American Drama of the Twentieth Century

Gerald M. Berkowitz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317901723
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this book Professor Berkowitz studies the diversity of American drama from the stylistic, experimental plays of O'Neill, through verse, tragedy and community theatre, to the theatre of the 1990s. The discussions range through dramatists, plays, genres and themes, with full supporting appendix material. It also examines major dramatists such as Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, Sam Shephard, Tennessee Williams and August Wilson and covers not only the Broadway scene but also off Broadway movements and fringe theatres and such subjects as women's and African-American drama.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The American drama is, for all practical purposes, the twentieth-century American drama. There were plays written and performed on the American continent well before there was a United States, and during the nineteenth century the American theatre was widespread and active. But, as was also true in much of Europe, it was, with rare exceptions, not the home of a particularly rich or ambitious literature. The theatre was a broadly popular light entertainment form, much like television today; it is possible to do artistically ambitious work on American commercial television, but television is not likely to be the first medium to come to the mind of a serious writer. This is not to say that the playwrights of the nineteenth century were without talent, but that, like television writers, they were more likely to be artisans skilled at producing the entertaining effects that audiences wanted, than artists looking to illuminate the human condition or challenge received values.

Yet in America, as in Europe, a change in the kind of literature being written for the theatre began to become apparent in the last years of the nineteenth century. As with many historical and artistic developments in American culture, this was much less a matter of an organized ‘movement’ than of trial and error and accidents of personality; an individual writer might not be consciously innovating, but something in his work might attract audiences or inspire other writers, so that the art form lurched forward a step. There is, for example, little evidence that James A. Herne considered Margaret Fleming (1890) revolutionary in any way, but with hindsight we can see that his version of the mildly sensational melodrama typical of the period raises moral questions that its contemporaries do not, and that those questions give the play a distinctly twentieth-century feel. The process was slow and unsteady, with false starts and relapses, but by the second decade of the twentieth century artistically ambitious writers were venturing into drama and finding it able to carry a weight of psychological insight and philosophical import it had not been asked to carry before.

This was very much a rebirth of an art form; with little in the recent history of the genre to build on, the first generations of twentieth-century American dramatists had to discover for themselves what shape the twentieth-century American drama would take. It is not surprising, then, that the years from, say, 1900 to 1930 saw a great variety of dramatic styles and vocabularies, as playwrights experimented with epic, symbolism, expressionism, verse tragedy and the like, finding out as they went along what a play could and could not do. Foremost among the experimenters was Eugene O’Neill, of whom it is only a slight exaggeration to say that during the 1920s he never wrote two plays in the same style. O’Neill, whose father had been a star of the nineteenth-century theatre, and who thus had a sharp awareness of its literary limitations, was consciously experimenting, trying to shape and stretch the medium so it could do what he wanted it to – express his profoundly thought-out insights and philosophies. But even the less determinedly innovative writers of the period found themselves making up the rules as they went along.

Inevitably, some experiments failed. One reason O’Neill kept changing styles was that many of them disappointed him, while some of the ‘–isms’ that were briefly successful in Europe proved unamenable to American topics and tastes, or simply uncommercial. Through trial and error, however, one particular dramatic mode came to the fore. Theatrically effective, easy for audiences to relate and respond to, remarkably flexible in its adaptability to the demands of different authors, the natural voice of American drama was revealed by the 1930s to be in realistic contemporary middle-class domestic melodrama and comedy.

Realistic contemporary middle-class domestic melodrama – each of those words is worth examining and defining. ‘Realism’ does not mean the uncensored photographic and phonographic record of external reality. Dramatic realism is an artifice as much as any other mode, violating reality in order to give the illusion of reality; to take one simple example, characters in ‘realistic’ plays generally speak one at a time, and in grammatical sentences. The important point is that the illusion of reality is maintained; realism avoids gross violations of the laws of nature (People don’t fly) or the introduction of purely symbolic characters or events (the Little Formless Fears of O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones), while presenting characterizations and behaviour that are at least possible. And thus a realistic play asserts the claim that it speaks the truth, that what happens on stage is a reflection of the world its audience inhabits.

