Cleo Dawson

              Cleo Dawson
RE-CREATOR OF GREAT PLAYS

MAKES BOOKS LIVE


Figure


LEE KEEDICK presents



A FEAST OF THEATRE
AS WE never know what the managers who make Broadway and our world of theatre are going to produce next, so we do not know what plays Cleo Dawson will offer from season to season, except that they will be culled from the best on current Broadway.

Of late she has recreated such plays as William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life, Robert Sherwood's Abe Lincoln in Illinois, Maxwell Anderson's Journey to Jerusalem.

Engaging committees will be apprized in advance of titles being offered.

WHEN Cleo Dawson comes to you to present a play, there is a new experience in life awaiting you.  As long as there have been plays, there have been play readers, those, who with one voice and a gift of mimicry recreate what others have done.

Cleo Dawson doesn't do that.

When she presents a play for you, she passes on to you across the footlights, actual and symbolical, the heart of the play, the soul of the dramatist, the philosophy of the thesis, the action of the drama.  To her a play, to be worth giving, must have more in it than casual comedy or depressing realism.  It must be imbued with some spark of life.  That spark she hands to you, to kindle within you the flame already burning in her own breast.

She visits Broadway.  Yes.  But she never mimics Broadway.  Or its playfolk.  She casts herself in parts of her own re-writing; she is her own director, her own critic.  She gives you a Cleo Dawson production very often superior to that of the original Broadway producer.  In the center of America where she lives and which she has been using as her proving ground, people hearing her, develop a greater interest in the original productions.  She doesn't bring Broadway to you; she brings you to you in the medium of some dramatist's portrayal of universal emotion.

She is grand fun, though.  Her talks about subtleties of the play give it a meaning you would never discover for yourself.  She takes you into the author's brain and lets you peep at hidden nuances you might overlook.  She takes ordinary play ingredients and makes of them a banquet of theatre.

What plays does she present?  Those of the hour, as changing as time itself.  Plays of now, And of eternity.

James B. Pond in PROGRAM MAGAZINE




FOUR DIMENSION BOOK REVIEWS
CLEO DAWSON does for great books what she does for great plays.  Out of the great overplus that comes from the press, she selects, appraises and passes on to the public, objectified against the background of the ancients and moderns, the best that the writers of our day produce.  She brings the press to the people, evaluated, yet dramatized to make it live and move and breathe.

Her book reviewing has come as a demand from the result of her study of the masters and their influences upon our thinking and our times.  She studies forces in writing, for her purpose is to help, to teach, to inspire as well as to entertain.  Never, however, does she forget that to inspire, to lift up, she must first hold her audience by entertaining.

When questioned as to her method of handling current books, Cleo Dawson's reply is ever the same, Every book and every play is a law unto itself, asserting the infinite variety of creation.  We must find its place and its value and draw out of it, its enjoyment.  That is all.

To read a book is to know the author's message from one dimension.  To hear Cleo Dawson is to know it from four dimensions.  She lifts the characters from the pages and makes them walk and talk and think before your very eyes.


Figure





CLEO DAWSON
CLEO DAWSON interprets literature because her life and her experiences have given her a unique grip on the forces that make writing.

Born on a west Texas ranch where her only playmates were goats, dogs and horned toads and her only playthings the prairie, the wind and the sky: she had to develop a keen imagination to entertain herself, to make up for a lack of human companionship.  She experienced privation, loneliness and often danger.  There she learned reality, the simple reality that is the need of the world, yet she never lost her innate optimism, her faith in the rightness of things and her joy of living.

In all her work there is the strong nostalgic strain for the wilderness and the elemental forces of life to which we have all been compelled to look in our quest for the answers to our problems, the forces of inspiration without which the world dies.

To the sophisticated novel of a blase world, her outlook comes like a draught of clean, cool mountain air, to purify, to give new vitality.  To those works which have subtle meanings of profound wisdoms, she brings an interpretation based on her years of lone vigil and inner communion; to the simple things overflowing with the joy of life, she brings a sympathetic collaboration.

Her cultural background obtained from her work in five universities (she has degrees from three) and her travels in Mexico, Central and South America give her a command of language which, combined with her profound thinking, make her a powerhouse on the stage.

She is fresh.  She is virile.  She inspires.  She brings joy in her entertainment.


Figure


RADIATING from the University of Kentucky, where she has been on the faculty for many years, are many cities and towns, which look forward eagerly to the annual visits of this remarkable woman.

Rarely have artists attained such a following amongst men's clubs, women's clubs, colleges and universities, state and regional conventions and meetings.

Cleo Dawson returns year after year, often times more than once a year, to appease hunger for real theatre, for living interpretation of fine books.

That Cleo Dawson is at last to extend that circle of her influence is an event that committees everywhere will welcome.



EXCLUSIVE MANAGEMENT
LEE KEEDICK, 475 Fifth Ave., New York