Making It New: 1900–1945 421first hundred years of the American republic but little really indigenous drama. Even
a touring group that called itself the American Company, which stimulated interest
in the theater in Virginia, South Carolina, and New York in the early nineteenth
century, was actually British in origin. Not only that, it mainly performed English
plays; it did stage The Price of Parthia (1763) by the American Thomas Godfrey
(1736–1763), but this, as its title intimates, was derivative, a blank-verse tragedy
that carried no traces of its American authorship. The first professional playwright
in the United States, William Dunlap (1766–1839), specialized in adapting European
plays for American audiences. Despite some success with plays like The Father; or,
American Shandyism (1789) and The Stranger (1798), his theater failed and he went
into bankruptcy; and his most notable work is probably The History of the American
Theater (1832), a firsthand record of his experiences and the first account of the
American stage. Popular plays of the time invested their mostly European but
sometimes American settings with sweet sentiment and melodrama. James Nelson
Barker (1784–1858), for example, produced the first dramatic version of the
Pocahontas legend in The Indian Princess (1808); it is a highly sentimental one, at
that. Similarly, the tone of the once immensely popular Clari, or the Maid of Milan
(1823) by John Howard Payne (1791–1852) can be gathered from the fact that it
introduced “Home Sweet Home” as a song to be sung by its heroine.
It was not until the last quarter of the nineteenth century that realism of a kind
came into vogue and American settings became more common. Character drama
began to make its appearance with Margaret Fleming (1890) by James Horne (1839–
1901), a work that showed the influence of Ibsen in its portrait of a woman
reconciling herself to the infidelity of her husband and assuming responsibility for
his illegitimate child when its mother died. Focus on character, and the frailties of
character in particular, is also a notable feature of The Easiest Way (1909) by Eugene
Walter (1874–1941) and The Girl with Green Eyes (1902) by Clyde Fitch (1865–
1909). These were both popular plays that exploited the growing interest in the
psychological. And equally popular were those dramas that concerned themselves
with psychological aberrations and extremes, such as The Witching Hour (1908) by
Augustus Thomas (1857–1934) and The Faith Healer by William Vaughn Moody.
Psychological interest, in turn, began to be assimilated into social reality. In The
Great Divide (1906) by Moody, for instance, a young woman from New England, a
modern product of inherited Puritan traditions and inhibitions, overcomes her
conditioning when she realizes she is in love with a free spirit, an individualist from
the “Wild West.” And a number of plays addressed social issues more directly.
Paul Kauvar (1887) by Steele Mackaye (1842–1894), for instance, explores the
growing tensions between capital and labor; The Lion and the Mouse (1905) by
Charles Klein (1876–1915) examines the power of monopolies; and The Nigger
(1909) by Edward Sheldon (1886–1946) investigates the racial issue as it tells the
story of a Southern political figure who learns, to his dismay, that he is not a pure
“Anglo-Saxon.” All these and similar plays written at the turn of the twentieth century
show a greater disposition toward empirically accurate notation of American
character and culture. But they are invariably compromised by the theatricalGGray_c04.indd 421ray_c 04 .indd 421 8 8/1/2011 7:53:57 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 57 AM