American Drama

After World War I, popular and lucrative musicals had increasingly dominated the Broadway theatrical scene. Serious theater retreated to smaller, less expensive theaters "off Broadway" or outside New York City.

This situation repeated itself after World War II. American drama had languished in the l950s, constrained by the Cold War and McCarthyism. The energy of the l960s revived it. The off-off-Broadway movement presented an innovative alternative to commercialized popular theater.

Many of the major dramatists after 1960 produced their work in small venues. Freed from the need to make enough money to pay for expensive playhouses, they were newly inspired by European existentialism and the so-called Theater of the Absurd associated with European playwrights Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Eugene Ionesco, as well as by Harold Pinter. The best dramatists became innovative and even surreal, rejecting realistic theater to attack superficial social conventions.

Edward Albee (1928-) The most influential dramatist of the early 1960s was Edward Albee, who was adopted into a well-off family that had owned vaudeville theaters and counted actors among their friends. Helping produce European absurdist theater, Albee actively brought new European currents into U.S. drama. In The American Dream (1960), stick figures of Mommy, Daddy, and Grandma recite platitudes that caricature a loveless, conventional family.

Loss of identity and consequent struggles for power to fill the void propel Albee's plays, such as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (l962). In this controversial drama, made into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, an unhappily married couple's shared fantasy -- that they have a child, that their lives have meaning -- is violently exposed as an untruth.

Albee has continued to produce distinguished work over several decades, including Tiny Alice (l964); A Delicate Balance (l966); Seascape (l975); Marriage Play (1987); and Three Tall Women (1991), which follows the main character, who resembles Albee's overbearing adoptive mother, through three stages of life.

Amiri Baraka (1934-) Poet Amiri Baraka, known for supple, speech-oriented poetry with an affinity to improvisational jazz, turned to drama in the l960s. Always searching to find himself, Baraka has changed his name several times as he has sought to define his identity as a black American. Baraka explored various paths of life in his early years, flunking out of Howard University and becoming dishonorably discharged from the U.S. Air Force for alleged Communism. During these years, his true vocation of writing emerged.

During the l960s, Baraka lived in New York City's Greenwich Village, where he knew many artists and writers including Frank O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg.

By 1965, Baraka had started the Black Arts Repertory Theater in Harlem, the black section of New York City. He portrayed black nationalist views of racism in disturbing plays such as Dutchman (1964), in which a white woman flirts with and eventually kills a younger black man on a New York City subway. The realistic first half of the play sparkles with witty dialogue and subtle characterization. The shocking ending risks melodrama to dramatize racial misunderstanding and the victimization of the black male protagonist.

Sam Shepard (1943-) Actor/dramatist Sam Shepard spent his childhood moving with his family from army base to army base following his father, who had been a pilot in World War II. He spent his teen years on a ranch in the barren desert east of Los Angeles, California. In secondary school, Shepard found solace in the Beat poets; he learned jazz drumming and later played in a rock band. Shepard produced his first plays, Cowboys and The Rock Garden, in 1964. They prefigure his mature works in their western motifs and theme of male competition.

Of almost 50 works for stage and screen, Shepard's most esteemed are three interrelated plays evoking love and violence in the family: Curse of the Starving Class (1976), Buried Child (1978), and True West (1980), his best-known work. In True West, two middle-aged brothers, an educated screenwriter and a drifting thief, compete to write a true-to-life western play for a rich, urban movie producer. Each thinking he needs what the other has -- success, freedom -- the two brothers change places in an atmosphere of increasing violence fueled by alcohol. The play registers Shepard's concern with loss of freedom, authenticity, and autonomy in American life. It dramatizes the vanishing frontier (the drifter) and the American imagination (the writer), seduced by money, the media, and commercial forces, personified by the producer.

In his writing process, Shepard tries to re-create a zone of freedom by allowing his characters to act in unpredictable, spontaneous, sometimes illogical ways. The most famous example comes from True West. In a gesture meant to suggest lawless freedom, the distraught writer steals numerous toasters. Totally unrealistic yet oddly believable on an emotional level, the scene works as comedy, absurd drama, and irony.

Shepard lets his characters guide his writing, rather than beginning with a pre-planned plot, and his plays are fresh and lifelike. His surrealistic flair and experimentalism link him with Edward Albee, but his plays are earthier and funnier, and his characters are drawn more realistically. They convey a bold West Coast consciousness and make comments on America in their use of landscape motifs and specific settings and contexts.

David Mamet (1947-) Equally important is David Mamet, raised in Chicago, whose writing was influenced by the Stanislavsky method of acting that revealed to him the way "the language we use...determines the way we behave, more than the other way around." His emphasis on language not as communication but as a weapon, evasion, and manipulation of reality give Mamet a contemporary, postmodern sensibility.

Mamet's hard-hitting plays include American Buffalo (l975), a two-act play of increasingly violent language involving a drug addict, a junk store, and an attempted theft; and Speed-the-Plow (1987). The acclaimed and frequently anthologized Glengarry Glen Ross (l982), about real estate salesmen, was made into an outstanding 1992 movie with an all-star cast. This play, like most of Mamet's work, reveals his intense engagement with some of America's unresolved issues -- here, as if in an update of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, one sees the need for dignity and job security, especially for older workers; competition between older and younger generations in the workplace; intense focus on profits at the expense of the welfare of workers; and -- enveloping all --the corrosive atmosphere of competition carried to abusive lengths.

Mamet's Oleanna (l991) effectively dissects sexual harassment in a university setting. The Cryptogram (1994) imagines a child's horrific vision of family life. Recent plays include The Old Neighborhood (1991) and Boston Marriage (1999).

David Rabe (1940-) Another noted dramatist is David Rabe, a Vietnam veteran who was one of the first to explore that war's upheaval and violence in The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (l971) and Sticks and Bones (l969). Subsequent plays include The Orphan (l973), based on Aeschylus's Oresteia; In the Boom Boom Room (1973), about the rape of a dancer; and Hurlyburly (1984) and Those the River Keeps (l990), both about Hollywood disillusionment. Rabe's recent works include The Crossing Guard (l994) and Corners (1998), about the concept of honor in the Mafia.

August Wilson (1945-2005) The distinguished African-American dramatist August Wilson, born Frederick August Kittel, was the son of a German immigrant who did not concern himself with his family. Wilson endured poverty and racism and adopted the surname of his African-American mother as a teenager. Influenced by the black arts movement of the late 1960s, Wilson co-founded Pittsburgh's Black Horizons Theater.

Wilson's plays explore African-American experience, organized by decades. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (l984), set in 1927 Chicago, depicts the famous blues singer. His acclaimed play Fences (1985), set in the 1950s, dramatizes the conflict between a father and a son, touching on the all-American themes of baseball and the American dream of success. Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1986) concerns boarding-house residents in 1911. The Piano Lesson (1987), set in the 1930s, crystallizes a family's dynamic by focusing on the heirloom piano. Two Trains Running (1990) takes place in a coffeehouse in the 1960s, while Seven Guitars (1995) explores the 1940s.

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