Jacques Copeau - in New York

In New York

Several laudatory articles in the New York press preceded his arrival. In the New York Times for example, an article by Henri-Pierre Roche carried the title: "Arch-Rebel of the French Theatre Coming Here." Copeau's presence in New York City attracted the attention of many, but none more influential in regard to his goals than Otto H. Kahn, the philanthropist and patron of the arts. Kahn invited Copeau to dinner at his mansion on East 68th Street and then from the table to the theatre to see George Bernard Shaw's Getting Married. The next day Copeau accompanied Mrs. Kahn to the Metropolitan Museum. Sufficiently impressed by what he learned from Copeau and from others, on February 19 Kahn offered to Copeau the directorship of what was known as the Théâtre Français, the French-language theatre that had been languishing under the directorship of Etienne Bonheur. He offered to Copeau the Bijou Theatre, a new house that opened in April 1917. Copeau chose rather an older theatre, the Garrick Theatre on West 35th Street which housed the Théâtre Français, because he felt that with the proper renovations, among other considerations, it would better suit the unit set he had conceived with Jouvet. For the renovations, he hired a young Czech architect, Antonin Raymond, whose modernist concepts coincided well with his ideas of stagecraft. From March through April he delivered some dozen lectures on topics such as Dramatic Art and the theatre Industry, The Renewal of Stagecraft, and The Spirit in the Little Theatres. When the inauguration of the Théâtre Français de New York took place at the Metropolitan Opera on May 17, 1917, Copeau had negotiated a generous contract with Otto Kahn and the board of directors and was ready to return to Paris with a letter of credit for eighteen thousand dollars to cover the costs of preparation for the season in New York City.

The summer in Paris proved to be a busy one: the repertoire for the coming season needed to be chosen; costumes, assembled; and his troupe, reconstituted. The latter proved a daunting task. Jouvet was finally given leave from his duties at the Front, but the authorities refused to release Dullin. Jouvet constructed a model set, given the dimensions of the stage area at the Garrick while in New York the young Antonin Raymond battled with the Shubert brothers and their architect over the renovations to the theatre. With the intervention of Kahn, who footed the bill, and Mrs. Philip Lydig, who was overlooking many of the decorative details of the hall itself, the old Garrick finally started to take shape. Jouvet, who knew that the design of the stage was essential to the success of the repertory that Copeau projected, left France in early October to oversee the final preparations of the stage.

When the troupe arrived in New York on November 11, 1917, all was not ready for the season. Renovations on the stage remained unfinished, the subscriptions for the season were not quite as substantial as initially reported, and housing for the actors was not available as projected and they were put up in hotels. Nevertheless, on November 26, 1917, the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier de New York opened its season on the stage of the renovated Garrick Theatre with an Impromptu du Vieux-Colombier, a piece written especially for the occasion by Copeau, and Molière's Les Fourberies de Scapin ("Scapin's Pranks"). In the center of the stage stood the bare platform Copeau had asked for in his Appel, which allowed the actors to wander about the stage until they were needed in a particular scene. The freedom of movement did not go unnoticed by the critics, as John Corbin of the New York Times remarked: "it renders possible many combinations and groupings, all sorts of telling encounters."

During the first season, Vieux-Colombier in New York staged twenty-one different plays. Among them were ten plays from the first season in Paris but with a different casts since not all the original members of the troupe came to New York: Molière's La Jalousie du Barbouillé, L'Avare and L'Amour médecin, Musset's Barberine, the Copeau/Croué adaptation of Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and Nuit des rois, the adaptation of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night shared the stage with Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement ("The Carriage of the Holy Sacrament") of Prosper Mérimée, La Surprise de l'Amour ("Love's Surprise") of Musset, and Poil de Carotte ("Carrot Head") of Jules Renard. As during the first season, a mixture of both classic and modern plays, some by living authors, served as the basis of the repertoire. At the close of the New York season, Copeau took his troupe to Washington, D.C. and to the Little Theatre in Philadelphia where they presented ten different plays. In early May, they performed L'Avare at Vassar College to close their season.

Certain offerings of the Vieux-Colombier received critical and popular acclaim. To no one's surprise The Brothers Karamazov, with Dullin, who finally arrived in New York in March 1918, in the role of Smerdiakov and later in his well-received role as Harpagon, the miser, counted among the successes. Nuit des rois also burnished the company's reputation. But some plays such as Octave Mirbeau's Les Mauvais Bergers ("The Evil Shepherds") ended with an almost empty house as the audience stalked to the exits during the play before the final curtain.

On May 20 the entire troupe wended its way to the palatial estate of Otto Kahn in Morristown, New Jersey where they were to prepare the 1918/1919 season of twenty-nine plays of which twenty-six would be new plays! Copeau, the taskmaster, established a rigorous regimen of rehearsals and exercises starting early in the morning and ending late in the day before dinner. The fatigue from the exertions of the first season, the hot summer, the rationed food, now that the United States was part of the war effort, took their toll on the spirits of these French actors and actresses. Complaints about Copeau abounded and rifts among them were rife. Not least among them were the disagreements between Copeau, Jouvet and Dullin. A bout of typhoid fever among the Copeau and Jouvet children and fear of the Spanish influenza added to the consternation.

The second season opened with a piece by Henri Bernstein, Le Secret, which had already played on Broadway. But Copeau was made aware that he needed to bow somewhat to popular taste if the Vieux-Colombier was to succeed financially. The second offering of the season—Pierre Beaumarchais's Le Mariage de Figaro—proved to be both a critical and popular success and maintained Copeau's standards. Among the other successes was Henrik Ibsen's Rosmersholm in a translation by Agnès Thomsen Copeau with Dullin as Rosmer and Copeau in the role of Kroll.

Copeau considered the aesthetic highlight of the season Maurice Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande, principally because of the way the unit set with subtle lighting and the judicious use of banners on its several levels allowed an uninterrupted flow of action in this major work of the Symbolist movement. However, the dispute between Copeau and several members of the company led to their dismissal by the end of January, most important amongst them one of the premier actors, Dullin. The season ended with an Impromptu, during which all the members of the troupe who remained played short scenes representing their major portrayals. At the end of the presentation, all the costumes were placed in the wicker baskets marked with the two doves representing the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier.

Before Copeau returned to Europe, he must have been buoyed by the positive reaction of the critics, some of whom did not always look kindly upon the Vieux-Colombier's offerings. The critic of The Nation who had consistently praised Copeau's efforts wrote: "The Vieux-Colombier has not only afforded New York a continually varied feast of inspiration and refreshment but it has set for us a new and practicable standard by which American dramatic art may be tested" Against all odds, a French-language theatre had presented a repertoire of plays of considerable taste during a two-season stint in a city enthralled with Broadway.