Theater in the United States
Encyclopedia
Theater
of the United States is based in the Western
tradition. Regional or resident theatres
in the United States are professional theatre companies outside of New York City that produce their own seasons.
Before the first English colony was established in 1607, Spanish dramas and Native Americans tribes performed theatrical events.
The birth of professional theatre in America may have begun with the Lewis Hallam
troupe that arrived in Williamsburg, Virginia
, in 1752. A theater was built in Williamsburg in 1716, and, in January 1736, the original Dock Street Theatre was opened in Charles Town, South Carolina. In any case, The Hallams were the first to organize a complete company of actors in Europe and bring them to the colonies
. They brought a repertoire of plays popular in London at the time, including Hamlet
, The Recruiting Officer
, and Richard III
. The Merchant of Venice
was their first performance, shown initially on September 15, 1752. Encountering opposition from religious organisations, Hallam and his company left for Jamaica
in 1754 or 1755. Soon after, Lewis Hallam, Jr., founded the American Company, opened a theater in New York, and presented the first professionally mounted American play—The Prince of Parthia
, by Thomas Godfrey—in 1767.
In the 18th century, laws forbidding the performance of plays were passed in Massachusetts
in 1750, in Pennsylvania
in 1759, and in Rhode Island
in 1761, and plays were banned in most states during the American Revolutionary War
at the urging of the Continental Congress
. In 1794, president of Yale College
, Timothy Dwight IV
, in his "Essay on the Stage", declared that "to indulge a taste for playgoing means nothing more or less than the loss of that most valuable treasure: the immortal soul."
In spite of such laws, however, a few writers tried their hand at playwriting. Most likely, the first plays written in America were by European-born authors—we know of original plays being written by Spaniard, Frenchmen and Englishmen dating back as early as 1567—although no plays were printed in America until Robert Hunter's Androboros
in 1714. Still, in the early years, most of the plays produced came from Europe; only with Godfrey's The Prince of Parthia in 1767 do we get a professionally produced play written by an American, although it was a last-minute substitute for Thomas Forrest's comic opera The Disappointment; or, The Force of Credulity
, and although the first play to treat American themes seriously, Ponteach; or, the Savages of America by Robert Rogers
, had been published in London a year earlier.
The Revolutionary period
was a boost for dramatists, for whom the political debates were fertile ground for both satire, as seen in the works of Mercy Otis Warren
and Colonel Robert Munford, and for plays about heroism, as in the works of Hugh Henry Brackenridge
. The post-war period saw the birth of American social comedy in Royall Tyler
's The Contrast
, which established a much-imitated version of the "Yankee" character, here named "Jonathan". But there were no professional dramatists until William Dunlap
, whose work as playwright, translator, manager and theatre historian has earned him the title of "Father of American Drama"; in addition to translating the plays of August von Kotzebue
and French melodramas, Dunlap wrote plays in a variety of styles, of which André
and The Father; or, American Shandyism are his best.
, "The Walnut" is the oldest theater in America. The Walnut's first theatrical production, The Rivals, was staged in 1812. In attendance were President Thomas Jefferson
and the Marquis de Lafayette.
Provincial theaters frequently lacked heat and minimal theatrical property
("props") and scenery
. Apace with the country's westward expansion, some entrepreneurs operated floating theaters on barge
s or riverboat
s that would travel from town to town. A large town could afford a long "run"—or period of time during which a touring company would stage consecutive multiple performances—of a production, and in 1841, a single play was shown in New York City for an unprecedented three weeks.
William Shakespeare
's works were commonly performed. American plays of the period were mostly melodrama
s, a famous example of which was Uncle Tom's Cabin
, adapted by H. J. Conway, from the novel of the same name by Harriet Beecher Stowe
.
In 1821, William Henry Brown established the African Grove Theatre
in New York City
. It was the third attempt to have an African-American theare, but this was the most successful of them all. The company put on not only Shakespeare, but also staged the first play written by an African-American, The Drama of King Shotaway
. The theatre was shut down in 1823. African-American theatre was relatively dormant, except for the 1858 play The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom by William Wells Brown
, who was an ex-slave. African-American works would not be regarded again until the 1920s Harlem Renaissance
.
A popular form of theatre during this time was the minstrel show
, which featured white (and sometimes, especially after the Civil War, black
) actors dressed in "blackface
(painting one's face, etc. with dark makeup to imitate the coloring of an African
or African American
)." The players entertained the audience using comic skits, parodies of popular plays and musicals, and general buffoonery and slapstick comedy, all with heavy utilization of racial stereotyping and racist
themes.
Throughout the 19th century, theatre culture was associated with hedonism
and even violence, and actors (especially women), were looked upon as little better than prostitutes. Jessie Bond
wrote that by the middle of the 19th century, "The stage was at a low ebb, Elizabethan glories and Georgian artificialities had alike faded into the past, stilted tragedy and vulgar farce were all the would-be playgoer had to choose from, and the theatre had become a place of evil repute". On April 15, 1865, less than a week after the end of the United States Civil War, Abraham Lincoln
, while watching a play at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C.
, was assassinated by a nationally popular stage-actor of the period, John Wilkes Booth
.
Victorian burlesque, a form of bawdy comic theatre mocking high art and culture, was imported from England about 1860 and in America became a form of farce
in which females in male roles mocked the politics
and culture
of the day. Criticized for its sexuality and outspokenness, this form of entertainment was hounded off the "legitimate stage" and found itself relegated to saloons and barrooms
. The female producers, such as Lydia Thompson
were replaced by their male counterparts, who toned down the politics and played up the sexuality, until the burlesque shows
eventually became little more than pretty girls in skimpy clothing singing songs, while male comedians told raunchy jokes.
The drama of the pre-war period tended to be a derivative in form, imitating European melodramas and romantic tragedies, but native in content, appealing to popular nationalism by dramatizing current events and portraying American heroism. But playwrights were limited by a set of factors, including the need for plays to be profitable, the middle-brow tastes of American theatre-goers, and the lack of copyright protection and compensation for playwrights. During this time, the best strategy for a dramatist was to become an actor and/or a manager, after the model of John Howard Payne
, Dion Boucicault
and John Brougham
. This period saw the popularity of certain native character types, especially the "Yankee", the "Negro" and the "Indian", exemplified by the characters of Jonathan
, Sambo and Metamora
. Meanwhile, increased immigration brought a number of plays about the Irish and Germans, which often dovetailed with concerns over temperance and Roman Catholic. This period also saw plays about American expansion to the West (including plays about Mormonism) and about women's rights. Among the best plays of the period are James Nelson Barker
's Superstition; or, the Fanatic Father, Anna Cora Mowatt
's Fashion; or, Life in New York, Nathaniel Bannister's Putnam, the Iron Son of '76, Dion Boucicault
's The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana
, and Cornelius Mathews
's Witchcraft; or, the Martyrs of Salem. At the same time, America had created new dramatic forms in the Tom Shows
, the showboat theater
and the minstrel show
.
allowed production companies, its actors, and large, elaborate sets to travel easily between towns, which made permanent theaters in small towns feasible. The invention and practical application of electric light
ing also led to changes to and improvements of scenery styles and the designing of theater interiors and seating areas.
In 1896, Charles Frohman
, Al Hayman
, Abe Erlanger, Mark Klaw
, Samuel F. Nixon, and Fred Zimmerman formed the Theatrical Syndicate
, which established systemized booking
networks throughout the United States, and created a management monopoly that controlled every aspect of contracts and bookings until the turn of the 20th century, when the Shubert brothers founded rival agency, The Shubert Organization
.
For playwrights, the period after the War brought more financial reward and aesthetic respect (including professional criticism) than was available earlier. In terms of form, spectacles, melodramas and farces remained popular, but poetic drama and romanticism almost died out completely due to the new emphasis upon realism, which was adopted by serious drama, melodrama and comedy alike. This realism was not quite the European realism of Ibsen
's Ghosts
, but a combination of scenic realism (e.g., the "Belasco
Method") with a less romantic view of life that accompanied the cultural turmoil of the period. The most ambitious effort towards realism during this period came from James Herne
, who was influenced by the ideas of Ibsen, Hardy
and Zola
regarding realism, truth, and literary quality; his most important achievement, Margaret Fleming
, enacts the principles he expounded in his essay "Art for Truth's Sake in the Drama". Although Fleming did not appeal to audiences—critics and audiences felt it dwelt too much on unseemly topics and included improper scenes, such as Margaret nursing her husband's illegitimate child onstage—other forms of dramatic realism were becoming more popular in melodrama (e.g., Augustin Daly
's Under the Gaslight) and in local color
plays (Bronson Howard
's Shenandoah). Other key dramatists during this period are David Belasco
, Steele MacKaye
, William Dean Howells
, Dion Boucicault
, and Clyde Fitch
.
was common in the late 19th and early 20th century, and is notable for heavily influencing early film, radio, and television productions in the country. (This was born from an earlier American practice of having singers and novelty acts perform between acts in a standard play.) George Burns
was a very long-lived American comedian
who started out in the vaudeville community, but went on to enjoy a career running until the 1990s.
Some vaudeville theaters built between about 1900 and 1920 managed to survive as well, though many went through periods of alternate use, most often as movie theaters until the second half of the century saw many urban populations decline and multiplexes
built in the suburbs. Since that time, a number have been restored to original or nearly-original condition and attract new audiences nearly one hundred years later.
By the beginning of the 20th century, legitimate 1752 (non-vaudville) theatre had become decidedly more sophisticated in the United States, as it had in Europe. The stars of this era, such as Ethel Barrymore
and John Drew
, were often seen as even more important than the show itself. The advance of motion pictures also led to many changes in theatre. The popularity of musicals may have been due in part to the fact the early films
had no sound, and could thus not compete, until The Jazz Singer
of 1927, which combined both talking and music in a moving picture. More complex and sophisticated drama
s bloomed in this time period, and acting styles became more subdued. Even by 1915, actors were being lured away from theatre and to the silver screen
, and vaudeville was beginning to face stiff competition.
While revue
s consisting of mostly unconnected songs, sketches, comedy routines, and scantily-clad dancing girls dominated for the first 20 years of the 20th century, musical theatre would eventually develop beyond this. One of the first major steps was Show Boat
, with music by Jerome Kern
and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein
. It featured songs and non-musical scenes which were integrated to develop the show's plot. The next great step forward was Oklahoma!
, with lyrics by Hammerstein and music by Richard Rodgers
. Its "dream ballets" used dance to carry forward the plot and develop the characters.
Amateur performing groups have always had a place alongside professional acting companies. The Amateur Comedy Club, Inc. was founded in New York City on April 18, 1884. It was organized by seven gentlemen who broke away from the Madison Square Dramatic Organization, a socially prominent company presided over by Mrs. James Brown Potter and David Belasco. The ACC staged its first performance on February 13, 1885. It has performed continuously ever since, making it the oldest, continuously performing theatrical society in the United States. Prominent New Yorkers who have been members of the ACC include Theodore, Frederick and John Steinway of the piano manufacturing family; Gordon Grant, the marine artist; Christopher La Farge, the architect; Van H. Cartmell, the publisher; Albert Sterner, the painter; and Edward Fales Coward, the theatre critic and playwright. Elsie De Wolfe, Lady Mendl, later famous as the world's first professional interior decorator, acted in Club productions in the early years of the 20th Century, as did Hope Williams (whom Katharine Hepburn understudied in "Holiday" in the 1920s), and Julie Harris in the 1940s. ACC directors have included Charles Coburn, Herbert Dawley, George Ferencz, Walter Greaza, Josephine Hull, Howard Lindsay, Gene Lockhart, Priestly Morrison, Ruth Rawson, Maida Reade, Jose Ruben, Janet Hayes Walker and Monty Wooley, among others.
