Popular Theatre of the Thirties

Abstract

The hardest literary game to play is that of typicality, choosing the work that most represents a period. Asked to make such a choice, to put my finger on the 1930's play, I would reach into the repertory open-handed, my fingers spread wide so that I could come down on more than one play. On Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing! (1935) as the exemplary social play with its urban idiom and its amorphous Leftist solution. On Three Men on a Horse (1935), in which John Cecil Holm and George Abbott caught a tone of knowing innocence and a tempo of word and movement that marked much of the comedy of the decade. Perhaps on On Borrowed Time (1938), the play that Paul Osborn made from Lawrence Edward Watkin's novel, openly stuffed with the throat-lumping sentimentality that also lurks behind the seriousness of Awake and Sing! and the toughness of Three Men on a Horse.