Chapter 19 American Drama

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Chapter 19 American Drama

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Part One Introduction

• 1.??????(????)
• ???? (Pulitzer Prizes) ????????,??????????????
  ?,????????????,???????????????????????????,?1917?
  ?????????
•     ????????????????,???14?????7????,????????????
  ?????????????????????????????????????????????????
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  ??????,????????????????????1?????????
•     ????????????????16????????????????,????,??????
  ?4??????????????????,5?????
•   

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?????? (Joseph Pulitzer),1847?4?10???????
???????????17???????,????,??????????????????????,?
?????,1867??????? ?????????????????????,??????
????????????????1903?,?????,??????????????????????
,???????????????????1911?10?29?????????????,1912??
??????????,1917??????????
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• 2. Background knowledge
• American playwrights have made enormous
  contributions to world drama during the last
  century, and their works are widely read and
  performed. At the turn of the 20th century
  American drama pointed the way from a separation
  from the 19th century theatricality. It made its
  tentative attempt to place realistic plays on the
  American stage. There are other dramatists of the
  period, but European work strongly influenced
  their writing. None of the artists of this time
  even approached greatness.
• The real development of American drama could not
• be accomplished through poetic plays or
  adaptation. During the 1920s the extravagant
  spending and general license of the boom period
  encouraged the use of the Broadway theater as
  upper class

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• entertainment. But the Little Theater Movement
  began around the beginning of World War I as a
  revolt against the formulaic conventions of the
  commercial theater. Small groups of amateurs
  throughout the country were enthusiastic to
  present native plays, the shorter and simpler the
  better. During the postwar years, there were over
  a thousand little theaters across the country. It
  is said that the most evident impact of the
  Depression in American literature was made not on
  the printed page but in the little theaters.
• Eugene ONeil was the founder of modern
  American drama.

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Part Two Major Playwrights

• 1.1920s
• Eugene ONeill Elmer Rice Susan Glaspell
• 2.1930s
• Clifford Odets
• 3.1940s
• Tennessee Williams Arthur Miller
• 4.1960s and 1970s
• Edward Albee Sam Shepard David Buffalo

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• ? Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (1888-1953)
• A. His Life
• He was an American playwright, and Nobel
  laureate
• in Literature. His plays are among the first
  to
• introduce into American drama the techniques
  of
• realism, associated with Russian playwright
  Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen,
  and Swedish playwright August Strindberg. His
  plays were among the first to include speeches in
  American vernacular and involve characters on the
  fringes of society, engaging in depraved
  behavior, where they struggle to maintain their
  hopes and aspirations, but ultimately slide into
  disillusionment and despair. O'Neill wrote only
  one well-known comedy (Ah, Wilderness!).Nearly
  all of his other plays involve some degree of
  tragedy and personal pessimism.

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• O'Neill was born in a Broadway hotel room in
  Times Square. The site is now a Starbucks (1500
  Broadway, Northeast corner of 43rd Broadway) a
  commemorative plaque is posted on the outside
  wall with the inscription "Eugene O'Neill,
  October 16, 1888 November 27, 1953 America's
  greatest playwright was born on this site then
  called Barrett Hotel, Presented by Circle in the
  Square."
• He was the son of actor James O'Neill and Ella
  Quinlan. Because of his father's profession,
  O'Neill was sent to a Catholic boarding school
  where he found his only solace in books.

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• O'Neill spent his summers in New London,
  Connecticut. After being suspended from Princeton
  University, he spent several years at sea, during
  which he suffered from depression and alcoholism.
  O'Neill's parents and elder brother Jamie (who
  drank himself to death at the age of 45) died
  within three years of one another, and O'Neill
  turned to writing as a form of escape. Despite
  his depression he had a deep love for the sea,
  and it became a prominent theme in most of his
  plays, several of which are set onboard ships
  like the ones that he worked on.

