THE PATH OF THE PLAY
The story of the attempt of the theater to escape from Realism is a
curious story. As a deliberate effort of the playwrights to see life
in the terms of Form instead of accidental actuality it goes back only
half a dozen years through the dramas of the Germans who adopted the
word Expressionism to describe their aim and technique. It has hung
potential for ten or fifteen years in the work of the more advanced and
philosophic designers and directors of the new stagecraft, a waiting
stimulus to the playwrights. As an unconscious impulse to reach beyond
the limits of Realism its beginnings are to be traced back twenty,
thirty, almost forty years in the work of some of Europe’s ablest
realists.
The two greatest figures in the modern theater—which is the realistic
theater—give the same demonstration of the limitations of Realism,
and turn in the same fashion away from actuality and towards an
intense spiritual vitality. Both Ibsen and Strindberg come out of
Romanticism into Realism, and pass on into a Symbolism that is far on
the way towards Expressionism. In Ibsen the new tendency is clearly
marked in _The Wild Duck_ (1884) and develops gradually through _The
Master Builder_ (1892) to completion in _When We Dead Awaken_ (1899).
Strindberg’s _Towards Damascus_ (1898) carries strong hints of the
spiritual intensity which threatened the outer reality of so many of
Strindberg’s earlier plays; and by 1902, in _Swanwhite_ and _The Dream
Play_, he is well embarked on a type of non-realistic drama which finds
a bizarre culmination in _The Spook Sonata_ in 1907.
Two other European playwrights of distinction—Tchehoff and
Wedekind—show a similar dissatisfaction with pure Realism, though
neither passes through the three stages of development to be traced in
Ibsen and Strindberg. The work of Tchehoff and the work of Wedekind
is all pretty much of a piece. It is never wholly realistic in the
narrowest sense. Each has a peculiar quality and method throughout.
Tchehoff, beginning in 1896 with _The Seagull_, keeps to a Realism
of such intense spiritual truth that, in a performance of his _The
Cherry Orchard_ by the Moscow Art Theater such as I have described,
its extraordinary virtues are the virtues of Expressionism. Wedekind’s
first play, the thesis-drama _The Awakening of Spring_, written in
1891, is stamped with his curious and violent intensity, and his sense
of the spiritual overtones of life. In 1895 and 1903 he produced in the
two parts of _Lulu_—_Erdgeist_ and _Pandora’s Box_—dramas horrifically
actual in their pictures of sexual aberration and at the same time so
intense psychologically and so sharply defined and apt in action that
their Realism treads close on the boundaries which Expressionism has
over-passed.
There is a curious distinction in end and means between such plays
as these of Ibsen, Strindberg, Tchehoff, and Wedekind, and the newer
expressionist dramas of Germany and America. The earlier plays
indulge in symbolic, fantastic, deeply spiritual ideas, but their
language is almost always highly realistic. They are still bound to
the past of their authors and to the present of their theater. The
newer expressionist dramas, on the other hand, are as free in speech
as they are in idea. It is a freedom that often makes a harmonious
wedding of end and means. Sometimes, as in plays of _Der Sturm_
group, the language is so completely free from the bonds of actuality
that it approaches the onomatopoetic verse of Mallarmé depending
on sound for its sense. In Eugene O’Neill’s distinguished piece of
Expressionism, _The Hairy Ape_, the playwright strikes a happy medium
with speech which is realistic and characteristic in idiom but which
is developed in idea, intensity and length of utterance clean past
the possibilities of the people of the play. Occasionally you find a
pseudo-expressionist piece like _Vatermord_, by Arnold Bronnen, whose
action is naturalistic—grossly naturalistic—but whose language is
often far from natural. This piece was first produced in Berlin in
the summer of 1922 when the mind of the German capital could safely
be described as neurotic. Its subject matter—the incest and patricide
of the Œdipus complex, with a little adventitious homosexuality, all
circling about a boy in his ’teens—produced a stormy session between
adherents and opponents, a session finally ended by the _Schutzpolizei_
