Kenneth Sawyer Goodman, Playwright

Title page for "The Wonder Hat" signed by co-author Ben Hecht.

In 1916, Kenneth Sawyer Goodman and Ben Hecht’s short play “The Wonder Hat” debuted, along with more well-known works of American literature such as Eugene O’Neill’s fourth play, Now I Ask You; Robert Frost’s Mountain Interval, Ezra Pound’s Lustra, and Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems. Not a central work of American literature, or even of Chicago literature of the period, “The Wonder Hat,” and “Back of the Yards” (which Goodman wrote in 1914 without Hecht’s collaboration) claim our attention for a variety of good reasons.

Both plays illustrate the themes and the modus operandi of the Little Theater movement, of which Goodman was a central backer and something of a theorist. “Back of the Yards,” especially, demonstrates the social vision of the Little Theater Movement and its connections to the social reform program of the Settlement Houses. “The Wonder Hat” has a certain stylistic charisma as it works changes on a traditional scheme from the commedia dell’ arte tradition. Both plays register, in engagingly different ways, what it meant to be “modern” in Chicago during the Woodrow Wilson years. Finally, both plays derive from the imagination of the man in honor of whom one of Chicago’s most distinguished theaters was named.

The plot of “The Wonder Hat” follows the commedia dell’ arte convention of star-crossed lovers overcoming obstacles to their union. Magical objects — a hat that confers invisibility and a slipper that makes its wearer irresistible to men — create comic confusions. Hecht and Goodman’s script brings to this traditional framework an atmosphere or tone that their 1916 audiences would have recognized as modern.

Harlequin and Peirrot in the park by moonlight

For example, when Punchinello, the fifth-business figure who will provide the lovers with the magic objects, first comes on stage, he cries “new loves for old,” and offers a menu of those cast-off items he’s willing to take in trade: “rejected poems, unfinished plays, bottles, bookmarks, and worn-out religions.” When Harlequin and Pierrot first make their appearance they are presented as world-weary boulevardiers “swinging light canes with an air of elegant ennui.” Their first exchange establishes the play’s mise en scene in an absurdist roundabout:

Harlequin. [Indicating with a wave of his cane] Dear fellow, this is a circular path. It runs quite around the outer edge of the park. It delights me. I always spend my evenings here. One can walk for hours with the absolute certainty of never getting anywhere.
Pierrot. [Removing his eyeglass] Dear chap, in these days of suburban progress, I had not supposed such a place possible.

Hecht and Goodman’s audiences would have recognized the atmosphere conjured on this stage as one consistent with a dry-eyed, unsentimental skepticism that many of them would have called modern. The drama of “The Wonder Hat” showed that, even for moderns thus construed, love could still triumph.

Father Vincent speaks with Michael in Back of the Yards. Illustration by Emily Murman. 

In contrast, “Back of the Yards” configures its modernity differently. Rather than a world in which ideals have come to a stylized exhaustion and characters enact an elegant ennui; in this world realistically drawn characters come to grief in the impoverished neighborhoods behind the Stockyards and dedicated reformers seek a remedy for familiar social ills. Granted, without Hecht’s collaboration, Goodman’s dialogue is creaky – many of the principals here sound like the stage Irish they are. The uptown Goodman had a largely theoretical understanding of the south side, and his “Back of the Yards” neighborhood has a somewhat abstract quality. But the issue with which his characters grapple—juvenile crime—was very much of the moment, and was as much a part of the dialogue at Jane Addams’s Hull House as it was on Goodman’s stage.

The program Goodman’s Father Vincent offers to reduce juvenile crime is, admittedly, somewhat hazy:

Priest. But it’s not graft or politics I’m thinking of. There’s something else does more to send boys and girls to hell then either of them. It’s the rule-of-thumb way we go at crime for the most part, making a great pother of catching and punishing the old hands at the game and letting slip the little things, slurring them over, hushing them up, passing by all the sprees and gambling and devilment that give the crook his start.

Goodman appears to have believed with Jane Addams that the theater itself could serve as a weapon against juvenile crime. “Back of the Yards” functioned both as a mouthpiece for Progressive reform (however inexactly conceived), and as a diversion to keep young Chicagoans off the streets and out of trouble.

