20th Century American Drama

Eugene O'Neill's play, "The Emperor Jones (1921)," is the horrifying story of Rufus Jones, the monarch of a West Indian island, presented in a single act of eight scenes of violence and disturbing images. O'Neill's sense of tragedy comes out undiluted in this surreal and nightmarish study of Jones' character in a mighty struggle and tension between black Christianity and black paganism (IMBD). Jones is an unforgettable character in his powerfulness and fatalness, made most evident by the support of language, sound and other stage effects, such as the dreadful drumming sounds and the Emperor's hallucinations. This psychological drama delves into the nature of power, the inevitable pull of history and in the belief in the supernatural as these were experienced in the first two decades of the last century.

The play is a monument to O'Neill's vision of conflict between a man and his own psyche, "between learning what life is really made of," and how the ordinary man is little prepared to learn (IMBD). It is a sordid, shattering tragedy, which brings the audience to a journey of fear, anger, humility, sadness and terror, experienced by a monster of an emperor whose only resort to sanity was to humiliate and dehumanize those whom he governs in the pursuit of social, political and financial goals. O'Neill spells out his tragic message about human reality - the truth about ourselves - after a merciless probe into its I dark alleys and frank depths.

The dehumanization of man is the same subject of another play, "The Hairy Ape (1922)." Rather than improve on the human condition, industrialization has reduced the human worker into a mere machine, which can be manipulated or turned on or off by whistles. He is no longer required or expected to think independently: machines do the job for him. The human worker is instead relegated to the most menial and meanest "grunt work and physical labor" that has reverted man into the ape or Neanderthal state.

O'Neill expresses his objection to the tyranny of progress and industrialization and the tragedy it has brought upon human life in the ironic retrogression of progressive human beings into unthinking, manipulated and helpless apes. Yank and his fellows are more than symbolic apes whose language is complex and to whom thought is difficult. O'Neill views modern man as "un-evolved," ignorant about class and concerned only with brute survival and a machine-like sense of belonging. Like an ape, Yank is territorial, pigheaded and aggressive and O'Neill uses his characterization to present a most grotesque condition of modern man.

Though a compelling primary need, the sense of belonging is not achieved in the play from an animal to a spiritual being. This frustration is presented by the character of Yank as the filthy and arrogant ship leader, who is later thrown out by the Industrial Workers of the World as a "brainless ape." In his urge to belong somewhere, he sets a gorilla free from a zoo in order to befriend it but the animal, instead, kills him, proving that even the beasts of the zoo reject him.

O'Neill's "The Hairy Ape" belongs to the category of plays for the expressionistic theater, which includes Elmer Rice's "The Adding Machine (1922)." "The Adding Machine" is a funny but a shattering presentation of the mechanization of man in the age of technology in the person of Mr. Zero. Mr. Zero is every man and no man, only a cog in the huge social mechanism of conformity and adherence among robots. There is no hope of getting liberated from this role and series of roles. The only hint of hope is precisely to escape this machine and become human again.

Expressionistic plays transmit an illusion of reality in the presence of the clearly un-real, and the last among O'Neill's naturalistic plays that do so is "Desire Under the Elms (1925)" and his first to re-create the tragedy of Euripides' Hippolytus and Jean Racine's "Phaedra." In all three, the father returns home to find his wife in love with his son. In "Desire Under the Elms," where Ephraim Cabot comes back with his a new wife to the farm and three sons he has abandoned. The youngest, Eben, hates his father for destroying his mother's life and pays his brothers t leave for California. The new wife, Abbie, gets pregnant by Eben, but deceives Ephraim into believing it is his child to entrench her security on the farm. When the child becomes an obstacle between her and Eben, she kills the infant and this infuriates him. He reports her to the sheriff but he then realizes his love for her and he confesses his part in the crime.

This play embodies O'Neill's sexual conflicts within his own family as well as his Freudian treatment of sexual themes. The elms are intended to represent a wicked kind of maternity, so that this 20th century American classic, shocked the sense of refinement of the audiences of the time because of its themes on infanticide, alcoholism, vengeance and incest - the first performance in Los Angeles led to an arrest for exhibiting an "obscene work."

