"I'M OUT AND HE'S IN": NATIVIST DISCOURSE IN AMERICAN EXPRESSIONIST DRAMA

"3 American expressionist playwrights including Eugene O'Neill, Susan Glaspell, Elmer Rice, Sophie Treadwell, and John Howard Lawson penned dramatic fables where typical characters struggle with abstract forces of modernity, including changing definitions of race and culture.4 They did so in plays that borrowed stage effects from the German art theatre and plots from American scandal sheets and sensation melodramas, fusing mass appeal and high culture.5 Issues of parentage, roots, and hybridity, then, are central to these plays both in terms of their form and their content. Action is focused on the threshold spaces mentioned by Kaplan, more often cast as spaces unique to the apartment budding such as courtyard or airshaft. Because these plays are set within urban space where immigration has become a fact of life, the relationship between the domestic and the foreign is already broken down; the question now is how to restabilize the domestic sphere and whether or not it is possible or even desirable to do so. [...]offense. Racial and moral impurity go hand in hand, and can be found in marginal urban space. [...]to take up Michael Trask's formulation, Judy O'Grady is a "subject in transit," one whose sexualized, workingclass identity is intimately bound up with her ethnicity.52 Rice's play belies a simultaneous fascination and repulsion with such figures, a feeling that underscores expressionist American drama.