New York currently swelters in what will probably be the last heat wave of the summer, and the city slows in anticipation of the Labor Day holiday — as do I. At the moment I am contenting myself with once again reading Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which opened at the Henry Miller Theater on 4 February 1938 following a preview at Princeton’s McCarter Theater on 22 January of the same year. (It is a play much admired by Edward Albee, as he mentioned in Alexis Soloski’s interview with the dramatist published in the Village Voice last week.)

This will no doubt surprise some people, but after many years of reading European drama almost exclusively, I thought a look back to my own shores would be of interest. As I prepare the production of What She Knew and the manuscript of Word Made Flesh, roughly in that order, I’ll be revisiting those American plays that I last read decades ago — particularly with an eye to how the paths and ideas laid out in Word Made Flesh are reflected in the drama of my own country. If these paths and ideas are intrinsic to theatre and drama, as I believe they are, they are as intrinsic to the American landscape as they are to that of Europe or anywhere else.

I must say I’m looking forward to this: it’s been some time since I’ve read or seen these plays (and I’ll sadly miss the highly-regarded David Cromer production of Our Town, which is scheduled to close on 12 September; time and the wallet, that dastardly duo, do not permit), and having more recently explored the history of contemporary British drama in books by Dan Rebellato, David Ian Rabey and Aleks Sierz, I’m interested to see how the threads they weave connect with drama on American shores. How these individual plays emerged from the postwar American theatre, particularly from the energies that circulate among Broadway, off-Broadway, off-off-Broadway and regional theatres — as the British plays I’ve recently read emerged from the energies that circulated among the National Theatre, the Royal Court and other British mainstays — is an intriguing question.

Waiting for Lefty, A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, The Iceman Cometh, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? — a heady list, but no doubt I will find more here now than I did twenty years ago. I’ll post on these, but not until after the holiday.