Contribution of American Dramatists to the development of Modern American Drama:
The
bridge between the pre-war and post-war world in the American theatre is
provided by a single man, albeit a man who, by 1945, had been silent for more
than a decade. If any one writer can lay claim to having invented that theatre
it was he. From a disregarded and parochial entertainment he had raised it to a
central cultural activity, making it thereby a focus of world attention. His
name was Eugene O'Neill and throughout his career and subsequently he has
created a sense of unease in literary and dramatic circles. There is something altogether too
uncontrolled, too eclectic, and too unformed about his talent to inspire
respect. He paints with a broad brush. His characters are pressed to social and
psychological extremes by experience. He shared with his father, whose own
theatre he so despised, a taste for the melodramatic and overstated. His
characters lurch between self-conscious lyricism and aphasia. He is, in short, something
of an embarrassment. And yet there is no way around him. For thirty years his
work constituted America's claim to have created a powerful modern dramatic literature.
However, by 1936, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, his
reputation was already in decline and hardly recovered in the immediate
post-war years. For twelve years, between 1934 and 1946, no new O'Neill play
was produced; and after a poor production of The Iceman Cometh, in 1946,
no further play was produced before his death in 1953—A Moon for the
Misbegotten dying on the road. Critics know they cannot do without O'Neill;
their problem is to know what to do with him.
Desire Under the Elms was
written during the year 1924. This play is intensely tragic and makes a
powerful impact upon the reader and the spectator. Incidentally, it marked the
highest point up to that time in O’Neill’s development as a tragic writer. The
play had a successful run, and solved the current financial difficulties of its
author. 
Albee is supposed to be one of the greatest
absurdist playwrights after the Second World War in American literature. By the
early 1960s, Albee was widely considered to the successor of Miller. Albee was
the first and perhaps the only one of his theatrical generation to move from “Young
American Playwright” to “Famous American Playwright”. Albee came up with the
series of successful works like The
Zoo Story; a play written in Absurdist style; The American Dream;
a play that attacks on the false values which have destroyed the real values in
American society ; Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The most famous book having the
theme of emptiness, and so on. Most of Albee’s dramas lack specific setting.
Audiences never know the situation and the place where things are happening in
play. This is the important feature of absurdist drama. Most of the characters
presented by Albee in his works are restless and uncomfortable in their own
self. The characters in Albee’s plays seem to suffer from loneliness because
they cannot or will not make any connection with each other. Through such an
image of the characters, it can be assumed that Albee’s view about human
condition is that it is always overpowered by separateness and loneliness, which
according to him may be the result of a collapse of values on the western world
in general and in the United States in particular. Love is also presented in
his plays but not in the way of romantic situation but in the way of lost,
decay, fall and failure. Albee’s plays are full of violence both physical
violence like in The
Zoo Story or verbal like in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is taken as a metaphor to the 1960s American society.
The character in the drama like George and Martha are husband and wife; whose
life is very much frustrated. They only argue all the time. The violence could
not let them to continue their partnership. They seem to be tired of arguing.
This shows the common whole American life style.
“Any account of American drama
must begin by noting the casual disregard with which it has been treated by the
critical establishment. There is no single history of its development, no truly
comprehensive analysis of its achievement. In the standard histories of
American literature it is accorded at best a marginal position.” - C. W. E.
