George Pierce Research Articles

The View from Pompey’s Head; But for Whom Charlie

The View from Pompey’s Head; But for Whom Charlie

Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O'Neill

Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O'Neill

The Play’s a Thing: The 47 Workshop and the “Crafting” of Creative Writing

AbstractThis article examines the first creative writing “workshop,” so called, in order to assess how present-day institutional practices restructure transhistorical questions of labor, education, and aesthetic and economic production. Drawing on extensive archival research, I document the procedures of and theory behind drama professor George Pierce Baker’s “47 Workshop” at Harvard, operative from 1912 to 1924. Baker’s use of the term, I argue, provides rhetorical cover by which to slot arts courses into a Harvard curriculum increasingly geared toward utilitarian education. At the same time, the term signals Baker’s ties to the American Arts and Crafts movement, a cause opposed to industrialization just as Baker opposed the mass fare of Broadway. Reading Baker’s 1930 pageant Control for its advocacy of preindustrial values, the article concludes by contending that this distinct genealogy for creative writing helps us rethink the discipline today. If Baker understood workshop as an alternative, nonrationalized discourse, present-day craft rhetoric consolidates the authority of elite educational institutions.

Eugene O'Neill Remembered

Eugene O'Neill Remembered

Et in Arcadia E.G.O.

Et in Arcadia E.G.O.

Et in Arcadia E.G.O.

Et in Arcadia E.G.O.

Thomas Wolfe and Eugene O'Neill

Thomas Wolfe and Eugene O'Neill

The Texts of O'Neill's Beyond the Horizon

Beyond the Horizon appeared in two editions within four and a half years. The first, published March 1920, printed a text that O’Neill probably completed in 1918 but may have tweaked for publication. It has not been reprinted since 1922, has never been edited, and was only recently reissued online.1 The second edition incorporated collaborative cuts made during a boozy span in mid-January 1920, prior to the play’s February 3 premiere. That edition debuted in O’Neill’s 1924 Complete Works and has been the basis of all subsequent editions. These are different texts, written at different times and representing different assumptions about authorship. Both are essential to our understanding of O’Neill. But I am aware of no study of the play or of O’Neill that engages the first-edition text. My purpose is threefold. First, I will consolidate and clarify the textual history of Beyond the Horizon. Second, I will enumerate significant differences between the two editions, with special attention to the generosity that O’Neill initially accorded to Ruth Mayo, the depressive wife of the poet manque Robert Mayo. Finally, I will argue that in the first edition O’Neill ponders the challenge of melding art and marriage in a gender-savvy manner reflective of his relationship with Agnes Boulton and characteristic of his fellow Provincetown playwrights Neith Boyce and Rita Wellman. The argument attempts to restore to Ruth a measure of dignity that O’Neill briefly allowed her, then withdrew. Judith E. Barlow discerns in the 1924 text “the venerable myth that domesticity, even when freely chosen, kills the male of the species” and “annihilat[es]” his “artistic soul.”2 But the first edition Ruth Mayo, agnes Boulton,

George Pierce Baker: A Century of Dramaturgs Teaching Playwriting

‘The dramatist is born, not made.’ This is the surprising opening of George Pierce Baker's classic book Dramatic Technique (1919). 1 This sentiment that one is either miraculously born a dramatist ...

Review

Review

Ernest Poole's The Harbor as a Source for O'Neill's The Hairy Ape

Ernest Poole's <i>The Harbor</i> as a Source for O'Neill's <i>The Hairy Ape</i>

Re-Publish or Perish: A Reassessment of George Pierce Baker’s The Principles of Argumentation: Minimizing the Use of Formal Logic in Favor of Practical Approaches

In preparing Suzanne Bordelon’s article for the February issue of CCC, the editorially unthinkable happened: An earlier version of her fine article replaced the final, wellrevised version as it went to the printer. In addition to my profuse apologies to Professor Bordelon, I have decided to publish the correct version of the article, delaying until September my publication of Janet Eldred’s review essay of several books on technology. The silver lining, in this instance, is a teachable moment, a rare glimpse for readers of CCC into an accountable but ultimately human (and I hope humane) editorial process: Bordelon’s article, quite good to begin with, was judged an “accept with revisions,” and she revised the article extensively and well, passing muster with a final read by one of the first reviewers and me.

George Pierce Baker’s Principles of Argumentation: “Completely Logical”?

The article contends that previous scholars have misread George Pierce Baker’s efforts by focusing primarily on The Principles of Argumentation and the role of logic. Baker’s view of logic was more complex than scholars have claimed. He challenged traditional concepts of formal logic, highlighting only those aspects that would help students learn argument.

