THE JOURNAL OF

AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 16, Number 2 Spring 2004
General Editor: David Savran
Guest Editor: William W. Demastes
Managing Editor: Ken Nielsen
Editorial Assistant: Amy E. Hughes
Circulation Manager: Jill Stevenson
Circulation Assistant: Serap Erincin
Professsor Daniel Gerould, Executive Director
Professor Edwin Wilson, Chairman, Advisory Board
Frank Hentschker, Director of Special Projects
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL AND UNIVERSilY CENTER
OF THE CllY UNIVERSilY OF NEW YORK
Editorial Board
Philip Auslander
Una Chaudhuri
William Demastes
Harry Elam
Jorge Huerta
Stacy Wolf
Shannon Jackson
Jonathan Kalb
Jill Lane
Thomas Postlewait
Robert Vorlicky
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THE JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE
Volume 16, Number 2 Spring 2004
Contents
fROM THE EDITOR
BARBARA 0ZIEBLO,
AVANT-GARDE AND MODERNIST: WOMEN DRAMATISTS OF
THE PROVINCETOWN PLAYERS: BRYANT, DAVIES AND MILLAY
ROBERT F. GROSS,
FIGHTING DISEASE, SEDUCING CAVALRYMEN AND ACHIEVING
MODERNITY: YELLOW JACK
DOROTHY CHANSKY,
KITCHEN SINK REAUSMS: AMERICAN DRAMA, DINING AND DOMESTIC
lABOR COME OF AGE IN lmLE THEATRE
JULIA A. WALKER,
BODIES, VOICES, WORDS:
ELMER RICE AND THE CINEMATIC IMAGINATION
DEBORAH R. GElS,
HAWTHORNE'S HESTER AS A RED-LETTERED BLACK WOMAN:
SUZAN-LORI PARKS'S IN THE BLOOD AND FUCKING A
ROBERT FRANCIOSI
BRINGING THE WALL TO BROADWAY
CONTRIBUTORS
IV
1
17
37
57
77
88
98
Journal of American Drama and Theatre 16, no. 2 (Spring 2004)
Introduction: Modernism and More
Once again, JADTs Editorial Board has allowed the American
Theatre and Drama Society (ATDS) to dedicate a special issue of the
journal to the publication of a group of essays derived from
presentations sponsored by ATDS and given at last year's ATHE, MLA,
and ALA conferences. The first four essays concentrate on modernism
and the American theatre while the latter two move beyond that
period into that enigmatic period curiously labeled postmodernism.
"Avant-garde and Modernist Women Dramatists of the
Provincetown Players: Bryant, Davies and Millay" by Barbara Ozieblo
positions three women playwrights from the Provincetown Players
squarely into the modernist movement so committed to attacking the
theatricality of its day. Ozieblo argues that "their origins lie precisely in
their rebellion against the theatricality that modernism objected to, the
'patterned,' anti-imaginative type of theatre with which Broadway
regaled its audiences."
In "Fighting Disease, Seducing cavalrymen and Achieving
Modernity: Yellow Jack," Robert F. Gross studies Sidney Howard's
drama which presents, as Gross reports, "the complex relationships
among medicine, modernity and masculinity in American drama of the
1930s." As he concludes his study, Gross tantalizingly suggests a
parallel between the yellow fever in Howard's drama and an equivalent
plague found in Irene Maria Fornes's 1990s postmodern work, Enter
THE NIGHT. Readers may also see reflections of Yellow Jack in Tony
Kushner's epic works.
Dorothy Chansky's "Kitchen Sink Realisms: American Drama,
Dining, and Domestic Labor Come of Age in Little Theatre" takes a
phrase from the 1950s theatre critic's notebook and studies its
applicability to three plays from the middle years of the Little Theatre
movement, 1918-1921, arguing that they "are forerunners to the sorts
of present-day plays that investigate upper middle class angst and self-
actualization in terms of food and domesticity even as they largely
bracket off the labor and class relations that make possible the very
worries and practices by which the protagonists define themselves."
Julia A. Walker's "Bodies, Voices, Words: Elmer Rice and the
Cinematic Imagination" challenges the idea that American modernist
expression is exclusively rooted in German antecedents; rather, she
sees much of the American experiment with what was to be termed
Expressionism as an "aesthetic response to the revolution in
communications technology at the turn of the 20th century," which has
taken "integrated bodily processes" and "splintered [them] into the
newly isolable elements of bodies, voices, and words." Walker
concludes: "Considered as a performative (rather than literary) whole,
then, the formal evidence in Rice's play [The Adding Machine] points
v
to the expressive culture movement, rather than German
expressionism, as the source of his expressionistic style."
At this point the essays' foci shift a bit in time and tenor,
though connections still exist. They begin with considerations of
translations of literary texts to performativejstaged works but then
penetrate much further. In "Hawthorne's Hester as a Red-Lettered
Black Woman?: Suzan-Lori Parks's In the Blood and Fucking A,"
Deborah R. Geis sees Parks's assaults on various icons of American
literature as an attempt to create an "unconventional theater style to
get the audience to examine its own guilty spectatorship and cultural
tourism." By "rewriting Hester Prynne, [Parks] insists that we consider
her again through the lens of our cruel and continuing histories of
oppression." The stage viscerally engages and indicts as no mere page
of text can.
In "Bringing The Wall to Broadway," Robert Franciosi also
considers an enterprise involving moving from the page to the stage:
a sweeping, graphic and disturbing adaptation of a Holocaust text,
Millard Lampell's dramatization of The Wall, John Hersey's epic novel
of the Warsaw Ghetto. Franciosi documents the difficulties involved in
presenting an unsentimental assault on theatre-goers' senses as the
stage presents the horrors that in many ways uprooted our modernist
leanings and led postmodernist re-visions.
William W. Demastes
President, American Theatre and Drama Society
Louisiana State University
Journal of American Drama and Theatre 16, no. 2 (Spring 2004)
AVANT-GARDE AND MODERNIST.
WOMEN DRAMATISTS OF THE PROVINCETOWN
PlAYERS: BRYANT, DAVIES AND MILlAY
BARBARA OZIEBLO
1
The theatre's "most glorious achievements," according to
Martin Puchner's provokingly entitled Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-
Theatricality, and Drama, are due to the modernist rejection of
mimesis;l W. B. Yeats, Bertolt Brecht, Gertrude Stein, and others were
suspicious of mimesis, and sought a theatre that would not be
threatened by character, plot, space or time. The same dramatists
have, of course, been claimed as the icons of avant-garde theatre and
Puchner, while he distinguishes between the avant-garde and the
modernist, duly acknowledges that "In fact, modernist anti-
theatricalism and avant-garde theatricalism sometimes come to similar
conclusions, a critique of the actual theater.''2 Puchner concentrates
our attention on selected "glorious achievements" of modernist
theater, but has no space for less visible trail-blazers such as the
Provincetown Players. The complexion of the Provincetown Players
was undoubtedly avant-garde in its time, but-without entering into
the debate on how we define and distinguish between avant-garde
and modernismJ-I would suggest that the Players also displayed a
modernist anti-theatricality which supports Puchner's argument that a
modernist theater is not an oxymoron and that it is enriched by its
opposition to popular, commercial theater, an opposition which it
shares with the avant-garde.
1 Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 13.
2 Ibid., 7.
3 Some authors do not distinguish between the avant-garde and
modernism; others do. For a discussion of the fraught relationship between these
two concepts in European and American crit icism see Astradur Eystensson, The
Concept of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), in particular,
chapter 4, "The Avant-Garde as/ or Modernism?" Also, Peter Carravetta, Prefaces to
the Diaphora: Rhetorics, Allegory, and the Interpretation of Postmodernity (West
Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1992), in particular, chapter 3, "The Wake
of the Avant-Gardes: Culture, Postmodernity, Interpretation." And, of course, Peter
Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1984).
2
0ZIEBLO
This essay will look at the plays of three women dramatists
who supplied the first seasons on Cape Cod and then at the
Playwrights' Theater on Macdougal Street with memorable productions
that were both modernist and avant-garde. In the summer of 1915
George Cram Cook had impressed a group of bohemian writers and
painters into the services of his idealistic scheme to regenerate
America through the theater, and so he laid the foundations for the
Provincetown Players; but it was his wifer Susan Glaspell
1
whor while
first opposing the venture, gave it the constancy and the backbone it
required to succeed. Moreover, her playsr more so even than those of
O'Neill
1
made the Provincetown Players known in New York and in
London; but she was not alone. She was writing in the midst of a
group of women who
1
as Cheryl Black convincingly demonstrates in
The Women of Provincetown, "participated significantly in America's
first important era of dramaturgical experimentation, pioneering
structural and stylistic features for which there was not yet a suitable
critical vocabulary."4 Among these were Louise Bryant, Mary Carolyn
Davies, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose work for the Provincetown
Players I will discuss here.
The outre anti-theatrical stance of much modernism-as
reflected in Pound's desire for a "new dramatic movement
1
plays which
wont [sic] need a stage" or Stein's formulation of the "landscape
play"-may appear to make it difficult to argue that the Provincetown
Players were imbued with a modernist ethos.s The Players certainly
wanted a stage and an audience-they wanted actors too; but their
origins lie precisely in their rebellion against the theatricality that
modernism objected to, the "patterned," anti-imaginative type of
theatre with which Broadway regaled its audiences.G
When the Provincetown Players embarked on their amateur,
experimental venture into histrionics they did not articulate their
distrust of theatricality on theoretical grounds, although they must
have been aware of
1
and undoubtedly participated in
1
considerations
such as those that led Herman Rosse to write "If the plastic arts mean
anything they mean an artificial reality
1
an interpretation of life in
4 Cheryl Black, The Women of Provincetown: 1915-1922 (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 2002), 72.
s Ezra Pound, 1916 letter to his father, qtd. in Peter Nicholls, "Ezra Pound
and the Example of Japanese Noh," ELH 90, no. 1 (January 1995): 2. Gertrude
Stein, "Plays," in Lectures in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1975).
6 See Susan Glaspell, The Road to the Temple (New York: Frederick A.
Stokes, 1927), 248.
AVANT-GARDE AND MODERNIST 3
another medium in an attempt to clarify life itself.'? The Players'
distrust of theatrical mimesis was spontaneous and intuitive; as did
Artaud, they too recognized that theatre no longer revealed "the lie,
the slackness, baseness, and hypocrisy of our world."S One of their
principal influences had been Yeats; according to Glaspell, "Quite
possibly there would have been no Provincetown Players had there not
been Irish Players. What [Cook] saw done for Irish life he wanted for
American life-no stage conventions in the way of projecting with the
humility of true feeling."9 The Neighborhood Playhouse, another
significant influence on the Provincetowners, had held Cook
spellbound with its 1915 evocative dance-drama, Jephthah's Daughter,
thus allowing him to live through the type of theatrical experience that
Edward Gordon Craig advocated .10
What the Players aspired to was a stage for the small group of
like-minded people that would give life to an "American Renaissance of
the Twentieth Century," which, as Cook wrote to Glaspell on 29 May
1912, "is not the task of ninety million people, but of one hundred."ll
Cook was obsessed by the conviction that it was up to him to reform
America and, moved by the Irish Players and performances at the
Neighborhood Playhouse, he gave up his faith in philosophy, politics,
antiquity, or mythology as the means to national regeneration in order
to center all his efforts on the theatre. Although he dreamed that his
transfiguration of America would reach the masses-cook had gone
through a strong socialist phase, as attested by his novel The Chasnr
he firmly believed that the means were in the hands of the aristocratic
few: his own, and those of his chosen "one hundred." Of necessity, this
modernist elitism translated itself into a Little Theatre: quite literally, a
minimal space, a select audience, and a small group of devoted
amateurs.
Cook's idealistic thinking is reflected in the Announcements
that were printed for each season of plays, but also in Glaspell's
biography of her husband, The Road to the Temple, which at first sight
appears to be a simplistic hagiography. However, the chapters on the
7 Herman Rosse, "Artificiality and Reality in the Future Theatre," Theatre
Arts Magazine III, no. 2 (April 1919): 95-97. (My italics.)
s Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline
Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 70.
9 Glaspell, Road to the Temple, 218.
10 Edward Gordon Craig, "The Art of the Theatre. First Dialogue (1905),"
in J. Michael Walton, ed., Craig on Theatre (London: Methuen, 1983), 62.
11 Qtd. in Glaspell, Road to the Temple, 224.
4 0ZIEBLO
Provincetown Players, made up of her selection of Cook's visionary
jottings and ontological musings on the form and role of the theatre in
society, become a treatise on theory and practice that is at least as
significant to an understanding of theatre history as Kenneth
Macgowan's better known The Theatre of Tomorrow. And, in that
Glaspell chose the fragments that make up her text, her voice acquires
an authority that she had always been reluctant to assume.
As so many of the Provincetowners, Cook and Glaspell had
come east from a small Midwestern town that had stifled their creative
spirit in more ways than one. They believed in the "joy," "beauty," and
"play spirit" that the theatre could offer, but also in the spiritual
importance of "bringing down fire from heaven to the stage" and the
cultural and social significance of "caus[ing] better American plays to
be written."12 Inevitably, the communal spirit of the theatre tempered
the elitism of their endeavor, and even Cook, in his self-appointed role
of overlord, bowed to its pressure as he proclaimed: "One man cannot
produce drama. True drama is born only of one feeling animating all
the members of a clan-a spirit shared by all and expressed by the few
for the all . If there is nothing to take the place of the common religious
purpose and passion of the primitive group, out of which the Dionysian
dance was born, no new vital drama can arise in any people."B
Disapproval of facile Broadway realism and a readiness to
experiment with stage design did not lead the Provincetown Players to
consider dispensing with the actor, the most obviously mimetic
element in any production, in favor of a Craigan Ober-marionette.
Their actors, initially, did not belong to any school of acting-although
Glaspell would be fascinated by Stanislavsky's My Life in Art when it
was published in America.14 They were simply, in Ida Rauh's words,
intent on "creating a new world ... a new theatre."1S One part of this
"newness" lay in rejecting the melodramatic gestures James O'Neill Sr.
tried to infuse into their performances,16 but it took some time for
them to work out and put into practice a new acting style. Meanwhile,
their acting, as that of all the Little Theatres, irritated most critics who
12 Glaspell, Road to the Temple, 263-64. (Italics in original.)
13 Ibid., 252.
14 Four pages of Glaspell's undated notes, and quotations from My Life in
Art (1924), are among her papers in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library.
15 Qtd. in Black, 7.
16 Hutchins Hapgood, A Victorian in the Modern World (1939; reprint,
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1972), 399.
AVANT-GARDE AND MODERNIST 5
found themselves disconcerted by what they saw as stumbling
attempts at innovation; John Corbin, writing in The New York Times,
condemned acting that was "more notable for its intention than for its
achievement,"17 and Jacques Copeau, when he attended a
performance of Glaspell's The People in 1917, berated the actors
soundly for their clumsy movements. The one person he had praise for
was Glaspell herself, who played the Woman from Idaho. Copeau
admitted that, "the simplicity of her attitude, the pure quality of her
person, the inimitable feeling in a nuance of her intonation" had
"touched [him] to the core."18
What Copeau praised in Glaspell's acting was in fact a
technique that the Provincetown Players were already consciously
beginning to adopt. In imitation of the Irish Players many of them had
admired, they were experimenting with an acting style that rejected
the histrionic and the mimetic in favor of the psychologically truthful.19
Cheryl Black argues that Glaspell was not alone in gaining recognition
for her acting and insists that: "Provincetown's actresses, no less than
its playwrights, were ahead of their time in pioneering new styles.''2o
Many of the Provincetown playwrights contrived to
amalgamate symbolism, surrealism or expressionism with vestiges of
melodrama or realism, thus creating plays that escaped classical
definition and befuddled reviewers. On the whole, they fulfill the
classical unities of times and place because of the limits imposed by a
short play performed on a stage that did not allow for complicated
scene changing. But the unity of plot was generally disregarded in that
there was no plot: no development, no denouement. A mood would be
created, as in O'Neill's Bound East for Cardiff, an issue discussed,
conclusions pointed to or left open, as in Glaspell's Trifles and Bernice,
but there was rarely any exciting action to awake a drowsy audience.
17 John Corbin, " Little Theater Plays," New York Times, 11 November
1917, sec. 8:6.
18 Qtd. in Barbara Ozieblo, Susan Glaspe/1: A Critical Biography, (Chapel
Hill: University of North carolina Press, 2001), 110.
19 The Provincetown Players' self-learnt technique, and the incorporation
of trained actresses such as Ann Harding, gave results: an unsigned review of
Inheritors stated categorically that "The Provincetown Players unquestionably act
well." ("Drama: Inheritors at Provincetown and Nice People on Broadway," Weekly
Review, 13 April 1921. Unsigned clipping in Provincetown Players' Scrapbook, Billy
Rose Theater Collection, New York Public Library.)
20 Black, 92.
6 OZIEBLO
Their rejection of the mimetic theatricality and commercialism
of Broadway and their insistence on the "group spirit" have won for the
Players a place in the histories of the American avant-garde theatre. In
1980, Ross Wetzsteon recognized that "Off-Broadway's roots go back
over fifty years," and that they include the Provincetown Players.Zl
More recently, Arnold Aronson also accepts that the little theatres,
among them the Provincetown Players, were the "spiritual roots" of
Off-Broadway. In his account of the origins of the avant-garde,
Aronson limits the influence of the 1913 Armory Show to the visual art
world. While there is no proof that Glaspell saw the Armory Show, it
certainly did impress Cook, and so was a significant element in what
"set wheels turning" in the American theatre.z2 Cook wrote to Glaspell
that he had been "perfectly fascinated" by the Show, which reaffirmed
his faith in spiritual regeneration through art and so precipitated his
desire for an autonomous, artistic theatre23-for the attempt to "alter
the institutionalized commerce with art"24-and for productions that
rejected the realistic mise en scene and searched for an inner truth not
to be found on Broadway.
For Wetzsteon, the Off-Broadway of the early 60s was "less a
place than a state-of-mind-a commitment to the idea that whatever
theatre might be, it was not a packaged product."zs As we have
already seen, such a definition would work for the Provincetown
Players; although, of course, they were linked to a specific place-the
sand dunes of Provincetown and then Macdougal Street in Greenwich
Village. When the Provincetown Players constituted themselves in
September of 1916, they accepted a set of"Resolutions," presented by
Jack Reed, which point ahead to the avant-garde theatres of the 60s.
Although great stress was laid on the author's continuing responsibility
once the play had been accepted, the idea of communal effort
prevailed. To begin with, the President (George Cram Cook) would
"cooperate with the author, in producing the play under the author's
21 Ross Wetzsteon, ed., The Obie Winners: The Best of Off-Broadway
(New York: Doubleday, 1980), vi.
22 Arnold Aronson, American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History (London:
Routledge, 2000), 15.
23 George Cram Cook to Susan Glaspell, 15 March 1913, Berg
Collection, New York Public Library. Qtd. in Ozieblo, Susan Glaspell, 76.
24 Jochen Schulte-Sasse, "Foreword: Theory of Modernism versus Theory
of the Avant-Garde," in Burger, xv.
25 Wetzsteon, viii.
AVANT-GARDE AND MODERNIST 7
direction,"26 and he would also assist in the casting and rehearsing. But
all "Active Members" were expected to participate in the various tasks
and chores which running a theatre and selecting and presenting a
new bill of three plays every two weeks involved, and "enthusiasm,"
"interest," and "democratic" control were naively safeguarded by
specific resolutions. This is probably the first time in American
dramatic history that the author is granted such responsibility for the
production of her/his play without denying the participation of the
ensemble of actors and technicians. The need for more knowledgeable
directing was, however, soon recognized, and the author's obligation
to direct his/her own play was waived when Nina Moise, an
experienced, professional director, joined the Players in early 1917. But
authors were still involved in the production of their plays, and once
Moise had left in 1918, they directed or co-directed, as Cheryl Black
affirms, "with a clearer understanding of directorial responsibilities."27
While group performance and production was, according to Puchner,
"anathema to many modernists," and is clearly a characteristic of later
avant-garde productions such as those of the Open Theater, insistence
on the author's control of the end product is more in tune with the
modernist "stress on the individual egoism of the artist and its
elitism."28 By successfully merging the two strategies, Cook achieved
that seeming oxymoron of an avant-garde, modernist theatre,
blending theatricality with anti-theatricality and realism with
innovative, experimental stage devices.
The first plays performed by the as yet unnamed Provincetown
Players in the summers of 1915 and 1916 moved away from the
"patterns" of Broadway in their subject matter, and in the
inexperienced, non-professional status of playwrights, actors and
venues. Theories of rebellion from these patterns, although discussed
and well known from European travel, and through the performances
of the Irish Players and the Neighborhood Playhouse, had not
consciously been put into practice; the spirit of play dominated. But
the second bill of the summer 1916 season, performed at the end of
July, radically broke all accepted patterns and launched the
Provincetown Players on their exploration of innovative theatrical
modes.
26 Minute Book of the Provincetown Players, 5 September 1916, Billy
Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library. Qtd. in Ozieblo, Susan G/aspe/1,
90.
27 Black, 103.
28 Puchner, 103; Christopher Innes, "Modernism in Drama," in Michael
Levenson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 131.
8 0ZIEBLO
O'Neill's Bound East for Cardiff, with the fog, the fog horn, and
the ocean stirring ominously under the audience's feet, offered, in its
first performance, an odd mixture of realism and expressionism; the
lack of plot and the total dependence on the evocation of a mood
intrigued and entranced the audience. 29 The second piece, Louise
Bryant's The Game, in which Life and Death play a game of dice for
the life-or death-of Youth and The Girl, introduced the Players to
stylization in setting and movement.3o Wilbur Daniel Steele's Not
Smart, a witty sketch on bohemian hypocritical double standards,
allowed the audience to leave the makeshift theatre, a rickety shed on
a disused wharf, laughing lightheartedly, the more serious
problematics of the first two plays already forgotten.
The backdrop for The Game inspired the design that would
become the group logo. Bryant gave artists Marguerite and William
Zorach, who had exhibited at the Armory Show, carte blanche to stage
her play and they painted a stylistic representation of an Egyptian bas-
relief for the setting to her discussion of suicide and love. Marguerite
then added quasi-geometrical figures and designed a woodcut for the
Provincetown programs, thus demonstrating that the Players were
committed to stage experiments that paralleled those taking place in
the art world. The backdrop represents a number of column-like trees
with a totem or sacrificial font in the middle supporting the sun. The
regular wavy lines representing the sea and the rock-like formations in
the lower area give the sense of the cliff from which the Youth and the
Girl would jump to death if Life lost her game of dice with Death. This
painted backdrop, "a cubist version of the view from Provincetown
harbor," most definitely not a realistic Belasco setting, was an integral
aspect of the play for Bryant.31 So much so, that when it was
published, she added the following commentary that reveals the
Provincetowners' early commitment to European experiment in theater
in their desire to offer American playwrights a stage on which to
experiment:
29 See Glaspell, Road to the Temple, 254.
30 Louise Bryant, The Game, in Frank Shay, ed., The Provincetown Plays
(New York: Frank Shay, 1916), 29-42. All future ci tat ions will appear parent hetically
in the text.
31 Robert Karoly Sarlos, Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players: Theatre
in Ferment (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1982) , 24.
AVANT-GARDE AND MODERNIST
The Game is an attempt to synthesize decoration,
costume, speech and action into one mood. Starting
from the idea that the play is symbolic of rather than
representative of life, the Zorachs have designed the
decorations to suggest rather than to portray; the
speech and action of the players being used as the
plastic element in the whole unified convention. As
the gestures and decorations of this play are as
important as the written speech it is essential that
theatres wishing to produce The Game should send
for photographs and directions. (28)
9
Deutsch and Hanau, in the earliest published history of the
Provincetown Players, describe The Game as a "particularly brilliant
morality play," while for the Gelbs it was but a "pallid morality play";32
but whether brilliant or pallid, the "moral" escapes definition. Possibly,
Bryant, in keeping with the craze for psychoanalysis that was sweeping
through American bohemia, was trying to make a personal statement
that the first Provincetown audience, made up of more or less
approving witnesses of her amatory arrangements, would probably
have understood. Although Bryant was very much in love with Jack
Reed, she had quickly brought O'Neill into what appeared to be a
satisfactory threesome, and Life's simplistic pronouncements on the
subject of love and desire may well reflect her own uncertainties. In
her play, Life manages to contrive things so that the two young people,
the Youth, a Poet, and the Girl, a a n c e ~ both having mistakenly taken
Desire to be Love in previous relationships, and so suffering from acute
disappointment, meet-and, of course, fall in love. The dialogue is
superficial, full of trifling observations and macho comments, such as
the Youth's "Why should she? Women do not have to understand" in
response to Life's question: "Did your sweetheart understand your
songs?" (33) The final words of the play, Life's declaration that "I must
never let [Death] know how much I mind losing soldiers. They are the
flower of youth-there are dreamers among them .... " (42) would
have raised applause from an audience then actively involved in the
struggle against American participation in the war in Europe.
The Game was performed before Jack Reed's "Resolutions"
had given the Provincetown Players a definite sense of purpose, and
although it seems that Bryant was involved in the production, the New
32 Helen Deutsch and Stella Hanau, The Provincetown: A Story of the
Theatre (1931; reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1972), 13. Arthur and
Barbara Gelb, O'Neill (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 310.
10 OzrEBLO
York program, as reproduced with the published play, indicates that
the Zorachs not only painted the backdrop, but that they "staged" the
play (28), and their influence is felt in the two photographs that Robert
Karoly Sarlos reproduces.33 The characters, as we see in the
photographs, adopt stylized poses that fit into the bas-relief
impression of the backdrop, and, apart from the Girl's dance inspired
by the Youth's poems, the play impresses the reader as static, with an
almost dream-like quality. The action is limited to the throwing of dice
and the suspense is minimal, since we do not doubt from the very
beginning that Death will lose out in his struggle for the two young
geniuses that Life desires to keep for herself. The slight dialogue
appears insipid compared with the modernist conception of setting and
movements that explores the possibilities of suggestion. Later
Provincetown plays, such as Glaspell's The Outside, and, of course,
The Verge, experiment with language to express, not only through
words, but also through structure and rhythms, the inner feelings of
the speaker. Bryant's treatment is more superficial as she touches on
the meaning of life, on the right to suicide, and on the importance of
love, never taking the discussion into deeper or more philosophical
terrain than Life's proclamation that she cannot promise that love "will
endure," or her suggestion that "What if it is himself he loves in you?
That too, is Love." (38) If we are searching for a moral or a lesson in
how to deal with life's problems, all we can do is to echo the Girl when
she cries out: "To be supremely happy for a moment-an hour-that
is worth living for!" (38)
The merit of The Game lies in the departure from realism in
both setting and acting that would become characteristic of the work
of the Provincetown Players. This spirit of innovation has never been
sufficiently recognized; most writers and critics have focused on the
Provincetown Players' "socio-realistic outlook" although Edna Kenton,
their unofficial historian, always insisted that they preferred "poetic
and fantasy plays."34
33 Sarlos, 26 and 27.
34 Gerhard Bach, "Susan Glaspell: Provincetown Playwright," Great Lakes
Review, 24:2 (1978): 35; Sarlos, 88 and ch. 6; Edna Kenton, "The Provincetown
Players and the Playwrights' Theatre," 89, Fales Collection, Elmer Bobst Library,
New York University; Ozieblo, Susan Glaspe/1, 104-05.
