Drama and the Rhythm of Work in the 1920s

Abstract

Representations of work in the drama of the 1920s often depicted it as either destructive to the individual or, to the extent that characters were well adjusted to their work environment, as a refuge for the shallow and unimaginative. Such dramatic representations of work and workers convey a horror of mechanization. In them machine processes consistently pervert the individual, in part by undermining the possibility of worker self-determination. But work also becomes a source of social distinction and self-creation, exacerbating the tension between the increased standard ization of work and the desire to see work as an expression of identity. On one level, work simply recapitulates the difficulties an ideology of individualism necessarily faces when confronted with the fact of society. In addition, however, the attention plays such as Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine, Sophie Treadwell's Machinal, George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly's Beggar on Horseback, and Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape and The Great God Brown pay to work as a sign of an individual character's essential capacities and attributes reflects a developing cultural focus on the adjust ment and contentment of the individual worker. The 1920s had seen the birth of industrial psychology as a discipline and accepted function within the firm, a development that coincided both with research suggesting the importance of worker morale to productivity and with the decline in the power of organized labor.