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Brenda Murphy
In 1914, realism was just making its way into the American theater. Several historical trends had come together early in the twentieth century to bring realist aesthetic values to the notice of playwrights and theater practitioners. One was the influence of Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw. Although serious theater people had read Ibsen’s plays and literary critics had written about them during the 1890s, they didn’t reach the general consciousness until the persistent efforts of well‐known leading ladies Minnie Maddern Fiske and Alla Nazimova to keep acting in A Doll’s House (1879), Hedda Gabler (1890), and other Ibsen plays finally found an audience around 1910. Similarly, Shaw’s influential The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891) was well known to serious playwrights and theater artists long before his own plays came to the attention of the general public when the cast of Arnold Daly’s 1905 production of Mrs. Warren’s Profession was arrested in New York for indecency. Once these playwrights were well known, producers were much more likely to risk putting on the plays of Americans who wrote similarly.
Another important influence was the outspoken drama criticism of committed American realist writers and critics like Henry James, Hamlin Garland, and particularly William Dean Howells, who kept up a 20‐year campaign to bring to the stage the realistic aesthetics that he practiced and encouraged in fiction. Howells and Garland had a direct influence on James A. Herne, “the American Ibsen,” whose Margaret Fleming (1890) is generally considered the first American play with a consciously realistic aesthetic. But the play, which included a scene of a woman preparing to nurse a baby, was too controversial for Herne to risk a commercial production in the 1890s. After the turn of the century, a younger generation – which, as the popular playwright Clyde Fitch said, represented “Howells’ Age” (Murphy 1987: 70) – worked consciously to write plays that embodied realistic aesthetic values but could be successful on the commercial stage. Besides Fitch, the most successful of these were Edward Sheldon and Rachel Crothers. Sheldon’s Salvation Nell (1909), Minnie Fiske’s most famous vehicle, established the metonymic aesthetic for realistic setting. The play begins with Nell, a young, single, pregnant woman, working as a scrubwoman in a saloon, the setting famous for its faithfulness in every detail to the garish Bowery joint that is bound to launch Nell on her final descent to the streets. The saloon is metonym for the social and economic milieu that threatens to destroy Nell. In the second act, Nell has joined the Salvation Army, and the set, the small, neat room where she lives with her child, suggests through its many details a milieu in which she is in control of her life and her decisions.
Rachel Crothers, whose plays would be a steady presence in the Broadway theater from 1906 until 1937, is well known for her American version of what Shaw called the “drama of discussion” in which “the action […] consists of a case to be argued,” and “the drama arises through a conflict of unsettled ideals” (Shaw 1891: 220, 221). Crothers’s discussion plays are set in common, mostly domestic spaces and feature mostly middle‐class characters who speak colloquial dialogue and are intended to be accepted by the audience as people like themselves. Crothers integrates the discussion into the action by introducing a conflict that can be resolved only when an issue between the characters is resolved, avoiding the arbitrary imposition of a resolution on the action that Shaw found intolerable in the contemporary “well‐made play.” Crothers’s best‐known discussion play, A Man’s World (1910), ends with an argument about the double standard of sexual morality, with a man insisting that he has the right to condemn the mother of his illegitimate child for being so weak as to have had sex with him, and that he has no responsibility for her child. Like Ibsen’s Doll’s House, the play ends with the relationship dissolving, rather than with the conventional “happy ending” of comedy or melodrama. Crothers used a similar strategy in writing her other discussion plays, He and She (1912), about the issue of whether a woman should have both a career and a family, and Ourselves (1913), about the responsibility for prostitution that is borne by both the men who exploit young women and the complacent wives who do nothing about it.
Crothers wrote the most fully executed American discussion plays on what Shaw described as the Ibsen model, in which characters discuss issues earnestly and the action is resolved only if the issue is resolved. Shaw’s own plays are mostly comedies, of course, and they are characterized by “the introduction of the discussion and its development until it so overspreads and interpenetrates the action that it finally assimilates it, making play and discussion practically identical,” and they make “free use of all the rhetorical arts of the orator, the preacher, the pleader and the rhapsodist” (Shaw 1891: 233–234). Shaw’s influence is obvious on the first play to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama, Jesse Lynch Williams’s Why Marry? (1917), a witty series of discussions in 10 scenes that covers every controversial aspect of the subject of marriage that its audience would be likely to think of, from divorce and the double standard to the New Woman and the economic dependency that forces women into loveless marriages. With lines like “the practical object of marriage is not to bring together those who love each other, but to keep together those who do not” (Williams 1918: 149), the dialogue resembles the witty repartee of Shaw more than the earnest argument of Crothers.
