Lecture: "The American Theatre Between the Wars"

I want to continue my discussion of Modern Theatre and African-American subjectivity (begun during the "Vaudeville and Minstrel Theatre" lecture) by focusing on one period of the career of Eugene O’Neill, the most significant American playwright of the interwar (between WWI and WWII) period.

The career of Eugene O’Neill is typically divided into three phases

1. The Early Period.  O’Neill helped form The Provincetown Players, an experimental theatre group. Thus, from the very start of his career, O’Neill is associated with the avant-garde component of theatre history.

2. The Expressionist Period.  In the interwar period, O’Neill became enamored of modernism, trying out, in particular, applications of European expressionism to the American theatrical stage. Expressionism is a modernist art movement which attempts to use heightened stylistic practices to express the interior psychological states of characters tormented by living in the brutal modern world. In particular, O’Neill applied Freudian ideas to express the unconscious relationships of his characters. The opening stage direction of Desire Under the Elms (1924) indicates this most clearly, as when he describes the smothering maternal appearance of the Elm trees which dwarf the house where the Oedipal action (a step son falls in love with his step mother) is to take place.

3. The Mature Period. O’Neill’s last plays, such as Long Day’s Journey into Night (1940), represent brutal, painful autobiographies of his earlier life.

During O'Neill's second, Expressionist phase, he wrote a set of plays that focused on the African-American experience. Thus, the interwar period represents a phase in the history of African-American theatre after the demeaning stereotypes of the minstrel theatre yet before Hannsberry, Baraka, and other black playwrights are in control of their own representational images. O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920) is a useful play for analyzing this in-between phase in African-American theatrical history. On the one hand, the play is quite politicized in representing the colonialist project of white traders abusing the African continent. On the other hand, O’Neill uses a stereotypical "black" dialect to represent Jones’ speech, a tendency not very far removed from the previous minstrel tradition.

CLIP #1: The Emperor Jones (1933): starring Paul Robeson

Our question of how the Modern Theatre relates to theatre history is addressed in Brenda Murphy’s article, "O’Neill’s America: the Strange Interlude Between the Wars." On the one hand, Murphy emphasizes O’Neill’s connection to modernism, via the Freudian unconscious, via the stream-of-consciousness technique in Strange Interlude (1928), and via the expressionism of The Emperor Jones. On the other hand, O’Neill is also intertextually reworking the classical history of drama, as when he grapples with the legacy of Greek tragedy for American life in Mourning Becomes Electra (1931).

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This page was last updated on June 16, 2001

Questions or Comments? Please phone me at (406) 994-6403 or send an e-mail to:  metz@montana.edu

Walter Metz, Department of Media and Theatre Arts, Montana State University--Bozeman