American Literature: Drama I INTRODUCTION American Literature: Drama, literature intended for performance, written by Americans in the English language.

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American Literature: Drama
I

INTRODUCTION

American Literature: Drama, literature intended for performance, written by Americans in the English language. American drama begins in the American colonies in the
17th century and continues to the present. See also Drama and Dramatic Arts.
Most American plays of the 18th and 19th centuries strongly reflected British influence. In fact, no New York City theater season presented more American plays than
British plays until 1910. The reasons behind this phenomenon are complex, but a common language and the ready availability of British plays and British actors offer the
most obvious explanation.

Paul Zindel
American author Paul Zindel won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1971 for his play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-inthe-Moon Marigolds. He is also known for his children's books, which blend sensitivity and humor.
UPI/CORBIS-BETTMANN

Although the British repertory dominated the American stage for so long, American drama had begun to diverge from British drama by the time of Andrew Jackson's
presidency, from 1828 to 1836. British plays, which typically reflected the attitudes and manners of the upper classes, were by then in conflict with more egalitarian
American values. Despite this growing divergence, British actors, theater managers, and plays continued to cross the Atlantic Ocean with regularity, and most American
plays copied British models until the early 20th century. For this reason some critics claim that American drama was not born until the end of World War I (1914-1918).
By the end of the 19th century American drama was moving steadily toward realism, illuminating the rough or seamy side of life and creating more believable
characters. Realism remained the dominant trend of the 20th century in both comedies and tragedies. American drama achieved international recognition with the
psychological realism of plays by Eugene O'Neill and their searing investigation of characters' inner lives. As the century advanced, the number of topics considered
suitable for drama broadened to encompass race, gender, sexuality, and death.

II

BEGINNINGS: 1600S AND 1700S

Because settlement was sparse and living conditions were arduous in the American colonies, little theatrical activity took place before the mid-18th century. The firstknown English-language play from the colonies, Ye Bare and Ye Cubb (1665), is lost. The play's existence is known as a result of the controversy it aroused in the
Virginia Colony, where a lawsuit was filed to prevent the play from opening. Several colonies had passed antitheater laws based on a Puritan belief that the seventh of
the Ten Commandments prohibited dancing and stage plays.
The oldest surviving American play is Androborus by Robert Hunter (1714). Hunter, the New York Colony's governor, published the cartoonish play as an attack on his
political enemies, despite New York's antitheater law. Intended for a reading public rather than a viewing audience, it established a tradition of political satire that
became common fare in American drama of the 1700s.
Before more American plays had appeared, a company of British professional actors established a touring circuit in the 1750s with an all-British repertory. By the early
1760s this group was known as The American Company and American writers occasionally submitted plays to the actors, though few were produced. But in 1767 The
American Company staged The Prince of Parthia, a tragedy by Thomas Godfrey, in Philadelphia. This is usually considered the first professional production of a play
written by an American. The play itself is indistinguishable from imitations of the works of English dramatist William Shakespeare that abounded in Britain in the late
1700s and early 1800s.
During the American Revolution (1775-1783), most professional actors moved to Jamaica. Satirical plays were written as propaganda during the war, either supporting
British control of the colonies or attacking it. British soldiers presented some of the pro-British plays. Few other plays were performed during the war years, although
they were widely read and recited. The Battle of Brooklyn (1776), which was pro-British and written anonymously, presented rebel generals, including George
Washington, as drunks, lechers, and cowards. The Blockade (1775), written by British General John Burgoyne, was performed in British-occupied Boston. The play's
ridicule of American soldiers was subsequently burlesqued in The Blockheads; or the Affrighted Officers (1776), written by an anonymous playwright identified only as a
patriot. The Blockheads depicts British soldiers as so terrified of the Americans that they soil themselves rather than go outside to use the latrine. Mercy Otis Warren,
who created several biting satires of the British, may have written The Blockheads as well. She remained the strongest American dramatic voice of the Revolution and
championed the rebel cause in The Group (1775), a play that describes Britain, called Blunderland, as a mother who eats her own children. The Patriots (1775?), a play
by Robert Munford, was unusual in its appeal for a neutral stance and its attacks on both sides for their intolerance.
By the mid-1780s professional actors were touring in America again. In 1787, when the Constitution of the United States was being written, Royall Tyler wrote The
Contrast, the finest American play of the 18th century. This five-act comedy owes much to The School for Scandal (1777) by British playwright Richard Sheridan. Like
Sheridan's play, The Contrast is a comedy of manners that satirizes the customs of the upper classes. It compares British and American fashions and values and
ultimately sides with what it sees as American candor and patriotism over British duplicity and artificiality. A masterful element of the play is the Yankee character
Jonathan, whose honest innocence stands in stark contrast to the rumor-mongering and gossiping of the play's British characters and the American characters who
emulate them.
The 1700s also saw the first American play written by a woman reach the professional stage. The melodramatic comedy Slaves in Algiers (1794) by Susanna Rowson
reflects troubles at that time with pirates along North Africa's Barbary Coast who interfered with shipping and ran a white slave trade that involved selling girls and
women into prostitution. Although the villain was treated comically, the conflict and resolution in this play indicated a move toward melodrama, a form of drama that
became extremely popular in the 19th century.

