hey there I'm Mike Rugnetta this is
crash course theater and today we're
talking about American modernism which
arrived late as you may remember from
our earlier episodes it took the u.s. a
long time to get a theatre at all
because of Puritans and war and then
America spent most of a century doing
red faced black faced Wild West shows
and bad imitations of English comedies
and Uncle Tom with crocodiles which is
to say it took American theater a really
really really long time to get good but
it happened today we'll look at the
United States embrace of realism the
rise of the Little Theater movement and
the turn towards the kinds of
experimental forms that Europe had
pioneered a couple decades earlier
why so tardy lights up already
[Music]
as we discussed before America loved
melodrama it went hard for spectacle
intrigue and cardboard characters
probably the first guy to try realism in
the states was James a Hearn an actor
and eventually a playwright he
collaborated with David Belasco on a few
melodramas and then decided that maybe
he should try to find a kind of
playwriting that mirrored life as people
lived it
he wrote the 1890 play Margaret Fleming
as a vehicle for his actress wife it's
about a wife and mother who discovers
that her mill owner husband Philip has
fathered an illegitimate child when the
child's mother dies the mothers sister
attempt to shoot Philip and Philip runs
away Margaret offers her breasts to the
starving baby and then goes blind from
the stress of the whole thing
Philip tries to kill himself and is
eventually rescued but it's unclear
whether the couple will ever reconcile
that is one eventful mirror of life now
maybe this doesn't seem that different
from domestic melodrama but there are no
soliloquies and no tableau and no one is
tying anyone to a railroad track Hearn
was hailed as an American absent
although Epson might have found the
sudden blindness a little extra the
writer William Dean Howells one of the
few people who saw the play wrote
Margaret Fleming clutched the heart it
was common it was pitilessly playing it
was ugly
but it was true and it was irresistible
for Howells maybe but most critics were
happy to resist even after her and made
the ending happier it never caught on
with the public either who were like the
depressing give us train tracks Hearn
had more success with Shore acres a
gentler attempt at realism that's about
a staged Yankee type huncle NAT who
successfully reunites his family other
writers also tried realism Clyde Fitch
William von moody even Henry James yeah
that Henry James his play guy domville
was one of the all-time great belly
flops of the late 19th century the
audience booed him for about 15 minutes
straight
15 minutes who has that kind of time
that seems like it would get
bring American realism wouldn't really
come into its own until the arrival of
Eugene O'Neill it's funny that O'Neill
became the champion of American realism
because his father James O'Neill made
his fortune performing in the romantic
melodrama The Count of Monte Cristo
Eugene spent his early life touring with
his alcoholic dad and his morphine
addicted mom he went to Princeton for a
year and then dropped out and sailed the
ocean after coming ashore he worked as a
vaudeville actor and then a newspaper
reporter after tuberculosis landed him
in a sanitarium he studied at Harvard
with George Baker who ran a famous class
called workshop 47 that taught the
fundamentals of playwriting a year or so
later he became involved with the
Provincetown players we'll talk about
them in a minute first he wrote
realistic seafaring plays and then he
wrote realistic landlubber ones as we
discussed previously his work took a
turn towards Expressionism with plays
like the Emperor Jones in which an
african-american actor Charles Gilpin
starred on Broadway a first O'Neill
wrote experimental plays that tried out
some of those cool newfangled European
techniques and even invented newfangled
to techniques of his own like having the
characters voice their internal
monologues O'Neill was one of the first
American playwrights to put lower-class
characters on stage and to write in an
American vernacular well an American
vernacular besides stage Yankee late in
life
he returned to realism with a run of
plays that include two acknowledged
masterpieces The Iceman Cometh and long
day's journey into night Diceman cometh
takes place in a seedy waterfront tavern
based on a dive where O'Neill tried to
kill himself as a young man it's
frequented by drunks and lowlifes who
keep themselves going with pipe dreams
the arrival of Hickey a traveling
salesman blows those dreams away for a
moment at least long day's journey into
night is O'Neill's most autobiographical
play written in tears and blood with
deep pity and understanding and
forgiveness and only performed after
O'Neill's death it spends a day and then
a very late night with the Tyrone family
O'Neill isn't for everyone the plays are
long and overwrought and O'Neill never
met a theme but he didn't want to hit a
again and again and again on his studio
wall he wrote before the soul can fly
its wings must be washed in the blood of
the heart fun guy but the desires of the
characters are so strong their pain is
