JADT Vol8 n1 Winter1996 Newlin Blank Cardullo Helfer Shout

THE jOURNAL OF
AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 8, Number 1 Winter 1996
Editor: Vera Mowry Roberts
Co-Editor: jane Bowers
Managing Editor: Vanessa Grimm
Editorial Assistants: Laura Drake and James Masters
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Assistant Circulation Manager: Julie Jordan
Edwin Wilson, Director
CENTER FOR ADVANCED STUDY IN THEATRE ARTS
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY CENTER
OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
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Stephen Archer
Ruby Cohn
Bruce A. McConachie
Margaret Wilkerson
Don B. Wilmeth
Brenda Murphy
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THE jOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE
Volume 8, Number 1 Winter 1996
Contents
KEITH NEWLIN, Uplifting the Stage:
Hamlin Garland and the Chicago Theater Society 1
MARTIN BLANK, Thornton Wilder's
Early Work in the Theatre 18
BERT CARDULLO, Whose Town Is It, Anyway?:
An Historico-Aesthetic Inquiry into Our Town 38
RICHARD HELFER, The Drag:
Mae West and the Gay World SO
jOHN D. SHOUT, The Idiosyncratic Theatre
of john Howard Lawson 67
CONTRIBUTORS 78
journal of American Drama and Theatre 8 (Winter 1996)
Uplifting the Stage:
Hamlin Garland and the Chicago Theater Society
KEITH NEWLIN
Hamlin Garland's efforts in the 1890s to foster innovative American
drama are well-known; his work with james Herne and the Boston
Independent Theatre Association has received ample chronicling by
literary and theatre historians.
1
According to these accounts, after
Garland and Herne failed to interest Boston theatregoers in Margaret
Fleming in 1891, Herne left for New York and more commercially viable
fare, while Garland moved to Chicago to inaugurate a career of lecturing
and club-joining, abandoning his reform efforts for the more lucrative
Western romance.
But Garland was not quite ready to gi.ve up on reforming the stage.
On 1'4 October 1 9 7 ~ after seei,ng The Donard Robertson Players in a
production of Ibsen's Rosmersholm at Chicago's Garrick Theatre, he was
again infused with dramatic ambition. "If ever there was a 'drama of
thought' this is one of them," he wrote in his diary. "It was very
powerful. Very gloomy and perfectly hopeless. It was fairly well acted
and gripped hard at times."
2
Garland was impressed with Robertson's
acting and choice of plays. Over the next few months he noted seeing
Robertson in Bjornson's Sigurd Slembe, Echegaray's Madman or Saint,
and Goldoni's A Curious Mishap, and he attended luncheon and
speaking engagements with Robertson. Finally, on 10 june 1908,
1
See, for example, Theodore Hatlen, "Margaret Fleming and the Boston
Independent Theatre Association, " Educational Theatre journal 8 (1956): 17-21;
Barnard Hewitt, " Margaret Fleming in Chickering Hall : The First Little Theatre
Movement in America?" Theatre journal 34 (1982) : 165-71; Alice M. Robinson,
" James A. Herne and His ' Theatre Libre' in Boston," Players 48 (1972) : 202-09; and
Donald Pizer, "The Radical Drama in Boston, 1889-91 ," New England Quarterly 31
(1958) : 361-4.
2
Garland' s diaries are held in the Hamlin Garland Collection, the Huntington
Library, San Marino, CA. My thanks to the Huntington and to Garland's
granddaughter, Victoria Doyle-Jones, for permission to quote from them. Subsequent
references to the diaries will be cited in the text.
2 NEWLIN
Garland noted that he had succeeded in interesting Robertson in the
production of his own play, Miller of Boscobel.
This event marked the beginning of an association that, while
occasionally fraught with misunderstanding and ill-temper, was to prove
singularly influential for the formation of non-commercial theatre in
Chicago. After Garland's play was produced by Robertson in early
1909,
3
both Garland and Robertson were optimistic about Chicago's
interest in supporting innovative theatre, despite the failure of Victor
Mapes's New Theatre, modeled upon European art theatres, at the close
of the 1907 season.
4
Their optimism proved short-lived, however, for the
Robertson Players disbanded at the end of 1909. Two years later Garland
and Robertson tried again, gathering together some of Chicago's
wealthiest patrons of the arts to form the Chicago Theater Society, which
functioned as a sponsoring society with Robertson' s newly organized
Drama Players as its acting troupe.
The Chicago Theater Society was an important though now largely
forgotten organization. The newspaper drama critics' universal champi-
oning of its goals helped educate audiences about the nature and
function of avant-garde drama and prepared them for other theatres that
followed the path the Society blazed. It was instrumental in demonstrat-
ing how-and equally important-how not to sponsor innovative drama
to "uplift" the masses. Its lessons proved influential for other organiza-
tions, such as Maurice Browne's more successful Chicago Little Theatre,
which in turn provided a model for the Washington Square Players and
the Provincetown Players.
5
Although Robertson received most of the
public attention in the newspapers, Garland's work behind the scenes
was of signal importance, for his efforts were largely responsible for the
direction, the successes, and the eventual failure of the Chicago Theater
Society.
3
Mi/ler of Boscobel, a labor reform melodrama, was presented three times: on
29 January 1909 in Madison, WI; on 30 January 1909 in Appleton, WI; and on 3
February 1909 at Fullerton Hall at the Art Institute of Chicago. The play exists in
manuscript in the Hamlin Garland Papers, Doheny Library, University of Southern
California in Los Angeles.
4
See James L. Highlander, "America's First Art Theatre: The New Theatre of
Chicago," Educational Theatre }ourna/11 (1959): 285-90; and Victor Mapes, "An Art
Theatre in Operation," Theatre Magazine 7 (1907): 202-09.
5
See Charles Lock, " Maurice Browne and the Chicago Little Theatre," Modern
Drama 31 (1988): 106-16; and Donald F. Tingley, " Ellen Van Volkenburg, Maurice
Browne, and the Chicago Little Theatre," Illinois Historical journal 90 (1987): 130-46.
Uplifting the Stage 3
The Robertson Players interested Garland because Robertson's
dramatic ambitions so clearly reflected his own. A Scottish immigrant,
Robertson first acted in the companies of Lester Wallack, Kate Claxton,
Dion Boucicault, and Steele MacKaye, and he later toured with Mary
Shaw's troupe presenting Ibsen's plays. In 1906 he became the director
of the Chicago Cosmopolitan School of Music and Dramatic Art and
planned to produce a series of recent European dramas in Chicago. The
project never materialized because of the rei uctance of his sponsors, the
Chicago Women's Club, to underwrite the venture after the failure of the
Chicago New Theatre. But in 1907 he formed his own company from
among the students at the school.
6
Like Garland, Robertson sought to cultivate an appreciation for
"intellectual" drama that disengaged itself from the standard melodra-
matic and social-comedy fare of the commercial theatre. "Instructive
drama is the only honest drama," Robertson explained in an interview.
" It should amuse, too, intellectually, with fragrant, quiet humor . ... We
are cultivating the highest ideals here in the American West, where the
soil as yet has no traditions. We are inculcating in the young mind a love
of dramatic ideals to cling through all the life."
7
Robertson believed that audiences remained bound to the commer-
cial theatre because they were not aware of the variety of drama
available; he therefore designed his first season's repertoire as an
educational smorgasbord. The seventeen plays, presented in eight
months in nearly two hundred performances, were Moliere's The Miser,
Pailleron's The Triumph of Youth, Ibsen's Rosmersholm, Hauptmann's
The Coming of Peace, Lamb's The Intruding Widow, Browning's A Blot
on the Scutcheon and In a Balcony, Maeterlinck's The Intruder, Cale
Young Rice's A Night in Avignon, Mary D'Este's The Law, Bjornson's The
Gauntlet and Sigurd Slembe, Calderon's Keep Your Own Secret, Gogol's
The Inspector, Giacosa's As the Leaves, Echegaray's Madman or Saint,
and Goldoni's A Curious Mishap.
As Lucy France Pierce noted in a review of the season, the "majority
of these plays from the Continental languages have never before been
6
James L. Highlander, "Robertson Players, " American Theatre Companies, 1888-
1930, ed. Weldon B. Durham (New York: Greenwood, 1987), 402-04.
7
Lucy France Pierce, "An Art Theatre in Successful Operation," Theatre
Magazine 8 (August 1908): 214.
4 NEWLIN
presented elsewhere in the English tongue."
8
By exposing audiences to
the variety of "literary" drama, Robertson hoped to encourage a taste for
more intellectual plays. As part of his educational program, Robertson
extended performances to college audiences at Northwestern University,
Indiana University, and the Universities of Chicago, Michigan, Illinois,
Wisconsin, and Minnesota.
By most accounts, this first season was a critical though not a popular
success because Robertson catered too specifically to an intellectual elite.
In a study of early Chicago art theatres, Jan Charles Czechowski notes that
" the Robertson matinees continued to lack large numbers of the 'popular
crowd.' " The reviewers praised the plays, but they consistently noted
that " the productions were not addressed to the 'herd' but mostly to
those with special interest in literature and art."
9
However, the number
of those interested in an art theatre had increased to the extent that by
mid-November, Robertson had to schedule an additional performance of
The Miser. Reviewers were united in praising Robertson's acting and
were eager to see the experiment succeed, but attendance began to fall
off. Robertson, with the support of the Chicago papers, then instituted a
fund drive and succeeded in raising a guarantee sufficient to finish the
season.
After the difficulties of the first season, in 1908 the Players gained the
backing of Ira Nelson Morris, a millionaire meat packer, "to establish a
subsidized theatre wholly independent of commercial considerations."
10
The Players were then invited by the trustees of the Chicago Art Institute
to appear on its stage at Fullerton Hall. This invitation was significant.
As Thomas H. Dickinson notes, " It was the first case in this country of the
recognition of the drama as a sister art by an Art lnstitute."
11
The second
season was less ambitious but now included four new American plays as
part of Robertson's program to encourage native drama: Richard Burton's
Rahab, Garland's Miller of Boscobel, Thomas Wood Stevens and Wallace
Rice's The Chaplet of Pan, and Lewis W. Smith's The Art of Life. The
Continental offerings were more traditional and included Milton's
Comus, Voltaire's The Prodigal, Asa and Carrion's Zaragueta, Ibsen's
8
Pierce, 214.
9
Jan Charles Czechowski , " Art and Commerce: Chicago Theatre 1900-1920,"
Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1982, 77.
'
0
Pierce, 216.
"Thomas H. Dickinson, The Insurgent Theatre (New York: Huebsch, 1917), 16.
john Gabriel Barkman, Goethe's Torquato Tasso, and a repetition of
Goldoni's A Curious Mishap.
During this second season the Robertson Players began to lose
support, and ultimately the company dissolved due, apparently, to its
failure to find a steady audience. Because the Players did not have a
permanent theatre but had to rely upon openings in established theatres,
they could not maintain continuity in their audiences. Moreover,
Dickinson explains, the company frequently lost members and had
difficulty "keeping plays in repertory." Robertson's ambitious ideals were
also responsible, for the rigors of producing a new play every week
simply exhausted his company and led to unevenness in the productions.
Finally, Robertson was unable to counter the immense popularity of the
traditional theatre in his choice of what Dickinson calls "a little strain of
the academic and far-fetched" as well as "some disastrous experiments
with unsuccessful American plays."
12
II
Early in February 1911 Robertson met Garland at the Cliff Dwellers
Club to tell him about his new plans to establish an art theatre in
Chicago. The result of-this discussion-the establishment of the Chicago
Theater Society- was to occupy Garland's creative energy and imagina-
tion for the next two years to the exclusion, as Garland was to note
repeatedly in his diary, of more remunerative work. Founded as a
guarantee organization rather than as a producing company, the Chicago
Theater Society hoped to avoid the financial and management problems
that had plagued both the New Theatre (1906-07) and the Robertson
Players. As Robert Morss Lovett noted in a review of the Society's first
season, the Society was composed of about 100 subscribers who
established a fund sufficient to cover the expenses of a season of ten
weeks.
13
Previous attempts to found a non-commercial theatre had
foundered in part because the manager had to look after the financial
management of the theatre as well as the details of production; the
Society therefore contracted with the Shubert Brothers to take over the
business end of the theatre and thereby enable the manager to concen-
trate on the p l ~ y s The Society would submit a list of thirty plays to the
Shuberts, of which the Shuberts would select ten for production in the
Shubert-owned Lyric Theatre by the Drama Players, headed by Robert-
12
0ickinson, 67.
13
Robert Morss Lovett, "The Season of the Chicago Theatre Society, " The Drama
no. 6 (May 191 2): 240.
6 NEWLIN
son, and guarantee "the productions as satisfactory in every respect." In
turn, the Society would guarantee "about $7000 a week to cover all
expenses."
14
Garland's only published comment about his involvement in the
Chicago Theater Society appears in Companions on the Trail (1931 ),
where he dismisses his role as secretary as a passing whim: " I should not
have accepted this position, but I did. I saw in it a chance for
diversion."
15
His extensive diary notations concerning his participation
in the Society, however, belie this posture of nonchalance. For more
than two and one-half years Garland meticulously noted his daily
activities on behalf of the Society. Elected Chairman of the Committee
of Organization on 27 April 1911, Garland began to solicit potential .
donors for the guarantee fund as well as to draft a prospectus. On 11
May he became the Society's Corresponding Secretary and began a flurry
of correspondence with playwrights who hoped to have their plays
chosen by the Society, issued publicity releases to the Chicago papers,
wrote to other repertory theatres to arrange performances under the
Society' s auspices, and acted as liaison between the Shuberts and the
Chicago Theater Society.
16
By 1911 Garland had hit a slump in his creativity. His most recent
novel, Cavanagh, Forest Ranger (191 0), had been dismissed as mediocre
and Garland was beginning to feel the ennui of age. As he wrote in his
diary on 12 February 1910, "I feel the passage of time these days-surely,
surely. I begin to feel the uselessness of half the pursuing I do. I shall
wait now and let things come to me. Perhaps at fifty, one may expect
things to come one's way. All my life I have striven and restlessly sought.
As I look back upon it my activity is appalling. " The opportunity to enact
his earlier dream of reforming the theatre- in the sense of promoting the
sort of intelligent, realistic drama for which he had campaigned so
vigorously in Boston-thus came at a time when Garland was casting
about for something to give his life direction and, ultimately, validation.
Garland initially was enthusiastic about his participation in the
Chi cago Theater Society. On the day that Robertson first revealed his
own aspirations, Garland noted that Robertson "again fi lied me with the
conception of what one person with money and ideals could do for the
drama in Chicago" (Diaries, 10 February 1911 ). The guarantee fund was
14
Lovett, 241 -42.
15
Haml i n Garland, Companions on the Trail (New York: Macmillan, 1931), 471 .
16
See Czechowski, 90-101 , for a discussion of the Chicago Theater Society that
emphasizes Robertson's part icipation in it.
quickly established, with Mrs. Harold McCormick, the wife of a
prominent millionaire and the daughter of John D. Rockefeller, offering
$10,000 to start the fund (Diaries, 30 March 1911). On 14 May, Garland
was "filled with the idea of a prize play competition" to stimulate
American dramatic authorship, the winning entry to be produced by the
Drama Players. During the month of June he helped overcome the
reluctance of the board of directors to hire the Shuberts to manage the
business end of the Society by writing a contract satisfactory to all parties
and by meeting with the Shuberts in New York.
By mid-July, however, a serious rift had developed concerning the
choice of plays, brought about by the competing interests of the
members, Robertson and Garland in particular. In a review of the first
season, The Dial noted that "The Society was formed, not to take chances
with untried material, but to present works of approved merit and
unquestionable significance."
17
Robertson, as dramatic director, wanted
more authority in the decision-making process and wished to continue
staging the great plays of Europe, as he had been doing in his former
company, the Robertson Players. Garland, however, saw the Chicago
Theater Society as his best chance to prove his long-held theory that
American authors had not achieved prominence because commercial
considerations led managers to favor plays with proven audience appeal.
In drawing up a tentative list of plays for consideration, Garland had
leaned heavily toward American authors, and in particular plays by his
good friends William Vaughn Moody (The Faith Healer, 1909), Augustus
Thomas (Arizona, 1899), and James Herne (Shore Acres, 1892). Garland
prematurely leaked his proposed l'rst to the press before the Society had
made the finaf selection; i"n response, Robertson gave hi's ltst to James
O'Donnell Bennett of the Chicago Record-Herald (Diaries, 18 July 1911 ).
The resulting controversy nearly shattered the fledgling Society. "The
Chicago Theater Society is finding Donald Robertson difficult-and my
duties as secretary are to be unpleasant I fear," Garland recorded in his
diary on 12 July. He wrote to Robertson and chastised him for what he
saw as Robertson's deviation from the goals of the Society. Robertson
fired off two angry letters to Garland protesting what he felt to be
Garland' s usurpation of his position as dramatic director. The first is
dated 14 July 1.911 :
17
"The Drama Players in Chicago," The Dial 52 (1912) : 302.
8
NEWLIN
My Dear Garland,
Your letter of the 9th just received. I gather from the contents
you think I have "changed." Why? Why? Why? In black and white
I set it down I have not. The first subscription and nucleus of the
Society was given to produce the great dramas of the world. And
that has been and is my hope. You not I gave out that list of
plays-that has met with such a chorus of disapproval and by the
number of letters I have received it would seem I am to [be] held
responsible for their selection. As I told Mrs McCormick, if you
finally decide you wish these plays I will loyally endeavour to
produce them, but I think it would be little less than criminal in me
not to point out to your committee the mistake they are making in my
judgement. Strangely enough I feel myself to be a better American
than yourself. I think the American people are entitled to the best,
and by striving to better that best will they finally become great
artists. Again have no fear about the Drama Company it will be able
to play anything and play it well. Dear Garland I have no desire to
be hard on any one as you seem to think I am, but where you talk
about working without price-well I too have done that, nay
more I have and still am paying for the privilege to work. You are
looking for American plays. There is no one better able to write one
than yourself. Why don't you get to work. Cheer up. Believe me
your friend
Donald Robertson
[P.S.] In your opinion my dear Garland what are the duties of "The
Dramatic Director" of The Chicago Theater Society? I know my
duties to the Drama Players but what are my duties to the Society.
Please read this to your Committee and let it serve as an
assurance to the Executive Committee I am only in earnest, not a bit
" vio/ent"-that is funny.
Garland's attempt to smooth things over only inflamed Robertson, for he
wrote to Garland,
You publish a list of plays without consulting me and were I thin
skinned I might think that very fairly as a discourtesy to the Office of
Dramatic Director. My position is clearly defined to you in my last
letter-1 mean my standing to the Executive Committee-! dont know
what agreement you refer to, you say I have broken. I dont
understand-Garland I am trying to do a big thing with the help of
the ladies and gentlemen I, more than anyone else, brought together.
Surely you are not going to keep nagging at me.
18
To settle their differences, Garland, with Business Secretary Arthur Bissell
and Treasurer Frank Logan, conferred with Mrs. McCormick, the Society's
President, who then became a member of the play selection committee
to resolve the issue. Their decision: add eight more plays to the list of
thirty, these eight plays presumably satisfactory to Robertson (Diaries, 18
July 1911 ). Garland left for Greeley, Colorado, soon after this meeting,
but matters had deteriorated so badly that he contemplated resigning. As
he wrote to Frank Logan from Greeley:
I am writing Mrs. McCormick to say that if she has anyone in mind
to represent her, who thinks the production of American plays less
important than the production of foreign plays, I shall be very glad to
resign. If my theories prove to be a source of friction to the Society,
and if the Board think that the guarantors are not in sympathy with
what I am trying to bring about, I certainly will withdraw. It may be
that I misjudge the temper of our members.
19
The repercussions of this squabble were greater than those involved
anticipated. Because they aired their grievances in the newspapers, the
public-and especially the critics-became confused about the Chicago
Theater Society's purpose. Depending upon whose list they read,
reviewers wrote that the Chicago Theater Society would produce either
intellectual, " highbrow" drama, American plays, or the best plays of the
Continent. In his 11 July column for the Chicago Record-Herald, James
O' Donnell Bennett wrote that the Society was drifting "toward the
mediocre and empirical" by proposing to produce plays by Shakespeare,
Congreve, Pinero, Synge, Moliere, Ibsen and others; in selecting the
" classics" instead of more timely plays, the Society was being too timid
and was not living up to its avowed purpose of offering the best modern
dramas. Bennett concluded that "A policy founded on expediency and
blurred with mediocrity will neither bring money into the box office nor
win renown for the venture. The New Theatre of Chicago proved that.
