Staging the War: American Drama and World War II (review)

To many Americans, especially those who lived through it, World War II represents the single most important event of the first half of the 20th century. Yet, surprisingly (and sadly) the theatre produced during this most formative era constitutes little more than a footnote in standard theatre history texts. Considering its contribution to and chronicling of the war years, relatively little has been written about the American theatre between 1939 and 1945 What little that has been written is either incomplete or inaccurate or both. Accounts of theatre during the Second World War contained in general histories of the American stage (e.g., Ethan Morrden's The American Theatre [Oxford, 1981]) provide little more than a laundry list of the era's seminal war-related productions—dramas like Command Decision (1947), Mister Roberts (1947), and Tomorrow the World (1941)—that were made into popular movies. The treatment of these productions in other texts (most notably Garff Wilson's Three Hundred Years of American Drama and Theatre: From Ye Bare and Ye Cubb to Hair [Prentice-Hall, 1982]) doesn't even amount to a listing of these plays. Furthermore, these texts routinely reduce 1940s drama to either escapist fluff like I Remember Mama (1944), Arsenic and Old Lace (1941), and Harvey (1944) or patently ultra-patriotic plays like Lillian Hellman's aggressively anti-Nazi Watch on the Rhine (1941).

Shortly before his death in 2003, Albert Werthiem set out to rectify this "omission" in what will undoubtedly be considered his most significant work, a study of the dramas—some legendary, most now-forgotten—of the World War II era. The result of his efforts, Staging the War: American Drama and World War II, represents a significant advancement over previous scholarship on World War II drama, not only by providing a more comprehensive list of war-era plays, but by significantly expanding the scope of these dramas and by proving that the American playwright was actively engaged in continuous commentary—both pro and con—upon the pending/continuing war and our country's involvement in it. In doing this, Wertheim effectively counters those historians who have proposed that America's wartime playwrights were simply indulging in sensationalized, mindless jingoism rather than actively and seriously writing about the war and making significant contributions to America's intellectual discourse about it.

In its scope alone, Wertheim's work is impressive. Rather than begin his coverage of the drama of the World War II era with plays written after the advent of war or America's entry into the conflict, Wertheim instead introduces and explores those plays written during the 1930s that illustrate that Americans were, in Tennessee Williams's words, "waiting for bombardments"—and waiting in any number of ways: as advocates of intervention in Europe, as isolationists, as the undecided. Thus, although American audiences of the '30s were still entranced by lighthearted fare like Hellzpoppin (1938), The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939), and Life with Father (1939), they were also exposed to dramatized warnings about Nazi and Fascist totalitarianism and impending war in Europe; were introduced to arguments both for and against war through plays like Elmer Rice's Judgment Day (1934), Till the Day I Die (1935) by Clifford Odets, Oliver H.P. Garrett's muddled Waltz in Goose-step (1938), and, the era's most famous work, Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here (1936), which suggests America's myopia about the rise of Hitler and Nazism by dramatizing the takeover of a small American town by jackbooted thugs. During the years immediately preceding America's entrance into the war, audiences were involved in vigorous debate about the benefits and the dangers of isolationism through plays like Archibald MacLeish's verse radio drama Air Raid (1938). Even the first shots of the war were represented in Robert Sherwood's Pulitzer Prize-winning Idiot's Delight (1936).

As important as prewar drama may have...