AMERICAN EXPRESSIONISM AND THE NEW WOMAN: GLASPELL, TREADWELL, BONNER AND A DRAMATURGY OF SOCIAL CONSCIENCE Rytch Barber The study of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American theater history has consistently and notoriously taken a backseat to its European counterpart. Since theater in the United States did not evolve within, or even alongside, the academy or any particular philosophical school—and made but little attempt toward a home- grown avant-garde movement until after World War II—the study of much American theater history tends to read as if it can only be understood in three parts: the froth and frivolity of melodrama, the groundbreaking (but anomalous) work of Eugene O’Neill, and the avant-garde intellectualism of post-World War II theater and performance art. It is as if until the United States could develop its own avant-garde movement, the study of its drama and performance could not possibly be worthy of the scholarly attention lavished upon European movements such as symbolism or futurism. Because the notion of the avant-garde has been ensconced as the ideal of theatrical expression in the twentieth century, the playwrights of what has come to be known as American expressionism have been cast as mere shadows of the real avant- garde movement which took place in Europe. The employment of expressionist ideals and techniques by American playwrights such as Susan Glaspell, Elmer Rice, Sophie Treadwell, and even Eugene O’Neill has thus consistently been qualified—even derided—by theater historians and performance scholars as a passing fad or a brief jump on the stylistic bandwagon to financially benefit the popular, mainstream theater. While it is certainly true that these playwrights were not working from the same locus as writers like Ernst Toller, Walter Hasenclever, or Georg Kaiser, they were 94 Rytch Barber undoubtedly searching for means to theatrically communicate something about the human condition in the wake of World War I and the rapid progress of urbanization and mechanization across the American landscape. Expressionism not only offered them this opportunity, but also provided them with the ability to imbue their drama with a more nuanced communication of their individual, lived experiences of the world, thereby enabling a notable shift in American theatrical writing which continues to inspire and inform contemporary playwrights. By de-emphasizing the litmus test of the avant-garde and instead focusing attention upon the relationship between expressionist dramaturgy and the communicability of experience, and by examining texts by Susan Glaspell, Sophie Treadwell, and Marita Bonner in that light, American expressionism can be resituated, not as a pale reflection of the German original, but as a vibrant movement with its own aspirations to enact change both on and off the American stage. The works of these playwrights not only offer sites for sound investigation of the translation of German expressionist models into American innovation, but collectively point to the development of a decidedly feminist dramaturgy given voice through the particular means of communication afforded by expressionism. In the hands of these women playwrights, the tools of expressionism enable them to experiment with both form and content. Assertions by theater historians and literary critics that expressionism in the United States was little more than the implementation of novelty for novelty’s sake are belied by the women who used expressionistic techniques to intertwine the personal with the political and place that dichotomy firmly at the center of feminist thought. Susan Glaspell is undeniably the pioneer of this vanguard, her radical play, The Verge, marking one of the first theatrical examples, not only of a particularly American version of expressionism, but also of a well-articulated, politically-charged feminist point of view. Expressionism’s call for the objectification of one’s subjective experience of the world, then, would seem to serve as auspicious terrain for Glaspell and those who came shortly after her, both to explore the limits of dramaturgy and to enunciate a specific feminist perspective which highlights the lived experiences of women. .