Chapter Six American Drama

Section One: American Drama

To say that American drama began in 1916 when the Provincetown Player produced Eugene O’Neill’s first play, Bound East for Cardiff, is to write off the efforts of the nineteenth-century playwrights too ruthlessly to be just. It is true that there were no great masters in the theatre before 20th century, but there were writers who contributed to the rise of American drama. Compared to notable accomplishments in other literary fields, drama was distinctly inferior. Limitations mainly resided in the inherent structure of melodrama, wherei contrived plots drove the action. Moreover, classics of nineteenth-century European drama (until the theatrical renaissance late in the century) are nearly as rare as American ones.

Responding to the changes that were occurring around the world after World War I, Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) was the foremost American playwright of the time. His earliest plays stay within the rules of the realistic play, but in his later plays The Great God Brown (1926) , The Iceman Cometh (1946) and Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956), he began to experiment with ways of expanding the theater beyond the realistic structure. O'Neill's major subject matter is the family with tension. His major theme is the power of illusion. It is fair to say, as one critic did, that O'Neill alone advanced the American drama by at least one generation. His plays, especially Beyond the Horizon (1920) and Desire Under the Elms (1924), are considered to be the first modern American plays.

Following O'Neill's successes, Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) also began bringing powerful drama to the American stage. However, Wilder demanded his audience to accept the fact that they were watching actors and actresses on the stage. The characters often speak directly to the people in the audience. Wilder only wrote a few plays, but they will be remembered for their expressionism. His best plays are Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942). The success of these two playwrights encouraged others, and the American theater was suddenly alive and exciting. S. N. Behrman (1893-1973), Robert Sherwood (1896-1955), Clifford Odets (1906-1963) (Waiting for Lefty) , Sidney Kingsley (1906), and Lillian Hellman (1905-1984)(Watch on the Rhine) all wrote some very good plays for the American theater before the next great disturbance in the peaceful existence of the world, World War II.

After World War II, Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) and Arthur Miller (1915) emerged as the prominent American playwrights. Both playwrights made effective use of both Ibsen's realism and Strindberg's expressionism. Williams' most acclaimed play is The Glass Menagerie (1945). The title refers to the collection of glass animals that Laura Wingfield has on the shelf in her room. They are fragile little animals and represent not only the girl, who is withdrawn from daily life, but all the characters in the play. The visual effects and poetic dialogue of the play are very good. Another important play is A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), a play about the decline and tragic end of Blanche DuBois, a southern lady, who, as she herself says, has "always depended on the kindness of strangers."

Arthur Miller's best contribution to American drama is Death of a Salesman (1949), a play about Willy Loman, a salesman and the values we all have in our lives. Willy finds himself unwanted at his job because of his age so he kills himself. A notable speech at the end of the play is: "Willy was a salesman, a man riding on a smile and a shoeshine. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory." Though it is a very traditional play, it makes extensive use of expressionistic techniques, especially in the scenes when Willy Loman talks with his dead brother, Ben. Other plays by Miller include All My Sons (1947), The Crucible (1953), and After the Fall (1964), which tells the story about his marriage to film star Marilyn Monroe.

The star dramatist of the 1960s was Edward Albee, the great representative of the Theatre of the Absurd, whose first work, The Zoo Story (1958), was presented off Broadway in 1960, followed by three more Off Broadway one-acts and, in 1962, by Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) on Broadway.  Particularly in his attacks on upper-middle class complacency in a style blending absurd humor, rhetorical pomposity and existential musings in a usually naturalistic context, Albee helped to reflect American society as it pulled apart in the wake of political assassinations, the Civil Rights and Women's Movements, and theVietnam War.

In the recent history of American drama there have been a good number of playwrights trying to offer, on Broadway or off it, a variety of productions, which have invigorated the theatre. A new generation of authors appeared in the sixties such as Jack Richardson and Arthur Kopit etc.. As to which of these people will eventually emerge as the greatest, it is too early to judge yet: it is indeed wise to leave it for time to decide.