424 Making It New: 1900–1945realistic war play, What Price Glory? (1924), he wrote, among many other things, a
series of blank-verse dramas in which the innocent and idealistic tend to be defeated
by the political, the economic, and the mundane. Elizabeth the Queen (1930) is
concerned with the love of Elizabeth I of England for the Earl of Essex. Night Over
Taos (1932) dramatizes the end of the feudal era in New Mexico in 1847 (“This is
what death’s for –” declaims the leading character toward the end. “To rid the earth
of old fashions”). And Winterset (1935), also in verse, is set in contemporary America
and was clearly suggested by the trial and execution of the anarchists Sacco
and Vanzetti – a gross miscarriage of justice that became a cause célèbre for the
left during the 1930s.
Night Over Taos was produced by the Group Theatre; Winterset was rejected by
the Group. That is a measure of what the most influential American production
company of the 1930s was after. Its aims were social as well as artistic. Although it
was never a doctrinaire political theater, the Group did see itself as a community of
artists working to say something significant and useful about society. It tended to
favor a particular series of styles that could be handily described as left-wing
symbolism; and it preferred optimism and hope over pessimism and despair. Which
is perhaps why Night Over Taos, with its resonant theme of the old giving way
to the new, found favor and support, while Winterset, in which the two leading
characters choose to die rather than live in a corrupt world, did not. The Group
Theatre grew out of the Theatre Guild of New York, the leading drama company
of the 1920s. It was in operation from 1931 to 1941, at first under the direction of
Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford, and then, from 1937, under
Clurman alone. It has been described as the most successful failure in the history of
American theater. Except for a couple of years when one of its plays, Golden Boy
(1937) by Clifford Odets (1906–1963), scored a big success, it was always in financial
difficulties. Nevertheless, in the ten seasons it existed, it managed to get 22 new
productions on stage. There were occasional revivals, tours, second companies, and
experimental evenings, but the main job of the Group as a production company
was how to get something of dramatic and social value into performance each
spring – and, in the process, keep the Group alive. Its first production was The House
of Connelly (1931) by Paul Green (1894–1981), a searing account of an old Southern
family that is a combination of Greek tragedy and regional folk play. Its last was
Retreat to Pleasure (1940) by Irwin Shaw (1913–1984). In between it produced
plays in a wide variety of styles. Gentlewoman (1934) by John Howard Lawson
(1895–1977), for instance, is a drawing-room play of ideas; Johnny Johnson (1936)
by Paul Green and the German composer Kurt Weill is a musical satire; Waiting for
Lefty (1935) by Odets, a play about a taxi-drivers’ strike, is made up of naturalistic
cameos set in a nonrealist frame; My Heart’s in the Highlands (1939) by William
Saroyan (1908–1981) is a sweet, wide-eyed, stylized fable. All of them are driven,
though, by an optimistic energy, sometimes angry, sometimes rapt, sometimes
plaintive: a desire to find some grounds for affirmation and belief. “We’ll never lose
our faith and hope and trust in all mankind,” Johnny Johnson concludes. “The world
is at its morning ... and no man fights alone!” declares a character in Paradise LostGGray_c04.indd 424ray_c 04 .indd 424 8 8/1/2011 7:53:57 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 57 AM