This edition presents “The Wonder Hat,” still Goodman’s best-known play, and “Back of the Yards,” still interesting for its social vision and reform agenda, with original illustrations by Jaime Deare and Emily Murman, respectively. This brief introduction illustrates the plays’ context, genesis and performance history, through brief biographies of Goodman and Hecht, a description of the Little Theater Movement, and a note on the commedia dell’ arte tradition.

Kenneth Sawyer Goodman with Marjorie Sawyer Goodman

Biography of Goodman

Born in 1883 as the only child of a wealthy Chicago lumber family, Kenneth Sawyer Goodman attended The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, where he wrote for The Hill News. [1] Later, at Princeton University, he continued writing and editing the University’s paper, as well as the Nassau Literary Review, and was encouraged by Dean Christian Gauss to pursue his interest in writing for the theater. Goodman graduated from Princeton in 1906 and turned down an offer to teach English at the university, in order to fulfill his obligations as an only child to the family lumber business. [2] In 1912, Goodman married Marjorie Robbins, the daughter of a prominent Chicago attorney. Marjorie served as treasurer of the Chicago Junior League, for which she also organized classes on contemporary political questions (“Cupid in Chicago”). The couple had a daughter, named Marjorie after her mother.

In early 1910, Goodman joined the Cliff Dwellers Club, an elite society of artists and patrons of the arts, founded by novelist Hamlin Garland in 1907. There, Goodman met and collaborated with Thomas Wood Stevens, who would later organize the first collegiate degree-granting Department of Drama in the country at Carnegie Institute of Technology and become the first director of the Goodman Theater. [3] Goodman and Stevens wrote several short plays, including “The Masque of Montezuma,” which they intended for a site- specific performance on the steps of the Art Institute. Goodman and Stevens founded Stage Guild Publications, which published Goodman’s plays, solo works, and collaborations for the rest of the decade.

Cover for Goodman's play "The Masque of Montezuma"

In late 1913, Goodman began collaborating with Ben Hecht, then a twenty-one year old newspaper reporter, who shared the playwright’s interest in the plight of Chicago’s immigrant working class. Hecht, who had a passion for writing about the gory details of Chicago crime, would soon become one of Hollywood’s most prominent screenwriters. Goodman and Hecht wrote eight one-act plays together, including “The Wonder Hat,” “The Hero of Santa Maria,” and “An Idyll of the Shops.” “Idyll” focused on Jewish life in Chicago garment factories; “Hero” featured an unscrupulous family trying to secure the death benefit for a son who had not in fact died during the war. In addition, they wrote several scripts that depict immigrant Jewish parent-child relationships gone awry. As the first-generation Jewish American characters in these plays attend prestigious schools and become assimilated, they lose respect for the parents who worked hard to give them the opportunities they lacked themselves. The typescripts of these unpublished plays are found at the Newberry Library and include “The Poem of David,” “The Egg and the Hen,” and “The Home Coming.” 

In 1916, Hecht connected Goodman to the Players’ Workshop, an amateur theater on Chicago’s South Side, which was primarily interested in new plays written by Chicago playwrights. Theater historian Stuart Hecht writes that Ben Hecht believed Goodman was a key shaper of the Chicago theater community, as he brought “people from different circles together, encouraging collaborative creative effort”. [4] One sees this pattern in the wide range of people with whom Goodman associated, from Hecht, the bohemian journalist, to Thomas Wood Stevens, the patrician academic, as well as his involvement with the elite Cliff Dwellers and the more working-class Players’ Workshop. 

Goodman also volunteered at the Art Institute and became the director of its Department of Prints. [5] As the First World War approached, Goodman became increasingly involved with war efforts and enlisted in the Navy, taking a staff position at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center in Chicago’s northern suburbs.