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• After suffering from multiple health problems
  (including depression and alcoholism) over many
  years, O'Neill died in Room 401 of the Sheraton
  Hotel on Bay State Road in Boston, on November
  27, 1953, at the age of 65.
• O'Neill Grave of
  Eugene

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• B. His main Works
• Bread and Butter, 1914
• The Personal Equation, 1915
• Now I Ask You, 1916
• Beyond the Horizon, 1918 - Pulitzer Prize, 1920
• Anna Christie, 1920 - Pulitzer Prize, 1922
• The Hairy Ape, 1922
• The Iceman Cometh, written 1939, published 1940,
  first performed 1946
• Long Day's Journey Into Night, written 1941,
  first performed 1956 - Pulitzer Prize 1957
• A Wife for a Life, 1913

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• C.???--??????????
• 1939?,???????????????????(1946),????????????,
  ????,????,??????????????????????????,????????,????
  ,???????????30?????????????????????,??????????????
  ????1946???,??????1934????????????????????????????
  ,??????,???????

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• C.???--??????????
• ?????????????????????????????????????????,????
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  ?,?????????????,?????????????????,????????????????
  ??????????????????????????

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• C.???--??????????
• ????????????????,??????????????????????????????
  ????????,????????,??????????,???????????????,???
  ?????????????????????????,????????????

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• C.???--??????????
• ??(1922)???????????????????????????????????????
  ,???????????????,????????????????,???????????,????
  ??????????????,??????????????????????????????,????
  ??????????????????????,????????????

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• ? Elmer Rice(1892-1967)
• A. His Life
• Elmer Rice was born in New York City. Due to
  the Poverty of family ,Rice had accepted no
  formal education and he was a high school dropout
  who developed an interest in the legal profession
  and graduated from New York Law School at age
  20.In 1913 ,the same year that he was admitted to
  the bar,Rice decided to try his hand at writing
  plays. After the success of his first play, On
  Trial(1914), he turned his interests to the
  theatre .

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• B. His Major Works
• On Trial(1914) ??
• The Adding Machine (1923) ???
• Street Scene(1929) ??
• Counsellor at Law(1931) ????
• We, People(1933) ??,??
• Between Two Worlds(1934) ??????
• Dream Girl(1945) ????
• The Living Theatre(1959) ????(Collections of
  Novels and Essays)

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• C. His Masterpiece -- The Adding Machine (1923)
• The Adding Machine tells the protagonist Mr.
  Zero has worked in a store for twenty-five years,
  doing the same job-adding figures-and is
  expecting a raise when his boss comes one day to
  tell him that he has to leave because the store
  has bought adding machines. In a sudden fit of
  anger he kills his boss with a bill file. He is
  tried and condemned to death. A failure and a
  waste product of mechanization, he remain a
  zero in modern life.

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• ? Susan Glaspell (1882-1948)
• A. His Life and Influence
• She was a well-known feminist author of time.
  Inspired and influenced by Kate Chopin, she
  become a strong and opinionated feminist.
  Glaspell was a founding member of Heterodoxy, a
  radial group of women activists prominent in the
  feminist movement of New York in the years
  1910-1920.

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• Glaspell grew up in Iowa, and attended Drake
  University. In1915 she founded with her husband
  the first influential noncommercial theater
  troupe in America- the Provincetown Players in
  Massachusetts and staged the earlier works of
  experimentalist drama by such authors like .
  Probably because of this, she has been regarded
  by some people as mother of American drama.
  She was both a playwright and a novelist.

