Summary
Until the post-World War I era, American drama, confronted with religious hostility and then by economic necessity and academic indifference, struggled to come into its own as a respected literary genre at home and as a force that made itself felt on foreign stages. A commonplace of American literary history is that the plays of Eugene O’Neill, in Walter J. Meserve’s words, marked “America’s full-scale arrival into the modern drama of western civilization.”
In an article in a 1907 issue of Atlantic Monthly, John Corbin quoted Edmund Stedman, who proclaimed a literary declaration of independence for American drama: “Quote boldly, then, I prophesy the dawn of the American drama; and quite confidently, too, for the drama has already dawned.” Decrying the exhaustion of the European-influenced melodrama, Corbin applauded dramas by William Vaughn Moody and Percy MacKaye as plays “which challenge comparison with the best work of the modern stage in any country.” Moody’s The Great Divide (pr. 1906) and MacKaye’s Jeanne d’Arc (pr. 1906) are hardly plays for which modern historians and critics would claim such eminence, but Corbin expressed an optimism about American drama that would become a reality in the post-World War I era in the dramas of O’Neill.
Kenneth Macgowan claims, in his introduction to Famous American Plays of the 1920’s (1959), that the book might have been titled “The American Drama Comes of Age.” When American drama finally came into its own, each decade thereafter left its unique mark on stage history. In the 1920’s, Eugene O’Neill ’s stylistic experiments initiated a period of explosive growth and rich variety. In the 1930’s, the social protest dramas of Clifford Odets and his contemporaries dramatized the personal conflicts of individuals and families at odds with themselves and with the conditions in the country. In the 1940’s, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller emerged at the forefront of post-World War II writers concerned with psychological and moral dilemmas of individuals in a society readjusting to a peacetime economy and Cold War diplomacy. Their mood continued into the 1950’s in the Beckettian plays of Edward Albee , with his bleak vision of American culture and its alienated or dismembered characters. Albee, Miller, and Williams continued into the following decades, while social-protest dramatists flourished in Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway theaters such as the Open Theatre, the Living Theatre, Café La Mama, the American Place Theatre, and the Public Theatre. Although the latter decades of the twentieth century witnessed some gains in minority theater by gay, feminist, and black dramatists, it was Sam Shepard , with his expressionistic utilization of the cowboy myth, and David Mamet , described by Ruby Cohn as the writer with “the most concentrated American stage speech since Edward Albee,” who captured critical attention as playwrights with the potential to join the ranks of O’Neill, Williams, Miller, and Albee.
A latecomer to literary history, American drama had its beginnings in the two preceding centuries, during which it slowly developed from plays modeled on foreign subjects and on the prevailing English and European styles of sentimental comedy and tragedy to those derived from native experience and characterized by a realism and literary quality that gained respectability domestically and internationally.
There was strong hostility from religious groups in colonial times, a carryover from the Puritan closing of the English theaters from 1642 to 1660. Except for the Southern states, where Episcopalians settled, the theater was considered frivolous. Puritan New England, Huguenot New York, and Quaker Philadelphia, where the American drama eventually took root, rallied against the theater. Their religious opposition was strengthened by the country’s preoccupation with the Revolutionary War. The...
(This entire section contains 1704 words.)
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high value placed on the thrifty use of time and money further consolidated opposition to such “trivial” pursuits as the theater. Yet even in earliest times, formal functions such as commencements featured quasi-theatrical performances at the College of William and Mary, the College of Pennsylvania (now the University of Pennsylvania), and Princeton. These performances took the form of recitations of odes and, occasionally, masques. A “pastoral colloquy” at the College of William and Mary in 1702 may well have been the first college dramatic performance in America.
Over the years, still another division developed, that between “theater” and “drama,” caused by purely commercial considerations. As popular entertainment, theater relied on traditional audience tastes for its survival. Theater managers and producers could not risk plays by new authors experimenting with subject matter and style. Consequently, these writers turned to the small, noncommercial theaters. Much of their success was a result of their association with groups such as the Provincetown Players and the Theatre Guild . Later, the Group Theatre and the Actors Studio strengthened the importance of the little theater movement. The inheritors of this tradition are to be found in cities and campuses across the country and in New York in Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway theaters and theater clubs such as the Manhattan Theatre Club, the Hudson Guild Theatre, the American Place Theatre, the Public Theatre, and Theatre Row, along West Forty-second Street. Some of these, such as the Public Theatre, have nurtured dramatists-in-residence. David Rabe and Lanford Wilson are but two dramatists who have had their plays steadily produced in resident theaters. Such regional theaters as the Goodman and Steppenwolf theaters in Chicago, the Actors Theatre of Louisville, and the Long Wharf in Connecticut are among groups that continue a vital tradition that began with the Provincetown Players and the Theatre Guild in the 1920’s.
On Broadway, indigenous musicals have enjoyed the financial successes denied much of the time to “serious” drama. Occasional dramatic imports such as those brought over by the Royal Shakespeare Company of London have enjoyed success with their limited runs. Serious plays by O’Neill, Williams, Miller, Albee, and others have enjoyed some financial success, but these are the exception rather than the rule.
The commercial division between theater and drama frequently has been carried over to the university level, where drama as literature is taught in English departments and plays are produced by theater departments. Until the end of the second decade of the twentieth century, the literary ambitions of the drama took a backseat to theatrical stageability and popular demand. This tardiness contrasts markedly with the national identity that native poetry and fiction enjoyed in the 1850’s with the outpouring of literature by major writers such as Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. Not until seventy years later was American drama to experience such acceptance.
Yet in the time since, international recognition of major American plays and playwrights has come swiftly. O’Neill received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936, and his play More Stately Mansions (pb. 1964) was premiered posthumously in Stockholm in 1967. Sir Laurence Olivier played the father in Long Day’s Journey into Night (pr. 1956) at the Old Vic in London in 1972. Miller directed—or helped direct—Death of a Salesman (pr. 1949) in China in 1983. Even the plays of later playwrights—Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class (pb. 1976) and Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross (pr. 1983)—received their premieres at two of London’s prestigious theaters, the Royal Court and the National, respectively.
A second major commonplace about American drama is its derivative nature. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the plays of William Shakespeare, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and a host of lesser dramatists, both English and Continental, were popular on the American stage. As will be discussed later, the subject matter and styles of foreign dramatists influenced the American dramatists of the time. Even in the twentieth century, the influences of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, and Samuel Beckett, among foreign dramatists, are evident in the plays of O’Neill and others. Miller’s All My Sons (pr. 1947), for example, is an adaptation of Ibsen’s Samfundets støtter (pr. 1877; The Pillars of Society, 1880) that is placed in a contemporary American setting.
Only in musical theater has the United States contributed innovatively to the history of world drama. The musical drama is, indeed, so indigenous that its transplantation to a foreign stage sometimes seems unnatural. Its unique Whitmanesque paradoxical qualities of idealism and energetic brashness are inimitably American. Not until the 1980’s did imported musicals such as the English Cats (pr. 1981) compete with native musicals on the New York stage.
Singular moments in American dramatic history when theater and drama coalesced to produce luminous moments on the stage must include Pauline Lord’s appearance in Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted (pr. 1924) and O’Neill’s Anna Christie (pr. 1921); Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in Robert E. Sherwood’s Idiot’s Delight (pr. 1936); Laurette Taylor as Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (pr. 1944); Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman in the 1949 production of Miller’s Death of a Salesman; Jessica Tandy as Blanche DuBois in Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (pr. 1947); and Colleen Dewhurst and Jason Robards (quintessentially O’Neillian actors) in the 1973 production of A Moon for the Misbegotten (pr. 1947).
Special events also mark stage history, such as the 1984 production of Death of a Salesman, with a jaunty Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman, contrasting vividly with the defeated Willy of Cobb’s portrayal. In an interesting coincidence, a new play about salesmen of another sort—this time, real estate salesmen—appeared in tandem, as it were, with the Miller drama. Glengarry Glen Ross dramatizes the distinctively American confidence game that has been the subject of many dramatists since the 1920’s. Hailed by critics as an updated sequel to Death of a Salesman, Mamet’s drama is a hard-hitting, brilliant verbal choreography of a basic American myth. Rather than focusing conventionally on the causes and consequences of the conflicts created by the betrayal of ideals, Mamet transforms the disillusionment into an energetic poetry that takes on a life of its own. Like Williams before him, Mamet transforms even the harshest American realities into a celebration of the vitality and energy that are usually the domain of the musical. He brings the dynamic of Carl Sandburg’s poetry to the stage. (It is an interesting coincidence that, like Sandburg, Mamet hails from Chicago.) The dapper Willy Loman of Hoffman, then, is, at least in part, akin to the spirit of Mamet’s salesmen.
