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Social Realism and Imaginative Theatre: Avant-Garde Stage Production in the American Social Theatre of the Nineteen-thirties
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2010
Extract
It has long been customary to deal with the social theatre of the 1930's in terms of explicit content; I shall deal with it in terms of theatrical style.
The first point that needs to be made is that realism was not a discovery of the social theatre of the 1930's. Both as an ideal and as a practice, realism was strongly in evidence in the 1920's, if not indeed in the successful Belascoism of earlier decades. The producer-director Arthur Hopkins, whose Shakespearian productions in association with his distinguished designer Robert Edmond Jones were notably symbolistic, had perhaps his greatest success with his naturalistic production of What Price Glory? in 1924. The nascent Theatre Guild, which was about to collapse after its initial production in 1919 of Benavente's symbolist commedia dell'arte, The Bonds of Interest, was launched upon a successful career with its next, ultra-realistic, production of St. John Ervine's John Ferguson.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1962
References
NOTES
1. Clurraan, Harold, The Fervent Years, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1945, p. 36.Google Scholar
2. The play was turned down by me as the Guild's playreader, because the version I read (it lacked the “Awake and Sing” theme and conclusion) struck me as depressing and maudlin. It is my impression that Miss Theresa Helburn, the Guild's executive director, had a similar reaction, for it was she who officially returned the play to the Group.
3. Gorelik, Mordecai, “Designing the Play” in Producing the Play, by Gassner, John, New York, 1941, 1953, pp. 301–52.Google Scholar
4. “Scenery: The Visual Machine. Part Two.” In New Theatre, III (January 1934). 9–10.
5. See especially Wiegand's, Charmion von “The Quest of Eugene O'Neill,” New Theatre (September, 1935), pp. 12–17, 30–32.Google Scholar
6. Even The Cradle Will Rock was somewhat resisted by some leaders of the New Theatre and had to share the New Theatre annual prize with a realistic play by Philip Stevenson in 1937. It was my vote-from the outside, so to speak [that is from the relatively conservative Theatre Guild], that broke a tied verdict and got The Cradle Will Rock a favorable decision.
7. “A Playreader Looks at Playwrights,” New Theatre, October 1934, pp. 9–11.
8. “Revolutionary Staging for Revolutionary Plays,” New Theatre (July-August, 1934), p. 16.
9. Clur-man, op. cit., p. 17.
10. “The Magic of Meyerhold,” New Theatre, September 1934, pp. 14–15, 30.
11. The transfer of conspicuously theatricalist productions from London to New York has been more or less unsuccessful, and the failure of such offerings as the charming Peter Brooks‘production of the Anouilh-Fry Ring ’Round the Moon in 1951 and N. F. Simpson's One Way Pendulum in 1961 does not bode well for imported theatricalism. Only the partial success of Brendan Behan's The Hostage provides some evidence to the contrary. Revived and refurbished famous French farces like Noel Coward's Look After Lulu, two or three seasons ago, got short shrift in New York. The last time we had the ubiquitous farce The Italian Straw Hat in the vicinity of Broadway was when Orson Welles staged an unsuccessful adaptation under the title of Horse Eats Hat for the Federal Theatre in 1936.