American Drama Since 1918: an Informal History

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA LIBRARY COLLEGE LIBRARY THE AMERICAN DRAMA SINCE 1918 An Informal History by JOSEPH WOOD RRUTCH Professor of English • Columbia University RANDOM HOUSE'NEW YORK H 9 4* COPYRIGHT, 1939 ? BY RANDOM HOUSE, INC. Second Printing MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AMERICAN BOOK-STRATFORD PRESS, INC., NEW YORK TO RAYMOND WEAVER 165224 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from LYRASIS Members and Sloan Foundation http://archive.org/details/americandramasinOOkrut CONTENTS Foreword ix I. The New American Drama and the European Tradition 3 II. Three New Realists 26 III. Tragedy: Eugene O'Neill 73 IV. Comedy 134 V. The Drama of Social Criticism 226 VI. The Poetic Drama: Maxwell Anderson 286 Index 319 FOREWORD The purpose of this book is to offer both a connected account and some critical evaluation of playwriting in America since the World War. It is by no means a complete record of theatrical production. Such a record for most of the period covered may be found in Mr. Burns Mantle's annual volumes. It does not always mention all the plays written by even highly successful or important authors. In certain cases the plays seem to me to have little or no significance. On the other hand the intention is to provide what the subtitle promises—an informal history—rather than an essay on this or that aspect of the contemporary American drama. A great many plays are discussed and the attempt is made to provide a con- tinuous account of the course of playwriting in the United States during the two decades ending with the present. I cannot, of course, hope that anyone will be entirely satisfied with either my inclusions or my omissions. For the task which I have undertaken I can claim at least one qualification : I have seen x Foreword performed on the stage nearly all of the plays men- tioned. The dates in parentheses refer to the first productions in New York. I am deeply indebted to Professor Dorothy Brewster who read the proofs. She does not neces- sarily share my opinions. J. W. K. THE AMERICAN DRAMA SINCE 1918 An Informal History CHAPTER I THE NEW AMERICAN DRAMA AND THE EUROPEAN TRADITION In FEBRUARY, 1915, an enthusiastic group of young amateurs calling themselves the Washington Square Players waved a solemn manifesto in the face of New York drama critics and opened the Bandbox Theater near the corner of 57th Street and Third Avenue. Just a year and a half later another group, equally young and equally enthusiastic, came home from a summer on Cape Cod to take posses- sion of a stable in MacDougal Street to be known thereafter as the Provincetown Theater. Eugene O'Neill acted a role in Bound East for Cardiff, the first playlet on its first bill, and thus the New Amer- ican Theater, which had been born once on Third Avenue, was born again in MacDougal Street. The Neighborhood Playhouse, established in Grand Street just before the opening of the Bandbox, pre- sented European plays almost exclusively. For rea- sons we shall presently come to, the starting point provided by any of these events is more than a little — 4 The American Drama Since 1918 arbitrary, but a more suitable one would be difficult to discover. By this time the "modern drama" was already an old story in several of the capitals of Europe. Ibsen was already a classic and more than twenty years had passed since Bernard Shaw, tired of scolding the English managers for their neglect of a non-existent new English drama, had decided to create it for himself. America was far behind the times, and our stage knew Ibsen, Shaw, and the rest chiefly in so far as certain isolated plays had succeeded in estab- lishing themselves commercially on Broadway. In- deed, these foreign masters were beginning to be almost passe as literature without having exerted a very profound influence on the native stage, and the fact had consequences not wholly unfortunate. By 1915 new thought was no longer so very new. The original manifesto of the Washington Square Players was a pastiche of now familiar phrases "the future of the American theater—experiment and initiative—commercial managers—not organ- ized for purposes of profit—if you are in sympathy with our aims ..." Its program was vague and there was no hint of commitment to any social or political program, not even of an enthusiastic concern with the particular variety of moral radicalism associated with the "free theater" in England, Germany, and France. As subsequent productions showed, the new group was nothing if not eclectic in its taste and it New American Drama and European Tradition 5 was rather more precious than earnest. Its first offer- ing consisted of four short pieces of which one was Maeterlinck's vaguely mystical Interior. The