Visible Scenes:
American Realism and the Absent Audience

I have stressed here the psychological aspect of realistic "character" and its production as acting. The interpretive perspective urged by this drama is clarified in plays of a more sociological orientation, in which the objects of stage design become metonymic figures for a world of material and metaphysical constraint. The anxiety of psychological realism is that the self may be only an act. The sociological mode lives on the fear that the world is only a theater, that there is no escape, no point of vantage from which others—or the environmental forces of economy, society, history—can be viewed: that it is not possible, in other words, to be a spectator after all. O'Neill's expressionism is tightly trained on psychological processes, but expressionism generally opens a wider vista on the relationship between character and a social environment. Gerald Rabkin is right to find a "monodramatic" impulse in expressionist drama, in which "all technical devices, all characters and situations combine to reveal the psychological workings of the mind of the hero, or as the case may be, the antihero" (131). Yet for all its solipsistic focus on the experience of its central character, as a stage practice expressionist drama

depends on the interpretive relations engrained in the realistic mode it appears to challenge. Even though it represents the externalized affect of a given character, the material stage of expressionist theater is itself a constraint, a world seen from the dystopic perspective of its victims rather than from the "objective" perspective of its privileged audiences. In performance, expressionistic plays tend to literalize the relations of realism, as characters are enclosed in a mechanistic and alien material world onstage, still searching for an elusive realm of private experience.

Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine (1923), for example, provides a kind of negative image of the realistic drama it swerves to avoid. The play's scenographic devices are familiar examples of the allegorical dimension of the expressionistic mode: the giant adding machine; the ballet mécanique of the Zeros, Ones, Twos, Threes, Fours, Fives, and Sixes; Zero's trial; the meeting with Shrdlu and Daisy Devore beyond the grave. In part, the play satirizes its central character, the organization man whose failure of imagination and will makes him an eternal slave. Even when he meets Daisy in the Elysian fields, after all, Zero maintains the moral standards of suburban society ("Anyway, they wouldn't stand for this—the way we been going on"), and the play closes with Lieutenant Charles injecting Zero back into worldly existence for another incarnation: "You can't change the rules—nobody can—they've got it all fixed. It's a rotten system—but what are you going to do about it?" (99, 105). Lukács argues that the "much-heightened sense of the significance of milieu" enables the modern "drama of individualism" to become problematic, and so dramatic in its characteristic fashion ("Sociology" 434); Zero's nullity becomes dignified in exact proportion to the extraordinary power embodied in the scenic environment necessary to express and control him. And as in realistic drama, both the mechanistic mise-en-scène and the language of the text work to mask a possibly unrecognized, perhaps barely representable subtext of desire. This aspect of language is most evident in the play's brilliant second scene, where Daisy and Zero check an endless series of figures. The public language of accounting dissolves (for the audience) to reveal a private and incommunicable discourse:

DAISY: Six dollars. Three fifteen. Two twenty-five. Sixty-five cents. A dollar twenty. You talk to me as if I was dirt.

ZERO: I wonder if I could kill the wife without anybody findin' out. In bed some night. With a pillow.

DAISY: I used to think you was stuck on me.
(72)

Although Rice thought The Adding Machine to be "the very antithesis of Ibsenism," it is, like most expressionist theater, substantiated by the realistic rhetoric it repudiates (Living Theatre 124). Rice described the difference between realism and expressionism to Dudley Digges, the first Mr. Zero, in the conventional terms of dramatic style: "In the realistic play, we look at the character from the outside. We see him in terms of action and of actuality. But in the expressionistic play we subordinate and even discard objective reality and seek to express the character in terms of his own inner life" (Minority Report 198–99). The "objective reality" that expressionism appears to discard is, in fact, simply—in the party scene, the trial—re-presented from the perspective of its victim. As in the realistic theater, the material world of the expressionist stage both constrains the character and becomes the character, in much the way that realistic heroes often find the signs of the degraded world they oppose etched within themselves.^[9] For this reason, it's not surprising to find that Rice's sense of Zero restates the realistic dialectic between external pressure and a private zone of interior contradiction:

For I conceive Zero as a complex being. A bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions, of impulses and fears, of desires and inhibitions. His conduct in a general sense is determined by hereditary influences, childhood environment, education and the social inheritance, but more particularly it is influenced by the state of his digestion, the weather, his internal secretions and the multitudinous sensory stimuli of light and sound, touch and temperature, taste, motion and pain.
(qtd. in Murphy 150–51).