His other work, "Mourning Becomes Electra (1931)," is the counterpart of the Freudian interpretation of the Oedipal complex of father - daughter and mother - son bonds. The character Lavinia longs to replace Christine as her father's wife and mother to her brother. Lavinia as the daughter is forcefully drawn to her father Ezra and Christine, to her son, Orin. Family foulness and intrigue surface when Lavinia discovers her mother Christine's betrayal of Ezra through a relationship with Brant. Christine's basic desire for her son is projected to Brant and Lavinia subjects Christine to an emotional blackmail. The clash of personalities and wills intensifies when Ezra suffers a heart attack and dies when Christine secretly deprives him of the medication. The ferocious fight then moves between mother and daughter, each trying to destroy the other for their men. The destruction that ensues is more the loss of the bond than their lives, that instinctive bond between mother and son, whether in the real mother or the projected mother image. O'Neill's exemplification of the sadness and brokenness of life, quite deeply within the family, crashes from beginning to end.

The same mothering instinct, the mother-son bond underlies O'Neill's 1932 play, "Strange Interlude," the message of which is that what people think is quite often not what they say. But this play reveals what people actually think and do not say and has the same tragic format as his previous drama plots.

Nina should have been happily married to Gordon Shaw if her father did not disapprove of the marriage and Gordon had not later joined the Army for the First World War where he was shot and killed. Charlie could have married her if he were not too withdrawn to let her know how he feels and so Nina ends up marrying Sam. But as soon as the wedding ceremony is over, she discovers Sam's hereditary mental illness and incapacity to give her children. The frustration drives her to a secret affair with Ned, who later demands that Nina leave Sam. She gets pregnant and gives birth to a dream son, whom she named Gordon, after her deceased first love. She does not tell Gordon who his father really is and manipulates the feelings of all three men, completely satisfied in devoting herself to a son.

Thornton Wilder's "Our Town (1938)" captures the everyday lives of everyday people of a fictitious town, Grover's Corner, in New Hampshire beginning in May 1901. The stage manager introduces the characters and setting and narrates the events that span years, the milkman and the paperboy doing their jobs, Dr. Gibbs performing his function as town doctor, Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Webb their home chores and ritual gossips for each day and George and Emily falling in love and eventually getting married.

Wilder mixes the everyday pleasures of simple life and its haunting limitations of transience and fragility. While he establishes the solidarity of human traditions and the sturdiness of the natural environment, the coming and going of the characters reveal their subjection to the passage of time, which the timekeeper himself misses. In realizing the tyranny of time, Wilder wonders if people truly appreciate the shortness of life and its preciousness precisely because of that shortness. What others would consider trivial routine activities, Wilder presents artfully and painfully because exactly these are fleeting - preparing and eating breakfast, feeding chickens, treating patients, marrying. He gives each routine activity a finality that outlasts the meaning of each event or routine. The characters themselves seem unaware of the daily entanglements and motions they go through or give them little attention as if time on earth were unlimited.

But time is not indefinite and the dead souls in the latter chapter testify to that, and these dead souls chastise the living for their ignorance, blindness or disregard for the value of time and the transience of life. That chastisement extends to George's grief over Emily's death at the grave, which the dead souls say should be spent by George in enjoying while he still has the time on earth to.

Wilder uses the stage to immortalize these simple and passing motions of daily life on earth and translate them into extraordinary and meaningful events through the eyes and perspective of the dead. It is the very irony of the play: that it takes death to acknowledge the immortal value of life, no matter how boring or meaningless some acts may be.

One more value "Our Town" salutes to is the importance of volitional companionship among the residents, e.g., with the milkman, the paperboy, the gossipers, the romance between George and Emily. It is the love expressed in these interactions that provides the creative power and courage to human beings in facing the inevitable passing of time and mortal life. Besides the most glaring romantic bond between George and Emily, there are routine relationships that test the strength of time: the milkman and the paperboy chatting with members of the Gibbs family as they deliver their goods, the children going to and from school, Dr. And Mrs. Gibbs, Mr. And Mrs. Webb go through their respective daily businesses. But as Mrs. Gibbs says in one of her private conversations, "the natural can be lonesome."

The title itself connotes the fundamental need for community as human life's first line of defense against loneliness and isolation. Wilder attempts to grapple the forces that afflict and limit the pleasures of life through the use of dramatic devices, such as a chorus (patterned after the Greek chorus) that renders commentaries to shape the audience's perceptions and the Stage Manager as narrator who also gets involved in the stage actions, speaks directly to the audience and controls the passing of time by means of flashbacks to relive and highlight previous events of pertinence to the present. Wilder uses these devices so effectively as to compensate for the stage's artificial presentation of what is real and make that which is real appear "more real."

