Introduction

The object that stands outside the circle usually casts the longest shadow across it. To understand the ever increasingly complicated world of Broadway in the last half of this century, one only has to look at a single event on the evening – midnight to be exact – of 6 April 1947 when, at the Waldorf Astoria, the American Theatre Wing paid tribute to its former executive director, Antoinette Perry, who had died the previous year. The tribute came in the form of awards given for achievements on Broadway in that current season – and they would be called, in respect for Ms. Perry, the Tony Awards.

The evening was a casual affair, by contemporary standards. There were no ranks of nominees from which a winner suspensefully emerged; there were no “bests” – just outstanding achievements; there was some brief entertainment courtesy of several musicals then running, plus performers such as Frank Fay, Ethel Waters, and newcomer David Wayne; the list of awards was broadcast at midnight for fifteen minutes on a local radio station.

What was significant that night is that despite the almost coyly modest affair, the Tony Awards – and the larger enterprise they became – were Broadway’s first attempt to model itself after another entertainment industry – the movies – and eventually by the fifties, the selection and presentation of the awards mirrored those of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’s Oscar presentations almost exactly. The television broadcast of the Tony Awards became the apogee of the theatrical season (and occasionally was more provocative than the season itself) and the last, best chance for Broadway to reach a national audience.

Introduction

The history of contemporary American theatre design, that is, the design of scenery, costumes, and lighting in the United States after World War II, can actually be traced back to the 1915 production of The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife, directed by British director Harley Granville-Barker and designed by Robert Edmond Jones (see Volume 2, Chapter 8 for a discussion of this event and its context). Jones’s flat, monochromatic set presented a stark contrast to the popular, realistic productions produced by David Belasco, and it is often cited as the first important domestic example of what would eventually be known as the New Stagecraft, which some recent scholars and critics have claimed to be the most significant development in twentieth-century American theatre.

In comparison to “Belascan realism,” the New Stagecraft presented a “simplified realism.” Primarily inspired by Edward Gordon Craig and Adolphe Appia, it promoted a visual stage picture that often bordered on the abstract. European designers associated with the New Stagecraft style included Max Reinhardt, Oskar Strnad, Georg Fuchs, and Joseph Urban, who began his American career working at the Boston Opera in 1912. In the United States, Samuel Hume’s 1914 exhibition of new designs from Europe (seen in Boston, New York, Detroit, Chicago, and Cleveland), Boston’s Toy Theatre, Chicago’s Little Theatre, and the design work of Livingston Platt also played an important part in introducing this style to American production.

While The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife occupies a critical position in the history of American theatre design, it was Jones’s other designs – for The Devil’s Garden, directed by Arthur Hopkins in 1915; for the John Barrymore Shakespeare productions (also directed by Hopkins) during the following decade; and his work on the major plays of Eugene O’Neill for the Provincetown Players – that actually popularized the New Stagecraft.

Introduction

The end of World War II did not instantly create a revolution in American stage direction, but it would not be long before radical new developments began to affect the field. During the early postwar years Broadway remained the principal source of all important American theatre activity, but it would soon find its eminence threatened. The major directors of the day were, for the most part, veterans with established track records, although several were younger men and women who would quickly assume command in the staging of both straight plays and musicals. Before long, realism – the dramatic theatre’s mainstay in 1945 – would be countered by various forms of theatricalism, choreographers would assume the director’s mantle, the invisible director would be rivaled by the auteur, and the director’s white male hegemony would be challenged.

This chapter looks at these developments in a roughly chronological order. In most – not all – cases, directors are mentioned or discussed in section covering the period during which they first began to make their mark, even though their work continued into later decades. In the 1945–1960 section, the names of new postwar directors mentioned, but not discussed, are accompanied by the year of their first Broadway production (see also Kliewer, Chapter 9, Volume 2).

