Hardcover
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253343109 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/16/2004 |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Staging the War
American Drama and World War II
By Albert Wertheim
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2004 Albert WertheimAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-34310-9
CHAPTER 1
Getting Involved: American Drama on the Eve of World War II
* * *
I
During the years when the Depression was taking its toll on this country, the storm clouds of war were rapidly gathering over Europe and Asia. Preoccupied with domestic labor and unemployment problems and still recovering from the scars of World War I, a war in which it seemed to many the U.S. had paid a price for allowing itself to be involved in the disputes of other countries, Americans seemed eager in the 1930s to cling to pacifism and splendid isolation and to avert their eyes from events beyond American shores. They turned away from the quarrels in Europe to laugh instead over the quarrels between Fibber McGee and Molly or the antics of Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. Looking back on that period, Tennessee Williams in The Glass Menagerie (31 March 1945) has his narrator, Tom Wingfield, brilliantly capture the tenor of the times in a lyrical comment:
Adventure and change were imminent in this year. They were waiting around the corner for all these kids. Suspended in the mist over Berchtesgaden, caught in the folds of Chamberlain's umbrella — In Spain there was Guernica! But here there was only hot swing music and liquor, dance halls, bars, and movies, and sex that hung in the gloom like a chandelier and flooded the world with brief, deceptive rainbows. ... All the world was waiting for bombardments!
The last sentence, moreover, sardonically references the optimistic 1930s hit song "The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise." A half-century after World War II, America's willful denial of events in Europe was likewise movingly captured in Arthur Miller's Broken Glass (1994). And in the Broadway theatres of the late 1930s, there was certainly much on the boards to take the public's mind off the hardships of the Depression and off the initial acts of the tragic drama then unfolding in Europe. The period from 1938 to 1941 saw the popular productions of such lighthearted fare as Hellzapoppin (1938), The Philadelphia Story (1939), The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939), Life with Father (1939), My Sister Eileen (1940), and Arsenic and Old Lace (1941). Eventually, however, not even such Broadway delights could provide sufficient diversion from the terrible activities already in progress in Europe, from the horror of Kristallnacht and rampant anti-Semitism, the invasion of Poland, the German takeover of Paris, and the bombing of Coventry, to Hitler's strikes against Greece and Russia. Increasingly, war-related plays took their place on Broadway alongside the comic and more usual dramatic fare.
But in the 1930s, many Americans simply tried to avert their gaze from Europe; others, imbued with post–World War I pacifism, urged American neutrality on ideological grounds; still others felt that the U.S. needed to address the problems of the Depression at home before addressing those across the ocean. Splendid isolation and pacifism were, for many, desirable goals for the United States. Indeed, possibly the most widely read novel of the 1930s was Margaret Mitchell's subversively pacifist Gone with the Wind (1936), which pointedly presented the destruction and loss of human life that inevitably accompany war. And when that novel was made into the famous 1939 epic motion picture, Mitchell's pacifist message was italicized by the new process of Technicolor, which could display wartime bloodletting with new vividness. In the theatre of the mid-1930s, the pacifism of the day found voice in several plays, including three notable new offerings of the 1936 New York season: Irwin Shaw's Bury the Dead, Paul Green and Kurt Weill's Johnny Johnson, and Robert Sherwood's Idiot's Delight. The previous year had seen the production of a dramatic paradox: Albert Maltz's militantly pacifist one-act play Private Hicks, about a national guardsman who refuses to shoot at industrial strikers. But the clouds over Europe grew increasingly dark. The abuse of Jews and dissidents and the existence of concentration camps (though not what was happening in them) became known through the media and through the poignant accounts of the increasing number of refugees escaping to American shores from Germany and Nazi-occupied countries. As a result, some pacifists and some who had turned a blind eye began to rethink their stances; playwrights like Irwin Shaw and Robert Sherwood, who had written pacifist plays, found themselves doing a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn.
Although theatre can serve as diverting, escapist entertainment, theatre can also be a vehicle for reaching a large and popular audience, alerting them to pressing political and social issues. And who better in the 1930s to know the power of theatre than those playwrights connected with the Group Theatre or Federal Theatre Project? The political engagement and pugnacity of those playwrights can be felt by the very titles of the books written about Depression-era theatre: Real Life Drama, The Fervent Years, The Drama of Attack, Drama Was a Weapon, Drama and Commitment, and The Political Stage. Thus, even as madcap comedies of diversion were being mounted in the late 1930s by Kaufman, Hart, and others, a new drama of conversion was also finding its way onto the stage and into the minds of Americans, shaping their attitudes toward the events brewing in Europe and turning their fear, indifference, and avoidance into concern and involvement. Many of the writers who had written the politically engaged dramas of the Depression years now turned their attention to the dire events in Europe and to America's foreseeable involvement in another global war. And other playwrights joined them. Some of these conversion plays have become classics of the American theatre: Thornton Wilder's Our Town (5 February 1938), Robert Sherwood's Abe Lincoln in Illinois (15 October 1938), William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life (25 October 1939), Sherwood's There Shall Be No Night (29 March 1940), and Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine (1 April 1941). These plays and others written during the period immediately prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor use the strategies of drama to raise the consciousness of their American audiences, encouraging them to take an active stand in stemming the tide of fascism in Europe. They tell us much not only about American society and attitudes during those tense years before the American declaration of war on 7 December 1941 but also about the effective uses of drama during a period of crisis.
