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

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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

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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 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

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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
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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.
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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
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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 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

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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

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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
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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.
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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...”

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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 Art
❧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”

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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

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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
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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.
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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

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