7

Midcentury American Engagements with Evolution

We have almost become Darwinian in our playtaste.

Carol Bird, “Enter the Monkey Man”

The playwrights I consider in this chapter—especially Susan Glaspell and Thornton Wilder—take the theatrical engagement with evolution in radically innovative directions compared with their predecessors, and I explore what makes these innovations particularly American. Peter Middleton has noted a characteristically midcentury American attitude toward science, particularly physics.¹ The period (circa 1920–1955) also saw profound changes in evolutionary theory, from the gradual waning of the popularity of eugenics to the rejection of non-Darwinian alternatives to the consolidation of the genetics–natural selection camps into the Modern Synthesis. For almost this entire period, Glaspell experimented in a wide range of theatrical forms with both non-Darwinian and Darwinian thinking, and she, Wilder, and a range of other playwrights take the theatrical engagement with evolution in a variety of new and sometimes-startling directions and modes.

Although Paul Lifton argues that by the early 1940s “evolutionary theory was scarcely a subject of heated controversy . . . at least among aware, well-educated writers who were not religious fundamentalists or reactionaries,”2 generally, Charles Darwin fared less well in America than in Britain in terms of broader cultural acceptance. There are strong resemblances, for example the enthusiasm for Herbert Spencer, the rise of eugenics, and the preference for “the Lamarckian view of human nature” around the turn of the twentieth century.³ This is true also of developments in Continental Europe, where, particularly in Germany and France, genetics remained more open to Lamarckism and other non-Darwinian influences. The American resistance to Darwin was consistent with the optimism—albeit eugenic in its overtones—of the frontier hypothesis of Frederick J. Turner, with its notion that the American West was “a stimulating environment which worked directly on the constitution of immigrants to produce a superior form of humanity.”⁴ An important context here is the positive feeling about humanity’s place in nature, so long as we can take care of it and be vigilant about limited resources—something that Glaspell touches on in several plays, long before other proto-environmentalist authors.⁵ Plays like Hallie Flanagan Davis’s E = mc² (1948) are typical of the time, balancing stark warnings about the danger of atomic energy with optimistic suggestions for the good that it can do, for example, for agriculture.⁶ The theatre of midcentury America thus evinces a strong environmentalist streak, one that may be connected to the simultaneous romanticization of its wilderness (itself a problematic term since “wilderness” was often created by clearing land occupied by indigenous peoples) and steeped in the “vernacular modernism” of Georgia O’Keeffe, Wild West cinema, and the novels of John Steinbeck.⁷

Susan Glaspell’s Theatrical Hybridity

Since Christopher W. E. Bigsby in 1984 described Glaspell as regrettably a mere footnote in the history of modern drama,8 she has enjoyed a blossoming reputation: dozens of books and articles have been published on her work, her Complete Plays were published in 2010, a very active international Susan Glaspell Society now exists, and many of her works have enjoyed successful revivals, particularly at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, England. Theatre critic Michael Billington has championed Glaspell as “American drama’s best-kept secret,” “an audacious pioneer whose voice cries out to be heard.”⁹ Tamsen Wolff writes that “the animation that important artists like Glaspell and [Eugene] O’Neill brought to the vexed issues of biology and identity left a permanent stamp on American theatre.”¹⁰ Right to the end of her career, she was still showing this interest in biology and human destiny, in her collaboration with the Federal Theatre Project on the play Spirochete (tracing the evolution of syphilis) and in her last play, Springs Eternal, which continues her method of representing evolution through the depiction of multigenerational families.

Glaspell’s first novel, The Glory of the Conquered (1909), reveals a wealth of intellectual influences, including George Bernard Shaw, Ernst Haeckel, and Darwin.¹¹ This first novel came out two years after Glaspell’s partner, George Cram Cook, had published a paper on evolution first delivered in 1906 at the Davenport, Iowa, Contemporary Club (after Scientific American refused it).¹² Cook’s paper referred to saltation as part of “the ‘heroic history’ of evolution, of one-celled plants and animals that had taken the leap and dared become more until some of them ‘crossed the difficult gap from invertebrate to vertebrate life’ and eventually developed a brain.”¹³ Perhaps this is the origin of Glaspell’s use of this idea of the sudden leap in evolution in The Verge and Inheritors, both of which put forth saltation rather than natural selection as the preferred mechanism of evolutionary change. It offers a “heroic” vision of evolution that is fast, visible, and dramatic. Another distinctive quality in Glaspell’s evolutionary vision is her focus on plants, drawing our attention back to botany, the foundation of evolutionary thought for Carl Linnaeus, Erasmus Darwin, Darwin himself, and so many other evolutionists before being overshadowed by the anthropomorphic appeal of mammals. Glaspell’s The Verge and Inheritors (1921), as well as shorter plays like The Outside, foregrounds botany. In what follows, I trace her dramatic engagement with both of these concepts and show how innovatively she treats them in her work and discuss the other evolutionary element animating her plays, Haeckel’s monism.

Bernice (1919) was her big breakthough, after which critics always reviewed her work, particularly in Britain.14 The play contains a couple of direct references to Darwin, but they are not well integrated and therefore seem gratuitous; Darwin is just a label to slap on to a specific character, as with Robert Buchanan’s references to evolution in The Charlatan or Henry Arthur Jones’s use of Spencer in The Dancing Girl. Bernice’s bereaved father is called “one of the wrecks of the Darwinian theory” by his son-in-law, Craig: “Spent himself fighting for it and—let it go at that.”¹⁵ The line is echoed a few moments later: “You said he was a wreck of the Darwinian theory. Then me—a wreck of free speech.”¹⁶ The line recurs when Margaret, “on the verge of being not herself” (a productive idea for Glaspell), calls Abbie “another wreck. It’s your Darwinian theory. Your free speech.”¹⁷ This makes little sense given that Abbie has not been part of the previous exchanges regarding Darwinian theory and wrecks, and it suggests that Glaspell read Darwin and Spencer naïvely and did not seem to distinguish between them.¹⁸ Certainly Bernice bears this out; Darwin is simply shorthand for free-thinking progressivism, just as he was in many of Glaspell’s predecessor Herne’s plays.

Inheritors still has this flavor but shows a much more thoroughgoing engagement with evolution, with its panoramic sweep encompassing the history of America, the pioneers settling and displacing Native Americans: the play stages the sheer force of history and offers as well a protest against World War I and its after-effects. The central figure is a jailed conscientious objector who never appears to the audience. As in Bernice, there are direct references to Darwin, but now better integrated and explained. “You haven’t read Darwin, have you, Uncle Silas?” asks the student Felix, and he describes Darwin as “the great new man” with his theory of “the survival of the fittest,” a term we know to come from Spencer rather than Darwin.19 Both social Darwinism and Lamarckism crop up in this dialogue. Felix says that Darwin can make us “feel better about the Indians” because “in the struggle for existence, many must go down. The fittest survive. This—had to be.” When Silas seems a bit shocked by such easy exculpation, Felix expounds: “[Darwin] calls it that. Best fitted to the place in which one finds one’s self, having the qualities that can best cope with conditions—do things. From the beginning of life it’s been like that. He shows the growth of life forms that were barely alive, the lowest animal forms—jellyfish—up to man.” The exchange culminates in a lyrical explanation of evolution that is suffused with Lamarckism. Fejevary says “gently” that we should not be discouraged by the idea that we are descended from monkeys. Look at our hands, he says: “Why have we hands?” It is not because God gave them to us, but because “ages back—before life had taken form as man, there was an impulse to do what had never been done—when you think that we have hands today because from the first of life there have been adventurers—those of best brain and courage who wanted to be more than life had been, and that from aspiration has come doing, and doing has shaped the thing with which to do—it gives our hand a history which should make us want to use it well.”²⁰

We thus move from the ugly social Darwinism of the narrow-minded Felix to the Lamarckian vision of progress and human will equating to the pioneer spirit that Fejevary personifies. Silas is thrilled by this vision: “Think what it is you’ve said! If it’s true that we made ourselves—made ourselves out of the wanting to be more—created ourselves you might say, by our own courage—our—what is it?—aspiration.” Silas is sure that he has felt this thought emanating from nature itself: “The earth told me. The beasts told me.” In fact, he says, even Fejevary’s face has been revealing this thought: “In your face haven’t I seen thinking make a finer face?”²¹

