The drama of the United States is considered a bastard child of literature; like all plays, they are apparently banished by the academy (as well as the bookstore) into their own genre. But unlike those other international plays, they have received little due even from American critics. In his 1945 book The Playwright as Thinker, Eric Bentley favored European playwrights and dismissed American writers like Eugene O’Neill, and in a preface from a later edition of the book (a preface dropped from the edition currently in print), Bentley castigated American drama as he found it on Broadway in the 1950s. Similarly, Robert Brustein’s influential 1964 The Theatre of Revolt, while giving O’Neill a chapter of his own and therefore balancing the scales a little, is subtitled “Studies in Modern Drama from Ibsen to Genet,” lending Williams, Miller, Odets, Inge and most other American dramatists very little credit. Although there have been recent studies of American drama as a whole (Don Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby’s magisterial three-volume history of the American theatre from Cambridge University Press, for example, and Marc Robinson’s recent The American Play: 1787–2000 from Yale University Press), you won’t find these at your local bookstore, nor, I’ll wager, on the bookshelves of many American dramatists or critics themselves. Of fine, more individualized and specialized surveys for the non-academic reader like those for British drama of the postwar period — David Ian Rabey’s English Drama Since 1940, Dan Rebellato’s 1956 and All That and Aleks Sierz’ In-Yer-Face Theatre — there are even fewer (though it’s not a survey, one must heartily recommend Walter Davis’ excellent Get the Guests in this context). The history of the Broadway musical — yes, there are scores of books about that; a recent visit to a Barnes & Noble proved that these large books take up an entire shelf in the Theatre & Drama section. But you will search in vain for anything similar about “straight” American drama.

The accepted canon of post-war American drama may easily be covered in the four months’ duration of any undergraduate survey course. One can even come up with the fifteen weeks of readings in a mere fifteen minutes of thought:

Our Town by Thornton Wilder
A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee
Angels in America by Tony Kushner
Streamers by David Rabe
Buried Child by Sam Shepard
Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
Fences by August Wilson

And of course a passing glance at a few other writers in the interests of multicultural justice and aesthetic breadth, perhaps:

Fefu and Her Friends by Maria Irene Fornes
365 Plays/365 Days by Suzan-Lori Parks
The Laramie Project by Moises Kaufman
The Boys in the Band by Mart Crowley
Unbalancing Acts by Richard Foreman

And, if we must cater to the desire of students to confront work from the generation closest to its own, Paula Vogel, Sarah Ruhl, Adam Rapp, Lynn Nottage, Young-Jean Lee and Neil LaBute can fill in the odd gap. Indeed, it is likely that instructors seeking to “engage” their students more readily with the form of the theatre may well assign a full semester of this recent work instead; for O’Neill, Miller and Williams may not “speak to” their students or even themselves (whatever “speak to” is supposed to mean in this context, though one can hazard various guesses which do no favors to either teacher or student) with the power of Kushner, Vogel, Crowley or Lee.

If the student or the fledgling American dramatist first confronts the work of these earlier writers in the undergraduate classroom, that may be the last place they read or see it (when I was at Bard College in the early 1980s, published scripts were all we had; perhaps today the instructor can utilize film or video versions of these same plays, all of which are far more readily and economically available for classroom use now). Though the plays themselves do not change, we do; and the 48-year-old man who reads The Iceman Cometh will approach the play with a richer variety of experience and a wider breadth of knowledge both personal and theatrical through which he can read the play than he did when he was 18. Between this and the critical disservice to American dramatists by critics like Bentley and Brustein, it is no wonder that written American drama, that bastard form of theatre, remains acknowledged (if not honored) but unread.

This condition is unfortunate in more ways than one, for both this older drama and for the contemporary American stage. Some directors have found extraordinary possibility in stagings of these older plays. Ivo van Hove will continue his exploration of American drama in his production of Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play The Little Foxes at New York Theatre Workshop later this month [1] ; Elizabeth LeCompte and the Wooster Group have, during their existence, revisited almost all of the canonic American dramatists, from Wilder to Miller to O’Neill and most recently to Williams.

