This is Crash Course Theater.

And today we're talking about American modernism, which arrived late.

As you may remember, from our earlier episodes, it took the U.

S.

A long time to get a theater at all because of Puritans and War.

And then America spent most of a century doing red face blackface, Wild West shows and bad imitations of English comedies and Uncle Tom with crocodiles.

Which is to say, it took American theater a really, really, really long time to get good.

But it happened.

Today we'll look at the United States embrace of realism, the rise of the little theater movement and the turn towards the kinds of experimental forms that Europe had pioneered a couple decades earlier.

Why so tardy lights up already, as we discussed before America loved melodrama, it went hard for spectacle, intrigue and cardboard characters.

Probably the first guy to try realism in the States was James Ahern, an actor and eventually a playwright.

He collaborated with David Belasco on a few melodramas and then decided that maybe he should try to find a kind of play writing that mirrored life as people lived it.

He wrote the 18 90 play Margaret Fleming as a vehicle for his actress wife.

It's about a wife and a mother who discovers that her mill owner husband, Philip, has fathered an illegitimate child.

When the child's mother dies, the mother's sister attempts to shoot Philip and Philip runs away.

Margaret offers her breast to the starving baby and then goes blind from the stress of the whole thing.

Phillip tries to kill himself and is eventually rescued, but it's unclear whether the couple will ever reconcile.

That is one eventful mirror of life now.

Maybe this doesn't seem that different from domestic melodrama, but there are no soliloquies and no tableau, and no one is tying anyone to a railroad track.

Hearn was hailed as an American Ibsen, although Gibson might have found the sudden blindness a little extra.

The writer William Dean Howells, one of the few people who saw the play, wrote Margaret Fleming clutched the heart.

It was common.

It was pitilessly playing.

It was ugly, but it was true, and it was irresistible for howls.

Maybe, but most critics were happy to resist even after her and made the ending happier.

It never caught on with the public, either, who were like the depressing Give Us Train tracks her and had more success with Shore Acres, a gentler attempt at realism.

That's about a stage Yankee type Uncle Nat, who successfully reunites his family.

Other writers also tried realism.

Clyde Fitch, William von Moody, even Henry James.

Yeah, that Henry James.

His play guy Danville was one of the all time great belly flops of the late 19th century.

The audience booed him for about 15 minutes straight.

15 minutes.

Who has that kind of time?

That seems like it would get boom Bring American realism wouldn't really come into its own until the arrival of Eugene O'Neill.

It's funny that O'Neill became the champion of American realism because his father, James O'Neill, made his fortune performing in the romantic melodrama The Count of Monte Cristo.

Eugene spent his early life touring with his alcoholic dad and his morphine addicted mom.

He went to Princeton for a year and then dropped out and sailed the ocean.

After coming ashore, he worked as a vaudeville actor and then a newspaper reporter.

After tuberculosis landed him in a sanitarium.

He studied at Harvard with George Baker, who ran a famous class called Workshop 47 that topped the fundamentals of playwriting.

A year or so later, he became involved with the Provincetown Players will talk about them in a minute.

First, he wrote realistic seafaring plays, and then he wrote realistic landlubber ones.

As we discussed previously, his work took a turn towards Expressionism with plays like The Emperor Jones, in which an African American actor, Charles Gilpin, starred on Broadway.

A first, O'Neill wrote experimental plays that tried out some of those cool new fangled European techniques and even invented new fangled the techniques of his own, like having the character's voice, their internal monologues.

O'Neill was one of the first American playwrights to put lower class characters on stage and to write in an American vernacular well on American vernacular.

Besides Stage Yankee late in life, he returned to realism with a run of plays that include two acknowledged masterpiece is The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey Into Night.

The Iceman Cometh takes place in a seedy waterfront tavern based on a dive where O'Neill tried to kill himself as a young man.

It's frequented by drunks and low lifes who keep themselves going with pipe dreams.

The arrival of Hickey, a traveling salesman, blows those dreams away for a moment at least.

Long Day's Journey into Night is O'Neill's most autobiographical play, written in Tears and Blood, with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness, and on Lee performed after O'Neill's death, it spends a day and then, ah, very late night with the Tyrone family.

O'Neill isn't for everyone.

The plays are long and overwrought, and O'Neill never met a theme that he didn't want to hit.

Again and again and again.

On his studio wall, he wrote.

Before the soul can fly, its wings must be washed in the blood of the heart fund guy.

