American Literature: Drama

Article Outline

Introduction; Beginnings: 1600s and 1700s; Nationhood: The 1800s; The Modern Era: The 20th Century and Beyond

Forms of Melodrama

Melodrama was the most pervasive dramatic genre of the 19th century. Melodramas were typically overflowing with emotion, set in mysterious locations, and peopled with stereotypical characters: heartless villains, heroines in distress, and strong heroes who faced almost insurmountable odds in rescuing those heroines.

Frontier melodrama enthralled audiences in the first half of the 19th century. Nick of the Woods (1838) by Louisa Medina capitalized on the spectacle, romance, and danger of the frontier—for example, when the title character escapes his pursuers by plunging over a waterfall in a burning canoe. Playwrights repeatedly glorified backwoodsmen and moved toward making Native American characters into villains. One of the most successful frontier melodramas, Davy Crockett (1872) by Frank Murdoch, featured the so-called natural gentleman. This character had developed from an earlier view of the Native American but was now white and considered a gentleman, despite his life outside society and his uncouth ways.

Another form of melodrama was the temperance play, which illustrated the evils of alcohol and supported a ban on its sale. An example is The Drunkard; or, The Fallen Saved (1844) by W. H. Smith. Temperance plays had American locations and were staged frequently from the 1830s until the Civil War (1861-1865), though they continued to be produced until passage in 1917 of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcohol. Most of these plays included scenes of the acute stages of alcoholism; featured protagonists who are lured into alcoholism by villains; and showed the victims losing everything until the play’s climax, when they convert to abstinence and regain their life and family. Because the formulas of the plays accommodated moral lessons important to social crusaders and reformers of the period, temperance plays attracted audiences formerly opposed to the theater.

Melodramatic comedy appeared frequently in the 1800s, while comedies of manners, so popular in the previous century, were rare. A notable exception and one of the most successful and well-written plays of the 19th century was Fashion (1845) by Anna Cora Mowatt. Yet what most tellingly distinguished Fashion from earlier American comedies, such as The Contrast, was its melodramatic subplot and its heroine in distress. In the play, a newly wealthy woman attempts to marry her unwitting daughter to a morally corrupt French count. While satirizing Americans who imitate European manners, it also prescribed a cure for this so-called disease of imitation through extended exposure to a rural environment. Like frontier melodramas, the play urged Americans to resist British cultural models.

A Shift Toward Realism

Drama after the Civil War was marked by greater realism. Playwrights created plays in three-dimensional settings with characters speaking authentic-sounding dialogue. Beginning in the late 1870s European theater reached profound levels of psychological realism, prompted by the work of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. While melodramatic plots still prevailed in late-19th-century American theater, several American playwrights began to move in the direction of Ibsen. Shenandoah (1888) by Bronson Howard told the story of two friends who attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point together, fought on opposite sides in the Civil War, and loved the other’s sister. Despite the plot complications, the play revisited the war with realistic detail and found enormous popularity with audiences because of its combination of melodramatic tension and comic romance. A master of melodrama in a realistic style was actor and playwright William Gillette, who excited audiences with his own Civil War thrillers. In Secret Service (1896), for example, Gillette played a Northern spy working in Virginia.

Other late-19th-century playwrights whose works marked the gradual move toward realism included Steele Mackaye and William Dean Howells. In Hazel Kirke (1880) by Mackaye, the title character defies her father by marrying the man she loves, rather than the man he has chosen for her. A melodrama without a villain, the play was also notable for its more natural dialogue. Howells, best known as a novelist and critic, advocated realism in literature generally. Many of his short comic plays, such as The Mouse Trap (1889), were set in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood, focused on a single incident involving a married couple, and incorporated believable dialogue.

Howells also championed the work of other writers, including actor and playwright James Herne, whose work came closest to Ibsen’s. However, Herne’s Margaret Fleming (1890) upset too many American audiences with its harsh, raw treatment of infidelity and marital distress, and its power was recognized only by later generations. Herne had more success with gentler realism in such plays as Shore Acres (1892), in which two brothers finally gain an understanding of one another in old age.

