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Modern American Drama, ‒
C . W. E . B I G S B Y
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom
http://www.cambridge.org
Notes
Index
vii
Preface to First Edition
ix
Preface to Second Edition
Eight years after the first edition, I return to bring the story up to the
year . In , additional words I have tried to expand on the
careers of those in the original edition and add something on those who
should have been given greater space the first time around or whose
careers blossomed in the s.
All organising principles are suspect. No taxonomy without misrepre-
sentation. Nonetheless, necessity rules and I have chosen to gather a
number of writers in a chapter called ‘Beyond Broadway’. It is, heaven
knows, a vague enough term, and indicates a structural change in the
American theatre that goes back several decades. It is, however, prob-
ably as good as any, provided one remembers that those gathered
together in this way are heterogeneous talents united by nothing, neces-
sarily, beyond a belief that Broadway was to be neither natural home nor
validating agency.
When Henry Luce declared that his was to be the ‘American
Century’, he was hardly making a high-risk prophecy. Financial and mil-
itary power were already accruing in the face of collapsing empires. I
doubt, however, that he gave much thought to culture. That his proph-
ecy should also have proved true, in large degree, of the novel, poetry,
art, music and dance would no doubt have surprised him. That it should
also have proved true of the theatre would surely have been more of a
shock. After centuries of laments at the lack of native playwrights (a
lament not entirely justified), America produced a series of dramatists
who not only engaged with the realities, the illusions and values of their
own society but proved to be powerful and defining presences on the
international stage.
The process, of course, was already underway when this book begins,
O’Neill receiving the Nobel Prize in , still, astonishingly, the only
American playwright to be so honoured. The second half of the century,
however, saw the emergence of writers (and also actors, directors,
x
Preface to Second Edition xi
designers) who helped shape the way we see the world and whose
impress is clear on the work of their contemporaries around the world.
Again, I must underscore what I said in the preface to the first edition.
This is not an encyclopedia. Even expanded space precludes addressing
the work of all those writers whose achievement I would wish to
acknowledge. Nonetheless, I trust that at the very least it provides evi-
dence of the continuing power and significance of American play-
wrights as we passed through that artificial barrier which separates one
disordered century from another.
Perhaps in the future we shall no longer speak of American drama but
of an English language drama. Perhaps even that will begin to seem
unnecessarily parochial and limiting. Is difference, after all, not being
sandblasted away by a homogeneity claimed as evidence of the modern,
or postmodern? National cultures, competing ideologies, it is argued,
may be nothing more than quotations, so many stories within a master
story which speaks of a planetary consciousness, to be welcomed as evi-
dence of a new understanding and deplored as a consequence of trans-
national corporations imposing their own models of the desirable. I
rather doubt it.
As we passed through the invisible barrier of the millennium, filling
the sky with fireworks, from Beijing to Boston, as if to light our way and
cast out demons, nationalism, religious fundamentalism, cultural and
gender difference seemed to many to contain the essence of their being,
to define, in effect, who they were.
On the other hand, writers, like all of us, inhabit a world not defined
by national, or, indeed, other borders. King Lear, as Peter Brook has said,
is the story of a family and that is the door through which we can all
enter that annihilating play. There is a shared world of experience, of
symbols, of knowledge. Then, again, writers reach out to other writers
as their source and inspiration, and feel happier, often, in their own
company than in that of their fellow citizens, who care less for striking
through the pasteboard mask. Yet, even so, we are in part shaped, in our
acquiescence and our rebellion, by the proximate world. We are con-
tained (if not absolutely) not only within a language but a set of pre-
sumptions, values, myths which speak of the particular as well as the
general. And though America remains a contested space, in which iden-
tity must, immigrant country that it is, constantly be making and remak-
ing itself, the theatre remains a place where that identity continues to be
explored.
By the same token, the triumphs and failures of a country born out of
xii Preface to Second Edition
a utopian impulse are still, it seems, to be examined and tested, and
where else but on a stage which brings together the private and the
public, which presents us simultaneously with appearance and the real,
the dream and the actuality. Perhaps, indeed, in some ways it is that
tension between a utopian rhetoric and a diminished and flawed expe-
rience which not only connects the various writers in this book but
defines the very nature of the American writer.
