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THEATER

American theater between 1870 and 1920 falls into two distinct but overlapping periods. The last third of the nineteenth century is characterized by an America of booming growth in numbers, size, and commercial activity, and all of those factors affected the theater. As a result theatrical activity exploded, with touring companies taking productions to every city and hamlet. For the most part, American plays continued to hew to a melodramatic format. The first two decades of the twentieth century, by contrast, find American theater searching for new directions, finding inspiration in European models, and taking steps toward international acclaim and influence.

POST–CIVIL WAR THEATRICAL CONDITIONS

After the Civil War the United States experienced enormous population growth. In addition, people were moving to the cities, further concentrating the population centers. The country grew in size, as well, with eleven states added between 1870 and 1912. The settling of the western territories turned the public's attention in that direction, and many plays during the period focused on frontier action, thus developing uniquely American characters and themes.

Despite the expanded map, in many ways America seemed to become smaller and more tightly knit as advances in communication and transportation made the populace more immediately aware of what was occurring in other parts of the land. The first transcontinental telegraph line, completed in 1861, drew the east and west coasts together, dramatically increasing the speed of news reporting and business transactions. Other innovations such as faster and larger presses contributed to the popularity and significance of newspapers. Advertising, reviews, and news reports publicized the theater while theatrical trade journals such as the New York Dramatic Mirror disseminated professional information and promoted the business activities of theater.

The importance of railroads to late-nineteenth-century troupers can hardly be overemphasized. The transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, and by the end of the century nearly 200,000 miles of track crisscrossed the land. Ease of transportation changed the way theater was produced: instead of touring stars arriving in town to play with resident companies of actors, as was the norm before the war, postwar theater saw the emergence of "combinations" in which whole productions toured from city to city.

The postwar economic boom put discretionary money into the pockets of prospective patrons, which allowed them to take advantage of entertainment opportunities, including not only plays but also lavish circuses and Wild West shows. Another factor that contributed to the flowering of theatrical entertainment was a rapidly changing moral climate. America's postwar, cosmopolitan attitude accepted entertainment as a valid and worthwhile pursuit, a distinct change from the puritanical, prewar moral code.

PRODUCER-DIRECTORS

Two trends that moved together in the last third of the nineteenth century were the emergence of the dominant producer-director, who frequently wrote plays as well, and advances in realism in theatrical production. One of the first of the influential managers was Augustin Daly (1838–1899), who first gained prominence with the melodrama Under the Gaslight (1867), which featured a hero bound to a railroad track, rescued by a plucky heroine. Among his ninety-plus plays, usually written in collaboration with his brother Joseph, were Horizon (1871), which utilized Bret Harte–like characters in a western setting and helped to fashion a vogue for plays set on the frontier, and Divorce (1871), a social comedy based on the impending divorces of two sisters and the shenanigans of a conniving divorce lawyer.

Actor-playwright William Gillette (1853–1937) is best known for three plays: Held by the Enemy (1886) involved a sinister spy story set during the Civil War, Secret Service (1895) employed a similar suspenseful situation, and Sherlock Holmes (1899) adapted the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle to create a tense detective drama. Gillette, who played the lead role in most of his plays, incorporated lengthy descriptions of the set and the stage business in his scripts to emphasize realistic detail.

NOTED ACTORS AND FAMOUS ROLES

The following list gives the names of some of the best-known performers of late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century American theater in addition to the role, the play, and the year of the first performance for which the performer was most famous.

Maude Adams (1872–1953). Peter Pan. Peter Pan (1905)

Margaret Anglin (1876–1958). Ruth Jordan. The Great Divide (1906)

Ethel Barrymore (1879–1959). Madame Trentoni. Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines (1901)

Lionel Barrymore (1878–1954). Milt Shanks. The Copperhead (1918)

Blanche Bates (1873–1941). Cho-Cho-San. Madame Butterfly (1900)

Edwin Booth (1833–1893). Hamlet. Hamlet. (1865)

Leslie Carter (1862–1937). Maryland Calvert. The Heart of Maryland (1895)

George M. Cohan (1878–1942). Johnny Jones. Little Johnny Jones (1904)

William H. Crane (1845–1928). Senator Hannibal Rivers. The Senator (1890)

