When the history of female American playwrights is written, certain individuals will occupy prominence. Some will be signal 19th-century figures like Anna Cora Mowatt, who wrote the play Fashion, while some, of course, will be scribes from the later years of the 20th century and beyond. It'll be in the chapters dealing with the first few decades of the 20th century, however, where some of the most interesting chronologies will come—those beneficiaries of universal suffrage who overcame the constricting mores of their time. Of all the women figuring into that discussion, Rachel Crothers (1878–1958) will undoubtedly be viewed as the trailblazer: The Internet Broadway Database lists 27 productions of her plays on Broadway between 1906 and 1940; as of the 1920s, she regularly directed her own work as well.
In recent years there's been a resurgence of interest in Crothers' life and work. In 1999, the Metropolitan Playhouse mounted an Off-Off-Broadway revival of her 1910 play A Man's World. A 2002 book, Staging Desire: Queer Readings of American Theater History, contains a terrifically researched chapter analyzing Crothers and summarizing the place her work occupies in the American dramatic canon. In 2006, the Mint Theater Company offered a superlative Off-Broadway revival of Crothers' 1937 work Susan and God. Now, Expressing Willie, her 1924 play, is being revived for the first time ever by an Off-Off-Broadway company, Woman Seeking…A Theater Company.
Originally, says Christine Mosere, the company's founding artistic director, the idea was to revive the George S. Kaufman–Moss Hart play Once in a Lifetime to celebrate the group's 10th anniversary. Among other qualities, Once in a Lifetime "has a large cast, and we prefer to do large-cast productions because they offer more chances to give more women opportunities to work." When the rights became unavailable, Mosere began researching the era of Kaufman, Hart, and the like, and while she'd "vaguely heard" of Crothers, she was astounded to learn "that here was an American woman who had a new play on Broadway every year for something like 30 years." Still, Mosere discovered no anthology of Crothers' work sitting on the shelves of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts—she had to sleuth out as many plays as she could find. "I checked antiquarian bookstores, I bid for scripts on eBay, and a couple of them Samuel French holds the rights to," she says. "A lot of them are in the public domain, but a lot are impossible to find. So when I finally started getting the plays and reading them, I discovered that in almost everything she wrote, Crothers was delivering very powerful messages. I picked Expressing Willie not only because I thought it was a fun play with a message, but because it was also one of her favorites."
It was also a matter of practicality: "There's one play, for example, called A Little Journey, which occurs on a train and has 20 characters and a train wreck, whereas Expressing Willie takes place in a living room."
Crothers, Mosere adds, was attempting to do something difficult for a dramatist in any era: write plays with meaning but that meaningfully entertain, too: "She always had the philosophy, I think, that it's important for the audience to have a good time—that theatre is not enough if you're not entertaining the audience in some way, on some level. What's really interesting to me is how the women in this play are so powerful. It's like we have a false memory of the 1960s. When Crothers was at her height in the '20s, women had just gotten the right to vote. In Crothers' plays, the way women spoke—the language she used was very empowering."
The action of the play concerns a man who, through the machinations of his mother, finds himself commiserating among the wealthy on Long Island. (Some scholars have conjectured that the play provided the inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.) At length, the man's former girlfriend, a Midwesterner who is hardly well-to-do, arrives; dramatically, the effect is to place the values of the rich and the middle class cheek by jowl in front of the man as well as the audience. "For me," Mosere says, "even though the lead role is male, the real power is centered on the women."
One of the topics that arises in the dialogue, Mosere adds, is "New Age religion, and this is one of the things I think is going to be most surprising for modern audiences. I mean, the thing that [the characters] are talking about is new—New Age, the whole post-spiritual bent. But isn't that the same thing that so many people are talking about today? Crothers is kind of making fun of it, and her message about it is there. You know, we think that everything is new. But sometimes you discover that previous generations have already gotten there—that what it is, is new to a new generation. If you take out the time period of the play and the costumes, it's still a relevant play."
Expressing Willie runs April 6–22 at the West End Theatre at the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew, 263 W. 86th St., 2nd floor, NYC. Tickets: (212) 868-4444 or www.smarttix.com. Website: www.womanseeking.org.