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Am Lit Booklet Final.doc
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American Drama

Drama is probably the most difficult form of writing. According to a saying, young poets are 18, young novelists are 24, and young playwrights are 30. It is difficult, possibly because when a play is written, it is not finished in the same way that a poem or a novel is. There remains the painful and pleasurable process of bringing the play to life on stage, with the help of a director, actors, set designer, costume designer, stagehands, musicians, electricians – and a responsive audience. Producing a play is a team effort, and much can go wrong. Another difference between drama and other literary forms is that movement and gesture are essential elements in drama. Some of the high points in a play may be even nonverbal.

Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) is generally considered the first important figure in American drama. It is significant that several decades after the 1920 production of his first full-length play “Beyond the Horizon”, he is still regarded as the most important playwright America has ever produced.

American drama before O’Neill consisted of shows and entertainments. There was great theatrical activity in the 19th-century America, a time when there were no movies, radio or TV. Every town of any size had its theatre or “opera house” in which touring companies performed.

The post-World War years brought two important figures to prominence in American drama: Arthur Miller (1915 - 2005) and Tennessee Williams (1911-1983). Miller and Williams represent the two principal movements in modern American drama: realism and realism combined with an attempt at something more imaginative. Arthur Miller’s best work “Death of a Salesman” (1949) is one of the most successful in fusing the realistic and the imaginative; in all of his other plays, however, Miller is the master of realism. In Miller’s plays the course of the action and the development of character depend not only on the character’s psychological makeup, but also on the social, philosophical and economic atmosphere of the times. Miller is a writer of high moral seriousness, whether he is dealing with personal versus social responsibility, as in “All My Sons” (1947), or with which he hunts past and present, as in “The Crucible” (1953). Miller writes a plain and muscular prose that under the force of emotion often becomes eloquent.

Although Tennessee Williams was Miller’s contemporary, his concern was not with social matters, but with personal ones. If Miller was often the playwright of our social conscience, then Williams was the playwright of our souls. In play after play, he probed the psychological complexities of his characters, especially of his women: Amanda and Laura in “The Glass Menagerie” (1944), Blanche in “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1947), and Alma in “Summer and Smoke” (1948). In contrast to Miller’s plain language, William’s writing is delicate and serious. Miller’s characters are ordinary people with whom we identify because they are caught up in the social tensions of our times. William’s characters are often women who are “lost ladies”, drowning in their own neuroses, but somehow mirroring a part of our own complex psychological selves. Williams usually theatrialized realism with “music in the wings” or symbolic props, such as Laura’s unicorn in “The Glass Menagerie” or the looming statue of the Eternity in “Summer and Smoke”.

LECTURE XIV

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