Minnie Maddern Fiske (1864–1932). Cynthia Carslake. The New York Idea (1906)

William Gillette (1853–1937). Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes (1899)

Ned Harrigan (1845–1911). Dan Mulligan. The Mulligan Guard Ball (1879)

Joseph Jefferson III (1829–1905). Rip Van Winkle. Rip Van Winkle (1865)

Julia Marlowe (1866–1950). Barbara Frietchie. Barbara Frietchie (1899)

Frank Mayo (1839–1896). Davy Crockett. Davy Crockett (1872)

James O'Neill (1846–1920). Edmond Dantès. The Count of Monte Cristo (1883)

Annie Pixley (1855–1893). M'liss. M'liss, Child of the Sierras (1878)

Annie Russell (1864–1936). Major Barbara. Major Barbara (1905)

Otis Skinner (1858–1942). Hajj. Kismet (1911)

Denman Thompson (1833–1911). Joshua Whitcomb. The Old Homestead (1886)

A multitalented man of the theater, Steele MacKaye (1842–1894) was a playwright, actor, architect, inventor, and theatrical visionary. His most famous play was Hazel Kirke (1880), an unconventional but extremely popular domestic drama in which Hazel, after a falling out with her father, attempts suicide.

The actor, playwright, and producer Ned Harrigan (1845–1911) composed farcical comedies set in the teeming melting pot of New York City. Harrigan's plays, in which he played the leads—in tandem with Tony Hart, who enacted women's roles—featured the antics of Dan Mulligan and his Irish friends. Comedies such as The Mulligan Guard (1873), The Mulligan Guard Ball (1879), and The Mulligan Guard Nominee (1880) threw the Irishmen into humorous conflict with the Germans, Italians, Chinese, and African Americans who shared the lower- and middle-class city landscape. At their best, Harrigan's plays provided a uniquely American comedy, with caricatures based on direct observation of New York life.

Perhaps no one is better known for stage realism than David Belasco (1853–1931), who wrote some seventy plays—often in collaboration with other authors—and produced numerous others. Among his most famous works are Madame Butterfly (1900), the touching story of an innocent Japanese woman deserted by her American lover, and The Girl of the Golden West (1905), which paired Minnie, a feisty bartender in a frontier mining town, with her outlaw lover, Ramerrez. Both plays were adapted to opera by Giacomo Puccini. Other important Belasco works include The Heart of Maryland (1895), in which the heroine saves her lover by preventing a curfew bell from ringing, and Zaza (1898), the tale of a saucy music-hall singer. Successful as they were, by the turn of the century Belasco's plays were regarded as old-fashioned because of their reliance on melodramatic devices. As a result, Belasco is primarily remembered for his realistic staging techniques and for his sophisticated lighting.

Two brothers, Charles and Daniel Frohman, were among the most powerful theatrical producers of the time. Daniel (1851–1940) produced fashionable plays in New York from 1880 until his retirement in 1909. He implemented a system of road companies to tour major cities while the original hit was still playing in New York. His brother, Charles (1860–1915), who produced Bronson Howard's huge hit, Shenandoah, in 1888, was perhaps even more successful. In 1896 he joined with five other men to form the Theatrical Syndicate, a monopoly that exercised control over writers, performers, and theater managers throughout the country. The syndicate proved enormously efficient and profitable until outmaneuvered by the Shubert brothers—Sam S. (1877?–1905), Lee (1875–1953), and Jacob J. (1879–1963). The Shuberts began producing shows in New York in 1900, and by 1916 they had become the most dominant theatrical producers in America, with several theaters in New York and over a hundred more throughout the country under their ownership or control.

POPULAR MELODRAMA

Between 1870 and 1920 the movement from formulaic melodrama to more realistic presentations is apparent. Early writers followed the lead of Irish-born Dion Boucicault (1820–1890), a master of melodramatic convention, who was still composing plays such as The O'Dowd (1873), in which an estranged father and son both sacrifice to restore their relationship, and The Shaughraun (1874), which features the daring escapades of an Irish hero.