Plays like Sophie Treadwell's Machinal (1928), John Howard Lawson's Roger Bloomer (1923), and The Adding Machine suggest the problem posed by expressionism: namely, that as a style it superficially departs from a realistic ideology that it reifies in the rhetoric of its stage production. The expressionistic mapping of the dynamics of character onto the scenic materials of the stage presents a

[9] See Williams, Modern Tragedy 98.

world governed by alienated, abstract forces that the characters in the plays are barely capable of recognizing. As Raymond Williams argues, the increasingly threatening and hostile realistic environment becomes (often in plays written by the same authors and produced by the same companies) transformed into a realization of the characters' responses to that environment, staging the characters' responses to the world as the dramatic world itself (Drama 339–40). In a sense, Rice's career is emblematic of Williams's observation, for in turning from the expressionistic mode of The Adding Machine and The Subway (1929) to the scenic realism of his most famous play, Street Scene (1929), Rice reveals the complicity between these two modes of production, a complicity based primarily on the determining power located in the scene . Moreso than the expressionistic theater, drama in the sociological mode uses the object world of the stage design to control the audience's interpretive perspective on the action. Much as the mechanistic quality of expressionistic staging reduces the characters to machines, in the sociological drama the extent to which stage objects become agents of the action transforms the characters into things.

To view the lower classes as objects is one of the originary aspects of realistic theater; as Martin Meisel observes, even Zola's "public places, inhabited by functioning representations of all classes and occupations, suggest a sociological rather than a psychological perspective, and ultimately an alternative to bourgeois drama" (Realizations 374). The supposed neutrality of this environmental absence of perspective is enforced in Street Scene through the rhetorical arrangement of stage space. The New York Times reviewer commented on Rice's (and designer Jo Mielziner's) "lithographic New York environment" and saw it as the hallmark of a play apparently without "a point of view," without a perspective on the "traits of our slummy life." The title claims the play's slice of life for its subject, a working-class scene modeled on a brownstone front on New York's West 65th Street. Mielziner found the play "a work of strong, almost journalistic realism," and his celebrated set seemed to spill its contents directly onto the foreshortened playing area (Designing 148). The space, defined by the edge of a street running parallel to the proscenium downstage and the facade of the brownstone occupying the entire upstage wall, is one of maximum frontality. Directing the play, Rice orchestrated a variety of dramatically inconsequential activities

to enhance the apparently random and lifelike process of the action, down to laying a concrete sidewalk on the stage and using prerecorded street noises throughout the performance to create an auditory as well as a visual environment. But it was Mielziner's set that became the play's protagonist, brooding over the drama, integrating the scattered and inconsequential lives of the characters.

As in plays like The Silver Box , the condition of such characters is to be visible, revealed to us on this occasion because of the summer heat and the size and poor ventilation of their apartments. The brownstone becomes a kind of vitalistic center of the action, and the characters become its furniture, a point emphasized toward the end of act 2, when two objects are about to be brought from the building: the corpse of Mrs. Maurrant and the belongings of the evicted Hildebrand family. The objectification of the characters is implied as well in the position that the play's environment assigned to its audience:

What distinguishes "Street Scene" from a host of synthetic forerunners is Mr. Rice's remarkable sense of character. Here are not merely the automatons of the giddy city streets, but the people—the intellectual Jew who runs on endlessly about the capitalistic classes, the Italian musician who dreams of the flowery land from which he came, the office girl who wants to move out to Queens, the pleasant woman who is quietly sacrificing her life to a sick mother, the ruffian taxicab driver, the flirt, the school teacher, all brought into focus with telling strokes of character-portrayal.
(Rev. of Street Scene )

