Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

220 Chapter 8 The Modern Theatre
Perhaps the seminal play of mid-century American realism was Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing. First produced by the
Group Theatre in 1935, this extremely realistic drama led to a down-to-earth, gritty style of both playwriting and acting.
The play focuses on Jewish immigrants during the Great Depression and dominated the American theatre long after its
debut. From the Huntington Theatre Company 2014 production in Boston, Massachusetts. © T. Charles Erickson
credible force for change in society, was anathema to the
naturalists, who despised neat dramatic conclusions or
climaxes. Whereas realist plays at that time tended to deal
with well-defined social issues—women’s rights, inheritance
laws, worker’s pensions, and the like— naturalist
plays offered nothing more than a “slice of life.” The
characters of the play were the play’s entire subject. Any
topical issues that arose served merely as a result of the
characters’ situations, frustrations, and hopes.
The naturalists sought to eliminate every vestige of
dramatic convention: “All the great successes of the stage
are triumphs over convention,” declared Zola. Their
efforts in this direction are exemplified by August Strindberg’s
(1849–1912) elimination of the time- passing intermission
in Miss Julie. Instead of a traditional gap of time,
a group of peasants, otherwise irrelevant to the plot, enter
the kitchen setting between acts and dance to fill the
time Miss Julie is spending in Jean’s offstage bedroom.
Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931) similarly eliminated conventional
scene beginnings, endings, and climaxes in
the interlocking series of love affairs that constitute the
action of his La Ronde.
Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953), America’s first great
playwright, pioneered an earthy naturalistic style in his
early plays and returned to that style in his autobiographical
masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey into Night—a play
so true to life that O’Neill forbade its production or publication
until many years after his death. In subsequent
times, the dramas of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams,
August Wilson, Wendy Wasserstein, Neil LaBute, Theresa
Rebeck, and Annie Baker are all strongly influenced
by both realism and naturalism, which continue to have a
commanding presence on the American stage.
Antirealism
Realism and naturalism were not the only new movements
of the late nineteenth century to make themselves
strongly felt in the modern theatre, however. A reactionary
force, equally powerful, was to emerge. First manifest