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DeAnna M. Toten Beard
The 1910s and early 1920s was a period of exploration and experimentation for playwrights and other artists in the United States who challenged dominant theater business models, production practices, and standard dramatic fare on the professional stage. Economic pressure in theater centers such as New York City discouraged artistic risk‐taking, and new forms of dramatic writing were particularly unrewarded by the demands of commercial theater. Efforts to change these conditions resulted in a cultural phenomenon known as the Little Theater movement, led by progressives who founded small organizations as alternatives to big business theater. The little theater model offered an attractively humble and frugal approach to theater production. Many in the period saw the little theaters as sanctuaries in which play selection and production techniques might be decided on artistic rather than commercial criteria. The hope was for this kind of new species of theater organization to (i) improve economic conditions shaping American producers, artists, and audiences; (ii) create a safer environment for artistic exploration of both realistic and non‐realistic techniques; (iii) facilitate productions of artistically significant drama from around the globe; and (iv) promote the rise of a new generation of American playwrights.
The Little Theater movement was an organic and complex artistic ecosystem with many varieties of institution. Called “little” or “art” theaters in American press at the time, some organizations were minimalist and modern, like the Chicago Little Theatre, founded in 1912 by Ellen Van Volkenberg and Maurice Browne. Other little theaters were driven as much by progressive politics as aesthetics, such as the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, financed by Irene and Alice Lewisohn, which was launched through the Henry Street Settlement House and blended social work with community dramatics. The Portmanteau Theatre in New York City, also founded with performances at a social services organization, was a portable little theater with an innovative system of platforms that could be set up anywhere. In 1915, New York also became home to the Washington Square Players, created by a group of artists and intellectuals to produce artistically significant plays of any origin: European, American, or non‐Western. The movement was by no means limited to Chicago and New York City, as evidenced by the geographical diversity of, for example, the Dallas Little Theatre, the Boston Toy Theatre, the Little Theatre of Indianapolis, the Detroit Arts and Crafts Theatre, and the Pasadena Playhouse. Geography, financial status, and human resources made each little theater unique, and these factors also shaped – and were shaped by – each group’s particular mission. For example, some little theaters sought to bring quality dramatic entertainment to rural communities, such as Alfred Arvold’s Little Country Theatre at the University of North Dakota or the Carolina Playmakers at the University of North Carolina. A distinct black Little Theater movement also flourished from 1918 to 1927, inspired by tours from international art theaters such as the Irish Players as well as the recent rise of American folk drama, notably Ridgely Torrence’s Three Plays for a Negro Theatre (1917) (Krasner 2002: 202–203). Important black little theaters included Krigwa Players Little Theater Group in Washington, DC, the Harlem Experimental Theatre in New York City, and the Folk Theatre of Chicago.
The little theaters explored myriad forms of programming in keeping with their diverse artistic goals. Many experimented with a repertory system, in which a company offered several productions regularly or in rotation throughout a single season. Others created short programs or “bills” of three or more plays presented in one night, with each bill running for just a few days. This format favored short plays and may have encouraged the experimentation in one‐act plays seen among little theater playwrights. Indeed, the development of the one‐act play form in American dramatic literature is due largely to the Little Theater movement. One‐act plays suited the goals of many little theaters because the short form made it possible for more plays to get staged, each with less development time and rehearsal preparation. Moreover, the plays required lower royalty fees when licensed for subsequent productions which was compatible with little theater frugality.
Of all the organizations founded in the Little Theater movement, none is as lauded today as the Provincetown Players. Their particular mission was to produce original plays by American playwrights. Launched in the summer of 1915, the theater began with Susan Glaspell and her husband George Cram Cook as they vacationed on Cape Cod with several other New York City artists and writers. The group began calling themselves “The Provincetown Players” the next summer when they returned to Massachusetts along with friend Eugene O’Neill to produce 10 new American plays, including Glaspell’s Trifles (1916) and O’Neill’s Bound East for Cardiff (1916). Both plays would be produced again a few months later when, in the fall of 1916, the group established their cooperative enterprise in New York City’s Greenwich Village. They appropriately christened their new home the Playwright’s Theatre and devoted themselves to the mission of promoting new American playwrights. There they thrived until 1922, when O’Neill’s expressionist drama, The Hairy Ape, transferred from their small stage to Broadway. Though Cook had directed the production for the Provincetown Players, he was not asked to helm the Broadway production. In response, Cook removed himself from the group and went with Glaspell on a sabbatical to Greece where he would write, study, drink, and eventually die two years later. After Glaspell and Cook left the country, the Provincetown Players reorganized into a new producing entity under the leadership of O’Neill, Kenneth Macgowan, and Robert Edmond Jones; when Glaspell returned alone from Greece she did not rejoin the group.
