The Oxford Handbook of American Drama

Abstract

Anyone who assumes that American drama began with Eugene O'Neill and the Provincetown Players during the First World War will instead find O'Neill and the Players right in the middle of things in this comprehensive survey of American drama studies. Otherwise sparsely illustrated, the book has a dust jacket with a photograph of Paul Robeson (with Frank Wilson) in the original 1923 production of O'Neill's All God's Chillun' Got Wings, a work that almost in spite of the playwright's avowed purpose was historically pivotal in its explicit treatment of race, gender, class, sexuality, identity, and other themes that have preoccupied many American playwrights who followed. Even the placement of Steven Bloom's essay on O'Neill, one of only three devoted to an individual playwright (Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams are the others), as the sixteenth of the book's thirty-two essays conveys this sense that O'Neill's body of work represents the culmination of dramatic traditions that preceded him as much as it marks the moment when American drama came into its own.This broader historical treatment fittingly delays O'Neill's entrance, like Hickey's in The Iceman Cometh, until after we get the background stories. Lead editor Jeffrey H. Richards, along with coeditor Heather S. Nathans, who completed the book after Richards's death in 2011, are among the leading scholars of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American stage, with a strong interest in surveying the rich and complex dramatic landscape before the modernist era. In the introduction, Richards acknowledges the collection's “emphasis on drama before the age of Eugene O'Neill” (1) and thus its goal of situating O'Neill and the playwrights who succeeded him within the contexts of the colonial period, the early republic, and various performance traditions, especially melodrama, that dominated the nineteenth century.In her brief preface honoring Richards, Nathans likewise makes clear that rather than covering “the merely factual or encyclopedic,” the book offers “a series of arguments, debates, and new interpretations of some familiar histories” (ix). As such, it differs sharply from such previous works as The Cambridge Guide to American Theatre (1996; second edition in 2007), with its briefer and far more numerous entries, and therefore serves less effectively as a reference tool or introductory survey than as a detailed anatomy of the current state of American drama scholarship. The reader is guided in each essay by subheadings every two or three pages, though each contributor manages these in varying ways (most cryptically, the “A,” “B” and “C” sections of Dorothy Chansky's “Feminist Drama”) that seem intended to reshape certain conventional narratives. Stephen Bottoms's “Tennessee Williams and the Winemiller Inheritance,” for example, begins its assessment of Williams's work by considering not The Glass Menagerie or A Streetcar Named Desire but Summer and Smoke under the subheading “Alma Winemiller,” the main character in that initially unsuccessful 1948 play, whom Bottoms presents as a surrogate for the playwright and his struggle with homophobia in postwar America. The next section, “Alma #2,” discusses José Quintero's successful 1952 revival as a prelude to the Circle-in-the-Square's triumphant productions of O'Neill's late masterpieces in the years following, a defining moment for Off-Broadway theater. The next section, “Oliver Winemiller,” leaps ahead to the Caffe Cino and the Off-Off-Broadway theater in the 1960s, with its stagings of certain Williams short stories. This idiosyncratic treatment of a major playwright is representative of many of the essays in The Oxford Handbook, which seem intent on engaging the ongoing scholarly debates and marking out new critical territory rather than guiding the uninitiated through the basic contours of the field.Another conspicuous feature of this collection is its thematic interconnections, with several key topics and issues treated in multiple essays spanning different historical periods. The editors do not mark off clear boundaries for their contributors. Mark Mullen's essay “Reform Drama,” for example, overlaps significantly with some of the other chapters that explore melodrama in the nineteenth century, such as Scott C. Martin's “The Politics of Antebellum Melodrama” and Mark Hodin's “Late Melodrama.” Inevitably, the “melodramatic imagination,” the phrase coined by Peter Brooks in his influential 1976 book of that title, figures also in Amelia Howe Kritzer's “Antebellum Plays by Women: Contexts and Themes” and coeditor Nathans's own contribution, “Representing Ethnic Identity on the Antebellum Stage, 1825–61.”Ethnicity and race as distinctively American concerns in drama are a recurring focus of the collection, with significant attention distributed through the earlier essays and four essays dedicated to representations of African American identity in particular: Sarah Meer's “Minstrelsy and Uncle Tom”; Marvin McAllister's “The Rise of African American Drama, 1822–79”; Kathy A. Perkins's “African American Drama, 1910–45”; and Harry J. Elam Jr.'s “Post–World War II African American Theatre.” Other essays that devote sections to a shared theme include Stephen Watt's “Political Drama” (“From Civil Rights and the Vietnam War to the AIDS Crisis”) and S. E. Wilmer's “Postwar Protest Plays” (“African American Protest Theatre”). The ethnicity thread culminates in Jon D. Rossini's “Ethnicity and Postwar Drama,” which features an inclusive