Category Archives: History

The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O’Neill

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Eugene O'Neill in rehearsals for the Broadway production of The Iceman Cometh, 1946

The Iceman Cometh. A play in four acts by Eugene O’Neill. New York premiere: Martin Beck Theatre, 9 October 1946. Production and lighting design by Robert Edmond Jones; produced by The Theatre Guild; directed by Eddie Dowling. With James Barton (Hickey), Carl Benton Reid (Larry Slade), Dudley Digges (Harry Hope), Paul Crabtree (Don Parritt), E.G. Marshall (Willie Oban), Jeanne Cagney (Marcie), Leo Chalzel (Hugo Kalmar) and others. Closed 15 March 1947 (136 performances). Text: The Iceman Cometh, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. With an introduction by Harold Bloom.

If you were to ply me with drinks at a cocktail party (which doesn’t happen often enough, by the way) and ask for my nominee for the greatest American play of the twentieth century, my answer would be The Iceman Cometh, without hesitation. One of O’Neill’s two great masterworks of the postwar period, O’Neill completed the play in 1939 then withheld it from production for the duration of World War II. “A New York audience could neither see nor hear its meaning,” he wrote to Lawrence Langer. “The pity and tragedy of defensive pipe dreams would be deemed downright unpatriotic. … But after the war is over, I am afraid … that American audiences will understand a lot of The Iceman Cometh only too well.” [1] O’Neill was wrong about this; the play lasted a scant six months on Broadway, its power and brilliance recognized only with the 1956 revival of the play off-Broadway at the Circle in the Square theatre, directed by Jose Quintero and featuring Jason Robards as Hickey (Robards’ performance as Hickey in the 1985 Broadway revival of the play, also directed by Quintero, is one of the most indelible memories of my entire theatregoing experience). And it is the product, most certainly, of a tragic, and not a comic, consciousness.

O’Neill’s consideration that the play might be received as “unpatriotic” points to the peculiarly American nature of its theme — the “pipe-dream” as the dream of America, new beginnings and, once again, a prelapsarian experience that would leave European history behind. I use the word “theme” deliberately, for the play’s structure itself doesn’t resemble the three-act structure of Ibsen or the five-act structure of Shakespeare but rather the four-movement structure of a symphony, containing a theme and its variations more important than a storyline. O’Neill’s reputation as a repetitious writer may have some of its ground in a consideration of the play’s four-hour length, but it was not a failing of O’Neill’s work as much as a well-considered compositional approach. Bogard also cites a moment during rehearsals for the play when producer Lawrence Langer noted that one point had been made eighteen times — “O’Neill told him ‘in a particularly quiet voice, “I intended it to be repeated eighteen times!”‘”

The musical structure is additionally revealed in the first act of the play, by far the longest of the four at 81 pages in the published text. The fifteen denizens of Harry Hope’s backroom (no doubling possible here, either), significantly set in 1912, just before the First World War, engage in a lengthy polyphonic fugue of their dreams and aspirations, all of which they will fulfill “tomorrow”; it is a suite of voices of varying tone and note. And it is a polyglot tongue with which the play speaks, reflecting also the mass immigration to America at the turn of the century; Dutch, Irish, British; a Harvard-educated law student next to a cop and a carnival barker; Hugo Kalmar, an anarchist revolutionary who has spent ten years in prison and upon his release has been easily assimilated into the America which Harry Hope’s back room signifies;  and the black Joe Mott. [2] There are three women as well, generating an aural soundscape of urban America at the time.

At the end of the act the salesman Hickey arrives for his annual bender on the occasion of barowner Harry Hope’s 60th birthday, but he arrives this time selling something to the denizens of the bar — a release from illusion and pipe-dreams, urging them to take action to make these dreams true. It is, as it transpires, something of a trick; Hickey knows that none will be able to do so, but convinces them to make the effort in a project to bring “truth.” In attempting to reveal the lies beneath human hope, he reveals also the nothingness that lies beneath both eros and death.

The title of the play, The Iceman Cometh, is a sickly double-entendre marrying death and orgasm; while death is the iceman, so is Hickey, for even the peace to be found in death is an illusion. Perhaps its key can be found in the realization achieved by Larry Slade, an ex-anarchist who believes he has resigned himself to the failures of the human spirit, describing himself as a “grandstander,” waiting for the peace of death. But even this is a lie, in the words of the play a “pipe-dream”:

LARRY (With increasing bitter intensity, more as if he were fighting with himself than with Hickey): I’m afraid to live, am I? — and even more afraid to die! So I sit here, with my pride drowned on the bottom of a bottle, keeping drunk so I won’t see myself shaking in my britches with fright, or hear myself whining and praying: Beloved Christ, let me live a little longer at any price! If it’s only for a few days more, or a few hours even, have mercy, Almighty God, and let me still clutch greedily to my yellow heart this sweet treasure, this jewel beyond price, the dirty, stinking bit of withered old flesh which is my beautiful little life! … You think you’ll make me admit that to myself?
HICKEY (Chuckling): But you just did admit it, didn’t you? (168)

Hickey has turned his merciless project onto himself already, having killed his wife Evelyn in an effort to relieve himself of the guilt of being human, a guilt which Evelyn was willing to forgive; but it is something in the human spirit, some mysterious force which hovers over all the characters of the play, which turns eros to violence. The second act of the play is perhaps one of the most telling, as Hickey’s admittedly successful attempt to tear the illusions from each of the characters leads to the physical violence — racial, political, sexual — among those who peaceably enjoyed each other’s company, drunk as they were, in the hours before Hickey’s arrival.

