Theater: The American Stage in Transition

THEATER: THE AMERICAN STAGE IN TRANSITION

Abandoning Old Formulas

Writing for The Theatre magazine in 1919, Broadway producer Daniel Frohman lamented the passing of what he considered "the two prime requirements" of good theater: "cleanliness and a happy ending." At the beginning of the decade most plays performed in America had both. But by middecade a shift had occurred in the theater, one similar to the advent of realism in American literature and art: instead of portraying how life ought to be, new plays reflected their writers' perspectives on how life was. Small theater companies were springing up across the country, experimenting with new themes, new staging, and new styles of acting. The qualities common to turn-of-the-century stage productions—predictable plots, melodramatic acting, and happy endings—gave way to psychological, often gritty, drama, some of it in plays by one of the century's greatest playwrights, Eugene O'Neill.

The Actors

The 1910s were important years for the "Royal Family" of the American theater, the Barrymores. Though she had been featured in Broadway plays since 1901, Ethel B anymore was not considered a dramatic star until her 1910 appearance in Arthur Wing Pinero's Mid-Channel. Her brother John's first important role in a serious stage drama came in John Galsworthy's Justice in 1916. The third Barrymore sibling, Lionel, received major acclaim in Augustus Thomas's 1918 play The Copperhead. Other theatrical talents of the decade included Minnie Maddern Fiske, Billie Burke, James K. Hackett, George Arliss, David Warfield, Otis Skinner, Alfred Lunt, Douglas Fairbanks, and Frank Bacon. Among American playwrights whose works had their debuts on Broadway during the decade were Edward Sheldon, Percy MacKaye, Owen Davis, Jesse Lynch Williams, Edna Ferber, and Zoë Akins. David Belasco, best known for his earlier plays, was still writing in the 1910s. Glimmerings of the new trend toward dramatic realism could be seen in Sheldon's Salvation Nell (1910) and Belasco's The Governor's Lady (1912).

The Problems

Still, several factors combined to make the 1910s a relatively unexciting decade for dramatic works on Broadway. Theater ownership—by then virtually a trust—controlled playwrights' and actors' access to existing theaters across the country. Musical revues and vaudeville, which made traditional dramas seem dull by comparison, dominated Broadway. Most of the nonmusical productions on Broadway were light comedies, such as the popular Peg o' My Heart (1912), starring Laurette Taylor. Finally, the dramatic stage suffered the defection of many of its stars to the new medium of film during the 1910s. Actors who went from stage to screen included

THE GOLDEN AGE OF YIDDISH
THEATER

Dring the first two decades of the twentieth century, the majority of immigrants pouring into America were from eastern Europe and Russia, many of them Jews Fleeing religious persecution and poverty The Lower East Side of Manhattan was home to the largest population of Jews in America—some 1 4 million by 1915 The new arrivals provided a talent pool and an audience base that made a booming business out of the theatrical tradition known as Yiddish theater, which had existed in the United States since the 1880s By 1919 New York was home to nearly two dozen Yiddish theaters, where both comedy and serious drama were performed Among the actors were Jacob Adler, David Kessler, Bertha Kahch, and Paul Muni Adler and Kessler went on to form their own Yiddish-theater companies, while Kahch and Mum made the transition to mainstream theater (Muni to movies as well) Of the many playwrights who wrote for the Yiddish theater, the one whose legacy has lasted longest is Sholem Aleichem, whose tales of Russian-Jewish life were the source for the 1964 Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof.

Source:

David S. Lifson, The Yaddish Theatre in America (New York: Yoseloff, 1965).

Fiske, Burke, Hackett, Arliss, Fairbanks, Lily Langtry, James O'Neill (father of the playwright), Elsie Janis, Marguerite Clark, Lillian Russell, and all three Barrymores. One new movie company, Adolph Zukor's Famous Players Company, was founded for the sole purpose of bringing stage actors and plays to the screen.

The Little Theater Movement

As the Broadway theater went into a decline in the 1910s, small theaters appeared across the country. Most of these new companies were staffed by amateurs who shared responsibilities such as writing scripts, acting, set design and construction, and lighting, and they typically produced short (usually one-act) works in tiny theaters. Some little theaters were begun as part of the Progressive reform movement, in settlement houses including Hull House in Chicago and the Henry Street Settlement in New York City (the Neighborhood Playhouse). Others were inspired by the 1911 American tour of the Irish Players from the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, particularly their performances of John Millington Synge's controversial The Play boy of the Western World, The earliest little theaters in America, the Toy Theater in Boston and the Little Theater in Chicago, were founded in 1912. Within five years there were more than fifty such companies across the country, in cities including New York, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Detroit, Baltimore, Indianapolis, Madison, Fargo, and Chapel Hill. Among the several little theaters in New York City, two had lasting legacies. One was the Washington Square Players, who presented sixty-two plays between 1915 and 1918, the year they became the Theatre Guild. The other was the Provincetown Players.

The Provincetown Players

The most important littletheater group of the 1910s was named for the place in which it was founded, Provincetown, Massachusetts—a small fishing village at the tip of Cape Cod, where its members spent their summers. The rest of the year they lived in Greenwich Village, New York, where they established their Provincetown Playhouse. Members of the group were radical artists and intellectuals including journalists John Reed, Max Eastman, and Hutchins Hapgood; actress and sculptor Ida Rauh; stage designer (and Socialist activist) Robert Edmond Jones; poet Edna St. Vincent Millay; and novelist-playwrights George Cram Cook, Susan Glaspell, Floyd Deli, and Neith Boyce. Suppressed Desires by Cook and Glaspell, Constancy by Boyce, "Change Your Style" by Cook, and Contemporaries by Wilbur Daniel Steele—the four plays produced during the summer of 1915 at the Wharf Theater in Provincetown—focus on the psychological drama of Americans' everyday lives, a new direction for theater. It was this same theme that attracted the group to the unpublished, unproduced works of a newcomer to the group the next summer. In Provincetown on 28 July 1916 the players gave the first performance of a play by Eugene O'Neill, Bound East for Cardiff. They performed the play again on 3 November in New York City. They staged a dozen more of his plays there over the next four years, bringing him the critical attention that led to the 1920 Broadway production of his Beyond the Horizon, which won a Pulitzer Prize for drama.

The Legacy of the Little Theater Movement

It is a curious footnote to American theater history that the little-theater movement of the 1910s—a movement that arose in response to creative stagnation in the legitimate Broadway theater—produced one of the greatest talents in American drama. O'Neill's pioneering works inspired later American playwrights such as Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, and Arthur Miller. The little theaters of the era left an important legacy as well: an example of success out of the mainstream that served as a model for the Federal Theater Project during the Great Depression of the 1930s and for regional theater companies that still exist across the country.

Sources:

Brooks Atkinson, Broadway (New York: Macmillan, 1970);

Adele Heller and Lois Rudnick, 1915, The Cultural Moment: The New Politics, the New Woman, the New Psychology, the New Art, and the New Theatre in America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991);

Benjamin McArthur, Actors and American Culture, 1880-1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984)

Ethan Mordden, The American Theatre (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).