The constitution of the original Provincetown Players dictated that the playwright had control over the production of her or his play, selecting the actors, supervising production choices, and directing the show. The group would eventually abandon this strict practice, choosing instead to share duties more loosely and even to bring in guest directors for particular bills, but a commitment to empowering playwrights stayed at the heart of the theater’s self‐identity. In the years 1915–1922, the Provincetown Players produced approximately 100 new American plays by over 50 playwrights, including 16 women who wrote about one‐third of the total plays (Black 2002: 51). Many of the Provincetown Players writers are unfamiliar as playwrights today: Floyd Dell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Rita Wellman, John Reed, Neith Boyce, Hutchins Hapgood, Alfred Kreymborg, and Wallace Stevens. However, the ranks of Provincetown Players playwrights also include two very significant names in theater history: Susan Glaspell and Eugene O’Neill. Their plays became mainstays of the Little Theater movement and enduring examples of modern American drama.
Susan Glaspell (1876–1948) started her writing career in her home state of Iowa as a newspaper columnist for the Des Moines Daily News, where she covered the murder trial that would inspire her famous one‐act play, Trifles, as well as the short story “A Jury of Her Peers” (1927). She met and married writer George Cram Cook, also from Iowa, with whom she would found the Provincetown Players. In total, Glaspell wrote 11 plays for the Provincetown Players: Trifles, Suppressed Desires (1916), The People (1918), Close the Book (1918), The Outside (1917), Women’s Honor (1918), Tickless Time (1918), Bernice (1919), Inheritors (1921), The Verge (1921), and Chains of Dew (1922). A leader of the Provincetown Players, she also directed and performed in the plays of her fellow members. Later in her career, after the dissolution of the original Provincetown Playhouse and death of Cook, Glaspell won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Alison’s House (1931).
However, it was Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953), son of legendary actor James O’Neill, who would become the first face of modern American drama, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936 and four Pulitzer Prizes (the last awarded posthumously). O’Neill wrote more than a dozen plays for the Provincetowners from 1915 to 1922, including Bound East for Cardiff (1914), Thirst (1913), Before Breakfast (1916), Fog (1914), The Long Voyage Home (1917), ’Ile (1917), The Rope (1918), Where the Cross is Made (1918), Moon of the Caribbees (1918), The Dreamy Kid (1918), The Emperor Jones (1920), Diff’rent (1921), and The Hairy Ape (1922). O’Neill continued to write for the reorganized group after the original Provincetown Players dissolved, presenting new works such as All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1924), a hard‐hitting play about race staring Paul Robeson, and Desire Under the Elms (1924), his New England adaptation of the Greek tragedy Hippolytus. His body of work to follow included Strange Interlude (Pulitzer Prize, 1928), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), The Iceman Cometh (1946), and Long Day’s Journey into Night (Pulitzer Prize, 1957).
Plays of the Little Theater Movement
The plays that made up the repertoires of the various little theaters in the United States range widely. On little theater stages, one could have seen classic drama of the Western tradition, modern British and European plays, translations and adaptations of non‐Western plays, and new work by American playwrights. Short medieval plays such as Pierre Patelin and Abraham and Isaac were popular, as was Renaissance drama. Anthologies of classic drama suitable for American little theaters were published, for example the four volumes of Little Theatre Classics edited by Samuel A. Eliot, Jr. (1918–1922). Newer European works were widely produced and while some modernist plays produced at the little theaters are unfamiliar in the United States today – for example, the works of Jacinto Benavente and Leonid Andreyev – many are named as pillars of the modern drama. British and continental one‐act plays were especially popular at the little theaters, in keeping with the general interest in short plays, such as Synge’s Riders to the Sea (1904), Wilde’s Salomé (1891), and Chekhov’s The Bear (1888).
Little theaters audiences were also introduced to translations and adaptations of non‐Western stories. One of the most produced non‐Western plays was the one‐act Bushido (1916), an adaptation of a Kabuki play called Matsuo written by Takeda Izumo in 1746, which was very successful with the Washington Square Players and became a staple of little theater repertories. Such productions, cast almost invariably with white actors, presented the non‐Western elements primarily as an aesthetic experience. American playwrights explored this fashion for cultural tourism on the little theater stage, for example Rita Wellman’s The String of the Samisen (1918). Wellman, a Provincetown Players member, modeled the plot after available adaptations of samurai tales, blending the set dressing of feudal Japan with a vague understanding of its cultural forces. The play explores the limitations on women’s life choices and the power of love, sexual desire, and social bonds through the story of a samurai’s daughter named Tama. A married woman, Tama is asked by her samurai lover to help assassinate his enemy: her husband. In the climax, Tama disguises herself so that the lover murders her instead of the husband. While the play shows an interesting level of volition by Tama, she is still a subordinated character who self‐sacrificially chooses death for the sake of both husband and lover. Wellman depicts Tama’s actions to be rooted in concepts of honor and duty presented as racially natural and ideally feminine. The String of the Samisen was widely produced in the little theaters and was anthologized in the period along with other new plays by US authors.
