About Theatre Arts Magazine

Theatre Arts Magazine

Theatre Arts Magazine was an American magazine devoted to the stage, published from November 1916 to January 1964. Founded by the author and critic Sheldon Warren Cheney, it began in Detroit, Michigan, before moving to New York City, and over a run of nearly five decades it became one of the most influential English-language publications about theatre. It appeared at different times under the titles Theatre Arts, Theatre Arts Monthly and Theatre Arts Magazine, and it was published by Theatre Arts, Inc.

The magazine is remembered less as a record of Broadway openings than as an argument about what American theatre could become. Cheney founded it to encourage a renaissance in American theatre, and its pages promoted modernist staging, the Little Theatre movement and the idea that serious theatre could flourish far beyond the commercial stages of New York. Later editors broadened that mission, but the magazine never lost its character as a journal of advocacy as much as of reporting.

Founding in Detroit

Cheney established the magazine as a quarterly in 1916 with support from the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts, which gave him workspace and financial backing. The first issue appeared in November of that year. Cheney, who had written on modern art as well as drama, saw the publication as a platform for new approaches to staging that were then emerging in Europe and in experimental American companies.

The Detroit sponsorship did not last. When the United States entered the First World War, hostility toward German culture became widespread, and censorship of German art was common. Cheney criticised that practice in the magazine's August 1917 issue, and the Society of Arts and Crafts withdrew its support in response. Cheney answered by relocating the magazine to New York City, the centre of the American commercial theatre he hoped to reform.

Cheney's editorial vision

Cheney edited the magazine until 1921, taking on co-editors from its third volume onward. In those first five years, as the scholar DeAnna M. Toten Beard documented in her book on the magazine's early history, Theatre Arts gave voice to scores of little theatres across the country — small groups with artistic ambitions and local roots that later became models for the American regional theatre movement.

Cheney used articles, photographs and drawings to popularise the New Stagecraft, the modernist movement in scenic design that favoured suggestion and atmosphere over literal, realistic scenery. In doing so, the magazine helped raise the status of the American scenic designer from a tradesperson executing instructions to an artist whose work shaped a production's meaning. Beard's study notes the central tensions of the magazine's first years: commercial theatre against non-commercial theatre, realistic scenery against newer approaches, and the search for an authentically American voice in playwriting.

The Isaacs era and Theatre Arts Monthly

When Cheney departed in 1921, Edith J. R. Isaacs took over as lead editor and led the magazine through its most expansive period. In 1924 its name changed to Theatre Arts Monthly and its frequency increased to monthly publication to match. In 1939 the title was shortened again, to Theatre Arts.

Isaacs held a broad view of her subject, treating music and dance as part of theatre rather than separate arts. She continued the magazine's support for the Little Theatre movement and backed the establishment of the American National Theatre and Academy. She also publicised emerging artists early in their careers, among them the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, the designers Robert Edmond Jones, Jo Mielziner and Donald Oenslager, and the playwrights Eugene O'Neill and Thornton Wilder — figures who went on to define twentieth-century American performance.

Rosamond Gilder and the postwar years

In 1945 the magazine was bought by Robert W. Dowling and Henry Steeger. Isaacs retired the following year because of ill health, and Rosamond Gilder succeeded her as editor. Gilder had contributed to the magazine since the 1920s and had joined its staff in 1936, working her way through proofreading, book reviews and drama criticism before reaching the editor's chair.

Gilder later recalled that Isaacs had given scenic designers a platform they never had again, observing that when Theatre Arts eventually died there was no comparable place for a designer to exhibit work. Gilder herself became a major figure in international theatre: in 1947 she was among the founders of the International Theatre Institute, she received a Tony Award in 1948 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1950, and she later served as president of the Institute's American arm from 1963 to 1969.

Financial trouble and the Stage merger

The postwar magazine struggled to pay its way. Across three years Dowling and Steeger lost some $60,000 on it, and by the beginning of 1948 they were ready to close it down. Instead they sold it to another publication, Stage, which merged with it while keeping the Theatre Arts name. The playwright Charles MacArthur, listed among the magazine's editors, took over as editor after the merger.

That arrangement carried the magazine through the 1950s, a period when American theatre itself was changing. The regional theatre movement the magazine had championed in its earliest years was becoming an established part of the theatrical landscape, and the little theatres Cheney had publicised had grown into institutions. The magazine, however, remained financially fragile.

Final years

Byron Bentley took over as both editor and publisher in 1962, the last change of leadership in the magazine's history. The final issue appeared in January 1964, closing a publication run that had begun forty-seven years earlier in Detroit. Its ISSN was 2690-0505.

The magazine's longevity is striking given its repeated financial crises. It survived the loss of its founding sponsor within its first year, a change of city, the departure of its founder, a change of ownership in the 1940s and a merger in 1948. Each rescue preserved a title that editors and readers clearly believed filled a role no other American publication was filling.

Contents and character

Surviving issues show a magazine mixing criticism, essays, production photographs and drawings, book reviews and international reporting. A single late-1930s issue might move from Broadway reviews to theatre in Argentina, Brazil or China, from labour unions in the theatre to Picasso's work for the stage. The magazine treated theatre as a world art form while keeping its focus on building a serious American stage.

Photography and design reproduction were central to its identity. From Cheney's campaign for the New Stagecraft onward, the magazine understood that modern staging had to be seen to be understood, and it invested in images at a time when doing so was expensive. That visual record is a large part of why historians of stage design still consult it.

Legacy

Theatre Arts Magazine's legacy rests on three achievements. First, it documented the Little Theatre movement and connected scattered local companies into something like a national conversation, preparing the ground for the regional theatre system that followed. Second, it elevated stage design into an art with named, celebrated practitioners. Third, under Isaacs it gave early, serious attention to artists such as Graham, O'Neill and Wilder before their reputations were secure.

Scholarly interest has kept the magazine visible. Beard's study of its first five years, published by Scarecrow Press, argues that those early volumes hold the keys to understanding the progressive movement for a modern American theatre. For researchers, complete runs of the magazine remain a primary source for how Americans of the period argued about the purpose of theatre.

A record of its editors

The magazine's history can be read through its editors: founder Sheldon Warren Cheney (to 1921); Edith J. R. Isaacs, whose tenure defined its maturity and who broadened its scope to music and dance; Rosamond Gilder, who carried it into the postwar era; Charles MacArthur, who edited it after the Stage merger; and Byron Bentley, its final editor and publisher from 1962. Few American arts magazines have been so closely identified with the personal visions of the people who edited them — or have left so clear a record of how those visions changed American theatre.