MacGowan, Kenneth

(1888-1963)

   One of the most influential producers and drama critics between the world wars, Kenneth Macgowan was born in Winthrop, Massachusetts. He attended Harvard University and worked as a dramatic critic for the Boston Evening Transcript and the Philadelphia Evening Ledger before becoming the drama critic for the New York Globe in 1919, a position he held until 1923. Macgowan also wrote criticism for Vogue and TheatreArts. In 1924, he became a producer when he joined Robert Edmond Jones and Eugene O'Neill in managing the Province-town Playhouse in New York. Macgowan's friendship with O'Neill was particularly significant, not only because he produced several of O'Neill's early plays (All God's Chillun Got Wings, Desire Under the Elms, The Fountain, and The Great God Brown) when they and Jones operated the Greenwich Village Theatre (1925-1927), but because he encouraged O'Neill's inclination to move beyond realism in his plays. Macgowan presented the first New York production of August Strindberg's Spook Sonata in 1924, as well as a hit revival of Anna Cora Mowatt's Fashion (1924). He produced on Broadway and for motion pictures. His books on theatre, including The Theatre of Tomorrow (1921), Continental Stagecraft (1922, with Robert Edmond Jones), Masks and Demons (1923, with Herman Rosse), and Footlights Across America (1929), did much to encourage acceptance of modernist production practices emanating from Europe's stages and ushering in the New Stagecraft.