From the perspective of cultural history, the emerging body of little theater plays about American life by US authors represents the most significant contribution of the movement. The plays of the little theaters were instrumental in the definition and development of a modern American drama, though they did not speak with a unified artistic voice. Some little theater plays are similar to the work of Shaw, Ibsen, and Chekhov with scenic specificity, regional accents, detailed stage business, and other markers of realism. Such realistic little theater plays explore social injustice and shine a light on contemporary society, dramatizing people and situations previously considered beneath the consideration of the stage. However, other examples of little theater plays were inspired by the non‐realistic dramaturgical experimentalism of modern European writers. For example, some little theater playwrights seem to model their work on the French symbolism of Maurice Maeterlinck and still others on the German expressionism of Georg Kaiser. These little theater plays eschew real world specificity in exchange for poetry, atmosphere, and dream imagery.
Across the various dramaturgical forms and styles, some common themes emerge in American little theater plays. Gender dynamics is one of the most important ideas explored in the body of little theater plays. Many plays focus on women in society, addressing oppression of women, the sexual double standard, disruption of traditional female gender roles, and power struggles in marriage. Another notable theme is modernity itself, especially mechanized city life and the place of humanity in a scientifically advancing world. Playwrights experimenting with expressionist dramaturgy particularly explore this theme, usually with dark pessimism for the hope of humanity. A third theme seen across many little theater plays is modern psychology and Freudian concepts of the human mind. Little theater plays use the fashionable vocabulary of psychology as a means of describing human behavior and as a social backdrop signifying city life, trendy education, or erudite urban modernity. These three thematic threads – gender dynamics, the mechanized city, and Freudian psychology – permeate both realistic and experimental little theater plays and reveal developing ideas of Americanness and modernity in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Realistic Little Theater Plays
A prime example of the realistic mode in little theater dramaturgy is Susan Glaspell’s one‐act play Trifles, first produced in 1916 by the Provincetown Players and then at the Washington Square Playhouse before being staged all around the country. Today, it is one of the most anthologized American dramas and is often used to illustrate sound one‐act play construction. Trifles is set in the humble, rural kitchen of John and Minnie Wright. Mr. Wright, an unsociable farmer, has been found strangled to death in his bed and his wife – the only person in the house at the time of the death – arrested for the murder. During the action of the play, Minnie Wright is in jail awaiting trial; she never appears on stage. Instead we witness a visit to the cold, empty house by the county attorney, sheriff, and a male neighbor who are searching the farmhouse and outbuildings for evidence that might demonstrate a clear reason for Mrs. Wright to have killed her husband; her guilt seems undeniable but without a strong case for motive it will be hard to secure a jury conviction. Accompanying the men are Mrs. Peters, wife of the sheriff, and Mrs. Hale, wife of the neighbor, who have been asked to retrieve some of Mrs. Wright’s personal items. During the course of the short play, the men come and go across the stage with great purpose, passing through the kitchen as they search for evidence. Meanwhile, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale stay in the domestic sphere of the house and quietly discover both their empathy for Mrs. Wright’s lonely life and strong evidence for her motive to murder. Noticing work left unfinished and erratic sewing, the women deduce that Minnie Wright was agitated. Then they find her dead pet bird and deduce that Mr. Wright killed it in an act of brutality that pushed Mrs. Wright to murder. However, the women hide this evidence out of both female solidarity and a sense of personal guilt for having paid little attention to the lonely Minnie Wright.
The play is drawn with the kind of specificity of scenery, properties, and behavior typical of realism: characters wash their hands on stage, handle jars of preserves, clean up crumbs from fresh bread, and discuss details of an unfinished quilt. Glaspell creates a world in which the things of Minnie Wright’s home communicate her story and reveal her motives. The play also shows that evidence requires sensitive and knowing interpreters to give up its truth; like dream analysts, the women come to knowledge about Mrs. Wright through observation, association, and metaphor. Glaspell also invites interpretation of Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Wright’s motives to hide evidence from the men by providing just enough personal history of each woman in the dialogue for us to study their psyches. Built around the actions and reactions of Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, the play emphasizes women’s voices while calling attention to how little they are heeded or understood by the men around them. Meanwhile, the most vulnerable woman in the story is kept off stage – voiceless and without physical substance.
Glaspell uses the device of an important off‐stage female character again in Bernice (1919). A full‐length play – only the second of that form to be produced by the Provincetown Payers – Bernice is set in a country house following the death of the title character. Her family and close friends debate the cause of her death before it is suggested by her maid, Abbie, that she committed suicide out of despair following her husband’s infidelity. To him and others, this is sobering evidence of her deep love her for him, but friends find the explanation implausible and vow to investigate the death further. Finally, we learn that Bernice died of a sudden illness but, in her final moments, asked Abbie to spread the lie that she killed herself out of heartbreak in the hopes that it might inspire her husband to reform his life. The theme of a woman’s perceived value in society is raised provocatively by Bernice; Bernice’s alleged self‐sacrifice for a man is easily viewed by the community as an honorable demonstration of her female sincerity. Like Trifles, the plot of Bernice shows the influence of a modern psychological understanding of behavior as characters seek to interpret signs that will unveil the hidden motives of others.