consideration of Latina/o, African American, Native American, and Asian American plays and playwrights, and seeks ultimately to destabilize fixed ideas of ethnicity by positing instead “an evolving conceptual framework that highlights process and perspective rather than serving to define category or culture” (497).The subset of essays highlighting women and gender begins with Kritzer's “Antebellum Plays by Women” and continues with Katherine E. Kelly's “The New Woman, the Suffragist, and the Stage” and Chansky's “Feminist Drama,” with related sections in other essays such as Theodore Shank's analysis of performance artists Karen Finley and Annie Sprinkle in “Experimental Theatre: Beyond Illusion,” the only essay in the volume that includes photographs—an odd editorial choice, given the richness of the visual record of theatrical art in America. “In Drama and the New Sexualities,” Jordan Schildcrout picks up one thread of the “Feminist and Gay Theatre” section of Wilmer's essay on protest plays with a more thorough examination of plays featuring LGBT characters, covering well-known works by Tony Kushner and Terrence McNally, among others, along with the alternative performance spaces and styles that demonstrate how, for Schildcrout, “the theatre played a crucial role in reflecting and shaping new understandings of sexual identity in the postwar era” (468).Fittingly, at the center of the collection lie Brenda Murphy's “The Provincetown Players in American Culture” and Steven Bloom's simply titled “Eugene O'Neill,” much as their subjects are poised between nineteenth-century theatrical traditions and the modernist (and postmodern) stage. Murphy begins by situating the Players in the counter-commercial theater movement of the early twentieth century, followed by a “History” section detailing the familiar cast of Provincetowners who comprised the core group or came within its orbit. Murphy's next section, “Realism,” glances back at Mark Fearnow's subject in chapter 11, “A New Realism,” with its focus on James Herne, Clyde Fitch, Rachel Crothers, and other playwrights around the turn of the century, extending that discussion into such seminal Provincetown works as O'Neill's Bound East for Cardiff, Susan Glaspell's Trifles, and Neith Boyce's Winter's Night. In Murphy's longest section, “Modernism”—the only explicit treatment of that topic in the volume—she offers a compact yet detailed image of an American theater in the ferment of experimentation in stagecraft and dramaturgy, with special attention to O'Neill's expressionist plays The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape, along with Glaspell's The Verge which she describes as “the most completely modernist play produced by the Provincetown Players” (245).Concluding with the demise of the Players in 1922 and the emergence of Experimental Theatre, Inc., with the “triumvirate” of O'Neill, Robert Edmond Jones, and Kenneth Macgowan at its helm, Murphy's essay creates an apt transition to Bloom's discussion of the special significance of O'Neill in American drama. Bloom begins his account in 1916 when O'Neill first affiliated with the Players and thus began the productive phase of transforming “Life into Art,” the phrase that serves as Bloom's first section heading and points to what may ultimately be O'Neill's most important contribution to dramatic writing: opening its capacity to explore a playwright's own life trauma. After a brief discussion of the one-act plays O'Neill wrote before 1920 during his association with the Provincetown Players, Bloom moves briskly through the naturalistic, expressionistic, experimental, and frequently grandiose if also often highly effective works that followed through the 1920s into the 1930s and that earned O'Neill the Nobel Prize in 1936.The essay's longest section, “Return to Naturalism: The Lie of the Pipe Dream,” takes up the landmark works O'Neill wrote during his years in California while in self-imposed exile from theatrical production in the later 1930s and early 1940s. Bloom discusses The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey Into Night, the one-act Hughie, and A Moon for the Misbegotten with his usual perspicacity and command of the scholarly tradition, and unlike much of the rest of the volume, supplies a detailed account that is nonetheless accessible to a reader previously unfamiliar with the playwright and his legacy. In the brief final section, “O'Neill's Genius,” Bloom presents O'Neill as a worthy member of the first rank of modern dramatists along with Ibsen, Chekhov, and Strindberg, as well as a bridge between modernism and such later styles as absurdism and such important contemporary American dramatists as Sam Shepard and David Mamet.The notion of a playwright's “genius” itself seems odd in a collection of essays so strongly committed to the analysis of dramatic art as fully situated and enmeshed in the prevailing cultural and ideological conditions of its time rather than focusing on individual playwrights. Bloom seems almost to be writing against the grain of the volume itself but concludes in good company by quoting one of O'Neill's most ideologically engaged successors, Tony Kushner, and particularly his assertion of “Eugene O'Neill's centrality in American drama, his inescapable presence in our national theatrical imagination” (262). By placing Bloom's essay at the center of their collection, coeditors Richards and Nathans seem likewise to acknowledge O'Neill's inescapable presence and centrality amid the shifting narratives and emerging trends in the field of American drama.