Nasrullah 1

Topic: Strength of American Drama is experimentation.

Being different from others is natural, but a conscious attempt to be different is natural or it is

not, it can be argued, but this is a fact that no nation has been obsessed with the idea of being

different as was the American nation in the beginning of twentieth century. This craze of

being different influenced their literature, and whatever language structure, themes, literary

traditions they were following earlier, they rejected them, or modified them.

If we talk about American drama, there is no unique feature in American drama, if anything

can define it, it is experimentation. This experimentation is mostly the experimentation with

theme, and then with the technique of expression. To be an American dramatist, especially

modern American dramatist was to be an experimenter. If we look at history of American

drama, it has progressed like the nation itself. American drama grew out of the different

economic, political, social, and cultural changes that occurred in its history.

If we look at history, in 1800 there were just a few theaters with perhaps 150 actors in all, up

and down the eastern seacoast, when the population of New York City itself was still not

much more than 50,000 people, but as the country expanded dynamically, so did the theater.

By 1885 it is estimated that there were 5000 playhouses in at least 3500 cities great and small

throughout the expanded country, and somewhere between 50,00 and 70,00 actors, many of

whom before 1850 were in fact English-born rather than Americans. At that time, there were

two favorite themes, the evils of drink and the evils of slavery. Ethnic plays were also

popular. The American Negro was portrayed in “The Octroon” or “Life in Louisiana”, the

Irish in “The Colleen Bawn”, and “The Mulligan”, the Chinese in “A Trip to Chinatown”,

and the American Indian in “The Indian Princess”. There were plays on American historical

themes such as Bronson Howard’s “Saratoga” and “Shenandoah”.(Gabriner,Paul)

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By the end of nineteenth century and beginning of twentieth century, Industrial Revolution

and new psychological theories resonated throughout American culture, American society

shifted from an agrarian to an industrial society. Experimenting American dramatists found

inspiration in the intellectual "arguments" of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Herbert

Spencer and especially the psychoanalytical concepts of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.

By the end of the 19th century American drama was moving steadily toward realism,

rejecting melodrama. Melodramas were typically overflowing with emotion, set in

mysterious locations, and peopled with stereotypical characters: heartless villains, heroines in

distress, and strong heroes who rescued the heroines. In the beginning of the 20th century, a

new trend became evident. This was realism, which was a revolt against the melodramatic

excesses of the romantic style. Realism remained the dominant trend of the 20th century in

both comedies and tragedies. (Gabriner, Paul)

American drama achieved recognition with the psychological realism of plays by Eugene

O’Neill. He was prominent during the 1920s and 1930s, writing nearly 50 plays. He

examined the use of masks onstage, explored inner monologues, developed an American

brand of expressionism, and firmly established American dramatic realism. O’Neill brought

to the stage a richness of detail and psychological depth rarely seen before in American

drama. His dialogue was sensitive to regional and ethnic vernacular, and his three-

dimensional characterizations have rarely been equaled. Few play-wrights in American

theatre have made use of their personal life – family, experiences, and inadequacies – with

similar candor. O’Neill’s dramas explore his alcoholism, his life at sea, his father’s

disappointments, his mother’s drug addiction, his brother’s suicide by alcohol, and his own

shortcomings. His plays probe the American Dream, race relations, class conflicts, sexuality,

human aspirations, disappointment, alien-ation, psychoanalysis, and the American family

with a thoroughness and intensity at a level his contemporaries could barely contemplate. He
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wrote about the wealthy and the underclass with equal perception. His plays investigate

modern relationships and the human frailties they conceal.(American Drama.web) I am

focusing on Eugene O’Neil as he is the person who is known as “Shakespeare of American

drama”, and can be taken as a representative of American drama. “O’neil was a tireless

experimenter who experimented with a variety of dramatic forms and modes. Even when he

succeeded in one form or style, he would move on to another one, and this experimentation

continued from the beginning of his career upto the very end. He started his career with

writing plays in the realistic tradition. In his early plays he rendered life and speech

authentically. He did not abandon colloquial dialogue until late in the nineteen-twenties, and

then only for good reasons- and he returned to it in 1939 with the writing of The Iceman

cometh. He depicted environment scrupulously. And he was virtually the first serious