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• B. His Works
• The Verge(1921) ??a pioneering feminist
  drama
• Alison House(1930) ?????? the Pulitzer
  Prize-winning work
• Her major novels
• Fidelity(1915) ??
• The Morning Is Near Us(1930) ????
• (She wrote ten novels in total)

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• ? Clifford Odets(1906-1963)
• A. His Life
• Odets was born in Philadelphiaof
• immigrant parents, Lou Odets and
• Esther Geisinger, and raisedin the
• Bronx, New York. He dropped out
• of high school to pursue acting. He
• helped found the Group Theatre, a
• highly influential theatre company in
• the U.S. that utilized a new acting
• technique, closely associated with the
  thinking of the Russian master Constantin
  Stanislavski.
• After briefly trying acting, Odets decided to
  become the Group Theatre's first original
  playwright. At the urging of Group co-founder
  Harold Clurman, he wrote Awake and Sing! in 1935.
  Although his first play, it is often considered
  his masterpiece. It follows the story of a large
  Jewish family in New York.

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• His first wife was Academy-Award winning actress
  Luise Rainer his second wife was actress Bette
  Grayson, and he also had a relationship with
  actress Frances Farmer. Grayson's death at 32
  left Odets to care for their two children, Nora
  born in 1945, and Walt Whitman, now a clinical
  psychologist, author and painter, born in 1947.
  Clifford Odets died of colon cancer at the age of
  57 in 1963 and was interred in the Forest Lawn
  Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.

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• B.His Works
• (1935) Waiting for Lefty????
• (1935) Awake and Sing! ????
• (1935) Till the Day I Die ????
• (1935) Paradise Lost ?????
• (1936) I Cant Sleep ?????
• (1937) Golden Boy ????
• (1938) Rocket to the Moon ????
• (1940) Night Music ??
• (1949) The Big Knife ??
• (1950) The Country Girl ????
  
• (1954) The Flowering Peach ?????

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• C.His Masterpiece-- Waiting for Lefty
• 1.Plot (P300, 2nd para.)
• 2.Acting (P300, third para.)
• D.His Themes
• Quite a few Odets plays concer the loneliness of
  modern life and the money-success theme in
  American society.

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• ? Tennessee Williams(1911-1983)
• A.His Life
• Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi,
• in the home of his maternal grandfather, the
• local Episcopal priest. He was of Welsh
  descent.
• By the time Thomas was three, the family had
• moved to Clarksdale, Mississippi. At five, he
  was diagnosed with diphtheria. It caused his legs
  to be paralyzed for nearly two years but his
  mother encouraged him to make up stories and
  read. She gave him a typewriter when he was 11.
• His father, Cornelius Williams, was a traveling
  salesman who became increasingly abusive as his
  children grew older. The father often favored
  Tennessee's brother Dakin.Tennessee's mother
  Edwina Dakin Williams had aspirations as a
  genteel southern lady and was smothering. She may
  have had a mood disorder.

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• In 1918, when Williams was seven, the family
  moved again, this time to University City,
  Missouri, where he later attended University City
  High School. In 1927, at age 16, Williams won
  third prize (five dollars) for an essay published
  in Smart Set entitled, "Can a Good Wife Be a Good
  Sport?" A year later, he published "The Vengeance
  of Nitocris" in Weird Tales.
• In the early 1930s Williams attended the
  University of Missouri, where he joined Alpha Tau
  Omega fraternity. His fraternity brothers dubbed
  him "Tennessee" for his rich southern drawl. In
  the late 1930s, Williams transferred to
  Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri for
  a year, and finally earned a degree from the
  University of Iowa in 1938. By then, Williams had
  written Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay!

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• B.His Works
• American Blues ????
• The Glass Menagerie ?????
  
• A Streetcar Named Desire ?????
• Summer And Smoke ????
• The Rose Tattoo ????
• Cat On a Hot Tin Roof ????????
• Suddenly Last Summer ????
• Sweet Bird of Youth ????
• Period of Adjustment ???
• Night of the Iguana ????
• The Milk Train Does Not Stop Here ????
• Red Devil Battery Sign ????
• Vieux Carre ???

