The Hairy Ape Up In Mabel's Room

Abstract

Ronald Wainscott's The Emergence of Modern American Theater, 1914-1929 is a good stab at something that needs doing: studying modern American drama as a cultural artifact. Like a good stage thrust encased in aesthetic conventions, work draws little intellectual blood, but remains a richly suggestive gesture. While a flourishing cultural studies industry exists around nineteenthcentury American plays, more highly regarded drama of this century has been handled largely as an object of literary analysis and artistic evaluation. Bruce McConachie, Jeffrey Mason, Robert Toll, Eric Lott, Robert Allen, and others have used early American stage to explore historical issues, while scholars with other core interests like Alexander Saxton, Jean Baker, and David Roediger have integrated early minstrelsy with grappling with questions of race, class, and politics. Yet drama as indicator/influence of popular mood in twentieth century remains sparsely developed, despite much cultural interpretation of film and other types of artistic expression. Wainscott's argument is that artists in 1920s redefined direction of American theater for decades to come in plays characterized by violent, pathetic, satiric, outrageous, or incomprehensible, latter term referring to characters' and even playwrights' inability to understand the violent or overwhelming nature of world being dramatized (pp. 1-2). This is result of what Wainscott calls one supreme irony: World War I, intended to preserve prevailing values, culture, and democratic principles, in fact destroyed or enabled destruction of these social forms and cultural expressions (pp. 3-4). The problematics of these expansive claims are great. The plays of 1920s were less violent and pathetic than those of 1830s, nor were they often outrageous or incomprehensible to their audiences. Both American society and democracy survived war, while questioning of nineteenth-century's external verities was well underway long before that conflict began.