But death, whether it comes to Evelyn through murder or Don Parritt through suicide in the last moments of the play, does not bring peace. This truth confuses Hickey as he surveys the broken human community he has created; but he has sold this truth. In Act Four, which features Hickey’s tortured 40-minute monologue describing his murder of Evelyn, the drunks of Harry Hope’s bar can’t even find peace in the booze, which has “lost its kick.” It is only with Hickey’s departure that it regains its effect.

If Don Parritt is the Judas figure of the play, having ratted out his anarchist mother out of both hatred and greed (and Larry Slade just might be his father), Hickey is its corrupt Christ, bringing a spiritual truth which he himself may not fully understand. What is left is the human figure of Larry Slade, and the human community. It is no surprise that the final curtain falls on a raucous cacaphony of popular song, drinking and laughter:

([Hope] starts the chorus of “She’s the Sunshine of Paradise Alley,” and instantly they all burst into song. But not the same song. Each starts the chorus of his or her choice. Jimmy Tomorrow’s is “A Wee Dock and Doris”; Ed Mosher’s, “Break the News to Mother”; Willie Oban’s, the Sailor Lad ditty he sang in Act One; General Wetjoen’s “Waiting at the Church”; McGloin’s, “Tammany”; Captain Lewis’s, “The Old Kent Road”; Joe’s, “All I Got Was Sympathy” [and on for a bit] … while Hugo jumps to his feet and, pounding on the table with his fist, bellows in his guttural basso the French Revolutionary “Carmagnole.” A weird cacophony results from this mixture and they stop singing to roar with laughter. All but Hugo, who keeps on with drunken fervor.)
HUGO:
Dansons la Carmagnole!
Vive le son! Vive le son!
Dansons la Carmagnole!
Vive le son des canons!
(They all turn on him and howl him down with amused derision. He stops singing to denounce them in his most fiery style.)
Capitalist svine! Stupid bourgeois monkeys!
(He declaims.)
“The days grow hot, O Babylon!”
(They all take it up and shout in enthusiastic jeering chorus.)
“‘Tis cool beneath thy willow trees!”
(They pound their glasses on the table, roaring with laughter, and Hugo giggles with them. In his chair by the window, Larry stares in front of him, oblivious to their racket. Curtain.) (218-219)

Metatheatrically, the “dirty black curtain which separates [the back room] from the bar” at upstage right (7) is a mirror of the proscenium curtain that separates The Iceman Cometh from its audience, and indeed the curtain falls. In these final moments, O’Neill masterfully presents a remarkable picture of America (this is Walt Whitman’s America singing, its democracy to be found in the individual songs each singer chooses to bawl), drawing the audience too into that back room and rendering them similarly denizens of illusion. Even the ideals of Hugo’s revolutionary political fervor are rendered as just one additional instance of the noise of America, a putatively joyful noise which isolates those who have learned the truth, who have pierced through the illusion to see the yawning abyss beneath it; once truly seen and recognized in the self, it is impossible to turn away again and lose oneself in that community, as Larry Slade knows. (O’Neill, interestingly, was also one of America’s few dramatists with a firm grounding in philosophy, especially that of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer; as Harold Bloom notes in his foreword to the Yale University Press edition: “We live and die, in the spirit, in solitude, and the true strength of Iceman is its intense dramatic exemplification of that somber reality. … Life, in Iceman, is what it is in Schopenhauer: illusion.” [x]) America — and the newly Americanized world — have not become less cacophanous since 1946; over sixty years later, with the Internet, mass media and other devices, it may be more cacophanous than ever, rendering The Iceman Cometh perhaps the greatest American play of the 21st century as well. O’Neill’s work is a deeply moving, shockingly sublime and disconcerting (in the best sense of the word) experience on the page or on the stage; anyone who does not know it does not know the American theatre, what it has been, is, and could be, for better or worse. It is, with the novels of Herman Melville, the canvases of Mark Rothko and the music of Morton Feldman, among the most majestic expressions of the tragedy that lies at the heart of the American experience.

