A surprising lacuna in American theater scholarship until fairly recently was the dearth of book-length studies of what was arguably the most important little theater company in the United States: the Provincetown Players. Robert Sarlos (Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players, 1982) and Cheryl Black (The Women of Provincetown, 2002) have made vital contributions to this scholarship from their respective vantage points. What was missing was a fully contextual-ized discussion. In The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity, Brenda Murphy remedies this problem as she focuses on the ways in which the dramatic works produced by the group, as well as its internal conflicts and the direction it ultimately took, were shaped by the culture of modernity, and in turn, helped to inform the modernist consciousness of the artists, journalists, intellectuals, activists, poets, and fiction writers who staged plays at the Provincetown.

First, Murphy challenges the master narrative of the group's founding by George Cram (Jig) Cook. Through their writings, Susan Glaspell, Edna Kenton, Helen Deutsch and Stella Hanau, among others, constructed Cook as the moving spirit behind the company's efforts, an idealist committed to founding a theater collective that would put on plays in the spirit of Dionysian drama in opposition to the commercialism of Broadway. As a corrective, Murphy offers a more balanced and thoroughly researched account of the group's origin and development, delineating the modernist influences that helped to instill in the company the ideals of spontaneity, simplicity, group spirit, amateurism and experimentalism. She discusses the work of the Irish Players and the Chicago Little Theatre; Jack Reed's staging of the Paterson Pageant; the efforts of the dramatic wing of the Liberal Club and of the Washington Square Players; the aesthetic of the Post-Impressionists, as evidenced in the 1913 Armory Show; and the ideas of John Dewey, William James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as the philosophies of anarchism and feminism then in vogue. In elaborating this complex of cultural influences, Murphy enriches our understanding of the group's development as a manifestation of the modernist zeitgeist. She also explodes that aspect of the master narrative that positions Cook as the champion of group spirit and amateurism pitted against the professional aspirations of a younger generation of Provincetown Players by tracing the ways in which Cook and his allies—Glaspell, Kenton, and actress Ida Rauh—consolidated their authority over the protests of more democratically-oriented members as verified in the group's constitution, minutes, and other documents.

Murphy then moves on to discuss the thirteen plays produced during the company's first two summer seasons. Several have received little scholarly attention, such as Wilbur Daniel Steele's Not Smart, Jack Reed's The Eternal Quadrangle, and George Cram Cook's Change Your Style. This chapter would be a valuable contribution to American theater scholarship if it did nothing other than expand our knowledge of these works and their origins. But the chapter also sets up the central conflict that Murphy sees at work during the eight seasons of the company's trajectory: the tension between those Provincetown Players who wanted to put on realist works to draw larger, more mainstream audiences and those who wanted to stay true to the company's original commitment to experimental theater.

Crucial to the development of this line of argument and perhaps the most interesting part in the book is chapter 3, which explores the contributions of modernist poet Alfred Kreymborg and the poets associated with Others, the literary magazine he founded in 1915 and edited for four years. Murphy fully explores the role of the Others poets in developing a new form of theater—verse drama—that emerged as a competing mode to the realism that dominated the early Provincetown bills. Twelve of the poets published in Others—Wallace Stevens, Djuna Barnes, and Evelyn Scott among them—staged plays at the Provincetown, and Kreymborg himself wrote four plays that were produced by the group, only one less than George Cram Cook (and two of Cook's five plays were co-authored by his wife). Murphy positions Kreymborg, modernist painter William Zorach, and several of the Others poets as the experimental wing of the group that advocated including more nonrepresentational pieces on the company's bills to counter its realist bias. When their arguments for presentational theater proved less persuasive than those of the majority of the Players, they formed an ad hoc group, the Other Players, and put on a bill of experimental plays at the Provincetown Playhouse in 1918. Through her analysis of the contributions of the Others poets, Murphy reveals this little-discussed aspect of the company's dynamic: the competing claims of representational and presentational theater, here demonstrated to be as divisive an issue as the amateur/professional dichotomy emphasized in earlier studies.

Murphy ties her third and fourth chapters together by showing how Glaspell and O'Neill, inspired by the experimentalism of the Others playwrights, took Bernice, The Outside, The Verge, The Emperor Jones, and The Hairy Ape beyond the limits of representational theater. In her final chapter, focused on the work of the Experimental Theatre, Inc.—the company reorganized from the Provincetown Players in 1924 and led by O'Neill, Robert Edmond Jones, and Kenneth Macgowan—Murphy considers how the experimental aesthetic of the earlier group informed not only the work of the new company but also the poems, plays, fiction, and journalism of participants such as Stark Young, Edmund Wilson, and e.e. cummings.