AVANT-GARDE AND MODERNIST 11
Another piece that qualifies as a "fantasy play" is Mary Carolyn
Davies's The Slave with Two Faces: An Allegory,3s which was
performed from 25 to 31 January 1918, on the Fourth Bill of the 1918-
19 season, together with Grace Potter's About Six and Floyd Dell's
Sweet and Twenty.36 I have not been able to find Potter's play, but
Sarlos quotes James Light's description: a "snappy, witty domestic
comedy," and tells us that Dell's play was the "main attraction.''37 If so,
it must have been because Edna St. Vincent Millay, known as "the
beautiful young actress at the Provincetown," took the part of the
ingenue in Dell's rather tiresome discussion of marriage.38
Davies's The Slave with Two Faces is a clever, well-paced
allegory on how best to live life, that Sarlos demotes to a "fairy-tale.''39
The "slave with two faces" is Life himself, at times masterful, proud
and unrelenting, and, at others, docile and submissive. We learn that
we must never show fear; the moment Life realizes we are afraid of
him, he transforms into an ugly, cruel master that knows no pity. Two
girls discuss this in an opening dialogue, the First Girl warning the
Second that she must never let Life see her without her crown. But the
Second Girl, when left alone with Life, is easily flattered; he assures
her she is beautiful and that she will be even more beautiful if she
takes off her crown and allows her hair to fly in the wind. By the end
of the play, the Second Girl has become Life's slave, and, unable to
intervene, we watch as he humiliates her, beats her, and eventually,
chokes her to death.
The figure of Life clearly represents life, but it is also tempting
to see him as a representation of the patriarchy. Such an interpretation
would be in accordance with the Provincetown women's feminism,
generally expressed indirectly (or so it seems to us today), in order not
to offend the self-styled male feminists among them-who, with Dell,
35 Mary Carolyn Davies is better known as a poet. Her poems appeared
in the anarchist Blast, and she edited the modernist little magazine Quill. She also
wrote the short plays Cobweb Kings and Tables and Chairs.
36 Mary Carolyn Davies, The Slave with Two Faces, in Barbara Ozieblo,
ed., The Provincetown Players (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), 183-94.
All future citations will appear parenthetically in the text.
37 Sarlos, 86.
38 Deutsch and Hanau, 30.
39 Sarlos, 163.
12 OZIEBLO
preferred women to be passive: "a girl that can be talked to, and that
can be kissed" was Dell's ideai.40 Unfortunately (we may think today),
Davies does not sustain this feminist approach for she also includes a
scene in which Life bullies and mistreats a small group of men who,
too, have shown their fear. However, the heroine of the piece, the First
Girl, is a proto-Hemingway hero who lives to the full, knows she can
get everything she wants, is brazen and courageous, and never shows
her fear, even when Life surprises her straightening the gown of the
murdered Second Girl, who has died with Life's ring on her finger.
The set for The Slave With Two Faces was simple and
effective. As the play begins, the stage directions require two girls to
be waiting for Life on opposite sides of a path that runs through a
wood. Nina Moise directed the play, and Norman Jacobsen designed a
simple set with sloping banks rising gently from the path, thus giving
the small stage greater versatility and allowing for blocking the actors
on different levels and so avoiding crowding. A stage made up of
blocks that would allow different levels was one of George Cram Cook's
dreams; he wanted "plastic elements with which you may compose"
(RT 307), such as he had had in the fish-house on the Provincetown
wharf, where "The stage was in four sections .. . [which] made it
possible to have sets on different levels."41 Jacobsen further gave the
stage a sense of space by using a series of cut-outs to represent the
leafy boughs of trees, which, like inverted Craigian screens, receded
into the background, framing an empty, lighted space which gave a
sense of perspective and distance, increased by the use of color and
detail on the cut-outs.
The Provincetown Players' production of The Slave with Two
Faces, then, true to the allegorical subject matter, rejected the
theatricality of real istic sets, costumes, and acting, but went beyond
realistic representation in its attempt to create a harmonious whole.
Ida Rauh, known as the "Duse of Macdougal Street," took on the role
of Life, which she apparently played with an "appalling zest," but the
movements of the figures implied in the photograph are quite in
keeping with the set.42 Alfred Kreymborg wrote the music for this
piece, and played it himself, according to the program.
The best play of the 1919-20 season, Edna St. Vincent Millay's
40 Floyd Dell, Moon-Calf (New York: Sagamore Press, 1957), 252-53.
41 Glaspell, Road to the Temple, 307; qtd. in Sarlos, 201.
42 Deutsch and Hanau, 50 and 33.
AVANT-GARDE AND MODERNIST 13
Aria Da Capo, is probably the most daring challenge to theatricality
that was staged at the Playwrights' Theater.43 It is also one of the few
short plays to receive Elmer Rice's ungrudging praise, thus, as he
admits, destroying his hypothesis that short plays are "art at a low
level." Rice went even further and affirmed it was "the only actable
poetic play that has been written in America."44 Millay too, was pleased
with herself; writing to her mother she exclaimed triumphantly that it
was "a peach,--one of the best things I've ever done."4S Rather than
use an iambic pentameter line as traditional in drama, she had turned
to the older, four-beat rhythm with a caesura reminiscent of Anglo-
Saxon verse, for what Edmund Wilson, one of her many suitors at that
time, would call, "an eclogue, highly charged and deeply disturbing";
he added that "the characters-as was suitable-were pure
abstractions."46
Aria Da Capo played on Macdougal Street from 5 to 18
December in 1919, and was revived many times. Millay both acted and
directed, thus controlling her play as far as it is possible for the
playwright to do so. She continued this control into the 1924 edition of
the play, where she included a description of the original Provincetown
decor designed by Charles Ellis at her prompting.47 She wanted a
"merry" interior that would highlight the futility of the action, and
photographs show Ellis's black screens, with gay white outline pictures
of trees, flowers, and hills, arranged in a Craig ian fashion so as to give
depth to the small Provincetown stage. A long table, "covered with a
gay black and white cloth, on which is spread a banquet," was placed
parallel to the footlights and as the curtain rises, we see Columbine
and Pierret, sitting on "delicate thin-legged chairs" {219), dining. Their
conversation, a witty repartee, mocks all the fads of the period and
makes allusions that would not have been lost on the Macdougal
43 Edna St. Vi ncent Millay, Aria Da capo, in Ozieblo, ed., The
Provincetown Players, 219-35. All future citations will appear parenthetically in
the text.
44 Elmer Rice, ed., One-Act Plays for Stage and Study (5th Series) (New
York: Samuel French, 1933), viii.
45 Edna St. Vincent Millay to Cora B. Millay, November 1919, in Allan Ross
Macdougal, ed., Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1952), 90.
46 Edmund Wilson, Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties
and Thirties (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1952), 683.
47 Edna St. Vincent Millay, Aria Da Capo (New York: Appleton & Co.,
1924), 39.
14 OZIEBLO
Street audience. Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase
would have been recognized in Pierret's description of the portrait of
Columbine that he suddenly decides to paint: "Ah, yes!-six orange
bull's-eyes, four green pin-wheels,/ And one magenta jelly-roll-the
title/ As follows: Woman Taking In Cheese From Fire-Escape" (220) .
(Millay was surely an exception in the Provincetown crowd; she had
decried the Armory Show as "piles of shingles."4B) Pierret's attack on
socialism must have raised knowledgeable laughs when he
enunciated, "I am become a socialist. I love/ Humanity, but I hate
people" (221) . He then proposes to make an actress of Columbine,
promising, "You' ll be a star by five o'clock . .. That is/ If you will let
me pay for your apartment" (221), which was a clear allusion to David
Belasco's proposition to make Mary Pyne, one of the most successful
Provincetown actresses, famous on Broadway.
As Pierrot attacks art, society, and politics, and Columbine
fusses about the food and worries that her lover is making fun of her,
they are interrupted by Cothurnus, whom Millay identified as "Masque
of Tragedy" in the Dramatis Personae. Cothurnus is more than an
impersonal "masque," however; he is master of the proceedings,
director of the play in which Pierrot and Columbine are acting. His
appearance shatters any illusions of reality we may have been holding
onto; the theatricality of the piece is revealed: we can no longer doubt
that we are watching two actors, two "hypokrates' to use Plato's term,
who are trying to deceive us into believing they are what they are
not.49 As Pierrot and Columbine leave the stage, Cothurnus pages
Thyrsis and Corydon, two shepherds. From off-stage, they complain
that their scene is down for later, that the stage is not set and they are
not " in the fancy/ To play the play" (224). But Cothurnus, reducing the
role of the actor to a mere vehicle for the words, insists that: "The
important thing is that you speak the lines,/ And make the gestures"
(224).
In order to blur even further the edges between "reality" and
"theatricality," the two shepherds are constantly forgetting their words
and need to be prompted by Cothurnus, while Pierret and Columbine
continue their dialogue off-stage, occasionally audibly, so that Thyrsis
and Corydon are interrupted again and again. The two Harlequin
characters, representatives of New York society, are so full of
themselves that they are totally unaware of, and uninterested in, what
is happening on the stage.
Thyrsis and Corydon are shepherds: they must care for their
48 Qtd. in Black, 24.
49 See Puchner, 24.
AVANT-GARDE AND MODERNIST 15
flock but, in a critique that foreshadows the history of the twentieth
century, they are shown to be so absorbed by their little game of war
that they disregard their obligations. Thyrsis, who needs constant
prompting from Cothurnus, suggests they play at separating their
territories and building a wall : "over there belongs to me,/ And over
here to you!" Corydon agrees quite happily and suggests, "you may
not come upon my side/ Unless I say you may." To which Thyrsis, in
the spirit of the game, adds: "Nor you on mine!" (225). They build a
symbolic wall of colored ribbons, and take up their positions on either
side, only to discover that all the water is on Thyrsis's territory, while
all the precious stones are on Corydon's. Their mutual distrust is such
that no entente is possible. Eventually, Thyrsis discovers a root with
which to poison the water he finally agrees to give Corydon in
exchange for some precious stones. Corydon astutely strings these
into necklaces, with which he strangles his friend as he drinks the
proffered water.
Cothurnus then pushes the two bodies under the table and
calls back Pierrot and Columbine, who complain that the stage is a
mess, and that they can't eat with two cadavers visible at their feet.
Pierrot reckons "The audience wouldn't stand for it!" But Cothurnus
instructs them to "Pull down the tablecloth ... And play the farce. The
audience will forget." Cothurnus is, of course, right. The tragedy of the
two shepherds is easily forgotten as the harlequinade begins again,
and Pierrot and Columbine, "speaking even more rapidly and
artificially" than before, repeat the same lines we heard when the play
opened (234).
In the fragmentation inherent in its very conception, in its
criticism of society, in its elite dramatic form, in its use of the Greek
pastoral and the Renaissance commedia del arte, and in its attack on
theatricality, Aria Da Capo can only be considered a modernist play,
even though, as Jo Ellen Green Kaiser rightly affirms, Millay "has been
largely absent from critical accounts [of modernism] . The consensus
has been that Millay, although living in the modernist period, did not
participate in modernism."so
The productions of the Provincetown Players, the ninety-three
plays by forty-seven American playwrights that they performed, have
not been included in the modernist canon, although among them we
find the earliest experiments with anti-theatricality-expressionism,
symbolism, surrealism-in the American theatre. The three plays
discussed here by Bryant, Davies, and Millay are notable examples of
so Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, "Displaced Modernism: Millay and the Triumph
of Sentimentality," in Diane P. Freedman, ed., Millay at 100: A Critical Reappraisal
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995), 27.
16
0ZIEBLO
the Players' recusant attitude toward the populist, commercial theatres
of Broadway. These three women, as all of the Provincetown women,
were rebels too-doubly so, as Greenwich Village bohemian artists and
as women, and they wanted to make of their theatre something
different, paralleling, if not pre-empting, Pound's injunction to "make
it new." Actress Ida Rauh, more pragmatic than Cook, expressed the
specific goals of the Players in language that articulates in professional
terms their convictions: "We have come to believe a play must tell a
complete story-just like a novel-and that is wrong and [Djuna
Barnes's] Three From the Earth proves it. ... It calculates only to
produce a certain mood. It cannot be called realism or artificialism or
even symbolism. It establishes a new form, a new technique for the
theatre-one that is going to develop a great deal in the future."51
Rauh's words show that Cook's initial idealistic
pronouncements were being grounded and theorized by the younger
generation that took over for the 1919-20 season. The initial "wish to
work in the dark," recorded by Edna Kenton, was giving way to
experience and professionalism, leading to such successful
experiments as O'Neill's The Emperor Jones and Glaspell's The
Verge. 52 The work of the other Provincetown women, however, should
not be ignored; it gave Glaspell (and O'Neill) the context in which to
develop her ideas. A feminist context that was at once avant-garde
and modernist, populist and elitist, political and personal.
51 Undated clipping qtd. in Black, 57-58. (My italics.)
52 Kenton, 34.
Journal of American Drama and Theatre 16, no. 2 (Spring 2004)
FIGHTING DISEASE, SEDUCING CAVALRYMEN AND
ACHIEVING MODERNI1Y:
YELLOW JAC/(1
ROBERT F. GROSS
I
Brooks Atkinson, the lead critic for The New York Times, was
exultant. By the time the curtain fell, he reported "the theatregoer has
that rare sensation of feeling proud of the human race."2 The play was
Yellow Jack, which told the story of Walter Reed and his experimental
verification of the means of transmission of yellow fever in Cuba during
the summer and fall of 1900. Playwright Sidney Howard drew his
material from Paul De Kruif's 1926 history of microbiology from Antony
Leeuwenhoek to Paul Ehrlich, Microbe Hunters. Although billed on
Broadway as the work of de Kruif and Sidney Howard, most evidence
points to Howard being the sole dramatist, adapting the material from
de Kruif's bestseller.3 Howard had written much of Yellow Jack by
1927, but it took until March 6, 1934, for this unconventional material
to find its way to Broadway, under the guidance of producer/director
Guthrie McCiintic.4 In the meantime, the fight against yellow fever had
taken two major steps forward, and Howard gave Reed's story a
double frame, showing the development of a simian host for the
disease in West Africa in June 1927, and the beginnings of the
development of a human vaccine in London in January 1929. Although
Atkinson's enthusiasm turned out to be far from contagious, and
1 An earlier, shorter version of this paper was presented under the title,
"Yellow Jack: Disease, Discipline, Dramaturgy," at the Association for Theatre in
Higher Education Conference, New York City, 1 August 2003. I would like to thank
Stephanie B. Hammer, Michael Schiavi, and Scott Stoddart for their insightful
responses to that earlier paper.
2 Brooks Atkinson, "Yellow Jack in which Sidney Howard Shows How
Scientific Heroism Can Be Displayed on the Stage," New York Times, 7 March 1934.
3 Estelle Manette Raben, "Men in White and Yellow Jack as Mirrors of the
Medical Profession/' Literature and Medicine 12 (1993): 19-40.
4 For indication of Yellow JacKs early composition, see Sidney Howard to
mother, 12 June 1927, Howard Collection, Bancroft Library, University of
California-Berkeley.
18
GROSS
Yellow Jack ran for a mere seventy-nine performances, the play and
its reception provide interesting insights into the complex relationships
among medicine, modernity, and masculinity in American drama of the
1930s.
For Brooks Atkinson, Yellow JacKs theatrical tactics are one
with its subject matter. Not only does the play introduce a story of
modern medicine to the stage, investing it with all the emotional
intensity of a war drama, he reports that director McClintic, designer
Jo Mielziner, and the cast achieve a quintessentially modern style, one
in which form follows function. Written in "utmost simplicity in
colloquial language,''S dispensing "with all the old fustian of the
theatre," staged on a simple, functional unit set (a radical departure,
we must remind ourselves, for Broadway scenography of the thirties),
and acted by an ensemble cast, rather than by stars, in a subdued
style in which the actors play with "almost tenderly," and "interpose
nothing between you and the story,"G the values and techniques of the
nineteenth century theatre are fully repudiated: artifice gives way to
fact, purple prose to reportage, illusionistic scenery to a functional set,
and star posturing to histrionic "humility." Atkinson's two articles on
Yellow Jack for the Times suggest a homology between the
self-sacrifice and discipline of the search for an explanation of the
transmission of yellow fever and the disciplined dramaturgy of the
play, which eschews the blight of Broadway. Atkinson praises Howard
for his refusal to succumb to Broadway's decadence. "He is not a
genius," Atkinson explains, "he is not so fine an artist as Philip Barry
or Maxwell Anderson, but he is the most hard-headed working
playwright we have in our theatre," one who is able to deliver
straightforward narrative without recourse to Atrickery."7
"Hard-headed," "working," "straightforward" and without "trickery,"
Howard comes to embody both a modernity and masculinity without
softness, indolence, deviation, or artifice. As such, he becomes the
ideal leader of men for this modern paean to the masculine collective.
For Atkinson, Yellow Jack is the representation of a perfectly
sublimated group activity in the form of a perfectly sublimated work of
collaborative art.
That Atkinson should be able to so effortlessly conflate Yellow
JacKs medical narrative with a narrative of its theatrical modernity
s Atkinson, "Yellow Jack."
6 Ibid.
7 Brooks Atkinson, "Sidney Howard, Realist," New York Times, sec. 9, 18
March 1934.
FIGHTING DISEASE 19
shows how easily medicine could provide a referent for the modern
theatre in the first decades of the twentieth century.s The whole
modern project, "which is the Enlightenment project of refounding
morality and society on universal, tradition-independent rational
principles," looked upon science as a privileged source of knowledge,
and Howard's play could easily be construed as a celebration of the
triumph of science as an expression of that project.9 Atkinson's praise
of the modernity of Yellow Jack, however, must not be confused with
any identification of it as a modernist drama, if by "modernism" we
mean, as Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane have noted, a term
that suggests, "a new era of high aesthetic self-consciousness and
non-representationalism, in which art turns from realism and
humanistic representation towards style, technique, and spatial form
in pursuit of a deeper penetration of life."lO Howard's position was at
once both consciously modern and anti-modernist. Beginning as an
author of verse plays in the neo-Romantic mode, he converted to
realism after encountering the plays of Charles Vildrac, the author of
Le Paquebot Tenacity and Michel Auclair, both of which Howard
translated into English. Vildrac's gentle, low-key realism was far more
influential on Howard than any non-realistic, European playwright.ll
Howard identified his 1925 realistic drama, Lucky Sam McCarver, as an
"experimental" drama, thus implicitly putting it in that tradition of
modern drama that stakes its claim to modernity by reference to
science, while at the same time setting it apart from the
self-proclaimed "modernism" of non-realistic drama. "I might go so far
as to call this an experimental play if I thought for a moment that any
one would believe me," Howard explains. "No one would believe me,
because it was not produced in an art theatre and no one wore
masks."12 More important, Howard explains, is the fact that he
8 For a wider consideration and contextualization of these discourses in
modern drama, see Stanton B. Garner, Jr., "Physiologies of the Modern: Zola,
Experimental Medicine, and the Naturalist Stage," in Modern Drama: Defining the
Field, ed. Ric Knowles, Joanne Tompkins, and W. B. Worthen (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2003), 67-79.
9 John Gray, Enlightenment's Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of
the Modern Age (London: Routledge, 1995), 149 and 158.
10 Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, "The Name and Nature of
Modernism," in Modernism, 1890-1930, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James
McFarlane (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1978), 25.
11 Sidney Howard White, Sidney Howard (Boston: Twayne, 1977), 39.
12 Sidney Howard, Lucky Sam McCarver: Four Episodes in the Rise of a
New Yorker (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1926), viii-ix.
20 GROSS
consciously avoided obfuscation. Even if some of his audience was
befuddled by his play, he could give a clear rationale for every line he
wrote, "and that would have been unworthy, I know, of an
experimental dramatist."B For Howard, realism is to modernism, as
truth is to affectation; the one providing a valid response to modernity,
the other, a pretender to it. One is medicine; the other, quackery.
II
Yellow fever is a viral infection, usually transmitted by the
Aedes aegypti mosquito, and whose "symptoms range all the way from
the mildest, flu-like indisposition to horrible death."14 Although the
death rate has been estimated at five to ten percent, the popular
image of the disease was based on its most virulent cases. A modern
historian of disease describes the symptoms:
The illness strikes suddenly, three to six days after the
bite of an infected mosquito. There is headache,
backache, nausea, and fever of 103 or 104. The
patient is intensely restless, his tongue a bright red,
lips swollen, face flushed, eyes inflamed. In this first
stage, lasting three or four days, the virus circulates
in the blood, and it is only at this time that the patient
can infect a mosquito that bites him. The second
stage is one of deceptive improvement; the fever may
ease and the patient feels better. The third stage is
one of bodily intoxication. The fever returns. The
complexion changes to a dusky, sometimes yellowish
pallor. There is sometimes elvomito negro, a black
vomitus that is altered by stomach acids. Bleeding
may also occur in tiny spots in the gums of the mouth
and in the skin anywhere.ls
13 Ibid., ix.
14 Greer Williams, The Plague Killers (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1969), 186.
15 Ibid., 187.
fiGHTING DISEASE
21
It has been reported that there were 135 major outbreaks of
yellow fever in American ports between 1668 and 1893.16 In 1878
alone, yellow fever killed more than 20,000 people in a hundred
American cities.17 The last major outbreak of the disease in the Unites
States occurred in New Orleans in 1905.18 Major outbreaks were still
common in Latin America in the 1920s, and is still occasionally
reported in South America and Africa.19
In the United States, yellow fever was popularly known under
a variety of names, including not only yellow jack, but also bronze
John, dock fever, Orleans fever, Panama fever, and vomito.2o While it
has been explained that the term yellow jack derived from the yellow
quarantine t1ag,21 Mitford M. Mathews's citation of eighteenth century
usage points to a derivation from the jaundiced appearance that often
accompanied the disease.22
Major outbreaks of yellow fever in port cities on the Eastern
seaboard of the United States in the 1790s, leading to a vast literature
reporting on the epidemics as they struck, as well as speculating on
causes of the disease and treatments.23 The most noted literary
response, Charles Brockden Brown's novel Arthur Mervyn (published in
two installments in 1799 and 1800)-set in Philadelphia during the
yellow fever epidemic in 1793, which claimed ten percent of the city's
inhabitants in roughly three months-used the plague as an image of
social dislocation, moral decay and epistemological uncertainty in the
new republic: "The chambers of the disease were deserted, and the
sick left to die of negligence. None could be found to remove the
lifeless bodies. Their remains, suffered to decay by piece-meal, filled
16 Ibid., 186-87.
17 Ibid., 186.
18 Arno Karlen, Man and Microbes: Diseases and Plagues in History and
Modern Times (New York: G. Putnam's Sons, 1995), 159.
19 Ibid.
20 Mitford M. Mathews, ed., A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical
Principles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 2:1905
21 Williams, 186.
22 Matthews, 2:1905.
23 See Bryan Waterman, "Arthur Mervyn's Medical Repository and the
Early Republic's Knowledge Industries," American Literary History 15 (2003):
213-49.
22 GROSS
the air with deadly exhalations, and added ten-fold to the
devastation."24 Brown's descriptions, which hearken back to
Thucydides' classic account of the Athenian plague in his
Peloponnesian Wars, continue the practice of using an epidemic to
comment on the moral disintegration of the polis. This device had
become a t ired theatrical commonplace by the 1930s, as the Broadway
premiere of Owen Davis's romantic melodrama Jezebel, earlier in the
1933-34 season, demonstrates. Jezebel, better known in its 1938 film
adaptation with Bette Davis, uses the New Orleans yellow fever
epidemic of 1853 to picturesquely evoke the decadence of the
ante-bellum South, and provides a romantic means of redemption
through love for its tainted heroine.2s Brooks Atkinson's praise of the
modernity of Yellow Jack even more vividly against his review of
Jezebel, in which he complains, not only of "those old melodramatic
bogeymen grumbling" beneath the surface, but of "threadbare"
situations as well, leading him to conclude that "Mr. Davis's romantic
play of the Southland is only a Bowrey trollop at heart."26 The
exhausted conventions of melodrama, outdated, feminine, and tawdry,
lead Atkinson to be predisposed to the modern, masculine, and
scientific approach of Yellow Jack.
III
In pursuit of modernity, Howard adapts de Kruif's narrative,
one which moves the representation of epidemic out of the decadence
and chaos of the city and into the controlled world of the laboratory.
The movement away from a raging epidemic into a closed and
removed space is a common one in literature, whether Giovanni
Boccaccio's Decameron or Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red
Death," but Yellow JacKs spatial movement is both more modern and
more complex; the movement into the laboratory is not a movement
away from the disease, but a movement to contain the disease within
a scientific project of mastery. Such a move clearly produces a
different kind of narrative; one which equates the epidemic with a
24 Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn or, Memoirs on the Year
1793, in Three Gothic Novels, ed. Sydney J. Krause (New York: The Library of
America, 1998), 346.
25 For 1930s treatments of Southern decadence, primarily on the screen,
and focusing on the film adaptation of Jezebel, see Ida Jeter; "Jezebe/ and the
Emergence of the Hollywood Tradition of the Decadent South," Southern Quarterly
19 (1981), nos. 3-4: 31-46.
26 Brooks Atkinson, rev. of Jezebel, in New York Times, 20 December
1933.
FIGHTING DISEASE 23
mystery that can be investigated, understood, and controlled.
Following a cultural narrative of intellectual progress, Howard creates
a sequence of closed spaces in which the unknown can become
known; the irrational terror of epidemic gives way to rationality. This
primary narrative, however, does not exist alone. Howard does not
completely purge irrationality from the text in the quest for modernity,
letting it quickly resurface, interestingly enough, at the heart of the
scientific quest itself.
This ambivalence toward the quest for a cure for yellow fever
had already appeared in Microbe Hunters. Paul de Kruif's penultimate
chapter, devoted to Walter Reed and the discovery of the means of
yellow fever transmission, tells the most morally problematic story in
the book, because Reed introduced the issue of human
experimentation to microbe hunting. Since no animal could be infected
with the disease, Reed designed experiments, sometimes without the
knowledge of the subjects themselves, to further knowledge of the
disease. For de Kruif, Reed is the figure of science at both its most
magnificent and inhuman. He refers to him with such oxymoronic
constructions as "the fine gruesome experiment of Reed" and "the
insanely scientific Walter Reed."27 He underscores the agonizing
paradox in Reed's decision, which, in de Kruif's account, seems not to
have caused Reed any agony: "Walter Reed's moral nature told him,
'You must kill men to save them' " (322). De Kruif, however, ponders:
"Was it worth a human life (even that of a Spanish immigrant) to find
the answer? Myself I cannot answer yes or no. But Reed and Carroll
answered yes . .. they had been bitten by the virus of the search for
truth, cold truth-they were enchanted with the glory that comes from
the discovery of unknown things" (331). By fusing the desire for a
scientific knowledge that might cure disease with a disease itself, and
making that disease akin to a magic spell ("enchanted''), de Kruif links
the search for the origins of yellow fever to transgressive behavior, to
the quests for forbidden knowledge that go back in Western thought
through the mad scientists of science fiction films, Victor Frankenstein,
Johannes Faustus, and, ultimately, Adam and Eve. In no other chapter
in Microbe Hunters does de Kruif so completely fuse the Enlightenment
valuation of scientific knowledge with its mythic condemnation. Given
the strongly ambivalent mixture of admiration and disgust that de Kruif
manifests throughout his chapter on Walter Reed, it is difficult to read
the chapter's subtitle-"In the Interest of Science-and for
Humanity!"-as free of irony.
27 Paul de Kruif, Microbe Hunters (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1926), 312
and 326. All subsequent page citations to this book will appear in parentheses in
the body of the text.
