Drama Downsizes

DRAMA DOWNSIZES

Downsizing

Theater diminished in the 1940s. Although attendance rose on Broadway during the war years, audiences sought musicals and spectacles—escape, not drama. Dramatic theater, in fact, was downsizing and entering a period of decline. In the 1930s, with the advent of the Federal Theater Project, a division of the WPA, the sheer number of plays being produced and actors being employed reached an all-time high nationwide. The volume of production led to a theater of mass consciousness that reflected the politics of the times. Social realism was the norm, as it was in fiction and painting during the decade. The proletarian plays of Clifford Odets or the socially conscious melodrama of Lillian Hellman were the dominant forms on stage. Utopian ideas about working people entering a new era were common, including an often rhapsodic, tragic, and beautiful portrayal of mass movements. These ideas began to dissipate in the 1940s. Labor unions became less confrontational and more cooperative with the forces of Capital. Russia's purge trials and short-lived non-aggression pact with Hitler disillusioned idealists in America. The result in the theater was a shrinking of the scope of the stage and its themes. Postwar drama focused on families, not unions, on the individual in conflict with himself, not social forces clashing against one another. Theater became a quieter, more intimate peek into manners, lives, personal morality, and individual responsibility than it had been in the 1930s. By 1950 it had also become more pessimistic.

EUGENE O'NEILL RETURNS TO
THE STAGE

The single most publicized event of the American stage during the 1940s was the return of Eugene O'Neill. O'Neill had not allowed any of his new work to be produced in twelve years when The Ice-man Cometh opened in New York on 9 October 1946. It was an international event.

O'Neill was and is still considered America's greatest playwright. Life magazine reported that O'Neill was the "second most widely read playwright ever" behind William Shakespeare. He had dominated the American stage in the 1920s and won the Nobel Prize in 1936, topping off a career that had earned him three Pulitzer Prizes.

O'Neill had lived quietly on the West Coast during his absence from the public eye. He wrote prolifically. The Iceman Cometh had actually been finished in 1939. O'Neill returned to New York in May 1946 to prepare the production. The pre-opening ticket sales topped three hundred thousand dollars. Inevitably, the hoopla drowned the drama. The play disappointed many critics. The review in Life was headlined "too long, too wordy, but deeply absorbing." Other reactions were similarly mixed, though all agreed the play had merit. The American theater was glad to have any work from its most prominent voice. The play was later revived with great success.

Sources:

"Broadway Goes Hollywood." Life, 21 (28, October 1946) 109-111;

Tom Prideaux. "Eugene O'Neill," Life. 21 (14 October l946): 102 116.

Optimists

Two playwrights early in the decade provided optimistic dramas for theatergoers. Thornton Wilder's Our Town defied the theater of the proletariat in 1938 by shedding all sense of mass struggle in favor of the individual life. Wilder was an experimenter on the stage, content to show human beings surrounded by the incomprehensible wonder of existence. His experiments in technique, the stripping away of the realist facade, had great influence in Europe, while Our Town became a classic modern play. In 1942 he premiered The Skin of Our Teeth, a play which merges all history into a middle-class moment in time. Wilder took the long view of life. He believed in human life on a small scale, in the "things that repeat and repeat in the lives of millions," as he later put it. William Saroyan had a similar outlook, though he was less of an innovator on stage. With My Heart's in the Highlands (1939), The Time of Your Life (1940, Pulitzer Prize winner), and Hello, Out There (1941), Saroyan enjoyed meteoric success as the decade opened. He, too, found the good and the personal that lurked behind the faceless masses of men. He was a brash, lyric optimist who had written himself out by 1945. His later work never approached his energy of the early 1940s.

Tennessee Williams

The great find of the decade was Tennessee Williams. He wrote arguably the two best plays of the era. The first, The Glass Menagerie, appeared in 1945 and opened the door to the late-1940s theater of the negative, of disillusionment. Williams was very much an American dramatist in an American idiom. His characters lived a brutal existence that belied their romantic illusions. He presented his character studies in a stark, realistic style. With the production of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947, Williams established himself as a major figure in American drama. His intense, compulsive characters reveal his unique insight into and empathy with anguished and frustrated people. The same themes would appear in his later work such as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), another of his American classics.

