Introduction: A Matter for Experts

Abstract

The early twentieth century is a problematic era in American theatre. A key critical commonplace is that the work of this era avoided or simply ignored the seismic shifts of the world beyond the Great White Way. A few scholars, however, have shown some appreciation of the pre-1920 years of Broadway. Brenda Murphy, for example, acknowledges the period as one of transition—crucial years for establishing realistic principles in American drama (Murphy 86). John Gassner makes a case for the “sweepings” of Progressive muckraking that “fell” on the early twentieth-century American stage (Gassner viii), and the controversial feminist heroines of Rachel Crothers have garnered more than cursory interest in the past 25 years. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that Ronald Wainscott’s summation of the period is representative of—an era given “short shrift” because “what is clearly missing in most of the work is a direct assessment of or confrontation with the obvious vicissitudes and tensions of the larger world surrounding the microcosm of the American theatre” (Wainscott, “Plays” 263).