Southern Illinois University Press Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre, 1923-1937 (Theater in the Americas)

Review Over the past five years the Southern Illinois University Press's "Theater in the Americas"series, edited by Robert A. Schanke, has produced an array of manuscripts that explore some ofthe most provocative and largely overlooked practitioners, organizations, and movements of themodern theater tradition in the United States. Titles have included works on Sophie Treadwell, the little theater movement, and Mordecai Gorelick; with this new study of John HowardLawson, the SIU Press series continues not only to preserve, but also to enhance, its inimitablevoice in the study of both modernity and theater within U.S. national culture. This recent addition to the SIU Press series deftly situates the marginalized, half-hidden workof communist playwright John Howard Lawson within a broader community of socially-aware, politically-engaged creative artists. It also offers an astute look at the trials and tribulations ofthe literary and artistic left in the years between the First World War and the Second WorldWar. In doing so, Messiah of the New Technique encourages not only the "reconsideration ofLawson's career and the cultural and political left of the interwar years" but also the "larger culturalmatrix of that historical moment" (3). The potency of this much needed study is enrichedby Chambers's meticulous examination of Lawson's lived experiences, play scripts, letters, andtheoretical writings regarding 1920s and 1930s theater as "material manifestations chroniclingone man's journey to define who he was and where he belonged in the world as he venturedfrom 'artist-rebel' to 'political revolutionary'" (204). From the start it is apparent that Chambersis neither necessarily concerned with, nor particularly intrigued by, value judgments of Lawson'splays in production, choosing instead to concentrate his efforts on illustrating ways in whichLawson "was both a product and producer of the social energy specific to this era" (204). By way of introduction, Chambers takes great care to highlight the fact that a preponderanceof existing scholarship has all but dismissed Lawson as a key "player in the evolution of UnitedStates drama" (4), with many publications offering nothing more than a "reductive view ofLawson's career in theatre" (5). This judgement, argues Chambers, warrants greater reflectiongiven that during the interwar years Lawson penned Roger Bloomer (1923), Processional (1925), Success Story (1932), Marching Song (1937), among several other plays, as well as the innovativefusion 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 lifein theater. Having carved out both niche and need, Chambers sets about the task of delineatinghis research frame, which is noticeably indebted to both neoMarxist criticism and the tenets ofNew Historicism. This deployment of materialist historiography provides a "long-overdue newreading of Lawson scripts for the theatre" as well as "a much needed study of the context thatenveloped him" (13). Opening with Lawson's early life as the son of practicing Christian Scientists, continuingthrough his 1914 graduation from Williams College, and converging on the awakening of hisaesthetic sensibilities and political beliefs, Chambers recounts the beginnings of Lawson's "intellectualand spiritual upheaval that would continue and intensify through the middle years ofthe 1930s" (21). This upheaval led Lawson both to make an early foray into commercial theaterand then out of it shortly thereafter when he enlisted in the French ambulance corps wherehe became fast friends with John Dos Passos. For Chambers, the relationship with Dos Passosand wartime service in France provided the seed for both Lawson's commitment to revolutionarypolitics and his certainty that theater is a "pulpit from which he could communicate radicalcontent" (22). Aesthetically and ideologically somewhere between