In "The Iceman Cometh" (1940), O'Neill explores the "pipe dream" of dejected characters: Larry, Hugo, Paritt, Hickey and Larry's mother. The first three men long for political salvation, while Hickey seeks a spiritual one that can wash guilt away. Larry deridingly calls this group as the "tomorrow movement." Each of the three recalls his glory days and sits around, drinking and waiting for redemption the following day. Meantime, they do not see an option other than drink and wait. But Hickey enters the scene to bash away and demystify their complacency with his spiritual doctrine that says that a man must kill tomorrow to achieve peace with himself. But, in time, Hickey's gospel soon proves to be just another pipe dream that simply allows the evasion of guilt.

Parritt takes recourse to his pipe dream in his struggle against the hatred he feels for his mother that drove him to betray her and the Anarchist Movement and implores Larry, his father figure, for judgment and a sentence. Larry, at first, refuses, but when he eventually sentences Parritt to death, Parritt realizes in his continued existence in this world that he now yearns more to die than to live.

This play presents the ambivalence of hatred for those who are loved: Parritt for his mother and Hickey for his wife, Evelyn, whom he murdered. Hickey has conflicting unconscious desires to avenge himself on her and to be punished for murdering her. By denying the instinct to take revenge, Hickey thinks he saved her from misery, which in turn led his own pipe dream to fail. Hickey's love-hatred imbalance is also quite strong in Parritt in the same struggle to hide that precise reality from conscious recognition. But that imbalance has led him to false patriotism and a relationship with a prostitute.

O'Neill's tragic vision is sharply projected on the fight between a man and his guilt, between his instinct to survive and yield to the instinct of dying. Larry quotes some lines from Heine's "Death and His Brother Sleep." Sleep in Heine's book refers to morphine. The characters continue to describe the saloon as a "morgue" and as a "graveyard" and these men dwelling on their individual pipe dreams as being dead to the world until Hickey comes and bursts their illusion about tomorrow and urges them to face the reality of their true desires. O'Neill presents a very much lifelike situation of many modern-day pipe dreamers and their un-acknowledged desires freezing them into inaction. The drinking characters also hold feasts to make merry in palliating or deadening the pain of their guilt until Hickey comes to uncover the truth of their lies.

Seeing O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey into Night" gives the audience part of that tragic vision that he consistently projects in most of his plays, the fall of something truly great. The Tyrone family is subjected to a series of disasters. One a closely-knit family, its ties have deteriorated through the years because of Mary's addiction to morphine, Tyrone's stinginess and Edmund's drinking. Exasperation and despair have begun replacing the hope of seeing the children achieve. This play is mainly autobiographical, with O'Neill as Edmund, his father as Edmund's Irish Catholic father and Mary like O'Neill's mother who was addicted to morphine around the time of his birth. His older brother, like Jamie, his character, was dissolute and vicious, went around with prostitutes, drank a lot and lived a fast life. This moving drama was published after O'Neill's death and shows that a character should not be viewed as worse than another. Rather, it suggests that character flaws can re-appear as positive when viewed in another way. O'Neill's language in this play is most powerful in the comparison between "stinginess" and "thrift" or prudence, but more noteworthy is his description of how lines of true communication have broken down among the Tyrones despite their constant fights.

Long Day's Journey into Night" is not only a forward journey but also a constant journey back into the past into which each character continues to dip back in order to proceed. There is always an unfinished business in the past that the present must pause for. It is a fixation and a disability to forget and forgive. Its tragedy lies in the lack of hope for a future for the family that keeps on rebounding on something in the past. The play is an instant and lasting success because families can easily identify with the conflicts and characters it presents. It appeals to both the American drama academe and individual reader, hence its enduring acclaim.

Tennessee Williams' naturalism and sexuality characterize all his works, specifically the pungent and stirring "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1940). A homosexual in real life, this play deals with fantasy over manliness or broken manliness that centers on Brick. Brick is a favorite son and heir of a wealthy plantation owner family. He is a very charming and composed buck who has inherited the right to smugness, the archetypal masculinity. But Brick's admired and envied coolness is really a facade and cover-up for a repressed affection for a dead friend, Skipper. He endeavors at great length to deny this to all and to himself by a cordon of liquor. Each day, he must take his drink to assure peace and getting discovered.

Deep within, Brick sees Skipper as the only good thing in his life. His grief over Skipper's death and loss is made worse by his refusal to acknowledge his obsession for him. He dodges the very best attempts at revealing it by Daddy with whom "talks never materialize" and insists on "solid quiet." The truth is that Brick fears being derided and called a "fairy" by gossipers and staunch admirers. It terrifies him even to consider it might be true that he feels this way with Skipper.