so real and their tragedies feel so
inevitable that his plays have an
undeniable force his plays are about
individual characters and families but
they're about the United States too in
its greediness an Lea nation and
perpetual dissatisfaction I'm going on
the theory that the United States
instead of being the most successful
country in the world
is the greatest failure he told an
interviewer it's possible that we
wouldn't have O'Neill without the little
theater movement the little theaters
were inspired by European theaters like
the FRA buna the Tatra Libre and the
independent theatre Society the little
theaters provided alternatives to
Broadway into theatres across the
country that were tightly controlled by
a syndicate who programmed them pretty
exclusively with popular non-threatening
stuff you know train tracks place the
little theatres were like we're not here
to make money we don't care if people
buy tickets there will be no train
tracks here at all or if there are there
gonna be weird expressionist train
tracks there were several little
theaters in 1920s New York like the
Washington Square players the Harlem
Lafayette players and the Neighborhood
Playhouse Boston Chicago and Detroit
also had little theaters the most famous
of them was the Provincetown players
which started you guessed it in
Provincetown Massachusetts but because
even anti commercial theaters want to
make a splash the players moved to
Manhattan the players got started in
1915 by the writer Susan Glaspell and
her husband George cram kook they
produced their work and the work of
friends the second season included
Eugene O'Neill's Bound East for Cardiff
the theater became a home for poets like
Edna st. Vincent Millay
and Wallace Stevens and four female
playwrights like Djuna Barnes Nathe
poised and glassful herself who would
later win the Pulitzer Prize for drama
O'Neal's plays made the theater a hit
but this was never what its founders
wanted so it disbanded in 1923 let's
look at one of glaspell's plays trifles
written in 1916 this is both a realistic
play and an experiment
and one of the earliest examples of
feminist theater it's also a murder
mystery helpless a palpable like Sophie
tread wells Moschino from our episode on
Expressionism trifles was inspired by an
actual murder case the glassful covered
in which an Iowa woman was accused of
murdering her husband with an axe
trifles begins in a farmhouse a few days
after a murder a neighbor discovered the
husband John dead in his bed upstairs
the wife many claimed a burglar had
strangled him now the county prosecutor
plus the neighbor and the sheriff and
their wives have come to the farmhouse
to look for clues and gather up a few of
minis things CSI double date they come
into a living area and the prosecutor
asks if there's any evidence here but
the sheriff says nothing here but
kitchen things so the men leave the
unimportant kitchen things to the ladies
women are used to worrying over trifles
the neighbor says that is when the
ladies cracked the case while they're
looking at her preserves and her bread
dough and her quilting they find an
empty birdcage and then the dead bird
it's been strangled the same way that
John was strangled the women come to
understand that John had isolated his
wife and mistreated her and then killed
her bird so she retaliated I know how
things can be for women the sheriff's
wife says we all go through the same
things it's just a different kind of the
same thing
thanks this is a naturalistic play but
it's clear that what's natural in a
marriage means different things to the
male and female characters the men can't
understand why a wife would kill her
husband
the women get it they sympathize with
many they don't share her motive with
the men and they conceal the evidence
why is the play feminist though well not
only because it's a portrait of an
abusive marriage that is sympathetic to
the wife but because the wives are more
perceptive than their husbands and
ultimately they solve the mystery
O'Neill and the Provincetown
Confederates weren't the only American
moderns though living in France American
Gertrude Stein was writing some very
strange plays that don't move or feel
like plays at all works
ladies voices and what happened aren't
big on character or plot but they're
full of words that swirl and dart and
loop and repeat in a continuous present
tense everything seems to always be
happening at the same time you can even
call her plays cubist the literary
analogue of the Picasso paintings that
Stein loved and over in Connecticut
Stein's friend Thornton Wilder was
writing quiet philosophical bittersweet
plays that played with structure and
design like the long Christmas dinner
and our town though the plays seemed to
tackle typical subjects a family of
romance they take a wry metaphysical
approach to everyday life presenting an
audience with a mostly bare stage and
asking them to use their imaginations
and their own life experiences to fill
that stage back in thanks for watching
next time we're gonna be heading to the
Renaissance the Harlem Renaissance a
movement that encouraged a flowering of
African American theatre and performance
but until then Curtin crash course
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