The massive social change that went on during the Great Depression
also had an effect on theatre in the United States. Plays took on social roles, identifying with immigrants and the unemployed. The Federal Theatre Project
, a New Deal
program set up by Franklin D. Roosevelt
, helped to promote theatre and provide jobs for actors. The program staged many elaborate and controversial plays such as It Can't Happen Here
by Sinclair Lewis
and The Cradle Will Rock
by Marc Blitzstein
. By contrast, the legendary producer Brock Pemberton
(founder of the Tony Awards) was among those who felt that it was more than ever a time for comic entertainment, in order to provide an escape from the prevailing harsh social conditions: typical of his productions was Lawrence Riley
's comedy Personal Appearance
(1934), whose success on Broadway (501 performances) vindicated Pemberton.
The years between the World Wars were years of extremes. Eugene O'Neill
's plays were the high point for serious dramatic plays leading up to the outbreak of war in Europe. Beyond the Horizon
(1920), for which he won his first Pulitzer Prize; he later won Pulitzers for Anna Christie
(1922) and Strange Interlude
(1928) as well as the Nobel Prize in Literature
.
1940 proved to be a pivotal year for African-American theatre. Frederick O'Neal
and Abram Hill founded ANT, or the American Negro Theater
, the most renowned African-American theatre group of the 1940s. Their stage was small and located in the basement of a library in Harlem, and most of the shows were attended and written by African-Americans. Some shows include Theodore Browne's Natural Man (1941), Abram Hill's Walk Hard (1944), and Owen Dodson
's Garden of Time (1945). At ANT, many famous actors received their training there, including Harry Belafonte
, Sidney Poitier
, Alice
and Alvin Childress
, Osceola Archer, Ruby Dee
, Earle Hyman
, Hilda Simms
, among many others.
and Tennessee Williams
, became world-renowned.
In the 1950s and 1960s, experimentation in the Arts spread into theatre as well, with plays such as Hair
including nudity
and drug culture references. Musicals remained popular as well, and musicals such as West Side Story and A Chorus Line
broke previous records. At the same time, shows like Stephen Sondheim
's Company
began to deconstruct the musical form as it has been practiced through the mid-century, moving away from traditional plot and realistic external settings to explore the central character's inner state; his Follies
relied on pastiches of the Ziegfeld Follies
-styled revue; his Pacific Overtures
used Japanese kabuki
theatrical practices; and Merrily We Roll Along
told its story backwards. Similarly, Bob Fosse
's production of Chicago
returned the musical to its vaudeville origins.
In the late 1990s and 2000s, American theatre began to borrow from cinematic and operatic roots. For instance, Julie Taymor
, director of The Lion King
directed Die Zauberflöte at the Metropolitan Opera
. Also, Broadway musicals were developed around Disney's Mary Poppins
, Tarzan
, The Little Mermaid
, and the one that started it all, Beauty and the Beast
, which may have contributed to Times Square
's revitalization in the 1990s. Also, Mel Brooks
's The Producers
and Young Frankenstein
are based on his hit films.
, Maeterlinck
and Hauptmann
). The most notable example of this trend was the "Biblical trilogy" of William Vaughn Moody
, which also illustrate the rise of religious-themed drama during the same years, as seen in the 1899 production of Ben-Hur
and two 1901 adaptations of Quo Vadis
. Moody, however, is best known for two prose plays, The Great Divide (1906, later adapted into three film versions
) and The Faith Healer (1909), which together point the way to modern American drama in their emphasis on the emotional conflicts that lie at the heart of contemporary social conflicts. Other key playwrights from this period (in addition to continued work by Howells and Fitch) include Edward Sheldon
, Charles Rann Kennedy
and one of the most successful women playwrights in American drama, Rachel Crothers
, whose interest in women's issues can be seen in such plays as He and She (1911).
During the period between the World Wars, American drama came to maturity, thanks in large part to the works of Eugene O'Neill
and of the Provincetown Players
. O'Neill's experiments with theatrical form and his combination of Naturalist
and Expressionist techniques inspired other playwrights to use greater freedom in their works, whether expanding the techniques of Realism
, as in Susan Glaspell
's Trifles
, or borrowing more heavily from German Expressionism (e.g., Elmer Rice
's The Adding Machine
), Other distinct movements during this period include folk-drama/regionalism (Paul Green's Pulitzer-winning In Abraham's Bosom
), "pageant" drama (Green's The Lost Colony
, about the mysterious Roanoke Colony
), and even a return to poetic drama (Maxwell Anderson
's Winterset
). At the same time, the economic crisis of the Great Depression
led to the growth of protest drama, as seen in the Federal Theatre Project
's Living Newspaper
productions and in the works of Clifford Odets
(e.g., Waiting for Lefty
) and of moralist drama, as in Lillian Hellman
's The Little Foxes
and The Children's Hour
. Other key figures of this era include George S. Kaufman
, George Kelly, Langston Hughes
, S. N. Behrman
, Sidney Howard
, Robert E. Sherwood
, and a set of playwrights who followed O'Neill's path of philosophical searching, Philip Barry
, Thornton Wilder
(Our Town
) and William Saroyan
(The Time of Your Life
). Theatre criticism kept pace with the drama, such as in the work of George Jean Nathan
and in the numerous books and journals on American theater that were published during this time.
The stature that American drama had achieved between the Wars was cemented during the post-World War II generation, with the final works of O'Neill and his generation being joined by such towering figures as Tennessee Williams
and Arthur Miller
, as well as by the maturation of the musical theatre
form. Other key dramatists include William Inge
, Arthur Laurents
and Paddy Chayefsky
in the 50s, the avant garde movement of Jack Richardson, Arthur Kopit, Jack Gelber
and Edward Albee
the 60s, and the maturation of black drama through Lorraine Hansberry
, James Baldwin
and Amiri Baraka
. In the musical theatre, important figures include Rodgers and Hammerstein
, Lerner and Loewe
, Betty Comden
and Adolph Green
, Richard Adler
and Jerry Ross
, Frank Loesser
, Jule Styne
, Jerry Bock
, Meredith Willson
and Stephen Sondheim
.
The period beginning in the mid-1960s, with the passing of Civil Rights legislation and its repercussions, came the rise of an "agenda" theatre comparable to that of the 1930s. Many of the major playwrights from the mid-century continued to produce new works, but were joined by names like Sam Shepard
, Neil Simon
, Romulus Linney
, David Rabe, Lanford Wilson
, David Mamet
, and John Guare
. Many important dramatists were women, including Beth Henley
, Marsha Norman
, Wendy Wasserstein
, Megan Terry
, Paula Vogel
and María Irene Fornés
. The growth of ethnic pride movements led to more success by dramatists from racial minorities, such as black playwrights Douglas Turner Ward
, Adrienne Kennedy
, Ed Bullins
, Charles Fuller
, Suzan-Lori Parks
, Ntozake Shange
, George C. Wolfe
and August Wilson
, who created a dramatic history of United States with his cycle of plays, The Pittsburgh Cycle, one for each decade of the 20th century. Asian American theatre is represented in the early 70s by Frank Chin
and achieved international success with David Henry Hwang
's M. Butterfly
. Latino theatre grew from the local activist performances of Luis Valdez
's Chicano-focused Teatro Campesino
to his more formal plays, such as Zoot Suit
, and later to the award winning work of Cuban Americans Fornés (multiple Obies) and her student Nilo Cruz
(Pulitzer), to Puerto Rican playwrights José Rivera
and Miguel Piñero
, and to the Tony Award winning musical about Dominicans in New York City, In the Heights
. Finally, the rise of the gay rights movement and of the AIDS crisis led to a number of important gay and lesbian dramatists, including Christopher Durang
, Holly Hughes
, Karen Malpede, Terrence McNally
, Larry Kramer
, Tony Kushner
, whose Angels in America
won the Tony Award two years in a row, and composer-playwright Jonathan Larson
, whose musical Rent
ran for over twelve years.
s and Vaudeville
acts have disappeared from the landscape, but theatre remains a popular American art form. Broadway productions still entertain millions of theatregoers as productions have become more elaborate and expensive. At the same time, theatre has also served as a platform for expression, and a venue for identity exploration for under-represented, minority communities, who have formed their own companies and created their own genres of works, notably East West Players
, founded in 1965 as the first Asian American theatre
group. Notable contemporary American playwright
s include Edward Albee
, August Wilson
, Tony Kushner
, David Henry Hwang
, John Guare
, and Wendy Wasserstein
. Smaller urban theaters have stayed a source of innovation, and regional theaters remain an important part of theatre life. Drama is also taught in high school
s and college
s, which was not done in previous eras, and many become interested in theatre through this.
The Faster Times
, an online newspaper that began in 2009, features a weekly column that discusses issues and trends in American theatre.
Theatre
Theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music or dance...
of the United States is based in the Western
Western world
The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term referring to the countries of Western Europe , the countries of the Americas, as well all countries of Northern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand...
tradition. Regional or resident theatres
Regional theatre in the United States
Regional theaters, or resident theaters, in the United States are professional or semi-professional, theater companies that produce their own seasons. The term regional theatre most often refers to professional theatres outside of New York City...
in the United States are professional theatre companies outside of New York City that produce their own seasons.
Early history
The birth of professional theatre in America may have begun with the Lewis Hallam
Lewis Hallam
Lewis Hallam was an English-born actor and theatre director in the colonial United States.-Career:He arrived in North America in 1752 with his theatrical company, which first performed in Williamsburg, Virginia. In 1752, Hallam built the first theater in New York City, New York, on Nassau Street...
troupe that arrived in Williamsburg, Virginia
Williamsburg, Virginia
Williamsburg is an independent city located on the Virginia Peninsula in the Hampton Roads metropolitan area of Virginia, USA. As of the 2010 Census, the city had an estimated population of 14,068. It is bordered by James City County and York County, and is an independent city...
, in 1752. A theater was built in Williamsburg in 1716, and, in January 1736, the original Dock Street Theatre was opened in Charles Town, South Carolina. In any case, The Hallams were the first to organize a complete company of actors in Europe and bring them to the colonies
Thirteen Colonies
The Thirteen Colonies were English and later British colonies established on the Atlantic coast of North America between 1607 and 1733. They declared their independence in the American Revolution and formed the United States of America...
. They brought a repertoire of plays popular in London at the time, including Hamlet
Hamlet
The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or more simply Hamlet, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601...
, The Recruiting Officer
The Recruiting Officer
The Recruiting Officer is a 1706 play by the Irish writer George Farquhar, which follows the social and sexual exploits of two officers, the womanising Plume and the cowardly Brazen, in the town of Shrewsbury to recruit soldiers...
, and Richard III
Richard III (play)
Richard III is a history play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in approximately 1591. It depicts the Machiavellian rise to power and subsequent short reign of Richard III of England. The play is grouped among the histories in the First Folio and is most often classified...
. The Merchant of Venice
The Merchant of Venice
The Merchant of Venice is a tragic comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1596 and 1598. Though classified as a comedy in the First Folio and sharing certain aspects with Shakespeare's other romantic comedies, the play is perhaps most remembered for its dramatic...
was their first performance, shown initially on September 15, 1752. Encountering opposition from religious organisations, Hallam and his company left for Jamaica
Jamaica
Jamaica is an island nation of the Greater Antilles, in length, up to in width and 10,990 square kilometres in area. It is situated in the Caribbean Sea, about south of Cuba, and west of Hispaniola, the island harbouring the nation-states Haiti and the Dominican Republic...
in 1754 or 1755. Soon after, Lewis Hallam, Jr., founded the American Company, opened a theater in New York, and presented the first professionally mounted American play—The Prince of Parthia
The Prince of Parthia
The Prince of Parthia by Thomas Godfrey was the first play written by an American to be presented in the United States by a professional cast of actors, on April 24, 1767. It was first published in 1765.-Plot :...
, by Thomas Godfrey—in 1767.