18
Correspondence between Robertson and Garland is held in the Hamlin Garland
Papers, #3283, Doheny Library, University of Southern California at Los Angeles.
There is no date on this second letter.
19
Hamlin Garland to Frank Logan, 24 July 1911, #2585, Doheny Library.
10
NEWLIN
The New Theatre of New York clinched the matter."
20
And in response
to an announcement that the Society would offer " a season of 'joyous'
drama, " The Nation wrote that
to Mr. Garland the principal function of the " j oyous" drama would
be to wean the American people away from the puerilities of the
musical "show." . . . It can be made the instrument for educating
public taste and the public's judgment to the highest forms of the
drama. Reformers of the theatre too often make the mistake of
leaping from the musical-comedy level to the Ibsen level, and thus
supply an opening for scornful girding at the " highbrows."
The writer then noted that by choosing to stage comedies rather than
more somber, "disagreeable" studies of life, the Society correctly
perceived that "there can be truth and art in the lightest of comedies; and
that truth in art is what the American theatre needs most."
21
To clarify matters, Garland sent a letter to the Record-Herald and to
The Nation that he hoped would eliminate the confusion. He wrote:
It is our plan to present the most unconventional and truthful comedy
obtainable, but it is not easy to make up a programme .... Personally
(and as the secretary of the society) I am more profoundly concerned
with the question of how this organization can be of use to the
American dramatist who wishes to write character plays without the
"arm of coincidence." . ..
It may be that we are mistaken, but we bel ieve there are plays of
this character already written (and, perhaps, thrice refused by
managers who must consider their "stars"), and that a repertory stage
would furnish a hearing for such pieces. It may be that we are being
cheated of plays which would be a credit to our l iterature and a joy
to the theatre-goer. Anyhow, that is my own belief. It cannot be that
we are so lacking in observation and invention as to be obliged to
borrow all of our high-class comedy from the old worldY
20
James O' Donnell Bennett, " News of the Stage," Chicago Record-Herald, 11
July1911,8.
21
" Another Stage Experiment," The Nation 93 (13 july 1911): 41.
22
The letter is dated 14 July 1911 ; it appeared as " Starring the Play," The Nation
93 (20 july 1911): 54; and in the Chicago Record-Herald, 23 july 1911.
Garland's letter did help to clarify matters, for the reviewers now
understood that the Society's aim was not to "exploit the esoteric drama,
or the drama of the cult" or to revive plays that had failed in the
commercial theatre. Moreover, "It is not, most emphatically not, to stage
American plays because they are the work of American writers . ..
irrespective of those broad standards of excellence that alone should
determine selection," as The Dial wrote in its discussion of the Society' s
goals.
23
Other reviewers praised the Society and Garland in particular for
seeking to foster new plays by American playwrights. Responding to
Garland's letter in his 22 July column in the Chicago Evening Post,
Frederick Hatton wrote,
Mr. Garland's stand seems to us to be characterized by the element
of vision which the enterprise must have if it is to be progressive. A
program given over entirely to revivals means that we shall go back
to the ancient and honorable American theatrical occupation of
marking time. So long as we do that we shall remain provincial in
all things dramatic.
24
The tone of all these columns was that of high expectation: The
reviewers were eager for the Society to succeed, and an extensive and
interesting dialogue took place in the letters columns, with such
luminaries as Walter Prichard Eaton, Barrett H. Clark, and Constance
Skinner suggesting plays for the Society to sponsor.
25
Finally, on 18 August the Society announced its selection of seven
plays by foreign authors: The Learned Ladies (Moliere), The Thunderbolt
(Pinero), The Lady from the Sea (Ibsen), The Stronger (Giacosa), The
Passing of the Torch (Hervieu), The Coffee House (Goldoni), and The
Voysey Inheritance (Granville-Barker; subsequently dropped). It would
23
" The Chicago Theatre Society," The Dial 51 (191 1): 65.
24
Frederick Hatton, "The Theatres, " Chicago Evening Post, 22 July 1911, 7.
25
For the letter by Eaton (which is Eaton's public response to Garland' s
request for play suggestions), see Chicago Record-Herald, 27 July 1911, 8; for
the letters from Skinner and Clark, see "The Repertory Argument" [letters
column] Chicago Record-Herald, n.d. (Garland' s clipping f ile, #725c, Doheny
library) .
12 NEWLIN
also produce three plays by Americans, to be announced at a later date.
26
Garland embarked upon an extensive, time-consuming search for
three American plays that would illustrate his theories. He wrote to
Augustus Thomas, who agreed to write a play specifically for the Society,
but prior commitments later caused him to decline. Plays began pouring
in from authors responding to the Society's play contest, but Garland
found few of them satisfactory. As he explained during an interview
about the contest:
The plays thus far submitted seemed to lack the individuality, the
self-expressive quality, which the society is seeking. We do not
invite the submitting of scenarios, and we wish to avoid the conven-
tional commercial vehicle.
Of course, we are not hoping for masterpieces in this early stage
of the movement, though we will call the man blessed who gives us
one. We are eager for a play that is significant, whether it be in one
or five acts. In short, the executive committee hasagreed that its
stage shall be open to the most self-expressive, the most original, and
the most American of dramatists. Too many of the plays that have
come to us thus far are obviously based upon some successful
work-"The Lion and the Mouse," for instance.
And yet there have been among them plays that aroused our
enthusiasm, lacking only in minor details of what we want. We have
already found good reason to believe that there is an intellectual
stirring among American dramatists which will soon result in work
as significant of our own time and people as that of the young
26
"Chicago Theater Society's Repertory Announced," Chicago Daily Tribune, 18
August 1911, 8, 9. In a letter to Lee Shubert, Garland expressed his disappointment
that the Shuberts had rejected The Voysey Inheritance, noted that the play selection
committee was united in its support of the play, and asked that the Shuberts
reconsider their decision (18 August 1911, #2496, Doheny Library). Garland
evidently made some headway in his lobbying but later grew discouraged by what he
felt was the poor quality of the Drama Players' acting. As Harley Granville-Barker
wrote to Garland, "Well, it is all right. I' d sooner you put off the play than did it with
a company you felt was not going to be at its best for the work" (24 April 1912,
#1942, Doheny Library}.
Garland also proposed an exchange of plays between the Chicago Theater
Society and Manchester's Gaiety Theatre, but the Gaiety's director, A.E.F. Horniman,
refused because of her perception of American drama as provincial: "I don't see how
plays can well be exchanged as conditions are so different-besides there must be
something to exchange must there not? And such plays from America which have
been sent to me have never been possible for the Gaiety" (Horniman to Garland, 27
October 1911, #2235, Doheny Library}.
dramatists who have been associated with the Abbey theater of
Dublin and the Court theater of LondonY
Garland went to New York in September and spent six days at the
Shubert office reading plays; clearly exhausted by his task, he noted in his
diary, "I went back to the club very tired and not at all willing to go to
the theatre or anywhere else." He later added to this entry the note, "I
have a feeling that I am wasting my time in an unworthy position. Why
should I be Secretary of the Chicago Theater Society? I decided to go
home at once" (Diaries, 22 September 1911 ). By December, the play
selection committee had chosen the American plays. Two-Gold, by
Ancella Hunter, and june Madness, by Henry K. Webster-had been
submitted to and rejected by commercial theatres; The Materna/Instinct,
by Robert Herrick and Harrison Rhodes, was written expressly for the
Society.
28
Despite much earnest boosting by the Chicago papers, the Chicago
Theater Society had consistent difficulty in attracting audiences to its
productions. After a series of tryouts in New York and other cities to
mixed reviews, the Drama Players opened in Chicago with Moliere's The
Learned Ladies on 5 February 1912. "Robertson and his company
succeeded in over-turning the feeling of distrust," Garland recorded.
"They pleased the audience with a classic comedy and that is something
to say. There was a fine audience and many curtain calls. I was
immensely relieved" (Diaries, 5 February 1912). Two days later,
however, he noted that the audience was dwindling, and his daily
notations depict his despair as he realized that, for play after play, the
subscribers turned out in force for the openings but few people came for
subsequent productions. On 8 March the board of directors met and
decided to reduce ticket prices in the hope of attracting students. The
strategy proved ineffective, however, as Garland noted on 13 March:
"The Drama Players are doing no business at all . I feel we are in for it."
By the season' s end, it was clear to all those involved that, as Garland put
it, "nothing we do can win an audience. We've lost our chance-if we
ever had any" (Diaries, 25 March 1912).
The reasons for this failure to interest an audience can be traced, as
Robert Morss Lovett noted in his review of the season, to the poor
selection of plays. The Society was formed to offer the best plays of
Europe and America, plays that would demonstrate the highest standards
27
"Chicago Theater Society' s Repertory Announced."
28
Lovett, 250.
14
NEWLIN
of craftsmanship, innovation and intellectual content, yet the plays
ultimately chosen were "unprepossessing" and "already
"already out of date."
29
Moreover, The Dial noted, entrusting the
selection of plays to a committee perverted "the singleness of aim which
was absolutely imperative" and promoted "the confusion that comes
from compromise, and working at cross-purposes, and the effort to
reconcile conflicting views."
30
Of the American plays, only june
Madness created any audience support. However, The Dial questioned
whether this play "came within the scope of the Society's for
its sensationalization of illicit love merely replicated what could be found
in the commercial theatres. The result was more confusion, for the
public could not "understand how the declared objects of the Society
were being furthered" by this play.
31
Lovett also observed that other
theatre groups were offering plays in Chicago that better illustrated the
Society's aims; the production of The Playboy of the Western World by
the visiting Irish Players in particular showed what a small theatre
could-and should-do.
32
Although the Drama Players did not succeed in attracting a substan-
tial audience for its plays, it did provide a valuable lesson in theatre
management. Garland and his associates proved that enough people
were interested in alternative theatre to support one on a subscription
29
Lovett, 246.
30
''The Drama Players in Chicago," 302.
31
/bid., 303.
32
Lovett, 258. Garland was in the audience for three performances of The
Playboy of the Western World, and his rather snide evaluation in his diary reveals his
disappointment as he compared the Abbey Players to the Drama Players' performance
of The Thunderbolt, which was playing at the same time:
I went again to see the Irish Players but I found them very lacking on the acting
side. They read well but their acting was very small and insincere. At all the
strong points of the play they failed to my mind .... Our own company gave a
wonderful performance of "The Thunderbolt" but there was nobody there to see
it (29 February 1912).
I got still more definitely their limitations. They all read al ike the same cadence
and the same tempo, but read their lines as if they realized that they were
literature (1 March 1912).
For Garland's much-edited version, in which he praises the Abbey Players'
performances, see Companions On the Trail, 476-8.
Up I ifting the Stage 15
basis, and their publicity activities succeeded in educating the public
about the aims of an art theatre, although the Society itself failed to live
up to its purpose. Critics were united in praising the quality of the acting
and particularly the Drama Players' departure from the "star" system,
with its emphasis on personality, in favor of the ensemble. As The
Nation noted in its review of The Lady from the Sea, despite deploring
the choice of play, "these Chicago Players exhibit their artistic sense by
representing [Ibsen's characters] in exactly the right method of precise,
unconscious naturalism .... A better performance of intimate domestic
drama it would be unreasonable to ask for."
33
Moreover, while the
Society's board of directors and the Shuberts were understandably
concerned about the return on their investment, the Chicago Theater
Society did not fare too badly when their losses are compared to those
suffered by the Chicago and New York New Theatre ventures. As one
reviewer noted, receipts amounted to "about fifty per cent of the sums
pledged by them. This is not a bad outcome for the first season of what
was confessedly an experimental enterprise."
34
Faced with the fact that their own Drama Players were not attracting
an audience, the Chicago Theater Society decided to dissolve the Drama
Players and to sponsor other theatre groups for the 1912-1913 season . .
The Society's new goals were to bring to Chicago "plays of artistic merit
and interest" and "to organize all the people of the city who are
interested in such plays."
35
In this new purpose the Society was
remarkably successful. Over the next two years, Chicagoans were able
to see an astounding variety of dramas, ranging from the classics to the
most recent innovations of Europe to American regional drama. New
York's Coburn Players produced Electra, lphigenia, and Macbeth;
Winthrop Ames's reorganized New Theatre (New York) offered
Schnitzler's Anatol; the Society sponsored the Hull House Players in
Masefield's The Tragedy of Nan and Galsworthy's justice and The
Pigeon; Dublin's Abbey Players appeared for four weeks in twenty-two
plays; the Horn iman Players of Manchester presented four weeks of
classical and modern English comedy; the Wisconsin Dramatic Society
offered four short plays, including Zona Gale's Neighbors and Thomas
33
" Drama," The Nation 93 (9 November 1911): 451.
34
"The Drama Players in Chicago," 303.
35
Martyn Johnson, "The Chicago Theatre Society: A Step Toward the Future,"
The Drama no. 12 (November 1913): 198-9.
16 NEWLIN
Dickinson's In Hospital; the Society sponsored individual productions of
Stanley Houghton's controversial Hindle Wakes and George Hazelton
and j.H. Benrimo's The Yellow jacket, a play inspired by the conventions
of Chinese theatre; and B. lden Payne, the former stage director of the
Manchester Players, began his long and distinguished career in America
by offering a repertory of plays under the Society's auspices.
36
As early as 1892 Garland had prophesied the role of the independent
theatre in overcoming commercialism on the American stage. He
informed an interviewer for the Chicago Daily News that the independ-
ent theatre "should aim at the encouragement of American drama. It
should be a school to educate the public as well as the dramatist and the
actor."
37
Although Garland's first effort, the Boston Independent Theatre
Association, did not achieve its aims, the Chicago Theater Society
provided a wealth of data about theatre management, advertising, play
selection, and ensemble acting, that both encouraged other theatre
groups and focused pub I ic attention upon the I ittle theatre ideal. Such
innovators as Maurice Browne profited from the Chicago Theater
Society's experience: Browne's Chicago Little Theatre emphasized the
importance of the director's unified artistic vision and took risks with its
choice of plays rather than attempting to play it safe with a repertory that
deferred to committee decisions and that both pandered to commercial
needs and simultaneously sought to uplift the masses. Garland was a key
player in this historical moment and, although he never understood or
appreciated his role because he was too embittered by the Society's
immediate failure, he was largely responsible for the Society's direction
and influence.
The Chicago Theater Society represented Garland's best opportunity
to prove his long-held theories about why American drama had not
achieved stature. That he consistently overestimated public receptivity
for non-commercial theatre and did not sufficiently appreciate the
amount of dramatic education necessary for his ambitions to succeed is
one of the great ironies of his career. For Garland, the success of the
Chicago enterprise would have meant validation of his literary and
36
Sources for this account of the 1912-1914 seasons include Garland, "The New
Chicago," Craftsman 24 (1913): 555-65; Garland, "The Wisconsin Dramatic Society
in Chicago," The Play-Book 1 Uune 1913): 20-23; Johnson, 194-99; Dickinson, 34-5;
and " B. lden Payne," in The Biographical Encyclopedia and Who's Who of the
American Theatre, ed. Walter Rigdon (New York: Heineman, 1966), 733-34.
37
" For a 'Theatre Libre' : Prof. Hamlin Garland' s Plans," Chicago Daily News, 30
January 1892 (morning edition), 1.
dramatic ambitions. The fai I ure of the Chicago Theater Society commit
ted Garland to more than twenty-five years of reliving his former triumphs
in a series of eight autobiographical volumes in which he attempted to
justify his life and career. The failure of the Society thus assumes major
significance in Garland's work, for after its demise Garland attempted no
more creative work as he retreated further into the recesses of memory.
Thornton Wilder's Early Work in the Theatre
MARTIN BLANK
Thornton Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1897 and spent
the first nine years of his life there. In 1906, he spent six months in
Hong Kong where his father held the post of Consul General. He
returned to the United States with his family and settled in Berkeley,
California, until 1910, when he went to China-this time to Shanghai-to
rejoin his father. He returned to Berkeley in 1912, not having seen any
Asian theatre on either trip.
1
However, he immersed himself in Western
theatre from chi ldhood on, first in Wisconsin and then in California. It
was in California that he first began to make up plays to be acted by his
friends, his sisters and himself.2 Wilder saw stock plays and road shows
at Ye Liberty Theatre in Oakland and at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley.
In Berkeley, where, as he said, "I was so little that I was allowed to walk
into rehearsals," he saw the classics: Maude Adams in As You Like It,
Sarah Bernhardt in Phedre, Margaret Anglin, Edith Wynne Mathieson,
and Sidney Howard in The Countess Cathleen.
3
In Berkeley High School
one of his first stage efforts was a sketch he wrote in 1913, The Advertis-
ers, in which he played Lydia Pinkham. A reviewer called the work "a
truly original conception." The following year, 1914, he played Le Beau
in As You Like It, and his performance received this notice: "Who will
forget Le Beau, fastidiously costumed, fastidious in manner and speech,
remarkably sustained by Thornton Wilder?"
4
1
Letter from Thornton Wilder to Earl Roy Miner, 2 July 1953, University of
California at Los Angeles Library.
2
Donald Haberman, The Plays of Thornton Wilder (Middletown: Wesleyan
University Press, 1967), 11.
3
Letter from Thornton Wilder to Alexander Woollcott, 7 May 1940, Harvard
University Library.
4
Berkel ey High School newspaper, The jacket, and the yearbook, The 01/a
Podrida. Mrs. Pinkham was a nineteenth century feminist who made a fortune selling
her vegetable compound, a home remedy for various ailments. She wrote the
Wilder's Early Work 19
While he was in high school, Wilder began wnttng his brief,
epigrammatic "three minute plays," most of which are religious parables,
in the belief that "beauty is the only persuasion."
5
This is the first
appearance of the didactic strain in Wilder's work, a tendency that he
had to guard against throughout his career.
6
In these plays one may see
a concern with form that satisfied his "personal passion for compres-
sion." As Wilder explained it, "no idea was too grandiose for me to try
and invest it in this strange discipline."
7
It is significant that stylistically
these first efforts were not realistic; they foreshadow the theatrical ism of
Wilder's major work. The appeal that the theatre held for him may be
seen in the opening stage directions of Centaurs:
The usual chattering audience of our theatres is waiting for the
curtains to part on a performance of Ibsen's Master Builder.
Presently the lights are lowered to a colored darkness, and the warm
glow of the footlights begins again the ancient magic.
8
Wilder recognized the ability of the theatre to unify a diverse group
of individuals, transforming them into a cohesive body that could
participate in a communal experience. He was to develop this idea in his
1941 essay, "Some Thoughts on Playwriting," where he discusses the
appeal of theatre to a group mind: "It rests on the fact that (1) the
pretense, the fiction on the stage would fall to pieces and absurdity
without the support accorded to it by a crowd, and (2) the excitement
induced by pretending a fragment of life is such that it partakes of ritual
and festival, and requires a throng."
9
Centaurs has as its characters Shelley, Ibsen, and Hilda Wangel of
The Master Builder arguing over Shelley's unwritten poem, "The Death
of a Centaur," which Shelley claims is the source of Ibsen's play.
advertisements herself, and by 1898 her concoction was the most widely advertised
product in the country.
5
Thornton Wilder, Preface to The Angel That Troubled The Waters (New York:
Coward-McCann, 1928).
6
Malcolm Cowley, ed., Writers at Work (New York: Viking Press, 1958), 111.
7
Wilder, The Angel That Troubled The Waters .
6
/bid.
9
Thornton Wilder, "Some Thoughts on Playwriting," Playwrights on Playwriting,
ed. Toby Col e (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960) 110-111 .
20
BLANK
That he was drawn to Ibsen at an early age may be seen when Wilder
confides his youthful fantasies about his work as a playwright. He had,
he said:
a carefully planned repertory for two theatres, a large and a smal l.
Here my longer plays were to alternate with The Wild Duck and
Measure for Measure and were cast with such a roll of great names
as neither money nor royalty could assemble.
10
The Ibsen plays for which Wilder seemed to have an affinity are the
symbolic ones (The Master Builder, The Wild Duck) rather than the
realistic, social-problem plays. He also greatly admired Shakespeare and
believed that he was born with the ability to admire him, confirmi ng
Wilder's bel ief in a God.
11
Wilder was exposed at an early age to the
great writers and he developed an appreciation of the classical dramatists.
