Tom's Two Cents: Three Bios Sum Up the American Theatre in the 20th Century

The new biography of Tennessee Williams by John Lahr ("Tennessee Williams: Mad Pleasures of the Flesh") turned me back to Martin Gottfried's bio of Arthur Miller, published in 2003, and the massive (964pp) bio of Eugene O'Neill by Arthur and Barbara Gelb, published over fifty years ago, in 1962.  Together they sum up the story of the American Theatre in the 20th century, as well as it can be, into its last quarter.  Williams was its lyrical heart, Miller its probing intellect, and O'Neill its long suffering soul.  From 1920 to 1970 they turned the American Theatre from vaudeville, musical, and revue into drama of the highest order.

The Gelb biography of O'Neill is a massive achievement, definitive in every respect.  If it has been superseded, I suspect that can be only in the interpretation of O'Neill's plays, which he began writing in the teens and first achieved major recognition for in 1920, with the production in New York of his first full length play, "Beyond the Horizon," a play that so astounded O'Neill's actor-father, James, that he asked his son, "Are you trying to send your audience home to commit suicide?"  For over fifty years, James O'Neill had entertained and enthralled American audiences with his vehicle play, "The Count of Monte Cristo," based on the swashbuckling French novel by Alexander Dumas.  It was an era that exulted in entertainment, especially on Broadway, where extravaganzas like the Ziegfield Follies flourished.  Only Shakespearean tragedy, plays like "Hamlet" or "Julius Caesar," with high profile actors like John Barrymore, could hope for successful runs.  So, when O'Neill burst upon the scene with a true American tragedy (he was literally five years before Dreiser's "An American Tragedy"), the Theatre in America was turned upside down.

Nourished in the teens by a group of semi-professional actors in Provincetown, Mass. known as the Provincetown Players, O'Neill cut his professional teeth on the one-act play and emerged on Broadway as a fully adult playwright, giving audiences what they had seldom, if ever, had before.  Surprisingly, they lapped it up.  The same decade (the 20's) that produced the Follies, Noel Coward's brittle comedies, and the re-birth of the American musical  in Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein's "Showboat" also unveiled serious and thought-provoking plays of O'Neill such as "The Emperor Jones," "Desire Under the Elms," "Strange Interlude," "The Great God Brown," and "Mourning Becomes Electra."  The American Theatre had never seen anything quite like it before or since.  Not only O'Neill, but a host of new dramatists like Sydney Howard, Elmer Rice, and Thornton Wilder emerged out of this same burgeoning period.  In many respects, the 20's and the 30's, despite the Crash and the Depression, were the Golden Age of American Drama.

By the end of this period O'Neill had won three Pulitzers and the Nobel Prize for Literature, being only the second American to do so.  Regrettably by 1940 a reversal of Fate had relegated O'Neill to near the bottom of a distinguished heap.  In deteriorating health, beset with personal and financial problems, and over- extending himself with ambitious, half-written cycles of as many as eleven plays, he was all but finished as a writer.  It remained for two young "upstarts" named Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller to revive the American Theatre in the 40's and 50's.

(Next time: Williams and Miller, O'Neill's successors)