“It Did Not Sound Like a Professor's Speech”: George Pierce Baker and the Market for Academic Rhetoric

In November 1910, New Theatre artistic director Winthrop Ames asked his former teacher, Harvard English professor George Pierce Baker, to speak at a reception honoring the theatre's financial backers. The occasion was the start of the New Theatre's second season, and Ames was hoping to raise morale after a disappointing first year. Endowed primarily by millionaires in New York City, the New Theatre was supposed to offer a venue for staging plays free of the usual commercial pressures of Broadway productions. The contradiction at the heart of such an enterprise was manifest, particularly in the New Theatre's architecture and opulent interior design, which continually marked the “noncommercial” house as a monument to the economic power of those wealthy enough to provide for its massive and gaudy construction. Audiences complained that the two-thousand-seat auditorium had lousy acoustics; critics deemed the productions undistinguished and condemned the twenty-three Founders Boxes that ringed the orchestra as vulgar and ostentatious. Maybe an English professor, Ames thought, would have something helpful to say on the matter.

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

Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience (review)

Reviewed by: Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience Katie N. Johnson Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience. By Dorothy Chansky. Theatre in the Americas Series. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004; pp. xiii + 293. $55.00 cloth. Dorothy Chansky's Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience offers an important contribution to American theatre history. Defining the Little Theatre movement as "a national, multipronged phenomenon, and not just the work of well-known experimenters," Composing Ourselves redefines and expands the parameters of the collective movement that sought to reform theatre as something other than Broadway fare (2). While some books have recently examined theatre artists or theatres in the Little Theatre movement (such as Shannon Jackson's Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity;J. Ellen Gainor's Susan Glaspell in Context: American Theater, Culture, and Politics, 1915-48; or Cheryl Black's The Women of Provincetown), Chansky's is the first extended study since Constance D'Arcy Mackay's 1917 The Little Theatre Movement in the United States and is a welcome addition to that body of research. Constituted by six chapters, Composing Ourselves is smartly written, weaving archival research, historical [End Page 138] context, and critical theory to redefine the Little Theatre movement and its key players. Chansky is careful to avoid hasty generalizations, mapping out the movement's contradictions and ironies while observing it included "forward-looking activism and modernist aesthetics as well as skepticism, nativism, elitism, and nostalgia" (3). Chansky also redefines the Little Theatre movement by pressuring the timetable by which we bracket it. While most historians focus on the work of the 1910s, Chansky broadens the timeline to include the 1920s, arguing "that only the full arc of the work within both decades" can account for the wide array of theatre making in Little Theatres across the country (5). Her discussion of theatre reformers of the 1920s, especially the recuperation of Alice Gerstenberg's career in chapter 5, is among the greatest strengths of the project. As the title implies, Chansky also focuses on how Little Theatres formulated what she calls "audience construction," or: the creation of attitudes and behaviors concerning theatergoing in the minds and bodies of actual or potential spectators as well as other Americans. The purpose of audience construction was, beginning in the Little Theatre movement, and remains in the United States, to create and maintain a permanent audience class and a public belief in the importance of theatre in civic and personal life. [7-8] With detailed examples, Chansky shows how audiences were cultivated (and cultivated themselves) during times of dwindling theatregoing. Chapter 2 illustrates various attitudes toward audiences and theatre making by reformers, from those who blamed the audience for their lack of taste or "breeding" (Edward Dithmar and Annie Nathan Meyer), to those who strove for professionalism (Beulah Jay's Little Theatre of Philadelphia), to those who used theatre to serve neighborhood immigrants (Hull-House and Henry Street Settlement). Chansky's third chapter focuses on two major influences in Little Theatre audience construction: Theatre Arts Monthly and George Pierce Baker's 47 Workshop at Harvard. As divergent as these forces might appear at first glance, Chanksy observes that both were indebted to the view that "the audience must function as an informed participant in the creation of serious theatre, and the audience must be organized so as to guarantee payment for that theatre" (71). As backdrop for that discussion, Chansky gives a helpful, if somewhat overdrawn, historical overview of theatre reformers who published their theories about the new theatre. The chapter is most intriguing when Chanksy shows how Baker's 47 Workshop developed a cadre of educated theatregoers, designers, playwrights, and directors, including Eugene O'Neill, Robert Edmond Jones, and Edward Sheldon. Here, Chanksy's argument is crisp and compelling as she documents Baker's rigorous audience development that, in spite of its success, fell victim to an Ivy League bias. Another valuable contribution Composing Ourselves makes is its attention to gender, race, and ethnicity in theatre making of the day. Chansky notes how racism and sexism underwrote the movement at the same time that some...