Geological time is acknowledged—human evolution has taken “many millions of years since earth first stirred”—but the role of the will is given pride of place in one of Glaspell’s most syntactically stilted lines, characteristic of her approach to theatrical dialogue: “Then we are what we are because through all that time there’ve been them that wanted to be more than life had been.”²² Once he has realized this, Silas has a second revelation: that this progressive unfolding might easily be reversed, if the will has such a key part in it. In other words, we could regress. He determines to found a university as a means of keeping humanity on the steady evolutionary march forward. Silas clings to his idea that “we created ourselves out of the thoughts that came,” rather than being created through natural processes. This is not far from Shaw’s vision. Silas’s university will be the culmination of “that thinking that breathes from the earth,” those “dreams of a million years.”²³

J. Ellen Gainor likens Inheritors to Angels in America in its epic “scope, sweep, and political force.”24 I would suggest a kinship as well with Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, which is discussed further in this chapter. Wolff writes that Inheritors is about the American grand narrative of “self-production.” The play is “an account of American history by way of an interpretation of Darwin.” There is also sustained discussion of genetics in the play, connecting it to The Verge, written at about the same time, which likewise concentrates on genetic manipulation. But the difference between the two plays with regard to their engagement with evolutionary theory is vast. In Inheritors, Glaspell “allows Darwinian theory inaccurately to encompass a self-making (or neo-Lamarckian) myth: her version of evolutionary theory is one in which these individuals ‘made ourselves—made ourselves out of the wanting to be more.’”²⁵ The hybrid corn that is being created in the subplot of the play by the farmer Ira Morton serves as the metaphor for this; it is now “best in the state. He’s experimented with it—created a new kind. They’ve given it a name—Morton corn. It seems corn is rather fascinating to work with—very mutable stuff.”²⁶ The Verge will take this concept further, staging it instead of describing it, and making the metaphor of mutation work on many levels.

Glaspell had spent some time around 1909 and 1910 working in Colorado for the United States Forest Service, “an experience that solidified her interest in ecology and sound environmental land use.”27 She uses trees, forests, and the unspoiled earth throughout her work as highly original and evocative metaphors. The setting of her one-act play The Outside (1917), for instance, is a barren and bleak Cape Cod coast where the sand meets the forest: “The rude things, vines, bushes, which form the outer uneven rim of the woods—the only things that grow in the sand. . . . The dunes are hills and strange forms of sand on which, in places, grows the stiff beach grass—struggle; dogged growing against odds.”²⁸ The idea of these two environments meeting fascinates her, as it did François de Curel in the central speech about the forests and the seas in Les Fossiles that I discussed in the context of changing ideas about extinction. Glaspell uses the imagery of woods and sand in a more dramatic sense, visualizing the moment they run up against each other and the two distinct habitats collide. She stresses that they may be in constant competition but the sands and the forests coexist, in contrast to de Curel’s sense of competition between these two environments, metaphors for incompatible kinds of humanity, unable to come together because they operate so differently and compete for supremacy. It is not inconceivable that Glaspell could have encountered de Curel’s play when she lived in Paris in 1908; she saw all the new art that was emerging, as well as much European drama—Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Gerhart Hauptmann, Maurice Maeterlinck. She went to the small theatres then leading the way in finding “new plays, new sight lines, cheap seats, ensemble acting.”²⁹ Jacques Copeau and others were founding Nouvelle Revue Française, attacking popular theatre in ways Glaspell would also do in her attacks on Broadway.

Forests provide Glaspell with powerful metaphors relating to the human condition, and these metaphors run right through her work. In Close the Book (1917), she gives a pedigree-obsessed family the name of “Root” and makes them realize in the final moments of the play that their sacred family genealogy needs mixing up with new blood, new “air through our family trees,” or else it will be “stifled.”³⁰ This variation on the theme of the dendritic tree of life suggests that a healthy genealogy will not be pure and homogeneous but will follow irregular patterns. Glaspell’s vision also encompasses a strong sense of agency in nature. In Inheritors, one character says, “Sometimes I feel that the land itself has got a mind,” and that something that’s “like thought” seems to be “coming up from” the earth.³¹ In her last play, Springs Eternal, only recently published, she refers to the self-absorbed and blinkered family of the play as “a tree of many branches, and each twig attracts to itself people who will travel hundreds of miles—sleepless and hungry—that they may finally sit in this room. With other twigs.”³²

Glaspell transplants these ideas, and her European influences, into American contexts. She is prescient—like Ibsen’s allusion to the filth-producing tanneries in An Enemy of the People—when in Inheritors she has a reference to industry encroaching on and polluting the land. The little town is growing. “It’s grown so much this year, and in a way that means more growing—that big glucose plant going up down the river, the new lumber mill—all that means many more people,” says Felix, and Fejevary adds that “they’ve even bought ground for a steel works.” Yes, says Silas, “a city will rise from these cornfields—a big rich place—that’s bound to be.”³³ The land they are discussing was taken from the Native Americans, and that sense of wrongdoing haunts the play. No matter how hard the characters try, it cannot be expunged; even building Morton College, the Harvard of the Midwest, has not atoned for it because its original Arnoldian idealism of spreading the “sweetness and light” of culture has been undermined by political corruption and reactionary ideas on the part of the younger generation who were meant to be progressive pathbreakers.

Glaspell often reverses the expected pattern of increased enlightenment and progressivism, as in Horace, the racist son of the college’s founder in Inheritors, and Elizabeth in The Verge, who is more conservative than her mother, Claire, who berates her for taking for granted all that women have fought for and for seeming to forget the struggle for the vote almost as soon as it was won. This maps directly onto the real-life backdrop for the play’s first performance in Britain in 1925—a period of backlash and hostility to feminists and working women, as Susan Kingsley Kent points out.34 The Verge is not only a key evolution-related drama but also an important precursor to the feminist approach to evolution in later plays like Bryony Lavery’s Origin of the Species.³⁵ A number of closely related ideas about nature inform Glaspell’s thinking in this play, among them saltation, Lamarckism, Haeckel’s monism, the great chain of being, genetic hybridity. There is also Alfred North Whitehead, whose book The Concept of Nature was published in 1920 and to whom Glaspell refers in her notebook as having written of “the leap of the imagination reaching beyond what is then actual.”³⁶ Claire is trying to make a great leap forward with her plant hybrid, breaking out of the old mold and creating a new form. This has always been seen as an analogy for what Glaspell is trying to do theatrically: breaking out of the realistic form and creating an expressionist hybrid whose dialogue is one of the first theatrical attempts at what we might identify now as “l’écriture feminine.”

Glaspell’s various evolutionary ideas were shot through with, and transformed by, a devotion to Friedrich Nietzsche, just as Shaw’s were. Cook’s greatest obsessions were the Greeks and Nietzsche. Margot Norris points out that Nietzsche used Darwin’s ideas “as critical tools to interrogate the status of man as a natural being.” But “Nietzsche misunderstands, rejects, and reappropriates an alienated version of Darwin’s most radical thinking.”37 Discussing evolution, Nietzsche, and socialism, Glaspell and Cook and their circle seemed to conflate them into one monist, possibly eugenicist, vision of the eventual perfection of humankind akin to Shaw’s Creative Evolution. Glaspell expressed in her writings her “need for oneness and the transcendence of humankind’s limitations, which could only be achieved in a struggle that would not be ‘woundless’ but would bring those few individuals sufficiently courageous to risk pain and failure nearer to perfection”; this “Nietzschean idealism” was also present in The Verge, in which “a way to reach the perfection of humankind, to transcend man-made institutions, is signaled by woman.”³⁸ Nietzsche’s ideas of eternal recurrence and the will to overcome oneself are closely bound with the monism Glaspell and Cook embraced.

Glaspell’s evolutionary mixture is thus a heady one, and performance is absolutely integral to it. Her texts contain numerous references to the evolutionary ideas described here, but it is the acting and staging that convey and clarify them effectively. In The Verge, the first thing the audience sees is a shaft of light coming from a trapdoor in the stage and striking “the long leaves and the huge brilliant blossom of a strange plant whose twisted stem projects from right front. Nothing is seen except this plant and its shadow.”³⁹ Light then reveals that the whole room is full of strange plants. But this is no ordinary greenhouse: it is not plants but for experimenting with them. It is “a laboratory” belonging to botanist Claire Archer, whose work is analogous to Glaspell’s use of theatre as a laboratory to experiment with new forms.

The oddest plant of all is the Edge Vine that Claire has been developing through experimentation with Hugo de Vries’s theory of mutation. As Claire explains to her daughter, she is not attempting to create better plants, but different ones, new plants that have been “shocked out of what they were—into something they were not.”⁴⁰ This is more than just an echo of the modernist demand, as expressed by Ezra Pound, to “make it new” or the feminist need to break out of patriarchal modes represented by the men who surround her, allegorically called Tom, Dick, and Harry. Claire explicitly links her project to evolution by couching it in terms that challenge assumptions about usefulness, the good of the species, and the upward drive toward perfection. The only character who comes close to understanding her project is Tom, her lover, whom she ends up strangling in a climactic frenzy.

