Week 1 – Introduction – Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Provincetown –
4 October, 2010
If possible, read these notes whilst looking at the Powerpoint presentation which
accompanies them. It can be found on the wiki page entitled ‘Introduction’.
1) The Nineteenth-Century American Theatre
Nineteenth-century theatre in America was dominated by revivals of English plays,
and in particular, melodramas (such as Tom Taylor’s Our American Cousin (1858),
the play Lincoln was watching when he was assassinated by the actor, John Wilkes
Booth – see the excerpt from the play on the ‘introduction’ wiki page). It was also the
home of productions like minstrel shows, which usually featured white actors
‘blacking-up’ in order to ridicule African-Americans and their society. [See Powerpoint
for a typical poster for a minstrel act.]
The Irish-born playwright Dion Boucicault (c.1820-1890), came to America in the
1850s, and contributed to these early debates about race in his play The Octoroon
(1859), debates which ultimately culminated in the Civil War (1861-1865). The play is
set on an estate in Louisiana, owned by Judge Peyton. After Peyton’s death, the
estate eventually has to be put up for sale, along with all the slaves. Zoe, the
daughter of Judge Peyton by one of his slaves – the ‘octoroon’ of the title is a person
with one-eighth African ancestry – soon learns that her father forgot to give her her
freedom, meaning that she will also be put up for sale. McClosky, the overseer of the
plantation, is in love with Zoe, and determined to have her. Zoe however is in love
with Judge Peyton’s nephew, George, but because of Zoe’s mixed-blood ancestry,
they are forbidden to marry under the laws of antimiscegenation. [There is an excerpt
from the play’s auction scene on the wiki, and in the Powerpoint two slides about
slave auctions.]
Although in practical terms Boucicault specialised in what came to be known as the
‘sensation scene’ – The Octoroon requires a steamer to be blown up on stage, in The
Poor of New York, he burns down a whole house, and in Pauvrette an Alpine
avalanche sovers the stage in several feet of snow – plays like The Octoroon
gestured towards a new direction for drama; a moral dimension of great complexity.
Inspired by European authors like Shaw, Ibsen, and Chekhov, more naturalistic plays
began to be written in the latter part of the nineteenth-century, and this increasing
concern with naturalism was complemented by an increasing desire for realistic
settings and stage effects.
Naturalistic plays like James A. Hearne’s Margaret Fleming (1890) frequently dealt
with moral concerns. Margaret Fleming, for example, tells the story of factory owner
whose working-class mistress gives birth to his child. Margaret, the wife, discovers
this, and adopts the child. In a shift away from the tone of melodrama, it is
ambiguous at the end of the play as to whether whether she will forgive her husband
for his actions. Gerald M. Berkowitz (in American Drama of the Twentieth Century,
p.14), points out that there are still elements of melodrama here: Margaret – in a
highly metaphorical turn – goes blind during the play, but the play’s content also
suggests a real engagement with real life. [See the accompanying Powerpoint on the
‘introduction’ wiki page for an example of the more realistic dialogue of Margaret
Fleming.]
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On the stage, David Belasco (1853-1931) began to introduce naturalistic lighting
effects and realistic settings onto Broadway. [See Powerpoint for a photo of Belasco.]
Belasco went to great lengths to reproduce reality on stage: he would change the
lighting to fit the natural colouring of his actors’ faces, and recreated or even bought
up realistic staging. For the play The Easiest Way, staged in 1910s, he visited a
theatrical boarding house in New York City, bought up a whole room and transported
it back to the theatre.
2. Provincetown and Eugene O’Neill
Plays like Margaret Fleming and Belasco’s innovations, sets the stage for the
Provincetown Players, a company that formed in 1915, and was committed to the
staging of realistic, American plays. [See Powerpoint for photograph of Provincetown
around 1900.]
Two of its most important founder members were the writer George Cram Cook
(1873-1924) and his wife, the novelist and playwright Susan Glaspell. [See
Powerpoint for photos of Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell.] Cram Cook and the
Provincetown Players are frequently regarded as the founders of American theatre.