III

NATIONHOOD: THE 1800S

American plays, while still a minority, began to appear in the theater repertory in the 19th century. Although American plays were still styled after British models, their
subject matter came to be based on specifically American incidents or themes. In the United States as in Britain, many plays reflected the influence of romanticism, a
European literary and artistic movement. Melodrama, with its outpourings of emotion, was the most prevalent dramatic form in the 19th century. Gothic melodramas,
which emphasized horror, mystery, and the supernatural, and melodramas with tragic endings appeared regularly in American theaters from the 1790s on--in many
cases adapted or translated from German, French, and British plays.

A

American Themes

Edwin Forrest
American actor Edwin Forrest's long-standing feud with English actor William Charles Macready over acting styles divided
the public and had violent consequences. In 1849 a mob of Forrest supporters attacked a New York City theater where
Macready was performing, killing 22 people.
Corbis

The first prolific writer of melodramas was William Dunlap, who also translated several German plays for production in the United States. Dunlap adapted Revolutionary
War history in André (1798), a fictionalized account of the final days of British spy Major John André. In 1803 Dunlap reshaped the play as a musical, Glory of Columbia,
in which George Washington is elevated to divine status. It was an early example of spectacle dominating dramatic content. Dunlap took spectacle even further in A Trip
to Niagara (1828) by making the play's purpose the duplication of scenic wonders that the audience would recognize, such as Niagara Falls.
Replication of local color, as in A Trip to Niagara, became the norm in 19th-century American melodrama and encompassed details of scenery, dialects, and gestures
representative of specific locations; contemporary slang; and historical incidents. An early example is She Would Be a Soldier (1819) by Mordecai Noah. The play depicts
the military spectacle of the War of 1812 between the United States and Britain and features a heroine who disguises herself as a soldier to help the American cause
and join the man she loves.
Although American drama of the 19th century usually followed European models, its subject matter often came from specifically American situations. Superstition
(1824), a romantic tragedy by James Nelson Barker, for example, was set in New England of 1675. It discussed conflicts between Native Americans and white settlers,
British interference in local affairs, Puritan xenophobia (fear and dislike of foreigners), and the idea of witchcraft. Superstition, in which the hero is tried and executed
for witchcraft, was the first of many American plays to explore themes of isolationism, bigotry, and intolerance.
Barker's The Indian Princess (1808) was the first professionally produced play to explore Native American characters and themes. It told the story of Pocahontas, a
Native American who married an English colonist. A vogue for so-called Indian plays began in the 1820s and continued through the 1840s. While the Pocahontas story
was popular in these plays, the most famous such drama was Metamora, or The Last of the Wampanoags (1829) by John Augustus Stone. It was written as a vehicle
for American actor Edwin Forrest, who began in 1828 to offer annual awards for new plays on American themes and gave Metamora first prize. This melodrama was
typical of most Indian plays in its setting in an earlier period of frontier history (the 1670s) and its characterization of the Native American hero. Metamora was viewed
as natural but uncivilized--that is, living in harmony with nature but unfamiliar with what European settlers saw as civilized ways. The play put forth sentiments in
harmony with white values and ended with Metamora's inevitable death as the representative of a displaced race that cannot survive with the white man. By midcentury
the waning importance of Indian plays was signaled by works that lampooned them. Irish-born playwright John Brougham, for example, wrote Metamora, or the Last of
the Pollywogs (1847), a musical burlesque that made fun of the idealized and earnest original.
Also in the 1820s an African American acting troupe called the African Theatre was organized in New York City by dramatist William Henry Brown. The troupe produced
plays by Shakespeare as well as African American plays, including The Drama of King Shotaway (1823) written by Brown. Although Indian plays of the 1820s and 1830s
written by whites preached tolerance and understanding for Native Americans, white toughs chased Brown's company off the stage, and no copies survive of the African
American plays it produced.
American romantic plays took various forms. But without the American slant in subject matter, it would be difficult to distinguish these plays from British melodrama and
romantic tragedy. What may be the best American play of the time, Francesca da Rimini (1855), is a romantic verse tragedy by George Henry Boker about an Italian
noblewoman of the 14th century. It presents a villainous fool, a forbidden love affair, and a grotesque, semi-villainous hunchback in the role of the protagonist.
However, nothing in the play's characters and setting or its imitation of Shakespearean style marks the play as American.

B

Forms of Melodrama

Melodrama was the most pervasive dramatic genre of the 19th century. Melodramas were typically overflowing with emotion, set in mysterious locations, and peopled
with stereotypical characters: heartless villains, heroines in distress, and strong heroes who faced almost insurmountable odds in rescuing those heroines.
Frontier melodrama enthralled audiences in the first half of the 19th century. Nick of the Woods (1838) by Louisa Medina capitalized on the spectacle, romance, and
danger of the frontier--for example, when the title character escapes his pursuers by plunging over a waterfall in a burning canoe. Playwrights repeatedly glorified
backwoodsmen and moved toward making Native American characters into villains. One of the most successful frontier melodramas, Davy Crockett (1872) by Frank
Murdoch, featured the so-called natural gentleman. This character had developed from an earlier view of the Native American but was now white and considered a
gentleman, despite his life outside society and his uncouth ways.
Another form of melodrama was the temperance play, which illustrated the evils of alcohol and supported a ban on its sale. An example is The Drunkard; or, The Fallen
Saved (1844) by W. H. Smith. Temperance plays had American locations and were staged frequently from the 1830s until the Civil War (1861-1865), though they
continued to be produced until passage in 1917 of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcohol. Most of these plays included
scenes of the acute stages of alcoholism; featured protagonists who are lured into alcoholism by villains; and showed the victims losing everything until the play's
climax, when they convert to abstinence and regain their life and family. Because the formulas of the plays accommodated moral lessons important to social crusaders
and reformers of the period, temperance plays attracted audiences formerly opposed to the theater.
Melodramatic comedy appeared frequently in the 1800s, while comedies of manners, so popular in the previous century, were rare. A notable exception and one of the

most successful and well-written plays of the 19th century was Fashion (1845) by Anna Cora Mowatt. Yet what most tellingly distinguished Fashion from earlier American
comedies, such as The Contrast, was its melodramatic subplot and its heroine in distress. In the play, a newly wealthy woman attempts to marry her unwitting daughter
to a morally corrupt French count. While satirizing Americans who imitate European manners, it also prescribed a cure for this so-called disease of imitation through
extended exposure to a rural environment. Like frontier melodramas, the play urged Americans to resist British cultural models.
Racial, social, and economic tensions in American society before the Civil War period found a way into popular drama, most successfully in stage adaptations of the novel
Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Sentimental versions of the novel filled so many professional stages that this material was performed more often
than any other American play of the time. An 1852 adaptation by George Aiken was the most enduring version. Stage adaptations of novels proliferated from the 1850s
until motion pictures took over the tradition in the 20th century. Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon (1859), a stage adaptation of the novel The Quadroon (1856) by Mayne
Reid, is the most well-crafted melodrama on the subject of slavery and racism in the mid-19th century. It combines local color from Louisiana, ethnic mixes, spectacle in
the form of a burning steamboat, and a tragic heroine whose ancestry (a black great-grandparent) prevents her from marrying the man she loves.

