MODERNISM IN AMERICAN DRAMA

1
MODERNISM IN AMERICAN DRAMA

• EUGENE ONEILL
• SUSAN GLASPELL
• THE BLACK PLAYWRIGHTS

2
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
3
Types of Modernist Drama

• Late-naturalist drama of Germany
• Shaws 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
4
American examples

• The Provincetown Players founded in 1915 by
  George Cram Cook, Susan Glaspells 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
5
George Cram Cook /1883-1924/
5
6
The Provincetown Players

• One thing were 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
7
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
8
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

8
9
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

9
10
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
  

10
11
Expressionist Drama

• Music and sound effects helped communicate the
  varying emotional states of the plays 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 Treadwells Machinal

11
12
Eugene ONeill /1888-1953/
12
13
ONeills Contribution

• Eugene ONeill 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

13
14
ONeills Contribution

• Planned multi-play cycles
• Domesticated Greek classical tragedy
• Strindbergian domestic drama
• Ibsenesque social plays
• Irish dramatic tone poems
• Expressionist melodramas

14
15
ONeills Life and Work

• The son of one of the famous melodramatic actors
  in America, James ONeill
  
• Survived a suicide attempt and tuberculosis
• Started writing melodrama in 1912

15
16
ONeills 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

16
17
ONeills 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.
17
18
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

18
19
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

19
20
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

20
21
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

21
22
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

22
23
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.

23
24
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

24
25
ONeills 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
  Bigsbys 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

25
26
ONeills 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

26
27
ONeills 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

27
28
ONeills 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

28
29
ONeills 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

29
30
ONeills 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 languageno longer possible for anyone
  living in the discordant, broken, faithless
  rhythm of our time

30
31
Susan Glaspell /1876-1948/
31
32
Susan Glaspell and Modernism
the domestic and sentimental novelists of
popular fiction from the 19th century. The
nineteenth century was dominated by the cult of
domesticity, the idea that womans sphere was
limited to the home, but that within this sphere
she was empowered to create a haven of morality,
order, comfort, and sympathy. This myth in
America was often joined with the frontier myth
and the home was seen as the only refuge in the
wilderness, a cultural icon that would persist in
American drama for decades.

• 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

32
33
Glaspells Work

• Trifles (1916)
• The People (1917)
• The Outside (1917)
• Womans 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.

33
34
Glaspells Art

• Fresh, innovative, and challenging
• Trifles,the story of Minnie Wright, epitomizes
  early modernisms 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
  

34
35
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.

35
36
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 wasnt sure which, but sure
  enough about the two women, who hung back,
  reluctant to enter that kitchen.

36
37
How she wrote the play Trifles 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...

37
38
Glaspells Art

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

38
39
Glaspells Art
which is the last of her Provincetown plays. It
is technically the most modernist of her work
because of its highly fragmented language,
characterized by the abundant use of dashes, and
expressionist images such as the greenhouse and
the thwarted tower, which could be interpreted
as representative of the mental state of the
characters. The change lies in her realization
that the World War I reinforced the repressive,
xenophobic, and biased elements of society as
epitomized in the Espionage Act of 1917 and the
Sedition Act of 1918.

• Until 1918 her plays representative of the
  avant-garde 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

39
40
Glaspells Art
In a sense, this play can be regarded as the dut
iful examplar of modernism between the wars when
art was supposed to exist, timelessly, for and in
itself, with little relation to the life around
it, the type of art praised by the rapidly
ascending New Critics. She thought that this
quality could be her only claim to immortality
but nevertheless all of the women modernist
playwrights were erased from the literary canon.
This was the case of Sophie Treadwell and most of
all of Djuna Barnes

• Bernice (1919)
• Inheritors (1921)
• The Verge (1921)
• First novel, Fugitives Return /1929/
• Returned to the theatre to write her Pulitzer
  Prize play Alisons House /1930/, a play about
  Emily Dickinson - a conventional epilogue to a
  radical career

40
41
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

41
42
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

42
43
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

43
44
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.

44
45
Little Theatre Movement
On the whole, modernism in American drama
appeared in many different disguises and as with
modernism in general, it will be more precise to
talk about the modernisms on the American stage
than about one unified whole. Moreover, many of
the tendencies exhibited by these early
modernists would be picked up by some of the
subsequent playwrights, modified and transformed
to answer the post-WWII realities.

• A nation-wide movement to create
  community-centered, amateur, not for profit,
  theatres where plays, mostly one-acts, could be
  inexpensively produced
• Federal Theatre Project

45