War Plays by Women

An International Anthology

Agnes Cardinal, Elaine Turner, Claire M. Tylee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136357329
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This anthology consists of ten plays from countries involved in the First World War, including plays from Germany and France never before available in translation.
Representing a range of dramatic forms, from radio play to street-epic, from comic sketch to musical, this anthology includes plays from: Gertrude Stein, Muriel Box, Marion Wentworth Craig, Dorothy Hewett, Berta Lask, Marie Leneru, Wendy Lill, Alice Dunbar Nelson, and Christina Reid. Highly successful in their day, these plays demonstrate how women have attempted to use theatre to achieve social change. The collection explores the historical development of theatrical conventions and genres and the historical context of social and gender issues.

1 Marion Craig Wentworth 1872–? _____________

War Brides

USA

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Introduction

Marion Craig was born in Minnesota, in 1872. After graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1894, she studied at the Curry School of Expression in Boston and then stayed on in Boston to become a teacher of expression. She married in 1900, had one son, and divorced in 1912. A socialist, she wrote several plays on social issues, including a suffrage play, The Flower Shop (1912). During the pre-war American Women’s Suffrage Campaign, she travelled to help raise support by giving public readings, often of the rallying speeches from Act II of the British suffrage play by Elizabeth Robins, Votes for Women!, which depicted an open-air suffragette meeting in London.

Thus Craig Wentworth had experience of political agitation through drama when she wrote her feminist anti-war play, War Brides, in September 1914. Although this was printed in the international journal, Century Magazine, in February 1915, and published in book form in New York the same year, the play was never licensed for performance in Britain. However, the first production opened in New York on 25 January 1915, starring Alia Nazimova, and then went on tour from coast to coast. So great was the demand to see the play that a second company was sent to tour the South, with Gilda Yaresi in the leading role. In 1916 a longer, 48-minute film version of the one-act play was made, also starring Nazimova but with a larger cast. This has been widely acclaimed: “the most distinguished and sincere film of the war-period was Herbert Brenon’s War Brides” (Butler 1974: 11), “by far the most eloquent of the anti-war films were Herbert Brenon’s War Brides and Thomas Ince’s Civilization” (Jeavons 1974: 27). The distributor, Selznick, made a huge profit of $300,000 from the film before America entered the war in April, 1917. Several cities and states banned the film because of its alleged pacifism, and Selznick had it re-edited to give it an anti-German bias. However, in 1917 it was suppressed for the duration of the war on the official grounds that: “The philosophy of this picture is so easily misunderstood by unthinking people” (Jeavons 1974: 27). The film was never shown in other Allied countries.

Despite disagreement about Nazimova’s acting style, there is no question that the play’s success was largely due to her fame and talent. Karl Schmidt praised her theatre performance, claiming that the play’s more powerful effect on the stage than when read was due to Nazimova’s “sincere and sympathetic acting” (Harper’s Weekly, 13 March 1915, p. 251). The film critics were not so happy. The reviewer of Variety criticised Nazimova for “posing in doorways and windows, leaning against walls and supporting herself on various pieces of furniture” and suggested she might learn from another actress on the cast, Gertrude Berkeley, who played the MOTHER (Variety, 17 Nov. 1916, p. 25). The reviewer in Motion Picture World (MPW) thought that, whilst the drama achieved “tragic height never before attained by a moving picture”, the Russian actress had one flaw: “in giving too freely of her inward fire” (MPW, 2 Dec. 1916, p. 1343). The existing stills of her stage and film performances may give an exaggerated idea of her acting as “absurdly over-dramatic” (Butler 1974: 11) because of the necessity to hold a pose for the camera at that time. Yet Nazimova is of great importance in the history of American theatre and cinema because she helped introduce current Russian practice which gave rise to “the Method” school of acting.

Alia Nazimova was born in the Crimea in 1879. She trained at Stanislawski’s dramatic school in Moscow and made her debut in St Petersburg in 1904. Joining Pavel Orlenev’s company she toured London, Berlin and New York, but when they broke up and she found herself abandoned in New York, she quickly learned to perform Hedda Gabler in English in 1906. Her success led to the Schubert brothers building her the Nazimova Theatre on 39th Street, where she played a series of Ibsen heroines. “Then came the fall” as Djuna Barnes put it (Barnes 1930: 360): Nazimova descended to vamp-roles in mediocre dramas, ending up on B. F. Keith’s vaudeville circuit. War Brides enabled her to break into cinema, acting in 22 films including A Doll’s House and Ghosts up to 1944. She made enough money to make her own version of Wilde’s Salome in 1923, and returned to the stage in 1930 with Russian and Scandinavian classics. That a one-act play in vaudeville could make such an impact that a reviewer of the film of War Brides would call the story “too well-known to need repeating” was certainly due to the power of her acting.

Yet, of course, War Brides did not keep the USA out of the 1914–18 war. In fact, despite the internationally feminist, anti-war argument of the play and its setting in an unnamed country, the stage version — and even more so, the film version — can be seen to have strengthened the racism and nationalism that stoked America’s entry into the war. Although the original place was not identified, the peasant way of life, the costumes, and the Germanic names of the characters all suggested somewhere in Eastern Europe, especially since the action is said to take place in “a war-ridden country”. Perhaps because of Nazimova’s accent, early reviewers supposed the location to be in Russia. Some of the names in the printed version were changed for the stage and film adaptation: “HOFFMAN” became “Bragg” and, more significantly, “HEDWIG” (Nazimova’s role) became “Joan”; yet the overbearing military officer bullying simple country-folk reinforced stereotypes of aristocratic Prussians forcing militarism on Bavarian peasants (Isenberg 1981: 157). But whatever the location, Joan’s dream of invading rapists, an episode in the Brenon/Wentworth screenplay not found in the stage version, clearly shows them to be of “Teutonic appearance”, wearing pickelhaubs — the distinctive spiked helmets of the German army uniform (see film-still, Isenberg 1981: 192). Thus, even if Craig Wentworth’s original aim had been to encourage (American) women to sympathise with women from other (non-specified) countries in a struggle against militarism, visually the film accorded with British atrocity propaganda and fel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright acknowledgements
• General Introduction
• 1 Marion Craig Wentworth (1872-?)
• 2 Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935)
• 3 Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
• 4 Marie Lenéru (1875-1918)
• 5 Berta Lask (1878-1967)
• 6 Muriel Box (1905-91)
• 7 Dorothy Hewett (1923- )
• 8 Wendy Lill (1950- )
• 9 Christina Reid (1942- )
• Appendix: Checklist of war plays by women, 1915-39