[1] Seven thousand citizens took part in MacKaye's civic masque, a historical pageant celebrating the 150th anniversary of the city's founding.

[2] After the civic masque in St Louis, MacKaye began to look to Central Park for an appropriate site to produce the community festival.

MacKaye was less worried about telling the journey of these characters in a story rather than present to the audience a piece of poetry meant to resonate with them on a deeper level.

The symbolic structure to include pageantry, poetry, and dance in one play is MacKaye's attempt at forming a new genre of theatre meant to affect the masses of people who saw his performances.

Mackaye worked with a number of activists from New York's various linguistic communities; the socialist labor leader and poet Arturo Giovannitti translated the play into Italian.

MacKaye's Civic Theater was one which, "resembles the harmonious mind of a man whose splendid passions and imaginations are controlled and directed by his enlightened reason to the service of his race".

With an audience numbering in the hundreds of thousands, the conversations stirring around Caliban by the Yellow Sands would lead to debate, agreement, and mass intelligent thought accomplishing his goal of unifying a community.

The "Community Masque" places MacKaye in the position which he dramatises as that of Prospero/Shakespeare, who uses the theatre to uplift Caliban from the material world of Setebos.

Cartelli discusses the implications this has in the context of Jewish immigration to New York and suggests that Mackaye is asserting the values of White Anglo-Saxon Protestantism in a way comparable to Senator Albert Beveridge's concerns raised at the turn of the century.

Cartelli thus considers MacKaye's work as an example of neocolonialism, which asserts Shakespeare as providing the peak experience of western civilisation.