In recent years attempts have been made to fill some of the more obvious
absences in the literary canon. The battle for the future, as ever, begins
with the past. First blacks and then women chose to define present reality
in terms of a redefined tradition. The project was an implicit critique of
a critical practice that had filtered out experiences not felt to be norma-
tive, that had denied a voice to those marginalised by the social or eco-
nomic system – hence the significance of the title of Tillie Olsen’s book
Silences and the potency of Richard Wright’s image of laboratory dogs,
their vocal chords cut, silently baying to the moon, in American Hunger.
Language is power, the shaping of language into art is power and the
codification of that literature in the form of literary history is also a
source of power.
It is, however, not merely the literary expression of the experiences of
particular sections of American society that have fallen below the
threshold of critical attention. There is also another surprising absence,
another silence, another example of critical reticence. Whatever hap-
pened to American drama? Why is it that literary critics, cultural histo-
rians, literary theorists, those interested in the evolution of genre, in
discourse and ideology, find so little to say about the theatre in general
and the American theatre in particular? Can it really be that an entire
genre has evaded the critic who was once drawn to the poem and then
the novel and who, more recently, has chosen to concentrate on literary
theory? There are, of course, honourable exceptions, but on the whole
the silence has been remarkable.
Any account of American drama must begin by noting the casual dis-
regard 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 liter-
ature it is accorded at best a marginal position. Why should this be? Is it
Modern American Drama, –
perhaps the nature of drama which takes it outside the parameters of
critical discourse, unless, like Shakespeare, its canonical status as schol-
arly text has been established by time? After all, is drama, and the theatre
in which it takes place, not inherently ideological? Does the transforma-
tion of the word on the page into the mobility of performance not raise
questions about discourse and text? Is the stage, the most public of the
arts, not a place to see dramatised the tensions and concerns of a society?
Is a concern with the reception of a work, with the way in which it is
‘read’, not of special significance to an art in which that reception may
profoundly modify the work in question? May questions of authorship
not have special bearing on an art which might be thought to be collab-
orative? Is the very nature and status of criticism not challenged by work
which to a large degree incorporates a critical reading in the very pro-
cesses of its transmission? These might be thought to be rhetorical ques-
tions, but the history of literary criticism and cultural studies suggests
otherwise.
It was Umberto Eco who reminded us that though the intervention of
the actor complicates the act of reception, the process remains the same
in that every ‘reading’, ‘contemplation’ or ‘enjoyment’ of a work of art
represents a tacit form of ‘performance’: and every performance a
reading. That reader may, of course, be in the theatre. He or she may be
on their own, confronted with the printed word. It could even be argued
that the latter may, in a perverse way, be in a more privileged if exposed
position in that the individual imagination is not coerced by the inter-
pretative strategy of director and actor. As David Mamet has said, ‘the
best production takes place in the mind of the beholder’.1 But of course
the theatre’s attraction lies in its power to transcend the written word.
That is the key. It is physical, three-dimensional, immediate, and
perhaps that very fact has itself intimidated the critic. It should instead
have challenged him. Too often, we are offered reductive versions, even
by those who acknowledge drama as an aspect of literature. Thus, in his
diatribe against the American playwright, Robert Brustein, as a young
critic, had denounced Eugene O’Neill as a ‘charter member of a cult of
inarticulacy’ who perversely suggested that the meaning of one of his
plays might lie in its silences, and Tennessee Williams for emphasising
‘the incontinent blaze of live theatre, a theatre meant for seeing and
feeling’, a plastic theatre which did not reward the literary critic. This
view, expressed in Harper’s magazine in , has been echoed
sufficiently widely since then to merit consideration.
The absent voice: American drama and the critic
Roland Barthes describes the author as a man
who radically absorbs the world’s why in a how to write . . . by enclosing himself
in the how to write, the author ultimately discovers the open question, par excel-
lence! Why the world? What is the ultimate meaning of things? In short, it is
precisely when the author’s work becomes its own end that it regains a mediat-
ing character: the author conceives of literature as an end, the world restores it
to him as a means: and it is in this perpetual inclusiveness that the author redis-
covers the world, an alien world, since literature represents it as a question –
never finally as an answer.2
But who more than Eugene O’Neill was engaged in this restless search?