***

A DVD of John Frankenheimer’s very good 1973 film of The Iceman Cometh, with Lee Marvin as Hickey, is available from the Superfluities Redux bookstore. And via YouTube, two more Hickeys: first, Al Pacino reads from the play in this excerpt from Ric Burns’ 2006 PBS documentary on O’Neill (I admit it is of sentimental value; a DVD of this documentary was the last present I received from my father before his death):

And Jason Robards as Hickey in an excerpt from Sidney Lumet’s 1960 television production of the play — and your eyes do not deceive you; that’s a very young Robert Redford as Don Parritt:

Footnotes
  1. Cited in Travis Bogard’s notes on the play in Contour in Time, available online here. [↩]
  2. It is little noted just how O’Neill’s extraordinary and subtle sense of the black experience in America makes its way into his plays; the romance between a white woman and a black man in his 1924 All God’s Chillun Got Wings brought the play to the attention of the New York mayor’s office. [↩]

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

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The Glass Menagerie. A play in seven scenes by Tennessee Williams. Out-of-town preview: Civic Theatre, Chicago, 26 December 1944. New York premiere: Playhouse Theatre, 31 March 1945. Set and light design: Jo Mielziner; original music: Paul Bowles (yes, that Paul Bowles); produced by Eddie Dowling and Louis J. Singer; directed by Eddie Dowling and Margo Jones. With Laurette Taylor (Amanda), Eddie Dowling (Tom), Julie Haydon (Laura), and Anthony Ross (Jim). Closed 3 August 1946 (563 performances). Text: The Glass Menagerie, New York: New Directions, 1999. This “definitive text” includes an introduction by Robert Bray and “The Catastrophe of Success,” an essay by Williams.

Eddie Dowling, Laurette Taylor and Julie Haydon in the original Broadway production of The Glass Menagerie. (Photo: The Lester Sweyd Collection, New York Public Library)

The three great American plays that premiered on Broadway in the years immediately after World War II — The Iceman Cometh (1946), A Streetcar Named Desire (1948) and Death of a Salesman (1949) — share themes of the disparity between truth and illusion, between self-definition and the forces that conspire to deny it. They also acknowledge the close relationships among violence, sex and death as they simultaneously undermine and undershore the conceptions of community and the family. Murder in The Iceman Cometh, rape in A Streetcar Named Desire, adultery in Death of a Salesman — while staples of American melodrama, these themes in the plays of O’Neill, Williams and Miller do not result in reconciliation of these forces or in comfort; they lack the tidy conclusions and justice of the melodrama, leaving their stages in an uneasy peace. If not tragedies, these plays are shot through with an erotic, tragic consciousness which anxiously underlies their more melodramatic, romantic yearnings.

Tennessee Williams’ 1944 The Glass Menagerie provides a prelude of sorts to these three plays. A “memory play” set in 1939, before the entry of the United States into World War II, it is an example of the exploration of the prelapsarian American consciousness. [1] It is also a tale of duelling romanticisms — that of Amanda Wingfield’s, based in the memory of a Mississippi delta youth (as well as its social prejudices; she makes references to “darkies” and “niggers” in the very first scene of the play), and that of her son Tom, who seeks refuge in Hollywood fantasies. A warehouse clerk, Tom remembers the 1930s as a time “when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.” (5)

The Wingfields now live in the midwestern city of St. Louis, Missouri. Much of the play deals with the attempts of Amanda and, more reluctantly, Tom to draw his sister Laura into a conventional romantic relationship. Laura is, however, somehow maladjusted, somehow incomplete, handicapped after a childhood illness and left with one leg slightly shorter than the other. Laura is drawn into the Southern romanticism into which Amanda tries to attract them both, but it is a curious romanticism, born of seduction and practicality. She admits the manipulative quality of a woman’s seduction as well as its ecstatic, alternatively submissive and aggressive character, characterizing “all pretty girls” as “a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be” (52); and also, despite her dislike of the word “cripple” to describe Laura, admits the accuracy of this characterization as well as her own status as a marginalized victim of abandonment: “Don’t think about us,” she tells Tom at the end of the play, “a mother deserted, an unmarried sister who’s crippled and has no job!” (96) In at least one sense, Amanda is far less romantic than her son Tom, who characterizes the approaching war as “adventure.” “Adventure and change were immanent in this year [1939],” he tells the audience. “They were waiting around the corner for all these kids. Suspended in the mist over Berchtesgaden, caught in the folds of Chamberlain’s umbrella. In Spain there was Guernica! … All the world was waiting for bombardments!” (39)

Perhaps, but Amanda and Laura are only awaiting the gentleman caller that Tom arranges — a warehouse colleague and former high-school athlete Jim O’Connor, on whom Laura has had a crush for many years. While Amanda’s romanticism may be counted by Tom as an illusion, this romanticism and Amanda’s subtle divination of the dynamic forces of masculine and feminine psychology indeed works, and Jim and Laura are drawn into a deep sexual flirtation, symbolized by the exchange and eventual accidental destruction by Jim of Laura’s small, delicate glass unicorn (Freudian and Lacanian critics, go to it). In fact, it is the seemingly more realistic consciousness of Tom and Jim that abandons the two women to a sexless adulthood, Tom to follow his father’s footsteps out the door and Jim to a career in television (introduced to the American general public at the 1939 World’s Fair; a prescient adventurer, that Jim O’Connor).

