American Literature: DRAMA
American Literature: Drama
I INTRODUCTION
American Literature: Drama, literature intended for performance, written by Americans in the English language. American drama begins in the American colonies in the 17th century and continues to the present. See also Drama and Dramatic Arts.
Most American plays of the 18th and 19th centuries strongly reflected British influence. In fact, no New York City theater season presented more American plays than British plays until 1910. The reasons behind this phenomenon are complex, but a common language and the ready availability of British plays and British actors offer the most obvious explanation.
Although the British repertory dominated the American stage for so long, American drama had begun to diverge from British drama by the time of Andrew Jackson’s presidency, from 1828 to 1836. British plays, which typically reflected the attitudes and manners of the upper classes, were by then in conflict with more egalitarian American values. Despite this growing divergence, British actors, theater managers, and plays continued to cross the Atlantic Ocean with regularity, and most American plays copied British models until the early 20th century. For this reason some critics claim that American drama was not born until the end of World War I (1914-1918).
By the end of the 19th century American drama was moving steadily toward realism, illuminating the rough or seamy side of life and creating more believable characters. Realism remained the dominant trend of the 20th century in both comedies and tragedies. American drama achieved international recognition with the psychological realism of plays by Eugene O’Neill and their searing investigation of characters’ inner lives. As the century advanced, the number of topics considered suitable for drama broadened to encompass race, gender, sexuality, and death.
II BEGINNINGS: 1600S AND 1700S
Because settlement was sparse and living conditions were arduous in the American colonies, little theatrical activity took place before the mid-18th century. The first-known English-language play from the colonies, Ye Bare and Ye Cubb (1665), is lost. The play’s existence is known as a result of the controversy it aroused in the Virginia Colony, where a lawsuit was filed to prevent the play from opening. Several colonies had passed antitheater laws based on a Puritan belief that the seventh of the Ten Commandments prohibited dancing and stage plays.
The oldest surviving American play is Androborus by Robert Hunter (1714). Hunter, the New York Colony’s governor, published the cartoonish play as an attack on his political enemies, despite New York’s antitheater law. Intended for a reading public rather than a viewing audience, it established a tradition of political satire that became common fare in American drama of the 1700s.
Before more American plays had appeared, a company of British professional actors established a touring circuit in the 1750s with an all-British repertory. By the early 1760s this group was known as The American Company and American writers occasionally submitted plays to the actors, though few were produced. But in 1767 The American Company staged The Prince of Parthia, a tragedy by Thomas Godfrey, in Philadelphia. This is usually considered the first professional production of a play written by an American. The play itself is indistinguishable from imitations of the works of English dramatist William Shakespeare that abounded in in the late 1700s and early 1800s.
During the American Revolution (1775-1783), most professional actors moved to . Satirical plays were written as propaganda during the war, either supporting British control of the colonies or attacking it. British soldiers presented some of the pro-British plays. Few other plays were performed during the war years, although they were widely read and recited. The Battle of Brooklyn (1776), which was pro-British and written anonymously, presented rebel generals, including George Washington, as drunks, lechers, and cowards. The Blockade (1775), written by British General John Burgoyne, was performed in British-occupied Boston. The play’s ridicule of American soldiers was subsequently burlesqued in The Blockheads; or the Affrighted Officers (1776), written by an anonymous playwright identified only as a patriot. The Blockheads depicts British soldiers as so terrified of the Americans that they soil themselves rather than go outside to use the latrine. Mercy Otis Warren, who created several biting satires of the British, may have written The Blockheads as well. She remained the strongest American dramatic voice of the Revolution and championed the rebel cause in The Group (1775), a play that describes , called Blunderland, as a mother who eats her own children. The Patriots (1775?), a play by Robert Munford, was unusual in its appeal for a neutral stance and its attacks on both sides for their intolerance.
By the mid-1780s professional actors were touring in again. In 1787, when the Constitution of the was being written, Royall Tyler wrote The Contrast, the finest American play of the 18th century. This five-act comedy owes much to The School for Scandal (1777) by British playwright Richard Sheridan. Like Sheridan’s play, The Contrast is a comedy of manners that satirizes the customs of the upper classes. It compares British and American fashions and values and ultimately sides with what it sees as American candor and patriotism over British duplicity and artificiality. A masterful element of the play is the Yankee character Jonathan, whose honest innocence stands in stark contrast to the rumor-mongering and gossiping of the play’s British characters and the American characters who emulate them.