Background

In the beginning was the Group Theatre. Co-founded in 1931 by Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford, the Group was a young people’s theatre dedicated to producing new American plays which illuminated the troubled spirit of the times. Defecting from the Theatre Guild, the Group’s leaders designed their new theatre on native grounds. In the twenties the Guild had been America’s leading art theatre, but with the advent of the Depression the Group’s firebrands had begun to regard it as an elitist, out-dated producer of mostly foreign plays. And unlike the Theatre Guild, which claimed the no-stars policy of a repertory company but nonetheless frequently featured the Lunts as headliners, its leaders envisioned the Group as a true company united by political convictions and molded into an ensemble through the common study of a specific acting technique. In its approach to actor training the Group has had a profound and enduring impact on the formation of what has come to be known as the American style.

For Clurman and Strasberg the concept of an ensemble tightly bound by its immersion in a particular approach to actor training was sparked by the visit to New York in 1923 of Stanislavsky’s renowned Moscow Art Theatre. Having been instructed in his system by Stanislavsky himself and having worked together over long rehearsal periods on plays, like those by Chekhov, which had been written especially for them, the troupe performed in a radiant style: realism lit by a remarkable depth and unity. When two members of Stanislavsky’s company, Richard Boleslavski and Maria Ouspenskaya, remained behind to teach the principles of Stanislavsky’s system, Strasberg, Clurman, and others who were to join the Group attended their courses at the American Laboratory Theatre.

The previous volume of this History told the story of the growth of Broadway theatre, the emergence of major playwrights, the shift from melodrama to a new realism and from that realism to a self-conscious experimentalism. It identified the extent to which the theatre reflected social change, as America moved from a rural to an urban economy, engaged a modernity which both delighted and appalled, and found in social inequity the source of dramatic energy. It charted the continuing influence, on actor training and design no less than dramaturgy, of the European theatre but also identified the extent to which America now exercised a powerful role. Through boom and Depression, the theatre in all its guises – from the Little Theatre movement, to the Federal Theatre, Broadway comedies and musicals, to powerful dramas of social and psychological experience – proved a public art with public appeal.

Yet already that role was threatened by the emergence of Hollywood. Ahead lay television. By the turn of the twenty-first century hundreds of channels would be available while cyberspace would exert its own seductive allure. Meanwhile, the economics of an art which required the collaborative efforts of a large number of people, used its plant inefficiently, and was often inconveniently situated, made it potentially less attractive than other arts or forms of entertainment.

This volume, though, is not an account of decline. Indeed, in some respects it covers a period in which the achievements of the American theatre were acknowledged worldwide as never before. For much of the second half of the century its playwrights were dominant, its musicals defined the genre, its actors, directors, and designers proved uniquely talented and internationally influential.

Introduction

The history of the United States, more than that of most nations, has been depicted as a grand and heroic narrative – a great epic of the triumph of the human spirit over adversity, the victory of good over evil, and the success of the individual in the face of enormous odds. From colonial times well into the twentieth century, the theatre was not only a reflection of this mythology, it was a crucial instrument for the molding of public perceptions. Prior to the birth of the movies – which did not really become a mass medium until the 1910s – theatre, especially in its popular incarnations, such as circus, vaudeville, and minstrel shows, was the closest thing to a national forum that the country had. Ideas were debated, public opinion was formulated, and national consciousness was achieved on the stages of American playhouses. In this context, the melodrama – the dominant form of the nineteenth century – was something close to American classicism. It created such quintessential figures as Mose the Bowery B’hoy, Nimrod Wildfire, Jonathan, and their kin – all symbols of the young, energetic, and fundamentally good American society, and all players in the grand story. As long as the American narrative was unfolding, the popular drama was a critical tool for the dissemination of ideas and the creation of a national sense of unity and purpose. But World War I began to reshape American consciousness as the country was no longer one player among many on the world stage but a protagonist; World War II continued the transformation of global politics and economics while permanently altering America’s international position and fundamentally transforming American life and sensibility.

Introduction

Several years after the close of World War II, Joseph Wood Krutch attempted to identify the distinguishing character of modern drama. Focusing on what is now commonly thought of as the first phase of modern drama, from Ibsen through Pirandello (c. 1880–1920), Krutch observed a recurring assumption of European drama: that a cavernous gap lay between the values of previous centuries and the values of our own. Those few who clung to the remnants of moral tradition could only admit, like the despairing old carpenter in Friedrich Hebbel’s Maria Magdalena (1844), “I do not understand the world anymore.”