Goodman's obituary

In the fall of 1918, attending a Navy football game, he contracted influenza and became, according to some sources, a victim of the global pandemic of 1918. [6] The American National Biography, on the other hand, claims that Goodman caught a cold, which developed into fatal pneumonia. [7] Though some uncertainty exists of the exact cause, Goodman died days after turning 35. Playwright, director, actor, and financial supporter of Chicago’s Little Theater movement, Goodman’s legacy lives on in the Goodman Theater endowed by his parents in 1925, in his plays, and in his contribution to the Little Theater Movement. His philosophy is carved above the doorway to the Goodman Theatre: “To restore the old visions and to win the new.”

Ben Hecht circa 1919

Biography of Ben Hecht

Kenneth Sawyer Goodman’s collaborator on “The Wonder Hat,” as well as a handful of additional one-act plays, published and in manuscript, is better known than the playwright himself, especially to Chicagoans. Ben Hecht was born to immigrant Russian Jewish parents in 1894 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His family moved while he was still young to Racine, Wisconsin, where he graduated from Racine High School in 1910. Hecht left for Chicago in that year, where he found work as a picture stealer, selling to Chicago newspapers the photographs of people killed in city accidents – photographs Hecht acquired from the victims’ families by a variety of devious strategies. [8] As a cub reporter, Hecht covered crime for the Chicago Journal and then joined the staff at Chicago Daily News in 1914. 

At the Daily News Hecht initially covered crime, then post-war life in Berlin, and eventually wrote a celebrated column registering impressions of urban life in the developing metropolis. 1001 Afternoons in Chicago contained vignettes about Chicago crime, trial scenes, romances, marriage, as well as impressions of the lake and lakeshore.[9] The column combined the nineteenth- century traditions of the flaneur and the sketch, filtering kaleidoscopic images of the city through a detached 

and ironic sensibility in a prose piece of one or two pages. The Chicago Daily News fired Hecht in 1922 over a censorship scandal about Fantazius Mallare, a work of stylized erotica Hecht wrote in collaboration with Wallace Smith, a Hearst reporter who drew in the style of Beardsley.[10] Hecht’s writing and Smith’s drawings were considered too obscene for a society that was still very much concerned with prohibiting vice from the marketplace. Fired from the Daily News, Hecht turned to writing novels, plays, and screenplays. Around this time, he founded with editor and publisher Pascal Covici the short-lived Chicago Literary Times, an absurdist journal of literature and culture. 

Much of Hecht’s early work, including the plays he wrote with Goodman, coincide with that period of cultural flowering in the city remembered as the Chicago Literary Renaissance. Many cite the founding of Harriet Monroe’s Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in 1912 as the inauguration of the period, and see it ending with the stock market crash of 1929.[11] Chicago Renaissance writers – Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg – often shared Hecht’s background in journalism. More fully than Goodman and Hecht, these other writers explored themes of “the revolt from the village,” the challenges of city life and city labor, and the disintegration of Victorian ideals in the industrialized modern world. Carla Capetti credits the Chicago Renaissance with bringing “the world to Chicago and Chicago to the world”.[12] Hecht and Goldman’s plays were a small and potent part of the Renaissance. 

Hecht had a number of significant collaborations aside from Goodman. With Maxwell Bodenheim, a poet, hobo and satirist, whom he met in the Poetry offices in 1912, he wrote, among other titles, Cutie: A Warm Mama (1924). With Charles McArthur, journalist and Algonquin roundtable regular, Hecht collaborated intermittently for eighteen years, their most famous work being The Front Page, about Chicago reporters covering the Cook County criminal court. The collaboration with Goodman occurred intermittently between 1914 and 1917, with the two writers often working in the elder Goodman’s corporation boardroom. Together, Goodman and Hecht wrote about a dozen plays, which Hecht later described as “sane and practical little one-acts”.[13]  

In 1918, Hecht spent a year in Germany, working as a correspondent for The Daily News. In 1926, he moved to Hollywood to get rich in the growing motion picture industry. One of his best-known screenplays is Scarface (1932), remade in the 1980s and generating many lines that would become part of the American vernacular.

For his 1927 Underworld Hecht won an Oscar for best original story; the gold statue remains with Hecht’s papers at the Newberry Library. In the final decades of his life Hecht traveled regularly between Hollywood and New York City, where he died in 1964. 