The 1700s also saw the first American play written by a woman reach the professional stage. The melodramatic comedy Slaves in Algiers (1794) by Susanna Rowson reflects troubles at that time with pirates along North Africa’s Barbary Coast who interfered with shipping and ran a white slave trade that involved selling girls and women into prostitution. Although the villain was treated comically, the conflict and resolution in this play indicated a move toward melodrama, a form of drama that became extremely popular in the 19th century.
III NATIONHOOD: THE 1800S
American plays, while still a minority, began to appear in the theater repertory in the 19th century. Although American plays were still styled after British models, their subject matter came to be based on specifically American incidents or themes. In the as in , many plays reflected the influence of romanticism, a European literary and artistic movement. Melodrama, with its outpourings of emotion, was the most prevalent dramatic form in the 19th century. Gothic melodramas, which emphasized horror, mystery, and the supernatural, and melodramas with tragic endings appeared regularly in American theaters from the 1790s on—in many cases adapted or translated from German, French, and British plays.
A American Themes
The first prolific writer of melodramas was William Dunlap, who also translated several German plays for production in the . Dunlap adapted Revolutionary War history in André (1798), a fictionalized account of the final days of British spy Major John André. In 1803 Dunlap reshaped the play as a musical, Glory of Columbia, in which George Washington is elevated to divine status. It was an early example of spectacle dominating dramatic content. Dunlap took spectacle even further in A Trip to Niagara (1828) by making the play’s purpose the duplication of scenic wonders that the audience would recognize, such as Niagara Falls.
Replication of local color, as in A Trip to Niagara, became the norm in 19th-century American melodrama and encompassed details of scenery, dialects, and gestures representative of specific locations; contemporary slang; and historical incidents. An early example is She Would Be a Soldier (1819) by Mordecai Noah. The play depicts the military spectacle of the War of 1812 between the and and features a heroine who disguises herself as a soldier to help the American cause and join the man she loves.
Although American drama of the 19th century usually followed European models, its subject matter often came from specifically American situations. Superstition (1824), a romantic tragedy by James Nelson Barker, for example, was set in New England of 1675. It discussed conflicts between Native Americans and white settlers, British interference in local affairs, Puritan xenophobia (fear and dislike of foreigners), and the idea of witchcraft. Superstition, in which the hero is tried and executed for witchcraft, was the first of many American plays to explore themes of isolationism, bigotry, and intolerance.
Barker’s The Indian Princess (1808) was the first professionally produced play to explore Native American characters and themes. It told the story of Pocahontas, a Native American who married an English colonist. A vogue for so-called Indian plays began in the 1820s and continued through the 1840s. While the Pocahontas story was popular in these plays, the most famous such drama was Metamora, or The Last of the Wampanoags (1829) by John Augustus Stone. It was written as a vehicle for American actor Edwin Forrest, who began in 1828 to offer annual awards for new plays on American themes and gave Metamora first prize. This melodrama was typical of most Indian plays in its setting in an earlier period of frontier history (the 1670s) and its characterization of the Native American hero. Metamora was viewed as natural but uncivilized—that is, living in harmony with nature but unfamiliar with what European settlers saw as civilized ways. The play put forth sentiments in harmony with white values and ended with Metamora’s inevitable death as the representative of a displaced race that cannot survive with the white man. By midcentury the waning importance of Indian plays was signaled by works that lampooned them. Irish-born playwright John Brougham, for example, wrote Metamora, or the Last of the Pollywogs (1847), a musical burlesque that made fun of the idealized and earnest original.
Also in the 1820s an African American acting troupe called the African Theatre was organized in New York City by dramatist William Henry Brown. The troupe produced plays by Shakespeare as well as African American plays, including The Drama of King Shotaway (1823) written by Brown. Although Indian plays of the 1820s and 1830s written by whites preached tolerance and understanding for Native Americans, white toughs chased Brown’s company off the stage, and no copies survive of the African American plays it produced.
American romantic plays took various forms. But without the American slant in subject matter, it would be difficult to distinguish these plays from British melodrama and romantic tragedy. What may be the best American play of the time, Francesca da Rimini (1855), is a romantic verse tragedy by George Henry Boker about an Italian noblewoman of the 14th century. It presents a villainous fool, a forbidden love affair, and a grotesque, semi-villainous hunchback in the role of the protagonist. However, nothing in the play’s characters and setting or its imitation of Shakespearean style marks the play as American.
