DURING THE FORMATIVE STAGE of American drama, which lasted
until around 1890, most American plays consisted of slapstick and sentimentalism, and plays about the frontier and the West were
not exceptions. Beginning in the 1890s,
there was a rise of realism in American drama, a trend which
culminated in the production in 1906 of William Vaughn Moody's
The Great Divide, said to mark the beginning of modern
American drama and notable for its use of a western setting and
western characters. Most subsequent plays about the West never
received the kind of notice given to works by eastern and southern
dramatists such as Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee
Williams. But western playwrights Sidney Howard, Lynn Riggs,
William Saroyan, John Steinbeck, and William Inge did write plays
that were acclaimed by audiences and reviewers and that constitute
a significant part of the literary heritage of the American West.
Until recently even most specialists in western American literature
have known little about any western dramas, probably because
few critical studies and literary histories–with the exception
of Felix Sper's From Native Roots (1948) and Ima Honaker
Herron's The Small Town in American Drama (1969)–even
mention more than one or two western plays. Western American
drama is still largely an undiscovered territory waiting to be
explored and mapped.
Any survey of western drama should begin with at least some mention
of Indian myth-dramas and Spanish folk plays, not only because
of their influence on the first Anglo playwrights, but also because
they have provided such an important stimulus for contemporary
western writers.
In Masked Gods: Navaho and Pueblo Ceremonialism(1950),
Frank Waters has explained that Navaho myth-dramas serve at least
three important functions: "to perpetuate the myths and
legends of the tribe" (p. 243); to "teach in the medium
of their own parables the universal truths of life" (p. 249);
and "to cure illnesses of the body and mind" (p. 258). The
mythdramas of many other western American tribes have similar
functions; and their thaumaturgic and therapeutic aspects seem
to have fascinated contemporary western playwrights such as Sam
Shepard, who has shown in plays such as Operation Sidewinder
that he recognizes the magical and healing elements in Indian
ritual.
Another early form of western drama,
the Spanish folk play, has also
been a strong influence on contemporary
dramatists. Folk plays appeared in the Southwest soon after the
founding of Santa Fe and were usually dramatizations of some
biblical story, although Los Comanches is a historical
drama based on a battle with the Indians. Roberto J. Garza says
that Chicano theatre remained alive in the Southwest from the
days of the folk dramas and of Teatro Carpa (a traveling
vaudevillian theatre for the masses) to the rise in this century
of Mexican folk-theatre groups that provided a cultural center
for Chicanos but that failed to "convey that espiritu
of La Raza which was about to manifest itself " (Contemporary
Chicano Theatre, pp. 1–6). Whatever the failings of the
Spanish folk plays and the Mexican folk-theatre groups, they
were probably the main inspiration for Teatro Campesino, which
Luis Valdez founded in the 1960s, and for plays by Valdez, such
as Zoot Suit (1978), plays which have been part of el
renacimiento, the rebirth of Chicano literature.
Another early western cultural group, the Mormons, produced no
firstrate dramas, in spite of the support which the Latter-day
Saints Church, almost from its beginning, had given to the theatre.
Mormons had staged plays even before their westward migration,
and in 1862 they built the Salt Lake Theatre, which was for years
one of the finest theatres in the country. "It was a little
surprising," John S. Lindsay wrote in his history The Mormons
and the Theatre (1905), "that with the love of the drama
so universal in Utah so few contributions to dramatic literature
were offered by local authors for representation on the stage"
(p. 155). In this century, the Mutual Improvement Association's
annual publication of a book of plays often contained original
Mormon dramas, but according to Lael J. Woodbury, "No pro-Mormon
drama has yet achieved commercial success. . . ." Anti-Mormon dramas enjoyed great commercial success in the 1800s, but they are no better artistically than the pro-Mormon plays. William Lysander Adams's
Treason, Stratagems, and Spoils (1852), Thomas Dunn English's
The Mormons (1858), and 
Club's Deseret Deserted (1858)
portray the Mormons as lying, stealing, murdering hypocrites.
Joaquin Miller made a small fortune with his anti-Mormon play
The Danites in the Sierras (1877), although he wrote in
a later preface to the work: "I have always been sorry I
printed it, as it is unfair to the Mormons and the Chinese."
Aside from their historical value as social documents of religious
bigotry, the anti-Mormon plays are chiefly interesting in their
frequent use of the theme of mistaken or lost identity; however,
what O. W. Frost says about Miller's Forty-Nine (1881)
applies to all the anti-Mormon dramas: "It is little more
than a curious exhibit of popular nineteenth-century American
comedy, a rollicking and tearful entertainment without
substance and without serious purpose" (Joaquin Miller, p. 106).
