The foregoing stage history
of Dreiser’s plays suggests that, for a while at least, Dreiser’s
work seemed dramatically compelling to those dedicated to experimental
theater. The Girl in the Coffin in particular appealed to those
troupes interested in overcoming the artificiality of commercial
productions. What most attracted theaters to this play was its evocation
of pathos, its realistic characterization, and especially its employment
of naturalistic detail in its staging. As one reviewer marveled,
"the [Detroit] Arts and Crafts Theatre dallied with disaster . . .
in using an honest-to-goodness coffin as one of the ‘props’ in
Theodore Dreiser’s play, ‘The Girl in the Coffin.’. . . [T]he very
fact that it was a necessary part of the staging has caused producers of
one-act plays to fight shy of this particularly keen and good little
drama."64
At the same time, the
difficulties in securing a production of The Hand of the Potter
testify to the resistance of the theater-going public to controversial
subjects enacted on the stage. Reviewers tended to fall into two camps:
those who condemned the play because they were troubled by its frank
portrayal of sexual deviance that did not accord with their sense of
stage propriety; and those who welcomed the play as an attempt to enact
a new vision of tragic drama. As Ludwig Lewisohn, reviewing the
production for The Nation, explained, Dreiser
substitutes the concept of tragic guilt for that
of sin; he sees that guilt arises out of the life-process itself and
selects its guilty but sinless victim . . . . He alienates the
ordinary spectator by repudiating the notions of sin and expiation
through punishment. It is Isadore Berchansky’s undeserved
punishment that he is what he is. The tragic guilt that he must bear
issues from implacable and anterior sources. Why should we strike at
him because the hand of the potter slipped?
Reviewers condemned the play, Lewisohn concluded,
because Dreiser’s conception of tragedy "invalidates their
absolute moral judgments; it cracks the foundations of their punitive
justice; it shows up the blank folly of hate, war, revenge."65
It is not Dreiser’s
realistic plays, however, but his supernatural plays that have had the
most influence on subsequent playwrights. Elmer Rice attributes Plays
of the Natural and Supernatural as one of the influences upon The
Adding Machine.66 And Thornton Wilder was reportedly
influenced by Dreiser’s expressionistic depiction of synchronous
movement. Richard Goldstone, who knew Wilder well, suggests that The
Blue Sphere in particular provided Wilder with a method for
depicting "scenes of continuous and even simultaneous action"
that Wilder would employ so masterfully in Our Town. Moreover,
Wilder was absorbed by two themes expressed in The Spring Recital
and Laughing Gas and developed them fully in Our Town and The
Skin of Our Teeth: "the ecstasy of being alive, as seen through
the eyes of those who no longer have life, and the repetitive, cyclical
history of mankind."67 Though now largely forgotten by
students of American literature and theater, Dreiser’s campaign to
introduce his work to the theater did affect others, who built upon the
path he helped to blaze.