Reconstructing Theatre/History

Reconstructing Theatre/History Joseph Roach (bio) Some men see things the way they are and say, “Why?” I dream of things that never were and say, “Why not?” —Robert F. Kennedy quoting George Bernard Shaw, 1968 How do we as theatre scholars define our objects of study? In terms of the discipline of theatre research in the United States, that very question has a history—and it continues to make history. To begin to answer it, one might look to several of our myths of origin: Brander Matthews’s then unprecedented teaching of drama at Columbia University, George Pierce Baker’s “47 Workshop” at Harvard, Baker’s move to Yale and the founding of the School of Drama, the inauguration of conservatory-technical training within the academy at Carnegie Mellon, or the granting of the first doctorates in theatre by the University of Iowa in 1929 and then Cornell University and Northwestern University in 1940. What is striking at first glance is how very different these pioneers’ objects of study were: Matthews’s enthusiastic antiquarianism, Baker’s how-to-make-a-play dramaturgy, Carnegie Mellon’s trade-school pragmatism, the PhD’s literary-historical professionalism—all seem to pull in very different directions. Different, yes, but they are all in some way focused on performance. Performance in each case provides a place where theory and practice enter into a potentially troubled yet deeply symbiotic relationship. Etymologically as well as ontologically, theatre is a practice of theory, as Jane Harrison, the great classicist, reminds us: “Our word theory,” she noted, “which we use in connexion with reasoning and which comes from the same Greek word as theatre, means really looking fixedly at, contemplation; it is very near in meaning to our imagination.” (Bentley 19). If theory has become passé, as the provocative questions posed by the hosts of Constructing Theatre/History suggest, then imagination has also outlived its importance to scholars in the field. And in some ways, alas, that is exactly what has been happening in theatre departments for the last thirty years. [End Page 3] The moment I want to examine—the moment when the field, organized around performance as the object of study, took a decisive and, I believe, unfortunate turn—also happens to coincide with the auspiciously happy moment we are celebrating on the occasion of this conference: the completion of Oscar Brockett’s History of the Theatre in 1967 and its publication in 1968. Let me hasten to add that these events, though simultaneous, were not causally linked. In fact, their autonomy as phenomena is conspicuous and part of the story I want to tell. My account takes the form of a memoir of a moment, not of when paradigms shifted but of when they stripped their gears, as told through the rise and fall of some of the theatre departments I have known, and loved, and lost. “In this book,” Brockett begins the preface to the first edition of the History, “I have attempted to trace the development of the theatre from primitive times until 1967” (v). Looking back from the perspective of students today, I guess one could say that 1967 and 1968 were primitive times. Even as Brockett’s History recorded the particulars of the construction of the Comédie Française, for instance, the then extant “House of Molière” was being occupied and deconstructed by rebellious students, who, like the barbarians of yore, decked themselves out in the stage costumes while they held the company director hostage in his office. As eighteen-year-old theatre majors, we took note. There was so much else to take note of in 1967–68. There were Happenings and Catastrophes: Guerilla Theatre (on campus, fake) and guerilla theatre (Tet Offensive, real), My Lai, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. There were Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite, Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in ‘69 (a year early), Hair, Arthur Hailey’s Airport, and Arthur Kopit’s Indians. There were Blau’s Impossible Theatre and Grotowski’s Poor Theatre. The Tulane Drama Review moved from New Orleans to Greenwich Village. There were riots in most major cities and Jacques Derrida announced that structuralism was...