In a similar melodramatic vein lay the plays of Bartley Campbell (1843–1888), perhaps the most popular American playwright of the early 1880s. Campbell was especially noted for his flowery, sentimental dialogue, exemplified by his most famous line, spoken by the distraught heroine of The White Slave (1881) as she refuses the villain's immoral proposition: "Rags are royal raiment when worn for virtue's sake, and rather a hoe in my hands than self contempt in my heart" (p. 227). Campbell also had success with My Partner (1879), a quintessential mining-camp play that owed much to the writings of Bret Harte.

Another prolific playwright at the end of the nineteenth century was Owen Davis (1874–1956), who wrote more than a hundred melodramas beginning with Through the Breakers in 1899. After The Family Cupboard in 1913, however, Davis switched styles, abandoning melodrama in favor of a more modern, realistic mode; his 1923 play, Icebound, depicting the disillusionment of a New England family, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Bronson Howard (1842–1908) is credited as the first author in the United States to make his living as a playwright, and that accomplishment earned him the title "Dean of the American Drama." Howard was one of the first dramatists to use the expanding world of American business as a backdrop for his plays. In Young Mrs. Winthrop (1882), Howard's heroine feels deserted by her workaholic husband, and The Henrietta (1887) cleverly mixes the business and familial rivalries of a stockbroker father and his two aspiring sons. Some of Howard's nearly twenty plays were social comedies, such as One of Our Girls (1885), which dramatized differences between French and American women as they looked to become engaged, and Saratoga (1870), whose hero falls into farcical adventures with four women, against the backdrop of a fancy resort.

Howard's most popular and financially rewarding play, however, was Shenandoah (1888). Moving from Charleston at the start of the Civil War to the Shenandoah Valley later in the campaign, Howard skillfully employs the backdrop of the war to follow the fortunes of lovers whose devotion is complicated by sectional allegiances. Although he showed little concern for drama as literature, Howard helped to raise the stature of the playwright by founding the American Dramatists Club (1891) and by advocating better copyright protection for dramatic work.

MELODRAMA AND REALISM

The popular melodrama of the late nineteenth century depended on conventional moral standards or ideals—that all mothers should love their children and vice versa, for example, or that all marriages are good and should last. Melodrama employs sentimental dialogue, stock characters, and exciting actions—for example the hero about to be sawn in half in Daly's The Red Scarf (1868)—which stretch the bounds of logic in order to reinforce the conventional moral world. Realism in theater, on the other hand, emphasized life as it actually existed. Sets and lighting mimicked the real world, aiming at photographic precision; social problems were addressed with unflinching candor; character, language, and behavior were based on an emerging understanding of human psychology rather than on moral guidelines of right and wrong. Hence, in James A. Herne's Margaret Fleming (1890), the title character refuses to take back her philandering husband.

ADVOCATES FOR REALISM

Numerous writers labored to break free of the constraints of melodrama and create a more realistic drama. The leader is this development was William Dean Howells (1837–1920), a novelist, critic, and author of thirty-six plays, a dozen of which were oneact social comedies involving the intertwined lives of two couples, the Robertses and the Campbells. Howells's witty dialogue and attention to detail satirized the tradition-bound lives of the protagonists. In The Garroters (1885) Edward Roberts mistakenly strangles old Mr. Bemis, and in Five O'Clock Tea (1887) Willis Campbell woos a young widow.

Even more than his plays, which garnered only mild success, Howells's critical writings were instrumental in championing a new style and earning him the designation "The Father of American Realism." Expounding his theories in Criticism and Fiction (1891), Howells called for a truthful representation of life. He condemned verse drama, old-fashioned devices such as soliloquies and asides, and contrived action. Howells also insisted that drama was a literary form and should be treated as such.

Lauded by Howells, James A. Herne (1839–1901) made the transition from melodrama to realism in his own writing. His first plays were melodramatic collaborations with David Belasco, such as Hearts of Oak (1879), but his most famous work was the controversial Margaret Fleming. Although not a commercial success, Margaret Fleming signaled an important step forward in realistic character and detail. Like Howells, Herne wrote critically about the drama as a literary form. In "Art for Truth's Sake in the Drama" (1897), Herne argued that drama had a "higher purpose" (p. 370) than mere entertainment, and he encouraged dramatists to pursue "large truth" and "humanity" (p. 362).