By 1944, American dramatic realism and naturalism as produced by David Belasco and Clyde Fitch had been repudiated for almost a generation; apart from O’Neill’s experimentation with masks in The Great God Brown and the stream-of-consciousness monologue in Strange Interlude, there was also the 1938 example of Our Town, to which The Glass Menagerie bows in its scenic minimalism — “Eating is indicated by gestures without food or utensils,” Williams writes in a stage direction (6). To judge just how disorienting Williams meant the poetic realism of The Glass Menagerie to be, one must turn to the reading edition of the play prepared after the Broadway premiere. In the original text of the play as written, Williams described “the use of a screen on which were projected magic-lantern slides bearing images or titles,” he writes. “I do not regret the omission of this device from the original Broadway production … but I think it may be interesting to some readers to see how this device was conceived. … [The screen] is to give accent to certain values in each scene. … The legend or image upon the screen will strengthen the effect of what is merely allusion in the writing and allow the primary point to be made more simply and lightly than if the entire responsibility were on the spoken lines. … In fact, the possibilities of the device seem much larger to me than the instance of this play can possibly utilize.” (xx) More disconcerting still would be the first projected legend, a quotation from a French poem, no translation provided: “Ou sont les neiges …” (“Where are the snows [of yesteryear]?” from François Villon). This explicit (nearly) post-war break with the conventions of prewar American drama, in its self-conscious reference to the melodrama of the silent film if not the pedagogic emphasis of the Brechtian projection, suggests a post-war dramatic and theatrical consciousness as well; like Laura and Amanda, a certain pre-war consciousness, a knowing innocence (if such can be conceived) has been abandoned.

The Glass Menagerie remains a work of Williams’ late apprenticeship — near the maturity of A Streetcar Named Desire, but lacking the broader sweep of the sexual dynamics that lay underneath that play. It remains almost embarrassingly autobiographical (Tom Wingfield = T.W. = Tennessee [Thomas Lanier] Williams), and like Death of a Salesman and Our Town it is hung perilously and not altogether successfully between tragedy and melodrama. But in its success it did lay the groundwork for a reconceived American drama that opened the stage for the darker forces that lay beneath American experience.

Below, a short excerpt from scene five of Anthony Harvey’s 1973 television production of the play, with Katharine Hepburn and Sam Waterston. A DVD of this production is available through the Superfluities Redux bookstore.

Footnotes
  1. In scene five, Tom reads a newspaper with the “enormous” headline “Franco Triumphs,” fixing the play in that year. (38) [↩]

A new history of postwar American drama?

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The drama of the United States is considered a bastard child of literature; like all plays, they are apparently banished by the academy (as well as the bookstore) into their own genre. But unlike those other international plays, they have received little due even from American critics. In his 1945 book The Playwright as Thinker, Eric Bentley favored European playwrights and dismissed American writers like Eugene O’Neill, and in a preface from a later edition of the book (a preface dropped from the edition currently in print), Bentley castigated American drama as he found it on Broadway in the 1950s. Similarly, Robert Brustein’s influential 1964 The Theatre of Revolt, while giving O’Neill a chapter of his own and therefore balancing the scales a little, is subtitled “Studies in Modern Drama from Ibsen to Genet,” lending Williams, Miller, Odets, Inge and most other American dramatists very little credit. Although there have been recent studies of American drama as a whole (Don Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby’s magisterial three-volume history of the American theatre from Cambridge University Press, for example, and Marc Robinson’s recent The American Play: 1787–2000 from Yale University Press), you won’t find these at your local bookstore, nor, I’ll wager, on the bookshelves of many American dramatists or critics themselves. Of fine, more individualized and specialized surveys for the non-academic reader like those for British drama of the postwar period — David Ian Rabey’s English Drama Since 1940, Dan Rebellato’s 1956 and All That and Aleks Sierz’ In-Yer-Face Theatre — there are even fewer (though it’s not a survey, one must heartily recommend Walter Davis’ excellent Get the Guests in this context). The history of the Broadway musical — yes, there are scores of books about that; a recent visit to a Barnes & Noble proved that these large books take up an entire shelf in the Theatre & Drama section. But you will search in vain for anything similar about “straight” American drama.

The accepted canon of post-war American drama may easily be covered in the four months’ duration of any undergraduate survey course. One can even come up with the fifteen weeks of readings in a mere fifteen minutes of thought:

Our Town by Thornton Wilder
A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee
Angels in America by Tony Kushner
Streamers by David Rabe
Buried Child by Sam Shepard
Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
Fences by August Wilson

And of course a passing glance at a few other writers in the interests of multicultural justice and aesthetic breadth, perhaps:

Fefu and Her Friends by Maria Irene Fornes
365 Plays/365 Days by Suzan-Lori Parks
The Laramie Project by Moises Kaufman
The Boys in the Band by Mart Crowley
Unbalancing Acts by Richard Foreman

And, if we must cater to the desire of students to confront work from the generation closest to its own, Paula Vogel, Sarah Ruhl, Adam Rapp, Lynn Nottage, Young-Jean Lee and Neil LaBute can fill in the odd gap. Indeed, it is likely that instructors seeking to “engage” their students more readily with the form of the theatre may well assign a full semester of this recent work instead; for O’Neill, Miller and Williams may not “speak to” their students or even themselves (whatever “speak to” is supposed to mean in this context, though one can hazard various guesses which do no favors to either teacher or student) with the power of Kushner, Vogel, Crowley or Lee.