In the 18th century, laws forbidding the performance of plays were passed in Massachusetts
Massachusetts
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...
in 1750, in Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...
in 1759, and in Rhode Island
Rhode Island
The state of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, more commonly referred to as Rhode Island , is a state in the New England region of the United States. It is the smallest U.S. state by area...
in 1761, and plays were banned in most states during the American Revolutionary War
American Revolutionary War
The American Revolutionary War , the American War of Independence, or simply the Revolutionary War, began as a war between the Kingdom of Great Britain and thirteen British colonies in North America, and ended in a global war between several European great powers.The war was the result of the...
at the urging of the Continental Congress
Continental Congress
The Continental Congress was a convention of delegates called together from the Thirteen Colonies that became the governing body of the United States during the American Revolution....
. In 1794, president of Yale College
Yale College
Yale College was the official name of Yale University from 1718 to 1887. The name now refers to the undergraduate part of the university. Each undergraduate student is assigned to one of 12 residential colleges.-Residential colleges:...
, Timothy Dwight IV
Timothy Dwight IV
Timothy Dwight was an American academic and educator, a Congregationalist minister, theologian, and author...
, in his "Essay on the Stage", declared that "to indulge a taste for playgoing means nothing more or less than the loss of that most valuable treasure: the immortal soul."
In spite of such laws, however, a few writers tried their hand at playwriting. Most likely, the first plays written in America were by European-born authors—we know of original plays being written by Spaniard, Frenchmen and Englishmen dating back as early as 1567—although no plays were printed in America until Robert Hunter's Androboros
Androboros
Androboros is a play by Robert Hunter written in 1714 when Hunter was serving as the colonial governor of New York and New Jersey. It survives as the earliest known play ever written and published in the North American British colonies...
in 1714. Still, in the early years, most of the plays produced came from Europe; only with Godfrey's The Prince of Parthia in 1767 do we get a professionally produced play written by an American, although it was a last-minute substitute for Thomas Forrest's comic opera The Disappointment; or, The Force of Credulity
The Disappointment
The Disappointment, or The Force of Credulity is a ballad opera in two acts with a prologue and epilogue, to a text by an unknown author writing under the pseudonym "Andrew Barton". William Peterson, in 1766, claimed that the opera was written by a "son of Philadelphia College," leading to...
, and although the first play to treat American themes seriously, Ponteach; or, the Savages of America by Robert Rogers
Robert Rogers (soldier)
Robert Rogers was an American colonial frontiersman. Rogers served in the British army during both the French and Indian War and the American Revolution...
, had been published in London a year earlier.
The Revolutionary period
American Revolution
The American Revolution was the political upheaval during the last half of the 18th century in which thirteen colonies in North America joined together to break free from the British Empire, combining to become the United States of America...
was a boost for dramatists, for whom the political debates were fertile ground for both satire, as seen in the works of Mercy Otis Warren
Mercy Otis Warren
Mercy Otis Warren was a political writer and propagandist of the American Revolution. In the eighteenth century, topics such as politics and war were thought to be the province of men. Few women had the education or training to write about these subjects. Warren was the exception...
and Colonel Robert Munford, and for plays about heroism, as in the works of Hugh Henry Brackenridge
Hugh Henry Brackenridge
Hugh Henry Brackenridge was an American writer, lawyer, judge, and justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.A frontier citizen in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, he founded both the Pittsburgh Academy, now the University of Pittsburgh, and the Pittsburgh Gazette, still operating today as the...
. The post-war period saw the birth of American social comedy in Royall Tyler
Royall Tyler
Royall Tyler , American jurist and playwright who wrote The Contrast in 1787 and published The Algerine Captive in 1797. He wrote several legal tracts, six plays, a musical drama, two long poems, a semifictional travel narrative, The Yankey in London , and essays...
's The Contrast
The Contrast (play)
The Contrast, written in 1787 by Royall Tyler, is an American play in the tradition of the English Restoration comedies of the seventeenth century; it takes its cue from Sheridan's The School for Scandal, a British comedy of manners that had revived that tradition a decade before. Royall uses the...
, which established a much-imitated version of the "Yankee" character, here named "Jonathan". But there were no professional dramatists until William Dunlap
William Dunlap
William Dunlap was a pioneer of the American theater. He was a producer, playwright, and actor, as well as a historian. He managed two of New York's earliest and most prominent theaters, the John Street Theatre and the Park Theatre...
, whose work as playwright, translator, manager and theatre historian has earned him the title of "Father of American Drama"; in addition to translating the plays of August von Kotzebue
August von Kotzebue
August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue was a German dramatist.One of Kotzebue's books was burned during the Wartburg festival in 1817. He was murdered in 1819 by Karl Ludwig Sand, a militant member of the Burschenschaften...
and French melodramas, Dunlap wrote plays in a variety of styles, of which André
André (play)
André is a play by William Dunlap, first produced at the Park Theatre in New York City on March 30, 1798 by the Old American Company, published in that same year together with a collection of historic documents relating to the case of Major John André, the British officer who was hanged as a spy on...
and The Father; or, American Shandyism are his best.
Pre-war theatre
At 825 Walnut Street in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is The Walnut Street Theatre, or, "The Walnut." Founded in 1809 by the Circus of Pepin and BreschardCircus of Pepin and Breschard
The equestrian theatre company of Pépin and Breschard, American Victor Pépin and Frenchman Jean Baptiste Casmiere Breschard, arrived in the United States of America from Madrid, Spain , in November 1807. They toured that new country until 1815...
, "The Walnut" is the oldest theater in America. The Walnut's first theatrical production, The Rivals, was staged in 1812. In attendance were President Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson was the principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence and the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom , the third President of the United States and founder of the University of Virginia...
and the Marquis de Lafayette.
Provincial theaters frequently lacked heat and minimal theatrical property
Theatrical property
A theatrical property, commonly referred to as a prop, is an object used on stage by actors to further the plot or story line of a theatrical production. Smaller props are referred to as "hand props". Larger props may also be set decoration, such as a chair or table. The difference between a set...
("props") and scenery
Theatrical scenery
Theatrical scenery is that which is used as a setting for a theatrical production. Scenery may be just about anything, from a single chair to an elaborately re-created street, no matter how large or how small, whether or not the item was custom-made or is, in fact, the genuine item, appropriated...
. Apace with the country's westward expansion, some entrepreneurs operated floating theaters on barge
Barge
A barge is a flat-bottomed boat, built mainly for river and canal transport of heavy goods. Some barges are not self-propelled and need to be towed by tugboats or pushed by towboats...
s or riverboat
Riverboat
A riverboat is a ship built boat designed for inland navigation on lakes, rivers, and artificial waterways. They are generally equipped and outfitted as work boats in one of the carrying trades, for freight or people transport, including luxury units constructed for entertainment enterprises, such...
s that would travel from town to town. A large town could afford a long "run"—or period of time during which a touring company would stage consecutive multiple performances—of a production, and in 1841, a single play was shown in New York City for an unprecedented three weeks.
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
's works were commonly performed. American plays of the period were mostly melodrama
Melodrama
The term melodrama refers to a dramatic work that exaggerates plot and characters in order to appeal to the emotions. It may also refer to the genre which includes such works, or to language, behavior, or events which resemble them...
s, a famous example of which was Uncle Tom's Cabin
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War", according to Will Kaufman....
, adapted by H. J. Conway, from the novel of the same name by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe was an American abolitionist and author. Her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was a depiction of life for African-Americans under slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the United States and United Kingdom...
.
In 1821, William Henry Brown established the African Grove Theatre
African Grove
The African Grove was a theatre founded and operated by free African Americans in New York City in 1821, six years before enslavement of blacks fully ended in New York state The young Ira Aldridge was said to have played at the African Grove...
in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. It was the third attempt to have an African-American theare, but this was the most successful of them all. The company put on not only Shakespeare, but also staged the first play written by an African-American, The Drama of King Shotaway
The Drama of King Shotaway
The Drama of King Shotaway, founded on Facts taken from the Insurrection of the Caravs on the Island of St. Vincent, written from Experience by Mr. Brown was the first known play by an African-American playwright, though no known copies exist. It was based on the story of Joseph...
. The theatre was shut down in 1823. African-American theatre was relatively dormant, except for the 1858 play The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom by William Wells Brown
William Wells Brown
William Wells Brown was a prominent African-American abolitionist lecturer, novelist, playwright, and historian. Born into slavery in the Southern United States, Brown escaped to the North in 1834, where he worked for abolitionist causes and was a prolific writer...
, who was an ex-slave. African-American works would not be regarded again until the 1920s Harlem Renaissance
Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after the 1925 anthology by Alain Locke...
.
A popular form of theatre during this time was the minstrel show
Minstrel show
The minstrel show, or minstrelsy, was an American entertainment consisting of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music, performed by white people in blackface or, especially after the Civil War, black people in blackface....
, which featured white (and sometimes, especially after the Civil War, black
Black people
The term black people is used in systems of racial classification for humans of a dark skinned phenotype, relative to other racial groups.Different societies apply different criteria regarding who is classified as "black", and often social variables such as class, socio-economic status also plays a...
) actors dressed in "blackface
Blackface
Blackface is a form of theatrical makeup used in minstrel shows, and later vaudeville, in which performers create a stereotyped caricature of a black person. The practice gained popularity during the 19th century and contributed to the proliferation of stereotypes such as the "happy-go-lucky darky...
(painting one's face, etc. with dark makeup to imitate the coloring of an African
African people
African people refers to natives, inhabitants, or citizen of Africa and to people of African descent.-Etymology:Many etymological hypotheses that have been postulated for the ancient name "Africa":...
or African American
African American
African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...
)." The players entertained the audience using comic skits, parodies of popular plays and musicals, and general buffoonery and slapstick comedy, all with heavy utilization of racial stereotyping and racist
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
themes.
Throughout the 19th century, theatre culture was associated with hedonism
Hedonism
Hedonism is a school of thought which argues that pleasure is the only intrinsic good. In very simple terms, a hedonist strives to maximize net pleasure .-Etymology:The name derives from the Greek word for "delight" ....
and even violence, and actors (especially women), were looked upon as little better than prostitutes. Jessie Bond
Jessie Bond
Jessie Bond was an English singer and actress best known for creating the mezzo-soprano soubrette roles in the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas. She spent twenty years on the stage, the bulk of them with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.Musical from an early age, Bond began a concert singing...
wrote that by the middle of the 19th century, "The stage was at a low ebb, Elizabethan glories and Georgian artificialities had alike faded into the past, stilted tragedy and vulgar farce were all the would-be playgoer had to choose from, and the theatre had become a place of evil repute". On April 15, 1865, less than a week after the end of the United States Civil War, Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through a great constitutional, military and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union, while ending slavery, and...
, while watching a play at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
, was assassinated by a nationally popular stage-actor of the period, John Wilkes Booth
John Wilkes Booth
John Wilkes Booth was an American stage actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre, in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865. Booth was a member of the prominent 19th century Booth theatrical family from Maryland and, by the 1860s, was a well-known actor...
.
Victorian burlesque, a form of bawdy comic theatre mocking high art and culture, was imported from England about 1860 and in America became a form of farce
Farce
In theatre, a farce is a comedy which aims at entertaining the audience by means of unlikely, extravagant, and improbable situations, disguise and mistaken identity, verbal humour of varying degrees of sophistication, which may include word play, and a fast-paced plot whose speed usually increases,...
in which females in male roles mocked the politics
Politics
Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, including behavior within civil governments, but also applies to institutions, fields, and special interest groups such as the...
and culture
Culture
Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
of the day. Criticized for its sexuality and outspokenness, this form of entertainment was hounded off the "legitimate stage" and found itself relegated to saloons and barrooms
Bar (establishment)
A bar is a business establishment that serves alcoholic drinks — beer, wine, liquor, and cocktails — for consumption on the premises.Bars provide stools or chairs that are placed at tables or counters for their patrons. Some bars have entertainment on a stage, such as a live band, comedians, go-go...