But the desires of the characters are so strong their pain is so riel and their tragedies feel so inevitable that his place have an undeniable force.

His plays are about individual characters and families, but they're about the United States to in its greediness, alienation and perpetual dissatisfaction.

I'm going on the theory that the United States, instead of being the most successful country in the world, is the greatest failure, he told an interviewer.

It's possible that we wouldn't have O'Neill without the little theater movement.

The little theaters were inspired by European theaters like the Fry, Bouna, the Tap, Her Libra and the Independent Theatre Society.

The little theatres provided alternatives to Broadway into theaters across the country that were tightly controlled by a syndicate who programmed them pretty exclusively with popular, non threatening stuff.

You know, train tracks place.

The little theaters were like, We're not here to make money.

We don't care if people buy tickets.

There will be no train tracks here at all.

Or if there are, they're gonna be weird Expressionist train tracks.

There were several little theaters in 19 twenties New York, like the Washington Square players, the Harlem Lafayette Players and the Neighborhood Playhouse.

Boston, Chicago and Detroit also had little theaters.

The most famous of them was the Provincetown Players, which started You guessed it in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

But because even anti commercial theaters wantto make a splash, the players moved to Manhattan.

The players got started in 1915 by the writer Susan Glass Bowl and her husband, George Graham Cooke.

They produced their work and the work of friends.

The second season included Eugene O'Neill's Bound East for Cardiff.

The theater became a home for poets like Edna ST Vincent Millay and while with Stevens and for female playwrights like Juno Barnes, Nate Boyce and Glassful herself, who would later win the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

O'Neill's plays made the theater a hit, but this was never what its founders wanted, so it disbanded in 1923.

Let's look at one of glass balls, Place trifles.

Written in 1916 this is both a realistic play and an experimental one and one of the earliest examples of feminist theater.

It's also a murder mystery that was palpable, like Sophie Treadwell's machine.

Oh, from our episode on Expressionism.

Trifles was inspired by an actual murder case, the glass ball covered in which an Iowa woman was accused of murdering her husband with an axe.

Trifles begins in a farmhouse.

A few days after a murder.

A neighbor discovered the husband, John, dead in his bed.

Upstairs, wife Minnie claimed a burglar had strangled him.

Now the county prosecutor, plus the neighbor and the sheriff and their wives have come to the farm house to look for clues and gather up a few of Minnie's things.

C s I double date.

They come into a living area, and the prosecutor asks if there's any evidence here.

But the sheriff says nothing here but kitchen things.

So the men leave the unimportant kitchen things to the ladies.

Women are usedto worrying over trifles.

Neighbors is, that is, when the lady's crack the case.

While they're looking at her preserves and her bread dough and her quilting, they find an empty bird cage and then the dead bird.

It's been strangled the same way that John was strangled.

The women come to understand that John had isolated his wife and mistreated her and then killed her bird.

So she retaliated.

I know how things could be for women, the sheriff's wife says.

Way all go through the same things.

It's just a different kind of the same thing.

Thanks.

This'd is a naturalistic play, but it's clear that what's natural in a marriage means different things to the mail and female characters.

The men can't understand why a wife would kill her husband.

The women get it.

They sympathize with many.

They don't share her motive with the men, and they conceal the evidence.

Why is the play feminists, though?

Well, not only because it's a portrait of an abusive marriage that is sympathetic to the wife.

But because the wives are more perceptive than their husbands and ultimately they solve the mystery.

O'Neill and the Provincetown Confederates weren't the only American moderns.

Though.

Living in France, American Gertrude Stein was writing some very strange plays that don't move or feel like plays at all.

Works like Ladies Voices and what happened aren't big on character or plot, but they're full of words that swirl and dart and loop and repeat in a continuous present tense.

Everything seems to always be happening at the same time.

You could even call her plays Cubist, the literary analog of the Picasso paintings that Stein loved.

And over in Connecticut, Stein's friend Thornton Wilder was writing quiet, philosophical, bittersweet plays that played with structure and design like Long Christmas Dinner and Our Town.

Though the place seemed to tackle typical subjects a family of romance, they take a wry, metaphysical approach to everyday life, presenting an audience with a mostly bare stage and asking them to use their imaginations and their own life experiences.

Toe fill that stage back in.

Thanks for watching.

Next time we're gonna be heading to the Renaissance, the Harlem Renaissance Ah, movement that encouraged a flowering of African American theater and performance.

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