Bigsby, Modern American Drama, 1945-1990. As disconcerting as it may
be, C.W. E. Bigsby's observation about the “casual disregard” American drama has suffered is true,
perhaps even understated. Indeed, writing just a few years earlier than Bigsby,
Susan Harris Smith more pointedly characterized American drama as an “unwanted bastard stepchild,” the most
“maligned” and “unjustly neglected” area of American literary studies. She's
right. Consider, for example, the paradoxical situation in which well-known
critic Harold Bloom found himself in introducing two books on Arthur Miller,
whose plays Death of a Salesman (1949) and The Crucible (1953),
among others, remain central to the American theatrical repertory. In his
“Introduction” to a 1987 collection of critical essays on Miller, Bloom
identifies what he regards as the “half-dozen crucial American plays”: Death
of a Salesman, which he disparages as reading “poorly”; Eugene O'Neill's The
Iceman Cometh (1939, first produced, 1947) and Long Day's Journey Into
Night (1939-1941, first produced, 1956); Tennessee Williams's A
Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth
(1942), and Edward Albee's The Zoo Story (1958). This list is striking
not only because of its brevity, but because of the implication that no drama
prior to the 1940s - the decade in which four of these six plays had their
premieres - is “crucial” to the American stage. Bloom wonders aloud how a
country that can claim such novelists as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville,
Mark Twain, and William Faulkner, and poets like Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson,
Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens can “offer us only O'Neill, Miller, and
Williams as its strongest playwrights.” - Stephen Watt .
Any background to 20th century drama must obviously begin with a
sketch of what the 19th century was like, because every action is in fact a reaction
to something else and effects are best understood in the light of their causes.
The development of the theater in 19th century America parallels the development
of the nation itself. At first, there were only theaters on the Atlantic
seacoast, and not too many of them. In 1800 there were just a few theaters with
perhaps 150 actors in all, up and down the eastern seacoast, when the
population of New York City itself was still not much more than 50,000 people,
but as the country expanded dynamically, so did the theater. By 1885 it is
estimated that there were 5000 playhouses in at least 3500 cities great and
small throughout the expanded country, and somewhere between 50,00 and 70,00
actors, many of whom before 1850 were in fact English-born rather than American.
There were plays on American historical themes such as Bronson
Howard’s Saratoga and Shenandoah, there were serious attempts at classical or
European history, such as Robert Montgomery Bird’s The Gladiator and George
Henry Boker’s blank verse drama, Francesca da Rimini; there was pure trash,
such as The Black Crook, pretentious trash, such as Virginius and Richelieu,
and there was social trash, such as The Poor of New York, The Poor of London
and the Poor of Liverpool, all of which were imitations of Augustin
Laperrière’s, Les Pauvres de Paris. There were also very many minstrel shows,
where white actors whose faces were blacked by burnt cork, sang and danced to
banjos, a type of production that sprang up in 1843 and lasted until the First
World War.
Downright melodramas of the kind we can only laugh at now were
extremely popular: Augustin Daly was
famous for tear-jerkers such as Leah the Forsaken. In Under the Gaslight he
tied his leading man to a railroad track, and in The Red Scarf he bound him to
a moving log in a saw-mill. Toward the end of the 19th century, a new trend
became evident that had begun some twenty years earlier in Europe. This was
realism, which was a revolt against the melodramatic excesses of the romantic
style, which had gone from bad to worse as the century progressed. Some of
these plays were of undoubted quality. Steele MacKaye’s Hazel Kirke, a
“domestic drama that had a quality of quiet naturalness,” ran for 486
performances in New York, a record that stood for forty years after it was first
produced in 1880. Kenneth MacGowan and William Melnitz, in their book, The
Living Stage, tell us that James A. Herne “went further than MacKaye in
simplicity and naturalness. In 1890 and 1892 he wrote two plays that were ahead
of their time,” Margaret Fleming, which “dealt seriously and psychologically
with a cultured American woman, and The Reverend Griffith Davenport, about a
Southerner who opposed slavery. His comedies, Shore Acres and Sag Harbor were
also better characterized than the runof- the mill bucolic comedy-dramas of the
times. The problem was that realistic playwrights required a realistic stage,
realistic direction, a style of realistic acting, and, not the least important,
an audience ready to receive realistic plays. None of these were as yet
present. The old joke, attributed to Heine, that when the world came to an end
he wanted to be in Holland, because there everything happens fifty years later,
could now be applied to the situation of realism in American drama. When Ibsen,
Strindberg, Hauptmann, Wedekind, Tolstoy and Chekhov were busy reforming the
European theater and preparing it for the 20th century, America was
still enjoying minstrel shows while paddle-wheeled showboats, plying up and
down the Mississippi River, were still performing such old standbys as Ten
Nights in a Barroom and From Rags to Riches. The spectacular growth of the
American theater in the 19th century was largely quantitative only. For most of
the 19th century, the quality of the plays performed was very poor, and even
when a play was of the very first rank, as was always the always case with
Shakespeare, the quality of the acting, direction, staging and production was
often still laughably low by modern standards. It has been estimated that only three
plays of any quality were written and produced before 1850, with possibly another
four between 1850 and the turn of the century. A major reason for this
lamentable state of affairs was that the influence of Romanticism on American
shores automatically turned anything dramatic into melodrama.
