World War II

The 1930s were marked by a decade of aggression that ultimately led to World War II. This global conflict was sparked by the emergence of totalitarian governments in Germany, Italy, and Japan. These militaristic powers seized control, fueled by the worldwide Great Depression of the early 1930s and the conditions established by the peace treaties following World War I. The dictatorships in these nations promoted territorial expansion into neighboring regions. In Germany, Hitler bolstered the military throughout the 1930s. In 1936, Italian forces under Benito Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. Between 1936 and 1939, Spain was embroiled in a civil war involving Francisco Franco’s fascist army, which received support from Germany and Italy. Germany annexed Austria in March 1938 and occupied Czechoslovakia by March 1939. Italy captured Albania in April 1939.

Just one week after Nazi Germany and the U.S.S.R. signed the Treaty of Nonaggression, Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, marking the start of World War II. Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, following the sinking of the British ship Athenia by a German U-boat off the Irish coast. Another British vessel, the Courageous, was sunk on September 19. All members of the British Commonwealth, excluding Ireland, soon joined Britain and France in declaring war. On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, prompting the United States to enter World War II.

Theater in the 1930s and 1940s

In the late 19th century, playwrights like Henrik Ibsen began moving away from the perceived artificiality of melodrama, focusing instead on the ordinary aspects of contemporary life. Their work, along with much experimental fiction from that era, embraced the principles of Realism, a fresh literary movement that earnestly explored realistic characters and their often challenging interactions with society. Playwrights who adopted Realism used settings and props that mirrored their characters’ everyday lives and crafted dialogue that mimicked natural speech patterns.

Realism continued to be a dominant style in 20th-century drama. During the 1930s and 1940s, a group of playwrights known as social realists brought plays to American audiences that reflected the political and social realities of the time. Dramatists like Lillian Hellman, Sidney Howard, Sidney Kingsley, and Clifford Odets examined political systems such as capitalism, totalitarianism, and socialism, as well as social issues like lesbianism and poverty.

Comedies, particularly drawing room comedies and vaudeville shows, also became popular dramatic forms in the early 20th century. During the 1930s and 1940s, comedic theater, which offered an escape from the depression and war years, became as popular as drama. This genre evolved into musicals, notably with the first of the Rodgers and Hammerstein masterpieces, Oklahoma in 1943, which helped establish the musical play as a significant American art form.

Farce and Melodrama

Kesselring diverges from traditional drama by blending farce with melodrama. While Elizabethan tragedies included scenes that offered comic relief, these moments were not central to the play's main storyline. In his review for the Nation, Joseph Wood Krutch observes that Elizabethan tragedies rarely mixed comedy with tragedy. He notes that comic and tragic characters were usually kept separate, and audiences knew to stop laughing when the comedic porter exited and Macbeth entered. He points out that plays from the early twentieth century, such as those by George M. Cohan, began to blend drama and comedy, implying that "the audience was expected to laugh when the corpse fell out of the closet and to see the more extreme forms of violence as inherently comic."

Kesselring embraces this contemporary approach by weaving farce into the dramatic framework of his play, which centers on the Brewster sisters' murder of eleven lonely old men who seek shelter...