24
GROSS
Howard disliked de Kruif's style, complaining in a letter to his
sister Jean that he "makes them sound like very arch and super
masculine bed time tales for grown ups," but added "the stories
themselves are so fascinating I can recommend that book too."2B He
adapted it freely, not only ridding the play of the heavy-handed irony
that characterized the original, but streamlining the plot, and inventing
plot complications. Most of the overt racism in de Kruif's narrative
history disappears in Howard's dramatic account. De Kruif's slurs
concerning Cuban hygiene and the rapaciousness of Spanish
immigrants vanish. One is relieved to find, for example, no trace in the
play of de Kruif's prejudicial observation "Habana had been scrubbed;
happy dirty Cubans had been made into unhappy clean Cubans" (313).
In Howard's play, de Kruif's casual speculation that a Spanish
immigrant's life is cheap while a U.S. Marine's is valuable disappears.
The Cubans in Yellow Jack, Doctors Finlay and Agramonte, are given
dignified portrayals. Agramonte is made the voice of scientific rigor and
careful workmanship; less effective in controlling the maniacal
researchers than the Great White Father Walter Reed is, but an
admirable figure of discipline nonetheless. For the most part, however,
Cubans are not subject to distorting representations because they are
almost invisible in Yellow Jack. Agramonte is an American military
officer, and Finlay is presented more as a Scot than a Cuban. Similarly,
the political context of the war against yellow fever is only sketched in
lightly. The Marxist soldier Busch objects to the U.S. imperialist
presence in Latin America briefly, but it is used less to establish
political context than to establish him as a comic type of Jewish,
Marxist intellectual, whose pronouncements go unheard by the rest of
the cast. Later, in the play, Doctor Gorgas observes, "it was yellow
jack, not Rough Riders, that licked the Spaniards here. And it will lick
us if we don't lick it first," and further observes that the canal cannot
be built in Panama until yellow fever is brought under control.29 But
both Busch's and Gorgas's comments go by quickly, and are neither
expanded on nor challenged by other characters. Howard seems less
interested in the specifics of late nineteenth-century American
imperialism than in the construction of a heroic, white embodiment of
collective values, a fusion of passion and discipline, who can defeat
adversity by virtue of his very coherence with the collective. In this
28 Sidney Howard to Jean, 16 April 1926, Howard Collection, Bancroft
Library, University of California- Berkeley.
29 Sidney Howard and Paul de Kruif, Yellow Jack: A History (New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1934), 37 and 40. All subsequent page citations from this book will
appear in parentheses in the body of the text.
FIGHTING DISEASE 25
sense, Yellow Jack is perhaps viewed more fruitfully as a
Depression-era parable of the repair of damaged masculinity in a
period of crisis than as a historical drama.
In contrast to his central role in Microbe Hunters, Walter Reed
is deemphasized in Yellow Jack. Howard ignores, most importantly, the
character issue over which de Kruif worried, that Reed excused himself
from the painful and perilous experiments he designed for his
subordinates. In Yellow Jack, Reed agrees to submit to the bite of the
Aedes aegypti, when he is suddenly called away by his superiors to
Washington, D.C. Similarly, Howard ignores Reed's experimentation on
Spanish immigrant subjects, and dramatizes instead the one case of a
soldier infected without his knowledge by an experimenter to a group
of subordinates of Reed's acting in his absence. In this sense, the play
whitewashes Reed in a way de Kruif does not. Yet Howard has not
chosen to write a play with Reed as its protagonist. Reed's presence
remains distant and paternal. Although he expresses the need for the
experiments, the importance of discipline, and concern for his men,
many of what could be the character's functions are delegated to
others. Lazear becomes the voice of Reed's determination and
fascination with "microbe hunting" taking it to the point to taking his
own life and undermining the rigor of the experiment; Agramonte
expresses Reed's insistence on discipline, and Nurse Blake, his
idealism. Rather than focusing on Reed as the hero in the defeat of
yellow fever, Howard disperses the heroism through the collective, and
charts the development of an individual who comes to embody the
highest aspirations and most idealistic values of the collective, Private
John O'Hara (played by a Broadway newcomer soon headed for
Hollywood, James Stewart).
O'Hara, an idealistic young Irish immigrant with dreams of
becoming a physician, volunteers to participate in Reed's experiment
following the urging of the play's sole female character, the noble and
seemingly yellow fever immune Nurse Blake. Urging the soldiers to
recognize the claims of "Science and humanity!" (130), she reports a
speech that she heard Reed make, but that Howard does not have him
deliver onstage. "If only, only one of our boys will step forward," the
Major said, "he'll make this reach and touch the heart of the world and
the world will weep and have faith in this!" (130). This is the language
of religious conversion, not scientific research or humanistic endeavor,
and its talk of touching hearts and weeping is redolent of a realm of
religious feeling more inclined to be gendered as feminine. The word
of the Father's desire comes displaced onto the person of a woman
who both articulates the desire of the Father in a manner that would
not be gender-transgressive, and stabilizes any potential for sexual
transgression that might have existed in the all-male camp by bringing
the entire enterprise under the aegis of an idealized heterosexuality.
26 GROSS
Inspired by Nurse Blake, O'Hara agrees to live in a hut open to the air
and possible infection with yellow fever, while other soldiers live in an
unventilated, closed hut filled with bedding slept upon by yellow fever
victims, but with no exposure to mosquitoes. Although offered a
stipend for this perilous work, O'Hara and his fellow soldier Brinkerhof
agree to become subjects only if they are not paid. It must be done,
they insist, Afor the good of humanity" (13) . O'Hara, like Lazear before
him, is avid to be infected, and reacts with increasing frustration as,
not only does he fail to come down with the disease, but sees his
comrade Brinkerhof fall ill before him. With only one of the two soldiers
having contracted the disease, the results are uncertain. Suddenly,
O'Hara is brought onstage before Reed-on a stretcher. He has come
down with yellow fever. Everyone wonders how this can be. O'Hara is
radiant. To ensure his illness, he broke into the laboratory and infected
himself from the mosquitoes in the lab. This plot complication, a pure
invention of Howard's with no basis in de Kruif's account, O'Hara
becomes at once heroic sacrifice and comic trickster. He transgresses
in order to be truly obedient; not merely acquiescing to suffering and
mortal danger but taking an active role in executing it upon himself,
thus ridding his heroic effort of any specter of passivity.
Howard's stage direction tells us that the light focuses down
on the figure of O'Hara laying on his stretcher at this moment as he
intones, "Now science and humanity and become one in the person of
Johnny O'Hara! And no shadow of gain for him but his own
satisfaction, and only the hell and vanity of that!" (149). At this
moment O'Hara has attained his status as hero and, at the same time,
completes the play's scientific and dramaturgical projects by
submitting to the desire of Reed, the Father, for the good of the
Father's values of science and humanity. John O'Hara has become
Bronze John, Yellow Jack. Instead of the horror that accompanied the
infections of Cartwright, Carroll and Lazear, O'Hara's illness largely
takes place in an atmosphere of heroic bravado and comic triumph.
After O'Hara's apotheosis, we are told casually that he has
survived his ordeal, but we do not see him onstage again. By virtue of
his apotheosis, he has moved beyond the frame of the play's realistic
aesthetic through an Enlightenment humanism to attain a
transcendent presence. At the moment of O'Hara's apotheosis, one
senses overtones of the lives of the saints, or even the passion of
Christ. After this mystical climax, the play's work is almost done, and
moves briskly to the final curtain. Reed declares his work finished and
closes up the camp; Howard jumps forward to the development of
rhesus monkeys as substitutes for human experimental subjects, and
to 1929 and the development of a yellow fever vaccine. Snappily
finishing up his play with a series of medical triumphs, Howard gives
the impression that the creation of O'Hara as hero and the defeat of
FIGHTING DISEASE 27
yellow fever are essentially identical.
Howard gives his audience the impression that the power of
yellow fever is diminishing as the heroic presence of O'Hara is being
constituted. In the first two-thirds of the play, references to the
rampant fatality of yellow fever are frequent, and we see Major
Cartwright in the agonizing death throes of the disease, and hear of
Lazear's death as well. But, after Lazear's death, and the careful
disciplining of the project under Reed, no one dies, and the threat of
it is treated lightly, even comically by Howard. O'Hara's self-inflected
infection is treated as much more as the comic triumph of a trickster
than the pathos-ridden fall of a victim. Although de Kruif takes pains
to point out that Reed was simply lucky that none of his subjects died
(330), Howard avoids that admission. In Yellow Jack, the rise of
O'Hara is equated with the defeat of disease.
Not all reviewers however, were as swept away with the
sublimated grandeur of Yellow Jack as Brooks Atkinson was. Most
notable among the skeptics was humorist and theatre critic for The
New Yorker, Robert Benchley, who offered what he described as a
" minority report" on the play. Jo Although he admires Howard's
dramaturgical skill at presenting this difficult material onstage,
Benchley is bothered by what he senses is Howard's desire to praise
the doctors despite their unethical-and sometimes downright
creepy-tactics in pursuing their research. The creepiest of these
scenes for Benchley (and, I suspect, for most viewers and readers as
well) is the one in which Doctors Lazear and Finlay trick Private William
Dean, a "nondescript, hick American" as Howard describes him (96),
into being infected with yellow fever from the mosquitoes they keep in
the lab. Dean, a typical stage rube, comes wandering into the lab to
get a look at the mosquitoes, thinking it might be like a flea circus he
saw once. Fascinated by the fact of sexual difference in mosquitoes he
goes further and asks "Do mosquitoes . .. ? [He seeks for the word but
cannot find it] Do they?" (98). Yellow Jack, which otherwise makes
pretenses to articulate a lofty and sublimated view of scientific
curiosity, uses comedy in this scene to suggest an earthier impulse at
work. Dean, it seems, is the only character in Yellow Jack who has
sexual impulses. In fact, he has just been discharged from a hospital
after treatment for what is coyly implied to have been a sexually
transmitted disease. Unmarried, a tainted veteran of sexual excess
(possibly, given the Cuban setting, with a Latina), and drawn to acts
of sexual curiosity and voyeurism with insects, Dean is the obvious
30 Robert Benchley, "Minority Report," The New Yorker 10, no. 5 (1934):
32.
28 GROSS
candidate for infection, and it takes surprisingly little for the doctors to
cajole the unsuspecting into letting their mosquitoes feed on him. In a
bizarre interaction of polymorphous perversity, mingling suggestions of
homosexual seduction, heterosexual female aggression (the insect as
femme fatale), miscegenation (the insect as woman of color), sadism,
voyeurism, exhibitionism, group sex, bestiality, and gang rape, the
doctors persuade Dean to allow one mosquito named "Black Beauty"
to feed on his arm (100), then forcibly hold his arm down as they visit
him with an unspecified number of hungry, penetrating, female
mosquitoes (101).
The effect of the scene is to sexualize yellow fever, making an
insect-borne infection carry the resonances of a sexually transmitted
disease. The "jack" of the title begins to reverberate with such slang
meanings as "fool," "penis," "erection," and, in "jack off,"
"masturbation."31 This debauchery in the absence of the patriarch has
mythic overtones: has Howard unwittingly recast the pagan excesses
of the Children of Israel in Moses' absence, cavorting before the
Golden Calf, in Reed's Cuban laboratory?
Dean's curiosity reverberates with Sigmund Freud's
observation in his essay on Leonardo da Vinci, in which he suggests
that the source of all human curiosity stems from the child's curiosity
about where babies come from. When this curiosity is repressed, Freud
speculates, this primal epistemophilia can take one of three courses;
neurotic inhibition, obsessive compulsion, or, most rarely and
impressively, a complete sublimation free of neurosis, in which "the
instinct can operate fully in the service of intellectual interest."32 In the
absence of Reed, however, the sublimation seems to regress to its
initial, purely sexual origin, giving way to an orgy of transgressions.
The argument for Yellow Jack as a narrative of the triumph of science
seems strained to limits here. Is this all in the cause of science as
Brooks Atkinson was persuaded?
Benchley was not. This scene, which is not only largely
Howard's invention, but also completely unnecessary to the narrative
of the conquest of yellow fever, crystallizes for Benchley his feelings of
distaste for what he considered the fanatic and irresponsible
tendencies of Reed and his followers, which Benchley identified with
sexual perversion. Accusing Finlay and Lazear of tricking Dean through
31 See Jonathon Green, The Cassell Dictionary of Slang (London: casell,
1998), 647-49.
32 Sigmund Freud, "Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,"
in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works (London: Hogarth
Press, 1957), XI:80.
FIGHTING DISEASE 29
"methods of seduction usually associated with men who offer little girls
candy and get them into the cellar," he judges the scene "about as
unpleasant a scene as any hero has ever been asked to participate in-
and still remain a hero."33 Repelled by the ethical failings of Reed's
team, Benchley finds himself preferring the skeptics and opponents of
Reed's work, finding them more emotionally stable, reliable, and
consistently principled. "At least they were against seducing
cavalrymen," he observes.34
Benchley uses devices of comic incongruity (noble doctors as
old child molesters, cavalrymen as innocent little girls) and hyperbole
to uncover the ethical repugnance he feels at the conscious decisions
of the characters, the aesthetic dissonance that he feels at the
emergence of melodramatic devices of fatal seduction from under
what he feels to be the play's claims to modernity, and the libidinous,
transgressive charge that he senses the play elicits but disavows.
For Atkinson, unlike Benchley, Yellow Jack presents an
opportunity to triumph not only over disease, but over moral decay in
the theatre. The failure of theatergoing audiences to make Yellow Jack
the success it deserves to be, Atkinson explains, is a sign of how
debauched they have become. Given an audience addicted to the
excesses, sentimentality, and sexual stimulation of Broadway, "What
puts them out about Yellow Jack," explains Atkinson, "is the candor of
the style."3S Atkinson characterizes the Broadway audience as a mass
of Deans, drawn into the laboratory out of a perverse fascination with
the mating habits of mosquitoes (and Jezebels), when serious
experiments could be underway.
Benchley is not nearly so willing to concede the play's
sublimated superiority to its audience. Not only does he question the
dignity of the doctors but also the scene in which Nurse Blake inspires
O'Hara and Brinkerhof to heroism. For Benchley, the entire scene,
especially as embodied by the "pictorially valuable" Katharine Wilson is
"a sop to the American public's craving for sex interest."36 One could
argue this point either way. Atkinson is certainly right in responding to
the fact that the play depends much less on overt sexual interest than
most Broadway plays of the twentieth century, but Benchley is right to
say that sexual interest still plays an important role here, even if more
covertly than usual.
33 Benchley, 32.
34 Ibid.
35 Atkinson, "Sidney Howard, Realist."
36 Benchley, 34.
30 GROSS
The point of comparing these two reviews is not to determine
which reviewer is correct is his reading of the play, but how their
readings complement each other and point to its complexity. Atkinson
sees sublimation; Benchley sees perversity. Atkinson sees energies
that are subordinated to the rule of the patriarch; Benchley sees the
libidinous energies that sublimation never quite succeeds in completely
taming. For Atkinson, the early, perverse sequence of actions, done in
Reed's absence and culminating in the exploitation of Dean and the
death of Lazear, are completely effaced by the second, sublimating,
sequence of actions, done under Reed's supervision, and culminating
in O'Hara's apotheosis and the conquest of yellow fever. The effect of
the second part of the play was so powerful for Atkinson that it
supplanted any emotional memory of what had gone before: he never
refers to the death-courting machismo, strong sexual overtones, and
unethical conduct spurred on by Lazear. For Benchley, the early scenes
are so disturbing that the second half never succeeds in dispelling the
uneasy feelings that have been elicited. This difference in response is
yet further evidence (as if more evidence were needed) that the
degree to which dramatic closure works can differ strongly from one
spectator to another, leaving critical readings that emphasize closure
as a matter of course extremely vulnerable. Just because something
appears later in the text does not mean it is necessarily more powerful.
O'Hara's transfigurative moment, not discussed by Benchley, needs to
be revisited in the light of his desublimating reading. O'Hara says,
"Now science and humanity are become one in the person of Johnny
O'Hara! And no shadow of gain for him but his own satisfaction, and
only the hell and vanity of that!" (149). The speech tries to weld
together, in the person of O'Hara, two distinctly different notions of
male heroism in two consecutive sentences. In the first, O'Hara
submits to the desire of the Father, even transcending the Father
through his ability to sacrifice himself which the Father cannot do.
Here the connotations are of sacrifice and martyrdom that verge on
the christological. However, the second-"no shadow of gain for him
but his own satisfaction, and only the hell and vanity of that!"-is a
completely different vision altogether. Here we see the nihilistic heroes
of Hemingway and Hammett, as well as the tough guys of What Price
Glory? and The Front Page. Although Nurse Blake may have
encouraged O'Hara in his heroism, she is not offered as a romantic
reward to the hero; he repudiates any reward whatsoever. Howard
tries to tie to together the hero who submits to the Law with the guy
who walks alone. For O'Hara's climactic action of breaking into the lab
to infect himself is as much transgression as obedience, is as much the
amoral zeal and death-fascinated drive of Lazear as it is the rule of
Reed. Sublimation and perversion, obedience and transgression,
shadow each other up to the very climax of the play. John O'Hara
FIGHTING DISEASE 31
becomes Yellow Jack, but is it sacrifice, or jacking off?
Although Yellow Jack at first seems to turn its back on the
disease-stricken chaos of Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn and
the romantic melodrama of Owen Davis's Jezebel, preferring to contain
such excesses within the discipline of the scientific laboratories that
provide its settings, further examination reveals that chaos repeatedly
threatens through the very enthusiasm that fuels the medical
research. In the opening scene of the play, set in a London laboratory
in 1929, a young researcher "In the eagerness of his work tips his stool
too far forward and loses his balance. In doing so he breaks the
pipette with which he is working" (7). The passion that motivates the
work is established at first as a peril to the work, a theme that recurs
with the slapdash methods of Carroll and Lazear in Reed's absence,
and the competitiveness with which Lazear and O'Hara pursue their
infection. As the play unfolds, however, it becomes increasingly clear
that the passion is both a hindrance to the work and its prerequisite.
This ambiguity is also seen in the second of the framing
narratives, which tells the story of Adrian Stokes's death by yellow
fever in Africa. Although research has concluded that Stokes was most
probably infected by the virus entering an open wound,37 Howard
suggests that Stokes might have knowingly infected himself in the
belief that no one would believe his research monkeys were actually
infected with the yellow fever virus until they had seen "white man and
monkey both dead of the same infection and side by side on the
autopsy table" (151). Following the play's tendency to erase all but the
white male victims of yellow fever, Stokes, like Lazear and O'Hara
before him, becomes the required human sacrifice for the
advancement of the scientific project. In Yellow Jack, "Black Beauty"
demands male whiteness as her preferred meal, and white males
succumb all too easily. Epistemophilia, within this mythic structure,
takes on the resonances of a sexually transmitted disease. De Kruif's
image of men "bitten by the virus of the search for truth, cold truth .
. . enchanted with the glory that comes from the discovery of unknown
things" (331) is carried into Yellow Jack in a pattern in which the
enlightenment quest for knowledge is a tenuously achieved
sublimation, always on the verge of erupting into an obscene and
lethal jouissance.
Yellow Jack intertwines two visions of medical research. The
first, embodied in Reed and Agramonte, is disciplined and rational. The
second, in Finlay and Lazear, is chaotic and passionate. The two visions
coalesce most clearly in O'Hara's self-infection, but come together at
37 Williams, 238.
32
GROSS
other points as well, creating two competing readings of the plot. Is
Stokes's death the result of self-sacrificing medical discipline, or the
search for a fatal jouissance? When Reed and his men visit the
Cuban/Scottish/French doctor Carlos Finlay, in hopes of getting eggs
of the Aedes aegypti to breed in the lab, Finlay warily tests their
commitment to the project at length before agreeing to help them.
Finally, convinced of their worthiness, he produces and uncovers a
porcelain dish containing the eggs. As he does so, Reed and his three
companions lean forward with fascination and "The light begins
imperceptibly to fade until only the five faces [of the scientists] are
visible, the old Scotchman's lit with a religious fervor as he describes
his great discovery" (64). Revealing that he has "a mystic's faith in this
mosquito" (64), Finlay goes on to reveal its mysteries to his initiates:
Beware of her. She isn't one of your common marsh
mosquitoes. She's your domestic pet. Shares your
home with you, takes her siesta underneath your
eaves, raises her family in your patio fountain and
rewards your hospitality with death. How do I know?
I know! (64)
This revelation of the mysteries of yellow fever brings together both of
Howard's views of medical research. Following the narrative of
rationality and humanitarianism, the men are awed as they move one
step significantly closer to the eradication of a dreaded disease. At the
same time, it follows the narrative of lethal jouissance, as an assertion
of mystical belief in a devious femme fatale who is found to live
unnoticed in the precincts of nee-tropical domestic life. The female
Aedes aegypti stands in relation to Nurse Blake as Latina whore to
Euro-American virgin. As in the later scene with Private Dean, medical
research is sexualized, and the fascination with yellow fever is fused
with excited curiosity about procreation. Seen in this light, the rivalry
among the men as to who will be infected with yellow fever first not
only is a sign of altruistic dedication, but of homosocial bonding
articulated in a rivalrous relationship to heterosexual conquest. In this
sense, Yellow Jack is a reworking of What Price Glory? with a mosquito
taking the place of a French coquette. Yet the highly eroticized
atmosphere surrounding the rivalry simultaneously brings its real
object into question. Is the female mosquito an object of desire, or
merely a masquerade for homosexual eros? The female sex of the
infectious Aedes aegypti provides an occasion for a common male
experience of penetration and transgressive pleasure. Benchley was
quite right to see Yellow Jack as a play about the seduction of
cavalrymen.
FIGHTING DISEASE 33
The female Aedes aegypti becomes a site of conflicting
meanings of g e n e ~ sexuality, and ethinicity, as well as modernity.
What does it mean for the researchers to have a mystic's faith in
Aedes aegypt1? Finlay's declaration of faith points contextually toward
a faith in scientific progress, but it also strains to detach itself from
that context and express itself as a mysticism of the death drive and
its jouissance. The men who hover with fascination about the
mosquito eggs cannot be wholly subsumed into an enlightened
narrative. Finlay is introduced as a crank and a madman, but Reed,
for all his love of discipline and scientific method, is drawn to a
madness of "the jumping forward kind that's always too risky for the
completely sane" ( 45). Discipline and order will not suffice to create
progress in Yellow Jack; madness, the Other of the Enlightenment
tradition, is needed as well. The transgressions of the maverick and
the madman become as necessary for Howard as the obedient
servant and the law-imposing father.
Though I suggested before that O'Hara is kept offstage after
his "apotheosis" because he has transcended the realistic order of the
play, I would now add that he is contained offstage after his
triumphant transgression because Howard is trying very hard to
suppress transgression in his final drive to triumphant closure. There
is no Hecht and McArthur here to bring the curtain down on "Take him
to the guardhouse. The son of a bitch stole my mosquitoes." Instead,
Howard moves from the dramatic into the epic (in a non-Brechtian
sense) to celebrate the community of enlightened, self-sacrificing
males and the achievement of a collective project. For Atkinson, this
shift in dramaturgy was completely successful; for Benchley, it was
not. While these two reviewers, both experienced and intelligent
theatergoers, left with very different experiences and interpretations
of the play, what may be most revealing is how Yellow Jack contains
both of their interpretations, and that its historical significance for the
study of masculinity in American drama is seen in how it registers
tensions of sublimation and perversion, discipline and sexuality,
individuality and collectivity in American culture of the Thirties.
Tony Speranza's careful consideration of Maxwell Anderson's
1936 Broadway success, High Tor, in the context of Depression era
discourses of masculinity, shows how Anderson attempts to recapture
the mythic rugged individualism of the American frontier for urban,
late Depression audiences.3B Yellow Jack provides an illuminating
38 Tony Speranza, "Renegotiating the Frontier of American Manhood:
Maxwell Anderson's High Tor," American Drama 5, no. 1: 16-35.
34 GROSS
contrast to High Tor in that, despite O'Hara's climactic assertion of
individualism, the play is constructed around a group effort, recasting
modern masculinity as ultimately a collective effort. O'Hara's body
becomes the fantasy embodiment of all the play's men, and, as the
body that is simultaneously diseased and triumphs over disease, the
imaginary prophylactic for all vulnerable bodies. The military
compound turned laboratory provides the place for a fantasy that
"maybe for the first time since armies began, soldiers are given a
chance to do good, not harm. To makes the world better, not worse,
as a place to live in" (130). There is no question that Howard's
exemplar of modernity is both racist and sexist. But it simultaneously
offers the possibility of refashioning traditional masculinity as a
peaceful and penetrable body. No longer is the hero a fighting
machine, but an invalid who finds his pleasure in submission to a
jouissance experienced in a sexually transgressive delirium.
IV
If the essential theater is like the plague, it is not
because it is contagious, but because like the plague
it is the revelation, the bringing forth, the
exteriorization of a depth of latent cruelty by means
of which all the perverse possibilities of the mind,
whether of an individual or a people, are localized.39
The year after Yellow Jack premieres on Broadway, Antonin
Artaud's essay, "The Theatre and the Plague," appears in The Theatre
and Its Double. It would be ludicrous to suggest any similarity
between Howard and Artaud, let alone influence. Howard's vision of
modernity, rooted in realism, has little in common with Artaud's
ectstatic modernism, with its strongly primitivistic impulses. In
important ways, they are opposed: what Howard tries to contain in
the laboratory/ Artaud dreams of releasing in the open; what Howard
tries to provide protection from
1
Artaud works to disseminate. Yet
both share a debt to the Western imagination of illness/ a common
tradition reaching back at least as far as Thucydides.
39 Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline
Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 30.
FIGHTING DISEASE 35
Howard's attitude toward the plague is more deeply
ambivalent than Artaud's. On the one hand, he works to contain the
horrors of yellow fever, both in his narrative of fighting the disease,
and in his dramaturgy. The characters suffering from yellow fever are
discreetly taken offstage. We are not shown their fevered deliria,
jaundiced bodies, and black vomit. Reed's story is contained twice
within frames that tell later stories of progress against the disease;
Stokes in West Africa in 1927 and Stackpoole in London in 1929.
Rather than using the straightforward chronology common to realistic
plays of the 1930s, Howard puts the major action within double
brackets, working to achieve a dramaturgical quarantine of the
hazardous material.
On the other hand, for all his attempts to seal off the disease,
it continues to erupt in every lab. Howard is fascinated by the ability
of the plague to break down order in the very sanctuary of modernity.
For him, the researcher is not less immune to the plague, but more
so, by the very fascination that brings him into contact with it. The
laboratory comes to carry opposed valences: it is both dedicated to
the eradication of illness and immersion in it. For Howard, the plague
and madness do not stand simply as the Other of Enlightenment, but
are revealed as constituents of it. The lab becomes the site where
epistemophilia becomes delirium. Despite his ostensible belief in
scientific method, Howard creates a vision of epidemic that is as
spectral and mysterious as Artaud's, which can manifest itself in the
dreams of the Viceroy of Sardinia.
The project of modernity may be gendered male in Yellow
Jack, but it is a maleness marked by madness, a madness that
Howard can neither completely contain-nor even want to contain.
