Anna Christie (Historical Context)

Historical Context

The Emergence of the American Theatre

At the end of the nineteenth century, a group of playwrights that included James A. Herne, Bronson Howard, David Belasco, Augustus Thomas, Clyde Fitch, and William Vaughn Moody started breaking away from traditional melodramatic forms and themes. As a result, American theatre began to establish its own identity. These and other playwrights in the early part of the twentieth century were inspired by the dramatic innovations of Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and George Bernard Shaw. During this period, experimental theatre groups made up of dramatists and actors encouraged new innovative American playwrights. In 1914, Lawrence Langner, Helen Westley, Philip Moeller, and Edward Goodman created the Washington Square Players in New York, and in 1915, playwright Susan Glaspell helped start the Provincetown Players in Massachusetts. The goal of both of these groups was to produce plays that the more conservative Broadway theatres rejected. The most important member of this latter group was Eugene O’Neill, who wrote plays with a uniquely American voice. George H. Jensen, in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, notes that “before O’Neill began to write, most American plays were poor imitations or outright thefts of European works.” Jensen insists that O’Neill became the “catalyst and symbol. . . of the establishment of American drama.”

Realism

In the late nineteenth century, playwrights turned away from what they considered the artificiality of melodrama to a focus on the commonplace in the context of everyday contemporary life. They rejected the flat characterizations and unmotivated, violent action typical of melodrama. Their work, along with much of the experimental fiction written during that period, adopts the tenets of realism, a new literary movement that supported the creation of believable characters with sometimes problematic interactions with society. Dramatists, like Henrik Ibsen, discard traditional sentimental theatrical forms as they chronicle the strengths and weaknesses of ordinary people confronting difficult social problems, like the restrictive conventions nineteenth-century women endured. Writers who embraced realism use settings and props to reflect their characters’ daily lives as well as realistic dialogue that replicates natural speech patterns.

O’Neill’s long career reflected the shifting styles of the American theatre at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. His early plays were unsuccessful attempts at melodrama. He then turned to realistic depictions of men at sea and later of the interactions between family members. In Anna Christie, O’Neill creates a lyrical realism in the problematic romance between Anna and Mat. O’Neill’s new type of realism rejects traditional forms, digging beneath the surface of everyday reality. Following the new American doctrine of “Art Theatre,” O’Neill incorporated philosophical themes and unusual forms in his plays. In the 1920s, he experimented with expressionism, most notably in Emperor Jones and The Great God Brown.

Compare & Contrast

• Early 1920s: Some Americans consider the Russian Revolution an important humanitarian development. Others, however, fear it to be a communist threat to American democracy.
  1926: Joseph Stalin becomes dictator of the Soviet Union. His reign of terror will last for twenty-seven years.
  1991: President Mikhail Gorbachev orders the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and a new Commonwealth of Independent States is formed by the countries that formerly made up the Soviet Union.
• 1921: Margaret Sanger founds the American Birth Control League. Other important social changes for women include the ability to vote, to receive higher forms of education, to smoke and drink, and to wear clothes that do not restrict their movements.
  Today: Women are guaranteed equal rights under the law.
• 1921: Approximately 900,000 immigrants enter the United States in the fiscal year ending June 30. After World War I, Americans are afraid of the influx of immigrants who are willing to work for lower wages and so could threaten American jobs.
  Today: Americans’ concern over the economic impact of immigrants continues.
• 1921: As a result of overproduction by American farmers, prices fall eighty-five percent below 1919 highs.
  Today: Many small farms are going bankrupt or being swallowed up by large farming conglomerates.