For still the Village is, or has been, inarticulate.  Individually it has found speech—­it has expressed itself in diverse and successful forms.  But there remains a void of voices!  A community must strongly utter something, and must find mouths and mouthpieces for the purpose.  It was hard to find, hard to locate, hard to vocalise, this message of the Village; eventually it came up from the depths and pitched its tone bravely and sweetly, so that men might hear and understand.

The need was for something concrete and yet varied, which could cry out alone,—­a delicious voice in the wilderness, if you like!  There have been play-acting companies, “The Washington Square Players,” “The Provincetown Players,” and others.  But something was still wanting.

Sometimes it strikes us that wonderful things happen haphazard like meteors and miracles.  But I believe if we could take the time to investigate, we would find that most of these miraculous and glorious oaks grow out of a quiet commonplace acorn.

Richard Wagner once held an idea—­perhaps it would better be termed an ideal—­concerning art expression.  He declared (you may read it in “Oper und Drama” unless you are too war-sided) that all the art forms belonged together:  that no one branch of the perfect art form could live apart from its fellows, that is, in its integral parts.  He contended (and enforced in Bayreuth) that all the arts were akin:  that the brains which created music, drama, colour effects, plastic sculptural effects—­anything and everything that belonged to artistic expression—­were, or should be, welded into one supreme artistic expression.  He believed this implicitly, and like other persons who believe well enough, he “got away with it.”  In Bayreuth, he established for all time a form of synthetic art which has never been rivalled.

Now Wagner has very little apparently to do with Greenwich Village.  And yet this big world-notion is gaining way there.  They are finding—­as anyone must have known they would find—­a new mood expression, a new voice.  And, wise, not in their generation, but in all the generations, the Village has seized on this new vehicle with characteristic energy.

The new Greenwich Village Theatre which Mrs. Sam Lewis is godmothering, is—­unless many sensible and farseeing persons are much mistaken—­going to be the new Voice of the Village.  It is going to express what the Villagers themselves are working for, day and night:  beauty, truth, liberty, novelty, drama.  It is going, in its theatrical form, to fill the need for something concrete and yet various, something involving all, yet evolved from all; something which shall somehow unite all the scattered rainbow filaments of Our Village into a lovely texture with a design that even a Philistine world can understand.

“Young, new American playwrights first,” says Mrs. Lewis.  “After that as many great plays of all kinds as we can find.  But we want to open the channel for expression.  We want to give the Village a voice.”