INTRODUCTION
a task in the arts until he has learned how to use his medium and his tools. Therefore is Karel Capek expert craftsman of the theater. Two years and a half ago. Americans were discovering him in “R. U. R.” as produced in New York by the Theater Guild, and great was their joy of him. Soon they knew him and his brother both in “The Insect Comedy,” and substantial and stimulating were the satisfactions. By that time “The Makropoulos Secret” had been acted in Budapest, and producing managers in America were making speed to scan a rough draft of the play. Perhaps the managers failed to visualize it in actual representation—an outlook sometimes denied them. Possibly, like good Americans, they believed that all things go in spasms and that “the Capek boom” in our theater was nearly past. More singularly, none of our leading actresses seems to have known or sought the piece. Yet for them it contains the high-pitched, the all-pervading, the virtuosa part of a generation.
The technician and the layman sit alike in admiration before a playwright who can arrest attention and kindle interest in the very first speeches of his play; who can coördinate the introduction of the personages into the progress
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