Although not polemical like the
pro-and anti-Mormon plays, other western American dramas of the
formative period (from the 1850s to 1890) were also artistic
failures, and no other early western playwright achieved financial
success as Miller had done. But in spite of such artistic and
financial failure, some of the frontier dramas have a few redeeming
features. Alonzo Delano's A Live Woman in the Mines (1857),
for example, deserves to be better known for its lively frontier
dialogue: "Whoora! for a live woman in the mines. What'll
the boys say? they'll peel out o' their skins for joy. . . .
Injins and grizzlies clar the track, or a young airthquake will
swaller you." If copies of A Live Woman had not become
almost as rare as the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, perhaps
Delano's use of frontier dialogue might have had some influence
on later western playwrights. In western drama, only the robust
frontier boasts in Roadside (1930) by Lynn Riggs equal the colorful
lingo in A Live Woman, but the probability that Riggs
had read Delano's play is small.
A Live Woman in the Mines could be performed in the rough-and-ready
atmosphere of California's Gold Rush camps, but more sedate eastern
audiences might not have paid to listen to an evening of frontier
hyperbole. What easterners did pay to see were less linguistically
exuberant plays such as Frank Hitchcock's Davy Crockett (1872),
which portrays a frontiersman who is more of a genteel Natty
Bumppo than a boasting ringtail roarer. And Augustin Daly's Horizon
(1871) is largely a bowdlerized caricature of the actual
West–complete with eastern dudes, drunken Indians, bumbling
soldiers, and a stage Chinaman. The main redeeming feature of
Horizon is Daly's satire, which sometimes resembles Mark
Twain's; but unfortunately, Daly's debt to Bret Harte is too obvious to escape notice.
Harte himself wrote quite a few
plays, but only three were staged and none was successful. Two
Men of Sandy Bar (1876) combines elements from several of
Harte's stories, but its moralism, bad dialogue, and lack of
dramatic tension make it a flop. "Ah Sin!" (1877),
the result of Harte's unhappy collaboration with Mark Twain,
was also an artistic and financial failure. Mark Twain's curtain
speech contains what is probably the best critical comment on
the joint effort: "I never saw a play that was so much improved
by being cut down; and I believe it would have been one of the
very best plays in the world if the manager's strength had held
out so that he could cut out the whole of it." Twain apparently
recognized that he and Harte had talents more suited to prose
narrative than to drama; and in Harte's case, other writers were
more successful in dramatizing his stories than was Harte himself.
A good example of such adaptation is Bartley Campbell's My
Partner ( 1879), which borrows a theme from Harte. Campbell's
characters boast that California is as good as heaven,
but the evil actions of many of them seem better suited to hell.
Like most nineteenth-century American
dramas, Harte's plays and the dramatic adaptations that others
wrote from his stories were melodramas, a form especially well
suited to be a part of theatrical productions that were like
Wild West shows. William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody had, in
fact, begun his career in 1871 "as an actor under the direction
of Ned Buntline," the pen name of E. Z. C. Judson, the most prolific
of the dime novelists.
2
A year later, Cody started his
own company, commissioning frontier melodramas; and through a
kind of theatrical mitosis, one of Cody's actors, John Wallace
"Captain Jack" Crawford, began his own company and
wrote three frontier melodramas. According to Garff B. Wilson,
nineteenth-century frontier melodramas enjoyed great popularity
and are the prototypes of twentieth-century movie and T.V. Westerns.
"During all this time," Wilson
says, "the genre has followed the same basic formula of
melodrama":
By the beginning of the 1890s, at least two playwrights began
to add more realistic details to plots that were still basically
western melodramas. By then, too, western stereotypes were quite
familiar to American audiences; the frontier melodramas were
dramatic equivalents of dime novels and novels of local color.
Such plays–Charles Townsend's The Golden Gulch (1893)
is a good example–usually had, in addition to the formula
plot outlined by Wilson, a cast that included a Chinaman, a taciturn
Indian, a smooth villain, an eastern dude, a coarse but warmhearted
local girl, and a hero. Such stereotypes were effectively used
in a satirical comedy by Charles H. Hoyt, A Texas Steer (1890),
in which a group of Texans try to get what they can from the
government in Washington, D.C. In their naivete the Texans are
like other Americans, but their frontier barbarism is depicted
as a western trait. But Hoyt's use of the stereotypes was an
exception; many of the western plays of his fellow dramatists
were as predictable as B-grade Western movies and were about
as aesthetically satisfying, too.
Augustus Thomas and David Belasco, the two 1890s dramatists who
tried to do more than produce Westerns with predictable plots,
never managed to write plays without some trace of Bret Harte-like
sentimentality. Both Thomas and Belasco, however, did manage
to make their dramas more realistic than the typical
play of that period. Thomas traveled to many western states,
gathering facts about local settings, characters, and events,
facts which he would later work into his dramas. Unfortunately,
he could never resist the temptation to make at least part of
a play melodramatic or overly romantic. In Mizzoura (1893),
for example, is filled with the details of an actual train robbery,
but the characters seem straight from a story by Bret Harte.