If the student or the fledgling American dramatist first confronts the work of these earlier writers in the undergraduate classroom, that may be the last place they read or see it (when I was at Bard College in the early 1980s, published scripts were all we had; perhaps today the instructor can utilize film or video versions of these same plays, all of which are far more readily and economically available for classroom use now). Though the plays themselves do not change, we do; and the 48-year-old man who reads The Iceman Cometh will approach the play with a richer variety of experience and a wider breadth of knowledge both personal and theatrical through which he can read the play than he did when he was 18. Between this and the critical disservice to American dramatists by critics like Bentley and Brustein, it is no wonder that written American drama, that bastard form of theatre, remains acknowledged (if not honored) but unread.

This condition is unfortunate in more ways than one, for both this older drama and for the contemporary American stage. Some directors have found extraordinary possibility in stagings of these older plays. Ivo van Hove will continue his exploration of American drama in his production of Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play The Little Foxes at New York Theatre Workshop later this month [1] ; Elizabeth LeCompte and the Wooster Group have, during their existence, revisited almost all of the canonic American dramatists, from Wilder to Miller to O’Neill and most recently to Williams.

Except in the hands of these and other directors, contemporary relevance for the postwar American drama — and the challenges it presents for the American stage and the contemporary American dramatist — remains unexamined. Yet even a cursory rereading of these plays reveals a hardness and rigor, a formal daring, every bit as significant as those of the postwar European and Asian stages. While they may have acquired a reputation for mawkish melodrama and sentimentality, the fact is that the opposite is more frequently the case — that melodrama and sentimentality are frequently at war with a hard, bitter vision of the American experience and the individual produced by it. Even Williams “memory play” The Glass Menagerie, like Our Town, long the staple of high school drama clubs and amateur groups, reveals a darkness and an uncompromisingly harsh metaphysics. In the very first stage direction, Williams describes the Wingfield apartment building as “one of those vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular living-units that flower as warty growths in overcrowded urban centers of lower middle-class population and are symptomatic of the impulse of this largest and fundamentally enslaved section of American society to avoid fluidity and differentiation and to exist and function as one interfused mass of automatism” — so much for the sentimental conception of community so valued by some contemporary American theatremakers. Williams also takes on American social realism in his notes on the play:

The straight realistic play with its genuine Frigidaire and authentic ice-cubes, its characters who speak exactly as its audience speaks, corresponds to the academic landscape and has the same virtue of a photographic likeness. Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance. These remarks … have to do with a conception of a new, plastic theatre which must take the place of the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions if the theatre is to resume vitality as a part of our culture. [2]

Williams, perhaps, can’t be responsible for lugubrious directorial renderings of his harsher plays; but in neglecting to revisit this original text, we render invisible the very real formal, political, cultural and metaphysical underpinnings of an important avenue of American dramatic experimentation. Williams, moreover, is not alone, and as I wrote in my essays about Wilder and Odets earlier this week, these dramas are surprisingly ambitious and complex — far more ambitious and complex, in reality, than much contemporary American drama.

During the period under discussion here, it was not only American drama that underwent considerable sea-change; American dramatists clearly did not wait for the development (as important as it was) of the off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway stages of the 1950s and 1960s to forge new paths. In other disciplines, such as plastic art and music, American artists entered upon a period of extreme experimentalism as well. The rise of abstract expressionism with artists like Jackson Pollack and Mark Rothko, the development of a uniquely American vein of musical experimentation with John Cage and Morton Feldman (as well as Charles Ives in the years before them) — both of these grew to maturation with the post-war American theatre. While the point might be made that these artists and musicians operated at the margins of the New York scene, away from larger museums and concert halls, as off- and off-off-Broadway would be distant from the Times Square theatre district, history proves this is not the case. Pollack was the subject of a Life magazine cover story as early as 1949 and his canvases were hung in the Museum of Modern Art, that bastion of institutional aesthetic canon-making; concerts at Carnegie Hall and Town Hall, far from the Greenwich Village scene, saw the premieres of Cage’s works in the 1940s and 1950s.

