MacKaye, [James Morrison] Steele

MacKaye, [James Morrison] Steele( 1842–94),
New York actor and playwright, whose more than 20 plays, all sentimental melodramas, include Hazel Kirke (1880), a domestic drama laid in England; a dramatization (1881) of Tourgée's A Fool's Errand; and Paul Kauvar (1887), a love story of the French Revolution. He also invented many stage devices, including an elevator stage and novel scenic and lighting effects. Epoch (2 vols., 1927), by his son Percy MacKaye, is his biography.