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• C. His Masterpiece -- The Glass Menagerie
• 1. Plot (P302 - P305)
• 2. Themes
• The Difficulty of Accepting Reality
• Each member of the Wingfield family is unable
  to overcome this difficulty, and each, as a
  result, withdraws into a private world of
  illusion where he or she finds the comfort and
  meaning that the real world does not seem to
  offer.
• The Impossibility of True Escape
• The play takes an ambiguous attitude toward
  the moral implications and even the effectiveness
  of Tom's escape. As an able-bodied young man, he
  is locked into his life not by exterior factors
  but by

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• emotional onesby his loyalty to and possibly
  even love for Laura and Amanda. Like a jailbreak,
  Tom's escape leads him not to freedom but to the
  life of a fugitive.  
• The Unrelenting Power of Memory
• The narrator, Tom, is not the only character
  haunted by his memories. Amanda too lives in
  constant pursuit of her bygone youth, and old
  records from her childhood are almost as
  important to Laura as her glass animals. For
  these characters, memory is a crippling force
  that prevents them from finding happiness in the
  present or the offerings of the future.

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• 3. Symbol
• Laura's Glass Menagerie
• As the title of the play informs us, the
  glass menagerie or collection of animals, is the
  play's central symbol. Laura's collection of
  glass animal figurines represents a number of
  facets of her personality. Like the figurines,
  Laura is delicate, fanciful, and somehow
  old-fashioned. Glass is transparent, but, when
  light is shined upon it correctly, it refracts an
  entire rainbow of colors. Similarly, Laura,
  though quiet and bland around strangers, is a
  source of strange, multifaceted delight to those
  who choose to look at her in the right light. The
  menagerie also represents the imaginative world
  to which Laura devotes herselfa world that is
  colorful and enticing but based on fragile
  illusions.

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• D. His Themes
• Williams deals with themes such as violence, sex,
  and homosexuality.

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• ? Arthur Miller (1915 -2005)
• A. His Life
• Arthur Miller was the son of Polish-Jewish
• immigrants, Isidore and Augusta Miller.His
• father, an illiterate but wealthy
  businessman.
• The family lived on East 110th Street in
• Manhattan and owned a summer house in
• Far Rockaway, Queens. In the Wall Street
  Crash of 1929, the family lost almost everything
  and moved to Gravesend, Brooklyn. As a teenager,
  Miller delivered bread every morning before
  school to help the family make ends meet.After
  graduating in 1932 from Abraham Lincoln High
  School, he worked at several menial jobs to pay
  for his college tuition.

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• At the University of Michigan, Miller first
  majored in journalism and worked as a reporter
  and night editor for the student paper, the
  Michigan Daily.
• In 1938, Miller received a BA in English. After
  graduation, he joined the Federal Theater
  Project, a New Deal agency established to provide
  jobs in the theater.
• On August 5, 1940, he married his college
  sweetheart, Mary Slattery, the Catholic daughter
  of an insurance salesman. The couple had two
  children, Jane and Robert. Robert, a writer and
  film director, produced the 1996 movie version of
  The Crucible.
• Miller's younger sister is the actress Joan
  Copeland.

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• B. His Works
• The Man Who Had All the Luck jixing ??????
• All My Sons ????
• Death of a Salesman?????
• The Crucible ????
• A View from the Bridge ????
• Collected Plays ????
• After the Fall ????
• Incident at Vichy ????
• The Price ??(1968)
• The Creation of the World and Other Business ???
  
• The Archbishops Ceiling ???????(1977)
• The Last Yankee ??????(1991)
• Broken Glass ???(1994)

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• C. His Masterpiece -- Death of a Salesman
• 1. Plot (P306-P311)
• 2. Themes
• The American Dream 
• Willy believes wholeheartedly in what he
  considers the promise of the American Dreamthat
  a well liked and personally attractive man in
  business will indubitably and deservedly acquire
  the material comforts offered by modern American
  life. Oddly, his fixation with the superficial
  qualities of attractiveness and likeability is at
  odds with a more gritty, more rewarding
  understanding of the American Dream that
  identifies hard work without complaint as the key
  to success. Willy's interpretation of likeability
  is superficialhe childishly dislikes Bernard
  because he considers Bernard a nerd. Willy's
  blind faith in his stunted version of the
  American Dream leads to his rapid psychological
  decline when he is unable to accept the disparity
  between the