The discussion play continued to be a popular form for playwrights who wanted to make a serious point throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s. Although the majority of these plays tended to focus on the controversial aspects of marriage and related issues, some other examples include Susan Glaspell’s Inheritors (1921), about freedom of speech on a college campus; Augustus Thomas’s Still Waters (1926), about Prohibition; Robert Sherwood’s The Road to Rome (1927), an anti‐war play; and Maxwell Anderson’s Both Your Houses (1933), about corruption in Washington. The Road to Rome is probably the most Shavian of these plays. For the most part, its tone is light despite its subject matter, and Sherwood spices it up with a romantic encounter between Hannibal and Amytis, the Greek wife of the dictator Fabius. Amytus cannot understand the bellicose Romans, and she complains that she can’t keep track of all the wars, or “who our enemies happen to be at the moment” (Gassner 1949: 300). Sherwood uses Amytus as a witty mouthpiece for exposing the bellicose imperialism that seems to come naturally to the Romans around her. But there are striking moments in the play when humor is displaced by a grim sense of war’s reality, all too familiar to Sherwood, a World War I veteran. A Roman soldier tells Amytus that in one battle, “our army was a confused mass of struggling, writhing men – battling against an enemy that attacked from every side. The slaughter was unspeakably awful” (306). Amytus sets out to convince Hannibal not to invade Rome, opting instead for the “human equation,” which is “so much more beautiful than war” (323). After sleeping with Amytus, Hannibal does discover the human equation, and he spares Rome, marching off and leaving a presumably pregnant Amytus to raise a son who will share his new values.
While realism was evolving in the commercial theater of Broadway, there was also a thriving movement to produce consciously literary plays that were free of commercial restraints. The Little Theater movement is covered at length elsewhere in this volume, but it is important to mention that some of the best and most influential work in realistic drama was produced by non‐commercial theaters like the Provincetown Players and the Wisconsin Players. In particular, Eugene O’Neill’s early one‐act “Sea Plays,” Bound East for Cardiff (1916) and The Moon of the Caribees (1918), feature scenes in which character and milieu are foregrounded without the artificial imposition of a conventional plot, creating dramatic action that seems to grow organically from the situation. Susan Glaspell’s Trifles (1916) and Neith Boyce’s Winter’s Night (1916) are tours de force in the metonymic use of setting for characterization. Many plays from these theaters were intended to give the audience the illusion that it was watching and overhearing a “slice of life” rather than a contrived dramatic plot, with locations from rural New England to bohemian Greenwich Village and the slums of the Lower East Side of New York. They helped to prepare theatergoers and producers alike for the developments of the 1920s and 1930s.
By 1920, theater artists, critics, and audiences all shared a general understanding of the elements of a realistic play. Its fundamental assumption is the “illusion of the fourth wall” – that the proscenium arch frames a space where a wall has been removed so that the audience can eavesdrop on a “slice of life” in a particular milieu, usually some aspect of contemporary life. The set evokes the illusion of that milieu as fully as possible, usually through close attention to recreating the environment in every detail. Rather than the Aristotelian sense of character as a set of qualities that motivate action, the realistic character is seen increasingly as a Freudian‐influenced representation of a particular personality, which has evolved within the environmental influences of the milieu. The realistic play generally takes on some social issue, large or small, the point of its verisimilitude being to expose for the audience some problematic aspect of contemporary life that they share and will be moved to do something about as a result of the empathy they are brought to feel for the characters. In terms of structure, the realistic play eschews the imposition of a conventional plot, such as melodrama, on the action and tries to create the illusion that the action has arisen organically from the particular characters being placed in the particular environment and circumstances of the play.
The fact that the first three Pulitzer Prizes for drama went to Why Marry?, Eugene O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon (1920), and Zona Gale’s Miss Lulu Bett (1921) gives a good sense of the esteem in which dramatic realism was held by the early 1920s. O’Neill’s and Gale’s plays are examples of the domestic realism that emerged from the fad of regionalism that hit the stage in the early part of the decade. This trend included plays like Hatcher Hughes’s Hell‐Bent Fer Heaven (1924), Paul Green’s In Abraham’s Bosom (1926), and Dubose and Dorothy Heyward’s Porgy (1927), which gave the illusion of an inside look into the culture of the Appalachian mountains or the Deep South.