Murphy is guilty of a couple of bloopers regarding Glaspell's work: her first novel was not Constancy, as she states on page 193, but The Glory of the Conquered (1909); Constancy, as noted on page 2, is the name of the Provincetown Players's inaugural play, written by Neith Boyce. (The fact that Glaspell did publish a novel called Fidelity in1915 may be the source of the confusion.) Also, the name of the male lead in Glaspell's Close the Book (1917) is Peyton Root, not John. However, these minor errors do not detract from the persuasiveness of Murphy's central argument, and overall, this book is firmly grounded in thorough, accurate, and painstaking research into the production history of the Provincetown plays, their contemporaneous critical reception, and the careers of the playwrights who staged them.

In her preface, Murphy states that she does not intend to focus on the role of the Provincetown Players in American theater history but rather on its contributions to the development of modernist culture in America. Her book actually accomplishes both of these goals quite admirably and therefore becomes all the more valuable and useful for a number of different audiences. Not only is it an essential research tool for scholars of American theater and a major contribution to the study of American literary modernism, it will also helpfully inform and update the classroom preparations of those who teach courses in modern American drama.

Marcia Noe
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

 

In this thoroughly researched study of American modernity in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries Walker situates the expressionist plays of O'Neill, Rice, Treadwell, Lawson, and others within a context outside the European, especially German, expressionist dramas (Kaiser, Hasenclever, et al.) that are usually taken to be their chief source of inspiration. She argues that it was the expressive culture movement, now "erased from cultural memory" (6) but once a powerful force in American culture and education, that more effectually gave shape to the peculiarly American version of expressionism exemplified by such 1920s plays as The Hairy Ape, The Adding Machine, and Machinal. Although this approach yields no startlingly new readings of individual works, Walker does manage to reframe the cultural historiography of theatrical expressionism through a close examination of the social conditions, technical innovations, and cultural practices that prevailed in the decades immediately prior to the rise of literary drama in the United States.

The first three of the book's seven chapters accomplish most of the work of this reframing, with the final four chapters each dedicated to one of the featured playwrights. The first chapter, "Bodies," traces the evolution of the actor's art of physical expressiveness as an affirmation of bourgeois realism in the nineteenth-century theater. Walker shows special interest in the "point," a non-verbal supplement to the verbal text that served as the actor's special stamp on its meaning, a gesture or brief pantomime that reinforced the value of individualism central to the ethos of the theater's predominantly middle-class audiences. In the second chapter, Walker examines the work and influence of French-born François Delsarte, whose theories of acting and expression were popularized in America in the later decades of the nineteenth century, and later adapted by Samuel Silas Curry, founder of an educational model (and the college near Boston that bears his name) that stressed personal expression as the key to the proper development of the self.

For Walker it was Delsarte and Curry who devised the most compelling ideas of performance as a means of harmonizing body and spirit even as the act of communication was becoming increasingly fragmented, with voices dissociated from bodies through such new technologies as the telegraph, telephone, and silent movies. Curry's elocutionary methods for expressing one's inner self, Walker argues, offer a distinctively American basis for expressionist theater practices. To conclude the opening section, in the third chapter Walker traces in impressive detail the development of international copyright law and its effect on dramatic texts, especially the increasing rift between the playwright as controlling author and the actor as performing artist.

The second section applies the contexts and arguments of the first section to the best-known American expressionist plays of the 1920s. Walker's approach to O'Neill combines the cultural-studies methods of Joel Pfister's groundbreaking Staging Depth (1994) with the more psychoanalytic concerns of Stephen Black to generate the thesis that in The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape, O'Neill was working through an Oedipal struggle with his father's flamboyant, romantic theatrical art. Walker explicates individual texts with erudition and insight, but her recurring hermeneutic metaphor of "unlocking the play's meanings" seems almost quaintly positivist. She seems almost to be channeling Curry at times, treating each text as a repressed self in search of the mode of expression uniquely capable of bringing it fully to light.