No other playwright has committed himself so completely to the ‘how’
of literature, restlessly testing every style, strategy, concept of character,
linguistic mode, theatrical device. And the ‘how’ does indeed lead him
towards the ‘why’.
The process of O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones is one in which style is sub-
stance, in which the theatricalised self is left disabled by its own imagi-
native projections. It is like the film of a life run backwards, from
sophistication and power to innocence and total vulnerability; the por-
trait of a social world unmaking itself, of a language dislocated and in
retreat from coherence, of a civilisation reverting to origins, of an indi-
vidual stripping off the accretions of logic and civility, of a society
tracing its roots back to myth.
In so far as language is power, the absence of language is an index of
relative powerlessness. So it is that Brutus Jones’s language slips away
with his loss of social control as the lowly night porter, in O’Neill’s
Hughie, barely contributes a coherent sentence. On the other hand a
steady flow of language does not of itself imply a confident control of
experience. Indeed in this latter case the hotel guest’s articulate accounts
of personal triumph merely serve to underline the social silence which
is his life. What is spoken betrays the centrality of what is not. The truth
of his life is what can never make its way into language. He keeps alive
by the stories he tells. He is a down-market Scheherazade. The dramas
he invents are his defence against the world and his own insignificance.
They are also all that stands between him and despair.
The theatre is unique in its silences. In the literary text such spaces
close. Even the blank page of a Laurence Sterne can be turned in a
second. In the theatre silence is not merely kinetic potential. It may
teem with meaning. We are used to the notation ‘silence’ in a Beckett
or Pinter play, but Susan Glaspell and Eugene O’Neill were fully alive
Modern American Drama, –
to the possibilities of reticence forty years earlier. In The Outside Susan
Glaspell created a character stunned into silence by experience; but the
aphasia of Anna Christie and the inarticulateness of Yank in O’Neill’s
The Hairy Ape equally compacted meaning into those moments when
language is inadequate to feeling.
If the word, spoken or withheld, is a central and potent fact of theatre,
so, too, is space and the occupation of that space by the body. Nor is it
simply a matter of proxemics, of the meaning generated by gesture or
appearance; it is that the word is made flesh. The theatre is by its nature
sensuous. Even didactic drama alchemises its arguments through the
mind made body. The severity of words on the page is corrupted by the
mouth which articulates them. The minimalism of the printed word
gives way to plenitude. That seduction, implicit in the text, becomes
explicit in production. It cannot be extirpated. The Puritans were right
to close the theatres. However irreproachable the sentiments, their theat-
ricalising required a waywardness the elect were bound to suspect. For
Tennessee Williams, for example, that sensuousness was crucial, since
theatre is not merely the condition of his art but also his subject.
Thus A Streetcar Named Desire is pre-eminently aware of its own constit-
utive conventions; that is to say it is concerned, in the Russian formalist
Viktor Schlovsky’s terms, with the generation of plot from story. It fore-
grounds the processes of theatre, the elaboration of a structure of
meaning out of mere events. It defamiliarises the real by dramatising the
extent to which, and the manner in which, that reality is constituted.
Blanche is self-consciously her own playwright, costume designer, light-
ing engineer, scenic designer and performer. You could say of her world
what Roland Barthes says of the actor – it is artificial but not factitious.
The dramas which she enacts – southern belle, sensitive virgin, sensuous
temptress, martyred daughter, wronged wife – are all carefully presented
performances embedded in their own narrative contexts. In Fredric
Jameson’s terms, it is a play that speaks of its own coming into being, of
its own construction. If, to Jameson, all literary works emit a kind of
lateral message about their own process of formation, in Streetcar it seems
more central and more deliberate. And not here alone. Laura, in The
Glass Menagerie, enters the theatre of her glass animals, making mobile in
her imagination what is immobile in a world of mere facticity, just as
Tennessee Williams himself enters his own drama, charging the words
on the page with a kind of static potential which gives them the energy
to be discharged in performance. There is, indeed, a real sense in which
Williams is a product of his work. When he began to write he was plain
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