MOVEMENT TOWARD REALISM

Many dramatists who followed the precepts of realism espoused by Howells and Herne proved more able in the writing than either of them. That was especially true of Augustus Thomas (1857–1934), whose sixty-plus plays featured carefully elaborated scenes of American life. Two of his major works were set in frontier areas. In Mizzoura (1893) focuses on a good-hearted sheriff whose love interest rejects his attentions for those of a dashing outlaw. In Arizona (1899) a gallant army officer accepts the blame for a theft he did not commit in order to spare the honor of a rancher's wife. Other prominent works included The Copperhead (1918), in which Lionel Barrymore achieved stardom as an Illinois farmer posing as a Confederate sympathizer, and The Witching Hour (1907), which explored hypnotism and mental telepathy.

Thomas often visited the sites of the action to develop authentic characters and details for the scenery and the story. He also pioneered the use of the dramatic anticlimax. While other authors sought to end an act with a dramatic flourish and a riveting tableau, Thomas preferred to close with his characters' reactions to a dramatic situation. Thomas had his scripts published as literature, a rather novel idea at the time, made possible by copyright legislation passed in the 1890s.

In the first years of the twentieth century, theater managers tried to duplicate the success of Arizona, the largest-grossing play up to that time, by producing other frontier dramas such as Edwin Milton Royle's The Squaw Man (1905), in which a dutiful Indian maiden kills herself in order to liberate her lover—an English lord—and their son. While The Squaw Man gained popular favor, a much more highly acclaimed frontier play premiered the following year. Written by William Vaughn Moody (1869–1910), The Great Divide (1906) immediately raised the bar for native drama. In its startling first scene Ruth Jordan, confronted by three desperadoes, promises herself to Stephen Ghent, the least undesirable of the trio, if he will protect her from the other two. He does, and Ruth goes off with him, but her puritanical upbringing undermines their attempts to create a real marriage. Moody's great contribution lay in his ability to infuse his drama with intelligent thematic dimension, contrasting the paralyzing inhibitions of the East with the freedom of expression and fullness of life in the West.

Another writer known primarily for one play was Langdon Mitchell (1862–1935). The New York Idea (1906) satirizes love and marriage among the upper crust as one couple renews their affection while a second decides to divorce. Mitchell's sophisticated dialogue and his rather scandalous comments on marriage and divorce caused some critics to compare him to George Bernard Shaw.

A much more prolific writer was Clyde Fitch (1865–1909), who, in his nearly sixty plays, wrote on a wide variety of subjects in an almost equally wide range of styles. Nathan Hale (1898) treated historical material, and The Cowboy and the Lady (1899) told a western story. Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines (1901) starred Ethel Barrymore in a sprightly comedy, and The Climbers (1901) satirized New York social life. In his best work, Fitch focused on individuals whose social vices bring on serious consequences. Jenny Tillman's jealousy almost leads to her suicide in The Girl with the Green Eyes (1902), and Becky Warden's constant lying nearly causes the dissolution of her marriage in The Truth (1906). Though a failure in New York, The Truth played successfully in London and in Europe, gaining Fitch an international reputation. In The City (1909) Fitch suggests that the city environment provides an evil influence on susceptible small-town innocents, as a father's infidelity results in tragic consequences for his children.

Another play constructed sturdily around the vice of the main character is Eugene Walter's (1874–1941) The Easiest Way (1908), in which John Madison pledges to marry the free-living and free-loving Laura Murdock when he has enough money, providing Laura ends her relationship with wealthy Willard Brockton. Walter's examination of Laura's failure to remain true to John demonstrated both structural skill and psychological insight.

Edward Sheldon (1886–1946) helped to nudge American drama toward social realism. His early plays included Salvation Nell (1908), a portrait of a faithful woman amid the rough and tumble world of New York's roughest precincts. Sheldon's detailed depiction of the squalid conditions of inner-city life earned critical praise. In The Nigger (1909) Sheldon wrote of a southern governor who learns that his grandmother was a Negro slave—a fact that, if known, would doom his political career—and in The Boss (1911) Sheldon dealt with business and politics as his hero, an Irish American labor leader, confronts the aloof, well-connected pillars of society. Sheldon's attempts to dramatize the plight of the disadvantaged members of society were unfortunately undermined by his reliance on sentimental plot devices.