C

A Shift Toward Realism

Drama after the Civil War was marked by greater realism. Playwrights created plays in three-dimensional settings with characters speaking authentic-sounding dialogue.
Beginning in the late 1870s European theater reached profound levels of psychological realism, prompted by the work of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. While
melodramatic plots still prevailed in late-19th-century American theater, several American playwrights began to move in the direction of Ibsen. Shenandoah (1888) by
Bronson Howard told the story of two friends who attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point together, fought on opposite sides in the Civil War, and loved the
other's sister. Despite the plot complications, the play revisited the war with realistic detail and found enormous popularity with audiences because of its combination of
melodramatic tension and comic romance. A master of melodrama in a realistic style was actor and playwright William Gillette, who excited audiences with his own Civil
War thrillers. In Secret Service (1896), for example, Gillette played a Northern spy working in Virginia.
Other late-19th-century playwrights whose works marked the gradual move toward realism included Steele Mackaye and William Dean Howells. In Hazel Kirke (1880) by
Mackaye, the title character defies her father by marrying the man she loves, rather than the man he has chosen for her. A melodrama without a villain, the play was
also notable for its more natural dialogue. Howells, best known as a novelist and critic, advocated realism in literature generally. Many of his short comic plays, such as
The Mouse Trap (1889), were set in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood, focused on a single incident involving a married couple, and incorporated believable dialogue.
Howells also championed the work of other writers, including actor and playwright James Herne, whose work came closest to Ibsen's. However, Herne's Margaret
Fleming (1890) upset too many American audiences with its harsh, raw treatment of infidelity and marital distress, and its power was recognized only by later
generations. Herne had more success with gentler realism in such plays as Shore Acres (1892), in which two brothers finally gain an understanding of one another in old
age.

IV

THE MODERN ERA: THE 20TH CENTURY AND BEYOND

Tennessee Williams
The plays The Glass Menagerie (1945; film, 1950), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947; film, 1951), and Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof (1954; film, 1958) are the best-known works of American writer Tennessee Williams, a native of Mississippi.
Williams, who was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes in drama (1952 and 1954), used the American South as the setting for
many of his plays and fiction. He is also noted for his unconventional characters, lyrical dialogue, and symbolic plot
elements.
THE BETTMANN ARCHIVE

Realism continued to be a primary form of dramatic expression in the 20th century, even as experimentation in both the content and the production of plays became
increasingly important. Such renowned American playwrights as Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller reached profound new levels of psychological
realism, commenting through individual characters and their situations on the state of American society in general. As the century progressed, the most powerful drama
spoke to broad social issues, such as civil rights and the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) crisis, and the individual's position in relation to those issues.
Individual perspectives in mainstream theater became far more diverse and more closely reflected the increasingly complex demographics of American society.

A

Before World War I: 1900-1914

Realism reached new levels in the prewar work of David Belasco and Clyde Fitch, both of whom directed their own plays. Belasco's The Girl of the Golden West (1905)
sentimentally recreated a rural California town of the mid-19th-century Gold Rush days, while Fitch's The City (1909) explored the evils of shady business deals and
drug addiction. Realistic portrayals of sensational subjects also flourished in many plays of this era. For example, The Easiest Way (1909), by Eugene Walter, dramatized
the situation of a kept woman whose acceptance of financial support from one man leads to her rejection by the man she loves.
Social tensions in the United States began to preoccupy dramatists in the years leading up to World War I (1914-1918). An early example of this was The Great Divide
(1906) by William Vaughn Moody. The story of a New England woman's move to Arizona, the play juxtaposed a Western, rural sensibility against an Eastern, urban one.
The most prolific of prewar playwrights with a social agenda was Rachel Crothers, who addressed such issues as society's double standard for men and women in A
Man's World (1909). The New York Idea (1906), a social satire by Langdon Mitchell, managed to entertain while commenting meaningfully on divorce. The American
family, and its development and disintegration, was a recurring theme of playwrights at this time, and it would dominate much American playwriting for the rest of the
20th century.

B

From World War I to World War II: 1914-1939

With World War I, European developments in modern drama arrived on the American stage in force. A host of American playwrights were intent on experimenting with
dramatic style and form while also writing serious sociopolitical commentary. From this time forward Britain's influence, although never absent, became much less
important to American drama.

One of the first groups to promote new American drama was the Provincetown Players, founded in 1915 in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The play Trifles (1916) by
Susan Glaspell, a subtle study in sexism, was among its first productions. The company was headed by Glaspell's husband, George Cram Cook, but its star was Eugene
O'Neill, the most experimental of American playwrights in the 1920s. O'Neill's The Hairy Ape (1922) was one of the first plays to introduce expressionism in America.
Expressionism was a movement in the visual, literary, and performing arts that developed in Germany in the early 20th century, in part in reaction against realism.
Expressionism emphasized subjective feelings and emotions rather than a detailed or objective depiction of reality. The Hairy Ape depicts a rejected ship laborer who
feels he belongs nowhere until he confronts an ape in a zoo. He sets the caged animal free only to be destroyed by it.
American expressionism was distinguished from its German forebears by a searching focus on the inner life of the central character, whose detailed depiction is in stark
contrast to all other characters. The most famous example of American expressionism is The Adding Machine (1923) by Elmer Rice, a play that focuses on the emotional
journey of the leading character, Mr. Zero, after he is replaced at his job by an adding machine. Rice was the first playwright to demonstrate silent film's influence on
theater in On Trial (1914), which borrowed the flashback technique. Some of the most novel expressionist experiments employed collage-like scenic effects and
cacophonous musical and sound techniques to explore social issues. Such plays include Processional (1925), a depiction of a West Virginia miners' strike by John Howard
Lawson, and Machinal (1928), a bleak study by Sophie Treadwell of the destruction of a young woman.