The delirium poses the question: does masculinity need to divest itself
of its urge to mastery if it really wants to know? Does it need to
become penetrable, and open itself up to desires forbidden to it? The
most significant intertext to Howard's play may be Thomas Mann's
canonical modernist text, Death in Venice (1912) . The exquisitely
self-disciplined Gustav von Eschenbach travels south to Venice, just
as Reed and his military men travel south to Cuba. There they meet
with an erotic fascination, configured as a deadly fever that comes
from the East (Mann's Asia, Howard's Africa). What Mann works to
control through his complex, intellectual ironies and the stylistic
elegance of his particular variety of high modernism, Howard tries to
contain through the disciplines of stage realism. Yet neither work,
once evoking the fascination of the epidemic, can completely contain
it. In both works, the pleasures of the Dionysian stake their claims on
the male subject. When the curtain goes down on Howard's soldiers
singing "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight," one can only
wonder what that hot time might be.
36 GROSS
The orgy of infection in Reed's laboratory with its ecstatic
male acolytes looks forward to our own, contemporary images of
infection, fears, and unspeakable jouissance. Thought reaches its
negation as the project of modernity once again displays its
limitations, now without the hopes that consoled DeKruif and Howard.
While they told a story of the successfully progressing fight against
disease, we have been brutally awaked to the resiliency of diseases
against treatment, and the evolution of new viruses. Howard was
aware of the challenges of modernity. Faster methods of
transportation, Stackpoole notes, carry the threat of faster
dissemination of disease (5-6); modernity brings both the hope of
prevention and the threat of contagion. Howard sees the threat of
modernity, and yet chooses to stress the hope it gives. He does not
foresee, however, the mutation of viruses that bring new epidemics
with them. What comes closest to containing the delirium of Yellow
Jack is a belief in the ultimate eradicability of disease, a myth of
modernity that been shown to be cruelly delusive.
Yet within the very containments of both a laboratory and
dramaturgy dedicated to modernity, Howard inscribes the limits of
modernity, thus opening up a problematic space that seems to find
powerful echoes in postmodernity. In the words of another Jack,
during another plague, this time in Irene Maria Fornes's Enter THE
NIGHT:
I was bleeding like a faucet and they fucked me and
fucked me and it hurt like the devil and I screamed
and screamed till I couldn't scream any more. And
they kept fucking me, one after the other, and I
never had so much pleasure in my life .... I
screamed Like a goat in the slaughterhouse. I don't
know. I don't know. Did I think?40
40 Maria Irene Fornes, Enter THE NIGHT, in Plays for the End of the
Century, ed. Bonnie Marranca {Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996),
175-76.
Journal of American Drama and Theatre 16, no. 2 (Spring 2004)
KITCHEN SINK REALISMS: AMERICAN DRAMA, DINING,
AND DOMESTIC LABOR COME OF AGE IN
LITTLE THEATRE
DOROTHY CHANSKY
[T]he gap between image and reality is . . . the
tension between the customer's desire to be titillated
by something distinctive and the wish for the
reassuringly familiar item on the plate.t
What does any of the rest of it matter if you have
lost your cook? ... What's the difference what's true
if you have to clean out your own sink?2
"Kitchen sink realism" is a term that can polarize theatre
workers and audiences. Some love its grittiness, literal-minded
representational practices, and emotional intensity. Others roll their
eyes at its mimetic naivete in the face of various avant-gardes, poetic
imagery, abstraction, or epic storytelling. "Kitchen sink" as a critical
term was coined to describe consciously rebellious post-World War II
realism in Britain, which was also known as "angry theatre" or
"committed theatre." In that work, according to J. L. Styan, "the well-
furnished elegance of the middle-class stage gave place to kitchens
and attics, with all their sordid paraphernalia of cooking stoves and
ironing boards and beds."3 Critics now use the term loosely to
describe dramas from many eras with domestic settings rendered in
detail and performed with an eye to passing as plausibly everyday.
I am grateful for Anne S. Hrobsky, Carolyn Hailey, and Jonathan
Chambers for their suggestions and advice on this essay.
1 Harvey Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of
the American Diet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 207.
2 Susan Glaspell and George Cram Cook, Tickless Time, in Contemporary
One-Act Plays of 1921 (American), ed. Frank Shay (Cincinnati: Stewart Kidd
Company, 1922), 158.
3 J. L. Styan, Modern Drama in Theory and Practice, vol. 1 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981), 149. Amy Dempsey points out that Kitchen Sink
School was the name given by critic David Sylvester in an article in 1954 to a group
of British painters whose work depicted "drab, unheroic scenes of poast-war
austerity, the commonplace subject-matter of daily life: cluttered kitchens,
bombed-out tenements and backyards." (Art in the Modern Era: A Guide to Styles,
Schools, and Movements [New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002], 199.)
38 CHAN SKY
By extending the descriptor to a plural-kitchen sink
am interested in looking at the ways that actual food
preparation, domestic manners, labor, dining, serving, entertaining,
and cleanup saturate the lives of dramatic characters and situations
even when the kitchen-related activities do not take center stage.
Likewise, the expectations and behaviors of anticipated audiences in
all these areas color what succeeds onstage in creating what an
enthusiastic critic in 1924 called a "verisimilitude ... that is pluperfect
in ... synchronizing the play and the audience without a hiatus of
even a murmur in the air between."4 What qualifies as "real," in other
words, depends not on some codifiable Platonic ideal, but on the
values and reading strategies of viewers. During the American Little
Theatre movement (1912-1925), such realism was-despite the
abstract, rhythmic, expressionist, and surrealist styles more
commonly thought of as Modernist-the most up-to-date and
engaging genre for the majority of playwrights, actors, and audiences
dedicated to creating a significant, modern, American art theatre that
might also give Broadway a run for its money. The three plays
discussed in this essay are from the middle years of the Little Theatre
movement, 1918-1921, and are forerunners to the sorts of present-
day plays that investigate upper middle class angst and self-
actualization in terms of food and domesticity even as they largely
bracket off the labor and class relations that make possible the very
worries and practices by which the protagonists define themselves.s
Such plays offered then and offer now, in terms that food historian
Harvey Levenstein uses to discuss actual comestibles, that perfect
balance between the titillating and the familiar for particular
anticipated audiences.
In the second of my opening quotes, Susan Glaspell and
George Cram Cook's equating in their one-act play Tickless Time of
cleaning out the sink with a critical loss of autonomy signaled
something besides a fascination with or fear of the declasse or "sordid
paraphernalia." In 1918, the year the line was written, live-in
domestic help was on the verge of disappearing as a widespread
phenomenon in the United States. Comfortably middle-class women
were about to enter an era of doing most of their own housework for
the first time in the history of the nation. They would be aided by a
host of new kinds of stoves, irons, washing machines, dryers, coffee
makers, waffle irons, juicers, and vacuum cleaners that replaced
4 Variety, review of The Show-Off, 7 February 1924.
5 A very short list might include Dinner With Friends, Dinner With
Demons, Omnium Gatherum, and The Dining Room.
KITCHEN SINK REALISMS 39
maids and cooks. The period of adjustment to working without help
and mastering new gadgetry could be heady or frightening (or both),
depending on one's resources and one's age. The issues, in other
words, were lifestyle and change, buttressed by technology and
advertising-not merely dirty work versus leisure. Drama reflected,
commented on, and perhaps helped viewers negotiate these
changes.
The three plays discussed and Cook's Tickless
Time, Alice Gerstenberg's The Unseen, and Christopher Morley's
Thursday Evening-grapple squarely, albeit humorously, with three
American institutions that changed dramatically in the teens and
twenties: food, theatre, and housework. Harvey Levenstein locates
the arrival of a "Newer Nutrition"-one based on understanding the
values of food groups, vitamins, and minerals-around 1915.6 Its
forerunner, the "New Nutrition/' had been the project of "domestic
scientists"-women reformers determined to overhaul American
dining and housekeeping along scientific lines during the last three
decades of the nineteenth century. Their goals were improved
efficiency, sanitation, and nutrition (understood mostly as fuel with
the potential to create sluggishness and dyspepsia if misunderstood),
but they were also "Americanizers" who hoped for a nation built on
WASP thriftiness and a bland diet.7 The Newer Nutrition, which
stressed the protective values of food, had similar goals and benefited
in terms of credibility from improved laboratories, the discovery of
and work on several vitamins beginning in 1911, and alliances with
food processing companies and advertising.s Its principles as well as
a nationally homogenized way of eating were consolidated in the
1920s, when mass-produced foodstuffs shaped to some extent the
eating habits of all but the most isolated rural Americans and when
ideas about healthful, modern eating came to saturate women's
magazines aimed at readers from almost all income levels.
Theatre during the teens underwent major changes as a
result of the Little Theatre movement and its "New Stagecraft/' the
name given to a European-influenced school of design that privileged
simplicity, suggestion, and unification over pictorialism and
6 Levenstein, 147-60.
7 See Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn
of the Century (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1986).
B Levenstein, 148-50.
40 CHANSKY
romanticism.9 The goal of the Little Theatre movement, which was a
national grassroots phenomenon, was to make theatre less frivolous
and more personally meaningful to audiences and to amateur
participants and to combat what Little Theatre reformers saw as the
trivialities of both commercial theatre and the increasingly
"threatening" movies. Because of the advent of movies, theatre was
understood by reformers as being not for everyone (although it was
certainly touted by its advocates as being potentially good for
everyone) . As Douglas McDermott notes, in the teens and twenties
American theatre "became an image of reform, struggling against a
conservative corporate society .... [L]ive theatre persists because it
offers an alternative image of society to an audience that desires
one."1o It is important, therefore, to recognize that American
theatergoers after the teens cannot unproblematically be understood
as representatives of the body politic writ small . They were (and
remain) a self-selected cohort.ll
The third American institution, housework, changed radically
after the War for two reasons. First, uneducated young women who
wanted or needed to work for wages increasingly chose
manufacturing occupations and ceased to "live in" as maids or cooks.
If they did choose to do domestic labor for wages, they came in one
or more days a week.12. Even if they worked in manufacturing or
service, though, they often contributed to household labor in ways
that became invisible to many families: wage earners facilitated the
production of processed foods or became waitresses in the many
lunch counters and restaurants that began to cater to non-wealthy
diners in the 1920s.13
9 Orville K. Larson, Scene Design in the American Theatre From 1915 to
1960 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1989), 46-49.
10 Douglas McDermott, "The Theatre and Its Audience," in The American
Stage: Social and Economic Issues from the Colonial Period to the Present, eds.
Ron Engle and Tice L. Miller (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 14-15.
11 See Dorothy Chansky, Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre
Movement and the American Audience (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 2004 [in press]).
12. David M. Kat2.man, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service
in Industrializing America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 51-53, 115-
17, 130-34.
13 These developed as Prohibition put an end to the sort of extravagant
dining that had defined most restaurant forays in the first two decades of the
century. (Levenstein, 183-93.)
KITCHEN SINK REAUSMS
41
Where does the kitchen sink fit into these evolving
"realisms"? Like everything else in the American household, the
kitchen and kitchen sink can be historicized. The earliest American
homes had, of course, no running water and no built-in sinks. Only by
the 1920s did indoor plumbing leave the luxury category and even
then this did not extend to many rural households, even if these were
reasonably well-off.14 Also, homes with sinks might still only have cold
running (or pumped) water, necessitating heating dishwater on a
stove and carrying it back and forth. The sink figured historically in
American manuals for housewives, such as Catherine Beecher's 1841
Treatise on Domestic Economy, which discoursed on efficiency and
thrift to a particular emerging audience. Regarding kitchens, Beecher
advised designing new homes with a single room for eating and some
cooking, thereby dispensing with the separate dining room. Still, the
sink was to be located in a small adjoining room to keep "the most
soiling employments" out of the family's sight. Beecher gave specific
directions regarding dishwashing itself, for which dishwater was to be
reused with progressively greasier and dirtier items. The overall task
required two tin tubs, one for washing and one for rinsing, as well as
a tray on which to drain the dishes, two water pails, several dishrags,
and hard soap.lS Dishwashing flakes-never mind liquid-were
decades away, as were commercial products to soften dishpan hands.
The idea that dishwashing and scrubbing out the kitchen sink could
be used as an indicator of a woman's skills and worthiness was clearly
in effect. Beecher's predecessor Lydia Maria Child had issued in 1832
the no-nonsense dictum that "there is no need of asking the character
of a domestic, if you have ever seen her wash dishes in a little greasy
water."16 Readers of such treatises and regular theatergoers were not
necessarily expected to do their own dishes, but they were certainly
supposed to know how to supervise those who did.
14 Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New
York: Henry Holt and Company, 1982), 86, 102.
15 Catherine E. Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy for the Use of
Young Ladies at Home, and at School (Boston: Marsh, Capen, Lyon, and Webb,
1841), 282-83 and 367-69. In 1869, the same dishwashing instructions were
repeated in The American Womans Home: or, Principles of Domestic Science, co-
authored by Beecher and her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe (reprint; New York: Arno
Press & The New York Times, 1971) with an added paragraph about the sink. It
"should be scalded out every day, and occasionally with hot lye." Dish-cloths should
be "put in the wash every week" and there should be three, graded by levels of the
greasiness of the items for which they were used (371-72).
16 Lydia Maria Child, The American Frugal Housewife (1832; reprint,
Sandwich, MA: Chapman Billies, Inc., n.d.), 16.
42 (HANSKY
Tickless Time captures the anxieties and pieties of a
particular segment of American theatergoers-progressives,
"bohemians," left-wing intellectuals-even as it goes about deflating
them. Authors Glaspell and Cook were co-founders of the
Provincetown Players and the play was first presented at the
company's New York theatre in December, 1918. Many of the
anticipated audience were members of the company. As Greenwich
Village "bohemians," Provincetown members were mostly rebelling
against the mores of Victorian Protestantism; a number were emigres
from the Midwest and had a push-pull relationship with the small
towns they had left behind. They chafed at moral and social strictures
even as they recalled fondly some of the values of a "simpler" way of
life.17 Virtually all of them did white collar work, and many were
writers in multiple genres. Few had any background in theatre or
much interest in popular entertainments, so the drama they wrote
and the theatre they created satisfied their own needs to see
themselves reflected on a stage of their own devising.1s At worst,
their plays were self-indulgent and unpolished. Jane Heap, co-editor
of The Little Review, which first offered Ulysses to American readers,
found little in the Provincetown fare to raise her appreciation or
challenge the intellect. She complained in 1919 that the
Provincetowners "presented plenty of plays about romantic triangles
and an abundance of works offering 'a problem from [the
playwright's] own little psychological laboratory .... But plays there
were none.' "19 Eugene O'Neill famously chafed at the inability of the
early Provincetowners to master even the rudiments of blocking a
play or remembering to follow what blocking there was. At best the
group was part of a new movement that made theatre a locus of
social commentary and expression for and by a changing middlebrow
citizenry. The small theatre in which they presented their works was
set up as a private membership organization in order to circumvent
fire codes.2o The Provincetowners sought publicity and reviews
17 See Robert E. Humphrey, Children of Fantasy: The First Rebels of
Greenwich Village (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1978); and Leslie Fishbein,
Rebels in Bohemia: The Radicals ofThe Masses, 1911-1917 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1982).
18 Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the
Creation of a New Century (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000), 160-61.
19 Jane Heap qtd. in Steven Watson, Strange Bedfellows: The First
American Avant-Garde (New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1991), 348.
20 Arnold Goldman, "The Culture of the Provincetown Players," Journal of
American Studies 12, no. 3 (1978): 303.
KITCHEN SINK REAUSMS
43
virtually from the outset, but the membership requirement as well as
the location outside New York's main theatre district meant that only
a particular, self-selected group comprised the audience for the
productions. In the first season, members of the well-heeled New
York Stage society purchased a block of subscriptions.2t As its name
suggests, the Stage Society had an interest in theatre and they
followed the latest in European avant-garde work. Between these
aesthetically progressive elites and the actual members of the group
an audience profile emerges of a group that was informed and
interested in new ideas but hardly willing to give up much personal
comfort whatever their responses to depictions of social inequality
might be.
Tickless Time is set in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where
Ian and Eloise Joyce, a young couple who consider themselves
superior to most of their culture, their neighbors, and their friends,
have decided to do away with their mechanical clocks and live by a
sundial that Ian has constructed. The action occurs in the yard where
the sundial stands. Near it is a chart which is requisite for making the
calculations needed in order actually to read the sundial with
accuracy. Eloise is unable to understand the chart but is thrilled with
"the feeling of it" (132). Invigorated by the chance to "refuse to be
automatons" (133) and live in "a first-hand relation with truth" (131),
the Joyces prepare to bury their regular clocks. The Joyces are
contrasted to their friends the Knights, described in the list of
characters as Eddy, "a Standardized Mind," and Alice, "a Standardized
Wife." It is Eddy who asks how, if the Joyces "cast off standard time,"
they are going "to connect up with other people" (145), and Alice who
answers Ian's disappointed observation that the cook "would rather
have a clock than grow" by asking why one can't do both (152).
In the first sign of trouble in paradise, Eloise starts to waffle
on the burial plan. One clock was a wedding present, another a legacy
from her grandmother; her watch-a graduation present-is what will
enable her to be on time for her dentist appointment and for the train
to Boston, where she wants to buy a new hat. Clearly the playwrights
intend to show that standardization is an element of modernity and
sociality and therefore necessary, even for intellectual and cultural
progressives. The Knights' intervention regarding the clocks, however,
is not nearly as dramatic as their intervention regarding the
impending departure of the cook, Annie. Other than the jokey sense
that the spoiled Joyces will be unable to function without their cook,
21 Helen Deutsch and Stella Hanau, The Provincetown: A Story of the
Theatre (New York: Russell & Russell, 1931), 19-21.
44 CHANSKY
much of the domestic reality related by the incidents involving Annie
is hard for a present-day audience to grasp. But it is precisely these
domestic realisms that would have made the play thematically and
ideologically immediate-and funny-for its viewers.
The cook herself would have been read as Irish. Her name
was almost as familiar as Bridget for cooks in literature or plays, and
New England householders, according to a 1910 survey, preferred
Irish and Scandinavian maids.22 The fact that Edna St. Vincent Millay,
who first played the role, had reddish hair would have added to the
impression. But Irish live-in maids and cooks were, as a group, on
their way out the door long before Millay's character departed in
frustration mid-scene over the loss of her kitchen clock. First
generation Irish immigrant women who worked had frequently gone
into domestic service, but by the turn of the century, it was clear that
their daughters had other aspirations.23 And by 1920, only seven
percent of native-born and twenty percent of immigrant women wage
earners-regardless of ethnicity-made their livings as servants.24 The
fictional Joyces' fictional Annie, therefore, was part of a breed headed
for extinction. She would be replaced, at least in cities, by black
domestics who would live in their own homes, work an eight-hour
rather than an on-demand day, and come to be called "cleaning
women." By 1920 only about half as many American families or
individuals would have servants as would have been the case in
1870.25 Even bohemians who came from what they saw as modest
circumstances (Giaspell's profile) would have been accustomed to
some household help. Tickless Time strikes at the intersection of
pretensions and progressiveness regarding household help.
The Joyces' and Knights' anxiety about Annie's threatened
departure is played out in a humorous spoof of the silliness of being
in the thrall of the "servant problem." Alice grabs a shovel and begins
to dig up the clocks as Eddie cries out "Come home, Annie! Clock!
22 Katzman, 70.
23 By 1910, household labor was of rapidly declining interest to all white
working women, either native or foreign-born (ibid., 72).
24 In 1900, 54% of all Irish-born working women in the United States
were servants and another 6.5% were laundresses. Irish women immigrants were
more likely to seek paid employment than were women from any other immigrant
group, with 24.8% employment, compared to 12.7% of Polish-born and 8.9% of
Italian-born women. But in the same 1900 study, only 18.9% of Irish women born
in the United States were in household service. An immigrant might go into service,
but her daughter wanted something else (ibid., 67, 68, 70, 73).
25 Ibid., 55.
KITCHEN SINK REALISMS 45
Clock!" Eddie then takes over the digging, and Ian, knowing exactly
which clock Annie wants, disinters the alarm clock and runs after her
with it (159). Their return is described with "Annie triumphantly
bearing her alarm clock, Ian-a captive at her chariot wheels-
following with suitcase, shawl-strap, and long strings of bag around
his wrist" (160). The "servant problem," as domestic labor historian
David M. Katzman observes, "was always a middle-class one, since
the upper class could always command the hire of whatever servants
they needed. The expansion of the middle class . .. occurred more
rapidly than the growth of the servant pool," and the fact that
American values promoted equality meant that most eschewed the
label "servant" if possible.26 This became increasingly possible as
vocational training and compulsory education affected the lives of the
majority of Americans. Both Glaspell and Cook were born in the 1870s
and were, as older members of the Little Theatre movement, able to
see how domestic service and servants had changed over roughly
four decades.
The play also reveals much about how the playwrights and
their presumed audience saw food, its preparation, and eating habits.
When Annie first rushes in she is peeling an onion and trying to
calculate time by the sundial and chart. "Starting the sauce for the
spaghetti. Fry onions in butter three minutes," she says.27 Although
Italian food would gain acceptance with many Americans after World
War I, it was hardly a staple in 1918. Glaspell and Cook's audience
would certainly have recognized it, however, since Greenwich Village
was one of the first places to have Italian restaurants staffed by
Italians but targeting non-Italian customers seeking exoticism.2s
Accordingly, what might look simply economical to a present-day
audience would have been stylishly "alternative" to those in the know
in 1918. Annie's recipe reveals something else about the Joyces as
diners. She is cooking the onions in butter and not ol ive oil,
suggesting an accommodation to a WASP-or at least a northern
European influenced- palate. Moreover, she says nothing about
sauteing garlic. Spiciness was routinely tempered in recipes for
Italian, Mexican, or Chinese food that was intended for consumption
by mainstream Americans.
26 Ibid., 223-24, 13-14, 240.
27 Glaspell and Cook, 148.
28 Donna R. Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making
of Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 99-102;
Levenstein, 146; Leslie Brenner, American Appetite: The Coming of Age of a
National Cuisine (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 89.
46 CHAN SKY
Still, the Joyces want to be thought of as modern. When
Eloise waxes momentarily sentimental about the clock with which her
grandmother started housekeeping (making it roughly a product of
the 1860s or possibly earlier, depending on how old we want to think
the Joyces are), Ian dismisses the grandmother as a "meticulous old
woman." Eloise retorts "you were glad enough to get her pies and
buckwheat cakes."29 Both these comestibles would have been
recognized as high on the list of old-fashioned foods that home
economists of the New Nutrition school were eager to discourage.
Yeast breads were considered lighter and more sophisticated than
buckwheat cakes or cornbread, which had been ordinary staples prior
to flour becoming largely a commercial rather than a homeground
product around the middle of the nineteenth century. Pies were the
bane of the food reformers' existence, as Helen Campbell, head of
home economics at the University of Wisconsin, pointedly noted on
more than one occasion. She was critical of rural women who relied
on old habits and refused the findings of science, deriding their
menus of" ... pie and cake three times a day," and regarding such
homey symbols of comfort as signs of dangerous, regressive
victimhood. "It was one of these victims who told me that with her
own hands she had made in one year twelve hundred and seventy-
two pies," Campbell reported.30 Eloise has scored a hit where it really
hurts: Ian has a very, very old-fashioned streak. In fact, one of the
ways in which Ian may be more stuck in the mud than his working-
class neighbor is the fact that the neighbor, Mr. Stubbs, works at a
fish-freezing plant. Stubbs is, therefore, part of the food processing
industry that would in a general way come to provide the convenience
that would replace the private domestic labor on which the Joyces
depend for their meals.
The fact that the Joyces' cook is timing her cooking is another
indicator that this is a progressive household. She is cooking in a way
that home economists had been encouraging and that had been
codified and popularized by Fannie Farmer, who was known for her
school of cooking that stressed precise measurements and timing and
whose Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, first published in 1896, had
sold 360,000 copies by the time of the author's death in 1915.31 Ian
Joyce, though, expects Annie to be more than someone who can cook
by the methods favored by home economists and suggests that
29 Glaspell and Cook, 136.
30 Shapiro, 168, 190.
31 Shapiro, 112.
KITCHEN SINK REALISMS 47
Annie's mastery of cooking along really modern lines has been less
than complete. "Let her establish a first-hand relation to heat. If she'd
take a look at the food instead of the clock-!''32 He would, in short,
like her to embody John Dewey's philosophy in her work. For Dewey,
merely learning to follow directions did not comprise education;
Dewey favored schooling that taught children to grasp principles,
thereby enabling them to solve problems based on their
understanding of the global laws of science operating in any given
situation. The play, then, spoke to progressive thinkers who would
have recognized the Deweyite imperative but would also have been
able to laugh at Ian's taking it (as well as virtually everything else) to
extremes.
Why, though, does Alice precede her plaint about cleaning
out the kitchen sink with the stern warning that "Eloise can't do the
work! Peel potatoes-scrub"-a line that the stage directions say is
delivered to Ian?J3 J. Ellen Gainor sees Tickless Time as set in a world
that maintains a conservative status quo regarding "hierarchical
structures of class and gender" especially regarding the "intellectually
domineering and condescending husband" and the "flighty, shallow,
and emotional wife" who relies on him for guidance.34 It would be
easy enough to read the anxiety as snobbishness or even laziness and
the appeal to the husband as an indication of the wives' protected
positions. But Eloise's status regarding her own kitchen sink is
ambiguous. For instance, it is not clear who earns the money in the
Joyce household. If the Joyces are stand-ins for Glaspell and Cook,
they both work and are freelancers for whom income arrives
irregularly. It is also unclear whether they are summer residents of
Provincetown seeking simplicity and escape, as many of the Players
were. If so, the house in which they find themselves might be more
spacious but have fewer conveniences than the apartment they
vacated in Manhattan; part of its appeal as a summer retreat might
be the unaffordable-in-Manhattan cook. It would not be surprising if
the kitchen in which Annie labors has a pump rather than faucets, an
iron or zinc sink, and no electricity, possibly resembling the Truro,
Massachusetts kitchen that Walker Evans photographed in 1930.
Alice might then be referring to a summer luxury (this is part of
32 Glaspell and Cook, 149.
33 Ibid., 158.
34 J. Ellen Gainor, Susan Glaspe/1 in Context: American Theater, Culture,
and Politics 1915-48 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 91.
48
Kitchen in Truro, Massachusetts, ca. 1930.
Walker Evans Archive, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
CHAN SKY
KITCHEN SINK REALISMS 49
Eloise's vacation, or part of what enables her to write) or to the
Joyces' old-fashioned values or, of course, to simple class privilege.
But Eloise's class privilege is likely not simple. Her reference
to her graduation would, if it refers to a college rather than a high
school graduation, put her in an unusual category of American
women in the 'teens. Only 3.8 percent of all American women
between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one were enrolled in
college in 1910, rising to 7.6 percent in 1920 and 10.5 percent by
1930.35 College educated women had access to better jobs than most
uneducated women, but an education was no guarantee of a career.
