Rachel Crothers wrote during many shifts in American theater. She began her career just as New York was becoming the center of the theatrical world, and plays were still mostly melodramas and historical romances. The influence of the social-problem drama was coming over from England, and this is where we can see Crothers find her niche. She wrote well-made plays that took on social issues, but wrapped up neatly. She came onto the stage (as it were) at a critical time for women in the theater. Before her time, women in the theater had “little hope of having [their] play produced” without a prior connection (Friedman 69). Crothers was able to make it in New York without knowing anybody in the industry beforehand, which would have been impossible even a decade earlier.

Crothers avoided many of the movements in theater, choosing rather to stay true to her themes and forms. She avoided the Syndicate, a group of men who controlled most of major theater for a short period around the turn of the century. She was somewhat involved with the Drama League, which wanted to educate American audiences about classical and continental dramas, as well as the Society of American Dramatists and Composers, a group who wanted to come together and write a successful Broadway play. During the War Years, American Drama began to move away from realism and become more imaginative, which was a movement Crothers did not follow. In the postwar years, there was a booming of theater, with many different options being available to theatergoers. Theatrical movements went even further away from Crothers’ wheelhouse with the rise of Expressionism. Even the “New Realists” writing in the 1930s were not focused on women’s issues, but rather poverty, working-class life, and other social problems than those Crothers was interested in exploring.

Rachel Crothers did not do a huge amount of experimentation with her writing – she was a very commercial playwright who knew her strengths. She began her career during the point in history where theater had a “goal of verisimilitude…and women playwrights did not hesistate to portray issues that drew upon the ‘facts’ of their lives as women” (Friedman 74). Crothers thus latched on to the charater of the “New Woman”, who was “usually a professonial, characterized by the critic as ‘strong, smart, economically independent” and who’s conflict was “her love for a man” (Friedman 77). She started writing during the period where the “New Woman” was a popular narrative to explore, and stuck to those types of stories, even when “feminism [was] taboo and women’s issues [were] less salient in the drama” (Friedman 70). Responses to this type of narrative were varied, and changed over time depending on the kind of theater that was in vogue at the time. Often her work was “welcomed by the critics,” but at times was also “marginalized by contemporary critics and reviewers” (Murphy).

Sources:

Friedman, Sharon. “Feminism as Theme in Twentieth-Century American Women’s Drama.” American Studies, vol. 25, no. 1, 1984, pp. 69–89. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40641831

Gottlieb, Lois C. Rachel Crothers. Twayne, 1979.

Murphy, Brenda. “Feminism and the marketplace: the career of Rachel Crothers”. Cambridge Companion to American Women Playwrights. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ProQuest Literature Online. Web. 26 April 2018.