. The female producers, such as Lydia Thompson
Lydia Thompson
Lydia Thompson, born Eliza Hodges Thompson , was an English dancer, actress and theatrical producer....
were replaced by their male counterparts, who toned down the politics and played up the sexuality, until the burlesque shows
American burlesque
American Burlesque is a genre of variety show. Derived from elements of Victorian burlesque, music hall and minstrel shows, burlesque shows in America became popular in the 1860s and evolved to feature ribald comedy and female striptease...
eventually became little more than pretty girls in skimpy clothing singing songs, while male comedians told raunchy jokes.
The drama of the pre-war period tended to be a derivative in form, imitating European melodramas and romantic tragedies, but native in content, appealing to popular nationalism by dramatizing current events and portraying American heroism. But playwrights were limited by a set of factors, including the need for plays to be profitable, the middle-brow tastes of American theatre-goers, and the lack of copyright protection and compensation for playwrights. During this time, the best strategy for a dramatist was to become an actor and/or a manager, after the model of John Howard Payne
John Howard Payne
John Howard Payne was an American actor, poet, playwright, and author who had most of his theatrical career and success in London. He is today most remembered as the creator of "Home! Sweet Home!", a song he wrote in 1822 that became widely popular in the United States, Great Britain, and the...
, Dion Boucicault
Dion Boucicault
Dionysius Lardner Boursiquot , commonly known as Dion Boucicault, was an Irish actor and playwright famed for his melodramas. By the later part of the 19th century, Boucicault had become known on both sides of the Atlantic as one of the most successful actor-playwright-managers then in the...
and John Brougham
John Brougham
John Brougham was an Irish-American actor and dramatist.-Biography:He was born at Dublin. His father was an amateur painter, and died young. His mother was the daughter of a Huguenot, whom political adversity had forced into exile. John was the eldest of three children...
. This period saw the popularity of certain native character types, especially the "Yankee", the "Negro" and the "Indian", exemplified by the characters of Jonathan
Brother Jonathan
Brother Jonathan was a fictional character created to personify the entire United States, in the early days of the country's existence.In editorial cartoons and patriotic posters, Brother Jonathan was usually depicted as a typical American revolutionary, with tri-cornered hat and long military jacket...
, Sambo and Metamora
Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags
Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags is a play originally starring Edwin Forrest. The play was written in 1829 by John Augustus StoneIt was first performed December 15, 1829, at the Park Theater in New York City....
. Meanwhile, increased immigration brought a number of plays about the Irish and Germans, which often dovetailed with concerns over temperance and Roman Catholic. This period also saw plays about American expansion to the West (including plays about Mormonism) and about women's rights. Among the best plays of the period are James Nelson Barker
James Nelson Barker
James Nelson Barker was an American soldier, playwright, and politician. He rose to major in the army during the War of 1812, wrote ten plays, and served as mayor of Philadelphia.-Life:...
's Superstition; or, the Fanatic Father, Anna Cora Mowatt
Anna Cora Mowatt
Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie was an author, playwright, public reader, and actress.- Childhood :Anna Cora Ogden was born in Bordeaux, France, March 5, 1819. She was the tenth of fourteen children. Her father was Samuel Gouveneur Ogden , an American merchant...
's Fashion; or, Life in New York, Nathaniel Bannister's Putnam, the Iron Son of '76, Dion Boucicault
Dion Boucicault
Dionysius Lardner Boursiquot , commonly known as Dion Boucicault, was an Irish actor and playwright famed for his melodramas. By the later part of the 19th century, Boucicault had become known on both sides of the Atlantic as one of the most successful actor-playwright-managers then in the...
's The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana
The Octoroon
The Octoroon is a play by Dion Boucicault, which opened in 1859 at The Winter Garden Theatre. Boucicault adapted the play from the novel The Quadroon by Thomas Mayne Reid . It concerns the residents of a Louisiana plantation called Terrebonne. The play was very popular in its day, and sparked...
, and Cornelius Mathews
Cornelius Mathews
Cornelius Mathews , was an American writer, best known for his crucial role in the formation of a literary group known as Young America in the late 1830s, with editor Evert Duyckinck and author William Gilmore Simms....
's Witchcraft; or, the Martyrs of Salem. At the same time, America had created new dramatic forms in the Tom Shows
Tom Shows
Tom Shows were stage plays and musicals based on the 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. The novel depicts the harsh reality of slavery...
, the showboat theater
Showboat
A showboat, or show boat, was a form of theater that traveled along the waterways of the United States, especially along the Mississippi and Ohio rivers . A showboat was basically a barge that resembled a long, flat-roofed house, and in order to move down the river, it was pushed by a small tugboat...
and the minstrel show
Minstrel show
The minstrel show, or minstrelsy, was an American entertainment consisting of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music, performed by white people in blackface or, especially after the Civil War, black people in blackface....
.
Post-war theatre
In the postbellum North, theatre flourished as a post-war boom allowed longer and more-frequent productions. The advent of American rail transportRail transport
Rail transport is a means of conveyance of passengers and goods by way of wheeled vehicles running on rail tracks. In contrast to road transport, where vehicles merely run on a prepared surface, rail vehicles are also directionally guided by the tracks they run on...
allowed production companies, its actors, and large, elaborate sets to travel easily between towns, which made permanent theaters in small towns feasible. The invention and practical application of electric light
Electric light
Electric lights are a convenient and economic form of artificial lighting which provide increased comfort, safety and efficiency. Most electric lighting is powered by centrally-generated electric power, but lighting may also be powered by mobile or standby electric generators or battery systems...
ing also led to changes to and improvements of scenery styles and the designing of theater interiors and seating areas.
Charles Frohman
Charles Frohman was an American theatrical producer. Frohman was producing plays by 1889 and acquired his first Broadway theatre by 1892. He discovered and promoted many stars of the American theatre....
, Al Hayman
Al Hayman
Al Hayman, also known as Raphael Hayman, was the business partner of the better-known Charles Frohman who together with others established the Theatrical Syndicate in 1896 and as theater impresarios and booking agents helped develop the theater district in New York at the turn of the 20th...
, Abe Erlanger, Mark Klaw
Marcus Klaw
Marc Alonzo Klaw was an American lawyer, theatrical producer, theatre owner, and a leading figure of the Theatrical Syndicate....
, Samuel F. Nixon, and Fred Zimmerman formed the Theatrical Syndicate
Theatrical Syndicate
-Beginnings:One day, early in the year 1896, six men gathered for lunch at the Holland House in New York City. These men were Charles Frohman, Al Hayman, A.L. Erlanger, Marc Klaw, Samuel F. Nirdlinger, and Frederick Zimmerman...
, which established systemized booking
Talent agent
A talent agent, or booking agent, is a person who finds jobs for actors, authors, film directors, musicians, models, producers, professional athletes, writers and other people in various entertainment businesses. Having an agent is not required, but does help the artist in getting jobs...
networks throughout the United States, and created a management monopoly that controlled every aspect of contracts and bookings until the turn of the 20th century, when the Shubert brothers founded rival agency, The Shubert Organization
The Shubert Organization
The Shubert Organization is a theatrical producing organization and a major owner of legitimate theatres based in Manhattan, New York City. It was founded by the Shubert brothers, Sam S. Shubert, Lee Shubert, and Jacob J. Shubert of Syracuse, New York in the late 19th century in upstate New York,...
.
For playwrights, the period after the War brought more financial reward and aesthetic respect (including professional criticism) than was available earlier. In terms of form, spectacles, melodramas and farces remained popular, but poetic drama and romanticism almost died out completely due to the new emphasis upon realism, which was adopted by serious drama, melodrama and comedy alike. This realism was not quite the European realism of Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father of prose drama" and is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre...
's Ghosts
Ghosts (play)
Ghosts is a play by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. It was written in 1881 and first staged in 1882.Like many of Ibsen's better-known plays, Ghosts is a scathing commentary on 19th century morality....
, but a combination of scenic realism (e.g., the "Belasco
David Belasco
David Belasco was an American theatrical producer, impresario, director and playwright.-Biography:Born in San Francisco, California, where his Sephardic Jewish parents had moved from London, England, during the Gold Rush, he began working in a San Francisco theatre doing a variety of routine jobs,...
Method") with a less romantic view of life that accompanied the cultural turmoil of the period. The most ambitious effort towards realism during this period came from James Herne
James Herne
James A. Herne , was an American playwright, born James Ahearn. Considered by some critics to be the "American Ibsen," his controversial play Margaret Fleming is often credited with having begun modern drama in America....
, who was influenced by the ideas of Ibsen, Hardy
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy, OM was an English novelist and poet. While his works typically belong to the Naturalism movement, several poems display elements of the previous Romantic and Enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural.While he regarded himself primarily as a...
and Zola
Émile Zola
Émile François Zola was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism...
regarding realism, truth, and literary quality; his most important achievement, Margaret Fleming
Margaret Fleming
Margaret Fleming, written by James Herne, is an 1890 play. The play is remarkable because many critics consider it to be the first "modern" drama, a play that focused more on the psychological complexities of its characters and on the role of social determinism the characters' lives than on...
, enacts the principles he expounded in his essay "Art for Truth's Sake in the Drama". Although Fleming did not appeal to audiences—critics and audiences felt it dwelt too much on unseemly topics and included improper scenes, such as Margaret nursing her husband's illegitimate child onstage—other forms of dramatic realism were becoming more popular in melodrama (e.g., Augustin Daly
Augustin Daly
John Augustin Daly was an American theatrical manager and playwright active in both the US and UK.-Biography:Daly was born in Plymouth, North Carolina and educated at Norfolk, Va...
's Under the Gaslight) and in local color
Regionalism (literature)
In literature, regionalism or local color refers to fiction or poetry that focuses on specific features – including characters, dialects, customs, history, and topography – of a particular region...
plays (Bronson Howard
Bronson Howard
Bronson Howard was a well-known American dramatist and son of Detroit mayor Charles Howard. He prepared for college at New Haven, Conn., but instead of entering Yale he turned to Journalism in New York. From 1867 to 1872 he worked on several newspapers, among them the Evening Mail and the Tribune...
's Shenandoah). Other key dramatists during this period are David Belasco
David Belasco
David Belasco was an American theatrical producer, impresario, director and playwright.-Biography:Born in San Francisco, California, where his Sephardic Jewish parents had moved from London, England, during the Gold Rush, he began working in a San Francisco theatre doing a variety of routine jobs,...
, Steele MacKaye
Steele MacKaye
James Morrison Steele MacKaye was an American playwright, actor, theater manager and inventor. Having acted, written, directed and produced numerous and popular plays and theatrical spectaculars of the day, he became one of the most famous actors and theater producers of his...
, William Dean Howells
William Dean Howells
William Dean Howells was an American realist author and literary critic. Nicknamed "The Dean of American Letters", he was particularly known for his tenure as editor of the Atlantic Monthly as well as his own writings, including the Christmas story "Christmas Every Day" and the novel The Rise of...
, Dion Boucicault
Dion Boucicault
Dionysius Lardner Boursiquot , commonly known as Dion Boucicault, was an Irish actor and playwright famed for his melodramas. By the later part of the 19th century, Boucicault had become known on both sides of the Atlantic as one of the most successful actor-playwright-managers then in the...
, and Clyde Fitch
Clyde Fitch
Clyde Fitch was an American dramatist.-Biography:Born William Clyde Fitch at Elmira, New York, he wrote over 60 plays, 36 of them original, which varied from social comedies and farces to melodrama and historical dramas.As the only child to live to adulthood, his father, Captain William G...
.
