Kirkland once said that he felt no season was complete without a Shaw piece. In Nightingale, she portrays an ultimate desire for a husband that is a protector rather than a lover.Alexander Kirkland and Zita Johnn in The Lake at The Berkshire Playhouse, 1930.Įugene O’Neill was one such writer, and quickly became a staple for The Berkshire Playhouse, along with Broadway-tested shows and classical works. Ladies Leave similarly deals with the double standard of morality imposed upon women. (Scandalous.) Nevertheless, in the same way that Machinal can be connected to Treadwell’s experiences in journalism, the rest of her works can be connected to her personal experiences. For example, her play immediately following Machinal, entitled Ladies Leave, was subtitled “A Modern Comedy of Morals”, and hits its high point when a young wife rejects both her husband and lover to move to Vienna. Little of Treadwell’s remaining work bears any resemblance to Machinal and its more expressionist tendencies. It was this theory that served to create the final image of Machinal, described as “overhead lights…first faint blue, then red, then pink, then amber…” Treadwell also articulated these same theories in her stage directions for Machinal, writing phrases such as the “relaxed meditating mind” and her desire for the use of sound to activate “still secret places, in the consciousness of the audience.” ![]() Arthur Hopkins, who staged the play’s inaugural Broadway production, wanted to “stimulate the unconscious”, thereby eliminating anything that would activate the conscious. Treadwell’s main collaborator on her most successful play, Machinal were notoriously opposed to realism. This was despite the fact that she also refused to edit her play for commercial tastes, or to publish her works under a male pseudonym to avoid female prejudice. However, Treadwell eschewed the little theaters, and mostly fought to have her plays produced on Broadway. Susan Glaspell, in particular, had put up the Provincetown Players specifically to give playwrights to experiment while retaining total control over their work, away from pressures to make a “commercial” play on Broadway. The Little Theater movement was certainly conducive to this emerging model of a playwright-headed theater. While this refusal to acquiesce to outside output caused its own fair share of difficulties in her career, it was also what led her to become “the only writer-producer-actress on Broadway”, often spearheading productions of her own plays. Sophie Treadwell learned from actress Helena Modjeska to, as much as possible, exercise total creative control over her work. Plays grappled with the concept of marriage and whether marriage and the liberation of the New Woman could be reconciled. ![]() In addition to this, by the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth, theater was grappling with the fundamental divisions between the women’s rights movement. This anti-traditional melodrama movement primarily occurred on the fringes of Broadway through the aforementioned little theater movement, primarily through the Provincetown Players, and while it was true that the company was the site of expressionist innovation, a significant amount of its productions hewed toward realism. For the most part, American theater-Broadway, in particular-was still steeped in melodramatic traditions.Īs such, expressionism in America was largely formulated as a response to these traditions, leading to the tendency of calling any play that wasn’t overtly melodramatic “expressionist”. The explosive theater movements that had already taken over Europe had yet to fully cross over into America when Treadwell began her career.
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