American Literature: Drama

IV. The Modern Era: The 1900s

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 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.

1. The Glory Days

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).

During this period 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.

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, middle-aged 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.

2. The Great Depression

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.

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

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.

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.

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 Mainstream Redefined: The 1960s to the 1990s

The civil rights movement and antiwar protests of the mid-1960s exploded in 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, often politically charged, events and images, for instance the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Megan Terry's plays, such as Calm Down Mother (1965), experimented with traditional dramatic structure through actor transformations, wherein one actor in any given piece would be playing multiple roles and would switch between characters without apparent transition. Terry, and other feminist playwrights, challenged contemporary social codes of behavior in their presentation of different points of view, giving voice to traditionally disenfranchised members of American culture—for example, lesbian women. Many African American voices had a confrontational edge. In his violent 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. Horror stories of the Vietnam War (1959-1975) found their way into drama for several decades, most notably in Indians (1969) by Arthur Kopit, Streamers (1976) by David Rabe, and Redwood Curtain (1993) by Lanford Wilson.

Small-scale musicals, such as 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, became long-running hits and continued to influence plays in the late 20th century. Plays that dealt openly with homosexuality also found large audiences, starting in the 1960s. They included Boys in the Band (1968) by Mart Crowley, Torch Song Trilogy (1981) by Harvey Fierstein, and Love! Valour! Compassion! (1995) by Terrence McNally. Neil Simon emerged as the premiere playwright of comedies for several decades with such works as The Odd Couple (1965), about two bachelors living together, and the autobiographical Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983), about a lower-middle-class Jewish family.

Sam Shepard and David Mamet loomed large in American drama of the 1970s, much as Miller and 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). Buried Child won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for drama. 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.

The movement known as postmodernism found expression in the American theater chiefly through staging and direction, rather than through the plays themselves. Postmodern staging and design tended toward the minimal and sometimes incorporated images from earlier plays and productions. Postmodern directors sought to uncover multiple layers of meaning in a play. These approaches were sometimes effectively appropriated by feminist playwrights. Fefu and Her Friends (1977) and The Conduct of Life (1985), both by Maria Irene Fornés, used spatial experiments, such as moving the audience from room to room instead of changing stage scenery. Wendy Wasserstein more safely 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 Odets, Williams, and 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. The Normal Heart (1985) by Larry Kramer confronted the devastation wrought by the AIDS crisis. 'Night Mother (1983) by Marsha Norman discussed the question of when suicide might be justifiable. In his M. Butterfly (1988), David Henry Hwang artfully examined the famous opera Madama Butterfly (1904), by Italian composer Giacomo Puccini, and the ways in which Western civilization feminizes Eastern civilization.

In the 1980s two new playwrights repeatedly took audiences into new territory, while expressing themselves in language as far apart as their subject matter. August Wilson set about creating a history of the African American experience in the 20th century in narrowly focused domestic dramas. Fences (1983) portrayed conflicts between father and son as the result of their coming of age in different eras. The Piano Lesson (1990) focused on conflicts between a brother and sister over selling a family heirloom to buy the land that they work and that their ancestors worked as slaves. Both plays won Pulitzer Prizes. 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).

A central event in drama of the 1990s was the two-part Angels in America by Tony Kushner. The two parts, titled Millennium Approaches (1991) and Perestroika (1993), won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993; Tony Awards for best play followed in 1991 and 1994. Angels in America follows eight characters over a six-year period, chronicling the effects of AIDS on their lives. Through its subject matter, bright humor, and visual theatricality Angels in America inspired audiences across the country.

The 1990s also saw the return of exciting domestic drama by playwrights assumed by many to have finished their careers: Arthur Miller's Broken Glass (1994) and Edward Albee's Three Tall Women (1994) received popular and critical acclaim. Younger established playwrights continued to challenge audiences, mostly 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 Seven Guitars (1995) revisited the black experience in 1940s America. Wasserstein's An American Daughter (1997) looked at gender politics in Washington, D.C. Sondheim's musicals became darker in his treatment of presidential assassination in Assassins (1990) and out-of-control love and guilt in Passion (1994).

E. Recent Trends

The direction of American drama presented troubling questions as the 20th century drew to a close. Economic woes of regional and experimental theaters resulted in a multitude of plays with a single setting and no more than two or three characters, which made them less expensive to produce. The aging of American theater audiences and competition from other forms of entertainment also endangered drama's future. Theaters were rejecting many large-scale plays as too risky and unlikely to draw big enough audiences to cover production expenses. Consequently, musicals, which were reliable crowd-pleasers, and revivals dominated Broadway theater seasons. Almost all nonmusical plays originated in regional theaters. The expense of touring productions meant that most new plays reached a geographically diverse audience only if they were adapted to motion pictures or television. Many playwrights appeared to write with a film or television adaptation in mind, a tendency accentuated by the fact that motion-picture companies owned many theaters and producing organizations.

Although experimentation continued and poignant subject matter was still addressed in some quarters, many playwrights worried that American theater had become too conservative in its mainstream and too specialized in its smaller venues. The chief concern as the 20th century ended was whether the 21st century would provide enough opportunities for strong new dramatic voices.

Drama

Ⅰ.Introduction,

Ⅱ.Beginnings: 1600s and 1700s,

Ⅲ.Nationhood: The 1800s,

Ⅳ.The Modern Era: The 1900s

Poetry

Ⅰ.Introduction,

Ⅱ.Beginnings: 1600s Through the American Revolution (1775-1783),

Ⅲ.The 19th Century,

Ⅳ.The 20th Century.

Prose

Ⅰ.Introduction,

Ⅱ.Beginnings: The 1500s and 1600s,

Ⅲ.Toward Independence: The 1700s,

Ⅳ.Nationhood: The 1800s ,

Ⅴ.Modernism: The 1900s,

Ⅵ.Current Trends