B Forms of Melodrama
Melodrama was the most pervasive dramatic genre of the 19th century. Melodramas were typically overflowing with emotion, set in mysterious locations, and peopled with stereotypical characters: heartless villains, heroines in distress, and strong heroes who faced almost insurmountable odds in rescuing those heroines.
Frontier melodrama enthralled audiences in the first half of the 19th century. Nick of the Woods (1838) by Louisa Medina capitalized on the spectacle, romance, and danger of the frontier—for example, when the title character escapes his pursuers by plunging over a waterfall in a burning canoe. Playwrights repeatedly glorified backwoodsmen and moved toward making Native American characters into villains. One of the most successful frontier melodramas, Davy Crockett (1872) by Frank Murdoch, featured the so-called natural gentleman. This character had developed from an earlier view of the Native American but was now white and considered a gentleman, despite his life outside society and his uncouth ways.
Another form of melodrama was the temperance play, which illustrated the evils of alcohol and supported a ban on its sale. An example is The Drunkard; or, The Fallen Saved (1844) by W. H. Smith. Temperance plays had American locations and were staged frequently from the 1830s until the Civil War (1861-1865), though they continued to be produced until passage in 1917 of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcohol. Most of these plays included scenes of the acute stages of alcoholism; featured protagonists who are lured into alcoholism by villains; and showed the victims losing everything until the play’s climax, when they convert to abstinence and regain their life and family. Because the formulas of the plays accommodated moral lessons important to social crusaders and reformers of the period, temperance plays attracted audiences formerly opposed to the theater.
Melodramatic comedy appeared frequently in the 1800s, while comedies of manners, so popular in the previous century, were rare. A notable exception and one of the most successful and well-written plays of the 19th century was Fashion (1845) by Anna Cora Mowatt. Yet what most tellingly distinguished Fashion from earlier American comedies, such as The Contrast, was its melodramatic subplot and its heroine in distress. In the play, a newly wealthy woman attempts to marry her unwitting daughter to a morally corrupt French count. While satirizing Americans who imitate European manners, it also prescribed a cure for this so-called disease of imitation through extended exposure to a rural environment. Like frontier melodramas, the play urged Americans to resist British cultural models.
Racial, social, and economic tensions in American society before the Civil War period found a way into popular drama, most successfully in stage adaptations of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Sentimental versions of the novel filled so many professional stages that this material was performed more often than any other American play of the time. An 1852 adaptation by George Aiken was the most enduring version. Stage adaptations of novels proliferated from the 1850s until motion pictures took over the tradition in the 20th century. Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859), a stage adaptation of the novel The Quadroon (1856) by Mayne Reid, is the most well-crafted melodrama on the subject of slavery and racism in the mid-19th century. It combines local color from Louisiana, ethnic mixes, spectacle in the form of a burning steamboat, and a tragic heroine whose ancestry (a black great-grandparent) prevents her from marrying the man she loves.
C A Shift Toward Realism
Drama after the Civil War was marked by greater realism. Playwrights created plays in three-dimensional settings with characters speaking authentic-sounding dialogue. Beginning in the late 1870s European theater reached profound levels of psychological realism, prompted by the work of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. While melodramatic plots still prevailed in late-19th-century American theater, several American playwrights began to move in the direction of Ibsen. Shenandoah (1888) by Bronson Howard told the story of two friends who attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point together, fought on opposite sides in the Civil War, and loved the other’s sister. Despite the plot complications, the play revisited the war with realistic detail and found enormous popularity with audiences because of its combination of melodramatic tension and comic romance. A master of melodrama in a realistic style was actor and playwright William Gillette, who excited audiences with his own Civil War thrillers. In Secret Service (1896), for example, Gillette played a Northern spy working in Virginia.
Other late-19th-century playwrights whose works marked the gradual move toward realism included Steele Mackaye and William Dean Howells. In Hazel Kirke (1880) by Mackaye, the title character defies her father by marrying the man she loves, rather than the man he has chosen for her. A melodrama without a villain, the play was also notable for its more natural dialogue. Howells, best known as a novelist and critic, advocated realism in literature generally. Many of his short comic plays, such as The Mouse Trap (1889), were set in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood, focused on a single incident involving a married couple, and incorporated believable dialogue.
