The Theatre: Texas Players

They Won the Little Theatre Contest

Players from Dallas journeyed to Manhattan, competed in the second annual Little Theatre (amateur) tournament, and were awarded the Belasco Cup—proof enough that the great open spaces still produce stirring drama, on stage as well as screen.

They traveled a greater distance than any of their competitors, yet that did not deter them from taking the drama with the same enthusiasm with which their forebears tackled wild steers. In fact, they were the only Little Theatre group (of 17) that came from outside the so-called Metropolitan district.

The representatives of the Lone Star State’s yearning for the finer things in the Theatre spent $1,200 in order to win a cash prize of $100 each. Yet each of the four players in this group felt that the glory more than balanced their bank account. They were a burning manifestation of local pride. Their group was established three years ago because the famine of first-rate touring attractions in Dallas spurred that town on to show that they could afford to ignore Broadway.

Their vehicle which won the laurel of the amateur Thespians’ Olympic was Judge Lynch, by one William R. Rogers, Jr., said to be “the Euripides of Texas.” It was an indictment of the hasty judgments on which lynchings are founded in the South, and although it represented a Yankee peddler as a thief, it stirred a Northern audience so deeply that the tournament management had to keep the curtain down to make them go home. The cast consisted of Julia Hogan, Louise Bond, Joe Peel and Louis Quince (who appropriately played a sour countryman).

Prizes of $100 each were also distributed to the Alliance Players of Jersey City, with Caleb Stone’s Death Watch, an ironic comedy of the death chamber by Martin Flavin, and to the Gardens Players of Forest Hills, with Crabbed Youth and Age, by Lennox Robinson.

With few exceptions these fledglings won high praise for their acting, staging and lighting, showing that the Torchbearers can often do more than clatter the teacups over the drama. A feature of the tournament was the first appearance of the Lighthouse Players of the New York Association for the Blind, sightless actresses who moved with confidence, intelligence, and only occasional awkwardness through My Lady Dreams, one of the two plays attacking birth control in the tournament.