B1

The Glory Days

Eugene O'Neill
Mourning Becomes Electra is a Civil War-era retelling of the Oresteia, a classic Greek tragedy by Aeschylus. The play is a
family tragedy of vengeance and death, as was the Greek original. In this scene from "The Haunted," the final section,
Lavinia is trying to escape the cruel fate of her family's destiny. She plans to leave the family house and marry an
innocent young man. Her ghosts prove too much for her, however, and at the end of the play she shuts herself up in the
house and has the shutters nailed closed.Excerpt recited by an actor.
Culver Pictures/(p) 1992 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

The 1920s was the most prolific decade for professionally produced plays on the New York City stage. During the so-called glory days of the 1920s and early 1930s
audiences saw incisive and exciting American drama. What Price Glory (1924) by Laurence Stallings and Maxwell Anderson was set in France during World War I. Its
portrayal of two soldiers' behavior satirized the often-romanticized vision of warfare. Anderson tried to reinvigorate drama in verse with such plays as Winterset (1935).

Oscar Hammerstein II
American librettist Oscar Hammerstein II won two Pulitzer Prizes for his musicals. His most well-known works include
Showboat (1927), Oklahoma! (1943), South Pacific (1949), and The Sound of Music (1959).
Culver Pictures

During this period Eugene O'Neill reached for greatness with vast five-hour plays. Strange Interlude (1928), a nine-act play, explored through its leading female
character the way in which hidden psychological processes affect outward actions. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1928. Mourning Becomes Electra
(1931), a trilogy, was a powerful adaptation of three ancient Greek tragedies by Aeschylus that told the story of Orestes and are known as the Oresteia. Set in New
England after the Civil War (which replaces the Trojan War of the Oresteia), Mourning Becomes Electra recounts the moral, emotional, and physical destruction of two
generations of the Mannon family, emphasizing the far-reaching consequences of adultery, incest, jealousy, and vengeance. Both plays capture O'Neill's lifelong
investigation of the human condition and the forces that plague humankind. In 1936 O'Neill became the first American playwright to win a Nobel Prize for literature.

Maxwell Anderson

American playwright Maxwell Anderson, right, wrote many plays and dramas. He also wrote the librettos to several
musicals, including Lost in the Stars (1949) for which German-American composer Kurt Weill, left, wrote the music.
SPRINGER/CORBIS-BETTMANN

Also in the 1920s and early 1930s, comedies of manners made a comeback through delightfully glib, lightly satirical plays such as Philip Barry's Holiday (1928), about a
man who decides to enjoy his newly made fortune while he is still young. In a later comedy of manners, End of Summer (1936) by S. N. Behrman, a flighty, middleaged socialite pursues both fascist and left-wing men in an attempt to remain a player in a world quickly passing her by.
African American characters became more visible in plays of this period. In the play In Abraham's Bosom (1926) by Paul Green, the main character, whose father is
white and mother is black, works to help his black community but is defeated by the racial prejudice of both whites and blacks. In Abraham's Bosom won the 1927
Pulitzer Prize for drama. White playwrights wrote most of the plays featuring black characters from this period, while black playwrights remained on the margins of the
theater world until the 1950s.
Even the musical was overhauled in the bustling theatrical activity of the 1920s and early 1930s. Most notably, lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II and composer Jerome Kern
teamed up to create Show Boat (1927), a musical production adapted from a novel of the same name by American author Edna Ferber. This was the first American
musical to fully integrate a musical score with meaningful and consistent dialogue and lyrics.