Howells also championed the work of other writers, including actor and playwright James Herne, whose work came closest to Ibsen’s. However, Herne’s Margaret Fleming (1890) upset too many American audiences with its harsh, raw treatment of infidelity and marital distress, and its power was recognized only by later generations. Herne had more success with gentler realism in such plays as Shore Acres (1892), in which two brothers finally gain an understanding of one another in old age.
IV THE MODERN ERA: THE 20TH CENTURY AND BEYOND
Realism continued to be a primary form of dramatic expression in the 20th century, even as experimentation in both the content and the production of plays became increasingly important. Such renowned American playwrights as Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller reached profound new levels of psychological realism, commenting through individual characters and their situations on the state of American society in general. As the century progressed, the most powerful drama spoke to broad social issues, such as civil rights and the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) crisis, and the individual’s position in relation to those issues. Individual perspectives in mainstream theater became far more diverse and more closely reflected the increasingly complex demographics of American society.
A Before World War I: 1900-1914
Realism reached new levels in the prewar work of David Belasco and Clyde Fitch, both of whom directed their own plays. Belasco’s The Girl of the Golden West (1905) sentimentally recreated a rural California town of the mid-19th-century Gold Rush days, while Fitch’s The City (1909) explored the evils of shady business deals and drug addiction. Realistic portrayals of sensational subjects also flourished in many plays of this era. For example, The Easiest Way (1909), by Eugene Walter, dramatized the situation of a kept woman whose acceptance of financial support from one man leads to her rejection by the man she loves.
Social tensions in the began to preoccupy dramatists in the years leading up to World War I (1914-1918). An early example of this was The Great Divide (1906) by William Vaughn Moody. The story of a New England woman’s move to Arizona, the play juxtaposed a Western, rural sensibility against an Eastern, urban one. The most prolific of prewar playwrights with a social agenda was Rachel Crothers, who addressed such issues as society’s double standard for men and women in A Man’s World (1909). The New York Idea (1906), a social satire by Langdon Mitchell, managed to entertain while commenting meaningfully on divorce. The American family, and its development and disintegration, was a recurring theme of playwrights at this time, and it would dominate much American playwriting for the rest of the 20th century.
B From World War I to World War II: 1914-1939
With World War I, European developments in modern drama arrived on the American stage in force. A host of American playwrights were intent on experimenting with dramatic style and form while also writing serious sociopolitical commentary. From this time forward ’s influence, although never absent, became much less important to American drama.
One of the first groups to promote new American drama was the Provincetown Players, founded in 1915 in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The play Trifles (1916) by Susan Glaspell, a subtle study in sexism, was among its first productions. The company was headed by Glaspell’s husband, George Cram Cook, but its star was Eugene O’Neill, the most experimental of American playwrights in the 1920s. O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape (1922) was one of the first plays to introduce expressionism in . Expressionism was a movement in the visual, literary, and performing arts that developed in in the early 20th century, in part in reaction against realism. Expressionism emphasized subjective feelings and emotions rather than a detailed or objective depiction of reality. The Hairy Ape depicts a rejected ship laborer who feels he belongs nowhere until he confronts an ape in a zoo. He sets the caged animal free only to be destroyed by it.
American expressionism was distinguished from its German forebears by a searching focus on the inner life of the central character, whose detailed depiction is in stark contrast to all other characters. The most famous example of American expressionism is The Adding Machine (1923) by Elmer Rice, a play that focuses on the emotional journey of the leading character, Mr. Zero, after he is replaced at his job by an adding machine. Rice was the first playwright to demonstrate silent film’s influence on theater in On Trial (1914), which borrowed the flashback technique. Some of the most novel expressionist experiments employed collage-like scenic effects and cacophonous musical and sound techniques to explore social issues. Such plays include Processional (1925), a depiction of a West Virginia miners’ strike by John Howard Lawson, and Machinal (1928), a bleak study by Sophie Treadwell of the destruction of a young woman.
B1 The Glory Days
The 1920s was the most prolific decade for professionally produced plays on the New York City stage. During the so-called glory days of the 1920s and early 1930s audiences saw incisive and exciting American drama. What Price Glory (1924) by Laurence Stallings and Maxwell Anderson was set in during World War I. Its portrayal of two soldiers’ behavior satirized the often-romanticized vision of warfare. Anderson tried to reinvigorate drama in verse with such plays as Winterset (1935).
