Drama and Religion in English Around 1925

This paper reflects on the interstices of religion and drama written in English around the year 1925. In this formative year for modernism in literature and live arts, playwrights explored the relations among theater, religion, and ritual, developing theories of dramatic performance that influenced theater practice and scholarship throughout the long twentieth century. As I show, 1925 marked an apogee of Anglophone dramatists’ diverse investments in religion. Authors from G. B. Shaw to Zora Neale Hurston, inquiring into the dramatic roles of religion in modernity, participated in a set of consummately modernist formal concerns, insofar as they sought to reinvigorate the theater by returning to its presumptive origins in devotional practice. Influenced by the ideas of Nietzsche and the Cambridge school of anthropologists, which held that theater’s origins lie in sacrificial religious observance, these dramatists turned to religion to peer into the deep histories of their chosen art and to speculate about its potential futures. Like modernist painters investigating the quality of representation on a flat plane or modernist poets examining the grammatical underpinnings of language, they understood their engagement with religion as an attempt to search out the fundamental mechanisms of theater’s forms and affordances. Their fascinations with the thematic and iconographic substance of religion – centrally, but not exclusively, related to medieval Christianity – served, paradoxically, to make modernist theater new.

By 1925, playwrights’ emergent investments in the drama of religion spanned across the Atlantic, building on spectators’ rising interest in this subject on purportedly secular stages in the US, Britain, and Europe. Shaw, the Anglo-Irish author, was awarded the 1925 Nobel Prize in Literature for his international sensation Saint Joan, a work closely modeled on the historical trial of Jeanne d’Arc. Saint Joan premiered in New York in 1923 before dazzling audiences in Britain, France, and Germany, providing the inspiration for other major modernist saint plays such as Bertolt Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards (1931) and T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral (1935). The year 1925 also saw the publication of W. B. Yeats’s opaque mystical treatise, A Vision, a text closely linked with his passion plays, Calvary (1920) and The Resurrection (1927). It was also in 1925 that Hurston, arriving in New York City, got her first break as a playwright with the publication of Color Struck. The success of this text among the elite readers of the Harlem Renaissance enabled Hurston to compose subsequent ethnographic dramas such as The Sermon in the Valley (1929), a play in which she aspired to set an entire Baptist service “word for word and note for note.” These English-language dramas were in dialogue with avant-garde performance works in other languages, such as the French writer Antonin Artaud’s Jet of Blood (1925), which draws upon the book of Genesis and culminates in an image of divine sacrifice. So, too, were they in conversation with devotional dramas staged explicitly for Christian audiences, including the decennial passion play at Oberammergau – even as modernist authors distanced themselves from the expressly theological project of such popular productions.

Scholars of the modernist theater have recognized the galvanizing influence of religious sources in monographs ranging from Elinor Fuchs’s foundational inquiry into the “modernist mysterium” to Sharon Aronson-Lehavi’s recent Performing Religion on the Secular Stage.[1] Meanwhile, scholarship from within religious studies, including work by Craig Prentiss and William Robert, has heralded expanding interests in twentieth-century theater and performance in the field.[2⁠] This paper, together with the book manuscript from which it is drawn, builds on these significant contributions to account for the religious work that I understand modernist playwrights to perform. Of course, these artists’ engagements with religion were as diverse as the cultures and communities that gave rise to them; while some were enthusiastic participants in the work of disenchantment, others sought to discover new, modern enchantments and modes of religiosity. Recognizing these variations, I show how the intersections of drama and religion around 1925 tend to exhibit three principal forms of religious aspiration that describe the modern theater’s “spiritual weather,” to borrow Tracy Fessenden’s term.[3] The first aspiration is to resurrect the theater as a site of artistic experimentation and potentiality, serving as a call for the art’s ritual renewal. The second aspiration is to script what I call “twice-lived religion,” a term that borrows from performance theorist Richard Schechner’s influential concept of performance as “twice-behaved behavior.”[4] By translating lived religious practices into a dramatic script, I claim, these dramatists destabilize the boundaries between secular and devotional space and unsettle the periodicity of secular modernity. Finally, the third aspiration of these modern dramas is to render the theater a profane and desacralizing space of play, an aim which itself constitutes a form of religious work.

My scholarship follows Agamben to think the “profane,” a category in which modern dramatists took great interest, as arising from acts of play that irreverently recycle sacred materials.⁠ Contrary to modern playwrights’ own beliefs about the origins of drama in religious ritual, theater has not always been profane in this sense of a transgressive, playful imitation. Rather, it became profane around 1925, with far-reaching implications for the aesthetics and politics of the modern stage. The figures I discuss are united by their commitment to modern drama’s profanations. It is within theater’s transient and contingent orbits of belief, they conclude, that new ways of being in the world are envisioned and enacted. The year 1925 brings these dramatic profanations keenly into focus.

1. Elinor Fuchs, The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater after Modernism (Indiana University Press, 1996); Sharon Aronson-Lehavi, Performing Religion on the Secular Stage (Routledge, 2023).
2. Craig Prentiss, Staging Faith: Religion and African American Theater from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II (New York University Press, 2013); William Robert, Unbridled: Studying Religion in Performance (University of Chicago Press, 2022).
3. Tracy Fessenden, Religion Around Billie Holiday (Penn State University Press, 2018).
4. Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (University of Pennsylvania Press), 1985.