Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre, 1923–1937 (review)

Over the past five years the Southern Illinois University Press's "Theater in the Americas" series, edited by Robert A. Schanke, has produced an array of manuscripts that explore some of the most provocative and largely overlooked practitioners, organizations, and movements of the modern theater tradition in the United States. Titles have included works on Sophie Treadwell, the little theater movement, and Mordecai Gorelick; with this new study of John Howard Lawson, the SIU Press series continues not only to preserve, but also to enhance, its inimitable voice in the study of both modernity and theater within U.S. national culture.

This recent addition to the SIU Press series deftly situates the marginalized, half-hidden work of communist playwright John Howard Lawson within a broader community of socially-aware, politically-engaged creative artists. It also offers an astute look at the trials and tribulations of the literary and artistic left in the years between the First World War and the Second World War. In doing so, Messiah of the New Technique encourages not only the "reconsideration of Lawson's career and the cultural and political left of the interwar years" but also the "larger cultural matrix of that historical moment" (3). The potency of this much needed study is enriched by Chambers's meticulous examination of Lawson's lived experiences, play scripts, letters, and theoretical writings regarding 1920s and 1930s theater as "material manifestations chronicling one man's journey to define who he was and where he belonged in the world as he ventured from 'artist-rebel' to 'political revolutionary'" (204). From the start it is apparent that Chambers is neither necessarily concerned with, nor particularly intrigued by, value judgments of Lawson's plays in production, choosing instead to concentrate his efforts on illustrating ways in which Lawson "was both a product and producer of the social energy specific to this era" (204).

By way of introduction, Chambers takes great care to highlight the fact that a preponderance of existing scholarship has all but dismissed Lawson as a key "player in the evolution of United States drama" (4), with many publications offering nothing more than a "reductive view of Lawson's career in theatre" (5). This judgement, argues Chambers, warrants greater reflection given that during the interwar years Lawson penned Roger Bloomer (1923), Processional (1925), Success Story (1932), Marching Song (1937), among several other plays, as well as the innovative fusion of his Marxist aesthetics and writing style, Theory and Technique of Playwriting (1936). Chambers's egalatarian approach provides a thoughtful, cogent inquiry into all of Lawson's life in theater. Having carved out both niche and need, Chambers sets about the task of delineating his research frame, which is noticeably indebted to both neoMarxist criticism and the tenets of New Historicism. This deployment of materialist historiography provides a "long-overdue new reading of Lawson scripts for the theatre" as well as "a much needed study of the context that enveloped him" (13).

Opening with Lawson's early life as the son of practicing Christian Scientists, continuing through his 1914 graduation from Williams College, and converging on the awakening of his aesthetic sensibilities and political beliefs, Chambers recounts the beginnings of Lawson's "intellectual and spiritual upheaval that would continue and intensify through the middle years of the 1930s" (21). This upheaval led Lawson both to make an early foray into commercial theater and then out of it shortly thereafter when he enlisted in the French ambulance corps where he became fast friends with John Dos Passos. For Chambers, the relationship with Dos Passos and wartime service in France provided the seed for both Lawson's commitment to revolutionary politics and his certainty that theater is a "pulpit from which he could communicate radical content" (22). Aesthetically and ideologically somewhere between Sheldon Cheney and Michael Gold, Lawson's scripts of the mid-1920s bore the mark...