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• Dream and his own life.
• Abandonment
• Willy's life charts a course from one
  abandonment to the next, leaving him in greater
  despair each time.
• Betrayal
• Willy's primary obsession throughout the play
  is what he considers to be Biff's betrayal of his
  ambitions for him. Willy believes that he has
  every right to expect Biff to fulfill the promise
  inherent in him. When Biff walks out on Willy's
  ambitions for him, Willy takes this rejection as
  a personal affront. Willy, after all, is a
  salesman, and Biff's ego-crushing rebuff
  ultimately reflects Willy's inability to sell him
  on the American Dreamthe product in which Willy
  himself believes most faithfully. Willy assumes
  that Biff's betrayal stems from Biff's discovery
  of Willy's affair with The Womana betrayal of
  Linda's love. Whereas Willy feels that Biff has
  betrayed him, Biff feels that Willy, a phony
  little fake, has betrayed him with his unending
  stream of ego-stroking lies.

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• D. His Themes
• A tipical theme of Arthur Millers plays concers
  the dilemma of modern man in relation to his
  family and work.

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?Edward Albee(1928-)
Born 12 March 1928 ) in Washington
D.C. Occupation Dramatist Writing
period1958 present Notable work(s) Who's
Afraid of Virginia The Zoo Story The American
Dream The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? Notable
award(s) Pulitzer Prize for Drama
(1967,1975,1994) Tony Award (2002)National
Medal of Arts (1996) Special Tony Award (2005)
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His works are considered well-crafted, often
unsympathetic examinations of the modern
condition.His early works reflect a mastery and
Americanization of the Theatre of the Absurd that
found its peak in works by European playwrights
such as Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, and Eugène
Ionesco. Younger American playwrights, such as
Pulitzer Prize-winner Paula Vogel, credit Albee's
daring mix of theatricalism and biting dialogue
with helping to reinvent the post-war American
theatre in the early 1960s. Albee continued to
experiment in new works, such as The Goat or,
Who Is Sylvia? (2002 )
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Theatre of the Absurd

• ?The Theatre of the Absurd is a designation for
  particular plays written by a number of primarily
  European playwrights in the late 1940s, 1950s,
  and 1960s, as well as to the style of theatre
  which has evolved from their work.
• ? It refers to some plays the theme of which
  centers on the meaninglessness of the life with
  its pain and suffering that seems funny, even
  ridiculous.

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His Works

• The Zoo Story(first play 1958 ),ltlt??????gtgt
• The Death of Bessie Smith (1960 one-act play)
  ltlt???????gtgt
• The Sandbox (1961 one-act play) ltlt??gtgt
• The American Dream(1961 one-act play)ltlt ???gtgt
• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ( 1962, first
  full- length)
• ltlt.??????????gtgt. The Balled
  of the Sad Café (1963) ltlt ???????gtgt
• A Delicate Balance(1966 winning a Pulitzer
  Prize)ltlt?????gtgt
• Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (
  1968)
• ltlt?????gtgt
• All Over (1971) ltlt??gtgt
• Seascape (1975,winning another Pulitzer Prize
  )ltlt??gtgt
• The Lady from Dubuque (1978)ltlt ????????gtgt
• The Man Who Had 3 Arms (1983 )ltlt ???gtgt
• Three Tall Women (1994 winning the third
  Pulitzer Prize for drama )
• ltlt???????gtgt

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Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

• The play seem to have dwelled on one problem only
  , that is, the absurdity of human life built very
  much on a frail illusion and spiritual emptiness.
• Just as sexual impotence in Eliot and Hemingway
  denotes spiritual poverty, so here in Albee
  childlessness is only a representation of a much
  grave problem with which these people are beset.
• The mental suffering of all the people in the
  play is graphically illustrated here in this
  Ill-tell-you-all kind of speech,.
• The play is an impressive work. The three acts,
  Fun and Games(?????), Walpurgisnacht(????????),
  The Exorcism (????) represent the typical
  structural pattern of Albees plays normal
  opening, gradual building up towards emotional
  crack-up, and quick drop-off.

