WOMEN ON THE VERGE
by Alice Erya Gerstenberg
Descended from the House of Gerstenberg, grain merchants who founded the Chicago Board of Trade, Alice was the only child of Julia, a woman with no formal education who had had aspirations of becoming an actress and Erich, a successful businessman. She enjoyed a lifestyle available only to the very wealthy. After being enrolled at a private school in Chicago, her mother decided she should attend Bryn Mawr. Founded in 1885, Bryn Mawr was a women’s liberal arts college based on Quaker values. The curriculum offered women a more progressive academic program than any others, and it prepared them for meaningful opportunities to contribute to the world so they could compete with men. In 1908, a year after her graduation, she began writing plays professionally. A Little World contained four one-acts written for girls in a Chicago acting school. She also published two feminist novels which were highly successful. Unquenched Fire (1912) concerns Jane, a Chicago society girl who goes to New York to be an actress. She is aware of her ability to be in an emotional situation while at the same time able to watch and chart her own reactions and those of others. Jane embodies the split between woman and artist and in the end must choose between them. In her memoirs, Alice wrote of a similar ability of consciously filing serious or funny moments away for future use in her work. She was already employing the split subject in her themes. Overtones (1913) her most well-known and still oft-produced one-act about the primitive vs. the cultured selves of two women, was inspired by a visit to an acquaintance from Chicago who had moved to Manhattan. The friend asked her husband twice within a few seconds whether, as he left to visit a neighbor, he was going to take the car. At this point, Alice reminisced “I heard a click at the top of my head, as if the shutter of a camera had closed and my mind said to me about her, ‘I know you have an automobile, I heard you the first time." We are not two women sitting on this couch having tea. We are four women, each with an underlying self.” Feminist objectives recur in her novels and plays and reflect her interest in the inner psyche as “a critique of a society that represses women so severely they break apart.” Two years after the publication of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, she was the first playwright to give Broadway an authentic glimpse into unconscious life. Overtones was produced by the Washington Square Players with a set designed by Lee Simonson in 1915 and performed in repertory with other short plays at the Bandbox Theatre (E. 57th St. and 3rd Ave.) until May 1916. After its run there, it toured on Martin Beck’s Vaudeville circuit, performed at the Palace Theatre in Chicago and in London where Lillie Langtry starred as Harriet. Bandbox in 1914 Interviewed for a New York daily in 1915, she was described as a “little, blond-haired, blue-eyed schoolgirl…perched on the arm of a chair with a letter from her daddy.” She was actually 30 and had just published her second novel, The Conscience of Sarah Platt, and was already known for her successful stage adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. What is easy to describe in novels, such as unrealistic distortions of space, swift transitions, long falls down holes and flying through the air, was, to say the least, challenging when compressing the action of two novels into a comprehensible play; lighting, set design, music and stage directions were daunting. In Gerstenberg's adaptation, when Alice escapes from the Red Queen the stage direction involved her jumping over “the footlights on the bridge and as the curtain falls dividing her from the crowd, she appeals to the audience to save her.” This is one of the first examples of a character breaking through the proscenium and engaging in direct address to the audience in the American theatre. One critic noted that nearly thirty playwrights had tried unsuccessfully to dramatize Carroll’s stories and “it remained for Alice Gerstenberg to dramatize the book successfully as Carroll wanted it.” The story of the psychological maturing of the American drama is connected to the emergence of the Art Theatre or Little Theatre movement, which led the revolt against the hackneyed commercial theatre in New York referred to as the Great "Trite" Way. Between 1912 and 1915 Little Theatres sprang up in various parts of the country including Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, Provincetown, and the Neighborhood Playhouse and Washington Square Players in New York. Gerstenberg was a pioneer in the movement and one of the original members of the Chicago Little Theatre founded by Maurice Browne in 1912. She and Annette Washburne started the Chicago Junior League for Children in 1921. Her most significant contribution to the theatre was in being founder, producer and president of The Playwrights’ Theatre of Chicago (1922-1945).1 Her plays and investment in the community embraced her concerns for fellowship, self-expression and anti-commercialism that the Little Theatre movement fought for. She believed that it was "necessary for a woman to be a human being first and a woman afterward and to learn to express her individuality with the same freedom and confidence that men do!” But her feminism is too easily lost in critiques of her work that see only the upper-class milieus or the satirized women’s behavior. While her characters like Mrs. Pringle in Fourteen, or Lois in The Unseen are often frivolous or shallow, she also wrote about women of substance like the psychic Grace in Attuned or Miss Ivory, the savvy ingénue in her updated restoration farce The Pot Boiler who outsmarts Sud, the inept playwright. She was often urged to move to New York, but preferred to remain in Chicago tending to her supportive parents and stating, "Chicago’s climate itself stimulates the “I will” spirit. We kept on striving to build for a richer soil in the arts.” Described in an early interview as a ‘girl author’, she rebutted with “There should be no condemning laws for women and condoning laws for men. There should be but one law for both, and that a clean, broad, uplifting, developing human law, a law of honest self-expression.” She never married but chose to devote her life entirely to the theatre and to improving the lives of women, practicing what she preached most passionately and eloquently.