other three were Lawrence Langner's Licensed, Edward Goodman's Eugenically Speaking and a pantomime called Another Interior, supposed to take place in a human stomach and having Gastric Juice for its hero. All three playlets were more impudently than se- riously satiric, mildly shocking rather than grim, and the product of authors obviously quite as much under the influence of the newly fashionable Have- lock Ellis as impressed by the gloom of Ibsen or the puritanism of Shaw. During the four years of its existence the Washington Square group produced sixty-two one-act plays and six long dramas includ- ing Ghosts and Andreyev's The Life of Man. But its most characteristic achievements were playlets like Susan Glaspell's youthfully brutal Trifles, or prank- ish satires like Philip Moeller's Helenas Husband. The atmosphere was predominantly bohemian and the rebelliousness of the group was something which it took a great deal more lightheartedly than rebelliousness had ever been taken by the Ibsenites or the Shavians. The early productions at the Provincetown The- ater were almost as varied as those of the Wash- ington Square Players but its first guiding spirit, George Cram Cook, was of the stuff of which cult 6 The American Drama Since 1918 leaders are made and from the beginning its writers were more earnestly conscious of their mission. With the exception of O'Neill, none attained great fame as a playwright but several—John Reed, Floyd Dell, Maxwell Bodenheim and Mike Gold—either were or were about to become prominent literary radicals. It is significant, perhaps, that whereas the Wash- ington Square Players disbanded in the spring of 1918 because America's entry into the War had produced an atmosphere unfavorable to their activities, the Provincetown Theater continued under var- ious directors to house productions straight through the War years and offered its stage to O'Neill's early plays one after another. Inevitably a discussion of the development of the contemporary American drama begins with some reference to these two groups. They made the first successful attempts to provide a local habitation for the unconventional American playwright. When the Washington Square Players were reorganized after the Armistice as the Theatre Guild, they presently built the only "art theater" which has ever succeeded in competing directly with the commercial manager in New York. It would, on the other hand, be easy to create a false impression by sug- gesting that the development of the American playwright was more closely associated than it actually was with the activities of these groups. Under vari- ous leaderships, the Provincetown group continued New American Drama and European Tradition 7 for a number of years and the Guild is still an important institution, but neither has ever had any mo- nopoly of important American plays and the serious American drama very soon ceased to find the doors of the commercial manager closed against it. Broad- way learned much from the Provincetown Theater and from the Washington Square Players 5 but it learned quickly, and the history of the American drama during the past twenty years is almost as much a part of the history of regular commercial productions as it is the history of any art theater. This fact raises a question. To what extent may we speak of the modern American drama as of something which began at a definite time and which has exhibited characteristics marked enough to fur- nish the basis for a satisfactory definition? Certainly the playwrights who created it form no school and are the common disciples of no acknowledged mas- ter, either native or foreign. Indeed, until the recent rise of the little company of devoted Marxians, none proclaimed himself, as Shaw for example had done, the protagonist of a set of definitely formulated ideas. If individuals occasionally drew up manifes- toes there was never any general agreement upon any set of propositions. It is plain that even the Washington Square Play- ers were clearer concerning what they did not want than what they did. They wanted whatever the established theater would have none of 3 and in the 8 The American Drama Since 1918 beginning that included a great deal—the esoteric, the radical, the intellectual, and the merely shocking. The influence of Ibsen and Shaw was plain in some of their productions, but they were not com- mitted to the aims or methods of either. Maeterlinck was just as welcome because, if Maeterlinck resem- bled Shaw and Ibsen in no other respect, he re- sembled them in having little appeal for the Broad- way manager. For a similar reason Susan Glaspell was an equally "advanced" playwright, whether she was composing the determinedly grim Trifles or the naughtily Freudian Suppressed Desires.

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