MODERNISM IN AMERICAN DRAMA

EUGENE O’NEILL

SUSAN GLASPELL

THE BLACK PLAYWRIGHTS

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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

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Types of Modernist Drama

Late-naturalist drama of GermanyShaw’s plays in EnglandEarly absurdists in FranceItalian and Russian FuturismExpressionist drama at largeMuch of Dada and SurrealismIndividual elements in Brecht

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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

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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).

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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

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Types of Modernist DramaThe second type:

- oriented more towards things structural and technical and linguistic

- the intimate, the oblique, the implied, the elusive, the subdued, the symbolic

Maeterlinck, HofmannsthalChekovYeatsLorca

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Expressionist DramaA hybrid formAttempted 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 DramaMusic 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 tragedyRenovated the soliloquy and the use of masksExperimented with the use of film on the stageWrote about miscegenation and incest

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O’Neill’s ContributionPlanned multi-play cyclesDomesticated Greek classical tragedyStrindbergian domestic dramaIbsenesque social playsIrish dramatic tone poemsExpressionist 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

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O’Neill’s Work

Continued with realistic sea playsExpressionist agonsEnded 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

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O’Neill’s First PlaysMelodramas, 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 Playersfrom top left (clockwise) James Light, Christine Ell, "Jig"Cook , O'Neill, Charles Collins. Painting by Charles Ellis.

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Experimentations with Expressionism /1920-1924/The Emperor JonesThe Hairy ApeAll God's Chillun Got WingsDesire Under the Elms:

- Phaedra-Hippolytus-Theseus myth

- Race and class conflicts, sexual bondage

- American tragedy modelled on the classic Greek plays

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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

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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

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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…”

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O’Neill’s Dramatic ArtThe falsity, the betrayal of ideal, the substitution

of artificial for real valuesAll 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

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O’Neill’s Dramatic ArtOffer 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 ArtIn 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

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O’Neill’s Dramatic ArtEscape 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 ArtBecame 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 dissolvedDrawn 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 curseVery closely associated with the

Provincetown Players Her task was much more difficult than the

task of her male contemporariesShe had not only to break with the past but

to divide herself from the rich literary tradition of her literary foremothers

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Glaspell’s WorkTrifles (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 ArtFresh, innovative, and challengingTrifles,the story of Minnie Wright, epitomizes early

modernism’s attitude toward the past and its artAdvocates the rejection of what is bad from the past,

what constricts the charactersPreserves what is good, and what could give birth to

originalityModernist 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.

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From The Road to the TempleAfter 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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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...”

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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 ArtUntil 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”

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Glaspell’s ArtBernice (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 PlaywrightsPlays 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

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African American Playwrights

The most prolific playwrightsLangston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston:

Mule BoneGeorgia Douglas Johnson: Blue Blood,

Plumes, A Sunday Morning in the SouthWrote both types of drama often combining

strands of each type in a single work

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African American Plays

Plays with historical themes and subjectsAfrican heritageSlaveryHeroic ancestorsServed to inform audiences about the

traditions of black culture and to reinforce racial pride.

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Little Theatre Movement

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

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.

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.