Another interesting exemplar of the realistic mode in little theater drama is Pendleton King’s Cocaine (1917), originally produced by the Provincetown Players. King questions social mores and challenges propriety as he dramatizes the lives of people on the lowest rungs of society. The gritty one‐act is set pre‐dawn in a dark attic apartment shared by a drug‐dependent and impoverished couple named Joe and Nora. Nora is returning home from an unsuccessful night trying to make money through prostitution; a cold sore on her mouth has repelled potential clients. Nora and Joe are desperate for money to buy more cocaine, having been out of the drug for several days. We hear from Joe – whose voice is written with a dialect designed to emphasize his undereducated and physical nature – that the landlady is offering to provide cocaine and forgive back rent if Joe will sleep with her. Nora is horrified at the idea of Joe trading sex for their shelter and drug needs, but he reminds her that this is exactly what she does. Rather than a call for radical equality considering sex workers, however, the play offers a double standard based on Nora’s sense of her own fundamental unworthiness as a fallen woman. Nora tells Joe that her prostitution is “a sort of sacrifice to you, a sort of way of showing how much I love you. It doesn’t matter about me” (King 1921: 84). Finally, Nora convinces Joe that they should turn on the gas and commit suicide. When they try, however, the pair discovers that they are even too poor to afford enough gas to kill themselves. Without the comfort of a quiet death, they realize they have no choice but to face the dawn of one more day.
Not all little theater plays in the realistic mode were so dark in nature. Suppressed Desires (1915) and Tickless Time (1918), both co‐written by Susan Glaspell and George Cram Cook, use the stylistic markers of realism for the purposes of comic social commentary. The first production of Suppressed Desires was a simple staging in Provincetown with the authors and their friends in 1915. It would later get a full production by the group in New York and eventually become one of the most produced of all little theater plays. Suppressed Desires uses keen satire to explore the fad for psychoanalysis that struck American intellectual circles following publication of A.A. Brill’s English translations of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1913) and Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1914). The one‐act play is set in the New York City apartment of Henrietta and Steve, filled with her thick scientific books as well as his architectural blueprints. The highly educated and progressive married couple bicker as Henrietta presses Stephen to analyze his dreams and address his hidden sexual complexes. He resists the suggestion as faddish, but she argues for the value of uncovering all secret desires, even those that might topple notions of orthodox morality. The comedy relies on a sense that Henrietta’s devotion to the scientific study of Freud has made her a topsy‐turvy woman, which is reinforced by comparisons between Henrietta and her visiting sister, Mabel, who lives a very different life back home in Chicago where she is married to a dentist. A satirical contrast is established between the kind but gullible American midwestern housewife and the fashionable but obsessive east coast sophisticate. After sowing discontent in Mabel by suggesting she is not really as happy as she thinks she is, Henrietta excitedly sends her to see a psychoanalyst. Everyone is shocked when Mabel returns with the doctor’s assessment: Mabel desires Stephen, and Henrietta desires Mabel’s husband. Then Stephen reveals that he, too, has visited this doctor and been informed of his subconscious desire to escape his marriage. Now facing the specter of divorce, Henrietta denounces psychoanalysis and offers to burn her scientific books. The humorous play offers sharp satire of the glib use of psychological jargon and dream interpretation common in the social circles of the Provincetowners and their audience members. Light in tone, the play nonetheless delivers a strong critique of amateur Freudianism while examining the difficult relationship dynamics among modern, sophisticated urbanites.
Glaspell and Cook’s Tickless Time also spoofs fashionable intellectualism. The play is set at the Provincetown summer home of Ian and Eloise Joyce, enlightened New Yorkers, who have recently installed a sundial in the garden because, as Ian declares, a clock means getting one’s information from a machine rather than having a “first‐hand relation to truth” (81). Ian wants to eliminate all mechanical time pieces from their home but Eloise is reluctant to abandon the comfort of ticking clocks. Finally persuaded, she begins helping her husband dig a hole to bury all of their clocks including several family mementos. When the rustic Mrs. Stubbs – a local Provincetown neighbor – stops by to see the sundial she becomes insulted at the suggestion that keeping her watch set to Eastern Standard Time is both arbitrary and inaccurate. When friends Eddy and Alice arrive for dinner – with some confusion among the group about what time it actually is! – they, too, are unpersuaded by Ian’s insistence that sun time is more correct and noble than standard clock time. As Eddy declares, “what difference does it make if we’re wrong, if we’re all wrong together?” (Glaspell 2010: 86). Eloise becomes concerned about how they will function after their housekeeper threatens to quit without a kitchen clock. Eventually, several characters pick up spades and uncover the various buried clocks in a rush of comic activity. The play pokes fun at extreme idealism and gently mocks the manners of overly philosophical moderns – not unlike like Glaspell and Cook’s own circle of friends – who import their sometimes‐obnoxious modern fashions to the plain pragmatism of Massachusetts.
