PRE-WAR DEVELOPMENT

American drama imitated European theatre until the 20th century. One of the causes was the American copyright law that did not protect and promote American dramatists together with the “star system,” in which actors and actresses, rather than the actual plays, were given the most acclaim. While the drama was not appreciated by the Puritans and banned during the Revolution, the popular dramatic forms were on the rise: 

vaudeville (popular variety theatre involving skits, clowning, and music). 

Minstrel shows, based on African-American music and folkways -- performed by white characters using "blackface" makeup.

ELMER LEOPOLD RICE (1892-1967) studied law at New York University. He became a playwright and used his experience in his works. His plays often reflected the social and political issues of their day. His first drama, On Trial (1914), was the first American play to use the flashback technique, important also in literature and movies. The Adding Machine (1923) is an expressionistic fantasy presenting the dehumanizing effects of machines. His Street Scene (1929) is a realistic drama set in the New York City slums, received the 1929 Pulitzer Prize in drama and in 1947 was made into an opera by the American poet Langston Hughes and the German-born American composer Kurt Weill. Street Scene premièred at the Adelphi Theater, Broadway, on January 6, 1947. 

EUGENE O'NEILL (1888-1953) became the first American Nobel prize winner for drama. His earliest dramas concern the working class and poor; later works explore obsessions and sex, under the influence of Sigmund Freud. He focused on the Freudian issues of love and dominance within families in a trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), based on the classical Oedipus complex. His later plays include The Iceman Cometh (1946), and Long Day's Journey Into Night (1956), an autobiography focusing on his own family and their physical and psychological deterioration. He often used masks; Shakespearean monologues and Greek choruses. 

OTHER PLAYWRIGHTS: THORNTON WILDER, CLIFFORD ODETS

POSTWAR AMERICAN DRAMA

LILLIAN HELLMAN (1905–1984) was a Jewish Southern dramatist. The first popular play was The Children's Hour (1934), a story of a little spoilt girl who accuses her teachers of a lesbian relationship. This lie has tragic consequences, the school is closed and the life of both teachers is ruined. One of them loses her fiancée and the other one commits suicide because she realizes she really is in love with her best friend. In her following plays that brought her fame, she is describing the social changes of the American South, i.e. The South before and after the Civil War (1861-1865). Her most famous work is The Little Foxes, 1939. It is the story of a former aristocratic family that got rich during the war and they run new businesses. Like little foxes in the biblical vineyard, they destroy everything valuable for their own profit. Hellman returned to the Hubbard family history again in the play Another Part of the Forest (1946), which was set in Alabama in 1880. Chronologically it precedes The Little Foxes 

From the mid-1930s, Hellman was irregularly involved in liberal and leftist activities and organizations. She also wrote an antifascist play The Watch on Rhine, in 1941. Hellman was blacklisted from the late 1940s to the 1960s. Among the latter important plays belong Toys in the Attic, 1960. In 1969 Hellman published AN UNFINISHED WOMAN, the first of three memoirs that dealt with her social, political, and artistic life. Followed four years later by PENTIMENTO: A BOOK OF PORTRAITS and in 1976 by SCOUNDREL TIME dealing with the fifties. 

ARTHUR MILLER (1915–2005) became one of the most important American playwrights. His main theme is the false ideal of the American dream and the unnecessary suffering and deaths caused by the will to succeed. His plays were never complicated or symbolic and therefore gained wide audiences. 

His play All my Sons, 1947 is a combination of family story and social criticism. It is the story Mr. Keller who is selling guns for the government during the war. He does not want to lose the job and sells them defective pieces for aircrafts. This causes the deaths of many soldiers including one of his sons. Yet the family keeps refusing the death. Admitting it would mean that Keller is a murderer. Keller himself does not want to accept his guilt but when his other son finds out the truth, he commits suicide. This play poses questions of responsibility and guilt. Who is responsible for the deaths? Is Keller's son also a murderer when he pushed his father to suicide?      

Death of a Salesman 1949 is a play about the falseness of the American dream and its destructivity. Willy Lowman, an ageing salesman, is a stranger in a business world as well as in his family. Willy is an average person, he does have the skills to become successful. He is constantly referring to his famous ancestors, but he cannot live up to his ideals, he hopes his two sons will have a bright future. Willy is blind to reality, he does not want to admit his failure or the failure of his sons, he mixes his dreams, his past and bits of real life. His two sons Biff and Happy believe they will have bright future but after the death of their father they follow their fathers dream. Deciding that he is worth more dead than alive, Willy kills himself in his car - hoping that the insurance money will support his family and his son Biff could get a new start in his life. He is exceptional in one thing, unlike many others, he does realize that he is average. The only valuable thing he can leave to his family is the life insurance. 

The Crucible, 1953 is a reaction to the period of McCarthyism, Miller is drawing parallels between the witch hunt in Salem in the 17th century (1692) and the 50s hunt for communists, both real and imaginary. View from the Bridge (1955), After the Fall (1965), Incident at Vichy (1965) The last mentioned play deals with a group of men waiting for their deportation to concentration camp. The camp represents a universal evil and guilt. His last successful play was Playing for Time, 1984 based on real facts. It tells the story of a women's orchestra in concentration camps. Yet Miller's plays are not negative, he refuses to give up to violence, he believes that human existence is not absurd, it does make sense. The problem is not to avoid evil, but to become aware of it but how to live with it. 

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS (1911-1983) His plays openly reflect sexual and psychological aspects of relationships which are traditionally controversial. His shocking plays are full of neurotic characters, sexually obsessed men and women, violence, both physical and mental. One of the main motifs of Williams's plays is the contrast and conflict between fragile, highly sensitive characters and the world or other characters that represent the animalistic, aggressive forces. The action of the play is based o the attempts of the fragile and sensitive characters to defend their old values, life-style and innocence in a world that cannot accept them and does not understand them. However, this duality is not presented as the fight between good and evil, there are no black and white characters. Williams always handles his themes with high complexity even within one play, the image of love in his plays rages from sentimental, idealistic love to sexual passion or prostitution. (for example in the play Camino Real)

All his plays show the subjective thoughts ad emotions of the character, there is no objective comment or standpoint. In all of his plays, he deals with the isolation of individual characters, their inability to explain themselves, to have a meaningful conversation with others - which is the basic premise for love and understanding. 

Williams was no formal experimenter like O'Neill but he uses more poetic language, his plays are full of symbols. His plays are a synthesis of expressionism, impressionism and symbolism. His plays have their specific atmosphere and mood. 

There are three main groups of his plays: 

early plays: Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Glass Menagerie (1945), Summer and Smoke (1948). In these plays which are the most realistic he presents his main themes: contrast of illusion and reality, body and soul. All these plays are fragmentary and are Williams's most realistic works. 

The second group of plays: The Rose Tattoo (1951), Camino Real (1953). Camino Real is a image of modern hell, it presents a moral wasteland. It is a combination of surrealism, caricature and myth. There are many characters, among others Don Quixote, or Byron. 

Third group of plays: Williams received Pulitzer Prize for CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1955), about the moral decay of a Southern family. ORPHEUS DESCENDING (1957), Suddenly Last Summer, (1958). These plays are criticism of contemporary society, the contain images of greed, corruption, drug usage, cannibalism (Suddenly last summer). These plays are close to images of Troilus and Cressida by Shakespeare. He is showing the degeneration of youth and innocence into perversity, drunkenness and illusions.