That American dramatists experimented with their form for Broadway audiences does not undermine the validity of that experimentation, even if such experimentation in the same venues is unthinkable now; but that too is the result of history and does not reflect the status of the Broadway stage at the time. If one’s mind and sense of aesthetic history is playful enough, one might even draw imperfect but instructive parallels between one artist, one form, and another — Ives and Wilder in their appropriation of New England history and experience; O’Neill, Feldman and Rothko in their tragic conceptions of American consciousness; the abandonment of stage realism and realistic dialogue as painters and composers abandoned representation and tonality — each of these with an American flavor distinct from that of the European consciousness, but no less rigorous and sublime.

To survey postwar American drama through the lenses of eros, tragedy and death, and to assume that this admittedly prejudicial and idiosyncratic survey may revive these dynamics in contemporary American drama, is something, one suspects, of a revolutionary activity — the American mind seems from its inception to break from the past and lunge purposefully into the future. But the American is not exempt from the sobering realization that we cannot know where we are until we know where we’ve been, that regardless of our boundless energy and good intentions we are burdened by a violent and tragic past which we appear condemned to repeat into eternity; and that this knowledge broadens our conception not only of the possibilities which remain open to us but also prevents us from treading water in a continuous present. To assume otherwise is to risk condemning American drama to a state of perpetual adolescence; a less-than-charitable observer may conclude that this is already the case, and that it is already too late.

This conclusion itself emerges from the survey of postwar American drama, which begins just before the end of the war in 1944 with the Broadway premiere of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie. On that, more next week.

Footnotes
  1. At about the time the revival of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, which van Hove directed a few years ago, opens at the Signature Theatre Company — interestingly, not in van Hove’s production, which is worthy of some consideration of the current American condition of and receptiveness to stage experimentation itself; Kushner discusses this production in a recent Time Out New York interview. [↩]
  2. Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, New York: New Directions Books, 1999, xix. [↩]

Awake and Sing by Clifford Odets

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Awake and Sing. A play in three acts by Clifford Odets. New York premiere: Belasco Theatre, 19 February 1935. Scenic design: Boris Aronson; produced by The Group Theatre, Inc.; directed by Harold Clurman. With Art Smith (Myron), Stella Adler (Bessie), Morris Carnovsky (Jacob), Phoebe Brand (Hennie), Jules (John) Garfield (Ralph), Roman Bohnen (Schlosser), Luther Adler (Moe Axelrod), J.E. Bromberg (Uncle Morty) and Sanford Meisner (Sam). Closed 27 June 1935 (184 performances; an additional 24 performances were produced at the Belasco Theatre in September 1935 in repertory with Waiting for Lefty). Text: Waiting for Lefty and Other Plays, New York: Grove Press, 1993. Includes introduction by Harold Clurman and preface by Clifford Odets.

Zoe Wanamaker, Lauren Ambrose and Ben Gazzara in the 2006 Lincoln Center revival of Awake and Sing. (Photo: Sara Krulwich, New York Times)

After Waiting for Lefty, Clifford Odets had planned to write a play about Beethoven; this was abandoned, and Awake and Sing, his first full-length play to reach Broadway, was the result. Set in a Bronx apartment, the play chronicles slightly over a year in the life of the Jewish working-class Berger family. It may also have been Odets’ most influential play, and certainly it is one of his most frequently revived (most recently at the Belasco Theater in 2006, produced by the Lincoln Center Theater and directed by Bartlett Sher). Its uneasy combination of political idealism and social realism in a domestic setting would affect the early plays of both Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.

It also represents perhaps the height of the American melodramatic imagination in the theatre, which might be defined as a dramatic consciousness which values feeling over thought; collective empathy rather than individual distance; heightened (but not too heightened) language; a plot rich in event, character rich in eccentricity; and domestic crisis rather than cultural or social catastrophe. It also, in its way, optimistically celebrates the individual even as it maps his or her tortuous way through family and conformity. It does so through a “well-plotted” structure; that is, coincidence, chance and contrivance are so crafted and arranged as to masquerade as fate and destiny, though five minutes’ thought brings the tender structure crashing to the ground.

Awake and Sing is as stuffed with event as the furniture in the Berger apartment. A head-strong, fearful Bessie (one in a continuing line of American mother-monsters) presides over a household which includes her father, Jacob, a retired barber with anarchist leanings (he hangs portraits of Sacco and Vanzetti in his bedroom) (40); her put-upon husband Myron; daughter Hennie and son Ralph. Coming and going are Uncle Morty, Bessie’s successful businessman brother; Moe Axelrod, a one-legged WWI veteran who plays the horses; and Sam Feinschreiber, fresh-off-the-boat and eventually husband to Hennie. The plot details the efforts of the Berger children to strike out on their own, their plans foiled by both circumstance and Bessie’s authority, though by the end they quite unexpectedly succeed through a variety of plot machinations that include the probably accidental death of Jacob (who falls from the rooftop while walking the family dog, in an unlikely contrivance which is telegraphed from the first five minutes of the play [45]).

