Owen Davis

• Born: January 29, 1874
• Birthplace: Portland, Maine
• Died: October 14, 1956
• Place of death: New York, New York

Other Literary Forms

In addition to more than three hundred plays, Owen Davis wrote a radio series entitled The Gibson Family (1934), which lasted for thirty-nine weeks. He was also a screenwriter in Hollywood, where his work included Icebound (1924), How Baxter Butted In (1925), Frozen Justice (1929), and Hearts in Exile (1929).

In 1930, dissatisfied with Hollywood and its exploitation of the writer, Davis returned to writing for the stage. In 1931, he published a volume of autobiography, I’d Like to Do It Again; he updated his life story in 1950 with My First Fifty Years in the Theatre.

Achievements

Owen Davis’s career spanned almost sixty years, and during that period, he wrote more than three hundred plays, most of which were performed professionally. Inasmuch as his work was produced in New York for thirty-seven consecutive seasons, and twenty of his plays were produced in Hollywood as movies, he was, from 1900 to 1950, America’s most prolific playwright. Drama critic George Jean Nathan called Davis “the Lope de Vega of the American Theatre.”

Davis began his career as a writer of Ten-Twent’-Thirt’ melodramas, and by 1910, he achieved recognition as the dominant writer in this dramatic form. Motivated to be a serious writer, Davis wrote The Family Cupboard, which enabled him to move from the visually dominated melodramas to comedy. Always seeking to grow as an artist, Davis shifted from situation comedy to psychological melodrama; perhaps his finest work in this form was the 1923 play Icebound, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and for which he was inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Later, he would serve on the Pulitzer Prize selection committee.

In addition to his work as a dramatist, Davis sought to free the writer from managerial abuse and plagiarism. Therefore, he became actively involved in founding the Dramatists’ Guild , serving as its president in 1922. As president, he addressed himself to such issues as film rights, actors’ homes, loans, and other issues germane to the theater profession. Davis had a gift for organization and administration and was continually drafted into leadership positions.

Biography

Born in 1874, Owen Davis was one of eight children of Abbie Gould Davis and Owen Warren Davis. His father, a graduate of Bowdoin College and a Civil War veteran, was primarily in the iron business, owning the Kathodin Iron Works and serving one term as president of the Society of American Iron Manufacturers. Later, he operated a photography studio on New York’s Forty-second Street. He died in 1920 of a heart attack.

Davis went to school in Bangor, Maine, and at the age of nine wrote his first play Diamond Cut Diamond: Or, The Rival Detectives. At the age of fourteen, he enrolled as a subfreshman at the University of Tennessee. To satisfy his father, Davis left after one year and attended Harvard. Because Harvard did not have a theater and drama department, Davis first majored in business and then transferred, in 1893, to the sciences to become a mining engineer. While at Harvard, Davis participated in football and track and organized the Society of Arts, under the auspices of which he produced his verse dramas. In 1893, he left Harvard without a degree and followed his family to Southern Kentucky, where he was hired by the Cumberland Valley Kentucky Railroad as a mining engineer. Dissatisfied, Davis decided that he wanted to become a playwright or an actor. In 1895, with twelve dollars in his pocket, he quit his job and went to New York City. Meeting with continual discouragement, Davis was finally aided by theater manger A. M. Palmer, whose influence helped Davis get work as a utility actor, stage manager, press agent, advance man, company manager, and in some instances assistant director for the Fanny Janauschek Troupe. Davis left the company in 1896, committed to becoming a writer.

Giving full attention to writing, Davis tried to sell his first play, For the White Rose. Meeting with rejection after rejection, he became determined to figure out a formula for the then-running successful plays. After studying the melodramas and the audiences, Davis discovered that he needed to write for the “eye rather than the ear”—that is, he needed to emphasize scenic elements. Davis also concluded that the successful melodramas depended on such common features as a strong love interest, the triumph of good over evil, and stock comic characters. Although For the White Rose was finally produced in 1898, Through the Breakers was to be Davis’s first successful play.

In January, 1901, Davis met Elizabeth Drury “Iza” Breyer, whom he married on April 23, 1902. They remained married for fifty-five years and had two sons. In 1902, Davis and Al “Sweetheart” Woods signed an agreement that led in 1905 to the well-known “Owen Davis-Al Woods Melodrama Factory,” from which fifty-nine plays were produced, the first being The Confessions of a Wife in 1905. While pouring out “Davidrama” after “Davidrama,” as his particular brand of melodrama was labeled, at a rate of eight or more per year, Davis began using such pseudonyms as Arthur Lamb, Martin Hurly, Walter Lawrence, George Walker, and John Oliver.