with rifles and the command: “Sei ruhig, meine Herrschaften!” The
run which followed at one of the theaters formerly directed by Max
Reinhardt may be explained by the notorious subject matter, but there
were critics to assert that Bronnen had a style of considerable power
as well as novelty. The boy’s final speech, as he staggers onto the
stage from an inner room, where he has killed his father, and rebuffs
the passionate entreaties of his mother, is translated from the printed
version, retaining the one form of punctuation used, the slanting dash
to indicate the end of a line, though not necessarily of a sentence:
I’m through with you / I’m through with everything / Go bury
your husband you are old / I am young / I don’t know you /
I am free /
Nobody in front of me nobody next to me nobody over me father’s
dead / Heaven I spring up to you I fly / It pounds shakes groans
complains must rise swells wells up springs up flies must rise must
rise
I
I bloom
Before such an arrangement of words _The Spook Sonata_ seems almost
mid-Victorian. The Student speaks to the ghostly Milkmaid in the most
matter of fact fashion. Even the old Mummy, the mad woman who always
sits in a closet, talks like a most realistic parrot when she is not
talking like a most realistic woman. Here it is the ideas that stagger
and affright you, the molding minds, the walking Dead, the cook who
draws all the nourishment out of the food before she serves it, the
terrible relations of young and old; all of them are things having
faint patterns in actuality and raised by Strindberg to a horrible
clarity.
To follow the banner of Expressionism in playwriting—I say nothing of
stage setting, for that is, happily, another matter—requires all three
Graces and a strong stomach. The bizarre morbidity, the nauseating
sexuality, the lack of any trace of joy or beauty, which characterize
the work of most of those who labeled themselves expressionists in
Germany during the past few years, match Strindberg at his unhappiest,
while the vigor with which they drive their ideas forth in speech
far outdoes him. Expressionism, in the narrow sense in which such
plays define it, is a violent storm of emotion beating up from the
unconscious mind. It is no more than the waves which shatter themselves
on the shore of our conscious existence, only a distorted hint of the
deep and mysterious sea of the unconscious. Expressionism, as we have
so far known it, is a meeting of the fringes of the conscious and the
unconscious, and the meeting is startling indeed.
Germany’s reception of the expressionist plays was open-minded, as is
Germany’s reception of almost all new effort. The dramas of the best of
the expressionists—Georg Kaiser and Walter Hasenclever—were produced in
leading theaters, on the official stages of Dresden and of Frankfort,
and in Reinhardt’s playhouses, for example. But by the summer of
1922 they had disappeared from the very catholic and long-suffering
repertories of these houses, and while Wedekind and Strindberg were
produced from Stockholm to Vienna, the simon-pure expressionists,
the playwrights of what I think it is fair to call the lesser
Expressionism, were hardly to be seen. Only the one-act opera, _Mörder,
Hoffnung der Frauen_, a composition by Paul Hindemith on a playlet by
the artist-author, Oskar Kokoschka, was being played.
This piece, produced at the City Opera House in Frankfort, points
an interesting union and parallel between at least one sort of
Expressionism and music. The action, passing in some indefinite olden
time, is symbolically very difficult—quite as difficult as its title,
_Murderer, Hope of Women_. The emotion of the scenes, on the other
hand, is clear enough, and it receives from the music a background of
color, a tonal reinforcement, that is most welcome; at the same time
the composer finds in the vigorous and intense, if somewhat arbitrary,
feeling of the playwright a provocative challenge.
[Illustration:
A setting by Ludwig Sievert for _Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen_, an
expressionistic opera by Kokoschka. Ramps lead from the center of the
stage to raised platforms right and left. Dark walls rise at the back,
broken by triangular entrances at either side and by a grilled doorway
in the center, flanked by tall triangular pylons of red-orange.
