NOTE: The remainder of this narrative deals primarily with theatre in the United States, although significant happenings in other nations are addressed as they pertain to the human art.

Immediately after the American Revolution, theatre in the new United States began to thrive; within ten years four companies were touring the eastern seaboard. After the War of 1812, the exploding population migrated west, and by the end of the 19th Century, every major town and city from Boston to Sacramento had at least one “opera house” (more than a few on Broadway), with professional companies in residence or riding the rails on tour, playing on riverboats.

The early companies were simply imitators of the London stage, with English actors playing English plays. The first American playwright of historical note was Royal Tyler, whose comedy, The Contrast (1787), introduced the stereotypical Yankee character. Others followed over time, a few extremely popular, but very few enduring. Native actors rivaled British stars and toured The Drunkard (or Macbeth) to sellout crowds (or not) all over. Plays about the Common Man, the Noble Savage and Jim Crow were popular, but the only lasting theatrical innovation was the minstrel show.

Sadly, and ironically, the whole of 19th Century theatre is embodied in and triggered by the night of April 14, 1865, when an actor from a famous family of actors, John Wilkes Booth, went to the Ford, where President Lincoln was enjoying a performance of British playwright Tom Taylor’s Our American Cousin (1858), and committed the crime of the century.

Otherwise, although theatrical entertainment was abundant and very popular—and more and more spectacular, its stars celebrities—the plays were crafted to appeal to the masses, and are considered less than mediocre. At is peak, six names emerge as authors of successful melodramas: Augustin Daly (Under the Gaslight, 1867), Steele McKaye (Hazel Kirke, 1878), Bronson Howard (Shenandoah), William Gillette (Secret Service, 1895), James A. Herne (Margaret Fleming, 1890), and David Belasco (The Girl of the Golden West, 1905). Their well-made plays play well today, if played well, and many were made into movies.

In 1912, emulating the “free theatre” trend in Europe, a group in Boston f(of all places) ormed the Toy Theatre to stage amateur productions of new plays and launch America’s”Little Theatre” movement. Within five years there were 50 such “Little Theaters” in cities nationwide.

Eugene O’Neill

The first significant and arguably the greatest ever American dramatist, O’Neill’s first two Broadway plays—Beyond the Horizon (1920) and Anna Christie (1922)—won Pulitzer Prizes for Drama and opened the door for American realism, while he went on to explore and experiment with a wide variety of dramatic forms and genres—expressionism (The Emperor Jones, 1920; The Hairy Ape, 1922; All God’s Chillun Got Wings, 1924), naturalism (Desire Under the Elms, 1924; The Iceman Cometh, 1944), symbolism (The Fountain, 1922), surrealism (The Great God Brown, 1926), autobiographical family comedy and gritty drama (Ah, Wilderness, 1933; A Long Day’s Journey into Night, 1941), Noh drama and the Bible (Lazarus Laughed, 1926), Greek tragedy (Mourning Becomes Electra, a trilogy, 1931), and a 9-act Freudian marathon (Strange Interlude, 1928) in which characters in conversation express their unspoken thoughts as “interior monologues.”

Everything that’s happened in American dramatic art began with him.

His father was the actor James O’Neill, the model for James Tyrone in his autobiographical Long Day’s Journey, who “played Iago to Edwin Booth’s Othello” and vice versa. He bought the rights to Charles Fechter’s dramatization of The Count of Monte Cristo (1868) in the early 1880’s, claimed the title role, and famously toured the nation for thirty years—more than 6000 performances. His career coincided with and represents the apex and the end of melodrama’s century-long appeal. His son launched the American Century.

His early life, as told in Long Day’s Journey (and imagined, romanticized, in his only comedy, Ah, Wilderness!), was complicated by his Catholic family—alcoholic father and older brother and a morphine-addicted mother—and his own tuberculosis (and his guilt). Born is a trunk, as the saying goes, in the Barrett House Hotel on Times Square, he spent his preschool years “on trains and in hotels,” after which he went to Catholic schools. At nineteen, expelled from Princeton, he worked briefly as a secretary for a mail order house in New York, then sailed off to prospect for gold in Honduras. No gold, but he caught malaria.

During the next five years, he wandered home to manage a theatrical tour, act on the vaudeville stage, and report for the New London Times; then sailing back to work for Westinghouse, Swift Packing, and Singer Sewing Machines Companies in Buenos Aires, and wound up full time as an able-bodied seaman on the transatlantic American Line. He captured these years at sea in several of his early one-acts (“Bound East for Cardiff,” 1914).

In 1912, he spent six months in a sanitarium, related in The Straw, 1919, where he made the decision to become a playwright. He studied for a year with George Pierce Baker at Harvard, then joined the Provincetown Players (1916), where most of his early one-acts were produced. In 1918, Beyond the Horizon was produced on Broadway, and won his first of his four Pulitzer Prizes.