Not satisfied with his success as a popular playwright, Davis struggled to write serious drama. In 1918, he moved from the melodrama of the Ten-Twent’-Thirt’ theaters to try his luck on Broadway. Success on Broadway was not easy to achieve, and Davis again studied the work of other successful writers (such as Clyde Fitch) to ascertain the necessary formula. Besides writing plays, he published articles on the theater in The New York Times and other periodicals.

Disturbed and sobered by World War I, Davis read works by Henrik Ibsen, Maxim Gorky, Gerhart Hauptmann, and other serious dramatists whose naturalistic emphasis on the influence of heredity and environment is apparent in such Davis plays of the early 1920’s as The Detour and Icebound. Another departure in Davis’s work occurred with his farce The Nervous Wreck, which Davis called “the terrible play which made us all rich.” Whereas his Pulitzer Prize drama, Icebound, made one thousand dollars weekly, The Nervous Wreck brought in twenty-one thousand dollars a week. Made into the musical Whoopee (1928), remade as Up in Arms (1944), and later adapted for the screen (Davis was not involved in these projects), The Nervous Wreck was Davis’s most popular and most lucrative work. From 1924 to 1941, Davis worked on movies, on radio, and on drama at the Lakewood Theatre in Skowhegan, Maine (known as “Broadway in Maine”), as well as on Broadway. His play Jezebel failed in New York, but as a 1938 movie, it earned for Bette Davis an Academy Award. Davis’s last major achievement was his adaptation of Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (1911). Failing eyesight and bad health slowed his output, and his last substantial work was Mr. and Mrs. North. Davis died in New York City on October 14, 1956.

Analysis

Writing plays like “a freshman writes home for money—as frequently and with as little effort,” Owen Davis became the United States’ most prolific dramatist. He began with melodramas, then moved on to comedy, and psychological drama.

The Detour

While under the influence of naturalistic drama, Davis wrote one of his finest plays, The Detour. Still using the melodramatic form, Davis varied his approach with a realistic style. The characters are therefore depicted as products of heredity and environment, placed in circumstances in which they struggle physically and psychologically against these forces. Despite their efforts to circumvent their fate, the destiny that shapes their ends prevails.

The central character, Helen Hardy, exemplifies this determination in the face of hardship. For ten years, Helen has scrimped and sacrificed for the sake of her daughter, Kate, who aspires to be a painter. Helen’s dream for Kate is in reality her own unfulfilled dream “to get away and go to New York, or somewheres where bein’ born and bein’ dead wasn’t the only things that ever happened.” Her efforts to escape her environment, however, fail when fate intercedes in the guise of Stephen Hardy. Helen admits that, in her loneliness, “somehow I got to loving him before I knew it.” Married and feeling trapped, Helen doggedly tells Kate, “Your life isn’t going to be like this.” Helen’s struggle against destiny becomes the central conflict of the play.

The struggle focuses on Kate’s suitor, Tom Lane, and takes on larger proportions when Tom, echoing a widely held viewpoint, affirms that “women ought to just cook, and clean, and sew, and maybe chop a little wood, and have the babies. . . . And if a woman sometimes gets to thinkin it ain’t quite fair” and decides to alter the situation, “she’s flyin’ in the face of Providence.” To expedite Kate’s departure to New York, Helen sells her bedroom wardrobe and with the additional money plans for Kate to leave immediately. Again, Stephen Hardy intercedes. Obsessed with owning land, and needing money to buy what he considers a prime section, Stephen takes the money intended for Kate. This makes the men happy: Stephen will get his land, and Tom will get Kate. Stephen’s act is a villainous one, and inasmuch as Tom supports Stephen, he must share that guilt. Thus, the men in The Detour symbolize society and its failure to guarantee equal rights for women. The play ends with the forces of tradition victorious: An art critic seriously questions Kate’s talent, and Kate decides to remain with her family and Tom. Despite this defeat, Helen is undaunted; “she stands, her face glorified, looking out into the future, her heart swelling with eternal hope.”

Icebound

The influence of naturalism is also apparent in Davis’s prizewinning play Icebound. In this work, despite his intention to move away from melodrama, Davis retained many of the basic elements of that form. Unlike tragedy, which contains highly serious action that probes the nature of good and evil, melodrama generally lacks moral complexity; in melodrama, good and evil are clearly defined. Although the plot of Icebound is essentially melodramatic, the play also features an element of psychological complexity that distinguishes it from straight melodrama.

Jane Crosby is an adopted second cousin to the Jordan family. Taken in by the family’s matriarch, Jane is considered an outcast by the rest of the family, especially as the mother is dying and the Jordan wealth is to be inherited. Responding to her enemies, Jane asserts her “hate” for the Jordans and her plans “to get away from them.” As for the dying mother, “She was the only one of you worth loving, and she didn’t want it.” When the mother dies, fate intervenes in the guise of the dead woman’s will: Jane is left the Jordan home and money. When the will’s contents are revealed, the Jordan family’s sentiments are summed up: “We’ll go to the law, that’s what we’ll do.” Thus, Jane is pitted against the greedy and vengeful Jordan clan. The conflict is clearly defined, and the audience is sympathetic to Jane.