American dramatist of any standing to bring characters from all walks of life on to the stage,

noting their origins of race and background with sympathy and understanding. It would not

be difficult to sustain the point that he gave us social pictures and socially-conditioned, if not

altogether socially-determined, actions with greater credibility and vitality than most “social

dramatists” of nineteen-thirties and since then. He is, indeed, historically important as the

first American to make naturalist prevail on our stage” (Tilak, 60)

The Hairy Ape (1922) is what O’Neill calls a “blend” of expressionism and naturalism. It

portrays Yank, a coal stoker who labors on a steamship, yet yearns for life “above.” Yank is

also a poet of sorts, expressing in rough language his physical prowess and lumpen-

proletariat alienation. Because of his “ape-like” qualities, he is able to shovel coal at

breakneck speed; because of Yank, the engines of the steamship (symbolizing modern

machinery) possess an incessant rhythm. Yet he becomes lonely; spying women on the top

deck, he seeks intimacy. Yank is intelligent but uneducated, a brute with a mind whose life in

the bowels of a steamship is an allegorical hell. His language, a mixture of Brooklyn dialect
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and working-class gusto, is filled with self-images of modern, industrial machismo. Yank’s

existential question, “Where do I fit in?” is a running motif for O’Neill’s characters. In the

bowels of the ship, Yank is a necessity. But up top and among the bourgeoisie, he is a mere

cog. Like Robert Mayo and Brutus Jones, he is destroyed by his inefficacy in a world that has

no use for him. These characters are driven by what one O’Neill biographer calls the author’s

own “questing spirit” as well as the feeling of “not ‘belonging’”. Yank may be the force

behind technology, but once his usefulness expires, he is just an “ape” (in fact, he dies in a

cage alongside a primate). In the play modern technology is found wanting; it is the hand of

progress, but crushes the humanity it is meant to serve.(American drama.web)

Other American dramatists such as Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams crafted forceful

statements of psychological and spiritual displacement, loss of connections, loneliness, self-

deception, and retrogression into sexual hedonism. In confronting problems of the "lost"

individual in an industrial, "mechanized" society, they lay bare human passions, exposed the

raw tensions of the American family, and challenged Victorian/Puritan "morality. To speak to

a world in which the individual had been increasingly cut loose from the traditional "anchors"

of religion, socio/political alignments, family relationships, and a defined self-

image.(history.web)

The protagonist we see in modern American dramas is no longer an idealistic "doer" who

ventured out to "save the day." He is mostly an alienated tragic hero seeking to "belong" in an

eroded "jungle" society, or an "everyman" trying to "cope" through false compensations of

"pipe dreams," or a muted survivor living a life of "quiet desperation," a victim of societal

pressure, animal desires, and loss of integrity. (history.web)

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“American modernism” in general began at the turn of the century and rose to prominence

during mid-century. It is defined by liberal values associated with free love, free speech, and,

to a certain degree, political anarchy. In addition, there was a rejection of sentimentality that

had been characteristic of American provincialism; advocacy of the suffragette movement

and women’s rights; and commitment to uncovering the “truth” in the human condition

The presuppositions of Impressionism, Expressionism, and Surrealism serve as inspirations

for the outburst of evocative imagery and symbolism into both diction and technical

directions. Lighting, music, visual props, and set design became an integral part of dramatic

scripts, deepening characterization, punctuating dramatic tensions, reinforcing theme.(Elias.

Web)

If we look at all these points and ideas, Tennessee William’s structure, characterization,

language, Eugene O’Neil’s realism and psychological insight into characters life, Arthur

Miller’s critique on American dream, his satire on capitalism in “death of a salesman”, and

then in 1960’s a new trend and form in American drama, which is “the theatre of the absurd”,

we can conclude that the strength of American drama is its most prominent feature i.e

experimentation.
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Bibliography

 Tilak, Raghukul. The Emperor Jones, india. Print.

 http://neoenglishsystem.blogspot.com/2010/10/eugene-oneills-american-drama-

and.html

 http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/~/media/ArtsEdge/LessonPrintables/grade-9-

12/sourthern_puritanism_history_of_modern_american_drama.ashx

 Gabriner, paul.

http://media.leidenuniv.nl/legacy/lezing%2020th%20century%20american%20drama.

pdf

 http://people.hum.aau.dk/ics/project/english/project_wiis_S04.pdf