Theatre
VaudevilleVaudeville
Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...
was common in the late 19th and early 20th century, and is notable for heavily influencing early film, radio, and television productions in the country. (This was born from an earlier American practice of having singers and novelty acts perform between acts in a standard play.) George Burns
George Burns
George Burns , born Nathan Birnbaum, was an American comedian, actor, and writer.He was one of the few entertainers whose career successfully spanned vaudeville, film, radio, television and movies, with and without his wife, Gracie Allen. His arched eyebrow and cigar smoke punctuation became...
was a very long-lived American comedian
Comedian
A comedian or comic is a person who seeks to entertain an audience, primarily by making them laugh. This might be through jokes or amusing situations, or acting a fool, as in slapstick, or employing prop comedy...
who started out in the vaudeville community, but went on to enjoy a career running until the 1990s.
Some vaudeville theaters built between about 1900 and 1920 managed to survive as well, though many went through periods of alternate use, most often as movie theaters until the second half of the century saw many urban populations decline and multiplexes
Movie theater
A movie theater, cinema, movie house, picture theater, film theater is a venue, usually a building, for viewing motion pictures ....
built in the suburbs. Since that time, a number have been restored to original or nearly-original condition and attract new audiences nearly one hundred years later.
By the beginning of the 20th century, legitimate 1752 (non-vaudville) theatre had become decidedly more sophisticated in the United States, as it had in Europe. The stars of this era, such as Ethel Barrymore
Ethel Barrymore
Ethel Barrymore was an American actress and a member of the Barrymore family of actors.-Early life:Ethel Barrymore was born Ethel Mae Blythe in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the second child of the actors Maurice Barrymore and Georgiana Drew...
and John Drew
John Drew
John Drew was an Irish-American stage actor and theatre manager.-Early life:Born Jonathan Henry Drewland in Dublin, Ireland, to Thomas L. Drew and Louise Kanten, he was the fifth of six children. He lived in Templeogue, a poor Irish village in County Dublin during the 19th century...
, were often seen as even more important than the show itself. The advance of motion pictures also led to many changes in theatre. The popularity of musicals may have been due in part to the fact the early films
Silent film
A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound, especially with no spoken dialogue. In silent films for entertainment the dialogue is transmitted through muted gestures, pantomime and title cards...
had no sound, and could thus not compete, until The Jazz Singer
The Jazz Singer (1927 film)
The Jazz Singer is a 1927 American musical film. The first feature-length motion picture with synchronized dialogue sequences, its release heralded the commercial ascendance of the "talkies" and the decline of the silent film era. Produced by Warner Bros. with its Vitaphone sound-on-disc system,...
of 1927, which combined both talking and music in a moving picture. More complex and sophisticated drama
Drama
Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "action" , which is derived from "to do","to act" . The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a...
s bloomed in this time period, and acting styles became more subdued. Even by 1915, actors were being lured away from theatre and to the silver screen
Silver screen
A silver screen, also known as a silver lenticular screen, is a type of projection screen that was popular in the early years of the motion picture industry and passed into popular usage as a metonym for the cinema industry...
, and vaudeville was beginning to face stiff competition.
While revue
Revue
A revue is a type of multi-act popular theatrical entertainment that combines music, dance and sketches. The revue has its roots in 19th century American popular entertainment and melodrama but grew into a substantial cultural presence of its own during its golden years from 1916 to 1932...
s consisting of mostly unconnected songs, sketches, comedy routines, and scantily-clad dancing girls dominated for the first 20 years of the 20th century, musical theatre would eventually develop beyond this. One of the first major steps was Show Boat
Show Boat
Show Boat is a musical in two acts with music by Jerome Kern and book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. It was originally produced in New York in 1927 and in London in 1928, and was based on the 1926 novel of the same name by Edna Ferber. The plot chronicles the lives of those living and working...
, with music by Jerome Kern
Jerome Kern
Jerome David Kern was an American composer of musical theatre and popular music. One of the most important American theatre composers of the early 20th century, he wrote more than 700 songs, used in over 100 stage works, including such classics as "Ol' Man River", "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man", "A...
and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein
Oscar Hammerstein II
Oscar Greeley Clendenning Hammerstein II was an American librettist, theatrical producer, and theatre director of musicals for almost forty years. Hammerstein won eight Tony Awards and was twice awarded an Academy Award for "Best Original Song". Many of his songs are standard repertoire for...
. It featured songs and non-musical scenes which were integrated to develop the show's plot. The next great step forward was Oklahoma!
Oklahoma!
Oklahoma! is the first musical written by composer Richard Rodgers and librettist Oscar Hammerstein II. The musical is based on Lynn Riggs' 1931 play, Green Grow the Lilacs. Set in Oklahoma Territory outside the town of Claremore in 1906, it tells the story of cowboy Curly McLain and his romance...
, with lyrics by Hammerstein and music by Richard Rodgers
Richard Rodgers
Richard Charles Rodgers was an American composer of music for more than 900 songs and for 43 Broadway musicals. He also composed music for films and television. He is best known for his songwriting partnerships with the lyricists Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II...
. Its "dream ballets" used dance to carry forward the plot and develop the characters.
Amateur performing groups have always had a place alongside professional acting companies. The Amateur Comedy Club, Inc. was founded in New York City on April 18, 1884. It was organized by seven gentlemen who broke away from the Madison Square Dramatic Organization, a socially prominent company presided over by Mrs. James Brown Potter and David Belasco. The ACC staged its first performance on February 13, 1885. It has performed continuously ever since, making it the oldest, continuously performing theatrical society in the United States. Prominent New Yorkers who have been members of the ACC include Theodore, Frederick and John Steinway of the piano manufacturing family; Gordon Grant, the marine artist; Christopher La Farge, the architect; Van H. Cartmell, the publisher; Albert Sterner, the painter; and Edward Fales Coward, the theatre critic and playwright. Elsie De Wolfe, Lady Mendl, later famous as the world's first professional interior decorator, acted in Club productions in the early years of the 20th Century, as did Hope Williams (whom Katharine Hepburn understudied in "Holiday" in the 1920s), and Julie Harris in the 1940s. ACC directors have included Charles Coburn, Herbert Dawley, George Ferencz, Walter Greaza, Josephine Hull, Howard Lindsay, Gene Lockhart, Priestly Morrison, Ruth Rawson, Maida Reade, Jose Ruben, Janet Hayes Walker and Monty Wooley, among others.
The massive social change that went on during the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
also had an effect on theatre in the United States. Plays took on social roles, identifying with immigrants and the unemployed. The Federal Theatre Project
Federal Theatre Project
The Federal Theatre Project was a New Deal project to fund theatre and other live artistic performances in the United States during the Great Depression. It was one of five Federal One projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administration...
, a New Deal
New Deal
The New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They were passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were Roosevelt's responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call...
program set up by Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin Delano Roosevelt , also known by his initials, FDR, was the 32nd President of the United States and a central figure in world events during the mid-20th century, leading the United States during a time of worldwide economic crisis and world war...
, helped to promote theatre and provide jobs for actors. The program staged many elaborate and controversial plays such as It Can't Happen Here
It Can't Happen Here
It Can't Happen Here is a semi-satirical American political novel by Sinclair Lewis published in 1935 by Doubleday, Doran. It describes the rise of a populist politician who calls his movement "patriotic" and creates his own militia and takes unconstitutional power after winning election —...
by Sinclair Lewis
Sinclair Lewis
Harry Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of...
and The Cradle Will Rock
The Cradle Will Rock
The Cradle Will Rock is a 1937 musical by Marc Blitzstein. Originally a part of the Federal Theatre Project, it was directed by Orson Welles, and produced by John Houseman. The show was recorded and released on seven 78-rpm discs in 1938, making it the first cast album recording.The musical is a...
by Marc Blitzstein
Marc Blitzstein
Marcus Samuel Blitzstein, better known as Marc Blitzstein , was an American composer. He won national attention in 1937 when his pro-union musical The Cradle Will Rock, directed by Orson Welles, was shut down by the Works Progress Administration...
. By contrast, the legendary producer Brock Pemberton
Brock Pemberton
Brock Pemberton was an American theatrical producer, director and founder of the Tony Awards.Pemberton was born in Leavenworth, Kansas and attended the University of Kansas. Before becoming a producer he was a press agent in New York...
(founder of the Tony Awards) was among those who felt that it was more than ever a time for comic entertainment, in order to provide an escape from the prevailing harsh social conditions: typical of his productions was Lawrence Riley
Lawrence Riley
Lawrence Riley was a successful American playwright and screenwriter. He gained fame in 1934 as the author of the Broadway hit Personal Appearance, which was turned by Mae West into the classic film Go West, Young Man , starring herself.-Biography:Riley was a Princeton University alumnus and a...
's comedy Personal Appearance
Personal Appearance
Personal Appearance is a stage comedy by the American playwright and screenwriter Lawrence Riley , which was a Broadway smash and the basis for the classic Mae West film Go West, Young Man ....
(1934), whose success on Broadway (501 performances) vindicated Pemberton.
The years between the World Wars were years of extremes. Eugene O'Neill
Eugene O'Neill
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into American drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish...
's plays were the high point for serious dramatic plays leading up to the outbreak of war in Europe. Beyond the Horizon
Beyond the Horizon (play)
Beyond the Horizon is a 1920 play written by American playwright Eugene O'Neill. It was O'Neill's first full-length work, and the winner of the 1920 Pulitzer Prize for Drama....
(1920), for which he won his first Pulitzer Prize; he later won Pulitzers for Anna Christie
Anna Christie
Anna Christie is a play in four acts by Eugene O'Neill. It made its Broadway debut at the Vanderbilt Theatre on November 2, 1921. O'Neill received the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his work.-Plot summary:...
(1922) and Strange Interlude
Strange Interlude
Strange Interlude is an experimental play by American playwright Eugene O'Neill. O'Neill finished the play in 1923, but it was not produced on Broadway until 1928, when it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Lynn Fontanne originated the central role of Nina Leeds on Broadway...
(1928) as well as the Nobel Prize in Literature
Nobel Prize in Literature
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...
.
1940 proved to be a pivotal year for African-American theatre. Frederick O'Neal
Frederick O'Neal
Frederick O'Neal was an American actor, theater producer and television director. He founded the American Negro Theater and was the first African-American president of the Actors' Equity Association...
and Abram Hill founded ANT, or the American Negro Theater
American Negro Theater
The American Negro Theater was formed in Harlem on June 5, 1940 by writer Abram Hill and actor Frederick O'Neal. It produced 19 plays before closing in 1949. Designed as a community theater group, performances were held in Harlem's Schomburg Library. In 1942, ANT began its Studio Theatre training...
, the most renowned African-American theatre group of the 1940s. Their stage was small and located in the basement of a library in Harlem, and most of the shows were attended and written by African-Americans. Some shows include Theodore Browne's Natural Man (1941), Abram Hill's Walk Hard (1944), and Owen Dodson
Owen Dodson
Owen Vincent Dodson was an American poet, novelist, and playwright. He was one of the leading African American poets of his time, associated with the generation of black poets following the Harlem Renaissance....
's Garden of Time (1945). At ANT, many famous actors received their training there, including Harry Belafonte
Harry Belafonte
Harold George "Harry" Belafonte, Jr. is an American singer, songwriter, actor and social activist. He was dubbed the "King of Calypso" for popularizing the Caribbean musical style with an international audience in the 1950s...
, Sidney Poitier
Sidney Poitier
Sir Sidney Poitier, KBE is a Bahamian American actor, film director, author, and diplomat.In 1963, Poitier became the first black person to win an Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in Lilies of the Field...
, Alice
Alice Childress
Alice Childress was an American playwright, actor, and author.-Early life:Childress was born in South Carolina, but at age nine, after her parents separated, she moved to Harlem where she lived with her grandmother on 118th Street, between Lenox Avenue and Fifth Avenue...
and Alvin Childress
Alvin Childress
Alvin Childress was an African American actor who is best known for playing the cabdriver Amos Jones in the 1950s television comedy series Amos 'n Andy.-Biography:...