Rachel Crothers (1878–1958) began her playwriting career with The Three of Us (1906), an unusual frontier play in that it was set in a completely developed western town with all the amenities of civilization. Like almost all her plays, it focuses on a fully realized female character who deals with the world on her own terms. Over the next twenty-five years, Crothers offered a new play almost every season. In A Man's World (1909), which examines the different standards applied to men and women, the heroine learns that her suitor is the father of her adopted child. He and She (1911)—in which sculptor Ann Herford gives her designs to her sculptor husband in order to care for her troubled daughter—explores the sacrifices a working woman is forced to make to support her family. Crothers's body of work presents a virtual case study of the thoughts and feelings of women in the first third of the twentieth century.

>FARCE AND SATIRE

As in the serious plays and social comedies, farce and satire in the late nineteenth century also developed a flair for local color and careful detail. Charles Hoyt (1860–1900), a member of the New Hampshire legislature, wrote about small-town politics in a series of madcap farces that anticipate George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. He satirized the temperance movement in A Temperance Town (1892) and lampooned home guard companies in A Milk White Flag (1893). In A Texas Steer (1894) he lambasted Washington politics, as newly elected Texas representative Maverick Brander moves with his family to the big city. Much of Hoyt's political commentary, like that of Will Rogers, retains a surprisingly modern relevance, and his A Trip to Chinatown (1891) became the longest-running play of the nineteenth century (657 performances) by combining his own clever observations with popular songs and setting them against the appealing backdrop of San Francisco's Chinatown.

Writing a few years after Hoyt, George Ade (1866–1944) continued the same tradition by finding humor in middle America. The College Widow (1904) and Just Out of College (1905) used education and football as the subjects for comedy, while in The County Chairman (1903) a love affair plays out amidst a scandalous small-town political campaign.

CIRCUSES AND OUTDOOR SHOWS

The rapid expansion of railroad lines in late-nineteenth-century America made possible the development of large-scale outdoor circuses and extravagant special shows. Phineas T. Barnum (1810–1891) joined up with James A. Bailey (1847–1906) in 1880 to create the three-ring Barnum and Bailey circus, the self-proclaimed "Greatest Show on Earth." The five Ringling Brothers challenged the supremacy of the Barnum and Bailey circus and eventually bought it out. During their heyday, the circuses brought incredible entertainment to virtually every town and hamlet in the United States.

One of the most influential and successful of the huge outdoor extravaganzas was the Wild West show assembled by William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody (1846–1917). From its inception in 1883 until Cody's death, the Wild West regaled audiences in America and throughout Europe with its exciting view of frontier events and activities.

AMERICAN MUSICAL COMEDY

One of America's most distinctive theatrical forms—musical comedy—developed during this period after the 1866 production of The Black Crook, a forerunner of the genre with its combination of lavish sets, music, and chorus girls in revealing costumes. Several influences on the American musical were foreign imports. The music in operettas by Jacques Offenbach (1819–1880) such as La Perichole (1868) enchanted American audiences in the 1870s and 1880s. After the 1879 American debut of HMS Pinafore, the British team of W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) and Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900) emerged as the most prominent and popular writers of operettas. American musical influences at this time included the minstrel show—a pre–Civil War concoction of song, dance, and blackface comedy that continued to be popular throughout the nineteenth century—and a spate of small-scale pieces that featured a wide range of songs and dances assembled around a loose plot and designed to feature skilled performers. One of the most popular of these sprightly confections was The Brook, cobbled together by Nate Salsbury (1846–1902) and his Troubadours in 1879.

The early part of the twentieth century continued to demonstrate European influences on the American musical. The Irish-born, German-educated Victor Herbert (1859–1924) regaled audiences with hits such as Babes in Toyland (1903) and Naughty Marietta (1910). Czech-born Franz Lehár (1870–1948) wrote The Merry Widow, which was so popular in New York in 1907 it created a fad for Viennese operetta that lasted until World War I.

Revues—variety shows that featured songs, dances, comic routines, and elaborate sets and costumes but with no real plot or story—also gained popularity at this time. Florenz Ziegfeld (1869–1932) produced his first Follies revue in 1907, and he followed that success with several more editions that introduced talents such as "Funny Girl" Fanny Brice (1891–1951) and the humorist Will Rogers (1879–1935). Just before World War I new talents emphasizing American musical ideas began to emerge in the musical theater field, as Irving Berlin (1888–1989) wrote his first score for the revue Watch Your Step in 1914 and Jerome Kern (1885–1945) wrote scores for a series of small scale musicals including Very Good Eddie (1915).

