Abstract
During the 1920s, theatre flourished as never before during its long history in the United States. Broadway was the vibrant centre of theatrical activities, a ‘paradise for playwrights’, in Brenda Murphy’s words.1 On the average, more than 200 new productions opened each year on the Great White Way.2 By 1927, there were 76 theatres in New York City used for plays and musical comedies, twice as many as had been available only 12 years before.3 Although playwrights such as Elmer Rice, Philip Barry and George S. Kaufman became certified Broadway favourites, they all were overshadowed by a relative newcomer, Eugene O’Neill, who was repeatedly singled out, even during the 1920s, as the inheritor of the mantle of Shakespeare, Ibsen and Shaw, and the chief native architect of what one well-regarded critic, Walter Prichard Eaton, called ‘the true theatre, the true spoken drama’.4 O’Neill, more than any other playwright, succeeded in establishing ‘America’s kinship’, in the words of one of his earliest champions, ‘with the stage of the modern world’.5 With O’Neill’s long string of Broadway successes during the 1920s, from Beyond the Horizon to Strange Interlude, ‘American drama’, Barnard Hewitt announced, finally ‘came of age’.
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Notes
Brenda Murphy, ‘Plays and Playwrights: 1915–1945’, in Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby, eds, The Cambridge History of American Theatre, Volume Two: 1870–1945’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p.289.
Jack Poggi, Theater in America: The Impact of Economic Forces, 1870–1967 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), p.47.
Walter Prichard Eaton, ‘The strangling of our theatre: Dangers involved in the coming control, by film producers, of the American stage’, Vanity Fair, April 1926: 48, 144.
Ludwig Lewisohn (1920), cited in Barnard Hewitt, Theatre U.S.A.: 1668 to 1957 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), p.331.
Paul DiMaggio, ‘Cultural Boundaries and Structural Change: The Extension of the High Culture Model to Theater, Opera, and the Dance, 1900–1940’, in Michèle Lamont and Marcel Fournier, eds, Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p.29
Richard Butsch, The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p.122.
Alfred L. Bernheim, The Business of the Theatre: An Economic History of the American Theatre, 1750–1932 (1932; New York: Benjamin Blom, 1964), p.91.
Joseph Jefferson, The Autobiography of Joseph Jefferson, ed. Alan S. Downer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), p.312.
Charles Coburn, ‘Our theatre fighting for its life’, Theatre Magazine, July 1926: 9.
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Michael Kammen, The Lively Years: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p.31.
Gilbert Seldes, The 7 Lively Arts (New York: Dover [1924], 2001), p.348.
Jacques Derrida, ‘The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p.247.
Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p.3.
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Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), p.323
Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).
David Savran, ‘Middlebrow Anxiety’, A Queer Sort of Materialism: Recontextualizing American Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), pp.3–55.
George Jean Nathan, The Popular Theatre (1918; New York: Knopf, 1923), pp.9, 44.
Gerald Bordman, The Oxford Companion to American Theatre, 2nd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p.461.
Burns Mantle, ‘Introduction’, The Best Plays of 1919–20 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1920), p.iv.
Mantle, ‘Introduction’, The Best Plays of 1919–20, p.iv
Burns Mantle, ‘Introduction’, The Best Plays of 1921–22 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1922), p.iii.
Burns Mantle, ‘Introduction’, The Best Plays of 1920–21 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1921), p.iii.
André Siegfried, America Comes of Age, trans. H. H. Hemming and Doris Hemming (New York: Harcourt, Brace 1927), p.3.
C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), p.146.
Thomas F. Connolly, George Jean Nathan and the Making of Modern American Drama Criticism (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), p.27.
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© 2006 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Savran, D. (2006). The curse of legitimacy. In: Ackerman, A., Puchner, M. (eds) Against Theatre. Performance Interventions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230289086_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230289086_11
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