The Verge has many themes, from the search for an authentically female language to a fierce questioning of biological determinism to the fragility of much-needed hybrid forms. The play has received thoroughgoing attention in terms of its science. In particular, Jörg Thomas Richter provides a detailed and insightful discussion of the play’s use of mutation theory in relation to Glaspell’s feminism.41 Wolff also provides a searching analysis of Glaspell’s use of genetics in the context of eugenics.⁴² There are theatrical precedents as well as scientific influences; Glaspell’s probing of plant life has an important precursor in the work of Strindberg, for instance, for whom, as we have seen, plants were “living beings with nerves, perhaps sense perceptions, and conceivably: consciousness.”⁴³ Indeed, one recent revival of The Verge took the leap of having actors portray the Edge Vine and the other key plant in the play, Breath of Life. This gives added poignancy just for growing to Claire’s interaction with her beloved creations, but it also makes her more of a Frankenstein who is simply playing with life.⁴⁴

The play itself resists this kind of science-fiction reading, however, because the science being attempted is no fantasy but grounded in contemporary genetics and because the setting, for all its exotic feel, evokes a plausible botanical laboratory. Cook built an amazing greenhouse that must have influenced Glaspell in writing The Verge; she describes it as a “rampart against a thousand leagues of cold invading from the bitter polar night.”⁴⁵ This contrast between extremes of heat and cold dominates the opening stage directions describing the greenhouse in The Verge, and it serves as further evidence of Glaspell’s enduring interest in how incompatible environments coexist. The greenhouse has been likened to the remarkable loft space in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck.⁴⁶

At the beginning of the twentieth century, insects and plants were at the forefront of evolutionary science, as work with Drosophila and the foundation laid by Mendel’s experiments with peas, respectively, made genetics the focus of new research on evolution. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin, and Linnaeus all began with plants as the foundation of their scientific investigations.47 Indeed, the attention given humans and animals as the main focus of evolutionary science due to The Descent of Man and Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals can obscure the fact that the bulk of Darwin’s research was on plants, one of the main areas of interest and firsthand experimentation and observation (as opposed to the secondhand information he obtained about humans and animals). As Steve Jones has shown, England was Darwin’s Galápagos and the garden at Down House his main center of experimental research.⁴⁸ He published numerous books and papers based on his botanical observations, and in his memoirs, he fondly recollects them: the Fertilisation of Orchids (1862), a paper on “the two forms or dimorphic condition of primula” (1862), a long paper on climbing plants (written 1864; expanded into book form and published 1875), a book on insectivorous plants (1875), the book Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom (1876; expanded and revised edition 1977), the book The Different Forms of Flowers (1877; second edition 1880), the book The Power of Movement in Plants (1880), and “a little book on ‘The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the action of worms’” (1881).⁴⁹ Indeed, Darwin’s enthusiasm for plant experimentation shines through his Autobiography; for instance, “No little discovery of mine ever gave me such pleasure,” says the man who gave us natural selection and revolutionized our understanding of human origins, “as the making out the meaning of heterostyled flowers. The results of crossing such flowers in an illegitimate manner, I believe to be very important as bearing on the sterility of hybrids.”⁵⁰ Claire’s intense concentration on her plants evokes Darwin working away at his orchids or Mendel and his peas. The Verge also is timely for this reason, coming as Mendel’s ideas were being compared but not yet synthesized with Darwin’s.

This helps explain the presence of a theory that still held attraction although it was soon to be discarded by the New Synthesis. De Vries’s mutation theory (published in 1901–1903; translated into English in 1910) became “the most popular theory of evolution in the early decades of the twentieth century.”⁵¹ Glaspell’s most important full-length play directly reflects this influence. The idea of mutation appealed to biologists looking for an alternative to natural selection. It gained quite a following but was ultimately shown not to be able to cause the kind of long-term change or significant transformations in species that natural selection brought about. Darwin writes in The Descent of Man about the concept of “spontaneous variation,” a term to denote that “large class of variations” that “appear to arise without any exciting cause.” But he says that such variations, whether subtle and slight or “of strongly marked and abrupt deviations of structure, depend much more on the constitution of the organism than on the nature of the conditions to which is has been subjected.”⁵² He favored the principle of gradualism instead. Darwin’s “deep faith that nothing in nature makes leaps” became absorbed as a political idea; “human society cannot make leaps either: evolution not revolution.”⁵³

The prominent geneticists William Bateson and Thomas Hunt Morgan embraced saltation as a more satisfactory explanation of how evolutionary novelties are produced than natural selection and Darwinian gradualism. Both were bitterly opposed to adaptation as the driving force of evolution. Like St. George J. Mivart before them, these men wanted “to believe that internal forces direct evolution along predetermined lines. Their saltation theory was an effort to suggest that evolution could become accessible to experimental study through direct observation of how new characters appear.”54

Glaspell’s The Verge is another example, then, of the tværtimot (contrarian) impulse among dramatists engaging with evolution. Saltation is inherently dramatic. The “sudden leap” was something that could be shown in the brief traffic of the stage and could signal evolution in a single bound, and hybridity was something visible and tangible, finding ready physical expression in an actor or through scenery. What is interesting is that the early discourse on mutation casts it generally in a negative light (it is “injurious,” in Darwin’s term, as quoted in my previous discussion of freakery). But by 1933, Richard Goldschmidt posited “hopeful monsters”: those “rare but incredibly significant moments in the biological record when a species makes a random, radical change, a macromutation, taking it into a completely different set of survival circumstances.”⁵⁵ This move toward a more positive kind of mutation is part of the cultural background informing The Verge. As Michael M. Chemers puts it: “Evolution is an unpredictable force. Every once in a while the great leap into the unknown actually works out for the better and, in some cases, generates a whole new line of species, a race of monsters that manages to survive while the rest of the species gets wiped out by predation, climate change, or getting hit by an asteroid. The monsters, then, become the new ‘ordinary’ species.”⁵⁶ Claire’s Edge Vine may well turn out to be such a monster; is this why she tears it from its trellis? Is she herself a monstrous freak who must be destroyed?

The limitations of language as a means of expressing the self are the key to these questions. But, whereas Claire’s idiosyncratic and halting language is usually seen as an important early example of feminist writing, it also needs to be understood in evolutionary terms. Claire gropes toward self-expression through her many long speeches of disjointed, half-articulated thoughts that, paradoxically, are loaded with expression; we understand that they are the keys to her true self (“let her be herself,” insists Tom). The paradox here is that while sophisticated spoken and written language is arguably what makes humans distinct as a species, Claire has reached a point at which she can no longer find a use for speech. Glaspell seems to be pointing out something along the lines of what Lavery would do in The Origin of Species: showing the bias of evolutionary discourse that takes the male as metonymic/representative of the human race. Both seem to be saying that there not only is a single “human” evolution but also are distinctively male and female evolutions.

This state of speech abjection connects to Jean’s elective muteness in Alan’s Wife, as discussed in chapter 6, and it raises the question of why these female playwrights are showing female protest through evolutionary regression if language is the highest development of human evolution.⁵⁷ According to Mark Pagel, language is the key human innovation not only because it allows us to express ourselves most fully but also because it enables cooperation, which is essential to survival.⁵⁸ It allows us to operate as groups rather than simply as individuals, making the struggle for existence easier. But for Glaspell and Robins (as for later feminists like Hélène Cixous and Simone de Beauvoir, for that matter), the “group” is fundamentally patriarchal, and “cooperation” can mean collusion against women. So for them, the tactic is to refuse language. Is this regressive and counter-evolutionary, or is it simply an alternative strategy for survival? How are women to survive on their own terms if they conform to the evolutionary patterns and strategies of the group if these have been devised by men? This is the same kind of strategy as Nora leaving her family in A Doll’s House. In all of these cases, playwrights are rejecting conventional assumptions about human evolution and seeking—if not actually providing—alternatives to it that are better for women.

In so many ways, The Verge radically departs from the kinds of plays we have seen in the Edwardian period focusing on gender issues relating to evolution, in particular motherhood. One of the great achievements of the play is that it explores femininity and creativity by replacing “the ubiquitous creative metaphor of motherhood” with scientific experiment.⁵⁹

I want to conclude my discussion of The Verge with a brief look at its extraordinary fortunes in England, where Glaspell was held in higher esteem than O’Neill and where the play was embraced by a group of forward-looking female theatre practitioners who brought it to a highly appreciative audience. In particular, this is the story of one actress’s instantaneous recognition of the play’s evolutionary language and her ability to translate that into her performance.