It is not surprising that one of the first playwrights to use drama to warn Americans about the dangerous nature of European totalitarianism is Elmer Rice, a writer particularly sensitive to political and social change. In September 1934, when Rice's Judgment Day opened at the Belasco Theatre in New York, Mussolini's dictatorship in Italy was already firmly established and Hitler had been named chancellor and given dictatorial power in Germany twenty-one months earlier. Trained as a lawyer, Rice found courtrooms and law offices congenial settings for his plays. His Judgment Day, like his Counsellor-at-Law and On Trial, is a courtroom drama. Set in an anonymous Eastern European country, Judgment Day is obviously inspired by the much-publicized trial of Bulgarian communist leader Georgi Dimitrov, who, living in exile in Germany, was arrested along with other communists on 27 February 1933 and subsequently put on trial in Leipzig by the newly elected Adolf Hitler. Charged with setting fire to the German Reichstag building, Dimitrov was eventually deemed not guilty and subsequently released, largely as a result of a strong defense and the worldwide attention given to his trial. Notwithstanding Georgi Dimitrov's acquittal, Rice saw the handwriting on the German wall, and in Judgment Day directed the American gaze to read that handwriting. In Rice's play, the defendants in a rigged trial are accused of an assassination attempt on the country's dictator, and in the course of the play, the brutalities of dictatorship are powerfully exposed. The courtroom setting is at once Judgment Days asset and liability. It allows the many outrages of dictatorship to be recounted through courtroom testimony, yet, by withholding the actual stage presentation of violence, Rice's play is hindered from moving the audience in emotional, visceral ways. As the trial in Judgment Day comes to its conclusion, Rice's defense lawyer, pointedly cast as an American, pleads emotionally:
To adjudge these defendants innocent is to proclaim to the world that we take our place among those nations who put justice and honor above political considerations; that in our land, truth and right still prevail. To condemn them, to find them guilty, is to acknowledge that justice is dead, that liberty no longer exists; it is to invite the indignation and the opprobrium of the civilized world. (192)
The appeal here is clearly to American democratic values and the concern for the preservation of American civil liberties. Nevertheless, in Rice's 1934 drama, dictatorship, set as it is in some anonymous corner of Eastern Europe, still seems a relatively remote threat for Americans, who can enjoy the luxury of being outraged and condemning but who need not worry that dictatorship might take root and flourish on American soil.
Even more remote is the fascism that is portrayed rather vaguely in S. N. Behrman's Rain from Heaven, which opened at the Golden Theatre on Christmas Eve, three months after Judgment Day. Set in the drawing room of Lady Lael Wyngate's English country manor house, Behrman's is a well-made play that could have come from the pen of Arthur Wing Pinero, Somerset Maugham, or Sidney Howard. Amid a lot of talk, infidelities, and conflicted couples is a contention between those Americans and English characters who would found a league of Anglo-American Aryan youth and those who are refugees from a Continental anti-Semitism and fascism that hovers turbidly in the play's background. Gerald Bordman notes the stage success of Rain from Heaven, which ran for an impressive ninety-nine performances. This is not surprising, for American audiences in 1934 — perhaps caught between isolationism and naïveté — were not yet ready for stronger dramatic fare about anti-Semitism and Nazis. Indeed, Behrman neatly keeps the unpleasant subject matter from the American doorstep by locating it, for no good reason, in an aristocratic British home. Resident at Lady Lael's house, moreover, is Hugo Willens, a German refugee musician who is one-eighth Jewish, has, therefore, been persecuted by the Nazis, and has spent time in a concentration camp. Despite what would naturally be life-changing trauma, he appears at Lady Lael's seemingly unruffled except for a new cynicism and a determination to return to Germany to fight the only roughly defined evil there. At the conclusion of the play, as Hugo speaks of his plans to depart, he and the other characters speak of events in Germany using clichéd images and the most general of terms:
Lael. You are leaving to fight a mania as ravaging as a forest fire that burns down everything before it, leaving stumps and ashes where there had been strength and growth. I don't want it to consume you....