Except in the hands of these and other directors, contemporary relevance for the postwar American drama — and the challenges it presents for the American stage and the contemporary American dramatist — remains unexamined. Yet even a cursory rereading of these plays reveals a hardness and rigor, a formal daring, every bit as significant as those of the postwar European and Asian stages. While they may have acquired a reputation for mawkish melodrama and sentimentality, the fact is that the opposite is more frequently the case — that melodrama and sentimentality are frequently at war with a hard, bitter vision of the American experience and the individual produced by it. Even Williams “memory play” The Glass Menagerie, like Our Town, long the staple of high school drama clubs and amateur groups, reveals a darkness and an uncompromisingly harsh metaphysics. In the very first stage direction, Williams describes the Wingfield apartment building as “one of those vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular living-units that flower as warty growths in overcrowded urban centers of lower middle-class population and are symptomatic of the impulse of this largest and fundamentally enslaved section of American society to avoid fluidity and differentiation and to exist and function as one interfused mass of automatism” — so much for the sentimental conception of community so valued by some contemporary American theatremakers. Williams also takes on American social realism in his notes on the play:

The straight realistic play with its genuine Frigidaire and authentic ice-cubes, its characters who speak exactly as its audience speaks, corresponds to the academic landscape and has the same virtue of a photographic likeness. Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance. These remarks … have to do with a conception of a new, plastic theatre which must take the place of the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions if the theatre is to resume vitality as a part of our culture. [2]

Williams, perhaps, can’t be responsible for lugubrious directorial renderings of his harsher plays; but in neglecting to revisit this original text, we render invisible the very real formal, political, cultural and metaphysical underpinnings of an important avenue of American dramatic experimentation. Williams, moreover, is not alone, and as I wrote in my essays about Wilder and Odets earlier this week, these dramas are surprisingly ambitious and complex — far more ambitious and complex, in reality, than much contemporary American drama.

During the period under discussion here, it was not only American drama that underwent considerable sea-change; American dramatists clearly did not wait for the development (as important as it was) of the off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway stages of the 1950s and 1960s to forge new paths. In other disciplines, such as plastic art and music, American artists entered upon a period of extreme experimentalism as well. The rise of abstract expressionism with artists like Jackson Pollack and Mark Rothko, the development of a uniquely American vein of musical experimentation with John Cage and Morton Feldman (as well as Charles Ives in the years before them) — both of these grew to maturation with the post-war American theatre. While the point might be made that these artists and musicians operated at the margins of the New York scene, away from larger museums and concert halls, as off- and off-off-Broadway would be distant from the Times Square theatre district, history proves this is not the case. Pollack was the subject of a Life magazine cover story as early as 1949 and his canvases were hung in the Museum of Modern Art, that bastion of institutional aesthetic canon-making; concerts at Carnegie Hall and Town Hall, far from the Greenwich Village scene, saw the premieres of Cage’s works in the 1940s and 1950s.

That American dramatists experimented with their form for Broadway audiences does not undermine the validity of that experimentation, even if such experimentation in the same venues is unthinkable now; but that too is the result of history and does not reflect the status of the Broadway stage at the time. If one’s mind and sense of aesthetic history is playful enough, one might even draw imperfect but instructive parallels between one artist, one form, and another — Ives and Wilder in their appropriation of New England history and experience; O’Neill, Feldman and Rothko in their tragic conceptions of American consciousness; the abandonment of stage realism and realistic dialogue as painters and composers abandoned representation and tonality — each of these with an American flavor distinct from that of the European consciousness, but no less rigorous and sublime.

To survey postwar American drama through the lenses of eros, tragedy and death, and to assume that this admittedly prejudicial and idiosyncratic survey may revive these dynamics in contemporary American drama, is something, one suspects, of a revolutionary activity — the American mind seems from its inception to break from the past and lunge purposefully into the future. But the American is not exempt from the sobering realization that we cannot know where we are until we know where we’ve been, that regardless of our boundless energy and good intentions we are burdened by a violent and tragic past which we appear condemned to repeat into eternity; and that this knowledge broadens our conception not only of the possibilities which remain open to us but also prevents us from treading water in a continuous present. To assume otherwise is to risk condemning American drama to a state of perpetual adolescence; a less-than-charitable observer may conclude that this is already the case, and that it is already too late.

This conclusion itself emerges from the survey of postwar American drama, which begins just before the end of the war in 1944 with the Broadway premiere of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie. On that, more next week.

1. At about the time the revival of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, which van Hove directed a few years ago, opens at the Signature Theatre Company — interestingly, not in van Hove’s production, which is worthy of some consideration of the current American condition of and receptiveness to stage experimentation itself; Kushner discusses this production in a recent Time Out New York interview. [↩]
2. Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, New York: New Directions Books, 1999, xix. [↩]