Another problem conspicuous throughout the book is Walker's unpersuasive if insistent rhetoric in which the reader is first told what will be demonstrated, and then, following the discussion, reminded of what has been shown. Sometimes these demonstrations are circumstantial at best, as when she notes of Sophie Treadwell: "As a young woman growing up at the turn of the twentieth century, Treadwell certainly would have known of Curry's theory of expression [. . .]. As a drama student at Berkeley she was probably trained in its methods. Like O'Neill, Rice, and Lawson, then, Treadwell appears to have developed her expressionistic style by ironizing Curry's theory of expression" (222). From there she moves to the assertion that Treadwell was in fact directly responding to Curry's theories. This passage exemplifies an assumption that is crucial to Walker's larger argument in book—that Curry was more influential on O'Neill and Treadwell than was Georg Kaiser or the other German sources of expressionism—without producing much real evidence to support it. At several points she simply asserts that Curry's ideas were "in the air" (as when she presumes Santayana's and T.S. Eliot's interest in them) and therefore likely influences on playwrights of the time.

It seems highly probable that Eliot, O'Neill, and S.S. Curry were all writing in response to the same technologized American cultural landscape of which Walker offers a well-informed account, but that does not prove Curry's influence in quite the sense that Walker tries to demonstrate. Determined to assert an indigenous source of American expressionism in Curry, she overlooks its more conspicuous forebears. O'Neill was notorious for denying certain kinds of influence (e.g., Freud), but readily owned up to others, especially Nietzsche and Strindberg. In fact, Walker nowhere mentions Strindberg's influence on O'Neill or on theatrical expressionism more generally. This also tends to weaken her argument that expressionism in America was more influenced by Curry and the expressive culture movement than by European playwrights.

Though Walker overplays the evidence of Curry's influence on American playwriting, she nonetheless succeeds in beginning to pry America's version of stage expression away from easy assumptions of its reliance on German models. If she had more on some of the other contextual, historicist issues she stresses in the book's first section, her argument would have been even more useful for understanding the peculiarly American features of this undeniably internationalist style.

Kurt Eisen
Tennessee Technological University

 

In Hedda Gabler, the offstage prostitute Mademoiselle Diana functions as an ironic counterpart to Ibsen's title character, signifying the unthinkable of female sexual autonomy within Hedda's determining environment. Whereas this obscene double remains out of sight, eclipsed by Ibsen's tragically conflicted middle-class protagonist, Katie Johnson's Sisters in Sin: Brothel Drama in America, 1900-1920 brings the figure of the prostitute center stage, suggesting that in her many incarnations—among them, O'Neill's Anna Christie—this figure was "central to the development of American realist theatre and [. . .] early twentieth-century modern drama" (2).

As Johnson explains, "The term `brothel drama' was coined and used commonly in the 1910s to describe the persistent, and often scandalous, representation of prostitution on stage," particularly in plays "about white women abducted into sexual slavery" (4). Johnson's own use of the term encompasses a much wider range of "sisters in sin," including not only prostitute characters but the many "fallen women" who were popularly perceived to be their equivalents. One of Johnson's more interesting observations about "brothel" drama is, in fact, that theatrical representations of brothel interiors were rare because they were particularly likely to provoke demands for censorship (4, 139-143), the physical space of the brothel calling more insistent attention to the corporeal and economic transactions of prostitution than did the variously idealized and demonized figures of the prostitute characters themselves.

A particular strength of Sisters in Sin is its exhaustive archival research: Johnson makes excellent and extensive use of journalistic reportage on prostitution and brothel drama in analyzing the cultural work performed by the material that is the focus of her study. Despite an apparently uncritical use of the term "whoredom" (3, 18, 29, 67, 71, 73), her overarching objective is deconstructive as she "[weaves] together the historical material reality of prostitutes with cultural discourse on prostitution" in order to clarify how the Progressive Era "prostitute-construct serviced many cultural clients" (11). Johnson's thesis is that "dramas about the sex trade were [. . .] part of an elaborate system for the construction and regulation of sexuality and gender, but also [. . .] the site of occasional ruptures in that policing" (3).

Following a general introduction, Sisters in Sin is structured into four parts, each with its own brief introduction. Part I, "The female performer as prostitute," includes chapters on David Belasco's 1899 adaptation and production of Pierre Berton and Charles Simon's Zaza, with Mrs. Leslie Carter in the title role; Olga Nethersole's 1900 production of Clyde Fitch's Sapho; and Belasco's 1909 production of Eugene Walter's The Easiest Way, starring Frances Starr. In Johnson's analysis, these plays reveal a linkage in the popular imagination between performing women and prostitutes and suggest how the particular public personas and performing bodies of Carter, Nethersole, and Starr respectively mediated the extent to which the plays they appeared in were or were not regarded as obscene and in need of censoring.

