Women, the Theatre, and the Avant-Garde
By Andrew White, PhD
By the early 1900's, middle-class white women could adopt
the stage as a profession and enjoy respectable careers as
actors or playwrights. It was still a struggle, however,
for female playwrights to get their works produced. Some
of them simply shelved their plays; others responded by
creating their own small companies. In 1916, Susan
Glaspell co-founded the Provincetown Players with her
husband; based in Greenwich Village and the Cape Cod city
of the same name, Provincetown featured works that covered
a wide range of theatrical styles; among her collaborators
was Eugene O'Neill.
Like their male peers, women tended to write light
theatrical fare. This isn't surprising, because the
theatre had the same entertainment function now taken up
by television and film: then as now, the proportion of
high quality work was very low. As women became more
politically active, however, they began to address
contemporary issues in otherwise conventional plays. And
the growth of the Little Theatre movement, in both white
and black communities across the country, offered greater
opportunities for productions of daring, higher-quality
material.
Although realism was the most popular theatrical style,
white
avant-garde
artists in Europe and the U.S. had long since abandoned
realism and moved on to greener pastures. (Constanine
Stanislavsky toured the USA in the 1920's with his Moscow
Art Theatre; the first season, consisting of his old
realist masterpieces, was well received; his second
season, featuring his more experimental contemporary work,
was panned.) Perhaps the first great
avant-garde movement was the Symbolists, who were
inspired in many instances by the Orthodox Christian
vision of the material world as a veil of the sacred.
Symbolists from Moscow to Paris experimented with ways of
evoking spiritual and supernatural presences on the stage.
The Expressionists, meanwhile, took some of the more
histrionic acting techniques developed during the
nineteenth-century and focused them to create more
shocking effects on their audiences. Melodrama, for
example, allowed middle-class patrons to watch
sympathetically from a distance as tragic, "transgressive"
women died rather than challenge society's hypocritical
values. Expressionism also forced audiences to experience
the hell created by their own hypocrisy, through the
state-of-mind of its tragic heroes and heroines,
challenging the
status quo
in a more visceral way.
The other international movement from this period emerged
out of the moral wreckage of World War I: Dada (French for
"hobby-horse," and a word that also has rude sexual
connotations). Launched at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich,
Dada mocked everything that was sacred and politically
expedient with what, on the surface, looked like utter
trash. There was method to the madness, however. Dada was
profoundly anti-authoritarian in an age when authority
(especially in Europe) had proven to be morally bankrupt.
Language - the ultimate tool of government propaganda -
became a plaything, with a greater emphasis on sound than
sense and little concern for niceties of grammar or
syntax.
(Tristan Tzara, one of Dada's leading lights, once offered
this recipe for writing a Dada poem: 1) take a newspaper
and scissors; 2) cut up the paper into individual words;
3) place these clippings in a bag and give them a shake;
4) pull the words out one by one and write them down in
the exact order they come out. Check out those
refrigerator magnet word games the next time you're in
your kitchen!)
The mechanized nature of modern warfare also led Dada to
question the value of the human being in a machine-driven
world. Meanwhile, photography, a technology initially
dismissed as "artless," had become a fascination among the
avant-garde.
Gertrude Stein's good friend Man Ray began to experiment
with a variety of subversive photographic and filmic
techniques.
The 1920's was an especially fertile period for black
theatre and drama. Harlem had a dozen theatre companies,
with nearly as many ideas about the nature and purpose of
black theatre. Some companies, in the tradition of the
great nineteenth-century actor Ira Aldridge, insisted on
including European classics and Shakespeare in their
repertoire. Others confined themselves to light fare and
melodrama. Others still indulged in blackface performance;
indeed, it wouldn't be until the 1940's that black
entertainers finally stopped "corking up" for their shows.
A debate raged over what black drama was and what it
should be. Should it copy prevailing European styles?
Should it portray black life as it is? Or should it go
back to its African roots and incorporate more traditional
forms of storytelling, song and dance?
Harvard graduate W. E. B. DuBois, founder of the
N.A.A.C.P., argued passionately for the portrayal of
blacks as human beings, and started a movement for theatre
"about us, by us, for us, and near us." Some advocated
"folk plays" that portrayed blacks using the
patois
of their own communities (like Zora Neale Hurston's
Florida or Eulalie Spence's Harlem). On the other hand
"race plays," as championed by W. E. B. DuBois, were
overtly political and confronted the most compelling
political issues of the day.
Because black writers were excluded from most literary
contests downtown, Harlem had its own dramatic
competitions sponsored by the seminal black magazines
Crisis
and
Opportunity. In the years 1925-1927, the variety
of prizewinning plays, many written by women, attested to
the vitality of the black theatre scene at that time.
The 'teens and twenties witnessed a wide variety of
artistic movements, and the plays selected here show how
American women playwrights worked in all of them.
~ Originally published in 2007 in the
Audience Guide
for TACT's production of
Drama Under the Influence.
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