Arthur Miller

The other major playwright to emerge during the 1940s was Arthur Miller, who, like Williams, contributed two works to the canon of American literature during the decade. While Williams was showing the fragility of personal illusion, Miller was exposing the illusions inherent in the American Dream. He called capitalism and the morality it imposes on people into question. All My Sons, produced in 1947, deals with the theme of personal responsibility in a world that values the dollar or the deal, that values personal success over the success of the whole. Miller's greatest work, Death of a Salesman (1949), expands his themes of disillusionment. The play made Miller's reputation as a playwright, and Willy Loman became one of the most recognizable figures in American literature. Miller again pointed the finger at the illusions fostered by postwar prosperity and its materialism. The work is powerful theater and got Miller branded as anti-American. He would become one of the most prominent targets of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s.

Other Notables

Other playwrights produced satisfying if not spectacular work. Lillian Hellman carried over her success of the 1930s with Watch on the Rhine (1941), The Searching Wind (1944), and The Autumn Garden (1951). Watch on the Rhine was chosen best play of 1941 by the New York Drama Critics' Circle. Older playwrights who had thrived in the 1920s and early 1930s produced several good works. Maxwell Anderson (Candle in the Wind, 1940; The Eve of St. Mark, 1942), Elmer Rice (Dream Girl, 1945), and Philip Barry (Without Love, 1942; Foolish Notion, 1945) closed out their careers with solid work. Robert Sherwood won his third Pulitzer Prize in 1941 with There Shall Be No Night before moving to Hollywood. Even Eugene O'Neill, the grand theatrical voice of American letters, produced a new play. The Ice-man Cometh (1946) was the most widely publicized production of the year. The hit comedy Mister Roberts (1946), by Thomas Heggen, was one of the few productions that dealt with World War II. All of these plays reflected the almost bland realism of the times. There was neither great experimentation nor great poetry, Williams and Miller excepted, appearing on the stage.

THIS IS THE ARMY

No single cultural artifact of World War II better expresses the spirit of the war effort than did Irving Berlin's musical This Is The Army. Originally a 1942 Broadway hit, the show toured the country, eading in Hollywood, where it became a smash 1943 film featuring a cast that included future president Ronald Reagan. The show was so popular that it was shipped overseas, winding its way through the various war theaters to entertain the troops. Irving Berlin's lyrics reassured Americans that this was the last time they would be called to war. His show-stopping tunes, "This Is the Army, Mr. Jones" and "The Army's Made a Man out of Me," were hummed by millions.

The show had something for everyone. Billed as an "all soldier musical," it nonetheless had characters such as Eileen, the girl left behind on the home front, who stoically endured separation from her beau because "We're all in this fight together." Joe Louis, the fighter, was recruited for the film to pitch the war cause to African Americans.

The show was conceived as a wartime morale booster, and the army created a special company comprised of talented soldiers to man the musical. The Broadway contingent had to stand muster every morning for roll call and duty assignments. The touring company carried its own props, costumes, and sets around the world, pitching the play on makeshift stages from the Middle East to the Pacific. Ultimately the show gave 1,238 performances to 2,468,005 people across four continents and three oceans.

Off Broadway

One prominent and promising development during the decade was the rise of the Off-Broadway theater. Broadway drama was declining. Fewer plays made a profit, and fewer were produced. The pressure for every production to be a smash hit grew due to rising costs. As a result theater often took the safe route of old familiars such as Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov rather than risk a new play. New artists were forced to find new venues. Broadway had begun outpricing its larger audience. The result was a growth in the number of small "fringe" theaters that used little or no set design. Budgets were often kept below one hundred dollars per production. The focus was on ideas and language. The settings were small theaters, high-school gymnasiums, or any small space where people could sit to watch actors perform. There was little chance for profit Off Broadway. Groups such as On Stage and Abbé Practical Workshop produced new plays. Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Work-shop produced Marlon Brando. Broadway was waning but theater remained vital. Plays such as Jean-Paul Sartre's The Flies, Robert Penn Warren's All the Kings Men, and Barrie Stavis's Lamp at Midnight were produced Off Broadway when Broadway would not touch them. The small stage seemed to flourish, a fitting scale for the new, intimate plays of the 1940s.

Sources:

John Gassner, ed., Best American Plays: Third Series, 1945-1951 (New York: Crown, 1952);

Allan Lewis, American Plays and Playwrights of the Contemporary Theatre (New York: Crown, 1965).