Life "on the grimier edge of the middle class" is replete with social and ethnic types—the cranky Jewish intellectual, the happy-go-lucky Italian, the stoic Swedish janitor, and so on—whose verisimilitude is a function of the reviewer's voyeuristic point of vantage outside the social, economic, and ethnic conditions they inhabit. Rice echoes the review when he discusses his own audience and implies that the class differential between stage and audience is necessary for the scene to seem an image of social reality. No grimy social others here. The "cross section of the New York theatregoing public" that Rice sought was predictably an educated, professional-class audience of "college students, office workers, hospital nurses, lawyers, shopkeepers, a sprinkling of actors and of personal friends" (Living Theatre 219). Not surprisingly, the least stereotypical characters in the play are those who reflect this audience: Rose

(who has a job in a real-estate office) and Sam (who is planning to go to law school). These characters are granted the richest interior life, the most complex motivation, the least obtrusive ethnic tics; their longing for escape is the most urgently felt, and their opportunities for mobility are the most keenly realized.

The object-like quality of the characters can be read in the context of Mielziner's massive set. The set creates and specifies an immediately recognizable locale, but it also functions dialectically, to signify an absence, an unattainable elsewhere that seems to have been forced out of the picture by the weight of the material world. Rice recalled critics like St. John Ervine complaining of "a garbage can, an actual and veritable garbage can," onstage; such effects helped to compose a concrete locale to sustain and substantiate the action (Minority Report 256). The totality of Rice and Mielziner's scenic integration also seems to render the characters' desire for something else—Mrs. Maurrant's indefinite longing for something better, imperfectly realized in her tawdry affair with the sleazy milk collector; the romance of Rose and Sam—powerful, poignant, and impossible. The materiality of the set, in this sense, seems oddly to express not the drama's openness to the unscripted world offstage but its closure to the world beyond this street. This feeling of closure underlies the play's sketchy politics as well—"And if you was to elect a Socialist president tomorra, it would be the same thing" (129)—and reifies them in its plot structure. Although the events of the day appear to the characters as points in a disconnected yet unremitting repetition of the same, the play insists that the audience regard the action as part of a natural cycle of change and renewal. Street Scene closes, after all, with the arrival of new tenants and with a new round of gossip developing among the inhabitants of 25 West 65th.^[10]Street Scene requires and projects an audience of

[10] As a television producer suggested to Rice in 1954, explaining why Street Scene could not be considered as a vehicle for a weekly television series, the play requires an asymmetry between stage and audience at odds with Madison Avenue's sense of good advertising: "Foremost among these objections is the squalor of the setting, the lower class social level of all the chief characters, and the utterly depressing circumstances which they all find themselves in," circumstances opposed to how the "American consuming public" is presented "by the Advertising Industry today . . . middle class, not lower class; happy in general, not miserable and frustrated; and optimistic, not depressed" (Living Theatre 223).

others, whose freedom—to dream, to judge, to depart, not to be seen—exactly reverses the determined scenic milieu that stands for reality on the stage.

The scenic rhetoric of realistic theater insists on the explanatory power of the stage milieu and on the inaccessibility of the "self"—of some characters at least—that the scene claims to control. In something like Mielziner's celebrated design for Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949; the working title was The Inside of His Head ), the world of realism falls open to enable contact between two zones of privacy, a one-way transaction illuminating the actor-characters onstage for an unstaged and concealed audience. Willy Loman's expressionistic timebends do not, after all, open him more fully to the understanding of his family, who remain, as the characters in realistic drama generally do, isolated from one another, trapped within themselves, their language, and the walls that surround them. This sense that scenic or sociological realism locates two complementary realms of interiority, of freedom, while dramatizing an intervening realm of economic and material necessity can be felt throughout the drama of the 1930s, particularly in plays like Street Scene and Maxwell Anderson's Winterset (1935; the set, also designed by Mielziner, was dominated by the enormous pier of the Brooklyn Bridge), in which the set operates like the outsized machinery of expressionist theater to dwarf, control, and objectify the characters as cogs in the urban machine. When there is escape from such scenes, it often appears as escape into an unknown and unknowable elsewhere, a figure for the unreality of the characters' desire to depart the scene: the Liebstod of Anderson's Mio and Miriamne, Rice's Elysian Fields, the "certain place where it's moonlight and roses" that draws Moe and Hennie at the end of Awake and Sing !