Economic Challenges for the Fourth Generation University Theatre

Economie Challenges for the Fourth Generation University Theatre Kent Neely College and university educators are keenly aware of the current economic pressures which are causing tremendous shifts and changes in the manner in which they work. University theatre scholars and practitioners in particular experience an exacerbation of the problem. The current economic crisis affects university theatres especially hard, largely in part from a history of serving two constituencies, higher education and the professional theatre. Those two institutions grew rapidly over the last 30 years by relying upon deficit budgeting and an imbalanced exchange between services and population . As a result of this conflict, the university theatre can no longer sustain the quantitative productivity which characterized it in the past. For the purposes of this article, university theatres are defined as academic and practical programs of theatre study found in colleges and universities . The phrase "economic challenges" refers not to sales, earnings nor the means to those ends, but to the conditions that surround, and to the influences exerted upon, an enterprise by coincidence or design. Further, it presumes that these conditions and influences affect the existence of that enterprise through the supply and acquisition of human, financial and material resources and the use of those resources in the creation of a service: education. University theatre, now in its fourth generation, has developed within four distinct periods that parallel major changes in the United States economy, public policy and higher education.1 The first generation occurred near the turn of the century when George Pierce Baker began playwriting and study classes at Radcliffe in 1904, at Harvard in 1906 and finally at Yale in 1925. Baker's efforts were the first to indicate that the study and practice of theatre was a legitimate academic pursuit. The second generation began shortly thereafter and continued through the Second World War as colleges and universities "bootlegged" theatre courses 57 58 Kent Neely into curricula. Public speaking courses were thinly veiled efforts to teach acting; playwriting began to be taught in "workshops" and classes at places like the Carnegie Institute, Cornell, Northwestern and the University of Iowa. The third generation, after World War II and through the 1960s, was the boom time for higher education. The G.I. Bill enabled veterans to reenter acadame. The National Defense Education Act of 1958 and the Higher Education Facilities Act of 1963 funneled vast amounts of money into colleges and universities. The growth was unprecedented in the nation's history.2 The fourth generation began in the early 1970s when college and university funding and student populations changed dramatically. It has been further affected by the erosion of academic resources since 1980. For the past three years it has been hit hard by a major economic recession that Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman said is unlike any the country has previously experienced.3 Friedman noted that "because we have underinvested and overborrowed to such a great extent for the last dozen years, we have seriously impaired our country's long range growth prospects" (Meyers and Alters 16A). Friedman's observations apply to the fourth generation of university theatres and to professional theatres since the prior three decades are characterized by an overextension of education's and theatre's economic tools. Neither grew as a result of an equitable provision and exchange service based upon continuous market need or demand. Both have relied upon deficit budgeting while defining operations by growth objectives; a strategy which grew opportunistically and concurrently in both the university theatre and the professional theatre. An initial rupture occurred for both institutions in the early 1960s as more and more colleges and universities embraced art training as part of their missions. Consider a position speech delivered by W. MacNeil Lowry in 1961 to a conference of graduate deans. Lowry, then director of the Ford Foundation's Program of Humanities and the Arts, was a principal leader in the funding of non-profit arts organizations. He noted a dilemma in the shift of arts training programs into higher education and away from private institutes. The shift concerned him because it was inconsistent with the traditional college and university role as a place for the liberal education of the...

Elizabethan Stagings of Hamlet: George Pierce Baker and William Poel

On 21 February 1900, William Poel staged the First Quarto Hamlet for a single performance in the Carpenters' Hall, London. On 5 and 6 April 1904, George Pierce Baker mounted a production of Hamlet with Johnston Forbes Robertson in Sanders Hall at Harvard University. The two productions shared a number of remarkable similarities. Both were attempts to stage the play in the Elizabethan manner; therefore, they departed from illusionistic traditions of the nineteenth century. Although there were distinct differences – for example, one had a cast of amateurs, one was professional; one was performed for the public, one for a university – each was an important step in the reformation of Elizabethan staging. The productions also reflected the pursuits of two men who, although they had similar ideas about Elizabethan drama, were motivated by different objectives.

Eugene O'Neill and George Pierce Baker: A Reconsideration

1N THE FALL OF I9I4, after a year of activity which saw completion of nine one-act and two full-length plays, Eugene O'Neill, as Julius Bab noted many years ago with some surprise, what few Europeans would do-he went to school and under Professor [George Pierce] Baker how to write plays.' O'Neill's subsequent experience as a special student at Harvard in Baker's playwriting class has become, long since, a topic of recurrent interest in O'Neill studies, especially with regard to question of Baker's influence on O'Neill. However, when this question has been raised, it has not always been answered in simple, matter-of-fact manner of Julius Bab, who seems to have assumed that Baker had something to teach O'Neill and that O'Neill it. Rather, a great deal of discussion on this point has been devoted to minimizing importance of Baker's influence, even to characterizing it as a very negative influence. For example, as early as I923 Andrew E. Malone observed that it was perfectly obvious that O'Neill learned more from sea than did from Professor Baker.2 Ten years later, James Hilton concluded somewhat more negatively that the Harvard drama year can have had small effect on O'Neill, though what small effect it did have was probably not a good one.3 More recently, in I960, Norman C. Chaitin explained that O'Neill did not return for Baker's second-year course in playwriting because he had nothing to learn from Baker.4 Even more recently, strongest and most