Playbill for "The Wonder Hat," Chicago Little Theatre, May 19, 1916.

The Little Theater Movement

The American Little Theater Movement coincided with and became one aspect of the Chicago Literary Renaissance of the early twentieth century. As early as 1901, Jane Addams’s Hull House began producing plays that dealt with the social problems of the South Side’s local immigrant populations. [14] Between 1912 and 1916 sixty-three little theaters opened in the U.S.; by 1926, there were five thousand, and Chicago remained the center of the movement. Some theaters attracted working-class, immigrant audiences, while many others drew audience, cast, and financial support from city elites. For this reason some scholars of American theater history claim the Little Theater movement was “essentially—despite populist roots—an elitist enterprise.”[15]

The Little Theaters generally produced short plays of one or two acts, and had a willingness to experiment with avant-garde staging techniques. The shows were usually produced in small venues that seated fewer than a hundred playgoers; audiences differed in demographics from theater to theater. Proponents of the Little Theater Movement objected to the increasingly standardized and commercial character of theater in the United States. Maurice Browne, a notable promoter of the movement who founded the Chicago Little Theater, believed, with some justification, that a cabal of Broadway producers controlled play selection and production style for theaters all over America. Browne felt they chose “the lowest common denominators in playwriting – obvious themes, cheap sentiment, childish musical comedy, and conventional scenery.”[16] Little Theater proponents also opposed what they considered to be the vulgarity and commercialism of the early motion picture industry. Constance D’Arcy Mackay, a playwright and director best remembered for children’s theatrical pageants in the teens and twenties, asserted that the Little Theater was “the arch-foe of commercialism.”[17]

Inside page of "The Wonder Hat" playbill from May 19, 1916

In addition to opposing commercialism, the Little Theaters also desired to provide a meaningful activity for the middle class to fill the leisure hours created by advances in domestic technology. Little Theater proponents considered commercial productions of the time to be “intellectually thin, or downright frivolous... shoddily produced and sometimes falsely advertised… mindless, bloated, and detrimental to psychic well- being”.[18] In his book The Civic Theater (1912), Percy Mackaye advocated for theater as a means of “constructive leisure” that would enable playgoers to forge relationships, and improve their communities. Little Theater advocates believed theater could improve American society by offering participants “a chance to explore social issues and to resist the numbing lure of predictably scripted spectacle shows.”[19]

Jane Addams founded one of the first Little Theaters in the country in 1901 at Hull House, located at 800 S. Halsted, then a neighborhood of Greek, Italian, and Jewish immigrants. As Constance Mackay put it in a period manifesto for the Little Theaters, the productions staged at Hull House were “interpretive of struggle, of the knowledge of bitter inequalities, of valiant aspirations”.[20] Under the direction of Laura Dainty Pelham, an actor and women’s suffrage leader, the theater at Hull House drew its casts from the surrounding neighborhoods, often with a handful of uptowners included. In 1917, the theater could seat 230 people. Viola Spolin, whose Theater Games would become a classic text in Chicago’s improvisational performance community, taught theater classes at Hull House in the 1930s.

Maurice Browne, a British import, founded the Little Theater of Chicago in 1911, describing it as “a repertory and experimental art theater producing classic and modern plays, both tragedy and comedy, at popular prices”.[21] Browne produced classical plays like The Trojan Women and Medea, as well as contemporary works like Wilde’s The Happy Prince, Yeats’s The Shadowy Waters, and Goodman and Hecht’s “The Wonder Hat.” Browne claimed that the theater intended no less than “the creation of a new plastic and rhythmic drama in America,” and sought to produce highly wrought productions of plays that would not be found in the commercial theaters of the day.[22] Browne’s work faced a number of significant challenges including, according to Mackay, “the early prejudice that labeled a Little Theater, ‘Dangerous! Beware of Highbrowism”.[23] The theater was located on the 4th floor of the Fine Arts building on Michigan Ave, had a seating capacity of ninety-one, and enjoyed a subscriber membership of four-hundred by 1917.