He admired Goethe,
12
Beaumarchais, Lessing, Goldoni, and Sheridan.B
Wilder began his undergraduate education at Oberlin and won a
prize there for his essay, "The Language of Emotion in Shakespeare" in
which he called for a great, but natural language as the need of plays, a
living speech carrying the burdens of the emotions. His references to
other writers and how they overcame the problem of projecting emotion
in their plays reveals Wilder's familiarity with world drama. He points
out that the great plays do not need the detailed stage directions that the
modern writer uses, and that those directions are often included to hide
the fact "that the scant text reveals the deepest distress."
14
This may be
seen as Wilder's summons to revitalize the anemic dramatic literature of
his day, a literature that often settled for startling, theatrical effects on the
stage, revealing the production's ability to simulate reality, but which
nevertheless constituted poor drama.
10
Wilder, Preface to The Angel That Troubled The Waters .
11
Letter from Thornton Wilder to Alexander Woollcott, undated, Harvard
Uni versity Library.
12
Letter from Thornton Wilder to Professor George C. D. Odel l, 27 June 1949,
Columbia University Library.
13
Letter from Thornton Wilder to Alexander Woollcott, undated, Harvard
University Library.
14
Thornton Wilder, " The Language of Emotion in Shakespeare," Oberlin Literary
Magazine, March 191 6, 141-144, Thornton Wilder Collection, Yale University
Library.
With time out for military service during World War I, Wilder
resumed his education at Yale. He was a passionate theatre-goer and
began reviewing the plays he saw in New Haven, Stamford, and
Hartford, Connecticut, the cities in which Broadway-bound plays were
regularly tested. Wilder eventually contacted the drama critic of the
Boston Evening Transcript, H.T. Parker, and showed him his work. For
the next two years, the newspaper published Wilder's reviews. The
reviews are important to an understanding of Wilder because they reflect
the theatre of his day as well as Wilder' s rebellion against that theatre in
his search for the dramatic subjects and forms in which he would write
his own plays. Upon graduation, Parker invited him to be his assistant.
Wilder, however, had other plans, including a year of study at the
American Academy in Rome.
Wilder reviewed the plays of such writers as Rachel Crothers, Claire
Kummer, and Booth Tarkington. He saw such performers as Marjorie
Rambeau, Roland Young, and George Arliss in plays directed by Arthur
Hopkins and designed by Lee Simonson, two of America's exponents of
the " new stage-craft" during the early years of this century. In one
review, Wilder was impressed that Hopkins had "shown himself
idolatrous of Rheinhardt," one of Europe's leaders in the movement, and
was pleased that Hopkins had announced plans for a production of The
Master Builder along with a repertory season that would include John
Barrymore and Nazimova as players. Wilder also lauded Hopkins' s
"search for manuscripts among the unknown dramatists of the
country."
15
The typical fare that Wilder saw, however, and which he criticized,
were the conventionally plotted plays-melodrama or I ight com-
edy-with cliche-ridden dialogue ("I am only a woman. I do not
understand these great issues. I want my man and my home."),
16
and a
host of devices that playwrights seemed to borrow from one another.
Among these were "one of those light comedies made to fit some great
woman star 'like a glove' [with] a long monologue to be delivered
extremely well,"
17
the reuniting of a lost son and his mother climaxing in
15
Thornton Wilder, "A Very Good Young Man," Boston Evening Transcript, 17
August 1918, Part 3, 7.
16
Thornton Wilder, " The Chall enge," Boston Evening Transcript, 5 August 1919,
14.
1
'Thornton Wilder, "Miss Hedman and a Comedy," Boston Evening Transcript,
16 April1919, Part 2, 6.
22
BLANK
a recognition scene,
18
and a scene of renunciation that is "so common in
the theatre, where the mouths of characters are often unaccountably
stopped by their creator from speaking clearly and frankly."
19
This is the
theatre that Wilder characterized as " the Woodsian idea of life and the
theatre." The reference is to the highly successful producer, AI Woods,
who managed never to mix art with his entertainments.
20
(Woods's
formula was quoted: "I read a play, watch it at rehearsals and say to
myself, 'Do you get two dollars worth of fun out of it?' If I think I do I
know lots of others will.")
21
Wilder realized that the plays needed not "freedom from conven-
tions, for even these can be made to live, but more distinction in the
writing."
22
He also wrote that "one does not object to seeing an old plot
freshened-we are often told that all fiction consists only in that-but to
see an old plot retold without the slightest variation is hard."
23
Wilder
found many of the plays to be didactic, depicting capital and labor
struggles, political corruption, Bolshevism, and women's rights; they
seemed to need to prove something or to teach a lesson, a quality that
Wilder was well aware of in his own work. Of this kind of play, Wilder
wrote that
they recall to us that strange world wherein everyone exemplifies an
aspect of the argument, where even the servants make profound
observations, and where any little anecdotic by-play is suddenly
shown to bear a weight of proof or rebuttal.
24
In a review of Booth Tarkington's Poledkin, Wilder noted the
suggestion of Sir Arthur Wing Pinero that
18
Thornton Wilder, " Hopkinsian Handiwork," Boston Evening Transcript, 26
February 1919, Part 2, 9.
1
9"fhornton Wilder, " Again the Spirits, " Boston Evening Transcript, 10 May 1920,
15.
20
Thornton Wilder, " Hopkinsian Handiwork."
21
" Piays and Players, " Boston Evening Transcript, 26 February 1919, Part 2, 9.
22
Thornton Wi lder, " Again the Spirits. "
23
Thornton Wilder, "Miss Crothers Cries Again," Boston Evening Transcript, 20
March 1919, 22.
24
/bid.
even clever dramaturgy, to say nothing of great drama, arises out of
a special form of respect for the stage. For years it was this respect
that Mr. Tarkington lacked. He saw on every side how easy it was
for a writer of talent to arouse amusement in an audience, or
astonishment, or indignation; and for years without the least
conscience and without particular success, he played simple tricks
on simple audiences.
25
Tarkington was upset by the notice and wrote Wilder to tell him so.
Wilder answered that, as a critic, he was "one of the knowing." These
included people who had read War and Peace, Richard 11, and Mr.
Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons; and as one of these people, he
was expected to make judgments. "My feeling about Poledkin springs
from the same mind as does the pride and delight I feel in The Magnifi-
cent Ambersons and Clarence."
26
Tarkington never forgave Wilder for
panning the play.
27
In addition to criticism Wilder continued to write plays. During his
senior year at Yale, his full-length play, The Trumpet Shall Sound, was
published serially in The Yale Literary Magazine between October 1919
and January 1920.
28
William Dean Howells, who was considered even at that time to be
one of the fathers of American realism, made his prophecy-and Wilder
was not unmindful of it-that the "great American play" would probably
take place in a boardinghouse. In his eagerness to write that play, Wilder
realized that the principal requirement for an author intending to show
life as a realist was a sharp ear for the "racy folk speech .. . and a not-
contemptuous eye for the infinitely varied field of personal
idiosyncracy."
29
The Trumpet Shall Sound is an allegory of divine justice
and mercy and of Christian rebirth (thematically related to many of the
"three minute plays"), but the form of the play, which is set in a New
York City mansion in Washington Square in 1917, is realistic. Peter
25
Thornton Wilder, "Arliss and Tarkington," Boston Evening Transcript , 25
February 1920, Part 2, 3.
26
Letter to Booth Tarkington from Thornton Wilder, 29 March 1920, Princeton
University Library, Booth Tarkington Collection.
27
Letter to the author from Isabel Wilder, 3 Apri I 1968.
26
The Trumpet Shall Sound, in four acts, appeared one act at a time in four
successive issues of Yale Literary Magazine.
29
Thornton Wilder, "A Very Good Young Man."
24
BLANK
Magnus is a master of four servants who are left in charge of the house
during his absence. Flora, one of the servants, has rented rooms in the
house to a variety of sinners in the hope that Charles, a young sailor
whom she loves, will claim one of the rooms. Charles arrives and,
although he does not love Flora, he consents to marry her. Eventually
Magnus returns home, summons the police, and arranges to question
each of the sinners to determine the severity of his crime. He tries each
case and acquits each individual, but he is unable to help Flora, who has
lost Charles and, distraught over that loss, commits suicide. Among the
various sinners, Wilder depicted a prostitute, a sea captain, a wealthy
Swedish matron who pretends to be a pauper, and a pyromaniac.
In the spring of 1926, Wilder's first novel , The Cabala, was pub-
1 ished. In December of that year, a production of The Trumpet Shall
Sound was given by the American Laboratory Theatre directed by Richard
Boleslavsky. Edith j .R. Isaacs of Theatre Arts Monthly magazine
championed Wilder. In 1925 she had published his dramatic criticism
"The Turn of the Year," in her magazine
30
and it was she who had
recommended Wilder's play to Boleslavsky.
31
The production was
notable primarily because it marked the first professional production of
any of Wilder's plays and his entrance into New York theatre. The
reviews were poor and the play lasted only thirty performances. The
New York Herald Tribune found the play "besprinkled with misty
symbolism" and cal led it sophomoric. The reviewer went on to say:
The author has displayed a fine talent for character-drawing in this
piece, picturing the ill-assorted crew of boarders in sharp, clear
outline. But the symbolism takes away nearly all the effect of these
characterizations . .. the scenes between Flora and her sailor lover
were written with a heartening truth and beauty.
32
The New York Times reviewer thought that the play
furnishes a rather murkey evening among the better known symbols.
It is more or less a rehash- and one concocted without any highly
3
0"fhornton Wilder, "The Turn of the Year," Theatre Arts Monthly, March 1925,
143-153.
31
Mal colm Goldstein, The Art of Thornton Wilder (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1965), 33.
32
B.S., " Laboratory Theatre Adds New Wilder Play to Repertory, " New York
Herald Tribune, 11 December 1926.
piquant sauces-of other works of the kind, from Ibsen to Sutton
Vane, with a stopover to break the jump at Jerome K. jerome.
33
Early the next year, in a letter that Wilder wrote to Sylvia Beach,
James Joyce's publisher, he said that the play was "razzed by the critics
but it still keeps its place in the repertory." Wilder also noted that there
was interest in the play from little theatres in the western states.
34
In 1927, barely a year after his initiation into professional theatre,
Wilder published his Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, The Bridge of San Luis
Rey, and the year after that, he published The Angel That Troubled the
Waters, a collection of his "three minute plays."
Wilder resigned from his teaching position at Lawrenceville School
in 1928 (he had been an instructor of French there since 1921 ), even
though he had told F. Scott Fitzgerald early in the year that he considered
himself a lone worker rather than part of a "generation," and that he
liked teaching and expected to remain at the school for a long while. "A
daily routine is necessary to me: I have no writing habits, am terribly lazy
and write seldom."
35
Wilder was in Europe in the summer of 1928. In a conversation with
Andre Maurois, Wilder confessed to being "too bookish" and to knowing
I ittle of life. He told Maurois that the characters in his novels were made
from the heroes of books; the Marquessa in The Bridge of San Luis Rey
was based on the Marquise de Sevigne, and the central character in The
Cabala was based on john Keats. While the method served him well, he
did not wish to use it again and did not plan to write further until"! have
observed men better." He went on to explain that the writer cannot
bring new subjects to his work. In the entire world's literature there are
only seven or eight subjects and, by the time of Euripides, they had all
been dealt with; all a writer can do is rework them. Euripides, according
to Wilder, took his subjects from history or from foreign tales, the
Romans took their subjects from the Greeks, Moliere from the Romans,
Corneille from the Spaniards, Racine from Corneille and the Bible. The
only character that Shakespeare actually created, Wilder believed, was
33
"The New American Play is Quite Fantastic," New York Times, 11 December
1926.
34
Letter from Thornton Wilder to Sylvia Beach, 15 February 1927, Princeton
University Library, Sylvia Beach Collection.
35
Letter from Thornton Wilder to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 12 january 1928, Princeton
University Library, F. Scott Fitzgerald Collection.
26
BLANK
Ariel. Such borrowing, Wilder concluded, continued into the present.
36
He compared himself to a shoplifter who only steals from "the best
places, and whose defense is that they don't miss the merchandise."
37
Although a writer cannot bring new subjects to his work he can offer
a particular way of looking at life, Wilder told Maurois. Wilder's way
was to expose the masks that human beings use to conceal their
unhappiness. In varying degrees, all people are unhappy:
They are solitary, they are consumed with desires they dare not
satisfy; and they wouldn't be happy if they did satisfy them, because
they are too civilized. No, a modern man cannot be happy; he is in
conflict whether he likes it or not. Humor is a mask to hide unhappi-
ness, and especially to hide the deep cynicism which life calls forth
in all men. We're trying to bluff God. It's called polish.
38
After this interview, Wilder and his sister Isabel undertook a tour of
European theatres. They kept a travel diary, which was published in
Theatre Arts Monthly, recording their impressions of much of the work
that they saw. One notices Wilder's awareness not only of dramatic
literature, but also of production, acting, setting, l ighting and theatre
architecture-the totality of theatre experience-which were the concerns
of the theatre's revolutionaries during the latter part of the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. These were the concepts of Stanislavsky,
Antoine, Appia, Craig, Copeau and Reinhardt among others, whose ideas
of ensemble and attention to detail in production permitted all elements
to combine and produce theatre art. In the diary, Wilder seems to
ponder the relationship between stage and auditorium, actor and
audience:
Auditorium holds about four hundred. Stage small and close to the
audience so that our joy which couldn't be confined to two seats in
the third row, reached the stage and the entire house .... A
competent play and production start one thinking long thoughts
about the place of audiences in the theatre; to have or not to have
proscenium arches; is there an easy way out in a 'new' theatre ...
36
Andre Maurois, A Private Universe, (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1932),
39-40.
37
Letter from Thornton Wilder to Mrs. Rumbold, 18 November 1940, Henry E.
Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
38
Maurois, A Private Universe.
devices of [the directors and designers] though not new, kept the
house amused through seven scenes. Among these tricks: a dozen
or more actors planted in the audience to ridicule, provoke, or
acclaim the Doctor and Professor.
39
Wilder eventually used similar devices in Our Town and The Skin of Our
Teeth.
In 1929 Wilder began his third novel, The Woman of Andros, based
in part on the Andria of Terence (which in turn was based on two lost
plays of Menander).
40
Wilder wrote to British playwright St. John Ervine,
"When I have finished the remaining two chapters of The Woman of
Andros I intend to write five plays without stopping. The fifth may be
produced (who knows)?"
41
With the publication of The Woman of Andros in 1930, Wilder had
accepted a part-time appointment as Lecturer in Comparative Literature
at the University of Chicago. During his tenure there, he read dramatic
literature extensively and became awareof a truth that was to affect his
own playwriting: When theatre rose to its greatest heights as an art,
scenery, properties, and costumes played the least part.
42
Conversely, in
realistic theatre, these "encumbrances" play the most part, and while
works in realism tell a succession of truths, these "tumble to the ground,
true, but without significance."
43
It was precisely this theatre with its
"chrfdish attempts to be real" that Wilaer found so offensive. He traced
its power to the m lddle classes and their rise during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, when the theatre had been "permitted to become
a minor art and an inconsequential diversion." The vocal and powerful
middle class wanted to see itself mirrored on the stage, and this desire
helped to establish firmly the box-set that encumbered the stage with
39
Thornron and WiiMer, .. Niig,IM's,:p 711teattre Alts. Mot:11thUy'. june
1929,411-419.
40
1929 was also the year that Wilder's work was first adapted for motion pictures.
A silent movie of The Bridge of San Luis Rey was produced that year. Over the next
few years Wilder worked on several screenplays but did not receive screen credit.
41
Letter from Thornton Wilder to St. John Ervine, 3 October 1929, The Berg
Collection, New York Public Library.
42
Robert Van Gelder, "Interview With a Best-Selling Author," Cosmopolitan,
April 1948, 123.
43
Thornton Wilder, "A Preface for Our Town," New York Times, 13 February
1938, Section X, 1.
28
BLANK
specific objects that limit and narrow a play's action to one moment in
time and place. In short, the realistic theatre particularized the universal
experience, while in every "great age" the theatre had universalized the
particular. So it was "not verisimilitude but reality" that Wilder was to
attempt in his plays.
44
He believed that because the theatre is a world of
pretense it lives by conventions that are "permitted lies." The greatest
number of "agreed upon falsehoods," according to Wilder, seemed to
coincide with the greatest periods of theatre. The fundamental pretense,
of course, is the stage itself, and it is the function of many other conven-
tions that the stage suggests to provoke the viewer's imagination and to
universalize the particular action. Wilder believed that the novel rather
than the theatre is the genre of the particular truth; this is why the drama
is the greatest genre.
45
At this time, Wilder began work on his second collection of one-act
plays, The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act, published
in 1931. The collection contained six plays, several of which had been
written in a realistic style during Wilder's undergraduate years at Yale:
Such Things Only Happen in Books, Love and How to Cure It, and
Queens of France. The major pieces-The Long Christmas Dinner, The
Happy journey to Trenton and Camden, and Pullman Car
Hiawatha- were plays that reflected his new theatricalism as a style of
presentation.
Similar theatricalism may be seen also in the theatre of Andre Obey
and Jacques Copeau
46
with its simple and unadorned settings, its use of
stage light, pantomime, and narration-all devices to break the illusion
of realism and involve the audience in the theatricality of its style. Wilder
had read about Michael St. Denis's method of staging Obey's plays, and
this was a large influence on The Long Christmas Dinner, The Happy
journey, and later, the longer plays. He was particularly impressed with
the way the Roman soldier, Tarquin, prowled through the house, walking
"merely between posts set up on the stage, " and with the two commenta-
44
Thornton Wilder, " A Platform and a Passion or Two," American Playwrights
on Drama (New York: Hill and Wang, 1965), 120-1 26.
45
Thornton Wilder, "Some Thoughts on Playwriting."
46
Copeau had started his company, the Vieux-Colombier, before World War I,
but saw it disband during the war. Following the armistice, his troupe played two
tours in the United States and upon returning to France, they settled down to become
one of the most important twentieth century theatres. Michel St. Denis was a member
of this company, but in 1931 he formed an independent unit, the Companie des
Quinze, that performed on the stage of the Vi eux-Colombier. The St. Denis company
was the group for which Obey wrote all of hi s plays.
tors in Le Viol de Lucrece.
47
(Critic Charles Morgan describes this
moment about which Wilder speaks: "the bed of Lucrece . .. because for
us, as for him, a thing imagined and desired, a remote thing still divided
from him by doors and darkness, toward which he moves, creating walls
by the trembling extension of hi.s hands, filling the little stage with long,
winding corridors by the slow, tentative movements of his feet. Scenery
is abolished and the theatre built, painted, and lighted by the mind.")
48
Edmund Wilson says that Wilder acknowledged that the techniques
for the one-act plays (The Long Christmas Dinner collection) came from
the classical Noh drama of Japan.
49
Many of Copeau's devices are also,
in effect, those of the Noh.
50
Over the years, Wilder had heard much
about the stylized movements and imagined properties of Oriental theatre
and had seen a one-man performance by the brilliant Chinese actor, Mei
Lan-fang, in New York in 1930.
51
Similarly, Wilder was "deeply influenced" by Paul Claudel's essay
on Noh drama
52
and had hoped to borrow the device of "the Ideal
Spectator" for one of his own plays.
53
It may be seen, therefore, that the
portion of Wilder's stagecraft that comes from Asia does so indirectly, the
far greater contribution coming from the leading dramatists of the world
and the major directors of twentieth century European theatre, such men
as St. Denis, Copeau and Reinhardt, whom Wilder found to have
translated the text into stage action with such deeply felt meaning that
47
Letter from Thornton Wilder to Mr. Helmensdorfer, 14 October 1961, Yale
University Library.
48
"Charles Morgan on Andre Obey's Le Viol de Lucrece," The English Dramatic
Critics, ed. James Agate (New York: Hill and Wang, publication date unknown), 351-
2.
49
Edmund Wilson, The Shores of Light (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, Inc.,
1952), 538-9.
50
Leonard Pronko, in his book Theatre East and West (Berkeley: The University
of California Press, 1967), shows the similarities between many of Copeau's practices
and those of Noh. In the same study, Pronko also shows similarities between Max
Reinhardt's methods and those of Japanese Kabuki.
51
Letter from Thornton Wilder to Earl Roy Miner, 2 July 1953, University of
California at Los Angeles Library.
52
Letter from Thornton Wilder to Mr. Helmensdorfer.