Part II, "Working girls," links the figure of the salesgirl that emerged in conjunction with the rise of the department store in the early twentieth century with the figure of the madam as successful businesswoman in the person of Shaw's Mrs. Warren. As Johnson explains, "The term `working girl' is not only a pun on turning trades and tricks; it also connotes the slippery terrain that many working women negotiated between selling commodities (the shop girl) and commodifying themselves (the girl shop)." Thus, "[in] playfully referencing both kinds of working (and, indeed, both kinds of shopping)," Johnson "seeks to capture the tension inherent in the plight of Progressive Era working women, unsettling the seemingly clear binary between honest worker and prostitute" (81).

Part III, "Opium dens and urban brothels: Staging the white slave," interestingly situates Progressive Era narratives of sexually enslaved white women within a "tradition of captivity tales dating back to colonial America" (112) and clarifies the relationship between the popular "white slave" genre and early-twentieth-century anxieties about urbanization and immigration. Among the cluster of plays considered here, Rachel Crothers's reform-oriented Ourselves (1913) deviated from the conventional emphasis on "sensational portraits of the sexual underworld" (146) and consequently met with little popular success.

The final section of the book, "The legitimation and decline of the brothel drama," begins with a chapter on Eugène Brieux's Damaged Goods, staged in the US in 1913 as part of a social hygiene agenda, but simultaneously subverting Progressive Era gender reforms through its reliance on the figure of the "prostitute fatale." The next and last chapter accounts for the success of "Anna Christie" by linking O'Neill's dramaturgical taming of the prostitute's rage to actress Pauline Lord's plain and unthreatening appearance and by positioning Anna within the "repentant courtesan" tradition inaugurated by Dumas fils with Camille in 1852. While Johnson is undoubtedly correct in situating O'Neill's title character within a long dramatic line of redeemed prostitutes, her categorization of Anna as a "courtesan" is jarring and inaccurate. "Anna Christie" is contrasted here with Sholom Asch's The God of Vengeance, which included lesbian content and resulted in the conviction of the production manager and actors on charges of obscenity when it was staged in English in New York in 1922. Thus, whereas the awarding of the Pulitzer Prize for "Anna Christie" represented the legitimation of brothel drama, the censoring of The God of Vengeance "demonstrate[d] the limits of portraying a nonrepentant prostitute, unconventional brothel interiors, and nonnormative sexual desires" (20). By way of a conclusion, Johnson notes in the last paragraph of this final chapter that by the time the Progressive Era came to an end, "what was left in [its] wake" was "not a tidy trajectory of native drama or a surgical excision of prostitution, but rather lingering ambivalence regarding prostitution, sexuality, censorship, and women in the public sphere" (200).

The structure of Sisters in Sin (general introduction, including chapter summaries; mini-introductions to the four parts; sub-sectioned chapters) makes for a repetitive quality that is exacerbated by a repetitive prose style, with the result that the argument of the book seems overstated. We are informed, for example, that a dialogue between a white slave and a madam in George Scarborough's The Lure (1913) "reveals a sympathetic treatment of prostitution" (132), and then, in the same paragraph, we are told again—as if for the first time—that "prostitution is given unusual sympathy in The Lure" (132). Elsewhere, the last sentence of one paragraph notes that Crothers's Ourselves represents "the realities of prostitution as told from a female perspective," and the first sentence of the next paragraph observes once more that Ourselves "[tells] the story of prostitution from a female point of view" (149). James Agate's comparison of the familiar figure of the "repentant courtesan" to "a tin can kicked down the street by a parcel of vigorous schoolboys, and bearing the dints made by individual legs" (183), originally serves as a witty epigraph to chapter 9 but is then recycled repeatedly in the pages that follow (183, 184, 197, 200). The "shop girl"/"girl shop" reversal (82) that is introduced at the beginning of Part II informs the ensuing two chapter titles and is repeated several times within the chapters themselves (83, 92, 93), including twice in the final paragraph on Mrs. Warren's Profession (108), even though Shaw's play does not actually represent a brothel. Sisters in Sin is a well-researched study that does much to illuminate the role of the prostitute-figure in early-twentieth-century American drama, but it would have gained in clarity, force, and interest through more rigorous editing.

