IN BALTIMORE.—­The fashionable dramatic club of Baltimore, known as the Wednesday Club, expects to develop a theater for regular amateur performances.  This playhouse will be modeled on Boston’s ‘Toy Theater.’

AGAINST THE SPECULATOR.—­The Chicago city council has offered to reduce the theater licenses in amounts from one thousand to five thousand dollars if the theater managers will refuse to take back from agencies unsold tickets.  Nine managers are said to have agreed to do so.  This will aid the public to get good seats without paying advanced prices.  Any gleam of civic interest in the real welfare of the theaters is most welcome.

The editor of the Playfarer will be glad to receive information about any American dramatic venture, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant.

* * * * *

    THE PLAYHOUSE
  BY CHARLOTTE PORTER

Civic Experiments in Massachusetts

When we say ‘Civic Theater’ we are all so used to thinking in terms of money that we think of nothing but a theater financially supported by a city or community.  Yet there are other ways of support that are more vital.

A civic theater cannot be created by money, although it requires it.  Intelligence demands, therefore, when we say ‘Civic Theater,’ that we think at once and foremost of these other more vital ways of support.

Fortunately we can appeal to historic life for light on these other and more vital ways of support by city or community.  Historic life can show us well-ascertained facts concerning drama that has been supported by the civic life of its whole people, and expresses, in consequence, the life of its men of genius, and of its interpretative artists and artisans, along with its racial genius.

Because historic life at its great moments of dramatic activity can show us these facts and supplement the bias of the present moment toward but one way of support, I shall appeal to it to make our definition complete and sound.

Yet because we all, first of all, are the children of our current notions, and only in a deeper sense, when we think below the bias of the moment, the children of all life’s experience, I shall call attention first to two or three facts of civic life here in Massachusetts which illustrate merely the financial support of a theater by a city or community.

It seems to me significant that already one of our own states, and that state Massachusetts, offers an example or two of this least vital but most obvious necessity of financial ownership or support of a city’s main theater.

Northampton is the town in Massachusetts which took the lead in this respect.  It was first to secure ownership of a theater.

A native citizen of Northampton, Mr. G.L.  Hinckley, who knows the town well, at my request has written the following report of it: 

’The Academy of Music of Northampton was presented to the city of Northampton by Mr. Edward H.R.  Lyman, of Brooklyn, N.Y.  In making this gift it was his desire to benefit his native town by providing it with a safe, handsome, and well-equipped theater of a suitable size.