O’Neill’s play is set on a farm in New England and Gale’s in a small midwestern town, but each of these does more than evoke its milieu. Gale used a confined domestic space as metonymy for virtual domestic slavery. Lulu, a single woman who lives with her brother and sister‐in‐law, works “for her keep” by doing all the domestic work for the family. In the early part of the play, the other family members come and go freely through the dining room while she never leaves this space. It is only when she takes action to secure her independence that the setting is moved to a more open space on the porch, free of the association with domestic drudgery. Always a master of stage directions, O’Neill used his farmhouse to delineate the dissolution of a marriage through its gradual descent into dilapidation, but more interestingly, he created a subliminal rhythm through the alternation of scenes inside the farmhouse, the representation of the poet Robert Mayo’s confinement, with scenes on the hilltop that represent his yearning for transcendent experience. O’Neill described the rhythm as “the alternation of longing and loss,” insisting that a playwright “can actually produce and control emotions by that means alone” (Sheaffer 1968: 419).
Domestic realism took a turn toward social critique in the middle of the decade with such plays as George Kelly’s Craig’s Wife (1925), Sidney Howard’s The Silver Cord (1926), and Lewis Beach’s A Square Peg (1923), each of which portrays some aspect of the middle‐class wife as domestic tyrant, sucking the life out of her husband and children because of her need to control them and live vicariously through them. With their roots in Ibsen and Freud, these plays are centered in character and discussion. They all make effective metonymic use of setting, however, each creating a house that is the psychic domain in which a neurotic personality holds sway and in which the other members of the family must live. Harriet Craig’s house, for example, “reflects the very excellent taste and fanatical orderliness of its mistress […] a kind of frozen grandeur” (Coe 1935: 321). In keeping with their Freudian roots, these plays feature direct discursive analysis of the main character. Rena Huckins of a Square Peg is analyzed by her daughter as having been ruined by suppression. Mrs. Phelps of The Silver Cord is described by her daughter‐in‐law Christina as an unnatural mother who has “swallowed [her son] up until there’s nothing left of him but an effete make‐believe” (Tucker 1931: 672). But a series of actions has already revealed the characters to the audience so that the analysis is meant as an explicit articulation of what they have seen and a preparation for the playwright’s implication of the need for change. Christina ends her speech with what is presumably Sidney Howard’s statement of what’s wrong with the current state of motherhood: “What makes you doubly deadly and dangerous is that people admire you and your kind. They actually admire you! You professional mothers!” (672). Christina takes action to get her husband out of Mrs. Phelps’s clutches and off to Europe where they can both pursue their careers as research scientists and Christina can presumably avoid replicating her mother‐in‐law’s mistake with her own children.
While these plays have their roots in Ibsen, another form of domestic realism, the society comedy, owes more to Shaw. These sophisticated plays by playwrights such as Philip Barry, Rachel Crothers, and S.N. Behrman, who were active throughout the 1920s and 1930s, reflect an upper‐class, usually New York, milieu and address social issues, usually related to male–female relations, with wit and humor. At their best, as in Barry’s The Philadelphia Story (1939), Crothers’s When Ladies Meet (1933), and Behrman’s Biography (1932), they use set and dialogue to illustrate some kind of character‐changing revelation that will be illuminating for the audience as well. While the wit is what kept the audience’s interest in these plays, they are often interesting dramatically for their structure. Both Crothers and Behrman, for example, make their point partly through their disruption of the audience’s expectations for romantic comedy. Behrman’s protagonist, Marion Froude, secures the prospect of a happy future for herself by leaving her three suitors behind and going off alone to pursue her career as a freelance portrait painter, secure in her economic independence. In When Ladies Meet, what is presented as a love triangle in which the woman who loves the man the most should get him ends with both women rejecting him because each realizes he has not treated her rival very well.
