Modern American Theatre

1
Modern American Theatre

• Alexander Gorrin
• Intro to Theatre
• Dec 11, 2008

2
Ingredients

• By the beginning of the 1950s the vitality of
  American theatre was acknowledged around the
  world. The international reputation of Eugene
  ONeill was complemented by two potent young
  dramatists Arhtur Miller, who turned the
  ordinary man into a figure of tragic stature in
  Death of a Salesman (1949) and drew a parallel
  between U.S. Sen. Jospeh R McCarthys
  anti-Communist crusade of the 1950s and the
  Salem witch trials of 1692 in The Crucible
  (1953), and Tennessee Williams, who created a
  world festering with passion and sensuality in
  plays such as A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and
  Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1954).

3
Ingredients

• At the same time, the director Lee Strasberg,
  together with Elia Kazan, was codifying the
  teachings of Stanislavsky into the Method,
  which generated both controversy and
  misunderstanding. Although the Actors Studio,
  founded by Kazan in 1947, produced many fine
  actors, including Marlon Brando, Geraldine Page,
  and Paul Newman, the Method proved inadequate as
  an approach to acting in classical plays it was
  best suited to the realism of the new American
  plays and films.

4
Arthur Miller

• Arthur Miller (October 17, 1915 February 10,
  2005) was a playwright and essayist. He was a
  prominent figure in American theatre and cinema
  for over 61 years, writing a wide variety of
  dramas, including celebrated plays such asThe
  Crucible, A View from the Bridge, All My Sons,
  and Death of a Salesman, which are studied and
  performed worldwide. Miller was often in the
  public eye, most famously for refusing to give
  evidence against others to the House Un-American
  Activities Committee, being the recipient of the
  Pulitzer Prize for Drama among countless other
  awards, and for his marriage to Marilyn Monroe.
  Miller is considered by audiences and scholars as
  one of America's greatest playwrights and his
  plays are lauded throughout the world.

5
Arthur Miller

• Death of a Salesman (1949), Miller's most famous
  work, addresses the painful conflicts within one
  family, but it also tackles larger issues
  regarding American national values. The play
  examines the cost of blind faith in the American
  Dream. In this respect, it offers a postwar
  American reading of personal tragedy in the
  tradition of Sophocles' Oedipus Cycle. Miller
  charges America with selling a false myth
  constructed around a capitalist materialism
  nurtured by the postwar economy, a materialism
  that obscured the personal truth and moral vision
  of the original American Dream described by the
  country's founders.

6
Arthur Miller

• The Crucible (1953) was based on the witchcraft
  trials in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, a period
  Miller considered relevant to the 1950s, when
  investigation of subversive activities was
  widespread. In 1956, when Miller was called
  before the House Un-American Activities
  Committee, he refused to name people he had seen
  10 years earlier at an alleged communist writers
  meeting. He was convicted of contempt but
  appealed and won.

7
Tennessee Williams

• Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier
  Williams III in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1911.
  His friends began calling him Tennessee in
  college, in honor of his Southern accent and his
  father's home state. Williams's father, C.C.
  Williams, was a traveling salesman and a heavy
  drinker. Williams's mother, Edwina, was a
  Mississippi clergyman's daughter prone to
  hysterical attacks.
• Tennessees plays reveal a world of human
  frustration in which sex and violence underlie an
  atmosphere of romantic gentility.
• Williams died in 1983 when he choked on a
  medicine-bottle cap in an alcohol-related
  incident at the Elysee Hotel in New York City. He
  was one month short of his seventy-second
  birthday. In his long career he wrote twenty-five
  full-length plays (five made into movies), five
  screenplays, over seventy one-act plays, hundreds
  of short stories, two novels, poetry, and a
  memoir. The mark he left on the tradition of
  realism in American drama is indelible.