Social convention would continue to dictate that women leave the
salaried work force upon marriage or, in the case of more progressive
thinkers, upon the birth of their first child, making college a push-pull
proposition for bright women.36 Homemaking and college education
were, in fact, joined at the hip by the mid-teens owing to the success
of the domestic science pioneers. Largely founded by Ellen Richards,
the first woman to attend M.I.T. (in 1870), domestic science wedded
the male domain of research and objectivity to the female domain of
home and family. Richards and her followers believed that American
women were largely superstitious and sentimental in their attitudes
towards their lives and work, once noting impatiently that women
"have allowed the sink drain to feed the well and the dark, damp
cellar to furnish air to the house .... They need the influence of the
scientific spirit, which tests all things and suspends judgment.''37 By
1914, over 250 colleges and universities offered home economics
courses, with twenty-eight schools having four-year programs leading
to the B.A., twenty offering a master's degree, and a Ph.D. in
household administration available at the University of Chicago.3s
Home economics was considered a "parallel" program to agriculture
in Midwestern schools and while it was never required of women
students, it "enjoyed an unusually fluid position in the university
curriculum, so that women ran across it no matter where they
concentrated their studies.'' Chemistry, biology, art, and economics
35 Lynn D. Gordon, Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 2.
36 Ibid., 197, 163; see also Paula S. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful:
American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
37 Ellen Richards qtd. in Shapiro, 175.
38 Ibid., 185.
50
CHAN SKY
proper were among the fields that "could be studied profitably from
the point of view of the home."39 Both the popular press and the
scholars of the home economics world found ways to link the values
of higher education to the imperative to please one's husband and
find stimulation precisely in scrubbing the kitchen sink and peeling
potatoes. Accordingly, Alice's cry may be a plea: Eloise can't perform
these tasks if she is to escape living in a realm proscribed by them.
The issue is not helplessness but a fear of being (re)defined by the
very tasks that would sap her of the energy and time to do other,
probably more creative, work. The fine-and slippery-line dividing
college-graduate-as-beloved-wife from beloved-wife-as-de-facto-
scullery-maid would have been crucial to an educated, urban,
progressive audience of independent but not wealthy young women
and men.
In the 1918 production of Tickless Time, two other material
facts would have underscored the anxiety attendant on falling prey to
being a kitchen slave and the fact that, education or no, women
continued to be seen as belonging in the kitchen. First, Edna St.
Vincent Millay, the original Annie, had graduated from Vassar the year
before she played this role and was here offering an embodied, albeit
fictional, conflation of the two kinds of young women. Second,
anyone who could read a program could, if she had a mind to, figure
out the similarity-even the bond of sisterhood-between maid and
educated wife based on one other amusing irony: the role of Eloise
was played by Millay's actual sister Norma.
Other Little Theatre one-acts provide insight into what
amused a certain audience demographic around 1920. Little Theatre
audiences usually included people who were company members
functioning as playwrights or actors but who in greater numbers
worked backstage or to market and produce a season. Audiences also
included like-minded friends whose social habits and interests were
the same as the participants'. Little Theatres made much of wanting
to be inclusive and they generally welcomed any people who stepped
forward to do the requisite production work, but the willing workers
generally self-selected because they were socially comfortable with
the founders, leaders, and visible members of the group (who
sometimes had professional theatre ambitions or experience).40 Little
Theatre was a nationally distributed phenomenon that started in the
39 Ibid., 187.
40 See Chansky, Composing Ourselves; and Maurice Browne, "The
Temple of a Living Art," Chicago Little Theatre, 1914.
KITCHEN SINK REAUSMS
51
mid-teens. Between 1912 and 1916 sixty-three organizations calling
themselves Little Theatres sprang up in the United States.41 By 1926
a writer for Variety claimed there were 5,000.42 Little Theatre workers
and supporters were virtually all white collar. Accordingly, the kitchen
sink realisms their plays favored tell a great deal about the concerns
and the expectations of their members.
Alice Gerstenberg's The Unseen {1918) had been produced at
least three times in the Midwest by the time it was published in 1921
in her anthology Ten One-Act Plays, which enjoyed fifteen printings
between 1921 and 1959, suggesting an ongoing popularity with
amateurs.43 The play has three characters and is unusual because
Hulda, who is described as "a Swedish servant," has a large role,
stands up for herself, and may, depending on one's reading, reveal the
shortsightedness as well as the entrapment of the seemingly
privileged, better-off young wife. The play's first line is Hulda's, as she
proclaims "It vas not my fault!" to the irritated and disapproving couple
whose dinner is ruined by this new cook, who, trying to please her
employer, has prepared only what she was asked to. She responds to
the assertion that she should know what the mistress "meant to order"
with "I can't smell vat you vant" (69). Jeffrey Baldwin, the husband, is
an up-and-coming architect and his wife, Lois, truly is "flighty, shallow,
and emotional." She forgets to order dessert at the bakery, neglects to
tell Hulda precisely how to prepare the unfamiliar (to Hulda) foods she
expect for dinner, admits that she can't think of anything besides the
new dress she is making for herself, chides Hulda for failing to serve
from the left, and wishes she could go to the theatre more often.
Jeffrey, irritated over the dismal service Hulda is providing, asks Lois,
"Why didn't you go into the kitchen yourself and show her? After all it
is your job to look after things .. . " (71). Later he loses his patience
and tells Lois, "You scatter so! You don't concentrate!" (77) When
Hulda's failure to deliver a telegram to Jeffrey costs him an important
commission, Lois turns on the servant, but Jeffrey turns on Lois.
"What's a wife supposed to be to a man? Haven't your slack methods
ruined my prospects for life?" (87)
41 Constance D'Arcy Mackay, The Little Theatre in the United States (New
York: Henry Holt and Company, 1917).
42 Qtd. in Alfred Bernheim, The Business of the Theatre: An Economic
History of the American Theatre, 1750-1932 (1932; reprint, New York: Benjamin
Blom: 1964), 102.
43 Alice Gerstenberg, Ten One-Act Plays (New York: Brentano's, 1921).
52 CHAN SKY
The play may be asking what a wife is supposed to be as much
as it is asking whether the titular "unseen" forces guide our lives more
than we recognize. (Hulda's negligence later turns out to be a
godsend, as the second choice architect who does receive the
commission is killed in an on-site accident that would have claimed
Jeffrey's life. Hence the discussion of "unseen" forces and the
conclusion that Hulda is an angel.) Lois lives in a house with a dining
room, a study for Jeffrey, and a sewing space she refers to as her
room. Since Hulda's impending departure includes her appearance in
"a ridiculous hat and shawl and carr[ying] a dilapidated suit-case and
several weird hat-boxes" (91)-not unlike the description of Annie's
threatened flight in Tickless Time-the house also seems to have
separate maid's quarters, meaning at least a seven-room dwelling for
a couple whose servant problem is the result of the fact that "no one
else will come for the small price we pay" (70). Gerstenberg was an
heiress and knew firsthand a world of full household staffs; here she
both invokes it and points to its shortcomings precisely vis-a-vis
wifedom and the domestic realm. Lois may or may not have gone to
college. She may or may not be destined for wealth. But as the realm
of finger bowls, dressmakers, and breakfast caps-all of which are
specified in the play-disappeared for all but the wealthiest Americans,
the question of what a wife was supposed to be remained.
The answer provided by home economists, popular culture,
and many university programs was that wives were to be homemakers
and that homemaking was vital to the wellbeing of the nation.
Homemaking was presented as different from mere housekeeping in
that homemakers were not just domestic laborers who happened to be
married to their bosses. Rather, they were savvy consumers who did
housework and might even acknowledge that it was drudgery. They
valued efficiency (read appliances and processed foods) because
industry's answer to the exodus of household help enabled wives to
have more time to make themselves interesting to their husbands and
useful to their children.44 Homemaking was, by one account, a "phase
of citizenship." 45
44 Shapiro, 222-27.
45 Cora M. Winchell, " For the Homemaker: Homemaking as a Phase of
Citizenship," The Journal of Home Economics, January 1922.
!KITCHEN SINK REALISMS 53
Plays written for audiences expected to come from the
mistress and not the maid class (which is to say virtually all dramas for
Broadway or for Little Theatre audiences) rarely let domestics talk
back, which makes both Tickless Time and The Unseen unusual. Plays
featuring the upper class almost never bother with servants who speak
much; it is understood that these liveried workers appear as signifiers
of wealth and are, along with furnishings and clothing, part of the
vicarious fun of going somewhere unusual. As domestic labor came to
be understood after World War I as something for which one paid on
an hourly or daily or even weekly basis, with the laborer herself going
home at night and having her own household, American plays
struggled with other kitchen sink realisms. Maids and cooks did not
disappear from protagonists' lives, but they moved offstage as the
onstage characters struggled to make sense of new household
responsibilities, new ideas about homemaking, new products, and new
ambitions.
The one-act "Thursday Evening" by Christopher Morley puts
domestic labor at the heart of middle-class aspiration even as the hired
help has moved offstage and into her own home. 46 The play was first
presented by the Stockbridge Stocks, a New York City based Little
Theatre company, in 1921. The title refers to the stereotypical
servants' night off47 and the action is set in "a small suburban kitchen
in the modest home of Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Johns" ( 457) following a
dinner that the twenty-three-year-old wife, Laura, has prepared. They
are the parents of a ten-month-old baby. Both their mothers have
unexpectedly joined them for dinner, but Gordon and Laura refuse
offers of help with cleanup and start to do the dishes themselves.
Fatigue, personal preferences, and each spouse's desire to praise
mother over mother-in-law have them bickering in short order. The
plot resolves when the couple storm out in opposite directions and the
two mothers-in-law take over, recognize the sources of the conflict,
and stage an argument of their own in which each calculatedly
criticizes the other's child mercilessly. They know their offspring are
eavesdropping and the mothers quietly exit to allow the couple to
reconvene, apologize, and shake their heads over the audacity of the
mothers trying to set them against each other.
46 Christopher Morley, " Thursday Evening," in Contemporary One-Act
Plays of 1921 (American), ed. Frank Shay (Cincinnati: Stewart Kidd Company,
1922), 455-85.
47 Katzman, 114.
54
CHAN SKY
The entire physical activity of the play involves clearing,
scraping, washing, drying, and putting away dishes, along with
disposing of garbage, emptying the tray of the icebox, and inspecting
the baby clothes that are drying on a clothes horse near the stove. The
stage directions specify the precise layout of the kitchen fixtures and
the dialogue reinforces the domestic details: an oil stove, open-shelved
cabinets, a sink with separate dishpan, a kettle in which the water for
washing the dishes must be heated, and a cracked platter that upsets
Gordon because it was a wedding gift from his mother. The centrality
of consumer savvy to modern wifedom appears in Laura's disparaging
retort that Copenhagen is "a stock pattern. You can get another at any
department store" (461). Throughout the play the two take turns
complaining about the absent maid, Ethel, who is repeatedly referred
to as a "coon." Despite the racial slur, the couple's real irritations
regarding the maid are the same ones that the self-absorbed couples
made in Tickless Time and The Unseen about the Irish and the
Swedish household help: she doesn't cook to their taste, she is
careless of their personal treasures, and she can't accommodate
herself to the particular technology by which they define themselves.
Gordon complains that he never yet saw a cook who could remember
to empty the icebox pan, whereupon he himself empties it into the
sink, cooling off the dishwater to the point that the dishes washed in
it come out greasy. Laura's reminder that he should wash "the silver
first, while the water's clean" (459) could have come straight from
Catherine Beecher's 1841 treatise. A list of the foods that the penny-
pinching Gordon scrapes from the plates to save indicates a solidly
WASP diet: lettuce, beef, and cheese.
Laura is caught in a world where women were expected to be
housewives in homes that no longer conferred special claims to
cultural influence as they had in the nineteenth-century world of
"separate spheres." She is embarking on her homebound career in the
decade that probably gave birth to the apologetic phrase "just a
housewife."4B In the mothers-in-laws' fake fight, Mrs. Johns laments
"that Gordon should have to entrust his son to amateur care when it
needs scientific attention," but responds to the suggestion that this
superior man participate in the household with the observation that
"Gordon is too intellectual to be bothered with these domestic details."
Mrs. Sheffield, in turn, says "I think the way Laura runs her little house
is just wonderful. See how she struggles to keep her kitchen in order-
48 Glenna Matthews, "Just a Housewife": The Rise and Fall of Domesticity
in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 192-93.
KITCHEN SINK REALISMS 55
this miserable, inconvenient little kitchen, no gas, no pantry, no decent
help .... A husband, a home, and a baby-it's enough to ruin any
woman" (478-9). In the reconciliation, although Gordon promises to
be less obstinate and less obsessed with saving leftovers, it is Laura
whose desperation to please comes through. She refuses a nurse for
the baby and defends herself as "scientific" and "not an amateur,"
since she weighs the baby every week and keeps a chart (481). We
also know she follows some of the latest "scientific" ideas about
housework because she sits (rather than standing) to dry the dishes,
the sort of thing recommended by home efficiency expert Christine
Frederick in Ladies Home Journal in 1912 and later in her books The
New Housekeeping (1914) and Household Engineering: Scientific
Management in the Home (1925). Scientific and competent or not,
Laura also desperately tells Gordon that he's all she has. (Tellingly, she
has no interest in giving up the cook, and, once they are in a better
mood, Gordon expansively notes that Ethel is "all right" and that they
are "lucky to have her" [ 482]). He repeats his favorite nickname for
Laura-Adorable Creature (485)-signaling that all is right once again.
Maintaining "adorableness" and being "scientific" comprise
Laura's understanding of how to hold on to all she has. Laura is a
character built almost wholly on cliches of wifedom; we know little of
her past, her aspirations, or her skills, except that she is
knowledgeable as a shopper. Shopping would be presented relentlessly
after World War I to housewives as the way to fulfill their duties as
homemakers and citizens. Advertisers played into anxieties about
practicality, adorableness, and duty with such lines as "are you keeping
up with your husband?" as a lead for selling appliances. "Are you still
the attractive, alert, up-to-date woman he married? Are you keeping
up with the interesting things in life as he is, or are you devoting all
your time, strength and thought to housework?" reads a 1918 ad for
the Simplex Ironer, warning that men "progress mentally" through
their contacts at work, while wives who get along without household
aids are forced into "the narrow sphere of housework," a situation that
is bad economy in terms of both finances and companionship.49 The
answer for the fatigued housewife depicted mopping her brow as she
irons in front of a large wall clock that warns that the afternoon is
almost over, is a more modern product. Unlike Cook and Glaspell's
Eloise who "can't" scrub out the kitchen sink perhaps because she has
intellectual or professional goals, or Alice Gerstenberg's housewife
49 Simplex Ironer ad, 1918 (#22,821 in the New York Public Library
Picture Collection).
56 CHAN SKY
character Lois, who simply won't and is focused on social climbing,
Morley's Laura lives in a world that revolves around the kitchen sink
and, with her absent maid and budget-conscious husband, is the
target for such ads.
The Little Theatre plays discussed here are a prologue-an
amuse bouche, if you will-to a multi-course sequence of American
dramas of domestic anxiety. It would be easy to try to read American
plays of the 1920s featuring domestic settings (the soup course, to
extend the metaphor) with an eye to how female characters are
depicted capitulating to the lures of advertising and how male
characters are constructed to expect their women to do precisely that.
It would likewise be easy to see plays themselves as commodities
meant to allay anxieties about fitting into the rapidly changing 1920s
by giving audiences models to follow. But neither advertising nor plays,
no matter how predictably melodramatic or ethnographically
"accurate" they may seem from a distance, can be read as sets of
directions eagerly gobbled up and followed by wholly gullible
consumers. As Ed Schiffer notes, consumer advocates base their
activism on the belief that consumers need not be passive in their
consumption of advertising. Consumers are neither completely
foolproof nor completely led by the nose. When Schiffer speaks of the
genius of successful commercials, he might also be speaking of the
genius of successful plays, which "lies in their ability to negotiate
between ... two views of its [sic] audience, either by appealing to one
in the name of the other, or by using an appeal to one to legitimate
the other."so Even the most cynical theatre producer or playwright,
while hoping that audiences will buy tickets to a production, cannot
stipulate precisely how audiences as consumers are to make use of
what they see and feel while or after attending a play. Students of
drama are taught that the bedrock of theatre is conflict and in some
of the most popular and memorable (although these are not the same
thing) plays of the 1920s, the frisson between advertisers' or
psychologists' norms and characters' or audiences' desires concerning
domestic labor, food, and wifedom would have been palpable.
"Dinner and a show" was, for many decades, an entertainment
commonplace. My hope is that this short look at dinner in a show or
two can trouble the easy combination at its very root in the modernist
beginnings of present-day kitchen sink realisms.
so Ed Schiffer, "'Fable Number One': Some Myths About Consumption," in
Eating Culture, eds. Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1993), 292.
Journal of American Drama and Theatre 16, no. 2 (Spring 2004)
BODIES, VOICES, WORDS:
ELMER RICE AND THE CINEMATIC IMAGINATION
JULIA A. WALKER
Critics have long maintained that American dramatic
expressionism was simply derivative of the better-known German
movement. That narrative-first floated by journalists reporting on
"the new stagecraft" arriving from Europe in the 1920s-was
cemented in 1972 by Mardi Valgemae's Accelerated Grimace, the first
full-length critical study of American expressionist drama. Citing the
term's first use by French painter Julien-Auguste Herve in 1901 and its
subsequent adoption by German literary critic Kasimir Edschmid in
1917, Valgemae asserts that "expressionism, like most new
developments in early twentieth-century art, music, and literature,
originated in Europe."
1
He cites the American premieres of Robert
Wiene's film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in 1921, Georg Kaiser's play
From Morn to Midnight in 1922, and Walter Hasenclever's play The Son
in 1925 as important and necessary influences on the expressionist
plays written by American dramatists, based upon formal homologies
such as the stylized presentation of a subjective inner world,
compressed syntax, exaggerated caricatures, and episodic action.2
While it is true that American and German expressionist
dramas share many of these traits, it is not necessarily true that
German expressionism was the only or even primary influence upon
the development of the American form. Yes, German expressionism
predates the development of American expressionist drama, but the
German plays were not produced on the American stage until many of
the American plays had been written and, in some instances, already
produced. Yes, American playwrights had access to copies of the
German plays, but they consistently denied having read or been
influenced by them. Eugene O'Neill, for example, claimed that The
Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape were written "long before I had ever
heard of Expressionism," while Elmer Rice insisted that The Adding
Machine was "a spontaneous thing. I had no experience with German
expressionism at that time." Rice even went so far as to extend
1 Mardi Valgemae, Accelerated Grimace: Expressionism in the American
Drama of the 1920s (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), 2.
2 Ibid., 8-10; 2-3.
58 WALKER
amnesty to other American expressionist playwrights, asserting that
"there is no foundation for the belief that the Americans-Lawson,
O'Neill, Treadwell, whatever others there were-were imitating
German forms."3 Valgemae, like many critics, dismisses such denials
on the grounds that they were likely motivated by the playwright's
conscious or unconscious desire to protect his or her artistic vanity. But
this seems rather unfair since O'Neill did not fail to credit Ibsen,
Strindberg, and Hauptmann as important influences on his work, and
Rice allowed that, however unaware he was of any debt he owed to
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, it might indeed have been an
"unconscious" influence.4
What if we were to take these playwrights at their word? What
if they were not directly influenced by German expressionism in the
writing of their plays? What if there were other-perhaps more
influential-sources closer to home? In this article, I contend that
there were, offering an alternative critical narrative to account for the
experimental formal style of American expressionist plays. This
narrative looks not to Germany but to American cultural modernity for
the origin of these plays, understanding them as an aesthetic response
to the revolution in communications technology at the turn of the 20th
century. For, with the invention of the kinetescope and
cinematographe, the phonograph, telephone and radio, and the
wireless telegraph and typewriter, the act of communication-once
experienced as an integrated bodily process-was splintered into the
newly isolable elements of bodies, voices, and words. Imagine, if you
will, just how odd it must have been to have seen, for the first time, a
recognizably human figure gesticulating silently on the silver screen.
Or what it would have been like to have heard a disembodied voice
emanating from a phonograph horn. Or even, after so many
generations of print literacy, what it would have been like to have
known that a meaningful sequence of words had been transcribed
from a pattern of electrical impulses. Communication-once
understood as a single intentional act-was suddenly rent apart into
three distinct and potentially independent streams of signification.
American expressionism, I argue, is a direct response to this
revolution in communication technologies. For it was in the theatre-
that art form most dependent upon the integration of bodies, voices,
and words-that fears concerning these new technologies were given
3 Qtd. in William R. Elwood, "An Interview with Elmer Rice on
Expressionism," Educational Theatre Journa/20 (1968): 6.
4 Elmer Rice, "Business Correspondence, The Adding Machine" B47-24 to
B47-191, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas.
ELMER RICE
59
their most acute cultural expression. These plays gave voice to the fear
that such technologies would alienate or even displace the individual
from the act of making meaning not only in their dystopic content, but
also in their experimental form. In what follows, I take Elmer Rice's
1922 play The Adding Machine as my example, demonstrating how its
tale of a beleaguered soul beaten down by the forces of modern
industry encodes its playwright's own fears of a technology that
threatened the integrity of the theatre-a technology that Rice knew
all too well, having served a brief and unhappy stint working as a
screenwriter in Hollywood. Reading The Adding Machine against this
background, I show how the play critiques film in both its content and
its form. Not only does it expose Hollywood's cynical interpellation of
its characters' desires, but, by counterpointing bodies, voices, and
words-the three modes of signification made newly visible by these
new communication technologies-Rice's play reveals film's limitations
in order to reaffirm the artistic integrity of the theatrical medium.
I. Hailed by Hollywood
The Adding Machine is a Nietschean fable of modern man.
Detailing the life of Mr. Zero, its hapless anti-hero who, displaced from
his job by a machine, murders his boss, is condemned to death, and
finds himself in a heaven he cannot accept, it is the story of a "slave"
who, in thrall to the "herd mentality" of conventional morality, is
incapable of evolving into an "i.ibermensch" for the future. Indeed, the
play's action charts not his evolution upward but his de-evolution
downward into an unending spiral, as Zero is reincarnated into an even
more degraded existence at the end of the play. It is, in Rice's words,
"the case history of one of the slave souls who are both the raw
material and the product of a mechanized society.'
15
From the moment the play begins, we see Zero silently
subjected to the pressures of work and home. As his wife harangues
him about his various inadequacies, he distracts himself with thoughts
of his day's work, its residue having coopted his brain. This impression
is masterfully created by the tableau of a man, lying in bed,
surrounded by numbers projected on the wall, while his wife sits
talking at her vanity, undressing as she dresses him down. Indeed, as
we'll see, tightly constructed visual images like this form the backbone
of the play, often standing alone from or commenting ironically on the
characters' dialogue. Yet, as critic Robert Hogan points out, Mrs. Zero's
s Elmer Rice, Minority Report: An Autobiography (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1963), 190.
60
WALKER
monologue is not unimportant: "its effect depends upon the beautiful
variations of exasperation that an actress gives to the constant
repetition of a single idea."
6
For, if we listen to the substance of Mrs.
Zero's complaints, we hear the echo of a ressentimentthat is particular
to the American middle-class, born of its uncomfortable capitulation to
a punitive morality internalized as "respectability."
Speaking of the films she has seen, wants to see, or probably
never will see, Mrs. Zero declares in the play's opening line, "I'm gettin'
sick o' them Westerns." Presumably, this genre is a favorite of Zero's.
She, on the other hand, prefers comedies or "them sweet little love
stories" such as For Love's Sweet Sake or A Mother's Tears.
7
Them
sweet little love stories are not as "nice an' wholesome" as she insists;
o ~ in recounting the stories they tell, Mrs. Zero reveals that they often
relish in the depiction of their heroine's threatened virtue. Although the
heroine is saved and the villain punished at the end, the moral order
that these films restore is less their vaunted goal than the rationale
that allows them to represent villainy in its most salacious form.
The so-called reform melodramas to which Mrs. Zero refers
only began to appear after 1908, when filmmakers were forced to
respond to complaints that movies were corrupting society's morals. As
film historian Lary May explains, 1908 was the year when New York
City mayor George B. McClellan, Jr. ordered all of the city's
nickelodeons and movie houses closed.B Although the owners and
operators of these mostly Lower East Side establishments managed to
evade this injunction long before it was officially rescinded, they soon
found themselves subject to Mayor William Gaynor's Motion Picture
Ordinance of 1912. That ordinance, too, was aimed at elevating the
moral tone of the city's amusements. But, instead of prohibiting films,
it increased licensing fees "in an effort to bring a 'better' class of
businessmen into the movies," and enforced safety inspections in order
to assure the well-being of middle-class patrons.9 In this way, the
Motion Picture Ordinance of 1912 implemented an official system of
regulation that could be unofficially used to police the content of films
shown.
6 Robert Hogan, The Independence of Elmer Rice (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), 33.
7 Elmer Rice, The Adding Machine (New York: Theatre Guild, 1922; repr.
Samuel French Publishers, 1956), 2).
8 Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the
Motion Picture Industry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 43.
9 Ibid., 57.
ELMER RICE
61
Such unofficial regulation came from the National Board of
Review, a volunteer organization of citizens who independently rated
films. Determining which films were fit for viewing and which were not,
the National Board of Review exerted a tremendous influence on the
viewing habits of audiences. Its influence, m o r o v ~ extended well
beyond the limits of New York, with many communities adopting its
recommendations when determining their programming needs.1o The
Board's seal of approval, then, meant greater profits for those
filmmakers whose films conformed to its moral standards. In this way,
reformers were able to influence the making as well as showing of
films. As Frederic Howe, the Board's president, explained:
If a producer refused to abide by the action of the
Board, pressure is brought to bear on him by the
rejection of his output by the local agencies
throughout the country, which if continued long
enough will destroy his concern, his standing, or
seriously cripple his business.
11
Given such pressures, films made in the 1910s began to reflect
a greater concern for conventional morality, often adopting the formula
of the reform melodrama so popular on the stage. Those that did not
risked having scenes cut or being censored altogether. For, if a movie
house showed a film that did not meet the Board's approval, it could
be shut down for any one of a number of ''safety" violations. The trick,
then, for filmmakers was to include sensational scenes that could be
contained within a putatively moral framework. Even so, such scenes
often ended up getting cut, especially by the time they made it uptown
to the second-run movie houses. This would seem to be the subtext
of Mrs. Zero's complaint that they never get to see first-run films.
Lamenting that she missed the presumably titillating cabaret scene cut
from The Price of Virtue,12 Mrs. Zero mollifies herself by claiming to be
above all the "rough stuff" they show in films these days. Rice's
critique, then, would seem to be directed not only at the hypocrisy of
a culture that sells titillation in the guise of salvation, but at that of its
citizens who vicariously indulge their basest appetites while pleading
their own moral goodness. The Zeroes are Nietzschean slaves, subject
10 Ibid., 57.
11 Qtd. in May, 57.
12 Rice, The Adding Machine, 4.
62
WALKER
to a "herd mentality" that thoughtlessly subscribes to a standard of
conventional morality, despite the longings of their own individual
wills. Anthony Palmieri identifies this as one of Rice's persistent
themes-"the destructiveness of Puritanical morality."
13
Considering that the play contains several references to film,
it is curious that critics have never thought to interpret it in light of
Rice's sojourn in Hollywood. Indeed, they tend to ignore the
significance of Rice's Hollywood experiences, briefly dismissing them if
they discuss them at all.14 For, besides Mrs. Zero's opening monologue,
Rice appears to script Zero's life out of tired old storylines borrowed
from recent films. The Clerk (1914), for example, concerns "the slave
of the office who has no labor union to champion his cause and faces
a lifetime of drudgery," according to a contemporary issue of Motion
Picture World. In May's summary, it is about "a young man constrained
by a drab office, a time clock, and a boring job. Seeking relief, he turns
to romance with a young secretary in the office. Though they fall in
love, the hero eventually loses her to his boss. In despair, he kills his
employer and goes to jail."
15
Clearly, Georg Kaiser was not the first to
detail the anomie and sordid desperation of modern clerical work in
From Morn to Midnight. Indeed, it would seem that much of the plot
to the first half of Rice's play was borrowed not from the 1922
American stage debut of Kaiser's play but from this and perhaps other
films.16
13 Anthony F. R. Palmieri, Elmer Rice: A Playwright's Vision of America
(Rutherford NJ: Associated University Presses, Inc., 1980), 84.
