American Literature: Drama

B

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 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.

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.

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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.

B

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 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.

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