During this period Eugene O’Neill reached for greatness with vast five-hour plays. Strange Interlude (1928), a nine-act play, explored through its leading female character the way in which hidden psychological processes affect outward actions. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1928. Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), a trilogy, was a powerful adaptation of three ancient Greek tragedies by Aeschylus that told the story of Orestes and are known as the Oresteia. Set in New England after the Civil War (which replaces the Trojan War of the Oresteia), Mourning Becomes Electra recounts the moral, emotional, and physical destruction of two generations of the Mannon family, emphasizing the far-reaching consequences of adultery, incest, jealousy, and vengeance. Both plays capture O’Neill’s lifelong investigation of the human condition and the forces that plague humankind. In 1936 O’Neill became the first American playwright to win a Nobel Prize for literature.
Also in the 1920s and early 1930s, comedies of manners made a comeback through delightfully glib, lightly satirical plays such as Philip Barry’s Holiday (1928), about a man who decides to enjoy his newly made fortune while he is still young. In a later comedy of manners, End of Summer (1936) by S. N. Behrman, a flighty, middle-aged socialite pursues both fascist and left-wing men in an attempt to remain a player in a world quickly passing her by.
African American characters became more visible in plays of this period. In the play In Abraham’s Bosom (1926) by Paul Green, the main character, whose father is white and mother is black, works to help his black community but is defeated by the racial prejudice of both whites and blacks. In Abraham’s Bosom won the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for drama. White playwrights wrote most of the plays featuring black characters from this period, while black playwrights remained on the margins of the theater world until the 1950s.
Even the musical was overhauled in the bustling theatrical activity of the 1920s and early 1930s. Most notably, lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II and composer Jerome Kern teamed up to create Show Boat (1927), a musical production adapted from a novel of the same name by American author Edna Ferber. This was the first American musical to fully integrate a musical score with meaningful and consistent dialogue and lyrics.
B2 The Great Depression
American theater attendance declined severely in the 1930s and after, primarily as a result of new sound technology that gave motion pictures a voice. But films were not the only drain on theater attendance. The economic collapse of the Great Depression of the 1930s closed many theaters permanently. The austerity of the 1930s inspired a new wave of hard-edged drama that tackled economic suffering, left-wing political ideologies, fascism, and fears of another world war. European agitprop techniques, which used literature and the arts for political propaganda, animated many plays about the working class. The most famous of these plays is Waiting for Lefty (1935) by Clifford Odets. In the play taxi drivers decide to go on strike, but the true concern of the play is a more abstract debate over the pros and cons of capitalism. Odets also wrote one of the finest expressions of 1930s anxieties, Awake and Sing! (1935), in which a Marxist grandfather commits suicide for his family’s financial benefit, and his grandson ultimately dedicates himself and the life insurance money to helping his community rather than seeking better opportunities elsewhere.
The plays of Lillian Hellman also displayed a social conscience. Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (1934), in which a child’s vengeful anger causes the downfall of a school and the two women who run it, explored the devastating effects of evil in an intolerant society. Langston Hughes paved the way for acceptance of African American drama with his successful play Mulatto (1935), about the complexity of race relations. The global scale of fears in the 1930s was reflected in the plays of Robert Sherwood, whose satirical attack on weapons manufacturers in Idiot’s Delight (1936) predicted the impending world cataclysm of World War II. It was awarded the 1936 Pulitzer Prize for drama.
C Postwar Drama: 1945-1960
During World War II (1939-1945) little drama of note appeared that was neither escapist fare nor wartime propaganda. With the end of hostilities, however, two playwrights emerged who would dominate dramatic activity for the next 15 years or so: Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Miller combined realistic characters and a social agenda while also writing modern tragedy, most notably in Death of a Salesman (1949), a tale of the life and death of the ordinary working man Willy Loman. Miller’s The Crucible (1953), a story about the 17th-century Salem witch trials, was a parable for a hunt for Communists in the 1950s led by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.
Tennessee Williams, one of ’s most lyrical dramatists, contributed many plays about social misfits and outsiders. In A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), a neurotic, impoverished Southern woman fights to maintain her illusions of gentility when forced to confront the truth about her life by her sister’s working-class husband. Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, similarly focused on pretense and its destructiveness and destruction in an unhappy family.
The 1940s also launched lighthearted musicals, most notably a series with lyrics and score by the productive partnership of librettist Oscar Hammerstein II and composer Richard Rodgers. Their first collaboration, the love story Oklahoma! (1943), set the style for musicals until the 1960s with its thorough integration of text and music.
Realism continued strongly in the 1950s with character studies of society’s forgotten peo