53
Letter from Thornton Wilder to Earl Roy Miner.
30
BLANK
there was no condescension, but only dynamic stage life.
54
It was with
this background that Wilder was called upon to do his first writing for
Broadway theatre.
In 1932 Wilder undertook his translation of the play that was so
important to his Long Christmas Dinner collection-Andre Obey's Le Viol
de Lucrece. Katherine Cornell had wanted to play the title role in the
Obey play as an experiment by which she would test her abj lity in classic
roles. 5
5
She explained the appeal that the play had for her:
Normal, routine lives offer the playwright meagre dramatic material.
The more highly strung and intense, the less patterned the existence,
the better it is as theatrical substance.
56
Wilder's involvement with the play came about because:
On the same day, within two hours of each other, came messages
from Miss Cornell and Gilbert Miller asking me to translate dramas
for them. For Miss Cornell it was M. Obey's Lucrece, for Mr. Miller
it was Otto lndig's The Bride of Torozko. I have adapted lndig's
comedy, but my work on Lucrece is entirely translating, without
changing a single scene or line, nor adding nor eliminating a word
from the original manuscript. I say this because my regard for the
original tragedy is such that I do not want any credit whatever for
something not my own. Where the French author had turned French
lines from Shakespeare's poem which inspired Lucrece I have
restored Shakespeare's own verse. Otherwise everything in this play
is as literal a translation of Obey's composition as I have been able
to make it . .. Obey has violated so many rules of the drama in
Lucrece that I think his play breaks new ground in the theatre.
57
54
See Theatre Arts Magazine, February 1941, 148-9, in which leading theatre
practitioners responded to questions on the possibilities for a repertory theatre
movement in the United States.
55
Percy Hammond, "The Theatres," New York Herald Tribune, 21 December
1932.
56
" Miss Cornell Defends Her Choice of Play," New York Evening Post, 17
December 1932.
57
" Fame as Novelist Fails to Dim Wilder's Hope of Writing Plays," New York
Herald Tribune, 1 January 1933. According to the New York Times, 8 June 1932, the
lndig play was to be known as Klari. The play, featuring Jean Arthur and Sam Jaffe
under Herman Shumlin's direction, was produced in September 1934, but the
The story of Lucrece concerns a Roman soldier, Collatine, and his
virtuous wife, Lucrece. Her virtue, recounted to the Roman soldiers by
Brutus, awakens desire in a young hero, Tarquin, who returns secretly to
Rome and rapes his friend's wife. Tortured by what has happened,
Lucrece summons Collatine back to his home and reveals Tarquin's act.
Unable to live in dishonor, she stabs herself.
Obey employed pantomime (the use of a spinning wheel, the
opening of imaginary doors) and two narrators, a man and a woman,
who told the stories for Tarquin and Lucrece respectively. Positioned on
either side of the stage, they also commented on the action, assuming the
roles of spectators.
Robert Edmond Jones was engaged to design sets and costumes and
Deems Taylor to compose incidental music. Miss Cornell's husband,
Guthrie McClintic, served in his usual capacity as her director. Brian
Aherne played Tarquin, and in the featured roles of the narrators were
Blance Yurka and Robert Loraine.
Wilder attended many of the rehearsals and gave brief notes to
McCI intic, which afforded Wilder an opportunity to broaden his
knowledge of play production: "It has been a marvelous experience for
met watching Miss Cornell, Mr. McClintic and their actors at work."
58
The play had its. premier engagement in Cleveland where the
audience was at ftrst confused by the '''unconventionaf stagecraft." Once
the first night audience got used to the style of the drama, however, they
were cordial. William McDermott of the Plain Dealer wrote:
My own feeling about Lucrece is that, as a production, as an
intelligent meeting of all the complexities of projecting an original
and difficult play on the stage, it is one of the most complete and
singular triumphs on theatrical record. There is not a detail which is
not mastered with deftness and taste, and the whole laborious
enterprise has an imagination, a loftiness of conception and a
proficiency of execution that set it quite apart for our habitually
routine and tatterdemalion theatre. For this all honor and all praise.
This most elaborate magic does not bring it quite alive. 5
9
adaptation was by Ruth Langner.
58
"Fame as Novelist Fails to Dim Wilder's Hope of Writing Plays."
59
"Katherine Cornell presents Lucrece on Cleveland Stage," New York Evening
Post, 30 November 1932.
32
BLANK
Wilder acknowledged its unconventional techniques and could
appreciate individual opinion on the drama, but found it unbelievable
that anyone should find it difficult.
60
Lucrece opened at the Belasco Theatre in New York on 21 December
1932. It was respectfully received, but its episodic structure in six scenes,
with the action alternating between Collatine's tent and various rooms in
his house, and Obey's narrative device were found to be ineffective and
self-conscious. Gilbert W. Gabriel of the New York American suggested
that "the drama drowns in art."
61
One of the enthusiastic critics was Arthur Pollock of the Brooklyn
Daily Eagle who wrote:
Thornton Wilder's translation has a colloquial dignity and a fluent
ease rarely to be discovered in a work of this kind, permitting none
of the beauty to be lost, giving the play an elastic tautness ... . It is
a striking and beautiful thing, this Lucrece.
62
Several of the critics agreed with the New York Herald Tribune's
Percy Hammond, who wrote: "The play is translated conscientiously,
perhaps too much so by Mr. Thornton Wilder."
63
Also speaking for the
majority was John Mason Brown of the New York Evening Post who
found the play
arty and trivial, empty and cold. It remains the sort of production
one would like to be grateful for but can't. And the reason is that it
is dull, almost persistently so.
64
The play closed after only thirty-one performances. It was published
in 1933, and in a preface Wilder wrote that the audiences were unable
to respond to the "high Roman thirst for decorum."
65
60
"Fame as Novelist Fails to Dim Wilder's Hope of Writing Plays."
61
Gi lbert W. Gabriel, "Viewing the New Play, " New York American, 21
December 1932.
62
Arth ur Pollock, "The Theatres," Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 21 December 1932.
63
Percy Hammond, " The Theatres."
64
john Mason Brown, "The Play, " New York Evening Post, 21 December 1932.
65
Thornton Wilder, Preface to Lucrece (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Co., 1933).
This was a significant production for Wilder. When he came to work
on Lucrece, it was with a deep immersion in and appreciation for the
theatre of leading European practitioners, especially the work of men like
Reinhardt and Copeau, whom Wilder saw as freeing the realistic theatre
from dullness. For Wilder, after the early experiments with the "three
minute plays" and the unsuccessful attempt to find a theatrical way to
embody his allegory, The Trumpet Shall Sound, Lucrece helped him
embrace theatricalism as the style in which he would write his major
dramas.
Another result of this Broadway initiation was the development of
Wilder's friendship with author-critic Alexander Woollcott, with whom
he began a correspondence in 1928, and many of Woollcott's circle of
friends, including Edward Sheldon, the blind and paralyzed playwright
of Salvation Nell and Romance. The support and counsel of these two
men were of infinite value to Wilder during the period in which he was
to write his major plays.
Following his work on Lucrece Wilder resumed writing his novel,
Heaven's My Destination, which he had begun before being summoned
to adapt the Obey play. Heaven's My Destination, with its American
setting, may be seen as a reply to Michael Gold's Marxist crit icism,
shortly after the publication of The Woman of Andros in 1930, that
Wilder did not reflect contemporary America in his work.
66
Wilder later
explained:
For years I shrank from describing the modern world. I was alarmed
at finding a way of casting into generalization the world of doorbells
and telephones. And now (1938), though many of the subjects wi l l
often be of the past, I I ike to feel that I accept the twentieth century,
not only as a fascinating age to live in, but as assimilable stuff to
think with.
67
Wilder seemed to reflect his awareness of Gold's criticism by setting
the novel, several of the one-act plays in his 1931 collection, and three
major plays, in an American environment. During his Chicago years, too,
Wilder had formed a deep friendship with Gertrude Stein, and her ideas
on the nature .of Americans and the American experience held great
significance for Wilder. His plays, therefore, may be seen as a union
between theatrical ideas of such men as Copeau, Reinhardt, St. Denis,
66
Michael Gold, "Wilder: Prophet of the Genteel Christ, " New Republic, 22
October 1930, 266-7.
67
Ross Parmeter, "Novelist into Playwright," Saturday Review, 11 june 1938, 11 .
34
BLANK
and Obey, and an American setting that served to present his major
themes.
It was upon publication of Heaven's My Destination that Wilder had
made a decision to abandon the novel and devote himself exclusively to
playwriting, thus formally resolving the conflict that had plagued him all
his professional life.
68
Having resigned his teaching position in 1936,
Wilder was now committed to a full-time career of writing plays. He was
about to present Our Town to Jed Harris when Harris summoned Wilder
to adapt Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House for Broadway.
Wilder's work on A Doll's House is important not only because it
gave him a chance to express his admiration for Ibsen in a practical
way-reworking Ibsen's text for modern audiences-but also because it
was the first time Wilder worked with both Ruth Gordon and Jed Harris,
two artists who later figured prominently in his career.
Wilder was well aware of the problems that Ibsen presented for a
twentieth century American audience. While acknowledging that Ibsen
was a master realist, Wilder believed that he carried realism as far as it
could go.
69
According to Wilder, Ibsen's contribution was not the way
he told stories but in "being the only dramatist to invent new themes,"
and in that invention lay his real greatness.
70
Wilder also was aware that
a realistic setting usually does not allow for emotional eloquence. He
suggested that Ibsen, as a modern writer, overcame the problem of
language in many of the plays by using symbols, "which move like great
clouds behind the ordinary parlor conversations."
71
Wilder believed that
literature should express the relation of every man to the entire universe.
While the work of Shakespeare and Moliere, for example, can sustain this
relationship, he questioned whether Ibsen could as well.
72
Of A Doll's House, in particular, Wilder had noted previously that it
was an "earnest, awkward, overflowing first play .. . [and] showed strain
amounting to positive distress during the scene of reconciliation between
68
Wilder was to keep his resolve for thirteen years until the publication of his
1948 novel, The Ides of March.
69
Thornton Wilder, Preface to Our Town.
70
Maurois, A Private Universe.
71
Wilder, "The Language of Emotion in Shakespeare."
72
Thornton Wilder, " World Literature and the Modern Mind," Goethe and the
Modern Age, ed. Arnold Bergstraesser (Chicago: Regnery, 1950), 213-224.
Kmgstad and Mrs. Linden."
73
When he was asked by Harris to adapt the
play, Wilder's approach was to make
some cuts but no alterations. I took three translations, including that
of Ibsen's friend Brandeis, and turned out a version in colloquial
English so that you get the feeling. I think the cuts and the translation
give the play a twentieth century feeling. The problems raised by the
play are our problems-but much that was necessarily explicit can be
glanced at now.
74
Wilder consulted William Archer's popular translation of A Doll's
House along with two German translations and from them and the
critical literature, he emerged with his own version of the play that
reflected what he believed Ibsen meant. Some of the major cuts led to
making the character of Kmgstadt a weakling rather than a villain imbued
with evil. This was achieved by eliminating references to his "status"
during the play and permitting his past behavior to reveal him as a victim
of circumstances and environment, worthy of sympathy.
75
Wilder's "acting version," as it was credited in the play's program,
sought to eliminate William Archer's pedantry:
... his elephantine playfulness in the scenes between Nora and
Helmer, his tiresome involutions of thought and archaic turns of
phrase, were and are very far from the spirit of Ibsen, who first of all
expressed a fresh point of view on human life in clean dramatic form .
. . . The character of Kmgstadt existing as a stock nineteenth century
villain [in previous translations] has been rounded and deepened
until one feels, while wanting him out of the way for Nora's sake,
that he deserves his own sympathy and is caught as much as Nora
and Helmer in the web of circumstances that enfolds them all . The
73
Thornton Wilder, " Hopkinsian Handiwork."
74
Unidentified newspaper clipping, Billy Rose Theatre Col lection, New York
Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, Thornton Wilder file.
Wilder's version of the play has not been published.
75
New York World Telegram, 8 January 1938, n.pg., Bil ly Rose Theatre
Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center,
Thornton Wilder file.
36
BLANK
famous curtain line is not shocking today, and Wilder, taking his cue
from Shaw, ends the play on that speech.
76
Harris cast Dennis King as Torvald, Paul Lukas as Dr. Rank, and Sam
Jaffe as Kmgstadt to appear in major roles opposite Ruth Gordon's Nora.
Donald Oenslager was engaged to design the settings and costumes and
Nora's dance was to be choreographed by Martha Graham. Harris
evidently lived up to his reputation as a demanding, tireless, totally
committed producer-director who worked long and hard to get the actors
to achieve his vision of the play. Dennis King recalls that although Harris
was " a brilliant director ... [he] terrified the company with his
direction."
77
Prior to its New York engagement, the play was presented
in trial performances in Central City, Colorado, in July 1937. Wilder was
at rehearsals, but left for Europe before the opening in order to complete
his work on Our Town.
78
Before leaving, Wilder became upset with
Harris's methods; he believed that Harris was "succumbing to the
temptation I spend my life in fighting"-that point in the creative act
where "one rises up to destroy the work in creation." Wilder believed
that the same mind that is intelligent enough to create something is
intelligent enough to see every flaw in the work and to reject and destroy
it. That critical impulse must remain at the subconscious level as a
"corrective power." Wilder greatly admired Harris but believed that
Harris denied him the "dignity of cooperation."
79
76
Souvenir program of the Jed Harris production of A Doll's House, Billy Rose
Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center,
Thornton Wilder file.
77
Letter to the author from Dennis King, 26 March 1968.
76
Letter from Thornton Wi lder to Mrs. Alexander, 9 August 1937, Princeton
Universi ty Library. In the letter, Wilder mentions that he planned to finish three plays
that autumn.
79
Letter from Ruth Gordon to Thornton Wilder, 18 August 1937, Thornton Wilder
Collection, Yale University Library. The letter was transcribed in Wilder' s
handwriting and given to the coll ecti on March 1941. In this letter, Gordon quotes a
passage from a letter that Wilder had written her. While both Harris and Wilder had
respect for each other's talents, Harris's methods of working actors, using almost any
technique to get the desired results, was distasteful to Wilder. While both had strong
personalities, Wilder was more reticent than Harris in dealing with members of the
company. It is on the basis of this relationship that Our Town was undertaken once
A Doll's House was successfully opened, and many of the problems of that
production may be seen in light of the admiration and antagonism that developed
during the two men's work on A Doll's House.
The production opened in New York at the Morosco Theatre on 27
December 1937 to generally favorable reviews and a run of 144
performances, a record for an Ibsen play in New York at that time.
Writing in the New York Post, Richard Watts Jr., called Wil der's
adaptation "a fluid new acting version."
80
Brooks Atkinson of the New
York Times found that: " In every respect this is a notable revival. "
81
Robert Coleman of the New York Daily Mirror said: "A Doll 's House is
one of the season's significant offerings."
82
At this time, Wilder was completely committed to a career as a
dramatist and told one interviewer that "all my work, all of the earlier
writing has been one long apprenticeship for the theatre. "
83
This seems
to be so, for in the next four years, Wilder was to write and produce his
major full-length plays.
60
Richard Watts Jr., " Review of A Doll's House," New York Post, 28 December
1937.
61
Brooks Atkinson, " Review of A Doll's House," New York Times, 28 December
1937.
62
Robert Col eman, " Review of A Doll 's House," New York Daily Mirror, 28
December 1937.
63
Newspaper intervi ew with John Gibbons, 1939, from the Thornton Wi l der
Collecti on, Yale University library, as cited in Donald Haberman, " Thornton Wilder:
A Study of Hi s Theatri cal Style," (Ph.D. di ss., Yale University, 1962), 159.
j ournal of American Drama and Theatre 8 (Winter 1996)
Whose Town Is It, Anyway?:
An Historico-Aesthetic Inquiry into Our Town
BERT CARDULLO
It has long seemed to me that Thornton Wilder's Our Town (1938)
has two flaws at its center that have never been adequately addressed by
critics, if addressed at all. The first has to do with the play's implicit
argument that the cause of man's unhappiness is not his failure to achieve
or sustain greatness or wealth, but rather his failure "to find a value above
all price for the smallest events in our daily life," his inability to delight
in the beauty of ordinary, "undramatic" existence. The quoted words are
Wilder's own, from the preface to his Three Plays,
1
and over the years
such critics as Malcolm Goldstein, Rex Burbank, Hermann Stresau,
Eugene Current-Garcia, Gerald Berkowitz, and Donald Haberman have
taken his word as gospel in their own discussions of Our Town.
2
In the play itself Emily Webb acts as the spokesman for the play-
wright's view when, after her death, she returns to life to simultaneously
observe and relive her twelfth birthday (at the same time that she
curiously or, rather, contradictorily never addresses her brother, Wally,
either in death-where he preceded her-or in the past life of 1899).
Here is what she cone! udes:
[Life] goes so fast. We don' t have time to look at one another.
didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed . . . .
Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover's Corners ... Mama
'Thornton Wilder, Three Plays (New York: Bantam, 1961), xi .
2
5ee Malcolm Goldstein, The Art of Thornton Wilder (lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1965), 96-1 08; Rex Burbank, Thornton Wilder 2nd ed. (Boston:
Twayne, 1978), 75-83; Hermann Stresau, Thornton Wilder, trans. Frieda Schutze
(New York: Ungar, 1971 ), 60-61; Eugene Current-Garcia, " Our Town," International
Dictionary of Theatre 1: Plays, ed. Mark Hawkins-Dady (Chicago: St. james Press,
1992), 581 ; Gerald Berkowitz, American Drama of the Twentieth Century (New
York: Longman, 1992), 61 -63; and Donald Haberman, The Plays of Thornton Wilder
(MiddletoWn, Conn.: Wesl eyan University Press, 1967), 15-16, 57-59, 63-64, and
" Our Town": An American Play (Boston: Twayne, 1989), 16, 18, 38, 73-74.
Whose Town Is It, Anyway? 39
and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking ... and Mama's sunflowers.
And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths .. . and
sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for
anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while
they live it?-every, every minute? ... That's all human beings are!
just blind people.
3
The problem with this view, as applied to the characters of Our
Town, is that they are not particularly blind, or unhappy, or troubled,
with the exception of the town malcontent, Simon Stimson. Indeed,
more than most dramatis personae, the characters in this play do take the
time to appreciate the dailiness of human existence, to bear witness to the
wonder of God's creation, and that may explain why they are so clear-
eyed and uncomplicated. David Castronovo seems to realize this when
he writes that "Wilder's people in Our Town are rarely allowed to move
out of their mysterious innocence and become hokey figures who are too
sophisticated for their setting and the terms of their dramatic existence. "
4
But then Castronovo goes on blithely and unconvincingly to declare that
"Emily-the young girl who poses the greatest threat to the play by her
speech making about blindness and the fact that we never 'look at one
another'-is not allowed to spoil the play,''
5
which is to say the side of
the play that reveals characters who, for all their innocence, are not so
blind and do take the time, in Emily's words, to "look at one another."
6
One reason these characters bear such witness to the wonder of
God's creation is that they have the time to do so, since, unlike conven-
tional theatrical figures, they are not caught up in suspenseful conflicts or
carrying out momentous dramatic actions. (Act I is prosaically called
"Daily Life," Act II "Love and Marriage," and Act Ill "Death and
I
Dying.") Another reason is that they live in an isolated place-the small
town of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire (population 2,642)
7
-where
they are able to appreciate the dailiness of human existence, undeterred
by the masses of people, mass transportation, and massive buildings
3
Thornton Wilder, Our Town (New York: HarperCollins, 1985), 100-101.
4
David Castronovo, Thornton Wilder (New York: Ungar, 1986), 91 .
5
/bid.
6
/bid., 99.
7
Wilder, Our Town, 22. Subsequent references to the play will be ci ted in the
text.
40
CARDULLO
common to big cities. The whole point of Our Town, Emily's criticisms
notwithstanding, is to document not only the pleasurable anti-drama of
everyday life, but also the pleasure the townspeople take in enacting it:
in portraying "the way [people] were in the provinces north of New York
at the beginning of the twentieth century ... in [their] growing up and in
[their] marrying and in [their] living and in [their] dying" (32). As Mr.
Webb, the editor of the local newspaper and Emily's father, puts it in Act
1 :
No . . . there isn't much culture [in Grover's Corners]; but maybe this
is the place to tell you that we've got a lot of pleasures of a kind here:
we like the sun com in' up over the mountain in the morning, and we
all notice a good deal about the birds. We pay a lot of attention to
them. And we watch the change of the seasons; yes, everybody
knows about them. But those other things . .. there ain't much (25).
