THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN DRAMA

By the end of the 19th century Henry James, Howells, and even Mark Twain had all tried their hand at playwriting. Behind them was a long struggle of American dramatists. In the 18th century there had been principally Thomas Godfrey (1736-1763), a Philadelphia poet who in 1759 had written the blank verse tragedy The Prince of Parthia, and Royall Tyler (1757-1826), a Boston lawyer, remembered for The Contrast, the first comedy by a native American, produced professionally in New York in 1787.

William Dunlap (1766-1839) helped to turn the century on a native note with his historical melodrama Andre (1798). Robert Montgomery Bird (1806-1854) tailored his historical tragedy The Gladiator (1831) and his domestic tragedy The Broker of Bogota (1834). But the receipts went to the actors, not to the playwrights. Bird, discouraged, turned to writing novels like Nick of the Woods (1837).

There was great theatrical activity in nineteenth-century America, a time when there were no movies, radio, or television. Every town of any size had its theater or “opera house” in which touring companies performed. Given the hunger for entertainment, one may wonder why no significant American drama was written in the century that produced, among others, Melville, Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, and Twain.

After World War I, expressionism made itself felt, to be followed after World War II by the influence of Sartre, Brecht, and Samuel Beckett.

Despite the development of a native drama, the important impacts on modern American drama came from abroad. European drama, which was to influence modern American drama profoundly, “matured” in the last third of the nineteenth century with the achievements of three playwrights: the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), the Swede August Strindberg (1849-1912), and the Russian Anton Chekhov (1860-1904). Ibsen deliberately tackled subjects such as guilt, sexuality, and mental illness – subjects which had never before been so realistically and disturbingly portrayed on stage. Strindberg brought to his characterizations an unprecedented level of psychological complexity. And Chekhov, along with Ibsen and Strindberg, shifted the subject matter of drama from wildly theatrical displays of external action to inner action and emotions and the concerns of everyday life. Chekhov once remarked, “People don’t go to the North Pole and fall off icebergs. They go to the office and quarrel with their wives and eat cabbage soup.”

These three great playwrights bequeathed to their American heirs plays about life as it is actually lived. They presented characters and situations more or less realistically, in what has been called the “slice of life” dramatic technique.

Realistic drama is based on the illusion that when we watch a play, we are looking at life through a “fourth wall” that has been removed so that we can see the action. Soon after the beginning of the twentieth century, realism became the dominant mode of American drama. As with all theatrical revolutions, the movement toward realism began apart from the commercial theatre. But soon the commercial theatre adopted realism too.

The vitalization of both the American theater and American drama came not from the Broadway stage but from the little theaters later spreading to smaller cities and college campuses. Croups like the Washington Square Players in New York City and the Provincetown Players on Cape Cod (later in New York) were celebrated trailblazers.

In Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953), American literature had its first great dramatist. O’Neill’s beginnings were off-Broadway efforts, but they came as a consequence of his familiarity with the working theater (his father had been a famous actor) and his study in the “47 Workshop” at Harvard under George Pierce Baker.

The period between the two world wars saw an activity in American drama that made O’Neill part of a movement. The Adding Machine (1923) by Elmer Rice did much to bring the expressionist movement to the American stage. His Street Scene (1929) and Judgment Day (1934) were more topical but not less socially conscious. What Price Glory? (1924) by Maxwell Anderson (1888-1959) was a successful war play whose lusty language startled audiences. Sidney Howard (1891-1939), who like O’Neill, was a student at Harvard’s “47 Workshop”, began a series of popular plays with They Knew What They Wanted (1924), which broadened the limits of dramatic subject matter by the realism of its story of unorthodox love. Philip Barry (1896-1949), still another “47 Workshop” student, began as a writer of urbane comedies (Paris Bound, 1927) but gained greater dramatic strength through more serious plays – Hotel Universe (1930), The Animal Kingdom (1932), and Here Comes the Clowns (1938). The finest proletarian plays of the socially conscious 1930’s were by Clifford Odets (1906-1963), whose Waiting for Lefty (1935) had a vigor that his later plays could not recapture. The former shows the awakening of class consciousness of workers and intellectuals under the pressure of want and exploitation, the growth of the militant spirit of the people rising to fight their oppressors. The play opens with a prologue showing a trade union meeting discussing the question of whether to declare a strike or not. His Awake and Sing! (1935), a nostalgic family drama, became another popular success, followed by Golden Boy, the story of an Italian immigrant youth who ruins his musical talent when he is seduced by the lure of money to become a boxer and injures his hands.

Eugene O’Neill is generally considered the first important figure in American drama. It is significant that several decades after the 1920 production of his first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, he is still regarded as the most important playwright America has produced.