The rhetoric of realism is torn between the assertion of an environmental causality—assimilated to the economy by Odets, to social pressure by Galsworthy, to the double standard by Pinero, to gender and class oppression by Robins and Shaw—and the necessity to retain the freedom of its characters, a freedom that seems increasingly internalized and impalpable. This dialectic between visible constraint and an unknown inner freedom apparently inverts the circumstances of the absent audience of realism but actually duplicates them: our "freedom" exists similarly in the form of

consciousness, while our actions are hedged by the manifest proprieties of our attendence in the theater. This tension is expressed in the Method's reliance on "given circumstances" vivified by the actor's "emotion memory," and in the dramatic function assigned to privileged moments of privacy or withdrawal from society in the drama.

These concerns can also be seen in the working of the visible mise-en-scène itself, in a play like Sidney Kingsley's Dead End (1935). The play is set on a New York street that dead ends into the filthy East River, and provided the occasion for one of Norman Bel Geddes's most intricate and splendid sets. More than the familiar brownstone of Street Scene , Geddes's design strikingly evoked the dialectic between engagement and detachment characteristic of realistic vision. Instead of the frontally oriented brownstone, Dead End presented the audience with a deeper, more urgent perspective. The entire front of the stage was transformed into an East River pier, extending the width of the proscenium and jutting several feet beyond the curtain line into the orchestra pit. A narrow street, running between a dilapidated tenement (audience left) and a huge coal hopper (downstage corner, audience right), angled upstage to the audience's right, disappearing in a dark horizon. As one reviewer noted, "So real it all seemed that I, sitting there in mid-river, found myself paddling to keep afloat" (Gabriel). On the audience's left, downstage and roughly parallel to the proscenium, a narrow and fenced path led to a swanky apartment offstage; a small gate faced the street, beside a raised and fenced terrace: "The wall is of rich, heavy masonry, guarded at the top by a row of pikes. Beyond the pikes, shutting off the view of the squalid street below, is a thick edging of lush green shrubbery " (453). The upstage side of the terrace abutted the side wall of the tenement, freshly painted and adorned with a large trelliswork. The dreary front of the building faced the litter-strewn street, and other tenements could be seen on adjacent blocks, replete with broken windows, washlines, and dirty mattresses airing on the fire escapes. As Brooks Atkinson remarked in his review, Geddes "reared up a setting that pushes the thought of the author's drama ruthlessly into the audience's face. Not only in its accuracy of detail but in its perspective and its power his setting is a practical masterpiece."

Onstage, the drama and its scenic environment brought two

urban landscapes into an uneasy proximity: "What you have seen and heard in New York, wondering and apprehensive" (Atkinson) was brought up against East Side privilege, symbolized less by the unseen apartment or the green and growing terrace than by the small gate downstage, painted a dazzling white against the gloom and darkness of the set. The dramatic action is divided between showing the life of the slum's inhabitants and the conflict that erupts when they are confronted by their immediate spectators, the wealthy inhabitants of the apartment building. The scenic environment is similarly duplicitous, both receding into the city topography and aggressively threatening its audience. Geddes emphasized this perspective with a variety of devices—miniature laundry hanging on "distant" clotheslines, raking the street upward toward the back of the set—and then filled in the environment it governed with a famous array of realistic effects: street litter, recorded sounds of street noise and lapping waves on the pier, boys climbing dripping wet from the "river" in the orchestra (really a net below stage level, where they were sprayed with mineral oil), actors without stage makeup.^[11] Perspective constitutes its fictive scene by displacing the audience from it. Like the wealthy, slightly unreal inhabitants of the unseen apartment, we are screened from a reality we enter only empathetically. The little gate signals our access to, and protection from, the life of the street as well.

