Modernism In American Drama

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN DRAMA

EUGENE O’NEILL SUSAN GLASPELL THE BLACK PLAYWRIGHTS

Modernist drama in Europe ❧ Two trends in modernist drama: ❧ The first: - demonstrative, declarative, expressive, - ironical, occasionally absurdist - to see with a clear vision, to define the problems - to break free of convention - to proclaim in their own often very idiosyncratic way the truth 2

Types of Modernist Drama ❧Late-naturalist drama of Germany ❧Shaw’s plays in England ❧Early absurdists in France ❧Italian and Russian Futurism ❧Expressionist drama at large ❧Much of Dada and Surrealism ❧Individual elements in Brecht 3

American examples ❧ The Provincetown Players founded in 1915 by George Cram Cook, Susan Glaspell’s husband ❧ To provide a venue for a specifically American drama in a concomitant relation with the American people ❧ The structure, dialogue, and staging could exhibit various degrees of “making it new”, but the art of Provincetown Players remained connected with life 4

George Cram Cook /1883-1924/

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The Provincetown Players ❧“One thing we’re in need of is the freedom to deal with life in literature as frankly as Aristophanes. We need a public like his, which has the habit of thinking and talking frankly of life. We need the sympathy of such a public, the fundamental oneness with the public” (George Cram Cook in a letter to Susan Glaspell quoted in her biography The Road to the Temple, 1927). 6

The Provincetown Players ❧The prewar works represented an early form of modernism ❧“A cultural transformation of everyday life” through thematic and technical breaks with the past 7

Types of Modernist Drama ❧ The second type: - oriented more towards things structural and technical and linguistic - the intimate, the oblique, the implied, the elusive, the subdued, the symbolic ❧ Maeterlinck, Hofmannsthal ❧ Chekov ❧ Yeats ❧ Lorca

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Expressionist Drama ❧ A hybrid form ❧ Attempted to reject representation of surface reality in favor of a depiction of inner, subjective states of emotion and experience ❧ Visual and emotional qualities often featured an element of distortion, exaggeration, or suggestive symbolism ❧ A dream-like or nightmarish quality to the action

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Expressionist Drama ❧ The effects of mechanization and urbanization resounded in the complex syntax and telescopic dialogue of the characters ❧ Characters, with the exception of the central character, often appeared as abstracted types or caricatures

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Expressionist Drama

❧ Music and sound effects helped communicate the varying emotional states of the play’s focal characters; used as substitutes for words and action ❧ Tended to reject a linear, sustained exposition of story in favour of a rapidly changing sequence of short scenes dissolving one into the other in cinematic fashion ❧ Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal

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Eugene O’Neill /1888-1953/ ❧ Eugene O’Neill became the American representative of almost all of these European trends ❧ Modern versions of Greek tragedy ❧ Renovated the soliloquy and the use of masks ❧ Experimented with the use of film on the stage ❧ Wrote about miscegenation and incest

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O’Neill’s Contribution ❧ Planned multi-play cycles ❧ Domesticated Greek classical tragedy ❧ Strindbergian domestic drama ❧ Ibsenesque social plays ❧ Irish dramatic tone poems ❧ Expressionist melodramas

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O’Neill’s Life and Work ❧The son of one of the famous melodramatic actors in America, James O’Neill ❧Survived a suicide attempt and tuberculosis ❧Started writing melodrama in 1912 14

O’Neill’s Work ❧ Continued with realistic sea plays ❧ Expressionist agons ❧ Ended with sprawling realistic plays with an epic dimension ❧ He wrote 49 plays destroying many that he could not finish ❧ Won the Nobel Prize in 1936 15

O’Neill’s First Plays ❧ Melodramas, survived by accident, almost never staged today ❧ Continued with sea plays for the Province-town Players ❧ Bound East for Cardiff ❧ Beyond the Horizon

Members of the Provincetown Players from top left (clockwise) James Light, Christine Ell, "Jig"Cook , O'Neill, Charles Collins. Painting by Charles Ellis. 16