The iconic realistic play of the 1920s was undoubtedly Elmer Rice’s Street Scene (1929). The play was justly famous for its set, which recreated the front of a New York city brownstone. The entire action takes place on the front stoop and the sidewalk in front of it. The characters who live in the house, and many passers‐by, stand on the sidewalk, lounge on the stoop, or observe from the windows. Rice’s goal was to produce a play that fully created the illusion for the audience that they were watching life as lived in a New York streetscape. He wrote that
the whole point of the play […] is that life is complex and diversified, that every situation carries with it irrelevant and incongruous elements, that there is no such thing as unmixed joy or unmixed tragedy and that pathos, fun, sordidness, beauty, brutality, tenderness, passion, despair and hope are all inextricably mixed and all form part of one more or less unified whole.
(Murphy 1987: 185)
The structure of the play, which embeds a plot of thwarted romantic love and a plot of melodramatic revenge within the random life in the house and street, reinforces Rice’s point. Rice believed that life cannot be believably represented within the single pattern of melodrama or comedy or tragedy, but that is not to say that those patterns do not occur in the midst of life. A true realistic representation must, in his view, reflect both the randomness of human activity and the patterns that can be detected within it.
During the 1930s, the economy of the Great Depression had an important effect on the American theater. On the one hand, it put many theater artists and workers out of a job. The American theater would never again reach the heights of activity it had during the 1920s, when, during its most active season (1927–1928), 264 new plays were produced on Broadway (compared with 28 in 2014). This situation was mirrored in cities throughout the country. In response to the situation, however, many new forms of theater and venues for production sprang up, particularly workers’ theaters devoted to polemical, socially conscious plays. The development of agit prop (agitation propaganda) plays that were specifically intended to break through the fourth‐wall illusion and challenge audiences to take direct action is an important part of this phenomenon. The best known of these, Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty (1935), is of interest in a study of realism because he specifically adapted the European agit prop form to fit the realistic slant of the American theater. Unlike the distancing “alienation” of the Brechtian theater, Odets evoked an emotional identification between audience and characters. Before calling on the audience to join the cast in the call to “Strike, strike, strike!” Odets was careful to evoke recognition and empathy with the strikers through a series of scenes that show the effects of the economy on the workers and their families. More typical of his work was the realism of Awake and Sing! (1935), a domestic drama that evoked the audience’s affirmation of the protagonist’s choice to go out and fight against the abuses of capitalism in the spirit of his socialist grandfather.
Another characteristic of the 1930s was the development of social melodrama. This was not simply a reversion to the nineteenth‐century representation of the world in the simple terms of a battle between good and evil characters over a figure of innocence. Social melodrama manipulated melodramatic structure to dramatize an ideology, such as fascism or unbridled capitalism, through its personification in characters the audience would naturally condemn, leaving them open to approving the character who opposes this ideology, usually from the left. The greedy and sadistic Hubbards in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes (1936), the people who “eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts” (Hellman 1972: 188), personify the worst aspects of capitalism. The escape from them by the idealistic young Alexandra suggests the possibility of a new and better order. In Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine (1941), a fascist is killed by a resistance hero and the other characters help him to evade the American police so he can go back to Germany and fight, with the full approval of the audience. While this aggressively manipulated form of drama is far from realistic, Hellman and other playwrights made use of realistic characters, dialogue, and setting to help evoke the audience’s identification with the characters and its recognition of their ideological dilemmas as their own.
Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller began their careers in the socially conscious, didactic theater of the 1930s. Miller wrote plays about labor strife while he was at the University of Michigan. For The Mummers, a leftist theater in St. Louis, Williams wrote plays about coal miners, an urban flophouse, and a prison hunger strike. Miller freely acknowledged Ibsen’s influence on his early work for the commercial theater. His first Broadway play, The Man who Had All the Luck (1944), is so indebted to Ibsen’s The Master Builder (1892) that it could almost be considered an adaptation. In 1950, during the McCarthy hysteria, Miller did adapt Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1882), which he saw as an assertion of the individual’s right to tell truth to power.