Glaspell’s fame had begun to spread to Britain after a collection of her plays was published in 1920, and she was enthusiastically embraced and “became the American playwright against whom other American writers were judged.”60 In 1924, Bernice, Inheritors, and The Verge were published in London, and in 1925, Emma Goldman provided an important link between the Provincetown Players and London’s theatre world by giving lectures on Strindberg, German expressionism, O’Neill and his works, and Glaspell, in fact billing herself as “overseas representative of the Provincetown Players.”⁶¹

Glaspell was immediately seen as the producer of hybrid forms. The New Statesman hailed The Verge as a mating of Pirandello and “the new German cinema,” combining “Pirandello’s pre-occupation with the possibility of the isolation of thing, the problem of reality” with the method of Destiny or Dr. Caligari, “the metamorphic method that is to say (as distinguished from the symbolist).”⁶² The British also liked Glaspell’s kinship with Shaw and Nietzsche; Claire was overwhelmingly received as an example of a female Nietzschean Superwoman.⁶³

Even greater insight into Glaspell’s appeal to British readers and audiences lies in the views expressed by her champions in the theatre. Sybil Thorndike saw the play instantly as a thrilling “mould-breaker” and related it to her reading of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: “It was the first time I had come across the theory of the growth of the individual, the scientific concept which explains how certain unidentified creatures spring into another form of existence, and how it’s always small, sensitive forms of life that make this leap, not heavily armoured things like dinosaurs which became extinct.”⁶⁴ Teilhard’s emphasis on the life force is closely linked to Cook’s ideas and those of Gerald Heard, another influence on Thorndike later on, especially the notion of the Great Chain of Being, a concept that harks back to pre-Darwinian days yet held enormous popular appeal. James Harrison notes that Teilhard “at times reads like nothing so much as Pascal rewritten by Herbert Spencer and Bergson,” giving full scope to the “covert teleology Bergson never acknowledges.”⁶⁵

Thorndike was fascinated by evolutionary theory and its possible links with acting. In a tract called “Religion and the Stage” (1928), she characterized theatre as a “microscope” as well as a vital evolutionary mechanism: “If, as we are taught, the history of the race is epitomized in the development of every child, then drama precedes music and painting, for nearly every child acts before it can sing or draw.”66 The Verge became a turning point in Thorndike’s career: like Glaspell, she began to use the theatre as “a laboratory for research and experiment in human nature and the possible breakthrough, over the horizon.”⁶⁷ Through an exchange of increasingly excited letters, she implores Edith Craig to produce the play; she “adores” it and sees “wonderful awful things” in it.⁶⁸ She feels that Glaspell is voicing her own thoughts. Thorndike does not view Claire as insane but if anything a natural extension of the “Angel” St. Joan (a role Thorndike alternated with the role of Claire—playing Claire in the afternoons, Joan in the evenings), a saint with divine botanical visions.

This is remarkable, since Claire’s murderous actions at the end of the play are almost invariably explained as manifestations of insanity, an instability of mind that has been there from the start and is shown in her crazy experiments. The trouble with the insanity plea as an explanation for Claire’s behavior—just as with Jean’s infanticide in Alan’s Wife—is that it gives a rational cause for something that cannot be expressed or explained so easily and that is specifically related to being female. In fact, Thorndike’s emphasis on Claire’s otherness rather than insanity may well be connected to what she was doing prior to taking on the role. For two years (1920–1922), Thorndike had devoted herself to Grand Guignol, a form of performance that combined caricature, horror, melodrama, and the grotesque with ordinary domestic contexts. She loved it:

With the intensest pleasure, Sybil Thorndike would endure mortal agonies on the stage of the Little Theatre, John Street, Adelphi . . . revelling in the Guignol’s peculiar brand of horror. . . . Mad women in a lunatic asylum gouged out Sybil Thorndike’s eyes with knitting-needles; she was a murdered cocotte stuffed into a trunk; as a war-widow she killed her scientist-brother, inventor of a bomb; she was neatly strangled; she did a little strangulation herself.⁶⁹

Grand Guignol thrives on madness, but defamiliarizes it by taking it out of the realist acting context.70 Wolff notes that Claire’s strangling of Tom is “an unnatural act of strength, implausibly easily and rapidly [done], creating an almost stylized murder moment.”⁷¹ Such stylization is one of the defining features of Guignol theatre, which enjoyed a brief renaissance in the early 1920s (and earlier, in such plays as Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, 1896) as directors embraced its potential to disrupt realist expectations and conventions; Vsevolod Meyerhold, Aurélien Lugné-Poë, and Edith Craig’s Pioneer Players are all working in this vein at this time.⁷²

Figure 4 Lea (Sybil Thorndike) strangles Gregorff (George Bealby) in Private Room No. 6 (1920), part of the Grand Guignol season at the Little Theatre, London. (© Thompson Theatre Collection/ArenaPAL)

Thorndike, consciously or not, might have injected something of the Guignol spirit into her portrayal of Claire. A photograph of Thorndike in one of her Guignol roles shows her strangling a man (figure 4), an action she performed again just a few years later as Claire murdering Tom. Far from finding this kind of performance onerous, the Grand Guignol seasons were personally therapeutic for Thorndike: acting in these plays “did something for me, it was a kind of release,” purging her fears of failure and her life-long nightmares.⁷³ I would suggest that Guignol gave Thorndike the theatrical idiom she needed for Claire’s final actions. The Guignol connection is also persuasive given that critics still disagree on what form the play takes or what mode it is in—realistic, expressionist, or symbolist. The Grand Guignol, which has affinities with biomechanics in the stylized physicality and the grotesque features, might just be a plausible alternative.

This seems consistent with the critical response to the production and to Thorndike as Claire. The Verge was staged by the Pioneer Players (their last production) in March 1925 at the Regent Theatre for three matinee performances; it was seen as too “difficult” for any West End management.74 Although reactions to the play were, in Julie Holledge’s words, “extreme,” it was a “success.”⁷⁵ Lewis Casson, Thorndike’s husband, played Tom—the man Claire murders. It was condemned by publications like Vogue and the Daily Express, but the more serious critics saw the play’s pioneering quality: the Weekly Westminster calling it a brilliant psychological study, James Agate ranking it alongside Ibsen’s plays, and the Manchester Guardian describing Glaspell as the greatest playwright writing in English since Shaw began.⁷⁶ Thorndike’s acting drew ecstatic responses from audiences and critics alike, the Lady calling her “positively terrifying in her uncanny suggestion of evil and mental fury,” while the Era wrote that “for the immense understanding and fine nervous force, Miss Thorndike’s performance has rarely been equalled on the modern stage.”⁷⁷ In the Star, A. E. Wilson thought it greater than her portrayal of St. Joan:

The part of Claire might have been written for her, so closely did she enter into the mood and personality of this insane creature. Her own personality was absorbed in the part, and in her gesture, tone, facial expression, deportment, and everything that composes the art of acting she was precisely right. She delivered herself of the mad jargon with frenzied conviction. She permitted us an astonishing glimpse into a mind: no other actress could have created such an intensity of interest.⁷⁸

This illuminating analysis suggests a split between Claire’s “mad jargon” and her behavior. She is not simply dismissed as insane; instead, as Katharine Cockin notes, “Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the play for many reviewers was the tremendous energy of Claire Archer.”⁷⁹ We can never know exactly how Thorndike acted the role, but she clearly achieved a balance, a kind of theatrical hybrid echoing Glaspell’s own experiment with form.