, Osceola Archer, Ruby Dee
Ruby Dee
Ruby Dee is an American actress, poet, playwright, screenwriter, journalist, and activist, perhaps best known for co-starring in the film A Raisin in the Sun and the film American Gangster for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.-Early years:Dee was born Ruby...
, Earle Hyman
Earle Hyman
Earle Hyman is an American stage, television, and film actor. Hyman is known for his recurring role on The Cosby Show as Cliff's father, Russell Huxtable.-Career:...
, Hilda Simms
Hilda Simms
Hilda Simms was an African-American stage actress, best known for her starring role on Broadway in Anna Lucasta.-Early years:...
, among many others.
Post World War II theatre
After World War II, American theatre came into its own. Several American playwrights, such as Arthur MillerArthur Miller
Arthur Asher Miller was an American playwright and essayist. He was a prominent figure in American theatre, writing dramas that include plays such as All My Sons , Death of a Salesman , The Crucible , and A View from the Bridge .Miller was often in the public eye,...
and Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams
Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III was an American writer who worked principally as a playwright in the American theater. He also wrote short stories, novels, poetry, essays, screenplays and a volume of memoirs...
, became world-renowned.
In the 1950s and 1960s, experimentation in the Arts spread into theatre as well, with plays such as Hair
Hair (musical)
Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical is a rock musical with a book and lyrics by James Rado and Gerome Ragni and music by Galt MacDermot. A product of the hippie counter-culture and sexual revolution of the 1960s, several of its songs became anthems of the anti-Vietnam War peace movement...
including nudity
Nudity
Nudity is the state of wearing no clothing. The wearing of clothing is exclusively a human characteristic. The amount of clothing worn depends on functional considerations and social considerations...
and drug culture references. Musicals remained popular as well, and musicals such as West Side Story and A Chorus Line
A Chorus Line
A Chorus Line is a 1975 musical about Broadway dancers auditioning for spots on a chorus line. The book was authored by James Kirkwood, Jr. and Nicholas Dante, lyrics were written by Edward Kleban, and music was composed by Marvin Hamlisch....
broke previous records. At the same time, shows like Stephen Sondheim
Stephen Sondheim
Stephen Joshua Sondheim is an American composer and lyricist for stage and film. He is the winner of an Academy Award, multiple Tony Awards including the Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre, multiple Grammy Awards, a Pulitzer Prize and the Laurence Olivier Award...
's Company
Company (musical)
Company is a musical with a book by George Furth and music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. The original production was nominated for a record-setting fourteen Tony Awards and won six....
began to deconstruct the musical form as it has been practiced through the mid-century, moving away from traditional plot and realistic external settings to explore the central character's inner state; his Follies
Follies
Follies is a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by James Goldman. The story concerns a reunion in a crumbling Broadway theatre, scheduled for demolition, of the past performers of the "Weismann's Follies," a musical revue , that played in that theatre between the World Wars...
relied on pastiches of the Ziegfeld Follies
Ziegfeld Follies
The Ziegfeld Follies were a series of elaborate theatrical productions on Broadway in New York City from 1907 through 1931. They became a radio program in 1932 and 1936 as The Ziegfeld Follies of the Air....
-styled revue; his Pacific Overtures
Pacific Overtures
Pacific Overtures is a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, a libretto by John Weidman, and additional material by Hugh Wheeler. The musical is set in 1853 Japan and follows the difficult Westernization of Japan, through the lives of two friends caught in the change...
used Japanese kabuki
Kabuki
is classical Japanese dance-drama. Kabuki theatre is known for the stylization of its drama and for the elaborate make-up worn by some of its performers.The individual kanji characters, from left to right, mean sing , dance , and skill...
theatrical practices; and Merrily We Roll Along
Merrily We Roll Along (musical)
Merrily We Roll Along is a musical with a book by George Furth and lyrics and music by Stephen Sondheim. It is based on the 1934 play of the same name by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart....
told its story backwards. Similarly, Bob Fosse
Bob Fosse
Robert Louis “Bob” Fosse was an American actor, dancer, musical theater choreographer, director, screenwriter, film editor and film director. He won an unprecedented eight Tony Awards for choreography, as well as one for direction...
's production of Chicago
Chicago (musical)
Chicago is a musical set in Prohibition-era Chicago. The music is by John Kander with lyrics by Fred Ebb and a book by Ebb and Bob Fosse. The story is a satire on corruption in the administration of criminal justice and the concept of the "celebrity criminal"...
returned the musical to its vaudeville origins.
In the late 1990s and 2000s, American theatre began to borrow from cinematic and operatic roots. For instance, Julie Taymor
Julie Taymor
Julie Taymor is an American director of theater, opera and film. Taymor's work has received many accolades from critics, and she has earned two Tony Awards out of four nominations, the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Costume Design, an Emmy Award and an Academy Award nomination for Original Song...
, director of The Lion King
The Lion King (musical)
The Lion King is a musical based on the 1994 Disney animated film of the same name with music by Elton John and lyrics by Tim Rice along with the musical score created by Hans Zimmer with choral arrangements by Lebo M. Directed by Julie Taymor, the musical features actors in animal costumes as well...
directed Die Zauberflöte at the Metropolitan Opera
Metropolitan Opera
The Metropolitan Opera is an opera company, located in New York City. Originally founded in 1880, the company gave its first performance on October 22, 1883. The company is operated by the non-profit Metropolitan Opera Association, with Peter Gelb as general manager...
. Also, Broadway musicals were developed around Disney's Mary Poppins
Mary Poppins (musical)
Mary Poppins is a Walt Disney Theatrical musical based on the similarly titled series of children's books by P. L. Travers and the Disney 1964 film. The West End production opened in December 2004 and received two Olivier Awards, one for Best Actress in a Musical and the other for Best Theatre...
, Tarzan
Tarzan (musical)
Tarzan: The Musical is based on the Disney film of the same name and the story by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Music and lyrics are written by Phil Collins, with a book by David Henry Hwang.-Production:...
, The Little Mermaid
The Little Mermaid (musical)
The Little Mermaid is a stage musical produced by Disney Theatrical, based on the animated 1989 Disney film of the same name and the classic story of The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen...
, and the one that started it all, Beauty and the Beast
Beauty and the Beast (musical)
Beauty and the Beast is a musical with music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Howard Ashman and Tim Rice and a book by Linda Woolverton, based on the 1991 Disney film of the same name. Seven new songs were written for the stage musical...
, which may have contributed to Times Square
Times Square
Times Square is a major commercial intersection in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, at the junction of Broadway and Seventh Avenue and stretching from West 42nd to West 47th Streets...
's revitalization in the 1990s. Also, Mel Brooks
Mel Brooks
Mel Brooks is an American film director, screenwriter, composer, lyricist, comedian, actor and producer. He is best known as a creator of broad film farces and comic parodies. He began his career as a stand-up comic and as a writer for the early TV variety show Your Show of Shows...
's The Producers
The Producers (musical)
The Producers is a musical adapted by Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan from Brooks' 1968 film of the same name, with lyrics written by Brooks and music composed by Brooks and arranged by Glen Kelly and Doug Besterman. As in the film, the story concerns two theatrical producers who scheme to get rich...
and Young Frankenstein
Young Frankenstein (musical)
Young Frankenstein, officially known as The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein, is a musical with a book by Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan and music and lyrics by Brooks. It is based on the 1974 comedy film of the same name written by Brooks and Gene Wilder and directed by Brooks, who has...
are based on his hit films.
Drama
The early years of the 20th century, before World War I, continued to see realism as the main development in drama. But starting around 1900, there was a revival of poetic drama in the States, corresponding to a similar revival in Europe (e.g. YeatsWilliam Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...
, Maeterlinck
Maurice Maeterlinck
Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck, also called Comte Maeterlinck from 1932, was a Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist who wrote in French. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911. The main themes in his work are death and the meaning of life...
and Hauptmann
Gerhart Hauptmann
Gerhart Hauptmann was a German dramatist and novelist who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1912.-Life and work:...
). The most notable example of this trend was the "Biblical trilogy" of William Vaughn Moody
William Vaughn Moody
William Vaughn Moody was a United States dramatist and poet. Author of The Great Divide, first presented under the title of The Sabine Woman at the Garrick Theatre in Chicago on April 12, 1906...
, which also illustrate the rise of religious-themed drama during the same years, as seen in the 1899 production of Ben-Hur
Ben-Hur (play)
Ben Hur was an 1899 dramatization of the 1880 novel Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ by Lew Wallace. It was dramatized by William W. Young and produced by Marc Klaw and A. L. Erlanger. Inspired by the popular equestrian dramas of nineteenth century London, the production was notable for its elaborate...
and two 1901 adaptations of Quo Vadis
Quo Vadis (novel)
Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero, commonly known as Quo Vadis, is a historical novel written by Henryk Sienkiewicz in Polish. Quo vadis is Latin for "Where are you going?" and alludes to the apocryphal Acts of Peter, in which Peter flees Rome but on his way meets Jesus and asks him why he...
. Moody, however, is best known for two prose plays, The Great Divide (1906, later adapted into three film versions
The Great Divide (1925 film)
The Great Divide is a silent 1925 drama film produced and distributed by MGM and directed by Reginald Barker. The film stars Alice Terry, Conway Tearle and Wallace Beery. It is based on the William Vaughn Moody play, being the second of three film adaptations...
) and The Faith Healer (1909), which together point the way to modern American drama in their emphasis on the emotional conflicts that lie at the heart of contemporary social conflicts. Other key playwrights from this period (in addition to continued work by Howells and Fitch) include Edward Sheldon
Edward Sheldon
Edward Brewster Sheldon was an American dramatist. His plays include Salvation Nell and Romance , which was made into a motion picture with Greta Garbo....
, Charles Rann Kennedy
Charles Rann Kennedy (playwright)
Charles Rann Kennedy was an Anglo-American dramatist.-Biography:...
and one of the most successful women playwrights in American drama, Rachel Crothers
Rachel Crothers
Rachel Crothers was a prolific and successful American playwright and theater director, known for her well-crafted plays. One of the most famous was Susan and God , which was made into a film by MGM in 1940 starring Joan Crawford and Frederic March.Crothers was born in Bloomington, Illinois, USA...
, whose interest in women's issues can be seen in such plays as He and She (1911).
During the period between the World Wars, American drama came to maturity, thanks in large part to the works of Eugene O'Neill
Eugene O'Neill
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into American drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish...
and of the Provincetown Players
Provincetown Players
The Provincetown Players was an amateur group of writers and artists who, at the early part of the 20th Century, wanted to see a change in American theatre and created a company committed to producing new plays by exclusively American playwrights...
. O'Neill's experiments with theatrical form and his combination of Naturalist
Naturalism (theatre)
Naturalism is a movement in European drama and theatre that developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It refers to theatre that attempts to create a perfect illusion of reality through a range of dramatic and theatrical strategies: detailed, three-dimensional settings Naturalism is a...
and Expressionist techniques inspired other playwrights to use greater freedom in their works, whether expanding the techniques of Realism
Realism (arts)
Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...
, as in Susan Glaspell
Susan Glaspell
Susan Keating Glaspell was an American Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, actress, director, novelist, biographer and poet. She was a founding member of the Provincetown Players, one of the most important collaboratives in the development of modern drama in the United States...
's Trifles
Trifles
Trifles is a one-act play by Susan Glaspell. Her short story, "A Jury of Her Peers", was adapted from the play a year after its debut. It was first performed by the Provincetown Players at the Wharf Theatre in Provincetown, Massachusetts on August 8, 1916. In the original play, Glaspell played the...
, or borrowing more heavily from German Expressionism (e.g., Elmer Rice
Elmer Rice
Elmer Rice was an American playwright. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his 1929 play, Street Scene.-Early years:...