B2

The Great Depression

Clifford Odets
A talented social-protest playwright during the 1930s, Clifford Odets helped form the Group Theatre in New York City,
where he produced his own plays. His one-act play Waiting for Lefty (1935) chronicled a taxi drivers' strike.
Culver Pictures

American theater attendance declined severely in the 1930s and after, primarily as a result of new sound technology that gave motion pictures a voice. But films were
not the only drain on theater attendance. The economic collapse of the Great Depression of the 1930s closed many theaters permanently. The austerity of the 1930s
inspired a new wave of hard-edged drama that tackled economic suffering, left-wing political ideologies, fascism, and fears of another world war. European agitprop
techniques, which used literature and the arts for political propaganda, animated many plays about the working class. The most famous of these plays is Waiting for
Lefty (1935) by Clifford Odets. In the play taxi drivers decide to go on strike, but the true concern of the play is a more abstract debate over the pros and cons of
capitalism. Odets also wrote one of the finest expressions of 1930s anxieties, Awake and Sing! (1935), in which a Marxist grandfather commits suicide for his family's
financial benefit, and his grandson ultimately dedicates himself and the life insurance money to helping his community rather than seeking better opportunities
elsewhere.

Hellman's The Children's Hour
American dramatist Lillian Hellman wrote plays that displayed a perceptive understanding of human nature and that often
explored moral or social issues. Her first play, The Children's Hour (1934), established her as a major talent. Seen here in
the 1962 motion-picture version of the play are American actors Audrey Hepburn, left, and Shirley MacLaine, right.
Archive Photos

The plays of Lillian Hellman also displayed a social conscience. Hellman's The Children's Hour (1934), in which a child's vengeful anger causes the downfall of a school
and the two women who run it, explored the devastating effects of evil in an intolerant society. Langston Hughes paved the way for acceptance of African American
drama with his successful play Mulatto (1935), about the complexity of race relations. The global scale of fears in the 1930s was reflected in the plays of Robert
Sherwood, whose satirical attack on weapons manufacturers in Idiot's Delight (1936) predicted the impending world cataclysm of World War II. It was awarded the
1936 Pulitzer Prize for drama.

C

Postwar Drama: 1945-1960

Tennessee Williams Excerpt
In the scene from Tennessee Williams's play A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche is trying to convince her sister, Stella, to
leave her abusive husband Stanley. Stella refuses because she says she loves Stanley, and Blanche responds with this
passage about Desire, the actual name of the streetcar on which Blanche recently arrived in New Orleans. The
conversation between the two sisters continues in a highly symbolic manner, with Williams's trademark themes of desire,
guilt, repressed sexuality and spiritual torment being brought to the fore (recited by an actor).
© Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved./(p) 1992 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

During World War II (1939-1945) little drama of note appeared that was neither escapist fare nor wartime propaganda. With the end of hostilities, however, two
playwrights emerged who would dominate dramatic activity for the next 15 years or so: Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Miller combined realistic characters and a
social agenda while also writing modern tragedy, most notably in Death of a Salesman (1949), a tale of the life and death of the ordinary working man Willy Loman.
Miller's The Crucible (1953), a story about the 17th-century Salem witch trials, was a parable for a hunt for Communists in the 1950s led by Senator Joseph R.
McCarthy.
Tennessee Williams, one of America's most lyrical dramatists, contributed many plays about social misfits and outsiders. In A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), a
neurotic, impoverished Southern woman fights to maintain her illusions of gentility when forced to confront the truth about her life by her sister's working-class
husband. Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, similarly focused on pretense and its destructiveness and destruction in an
unhappy family.

O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night
American writer Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night (1956) is considered one of his most autobiographical
plays. It depicts one day in the life of the Tyrone family, each member of which is troubled by failed ambitions and
frustrated dreams.
Corbis

The 1940s also launched lighthearted musicals, most notably a series with lyrics and score by the productive partnership of librettist Oscar Hammerstein II and
composer Richard Rodgers. Their first collaboration, the love story Oklahoma! (1943), set the style for musicals until the 1960s with its thorough integration of text and
music.
Realism continued strongly in the 1950s with character studies of society's forgotten people. Come Back, Little Sheba (1950) by William Inge told the story of the
unfulfilled lives of an alcoholic doctor and his wife. O'Neill's painful autobiographical play, Long Day's Journey into Night (1956), considered his masterpiece by many
critics, premiered after the playwright's death in 1953. The play chronicled a day in the life of the Tyrone family, during which family members inexorably confront one
another's flaws and failures.

Edward Albee
American playwright Edward Albee won Pulitzer Prizes for his plays A Delicate Balance (1966), Seascape (1975), and
Three Tall Women (1991). His plays resemble theater of the absurd in their characterization of family relationships.
Tappe/Archive Photos

In the late 1950s African American playwriting received a tremendous boost with the highly acclaimed Raisin in the Sun (1959), the story of a black family and how they
handle a financial windfall. Written by Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun was the first Broadway production to be directed by an African American, Lloyd Richards.
Also at the end of the 1950s the semiabsurdist plays of Edward Albee, starting with Zoo Story (1959), caught the American imagination with their psychological danger
and intelligent dialogue. Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) depicted the destructive relationship of a married couple primarily through their verbal abuse.

