Chillun Got Research Articles

Art, glitter, and glitz: mainstream playwrights and popular theatre in 1920s America

Introduction by Arthur Gewirtz and James J. Kolb Mainstream Playwrights (Re)Claiming O'Neill's Strange Interlude As a Modernist Theatre Text by Thomas R. Adler Stillborn Future: Dead and Dying Infants and Children as a Secondary in the Plays of Eugene O'Neill: An Analysis of the Image in Desire Under the Elms by Linda L. Herr De New Dat's Moiderin' de Old: Oedipal Struggle as Class Conflict in Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape by Julia Walker Tempest in Black and White: The 1924 Staging of Eugene O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings by Glenda Frank Not Enough?: The High Comedy of Philip Barry by Leonard Ashley Philip Barry's Holiday: High Comedy as Morality Play by Harry B. Parker The Subway: Sophie as Elmer Rice's Ms. Zero by Cynthia McCown Without a Plot, Idea, Hero, or Heroine: The Unlikely Strategy of Sidney Howard's Lucky Sam McCarver by Cynthia McCown Some Kind of Damned Religion: A Reading of What Price Glory? by Maxwell Andersen and Laurence Stallings by Stanley Brodwin Baker's Boys: The Legacy of George Pierce Baker by Lue Morgan Douthit Broadway, The Elements of Success: An Analysis of Jed Harris's 1926 Production of the Play by Philip Dunning and George Abbott by E. James Zeiger Playwrights and Power: The Dramatists Guild's Struggle for the 1926 Minimum Basic Aggreement by T. J. Walsh Popular Theatre John Barrymore & Company, 1920-25: American Standard-Bearers of the Shakespeare Company by Michael A. Morrison When Actors Were Still Players by Ronald H. Wainscott No Sirree! A One Night Stand with the Algonquin's Vicious Circle by Jay Malarcher The Grand-Guignol in New York City: October-November, 1923: Violence Fails to Draw an Audience by John M. Callahan The Other Worlds of Ring Lardner: Popular Entertainment and the Legitimate Theatre by Richard Pioreck Feathers, Finals, and Frou-Frou: Florenz Ziegfeld's Exoticized Follies Girls by Ann Marie McEntee Gags, Girls, and Guffaws: Burlesque in Downtown New York in the 1920s by William Green Barbette: That Daring Young [Wo]Man on the Flying Trapeze by Joe E. Jeffreys A. H. Woods, Producer: A Thrill a Minute, a Laugh a Second! by Julian M. Kaufman The Girl Friends: Lew Fields and the Early Musicals of Rodgers, Hart, and Fields by Jason Rubin Bibliography Index

Tempest in Black and White: The 1924 Premiere of Eugene O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings

Tempest in Black and White: The 1924 Premiere of Eugene O'Neill's <i>All God's Chillun Got Wings</i>

Tempest in Black and White: The 1924 Premiere of Eugene O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings

Tempest in Black and White: The 1924 Premiere of Eugene O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings

Black Drama and the Harlem Renaissance

When the literary and artistic aspects of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance are examined in retrospect, the dramas of this seminal period are usually conspicuous in their absence. The major Black dramatists of that time, such as Willis Richardson, Eulalie Spence, and Randolph Edmonds are little remembered save for interested historians, or are remembered for other contributions. Their dramas are nearly never revived. The same appears true for the white playwrights who wrote dramas around Black characters, as Paul Green did. Perhaps the plays of this era are thought to be hopelessly dated, though Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones is staged fairly often, and his still highly controversial All Gods Chillun Got Wings has been revived within recent memory. Occasionally a period Black musical is dusted off and taken from the shelf. Because of George Gershwin's music, the operatic treatment of DuBose Heyward's play, Porgy, has played nearly continuously somewhere in the world since its recreation as Porgy and Bess.

Eugene O'Neill by Normand Berlin (review)

