Macgowan, Kenneth

Macgowan, Kenneth (1888–1963), producer and critic. Born in Winthrop, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard, he was assistant drama critic for the Boston Evening Transcript and critic for the Philadelphia Evening Ledger before serving in a similar position on the New York Globe from 1919 to 1923. At the same time he was drama critic for both Vogue and Theatre Arts. With Robert Edmond Jones and Eugene O'Neill, he took over the Provincetown Playhouse in New York in 1924 and later that same year also joined the Greenwich Village Theatre. At both houses he helped produce a number of interesting revivals, notably one of Fashion as well as several of O'Neill's plays, such as All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924), Desire Under the Elms (1924), The Fountain (1925), and The Great God Brown (1926). Although O'Neill had begun to move away from traditional realism in The Emperor Jones (1920) before he met MacGowan, it was his meeting and ensuing friendship with MacGowan that confirmed and strengthened this drift, which was aimed at creating a theatre that would be at once both professional and idealistic and which, as MacGowan wrote, would “attempt to transfer to dramatic art the illumination of those deep and vigorous and eternal processes of the human soul.” Ironically, when MacGowan later moved to Broadway and mounted more commercial ventures, he was less successful. He was also the author of several books on the theatre, including The Theatre of Tomorrow (1921), Continental Stagecraft (1922) written with Jones, Masks and Demons (1923), and Footlights Across America (1929). In later years he was an associate producer for RKO Pictures.