American Decades
Drama Downsizes
Downsizing.
Theater diminished in the 1940s. Although attendance rose on Broadway during the war years, audiences sought musicals and spectacles—escape, not drama. Dramatic theater, in fact, was downsizing and entering a period of decline. In the 1930s, with the advent of the Federal Theater Project, a division of the WPA, the sheer number of plays being produced and actors being employed reached an all-time high nationwide. The volume of production led to a theater of mass consciousness that reflected the politics of the times. Social realism was the norm, as it was in fiction and painting during the decade. The proletarian plays of Clifford Odets or the socially conscious melodrama of Lillian Hellman were the dominant forms on stage. Utopian ideas about working people entering a new era were common, including an often rhapsodic, tragic, and beautiful portrayal of mass movements. These ideas began to dissipate in the 1940s....
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1940's The Arts