140 Book Reviews NORMAND BERLIN. Eugene O'Neill. New York: Grove Press 1982. Pp. Xlll, 178, illustrated. $9.95 (PB). Nonnand Berlin opens his study of the dramatic achievement of Eugene O'Neill with a detailed discussion of Long Day's Journey Into Night. This strategy makes sense not only because this play is so closely associated with the author's earlier life, but because it is (by general agreement today) his greatest play and quite probably the play upon which his future reputation will chiefly rest. Putting aside the well-known autobiographical dimensions of the play, Berlin enters immediately upon its masterful dramaturgy: its clarity and simplicity of structure; its profound use ofthe dramatic unities; its remarkable buildup of emotional intensity; its minute exploration of the relationship between past and present; its resonant use of scenery, props, and lighting; and its identification of the closeness of "the four haunted Tyrones" with the sharply alternating emotional rhythms which make the play so universally immediate and affecting. On this last subject, Berlin says: "What we witness in this one day represents endless days of family togetherness and familyseparation; the rhythmic patterns persist" (p. 8). "That the Tyrones try to understand the past, that they listen to one another, that they endure together, as a family," Berlin concludes, "is the measure of their heroism" (p. 20). If Berlin's claim that "no analysis can take us very close to the emotional experience of the play" is correct, his own analysis has certainly taken us close. Having dealt so effectively with Long Day's Journey while making no allusion to O'Neill's life, Berlin then deals briefly with that fascinating subject. The O'Neill biographies (by Louis Sheaffer and the Gelbs) are long and detailed. Berlin packs an amazing amount from them into the space of a dozen pages. He concentrates on O'Neill's relations with his immediate family (the central personae, of course, of Long Day's Journey) and on his marriages to Agnes Boulton and Carlotta Monterey. A separate, more extensive chapter is reserved for O'Neill's theatrical "beginnings": the commencement of the playwright's journey down the parallel tracks of naturalism and expressionism established by his European predecessors. Berlin reviews 0 'Neill's early work with the Provincetown Players both on Cape Cod and in New York, concentrating first on the great promise of the SS Glencairn plays. Bound East for Cardiff and The Moon ofthe Caribbees represent for Berlin the first real breakthroughs in the emergence of a serious American drama. These plays, he says, begin that process of converting "Theatre into Drama" which would be the "hallmark of O'Neill's potent art" (p. 46). Berlin rightly divides O'Neill's massive canon into four periods - the early twenties, the late twenties, the thirties, and the later thirties/early forties - devoting a chapter to each. The early 1920'S constituted the period, Berlin feels, when O'Neill tinkered most effectively with dramatic expressionism. The critic sees The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape as the playwright's most successful efforts of the period, treating the fonner not "merely [~s] a theatrical tour de force," but as a probing examination, using expressionistic means, of an "archetypal idea." "Jones's long night's journey," he says, "is physical and psychological and racial and universal" (p. 59). And The Hairy Ape, continuing in the same mode, deals with modem man's cosmic loneliness. As Jones deals with man's past, claims Berlin, Ape deals with his present. Only a little less successful for Berlin are the realistic plays of this period - Beyond the Horizon, Anna Christie and Desire Under the Elms - all ofwhich show man's heroism measured by his Sophoclean struggle against a predetermined fate. O'Neill is less effective for Berlin Book Reviews 141 when he tries to combine realism, expressionism, and a social message in All God's Chillun Got Wings - courageous as that play's treatment of miscegenation was in the early 1920'S. Berlin's determination not to use biographical information in assessing the plays fails to serve him well when he turns to the plays of the late 1920'S. Despite the...

Eugene O'Neill: The Development of Negro Portraiture

The career of Eugene has some obvious progressions, from short one-act plays (The Dreamy Kid, The Moon of Caribees), to essentially expressionistic dramas (The Emperor Jones), back to realism with hints of expressionism (All God's Chillun Got Wings), and finally to long fully-developed dramas (The Iceman Cometh) that are primarily realistic with elements of symbolism (as in Larry Slade's early description of bar in The Iceman Cometh as the No Chance Saloon, It's Bedrock Bar, End of Line Cafe). The extent of development of character proceeds accordingly: in short plays characters are often only twodimensional, at best showing a small range of emotion, and at worst are mere caricature, while in longer plays characters are, for most part, more complex, showing a great depth of emotional capability which is only suggested in early plays. O'Neill's depiction of Black characters generally falls along these same lines, achieving a growth in racial sensitivity from 1918 (the year of publication of The Dreamy Kid and first performance of The Moon of Caribees) to 1946 (the year of first performance of The Iceman Cometh). Some recent critics have noted this development, most notably Peter J. Gillett and Roger Oliver, but all fail to recognize racial bias that plagued until end, and conclude that in The Iceman Cometh had progressed to a state of racial equality.1 Characteristic is Roger Oliver's conclusion that in Joe Mott, O'Neill transcends his previous treatment of Black characters. Joe Mott's specific racial nature, seen in social rather than stereotyped personal terms, is balanced with his shared humanity.2 Throughout progression, however, and even as must be acknowledged as first American playwright to include serious Black characters in popular drama, continually clings to some serious misconceptions and popular stereotypes concerning Black characters, with no exception in Joe Mott. The Dreamy Kid (1918) earns a notable place in history of American drama as one of first plays to be cast with Black actors in serious roles by a 'white' producing company. When The Moon of Caribees was

Music of the animals

We examine the question and some possible answers of whether animals make and appreciate music. We take as the material of music such aspects as pitch, intensity, timbre, texture, harmony, frequency modulation, and duration as well as rhythm which is just the interaction of all these aspects in structured patterns. Our answer is that a lot of God's chillun got rhythm.

Staged Segregation: Baldwin's Blues for Mister Charlie and O'Neill's all God's Chillun Got Wings

Staged Segregation: Baldwin's Blues for Mister Charlie and O'Neill's all God's Chillun Got Wings

Biblical Perversions In Desire Under The Elms

WHILE O'NEILL'S PLAYS ARE NOTED PRIMARILY for the dramatic force with which they express his tragic view of life, many of them—The Hairy Ape, All God's Chillun Got Wings, Marco Millions, Iceman Cometh, and others—contain a great deal of social criticism. So does his early tragedy Desire Under the Elms, which has been critically examined for its use of the Hippolytus and Medea myths, its Freudian elements, its relation to O'Neill's early plays (e.g., The Rope) and own biography, but there has been little close attention to the way in which religious references inform the play, and the way religion both causes the tragedy and comments upon it.