The main repressed materials in this play are Brick's homosexual desire (for Skipper) and Daddy's imminent death. Brick's mother will do anything to make him a responsible family man - to stop drinking, seek out a family and the perpetuation of the family line. Daddy must be replaced by Brick who is his only immortality. The Cat in the play is Maggie, the counter-equivalent to Brick's machismo. Maggie is a typically hysterical, forceful and discontented heroine who is hard, anxious and bitter towards Brick's unresponsiveness to her beauty. The audience pulsates with Maggie's frustration, envy and desperation that make her even more beautiful and desirable.

What makes it more unsettling with Maggie is that her childlessness endangers her position within the household. Not only is her femininity in question, her rightful inheritance is also at a risk.

At one point before confronting Brick on the truth about Skipper, Daddy takes a strange tour with Mama to Europe and North Africa, which represented a kind of primal space and primal savagery, lawlessness and sexual extremes - just about everything repressed. These are very exotic locations that are home for what civilization condemns as repressed. When Brick breaks down later, he confesses to being a sodomite.

A similar difficulty in addressing and accepting reality is the theme of another of Williams' plays, "The Glass Menagerie" (1945). The Wingfield family's inability leads the members to withdraw into a private world of illusion, which offers them false comfort they cannot find in the real world. The member or character who survives the least is Laura whose world consists of glass animals and other fanciful and delicate objects. Her brother Tom takes refuge in the fantasy of movies and the lulling of the senses by alcohol. But Amanda's struggle for a claim to pampering is the most difficult.

The Wingfields are embattled with the reality in the most futile way through the power of memory. The actions that ensue do not need the coatings of the stage to look real. The narrator only has to recall and it is memory that cripples and disables Tom, Amanda and Laura from pursuing a future.

Arthur Miller's "All My Sons" (1947) is about Joe Miller, a businessman who manufactures aero plane engines, and the choice he makes between his family's material prospects and his moral responsibility towards humanity. His devotion to his two sons, Larry and Chris, moves him to prefer the narrower welfare of his family by concealing a fatal production defect on his firm's products, killing soldiers as a consequence. The law soon catches up with Joe's assistant, Steve, and Joe himself, but on appeal, Joe manages to elude imprisonment but not the sense of shame and guilt over his true crime. In the end, Joe decides to give himself up to give his remaining son, Chris, the moral freedom he would otherwise lose if he does not make this ultimate sacrifice. As in his other works, Miller pits a man against his conscience in making choices and mending his world.

Fantasy is the major theme of Tennessee Williams' "Streetcar Named Desire" (1947), a work of social realism. The main character, Blanche DuBois, chooses to deceive and be deceived because life appears to be easier to live. But Stanley, her direct opposite who is well grounded on physical reality, contradicts her and tries his best to reveal her lies. Williams allows the fiery antagonism to reach a peak, by exploring the boundary between the exterior and the interior and by establishing the naturalistic interplay of one's exterior and interior realities through the effective use of an apartment and its surrounding streets as the setting. The trouble, which brews in the streets parallels the turbulence inside the Kowalski's apartment and the innermost turmoil in the minds of Stanley and Blanche.

Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" (1949) is about Willy and the realization of his American dream. He imagines that he is a likable and personally magnetic businessman who will surely and eventually reap material success offered by modern American life. His belief that personal attractiveness and likableness alone will work does not jibe with the American dream that rewards hard work without complaint. Willy's likableness is superficial and childish. He honestly dislikes Bernard whom he considers a nerd, for example. Willy's misconception of the American distorts and soon disables him psychologically when he begins to realize the misalliance between reality and his dream. Miller presents this misalliance as the veritable death of Willy.

Raisin in the Sun" (1950) by Lorraine Hansberry also deals with dreams, but dreams of hope for release from the oppression that rules and imprisons the lives of the members of the Younger family, who are African-American. Each member has a dream, one to become a doctor, another to make enough to buy what he needs and much of their joy or sorrow relates to the attainment or failure in attaining those dreams. Only at the end do they realize that it is their common dream of a house that unites them.

The play is also about the fight against racial prejudice. The Clybourne Park Improvement Association tries to resist the entry of the Younger family into its all-white community and sends an emissary to announce that rejection, even offers bribe money. This also shakes the foundation of the Youngers' traditional values. Rather than shirk and yield to the pressure, the Youngers put up a valiant fight to assert their dignity and right.