Abandoning Old Formulas.

Writing for The Theatre magazine in 1919, Broadway producer Daniel Frohman lamented the passing of what he considered "the two prime requirements" of good theater: "cleanliness and a happy ending." At the beginning of the decade most plays performed in America had both. But by middecade a shift had occurred in the theater, one similar to the advent of realism in American literature and art: instead of portraying how life ought to be, new plays reflected their writers' perspectives on how life was. Small theater companies were springing up across the country, experimenting with new themes, new staging, and new styles of acting. The qualities common to turn-of-the-century stage productions — predictable plots, melodramatic acting, and happy endings — gave way to psychological, often gritty, drama, some of it in plays by one of the century's greatest playwrights, Eugene O'Neill...