James Morrison Steele MacKaye was born on June 6, 1842, in Buffalo, New York. He was the son of James Morrison McKay (as the name was then spelled) and Emily Steele.
His father was a legal associate of Millard Fillmore and a friend of many of the leading men of the day. The son, in his youth, had as playmates Winslow Homer and William and Henry James.
At sixteen, MacKaye entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, with "unlimited funds at his disposal, " and perhaps thereby failed to learn the use and value of money; at any rate, he had an obvious disregard for it in later life. In Paris, he worked especially with Troyon.
In 1859, MacKaye returned to America. His father now lived in New York, a friend of many artists as well as public men. The Civil War soon broke in on American life, Steele joined the 7th Regiment and made his first stage appearance as Hamlet in a regimental performance in 1862.
At this period, William James declared he was "effervescing within coordinated romantic ideas of every description. " After the war, his incoordination led him into many fields in an attempt to find himself. He was a painter and an art dealer; he invented "photo-sculpture" and launched a company to commercialize it.
In 1869, his father set him adrift financially, so he went to Paris, where he met Delsarte and became his enthusiastic disciple. To spread the Delsartian philosophy of expression, he returned to America to give lectures, one of them at Harvard in 1871, and to try to establish a school.
On January 8, 1872, MacKaye made his début in New York as an actor, in Monaldi, supported by his pupils, and in a theatre rented and reconstructed by himself. The next autumn he studied acting in France and acted Hamlet in Paris in French that year, and in London in English the following spring the first American to play the rôle in England.
A year of acting and play-writing followed, and then he returned to America, opening a "school of expression" at 46 East Tenth Street, lecturing, and trying to get a foothold on the American stage for himself and his plays. His Rose Michel, an adaptation of the French play by Ernest Blum, was produced in 1875, in sets designed by himself. Won at Last was acted at Wallack's, December 10, 1877, with a notable cast and much success.
Finally, he succeeded in having a small theatre on West Twenty-fourth Street, New York, rebuilt in accordance with his ideas, and it opened as the Madison Square Theatre in 1879, one of the earliest of American "intimate" playhouses. During his occupancy, MacKaye invented for it a double, or elevator stage, artificial ventilation, and overhead and indirect lighting of the scene. Here, in 1880, his play Hazel Kirke was presented and ran for more than a year a phenomenal run at the time.
The play was acted everywhere, for two decades, and should have made him a large fortune, had he not been so childlike and improvident in all business matters that he signed contracts which gave most of the profits of both inventions and plays to others. Forced from the control of this theatre, he built the Lyceum Theatre on Fourth Avenue and established there the first dramatic school in America. This school influenced many future players and was an important development in the American theatre.
MacKaye was the author of more than twenty plays, seven of them in collaboration with others, but only Hazel Kirke is remembered. He was the first to light a New York theatre entirely by electricity the Lyceum, in 1884. Many were spectacular in nature and foreshadowed the so-called "crowd movies" of today. There is a Seventh Regiment Memorial statue, which stands in Central Park.
MacKaye was tall, dark, slender, and oddly resembled, in face, Edgar Allan Poe. He was intensely dynamic, worked sometimes for twenty hours at a stretch, was indifferent to food and creature comforts (including money), idealistic to the point sometimes of fanaticism (so it seemed to those working with him), and a bit lacking in the humor which makes for corrective self-criticism.
On June 30, 1862, MacKaye was married to Jennie Spring but was later divorced. On June 6, 1865, he was married to Mary Keith Medbery, of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a descendant of Roger Williams. One of their sons, Percy MacKaye, later became well known as a dramatist.
October 6, 1805 - April 6, 1888
1806 - 28 June 1849
July 11, 1845 - May 14, 1924
1880 - 1944
1878 - 1959
March 10, 1866 - 1928
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1863 - 1939
1869 - 1889
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1875–1956 Was an American dramatist and poet.
