Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The longstanding ideological separation of the commercial and avant-garde theatre in the United States has prompted the creation of two distinct historical narratives – chronologically parallel stories of the stage with little overlap of characters, theme, or methodology. Moreover, the critical privileging of the avant-garde, long identified with high culture, and the simultaneous dismissal of popular art forms, has only recently given way to more nuanced analyses of American cultural production of all kinds. Thus we have only lately realized that throughout the twentieth century, insurgent artists challenged this theatrical boundary through their efforts to bring the innovations of the avant-garde to audiences accustomed to the conventions of Broadway. Their goal was not to collapse these distinctions, but rather to prove the viability in multiple venues of aesthetically, intellectually, and politically challenging theatre. The remarkable similarities in the lives and careers of two modernist playwrights, Susan Glaspell and Sophie Treadwell, have rarely been noted, precisely because of this trope of separation, which connects Glaspell to the experimental theatre tradition and Treadwell to the commercial stage. Yet their stories provide an unprecedented scholarly opportunity to examine how artists in the early decades of the twentieth century struggled to stage dramas that strove ... log in or subscribe to read full text