Other threads that contributed to the development of the American musical included the comedies of Harrigan and Hart and the beginnings of vaudeville. American variety shows after the Civil War had become somewhat disreputable, so when Tony Pastor (1837–1908) opened a New York theater in 1881, he sought to attract a family audience with clean amusements. The combination of singing, dancing, and comic routines proved enormously popular, and soon vaudeville performers had their own theaters and circuits throughout the country. One of the largest and most influential vaudeville circuits was operated by Edward F. Albee (1857–1930) and Benjamin F. Keith (1846–1914).

No commentary on the musicals and comedies of the period would be complete without a mention of George M. Cohan (1878–1942). Cohan wrote some fifty plays, many of them musicals. Among the most notable were Little Johnny Jones (1904), which featured his signature song, "Yankee Doodle Dandy;" Forty-five Minutes from Broadway (1905), and Broadway Jones (1912). Cohan used a brassy acting style to create a distinctive American character—a wisecracking, street-smart city kid.

SHAKESPEARE IN AMERICA

Although many new plays emerged during this period, the classics—especially Shakespeare—were always popular. Noted Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth (1833–1893) retired for a time after his brother, actor John Wilkes Booth, assassinated Abraham Lincoln in 1865, but he reemerged to great acclaim with his own theater in 1869 and cemented his reputation as the greatest American tragedian of the mid-nineteenth century. Other well known classical actors in the last years of the century included the physically powerful John McCullough (1832–1885), and Laurence Barrett (1838–1891), who was one of the first Americans to emphasize historical accuracy in sets and costumes.

Starting in 1882, the British actor and manager Henry Irving (1838–1905) toured numerous Shakespeare plays throughout the United States, and his careful direction and lavish staging had great influence on American production. The early part of the twentieth century was dominated by Richard Mansfield (1854–1907), an American who staged lavish productions of Shakespeare as well as new scripts; Scottish-born Robert Mantell (1854–1928), who continued the older style of passionate declamation; and especially the engaging team of E. H. Sothern (1859–1933) and Julia Marlowe (1866–1950), who were particularly popular in the comedies.

NON-ENGLISH PERFORMERS

The exploding immigrant population during this period provided a receptive audience for foreign stars who played in languages other than English. The Italian actor Tomasso Salvini (1829–1916), who made several American tours, enacted Othello in his native tongue while the rest of the cast spoke English. Salvini's countrywoman, Eleanora Duse (1859–1924), brought her considerable talents to plays such as Camille and Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts in American tours between 1893 and 1924. The great French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923) made numerous profitable and influential tours through the United States between 1880 and 1917. America fostered a variety of non-English companies and performers, one of the most significant being the Latvian native Jacob Adler (1855–1926), who produced plays in Yiddish. Adler also fathered several children who followed him into the theater, the most prominent being the actress and teacher Stella Adler (1903–1992).

TWENTIETH-CENTURY INFLUENCES

The turn of the century brought even more foreign influences to the United States. Plays by George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) and Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), at first derided by critics as clownish and unpleasant, began to find an understanding audience. The theories and designs of Adolphe Appia (1862–1928) and Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966) gained currency, with a new emphasis on light and shadow, platforms, and abstraction. Theater practitioners learned about the work of André Antoine's (1858–1943) Théâtre Libre in Paris, the Frieie Bühne in Berlin, and the Moscow Art Theater. Dublin's Abbey Theatre brought productions to New York in 1911, and Austrian Max Reinhardt (1873–1943) staged the seminal Sumurun there in 1912. The Little Theater movement spread the new ideas, and soon cities throughout the country boasted noncommercial community-based groups that prided themselves on performing contemporary work. Included among the more than fifty such groups in existence before 1920 were organizations such as the Cleveland Play House (1916), the Pasadena Playhouse (1918), and New York's Washington Square Players (1915), forerunner of the Theater Guild.

Universities also initiated serious study of theater and of drama as literature. George Pierce Baker (1866–1935) began offering playwriting courses at Harvard in 1905, and several of America's budding playwrights honed their skills under Baker's tutelage, including Philip Barry, Sidney Howard, Eugene O'Neill, and Edward Sheldon.