Such a vision of the twentieth century as fundamentally different from and alien to all previous human history became, in Krutch’s assessment, the defining character of “Modernism.” Its assimilation into the national character of America, however, and hence of that country’s drama, was somewhat delayed. Eugene O’Neill and Maxwell Anderson, he claimed, though responsible for the passage of American drama from childhood to adolescence, were essentially writing classical tragedy at a time when Ibsen, Chekhov, and Strindberg were already dead and Shaw’s major work was done.

Krutch acknowledged, of course, the work of those American playwrights who began extending the boundaries of dramatic form in ways that both imitated and anticipated such European experiments as Surrealism, Dadaism, Expressionism, and epic theatre. O’Neill’s use of episodic form, Expressionistic techniques, and masks (The Hairy Ape, 1922, and The Great God Brown, 1926) contributed notably to new dramatic structures, as did Thornton Wilder’s fluid treatments of time (Our Town, 1938, and The Skin of Our Teeth, 1942), Tennessee Williams’s memory devices and slide screens (The Glass Menagerie, 1945), and Arthur Miller’s cinematic reveries (Death of a Salesman, 1949).

by the first decade of the fourteenth century, Florence had become a great trading city, had evolved a political system which allowed its leading merchant families to enjoy power without provoking the destructive feuds that had marred its earlier history and was on the threshold of an outburst of creative vitality in literature and art that produced the great works of Dante, Giotto and their contemporaries. A hundred years later, it stood on the verge of the most brilliant age of its culture, that of the Renaissance. In between, it passed through a crisis that led to ideological and intellectual readjustments, enabling some of the inheritance of the past to be preserved in a modified form and some to be transformed to suit new circumstances. Between about 1301 and 1342, the city drew on the capital of its previous achievements, enjoying a period of commercial expansion, of comparative internal stability and of successful, if ultimately wasteful, military conflicts with its neighbours. Then, between 1342 and 1382, came a time of economic and demographic contraction and crisis, and of tension between elements in the Florentine community which had previously either been reconciled to each other or held in check by dominant political forces. This was a stage in the city’s history when there was a break with the lines of development of the past without a clear sense of new directions emerging to replace them. Finally, between 1382 and about 1402, the authority of its political elite came to be reasserted and the foundations laid for a new culture.

western Europe in the fourteenth century was as diverse as the states of which it was composed. It followed the rhythm of a history dictated by its capricious geography, imposed by frequently divergent traditions and which men, whose reflexes gradually freed themselves from feudal constraints, wrote down. But beyond this diversity, in the fourteenth century there was also unity; the medieval west was deeply rooted in a common religion and a common culture. Christendom and Latinity made a unified zone, even if papacy and empire still disputed a supremacy which the slow but sure assertion of states shattered into pieces. They all shared the same adventure, all reacting as Christian princes in the construction of their political systems. In this century, when feudalism died, absolute monarchy everywhere took its first steps. But still very cautiously, propagandists, philosophers and jurists occupying a position of prime importance in the life of these young states, as if to devise their architecture and focus their birth. They thought out, each in their own way, a theory of politics (see section 1, below) which princes, councillors and administrators slowly assimilated to construct a true art of government (section 2, below).

1378 and its consequences

the southern French popes who ruled the universal Church from Avignon during most of the fourteenth century brought papal monarchy and the papalist ecclesiology that justified it to their highest pitch. What drove them chiefly was the need for enormously higher revenues to finance the endless wars that they fought to subdue the Papal States in Italy. For at the core of Avignon’s papal monarchy was a rampant ‘fiscalism’ in which the steady extension of papal rights of provision to benefices steadily generated new or heightened impositions on clerical revenues. But the communes and signorie of the Papal States never learned to accept their French overlords and in 1375 they joined Florence in war against them. The seventh Avignon pope, Gregory XI (1370–8), realising that papal domination could not be consolidated from afar, gave ear to pious voices urging a return to Rome and decided to make the move; he left Avignon in 1376 along with seventeen of his twenty-three cardinals and hundreds of officials of the papal curia, mostly French; only six cardinals and a reduced staff were left behind. The papal party entered Rome on 17 January 1377; just over a year later Gregory was dead.

