Baker, George Pierce

▪ American drama teacher

born April 4, 1866, Providence, R.I., U.S.

died Jan. 6, 1935, New York, N.Y.

      American teacher of some of the most notable American dramatists, among them Eugene O'Neill, Philip Barry, Sidney Howard, and S.N. Behrman. Emphasizing creative individuality and practical construction (he guided students' plays through workshop performances), Baker fostered an imaginative realism. The critic John Mason Brown and the novelists John Dos Passos and Thomas Wolfe also studied under Baker, who appears as Professor Hatcher in Wolfe's autobiographical novel Of Time and the River.

      Baker graduated from Harvard University in 1887 and remained there to teach. In 1905 he started his class for playwrights, Workshop 47 (named after its course number), the first of its kind to be part of a university curriculum. He concerned himself not only with writing but also with stage design, lighting, costuming, and dramatic criticism. Baker's annual lecture tours, following a lectureship at the Sorbonne in 1907, introduced many Americans to European ideas of theatre art. His university productions pioneered advanced staging techniques in the United States.

      From 1925 until he retired in 1933, Baker was professor of the history and technique of drama at Yale University, founding a drama school there and directing the university theatre. Many innovative techniques in theatre, motion-picture, and television production had their origins in his work at Yale. Of his writings, the best known are The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist (1907) and Dramatic Technique (1919).

Additional Reading

Wisner Payne Kinne, George Pierce Baker and the American Theatre (1954, reissued 1968).

* * *