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The Virginia Woolf in the title is significant
in a couple of ways

• First, Martha is well read and has a kind of
  respect for language. Had she been younger, she
  would have identified herself with Virginia Woolf
  who had an incredible amount of verbal wit.
• Then ,Virginia Woolf is used as a homophone for
  wolf and the title is in fact a humorous way of
  repeating a line from a ballad. Who is afraid of
  the big, bad wolf? and the wolf that has scared
  the four people in the play is the hopelessness
  that stretches before them.

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(No Transcript)
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?Sam Shepard(1943-)

• Samuel Shepard Rogers III (born 5 November 1943)
  in Fort Sheridan, Illinois .
• He is an American playwright, and actor,
  director of stage and screen. He is author of
  several books of short stories, essays, and
  memoirs, and received the Pulitzer Prize for
  Drama in 1979 for his play, Buried Child.

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?He trends to explore the world of the
subconscious and the repressed. ?He feels
fascinated with subjects like incent and
violence.?One major subject fir hi is failed
family relationships, relationships that can be
terrible and impossible.

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His plays

• Buried Child.(Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 )
  ??????
• Fool for Love (1986)??
• A Lie of the Mind ?????
• Paris ??
• Texas ????
• Motel Chronicles????
• Geography of a Horse Dreamer ltlt????????gtgt
• States of Shocks ltlt??gtgt

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Buried Child

• 1?The introduction of the play
• 2?There is a hint that the buried child is born
  out of an incestuous joining between Vinces
  father and his grandmother. It represents a past
  that bears heavily on the present.
• 3?The play seems to be saying that family
  generates pains. Its members look like a global
  race of strangers.

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(No Transcript)
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?David Mamet(1947-)

• David Alan Mamet is an American author, essayist,
  playwright, screenwriter and film director. His
  works are known for their clever, terse,
  sometimes vulgar dialogue and arcane stylized
  phrasing, as well as for his exploration of
  masculinity. He received Tony Award nominations
  for Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) and Speed-the-Plow
  (1988). As a screenwriter, he received Oscar
  nominations for The Verdict (1982) and Wag the
  Dog (1997).

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Mamets major thematic concern relates to his
pessimistic view of the dilemma with which
contemporary America is faced in the areas of
social, economics, and human relationships.
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His Plays

• House of Games (1987) ltlt????gtgt
• Sexual Perversity in Chicagoltlt???????gtgt
• American Buffalo ltlt????gtgt
• Glengarry Glen Ross (1984)ltlt????gtgt
• The Wods ltlt ??gtgt
• The Shawl ltlt??gtgt
• Speed the Plow ltlt????gtgt

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American Buffalo

• One of his most ambitious works.
• It is a two-act play.
• It is once a critique of American business ethics
  and portrayal of failed human relationships.

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Style

• Apropos to Mamet's writing style, the play is
  very terse and vulgar. Teach uses the word "cunt"
  numerous times and all three of them use the word
  "fuck" quite loosely. There are not many
  monologues and the parentheticals are very
  straightforward, without any line readings

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(No Transcript)
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The major feature of recent American drama

• The multiracial and multiethnic plays on the
  stage.
• 1?African American playwright (Ausust Wilson)
• 2?The native American Indians (The native
  American Ensemble ltlt ?????gtgt)
• 3?The Asian Americans ( Laurence Yep, David Henry
  Hwang)

?
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Thanks for You Attention!