Thomas could, however, create realistic characters. The rancher
and his wife in Arizona (1899) are based upon actual people,
and they give the play a strong air of reality; the rest of the
play, though, is conventional melodrama. Belasco, too, used actual
incidents as the basis for his dramas, but he seemed fascinated by events
that, however real, seem quite improbable, and his characters
seem more like outcasts from Poker Flat than like typical westerners.
In addition, Belasco's The Girl I Left Behind Me (1893)
resembles Thomas's Arizona in tacitly condoning the racism,
sexism, and militarism of the age, and Belasco distorted the
Spanish land grant conflict in The Rose of the Rancho (1906).
But Belasco will long be remembered for The Girl of the Golden
West (1905), which, in spite of its improbabilities, gives
a sense of Gold Rush life that almost approaches the exuberance
and playfulness of Mark Twain's Roughing It and which
was the basis of Giacomo Puccini's La Fanciulla del West (1910),
"the first grand opera to be written on an American theme."
Like Belasco and Thomas, William Vaughn Moody worked hard to
make his plays more realistic, using an actual incident as the
basis for The Great Divide (1906), the drama that is said
to have revolutionized American theatre. Moody had heard about
a woman who, in order to save herself from being raped by three
westerners, had told one of the men that she would be his if
he would save her from the others, which he did by buying her.
In The Great Divide, the woman is Ruth Jordan, daughter
of an old New England family, and the rough westerner who buys
her is Stephen Ghent. Ruth stays with Ghent, who has fallen in
love with her and treats her well, and she has their child; but
her Puritan conscience won't permit her to remain in a relationship
which had such an unholy beginning, so while Ghent strikes a
bonanza, she works like a peon, making baskets that she sells
to get enough money to buy herself back. She eventually does
so and then returns to her New England home. Ghent follows her,
losing his own fortune to redeem her family's. When he confronts
her, saying that since they love each other, he wants her to
return to him and to ignore what first brought them together,
she forces him to see that she had to leave because they had
come together not out of love but from the force of violent domination.
Having forced that concession from him, Ruth then consents to
go back with him.
As the summary shows, The Great Divide has some of the
melodramatic elements common to other western dramas of the period.
Yet as Martin Halpern has explained, Moody used
conventionalities to express profound and moving ideas. Ruth
and Ghent both undergo a painful transformation. Though the adventure-craving
part of Ruth initially finds Ghent attractive, she rejects him
at the insistence of the Puritan side of her personality, which
recognizes that evil cannot be ignored. After arguing for the
individual freedom offered by the frontier, Ghent ultimately
recognizes that Ruth is right in insisting that they cannot ignore
the evil which first brought them together. Halpern compares their moral and emotional
struggle to that of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale in Hawthorne's
The Scarlet Letter.
The Great Divide is also strikingly similar to Owen Wister's
The Virginian (1902), primarily because the romance of
Molly Stark and the Virginian proceeds in many respects like
that of Ruth and Ghent. Both the Virginian and Ghent woo New
Englanders, and both men are candid, sometimes blunt, westerners.
In both the novel and the play, when the cowboys win their ladies
the West seems to have triumphed over the East, but a closer
look shows that the American system of values, including male
dominance, is the final victor. What Halpern says of Moody is
true of Wister as well: "Moody is concerned not with widening
the `Great Divide' between East and West but with closing it.
. . ."
Moody achieved for American drama a little bit of what Mark Twain
had done for the American novel when he wrote Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn. As Maurice F. Brown puts it, "The
Great Divide brought realism and symbolism in an effective
combination into the American theatre, offering a native model
on which dramatists might build."
After World War I, aspiring playwrights not only had The Great
Divide and European plays by Ibsen, Chekhov, Shaw, and Strindberg as
models, but they could also see that one of their contemporaries,
Eugene O'Neill, was creating a modern American drama. Universities
had started to offer courses in playwriting, and college theatres
and new professional theatre groups were staging original dramas
by young American playwrights. Another Californian, Sidney Howard,
was a graduate of Professor George Pierce Baker's playwriting
course at Harvard. When Howard wrote a play about an unconventional
love affair, the Theatre Guild of New York-"dedicated to the production
of fine plays which commercial managers were afraid to present"
The men are Tony Patucci, a Napa Valley grape grower, and his hired man Joe; and the woman is Amy, Tony's mail-order bride. When Amy arrives at Tony's ranch
to be married to him, she at first thinks that Joe is Tony, since Tony had sent her Joe's photograph and said it was a picture of himself and since Tony had broken his leg shortly before her arrival and was therefore not present for it. In spite of that initial confusion, the wedding takes place; and afterwards, when Tony falls asleep, Amy and Joe succumb to a moment of strong sexual attraction. Three months later, when Amy and Joe learn that she is pregnant as a result of their one night together, the play appears to be headed in the direction of melodrama, for Amy and Joe decide to leave together, even though they are not in love and Joe does not want to be married. And when Amy breaks down and tells Tony everything, he first goes berserk, swearing all kinds of vengeance. But at this point Howard gives the play some realistic twists, and the earlier melodramatic elements become only a counterpoint for the play's basically realistic thrust. Tony, who is much older than Amy and Joe, cools
down and begins to think about the situation. Then, by pointing out that he and Amy love each other, that he wants a child, and that Joe wants to roam with the
Wobblies, Tony persuades Amy to stay and Joe to go.