The bold evolutionary gestures of The Verge were unique. Springs Eternal (probably written in 1943) is about “the theme of evolution and achievement” in the face of an imperiled humankind.80 Barbara Ozieblo characterizes the play’s message as conservative in its rhetoric, arguing that women should remain at home, stay married, and look after the men. While the play may not be indicative of Glaspell’s position on women, this conservative strain can be found in other works, like Chains of Dew, in which the potential of the wife to find fulfillment outside the home, pursuing a cause beyond raising children, is sacrificed to the perceived good of the husband. Springs Eternal focuses on a family line, using genealogy as the peg for larger evolutionary questions. “Are the Higginbothems unlike the rest of the human race?” asks Bill, the young doctor who is the moral center of the piece. This family is stuck in an evolutionary rut; they have not evolved.⁸¹ Meanwhile, the war is going on far away. War as a catastrophic mutation or “sudden leap” in human evolution, analogous to a natural disaster, figures here as it does in Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. The returning soldiers will “be different,” says Margaret, “so many will be different. That in itself will make a different world.”⁸² Later, Harry says “brightly” that “they say life is going to be entirely different after the war. In ten, twenty years you wouldn’t know it for the same planet.”⁸³ Glaspell’s plays shift constantly between individual development and the evolution of species or the group as she seeks theatrically engaging and metonymic ways of conveying her ideas about human evolution through individual change; a single soldier returning changed by the war changes “the planet.” Yet there is resistance to this kind of drastic change, even while it is deemed necessary, and we end up balancing the “Brave Old World” with the brave new one.⁸⁴

Again, monism comes to the rescue, providing moral uplift and hope. Glaspell’s monism is expressed in a long speech given by Bill when he explains that blood transfusions make some of the soldiers he treats “quite sentimental about the plasma. . . . They like to think of it as coming from a particular person . . . [and they] wonder whose it was—what they got, and what that person is doing now. How the rest of the blood is getting along. Maybe it’s plowing—or it might be making love. Tending the baby—flipping the pancakes, any nice simple thing. It’s quite a bond. I even think of it myself. Wouldn’t it be funny, but perhaps we will become—one blood.”85 Owen, whose defeatist attitude has turned him into a recluse but who through the events of the play regains purpose and hope, echoes this “one blood” vision when he says: “This home of the human race is one. You’ve got to think of it as one—or be damned.”⁸⁶ Thus, Glaspell’s final play both revisits and expands on some of her evolutionary questions, and like Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth (with which it is almost exactly contemporaneous), its stance is profoundly shaped by the war.

Glaspell’s vision seems torn between two competing models, like the sand and forest of The Outside or saltation versus gradualism or progress versus degeneration. Like Robins, she confounds attempts to categorize and taxonomize her as writing a particular type of drama. Even her places within the historiographies of theatre and of modernism are ambiguous and seem to defy easy definition. Veronica Makowsky’s essay on Glaspell and modernism, for instance, opens by acknowledging that modernism was for her, as for so many women writers, “at once a blessing and a curse. It stimulated her best work, and then scorned her aesthetic.”⁸⁷ I would suggest that this ambiguity stems from Glaspell’s sustained attempts to find an alternative to the male-dominated model of modernism that was emerging during her career, the model of “neocatastrophism” rather than Darwinian gradualism, the “shock of the new” cliché of modernism that values sudden and drastic breaks with tradition over transitional work that gradually forges something new while retaining strong traces of the past. Modernist historiography values both the avant-garde “sudden leap” model of newness and neat categories of artistic definition, and neither Robins nor Glaspell fits easily within this framework.

Later in life, Glaspell came to consider motherhood as “the ultimate achievement for a woman.”⁸⁸ Her plays oscillate between a radical feminist vision such as in The Verge, in which the scientist mother completely rejects the conventional, conservative daughter and kills her lover in her desperation to free herself from the bonds of traditional female life, and the vision of a traditional, self-sacrificing, motherly, nurturing woman such as the good wife Dotty in Chains of Dew. Glaspell was a woman of “vivid contrasts and sharp ambiguities” who defies easy pigeonholing into the “essentialized compartment” of feminism.⁸⁹ She was always torn: “Her firm belief in individual freedom of choice and freedom of speech was challenged by a belief just as firm in one’s obligations and responsibilities to friends, family, and society, while her modernist desire to break out and seek new ways of life conflicted with her Victorian upbringing in a traditional, religious family.”⁹⁰ Her solution to this conflicted state was to harness the science of genetics to the theatre to create new, hybrid forms and hope that they survived.

A Brechtian Bridge

Bertolt Brecht is a kind of counter-evolutionary force in the theatre, a lot like Shaw, to whom he paid tribute as a theatrical “terrorist” in his essay “Three Cheers for Shaw” (1926). He declared his theatre to be “theatre for a scientific age.”91 Not only his ideas but also his language are suffused with science; it is as if by emulating the methodology of science he lends his theatre its authority, continually referring to his “method,” his “technique,” the “model” he has set up, and his “experiments” in the theatre. In addition, his emphasis on imitation is similar to that of mimicry within Darwinian evolutionary theory; acting becomes for Brecht a process of imitation rather than embodiment, and such mimicry is shown to be a tool for survival, for enabling further processes to take place.⁹² Although his initial love of science underwent drastic revision when he saw to what uses it was put in World War II, his work remains deeply connected to the science of his age. Most commentators have seen this in terms of his engagement with, and repulsion from, modern physics; but in fact, his work is no less concerned with evolution. Brecht’s theatrical vision is founded on a particular conception of how human evolution works: he would “defy” naturalistic and Darwinian approaches to modernity.⁹³

There is a profound and mutually dependent connection between Brecht’s theatre and his views on evolution. His famous chart in “Notes on the Opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” lists, under “Dramatic Form of Theatre,” “evolutionary inevitability” as being replaced by “jumps” in the “Epic Form of Theatre.” Although this last term is not defined further, jumps signals sudden and drastic changes rather than gradual transitions, a kind of punctuated equilibrium in evolutionary development. This chart contrasting the dramatic and the epic theatre is in fact mostly concerned with evolution: how far humans are alterable, how far life is teleological, “human nature as process” and whether there is growth through linear development or in “curves.”94 For Brecht, the emphasis is on “rupture” and how “historical trauma constitutes reality. . . . Experience is the awareness of violent rupture that destroys the consistency of the historical narrative.”⁹⁵ Brecht had a “suspicion of the Enlightenment’s philosophy of history, especially of its belief in progress.”⁹⁶ Marxism would in any case have positioned him against natural selection and the way it came to stand, rightly or wrongly, for capitalism. He would be much more closely aligned with Lamarck or at least the way twentieth-century social reformers adapted Lamarckism. Brecht “treated nature as primarily a resource within an economy.”⁹⁷ His plays reveal the insidious impact of survival of the fittest when turned to capitalist ends, most starkly illustrated in Mother Courage and Her Children.

Brecht’s combination of saltation with epic form was highly suggestive to Wilder, who added a monistic element that suited his own theatrical and moral purposes.

Thornton Wilder’s Epic Gradualism

One of Wilder’s critical biographers writes that “all serious thought and art in the post-Darwinian age has been forced to take account, in one way or another, of the cosmological and religious implications inherent in The Origin of Species.”98 Wilder accepted Darwin’s theories from an early age and expressed surprise that they were still questioned in China when he visited there in 1910, remarking (perhaps too optimistically) that Darwinian evolution was accepted without objection in the United States.⁹⁹ A well-established novelist as well as playwright, Wilder might have chosen to treat evolution through narrative means. But, as if answering Henry Arthur Jones’s question about how to show in a brief evening’s entertainment what in nature takes eons of time, he developed an extraordinarily ambitious project for putting evolution on stage. Like Strindberg’s unrealized plan for an epic-scale depiction of evolution, Wilder’s evolutionary vision is sprawling, encompassing many of Haeckel’s ideas (recapitulation theory, monism) as well as a Spencerian and Lamarckian sense of progressive humanity that is constantly improving. In The Skin of Our Teeth, Wilder deftly telescopes vast stretches time into an evening’s theatre-going through the device of anachronism, showing a modern American family living in New Jersey in the time of an encroaching ice age, with pet baby dinosaur and mammoth in their living room. The play goes on to highlight various milestones in human evolution, juxtaposing progressive events (the invention of the wheel, fire, the alphabet, the times tables) with destructive ones (the first murder, war, natural disaster) and using a biblical frame like that of Back to Methuselah. Act 2 ends with the flood, another catastrophic natural event like the ice age that engulfs act 1, and act 3 follows a seven-year war. Of all these destructive events, only the last is human-made (though in the Bible, humankind brings about the flood).

Wilder wrote in frustration in October 1940 that the play presented “problems so vast” because of the “gigantism” of what he was attempting: “to do a play in which the protagonist is twenty-thousand-year-old man and whose heroine is twenty-thousand-year-old woman and eight thousand years a wife.”¹⁰⁰ He writes that “by shattering the ossified conventions of the well-made play the characters emerge ipso facto as generalized beings.” He refers to his “myth-intention.” He is trying to present Man and Woman; he is dealing in archetype. An early working title for this play was The Ends of the Worlds.¹⁰¹ Wilder said it was “the most ambitious subject I have ever approached . . . the struggles of the race and its survival. . . . It is a subject as real as any other, as dramatizable as any other . . . [and] not so much a matter of emotion at all, as it is of seeing, knowing, and telling.”¹⁰²

Wilder’s other way of showing evolution on stage was to juxtapose simultaneity with progression: as he writes in the preface to Three Plays, “The audience soon perceives that he is seeing ‘two times at once.’”¹⁰³ Wilder sets everyday actions against “the vast dimensions of time and place.” In an interview in 1957, Wilder noted how this was one of the prevailing ideas in all his art: “An unresting preoccupation with the surprise of the gulf between each tiny occasion of the daily life and the vast stretches of time and place in which every individual plays his role . . . [and] the absurdity of any single person’s claim to the importance of his saying, ‘I love!’ ‘I suffer!’ when one thinks of the background of the billions who have lived and died, who are living and dying.”¹⁰⁴ This is true of Our Town as well as of The Skin of Our Teeth. Ostensibly local and narrowly focused, Our Town actually offers two interconnected families in a small town in New Hampshire as metonymically spanning the same epic sweep as Skin. The audience is steered toward this view in many ways, always alert to the tension between the vast and the tiny.

