JAMES STEELE MACKAYE (1842-94)
Actor, playwright, director, designer, inventor, teacher, innovator.

As a lad, Steele Mackaye was interested in the arts. He entertained his fellows during the Civil War with amateur performances of Shakespeare including Hamlet. After the war, he went to Paris where he studied art and acting with Francois Delsartre, and the more traditional Francois-Joseph-Pierre Regnier.

Delsartre insisted that actors could convey emotions best by imitating specific gestures and body movements which had been scientifically observed in everyday life. The physicalization of these bodily movements was to precede the emotion and even replace it. The Delsartre System enjoyed quite a vogue through the latter part of the 19th Century. Steele Mackaye brought it to this country lecturing on it as early as 1871. In 1884, using its principles, he founded at the Lyceum the first American acting school which became the American Academy of Dramatic Art. The institution survives to this day, though today its theoretical underpinnings are very different that its founder's.

His career as a professional actor included his 1872 debut in his own forgettable adaptation of a play which he called Monaldi. Later in the same year, he toured Europe as Hamlet in both an English and a French version which were universally acclaimed.

As a playwright, he wrote or adapted nineteen plays, including three hits: Won at Last (1877), Hazel Kirke (1880), and Paul Kauvar (1887). Hazel Kirke was hailed as the epitome of the new realism, though it was the staging and the technical aspects of the production that were truly "real." The play itself is a romantic melodrama which is set in a mill and which dealt with middle class characters. Opened at the Madison Square Theatre, it became an astonishing success running 486 performances, a record against which future productions were measured for the next fifty years and spawning fourteen different road companies, one of which launched the career of Daniel Frohman as manager. The concept of simultaneous road companies was one of Mackaye's innovations.

Mackaye's greatest lasting contributions to the modern theatre are as designer/inventor. His first major technical triumph was with the Madison Square Theatre, which he rebuilt from the old Fifth Avenue Theatre. It included the famous elevator stage which measured 31' X 22' X 114'. It included two stages and an elaborate counterweight system. The orchestra was in a box above the stage. He eliminated footlights and used only overhead lighting. The Madison Square Theatre was the first to utilize what is perhaps Mackaye's most lasting invention, the folding theatre seat. The public's fascination with 55 second scene changes of totally realistic three dimensional scenery was sufficient to make the theatre a success. Ultimately, a disastrous deal made with the theatre's owners, the Mallory Brothers, caused Mackaye to lose the theater.

Later inventions were a "gyratory stage" used by "Buffalo Bill" Cody to simulate a realistic cyclone in one of his shows; an "honest" mechanical doorkeeper, an automatic prompter, and major improvements in electric stage lighting. He even held a patent on a stage that could move in any direction: up, down, sideways and diagonally, though it was never built.

He bought the Lyceum Theater in 1884 and the following year, with the aid of Thomas Edison himself, made it the first totally electric lighted theater.

In 1891, he began designs for his grandest scheme: The Spectatorium, a twenty-five stage theatre designed to mount Mackaye's play about Christopher Columbus for the Chicago Exposition of 1893. (His son Percy Mackaye contributed choral songs to the script.) With seating for 8,000, an eight foot deep concrete tank under the entire stage complete with wave machine and wind machines, railroad ties to aid in the shifting of three dimensional scenery behind a "light curtain.," the project was begun when the financial panic halted fund raising. In 1894, Mackaye built a smaller version utilizing many of the innovations he had planned, but, his health broken he died just three weeks after its completion.