Theatre in the U.S. between the Wars I: Background, Experiments and Innovations, The Group Theatre & the FTP

The United States had rescued Europe from the Great War (WWI) in a little over a year, and emerged as a preeminent new world power. After a boom in the Roaring Twenties, the U.S. plunged into the Great Depression during the 1930s, but recovered and became even stronger during World War II. America’s drama increased in significance as well, mirroring the political and cultural changes in that country.  American theatre artists studied the innovative new European artistic movements and borrowed from them, but concocted something new, creating less radical plays and performance styles than had their old-world contemporaries. Indeed, it has often been stated that theatre in the United States came of age in the period between World War I and II.

At the height of the commercial power of the brothers Shubert, some Americans began to look for more than the well packaged but predictable fare offered by men whose bottom line was the profit motive. Americans throughout the country looked to the independent theatres in Europe and began to create “little” theatres dedicated to producing plays not available on the theatrical syndicate’s frankly commercial tours, plays by Ibsen and other Europeans, and also new American plays, often written in experimental styles.  Beginning in 1912, Boston’s “Toy” Theatre and Chicago’s Little Theatre inaugurated what is generally known as the little theatre movement in America –The Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, founded in 1915, The Arts and Crafts Theatre in Detroit, (1916), The Pasadena Playhouse (1917), were only a few that followed.  These little theatres revitalized and expanded the focus of the American stage.  Not many of them turned professional, and most became assimilated into the community theatre movement of the 20s.  In fact by 1925 there were 2,000 of these amateur theatre groups in operation throughout the United States, however as the movement expanded much of its experimental nature evaporated.

      

Universities also helped to popularize new and different kinds of drama.  The single most important name in this field is George Pierce Baker, who in 1903 began to teach a playwriting course to the women of Radcliffe College, called English 47.  Later this course was opened to Harvard students as well, and by 1913 it became very active, changing its name to Workshop 47 and producing the work of some of the students.   Among these early students were Eugene O’Neill, Sidney Howard, Hallie Flanagan and Philip Barry.  Baker wrote a book called Dramatic Technique that remained the bible on how to write a play till the late 1970s at least. My playwriting teacher at the master’s level at Catholic University used it then.  It may be somewhat old fashioned now (it focuses on the plot more than we seem to like these days), but it remains one of the most important and readable books on playwriting ever written.  In 1925 Baker left Harvard and moved to Yale, where he established a department of Drama there.  The Carnegie Institute of Technology (now CMU) had offered a degree in Theatre since 1914. I should also point out that the Ithaca Conservatory of Music, founded in 1892, branched out a year later into a school of Elocution as well.  A guy named Williams ran the school of Elocution, which gradually developed into a degree-granting department of Theatre.

A clear indication of new stagecraft (below left
modeling Appia and Craig's design theories

In addition to the new kinds of plays introduced to the country by the universities and the little theatre movement, another strong move towards change came from American theatre designers who went abroad to observe and study the experimental design styles there, based on Appia and Craig 

and practiced by the symbolists, surrealists, and expressionists. The American designers brought back a “new stagecraft.”  The new style took on varied forms, but basically broke from scenic realism, strove for simplicity (often through abstract, expressionistic images) and sought to convey the spirit of the text and of the directorial concept through design.  Robert Edmund Jones was the pioneer in this area, and one of the most important of the designers, but others such as Lee Simonson, Norman Bel Geddes, Joseph Urban and the longest-lived of them, Jo Mielziner (who became the most important scene designer in America just after World War II) added their own experiments to the new stagecraft.

      

All these influences came together in two very important theatres, which began as little theatres but which moved into 

The original wharf theatre in Provincetown

the professional realm:  The Provincetown Playhouse and the Washington Square Players.  The Provincetown Players was founded by writer Susan Glaspell and her husband classics professor George Cram “Jig” (to his friends) Cook, began on Cape Cod in 1915, where the group produced the earliest plays by Eugene O’Neill, among others including Glaspell’s.  It moved to 

Greenwich Village in 1916 and produced 93 new plays by 47 new writers.  Many are forgotten now, but in 1919 O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon, which won the Pulitzer Prize, was produced there.  Their greatest success was O’Neill’s Emperor Jones, but the group split ideologically and the idealist Cook left for Greece. O’Neill, Robert Edmund Jones and critic Kenneth McGowan continued to produce foreign and new American works until 1929, when financial pressures forced them to disband.  This group was tremendously important and influential.