The Skin of Our Teeth opens with Mr. Antrobus (the Greek word for “human”), having invented the wheel, now working on the alphabet and the multiplication tables. He is Adam (“He was once a gardener, but left that situation under circumstances that have been variously reported”), and Mrs. Antrobus is Eve. She asks the maid, Sabina, “Have you milked the mammoth?” Anachronism drives both the humor and the fundamentally serious side of this play and provides a shorthand way (theatrical equivalent to the time-lapse photography shown on nature programs) of indicating vast geological time as well as species transmutation. For example, Mrs. Antrobus tries to cheer her husband up as he despairs of the future, invoking harder times:

When the volcanoes came right up in the front yard. And the time the grasshoppers ate every single leaf and blade of grass, and all the grain and spinach you’d grown with your own hands. And the summer there were earthquakes every night.105

At the end of act 1, Sabina appeals to the audience to help “save the human race” by passing their chairs up to be burned, to keep the fire from going out. Natural resources are limited; even the cuddly baby dinosaur and woolly mammoth are sent out into the cold to die. The comic and the tragic coexist. Wilder’s depiction of these animals having to die (proleptically signaling their inevitable extinction) to make way for human survival echoes Lord (George Gordon) Byron’s Cain when he laments the fate of animals forced into a fallen state by man’s first disobedience, although they themselves were innocent. The connection, however suggestive, seems to be coincidental, as there is no evidence that Wilder knew of Byron’s play.¹⁰⁶

The play has no resolution. Early on, the exasperated Sabina states: “What the end of it [both the play and human evolution] will be is still very much an open question.”¹⁰⁷ At the end, she breaks off in the midst of recapitulating the play’s opening to tell the audience: “You go home. The end of this play isn’t written yet.”¹⁰⁸ Her reflections guide us constantly back to evolutionary concerns:

That’s all we do—always beginning again! . . . How do we know that it’ll be any better than before? Why do we go on pretending? Some day the whole earth’s going to have to turn cold anyway, and until that time all these other things’ll be happening again: it will be more wars and more walls of ice and floods and earthquakes.¹⁰⁹

Mrs. Antrobus will have none of this existentialist angst. She fiercely defends the purposeful quality of life, through work and through procreation. Adaptation is key, but Wilder does not call it that; instead, he goes in for more emotional and moral terms like perseverance and endurance. Of the human characters, Mrs. Antrobus is the most adaptive. “We can start moving. Or we can go on the animals’ backs?”110 Sabina just complains, or wants to give up and die; Mr. Antrobus thinks only of the present, glorying in his achievements but blind to impending disaster. Somehow, as the play’s title suggests, we get by; perhaps the true evolutionary mechanism is sheer luck.

But Wilder’s vision is anti-Darwinian with regard to human evolution in that, like Shaw, he refutes the blindness, randomness, and lack of purpose in the mechanism of natural selection. His faith in the human mind, enriched and sustained by knowledge and wisdom of the great thinkers he cites, supersedes religion, despite all the biblical references in the play. Wilder also finds much theatrical mileage in Haeckel’s recapitulation theory. At the end of act 2, Mr. Antrobus talks of what Lifton characterizes as his own “prenatal history, during which he underwent all the traumas of evolution in his own person. . . . Not only is he Adam, Noah, and man in general, he also bears within him traces of earlier life forms.” Wilder uses the biogenetic law to suggest at least a partial solution to the problem of individual significance “since it indicates that every human being not only is a distillation of influences from a myriad of historical and prehistorical human epochs but also contains physical or behavioral vestiges of even earlier, prehuman ages.”¹¹¹ Lifton argues that Wilder also shows a general concern with harmony between humans and their environment, their “oneness with their surroundings”; Wilder is showing through this harmony a concern with “adaptation,” which naturalistic works usually broach in terms of a lack of such harmony, a sense of conflict between individual and environment.¹¹²

The Skin of Our Teeth bears close resemblances to several works, from Shaw’s Back to Methuselah to Brecht’s theatre and the ambitious sprawl of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (a debt that Wilder openly acknowledged). Wilder had met Shaw in 1928 but never commented much on his work, and he did not overtly draw a link between Skin and Methuselah despite their obvious similarities. Both depict biblical characters and events (Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve, Lilith, Noah’s Ark), a vast sweep of time and place, the development of humankind telescoped into a few hours (or several days, in Shaw’s case). Their Cains are virtually identical: both have turned their murderous bents to warfare and risen to the top of their ranks. But the two plays end radically differently: Skin of Our Teeth accepts our flaws and asserts human perseverance in the face of its own mistakes as well as natural disasters. It implies that there is something good in us that will keep surfacing and making us strive onward. Back to Methuselah turns its back on human imperfection, hoping that evolution will eventually result in an immaterial intellectual essence free from bodily limitations.113

Less well known is e. e. cummings’s fragmentary Anthropos or the Future of Art, which contains a colorful reference to “prehensile precincts of predetermined prehistoric preternatural nothing” that is “fourteen million astral miles” away.¹¹⁴ There is no evidence that Wilder knew of cummings’s play, but the affinities are fascinating. Cummings relies on anachronism as a comic device, just as Wilder does, with cavemen speaking in modern advertising jargon and clichés, a contemporary artist sharing the stage with the “infrahumans,” and a steam shovel acting as a woolly mammoth. (Byron also has a mammoth in his play Cain.) There is also the coincidence of cummings using Anthropos as his title character and Wilder using Mr. Antrobus.¹¹⁵

For all these possible or actual influences, Wilder claimed that Hellzapoppin’ was the real inspiration for his play. This was a hugely successful musical revue in 1938 that ran for over three years and featured fast-paced comedy sketches constantly updated with new material to remain topical; circus-like in style, it used slapstick, mimicry, clowns, dwarves, and audience participation, with actors wandering through the audience. The zany influence of Hellzapoppin’ would certainly explain why Wilder thought of Skin of Our Teeth as “a comic-strip play.”¹¹⁶ Its distinctly cartoonish quality nicely balances the stark subject matter. Wilder, in his journal, mentions Candide and Romain Rolland’s Liluli as being of the “same category” as what he is attempting in Skin. His overall question was:

What does one offer the audience as explanation of man’s endurance, aim, and consolation? Hitherto, I had planned here to say that the existence of his children and the inventive activity of his mind keep urging him to continued and better-adjusted survival. In the Third Act I was planning to say that the ideas contained in the great books of his predecessors hang above him in mid-air furnishing him adequate direction and stimulation.

This, he notes, is in contrast to the “vast majority of writers hitherto” who would have turned to religion to explain man’s endurance. He also notes that “the statement that the ideas and books of the masters are the motive forces for man’s progress is a difficult one to represent theatrically. . . . The Hours-as-Philosophers runs the danger of being a cute fantasy and not a living striking metaphor.”117 Lifton characterizes Wilder’s cosmology as “monistic” and says it is there in both Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth.¹¹⁸ The scene of the hours-as-philosophers includes Aristotle and Spinoza—key thinkers in developing preevolutionary explanations about the natural and spiritual worlds, Spinoza in particular founding the monist philosophy.

