Background

Percy MacKaye was born on March 16, 1875, in New York City. He was the son of James Morrison Steele MacKaye and Mary Keith Medbery.

His father, better-known as Steele MacKaye, was an actor, director, and playwright.

Education

MacKaye received much of his education at home, although for short periods, he attended public schools in New York and Washington, D. C. , and Lawrence Academy in Groton, Massachusets.

Career

Brought up in a hectic but cultivated theatrical and literary environment where dreams of new theaters vied with schemes for raising money, he tried his hand at plays and poems as a very young man. He composed choral songs for his father's spectacle-drama about Columbus, The World Finder, designed to be played at Steele MacKaye's original but ill-fated colossal Spectatorium at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. At his graduation from Harvard (B. A. , 1897), he delivered the first student commencement address on the theme of modern drama; "The Need for Imagination in the Drama of Today. "

In New York City, MacKaye taught from 1900 to 1904 at the Craigie School for Boys. When E. H. Sothern commissioned him to write The Canterbury Pilgrims, he was freed from teaching and took his family to live in Cornish, New Hampshire, where he made his home for the rest of his life. Although Sothern did not produce Pilgrims, he did give MacKaye his first professional production when he and Julia Marlowe appeared in MacKaye's Jeanne d' Arc in 1906. It was followed by some twenty-five produced plays and more than a hundred books of poetry, essays, and biography.

MacKaye championed a democratic, poetic drama for America that would be a "fresh imagining and an original utterance of modern motives which are as yet unimagined and unexpressed. " His Sappho and Phaon, a Tragedy was produced by Harrison Grey Fiske with Bertha Kalich (1907); Mater, an American Study in Comedy was produced by Henry Miller (1908); and The Scarecrow, his most accomplished and best-known drama, was produced first by the Harvard Dramatic Club (1909) and then in New York with Frank Reicher (1911). Anti-Matrimony, a Satirical Comedy, starred Henrietta Crossman (1910); and a group of one-acts plays collectively called Yankee Fantasies (1912) was staged by groups like the newly organized Washington Square Players.

Beginning in 1905 with the masque honoring the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, in which more than seventy members of the Cornish, New Hampshire, summer colony participated along with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, MacKaye spent much of his energies on this new form. He wanted to evolve a participatory drama that would be a civic rite, a theater that would serve as an "unsectarian temple. "

The Canterbury Pilgrims, produced in a natural amphitheater overlooking the harbor in Gloucester, Massachusetts, with music by Walter Damrosch, was staged in 1909 by 1, 500 citizens of the town before President William Howard Taft and some 25, 000 other spectators.

MacKaye produced or projected a bird masque, a masque of labor, a civic ritual for new citizens, a masque for the Red Cross, and one for the American Bible Society. In 1914, Saint Louis, a Civic Masque, celebrated the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of the city. It required a cast of almost 8, 000 and played to an audience of nearly a million in five nights.

MacKaye was commissioned by New York City to create a masque for the tercentenary of Shakespeare's death (1916). Caliban by the Yellow Sands, a Community Masque of the Art of the Theatre dramatized the transformation of Caliban, "the passionate child-curious part of us all, " through the power of reason, love, and art especially that of poetic theater.

On opening night at Lewisohn Stadium, Isadora Duncan danced and John Drew led a cast of 2, 500 in a production that had sets and costumes by Joseph Urban and Robert Edmond Jones. When it was repeated the following year in the Harvard Stadium, more than 5, 000 people participated.

Although most of these masques do not seem important works of art, the articles and addresses that MacKaye wrote advocating his vision of the role of drama in American life can still stir readers who turn to The Playhouse and the Play (1909), The Civic Theatre (1912), and Community Drama (1917).

In 1920, MacKaye became a professor of creative literature at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He toured the remote regions of the Kentucky mountains during the succeeding years and wrote poems, tales, and plays that told of the people of Appalachia in their rich, archaic language. In 1927, he published Epoch, a biography of his father. This "grandiose portrait of an indomitable genius" was a rich sourcebook on the theater of the late nineteenth century.

In 1932, his "folk masque" Wakefield, performed in celebration of the two-hundredth birthday of George Washington, was the first play commissioned, published, and produced by the federal government. MacKaye's poetic tetralogy, The Mystery of Hamlet, one of his major works, was performed at the Pasadena Playhouse in 1949. It revealed again his devotion to Shakespeare by chronicling the tragic events preceding the action of Hamlet. Greeted as a work of "soaring imagination" written in "astonishingly vivid verse" in the "grand manner of the classics, " it was also recognized as being outside the limits of popular theater in America.

In 1951, and 1952, MacKaye published two tales of his childhood memories, Poog's Pasture and Poog and the Caboose-Man. Filling a "noctary" he kept by his bed with verses, he continued writing almost until his death in Cornish, New Hampshire, United States.

Achievements

• MacKaye was a kind of American poet laureate. He wrote many commemorative poems for public occasions and public figures, including Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, and Thomas Edison; he also developed the masque as a unique "drama of democracy, " a form of "poetry of the masses. "

Works

More photos

• book

  • To-Morrow: A Play in Three Acts,

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

  • A Thousand Years Ago: A Romance of the Orient,
  • The Will of Song: A Dramatic Service of Community Singing, Devised in Coöperation With Harry Barnhart,
  • The Sistine Eve: And Other Poems,
  • The Canterbury pilgrims: a comedy
  • The Present Hour: A Book of Poems,

Connections

On October 8, 1898, MacKaye married Marion Homer Morse, a poet. They had three children.

Father:

James Morrison Steele MacKaye

June 6, 1842 - February 25, 1894 Was an American dramatist, actor, and inventor, better known as Steele MacKaye.

Mother:

Mary Keith Medbery

July 11, 1845 - May 14, 1924

Brother:

Harold Steele MacKaye

March 10, 1866 - 1928

Brother:

Emile Benton MacKaye

6 March 1879 - 11 December 1975

Brother:

William Payson MacKaye

1869 - 1889

Brother:

James Medbury MacKaye

April 8, 1872 - January 22, 1935

Half-blood brother:

Arthur MacKaye

1863 - 1939

Half-blood brother:

Edith Theodora de Bons (MacKaye)

1878 - 1959

Sister:

Hazel MacKaye

1880 - 1944

Wife:

Marion Homer MacKaye (Morse)

February 24, 1872 - June 1, 1939

Daughter:

Arvia MacKaye

1902 - 1989

Daughter:

Christina MacKaye

10 January 1909 - 18 December 2002

Son:

Robert Keith MacKaye

October 8, 1899 - June 9, 1992