Among the "we" of Webb's statement, we may _include Webb
himself, Emily Webb, Constable Warren, Mrs. Gibbs, Mrs. Soames, and
Mrs. Webb, all of whom take the time to notice the moon in Act I, as the
following dialogue and stage directions make clear:
GEORGE: Hello!
EMILY: I can't work at all . The moonlight's so terrible (33).
MRS. GIBBS: Myrtle Webb! Look at that moon, will you! Tsk-tsk-
tsk. Potato weather, for sure.
[MRS. SOAMES, MRS. WEBB, and MRS. GIBBS are silent a moment,
gazing up at the moon.] (38)
MRS. GIBBS: Now, Frank, don't be grouchy. Come out and smell
the heliotrope in the moonlight. [They stroll out arm in arm
along the footlights.] Isn't that wonderful? (39)
MR. WEBB: Good evening, Bill.
CONSTABLE WARREN: Evenin', Mr. Webb.
MR. WEBB: Quite a moon!
CONSTABLE WARREN: Yepp (42).
MR. WEBB: Why aren't you in bed?
EMILY: I don't know. I just can't sleep yet, Papa. The moonlight's
so wonderful. And the smell of Mrs. Gibbs' heliotrope. Can
you smell it?
MR. WEBB: Hm ... Yes (44) .
Above all we must number among the "we" of Webb's statement the
Stage Manager, who at the very start of the play observes that "the sky is
beginning to show some streaks of light over in the East there, behind our
mount'in. The morning star always gets wonderful bright the minute
before it has to go-doesn't it? [He stares at it for a moment ... ]" (6);
who at the top of Act II notes that "the sun's come up over a thousand
times. Summers and winters have cracked the mountains a little bit more
and the rains have brought down some of the dirt" (46); in addition to
arguing, as Emily does in Act Ill, that "You've got to love life to have life,
and you've got to have life to love life" (47); and who at the opening of
Act Ill pays a lot of attention to the natural surroundings of the cemetery
in Grover's Corners:
[This cemetery's] on a hilltop-a windy hilltop-lots of sky, lots of
clouds-often lots of sun and moon and stars. You come up here on
a fine afternoon and you can see range on range of hills-awful blue
they are-up there by Lake Sunapee and Lake Winnipesaukee ...
and way up, if you've got a glass, you can see the White Mountai ns
and Mt. Washington-where North Conway and Conway is. And,
of course, our favorite mountain, Mt. Monadnock, 's right here-and
all these towns that lie around it: Jaffrey, 'n East Jaffrey, 'n Peter-
borough, 'n Dublin; and there, quite a ways down, is Grover's
Corners. Yes, beautiful spot up here. Mountain laurel and li-lacks
(80).
So the inhabitants of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, have the
time and space to pay attention to the rising sun and the flight of birds,
to obseNe the change of seasons and the growth of children, to savor the
roses blooming and the coffee brewing. But they have the time and
space to do these things because they live in a time and place when and
where there was apparently more time and space to devote to the "small
pleasures" of living: 1901-1913, before World Wars I and II established
the United States as an industrial-military superpower the job of whose
workers-living in larger and larger, as well as more and more,
cities-was to keep America ahead of all the other nations in the world
in addition to competing with one another for a fair share of the
American dream. Our Town was first published and produced in 1938
for a Depression-weary and war-wary American public; thus it is no
accident that the play looks back to an earlier, almost innocent or idyllic
era, before the events of 1914-1938 changed forever the way Americans
would regard the world and each other. (By 1938 the New Deal was
over and the Roosevelt administration was turning its attention away from
domestic reform to the gathering storm in Europe and the Far East.) In
42
(ARDULLO
this sense, the play is not simply a nostalgic tribute to the "good old
days" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a generalized
instance of the American tendency to idealize the past, as Francis
Fergusson, George D. Stephens, and Thomas E. Porter maintain.
8
Rather,
Our Town is in fad nearly a piece of isolationist propaganda that
promotes the virtues of a simple, unhurried, unthreatened life in the
isolated small towns of America-the one place where the virtues of such
a life need no such promoting, despite Emily's criticisms of her fellow
townspeople and to the detriment of the play's artistic wholeness or
thematic unity.
It may seem folksy, for example, that Dr. Gibbs would rather remain
at home in Grover's Corners than visit so cosmopolitan a city as Paris,
France, but Mrs. Gibbs's explanation of her husband's desire to stay put
rings of isolationism-cum-chauvinism:
No, he said, it might make him discontented with Grover's Corners
to go traipsin' about Europe; better let well enough alone, he says.
Every two years he makes a trip to the battlefields of the Civil War
[on which Dr. Gibbs is an expert] and that's enough treat for
anybody, he says (20).
In apparent contradistinction to her husband, it occurs to Mrs. Gibbs
"that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where
they don't talk English and don't even want to" (20; emphasis added).
Emily Webb might have responded, based on her speech to her class-
mates about the Louisiana Purchase (27, 29-30), that with this purchase
Mrs. Gibbs already had a little bit of France in America. (Recall that
Emily's alternate speech topic was the Monroe Doctrine (27), which
proclaimed that the United States would not brook any political or
economic interference in the Western Hemisphere by European powers.)
Like the Gibbs' remarks and Emily's American history assignment, the
following, seemingly innocuous lines by the Stage Manager in Act I also
smack of isolationism-cum-chauvinism:
Uoe Crowell] got a scholarship to Massachusetts Tech. Graduated
head of his class there .... Goin' to be a great engineer, Joe was.
8
See Francis Fergusson, "Three Allegorists: Brecht, Wilder, and Eliot, " The
Human Image in Dramatic Literature (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 52-53; George
D. Stephens, "Our Town-Great American Tragedy?" Modern Drama 1.4 (February
1959): 258- 264; and Thomas E. Porter, "A Green Corner of the Universe: Our
Town," Myth and Modern American Drama (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1969), 219.
But the war broke out and he died in France.-A/1 that education for
nothing (1 0; emphasis added).
I'm going to have a copy of this play put in the cornerstone [so that]
people a thousand years from now' II know a few simple facts about
us-more than the Treaty of Versailles and the Lindbergh flight (32;
emphasis added).
Among those few simple facts about what the Stage Manager calls
"the rea/life of the people ... in the provinces north of New York at the
beginning of the twentieth century" (32), one should not ignore our
country's internal isolationism of ~ w kinds. First, there's the comic
regionalism, indeed "state-ism," championed by the Stage Manager when
he remarks that "the Cartwright interests have just begun building a bank
in Grover's Corners-had to go to Vermont for the marble, sorry to say"
(31-32); by Emily when she declares that "Grover's Corners isn't a very
important place when you think of all New Hampshire; but I think it's a
very nice town" (66); then by George when he responds to her later in
the same conversation, "I guess new people aren't any better than old
ones .... I don't need to go [away to State Agricultural College] and meet
the people in other towns" (67); and finally by Sam Craig when he
reveals, upon returning to Grover's Corners for Emily's funeral, that he's
now in business out West-.-which is where Buffalo, New York, is located
as far as he's concerned (82).
Second, and most important, there is our internal isolationism of a
tragic kind: that is, the segregation of American towns according to race
and ethnicity, which we began to remedy only after World War II, when
veterans from minority groups demanded equal treatment in housing
along with all other areas of life in return for their service to the nation.
The pre-Great War world of the Gibbses and Webbs is decidedly not "an
antielitist view of human existence," as David Castronovo believes
9
In
Grover's Corners, for instance, "Polish Town's across the tracks, [along
with] some Canuck families" (6), and the "Catholic Church is over
beyond the tracks" (6) as well. Such segregation, of course, was the
result as well as the cause of what the Belligerent Man in Our Town calls
"social injustice" and "industrial inequality" (24). When asked by this
"belligerent" man what the citizens of Grover's Corners are going to do
about poverty and discrimination in their town, Mr. Webb lamely-and
per em ptori ly-responds,
9
Castronovo, 93.
44 CARDULLO
Well, I dunno . ... I guess we're all hunting like everybody else for
a way the diligent and sensible ~ n rise to the top and the lazy and
quarrelsome can sink to the bottom. But it ain't easy to find.
Meanwhile, we do all we can to help those that can't help them-
selves and those that can we leave alone.-Are there any other
questions? (25)
Mr. Webb's statement that "we do all we can to help those that can't
help themselves" may appear to be charitable, but in fact it's obfuscatory,
for it assumes that the racially and ethnically segregated are unable to
help themselves as opposed to being prevented from doing so. Similarly,
when he declares that "we're all hunting ... for a way the diligent and
sensible can rise to the top and the lazy and quarrelsome can sink to the
bottom," Mr. Webb seems to be in favor of equal treatment for everyone,
but in reality he is playing to the audience's prejudice that blacks and
newly arrived European immigrants belong on the bottom of the
socioeconomic ladder.
That prejudice is confirmed early in the play by Dr. Gibbs's report
that he's returning home from the birth of "just some twins . .. over in
Polish Town" (9; emphasis added); by the Stage Manager's remark that
"the earliest tombstones in the cemetery [belong to] Gravers and
Cartwrights and Gibbses and Herseys-same names as are around here
now" [with the exception of those belonging to the Poles and
"Canucks;'!] (7; emphasis added); and by the Stage Manager's ominous
interruption of Professor Willard's anthropological survey of Grover's
Corners-a survey that itself avoids mention of the program of genocide
we conducted against the Indians-at the moment this "rural savant"
comes to the Slavic and Mediterranean migration to America:
PROFESSOR WILLARD: Yes ... anthropological data: Early Amer-
indian stock. Cotahatchee tribes .. . no evidence before the
tenth century of this era ... hm .. . now entirely disappeared
... possible traces in three families. Migration toward the end
of the seventeenth century of English brachiocephalic blue-eyed
stock . .. for the most part. Since then some Slav and Mediterra-
nean-
STAGE MANAGER: And the population, Professor Willard? (22)
That same ethnic prejudice is confirmed later in the play by Constable
Warren's report that he's been out "rescuin' a party; darn near froze to
death, down by Pol ish Town thar. Got drunk and lay out in the
snowdrifts" (94). The drunk is naturally a "dumb Polack," one of the ten
percent of the town's illiterate laborers (23), not a member of the Anglo-
Saxon Protestant majority. He must not be as dumb as the women of
Grover's Corners, however, for at least he got to vote if he was twenty-
one (and a citizen), whereas "women vote indirect" (23), which is to say
only by influencing their husbands' votes. The women of the United
States did not gain suffrage until 1920.
I have gone to the trouble of documenting the historicity of Our
Town because this historicity works against the play's universalizing
tendency. Our Town would be a play for all people of all time-in
deliberate contrast to the drama of sociopolitical consciousness, even left-
wing propaganda, produced by such writers as Clifford Odets, John
Howard Lawson, and Elmer Rice during the 1930s-but in its own time
it's not even a play for all the racial and ethnic groups of Grover's
Corners, let alone all the nationalities of the world. The Stage Manager
relates Grover's Corners to the past civilizations of Greece and Rome as
well as future ones, to the surrounding countryside and to evolution (21-
22, 32, 71, 80); Wilder eliminates scenery almost completely in order to
avoid the suggestion that the meaning of the play's action relates only to
Grover's Corners, New Hampshire; and Rebecca Gibbs connects the
individual to town, county, state, country, world, universe, and God
when she quotes the address on Jane Crofut's letter in Act I (45). Yet for
all these attempts to link the Grover's Corners of 1901-1913 to the great
world beyond as well as to other historical periods-perhaps partly as a
result of these attempts-Our Town remains bound to time and place. It
is the conservative record or dramatic preservation of a conservative,
even reactionary, attitude toward life, and it hides behind what appears
to be radical, self-searching dramaturgy but is in fact little more than
contrived, self-serving theatrical ism.
To wit, on the surface Our Town has the trappings of an avant-garde
play, or of such a play as influenced by the anti-illusionistic conventions
of the Asian theatre:
10
a narrator, the Stage Manager, who disrupts the
illusion of present-tense reality and the rule of sentiment on stage; "No
curtain. No scenery" (5), no props to speak of; characters who address
the audience (like Professor Willard and Editor Webb) and acknowledge
the existence of the Stage Manager; an episodic dramatic form stretching
over twelve years (Act I takes place in 1901, Act II in 1904, and Act Ill in
1913) that allows for flashbacks (the courtship of George and Emily in Act
II, Emily's twelfth birthday in Act Ill) and flash-forwards (the Stage
Manager's foretelling, in Act I, of the invention of the automobile and the
deaths of Dr. Gibbs, Mrs. Gibbs, and Joe Crowell); and a lyric mood
10
Lee Sang-Kyong, "Zur Rezeption ostasiatischer Theatertradition in Thornton
Wilder's Our Town," Arcadia 22.3 (1987): 284-300.
46 CARDULLO
rather than a dramatic conflict in the conventional sense of protagonist
versus antagonist.
But Wilder's characters are typed or familiar-the town malcontent,
the folksy sheriff, the steady milkman, the knowing newspaper editor, all
flat figures from the primitive world of folk art-not psychologically
complex, let alone inscrutable, and they are certainly not characters who
call into question the whole idea of unified character or integrated
personality, like those of Pirandello. Indeed, when Editor Webb fields
questions from the audience in Act I, he neither drops out of character
nor steps out from the play, in character, in order to do so: Instead he
answers "plants" in the audience-not real audience members asking
improvised questions-whose queries manage to keep him firmly within
the world of Our Town. And nothing is made, either by Wilder or by the
citizens of Grover's Corners, of the fact that the Stage Manager plays or
metamorphoses into multiple roles in Our Town: Mrs. Forrest, an old
lady into whom George bumps while playing baseball on Main Street
(2 7); Mr. Morgan, the owner of the local drugstore and soda fountain
(64); the minister presiding at George and Emily's marriage (71); the
literal manager of the stage who belongs to the "real" world of the
theatre, about which he immediately tells us: "This play is called 'Our
Town.' It was written by Thornton Wilder; produced and directed by A
.. . . In it you will see Miss C. . . . ; Miss D . . .. ; Miss E ... . ; and Mr. F .
. . . ; Mr. G ... . ; Mr. H .... ; and many others" (5); as well as the town's
native son, natural leader, and documentary biographer, historical
chronicler, or choral spokesman who speaks of "our" town (S-7) in the
same accent as every other citizen of Grover's Corners-every other
white Anglo-Saxon citizen, that is (e.g. "holla"' for holler or hollow [6],
'"twan't" for "it wasn't" [72], "hull" for "whole" [6]).
just as Wilder's dramatis personae are not designed either to plumb
the depths of character, on the one hand, or to deconstruct it, on the
other, neither is his interruption of the linear progression of time designed
to probe the nature of time-to suggest its relativistic quality-or to
question the principle of inexorable causality. Our Town flashes back
from 1938 to 1901-1913, then from 1913 to 1899 (the year of Emily's
twelfth birthday), for the purpose of chauvinistic nostalgia, even as it
flashes forward for the sake of cosmic wonder (although, tellingly, it
never really goes beyond the present of 1938); and the play does so
through the offices of an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent Stage
Manager who creates the play's lyric atmosphere, not because he wishes
to emphasize the subjectivity of his own voice or expression or to stress
the essential "plotlessness" of humao existence, but rather out of a desire
to banish all dramatic confrontation to the wings, which is to say
subsume it within his own quiescent oneness. In this he is, of course, a
god I ike figure, if not a spokesman for God himself in such speeches as
the following, which more than suggest that human beings are created in
the image of the divine and thus superior to the rest of creation:
The real hero of this scene [George and Emily's wedding] isn't on
stage at all, and you know who that is. It's like what one of those
European fellas said: every child born into the world is nature's
attempt to make a perfect human being. Well, we've seen nature
pushing and contriving for some time now. We all know that
nature's interested in quantity; but I think she's interested in quality,
too-that's why I'm in the ministry (71).
We all know that something is eternal. And it ain't houses and it
ain't names, and it ain't earth and it ain't even the stars ... every-
body knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that
something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever
lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you'd
be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There's
something way down deep that's eternal about every human being.
[Pause.] You know as well as I do that the dead [like Emily] don't stay
interested in us living people for very long .... They're waitin' .
They're waitin' for something that they feel is comin'. Something
important, and great. Aren't they waitin' for the eternal part in them
to come out clear? (81-82)
In the second speech the Stage Manager is clearly referring to the
immortality of the human soul, but he-or Wilder-does so without the
realization that in modern, not to speak of avant-garde, drama the
patriarchal relationship between God and the individual soul has been
replaced by the adversarial relationship between man and his own
psychology, his will to comprehend himself, even as the patriarchal
relationship between ruler and subject has been replaced by the
adversarial relationship between man and society, society's drive to
marginalize all those it cannot or will not homogenize. Our Town to the
contrary, the fundamental subject matter of almost all serious plays of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the attempt to resurrect fundamental
ethical certainties without resurrecting the fundamental ethical certainty
of a judgmental or mindful God-the very God that Mrs. Gibbs appears
to invoke when she advises the deceased Emily to "think only of what's
ahead, and be ready for what's ahead" (92). Contrary to the evidence
I've already adduced from the play showing average human beings who
are perfectly aware of the Platonic essence or eternal dimension of
reality, as well as contrary to evidence from Wilder's own non-fiction of
48
CARDULLO
his belief that human beings can find their relationship to God in a
conscious appreciation of the natural life around them,
11
the Stage
Manager implies that it is only this God who, in the person of "saints and
poets" (like the Stage Manager himself?), can realize the wonder of life
while it is being lived or appreciate the beauty of ordinary, unremarkable
human existence (1 00). He thereby implies that this God is the providen-
tial designer or moral center of a conventional dramatic triad whose two
other components are psychology and causality. Yet modern drama (for
my purposes, the realism and naturalism of the social-problem play)
banished theology as well as autocracy from its triadic paradigm of
human action, as I point out above, thus deepening the dramatic role
played by psychology, sociology, and linearity or linkage, while avant-
garde drama (all the -isms that react against realism and naturalism:
expressionism, surrealism, etc.) demonstrated that a play's movement can
be governed by something completely outside the triad that links motive
to act, act to logical sequence of events, and logical outcome to divine or
regal judgment.
For the avant-garde, beginning in the late nineteenth century with
jarry if not earlier with such German visionaries as Tieck, Buechner, and
Grabbe, the nature of reality" itself becomes the prime subject of plays
because of a loss of confidence in the assumed model for dramatizing
human behavior and thinking about human existence. Wilder writes as
if no such revolution in the writing of drama had occurred, though we
know he was well aware of it (if only through his intimate friendship with
Gertrude Stein, who, in her rejection of the cogency of plot or idea for
the sensuality or pure form of language and gesture, was probably the
first thoroughgoing American avant-garde dramatist).
12
Or rather he
borrows from that revolution its " designer fashions" while continuing to
wear the emperor's old clothes underneath. Those "old clothes" include
the realistic, period clothing that characters normally wear in productions
of Our Town in the absence of specific costuming direction from Wilder,
as well as the realistic sound effects of a rooster (5), a train whistle (7), a
factory whistle (15), and a clock striking the hour (103). The "old
clothes" even include an essential observance of the (neo)classical
unities, since there is certainly no subplot (one might even argue that
11
See Thornton Wilder, American Characteristics and Other Essays, ed. Donald
Gallup (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 207-208; and The journals of Thornton
Wilder: 7 938-7 961, ed. Donald Gallup (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985),
125.
12
See Donald Haberman's The Plays of Thornton Wilder, 37-38, 70, and "Our
Town": An American Play, 4, 16.
there is no plot); the entire action takes place in one location, the town
of Grover's Corners; and, even though years pass, the morning-to-
eveni ng, birth-to-death structure of the play's three acts suggests a kind
of unity of time. Wilder eliminates most scenery, it's true, including
some only "for those who think they have to have scenery" (7), in the
Stage Manager's words, but this elimination strikes me more as a
convenient way to get around the need for multiple settings in an
episodic play (Main Street, the Webb and Gibbs homes, Morgan's
drugstore, the Congregational Church, the town cemetery) than as a
genuine if misguided-misconceived attempt to give the drama universal
significance or symbolic resonance, let alone suggest that the stage is the
unencumbered mind of God or bald reflection of infinity itself.
