The experimental seduction of mechanistic modernism in Eugene O’Neill’s ‘Dynamo’ and the Federal Theatre Project’s ‘Altars of steel’

In the 1920s and mid 1930s, American dramatists struggled to find theatrical form to express America’s development from an isolationist agrarian nation into an industrial world power. Eugene O’Neill’s ‘Dynamo’ (1929) features a scathing critique of blind faith in scientific progress, whereas ‘Altars of steel’ (1937) favourably presents a regional factory under the control of a benevolent capitalist. Neither work was considered a critical success by New York critics, but both used expressionistic staging devices and religious imagery to explore the seductive quality of technological progress. Modernism, futurism, technoeroticism, and the lofty optimism of the emerging industrial design profession form the backdrop against which historical sources and contemporary reviews are used to analyse these plays. Tracing the fault lines and stress patterns of these two flawed theatrical works raises complex questions about how people might actually live in the society of the future, as it was imagined in the early twentieth century.