14 See Frank Durham, Elmer Rice (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970),
27, 34; Hogan, 27; and Palmieri, 54, 56. See also Michael Vanden Heuvel, Elmer
Rice: A Research and Production Sourcebook (Westport CT: Greenwood Press,
1996) who makes no mention whatsoever).
15 May, 102-3.
16 A Bedroom Blunder (1916), for example, similarly "opens on a young
clerk, Mr. Murphy, who slaves at his office, rarely finding any excitement in life."
Returning to May for a synopsis, we find that "Finally he takes his staid wife to
Atlantic City, one of the new amusement beaches. But when she 'was careless
enough to let him sit by the window,' the sorry hero looks out to the strand where
beautiful women sunbathe. Among the Sennett Bathing Beauties is Mary, whose
flouncey stride makes her ' the chief wigglette of Wigglesville.' To make matters
worse, during the dinner hour when Mrs. Murphy is out, the hotel clerk accidentally
puts Mary in Mr. Murphy's room. Soon the police are called in, along with the house
detective, to put a stop to what seems to be a bedroom affair" (104). A farce,
"where the police, the hapless couple, and Mary are all made to look ludicrous"
(May 104), this film would seem to provide the germ of the story concerning Judy
O'Grady, the good-time girl who lives across the courtyard.
ELMER RICE 63
Long before Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer came to
the United States and were horrified by the proto-fascistic tendencies
of what they deemed the "culture industry/' Rice was making his own
sort of Frankfurt School critique. What he seems to be saying here is
that the stories lifted from these films were never original to begin
with.
17
Even when these films were first released, they were already
hackneyed and stale. What is worse is that film audiences not only are
As we learn in scene one, Mrs. Zero has also been "careless enough to
let [her husband] sit by the window," where he has indulged his voyeuristic
fantasies by watching Judy undress every night. In an effort to punish them both,
Mrs. Zero has Judy arrested for indecent exposure, calling her a "dirty bum" who
has no right living "in a house with respectable people" (6). But, where A Bedroom
Blunder gently ridicules the beleaguered Murphy and his staid wife for their
repressive attitudes toward sex, Rice's play contemptuously mocks the equally
beleaguered Zero and his staid wife for internalizing their repression as
ressentiment.
17 This unoriginality may be seen in the titles of actual films released in
the late ' lOs and early '20s that are similar to the fictional titles mentioned in Rice's
play:
For Love or Money (1920)
For Love of Service (1922)
For His Sake (1922)
A Mother's Secret (1918)
A Mother's Sin (1918)
Mother's Darling (1921)
The Price of Innocence (1919)
The Price of Redemption (1920)
The Price of Silence (1920, 1921)
The Price of Possession (1921)
The Price of Youth (1922)
The Devil's Wheel (1918)
The Devil's Trail (1919)
The Devil's Claim (1920)
The Devil's Garden (1920)
The Devil's Passkey (1920)
The Devil's Riddle (1920)
The Devil's Angel (1922)
The Devil's Bowl (1923)
The Devil's Confession (1921)
The Devil's Dooryard (1923)
The Devil's Ghost (1922)
The Devil's Match (1923)
The Devil's Needle (1923)
The Devil's Partner (1923).
64 WALKER
moved by them but substitute them for their own emotional lives.
Poor Daisy, Zero's co-worker and tacit love interest, has gone her
whole life without a kiss, but imagines what it would be like from
having seen The Devil's Alibi. Only when she gets to heaven does she
allow herself to experience the real thing. And it is from film that she
gets the idea to kill herself. Although she hates the smell of gas and is
afraid to ask for carbolic acid or poison, she fantasizes that suicide is
glamorous, having seen Pauline Frederick do it in the movies.
18
In
borrowing or alluding to plots that are so recognizably unoriginal, then,
Rice would seem to be suggesting that his characters' lives are
similarly not original; that they think they are is what makes them
pitiable and ridiculous.
What made Rice so hostile to film? Perhaps his own
experiences working in Hollywood between 1919 and 1921. Lured by
the burgeoning film industry's promise of more consistent and better
paying work, Rice moved his family to Hollywood in the summer of
1919. Although he was initially excited about the creative possibilities
that Hollywood offered, Rice quickly found that any opportunity for
individual creativity was stifled by the system itself. For, despite
Samuel Goldwyn's promises to nurture writers and establish the art of
screenwriting, Rice found that Hollywood was first and foremost an
industry where storylines were written by committee and/or added
after the fact. As a writer, Rice may very well have felt like the
screenwriter depicted in The Original Movie (1922), puppeteer Tony
Sarg and filmmaker Herbert Dawley's animated spoof of the film
industry. Poking fun at the specialized labor processes used to
generate films, it traces the progress of a movie script from its author's
typewriter to the producer's desk to the cast's adaptations to the
director's film to the censor's edits to the editor's cutting room and
back to the author who, sitting in the audience, is no longer able to
recognize his script in the finished film.
19
18 Rice, The Adding Machine, 15.
19 Rice, himself, admits to having been enlisted in the cause of altering
someone else's scenario-even after it had been produced. By cutting some
scenes, reintroducing discarded footage and writing new intertitles, Rice changed
a "heavy-handed 'satire' on 'parlor Bolshevism"' into the story of a woman swept
up in the belief that human souls could be reborn in the bodies of animals. "It was
still a bad picture," Rice concedes, "but was now releasable," earning far more than
he made the entire time he was employed at the studio (Minority Report 174-5).
Despite his obvious pride at the film's success, this account provides only further
evidence for Rice's general complaint that, in Hollywood, " Everything went into the
old sausage machine and ... came out looking and tasting alike" (179). In this case,
he had got to play sausage grinder; more often than not, he provided the meat.
ELMER RICE 65
Increasingly, Rice began to resent his work, complaining
bitterly to his childhood friend and legal counsel Frank Harris that
"Continuity writing is fairly interesting, but much of it is purely
mechanical. After the story is blocked out, the detail work is rather
tiresome. There is not much scope for originality or imaginativeness.
And it's work that doesn't lead one anywhere, in particular. Besides, it's
more likely than not to be thankless: if the picture is successful, the
director gets the credit. If it fails, the continuity writer is blamed."
20
But as disappointed as he was with his work in Hollywood,
Rice was even more frustrated by his playwriting career. Although he
had a play, Find the Woman, in production, its producer and principal
actor Richard Bennett was taking liberties with Rice's script.21 Bennett,
it seems, not only enlarged his part, but felt that, by doing so, he had
essentially written a new play which he retitled For the Defense and
copyrighted in his own name.22 Understandably, Rice felt betrayed,
initially seeking to sue Bennett but settling for the restoration of
copyright and royalties. But further aggravating his frustration was
Goldwyn's refusal to let him take a temporary leave of absence to
oversee the play's troubled production.23 Although Goldwyn later
relented, granting Rice a two-week leave to salvage what he could of
the play, Rice increasingly felt trapped by a job that, in multiple ways,
limited his artistic autonomy.24
Miserable and depressed, Rice thought of resigning from
Goldwyn's studio many times. But, as soon as he allowed his hopes to
be buoyed at the prospect of release, they would be dashed against
the cold hard facts of his financial obligations. Newly married with a
child to support and another on the way, Rice had accepted Goldwyn's
offer upon realizing that he couldn't live forever on the profits of his
1914 hit play On Trial. When subsequent playwriting efforts met with
little success, Rice found himself in a panic. Recalling this period of his
20 Elmer Rice, letter to Frank Harris, 3/18/20, "Rice, Elmer/Harris, Frank,
1920/Letters," G87-55 to G87-77, HRHRC.
21 Rice's letter of 26 September 1919 indicates that he had authorized his
agent to enlist Zoe Akins to make any necessary revisions.
22
Palmieri, 10.
23 Elmer Rice, letter to Frank Harris 9/26/19, "Rice, Elmer/ Harris, Frank,
n.d. - 1919/Letters," G87-20 to G87-54, HRHRC.
24 Rice, Minority Report, 175-177.
66
WALKER
life, Rice remembers that he "had heavy economic responsibilities, and
I wanted to be free to experiment and to find my way without being
harassed by money worries .... I had before me ... the image of my
father, sitting night after night, covering sheets of paper with columns
of tiny figures, trying to solve the daily problem of making ends
meet."2S With financial concerns thus heavy on his mind and no
prospects of another theatrical success, Rice accepted Samuel
Goldwyn's offer of a five-year contract and moved to Hollywood,
feeling that "a complete change of scene and a wholly new activity
might pull me out of the bog in which I was floundering."26 At the end
of his first year, however, Rice considered walking out. But, after being
reassured that there was nothing in his contract to prevent him from
pursuing his own playwriting work, he signed a contract for a second
year. It would prove to be another year of profound unhappiness.
Finally, an opportunity presented itself for Rice to buy back his
freedom. On a train from San Francisco to Los Angeles, Rice had a
chance encounter with Will Rogers, one of Goldwyn's biggest stars for
whom he had written scenarios in the past. As Rice recounts in his
autobiography, Rogers "complained about the poor quality of his story
material and asked me to try to write something suitable for him."27 He
did. Entitled Doubling for Romeo, the film was a big success at the box
office. It was also a success in terms of Rice's career. With Rogers's
support for the screenplay, Rice was able to leverage a deal whereby
the sale of the scenario was conditioned upon his release from the
studio's contract. The studio-in the person of his superior, Thompson
Buchanan-agreed, but with an added condition: Rice had to invest
half of his proceeds from the sale into a speculative (and ultimately
unprofitable) oil company that Buchanan was setting up. Although
Buchanan probably thought he had put one over on the inexperienced
young writer, Rice felt the extortionate price was well worth paying for
his freedom. 2s
Thus, in December 1920, Rice finally and irrevocably made up
his mind to leave the studio. In a spirit of renewed self-confidence,
Rice wrote to Harris with the news of his decision, justifying his
reasons for leaving: production is slow, the economy's bad, people are
being laid off, and the hostility toward theatre practitioners, he reports,
has never abated.29 "So I shan't be sorry when my connection with the
25 Ibid., 133.
26 Ibid., 170.
27 Ibid., 180.
28 Ibid., 180-1.
29 Rice, letter to Frank Harris 12/ 14/ 20.
ELMER RICE 67
Goldwyn company ceases," he writes. " No one possessed of an
independent spirit or the desire to create should be a job-holder. The
great mass of men seems to have a taste for time-serving and petty
intrigue. I know no meanness like the meanness attendant upon self-
preferment."30
Undoubtedly a reference to Buchanan's strong-armed tactics,
Rice's vigorous pronouncements against "self-preferment" reveal the
extent of his disgust at Hollywood and the business of filmmaking. But
his lament for the "great mass of men" who seem "to have a taste for
time-serving and petty intrigue" appears to be aimed at himself. That
is, in defining himself against such a category of men, it is almost as
if Rice is casting off a version of what he fears he has become-a man
who willingly sells his "independent spirit" and "desire to create" for
the financial security of being "a job-holder." Perhaps ashamed of
having sold his soul for such a meaningless reward, Rice renounces
Hollywood with the passion of a newly converted zealot-his anger
compensatory for his previous self-deceit.
Having severed his ties with Goldwyn, Rice nonetheless
remained in Hollywood for the next six months, working as a free lance
for Jesse Lasky in order to earn enough money to move his family back
to the East Coast. Once there, he tried to resume his stalled
playwriting career, but found himself haunted by the specter of
financial uncertainty once again. His play Wake Up, Jonathan, co-
written with Hatcher Hughes, had opened in January, 1921 to
disappointing reviews,31 and further playwriting efforts were proving
just as hard won. Rice "was finding it difficult to get back to
playwriting," Palmieri tells us. "Plagued by self-dissatisfaction,
disheartened about his work, and doubtful about his future as a writer,
he was toying with a multitude of ideas, inspired by none. Finally, it
seems almost in desperation, he accepted an invitation from Walter
Jordan, a theatrical agent, to dramatize Haydon Talbot's unpublished
novel, It Is the Law. The play, bearing the same title, and sharing its
fate of being unpublished, ran for only fifteen weeks in New York in
1922. It provided Rice neither financial nor aesthetic satisfaction."
32
To
make matters worse, Jordan absconded with most of the money and,
though threatened with prosecution, was unable to pay Rice back.33
30 Ibid.
31 Vanden Heuvel, 22.
32 Palmieri, 56.
33 Ibid., 11. In Minority Report, Rice tells us that he dropped the case
after Jordan tearfully begged him not to send him to prison. Gratefully, Jordon
promised to repay him in full, but-as Rice wryly notes-never did (193).
68
WALKER
Like For the Defense, then, this crime drama featured as many
misdeeds behind the scenes as were represented on stage.
Given these disappointing set-backs, Rice was almost lured
back to Hollywood again, this time by the siren song of United Artists.
In a personal appeal from Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks,
founding principals of the new venture, Rice was invited to oversee the
studio's scenario department at a beginning salary of $700 per week-
a notable increase from the $250 or so he had been making under
Goldwyn. Rice was tempted by the prestige and, needless to say, the
money, but ultimately lashed his desire to the mast, feeling that he did
not want to surrender his artistic autonomy again. "I came away
feeling virtuous," he admits, "but doubtful about the soundness of my
judgment."
In fact, I was doubtful about everything, ridden by
uncertainty, discontent, and self-dissatisfaction. I felt
I was getting nowhere, accomplishing nothing. I
wanted knowledge, experience, understanding. I was
disheartened about my work, wondering whether I
really had a future as a writer. After two years in
Hollywood, I found it hard to get back to playwriting.
I toyed with one idea after another, but found none
that fired me. The trouble was that everything was
mentally contrived; what I wanted was something
charged with emotion. But there was an emotional
barrier that I seemed unable to break through.34
Unable to think clearly or write freely, Rice found his emotional
reservoir dammed. Until, that is, the waters rose and The Adding
Machine rushed fully complete into his head.
II. Motion Pictures
Written in only 17 days, The Adding Machine was, according to Rice's
own testimony, an exercise of psychological unburdening. In his 1963
autobiography, Minority Report, Rice confesses that:
part of the cathartic effect that the writing of the play
had on me was the purging of my lingering
antagonism toward my father. I had never really
hated him, but I had always resented his failure to
34 Rice, Minority Report, 188.
ELMER RICE
measure up to my standards of fatherhood. Now my
animosity was washed away and replaced, not by love
certainly, but by a kind of pity. I cannot explain the
connection between this abatement and the writing of
The Adding Machine. It was not as though I had
vented my ill-will by portraying my father in an
unfavorable light. For, though he had many of Mr.
Zero's prejudices and malevolences, he was proud,
self-assertive and anything but a conformist. My
release is part of the mystery that enshrouds the
whole creation of the play. 35
69
Such a confession suggests that the play functioned as a
"fantasm," or what Fredric Jameson refers to as a fantasy master
narrative, in which issues of real conflict are imaginatively resolved.
But if those issues are only partially explained by a lingering oedipal
conflict, they may also derive from Rice's own fears that he was
becoming like his father, a man forced to support his family by working
at a soul-destroying job. The play, I would like to suggest, invites us
to read it as an affective allegory of Rice's life in Hollywood, where
Zero is an unhappy figure of identification for Rice himself. Like Rice,
Zero is a wage slave who limits his ambition to a culturally acceptable
standard of success;36 like Rice, Zero unquestioningly defers to the
authority of his boss. But if Zero is a figure for Rice-the-Hollywood-
flunkie, he is also a figure that Rice-the-playwright definitively
rejects-not only in his cynical treatment of the character, but in the
play's expressionistic form. By telling his story in a way that both uses
and critiques the visual images he had learned to script as a
"continuity man" in Hollywood, Rice ultimately trumps the industry
that once oppressed him. For, having learned to plot stories through
purely visual means, having worked within the limitations of the film
medium like a poet perfecting his craft, Rice returned to the theatre
with the ability to disarticulate and redeploy its verbal, vocal and
pantomimic languages in new and complicating ways.
35 Ibid., 191.
36 As Christopher Wixon argues with regard to Counsellor-at-Law, this
culturally acceptable standard of success often appears as a theme in Rice's plays,
and is almost always figured specifically as a white ethnic privilege. Indeed, the
racist epithets shouted by the men in scene three suggest this to be true for The
Adding Machine, too. See "Everyman and Superman: Assimilation, Ethnic Identity
and Elmer Rice's Counsellor-at-Law." American Drama 8.1 (fall 1998): 59 - 74.
70 WALKER
To speak of verbal, vocal, and pantomimic languages is to
invoke the work of late-19th century speech educator S. S. Curry,
whose theory of "expression" held that all three languages were
necessary to the act of communication.37 Curry, drawing upon the
work of French vocal instructor Fran<;ois Delsarte, challenged
conventional elocutionary instruction by insisting that communication
was not a function of the voice alone but a whole bodily process that
depended upon the perfect coordination of all three "languages" of the
body. Tapping into cultural anxieties about the new communications
technologies that made these languages visible in their newly isolated
form, Curry's theory inspired the "expressive culture movement," a
broad-based program of personal and social reform advocating the
performing arts as a means of overcoming the alienating conditions of
modernity. An example of what Jackson Lears refers to as "anti-
modernism," it held that these new technologies alienated human
beings from their natural condition, throwing the body's rhythms out
of alignment with the spiritual forces of the universe. Indeed, silent
film rendered moving lips separate from the words they spoke-words
that appeared on intertitles jarringly distant from their imaged source;
phonograph recordings reoriented the experience of listening by
erasing the spectacle of singers or musicians practicing their craft;
even the typewriter altered the act of correspondence-its regular and
standardized forms stamped out the idiosyncracies of handwriting that
were believed to reveal the writer's "personality." It was thus to repair
such losses, to restore a sense of human integrity to the act of
communication, that students of the expressive culture movement
were taught to re-coordinate their verbal, vocal, and pantomimic
languages. By participating in drama, music and dance, students could
recalibrate theit' body's natural rhythms to a state of harmony with the
spiritual universe and thus counter the alienating conditions of modern
life.
Rice, like many of his fellow American expressionist
playwrights, appears to have been influenced by Curry's theory of
expression (which may be why, despite his demurral of German
influence, he never refused the name "expressionist''). But, rather than
coordinate all three languages in his play, he counterpoints them in
order to represent Zero's spiritual disharmony and create the effect of
a world out of balance. At the end of scene two, for instance, Rice
depicts the isolation of modern office work in Zero's relationship to his
37 For a complete account of Curry's theory of expression and the
expressive culture movement, see my book Bodies, Voices, Words: Expressionism
and American Theatrical Modernism (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, forthcoming).
ELMER RICE 71
co-worker, Daisy. With the shrill blast of a whistle, work is done, and
the dramatic action shifts from speech to pantomime:
With great agility they get off their stools, remove
their eye shades and sleeve protectors and put them
on the desks. Then each produces from behind the
desk a hat-Zero a dusty derby, Daisy, a frowsy
straw .... Daisy puts on her hat and turns toward Zero
as though she were about to speak to him. But he is
busy cleaning his pen and pays no attention to her.
She sighs and goes toward the door at the left.
38
Zero says goodnight, "But she does not hear him and exits. Zero takes
up his hat and goes /eft."
39
As critic Frank Durham observes, the
pantomime makes "clear the desolate separateness of these two, their
failure to communicate."
40
More pantomimic action ensues as the play's most powerful
image closes the scene. Just as Zero is about to leave, he encounters
his boss who, rather than promote him or grant him a raise as
expected, fires Zero with remarkably callous indifference. The boss
continues to speak, spouting platitudes and insipid excuses, but, as
Durham notes, his speech "breaks down into jagged stock phrases,
disconnected but meaningful in their very emptiness.'
141
Meanwhile,
Zero's mind begins to whirl : "[T]he sound of the mechanical player of
a distant merry-go-round" is softly heard. "The part of the floor upon
which the desk and stools are standing begins to revolve very
slowly.'
142
Gradually, the music increases in volume and the floor
rotates more quickly. Although the boss's jaw continues to move, we
are unable to hear what he says.
The music swells and swells. To it is added every off-
stage effect of the theatre: the wind, the waves, the
galloping horses, the locomotive whistle, the sleigh
bells, the automobile siren, the glass-crash. New
Year's Eve, Election Night, Armistice Day, and the
Mardi-Gras. The noise is deafening, maddening,
38 Rice, The Adding Machine, 24.
39 Ibid., 25.
40 Durham, 42.
41 Ibid., 43.
42 Rice, The Adding Machine, 29.
72
unendurable. Suddenly it culminates in a terrific peal
of thunder. For an instant there is a flash of red and
then everything is plunged into blackness.
43
WALKER
This "brainstorm," as Rice called it, is at once a visual and aural
metaphor for Zero's state of mind. Witnessing it, we feel his anger and
confusion and are paralyzed by its force. Much to Rice's delight, the
Theatre Guild production, directed by Philip Moeller, added even more
stage elements to augment this effect.
The play's final image also functions as a powerful metaphor
for forces out of control. When scene seven opens, we discover Zero
in limbo, hard at work on the very machine that replaced him in his
past life. Rice's stage directions indicate that,
Before the curtain rises the clicking of an adding
machine is heard. The curtain rises upon an office
similar in appearance to that in scene two .. .. In the
middle of the room Zero is seated completely
absorbed in the operation of an adding machine. He
presses the keys and pulls the lever with mechanical
precision. He still wears his full-dress suit but he has
added to it sleeve protectors and a green eye shade.
A strip of white paper-tape flows steadily from the
machine as Zero operates. The room is filled with this
tape-streamers, festoons, billows of it everywhere.
It covers the floor and furniture, it climbs the walls
and chokes the doorways.
44
Once again, Zero is dwarfed by forces much larger than he. Once
again, he finds satisfaction in generating and being consumed by the
debris of modern life. And-once again-the Theatre Guild production
exceeded Rice's hopes of realizing his intent. In a memorable set
positively cited by many reviewers, scene designer Lee Simonson
created a huge adding machine on which Zero, played by Dudley
Digges, jumped, hopping from key to key, pulling the lever with all of
43 Ibid., 30.
44 Ibid., 123.
ELMER RICE 73
his weight. Writing to Marc Connelly, Rice enthusiastically described
the scene thus: "At the rise of the curtain, Digges in his absurd full-
dress suit runs up and down on it like a monkey, gleefully pressing
down the keys and pulling the gigantic handle which makes them
spring back into place. His pantomime is wonderful and he gets a big
laugh."
45
Such images are powerful and proved memorable to the play's
audiences and critics. But equally effective was Rice's use of sound. In
scene two, for example, before we see Zero and Daisy's inability to
make contact with each other, we hear them fail to do so as they recite
numbers to each other, punctuated by their own private-and
uncommunicated-thoughts. From this jumble of thoughts we hear
how the meaningless exchange required of their work is made to pass
as a social exchange of another kind. It is as if they have to create an
imaginary social relationship out of the otherwise meaningless words
they speak in order to get through their day. Yet, as we discover at the
end of the scene and learn from their remembrances in scene six, they
are never able to activate that imaginary relationship; they are forever
stuck in their own atomized shells. This technique of layering dialogue
and spoken thought is one that Rice would use again in his
expressionist play The Subway (1923; 1929).
Rice thus disarticulates verbal, vocal and pantomimic modes of
signification in order to represent his character's spiritual malaise. But
he also seems to suggest that no mode of signification is capable of
standing on its own.46 The play offers several examples of how one
mode can contradict or at least mitigate against the tyranny of
another. Scenes 5 and 6, for instance, feature several corny puns.
Emerging from his grave with "hands ... folded stiffly across his breast,"
Zero walks "woodenly," grousing, "Gee! I'm stiff!" Referring at once to
his uptight personality and his rigor mortis, Zero is a "stiff." Later, in
heaven, he dismisses Daisy's concern for privacy by saying of his self-
absorbed and distracted companion Shrdlu "He's dead to the world."
47
In addition to providing a little humor, these puns illustrate the
unreliability of language to say exactly what it means. Puns, after all,
condense two meanings into a single word, requiring us to revise what
45 Elmer Rice, letter to Marc (Connelly?), 4/18/23, "The Adding Machine
-Miscellaneous" F-76-543 to F-77-694, HRHRC.
46 Ironically, this may have led to his neglect by literary critics, as Hogan
argues in his introduction (9-14). Rice's refusal to valorize language at the expense
of vocal and pantomimic modes of signification appears to be the source of both
his plays' exceptional theatricality and his critical neglect.
47 Rice, The Adding Machine, 96.
74 WALKER
would appear to be the manifest meaning with a more latent one.
What is more, there is verbal significance to Shrdlu's name. As
Professor Jean Collette observed in a 1953 letter to Rice, "shrdlu" is
the sequence of keys on the second line of a linotype machine
(comparable to "qwerty," for example, on a typewriter or computer
keyboard).4B This suggests that he represents an arbitrary-and
therefore meaningless-order. Indeed, the character of Shrdlu seems
to exist simply to make us see the meaninglessness of the
conventional moral order. Like Zero, he has committed a crime that is
so horrible (in his case, matricide) that he expects to and wants to go
to hell. His mother, however, was not the "saint" he insists she was,
but, as we easily deduce from his story, a controlling, moralizing
monster who ultimately reaped the abuse that she sowed. Shrdlu,
then, represents an order that is merely orderly; there is no meaning
behind it, just as there is no meaning in letters or even combinations
of letters, considered only as such. His is a case of abiding by the letter
which killeth the spirit of the law.
But language is not the only mode of signification whose
autonomy Rice puts into doubt. Sound and image are likewise
represented as inadequate on their own. In scene six, for example,
Daisy and Zero are surprised by the other's confession of love, having
previously relied on a body language that told another story. They
reminisce, for example, about coming home from a company picnic
when Zero put his arm across the back of Daisy's seat, while pressing
his knee against hers. Daisy moved away to see if he really "meant it,"
but, in doing so, she made Zero think that she was "sore."49 Zero's
inference then made him stop making advances, leading Daisy to think
that it was an "accident" all along. Misreading each other's body
language, Daisy and Zero missed an opportunity to acknowledge the
love they actually felt toward each other. And, as with gesture, sound
is unreliable, too, as we see in the play's final scene. Poor gullible Zero
stumbles off stage in pursuit of Hope, after Lt. Charles, God's
supervisor in Limbo, ventriloquizes her voice. so
48 See 9/29/53 letter from Jean Collette, Chairman of Dramatics at the
University of Idaho, F-76-543 to F77-694, HRHRC.
49 Rice, The Adding Machine, 101.
so Ibid., 140.
ELMER RICE 75
By disarticulating bodies, voices and words and revealing their
individual limitations, Rice-like Curry-would seem to suggest that all
three "languages" are necessary to the act of communication. He
would seem to suggest as well the superiority of the theatre compared
to the impoverished medium of film. In writing this play, then, Rice not
only cast off the specter of his former Hollywood self in his mocking
account of the hapless Zero, but reaffirmed a new sense of himself,
one committed to the art of the theatre, as his masterful deployment
of verbal, vocal, and pantomimic languages testifies.
***
As popularized through the expressive culture movement and
implemented in high school and college literary instruction, Curry's
theory of expression was well known to all who came of age between
the 1890s and 1910s, including playwrights such as Elmer Rice. In it,
these playwrights had a ready means of representing modern
alienation when they sat down to write their expression-ist plays in the
1920s. Indeed, Curry's three languages appear to be the source of
these plays' distinct formal style; counterpointed, rather than
coordinated, they represent the spiritual malaise experienced by the
play's central character as he or she comes to terms with the
imposition of industrial rhythms on his or her life. That these
playwrights did not dispute the term "expressionist" to describe their
plays (howevermuch they refused German attribution) suggests a tacit
acknowledgement of Curry's theory and/or the expressive culture
movement more generally as a source. Audiences schooled in
expression and familiar with its popularization may have been
confused by these plays' cynical appropriation and ironization of
Curry's theory, but they would have known immediately how it was
being used and what it was meant to represent.