All My Sons (1947), Miller’s first successful Broadway play, shows traces of Ibsen’s The Pillars of Society (1877) and The Wild Duck (1884). It is this play that most effectively demonstrates his development of Ibsenist realism for the mid‐twentieth‐century American theater. He was most interested in two characteristics of Ibsen’s realism. The first is the so‐called “late point of attack,” which Miller called “bringing the past into the present” (Miller 1996: 132) in order to locate the play’s action as a moment within the flow of time and not just an isolated incident. But he made it clear that the play “takes its time with the past, not in deference to Ibsen’s method as I saw it then, but because its theme is the question of actions and consequences, and a way had to be found to throw a long line into the past in order to make that kind of connection viable” (132). The second Ibsenist characteristic is the “insistence upon valid causation” (133) in his plots. Both of these principles are evident in All My Sons, as is the Ibsenesque theme of the individual’s responsibility to society, against the claims of his family if need be. When Joe Keller tries to defend having knowingly sent out faulty parts that would be placed in American fighter planes by saying he did it to save his business for the family, his son Chris will have none of it. Joe’s moral redemption comes only when he recognizes that the pilots were all his sons. As Miller put it, “the fortress to which All My Sons lays siege is the fortress of unrelatedness” (131).
While Miller was exploring the uses of Ibsenist realism in the early 1940s, Tennessee Williams was experimenting with expressionism and other anti‐realistic techniques. He insisted in his 1945 note on The Glass Menagerie’s production that “the straight realistic play with its genuine Frigidaire and authentic ice‐cubes, its characters who speak exactly as its audience speaks, corresponds to the academic landscape and has the same virtue of a photographic likeness. Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art” (Williams 1971: 131). With the exception of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), which he intended as a realistic family tragedy, Williams did not write any plays during the 1940s and 1950s that were examples of straightforward realism. Instead, in conjunction with designer Jo Mielziner and director Elia Kazan, he developed a theatrical idiom that can be called “subjective realism,” the use of staging and lighting effects that convinced the audience it was seeing the events on stage subjectively, as the protagonist saw them, rather than objectively, which is the implication of traditional realism. The trick is to ground the play in realistic conventions enough so that the audience accepts the illusion that the action is taking place in reality, while simultaneously introducing the subjective perception of the protagonist, sometimes through expressionist elements. An example of this technique is the gradual move from an objective representation of Stanley and Stella’s apartment in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) into Blanche’s hallucinations of her husband’s death and the jungle cries and lurid reflections on the wall, which the audience shares.
The culmination of subjective realism can be seen in the production of Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), on which he collaborated with Mielziner and Kazan. Miller wrote that in Salesman he had wanted to represent the “two logics” of a man who “can no longer restrain the power of his experience from disrupting the superficial sociality of his behavior […] he is literally at that terrible moment when the voice of the past is no longer distant but quite as loud as the voice of the present. In dramatic terms the form, therefore, is this process” (Miller 1996: 138). What Miller needed in the production was a “mobile concurrency of past and present” (138), and this is exactly what the techniques of subjective realism were to provide. In watching Death of a Salesman, the audience simultaneously believes in the existence of the Lomans and the other characters in the present of 1948 and knows that the scenes from 1932 are the past as Willy sees it; thus the objective and the subjective versions of reality are present together on the stage.
Subjective realism, which came to be known as “the American style,” was enormously influential not only in the United States but throughout the Western theatrical world, in the 1940s and 1950s, enough so that Miller complained, referring to Mielziner’s design techniques, that “the fifties became an era of gauze […] a cruel, romantic neuroticism, a translation of current life into the war within the self” (Miller 1996: 232). But traditional realism was still a powerful presence in the theater of the 1950s, largely because of two towering presences during the decade, Eugene O’Neill and William Inge. O’Neill died in 1953, his reputation having fallen into gradual eclipse since his winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936. This changed in 1956 when Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a play he had finished in 1940 but forbidden to be published or produced until 25 years after his death, was prematurely released by his widow for production first in Sweden, and then in the United States. The New York production and a revival of The Iceman Cometh (1946), both directed by José Quintero, reestablished O’Neill’s position as the premier American playwright. Both plays are brilliant pieces of dramatic realism, exhibiting its full potential in all of their dramatic elements, beginning with the sets that represent character‐determining milieux: the end‐of‐the‐line saloon in Iceman and the stultifying summer cottage in which the four Tyrones are trapped together in Long Day’s Journey. Each of the 18 characters in Iceman has a distinct identity and faces an issue that must be resolved as part of the action. As for Iceman’s structure, Quintero noted that, eschewing conventional dramatic forms, it “was not built as an orthodox play. It resembles a complex musical form, with themes repeating themselves with slight variation, as melodies do in a symphony” (Quintero 1956: 88). Long Day’s Journey works in a similar way, with a rhythm of escalating conflicts among the characters finally erupting in tour‐de‐force self‐revelatory modified monologues by each of the main characters in acts 3 and 4. In a departure from conventional dramatic form, the play has no single protagonist, and the inward ordeals of the characters are given nearly equal weight.
