The theatre and drama of the 1920s reflect a synergy of art, glitter, and glitz--a decade of great mainstream playwrights and a flourishing popular and commercial theatre, but it was also a decade in which discontented artists and a variety of people on the margins of American society could find a means of expressing their views. Gewitz and Kolb assemble 20 essays that reflect recent scholarship and research, focusing on generally unknown or ignored aspects of the decade: John Howard Lawson's polemics, especially in his ...
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The theatre and drama of the 1920s reflect a synergy of art, glitter, and glitz--a decade of great mainstream playwrights and a flourishing popular and commercial theatre, but it was also a decade in which discontented artists and a variety of people on the margins of American society could find a means of expressing their views. Gewitz and Kolb assemble 20 essays that reflect recent scholarship and research, focusing on generally unknown or ignored aspects of the decade: John Howard Lawson's polemics, especially in his most important play, Processional , his proclivity for using jazz and mixing the devices of popular theatre with serious drama, and his collaborations with the maverick designer Mordecai Gorelik; the first appearances of serious African-American drama, including discussions of African-American theatre critics and the work of dramatists Wallace Thurman, Garland Anderson, Willis Richardson, Frank Wilson, Angela Weld Grimke, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Myrtle Smith Livington, and Marita Bonner; the problematic depictions of African-Americans and other non-native characters on the stage; contributions of women artists and playwrights such as Eva Le Gallienne, Sophie Treadwell, and Susan Glaspell; and the search for new possibilities in theatre and set design, including an examination of the little-known Jane Heap, editor of The Little Review and a lesbian modernist who presented a pivotal International Theatre Expositon in 1926. An important resource for scholars, students, and other researchers of 20th-century American theatre and drama.
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