The play may have precedents in its epic structure, but its attempt to stage the natural order is unique. Act 2 imagines all the “orders” meeting at various conventions throughout the world, with the order of mammals’ convention taking place in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the setting of this act. Wilder thus represents “the collected assemblies of the whole natural world” in a nonhierarchical Darwinian model. The order of Mammals, headed by their president, Mr. Antrobus, has “received delegations from the other rival Orders,—or shall we say: esteemed concurrent Orders: the WINGS, the FINS, the SHELLS, and so on. These Orders … have sent representatives to our own, two of a kind.”¹¹⁹ Antrobus addresses them, beginning by announcing that “the dinosaur is extinct,” which garners applause, and “the ice has retreated.” He then goes on to answer the accusation made during the last election that

at various points in my career I leaned toward joining some of the rival orders,—that’s a lie. As I told reporters of the Atlantic City Herald, I do not deny that a few months before my birth I hesitated between . . . uh . . . between pinfeathers and gill-breathing,—and so did many of us here,—but for the last million years I have been viviparous, hairy and diaphragmatic.¹²⁰

The crowd cheers. Lifton notes that “the sense given by the entire act is of a deep bond of kinship uniting humans and animals.”¹²¹

What is brilliant about this act is the staging, which situates the audience in the ocean; when Mr. Antrobus toward the end of the act addresses all the orders of animals, he is pointing to the audience and saying, “Look at the water. Look at them all. Those fishes jumping. . . . Here are your whales, Maggie!” In this zooistic vision, we are all the animals, and Mr. Antrobus begins his formal speech: “Friends. Cousins. Four score and ten billion years ago our forefather brought forth upon this planet the spark of life—.” But thunder drowns him out, and moments later he is hustling all the animals two by two onto the ark, along with his family, to start a new world elsewhere.122

The play also focuses innovatively on women in an evolutionary context by exploring the troubling question of what has happened over the millennia to Mrs. Antrobus, whose power seems to have dwindled since act 1 rather than progressing: she’s become harmless, merely interested in domestic matters, whereas before she was the anchor of the family who ensured its survival. She has become increasingly conservative; she invokes and lampoons the suffragettes’ struggle for the vote when she recalls how she and her fellow woman fought for marriage (“at last we women got the ring”) and enjoins her fellow mammals to “keep hold of that” and to “Save the Family.”¹²³ Yet, toward the end of the act, as the deluge is about to break, she has a great speech championing women’s unsung evolutionary roles. Taking a bottle out of her bag and flinging it into the ocean, she says that in it is a letter containing “all the things that a woman knows. It’s never been told to any man and it’s never been told to any woman, and if it finds its destination, a new time will come. . . . We’re not what you’re all told and what you think we are: We’re ourselves. And if any man can find one of us he’ll learn why the whole universe was set in motion.”¹²⁴ This almost mystical invocation of women as the key to human evolution is akin to Ibsen’s speech about looking to women to sort out humanity’s problems. It is revealing to contrast this progressive male championing of women with the ambivalence of Robins and Glaspell, as well as many other women playwrights less sanguine about too easily finding such evolutionary hope in women. It would simply replicate the Victorian tendency to place women on a pedestal that the suffrage was supposed to help erase.

Glaspell and Wilder represent two of the most significant American interventions in the theatrical engagement with evolution in this period. They differ from the contemporaneous treatments of evolution in Britain, for instance in J. B. Priestley’s Summer Day’s Dream (1949), a virtually forgotten precedent for our current wave of climate change plays that amounts to an early, and prescient, call for environmental awareness and concern.125 Priestley is usually noted for his “time plays” or for the expressionist interpretation brought to the revival of An Inspector Calls in the 1990s. He shares Wilder’s idealism and theatrical techniques; a simple message like the social responsibility of each of us (Inspector Calls) is conveyed through didactic, semi-naturalistic theatre. It is illuminating to compare Summer Day’s Dream with Glaspell’s and Wilder’s work. The futuristic play is set in 1975 in a kind of utopia after a Third War has wiped out civilization and the survivors have gone back to the soil and the old ways (using horses rather than tractors and living off the land in modest but complete self-sufficiency). The characters are “survivors from a wreck, from the war of split atoms and split minds—who crawled out of the darkness into the daylight.”¹²⁶ Unlike most postapocalyptic plays (including Samuel Beckett’s Endgame), this has all been to the good. The play shows “an England out of the rat race, reduced to third world status, but environmentally friendly” as it lives in an “ecological paradise.”¹²⁷ Well before the current term Anthropocene came into vogue, this play suggests explicitly that the Industrial Revolution altered human evolution. “Hotter than it used to be, Fred,” comments Stephen.¹²⁸ The staging visualizes this: the garden is “thick with climbing plants, lush flowers and foliage . . . all rich and grand in a natural fashion, and looking rather more sub-tropical than the usual English scene.”¹²⁹ Far from being depleted, nature is simply changed; it is “slower” now, and in fact there are “more flowers, more birds, than ever before.”¹³⁰ Chris tries to explain to the visitors the new and improved relationship to the land: “We’re not just living off it. We’re living with it. We love it—and we think it’s beginning to love us.”¹³¹ This concern about how humans relate to the biosphere activates many Beckett’s Happy Days and other works, as I will discuss in the next chapter.

Priestley’s play also shows similarities with Glaspell and Wilder, challenging assumptions about what is “primitive” and what is civilized by inverting the two. In doing so, it also hints at ideas about altruism and cooperation, the group working together organically and only taking what it needs. As in many of his other plays, Priestley emphasizes “the group as much as the individuals.”132 And, like many of the generation of playwrights before him, Priestley seems to flirt with monism, especially through the rather mystical character of Margaret, a woman endowed with a kind of sixth sense. She says that “we men and women are part of a great procession of beings, many of them infinitely stronger and wiser and more beautiful than we are.”¹³³ Priestley, Glaspell, and Wilder also share—with Brecht—an interest in showing how war can alter the course of human evolution.

Maggie B. Gale notes that “the play is replete with discussions about the merits of industry versus husbandry, of nature versus science, and the ending, whereby the interlopers, so moved by the rural utopia and so convinced by the dedication of the Dawlish family to this ‘alternative’ to their ‘first world’ existence, tell their respective superiors that the land will not provide the commodity they had originally thought it would.”¹³⁴ But Summer Day’s Dream is not just a “critique of capitalism.”¹³⁵ It also muses seriously on humans’ place in evolution and the relationship between humans and their habitats in terms of what we would now call sustainability.

Wrestling with the Impact of Darwin

In this final section, I want to turn to playwrights who explored the implications of Darwinism in very different ways from Glaspell and Wilder, beginning with Eugene O’Neill, Glaspell’s close colleague and fellow playwright. Like her, O’Neill was a devotee of Nietzsche, a philosopher who rejected, even ridiculed, Darwinism; “[Nietzsche’s] enthusiasm for strength of personality and its inspiration [came] from quite different sources.”¹³⁶ O’Neill’s earlier work contains evidence of Darwin’s influence, or at least—as with his precursor, Herne—a watered-down Spencerian approach. As we have already seen, this was central to O’Neill’s short play Abortion. In The Great God Brown, O’Neill refers to Darwin: “Watch the monkey in the moon! See him dance! His tail is a piece of string that was left when he broke loose from Jehovah and ran away to join Charley Darwin’s circus!” The First Man, the play O’Neill wrote before The Hairy Ape, likewise carries evolutionary themes, with an idealistic explorer-anthropologist in search of human origins, partly as a way of running away from his domestic problems. His turn to anthropology—“the last romance”—has won him fame as “the most proficient of young skull-hunters,” surely about to discover “the Missing Link,” his friend says mockingly.¹³⁷

Erika Rundle points out that O’Neill’s “sea plays” are fundamentally concerned with “the discourse of species,” and his “musings on adaptation and selection as mechanisms of survival (or extinction)” culminate in The Hairy Ape (1922; adapted from his short story of that title from 1917).138 Already in his first sea play, The Moon of the Caribbees, O’Neill reorganizes “longstanding kinship models along the lines of species difference rather than those of race, ethnicity, or gender,” as well as “invoking a vaudeville tradition involving a monkey who is forced to perform in order to survive.” These elements become fully elaborated in The Hairy Ape a few years later.¹³⁹

O’Neill was “concerned with the social ramifications of Darwinism,” notes Rundle in her detailed analysis of the play’s engagement with evolution.¹⁴⁰ The Hairy Ape follows the downward trajectory of Yank, who works as a coal stoker in the engine room of a ship. The stooping fire stokers with overdeveloped back and shoulder muscles resemble “those pictures in which the appearance of Neanderthal Man is guessed at”; one thinks instantly of Gabriel von Max’s painting of Pithecanthropus alalus based on Haeckel’s descriptions of prehistoric humans in The Natural History of Creation, a book still popular in O’Neill’s time. According to O’Neill’s stage directions, “all are hairy-chested, with long arms of tremendous power, and low, receding brows above their small, fierce, resentful eyes.”¹⁴¹ This grindingly hard labor has made Yank coarse of tongue and body, a huge, blackened figure of little obvious intelligence who is likened to an ape. The turning point of the play is his encounter with a spoiled millionairess who recoils in horror on seeing him. This sends him on a rampage through New York that culminates in a scene at the zoo, where he confronts—and is killed by—his close kin, the gorilla. Travis Bogard classifies this play as one of O’Neill’s early “anthopological” dramas, “expressed in terms of a search for the origins of life and making reference to atavistic remnants of primitive man appearing in modern society.”¹⁴²