      

The Washington Square Players also began producing new, intimate theatre in 1915 (in fact some of its founders 

also founded the Provincetown company).  It disbanded in 1918, but re-formed the next year with a new name, The Theatre Guild.  This was a fully pro-fessional company whose goal was to produce quality plays that were not commercially viable.  It soon became the most respected theatre in the U.S., producing seasons of plays on subscription basis.  By 1928 the Guild had developed tours of some of their plays, and thus became known throughout the entire nation in the 1930s.  But their focus began to get more and more commercial and by World War II they had become yet another producer of long running, relatively “safe” hits.

      

In the 1930s, America was going through the great depression.  The promise of capitalism seemed to have failed, and many looked towards the socialist experiments in Europe, especially Russia, as a way out.  Several theatres were committed to this political agenda, producing “agit-prop” (agitation-propaganda) plays with political agendas.  Among the more famous of these “workers” theatres were the Workers’ Lab Theatre founded in 1930) and the Theatre Union (1932).

      

A much more important theatre dedicated to a socialist agenda, but also devoted towards the art of theatre (convinced -- and rightly so -- that a highly artistic theatrical product delivers the message much more compellingly than does agit-prop) was formed in 1931 by Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford.  The Group 

Theatre produced the angry plays of Clifford Odets, but more importantly for subsequent theatre history, it emulated the style of the Moscow Art Theatre, particularly the acting style displayed in the visit by MKhAT to the U.S. in 1923.  The Group Theatre began idealistically -- the first summer all members gathered on a farm outside New York and cooked for each other, worked together (some slept together) and developed their unique style. The Group produced a number of fine new plays by American playwrights, acted in the technique taught by Strasberg, a variation of Stanislavsky’s system, and influenced the American theatre (especially American actor training) in a revolutionary way. 

However, dissension grew within the group, on the method of training. Strasberg clashed with Stella Adler on sense 

memory.  She went to Paris and spoke to Stanislavsky about it, who replied that he had ceased using that aspect of his system. She returned with the good news, and Strasberg said tersely, “that’s Stanislavsky’s method -- this is mine!” Strasberg fought with the entire group when he refused to produce Odets’ first plays, and was fortunately voted down, so that the theatre was able to produce Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing.  Perhaps most importantly, the Group quickly began to lose the naturalistically trained (and therefore perfect for film) actors to Hollywood.  It disbanded in 1941, but it had already done great work in the American theatre, and after the war, the Actors’ Studio was born from its ashes.

      

Another manifestation of a new socialist spirit in the U.S. was the government’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) 

which, in order to get people back to work, used federal money to support people in all walks of life -- including the theatre and other arts.  The Federal Theatre Project (FTP) was established in 1935, headed by Hallie Flanagan, a teacher at Vassar who directed the experimental theatre at that college.  The FTP was incredibly important in the 1930s, not only because it put lots of people back to work, but also because it created 

theatre projects throughout America, introducing new styles in theatre all across the country.  The Living Newspaper was a great example.  In this sort of theatre piece, major issues of the day were examined in a unique theatrical setting:  Triple-A Plowed Under (1936) focused on the crisis in agriculture; Power (1937) dealt with getting electricity to rural areas; One Third of a Nation showed the nightmare of slum housing.  The last named was particularly important in displaying the power of theatre to send artfully produced messages to a nation in trouble.  One Third of a Nation opened in more than 20 projects throughout the country on the same night – attempting to send a shout all at once through the land to clean up the slums.

      

The FTP was color-blind -- to a point.  African American projects dotted the country, as well as (in smaller numbers) Hispanic and Asian American as well. The most important of 

these diverse projects was the Harlem project -- 891.  It was run by two white men at the request of Rose McClendon, the African American actress who’d been asked to lead it.  She argued that while there was tremendous talent in the African American community, it had not been trained in running theatres.  So this task was given to John Houseman and the young genius Orson Welles, while McClendon and others 

learned some of the tricks of the trade from these two talents.  Project 891 produced amazing pieces of work, for example a Dr. Faustus directed by and starring Welles in the title role with talented black actor Jack Carter in the role of Mephistopheles; even more renowned was the project’s Voodoo Macbeth, set in Haiti, the three witches played as voodoo witch doctors.  One of the great results of the FTP was that it gradually trained minority talent in management, stage managing, and other tasks which would allow future theatre troupes of color to run like well-oiled machines.  In fact the American Negro Theatre, founded only a few years after the FTP closed its doors, owed much of its continued success to training received during the FTP years.