D

The 1960s

The civil rights movement and antiwar protests of the mid-1960s triggered an explosion in American drama as regional and experimental theaters proliferated and many
talented new dramatists came to the fore. Experimental theater companies, including the Living Theater and the Open Theater, experimented with group dynamics by
placing performers and audience members in the same physical space. The Serpent (1968) by Jean-Claude Van Itallie, which used this elimination of physical barriers
between actors and audience, recreated Biblical stories through the depiction of modern events such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Megan Terry's plays, such
as Calm Down Mother (1965), experimented with traditional dramatic structure through actor transformations, in which one actor plays multiple roles and switches
between characters without apparent transition.
Small-scale musicals and comedies were also popular during this decade. These included the modern romance The Fantasticks (1960), written by Tom Jones with music
by Harvey Schmidt, and the antiwar rock musical Hair (1967), by Gerome Ragni and James Rado. Both became long-running hits and continued to influence plays into
the late 20th century. Neil Simon emerged as a major comedic playwright in the 1960s with such works as Barefoot in the Park (1963) and The Odd Couple (1965).
The political turbulence and social change in America during the 1960s impacted the drama of the period and in the ensuing decades. A number of playwrights of the
time challenged contemporary social codes of behavior in their presentation of different points of view, giving voice to traditionally disenfranchised members of American
culture. Many African American dramatic voices of the 1960s had a confrontational edge. In his violent play Dutchman (1964), Amiri Baraka portrayed white society's
fear and hatred of an educated black protagonist. The autobiographical Funnyhouse of a Negro (1962) by Adrienne Kennedy addressed the difficulties of being an
American of mixed racial ancestry.

E

The 1970s and 1980s

Sam Shepard and David Mamet loomed large in American drama of the 1970s and 1980s, much as Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams had in the 1950s. Shepard's
hard-edged drama, which explored the American family and the often-destructive myths of the American West, was most biting in Buried Child (1978) and True West
(1980). Mamet created a darkly comic style that imitated the fragmented speech of the inarticulate and employed profanity as nearly every part of speech. Mamet's
American Buffalo (1975) used a Chicago junk shop as a symbol of American capitalism, and his Pulitzer-Prize winning Glengarry Glen Ross (1983) depicted the moral
decay brought about by the win-at-all-costs ethic of the American salesman.
Beginning in the 1970s the movement known as postmodernism found expression in the American theater. This came primarily through staging and direction, rather
than in the subject matter of the plays themselves. Postmodern staging and design tended toward the minimal and sometimes incorporated images from earlier plays
and productions, while postmodern directors sought to uncover multiple layers of meaning in a play. In particular, these approaches were effectively used by feminist
playwrights such as Maria Irene Fornés and Wendy Wasserstein. In Fefu and Her Friends (1977) and The Conduct of Life (1985), Fornés employed spatial experiments
such as moving the audience from room to room instead of changing stage scenery. Wasserstein explored the complex social issues raised by the women's movement
in Uncommon Women and Others (1977) and The Heidi Chronicles (1988), which won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for drama.
In the late 1970s Lanford Wilson had success with realistic ensemble pieces, which had large casts and no one central character. His works, such as The Fifth of July
(1978), perpetuated the ensemble tradition of Williams, Clifford Odets, and William Inge. American musicals also enjoyed experimental developments in the work of
composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. His romantic A Little Night Music (1973) was written entirely in three-four time, and his Into the Woods (1987) refashioned
traditional fairy tales for adults.
By the 1980s many American playwrights found themselves tied to topics of current interest. 'Night Mother (1983) by Marsha Norman discussed the question of when
suicide might be justifiable. The Normal Heart (1985) by Larry Kramer confronted the devastation wrought by the AIDS epidemic. In his M. Butterfly (1988) David
Henry Hwang artfully used the famous opera Madama Butterfly (1904), by Italian composer Giacomo Puccini, to examine the ways in which Western civilization
feminizes Eastern civilization.
During this time two new playwrights took audiences into new territory while expressing themselves in language as different as their subject matter. Eric Overmyer
harnessed sophisticated language, satire, and vibrant theatricality to dissect a corrupt social and political infrastructure in On the Verge (1986) and In Perpetuity
Throughout the Universe (1988).
August Wilson was another American playwright who came to prominence in the 1980s. Wilson uses African American vernacular English in his narrowly focused
domestic dramas, each of which is set in a different decade of the 20th century. Among the best of these are Fences (1985), portraying the conflicts between a father
and son, and The Piano Lesson (1987), which focuses on the dispute between a brother and sister over selling a family heirloom to buy the land that their ancestors
worked as slaves. Both plays won the Pulitzer Prize.

