Expressionism in American Theatre

Expressionism in American Theatre. Although evident in the latter plays of August Strindberg and a few other late 19th‐century playwrights, the movement—which found advocates in almost all the arts—was not given formal theatrical definition until shortly before World War I and then primarily in Germany. It did not affect American drama and production until after the war. Most immediately it was a reaction to neoromanticism and impressionism, but mainly it sought to move behind the facade of naturalism and to unmask inner emotions and hidden realities. For a time Eugene O'Neill was its major American exponent, employing it with great skill in such works as The Emperor Jones (1920) with its irresistibly pulsating drums, the total indifference of the rich shoppers to the hero's rough jostling of them in The Hairy Ape (1922), and the symbolic masks of The Great God Brown (1926), all audible or visible manifestations of the points the playwright was driving home in his texts. Perhaps the most famous and completely successful expressionistic American play is Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine (1923), in which huge numbers whirled around the bookkeeper‐hero who was dwarfed by a gigantic adding machine. Another famous play was the work of two unlikely figures, George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly, who set their Beggar on Horseback (1924) in a fantastic dream world. Also popular were European playwrights such as Ernst Toller and Karel Capek, especially the latter's 1922 offerings: R. U. R. and The World We Live In (The Insect Comedy). By the late 1920s the movement's vogue had waned, although its characteristics remained to be seen in the distorted dialogue, the flattened figures, and surrealistic settings and props of later post‐expressionistic theatre. Broadway entries as different as Lenny (1971), Evita (1979), Nine (1982), Angels in America (1993), Kiss of the Spider Woman (1993), Jackie (1997), and The Lion King (1997) all used expressionistic techniques.