Theatre Appreciation Exam 4

Theatre in America

Movements in Modernism and realism

Americans loved melodrama (spectacle, intrigue, and cardboard characters) in late 1800’s when realism and naturalism were spreading around Europe

James A. Herne

An actor and playwright, he was the first artist to attempt realism in America

Wrote the play Margaret Fleming in 1890

By executing soliloquies and forgoing more melodramatic aesthetics, hailed as an American Henrik Ibsen

Realist stories that dealt with gentler subjects and happier endings fared better later in his career

Margaret Fleming

follows a husband and wife after the husband fathers an illegitimate child

Premiered in Lynn, Massachusetts, in July 1980, but was rejected as too controversial in New York and Boston

Many felt it was unseemly and were shocked when Margaret nursed the illegitimate child onstage

Little Theatre Movement

in Early 20th-century America they were inspired by the European theatre that had been developing and producing realist, surrealist, and avantgarde theater

Provided an alternative to Broadway spectacle and theatres across America that were tightly controlled

They were less interested in making money than in breaking boundaries

several were found in New York by the 1920’s, and had begun sprouting up in Chicago, Boston, and Detroit

Provincetown Players

The most famous of the Little Theatres

began in Provincetown, Massachusetts

Later moved to Manhattan to reach a wider audience

Started in 1915 by the writer Susan Glaspell and her husband George Cram Cook

Later included the work of the famous American playwright Eugene O’Neill

Became a home for writers wanting to push boundaries, both male and female

Company Disbanded in 1923

Susan Glaspell

Produced their own original work and the work of friends

Her play Trifles would premiere in 1916

Trifles

Both a realistic, experimental play and an early example of feminist theater

Plot: follows a murder mystery inspired by a real event in which a woman, Mini, is accused of murdering her husband. Country prosecutor and sheriff bring along their wives as they inquire into the murder. The wives, discovering a dead bird strangled just like the dead husband, realize the husband had isolated and mistreated Mini and killed her bird. Mini, in turn, strangled her husband to be free of him

The wives understand why the abused Mini could murder for her freedom, but the husbands can not. The wives conceal the evidence so Mini won’t be arrested—the men never suspect Mini is capable of murdering her husband.

Thornton Wilder

(1897-1975)

he wrote quiet, philosophical, and bittersweet plays

They take a wry, metaphysical approach to everyday life

His plays used bare stages with audiences meant to imagine the surroundings and settings

Our Town

follows the lives in the fictional small town of Grover’s Corners and takes place from 1901-1913

it was Wilder’s best known and most successful plays, winning the Pulitzer prize for Drama

Eugene O’Neill

Viewed for starting the movement of Realist playwrights to America

Was the son of famous actor James O’Neill who makde fortune in acting in romantic melodrama The Count of Monte Cristo

Spent early life touring with his alcoholic dad and morphine-addicted mother

Went to Princeton for a year and dropped out to sail the ocean

When he returned from the ocean he worked as a vaudeville actor and then a newspaper reporter

Tuberculosis landed him in a sanitarium, he studied at Harvard with George Baker

Who taught the fundamentals of playwriting

A year later he became involved with the Provincetown Players

O’Neill’s first plays were realistic seafaring and landlubber plays

would later take a turn towards expressionism

First American playwright to put lower-class characters on stage

Expressionism

Modernist movement that seeks to present the world solely from a subjective perspective

distorting it radically for emotional effect to evoke moods or ideas

Subjective Storytelling

A perspective and headspace of a particular character so that you experience the world as the character does

The Emperor Jones

a famous expressionist play that also features African-American actor Charles Sidney Gilpin on Broadway, which was a first

The Hairy Ape

follows a laborer as he searches for a sense of belonging and autonomy in a world controlled and steered by the wealthy

Written by Eugene O’Neill

The Iceman Cometh

Take place in a seedy, waterfront town, based on a dive bar where O’Neill tried to kill himself as a young man.

The bar is frequented by drunks and troubled people who keep themselves going with pipe dreams and delusions

Long Day’s Journey into Night

Revolves around a toxic family that is inspired by O’Neill’s familial troubles and his parents’ drug addictions

O’Neill’s plays

center around tragic individuals and families, but also the places in the United States that he experienced. he dramatized an American society filled with greed, alienation, and perpetual dissatisfaction

Harlem Renaissance

was a 1920s movement encouraging a dynamic reawaking and reimagining of art, music, and literature.

It spread out from Harlem and across America’s Northeast

Served as a corrective to the decades of melodramas, minstrel shows, and blackface

Many little theatres led by black casts sprouted in New York, but many plays were written by white playwrights and performed by black artists for black audiences

More black writers came to prominence in the community

One of the first times black artists became celebrated and given attention by white artists and audiences

Alain Locke

Characterized the Harlem Renaissance as being by and for people who had arrived from the South during the great Migration and those who arrived in America via to Caribbean diaspora

Invited black artists to practice forms of art that shattered stereotypes, increased visibility, and uplifted black Americans

Double Consciousness

Describes the feeling of being black and American at the same time; of seeing yourself as simultaneously part of, and not part of society

Ridgely Torrence

White playwright who create a hit with Three Plays for a Negro Theatre

The plays were more realistic portrayals of black life

Started off as played with white actor in blackface, later casted with all-black casts on Broadway

Angelina Weld Grimke

Premiered her play Rachel in 1917

she was a mixed-race playwright who saw race as a major issue 

known as one of the first black women to have a play publicly performed

Rachel by Angelina Weld Grimke

Staged with an all-black cast and tells the story of a young African-American women so shaken by the racism all around her that she vows to never have children

W.E.B Du Bois

founded Krigwa, a playwriting contest encouraging black artists throughout the Harlem Renaissance

in 1926, he published his manifesto on what African-American plays should be

1. About us

2. By us

3. For us

4. Near us

Willis Richardson

Became the first Black artist to have a full-length straight play to open on broadway (1925)

The play Appearances, was a melodrama that follows a black bellhop falsely accused of rape

Langston Hughes

had a Broadway hit with his play Mullato (1935)

play about a mixed-race child and his desire to be acknowledged as his father’s heir

Wrote the play Don’t You Want to be Free? in 1937

A modern, fragmentary production that covers slavery and the civil war to the first modern stirring of the civil rights movement

Du Bois and Regina Anderson

in 1925, Founded the Krigwa players

headquartered in the basement of a public library in Manhattan