Surely Wilder was not subscribing to jarry's anti-realistic, quasi-
Absurd theories of theatre and drama, as Donald Haberman maintains,
13
when he took it upon himself to kill the use of a box set for any produc-
tion of Our Town. And if Pirandello had attempted, in M.C. Kuner's
words, "to liberate the conventional stage from its physical limitations by
centering much of the action in the minds of the characters and by
juggling such opposites as madness and sanity, falsehood and truth,
illusion and reality, always asking which was which,"
14
then, Kuner to
the contrary, Wilder's theatre is surely the opposite of the Pirandellian
one where nothing is absolute or fixed, where everything is relative and
fluid. Wilder is interested above all in Our Town in confirming, indeed
glorifying, the eternal verities of family, country, and God, not in
questioning or undercutting them. And he does so in a manner middle-
brows can appreciate most: the conventionally unconventional, or the
traditionally experimental. Namely, he tells bourgeois audiences exactly
what they want to hear but in a way that makes them think they are
discoveri ng something new or startling. Wilder thus makes the familiar
strange or striking in a way consonant with the Brechtian theory of
Verfremdung, but certainly not to an end of which the politically
revolutionary Brecht would approve. This is the same Brecht who, at
about the time Our Town was being produced, was writing his two
greatest epic "Schaustuecke," Mother Courage and Her Children (1939)
and The Life of Calileo (1939), in an effort to bridge the gap between the
numbing prosaism of the modern problem play and the indulgent
ethereality of avant-garde drama, not to retreat from it.
13
Haberman, The Plays of Thornton Wilder, 65-68.
14
M.C. Kuner, Thornton Wilder: The Bright and the Dark (New York: Crowell,
1972), 137- 138.
The Drag:
Mae West and the Gay World
RICHARD HELFER
In 1927, with the long run of Sex, Mae West found herself with time
on her hands and the possibility of solidifying her new reputation as a
writer-performer. Also, since there was no telling how long she would
be playing in Sex, she had the chance to try her writing abilifies in a work
in which she would not personally be appearing. Her solution was
logical, if unexpected. Her next work was again a "comedy-drama" with
a sexually shocking theme. This time, however, the sex was homosexual.
The play that resulted, The Drag, is one of her most interesting, even if it
is not an artistic success. It and Pleasure Man, the only other play she
wrote in which she did not intend to appear, shed light on the question
of whether her predilection for sexual themes was merely a concern with
box-offi ce or if it also indicated a genuine desire to change public
opinion.
West was certainly familiar w ith gay men, especially the more
effeminate ones, simply from keeping her eyes open backstage. They
amused her, and she even brought some home to meet her mother, who
was also amused. "They'd do her hair 'n nails and she'd have a great
time," she later said.
1
In her autobiography, Goodness Had Nothing to
Do With It, however, she said she f irst thought of the play after her
introduction to a masculine, good-looking actor whom she discovered
was bisexual. Familiar and easy as she was with what was then the
stereotype, this man disturbed her. This attitude is seen even thirty years
later in Goodness. She wrote of him, " I had no sexual desire for Dupont
but I remained impressed by his personatity. " Before that, however, on
the same page, she had reported her reaction to him as "When I am
1
George Eell s and Stanl ey Musgrove, Mae West: The Lies, The Legends, The Truth
(London: Robson Books, 1984), 44.
The Drag 51
attracted to a man, I am like an Amazon in battle; I hit out in all
d i rections."
2
Whatever her emotional reasons for being attracted to the subject,
when she started work homosexuality was still extremely rare on stage.
Certain plays had hinted at it in a vague and consciously "artistic" and
proper way, and certain gay characters had been used-without their
homosexuality being acknowledged. West discusses this fact, but
confuses her chronology:
But when I first tried to set the truth down in a play I was almost
alone. The only two plays that had tried were romantic, not realistic,
and had been closed. A w o ~ n character got a bouquet of violets
from another woman, in a French drama, The Captive, [by Edouard
Bourdet] on Broadway, and the play was closed as "an indecent
display of Lesbianism." The Green Bay_ Tree, [by Mordaunt Shairp]
a romantic play delicately and artfully touching homosexual
relationship, was no great success, for it never fully stated its theme
directly.
3
Here she makes it sound as if these works had played before The Drag,
but The Captive opened 29 September 1926, while West was working on
her play, (The Drag has a joke referring to it) and ran until it was closed
in the same raid that attempted to close Sex. The Green Bay Tree came
much later, in 1933, and it is possible that she was here confusing it with
The Green Hat, from the 1925 season, another "sex" play, and one
which did have a rather obvious, if not openly stated, gay character. It
is true that both works she mentions treat homosexual ity delicately and
obliquely; so much so that there were critics who didn't see it at all in
The Green Bay Tree, merely seeing the play as the story of a young man
tempted by a soft life. There would be no mistaking West's subject
matter.
West made it known among the gay community that she was
working on a play dealing with aspects of their lives and welcomed many
into what was to become a large, if low-salaried, cast. The main outlines
of the plot, the " serious" scenes, were done by West, perhaps with the
2
Mae West, Goodness Had Nothing To Do With It (New jersey: Prenti ce-Hall, Inc.,
1959), 92.
3
/bid., 93.
52
HELFER
help of Jack Elsner/ but much of the dialogue for the gay characters was
first improvised by her actors.
The first mention of the play in Variety is in the "Shows in New
York" column, which reported the box office for each show on
Broadway. For the week of 15 December 1926, its report of Sex reads,
"Talk of some sponsors putting on a show called The Drag; may be
spotted here. Sex credited with playing to profitable business, however;
estimated at $7,000."
5
Two weeks later, the same column reported,
"Hanging on, with gross $6,000 to $7,000; may soon be followed by
even more raw topic under the title guise of The Drag."
6
This seems to
indicate some on Broadway thought The Drag was being prepared to
replace a show in the last weeks of its run, but Sex was probably still
turning a profit at $6,000, and was to increase its weekly gross in the next
weeks, first to the $10,000 range with increased tabloid fulminations
against what Variety called "dirt plays," and then to as high as $14,000
immediately after it was raided.
The rehearsals of The Drag were causing a lot of talk, as is evident
from a Variety article the week of 12 January 1927:
January 28 is the date set for the initial public playing of The
Drag, the newest style in shows. Place of opening or later places for
it to roost have not as yet been named.
The Drag was written by Mae West, authoress of Sex still current
at Daly's 63rd St. Miss West will not appear in the new piece.
About 40 young men from Greenwich Village are expected to,
however, in addition to 12 principals, not from the Village.
Rehearsals are being held daily at the 63rd St., with the chances
that a good pre-gross might be rolled up if admission could be
charged to watch the Villagers practicing.
7
West's confusion in her autobiography about events concerned with
The Drag extends to her account of its opening, which she places in
Paterson, New Jersey. Before that engagement, it had actually opened at
Poli's Park Theatre in Bridgeport, Conn., in the first three days of a week
split with Minna Daily's Burlesquers. This booking was made after a
4
Eells and Musgrove, 65.
5
Variety, 15 December 1926, 35.
6
Variety, 29 December 1926, 49.
7
Variety, 12 january 1927, 37.
The Drag 53
Stamford, Conn., engagement mentioned in the Variety article had been
canceled when the manager learned what the play was about.
Despite having been arranged quickly, the short Bridgeport run was
a great success, probably because of normal curiosity in the general
audience and, one suspects, because of heavy gay patronage, anxious to
see their group openly on stage for the first time. Reports of the
composition of the audience are mixed. The Graphic reported the
audience at the premiere had a majority of women.
8
Speaking of the
opening in Paterson, New jersey, the World said, "The majority were
men, with a fair turnout of women,"
9
but the Evening Post said that "few
of them were women."
10
Though there was coverage of the play as a
news story, the only formal r v i w ~ it received were from the Graphic
and Variety. Variety had been running articles for months about the
moral state of Broadway and about the possibility of an official censor;
the start of its review shows those concerns:
If P.T. Barnum [a former mayor of Bridgeport] had ever been
inspired to stage a grand and glittering spectacle entitled, for
instance, "The Destruction of Sodom," this is the way he would have
gone about it.
The whole play is a cheap and shabby appeal to sensationalism,
done without intelligence or taste and in the spirit of a Winter
Garden revue. If it ever gets to Broadway, it would be a calamity, just
at this time, when, more than ever before, the subject of a Broadway
censor is under national agitation.
11
Although the Graphic had been, and was to continue to be, a leader
in the tabloid fight for morality, its review was headed, "Went To Be
Shocked; Found The Drag Clean." Since Variety was to comment on the
later Paterson performances by saying, "It held over on the Sunday on
8
New York Graphic, 1 February 1927, n.pg. (clipping in the Billy Rose Theatre
. Collection, New York Public Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center).
9
New York World, 4 February 1927, n.pg. (clipping in the Billy Rose Theatre
Collection, New York Public Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center).
10
Evening Post, not dated, n.pg. (clipping in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection,
New York Public Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center).
11
Variety, 22 February 1927, 49.
54
HELFER
halves at Paterson, New jersey after playing denatured at Bridgeport,"
12
the Graphic reviewer might have been seeing a censored version, though
it is hard to see how the basic action could have been changed so much
as to be totally inoffensive.
The Drag continued to be a great draw, lines forming well in advance
of all performances and many being turned away. Initial reticence among
theatre managers was lessening in the face of such success; even the
manager of the theatre in Stamford who had refused the play indicated
he would now like to have it. The important question, of course, was
what would happen in New York, where it would not be an isolated
experience, but a new climax to the escalating line of "dirt shows," to
use Variety's phrase.
The week ending 9 February 1927 saw the fight over sexual themes
coming to a climax, as is reflected in several articles in Variety. One, on
the front page, showed the strongest effort yet to obtain approval of The
Drag for the previously mentioned reason of its "pathological aspect in
theme."
A midnight performance of The Drag was scheduled for Daly's,
New York, last night after the regular evening performance of Sex.
The Morganstern, Timony-Mae West people staged the midnight
show for city officials and 25 physicians with newspaper men barred.
No notice of the midnight show was sent out. It was reported
the management hoped to secure the endorsement of the medical
fraternity and the city officials to the effect The Drag is educational
and a remedial gesture on behalf of the "homos." According to the
"author" of Sex the homos number one male in every 20 in the
United States and a larger percentage in Europe_B
If successful:,.. performance wo1,.llld have probtems
mentioned rn. anotner artrde, under the prresdent 11eadilng "'Polif.ce Readlw
To Raid Theatres With 'Dirt' Plays." It deals with the troubl
1
es several
other plays, including The Captive and The Virgin Man, were foreseeing:
The Drag, which caused the managers, actors and authors to get
together, failed to secure a Broadway theatre. Its manager was
bluffing in stating several houses had been offered him for the show.
12
13
/bid., 1.
The Drag 55
One report had it that the "homosexual" drama would find a berth
in one of the downtown East Side houses.
14
Yet another article speaks of The Drag as "wildcatting," holding on
in New Jersey. Rumors that Sex would close to make way for the newer
drama were discounted, if only because the publicity had increased
patronage "to the extent they could not afford to withdraw" it.
15
In fact,
the "Shows in New York" column reports the box office for Sex had gone
to more than $13,000.
16
By the next week the censorship crisis over The Drag had climaxed,
with the 9 February raid on Sex, The Captive, and The Virgin Man. The
Drag, playing in New Jersey, was nqt actually raided, but it was generally
considered the single most flagrant example of the type of performance
causing the censorship uproar. As Variety reports:
The Drag, blamed for bringing the play censorship to a focus,
stopped last week in Jersey. It was booked for Bayonne, the police
refusing to permit it opening. The management sought an injunction
in Jersey City, alleged The Drag taught a moral lesson. The judge
thereupon demanded to know why the play was billed as "daringly
sensational." A restraining writ was denied.
17
It is certainly possible that West and her other producers could have
put up a harder fight, but their energies were involved with the efforts to
keep Sex, the proven moneymaker, on stage. West later claimed The
Drag made a profit, even in its shortened pre-Broadway run, of
$30,000,
18
The Drag is a frustrating play to analyze; obviously important and not
very good. Although he was not able to include it in his collection,
William M. Hoffman mentions it in the introduction to Gay Plays: The
First Collection, calling it "astonishing" and "the next landmark in gay
14
/bid., 34.
15
/bid. , 35.
l&fbid., 36.
17
18
West, Goodness, 95.
56
HELFER
plays in English" after Marlowe's Edward //.
19
For the sake of art, social
consciousness, the box-office, or any combination thereof, The Drag
deals with matters that the United States would not be ready to face for
more than another forty years; but it deals with them crudely, in a
manner not representative of the best talents of the author and with a
level of actual knowledge of the subject far below what was needed. It
also raises questions of West's attitude toward gay people-was it
sympathetic, or patronizing, or worse, and should the play be seen as a
move forward in the history of minorities or as a pandering to the
prejudices of the time? The Drag opens in the library of Dr. Richmond's
house in New York. His daughter Clair is married to Rolly Kingsbury,
the son of judge Kingsbury, his childhood friend; Rolly is a fine chap
who's "never never been associated with another woman."
20
David and Clem are shown in, Clem telling David to calm himself,
"All you need is a jab in the arm and you'll be all right"(I:S). Once alone
with Richmond, David is not coherent; not sure he can be helped. "I
was born a male, my mind has been that of a female"(l:7). He fell in
love, he says, with another man and they lived together happily, but he
was crushed when the other man married because of family demands.
That was bad enough, but the wife didn't hurt him as much as did his
former lover finding another, "normal" man to love. David is suicidal;
the burden is too heavy.
The doctor assures him; "One man is born white, another
black-neither man is a criminal"(l:9), and takes him off to give him
something to quiet his nerves.
Barbara, Richmond's sister, enters with Judge Kingsbury, warning of
the patient in Richmond's private office. Kingsbury wonders about Clair,
but none of the rumors of her unhappiness have reached her father.
Allen Grayson, a young civil engineer, has had business with Rolly's
business, bringing him frequently into Clair's company. Barbara knows
that tongues are wagging, but Kingsbury isn't concerned: "Bosh! Why
Rolly's very fond of Grayson. If any one's interested in Grayson, I'd say
it was Rolly and not Clair"(l:lO). Still, Barbara doesn't like the situation.
Clair is looking unhappy for a bride of less than a year. Richmond enters,
and Barbara leaves the two alone. Kingsbury wants Richmond's
~ i l l i a m M. Hoffman, Cay Plays: The First Collection (New York: Avon Books,
1979), xiv.
20
Mae West, The Drag 1:1. The unpublished manuscript of the play is in the
library of Congress, dated 25 May 1927. Subsequent references to the play will be
cited in the text.
The Drag 57
testimony in some insanity hearings, though Richmond is, as a
philosophical rule, reluctant to call anyone insane.
Take the example of the " poor devil" in the next room-his lack of
normality is normality to him. A discussion ensues, with Kingsbury
wondering what would happen if this were allowed to "go rampant" in
society and Richmond asking if they are to be so lacking in compassion
to those in such an unfortunate position through no fault of their own.
Clair enters, having come to the city for shopping. Rally will be
there shortly. After Kingsbury leaves, Clair breaks down; she wants to go
away-to Europe, anywhere. Rolly is a model husband, but she'll go
mad if she stays with him. Barbara enters and Richmond goes off to his
patient, warning that there is to be no scandal to either family name.
Clair is more specific to Barbara. Rally is always polite to her, but
strangely distant, as if she annoys him by just being alive. She denies
being in love with Grayson. She thinks if she could go to Europe for a
while she might feel differently-towards everything, not just Rally, and
when Richmond comes back, Barbara announces that she and Clair are
going on a trip.
Rally enters, having come from the office, though he wishes they
could do without him as he is not fond of business. Richmond says that
Rally was too coddled as a child, and Rally agrees; it was the dread of his
mother's life that he'd turn out to be a roughneck.
Barbara takes Clair off.and Richmond explodes. He wants to know
what is wrong between Rally and Clair. Rally insists there's no other
woman in his life, and Richmond goes off to try to talk the women out of
the trip.
David enters from the inner room, still upset, and he and Rally are
shocked to see each other. David didn't tell Richmond that he so much
as knew Rolly; he just wanted to be helped.
ROLLY: You fool he can do nothing for you-for any of us.
(Takes out wallet) Here take this-and get out of here.
DAVID: I don't want your money-Rally please-
ROLL Y: Get out of here. I've had enough of you.
DAVID: I've heard all about you and Grayson, he doesn't give a
damn for you.
ROLLY: Shut your mouth about Grayson-leave his name out of this.
DAVID: It's true and you know it. He doesn't give a damn for you.
ROLLY: Damn you-you-You- (Grabs David by the throat and
swings him onto divan. Doctor enters.)
DOCTOR: Rolly!
ROLLY: Who is this-this mad man-He tried to attack me.
58
HELFER
DOCTOR: My poor lad-what's got into you? It may be the drug
I've given him-1 don't know-poor devil-Thank God, Rolly,
you're not what he is-Come, come, my boy-Come- (Leads David
R. David turns and looks at Rolly.)
ROLLY: Not what he is-(Looks after Doctor and David and then
sinks in chair.) Good God!
CURTAIN (1:24)
The second act is set in Rolly's Westchester home. At rise, Parsons,
the butler, is answering the phone. It's Clem. We hear Rolly's end of the
conversation, including, "Where are you molls calling from? No, the
wife is out" (11 :1). He exits. Soon Clem, Rosco, Winnie
21
and "The
Duchess," (who doesn't know Rolly) enter. They seat themselves "in
rather artistic poses" waiting for Rolly. The Duchess takes out a powder
puff, which irritates Clem. Rolly enters with, "Say, what's the matter with
you queens, you're always fighting" (11:3). After Winnie compliments
him on his "lovely robe," they introduce Rolly and the Duchess. Rosco
complains "these molls" have been fighting all day.
22
After more talk,
the Duchess sits at the piano. Clem asks him to play "The Woman who
Stole My Gal from The Captive." The Duchess doesn't know that (of
course) but does play something, as Winnie "whoops" and Clem and
Rosco have an unspecified comedy bit to the music. Rolly praises The
Duchess' "beautiful touch," and Clem says, "You should feel my
beautiful touch, dearie" (11:5).
He tells of David's trouble and the visit to the doctor, not knowing
that Richmond is related to Rolly:
Well I got over and there was the poor queen ready to jump out of
the window. Of course I knew what was the matter. She needed a
jab. She's been taking heroine and morphine by the barrels. The
trouble with her is she's sensitive of what she is. Now, I don' t give
a goddamn who knows it. Of course, I don't go flouncing my hips
up and down Broadway picking up trade or with a sign on my back
advertising it. But of course, I don't pass anything up either, dearie
(11:6).
21
Winnie is not indicated at the entrance, but has dialogue at the bottom of the
page; a sign, probably, of rapid writing. .
22
Some of the script here clearly is to be improvised, saying " ad lib" when drinks
are poured.
The Drag 59
No one notices Rolly's peculiar expression while Clem is relating the
story.
The bell rings, and as the butler goes to the door, Rally warns the
others to be careful about the wisecracks if it should be Grayson.
Grayson enters and is introduced as the others are leaving, though Clem
would "love to stay and see your wonderful construction" (11 : 7), and
Winnie says, "So glad to have you meet me. Come up sometime and I'll
bake you a pan of biscuits" (11 :8).
23
Grayson starts setting up blueprints,
with Rolly watching him. Rolly asks what Grayson thinks of his
friends-perhaps he could join them on a week-end party. Grayson is
noncommittal, but Rally then admits his attraction to Grayson.
Grayson is surprised but keeps his composure. He had thought Rolly
showed an unusual amount of interest in him. He asks about Clair. Rolly
explains that they grew up together and it was understood by the families
that they would get married. "Clair is the same today as the day I
married her, if you know what I mean" (11 :9), Rally says.
Grayson finds that contemptible, but Rolly insists she's perfectly
contented, though she doesn't know about him. In his turn, Rolly
accuses Grayson of being interested in his wife. Grayson does not deny
this as he angrily starts to go, while Rolly tries to detain him.
just then Clair enters with Barbara and Marion, an old friend of both
her's and Rolly's. Rolly cannot take Clair to the opera, as he "has an
important engagement in town," but Grayson can take her, Marion and
Barbara. Rally goes upstairs. Sensing that Clair would like to talk to
Marion, Barbara takes Grayson off. The two women start talking about
what they will wear, but Marion makes some veiled remarks about Clair's
possible relationship with Grayson, which is causing comment. Clair is
miserable and gradually lets Marion into her confidence. Rolly shows
her no physical affection. She doesn't know if there are other women.
