Beginnings

Abstract

In the summer of 1916 in Provincetown, Massachusetts, answering the call of the Provincetown Players for new playscripts, Eugene O’Neill picked out from his trunkfull of plays Bound East for Cardiff, thereby changing the course of American drama. A change was more than overdue because America was offering its audiences mediocre unchallenging theatrical fare at a time when Europe had already witnessed some of the finest ‘modern’ drama. A cursory look at dates indicates the retarded nature of the development of American drama. Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov and Synge were already dead by 1916. Nora slammed the door of her doll’s house nine years before O’Neill was born. Before O’Neill was sixteen Synge’s Riders to the Sea and Chekhov’s The Three Sisters had already been performed. By 1916 Shaw had behind him thirty years of playwriting. Although plays by Ibsen and Shaw were presented on Broadway by that date, no striking change in the direction of American drama was discernible. These European imports, combined with the incremental contributions of important scenic designers (like Adolphe Appia and Gordon Craig) and important directors (like Max Reinhardt and Harley Granville-Barker), did chip away at the materialistic encrustedness of American drama, but for the most part Ibsen and Shaw and Craig and the others were offering theatre of ‘art’, whereas America seemed to be committed to a theatre of ‘business’.