Barrett H. Clark called They
Knew What They Wanted "a comedy of second thoughts;
in the first act Amy starts to do the conventional thing because
her pride is wounded, but on second thought she knows she wants
comfort and affection more than she does revenge; in the third
act Tony starts to do the same thing, because somewhere within
him is a conviction that a good husband must kill his wife's
lover, but on second thought he takes a wiser course."
9
Howard's characters arrive at their
second thoughts not by discussing ideas (as in The Great Divide)
but by a process of individual reconsideration that awakens them
to their actual feelings, thereby helping them to change their
minds. They Knew What They Wanted has been overshadowed
by its musical adaptation, The Most Happy Fella (1956),
which diminished the effect of realism by overplaying the sentimentality
in the story. For its sensitive portrayal of typical westerners
without gunplay and without other stage heroics, Howard's original
drama is a landmark in western American literature. Howard spent some time in Hollywood, where he wrote screenplays for Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith
and Dodsworth. In the 1920s, Hollywood entered its Golden
Age and became the subject of a number of plays, most of them
satirical comedies. What the playwrights satirized is the Hollywood
myth of the West as a land where the good cowboy always wins.
They showed that only fools believe a movie's version of the
West or of any other place; that Hollywood itself has become a new
gold camp, luring naive fame-and-fortune hunters by the thousands.
The best known satirizations of Hollywood are George Kaufman
and Marc Connelly's Merton of the Movies (1922; based
on the novel by Harry Leon Wilson) and Moss Hart and George Kaufman's
Once in a Lifetime (1930). Although satires such as these
hilariously expose the phoniness of the movieland West, they
give no sense of the real world on the other side of the false-front
sets.
For the people in that real world, life was not very hilarious.
The Dust Bowl and the Great Depression made the West of the late
1920s and the 1930s a place of hardship and anxiety. Thanks to
the support of many group theatre organizations, the Federal
Theatre projects, and university theatre programs–not only
at Harvard and Yale, but also at schools such as the University
of North Dakota and the University of Washington–serious
young playwrights received encouragement to write plays about
the hard times. Also during those two decades, the upsurge of
interest in regional literature helped to provide audiences for
new regional dramas.
A good example of such regional playwrights is E. P. Conkle,
whose Crick Bottom Plays 1928) are humorous sketches of
folksy Nebraskans.( When Conkle tried to write serious plays
about events and characters from western history and folklore,
he failed to bring them to life. But he was successful when he
wrote 200 Were Chosen (1937), a drama about the resettlement
in Alaska of destitute midwestern farmers. The play is strikingly
similar to parts of The Grapes of Wrath, and much of Conkle's
writing is as effective as Steinbeck's. Another Nebraska playwright,
Virgil Geddes, saw in the lives of midwestern farm families the
same problems that had faced the ancient Greeks, and he wrote
several dramas about incestuous relationships between fathers
and daughters. W. David Sievers says that in The Earth Between
(1930) and Native Ground (1932), "Geddes . . . attempted
to capture the Greek feeling for the majesty of a struggle with
the hereditary curse of evil within a family," but he did not
quite achieve "O'Neill's mastery of his material."
O'Neill's plays are rivalled, however,
by the works of the greatest of the western dramatists: Lynn
Riggs. His Green Grow the Lilacs (1931) has been so popular
in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical version that millions
of people outside the region think the West is Oklahoma!
(1943) plus some Indians. Delightfully entertaining though it
is, the musical has a saccharine optimism which probably deters
most readers from bothering to look at the
original drama or at any of the
rest of the more than two dozen plays by Riggs. What readers would find in Green
Grow the Lilacs is a dark side more ominous than the treatment
of evil in Oklahoma! The shivaree in Riggs's play is a powerful
and frightening display of mob lewdness and callousness, and
the mob consists of those who are usually considerate neighbors.
Also in Green Grow the Lilacs, Jeeter (Jud Fry) has been
warped by the demeaning force of his work, whereas Curly's easygoing
warm manner is the result of the freedom he's enjoyed as a cowboy.
In Oklahoma! Curly escapes a jail sentence, an ending
which, as Thomas A. Erhard has suggested, "is a little more
clear-cut in its lightness than the almost bittersweet Lilacs
. . ." (Lynn Riggs, p. 21).