American drama before O’Neill consisted mostly of shows and entertainments. These wildly theatrical spectacles often featured such delights as chariot races and burning cities, staged by means of special effects that dazzled audiences. Melodramas and farces were also written for famous actors, much as television shows today are created to display the personalities and talents of popular performers. In fact, O’Neill’s own father, James, spent the better part of his life touring in a spectacular melodrama based on Alexander Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo.

O’Neill’s early one-act plays of the sea, such as Bound Fast for Cardiff (1916), In the Zone (1917), The Long Voyage Home (1917), and The Moon of the Caribbees (1919) described hard life of the sailors whose life he knew well being a sailor himself. He became widely known in the twenties when these were followed by full-length psychological plays like Gold (1921), The Emperor Jones (1921) and Anna Christie (1922), which established his American preeminence. Most of his characters are dissatisfied with life and express their protest against the injustice of the society. In his play The Hairy Ape (1922) he creates the image of a stoker on a liner who is scorned by the rich passengers. Strange Interlude (1928) is a nine-act Freudian tragedy of frustrated desire; Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), a trilogy, is an American version of a Greek tragedy of fate. O’Neill masterly used the techniques of the antique theatre. In The Great God Brown (1926), for example, he uses masks, in other plays he restores the chorus of the Greek drama. O’Neill adopted the language of poetic symbolism. He received the Pulitzer Prize for his tragedy Beyond the Horizon.

O’Neill was always an experimenter. In The Iceman Cometh (1946) he abandons physical action on the stage for a life in words; in Long Day’s Journey into Night (produced posthumously in 1956), one of his finest as well as most personal plays, his characters simply talk in a family living room. It’s a powerful, extended autobiography in dramatic form focusing on his own family and their physical and psychological deterioration, as witnessed in the course of one night.

Well aware of Sigmund Freud and his new theories about complex self, O’Neill tried especially hard to reveal more than realism could normally reveal. In The Great God Brown, O’Neill experimented with using masks to differentiate between two sides of a personality. In Days Without End (1934), he had two actors play one character to achieve the same end. And in Strange Interlude characters spoke in aside to the audience, revealing thoughts and feelings that could not be expressed in dialogue. O’Neill dominated American drama in his generation; he can be said to have “put it on the map”. His plays were widely produced abroad, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936.

Next to O’Neill’s, the most distinguished American plays of the 1930’s and 1940’s were by Thornton Wilder, also a novelist of excellence. His Our Town (1938), which has become a classic, is an idyll of the meaning of existence. The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) is an optimistic version of the theory of cyclical history.

During the post-World War II period, four dramatists in particular left their mark: William Inge (1913-1973), Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), Arthur Miller (1915-2005), and Edward Albee (b.1928).

Inge’s Picnic (1953), Bus Stop (1955), and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957) show greater technical strength than originality of theme. At his best Inge is a master of dialogue, as he presents modern man’s fear and trembling and self-deceits. So too is Edward Albee, whose savage dialogues of academic intellectuals in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) frighteningly balance the serenity of Wilder’s Our Town as a rendering of life in America, Albee’s The Zoo Story (1959) and The American Dream (1961) were earlier studies of mankind frustrated by the imposition of an ideal. The ambitious Tiny Alice (1964) was a frustration for both characters and audience.

Of the four mentioned above, Williams and Miller stand out. The post -World War II years brought Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams to prominence in American drama: Although other playwrights, such as William Inge, have contributed striking and effective plays, Miller and Williams remain the dominant figures of the second half of the century. They represent the two principal movements in modern American drama: realism and realism combined with an attempt at something more imaginative. From the beginning, American playwrights have tried to break away from realism or to blend it with more poetic expression, as in Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1944), and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth.

Lillian Hellman became one of America’s leading playwrights and an outstanding master of the social and psychological play in the modern American theatre.

Lillian Hellman was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. At the age of five her parents moved to New York. However, she was to return to New Orleans periodically. She preferred life in that Southern city.

She studied at New York University for three years, but left the university before taking a degree. Later she studied for a short time at Columbia University.

At the age of nineteen she went to work for a publishing firm. She tried her hand at book reviews and short stories and for a while wrote theatrical reviews. She also spent some time as a play-reader in Hollywood.

In 1932 she returned to New York where she worked as a play-reader for Herman Shumlin, who was later to produce and direct her first five plays. In 1934 she launched on her career as a playwright with The Children’s Hour. Over the next three decades came a. succession of plays, among them The Little Foxes (1939), Watch on the Rhine (1941), Another Part of the Forest (1947), The Autumn Garden (1951) and Toys in the Attic (I960). Lillian Hellman was the author of some adaptations: My Mother, My Father and Me (1936), Montserrat (1950) and The Lark (1956). She also wrote an operette Candide (1957), and The Big Knockover: stories and short novels by Dashie Hammett (1966).