Yet, to a century of literary critics, Curry's theory appears not
to have been considered a possible source at all. Part of the reason for
this critical blindness may have to do with the way that sharp
disciplinary boundaries were erected between English and Theatre &
Speech departments in the 1910s. Although Curry's theory had a
tremendous influence upon literary methods of close reading, it
became assigned primarily to departments of Theatre & Speech with
their founding in the 1910s, while English departments increasingly
devoted themselves to New Critical formalism with its exclusive
attention to the verbal signification of texts. Thus without a vocabulary
with which to identify vocal and pantomimic modes of communication
and analyze the significatory work they perform, literary critics have
tended to focus their attention solely on the verbal components of
Rice's play. Noting the broad typification of character, the episodic
narrative structure, and the thematic concern with alienation in his
76 WALKER
plays, they have concluded that Rice must have been influenced by
German expressionism.
And though such an influence remains a possibility-Rice did
attend a screening of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari while in Hollywood-
it would seem a less likely source than one much closer to home. As
we've seen, Rice appears to draw upon Curry's theory of expression to
represent the Zero's spiritual disharmony. Zero's world, communicated
to us through pantomimic images, disarticulated sounds and punning
word play, is a world of limited agency and spiritual degradation. It is
a world that Rice knew all too well from his own experience as a
screenwriter working in Hollywood. Disparaged by the limitations of his
job and the film medium itself, Rice disarticulated Curry's three modes
of signification to critique such technological media, demonstrating
their inability to represent the totality of human experience. Thus, it
would seem that Curry's theory of expression and the expressive
culture movement that it spawned exerted a strong influence on Rice's
dramatic technique. Considered as a performative (rather than literary)
whole, then, the formal evidence in Rice's play points to the expressive
culture movement, rather than German expressionism, as the source
of his expressionistic style.
Journal of American Drama and Theatre 16, no. 2 (Spring 2004)
HAWTHORNE'S HESTER AS A RED-LETTERED
BLACK WOMAN?:
SUZAN-LORI PARKS'S IN THE BLOOD AND FUCKING A
DEBORAH R. GElS
I, Hester, am a red house lost in the thickening mist.
One of my sides is clearly visible. The red one. The
other side is hazy. I'm not sure if it's real.
-Kathy Ackerl
In Kathy Acker's landmark novel Blood and Guts in High
School, first published in 1987, the heroine, Janey, rewrites herself as
Nathaniel Hawthorne's Hester Prynne from The Scarlet Letter, a text
she has been assigned to write about for a book report. Her "book
report" brilliantly mixes the cliches of the genre with her strong
identification with Hester as a social reject, mixed with Acker's own
commentary about commercialism; Janey writes, "All of them even the
hippies hated Hester Prynne because she was a freak and because she
couldn't be anything else and because she wouldn't be quiet and hide
her freakiness like a bloody Kotex and because she was as wild and as
insane as they come" (65). In the early 1990s, playwright Phyllis
Nagy's adaptation of The Scarlet Letter also encouraged audiences to
see Hester through the lens of contemporary feminism.
No postmodern artist, though, has taken on quite the same
creative remapping of The Scarlet Letter as Suzan-Lori Parks does in
her pair of "Red Letter" plays, In the Blood and Fucking A. Although
the two pieces have been published together, they are normally
performed separately. In fact, Parks says that In the Blood came to
her "[i]n the middle of writing Fucking A''2 and insists that Hester in
each play is an entirely separate character than in the other work. In
the Blood premiered at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in New York in
November of 1999, and featured Charlayne Woodard as "Hester, La
1 Kathey Acker; Blood and Guts in High School (New York: Grove, 1989).
Subsequent references will be noted parenthetically in the text.
2 Kathy Sova, "A Better Mirror: An Interview with the Playwright,"
American Theatre, 17:3 (March 2000), 32.
78 GElS
Negrita"; Fucking A received its premiere a few months later (in
February, 2000) at Diverse Works/Infernal Bridgegroom Productions in
Houston, and starred Tamarie Cooper as Hester Smith. The Public
Theater production opened on March 16, 2003, and included S. Epatha
Merkerson as Hester, Mas Def as Monster, and Daphne Rubin Vega as
Canary Mary.
Parks's other works-including The America Play, The Death of
the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Venus, and
Topdog/Underdofrshare an interest in digging back into the "holes"
of history to resurrect bodies, especially Black bodies, that have been
commodified and exploited. Both The America Play and
Topdog/Underdog feature Black Abraham Lincoln impersonators who
re-create Lincoln's assassination; Last Black Man resurrects and kills its
protagonist over and over amidst a choral evocation of America's past
sins against Black humanity; and Venus resurrects the real-life
historical figure of Saartje Baartman, who was brought from Africa and
whose body was displayed exploitatively throughout England and
Europe in the early part of the nineteenth century. As Parks writes in
her essay "Possession":
Since history for me is a recorded or remembered
event, theatre, for me, is the perfect place to "make"
history-that is, because so much African-American
history has been unrecorded, dismembered, washed
out, one of my tasks as playwright is to-through
literature and the special strange relationship
between theatre and real life-locate the ancestral
burial ground, dig for bones, find bones, hear the
bones sing, write it down.3
Parks's revisionist approaches to these historical moments and figures
have used her unconventional theater style to get the audience to
examine its own guilty spectatorship and cultural tourism-in the
intermission of Venus, for example, the audience unwittingly becomes
members of the anatomy class subject to a dissection lecture about
Baartman, thus implicating us in our own moments of voyeurism
toward Venus that we have been participating in throughout the play.
In her Red Letter plays, Parks keeps her focus on cultural history, but
3 Suzan-Lori Parks, "Possession," The American Play, in The American
Play and Other Works (New York: TCG), 4.
HAWTHORNE'S HESTER 79
the shift toward Hawthorne marks a recent movement in her work
toward canon critique, in the same sense that her new novel Getting
Mother's Body might be said to be a radical rewriting of another
literary classic, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. In both In the Blood
and Fucking A, Parks creates a series of playful interactions with and
against Hawthorne's original Hester character that turns out to serve
as a larger pursuit of a topic that deeply interested Hawthorne himself:
the attempts of the self-regulating, theocratic society (the Puritans,
but as Parks shows, contemporary society as well) to contain and
devalue attempts at "otherness." Just as Acker's Janey is drawn to
Hester because she is a "wild woman"
4
who has been marginalized by
her society, Parks' two Hesters face the challenges of living in worlds
that view them with fear and suspicion.
As most literature students no doubt already know,
Hawthorne's Hester is marked with a scarlet "A" and designated an
outcast. Parks's Hesters, too, are shunned and marked by their race,
class, and gender. In both of her plays, Hester is an African-American
woman. Images of "otherness" in Hawthorne's novel are echoed in
multiple references to the "Black Man" who is said to haunt the forest
(and with whom the witches, like Mistress Hibbins, are said to
consort), as well as the Indians, from whom it is said that Roger
Chillingsworth learned his medicinal secrets. Hawthorne even says of
Hester at one point that her years of being shunned have made her
like a "wild Indian": "For years past she had looked from his estranged
point of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or legislators
had established; criticizing all with hardly more reverence than the
Indian would feel for the clerical hand, the judicial robe, the pillory, the
gallows, the fireside, or the church."S On the one hand, the novel
seems to evoke some sympathy for the Indian by means of this link to
Hester. On the other hand, Sacvan Bercovitch makes a convincing
argument that Hawthorne's language here creates an ambiguity that
effectively deprives the Indian of any real political power: "it serves to
empty the 'savages' of their own history so as to universalize them as
metaphors for Hester's development."6
4 Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School (New York: Grove, 1989),
66. Subsequent references will be noted parenthetically in the text.
s Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (New York: Holt, Rhinehart and
Winston, 1963), 193. Subsequent references will be noted parenthetically in the
text.
6 Sacvan Bercovitch, The Office of the Scarlet Letter (Baltimore and
London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 29.
80
GElS
Hawthorne's Hester lives in a society that rejects her, but
nevertheless finds its use for her: not only as the image of taboo
behavior against which they can measure their own, but as a
seamstress so skilled that even the community leaders call upon her
to embroider their robes. Lauren Berlant points out that "[s]ince
Hester is seamstress to the collectivity, in her work she reweaves and
reinforces the world as it already is, even as she is isolated from it and
judged by it."?
Parks uses her two plays to respond in two different ways. In
the Blood begins (and ends) with a choral recitation that resembles
Hawthorne's opening in which the citizens of the town stare at Hester
Prynne being forced to display herself upon a scaffold wearing her
scarlet "A"; here, the Chorus comments on Hester La Negrita's
behavior with such lines as "THERE SHE IS!/WHO DOES SHE
THINK/SHE IS/THE NERVE SOME PEOPLE HAVE."S This Hester
attempts to sew but has difficulty even threading a needle; her
difficulty at sustaining herself and her children involves regular
interviews with a character named Welfare, who further perpetrates
acts of oppression upon her, for instance asking her at the beginning
of their interview whether her hands are clean and then making her
wash them again. When Welfare hands her the fabric to be sewn
1
she
admonishes, "Make sure you don't get it dirty" (59). Hester sees the
fabric/ at least for the moment
1
as a ticket to a better lifer and she has
a monologue in which she fantasizes about the cloth: "Lets see what
we making. Oooooh. Uh evening dress. Go to a party in. Drink
champagne and shit" (62). But Welfare
1
despite identifying herself as
"a black woman too just like you" (60), is here clearly a version of
Hawthorne's Puritan society that claims to be taking care of Hester
Prynne, yet keeps her in her place. Welfare blames Hester for not
appreciating what she is being given, saying
1
"We at Welfare are at the
end of our rope with you ... We build bridges you burn them" (54).
Parks extends upon the play's social critique by having the Reverend
D talk about how "the poor" aren't interesting unless they have been
exoticized and even turned into products of colonialism:
7 Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia,
and Everyday Life (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 71.
Subsequent references will be noted parenthetically in the text.
8 Susan-Lori Parks, The Red Letter Plays (New York: TCG
1
2001), 5.
Subsequent references will be noted parenthetically in the text.
HAWTHORNE'S HESTER
I want my poor looking good. I want my poor to
know that it was me who bought the such and such.
I want my poor on tv ... And I dont want local poor.
Local poor dont look good. Gimmie foreign poor.
Poverty exotica. (73)
81
Indeed, Hawthorne refers to the self-interest involved in overseeing
the fate of outsiders like Hester Prynne; he comments that although it
may seem surprising to have the Governor take an interest in Hester,
"matters of even slighter public interest, and of far less intrinsic weight
than the welfare of Hester and her child, were strangely mixed up with
the deliberations of legislators and acts of state" (95). In the Bloocfs
structure includes a series of "Confessions" from various characters-
the Doctor, Welfare, Amiga Gringa, Reverend D, Chilli-who speak
directly to the audience; it is clear how each of them has literally
screwed Hester by profiting from their sexual exploitation of her.
Amiga Gringa, for instance, says, "It took a little cajoling to get her to
do it with me/for an invited audience./For a dime a look./Over at my
place" (72). Even Welfare, while insisting upon the "well-drawn
boundary line" (62) between herself and her clients, tells a story about
how she and her husband used Hester together for their sexual
gratification (which shows the truth behind her earlier attempt to
correct Hester's behavior when she reminded her of "that afternoon
with the teacups" [57]).
In Fucking A, Hester works as an abortionist (which is, in this
version, what the "A" on her chest stands for) . Again, she is seen as
both an outcast and a necessary component of her society; as her
friend Canary Mary the prostitute says to her, "No one would wanna
kill you. We need you too much. Like me, you perform one of those
disrespectable but most necessary services."9 To a certain degree,
Hester (in this very Brechtian play) is like Brecht's Mother Courage,
pursuing her job with relentless effort and causing the audience to
question her society rather than questioning it herself. This Hester's
clashes with the Freedom Fund character resemble the conflicts with
Welfare in In the Blood; although she says she admires Hester for
9 Susan-Lori Parks, The Red Letter Plays (New York: TCG, 2001), 121.
Subsequent references will be noted parenthetically in the text.
82 GElS
working hard at her job, she doesn't believe Hester's insistence on her
jailed son's honesty and claims that he is a "hardened criminal" (134).
In both cases, these figures claim to know what is best for Hester, yet
deprive her of the right to make her own choices. Parks adds a further
sardonic comment in Fucking A by following the Butcher's wild
monologue (an extravagant set piece which is sometimes, sadly, cut
from production) about the extreme behaviors of his daughter Lulu
with the remark, "Shes not eligible for the Freedom Fund program"
(161).
Another component of identity and social class for all three
Hesters is the issue of reading, literacy, and textuality. Of course, in
Hawthorne's novel, the scarlet "f:\' and how one is to "read" it is a
central theme; the role of reading also figures prominently in Hester
Prynne's interactions with her daughter Pearl. Even though Pearl in
The Scarlet Letter is the product of Hester's "sin," she is also her
treasure, as her name itself attests. Pearl herself is seen several times
in the novel as difficult to "read" because she is so defiantly unlike any
other children in the community, and is characterized as being more
like an elf or a sprite than a child. Hawthorne writes that "in this one
child there were many children, comprehending the full scope between
the wild-flower prettiness of a peasant-baby, and the pomp, in little, of
an infant princess" (85) . In Blood and Guts, Janey writes in her book
report that Pearl is "as wild as they come. Wild in the Puritan New
England Society Hawthorne writes about means evil anti-society
criminaf' (93). She goes on to say that the men in the town "want to
keep the child so they can train the child to suck their cocks. That's
what's known as education" (94).
Parks literalizes the "many children" within Pearl by giving
Hester La Neg rita five of them: Jabber, Baby, Bully, Trouble, and
Beauty. In Hawthorne's novel, it is through the act of reading-of
peeking into Reverend Dimmesdale's private notes when he is asleep-
that Chillingsworth confirms Dimmesdale's identity as Pearl's secret
father. "TEACH ME A NEW LANGUAGE, DIMWIT [Dimmesdale]," writes
Acker's Janey. "A LANGUAGE THAT MEANS SOMETHING TO ME" (96).
In both "red letter" plays, Parks emphasizes the illiteracy of the two
Hesters-Jn the Blood, for instance, begins with Hester scrutinizing the
word "Slut" written in graffiti on the wall under the bridge where they
live, and asking her oldest son Jabber whether it is a "good word or
a bad word" (9). Initially, Jabber refuses to answer, until much later,
leading to the pivotal moment of the play in which she beats him to
death. It is crucial to understand, though, that this Hester has a gifted
imagination; she helps her children to enjoy the meager soup that she
feeds them for dinner by telling them that it has everything they love
in it-"Theres carrots in there. Theres meat. Theres oranges. Theres
pie" (17), and her bedtime story for them seems to be a fairytale
HAWTHORNE'S HESTER
83
created as an imaginative retelling of the children's five fathers. She
attempts to end the story by saying, "And they was all happy," but
Jabber insists that there must be "bad news" still to come: "Theres
always bad news" (20). Fucking A takes place in a society in which
apparently very few people in the underclass know how to write, and
those who need to hire a Scribe; when at one point the Scribe
attempts to leave his shop, the Butcher admonishes him, "Theres lots
of people want writing done and yr shops closed. That's bad business"
(140). Hester in this play has Canary read her her son's letter from
prison, and uses the Scribe to write back; she tells the Butcher, "He
makes the nicest looking letters. Even when he's sloshed. Such pretty
shapes, straight bold lines and gentle curls. Makes me wish I could
read. And write too" (159). Interestingly, the Scribe himself bears a
relation to Hester in his description of the scars he received from being
beaten by his father: "Dad wanted me to make something of myself.
So he stood over me with a stick. I still got the welts, well, the scars
of the welts ... Perfectly formed letters at 3 years old. The most
beautiful alphabet you've ever seen" (140). Parks's focus on illiteracy,
as well as in the struggle to transcend one's social class by learning to
read, is also crucial to Maria Irene Fornes's dramas such as Mud and
The Conduct of Life. Like Fornes, Parks is interested in the historical
sense in which women have been kept in their place by being denied
the right to literacy; the image has even further resonance if we
consider the way in which African-American slaves in this country were
also denied access to education in order to prevent them from
acquiring knowledge which could lead to their rebellion. In his
discussion of how literacy made the difference in his realization that he
could work toward ending his enslavement, for example, Frederick
Douglass comments, "it is almost an unpardonable offence to teach
slaves to read in this Christian country."to Similarly, in Our Nig, Harriet
E. Wilson writes of Mrs. Bellmont (one of the antagonists) that she
"was in doubt about the utility of attempting to educate people of
color, who were incapable of elevation."tt
Parks complicates the issues of readability and language in
Fucking A by giving the characters an alternative dialect, called TALK,
that they use in casual conversation with one n o t h e ~ most often
when the women are discussing biological and sexual behavior. It is
clear that TALK is primarily a language for women; in a later scene, the
10 Frederick E. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (New
York: Signet, 1997), 52.
11 Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig, or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black
(New York: Vintage, 1983), 30.
84 GEIS
Second Hunter seems to be embarrassed after the First Hunter hears
him using TALK with Hester. The First Hunter tells him, "My wife wants
me to learn it but I say no way. Keep that stuff private. Like it should
be. Thats what I say" (146). TALK is amusing to read in the textual
version of the play because it draws upon unfamiliar combinations of
familiar sounds; "abortion," for instance, is an "Abah-nazip." Much like
Tom Stoppard and David Ives, Parks plays with the audience's need to
"decode" the drama. Her opening stage directions say that the
production should provide a "nonaudible simultaneous English
translation" (115); this can be interpreted as tongue-in-cheek
suggestion, or perhaps as a desire to have the language work
subconsciously on the minds of the spectators, much as we are
inadvertently drawn into the anatomical vocabulary in Venus. In the
Public Theater production, supertitles (which were also used, in
Brechtian fashion, to announce the songs) displayed the English
translations of the TALK sequences. At the same time, Parks again
hearkens back to the creation of coded and alternative languages in
historical African-American culture (and reminds us of such coded
languages that exist in contemporary cultural groups, including
"women's" languages). The difficulty of "reading" or appropriating the
characters is thus thrown back to us, much as Hawthorne's Hester is
never fully "readable" by the people of the town or by the consumers
of his text.
In Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, Hester is betrayed by both of
the men in her life. Roger Chillingsworth, her former husband who
reappears in the town as a physician but does not reveal his identity,
uses his power-and his knowledge of Hester's partner in guilt-to
manipulate both Hester and this partner, Reverend Dimmesdale. The
Reverend, too, is an instrument of torture because of his refusal to
admit publicly that he is the father of Hester's child. Hawthorne's
Dimmesdale is in some ways a sympathetic character because we see
the extent to which he is plagued by feelings of self-recrimination;
even Janey writes in her book report, "Like Hester, Dimwit
[Dimmesdale] hates himself. Like Hester, Dimwit is conscious he
doesn't understand what's happening. Hester sees Dimwit's going
crazy and in deepening torture" (98) . In Hawthorne's novel, he is also
clearly a coward, though, in his inability to step forward and claim
responsibility for Hester's public torture and rejection. Chillingsworth
and Dimmesdale are figured fairly obviously in In the Blood as Chilli
and Reverend D (as well as the Doctor), and in rather different ways
as the Butcher and the Monster (her son) in Fucking A. Chilli initially
re-approaches Hester because he has had a romanticized view of her
as the suffering mother-" I carried around this picture of you. Sad and
lonely with our child on yr hip" (96)-but flees when he realizes that
the reality is rather different. In his "confession" speech immediately
HAWTHORNE'S HESTER 85
afterwards, he admits, "She was my first./We was young./Times
change" (98). Reverend D initially promises Hester that he will take
up a collection for her at his church, but eventually he rejects her,
saying, "Don't ever come back here again! Ever! Yll never get nothing
from me! Common Slut. Tell on me! Go on! Tell the world! I'll crush
you underfoot" (103) . We can see Reverend D's real motives in his
confession speech, aptly titled, "Suffering is an Enormous Turn-On"
(78). Parks seems much more willing than Hawthorne to deny any
sympathy for the Reverend; her version of this character is an implicit
critique of the way Hawthorne, by having Dimmesdale die at the end,
leaves us with a somewhat more ambiguous set of feelings for his
character.
Fucking A initially sets up a more promising relationship for
Hester in her friendship with the Butcher. One form of betrayal,
though, comes when Jailbait-the wrong prisoner-arrives for the
picnic and Hester, not recognizing him, assumes that he is her long-
unseen son; the sequence culminates in Jailbait telling Hester that her
real son is dead, then raping her while she is "struck dumb with grief
and disbelief" (184). When her son Monster shows up at Hester's
house, he in turn pretends to be another former fellow inmate of her
"dead" son, and Hester is initially skeptical even when he shows her
the scar with which she marked him as a child C'When they corned to
take him away, just before they took him, I bit him. Hard . .. He'll
always have my mark" [166]). Like In the Blood, though, the play
ends in a Medea-like moment when Hester finally acknowledges
Monster's identity, but kills him before he is caught by the Hunters.
Parks's use of this kind of sacrifice again evokes her reflections (quoted
earlier) about African-American history and about "ancestral burial
grounds"-particularly when the burial grounds themselves do not
even exist as places for commemoration. In this case, Hester's
deliberate decision to "save" Monster by killing him herself conjures up
images of slave narratives in which the mother chooses to end the
child's life rather than give him/her up to slavery. The Sethe/Margaret
Garner story in Toni Morrison's Beloved is an example of how
contemporary African-American writers have drawn upon this legacy.12
Barbara Christian's words about Morrison's novel may also shed some
light upon Parks's debt to Morrison:
12 See Helene Moglen, "Redeeming History: Toni Morrison's Beloved," in
Female Subjects in Black and White, Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene
Moglen, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 205-06 for a
discussion of Beloveds sources.
86
In Beloved, Morrison not only explore the psychic
horror of those who can no longer call their ancestors'
names but also the dilemma of the mother who
knows her children will be born into and live in the
realm of those who cannot call their ancestors'
names. Sethe's killing of her already-crawling baby is
not only the killing of that individual baby but also the
collective anguish African-American women must
have experienced when they realized their children
were cut off forever from their "living dead," who
would never be called upon, remembered, or fed.B
GEIS
Finally, there is the question of the scarlet "A" itself that
Hawthorne's Hester is forced to wear when she is branded an
adulteress. The letter becomes so much a part of her that at one point
during her meeting with Dimmesdale when she casts it off into a
creek, Pearl refuses to recognize her until she puts it back on. While
critics have speculated endlessly about the multiple meanings of the
"A," they return repeatedly to the sense in which Hawthorne uses it as
a marker to create both an identity of and an identification with the
heroine. In this sense, Rita K. Gollin remarks, one of the many
associations of the "A" is with Hawthorne himself as "Artist or even
Author'; she adds that the novel "can be approached as a network of
statements about vocations chosen, evaded, and changed."14 Berlant
adds that while "[a]t first transfigured by the letter's power as the law's
sign, Hester turns the "A" into her own monogram" (142) .
In the Blood makes the "A" the only letter that Hester knows
how to write, and the way Jabber reminds her how to do so reveals
the extent to which for her, too, it has become a kind of bodily
marking: "Legs apart hands crost the chest like I showed you," he tells
her (11). After she kills Jabber, she writes an "A" on the ground in his
blood: "Looks good Jabber, dont it? Dont it, huh?" (106).
13 Barbara Christian, Fixing Methodologies: Beloved," in Female Subjects
in Black and White, Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen, eds.
(Berkeley: University of california Press, 1997), 369.
14 Rita K. Gollin, "'Again a Literary Man': Vocation and The Scarlet Letter,"
in Critical Essays on Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, David B. Kesterton, ed.
(Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988) , 180.
HAWTHORNE'S HESTER 87
In Fucking A, the letter "A" is branded on Hester's chest to
mark her as an abortionist; we are told that this is the law, and so
although she prefers to cover the "A," she wears it "like a shingle and
a license" (165) even though it appears to be repulsive to others; at
one point, one of the Hunters tries to get her to cover it up. Reflected
in the imagery of Hester's bloody apron and tools (214-15), the letter
" weeps" continuously "as a fresh wound would" (125), and she
remarks, "The A looks so fresh, like they branded me yesterday" (125).
Rendering the "A" as a bodily mark reflects Janey's sense in Acker's
novel that the treatment of Hester becomes inseparable from her
physical sense of self: "At this point in The Scarlet Letter and in my
life politics don't disappear but take place inside my body" (97) . In
Fucking A, the branding image invokes slavery (as well as Nazism),
and it allows Parks to create a disturbing sense of what it means for
the Black female body to be controlled and manipulated. Again, this
invokes the image of Saartje Baartman in Venus-but in rewriting
Hester Prynne, Parks takes another character (this time an American
one) who has been famously romanticized and mystified, and insists
that we consider her again through the lens of our cruel and
continuing histories of oppression.
Journal of American Drama and Theatre 16, no. 2 (Spring 2004)
BRINGING THE WALL TO BROADWAY
ROBERT FRANCIOSI
How does one translate the scope and weight of an epic novel
to the Broadway stage? particularly a work of historical fiction? And
how does a subject like the Holocaust resist the theatrical devices that
have been drawn upon in productions from Show Boat to Les Mis to
Ragtime? The challenges that Auschwitz poses to the dramatic
imagination are indeed daunting, and while many playwrights have
engaged the Holocaust, few have successfully brought its epic scale to
the stage. This is particularly true of American theatre between 1945
and 1965. Fifteen years after the liberation of the Nazi camps, only one
major American play had engaged the Holocaust in any sustained
fashion, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett's The Diary of Anne
Frank (1956). The controversies surrounding that successful Broadway
adaptation continue to this day (most notably in a 1997 New Yorker
article by Cynthia Ozick, "Who Owns Anne Frank?''), yet the glare of
attention it received has obscured a second, far more risky, theatrical
venture, one also sponsored by Kermit Bloomgarden, producer of the
Anne Frank play. Five years after The Diary of Anne FranKs success,
Bloomgarden took on another adaptation of a noteworthy Holocaust
text, one far more sweeping, graphic and disturbing than the calming
intimacy of his earlier production-Millard Lampell's dramatization of
The Wall, John Hersey's epic novel of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Millard Lampell's adaptation of The Wall provides some
interesting answers and presents a fascinating case study of the
challenges faced in adapting a work of historical fiction for commercial
theatre. Yet beyond issues of adaptation-the techniques of bringing
the page to life on the stage-Lampell's play also highlights the
dynamics of a singular moment in American cultural history: when the
Holocaust was about to be "discovered." By attempting to bring the
Warsaw ghetto to the American stage, the play's sponsors grossly
overestimated the willingness of popular audiences to engage such
material. Only two months after the play's close, the trial of Adolf
Eichmann began, its extensive media coverage inaugurating a new
phase in how Americans began to process the destruction of Europe's
Jews. And within five years the subject would gain added attention
from American theatre audiences, in part because of Arthur Miller's
Incident at Vichy (1964) but more because of the controversy
surrounding a pair of plays from Germany: Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy
(1963) and Peter Weiss's The Investigation (1965). Did Lampell's
version of The Wall simply miss its cultural moment? Or was its subject
THE WALL 89
finally beyond the reach of contemporary theatre? My consideration of
The Waifs journey from page to stage will o f f ~ if not answers to these
questions, at least paths for future consideration of this important
moment in what Hilene Flanzbaum calls the history of America's
"Holocaust consciousness."
