Theatre and the Good: The Value of Collaborative Play By Mark Fe ...

The Decline of Community

When researchers first came upon the eastern Pennsylvania town of Roseto in the 1940s and compared it to the neighboring towns of Bangor and Nazareth, they were struck by Roseto’s dramatically lower rates of chronic disease and premature death. All three towns showed similar patterns in diet, smoking, and physical activity, and all three shared the same water supply, hospital, and physicians.⁶ Researchers suggested that what made Roseto different was its comparative social health. The town was founded in the late nineteenth century by immigrants from the same town in southern Italy, and in the middle of the twentieth century, Roseto was typified by strong family ties, church-going, and what might be called social predictability—residents knew not just everyone in town but also their family histories. The picture was one of strong social cohesion and interdependence.

American popular culture has tended to romanticize the idea of community and interdependence. There is a reason that films such as Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life —in which the healing power of community emerges when people pull together in support of their fallen benefactor—are perennial television favorites and find a thousand cheaper, less artful imitators. Americans recognize in these narratives a paradise recently lost. At the same time, it must be said that “serious” American literature has tended to depict cohesive social systems as oppressive and stifling. Hawthorne repeatedly invoked the trope of the cultic village, united in a conspiracy of smugness and hypocrisy which eventually overwhelmed his baffled victim-heroes. Works such as Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (1915), Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and Sinclair Lewis’s Mainstreet (1920), extended the depiction of the town as a twisted and claustrophobic environment, a place of anti-creativity and anti-life.

Perhaps American artists have often seen the cohesive town as villain because these writers themselves felt alienated from such environments. A study of the biographies of America’s literary avant-garde suggests a trail of rejection and escape.