Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre, 1923-1937 (review)

The epilogue to Jonathan Chambers's rigorous new study of progressive American playwright John Howard Lawson includes the author's uncomfortable memory of an academic conference some years ago when a colleague asked him to defend his scholarly investment in the career of a failed playwright. Messiah of the New Technique, an insightful investigation of Lawson and leftist theatre culture in the United States, definitively confirms the value of Chambers's efforts. The author's "unyielding belief that the study of art and the study of society are inextricably intertwined" (9) has resulted in an illuminating materialist study of both Lawson and revolutionary politics in the United States before World War II. Chambers treats as discursive objects Lawson's plays, manifestoes, letters, and memoirs, along with reviews of his plays and period assessments of avant-garde theatre during the 1920s and 1930s. All of these sources richly record (even as they helped create) the liberal social energy in the country during the interwar years. The strength of Chambers's scholarship is his careful examination of John Howard Lawson as "both product and producer of a larger ideological conflict in the social and cultural spheres in this historical moment" (116), which persuasively shows how "common categorical labels for Lawson such as 'failed,' 'propagandistic,' and even 'left-wing' not only reduce and isolate his remarkable and varied career but also undergird and advance totalizing narratives regarding the theatre and, moreover, the political and cultural left in the United States during the twenties and thirties" (205).

Up until now, there has been little work done on the political and experimental theatre career of Lawson, author of Roger Bloomer (1923), Processional (1925), Loud Speaker (1927), and Marching Song (1937). The recent appearance of Gerald Horne's The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten (2006) might hint at a new wave of interest in Lawson's drama, although that study—like Gary L. Carr's The Left Side of Paradise (1984)—deals exclusively with Lawson's infamous career in Hollywood. Indeed, as Chambers's conference colleague pointed out, most of Lawson's plays were commercial and critical failures, yet Chambers is less interested in the relative success of Lawson's stagework than in the usefulness of that career to a richer understanding of the period theatrically, culturally, and politically. The book offers excellent descriptions of Lawson's infrequently read plays, providing not only important basic details of plot, character, and dramatic form, but also tracking changes in drafts of the plays and including valuable information about specific production choices made in the original productions. Employing materialist historiography and dialectical methodologies, Lawson's plays are read not simply for their formal qualities, but as evidence of both the playwright's changing ideas about political theatre and larger shifts within leftist ideology and subculture.

In reaction to the stale habit of framing early twentieth-century American theatre history as a dichotomy between commercial theatre—its allies and exigencies—and noncommercial theatre (read "experimental," "little," and "art"), recent scholarship has sought to complicate our understanding of the discourse in those years. Chambers's study contributes to this reexamination by arguing that there were in fact not simply two modes in US theatre between the wars. Lawson's politically saturated theatre, for example, did not entirely appeal to the goals and values of either Broadway or most art theatres: "Lawson was, in short, neither fish nor fowl, neither 'artist-rebel' nor 'revolutionary'" (118), Chambers notes. The absence of a single, monolithic noncommercial and experimental theatre in the period mirrors the complexity of revolutionary politics during the same interwar years when, as Chambers's study thoroughly describes, "the so-called left in the United States was in truth comprised of many communities" (155).

Starting with Lawson's upbringing within a Christian Scientist home and continuing through his formative friendship with...