Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre, 1923-1937 (Theater in the Americas) [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

fusion of his Marxist aesthetics and writing style, Theory and Technique of Playwriting (1936).



Chambers’s egalatarian approach provides a thoughtful, cogent inquiry into all of Lawson’s life



in theater. Having carved out both niche and need, Chambers sets about the task of delineating



his research frame, which is noticeably indebted to both neoMarxist criticism and the tenets of



New Historicism. This deployment of materialist historiography provides a “long-overdue new



reading of Lawson scripts for the theatre” as well as “a much needed study of the context that



enveloped him” (13).



     Opening with Lawson’s early life as the son of practicing Christian Scientists, continuing



through his 1914 graduation from Williams College, and converging on the awakening of his



aesthetic sensibilities and political beliefs, Chambers recounts the beginnings of Lawson’s “intellectual



and spiritual upheaval that would continue and intensify through the middle years of



the 1930s” (21). This upheaval led Lawson both to make an early foray into commercial theater



and then out of it shortly thereafter when he enlisted in the French ambulance corps where



he became fast friends with John Dos Passos. For Chambers, the relationship with Dos Passos



and wartime service in France provided the seed for both Lawson’s commitment to revolutionary



politics and his certainty that theater is a “pulpit from which he could communicate radical



content” (22). Aesthetically and ideologically somewhere between Sheldon Cheney and Michael



Gold, Lawson’s scripts of the mid-1920s bore the mark of a broader, ongoing clash between these



differing attitudes and approaches to leftist art and politics. Chambers deftly traces Lawson’s



persistent yearning to break down the walls of the theatre (34) and beat the drums of rebellion



(82) and he also investigates changes in the U.S. leftist community that complicated such



desires from the outset.



     It is, as Chambers proposes, the dynamic interplay between Lawson’s ever-evolving mode



of thought, the varied sociopolitical and cultural events in the United States (for example, the



execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927), and his method of artistic expression that eventually



presented Lawson with a thorny path to commitment at the dawn of the 1930s (119). With the



first years of the decade being what they were in the United States, Lawson “slowly began to



awaken to the view that Communism was ‘an American force, which had moral and intellectual



implications that could not be ignored’” (153). Aiding this shift was Lawson’s role in organizing



the Screen Writers Guild, his successful 1934 return to New York theater, and the subsequent



three-year period in which his ideas regarding art and politics were confronted and shaped



anew by an emergent and passionate social energy (195). It is this very energy, however, that



ultimately carried Lawson back to Hollywood for good in 1937 where he soon emerged as the



leader of several radical and revolutionary organizations including a local chapter of the Communist



Party. Since Messiah of the New Technique is most concerned with Lawson’s life in the



theater, its closing pages only briefly address his political activism during the 1940s and 1950s,



the HUAC hearings, the “Hollywood Ten,” and incarceration.



     Messiah of the New Technique is a refreshing addition to the study of the modern theater



tradition in the United States as well as the cultural and political left of the interwar years. The



primary strength of this manuscript is Chambers’s dedication to crafting a narrative that resists a



“hermeneutical, linear, and strictly formalist method of analysis” (12). As such, his prose captures



a sense of social energy and inner turmoil that most critical and political biographies and social



and intellectual histories do not. In doing so, Chambers challenges all of us who research and



write about the intertextuality of modernity and U.S. national culture not only to re-examine



our received narratives but also to interrogate our chosen methodologies.