Under the caption ‘A Community Theater’ the fact was recorded in the ‘Outlook’ in a news editorial (Feb. 10, 1912), from which the following sentences are an extract: 

’Pittsfield is ... a community which represents the best of old and new New England.  A very interesting experiment is being tried there by the Pittsfield Theater Company—­a company of gentlemen—­who believe that in a town like Pittsfield the theater justifies a consideration not dissimilar to that with which we regard our public library or our art museum!  These gentlemen are leading the way in a movement which ought to be widespread.  They have faced, not a theory, but a condition, and they will discover that, so far as immediate popular use is concerned, the theater is of more importance in a community than either the art museum or the public library.  If they give the people what will interest the people, ... if they arrange for popular prices, secure good actors, and treat the theater as a community institution in the same sense as an art museum and a library are community institutions, the “Outlook” has small doubt of their success.’

However the Pittsfield experiment turns out, considered, as it should be, as a sign of the times, it tells us emphatically—­first, that the present system of meekly taking whatever plays are sent on from New York by a monopolistic commercial management, for its own good, is by intelligent citizens seen to be anti-civic.  Again, it tells us that the shortest cut to give the community open access to all the dramas it wants itself or may assimilate for its needed pleasure and development is naturally seen to be the public library method as first established by Boston and since approved and adopted by all public-spirited communities.

This method was devised to give the community free access to all the books it wants for pleasure, profit, and advancement.  A similar device to give the community cheap access to all the plays it wants for the same purposes may readily follow by a correspondingly practicable path of administration by a special commission.  The same path thus proved good by test of time and utility for the library has since been followed with adaptation to its different purposes by the park commission.

The commission administering the public library and employing experts to operate it in all its departments and fields of activity has for many years accomplished and continued its civic work not merely adequately and thoroughly, but with superiority and distinction.  This originally self-appointed group of citizens was fired with the desire not to do an exclusive or sectional work but to put upon its feet for the whole municipality a civic institution.  It proceeded toward this goal by so shaping the undertaking that the city should ultimately accept and assume charge of it as its own.