Ben Iden Payne - Carnegie Tech

Carnegie Tech

While in Chicago, Kenneth Sawyer Goodman, the namesake of the Goodman Theatre, introduced Payne to Thomas Woods Stevens and Dr. Arthur Hamerschlag. Dr. Hamerschglag was the first President of Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University, and Stevens was the first chairman of the Department of Drama there, the first professional drama department in a university. Payne directed You Never Can Tell, by George Bernard Shaw during the department's first year of operation. Payne was associated with School of Drama at Carnegie Tech from 1914, and two years later he first directed the annual Shakespeare play, to 1950, excepting the Stratford years of 1935–43. While at Carnegie Tech he tried out Poel's concept of Shakespeare productions performed on English Renaissance theatre stages, without elaborate scenery, by staging an annual Elizabethan production there. At Carnegie they had first used elaborate scenery for Shakespeare plays, but Payne discovered that the more they simplified the scenery the better it was for the production and the more immediate was the appeal to the audience.

In 1925 Stevens departed Carnegie to manage the newly created Goodman Theatre in Chicago, and Payne succeeded him as Chairman of the Drama Department. His first year as chair, he directed a production of Shakespeare's Hamlet fully using the staging technique he came to described as 'modified Elizabethan staging'. He left the Chair of the Drama Department in 1928, but Payne returned every year through 1951 (except for the years at Stratford), directing 58 plays at Carnegie between 1914 and 1951, 26 of them by Shakespeare.