Hugo. No, I'm determined at last to view the world — including myself — completely without illusion. It's a matter of life and death. I see now that goodness is not enough, that kindness is not enough, that liberalism is not enough. I'm sick of evasions. They've done us in. Civilization, charity, progress, tolerance — all the catchwords. I'm sick of them. We'll have to re-define our terms. (272)
Fascism thus may seem a threat to a British society ruled by social class prejudices and to German-Jewish octoroons, but in Behrman's drama it does not (yet) pose a direct and potent threat to American democracy and rugged individualism.
Quite the contrary is the case in an important work that brings to life the horrors of fascist dictatorship and places them hypothetically, very believably, and very disconcertingly in contemporary America. In 1935, Sinclair Lewis, Nobel Prize laureate and arguably the most important American writer of his day, published his novel It Can't Happen Here. Set in Vermont, it describes the rise and frightening success of an American fascist coup. Within a year, Lewis, with the assistance of film writer John C. Moffitt, produced a dramatic version of his novel for the Federal Theater Project. Originally, Moffitt and Lewis wrote a filmscript of It Can't Happen Here for MGM Studios, "who shelved [it] for fear that it might offend Hitler and Mussolini." Subsequently and with great éclat, on 27 October 1936 the Federal Theatre opened its production of It Can't Happen Here simultaneously in eighteen cities, including New York, Boston, Miami, San Francisco, Chicago, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and Seattle. In 1938, Lewis and Moffitt revised the script, and a new version premiered in Cohasset, Massachusetts, with Sinclair Lewis himself playing the leading role of Doremus Jessup. Also among the cast was a young and as yet unknown Barry Sullivan.
Writing his novel and then his play-text in the early 1930s, Lewis found himself witnessing the unsettling rise of fascism and demagoguery both abroad and at home. In Europe, there were Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco. At home, there was the specter of Huey Long's demagogic reign in Louisiana, the openly anti-Semitic radio broadcasts from Detroit of Father Charles Coughlin, and the formation of the American Nazi Party by Gerald L. K. Smith and Governor Eugene Talmadge of Georgia. Using a rural New England setting and the joblessness of the Depression, It Can't Happen Here suggests the myopia of Americans who could witness the rise of Hitler and Nazism in Germany, or even of those homegrown demagogues who would create dictatorship and racism in the U.S. and say, "It can't happen here."
Fostering the election of Windrip (Lewis's stand-in for Hitler or Long) as the next U.S. president, the Vermont Commissioner of the Corpos (the storm troopers of dictator Windrip), woos a young, unemployed college graduate, saying:
You see, I've been dealing with a lot of lads from good families who have been ruined by the arguing and experimenting of the last three administrations. The country's gone soft. But Windrip will discipline it, if he has the help of men like you. ... We're recruiting more and more college men. Don't you find it good to be really needed, these jobless days — drafted for a man-sized job — with pay! (32)
Indeed, although the Corpos is mainly comprised of lower-class roughnecks and rednecks, the play shows Windrip's regime making clever appeals not only to unemployed college graduates but also to businessmen with labor problems and to feckless physicians with failing medical practices. Lorinda Pike, as her name suggests, is a pugnacious, feisty, unmarried newspaperwoman and the play's raisonneuse, who astutely remarks, "The Corpos intend everything. They tell the industrialists they'll stop strikes. They tell the workers, unions will be sacred. They tell the well-to-do they'll lower taxes. They tell the poor they'll have twenty-five hundred a year" (43).
In the course of It Can't Happen Here, Lewis and Moffitt vividly stage the fatal blackjacking of a plainspoken Vermonter who refuses to support the Corpos and Windrip's presidential campaign. The violence continues and intensifies after Windrip is elected, suspends democracy, and enforces his will through the Corpos and their weapons. Windrip himself never appears in It Can't Happen Here, but his disembodied, declamatory voice is heard in a bombastic radio address. More importantly, the dictator's strength is palpably and frighteningly dramatized as his Vermont commanders and troops psychologically and physically intimidate citizens in scenes meant to be indicative of similar ones being enacted in every state. Of course this brings home to the audience as well the similar scenes actually taking place in fascist Europe. The play's action spans approximately two years, during which time the United States has become a police state, the government controls all industry, concentration camps are in place, private property has been seized, and men and women are reduced to enforced labor just short of outright slavery. It is the enactment of physical violence and the scars of abuse on actors' bodies that render It Can't Happen Here an effective stage vehicle, one far more potent than Rice's comparatively restrained Judgment Day, in which the physical violence is spoken of but never shown.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Staging the War by Albert Wertheim. Copyright © 2004 Albert Wertheim. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.