Also in 1911, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Aldis established the Playhouse of Lake Forest, in a house next to their home. With a seating capacity of one-hundred, this was a grand suburban house turned into a theater. There was no subscription, admission to events being by invitation only. The Aldis’s prided themselves on producing new
or challenging material, mostly one-act plays. Since the stage was small, they preferred “static” plays, in which the action was more mental than physical. Produced plays include “Extreme Unction” by Mrs. Aldis, “The Village” by Octave Feuillet, and “Pierrot of the Minute” by Arthur Dowson.[24]

Advertisement of one-act plays by the Wshington Square Players in New York City. 

Established in Manhattan in 1915, the Washington Square Players earned a reputation as “the most interesting group of little theater players” in the U.S.[25] The Players’ specialized in the development of new work, generally one-act dramas by American playwrights. Much of this material — “Eugenically Speaking” by Edward Goodman, “Two Blind Beggars and One Less Blind” by Philip Moeller, and “The Clod” by Lewis Beach— has not stood the test of time.  

The Workshop Theater of Chicago opened in 1916, and by 1917 it had one-hundred active members, one- hundred associated members, and a seating capacity of eighty. According to its policy, this theater debuted new work, often one-acts and pantomimes, written by Chicago authors, acted by Chicago actors, with sets designed by Chicago artists. The Workshop premiered several of Kenneth Sawyer Goodman and Ben Hecht’s collaborations, including “The Wonder Hat,” “An Idyll of the Shops,” and “The Home Coming.” Though the Workshop was the first to showcase these plays, other theaters nationally would remount them in subsequent years. 

The Arts and Crafts Theater of Detroit, founded in November 1916, aimed for “the training of true craftsmen, the developing of individual character in connection with artistic work, and the raising of standards of beauty.”[26] Entirely financed by the Detroit Arts and Crafts Society, it was the only Little Theater in the U.S. that worked in partnership with an art guild. They focused on producing revivals of old plays of literary significance, such as plays by Moliere, Corneille, and Marlowe, among others. It had a seating capacity of two hundred and fifty, and the company was entirely amateur, albeit selective. 

The Players’ Club of the Chicago Hebrew Institute held productions at 1258 West Taylor Street, producing Goodman’s “Back of the Yards” in 1917. The Institute had been organized in 1903 as a settlement house to promote the assimilation into mainstream American society of Eastern-European Jewish immigrants to the west-side neighborhood. To this end, the Institute offered classes in citizenship, English, commerce, and literature. Longtime director Philip L. Seaman described the institute as “frankly Jewish and staunchly American.”[27] In 1922, it changed its name to The Jewish People’s Institute.

Goodman’s ubiquity in the Chicago Little Theater scene – as playwright, financial backer, and promoter of dialogue and connections in the city’s artistic community – illustrates one aspect of the elitist basis on which
the theater’s populist project relied, and the alliance between the theaters and the settlement house suggests another. The language of Goodman’s plays – sometimes folksy, sometimes mannered – might make Goodman’s theater seem old-fashioned to today’s audiences.

The interconnection of elite and populist elements in Goodman’s Little Theater Movement, however, should be familiar to theater-goers, at least in Chicago today, where that interconnection is still very much in force. Whether one attends the “urban interventions” of Redmoon theater, the visceral and immersive productions of the Sanford Meisner disciples at Profiles Theater, or the bio-play of an R&B icon at Jackie Taylor’s Black Ensemble Theater, the play, however populist its project, is sure to have been produced through elite or corporate sponsorship.

The character Pierrot in Goodman's The Wonder Hat, as illustrated by Jaime Dear. 

Commedia dell'Arte

Commedia dell’arte means “professional comedy.” The popularity of this tradition in the theater reached its climax in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most commedia dell’ arte plays mixed oral tradition and written culture, as the actors improvised dialogue based on a textual synopsis of the scenes. Plots were often inspired by the prestigious scripted comedy of the day, known as “commedia erudita.” In a typical plot, the old men (Pantalone and the Doctor) make plans that cannot be realized due to the interference of pair of young lovers and associated servants and clowns. A mixture of trickery and the discovery of a long-lost family connection would often bring the resolution and end the play.

