The American Family through Plays and Movies --- Fall, 2000

Session 1:

American Drama of the 20th century:

"A literary history with a plot. For various historical and aritistic reasons, the stylistic outline of the 20th century American drama has a clearly discernible arc: an art form that was essentially born afresh at the beginning of the century went through a period of exploration and experiment culminating in the discovery that one stlyle was more amenable to American tastes and more adaptable to the demands different writers made on it. That style --- realistic contemporary middle-class domestic melodrama - was to become the dominat and artistically most fertile and flexible mode." (G. Berkowitz Amercan Dram of the Twentieth Century, 1992)

Realistic: (19th Realistic Movements)

Contemporary: (20th)

Middle-Class: (Not working class, majority)

Domestic: (take place in living room)

Melodrama: (usually negative, shallow, emotional) (A serious play that does not pretend to be a tragedy. Ordinary, small people tragic bec society)



Theatre Histroy:

19th Century:
- Early 20th century (or last decade of 19th Century): Broadway (A street in N.Y.)

Around the 1950s:
-Off-Broadway (younger play-writer/actors (business, make money out of broadway), off-off-Broadway)
-Outside New York
-Establishment of charitable foundations (people don't want to play so much tax!)
--- 1966: Congress created the National Endowment for the Arts
-Decline of Broadway in the last third of the century: the post-Broadway Period, the 1960s onward



1. Period 1: 1890-1930: The Beginnings:

1.1 Late 19th century

1.2 The rise of realistic drama:
--- James A. Herne's "Margaret Fleming (1890)" (1st play reflects reality, lover of a playboy gives birth to a child)
---Rachel Crothers: "He and She (1911)" (position of women, realistic dilemma, conflict, famous for choosing career and daughter)

1.3 The Little Theatre Movement: (off-Broadway thing, gather in greenwich)
---The Provincetown Players (in 麻省)
---Susan Glaspell: "Trifles (1916)": depictions of the female experience (investigation of the murder of a farmer. women were supposed to be useless by men, but in fact, not.)
---Elmer Rice: "Street Scene (1929)": (realistic protray of ordinary, small people. bec ordinarieness makes up life)


2. Period 2: 1930-1945: Reality and Realism:

2.1 Two extraordinary historical events:
-------A decade-long worldwide economic depression (the Great Gatsby)
-------The Second World War

2.2 Drama of Depression: (Episodic/episodes ---> no conflict, no drama, just reflection)
-----Elmer Rice: "We, the People (1935)": (4 characters reflecting how difficult the reality of people)
-----Clifford Odets: "Waiting for Lefty (1935)": (Vs Street Scene. Taxi driver union meeting each talking about their story)

2.3 Plays of the Second World war:
-----Lillian Hellman: Watch on the Rhine (1941): (War play, American woman marry an anti-Nazi German. reflecting the war and the people. importance: Europe brought to America)

2.4 Historical plays:
----Maxwell Anderson: "Elizabeth the Queen (1933)": (being portray as a woman with weakness (flesh and blood))

2.5 Stage without props: (experimental) (stage manager will interfere during the drama/move the props)
-----Thornton Wilder: "Our Town (1938)": ("Happy Journey": just 4 chairs representing in a car, two ladders representing two houses)

2.6 Comedy:
----Kaufman and Hart: "You Can't Take It With You (1936)"



3. Period 3: 1945-1960: The Zenith of the Broadway Theatre

3.1 Arthur Miller:
----"All My Sons (1947)": (Two meanings: 1. His two sons; 2. All American sons. At last the sons suicide bec feel so guilty / shame about what his father done, manufacturer of aircraft)
----"Death of a Salesman (1949)": (a symbol of unsuccessful salesman having unsuccessful son. his brother is successful. He put his hope on his son, but he is not successful either.)
----"The Crucible (1953)": (Allegory 借古諷今 Use the old story of New England to say the fear of the cold war. After the WWII, cold war, USSR, fearing communinst, un-American -- everyone who involved in Communism.) (McCarthyism is the politically motivated practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence. The term specifically describes activities associated with the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s and characterized by heightened fears of communist influence on American institutions and espionage by Soviet agents.)

