James taught in 1931 , in the 1920s .

Percy MacKaye's circle of friends included the anthroposophist Albert Steffen and the poet Robert Frost as well as Khalil Gibran , Isadora Duncan , Thomas Alva Edison , Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson . He was married to Marion Homer Morse (1872–1939) and had a son (* 1899) and two daughters (* 1902 and * 1909). His daughter Arvia MacKaye Ege (1902–1989) founded the Rudolf Steiner Society in Ghent (New York) and published several volumes of poetry.

Write

As a teenager, MacKaye wrote chorals for a project his father's at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago . As a student at Harvard , he wrote Sapho , a rhyming drama performed by students from Harvard and Wellesley College . His first great success was in 1903 the comedy The Canterbury Tales , an adaptation of Geoffrey Chaucer in poetry, which was made known in 1904 by EH Sothern. Percy MacKaye's great passion was the Middle Ages, which is clearly evident in his choice of topics and his language. He often worked with historical processions and masks in his plays. Another subject was Nordic sagas and the history of the Kentucky people. There is also a four-volume history of Shakespear's Hamlet , published in 1949. Between 1903 and 1927, more than a dozen of his plays were published, as well as eleven masquerades, four operas, four essays and a two-volume biography about his father. His play The Scarecrow , written in 1908 and premiered on Broadway in 1911 with Frank Reichert in the lead role, was filmed three times: in 1923 by Frank Tuttle as Puritan Passions and in 1972 as a television adaptation with Gene Wilder by Boris Sagal and in 2000 as a cartoon by Brian Nissen and Richard Rich. The piece is based on Feathertop , a 17th century short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne published in 1852 .

Works

Plays

  • The Canterbury Tales. A comedy. 1903
  • Jeanne D'Arc. A tragedy. 1906 (Broadway performance at the Lyric Theater from January 21, 1907, produced by Lee and JJ Shubert)
  • Sappho and Phaon. 1907 (Broadway performance at the Lyric Theater from October 21, 1907 to October 1907, 7 performances, music by AA Stanley, produced by Harrison Gray Fiske)
  • The Scarecrow. A Tragedy of the Ludicrous. 1908 (Broadway performance at the Garrick Theater from January 17, 1911 to February 1911, 23 performances, produced by Henry B. Harris)
  • A Garland to Sylvia. A Dramatic Reverie.
  • Kinfolk of Robin Hood.
  • Mater. An American Study in Comedy. 1908 (first performance at the Van Ness Theater in San Francisco on August 3, 1908; Broadway performance at the Savoy Theater from September 25, 1908 to October 1908, 27 performances, director: Frank Brownlee , produced by Henry Miller, music: George Chadwick )
  • Anti-Matrimony. A satirical comedy. 1910 (Broadway performance at Garrick Theater from September 22, 1910 to October 1910, 20 performances)
  • Tomorrow. A play in three acts. 1912
  • Yankee Fantasies. Five One-Act Folk Plays. 1912
  • A Thousand Years Ago. A Romance of the Orient. 1914 (Broadway performance at the Shubert Theater from January 6, 1914 to March 1914, 87 performances, produced by Lee and JJ Shubert)
  • The Antic. 1915 (Broadway performance at the Brandbox Theater from October 4, 1915 to May 20, 1916, produced by the Washington Square Players)
  • Washington, the Man Who Made Us. A ballad play. 1919 (Broadway performance as George Washington at the Lyric Theater from March 1, 1920 to March 1920, 16 performances, produced by Walter Hampden)
  • Gettysburg. A play in one act. 1921
  • This Fine Pretty World. A Kentucky Mountain Comedy. 1923 (Broadway performance at the Neighborhood Playhouse from December 26, 1923 to January 1924, 33 performances, produced by The Neighborhood Playhouse)
  • Napoleon Crossing the Rockies. A Kentucky Mountain Play. 1924
Poster for the performance of Caliban at Harvard Stadium in 1917

Mask games

  • Gloucester Pageant. 1903
  • Saint Gaudens Masque Prologue. 1909
  • Caliban. A Masque on the Art of Theater. 1916 (Broadway performance as Caliban of the Yellow Sands from May 24, 1916 to June 1916 at the Lewisohn Stadium of the City College of New York , 10 performances, directors: Joseph Urban and Richard Ornisky, 10,000 visitors each)
  • Saint Louis. A Masque of the American Civilization.
  • Sanctuary. A bird masque. 1913 (written for a bird sanctuary in Meriden , New Hampshire, premiered September 12, 1913 in the presence of President Woodrow Wilson. With the presidential daughters Eleanor and Margaret as actresses)
  • The New Citizenship. A civic ritual. 1915
  • The Evergreen Tree. A Christmas Masque. 1917
  • The Roll Call. A Masque of the Red Cross. 1918
  • The Will of Song. A Ritual of Community Singing. 1919
  • The Pilgrim and the Book. A dramatic service.

Operas

  • The immigrants. A tragedy. 1915
  • The Canterbury Pilgrims. A comedy. 1916 (music by Reginald De Koven )
  • Sinbad the Sailor. A fantasy. 1917
  • Rip Van Winkle. A legend. 1919

Essays

  • The Playhouse and the Play. New York 1909
  • The Civic Theater. 1912
  • A substitute for war. Macmillan, New York 1915
  • Community drama. In terms of interpretation. 1917

Web links

Commons : Percy MacKaye  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Percy Mackaye, Portrait of Wayne S. Turney ( Memento from September 26, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) on wayneturney.20m.com (English)
  2. ↑ Percy MacKaye in an article from February 4, 1924 on time.com (English)
  3. ↑ Biography in estate listing of the Dartmouth College Library (English)
  4. ↑ Members: Percy MacKaye. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 11, 2019 .
  5. ↑ Rollins College on nndb.com (English)
  6. ↑ Biographical entry in the online documentation of the anthroposophical research center Kulturimpuls
  7. ↑ Percy MacKaye ( Memento of November 10, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) at Adonis Press (English)
  8. ↑ Arvia MacKaye Ege at Adonis Press (English)
  9. ↑ Complete text from The Scarecrow ( Memento from February 5, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) on wayneturney.20m.com (English)
  10. ↑ Complete text from Gettysburg on one-act-plays.com (English)
  11. ↑ Description of an autochromic photograph by MacKayes, taken by Arnold Genthe (English)
personal data
SURNAME MacKaye, Percy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES MacKaye, Percy Wallace Loring (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American playwright and poet
DATE OF BIRTH March 16, 1875
PLACE OF BIRTH Manhattan
DATE OF DEATH August 31, 1956
Place of death Cornish, New Hampshire , Sullivan County, New Hampshire