In Ted Merwin’s essay for the New York Times on the occasion of Odets’ 100th birthday in 2006, John Lahr is cited crediting Odets’ “lumpen lyricism” as “the first attempts to break the shackles of naturalism in American drama.” Leaving aside both O’Neill and Rice, this seems like a bold statement; looking at the dialogue itself, it’s just wrong; when a character wants to sound street-smart poetic, the tone is as scratchy as a 78rpm record, at least from a 70 year distance. It’s a few steps up from the stage Irish and Yiddish of Abie’s Irish Rose, but not that many steps; “I got a yen for her and I don’t mean a Chinee coin,” Moe Axelrod says in a line with a howlingly false ring, and I don’t mean the one he wants to put on Hennie’s finger (57).

Another quality of American melodrama is that the individual striving for self-fulfillment amidst the challenges of the culture and the family is always somehow victorious over the forces of evil (and this is a distinctly American conception of individualism; that of Europe is much more ambiguous); it is a trope that concludes Angels in America as well as Clifford Odets’ plays. This quality in plays of the post-1945 period is frequently at war with the tragic consciousness, and in plays like A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman this war takes many victims, leaving the melodramatic conception of the individual in American drama in considerable doubt.

The revival of interest in Odets’ plays dovetails with Marc Robinson’s conception of “sophisticated melodrama” as one of the most useful lenses through which to view American drama in The American Play, for Awake and Sing is rather sophisticated, especially at the end of the play when both Ralph and Hennie win their independence and set out on new lives, Ralph with a renewed sense of possibility within the culture and Moe and Hennie outside of it. There are costs: Ralph foregoes his share of Jacob’s insurance policy, and Hennie abandons her child to the care of her husband (who does not know he is not the father of the child). These are necessary and, to Odets’ credit, innovative breaks in the structure of the melodrama, but still serve melodrama’s intent to reward the individual. It sits uneasily, and in Hennie’s sudden abandonment of her son there is a fracture of the family contract. The melodrama can’t entirely contain this fracture, which remains a haunting echo after the curtain comes down. [1]

As I mentioned above, Odets would continue to affect the American drama over the next few decades, through Williams and Miller and Inge; it wouldn’t be until the work of Edward Albee in the 1960s and that of David Mamet and Sam Shepard in the 1970s that the mainstream American theatre would be free of his social-realist aesthetic. But before then there would be two plays by Eugene O’Neill, perhaps America’s sole tragic dramatist to that date (and even now), that would explode the melodramatic conception of the individual, the culture and the metaphysics that binds them; and the post-war American drama itself would open in 1946 with the Broadway premiere of The Iceman Cometh, which would premiere only a few months before Arthur Miller’s Ibsen-tinged All My Sons.

Further reading on Odets: John Lahr’s appreciation of Odets in the 17 April 2006 issue of The New Yorker; Brooks Atkinson’s review of the original production of Awake and Sing in the 20 February 1935 New York Times. The 1972 public television production, directed by Robert Hopkins and Norman Lloyd and featuring Walter Matthau in the role of Moe Axelrod, is available on DVD through the Superfluities Redux bookstore.

Footnotes
  1. In an interesting and perhaps instructive parallel, Katrin in Howard Barker’s The Europeans abandons her child as well, but not without considerable internal struggle — a struggle seemingly absent from Hennie. [↩]

Waiting for Lefty by Clifford Odets

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Waiting for Lefty. A play in one act by Clifford Odets. New York premiere: Longacre Theatre, 26 March 1935. Scenic design: Alexander Chertoff; produced by The Group Theatre, Inc.; directed by Sanford Meisner and Clifford Odets. Performed on a double-bill with Odets’ Till the Day I Die. With Abner Biberman, Russell Collins, Lee J. Cobb, Elia Kazan, Ruth Nelson, Clifford Odets and others. Closed July 1935 (144 performances; an additional 24 performances were produced at the Belasco Theatre in September 1935 in repertory with Awake and Sing). Text: Waiting for Lefty and Other Plays, New York: Grove Press, 1993. Includes introduction by Harold Clurman and preface by Clifford Odets.

In 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was well into his first term as President, and he was not yet “Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” The Depression had ignited considerable leftist (and rightist) political activity, an activity reflected in the popular culture as well, and the end of the Depression was still far in the future. Gregory LaCava’s very strange 1933 film Gabriel Over the White House suggested that the activist FDR administration might lead to a fascist dictatorship — a not necessarily unwelcome development, the film implied. [1] The films of the Warner Bros. studios, along with a successful line of gangster pictures, included social-realist depictions of working class life as well, including They Drive by Night (Humphrey Bogart and George Raft as interstate truckers) and the 1932 Taxi!, with James Cagney and Loretta Young, in which Cagney tried to organize independent cab drivers into a union (and in which the Irish Cagney spoke Yiddish).

The New York taxicab industry is also at the center of Clifford Odets’ early Broadway play, Waiting for Lefty, produced in 1935. Set in a taxi union committee meeting room, the union leadership and the drivers themselves argue whether or not to call a strike. Six short free-standing scenes, performed by the drivers, demonstrate several instances of social injustice, some relating to the condition of the taxi drivers and others not (a chemist is asked by an industrialist to work on a poison gas project; an internist is fired from his job at a hospital when it is discovered that he is Jewish). The more activist members of the drivers union finally convince the rest of the drivers to strike for fairer wages, undermining the authority of the union leaders, themselves backed by guns and violent thugs.

