In Which I Learn Of My Relation to One of the Most Influential Men in the 20th Century Theatre: George Pierce Baker

Well, I was feeling down yesterday but now I am up again in rather a major way (and not just because of a certain historical event happening today in a criminal court in Manhattan). I’d scheduled myself to do a post on a major figure in early 20th century theatre, and in so doing learned of several close connections, including the fact that I’m related to him!

George Pierce Baker (1866-1935) was one of the founders of the Yale School of Drama, but for most of his career, he was associated with Harvard, which he attended, and where he taught for nearly 40 years. He was instrumental in founding the Harvard Theatre Collection (an invaluable resource for folks like me), but he is especially well known for the number of major playwrights he taught, including Eugene O’Neill, Sidney Howard,Thomas Wolfe (who tried his hand at playwriting prior to writing novels like Of Time and the River, in which a fictionalized version of Baker is a character), George Abbott, Philip Barry,S.N. Behrman,Hallie Flanagan,Maurine Dallas Watkins (Chicago), and Florence Ryerson (best remembered nowadays as co-writer of the screenplay to The Wizard of Oz.) Another of his pupils was the critic John Mason Brown, who idolized him. In 1919 Baker published the book Dramatic Technique, which brought his wisdom to an even wider audience than the handful lucky enough to attend his legendary “47 workshops”.

Baker taught the principles of the “well-made play”, as inherited from the likes of Scribe and Sardou (he also taught for a year at the Sorbonne). O’Neill was a particularly devoted adherent, always following Baker’s method of writing an outline first, and then filling out the play to the shape of the blueprint. This modus operandi necessarily privileged plot over character. Nowadays, commercial theatre and Hollywood still pretty much do things Baker’s way. Serious dramatic theatre veered away from his methods soon after his death due to the influence of the Group Theatre, which put more emphasis on motivation and character. And then later came the post-war experimental theatre, which veered even farther away from any one “formula” in playmaking (including doing away with text entirely).

Still, Baker was revered in his day, and still is in some quarters. Imagine my joy when I skimmed John Mason Brown’s George Pierce Baker and the American Theatre(1954) this a.m. and learned that, not only did Baker grow up in Providence, but his theatre-loving mother was named Lucy Cady. My grandmother was also a Cady; our mutual ancestor was the immigrant Nicholas Cady (1627-1712). There’s a street named after Cady in Providence, not far from where Poe’s girlfriend Sarah Helen Whitman used to live. I took this snap there:

Other surnames in Baker’s mom’s family tree that are also in mine include Waterman and Slocum, which are also names you will find memorialized in Providence and other parts of Rhode Island as place-names.

Baker’s father was a medical doctor who had studied under the elder Oliver Wendell Holmes (also a relative) and who was fond of literature. From his father, Baker developed a love of Longfellow and Emerson and wished to emulate them. He grew up on the theatre of Edwin Booth and Boucicault, and later admired Arthur Wing Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones. I was doubly delighted to learn that at the age of ten, Baker attended, and was enthralled by, the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the same world’s fair that inspired visual aspects of my American Vaudeville Theatre, as I wrote here.

At any rate, George Piece Baker now joins illustrator Harrison Cady and feminist hero Elizabeth Cady Stanton as forbears whose angels I hope to keep in close proximity as I go forward. In fact, he clearly exceeds the other two in relevance as regards my case. How I wish I’d known about this when I was a kid. How insufferable I would have been! (Not that I wasn’t already). Has his ghost been guiding my steps? How very cruel of him!