Rundle argues that The Hairy Ape helped to create a new genre, the “primate drama,” which she calls “a twentieth-century American hybrid of classical and modernist structures that treats the subject of evolution, both explicitly and implicitly, through the disciplines of performance.”143 In addition to foregrounding and enacting ideas of regression, degeneration, heredity, and savagery, the play poses two challenging theatrical requirements. One is its invocation of a wide range of previous theatrical conventions and practices involving apes, such as the “missing link” show, the circus, the “menagerie,” the zoo as spectacle, and the so-called ethnological exhibit. The other is the presence of a “real” ape on stage in the final scene of the play. There is much discussion of O’Neill’s expressionism, of the play’s obvious pull away from naturalism; the scene in which Yank attacks people on the wealthy streets of Manhattan yet they feel nothing, as if they are marionettes, is an example of this technique. O’Neill wrote after finishing the play that it did not fit “any of the current ‘isms.’ It seems to run the whole gamut from extreme naturalism to extreme expressionism—with more of the latter than the former.”¹⁴⁴ Yet the final scene seems to demand realism in its representation of the real ape.

None of the discussions of the play in studies of O’Neill explains, in practical terms, how this was staged. Rundle does acknowledge that a real ape was not actually used, so it must have been a man in a monkey suit. There would have been strong evocations of the prehistory of such performances for a contemporary audience, not least the comical dimension as shown in farces like The Missing Link. So, for all the seriousness with which this scene is discussed, and all its tragic import, the reality is that it held potentially comic associations; it was daring, in other words, to disrupt this tradition and depart from the audience’s expectations of men in monkey suits as farcical, associated with circus and vaudeville.

One way critics have dealt with this is to suggest that Yank’s final visit to the zoo is merely in his mind—he is dreaming it.¹⁴⁵ Bogard sees the death in the gorilla cage as having “minimal plausibility. Although it realizes in a stage image the symbol of ape-in-cage which has been developed from the first scene, it does not entirely break from the context which the play has established as ‘real.’”¹⁴⁶ Just as with Glaspell’s plays, then, ambiguity of form—and the hybridity that results—generates sharp critical debate about what “kind” of theatre this is. Rundle points out that “O’Neill evokes the practices of nineteenth-century ethnographic display . . . [as Yank is] shackled to the violently constitutive performances” of so-called savages.¹⁴⁷ This is in stark contrast to the triumphant imperialism underpinning the popular Tarzan stories of the time, showing the savage becoming civilized; here, the savage regresses even further, dying in the gorilla cage at the hands of his seeming kin and equal, who then tosses him aside after killing him. Una Chaudhuri usefully contextualizes the play in terms of the rise of the modern zoo but likewise refrains from providing a sense of how this final scene was actually staged.

Bogard finds the ending “ambiguous” and unclear:148 “Yank is destroyed . . . by a figure out of his own ‘racial’ past, by a gorilla in the Zoo.”¹⁴⁹ Just when the audience thinks that Yank is successfully ascending the evolutionary ladder, he slides back down it. O’Neill discards that upward and predictable trajectory, instead dropping Yank “back into darkness by suggesting that he can only belong to a force of simian brutality.”¹⁵⁰ Rodin’s The Thinker is repeatedly invoked as the paradoxical model for how Yank (and eventually the gorilla) should sit and attempt to think.¹⁵¹

Kenneth Macgowan was a decisive influence on O’Neill, and his book The Theatre of Tomorrow, which O’Neill read in 1921, makes a clear link between theatre and evolution: “The grandeur of the play of the future must lie not in a superhuman figure, but in the vast and eternal forces of life which we are made to recognize as they play upon him.” The drama of the future will, he predicts, show us “the things that, since Greek days, we have forgotten—the eternal identity of you and me with the vast and unmanageable forces which have played through every atom of life since the beginning.” We must “recover the sense of our unity with the dumb, mysterious processes of nature,” and we must apply our scientific knowledge to drama.¹⁵²

A play that attempts to do this explicitly is Inherit the Wind (1955), which uses the clash between creationism and evolution as a means to criticize McCarthyism.¹⁵³ This pseudodocumentary play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee dramatizes the notorious Scopes trial of 1925, in which a schoolteacher in Tennessee was prosecuted for teaching evolution rather than creationism. Just as Arthur Miller did with his adaptation of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, Lawrence and Lee used the harassment of the scientist-figure to make a strong statement about free speech during the peak of McCarthyism (the blurb on the paperback edition of the book reads: “The spectators sat uneasily in the sweltering heat with murder in their hearts, barely able to restrain themselves. At stake was the freedom of every American”). It is pure courtroom drama depicting the trial in which two of the country’s greatest lawyers, William Jennings Bryan (prosecution) and Clarence Darrow (defense) went head to head over evolutionary theory.

Inherit the Wind has renewed political relevance now with the emergence of intelligent design as a pseudoscientific version of creationism. Like Miller, Lawrence and Lee were harnessing the persecution of progressive thinking to political purpose. They wrote in their original prefatory note that the play is timeless: “The stage directions set the time as ‘not too long ago.’ It might have been yesterday. It could be tomorrow.” But the play is not particularly interested in science trumping religion; it ends with the Darrow figure (pro-Darwin) alone on stage after the trial has ended, and as he packs up his briefcase, he takes the Bible in one hand and On the Origin of Species in the other and, “balancing them thoughtfully, as if his hands were scales,” he then “slaps the two books together and jams them in his brief case, side by side.”154 The world can accommodate the views contained in both these books, the playwrights seem to be saying, but it cannot tolerate suppression of ideas. Clearly, what is at stake in this play is freedom of speech and resistance to oppression, exactly the same subject matter as in Brecht’s Life of Galileo a few years earlier. (When Brecht was questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee, one observer remarked it was a case of “the biologist being examined by the apes.”)

Edward J. Larson, in his study of the Scopes trial, reveals the extent to which Lawrence and Lee distorted the facts of the case in their supposedly documentary approach. He shows in detail how the two playwrights oversimplified and made reductive some of the complexities of the trial and also made up things, like the hostile attitude of the crowd (actually, the atmosphere in the town was more like a circus or festival than a witch hunt with an angry mob) and the placement of Cates/Scopes in jail when in reality he was not jailed and it was highly unlikely that he ever would be.155 Larson refers to Lawrence and Lee’s influence (and the highly successful film version that was later made of the play) as contributing to an ongoing myth about this “trial of the century”: the myth of a resounding and definitive defeat of religious fundamentalism in America. Running for three years on Broadway, and going on tour across the United States, the play had a remarkable impact as a piece of theatre, regardless of the film version that was later made. But most reviewers at the time scorned both the play and the film; the New Yorker wrote that “history has not been increased but almost fatally diminished” by it, and Time characterized the film as “wildly and unjustly” lampooning the fundamentalists as “vicious and narrow-minded hypocrites . . . [and] just as wildly and unjustly idealizes their opponents, as personified by Darrow.”¹⁵⁶ Stephen Jay Gould emphasized the falsehoods perpetuated by both play and film: “John Scopes was persecuted, Darrow rose to Scopes’s defense and smite [sic] the antediluvian Bryan, and the antievolution movement then dwindled or ground to at least a temporary halt. All three parts of this story are false.”¹⁵⁷

It is striking that, in 1955, the most prominent American theatrical engagement with evolution was a historical one, set decades earlier, though encapsulating a debate that would dominate the popular reception of evolution in America for decades to come. Inherit the Wind looked backward, while in the same year in Britain, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot signaled a very different kind of encounter between evolution and the stage, opening up new possibilities and reflecting an acceptance of Darwinism on a scale not seen in the theatre since Ibsen. The broader cultural and scientific landscape had changed utterly as the New Synthesis took hold, conveying

certain moral and political lessons. . . . Man, too, was integrated in the synthesis—as a rational, responsible being, the pinnacle of evolution. Evolution was connected to progress, and knowledge of evolution would be crucial for the future of man. [Ernst] Mayr presented the new “population thinking” as bringing new respect for the uniqueness of the individual, as opposed to earlier essentialist, typological thinking. In the post-World War II climate, the modern synthesis represented optimism and hope.¹⁵⁸

Progress, optimism, hope; this is hardly a Beckettian landscape and it warrants further discussion.