]
Kokoschka himself designed a setting for _Mörder, Hoffnung der
Frauen_ when it was first produced at the Albert Theater in Dresden
as a play. A photograph of the production betrays an uneasy setting,
hardly stage-worthy in arrangement and composition, and rather badly
executed. The pages of _Die Neue Schaubühne_ have shown several
other expressionist stage designs as unsatisfactory, but in the more
widely known productions these pieces have been lucky enough to fall
into the hands of first-rate men like Adolf Linnebach of Dresden and
Ludwig Sievert of Frankfort. Sketches made from Linnebach’s production
of Hasenclever’s _Jenseits_ in Dresden show a simple and effective
use of light and shadow and of little else, with certain necessary
elements of design projected by a sort of magic-lantern technique upon
the background of dome or curtain. In actual performance Sievert’s
setting for the Kokoschka opera is strong and arresting with dark
surfaces massed in triangles symbolic of the feminine element dominant
in the piece, and with a successful, if not very subtle, use of red
and red-orange on the pylon surfaces guarding the prison door. The
direction of the singers and chorus, under the hand of Dr. Ernst Lert,
is a thoroughly expressive part of music and setting.
Though the most celebrated plays of the expressionist pioneers have
failed to make a place for themselves in the German repertory, they
have had their effect. Playwrights who might have written in the
conventional mode have been turned towards a freer technique, and
they have succeeded in accomplishing interesting and promising things.
The most notable of the plays thus produced, _Masse-Mensch_, deserves
a chapter to itself. I shall write here of two lesser works by Karel
Capek, one seen in the Czech National Theater, where it was first
produced, the other read in a German translation.
In the first, _The Insect Comedy_, Karel Capek’s brother, a scenic
artist, has a share as collaborator. It is a fantastic and picturesque
piece of satire providing excellent opportunities for the newer methods
in production. It is a comment on post-war conditions as symbolized
in the life of butterflies, beetles, and ants. The prolog finds a
young man wandering in the woods, and puts him comfortably to sleep
on a grassy bank after a little talk with an absurdly pedantical
entomologist. He sleeps through the three succeeding acts surrounded
and occasionally disturbed by figures of insects grown life-size. The
first act passes with the brilliant butterflies, who stand for the
heedless, unproductive men and women of the social and pseudo-artistic
worlds with time for only chatter and flirtation while disaster rumbles
beneath them. In the production of this scene, the _régisseur_, K. H.
Hilar, keeps the players moving ceaselessly, their hands and heads
lightly undulating, with the restlessness of the antennæed world, while
high around the back of the scene various of the brightly costumed
insects constantly dance behind the translucent curtain of the woods.
In the second scene the humble grubs crawl in and out of their burrows
on busy errands of accumulation. These are the assiduous profiteers and
misers of war-time society. The act ends in a broad touch of comedy.
A beetle has been murdering passing insects and dragging their bodies
down below for his wife to hoard. There enters The Parasite, a tramp
bug. He does not work. Why should he? He has only to wait for the
busy capitalists of his world to fill their larders. Then, when the
time comes, he will rise—or more accurately descend—and the wealth of
the world will be his. He ducks into the beetle’s hole, and in a few
moments he comes up, a swollen and jovial Communist, dancing in glee.
The ever-present prompter’s box serves conveniently for one of the
holes, and the background of green and black woods is projected instead
of painted; otherwise there is little of interest in the staging of
this scene.
The third act carries us to the ants. Here are the eternal laborers,
tramping in an endless circle upon their work, under the eye of
superiors very like officers and to a rhythm beaten out by a more
privileged one of their own number. The Capeks costume the army of
ants in khaki, puttees and all, and provide a desolate hill for a
background. It might be blasted by either war or commerce. Into its
surface descend shafts that might lead to either mines or dugouts.