The rest is history.

The Best of the Rest

Scores of other playwrights followed his motley examples during both the Roaring Twenties, as people flocked to theaters all over the country. In the 1927-28 season alone, well over 250 plays appeared on more than 70 legitimate Broadway stages—the most ever, before or since—and although none equaled those of Gene O’Neill, many became modern American classics that influenced the Great Ones after WWII.

One early incubator of American dramatists was the Theatre Guild (1919-present), a major force in Broadway theatre well into the 1970’s and currently producing tours of Broadway musicals. Between the wars, it introduced Maxwell Anderson (What Price Glory?, 1924), Sidney Howard (They New What They Wanted, 1924), William Saroyan (The Time of your Life, 1939), and Phillip Barry (The Philadelphia Story, 1939), among others, and produced several by O’Neill.

Equally influential in the ’30’s was The Group Theatre (1931-41), founded by Harold Clurman, Cheryl, and (most famously) Lee Stasberg, featuring works by Paul Green (In Abraham’s Bosom (1926), Sidney Kingsley (Men in White, 1933), Irwin Shaw (Bury the Dead, 1936), and most famously, Clifford Odets, whose agit-prop drama, Waiting for Lefty (1933), based on a New York City taxi drivers’ strike, argued for a communist society, got 28 curtain calls on opening night, and ran for 144 performances.

Add to this list Thornton Wilder (Our Town, 1938), Elmer Rice (The Adding Machine (1923), George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart (You Can’t Take It With You, 1937), Robert E. Sherwood (Idiot’s Delight, 1936), Lillian Hellman (The Children’s Hour, 1934), and four female Pulitzer Prize winners: Zona Gale (Miss Lulu Bett,1921), Susan Glaspell (Allison’s House, 1931), Zoë Akins (The Old Maid, 1935), and Mary Coyle Chase (Harvey, 1945).

Early in the Great Depression, dissident elements of the Little Theatre movement coalesced into the New Theatre League, presenting plays written and performed by working class amateurs that expressed the hardships of peoples lives and leaned toward Marxian solutions. The leading company was the Theatre Union, which produced Tobacco Road (1933)—the only play worth noting—a naturalistic, muckraking mix of “impure, adulterous sex and blasphemous, profane, elemental comedy” set in poverty-stricken backwoods Georgia that so shocked and lewdly entertained the public that it ran for eight long years—3182 performances—second only to Life with Father (1939) as the longest-ever run of a straight (non-musical) Broadway play. By the time it closed, the Union had failed (1937) and the League dwindled into obscurity.

In 1935, the suddenly socialist FDR government created the Federal Theatre Project to pay 10,000 persons in 40 states—including African-Americans—to stage 1000 theatrical productions, 65% presented free of charge, but the project is best known for developing the “Living Newspaper,” in which the universal “little man” raises questions on a social issue, and the facts are acted out. So left-wing radical were these productions that conservative congressmen were alarmed, and two years later—four days before the opening of Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock two years later (directed by Orson Wells) about a union organizer, they withdrew funding and padlocked the theatre. Two years after that, the House Committee on Un-American Activities found cause to curtail the project altogether.

For all these noteworthy playwrights and their excellent body of work, the number of Broadway productions fell sharply during the Depression, from the high in 1927-28 (over 250) to 80 in 1940-41. In part (of course) it was because the public had no money to buy tickets, but a more insidious reason was a cheaper, newer—and perpetual—form of entertainment.

The Movies

In 1930, more than 65% of the American population went to the movies every week. This portion dropped to 40% during the Depression, but climbed back to 60% during World War II. This new craze left the Wholly Human Art suddenly in the lurch and struggling to survive. By 1950, there were only 30 Broadway theaters, only150 (semi-) professional companies in the entire United States.

The argument in favor of live theatre over celluloid is the subject of a future essay, but it must be obvious that the difference is significant, and that by virtually eliminating plays on stage from the American experience, we’ve lost touch with a portion of our humanity.

The cause, of course, is the root of all evil. Movies were cheap. Plays not only cost more to produce; they couldn’t be re-produced for a mass market. And every small town in the country had a movie house.

Ironically, also in 1950, television suddenly knocked the movies down to 25%; by 1960, down to 10%, where it’s been stuck ever since—and lo and behold, these days, even TV’s out of date.

On the positive side, from the start, those plays that the well-to-do found worthy of acclaim (“smash hits”) were filmed for the movie-going populace, and some became smash hits themselves. It’s good that anyone today can stream Greta Garbo’s Academy Award-winning performance in O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Anna Christie and imagine seeing Pauline Lord in person. What’s missing is the communal magic.

Sadly, over the years, playwrights followed the money straight to film. Some plays still make it to the digital screen, but art is in the industry, and there’s no market for live theatre. What’s missing is communion.