Drama (Article)

The history of theater in the United States can be divided into three parts: the first 150 years, marked by efforts to break free of English cultural domination; the richly productive period from 1920 to 1950; and the last half of the twentieth century, shaped by the effects of television and film and a general sense of decline.

In the first period, down to 1920, the nation's struggle for a broader democracy and cultural independence was reenacted on the stage by American types in native dramas. Taking center stage, as performers and characters, were the dispossessed of Europe, the disenfranchised, and the powerless, all of whom endeavor to come to terms with tradition and authority: the Indian, the youthful freethinker, the African American, the rustic, the frontiersman, and, above all, the young woman, whom the stage rewarded with decent work and equal opportunity.

Many of those barred from the corridors of power turned to the theater, which was itself an outcast subculture, attacked by the pious as the devil's drawing room, a counterforce of evil plotting to compete with the church for time, money, and souls.

William Dunlap (1766–1839), the eighteenth‐century father of American drama, turned to the Revolutionary War for his materials. His successors found inspiration in Native American culture and frontier life. Few dramas of this first period have endured, but two merit attention: P.T. Barnum's production of The Drunkard and George Aikin's Uncle Tom's Cabin (from Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel). Their themes of temperance and Christian antislavery sentiment brought religious people into the theater for the first time, a trend that suffered a momentary reversal in 1865 with the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in a Washington, D.C., theater by an actor, John Wilkes Booth.

In this formative period, American theater was far more exciting than American plays. Despite religious disapproval and the paucity of native‐written drama, theater flourished in resident professional companies in every major city and in rural settlements from South Carolina to California, reached by many touring companies. The period produced few well‐known playwrights but many legendary performers, including Edwin Booth (John Wilkes Booth's brother), Joseph Jefferson, Edwin Forrest, Anna Cora Mowatt, and Lotta Crabtree.

One American type of drama that embodied democratic, working‐class ideals was the burlesque or travesty, in great demand from the 1840s until around 1910. These parodies of serious drama and upper‐class society were incorporated into an entertainment original to the United States, the formulaic minstrel show. The minstrel tradition and the show‐girl extravaganza (like the British import, The Black Crook) evolved into the vaudeville shows of the early twentieth century.

Beginning in the 1880s, American playwrights generally moved away from melodrama toward realism, laying the groundwork for the post‐1920 blossoming of American drama. These authors included Steele Mackaye, James A. Herne, Bronson Howard, Clyde Fitch, and William Vaughn Moody.

The second period of American theater, beginning in 1920 with the production of Eugene O'Neill's Beyond the Horizon and continuing for four decades, was unquestionably its greatest. This era was made grand not by actors (though there were many of considerable talent) but by playwrights, whose work continues to live in revivals on professional, community, and university stages; in adaptations for other mediums such as television and film; and in printed anthologies.

Although O'Neill dominated this period, several other American playwrights achieved distinction in world theater, notably Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) and Arthur Miller (1915– ), but also Clifford Odets, Thornton Wilder, Lillian Hellman, William Inge, and Edward Albee, among others. Wilder's Our Town (1938), an evocation of small‐town New England, became an enduring favorite.

The range of successful dramatic forms during these years is impressive, including naturalistic‐psychological dramas, historical romances, proletarian dramas, domestic Gothics, allegories, and realistic, middle‐class tragedies. Although an eclectic period stylistically, realism dominated.

The American stage from the 1920s to the 1960s responded to the cultural turbulence of the times—the modernist disillusionment following World War I; the Great Depression of the 1930s; the fascist menace and World War II; and the consumerist, conformist Cold War culture of the 1950s.

Even in the sometimes frivolous 1920s, playwrights addressed economic injustice and social upheaval. Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine (1923) satirized capitalism. Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stalling's antiwar, antifascist play What Price Glory? appeared the following year. But Eugene O'Neill, the preeminent playwright of the 1920s who joined classical themes and Freudian psychology in his domestic tragedies, usually ignored the issues of the day in favor of a more universal stance. A possible exception, The Great God Brown (1928), offers an allegory of the clash of the creative spirit with capitalism. This grim picture was not entirely alleviated by Show Boat (1927), a romantic musical by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II (based on an Edna Ferber novel), in which the issue of racial injustice looms large.

In the Depression‐ridden 1930s, more plays of social relevance came to the fore. These included Clifford Odets's Waiting for Lefty (1935), which wed radical politics and radical stylistics, the play being presented as if the audience were present at a labor‐union meeting. In 1933, one of the longest runs in theatrical history began with the production of Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, a play based on his novelistic stereotyping of poor southern whites. Two Depression‐Era dramas exposed the assault on the human spirit by capitalistic greed. John Steinbeck's long‐running Of Mice and Men (1937) dealt with migratory agricultural workers excluded from the American dream. Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes (1939) deromanticized an aristocratic but self‐destructive southern family obsessed with money. Despite Hellman's success, women playwrights and directors were rare. Similarly, with the exception of actor‐singer Paul Robeson, African Americans' theatrical participation was limited to small, often demeaning roles or to occasional experimental productions usually staged far from Broadway.

The 1930s also brought a brief interval of government funding for dramatic art: the Federal Theatre Project, a division of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration, employed over 1,200 theatre professionals nationwide. Its tendency to produce controversial, socially critical plays, like Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock, caused Congress to end the program in 1939.

These decades also saw the development of the musical—a particularly American contribution to dramatic entertainment. The developing tradition of staged musical dramas reached a pinnacle in 1935 with an American opera, Porgy and Bess, with script and music by Ira and George Gershwin. Based on a novel and play by Dubose and Dorothy Heywood, it chronicled African American life in Charleston, South Carolina. Not until 1957 with Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, which recast the Romeo and Juliet tale in the violent world of New York street gangs, did a work in this genre reach a similar level of success. Many musicals followed in the next decades, making this genre America's chief contribution to world theater. Some of the most successful over the years included Guys and Dolls, Brigadoon, Camelot, My Fair Lady, The King and I, The Fantasticks, Hello, Dolly, Hair, and A Chorus Line.

A series of memorable productions made the 1940s the single most important decade in the history of American theater. Four plays by O'Neill were produced, including one of his greatest, The Iceman Cometh (1946). Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller made their Broadway debuts with two plays each: Williams's The Glass Menagerie (1945) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), and Miller's All My Sons (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949). In addition, two classic American musicals, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein's Oklahoma (1943) and South Pacific (1949), alleviated O'Neill's grim philosophical explorations, Miller's social warnings, and the Gothic despair of Williams.

The third period of theater in the United States, beginning around 1950, was marked by several developments: the growing influence on actors and directors of Lee Strasberg's Actors' Studio, with its psychological, naturalistic style called “the Method”; a tendency to eliminate barriers between audience and performers (with arena stages, audience participation, and a diminished theatricality in staging); the continued impact of film and television (more accessible dramatic forms that drained both talent and audiences from the stages and fostered a star system based on popularity rather than talent); and, finally, the growth of a less commercially driven off‐Broadway theatrical tradition.

Among the playwrights who energized the theater as the twentieth century ended were the prolific Neil Simon, whose Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983), the first play in an autobiographical cycle, tempered his usual light comedies; David Mamet, the controversial author of American Buffalo (1996) and other works; Wendy Wasserstein, whose first highly acclaimed play was Uncommon Women and Others (1977); African American playwright August Wilson, author of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984); and Tony Kushner, whose play on the subject of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), Angels in America, premiered in 1993. In addition, for over forty years, from West Side Story to Into the Woods (1987), lyricist Stephen Sondheim strongly influenced musical theater. Although the Broadway musical was invigorated by British playwright Andrew Lloyd Webber (among his biggest hits were Cats [1981] and Phantom of the Opera [1986]), his influence intensified pressures for large and costly cinematic productions.

The 1990s found the American theater more decentralized and open to women and minority playwrights and a wider array of cultural themes. For example, Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959) provided audiences with a rare theatrical experience: a play by an African American playwright, about racial integration in the North, with African American characters. Not until August Wilson in the 1980s did an African American playwright have such a profound impact.

The end of the twentieth century also brought evidences of decline, marked by ephemera, bombastic spectacle, revivals from better times, and periodic infusions of life from Europe and England.