Most significantly for realism, both Iceman and Long Day’s Journey overflow what would be the final closure of the action within a conventionally structured play, suggesting, as Rice did in Street Scene, that such forms may be contained in life, but they do not account for it. Mary Tyrone’s last line, as she cradles her wedding dress surrounded by the drunken sons and husband on whom she blames her unhappiness and drug addiction, is the well‐known, “I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time” (O’Neill 1988: 828). This is not a tragic or melodramatic closure to the action but an acknowledgment of its contingency. Everything in the play is “for a time.” There is no assurance that the same endless round of accusation, defense, pain, and forgiveness among the four characters will not begin again the next morning. In Iceman, the drunks in the saloon set off on a round of singing when the truth‐teller Hickey, who threatened to destroy their life‐sustaining illusions, has been expelled from their midst, but it is not the celebration of a new harmonious order that comes at the end of a typical comedy. Their singing is a “weird cacophany” because none of them sing the same song, and Larry, the one convert to truth that Hickey made in the bar, “stares out in front of him, oblivious to their racket” (O’Neill 1988: 711).
William Inge was the most popularly successful of the serious American playwrights during the 1950s, with more than 1600 total performances among his four plays of the decade. His subject was the Midwest, on which he centered a realistic drama characterized by a relentless clarity of vision. Inge, who grew up a closeted gay man in Independence, Kansas, freely acknowledged that this work was autobiographical, meant to offer “some view of life that is peculiarly mine that no one else could offer in quite the same style and form” (Inge 1958: vi). His particular insight is evident in Come Back Little Sheba (1950), his first play to reach Broadway. Inge was plagued by alcoholism and drug addiction during his whole adult life, a special knowledge that is behind the unflinching depiction of the alcoholic Doc and his wife Lola, whom he physically abuses when he’s drunk. In Lola, the childless and affection‐starved wife who has invested her emotional life in her little dog Sheba, there is also a good deal of closely observed psychological truth. Inge’s honest representation of their marriage avoids both the sensational and the sentimental pitfalls of his material. When, at the end of the play, Lola accepts the fact that her dog is dead and they decide to get a bird dog so that Doc can take up hunting as a distraction from the things that lead him to drink, Inge manages to suggest hope for their situation within a realistic context that the audience can accept as believable.
In Picnic (1953), Inge focused on the many variations of love, marriage, and family dynamics in a midwestern small town. The play is perhaps most interesting in its clear‐eyed depiction of marginal characters. Rosemary, the “old‐maid schoolteacher,” with her feigned prudishness and repressed sexuality, makes a desperate proposal of marriage to a man she doesn’t love in order to escape her lot. Flo, bitter about her failed marriage, is determined that her beautiful daughter will choose comfort and safety in a husband rather than repeat what she sees as her mistake in marrying for love. They are balanced by Mrs. Potts, who manages to maintain a genial attitude toward the world despite the fact that she lives in virtual servitude to her mother, who had forced her to annul her marriage after her elopement with Mr. Potts many years earlier. All of them suffer to some degree for being outside the norm in the town, but they all find a way to live a life there, as full of compromises as it may be.
Although it takes place in a roadside diner, Bus Stop (1955) is in the tradition of the saloon play, which draws together a group of disparate characters in order to illuminate many sides of an issue, usually through the aid of alcohol. The Iceman Cometh is an example of this genre as well as William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life (1939) and Philip Barry’s Here Come the Clowns (1938). In Bus Stop, the passengers on a cross‐country bus are trapped overnight in a midwestern diner by a blizzard. As the night unfolds, each of them exhibits a problematic side of love and/or sex. In a realistic counter to the traditional romantic ending in which love conquers all, Inge has each of his collection of marginal people come to some limited insight about love, sex, and human relations which will make their lives and relationships better, although far from ideal. As Albert Wertheim wrote, “perhaps Inge’s greatest achievement as a dramatist was to bring sexual matters to the stage in such a way that they were neither grotesque nor obscene but could be discussed in a theater so as to illumine the private lives of the spectators” (2014: 17).
