Character, commodity fetishism, and the origins of Expressionism on the American stage

Frequently dismissed as a minor development in the history of modern drama, Expressionism in the American theatre has all too often been discussed as an appropriation of techniques from the German movement of the same name. In this dissertation I challenge the assumption that American theatrical Expressionism was a minor offshoot of the German movement, arguing that what came to be called "Expressionism" in the United States derived in large part from Nineteenth-century American acting traditions and their legacy on the Twentieth-century popular stage.; Using a historical materialist methodology, I begin by tracing the history of acting techniques against the social and economic history of the American theatre in order to show the relationship between the formal convention of character and the cultural forces which shape its production. By examining the rhetoric and rhetorical shifts in acting manuals, actors' biographies and memoirs, demonstrate how character changed over the course of the 19th century from an explicitly the theatrical convention forged out of a dynamic actor-audience relationship to a moral-psychological entity which naturalized bourgeois behavioral norms. I also show how the bourgeois ideology underlying the moral-psychological types that actors rendered on stage existed in sharp contrast with the material conditions of their own working lives when, at the turn of the century, actors were subject to the power of the booking monopoly known as The Syndicate. It was to resolve this contradiction between the ideology and practice of their craft that actors, playwrights, and other theatre practitioners independent of the Syndicate's control proposed an alternative model of character which could reintroduce the materiality of existence and make the representationality of character visible once again. Drawing upon melodrama, vaudeville, minstrelsy, and the burlesque, these experimental theatre practitioners reconfigured the unrealistic, highly stylized "point" method of characterization which was once practiced on the legitimate stage.; Focusing on Eugene O'Neill's plays, The Emperor Jones (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1922), Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine (1923), John Howard Lawson's Processional (1925), and Sophie Treadwell's Machinal (1928), I demonstrate how each of these playwrights drew upon popular sources not only to expose the ideology underlying the Naturalist model of character but to reconfigure character in such a way as to give rise to a new dramatic form that came to be known as "Expressionism."...