She wrote an autobiography called Scoundrel Time.

Lillian Hellman has twice been awarded the New York Drama Critic’s Circle Prize for the best play of the year – Watch on the Rhine and Toys in the Attic. In 1972 an edition of all her works for the theatre was published as The Collected Plays.

Hellman’s memoirs An Unfinished Woman (1969) was the winner of the National Book Award. She also received the Gold Medal for Drama from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and other awards, and also honorary degrees from various colleges and universities, in recent years Hellman has been teaching at the University of California and at Hunter College.

Lillian Hellman has devoted all her life to literature and the theatre. She reviewed books and plays for publishing houses (1927-1930), worked as a critic for the newspaper Herald Tribune (1925-1928) and wrote some scripts for Hollywood. She was the author of a film script Northern Star, which is about a Soviet kolkhoz during the Great Patriotic War.

She enriched the traditions of the American progressive theatre and the world theatre – the traditions of Ibsen, Chekhov, Gorky.

Two of Lillian Hellman’s plays, The Little Foxes and The Autumn Garden, are particularly interesting.

In this play Hellman deals with human relations in a society, based upon money. The following epigraph precedes the play: “Take from us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.” The title of the play symbolizes the playwright’s thesis that greed creates havoc among, humans. The “tender grapes” are the gentle characters, especially young Alexandra. “As is often the ease in Miss Hellman’s plays, she applies her thesis on both a personal and general social level. Here she is always saying that capitalistic greed exploits the lower economic sectors of society.”

The summary of the play as given in L. R. Holmin’s book is: Ben and Oscar Hubbard and their sister Pegina Giddens are members of an avaricious clan in a small Southern town in 1900. They represent the rise of the industrial South in its most ruthless aspect. Oscar’s gentle wife, Birdie, represents the old aristocracy, which the new order is replacing. In the social gathering which opens the play, we see the manner in which this new breed, rising from the poor whites, attempts to ape the cultural graces of the passing order.

A Chicago tycoon paying a visit is willing to-put up 400,000 dollars for the building of a cotton mill in the Southern town, where cheap costs and cheap labour will make high profits possible. Ben, Oscar and Regina are each to put up one-third of the remaining 225,000 dollars required for the financing of the project. For this investment they will receive 51% of the stock in the firm.

A struggle ensues between Regina and her husband, Horace Giddens, who is very ill with a heart ailment, over his unwillingness to put up their third. It is over this contest for money that we see first one, then another of the little foxes achieve the upper hand in their vicious talk among themselves. When Horace finds that Oscar’s son Leon has, with Ben and Oscar’s blessing, “borrowed” bonds from his safe deposit box for the project, he balks. He tells his wife, who despises him, that his vengeance on her is to pretend he loaned the bonds to the brothers and to write a new will which will cut off her dreams of going to Chicago to live a life of ease in society there. Her viciousness knows no bounds when she allows him to die by refusing to give him his medicine needed to prevent a heart attack, thus adding murder to her bag of tricks. Once again in power, she threatens the Hubbard men with exposure and demands three-fourths of the profit of the enterprise. Brother Ben accepts the arrangement, temporarily we feel, with a humor which has characterized brother and sister in their dog-eat-dog contest. Regina, however, is faced with what seems to the audience a hollow victory, when her daughter Alexandra, finally aroused, announces that she is leaving home to escape from the Hubbard influence.

Arthur Miller ’s best work, Death of a Salesman, is one of the most successful in fusing the realistic and the imaginative; in all of his other plays, however, Miller is the master of realism. He is a true disciple of Henrik Ibsen, not only in his realistic technique, but in his concern about society’s impact on his characters’ lives.

Arthur Miller created more directly social plays based on an ambiguity of images, whether defined in a family or broader cultural sense. Death of a Salesman (1949), the account of Willy Loman’s tragic struggle with “the law of success”, became another classic. The Crucible (1953), in which the Salem witch-hunts are used as a parable (witchcraft trials of the 17th century in which Puritan settlers were wrongly executed as supposed witches), and A View from the Bridge (1955) enhanced his reputation.

In Miller’s plays, the course of the action and the development of character depend not only on the characters’ psychological makeup, but also on the social, philosophical, and economic atmosphere of their times.

Miller’s most notable character, Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, is a self-deluded man; but he is also a product of the American dream of success and a victim of the American business machine, which disposes of him when he has outlived his usefulness. Loman has worked for Howard Wagner’s company for thirty-six years. He has opened new markets for their trademark. Wagner’s father promised him a job in New York, but Howard does not need him in town and fires him altogether. Willy realizes the futility of his dreams. He has been squeezed out and when he is unable to bring in a large profit he is dismissed. “I put thirty-six years into this firm. You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away – a man is not a piece of fruit”, he says bitterly. Having lost the sense of personal dignity, Willy decides to make a sacrifice for those he loves – he commits suicide in order that his sons, Biff and Happy, should get the insurance money and start a business.

