Experimenters, Rebels, and Disparate Voices: The Theatre of the 1920s Celebrates American Diversity

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.