1
* * *
A noted correspondent for Time and Life, John Hersey by 1947 had not
only written a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Bell for Adano, but also
a long essay on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima which quickly
became a multi-faceted media sensation. Based largely on interviews
with six survivors of the blast, "Hiroshima" first appeared in 1946 as
an entire issue of The New Yorker and was widely excerpted and
discussed on editorial pages, broadcast on radio, and even distributed
at no charge to Book-of-the-Month Club subscribers.
Hersey's visit in 1946 to Hiroshima and his conversations with
A-bomb victims impelled him, almost immediately, to begin research
for a novel on another horrific chapter in the annals of the twentieth
century, one he had encountered as a reporter during the war's final
winter-the destruction of Europe's Jews. Published in 1950, and
modeled in part on Emmanuel Ringelblum's ghetto archives, Oneg
Shabbat, Hersey's The Wall is not only an epic account of the Warsaw
Ghetto's life and death, but arguably the first American novel centered
on the Holocaust. When he began composing his book, a wealth of
materials on the ghetto was first being published, and, in the case of
Ringelblum's buried archive, literally being unearthed. Based on these
materials, The Wall details events between September 1939, when
Warsaw fell, and April 1943, when a handful of young Jews actively
fought the Germans for nearly a month. Two years before Anne Frank's
diary would captivate American readers and more than a decade
before the Eichmann trial would at last force many Jewish-American
writers to address the Holocaust, John Hersey had arrived at the
terminus a guo of serious engagement with Auschwitz, especially for
those without first-hand experience. By trying to imagine the
unimaginable, to convey through language what seemed beyond its
capabilities, Hersey had faced what Alvin Rosenfeld astutely cites as
the fundamental challenge posed by the "post-Auschwitz imagination":
"when fact itself surpasses fiction, what is there left for the novel and
the short story to do?''2
1 See Hilene Flanzbaum, ed., The Americanization of the Holocaust
(Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
2 Alvin H. Rosenfeld, A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature
(Indiana University Press, 1980), 66.
90 FRANCIOSI
Perhaps only a journalist would have attempted as early as
1947 to write fiction about the recent murder of six million Jews. The
subject, however, ultimately pulled Hersey away from the reportage
that had served him on the Russian front or in Hiroshima's ruins and
pushed him toward a new type of historical fiction, what he later
termed "the novel of contemporary history."
Early in 1947, after finishing "A Short Wait," a story on a Lodz
Ghetto survivor who is reunited with her American relatives, Hersey
embarked on what must have seemed a logical course for any writer
hoping to understand the death of Europe's Jews-he spent several
days interviewing an Auschwitz survivor. Not until his 1962 collection
Here to Stay, though, would the piece he drafted from these
conversations, "Prisoner 107,907," be published. Whereas his notes on
the Lodz Ghetto had led to a short story, Hersey's discussions with the
camp survivor dissuaded him from attempting to write on Auschwitz or
another death camp. In a 1952 essay on his writing of The Wall, "The
Mechanics of a Novel," Hersey explained that he felt the world of the
camps had so dehumanized the prisoners that it would be impossible
to turn their experiences into fiction. Yet if prisoners in the camps had
"been degraded by their experiences to a subhuman, animal level,"
those in the ghetto, Hersey realized, "had lived on as families to the
very end, and had maintained at least vestiges and symbols of those
things we consider civilization -theaters, concerts, readings of poetry,
and the rituals of everyday human intercourse."3 Especially for an
American audience, then, a book on the Warsaw Ghetto would achieve
what Hersey later described as the novel of contemporary history's
ability to illuminate the lives of ordinary people caught in history's
snares. That he chose to write about Warsaw rather than Lodz, which
had been the subject of "A Short Wait," and which would subsequently
inspire Leslie Epstein and others, seems based on two factors: the
fictional possibilities of the climactic uprising of April 1943, and the
wealth of documentary materials available on the Warsaw Ghetto.
By using the Warsaw Ghetto as his focus, Hersey also knew
that he faced two major challenges: to convey the sweep of events
within this traumatic history, and, more importantly, to bring a human
dimension to the mass death of the Hitler era. He accomplished the
first by resorting to a device as old as the novel itself-the fictional
archive. The Wall is built upon a series of dated entries from the
" Levinson Archive." Recovered after the war by a handful of ghetto
survivors, the archive, Hersey's fictional editor explains, " has scant
3 John Hersey, "The Mechanics of a Novel," Yale University Library
Gazette 27 (July 1952): 5.
THE WALL 91
precedent": "it is not so formidable as history; it is more than notes for
a history; it is not fiction-Levinson was too scrupulous to imagine
anything; it is not merely a diary; it is neither journalism nor a journal
in the accepted modes."4 Indeed, Hersey's imagining of the archive-
with hundreds of dated entries from November 1939 to May 1943, with
every detail based on facts from the ghetto's history, with actual
Judenrat and Nazi documents incorporated, with the full range of
Jewish political and cultural life given voice-was so convincing that
many readers wrote to him asking where they could view the Levinson
Archive, or attacked him for so deceiving" his audience.
Yet Hersey realized as well that those many excerpts from the
Levinson Archive (which his Editor tells us represents only one
twentieth of its four million words!), their sheer unwieldiness,
necessitated using another device to anchor the book, one he found
by focussing on what he termed "The Family," a small group of ghetto
residents whose lives are thrust together. Using this family as his
dramatic focus-with the commentary of the archivist Noah Levinson
serving a choric function-Hersey manages to tell the larger story of
the Warsaw Ghetto while retaining a sense of intimacy with the
characters. Through the character of Rachel Apt, for example (based
on the famous underground leader, Zivia Lubetkin), he not only
illustrates clandestine educational efforts in the ghetto, but ultimately
places us squarely within the world of the Jewish Fighters
Organization, while others bring to life the Judenrat, the Bund, the
Jewish Police, even the Jewish labor crews who built the ghetto wall.
And with his persistent focus on Dolek Berson, the "drifter" figure
whose life touches nearly all elements of the ghetto, Hersey also
depicted the change among Warsaw's Jews from passivity to active
resistance.
The Wall ultimately became more than an original and best-
selling novel; its life and possibilities did not remain cloth-bound. The
film rights were sold in 1950 for $100,000 to Hollywood mogul David
0 . Selznick. Five years before The Diary of Anne Frank became a
Broadway hit and more than a decade before Hollywood began to face
the Holocaust in such films as Judgment at Nuremberg and The
Pawnbroker, Selznick tried to bring the Warsaw Ghetto to post-war
American movie audiences. So impressed was he with Hersey's book,
he not only paid an enormous fee for the property, but granted the
author unprecedented artistic control. That the autocratic Selznick
gave such power to Hersey indicates just how much he wanted The
4 John Hersey, The Wall (New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1950), 6.
92 FRANCIOSI
Wall, how much he hoped it might become a film "as great as Gone
with the Wind." Hersey's creative authority, however, proved to be the
main impediment to filming the novei.S
Ten years after The Waifs initial impact on the American
reading public, and with its cinematic fate still unresolved, the novel,
with Hersey's approval, was adapted by Millard Lampell for the
Broadway stage. Produced by Kermit Bloomgarden, whose earlier
success with The Diary of Anne Frank convinced him that New York
audiences were prepared for a more hard-hitting treatment of the Nazi
era, the play in October 1960 seemed to have all elements in place for
a successful run: it was based on a popular novel by a Pulitzer-Prize-
winning author; it addressed subject matter of considerable interest to
New York's large Jewish audiences; and in telling the story of the
Warsaw ghetto, it depicted resistance as well as destruction.
Bloomgarden even managed to cast the young George C. Scott in its
lead role. The opening night reviews were mostly strong, some even
ecstatic. Yet The Wall closed after only 167 performances.
In retrospect, Lampell's play may have been doomed from the
start. Caught between the demands of theatricality and allegiance to
Hersey's text, the first-time playwright faced a host of difficult choices,
many of which undercut the novel's distinctive power. At nearly seven
hundred pages, Hersey's book depicts the full life and brutal death of
the Warsaw ghetto, from its inception in 1940 to the uprising of April
1943. It's filled with dozens of characters. So many, in fact, that Book
of the Month Club copies included a four-page list of the novel's
dramatis personae. Its author did exhaustive research, drawing on a
wealth of Polish and Yiddish materials; and as his Polish translator
reported, Hersey attempted to document every substantive detail in
his book-names, dates, addresses, edicts from the Germans, words
of popular ghetto songs, the political positions of various Jewish
groups, even the chemistry of bombs the fighters threw at the Nazis.
Given the wealth of documentation that is The Wall, no
character is more significant than Noach Levinson, the narrator whose
recovered archive is the novel's invented source. As the ghetto
archivist, Levinson depicts the full range of community responses to
the confinement and growing terror, yet Lampell chose to eliminate
this character from the play. Perhaps the regular commentary of
Hersey's narrator would have seemed too much like the voice-over
device of The Diary of Anne Frank. By cutting Levinson, however, the
dramatist lost a spatial element, the sense of the entire ghetto that the
archivist figure offered.
s See Robert Franciosi, "Scripting The Wall: David 0. Selznick's 'Lost'
Holocaust Film," Modern Jewish Studies 12 (2001): 3-11.
THE WALL 93
Millard Lampell seemed to understand this weakness in his
play and tried to convey the scope of ghetto experiences through a
series of brief scenes involving the Kogans, a middle class Jewish
family deported into the ghetto. They're not found in Hersey's novel
and are described upon their first entrance as being "dressed neatly,
stiffly, a cameo of small-town respectability."6 Their horrific decline
over the course of the play is signified by those clothes, which grow
more ragged each time they appear on stage. By play's end, the
parents have been sent to Treblinka, and their orphaned eight-year-old
daughter is described during the uprising as a crouching figure,
"tattered, unkempt, a lost animal poking in the ruins" (143). The
effectiveness of this device in the script, however, was lost on
Broadway, and the Kogans were cut from the production soon after
opening night. (They would reappear in the published version of the
play and in Lampell's 1964 revision.)
In many respects, cutting this family from the script was
symptomatic of the larger theatrical problems damaging the New York
production. Lampell's notes during the play's run reveal just how
dissatisfied he was with the staging of The Wall. " Every night, down at
the Billy Rose Theatre," he wrote in November, "they are performing
something called The Wall-a queer, crippled bastard cousin of a play
I once wrote. There are parts of it I cannot see without being flooded
with obscure frustration and unholy anger.'?
His objections to the play's production were numerous, and
ranged from director Morton DaCosta's emphasis on blocking over
character, on the "pictorial composition of scenes," to the tensions
between lead performers George C. Scott and English actress Yvonne
Mitchell, who apparently hated each other on first sight.
Lampell's persistent complaints about the set perhaps best
express his frustrations. Where he had emphasized in his script an
open stage design-"The key to the sets is simplicity," he said, "almost
an abstraction of place" (3)-the result at the Billy Rose Theater was
"exactly the opposite," and Lampell readily listed its deficiencies: "A
ponderous exterior that dwarfed the actors. A cramped, doll's house
apartment that reduced all movement to a wire-balancing act. A wall .
6 Millard Lampell, The Wall, A Play in Two Acts (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
Inc., 1961), 38.
7 Notes of 11 November 1960, Millard Lampell Papers, Wisconsin Center
for Film and Theater Research, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin
[hereafter Millard Lampell Papers].
94 FRANCIOSI
.. that could hardly be seen. And ... ruins that were simply bits of
wood and cardboard.''B He told Bloomgarden, finally, "You cannot build
a realistic Warsaw Ghetto. You cannot build realistic devastation. You
can only evoke it."
Not surprisingly, when Lampell saw a performance of The Wall
in Munich, he was most pleased with the spare and flexible set,
especially the use of a turntable to shift from scene to scene. The
device allowed the German production to capture the "constant flow"
of life in the ghetto, that "teaming world," without the unwieldy
machinery of the Broadway version. The "imprisoning wall itself," he
noted, was "never shown. In New York it was-and it was clearly a
poor thing of lathe and plaster. But left to the imagination, it [became]
real and terrifying."9 By 1964, it was the fully open space of the Arena
Stage in Washington, D.C., however, that most reflected his original
vision of the play. "The Warsaw Ghetto cannot be faithfully
reproduced," he concluded in the revised script. "It can only exist and
be destroyed in the mind's eye of the audience."to
Of course this statement assumes the presence of an engaged
and enthusiastic audience. The play had such an audience in Munich
and Washington, but not in New York. What kept Broadway audiences
away? After the opening week's reviews, Lampell and the producers
thought The Wall might sustain a long run. Nevertheless, he told
Hersey that the play's " deeper human values" had been sacrificed by
the director to "spectacular, surface theatrical effects," such
"Hollywood touches" as using real German shepherds during the
uprising scene.ll After the opening, with director Morton DaCosta off
to Hollywood, Lampell and Bloomgarden immediately set about to
make significant adjustments, "to put back some of the tender, quiet,
personal material, and take out the Hollywood touches."t2
8 " Production Notes" of 29 October 1960, Millard Lampell Papers.
9 Millard Lampell, "Fragments from a Munich Diary," American Judaism 11
(Spring 1962): 13.
10 Millard Lampell, The Wall, A Drama in Three Acts (New York: Samuel
French, Inc., 1964), 99.
11 Letter of 16 October 1960, John Hersey Collection, Beinecke Library,
Yale University.
12 Letter of 15 October 1960, Millard Lampell Papers.
THE WALL 95
Yet both men may have misread the very audience they
wanted to attract. The 1960-61 Broadway season was certainly no
high water mark in serious American drama. Neil Simon's Come Blow
Your Horn opened then, for example, and ran for over 600
performances, four times as many as The Wall. And as the Kennedy-
Nixon debates that fall had proven, the United States was fast
becoming a television nation. Any natural synergy between Broadway
and early television, with such live dramas as Playhouse 90, had begun
to fade with television's move from New York to Los Angeles and its
growing reliance on videotape.
If the response by Hollywood to television's challenge was
toward overwrought spectacles that could not be contained by the
small screen (think only of The Ten Commandments or Cleopatra),
Broadway shifted toward the forms which typify its offerings four
decades later-elaborate musicals, light comedies, and, occasionally, a
serious dramatic work.
In many respects Lampell knew that he was working against
the grain of Broadway expectations. He had first envisioned a play that
would run well over three hours, yet quickly yielded to an American
audience "that is like Pavlov's dog, trained by the dinner bells of
television and films." Two and a half hours was its absolute limit for
sitting in a theatre. That same impatient audience, Lampell believed,
wanted its emotions just as efficiently spurred. "The audience wanted
to weep and weep, and I did not want them to. It seemed to me a
subject where tears were too cheap."13
As the early weeks went by and the audiences in the Billy Rose
Theater declined, Lampell began to realize that the play's subject itself
had much to do with keeping people away. He later wrote of the many
people who had sheepishly admitted to him that they did not want to
see The Wall because they feared the experience would be "too
horrifying, too painful to take.'' They knew nothing of the valiant
resistance within the Warsaw ghetto and had written the play inside
their own heads. "They were sure that it was a grim, unrelieved tale
of horror," he recalled. One man from Scarsdale had simply told him,
"Why pay $6.60 to read my own obituary notice?"14
This comment expresses a sentiment that Lampell and the
producers of The Wall had never anticipated: "many of those we
13 " Production Notes" of 12 November 1960, Millard Lampell Papers.
14 Millard Lampell, "The Wall: Its Message is Life," ADL Bulletin 18 (June
1961): 4.
96 fRANCIOSI
thought might be especially interested in the theme-Jews-were
avoiding the play. Even the customary Jewish theatre-goers, always a
crucial part of the Broadway audience, were staying away."ls Other
than a few synagogue groups, no important Jewish organization had
made group purchases. But given the lackluster 1960-61 season, the
absent audience could not be solely attributed to The Waifs
deficiencies. What, then, kept Jews away?
We too easily forget today that American Jews during the
1950s and early 1960s showed little interest in Holocaust stories. (It
was only through the extraordinary efforts of Mrs. Isaac Stern, who
had recently saved Carnegie Hall from demolition and who rallied
Eleanor Roosevelt to the play's cause, that The Wall continued for two
months into 1961.) One rabbi who urged readers to see The Wall said
that "if the play is finally forced to close for lack of popular response,
this failure will be, in no small sense, a Jewish failure, an act of treason
against memories that must not be allowed to die."16 The trial of Adolf
Eichmann in the spring of 1961, especially its televised segments,
finally began to change this situation among American Jews, but not
soon enough to rescue Lampell's play.
He finally attributed the absent Jewish audience to "emotional
defensiveness," saying, "I became convinced that a significant number
of Jews were frightened, guilty, ashamed of what they thought was the
role of their brothers in Nazi Europe."17 With almost no understanding
of either the Warsaw uprising-to say nothing of the many other acts
of resistance in the ghettos and camps-American Jews, he concluded,
simply equated any story of the Warsaw ghetto with a tale of death.
Revealing his frustrations, Lampell addressed this issue in a post-
mortem article for the ADL Bulletin, entitled "The Wall: Its Message is
Life."
Yet perhaps Lampell was himself too willing to grab onto the
Warsaw resistance as a defense against the story of death that was
the ghetto's. Some of the best criticism of his play addresses this very
tendency. "The only way to answer death is with more life," the
character Rachel Apt declares in the final bunker scene. Shortly after
15 Lampell, "The Wall: Its Message is Life," 5.
16 Harry Essrig, "The Pain of Recall," Congress Bi-Weekly, 13 February
1961, 4.
17 Lampell, "The Wall: Its Message is Life," 5.
THE WALL 97
this, just before the group is about to escape through the sewers, a
baby with them begins to cry. Its father puts a hand over the infant's
face, but the mother snatches it away, saying "He can't breathe!" At
that moment, Dolek Berson, to whom Rachel had said those words
about life in the face of death, sacrifices himself in order to divert the
Germans' attention, a romantic touch not in Hersey's novel. He uses
his concertina to draw their fire and the curtain falls with its faint
sound playing "Dort'n, Dort'n," an "indomitable song tenderly defying
death.''18
In Hersey's novel, however, an underground commander
sacrifices the child to save the lives of the group. "What the Broadway
audience can't bear," George Ross wrote after seeing The Wall, "is
violence on the part of its loved ones, those with whom it identifies-
so far has the theater gone in selling identification at the expense of
revelation.'' The play "tries to have it both ways," he concludes, it
"offers the thrill of violence without its meaning.'' Hersey's scene may
hurt more, but "offers a greater truth."19
By 1964, when Lampell took a fresh look at his play, his
audience was better prepared for a more troubling, yet honest
theatrical moment. After the trial and execution of Eichmann, after the
success of Wallant's The Pawnbroker, after the furor surrounding Rolf
Hochhuth's The Deputy, after the start of the Auschwitz trials in West
Germany, American audiences-and Millard Lampell-were better able
to face a different kind of scene, the kind of Holocaust moment that in
1960 simply could not be brought to Broadway. The kind of theatrical
moment that has more recently become synonymous with serious
Holocaust drama. In the revised version of Lampell's play Berson still
uses the concertina to sacrifice himself for the group, but this time the
baby is smothered, and by the hands of its mother. This time the play
ends with Rachel Apt leaving the bunker, not uttering the name of her
fallen lover, but stealing a final glance at "the still, silent, blanket-
wrapped form.''20
18 Lampell, The Wall, A Play in Two Acts, 160.
19 George M. Ross, "'The Wall' on Broadway," Commentary 31 (1961): 68.
20 Lampell, The Wall, A Drama in Three Acts, 98.
CONTRIBUTORS
DOROTHY CHANSKY is assistant professor of Theatre at the College of
William and Mary. Her forthcoming book is Composing Ourselves: The
Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience (Southern Illinois
University Press 2004). She is book review editor of Theatre Journal
and has published work in Theatre History Studies, Text and
Performance Quarterly, Theatre Survey, Theatre Journal, and twice
previously in JADT.
ROBERT FRANCIOSI is Professor of English at Grand Valley State
University and the recent author of Elie Wiesel: Conversations (2002).
His essay on the Broadway production of The Wall is part of a longer
work-in-progress entitled, Imagining the Ghetto: John Hersey's The
Wall and American Holocaust Memory.
DEBORAH R. GElS is associate professor of English at DePauw
University, where she specializes in modern/contemporary drama,
postmodern literature, and film studies. She is the author of
Postmodern Theatric(k)s: Monologue in Contemporary American
Drama, co-editor (with Steven F. Kruger) of Approaching the
Millennium: Essays on Tony Kushner's Angels in America, and editor of
Considering MAUS: Approaches to Art Spiegelman's "Survivor's Tale"
of the Holocaust. She is currently working on a book about identity
politics in American feminist drama and performance.
ROBERT F. GROSS is Director of Theatre and Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He has
published articles on a number of American playwrights, including S.
N. Behrman, Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, William Inge,
Edward Albee, John Guare, Harry Kondoleon, and Wendy Wasserstein.
BARBARA OZIEBLO teaches American Literature at the University of
Malaga, Spain, and specializes in American drama and American
women writers. She is the author of Susan Glaspell: A Critical
Biography (University of North Carolina Press, 2000), editor of The
Poovincetown Players: A Choice of the Shorter Works (Sheffield
Academic Press, 1994) and Staging A Cultural Paradigm: The Political
and the Personal in American Drama (P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2002). She is
currently President of the Susan Glaspell Society.
JULIA A. WALKER is an assistant professor in the Department of
English and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A specialist in modern
drama and performance theory, she has published articles on 19th-
century acting, Eugene O'Neill's early plays, and contemporary
performance theory, and has just completed her first book manuscript,
Bodies, Voices, Words: Expressionism and American Theatrical
Modernism.
An Interdisciplinary Conference Jointly Sponsored By
The American Theatre and Drama Society and
The University of Kansas
Thursday-Sunday, 3-5 March 2005
Lawrence, Kansas
(35 Miles West of Kansas City, near the geographical center of
the United States)
Plenary Speakers:
Anne Bogart, Director, Saratoga International Theatre Institute
(Sm)
Olristopher Bigsby, University of East Anglia,
leading scholar of American Theatre and Drama
Jose Munoz, New York University,
leading scholar of perfonnance and American Studies
"Writing, Teadling, Performing America" is open to scholars,
teachers, writers, performers, and practitioners interested in
disrussing U.S. culture in an interdisciplinary framework. We hope
to attract panel, paper, and workshop proposals that are fresh and
open. Among topics to be explored:
what does it mean to be an ''American" artist or writer?
how is ''American" identity changing?
what is the role of performance (or writing or teaching) in
shaping ''America'?
For further information, rontact www.ku.edu/tvnlc
- or the ronference organizers:
William Demastes, President, American Theatre and Drama Society,
wdemast@lsu.edu
Iris Smith Rscher, Dept of English, University of Kansas,
ifischer@ku.edu
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
THE HEIRS OF
MOLIERE
FOUR FRENCH COMEDIES OF THE
17TH AND 18TH CENTURIES
@ Regnard:'J'L.Ahoeu.t--Mu.dedl..over
@ De.touda. 'J'L. Co..ceited Cou,.,t
@ L.Ckuu8e:l'heF...hiouahlePrefu<lioe
@ r...'l"' 'J'L.l'rleado.ltheL.w.
TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY
MARVIN CARLSON
The Heirs of
Moliere
Translated and Edited by:
Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four
representative French comedies of
the period from the death of Moliere
to the French Revolution: Regnard's
The Absent-Minded Lover,
Destouches's The Conceited Count,
La Chaussee's The Fashionable
Prejudice, and Laya' s The Friend of
the Laws.
Translated in a poetic form that
seeks to capture the wit and spirit of
the originals, these four plays
suggest something of the range of
the Moliere inheritance, from
comedy of character through the
highly popular sentimental comedy
of the mid eighteenth century, to
comedy that employs the Moliere
tradition for more contemporary
political ends.
In addition to their humor, these comedies provide fascinating social documents that
show changing ideas about such perennial social concerns as class, gender, and
politics through the turbulent century that ended in the revolutions that gave birth to
the modem era.
USA $20.00 plus shipping $3.00 USA, $6.00 International
Please make payments in U.S. Dollars payable to:
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MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Pixerecourt:
Four Melodramas
Translated and Edited by:
Daniel Gerould
&
Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four of
Pixerecourt's most important
melodramas: The Ruins of Babylon,
or Jafar and Zaida, The Dog of
Montatgis, or The Forest of Bondy,
Christopher Columbus, or The
Discovery of the New World, and
Alice, or The Scottish Gravediggers,
as well as Charles Nodier's
"Introduction" to the 1843 Collected
Edition of Pixerecourt's plays and
the two theoretical essays by the
playwright, "Melodrama," and
"Final Reflections on Melodrama."
"Pixerecourt furnished the Theatre of Marvels with its most stunning effects, and
brought the classic situations of fairground comedy up-to-date. He determined the
structure of a popular theatre which was to last through the 19th century ...
Pixerecourt determined that scenery, music, dance, lighting and the very movements
of his actors should no longer be left to chance but made integral parts of his play."
Hannah Winter, The Theatre of Marvels
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Please make payments in U.S. Dollars payable to:
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Mail checks or money orders to:
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Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Contemporary Theatre in Egypt contains the proceedings of a Symposium
on this subject held at the CUNY Graduate Center in February of 1999
along with the first English translations of three short plays by leading
Egyptian playwrights who spoke at the Symposium, Alfred Farag, Gamal
Maqsoud, and Lenin El-Ramley. It concludes with a bibliography of
English translations and secondary articles on the theatre in
Egypt since 1955.
(USA $12.00 plus $3.00 shipping. Foreign $12.00 plus $6.00 shipping)
Zeami and the No Theatre in the World, edited by Benito Ortolani and
Samuel Leiter, contains the proceedings of the "Zeami and the No
Theatre in the World Symposium" held in New York City in October 1997
in conj unction with the "Japanese Theatre in the World" exhibit at the
Japan Society. The book contains an introduction and fifteen essays,
organized into sections on "Zeami' s Theories and Aesthetics," "Zearni
and Drama," "Zeami and Acting," and "Zeami and the World."
(USA $15.00 plus $3.00 shipping. Foreign $15.00 plus $6.00 shipping)
Four Works for the Theatre by Hugo Claus contains translations of four
plays by the foremost contemporary writer of Dutch language theatre, poetry,
and prose. Flemish by birth and upbringing, Claus is the author of some
ninety plays, novels, and collections of poetry. The plays collected here with
an introduction by David Willinger include The Temptation, Friday,
Serenade, and The Hair of the Dog.
(USA $15.00 plus $3.00 shipping. Foreign $15.00 plus $6.00 shipping)
Theatre Research Resources in New York City is the most comprehensive
catalogue of New York City research facilities available to theatre scholars.
Within the indexed volume, each facility is briefly described including an
outline of its holdings and practical matters such as hours of operation. Most
entries include electronic contact information and web sites. The listings are
grouped as follows: Libraries, Museums, and Historical Societies; University
and College Libraries; Ethnic and Language Associations; Theatre Companies
and Acting Schools; and Film and Other.
(USA $5.00 plus $3.00 shipping. Foreign $5.00 plus $6.00 shipping)
Please make payments in U.S. Dollars payable to: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Mail checks or money orders to:
Circulation Manager
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
The CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016-4309
Visit our web-site at: web.gc.cuny.edu/mestcl
Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868