's The Adding Machine
The Adding Machine
The Adding Machine is a 1923 play by Elmer Rice; it has been called "... a landmark of American Expressionism, reflecting the growing interest in this highly subjective and nonrealistic form of modern drama." The story focuses on Mr. Zero, an accountant at a large, faceless company. After 25 years...
), Other distinct movements during this period include folk-drama/regionalism (Paul Green's Pulitzer-winning In Abraham's Bosom
In Abraham's Bosom
In Abraham's Bosom is a play by American dramatist Paul Green. Its original Broadway run starred Charles Sidney Gilpin as an African-American farmer from North Carolina whose efforts at self-improvement are thwarted by segregation. Green received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the work in 1927....
), "pageant" drama (Green's The Lost Colony
Lost Colony (play)
The Lost Colony is a historical play by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paul Green about Roanoke, the first English colony in North America. The play is based on the historical accounts of Sir Walter Raleigh's failed attempts to establish a permanent settlement in the 1580s in part of what was...
, about the mysterious Roanoke Colony
Roanoke Colony
The Roanoke Colony on Roanoke Island in Dare County, present-day North Carolina, United States was a late 16th-century attempt to establish a permanent English settlement in what later became the Virginia Colony. The enterprise was financed and organized by Sir Walter Raleigh and carried out by...
), and even a return to poetic drama (Maxwell Anderson
Maxwell Anderson
James Maxwell Anderson was an American playwright, author, poet, journalist and lyricist.-Early years:Anderson was born in Atlantic, Pennsylvania, the second of eight children to William Lincoln "Link" Anderson, a Baptist minister, and Charlotte Perrimela Stephenson, both of Scots and Irish descent...
's Winterset
Winterset (play)
Winterset is a play by Maxwell Anderson.A verse drama written largely in poetic form, the tragedy deals indirectly with the famous Sacco-Vanzetti case, in which two Italian immigrants with radical political beliefs were executed...
). At the same time, the economic crisis of the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
led to the growth of protest drama, as seen in the Federal Theatre Project
Federal Theatre Project
The Federal Theatre Project was a New Deal project to fund theatre and other live artistic performances in the United States during the Great Depression. It was one of five Federal One projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administration...
's Living Newspaper
Living Newspaper
Living Newspaper is a term for a theatrical form presenting factual information on current events to a popular audience. Historically, Living Newspapers have also urged social action and reacted against naturalistic and realistic theatrical conventions in favor of the more direct, experimental...
productions and in the works of Clifford Odets
Clifford Odets
Clifford Odets was an American playwright, screenwriter, socialist, and social protester.-Early life:Odets was born in Philadelphia to Romanian- and Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Louis Odets and Esther Geisinger, and raised in Philadelphia and the Bronx, New York. He dropped out of high...
(e.g., Waiting for Lefty
Waiting for Lefty
Waiting for Lefty is a 1935 play by American playwright Clifford Odets. Consisting of a series of related vignettes, the entire play is framed by the meeting of cab drivers who are planning a labor strike. The framing situation utilizes the audience as part of the meeting.While this was not the...
) and of moralist drama, as in Lillian Hellman
Lillian Hellman
Lillian Florence "Lily" Hellman was an American playwright, linked throughout her life with many left-wing causes...
's The Little Foxes
The Little Foxes
The Little Foxes is a 1939 play by Lillian Hellman. Its title comes from Chapter 2, Verse 15 in the Song of Solomon in the King James version of the Bible, which reads, "Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes." Set in a small town in Alabama in...
and The Children's Hour
The Children's Hour (play)
The Children's Hour is a 1934 stage play written by Lillian Hellman. It is a drama set in an all-girls boarding school run by two women, Karen Wright and Martha Dobie. An angry student, Mary Tilford, runs away from the school and to avoid being sent back she tells her grandmother that the two...
. Other key figures of this era include George S. Kaufman
George S. Kaufman
George Simon Kaufman was an American playwright, theatre director and producer, humorist, and drama critic. In addition to comedies and political satire, he wrote several musicals, notably for the Marx Brothers...
, George Kelly, Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes
James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes is best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance...
, S. N. Behrman
S. N. Behrman
Samuel Nathaniel Behrman was an American playwright and screenwriter, who also worked for the New York Times.-Early Years:...
, Sidney Howard
Sidney Howard
Sidney Coe Howard was an American playwright and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1925 and a posthumous Academy Award in 1940 for the screenplay for Gone with the Wind.-Early life:...
, Robert E. Sherwood
Robert E. Sherwood
Robert Emmet Sherwood was an American playwright, editor, and screenwriter.-Biography:Born in New Rochelle, New York, he was a son of Arthur Murray Sherwood, a rich stockbroker, and his wife, the former Rosina Emmet, a well-known illustrator and portrait painter known as Rosina E. Sherwood...
, and a set of playwrights who followed O'Neill's path of philosophical searching, Philip Barry
Philip Barry
Philip James Quinn Barry was an American playwright born in Rochester, New York.-Early life:Philip Barry was born on June 18, 1896 in Rochester, New York to James Corbett Barry and Mary Agnes Quinn Barry. James would die from appendicitis a year after Philip's birth, and his father's marble and...
, Thornton Wilder
Thornton Wilder
Thornton Niven Wilder was an American playwright and novelist. He received three Pulitzer Prizes, one for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and two for his plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and a National Book Award for his novel The Eighth Day.-Early years:Wilder was born in Madison,...
(Our Town
Our Town
Our Town is a three-act play by American playwright Thornton Wilder. It is a character story about an average town's citizens in the early twentieth century as depicted through their everyday lives...
) and William Saroyan
William Saroyan
William Saroyan was an Armenian American dramatist and author. The setting of many of his stories and plays is the center of Armenian-American life in California in his native Fresno.-Early years:...
(The Time of Your Life
The Time of Your Life
The Time of Your Life is a 1939 five-act play by American playwright William Saroyan. The play is the first drama to win both the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. The play opened 25 October 1939 at the Booth Theatre in New York City...
). Theatre criticism kept pace with the drama, such as in the work of George Jean Nathan
George Jean Nathan
George Jean Nathan was an American drama critic and editor.-Early life:Nathan was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana...
and in the numerous books and journals on American theater that were published during this time.
The stature that American drama had achieved between the Wars was cemented during the post-World War II generation, with the final works of O'Neill and his generation being joined by such towering figures as Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams
Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III was an American writer who worked principally as a playwright in the American theater. He also wrote short stories, novels, poetry, essays, screenplays and a volume of memoirs...
and Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller
Arthur Asher Miller was an American playwright and essayist. He was a prominent figure in American theatre, writing dramas that include plays such as All My Sons , Death of a Salesman , The Crucible , and A View from the Bridge .Miller was often in the public eye,...
, as well as by the maturation of the musical theatre
Musical theatre
Musical theatre is a form of theatre combining songs, spoken dialogue, acting, and dance. The emotional content of the piece – humor, pathos, love, anger – as well as the story itself, is communicated through the words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an...
form. Other key dramatists include William Inge
William Inge
William Motter Inge was an American playwright and novelist, whose works typically feature solitary protagonists encumbered with strained sexual relations. In the early 1950s, he had a string of memorable Broadway productions, and one of these, Picnic, earned him a Pulitzer Prize...
, Arthur Laurents
Arthur Laurents
Arthur Laurents was an American playwright, stage director and screenwriter.After writing scripts for radio shows after college and then training films for the U.S...
and Paddy Chayefsky
Paddy Chayefsky
Sidney Aaron "Paddy" Chayefsky , was an American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. He is the only person to have won three solo Academy Awards for Best Screenplay....
in the 50s, the avant garde movement of Jack Richardson, Arthur Kopit, Jack Gelber
Jack Gelber
Jack Gelber was an American playwright best known for his 1959 drama The Connection, depicting the life of drug-addicted jazz musicians. The first great success of the Living Theatre, the play was translated into five languages and produced in ten nations...
and Edward Albee
Edward Albee
Edward Franklin Albee III is an American playwright who is best known for The Zoo Story , The Sandbox , Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , and a rewrite of the screenplay for the unsuccessful musical version of Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's . His works are considered well-crafted, often...
the 60s, and the maturation of black drama through Lorraine Hansberry
Lorraine Hansberry
Lorraine Hansberry was an African American playwright and author of political speeches, letters, and essays...
, James Baldwin
James Baldwin (writer)
James Arthur Baldwin was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic.Baldwin's essays, for instance "Notes of a Native Son" , explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-20th century America,...
and Amiri Baraka
Amiri Baraka
Amiri Baraka , formerly known as LeRoi Jones, is an American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays, and music criticism...
. In the musical theatre, important figures include Rodgers and Hammerstein
Rodgers and Hammerstein
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II were a well-known American songwriting duo, usually referred to as Rodgers and Hammerstein. They created a string of popular Broadway musicals in the 1940s and 1950s during what is considered the golden age of the medium...
, Lerner and Loewe
Lerner and Loewe
Lerner and Loewe are the duo of lyricist and librettist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe, known primarily for the music and lyrics of some of Broadway's most successful musical shows, including My Fair Lady, Camelot, and Brigadoon....
, Betty Comden
Betty Comden
Betty Comden was one-half of the musical-comedy duo Comden and Green, who provided lyrics, libretti, and screenplays to some of the most beloved and successful Hollywood musicals and Broadway shows of the mid-20th century...
and Adolph Green
Adolph Green
Adolph Green was an American lyricist and playwright who, with long-time collaborator Betty Comden, penned the screenplays and songs for some of the most beloved movie musicals, particularly as part of Arthur Freed's production unit at MGM, during the genre's heyday...
, Richard Adler
Richard Adler
Richard Adler is an American lyricist, composer and producer of several Broadway shows.-Biography:Born in New York City, Adler had a musical upbringing, his father being a concert pianist. After serving in the Navy he began his career as a lyricist, teaming up with Jerry Ross in 1950...
and Jerry Ross
Jerry Ross (composer)
Jerry Ross was an American lyricist and composer whose works with Richard Adler for the musical theater include The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees, winners of Tony Awards in 1955 and 1956 respectively in both the "Best Musical" and "Best Composer and Lyricist" categories.-Biography:Ross was born...
, Frank Loesser
Frank Loesser
Frank Henry Loesser was an American songwriter who wrote the lyrics and scores to the Broadway hits Guys and Dolls and How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, among others. He won separate Tony Awards for the music and lyrics in both shows, as well as sharing the Pulitzer Prize for...
, Jule Styne
Jule Styne
Jule Styne was a British-born American songwriter especially famous for a series of Broadway musicals, which included several very well known and frequently revived shows.-Early life:...
, Jerry Bock
Jerry Bock
Jerrold Lewis "Jerry" Bock was an American musical theater composer. He received the Tony Award for Best Musical and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama with Sheldon Harnick for their 1959 musical Fiorello! and the Tony Award for Best Composer and Lyricist for the 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof with...
, Meredith Willson
Meredith Willson
Robert Meredith Willson was an American composer, songwriter, conductor and playwright, best known for writing the book, music and lyrics for the hit Broadway musical The Music Man...
and Stephen Sondheim
Stephen Sondheim
Stephen Joshua Sondheim is an American composer and lyricist for stage and film. He is the winner of an Academy Award, multiple Tony Awards including the Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre, multiple Grammy Awards, a Pulitzer Prize and the Laurence Olivier Award...
.
The period beginning in the mid-1960s, with the passing of Civil Rights legislation and its repercussions, came the rise of an "agenda" theatre comparable to that of the 1930s. Many of the major playwrights from the mid-century continued to produce new works, but were joined by names like Sam Shepard
Sam Shepard
Sam Shepard is an American playwright, actor, and television and film director. He is the author of several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child...
, Neil Simon
Neil Simon
Neil Simon is an American playwright and screenwriter. He has written numerous Broadway plays, including Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, and The Odd Couple. He won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Lost In Yonkers. He has written the screenplays for several of his plays that...