Although ostensibly about a taxi drivers’ strike, the play through its  Brechtian free-standing episodes argues for job actions in protest of the injustices exhibited by the owners, the union leadership and the government. As the union leadership paints the more extreme activists as “red boys,” a speaker says, “I ain’t a red boy one bit! Here I’m carryin’ a shrapnel that big I picked up in the war. And maybe I don’t know it when it rains! Don’t tell me red! You know what we are? The black and blue boys!” (6-7) But this ambivalence towards Socialism and Communism is not maintained throughout the play; a doctor caught in the mechanisms of the American health care system says, “I wanted to go to Russia. Last week I was thinking about it — the wonderful opportunity to do good work in their socialized medicine –” (28)

Interestingly, conformity in the status quo is also an indication of the lack of masculinity among the men of the play. In the first vignette, Joe’s wife taunts him with a variety of insults — “Who’s the man in the family, you or me?” (9) — and threatens to leave him for another man (11).

Though each of the vignettes displays one form or another of social injustice, the victims themselves inevitably decide to fight the injustice. Joe decides to “look up Lefty Costello,” another driver who had apparently been organizing a strike; the chemist punches the industrialist in the mouth (13); the internist decides to “study and work and learn my place” (29) — while earning his living as a taxi driver. And the play itself ends with the union membership triumphantly overruling its leadership. As a character named Agate Keller (played by Elia Kazan in the Broadway production) proclaims:

Hear it, boys, hear it? Hell, listen to me! Coast to coast! HELLO AMERICA! WE’RE STORMBIRDS OF THE WORKING-CLASS. WORKERS OF THE WORLD … OUR BONES AND BLOOD! And when we die they’ll know what we did to make a new world! Christ, cut us up to little pieces. We’ll die for what is right! put fruit trees where our ashes are! (To audience): Well, what’s the answer?
ALL: STRIKE!
AGATE: LOUDER!
ALL: STRIKE!
AGATE and OTHERS on Stage: AGAIN!
ALL: STRIKE, STRIKE, STRIKE!!! (Curtain) (31)

A similar revolution is called for in Till the Day I Die, a longer one-act play with which Waiting for Lefty was originally paired. The first American anti-Nazi drama, Till the Day I Die is set in Berlin in 1935, as an underground organization plots to overthrow the Nazi government; like the characters in Waiting for Lefty, they are tempted with various forms of collaboration; like those characters, they also decide to act decisively rather than accept the status quo. (Contemporary theatregoers would also hear echoes of Waiting for Lefty‘s condemnation of anti-Semitism in the dialogue of Till the Day I Die, drawing a subtle but explicit parallel between the cultures of Depression America and Nazi Germany.)

The romantic faith in social change through revolution is passionate in both plays, and as early examples of American agit-prop political theatre they display extraordinary anger. The dialogue is drawn from street language rather than the high-flown rhetoric of Robert Sherwood’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois or Maxwell Anderson’s more self-consciously poetic dialogue, and there is a seeming interest in revising the form of social realism from Ibsenite representation to Brechtian “alienation” — three years before Our Town, the audience is presented at the start of the play with “a bare stage.” (5)

But the interest is only seeming. Odets would abandon this formal experimentation with his future plays, turning back to Ibsenite representation; Odets would grow to resemble Shaw, not Chekhov as critic Saul Maloff suggested, in his belief that the social realist stage could be exploited as an explicit avenue towards social change. One is caught up here in the question of the efficacy of the stage in provoking this revolutionary change, and Waiting for Lefty suggests that it is the form of theatrical performance itself, especially in its American flavor, that may render Waiting for Lefty and other agit-prop plays ultimately poor substitutes for social action. Although Waiting for Lefty ends with “STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE!”, it also ends only to be repeated again, night after night after night, the cultural form of theatre dependent on repeated performance. The emotional energies cathected in the performance and reception of the play, exemplified through collective appreciation in the form of applause, directs those energies that may be invested towards social change towards self-approval instead. Although the fictitious taxi drivers may be ready to take to the streets at 8.45, the performers and the audience are aware that the curtain will come down and that the very same play will end in the very same way the next day: always on the verge of action, always with the dream of good intentions, but somehow stuck in neutral, the theatrical form containing within itself the seeds of its failure to serve as an instrument of social change.

Is the play still effective? Perhaps it depends on how you define that word “effective”; its passion can stir the emotions, which is indeed an effect. The play is still revived on occasion, recently in a New Orleans storefront in 2007 (two years after Hurricane Katrina) by the Cripple Creek Theatre Co., from which the below YouTube video of excerpts is drawn.

Footnotes
  1. Regrettably, this eccentric film is not available on DVD. [↩]