3.2 Tennessee Williams
----"The Glass Menagerie 動物園;獸欄(或籠)(1945)": (being treated as in a menagerie. 中度衰落's story. Brother still living in the past. escape from reality. glass-fragile like Laura, the end of a dream for everybody)
----"A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)": (Blache live in the past. Stanley-sexual power. Stella in the middle. Stella makes a choice. to choose between Blanche (south, rich) & Stanley(worker))
----"Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)"

3.3 William Inge
----"Picnic (1953)" (peopel trapped in fate, but no solution)
----"Bus Stop (1955)" (the only way for me to leave.. to marry a wrong man. a conscours choice. a second choice.)


4. Period 4: 1960-1975: Post-Broadway Era

4.1 Historical background and the development of the theatre:

The historical background of this period is the extraordinary expansion of the American theatre: as early as 1960 in New York, and by the late 1960s elsewhere in the county, new American plays were produced outside the realm of Broadway in unprecedented numbers, adding new dramatists and new points of view to the American dramatic repertory.

By this very nature, the expanded arena encouraged new experiments in form and content

Companies such as the Open Theatre an dthe Performance Group in New York, the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles, the Firehouse Theatre in Minneapolis, and the Living Theatre in self-imposed European exile share an impulse to move away from author - and text-dominated drama to develop new forms. Along with other companies and directors, they treated a script as only the starting point for theatrical invention, relying extensively on improvisation and borrowing freely from such allied arts as mime, dance, and religious ritual. Often their final prodct bore only a slight resemblance to the original text, while in some cases they dispensed with the playwright by composing the work communally, or reduced the author to the role of a scribe who recorded the final product of the group creation.

4.2 Edward Albee
----"Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf"

4.3 Sam Shepard: (playwrite + actor "American Buffalo". Claimed to be Ameriacan. examine themselves. Living away from America, start from Hemingway.)
----Can be roughly divided into three periods:
----- Early Plays: "Red Cross", "Chicago", "Icarus' Mother: convey Shepard's sense of psychic pressures of contemporary life"
----- Second group of plays: "Seduced", "Geography of a Horse Dreamer", "Cowboy Mouth", "The Tooth of Crime: deal with the ways the artist pursues his identity and freedom even if it results in isolation and betrayal"
----- Third group: the family plays: "Curse of the Starving Class" and "Buried Child"

4.4 Landford Wilson:
---- Wilson's early plays are essentially charactoer studies, using monologues and minimal interactions to provide insight into his generally unhappy characters: "The Madness of Lady Bright (1964)" (a man thinks past)
-----Wilson also wrote more conventionally structured plays: "The Hot l Baltimore (1973)"(The word "Hot l" is really without "e" --- bec neon light/rundown hotel so old that the neon light out. Baltimore is symbolic. accepted by people.)

4.5 David Rabe:
----The Vietnam War: "The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971)", "Sticks and Bones (1971)", and "Streamers (1976)" (going to collapse/fading of some system. like "Tea House" 茶館) (Streamers-on the way to death, Parachutta not open. both are not working, going to waiting to die.) (Pavlo Hummel-truma of war is not in Vietnam, but is when you come back to America)

4.6 LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) (not Am name)
---- The Civil Rights Movement: "Dutchman (1964)" (about Am Negro), "The Toilet (1964)", and "The Slave (1964)"

4.7 Neil Simon:
----In commercial terms, the most successful dramatist in American theatre
----Simon's general pattern is to juxtapose fairly simple opposites and then reconcile them or just enjoy the conflict (not deep but commedies)
----"Come Blow your Horn (1961)"
----"The Odd Couple (1965)"
----"The Sunshine Boys (1972)"



5. Period 5: 1975 - 1990: A National Theatre
By the mid-1970s, Broadway's domination of the American theatre was decisively over. Off and off-Broadway theatres routinely produced six or more times as many shows as Broadway did each season; and the hundreds of professional theatres around the country together staged many more productions than all the New York City theatres put together.

5.1: Arthur Miller: (1970s)

5.2: Neil Simon: (70s)

5.3: Edward Albee:

5.4 Lanford Wilson:

5.5 Sam Shepard:

5.6 David Mamet: