Street Scene | From Romance to Reality
Street Scene is described as ‘‘selective realism
at its best.’’ In the following excerpt, Downer
outlines the problems he notices with the play.
Rice presented his audience, not with a single family living under carefully controlled conditions, but with a cross section of city life as experienced by a large group of people who live in or are somehow connected with a huge brownstone tenement. They are varied in racial background, in philosophy, in occupation, in social status and intellectual stature: Italians, Jews, Swedes, Irish, musicians, electricians, milkmen, teachers, radicals, conservatives, poets and peasants. Yet the audience is not conscious that a cross section has been selected and presented to it; what is more...
[The entire page is 362 words long]
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