Historical plays were a mainstay of the nineteenth-century American drama, and continued to be written in the twentieth; most Broadway seasons in the 1920s saw at least one play about eighteenth-century France or nineteenth-century Mexico, and the 1930s had a thin but constant stream of plays about Washington, Lincoln or other American heroes. But the overwhelming majority of twentieth-century American plays are set in the present, again implying a close parallel to the real world. Moreover, a play set in the here and now is likely to reflect the external reality of the here and now, be it the Depression of the 1930s, the middle-class anxieties of the 1950s or the profound social changes of the 1960s and after; and one of the first important discoveries about domestic realism was that it could address large social and historical issues in theatrical terms.

Shakespeare wrote about kings, O’Neill wrote about Lazarus and Marco Polo, and Maxwell Anderson wrote about Elizabeth I and Mary of Scotland. But the overwhelming majority of modern American plays are about people from the same social and economic world as the playgoers – the urban middle class. That is not a narrow range, and can stretch from the barely-getting-by and underemployed to the comfortably well-off. But the extremes of the economic ladder, along with other fringes of society – blacks, rustics, etc. – are rarely represented before the 1960s, except as stereotypes, and infrequently thereafter except in plays specifically addressing minority subjects. Audiences for American plays are likely to see themselves or people like them, or people they might believably, with good or bad luck, be like.

Of all these adjectives being defined, ‘domestic’ may be the most significant. Not only are American plays about recognizable people in a recognizable world, but they are about the personal lives of these people. Whether a play is actually set in a living room, with a cast made up solely of family members, as an extraordinary number are, or whether the ‘domestic’ setting extends to an office and a circle of friends, the issues and events are presented in small and localized terms. Whatever the deeper meanings of an American play, on one solid level it is about love and marriage, or earning a living, or dealing with a family crisis.

Of course Americans did not invent domestic drama. Ibsen and Chekhov (to name just two) had written of realistic characters in domestic situations, and even hinted at larger social and moral issues through this mode. The gradual discovery of American dramatists, starting in the 1930s, was that domestic realism was their most effective vehicle for talking about larger issues – that the small events in the lives of small people could be presented so that they reflected the world outside the living room. Put another way, the insight becomes more than merely technical. Dramatists discovered that the real story of, say, the Depression was not in statistics and large social changes, but in the ways it affected a family in its living room. From there it was a small step to the discoveries of the 1940s and 1950s that purely personal experiences, even those without larger social implications, were valuable and dramatic in themselves. A national literature of plays set in living rooms is a deeply democratic national literature, one that assumes that the important subjects are those that manifest themselves in the daily lives of ordinary people.

And finally ‘melodrama,’ a word with unfortunate and undeserved negative connotations. Although ‘melodramatic’ is popularly used as a criticism of literature that invokes shallow or excessive emotional effects, the noun merely refers to a serious play with no pretension to tragedy. It is worth noting that few American dramatists aspire to high tragedy; indeed, the other characteristics already enumerated, particularly realism and the domestic setting, militate against any such ambition. Once again an essentially democratic impulse is at work, in the assumption that the important events of life, the things worth writing plays about, are the things that happen to the essentially ordinary, not the heroic.

As with the rebirth of serious drama at the beginning of the century, the discovery of domestic realism’s power and potential was not the result of conscious artistic manifestos or collusion among writers. The form worked, and so individual writers were drawn to it; indeed, in a number of cases dramatists who began as non-realistic writers or who went through a period of experiment found themselves drawn back to domestic realism in later works: Eugene O’Neill most strikingly, but also Maxwell Anderson, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard and others. The remarkable accomplishment of domestic realism lies in its richness and adaptability, as writers as different in their styles, subjects and ambitions as Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and August Wilson have been able to say what they want to say in this mode.