Marion advises her to be bolder-try a sheer negligee, take the initiative,
but Clair says Rolly never even comes to her room. She is "A wife and
not a wife" (II: 14).
As Rolly comes in, Clair goes up to change. Marion goes off to say
goodby to Grayson, and Rolly takes advantage of being alone to tell
Parsons to have everything ready for tomorrow night-a buffet supper in
the dining room and this room for dancing. Marion and Barbara enter
and go off with Rolly.
As Clair enters in her evening gown, Grayson tells her how beautiful
she looks. He tells her how much he has been wanting to kiss her. She
23
1s this the origin of West's more famous line in Diamond Lil?
60 HELFER
sobs with joy. Grayson first mistakes this for something else, but she
reaches out to him and he embraces her as the curtain falls.
When Act Ill starts, it is the next evening and the setting from Act II
has been set up for the drag. All the guests (the unnamed speaking parts
go up to fourteen) are dancing. Parsons is announcing new guests, "The
Duchess" and "Mr. Hathaway" (Clem) as "The Doll." After a toe dance
"in Olio," "Hell 's Kitchen Kate" enters to screams of welcome. After
some bitchy byplay, there is another dance and a short dialogue between
two of the guests about one's "husband,"
24
followed by a fight between
Clem and the Duchess. There are two long and three short rings on the
doorbell. A sudden hush as the l ights dim. All think it is the police.
Rally works his way through the crowd and says he will fix everything.
"The music picks up, pianissimo-exit number, as the guests all file out"
(111:4) .
Rally tells the butler he need not bother straightening out the house
until later; his wife will not be back until Monday. The only call for Rally
has been from Grayson, who said he would not be there. Rolly, lost in
thought, repeats Grayson's name and exits. Off stage we hear a door
slam, a pistol shot, and then another door slam. The butler runs off and
then rushes back on, shaken. Other servants come on asking what
happened. The butler runs to the phone and calls Kingsbury. He must
come to his son's home. Something terrible has happened. The curtain
falls.
The last scene is in the same location, a few hours later. An inspector
is asking the butler about events before Rolly's murder. Kingsbury and
Clair are also there. Because of his relationshi p with Clair, Grayson
seems to be implicated. He enters and is shocked to find out that Rolly
has been shot. The inspector asks him about the quarrel with Rally, and
he admits to a quarrel but says it was over business, not Clair. Despite
the inspector' s pressure, Grayson will not reveal the true reason.
Richmond enters, comforts his daughter, and then tells the inspector
he has the man who killed Rally. He calls in a pale and nervous David.
Kingsbury tries to get at him, crying, "You kil led my boy!" and David
collapses, saying "I killed him because I loved him!" (111:6)
Richmond tells Kingsbury, "This is the poor abnormal creature we
discussed the other day," to which Kingsbury says, ''Take him out of my
sight before I strangle him." David is enraged. He castigates Kingsbury's
legal cruelty and reveals: "Your son was the same as I. ... When you
condemn me, you condemn him ... "(111:7). He is taken off stage.
24
The action here is merely blocked out in the script, and contemporary reports of
the scene indicate it took up much more time on stage and included more than the
copyright script indicates.
The Drag 61
Richmond says the family names must be kept without blemish and
tries to comfort Kingsbury as much as possible, although he adds:
"You've sent many up the river, and you know it, Bob, but where it hits
home its a different story . . . . Little did we know that a fine, strong boy,
like Rolly, was one of them" (111 :7). Slowly, in a broken voice, Kingsbury
calls the inspector in and tells him to report this as a case of suicide. The
curtain falls.
Kaier Curtin's We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians takes a negative
view of both The Drag and Pleasure Man, calling West's motives
"obviously mercenary" and "obviously motivated by greed."
25
As
evidence Curtin cites many of West's comments, both those made at the
time and those made in later, o r ~ liberal years. There is, indeed, a
considerable difference between them, which might be indicative of an
original prejudicial attitude that the author did not later wish to
remember.
In her later years, West, proud of what she saw as her role in the
general liberalization of American society, spoke of The Drag in terms
that would have led some to think that it was a totally favorable view of
the gay life style. In an interview in 1961, she mentions the heavy
interest it caused and that she was told not to bring it to Broadway, and
then says: "It was a shame. I had a great story there. It wasn't morbid.
I kind of glorified the boys."
26
She repeats the word "glorified" in her
well-known Playboy interview of 1971
27
and in a 1975 interview with
The Advocate, a specifically gay newspaper.
This writer has a more favorable view of West's motives than did
Curtin, but will admit that "glorified" is not the word that comes to mind
after reading the play. Nor was it the word she used when discussing the
play at the time,. or even in 1958, when she was writing her
autobiography.
28
There, in telling of the feelings that drove her to write
The Drag, she says:
25
Kaier Curtin, We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians (Boston: Alyson Publications,
1987), 71 , 127.
261
' Come Up and See Me Sometime," Show Business Illustrated, 3 October 1961,
36.
27
" Piayboy Interview: Mae West, " Playboy, january 1971, 73-82.
28
Curtin has a possible error in his use of Goodness. On page 72 of his book he
speaks of it as " published in 1967." That is actually the date of the second edition,
whi ch was revised only to the extent of adding material at the end to update it. There
was a great change in attitude between 1958 and 1967, and things written in the more
oppressive climate might have been written differently later.
62
HELFER
I now began to probe into society's secrets. I have always hated the
two-faced, the smoother-over folk-the people who preach loudly
one way of life, and then do something in private that they're against
in public. In many ways homosexuality is a danger to the entire
social system of western civilization. Certainly a nation should be
made aware of its presence-without moral mottoes-and its effects
on children recruited to it in their innocence. I had no objection to
it as a cult of jaded inverts, or special groups of craftsmen, shrill and
involved only with themselves. It was its secret anti-social aspects I
wanted to bring into the sun.
29
A 1929 interview from Parade magazine is actually kinder in tone,
and reveals more of the problems seen in the play:
I admit that in my play Drag I was a little bit premature. The
public is still too childlike to face like grownups the problem of
homo-sexuality. How few are the people who even know what the
word means?
Because of this universal ignorance I wrote Drag with the
intention of taking it to all the theatres in the country to teach the
people. So much of a stir was made, however, that I voluntarily
removed it and I must mark time and wait till our country grows up
to show them a vital truth.
The time will soon come when homo-sexuality will be
faced-open mindedly. Already authors here and in England are
fighting the censors and making people sit up and take notice. It is
a great problem. Many of our famous lawyers, doctors, bankers and
judges are homo-sexualists. Thousands of others suffer because they
are starving for love both in body and in soul, and they become
mental prostitutes. Five thousand perverts applied for only fifty parts
when we were casting for Drag. One vice-president of a large bank
begged me to let him act secretly in Drag because there only could
he do what he was starving for-act like a woman and wear expen-
sive, beautiful gowns. Some homosexualists are not to be blamed for
their condition. They are the inverts or the ones born that way. I
think that the explanation of them is in the fact that the hormones
have male characteristics and the mother sets her mind on having a
girl-or vice-versa. There is a conflict and the result is a homo-
sexual ist or a Lesbian. Some, however are perverts- become that
way because of weak character or desire for new thrills.
29
West, Goodness, 94.
The Drag 63
Even though the problem is universal, medical books on the
subject are few. I have my own private collection on the subject and
for one book I had to pay $112. Professor Burton, of Columbia
University, declared that Drag was a masterpiece.
30
The problem is
here. It is the duty of the government to at least face this great truth
and do something about it. Let them treat it like a disease-like
cancer, for instance, discover its causes and if it is curable, cure it.
I am sure that soon the taboo on homo-sexuality will be removed.
For we are modern now, we are slowly going back to nature and
facing the hard-true facts of life intelligently.Jl
These quotes seem negative, but if put into historical context they are
ambiguous, possibly examples of the tendency of extremely early works
on forward-looking topics to seem backward once the topic is more fully.
explored. The fact that she speaks of homosexuality as "a disease" is
distasteful to current sensibilities, but it is a considerable distance from
treating it as a (literally) damnable moral flaw. Society's pressures on the
homosexual are seen in The Drag, but it is not shown that those
pressures, rather than an inner dynamic of the condition, might be the
cause for the unhappiness or neuroses of gay people. It would have been
magnificent of West to so realize, but we must remember that no one was
doing so at that time, not even psychiatrists, or most gay people
themselves.
Also, it is held distasteful by the majority to show or even to mention
a despised minority group. West was certainly correct when she said that
in 1927, "any mention of [homosexuality] was met by ordinary people
with a stare of shocked horror."
32
Thus, the mere fact of some gay
characters being shown as not utterly evil-even if we are supposed to
feel they are unfortunate and pitiable-is a considerable step forward.
One must also consider The Boys In The Band, from 1968, generally
considered to be the breakthrough work for gay characters on the
American stage. In its depiction of a troubled and self-troubled gay life
the play is already a period piece, but gay audiences at the time found it
liberating. Merely to see one's self on stage can be a step forward, and
West's comments show how desperate the gay community of .the time
was to do this.
30
Professor Russell Burton-Optiz was a lecturer in Physiology at Col umbi a. The
source of the quote, perhaps a private letter, has not survived.
31
Mae West, "Sex in the Theatre," Parade, September 1929, 13.
32
West, Goodness, 93.
64
HELFER
West was criticized, both at the time and more recently, for the
flamboyance of her presentation, which, it was felt, was the sign that she
was only working on such a subject for the money it would earn in shock
value. Evidently it is assumed that true art and true social concern are
never loud. It must be admitted that West had her eye on box-office and
promotion in whatever she did, but that does not necessarily mean she
was hypocritical; it means she thought in popular show-business terms.
The situation is similar, if on a lower level, to Verdi's magnificent
Requiem, criticized when new as having too much of the Opera house.
West's picture of gay life in The Drag is of a piece with her picture of
heterosexual life in her other works.
It is also revealing to compare The Drag with the other play of that
season that dealt with sexual inversion, and that also was closed in the
February raids-Arthur Hornblow's translation of Edouard Bourdet's The
Captive.
33
This was felt by all critics to be a genuine and powerful work
of art rather than the circus that West created. In The Captive, Irene De
Montcel pretends to be interested in the attentions of Jacques to have an
excuse to remain in Paris. Jacques begins to suspect that Irene might be
interested in M. D'Aiguines, an older man, but on meeting him discovers
that she is actually attracted to his wife, an attraction that has aged
D' Aiguines prematurely, for he loves his wife and cannot leave her
despite his knowledge of her nature. Later, Jacques meets Irene, and she
speaks more freely, referring to herself as "a captive" of a strange
fascination. She asks his help in her effort to free herself. In the last act,
they have been married almost a year, but she ha_s not been able to
develop a genuine passion for him. The marriage breaks up and she
leaves, probably to join Madam D'Aiguines. Madam D'Aiguines never
appears on stage and the word "lesbian" is never uttered.
It is hard to see how this play-in which the attraction of lesbianism
is seen as a mysterious, unexplained magnetism rather akin to the effects
Dracula has on his victims-is more advanced than The Drag. It is
certainly more "proper," more concerned with not offending the
audience by not actually showing anything, but that is not always a virtue
in bold topics. The Captive appears to have had no interest in challeng-
ing current beliefs. Though it was bold to put a taboo subject on stage,
the point of view and the sympathy remain with Jacques.
West shows sympathy for Clair, but her focus of interest is on the gay
characters. Rolly may be a cad, but there are other gay characters
.presented in a more neutral, or even sympathetic, tone. Clem and his
33
Edouard Bourdet, The Captive trans. Arthur Hornblow (New York: Brentano' s,
1926).
The Drag 65
circle, for instance, are marginal to the actual plot but are central to the
play's experience on stage, attracting more attention than the nominal
leads. The dialogue in their scenes is much fresher than that in the
serious scenes, still seeming taken from real life rather than the stage,
which probably comes from it having been improvised during rehearsal
by people who actually spoke that way. Even if it was not actually
written by West, she was intelligent enough to see its worth and save it.
The scientific explanations of the gay character given in The Drag
are certainly negative in terms of today's thinking, but West is trying to
explain the subject- even if she may have felt she had to do so to give
the medical aura that was needed to allow it on stage-and the
explanation is as morally neutral as .might be expected for 1927. There
is no reason to doubt that she had indeed done her research, something
in which the well-received and "artistic" Captive shows no interest. This
is not to say that she actually did "understand" the subject, but she might
be found innocent of the moral charge of cynically taking advantage of
the gay I ife style only for the sake of the box office.
There is one other possible bit of evidence for the relationship
between West's support of minorities and her eye on the box office. In
late 1931 West had taken her play The Constant Sinner on the road. The
Constant Sinner deals with race relations and in it West's character has
an affair with a black gangster-though that part was played in blackface.
Lorenzo Tucker, a black actor who had a small part in the New York
production, was set to take over that role when the show came to
Chicago. He recalled:
You have to give her credit; Washington was totally segregated at the
time. It took nerve to offer a black-and-white love story even if the
colored man was a blacked-up white. The DA, a fellow named
Rover, came to the theatre and told Miss West it just wasn't going to
happen in Washington, having blacks and whites on stage together
and a Negro kissing her. Even the Shuberts tried to get her to cut
those love scenes for Washington. Well, she was determined to have
it done, and Rover said she couldn't continue. But she said, "My
play stays the way it is." And she stuck to it, even though it meant a
big loss and cancellation of the Chicago date where I might have got
my chance.
34
In other words, here is a clear case where West chose principles over
cash when it came to her treatment of a minority.
34
Eell s and Musgrove, 101 .
66
HELFER
Despite any social importance, however, The Drag is still not a very
good play. One reason is probably that West's most productive theme,
despite what she may have thought consciously, was not sex so much as
sexual hypocrisy. She normally worked by placing an honest sinner in
opposition to dishonest conventional virtue. The Drag avoids attempting
to tie the "modern social problem"
35
she was concerned with into any
revelation of social hypocrisy about the subject-the hypocrite here is
Rolly, not society, and the "problem" does seem to be real and not a
mere creation of society's unreasoning fears and prejudices.
Also, in The Drag West shows an amount of sympathy for some of
the gay characters that is truly astounding for the times, but sympathy on
stage produces a weaker audience response than does identification. In
her other works, even the men in the audience are asked to put
themselves in the place of the central character and revel in her final
triumph; here we are mere onlookers. This lack of a strongly empathic
central character allows the melodramatic elements of the play to
become evident enough to hurt the overall effect. Sex, for instance, is
loosely written, but Margy's (West's} character dominates and distracts
from the play's flaws to the point that it is enjoyable. Pleasure Man is
also loosely constructed and has the same sudden revelation of a
murderer as The Drag, but its more gently observant tone allows us to
feel for, rather than clinically analyze, the lives of the characters. There
is a strong enough empathic response that the weaknesses of the plot
cannot spoil the overall effect.
The Drag is not a "high-quality" work of art, but it is revelatory of the
attitudes of the times and of its author. There are things to be said on its
subject that the average non-prejudiced person of today wishes might
have been said in 1927, and it therefore frustrates expectations, not only
of what it might be but also of what one feels it should be-but West was
writing for her own times and her own purposes . . The very elements that
keep the play from being an artistic success are actually signs of her
sincerity. As WilHam Hoffman says, the play is "extremely serious."
36
The fact that this is the seriousness of a person with a basically vaudeville
frame of mind should not lead us to make moral judgments against it,
even if this does keep the play from being aesthetically satisfying.
35
West, Goodness, 95.
36
Hoffman, xvi.
Journal of American Drama and Theatre 8 (Winter 1996)
The Idiosyncratic Theatre of John Howard Lawson
jOHN D. SHOUT
How much do any of us remember about John Howard Lawson?
How much did we ever know? As a Marxist playwright in the 1930s, he
would write Success Story, The Pure in Heart, and Gentlewoman,
doctrinaire works, more or less, though not forthright enough to please .
the purists of the Left. These plays would also receive a tepid response
from the mainstream press, leading to a nasty exchange between
dramatists and critics that diverted readers for a few weeks in 1934. Two
years after this, Lawson would turn out Theory and Technique of
Playwriting, a standard text on the subject that hung on into the 1960s.
The following year he would reinstate himself with the Left through
Marching Song, a radical drama that in 1937 looked unfortunately
anachronistic (though paradoxically it would have proved timely a few
months later with the General Motors strikes in the news). The play
would prove to be the swan song of the idealistically driven Theatre
Union. Lawson periodically shifted to Hollywood and would contribute
screenplays for the likes of Algiers, Counterattack, and Action on the
North Atlantic. Refusing to cringe in front of the House Un-American
Activities Committee, he would take the First rather than the Fifth
Amendment and spend time in prison as the first of the newly-dubbed
Hollywood Ten. And ultimately Lawson would wind up a Hollywood
adjunct, advising would-be players to get seriously into game shows.
Lawson's output in the 1920s, however, was considerable, and in the
decade in which the American theatre was being shifted in a new
direction with every other opening, his influence may well have been
pervasive. There were five Lawson plays on professional stages between
1923 and 1928, and even if none of the five is now part of whatever
canon there is for American drama, they startled audiences with surprises
and dissonances that would in time become standard features of theatre
grammar. Those who found the stage an exciting milieu in those years
were as likely to extoll Lawson as they were Rice or O'Neill. They would
persist in their enthusiasm, leading a frustrated Robert Garland in 1934
to rather snidely label Lawson, "America's most promising playwright.
Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year he
68 SHOUT
keeps on promising."
1
But once, the promise had been visible and
exciting.
Roger Bloomer was Lawson's breakthrough, a commercial failure in
its midtown production by the Equity Players in March of 1923 but much
better received a few weeks later when offered at the Greenwich Village
Theatre, which had at least some grasp of this startling sort of drama.
When published, Roger Bloomer would include a foreword in which
john Dos Passos, Lawson's one-time army buddy and sometime
collaborator, would insist that "there is going to be a theatre in America"
if only because the pace will require "other safety valves than baseball
and the movies and the Ku Klux Klan."
2
Roger Bloomer may seem an
odd sort of "safety valve," but it is purely American and answers to the
complaint, later in the foreword, that "the New York theatre today has no
more to do with the daily existence of the average New Yorker . . . than
it has with the pigtail of the living God at Lhasa" (viii).
Critics much later would debate whether The Hairy Ape (a year
earlier), Roger Bloomer, or The Adding Machine (two weeks after) ought
to be acclaimed as the first American play entirely "in the new mode."
The value of such a title is dubious since pure expressionism was on its
way to obsolescence, but expressionism may not be Roger Bloomer's
exact descriptor anyway. The first act provides a rather astute caricature
of what drives Roger to the breaking point: a stultified existence of rigid
propriety in aspiring middle-class America. If Lawson intends to be the
American Georg Kaiser (or perhaps, given Roger's half-articulated
longings for a sexual ideal, its Wedekind), his milieu is that of Sinclair
Lewis and Sherwood Anderson. Roger's nemesis is a father who finds it
"disagreeable" that his son is "different from other people." Roger's
vague ambition to possess women's souls sets him up as a pretty
confused guy, but the play implies that 1920s America has made him that
way.
So in Act I we get a detailed, hyper-realistic look at Roger's home life
in Excelsior, Iowa: the empty conversations over dinner (with virtually
identical meals every evening), the upwardly mobile father who longs to
send his son to "Yale College," the dead-end lives of the sales staff at
Everett Bloomer's department store, the supposed role-model "Yalie,"
1
Robert Garland, New York Evening. Post, 4 August 1934.
2
john Howard Lawson, Roger Bloomer (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923), v.
Subsequent references to the play will be cited in the text.
john Howard Lawson 69
Eugene, whose aspirations are limited to succeeding with the right crowd,
and so on-all of it providing plenty of justification for what Dos Passos
termed "the commonest American theme-a boy running away from
home to go to the big city" (vi).
The remaining two acts present the various disillusions of Roger's
New York experiment, and here Lawson finds the techniques of the
European expressionists more useful. A business office "where they
make the money" includes clerks who "all move in unison like wax-
works throughout the scene, turn over papers, pick up telephones, rise
and walk with the appearance of organized haste, giving impressions of
choral movement" (105). The boss, Mr. Ramsey, who refuses to hire
Roger because he doesn't fit in with .the "gigantic exchange of energies"
that is Wall Street, is given to spouting vast sums of foreign currencies at
random over his Dictaphone. At the depth of his misfortunes, Roger
identifies with pitiless, impersonal New York, and in a long soliloquy he
tells the city all about it: "I am yours, oh city of slaves . . . I am one of the
millions, servants of death and time, hungry, moaning for bread" (117).