The milieu of a modern marriage is further explored in two other realistic little theater plays: Enemies by Neith Boyce and Hutchins Hapgood and Before Breakfast by Eugene O’Neill. Enemies (1916), written by another real‐life Provincetowner couple, shares with Glaspell and Cook’s Suppressed Desires some ideas about trendy intellectualism and calls attention to the theme using prominent books and manuscripts as props. The battling married couple in Enemies, simply called “He” and “She,” fight about the state of their union. “He” argues that the marriage lacks true connection of the soul because they have each made strong bonds with companions outside the marriage. Moreover, “He” is disturbed by her lack of interest in domesticity, and “She” complains that his lack of violent jealousy is unmanly. “She” suggests the real problem is simply that men and women are natural enemies, like dogs and cats. In the end, the couple agree that they enjoy the passion of their eternal conflict and prefer the sparks of staying together to the boredom of separating.
O’Neill’s picture of the conflict between men and women in Beyond Breakfast (1916) is less optimistic. The short play is a single, extended monologue delivered by Mrs. Rowland who rails shrilly against her husband as she makes their morning coffee. We discover that she has found a letter to her husband from his pregnant mistress. She berates him about his infidelity while insulting him for being too artistic and ineffectual. O’Neill’s novelistic stage directions for the short play include specifics of place – the couple’s flat is located on Christopher Street in New York City – as well as detailed naturalistic business for Mrs. Rowland. Throughout, her husband remains an off‐stage presence who says nothing in defense of himself and is only seen as a hand reaching into the kitchen for a bowl of hot water to shave by; interestingly, O’Neill himself played the non‐speaking husband in the original production. In the final moments of the short play, Mrs. Rowland hears a crash and sees spilt water coming in from the next room. She looks inside and screams her husband’s name, suggesting that he has killed himself.
But it was O’Neill’s realistic plays set aboard the fictional ship the S.S. Glencairn that garnered him the earliest critical attention. Bound East for Cardiff was performed on a makeshift wharf stage in Provincetown in July 1916 before becoming the very first play offered at the group’s New York City theater space that November. Set below deck on the Glencairn one foggy night, we observe various seamen pass their off‐duty time telling stories, playing music, and trading insults. The sounds of Irish, Scottish, Cockney, Swedish, and American accents, along with the ship’s bells and live music, provide a realistic environment for the play’s subdued action. The men are unnerved by the nearness of death as their comrade Yank lies suffering in his bunk following a bad fall. Yank is afraid he will die alone when his closest friend, Driscoll, goes back on duty, but Driscoll tries to encourage him with the memory of an accident at sea which the two men survived together. Yank suddenly declares that he sees a pretty lady dressed in black in the corner of the room, and with that he dies. The final image is Driscoll kneeling in prayer in front of Yank’s bunk.
The realism of O’Neill’s second sea play, Moon of the Caribbees (1918), aims at more atmosphere and less narrative. The short play’s dramatic structure meanders and stalls, purposefully eluding climax. Set at night as the Glencairn sits anchored off the West Indies, the play begins with the men waiting on deck for the arrival of island girls and rum. They boast, bicker, and sing until the women arrive and the party moves indoors. Two seamen, Smitty and the Donkeyman, stay on deck alone. Music from the island drifts onstage from shore and the muffled sounds of the party can be heard as the two men obliquely discuss their lives. Smitty is a lonely man and we, like his companion, wonder what has happened in his past to make him seek a life at sea. Suddenly the party spills out onto the deck, and the stage is flooded with loud laughter and accordion music until a fight breaks out and the first mate clears the rabble‐rousers. In the final moments of the play, Smitty is alone on stage as distant melancholy music is heard on the sea wind. Similar techniques of moody atmosphere, music, regional dialect, and displaced characters characterize the other two short sea plays which make up the Glencairn cycle: The Long Voyage Home (1917) and In the Zone (1917). In the Glencairn plays, O’Neill explores the details of life among various working‐class immigrants and non‐white people, reflecting the contemporary interest in folk drama.
Folk plays, typically realistic in style, tell stories about rural working‐class or impoverished characters with special attention given to details of ethnic or national identity, dialect, culture, and place. The first 1911 visit to the United States by the Irish Players, especially their production of John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea, encouraged a fashion for folk drama. The Irish Players at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin were part of the Independent Theater movement that inspired the earliest little theaters in the United States, and their use of simplified staging and modern dramaturgy had a profound influence on Americans seeking to build theater that was more art than commerce. As historian Dorothy Chansky notes, “References to playwright J.M. Synge as a touchstone for folk authenticity and to the Irish Players as a model for performing same run throughout the American Little Theater era’s writing on what to emulate” (2004: 205). Folk plays offered writers and audience members an opportunity to imagine their cultural connections to pockets of America – for example, Appalachia and poor black communities – whose social and geographical isolation was assumed to preserve a more authentic experience of life. In this light, the fictional Glencairn is a floating village of working‐class people who are more “real” than city dwellers who navigate a mechanized urban landscape instead of the sea.