Had Davis kept the focus solely on the conflict between Jane and the Jordans, the play would be a simple melodrama; instead, he chose to emphasize the role of Mrs. Jordan’s son Ben, the black sheep of the family. Ben is a “wild, selfish, arrogant fellow, handsome but sulky and defiant.” Indicted by the grand jury for his “drunken devilment,” he has run away to avoid state prison. While he is still a fugitive, Ben, risking capture, returns to see his dying mother, and after her death, he is arrested. Alone and without money, Ben is befriended by Jane, in whose custody the court places him. Four months later, Ben comes to grips with his past. Ashamed and feeling remorse about his past behavior, Ben struggles to express his repressed emotions. Admitting love for his mother and for Jane, Ben beseeches Jane to “help me to be fit.” With Ben’s reformation, society’s positive values emerge triumphant over the baneful influence of the Jordan family. No longer emotionally icebound, Ben marries Jane, who gives him his rightful inheritance.

Ethan Frome

Davis was active as a playwright for many years after the appearance of Icebound, but the only significant work of this later period was his adaptation, with Donald Davis, of Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton’s short novel set in a harsh New England landscape. Ethan “lives in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access.” He is married to Zenobia, whom Davis characterizes as cruel, harsh, impersonal, and drab, like the play’s New England winter setting. In that she represents those forces that seek to enslave Ethan’s body and soul, and in that she drives the action to catastrophe, Zenobia (or Zeena) is the villain.

Despite her sickly appearance, Zeena is a forceful personality, and on issues of importance to her, her strength surfaces. For example, she demands that her cousin Mattie Silver be allowed to come and live with them as a hired girl. Citing a complete lack of money, Ethan protests against this demand, but Zeena settles the issue by curtly asserting, “Well—she’s comin’ just the same, Ethan!” The consequences, however, are not what Zeena intended: Mattie’s presence “thaws” Ethan, and eventually, the two fall in love. Jealousy rages within Zeena, who conspires to get rid of Mattie. For years, Ethan has felt trapped by the farm that he inherited, and with Mattie leaving, Ethan’s “desire for change and freedom” are resurrected. Ethan tells Zeena that he plans to go West for a fresh start and that Zeena may have the farm. Zeena, however, wishes to keep Ethan enslaved, and, playing on his strong sense of duty, she makes Ethan realize that he is a “poor man, the husband of a sickly woman, whom his desertion would leave alone and destitute.” Ethan and Mattie decide to kill themselves by sledding at high speed “into that big elm . . . so’t we’d never have to leave each other any more.” Their decision gives the play an element of high seriousness; it is a tragic action rather than a melodramatic one. The act of crashing into the elm is also symbolic in that it dramatizes the perennial conflict between human beings and nature. Typical of characters in tragedy whose decisions cause their undoing, Ethan and Mattie survive. Not only does their survival create a reversal in the action, but also it suggests nature’s superior force. Although crippled, Ethan can walk, but Mattie is partially paralyzed and is confined to a wheelchair. Ethan and Zeena are tied down to a daily existence of caring for the farm and for Mattie. Nature has demonstrated its mastery over human destiny.

Bibliography

Goff, Lewin. “The Owen Davis-Al Woods Melodrama Factory.” Educational Theatre Journal 11 (October, 1959): 200-207. One of the first major scholarly articles on Davis. Goff examines the unique, exclusive contract between Davis and controversial theatrical producer Al Woods, whereby the writer turned out fifty-eight plays over a five-year period.

Middleton, George. Owen Davis, January 29, 1874-October 14, 1956. New York: Dramatist Guild of the Authors League of America, 1957. A brief remembrance of the writer and his work.

Moses, Montrose J. The American Dramatist. 1925. Reprint. New York: B. Blom, 1964. Moses describes the development of Davis in the context of the many forms of American melodrama. He includes many quotations from an interview with the author.

Rahill, Frank. “When Heaven Protected the Working Girl.” Theatre Arts 38 (October, 1954): 78-92. This piece reviews Davis’s work in the Ten-Twent’-Thirt’ drama, with specific examples of how popularly priced plays were created. It focuses on some of the social and political events that became the subjects of many of the melodramas.

Witham, Barry B. “Owen Davis: America’s Forgotten Playwright.” Players 46 (October/November, 1970): 30-35. Witham’s article is a complete synopsis of Davis’s dramaturgy from the melodramas to the award-winning later plays. It also reviews Davis’s accomplishments outside the theater, such as his pioneering work on behalf of the Dramatist’s Guild and the Authors’ League of America.