Riggs had written a number of plays
before Green Grow the Lilacs, and one of the first–Big
Lake (1927), about the killing of two innocent teen-agers–had
been praised by Burns Mantle and Barrett H. Clark; and after
its production, Sidney Howard had encouraged Riggs to continue
writing. Like Howard, Riggs moved to Hollywood for awhile to
make a living by writing screenplays, and he also continued to
write dramas. Yet in spite of his early reputation as one of
America's most promising playwrights, Riggs never wrote a Broadway
hit and he never received the kind of acclaim granted to O'Neill.
Nevertheless, almost all of Riggs's plays are good, and a number
of them are first-rate.
Roadside: Or Borned in Texas (1930) presents a ringtail
roarer who woos and wins the ex-wife of a down-to-earth farmer.
While he woos, the swaggering frontier hero demolishes a courthouse
and jail and then brags his way out of punishment. Like the tall
tales of the mountain men, the boasts in Roadside create a special
and comic world of hyperbole, as one can see in the following
passage:
Erhard is clearly right when he says that Riggs
"captured the poetic flavor of frontier speech almost as
well as John Millington Synge captured that of Irish dialects"
(p. 2). At first the Irish refused to recognize Synge's achievement,
feeling that his plays were none too flattering; perhaps a similar
defensive reaction by Americans is part of the reason why Riggs
has not yet been recognized as the great writer he is. Riggs
was a master of tragedy as well as comedy. A Lantern to See
By (1928) is about a farmer who tyrannizes
his family. Here a western playwright tried to emulate the Greeks
and succeeded. John Harmon's whole life is his sons, but his
immense pride in them is overshadowed by his determination to
domineer. His domination of his eldest son, Jodie, so stunts
the boy's spirit that when he thinks he can find
no other escape, he is driven to kill his father. Another cause
of the patricide is John Harmon's forcing himself upon the girl
Jodie loves. The sexual rivalry that pits father against son
is apparent underneath their squabbles over work and money. Yet
Riggs shows us that even that sexual conflict is caused by a
deeper division, for John Harmon is the pioneer, the proud self-made
man who wants to dominate everything–Nature, his children,
women–whereas Jodie is of the second generation on the land and seeks sympathy and understanding.
The sexual rivalry between a farmer
and his son and the boasts of a frontier braggart were not subjects
that excited commercial theatre owners on Broadway, so Riggs
escaped obscurity only because he had written the play from which
Oklahoma! was created. When one considers that a widely
used textbook such as The Norton Anthology of American Literature
(1979) contains not a single reference to any American dramatist–not
even O'Neill–then it may be safe to assume that almost all
literary critics and historians have never read a line written
by Riggs. Amazingly productive in the face of such neglect, Riggs
wrote his last (and far from his best) play–a musical entitled
Toward the Western Sky (1951)–because he had received
a commission for a historical pageant-drama.
Pageant-dramas and other historical plays comprise a large category
of western drama, but unlike western novelists, playwrights have
not succeeded in bringing the Old West back to life, perhaps
because, as Susanne Langer has pointed out, the novel is virtual
memory pointing toward the present, whereas the drama is a virtual
present pointing toward the future; and until recently the West
was so young and changing so rapidly that no future could be
envisioned with certainty.
11
One of the best of the historical
plays is Maxwell Anderson's Night Over Taos (1928), which
recounts the story of the Taos rebellion of 1847, but which "belongs
among his lesser credits."
12
More effective at showing how the
past is linked to the present, Talbot Jennings's No More Frontier
(1931) dramatizes the changes in a pioneer Idaho family over
several generations. But no western historical play has yet matched
the artistry of A. B. Guthrie's The Big Sky or Wallace
Stegner's Angle of Repose.
Ostensibly about a robbery in a
western desert, Robert E. Sherwood's The Petrified Forest
(1935) shows allegorically that the American sense of history
had become petrified. Some twentieth-century robbers descend
on a desert filling station, where they hole up with hostages
until a posse shoots it out with the gang. But before the gang's
leader leaves, he fulfills his promise to shoot a destitute young
poet who had asked to be killed so that the granddaughter of
the filling station owner could receive the benefits of a $5,000
life insurance policy. The young poet mentions T. S. Eliot's
"The Hollow Men," an allusion which reinforces the impression
that Sherwood chose the southwestern desert for his setting because
he saw it as a good symbol of the wasteland and because the dreams
of the old frontier are petrified there like the forest in the
desert. In contrast to Sidney Howard and Lynn Riggs, neither
Sherwood nor his characters look upon the West as home; for them it is just a way station until they can get somewhere
else.