The realistic play, when it finally came just before 1900, would be
practically stillborn, surrounded as it was by such stifling conventions as
these. A sea change would be necessary before realism could really catch on,
and it not until about 1915 that the whole American theater began to play
catch-up with the terrific advances that European drama had been making already
since the 1870’s and 80’s.
Much of this change was owing to one theatrical group, the Provincetown
Players, with their Playwright’s Theater, which promoted the daring work of
American-born writers like Eugene O’Neill, who is rightly considered to be the
father of serious 20th century American drama.
O’Neill was the main conduit through which the influences of Europe
would be let loose upon the American stage, and his powerful, troubled dramas
would act as the main training school for all of the major dramatists who would
follow him, people like Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and, a generation later,
Edward Albee as well.
Miller belongs to the second half of the twentieth century. Miller
was leftist and being leftist he starts his dramatic career with the propaganda
plays. In his propaganda plays he explicitly overthrows capitalism and
advocates for the establishment of socialism. Miller is influenced by Marxism.
His propaganda plays are not published until the publication of Death of a Salesman
in 1949. In his later plays after propaganda plays he implicitly advocate
Marxism. Miller’s first time play is known to be All my Sons
(1947). Whenever he comes with his first play he does not use experimental
technique but the old realistic tradition, Miller’s play are rather similar to
the plays of Henrik Ibsen (the great nineteenth century naturalistic
playwright).Miller’s best known play Death
of a Salesman is supposed to be the best modern tragedy in the
sense that he tries to experiment the concept of tragic hero, pronounced by
Aristotle in poetics. According to Aristotle the tragic hero should be from
noble birth, intelligent but the hero of Death of a Salesman is Willy Loman,
very simple man from the simple family who is a traveling business man. Unity
of time, place and action is perfectly settled and it is of the exactly
twenty-four hours play. This play Death
of a Salesman is actually about the failure of an American
dream. In this play Miller shows that Americans behavior who do not work hard
and only run after developing the personality. Arthur Miller’s being a leftist
thinks that capitalistic society make people corrupt and make them running
always after the money and when it is not fulfilled it turns to be something
disaster.
At the same time, the revolution that was begun by Constantin
Stanislavsky and Vladamir Nemirovich-Danchenko at the Moscow Art Theatre, in
training actors to become their characters rather to merely memorize and
play a role, the so-called “method” acting, had also made its way to American
shores. Equally important advances that were making their imprint felt in
America had to do with stagecraft, such as the construction of sets that could
be used to serve a number of different scenes at the same time, and that added
a quality of powerful suggestion to the drama of the play’s text. An example of
what the new stagecraft could accomplish was seen in the multifunctional set
that Jo Mielziner designed for the 1949 production of Arthur Miller’s Death of
a Salesman, a set that served all the play’s many scenes as well as its many
shifts between reality and dream, past and present. Such a play would have been
impossible to produce on the cumbersome Victorian stage, where huge sets complete
with real, massive furniture had to be moved off between scenes while others
were waiting to be moved onto the stage in their place, a process that was costly
as well as very time-consuming, and one, moreover, which effectively hindered the
building up of dramatic pressure from scene to scene. A third fact to be
considered lay on the academic side of things, where all of above came together
in one place. Shortly after 1900, Prof. George Pierce Baker began to teach
playwriting, first at Radcliff, later at Harvard University. By 1924 playwriting
was taught at more than 100 colleges and universities all over the countries.
Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and William Inge are among
the many American dramatists who profited from such courses or who took part in
the workshop productions they sponsored. But this is running ahead of ourselves
if we do not put down a few essential definitions before proceeding further.
Clearly, both realism and expressionism could be taken to extremes:
Ibsen was on one extreme and Brecht would later be on the other, but the fact
was that great drama could be produced either way or by combining both modes,
as Tennessee Williams was to do with brilliant success in A Streetcar Named
Desire and Arthur Miller in The Death of a Salesman. A third concept that we
will need to deal with is that of the theater of the absurd, which naturally
tended to make use of expressionism, but in America that was a much later
development which did not make its impact felt until the early 1950’s when the
French philosophy of existentialism that was associated with Sartre, Camus was
introduced into the Anglo-Saxon world largely through the work of Samuel
Beckett and translations of Eugene Ionesco. This is not to say, however, that Albee
was not influenced by it, because he was. It is no coincidence that Albee’s
first plays bear so much resemblance to plays by Eugene Ionesco and Samuel
Beckett which were making such a stir in the mid-fifties, plays such as
Ionesco’s The Chairs (1952) and Rhinoceros (1959), Beckett’s Act without Words
(1956), Waiting for Godot (1952), Endgame (1957), Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) and
Happy Days (1960).
Expressionistic and absurdist, then, are not necessarily synonyms, and
the fact that almost all absurd theater is staged in an expressionistic style
should not mislead us into thinking that everything that written with an
expressionistic touch is therefore representative of the “theater of the
absurd.” Albee’s early expressionistic plays are political theater, as I
have tried to show, and they are all driven by the underlying belief that far
from being absurd, the human and civil rights expressed in the American Bill of
Rights and Constitution are extremely meaningful and have been denied or
grotesquely distorted by the way American history has developed in the 19th and
20th centuries. He is therefore not a nihilist or an absurdist, but an outraged
idealist.
Albee’s words, “mijn toneelwerk gaat over reële mensen met bestaande
angsten” and his reference to the “werkelijkheid van mijn theater” provides us
with an important clue for understanding him. By denying the element of the
absurd in his work and insisting that he deals with real people who have real
problems, Albee points us back toward the tradition of modern realism that I
described earlier. In fact, his two best plays, Virginia Woolf and Delicate
Balance, are not expressionistic in style all, but are both examples of 20th
century realistic drama at their best. In his interview with Albee, Kester
Freriks was also struck with the very non- European staging of Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf when it was recently revived in the Kennedy Center in
Washington, with Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin in the lead roles.
This is hardly surprising, as Albee’s own stage instructions at the
beginning of the play inform us that when the curtain opens what we should see
is “the living room of a large and well-appointed suburban house. Now.” This is
a tradition that owes nothing whatever to Genet, Ionesco or Beckett, but everything
to Albee’s great American predecessor, Eugene O’Neill, and his older European
forbears, Ibsen and Strindberg.
Here history opens on the future. The avant-garde theatre of Gelber
tells the story of postwar literature
even while advancing on its frontiers. Forms break and are remade; the attack
on conventions really heralds their inner collapse. If any motives emerge from
the story of the past decades, they are probably too bald to tell. And yet it
is the business of literature to tell of these things without baldness: man’s
renewed sense of his being, the encroachments he must deny and the commitments
he must once again test. In a world where conscience so often with compels
dissent, postwar literature found the courage commensurate with its vision.
Through form and anti form, its search for the basic thing, where self and
society meet, continues.
References:
1. Modern American Drama
(1945–2000) by C. W. E. BIGSBY
2. Kernan,
Alvin, ed. Classics of the Modern Theater: Realism and After. (New York, 1965).
3. McGowan, Kenneth and
William Melnitz. The Living Stage: A History of the World Theater (Engelwood
Cliffs, N.J, 1955).
4. McCarthy, Gerry. Edward
Albee (Macmillan Modern Dramatists) (London, 1987).
5. http://www.bachelorandmaster.com/index.html
6. http://cco.cambridge.org/
7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_literature.htm
8. http://www.bartleby.com/
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