The Washington Square Players, working at the same time, in New York, were also
significant, but they frequently staged European plays, and did not have an in-house
playwright of Eugene O’Neill’s calibre.
Despite the self-professed Americanness of the Players, there is some irony that the
key influence on Cram Cook’s philosophy was classical Greek theatre, which he
admired for bringing together poetry, philosophy, drama, tragedy in some kind of
synthesis. He claimed that: ‘[i]If there is nothing to take the place of the common
religious purpose and passion of the primitive group, out of which the Dionysian
dance was born, no new vital drama can arise in any people.’ (Quoted in Christopher
Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century Theatre, v.1, p.11.) For Cram
Cook, modern theatre needed to draw upon, even replace religious rites. But this
grasp of religion was an aesthetic one. Cram Cook did not subscribe to the ethical
teachings of Christianity: he had left his wife and children for Glaspell.
To create this synthetic art form, drawing on many disciplines, Cram Cook formed a
community of artists, who were also journalists, painters, political radicals: people like
Louise Bryant, a short story writer and playwright; John Reed, a journalist who was
to spend the most significant days of his life in Russia, joining the Bolsheviks; and
Hutchins Hapgood, a journalist and anarchist.
The Provincetown Players (as befitting Cram Cook’s idealism and several Players’
anarchism), aspired to be anti-materialistic, and was thus definitively anti-Broadway.
This was a significant statement in itself, since until the 1950s, Broadway held a tight
grip on the world of professional theatre in America, and anything staged anywhere
else was given short shrift by critics and audiences. (See Berkowitz, American
Drama of the Twentieth Century, pp.6-10 for more details.)
The Players vowed that their plays should be relevant to society, and not simply
entertainments. Although they were inspired by Europe (Strindberg, Ibsen, Shaw,
and Chekhov in particular), the Provincetown theatre was very definitely an American
theatre, and the Players performed their own plays. Although they began they spent
their 1915 season in Provincetown, in an old wharf house owned by a friend of the
company, they moved to New York in 1916, and settled at 133, Macdougal Street in
Greenwich Village, which at the time was a thriving artistic community. At O’Neill’s
urging, the company’s name was changed to the Playwrights’ Theatre, as if to assert
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their belief in new writing. In a further criticism of commercialism, they refused to give
free tickets to critics, removing themselves entirely from the Broadway culture. [See
Powerpoint for a shot of the wharf house, burning down just a few days before the
season was to open. It was saved.]
Its is important to mention the importance of Susan Glaspell as one of the key writers
of the group (her plays included the one-act play Trifles, The Verge, and Alison’s
House). She used straightforward language to deal with the relationships between
men and women, and the plays often concerned socially-unacceptable issues, such
as extramarital desire.
However, Eugene O’Neill was the key writer, and the staging of Bound East for
Cardiff was a key event. It was first produced at the Provincetown wharfhouse in
1915, and then at the Playwrights’ Theatre in 1916. [See Powerpoint for a photo of
O’Neill and others setting the stage for the play, and also for an excerpt from the
script.] Both he and many of the other playwrights working at the Playwrights’
Theatre were intent on forging and developing an American voice. In Bound East for
Cardiff, as in all of O’Neill’s one-act plays, there is an emphasis upon realistic
dialogue and realistic plotting – Bound East, for example, opens in the middle of a
sailor telling a story, and proceeds to depict the death of a sailor, not through any
action on stage, but as a result of a fall that occurred even before the play began.
But despite this concern with real voices, dialogue, character, and action, O’Neill was
fascinated with experimentation in the same way that Cram Cook wanted to stage
theatre differently. This was the same writer, after all, who wrote Before Breakfast
(1916), a monologue in which a young wife talks to her husband, whose only feature
the audience see is his hand, as he shaves offstage. At the end of the play he slits
his throat, and the woman becomes hysterical. O’Neill is the same writer too who
tried to drive his audiences insane by making them see ghosts in Where the Cross is
Made (1918). This combination – of realism and experimentation – was crucial in
both O’Neill’s and the Provincetown Players’ developments – in the case of O’Neill, it
brought him success, and in the case of the Players, that success was their
inevitable failure, since it represented that hated commercialism against which they
had fought so hard.
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