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27 one Greek Tragedy Finds an American Audience By the end of the nineteenth century, American commercial theater was becoming increasingly entrenched in stereotypical modes of production and a limited repertoire that was largely generated in new york before moving on established circuits to other parts of the country. Although twentieth-century scholarship on early American theater has defended a number of nineteenth-century plays and playwrights, Edgar Allan Poe, commenting as early as 1845 on one of the better new American plays, Mrs. Mowatt’s Fashion, reflected a stream of later critical opinion when he remarked:1 “It is a good play—compared with most American drama it is a very good play”; in the United States “the intellect of an audience can never safely be fatigued by complexity.”2 In any case, two developments began to liberate artists interested in performing a larger range of serious poetic drama from dependence on the theater syndicates that dominated the late nineteenthcentury theater world and to invite new audiences to attend Greek tragedy: the growing success of Greek tragedy on college campuses from the 1880s to the 1930s and the establishment of new venues for performance that permitted theatrical experimentation in stagecraft with strong links to Greek theater in the minds of major theorists and practitioners. outdoor performances across the country, including those in sports stadia and in new amphitheaters often built on college campuses, here complemented the founding of small, innovative regional theaters. Part 1 of this chapter first considers why nineteenth-century native efforts at presenting Greek tragedy on the professional stage, and especially translations of the original plays, met with an uninspiring reception. It then looks at how a growing number of university productions, along with small touring Anglo-American and American professional groups who primarily performed on college campuses 28 Greek Tragedy Finds an American Audience and at other local venues, paved the way for remarkably successful productions in the second decade of the twentieth century. In 1915, the prominent visiting British director H. Granville Barker took advantage of this trend by staging Euripides’ Iphigeneia in Tauris and Trojan Women in eastern college stadia. Part 2 focuses on four U.S. artists/theater groups that began to put a stronger American imprint on the reception of Greek tragedy, and to win audiences for the original plays in translation that were not merely respectful yet skeptical—often the standard critical reaction—but positively enthusiastic. As leader of the American branch of the International Theosophical Society, Katherine Tingley built the earliest important outdoor amphitheater in the country in San Diego, where she staged performances of Aeschylus’s Eumenides in 1899–1927 in order to establish a new spiritual and cultural agenda for American theater. In 1910–15 the noted actress-director-producer Margaret Anglin produced innovative Greek tragedies in the outdoor Hearst Greek Theatre in Berkeley, California, before she won a place for the Greek classics on the larger professional stage of major American cities in 1918–27. In 1912, Maurice Browne and his wife, Ellen Van Volkenburg, founded the Chicago Little Theatre, which aimed to establish the place of serious poetic drama including Greek tragedy on the U.S. stage. Their touring performance of Euripides’ Trojan Women in 1915 was timed to coincide with Barker’s and to advocate peace. Barker, Anglin, and Browne/Van Volkenburg attracted enormous audiences that have not been equaled since. These directors increasingly turned away from efforts at “historical authenticity” in the production of Greek tragedy popular on college campuses and in some early professional performances in favor of making the plays resonate with contemporary audiences. All were particularly attracted to creating “total theater” works that imaginatively united words, music, and dance. Although thematic issues were of interest to them, their most important contribution was to communicate the Greek originals through fresh modes of performance and aesthetic vision. Finally, the Provincetown Players, founded by the enthusiastic Hellenist George Cram Cook, paved the way for Eugene o’neill’s famous remakings of Greek tragedy, the 1924 Desire under the Elms and the 1931 Mourning Becomes Electra. Cook brought his passion for Greece to Provincetown and new york from the Midwest, where he had experienced the Chicago Little Theatre’s early efforts at Greek tragedy. By fostering ambitious new plays by American playwrights , the Players ultimately made the creation of new, American versions of Greek tragedy inviting. 1. SETTInG THE STAGE Nineteenth-Century Commercial Efforts Part 2 of this chapter explores one of the two...

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