O’Neill had some personal experience as a merchant marine, which gave him a framework to imagine the crew of the Glencairn, though he – like other playwrights in the period – felt free to create folk characters from communities he did not know firsthand. O’Neill wrote several prominent black characters, for example in The Dreamy Kid (1919), The Emperor Jones (1920), and All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1924). Pulitzer Prize‐winning playwright Paul Green is another noted example of a white writer in the little theater period who dramatized black folk characters. Green first began writing as a University of North Carolina student and was associated with the Carolina Playmakers whose collected plays, most by white university students, were made widely available through the publication of several volumes of Frederick Koch’s Carolina Folk‐Plays. Green’s plays with principal black characters are No Count Boy (1925), produced at the New York Theatre Club and Dallas Little Theatre among others, and In Abraham’s Bosom (Pulitzer Prize 1926), which was presented by the reorganized Provincetown organization.
Black writers also created opportunities to write and produce in the folk play form, for example, Georgia Douglas Johnson, whose one‐act Plumes (1927) won a playwriting contest sponsored by Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. The single‐setting play unfolds in just a few tight pages of dialogue between Charity Brown and her friend Tildy. Offstage, Charity’s daughter, Emeline, lies gravely ill in the second room of a humble cottage described with great realistic detail in the stage directions. As the women discuss the white doctor who wants to operate on Emeline, we watch them with the business of cooking a medicinal poultice, doing laundry, making coffee, checking on the unseen child, and sewing the hem on a dress for Emeline’s burial should she die. Charity declares that she has no faith in the doctor, though she seems to believe in Tildy’s ability to read the coffee grounds at the bottom of her cup to predict the child’s fate, and both are therefore shaken when Tildy foresees a procession of people which the women believe signifies a funeral. Talk quickly turns to assessments of how poorly various family funerals have been conducted. Determined to better honor her beloved dead, Charity has been saving up to purchase plumes for the horses who will pull the wagon for Emeline’s funeral parade. Dr. Scott arrives to again recommend surgery, though he cannot promise that it will heal Emeline and will cost $50 – everything Charity has saved for the eventuality of a funeral. “I can’t see what’s the use myself,” Charity tells Tildy, “he can’t save her with no operation – coffee grounds don’t lie” (Johnson 2001: 170). Before Charity has time to make a decision about the operation, however, Emeline dies and the only thing left to do is finish preparing the funeral dress. The realistic details of set and props as well as specific onstage domestic business in Plumes support a serious reflection on the proximity of death and the real pressure of poverty in the lives of rural black families in general and women in particular.
Experimental Little Theater Plays
In contrast to the literalistic scenic detail, regionalisms, and other specificity of realistic drama, experimental plays for the little theaters were often lyrical, using startling images and dream logic to evoke aspects of life which are often obscured or even transcendent. A good example is Alice Gerstenberg’s one‐act Overtones, written in 1913 and produced by the Washington Square Players as part of their first season in 1915. Gerstenberg, a founding member of the Chicago Little Theatre who adapted Alice in Wonderland for Broadway in 1915, uses experimental techniques to explore the psychological conflict of characters Harriet and Margaret. Margaret, recently returned from Europe, has come for tea to the elegant home of her old friend Harriet. Back in their hometown, Harriet dated an artistic boy but left him for a wealthy suitor when she realized he planned a career as a painter. The aspiring artist then married Margaret, who has now come to see Harriet in the secret hope that she will order a portrait and thereby provide the struggling couple with the money they desperately need. Harriet pines for her lost love and wants to commission a portrait as a means of spending time with him but is unsure how to do so without arousing suspicion. Complicating this scenario is the presence of Hetty and Maggie, Harriet and Margaret’s “primitive” selves or alter egos who are presented on stage by another pair of actors. Gerstenberg’s stage directions give concrete ideas for how this dual reality should be staged: Harriet wears light green and her alter ego wears a similar dress in a darker shade of “jealous” green. Likewise, Margaret is dressed in lavender while Maggie wears purple; both costumes use chiffon “to give a sheer effect, suggesting a possibility of primitive and cultured selves merging into one woman” (1943: 483). Hetty and Maggie bicker with one another and side‐coach their cultured selves, who are trapped in the play of surface appearances and compelled to follow the rules of appropriate social interaction. In the end, both women leave the meeting feeling they have manipulated the other into doing what they most deeply desire. Gerstenberg successfully creates a theatrical device for externalizing psychological conflict and Overtones thus reveals the dominance of popular Freudian ideas about the ego and id.