      

Welles and Houseman had their hands in all sorts of interesting projects with the Federal Theatre Project, but left it abruptly after trying to produce Marc Blitzstein’s musical The Cradle Will Rock in 1937.  In this musical, workers rise up against their corrupt bosses in “Steeltown, U.S.A.”  The government got wind of this and closed the play, but not before one historic performance from the auditorium -- while the recent film on this subject is flawed, it’s worth watching for a piece of fascinating American theatre history. 

The Cradle Will Rock wasn’t the first theatrical work of the FTP to be censored or closed (the government stopped a children’s play about beavers working together to build a dam, as those beavers seemed to some of the brighter congressmen to constitute an evil communist plot!). It’s sad, as the FTP was announced to be “free, adult, uncensored.”  But the government panicked from the start, and the house appropriations committee conducted one of the most embarrassingly stupid sessions ever held in the American congress.  Hallie Flanagan, when testifying before the committee, mentioned Christopher Marlowe. One of them stopped her and asked if this Marlowe feller was a member of the communist party! After Hallie picked her jaw up off the floor, she replied “Let the record show that Christopher Marlowe was the greatest English dramatist, after Shakespeare, in the Elizabethan theatre.”) The committee was not amused, and cut off funds, putting the FTP out of business in 1939, only four years after it had started. So much for government support of the arts in America!  Until the advent of the National Endowment for the Arts...which is now an eviscerated shell of its former self!  Their story continues, I fear, to be our story.

      

After leaving the FTP, Houseman and Welles continued to work in their own theatre, The Mercury Theatre, which in its short life produced Danton’s Death by Georg Buchner, 

Shaw’s Heartbreak House, and a modern dress Julius Caesar, which featured soldiers in fascist black-shirts.  Welles was actually running this concurrently with his work in the FTP. He was one of the busiest and most sought after actor/directors in New York. He produced radio plays as well, on The Mercury Theatre of the Air, which produced The War of the Worlds and scared the entire eastern seaboard to death on a particularly frightful Halloween eve in 1938.  And then of course he made a few films as well, most importantly Citizen Kane.

Another important producer/director during this era was Arthur Hopkins (1878-1950), who mounted daring 

productions on the commercial stages of New York using new stagecraft design methods.  His most usual collaborator was Robert Edmund Jones.  This team produced Ibsen, Gorky, O’Neill and Shakespeare.  Among their most famous productions was their 1921 Macbeth, lit and set by Jones in an non-realistic, highly atmospheric style; and their 1922 Hamlet, which starred John Barrymore and ran 101 performances, to purposely break Edwin Booth’s 100 nights record.

One of the relatively few women to run her own theatre between the wars, Eva Le Gallienne (1899-1991) started the Civic Repertory Theatre in 1926, which featured difficult 

European plays as well as challenging American pieces.  She built up a subscription list of 50,000 for this challenging theatre, but she could not survive the depression, and the Civic Rep was forced to close in 1933.  Le Gallienne was primarily an actress, starting as a young firebrand playing Ibsen heroines, but continuing her stage career into the early 1980s.  Her daring work as producer of the Civic Rep, however, inspired other women to create theatres throughout the United States after World War II.

The teens and 20s also brought the organization of unions, largely to cope with nightmarish conditions producers such as the theatrical syndicate and the Shuberts imposed. The earliest was the National Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees (1893 -- it went International in 1898, and became known by its acronym, IATSE -- it increased its status in 1910-11 and is one powerful union today!).   In 1918 the United Scenic Artists was formed.  Actors’ Equity was founded in 1912, but was given national recognition only in 1919, after a month-long strike that forced producers to capitulate.  In 1924 Equity became a “closed shop” and developed a minimum wage scale in 1933.  The Dramatists’ Guild increased rights for theatrical writers in 1912, and became the bargaining agent for all playwrights in 1926. 

Up next? An amazing crop of American playwrights!