The title of Inge’s The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957) hints at the Freudian insights about family dynamics and sexual secrets in the play, particularly the oedipal relationship between Cora Flood and her son, called Sonny. Cora’s husband Rubin, distressed by what he considers Cora’s making his son into a mama’s boy and his wife’s lies about money, hits her and leaves the house at the beginning of the play. The specter of sexuality, symbolized by the dark unknown that Sonny fears at the top of the stairs, hangs over the play throughout. In addition to the ever‐present staircase, Inge even suggested that the play’s title should be displayed throughout the performance as a constant reminder to the audience. The specter is dispelled at the end of the play when Rubin returns and asserts his role as “the man of the house.” Cora and Rubin head upstairs together as she lets Sonny go to the movies with his sister, negotiating his own way in the town without his mother to protect him from bullies.
The 1950s abounded with realistic plays about sexuality and the American family, such as Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy (1953), both of which deal with homosexuality in a familial and social context. The decade ended, fittingly, with Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), a play that made use of a finely honed domestic realism to point out the destructive effect of the exclusion of a large part of the population from America’s vision of the family and society. It has often been noticed that the Younger family is very much like the Loman family in Death of a Salesman, with its dreams of a better life than the one that has five people crammed into a three‐room apartment and its hope for the younger generation to get educated and achieve something in the world. Unlike Miller’s assimilated Jews, however, the Youngers face a seemingly immovable external obstacle in achieving the American Dream, the racism that keeps them in an overpriced ghetto apartment with the adults all employed at poorly paid menial work. In the play, the Youngers’ dream takes on the material shape of buying a house in the suburbs with the insurance money from the father Big Walter’s recent death. Despite the politely racist attempt of the neighborhood association to buy them out, they decide to persevere and move into the hostile environment of the all‐white town.
Hansberry uses the techniques of realistic setting to emphasize the play’s conflict. The Younger apartment, a metonym for the whole ghetto environment that is keeping the Youngers back, is described in specific detail, down to the much‐scrubbed surfaces, the worn carpet, the tired pillows on the couch, and the little plant that can hardly survive in the weak light that comes from the single window. When they leave the apartment together at the end of the play, the family members have escaped the environment, but the plant, symbolic of the seed that Big Walter had planted for their future and that his wife Lena had nurtured, goes with them. In the decades since the play’s premiere, Hansberry’s characters have been criticized as stereotypes, epitomized in the caricature of the “Last Mama on the Couch” in George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum (1986), but it must be remembered that this was the first play by an African American woman to reach Broadway, and a very rare depiction of a middle‐class black family. If Hansberry’s characters have become stereotypes, in 1959 they were carefully rendered individuals new to the American stage.
As in Rice’s Street Scene, several plotlines are embedded in the overall action of A Raisin in the Sun. The son, Walter Lee, enacts a delayed coming of age during the play, as he assumes his rightful place in the family and refuses the money from the white racists that he had been planning to accept. Hansberry subverts the traditional romantic comedy plot when Walter Lee’s sister Beneatha breaks up with George Murchison, the son of a rich man who would provide her with comfort and comparative luxury but would cut off her dreams of finishing her education and becoming a doctor. These plots, organic to the play’s overall action, undergird the family’s move from the confining enclosure of the apartment and the ghetto to the greater possibilities inherent in a home they own in an open, suburban environment.
There was a major shift in the American theater during the 1960s and 1970s, as serious playwrights, inspired by new anti‐mimetic theater in Europe, turned away from realism and experimented with many theatrical idioms, beginning with the Theater of the Absurd. A number of new groups, including the Black Arts Theater and the Feminist Theater movement, challenged the dominance of realism on both political and aesthetic grounds. The playwright was relegated to the background in auteur theaters that privileged the director and in collective theaters that made the creation of plays a group activity. Realistic playwrights continued to flourish on Broadway, where Neil Simon, the most popular playwright in the history of the American theater, had hit after hit of middle‐class social comedy during the two decades, including four plays running simultaneously during the 1966–1967 season. But realism’s dominance was no longer recognized by serious literary playwrights, whose work was more likely to be produced in Off‐Broadway, Off‐Off Broadway, regional theater, and alternative theater venues than in Broadway theaters. Older playwrights like Williams and Miller shifted to writing non‐mimetic plays during this period, although they were not welcomed by audiences or critics. A good example of the younger generation that flourished is Edward Albee, the first American to write important absurdist plays with The Zoo Story (1958) and American Dream (1960). Albee experimented with different theatrical idioms throughout his career, and wrote mostly for Off‐Broadway venues, although the success of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) opened the door for a number of his plays to be produced in Broadway theaters.