F

The 1990s and Early 21st Century

The 1990s saw the return of exciting domestic drama by two celebrated playwrights whom critics thought had finished their careers: Arthur Miller (Broken Glass, 1994)
and Edward Albee (Three Tall Women, 1994). Both plays received widespread popular and critical acclaim, with Albee's work capturing the Pulitzer Prize.

Younger established playwrights continued to challenge audiences, often in small or regional theaters. Mamet's Oleanna (1992) investigated sexual harassment.
Overmyer's Dark Rapture (1992) combined crime, greed, and sex in the style of motion-picture thrillers. Wilson's Two Trains Running (1990) revisited the black
experience in 1960s America, while Seven Guitars (1995) did the same for the 1940s, King Hedley II (1999) for the 1980s, and Gem of the Ocean (2003) for the first
decade of the 20th century. Wasserstein's An American Daughter (1997) looked at gender politics in Washington, D.C. Sondheim's musicals became darker, tackling
topics such as presidential assassination (Assassins, 1990) and out-of-control love and guilt (Passion, 1994).
Another important young playwright of this period was Tony Kushner. His Angels in America was one of the most successful dramatic events of the 1990s. The two-part
story chronicled the effects of the AIDS epidemic on the lives of eight characters over a six-year period. The two plays, Millennium Approaches (1991) and Perestroika
(1993), each won a Tony Award for best drama. Kushner was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Angels in America in 1993.
In the mid-1990s and the beginning of the 21st century, revivals of older plays and blockbuster musicals dominated new commercial theater in the United States.
Beginning in 1996 with the success of Jonathan Larson's Rent, many contemporary plays and musicals began to target younger audiences that had been wooed away
from the theater by film, television, and computer entertainment. A musical inspired by Puccini's 1896 opera La Bohème, Rent examines the experiences of disillusioned
young Americans looking for meaning in their lives. The theater lost a bright young voice when Larson died suddenly just before the debut of his play, which went on to
win the Pulitzer Prize.
The large-scale musical also returned to prominence during the 1990s, especially with a 1997 Broadway version of Disney's film The Lion King. The hit animated movie
was imaginatively recreated for the stage with puppetry by director-designer Julie Taymor. Elton John and Tim Rice, who wrote the music for The Lion King, also teamed
on Aida (2000), a successful musical based on the 1871 opera of the same name by Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi.

G

Recent Trends

Amiri Baraka
A prominent 20th-century writer and political activist, Amiri Baraka has dedicated himself to the advancement of black
culture. Distancing himself from white culture, especially after the assassination of Black Muslim leader Malcolm X in 1965,
Baraka turned solely to black themes in his writings and advocated increased political power for blacks. His poems, plays,
novels, and essays have helped push African American literature away from themes of integration toward a focus on the
black experience.
Chester Higgins Jr./Photo Researchers, Inc.

As the 21st century began, the direction of American drama prompted troubling questions. Economic difficulties at regional and experimental theaters resulted in plays
with a single setting and no more than two or three characters, making them less expensive to produce but also less ambitious. The aging of American theater
audiences and competition from other forms of entertainment also threatened drama's future. Theaters were rejecting many large-scale plays as too risky and unlikely
to cover production expenses. Consequently, crowd-pleasing musicals and revivals dominated Broadway.
Almost all nonmusical plays today originate in regional theaters. The expense of touring productions means that most new plays reach a geographically diverse audience
only if they are adapted to motion pictures or television. Many playwrights write with film or television adaptation in mind, a tendency encouraged by the fact that
motion-picture studios own many theaters and dramatic production companies.
Although experimentation and poignant subject matter continue to appear in the dramatic world, many playwrights worry that American theater has become too
conservative in its mainstream work and too specialized in its alternative productions. A major issue going forward is whether the theater of the 21st century will
provide enough opportunity for original work and strong new dramatic voices.

Contributed By:
Ronald Wainscott
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