A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama: Volume One, 1900-1940 by C.W.E. Bigsby (review)

Book Reviews c.W. E. BIGSBY. A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama: Volume One, 1900-194°. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1982. Pp. ix, 342, illustrated. $39.50; $14.95 (PB). What should readers expect from the first half of a projected two-volume Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama? British scholar C.W.E. Bigsby cautions us in his introduction not to look for an "exhaustive" overview; instead, he will provide a perspective "concentrating on the major figures" and principal "theatre groups of the period" that were responsible for "shap[ing] the nature of the American dramatic imagination." With that focus, he devotes individual chapters to critical analyses of O'Neill (eighty-five pages that would make a solid, hefty monograph on their own), Wilder, and Hellman, with sizable discussions of Glaspell, Rice, Barry, Saroyan, Maxwell Anderson, Odets, Langston Hughes, and Theodore Ward appearing in other contexts; about the only American playwrights of any continuing consequence who go virtually unnoticed are Kaufman and Hart. Bigsby also includes chapters of cultural history about Provincetown, the Theatre Guild, the Group Theatre, left-wing theatre, the Federal Theatre and Living Newspaper, and black drama; the one considerable body of enduring work he ignores is the American musical - apparently having made a decision, albeit unstated, that it falls outside the purview of his book. That Bigsby rehearses some of these movements at greater length than necessary reveals his neo-Marxist predilection for theatre that is sociopolitical in its orientation. Yet in the process he dusts off some neglected plays, such as Glaspell's The Verge and Ward's Big White Fog, that American critics might now well look at anew. Informing the first two-thirds ofthis study is Bigsby's central thesis: American drama is a drama of "alienation," of man's "loss of an organic relationship" with the cosmos, with society, with the self. Materialism has numbed a formerly redeeming idealism, while metaphysical angst has superseded belief in transcendence. "The dominant image" of such a theatre - seen recurrently in stage symbols of "the cage, the machine, the drifting ship, the petrified forest, the tenement room, the urban street" - is "the loss of space." This "temporal and spiritual dislocation" of man existing at the whim of mechanization, determined by social and psychological forces, and in retreat from once Book Reviews 139 sustaining myths is traced extensively here in the discussion of O'Neill, and it will undoubtedly reoccur in the treatment of Arthur Miller in Volume Two. Bigsby expands upon what others have already said about the connections between Schopenhauer's and Freud's notions of "immutable character" and the tension between the "will to life" and the death wish as they appear in O'Neill's Strange Interlude and Mourning Becomes Electra (his analysis ofMourning is as good as anything available on that play), while he establishes in a new way the dramatist's "literary" links to Melville in attitude, symbology, and world view. Larry in The Iceman Cometh, for instance, calls Ishmael to mind: both are "individual[s] who, knowing all, continued to exist with that knowledge while offering a necessary gesture of ... human solidarity." Bigsby tends to be overinsistent, however, about O'Neill as an early absurdist whose consciousness of "future entropy" and meditations on "the moment of death [as] the only moment of consonance" make him a precursor of Beckett. This approach causes some difficulty when he later explicates Edmund's famous speech about the artist's piercing ofthe fog in Long Day's Journey Into Night, since when the veil is lifted meaning does, indeed, exist, no matter how fleeting the revelation of it might be. The adjective "critical" is appropriate to this oftentimes densely written study in another sense, for Bigsby finds fault, perhaps justifiably, with much American dramatic literature on aesthetic grounds. What disturbs him about most American playwrights is their tendency to sentimentalize (Glaspell, Saroyan, Hellman); their overexplicitness in making their points, as if they distrust their technical skills (O'Neill, again Hellman); and their failure to pursue their insights through to logical conclusions (Sherwood, Barry, and Wilder). A writer whom Bigsby would evidently like to like more but who fails for him...