DRAMATIC CLUB PLAY IS NEWEST MOVEMENT IN PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

The following article on "The Moon is a Gong," which the Dramatic Club will present tomorrow night, was written especially for the "Crimson" by H. L. W. Dana '03, lecturer on literature at the New York School of Social Research.

At last American drama seems to have hit upon a pattern and a rhythm all its own. Breaking away from German Expressionism, our native playwrights are developing a special national technique--a sort of radio-ragtime-phonograph-jazz. Two plays in particular illustrate this latest experimental phase. One is John Howard Lawson's "Processional" which has been the storm center of discussion in New York. The other is a still more extraordinary play by his friend, the novelist John Roderigo Dos Passos, a play that has not yet been acted or published, called "The Moon is a Gong". This is to be presented for the first time during the coming week by the Harvard Dramatic Club and may well arouse an even more heated controversy between violent detractors and equally violent defenders. Those who would be in touch with the newest movement in dramaturgy cannot afford to miss the opportunity of seeing this Dos Passos play. For it is around plays such as these, which utterly demolish the conventions of the traditional drama, that the theatrical battle of the moment is waging.

A Part of Revolt From Realism

This American counterpart of Expressionism--or whatever other ism you want to call it--is of course a part of the whole Revolt from Realism which has taken so many different forms as we have emerged from the Nineteenth into the Twentieth Century. At first it was only in the dramatic representation of dreams within the plays that our dramatists dared to present that fanciful and fantastic caricature of American life which we find for example in the dream scenes of "The Beggar on Horseback" or "The Crime in the Whistler Room". But in "Processional" and "The Moon is a Gong" the frenzied nightmare is in full swing through the waking moments of the whole play. It is the same transition which we find in Eugene O'Neill. The expressionism which had appeared in the terror-striken visions and "ha'nts" of "Emperor Jones" has come to permiate the entire play in "The Hairy Ape" till we see everything from the point of view of the central character. Similarly, among the German Expressionists, Ernst Toller, who had at first, in "Die Wandlung" and in "Masse-Mensch" alternated with reality dream-scenes showing what was going on in the mind of his characters, has emerged altogether from the dream settings in his later plays "Die Maschinensturmer" and "Der Deutsche Hinkemann". In other words the Freudian psycho-analysis which had at first been applied to the interpretation of dreams has come to be applied to the whole of our waking life.

Out-Processionals "Processional"

While "Processional" has as its subtitle "A, Jazz Symphony of American Life". "The Moon is a Gong" has as its sub-title. "A Parade with Shouting". "The 'Moon is a Gong" out-processionals "Processional". In his riotous imagination, Dos Passos makes confusion worse confounded. Every device has been accumulated to shock the eye and split the ear. In its revolt from realism it is frankly, blatantly theatrical, and heaps up all the artificial tricks of expressionist drama. As in the Fifth Avenue scene of "The Hairy Ape", so here in the funeral scene masks are used to intensify the impression of stifling conventionality. As in "The Beggar on Horseback", newsboys rush in selling extras. As in "All God's Chillun," the plaintive sound of the grind-organ and the hurdy-gurdy suggest the flavor of the times through popular airs. As in "The Adding Machine", the singing of "My country 'tis of thee" marks the culmination of an outburst of intolerance. The phonograph which played a poignant role in "Rain" and in "The Square Peg" and was doubled to two phonographs in Jean Cocteau's fantastic "Les Maries de la Tour Eiffel", is here multiplied into no less than four phonographs all playing different tunes full blast.

Set off against this metalic and mechanical cacophony of American noise, stands the surprising loveliness of some of the scenes between Tom and Jane. If he has not yet the theatrical skill and wit of Lawson, Dos Passos, the author of "Three Soldiers," perhaps the most important American contribution to the literature of the Great War, shows a similar courage in his social satire, in his ironic juxtaposition of social conditions in the suffering of these central characters and the raucous shouts of the prosperity boosters, on the gong of the moon