How far has the historical, social and cultural development of America shaped the plays of major American playwrights of the 20th century?

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        Don Schiach/ American Drama 1900-1990/ Cambridge University Press: 2000

Introduction to American drama

  • How far has the historical, social and cultural development of America shaped the plays of major American playwrights of the 20th century?
  • What are the particular and personal viewpoints of individual playwrights?
  • What makes a play an example of major drama of the 20th century?

In the last decades of the 19th century American theatre had been largely given over to melodramas and lavish spectacle. Towards the end of the 19th century and in the first two decades of the 20th, America became a 'melting pot' of nationalities and cultures. Between 1900 and 1915, 14.5 million immigrants from southern and central Europe poured into the United States. These immigrants, anxious to hold onto their national culture and language, were entertained at neighbourhood theatres in big cities such as New York and Chicago. Audiences enjoyed sentimental dramas about the 'old country', or about the problems of holding onto traditional mores and lifestyles in this new society of America. In the film The Godfather Part II, there is a scene set in just such a theatre, an Italian-American neighbourhood theatre in the Little Italy area of New York. The audience are watching a melodrama representing the problems of different generations of Italian-Americans adapting to the new society.

In European drama, in the latter part of the 19th century, there had emerged major playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen, August Strinberg, Anton Chekhov and Bernard Shaw, who were intent on representing life in their plays in a more realistic style. Realism in the theatre emerged from a desire to reject excessive theatrical artificiality. It represented everyday reality in a style that would seem familiar to the audiences that came to see these new plays. The dramatic language was meant to be close to everyday speech, the situations and settings akin to the kind of social problems and millieus familiar to contemporary audiences. Realism had an influence on the American stage in this period, but mainly in terms of elaborately realistic sets. Several years would pass, however, before the influence of the new realism meant that American drama could handle more mature themes and develop more sophisticated dramatic treatment.

Hardly any of the American plays produced between 1900 and 1915 are revived or read nowadays. At the time, however, there were large audiences for romantic melodramas with lavish but realistic settings. Meanwhile, the new entertainment medium of the cinema was beginning to challenge the supremacy of the theatre. Soon, films would provide much more elaborate spectacle, lavish settings and 'reality' than the theatre could compete with, even though until the invention of the film soundtrack in 1927, movies were 'silent'.

1915-41:the first authentic voices in the American theatre

In 1915, American drama found its artistic feet with the founding of the three new theatrical groups, the most influential of which were the Provincetown Players. The importance of these groups was that they produced the plays of European dramatists, including Ibsen and Chekhov, and that they nurtured American playwrights, giving them the opportunity to write without the commercial pressures of Broadway. 'Broadway' is a generic term generally used to denote mainstream, New York commercial theatre. Most Broadway plays and 'shows' (musicals, light comedies and theatrical spectacles) are produced by theatrical entrepreneurs for profit and are not subsidised by public funding.

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The historical, social and cultural context

By 1915, Europe was in the middle of the First World War and America was debating whether it should stay neutral. Eventually, President Wilson persuaded the American Congress to declare war on Germany. America's participation in the war and the important role it played in finalising the Treaty of Versailles that shaped post-war Europe marked its emergence as a major world power.

In the 1920s, new assembly-line manufacturing methods produced American goods at cheap prices for mass consumption. The American economy was going through a boom time, yet recent immigrants and black ...

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