Experimentations with Expressionism /1920-1924/ ❧The Emperor Jones ❧The Hairy Ape ❧All God's Chillun Got Wings ❧Desire Under the Elms: - Phaedra-Hippolytus-Theseus myth - Race and class conflicts, sexual bondage - American tragedy modelled on the classic Greek plays 17

Non-realistic plays /mid-1920s to the mid-1930s/ ❧Marco Millions, a picturesque and satirized Babbitt ❧The Great God Brown, a mask theatricalization of the Apollonian-Dionysian conflict ❧Lazarus Laughed, uses the Bible, Greek choruses, Elizabethan tirades, expressionist masks, populous crowd scenes, and orchestrated laughter

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Non-realistic plays /mid-1920s to the mid-1930s/ ❧ Strange Interlude: - a 'woman play' - resurrected the stage asides to reveal repressed desires ❧ Mourning Becomes Electra: - re-worked the Orestia myth - a play about the American Civil War

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Cycle Plays ❧ In 1932 he conceived the idea of a cycle of plays ❧ About several generations of an American family ❧ A Touch of the Poet ❧ More Stately Mansions: - rescued after his death 20

Extra-cycle plays ❧ The Iceman Cometh, written in 1939 but staged in 1946 ❧ Long Day's Journey into Night (1940) ❧ Hughie (1941) ❧ Only the first was staged in his lifetime signalling a very important development in his attitude towards the commercial Broadway theatre 21

Attitude to Broadway ❧ “I dread the idea of a production because I know it will be done by people who have really one standard left, that of Broadway success. I know beforehand that I will be constantly asked, as I have been before, to make stupid compromises for that end … The fact that I will again refuse to make them is no consolation. There are just groups, or individuals, who put on plays in New York commercial theatres.

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Attitude to Broadway ❧ The idea of an Art Theatre is more remote now, I think, than it was way back in the first decade of this century, before the Washington Square Players or the Provincetown Players were ever dreamed of... To have an ideal now … is to confess oneself a fool…” 23

O’Neill’s Dramatic Art ❧The falsity, the betrayal of ideal, the substitution of artificial for real values ❧All his characters are caught in decline, they are “ghosts of their former selves” and in Bigsby’s words “this is a theatre of entropy” ❧Rather than speak their own lives they hide in the language of others whose identity they try to assume creating a space between the self and its expression 24

O’Neill’s Dramatic Art ❧ Offer a specific critique of language characterized by a profound suspicion of the uttered word ❧ Not only a dramatization of the inaptness of words to express human feelings but enough evidence of the impossibility to bespeak the truth by words ❧ His works abound with liars, deceivers, actors, people who push language forward as though it could offer them some protection or distraction

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O’Neill’s Dramatic Art ❧ In the last plays as in the sea plays, there is little physical movement, we rarely escape a single room, time nearly stops ❧ The playwright, who had restlessly experimented with form, deconstructed character, vocalized the subconscious, splintered the sensibility, and energized the mise en scene, now settled for a drama, Hughie excepted, that might seem conventional

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O’Neill’s Dramatic Art ❧ A return to surface realism? ❧ Conventionality becomes the subject, it is turned into a form of defence mobilized by characters in their withdrawal from the real ❧ Exemplified in the way in which theatre itself is so often invoked by the characters both as an image and as a fact from reality 27

O’Neill’s Dramatic Art

❧ Escape from reality is the oblivion the characters seek in alcohol, in memory or in narrating the story of their lives again and again in hope to create those lives anew ❧ They hold the real at bay, they are self-conscious performers, jumping from one role to another ❧ In Hughie thought of using a puppet for one of the two characters in order to represent the role of the audience building his play on a principle of absence

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O’Neill’s Dramatic Art

❧ Became increasingly conscious of the radical impossibility for any kind of linguistic closure rooted in the very modernist view of the world as crumbling under the pressure of its lost coherence ❧ The grammar of experience has dissolved ❧ Drawn to the “clotted, clogged, and inarticulate” ❧ “Great language”no longer possible for anyone living in the “discordant, broken, faithless rhythm of our time”