Just as there have been few stylistic schools or movements in the American drama, so there have been few conscious agreements among writers about subject matter. Individual dramatists wrote about what interested or moved them, and cases of direct influence (e.g. of Tennessee Williams on William Inge) are far less common than situations in which playwrights responding to a similar reality independently found their way to similar subjects and approaches. Still, similar realities, or the discoveries of particularly strong or insightful writers, are likely to produce some similarities among contemporaries. It is both coincidental and (with hindsight) inevitable that the Great Depression of the 1930s would lead some dramatists to explore and even criticize the social and economic forces that were affecting the lives of millions; and the drama of social and political criticism remains a small but significant part of the American repertoire. (It may be the American theatre’s commercial constraints, the need to sell tickets and make a profit, that kept political drama from becoming as dominant or as angry as it did in some European countries.)

Similarly, Tennessee Williams wasn’t trying to move the American drama into new subject areas when his own personal empathy for the lost and weak led him to explore their experience in the 1940s and 1950s; it was the fact that these plays spoke to a perhaps unexpected hunger for counsel and reassurance in the hearts of his audiences that made them succeed, and allowed other writers with their own forms of counsel and reassurance to voice them in drama. Clear evidence that this was no conscious ‘movement’ is the fact that O’Neill’s late and posthumous plays, some written as early as 1940 but not released until the 1950s, address some of the same emotional questions as the Williams plays that preceded them in the theatre but were written later; the two authors (and others) independently found their ways to subjects that only became a recognizable genre when audiences responded to them, making reassurance that the pains and insecurities of life can be endured a recurring theme in plays from the 1950s to the 1990s.

This, then, is a literary history with a plot. For various historical and artistic reasons the stylistic outline of the twentieth-century American drama has a clearly discernible arc. An art form that was essentially born afresh at the beginning of the century went through a period of exploration and experiment culminating in the discovery that one style was more amenable to American tastes and more adaptable to the demands that different writers made on it. That style – realistic contemporary middle-class domestic melodrama – was to become the dominant and artistically most fertile and flexible mode, the one in which the greatest American dramatists were able to create the greatest American plays, and in which writers with widely varying agendas could offer psychological insights, political criticism or spiritual counsel. So absolute was the superiority for American dramatic purposes of domestic realism that when, soon after the middle of the century, some significant changes in the theatrical structure led to another period of experiment and exploration, the centre held. Artistic discoveries were made – some of them greatly enriching the dramatic vocabulary – but domestic realism retained its place as the native and natural American dramatic style as new generations of dramatists continued to discover its flexibility and power.

Theatre history

By its very nature the drama – the literature of the theatre – is more closely bound to the marketplace than any other literary form. Poetry exists even if it is not published, and a novel may sell very few copies but remain on the library shelves to be discovered later. But a play simply is not a play until it is put on a stage, and it is likely not to exist for posterity unless it proves itself on a stage; it is the general rule that plays are not published unless they have had successful productions. So, since forces and events that are really more part of theatrical than literary history have a direct effect on the types of plays that are written and the types of plays that survive, a brief history of the twentieth-century American theatre is in order.

As mentioned earlier, there was professional theatre in colonial America and in the Spanish southwest before there was a United States. In the nineteenth century live theatre was a flourishing entertainment form, with more than two thousand resident professional companies across the continent, in almost every city of more than village size, each with a repertoire of classics and new plays. Though first Philadelphia, and later New York, was acknowledged as the cultural capital of the nation, audiences in Chicago, St Louis, Denver and dozens of other cities were just as likely to see new plays and leading performers in first-class productions.

This situation began to change in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, in part because New York-based producers began sending out touring companies of their biggest hits, drawing audiences away from the less glamorous local theatres. In the 1890s a cartel of producers bought up or sabotaged the competition in many cities, to give themselves a monopoly. In the new century most of the remaining resident companies succumbed to competition from vaudeville, movies and later radio. By 1920 at the latest, New York City had achieved an absolute dominance and virtually absolute monopoly of the American theatre, with the rest of the country reduced to local amateur fare and touring companies of last year’s New York hits.

‘Broadway’ is the name of a street in New York City, and the label has come to be attached to the commercial theatres of that city (even though most Broadway theatres are in fact on the side streets intersecting Broadway), just as the term Wall Street has come to refer generically to the financial community. And for roughly the first half of the twentieth century ‘Broadway’ was for all intents and purposes the entire American theatre.

