James Morrison Steele Mackaye

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Mackaye, [James Morrison] Steele (1842–94), playwright. One of the most important innovators in late 19th‐century American theatre, he was born in Buffalo, where his father was a respected lawyer and art connoisseur. He studied art in Paris before returning home to fight in the Civil War, rising to the rank of Major before illness forced him to resign. Once again in Paris, he became the disciple of François Delsarte, who was advocating a naturalistic style of theatre, and MacKaye promoted the Delsartean school in lectures back in America. In 1872 his first play, Monaldi, co‐written with Francis Durivage, won some critical approval but failed commercially; on the other hand, his comedy‐drama, Won at Last (1877), was well received. Afterward MacKaye took over the old Fifth Avenue Theatre and remodeled it with the most modern, elaborate equipment ever seen in an American playhouse, including overhead and indirect lighting and a double moving stage that allowed rapid scene changes. He reopened the house as the Madison Square Theatre with his play Hazel Kirke (1880), which established a long‐run record for a nonmusical play. In both writing and performance, the play was an attempt to move toward the newer principals he was espousing. But MacKaye's mismanagement cost him his theatre, so in 1885 he opened another technically inventive theatre, the Lyceum. Here he established a school of acting that eventually became the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. In time he lost this theatre too, but continued to write plays, most importantly the French Revolution drama, Paul Kauvar; or, Anarchy (1887). In all, nineteen of his plays were produced in New York (and nearly all enjoyed some commercial success), including Rose Michel (1875), Won at Last (1877), and The Drama of Civilization (1887). Shortly before his death, MacKaye planned a huge, technically progressive auditorium for the Chicago Columbian Exposition, but it was never built. Otis Skinner remembered him as “tall, spare, emotional and eloquent, looking like a more stalwart Edgar Allan Poe, holding forth to a knot of listeners on some theory destined never to be realized, some dream never to become articulate. He was always magnetic and compelling.” Biography: Epoch, Percy MacKaye (his son), 1927.