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Susan Glaspell /1876-1948/

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Susan Glaspell and Modernism ❧ Modernism - a blessing and a curse ❧ Very closely associated with the Provincetown Players ❧ Her task was much more difficult than the task of her male contemporaries ❧ She had not only to break with the past but to divide herself from the rich literary tradition of her literary foremothers 31

Glaspell’s Work ❧ Trifles (1916) ❧ The People (1917) ❧ The Outside (1917) ❧ Woman’s Honor (1918) ❧ The women protagonists resist the new cultural imperative in their attempt to bring the best parts of the past forward while attempting to create new forms in the present that will, in turn, benefit the future.

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Glaspell’s Art ❧ Fresh, innovative, and challenging ❧ Trifles,the story of Minnie Wright, epitomizes early modernism’s attitude toward the past and its art ❧ Advocates the rejection of what is bad from the past, what constricts the characters ❧ Preserves what is good, and what could give birth to originality ❧ Modernist art must return to communal decisions about the future

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Trifles/ “A Jury of her Peers” ❧ ”So I went out on the wharf, sat alone on one of our wooden benches without a back, and looked a long time at that bare little stage. 34

From The Road to the Temple ❧After a time the stage became a kitchen - a kitchen there all by itself… Then the door at the back opened and people all bundled up came in – two or three men, I wasn’t sure which, but sure enough about the two women, who hung back, reluctant to enter that kitchen.

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From The Road to the Temple ❧When I was a newspaper reporter out in Iowa, I was sent down-state to do a murder trial, and I never forgot going into the kitchen of a woman locked up in town. I had meant to do it as a short story, but the stage took it for its own, so I hurried in from the wharf to write down what I had seen...” 36

Glaspell’s Art ❧ The People: - explores the themes of the relationship between art and life - the catalytic role of women in questioning and subverting men’s penal or artistic laws - the challenge of bringing what remains alive from the past into the future without its incarceration in dead forms

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Glaspell’s Art ❧Until 1918 her plays representative of the avantgarde version of modernism, of “the insistence on the cultural transformation of everyday life” ❧From 1918 onwards her plays manifest another aspect of modernism what Matei Calinescu terms “its outright rejection of bourgeois modernity” and “its ideals of rationality, utility, progress”

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Glaspell’s Art ❧ Bernice (1919) ❧ Inheritors (1921) ❧ The Verge (1921) ❧ First novel, Fugitive’s Return /1929/ ❧ Returned to the theatre to write her Pulitzer Prize play Alison’s House /1930/, a play about Emily Dickinson - a conventional epilogue to a radical career

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African American Playwrights ❧ Plays concerned with the lives and problems of the community, which was part of the Harlem Renaissance ❧ Black theatre included: - The Harlem Experimental Theatre - The Krigwa Players - The Howard Players from the Howard University, Washington, DC - The various Negro Units of the Federal Theatre Project

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Philosophical Trends ❧ Du Bois favoured “propaganda plays” that revealed the racial prejudice and violence encountered by black Americans ❧ A. Locke promoted “folk drama” that focused on authentic black themes and characters but without emphasizing racial oppression 41

African American Playwrights ❧ The most prolific playwrights ❧ Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston: Mule Bone ❧ Georgia Douglas Johnson: Blue Blood, Plumes, A Sunday Morning in the South ❧ Wrote both types of drama often combining strands of each type in a single work 42

African American Plays ❧ Plays with historical themes and subjects ❧ African heritage ❧ Slavery ❧ Heroic ancestors ❧ Served to inform audiences about the traditions of black culture and to reinforce racial pride. 43

Little Theatre Movement ❧ A nation-wide movement to create community-centered, amateur, not for profit, theatres where plays, mostly oneacts, could be inexpensively produced ❧ Federal Theatre Project

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