The Modern Era: The 20th Century and Beyond

Print this section

Realism continued to be a primary form of dramatic expression in the 20th century, even as experimentation in both the content and the production of plays became increasingly important. Such renowned American playwrights as Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller reached profound new levels of psychological realism, commenting through individual characters and their situations on the state of American society in general. As the century progressed, the most powerful drama spoke to broad social issues, such as civil rights and the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) crisis, and the individual’s position in relation to those issues. Individual perspectives in mainstream theater became far more diverse and more closely reflected the increasingly complex demographics of American society.

Before World War I: 1900-1914

Realism reached new levels in the prewar work of David Belasco and Clyde Fitch, both of whom directed their own plays. Belasco’s The Girl of the Golden West (1905) sentimentally recreated a rural California town of the mid-19th-century Gold Rush days, while Fitch’s The City (1909) explored the evils of shady business deals and drug addiction. Realistic portrayals of sensational subjects also flourished in many plays of this era. For example, The Easiest Way (1909), by Eugene Walter, dramatized the situation of a kept woman whose acceptance of financial support from one man leads to her rejection by the man she loves.

Social tensions in the United States began to preoccupy dramatists in the years leading up to World War I (1914-1918). An early example of this was The Great Divide (1906) by William Vaughn Moody. The story of a New England woman’s move to Arizona, the play juxtaposed a Western, rural sensibility against an Eastern, urban one. The most prolific of prewar playwrights with a social agenda was Rachel Crothers, who addressed such issues as society’s double standard for men and women in A Man’s World (1909). The New York Idea (1906), a social satire by Langdon Mitchell, managed to entertain while commenting meaningfully on divorce. The American family, and its development and disintegration, was a recurring theme of playwrights at this time, and it would dominate much American playwriting for the rest of the 20th century.

From World War I to World War II: 1914-1939

With World War I, European developments in modern drama arrived on the American stage in force. A host of American playwrights were intent on experimenting with dramatic style and form while also writing serious sociopolitical commentary. From this time forward Britain’s influence, although never absent, became much less important to American drama.

One of the first groups to promote new American drama was the Provincetown Players, founded in 1915 in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The play Trifles (1916) by Susan Glaspell, a subtle study in sexism, was among its first productions. The company was headed by Glaspell’s husband, George Cram Cook, but its star was Eugene O’Neill, the most experimental of American playwrights in the 1920s. O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape (1922) was one of the first plays to introduce expressionism in America. Expressionism was a movement in the visual, literary, and performing arts that developed in Germany in the early 20th century, in part in reaction against realism. Expressionism emphasized subjective feelings and emotions rather than a detailed or objective depiction of reality. The Hairy Ape depicts a rejected ship laborer who feels he belongs nowhere until he confronts an ape in a zoo. He sets the caged animal free only to be destroyed by it.

American expressionism was distinguished from its German forebears by a searching focus on the inner life of the central character, whose detailed depiction is in stark contrast to all other characters. The most famous example of American expressionism is The Adding Machine (1923) by Elmer Rice, a play that focuses on the emotional journey of the leading character, Mr. Zero, after he is replaced at his job by an adding machine. Rice was the first playwright to demonstrate silent film’s influence on theater in On Trial (1914), which borrowed the flashback technique. Some of the most novel expressionist experiments employed collage-like scenic effects and cacophonous musical and sound techniques to explore social issues. Such plays include Processional (1925), a depiction of a West Virginia miners’ strike by John Howard Lawson, and Machinal (1928), a bleak study by Sophie Treadwell of the destruction of a young woman.

Windows Live® Search Results

American Literature: Drama

Forms of Melodrama

A Shift Toward Realism

The Modern Era: The 20th Century and Beyond

Before World War I: 1900-1914

From World War I to World War II: 1914-1939