18 - Fragile Realism

Summary

This chapter examines the common forms and themes of American dramatists and theater practitioners in the early twentieth century. The primary visual characteristic of plays by the Provincetown Players, Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, Zora Neal Hurston, and Thornton Wilder is a realistically depicted dwelling-place precariously nested within a larger, stylized evocation of the natural world. While the dwelling is most often a house, it can also be a boat, a back garden, a Pullman car, a wooded clearing, or even a street corner.  In these dwelling-places, what is social and natural, or artificial and real, remains distinct, but merges at the borders of both the stage and the stage dwelling. By depicting a domestic interior vainly fortified against a natural yet also theatrical exterior, American dramatists make compelling drama and theater out of the boundary between human and inhuman. I call this genre of American drama “fragile realism.”