An American Tragedy as Epic Theater: The Piscator Dramatization

AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY AS EPIC THEATER: THE PISCATOR DRAMATIZATION THE HISTORY OF ERWIN PIsCATOR'S German dramatization of Dreiser's masterpiece, An American Tragedy, begins with one quarrel and ends with another. Separating these disputes were six years of preparation, frustration, friendship, hard work, qualified triumph, and even tragedy for the scores of people who at one time or another lent their energies to the play's creation and production. Of this cooperative· enterprise the present study proposes to give some account. Like so many other inveterate novelists, Theodore Dreiser thought himself something of a playwright, and no amount of disappointment or expenditure of misdirected effort could rid him of the desire to write successfully for the stage. In Dreiser's own lifetime, Howells, James, and Sherwood Anderson entertained similar aspirations, but in their attempts as in his, the result was a dramatic output which constitutes at the most an interesting appendage to an achievement in prose fiction. As a playwright, Dreiser was busiest between 1913 and 1920, a fallow period in his career as a novelist.! In Plays of the Natural and Supernatural (1916), he collected seven short dramatic pieces, all but one of which had previously appeared in periodicals; The Hand of the Potter: A Tragedy in Four Acts followed in 1918; and two fragmentary plays were included in the miscellany Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub in 1920. Of these ten published plays, the most ambitious, The Hand of the Potter, was first produced (rather unsuccessfully) by the Provincetown Theatre in 1921;2 some of the others have been staged by little theaters. But Dreiser himself never lost interest in any of them. In 1938, for example, he expanded "The Girl in the Coffin," written originally in 1913, into a full-length play and brought it to the attention of Gertrude Lawrence and others (Elias, pp. 269 and 348). No one offered to produce it. All in all, Dreiser's plays reveal a concern with experimental techniques and unhackneyed themes which make them mildly significant landmarks of the pre-O'Neill American drama. Somewhat ironically, Dreiser's most successful contribution to the theater was his most successful novel. On October 11, 1926, Patrick 1. Dreiser published no novels between The "Genlw" (1915) and An American Tragedy (1925). 2. Robert H. Elias, Theodore Dreiser: ApMZe of Nature (New York, 1949), p. 207. 365 366 MODERN DRAMA February Kearney's adaptation of An American Tragedy began a run of 216 performances at New York's Longacre Theatre,S but the movie version produced by Paramount in 1931 was a disappointment.4 Twenty years later Paramount made amends. As A Place in the Sun the novel was at last brought to the screen in a thoroughly creditable production.I) In a roundabout way the Kearney play brought the theatrical possibilities of Dreiser's book to the attention of Erwin Piscator, whose reputation as one of the most gifted of Germany's avant-garde producers and directors had grown steadily since the end of World War I. By the late twenties Dreiser was also becoming better known in Germany. The first German-language edition of An American Tragedy was published in 1927 by the Viennese firm of Paul ZSolnay Verlag, which printed 22,000 copies the first year. Other works followed in rapid succession: The Financier, The Titan, Jennie Gerhardt, Sister Carrie, The "Genius," and A Gallery of Women were all available to German readers by 1930.6 By 1930, too, German audiences had seen one of Dreiser's plays. The house of Drei Masken Verlag (Berlin) arranged for the production of The Hand of the Potter in Berlin and the provinces during the season 1928-29.7 The play fared poorly. Royalties were trifling and interminably slow arriving, and Dreiser lost patience with Drei Masken. Consequently, he hesitated to make an agreement with the firm concerning the Kearney version of An American Tragedy, which he was none the less eager to see produced in Germany. Meanwhile he' had begun to correspond with a German friend, Frau Lina Goldschmidt, who wanted to make a dramatic adaptation of her own from the German text of the novel. Dreiser suggested she visit Drei Masken...