Conceptualizing Americanness: U.S. Drama in Spain, 1910–1930

This essay surveys the presence of North American dramatic works¹ in Spain in the early twentieth century, and seeks to investigate the shifting conception of Americanness of audiences who consumed American plays, and critics who discussed, and companies which produced, them. While in an early moment being American was disconcertingly something that even a play not written by an American could be, throughout the 1930s, coinciding with the profound revolution in all orders of life which culminated in the Spanish Civil War, American theater came to be seen as more and more diverse; an American play was merely one written by an American, without that nationality precluding any kind of play. Such a truism was not easy to embrace, as there were still those who believed America could only produce one specific kind of (highly successful and popular) commodity. This indispensable step toward a less univocal, more nuanced appreciation of American drama could not have been taken without the work of theater critics. Whatever one is to think about the job (not a few American playwrights have resented their power), Spanish critics of the 1920s rendered an invaluable service of dis-essentializing Americanness in the theater.

The popular perception for a long time was that American theater started with Eugene O’Neill, and we have all found him referred to more than once as the “father” of American drama, “as though American theatre came into existence as a sudden grace with Eugene O’Neill and his suitcase of plays its only begetter” (Wilmeth and Bigsby, The Cambridge History of American Theatre, Volume Two xv).² Curiously enough, a Spanish history of American drama could never start by surveying O’Neill’s work, as the latter was only the culminating point of a long exposure to purely commercial offerings from America (while more and more voices, nevertheless, claimed that “another” American drama existed). Thomas Postlewait, in “The Hyeroglyphic Stage: American Theatre and Society, Post-Civil War to 1945,” posits Gilbert Seldes’s 1924 volume The Seven Lively Arts as among the first books to vindicate the popular tradition of theater and entertainment, “from minstrelsy, circuses, and vaudeville to the popular entertainment of the modern stage, screen, radio, and television” as “the definitive achievement of American culture” and failing to honor it as not only “incomplete but myopic” (125). Postlewait goes on to object to realism and naturalism’s being considered as the starting points of any worthwhile theatrical tradition, something which obviously marginalizes all other forms of theatrical expression, especially less logocentric ones (125–26). Spain, however, makes it possible to historicize American theater in a wholly different way. As we will promptly see, in the matter of importations from America, the curtain opened on all the more popular hits, with their panoply of tricks, stage effects, surprising plot twists and whatnot, while the more “serious” drama would only come much later.

It is not easy to pinpoint when exactly the first American play was produced in Spain, but there is evidence that it was not before the 1910s. Before this decade, shows derived from some American novel or short story could be seen occasionally, but were so much tampered with that little of the original (if anything) lived on in the stage work inspired by it. Such is the case of L’agricultor de Xicago, a Catalan playscript which opened in Barcelona in 1909, based on Gabriel Timmory’s 1906 Le cultivateur de Chicago. Timmory drew inspiration from Mark Twain’s “How I Edited an Agricultural Paper” but moved in directions not distantly anticipated or suggested by the American original. Even before that, Uncle Tom’s Cabin had had a fruitful life on Spanish stages ever since its first occurrence in Madrid in 1853. Early in the twentieth century the playscript, based once more on a French version, went back to Spanish theaters for generally successful runs. The similarities with Stowe’s novel are tangential at best, as can be observed in the published version La cabaña del tío Tomás, brought out in Barcelona in 1882. For the purposes of...