8
Tennessee Williams

• His first recognition came when American Blues
  (1939), a group of one-act plays, won a Group
  Theatre award. Williams, however, continued to
  work at jobs ranging from theatre usher to
  Hollywood scriptwriter until success came with
  The Glass Menagerie (1944). In it, Williams
  portrayed a declassed Southern family living in a
  tenement. The play is about the failure of a
  domineering mother, Amanda, living upon her
  delusions of a romantic past, and her cynical
  son, Tom, to secure a suitor for Toms crippled
  and painfully shy sister, Laura, who lives in a
  fantasy world with a collection of glass animals.
• Williams next major play, A Streetcar Named
  Desire (1947), won a Pulitzer Prize. It is a
  study of the mental and moral ruin of Blanche Du
  Bois, another former Southern belle, whose
  genteel pretensions are no match for the harsh
  realities symbolized by her brutish
  brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. The play opened
  on Broadway on December 3, 1947 and closed on
  December 17, 1949 in the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.
  The Broadway production was directed by Elia
  Kazan and starred Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy,
  Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden.

9
Tennessee Williams

• Tennessees Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) was
  awarded a Pulitzer Prize and was successfully
  filmed. ""Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"" is the story of
  a Southern family in crisis, focusing on the
  turbulent relationship of a wife and husband,
  Maggie "The Cat" and Brick Pollitt, and their
  interaction with Brick's family over the course
  of one evening gathering at the family estate in
  Mississippi, ostensibly to celebrate the birthday
  of patriarch and tycoon "Big Daddy" Pollitt.
  Maggie, through wit and beauty, has escaped a
  childhood of desperate poverty to marry into the
  wealthy Pollitt family, but finds herself
  suffering in an unfulfilling marriage. Brick, an
  aging football hero, has neglected his wife and
  further infuriates her by ignoring his brother's
  attempts to gain control of the family fortune.
  Brick's indifference and his near-continuous
  drinking date back to the recent suicide of his
  friend Skipper. Big Daddy is unaware that he has
  cancer and will not live to see another birthday
  his doctors and his family have conspired to keep
  this information from him and his wife. His
  relatives are in attendance and attempt to
  present themselves in the best possible light,
  hoping to receive the definitive share of Big
  Daddy's enormous wealth.

10
Edward Albee

• Edward Franklin Albee III (born March 12, 1928)
  is a three time Pulitzer Prize winning playwright
  known for works including Who's Afraid of
  Virginia Woolf?, The Zoo Story, The Sandbox, The
  Delicate Balance and The American Dream. His
  works are considered well-crafted and often
  unsympathetic examinations of the modern
  condition. His early works reflect a mastery and
  Americanization of the Theatre of the Absurd that
  found its peak in works by European playwrights
  such as Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, and Eugene
  Ionesco. Younger American playwrights, such as
  Pulitzer Prize-winner Paula Vogel, credit Albee's
  daring mix of theatricalism and biting dialogue
  with helping to reinvent the post-war American
  theatre in the early 1960s. Albee's dedication to
  continuing to evolve his voice as evidenced in
  later productions such as The Goat or, Who Is
  Sylvia? (2002) also routinely marks him as
  distinct from other American playwrights of his
  era.

11
Edward Albee

• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a play by
  Edward Albee that opened on Broadway at the Billy
  Rose Theater on October 13, 1962. The original
  cast featured Uta Hagen as Martha, Arthur Hill as
  George, Melinda Dillon as Honey and George
  Grizzard as Nick. It was directed by Alan
  Schneider. Subsequent cast members included
  Henderson Forsythe, Eileen Fulton, and Mercedes
  McCambridge, and Elaine Stritch.
• In this play a middle-aged professor, his wife,
  and a younger couple engage one night in an
  unrestrained drinking bout that is filled with
  malicious games, insults, humiliations,
  betrayals, savage witticisms, and painful,
  self-revealing confrontations.
• A film adaptation of the play was released in
  1966. It was directed by Mike Nichols and starred
  Elizabeth Taylor as Martha, Richard Burton as
  George, George Segal as Nick and Sandy Dennis as
  Honey.

12
Gallery
13
Gallery
14
Gallery