One of the most famous of the Little Theater groups was the Provincetown Players, which first offered plays in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1915. Founded by George Cram "Gig" Cook, the organization moved to Greenwich Village the next year and achieved immediate prominence producing the early work of Susan Glaspell (1876–1948) and Eugene O'Neill (1888–1953). O'Neill began to establish his reputation for the realism of his characters and the power of his dramatic situations with a series of one-act plays based on his experiences aboard tramp steamers. Those short pieces, based on his personal seafaring experiences, included Bound East for Cardiff (1916), The Long Voyage Home (1917), and The Moon of the Caribbees (1918). Glaspell wrote Suppressed Desires (1915) with Cook, her husband, and Trifles (1916), both of which explored women's psychological struggles.

In Bound East for Cardiff, Eugene O'Neill, in one of his first plays based on his own seafaring experiences, strives for realism in character and dialogue. He also seeks a kind of poetic statement as the young seaman, Yank, faces death.

The setting is the seaman's forecastle on a steam ship. YANK, a young American, is dying of an illness and DRISCOLL, a brawny Irishman, is watching over him.

YANK: You must'nt take it so hard, Drisc. I was just thinkin' it ain't as bad as people think—dyin'. I ain't never took much stock in the truck them sky-pilots preach. I ain't never had religion; but I know whatever it is what comes after it can't be no worser'n this. I don't like to leave you, Drisc, but—that's all. DRISCOLL (with a groan): Lad, lad, don't be talkin'. YANK: This sailor's life ain't much to cry about leavin'—just one ship after another, hard work, small pay, and bum grub; and when we git into port, just a drunk endin' up in a fight, and all your money gone, and then ship away again. Never meetin' no nice people; never gittin outa sailor town, hardly, in any port; travellin' all over the world and never seein' none of it; without no one to care whether you're alive or dead. (With a bitter smile.) There ain't much in all that that'd make yuh sorry to lose it, Drisc. DRISCOLL (gloomily): It's a hell av a life, the sea. YANK (musingly): It must be great to stay on dry land all your life and have a farm with a house of your own with cows and pigs and chickens, way in the middle of the land where you'd never smell the sea or see a ship. It must be great to have a wife, and kids to play with at night after supper when your work was done. It must be great to have a home of your own, Drisc. DRISCOLL (with a great sigh): It must, surely; but what's the use av thinkin' av ut? Such things are not for the loikes av us.

O'Neill, Bound East for Cardiff, pp. 48–49.

During this period American drama turned an important corner. Earlier writers had achieved a realism of character, detail, and language but seemed unable to escape the plot conventions and sentimentality of melodrama. But by 1920 O'Neill had composed his first Pulitzer Prize–winning play, Beyond the Horizon, as well as Anna Christie and the surrealistically experimental The Emperor Jones.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Campbell, Bartley. The White Slave. 1881. In "The White Slave" and Other Plays, edited by Napier Wilt. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1941.

Herne, James A. "Art for Truth's Sake in the Drama." Arena 17 (February 1897): 361–370.

O'Neill, Eugene. Bound East for Cardiff. In The Long Voyage Home: Seven Plays of the Sea. New York: Modern Library, 1946.

Secondary Works

Bigsby, C. W. E. A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama. Vol. 1, 1900–1940. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University. Press, 1982.

Dickinson, Thomas H. Playwrights of the New American Theater. New York: Macmillan, 1925.

Fyles, Franklin. The Theatre and Its People. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1900.

Laurie, Joe, Jr. Vaudeville: From the Honky-Tonks to the Palace. 1953. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1972.

Mason, Jeffrey D. Melodrama and the Myth of America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.

Mates, Julian. America's Musical Stage: Two Hundred Years of Musical Theatre. New York: Praeger, 1987.

Matlow, Myron, ed. The Black Crook and Other Nineteenth-Century American Plays. New York: Dutton, 1967.

Moody, Richard, ed. America Takes the Stage. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955.

Murphy, Brenda. American Realism and American Drama, 1880–1940. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Quinn, Arthur Hobson. A History of the American Drama from the Civil War to the Present. New York: Appleton-Crofts, 1936.

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