Edna St. Vincent Millay, best known for her modern poetry, also explored the possibilities of the non‐realistic dramaturgy in her work with the Provincetown Players, especially Aria da Capo, a commedia dell’arte style one‐act play first presented in December 1919. Aria da Capo is an anti‐war play that employs metatheatricality by establishing one set of characters – Pierrot and Columbine of a traditional Harlequinade – who are interrupted by two shepherds from a pastoral verse drama eager to perform their own scene. The play is highly theatrical throughout, with the shepherds engaging in symbolic warfare using crepe paper and confetti. Her pacifist message is reinforced in the last moments of the play after the shepherds kill each other because of a land border dispute. A shadowy onstage director figure orders Pierrot and Columbine to come back and perform again the frothy love scene which started Aria da Capo; the phrase da capo in music means “from the beginning.” When the pair protest because the dead shepherds are still visible on stage, Cothurnus instructs them to just hide the bodies and do their show because “The audience will forget” (1943: 478). Performed in the wake of the Great War, Millay’s message of ignoring war death and returning to normal life would have been clear to her audience.
Experiments with expressionism by little theater playwrights had arguably the most lasting effect on American drama. Expressionism in literature, theater, or visual art is generally defined as art that uses exaggeration and distortion to externally manifest internal conditions; German playwrights such as Oskar Kokoschka, Ernst Toller, and Georg Kaiser first borrowed the principle from the realm of painting. Of the American little theater plays that first used expressionist technique, the most notable were all produced by the Provincetown Players: O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1922) and Glaspell’s The Verge (1921). All three continue to be produced in theaters today as well as widely anthologized as examples of modernist American drama.
The Emperor Jones uses an eight‐scene structure to tell the story of Pullman porter Brutus Jones’s rise and fall as the “emperor” of Haiti. Monologue is the primary dramaturgical building block of the play, which presents Jones’s nightmarish vision as he flees through Haiti, moving both geographically deeper into the jungle and chronologically back in the history of black slavery. Jones’s fear‐fueled hallucinations include a slave auctioneer and a witch‐doctor and are underscored throughout by the sound of footfalls, wind, gunshots, shrieks, and unrelenting drumming which, according to the stage directions, “starts at a rate exactly corresponding to normal pulse beat – 72 to the minute – and continues at a gradually accelerated rate from this point uninterruptedly to the very end of the play” (2001: 275). The production opened on 1 November 1920, and subsequently moved to Broadway for a total of over 200 performances during the 1920–1921 season. Charles Gilpin originated the title role – the first modern serious black character to be played on the Broadway stage by a black actor – and was replaced by Paul Robeson in the 1924 revival on Broadway. The original production’s bold visual elements – angular lines and high contrast of light and shadow, created by director George Cram Cook and designer Cleon Throckmorton – were modeled on expressionist art. Its nightmare logic – the sense that we are trapped with Jones in a hallucination of racial history – suggests the influence of expressionist dramaturgy while foregrounding the psychological state of Brutus Jones. The play’s clear connection to experimental German drama was noted at the time, though extended nightmare or hallucination scenes had appeared in recent experimental American plays, for example in Theodore Dreiser’s little theater play Laughing Gas (1916).
Susan Glaspell’s expressionist‐tinged drama The Verge centers around a botanist named Claire Archer (played originally by Margaret Wycherly who had directed Cocaine for the Provincetowners in 1917). Married and parent to a 17‐year‐old daughter, Claire is a nonconformist who eschews monogamy and confesses to feeling unmotherly. Her passions are reserved for her scientific experiments to create new plants which will push beyond the known limits of nature. The first and third acts of the play take place in designer Cleon Throckmorton’s stylized greenhouse with a twisted staircase while the middle of the play is set in a distorted tower that serves as Claire’s refuge; the production also used harsh angles of light to expresses the discord in Claire’s mental state. Claire’s husband, Harry, is concerned about her state of mind and calls for a doctor while their house guests, Tom and Dick, are eventually revealed to be both having affairs with Claire. When Tom begs her to come away with him, the increasingly unstable Claire shoots him for being another typical man who wants to possess her. In the end, Claire’s plants also disappoint her and she loses her mind. Read in the context of popular Freudian thought of the time, Claire is an obsessive woman subject to hysteria. Glaspell, however, seems to suggest something much more significant in Claire’s break with sanity. Rather than the result of a faulty mind, Claire’s problems seem rooted in the insufficiency of the natural and social worlds to contain her big ideas and unorthodox desires. Given more freedom to think and live, Claire could possibly thrive, just as her plants would if the characters stopped disturbing her greenhouse conditions throughout the play. While more sentimental than the expressionism of the German playwrights or O’Neill and, at times, even comic, Glaspell’s play is clearly related to these experiments. The Verge employs exaggerated violence that alarmed and thrilled, externalized the emotional state of the protagonist, and featured boldly stylized design to underscore the essential non‐realism of the play. As historian Ronald Wainscott notes, given the relationship between Glaspell and O’Neill, “The Verge probably influenced The Hairy Ape” (1997: 114).