This was obviously an imperfect state of affairs. When virtually all the new plays, all the major playwrights, all the best actors, directors and designers were to be found in one square mile of one city, then the overwhelming majority of the population was being deprived of the opportunity to experience American theatre at its best. Meanwhile the intense competition for a limited audience meant that many talented artists were inevitably squeezed out or not given a chance. On the other hand, the concentration of the best and most ambitious in one place had some salutary effects. Writers and performers could be inspired and challenged by each other, and build on each other’s accomplishments. It is surely not coincidental, for example, that the psychologically realistic performance style called ‘Method Acting,’ the emotionally evocative powers of such directors as Elia Kazan and Jose Quintero, and the major plays of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller all appeared at the same time, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Each of these, along with the responsiveness of an experienced and sophisticated audience, fed on and nourished the others, helping to create an identity, a unified style and a very high standard of accomplishment that a more dispersed theatrical community would probably not have achieved.

Virtually all of the dramatists discussed in the second, third and fourth chapters of this book wrote for the Broadway theatre; and the overall arc of theatre history in the first half of the century – the period of experiment leading to the discovery of a dramatic mode that seemed most amenable to the task of addressing American concerns, and the subsequent development of this mode to its fullest potential – is itself clearly a product of a small community of artists observing and learning from each other’s errors and accomplishments. It is quite likely that the shape of the American drama by mid-century would have been quite different, in unpredictable ways, if the performance arena of American theatre had not been so concentrated and localized.

This state of affairs began to alter around 1950, as a result of four distinct changes in the structure of the American theatre. The first was the appearance of an alternative theatrical environment within New York City, as young actors, directors and designers who could not find employment on Broadway formed their own shoestring ‘Off-Broadway’ companies. Motivated by the desire to be seen and to exercise their craft, they performed in lofts, unused theatres and various converted spaces, free to do uncommercial and experimental work simply because there was so little money or prestige to lose. And because there were so many good young actors, directors and designers in New York, some very good work was done Off-Broadway, leading critics and audiences to discover and appreciate the potential of this new venue.

With its lower budgets, Off-Broadway concentrated in its first few years on classics and revivals. By 1960, though, it found a new function, as a showcase for commercially risky new writers. Its generally younger and more adventurous audiences were open to new styles and subject matters, encouraging a period of experiment and stylistic diversity recalling that of forty years earlier. A generation of American dramatists had their first plays produced Off-Broadway, and the alternative theatre was soon recognized as a significant complement to Broadway, its new respectability inspiring a further expansion of the fringe and avant-garde to the ironically labelled ‘Off Off-Broadway’.

About the same time that an alternative theatre was developing in New York, alternatives to New York theatre were being born elsewhere in America. In the late 1940s and early 1950s new professional resident theatre companies were founded in Dallas, Houston and Washington; and by 1960 there were a dozen such companies around the country. By 1966 there were thirty, with, for the first time in the century, more professional actors employed outside New York City than on Broadway. By 1980 there were more than seventy large, permanently established resident theatres in America and, since many of them awakened a hunger for theatre in their areas, at least ten times as many smaller professional companies functioning in local equivalents of Off-Broadway.

The opening of new theatres all over the country did not just mean that high-quality live drama was now available to more people than ever before in the century, though that was accomplishment enough. It meant more opportunities for new writers, particularly those from outside New York City and those doing challenging new work. Unlike the New York theatre, which was structured as a marketplace, with each production an independent commercial enterprise in competition with others, most regional theatres produced full seasons of from four to ten plays a year. This innovation, seemingly just a matter of logistics and organization, actually changed the way in which audiences, at least outside New York, experienced plays.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Editors’ Preface
• Longman Literature in English Series
• Acknowledgements
• Author’s Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 1890–1930: The Beginnings
• 3 1930–1945: Reality and Realism
• 4 1945–1960: The Zenith of the Broadway Theatre
• 5 1960–1975: The Post-Broadway Era
• 6 1975–1990: A National Theatre
• Chronology
• General Bibliographies
• Individual Authors
• Index