, Romulus Linney
Romulus Linney (playwright)
Romulus Zachariah Linney IV was an American playwright and professor.-Life and career:Linney was born in Philadelphia, the son of Maitland Clabaugh and Romulus Zachariah Linney III. His great-grandfather was Republican Congressman Romulus Zachariah Linney. Linney was raised in Boone, North...
, David Rabe, Lanford Wilson
Lanford Wilson
Lanford Wilson was an American playwright who helped to advance the Off-Off-Broadway theater movement. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1980, was elected in 2001 to the Theater Hall of Fame, and in 2004 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters...
, David Mamet
David Mamet
David Alan Mamet is an American playwright, essayist, screenwriter and film director.Best known as a playwright, Mamet won a Pulitzer Prize and received a Tony nomination for Glengarry Glen Ross . He also received a Tony nomination for Speed-the-Plow . As a screenwriter, he received Oscar...
, and John Guare
John Guare
John Guare is an American playwright. He is best known as the author of The House of Blue Leaves, Six Degrees of Separation, and Landscape of the Body...
. Many important dramatists were women, including Beth Henley
Beth Henley
Elizabeth Becker "Beth" Henley is an American dramatist and actress. She writes primarily about women's issues and family in the Southern United States. She is also a screenwriter who has written many film adaptations of her plays...
, Marsha Norman
Marsha Norman
Marsha Norman is an American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. She received the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play night, Mother...
, Wendy Wasserstein
Wendy Wasserstein
Wendy Wasserstein was an American playwright and an Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University...
, Megan Terry
Megan Terry
Megan Terry is an internationally known playwright and prolific writer. Terry, born in Seattle, Washington, United States in 1932, had a love for the theatre since the age of seven and became involved with the theatre at an early age...
, Paula Vogel
Paula Vogel
Paula Vogel is an American playwright and university professor. She received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play, How I Learned to Drive.-Early years:...
and María Irene Fornés
María Irene Fornés
María Irene Fornés is a Cuban-American avant garde playwright and director who is associated with the establishment of the Off-off-Broadway movement in the 1960s. Fornes themes focused on poverty and feminism. In 1965, she won her first Obie Award for Promenade and her second for The Successful...
. The growth of ethnic pride movements led to more success by dramatists from racial minorities, such as black playwrights Douglas Turner Ward
Douglas Turner Ward
Douglas Turner Ward is an American playwright, actor, director and theatrical producer best known as a founder and artistic director of the Negro Ensemble Company .-Biography:Turner was born in Burnside, Louisiana...
, Adrienne Kennedy
Adrienne Kennedy
Adrienne Kennedy is an African-American playwright and was a key figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. She is best known for her first major play Funnyhouse of a Negro....
, Ed Bullins
Ed Bullins
Ed Bullins is an African American playwright. He was also the Minister of Culture for the Black Panthers. In addition, he has won numerous awards, including the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and several Obies. He is one of the best known playwrights to come from the Black Arts Movement...
, Charles Fuller
Charles Fuller
Charles H. Fuller, Jr. is an American playwright, best known for his play, A Soldier's Play, for which he received the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.-Early years:...
, Suzan-Lori Parks
Suzan-Lori Parks
Suzan-Lori Parks is an African American playwright and screenwriter. She received the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant in 2001, and the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play, Topdog/Underdog.-Early years:...
, Ntozake Shange
Ntozake Shange
Ntozake Shange born October 18, 1948, is an American playwright, and poet. As a self proclaimed black feminist, much of the content of her work addresses issues relating to race and feminism....
, George C. Wolfe
George C. Wolfe
George Costello Wolfe is an American playwright and director of theater and film. He won a Tony Award in 1993 for directing Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and another Tony Award in 1996 for his direction of the musical, Bring in 'da Noise/Bring in 'da Funk.-Early life and...
and August Wilson
August Wilson
August Wilson was an American playwright whose work included a series of ten plays, The Pittsburgh Cycle, for which he received two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama...
, who created a dramatic history of United States with his cycle of plays, The Pittsburgh Cycle, one for each decade of the 20th century. Asian American theatre is represented in the early 70s by Frank Chin
Frank Chin
Frank Chin is an American author and playwright.- Life and career :Frank Chin was born in Berkeley, California, but was raised to the age of six by a retired Vaudeville couple in Placerville, California. At six his mother brought him back to the San Francisco Bay Area to live in Oakland Chinatown...
and achieved international success with David Henry Hwang
David Henry Hwang
David Henry Hwang is an American playwright who has risen to prominence as the preeminent Asian American dramatist in the U.S.He was born in Los Angeles, California and was educated at the Yale School of Drama and Stanford University...
's M. Butterfly
M. Butterfly
M. Butterfly is a 1988 play by David Henry Hwang loosely based on the relationship between French diplomat Bernard Boursicot and Shi Pei Pu, a male Peking opera singer....
. Latino theatre grew from the local activist performances of Luis Valdez
Luis Valdez
Luis Valdez is an American playwright, writer and film director.He is regarded as the father of Chicano theater in the United States.-Education:...
's Chicano-focused Teatro Campesino
Teatro Campesino
El Teatro Campesino , is a theatrical troupe founded in 1965 as the cultural arm of the United Farm Workers. The original actors were all farmworkers, and El Teatro Campesino enacted events inspired by the lives of their audience...
to his more formal plays, such as Zoot Suit
Zoot Suit (play)
Zoot Suit is a play written by Luis Valdez, featuring incidental music by Daniel Valdez and Lalo Guerrero, the "father of Chicano music." Zoot Suit is a fictionalized version of the real-life Sleepy Lagoon murder trial – when a group of Chicano youths were charged with a murder that they did...
, and later to the award winning work of Cuban Americans Fornés (multiple Obies) and her student Nilo Cruz
Nilo Cruz
Nilo Cruz is an Cuban-American playwright and pedagogue. With his award of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play, Anna in the Tropics, he became the first Latino so honored.-Early years:...
(Pulitzer), to Puerto Rican playwrights José Rivera
José Rivera (playwright)
José Rivera is a playwright and the first Puerto Rican screenwriter to be nominated for an Oscar.-Early years:Rivera was born in the Santurce section of San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1955. He was raised in Arecibo where he lived until 1959. Rivera's family migrated from Puerto Rico when he was 4 years...
and Miguel Piñero
Miguel Piñero
Miguel Piñero was a Puerto Rican playwright, actor, and co-founder of the Nuyorican Poets Café. He was a leading member of the Nuyorican literary movement.-Early years:...
, and to the Tony Award winning musical about Dominicans in New York City, In the Heights
In the Heights
In the Heights is a musical with music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda and a book by Quiara Alegría Hudes. The story explores three days in the characters' lives in the New York City Dominican-American neighborhood of Washington Heights....
. Finally, the rise of the gay rights movement and of the AIDS crisis led to a number of important gay and lesbian dramatists, including Christopher Durang
Christopher Durang
Christopher Ferdinand Durang is an American playwright known for works of outrageous and often absurd comedy. His work was especially popular in the 1980s.- Life :...
, Holly Hughes
Holly Hughes (performance artist)
Holly Hughes is an American lesbian performance artist. She began as a feminist painter in New York but is best known for her connection with the NEA Four, with whom she was denied funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, and for her work with the Women's One World Cafe. Her plays...
, Karen Malpede, Terrence McNally
Terrence McNally
Terrence McNally is an American playwright who has received four Tony Awards, an Emmy, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Grant, the Lucille Lortel Award, the Hull-Warriner Award, and a citation from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been a member of the Council of the...
, Larry Kramer
Larry Kramer
Larry Kramer is an American playwright, author, public health advocate, and LGBT rights activist. He began his career rewriting scripts while working for Columbia Pictures, which led him to London where he worked with United Artists. There he wrote the screenplay for Women in Love in 1969, earning...
, Tony Kushner
Tony Kushner
Anthony Robert "Tony" Kushner is an American playwright and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1993 for his play, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and co-authored with Eric Roth the screenplay for the 2005 film, Munich.-Life and career:Kushner was born...
, whose Angels in America
Angels in America
Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes is the 1993 Pulitzer Prize winning play in two parts by American playwright Tony Kushner. It has been made into both a television miniseries and an opera by Peter Eötvös.-Characters:...
won the Tony Award two years in a row, and composer-playwright Jonathan Larson
Jonathan Larson
Jonathan Larson was an American composer and playwright noted for the serious social issues of multiculturalism, addiction, and homophobia explored in his work. Typical examples of his use of these themes are found in his works, Rent and tick, tick... BOOM!...
, whose musical Rent
Rent (musical)
Rent is a rock musical with music and lyrics by Jonathan Larson based on Giacomo Puccini's opera La bohème...
ran for over twelve years.
American theatre today
Earlier styles of theatre such as minstrel showMinstrel show
The minstrel show, or minstrelsy, was an American entertainment consisting of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music, performed by white people in blackface or, especially after the Civil War, black people in blackface....
s and Vaudeville
Vaudeville
Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...
acts have disappeared from the landscape, but theatre remains a popular American art form. Broadway productions still entertain millions of theatregoers as productions have become more elaborate and expensive. At the same time, theatre has also served as a platform for expression, and a venue for identity exploration for under-represented, minority communities, who have formed their own companies and created their own genres of works, notably East West Players
East West Players
East West Players is an Asian American theatre organization in Los Angeles, founded in 1965. As one of the nation's first Asian American theatre organizations, East West Players today continues to produce works and educational programs that give voice to the Asian Pacific American...
, founded in 1965 as the first Asian American theatre
Asian American theatre
Asian American theater is theater written, directed or acted by Asian Americans.- Background :Asian American theater emerged in the 1960s and the 1970s with the foundation of four theatre companies: East West Players in Los Angeles, Asian American Theatre Workshop in San Francisco, Theatrical...
group. Notable contemporary American playwright
Playwright
A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...
s include Edward Albee
Edward Albee
Edward Franklin Albee III is an American playwright who is best known for The Zoo Story , The Sandbox , Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , and a rewrite of the screenplay for the unsuccessful musical version of Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's . His works are considered well-crafted, often...
, August Wilson
August Wilson
August Wilson was an American playwright whose work included a series of ten plays, The Pittsburgh Cycle, for which he received two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama...
, Tony Kushner
Tony Kushner
Anthony Robert "Tony" Kushner is an American playwright and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1993 for his play, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and co-authored with Eric Roth the screenplay for the 2005 film, Munich.-Life and career:Kushner was born...
, David Henry Hwang
David Henry Hwang
David Henry Hwang is an American playwright who has risen to prominence as the preeminent Asian American dramatist in the U.S.He was born in Los Angeles, California and was educated at the Yale School of Drama and Stanford University...
, John Guare
John Guare
John Guare is an American playwright. He is best known as the author of The House of Blue Leaves, Six Degrees of Separation, and Landscape of the Body...
, and Wendy Wasserstein
Wendy Wasserstein
Wendy Wasserstein was an American playwright and an Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University...
. Smaller urban theaters have stayed a source of innovation, and regional theaters remain an important part of theatre life. Drama is also taught in high school
High school
High school is a term used in parts of the English speaking world to describe institutions which provide all or part of secondary education. The term is often incorporated into the name of such institutions....
s and college
College
A college is an educational institution or a constituent part of an educational institution. Usage varies in English-speaking nations...
s, which was not done in previous eras, and many become interested in theatre through this.
The Faster Times
The Faster Times
The Faster Times is an online newspaper launched by Sam Apple on July 9, 2009. Many print newspapers were going out of business and reporters were losing their jobs. The New York Times reported that in this climate, Apple was able to recruit professional writers guaranteeing them 75% of revenue...
, an online newspaper that began in 2009, features a weekly column that discusses issues and trends in American theatre.