"The street has imaginative, as well as actual, perspective," Edith Isaacs remarked for Theatre Arts Monthly , and within that perspective the environment utterly controls the characters' lives: "Before a word is spoken, you recognize that this place of darkness and dirt is captain of their soul and master of their fate" (891). The

[11] Geddes used an RCA recording crew to make recordings of waves lapping against a pier, the sound of boys diving into the river, vehicle sounds, dogs barking (various kinds and duration), babies crying, and so on, which were broadcast from speakers located at various points in the set both before the curtain rose and during the play itself. On the complexity of the design and placement of speakers (river sounds emanated from a speaker near the front of the stage), see Sobel. Various articles were published noting that no special stage makeup was used for the performance; women wore cosmetics in character, and the men appeared without makeup. One article also notes that the boys were dirtied with cork instead of real dirt, and that they were sprayed with mineral oil before climbing out of the "river" onto the stage; see "'Dead End' Cast Shuns Make-Up."

scene urges a cyclic social evolution in much the manner of Street Scene , with which it was inevitably compared. The boys who hang out on the pier eventually get into trouble with the wealthy apartment residents; their future is embodied by the gangster Babyface Martin, once a child here himself, who comments, "Da kids aroun' here don' change" (471). The stage's receding perspective, however, was offset by its aggressive confrontation of the audience, reaching out into the auditorium to force a kind of complicity between the viewer and the scene. The forestage acting area was dominated by the gang, and one of the boys' principal activities throughout the play was diving off the pier into the "river" in the orchestra pit.

Despite its melodramatic plot and sentimental characterization, Dead End seemed to strike a certain apprehension in its audiences, reflected not so much as a response to the play's dramatic action as to its characterization of the gang. The rumor that the boys were really not actors at all is a testament in part to the polish of their performance and in part to Kingsley's dialogue. This is, after all, a play in which boys talk about diving "bareass" into the river (460); they taunt one another with "Sissy, sissy, sucks his mamma's titty!"; one boy shouts "Frig you! . . . Ah, I'll sock yuh inna tit" to his friend's older sister (465); and they "cockalize" victims like Milty and the rich boy Philip. Such performance emphasized the verisimilitude of the scenic milieu by puncturing familiar stage conventions: the boys were neither winsome waifs, nor sentimental stage hooligans. "It seems to me no group of children could be so perfect in their portrayal of the various roles or be so filthy in body and mind unless they were accustomed to such an environment," complained one reviewer, and Variety warned—or hoped—that "the script will have to be tempered somewhat to keep the law out."^[12] Geddes's design shaped Kingsley's sharpest assault on the audience's sensibilities, by thrusting the "realistic" behavior of desanctified stage children appropriately through the proscenium, practically into the audience's lap.

Like Method acting, like realistic dramatic action, the design of Dead End locates the privileged perspective of the spectator as a

[12] Rev. of Dead End, Brooklyn Citizen 29 October 1935; Rev. of Dead End, Variety 30 October 1935.

zone of privacy and illusionistic completion; breaking the proscenium, it dramatizes the relationship between that privacy and social empowerment. Appropriately enough, the subject of architecture becomes critical to the play's thematic design, extending and clarifying the function of stage space in its theatrical organization. The romantic plot in the play involves another neighborhood character, an unemployed architect named Gimpty, who cannot hope to make the money to support the woman he loves and must watch her sail out of his life on a yacht, knowing that she loves him but will not live in poverty. Gimpty sits watchfully on the edge of the scene throughout the play, observing events while he sketches designs for an urban scenario that will never be built, a city of dreams. He comments on the relationship between environment and character in the play:

New York with its famous skyline . . . its Empire State, the biggest God-damned building in the world. The biggest tombstone in the world! They wanted to build a monument to the times. Well, there it is, bigger than the pyramids and just as many tenants. . . . I wonder when they'll let us build houses for men to live in?
(491)

Kingsley's echo of Ibsen's Master Builder Solness is important here. Solness, climbing the dizzying tower toward his castles in the air, undertakes a vertiginous assault on the uncanny, unknowable interiority of realistic character, and an assault on the reliability of the material stage world to express it. Architecture, in The Master Builder , figures one of Ibsen's characteristic projects of self-creation, whose awkward place in the rhetoric of realism marks their descendance from an earlier, more expansive romantic dramaturgy.^[13] Gimpty, on the other hand, is unemployed, unable to build the world where he might stalk that romantic self. In the scene, but not part of it, Gimpty's drawings precisely register the dialectic of engagement and detachment typical of realistic observation, reified here in the design of the set itself. As the play's title implies, Dead End stages a world of material limitation, in which characters are unable to climb where they build, and an unchanging future is visible in the static present. Only the audience remains disencumbered, floating in an unimaginable freedom.

[13] See Goldman, "The Ghost of Joy."