Production of "The Wonder Hat" at Central High School in Aberdeen, South Dakota.

Characters

Commedia dell’arte promoted virtuoso solo and ensemble performances in ways that more scripted theater did not allow. Actors became highly skilled in playing a certain character or “mask,” which they played over a lifetime. Commedia performers worked together in troupes which required good chemistry, as each actor had to respond to the other actors’ improvisations. Sometimes the troupes were composed of family members for whom acting was the family business. Actors memorized repertoire for the character they would play, and then insert bits, as appropriate in different scenes and contexts. The tradition developed at least eight stock commedia dell’ arte characters, which have distinct characteristics, masks, shapes, emotions and even dialects. These characters were meant to be exaggerated portrayals of familiar social types.

Illustration of Punchinello, the "Pantalone" character in Goodman's The Wonder Hat. Illustration by Jaime Dear.

Harlequin is a valet from Bergamo. He is usually stupid but occasionally displays some wit. His character clumsy, greedy, credulous, yet charming. Harlequin is usually played by a talented acrobat.

Brighella is a cruel jack-of-all-trades from Bergamo. He is cunning and sharp, always seeking his own pleasure, and for this reason disliked and feared.

Pantalone is a retired merchant from Venice. Greedy and miserly, he has faced financial losses and is frequently duped.

The Doctor is a well-educated Bolognese. A pedant and wind-bag, he knows everything but understands nothing. One of his trademarks is to misquote Latin. He is miserly, conceited, and trivial. Like his friend Pantalone, he is despised and ridiculed by everyone.

Pulcinella is an old bachelor from Benevento. He usually embraces an epicurean way of living, and is sometimes played as humpbacked.

The Captain is a loud-mouthed military officer, usually from Spain. He tells stories of his great courage.

Pedrolino (Pierrot) is a sweet-natured and trustworthy valet. Young, sensitive and personable, he is usually the scapegoat and is the one who gets blamed for trickery, though he only had a minor part in it. He sometimes even accepts fault for wrongs he did not commit.

The lovers’ primary trait is to be in love. They are usually young and from the court. Their speech is usually elegant and shows their upper-class status. They are courteous and gallant.

Margot asks the audience a question in The Wonder Hat's surprise ending. 

Lazzi

Another feature of commedia dell’arte are the interludes, known as the lazzi, meaning “turn” or “trick,” which were sometimes brought into British drama as “Italian business.” These were typically the only scripted pieces of the act and, as comic relief, rarely had much to do with the plot. Some actors or troupes became well-known for a certain act and the audience would come to expect it. The lazzi could be anything from an acrobatic act to the actors engaging in silly horseplay. 

The full cast of The Wonder Hat meets for the first time, overlaid on an image of a historical production of The Wonder Hat from Central High School in Aberdeen, North Dakota, with illustrative additions by Jaime Deare. 

Conclusion

In one way, the Little Theater Movement, along with Goodman’s imagination, drew from the classicism of European drama; in another, though, both Goodman and the Little Theaters were oriented toward the contemporary American social world with all its diversity and mess. “The Wonder Hat” brings these two orientations together through characters who bear the names (comically altered) and stand in the attitudes of Commedia dell’ arte types, but who speak in an arresting American vernacular. Goodman’s “Back of the Yards,” too, with its focus on troubled youths on the streets of Chicago’s immigrant neighborhoods, hearkens also to the emerging diversity of American society. 

From the apparent whimsy of “The Wonder Hat” to the contrasting realism of “Back of the Yards,” these two short plays recall that the reformist agenda of the Little Theater movement existed alongside the movement’s deceptively simpler goal of providing entertainment and diversion for an increasingly diverse, modern society. 

It may be that the moment is not ripe for a full-fledged Kenneth Sawyer Goodman revival in the Chicago theater scene, but it is beyond argument that the Goodman theater has honored the memory and mission of a playwright whose life and work were inextricably linked to this city. This volume makes two of Goodman's richest plays available in a format illustrated by artists Jaime Deare ("The Wonder Hat") and Emily Murman ("Back of the Yards") who, in engagingly disparate styles, have undertaken "to restore old visions and to win the new."