The Hairy Ape (1922), O’Neill’s second major experiment with expressionism and his most critically successful early play, is centered around an engine stoker named Yank who works in the bowels of a luxury ocean liner. In the first of the play’s eight scenes, Yank is shown as the confident leader of his working world, a man who is secure about his place in the modern, mechanized world. He boldly dismisses the useless class of people who buy expensive passage on his ship: “Dey’re just baggage. Who makes dis old tub run? Ain’t it us guys? Well den, we belong, don’t we? We belong and dey don’t. Dat’s all” (2001: 362). When his worldview is challenged by a high society woman named Mildred, daughter of a steel baron and head of the ship line, Yank’s philosophy collapses like a house of straw. Mildred, fascinated by the working class whom she doesn’t understand, has gone below deck to see the stokers whose labor powers the ocean liner. When Mildred enters the stoke hole and sees Yank covered in soot, she recoils and screams in an expression that, a shipmate tells Yank, was just as if she had seen a hairy ape escaped from the zoo. This description haunts Yank and sends him on a mission for revenge.
First, Yank goes ashore in New York City with a fellow stoker where they encounter well‐heeled New Yorkers depicted as soulless automatons; the figures are dressed in fancy clothing and wearing expressionless masks in order to visually manifest Yank’s perception of wealthy Manhattanites. The use of masks to externalize psychological action would be explored again by O’Neill in The Great God Brown (1926). Yank ends up punching a man on the street and being seized by the police. The next scene shows Yank seated like “The Thinker” in a set of jail cells where he is persuaded by another prisoner that his real enemy is the capitalism represented by Mildred’s father. We then follow Yank as he searches for a renewed sense of purpose and identity at a meeting of the Industrial Workers of the World (the “Wobblies”); however, his offer to do violence on their behalf is interpreted as a police trap and he is ejected. In the eighth and final scene of the play, Yank visits the zoo where we see a line of animal cages reminiscent of the earlier jail cells and a gorilla posed like “The Thinker.” The entire scene is Yank’s monologue to the gorilla about finding one’s place in the hostile world. In a passion, Yank releases the gorilla only to have the creature embrace him in a deadly hug that ends the play. The sensory elements of The Hairy Ape are all excessive. Characters speak in heavy dialects and deliver lengthy monologues. The stokers are filthy animals and Mildred wears pristine white. The stokers, prisoners, and zoo animals all chatter loudly and angrily. The play’s exaggeration expresses Yank’s relationship to a world that suddenly feels overwhelming. His inability to thrive outside of the ocean liner’s stoke hold demonstrates the failure of mechanized modern society to support human flourishing.
Conclusion
Little theater experiments with the techniques of expressionism would inspire more notable exploration of the form, for example The Adding Machine (1923) by Elmer Rice and Machinal (1928) by Sophie Treadwell. Both of these lauded American expressionist plays would open first at Broadway houses rather than little theaters. The very fact that such risky drama was being produced commercially in New York is evidence of the success of the Little Theater movement’s mission to foster innovation in theatrical practice and to encourage new modes of playwriting. While it would be naive to suggest that the movement fully transformed the priorities of the American theatrical industry from profit to art, the little theaters were demonstrably successful in altering the place of theater in the culture. Before the Little Theater movement, theater seemed to live outside of the purview of civics, art, and higher education. By the end of the era, the national conversation shifted toward a view of theater as socially valuable, connected to wider movements in art, and an appropriate subject for intellectual inquiry. Nor was the influence of the little theaters limited to the heyday of the movement. These same little theaters, often referred to collectively in the period as “tributary theaters” for their geographical relationship to commercial centers, would become the foundation for the first push of American regional theaters which began in the 1950s and prospered into the 1980s.
What is more, as the plays discussed in this chapter reveal, the Little Theater movement successfully fostered the careers of new American playwrights and shaped the development of a modern American drama. In her book The Little Theatre in the United States (1917), art theater advocate Constance D’Arcy Mackay enthusiastically declared, “Before the advent of the Little Theatre in this country poetic drama went starving; fantasy, shivered in the biting wind of neglect. Now poetry, fantasy, grim realism, star‐dust pantomime, and tingling satire find place in the Little Theatres” (1917: 18). Highly celebrated playwrights Susan Glaspell and Eugene O’Neill shaped, and were shaped by, the Little Theater Movement, as were lesser known writers such as Georgia Douglas Johnson, Pendleton King, and Alice Gerstenberg. Their work in the highly detailed mode of realism as well as more poetic and dreamlike forms such as expressionism demonstrated the power of modern dramaturgy to speak to American concerns of the new century, including the place of women in society, the cost of urbanization and mechanization, and the value of a scientific understanding of human behavior.
References
Further Reading
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 12 (REALISM IN AMERICAN DRAMA).