the university network

although there were still relatively few universities in western Europe in the fourteenth century, they occupied an unchallenged and powerful position in the development and diffusion of learning. The major centres of the university network remained the oldest universities, which had been founded at the beginning of the thirteenth century at Bologna, Paris and Oxford. Their prestige was unrivalled, and they attracted the largest numbers of students. They were both bench-marks for teaching standards and models for the institutional framework of newer foundations.

A dozen other universities appeared in the course of the thirteenth century, but their influence was much smaller. Although some, such as Cambridge or the faculty of medicine at Montpellier, were almost as old as those already mentioned, others were more recent foundations, dating above all from the 1250s and 1260s, amongst them Padua in Italy, Toulouse in France and Salamanca in Spain. Others (such as Lisbon, Lérida and the law faculty at Montpellier) dated from the very last years of the thirteenth century, and heralded the new foundations of the fourteenth.

These testified to the success of the university, which was an established institution from this date onwards. Nevertheless, the rate of foundation remained modest. In some cases, this was simply done by papal confirmation of the status of studium generale in schools which had already operated on a university level for varying periods of time: this happened, for example, to the law school at Orléans (1306), whose privileges were extended to those at Angers in 1364, as well as for the studium of Valladolid (1346) in Castile.

at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the consequences of the Byzantine reconquest of 1261 on the expansion of Latins into the Aegean and the Balkans were clearly felt. Michael VIII Palaeologus had opened access to the Black Sea to the Genoese by the Treaty of Nymphaeum, and to the Venetians in the years that followed, and recognised the principal conquests made by the latter after the Fourth Crusade. A chain of ports of call and trading-posts stretched along the main sea routes, since Andronikos II had abandoned the maintenance of a Byzantine fleet as too costly. The Aegean Sea was thus at the heart of the great trade routes which led from Italy to Constantinople and the Black Sea, Cyprus and Lesser Armenia, Syria and Alexandria. Control of the islands and coasts became a vital necessity for the Italian maritime republics and the object of frantic competition between them: from this sprang the three ‘colonial’ wars between Genoa and Venice in the course of the fourteenth century. Their only result was a de facto sharing of the Aegean: Venice had the western and southern coasts, with Messenia, Crete and Negroponte, Genoa the eastern coasts with Chios and Mytilene, while the Catalans were to come to disturb Italian maritime and commercial hegemony through their domination over the duchy of Athens and the rapid development of piracy.

the fourteenth century saw the triumphant expansion of Gothic architecture from a largely French into a wholly European phenomenon. Gothic became the dominant visual language of Christendom, and in the process underwent a transformation of almost everything that it had meant in the first century of its life. Conceived as the theological and liturgical handmaiden of a small and homogeneous circle of European higher clergy, it now emerged, revitalised but fragmented, as the architecture of a socially diverse patronage, much of it lay rather than ecclesiastical. In the hands of kings, princes, the higher nobility, a prosperous bourgeoisie and the ‘popular’ orders of the friars, Gothic proliferated into new, more secular, genres, promoted in part by the expectations of this new clientèle. If the ‘great church’ – the basilican cathedral and monastic church – dominated the first one hundred years of Gothic, the chapel, the castle-palace, the city and its public buildings were now, for the first time, recognized as the principal architectural challenges of the later Middle Ages. In turn, these new classes of patron altered the geography of medieval art. The architectural hegemony enjoyed by Paris and northern France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries came to be disputed by centres of patronage hitherto on the fringes of the Gothic world – Naples, Florence, Cologne, London, Barcelona, Prague and Marienburg – many of them new capitals of lay government. Such shifts in the balance of artistic power had profound consequences for the history of architectural style.