In a sense, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was a play that straddled the old and the new theaters in 1962. It can be seen and understood as a realistic play about a couple who create a sustaining illusion and a series of intellectual and emotional games to make their marriage work, but learn through a drunken night with a younger couple that they have a better chance at happiness if they “exorcise” that illusion from their relationship and look at each other honestly and directly. There is nothing anti‐realistic in the elements of the play, which takes place in the living room of a typical faculty member’s house in an elite New England college town. The characters are believable, psychologically complicated people who speak a colloquial if exceptionally clever intellectual dialogue, which is understandable in the academic milieu in which they operate. The play’s theme, which Albee described as “who’s afraid of living life without false illusions” (Flanagan 1998: 52), is certainly realistic, and its organic structure, which plays the evening’s games out to their logical end, is within the realm of realistic drama. What gives it an avant‐garde, experimental edge, aside from the sometimes shocking interactions among the characters, is a style that recalls the Theater of the Absurd, a disjointed quality in the events, the surprises that punctuate the action, and the existential bleakness in the atmosphere. In this play, it is finally George’s rationality that wins out, but there is also a sense that rationality is terrifying.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, a number of playwrights infused realistic drama with new techniques and perspectives that created hybrid idioms, such as what is often referred to as the “hyperrealism” or “super‐realism” of Sam Shepard, the minimal realism of David Mamet, and the magical realism of August Wilson. Mamet’s American Buffalo (1975), Glengarry Glen Ross (1983), and Oleanna (1992) are composed of aggressively colloquial dialogue that has come to be known as “Mamet speak,” but the playwright deliberately offers almost no instruction on setting or characterization. Mamet insists that the play is entirely contained in the dialogue.
For the most part, the women in the theater movement that grew out of second‐wave feminism during the 1970s rejected realism, which they saw as a form of linear drama that reinforced the patriarchal values and masculinist aesthetics that they were working to oppose. But several feminist playwrights, notably Wendy Wasserstein, Marsha Norman, and Beth Henley, chose to work in realism, which they saw not as an ideology but as an aesthetic tool that could be used in the service of feminism as well as patriarchy. Norman’s ’Night, Mother, which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize, is a particularly good example. The relentless, rhetorically driven action of this play about a middle‐aged woman who wants to spend the last evening of her life preparing her mother to accept her suicide, takes place within the generously detailed realistic set of a middle‐class kitchen in Kentucky. The set recalls Glaspell’s Trifles in its metonymic representation of the life these women lead, and together with Jessie’s action, as she moves around filling candy bowls, making hot chocolate, and instructing her mother on the way to deal with the grocery store, is an eloquent expression of the banality of their life. Thematically the set and action reinforce Jessie’s explanation that she is going to kill herself because there is just not a good enough reason not to. This play has the structure of a classical tragedy, ending with Jessie’s death, but it is so embedded in the quotidian reality of these women’s lives that the action seems as organic and natural as it is inevitable.
In the twenty‐first century, a new generation of playwrights has reinvented domestic realism. Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County (2007) and Amy Herzog’s After the Revolution (2010) and 4000 Miles (2011) are both timely representations of twenty‐first‐century life and family dramas that bear traces of Tennessee Williams and Clifford Odets. Realism has also been revitalized by playwrights who have seen its usefulness in a drama that privileges social commentary and makes use of empathy evoked by realistic techniques to gain the audience’s recognition for their common humanity with the characters and sympathy for their ordeals. In Doubt (2005), John Patrick Shanley introduces complexity to a hot‐button social issue through his realistic representation of the characters involved in an accusation of sexual abuse against a Catholic priest. Lynn Nottage’s Ruined (2009), which focuses on the rape victims from the Congolese Civil War, breaks down the audience’s distance from this atrocity through the realistic depiction of the women and girls who are its victims. Of course, there is no predicting what will happen during the rest of the twenty‐first century, but the first decade suggests that the American theater is ready for a resurgence of realism.
References
Further Reading
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 8 (THE LITTLE THEATER MOVEMENT).