Experimenters, Rebels, and Disparate Voices: The Theatre of the 1920s Celebrates American Diversity (review)

In their introduction to this volume, one of two collections of essays culled from "Art, Glitter, and Glitz," a conference held at Hofstra University in 1994, coeditors Arthur Gewirtz and James J. Kolb establish the context for the ensuing chapters by delineating the worlds of "art theatre" and "commercial theatre" in the United States in the 1920s. Although the eighteen essays in this collection focus on "persons and groups who did not usually draw the attention of numerous playgoers" (xi), several chapters discuss works, such as Sophie Treadwell's Machinal,thatstraddled both spheres, enjoying success in mainstream venues while breaking new artistic ground. The collection delivers lively discussions of theatrical experimentation and presents a notable variety of artists and their work, but the volume's subtitle is somewhat misleading. Many of the essays conclude that theatre in the 1920s often reproduced existing racial, gender, and class stereotypes without offering significant challenges to them, suggesting that it is not so much the theatre of the 1920s that celebrates American diversity, as it is the writers of these essays that celebrate the heretofore largely underexamined diversity of voices, both on stage and off, in early twentieth-century American theatre history.

The first three chapters focus on the work of one playwright, John Howard Lawson. Lawson, who resurfaces in two essays in the second section of the book, ultimately emerges as the representative figure of the "rebel" in this collection, characterized by Gewirtz and Kolb as the "most clangorous of the discordant voices" (xv). Chapter one, by Beverle Bloch, offers an in-depth look at Lawson's 1925 play Processional, controversial for a style that demanded "direct communication between the actors and the audience" (6). Bloch's clear and evocative analysis seamlessly blends a close reading of the script with critical reception, production history, and cultural context. The next two chapters, by John D. Shout and Michael C. O'Neill, respectively, offer overviews of Lawson's work and complement one another effectively. Shout devotes his attention to Lawson's structural choices, particularly his use of Expressionist techniques; O'Neill focuses on content, assessing Lawson's penchant for creating protagonists who are all ultimately a romanticized version of the common man negotiating the "confusion of American life" (26). In addition to providing a solid overview of Lawson's work, these opening chapters establish a recurring topic of the collection: constructions of national identity in American drama of the 1920s.

Among the most significant contributions to discussions of diversity and American identity are the five chapters that focus on African American drama and theatrical production, beginning with Freda Scott Giles's "Glitter, Glitz, and Race: The Production of Harlem." Giles outlines the history of the adaptation of Wallace Thurman's short story "Cordelia the Crude" into the play Harlem, co-written by William Jourdan Rapp, and its path to Broadway, where it opened in 1929. The story of a family from North Carolina struggling to adjust to life in Harlem, the play garnered critical acclaim and enjoyed commercial success, though some "viewed the play as detrimental and dangerous" in its affirmation of stereotypes (43). Giles's second contribution, "Disparate Voices: African American Theatre Critics of the 1920s," offers a compact history of the emergence of African American critics who helped "shape and define the debate over the nature of a black theatre aesthetic, and [assisted] in the formation and development of a body of work by a tiny but growing cadre of African American playwrights" (47). Both of Giles's essays effectively explore the challenges confronted by the artists, activists, and theorists who strove to find "the universal through the unique experience of the African American" (54).

The next three chapters also consider the ways in which African American artists negotiated, in terms of both product and process, the gaps and bridges between white and black...