We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
Hitch Your ZJkeatre to a Star
EDITH J. R. ISAACS, Editor of "Theatre Arts," writes a thoughtful article on "How To Give a City a New Soul."
ONE day in early summer, just as our armies started slugging their brave way up from Rome, three articles, obviously unrelated and with no apparent relation to the theatre, appeared in a single issue of The T^ew Tor\ Times. Obviously unrelated, yes; but fitted together they were transformed by some strange alchemy into a hopeful pattern for community living in America after the war. They seemed clearly to point a way to break through that overpowering sameness which has dulled our naturally lively American eyes and ears; to give back to our cities and towns the souls too many of them have lost. And when you talk of giving a city a new soul, of course you think of the theatre as an active means to that desirable end.
A bright editorial noted the young suburban lieutenant who was the first American soldier to look down on the Tiber, and the Brooklyn youngster who drove the first tank across the Via Casilina: "To say that the New World has met the Old World is not so thrilling as to say that a boy from 3081 Third Avenue has just driven past the sacred grove where old King Numa Pompilius used to meet the nymph Egeria for lessons in political science;" and so on to other names that stirred the memory of myth and mystery.
The second article took its theme nearer our own day. A survey conducted by the War Department was authority for the statement that a large percentage of veterans being discharged from the Army not only did not want their old jobs back, they did not even want to return to their old communities.
The third article reported an address before the National Wartime Conference. The speaker was a man who has watched the sun and the stars so long that the earth's time and space cannot frighten him. It was a gay speech and forward-looking. It was, however, introduced by this solemn paragraph: "Prof. Harlow Shapley, director of the Harvard College Observatory, called upon scientists, artists, professional and white-collar workers 'not to leave to practical politicians or to uniformityproducing . . . broadcasters, the shaping of the future'." With a preface like that, one might easily have missed what followed, unless by a lucky chance his eye fell upon this:
"The major hope, in this brief confession of optimism, is that the local American community will grow in cultural self-sufficiency. We are quite willing to give over to international organization the responsibility of the larger political and economic management, if such delegation means peace, efficiency, and progress. But