The twentieth-century urban West
is home for most of the characters in William Saroyan's My
Heart's in the Highlands (1939) and The Time of Your Life
(1939), but their behavior and beliefs are little changed
from what one finds in the pages of Bret Harte. My Heart's
in the Highlands is a sentimental drama about a struggling
poet and his nine-year-old son who are inspired by the bungling
and philosophy of an old stranger. A Pulitzer Prize was awarded
for The Time of Your Life, but Saroyan refused it. The
play's setting is a San Francisco waterfront bar in and out of
which characters drift while the bartender watches some of the
regulars interact with the other customers. An eccentric rich
man befriends a two-dollar whore and encourages her and his slow
friend to fall in love. When a police detective picks on the
whore, we expect the rich man or her new lover to retaliate,
but instead the cop is killed by Kit Carson, a talkative old
Indian fighter. The whore with a heart of gold is straight from
Bret Harte; and once one notices that resemblance, it becomes
clear that many of the other characters also have Hartesian prototypes.
The regulars in the bar share a feeling of community and camaraderie
that is similar to the spirit evinced by some of the groups and
towns in Harte's stories.
Although better known than Riggs, Saroyan was not nearly so good
a playwright as his Oklahoma contemporary, and the critical consensus
holds that Saroyan's later dramas did not match the freshness
and spontaneity of his two 1939 plays. For example, Love's
Old Sweet Song (1940), Saroyan's spoof of John Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath, suffers from a plot that was "badly
neglected."
13
Ironically, Steinbeck wrote a play,
Of Mice and Men (1937), that is much better than any of
Saroyan's dramas. Steinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men, The Moon
Is Down (1942), and Burning Bright (1950) as play-novelettes,
"novel[s] which can be played," as he defined them. The
only one of these works that has a western setting, Of Mice
and Men is a major work of western American literature. Although
George and Lennie's dream of owning their own ranch is crushed,
Steinbeck shows us how powerful and sustaining that dream can
be. As Malcolm Goldstein has noted, "Steinbeck is reluctant
to point a moral by directly linking the defeat of the pair to
the national economic situation; rather
than do so, he is content to create a situation in which the
dual protagonists are victims of their own skewed psychological
structures. Yet darting through their story are insights into
the worker's life. . . ."
In contrast to Steinbeck and Riggs,
western dramatists of the 1940s showed scenes of real life only
to suggest that it can be escaped through fantasy. Robert Finch's
Plays of the American West (1947) are short dramas in
most of which a happy resolution is achieved when the protagonist
begins to live in an imaginary world that is an escape from the
harsh reality of the actual and inhospitable West. Mary Chase's
Harvey (1944), the best and most widely known of her works,
is like Finch's plays in that it suggests that fantasy is often
preferable to reality. Although Chase is a longtime resident
of Denver and although Harvey is set in a city in the
Far West, there is little that marks her play as western.
A theatrical development of the 1940s that reached full bloom
in the next decade was the production of hit musicals on western
themes. Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! (1943) is
the best known of these, but many of the western musicals that
followed were almost as popular: Irving Berlin's Annie Get
Your Gun (1946); Lerner and Loewe's Paint Your Wagon (1952);
the film musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954);
Harold Rome's Destry Rides Again (1959); Rodgers and Hammerstein's
Flower Drum Song
(1959); and Meredith Willson's The Unsinkable Molly Brown
(1960). As drama, the musicals differ from earlier melodramas
only in the addition of songs, a few more realistic details,
and an unbounded optimism that is never disappointed by an unresolved
conflict. In the world of the western musicals, the West becomes
a kind of vast Disneyland and life there is a game with a predictable
happy ending.
Without any of the saccharine optimism of the musicals, the plays
of William Inge are studies in midwestern despair and psychological
turmoil. Yet four of Inge's plays were Broadway hits during the
1950s, bringing him fame and fortune: Come Back, Little Sheba
(1950), about an alcoholic chiropractor who had wanted to
be a doctor, and his childless wife whose life is empty; Picnic
(1953; Pulitzer Prize), about a young drifter, Hal, whose
love affair with a small-town girl leads to his expulsion from
the town; Bus Stop
(1955), about some passengers whose forced stay in a small-town
cafe leads to a successful romance for a Montana cowboy and a
nightclub singer but only to more loneliness for others; and
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs
(1957), which is set in a small Oklahoma town of the 1920s and
which shows the family struggles of a cowboy turned harness salesman.
Although popular and often praised, Inge's plays have also been
strongly criticized. Gerald Weales, for example, finds the talk
in an Inge play dull and whining: "The naturalistic tradition
seems to have spawned a host of dull people who are bromidic and
repetitive, inarticulate except at those moments of high whine
when they grind out their tales of woe; Inge's plays have their
quota of such characters."
Critics such as R. Baird Shuman have pointed out that many of
Inge's characters must humble themselves and must accept a more
realistic view of life before they can find any sort of happiness.
Inge shows that it is because of social pressures and psychological
forces that they come to realize what they must do. In some of
his plays, the pressures take the form of ancient social patterns.