Roger's partner in despondency is Louise Chamberlain, likewise an
escapee from Excelsior and no happier in New York than is Roger; but
preoccupied with her living standard, she steals some bonds and then,
pursued amorously first by her boss and then by Roger's erstwhile chum
Eugene, she becomes convinced of her unworthiness and commits
suicide. In lines reminiscent of Wedekind, she mutters: "All a joke
anyway: I'm caught in a net, more subtle than Law, wider than Time,
that's all there is to this pure love stuff! What are we anyway? just two
children, caught by this terrible Sex joke, that's all there is ... " (181 ).
Roger is improbably imprisoned as a material witness in Louise's
death, a plot turn that allows the play to resolve in a nightmare in which
Lawson at last employs his full arsenal of expressionistic techniques. All
of the figures in Roger's life writhe or shimmy past him with threats or
cynical rejections until the spirit of Louise rises from her bier to protect
Roger and to admonish him that "In yourself you must find the secret"
(224).
In Theory and Technique of Playwriting Lawson remarks that
expressionism "reflects the confusion of a rebellion without a defined
objective."
3
This confusion is readily apparent in Roger himself and
implicit in the structure and widely varied technique in Lawson's play.
Some of the time Roger's distress is an obvious product of his
"booboisie" environment, but his subsequent dissatisfaction with either
3
John Howard Lawson, Theory and Technique of Playwriting (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1936), 119.
70
SHOUT
P.B. Shelley or the Police Gazette as an articulation of what he is looking
for in women (as well as poor Louise's inability to supply that impossible
feminine ideal) can hardly be blamed on the America of Warren G.
Harding. (In fact, whenever he muses on women or sex Roger sounds
thirteen rather than eighteen, and the whole play seems to be about
arrested development. It can't have helped the uptown production that
Henry Hull, the original Roger, was thirty-three.)
As frustrating as this incoherence might have been to playgoers in
1923-most of whom couldn't have entered the theatre well-versed in
expressionistic language-there is a logic to it. The judge who passes
sentence on Roger orders him to "organize your ideas, young man!
What use are you to Society?" (188), and Louise's spirit at the finish
proclaims Roger's liberation thus: "Away ghosts of yesterday, for the
young are coming marching" (222). Roger Bloomer only makes sense as
the inarticulate discontent of youth with their elders' demand that they
organize their ideas, so of course their rebellion can't very well be
coherently explained. The ending may still seem rather preposterous, but
the expressionists liked to juxtapose nightmares with the loftiest
optimism. Expressionism, when it goes all the way, is probably not for
anyone much over twenty-five.
II
Anyone looking for an evening of theatre early in 1925 might have
happily settled on Othello with Walter Hampden, fresh from his much-
acclaimed Cyrano. But a reader of Robert Bench ley would certainly have
considered a Theatre Guild offering of John Howard Lawson's Proces-
sional. "Enough inspiration, originality, poetry and sincerity to make
fifteen Othellos," pronounced Bench ley, while Heywood Broun, nearly
as enthusiastic, called Processional "one of the finest things that has
come out of native theatre." Still Broun had to acknowledge that he had .
seldom seen "first nighters more mystified and annoyed." A theatregoer
might also have read Winchell : "I have never seen anything so bad,
which is being pretty kind to it."
4
There were few who sat on the fence
for Processional.
Many viewers were surprised by Lawson's willingness to bring the
vitality of what later generations learned to call popular culture to the
serious theatre. In his preface to the published edition, Lawson would be
. explicit about this:
4
AII these reviews are cited by Percy Hammond in the New York Herald Tribune,
1 April 1934.
John Howard Lawson 71
It is only in the fields of vaudeville and revue that a native craftsman-
ship exists. Here at least a shining if somewhat distorted mirror is
held up to our American nature. Here the national consciousness
finds at least a partial reflection of itself in the mammy melody, the
song and dance act and the curtain of real pearls.
5
This invocation of the popular is evident in various ways. There is
ethnic comedy-ca:rtoon representatives of Jew, Black and Pole of the sort
that were becoming an embarrassment to the more proper theatre of the
mid-1920s. There is a newspaper man who is supposed to be a
journalistic version of George M. Cohan. There is a jazz band entering
through the house and, although t ~ term "jazz" in 1925 could mean
practically any music that wasn't strictly European, this very American
ensemble included a banjo, a bassoon, a harmonica and an accordion,
as well as the instruments one would expect. (In fact bandleader Ben
Bernie dismissed the whole show on the grounds that the band didn't
play very well). Mordecai Gorelick, who designed the scenery, insisted
that the design of the play have the open contrivances of "theatrical ism"
as inspired by Meyerhold, but acknowledged that his own main source
was "cheap burlesque."
6
Affection for the low-brow, which has
provided the basis for all sorts of "serious" American theatre since the
1920s, has a start! ing fruition here, but there is a fair question how
connected it is to Processional's particular story.
Processional is set in West Virginia where a miner's strike 1s m
progress, and the protagonist is a rough-hewn working class rebel called
Dynamite Jim Flimmins. Jim is incarcerated and busts loose, finds an
outlet for his passions in the seventeen-year-old flapper Sadie Cohen, and
then, running afoul of the Ku Klux Klan as well as of mining interests,
ends up blind. Processional is on its way to being a bona fide didactic
labor play-and would become one a decade later in Lawson's Marching
Song. Some elements are already in place, in the agit-prop caricatures of
The Man in the Silk Hat (representing capitalist interests) and the Sheriff
(who stands for hired goons). But Jim is no prototypic labor martyr: His
anger is too random and unfocused, just as Roger Bloomer's was. If
Processional is muddled, as it now seems to be, its very muddle might be
indicative of an era when the enemies of the Left were clearly understood
but its heroes were not. Dynamite Jim is all energy and libido. But he's
5
john Howard Lawson, Processional (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1925), vi.
Subsequent references to the play will be cited in the text.
6
Mordecai Gorel ick, New Theatres for Old (New York: Samuel French, 1940),
308-9.
72 SHOUT
also stuck with a puritanism (mixed with an Oedipal impulse) that turns
him against his mother when she uses sex to distract his pursuers. In
traditional terms Jim seems the perfect match for Sadie Cohen who is just
as confused about what she wants as Jim is. The same inexplicable
conscience is working here that operated in Roger Bloomer and, as in the
earlier play, it is mixed up with undefined resistance to the establishment.
Still, the resistance is pursued with all the vitality that Lawson finds in
popular entertainment of his time. He mistrusts American standards but
loves American schlock with equal intensity, which is not a bad start for
lively political theatre.
The Garrick Theatre!Theater Guild program proclaimed that "Mr.
Lawson employs the various techniques of the theatre, ranging all the
way from vaudeville to tragedy, " and Processional invites the question
whether such a mix is advisable. For most of the play Lawson imposes
too much plot-as would continue to be his undoing-so that there's no
time to explore the possibilities that abound once popular theatre has
been allowed in. But in his fourth act he gets it right. Starting with a
Klan rally bent on protecting the community's morals by punishing Sadie
Cohen (who is carrying jim's child), Lawson goes on to expose the King
Kleagle who, with his hood off, turns out to be The Man in the Silk Hat.
But his fearsome situation is less sinister than it sounds: The Klansmen
with their illuminated crosses and American flags (burlesque gimmicks)
are altogether inept and take frequent pratfalls. When the blinded Jim
returns and he, Sadie, and Mrs. Fl immins are feeling most threatened,
Lawson suddenly invokes the most artificial of happy endings: The Man
in the Silk Hat proclaims a strike settlement-"We want to open up the
mines, make concessions, boom business, sign contracts" (211)-pardons
all the strikers, disbands the Klan, and, reminding us that this is Mother's
Day, reads a telegram from Calvin Coolidge "stating that all men are
brothers" (214). All this harmony will be cemented with Jim and Sadie' s
marriage, albeit with a dog rather than a marriage license. One who
found this intoxicating was Thornton Wilder: " A jiggling parade is
formed, the entire cast links arms and the whole house is invited to come
along, God knows where."
7
Lawson was at his best when he was able
to lighten up. The original Dynamite Jim was none other than George
Abbott, and he may have been on target in Mister Abbott to limit his
comments on the production to one observation: He called his co-star,
June Walker, "one of the cutest little ingenues you ever want to look at."
8
7
Thornton Wilder, Theatre Arts IX (1925) : 152-3.
8
George Abbott, Mister Abbott (New York: Random House, 1963), 108-9.
Processional was alone among Lawson's 1920s plays in being treated
to a full-scale revival-in 1937, in a Federal Theatre production. In the
wake of the Depression the extravaganza felt very different, and the
director, Lem Ward, offered an appropriately sober revisiting:
The play is essentially a conflict of two philosophies which were
prevalent in the post-war period in the United States-idealism
against cynicism. It is the cynicism of the Mencken school in conflict
with the idealism of certain Utopian labor leaders and social
workers, which is represented in the clash of the characters, with
each other, with their environment and with the economic and social
conditions of the time.
9
An astute summary, no doubt, but also a basis for a tiresome production
since there is no special insight to be found among Lawson's depictions
of the conflict. This play probably just needed to be let fly, as the Guild
did in 1925. Processional's original director was the imaginative Philip
Moeller, who had staged that other landmark of expressionism in 1923,
The Adding Machine, and he apparently knew that in a play like this one,
style was what mattered.
Ill
It is necessary to mention-but to rush quickly past-Nirvana, the
Lawson disaster of 1926. Although he never let this misbegotten play
reach publication, we know that it brought together a variety of discon-
tented people-unhappy for personal, ideological, sexual, or religious
reasons, or just because they said they were unhappy. Ultimately this led
to the most disconsolate character being shot into space in search of a
new god. Lawson, if we can believe the reviewers, once again was not
focusing.
But he managed to focus very well the next time, with the suddenly
established New Playwrights League, a bunch of variously aligned or
unaligned radicals who had finagled financing from the unlikely figure of
Otto Kahn. They would assert their position with a manifesto-as every
non-commercial theatre did then: They would be a "theatre which is as
drunken, as barbaric, as clangorous as our age."
10
9
John O'Connor and Lorraine Brown, The Federal Theatre Project (London: Eyre
Methuen, 1980), 95.
10
Malcolm Goldstein, The Political Stage (New York: Oxford University Press,
1974), 16.
74
SHOUT
These were not Lawson's words-his colleague with the New
Playwrights, Em Jo Basshe, wrote "The Revolt on 52nd Street''-but
Lawson's Loud Speaker, the first offering of the group, aptly fit the
description. In Loud Speaker, Lawson let his imagination for the
possibilities of popular theatre run wild, but this time without undirected
hostility. Joseph Wood Krutch, always a Lawson promoter, emphasized
this in his introduction to the published edition: "What Mr. Lawson has
done is to take both the mechanics and the philosophy of the revolution-
ary drama and to use them joyously." Krutch would go on to call the
play "American com media dell' arte.
1111
The satire takes off from the published epigraph, Calvin Coolidge's
demand that we "Look well to the hearthstone, therein all hope for
America lies.
11
Lawson finds the hearthstone useful as both a political
and a domestic target. Harry U. Collins, a successful businessman, is
now a candidate for governor of New York, hopping about with varied
platitudes for each ethnic constituency and watching his home life break
up as his wife embarks on spiritual odysseys and his flapper daughter
looks for thrills. Meanwhile, he is haunted by memories of a long-ago
fling with a beauty-pageant competitor and is terrified that the rapacious
press may learn about his past. Characteristically, Harry gives a drunken
radio appeal to the voters in which he abandons the usual boilerplate in
favor of seamy bluntness: "I'm too good to be a governor, l get more
satisfaction out of telling the American people to go to hel'l
11
(139}. This
statement is enough to sweep Harry into office and reunite his family, at
least temporarily.
None of this. story is presented for more than a minute with anything
like seriousness. Instead Lawson assaults the audience with burlesque-
style gags, many of them openly corny: Johnnie, the journalist/juvenile:
"She conceived a hopeless passion for me
11
; Clare, the world-weary
flapper : "Any passion for you would be hopeless" (1 08). Others are
snappy twits at Mencken's "Boobus Americanus" : " To think I thought
religion could save my soul, when all I wanted was publicity!" (120).
Anything with pretension is promptly leveled, again in the burlesque
spirit: The feminine ideal (which had so obsessed Roger and Jim) here is
a beauty queen whose banner reads "Miss New Lots A v e n u e ~ ~ And
when the young lovers, Johnnie and Clare, try to be ardent they mess up
so badly they decide to shoot craps instead. This is political humor,
certainly, with the characteristic vote-scrounging politicos presented at
11
John Howard Lawson, Loud Speaker (New York: The Macaulay Company,
1927), ix. Subsequent references to the play will be cited in the text.
their most ludicrous, but, in commedia fashion, the laughs come first and
each of the clowns has plenty of opportunity for lazzi.
Mordecai Gorelick gave Lawson a varied set of platforms connected
by ladders, stairways, and chutes (the latter inspired by Coney lsland
12
),
all of it in the Meyerhold constructivist manner, and Lawson worked
them directly into his script: The platforms might be rooms in Harry's
house and, a second later, gathering places for his various ethnic
constituencies. Simultaneous staging occurs, sometimes with three
platforms presenting three separate plot strands at one time. Here and
elsewhere Lawson anticipates Brecht (whom, in the sober 1930s, he
would condemn, in the pages of Theatre Workshop, as "unmarxist") .
13
For his denouement Lawson went expressionistic with a dream
sequence brought on by Mrs. Collins's mysterious astral lover. Harry
imagines himself an important governor, a stooge of various power
interests and a victim of his waning physical abilities, falling ingloriously
from an unlit rostrum. Abruptly the action switches to China-calling
attention to the uninhibited theatrics with Johnnie's line "Anything's
possible nowadays: look at the theatre" (182). Here Gerald Rabkin, in
Drama and Commitment, would have us take seriously Johnnie's vision
of a "new religion,"
14
but actually the play is twitting that too and is
derisory to the finish.
Harry Wagstaff Gribble, who directed, had to struggle to find a style
for this material and, though he aimed at laughs (apparently), he also
imposed full-scale choreography and went along with Lawson's request
for "a Negro jazz orchestra" above the stage. The mix led to confusion,
even though Loud Speaker is Lawson's most coherent script, the one least
cluttered with contradictory intentions. But the prevailing adjective
among the critics once again was "muddled," and Loud Speaker had a
very short run. For the New Playwrights, though, that was proof of their
integrity.
Lawson's other New Playwright's script, The International, produced
early in 1928 under his own direction, ought to have been a pinnacle of
achievement. He had a mixed theatricalist-constructivist scheme in mind
but this time for a global scenario: His play would leap from New York
12
joseph Wood Krutch, The American Drama Since 1918 (New York: George
Brazilier, 1957), 243.
13
Theatre Workshop (September 1937): 75. Cited in Ira A. Levine, Left Wing
Dramatic Theory in the American Theatre (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985).
14
Gerald Rabkin, Drama and Commitment (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1964), 139.
76
SHOUT
to Tibet to Paris. The subject would be vast-an intercontinental conflict
pitting American and British oil interests against Soviet-Trotskyite
ideologues. Characteristically, Lawson would demand a continuous
musical score with "special emphasis on broken rhythms, machine
noises, and chanting blues," and, in addition, there would be a double
chorus, "a combination of jazz treatment with the dignified narrative
strophe and antistrophe of Greek drama."
15
The International would be
Lawson pushed to the limit, a backdrop larger than America and an
arsenal of theatrics incorporating classical as well as popular culture. The
sorry fact is that he couldn't handle it, and the massive production was
required to conceal some pretty shallow thinking. Charles Brackett's
response in The New Yorker was characteristic: Finding the play
"bewildering," he could only conclude that he had spent "three hours
in one of those penitential seats."
16
Lawson attempts to build out from young David Fitch, the son of an
international oil manipulator, who, despite his worldly upbringing, is as
guileless as Roger Bloomer. Determined to go his own way, David
becomes a boy-hero out of the dime novels, getting entangled with
revolutionaries in Tibet, the primary arena for the first half of the play
before matters get altogether apocalyptic. Thereafter, Lawson tries to
juggle his own radical sympathies with David' s Bloomer-like Oedipal
hostilities and his yearning for a feminine ideal (here an anarchist called
Alise, tougher but no more divine than Louise or Sadie). This leads to an
absurd impulse to define a kind of universal itch that would make
everyone, regardless of class, a revolutionary. Thematic words emerge
from the Act Ill chorus: "We got the bad mad bad glad blues" (223), but
the source, nature, and cure of those blues remain undefined.
Lawson is a perceptive scenarist sometimes, using a simple map on
a roller to create a global backdrop (though he is in debt to Piscator for
this) and ingeniously employing malfunctioning cannon to evoke a
spontaneous revolution. And the ironist who played a range of games
in Loud Speaker is sometimes on target, as when the High Lama studies
" an occidental treatise on Love," which turns out to be an Elinor Glyn
novel. On the downside there is such nonsense as the slashing of the
revolutionary Alise's palms by a Mussolini worshiper, this providing her
with instant and very obtrusive stigmata, and allusions to Sacco and
Vanzetti that some must have found offensive. The International is not
quite as incoherent as Charles Brackett thought (though Lawson's
15
John Howard Lawson, The International (New York: Macaulay, 1927), 7.
Subsequent references to the play wi l l be cited in the text.
16
Charles Brackett, The New Yorker (28 January 1928): 26.
john Howard Lawson 77
direction was apparently less than lucid), but it was ill-thought, never an
argument for revolution, never an explanation for revolutionary impulses,
merely a panorama of global anxiety. Alexander Woollcott understood
that The International was structured as a musical with heavy condensa-
tion to allow for numbers, except that there weren't any numbers, only
more anxiety.
The lesson that Lawson apparently took from his 1920s experiments
was the necessity of being explicit in his didacticism. But that lesson did
not exactly suit his temperament: Gentlewoman and Success Story are
hardly confusing, but rumbling among their protagonists' speeches is still
a discontent that they don't articulate, just as Roger, Jim, and David
couldn't articulate theirs. The likelihood is that revolutionary politics-of
whatever stamp-just wasn't Lawson's cri de coeur and that he never
found his real fury.
In a piece called "The New Showmanship" that appeared in 1927,
Lawson praised such dramas as The Hairy Ape, The Adding Machine,
and Francis Faragoh's Pinwheel (as well as his own Roger Bloomer),
asserting that "to my way of thinking and seeing, this work ... is a
hundred times more real than the mechanism of the drawing room
conversation patter play."
17
His adjectives of choice for this new theatre
were "dynamic" and "pictorial," and his theatre was certainly both of
these, but he also called for a "return to theatre values" and an emphasis
on story-telling, and here Lawson faltered, for he didn't care about his
stories or he didn't know when to stop telling them. A decade later, in
New Theatre, Charmion Von Wiegand mused on Lawson's failure to
follow up on the exhilaration she had found in Roger Bloomer. Lawson's
undoing, she concluded, was simply "an abundance of gifts."
18
17
John Howard Lawson, "The New Showmanship," New York Sun, 2 February
1927.
18
Charmion Von Wiegand, "Playwright into Critic," New Theatre, April 1936.
CONTRIBUTORS
KEITH NEWLIN is Assistant Professor in the department of English
at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He is co-editor
of the forthcoming Selected Letters of Hamlin Carland and editor
of the. forthcoming American Plays, 1900-1920.
MARTIN BLANK is Associate Professor of Drama at The College of
Staten Island, The City University of New York. His most recent
publication is Critical Essays on Thornton Wilder, which he edited
for G.K. Hall, Inc. I Macmillan (1995).
BERT CARDULLO is Associate Professor of Theatre and Drama at
the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He is a contributing
editor to The Hudson Review and was appointed to the theatre
advisory panel of the National Endowment for the Humanities in
1994.
RICHARD HELFER is an expatriate Chicagoan living in New York.
He has a Ph.D. from The City University of New York and is an
adjunct at several universities in New York City.
jOHN D. SHOUT is a Professor of English and Theatre at the State
University of New York at Plattsburgh. He has published several
articles on theatre history and film. The article in this issue of
}ADT is a reworking of a paper offered at the Hofstra University
1 994 Conference on the American Theatre of the 1920s: "Art
I
Glitter and Glitz."
78
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