A glowering background of crazy chimneys and telegraph poles and
smoke—all projected on the cyclorama—completes the picture. Presently
there come shouting and a courier. More couriers. War threatens. The
ants drop their burdens for rifles and continue their march. The
officer-ants assume a higher station and even loftier phrases of
command; from the back they philosophize and give orders in good old
Kaiser-fashion. The act culminates with a conflict and the lordship of
a new race of ants.
The epilog is divided between the appearance from her chrysalis of
an ephemera of whom the sleeping man has been dimly and hopefully
conscious in the last two scenes, her death after a dance with other
short-lived mayflies, and the despairing end of the human visitor. This
end is commented upon in a half satiric and half aspiring vein through
the introduction of a group of wanderers who come upon the dead body,
gaze at it in astonishment and sadness for a moment, and then pass on,
singing, upon the ever-creative way of the peasant.
_R. U. R._, Karel Capek’s other play (in German, _W. U. R._) is a tale
of a Frankenstein such as H. G. Wells might have written in his earlier
days. It seems both gruesomely effective and at times philosophic. The
letters “R. U. R.” are an abbreviation of the name of a firm engaged in
manufacturing “_Roboters_,” or workmen stamped out and given life by a
machine. After a not very skilful exposition of the nature of this new
device for lightening the world’s work, the play passes on to show the
degenerating effect upon mankind of ceasing to labor. The “_Roboters_”
are given pain in order to remind them not to be careless and break
their legs and arms. Thereupon they acquire something not unlike a
soul. Presently comes a consciousness of their station and their power.
They rise and kill all mankind—except one man. Later they find to
their dismay that the secret formula of the materials from which they
were stamped out has been destroyed. They wear out in twenty years.
And there will be an end. The last act shows their frantic appeal for
a way to perpetuate themselves. The one man finds it at last when he
recognizes love awakening in a male and a female “_Roboter_.” The
process of mankind will begin once more. Rather the sort of end that
Anatole France would have put to the story—Frankenstein turned man.
None of this, of course—either Kaiser or Capek—is Expressionism very
far on its way. Some of it is trivial. Some is interesting enough.
Much is decadent or uncertain. But it is not difficult to believe
that there is something of the future in it. It is a sign. There is a
starlike gleam in even the worst of the mire. Vitality, though often a
morbid vitality, animates it. When we see Eugene O’Neill saying Nay to
Realism in the same fashion, and turning out so strong and significant
a play as _The Hairy Ape_—a play that grows greater in the perspective
of Europe—it is not very difficult to hope and to look forward.
In the artists who give Expressionism a physical form and a pictorial
atmosphere upon the stage we find still more of hope. They have gone
more quickly and more securely towards their goal. They have had a
disciplinary practice upon the plays of an earlier time, a time before
Realism. They are freed from the moral problems of the writer; and
where their work is distempered with the morbidity, the unhealthiness,
of so much of our time, the result is less obvious in color or design
than it would be if it took the form of words. And they have had
behind them the history and the example of the movement in art which
we once called Post-Impressionism, but which follows logically into
Expressionism, the movement of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso,
Duchamp.
The problem for the expressionist play is the problem of music. And
yet not its problem; for music, being so markedly apart from actuality
in its materials, has made few and not very successful attempts at
the Realism which has swamped our stage. Music has been by very
nature expressionistic. It has failed whenever, as program music, it
approached the suggestion of the actual. For the rest, it has soared,
soared easily, surely, towards direct expression of spiritual reality.
Expressionism in the theater has to seek the way of music, the way
towards beauty and ecstasy. The difficulty of the playwright is that
he must always feel the pull of the actual life about him; he must
make his drama out of human beings and not out of pure vision or pure
emotional response. The world about him is corrupt and corrupting
outwardly, as well as beautiful and wonderful within. He cannot, like
the musician, leap away from its entanglements by putting his hands to
an instrument of abstract art. But he can gain a certain release by
forswearing as much as possible the reproduction of the actual.