But Gerstenberg was, in fact, known nationwide on the Vaudeville circuit, the most popular form of indigenous entertainment between 1893 and 1925. One-act plays lent dignity to the bill of entertainment and she had many of them. Overtones was presented at Chicago’s Palace Theatre by Martin Beck, founder of the Orpheum Circuit. The Pot Boiler was presented not only in Vaudeville, but in a trench in France, in Hawaii, as well as little theatres in Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Hollywood. Her inventive last line for this modern Restoration farce cleverly turns the lens upon herself. When the character of the playwright doesn’t know how to end his absurd playlet. "I don’t know who shoots!" he shrieks (in Vaudeville the ingénue traditionally asked, "Who Shoots?") Gerstenberg's players exclaim in disgust, "Oh, shoot the author!" Fourteen is a one-act social satire originally performed at Maitland’s Theatre in San Francisco in 1919 and published in the February 1920 issue of The Drama magazine, in which J. Vandervoort Sloan described Gerstenberg as "a progressive young playwright, possibly the best-known and most widely be-played by amateur groups in America" and Fourteen as belonging "in the 'A' class of her plays". A reviewer for the American Library Association called it an "exemplary social farce" and it continues to be produced to this day. The character of Mrs. Pringle foreshadows Hyacinth Bouquet in the British sitcom Keeping Up Appearances and Billie Burke’s social climbing hostess in Dinner At Eight (I suspect Edna Ferber had seen a performance of Fourteen.) Gerstenberg's Midwest origins put her in association not only with Iowa’s Susan Glaspell, but also Wisconsin’s Zona Gale and Missouri’s Zoe Akins. She was dedicated to the Chicago Little Theatre movement and was passionately invested in creating production opportunities for authors who remained outside of New York, serving on the board of the Society of Midland Authors. This quote in praise of the founder John M. Stahl gives a sense of that dedication, the resistance the society encountered, and Gerstenberg's frank but literary turn of phrase: "Some people were aggravated by his eagerness to make a success of this society. Most people never even try to exercise the second commandment, they are so busy looking at the outside of a fellow without taking an accompanying glance at the inner soul. I admire people who have the initiative to put something worthwhile into the world as against those who remain lumps of criticism in the path.” She embraced spiritualism and its emphasis on freedom of conscience. It became a magnet for social radicals, especially advocates of women’s rights and abolition. They sought knowledge of the world beyond. Alice tackled this subject matter in her one act monologue Beyond about a dead woman awaiting judgment from the All Powerful. Scholar Dorothy Chansky, author of Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience, summarizes Gerstenberg's contributions as follows: "She greeted changes with a willingness to go on writing, producing, and speaking about and on behalf of women and theatre. Her life was transitional in the sense that she made, rather than resisted changes. If she was unwilling or unable to play the role of the tough rebel or to give up her financial status, she accomplished for decades the feat that was often short-lived for female playwrights of the Progressive Era. Alice the artist and Alice the woman continued to face each other in the mirror. One can imagine they were often smiling."
But Gerstenberg was, in fact, known nationwide on the Vaudeville circuit, the most popular form of indigenous entertainment between 1893 and 1925. One-act plays lent dignity to the bill of entertainment and she had many of them. Overtones was presented at Chicago’s Palace Theatre by Martin Beck, founder of the Orpheum Circuit. The Pot Boiler was presented not only in Vaudeville, but in a trench in France, in Hawaii, as well as little theatres in Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Hollywood. Her inventive last line for this modern Restoration farce cleverly turns the lens upon herself. When the character of the playwright doesn’t know how to end his absurd playlet. "I don’t know who shoots!" he shrieks (in Vaudeville the ingénue traditionally asked, "Who Shoots?") Gerstenberg's players exclaim in disgust, "Oh, shoot the author!" Fourteen is a one-act social satire originally performed at Maitland’s Theatre in San Francisco in 1919 and published in the February 1920 issue of The Drama magazine, in which J. Vandervoort Sloan described Gerstenberg as "a progressive young playwright, possibly the best-known and most widely be-played by amateur groups in America" and Fourteen as belonging "in the 'A' class of her plays". A reviewer for the American Library Association called it an "exemplary social farce" and it continues to be produced to this day. The character of Mrs. Pringle foreshadows Hyacinth Bouquet in the British sitcom Keeping Up Appearances and Billie Burke’s social climbing hostess in Dinner At Eight (I suspect Edna Ferber had seen a performance of Fourteen.) Gerstenberg's Midwest origins put her in association not only with Iowa’s Susan Glaspell, but also Wisconsin’s Zona Gale and Missouri’s Zoe Akins. She was dedicated to the Chicago Little Theatre movement and was passionately invested in creating production opportunities for authors who remained outside of New York, serving on the board of the Society of Midland Authors. This quote in praise of the founder John M. Stahl gives a sense of that dedication, the resistance the society encountered, and Gerstenberg's frank but literary turn of phrase: "Some people were aggravated by his eagerness to make a success of this society. Most people never even try to exercise the second commandment, they are so busy looking at the outside of a fellow without taking an accompanying glance at the inner soul. I admire people who have the initiative to put something worthwhile into the world as against those who remain lumps of criticism in the path.” She embraced spiritualism and its emphasis on freedom of conscience. It became a magnet for social radicals, especially advocates of women’s rights and abolition. They sought knowledge of the world beyond. Alice tackled this subject matter in her one act monologue Beyond about a dead woman awaiting judgment from the All Powerful. Scholar Dorothy Chansky, author of Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience, summarizes Gerstenberg's contributions as follows: "She greeted changes with a willingness to go on writing, producing, and speaking about and on behalf of women and theatre. Her life was transitional in the sense that she made, rather than resisted changes. If she was unwilling or unable to play the role of the tough rebel or to give up her financial status, she accomplished for decades the feat that was often short-lived for female playwrights of the Progressive Era. Alice the artist and Alice the woman continued to face each other in the mirror. One can imagine they were often smiling."