According to Philip M. Armato, "Picnic can be viewed
as an incisive study of modern scapegoat ritual. . . . Inge creates
in Hal a victim for our times. Hal is polluted by the sins of
the townspeople which are laid upon his head through the psychological
device of projection. . . . Instead of punishing themselves for
their own transgressions, the townspeople punish Hal"
Inge's plays show not only the universal problems of small-town
life but also the special pressures that plague the West because
the frontier is gone. In The Dark at the Top of the Stairs,
Rubin expresses well the theme of most of Inge's plays: "Sometimes
I wonder if it's not a lot easier to pioneer a country than it
is to settle down in it." Most of Inge's characters cannot settle
down, because they are lonely, insecure, and bored. Nothing in
their empty lives substitutes for the sense of purpose and the
challenges that filled the lives of the pioneers. Like the characters
in many post–World War II western novels, Inge's characters
struggle on a frontier within themselves. Before they can find
happiness they must come to see that, as Hegel put it,
"Freedom is the recognition of necessity."
Inge achieved what Lynn Riggs had
never been lucky enough to enjoy: success on Broadway. But western
American dramatists had to wait until the 1970s before they could
receive national acclaim regardless of whether Broadway producers
cared for their work. By the end of the 1950s, a number of outstanding
western dramas had been written, but no one had published a volume
of Great Plays of the American West, probably because
the interest in regional culture that had peaked in the 1930s
had waned by then and because in the West the short story and
the novel had such strong, coherent traditions that few critics
thought much of other genres. Perhaps, too, the inferior works
of the formative period–the pro-and anti-Mormon dramas and
the melodramas–discouraged readers from pursuing any further
a study of western drama. Whatever the reasons for their neglect,
the western plays of William Vaughn Moody, Sidney Howard, Lynn
Riggs, William Saroyan, John Steinbeck, and William Inge
deserve our attention now. A tradition of western drama does
exist; and its sustained study could be a positive cultural force, not only because the plays can entertain us, but also because they can give us a clearer view of ourselves.
JAMES
H. MAGUIRE, Boise State University
1. Lael J. Woodbury, "Mormonism and the Commercial Theatre,"
Brigham Young University Studies 12 (1972): 238–39.
2. Paul T. Nolan, John Wallace Crawford, Twayne's United
States Authors Series, No. 378 (Boston: Twayne, 1981), p. 34.
3. Garff B. Wilson, Three Hundred Years of American Drama, 2nd
ed. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1982), p. 136.
4. Arthur Hobson Quinn, A History of the American Drama: From the Civil War
to the Present (New York: Crofts, 1936), p. 192.
5. Martin Halpern, William Vaughn Moody, Twayne's United States Authors Series, No. 64 (New York: Twayne, 1964), p. 130.
6. Maurice F. Brown, Estranging Dawn: The Life and Works of William Vaughn Moody (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1973), p. 214.
7. Wilson, p. 242.
8. Joseph Wood Krutch, The American Drama Since 1918: An lnformal History (New York: Braziller, 1957), p. 53.
9. Barrett H. Clark, An Hour of American Drama (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1930), p. 81.
10. W. David Sievers, Freud on Broadway: A History of Psychoanalysis and the American Drama (New York: Cooper Square, 1970), p. 95.
11. Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (New
York: Scribner's, 1953), pp. 306–07.
12. Alfred S. Shivers, Maxwell Anderson, Twayne's United States Authors Series, No. 279 (New York: Twayne, 1976), p. 30.
13. Howard R. Floan, William Saroyan, Twayne's United States Authors Series, No. 100 (New York: Twayne, 1966), pp. 108–09.
14. Malcolm Goldstein, The Political Stage: American Drama
and Theater of the Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 372.
15. Gerald Weales, American Drama Since World War II (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), p. 44.
16. Philip M. Armato, "The Bum as Scapegoat in William Inge's Picnic," Western American Literature 10 (1976): 275.
The hero is the rough but valiant and resourceful
frontiersman; the heroine is a pure, modest maiden with hidden
strength in her character; the villain is either an ugly gunslinger
or a suave, polished hypocrite; the conflict that develops runs
a predictable course, but after the perils, fights, narrow escapes,
and misunderstandings have occurred, the villain and his bad
guys are defeated; the hero and the good guys are victorious.
3
Wild and reckless,
Borned in Texas
Suckled by a bear,
Steel backbone,
Tail screwed on,
Twelve feet long,
Dare any son-of-a-bitch to step on it!
Primary Sources
Conkle, Ellsworth Prouty. 200 Were Chosen. New York: French, 1937.
Delano, Alonzo. A Live Woman in the Mines: Or, Pike County Ahead! New York: French, 1857.
Howard, Sidney. They Knew What They Wanted. New York: French, 1925.
Inge, William. Four Plays. (Includes Come Back, Little Sheba; Picnic; Bus Stop; and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs.) New York: Random House, 1958.