Miller is a writer of high moral seriousness, whether he is dealing with personal versus social responsibility, as in All My Sons (1947), or with witch hunts past and present, as in The Crucible. Both are political – one contemporary, and the other set in colonial times. The first deals with a manufacturer who knowingly allows defective parts to be shipped to airplane firms during World War II, resulting in the death of his son and others.

Miller writes a plain and muscular prose that under the force of emotion often becomes eloquent, as in Linda Loman’s famous speech in Death of a Salesman, where she talks to her two sons about their father: “I don’t say he’s a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.”

Tennesee Williams (born as Thomas Lanier Williams) (1911-1983) was born in Columbus, Mississippi. He changed his name when he left home for New Orleans. It had been his college nickname because his father was from Tennessee.

Tennessee Williams wrote two novels, The Roman Spring of Mrs.Stone (1950) and Moise and the World of Reason (1975), and a novella, The Knightly Quest (1966). He is the author of collection of stories One Arm (1948), Hard Candy (1954), Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed (1974), and a collection of poetry In the Winter of Cities (1956).

But he is valued most of all as a playwright. Tennessee Williams showed his mastery of dialogue and movement on the stage in a series of plays. They treat the emotional involvements and frustrations with which Williams chiefly concerned himself. Although Tennessee Williams was Miller’s contemporary, his concern was not with social matters, but with personal ones. If Miller is often the playwright of social conscience, then Williams was the playwright of our souls. His earlier works were in production around the world. He dominated the American theatre for twenty years, beginning with Battle of Angels (1940). It was the first play to bring him public attention, and it evolved into Orpheus Descending (1957). He won national acclaim with The Glass Menagerie (1945) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (.1950), Camino Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Roof (1955), Garden District (1958), Suddenly Last Summer (1958), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), Period of Adjustment (1960), The Night of the Iguana (1962). All these plays were made into films, and he wrote an original film script for Baby Doll (1956). In the mid-sixties, he started writing the darker plays of his late phase, beginning with Slapstick Tragedy (1965), which includes The Mutilated and Gnadiges Fraulein; The Seven Descents of Myrtle (1968); In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969); The Two Character Play (1969), later rewritten and staged as Out City (1973), The Red Devil Battery Sign (1976), A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (1979), and a play about Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald entitled Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980).

In contrast to Miller’s spare, plain language, Williams’s writing is delicate and sensuous; it is often colored with lush imagery and evocative rhythms. Miller’s characters are, by and large, ordinary people with whom we identify because they are caught up in.the social tensions of our times. Williams’s characters are often women who are “Lost ladies”, drowning in their own neuroses, but somehow mirroring a part of our own complex psychological selves.

The actual scenes in Williams’s plays are usually purely realistic, even though these scenes may deal with colorful and “extreme” characters. But Williams usually theatricalized the realism with “music in the wings” or symbolic props, such as Laura’s unicorn in The Glass Menagerie or the looming statue of Eternity in Summer and Smoke (1948). He always conceived his plays in visually arresting, colorful, theatrical environments.

The Glass Menagerie has become an American classic. When it was shown on Broadway in the spring of 1945, Mississippi-born Tennessee Williams was practically unknown; almost over-night, he became an international success.

The Glass Menagerie is a mixture of straightforward, realistic play construction and “poetic”, highly imaginative conception and language. Williams used this combination for most of his works. The structure of his plays is basically conventional; his vision, his “voice”, is imaginative and sensitive.

Because The Glass Menagerie is a memory play, its images are hazy. The characters, too, are poetically conceived and removed from the daily life of the Great Depression of the 1930’s. In a few lines in the opening narration, Williams sets the social background of the period; but he is not really interested in the larger society. In all his plays, what interests him most is the psychological makeup of his characters. Laura Wingfield passes her life listening to phonograph records and rearranging her collection of glass animals. Tom wants to be a writer and to escape to the sea. Amanda lives in the past glories of being a Southern belle. In contrast to the Wingfield family, the gentleman caller is not poetic. He is from the real world, and it is the touching confrontation of this real man with the withdrawn Laura that provides the climax of the play.

In play after play, Tennessee Williams probed the psychological complexities of his characters. Though Williams became known principally for his colorful women characters – Amanda and Laura in The Glass Menagerie, Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, Alma in Summer and Smoke, and Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – he also created some great male characters, among them Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Marlon Brando’s portrayal of Stanley in the original production, and in the movie, established a kind of mumbling, torn-Tee-shirt technique of acting that was to become popular with many of the younger male actors of the next decade.

 

Канд.філол.н, доц.

Доцент каф.фонетики та граматики Л.В.Горішна