 

Three more volumes of O'Neill's plays have appeared since July under Yale's Nota Bene imprint, joining the previously published Long Day's Journey (2002) and Martha Bower's combined edition of A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions (2004). These paperbacks of The Iceman Cometh, A Moon for the Misbegotten and Collected Shorter Plays, offer an affordable choice ($12.95 to $15.95) for drama students, with introductions by major scholars though little else in the way of scholarly apparatus except for the brief note on O'Neill's life and work that concludes each volume. The new Yale Iceman is priced the same as the still-in-print Vintage edition but does not include cast lists (those of the 1946 premiere and the 1999 revival with Kevin Spacey appear in the Vintage).

Publication of A Moon for the Misbegotten, whose introductory essay by Stephen Black is the most substantial in this group, is especially welcome now that the Vintage paperback of that play is apparently no longer in print. The new Collected Shorter Plays distinguishes itself by including the late one-acter Hughie along with the early short works that are now widely republished in editions by Dover and Penguin, thus offering the only available mix of early and late shorter plays. It includes The Hairy Ape but omits The Emperor Jones along with many other works and is therefore nothing close to a "complete shorter plays" edition.

The new Iceman edition begins with a slightly updated version of the essay Harold Bloom published to introduce his 1987 Chelsea House volume of critical essays on O'Neill's play. Unfortunately, Bloom's critical sensibility is not a good match for O'Neill's drama, and the essay contains numerous unhelpful or off-target comments even as it accords the playwright his due as a major figure and a writer of power. For example, Bloom starts by claiming that O'Neill had "no American precursors," by which he means not so much that there were no great American dramatists before O'Neill as that O'Neill has no strong affinity for Emerson or Whitman (Bloom doesn't mention Melville, who really is something of a precursor to O'Neill). He also finds it necessary to hyperbolize his preference for Beckett as "infinitely the better artist, subtler mind, and finer stylist." Indeed, the title of this foreword should probably have been, "Why O'Neill is a Great Artist even though He's Not Really That Good"—falling short especially according to the terms that Bloom invented in his own widely-read theoretical works of the 1970s. Any director, reader or drama student who uses this text would do well to challenge Bloom's assertion that the character Larry Slade represents a clear "failure" in O'Neill's art.

Stephen Black's essay, despite some minor errors ("Kathleen" for Katherine Ross, who played the maid Cathleen in the 1956 Long Day's Journey), has a much stronger hold on O'Neill's artistic temper. Whereas Bloom tries to squeeze O'Neill within his own pantheon of literary figures, Black works from within to offer the reader an emotional map of the play that follows. Much of the essay summarizes the argument of Black's landmark 1999 biographical study, Eugene O'Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy (also published by Yale), and in general Black offers the fullest interpretive preface of any of these volumes. The last several pages veer into a more generalized discussion of tragedy that some readers may find less helpful than Black's sketch of O'Neill's psychological process in writing Moon, but even this section provides a useful framework for understanding O'Neill's particular way of connecting psychological trauma with classical tragedy. Somewhere between Bloom and Black in its feel for O'Neill's art, Robert Brustein's very brief introduction to the modest selection of works gathered under the somewhat misleading title Collected Shorter Plays reprises some of the criticisms of O'Neill that Brustein has made in previous commentaries: that O'Neill writes "tone deaf" dialogue, that his plays are full of "patented pessimism," etc. Brustein also seems to be at odds with Yale's editors in charge of choosing the book's contents, calling the inclusion of The Hairy Ape "a bit of an anomaly." Still, his comparison of O'Neill's work in the short-play format to Hemingway's in the short story raises a useful point about the place of each writer within American modernism. Brustein also gives readers coming to these plays for the first time a sense of how O'Neill was developing the craft that would later come to full maturity in the late, full-length plays.

So far the Nota Bene editions of O'Neill's work complement the other available paperback editions rather than staking out the entire terrain of his writings. It bears watching to see if Yale will also undertake publication of plays from O'Neill's middle period from 1923 to 1934. More likely, it will be content to focus on these important early and later works, which after all represent the focus of most readers' interest in O'Neill's art.

Kurt Eisen
Tennessee Tech University