Moody, William Vaughn. The Great Divide. New York: Macmillan, 1909.
Riggs, Lynn. Big Lake. New York: French, 1927.
. Green Grow the Lilacs. New York: French,
1931.
. Roadside: Or, Borned in Texas. New
York: French, 1930.
. Two Oklahoma Plays. (Includes A Lantern to See By and Sump'n Like Wings.) New York: French, 1928.
Saroyan, William. Three Plays: My Heart's in the Highlands; The Time of Your Life; Love's Old Sweet Song. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939.
Sherwood, Robert E. The Petrified Forest. New York: Scribner's, 1935.
Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men. New York: Covici, Friede, 1937.
Secondary Sources
Brown, Maurice F. Estranging Dawn: The Life and Works of William Vaughn Moody. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973. Detailed biography related to the works.
Clark, Barrett H. An Hour of American Drama. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1930. Has brief sections on Sidney Howard, E. P. Conkle, Virgil Geddes, and Lynn Riggs.
Dusenberry, Winifred L. The
Theme of Loneliness in Modern American Drama. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1960. Discusses plays by
Sherwood and Inge.
Goldstein, Malcolm. The Political Stage:
American Drama and Theater of the Great Depression. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1974. Thorough analysis of drama from
1920 to 1940 in terms of government activity and politics.
Herron, Ima Honaker. The Small Town in American Drama. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1969. Biographical
details about western dramatists, plot summaries, and evaluations of plays, from Gold Rush days to the 1960s. Indispensable for a study of western drama.
Hughes, Glenn. A History of the American Theatre, 1700–1950. London: French, 1951. Theatrical history by a western playwright who was also a teacher of playwrights.
Krutch, Joseph Wood. The American
Drama Since 1918: An Informal History. New York: Braziller,
1957. Discusses, among others, Howard, Sherwood, Saroyan, and
Steinbeck.
Quinn, Arthur Hobson. A History
of the American Drama: From the Beginning to the Civil War. 2nd ed. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1943.
Sievers, W. David. Freud on
Broadway: A History of Psychoanalysis and the American Drama.
New York: Cooper Square, 1970. Examines the influence of
theories of psychology on twentieth-century drama, including
comments on plays by Howard, Anderson, Sherwood, Totheroh, Riggs, Inge, Chase, and Foote.
Sper, Felix. From Native Roots: A Panorama of Our Regional Drama. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton, 1948. A survey by western subregions, providing plot summaries, bibliographies, and information about regional theatre programs.
Weales, Gerald. American Drama Since World War II. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962. Sometimes harsh, but thought-provoking.
Wilson, Garff B. Three Hundred Years of American Drama and Theatre. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1982. An adequate introduction for beginning students.
Standard Sources
The Twayne's United States Authors
Series includes works on the following authors of western plays:
O. W. Frost, Joaquin Miller, No. 119 (1967); Paul T. Nolan,
John Wallace Crawford, No. 378 (1981); Martin Halpern,
William Vaughn Moody, No. 64 (1964); Earle Labor, Jack
London, No. 230 (1974); T. M. Pearce, Mary Austin, No.
92 (1965); Sidney Howard White, Sidney Howard, No. 288
(1977); Warren French, John Steinbeck, No. 2, 2nd ed.
(1977); R. Baird Shuman, Robert E. Sherwood, No. 58 (1964);
Howard R. Floan, William Saroyan, No. 100 (1966); and R. Baird Shuman, William Inge, No. 95 (1965).
The Steck-Vaughn Southwest Writers
Series includes pamphlets on the following authors of western
plays: Jo W. Lyday, Mary Austin, No. 16 (1968) and Thomas
A. Erhard, Lynn Riggs, No. 29 (1970). See also the following
pamphlet in the Boise State University Western Writers Series:
Benjamin S. Lawson, Joaquin Miller, No. 43 (1980).
Advanced Study
See James H. Maguire, "A Bibliography
of Western American Drama," Western American Literature 14
(August 1979): 149–63, for a listing of published plays
about the American West and for a checklist of some secondary
materials. By no means exhaustive, this bibliography stands in
need of corrections and additions; but it includes some otherwise
relatively inaccessible information.
Arthur Hobson Quinn's A History of the American Drama (1936;
1943) contains information about the many western American dramas
that exist only in manuscript form and the many others that have
long been out of print and are difficult to obtain.
Another source of information about
unpublished western plays is the government document entitled
Dramatic Compositions Copyrighted in the United States: 1870–1916.
Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1918.
. A History
of the American Drama: From the Civil War to the Present. New York: Crofts, 1936. Quinn is a gold mine of information–he gives play summaries, bibliographies, and biographical information–but his high praise of some nineteenth-century dramas now seems overdone. Contains information about many dramas that exist only in manuscript form, are out of print, or otherwise difficult to obtain.
© Texas Christian University Press, 1998. All rights reserved.